Virginity as a Weapon of Diplomacy
The secret weapon of Elizabeth's diplomacy was her unmarried state. Whether she was truly a virgin is a mystery historians should not claim to settle; we may accept it, as Raleigh did when he named a colony Virginia in her honor. Cecil for a time had doubts, given her long intimacy with Leicester, yet two Spanish ambassadors, who would gladly have shamed her, vouched for her chastity. Court gossip, as Ben Jonson later told Drummond of Hawthornden, spoke of some physical impediment to marriage, and the antiquary Camden wrote in 1615 that people cursed Dr. Huick, the queen's physician, for advising her against marrying because of some defect. Parliament, however, which repeatedly begged her to wed, assumed she could bear children.
There was a weakness in the Tudor line. Perhaps, the book suggests, Catherine of Aragon's misfortunes in childbirth stemmed from Henry VIII's illness; Edward died young of an obscure disease, and Mary tried so hard for a child that she mistook dropsy for pregnancy. Elizabeth flirted to the end of her life but never found the courage to marry, saying she had always avoided it. As early as 1559 she declared her resolve to remain single. In 1566 she promised Parliament to marry as soon as she conveniently could and hoped to have children; yet that same year, when Cecil told her that Mary Stuart had borne a son, she nearly wept and said that the Queen of Scots had a fair son while she herself was but a barren stock. For a moment she revealed her lasting sorrow at never fulfilling the role of a woman.
Robert Dudley
Politics deepened the tragedy. Many of her Catholic subjects saw her childlessness as fit punishment for her father's sins and hoped that Mary Stuart would inherit the throne, while Parliament and the Protestant majority dreaded that outcome and pressed her to choose a husband. Despite her efforts she lost her heart to a married man. Lord Robert Dudley, tall, handsome, learned, courteous and brave, was the son of the Duke of Northumberland, who had tried to disinherit Mary Tudor in favor of Lady Jane Grey and had died on the scaffold for it. Dudley was married to Amy Robsart but did not live with her, and rumor called him a rake without principles. When his wife fell down a staircase at Cumnor Hall and died of a broken neck in 1560, Dudley was with the queen at Windsor.
The Spanish ambassador and others accused the two of arranging the clumsy death. The suspicion was groundless, but for a while it ended Dudley's hopes of marrying the queen. When Elizabeth believed she was dying in 1562, she asked that he be made Protector of the realm. She admitted she had loved him long but swore that nothing improper had passed between them. Two years later she proposed him as a husband for Mary Stuart and made him Earl of Leicester to enhance his appeal, but Mary had no wish to marry her rival's favorite. Elizabeth consoled Dudley with monopolies and kept him near her until his death in 1588.
A Procession of Foreign Suitors
Cecil bore this romance with dignified anger and for a time considered resigning, for he hoped to arrange a marriage that would strengthen England through alliance with a great power. For a quarter of a century foreign suitors came and went. One envoy wrote that there were twelve ambassadors competing for her hand; the Duke of Holstein was expected for the King of Denmark, and the Duke of Finland, wooing for his brother the King of Sweden, threatened to kill the emperor's ambassador, so that the queen feared they would cut each other's throats in her presence.
When Philip II of Spain, the greatest Christian monarch, proposed in 1559, she must have been flattered, but she refused, seeing the offer as a ploy to make England a Catholic dependency of Spain. She lingered longer over Charles IX of France, since France then needed peace. The French ambassador complained that the world was created in six days, while the queen had spent eighty without deciding; she replied that the world had been made by a greater craftsman than herself. Later she let her agents propose a match with Archduke Charles of Austria, but dropped it at Leicester's urging.
When the international situation in 1570 required France to be kept content, the Duke of Alencon, son of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, was encouraged to court the thirty-seven-year-old queen, though he was only sixteen, according to the book. The talks met three obstacles: his Catholicism, his youth, and his pockmarked nose. Five years removed one of them, and Alencon, now Duke of Anjou, was considered again; he was invited to London and Elizabeth played with him, and with France, for five more years. After a final flurry the merry courtship ended in 1581, and Anjou left the field displaying one of the queen's garters as a trophy. Meanwhile she had kept him from marrying the King of Spain's daughter and prevented her two enemies, Spain and France, from uniting. Rarely has a woman gained so much from childlessness or enjoyed her maidenhood so profitably.
A Court of Flattery
Elizabeth enjoyed flirting with strong Englishmen more than with that pockmarked youth, especially since such flirtations could last as long as no marriage ended them. She delighted in flattery. Many nobles ruined themselves with entertainments in her honor; courtiers staged masques to display her greatness, poets wrote sonnets and odes in her praise, and musicians composed songs to her. One lyric compared her eyes to two spheres whose light quenched the fires of war. Sir Walter Raleigh told her that she walked like Venus, hunted like Diana, rode like Alexander, sang like an angel and played like Orpheus. She half believed it, and was vain enough to think that all of England's virtues were born of her motherly care, in which she was not wholly wrong.
Growing unsure of her beauty, she wore costly gowns and a new dress almost every day, leaving, according to the book, some two thousand gowns at her death. She adorned her hair, arms, wrists, ears and clothes with jewels. When a bishop rebuked her love of finery, she warned him that if he spoke of it again he would leave this world before his time.
Temper, Courage and Thrift
Her manners could be startling. She caressed courtiers and even ambassadors and sometimes boxed their ears. When Dudley knelt to receive his earldom, she tickled the back of his neck. She spat when she pleased, once even on a costly cloak. The gossip Aubrey told of the Earl of Oxford, who was so mortified by a small indiscretion while bowing to her that he went abroad for seven years; on his return she greeted him warmly and said she had quite forgotten the incident.
She was usually kind and easy of access, but she talked too much and could become a stubborn shrew. She swore like a pirate, whose patron she half was, and "God's death" was among her ordinary oaths. Her treatment of Mary Stuart showed she could be hard, and she kept Catherine Grey in the Tower until that unhappy woman died of grief. Though at heart she was tender, she mixed severity with gentleness; she lost her temper often but quickly mastered it, and laughed heartily when amused, which was often. She loved dancing and kept at it until she was sixty-nine. She liked sport, gambling and hunting, and had a great taste for masques and plays. Even in adversity she did not lose heart, and in danger she was a model of courage and wit. She was moderate in food and drink but greedy for jewels and money, eagerly confiscating the wealth of rich rebels; in this way she acquired crown jewels of Scotland, Burgundy and Portugal, and kept in her treasury the gems offered by hopeful nobles. She was not known for gratitude or generosity, and sometimes gave her servants kind words instead of rewards. Yet in her thrift and pride there was a kind of patriotism.