The first Elizabeth Read online

  She was not raised to revere particular doctrines for themselves, but rather to believe deeply and without question the central verities of Christianity—the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, the miracle of blessed bread and wine consumed in worshipful remembrance, the promise of a serene afterlife. When she disobeyed, she was reminded of heaven and hell, of "the horned and hairy monster being in hell to catch bad children," and of how "the good ones go to paradise, dancing with the angels."

  Such were Elizabeth's mental parameters, the fixed ideas that shaped her earliest thoughts. "For the pure clean wit of a sweet young babe," Ascham wrote, "is like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing; and like a new bright silver dish never occupied, to receive and keep clean, any good thing that is put into it." 14 By the time she was five or six, Elizabeth's "pure clean wit" bore a strong and lasting imprint, one that would be deepened and refined, though not fundamentally altered, as she grew older.

  Early in 1540, when she was six years old, Elizabeth was brought to court to be present at an unusually solemn event. Her father was to celebrate his fourth wedding, and this time his bride was to be a foreigner, the delicate blond sister of the duke of Cleves.

  Jane Seymour, Edward's mother and the king's third wife, had died within days of her son's birth, and after more than two years as a widower King Henry had agreed to a political match. His bride-to-be, Anne of Cleves, came from a duchy rich in mercenary soldiers and with great strategic importance should war break out between England and the Haps-burg emperor Charles V. On the day of her public greeting at Greenwich Anne's "determined and resolute countenance" was framed by a pearl-trimmed bonnet and her thin figure was encased in an ill-cut German gown which did nothing to enhance her appearance in English eyes. Yet despite this inauspicious debut the king married her, and Elizabeth began to grow accustomed to seeing yet another woman in her mother's place at her father's side.

  Queen Anne's appeal as a stepmother cannot have been great. She spoke only a few words of English, and was surrounded by ruddy-faced foreigners with such unpronounceable names as Vresvydour, Hoghsteyn and Swart-zenbroch. Yet nothing in her outward behavior was objectionable enough to explain the king's decision, only a few months after the marriage, to separate from her. Elizabeth could hardly have guessed that simple physical revulsion lay behind the separation, and she must have been puzzled, to say the least, by the swiftness with which Anne was replaced by the king's fifth wife, Catherine Howard.

  The new queen was not yet out of her teens, a blooming, nubile girl whose sensuality rejuvenated the king and made him besotted. His abundant gifts to his new wife—gowns, chains, jewels in an inexhaustible stream —were one measure of his affection; his constant caresses another. Catherine's Howard relatives regained entirely what favor they had lost with the disgrace of the family prodigal Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth too was drawn closer to the circle of privilege around the queen.

  Elizabeth and Catherine Howard were closely related, as Elizabeth's Howard grandmother was Catherine's aunt. Whether there was any close personal attachment between them is conjectural, but Elizabeth rode in Catherine's barge and stayed with her for a time, in the spring of 1541, at the king's riverside manor of Chelsea. 15 Evidently Queen Catherine passed on to her young stepdaughter a small share of the largesse with which King Henry showered her. An inventory of her jewels listed a small bauble, "little thing worth"—perhaps a brooch or cross—given away to Elizabeth, and also a rosary "with crosses, pillars and tassels attached." 16

  With the king's several marriages came renewed interest in Elizabeth as a potential bride. During 1538, when Henry had been engaged in the search for a wife which culminated in his marriage to Anne of Cleves, he proposed matches for himself and his children. Elizabeth was included in

  these grandiose schemes for multiple marriages, in which her father, brother and sister were to take brides and bridegrooms from among the relatives of Charles V. (The emperor let the English ambassador know, however, that where Elizabeth was concerned he "noted the life and death of her mother," and considered the subject closed.)

  Later, while Catherine Howard was queen, the legitimacy of both of King Henry's daughters became a stumbling block in marriage negotiations with the French. "It was more honorable," the French envoys said haughtily, "for the son of France [the dauphin] to marry the poorest gentlewoman, being legitimate, than a dame of the noblest parentage, being illegitimate." 17 This being their view, Norfolk discouraged them from bargaining for Elizabeth as a bride for the duke of Orleans. "The opinion of Queen Anne, her mother, was such that it was quite decided to consider her illegitimate," he told them, "as the Act of Parliament declared." And besides, she came last among the king's children in order of succession. 18

  As the issue was being decided there came another wrenching reversal in the king's affections. After a year and a half of marriage it was discovered that Catherine Howard had not been a virgin when she married King Henry, and there were those who swore she had not been faithful to him as a wife. She was sent away, her lovers executed, many of her relatives imprisoned. Lady Rochford, wife of the executed George Boleyn and Elizabeth's aunt, was condemned as the queen's accomplice in her romantic intrigues.

  Catherine Howard's swift fall reminded many of the dramatic ruin of her cousin Anne Boleyn^ and led to much head-shaking over the spectacular unchastity of the Howard women. Old memories were revived, and once again Anne Boleyn's daughter came in for tacit censure.

  For Elizabeth, who at eight and a half was beginning to grasp the enormity of her father's treatment of her mother, now lived through a reenactment of his vengeful authority. The queen, a terrified girl one-third her bloated husband's age, was brought to the Tower where she and Lady Rochford—the latter raving mad—awaited death. As with Anne Boleyn's execution six years earlier, the high scaffold was erected on Tower Green. The crowd assembled. The queen was led up the steps to stand before her subjects, to confess with her final words that she had broken God's commandments and offended "very dangerously" against the king, and to ask the king's pardon. And she suffered, and her headless body was taken to the Tower chapel to be buried, without ceremony, near her cousin's.

  Spring came, then summer, and in September Elizabeth's ninth birthday. There was a new companion in her life, a boy of about her own age. He was Robin Dudley, the son of John Dudley, a man of rising importance

  at her father's court. There was a special empathy between the two children, and though Elizabeth was not a confiding child she confided in him. She told him very seriously, he recalled many years later, that she had made up her mind never to marry.

  Think'st thou, Kate, to put me down With a "No" or with a frown? Since Love holds my heart in bands I must do as Love commands.

  T

  he destruction of his plump, young fifth wife left King Henry depressed and sometimes savagely hostile. He limped around the privy chamber on his swollen legs, ranting at his servants, cursing his subjects for their ingratitude and his councilors for their hidden plottings. He limped to the dining table, and sat down to course after course of savory delicacies, which he consumed with a methodical gluttony that kept his tailors steadily engaged in enlarging his doublets and his armorers hammering new harness to surround his enormous girth. The Herculean meals he consumed and the rivers of wine with which he washed them down blackened his temper; while the mood was on him he trusted no one, and became, to those who tiptoed into his presence, quite simply "the most dangerous and cruel man in the world." 1

  Yet after a year of this he found his equilibrium, and in July of 1543 braved ridicule by marrying for the sixth and last time. His tall, auburn-haired bride was a witty and sensitive woman with serious turn of mind. Catherine Parr had been brought to the marriage not by the king's persuasion but by a powerful conviction that it was God's will; her own will, set firmly on another course, she renounced. Her small features composed, she repeated her marriage vows in the queen's privy clo
set at Hampton Court, as nine-year-old Elizabeth and five-year-old Edward looked on. Mary, who

  at twenty-seven was only a few years younger than the new queen and had grown up with her at court, stood by as her father spoke his vows "with a joyous countenance," and put the gold wedding ring on Catherine's white finger.

  Though demure and subservient in her husband's presence, Catherine was accustomed to taking command. She came from a line of dominant, enlightened women: her grandmother Elizabeth Fitzhugh had been a remarkable woman of vigorous intellect; Maud Parr, her mother, as a young widow with three children had served Katherine of Aragon as lady in waiting while looking out for her children's welfare and interests virtually unaided. Catherine Parr herself was a veteran of two dutiful, demanding marriages, neither of which can have awakened her passion. She had married her first husband, an elderly widower in declining health, at fourteen, and when he died she married Lord Latimer, a middle-aged Yorkshire gentleman who expected her to look after his London house, his magnificent border castle and his two young children. By the time he died in 1542 Catherine was no more than thirty, yet she had acquired the organizing genius of a lord chamberlain, the healing skill of a physician and the toughness and resilience of a soldier on campaign. She had the strength and skill to cope with yet another cantankerous, aging husband, and she had convinced herself that coping with him was, at least for the time being, her destiny.

  Much has been made of the high-minded learning and religious devotion of Elizabeth's fourth stepmother. Her earnest study of the Christian classics and the inward-looking piety she expressed in her widely read devotional books set her apart from her contemporaries and gave her unique appeal as a woman who combined strong intellect with urgent human feeling. A member of Catherine's household left a flattering portrait of his mistress, her mind "so formed for pious studies that she considered everything of small value compared to Christ." 2 Her rare goodness, he wrote, "made every day a Sunday, a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace." He considered himself blessed to be part of her holy establishment, "where Christ is celebrated daily," and where the queen's rich store of virtue improved and uplifted all who dwelt with her.

  Yet these effusive sentiments are misleading. Catherine was indeed devout, but her capacity for passionate devotion was but one part of a general capacity for passion. She was an ardent woman, and when she married Henry VIII she was very much in love with another man.

  Thomas Seymour was a handsome, energetic man with a broad brow and keen eyes. Robust and youthful at thirty-five, he was still unmarried, though consumingly eager to marry as soon as the right situation presented itself.

  He was only the fourth son of a country gentleman, but his sister Jane Seymour had been queen and his nephew Edward Tudor would before long be king; his brother, Edward Seymour, far outshone him in political advancement—though not in looks or personality—yet his brotherly patronage and indulgence of Thomas' undisguised ambition was bound to be an asset in the long run. All in all, Thomas Seymour held himself worthy to marry a woman of unusually high rank and great fortune, and as Lord Latimer's widow Catherine Parr fulfilled at least the second requirement. Seymour approached her, and found her warmly responsive. "My mind was fully bent," she wrote him later, "to marry you before any man I know." But then the king intervened, and his proposal took priority.

  In Henry's eyes Catherine was the perfect bride. She was a good-looking woman, an intelligent and opinionated conversationalist, an accomplished huntswoman and a good shot with a crossbow. Careful tutelage had purged her of willfulness and sensuality—though vulnerable to romance she was, as she put it, "none adulterer, nor fornicator, and so forth"—and she was old enough to show common sense should temptation present itself. She would supervise the care of his children, Henry was sure, and would serve him humbly and without resentment as he confronted old age.

  It was no wonder that, after five unsatisfactory wives, his expression was joyous as he married his sixth. And no matter what malicious gossip said, it was not in perverse celebration of his wedding that he sent a priest, a chorister and a tailor to their deaths just then for heresy. 3 These were uncertain times for the church, and Henry, with his godly wife beside him, had to purge error ^s often as he found it, wedding season or no.

  The royal couple set out almost at once on a leisurely hunting progress, riding through green fields and luxuriant meadows to the country manors of Oatlands, Guildford, Sunninghill and the More. The grasses were unusually tall, and stubborn weeds crowded the planted fields, for the summer was oppressively rainy. Henry decreed prayers to be said for sunshine; without it the crops would be ruined. But the wet weather continued, and made conditions ripe for a severe outbreak of the summer scourge, plague.

  In the early weeks of the honeymoon all three of the king's children were together with their father and stepmother—until then a very rare circumstance. In August, as Henry and Catherine proceeded with their progress, Elizabeth was sent to stay with Edward, and Mary continued on with the royal party. By then the pestilence was spreading. As always it was worst in London, with tentacles of infection reaching deep into the countryside to menace market towns and villages. The king and his party took refuge in the remote hunting lodge of Woodstock, where for a month and more

  they isolated themselves from the surrounding region and watched the rain drench the park, ruining their sport. By mid-October, however, the sickness had run its course and, with the number of deaths subsiding, they made their way back to court, where Catherine would take up in earnest her role as mother to the heirs to the throne.

  A harsh stepmother, a contemporary treatise taught, "shows herself to be an enemy, gathering up hate without cause, and wreaking it upon the weak and innocent." A good stepmother, on the other hand, "will wish to be to her husband's children that which she may often hear them call her, that is 'Mother.' " For the next five years Catherine Parr was something akin to a mother to Elizabeth and Edward, and a sisterly adviser to Mary. Her role was more that of overseer than anything else, for as always the children had their own households and followed the itinerant pattern that saw them moving in a recurring cycle from one country house to another. Sometimes the royal family did not even assemble on holidays; in fact, for a year after the wedding Elizabeth did not see either her father or her stepmother at all. 4

  Yet Queen Catherine's influence was no less powerful for being exerted at a distance. Undoubtedly she gave careful attention to Elizabeth's education, as she graduated from Kat Champernowne's rudimentary tutelage to more advanced lessons with Edward's tutors, first the learned clergyman Richard Cox and then John Cheke, regius professor of Greek at Cambridge and among the greatest scholars of his age.

  Cox, Edward's first tutor, was an affectionate teacher who used the most imaginative means to make learning palatable. In 1544, when Edward was nearly seven and Elizabeth going on eleven, he built his lessons around the most interesting of contemporary events: Henry VIII's invasion of France and conquest of Boulogne. He challenged the children to "conquer the captains of ignorance" as the king was conquering the French, and presented every exercise—learning the parts of speech, conjugating Greek and Latin verbs, and so on—as a fortress to be besieged or a bulwark to be defended. He even cloaked discipline in military metaphors, referring to Edward's recalcitrance as "Captain Will" and subduing it with the "morris-pike" of a sharp slap or spank.

  John Cheke succeeded Cox, and perhaps because of his own exalted abilities as a classical linguist—most of his works were translations of Greek texts into Latin—he recognized Elizabeth's precocity and, with her stepmother's acquiescence, recommended that she have her own tutor. William Grindal, a learned and patient young Cambridge scholar recently disappointed in his bid for a readership at St. John's College, was the

  choice. For the next three years and more, Elizabeth was to benefit from Grindal's scrupulous, attentive training, as she was steeped in the particular world view of English Protestant humani
sm.

  Cheke, Grindal, and Roger Ascham—who though he stayed at Cambridge until 1548 was nonetheless in close touch with the others—were all from St. John's. With Cox and other Cambridge scholars they formed an intellectual bridge between the internationalist, Catholic humanism of Erasmus and Thomas More, with its distaste for fine points of doctrine and its optimistic religious tolerance, and the radical, Protestant learning that was aggressively nationalistic and that welcomed doctrinal distinctions as antidotes to heresy. Their program laid much emphasis on Greek and Latin (and, for university scholars, Hebrew as well), for without a mastery of these tongues one could not read either the works of the Church Fathers or the classics of antiquity in the original. But though the classical writers— Demosthenes, Plato, Vergil and, in particular, Cicero—were prized for their unsurpassed eloquence and depth, still their works were seen as imperfect compared to the higher eloquence, the perfect truth of the Bible. Cambridge in the 1540s, one writer has said, was in transition from a stronghold of ecclesiastical learning to a seminary for laymen; no longer clerical, it was nonetheless a training ground in Christian virtue, where gentlemen's sons were meant to form their character and sharpen their religious sensibilities for the lifelong struggle against sin. And they were to live their heroic lives within the confining bounds of the English church, devoting themselves to the untiring service of the state and the monarch.

  The men who taught Elizabeth were young. Grindal was in his twenties, Cheke barely thirty, Cox an ingenuous forty-four. Yet compared to the earlier generation of humanists they were straitlaced and inflexibly devoted to purity of life. Dancing, card-playing, gambling were anathema; long hours of sermons and private meditation, combined with improving reading, fortified one, they taught, for the strife of the world. There was an occasional whiff of the medieval about these enlightened products of the Renaissance. Roger Ascham, writing to Elizabeth's cousin John Ashley, sent him a series of pictures representing the Dance of Death, in the hope that in this macabre reflection he would "discern, as in a mirror, the decay of glory, the flesh, the world, lust, and all vanities." 5