The Children of Henry VIII (26 page)

Seeing for the first time a very real prospect that she could succeed to the throne if her elder sibling failed to bear a child or died, Elizabeth asked Thomas Parry to seek advice from William Cecil about how she should style herself and to send her word secretly in writing.
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Addressed as ‘the Lady Elizabeth’ after she was stripped of her royal title by her father after her mother’s trial and execution, she clearly wanted something more impressive, if possible to recover her original title of ‘Princess’.

Exactly what Cecil came up with is unknown, but eighteen months later Elizabeth granted him a lease of land from a portion of her Northamptonshire estates once belonging to her great-grandmother. The lease was signed ‘Elizabeth’ and sealed with a personal seal, never previously used as it appears, bearing a Tudor rose and the inscription ‘The seal of Elizabeth, King Edward’s Sister’ in Latin. Curious as it may seem to style herself after her dead brother, it may well be that this was Cecil’s ingenious solution as to how to identify her as a princess without using that word.
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If anyone knew how to negotiate his way around the backstairs of Mary’s Court, it was Cecil. Far from retiring to his estates at Stamford in Lincolnshire or fleeing into exile in Switzerland or Germany like so many of his fellow Protestants after Jane Grey’s execution, he stuck close to London and Westminster, seeking to salvage his Court networks. When, in July 1554, Philip had landed at Southampton for his marriage to Mary, Cecil had laid on temporary lodgings for the king’s secretary, Gonzalo Pérez, at his own London house. Then, in November, he was one of a party sent to
meet Cardinal Pole in Brussels and escort him back to England. He used the occasion to ingratiate himself with Pole despite their religious differences and they sometimes dined together at Lambeth Palace.
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Like Elizabeth, Cecil was playing a long game. On New Year’s Day in 1555, he sent a gift of gold to the queen, which he valued in his accounts at £10. And on Easter Day 1556, he and his whole family would make their confessions to a priest and attend a Paschal high mass in their parish church at Wimbledon, complete with tapers and holy oil. Cecil made a special journey by boat to London to purchase supplies of wine, wafers, wax, oil and cream for the mass. He even began learning Spanish ready for a possible assignment as a diplomat.
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Both Elizabeth and Cecil were the sort of Protestants whom John Calvin had begun to dismiss contemptuously as ‘Nicodemites’—for in St John’s Gospel it was said that Nicodemus, for fear, had visited Christ only by night. Both dissembled their true beliefs and conformed (however reluctantly) to the mass when under pressure, preferring to live and fight another day rather than fleeing into exile or joining the Protestant martyrs at the stake.
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Roger Ascham was another Nicodemite, and once Elizabeth was safely back at Hatfield and Ashridge, she was allowed occasional visits from him to read the orations of Demosthenes with her. In 1554, Mary had made Ascham her Latin secretary—it was he who drafted some of the letters announcing the birth of a prince during the queen’s phantom pregnancy.
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Like Cecil, Ascham sometimes dined with Pole, when they discussed the possible whereabouts of a missing work by Cicero,
De Republica
, known only from quotations made from it by St Augustine. Praising Pole’s kindness to the skies, Ascham presented the cardinal-archbishop
with a handsome copy of Jeronimo Osorio’s treatise on civic and Christian nobility, a book he was championing at the time.
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As Ascham enthused to Johann Sturm after his return to Hatfield, ‘Elizabeth and I read together in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes.’ She ‘first reads it to me’ and immediately she understands not only the language and the meaning, ‘but also the whole nature of the argument, the decrees of the people, the manners and the customs of the city: she is so intelligent you would be simply amazed.’
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Once more Ascham made his inflated claims to broadcast his own talents as a teacher.
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Blinded by his ego, he overlooks the fact that for Elizabeth to have recalled him after his earlier disgrace, she must already have come to see herself as a queen-in-waiting. The sole purpose of reading Demosthenes, by far the most difficult author she had so far tackled, was to train a future ruler or privy councillor to make speeches ‘aptly’ when addressing a great audience. An author whose work was considered to be the finest training for pure eloquence rather than for promoting religion and moral virtue, Demosthenes represented a traditionally masculine virtue—the art of public oratory—which in a woman was reserved to those in line for the succession to kingdoms.
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In the end, it was almost entirely due to Philip that Elizabeth was able to use the skills she had learned from Ascham and one day address her Privy Council and Parliament as queen of England. Philip had first shielded her from Mary’s vengeance at Hampton Court. He saved her again when, on 18 March 1556, another conspiracy to put her on the throne was discovered.
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Clumsily cobbled together by a Berkshire gentleman with ideas above his station, Christopher Ashton, and a military man, Sir Harry Dudley, fourth cousin of the former Duke of Northumberland, the plotters aimed to steal £50,000 in bars of Spanish silver that were stored in the Exchequer at Westminster to fund an army of mercenaries and Protestant exiles who would invade England, drive out the Spaniards and depose Mary.
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Unmasked when one of them lost his nerve and betrayed the plot, the conspirators turned out to be the pawns of Antoine de Noailles, the French ambassador, who wrote frantically home asking to be recalled before he was put in the Tower himself.
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Part of the plot involved betraying Calais to the French, and Mary was determined to put all those implicated in it on trial for treason. As with Wyatt’s revolt, the trail led straight to Elizabeth’s household, and as soon as de Noailles left the country in May, Mary decided to strike.

Kat Ashley was arrested at Hatfield and put in the Tower, as was Elizabeth’s Italian tutor Giovanni Battista Castiglione and three other female servants.
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Soon, Francis Verney and Henry Peckham, two of the gentlemen-servants, had been arrested too, and an armed guard stationed around Hatfield. A search of Elizabeth’s London house, Somerset Place in the Strand, even led to the discovery of a chest crammed full of imported Protestant books and libels attacking the king and queen.
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Verney and Peckham were found to be in the plot up to their necks. Both were convicted of treason.
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But however much Mary wanted to put Elizabeth on trial for her life, she felt she could not do so without consulting Philip. The Venetian ambassadors in London and Brussels recorded her every move. On 1 June, she sent her confidential courier, Francesco Piamontese, in haste to Brussels,
since ‘nothing is done, nor does anything take place, without having the King’s opinion about it, and hearing his will.’
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When the courier returned, Mary discovered, humiliatingly, that her husband wanted Elizabeth’s name kept out of the trials and reprisals and that the investigations into her conduct were to be dropped.
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On 8 June, Mary sent two of her most trusted inner councillors to Hatfield to withdraw the guard placed on her sibling and inform her that Kat, Verney and Peckham in their confessions had implicated her in the conspiracy. The councillors were probably lying—making this an act of deliberate spite on Mary’s part, since in a confidential memorandum another privy councillor, writing anonymously, insisted that Elizabeth’s involvement was hard to credit. She was, he said, known ‘to be of too much honour, wisdom, truth and respect to duty and honesty’ to be complicit. ‘Who’, he asked, ‘can let [i.e. prevent] knaves to say … we hope this of My Lady Elizabeth or of this Lord or this man?’

At the very least, the Privy Council was split again.
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But even if Elizabeth
had
dabbled in treason in the hope of deposing her sister and gaining the throne, it no longer mattered, since Philip had decided that she was to be deemed innocent.

Thus it was that the two councillors went on to explain to her that, on Philip’s advice, Mary had decided—it was clearly a decision made through gritted teeth—that she was cleared of all suspicion, in proof of which she was to receive a token, a diamond (said the Venetians) worth as much as 400 ducats.

All the same (and this Philip may not have approved) Mary took the opportunity to remodel Elizabeth’s household again, putting it under the control of Sir Thomas Pope, a Catholic privy councillor and the founder of Trinity College, Oxford.
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Fortunately for Elizabeth, Sir Thomas was a more agreeable gaoler than Bedingfield. Nor, since he made no secret of how much he disliked his new role, did the change last long. On 19 October, after just four months, Mary discharged Pope and released Kat from the Tower, although she was strictly forbidden to return to Hatfield.

The reason for the sudden reversal was that Elizabeth was to go to Court for Christmas.
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On 28 November, she and her retinue rode in their finery through the London streets to Somerset Place, her gentlemen-servants all arrayed in velvet coats and gold livery chains, behind them some 200 others in red coats cut and trimmed with black.
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Three days later she went to Court and met Mary and Pole, who graciously received her. Except that something went wrong, and on 3 December she unexpectedly retraced her steps to Somerset Place and from there to Hatfield.
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The explanation came when the Venetian ambassador to France met Henry II of France at Poissy shortly before Christmas. The king told him that Mary had sent for Elizabeth to inform her that Philip wished her to marry Emmanuel Philibert without further delay. She had refused, purportedly retorting that ‘the afflictions suffered by her were such that they had … ridded her of any wish for a husband’. Bursting into tears, she declared that she would rather die than have a husband thrust upon her.
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By now, the marriage proposal was the keystone of Philip’s plans to secure England as a Spanish dependency should his wife die childless. Mary still violently opposed it. But he overruled her.
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If the marriage went ahead, Philip meant to have Parliament confirm Elizabeth as the lawful successor, whereas Mary had come
to think that, if her half-sister took the throne, she would, as an act of revenge, restore the break with Rome and make England as Protestant again as it had been under Edward, and Philibert would be too weak a man to stop her.
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Mary had now come to hate Elizabeth so much, she was said to have begun claiming her half-sister was not, after all, Henry VIII’s daughter. Did she not look far too much like Mark Smeaton, one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, ‘who was a very handsome man?’
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And yet Mary, struggling to come to terms with her own contradictory feelings, believed that her duty lay in obeying her husband. Faced with Elizabeth’s refusal to marry the duke, she threatened again to exclude her from the succession.
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But she had the Privy Council to contend with. If she wanted Elizabeth disinherited, a majority of councillors led by Lord Paget did not.

A political crisis erupted in March 1557, when Philip returned to England to force his wife into joining Spain in a war against France and to bludgeon Elizabeth into marrying Philibert. He succeeded in the first of these aims and failed in the second. When war was declared on 7 June, it began well, but raged in four separate theatres and was universally unpopular despite a spectacular victory at St Quentin in which English troops played a supporting role.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, dug in her heels and refused to be told whom to marry, even when Philip brought his cousins, the Duchesses of Lorraine and Parma, to London in a clumsy attempt to twist her arm. Arriving at Whitehall while Mary was at mass, the duchesses were greeted by Philip and entertained lavishly for a month.
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They failed abysmally to work their magic on Elizabeth, whose resistance the French ambassador had considerably stiffened by
sending a message warning her of a possible kidnap attempt. She said she would die before she would allow herself either to be kidnapped or to be forced into marriage.
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The last residue of mutual trust between Philip and Mary collapsed when Philip made his second and final departure for Brussels on 6 July after a stay of just three and a half months. By then, the queen’s depression over her inability to conceive a child had brought her to the verge of despair.
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Matters descended into farce when, in January 1558, she asked Pole to write to Philip to assure him that she was pregnant again.
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In February, she believed she might be delivered later that month, and in March she made her will, directing that the throne was go to ‘the heirs, issue and fruit of my body according to the laws of the realm’, making Philip guardian of both the child and the realm.
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