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| Elizabeth, aged 13 William Scrots Public domain |
There have been numerous books on Elizabeth but this post is especially indebted to a couple of the more recent: Helen Castor's Elizabeth I. A Study in Insecurity (Penguin 2018) and Anna Whitelock's Elizabeth's Bedfellows. An Intimate History of the Queen's Court (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Reversal of fortune
Before Elizabeth was three, her life had seen an astonishing reversal of fortune. In spite of the disappointment at her birth in September 1533, she was named Princess of Wales and the heir to the throne. Then in May 1536 her mother was executed. This in itself was a shocking event – the putting to death of an anointed queen. Although Anne had been executed for alleged adultery, the marriage to Henry was declared invalid, leaving Elizabeth illegitimate like her half-sister, Mary. But her status remained ambiguous. The Act of Succession of 1543 named Mary and Elizabeth as heirs to their half-brother, Edward at the same time as they remained illegitimate.She is unlikely to have felt personal grief for her mother, though it may be significant that when she became queen, she promoted her Boleyn relatives. In her later years she owned a mother-of-pearl locked ring which opened to reveal portraits of her mother and herself.
At her mother’s death she experienced a series of stepmothers – Jane Seymour who died, Catherine Howard who was executed, and Katherine Parr, who proved a kind and loving stepmother. But even she could not protect her.
The Thomas Seymour affair
When Henry VIII died Elizabeth went with her governess, Kate Ashley, to live with the widowed Katherine. But six months after her husband’s death Katherine married Thomas Seymour, uncle of the young king and brother of the new Lord Protector, the king's uncle, the Duke of Somerset. But Seymour had his eyes on Elizabeth and he and Catherine indulged in boisterous horseplay with her. In May 1548 she and her servants left to stay with Kate’s sister. On 5 September Catherine died following complications after childbirth. |
| The tomb of Katherine Parr at Sudeley, Gloucestershire My photograph |
In January 1549 Seymour was arrested and a few days later Kate Ashley and Elizabeth’s financial administrator, Thomas Parry found themselves in the Tower. When they were interrogated the story emerged of Seymour’s conduct. At the age of 15, Elizabeth was in danger. She had not repulsed Seymour’s attentions – so had she been preparing to marry him?
She was interrogated by Sir Robert Tirwhit who wrote to Protector Somerset, ‘I do see in her face she is guilty’. But could he prove anything against her? On the following day he wrote, ‘I do assure your grace she has a very good wit, and nothing is gotten off her but by great policy’. She defended herself in a letter to the Protector: ‘My Lord, these are shameful slanders’. On 20 March 1549 Seymour was executed. In 1552, Somerset himself was executed.
Elizabeth had learned the dangers of proximity to the throne. She was now careful to cultivate the image of a demure and learned young lady, committed to her brother’s Protestant policies.
The reign of Mary Tudor
When Northumberland mounted his unsuccessful coup against her half-sister, Mary, in 1553 she remained secluded in her house in Hatfield, watching and waiting in silence. When Mary’s success was assured, she rode into London with 2,000 armed retainers. She was now unquestionably the heir to the throne, but also facing a new danger. Would she have to abandon her Protestantism once Mary reinstated the Catholic Church? The only weapon at her disposal was dissimulation. She found excuses not to attend Mass at the Chapel Royal, and expressed her wish to learn more about the Catholic faith. She faced another moment of danger when in February 1554 Thomas Wyatt led a Kentish rebellion against Mary’s projected marriage to Philip. After the rebellion was put down, Jane Grey and her husband were beheaded and Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower. She seems at this period to have been in a state of genuine terror and emotional collapse. (Was she thinking of her mother?) Again, she withstood interrogations, and though Mary was unconvinced of her loyalty, she was released in May and put under house arrest at Woodstock. There, for the next year, she played a cat-and-mouse game with her gaoler, Sir Henry Bedingfield. She continued to press her innocence and lobby the council.
In April 1555 Elizabeth was summoned to court and in May she met her sister, in a tense stand-off. But the balance of power was shifting towards Elizabeth. Mary’s pregnancy was now known to be unreal and her husband Philip was prepared to support her in order to keep Mary Queen of Scots off the English throne. In October Elizabeth was given permission to return to Hatfield, protected by Philip.
Queen
With the death of Mary on 17 November 1558 Elizabeth became queen. But this did not mean that she was secure. Throughout her reign she experienced a series of crises and dangers, which she survived through her shrewdness - and a good deal of luck. |
| Elizabeth in her coronation robes Public domain. |
Elizabeth had no doubt that she was divinely appointed to rule. She noted in a prayer published in 1563: God had
… chosen me thy handmaid to be over thy people that I may preserve them in peace.… Under thy sovereignty, princes reign and all the people obey.
But her position was challenged at least in principle by those who objected to the rule of a woman. John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published at the start of her reign, and though it had been aimed at Mary Tudor rather than her, she was greatly offended by it and would not allow Knox to enter the country. A reply was published by the Protestant scholar, John Aylmer, but he was unable to make the resounding defence that Elizabeth wanted. He conceded that women were ‘weak in nature, feeble in body, soft in courage, unskilful in practice’. But he argued that there were exceptional women like the prophetess, Deborah, who had been a judge in Israel. He added that government would be conducted not so much by the queen in person as by her male counsellors. It seemed unthinkable that a woman could make her own independent decisions.
Religion
Elizabeth inherited a religiously divided country. The bishops were all Mary’s bishops and only the Bishop of Carlisle was prepared to crown her. She faced a Parliament that contained a substantial number of radical Protestants and she had to negotiate a religious settlement that would be acceptable to a majority of the population.In May 1559 she was named Supreme Governor rather than Supreme Head of the Church of England, as a concession to those who thought that a woman could not be head of the Church. The religious settlement was laid down in the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity that were a careful attempt to create as broad a church as possible, with significant continuities with the past. Bishops were retained, the clergy were ordered to retain vestments, and cathedral services continued with the choirs of the medieval period. The result was a church that was Protestant, but different in many respects from the Calvinist and Zwinglian churches on the continent.
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| Elizabeth, the new Constantine, triumphs over the Pope. From John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563) |
The settlement was never satisfactory to Protestant radicals, who wanted a much more thorough-going reformation of the Church. Neither, of course, was it satisfactory to Catholics.
Religion was therefore one great question that Elizabeth was not able to resolve to everyone’s satisfaction.
Marriage and the succession
At the end of 1558 the Spanish ambassador, Feria, wrote,The more I think about this business, the more certain I am that everything depends on the husband this woman will take.
A German diplomat wrote to the Emperor Ferdinand,
the Queen is of an age where she should in reason, and as is woman’s way, be eager to marry and be provided for. … For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.
It was taken for granted that Elizabeth would marry: she needed a man to guide her and to produce an heir to the throne.
On 4 February 1559 the House of Commons resolved ‘that a request be made to the Queen’s Highness for marriage'. On 6 February the Speaker and others approached her. She told them that it was her wish 'to remain in this kind of life in which I yet live’. If God did incline her ‘heart to another kind of life’, she would never marry against her subjects’ interest; if she never married, an heir would be chosen ‘in convenient time’. She ended
And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a queen having lived such a time lived and died a virgin.
The reply was less ambiguous than some of her later answers, but the Council refused to hear what they did not wish to know. Her meaning was clear, but no-one was listening.
Her continuing single state was fraught with problems. Bishop Jewel of Salisbury wrote in February 1562: ‘Oh, how wretched are we who cannot tell under what sovereign we are to live’. The play Gorboduc, performed before the Queen in January 1562 predicted the disasters attendant upon a disputed succession.
The question of the succession was raised again after the Queen contracted smallpox in October 1562. If she had died then, there might have been a civil war. Yet when in the following year Parliament again requested her to marry, she fobbed them off with obscure statements.
There were plenty of candidates for her husband: ‘two kings, two archdukes, five dukes, two earls, and some lesser mortals’ (Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (Allen Lane, 2000). She welcomed this attention both from vanity and because every suitor was a further validation of her right to the throne.
Robert Dudley
However, she muddied the waters by her preference for Robert Dudley. In 1558 she made him Master of the Horse, making him the only man publicly permitted to touch her. But when his wife was found dead in 1560, it became impossible for her to marry him. Instead she offered him as a husband to Mary, Queen of Scots and created him Earl of Leicester in 1564 in order to make him more acceptable. |
| Robert Dudley. the man Elizabeth loved but could not marry. Public domain |
This seems a bizarre offer to make to Mary, yet there was calculation behind it. Mary had a strong claim to the English throne and marriage to Leicester would make her Elizabeth's protégée. But instead, Mary, to Elizabeth's displeasure, married her cousin, Henry Stewart Earl of Darnley and her reign crashed into disaster. It was an object-lesson about what could happen if a reigning queen married the wrong man.
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