The young elizabeth, p.1
The Young Elizabeth, page 1
ALISON PLOWDEN was born in India and was formerly a script writer and editor for the BBC. Her television credits include Mistress of Hardwick, for which she won a Writers Guild Award. She is the author of many successful historical books including The House of Tudor, acclaimed by the great historian A.L. Rowse as ‘Simply excellent on every count … impossible to fault in scholarship or writing’. This has recently been re-published by Sutton, where it joins others of her works, including Two Queens in One Isle: The Deadly Relationship of Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots, Tudor Women, The Stuart Princesses and Women all on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War. Alison Plowden lives near Wantage in Oxfordshire.
Praise for Alison Plowden’s Elizabethan Quartet
‘The expert and scholar … ought to give Miss Plowden the fullest marks for remarkable accuracy’
Jasper Ridley
Glasgow Herald
‘a vastly interesting account’
The Times
‘Miss Plowden brings to the whole period perceptive judgment and wide sympathy’
Irish Times
‘it would be difficult to praise too highly Alison Plowden’s Danger to Elizabeth … her extraordinarily fine book’
Church Times
‘Enchanting, scholarly and superbly written, warmly recommended’
Charity Blackstock
Books and Bookmen
‘the sustained concentration on the subject and the balanced intellectual control of the elements involved make it the work of a scholar’
Stephen Wade
Catholic Herald
‘Professors have something to learn from perceptive women in penetrating the very feminine psychology of Elizabeth I’
A.L. Rowse
Sunday Telegraph
‘She writes with verve, brevity and often wit … a most entertaining book which, at the same time, is accurate and judicious’
Paul Johnson
Evening News
‘an absorbing portrait of possibly the greatest tease in history’
Publishers’ Weekly, USA
‘a model of clarity’
G.M. Wilson
Times Literary Supplement
To Joe Burroughs
In Happy and Grateful Memory
Contents
* * *
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
I A Gentleman of Wales
II The King’s Great Matter
III ‘An Incredible Fierce Desire to Eat Apples’
IV ‘Anne Sans Tête’
V The King’s Daughter
VI Elizabeth’s Admiral
VII ‘The Peril that Might Ensue’
VIII Sweet Sister Temperance
IX The Queen’s Sister
X ‘We Are All Englishmen’
XI Elizabeth, Prisoner
XII ‘A Second Person’
XIII England’s Elizabeth
Notes
Select Bibliography
Copyright
Prologue
* * *
AT three o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, 29 May 1533, Queen Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke, ‘most dear and well-beloved’ wife of Henry VIII, embarked at Greenwich for the journey up-river to the Tower at the beginning of her coronation celebrations. She was escorted by an impressive contingent of the nobility and by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, with all the crafts of the City of London in barges sumptuously decorated with banners and streamers and cloth of gold, and plentifully supplied with bands of musicians ‘making great melody’.1 According to one awed foreign spectator, there were so many boats and barges, and so many ladies and gentlemen that it was a thing to wonder at. He added that, although it was four English miles from Greenwich to London and the river was quite wide, nothing else could be seen all the way but boats and barges draped with awnings and carpeted. On arrival at the Tower, the Queen was greeted by a salvo of more than a thousand guns so that it seemed to the same foreigner ‘verily as if the world was coming to an end’.2 In fact, such was the gunners’ enthusiasm, that not a single pane of glass survived either in the Tower or neighbouring St Katherine’s.
On Saturday, the thirty-first, came the recognition procession through the City to Westminster, and no expense had been spared to make it a memorable occasion. The great cavalcade, shimmering with gold and crimson, silver and purple and scarlet, wound its way through freshly gravelled and gaily decorated streets. The Queen herself, dressed in white cloth of tissue and ‘sitting in her hair’ as one observer put it, rode in a litter of white cloth of gold drawn by two palfreys caparisoned to the ground in white damask. At every point of vantage along the route pageants and tableaux were presented, children spoke carefully rehearsed pieces in welcome and praise, and all afternoon the conduits and fountains ran with wine.
The climax of splendour was reached on the following day, Whitsunday, with the coronation ceremony itself when
Queen Anne was brought from Westminster Hall to the Abbey of St Peter’s with procession, all the monks of Westminster going in rich copes of gold with thirteen abbots mitred; and after them all the King’s Chapel in rich copes with four bishops and two archbishops mitred, and all the Lords going in their Parliament robes, and the crown borne afore her by the Duke of Suffolk, and her two sceptres by two Earls, and she herself going under a rich canopy of cloth of gold, apparelled in a kirtle of crimson velvet powdered with ermines and a robe of purple velvet furred with powdered ermines over that, and a rich coronet with a caul of pearls and stones on her head, and the old Duchess of Norfolk bearing up her train, and the Queen’s Chamberlain staying the train in the midst.3
In the Abbey itself, set in her ‘seat royal’ before the high altar, Anne Boleyn was anointed and crowned Queen of England by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ‘and so sat crowned in her seat royal all the Mass and offered also at the said Mass’. Afterwards, at the banquet in Westminster Hall, she occupied the place of honour at the high table under the Cloth of Estate, served by the nobility of England, while the minstrels made ‘goodly sweet harmony’ in the background and the King looked on from a place which he had had made from which he could see without being seen.
This was Anne’s moment of triumph – a moment which for six years she had worked and schemed to bring about, conducting a dangerous and difficult campaign with cold-blooded courage, tenacity and skill. It only needed now for the child she was so visibly carrying to be a healthy boy and her tremendous gamble – a gamble which had brought the former maid-of-honour to the second highest place in the land – would finally have paid off beyond all possibility of doubt.
CHAPTER I
A Gentleman of Wales
* * *
THE story of Elizabeth Tudor began just over a hundred years before she was born. It began with a love story – with the romance of a young widowed queen and ‘a gentleman of Wales’.
Katherine of Valois, called ‘the Fair’, daughter of the King of France, had been married to that notable warrior, King Henry V of England, hero of Agincourt, in June 1420 – a marriage designed to seal the Treaty of Troyes which was to inaugurate ‘perpetual peace’ between the two countries. Two years later, on the last day of August 1422, Henry died of dysentery at the Castle of Vincennes just outside Paris. Katherine became a widow shortly before her twenty-first birthday, and her son, ‘Harry born at Windsor’ who was destined to lose all the glory his father had gained, became King Henry VI at the age of nine months.
The youthful Queen Dowager, stranded in a foreign country and probably both bored and lonely, presently found diversion with one of the gentlemen of her household, Owen Tudor, her Welsh Clerk of the Wardrobe. ‘Following more her appetite than friendly counsel and regarding more her private affections than her open honour’, as the chronicler Edward Hall put it. Understandably perhaps, for Owen is described by Polydore Vergil as being ‘adorned with wonderful gifts of body and mind’, and by Hall as ‘a goodly gentleman and a beautiful person garnished with many godly gifts both of nature and of graces’. Another (earlier) chronicle was less complimentary, referring to him tersely as a man of neither birth nor livelihood.
Years later, Owen’s grandson, the first Tudor king, was to be somewhat embarrassed by certain ‘reproachful and slanderous assertions’ about the deficiencies of his pedigree, and felt it necessary to appoint a commission consisting of the Abbot of Valle Crucis, Doctor Owen Poole, canon of Hereford, and John King, herald, to enquire into the matter. After visiting Wales and consulting the bards and other authorities, these seekers after knowledge drew up their masters ‘perfect genelogie’ from the ancient Kings of Britain and Princes of Wales. The Tudors, they said, could prove lineal descent by issue male, saving one woman (an artistic touch), from Brute the Trojan – mythical first King of the Britons, who was supposed to have given his name to the land.
In actual fact, however, the founder of the family fortunes appears to have been Ednyfed Fychan, who served the rulers of Gwynedd – the principality of North Wales – as seneschal or steward, from approximately 1215 to his death in 1246. Ednyfed was evidently highly thought of by his employers, for they rewarded him with extensive grants of land in Anglesey and Caernarvon. He also acquired estates in West Wales, and he and his relatives were allowed the unusual privilege of holding their lands free from restriction, excepting homage and military service in time of war.
The conquest and subjugation of Wales by England in 1282 does not seem to have ad versely affected Ednyfed’s descendants. On the contrary, by the middle of the next century, the seneschal’s great-great-grandson, Tudurap Goronwy, had emerged as a considerable landowner. Like a number of other Welsh magnates, he probably supported the English crown and Goronwy, eldest of his five sons, served with the army in France. It was the unsuccessful revolt of Owen Glendower in the early 1400s which brought about the family’s downfall. Through their mother, Tudur’s sons were first cousins to Glendower. Old loyalties reasserted themselves and the remaining four brothers (Goronwy had died in 1382) threw in their lot with the rebel chieftain. The consequences were disastrous. Rhys, the middle brother, was executed in 1412 and all the family estates were confiscated; though the property at Penmyndd in Anglesey was later returned to Goronwy’s heirs.1
Owen Tudor was the son of Maredudd, youngest of the brothers, who held some office under the Bishop of Bangor and was escheator of Anglesey. He was born most probably some time in 1400 and despite the ill-judged activities of his relations later contrived to enter the English royal service. It is not known exactly how or when this happened, although he may have followed Glendower’s son, who was officially pardoned in 1417 and became a Squire of the Body to Henry V. There is no evidence to support the tradition that Owen was present at the battle of Agincourt, but he may have been in France in 1421 on the staff of the distinguished soldier and diplomat Sir Walter Hungerford. Sir Walter was one of the executors of Henry V’s will and in 1424 became steward to the infant Henry VI, so it is at least possible that he was the means of finding the promising young Welshman a job in the Queen’s household.2
The circumstances surrounding Owen’s courtship of the Queen Dowager are unfortunately obscure. As Clerk of the Wardrobe, his duties would have included guarding Katherine’s jewels and buying and paying for the materials for her dresses – duties which no doubt provided plenty of opportunity for them to get acquainted. It is said that on one occasion he was called upon to dance before the Queen and her ladies. He overbalanced and fell into Katherine’s lap, and her reaction to this familiarity led the onlookers to suspect there was something between them.
No record survives of when or where they were married; but, as Katherine bore her second husband three sons and one, possibly two, daughters before her death in 1437 and their legitimacy seems never to have been questioned, the ceremony cannot have taken place much later than 1429, the date generally assigned to it.
It would be fascinating to know more about the private life of this oddly assorted couple. Katherine’s own early childhood had been unsettled, with a background of disruption and war. Her father, Charles VI of France, was subject to long and recurring fits of insanity, during which he was liable to tear his clothes, smash the furniture and imagine himself to be made of glass, so that he dared not move for fear of breaking. Her mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, acquired a considerable reputation for loose living and general bad character. She is said to have neglected her younger children to such an extent that for a time they went ragged and hungry. Katherine’s short-lived marriage to Henry V was a matter of high politics and one hopes she found happiness with her Welshman.
Their wedding took place without the knowledge or consent of the Duke of Gloucester – Protector of the realm during the King’s minority – and several accounts declare that it was not discovered until after Katherine’s death. It is straining credulity somewhat to believe that the Queen Dowager could have successfully concealed at least four pregnancies, even if she was living away from the court. A more probable explanation seems that her unsuitable marriage was tolerated by tacit consent during her lifetime, rather than precipitate a scandal involving the King’s mother. Owen may also have had influential friends, for in 1432 he was granted letters of denizenship which relieved him of some at any rate of the penal legislation then in force against the Welsh people. Towards the end of 1436, however, the family broke up. Katherine retired into the Abbey of Bermondsey, where she died the following January at the age of thirty-five – possibly giving birth to a daughter who did not survive. The Abbess of Barking took charge of the other Tudor children – Edmund and Jasper, then about six and five years old, Owen, who later became a monk, and a girl of whom nothing is known except that she, too, entered the religious life.
Their father’s subsequent career contains all the ingredients of an old-fashioned adventure-story. Deprived of his wife’s protection, he evidently thought it wiser to remove himself from the vicinity of the Duke of Gloucester. He was at Daventry when, not long after Katherine’s death, a summons was issued by the Council requiring ‘one Owen Tudor the which dwelled with the said Queen Katherine’ to come into the King’s presence. Suspecting a trap, Owen refused to obey unless he was given an assurance in the King’s name that he might ‘freely come and freely go’. According to a minute of the Privy Council’s proceedings dated 15 July 1437, a promise to this effect was conveyed to him by a certain Myles Sculle, but Owen was not entirely satisfied. He came to London ‘in full secret wise’ and took sanctuary at Westminster, where ‘he held him many days’. This despite the fact that ‘divers persons stirred him of friendship and fellowship to have comen out thereof, and some in especial to have disported him in [the] tavern at Westminster gate’. Owen, no doubt wisely, resisted these persuasions. However, some time later, hearing that the King was ‘heavily informed of him’, he suddenly appeared in the royal presence and
declared his innocence and his truth, affirming that he had nothing done that should give the King occasion or matter of offence or displeasure against him, offering himself in large wise to answer as the Kings true liege man should to all things that any man could or would submit upon him. And so submitted himself by his said offer to abide all lawful answer.3
He was allowed to depart ‘without any impeachment’ but shortly afterwards was arrested and committed to Newgate. The Council felt it necessary to justify their action in a somewhat specious memorandum, saying that Owen’s ‘malicious purpose and imagination’ were not known to the King or the Duke of Gloucester when the safe conduct was issued. They added piously that it was ‘thought marvellous’ that one of the King’s liegemen should desire any such surety before coming to his presence, and anyway Owen had been allowed to go free – for a time.
Polydore Vergil says that he was committed to ward by order of the Duke of Gloucester, ‘because he had been so presumptious as by marriage with the Queen to intermix his blood with the noble race of kings’, but there is nothing to support this assertion in the Privy Council minutes. In fact no specific charge is mentioned, but from the very meagre information which does exist it would appear that Owen was involved in some private quarrel – probably of a financial nature – with an unnamed adversary.
An entry in the Chronicle of London for the sixteenth year of the King’s reign records that Owen ‘brake out of Newgate against night at searching time, through help of his priest, and went his way, hurting foul his keeper; but at the last, blessed be God, he was taken again’.4 This was probably in February. He was recaptured by Lord Beaumont and temporarily consigned to the dungeons of Wallingford Castle in Berkshire, but later returned to Newgate with his servant and the priest. On 4 March 1438, Lord Beaumont received twenty marks to cover his expenses, and the sum of eighty-nine pounds which was found on the priest was handed over to the Exchequer.5 It would be interesting to know if this enterprising cleric was the same priest who had married Owen and Katherine.
When Henry VI reached his majority the fortunes of the Tudor family improved. The gentle, devout king took a constructive interest in the welfare of his Welsh relations and provided for the education of his two elder half-brothers. As soon as they outgrew the Abbess of Barking, Edmund and Jasper were brought up ‘chastely and virtuously’ by discreet persons. Their father also received a pension of forty pounds a year which the king, moved by ‘certain causes’, paid out of the privy purse ‘by especial grace’. Owen, who had finally been released from prison in 1439, was now a respected member of the royal household and presently found it convenient to adopt an English style patronymic, Owain ap Maredudd [or Meredith] ap Tudur becoming Owen Tudor.
