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ON THE AFTERNOON of Sunday, 7 September 1533, Queen Anne Boleyn gave birth to a daughter, appropriately – for a future Virgin Queen – in a chamber hung with tapestries depicting the life of the Virgin at Greenwich Palace and on the eve of the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her astrological sign was Virgo, the Virgin. The sex of the child was a grave disappointment and embarrassment, particularly to her father, King Henry VIII, who had broken with Rome and imperilled his immortal soul in order to cast off his previous queen and marry his mistress. It was not for another unwanted girl that Henry had risked so much. Anne had promised him a son and had failed to deliver. As the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys gleefully reported to the Emperor, it was ‘to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards and witches, all of whom affirmed that it would be a boy’.
So sure had they been of the sex of the child that the Queen’s letter to the courts of Europe announcing the birth of a prince had already been written, and there was scarcely room to insert an S. From this moment, Anne’s star began to wane, but she loved her daughter with a fierce and protective passion, so much so that she wanted to take the unusual step – for a lady of high birth – of breastfeeding the child herself. Her wish was denied, not least because it was her duty to become pregnant again and produce a son with all possible haste. Queens consort were glorified breeding machines.
A splendid tournament to celebrate the birth of a son was hurriedly cancelled, but the royal couple was determined to put on a fine show for the christening. In lieu of a son, this child was to be the heir of England, even though, in his heart, Henry could never accept a woman as his successor. How could a daughter, a visible sign of his inadequacy to sire sons, possibly embody the perfection of his regal identity? The Lord Mayor and aldermen and forty of London’s chief citizens were commanded to be at the ceremony to be held on the Wednesday following the birth. They duly took barge for Greenwich at one o’clock on the appointed day, dressed in crimson velvet and scarlet and bristling with gold collars and chains of office.
The christening procession made its way from the palace to the Church of the Observant Friars through a specially erected passageway hung with rich arras and strewn with green rushes. The old Duchess of Norfolk carried the child, who wore a mantle of purple velvet, with a long train furred with ermine. The Duchess was flanked by the premier Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, while the Countess of Kent bore the long train of the child’s mantle. Her grandfather, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, and the Earl of Derby supported the train in the middle at either side, while her uncle, Lord Rochford, was among the four noblemen carrying the rich canopy of estate – denoting her royal status – over her head.
They were met at the church door by the Bishop of London, who named her Elizabeth, after her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth of York. Inside on a raised platform in the middle of the church, the silver font from Canterbury stood under a canopy of crimson satin fringed with gold. Several gentlemen with towels round their necks, ‘that no filthe should come to the fonte’, hovered round it. After the infant had been disrobed close to the warmth of a brazier, she was submerged in the water of the font three times. Her godparents were Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, who had pronounced her father’s previous marriage invalid and that to Anne Boleyn good and sound only a few short months previously, the old Duchess of Norfolk, and Margaret Grey, Marchioness of Dorset. As the devil was driven out, a lighted taper was placed in the child’s hand and all the torches were lit. The Garter chief King of Arms then cried aloud: ‘God of his infinite goodness send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England Elizabeth!’ There were many who wished the baby ill, but this wish would be granted.
The trumpets sounded and Elizabeth was taken up to the altar, where the Gospel was said over her. The godparents presented their gifts, then the company was treated to ‘wafers, confects, and ipocrasse, in such plentie, that every man had as much as hee woulde desire’. The torch-lit procession returned to the palace in the same order, with the trumpets sounding and the christening gifts borne before the child by four persons. Elizabeth was brought to the door of the Queen’s chamber and handed over to her attendants. The Lord Mayor and his companions were taken to the King’s chamber, but they were not to be greeted by the great man in person. He sent Norfolk and Suffolk out to thank them. Then they were taken to the cellar for drinks and back to their barges.
Two months later Elizabeth made the first of many triumphal progresses in a long life as she was carried ostentatiously through the streets of London on the twenty-mile journey north to the former monastery of Hatfield in Hertfordshire, where according to tradition she was to have her own establishment in the charge of the royal governess, Margaret, Lady Bryan. Anne visited her daughter whenever she could, showering her with beautiful clothes – little caps of purple and white satin covered in gold net, kirtles of orange and russet velvet, of yellow satin edged with yellow velvet, green satin with green velvet and white damask with white velvet, and green satin for ‘a little bed’ – and occasionally, as at Eltham in the spring of 1534, Elizabeth received a visit from both parents. She might gradually have become aware of the brooding presence and resentment of her elder half-sister Mary, who had been sent to join her household when her own had been disbanded.
Elizabeth was at court in January 1536 when news came that the erstwhile Queen, Katherine of Aragon, was dead. Chapuys was shocked at the enthusiasm with which the news was greeted, noting that Henry sent for ‘his little bastard’ to join in the celebrations. She was a little over two, but it is just possible that she was aware of the excitement and her father’s joy as he carried her into Mass to the sound of trumpets and later – clad in yellow from top to toe with a white feather in his cap – held her high in his arms and whirled her round, showing ‘her first to one and then to another’. Elizabeth always loved to be the centre of attention and this might have been her first taste of it.
A few months later, she might have been conscious of a rather different scene, when her mother allegedly held her up in supplication to Henry as he stood looking down at them from an open window at Greenwich, barely suppressing his anger. Her mother was pleading with the King, but over what, we cannot be sure. The witness to this event – who recounted it to Elizabeth many years later – places it just prior to Anne’s arrest, but this is unlikely to have been the case. Elizabeth was almost certainly at Hunsdon by the time of her mother’s downfall.
On May Day 1536 Queen Anne was presiding over the traditional tournament at Greenwich when Henry quietly left, slipping out of her life as seamlessly as he had done Katherine’s. The next day, she was arrested on trumped-up charges of adultery with four gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and a court musician, Mark Smeaton. She was also accused of incest with her brother, Lord Rochford. No crime was too monstrous to believe of a woman who was already held in suspicion for her heretical opinions and who, in some quarters, was branded a witch. Brother and sister, it was said, had been seen kissing, with their tongues in each other’s mouth. More pertinently, if the foetus Anne had miscarried in January had been malformed, it would have been easy to persuade the King that such a monster was not his, but the product of an unnatural act.
Anne was also charged with despising her marriage, entertaining malice against the King and affirming that she would never love him in her heart. At the trial she acquitted herself well, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. With her mocking laugh, she had touched the King on his most vulnerable spot, indiscreetly revealing that he was ‘no good in bed with women, and had neither potency nor force’.
Henry was vicious in his revenge. Anne was condemned to be burned alive or beheaded at the King’s pleasure. Her marriage was now judged unlawful, owing to his former relationship with her sister, Mary, and was dissolved. If Anne had not legally been a wife, she could not logically be condemned for adultery, but she was to die anyway. On the morning of 19 May Henry extended the mother of his child a modicum of mercy when on the green within the Tower of London the swordsman from Calais struck off her head with one swift, subtle slice. Her headless body was then pushed into an arrow box and unceremoniously buried beneath the flagstones of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower.
We do not know when Elizabeth learned of her mother’s terrible end and can only speculate as to what psychological effect the brutal truth that her father had judicially murdered her mother had on her young mind; she never spoke or wrote of it. While Elizabeth grew to adore and emulate her father, she certainly was not ashamed of her mother. She inherited many of her qualities: her love of learning and enquiring mind, her ability as an actress and linguistic skills, her elegance and love of dance and poetry, her independent spirit and her wit. As queen she surrounded herself with her mother’s relatives and wore a ring with a portrait of Anne enclosed in a secret compartment.
Elizabeth had enjoyed the position of inheritrix of England for just over two and a half years. Now her fortunes changed abruptly. She was declared a bastard by the Act of Succession of July 1536. Like her elder sister Mary, she was no longer to be addressed as Princess, but as the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, the King’s daughter. Mary and Elizabeth were both bastards now and Mary, basking again in her father’s favour, began to show her little sister some sympathy and kindness. It was not the case with Henry.
While her mother was alive, Henry had appeared quite fond of Elizabeth, but now, just when she had reached the age when a girl-child relates to her father, he broke contact with her. Caught up in the excitement of his third marriage to Jane Seymour, which had taken place with indecent haste shortly after Anne’s execution, Henry seems to have forgotten his little daughter. It was not altogether surprising that Henry did not want to see Elizabeth, the living reminder of a once passionate relationship which had descended into bitter humiliation. The child’s red-gold hair and white skin were clearly his, but her dark, penetrating Boleyn eyes were there to remind him of an episode he would rather forget.
It was left to Lady Bryan to pen an exasperated letter to Cromwell, the King’s secretary, to clarify the matter of her charge’s status and to complain that she had outgrown all her clothes and had nothing to wear. ‘Now it is so, my Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now, I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her, or myself or her women or grooms,’ she protested. She moved on quickly to the more practical problem of the clothes shortage: ‘for she hath neither gown, nor kirtle, nor petticoat, nor no manner of linen, nor smocks, nor kerchiefs, nor rails [nightdresses], nor stitchets [corsets], nor handkerchiefs, nor sleeves, nor mufflers [mob caps], nor biggens [night caps]’. Once beautifully dressed by her mother and already keenly aware of her status, one can imagine the child’s humiliation at having nothing to wear; it was a sharp contrast to the 2,000 or more dresses she left in her wardrobe at the end of her life.
Evidently, Sir John Shelton, the chief gentleman of the household, was still treating Elizabeth as a princess, because he had the three-year-old dining in state every day, much to the chagrin of her sensible lady mistress. ‘Alas! my lord, it is not meet for a child of her age to keep such rule yet. I promise you, my lord, I dare not take it upon me to keep her Grace in health an’ she keep that rule. For there she shall see divers meats, and fruits, and wine, which it would be hard for me to restrain her Grace from. Ye know, my lord, there is no place of correction there; and she is yet too young to correct greatly.’ Lady Bryan, a stickler for discipline and good manners in her royal charges, was reluctant to chastise the child because ‘she hath great pain with her great teeth, and they come very slowly forth, which causeth me to suffer her Grace to have her will more than I would.’ Elizabeth already seems to have been showing signs of a formidable will.
When Henry’s longed-for son, Prince Edward, was born in October 1537, the four-year-old Elizabeth made an official public appearance. She had been relegated to the shadows in the aftermath of her mother’s disgrace, but it seems that she was to take her place with the rest of the family on ceremonial occasions. She was given a part to play at the christening, carrying the chrisom-cloth. She was so young that she had to be carried herself, in the arms of the Queen’s brother, Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, while her elder sister Mary took her hand for the procession’s return to the Queen’s chamber, with Lady Kingston and Lady Herbert bearing their trains.
The sharp four-year-old might have drawn the conclusion from all the fuss being made over her baby brother that it was maleness, being a boy, that mattered. The birth of a brother also meant the loss of Lady Bryan, whose duty as royal governess meant that she had to turn her attention to the next child now. Only eighteen months after the loss of her own mother, Elizabeth lost her surrogate mother, but Cromwell made a wise choice in replacing her with Catherine, the daughter of Sir Philip Champernowne of Devon, who was to spend the rest of her life with Elizabeth.
Catherine, or Kat as she was usually known, was exceptionally well educated for a gentlewoman of her time and, recognizing that her small charge was extremely intelligent and, indeed, precocious, did everything she could to nurture her mental gifts. It was Kat who encouraged and oversaw Elizabeth’s early education, and loved her as a mother. She was obviously doing a good job, because when Elizabeth was six Lord Chancellor Wriothesley visited her and reported: ‘If she be no worse educated than she appears, she will be an honour to womanhood.’ Elizabeth always responded to kindness – perhaps because she already suspected it was a rare commodity – and repaid Kat with her loyalty and devotion: ‘we are more bound to those that bringeth us up well than to our parents,’ she was later to write, ‘for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is bringeth us into this world – but our bringers up are a cause to make us live well in it.’
The death from puerperal fever of Queen Jane Seymour only a few days after her great triumph and Henry’s continuing turbulent marital history made little impact on Elizabeth, with the exception, perhaps, of the fate of his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. The flighty, flirtatious Katherine was Anne Boleyn’s cousin and showed Elizabeth some kindness, giving the child little presents of jewellery of no great value. It is easy to imagine how eagerly the motherless Elizabeth must have responded to this show of affection from the new Queen, and how shattering the news of her brutal end – so reminiscent of her mother’s – must have been to Elizabeth’s young ears. When she was arrested, Katherine ran screaming along the gallery at Hampton Court, desperate to reach Henry. As with Anne Boleyn before her, he adamantly refused to see her. When Elizabeth later wrote to her sister Mary that she knew of many who had been brought to their death by being denied access to their prince, perhaps she had this scene in mind. More pertinently, according to her childhood companion Robert Dudley, it was from this time – when she was eight years old – that Elizabeth determined that she would never marry.
Within the security of her own household under Kat’s care, Elizabeth was happy. Henry’s three children spent much time together in the various royal residences at Hunsdon, Ashridge, Hatfield and Hertford Castle in Hertfordshire. Living with her little brother was a benefit. Not only did the two enjoy a close and affectionate relationship, but Elizabeth could share some of her brother’s tutors and lessons. Edward’s tutor John Cheke, of St John’s College, Cambridge, happened to be Kat’s brother-in-law; he introduced his star pupil Roger Ascham, who was to have a profound influence over Elizabeth’s education. Ascham became a good friend of Kat and of her husband, John Ashley, a distant relative of the Boleyns, whom Kat married about this time, and he recommended as Elizabeth’s tutor his own favourite pupil, William Grindal.
Grindal was to give Elizabeth a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek, while Ascham taught her to write in the distinctive italic hand, of which her signature on state documents is the prize example. With the aid of Jean Belmain and Battista Castiglione Elizabeth became so proficient at modern languages that as queen she could conduct a three-way conversation with, say, the French, Spanish and Venetian ambassadors each in his own language simultaneously. It was a skill, a sharpness of mind, perhaps facilitated by her mastery of Ascham’s method of double translation: his pupil would translate from the Latin into English, then after a time translate back into Latin, attempting an exact reproduction of the original text.
There was no question of Elizabeth’s tutors instilling in their female pupil the sort of passivity that was so inherent in Vives’ education programme for her sister, Mary. These Cambridge men came with a reformist tinge and it was Ascham the supreme educator’s goal to train Elizabeth to think for herself. Above all, he schooled her in rhetoric. The Pauline teaching so redolent in Vives’ thinking, that a woman should be silent and by inference subservient to the male, had no place in Ascham’s curriculum for his future queen.
When Henry married his sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr, in July 1543 all three children were present at the wedding. Elizabeth’s rehabilitation with her father had begun the previous year, when on a visit to Essex he invited his daughters to dine with him. It was almost certainly the first time that Elizabeth, then nine years old, had eaten with him. Henry, whose knowledge of his younger daughter had hitherto depended on the reports of carers and tutors, liked and approved of her. So much so that he proposed her as a suitable bride for the Earl of Arran, in line for the Scottish throne, although it came to nothing. Henry’s children were already on amicable terms, but under Katherine’s kindly influence all three began to spend more time at court, giving Elizabeth a chance to get to know her father.
Unlike Mary, who had pinned her colours firmly to her mother’s mast and devoted much of her energy to defiance and rejection of her father, Elizabeth approached their relationship positively. She genuinely admired the mighty Henry and was proud to be his daughter. ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him,’ the Venetian ambassador was later to observe. Elizabeth was said to resemble him far more than her sister did and she played on this family likeness, speaking of her father frequently in a way that caused people to associate father and daughter, even standing under his portrait when as queen she received foreign dignitaries at Whitehall Palace.
Henry, in turn, seems to have been impressed by Elizabeth, affectionately referring to her as his Bess. Her reward came in the spring of 1544 when she was restored to her place in the succession, after Edward and Mary. Henry did not go so far as to legitimize either of his daughters, but Elizabeth does not seem to have been too concerned about this. It seems to have been enough for her to be acknowledged as the King’s daughter and as an heir to his crown. Later, she was particularly pleased to find that Henry had treated her and her sister as equals in his will. Henry made generous financial provision for them. As queen, Elizabeth made no effort – as Mary did – to have her parents’ marriage declared valid and herself legitimate. She seems to have been content to leave the past where it belonged. In June that year Henry held a ‘void’ or reception at Whitehall, in which he presented his three heirs to the court.
Meanwhile, Queen Katherine Parr clearly saw Elizabeth’s promise and took the girl under her wing, encouraging her in her studies – although Elizabeth was already streaks ahead of Katherine, who was a keen but late beginner – and gently inculcating her into the reformed religion. Elizabeth was already religiously devout and she had imbibed reformist ideas from her Cambridge tutors, but Katherine’s influence on her at an impressionable age reinforced these ideas, which once implanted never left her. As a special tribute to her stepmother, Elizabeth translated Marguerite of Angoulême’s religious poem, Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse, from the French and wrote it out in her own beautiful italic as her New Year’s gift to the Queen in 1545. Like Katherine, Marguerite, sister of Francis I, had been the leading patroness of the reformed religion at the French court and, what’s more, she had known Elizabeth’s mother – another keen reformer, whose 1533 edition of the book Elizabeth might have used for her translation. The book seems to have represented Katherine and Elizabeth’s joint religious belief, particularly the idea of justification by faith alone.
The translation and the prefatory letter which sums up the theme of the book were formidable intellectual achievements for an eleven-year-old, made all the more touching because from the evidence of the handwriting, which declined as the work progressed, and the standard of the stitching of the pansies that graced the cloth cover, she had left the endeavour too late and had to finish in a hurry – literally on New Year’s Eve 1544 itself, leaving the messenger barely enough time to gallop from Ashridge to court with it. She apologized to Katherine for the writing, ‘which I know in many places to be rude and nothing done as it should be’, and pleaded with her not to show it to anyone else ‘lest my faults be known of many’. Already, she was very mindful of her reputation.
The following year, Elizabeth complimented her stepmother by translating into French, Italian and Latin her book of devotions, Prayers and Meditations, and presenting the work to her father as his New Year’s gift. The accompanying letter is the only one addressed directly from Elizabeth to Henry, the norm being to communicate with the King through an intermediary, such as the Queen. ‘To the most illustrious and most mighty King Henry the Eighth, king of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and second to Christ, supreme head of the English and Irish Church, Elizabeth, his majesty’s most humble daughter, wishes all happiness, and begs his blessing,’ she begins. It is significant that Elizabeth alludes to the royal supremacy. Every day when Elizabeth opened her Bible (in English) she would have seen in the frontispiece her father enthroned, like God himself, or at least God’s representative on earth. Elizabeth thoroughly approved this aggregation of the spiritual and temporal power in one person – the sovereign, ‘whom philosophers regard as a god on earth’. There is no doubting Elizabeth’s admiration for this exalted being, to whom she claimed to owe obedience as her ‘greatest lord and matchless and most benevolent father by the divine law’.
Not only did Elizabeth admire and seek to emulate her father, she was enough of a flatterer of the male ego at twelve years of age to tell him so. ‘May I … be indebted to you not as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them,’ she asked. Henry must have chuckled to think of a mere daughter following in his footsteps, but in fact it was by assimilating so many aspects of her father’s identity that Elizabeth was able to buttress her own power as ruler. Eventually, she was to surpass him in achievement.
Elizabeth was left in the care of the Queen when Henry embarked on his last military campaign in France. Not only did she regard her father as a heroic leader in war – one of the prime functions of a king – but his absence gave Elizabeth the opportunity to experience female rule. Like Katherine of Aragon at the outset of Henry’s reign, Katherine Parr ably fulfilled the role of regent, although unlike her predecessor she did not have to muster and supply an army to meet the Scottish threat on the northern border. Elizabeth saw a woman running the country, supported by the Privy Council, and it all seemed to work perfectly smoothly. Why should a woman not rule as well as a man? she might have asked herself.
When Henry died at Whitehall on 28 January 1547 his death was kept secret for several days while the new King’s uncle made his bid for power, overturning Henry’s express wishes that a council of equals should rule during his son’s minority. Edward Seymour, who soon became Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset, secured the person of the young King and, in a surprising gesture of sympathy to the bereft children, brought him to Elizabeth at Enfield so that the two could be together when they learned of their father’s death. They apparently fell into each other’s arms, overcome by grief.
The happiest years of Elizabeth’s childhood had been spent in the last years of her father’s reign. At thirteen, the orphaned girl was all too vulnerable to the designs of the ambitious and unscrupulous men who hustled to fill the power vacuum.