Elizabeth (12 page)

“She is considering Don Carlos,” Cecil said.

Elizabeth struck the table and leant on it, her eyes narrowed at the Secretary.

“Philip of Spain's son and heir! A sadistic imbecile whom even his own family admits is mad. But she considers him, and with enthusiasm! Because he would bring the might of Spain and the armies of Spain as his bridegroom's portion! That is the measure of her. By the living Saviour, my stomach turns at the thought of him, and I'm not squeamish when it comes to the needs of the State. But not Mary's; no, she doesn't balk at him, nor at the King of Sweden who really
is
a lunatic.… She'd open her covers to an ape, if it would help her take the Crown away from me.”

“The King of Spain will reject the match,” Cecil reminded her. “He knows it could mean war with us. Others will see the same danger; if necessary we can make that plain to the Queen of Scots herself.”

“We go too fast, Cecil,” Elizabeth complained. “My head aches. Caution is necessary now; extreme caution, until we see how she progresses. She knows I am her enemy, as I know that she is mine. We will send friendly words through Randolph, and I shall suggest that we have a cousinly meeting in order to smooth out our differences. She will not agree, and if she does, I will get out of going. We will play chess, my dear Cecil, and move our pawns a little, but nothing more until
she
makes a move.”

The interview was over, and Cecil knew that however much he argued, the Queen had decided on the course of her immediate policy, and nothing would alter that decision. As he walked back to his own apartments he thought that her favourite word was caution. It was an unfeminine word, with its suggestion of a careful, premeditated mind; it warred with the idea of a child of Henry VIII and of the rash and wanton Anne Boleyn.

But there was a great deal of the crafty, tortuous grandfather, the first Tudor King of England, in Cecil's mistress. She symbolized the coming struggle for her throne with the pieces on her golden chessboard, and he knew that she would play her deadly game with Mary Stuart with the icy calculation which won her every match. He knew, just as clearly as she did, that the arrival of the other Queen in Scotland preluded a period of the most acute personal danger Elizabeth had ever known. Every disaffected Catholic in England—and, thanks to Cecil's Act of Settlement, there were thousands of them—every petty noble with a grievance, and every great peer with ambitions which the Queen had left unsatisfied—all of them now had a focal point for their rebellion, the rebellion which had not yet come. Much as he hated Mary Stuart, his hatred fed by her detested religion, much as he affected to despise and minimize her, he had no real knowledge of her as a woman. She might be headstrong and foolish and unable to hold Scotland for more than a few months, or weak and full of empty threats; she might be consumed with ambition as Elizabeth judged her. Only time would answer that question, and time, as Elizabeth often said, had been a good friend to her in the past. Cecil instructed one of his secretaries to draft a letter to the envoy Randolph, ordering him to show a friendly face to the new Queen and her supporters in Edinburgh.

In England all was quiet; the expected storm between Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots was dissipated in a flow of affectionate letters and the exchange of Maitland of Lethington, the man Cecil had called a snake, for Randolph as an emissary to the English Court. The two ships were returned to Mary with her treasures untouched, and Elizabeth suggested a meeting of the two Queens at York. Her letters were brilliant; they were dignified and persuasive and they held out real hope of an arrangement which would consolidate Mary on her throne by Elizabeth naming her as her successor if she died childless, thereby removing the only cause of enmity and suspicion between them.

In Scotland the atmosphere was much less restful. The Earl of Arran had led a band of armed men into the Queen's private chapel when she was attending Mass, and her half-brother, Lord James, and his servants had driven him out with drawn swords. The Earl of Bothwell, Mary's staunch supporter, had been exiled from Edinburgh to appease the jealousy of his fellow Lords and to prevent him avenging the insults of Arran and others in a bloody clan war in the streets of the City itself.

Lord James, sullen and envious of his beautiful sister's position as sovereign, had to be flattered and cajoled to keep his suspicions at bay and induce him to protect her; the violent Papist-hater John Knox roared of the rules of Whores and Jezebels from the public pulpit and received a temperate summons to the Palace of Holyrood to explain himself instead of the committal to a dungeon which Mary longed to send him instead.

In those first months the hot-tempered, incautions girl who had been so tactless in France and so confident in her own power to charm her enemies, displayed astonishing forbearance in the face of every kind of frustration and encroachment on her life as a woman and her powers as a Queen. She sat meekly at her Councils, sewing and listening to her half-brother and the other Lords deciding for her; she endured the ranting of Knox to her face, and only gave vent to her feelings in tears. She cried a great deal in private, but in public she was gentle and moderate and patient, without seeming weak. Her charm was her only weapon and in spite of her youth and her inexperience, she knew it and used it to the utmost. She was anovelty to these rough and ruthless men, and she knew that too. They did not understand her, but most of them were too naturally shrewd to overlook her altogether. Slowly she began to win some of them, and to gain the people's admiration. While Knox and the Reformers chilled their congregations with threats of a Catholic persecution, led by the idolatrous Queen, Mary went out of her way to show tolerance to a religion which she hated and which had declared war to the death on her own Faith. There were no burnings for heresy, no laws introduced which diminished the tyrannical power of the Kirk and its Elders, and no invasion of French troops to compel heretic Scotsmen to behave themselves towards their Queen. Her religion, accent and upbringing were different from theirs, but she rode among them in Highland dress, danced their reels and ate their food, and tried to show that in all essentials she was one of them. In spite of the disapproval of Knox and others who were going to find fault with her whatever she did, Mary gradually introduced an atmosphere of elegance and culture into her Court. Musicians and poets gathered round her; there were gay balls in the bleak rooms of Holyrood, its walls covered with fine tapestries and silks from France, and the dour Scots Lords found themselves entertained by a lovely gracious sovereign who seemed anxious to show equal favours to them all. There was peace, disregarding the occasional outbursts of violence on the Border towns and the riots in the City between rival clansmen, and the more serious of these were put down by the Queen's men, supported by the citizens. It seemed as if law and authority were gaining the support of all but the most hardened ruffians in her kingdom, and it was becoming less safe to insult the Queen's faith and the Queen's habits because of her increasing popularity with all classes of society.

There was no whisper of scandal against her or any of her ladies; Queen Mary and her four Maries, daughters of the noblest Scottish houses, lived lives of extreme circumspection. It delighted her subjects to contrast this with the ugly scandals issuing from England, where the self-styled Virgin Elizabeth was surrounded by flatterers and suitors, and permitted the most sinister of them all, the infamous Dudley, to come into her bedroom and hand her her chemise while she was dressing.

The Catholic Queen of Puritan Scotland subdued her passion for fine clothes and dressed in sober velvets, covered to the neck, while the fashion set by Elizabeth exposed more and more of the unmarried female bosom to the gaze of men in England. If the English loved Elizabeth because she appeared among them like a gorgeous peacock, covered in jewels with her pale face painted and her hair puffed and curled out over her head, the Scots were proud of the grave and modest mien of their own beautiful sovereign. There were now two eligible Queens in Europe, and though she was far less powerful, Mary was the younger and the healthier of the two. She was nineteen and unsullied in virtue, with a valid claim to the throne occupied by a woman with a dubious reputation, ten years' seniority and allegedly poor health. The man who married Mary might well find himself King of both countries. Mary was disappointed when her meeting with Elizabeth was postponed and finally put off indefinitely. She was distinctly curious to see the writer of those friendly letters whom men like Bothwell and her brother James said was as cunning as a serpent and never to be trusted. Privately she considered Elizabeth a vulgarian, and excused her by pointing out that her mother was an adventuress from the trading classes. Her morals were her own affairs, though Mary deplored the display she made of them. Her protestations might well be genuine; in her growing confidence Mary thought they stemmed from fear, and was already prepared to be generous and wait until Elizabeth died of one of her frequent illnesses before she made her claim for the English throne. Her lack of insight was infectious; it was bred in pride and the conviction that mere craft never triumphed over blue blood. Her nobles began to swagger, thinking with envy of the rich spoils of England, which they only sampled when they raided the English Border, and the defeats in the bitter Anglo-Scottish wars which might be redressed with Mary as their figurehead. They liked her because she rode well, and showed spirit; they obeyed her because she requested, and then only on matters where it cost them nothing to agree. Occasionally her justice had to be executed against someone they wished to destroy on other counts and they rallied to the business with enthusiasm. There was no such thing as loyalty to the sovereign in the sense that Mary knew it, but she began to forget that and be deceived. The Divine Right of Kings enforced with such bloodshed and terror by Henry VIII, had never penetrated to Scotland where the attitude to the throne was one of envy for the temporal power and accession to it by murder or force of arms was a natural process. The ruler was not God's anointed, tinged with the same mystic quality as the Pope himself; the King was only the strongest and toughest of the Lords, and he remained King until a stronger came and overthrew him.

Mary did not see this, though she had been warned of it and acted as carefully as she did in the first year of her reign with that warning in her mind. But gradually the reality became obscured in the triviality of homage and surface power. Her brother seemed content enough; she supposed he no longer grudged her the throne because she had made him Earl of Moray and given him the first place in her Council; she thought she had won his loyalty forever when she arranged the marriage he wanted by using her influence with the Earl Marshal of Scotland, who had previously refused to give his daughter to a bastard, even a Royal one. She was too straightforward and too generous to realize that Lord James took her favours, the love-match among them, and felt no gratitude because they came from her.

When a scandal threatened her, she acted with devastating courage, and with a revealing lack of mercy. The young poet, Chatelard, had come in her entourage from France. He stayed in the bleak, unfriendly country because he fell madly in love with the Queen; and he allowed his sense of Gallic romanticism to delude him into hiding under her bed, in the wild hope of becoming her lover. Such a thing could be done in France, where it would have been conducted with finesse and Queens and great ladies shared their beds judiciously with whom they chose. But not in Scotland. The intruder was arrested, tried by the Queen's order, and condemned to be publicly beheaded. The sentence was carried out in Edinburgh before an immense crowd, with Mary watching from a galleried window. Unlike Elizabeth, who now kept Robert Dudley in a bedroom adjoining her own, the Queen of Scots forfeited, for the sake of her own honour, the life of a man she had genuinely liked, though she fainted outright when his head was struck off. Her popularity soared; even Knox's venomous tongue wagged in vain when the axe fell on Chatelard, and the spectators delighted in a bloody spectacle where the victim was a foreigner and a Frenchman as well. The pawns were moving slowly on the chessboard, but they had left no opening for Elizabeth, and in October 1562 death seemed likely to remove the Red Queen from the board and end the game.

For the second time in her reign, Elizabeth had gone to war. Her first intervention in Scotland had been so costly in men and money that it left her with a rooted aversion to armed interference. It was easy for the Councillors, men like Sussex and Hunsdon and even Cecil, to argue in favour of troops. Men were always ready for war and less ready to cope with the bankruptcy which followed. The conflict in which she was finally persuaded to take part was raging over the Channel in France, where the Catholic and Huguenot parties, headed by the Scots Queen's uncle, the Duke de Guise, and by the Prince de Condé respectively, were engaged in a bitter and bloody battle in which neither age nor sex was spared. Nothing pointed out the powerlessness of the French Crown more plainly than its inability to stop two of its most powerful nobles from plunging the whole country into a savage religious war. For some time Elizabeth remained inactive, waiting as usual while the hotheads round her fumed for action, determined to avoid committing herself until she saw which side was going to win. It was argued that a Protestant ruler could not stand idle while her co-religionists were slaughtered; if the Guises won and Protestantism was wiped out in France, there might be no end to their ambitions. The result of a Catholic victory might be a religious invasion of England, aimed at setting the Catholic Mary Stuart upon Elizabeth's throne. And if that happened, which of the other Protestant Princes would give Elizabeth aid, when she had refused help to Condé and the Huguenots? Cecil was the most insistent upon intervention; his religious prejudices were backed by a sound political reasoning, and though she felt no sympathy with his conviction, she agreed in principle with his policy. When a truce in France was broken and the fighting began again she gave the order to negotiate with Condé and send English troops. She drove a merciless bargain with the hard-pressed Huguenots; they were forced to surrender Havre to the English in return for a subsidy and English troops to garrison the port, and Havre was only a hostage for Calais, lost in the disastrous campaign waged by her sister Mary Tudor. She went to war against her will, but with the determination to squeeze the last drop of profit out of it for England. When she received the bill for the expedition, she was unable to hide her displeasure with Cecil whose advice was responsible for the plunder of her exchequer by merchants and shipwrights. She blamed Cecil for the war, and particularly for the expense, and the Secretary blamed Dudley for the Queen's coldness towards him.