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| ELIZABETH REGINA: 1558-1568 | |||||||||
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From her accession in 1558 until she passed the age of childbearing, Elizabeth I's ministers, parliament and people were obsessed with her marriage. This was no romantic or frivolous obsession but a deadly serious political essential. When Elizabeth coyly demurred from wedlock in the early months of her reign, no one believed she meant it. In a violent age where kings maintained their thrones by armies and in which no army would follow even a popular queen, the Queen's most important duty was to marry and bear an heir immediately. Her husband would defend the realm and her child inherit it and provide for England's future stability. TO DIE A VIRGIN " And in the end, it shall seem to me sufficient that a marble stone shall declare that a queen having lived such a time lived and died a virgin." Elizabeth I to her first Parliament, 1559. The panic of Protestant reformers focused this obsession with an heir like a magnifying glass concentrates light. England was a small island of reformation in a Catholic world. The horrors of Queen Mary's heretic-hunting emphasized that the religion of the ruler could be enforced as the rule of the kingdom. If Elizabeth should die without heirs, the next in line was undoubtedly the very Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. England would again do the volte-face in which thousands might die in the martyrs' fires. Even after Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in England after 1568, Elizabeth's death without heirs laid the kingdom temptingly on the plate for hungry French and Spanish Catholic rulers. It was the decision of her Council, courtiers, and Parliament that she must marry, and quickly too. This reckoned without Elizabeth. She had that rare, troubling facility to see a question from multiple angles. Regarding this burning issue, she could see no acceptable solution. To marry would give up her sovereignty in an age when men ruled and women bore their children. To marry a foreign prince would drag England at the coattails of a foreign nation, as Mary I had supported her Spanish husband in war with France, with the devastating loss of Calais. To marry an English noble would demean the monarchy as a whole and, specifically, risk uprisings among those jealous of the chosen. The religious crisis intruded. To marry a Catholic might cause revolts in her own kingdom; to marry a Protestant would cast her foreign policy in granite and force England into endless wars with Catholic Europe. To bear children would be to risk her own life; if (and this is a big "if") Elizabeth even believed herself capable of having children. She may have had intimations that she was barren. If not able to bear an heir, in marrying she would have thrown away the advantages of her autonomy for nothing - as Mary had done and as her father had nearly done. And after a lifetime of uncertainty, the new Queen was determined to enjoy her freedom without immediate obligations. THE PROTESTANT SETTLEMENT Early in her reign, Elizabeth took on the vexing necessity of hammering out a religious settlement for the English Church. In the end, she and her counselors chose a middle path which satisfied neither religious extreme but proved workable for the country at large. The religious settlement reached in the spring of 1559, embodied in complicated Acts after months of intense negotiations, was more Protestant than Mary or Henry VIII's church. It was more "Catholic" than the most extreme of Edward VI's reformed rites. The Queen was denominated Supreme Governor of the Church in England. In the face of extraordinary difficulties, a compromise was reached which was accepted by the majority of her subjects and which prevented the kinds of religious wars seen throughout the end of the century in Europe.
SWEET ROBIN Throughout the heady early years, it was Robert Dudley, the bête-noir of her counselors, who was constantly by Elizabeth's side. Dudley, son of the attainted traitor who crowned Jane Gray, who had known Elizabeth since childhood and had attended her brother Edward until his death, is the perennial imponderable all writers must address in discussing Elizabeth's sexuality. From the first moments of her reign, when she made Dudley her Master of Horse, to his last letter to her 30 years later on his deathbed, Dudley maintained his hold on Elizabeth's friendship and affections. Nicknamed "the gypsy" for his swarthy handsomeness, Dudley was in Elizabeth's favorite mold; energetic, athletic, swaggering, educated, witty, and visibly virile. He was also ambitious to the core. For a long time it may be that Dudley actually thought Elizabeth might marry him, given all the dangers in her imagination from a foreign husband. Certainly, her court buzzed as scandalous tales reached throughout Europe of her flirtations with Dudley, rumors that she admitted him to her bed, even rumors of children born and smuggled out of the palace. As Baron Von Bruener, a Hapsburg agent, wrote his employers, Elizabeth seemed to think she could get away with anything "but herein she errs, for if she marry the said my Lord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and the rise the next morning as plain Mistress Elizabeth." Cecil was in despair that all the benefits of a foreign alliance could be thrown away on this parvenu. He hinted to the Spanish ambassador that he would have to resign and had heard that Dudley meant to poison his wife. Then the roof caved in on Dudley's hopes. Dudley had married Amy Robsart in 1550, before his dizzying ascent as Elizabeth's favorite. The young Princess had possibly attended the wedding. Amy was not brought to Court but remained with various family friends. There were rumors of a malignancy of the breast. Ambassadors wrote in code that Elizabeth was merely waiting until the wife's death to marry her favorite. In the fall of 1560, Amy was staying with friends at Cumnor Place in Berkshire. On September 8, 1560, Amy was found dead at the foot of the Cumnor Place stairs - from a broken neck. The servants had been sent away for the day and there were no witnesses to her death. Elizabeth acted as hastily as if Dudley had the plague and she might catch it. Dudley was sent from Windsor to Kew. A rigorous examination of the facts was initiated, carried through by independent authorities in preparation for the inquest. When the coroner's court returned a verdict of accidental death, Elizabeth recalled Dudley, while the scandal rocked the embassies of Europe. Mary Queen of Scots summed it up for many with the memorably catty remark, " So the Queen of England is going to marry her horsekeeper,who has killed his wife to make room for her!" Throughout, Elizabeth debated. By the end of the year we have Cecil's word for it that, if she had ever entertained the idea of marrying Dudley, she had abandoned it. Significantly, everyone who knew the Queen best believed that she was truly in love with Dudley. It is highly significant that, in view of his reputation, the damage she could do to hers, her loss of political clout, and perhaps more private considerations, she made the decision to reject any further relationship beyond friendship and flirting. Only once more would she ever seem emotionally involved on the subject of marriage. THE SUCCESSION TATTOO 
Suitors continued to be suggested for Elizabeth after the Dudley debacle. The issue of the succession was given a severe wrench when, in 1563, Elizabeth caught smallpox and nearly died. Although she finally recovered, her deathbed petition to her Council was to make Dudley the realm's protector, which everyone agreed was intolerable. Facing continued pressure from her Council and people, Elizabeth resorted to procrastination and theater. Throughout the 1560's and '70's, numerous suitors paraded through her Court and were briefly or lengthily considered: two kings, two archdukes, five dukes, two earls, and more in the first years of her reign alone. At the same time, her courtiers - never quite sure that none of them could be the chosen one - swirled about her as planets about the sun. Periodically her Parliament approached her, hectoring or humbly, requesting that she marry and provide an heir but she always managed to stave them off. Whether Elizabeth foresaw the consequences of her delaying tactics, their end result was to keep alliances warm for years on the mere hope of a concluded marriage and to defer wars because a slender hope of becoming England's king was trotted out at necessary intervals. Meanwhile, the Queen spent her first decade on the throne watching the emotional and political self-destruction of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, with its built-in homily that queens who married for love repented at leisure . . . if they survived. By the end of the 1560s, Elizabeth faced the relentless buildup of a Catholic Europe now in counter-Reformation. Although she had faced many challenges in ten years - the rebellion in Scotland, the religious settlement, playing France and Spain off against each other - the issue of religious war had lain dormant, a serpent drowsily asleep under the table. Her personal relationships had never mattered; now, they mattered only to provide an heir to keep England alive. In hindsight, her first decade would be the most peaceful of her reign, in the face of a world which now demanded that she choose one religious extreme or the other. The half-asleep serpent was awake.
Sources: Coronation Portrait of Elizabeth from The National Portrait Gallery, London. Portrait of Robert Dudley from The Wallace Collection. Quotation from Baron Von Bruner from Plowden's Two Queens in One Isle, p. 52. Chalk drawing of Elizabeth by Federico Zuccaro courtesy of Elizabethan Images. The chalk sketch is one of the few images of Elizabeth I which are believed to have been drawn from life.
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Suzanne Cross
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