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CHAPTER I

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Table of Contents

The Elizabethan period and the change in society—the conscience of Henry VIII—birth of Elizabeth—her illegitimacy—her education under Roger Ascham and afterwards under Lord Seymour of Sudely—their relations—execution of Seymour and examination of Elizabeth—her retired life, till the accession of Mary—she joins Mary and enters London with her.

The life of Elizabeth represents, in English history, the longest and most spectacular period of a change in society. That change began before her, and was not concluded until long after her. It was the change from a society directed, at any rate in theory, by a metaphysical idea, to a society directed, both in theory and practice, by nothing but the continual pressure of events. It is a change completed in our own day; beyond our present political accommodation to events we cannot go. We are on the point of discovering whether that accommodation is sufficient, or whether we must return to a metaphysical idea—either that of the past or some other.

This change in society was unintended, through Europe at large as through England in particular. It took place because the results of all human action are always different from anything intended or expected. No ruler and no statesman of the Elizabethan period—except perhaps Maitland of Lethington—wished to abolish metaphysical ideas from their place in society. Elizabeth no more definitely desired it than did Philip of Spain. Both she and he proposed that all events in their dominions should be subordinated to themselves, and to the metaphysical schemes which they respectively held. The nature of Philip held very intensely to his metaphysical scheme; the nature of Elizabeth much more lightly to hers. She was vividly and personally aware of events; he, impersonally and abstractly. In the great medieval society of Europe which preceded them there had been many rulers who resembled one or the other; some had tended to beliefs, some to events, but their natures, in every case, had been modified by the nature of the whole society. Before the rise of Elizabeth and Philip that society had received two violent shocks, both of which compelled princes to take immediate cognizance of beliefs other than their own. A belief other than one’s own is not, to oneself, a belief; it is an event.

The metaphysics of medieval Europe consisted of two correlated parts. The first part included the nature of God and the soul; the second, the temporal nourishment and instruction of the soul. The first dealt, largely, with the person and life of our Saviour; the second with the visible Church, the nature of the Sacraments, and the ordering of morals. The first has throughout the history of Christendom remained practically untouched, except by a few scattered and suppressed teachers; it was the second part that received the shocks, first, of the Great Schism, and, second, of the Reformation.

The Great Schism of the West concerned the person—but not primarily the office—of the Pope. It began when, in 1378, during the pontificate of Urban VI, certain Cardinals, fleeing from Rome, elected one of their number to the Papacy under the name of Clement VII. In theory, the organization of the Church remained unaffected by this action; one of the two, and later three, claimants was the true Pope, and the true Pope was the true Pope, however many claimants there might be. In fact, however, that organization suffered throughout Europe all kinds of controversies and compromises. Not only were the religious nerves of Europe seriously shaken, but a considerable impetus was given to a movement already in progress—the Rise of the Nations. This rise, which had many causes, had many results, one of the most important of which was what may be called a deflection of mass. Medieval Europe had theoretically considered the mass of mankind as one, which was the Church, corresponding to the One Man which was Christ. There were heretics and infidels, but they were an outrage on the unity of mankind. Theoretically, mankind and Christendom were identical; anything else was disease. But however much the laws of belief still compelled attention to this supreme mass which was mankind, the laws of events during and after the Schism compelled a much more immediate attention to those smaller masses which were the nations. The shadowy headship of the Emperor, and the substantial headship of the Pope, lost something of their prestige. National, or at least dynastic, glory obtruded itself upon universal glory. The close of the Schism was followed by the continual rise of these secondary national glories, and by an accompanying weariness with metaphysics after the strain of the Schism, which in turn assisted, even in the case of the Popes themselves, the other glory of the Renascence.

This variation preceded the second metaphysical shock which Europe received; namely, the outbreak of the Reformation. This second shock, again, was not directed against the primal idea of Christianity—of redemption through the Double Nature and supernatural interposition of Christ. But it very seriously affected all ideas of the nature of the visible Church, of the Sacraments, and of the official direction of morals. The question of the Papacy itself was only one among a number of questions, and was not everywhere regarded as of the first importance. The Council of Trent had not yet met; nor had the Roman Church, as it now is, been adequately formulated. On that and other subjects, however, a new series of other people’s beliefs—that is, of events—came into violent existence. The sovereigns of Europe had to deal with these events, and had to deal with them not as sporadic but as continuous. Heresy (whatever, in a short time, that came to mean in each State) was no longer a person, a sect, or even an idea; it had become an unbroken and militant series of persons, sects, and ideas. It was a permanent hostility outside each State and a permanent threat of revolt within, a threat acutely felt by the developed sense of royal and national glory which pervaded the kingdoms.

In England the serious dispute began not with metaphysics but with morals. The King of England, Henry VIII, had indeed written a book against Luther, a champion of the new metaphysics, and had been saluted as Defender of the Faith by the Pope. His marriage had been arranged by a special action on the part of the Pope. He had married his brother Arthur’s widow, by dispensation from the Papal authority, representing a moral law which normally forbade men to marry their brothers’ widows. It was pontifically declared that Catherine of Aragon had not been Arthur’s wife, and that Henry might justly marry her. The King very greatly desired a male heir. Unfortunately, in the next sixteen years Catherine bore five children—four stillborn, another dying just after birth. She had one child who lived, the daughter Mary. Presently she was beyond childbearing. It was clear that God had refused an heir to Henry by Catherine. The state of Henry’s mind has received little sympathy, since nowadays few of us desire children, fewer marry their brothers’ widows, and still fewer believe that there is a moral law forbidding such marriages. To understand his decision it is necessary to understand his dilemma: was God displeased at his marriage? His emotions said yes; the old metaphysic said no. It was an age in which natural events were held to be supernaturally significant, and, had circumstances been reversed, it is certain that Henry’s five dead children would have been declared by the vocal champions of the Church to be very certain signs of God’s displeasure.

Another series of events intensified the King’s emotional crisis, and assisted its resolution: their name was Anne Boleyn. Henry fell violently in love with her; she demanded marriage. The King’s fear, the King’s hope, the King’s desire, combined to urge him to discover a solution of his problem other than that maintained—but only just maintained—at Rome. Negotiations broke down. There was, of course, never any divorce between him and Catherine, but a decree of nullity was issued by English ecclesiastical authority without Roman assent. The breach between two metaphysics concerning the nature of the visible Church was immediately present. It was followed by an immediate and official intensification of an attack on the wealth and power of the clergy in England which had been for some time officially in motion. The monasteries were dissolved.

The decree of nullity was pronounced by Cranmer in May 1533. The King had been privately married to Anne in December 1532. The Princess Elizabeth was born in the following September. Three months afterwards she was given her own royal household at Hatfield, and her elder sister, the Lady Mary, now publicly declared illegitimate, was commanded to form part of the Court that circled round the unconscious interloper. In another sense also Elizabeth was an interloper: the King had been hoping for a male heir. But he was gracious, and proceeded to take steps further to define the situation. In 1534 an Act and Oath of Succession was promulgated, by which the marriage with Catherine was declared “against the laws of God” and the marriage with Anne “perfect ever.” A mass of detail concerning marriage and prohibited degrees was included in the Act and therefore in the Oath, as also was a renunciation of any contrary oath “to any other within the realm, or foreign authority, prince, or potentate.” The Oath was almost universally received, by laity and clergy alike. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, refused; so, in spite of the earnest entreaty of the Abbot of Westminster, and others, did Sir Thomas More. It may be allowed that they kept their integrity, but it is impossible to believe that all the rest of the hierarchy and the priesthood deliberately and consciously abandoned their own. A much more severe Oath, expressly repudiating the jurisdiction of the Roman See “and its laws, decrees, and canons, if any of them should be found contrary to the law of God and Holy Scripture,” was addressed to all orders of friars and monks; it was refused only in three places. Meanwhile the fleet of the King of France hovered in the seas ready to assist against Catherine’s cousin, the Emperor, if he should desire to interfere. Convocation, north and south, with five dissentients, resolved that by Holy Scripture the Bishop of Rome had no greater jurisdiction in England than any other bishop; the Universities assented. In February 1535 all the bishops explicitly renounced the primacy of the See of Rome; a number of them wrote felicitating the King on his action. They provided for similar acts on the part of all their clergy. The same year saw the execution of More, Fisher, a small number of recalcitrant monks, and twice as many otherwise recalcitrant Anabaptists. Under such auspices the legitimacy of the child Elizabeth was declared and upheld; to this extent the events of the dead children and of Anne had shaken the pattern of metaphysical theory.

Nevertheless, in the very next year her legitimacy was, in a few days, utterly and royally denied. The life of the Courts of the Renascence was as bloody and spectacular as its plays; its palaces were full of a perilous domesticity, and what actual life could not attain common report provided. Fact, rumour, and imagination mingled their melodrama. The peculiarity of Henry was his passionate desire to be moral, and even legal, in his marriages and murders. In that certainly he was less than strong; his spirit demanded popular support, and he took steps to ensure it. The weakness exposed him to something like blackmail; the lands of the clergy formed an unspoken union between the Catholic lords and their Catholic sovereign. But that bargain was separate from, though politically related to, the theological controversy; the unhappy figure of Cranmer unites them. He was concerned for the truth of doctrine, and he was involved in the falsehood of politics. He is a shy literary figure among those crimson Renascence splendours and terrors, and singularly out of place.

In January 1536 Anne Boleyn gave birth to a prince; the child, as if celestial anger renewed itself against the Throne, was born dead. Again the superstition and the lust of the King grew together, but this time, Anne being his own subject, and he being more used to action, he struck more violently. On 2 May, accused of great and heinous crimes, Anne was sent to the Tower; on 17 May, in the vaults of Lambeth, the marriage was declared by Cranmer, on the evidence laid before him, to be nullum, invalidum, et inane. On 19 May the wretched woman was executed. In June the Parliament also declared the marriage void, and the Princess Elizabeth illegitimate. In the eyes of Rome and half Europe she was already so; she was now to be so to all England. It became treason for anyone to assert the legitimacy either of her or of her half-sister Mary, though, by a fantastic logic worthy of the theatre itself, the penalties against all those who had previously declared her illegitimate still remained in force. Meanwhile, Catherine and Anne both being dead, Henry achieved his first indubitably valid marriage—with Jane Seymour. Could events be certainly related to ideas, the result might be held to have justified all his doubts, all his denials, and all his destructions—a male heir was conceived, and born in July of 1537. So swift a celestial justification of his action must have hardened through his future life the King’s belief in his own interpretation of doctrine and morals. The Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth were brought, from that joint household to which now they were both reduced, Elizabeth as the junior member, to be present at their legitimate brother’s baptism. His mother, Jane, ensured the legal future of her son by dying soon after the ceremony.

The King had some virtue; he held no grudge against the children of his disasters. By 1544 he even established both his daughters in the right of succession to the Throne. They remained formally illegitimate, but the bar sinister was to be merely ignored; le Roi le veult. The small Elizabeth grew; she had difficulty with her teeth; they came slowly—“causeth me,” wrote her governess, Lady Bryan, “to suffer her Grace to have her will more than I would.” With her mental teeth she had no difficulty—“a toward child.” In the same year, 1544, when she was ten years old, she was translating French devotional poetry. Tutors were appointed—from the group of Cambridge humanists who represented more particularly the New Learning, and therefore the Reforming party. The intellectual influences brought to bear on her through the years of her education were those of “true religion” as distinguished from the “old Faith.” To scholarship she grew easily—Greek and Latin; and modern languages—French and Italian and Spanish. “Her mind,” wrote Ascham, “has no womanly weakness.” Elizabeth would not have thanked him for the adjective. Whatever she admired in her masculine Court of later years was not the mental capacity of its members; nor did she need.

In 1547 Henry died. Edward VI, at ten years old, began to reign, and his uncle, Edward Seymour, became Earl of Somerset and Protector of the Kingdom. The blackmail of the old reign ceased, and a simpler process of direct seizure was substituted. The Lady Elizabeth, then thirteen, was moved to the guardianship and house of Henry’s widow, the Queen Catherine Parr. She wrote letters, of dutiful affection and youthful piety, to her brother the King. The small King, also learned, also devotional, sent comfortable messages. Suddenly there fell upon her a personal crisis, and one in no sense theological.

It was two years since the King had died. He had been to the child a huge, terrifying, and thrilling wonder; all her life she recalled him, a fabulous and yet familiar splendour. He was her father, and he had put her mother to death; he had done so because, besides being her father, he was also the King, and her mother had sinned against the King in his kingdom. When she called herself “Harry’s daughter,” the very intimacy of the word increased the myth, and she made herself more ordinary and more extraordinary at once. The child’s imagination of him, being through his death undefeated by any natural conflict or scorn, matured, but it did not change its characteristics. She loved thrills, and this was the great thrill of her childhood. At sixteen she was provided with another. Catherine Parr married again, this time the brother of the Lord Protector, Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudely.

Lord Seymour was one of the less contented lords of the Council. He was irked by what seemed to him the unnecessary greatness of his brother, and he had at first proposed to himself to make an even more royal alliance than with his new wife; he thought of marrying Elizabeth herself. The Protector and the Council stopped him, and he fell back, at first secretly, on Catherine. In the triple household Elizabeth, maturing, sensuous, intellectual, found herself introduced to a new freedom, and to unprecedented freedoms. The Lord Seymour had a broad taste in jollity, and the Dowager Queen little inclination, at first, to discourage him. There were jests and romps. Elizabeth’s room was visited in the early morning; she was teased and tickled, mentally and corporally rolled and smacked. She was not alone in her experiences; the other young ladies of the household also enjoyed the Lord Seymour’s attentions. He rollicked through his domestic world, as he attempted to rollick through his political. The gardens of the house received the laughter of the three great personages. The Princess was held fast by the Dowager while Lord Seymour cut up her skirt. Her education took a broad scope, and presently, even in that world, caused some scandal. Elizabeth was observed to blush when the talk veered round to Seymour; it was suspected that she was beginning to be acutely and unduly aware of him. The Queen Dowager grew difficult and the household strained. Elizabeth eventually withdrew, in the spring of 1548, thus re-establishing friendship with Catherine. In the autumn the Dowager died. Elizabeth’s household were all for Seymour; Elizabeth had by no means forgotten him. Full life had awakened in her. He returned to his hope of marrying her; meanwhile he had made himself intimate with the young King. His head grew full of visions of himself as Protector of the King and husband of the Princess. He made vague general preparations for something, and talked more vaguely. He spoke of his brother as intending to “enslave England by mercenaries.” In January 1549 the Council took action. He was arrested. Immediately upon the news there arrived from the Government deputies to cross-examine the Princess. Members of her household found themselves under guard. Had there been a plot? What did she know of the plot? Had she been in the plot? Into the full stirring of amorous excitement, however watched and warned it had been by her wary intelligence, there drove this sudden close catechism of peril. Her servants confessed all they knew, and perhaps more than she knew. Breathless, obstinate, betrayed to suspicion, besieged by threats, persuasions, and slanders, she denied “any practice.” She wept in private and stormed in public. She was agitated over Seymour’s imprisonment, but she stood staunchly to herself. Her exhausted examiners said she needed two governesses rather than one: “she hath a very good wit.” Parry, her steward, testified that he had asked her if she would be willing to marry Seymour. She had answered, as anyone might, that “she could not tell her mind therein,” but in her it was prophetic of the long series of replies in her future. It is not conceivable that Seymour could have roused in her any devotion of pure and superfluous self-sacrifice. The whole episode terminated by accentuating the necessity of a perpetual guard on her emotions and intelligence. There may have been also something of an angry contempt. It was clear that he had meant to use her. She probably knew it before; now she felt it, and felt that others knew it.

They executed him. It was the second time the axe had swung near her life. Of her mother’s death she knew only by reading and report, and there the figure of her mighty and monstrous father came between. She was sixteen now, and was left to her studies in Hatfield, peculiarly alone. Her sister Mary had more continuous difficulties, but Mary had the privilege, the peril, and the protection of a Cause and of a party, and of the attention of half Europe. Nothing except inconvenience hovered round Elizabeth. She retired into herself and her mind.

The lords continued intrigues. There were rebellions. The mercenaries marched—Hungarians against the Scotch, Germans and Italians against the men of Norwich and the men of the West Country. Certain of the Roman Catholic Italians afterwards sought absolution for having fought the battles of the heretic Protector; the Lutheran Germans were less troubled in conscience. Somerset, having crushed the revolting peasants, tried to crush the rising power of the Dudleys, and failed. He was put to death. Dudley succeeded; the King died; Lady Jane Grey, married to Guildford Dudley, was proclaimed Queen. Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, already at odds with Cranmer over Church doctrine and Church land, tried to raise the banner of the Reformed religion, and failed. Elizabeth, from wilfulness or wisdom, from principle or prudence, threw in her lot with her house and her sister. She came up to London with a great following; on the last day of July 1553 she rode out to meet the triumphant Mary. She saluted and joined her. The daughter of events rode into London next after the daughter of metaphysic, two illegitimates. Into the city of the Reformation rode the crowned champion of the Counter-Reformation; after her short, thin figure, came the tall, handsome, and striking shape which was to be, in effect, both Counter-Reformation and Counter-Counter-Reformation. She was twenty, and she had learnt to keep her mouth shut on her heart.

Queen Elizabeth

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