Williams Queen Elizabeth

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-96661-809-0
Verlag: Librorium Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 62 Seiten

A brief, engaging, and beautifully written biography of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Without space for all the historical detail, Williams focuses keenly on the woman and serves us up an intriguing primer for a vast and fascinating subject.

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (September 20, 1886-May 15, 1945) was an English writer, lecturer and literary advisor at the Oxford University Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, Charles

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

Elizabeth, the Queen, and the Roman Catholic demand—her withdrawal from Court—the Wyatt rebellion—the Princess in the Tower, and her release—the Spanish marriage, and the reconciliation with Rome—prospects of Elizabeth’s succession—Mary’s distrust of her—Philip accepts her succession—proposals for her marriage—the division between France and Spain, and the schism in the Roman Catholic front—last efforts of Mary—loyalty to Elizabeth fashionable—her accession.

The single danger to Elizabeth’s person hitherto had been political; now an element in which, by nature, she had no keen interest, entered her life: the element of dogma. The change upon the Throne had suddenly rendered herself and her household religiously suspect to the sovereign. Unless she could be converted she was bound to remain a precise threat of that permanent nature of heresy which was, in the period of the Reformation, its new and shattering characteristic. The two sisters, opposed in their theologies, were still more opposed in their temperaments. There was in Mary a strain of supernatural humility; she devoutly and sincerely adored God and obeyed a revelation from God. There was in Elizabeth a queer strain of natural humility—or of that common sense which is unsanctified humility. She thought it was always quite possible that she might be wrong, and even more strongly did she feel that everybody else might be wrong. When she was opposed or when she was angry, this natural humility was often lost in an equally natural obstinacy, but it existed. Mary exalted a hypothesis into faith—a superb and noble achievement. Elizabeth could hardly allow it to be even a hypothesis if she could not also feel that it was a fact. Elizabeth, expressing, after her own manner, her most sincere religious beliefs, would always have left Mary with a strong feeling that her sister was irreligious. Since, at present, from Mary’s point of view, she was in matters of faith almost worse than irreligious, the hostility between them, bound at best to be subdued but permanent, grew to the worst and increased.

In a few months two things became clear. First, Mary’s policy was to be actively and penally Roman; second, she proposed to marry the Prince of Spain. The first was unpopular among the stalwarts of the true religion; the second, almost everywhere. Spain was the great maritime commercial rival, the power threatening mastery. There was, if not a party, yet certainly a prejudice in favour of Elizabeth in two places—among the general populace of London and at the Court of France, both hostile to Spain. But Spain and Papalism were two separate things, and Elizabeth’s immediate difficulty was with the second. For a few weeks she held aloof from the spreading triumph of the old Faith, but by the beginning of September she curtseyed to a great monarch. Cujus regio, ejus religio was a phrase which then beat in the heart; nowadays it merely astonishes the brain. The Princess contemplated the restored rites; she considered her sister’s awful will, and it is to be remembered that the will of the sovereign meant a very great deal then. She considered her own position also; eventually she asked for instruction. She went to Mass—not too often. The mistrustful Mary made inquiries of her; the Princess protested the honesty of her devotion. The Queen remained suspicious both of her sister’s spectacular beauty and her sister’s spectacular behaviour. But she knew she owed goodwill to Elizabeth as to all of God’s creatures; she laboured to be intelligent and yet to pay her debt.

Her careful mind, a little taking after the legalism of her father Henry, proceeded to take steps to repeal the statute which declared her own illegitimacy; Elizabeth’s, naturally, she left explicitly untouched. But she went farther. She thought Elizabeth, being a legal and canonical bastard, ought not to reign. The Queen therefore desired to repeal that other statute, which set Anne Boleyn’s daughter in the way of the succession. She was warned that it would prove impossible, and, thwarted in her logic, she grew less capacious in goodwill. The first political results of the new religious revival, of the faith which was pressed upon her, exhibited to Elizabeth a loss of her future right to the Throne and a growing personal antagonism. She answered as well as she could. She did her best to hover interestingly at the gate of the Roman fold; at that personal cost she could not want to enter, but she had no desire to be left to the dangers of the wilderness. It was not only her physical danger in, but her intellectual distaste for, the wilderness that revolted her. She did not much care for the fierce company of the extreme Reforming fanatics who wandered there. She did not want to go anywhere, yet it seemed she, first of all England, must make a public, responsible decision to go somewhere—credally. She was the Queen’s sister and successor; it was impossible that she should not be a marked person. Cranmer and others were out of favour and soon to be in prison; Cecil and others were out of favour and living in retirement—Cecil himself discreetly going to Mass after the old style. She fell from favour. In November the Lady Elizabeth asked permission to withdraw from the Court. It was granted. On her way out of London, five hundred gentlemen in her train, she sent a message to the Queen asking for a supply of vestments. It is by no means certain that she was not sincere, in her own way. She was not drawn to the Roman party by conscience, but neither was she conscientiously opposed. Nothing was more remote from her conscience than the whole ecclesiastical problem. Only she did not love yielding to threats, and to her of all people in the realm the doctrine came accompanied by implicit threats. She did not mind a pretence at a readiness to surrender. But a pretence of readiness to surrender is not quite a pretence of surrender—not quite the same to the actor and not quite the same to the spectator. It was this delicate distinction which caused uneasiness in her sister, her servants, and her enemies; it was this distinction which bewildered her contemporaries throughout her life.

At the beginning of January 1554 ambassadors came from the Emperor to settle the affair of the Queen’s marriage; at the end, rebellion broke out in Kent and elsewhere. Sir Thomas Wyatt led a march on London. He was defeated by the measures and the ardour of the Queen, and as soon as his defeat was accomplished orders were sent that Elizabeth should be brought back to London for examination. She was very unwilling to go; she said she was ill, which was at any rate partly true. She said she was innocent and ignorant, which is not so likely. A letter of hers had been found in the dispatches of the French ambassador. She and the ambassador both swore vehemently that it was not hers. There was evidence that letters had been written to her by Wyatt; she swore she had received none, and none from her to Wyatt could be found. The Imperial ambassador was pressing for her execution. The anti-Spanish party in the Council resisted him, and he wrote to his master complaining of their obstruction. The Queen, who was not only religious but also moral, would do nothing unjustified by morals and law. The balance swung almost level.

Elizabeth came to London. In an open litter, very pale, very haughty, in extreme danger, she passed through the streets. Three weeks afterwards further orders against her were given; she was to be conveyed to the Tower. It was Palm Sunday, and a rainy day, when the barge received her—during the time of Mass, when the streets would be least peopled. At Traitor’s Gate, as she landed, she became, for the first recorded time, her public self. She stood still; she looked up to the dark skies; she cried: “Lord, I never thought to come here as prisoner.” She turned from heaven to the people; she called out to the guards around her: “I pray you all, good friends and fellows, bear me witness that I come in no traitor, but as true a woman to the Queen’s Majesty as any now living, and thereon will I take my death.”

Nothing quite sufficient against her could be found to put in evidence, though the Lord Chancellor Gardiner was suspected of suppressing a packet of letters. Division in the Council, agitation in London, Wyatt’s dying declaration that she was innocent, made it impossible for Mary to act, even if she wished. In spite of the Imperial ambassador, Elizabeth was released in May, and dispatched to the honourable semi-captivity in which, now less and now more guarded, she was to remain. It was an experience not without an effect on her future years and acts; if she were so detained and watched, so might other royal persons properly be. She had inconvenient friends; so other royalties might have. For the moment she breathed delight. She was sent, in the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield, to Woodstock, making slow time, and turning the journey almost into a pastoral progress. Guns of salute were fired in London, bells rung in the country. Villagers cheered her, thronged round her, brought her presents. She came laughing through the country roads; she was not yet twenty-one. At Woodstock she remained for a year, watched, but left free to her personal tastes, even in religion. The Roman devotion of her earlier interest was for awhile abandoned; she used—by permission—the English service. Her intellectual exploration had ceased, but the chance of things had thrown her with the New Learning and the Reforming party, and they with her. They had, both parties, nowhere else to look, though neither was quite at ease tali auxilio. She made herself as tiresome to the unfortunate Sir Henry Bedingfield as a young woman of a restless,...