The Children of Henry VIII (28 page)

F
IGURE
16
Elizabeth kneeling in prayer, with the sceptre and the sword of justice on the floor beside her. A scene in which the queen is depicted in what may be the artist’s imagination of her ‘closet’ or secret oratory at one of her palaces. Off the ‘closet’ was a smaller room fitted with a kneeling desk for the queen. This image first appeared in 1569.

Elizabeth’s own religious creed remained close to the moderate beliefs of Katherine Parr and Edmund Allen, her chaplain in Edward’s reign—whom Cecil prudently nominated for the bishopric of Rochester.
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She visibly hankered after the more ambiguously traditionalist 1549 Prayer Book and had started using this version of the liturgy in the Chapel Royal before pressure from her own supporters forced her to abandon it. Subconsciously, she seems to have associated the 1552 alternative with Edward’s ‘Device for the Succession’, which had made Jane Grey queen and excluded herself.
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Once committed to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, Elizabeth sought to dilute its practical effects by stealth. A last-minute clause was inserted into the Act of Uniformity, stating that until she decided otherwise, the vestments of the clergy and ornaments of the chancel should be those of 1549, which were still largely those of the mass.
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To her dismay, she found that Matthew Parker—whom she made archbishop of Canterbury, believing him to be a natural ally—circumvented her. Colluding with Cox and Cecil, Parker contrived that the Injunctions drawn up for a general visitation of the dioceses later in 1559 specified clerical dress as worn in 1552 and ordered ‘idolatries’ such as images, paintings and candlesticks to be stripped out of the parish churches, ‘to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy … may vanish’.
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Elizabeth ostentatiously reinstated the crucifix and candlesticks in her Chapel Royal in the autumn of 1559 after the iconoclasts removed them. Thereafter, she expressed her ‘old’ (some say ‘odd’) sort of Protestantism in a variety of different ways. High on her list
was her scathing disapproval of the clergy’s right to marry. She particularly loathed married bishops, believing that their low-born wives considered themselves to be noblewomen. And although preaching the Word of God lay at the heart of the Protestant view of salvation, she considered regular sermons to be unnecessary.
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After her early skirmishes over the settlement’s small print, Elizabeth maintained a vice-like grip on the Church of England and on the pace of change. Unlike her father during his anti-papal campaign, she demanded only outward conformity to the new settlement. As a former ‘Nicodemite’ herself, prying into the private beliefs of her subjects as long as they attended church regularly was not on her agenda. As Francis Bacon later said of her, it was not her custom to ‘make windows into men’s souls’, although he added the crucial rider, unless dissent ‘did overflow into overt and express acts and affirmations.’
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Unlike in Edward’s reign, when Cranmer, Cheke, Cecil, Northumberland and the young Josiah’s other ‘godly councillors’ debated preaching and the conversion of the nation, Elizabeth after 1559 excluded her privy councillors from almost every matter concerning the ‘further reformation’ of religion. Like her father, she interpreted the royal supremacy to mean sacral monarchy by another name. When Parker’s successor at Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, clashed with her in 1577 over his support for the puritan campaign of sermon-centred piety, she suspended him for daring to suggest that he owed allegiance to God before the queen.

Equally resoundingly, Elizabeth rejected a Calvinist extension of the argument first floated by Roger Ascham that she was an ‘exceptional’ woman whom God had destined for higher things.
In a clumsy attempt to justify and exalt her position as an unmarried female ruler, several former Marian exiles, among them John Aylmer, Jane Grey’s former schoolmaster, declared that the new queen had come to her position as a second ‘Deborah’.
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The most celebrated woman prophet in the Old Testament, Deborah, a judge and virtual king in Israel, had delivered the people from the ‘yoke’ and ‘idolatry’ of the Canaanites through her ‘extraordinary’ faith and courage.
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Elizabeth’s reaction is not recorded when she first discovered that ‘Deborah’ had been chosen as an icon of female rule by the City of London’s guildsmen in their pageants on the eve of her coronation. Since the costumes for these pageants had been lent by the queen’s Master of the Revels, it is often assumed that Elizabeth had personally overseen and approved the pageants or their scripts, but this is highly questionable. The Revels Office and royal Office of Works routinely cooperated with the city guilds over loan of costumes, interior decoration, carpentry and the construction of temporary edifices without reference to the monarch or lord chamberlain.
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In any case,
after
the coronation, Elizabeth repudiated the suggestion that she was a second ‘Deborah’. In April 1559, John Knox joined in the debate, claiming that Elizabeth’s female rule—like Deborah’s—was the result of a ‘miracle’ or an ‘extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy’.
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In taking this line, Knox sought to wriggle free of the consequences of his bad timing in publishing a book entitled
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
in the spring of 1558, where he had argued the opposite, saying that a woman ruler was a ‘monster in nature’ and unfit to rule. A diatribe against female rule in general,
The First Blast
had gone on specifically to attack Mary Tudor in England and the regent Marie de Guise, mother of Mary Queen of Scots, in Scotland,
openly inciting the subjects of both kingdoms to depose them for their ‘inordinate pride and tyranny’.
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In the spring of 1559, a red-faced Knox was corresponding with Cecil from Dieppe in the hope of making amends and so resuming the career in London he had begun under Edward. His solution was to reshape his arguments in line with Calvin’s opinion that female monarchy, in exceptional instances, was ordained by the ‘peculiar providence’ of God. Women’s rule, according to Calvin, deviated from the ‘proper order of nature’, but exceptionally there were special women—of course, he meant only Protestant women—who were ‘raised up by divine authority’ to rule in order to become the ‘nursing mothers’ of the Church.
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In his
First Blast
, Knox had already framed the case of Deborah as an ‘extraordinary’ exception to the general prohibition of female rule, an act of God’s ‘inscrutable wisdom’ that, at a key moment in biblical history, had allowed a ‘godly’ woman to be set to rule over men.
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Elizabeth, however, never accepted that her monarchy was the result of a ‘miracle’ or an ‘extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy’. She refused to allow a religious test, rather than hereditary right, to set the standard against which the legitimacy of her rule should be judged. Her reasons were not feminist, but dynastic. Her case was summarized in 1563 or 1566 by Thomas Norton, another of Cecil’s coterie. If her title were to be established ‘by God’s special and immediate ordinance’ without any regard to her hereditary right and title, she had insisted, it ‘setteth all her subjects at liberty, who acknowledge no such extraordinary calling.’ Indeed, ‘the pope and papists may as easily say that the queen ought not to be queen though she have right.’
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F
IGURE
17
View of Windsor Castle as it appeared in 1582. Substantially constructed mainly during the reigns of Henry III and Edward III, the royal apartments had been modernized by Edward IV, and Henry VII added a new tower and gallery. The castle was the most secure of all the Tudor royal palaces. Although not one of her favourite residences, Elizabeth would retreat to it whenever she felt herself to be in danger.

Confronted by an increasing challenge—not least from Cecil and his fellow privy councillors in and after 1563—that she should marry and settle the succession, Elizabeth found herself living out the very dilemma that her father had flagged up in the preface to
A Glasse of the Truthe
during his first divorce campaign in 1531. If a woman ‘shall chance to rule’, he had written, ‘she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm.’
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Unless from a Nordic or a North German state (and a Lutheran), a foreign prince whom Elizabeth might consider marrying would inevitably be a Catholic as well as a foreigner. She would never forget what had happened to her half-sister after she had married Philip—her Privy Council was divided, the realm scarred by revolt and xenophobia, then finally dragged into an unpopular war, culminating in the catastrophic loss of Calais. The prospect of an absentee husband, such as Philip had become, was a further complication.

Just as powerful an objection was that marriage with one of her subjects would transform a ruling queen’s relationship with her nobles, councillors and people. Elizabeth must have heard the disturbing reports of Jane Grey’s experience after she had been proclaimed queen. Her husband, Guildford Dudley, had demanded to be king. A furious row had erupted between the young couple at the Tower, shortly after Jane was handed the crown jewels. Married in haste to a man she barely knew, Jane spiritedly told Guildford he could only be a duke. His response was to refuse to sleep with her which, had the reign lasted longer and Guildford persisted in his attempt to extort the kingship, would have prevented her from having a child and settling the succession.
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A very similar demand for the kingship would throw Scotland into turmoil and revolt when Mary Queen of Scots married Lord Darnley in 1565, leading within two years to his brutal assassination, followed by her forced abdication and flight to exile in England.
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The one man with whom Elizabeth fell in love as queen and whom she would almost certainly have married if the circumstances had been right, Robert Dudley, may have come closest to the truth about her. In 1566, conversing with the nephew and secretary of the French ambassador, who had asked him whether he
thought she was more likely to marry abroad or at home, Dudley confided that his ‘true opinion was that she would never marry’.

Claiming that he knew Elizabeth ‘as well as or better than anyone else of her close acquaintance, for they had first become friends before she was eight years old’, Dudley added that ‘both then and later (when she was old enough to marry) she said she had never wished to do so.’

The difficulty is that Dudley was at pains to qualify his remarks by observing that, ‘if by chance she should change her mind … he was practically assured that she would choose no one else but him, as she had done him the honour of telling him so quite openly on more than one occasion’.
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Was this true, or were all his remarks part of a wider diplomatic smokescreen?