Marriage With My Kingdom E-Book

Alison Plowden

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 434

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Born in 1533, Elizabeth I was the product of the doomed marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In 1558, on her Catholic sister Mary's death, she ascended the throne and reigned for 45 years. Loved and respected by her subjects and idolised by future generations, Gloriana's fierce devotion to her country and its people made her England's fairest queen and icon. Royal marriage in the age of Elizabeth was a political business. Unions between great familes could be the key to security at home and to the making of great empires. No one represented a better prize than Elizabeth. She encouraged attention and spent her life surrounded by suitors, but she remained, until the end, married only to her kingdom. This, the third volume of Alison Plowden's Elizabethan quartet, plots the true story of the Virgin Queen's courtships and her career as "the greatest tease in history".

Leseprobe

Yea, to satisfie you, I have already joyned my self in Marriage to an Husband, namely, the Kingdom of England. And behold (said she, which I marvell ye have forgotten,) the Pledge of this my Wedlock and Marriage with my Kingdom.

And therewith she drew the Ring from her Finger, and shewed it, wherewith at her Coronation she had in a set form words solemnly given her self in Marriage to her Kingdom.

William Camden, Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth

CONTENTS

Marriage With My Kingdom

The Courtships of Elizabeth I

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

1 The King’s Last Daughter

2 The Noblest Man Unmarried in This Land

3 Le plus beau gentilhomme d’Angleterre

4 No Alliance More Advantageous than That with the Duke of Savoy

5 I Am Already Wedded to an Husband

6 If the Emperor So Desires Me for a Daughter

7 Lord Robert Would Be Better in Paradise

8 Without a Certain Heir, Living and Known

9 Talk Is All of the Archduke

10 To Marry With France

11 A Frog He Would-a-Wooing Go

12 Envoi

Notes and Abbreviations

Sources and Bibliography

Copyright

PROLOGUE

On or about 28 August 1556 a young Englishman, with his hawk on his wrist, took a gondola out of Venice hoping to enjoy a day’s sport among the islands. But the bad luck which had dogged Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, throughout his life pursued him even across the Venetian lagoon. A violent squall of wind and rain caught him on the tiny, shelterless island of Lio and the young man in his light summer clothes was quickly soaked to the skin. A gondola was useless in such conditions, and the Earl and his party were fortunate to be picked up by a Venetian naval craft cruising in the area.

Edward Courtenay was travelling abroad at his sovereign’s command rather than his own inclination. He took no part in the social round of Venice, keeping himself resolutely to himself and admitting to his friendship only a small group of those gentlemen eager to make much of the romantic English milord. Five days after his adventure on the lagoon, which had brought on an attack of malaria, the Earl of Devonshire had a fall on the stairs of his house and decided to move to Padua. The University of Padua was famous for its medical school, and an invalid could expect to receive the most up-to-date treatment from the city’s doctors.

Most people travelled the twenty-five miles from Venice by water, patronising horse-drawn barges which plied up and down the River Brenta. But Edward Courtenay, either from obstinacy or impatience, ‘took the worst way and came by a certain waggons called coches’ – a form of transport which, in the opinion of Peter Vannes, Queen Mary’s agent in Venice, was ‘very shaking and uneasy’. Vannes was himself temporarily resident in Padua to avoid the plague which reigned in Venice during the summer months. News of the Earl of Devonshire’s arrival reached him late on Saturday night, and next morning he hastened to pay his respects to the distinguished visitor. Vannes found the Earl very weak and feverish after his uncomfortable journey, and although two of the best available physicians were summoned to his bedside his condition deteriorated rapidly. The last representative of the old royal house of England, whose grandmother had been a Plantagenet princess, lay alone in his lodgings, gripped by ‘a continual great hot ague’, nursed only by his servants, too ill to see anyone but Peter Vannes and the Italian doctors.

The end came on 18 September. Vannes reported that he believed the Earl of Devonshire had died a good Christian who could hope for God’s mercy. He had listened meekly to spiritual exhortation, lifted up his eyes and knocked himself on the breast in token of repentance of his sins; but by this time ‘his tongue had so stopt his mouth, and his teeth so cloven together’, that he had been unable to receive the sacrament.1

Knowing that news of Edward Courtenay’s death would come as a considerable relief to at least one European power and as a serious disappointment to another, Peter Vannes took the precaution of securing sworn statements from the Earl’s servants, from the physicians who had attended him and the surgeons who had carried out the post-mortem examination that to the best of their knowledge he had died from natural causes.2 Vannes was also saddled with the responsibility of making the funeral arrangements, which he hoped to contrive ‘with as much sparing and as much honour as can be done’. In the event, there was more sparing than honour. Vannes was currently suffering from such an acute attack of penury – the chronic affliction of sixteenth-century ambassadors – that he described himself as being ‘next door to going a-begging’, and Mary Tudor proved unresponsive to suggestions that she should pay for the obsequies of a kinsman she had small reason to regret.3

Half a century later, an English tourist exploring St Anthony’s Church in Padua was deeply shocked when a plain wooden coffin containing the mortal remains of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, was pointed out to him stacked casually in the cloister and ‘having neither epitaph nor any other thing to preserve it from oblivion.’4 It was then five years since the House of Tudor had followed the House of Plantagenet off the stage, and the name of Edward Courtenay had long since been forgotten. Worthy Thomas Coryat, gazing on the sight of a noble Englishman so ignobly buried, was struck by compassion and remorse. He was not aware that he was also looking at the last resting-place of a man who, as the predestined bridegroom of Elizabeth Tudor, might so easily have altered the whole course of English history.

1

THE KING’S LAST DAUGHTER

When Anne Boleyn gave birth to a girl between the hours of three and four o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 7 September, 1533, Catholic Europe sniggered behind its hands over the devastating snub which Providence had dealt the King of England and his concubine. Messire Eustace Chapuys, the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador at the Court of St James’s, did not attempt to conceal his malicious amusement.1

Te Deum for Queen Anne’s safe delivery was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, and the ‘high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth’, was given a splendid christening in the Friar’s Church at Greenwich.2 Over these proceedings, however, there hung a faint but palpable air of defiance. No amount of pompous ceremony and displays of official rejoicing could conceal the embarrassing fact that the flamboyantly masculine Henry VIII had once more failed to get a legitimate son. In his quest for a male heir, Henry had repudiated his blameless first wife and offended her influential relatives; he had challenged the Pope and resigned from the Church of Rome; he had ruthlessly manipulated the accepted laws of God and man to suit his own ends – and all he had got for his pains was another daughter.

In 1533 the break with Rome was not yet irrevocable. In July, Pope Clement had solemnly condemned the King’s separation from Catherine of Aragon, denounced his second marriage and framed (but not published) a bull of excommunication.3 In November, at a meeting with the Pope arranged under the auspices of the King of France, Henry’s representatives made what seemed a deliberately provocative appeal against the threatened excommunication to a future General Council of the Church.4 But still the way to reconciliation was not finally barred. For years now Clement had temporised and delayed in the matter of the King of England’s divorce. If he could have devised some face-saving formula, he would, even at this eleventh hour, have used it thankfully. As for Henry, if he had been offered a settlement on his own terms, he might, even now, have accepted it. The King’s position was not unlike that of a man who has quarrelled with the committee of his club and left to set up a rival establishment, but who, at the same time, cherishes a sneaking desire to be invited to return.

The invitation never came. On 23 March 1534 the Pope was finally forced to give a ruling on the divorce. Twenty-two cardinals in secret consistory pronounced in favour of Queen Catherine – declaring her marriage to be lawful and valid, and optimistically enjoining the King to take her back as his wife.5 Later that year Parliament at Westminster passed the Act of Supremacy, 26 Henry VIII, recognising the King, his heirs and successors, without qualification, as ‘the only supreme head in earth of the church of England’, with all the ‘honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities … belonging and appertaining’.6 After this, nothing short of unconditional surrender by one party or the other could heal the breach between England and Rome.

The King’s divorce, the Great Matter which had occupied Henry’s thoughts and energies almost exclusively for the past seven years, had come to overshadow every aspect of English domestic and foreign policy, and had had the effect of forcing the country further and further into the arms of France. France might remain the ancestral enemy, Spain the traditional ally, the Netherlands – now a Spanish apanage – the trading partner on which England’s economic prosperity depended; but unfortunately Charles V – ruler of Spain, Lord of the Netherlands, the Franche-Comte and Austria, King of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, suzerain of the Habsburg fiefs in Germany and northern Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor – also happened to be the nephew of the discarded Queen of England. Charles, with the cares of half Europe on his shoulders, menaced by advancing Turkish hordes in the east, harassed by heresy in Germany and by French territorial ambitions in Italy, was naturally reluctant to add war with England to his problems. Common decency and the obligations of family honour compelled him to protest at the humiliation of his aunt, and to promote her cause by all the diplomatic means at his disposal. More than that he had not, so far, been prepared to do. At the same time, the Empire represented the greatest power-bloc in Europe and the Emperor could, if sufficiently provoked, make things very uncomfortable for the King of England. It had, therefore, seemed a necessary precaution to strengthen English ties with France. In 1532 a new defensive treaty was negotiated between the two countries and in September of that year the entente cordiale was sealed by a meeting between the two kings – Henry and François – at Boulogne.7

Their alliance was based on mutual self-interest. Henry needed a promise of French assistance in case of an Imperial attack. He also needed friends in Rome, especially since he had dispensed with the invaluable services of Cardinal Wolsey. François needed English support in his perennial feud with the Emperor – with English help he could close the Channel and cut sea-borne communications between Spain and the Netherlands. To embarrass Charles, he was prepared to side with Henry in his battle for the divorce, and French cardinals were instructed to use their influence at the Vatican on his behalf. The King of France was not, however, prepared to offend the Pope and certainly not, as Henry appears to have believed, to join England in schism. François needed papal backing for his Italian ploys and in 1533 acquired the Pope’s niece, Catherine de Medici, as a daughter-in-law. He was, in fact, attempting to perform the increasingly difficult feat of running with the King of England while hunting with the Pope.

Then, in the autumn of 1534, Clement VII died, to be succeeded by Paul III. Though an Italian, the new Pope was said to be ‘a good Frenchman’. He was also said to have been pro-Henry in the matter of the divorce and soon after his election began asking for advice on ‘what means he should take to win back the King of England’.8 François, always an optimist, began to hope that here might be an opportunity to realise his long-cherished ambition to weld England, the papacy and perhaps even the German Protestant states into a grand alliance directed against the hegemony of the Empire. In terms of practical politics this had never been a particularly realistic scheme, and in 1534 it was probably less so than ever, but the Emperor was sufficiently disturbed by the general trend of events to make some friendly overtures to François and to send the Count of Nassau on a special mission to France. The English government maintained an attitude of elaborate unconcern although, in the opinion of Eustace Chapuys, Nassau’s visit was ‘a flea in their ear’. English immunity from fears of Imperial vengeance depended largely on the continued animosity between France and the Empire, and Henry was haunted by a suspicion that François would not hesitate to stab his ally in the back any time it suited him.

It was common gossip that the Count of Nassau had come to discuss ‘great affairs and marriages’ with the King of France, but no one seemed to know any details. The details were, in fact, being carefully concealed, for Nassau had brought a top-secret proposition from Charles that François should suggest a match between Mary Tudor, Catherine of Aragon’s only surviving child, and his own third son, the Duke of Angoulême. It was true that Mary had recently been bastardised and disinherited by Act of Parliament, but in the eyes of Rome, and therefore of all orthodox Catholics, she was still the legitimate English heiress. This was to be pointed out to François, together with a reminder of the various financial and political advantages to be gained by himself and his son, and a hint that if he co-operated with the Emperor, the thing could be carried through whether the King of England was willing or not. In other words, France and the Empire could jointly exert enough pressure on Henry to force him to restore his elder daughter to her proper place in the succession.9

Charles naturally took a close interest in his young cousin, who was currently being bullied and threatened by her father and step-mother, and made to yield precedence to her baby half-sister. The Emperor was not without human feelings and, besides, Mary was a potentially valuable weapon in his dynastic armoury. If the King of France could be induced to make an offer for her without revealing the Emperor’s interest, it might kill three Imperial birds with one stone; it would divert François from further Italian adventures, drive a useful wedge into the Anglo-French alliance – Henry could scarcely miss the wounding implication that not even his closest ally recognised his do-it-yourself divorce – and might also provide an escape-hatch for Mary.

Unhappily for these amiable intentions, the only effect of Nassau’s cautiously worded approach was to impress François with a sense of the Emperor’s disquiet and to strengthen his hopes of being able to make a successful challenge. A few weeks after the Count’s departure, a mission led by Philippe Chabot, sieur de Brion and Admiral of France, crossed the Channel for high-level talks in London. De Brion at once passed on Charles’s suggestion of a French marriage for Mary – a suggestion which Henry had no hesitation in ascribing to the Emperor’s malice and his intent to ‘dissolve the amity’ between François and himself. At the same time, the King resisted French proposals designed to involve him in the Habsburg–Valois vendetta. Instead, he put forward a proposal of his own. If François could obtain from Pope Paul a reversal of Clement’s ‘unjust and slanderous’ verdict on the divorce, Henry would consider formally renouncing the title of King of France, still borne by the kings of England, and would also be willing to open negotiations for a marriage between the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Angoulême.10 Thus the twelve-year-old duke achieved the distinction of becoming the first in a long line of Elizabeth Tudor’s suitors and Elizabeth, at the age of fourteen months made her debut on the international political stage.

In spite of much outward cordiality, the French were disappointed by Henry’s reluctance to be drawn into their net and by his evident determination not to give an inch in dealing with the Pope. According to Eustace Chapuys, de Brion left for home in a mood of disenchantment, and certainly his departure was followed by a somewhat ominous silence. Henry, who seems to have been expecting a prompt reply to his flattering offer, grew so impatient that de Morette, the resident French ambassador, began to avoid the Court, but it was not until the end of January 1535 that de Brion’s secretary, Palamedes Gontier, returned to London to resume discussions. The King received him informally, leaning against a sideboard as Gontier opened the subject of the Angoulême marriage with a discreet enquiry about the prospective bride’s exact legal status – a matter of some interest to her prospective father-in-law. François assumed that, having given Elizabeth the title of princess, Henry intended to assure it to her and treat her as his only heiress; but, said Gontier, his king felt that in the circumstances steps ought to be taken which would ‘deprive lady Mary of any occasion or means of claiming the Crown’.11

Henry hastened to allay any French misgivings by explaining ‘what had been done by Parliament’ – that is, by the 1534 Act for the Establishment of the King’s Succession. This was the Act which had ratified the divorce proceedings conducted under the aegis of Thomas Cranmer at Dunstable in May 1533. It declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon ‘utterly void and annulled’ and settled the succession on children born of the Anne Boleyn marriage, naming ‘the Lady Elizabeth, now princess’, as heiress presumptive. To make assurance doubly sure, it further laid down that the King’s subjects were to ‘make a corporal oath’ to ‘truly, firmly and constantly … observe, fulfil, maintain, defend and keep … the whole effects and contents of this present act’ or incur the penalties of misprision of high treason.12 This oath, Henry assured Gontier, had now been taken throughout the kingdom, adding pleasantly that everyone took Mary for the bastard she was. Elizabeth had been quickly proclaimed his sole heiress and there was no question of Mary ever becoming Queen or claiming any right to the crown. He went on to point out that, if François would only persuade the Pope to agree that his first marriage was null and void, all doubts would cease.13 This was not strictly true, for the French had already been taking legal advice as to whether or not Mary could still be considered legitimate, even if her parents’ marriage was invalid.14

Palamedes Gontier did not, however, feel it necessary to mention this to Henry, but turned instead to financial matters, indicating that the King of France would be obliged if the annual pensions being paid to England under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens were remitted as part of Elizabeth’s dowry. The King of England ‘took this ill’. Considering that he had, of his own accord, offered the heiress of a kingdom ‘of most certain title, without remainder of querel to the contrary’, to a younger son, all the obligation was on the French side and ‘they ought rather to give him something than ask’. Such looking of a gift horse in the mouth, together with the long delay in giving him an answer, made him think ‘there was a practice going on elsewhere’.15

Having got over these preliminary skirmishes, Gontier was passed on to the King’s advisers, and during the month he spent in England the rough draft of a marriage treaty was drawn up and arrangements made for a further meeting between the representatives of both sides to be held at Calais at Whitsun, so that the Bishop of Faenza, papal nuncio in France, thought the matter could reasonably be expected to take effect.16

But, unknown to the Bishop, some devious cross-currents were moving beneath the surface. Thomas Cromwell, the King of England’s hard-headed secretary and man of business, placed little long-term reliance on the French connection. Cromwell, who had already set in train the complicated administrative machinery for nationalising the resources of the Catholic Church in England, knew there was not going to be any accommodation with the Pope, that, in fact, the open hostility of the Pope could not be long delayed. He also knew that France, a Continental power with important interests in Italy, would never break her ties with Rome and that, if it came to a showdown, England could not rely on her support. By far the most logical alliance for England was still with the Emperor, and Cromwell, unhampered by illusions, ideals or old-fashioned notions of honour and filial piety, found it hard to credit that Charles could seriously mean to go on denying himself the obvious advantages of English friendship just for the sake of a surely expendable aunt and cousin. As early as February 1535, Master Secretary was remarking to Eustace Chapuys that it would be better to be talking of a marriage between the Spanish prince – the Emperor’s eight-year-old son Philip – and the King’s last daughter.17 This unlikely suggestion was apparently intended as a joke, and the ambassador took it as such, but a month later Cromwell brought the subject up again – only to drop it hastily at the sight of Chapuys’ frosty expression, saying wistfully that he suspected the Emperor would not hear of it out of respect for his cousin.18

Meanwhile, negotiations with France continued. The Calais meeting duly took place at the end of May, but ended in stalemate. The English commissioners, headed by the Duke of Norfolk, had been instructed to press their opposite numbers to agree that young Angoulême should come to England immediately to complete his education, although the formal betrothal would not be solemnised until Elizabeth was seven years old.19 The French, not unnaturally, jibbed at the idea of parting with their bridegroom before the bride was of full marriageable age and, according to the Bishop of Faenza, François refused disdainfully to send his son to be a hostage in England.20 But this was a negotiable point, and the rock on which the talks foundered seems to have been Henry’s ‘exorbitant demand’ that François should make a public declaration binding himself to uphold the validity of the Anne Boleyn marriage against all comers.21 The King of France was quite prepared to do his best to persuade the Pope to re-open the King of England’s case with a view to revoking Clement’s ‘false and unreasonable’ judgement on the divorce;22 for such a revocation would not only place Henry under a heavy obligation to France but, more important, would also go a long way towards realising her king’s dreams of detaching the papacy from its dependence on the Empire. But François could only move through conventional channels. He neither could nor would reject or even question the Pope’s right of jurisdiction in matters of Canon Law. By July, therefore, the Angoulême marriage negotiations had petered out and the Anglo-French entente was showing distinct signs of strain.23

Fortunately for Henry, developments in Italy in the autumn of 1535 portended the imminent renewal of Franco-Imperial hostilities and considerably increased his opportunities for engaging in the exhilarating diplomatic sport of playing one great power off against the other. In October, Cromwell was telling Chapuys about attempts by certain ‘malicious and badly-intentioned parties’ to make mischief between their respective masters, and that Henry was thinking of sending ‘a very great and most honourable embassy’ to the Emperor to discuss a renewal of their old friendship and confederacy.24 Cromwell had also reverted to his idea of an alliance cemented by the marriage of Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain, working the subject into conversation with elaborate casualness and always making the suggestion timidly, ‘like one offering a coin to an elephant’.25

During the Christmas holidays Chapuys had a long audience with the King, who walked the ambassador up and down with an arm round his neck explaining how invaluable English support would be to the Emperor should war break out again in Italy. But, Henry went on, if Charles did not soon respond to his overtures, he would be obliged to listen to the French, who were overwhelming him with the most flattering offers.26 When Chapuys tried to pin him down, saying that all the time he and Cromwell had been discussing the possibility of a new understanding no tangible proposal had been made, Henry himself spoke of the marriage of his ‘little daughter’. Although Chapuys was too old a hand not to see through Henry’s game, and found the thought of a marriage between the English king’s bastard and the Holy Roman Emperor’s heir almost too preposterous to be mentioned, he nevertheless told his master that perhaps the proposal should not be rejected out of hand, in case England was driven back irretrievably into the French orbit.27

During the first half of 1536 the situation on both the international and the domestic fronts underwent a radical change. By the spring a French army had invaded northern Italy, and the Emperor had less time than ever to spare for England. In any case, the chief personal bones of contention between Henry and himself were now beginning to disappear. Catherine of Aragon died in January and, on 2 May, Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken to the Tower. A fortnight later she was arraigned before a commission of lords on a charge of treason against the King’s own person. The result of the trial was, of course, a foregone conclusion and Anne was beheaded on Tower Green at eight o’clock in the morning of Friday, 19 May, ‘when she had reigned as Queen three years, lacking fourteen days, from her coronation to her death’. But Henry was not content with merely killing the woman for whom he had so recently been prepared to turn the world upside down. Two days before her execution, ‘at a solemn court kept at Lambeth by the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and the doctors of the law, the King was divorced from his wife Queen Anne … and so she was discharged and was never lawful Queen of England’.28

The dissolution of the King’s second marriage necessitated a second Act of Succession, passed in the summer of 1536, by which Parliament once again ratified a decision by Thomas Cranmer on Henry’s matrimonial affairs and once again bastardised and disabled his heiress. The two-year-old Elizabeth thus joined her half-sister in social limbo, the natural consequence being a drastic reduction of her value in that area where sixteenth-century princesses were alone considered to be of value – the international marriage-market.

Such wholesale dissipation of his potential assets worried the King’s more frugal advisers, and in the spring of 1537 an aide-mémoire drawn up for a council meeting noted that: ‘The King has two daughters, not lawful, yet king’s daughters, and as princes commonly conclude amity and things of importance by alliance, it is thought necessary that these two daughters shall be made of some estimation, without which no man will have any great respect to them’. As Mary, now twenty-one, would be ‘more apt to make a present alliance’, it was suggested that the King should either legitimise her or else ‘advance her to some certain living decent for such an estate, whereby she may be the better had in reputation’. A similar course could then be taken with regard to Elizabeth and in this way Henry might, by means of his elder daughter, ‘provide himself of a present friend and have the other in store hereafter to get another friend’.29

Needless to say, no part of this ingenuous plan was ever carried out. It was probably never even discussed. The legitimacy or otherwise of the princesses was a touchy subject at the best of times, but especially so just then in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace. That October, Queen Jane Seymour succeeded (though it killed her) in presenting the King with a male heir unquestionably born in wedlock, but Henry continued to adopt an uncompromising take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards his daughters’ suitors. In any case, now that he was a widower again, he had a far more tempting piece of merchandise to offer and at once embarked on an extensive programme of consumer research.

Although there is a strong flavour of opéra bouffe about the King of England’s heavy-footed pursuit of love round the courts of Europe during the years 1538 and 1539 – a pursuit which finally netted the despised Anne of Cleves – his underlying purpose was serious enough. The King of France and the Emperor, both at least temporarily exhausted by their increasingly pointless and increasingly expensive hostility, were showing definite signs of coming to an understanding. Such an understanding might well lead to England’s isolation; at a time of domestic unrest, ominously linked with the names of certain surviving members of the old royal house, it might well lead to something worse. Dread of the Catholic powers combining to attack the heretic island under colour of a papal crusade, in the expectation of internal support as well as of rich pickings for themselves, first became acute in the late 1530s and influenced English foreign policy for the rest of the century. Henry’s marriage-mongering was therefore designed primarily to prevent a new alignment of the great powers or, failing that, to prevent his exclusion from any new Continental alignment.30

With this end in view, either a French or an Imperialist bride would do equally well, and the King’s first choice fell on a Frenchwoman, the widowed Mary of Guise. But, when the lady was irritatingly snapped up by James of Scotland, Henry turned his attention to the Emperor’s niece, the young Duchess of Milan – and certainly the far-reaching Habsburg family provided greater scope for the multiple marriage-schemes he now began to evolve.

The first suggestion was for a double wedding – Henry to the Duchess of Milan and Mary to Dom Luis of Portugal. This idea was presently expanded to include the other two Tudor children, Prince Edward being offered to the Emperor’s daughter and Elizabeth either to one of his nephews, sons of the Kings of Hungary, or alternatively to a son of the Duke of Savoy.31 Charles von Habsburg and Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont, were later to become familiar figures in the Elizabethan matrimonial scene, but in 1538 not even Henry could expect his younger daughter – bastard of a notorious adulteress – to be in much request among foreign royalty in search of eligible brides, and by October he was lumping Elizabeth together with his niece, Margaret Douglas, and Mary Howard, widow of his base-born son, in a special bargain offer – all three girls to be bestowed by the Emperor’s advice ‘upon such of the princes of Italy as shall be thought convenient’.32

Just how seriously Henry took schemes of this nature is hard to say, but in any case he was, as usual, asking too high a price for his goods. He had not been able to prevent Charles and François from signing a ten-year truce in the summer of 1538 and, predictably, neither monarch was now so interested in an English alliance. In 1539 the international situation became so threatening that Henry was forced to look for friends among the non-aligned German Lutheran princes, and by the end of the year found himself trapped in his distasteful fourth marriage.

But the crisis was short-lived. Cracks soon began to appear in the papering-over of Habsburg–Valois animosity, and by the beginning of 1541 France and the Empire were at loggerheads once more, thus once more opening up England’s freedom of diplomatic manoeuvre. Since there were no longer any personal obstacles in the way of an Anglo-Imperial alliance and since, for both economic and sentimental reasons, English public opinion favoured the Emperor, France was now obliged to make the running if she wanted to avoid being left out in the cold. In June, therefore, François instructed his ambassador to assure the Duke of Norfolk that he had ‘no greater desire than to live in perpetual amity with England’. If Norfolk showed any disposition to enquire how this amiable intention might be furthered, Charles de Marillac was to reply that he had heard that when the Duke was last in Calais ‘some question of marriages’ had been under discussion, and that these were the surest bonds to strengthen amity between princes. He could then add – quite casually, of course – that the King of England had a daughter, ‘her who is held legitimate’, and François a son, M. d’Orléans, to whom he intended to give the Duchy of Milan, and that this would be one of the greatest matches in Christendom ‘by means of which great things could be accomplished both for France and England’. Marillac was to suggest that Norfolk might care to think the matter over, while at the same time being careful to maintain the convention that it was all his own idea, and one that he would not like his master to know he had even mentioned.33

There were two flaws in this interesting scheme, one being that François was under the mistaken impression that Elizabeth was still regarded as legitimate by the English. The other concerned the Duchy of Milan, the rival claims to which constituted one of the chief bones of contention between François and Charles. France plus Milan plus England would certainly have formed a powerful combination, but unfortunately Milan was currently firmly in the Emperor’s possession. Another snag was the fact that M. d’Orléans was already married. But since his wife, Catherine de Medici, had so far proved barren there was talk of divorcing her.

It was August before the Duke of Norfolk gave the French ambassador his cue to broach the subject of the Orléans marriage and appeared so receptive to an initial approach that Marillac felt justified in asking how it could best be arranged and which of King Henry’s daughters should be proposed for the honour. Although Mary was better qualified by age and seniority, no French prince – and especially not Henri d’Orléans, who was François’ eldest surviving son and his heir – could ever marry a bastard, so perhaps it might be better to choose the younger sister in spite of her regrettable maternity. The Duke’s reaction was immediate and for that reason, thought Marillac, unfeigned. The younger of the two was not to be spoken of, he said roundly. For one thing she was only seven years old, and her mother’s reputation was such that ‘it was quite decided to consider her illegitimate, as the Act of Parliament declared’. In any case, Norfolk refused to become involved. Anne Boleyn had been his niece and, if he attempted to advance Elizabeth’s cause, he would be laying himself open to accusations of ‘seeking to aggrandise his own house’.34

Such sensitivity seems a little curious in a man who had recently married another of his nieces to the King, but Norfolk was not, as he hastened to assure Marillac, opposed to a French alliance in principle. The Lady Mary was available, and the Duke readily undertook ‘to forward matters so that a good end might be expected’.35 Negotiations did, in fact, begin and dragged on for several months – always to be frustrated by Henry’s rigid insistence on the immutable nature of Mary’s illegitimacy. Not even by implication would he allow the annulment of his first marriage to be questioned.

Meanwhile the King was busy angling for an alliance with the Emperor, and in 1542 Elizabeth’s name was again briefly linked with the Prince of Piedmont. Eustace Chapuys saw on objection to this. Such a connection, he thought, would help to detach England from France.36 But the whole tide of events during the 1540s was taking England away from France, and an Anglo-Imperial treaty was concluded in February 1543. It was not, however, to be sealed by a marriage. Henry, it appeared, did not intend actually to part with his daughters if he could help it; they were too useful to him as bargaining-counters in the endless horse-trading of dynastic diplomacy, as bribes to be dangled in front of recalcitrant allies.

Mary, now in her mid-twenties, her youth slipping emptily away, had already realised that as long as her father lived ‘there would be nothing to be got but fine words’, and was bitterly resigned to being only the Lady Mary, ‘the most unhappy lady in Christendom’.37 Elizabeth, at nine years old and not yet understanding all the bleak implications of a spinster’s fate, was old enough and intelligent enough to have begun to observe the developing pattern of her sister’s life and her own. A sixteenth-century princess was conditioned to expect an arranged marriage at an early age, to serve her country’s interests abroad with her own body. There was nothing new or remarkable about that. But to see herself being cynically hawked in the market-place without serious intention was another matter. It was not playing fair. If Elizabeth did indeed say to Robert Dudley about this time ‘I will never marry’, it may have been a child’s statement of simple fact rather than of intent.

In 1543, Henry’s younger daughter was once again featured in the shop-window as the centre of political interest moved to Scotland, where a crisis situation had been building up over the past two years. Scottish friendship with France, dating back to the early fourteenth century, had always been a source of inconvenience and sometimes danger to her southern neighbour. Henry VIII had hoped to break the ‘auld alliance’ by marrying his daughter Margaret to King James IV, but even this did not prevent James in 1513 from adhering to the time-honoured custom of attacking through England’s back door while English forces were engaged across the Channel.

At the beginning of the 1540s it looked as if the bloody lesson of Flodden Field had been lost on Margaret Tudor’s son. As he grew to manhood James V turned his face obstinately towards France, choosing first one French wife and then another. Influenced by the powerfully pro-French Cardinal Beaton, he snubbed his English uncle’s friendly overtures and rejected the anti-papal propaganda disseminated by Henry. Scotland remained a Catholic country, potentially if not actually hostile – a state of affairs made more than ordinarily explosive by the fact that the King of Scots stood very close to the English throne. The King of England was no longer a young man, and his health had begun to deteriorate. Prince Edward was still little more than a baby, and Henry had himself removed his daughters from the succession. If he could not soon separate James from his foreign friends and secure the vulnerable land-frontier, the danger from possible future consequences scarcely needed spelling out. In 1541 border incidents were already proliferating, and by the autumn of 1542 England and Scotland were at war.

Within a matter of weeks a dramatic series of events had changed the situation out of all recognition. The Scots had suffered total and humiliating defeat at Solway Moss, the melancholic James had turned his face to the wall and died, and a week-old baby girl had succeeded to the Scottish throne. Now, if ever, was the time for a bold stroke of dynastic diplomacy. A marriage between the five-year-old heir to the English throne and the infant Mary Queen of Scots would unite the two countries with England as the dominant partner and certainly seemed to offer the best chance of a permanent solution to the whole intractable problem of Anglo-Scottish relations. ‘I would she and her nurse were in my lord Prince’s house,’ remarked one Englishman less than a fortnight after Mary’s birth.

To begin with, at least, the omens looked favourable. The Scots were ready to make peace, the Franco-Catholic party had fallen into disarray, and in January 1543 the Scottish Council named James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, as regent or governor. Arran was generally considered to be well disposed towards England, but the Hamiltons were themselves of royal Stuart blood; Arran was, in fact, the heir presumptive, and it was known that he had hoped to marry the little Queen to his own son. It would, therefore, be necessary to offer him a consolation prize and, in April, Sir Ralph Sadler, the English diplomat sent by Henry to handle negotiations in Edinburgh, was instructed to tell him that the King had a daughter called the Lady Elizabeth ‘endowed with virtues and qualities agreeable with her estate’. If Arran proved sincere in his friendship, Henry meant to condescend to her marriage with his son, and would ‘bring up and nourish his said son’ as a son-in-law at the English court.38

When these tidings were conveyed to him, reported Sadler, ‘the Governor understanding the great honour your Majesty did offer unto him in that behalf, put off his cap and said, “he was most bound of all men unto your Majesty, in that it pleased the same, being a prince of so great reputation in the world, to offer such alliance and marriage with so poor a man as he is, for the which he should bear his heart and service to your Majesty next unto his sovereign lady during his life”.’39 Three days later Arran told Sadler that he would willingly ‘accept and embrace’ Henry’s proposal, and on 6 May he sent the Earl of Glencarne and Sir George Douglas to London with instructions ‘humbly to desire the King to accomplish the contract of marriage betwixt the Lady Elizabeth and James Lord Hamilton, son and heir apparent to us, James Earl of Arran, governor and second person of Scotland; not doubting but the King shall provide for the said lady and her part according to the state of such a princess’.40

Meanwhile, progress towards accomplishing the other and more important Scottish marriage-contract was less satisfactory for, with his customary insensitivity, Henry had presented a shopping-list of demands calculated to confirm the worst fears of a nation notoriously touchy and suspicious of English intentions. Although the treaty finally signed at Greenwich in July met the Scots rather more than half-way, the damage had been done and the pro-French faction led by Cardinal Beaton and the Queen-Dowager, Mary of Guise, was rapidly regaining its former ascendancy. Arran continued to feed Sadler with fair words, but he was not a strong character and his position had become untenable. In September, to Henry’s unspeakable disgust, he threw in his lot with the Cardinal and a rare opportunity for creating a peaceful and united Great Britain had vanished into the northern mist.

The King of England spent most of the next eighteen months trying to win by fire and sword what he had failed to achieve at the conference table. In the spring of 1544 he sent the Earl of Hertford on a punitive expedition to Scotland and that summer embarked on a war with France which, although undertaken in conjunction with the Emperor, was chiefly designed to cut the Scots off from their Continental allies.

The capture on 14 September of the strategic port of Boulogne by the English army went some way towards gaining this objective by cutting the short sea-route to Edinburgh. Henry had personally superintended the siege of Boulogne, and its fall gave him a good deal of simple pleasure. To the French it was a serious loss which they immediately exerted their best efforts to recover. As early as October, Cardinal du Bellay was suggesting to William Paget that Henry might care to give his younger daughter to ‘some Prince of France’ together with Boulogne, and François might afterwards exchange other lands in France for it. Unsurprisingly Paget was not impressed by this hopeful plan. It would, he remarked, be a great dowry and offer no compensation for the cost of winning it.41

Henry clung to Boulogne, but by the beginning of 1545 found himself uncomfortably short of friends. He had fallen out with his Imperial ally and, since France and the Empire had made a separate peace, François would now be in a position to concentrate all his forces against England. Henry, therefore, turned once more to Germany, sending his unofficial envoy, Christopher Mundt, on a visit to the Landgrave of Hesse with instructions to propose an offensive and defensive alliance with the Protestant League. Mundt, and Walter Buckler who went with him, were to say that the King was surprised that none of the German princes had so far sought ‘to enter with us by marriage or otherwise’. They were ‘to set forth the qualities’ of the King’s two daughters – either of whom would, of course, be a catch ‘for a prince of the greatest honour’ – and suggest the King of Denmark’s brother as a possible bridegroom.42

The King of Denmark, when this flattering offer was relayed to him, was polite but not notably enthusiastic – the Protestant League had problems enough of its own at that particular moment – and Henry, facing the prospect of a French counter-offensive, was obliged to mend his fences with the Emperor. All the old triple-marriage proposals were trotted out again – Mary to the Emperor himself, Prince Edward to the Emperor’s daughter and Elizabeth to Philip of Spain. Elizabeth’s claims in particular were pressed when Henry got wind of ‘a practice in hand’ for a French marriage for Philip.43

After a period of intense diplomatic activity the Anglo-Imperial entente was patched up, but no betrothals followed. The Emperor, who was just then gathering his forces for an onslaught on German Protestantism, seemed unaccountably uninterested in welcoming the Tudors into the great Habsburg clan, and when Henry died in January 1547 he left his daughters unsought, unpromised and fancy-free – their future a matter for speculation.

2

THE NOBLEST MAN UNMARRIEDIN THIS LAND

Elizabeth Tudor was rising thirteen and a half when her father died. The portrait painted by an unknown artist some time between 1542 and 1547 shows a pale flat-chested girl in a red dress. Her carroty-coloured hair is parted in the middle and tucked smoothly under a French hood. Her eyes, dark and watchful in the immature but unmistakable Tudor countenance, give nothing away. She holds a book in her incredibly long fingers. Beside her another book lies propped open on a reading-stand. She looks the very image of the studious young lady whose ‘maiden shamefastness’ was considered so praiseworthy by sober Protestant divines like John Aylmer. She looks, in fact, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Until 1547, Elizabeth’s life had been spent almost entirely in one or other of the royal manor-houses which lay in a rough semi-circle to the north of London, sometimes sharing an establishment with her elder sister, sometimes with her brother. Apart from those infrequent occasions when she was summoned to court to play her part with the rest of the royal family in some state function, she had lived quietly in the country, working at her lessons, aware of the great world which lay on the periphery of her existence but not yet personally involved in it. Now all this was to be changed. The year 1547 marked the end of childhood – the beginning of a long life spent at the epicentre of the great world.

Henry had left his daughters in a peculiar constitutional position. Both remained bastards by Act of Parliament but, bastards or not, both had now been restored to their places in the succession. In 1536, Parliament had granted the King power to bequeath the crown by will in order to meet the then very real possibility that he might die without any legitimate heirs at all. The birth of Prince Edward had relieved the worst of this anxiety, but in 1544 the situation was still sufficiently uncertain to make a third Act of Succession seem a necessary precaution. In the event of Edward’s death without heirs, and failing any further heirs born of the King’s sixth marriage, this Act settled the succession first on Mary and then Elizabeth, subject to conditions to be laid down in their father’s will or by his letters patent. In his will, a complicated and much discussed document, Henry confirmed his daughters’ rights to the reversion of the crown on condition that neither of them married without ‘the written and sealed consent’ of a majority of the surviving members of the Privy Council appointed by the same will to rule during Edward’s minority. If either Mary or Elizabeth failed to observe this condition, she would forfeit her chance of succeeding.1

Looked at from a personal point of view, both sisters were left in a peculiarly uncomfortable position – both were orphaned and unmarried in a society where the Law, with few exceptions, regarded women as the extension of either husband or father; both were shadowed by the reproach of bastardy and yet both, by reason of their royal blood and their father’s will, might well become objects of dangerous interest to practitioners of the sort of cut-throat politics likely to prevail in a country suddenly bereft of strong leadership.

Of the two princesses, Elizabeth was the most vulnerable. Mary was at least an adult, with an adult’s experience and capacity for judgement. Elizabeth, at thirteen, was still a child, although in the eyes of the Law she had reached maturity and was of full marriageable age. Unlike her sister, she had no relatives, either at home or abroad, with the power to exert themselves on her behalf. The Boleyn family had disappeared as completely as if it had never been, and Elizabeth’s noble kinsfolk, the Howards, were in eclipse – the Duke of Norfolk being in the Tower under sentence of death. Her natural protector, of course, was her brother, but at nine years old King Edward could scarcely be expected to provide much in the way of support. For the time being, at any rate, effective power over the government, over the King and the King’s sisters lay in the hands of the King’s maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, now created Duke of Somerset.

The question of Elizabeth’s immediate future had been settled by the beginning of March 1547 when François van der Delft, the current Imperial ambassador, reported from London that the Queen-Dowager was shortly going to reside in the suburbs with Madam Elizabeth, daughter of the late King. Madam Elizabeth, he added, would remain always in the Queen’s company.2 On the face of it, this seemed a sensible and humane arrangement. The Queen-Dowager was the obvious person to take charge of the King’s sister and Katherine Parr, in many ways the most sympathetic of Henry’s wives, had already proved herself a conscientious and affectionate step-mother. The household she established in the cheerful, modern, red-brick mansion overlooking the Thames at Chelsea was joined by nine-year-old Jane Grey, eldest of King Henry’s English great-nieces, as well as by Elizabeth and offered all the facilities of an exclusive boarding-school. No one could reasonably have forseen the danger that was to intrude itself into these decorous surroundings.

Trouble, inevitably in the circumstances, came in masculine shape. The Queen Dowager was serious-minded and pious, an active patron of