The Children of Henry VIII (25 page)

Just after midday on Saturday, 19 May, the eve of Whitsuntide 1554 and two terrifying months after she had first entered the Tower, the Marquis of Winchester and Sir John Gage took Elizabeth by river to Richmond. On arrival, she was held under guard for a week before being taken on to Windsor and from there to Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where she was kept under house arrest with as few attendants as possible.
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Sir Henry Bedingfield, a Catholic loyalist whom Mary had made constable of the Tower and would soon promote to captain of the guard, was made her gaoler, receiving his instructions, signed by the queen, on 26 May.
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F
IGURE
15
The opening page of
The myraculous preservation of Lady Elizabeth, nowe Queene of England, from extreme calamatie and danger of life, in the time of Q. Marie her sister
. First included in John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
(or ‘Book of Martyrs’) in 1563 and subsequently expanded, this version is from the 1583 edition and much of the information was supplied by eyewitnesses.

Bedingfield, a fussy, pedantic Norfolk man who worried about the dangers of not discharging his duties and was not above
spying on those in his charge, struggled to impose his will on his royal prisoner. Elizabeth gave him a hard time, demanding an English Bible and insisting on saying the litany in English and not Latin on the grounds that the vernacular litany ‘was set forth in the king my Father his days’.
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But when ordered outright to stop, she gave in and conformed to Catholicism by regularly attending mass.
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Even then, Bedingfield was not satisfied, complaining that she withdrew for two or three hours a day ‘under colour of wishing to pray’, but could well have been plotting.

And her servants were vociferously defiant. Infuriated by Elizabeth Sandes, one of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen and a strident Protestant, who was repeatedly absent from mass, Bedingfield expelled her from the household. He had no compunction either about reporting a male servant to the Privy Council and sending for a priest to threaten another servant with what was tantamount to a heresy trial.
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After almost a year of playing cat and mouse at Woodstock, Elizabeth was commanded to await Mary’s pleasure at Hampton Court. Bedingfield brought her the news on 17 April 1555, and somewhere between the 24th and the 29th she entered the palace by a back door with only three or four gentlewomen, still under guard and occupying the Prince’s Lodging that her father had rebuilt for her half-brother, except the gallery leading to the royal apartments had been sealed off.
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By then, Mary’s marriage to Philip had been solemnized at Winchester and Cardinal Pole had arrived from exile in Rome and absolved the realm from sin. A younger son of Mary’s old governess,
the Countess of Salisbury, Pole was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of Cranmer, who was in the Tower. He reunited England with the papacy, assiduously helping Mary to undo the work of Somerset’s iconoclasts. He also helped the queen to restore a handful of monasteries, mainly those closely associated with her mother, Katherine of Aragon.

Against Philip’s advice and better judgement, Mary encouraged Pole to create the equivalent of an English Inquisition, reinforced by Spanish Dominicans, to root out heresy and compel Protestants to attend confession and mass at least once a year. Unflinching and determined, Pole was assisted by Bishop Bonner of London, a man who deplored the laxity of Tudor prisons and kept suspects locked up in his coal-house. Around 284 victims, including Cranmer, were burned at the stake for their heretical beliefs in just under four years.
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It is usually supposed that Elizabeth was brought to Hampton Court because—with her servants’ connivance—she had smuggled the astrologer John Dee into the house at Woodstock to cast horoscopes. The destinies she had tried to have foreseen were her own, Philip’s and Mary’s. Casting a royal horoscope was a dangerous business—Henry VIII had regarded it as tantamount to high treason.

But Mary had not yet found out about the horoscopes when the order was given for Elizabeth to come to Hampton Court. In fact, the warrant for Dee’s arrest was not issued by the Privy Council until 28 May.
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Elizabeth wanted the horoscopes because rumours were rife that Mary, after just eight months of marriage, was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Said to be ‘near her time’ as early as the end of March, she had chosen Hampton Court as the place where she
would take to her lying-in chamber. So confident was she that God was on her side, she had shown herself from a window of her apartments to Philip and his fellow Knights of the Garter as they processed in their robes to Chapel on St George’s Day (23 April), contrary to the strict seclusion demanded of an expectant queen by the
Royal Book
.
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Mary, it seems, had sent for Elizabeth in order to gloat. Once a living child of whichever sex was born, her half-sister would no longer be next in line for the succession and the Anglo-Spanish dynastic union would be permanent. So confident was Mary about her pregnancy that, on 16 May, she and Philip began signing open letters announcing ‘the happy delivery of a prince’ and appointing special messengers to deliver them.
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The parallel with Anne Boleyn when she gave birth to Elizabeth is uncanny.

Except that in Mary’s case it was far worse, since no child was born at all. Mary’s turned out to be a false pregnancy, complete with a swelling of the breasts and lactation, probably caused by a prolactinoma, a non-cancerous tumour of the pituitary gland. This results in too much of a hormone called prolactin in the blood, triggering amenorrhoea in the earlier stages and eventually pseudo-pregnancy, and which, as the tumour expands and starts to press on the surrounding structures such as the optic nerve, accounts for Mary’s other symptoms, notably migraines, vomiting, depression and loss of vision.
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Imagining the birth of her child to be imminent, Mary briefly came to think her sibling posed a much reduced threat. While Elizabeth was still at Hampton Court and about a week after Mary and Philip had signed the letters, the queen sent for her on an impulse at 10 p.m. in an attempt to patch up their differences. Led across the privy garden and up a staircase by Susan Tonge to
Mary’s bedchamber, Elizabeth knelt before the queen and protested her loyalty.

But when Mary suddenly upbraided her over her religion, it was clear no reconciliation would be possible. The only positive outcome was that Philip, observing the scene from behind the arras, decided that his sister-in-law was a dynastic asset and therefore best kept alive.
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According to the Venetians, Elizabeth had been making a determined effort at Hampton Court to ingratiate herself with the Spaniards in Philip’s entourage and this was paying off.
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When in August it became clear that Mary’s pregnancy was a phantom, the royal couple returned to Whitehall scarcely on speaking terms. On 4 September, Philip sailed from Dover to Calais on his way to Brussels.
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His departure marked the turning point of the reign, for he would not return until March 1557, and only then for three and a half months to drag England into an unpopular war against France.

Realizing she had been all but deserted, Mary succumbed to fits of hysterics, on one occasion haranguing Philip’s portrait hanging in the Privy Chamber before kicking it out of the room.
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In particular, the royal couple disagreed over what to do with Elizabeth. Now 22, she was tall and shapely, with shining red-gold hair and long, slim-fingered hands. Even if her critics judged her complexion to be ‘sallow’ like her mother’s, she had Anne Boleyn’s dark eyes and a decidedly royal look. Philip, himself notorious as a womanizer, was not slow to see the potential.
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Mary’s instinct was to oust Elizabeth from the succession in favour of her cousin Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. The daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret by her second
marriage to the Earl of Angus, Douglas was one of the queen’s closest and oldest friends and the staunchest of Catholics. Already Mary had showered Douglas with gifts of jewels, tapestries and cash, giving her clothes from the royal wardrobe and allocating her spacious apartments at the royal palaces.
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She was even allowed to order her meals directly from Mary’s private kitchen.
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The Spanish ambassador knew that before marrying Philip and once afterwards, Mary had urged that Douglas be named as her successor ‘if God were to call her without giving her heirs of her body’.
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Philip, for his part, understood that excluding Elizabeth from the succession would involve the difficult task of persuading the Privy Council and Parliament to set aside her father’s will. He also had to contend with his own father, Charles V, who—as one of his final acts before he abdicated—wanted to see her safely married off to a nonentity. One candidate was Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont and titular Duke of Savoy, who had already made a visit to England from the Low Countries to inspect her. Another was the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.
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Philip, from the outset, expressed a clear preference for Philibert. A landless aristocrat with royal pretensions whose father had lost his family’s patrimony in supporting Charles against the French, the duke of Savoy was a close ally of Spain, a loyal Catholic, good at languages and not too powerful to appear a threat to the English. But either candidate would ensure that England remained a Spanish–Habsburg dependency should Mary fail to produce a child.
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Shortly before Philip left for Brussels, Elizabeth was allowed back to Hatfield and Ashridge with her household restored to her. Only
her chaplain Edmund Allen, who had taken a wife and left for the Continent, and Elizabeth Sandes, who had fled to Geneva, were missing. With Philip effectively shielding his sister-in-law from Mary, even John Ashley felt it safe to return from Padua.