The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (22 page)

Fearing the Queen’s reaction, Norfolk now fled to his estates in East Anglia. When Elizabeth summoned him back to court he initially resisted but then set out for the court at Windsor, to submit to her and profess his loyalty. Three days later he was arrested by Sir Francis Knollys and by 10 October he was a prisoner in the Tower of London where he would remain until the following summer. His sister, the Countess of Westmoreland, wrote scornfully of her brother’s weak resolve: ‘What a simple man the duke is, to begin a matter and not go through with it.’
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In the first clear rebellion of her reign, Elizabeth faced a dangerous challenge to her crown as members of her Privy Council and leading Catholic noblemen conspired against her in support of Mary Queen of Scots. It was only Norfolk’s lack of resolve and Dudley’s belated loyalty that had saved her. But the matter was not yet over. With Norfolk in the Tower, the two northern earls knew they were compromised. They had been plotting for months and their intentions were widely known. The Earl of Northumberland sent a message to de Spes, the Spanish ambassador, that he would now have to rebel, or ‘yield my head to the block, or else be forced to flee and forsake the realm, for I know the Queen’s Majesty is so highly displeased at me and others that I know we shall not be able to bear it nor answer it’.
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Elizabeth summoned the earls to court, but instead they rallied over 5,000 rebels to their cause in a spontaneous uprising. On 14 November the earls stormed Durham Cathedral where they ripped apart the Protestant prayer book, overturned the communion table, and celebrated a Catholic mass.
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Two days later they issued a proclamation declaring:

Forasmuch as diverse evil-disposed persons about the Queen’s Majesty have, by their subtle and crafty dealings to advance themselves, overcome in this Realm the true and Catholic religion towards God, and by the same abused the Queen, disordered the realm and now lastly seek and procure the destruction of the nobility. We, therefore, have gathered ourselves together to resist by force, and rather by the help of God and you good people, to see redress of these things amiss, with the restoring of all ancient customs and liberties to God’s church, and this noble Realm.
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Elizabeth had prepared for the worst and quickly mobilised 14,000 men who were sent north, whilst a special reserve guard was put in place for the Queen’s own protection.
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The Aldermen of London ordered that guns be put in readiness and the city gates and portcullises be fixed. Meanwhile, the Earl of Shrewsbury was commanded to move Mary south to the walled city of Coventry.

On 20 December, the conflict came to an end without a shot being fired. As the Queen’s forces rode north, Northumberland and Westmoreland fled over the border and the rebels disbanded. Despite the speed of its collapse, the rebellion had represented a major threat to Elizabeth and her government. There had been rumours of promised Spanish assistance, her Catholic nobles had demonstrated their opposition to her and the north of England had responded to their call to arms. Moreover, the Queen’s most senior nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, remained alienated and ambitious and, despite his imprisonment, he continued scheming with Mary Queen of Scots. In the months that followed nearly 800 of the rebels were executed on hastily erected gallows. It was a ruthless and very timely reminder of the price of disloyalty to Elizabeth and her crown.

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On 25 February 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull of excommunication,
Regnans in Excelsis,
in which he formally declared Elizabeth to be a usurper and absolved her subjects from allegiance to her.

Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith and loss of so many million souls, there is little doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing God’s service, not only does not sin but gains merit … And so, if those English gentlemen decide actually to undertake so glorious a work, your Lordship can assure them they do not commit any sin. We trust in God also that they will escape danger.
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In the early hours of the morning of 15 May, John Felton, a wealthy Catholic living in Southwark, nailed a smuggled copy of the bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace. Felton was immediately arrested, tried for high treason and within months was hanged, disembowelled, decapitated and quartered. The issuing of the papal bull signalled the start of the long-awaited Catholic crusade against England and the moment when Catholics in England were marked out as traitors to the realm. The Pope had effectively sanctioned Elizabeth’s murder and she now became the legitimate target of any wilful Catholic plotter.

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Want of Posterity

In an audience at Hampton Court on 23 January 1571, Elizabeth told the French ambassador Fenelon that ‘she was determined to marry, not for the wish of her own, but for the satisfaction of her subjects’. In a remarkably candid exchange, she explained that marriage would also ‘put an end, by the authority of a husband or by the birth of offspring, (if it should please God to give them to her), to the enterprises’ which, she felt, ‘would perpetually be made against her person and her realm, if she became so old a woman that there was no longer any pretence for taking a husband, or hope that she might have children’. Whilst ‘she had formerly assured him that she never meant to marry’, she now said that ‘she regretted that she had not thought in time about her want of posterity’.
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It was a dramatic and very personal revelation which appeared to demonstrate a new resolve finally to settle the succession.

Marriage had become a necessity. The lessons of the Norfolk affair and the northern rebellion were plain to the Queen and her government; so long as her death meant the accession of a Catholic queen, her life would always be under threat. The papal bull of excommunication and Spanish intrigues in Ireland, coming after de Spes’s involvement with the northern earls, all seemed compelling evidence that an international conspiracy spearheaded by Spain was operating against Protestant England. Cecil held out hope that the Queen was at last sincere in her pledge to marry: ‘If I be not much deceived, her Majesty is earnest in this’; if a marriage went ahead, ‘the curious and dangerous question of the succession would in the minds of quiet subjects be buried – a happy funeral for all England’.
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In this renewed atmosphere of hope, Fenelon took the opportunity to revive the proposal of a match with Charles IX’s younger brother, Henri, Duke of Anjou, which had been first mooted two years before. The French King was still keen to use a marriage alliance with Elizabeth to conciliate the French Huguenots, draw Anjou away from the influence of the Cardinal of Lorraine, the senior member of the Guise family, and form the first stage of a defensive alliance against Spain. Anjou was, as Fenelon enthused, ‘the only prince in the world worthy of her’.
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But it was hardly an ideal pairing. Anjou was eighteen years younger than Elizabeth, ‘obstinately papistical’ according to the English ambassador, and a blatant transvestite who regularly appeared at court balls in elaborate female dress and was rumoured to be bisexual. As a Venetian envoy described, ‘He is completely dominated by voluptuousness, covered with perfumes and essences. He wears a double row of rings and pendants in his ears.’
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Marriage to Anjou also risked a further decline in relations with Spain, where a ‘coldness of amity’ had already developed mainly as a result of Spanish action in the Netherlands.

Elizabeth had immediately expressed her doubts about the Anjou match, as had the duke himself, who, encouraged by the Guise faction at the French court, considered Elizabeth a ‘heretical bastard’.
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As Catherine de Medici admitted in her letters to Fenelon, ‘so much has he heard against her honour, and seen in the letters of all the ambassadors who have ever been there, that he considers he should be utterly dishonoured and lose all the reputation he has acquired if he was to marry Elizabeth’.
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Catherine had tried to convince her son by explaining that, ‘the greatest harm which evil men can do to noble and royal women, is to spread abroad lies and dishonourable tales of us’, and that ‘we princes who be women, of all persons, are subject to be slandered wrongfully of them that be our adversaries: other hurt they cannot do us’.
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Nevertheless, the queen mother was forced to concede that, ‘he will never marry her, and in this I cannot win him over, although he is an obedient son.’
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Besides her own reservations about taking a teenage boy to bed as a husband, Elizabeth had also received warning from her agents in France that some people were encouraging Anjou for malicious ends. They believed that he would do well to marry ‘an old creature who had had for the last year the evil in her leg, which was not yet healed and never could be cured’ – a reference to a leg ulcer – ‘and that under pretext of a remedy, they could send her a potion from France of such a nature, that he would find himself a widower in the course of five or six months; and then he might please himself by marrying the Queen of Scotland, and remain the undisputed sovereign of the united realms.’
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Elizabeth was naturally alarmed at the suggestion of murderous plotting against her in France but was also affronted by the reference to her age, apparent infirmity, and the unfavourable comparisons to her Scottish cousin. Especially vain, Elizabeth pointedly informed Fenelon that, ‘notwithstanding the evil report that had been made of her leg, she had not neglected to dance on the preceding Sunday at the Marquess of Northampton’s wedding; so she hoped that Monsieur would not find himself cheated into marrying a cripple instead of a lady of proper paces’.
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Negotiations for a French marriage were revived and by March, Catherine wrote to Fenelon that her son had changed his mind and now ‘infinitely desires the match’. King Charles sent his envoy de Foix to England and talks continued through the spring and summer of 1571. However, though Elizabeth was, according to her closest councillors, ‘more bent to marry than heretofore she hath been’, religion remained the sticking point. Whilst the Queen made it clear that Anjou would have to conform to the laws of the realm, the French were equally uncompromising in their demands that Anjou and his servants should have ‘free exercise’ of their religion.
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But as Walsingham wrote, such was the necessity of a marriage that all reservations could be reasoned away: ‘When I particularly consider her Majesty’s state, both at home and abroad … and how she is beset with Foreign peril, the execution whereof stayeth only upon the event of this match, I do not see how she can stand if this matter break off.’
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On 9 July the French ambassador was pleased to inform Catherine de Medici that the Queen had told one of her ladies, when they were alone, that she ‘had of her own accord commenced talking of Monsieur’ and had made clear that, despite her concerns about the age gap and his religion she was ‘resolved on the match’. Elizabeth had naturally turned to her Bedchamber women for counsel and reassurance; she feared especially that Anjou might grow to despise her if she was unable to have children. The Queen asked Elizabeth Fiennes de Clinton, the Countess of Lincoln, and Lady Frances Cobham – ‘two of the most faithful of her ladies’ in whom she placed ‘more confidence’ than the others – to tell her ‘freely their opinions’ on the match. Lady Cobham spoke of how ‘those marriages were always the happiest when the parties were of the same age, or near about it, but that here there was a great inequality’; she hoped in this case that ‘since it had pleased God that she was the oldest’ that the duke would be ‘contented with her other advantages’. Lady Clinton, who had known Elizabeth since childhood and sensed the need to reassure the Queen, spoke favourably of Anjou, ‘whose youth’, she said, ‘ought not to inspire her with fear, for he was virtuous, and her Majesty was better calculated to please him than any other princess in the world’.
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Elizabeth said ‘she would place all her affection on the prince, and love and honour him as her lord and husband’ and hoped that this would be enough for him.

Yet her doubts lingered, and on receiving a portrait of Anjou, Elizabeth again expressed concerns as to the ‘disparity of age between herself and the prince’; considering her ‘time of life’ she should be ‘ashamed’ to marry one so young.
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Once more Fenelon sought to assure her of her suitability and persuade Anjou, ‘God had so well preserved her Majesty, that time had diminished none of her charms and perfections, and that monsieur looked older than her by years; that the prince had shown an unchangeable desire for their union.’ She would find in the duke, ‘Everything she could wish for her honour, grandeur, the security and repose of her realm, with the perfect happiness for herself.’
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Elizabeth suggested that Anjou might cross the Channel incognito to meet with her, but he refused, and she remained adamant that she would not marry a prince that she had not seen. For all Fenelon’s assurances of the duke’s enthusiasm for the marriage, by October, Anjou was refusing to marry Elizabeth under any circumstances and was now so ‘assottied’ in religion that he was hearing mass two or three times a day.
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After months of talks and false promises, all hope for a match with the flamboyant young Frenchman had vanished.

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Compass Her Death

In a letter to Henry Bullinger in the summer of 1571, Robert Horne, the Bishop of Winchester, wrote of the ‘dangerous and dreadful state of agitation’ that had plagued the English government ‘for almost the last three years’. Not only had Elizabeth and her councillors been ‘shaken abroad by the perfidious attacks of our enemies’, but they had been threatened at home by ‘internal commotions’ which Horne described as the ‘brood and offspring of popery’. Pope Pius V was sponsoring ‘desperate men’ who sought to ‘besiege the tender frame of the most noble virgin Elizabeth with almost endless attacks and most studiously endeavour to compass her death both by poison and violence and witchcraft and treason and all other means of that kind which could ever be imagined and which it is horrible even to relate’.
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