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She was not, however, secure on her throne. There were many who still chaffed at the idea
of a woman monarch. France and several
other European nations did not allow their crowns to pass to a woman. Moreover, while her sister Mary still
reigned in England, the Scots/English Protestant who was winning Scotland to
the Protestant cause, John Knox, had written a diatribe against women monarchs
entitled “First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regimen of Women”—which
made the claim that was unnatural for women to hold governance. Knox’s tract is
a truly wonderful exercise in misogyny.
It was also a hugely politically stupid thing to do. While this tract was directed primarily
against Mary Tudor and secondarily against the Scots Queen, the Catholic Mary Stuart
and her regent, Mary of Guise, Elizabeth took it personally, very personally. She was, after all, a woman ruler, and she
was sensitive to the fact that Knox’s shoe fit her feminine foot. And she was already under pressure to cede
her crown to a man—England was pretty much united in the expectation that she
would marry and give them a king—the question would be whom would she marry?
And of what religion would he be?
Today when a woman inherits a crown, her husband is
usually accorded the rank of prince consort, but in the sixteenth-century he
was traditionally given “the crown matrimonial” and made king. And while it was acknowledged that his power
came from his wife’s title, it was he, and not she, that held the power. Consequently there was much pressure on
Elizabeth to marry and turn her power over to a husband. The concern was what
sort of a husband. The Protestant party
was afraid of a French or Austrian marriage which would most likely lead to a
Catholic King. The most serious of the
Catholic suitors was Francis, Duke of Anjou but by that time Elizabeth was
forty and the Duke 22 years her junior.
She was obviously just stringing him along for political reasons. The
Protestant Eric XIV of Sweden had been a possibility earlier in her reign but
nothing came of it. The Protestant party
would have been happiest with the English courtier Robert Dudley. He lacked Royal Blood—and it was somewhat
uncommon for royalty to marry out of the club (though Elizabeth’s father, Henry
VIII, had only two wives of his six who had the blood of sovereignty in their
veins, Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn herself being a non-royal.) Elizabeth seemed to favor Dudley and
undoubtedly was deeply in love with him.
But he was a married man. And
even when his wife died—under somewhat suspicious circumstances—Elizabeth made
no moves for marriage.
It seems that Elizabeth probably never had a
serious intention of marriage. She knew
that it would mean a loss of power and while others may have been foolish
enough to think that a woman could not rule, Elizabeth had not such doubts. There is some speculation that Elizabeth may
have been sexually abused in her teen years and consequently developed an antipathy
towards sexual relations, but this seems a bit anachronistic. Elizabeth’s sexual life as an adult had
engendered much discussion and speculation with some claiming that her
appetites were insatiable and others maintaining that she did indeed merit the
appellation “The Virgin Queen.” All we
know for certain is that she never married and that seems to have been a
political choice rather than a personal one.
The problem with her not marrying, of course, was
who would be the heir to the English throne.
She was the last remaining descendent of Henry VIII and if she died
childless, his line would come to an end.
But not the Tudor line! Her
father had a sister, a daughter of Henry VII Tudor, the founder of the Tudor
dynasty, who had married into the Scots Royal House of Stuart. Elizabeth’s closest relative and heir
apparent was the Catholic Queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart. This panicked the English Protestants as it
meant the crown would revert to a Catholic and the Church would most likely be
restored to the Roman Communion.
Elizabeth was well aware of the problem and used it to her advantage in
maintaining the power balance and checking the power of extreme
Protestants.
Indeed Elizabeth tried to steer a middle course, a via media as it would come to be known,
between the Protestant and Catholic factions.
Many of the old nobility and much of the rural populace was still firmly
Catholic, and loving it. The mercantile
classes of the cities, on the other hand, and the new nobility of her father’s
reign, were convincedly Protestant.
Elizabeth was anxious that all should live in peace together. For the first ten years of her reign she was
able to do this. Catholicism was
officially proscribed but discreetly tolerated and there were no
martyrdoms. This did not please the
Protestant party, most of whom wished for a more aggressive propagation of the
new religion by a forceful suppression of the old, but that was not
Elizabeth. She did not want her Church
subject to a foreign prince—the Pope—and she certainly believed in Protestant
doctrine, at least as regards the sacraments.
But on the other hand, she had a taste for ritual and tradition that she
did not want to lose. She saw how
traditional religion propped up monarchial authority and she wanted to use that
to her advantage. She also does not seem
to have bought into the extremely negative anthropology or soteriology of the
Calvinist faction that was hijacking the Protestant wing of the English Church. In fact, I think it is fair to say that
while Elizabeth was perhaps the best theological mind of the Tudors, she was
also the least pious and she lacked any sort of fanaticism towards those whose religious
opinions differed from her own. This was
in part practicality: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And it was in part her natural liberality of
being comfortable with multiple opinions on matters intellectual.
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