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‘I am already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England’ …

Stretching out her hand she showed them the ring.

Queen Elizabeth’s first speech before Parliament, 10 February 1559

THESE WERE DANGEROUS TIMES. The second quarter of the sixteenth century had made Elizabeth Tudor and her generation of coming men watchful, insecure, fearful for their lives. Nothing could be taken for granted. Health and happiness were fleeting, reversals of fortune came with devastating speed. This was the generation raised in the last days of King Henry and come of age in a time of religious and political flux. The religious radicalism of Edward VI’s reign had been quickly followed by reactionary extremism and bloodshed in Queen Mary’s. During the political tumult of these years there was no better time for ambitious men to seize position, wealth and honours. No longer was power the exclusive prerogative of old aristocratic blood. When a Thomas Wolsey, son of a butcher, or a Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, could rise in Henry’s reign to be the mightiest subject in the land, then what bar to ambition during the minority of Edward, the turmoil of Mary, and the unpromising advent of Elizabeth? But vaulting ambition and exorbitant rewards brought their own peril. The natural hierarchy of things mattered to the sixteenth-century mind. Men elevated beyond their due estate, women raised as rulers over men were unnatural events and boded ill. Those with the greatest aspirations could not expect to die peaceful in their beds.

God remained at the centre of this febrile and unpredictable world. His will was discerned in every random act. Death was everywhere. It came as sudden sweating sickness and struck down communities of healthy adults. It came as fire to purify heretic beliefs. It came through poison or the deadly thrust of steel to dispose of inconvenient obstacles in the machinery of power. The supernatural had a physical presence, and spirits and magic were natural companions to everyday life. They were part of the grand cosmic scheme which constituted God’s hierarchical universe. Analogy, interconnectedness, fixity were deeply impressive to the Elizabethan mind, mutability and disorder a sign of man out of harmony with God’s plan. Superstition and religion were ways to make sense of suffering, attempts at warding off the apparently random blows of fate. Yet the insecurity of life itself made the living intense, the wits sharper, the senses more acute. For sixteenth-century men and women there was a life after death, for the godly well-mapped and glorious, but life on earth was a precious and precarious thing to be seized and drained to the dregs.

At a time of augury and superstition, there was nothing to foretell the events of 1558: no sightings of whales in the Channel; no preternaturally high tide, nor monstrous births nor the mysterious, lingering trajectory of a comet across the northern sky. Even Nostradamus, whose prophecies were consulted by those in a fever of uncertainty, appeared unaware of its significance. The year opened without cosmic fanfare. Yet this was to become one of the momentous dates in every British schoolchild’s history rote. Along with the Battle of Hastings of 1066 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, 1558 was one of the markers of a seismic shift in English experience, to be chanted in schoolrooms through subsequent centuries. It was a year of grand transfers of power, as one reign came to an end and a new era began. It was a time of inexorable religious schism, when universal monopolistic Catholicism was permanently supplanted by the state religion, Protestantism.

Scotland’s most recent history had been less convulsive. By the beginning of 1558 it was balanced in a certain equilibrium. A significant number of lords had proceeded informally down the road of religious reformation and the opposing factions had forged an uneasy coexistence. Clan loyalties and rivalries would always be the defining identity which cut across ideology, matters of faith or political allegiance. Rather than a religious cause, any growing unrest and sense of danger came more from Scottish resentment against the increasing presence of the French, garrisoned in various towns and awarded lucrative offices over the heads of the native Scots. As a child ten years previously, Mary Queen of Scots had escaped the clutches of the English and sailed for France. Her French mother Mary of Guise was courageous and just as regent but inevitably favoured her own country with which Scotland was in alliance. This cosy relationship was about to be challenged when, in 1559, the Reformation turned militant and anti-French, and John Knox, the inspired Calvinist preacher, returned home after twelve years’ exile to become its hectoring mouthpiece.

At the beginning of 1558, however, both Elizabeth and Mary were poised on the margin between apprenticeship and their public lives as female monarchs. By the end of that year both had embraced their fate. The defining moment for Mary came with a kiss – in effect a marriage. For Elizabeth it came with a death – and an exclusive contract with her people.

It was apparent that a woman in possession of a throne must marry, and do so without delay. All biblical and classical texts, with which the educated sixteenth-century mind was imbued, stressed the natural order of the male’s dominion over the female. A female monarch was a rare and unnatural phenomenon which could only be regularized by speedy union with a prince who would rule over her in private and guide her in her public, God-given, role as queen. Only by restoring man’s necessary dominion could the proper balance of the world be maintained.

Although her cousin Elizabeth was revolutionary in her lifelong resistance to this obligation, Mary Stuart was more conformable and fulfilled this expectation of her status and sex – not once but three times. In early 1558 she was fifteen and had been a queen since she was six days old. She had never known any other state. First as a queen of Scotland, the land of her birth and a country she did not know: secondly as Queen of France, the country of her heart. Having lived from the age of five at the centre of the powerful French court, Mary had grown into a charming and accomplished French princess, destined to become the wife of the Dauphin of France. Her spectacular dynastic marriage, reinforcing the ‘auld alliance’ between Scotland and France, was set for the spring. Mary would marry her prince on 24 April 1558. François, the beloved companion of her childhood and King Henri II’s eldest son, was just fourteen years old.

In England, Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-four years old and living quietly in the country at Hatfield some thirty miles north of London. Expectant, and fearful of losing the one thing she desired, she was fearful too of its fulfilment. She had already been bastardized, disinherited, often in danger and always waiting, never certain of the prize. Elizabeth had seen her two siblings (and a cousin, fleetingly) succeed to the throne before her. If any had had children then her position on the sidelines of power would have become permanent. But Edward VI died in 1553, unmarried and childless, aged sixteen. He was followed not by either of his elder half-sisters but by their hapless teenage cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Sacrificed to further the ambitions of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, she was queen in name only and then barely for nine days. Immediately imprisoned she was executed seven months later. Now in 1558, Henry VIII’s eldest child, Mary I, herself appeared to be ailing.

Elizabeth had survived much danger. She knew well how closely scrutinized her actions were and how much she was the focus of others’ desire for power. The previous two decades had seen so many ambitions crumble to dust, so many noblemen and women imprisoned and beheaded, accused of heresy or treason, tortured, tried and burnt, or if a traitor, hung, drawn and quartered, in the terrific ways of judicial death.

At the beginning of 1558, Elizabeth and her supporters knew that some great change was in motion. But change brought disruption too and increased danger. Her half-sister Mary Tudor had been queen for nearly five years. Suspicious, suffering, devoutly Catholic and zealous to maintain the supremacy of the old faith, her reign had grown increasingly unhappy. Mary’s worst mistake had been her insistence on marrying Philip II of Spain, for the English hated foreigners meddling in their affairs, and they hated the Spanish most of all.

The fanatical purges of heresy by her decree, and the torture and burnings of hundreds of martyrs, would earn Mary the epithet ‘Bloody Mary’ from generations to come. The country grew ever more tired and repelled by the bloodshed. The dreadful spectacles had become counter-productive, alienating her subjects’ affections for their queen and strengthening the reformers’ support. In reaction to the mood of the country, the burnings in Smithfield were halted in June 1558. But nature seemed to be against Mary too, for the harvests also failed two years in succession. In 1556 people were scrabbling like pigs for acorns and dying of starvation. The following year they were ravaged by disease as various epidemics swept through the land. Famine and pestilence – people wondered, was this God’s retribution for the sins of Mary’s reign?

By the beginning of 1558, Mary was herself sick and in despair. Still longing for a child and heir, once more in desperation she had made herself believe she was pregnant again. But Philip had not bothered to hide his antipathy to his queen and anyway had been absent from her for too long. Her delusion and humiliation were evident even to her courtiers. Elizabeth, who had waited so long in an uneasy limbo, under constant suspicion, her sister refusing to name her as her heir, would have lost everything if this miraculous pregnancy turned out to bear fruit. No one could know, however, that the symptoms which Mary interpreted as the beginning of new life and hope were instead harbingers of death.

The queen’s spirit that cold January had already been broken over the loss of Calais. The last trophy left to the English from their ancient wars with France, this two-century-old possession had been lost in the very first days of the year. Since the previous June, Mary had supported her husband by embroiling her country in an expensive, unpopular and now ultimately humiliating war with France. The loss to their old enemy of Calais, remnant of Plantagenet prowess, was more a symbolic than strategic catastrophe, and it cut her to the heart.

This latest humiliation of English pride had been inflicted by François, Duc de Guise, nicknamed ‘le Balafré’, ‘scarface’, after a wound inflicted by the English at the siege of Boulogne fourteen years earlier. A lance had smashed through his face from cheek to cheek but he had overcome all odds and recovered his life, his sight, and even the desire to fight again. He was a brilliant soldier, and the eldest and most powerful of Mary Queen of Scots’ six overweening Guise uncles. The ambition of these brothers knew no bounds. They claimed direct descendency from Charlemagne. Catholic conviction and imperial ambitions commingled in their blood. Their brotherhood made them daunting: they thought and hunted as a pack, their watchwords being ‘one for all’ and ‘family before everything’.

Taking advantage of their monarch’s gratitude for the success of the Calais campaign and riding on a wave of popular euphoria, the Duc de Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine agitated for the marriage of their niece to the youthful heir to the French throne. The fortunes of the girl queen and the triumphant family of her mother, Mary of Guise, were fatally intertwined. At this time, the Guises seemed to be so much in the ascendant that many of their fellow nobles resented and envied their power, fearing that it was they who in effect ruled France.

Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots had always been aware of each other, of their kinship and relations to the English crown. As cousins, they were both descended from Henry VII, Elizabeth as his granddaughter, Mary as his great-granddaughter. European royalty was a small, elite and intermarried band. As the subject of the English succession loomed again, Elizabeth was acutely conscious of the strength of the Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne. Certainly she knew that if her sister Mary I’s repeal of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was allowed to stand then her own parents’ marriage would remain invalid and she could be marginalized and disinherited as a bastard. To most Catholics Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn had always been invalid and Mary Queen of Scots was legally and morally next in line to the English throne. If Mary united the thrones of Scotland, France and England then this would ensure that England remained a part of Catholic Christendom.

However, if the Acts of Mary Tudor’s reign should be reversed then Elizabeth’s legitimacy was confirmed and she, as Henry VIII’s legitimate daughter, had not only the natural but the more direct claim. She also had popular, emotional appeal. Her tall, regal figure and her reddish gold colouring reminded the people, grown nostalgic and selective in their memory of ‘Good King Harry’, of her father when young. Her surprisingly dark eyes, an inheritance of the best feature of her mother Anne Boleyn, were not enough to blur the bold impression that the best of her father lived on in her.

In fact, despite the stain on her mother’s name, it was to Elizabeth’s credit that she was not the daughter of a foreign princess, that unadulterated English blood ran in her veins and that she had been born in Greenwich Palace, at the centre of English royal power. In early peace negotiations with France, Elizabeth had Cecil point out she was ‘descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister was’. This meant she was ‘a free prince and owner of her crown and people’.¹ She was an English-woman, and she knew this counted for much in this island nation of hers. ‘Was I not born in the realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?’²

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a Venetian ambassador noted the insularity and self-satisfaction of the English even then:

the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’, and that ‘it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman’.³

In early 1558 this pride seemed rather misplaced. As the French celebrated their victory over the English at Calais, it was clear that the greater power was with them, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and soon to become Dauphine and eventually Queen of France, basked in this radiance. Meanwhile England was impoverished and demoralized by unpopular government and wasteful war, and the Lady Elizabeth, hopeful successor to the throne, remained sequestered in the country. Both she and the English people seemed overcast by a cloud of stasis and failure, fearful of the past and uncertain of the future. A historian and near contemporary expressed it thus:

For every man’s mind was then travailed with a strange confusion of conceits, all things being immoderately either dreaded or desired. Every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truths suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. Invasion of strangers, civil dissension, the doubtful disposition of the succeeding Prince, were cast in every man’s conceit as present perils.⁴

The triumphalism of France and the pre-eminence of the Guises were publicly enacted in the spectacular wedding celebrations of the youthful Mary Stuart and François de Valois. Both Catherine de Medici, the dauphin’s mother, and Diane de Poitiers, Henri II’s omnipotent mistress, argued that the marriage need not be hastened, that these children should be given more time. There may have been some concern at their youth and the dauphin’s sickliness, but both women were more exercised by the growing influence of the Guises whose power as a result of this union threatened to become insurmountable.

Objections were put aside, however, and the day was set for Sunday 24 April 1558. It had been two centuries since a dauphin had been married in Paris, and the streets around the cathedral of Notre Dame were thronged with an excited and expectant crowd. A large stage had been erected so that as many of the public would see the proceedings as possible. Blue silk embroidered with the arms of the Queen of Scotland and gold fleur-de-lis arched above the scaffolded platform to suggest a star-studded sky. The magnificent Gothic cathedral dwarfed the fluttering silk and national flags, its magisterial presence adding spiritual gravitas to the carnival spectacle. The people’s hero, the Duc de Guise, was master of ceremonies. He played to the crowds and waved the bejewelled noblemen aside so that the common people might better see. It was Guise policy always to court the Paris mob even at the expense of their popularity with their fellow noblemen.

And what the mob craned to see was the arrival of the wedding procession with Mary Stuart as its cynosure. Leading the assembly was the ubiquitous Duc de Guise closely followed by a band of Scottish musicians dressed in red and yellow, the colours of their queen. Then came a vast body of gentlemen of the household of the French king followed by the royal princes, the bishops, archbishops and cardinals, as brilliantly plumed as parrots. The sumptuous clothes and jewels were a spectacle in themselves. The diminutive figure of the dauphin then arrived, looking younger than his fourteen years, stunted in growth and with the frailty and pallor of a lifelong invalid.

Of greatest interest was his young bride, a queen in her own right. The French had taken her to their hearts ever since she had been sent as a child to their shores for safekeeping from the English. She arrived that Sunday morning escorted by the king himself and another of her uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine. Mary had grown up with an unwavering sense of destiny and a natural flair for the theatrical: she knew what was expected of her and to what she had been born. But she had not learnt from her uncle a respect for the power of the people. As a prospective queen of France, she did not need to. The French monarchy was so rich and self-confident that it sought to remove itself still further from its subjects and advertise to all, particularly its competitor monarchs abroad, the extent of unassailable wealth and the power of the crown.

Although only fifteen, the young Queen of Scots was already tall and graceful; she and her uncles towered over the young dauphin and were all taller and more impressive than even the king and queen themselves. Mary’s much vaunted beauty was not just a construct of the conventional hyperbole of court poets and commentators, but a beauty that had as much to do with her vitality and vivacity as the symmetry of her features. She had a fine complexion, chestnut brown hair and intelligent, lively eyes beneath prominent lids and fine arched brows. She had a strong active body and was good at sports, loving to ride hard and to hunt the wild animals with which the royal forests surrounding the châteaux of her youth were stocked.

Dressed in white for her wedding, Mary confounded the usual tradition of cloth of gold; white was more usually the colour of mourning. She trailed a pearl-encrusted cloak and a train of grey velvet. Neither did her jewels disappoint for on her head was a specially commissioned crown studded with gemstones (the canny Scots had refused to let their crown jewels leave Scotland) and round her throat was a grand diamond necklace. This diamond was most probably the ‘Great Harry’ which she had inherited from her grandmother, Margaret Tudor, to whom it had been given by her own father, Henry VII of England. The importance of her Tudor inheritance was embodied in this priceless jewel.

Magnificence was the order of the day. Sublimely present, but far removed, Mary made her marriage vows elevated in front of the crowds pressing towards the great doors of Notre Dame. As a symbol of imperial munificence, inviting too perhaps a reciprocal generosity from heaven, the heralds took handfuls of gold and silver coins and threw them amongst the people crying, ‘Largesse! … largesse!’ So desperate was the rush that many were trampled, some fainted and others scrabbled and fought savagely for a salvaged ducat or sou. Fearing a riot, the largesse was prematurely dammed and the heralds’ moneybags stowed away. The young Queen Mary of Scotland and her even younger husband, now known as the King of Scotland, were shown again to the surging crowd.

It was the first time Mary was to experience the hysteria of a crowd whose energies were focused wholly on herself. Although this time they were benign and wished her well, there was always something potentially terrifying in the sheer force and power of the mob, crying out, shoving each other, sweating, straining to touch her hand or grasp a passing fragment of her robe, to catch her eye and elicit some recognition or blessing.

But the grandeur of French ceremony was aimed at distancing royalty, projecting them to god-like proportions, not just to their subjects but to themselves. It was an inflation that could only make the young dauphin and dauphine think of themselves as close to divine. The populace was excluded from the archbishop’s palace where the extravagant wedding banquet was held. On a day fraught with symbolism, and exhausting in its demands, Mary’s fifteen-year-old head was beginning to ache under the weight of her crown and she was permitted to relinquish it to the king’s gentleman of the bedchamber. Then once the feast was cleared away the ball began, with the king leading out his new daughter-in-law, taller than he was, altogether more regal in her mien and a notably graceful dancer.

However, the highlight of the celebrations was yet to come with the removal of the wedding party and guests to the Palais de Justice for a series of fantastical pageants. Twenty-five wicker horses arrayed in cloth of gold, with the young Guise sons and Valois princes on their backs, entered pulling coaches filled with people dressed as pilgrims, singing in praise of God and the young bride and groom. A dozen bejewelled unicorns, the heraldic and mythical symbol of Scotland, more carriages filled with beautiful young women dressed as the Muses, and more celestial music all captured the imaginations of the glittering wedding guests.

The pièce de résistance was kept for last as six gauzy ships, their sails filling with an artificial breeze, appeared to float across a painted, billowing sea. In each was a prince, brilliantly attired in gold and wearing a mask, with an empty throne beside him. As the ingenious fleet approached the great marble table at which the wedding party sat each masked prince disembarked to choose his princess and place her on his throne, to the evident pleasure of both the participants and the spectators. The smallest of them all approached one of the tallest of the young women, as the Dauphin François claimed his young dauphine. He and the young Queen of Scots sailed away in a make-believe ship to a fantasy land.

These were purposefully extravagant fun and games, full of symbolism and self-indulgent conceit, and executed with peculiarly French stylishness and wit. The country had been brought close to bankruptcy by wars with England and Spain, and riven with religious and political factions. Such pomp was a necessary reassurance to themselves and assertion to their neighbours that the imperial greatness of France remained undimmed. But at heart it was a fairytale confection, an entertaining froth for the diversion of a complacent, self-regarding court. The focus of all this fuss was the fairytale princess herself, undeniably beautiful, intelligent and robust but disabled by the fantasy, and burdened with vain pride.

There were many epithalamia written in France and Scotland in praise of the marriage of Mary and François, of Scotland with France. The French, not surprisingly, stressed the supremacy of France in the union, some getting carried way with the vision of empire extending into Britain and throughout Europe. More modestly, Michel l’Hôpital, in his famous wedding poem of 1558, described proud Scotland as, ‘a kingly crown, a subject land./Light in its weight, in truth, with ours compared’.⁵ Another song, published by one of the Pléiade^* group of poets, Jean de Baïf, celebrated Mary’s legitimate claim on the English throne: ‘without murder and war, France and Scotland will with England be united’.⁶

Back in Scotland, the local poets saw the marriage as a union of equals. Sir Richard Maitland characterized the relationship as fraternal, ‘Scots and French now live in unity/As you were brothers born in one country … Defending other both by land and sea’.⁷ The celebrations too were inevitably a more muted and frugal affair. Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, regent since 1554, ordered the great cannon, nicknamed ‘Mons Meg’, to be fired from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. But then, with suitable economy, she dispatched a body of men to retrieve the monster shot so that it could be dusted down and used again. When France exacted a tax on the Scottish people to finance the nuptials of the queen who had left their shores as a small child, more than ten years before, there was some muttering. When France then came back for an even larger contribution, resentment became more entrenched. The independent-minded nobles and lairds had largely put up with the influx of French courtiers and advisers around Mary of Guise, particularly if a strong French presence threatened their old enemy England, but no true Scotsman could stomach any sense of their country being annexed in some unequal alliance.

Monarchies when women or children inherited were notoriously susceptible to powerful factions and self-seeking ambitions amongst their subjects, and Scotland had had more than its fair share of premature royal deaths and restive noblemen. During Mary Stuart’s minority and absence in France, the reformed religion had flourished with little real curb under the eleven-year governorship of the indecisive Earl of Arran, followed by that of her own mother. Although Mary of Guise was not a natural persecutor of heretics, her family was the pre-eminent force in France and hardline in its Catholicism and antipathy to dissent. The court became thick with Frenchmen, some of whom held lucrative posts, most of whom seemed to the more impoverished and frugal Scots to be arrogant in their manner and wantonly extravagant in their tastes. French interests were seen by the Scots to be increasingly paramount in their increasingly partisan government.

In France, the wedding celebrations lasted for days, in part aimed at bolstering the people’s support for their monarchy and in the process uniting some of the alarming and bitter rifts caused by the fiery advance of the reformed religion fuelled from Geneva. But the really important political union was transacted privately in the weeks before the public celebration. Nine Scottish commissioners braved the February storms to sail to France. They survived seasickness and shipwreck in order to be there in person to act on behalf of Scotland and her queen in the negotiations of the marriage treaty. Everything seemed to be generous and convivial enough. Scotland’s independence was assured; Francis would become King of Scotland alongside his queen; if they should have a son he would inherit both realms; if they only had a daughter she would inherit the crown of Scotland alone, being prohibited from claiming the French throne.

Henri II also apportioned money and land for Mary’s own use, and if she should be widowed then her rights to that property at least remained. If she and François did not produce an heir then the Scottish throne would revert to the ancient line of Scottish succession,^* not be absorbed into the French inheritance. The Scottish commissioners could find nothing objectionable in this.

However, in an act of gross duplicity by the king and his advisers, Mary was asked that same day, 4 April 1558, to sign further secret documents, without the knowledge of her commissioners, which so compromised Scotland politically and financially that in effect it would have made her country a satellite of France. One signature allowed that if Mary should have no heirs, then Scotland, and also her claim to the English throne, would be inherited by Henri II’s successors. Another document promised virtually a limitless mortgage on the Scottish treasury to repay France’s expenditure in the defence of Scotland against England, even the costs to the French royal house of the hospitality extended to Mary during the time she had lived with them at court. In a final act of perfidy, the French king had this young woman, to whom he had acted as guardian and father figure, sign a further document invalidating any subsequent attempt she might make to modify or nullify these larcenous orders.

On the face of it these secret documents, signed by Mary behind the backs of her own commissioners, constituted a betrayal of her country. It is hard to believe that she knew the full meaning of what she was signing. The plea that she was but a young woman of fifteen, keen to please and in awe of her powerful uncles and the fond King Henri, is just enough. Although it excuses her the worst motives, however, it does not do her much credit. Fifteen was not considered as youthful then as it is to modern minds. Fifteen-year-olds were leading men into battle, having children and dying for their beliefs. The Queen of Scots’ political naivety and lack of judgement, even if merely following the advice of these apparently trustworthy men, did not bode well for her political deftness in the future. Her lack of respect for the independence of her own ancient and sovereign kingdom was a failure of education and imagination. In fact the comparison with her cousin Elizabeth at the same age could not have been more marked.

When Elizabeth Tudor herself was merely fifteen, she was involved in early 1549 in a political crisis revolving around the ambitions of the Lord Admiral Seymour, the husband of her favourite stepmother, Catherine Parr. Elizabeth was cross-examined about the extent of his relationship with her when she had lived under their roof. As a possible successor to the crown, all Elizabeth’s relationships were considered political. It was dangerous to encourage any overtures not previously sanctioned by the monarch and his advisers.

At this time her young brother Edward was king and Seymour’s elder brother, the Duke of Somerset, was Lord Protector. The Seymour brothers were ambitious men. Scurrilous rumours were abroad that Elizabeth and Seymour had been secretly married, were at least sexually involved with each other, even that she was already pregnant. All this was dangerously discreditable to her and potentially fatal for him. Seymour was thrown into the Tower of London and her own closest servants taken into custody. Elizabeth was isolated and at real risk. Yet she conducted herself with remarkable intelligence and self-control and could not be wrong-footed by her experienced interrogator: ‘She hath a very good wit, and nothing is gotten of her but by great policy,’⁸ the exasperated man wrote to the Lord Protector. Elizabeth steadfastly maintained her innocence, prevaricated when things became difficult, and in the end prevailed.

Mary had been just as youthful at this test of her judgement but, at fifteen, she thought of herself as a French rather than a Scottish queen. Scotland and the interests of her people were a long way from where her heart lay. Although her wits were sharp enough, her ambitions dynastic and her will strong, her characteristic motivation was in action and desire. Decisions would spring always more readily from impetuous feeling. This was to make her attractive as a woman, compelling as a romantic heroine and impressive in command when things went her way. But it made her tragically fallible as a queen.

However, there were certain more sinister aspects of political life to disturb Mary’s apparent ingenuousness. News reached her of the tragic return journey of her Scottish commissioners that September. All were stricken with violent sickness and four of them died within hours of each other. Mary’s illegitimate half-brother Lord James Stewart was young enough and strong enough to survive but was left with a constitutional weakness for the rest of his life. Rumours abounded that they had been deliberately poisoned. Subsequent commentators thought the Guises quite capable of such an act if they had thought their private treaty with Mary and the betrayal of Scottish interests had been discovered. Certainly tradition had it that the French and Italians vied with each other for the reputation as Europe’s most artful poisoners. And even though, at the time, any case of sudden death was quickly supposed to be due to the poisoner’s art, for so many adult men to die in such quick succession appeared suspicious indeed. Surprisingly, nothing subsequently was seriously investigated, let alone proved, but back in Scotland it was used by Knox and others as powerful propaganda for anti-French feeling.

Mary seemed to be little moved by the tragedy but was generally uneasy. Her husband was away from her in Picardy, with his own father the king, at a camp where sickness was rife: everyone was ready for peace with Spain and England, yet progress seemed to be slow. She expressed her disquiet in a letter to her mother in Scotland. Fearing the factions in the court at that time she was resigned, ‘unless God provides otherwise … because we have so few people of good faith it is no wonder if we have trouble’.⁹

So 1558 was significant for Mary as the year she married the person she was to love most in her life, albeit with a sister’s affection rather than a sexual love. With that marriage she had fulfilled the ambitions of her mother, her mother’s family and the King of France himself. Her previous ten years in France had prepared her solely for this, to be a princess and eventually queen consort of France. To her family in France, Scotland was of little value or interest except as England’s Achilles’ heel, the gateway for a future French invasion. As she married the heir to the French throne it was clear to her that her greatest duty was to promote the Valois dynasty and to produce the male heir that would continue their dominance of royal power begun in 1328.

The lessons of her past were with Elizabeth always. Born an heir to the throne she nevertheless had endured disinheritance, reinstatement, exclusion, humiliation, imprisonment and real fear for her life. ‘Taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters)’¹⁰ was how William Camden,^* Elizabeth’s first chronicler, characterized her cast of mind at this time. She had been alone and without powerful protectors and had learnt patience, circumspection, discipline and the absolute necessity of command. She had also discovered the extent of her own courage and the coolness of her intellect under fire. This gave her a special confidence, proof against any challenge to come. The whole purpose of her life was to inherit what was rightfully hers; the daughter most like her father who most deserved his crown. And she meant to rule like a king. Everything else was secondary to that desire. Yet the question of her own legitimacy, denied by the Catholic powers, upheld by her own people, was an ever-present liability.

Although ambitious men would seek her all her life for dynastic alliances, Elizabeth, from a very young age, had rejected the orthodoxy that a woman must marry, that a princess, particularly, had a duty to marry. Given all the human and political circumstances of tradition, expectation, security, and dynastic and familial duty which pressed in upon her, Elizabeth’s insistence that she would not marry was a remarkable instance of revolutionary action and independence of mind. In May 1558, she reminded Sir Thomas Pope that even when Edward VI was king she had asked permission ‘to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best lyked me or pleased me … I am even at this present of the same mind … I so well like this estate, as I perswade myselfe ther is not anie kynde of liffe comparable unto it … no, though I were offered the greatest Prince in all Europe.’¹¹ To remain unwed was also a masterly diplomatic ploy for the unfulfilled prospect of her marriage to various foreign princes kept the equilibrium between the great European powers in constant suspension.

Part of this determination had to be as a result of experience and contemplation. She was twenty-five and had been through a rigorous training for something much greater than submission to a husband in marriage and sharing her monarchic power with a prince. She had her sister Mary’s sad example in near memory; her father’s ruinous effect on the women he married as a more distant example. Yet to remain unmarried flew in the face of the pleas of her increasingly desperate councillors. Almost every parliament included a petition that she should marry. For a monarch so insistent on her primary concern for her people it seemed perverse to persist in celibacy and risk at her death the eclipse of the Tudors and the possibility of civil war.

But to remain unmarried also flouted the hierarchical order of life which kept the nation safe, the universe in harmony. If Elizabeth continued to ignore the immutable laws of interconnectedness and the due place of everything, including herself and her rights and responsibilities as a monarch, then she risked the catastrophe of chaos. In the first years of her reign, her bishops of Canterbury, London and Ely expressed a similar fear ‘that this continued sterility in your Highness’ person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’.¹² In this decision Elizabeth confounded every shade of opinion. She stood alone and unsupported. How could she not sometimes have faltered?

As the year drew to its wintry close, the opportunity Elizabeth had barely hoped for all her life was hers at last. By the beginning of November it became clear that her sister Mary was mortally ill. The swelling in her belly which she had prayed so desperately was a growing child was most probably ovarian or uterine cancer. As Mary slipped in and out of consciousness the courtiers who had danced attendance at her door melted away. They joined the hasty ride from London towards Hatfield, ready to ally themselves to the new source of power and patronage. All her life Elizabeth was to remember her unease at this precipitate turning from the dying monarch to court the coming one.

And she was the coming queen. She was Henry’s legal heir, after the deaths of Edward and Mary, as declared by the succession statute of 1544. There was, however, the small matter of an earlier statute when her father had declared her and Mary ‘preclosed, excluded, and barred to the claim’.¹³ This remained unrepealed, although Mary had taken steps to legitimize herself. Elizabeth chose to rely on the 1544 statute for her legitimacy, but the insecurity she felt when faced with the claim of her cousin Mary Stuart remained. She was however the popular choice, the only choice as far as the people were concerned. The dying Mary had even given her blessing, urged on by Philip of Spain, who feared Protestantism less than the imperial ambitions of France. She had sent two members of her council to Elizabeth to let her know ‘it was her intention to bequeath to her the royal crown, together with all the dignity that she was then in possession of by right of inheritance’. Elizabeth’s reply illustrated partly why the long-suffering Mary found her younger sister so exasperating to deal with: ‘I am very sorry to hear of the Queen’s illness; but there is no reason why I should thank her for her intention to give me the crown of this kingdom. For she has neither the power of bestowing it upon me, nor can I lawfully be deprived of it, since it is my peculiar and hereditary right.’¹⁴

So it was that on the 17 November 1558, a Thursday, Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. She sank to her knees, apparently momentarily overcome, breathing deeply with emotion. But with the breadth of her learning and her cool self-possession she was not long lost for words: ‘A domino factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis meis!’ was her first utterance as queen. Quoting part of Psalm 118 she had declared, ‘This is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in my eyes.’¹⁵

Fortuitously Parliament happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured tones ‘with joint consent of the whole assembly’ they declared ‘the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be proclaimed Queen’.¹⁶ This was broadcast by the herald-at-arms at the front door of the Palace of Westminster, at the cross in Cheapside and at other prominent places in the city. Weary of bloodshed, fearful of foreign wars, weakened by bad harvests and disease, the people welcomed the new queen. But there was foreboding too as to what the future would bring. Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment, seemed to be too risky when England was in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospect of marriage for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign power. It was not surprising there were mixed emotions beyond the general feeling of relief. Sir John Hayward,^* an early historian, wrote: ‘Generally, the rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful, the discontented and the desperate, and all such whose desires were both immoderate and evil, joyful, as wishing trouble, the gate of spoil.’¹⁷

And trouble was what everyone expected. The transition from old monarch to new was inherently uncertain. Diplomatically too, it upset the status quo between nations. The death of a stalwart Catholic during a period of fomenting religious debate changed the tensions between the ancient neighbours and rivals, France, Spain, Scotland and England.

The fiery Scottish Protestant John Knox was also to remember 1558 as a year of particular significance. His tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published, with unfortunate timing, just as Elizabeth came to the throne. By monstrous regiment he meant unnatural government and his blast was directed against the women rulers in Europe at the time of his writing whom he saw as implacable enemies of the reformed religion: Mary I of England and the Scottish regent Mary of Guise.^* Unfortunately, the new Queen of England who could have been his most powerful ally was instead greatly offended. She did not find it amusing to be hectored in his main argument: ‘to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good Order, of all equity and justice’.¹⁸

An intemperate and gifted preacher, Knox was barred from returning from Geneva to England to resume his preaching career. He wrote to Elizabeth trying to ingratiate himself into her favour but even that letter turned into a rant on this most sensitive of subjects, and he never recanted his anti-woman stand, accepting the consequences of his inflexible principles: ‘My First Blast has blown from me all my friends in England.’¹⁹ Instead he returned to Scotland in 1559, the most powerful and vociferous opponent of Catholic and French influence, and the mouthpiece of Scottish Calvinist conscience. He remains to this day a brooding, implacable and self-righteous symbol of the Scottish Reformation.

Knox’s view of the natural and divine order of things, with woman subservient to man, was a commonly accepted one. His stance was uncompromising and his language colourful, but he was not saying anything new. The lower orders knew of woman’s inferiority through the traditions of their lives and the discrepancy between the sexes in simple brute force. The educated aristocracy was imbued with the necessity for this human hierarchy from their readings of classical authors, like Plato and Aristotle, and the thundering metaphors of the Bible. Did not God say to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’?²⁰ In fact the mortality rate of women in childbirth made it clear that they were the more expendable half of the species, that God and nature put a lower value on womankind.

The male was the norm and the female a deviation, the mysterious, less adequate ‘other’. For Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart these were accepted philosophical, theological, legal and medical truths that permeated the way the world was interpreted and relationships between people understood. Everything these young women read and were taught informed them of their intellectual and moral limitations and the narrowness of their vision. Classical and biblical texts were ever-present in the Renaissance mind; the myths a ready source of reference. The scientific humanism of Aristotle was highly influential. He had no doubt of the right order of things: ‘Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine.’ Not only endowed with more of the best qualities, man was also closer to God.

In classical Greece, women were seen as perpetual minors: worse off even than the disregarded Victorian child, they were exhorted to be neither seen nor heard. A woman’s name was not given in public unless she was dead or of ill repute. In Pericles’s famous funeral speech, Thucydides set out the aspirations of womankind: ‘Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be less talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.’²¹ Silence best became her.

This was the philosophical inheritance that informed both Elizabeth and Mary’s view of what it was to be a sixteenth-century woman. Mary’s often quoted saying was, ‘The best woman was only the best of women.’ Elizabeth, while cleverly using her perceived incapacity as a woman to dramatic effect in grand speeches and diplomatic letters, nevertheless in her irony reflected a profound and universally held truth when she spoke in these terms to her Commons: ‘The weight and greatness of this matter [their request that she should marry] might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex.’²² These were the prejudices they had to overcome.

In the most commonly held myth of the birth of Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom springs from the head of her father, Zeus, fully formed, without any contribution from her mother. In this way, the necessarily male source of all that is active and intellectually pre-eminent is not diluted by the female. By stressing all her life her relation to her father, Elizabeth claimed not only some of the lustre of this Tudor Zeus but perhaps also tried to distance herself from the perceived weaknesses of her mother’s (and all women’s) femininity: duplicity, moral deficiency and treachery.

Both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots were of course regnant queens, monarchs in their own right, ordained by God. A female monarch was in a different relationship with the world: she had a public, political and spiritual contract as ruler of her people, while her personal and private relationship as a woman made her naturally dependent on the male. Elizabeth at least was able to counteract the perceived weaknesses of her sex with the certainty that as a queen she was divinely chosen above all men, ‘by His permission a body politic, to govern’.²³ This confidence and certainty she could bolster with the knowledge that she had more intellectual and executive competence than almost anyone of her acquaintance.

Mary’s sense of herself as queen had been with her from the dawning of her consciousness. It was never disputed or tested, as was Elizabeth’s. This awareness of her pre-eminence was her companion through life, something taken for granted, the responsibilities to which she did not apply much profound thought nor, in the end, much value. However, philosophers as various as Knox and Aristotle considered even the God-ordained female ruler to be an aberration of the natural order, a phenomenon that could only bring inevitable disorder and strife to the realm. It was a measure perhaps of Elizabeth’s sensitivity to this pervasive point of view that made her react so uncompromisingly against the author of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

But she was assailed too by a potentially more serious discredit than merely being the wrong sex. Just as the death of her sister Mary I transformed Elizabeth’s destiny, so too it altered the course of the life and aspirations of the youthful Queen of Scots. Catholic Europe could not accept Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and considered his only legal wife to have been Catherine of Aragon. Given this fundamentalist approach, Elizabeth was undoubtedly a bastard born to a royal mistress not to a wife. Consequently much of Europe considered the more direct legitimate heir to be Mary Queen of Scotland and Dauphine of France.

This fact caused excitement and consternation abroad. Philip II of Spain, acting from pragmatic and political, rather than religious, principles feared his loss of influence in England especially since France seemed to be establishing an increasing presence in Scotland. Even before the death of his wife he had manoeuvred himself into position as a possible husband for her sister. While Mary I had lived, Spain had been an influential ally, but Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of continuing this relationship by accepting him as a husband for herself.

However, within the triangular tension that maintained a certain balance between England, Spain and France, an outright rejection of Philip would be impolitic. By evading his offer for as long as possible, therefore, Elizabeth could ingeniously sidestep an unequivocal rejection. Then she invoked precedence and the law by pointing out that for her to marry her widowed brother-in-law was no different in fundamentals from the marriage her father had made with his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. As had been so crucially argued at the time as the basis of her father’s split with Rome, this was a relationship contrary to biblical law. To accept Philip would in effect be to deny her own legitimacy.

But it was in the French court, within the grandiose schemes of King Henri II and the Guise family, that the death of the Queen of England raised the greatest ambitions. With Mary as their tool, her uncles and Henri decided to claim the title Queen of England and Ireland for the house of Valois, and quarter Mary’s arms with those of France, Scotland and England. At this time France was seen as distinctly the more powerful country, England as the weakened neighbour under threat. This was particularly marked with the recent loss of Calais and the accession of another woman to a throne already undermined by disastrous female rule. This act of acquisitiveness was not initiated by Mary, but her acceptance and over-riding pursuit of it altered her destiny for ever. It gave her a compelling idea of herself as rightful heir to the English crown, an aspiration she maintained throughout her life. In the end it was a presumption which cost her that life, and this aggressive early claim on Elizabeth’s throne flung down the gauntlet.

Traditionally English monarchs claimed nominal dominion over France. Mary, however, as Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, both England’s old enemies, was in dangerous territory. To claim England and Ireland as her realms too was considered an insult to Elizabeth, not least because it publicly rehearsed all the hurtful insecurities of her cousin’s anxious youth. All those whispered calumnies she had endured during the wilderness years were given a kind of legitimacy of their own. Mary’s claim implied that Elizabeth’s mother was a whore not a wife; that Elizabeth herself was a bastard child and not the legitimate daughter of the King of England; that she had no claim on a divine right to rule but instead had usurped another’s.

Little over a year later, in the proclamation of her peace treaty with France and Scotland, Elizabeth diplomatically accepted, ‘that the title to this kingdom injuriously pretended in so many ways by the Queen of Scotland has not proceeded otherwise than from the ambitious desire of the principal members of the House of Guise’. And she went on to patronize Mary and her husband François for their youthful folly: ‘the King, who by reason of his youth … the Queen of Scots, who is likewise very young … have [not] of themselves imagined and deliberated an enterprise so unjust, unreasonable and perilous’.²⁴ But these judicious, diplomatic words masked a more troubling recognition that the tacit had been made explicit; the challenge once made could not now be undone.

The earliest authoritative history, written by Camden, recognized the train of events set off by such over-reaching ambition: ‘in very deed from this Title and Arms, which, through the perswasion of the Guises, Henry King of France had imposed upon the Queen of Scots being now in her tender age, flowed as from a Fountain all the Calamities wherein she was afterwards wrapped’. The protagonists were henceforth acutely aware of each other. There were such networks of vested interests surrounding both queens that gossip and intrigue and misrepresentation found their way into every discussion where direct dealing would have been less divisive: ‘For hereupon Queen Elizabeth bare both Enmity to the Guises, and secret Grudge against [Mary]; where the subtile Malice of men on both sides cherished …’²⁵

The crowning of the new Queen of England needed to be quickly done, but at an auspicious time too. The country was impoverished by injudicious wars, humiliated by the loss of Calais, vulnerable on the Scottish border and confused and suspicious after the reversals of religious dogma during the previous two reigns. Elizabeth’s potential as a queen was unknown but her popularity among her people was certainly growing. Since her accession she had been the centre of intense activity at Hatfield with the selection of advisers and discussions of policy, but within the week, she began her progress to London. People travelled many miles out of the city to greet her. Her reign began as it so distinctively would continue, with a lively interest in and concern for her people exhibited in an exceptional common touch:

All her faculties were in motion, and every motion seemed a well guided action; her eye was set upon one, her ear listened to another, her judgement ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech; her spirit seemed to be everywhere, and yet so entire in herself, as it seemed to be nowhere else. Some she pitied, some she commended, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittily jested, condemning no person, neglecting no office; and distributing her smiles, looks, and graces so [artfully], that thereupon the people again redoubled the testimonies of their joys.²⁶

A few days later, on 28 November, Elizabeth took possession of the city in style. Alone in her carriage, surrounded by horsemen and the trappings of monarchy, she entered through Cripplegate, to be greeted by fluttering banners of the guilds and excited Londoners hanging from the windows and pushing through the narrow lanes. At the gate to the city she mounted her own horse, on this occasion a striking grey. Elizabeth, dressed in purple velvet, was skilled as a horsewoman and graceful in the saddle. This majestic spectacle of their new queen on horseback was glamorized further by the first sight of her Master of the Queen’s Horse, riding just behind her on a magnificent black charger.

An excellent judge of horseflesh, Lord Robert Dudley always made sure he had a mount that equalled his own physical splendour. Elizabeth’s friend from her youth, and a lifetime favourite, was a tall, powerful, handsome man, probably the best horseman in England and one of the most ambitious of an ambitious line. Elizabeth’s first biographer pointed out that her ‘rare and Royal Clemency’ meant she had ‘heaped Honours upon him, saving his life, whose Father would have Her destroyed’.²⁷ In fact the consummate ability and ambition of the Dudleys was akin to that of the Guises but, unlike the French, the English peers were strong enough to chop them down. And when the hated Lord Robert was too well loved by the queen for them to harm him, Elizabeth was clever enough to keep him ultimately in check herself.

To all who hailed her from the crowd, Elizabeth exhibited the authority and gift of attention that had so distinguished her in her dealings with her subjects so far. A salty humour and an air of God-given majesty seemed to her eager people to be united in Elizabeth Tudor in irresistible combination. She indulged in the kind of direct dialogue and repartee which the French court never encouraged in their monarchs. The Tower was her final destination and as she entered the dark stone portal, she recalled the memories of the last time she had been there as a prisoner, frightened for her life. With genuine emotion and a natural appreciation for dramatic peripeteia she addressed the people around her: ‘Some have fallen from being Princes of this land, to be prisoners in this place; I am raised from being prisoner in this place, to be Prince of this land’, and she thanked God for her elevation.²⁸

Even a devout Catholic observer, like the Italian Schifanoya,^* with a natural bias against her, was in no doubt about Elizabeth’s appeal: ‘… the Queen, by frequently showing herself in public, giving audience to all who would wish for it, and using every mark of great graciousness towards every one, daily gains favour and affection from all her people’.²⁹ Her ability to unite magisterial grandeur with informality was at the heart of her unique attraction to even her humblest subjects. It also discomfited her enemies. The Spanish ambassador related with disapproval how, on her return from the Tower, Elizabeth caught sight of Catherine Parr’s brother, the Marquis of Northampton, watching from a window. He was suffering from one of the periodic malarial fevers which afflicted most of the populace then. The queen pulled her horse out of the procession and rode up to his window and spent a good time commiserating with him about his health, ‘in the most cordial way in the world’.³⁰

But there was still a general uneasiness as to what sort of monarch she would make. When she succeeded to the throne no one was certain even quite what form her religious policy would take. There was a national longing for a strong wholly English king. Despite her many good personal qualities and the great swell of popular support with which she began her rule, Mary I’s reign had been disastrous. Now people wondered if Knox and Calvin, the Classical philosophers and the Bible were all correct in deploring a woman raised beyond her natural estate to be a ruler over men. What if Elizabeth, with all her well-known virtues, was to fail as calamitously as her sister? There was a natural optimism at the prospect of this new reign after the miseries of the last, but everyone from her greatest ministers of state to her lowliest subjects agreed Queen Elizabeth had to marry, and marry quickly. A king was desperately needed, first as her consort, the steadying hand on the tiller of this vast ship of state, and then as the progenitor of a male heir to secure the succession.

Whom she would marry was one of the major topics of gossip and at times it seemed that any man of noble enough birth was mooted as the chosen one. Apart from Philip II of Spain and Crown Prince Eric of Sweden, there was the Earl of Arundel, although court chatter suggested also younger, more romantic possibilities: ‘a very handsome youth, 18 or 20 years of age^* … because at dances and other public places she prefers him more than any one else’.³¹ But then, it was said, there was also that fine looking young nobleman, Sir William Pickering, still in exile in France because of his religion: the general speculation and excitement was palpable. No one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s own often expressed contentment with the spinster state. In fact, in her first speech before Parliament she could not have made it plainer. She was married to her kingdom with all the advantages that conferred on her people. ‘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.’³²

Equally serious and compelling to Elizabeth-watchers during the first months of her reign was the subject of religion. She was known to have been brought up in the reformed religion alongside her brother Edward, but her exact beliefs and her intentions so far as the nation’s spiritual leadership were concerned were far from clear. Protestant exiles were beginning to stream back into the country, expecting a return to the pre-Marian state of radical reform. Her Catholic subjects and the Catholic states watched anxiously. When necessary Elizabeth was a master of equivocation. Never was this more evident than in her stance on religion. As Francis Bacon famously said of her, she did not choose to make windows into men’s souls and her soul was conveniently adaptable, and naturally more conservative than any of her closest advisers.

Court life had revived within the month. Having been secluded for so long, careful to be seen as modest, scholarly and not overly ambitious, Elizabeth now joined her courtiers, feasting and dancing into the early morning. Her physical vitality reminded the older ones present of her father when a young man; but unlike him, her energy and physical fitness lasted well into late middle age when she still could hunt and dance her noblemen to a standstill. Elizabeth began that Christmas to exhibit something of her capacity for epic enjoyment. In another dispatch, Schifanoya was rather disapproving: ‘The Court is held at Westminster, and they are intent on amusing themselves and on dancing till after midnight,’³³ he sniffily reported to the Mantuan ambassador at the court of Philip II in Brussels. A month later he was deploring ‘the levities and unusual licentiousness’ at Elizabeth’s court, refusing to detail the profanities acted out on the feast of the Epiphany, traditionally Twelfth Night, when mummers dressed up as crows wearing the habits of cardinals, or as asses in bishops’ regalia and wolves in abbots’ clothing. While the court and the young queen greeted this ribaldry with wild laughter, our devout Italian observer was not amused at the wider implications as to Elizabeth’s intentions towards the true religion: ‘I will consign it to silence.’³⁴

The timing of the coronation was of crucial moment. With the implicit threat from the French with Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne in their pocket, and the obdurate insistence of two popes that Elizabeth was illegitimate, it seemed politic to claim her crown as soon as possible. By then it was well-established law, ‘that the crown once worn quite taketh away all Defects whatsoever’.³⁵ But these new Elizabethans had a complicated relationship with the supernatural. A teeming spirit world coexisted with the material, and divination, astrology, alchemy and other esoteric beliefs flourished as part of the natural sciences. Nostradamus was closely consulted for his prophecies (Catherine de Medici, the mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, was a particularly fervent devotee). According to this seer, 1559 was an inauspicious year: to anyone who could read or was susceptible to tavern gossip there was not much better to be hoped for than ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’³⁶ which would sweep the land. It was not the best omen for the beginning of the reign of another woman and it added to the atmosphere of anxious uncertainty.

Lord Robert Dudley was entrusted with a mission to seek out Dr John Dee, a remarkable and learned man, who was to become Elizabeth’s own consultant philosopher and who numbered astrology amongst his many accomplishments. Unlike Nostradamus with his mysticism, Dr Dee was known for his more scientific approach to divination by mapping the positions of the planets. His task was to draw up a horoscope of the most auspicious day and time for Elizabeth’s coronation, the formal birth of her reign. Apparently the best astrological augury pointed to 15 January 1559, with Jupiter, the chief god of the planetary system, positioned satisfactorily in Aquarius, to signify a universality to this Jovian power and Mars, the planet of war and assertive action, placed in indomitable Scorpio. That date of greatest promise was what the queen accepted.

The Christmas of 1558 was even more busy than usual as everyone prepared for the coronation, working ‘day and night both on holidays and week days’.³⁷ There was such a run on crimson silk and cloth of gold and of silver that any sale of it was embargoed until Elizabeth had made her choice for herself and her household. Her noblemen and women were determined to cut a dash and make their mark. With a new reign there was much insecurity and jostling for position and preferment. This was the greatest opportunity for dressing up and showing off, parading one’s wealth or influence, or the wealth and influence to which one aspired. It was a chance to catch the royal eye.

Across the English Channel cloth of gold was in similarly short supply. Mary was caught up in the flurry of preparations for another grand celebration at court. Only nine months after her own magnificent wedding, she was to be one of the leading guests at the wedding of the king’s second daughter Princess Claude, with whom she had grown up. This girl was not yet twelve years old and was marrying the nominal head of the Guise family, Charles, the young Duc de Lorraine. This was yet another triumph for his uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘le Balafré’, whose family consolidated further its position at the heart of the French royal family.

Again no expense was to be spared. In a country still struggling under the levies of war, the young duke spent nearly 200,000 crowns, raised in taxes from his people, on the wedding and the week-long jousting and masquerades which were traditional accompaniments to such regal nuptials. Part of his expenditure was on the livery of cloth of gold and silver for his team of twelve jousters and the matching eight or nine dresses of extravagant construction for the main female guests. Mary was presented with one of these creations, richly embroidered in gold and silver and lined with lynx fur against the January weather. There were countless other beautiful gowns offered as gifts to the ladies of the court.

This display of ostentatious wealth and munificence was commented on even by the worldly-wise Venetian ambassador. Mary herself could not have been oblivious to the grandeur and self-confidence of her family inheritance exhibited at every possible occasion. United in her youthful person was the pride and valour of the Guises with the God-given pre-eminence as both a Stuart queen and – she hoped – a queen of the house of Tudor. This powerful dynastic mix was further enhanced through marriage with the mighty Valois, royal family of France. Born to all this, it was understandable if such a young queen had a share of the hubris of those she had grown up amongst. It made it difficult for her to recognize that even such certainty as her right to be the Queen of Scotland, the kingdom she valued least of all, was not immutable.

Perhaps the same astrological phenomena Dr Dee used were pored over by French diviners looking for auspicious signs, for this marriage was solemnized on 22 January just a week after the coronation of Elizabeth as the new Queen of England.

Elizabeth’s coronation managed to be both a grand spectacle and yet intimately involving of her subjects. This ability to combine ‘a superb show’³⁸ with a certain informality at great state occasions seems to have been a characteristic peculiar to the English at the time, differentiating them from the Italians and the French. A perceptive Italian observer in his eyewitness account commented on this, not entirely favourably: ‘the English having no Masters of the Ceremonies … and still less caring about formalities’³⁹ seemed to rely less on pomp and ceremonial. He thought the cheery way Elizabeth answered back to the jocular crowds who clamoured for her after her coronation was equally deplorable. This informality and sensitivity to the popular mood was to appear to her Catholic observers to extend even into her attitude to religious worship and allow a fatal backsliding, they feared, to her brother’s radicalism.

This ability to unite grandeur with a genuine common touch was memorably displayed in Elizabeth’s state entry into London on the Saturday afternoon, the day before her coronation. The sky was dull with heavy snow clouds, in fact some snow even fell on the waiting crowds, some of whom had been out all night ‘their untired patience never spent, eyther with long expecting (some of them from a good part of the night before) or with unsatiable beholding of the Ceremonies of that day’.⁴⁰ There was thick mud everywhere, brought on by the rain and churned up by the increased traffic of carts and horses, and each householder had taken it upon himself to strew sand and gravel in front of his house to make the going less difficult. The whole court was present and so brilliantly arrayed the weather hardly mattered. They ‘so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air’.⁴¹

Her court preceeded her on horseback, numbering about a thousand, one eyewitness estimated. Then Elizabeth herself finally arrived in an open carriage entirely upholstered in gold. She was dressed in cloth of gold and on her head over her unembellished hair she wore the simple gold crown of a princess studded with precious stones. Her hands held nothing but her gloves. Around her were her footmen in their crimson velvet jerkins with the white rose of York on their chests and the red Lancastrian rose on their backs. They wore too the letters E R in bold silver gilt relief, the first time the crowd had seen their new queen’s insignia.

Behind her carriage rode Lord Robert Dudley, resplendent on his fine horse, followed by the Lord Chamberlain and the lords of her Privy Chamber. At the Tower Elizabeth stopped the cavalcade. So deeply impressed had she been by the terror of her two months imprisonment there, and so struck by the subsequent transfiguration of her life, that once more she felt moved to make a heartfelt speech thanking God for delivering her from that place: as ‘he had delivered Daniell from the lyones denne’ so he had ‘preserved her from those dangers wherwith shee was both invironed and overwhelmed, to bring her to the joye and honour of that daye’.⁴² On her first formal entry into London as queen at the end of November, Elizabeth had expressed a similar gratitude to God for her deliverance from that place. Her tenacity of mind and loyalty of feeling meant that she revisited many times in her speeches the trials of her past as well as the triumphs. In this way she involved her people in an act of sympathetic imagination and in her lifetime created her own biography for them to share.

What struck the commentators who watched her stately progress through the city was the attentiveness and light-heartedness of her manner to everyone who called out or approached her. She was quick-witted and could be alternately funny and moving in her ripostes to the crowd. Her progress was leisurely; she kept on stopping to receive blessings, appeals and posies of flowers from even the poorest and humblest of her subjects. Her carriage became filled with modest bunches of rosemary and anything remotely flower-like that might have struggled to life through the January frosts. Being short-sighted, Elizabeth had to draw especially close to see those who spoke to her or to accept the gifts she was offered and this added to the sense of attentiveness and intimacy which so charmed the crowds. An eyewitness recalled: ‘her grace, by holding up her hands and merry countenance to such as stood far off, and most tender and gentle language to those that stood nigh to her grace, did declare herself no less thankfully to receive her people’s goodwill than they lovingly offered it to her’.⁴³

A number of tableaux were acted out for her on her progress, each of which symbolized an aspect of England’s history and the people’s hopes for Elizabeth’s reign. At each was hung a painting of specially composed verses explaining the meaning of the pageant in both Latin and English and, as the queen approached, a child stood forward to recite in English. So excitable were the crowds and noisy the bands of musicians that accompanied each set piece that the queen asked for quiet so that the child could be heard.

Elizabeth’s face was closely watched as she listened, nodding and smiling, before thanking the child graciously and turning to the crowd with encouraging words. No one was inclined to call her a great beauty. Elizabeth’s colouring was much admired; the pale skin and reddish gold hair were considered closer to perfection than dark hair and olive skin, but her face was thought rather too long, as was her nose with its ‘rising in the middest’,⁴⁴ for classical beauty. Her eyes though were strikingly dark like her mother’s, and full of intelligence and humour. They had the largeness and the sweetness of expression of the very short-sighted. But what set her apart from all others was the vitality and force of her character and mind. ‘Her vertues were such as might suffice to make an Aethiopian beautifull’,⁴⁵ where an ‘Aetheopian’ was seen by one of her earliest chroniclers as an example of someone as exotic and rebarbative as it was possible for a late sixteenth-century mind to imagine.

As the queen approached Gracechurch Street she came upon a tableau set within a triumphal arch, complete with battlements, and a three-tiered stage. Meant to evoke the union of the houses of York and Lancaster, the first tier supported two children representing Henry VII sitting with his wife Elizabeth, their hands joined in matrimony, the king clothed in the red rose of Lancaster and his wife in the white rose of York. Above them the two rose stems twined into one which flowered round the figure of Henry VIII, with his queen Anne Boleyn beside him. Both of these were represented also by children richly dressed and crowned, with a pomegranate between them, symbol of their blessed fertility in producing the precious Elizabeth, and each carrying sceptres, in an obvious reference to Elizabeth’s mother’s legitimacy as Queen of England. The rose stem wound on up to the top tier where sat another child representing ‘the Queen’s most excellent Majesty, Elizabeth, now our most dread Sovereign Lady’.⁴⁶ The whole edifice was festooned with red and white roses, the royal arms of England and various trophies and symbols. The child orator interpreted it to the queen as a longing in the people for unity and concord: just as Henry Tudor’s marriage with Elizabeth of York had healed the wounds of the War of the Roses, so this new Elizabeth would heal the divisions over the succession and religion of the previous reigns, for now ‘she is the only heir of Henry VIII, which came of both Houses as the knitting up of concord’.⁴⁷

Another tableau had characterized Elizabeth as Deborah, ‘The Judge and Restorer of Israel’.⁴⁸ Deborah was the prophetess and judge of the Old Testament who was used as a convenient example of God confounding his own dictates in sending a woman successfully to rule over men. But by this exemplar, Elizabeth was also reminded, ‘that it behoveth both men and women so ruling, to use advice of good counsel’.⁴⁹

As the day drew to its triumphant close, a final symbolic act from the last of the tableaux involved a Bible, translated into English, let down to her on a silken cord by a child representing Truth. Elizabeth, ever mindful of the visually dramatic, kissed both her hands as she reached out to receive it and then kissed the Bible itself and clasped it to her breast. She promised the expectant crowd she would study and learn from it, but her enthusiastic embrace of a Protestant Bible promised more.

And so Elizabeth left the city with cheers and blessings in her ears. The extraordinary emotion of the day was like a common exhalation of the anxiety and fear of the last years replaced with an inspiration of hope for what was to come: ‘some with plausible acclamations, some with sober prayers, and many with silent and true-hearted teares, which were then seen to melt from their eyes’.⁵⁰

The ancient ritual and solemnity of the coronation on the following day, a Sunday, was charged with even greater moment by the question everyone at home and abroad wanted answered: how would Elizabeth’s preferences on religion be revealed?

Nowhere was this more keenly monitored than in France where Henri II, with his eye firmly on his daughter-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, and the opportunity she presented of further advancing his empire, was attempting to enlist the pope as a powerful ally in his plan to outlaw Elizabeth and annex England. The grandest of Spanish ambassadors was Count de Feria who, in his report to Philip II, saw nothing but doom to Spanish hopes, to the world, if France got its way. ‘Whenever the King of France finds means in Rome to get this woman declared a heretic, together with her bas-tardy, and advances his own claim’,⁵¹ Feria believed, France would be able to walk into England, so debilitated was its exchequer and so disabled by having yet another woman ruler, this time of dubious legitimacy. All the French needed was the pope’s authority assuring the support of the English Catholics and the seductive substitute queen, Mary Stuart, as the rightful heir: already he had the one and was working on providing the other.

Elizabeth and all her court made the journey from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on foot. The great church, rebuilt by Henry III as a soaring monument to faith three centuries before, dominated the skyline and drew thousands of the new queen’s subjects from the grandest to the lowliest to witness and participate in this ancient rite. Elizabeth walked in procession to her coronation along a carpet of purple cloth which seemed to melt like snow and disappear the moment her feet had passed, as the crowd grabbed what they could, tearing and cutting it away, for any scrap as a memento of this auspicious day.

Tall and slim, Elizabeth followed the procession of lords and ladies of the court and her bishops, her face pale, her hair worn loose and unadorned over her shoulders as a symbol of virginity. As she arrived at the abbey all the church bells in the city were ringing out in a clamour of celebration. Then Elizabeth mounted the high platform raised in front of the altar that exhibited her clearly to everyone and the question was asked of the people whether they wished to have her as their queen. The roared ‘YES’ was followed by a cacophony of ‘organs, fifes, trumpets, and drums playing, the bells also ringing, it seemed as if the world were come to an end’.⁵²

The coronation Mass proceeded to its centuries-old pattern of prayer and elaborate ritual lasting several hours, with Bishop Oglethorpe of Carlisle officiating. Resplendent on her throne, Elizabeth retained all aspects of the ceremony and Mass, except for the crucial elevation of the Host. This was a rite which she had already made clear was distasteful to her; she had ordered once before the same bishop to desist from elevating the Host at his Christmas Day mass and when he had refused she had withdrawn from the service.⁵³ Now at her coronation, when the Host was elevated, with all the concomitant meanings of transubstantiation, a doctrine considered clearly idolatrous by the Protestant reformers, the queen once more withdrew. She only returned to her throne once the offending ritual was over.

There was one other modification that would have given her bishops and their Catholic supporters pause for thought. At the end of the coronation ceremony itself, just prior to the Mass, the monarch accepted a ritual homage from her bishops and peers. Traditionally the archbishops headed the queue in order of seniority, followed by the bishops and then the lords. This was the order followed by Elizabeth’s father and the founder of the dynasty, her grandfather Henry VII. It was also followed closely by her sister Mary. Her brother Edward, however, accepted homage first from the Protector, the Duke of Somerset, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and then all the bishops and peers together with no distinction between his lords temporal or spiritual. Elizabeth instituted a significant change in accepting homage first from her officiating bishop but ‘then the Lordes went up to her Grace kneeling upon their knees and kissed her Grace. And after the Lordes had done, the Bishops came one after another kneeling and kissing her Grace.’⁵⁴ This was a clear message to her bishops, and the church they represented, not to take their pre-eminence for granted.

The news travelled fast to her Continental neighbours. The Count de Feria, always full of foreboding and implacable in his dislike and suspicion of the English and ‘that woman’ wrote to Philip of Spain in outrage and a sense of doom: ‘I had been told that the Queen [the following continued in cipher] took the holy sacrament sub utraque specie [both wine and bread] on the day of the coronation, but it was all nonsense. She did not take it.’⁵⁵ His spirits were lowered further when Elizabeth told him she resented the amount of money that flowed out of the country yearly for the pope’s use and that she considered her bishops to be ‘lazy poltroons’.⁵⁶ It did not need a Dr Dee to divine that change was going to come.

Mary, along with her father-in-law Henri and her own Guise family, was increasingly concerned about the growing strength of the reformed religion in France and the inevitable factions and unrest. A desultory peace process between Spain, France and England had already begun before Elizabeth’s accession to the throne and this progressed slowly throughout the early months of her reign. Mary wrote to her mother with some of her anxieties: ‘We were hoping for a peace but that is still so uncertain … God grant it all turns out well.’⁵⁷

The greatest stumbling block in the peace negotiations between France and England was the emotive question of Calais. This was not helped by the insolence of the French negotiators who had stated initially: ‘that they knew not how to conclude a peace with the Queen’s majesty, nor to whom they should deliver Calais, but to the dolphin’s wife, [Mary Queen of Scots] whom they took for Queen of England’.⁵⁸ Elizabeth’s Minister of State William Cecil, who had noted this insult in a report written in his own hand, On the Weighty Matter of Scotland, was also concerned by Mary’s manner towards Elizabeth, revealed ‘by her own disdainful speech to diverse persons’.⁵⁹ The young Scottish queen’s disparagement of her older cousin was not confined to her acolytes at court but rashly had been expressed to some of Elizabeth’s own gentlewomen in France. Mary’s impetuous nature and political naivety had already begun to store up trouble for her in the fast evolving dynamic between the two queens.

As Elizabeth left the abbey on her coronation day as Queen of England, wearing her heavy robe of cloth of gold and carrying her orb and sceptre in each hand, she was greeted by the clamour of the crowds, their voices and their musical instruments sounding, and all the city’s church bells ringing. Young, alone, and with her ministers and court processing behind her, she seemed in no way overwhelmed by the solemnity and significance of the occasion. On the contrary, she was beaming so broadly, greeting everyone who greeted her, shouting witticisms back to the crowd, sharing her delight with her exuberant subjects to such an extent that at least one of her foreign, Catholic observers looked on with disapproval: ‘in my opinion she exceeded the grounds of gravity and decorum’.⁶⁰

It was remarkable indeed that Elizabeth, still young and quite inexperienced, should exhibit such confidence and revel so obviously in the acquisition of power. Her animal high spirits naturally reciprocated her own subjects’ ebullience, and they loved her for it. In fact her ability to be affectionate and informal with the crowd was all the more surprising given that this was a queen who was a natural autocrat of the most self-conscious kind, in all ways the daughter of a ruthlessly autocratic father to whose burnished memory she aspired. With a penetrating intelligence and lively sympathy, Elizabeth was never to be as brutal or warlike as Henry, nor as self-serving, but she was capable of being as princely as Machiavelli could ever have prescribed in her pragmatic ability to do what was necessary.

The Spanish ambassador was surprised at how superstitious he found the English to be: ‘so full of prophecies … that nothing happens but they immediately come out with some prophecy that foretold it … serious people and good Catholics even take notice of these things.’⁶¹ And so as Elizabeth walked amongst them on that cold January day, what were the prognostications for her reign? Some Catholics hoped she would only rule for a short time before Philip II of Spain was once more back in power, presumably as her consort; others thought her growing popularity and the promise of change would pacify the discontented; others looked to a French Catholic alliance with Mary Queen of Scots as queen. But most rejoiced in the fact that Elizabeth was a monarch in whose veins ran unadulterated English blood. The Venetian ambassador also noted, ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him; everybody saying that she also resembles him more than [Mary I did]; and he therefore always liked her.’⁶² If this imperious and clever daughter could prove herself even half the man her father was they would be happy.

Her sex was a problem, but they consoled themselves with thoughts of Deborah, and God’s trust in her, of Mathilda, Boudicca, even of Cleopatra VII whose courage in holding off the Romans was well known to the educated through their reading of Horace and Plutarch. They had claimed Cleopatra’s conversation rather than her beauty was the secret of her fascination. But even if there were a few precedents for successful female rulers, no one considered that a woman could effectively rule alone. One thing everyone agreed on, from her first minister, William Cecil, to the lowliest beggar in the stocks: the queen must marry, and marry soon. No one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s professed contentment with the ring of state she had worn on her marriage finger since pledging herself to the nation at her coronation: ‘bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England’.⁶³

And so with Mary Stuart’s marriage and Elizabeth Tudor’s coronation the two most important celebrations of their lives marked the increasingly divergent yet interdependent paths of the Queen of Scotland and the Queen of England. The one had married her prince to pursue her destiny as a woman. The other had married her people in recognition of her destiny as a queen. Mary’s status as queen also mattered greatly to her but she considered it an immutable right, somehow divorced from any real sense of self-sacrifice and responsibility. Whereas Elizabeth never doubted the awesome responsibilities of her task, ‘the burden that is fallen upon me maketh me amazed’⁶⁴ were amongst the first words she spoke as queen to her Lords. The struggles, triumphs and tragedies that followed were a direct result of each woman’s individual decision: the one to put the personal increasingly before the political; the other to sacrifice the personal and place her responsibilities as queen at the centre of her life.

A fatal complication ensued when Mary turned her sights on the greater crown of England, believing it her rightful inheritance and a prize worth pursuing. Elizabeth’s fundamental insecurity in her own legitimacy, where the whole of Catholic Europe was ranged against her, the ‘bastard child of a whore’, increased the tension and emotional volatility of the issue. The complex rivalry, the feinting and parrying of their personal relationship, sprang from the challenge Mary had made for Elizabeth’s throne and the unassailable legitimacy of her claim. The powerful passions this relationship engendered in each was a result of their strikingly different natures. The fact they never met allowed their rivalry to inflate in each queen’s imagination, their qualities elaborated upon by ambassadors and courtiers intent on their own ambitions.

In a tradition instituted by William the Conqueror, the Champion of England on coronation day would ride up through Westminster Hall and challenge anyone who disputed the right of succession. In front of the newly crowned queen and her peers, the clatter of hooves announced the arrival of the queen’s champion. Sir Edward Dymoke, the latest member of the family who for centuries had enacted this role, rode into the hall in full armour, and flung down his gauntlet, challenging anyone who questioned Elizabeth’s right to the English throne. An uneasy silence fell on the assembly. No voice was raised on this day. But Elizabeth and Mary knew that the question had already been asked, that the contest was engaged, and in a more public arena, with wider repercussions for everyone.

A rivalry had been instituted that ‘could not be extinguished but by Death’.⁶⁵

^*La Pléiade was a group of seven French writers, led by Pierre de Ronsard and including Joachim du Bellay, Jean Dorat and Remy Belleau, who aimed to elevate the French language to the level of classical Greek and Latin as a medium for literary expression. They were named after the constellation and are considered the first representatives of French Renaissance poetry.

^*The Hamiltons became nearest family to the throne when Lord Hamilton married James II’s daughter, Princess Mary, in c. 1474. Their grandson James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, born about 1516, engineered his position as regent and heir presumptive on the death of James V. But Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, was also descended from Princess Mary and so believed he too had a claim to be heir presumptive, possibly even more indubitably legitimate than Arran who was born of a marriage which had followed a divorce. The Hamilton – Lennox rivalry was one of the dynamic power struggles of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots.

^*William Camden (1551–1623) was an antiquary and historian, one time headmaster of Westminster School where Ben Jonson was his pupil and claimed that he owed him ‘all that I am in arts, all that I know’. In 1615 Camden published his ground-breaking and authoritative Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha which marked a new departure in the writing of history with its use of state papers and lively, often first-hand, description, combined with academic detachment and lack of bias.

^*Sir John Hayward (?1564–1627) a historian who was imprisoned by Elizabeth for offending her with his dedication to the Earl of Essex in his history of Henry IV (1599), suggesting Essex was likewise capable of usurping the crown. Hayward subsequently wrote a lively account of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign.

^*The French queen, Catherine de Medici, was yet to assume full regency and exercise her considerable authority and guile in the religious wars which convulsed France.

^*Schifanoya, resident in London at the time, was the author of some descriptive and lively dispatches to the Spanish court in Brussels.

^*Possibly Charles Howard, a handsome courtier born in 1536 who became Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral and eventually was rewarded with the earldom of Nottingham in 1597.