Read Online The Men Who Would Be King by Josephine Ross - Free Book Online Page B

Nothing she could do, however, would douse Renard’s crackling suspicions, and at the end of November he wrote that he was convinced that it would be best to send Elizabeth straight to the Tower.
    She was relegated from her rightful position at court; none of the ladies dared be seen in her apartments, and though she spiritedly encouraged the young gentlemen to visit her instead, de Noailles thought she did so deliberately, “in the hope of obtaining her dismissal so that she might go to her own house, where she lived formerly.” Early in December she was allowed to leave. The Lords Arundel and Paget gave her final admonishments not to meddle in plots with heretics or the French, warning her frankly of the consequences. Mary put on a show of affection and gave her a beautiful fur wrap, and at last Elizabeth was able to depart for her manor of Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, spied on, suspected, schemed over, but mercifully out of sight of her sister’s peering eyes.
    â€œIn the beginning of November was the first notice among the people touching the marriage of the Queen to the King of Spain,” a contemporary chronicler wrote. The entry needed no amplification. Mary had turned to the emperor as to a father, eager to lean on him for advice and support in all things, and in the great matter of her marriage above all; the emperor’s choice for her husband, gradually revealed and subtly urged by Renard, was his own beloved son, Philip of Spain. Mary’s acceptance of that choice was the greatest error of her life.
    One of Northumberland’s most powerful arguments for debarring Mary from the throne had been that she “might marry a foreigner and thus stir up trouble in the kingdom and introduce a foreign government.” The insular English had grown more suspicious than ever of foreigners in the decades since Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and rupture with Rome had cut them off from religious brotherhood with Europe. The gentleman of Kent who cried that “the Spaniards were coming into the realm with harness and handguns, and would make us Englishmen worse than enemies, and viler; for this realm should be brought to such bondage by them as it never was before, but should be utterly conquered,” voiced the fears of many loyal Englishmen. “If we should be under their subjection they would, as slaves and villeins, despoil us of our goods and lands, ravish our wives before our faces and deflower our daughters in our presence” ran a desperate call to arms against the “proud Spaniards or strangers.” But a half-Spanish queen, who, as Renard put it, did not trust her people, knowing them to be variable, inconstant, and treacherous, was not likely to be influenced by her subjects’ street talk. Nor was she prepared to be dictated to by Parliament; when the greatest peers in England, the councillors and members of the Lower House, delivered their earnest petition to her to marry, and to choose an English husband, she became so angry that she was obliged to sit down. The Speaker dwelt on the state of the succession, the strife that might arise if she were to die without issue, and the desirability of her leaving an heir of her own, and then began a passionate diatribe against the dreadful dangers of a foreign match. When Mary had regained control of her anger, she adopted a benevolent tone and assured them that though her own inclination was against marriage, she would conquer her feelings for the sake of the welfare of her kingdom. But unlike her keen-eyed half sister, she lacked the vision to see in which direction the welfare of the kingdom lay.
    If the alienation of her own people was one grave consequence of Mary’s marriage, the implied rejection of France was another. To tie herself to the empire was at best to relegate France to the role of secondary ally, at worst to involve the English and French in open hostility—whereas, as de Noailles