Elizabeth I

142 Pages·2014·3.54 MB·English

by  Abigail Archer

Nearly everyone has a mental image of Elizabeth, the brilliant
sixteenth-century Queen of England who launched the age we
now know by her name. We may think of her as the greatest
ruler her nation ever had, one who pulled together a shattered
country and laid the foundation for an empire that lasted for
centuries. Or we may see her as Glorianna, the improbable
Virgin Queen, who inspired the devotion and chivalrous passion
symbolized by the myth of Sir Walter Raleigh flinging his cloak
across a puddle so that she could cross it dry-shod. We might
remember Elizabeth as the global strategist who sent Raleigh to
colonize North America and commissioned Sir Francis Drake to
plunder the treasure galleons of Spain and then used him to
defeat the mighty armada that Spain had launched to conquer
England. Or we could see her as the inspiration for a new
flowering of English culture, culminating in the music of William
Byrd and the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare.
All of those visions would be correct, but none of them does her
full justice. Elizabeth was a queen for all seasons. She
transcended a wretched, motherless childhood: She was
declared a bastard after her father, Henry VIII, divorced her
mother, Anne Boleyn, and then had Boleyn beheaded. A lifelong
lover of books, Elizabeth became a scholar and intellectual;
through instinct and her classical studies, she learned to
navigate the perilous politics of Tudor England and survive the
plots that could easily have ended in her death. And when she
finally gained the throne, she used her wit and talent to fend off
her many suitors and keep her enemies divided. In the end, she
held her fractured country together long enough to mend its
worst wounds, see the dawn of prosperity, and win the
enduring love of her people.
Queen Elizabeth’s life was as complex as her character; no
matter how much we learn about her, we will never know the
complete woman. But the effort is both instructive and
rewarding – and this brief story of her life is a good way to
begin.
Elizabeth ruled England for forty-four years. She was the last of
the Tudor line of monarchs, whose roots were in Wales; the
Tudors had risen to power in 1485, when Henry VII became
king. His son, the flamboyant, mercurial, sometimes wrathful
Henry VIII, broke with the Catholic Church and founded the
Church of England to escape his marriage to his first wife,
Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry the young and lissome
Anne Boleyn, the daughter of one of his courtiers. But Anne
turned out to be only another in a succession of wives. Henry
married six women, executing two of them, with Anne the first
to lose her head. The charges fabricated against her – treason,
adultery, witchcraft, and incest – were clearly a pretext; her
true fault was failing to produce a male heir. Elizabeth was
three years old when her mother went to the block and fourteen
when Henry VIII was buried. She would have to wait ten more
years, through the reigns of her half-sister Mary I and half-
brother Edward VI, until she won the crown.
As a monarch, Elizabeth was sensible and judicious. Her father’s
break with Rome had thrown the country into turmoil, and Mary
had tried zealously to restore Catholicism in England, earning
the name “Bloody Mary” by persecuting Protestants and burning
them at the stake as heretics. But Elizabeth put an end to the
inquests, trials and executions. “I have no desire to make
windows into men’s souls,” she said. She reinstated the
Protestant Bible and English Mass, but generally refrained from
persecuting Catholics.
Under her rule, her country experienced a cultural renaissance.
Poetry, music, and literature flowered. Shakespeare and
Christopher Marlowe composed plays that broke free of tradition
to create a new style of theater. William Byrd’s music gave the
age its tone, and a generation of British artists began to
displace the European painters, led by Hans Holbein, whose
portraits had long held sway.
Elizabeth used her wit and calculated duplicity to thread her
way through the tangle of schemes, rivalries, and wars plaguing
Europe, and her country’s power and influence grew. In a time
of bold seafaring exploration and conquest, she dispatched
Drake to the New World with orders to sack Spanish holdings
along the coast of the Americas and intercept the galleons
bringing gold to Spain. When Drake brought the Golden Hind
into Plymouth port in 1580, the ship was laden with so much
treasure that Elizabeth, whose share was half, realized a 4,700
percent return on her investment.
The Virgin Queen never married or produced an heir; she
insisted that she would live and die a virgin, and despite her
pleasure in men and her many flirtations, she probably did. She
was never a classic beauty, but in her youth she was slender,
vivacious, athletic, and charming. Her courtiers were smitten,
and she reigned as Glorianna in a mist of erotic tension,
extravagant poetic tributes, and the tattered remnants of
chivalry. Somehow, she kept that illusion alive as she aged
inexorably into a balding grotesque with painted face and
rotting teeth. But all that was a surface play. Elizabeth’s great
talent was to rule, wisely and well, using ambiguity and
calculated dithering to fend off enemies when she lacked power.
She brought wealth and glory to her country and laid the
groundwork for a British empire that would span the globe –
and to this day, not as Glorianna but as “Good Queen Bess,”
she is loved and revered by her countrymen.

On September 7, 1533, at Greenwich Palace, official residence
of England’s Queen Consort, in a room called the Chamber of
the Virgins, Anne Boleyn gave birth to a girl. They named her
Elizabeth after her grandmothers, Elizabeth Howard and
Elizabeth York, doyennes of the Tudor clan. Her parents had
wanted a boy; all of England had wanted a boy, and the royal
astrologers and physicians had confidently predicted the birth of
a prince. So Elizabeth began life as a disappointment.
The king already had two children: the illegitimate and half-
royal Henry FitzRoy, who pursued a life in the shadows as the
Duke of Richmond; and a daughter, Mary, by Henry’s first wife
Catherine. The duke was not considered an heir, but Mary was,
though not a preferred one. Ruling was a man’s job. Only once
in English history had a woman, Mathilda, sat on the throne,
and her twelfth-century reign was not considered a success.
Still, Henry understood that all of England saw Elizabeth as one
of his heirs, and he undertook to make her birth a cause for
celebration. For Elizabeth’s christening, the mayor of London
and a contingent of the city’s most prominent citizens went to
Greenwich aboard barges decorated for the occasion. They were
accompanied by the entire royal court. The assemblage
gathered at the palace and then proceeded in a parade to the
church, walking on a road that had been carpeted with green
rushes. The baby Elizabeth wore a purple velvet gown and a
long train trimmed in ermine that was carried by high-ranking
lords and ladies of the court. An enormous crowd lined the
street. At the church, decked in fine tapestries, the Archbishop
of Canterbury baptized Elizabeth under a crimson canopy.
Afterward, the baby was showered with expensive gifts.
Although he continued to long for a male heir, Henry secured an
act by Parliament formalizing Elizabeth’s claim to the throne.
Henry also demanded that his daughter Mary, now seventeen
years old, acknowledge his marriage to Anne and the
annulment of his marriage to her mother, Catherine. When
Mary refused, he had her moved into Elizabeth’s household to
serve as one of her baby sister’s ladies in waiting. Told to pay
her respects to the new princess, Mary said she knew of no
princess save herself – and burst into tears. It was the
beginning of a lifelong enmity between the half-sisters.
Anne Boleyn knew how much Henry still wanted a son. As
months and then years crawled by with two miscarriages and
no future king, Henry began taking his pleasure elsewhere. He
told Anne bluntly that her life depended on her producing a son.
And when Elizabeth was still a toddler, Henry lost the small
amount of patience he had with his wife. Anne was falsely
accused of having no fewer than four lovers, one of them
supposedly her brother.
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and a key figure in
the English Reformation, decreed the marriage of Henry and
Anne “absolutely and entirely null, invalid, void, without force,
consequence, moment, or effect at law,” and Parliament
declared the Lady Elizabeth, as she was thereafter called, no
longer a princess. The Act “preclosed, excluded, and barred”
her claim to the throne. Catherine of Aragon had recently died,
and now Elizabeth and Mary were both officially bastards.
Then events took a darker turn.
The Tower of London is a large, heavily fortified castle made up
of a number of buildings, including a high tower within an
imposing outer wall. Its earliest structures were built by William
the Conqueror in 1078, and it was regarded as one of the most
impregnable fortresses in the world. Formally a royal palace,
the Tower was, for most of its history, not used primarily as a
prison, and its reputation as a place where people were tortured
and executed is exaggerated. During the reign of the Tudors,
however, it was a grim and gloomy death house for the
condemned. The castle stands on the bank of the River Thames,
and a set of steps drops down to the water from the so-called
Traitors’ Gate, through which prisoners could be delivered to
the Tower by barge.
In the spring of 1536, Henry and Anne quarreled at a jousting
tournament. The king believed, or at least feigned outrage, that
Anne had behaved improperly with one of the gentlemen in
attendance and ordered her taken by a heavily armed barge to
the Tower and deposited in a bleak cell. Terrified, she prayed
for her life and insisted she had done nothing to deserve
punishment. She quickly realized that Henry was not interested
in whether she had committed any indiscretion; he only wanted
her out of the way so he could marry again. She screamed and
cried until the guards concluded she had gone insane, at which
point Henry ordered her put on trial.
But first, he sent a commission to the Tower to interrogate
Anne and make clear what she was being charged with. Also
imprisoned at the Tower were her brother and three men Henry
had chosen for his scenario. Anne was accused of having illicit
affairs with all four; that supported a charge of treason, along
with adultery and incest, and for good measure, she was
accused of witchcraft as well. Henry had his commission inform
Anne that he would spare her life if she confessed. Believing
that surely the truth would somehow come out, and perhaps
fearing what would befall the four men if she confessed, Anne
refused.
Instead, she wrote the king a long, pleading letter from the
place she called her “doleful prison in the Tower.” Anne
professed her complete innocence and told Henry she was
bewildered that he would think she had been unfaithful to him.
She said it was unfair to besmirch her reputation and, by
transference, the infant Elizabeth. Anne begged Henry for a fair,
impartial trial, insisting that such a proceeding would establish
her faithfulness beyond any doubt. She signed off as Henry’s
“most loyal and ever faithful wife.”
In fact, there was no way out for any of the accused. The four
men were told they could avoid execution by confessing. One