Heretic Queen (7 page)

So Cecil gambled that he knew the queen's mind. He prompted her directly and obliquely that the people looked upon her relationship with Dudley as unsuitable. When that didn't work, he threatened to resign unless Elizabeth came to heel. Just in case she didn't believe him, Cecil announced his purpose to anyone who would listen, including the notoriously loose-lipped Spanish envoy de Feria. Unless Cecil could wrest Elizabeth away from the clutches of Lord Robert, he predicted, “the extreme injury of the realm” and the ruination of the young queen would ensue.

Nonetheless, Elizabeth was not prepared to have her secretary of state dictate terms to her. Though Cecil admired the queen in many ways, in keeping with the times, he regarded Elizabeth in biblical terms as a “weak and feeble woman” unable to govern a vulnerable England on her own. There was nothing astounding in this condescending attitude to the queen for a Tudor man. It was simply the honest truth as known in their day, and as her first minister and secretary of state, it was his duty to limit the queen's exuberance (as he saw it) for her Dudley. Cecil felt duty bound to draw the proverbial line in the sand where the queen's potential loss of reputation weakened England's already fragile political and spiritual position. So he spread the word that he would resign, even if it meant being sent to the Tower. He let it be known that England by and large was outraged by any proposed match with Dudley. He even went so far as to say that such a marriage could lead to deposition of the queen or revolt, and that the French would aid such civil unrest. Naturally, his intention was that this would shock Elizabeth into seeing reason and thereby abandoning her Dudley.

Cecil's ploy wasn't as big a gamble as it might seem. He knew Elizabeth craved the love of her people more than anything else. He had been advising her on her landholdings since she was in her teens and knew just how far he could push her. No matter how much she claimed she didn't want to marry for reasons of state, the fact remained that it was expected of her. After all, her half sister, Queen Mary, had accepted this reality, reasoning that the only way to keep England in obeisance to the Holy See of Rome was to have a child and heir.

Yet despite all the gossip and Elizabeth's evident desire to simply amuse herself with Dudley, there is every indication that she had no intention of marrying, ever. For Parliament and the Privy Council, it was simply unthinkable that England's twenty-five-year-old handsome, inexperienced, and fiery queen not only desired but actively sought spinsterhood—particularly in light of the Dudley scandal that was brewing.

In part this was because in Tudor England, all men believed that women lived for the estate of holy wedlock, and it was disbelieved that a queen of England would set herself above this rule of God. Procreation was their reason for existence, so the Bible taught. “Eve” was the root word of “evil,” and Eve the cause for the downfall of Man from the Garden of Eden. Religious thought and marriage were dangerously intertwined among all Christians, with muddled belief systems about women permeating popular art and literature. Women were sometimes portrayed as maternal, while at other times they were seen as a wicked source of disease and the cause of the sexual debasement of society.
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After all, hadn't Henry VIII himself become the victim of the charms and bewitchment of women—most notably Elizabeth's own mother—who had debased his reign?

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Since the beginning
of the sixteenth century, there had been a male fascination with the female form; a male need to understand the maternal body's secrets and how a woman could represent both the innocent nourishment of maternity and man's bestial sexual desire. Anatomists like Charles V's physician, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, tried to explain this dichotomy by stealing the bodies of prostitutes or female criminals in direct violation of religious decency and papal decree. It was only by dissecting the female body that he could reveal the secrets it held, Vesalius claimed.

Yet the anatomist himself became like a man possessed in his quest, frequently allowing himself to be locked out of the city gates to “look for the bones” of executed criminals. Vesalius's own account of his body-snatching borders on the sensual: “So great was my desire to possess those bones that in the middle of the night, alone and in the midst of all those corpses, I climbed the stake with considerable effort and did not hesitate to snatch away that which I so desired.”
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Significantly, in Vesalius's
Letter on the China Root,
published in 1546, he waxes lyrical on the lasciviousness of the monks and how the monasteries are a microcosm for the corruption within the Catholic Church. At the heart and soul of the monk's fall from grace is the female form—the nun whose virginity cannot be taken on trust unless “anatomized.”
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Even earlier than Vesalius, the charismatic and libidinous scoundrel Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), who popularized erotic poses of lovemaking, reveled in clerical and political gossip among the literati close to the papacy by making the rich and famous “infamous” with his observations on the papal sex scandals of his day.

In fact, the popular trend to anatomize, or dissect, the female form in print was well established by the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. The title page of Vesalius's
De humani corporis fabrica
, first published in 1543, shows a dissection of a woman posing as if in a pagan sacrifice. Yet the female form was only one feature of a woman's imperfections, and queens, so it seemed, were no exception.

The woman's mind was not highly valued either. In his influential work written in 1528,
The Book of the Courtier,
Baldesar Castiglione explains that men steadfastly held the view that women were “the most imperfect creatures, incapable of any virtuous act, worth very little and quite without dignity compared with men.”
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Imperfect or no,
being an effective woman ruler was a nearly impossible task when viewed through the eyes of Tudor man. To marry and have children—heirs—unlocked her realm to the unwanted interference of the husband or king consort, just as it had done with Mary I and Philip of Spain. To not marry opened a queen regnant to possible scandalous criticisms by religious extremists that she sought to satisfy her sexual desires outside of wedlock, as with Elizabeth and Robert Dudley.

Tudor men hardly considered that having children held its own risks, though childbirth itself claimed both mother and child in alarming numbers until the twentieth century. Besides, marriage was no guarantee of giving birth to a boy. What if the queen could only give birth to a girl? Then, even if she had a son, would that son—and Elizabeth—live until he was old enough to rule? Even well-loved heirs, too, could drain power away from a reigning queen, just as Elizabeth had done with her sister. Would Elizabeth's heir do the same to her? Muddying the picture even more was the added complication of Elizabeth's parentage and moves by the French king to have her declared a bastard by Pope Paul IV.

As the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was despised as the offspring of an “incestuous” marriage and suffered at the hands of those who should have cared for and loved her.
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Elizabeth knew the twisted fate of most women and had known a husband's cruelty through a daughter's eyes: witnessing Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catherine Howard, pulled from the palace by her hair and fearing the demise of Henry's last wife, Catherine Parr, over the writing of her Protestant religious tracts. Elizabeth had seen male domination at close quarters throughout her life. She had experienced the terror of the unknown that pregnancy represented, as in the case of her sister's phantom pregnancies or the deaths of two of her stepmothers after childbirth.

Yet when it comes to her most private reasons for steadfastly refusing marriage—despite playing along with the pretense of it myriad times in her life—we shall never truly know if she ever held hopes of a husband and family. Was her enforced celibacy because she could never marry the one man she surely loved, Robert Dudley? Or did she regard the overzealous need for her to conform to the image of a queen as conceived by Parliament—to beget an heir—tantamount to an anatomization of her body and soul? Did she fear being unable to conceive a child, like her sister? Did she fear dying in childbirth? Or giving birth to a deformed child as her mother reputedly had done? Or did she see her own imagined child, the beloved and coveted heir apparent, as stealing away the prerogative that she had at long last inherited?

Perhaps she saw a husband—who must dominate her because he was a man—as an unnecessary by-product and the ultimate usurper of her own newfound power? Or did Elizabeth simply seek from the outset to create a pure, chaste image of herself not only as queen but as virgin queen, defying popular literature and art; to be loved as England's mother, freeing it from the bewitchment and superstition of the Catholic Church? Perhaps at different times it was all these things. Then again, perhaps not. It is a secret that Elizabeth took with her to her grave.

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Though Elizabeth eventually
gave in to Cecil's blackmail, she would have recalled the evangelizing voices of the Calvinists through the words of the fire-breathing Scots vicar John Knox, who had already blown a steady tempest against all women—and women rulers in particular. Having returned to Scotland in the spring of 1559, Knox had to face the great displeasure of England's new queen for his
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, published in Geneva a year earlier. Elizabeth refused to see Knox or admit him to her realm. William Cecil tried to make Elizabeth see the political imperatives of remaining on friendly terms with the pugnacious Scot and the significance of the Scottish Protestant movement Knox represented, particularly in light of the French king's unreliable friendship, but Elizabeth was not for turning.

Knox protested in writing that he was not Elizabeth's enemy, nor the enemy “of the regiment of her, whom God hath now promoted.” His tract of the previous year had been directed against Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and her mother, Mary of Guise—all of whom had had devastating effects on Scotland, he claimed. While mildly conciliatory, Knox couldn't help but stick his proverbial foot in it with a letter to Cecil, directed at Elizabeth. “If,” Knox droned on, “Queen Elizabeth shall confess so that the extraordinary dispensation of God's great mercy maketh that lawful with her which both nature and God's law doth deny all women, then shall none in England be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I shall be. But if, God's wondrous works be set aside, she ground, as God forbid, the justness of her title upon consuetude [custom], laws and ordinance of men, then as I am assured, that evil foolish presumption doth greatly offend God's supreme majesty, so do I greatly fear that her ingratitude shall not long lack punishment.”
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Despite her anger with Knox over his interpretation of women as “the weaker vessel,” Elizabeth stayed focused on the political imperative dictated by the signing of the peace treaty at Cateau-Cambrésis in the spring of 1559. She knew full well that this treaty wasn't so much a declaration of peace as a “time-out” from active combat. Mary Tudor had lost England's staple town of Calais needlessly in what Elizabeth and the country viewed as the king of Spain's war to none other than France's commander of the action, the warrior Francis, Duke of Guise—uncle of Mary Queen of Scots. The loss of Calais alone made England economically vulnerable.

For William Cecil, an alliance to the right man through marriage could serve to protect England's interests abroad. Such an alliance, Elizabeth thought, needn't take the irrevocable step into marriage. After all, France, not Spain, represented the greatest threat to England's security. There were thousands of French troops massing on England's northern borders with Scotland. Elizabeth's cousin Mary, since the age of one week Mary I of Scotland, had been a creature of the French court since she was six years old, transforming Scotland into almost a vassal state of France.
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Indeed, Mary had taken her first husband just a year earlier, on April 24, 1558, amid tremendous splendor and fanfare in Paris. The Scottish queen—one of the most “imperfect creatures” in so many ways—had wed the sickly Francis of Valois, the dauphin of France. Mary was only fifteen years and four months of age. This marriage, carved from the model of so many medieval child marriages among royalty, allied her impoverished realm to one of the most glorious in Europe. Although the young Scots queen knew she was marrying for the good of her realm; nonetheless, to observers she seemed simply ecstatic.

Had Elizabeth looked on in wonder from her exile at Hatfield then, envying Mary, who had been compared to Helen of Troy in beauty, the fabled Lucrece in chastity, the Athenian goddess Pallas in wisdom, Ceres in riches, and Juno in power?
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Or did Elizabeth take good heed of one of the wedding eulogies by Estienne Perlin dedicated to the French king's sister, the Duchess of Berry, observing, “How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favored, fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most Magnanimous king of France … for without him thou would'st have been laid in ashes, thy country wasted and ruined by the English, utterly accursed by God”?
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There were plenty of women in history, from Eleanor of Aquitaine four hundred years earlier up to Mary's wedding day, to show Elizabeth to beware of a groom. So, in her speech delivered to the House of Commons on February 10, 1559, Elizabeth clearly stated her marital intentions for her reign:

And albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdoms as good provision by His help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir that may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me … And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.
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