Читать книгу Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens - Jane Dunn - Страница 8

The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!

Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 3

IF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN these two queens would only be resolved through death, the individual significance of their births had a certain symmetry too. Both entered the world as bitter disappointments to their fathers, and the birth of each princess was a contributory factor in the untimely death of a parent. It was all a matter of sex. Both fathers were kings without legitimate male heirs. Had Elizabeth not been a girl but the longed-for, expected prince it is most unlikely that her mother would ever have been executed. It is even possible that Henry’s popular reputation might have rested more on his Reformation, encouraged by his independent-minded reformist Queen Anne, than on his grotesque failures as a husband and father.

In the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her birth in 1542 was followed almost immediately by her father’s death. Already sick and humiliated, James V, on hearing his heir was a girl, literally turned his face to the wall like a wounded animal, and waited to die. His valedictory words showed him defeated as much by fate as by life: looking back two centuries to Marjorie Bruce, founder of the Stewart dynasty, he reputedly said to the messenger bringing the news of Mary’s birth: ‘It cam’ wi’ a lass, it will gang wi’ a lass.’¹ In fact, James was as poor a prophet as he was survivor. He died aged only thirty and without seeing his daughter and heir. The Stuart^* dynasty, however, managed to teeter on for a further century, despite revolution and republicanism, although Scotland’s absolute independence did not survive the reign of his daughter Mary.

Nine years separated these two princesses, born in neighbouring kingdoms in an outlying island of Europe. England and Scotland were small and relatively unimportant, impoverished lands, mostly under threat from the many times larger and richer Continental powers of France and Spain, and spasmodically at war with them, and with each other. The newly established and insecure Tudor dynasty was in urgent need of a male heir; the Stewarts, although an ancient race of kings, were ill-fated, desperate for a monarch who could survive to middle age and produce a strong male heir. The last five Scottish kings had been children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.)

The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered and James II, a murderer himself, was blown up while watching his own cannon being fired) and they were undermined by the subsequent power of factious regents and murderous clan rivalry. When they eventually succeeded at the start of the seventeenth century to the English throne and moved south, their life expectancy improved. The dynasty’s star, however, continued as mismanaged and bloody as ever it was in earlier centuries, with both Mary and her grandson, Charles I, tried and beheaded for treason.

Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 to a father who was already forty-one and who had longed for a healthy son during the twenty-three years of his marriage to the unimpeachable Catherine of Aragon. In despair at producing only one surviving child, Mary, born in 1516 (his other three sons and two daughters were either stillborn or died soon after birth), Henry began to wonder if somehow his lack of male heirs was not a personal punishment by God. He looked across to France at his main rival, François I, a chivalrous and extravagant Renaissance king whose reign of thirty-two years corresponded with Henry’s so closely that they even died within two months of each other, in 1547. Henry identified with this athletic, popular, resplendent monarch whose procreative vitality seemed gallingly superior to his own. François’s fragile Queen Claude had managed to produce seven live children, three of them sons, before herself dying of exhaustion at twenty-four.

In an age of superstition and magic, where God’s agency and the spirit world controlled the elements and directed daily lives, barrenness, and the lack of a son as heir, was never just a matter of chance. There was an uneasiness in kingdoms without male heirs that somehow the natural order of things had been disrupted and disappointment, rupture and discord would ensue. To continue the quote at the head of the chapter of the speech which Shakespeare gave Ulysses on the essential patterning of the universe:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,

Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office, and custom, in all line of order:

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d

Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye

Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,

And posts, like the commandment of a king,

Sans check, to good and bad.

In such a closely ordered world where everything had a reason, and that usually a supernatural one, Henry feared that his virtually barren marriage indicated he had transgressed some article of holy writ. The words of Leviticus particularly troubled him: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’² Had he not done precisely that in marrying Catherine, the widow of his elder brother Arthur? But Henry was also an opportunist. Although conservative and orthodox in his own religious beliefs he cannot have failed to give thought to the Continental reformers whose disdain for the pope and evangelical zeal for an individual faith drawn directly from the Gospels gave him a different approach to his own immutable church. His troubled conscience, however, his questioning of a possibly invalid marriage, were made all the more insistent by the fact that Henry had long ago tired of his wife and found a determined replacement in an attractive, nubile, lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. It was significant that this clever woman was part of the radical religious faction at court and her own conversation was as tantalising to the king as her physical charms.

Emotionally, Henry was a crass and simple man. He could be handled by any adept and resolute woman who managed to withhold from him something he desired. For more than six years Anne drew him close and reeled him out. At times he was driven almost to distraction by her seductive manner combined with her steadfast refusal to become his mistress. Henry had already produced a bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, a boy he was fond of and ennobled as Duke of Richmond and Somerset. But the prize Anne held out to the king was a legitimate son and heir. The longing to secure the succession with a male heir propelled him to marry again. So Henry put in train the momentous events which led him to sweep aside the Catholic Church and proclaim himself supreme head of the newly established Church of England. Spurred on by fear and desire, Henry drove this pragmatic revolution through Parliament. He had the support of the Protestant apologist Thomas Cranmer and his tireless executor Thomas Cromwell. His immovable Lord Chancellor Thomas More, however, paid with his life.

By the beginning of 1533, however, Anne Boleyn’s long game seemed to have paid off triumphantly. Showing remarkable self-confidence and independence of mind, she had refused the considerable honour of becoming the king’s mistress (having first been married off for propriety’s sake to a compliant nobleman). She had the presence of mind and the boldness to play for the much higher stakes of becoming his queen. This really was a remarkable ambition given that there was already a genuinely popular possessor of that title in Queen Catherine, and divorce was not an obvious or easy option. It suggested a woman of will and vision who, through force of character, could impart that vision to others. Certainly she did not appear overawed by her evident destiny, believing that God had elevated her to this high estate in a divine intervention of a personal kind: she told the Venetian ambassador that God ‘had inspired his Majesty to marry her’.³ The poet Thomas Wyatt, probably half in love with Anne, certainly arrested in the debacle of her downfall, left a compelling image of her mysterious and self-possessed attraction. His poem envisaged her as a magical deer whom only the king could hunt, her tameness an illusion:

Whoso list to hunt? I know where there is a hind,

….

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain!

And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about:

‘Noli me tangere’ [do not touch] for Caesar’s I am

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.⁴

Anne Boleyn’s trump card was the promise of fecundity. The point of a queen was to produce the male heir, ideally a number of possible heirs to ensure against disease, misfortune and sudden death. In fact, Anne’s resistance to Henry’s sexual desire had been overcome sometime prior to their secret marriage at the end of January 1533. By then, already a month pregnant, she had proved her fertility. Perhaps her strategic surrender was Henry’s reward for ennobling her as Lady Marquess of Pembroke on the first day of September the previous year. With this honour came considerable estates and authority. Or perhaps Anne’s capitulation came little over a month later, after the triumphant diplomatic meetings with the French king King François I in Calais and Boulogne which she attended as Henry’s consort and where she gained gratifying recognition from this influential potentate. Whatever the timing, Anne quickly conceived and that boded well for her. Queen Catherine was much more widely loved but by 1533 she was beyond childbearing: for the people to be prepared to accept their new queen, Anne had to provide the hoped-for prince.

At her coronation the pageants stressed this contract with the people. One had Clio, muse of history, chant ‘Anna comes, bright image of chastity, she whom Henry has chosen to his partner. Worthy husband, worthy wife! May heaven bless these nuptuals, and make her a fruitful mother of men-children.’⁵ It was the first day of June and Anne was already almost six months pregnant. The whole of Christendom had been defied for the sake of this baby; no one seemed to doubt that it would be a boy. But childbirth was dangerous for both mother and baby. It was customary for a woman who had any property to leave, to make her will before entering the dark wood of labour for there was real uncertainty as to whether she would return. But the omens were fair: the late summer weather had been warm and sunny, the harvest was expected to be a good one, there were no epidemics or plagues to disturb the surface calm. Good order was all around: the spirits seemed appeased.

There was an underlying uneasiness and dissension, however, in all segments of society. People did not like to see their good queen Catherine, who had behaved with nobility and utmost probity throughout, so humiliated and ill-treated. Henry’s subjects were largely conservative and did not care for the extreme measures he had pursued in order to satisfy his desire to marry again and produce an heir. Happy as they may have been at the thought that the excesses and corruption of the established church in England would be redressed, there was less support for so radical a reform of religion that papal authority was abandoned and spiritual power vested in the king. Certainly the pope’s^* excommunication of Henry in July, and the declaration that his marriage to Anne was invalid, was serious and unwelcome to a conservative and still Catholic people.

During the summer of 1533, augury and prognostication were more prolific than ever. Most significant perhaps were those of a visionary, Elizabeth Barton, known as ‘the Maid of Kent’, who was well known and respected for her power of prophecy. However when she began prophesying that Henry would cease to be king one month after marrying Anne Boleyn, and that in God’s eyes his status as divinely ordained monarch would be immediately forfeit, there was real consternation. Many eminent churchmen and politicians, amongst them Sir Thomas More himself, considered her to have genuine spiritual authority. But such reckless courage and moral fervour was dangerous. A month after the coronation this young nun was arrested, tortured and imprisoned in the Tower. She and her associates were eventually convicted of high treason and hanged the following spring.

So with more weighty anticipation perhaps than accompanied any other royal birth either before or since, Queen Anne settled in to Greenwich, the favoured royal palace and birthplace of Henry himself, to await the event which would seal the fates of many. The expectant father had already chosen the baby’s names, Edward or Henry, and had ordered the elaborate celebrations expected to honour a male heir. Anne seemed to be as certain as Henry was of the desired outcome of her pregnancy. In dismissing a book which claimed that marrying the king would literally be the death of her, she reputedly said: ‘I think the book a bauble; yet for the hope I have that the realm may be happy by my issue, I am resolved to have him [the king] whatsoever might become of me.’⁶

Elizabeth’s birth was not easy. She was her mother’s first child and the labour, according to Anne’s earliest biographer, was particularly painful: the sight of the red-faced infant lacking the prerequisite male genitalia would not immediately have replaced pain with triumphant euphoria. The same biographer mentions that the baby looked more like her father than her mother, which was less surprising given that many newborn babies seem to bear a passing resemblance to Henry VIII, whose features by that time were beginning to sink into his surrounding cheeks and multiple chins.⁷

‘The King’s mistress was delivered of a girl, to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards, and witches, all of whom affirmed that it would be a boy,’⁸ reported Chapuys, ambassador to Charles V. As a stalwart Catholic representing the Holy Roman Empire whose emperor, Charles, was the nephew of the divorced Catherine, any schadenfreude at the unexpected confounding of Henry’s schemes was only to be expected.

The sixteenth-century mind sought significance in everything, made connections between apparently random events and attempted to bring order and understanding to chaos. Anne, confronted with her fundamental failure in bringing forth a daughter, pointed out the fortuitous circumstances of this baby’s birth in an attempt to salvage some divine justification for her life from the critical flaw of her sex. She was born on the eve of the Virgin Mary’s own feast day, and in a room hung with tapestries depicting the histories of the holy virgins, a room which had therefore become known as the chamber of virgins. Anne too would have grown up knowing that Saint Anne, after whom she was named, was the mother of the Virgin herself. So the symbolism of the pre-eminent Virgin, the woman elevated above all others, was associated with Elizabeth from the moment of her birth.

None of the mother’s frantic reasonings, however, mitigated the outraged disappointment of the baby’s father. Surely he had done all he could, endured enough penance, prayed night and morning, changed his wife for someone younger and untainted by scriptural ambiguity, even altered the tenets of Christianity. Such a blatant blighting of his hopes had to have some deeper message, and it could not be a comforting one.

Eustace Chapuys, admittedly a hostile witness, gave a verdict on Henry’s disappointment which most of Catholic Europe and many of his own English subjects would have shared: ‘God has entirely abandoned this King, and left him prey to his own misfortune, and to his obstinate blindness that he may be punished and completely ruined.’⁹ The pageant and jousting which had been organized to celebrate the birth of a son was cancelled, although the elaborate christening and confirmation went ahead as planned three days later in the friars’ church at Greenwich. But there was no disguising the general sense of disappointment underlying the ancient rituals and the lack of spontaneous enthusiasm on the streets. There were even many who were as hostile to this new princess as they were to her mother. They could not accept the sophistry which had transformed Queen Catherine from faithful wife of twenty-four years to Henry’s unwitting concubine, and reduced her daughter from Princess Mary, her father’s heir, to Lady Mary, her father’s bastard. To these sceptics, Anne Boleyn was the impostor queen and Elizabeth her cuckoo in the nest, although the epithets used then were more frequently ‘whore’ and ‘bastard’.

Oblivious to all these adult judgements, the baby Elizabeth was carried back from her christening to the palace and to her mother who was traditionally in seclusion until ‘churched’ about a month after childbirth. Certainly Henry was not expected to be present at the christening but there was no mention that he was even at Greenwich that day. As was the custom, a wet nurse was immediately found for Elizabeth, for queens of England and noblewomen generally did not feed their babies themselves. Royal and aristocratic women were mostly of value as brood mares and binding up the breasts of a new mother to staunch her milk would make her sooner able to conceive again, thereby continuing her procreative duty.

In fact by the beginning of 1534, just four months or so after Elizabeth’s birth, Anne was thought to be pregnant again. But strain and anxiety were an inevitable part of the pressure to produce, a pressure which the baby Elizabeth’s sex had intensified. By the late summer a miscarriage, or possibly the realization that her symptoms were due to a hysterical pregnancy, had robbed Anne and Henry again of their longed-for prince. Anne had failed twice and her hold on Henry and the throne was beginning to feel precarious.

Elizabeth spent only three months in Greenwich Palace with her mother and the court before being sent to the old palace at Hatfield, some thirty miles from London, to establish her own household under her governess Margaret, Lady Bryan. Elizabeth’s day-to-day care was already the responsibility of her women attendants, with the queen’s role more as visitor to the nursery, but this banishment from her mother at such a young age would not have been a conscious wrench. Elizabeth was never to live with her again.

At the same time, by orders of their father, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary was deprived of her own household and sent to become a lady-in-waiting to the new heir presumptive. The manor she had been ordered to leave had been granted to Queen Anne’s brother, George Rochford, and the new governess to whom she was subject, Lady Anne Shelton, was the new queen’s aunt. In this way the influence of the Boleyns extended even into Mary’s most private life and could only seem to her to be all-pervasive and utterly malign. Together with the insults to her much-loved mother, whom since 1531 she had been forbidden to see, these new strictures were particularly cruel humiliations for an unhappy young woman of seventeen. She was to take these hurts, unforgiven, to her grave. Despite her loneliness and misery, however, Mary seems to have been as taken with her baby sister as anyone, commending her to their father when she was three: ‘My sister Elizabeth is in good health (thanks to our Lord), and such a child toward [a forward child], as I doubt not, but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.’¹⁰

If a girl child was unwelcome as heir to a king, she did have her uses as a future bride in the strategic game of dynastic alliances. When Elizabeth was barely six months old, Henry opened negotiations with François I to see if they could reach an agreement to marry his new daughter, and currently still his heir, to Francis’s third son, Charles, Duc d’Angoulême. The French and Spanish ambassadors were introduced to the baby princess who was presented in full regal apparel: ‘[she] was brought out to them splendidly accoutred and dressed, and in princely state, with all the ceremonial her governess could think of, after which they saw her quite undressed’.¹¹ The undressing of high-born infants, whose health and survival – and sex – were of strategic importance in their families’ marital bartering, was a common enough procedure at the time. Nine years later, the baby Mary Queen of Scots was to be undressed in the coldest of Scottish winters to show her health to Henry VIII’s envoy. Elizabeth, however, was pronounced a healthy and anatomically perfect girl but her father’s demands were excessive and the marriage negotiations eventually came to nought.

As the baby Elizabeth thrived in the care of her attendants in the country, a terrible momentum was building which would catch her mother helplessly in its tide. Anne Boleyn had never been a popular queen. And she was too clever and forthright, too vivacious and sexually bold to overcome these natural prejudices against her. A French diplomat reported back from a mission to visit Henry and Anne’s court in the early autumn of 1535: ‘the lower people are greatly exasperated with the Queen, saying a thousand ill and improper things against her’.¹² For many years before their marriage and for a short while after, the king had been blatantly obsessed with her. A contemporary Scottish theologian, Alexander Alesius,^* known for his eyewitness accounts, described the king’s emotional avidity: ‘so ardent was he when he had begun to form an attachment, that he could give himself no rest; so much so that when he was raving about Queen Anne and some of his friends were dissuading him from the divorce, he said he preferred the love of the Queen to half his realm’.¹³

In a society used to dynastic marriages, brokered by diplomats, and public displays of affection bounded by the etiquette of courtly love, the love-struck middle-aged man was an unsettling sight. When that ageing man was a king, ordained by God, the uneasiness grew, for here was an all-powerful being in thrall to a woman, an omniscient monarch behaving like a fool. In Henry’s case, however, the obvious way to absolve that feeling of unseemliness in the spectator was to blame Anne. The harlot had somehow made him succumb to her wishes through the exercise of her powers, and those were most probably unnatural. Rumour abounded as to the nature of Anne’s hold over him.

Gossip, rumour and innuendo are a powerful triad in any royal court when too much power, patronage and money circulates in a closed society of ambitious people with too little to do. In Henry’s court, life was made more treacherous by the sense of the nearness of death – through sudden illness, injury or an inexplicable eclipse from royal favour. At this point in his life, Henry was a sun king turned tyrant, and his whims could be fearsome. This ever-present threat of random violence was made more unnerving by the widespread belief in the supernatural, the practice of necromancy and the ready presence in everyday life of the devil. Rumour and speculation energized idle chatter, but too easily gained a life of its own: whispered puffballs had a habit of turning into stone-shod facts. When those rumours were of bewitchment and sexual depravity then the sixteenth-century victim of these accusations had little chance of restoring any reputation for virtue and probity. She had not much better odds of escaping with her life.

The court was full also of the stories of Henry’s new mistresses, one even a cousin of Anne’s. There was talk of the king no longer in thrall to his wife, resentful of her temper, intelligence and assertiveness. The Venetian ambassador reported home that Henry ‘was already tired to satiety of this new Queen’.¹⁴ But the bitter accusations and estrangements were followed still by reconciliations with much merriment. Anne continued to view Catherine of Aragon’s existence as a threat and her daughter Mary, whose obstinacy and flagrant rudeness to her new stepmother – whose status she refused to acknowledge – was a constant thorn. Both were a continuing barrier to her own daughter’s inheritance and the further advancement of her ambitious family.

A story, aimed at revealing Anne’s ruthlessness and malice, did the rounds of the court and diplomatic reports in the early summer of 1535. Anne was supposed to have paid a man to proclaim – to Thomas Cromwell and even to Henry himself – that he had had a revelation that the queen would not conceive again as long as Catherine and her daughter lived. Lives could hang on threads of trumped-up prophecy, divination and manipulative lies. And rumours could kill.

But it was not just Anne’s appearance of sexual boldness which exercised her detractors; her strong evangelical leanings and active promotion of the reformed religion gained her some important enemies who were working always to find a way of diminishing, if not effacing, her influence on the king. Certainly her library was known for its inclusion of radical reform literature from the Continent and she was credited with introducing to Henry the polemical Obedience of a Christen Man by William Tyndale, a copy of whose English translation of the New Testament she owned soon after publication in 1534. All the chaplains she promoted to her service were evangelicals. According to Alesius, however, the interference in religious policy that focused the hostile forces against her was her instigation through Henry of the delegation sent to the German Lutheran princes in 1536. Before they had returned the trumped-up charges against her had been contrived.

In fact, Henry’s ruthlessness towards the moral leaders of the opposition to his Reformation, specifically Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was to shock the whole of Catholic Europe. Fisher, whom the pope provocatively had made a cardinal while he was imprisoned in the Tower, was the most bold and implacable of opponents and his downfall came when he refused to take the oath of succession, which placed Elizabeth as her father’s heir over Mary. Incarcerated in the Tower, both men were eventually executed in 1535, along with a number of other Catholic martyrs, as a result of a new treason act, which made ‘malicious’ denial of the king’s title punishable by death. The bluff and hearty Good King Hal had completed his metamorphosis into the paranoid tyrant of his later years. And Anne was blamed by many for the executions. It was even possible that Henry’s uneasiness at having destroyed More, once so close and admired a friend, meant he exorcised some of his guilt by blaming his wife for this too.

In this atmosphere of alarm and fear, there was a short respite for Anne, for by the end of 1535 she was pregnant again. Despite the rumour, there was no indication that harm had been done to Catherine or her daughter to ensure this pregnancy. Quite soon, however, the divorced queen was mortally ill. Although her health had been failing for a long time, when Catherine finally died in January 1536 at the age of fifty, there were the inevitable rumours that Anne had succeeded at last in having her poisoned. This story was given some credence at the time by the news that when Catherine’s body was opened up they found her heart was ‘black and hideous to look at’ with a dark growth attached. Subsequent medical experts have stated this was much more likely to be a signature of the cancer which probably killed her.¹⁵ The royal lack of sympathy for Catherine was evident up to and beyond death. Right to the end, she and her daughter Mary had been forbidden to see each other, in an act of petty malice. And the news of her death after much suffering was greeted by the king without any show of guilt or sorrow.

Anne and Henry celebrated in unseemly delight, with Anne – and possibly the king too – clothed from head to foot in yellow, more the symbolic colour of jealousy and betrayal than of mourning. Elizabeth, just over two years old, was taken to church in grand ceremonial ‘to the sound of trumpets’ and then, in her father’s embrace, shown off to his courtiers.¹⁶ Here was his legitimate heir, his actions proclaimed, although Henry still hoped to displace her with a son.

This celebration of Elizabeth’s place in the succession, however, was to be short-lived. Rather than consolidating Anne’s position, Catherine’s death left the queen horribly exposed. While Catherine lived Henry would have found it very difficult to cast Anne off in order to marry for a third time. Now that protection was gone. There was a powerful argument, maintained by the conservative Catholic faction and which many in the general populace found sympathetic, that Henry’s marriage to Anne had never been legal and now, with his only true wife dead, he was an unencumbered widower who was free to marry again. But although the momentum was building inexorably against her, Anne still felt a certain optimism and relief: her new pregnancy brought hope. Her personal wheel of fortune she believed must have revolved by now. This time her body had to be nurturing a healthy boy. On this her fate, even her life, depended.

What happened next was a catastrophe for Anne. In late January 1536, the precious prince was born, but so premature at just over three months that Henry and Anne’s son was more a miscarriage than a stillbirth. Anne blamed this untimely birth on the shock to her nervous system caused by news that Henry had fallen heavily while jousting and, it was rumoured, lain unconscious for two hours. She also said that her husband’s blatant flirtations, particularly with one of her own ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour, had added to her upset and strain during this precarious time. Anne was desperate to absolve herself from some of the blame for the failure of this last pregnancy. But the tragedy was possibly even graver than the loss of a prince, for Henry articulated the chilling accusation that Anne’s powers sprang from a sinister and supernatural source, and this miscarriage of the longed-for son was her punishment alone, relieving him from responsibility. Chapuys, the busy and hostile Spanish ambassador, reported something the king had said in confidence to one of his courtiers in a serious and confessional tone: ‘that he [the king] had made this marriage seduced by witchcraft, and for that reason he considered it null; and that this was evident, because God did not permit them to have male issue’.¹⁷ The fact that it was assumed that Anne was now incapable of producing a healthy male heir could be an expression of the fear that Anne was somehow tainted by her involvement with unnatural practices, like sorcery.^* Her many detractors now had a powerful weapon to use against her.

Accusations of witchcraft were easily made and impossible to disprove. The existence of witches was accepted even by the learned and rational. It was self-evident that their powers were malignant and destructive, the result of a supposed secret pact with the devil. They often bore the brunt of the everyday struggle to manage and understand the natural world. It was generally believed that with a few incantations and a sacrifice or two a witch could blight the harvest, turn milk sour, make bonny children sicken and die. She could create a flash flood out of nothing, dry up the wells, invoke a freak storm, kill lambs with a glance and strike land, animals and women barren.

It was in the area of sex that the activities of witches were most feared and decried. A witch was represented as the embodiment of the inverted qualities of womankind: where natural women were weaker than men and submissive, witches were harsh, with access to forbidden power; where women had kindness and charm, witches were full of vengeance and the will to harm; where women were sexually passive, witches were voracious in their appetites and depraved. Witches were privy to recipes for aphrodisiacs and could make men fall helplessly in love with the most unlikely of women – even with their own benighted selves.

Lust was the domain of witchcraft. Incest and sodomy were intercourse with the devil and witches invariably gave birth to deformed children as a result of these deviant practices. Certainly it was believed that just as a man could be bewitched into illicit sex so he could also be rendered impotent. It was rumoured witches would even sacrifice babies in the pursuit of their terrible power.

The fact that proof of witchcraft was spurious was no obstacle to the accusation. It was a powerful and ancient belief which gave a meaning to misfortune in a world of suffering, and a cathartic focus for blame and revenge. Any woman who was somehow eccentric to her immediate society, difficult, lonely, odd in her behaviour, unbridled in her speech – even just the possessor of a cat – was at risk of becoming the scapegoat for her community, her perceived malevolence responsible for all the ills that befell it. Witchcraft was established as a crime in the parliamentary acts of 1542 and 1563 and evidence was a congeries of hearsay, superstition, malice and fear. There were periods when witch-hunts were instigated as a manifestation of the spiritual war between God and the devil. Likely women were sought out and prosecuted, their confessions often extracted under torture. Many were executed as witches, often on the vaguest anecdotes of a neighbour’s ill fortune and a run of unlucky coincidences.

Accusations of witchcraft were largely made against poor rural women. But it was a charge that could be levelled against any woman (men were rarely charged) and there were cases of aristocratic women accused of weaving malevolent spells, with mysterious powers to do harm, the crime being maleficium. Anne Boleyn’s confidence and sense of power had been noted as unbecoming in a woman. Now, in her failure for a third time to present the king and his people with the necessary male heir, Anne’s downfall was inevitable. This was all the more brutally so if the failure of her last pregnancy could be used to intimate her gross malevolence and unnatural appetites.

The speed and ruthlessness of Queen Anne’s destruction suggest fear of her power amongst the king’s closest advisers, most notably Cromwell, and a growing animus towards her, disgust even, on Henry’s part. Henry was susceptible to his own propaganda, and it was only a small matter to transform convenient surmise into cold reality. There was a widespread belief that a witch bore a mark on her face or body which revealed her true nature: either hidden peculiarities like a third nipple, a hairy birthmark, an odd lump, indentation or discoloration, or outright deformities. In the attempt to defame Anne as a witch, stories gained momentum after her death of an extra finger or some grotesque mole-like growth on her neck.

The main published source for details of her disfigurement came from a Catholic priest who never knew or even saw her. Nicholas Sander’s tract De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani, posthumously published in 1585, described her fantastically libidinous life, labelled her marriage with the king as incestuous (claiming Anne was Henry’s daughter) and listed her physical imperfections thus: ‘Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of a sallowish complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the top lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat.’¹⁸ Despite being under the closest scrutiny during her life as consort and queen, none of the contemporary chroniclers of the time mentioned any abnormalities in Anne’s appearance. In fact, the Venetian ambassador who, like his fellow hostile ambassadors, was avid for any disparaging detail to report home, thought her ‘of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised … and eyes, which are black and beautiful’.¹⁹

Unable initially to find any legal reason to invalidate Anne and Henry’s marriage, her accusers sought another way to destroy her. Anne was a natural flirt and an accomplished social creature. Emotionally expressive and thin-skinned, her education in the French court had added to her manner a gloss of worldliness and wit that her more stolid compatriots regarded with some suspicion. To charge her with adultery of the most depraved kind seemed an obvious and usefully double-barrelled weapon: if it could be suggested that this last abortive pregnancy was the result of Anne’s moral turpitude with another man (or the devil) then Henry was absolved of any responsibility. The baby was then a punishment of Anne’s behaviour, not of his.

The Tudor state could act with expedient ruthlessness. Within only three months of Anne’s miscarriage she and seven men were arrested and sent to the Tower. Of the two who were released one was the poet Thomas Wyatt, an admirer of Anne’s from before her marriage. The remaining five, however, including her own brother George Rochford, were accused of fornication with the queen. Only one, Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a gentle and artistic man, confessed, probably under torture, to this dangerous adultery: ‘The saying is he confessed, but he was first grievously racked,’ it was reported to Cromwell.²⁰

The charges worked up to ensnare the queen and destroy the power of her family, by implicating her brother, involved Anne’s incitement of these men to commit adultery with her. A second charge of conspiring the king’s death was also brought. Again it was Anne’s malignancy, her powers of bewitchment, which were implied in the wording: ‘The said Queen and these other traitors … conspired the King’s death and destruction … And the King having a short time since become aware of the said abominable crimes and treasons against him took such inward displeasure and heaviness, especially from the said Queen’s malice and adultery, that certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body.’²¹ The evidence brought against the defendants was so tenuous as to be merely a gesture, an incoherent ragbag of gossip, innuendo and misinterpreted courtliness. She did dance with the king’s chamberlains, but then so did all the ladies of the bedchamber; she did kiss her brother and write to him of her pregnancy but then, as Alesius pointed out, ‘it is a usual custom throughout the whole of Britain that ladies married and unmarried, even the most coy, kiss not only a brother, but any honourable person, even in public’.²²

However one piece of evidence was of terrific moment and had also the ring of authenticity. Anne was accused of making an unguarded comment to her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford, who had subsequently become a hostile witness against her husband and queen. The rash female confidence was: ‘que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soy copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance’ [that the king has not the ability to make love to a woman, for he has neither the vigour nor the potency].

This was so sensitive an area of discussion that when Lord Rochford at his trial was asked to comment on this statement he was handed a piece of paper with the words written down rather than have them broadcast to the packed court. (He inadvertently – or otherwise – read them out loud.) To cast aspersions on Henry’s virility was bad enough. To say such things about a king so wilful in his drive for a son and heir, and so ruthless in his actions to achieve that, was dangerous in the extreme. And the danger was doubly reflexive against Anne, for a powerful man’s impotence was readily blamed on the woman. Perhaps the words of the indictment against Anne, that due to her activities ‘certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body’, referred implicitly to that dreaded loss of virility which may well have periodically affected the king.

So the net closed in around the queen. She was almost certainly innocent of the gross charges brought against her, as were the men chosen as luckless tools in her downfall. The evidence produced against them was barely plausible let alone proof of anything more than acquaintanceship and, in Lord Rochford’s case, fraternal affection. Pride, reckless indiscretion and ill luck were Anne’s undoing at the hands of a king with absolute power, his fickle heart and tyrannical nature in harness to a fanatic pursuit of a male heir.

There was one poignant glimpse of the baby Elizabeth, only two and a half years old, being held up to her father by a distraught Anne for the last time. In his letter to Elizabeth on her accession, Alesius wrote: ‘Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard … the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry.’²³ Anne must have been dispatched immediately to the Tower for just as Alesius arrived in London from Greenwich the cannon thundered out, heralding the imprisonment of a person of the nobility or higher.

Having collapsed in hysterical terror when first imprisoned, Anne recovered her composure to impress even her enemies at her trial. On 19 May 1536 she was beheaded. As a special dispensation a swordsman was imported from France so that her execution was effected not by an axe on the block but by a sword. His dexterity was so great that Anne appeared unaware of the moment of death and those present thought the whole process looked more like sleight of hand than the gruesome butchery it so often became. Her arrest, trial and execution had all taken place within seventeen days. Three days before she died, the final humiliation was delivered by Archbishop Cranmer, her fair-weather friend. He had managed to elicit from Anne some statement that could be used to nullify her marriage to the king, possibly concerning the contractual status of her previous engagement to Lord Henry Percy. So Anne went to her death, still a young woman but technically no longer a queen.

The baby princess’s future also was in the balance. Although she too was to be threatened with a traitor’s death eighteen years later, at this time she was not in peril. Elizabeth’s own status, however, was inextricably bound up with her mother’s and just as the legality of Anne’s marriage was denied, so too was her daughter’s legitimacy. Two months after her mother’s execution, an act removing her from the succession stated she was ‘illegitimate … excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir … to [the king] by lineal descent’. From being the much-vaunted Princess Elizabeth, for a time sole heir to her father’s crown, she now became just Lady Elizabeth, with no clear place in the Tudor succession. Significantly, given the sexual charges against her mother, there was never any occasion when Henry chose to doubt the fact that Elizabeth was his true daughter.

Although largely oblivious at the time, for she was not yet three years old and living in a separate household, Elizabeth’s subsequent demeanour and expectations were affected fundamentally by the legacy of Anne’s spectacular fall from favour, her execution for treason and subsequent vilification for obscene acts and rumours of evil. Of all Henry’s wives, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, was to attract the most attention and opprobrium during her lifetime and the most scandalous stories in the centuries which followed. Lurid tales of incest and witchcraft grew with the telling. And witchery was strongly believed to be passed to subsequent generations as a hereditary taint: people born of ‘bad and wicked parents’ were deemed likely to be witches themselves.²⁴ This was a damnation that would fuel her daughter’s enemies and echo in unexpected ways down the years.

But even more damaging to Elizabeth’s confidence was her disputed legitimacy and shifting status as one of her father’s heirs – or not – as his own dynastic struggles continued. Even as a small child she appeared to be conscious of her demotion. When the new queen, Jane Seymour, recalled the Princess Mary to court in the spring of 1537, the three-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth was reputed to have said to the governor of her household: ‘How haps it, Governor, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?’ This insecurity would become a lasting strain in her life, played upon and exacerbated by the indubitable claims on the English throne of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots.

Prior to Mary’s birth and the beginning of her own lifelong competition for the English throne, her father, James V of Scotland, was already locked into a futile arm-wrestling with his uncle and neighbour Henry VIII, both conducting raids and counter-raids of the border lands between their two kingdoms. Although James had managed to wrong-foot his uncle in the marriage stakes by winning the hand of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, from under Henry’s nose (Henry had her in mind as his fourth wife), he was having less luck with his frontier skirmishes against the English king. Henry had launched spasmodic raids across the border and James, increasingly demoralized by the lack of solidarity from his lords (many of whom were accepting money from the English exchequer), had attempted a counterattack. In 1542, in the bitter end of November, James presided over an ill-judged retaliatory invasion of the Debatable Land, the unruly and ungovernable strip of wild country to the west of Liddesdale. In this godforsaken heath he suffered a humiliating rout of his men by the English troops at Solway Moss. His uncommitted nobles had deserted him and over a thousand Scots were taken prisoner.

James was left to ride north, broken in spirit and submerged in deepest melancholy. He was an intelligent, sensual man, a creative builder of beautiful palaces, personally attractive to his people but temperamentally more suited perhaps to the life of an enlightened landowner than to the crown of thorns of the Scottish monarchy. He had a complex character, combining opposing qualities of rapacity and a certain identification with his people. He tried to break the domination of his lords and establish a rule of law but earned the suspicion of both church and nobility with his attempts at raising money from their assets in order to build grand palaces such as Falkland and Linlithgow. Striving to secure a male heir for his dynasty he, nevertheless, was known for his licentiousness and fathered seven or more illegitimate children, at least five of whom were sons. John Knox managed succinctly to sum up his doublesided nature, a polarity that fatally weakened him as a man and a king: ‘Hie was called of some a good poore mans king; of otheris hie was termed murtherare of the nobilitie, and one that had decreed thair hole destruction. Some praised him for the repressing of thyft and oppressioun; otheris dispraised him for the defoulling of menis wiffis and virgines. And thus men spake evin as affectionis led thame. And yitt none spack all together besydis the treuth: for a parte of all these foresaidis war so manifest that as the verteuis could nott be denyed, so could nott the vices by any craft be clocked [cloaked].’²⁵ After a long night’s ride James arrived at Linlithgow, where Mary of Guise was awaiting the birth of their baby, the much-needed son and heir.

Part of the king’s melancholy lay in the recent deaths of his two baby sons and heirs, cared for in separate establishments but dying within days of each other in a tragic synchrony. The timing was so inexplicable and shocking that poison was suggested, as it always was in cases of sudden death. But these deaths mingled natural grief in James’s mind with a supernatural warning. They seemed to give ominous meaning to a nightmare that had haunted him. In his dreams a dead man, possibly his old friend Sir James Hamilton (whose property James V had appropriated after he had been executed on trumped-up charges), approached, brandishing a sword. The animated corpse then cut off both the king’s arms and swore he would return to cut off his head.

When, in the late April of 1541, King James’s eleven-month-old heir, James, and the week-old infant, Robert, died it seemed to James as if he had in fact symbolically lost both his arms, as the dream had foretold. All that remained now was for him to lose his head and thereby his life. With the betrayals of Solway Moss followed so closely by the birth of Mary, not the replacement prince who would bring hope for the future but a weak and premature girl, James’s own death seemed to him to be an awful certainty.

As the King of Scotland rode further north and collapsed into bed in Falkland Palace, the following day Mary of Guise went into labour at Linlithgow. She cannot have been in a peaceful and optimistic frame of mind. Contemporary reports suggest that the labour was not full term and so the subsequent risk to the child was increased, especially as she was born in the heart of a storm in the deepest of bitter winter. Her husband too had just left her in a state so utterly distraught that she could not be sure when or if she would ever see him again. The country was in dire peril without an effective king and with a ruthless neighbour in Henry threatening invasion and war. Religious divisions were sweeping Europe, the Reformation had a dynamic all its own which James V had resisted, but which focused factions within Scotland and inflamed dissent.

And all the while the Scottish nobles were in disarray, captured, bribed by the English, unwilling to serve the crown before their own interests. Scotland that December was especially cold, dark and dangerous. On the 8th of that month a small frail baby entered the world. Unwelcome as she may have been to her father, she was her mother’s fifth child^* and her first daughter. Mary of Guise was a redoubtable woman and a fond mother, with a close relationship with her own mother, and there is every reason to believe that, despite the dynastic disappointment of her child’s sex, she was happy to have given birth to a girl.

Both Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart were to become queens regnant in their own right but aware always of the pitfalls and inveterate expectations of their roles. Just as for less exalted women, marriage was their unequivocal duty and procreation the necessary thing. But the marriage contract for princesses and queens traditionally had little to do with personal choice and everything to do with political expedience. Just as the three-month-old Elizabeth had been offered in marriage by her father to a French prince, in order to build an alliance between historic enemies, so the infant Mary, now Queen of Scots, became the focus of a fierce struggle between these same old adversaries.

Mary, as a female heir, may have been equally as disappointing as was her cousin, but her marital prospects in 1543 were much more dazzling. For Mary was already a regnant queen while Elizabeth’s chances of inheriting the crown, having been bastardized and disinherited by her father, seemed very remote. It was traditional that the kingdom with the misfortune to be ruled by a queen was considered part of her dowry in the marriage negotiations. The future dispensation of Scotland, therefore, made Mary’s tiny, oblivious form the immediate focus of her ambitious neighbour. Elizabeth’s father, the ageing bully Henry, was determined to annex Scotland and prevent for ever his old enemy France from getting a base from which to invade England. He meant to claim the infant Mary as a wife for his five-year-old son, Edward.

On 12 October 1537 Henry had at last been awarded his prince and heir after marrying his third wife, Jane Seymour, within eleven days of the execution of the second. The eruption of happiness in court and country was crowned with the baby’s magnificent christening later that October. Elizabeth, just four years old, was carried to the ceremony by Edward Seymour, uncle to the new prince. The elder of the ambitious brothers of the queen, Edward Seymour was to become Lord Protector on Henry’s death, the most powerful nobleman in the land.

But the birth of a male heir came at a high cost. After a gruelling three-day labour, Queen Jane was dead in less than a fortnight of a postpartum sepsis. She died in the midst of her triumph aged only twenty-eight. Henry seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken, writing to François I of France, ‘Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who brought me this happiness.’²⁶

However, the monarch’s round of marriages, alliances and wars continued with barely a pause. And so, five years later, when his old Scottish adversary, James V, died in the winter of 1542 with a sole female heir, just five years younger than the English male heir, it appeared to Henry to be a God-sent opportunity. The Spanish ambassador considered it a possible double boon for Henry, for the ageing king was in need of a wife himself, caught in an unusual marital lacuna between Catherine Howard, whom he had just executed for adultery, and Catherine Parr, whom he had yet to woo. Certainly, for those with any memory, there was a certain justice in the possibility of Henry finally winning the admirable, and fertile, Mary of Guise, having lost her the first time to his nephew James of Scotland. Such a marriage would have brought the baby Queen of Scots into closest sisterhood with Elizabeth, most probably sharing a similar education and upbringing in England. How different her future would have been. But the idea of marrying the dowager queen did not appear to fire Henry’s imagination as it had five years before.

The marriage of his heir to Scotland’s heir was a much more rewarding enterprise. Henry wanted to get his hands on this intractable kingdom and there was no easier way, it would seem, than through such a marriage alliance. The fact that the English provided the male side of the bargain ensured England’s natural superiority in any union with Scotland, just as a husband had dominion over his wife. From the English point of view there was something right and natural about uniting these two sea-bound kingdoms, with England as the senior partner. Such a marriage of neighbours would annex Scotland in an expansion of Henry’s own house and territory and thereby reduce the attrition on the border and, more seriously, close the back door to France.

Needless to say, Scotland, with a real pride in her own ancient history and fiercely protected independence, saw the situation rather differently. There was also the small matter of how revenues were raised and where they were spent: ‘if both the realms were under one, all should go to the King of England out of the country of Scotland not to be spent there, whereby Scotland now being poor already should be utterly beggared and undone’.²⁷ But Henry had a fistful of Scottish noblemen captured at Solway Moss, whom he would treat well, bribe with money and promises of patronage, and return to Scotland to work on his behalf to facilitate the marriage contract. Ten of these signed a secret pact recognizing Henry as King of Scotland should Mary Queen of Scots die without an heir.²⁸ This was a shameful precursor of the secret treaty Mary herself, when a young woman, was to sign with the Guises and the French King Henri II, ceding Scotland to France in the event of her death without issue.

Initially there were fears for the baby queen’s survival: ‘a very weak child and not like to live’.²⁹ Even two weeks after her birth, Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was writing that not only the child but the mother too was expected to die. However, the frail baby did thrive and by March the following year, Henry’s ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, had travelled north to oversee the marital negotiations and examine the prize himself.

Sadler, a loyal but literal-minded man, was shown into the presence of the dowager queen, Mary of Guise. After discussing the marriage proposals, Mary led Sadler to the nursery to see the new queen. The baby Queen of Scots was not yet four months old. Her mother asked the nurse to unwrap her and show her quite naked for Sadler’s approval. Sadler, a fond husband and father himself, seemed touched and impressed by the sight: ‘I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God,’ he reported back to Henry.³⁰

Sadler’s conversations with Mary of Guise and with Arran, the regent, were doggedly relayed back to his master in meticulous letters of epic length which make them an invaluable source of information, conveyed with an immediacy which transcends more than four and a half centuries of intervening history. Sadler was ever puzzled as to whom he should trust. Mary of Guise was charming, intelligent and a skilful stateswoman. She was quite capable of dissembling when need be. Mary gave the impression that the King of England’s plans for her daughter were exactly what she would have hoped, and Sadler was naturally credulous. But Arran had warned him, ‘that I should find her in the end (whatsoever she pretendeth) a right French woman’, with her main motive to keep England at bay and the ancient Scottish alliance with her own country strong.

No one could fail to appreciate the incongruous weight of responsibility which had fallen to this unwitting infant. She was already queen in name. One day she would have to become queen in deed of a kingdom of proud, disputatious clans centred on ancient tribal strongholds spread out across a sparsely populated, mostly mountainous, beautiful but inhospitable land. And as Mary lay in her cradle the factions were already entrenched in their rivalries, working for their own advancement and against their foes.

The immediate struggle for influence was between Cardinal Beaton, a powerful, worldly, pro-French ally of Mary of Guise, and the Earl of Arran, a vacillating opportunist and the leader of the pro-English tendency. Arran won the first round by wresting the regency from the churchman and declaring himself, as a Hamilton, next in line to the throne after Mary. But even these allegiances were not as they seemed, for Arran was rumoured to be intending to marry his own son to the new queen, and thereby doubly ensure his family’s hold on the crown. This meant that, despite being in the pay of Henry, he was unlikely to be working to promote the English king’s ambitions. On hearing this, Henry decided to offer his daughter Elizabeth to Arran for his son: in return Arran was expected to support the marriage proposal that really mattered to Henry, that between his heir Edward and the baby Queen of Scots.

Elizabeth was nine years old at the time, serious, highly intelligent and so well educated that those who met her inevitably remarked on her evident abilities. When she was only six years old her father’s courtier, soon to be secretary, Wriothsley was struck by the small girl’s grace and presence of mind: having been offered the king’s blessing, Elizabeth gave her humble thanks and then ‘[asked] after His Majesty’s welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old’.³¹ Yet at the age of nine, Elizabeth was unlikely to have been informed of her father’s offer of herself in marriage to Arran’s son, a mere compensation in the hopes that the real prize, Elizabeth’s new cousin, Mary, would be saved for Henry’s grander scheme. But her impromptu place in this scheme showed that in Henry’s mind his illegitimate daughter, by the woman he had hoped to erase forever, was valued rather lowly on the scale of marital barter.

Just as in his first abortive negotiations over his daughter Elizabeth’s prospective betrothal, Henry’s conditions for the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to his son were self-defeatingly excessive and heavy-handed. One of the main areas of disagreement was over the immediate possession of the baby queen. Henry, hoping to be supported by his recently released Scottish lords, had demanded that she be put into his hands, to be brought up in England until she was old enough to marry. The Scottish Parliament had met in March 1543 and passed a set of articles agreeing in principle to the marriage, but insisting that Mary should remain in Scotland until she was ten years old, ‘that hir personne be kepit and nurist principallie be hir moder’.³² The same Parliament gave a nod in the direction of the reformed religion by authorizing the reading of the Bible in the vernacular, an activity which previously had been widespread but discreetly done.

On 1 July the Treaty of Greenwich allowing for the marriage of Prince Edward and Queen Mary of Scotland was drawn up. But Henry’s influence in Scotland was already on the wane. With a Guise as queen mother and dowager queen, France’s importance, on the other hand, had never been in much doubt. Towards the end of June a fleet of French ships was tracked making their way to the offshore waters of Scotland, lying off Aberdeen and then Arbroath. Rumours abounded; there were 4000 men of war on board, 1000 of them at least were hackbuteers, armed with the fearsome firearm, the harquebus: ‘they come to convoy away the young Queen, and also the old’.³³ Sadler was much concerned by this threat as he reported back to the Privy Council, but his fears were partly allayed by Arran who assured him that the Palace of Linlithgow was properly guarded, and anyway the young queen could not be moved ‘because she is a little troubled with the breeding of teeth’. This seemed to be accepted at face value by Sadler who added, ‘by my truth I cannot but see that [governor Arran] tendreth as much her health, preservation, and surety, as if she were his own natural child’.³⁴ As the tenuous thread of the infant Mary’s life was all that stood between Arran and his ambitions as next heir to the kingdom, this observation may have been more an expression of Sadler’s honourable credulity and his own paternal affections than Arran’s careful concern.

Under armed escort of more than three thousand men, the seven-month-old queen was moved to safer ground that summer. But she went not to Edinburgh as Henry had demanded but to Stirling Castle, the great medieval stronghold much beautified and domesticated by Mary’s father James. This castle, with its lovely new French-inspired palace building, belonged to Mary’s mother through her marriage contract. Now ensconced there with her daughter, Mary of Guise’s own power was greatly increased. She was keen to appear conciliatory to their powerful neighbour and requested Sadler’s presence at Stirling where she asked him to assure his king ‘that as nothing could be more honourable for her and her daughter than this marriage, so she desired the perfection thereof with all her heart’.³⁵ Again, she wished to show off her daughter, this time with evident maternal pride at how tall she was growing and how advanced she seemed, declaring, ‘that her daughter did grow apace; and soon,’ she said, ‘she would be a woman, if she took of her mother’.³⁶ This, as Sadler reminded Henry, was a reference to the queen mother’s own unusual height, a general characteristic of the physically splendid Guises which was shared too by Mary Queen of Scots.

By the beginning of September, Sadler’s much exercised credulity was finally worn thin when the irresolute Arran relinquished his support of the English and reformed religion and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton. The volte-face was further underlined by the Earl of Lennox, home after many years in France fortified with French cash and promises of support, who later that month joined the pro-English party solely to continue in opposition to his arch rival Arran. No imperative was more important to a Scotsman than maintaining the tribal status quo and the Lennox – Hamilton hostility was one of the dynamos of Scottish history at the time. In the midst of all this duplicity, the baby at the eye of the storm was crowned Mary Queen of Scots on 9 September 1543, aged nine months. It was an ancient but modest ceremony, ‘with such solemnity as they do use in this country, which is not very costly’.³⁷ The pro-English noblemen refused to attend.

Sadler realised that he could trust no-one when the factions were so opportunistic and shifting, and the noblemen within them motivated by frustrating old enemies rather than consolidating new friends. Nonplussed by the dour Celtic passions which could keep alive ancestral feuds over centuries he expostulated: ‘There never was so noble a prince’s servant as I am so evil intreated as I am among these unreasonable people; nor do I think never man had to do with so rude, so inconsistent, and beastly a nation as this is.’³⁸

As the baby Mary peacefully continued her life circumscribed by sleep, food and play, the tensions in her kingdom intensified. Although the Treaty of Greenwich, promising her in marriage to Prince Edward of England, had been ratified, albeit belatedly, her mother, desperate to try and lure Lennox back to her pro-French cause, offered the greatest prize of her daughter and the kingdom to him.³⁹

Marriage to the infant Queen of Scots, a marriage that would make him king, thereby obliterating Arran’s power and his rival claim as next in line to the throne, was on the face of it an irresistible offer. There was the small matter of the age gap of twenty-six years but, although Lennox entered into negotiations with the queen mother for a while, he knew the offer was merely a ruse to defuse his capacity for trouble. Already his gaze had alighted on another royal bride, Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor, and niece of Henry VIII, rather closer in age to himself, whose advantages of birth would become immediately available to him. The dream of kingship, however, would be worked out in the subsequent generation. The marriage of Lennox in 1545 with this strong-willed, red-headed Tudor, full of pride in her royal blood, produced an ill-fated son, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley.

Henry VIII was increasingly impatient with the Scottish lords’ refusal to submit to his demands. He misunderstood the complex loyalties and shifting alliances of interest, which only included him and the English cause to the extent that they could extract more English gold through unsubstantiated promises of support. However his intimidation and threats of reprisals did not force the mettlesome Scots into compliance. In fact it had the contrary effect. In December 1543, their Parliament solemnly annulled the Treaty of Greenwich: the marriage, the peace and the small concessions to the reformed religion were all duly cancelled. It was obvious that the ‘auld alliance’ with France was again pre-eminent and Henry and the English were clothed in their ancient habit of the ‘auld enemie’. Perhaps, in reality, it had ever been thus.

Henry’s revenge was to be bloodthirsty and terrible. The first raid he launched was in May 1544. The directions to his executor Hertford were as merciless as they were exact: ‘put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon [them] for their falsehood and disobedience’.⁴⁰ The series of invasions, burnings, massacres and lootings that followed were to become known as ‘the Rough Wooing’. But in love as in war, Henry’s judgement had become skewed with illness and age. He would never manage now to unite the two kingdoms in his lifetime, although that possibility tantalizingly remained throughout the lifetime of his children and came to haunt his daughter Elizabeth.

At the beginning of 1543, the young Lady Elizabeth was as far away from the English throne as she had ever been. Still illegitimate, still barred from the succession, she and her half-sister Mary, nevertheless, were on warmer terms with their father and now included in court ceremonial. But they remained marginal to the future of the monarchy. However, that spring Henry’s mind turned to the fundamental issue of securing the Tudor dynasty. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that his god-like being was mortal after all. Hugely obese and in failing health, he suffered excruciating pain from a chronically ulcerated leg. In June, Parliament formally restored Mary and then Elizabeth to the succession, to follow their half-brother Edward. However, Henry did not choose at the same time to reinstate the legitimacy of both his daughters, leaving them with a fundamental insecurity and vulnerability to counterclaims on their throne.

At this point it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would ever become Queen of England, but her restoration to the succession made the dream at least possible. Aged nearly ten, this clever, watchful, ambitious girl was no longer a child and was beginning instead to think about her own destiny. She was uncritically adoring of her distant father and grateful for the warmth and authority of her new stepmother, Catherine Parr, a mature and intelligent woman who was herself avid for education and self-improvement. That summer Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary had been summoned to court to meet the young widow and then attended as special guests the sixth and last wedding of their father. Closer to him than she had ever been previously, Elizabeth’s most vivid memories of Henry as a father and king would date from these last three years of his life when the turmoil of his private life was over and he turned once more to engage in self-aggrandisement abroad. Ill-judged and costly as these grandiose schemes may have been, they energized the ageing king with something of the charismatic vitality and splendour of his youth.

It is impossible to know what Elizabeth knew of her father’s military campaigns against both their Scottish neighbours and the French in the summer of 1544. But he was in her thoughts when, on the last day of July, she wrote her first extant letter, to her stepmother Catherine Parr, and ended this exercise in courtly Italian with the sentiments: ‘I humbly entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to his majesty you will deign to recommend me to him, entreating ever his sweet benediction and likewise entreating the Lord God to send him best success in gaining victory over his enemies, so that your highness, and I together with you, may rejoice the sooner at his happy return.’⁴¹ Elizabeth was living at St James’s Palace, immersed in her books and study, reading and translating from Latin and Greek the stories of classical battles and mythic heroes. While she laboured at home, her own flesh and blood hero Henry was so revivified by war that he led the siege of Boulogne himself in a last gesture of defiance against the French, his doctors and the approach of death. Eventually he entered the city in triumph in the middle of September. For that moment, perhaps, he felt he had turned back the years.

Elizabeth was at Leeds Castle in Kent to welcome him home, an awe-inspiring father and, it would seem to her then, a Hercules among men. Although when she was queen she was to choose equivocation and peace rather than confrontation and war, all her life Elizabeth was to consider it as the highest compliment to be likened to him, the man she loved and admired more than anyone; ‘my own matchless and most kind father’.⁴² The king she saw in the last years was an ageing old lion but in his young daughter Elizabeth’s opinion, he was ‘a king, whom philosophers regard as god on earth’.⁴³

As queen she was to invoke the glorious reputation of her father whenever she felt at all defensive as a woman with her all-male government ranged against her, or facing military aggression from abroad: ‘though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had’,⁴⁴ she was to tell her Lords in November 1566, when she was thirty-three and still angrily resisting their pressure to marry or otherwise settle the succession. And writing to her father at the time of his ‘Rough Wooing’ when she herself was only twelve years old, Elizabeth claimed not only kinship with her ‘illustrious and most mighty’ father but also an intimate intellectual and personal bond with him: ‘May I, by this means [the trilingual translation of her stepmother Catherine Parr’s book of prayers], be indebted to you not as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.’⁴⁵ It took courage and confidence in this girl to place herself on a par with her father, a distant figure of gigantic proportions and terrifying reputation, a tyrant and a divinely ordained king.

Her public identification was always with her heroic father, but in private it seems Elizabeth honoured the memory of her mother too. At some point in her life she began to wear a diamond, ruby and mother of pearl ring with a secret compartment which revealed a portrait of Anne, face to face with a companion miniature of her daughter. They folded together when the ring was closed. The vilification of Anne’s reputation and the disputed legality of her marriage, together with the dangerous imputations of witchcraft, incest and depravity attached to her name, meant Elizabeth’s attempt at some identification and intimacy with her mother was necessarily secretive. She did show, however, interest and sympathy for her Boleyn relations, promoting her cousin, Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, to the baronetcy of Hunsdon. Anne may not have been publicly celebrated by her daughter but she was not forgotten.

Although Boulogne was a short-lived victory for Henry and virtually bankrupted his country, it did a great deal for the old king’s morale and his people’s insular pride. Knowing once more the thrill of conquest he could forget the years of domestic frustration and impotence. Scotland and the baby queen were to be casualties of his new energy and belligerence, for he was determined to force the marriage of his heir with Mary, Scotland’s queen. By the autumn of 1545, Henry was furious at the Scots’ continued recalcitrance and once again unleashed his warlord, the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour. While the almost three-year-old Mary was kept in close confinement by her mother at Stirling Castle, the marauding English rode over the border to burn and destroy crops and towns and particularly the abbeys and religious establishments. Kelso Abbey, Melrose Abbey, and the abbeys of Dryburgh and Jedburgh were all put to the torch, and their inhabitants and the surrounding populace dispersed or killed. As great a destruction as possible was wreaked on the fair and fertile valleys between these towns as Hertford and his troops swept through on their vengeance raids. It was harvest time and Henry wanted the Scots to reap their bitterest for spurning the English alliance.

Henry’s counterproductive ‘Rough Wooing’ was to be continued even more ruthlessly after his death in 1547 by Edward Seymour, now the Lord Protector of Edward’s reign. The baby Scottish queen had grown into a bonny child, intelligent and charming who, having outlived the extreme perils of infancy and risks of neonatal disease, now had to face the dangers of her predatory neighbour. So important was it for England to secure Scotland as insurance against her Continental enemies that Somerset remained intent on prising Mary away from her mother and her country to ensure her alliance with the young English king, himself not yet ten years old. On 10 September 1547, a day that became known in Scottish annals as ‘Black Saturday’, Somerset’s troops routed the Scots under Arran’s ineffectual command at Pinkie Cleugh near Inveresk. Once more the flower of Scottish nobility was slain or taken prisoner. Once again the Earl of Arran managed to escape unscathed from the bloody destruction of the best of Scotland’s fighting men.

This latest defeat was so devastating that Mary of Guise feared that even Stirling Castle, that great bulwark against attack, might not be able to protect her daughter from the English. Lord Erskine, one of the queen’s guardians, and a man already grieving the loss of his son at Pinkie, suggested he take the precious child into safekeeping and install her on the nearby island of Inchmahome, where the secluded Augustinian priory there was surrounded by the deep waters of the Lake of Menteith. Although Mary was not yet five years old and was only to stay for two to three weeks, the stealth and urgency of her departure from Stirling and the mysterious atmosphere and beauty of the place may well have impressed her with a visceral memory of excitement and tension.

Perhaps at this impressionable age Mary’s natural polarity of impetuous courage and nervous sensibility thus was etched deeper in her developing psyche. The atmosphere of isolation and meditation on the mysterious island was far removed from the world from which she had been plucked, of aggressive self-interest, anxious politicking and the alarms of war. The sixteenth century was not a time troubled by modern ideas of child rearing and the fragility of the emergent self, and Mary’s retainers would have talked freely in front of her. Even at so young an age this child not only would have sensed the fear and the excitement of the adults around her but she would have understood intellectually some of the facts of the situation.

Within weeks she was back with her mother at Stirling but, at the next invasion of the English, the queen mother dispatched her precious daughter to Dumbarton where the French, for whose help she had petitioned in increasing desperation, could easily arrive by sea and collect her. The new King of France had an infant son and heir, named François after Henri’s own illustrious father. This firstborn but sickly boy seemed to unloose a surge of fertility in his mother Catherine de Medici who, after eleven anguished years of childless marriage, suddenly produced ten children in the following twelve years.

Mary of Guise had never lost her primary allegiance to her home country and cajoled her lords into allowing her to negotiate a marriage contract between her young daughter and the even younger Dauphin of France. On 7 July 1548 the treaty was signed and Mary’s fate was sealed. Neither England nor Scotland now was to be her home. Instead she was to be brought up as a French princess and would learn to rate her adopted crown of France higher than that of Scotland, and covet for most of her adult life the crown of England. The child queen was made ready for the next poignant journey of her life, as a fugitive from the marauding English and an emotional and political captive of the French.

Just as the five-year-old Mary Stuart was beginning to attain consciousness of herself as a queen while imbibing the adrenaline of flight and concealment, adventure and romance, her older cousin Elizabeth Tudor was deep in her studies at various royal manors in the country outside London. Just fourteen, she was polishing her French and Italian, and reading and translating from Latin and Greek. Pindar’s poetry and Homer’s Iliad were among the specific works in her mind when she wrote to her brother Edward in the autumn of 1547: ‘Nothing is so uncertain or less enduring than the life of a man, who truly, by the testimony of Pindar, is nothing else than a dream of shadows.’^*46 Her father had died the previous January and this letter was in elegiac mood. What more telling example could there be of the essential transience of all things than the fact that someone as superhuman and magnificent in life as this omnipotent king had to succumb to death as inevitably as the commonest thief or beggar?

In fact Henry’s death was the beginning for Elizabeth of a decade of uncertainty and at times extreme danger. These painful years were the furnace that would temper her nature for good and ill. While Elizabeth learnt her lessons the hard way, Mary was to have the danger of her birthright as Queen of the Scots deferred. Instead she entered her defining decade in the French court, pampered, admired, groomed for the mostly decorative role as Dauphine, then fleetingly Queen of France. John Knox, austerely Calvinist in his sympathies, recognized the decadence of this French courtly inheritance from his experiences at the time as a prisoner and galley slave of the French. His warning of the effect on the young Queen of Scots, growing up away from her country and her people in this artificial and alien air, had a terrible truth: ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm and for her final destruction’.

^*There is some confusion over the spelling of the dynasty. I have opted for Stewart prior to Mary’s accession, and for Mary and her descendants Stuart thereafter.

^*Pope Clement VII (1523–34), a Medici prince, nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

^*Alexander Alesius (1500–65) writer and theologian. Born Alexander Alane, he became a canon of St Andrew’s Cathedral but adopted the Greek name ‘Alesius’ (meaning ‘wandering’) to signify his exile from Scotland after the trauma of witnessing his Lutheran mentor, Patrick Hamilton, burned at the stake in 1528. From 1535 he was in England at the heart of the English Reformation and is valued for his lively accounts and reminiscences.

^*One of Anne’s recent biographers, Retha M. Warnicke, has suggested that this miscarried son was in some way deformed; this in a time when monstrous births were considered another fingerpost of witchcraft. But that thesis has to remain speculation.

^*Mary of Guise had been married to the Duc de Longueville in 1534 and had two sons, François born in 1535 and Louis in 1537, a few months after his father’s death. Louis died and François, as the new duke, was left with her Guise relations when she travelled to Scotland to marry James V.

^*Elizabeth was refering to the Pythian Ode: ‘Creatures of a day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow. But when a god given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a gentle life’.