Elizabeth (26 page)

Whatever the truth of the gossip, the only type of heir that counted was a lawful one, and the fears of the English Council on the urgency of this need were soon to be aggravated.

In 10 October 1562, Elizabeth became ill at Hampton Court after taking a relaxing bath and a long walk. For a week she lay in bed, getting weaker and less responsive. As she did not appear to be recovering, her cousin, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, arranged for Dr Burcot, a German physician, to visit her. In spite of the lack of any spots or rash, he immediately diagnosed smallpox, a very serious illness that often resulted in death. When he told Elizabeth the news, she furiously ordered him to leave.

With the Queen seriously ill and little idea of how to treat her, a panic ensued as to who should succeed her if she should die. An heir had to be acknowledged and ready to assume the throne. The Council was split on who should be nominated: the candidates included Catherine Grey (the granddaughter of Mary Tudor); the Catholic Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (the daughter of Margaret Tudor); and Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, known as the Puritan Earl (he was descended from the brother of Edward IV and Richard III). No one recommended Mary, Queen of Scots – the Catholic votes went to Lady Margaret Douglas, who was the mother of two healthy sons.

However, Elizabeth still refused to name a successor. When the Council came to the gravely ill Queen’s bedchamber, she asked them to name Robert the Protector of the Realm, to make him a noble and to pay him £20,000 a year. According to a Spanish account of the scene, she said that ‘although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them.’
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She further asked that Robert’s body-servant, Tamworth, who slept in his bedchamber, should be given £500 a year for life. She commended her cousin, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, to the Council, and also praised her household members. She became so agitated and delirious that the Councillors agreed to all her demands in order to calm her.

Elizabeth’s statement about Robert that ‘nothing improper had ever passed between them’ has long intrigued historians. She appears to be saying that they had never had a sexual relationship. On the other hand, she could also have made this statement with a clear conscience if they had gone through a form of pre-marriage, the
de futuro
, in which the couple say ‘I will’, rather than ‘I do’, or a
de praesenti
marriage, in which vows are exchanged in front of witnesses. These were both religiously and legally acceptable marriages, which would have permitted the couple to have officially sanctioned sexual relations.

If such a marriage did take place, it probably would have been in the summer of 1560, in the months before Amy Robsart died. With his wife dying from a terminal illness, Robert and Elizabeth may have gone through the marriage ceremony in front of a few chosen witnesses, which would have made their relationship legitimate in the eyes of the Church. They would have imagined that a second, formal, public ceremony would take place after Amy’s death, but any consequences of their actions, such as a
pregnancy, would make the child legitimate since it had been lawfully conceived.

Henry VIII had behaved in a similar manner with Elizabeth’s own mother, Anne Boleyn. In anticipation of divorcing Catherine of Aragon, he had married Anne in January 1533, several months before his divorce became final in April, and in May Henry and Anne were publicly proclaimed to be legally married. This had been in part to protect any child conceived: Elizabeth was born in September. If Robert and Elizabeth also chose a secret ceremony, any sexual activity would be lawful and natural, which would enable Elizabeth to make what she feared was her deathbed vow in all honesty.

Another possibility is that Elizabeth and Robert were having a sexual relationship that did not include vaginal penetration, although this would obviously preclude the possibility of a secret pregnancy or child. This would allow Elizabeth to state publicly that she was a virgin, which would have been technically true. In Tudor England, although anal sex was illegal, it was sometimes used as a form of birth control.

It is notable that most of Elizabeth’s statements on her sexual status tended to be worded in such a way that they referred to her as Queen, neatly sidestepping anything that happened prior to 1558, including her relationship with Thomas Seymour.

Elizabeth’s sickbed wishes never had to be carried out. She began to get better after Dr Burcot was persuaded to return, grumbling and complaining at her rudeness. He wrapped the patient in red cloth, laid her on a mattress before the fire and gave her a potion to drink. She began to cry when spots appeared on her hands, but the doctor asked her brusquely if it were better to have spots or to die. The treatment worked, and within a month Elizabeth recovered, her face unmarked by smallpox scars.
However, Lady Mary Sidney, Robert’s sister, who had nursed her throughout her illness, fell ill and was badly pockmarked; she left Court and never returned. Elizabeth never forgot her courage and nobility, and remained her friend for the rest of her life.

By 20 October 1562, Elizabeth was able to resume her duties. She named two new members to her Council, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk – and Sir Robert Dudley. On November 26, she approached Robert in Windsor Park, where he was having a shooting match. Elizabeth, who had come to watch with several of her ladies, was dressed as a maid, with her hair loose and wearing informal robes. She told Robert that he was in her debt as she had ‘passed the pikes’ for his sake.
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The phrase literally meant that she had passed through some deadly danger, which could have referred to her bout with smallpox. But why ‘for his sake’? Could it have referred to her going through the trauma of childbirth?

Following the Queen’s brush with death, Parliament was frantic about the question of the succession. They presented her with a petition, begging her to marry or to name a successor. She obfuscated, stating that even if she did not desire marriage as ‘a private woman’, as a Queen she realized she had certain duties and would not rule it out.
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Given this, she would not be pressed to name a successor, as she might yet produce an heir by birth.

Her Councillors wouldn’t give in. January 1563 started with yet another broadside to persuade Elizabeth of the vital importance of marrying and having a child. When she attended services at Westminster Abbey, the Dean of St Paul’s preached about Elizabeth’s lack of an heir and her duty to get one: ‘For as the marriage of Queen Mary [to Philip of Spain] was a terrible plague to all England, the want of your marriage and issue is like to prove as great a plague … If your parents had been of your mind, where had you been then? Or what had become of us now?’
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The Queen was furious that once again she was being lectured on a matter that she considered her personal and private concern. It did not bode well for the next sitting of Parliament, at which the issue would come up again.
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Cecil realized the futility of acting in this manner, but the government continued its campaign. In April 1563, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Nicholas Bacon, made a submission to the Queen on behalf of Parliament, begging her to marry and beget an heir; this time he emphasized the joy of motherhood: ‘If your Highness could conceive to imagine the comfort, surety and delight that should happen to yourself by beholding an imp of your own … it would, I am assured, sufficiently satisfy to remove all manner of lets, impediments and scruples.’
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Bacon might have done better if he had studied Elizabeth’s previous remarks on the subject of children. From her own experience, families were not necessarily a source of ‘comfort and delight’. She knew that princes, and especially princesses, could have their rank stripped away and find their status in doubt. As she had told a Scottish diplomat in 1561, ‘… some [say] that this marriage was unlawful, some that one was a bastard, some other, to and fro, as they favoured or misliked. So many doubts of marriage was in all hands that I stand aw[e] myself to enter into marriage fearing the controversy.’
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She knew, too, that a ruler had cause to fear their heir and also knew that a blood tie was no guarantee of love and fidelity: ‘Princes cannot like their children, those that should succeed unto them.’
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Furthermore, there was no guarantee that an heir would follow her policies, as she had stated in 1559 in an address to Parliament: ‘although I be never so careful of your well doings, and mind ever so to be, yet may my issue grow out of kind, and become perhaps ungracious.’
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Not to mention that if, indeed, she had borne a child
by Thomas Seymour or Robert Dudley, she already knew the pains and terrors of childbirth.

To strengthen her argument, Elizabeth raised the fear of civil war, telling her Council that although she might be old, ‘… God would send her children as he did to St Elizabeth, and they had better consider well what they were asking, as, if she declared a successor, it would cost much blood to England.’
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It was not impossible to foresee a situation arising in which the country could be torn apart by different factions supporting the Queen, her successor, or other candidates to the throne.

If she named either Catherine or Mary Grey as heir, there would be disgruntled Protestants who supported Henry Hastings, never mind the reaction of Catholics. If she named Mary, Queen of Scots, there would be Catholics who supported Lady Margaret Douglas, as well as an extreme Protestant backlash that could well risk her reign. The wisest move was the one she chose: to offer possibilities, but no certainties. She summed up her position, ‘So long as I live, I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed that have the most right.’
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Catherine Grey was taken out of the running. She had been sent to the Tower with her son and unrecognized husband, Edward Seymour, but he had bribed their warders to enable them to visit each other in secret; when Catherine fell pregnant and gave birth to a second son in February 1563, the heirless Queen was furious. A second commission was set up and a formal declaration made that the marriage between Catherine and Edward had never taken place, making their two sons bastards and resulting in Edward having to pay a fine of 15,000 marks for having seduced a virgin of royal blood and having ‘ravished her a second time’.
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The couple were separated, with Catherine sent to her uncle, and Edward Seymour remaining in the Tower. This did not seem to dissuade those who supported Catherine and her sons as heirs for the throne. Later in the year, a Member of Parliament named John Hales published a pamphlet with the support of Catherine, her uncle Sir John, Edward Seymour and his mother Anne Seymour, the Dowager Duchess of Somerset, which made an argument for Catherine Grey as heiress. It claimed that her marriage was legitimate, making her sons lawfully born male heirs, direct descendants of Henry VII, pure English and Protestant.

Viewing this development as a conspiracy, Elizabeth reacted harshly. Hales was incarcerated in the Fleet prison for six months, and Catherine was removed from her uncle’s care and spent the rest of her life in captivity (she would die in 1568, at the age of 27), moving from house to house. She never saw her husband again.

Cecil, who had been a favourer of Lady Catherine’s title to the Crown although he refused to be enlisted in any campaign in her support, recognized the prudence of lying low and not offending the Queen. He did, however, hope that the matter would force Elizabeth’s hand in finally choosing a husband: ‘God give her Majesty by this chance a disposition to consider hereof, that either by her marriage or by some common order, we poor subjects may know where to lean and adventure our lives with contention of our consciences.’
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Cecil’s attitude towards Robert had changed and they had achieved a relationship bordering on friendship. Both seemed to find each other a more valuable ally than enemy. Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Smith, the Queen’s Ambassador in Paris, ‘I must confess myself to be much beholden to his Lordship [Robert] and for my part I do endeavour myself in good earnestness to merit well of him.’
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But Cecil’s support did not have the result Robert wished
for, and he found himself part of an extraordinary plan hatched up by Elizabeth in the spring of 1563.