Elizabeth I

Judith M. Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136588266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Elizabeth I was Queen of England for almost forty-five years. The daughter of Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, as an infant she was briefly accepted as her father's heir. After her mother was executed at her father's command she was declared illegitimate and led a sometimes scandalous existence until her accession to the throne at the age of twenty-five. Elizabeth oversaw a vibrant age of exploration and literature and established herself, the "Virgin Queen", a national icon that lives on in the popular imagination. But Elizabeth was England's second female monarch, and was greatly influenced by the experiences and mistakes of the reign of her half-sister, Mary I, before her. During her reign, Elizabeth had to perform a complicated balancing act in religious matters. As religious wars raged in Europe, Elizabeth herself a moderate Protestant, had to manage an inherited Catholic realm and the demands of zealous Protestants. The importance of such familiar features of Elizabeth's reign as the presence in England of Mary Queen of Scots and her enduring efforts to take the throne, the Spanish armada, and the origins of English colonial expansion beyond the British archipelago all receive fresh attention in this engaging book. This new biography sheds light on Elizabeth's early life, influences and on her personal religious beliefs as well as examining her reign, politics and reassesses Elizabeth's reluctance to marry, a matter for which she has been much praised, but which is here judged one of the second queen regnant's more problematic decisions. Judith M. Richards takes an objective and rounded view of Elizabeth's whole life and provides the perfect introduction for students and general readers alike.

1

Elizabeth, briefly Princess of
England

A divisive beginning

Elizabeth Tudor was born in the royal palace at Greenwich on 7 September 1533, the child of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The birth went well for mother and child, and the infant was healthy. Still, Elizabeth's arrival was something of a disappointment since both parents, encouraged in their hopes by royal doctors, midwives and, above all, astrologers, were confidently expecting a son. King Henry VIII already had a healthy daughter, Mary – her mother was his first wife, Katharine of Aragon – and an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. To secure the Tudor dynasty, of which he was only the second ruler, what the king most needed was a legitimate, healthy son. When he decided to end his first marriage, to Katharine of Aragon, her failure to provide a healthy male heir was one of Henry's proofs that his first marriage had been against God's law: her failure to produce a healthy male heir demonstrated God's displeasure that Henry had married his elder brother's widow.

Anne Boleyn, his second wife, had supported, cajoled and scolded her prospective husband for several years before he achieved the annulment of his first marriage. When success finally seemed near enough in late 1532, she had agreed to sleep with the king. She carried the resultant pregnancy safely through her marriage to Henry VIII in late January 1533 and her coronation in May. After both Katharine and the pope failed to fall in with Henry's wishes to end his first marriage, he had finally declared himself a sufficient authority, under God, to replace the papacy by himself as head of the Church in England and now subject only to God. Although that process was not completed until after Elizabeth's birth in May 1533 his new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was empowered to declare Katharine had never been rightfully wife to Henry. Under that dispensation, and bypassing papal sanction, Elizabeth was born the legitimate daughter, and Mary declared illegitimate.

The processes whereby the pope's authority had been superseded by that of the king had not been popular. That Queen Katharine's marriage was repudiated, and Queen Anne set in her place, divided court, clergy and the population at large; such divisions were based partly on religious grounds, but were also a consequence of the considerable popularity of Katharine and almost equal hostility to Anne, widely seen as responsible for the whole sequence of the king's religious and marital changes. The infant Elizabeth was from her birth a symbol of the political and religious divisions between traditional Catholics and adherents of the new and changing religious order, divisions that were to haunt the English realm throughout her reign. These divisive religious issues connected to Henry's marital adventures were to shape major aspects of the reigns of all three of his children, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Of the three, however, Elizabeth was the original and most obvious symbol of the profound and enduring divisions in church and state resulting from Henry's innovations. It may be helpful to explain what was involved in the king's first two marriages in more detail.

From Queen Katharine to Queen Anne

As previously indicated Elizabeth's first 25 years at least were shaped in many ways by the circumstances of her birth. When Henry VIII, then 17, came to the throne in 1509 one of his first acts was to marry Katharine of Aragon, the widowed wife of his elder brother Arthur. There was some unease at his decision because, if her first marriage had been consummated, then Henry's relationship to Katharine was within the forbidden degrees of affinity. Katharine always denied the consummation of that marriage, but as an additional precaution a papal dispensation for her second marriage had also been obtained.

Observers were generally agreed that the early years of her second marriage were successful in almost every way, except in the crucial matter of ensuring a (male) heir. After the brief – six week – life of their son, another Henry, in 1511 Katharine gave birth in 1516 to Mary Tudor, her only child to survive. By 1525, given Katharine's age (she was approaching 40), recent miscarriages and general health, Henry had little prospect of any more children with his wife. He was very fond of his daughter, who was treated as effectively Princess of Wales (male heirs to the throne were formally given the title of Prince of Wales). He was proud of her musical and other accomplishments and took pleasure in her company; but manifestly she was not a son – and no woman had ever reigned successfully in England.

Just when Henry first expressed his doubts about the legitimacy of his first marriage is not certain, but they were being widely discussed at court and beyond by 1527. His doubts about his marriage to Katharine were reinforced by his growing attraction to Anne Boleyn, at his court from 1522 as an attendant to Queen Katharine. The king had previously had several mistresses, of whom the historically more important were Elizabeth Blount, mother of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, and Anne Boleyn's married elder sister, Mary Carey, whose subsequent children by her husband were to provide Elizabeth's immediate family. But Mary Carey's younger sister had no intention of following her sister's more submissive path to the king's bed as his mistress.

Anne Boleyn's leading biographer, E.A. Ives, has argued that Henry's own intentions were also quite different on this occasion. At first, Ives wrote, both Anne and Henry anticipated a quick end of his marriage to Katharine, and that their marriage would swiftly follow. They had no reason to expect significant opposition from the Papacy, the only authority in Catholic Christendom with power to approve royal divorces, for popes had often obliged monarchs by annulling their marriages. So Henry turned his mind readily enough to having his first marriage annulled. (Annulment of his marriages, it might be noted, was always Henry's preferred language, since throughout his life, and despite six marriages, he disapproved of divorce.)

His decision that his first marriage to Katharine of Aragon, his wife since 1509, had never been legitimate was based on the text of Leviticus 20 v. 21, which forbade a man's marrying his brother's widow. Other scriptural texts, including Deuteronomy 25 v. 5, actually instructed a brother to marry the widow of his deceased childless brother, but Henry preferred the earlier text.¹ His argument that his first marriage was against God's law (and therefore could not be justified by papal sanction) seemed all the stronger when he considered the death within weeks of his only son, perhaps a divine punishment.

But Henry faced unexpected problems as he began to move for an annulment of his marriage with Katharine. He had always expected that the most serious opposition to Henry's divorce would come from the Hapsburg Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful ruler in Europe, and protective nephew of Katharine. Charles was always careful of his family's reputation. On the other hand, Henry may well have expected that, because the pope was closely allied with France and therefore opposed to Hapsburg interests, Pope Clement VII would be indifferent to Hapsburg hostility to his divorce. By May 1527, however, there was open warfare between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, leading to the Emperor Charles V capturing Rome and taking Clement VII prisoner.

Thereafter Clement was in no position to defy the Emperor, and Henry's anticipated annulment of his marriage became much more problematic. As Henry turned to seeking a ‘divorce’ despite papal reluctance, his subjects were forced to decide between their traditional obedience to the pope and the powerful ideology that taught that resistance to the monarch was treason and against God's law. Nevertheless, some leading women, including Henry's favourite sister Mary, Dowager Queen of France, now married to his good friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, found it hard to abandon Katharine, England's much-admired queen for more than 20 years. Some, but fewer, leading nobles had the same difficulty. Katharine also had considerable popular sympathy within England among the clergy and women. As it became ever more obvious that the king's future marriage plans were focused on Anne Boleyn, the protests widened within as well as beyond England. There were street riots in London, and at least once noble retinues brawled when their respective lords clashed in their support for the current or the prospective wife.

Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn in late January 1533 was so secret that not even Thomas Cranmer, an ally of the Boleyns since 1529, knew the precise date; the haste was necessary because by then the king knew that Anne was pregnant. The secrecy was essential because Henry's second marriage was being celebrated before his first marriage had been formally annulled. By mid-1533, however, Henry had undermined the power of papal dispensations so much that his new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, could feel free to confirm that Katharine's marriage to Henry had never been legitimate; a proclamation to that effect was issued on 5 July 1533.Katharine was henceforth to be known only as Princess Dowager, her status now redefined as that of Prince Arthur's widow. These moves did not put an end to public protests and intermittent public displays of support for the first queen, who was now moved away from the court to places ever more remote from London. To add to the complexities, the cause of the old queen was closely associated with the familiar papal religious authority, the cause of the new queen with the reformist agenda of men like Luther and, increasingly, those promoting even more advanced religious changes.

Contemporaries reported occasions in London when, after the clergy followed their new instructions to pray publicly for Queen Anne, congregations walked out of their churches. It was said that when Anne's coronation procession passed through the capital on 1 June 1533 there were very few cheers from the assembled onlookers. The printed account of that occasion – itself a significant innovation in the use of print to spread the carefully shaped ‘good news’ of the new queen widely across England – made many references to the sounds of musical instruments, none to the sounds of cheering, let alone any reference to the actual numbers assembled.

Despite the contradictory accounts of some observers, the message of the pamphlet, The most noble, triumphant Coronation of Queen Anne, wife unto the most noble king Henry VIII, was that all the ceremonies surrounding the coronation of Queen Anne had been most properly magnificent, and that the new queen had had shown ‘a joyful, thankful countenance’ throughout. The pamphlet also carried the promise that Anne would bring Henry the son he so desired. She was visibly pregnant at her procession through London. The messages adorning the pageants along her path through London streets praised her virtue and her chastity, promising Anne that ‘when thou shalt bear a new son of the King's blood; there shall be a golden world unto thy people.’²Another message set out the diplomatic implication of this marriage: that her marriage confirmed a French – and therefore anti-Hapsburg – alliance.

The next day was Anne's coronation day, celebrated with all the usual ceremony and the customary church rites. Enough of the elite of the land had dutifully gathered to support her coronation ceremony and to endorse their king's new queen at a great feast. Although it was always evident to Henry – and everyone else – that there was widespread unease at the king's break with traditional papal authority, members of the nobility always had to weigh up the dangers to their status, their possessions, their lives and their families if they openly resisted their God-ordained king. Lesser subjects also had to weigh up their public interests – and lives – against their private convictions.

Some observers speculated that hostility to Henry's second marriage – and the subsequent declaration that Princess Mary was illegitimate – was so widespread that if only Katharine had supported any proposed insurrection there would have been armed risings across the realm. Henry himself expressed some anxiety about that possibility. Katharine, however, insisted on her duty of obedience to the man she still regarded as her lawful husband. Nevertheless, Henry's repudiation of papal supremacy and of his first wife continued to take its toll; a number of traditional Catholics were to die as traitors to their king, including both Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, executed in mid-1535 for refusing the oath declaring the legitimacy of Henry's second daughter, Elizabeth. For both, the sticking point was less the legitimacy of Elizabeth, much more the oath's preamble rejecting all papal authority. The two issues, however, were always inextricably linked.

In the following years, less scholarly but more aristocratic conservative families such as the Courtenays and Poles, both with strong Plantagenet descent lines and therefore some possibility of claims to the throne, were brought almost to extinction by Henry's anxiety about their religious conservatism and possible support for his elder daughter. All in all, it is plain to see why the aftermath of the religious transformations which accompanied Henry's divorce from Katharine and marriage to Anne Boleyn had significant consequences for Elizabeth throughout her whole life, and why English religious divisions (and their foreign supporters) were to be always a problem for her.

The Princess Elizabeth and the Lady Mary

As already noted, when Queen Anne Boleyn gave birth, the child was not the son so widely prophesied. It was said some astrologers had fled for fear of the consequences of their error, but publicly at least Henry had accepted his new daughter serenely enough, in the expectation that sons would follow. One person, however, for whom the arrival of Queen Anne Boleyn's daughter did augur badly was Katharine's daughter, Mary. As long as the infant was expected to be a boy, it was unlikely to have much impact on Mary's status, since a male child would always take precedence over her, but another daughter gave rise to more nuanced issues, which helped set the pattern for the recurrent difficult relations between the two sisters as long as Mary lived.

At Elizabeth's first great royal occasion, her christening four days after her birth, there were several reminders of divided loyalty towards the first or second queen, and of the political imperative for critics of the new order to conceal their misgivings. The christening was a splendid occasion, quite as magnificent as the ceremony for Henry's first daughter had been, although neither occasion had been marked by such celebrations as the jousting which had marked the birth of Henry's brief-lived son in 1511. The new princess's godparents were the obliging Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, the duchess of Norfolk and the marchioness of Exeter. Significantly, both the suitably high-status godmothers were known supporters of Katharine and Mary, but neither could afford to offend the king by refusing to take part. The marchioness's equally conservative husband, the marquis, and John Lord Hussey, Mary's chamberlain, also played the parts allotted to them precisely to test their loyalty to the king's new domestic order.

After the main part of the ceremony, Elizabeth was proclaimed ‘the high and mighty princess of England’, explicitly displacing the 17-year-old Mary from that title. Perhaps at Anne Boleyn's instigation, but certainly with the king's active support, Mary was several times pressured to acknowledge the illegality of her mother's second marriage, her own illegitimacy and the precedence now due to her infant sister. She adamantly refused to accept any such propositions. When just two months old, Elizabeth was given her own household and established at Hatfield, sufficiently close to London to make parental visits easy. The journey there was the infant's first major public appearance, and she was escorted through London by two dukes and an impressive number of lords and gentlemen to emphasise the high status of the new princess. Chapuys, the Hapsburg ambassador, had no doubts that Henry had arranged a longer route for the whole retinue – through the more populous parts – in order to impress on as many bystanders as possible the royal status of this new daughter.

In the following days, the remnants of Mary's household were removed from her and she was moved into her sister's household, where the older daughter was surrounded by women whose interests lay entirely with the Boleyn ascendancy, and all were overseen by Anne Boleyn's aunt, Lady Sheldon. It is, of course, impossible to know how much Elizabeth ever saw or understood of the recurrent tension and/or hostility in her infant household between Mary and the supporters of her mother in those early years, but it was not a promising start for any hope of good relations between the king's two daughters.

Elizabeth's life as princess

Lady Margaret Bryan supervised the household of the new royal infant as she had previously headed the nursery of the infant Mary – and was to do again for Prince Edward; clearly Henry had great confidence in her. If the regulations Henry had set out in Mary's infancy were followed again, as they most likely were, Elizabeth's early life was shaped by strict etiquette: every man approaching the infant princess was required to doff his cap, every woman to curtsey to her. None but the greater nobility were permitted to approach so close they could kneel and kiss her hand. Only her social equals – effectively members of her most immediate family – were permitted to kiss her on the cheek. Her formal dress reflected the same highest social standing, and the need to set her apart. Even Elizabeth's caps distinguished her; they included two purple ones – purple always being the colour of royalty – of taffeta and satin, and each with a net of damask gold to catch her hair.

It is unlikely that Elizabeth knew much of her mother or father, since the infant was most frequently lodged in the country and only occasionally visited by her parents. But one glimpse of the king's ultimate control of the household is a note, dated 9 October 1535, recording that the king, acting on advice from Lady Bryan and other members of the household, had decided that Elizabeth, now two, should be weaned. Although the princess's main place of residence was the old palace at Hatfield, she also spent time in other houses, above all at Eltham and Greenwich, places where she was more likely to be with her parents. (Like any great household, Elizabeth's moved frequently, to allow for the thorough cleaning of the drains and accumulated refuse from whichever house had been occupied, a process referred to as ‘sweetening’ the house.)

Little reliable information survives about the earliest year of Elizabeth; she was, after all, princess for less than three years. She visited and was visited by her parents, separately or together at intervals. On occasion, she was visited by other members of Henry's court, who dutifully reported on her unusual promise, even from the age of six months – as politically wise subjects did for each royal child. The household was supplied with all the necessary furnishings to establish the standing of the royal princess for any visitor. When questions were asked about the increased expenses of the household, however, some of it was attributed to the extra requirements and demands which Mary made – in part because of her insistence on eating apart from the main household, precisely to avoid any need to enact her submission to her sister's precedence.

Care was always taken that the royal infant was shown in a sufficiently rich setting, with sumptuous hangings around the chamber. As relations with the Hapsburg emperor deteriorated further over the treatment of both his aunt Katharine and his cousin Mary, the French pursued the time-honoured practice of seeking a marriage alliance to confirm a political one. The first diplomatic overtures to that end had taken place in early April 1534; just some six months old, Elizabeth was displayed naked t...