Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 21

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At one moment, during the long discussions about Calais at the Peace Conference, the French had enquired to whom, in truth, did Calais belong? Not, surely, to Elizabeth, since not she, but Queen Mary of Scotland, the Dauphine, was Queen of England, since, they said, she was the legitimate granddaughter of King Henry the Eighth’s sister, the Queen of Scotland, whereas Elizabeth was Henry’s daughter by his second wife, married while his first Queen was yet alive, and was therefore illegitimate.

The English Commissioners, according to themselves, did not know how to answer this—which seems strange—and without showing any sign of indignation, wrote home for instructions.

The Queen, in a fury, asked how they had dared to discuss their sovereign’s right to the throne of her ancestors—how they could permit such a statement to be made in their presence, no matter by whom, whether by Frenchman or Spaniard—how they had dared to ask her pleasure in such a matter!

The grief of the Commissioners on receiving this letter was not to be borne. Sir John Mason assured the Council that rather than their sovereign mistress should have such an opinion of them, they would infinitely prefer to be out of this world. They implored him to assure her that it was all due to a misunderstanding—they had not expressed themselves properly, had, perhaps, not been precise enough. They were appalled by the letters from the Council, but that from Her Majesty had placed them beyond comfort. They were clean amazed. Indeed, two of them had been so stricken that they would carry the matter to their graves. Poor Doctor Wotton ‘had fallen half into an ague, marry, rather an ague of the mind than of the body, and was sore broken’. As for the Bishop of Ely, he had been rendered senseless. ‘For the love of God’, Sir John implored Cecil, ‘help to salve this sore and move the Queen to heal the wounds she hath given by some comfortable letter ... for the senses of her ministers are clean taken away by sorrow.’

Then it became known to Sir William Cecil that, under the influence of the King of France, his fifteen-year-old daughter-in-law, the Queen of Scotland, had assumed the royal arms of England. ‘On the 16th of January 1559’, he noted in his diary, ‘the Dauphin of France and the Queen of Scotland, his wife, did, by the style and title of King and Queen of England and Ireland grant the Lord Fleming certain things.’

A brief entry, but one that seemed like a long shadow—red as if the being that cast it had been too long in the light of the sun. (When Mary was a child, the Queen of France, watching her playing, asked Nostradamus, her astrologer: ‘Do you perceive any calamity threatening that fair head?’ ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I see blood.’)

It was now obvious to the Council that only one life lay between England and its annexation by France.^[1] The question of the Queen’s marriage and the birth of an heir eclipsed, therefore, all others in importance. So, on the 6th of February, the Privy Council, the Speaker, and thirty members of the House of Commons asked for an audience of the Queen, and, without naming either the man or his nationality, begged her, in the name of the nation, to take a husband.

On the morning of the 10th, they were summoned to the Palace to receive the Queen’s answer.

‘Concerning marriage, which ye so earnestly move me to,’ she said, ‘I have long been persuaded that I was sent into this world by God to think and do those things chiefly which may tend to His Glory. Hereupon have I chosen that kind of life which is most free from the troublesome cares of this world, that I might attend to the service of God alone. From which if either the tendered marriages of most potent Princes, or the danger of Death intended against me, could have removed me, I had long agone enjoyed the honour of an Husband.

YOUNG FRANCIS

‘And these things have I thought upon when I was a private person. But now that the public care of governing the Kingdom is laid upon me, to draw upon me also the cares of marriage, may seem a point of inconsiderate Folly. Yes, to satisfy you, I have already joined myself in Marriage to an Husband, namely, the Kingdom of England. And behold’, said she, ‘which I marvel you have forgotten, the pledge of this my Wedlock and Marriage with my Kingdom.’ And therewith she drew the ring from her finger and showed it, wherewith at the Coronation she had in a set form of words solemnly given herself in Marriage to her Kingdom. Here having made a pause, ‘And do not’, saith she, ‘upbraid me with miserable lack of Children: for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are Children and Kinsmen to me; of whom, if God deprive me not (which God forbid) I cannot without injury be accounted Barren. But I commend you that ye have not appointed me an Husband, for that were most unworthy the majesty of an absolute Princess, and unbecoming your wisdom, which are subjects born.

‘Nevertheless, if I enter into another course of life, I promise you I will do nothing which may be prejudicial to the Commonwealth, but will take such an Husband, as near as may be, as will have as great a care of the Commonwealth as myself. But if I continue in this kind of life I have begun, I doubt not that God will so direct mine own and your Counsels, that ye shall not need to doubt of a Successor which may be more beneficial to the Commonwealth than he which may be born of me, considering that the issue of the best Princes many times degenerateth. And to me it shall be a full satisfaction, both for the Memorial of my Name, and for my Glory also, if, when I shall let my last breath, it be engraven upon my Marble Tomb: Here lieth Elizabeth, which Reigned a Virgin, and died a Virgin.’

In spite of this statement, wooers and their ambassadors flocked to the Palace. Distant potentates offered themselves, their sons, their brothers. And the Queen’s subjects were among her suitors: nor did she seem by any means disinclined to consider them.

It seemed, indeed, likely at one moment that she might marry a subject, the Earl of Arundel—or else Sir William Pickering, once Queen Mary’s Ambassador in France.

The former, a widower aged forty-seven, was, at the time of her accession, head of the English delegation to the Peace Conference, but he returned to England immediately to offer himself as the Queen’s husband. Another passenger on the same ship was de Quadra, Bishop of Aquila, the Spanish Ambassador’s aide. The sea was extremely rough, and seemed determined that the ship should not reach England. The Bishop suffered greatly at sea, as the Ambassador told his King: ‘but I believe the tears of the Earl of Arundel floated them into port, for he (the Bishop) says the Earl cried like a child’.

A few days afterwards, however, the Ambassador was sorry to see Lord Arundel at the Palace, ‘very smart and clean; and they say he carries his thoughts very high’. And a fortnight after that, the Ambassador was obliged to tell his King ‘the Earl of Arundel has been going about in high glee for some time; and is very smart. He has given jewels worth 2000 pounds to the women who surround the Queen, and his son-in-law Lord Lumley has been very confidential with her. I was rather disturbed at this for a time, as an Italian merchant from whom he has borrowed large sums of money (lent, no doubt, on his expectations) told others that he was to marry the Queen; but I did not lose hope, as the Earl is a flighty man of small ability.’

The anxieties of King Philip rose. Was it possible that she could refuse so magnificent a marriage as that which he offered her? It was obviously impossible! But then again, might he not be obliged to withdraw the offer, if she persisted in her heresy? It was doubtful how much longer he would be able to induce the Pope to refrain from excommunicating her. But the Duke of Alva, on being consulted, reassured him. It was out of the question that the Queen should refuse him. And once he became King of England, he could impose his will on her and on the whole nation. They would be forced to obey him.

But the King, still anxious, impressed upon de Feria that he must warn Elizabeth of the dangers she was running. He must try to frighten her, once more, with the name of the Queen of Scots. He must even, if she persisted in her folly, threaten her with the danger of losing him!

When, after his voluminous correspondence with his King, the Ambassador at last informed the ‘young untried lass’ of the honour awaiting her, she seemed neither surprised nor overwhelmed. The Ambassador had kept the matter an absolute secret—confiding it only to the Queen’s ladies—and yet, he could almost have sworn that the proposal had been awaited. The Queen’s speech in answer to him might have been prepared beforehand: it showed no sign whatever of the astonishment, pride, and joy that he had expected.

She spoke of her profound respect for the King, both as man and monarch; but said that she must be given time to consider the matter, and to consult Parliament. She asked the Ambassador to assure the King (and such was her tone that he felt certain she would have liked to express herself even more warmly) that if she should marry, he would be preferred before all.

But as time went on, there occurred, in the Queen’s conversations with the Ambassador on this subject, phrases that awoke a strange echo in his mind. It was extraordinary! They might almost have been phrases taken verbatim from His Majesty’s own letters. She feared, she said, that the King would spend but little time with her. He would marry her but to leave her. He would come and he would go.

It was evident to the harassed Ambassador that ‘the devil had taken possession of her’. She would not listen to entreaties. Menaces could not frighten her. The Pope would not allow her to marry her brother-in-law, she said. (What of that long-past divorce between the King her father and Queen Catherine?) And as for the fear of France, ‘her realm was not too poor, nor her people too faint-hearted to defend their liberties at home and to protect their rights abroad. She would not marry, and she would agree to no peace without the return of Calais—that was her answer.’^[2]

On the 19th of March, after another confidential talk with Her Majesty, the Ambassador told his King, ‘After we had talked a short time, she said she could not have married Your Majesty because she was a heretic’. (Those letters again!) ‘I said I was astonished to hear her use such words. I asked her why her language was now so different from what it had been! But she would give me no explanation; the heretics, with their friend the devil, are working full speed; they must have told her that Your Majesty’s object in proposing for her was only to save religion.

‘She spoke carelessly, indifferently, altogether unlike herself, and she said positively she meant to do as her father had done.

‘I told her I could not believe she was a heretic—I could not think she would sanction the new laws—if she changed her religion, she would ruin herself. Your Majesty, I said, would not separate yourself from the Church for all the thrones in the world.

‘ “So much the less”, she replied, “should Your Majesty do it for a woman.”

‘I did not wish to be too harsh with her, so I said men sometimes did for a woman what they would do for nothing else.’

Then, just as Her Majesty had called the English Bishops ‘a set of lazy scamps’, in came ‘Knolles to tell her that supper was ready—a story made for the occasion, I fancy. They dislike nothing so much as her conversations with me. I took my leave for that time, saying merely that she was no longer the Queen Elizabeth whom I had known hitherto, that I was ill-satisfied with her words to me, and that if she went on thus she was a lost woman.’

In a later conversation, the Ambassador told her he knew what her resources were; ‘I knew also’, he wrote to his King, ‘what Your Majesty’s resources were, and what those of France were, and her only chance was to remain on good terms with Your Highness.

‘She said she did not mean to quarrel with France; she intended only to maintain herself in her own realm as her father had done.

‘I told her she could not do it. She talked of imitating her father; and yet she kept about her a parcel of Lutheran and Zwinglian rogues that King Henry would have sent to the stake. May God and Your Majesty provide a remedy for those misdoings.’

But the hour was late; and the King of Spain knew now that he must sacrifice himself elsewhere.

One of the conditions of peace proposed at the Conference in the previous autumn, was a marriage between Don Carlos and Elizabeth, daughter of the French King and Catherine de’ Medici. Now the King of Spain proposed that he, instead, should be her husband.

On the 2nd of April, the suggestion was put forward openly by Montmorency (who had been in correspondence with the Duke of Alva on the subject). It was accepted immediately, and the marriage was arranged so quickly that the treaty was completed and signed next day.

The Queen of England, when she was told the news of the marriage, ‘affected one or two little sighs, and then observed, with a smile, that her name was a fortunate one. I told her’, the Ambassador wrote, ‘I was very sorry but the fault was more with her than with Your Majesty; she knew how unwilling I had been to accept her refusal.

‘She admitted the truth of my words; but she said Your Majesty could not have been so very much in love with her, or you would have waited three or four months. She did not seem to like it, though two or three of the Council, she told me, were delighted.’

He added: ‘Both she and they are alarmed at your alliance with France, and fear that it bodes no good for them. That pestilential scoundrel Cecil tried to persuade me that they would have liked nothing better than to go on with the war. I bade them go say that to someone less well acquainted with the state of the country than I was.’

But ‘the country is lost to us now—body and soul’, for ‘it has fallen into the hands of a woman who is the daughter of the Devil’.

Or the granddaughter, perhaps. For had it not been said that Anne Boleyn was the daughter, not of Lord Wiltshire, but of the Prince of the Powers of the Air?