LITMIR.BIZ

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‘There is something sublime in the words and bearing of the Queen of Scots that constrains even her enemies to speak well of her.’

      Part of the drama of their lives is this great opposition between their natures, their earliest experiences and the kinds of rulers they wished to be. All her life, Elizabeth had steeled herself to prove to the world she had the heart and mind of a man, so aware was she of the accepted inferiority of being merely female. She often boasted that in this masculinity her strength resided, yet she had all the passions of a woman, and expressed these most notably in her love for her favourites and her tenderness for her people. Mary was seen as recklessly emotional and liable to nervous collapse, and yet she showed a more ruthless resolve to see her sister queen murdered than Elizabeth could summon up for the judicial execution of Mary herself. So unlike in temperament, these queens nevertheless were well matched in the vigour of their ambitions and their obstinacy of purpose. The weapons they used were different, but each had just as great a capacity for harm.

      In considering Elizabeth’s and Mary’s lives in relation to each other, illuminating symmetries occur. They both had remarkable mothers who, for different reasons, were lost to them. Anne Boleyn was a clever woman, radical in her Protestant sympathies, courageous and spirited, but a stranger to her daughter through death, and erased through the dangers inherent even in her memory. Mary of Guise, redoubtable queen and role model for Mary, but largely absent and unknown, due to the dynastic ambitions that made both mother and daughter exiles in each other’s land.

      Each queen was involved in scandal over a favourite possibly implicated in murder, but they dealt with the crises they faced in completely different ways: Elizabeth’s action safeguarded her throne and gave her the moral foundation from which to impose her future authority; Mary’s decision lost her not only the throne but her freedom, and eventually her life. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign it was the English queen who was consistently compared by foreign ambassadors, to her detriment, with her cousin, the Queen of Scotland. Elizabeth was the intractable monarch, the wanton queen, while Mary lived a model life as dauphine, then queen, then dowager queen of the great kingdom of France. Her return to Scotland marked the beginning of the adventures that would reverse these comparisons in epic fashion.

      From that moment the tension in their relationship mounted. There was a struggle for supremacy and a desire in each to claim the moral high ground. Mary’s marriage and the birth of her son confirmed her conformity with expectations of what it was to be a good queen, while Elizabeth continued to prevaricate and evade her duty to provide for the succession. Then with Mary’s rumoured involvement in the murder of her husband and marriage to the likely murderer, heedless of Elizabeth’s trenchant advice, she set the English and Continental courts agog. There followed civil war in Scotland and humiliation for Mary, then imprisonment, fear for her life, miscarriage, forced abdication, night-time escape and precipitate flight to England. A plaintive existence as a genteel prisoner for seventeen years was enlivened with various plots to attain her freedom, and even her eventual elevation to the throne of England.

      Even in death Mary sought to wrong-foot Elizabeth. Found guilty of incitement to kill her cousin, she went to her execution nobly insisting she was sacrificed for her faith alone. By dying heroically as a Catholic martyr, she rescued her reputation from the wreckage of her life. Elizabeth, as an old queen dying after more than four decades of transforming rule, was aware instead of the galloping hooves of the messenger’s horse riding north. The next incumbent of her jealously guarded throne would be Mary’s son, James, King of Scotland and now King of England too. This would mark Mary’s final triumph, the succession of the Tudors by the Stuarts. But there was triumph for Elizabeth too, for Mary’s son ruled their newly united kingdoms as a Protestant state.

      The story of Elizabeth’s and Mary’s relationship is punctuated with reversals of fortune: murder mysteries, sexual intrigue, reckless behaviour, avowals of affection, heated battles and cold war. Fear, heartbreak and tragedy were its underlying strain. Yet surging through natural barriers of prejudice, masculine perspective and vested interest, these two queens emerge evergreen in their importance and fascination: Elizabeth, regardless of her weaknesses, confounding every prejudice against women in power; and Mary, despite her strengths, fulfilling in the end every foreboding, but with astounding boldness and abandon. They are welcome exceptions in the vast congregation of men who jostle for space in their domination of history.

      That these two remarkable queens should have been contemporaries, neighbours in one small island, is gift enough for any writer. That they should be united by blood but inextricably enmeshed in a deadly rivalry for the same kingdom, the same throne, gives the story of their relationship the brooding force of Greek tragedy.

      I came to this book as a biographer not a historian, believing that character largely drives events, explains motivation, and connects us to each other through the centuries. These queens lived lives vastly different from our own, but they behaved and felt in a way fundamentally familiar to us now. The outbursts of defiance, the flagging spirit, the pride in achievement and longing for love, all this is expressed in their own clear voices, as are the less familiar qualities of kingly pride, autocratic power and bloody revenge.

      As a biographer one lives for years exploring the world and the mind of a stranger. For me in this case it was two strangers. Yet in those years these strangers gain a certain sense of intimacy and their lives a foothold in one’s own. In living so closely with these queens, inevitably my ideas and prejudices have changed. I became more aware of the profound loneliness of their role; the fear, the danger and responsibility were daunting, yet they accepted this and even revelled in it. The physical suffering and discomfort of their everyday lives was overlaid with such magnificent show and animated with an enormous zest and appetite for life itself. Above all, it is their characters that have gripped me, with their different energies and ambitions, their distinctive voices and the complexity of their human responses and feelings.

      Mary was clearly a passionate and impetuous woman, but with a personal charm so disconcerting that even Elizabeth feared to meet her. She emerges a more intelligent and subtle thinker than I had initially thought her to be, and with a courage and energy in action that was breathtaking; her ruthlessness and desire for revenge more Medicean than Stuart in its lack of compromise or pity. Elizabeth, so obviously crafty, clever, and in imperial command of herself and others, also surprised with how tentative she could be, how affectionate, tender, and full of humour and charm. I hope that in these pages will be found some sense of that vitality; that through their own words, and the exploration of their relationship, we can look anew at these remarkable women and redoubtable queens.

       CHAPTER ONE The Fateful Step

      ‘I am already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England’ …

      Stretching out her hand she showed them the ring.

       Queen Elizabeth’s first speech before Parliament, 10 February 1559

      THESE WERE DANGEROUS TIMES. The second quarter of the sixteenth century had made Elizabeth Tudor and her generation of coming men watchful, insecure, fearful for their lives. Nothing could be taken for granted. Health and happiness were fleeting, reversals of fortune came with devastating speed. This was the generation raised in the last days of King Henry and come of age in a time of religious and political flux. The religious radicalism of Edward VI’s reign had been quickly followed by reactionary extremism and bloodshed in Queen Mary’s. During the political tumult of these years there was no better time for ambitious men to seize position, wealth and honours. No longer was power the exclusive prerogative of old aristocratic blood. When a Thomas Wolsey, son of a butcher, or a Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, could rise in Henry’s reign to be the mightiest subject in the land, then what bar to ambition during the minority of Edward, the turmoil of Mary, and the unpromising advent of Elizabeth? But vaulting ambition and exorbitant rewards brought their own peril. The natural hierarchy of things mattered to the sixteenth-century mind. Men elevated beyond their due estate, women raised as rulers over men were unnatural events and boded ill. Those with the greatest aspirations could not expect to die peaceful in their beds.

      God

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