13

Queen

THE QUEEN IS not Queen until the body of her predecessor has been laid to rest. The monarchy is continuous but the person of the sovereign is mortal. The first official act of any new reign is the burial of the dead sovereign. While Mary’s funeral rites were taking place in London, Elizabeth remained at Hatfield. She would not enter Whitehall Palace until her sister had, as it were, vacated it.

There was plenty to do, although Elizabeth knew exactly how she was going to proceed. Indeed, on 17 November her chosen secretary and chief minister, Sir William Cecil, was already installed at his desk, where he was effectively to remain for the next forty years. Together, they were to use these few days, from 17 to 23 November when she left Hatfield to take up residence at the Charterhouse outside the City of London, to nominate the new government and lay the foundations for a mode of governing that was to serve Elizabeth well for the next forty-five years.

Unlike Mary’s accession speech, which laid emphasis on her subjects’ duty of obedience to her, in return for which ‘they shall find us their benign and gracious sovereign lady’, Elizabeth’s typically stressed what she could do for them and her trust in them. She promised ‘to all manner [of] people being natural subjects … no less love and care towards their preservation than hath been in any our progenitors, and not doubting on their part but they will observe the duty which belongeth to natural, good and true loving subjects’. When Elizabeth referred to her people, she almost always prefixed it with the word ‘loving’. Hence, she began her Armada speech in 1588 with the words, ‘My loving people’, and in her Golden Speech of 1601 expressed her appreciation that ‘no prince ever governed a more faithful, valiant, and loving people’. By offering the people her love and pledging them her life she was inviting their love and loyalty in return.

After the vicissitudes of her youth, the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was a shrewd judge of character. She and Sir William Cecil had had a long association. Cecil had been at St John’s College, Cambridge, as a contemporary of Roger Ascham with Cheke as their tutor and he had married Cheke’s sister as his first wife. Cecil shared Elizabeth’s intellectual interests, therefore, and was of the reformed religion. He had been able to transfer seamlessly from academe to the cut and thrust of court politics, where he had proved an excellent administrator, first serving Somerset as secretary and then, after his fall, deftly moving on to become secretary to the Council, under Northumberland. He had the crucial experience of government which so many of Mary’s counsellors lacked. During Mary’s reign, he had quietly retreated into the background, not conforming exactly, but also not joining the exodus of Protestant exiles. While Elizabeth was in disgrace, Cecil had taken on the role of trustee, overseeing the management of her estates, which gave him the excuse to keep in contact with her. Now, she was able to honour him with a trust which was never misplaced:

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 judgement 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, and if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only. And assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein, and therefore I charge you.

Elizabeth was giving a clear indication that she would govern not as a tyrant, but by counsel. Unlike her sister, who had imposed her will in pursuit of her own narrow agenda, she would listen to the views of others. She was relying on Cecil to speak plainly and honestly, to give her the best and most impartial advice, no matter how unpalatable it might be to her.

Nor was Elizabeth prepared to continue with the over-large Council whose divisions and divergent interests had made it so difficult for Mary to govern or manage Parliament. It was a mess. Summoning her nobles, who were almost synonymous with Mary’s Council, before her at Hatfield, she told them in the nicest possible way that she was dismissing most of them. The nobility, of course, were the monarch’s ‘family’, or cousins. They were the natural supporters of the crown, having received their estates from ‘my progenitors, kings of this realm’. They were honour bound, she reminded them, ‘to have more natural care for maintaining of my estate and this commonwealth’. She promised to consult them as and when appropriate. As for those she did not appoint, ‘let them not think the same for any disability in them.’ She simply wanted a smaller, tighter Council, ‘for that I do consider a multitude doth make rather discord and confusion than good counsel’.

Over the next few days, Elizabeth’s Council of twenty-one handpicked men took shape and the key appointments to her household were made. She rewarded many of those who had been loyal to her through her troubles, not least Thomas Parry, who became Treasurer of the Household and Master of the Court of Wards and a member of the Privy Council. Although she was present at the inaugural meeting of her Council, she was rarely to attend meetings. She was chairman rather than chief executive. Like all successful people, she was able to delegate, confident that those in whom she had placed her trust would show her an unswerving loyalty in return. In practice, a small inner core worked closely together and more often than not presented a united front, even if it was one advocating a policy the Queen disliked. Elizabeth wanted harmony, encouraging consensus; she was not a prince who sought to divide and rule.

She was to repeat the promise she had made in her short speech to Cecil in her first address to Parliament, which the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, read out for her when it met in January. She would rule with ‘counsel’. This did not mean that Elizabeth was willing to surrender the absolutist powers of the monarchy. Like her father, she believed her sovereignty was ordained by God alone and that her prerogative was unlimited by her counsellors’ advice. She would not be ruled by her Council; she would rule with them and be advised by them. Elizabeth, only the second queen regnant, would be the last one to rule as well as reign. No one could ever mistake who was boss. She had a natural air of authority. As Feria reported, she ‘seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister, and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did’.

Elizabeth also promised to do nothing to antagonize her people and drive them to rebellion. This was a radical departure from previous Tudor monarchs, who had demanded absolute obedience from their subjects. Rebellion against the monarch – God’s anointed – was traditionally considered a sin. Elizabeth was prepared to admit that the misguided policies of her predecessors had provoked rebellion – Wyatt’s revolt, for instance – but she would try to avoid such confrontation. She would not force her policies on an unwilling people. She would rule by consent.

To rule by consent, she must also be popular. Elizabeth never lacked popularity. She knew its importance and assiduously courted and bolstered it. She was an image-maker extraordinaire, a mistress of public relations and propaganda. She understood the power of the printed word. After composing and delivering her speeches, she would often edit them before releasing them for publication. She knew it was not just enough to be Queen: she must act the part, play the role for all it was worth. ‘We princes are set on stages, in sight and view of all the world,’ she commented. Nowhere is this consciousness of the need to perform more evident than in her pre-coronation procession through London, in which Elizabeth, the consummate actress, showed her star quality.

It was to take place in January, after the final ceremonies separating the late Queen’s two bodies, the mortal and the immortal, were completed. Until then, Elizabeth remained low-key. She left the Charterhouse for the Tower on 28 November, accompanied by an entourage of 1,000. With the trumpeters heralding her arrival, she was preceded by the Earl of Pembroke, bearing the upright sword which was the symbol of sovereign power. Elizabeth, wearing a velvet gown of royal purple, was immediately followed by the dark, handsome figure of her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley. The guns grew louder as she approached the Tower and disappeared inside. On 5 December she left the Tower for her London home, Somerset House in the Strand, which she reached by water.

Mary was still lying in state at St James’s, and Elizabeth – inscrutable as ever – was delaying her entry into public life as long as possible. When she arrived at the palace, she would have to worship publicly in the Chapel Royal, and she was not yet ready to show her hand on the religious question. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton had advised her ‘to succeed happily through a discreet beginning’, but Elizabeth needed no such reminder. She was naturally cautious until she was sure of her ground. So far she had maintained a studied vagueness, while both sides, Catholic and Protestant, watched avidly for any clues. Although Elizabeth believed wholeheartedly in the royal supremacy, one of the central tenets of her father’s monarchy, she was not yet in a position to assume the title. Like Mary on her accession, she followed the proclamation of her royal titles as Queen of England, Ireland and France, Defender of the Faith, with an Etc, Etc.

On 13 December Mary’s funeral began, culminating in the burial in Westminster Abbey next day. Only after the regalia were offered up on the altar – symbolically returned to God from whom they had come – and Mary’s household officers had broken their wands of office and thrown them on top of the coffin, and the heralds had torn off their tabards and hung them on the hearse, could Mary’s sovereignty be said to have truly ended.

Only now could the heralds cry: ‘The Queen is dead; long live the Queen!’

It was time for Elizabeth to proceed to Westminster, the seat of government, and take possession of her palace. On 23 December she arrived at Whitehall for Christmas. It was now that she gave the clearest indication yet of the religious position she would take, when she went to the Chapel Royal in procession with her ladies on Christmas morning, the holiest feast of the year and the most important on the court calendar. She had specifically asked Owen Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle, not to elevate the Host in the Mass. As soon as he did so, the Queen stood up and swept out of the chapel.

Elizabeth consulted the astrologer-mathematician Dr John Dee to give her the most auspicious day for her coronation; not for her the leafing through a missal to find the most appropriate holy day. It was to take place on 15 January. A frenzy of preparations began, with a royal warrant demanding the holding of all imported silks, so that the Queen could take her pick of them; she chose a profusion of crimson damask and gold-striped crimson satin. The treasury might be empty, but Elizabeth, like Mary before her, was determined to put on a fine show. Sir Thomas Gresham was ordered to take out loans on the Antwerp money market, with the City of London providing bonds as security. As they were to be the main beneficiaries of the spectacle, they were probably happy to comply. The citizens were to bear the cost of staging the pageants and decorating the processional route with ‘fyne payntynge and riche clothes of aras, sylver, and golde’, while Elizabeth had the Master of the Revels lend them a number of costumes and props from the Great Wardrobe.

It is probable that Elizabeth spent some of the time leading up to the coronation vetting the script for her pre-coronation procession through the City. This had been a rite of passage for every monarch – his welcome and acceptance by the people, as he processed from the Tower in the east to Temple Bar on the westernmost edge of the City. Traditionally, the most important event was the actual coronation next day, when the monarch was imbued with the sacred powers lent by God. Realizing that the future of the monarchy no longer lay with the Church, Elizabeth sought to switch the emphasis from the religious to the secular. Sovereignty was still divinely ordained, but needed the support of the people. Knowing also that the religious compromise she intended would displease Catholics and Calvinists alike, Elizabeth would use her considerable theatrical skills to distract attention from problematic religious ritual at the coronation to the civic pageantry the day before. The civic progress, always more of a crowd pleaser, became the main event.

This was a job for a professional. The humanist scholar Richard Mulcaster, who had been trained in his craft by Nicholas Udall, who devised the pageantry for Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession in 1533, was asked to script and arrange the various pageants, in liaison with the City authorities and with a large body of helpers. He was also to act as reporter, rushing his pamphlet, The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Daye before her Coronacion, into print within days. It was powerful propaganda, intended for the widest possible audience. Under this new Queen, secular ceremony and the printed word were to affirm royal authority more effectively than sacred ritual.

On the 12th, Elizabeth arrived by water at the Tower. Not only was this a royal palace, but part of the ancient city walls. By taking up residence there, the new monarch was in effect assuming command of the City defences. Wherever possible, processional routes moved from east to west. The east had a special significance: Christ the Redeemer had appeared in the East and altars in Christian churches were placed to the east. The traditional royal entry, which could be likened to a Roman triumph or Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, took advantage of the sacral power of an east–west route and the geography of London lent itself perfectly.

Elizabeth left the Tower at two o’clock on 14 January. As she passed the lions, she stopped, ostentatiously offering up a prayer of thanks, reminding the onlookers of her incarceration during her sister’s reign and the fact that God had delivered her, just as He had rescued Daniel from the lions’ den. In this way, Elizabeth was contributing to the myth of her own suffering under Mary – a bond she shared with her people – and suggesting that she had divine sanction for her rule. It was duly recorded by Mulcaster. She was accompanied by a 1,000-strong cavalcade of officers, noblemen and -women, knights and foreign dignitaries, all splendidly attired in the richest fabric imaginable. ‘The whole court so sparkled with jewels and gold collars,’ reported the Italian, Il Schifanoya, ‘that they cleared the air, though it snowed a little.’ They left the Tower in ascending order of rank, culminating with the Queen at the apex of the social hierarchy and as the fount of all honour, with the guards bringing up the rear.

Like her sister before her, Elizabeth borrowed the iconography of a queen consort, as opposed to that of a male monarch who rode on horseback as a military leader. In time, her unmarried state was to become for the Virgin Queen what military virtue was for her male predecessors: the mysterious sign and source of her power to rule. Accordingly, she went ‘in her hair’ – the long, red-gold tresses hanging over her shoulders and down her back in token of her virtue – with a plain gold crown on her head. She was carried in an open litter covered in thick gold brocade and pulled by two mules swathed in the same material. In spite of the money being lavished on the spectacle, Elizabeth, in a characteristically careful piece of housekeeping, wore Mary’s rich mantle and kirtle of cloth of gold with silver tissue, with a new bodice to fit her slimmer figure and a new pair of sleeves. She was surrounded by footmen in jerkins of crimson velvet and yellow cloth of gold, with the Tudor rose and the letters ER embroidered in silver on their backs. Behind her rode the handsome figure of Robert Dudley, mounted on a fine charger and leading a white hackney covered with cloth of gold.

The procession was far more than a display of royal power and magnificence designed to impress the spectators lining the route. The ruler, the elite and the people were actors in a theatrical spectacle; the crowd, whose cries and actions were recorded in Mulcaster’s pamphlet, acted as a dramatic chorus. Traditionally, it was an opportunity for subjects to counsel the new monarch through a series of didactic, edifying tableaux, with singing children, Latin orations, triumphal arches, and a frank expression of their hopes conveyed in rudimentary verse. On the day of Elizabeth’s procession, the people had something they had never had before, however: a dialogue with the monarch. It was through this direct contact, maintained throughout her reign in the royal progresses, that Elizabeth cemented the relationship with her subjects, which was the core of her monarchy.

If not the first royal walkabout, Elizabeth interacted with the crowd as no previous monarch had done. There was no doubt she had the common touch. As Mulcaster noted: ‘The people … were wonderfully ravished with welcoming answers and gestures of their princess.’ Her genius was not only to show her love towards her people in general, but privately to particular individuals along the route in apparently unrehearsed stops. When an old woman stepped up to the litter to offer a sprig of rosemary, she insisted on pausing to receive it. She showed evident sympathy for the poor children of Christ’s Hospital, almost patting their heads like some latter-day politician. When an old man shouted out, ‘Remember old King Henry VIII?’ she smiled broadly at this comparison between herself and her mighty father. Had the man perhaps been briefed?

And all along, Mulcaster was keeping pace with her, documenting her every word, expression and gesture, underscoring their significance, magnifying the Queen’s rapport with her subjects, and ensuring that her exchanges with individuals were brought to the widest audience.

The tableaux were situated at five key points throughout the City. The first in Gracechurch Street depicted her grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and her parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. This was the first mention of the disgraced Queen since her execution, but Elizabeth’s mother could hardly be airbrushed from the celebrations, as she had been from the public memory for the last twenty-odd years. It was not Anne, but Elizabeth of York – the female vessel who had transmitted her claim to the throne to Henry VIII – who was the crucial figure here. By her marriage, Elizabeth had brought an end to the Wars of the Roses; surely now her granddaughter and namesake would bring peace to a strife-torn England?

One of Elizabeth’s greatest strengths was her ability to identify with her people. With her English parents and grandparents, the tableau was eager to remind them that Elizabeth had been born ‘mere English here amongst us’. The criticism of the previous Queen, the half-Spanish Mary, was implicit. The loss of Calais was still raw, but this new, English Queen would not take England into a costly foreign war to please a Spanish husband. Moreover, Elizabeth was depicted in the tableau wearing an imperial crown – an arched, closed crown – reminding the audience that the Reformation Parliament had confirmed Henry VIII’s imperial status in law. By inference, Elizabeth would embrace the royal supremacy and continue to adhere to true, or pure, religion. Unlike Mary, who had crawled back to the Roman allegiance, Elizabeth would be an imperial queen who would guarantee good government.

The flavour of the pageantry, as might be expected in strongly Protestant London, was anti-Catholic. The pageant at the Little Conduit in Cheapside was the most blatantly critical of the previous regime. It appropriated Mary’s personal motto, Veritas Filia Temporis. ‘Time!’ Elizabeth exclaimed when the tableau was explained to her. ‘And Time hath brought me hither.’ On one side of Time was a tableau representing a decayed commonwealth, on the other a flourishing commonwealth – the first being Mary’s, the second Elizabeth’s. Time had a daughter, Truth, who carried a Bible in English, prominently labelled ‘The Word of Truth’. Apparently impatient to possess the Bible, Elizabeth nudged an attendant forward to take it. But he was politely told to wait until a child had delivered a speech. The Bible was then lowered to the Queen on a silken thread. In raptures, she kissed it; she held it up for all to see, and then passionately clutched it to her breast, thanking the City. It was a brilliant piece of showmanship.

When the procession reached the end of Cheapside it was traditional for the Lord Mayor and aldermen to present the monarch with a purse of gold. Again, Elizabeth seized her chance to say something more memorable than mere thanks. ‘I will be as good unto you, as ever quene was to her people,’ she assured them. ‘And perswade yourselves, that for the safetie and quietnes of you all, I will not spare, if nede be to spend my blood, God thanke you all.’

The biblical figure of Deborah, dressed as the Queen in her Parliament robes and sitting under a palm tree, was set up on a stage in Fleet Street. In the Bible, the Israelites were saved by Deborah; so England would be saved by Elizabeth. She would be an Anglicized Deborah, a ruling magistrate who took counsel from the three estates – the nobility, the clergy and the commons – who sat at Deborah’s feet. Unlike Mary, whose parliamentary record was disastrous, it was the fondest hope of the organizers that Elizabeth would be a sort of Deborah-in-Parliament. There were to be ten Parliaments in her forty-five-year reign and it would indeed be the stage for some of her greatest triumphs.

At Temple Bar, her rite of passage was complete. Having been accepted by the people, she had now been integrated into the community as recognized, if still uncrowned, sovereign.

Elizabeth’s passage through the City had been a triumph. It was to be less easy to win over Mary’s bishops, who scented in Elizabeth’s drift towards religious compromise rank heresy. Only one of them, Oglethorpe, of the minor see of Carlisle, could be prevailed on to anoint and crown her, but since he still proved intractable on the question of the elevation of the Host, the coronation Mass would be celebrated by the more compliant George Carew, Dean of the Chapel Royal, who could be relied on to refrain from any unwanted displays of clerical independence. Cardinal Pole, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had conveniently died the same day as Mary, while Elizabeth herself explicitly excluded the Catholic primates, Heath of York and Bonner of London, from the service. She detested Bonner, whom she held largely responsible for the persecution of Protestants during her sister’s reign – so much so that she would not suffer him to kiss her hand. The rest – their numbers depleted by ten owing to the flu epidemic – would attend the coronation, but other than swearing their allegiance play no part in the ceremony. Suspecting the worst after her behaviour at the Christmas Mass, Feria pointedly absented himself from the service at the abbey.

Coronations traditionally took place on a Sunday. On 15 January Elizabeth processed in solemn dignity from Westminster Hall to the abbey. Her tall, elegant figure with its superb posture and the slow glide she had perfected made her look truly regal. She wore her long red hair loose again and her crimson Parliament robes. Significantly, she was not escorted by a bishop and a layman, as her predecessors had been, but by the Earls of Pembroke and Shrewsbury, the emphasis again being placed on the secular. She was followed by the ladies of the nobility, also in crimson, wearing their coronets and dragging their long trains behind them.

The coronation was inadequately recorded – on purpose – and it is difficult to determine exactly what happened. It seems that Oglethorpe took Elizabeth up to the stage, or theatre, in the transept and presented her to the four points of the compass, asking those present each time if they would have her for their Queen. ‘Yea, yea!’ they cried, as the trumpets, drums, bells and organ all sounded together. After that, there is some confusion. Elizabeth took the oath, but whether it was the traditional one, or the one doctored by Archbishop Cranmer to fit the new circumstances of the post-Reformation monarchy and the implications of the royal supremacy is hard to determine.

There was a sung Mass, during which the Epistle and the Gospel were read not only in Latin but also in the vernacular. What happened at the moment of consecration is not clear. Elizabeth seems to have disappeared to the traverse behind the high altar next to St Edward’s shrine, which was to serve for her frequent changes of clothes during the ceremony. Later, she told the French ambassador that she had not attended the Mass; at any rate, she seems not to have taken communion.

The rest of the ceremony proceeded according to form. She withdrew to the traverse again to strip down to her kirtle for the anointing. She leaned on cloth of gold cushions before the altar while a scarlet pall was held over her head, as the bishop anointed her on the shoulders, the breast, the inside of the arms, the hands and the head. Later, she complained to her ladies that the oil stank. Elizabeth seems to have been unusually sensitive to strong odours, so much so that she would use liberal quantities of rose water with cloves in the perfume pan in her private apartments, the council chamber and chapel and whenever she went out in her litter, but her turning her nose up at the oil might also have been prompted by her disdain for what she regarded as popish superstition. She took her place on St Edward’s chair for the investiture with the ornaments: the sword, the bracelets, the mantle, the sceptre and the ruby ring, which she was to prize as symbolizing her marriage to England. As a woman, she did not actually wear the sword. The bishop then placed each of the three crowns on her head in succession.

Covered in gold robes from head to foot, with the imperial crown on her head, Elizabeth was once more led up to the stage to be hailed by the people – this time as their consecrated sovereign. Sitting on the throne with the golden sceptre in one hand and the orb in the other, she then received homage. In another break with tradition, the temporal peers went first, kissing her on the cheek, followed by the clergy.

The Italian, Il Schifanoya, noted that she left the abbey ‘very cheerfully, with a most smiling countenance for every one, giving them all a thousand greetings, so that in my opinion she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum’. Elizabeth could well afford to be pleased. She had been crowned and anointed with full Catholic ritual without committing herself to the maintenance of her sister’s Catholicism; indeed, leaving herself free to follow the course she thought best for her country.

The fourth part of the coronation ceremony was the feast held in Westminster Hall. Sitting in solitary splendour beneath a cloth of estate at a table set upon a dais, Elizabeth was served by Lord Howard of Effingham and the Earl of Sussex, the former carving and the latter placing and removing each dish, both of them on their knees. She was already feeling the onset of a cold and was so exhausted she could hardly speak. Each course was heralded by the sound of trumpets and its arrival preceded by Elizabeth’s kinsman, the Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, and the Earl of Arundel on horseback. After the second course, Sir Edward Dymoke rode into the hall dressed as a knight in armour on ‘a very handsome barbed charger’, saluted the Queen, and threw down his gauntlet, challenging anyone who denied, disputed or contradicted that the Queen his Sovereign Lady was not the true and legitimate crowned Queen of England, France and Ireland. No one responded. Elizabeth drank the knight’s health and, as was customary, gave him the silver gilt cup worth 200 crowns.

The coronation always took place before the opening of the monarch’s first Parliament. On 25 January Elizabeth, wearing her crown and her crimson Parliament robes again, went in procession from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, where traditionally the Mass of the Holy Ghost was said, to invoke divine inspiration for Parliament’s proceedings. The Queen gave a hint of what was to come on her arrival at Westminster, when she was greeted by the abbot and the monks, swinging their censers and holding their lighted tapers. ‘Away with those torches,’ she cried, ‘we can see very well.’ Previous monarchs, with the exception of Edward VI, had always been censed by the clergy as they went in procession, associating the spiritual with the temporal powers. Like her father, Elizabeth was determined to subordinate her prelates to royal control. She believed that the clergy had no role in government and was impatient to relegate them to their proper place. The demise of ecclesiastical pageantry would heighten the importance of the secular ceremonial surrounding the monarchy.

The Queen moved on to the Lords’ Chamber in the Palace of Westminster, where she took her place on the throne. The Commons were brought to the bar. The Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, read her accession speech, in which he emphasized the Queen’s wish for unity among her people, which could be brought about only by a broad religious settlement. Her brother and sister had condoned extremism, opening the floodgates to discontent and rebellion, but Elizabeth wanted to steer a middle course. She reiterated her father’s pleas in his last speech to Parliament, in which he had denounced the extremists of both kinds and urged his people to live together in Christian charity. As Supreme Head, the monarch’s duty was to preside over an all-embracing, inclusive Church.

Elizabeth was aware that the country was still largely Catholic, but she was perhaps taken by surprise at the level of resistance put up by the Marian bishops and the conservative, Catholic lords in the Upper House. They watered down the proposed bill to restore the royal supremacy, indicating that it would not be conferred on her, but that she might assume it if she chose. A Uniformity Bill outlining the faith and liturgy of the proposed Elizabethan Church had been joined to the Supremacy Bill. The Upper House simply struck out its clauses and sent the mutilated bill back to the Commons, who were inclined to accept it, since otherwise they were stuck with the existing Catholic religion and the heresy laws.

Elizabeth had no intention of giving her assent. Instead of dissolving Parliament, she simply prorogued it for the Easter recess. On Easter Sunday she processed to the Chapel Royal, but instead of the Catholic Mass, the English communion service was used, as under Edward VI, with the laity receiving communion in both kinds – the bread and the wine. It was a blatant flouting of the law that was still in force.

The Queen’s evident endorsement of the reformed religion was still not enough to move the Lords, however. Overt lobbying of the House when it was in session was not allowed, but now a more oblique tactic was applied. When Mary lay dying, Elizabeth had apparently promised that she would not change the Catholic religion, ‘provided only that it can be proved by the word of God’. It was decided to test that proof by holding a great debate between the leading proponents of the Catholic and Protestant religions. The chairman was Lord Keeper Bacon and the judges the Privy Council. The Catholic prelates were outmanoeuvred, with two of them ending up in the Tower for contempt.

When Parliament reconvened the Supremacy Bill was brought in again and passed without a hitch. The only difference was to the Queen’s title, which was altered from Supreme Head to Supreme Governor, a concession that answered concerns from both Catholics and Protestants about the appropriateness of a woman holding the former title. A separate Uniformity Bill imposed the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, with the communion text revised to reflect both the Catholic belief that the bread and wine contained the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ and the Protestant belief that it was purely commemorative, as the liturgy of England. The bill passed by three votes – the crucial three being the two prelates still in the Tower and the Abbot of Westminster, who in the interests of harmony absented himself.

To the disgust of the Calvinist exiles returning from Geneva, the settlement left many aspects of the old religion intact. They were a small, vociferous minority, skilled in the art of propaganda, who felt that with the accession of a Protestant queen their time had come. Had she not been saved by God for this very purpose? Apart from the silver crucifix and candlesticks and sacred music in the royal chapel, they were disgusted that the Queen should dance and hunt on the Sabbath day and utter oaths – Elizabeth could swear like a trooper. Elizabeth’s agenda was different from theirs. She denied the papal supremacy, rejected transubstantiation and asserted the supremacy of scriptural authority, but having spent much of her life steeped in Catholic ritual, she was comfortable with many of its externals. For her part, she was unhappy about clerical marriage and the Protestant inclination for sermonizing, but even she had to make concessions.

Overall, the religious settlement of 1559 was a qualified success for Elizabeth, a tribute to her determination to hold true to her principle, that compromise, a middle way, was the surest path to peace in her realm. She had adopted as her personal motto the words, ‘Semper Eadem’ – ‘Always one and the same’. In her religious settlement, at least, that was true. No amount of pressure would ever deflect her from it.

The motto belied a deeper truth about her: a fluidity of approach that made compromise possible. As she admitted, she had no desire to make windows into men’s souls. There was only one Jesus Christ, she later told the French ambassador, and all the rest was a dispute over trifles. She simply asked for an outward conformity. This is not to detract from her very deep religious conviction. In her personal book of prayers and devotions, she exhibited no doubt that her cause was God’s own, and that it was England’s Church that held to His truth. When Elizabeth prayed, it was as if she had the sense of carrying the English people with her into God’s presence. In this way, she fulfilled her queenly role as an intercessor.