Proud and haughty, as although she knows she was born of such a mother, she nevertheless does not consider herself of inferior in degree to the Queen, whom she equals in self-esteem; nor does she believe herself less legitimate than her Majesty, alleging in her own favour that her mother would never cohabit with the King unless by way of marriage, with the authority of the Church.... She prides herself on her father and glories in him; everybody saying that she also resembles him more than the Queen does and he therefore always liked her and had her brought up in the same way as the Queen." So said the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michiel, after meeting Elizabeth Tudor in the spring of 1557. She had survived four years of her sister's disastrous reign - but only just.

THE SHORTEST REIGN

On July 6, 1553, King Edward VI died, aged 15. John Dudley, head of the king's Council and Earl of Northumberland, had already summoned both Princess Mary and Elizabeth at their separate country estates to come to their dying brother - who was already dead. The difference in response between the two sisters speaks volumes about their respective characters. The Council's summons was ignored by Elizabeth (who feigned illness) and accepted by Mary, who set out for Greenwich in spite of warnings from the Spanish ambassador that she was in danger. As they did now, so the rest of their lives the two sisters would show the same contrast between Elizabeth's cool political instincts and Mary's warm and dangerous emotion.

Elizabeth and Mary were both suspicious of Dudley, whose radical Protestantism and personal ambition led him to engineer Seymour's destruction and seize control of the Council. Although it had been kept secret, Dudley had convinced the very sick King in June to cut both his half-sisters out of the Act of Succession mandated by Henry VIII in 1544. The King's "device" named the starkly Protestant Lady Jane Gray as his heir. In that same month, the "44 Articles" had gone further than ever before in destroying Catholic belief in the state religion, inserting Protestant beliefs such as redemption by good works alone. The young King had become a hard-line reformer. He was happy to remove the Catholic Mary from the succession but Dudley had to do some convincing before he also disinherited Elizabeth. Dudley's argument was that, for consistency's sake, neither half-sister could be permitted to inherit the throne. It was also not widely known that that Dudley had married his son, Guildford, to Lady Jane Gray in anticipation of the king's demise. Dudley planned to install the strongly Protestant Jane and his son as puppet rulers, with himself in control. To succeed in what was essentially a coup d'état, Dudley needed to get physical possession of both remaining heirs before any risings could occur in their favor.

After Edward died, Dudley hid news of the death while he frantically laid final plans. On July 9, Jane was proclaimed Queen in London. A merchant described her en route to the Tower of London in the next day's procession:

"She is very short and thin, but prettily shaped and graceful. She has small features and a well-made nose, the mouth flexible and the lips red. The eyebrows are arched and darker than her hair, which is nearly red. Her eyes are sparkling and reddish brown in color." (Baptista Spinola) As the only portrait of Jane Gray is now proved to be of Katherine Parr, no likeness of the nine-day queen is known to exist.

On that same day, the first letter for the Council arrived from Mary, now in Kenninghall in East Anglia, expressing astonishment that, as heir to the throne, she had not been formally notified of Edward's death. The letter commanded that Mary's accession be proclaimed in London.

It took slightly more than a week for Dudley and the Council to lose all support for their dynastic scheme. Dudley, after a failed attempt to raise an army, saw Mary acclaimed by one town after another. The Council skulked in corners. Seeing the game was up, its members betrayed Dudley and proclaimed Mary as Queen. While England rallied to her, Mary was communicating frantically with the ambassadors of her cousin, Charles V of Spain, beseeching Spanish advice and arms to assure her throne. For some days she put more faith in promised Spanish aid than in the welling support of her English subjects, a pattern she would repeat in the future. On July 19, it was all over. Mary was proclaimed Queen in London. The reign began with the first, but not the last, conspiracy against a Catholic queen.

Dudley, returning to London, was quickly taken, tried, and condemned. The arch-Protestant gave an extraordinary speech which clearly showed which way the wind was now blowing: "My masters…I do most faithfully believe this [Catholicism] is the very right and true way, out of the which true religion you and I have been seduced these sixteen years past, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new [Protestant] preachers.... And I do believe the holy sacrament here most assuredly to be our Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ and this I pray you all to testify and pray for me." It did not save him and he went to the scaffold in the Tower that August.

lLONG LIVE THE QUEEN

Throughout the nervous month between Edward's death and Mary's entry into London, Elizabeth had watched and waited at Hatfield, ignoring every Dudley effort either to draw her out or secure cooperation with his efforts. Finally, when word reached her of the collapse of the Dudley forces, Elizabeth promptly took off for London to meet her victorious sister. Perhaps tactlessly, Elizabeth entered London on July 29 accompanied by 2,000 retainers in Tudor green and white, accepting the cheers of the city. On July 31, she rode to the northern highway along which Mary was entering the city and greeted the new Queen. The sisters had not met since shortly after their father's death. By all accounts Mary had treated the childish Elizabeth with generosity and kindness. She now saw before her the self-possessed and devious daughter of her nemesis, Anne Boleyn,with Anne's dark eyes and long fingers. While Mary had risked all, Elizabeth had held back, safe, at Hatfield. Elizabeth also saw that her half-sister was prematurely aged, thin, nervous and emotional. The air must have twanged with undercurrents.

A conciliatory Mary insisted that Elizabeth participate in her formal entry into London in August. Elizabeth was brought to Court and made a part of those frenetic early weeks in which the future course of Mary's Catholic reign would be decided. Charles V responded to Mary's requests for aid by sending her Simon Renard, the new Spanish ambassador, who more than any single man would help set the tone for Mary's reign and Elizabeth's place within it. Mary's mission appeared to be, rather pathetically, the determination to return England's society and Church to its place in the last years in which she had known security and happiness, in the late 1520's - before the arrival of Anne Boleyn, the Divorce, and the English Reformation.

Mary was 35. For almost sixteen years she had lived largely retired from Court in a Catholic household, surrounded by Catholic and Spanish advisers. Her mind and character had been forged in the searing misery of the 1530's when the formerly petted Princess of England was denounced and declared a bastard, her mother was divorced and mistreated until she died, and the daughter similarly abused by her father, her evil new stepmother, the king's Council, and Thomas Cromwell. Further pressures had been brought to bear against her during her brother Edward's increasingly radical Protestant reign. Her miseries had made her a religious hysteric, an ailing, melancholy, emotionally starved woman who had once abjured her Faith under political pressure from her father. She now had the stubborn fanaticism of the sheep returning to the fold. She was also frequently ill from both physical and psychosomatic reasons; her digestion had long been poor, she suffered from severe headaches, and she had menstrual difficulties.

Mary turned, as she had always turned, to her mother's family for help and counsel. Throughout her reign, Mary would trust Spain with the simplicity of a child. Every wrong turn she made was made in the hopes of pleasing the Spanish and the Pope, to whom the restoration of England to the hegemony of Rome was all-important. This dependent trust would nearly kill Elizabeth and forever stain Mary's own reputation for good judgment.

DANGER TO ELIZABETH

From the first weeks of Mary's accession in the fall of 1553, Renard sought to distance the Queen from her English advisors and from her half-sister. As marriage negotiations continued, pressure was brought to bear upon Elizabeth to conform to the rejuvenated Catholicism of Mary's court. The housecleaning began immediately. In September, famous Protestant ministers like Coverdale were deprived of office and fled overseas. The Catholic bishops Gardiner and Bonner, long imprisoned in a Protestant state, were released and reinstated. Archbishop Cranmer, who more than any man helped Henry VIII found a Protestant kingdom, was arrested along with other notable Protestant divines like Latimer and Ridley. Parliament passed an Act of Repeal in October that essentially emasculated the Edwardian Reformation: the Catholic mass was reinstated throughout the kingdom. Mary refused her father's vaunted title of Supreme Head of the Church in England. Protestants were already abroad.

Elizabeth had not been born when her father broke with Rome. She was brought up as a Protestant and studied under and read divines deeply influenced by the Calvinist experiments in Geneva. Mary, pressuring her to attend Mass, presented Elizabeth with a dangerous dilemma. She knew herself to be the beloved figurehead of a reformed Protestant party - her brother Edward had called her his sweet"Sister Temperance" - so a volte-face like that engineered by Dudley at the scaffold would damn her with the Protestant faction. Not attending Mass would inflame Mary's already paranoid suspicions that her sister was prevaricating about her faith. As she would do for the rest of her life, Elizabeth delayed commitment as long as possible in either direction.

Mary's dislike and jealousy of her half-sister became increasingly obvious as the weeks passed. So did the fascination and distrust of the French and Spanish courtiers swarming throughout the palace, addressing themselves to Elizabeth as if she was the acknowledged heir to the throne. By October 1, only three months after their first meeting, Elizabeth appeared in Mary's coronation procession in slightly reduced rank, matched with Anne of Cleves, her father's divorced fourth wife. That same month, Mary forced Parliament to repeal her parents' divorce. This re-legitimized Mary and publicly bastardized her half-sister. Mary was heard making emotional references to her half-sister. At one point she declared that Elizabeth was not, in fact, her half-sister at all, but the bastard of Anne Boleyn and a court musician. Elizabeth's position in court ritual was diminished.

Increasingly uncomfortable, Elizabeth asked leave in late October to leave Court and go to one of her houses in Ashridge. Mary refused, preferring to keep Elizabeth where she could control her, but finally agreed to Elizabeth's withdrawal in late 1553. The two sisters had endured each other's company precisely four months. Elizabeth would soon return to Court under extraordinary circumstances.

From the first, Renard had pressed Mary to execute both Lady Jane Gray and Elizabeth, thus removing all Protestant heirs before Mary reintroduced Catholicism. Within weeks of her accession, Renard had helped negotiate a marriage between Mary and Philip, the son of her cousin, Charles V. Philip of Spain was 28 years old and a widower. Mary, nearly a decade older, hoped for an heir even at her advanced age. The marriage was extraordinarily unpopular with the English people. They distrusted foreigners, especially Spanish foreigners - one might say, especially Catholic Spanish foreigners.

In January, 1554, negotiators arrived from Spain to draw up the formal marriage contract and in early February, rebellions cumulatively known as the Wyatt Rebellion flared up in several areas of England. Its instigators - including Thomas Wyatt, son of the poet - were determined to force the Queen to give up the Spanish marriage and alliance. The inept plotters were summarily captured and beheaded but the conspiracy gave Renard an excuse to pressure Mary. He declared that, unless the threats to her realm's stability were removed (i.e., Elizabeth and Jane Gray), Philip would refuse to come to England for the marriage. Mary angrily agreed. After her long imprisonment, Jane Gray was executed. Elizabeth would be accused of treason.

TO THE TOWER FOR TREASON

Elizabeth was summoned to Court at Whitehall to answer certain charges in February, 1554. She was only slightly implicated in Wyatt's Rebellion by certain letters captured from the French ambassador. Wyatt declared her innocence from the scaffold but Mary did not believe him. Elizabeth tried to delay by claiming illness but was summarily brought to Court in a litter. The Queen was leaving shortly to go to Oxford. Kept in an isolated part of the palace, Elizabeth was closely interrogated by Bishop Gardiner. Her servants were questioned. Elizabeth knew from the start that any connection with the Wyatt Rebellion would be high treason and she would probably die for it. Sympathetic ministers of her sister had already warned her that the least misstep in either loyalty or politics could destroy any remaining credit she had with Mary. It was the most frightening time of her life. She was 20 years old.

Finally, the pleas of Renard, the advice of Spain, and the demands of Gardiner and the Council were fulfilled; on March 16, 1554, Elizabeth was surrounded in her apartments by officers come to take her to the Tower of London, where her mother, Catherine Howard, Thomas Seymour, Jane Grey, and others she knew had gone to imprisonment and death. Elizabeth pleaded to be permitted to write the Queen before the barge left on the evening tide. When this was grudgingly granted, she swiftly composed a poignant masterpiece of political art and heartfelt anguish which shows that she clearly knew precisely what political and personal motivations underlay her arrest: the Spanish pressures to remove her as a threat before Phillip's arrival. By the time she finished her lengthy letter, Elizabeth had lost them the tide. It was not until the next day, March 17, 1554, that she was conveyed in secrecy to the Tower.

Elizabeth staged a minor scene upon her arrival, which many have seen as an emotional breakdown. Elizabeth was in a nightmare position. When the barge entered Traitors' Gate and grounded against the wharf, Elizabeth, like a child, sat in the rain and refused to get up and climb the stairs to the Tower. She protested her innocence of any wrongdoing to her surrounding guards, calling herself Mary's loyal and faithful subject, with no friend but God alone. Some historians think this was an hysterical collapse in the face of unimaginable stress. It is equally easy to see it as a desperate staging to secure maximum attention from the guards and those around her. The more who knew she was confined within the Tower, the less likely she would simply be taken off within its walls by poison or other means. In fact, her display of terror provoked a sympathetic reaction in the royal guards, with cries of "God preserve your Grace!"

Elizabeth was lodged in a small room in the Bell Tower with her few attendants. For the next several weeks she was interrogated concerning her knowledge of Wyatt's Rebellion and permitted to take some exercise upon the battlements of the Tower. Ironically, Robert Dudley, later so significant in her life, was also imprisoned in the Tower with other surviving sons of the Duke of Northumberland. It is unknown if they met. Although Elizabeth remained outwardly calm and collected, her health began to suffer from the unending stress and confinement.

Although she did not know it, events would soon make her imprisonment of only two months' duration, although long enough to mark her in ways she never afterwards forgot. Philip II was going to marry Mary I in the summer. Although Renard continued to pressure Mary to execute Elizabeth for treason, his master soon made it clear that he did not agree. Philip, invariably smarter than Mary in reading her own people, knew that Elizabeth was tremendously popular with the English, particularly those who looked to her as a Protestant symbol. For Mary to execute her own sister, however compromised she might be, immediately before an unpopular marriage with a foreign Catholic king, would start the new administration off on the worst possible footing. Philip had his own plans for how to deal with Mistress Elizabeth, and none included making her a martyr to discontented English Protestants. He urged Mary to be conciliatory.

Elizabeth was never a woman who wore her heart on her sleeve, but she must have known real fear during this period, based on her innate understanding that a prince's wrath was death, never more so than for those accused of treason. An early prayer attributed to her during this period was "Help me now, O God, for I have none other friends but Thee alone. And suffer me not (I beseech Thee) to build my foundation upon the sands, but upon the rock, whereby all blasts of blustering weather may have no power against me, amen."

In preparation for her wedding, Mary intensified the pressure to return England to Catholic purity of worship. In March, 1554, she ordered the bishops to suppress heresy and restore numerous Catholic ceremonies, including Holy Days. Married clergy were to be removed from their parishes. In April, after a sharp clash with the Queen, Parliament agrees to pass laws against heresy only if the Queen agreed to drop the issue of returning monastic lands despoiled by King Henry and purchased by patriotic Englishmen a generation before. Mary, in her naiveté, had initially offered to return all church lands owned by her subjects to the Church. It would not be until November, 1554, a year after her accession, that Mary's supreme happiness was accomplished: the Pope lifted the sentence of excommunication from England and Reginald Pole, Cardinal Legate, again brought Roman authority to England. At the same time, Parliament finally bent by passing a second Act of Repeal, which voided all religious legislation since 1529. It was as if the Henrician and Edwardian religious reforms had never occurred. England's official faith returned to that of Mary's youth. The burning of Protestant martyrs would begin in February, 1555. Eventually, more than 300 would burn in 3 ½ years, giving Mary the indelible nickname of "Bloody Mary."

RELEASE FROM THE TOWER

On May 19, after slightly more than two months in the Tower, Elizabeth was released on the very day on which Philip II finally came to London to claim his bride. She had survived two months of interrogation and rumor - rumors of poisoning, rumors that her death warrant was already prepared - and towards the end her nerve had apparently faltered. Under the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield, she was now conveyed slowly to the old royal lodge at Woodstock, where she would undergo an extended period of house arrest far from Court. Mary wished no distractions for the arrival of her prince. For many months, Elizabeth became invisible. She was not present for the marriage to Philip in July 1554, in a blaze of Catholic ritual and celebration. At least in her travel to Woodstock she had seen many tokens of the affection in which she has held and the procession became, in a small way, a celebration through the countryside. Now, she was essentially in the care of a jailer who who regulated her company and forbade or monitored her news, letters, or visitors. Almost all she was permitted to do was to read and, with limitations, to write to her sister and to the Council, which she did unfailingly. Without specifically protesting her imprisonment and subsequent treatment, she clearly suggested that she had not been permitted to defend herself against allegations of disloyalty and was, as Henry VIII's daughter, next in line to the English throne. Perhaps worst of all to Elizabeth was the difficulty in securing news of Ccourt or larger political horizons. While Philip and Mary celebrated and Mary soon declared herself pregnant (which would diminish Elizabeth's place in the succession), Elizabeth had few sources of information. Month after month passed in Woodstock in dreary sameness.

Woodcut illustrations from Fox's so-called "Book of Martyrs."

Meanwhile, Mary's efforts to restore Catholicism intensified throughout 1554 and 1555. It was not until April, 1555 - almost a year after Elizabeth's rustication at Woodstock - that Mary was finally persuaded by Philip to recall Elizabeth to Court. Once there, Elizabeth was not permitted to see her sister (although she did meet Philip). She was again interrogated by Bishop Gardiner and others who demanded that she confess to disloyalty and beg the Queen's forgiveness. When Elizabeth dodged this by stating she had done nothing which required forgiveness, Mary became angry all over again. Finally, in a late-night summons from Mary, an uneasy pseudo-reconciliation was devised. Within the next weeks, Bedingfield was removed as Elizabeth's keeper and she was permitted to move into Hampton Court Palace in her own chambers, although still under close observation. She would need all her patience in the next four months.

Mary had declared herself to be pregnant in the fall of 1554, and the birth was expected in April of the next year. It was to witness the birth of Mary's child under safe guard that Elizabeth had been brought back to Court. Week after week went by with no signs of labor while every ambassador in Europe awaited results. The date of the expected birth was put back by weeks, then months, while Mary herself apparently could not admit to herself that there was no child. The symptoms of pregnancy may have been due to a "hysterical" pregnancy (in which symptoms of pregnancy are created by psychosomatic factors) or through an ovarian tumor. Finally, in August, 1555, even Mary had to admit the truth. Philip, who had stayed dutifully in England awaiting the birth of the non-existent child, soon announced his intention to return to the Netherlands to look after his own lands. During the same period of the queen's purported pregnancy, bad harvests and increasing unrest over the escalating execution of Protestant heretics had created a poisonous atmosphere. Through all this, Elizabeth stayed as much out of sight as possible and did not see the Queen.

Before leaving England, Philip pointedly asked Mary to safeguard Elizabeth, making it clear that Mary's mistreatment of Elizabeth, still the sole heir to the throne, would personally displease him. Elizabeth's safety hung on Mary's obsessive desire to win her husband's love.

Much later in life, Philip hinted that he had been very much taken with the young Elizabeth. Married to a sick woman whom he did not love, and given their occasional meetings at Court during this unpleasant period, some have even fantasized that Philip fell in love with his half-sister-in-law. This is extremely unlikely. Elizabeth walked far too dangerous a tightrope during this time to even dream of a flirtation with her sick sister's husband. Philip throughout his life was a slave of duty, not pleasure. It is likely that Philip recognized Elizabeth's intelligence and good looks. From almost the moment Mary was dead, he pursued a marriage with Elizabeth to retain his influence in England. In any event, his intercession was significant in preserving Elizabeth's safety for the rest of Mary's reign.

FAR FROM THE COURT

IIn late 1555, Elizabeth departed the gloomy Court for her own house at Oatlands. The next three years of her life, although never comfortable, were far less traumatic than the first two of Mary's reign. Elizabeth continued to remain well out of the public eye. She was not invited to Court and did not seek attention. Largely from her house at Hatfield, she communicated carefully with others; she would say later (when Mary Queen of Scots was being condemned) that she well knew how prisoners could influence their jailers and obtain information when isolated from the great world. By the fall of 1558, Mary was obviously dying, probably from an abdominal or uterine tumor. Almost until the end, she bitterly resisted any attempts to formally declare Elizabeth her successor. In spite of her silence, the road to Hatfield was increasingly studded with French, Spanish, and other diplomats paying a courtesy call on the next queen of England. Elizabeth, particularly in view of her sister's uncertain temper, maintained great decorum with such visitors as she chose to receive.

The new Spanish ambassador arrived in Hatfield, piping hotfoot with instructions from Charles V. He was puzzled at Elizabeth's response to his overtures of Spanish support. The ambassador advised Elizabeth that she owed her life and (future) crown to Phillip, and in return, Philip expected Elizabeth to accept his advice and guidance, based of course on the continuation of a Catholic nation. Elizabeth murmured sweet nothings but provided no specifics. The ambassador felt unappreciated. As he wrote to Philip, all of the new men about Elizabeth appeared to be Protestants and her inclinations after her succession seemed sympathetic to the reformers:

ACCESSION DAY: NOVEMBER 17, 1558

At long last, on November 17, the messenger arrived bearing the Queen's ring. Mary had died in the night. The legend says that he found Elizabeth beneath a spreading oak tree where she had gone for a walk. She took her sister's ring and, in Latin, quoted from the Biblical verse of Mary at the Annunciation, "This is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in Our eyes." Even in that sublime moment, she used the royal plural.

Within days, courtiers of her sister crowded Hatfield's neighborhood, including one above all others upon whom Elizabeth would depend in the years and decades to come. On November 20, 1558, prior to leaving for London, the new Queen made a speech to her attendant lords, saying to William Cecil, new Secretary of her Council,

I"I give you this charge, that you shall be of my Privy Council and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgment I have of you; that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best..."

To the rest, she noted gracefully that she would govern with the advice and counsel of her nobility and those who had advised her father, brother and sister, noting that those not selected for her Council were dispensed with only because "I do consider a multitude doth make rather discord and confusion than good counsel." This allowed her to immediately reduce the bulky size of Mary's Council and begin to weed out those who would attempt to hinder her in setting a new course for where she meant England to go.

NEXT: ELIZABETH REGINA

Sources:

Portrait of Elizabeth soon after her accession by unknown artist. Portraits courtesy of Tudor and Elizabethan Portraits, Queen Elizabeth I Gallery. The Bell Tower, pictured, where Elizabeth was imprisoned at the Tower of London, was also where Sir Thomas More was imprisoned. He died due to the marriage of Elizabeth's parents and Henry VIII's subsequent Reformation of the English Church. The Bell Tower is the second oldest structure besides the White Tower itself.

Elizabeth's prayer is from a collection published in 1582 known as "The Christian prayers of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth, which her grace made in the time of her trouble, and imprisonment in the Tower..." See Elizabeth I: Collected Works.