The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Read online

  With her pale skin, red-gold hair and incredible height, graceful carriage and sweet voice, Mary was much admired – the Venetian ambassador called her ‘the most beautiful princess in Europe’.7 Her height and stature always made her look healthier than she was.

  Plans for the marriage proceeded apace. The king wanted to dazzle and throw gold to distract the populace. But even more important were the secret treaties that Mary signed – providing that, if Mary died with no heirs, Scotland would become a vassal of France. Henry congratulated himself on his brilliance and pushed his daughter-in-law to claim the kingdom of England for herself. On the eve of her wedding, Mary had everything. Glory, accolades, beauty, Queen of Scotland, one day Queen Consort of France – and soon to be Queen of England. It was an intoxicating vision.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Marvellous in Our Eyes’

  Six months after Mary’s grand ceremony in 1558, young Princess Elizabeth thought she had a great prize within her grasp. It was November, the dreary winter of a bleak year, and at the palace of St James’, her elder sister, Queen Mary I, was dying.

  Just five years earlier, on 3 August 1553, Queen Mary had ridden into London in a blaze of triumph to take her throne against all the odds. Her father, Henry VIII, was long dead, and her younger brother, Edward VI, had ruled for fewer than six years. Edward had attempted to ensure that his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, would be his successor so that she continued his Protestant reformations. But Mary had the greater claim and Jane had only reigned for nine hopeless days before the firstborn daughter of Henry VIII seized the advantage. Resplendent in purple and gold, she had 800 nobles in her train – and, most importantly of all, her half-sister Elizabeth by her side, waving out to the people and showing the assembled crowd the possessors of the true Tudor blood.

  The nineteen-year-old Elizabeth, handsomely dressed in the Tudor colours of green and white (she was certainly not mourning Lady Jane), had processed through London accompanied by 2,000 soldiers to meet her sister at Wanstead, just outside the capital. Mary gave her sister a wonderful necklace of coral beads set in gold and a ruby and diamond brooch, and the two embraced in a thrilling display of familial unity. The government had been protecting Lady Jane Grey, with gunships in the Thames and troops across the country. But Mary, determined the crown would be hers, stormed into London with a huge entourage. Her following had begun in East Anglia with a small troop of local men and now she was surrounded by guards and attendants and carried by the weight of popular adoration. For the people of England, she was the true queen. Elizabeth by her side only added to the glory.

  Elizabeth always meant to dazzle, both with her spectacular wit and her dress. She was not judged a perfect beauty, but she had the grace of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and her father’s sense of ceremony. She was very tall and slim with a slender waist and small, high bosom. She had dark, expressive, dancing eyes, like her mother, but a somewhat long face and pointed chin with the Tudor rather hooked nose. She had her father’s thick red-gold hair but an olive skin, which she covered in a toxic paste of borax, alum, poppy seeds and powdered eggshell to lighten it. Her voice was attractive, and she was most vain of her delicate hands, which she was fond of showing off at every opportunity. Elizabeth was young and energetic and much more beautiful than her older sister – but she knew her place. Her role was to ride behind the new queen, imply she had no ambition of her own, be the supporting actress in the Tudor comeback drama.

  The country threw itself into celebration, and Mary and Elizabeth appeared together at every public event. The people cheered their ruler, believing that the conflicts and violence of the past years were over. Not since Matilda, in 1141, had a woman claimed the throne in her own right – and she had been judged an unequivocal disaster, blamed for a terrible civil war as her cousin, Stephen, fought for the right to rule. But Mary was the true heir of Henry VIII, and under her the country would see glory once more.

  Mary I was committed and determined, politically careful and intelligent. Her attempt to prompt England to Catholic loyalty, to turn it into the epitome of a counter-reformation country, had much support – but ground had been lost, particularly due to Edward VI’s imposition of a more ascetic Protestant religion. And the queen’s most unpopular act was her effort to secure the throne and protect herself by marrying Philip of Spain. The people were convinced they were being subordinated to foreign interests – and plots to dethrone the queen grew. Elizabeth was implicated in one and was thrown into the Tower, occupying the same rooms her mother had lived in before her execution twenty years before. Only by her cleverest wiles (and the refusal of the accused to implicate her, despite terrible torture) did she manage to escape blame and regain her freedom. She then lived quietly at Hatfield, attempting to keep away both from plots and attending court, where she was forced to take Mass.

  Mary I was painfully obsessed with Philip of Spain and convinced herself she was pregnant. But – as everybody but she came to understand – she was not. Instead she probably had a tumour in her stomach – and it was killing her. By early 1558, she was dying and refusing to name Elizabeth as her heir. She declared furiously that Elizabeth was ‘neither her sister nor the daughter of the queen’s father, King Henry, nor would she hear of favouring her, as she was born of an infamous woman, who had so greatly outraged the queen her mother and herself’.1 But already the great men of the country were moving to her sister. Elizabeth was kept constantly abreast of the happenings at court – as one parliamentarian later recalled, ‘Few things could be spoken either in the Privy Council or the Privy Chamber of the queen her sister but they were revealed unto her Majesty.’2

  Almost everyone wished for Elizabeth to be queen, including many Catholic supporters of Mary – for the heretic daughter of Anne Boleyn was a better option than being thrown into uncertainty, or even, knowing the eagerness of Philip II to declare his claim and ‘assist’ in ruling, becoming subject to Spain. Mary had to give in and on 8 November a messenger arrived to tell Elizabeth at Hatfield House that the queen had declared her the heir. Elizabeth had known what was afoot – for Mary’s trusted lady had already arrived with a selection of the queen’s jewels, an indication of what Elizabeth would soon receive. Philip of Spain had made it known that he would not protest Elizabeth’s ­accession. Elizabeth was ready. Ever-loyal William Cecil busied himself drafting the letters that were to be sent out when the new queen took the throne. On 17 November, in the early hours of the morning, the queen died – declaring anyone who cut her open would find ‘Philip and Calais inscribed on my heart’ after the humiliating defeat by French troops that lost England their last land in France. A messenger was sent to Hatfield and Elizabeth fell to her knees, overcome with emotion. She quoted in Latin, ‘This is the doing of the Lord; and it is marvellous in our eyes.’3 It was a beautiful scene but Elizabeth was putting on a show to be reported back to court. She had already been informed by her own spy, who had ridden faster than the messenger, that Mary was dead.

  As Elizabeth later told the Spanish ambassador, her first act as queen was to thank God for her peaceful accession and ask that ‘He would give her grace to govern with clemency and without bloodshed’. Between eleven o’clock and midday on 17 November, Elizabeth was formally announced as queen outside the Palace of Westminster and other positions in London. England’s first queen regnant had been defeated by illness, but she had set an effective model for the female role, and had been a warning of the problems Elizabeth would face.

  On 20 November, the Privy Council and key members of the peerage came to the great hall at Hatfield to hear Elizabeth make her first public address and see who had been chosen as her advisors and councillors. Under a canopy and on a rather makeshift throne, she pronounced, ‘The burdaine that is fallen uppon me maketh me amazed and yet considering that I am God’s creature, ordained to obey His ­appointment, I will yield thereto.’4 She was being disingenuous – the brand-new twenty-five-year-old monarch had been carefully planning her triump
h for years. And her aim, above all, was to create unity. As she continued in her speech, ‘And as I am but one body, so I shall require you all, my lords, to be assistant with me.’

  Among them was one of her very favourites, the young and handsome Lord Robert Dudley, her friend since childhood, whose father had been the second Protector to Edward VI and who had been under threat of execution when she was in the Tower, whom she immediately made Master of the Horse and put in charge of the coronation. Although she had packed her closest circle with her supporters, such as her trusted William Cecil, and Sir Francis Knollys, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Katherine Parr’s brother, William, as well as keen Protestant lords – she retained ten of Mary’s councillors. Elizabeth had long been acting as a monarch. Now finally she was Queen.

  Elizabeth planned the theatre of her victory. On 28 November, she adorned herself in purple velvet and jewels and formally entered the City as queen, parading with 1,000 men to the royal apartments in the Tower of London. The procession was led by the Lord Mayor of London and Garter King of Arms. Pembroke bore the sword of state and Dudley rode behind the queen on a black stallion. The streets were packed with waving crowds, all the church bells rang, and trumpets along the way announced her arrival. Her subjects were not disappointed. As one ambassador wrote later, ‘Such an air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail to suppose she is a queen.’ But for Elizabeth – unlike her fellow monarchs, who were terrified of letting the royal mask slip – dignity did not mean ignoring the people who cheered for her. As one observer recalled, she excelled in engaging with the crowd. ‘Her spirit seemed to be everywhere’, he judged, declaring that ‘her eye was set upon one, her ear listened to another, her judgement ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech . . . distributing her smiles, looks and graces so artfully that thereupon the people again redoubled the testimony of their joys, and afterwards, raising everything to the highest strain, filled the ears of all men with immoderate extolling of their prince’.5 As he put it, ‘If any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of the people, it was this queen.’

  For, as Elizabeth told the Spanish ambassador – when he declared she owed the crown to the influence of his king – she was on the throne thanks to the people of England and her only gratitude was to them. She never forgot it.

  When Elizabeth neared the Tower there was a ‘great shooting of guns, the like was never heard before’. She looked up at the great and terrifying building where she had once been imprisoned – and where her mother had died – and brought her horse to a stop. ‘I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be a prince of this land. That dejection was a work of God’s justice; this advancement is a work of His mercy.’6

  The queen entered the Tower and promptly told the lieutenant – who had been her jailer – that she would appoint another in his place. She gave her judgement kindly, but she would never forget those who had been loyal to her. And she expected her word to be obeyed. As the Spanish ambassador wrote gloomily to his master, Philip of Spain, ‘Her Majesty seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did. We have lost a kingdom, body and soul.’

  To the French king and the Guises, however, Elizabeth’s arrival on the throne only strengthened their case that it should truly be Mary, Queen of Scots who ruled. The new queen was a heretic, born of an adulteress. In their plan to gain the English throne, they now had God on their side.

  What did Mary think of Elizabeth, growing up in the French court? They were cousins, relations – and Mary was, of course, by her very actions attempting to disinherit her cousin. She was influenced by the perception of England in France. She knew England as the enemy, even if she had only the very vaguest memories of the attacks and the invasions of Hertford’s men. And everyone knew and judged Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, once a lady-in-waiting to King Henry’s mother, Queen Claude. The French and the Guise family were watching England: every false step, every failed pregnancy.

  Nearly ten years before Mary was even born, Anne Boleyn had been at her triumphant coronation on 1 June 1533. Finally, after six years of chasing, Henry had won her, in the process divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, alienating Catholic Europe and breaking from the Church of Rome. The people had lived through schism and disruption – but on the day of coronation, the symbolism was all unity. London was transformed into a vision of celestial Jerusalem with Anne as the Virgin Mary. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she was gowned in white – and visibly pregnant, rounder than one might expect given that she had been married for only four months. Along the way was a great tableau of a castle against a hill. As Anne passed by, a tree stump on the hill streamed forth a tumble of red and white roses, an outpouring of Tudor symbolism, and then a (well-trained) white falcon emerged from a painted cloud and flew to the flowers. An angel appeared out of the cloud and put an imperial crown on the head of the white falcon. The crest of the white falcon alighting on roses was Anne’s own – and the import of the tableau could not be mistaken. Anne was bringing new life to the Tudor dynasty.

  No one was buying it. Londoners lined the route, but they were dull and unenthusiastic. As the ever-critical Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys said, the coronation was a ‘meagre and uncomfortable thing, to the great dissatisfaction, not only of the common people, but also of the rest’.7 Instead of cheering for the royal couple, the crowds saw the initials of Henry and Anne and turned them into a joke, shouting ‘Ha, Ha,’ as the queen passed. They still loved the old queen, Catherine of Aragon, now living in exile at The More Palace in Hertfordshire, barred from seeing her teenaged daughter, Mary, and kept in privation. She called herself the queen, rather than the Dowager Princess of Wales, the title Henry wished her to assume as the widow of his brother Arthur. Catherine, praying and pious in Hertfordshire, was a constant thorn in Henry’s side.

  Every day the new Queen Anne grew larger with her child, which she was convinced was a boy. In August, as Anne prepared to go into confinement, the royal couple removed to Windsor and then Greenwich, where Anne would give birth. Henry’s daughter with Catherine, Mary, now no longer a princess but simply Lady Mary, was ordered to join the ladies and attend the queen, to witness the victory of her mother’s nemesis, as she gave birth to a prince and proved that everything the king had done to marry her had been ordained and rewarded by God. He had broken from Rome, exposed his subjects to excommunication and opened years of religious strife, but a boy would prove that it had been a virtuous battle.

  Anne needed to hold the king’s affections. He had been her devoted swain when he fell in love with her eight years earlier in 1525. She had played the cruel mistress, charmed him, kept him wound around her finger. The court had marvelled over how obsessive his love had been. But, now she was pregnant and married, she heard gossip that he had been chasing other women and challenged him on it, expecting him to play the subservient lover, as he always had. But instead, the king had told her she must ‘shut her eyes and endure’ as her betters had done. Anne was furious, and everybody whispered that she was losing her hold over Henry. As they said, she was ‘very jealous of the king and not without legitimate cause’.8

  A queen was supposed to go into confinement four to six weeks before the child was born. But Anne’s due date had almost certainly been fudged – for she and the king had begun sexual relations before they married, and Anne was probably pregnant when they did finally wed. Anne took her seclusion on 26 August, after hosting a great court banquet. Her rooms were hung with tapestries, and rich velvet covers adorned the bed. The aim was to reduce infection by shutting out natural light and air, but the place was unbearably suffocating and not conducive to a healthy birth. But Anne was young and strong and on 7 September, not even a fortnight after going into confinement, she went into labour. The king planned jousts and celebrations to commemorate the birth of his sacred prince. The courtiers and ambassadors waited eager
ly for news and the ladies of the chamber rushed to and fro. Not long after three o’clock in the afternoon, Anne gave birth to a fine, healthy child with a rush of Tudor red-gold hair. The baby was lusty and strong – and a girl. Outwardly, the king was calm and engaged in the jousts and celebrations he had planned. He told Anne that they could expect to have more children and announced that the baby would be Elizabeth, named after both his mother and Anne’s. Anne was immediately devoted to her daughter, delighted that she had been born on the eve of the birthday of the Virgin Mary and wanted her daughter always by her side.

  Chapuys said that the king felt ‘great regret’ and he was correct. Although he was pleased with a healthy baby, the king had turned the world upside down for a son. Even though he was confident that he would have more sons, he was growing less convinced that Anne should be their mother.

  Anne’s enemies scented weakness – and began to circle. Now she had failed to bear a son, perhaps another mistress should take her place. ‘There is little love for the one who is queen now or for any of her race,’ reported one French observer (‘her race’ meaning the ambitious Boleyn family).9

  The baby Princess Elizabeth was christened on 10 September at the Chapel of the Observant Friars at Greenwich. Neither parent was present, as was customary. She was carried to the font by the Duchess of Norfolk, wrapped in a purple and ermine mantle, her train borne by the Countess of Kent. Five hundred torches accompanied her back to her mother – who was still in confinement. Anne had demanded that she be named Mary as well as Elizabeth. She wished, she told the king, to commemorate how the princess had been born on the nativity of the Virgin. But she also wanted a second Mary, to replace Henry’s first daughter. The king refused, much to her fury. Elizabeth was pronounced the king’s first legitimate child. Elizabeth, not Mary, was his heir.