Elizabeth and Leicester Read online

  Elizabeth’s babyhood, on the other hand, gets the careful chronicle due to royalty - and to a royal baby awaited with especial eagerness. This was, after all, the early 1530s, a time when the English Reformation was just barely under way: almost a decade since Henry VIII’s interest had first been piqued by Anne Boleyn; six long years since he had started trying to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon; four years since the overthrow of Anne’s enemy, Cardinal Wolsey. But no papal court had yet granted the King a decree nisi. Now past forty, he was beginning to change from the Adonis of his early reign into the bloated and temperamental autocrat of story. But it would not be until the middle of the decade that Henry (conservative by temperament and no Lutheran) finally broke off relations with the Pope, declared himself Supreme Head of the English church and launched a general visitation of the monasteries. It would be more than a decade after that before, under a new young king, the old church rites were swept away.

  With hindsight, we tend to see the Reformation in England as the logical, the inevitable, fruit of the European movement. Look backwards to how, in Martin Luther’s Germany, the call for reformation of corrupt church practices grew to become a revolution in doctrine and belief. Look onwards to the rise of English puritanism, and how Protestantism came to be strongly associated with the national identity. But at the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the English Reformation was so new as hardly to be firmly established as an ideal. Contemporaries, when they looked at the King and his new queen, must have seen first and foremost the consequences of a wild, unsanctioned passion; everything done for Anne, and for Anne’s expected baby.

  At the time Elizabeth was born, her parents’ marriage was very recent - a secret ceremony in January, when Anne was already pregnant, with the coronation festivities postponed until the very end of May. Even so, Europe had had ample time to be scandalized by the love story: not by the King’s taking a mistress (the thing was commonplace; Henry’s mistresses had already included Anne’s sister Mary) but by the way in which, over the course of the six-year wooing, he had come to confuse the roles of consort and concubine. The Habsburg ambassador Chapuys, commenting before the relationship was official, had described how Anne was made ‘to sit by the King’s side, occupying the very place allotted to a crowned Queen . . . After dinner there was dancing and carousing, so that it seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.’ Thirty years on, another Spanish ambassador would be saying much the same about Robert Dudley.3

  Anne had performed well as mistress, both in the sense of unwedded lover and in the old courtly sense of unattainable adored. Now she had to perform as a married woman. Even the pageantry of her longed-for coronation had told the new queen her duty. ‘Queen Anne, when thou shalt bear a new son of the King’s blood; there shall be a golden world unto thy people!’ The play was over. It was time to pay.

  The hour of Elizabeth’s birth is matter of public record - three o’clock of a Sunday afternoon, at Greenwich, the Thames-side birthplace of her father Henry VIII. There was, of course, overwhelmingly special reason to note this particular accouchement. Everyone had hoped - and almost every physician and astrologer had predicted - that it would bring forth the longed-for male heir. For this (or so it must have seemed), Henry had cast off his first wife Katherine and bastardized his daughter Mary; offended Queen Katherine’s nephew Charles V, and cut himself and his country off from the mainstream of Europe; and, at the risk of his eternal damnation, defied the Pope, whom he and all his subjects had been raised to believe God’s representative on earth. For this: that Queen Anne’s son should be born legitimately.

  Everyone put a good face on the arrival, instead, of a daughter, expressing their pleasure and relief that Anne had at least come through her ordeal safely, and had, moreover, produced a healthy child at her first attempt. Surely a boy would follow shortly. The splendid tournament planned for the arrival of a prince was cancelled, but the pre-written letters of announcement were sent out with ‘prince’ altered to ‘princes[s]’, the Te Deum was sung, and Elizabeth’s first progress, the brief journey back from her christening, was accompanied by five hundred men carrying lighted torches.

  Underneath this public show of rejoicing, however, there was a darker story. There are no records of what her parents actually felt when the child’s sex was announced. But then, there hardly need to be. The disappointment can only have been overwhelming - a new and intolerable strain on a relationship that was already carrying a crushing burden of guilt and responsibility. Anne has to have known, from the moment the midwife held up the long baby, that she had failed to deliver on her implicit promise - and to have known, too (since she was very far from a stupid or an imperceptive woman), that it was in Henry’s nature to try to rid himself of any guilt for the trauma that surrounded this marriage, and to throw the blame her way. To Henry the sex of this child was not just a misfortune, it was a gesture from God; a potential warning that perhaps, after all, His will had not been interpreted clearly. From the moment of her actual delivery, you could say, Elizabeth’s potential importance declined rapidly.

  Henry, in accordance with contemporary thinking, had long believed that God was showing His displeasure in allowing him no living male issue - he had, indeed, promised the Pope he would go on crusade, if he were only granted a male heir. (What a contrast with the Dudleys’ fecundity.) Possibly, Anne herself had encouraged the idea that Henry’s marriage to Katherine was demonstrably wrong, since it could produce only Mary. Had she borne a son, she would have had a position in the country and the hierarchy secure enough no longer to need the constant endorsement of Henry’s passion. As long as she was mother only to a daughter, there was no reason why her many enemies should abate their attack.

  For the first three months of her life Elizabeth remained at Greenwich, with her mother - not that Anne was expected to take a primary role in her care. In the special nursery suite, a wet nurse fed the child under the supervision of the Lady Mistress of the Nursery, Lady Bryan, who had similarly had charge of Princess Mary, and would perform the same function for Edward. The seventeen-year-old Mary - now disinherited by the annulment of her parents’ marriage - was required to yield the jewels and the title of princess to her half-sister, and to acknowledge her own bastardy. Her refusal on the latter two points confirmed her on a collision course with Anne.

  At three months, Elizabeth and her dozen or so attendants were sent away from court to reside in the fresher air of Hertfordshire. This meant the formation of a separate household for England’s new heiress, including a host of mostly male servants to run everything from the stables to the buttery. To the hostile eyes of the Habsburg ambassador, it seemed to be Anne herself who decreed that Mary should form part of Elizabeth’s entourage and dance attendance on the infant who had supplanted her. Mary was compelled to move to Hatfield where, in everything from diet to seating, she would be treated as a person of secondary importance. She fought a formidable rearguard action - even down to eating a large breakfast in her room, in order to avoid having to go into hall and accept a lower place at dinner. Anne lashed back with savagery. If Mary called herself princess, her ears should be boxed ‘as the cursed bastard that she was’, Anne declared - or so Chapuys reported - and she should be starved into hall. No-one (least of all Anne) seems to have considered what it might mean for a baby and toddler to grow up in the enforced presence of someone with reason to resent her so bitterly. That was not the thinking of the sixteenth century.

  When Katherine died, in the early days of 1536, Mary was not allowed to go to her mother’s deathbed. The two-year-old Elizabeth was at court with her parents for the Christmas festivities - more festive than ever, after the news of Katherine’s demise, which (said Chapuys) sent Henry into a celebratory suit of yellow velvet, and Anne’s ladies into a frenzy of joy. Elizabeth was paraded around the courtiers in her father’s arms. Everything - not just Henry’s suit - seemed sunny. But again, underneath th
e dance music there was a darker melody. Chapuys heard that the King had already whispered to one confidant that he had been seduced by witchcraft into the marriage with Anne, and therefore considered it null: as witness the fact he still had no male heir. Anne herself seems already to have had an early sense of foreboding, even sending a half-conciliatory message to Mary - hoping to recruit future sympathy for her own daughter, maybe? She was pregnant again, but lost the male foetus; perhaps because news was brought to her that Henry had fallen, and could easily have been fatally injured, in a jousting tournament. (‘She has miscarried of her saviour,’ her uncle said.) In the same breath as he reported it, Chapuys mentioned that the King was making much of one Mistress Seymour. Anne must have been aware that if she fell, Elizabeth would be left very vulnerable.

  One of the great imponderables about Elizabeth’s early life is her relationship with her mother. Were those first three months together at Greenwich enough to forge a bond? Or did Elizabeth effectively find mother figures, adequate or otherwise, in the parade of women who raised her - to some of whom she would remain close until their dying days? Later, she would write that ‘we are more indebted to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents’. Even had Anne lived, she would not necessarily have shared an establishment with her daughter. She visited the nursery, alone and with Henry; wrote to and heard from Lady Bryan. She sent many gifts up the north road, from a fringed crimson canopy for the cradle to a gadget for straightening the fingers of which Elizabeth would later be so proud. We may if we choose deduce a doting mother from the lavish items of clothing she bestowed on the infant, but evidence as to direct involvement is limited. Having given birth to a royal child, her emotion or lack of it was not an issue. In either case, she was required now merely to step back and leave matters to King and council. From now on even the decision to have Elizabeth weaned at twenty-five months would be ratified ‘by his grace, with the assent of the queen’s grace’. It is true that Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary had been unusually close to her mother Katherine (who, when the child Mary was ill, had her in her bed to nurse her). But even Katherine had bent the rules of royal matrimony only with difficulty. And Katherine did not have Anne’s other fish to fry: was not, at that time, surrounded by enemies; did not have a religious reform to promote and a political party to rally.

  Elizabeth may have stayed with or near her parents that spring. If so, it is not clear why. Perhaps now Anne felt the need to spend time with her daughter; perhaps the King was too distracted to order her return to Hertfordshire. Perhaps Katherine’s death (which, as Anne well knew, paved the way for her own replacement by a third wife, less controversial and more fecund) made them feel the child was indeed better away from Mary. Two decades later, the Scottish reformer Alexander Alane (also known as ‘Alesius’), then living in England, told Elizabeth that he remembered a scene: ‘your most religious mother carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, from the open window . . . the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry’. But that may have been fantasy rather than memory; and Elizabeth may have been in Hertfordshire, well away from the court.

  A surviving clothing bill to Queen Anne, presented by the mercer William Lok in that spring of 1536, shows that in the three months from January to April alone, the two-year-old Elizabeth was supplied with a gown of orange velvet; kirtles of russet velvet, yellow satin, white damask and green satin; embroidered purple satin sleeves, ribbons, a damask bedspread, and carefully fitted caps, one made of purple satin, another in a net of gold. But the lavish spending stopped abruptly. At the beginning of May, Anne was arrested.

  She was charged with committing adultery with a handful of men, including her musician Mark Smeaton (the only one to have confessed, almost certainly under the fear or fact of torture) and her own brother George. From the start she seems to have had few illusions about her fate. A few days before her arrest, Anne had had a conversation with her chaplain Matthew Parker (later Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury) about Elizabeth’s future upbringing. As he recounted it later, with the dubious benefits of hindsight, he was convinced that Anne was in some way entrusting Elizabeth to his care.

  Just as it has always been one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history whether, if Henry had never met Anne, England would still be a Catholic country, so it has always been a puzzle just why Anne had to die. We realized a while ago that Anne was not the villainess of earlier legend, just as we know how unsubstantiated were the charges of adultery that prefaced her death. But it has proved curiously hard to replace that biblically colourful image of a scheming Jezebel with another that convinces entirely. Was this a woman who combined a genuine religious fervour with personal ambition? It is possible Anne had become a political liability - that diplomatic pressures in Europe, and her own very sincere espousal of a kind of moderate religious reform, came to threaten her former ally Cromwell over the great land grab that was the dissolution of the monasteries.4 Anne’s vulnerability (just like Robert Dudley’s, later) was that she had set herself up as a natural scapegoat - too aggressive, too rapid a riser, ever to command much sympathy.

  We do not know how or when Elizabeth heard of her mother’s death. She was probably told by her own household, and kindly - but did the news come all at once, or in gradual stages? Did she hear first that her mother was dead, and only later the manner of it? Did anyone, in her childhood, throw in her face her mother’s supposed failings? It is hard to doubt that the gossip of servants, and the bitterness of her sister Mary, told her enough to mark her indelibly. The more so if the two half-sisters were together when Lady Kingston (wife to the Lieutenant of the Tower) came hotfoot from London, where she had accompanied Anne to the scaffold, with news that was the best of all to one girl, the worst of all for the other.

  Did Elizabeth herself, as she grew, believe Anne innocent? Presumably. As queen, she would favour her mother’s kindred; would adopt her mother’s motto ‘Semper eadem’, ‘Always the same’, and her badge of a falcon. She cherished a jewel that showed her portrait and her mother’s side by side. Unlike her sister Mary, she made no attempt to revive and clear her mother’s memory when she came to the throne (any more than did Robert Dudley to clear his family). But one might argue that she paid her debt to her own past in many tiny ways. They permeate the relationship she and Robert shared.

  If Elizabeth’s mother was innocent, then her father was the more guilty . . . Did Elizabeth learn here the downside of a marriage based on mere personal attraction? It is anachronistic to suggest that Elizabeth felt precisely the same guilt and trauma we today impute to the child of quarrelling parents. But she must have had her own horrors to contend with; must have been aware that her mother was widely credited with the heinous crimes of treason and adultery - aware, too, that her mother’s fate might have been very different, had she herself been a boy. Later in life her refusal to look facts squarely in the face amounted almost to a flair, a distinct element in her governing style. It is tempting to speculate that she was forced to learn the skill early.

  As a parent, Henry had one thing going for him (besides being there, alive) - his royalty. It was his name (not her mother’s, unless you count her pride in her ‘most English’ descent) that the adult Elizabeth would invoke so frequently. Did Elizabeth perceive a class element in her parents’ relationship, which would be replicated in her own with Robert Dudley? Years before her birth - before her mother yielded - Henry had written to Anne a letter in which (though he spoke of himself as her ‘very loyal servant’, in the language of courtly fantasy) the King urged the commoner to ‘do the duty of a true, loyal, mistress and friend, and give yourself body and heart to me’. There was something consuming in his passion. It sounds as if he wanted to gobble Anne up whole, which is effectively what Elizabeth would do with her favourites. Elizabeth surely found the relationship a thankless one, in that she was to give her head and heart to a man who - when he had a livin
g daughter, but no legitimate son - would describe himself as ‘childless’. And for the first half of the period - hardly more than a decade in all - that passed between Anne’s death and that of Henry himself, Elizabeth’s father was effectively an absentee from her life.

  As the 1530s gave way to the 1540s - while Jane Seymour gave birth to a son and died; while Henry made his brief fourth marital experiment with Anne of Cleves; and even while he took as his fifth wife the pretty, teenaged Katherine Howard - the royal sisters were chiefly living in Hertfordshire; and all the better for being away from the court, no doubt. Even Mary, at this stage of Elizabeth’s early life, managed to separate her hatred of the mother from her feelings towards the child. Now that Anne, like Katherine, was dead, she managed to see both herself and her half-sister as victims.

  Mary had quickly learned that Anne’s death had not ended her problems, and had fought long and hard before, in that summer of 1536, she signed the ‘confession’ of her own bastardy. Two days before Anne’s execution, the Archbishop of Canterbury had annulled her marriage, so that Elizabeth too was ipso facto a bastard. The Act of Succession passed that summer decreed that the throne should go only to Henry’s children by Jane or by some subsequent wife, Elizabeth, like Mary, being ‘illegitimate . . . and utterly foreclosed, excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir’.

  None the less, if they were bastards they were still royal bastards, and would (while they pleased their father) be treated royally. While Mary stood as godmother at the new Prince Edward’s christening, Elizabeth (herself still so small she had to be carried) held up the chrisom.