The Spanish policy with regard to the Austrian match—English suitors for the Queen’s hand—Arundel and Pickering—Philip II.—The Archduke Ferdinand—Lord Robert Dudley—The Prince of Sweden—Philip’s attitude towards the Austrian match—The Archduke Charles—Pickering and Dudley—The Earl of Arran—Dudley’s intrigues against the Archduke Charles’ suit—Death of Lady Robert Dudley—Prince Eric again.

In the same ship that brought Arundel from Flanders came that cunning old Bishop of Aquila, who was afterwards Philip’s ambassador in England. He conveyed to Feria the King’s real wishes with regard to Elizabeth’s marriage, which were somewhat at variance with those which appeared on the surface. Philip had now definitely taken upon himself the championship of the Catholic supremacy, and his interests were hourly drifting further away from those of his Austrian kinsmen, who were largely dependent upon the reforming German princes. This was the principal reason why Sussex and other moderate Protestants in England were promoting an Austrian marriage which, it was assumed, would conciliate Philip without binding England to the ultra-Catholic party. The Bishop’s instructions were to throw cold water on the scheme whilst outwardly appearing to favour it, but if he saw that such a marriage was inevitable, then he was to get the whole credit of it for his master, who was to subsidise his impecunious cousin, the Archduke, and make him the instrument of Spain. Feria confessed himself puzzled. If he was not to forward the Archduke Ferdinand, he did not know, he said, whom he could suggest. Everybody kept him at arm’s length and he could only repeat current gossip. Some people thought the Earl of Arundel would be the man, others the Earl of Westmoreland; then Lord Howard’s son, and then Sir William Pickering; “every day there is a new cry raised about a husband.” “At present,” he said, “I see no disposition to enter into the discussion of any proposal on your Majesty’s own behalf, either on her part or that of the Council, and when it has to be approached it should be mentioned first to her alone.” The first step, he thought, should be to arouse the jealousy of each individual councillor of the Queen’s marriage with any Englishman; and at the same time to work upon the Queen’s pride by hinting that she would hardly stoop to a marriage inferior to that of her sister. He thought, however, that a marriage with Philip would scarcely be acceptable, as he could not live in England, and Feria was still in hope that if they took any foreigner the Archduke Ferdinand would be the man. Feria’s plan of campaign was an ingenious one. After he had aroused Elizabeth’s jealousy of her dead sister and deprecated the idea of the degradation to the Queen of a marriage with a subject, “we can take those whom she might marry here and pick them to pieces one by one, which will not require much rhetoric, for there is not a man amongst them worth anything, counting the married ones and all. If, after this, she inclines to your Majesty, it will be necessary for you to send me orders whether I am to carry it any further or throw cold water on it and set up the Archduke Ferdinand, for I see no other person we can propose to whom she would agree.”16

Philip had sent to the Queen a present of jewels by the Bishop of Aquila, with which she was delighted, and assured Feria that those who said her sympathies were French told an untruth. She was indeed quite coquettish with him sometimes, but he felt that he was outwitted. He could get no information as he did in the last reign. The councillors fought shy of him, anxious as ever for bribes and pensions, but willing to give no return for them, for the very good reason that they had nothing to give, they being as hopelessly in the dark as every one else as to the Queen’s intentions. “Indeed I am afraid that one fine day we shall find this woman married, and I shall be the last man in the place to know anything about it,” said Feria. In the meanwhile Arundel was ruining himself with ostentatious expenditure; borrowing vast sums of money from Italian bankers and scattering gifts of jewels of great value amongst the ladies who surrounded the Queen. He was a man far into middle age at the time, with two married daughters, the Duchess of Norfolk and Lady Lumley, and was in antiquity of descent the first of English nobles; but one can imagine how the keen young woman on the throne must have smiled inwardly at the idea of the empty-headed, flighty old fop, aspiring to be her partner. “There is a great deal of talk also,” writes Feria, “lately about the Queen marrying the Duke Adolphus, brother of the King of Denmark. One of the principal recommendations they find in him is that he is a heretic, but I am persuading them that he is a very good Catholic and not so comely as they make him out to be, as I do not think he would suit us.” At last, after the usual tedious deliberation, the prayers and invocations for Divine guidance, Philip made up his mind that he, like another Metius Curtius, would save his cause by sacrificing himself. He approached the subject in a true spirit of martyrdom. Feria had been repeating constantly—almost offensively—how unpopular he was in England, ever since Mary died. He had, he was told, not a man in his favour, he was distrusted and disliked, and so on, but yet he so completely deceived himself with regard to the support to be obtained by Elizabeth from her people through her national policy and personal popularity, as to write to Feria announcing his gracious intention of sacrificing himself for the good of the Catholic Church and marrying the Queen of England on condition of her becoming a Catholic and obtaining secret absolution from the Pope. “In this way it will be evident and manifest that I am serving the Lord in marrying her and that she has been converted by my act.... You will, however, not propose any conditions until you see how the Queen is disposed towards the matter itself, and mark well that you must commence to broach the subject with the Queen alone, as she has already opened a way to such an approach.” It must have been evident to Feria at this time (January, 1559) that the Queen could not marry his master without losing her crown. The Protestant party were now paramount, the reformers had flocked back from Switzerland and Germany, and Elizabeth had cast in her lot with them. To acknowledge the Pope’s power of absolution would have been to confess herself a bastard and an usurper. There was only one possible Catholic sovereign of England and that was Mary Queen of Scots, and it is difficult to see what could have been Philip’s drift in making such an offer, which, if it had been accepted, would have vitiated his wife’s claim to the crown of England and have strengthened that of the French candidate.

In any case Elizabeth perceived it quickly enough, and when Feria approached her and delivered a letter from Philip to her, she began coyly to fence with the question. She knew she could not marry Philip; but she was vain and greedy of admiration, and it would be something to refuse such an offer if she could get it put into a form which would enable her to refuse it. So she began to profess her maiden disinclination to change her state; “but,” says Feria, “as I saw whither she was tending, I cut short the reply, and by the conversation which followed ... as well as the hurry she was in to give me the answer, I soon understood what the answer would be ... to shelve the business with fair words.” The end of it was that he refused to take any answer at all, unless it were a favourable one, and so deprived Elizabeth of the satisfaction of saying she had actually rejected his master’s offer—which was a grievance with her for many years afterwards.

Of all this the multitude knew nothing. They were busy with speculation elsewhere. “Il Schafanoya,” the Italian gossip-monger, gives an interesting account of the coronation ceremony and the self-sufficient pomposity of Arundel, who was Lord Steward, “with a silver wand a yard long, commanding everybody, from the Duke (of Norfolk) downwards.”17 Lord Robert Dudley as Master of the Horse “led a fair white hackney covered with cloth of gold after the Queen’s litter,” but no one as yet seemed to regard him as her possible consort. That came afterwards. Schafanoya, writing to the Mantuan ambassador in Brussels (January, 1559), says: “Some persons declare that she will take the Earl of Arundel, he being the chief peer of this realm, notwithstanding his being old in comparison with the Queen. This report is founded on the constant daily favours he receives in public and private from her Majesty. Others assert that she will take a very handsome youth, eighteen or twenty years of age and robust, judging from passion, and because at dances and other public places she prefers him to any one else. A third opinion is that she will marry an individual who until now has been in France on account of his religion, though he has not yet made his appearance, it being well known how much she loved him. He is a very handsome gallant gentleman whose name I forget. But all are agreed that she will take an Englishman, although the ambassadors of the King of Sweden seek the contrary.”

The “very handsome youth” was perhaps the Earl of Oxford; the “handsome gentleman” was certainly Sir William Pickering, who for a time was the favourite candidate. It is known that there had been love passages long before between Elizabeth and him, but to what extent was never discovered. He can hardly have been a very stable character, for he had fled to France under Mary, but had very soon entered into treacherous correspondence with the Spanish party to spy upon the actions of the Carews and the rest of the Protestant exiles. Shortly before Mary’s death he had been commissioned to go to Germany and bring thence to England a regiment of mercenaries which had been raised for Mary. They were, however, used by Philip for his own purposes, and when Elizabeth ascended the throne, Pickering thought proper to have a long diplomatic illness at Dunkirk, to learn how he would be received in England after his more than doubtful dealings. As soon as he was satisfied that bygones would be bygones, he came to England in fine feather. Tiepolo writes to the Doge, February 23rd: “Concerning her marriage it still continues to be said that she will take that Master Pickering, who from information received by me, is about thirty-six years of age, of tall stature, handsome, and very successful with women, for he is said to have enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones.”18 Parliament had sent a deputation to the Queen to urge her to marry, and to represent the disadvantages of a foreign match, to which the Queen had given a sympathetic but cautious answer. This had raised the hopes of Pickering to a great height, and in the early spring he made his appearance. He had lingered too long, however. Lord Robert Dudley had already come to the front. Feria wrote to Philip on the 18th of April: “During the last few days Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatsoever he pleases with affairs, and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert. I can assure your Majesty that matters have reached such a pass that I have been brought to consider whether it would not be well to approach Lord Robert on your Majesty’s behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.” At the same time the Swedish ambassador was again pressing the suit of Prince Eric; but he must have been extremely maladroit, for he offended Elizabeth at the outset by saying that his master’s son was still of the same mind, and asked for a reply to the letter he had sent her. “What letter?” said the Queen. “The letter I brought your Majesty.” Elizabeth replied that she was now Queen of England, and if he required an answer he must address her as such. She added that she did not know whether his master would leave his kingdom to marry her, but she could assure him that she would not leave hers to be the monarch of the world, and in the meanwhile she would say neither yes nor no. A messenger was sent off with this cold comfort, and came back with fine presents of furs and tapestries, and for a time Swedish money was lavished on the courtiers very freely—and it is curious that the King of Sweden is always spoken of as being one of the richest of monarchs—but the ambassador became a standing joke and a laughing-stock of the Court ladies as soon as his presents ran out. A more dignified embassy from Eric shortly afterwards arrived with a formal offer of his hand, but they were, as the Bishop of Aquila says, treated in a similar manner, and ridiculed to their own faces in Court masques represented before them.

A much more serious negotiation was running its course at the same time. When the Emperor had been informed that Philip had desisted from the pursuit of the match for himself, he begged him to support the suit of the Archduke Ferdinand. It was considered unadvisable to mention at first which of the Archdukes was the suitor, but Philip himself made no secret of his preference to Ferdinand, who was a narrow bigot of his own school; so the Spanish ambassador in England was instructed to forward the matter to the best of his ability, in conjunction with an imperial ambassador who was to be sent for the purpose. When the instructions arrived, matters had gone so far that a secretary had already come to London from the Emperor with letters for the Queen and a portrait of Ferdinand. This had been arranged by Sir Thomas Challoner, who had recently been in Vienna; but much doubt existed as to the sincerity of Philip’s professions of good-will towards the affair. Indeed, those who were most in favour of it appear to have thought, not unreasonably, that the marriage would become impossible if it were hampered with conditions dictated by Spain. The Austrian match certainly had influential support at Court. Cecil, Sussex, and all of Dudley’s many enemies thought at the time that it offered the best way of checking his growing favour, and forwarded it accordingly. In April Feria wrote: “They talk a great deal about the marriage with the Archduke Ferdinand and seem to like it, but for my part I believe she will never make up her mind to anything that is good for her. Sometimes she appears to want to marry him, and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great prince; and then they say she is in love with Lord Robert and never lets him leave her. If my spies do not lie, which I believe they do not, for a certain reason which they have recently given me, I understand she will not bear children; but if the Archduke is a man, even if she should die without any, he will be able to keep the kingdom with the support of your Majesty.”

When Pickering finally arrived, therefore, he found the field pretty well occupied, but his advent caused considerable stir. He was at once surrounded by those who for various reasons were equally against Dudley and a Catholic prince. Two days after his arrival Dudley was sent off hunting to Windsor, and Sir William was secretly introduced into the Queen’s presence; and a few days afterwards went publicly to the palace and stayed several hours by the Queen’s side. “They are,” wrote Feria, “betting four to one in London that he will be king.... If these things were not of such great importance and so lamentable, they would be very ridiculous.”19

Pickering’s arrival at Court is thus spoken of by Schafanoya, writing on the 10th of May, 1559: “The day before yesterday there came Sir William Pickering, who is regarded by all people as the future husband of the Queen. He remains at home, courted by many lords of the Council and others, but has not yet appeared at Court. It is said they wished in Parliament to settle what title they should give him and what dignity, but nothing was done. Many deem this to be a sign that she will marry the Archduke Ferdinand, but as yet there is no foundation for this, although the news comes from Flanders. Meanwhile my Lord Robert Dudley is in very great favour and very intimate with her Majesty. On this subject I ought not to report the opinion of many persons. I doubt whether my letter may not miscarry or be read, wherefore it is better to keep silence than to speak ill.”20 When Challoner had returned from Vienna he had brought with him full descriptions of the Emperor’s sons. Ferdinand was a bigot and a milksop, and Charles, the younger Archduke, was said to have narrow shoulders and a great head. So when Baron Ravenstein arrived in London on his matrimonial embassy the Queen was quite ready for him. Ravenstein himself was as devout a Catholic as his master, and was received very coolly at first. The Queen told him she would marry no man whom she had not seen, and would not trust portrait painters; and much more to the same effect. To his second audience Ravenstein was accompanied by the Bishop of Aquila, as it was desirable that, if anything came of the negotiation, Spain should get the benefit of it. It soon became clear to the wily churchman that Ferdinand would never do. He says: “We were received on Sunday at one, and found the Queen, very fine, in the presence-chamber looking on at the dancing. She kept us there a long while, and then entered her room with us.” The Bishop pressed her, in his bland way, to favourably consider the offers of the Emperor’s ambassador; “but I did not name the Archduke, because I suspected she would reply excluding them both. She at once began, as I feared, to talk about not wishing to marry, and wanted to reply in that sense; but I cut short the colloquy by saying that I did not seek an answer, and only begged her to hear the ambassador.” He then stood aside and chatted with Cecil, who gave him to understand that they would not accept Ferdinand, “as they have quite made up their minds that he would upset their heresy,”21 and went on to speak of the various approaches that had already been made to the Queen; politely regretting that affinity and religious questions had made the marriage with Philip impossible. In the meanwhile poor Ravenstein was making but slow progress with the Queen, who soon reduced him to dazed despair, and the Bishop again took up the running, artfully begging her to be plain and frank in this business, “as she knew how honestly and kindly the worthy Germans negotiated.” And then, cleverly taking advantage of what he had just heard from Cecil, he said that he had been told that the Archduke had been represented to her as a young monster, very different from what he was; “for, although both brothers are comely, this one who was offered to her now was the younger and more likely to please her than the one who had been spoken of before. I thought best to speak in this way, as I understood in my talk with Cecil that it was Ferdinand they dreaded.” The Queen at this pricked up her ears, and asked the Bishop of whom he was speaking. He told her the Archduke Charles, who was a very fit match for her as Ferdinand was not available. “When she was quite satisfied of this,” says the Bishop, “she went back again to her nonsense, saying that she would rather be a nun than marry a man she did not know, on the faith of portrait painters.” She then hinted that she wished Charles to visit her in person, even if he came in disguise. Her thirst for admiration and homage was insatiable, and, popular parvenue as she was, the idea of princes of spotless lineage humbling themselves before her very nearly led her into a quagmire more than once. She probably had not the slightest intention of marrying Charles at the time, but it would have been a great feather in her cap if she could have brought a prince of the house of Austria as a suitor to her feet. But the Bishop was a match for her on this occasion. “I do not know whether she is jesting ... but I really believe she would like to arrange for this visit in disguise. So I turned it to a joke, and said we had better discuss the substance of the business.... I would undertake that the Archduke would not displease her.” The Bishop having soothed the Queen with persiflage of this sort, disconsolate Ravenstein was called back rather more graciously, and told that, on the Bishop’s request, the Queen would appoint a committee of the Council to hear his proposals.

In the meanwhile Dudley and Pickering were manoeuvring for the position of first English candidate. Sir William had now a fine suite of rooms in the palace, and was ruffling bravely, giving grand entertainments, and dining in solitary state by himself, with minstrels playing in the gallery, rather than feast, like the other courtiers of his rank, at one of the tables of the household. He pooh-poohed Ravenstein and his mission and said that the Queen would laugh at him and all the rest of them, as he knew she meant to die a maid. Pickering appears to have rather lost his head with his new grandeur, and soon drops out of the scene, upon which only the keenest wits could hope to survive. His insolence had aroused the indignation of the greater nobles, but somehow it was only the least pugnacious of them with whom he quarrelled. The Earl of Bedford, who from all accounts seems to have been a misshapen monstrosity with an enormous head, said something offensive about Pickering at a banquet, and a challenge from the irate knight was the immediate result; Dudley, of all men, being the bearer thereof, always at this time ready to wound the extreme Protestant party, to which Bedford belonged. But Pickering was as distasteful to Catholics as to Protestants. On one occasion he was about to enter the private chapel inside the Queen’s apartments at Whitehall, when he was met at the door by the Earl of Arundel, who told him he ought to know that that was no place for him, but was reserved for the lords of the Council. Pickering answered that he knew that very well, and he also knew that Arundel was an impudent knave. The Earl was no hero, and Pickering went swaggering about the Court for days telling the story. With such a swashbuckler as this for a rival, it is not surprising that the handsome and youthful Dudley rapidly passed him in the race for his mistress’s favour. Dudley played his game cleverly. His idea was first to put all English aspirants out of the running by ostensibly favouring the match with the Archduke, whilst he himself was strengthening his influence over the Queen, in the certainty that, when matters of religion came to be discussed, difficulties might be raised at any moment which would break off the Austrian negotiations. In the meanwhile the Queen coquetted with dull-witted Ravenstein, and persuaded him that if the Archduke would come over and she liked him, she would marry him, although she warned the ambassador not to give his master the trouble of coming so far to see so ugly a lady as she was. Instead of paying her the compliment for which she was angling, he maladroitly asked her whether she wished him to write that to the Archduke. “Certainly not,” she replied, “on my account, for I have no intention of marrying.” She jeered at Ferdinand and his devotions, but displayed a discreet maidenly interest in Charles, and, it is easy to see, promptly extracted from Ravenstein all the knowledge he possessed, much to Bishop Quadra’s anxiety. Feria had gone back to Philip, with the assurance that she never meant to marry, and that it was “all pastime,” but Quadra thought that she would be driven into matrimony by circumstances. “The whole business of these people is to avoid any engagement that will upset their wickedness. I believe that when once they are satisfied about this they will not be averse to Charles. I am not sure about her, for I do not understand her. Amongst other qualities which she says her husband must possess is that he should not sit at home all day among the cinders, but should in time of peace keep himself employed in warlike exercises.” For many reasons it suited Elizabeth to show an inclination to the match; for she could thus keep the English Catholics in hand, notwithstanding the religious innovations and her severity, whilst satisfying others “who want to see her married and are scandalised at her doings.” But the Bishop disbelieved in the marriage unless she were driven to it. Whilst Ravenstein was being caressed and befooled, the French were doing their best to hinder an understanding with him. There were sundry French noblemen in London as hostages—and very troublesome guests they were—who industriously spread the idea that it was ungrateful of the Queen to disdain to marry one of her own subjects who had raised her to the throne. When Ravenstein discussed this view with her, “she was very vexed, and repeated to him that she would die a thousand deaths rather than marry one of her subjects; but for all this,” says the Bishop, “he does not seem to have got any further than usual with his master’s affair.” And Bishop Quadra and his master were determined he should not do so, except with Spanish intervention and on Spanish terms, which would make the marriage impossible in England. Things were thus going prosperously for Dudley. The Swedish embassy had come and gone, “much aggrieved and offended ... as they were being made fun of in the palace, and by the Queen more than anybody. I do not think it matters much whether they depart pleased or displeased.”22 It was clear that Elizabeth would have nothing to do with “Eric the Bad,” and the Archduke was now the only serious competitor; which exactly suited Dudley, as he knew the insuperable religious obstacles that could be raised to him.

But Dudley was not by any means the only artful or self-seeking man in Elizabeth’s Court, and was not allowed to have all his own way. The real difficulties of the marriage with the Archduke, hampered as he would be by unacceptable Spanish conditions, were soon obvious to the Protestant party, who tried a bold stroke, which, if their weapon had been a strong instead of a lamentably weak one, might have altered the whole course of English history. To a French Catholic princess, as Queen of Scotland and heiress to the crown of England, the natural counterpoise was a close alliance between England and Spain; but the Protestants saw that, from a religious point of view, one position was as bad as the other, and conceived the idea of encouraging the claims of a son of the house of Hamilton, who, after Mary, was next heir to the crown of Scotland. The Earl of Arran, son of the Duke of Chatelherault was in France; and Cecil’s henchmen, Randolph and Killigrew, were sent backwards and forwards to him and to Throgmorton, in Paris, to urge him to action. If he could raise a revolution in Scotland against papists and foreigners, and seize the crown, he might, thought Cecil, marry Elizabeth, unite the two countries, and defy their enemies. Trouble in Scotland was easily aroused; but the King of France, just before his own death, which raised Mary Stuart to the throne of France as well, learnt of the plan and ordered Arran’s capture alive or dead. Killigrew managed to smuggle him out of France disguised as a merchant, and took him to Geneva and Zurich, where he sat at the feet of Peter Martyr and other reformers, and then as secretly was hurried over to England in July, 1559. The Spanish party and the Emperor’s ambassador soon got wind of it, and were in dismay. The Earl was hidden first in Cecil’s house, and was afterwards conveyed secretly to the Queen’s chambers at Greenwich. The news soon spread, and the marriage was looked upon, all through August and part of September, as a settled thing;23 and, although Bedford and Cecil went out of their way to buoy up the hopes of a marriage with the Archduke, it was clear to the Spanish party that Arran was the favoured man, the more especially that Mary Stuart’s husband had now become King of France. But this did not suit Dudley. Early in September Lady Mary Sidney, Dudley’s sister, came to the Spanish ambassador with a wonderful story that a plot had been discovered to poison the Queen and Dudley at a dinner given by the Earl of Arundel. This, she said, had so alarmed the Queen, who had now a war with France on her hands, that she had determined to marry at once, and awaited the ambassador at Hampton Court with the offer of the Archduke, whom she would accept. Lady Sidney professed to be acting with the Queen’s consent, and emphatically insisted that, if the matter were now pushed and the Archduke brought over at once, it could be concluded without delay. The cunning Bishop himself was for once taken in. Before going to Hampton Court he saw Dudley, who placed himself entirely at the disposal of the King of Spain, “to whom he owed his life.” He said the Queen had summoned him and his sister the night before, and had directed them how to proceed. The marriage, he assured the Bishop, was now necessary and could be effected.

The Bishop wrote to Cardinal de Granvelle directly after the interview: “Lord Robert and his sister are certainly acting splendidly, and the King will have to reward them well—better than he does me—and your Lordship must remind him of it in due time. The question of religion is of the most vital importance, as is also the manner of the Archduke’s marriage and its conditions and ceremonies. In view of these difficulties it would be better for the wedding to be a clandestine one. I do not know how he will get over the oath that he will have to take to conform with the laws of the land, which are some of them schismatic.”24

The Bishop’s interview with the Queen, however, fairly mystified him. She blew hot and cold as usual. “She hoped to God that no harm would come to the Archduke on his incognito visit; she would be glad to see him; but mind,” she said, “I am not bound to marry him if he come,” which the Bishop assured the Emperor “was only dissimulation, and she really meant to marry him.” She was very careful to repeat that she had not invited the Archduke, and was not bound to marry him, and went so far as to say she could not trust Quadra to state this clearly, and would write to the Emperor herself. But whilst she said it in words she took equal care to contradict it in looks and gestures that could never be called up in witness against her. The Bishop was at last completely won over, and strongly urged the Emperor to send his son and seize the prize. This new turn of events hardly pleased Cecil, but it was necessary for him to dissemble, for Elizabeth was now at war with France and Scotland, and she could not afford to give the cold shoulder to Spain as well. When the Bishop saw him on leaving the Queen, he says: “I listened to him (Cecil) for some time, and seeing that he was beating about the bush, I begged that we might speak plainly to each other, as I was neither blind nor deaf, and could easily perceive that the Queen was not taking this step, to refuse her consent after all. He swore that he did not know, and could not assure me,” and with this, and vague protestations of Cecil’s personal wish for the Archduke’s success, the Bishop had to be contented. He faithfully conveyed the Queen’s words to the Emperor, but her looks and gestures could not be put upon paper, so that it is not surprising that his Majesty could see no further assurance than before that he was not to be fooled after all. Feria was more deeply versed in the ways of women than was the Bishop, and on receiving the news, answered: “It seems that the Emperor up to the present refuses leave for his son to go, and, to tell the truth, I cannot persuade myself that he is wrong, nor do I believe that she will either marry him, or refuse to marry him whilst the matter at issue is only his visit.... As to what Lord Robert and his sister say, I do not believe more than the first day that the only thing the Queen is stickling for is the coming of the lad.” There was one point touched upon by the Queen in her interview with the Spanish ambassador, which, as he tells his own master, he dared not refer to in his letter to the Emperor. After much fencing and fishing for compliments respecting her personal attractions, and expressed doubts on the Queen’s part as to whether the Archduke would be satisfied when he saw her, she said that even if he were, he might be displeased with what he heard about her, as there were people in the country who took pleasure in maligning her. The Bishop wrote that she displayed some signs of shame when she said this, whilst he parried the point diplomatically, and hastened to change the subject. “I saw she was pleased, as she no doubt thought that if the Archduke heard any of the idle tales they tell about her (and they tell many) he might take advantage of them to the detriment of her honour if the match were broken off, although, from this point of view, I was not sorry, as the fear may not be without advantage to us.” But to the Queen he expressed himself shocked that she should think of such a thing as he had done previously when Lady Sidney had hinted at a similar doubt. For the next two months an elaborate attempt was made to keep up the appearance of cordiality towards the Archduke’s match, and the Spanish party was still further beguiled by the sudden tendency of the Queen to smile on Catholicism. Candles and crucifixes were placed on the altar in the Chapel Royal, and the Queen entertained the Bishop with long religious discussions, for the purpose of inducing him to believe that she was a Catholic in her heart. But they could not deceive the Bishop for very long; nothing definite could be got from the Queen, from whose side Dudley never moved, and by the middle of November (1559) the Bishop satisfied himself that he was being played with. A new Swedish embassy had arrived, and was being entertained with hopes for the first time, particularly by Dudley, who thought that the Austrian suit, having now served his turn and eclipsed Arran, was becoming too hot to be safe for him. The Bishop writes: “I noticed Lord Robert was slackening in our business, and favouring the Swedish match, and he had words with his sister because she was carrying our affair further than he desired. I have heard from a certain person who is in the habit of giving me veracious news that Lord Robert had sent to poison his wife. Certainly all the Queen has done with us and with the Swede, and will do with all the rest in the matter of her marriage, is only to keep Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words, until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated. I am told some extraordinary things about this intimacy which I would never have believed, only that now I find Lord Robert’s enemies in the Council making no secret of their evil opinion of it.” The Queen tried to face the Bishop with her usual blandishments, but his eyes were opened, and when he pressed the point closely, she became coolly dignified, surprised that she had been misunderstood, and threw over Lady Sidney and Dudley, who reciprocally cast the blame upon each other. The Bishop and the Emperor’s ambassador were furious; and, as the best way to checkmate Dudley, approached the Duke of Norfolk, who had been declaiming for some time against the insolence of the rising favourite, saying that if he did not abandon his plans he should not die in his bed, and so forth. The Duke, who was the most popular as well as the most exalted of the English nobles, listened eagerly to anything that should injure Dudley, and promised all his influence and personal prestige in favour of the Archduke. He recommended that the latter should at once come openly in state to England, and he, the Duke, wagered his right arm if he did “that all the biggest and best in the land should be on his side.” Whatever may have been passing in Norfolk’s mind, there is no doubt as to what the Bishop’s own plan was, to avenge himself for the trick played upon him. He says: “I am of opinion that if the Archduke comes and makes the acquaintance, and obtains the goodwill of these people, even if this marriage—of which I have now no hope except by force—should fall through, and any disaster were to befall the Queen, such as may be feared from her bad government, the Archduke might be summoned to marry Lady Catharine (Grey) to whom the kingdom comes if this woman dies. If the Archduke sees Catharine he should so bear himself that she should understand this design, which, in my opinion, will be beneficial and even necessary.” The “design” evidently was the murder of the Queen and Dudley, and the securing of Catharine Grey to the Spanish interest. A daring plan, but requiring bold instruments and swift action. Weak, unstable Norfolk was no leader for such an enterprise, as he proved years afterwards. Whilst Quadra was plotting and sulking at Durham House, Dudley’s opponents strove to checkmate him by keeping the Archduke’s match afoot. Count Helfenstein had come from the Emperor before the fiasco, and it was now proposed to send special English envoys to Austria and to the King of Spain, the purpose of course being to frighten the French into the idea that the matter was settled. One day at Court Dudley and Norfolk came to high words about it. He was neither a good Englishman nor a loyal subject who advised the Queen to marry a foreigner, said Dudley; and on another occasion, Clinton and Arundel actually fell to fisticuffs on the subject. The Swedes had stood less on their dignity than the Austrians, and Eric’s brother, the young Duke of Finland, had come over to press his brother’s suit. When he arrived with vast sums of money for gifts, as before, he preferred rather to become a suitor himself, but with little success. When he begged for a serious audience he was kept so long outside in an antechamber alone that he went away in a huff. The Venetian Tiepolo writes on December 15th, giving an account of Arran’s defeat in Scotland by the French, which, with his growing dementia, spoilt him as a suitor; and Tiepolo goes on to say: “The Queen is still undecided about her marriage, though amongst all the competitors she showed most inclination for the Archduke Charles. The Duke of Finland, second son of the King of Sweden, is with her. He came to favour the suit of his elder brother, and then proposed himself, but the man’s manners did not please the Queen. The second son also of the late John Frederick of Saxony, who heretofore was proposed to the Queen by the French, but was afterwards deserted by them because they wished her to marry an Englishman ... has not relinquished his pretensions, and has sent Count Mansfeldt to propose to the Queen. The King of Denmark, in like manner, has not failed to exert himself, although the general opinion is that if the affairs of the Earl of Arran prosper he will prevail over all competitors.”25

All through the winter of 1559–60 matters thus lingered on. The Bishop plotting and planning for the invasion of England from Flanders, and completely undeceived with regard to the Queen’s matrimonial intentions, whilst the English still desired to keep up an appearance of cordial friendship with the Spanish party, as a counterpoise to the King of France, with whom they were at war in Scotland. The Bishop gives an account of an interview which he and Helfenstein, the new imperial ambassador had with the Queen in February, and it is clear that at this time she was again very anxious to beguile the Emperor into sending his son on chance. But Helfenstein was a very different sort of ambassador from Ravenstein, and she could not do much with him; his idea being to hold her at arm’s length until she was forced to write to the Emperor herself, as she promised to do, in which case it would not, he thought, be difficult to construe something she might say into a pledge which she could be forced to fulfil. “I do not,” says the Bishop, “treat this matter with her as I formerly did, as I want her to understand that I am not deceived by her.” Nor was he for a time deceived by Dudley. “The fellow is ruining the country with his vanity.” “If he lived for another year he” (Dudley) said “he would be in a very different position,” and so forth. During the summer an envoy named Florent (Ajacet) was sent by Catharine de Medici and her son to propose as a husband for Elizabeth a son of the Duke de Nevers. As may be supposed, such a match—or indeed any match recommended by the consort of her enemy Mary Stuart, with whom her war was hardly ended—did not meet with her approval, and the envoy then went to Bishop Quadra and told him he knew of a certain way of bringing about the marriage with the Archduke. His plan was that the Emperor should prevail upon the King of France to give up Calais to England. This was merely a feeler and absurd, as Francis II. had nothing to gain by the Austrian match, but the Bishop maliciously told the Queen the joke, as he called it, whereupon she was very angry that her claim for Calais should be treated so lightly. She then told him that she saw now she must marry without delay, “although with the worst will in the world,” and tried again to lead him to believe that she was anxious to marry the Archduke, “but I fear,” said he, “that it is with the hope of gaining your Majesty’s favour in her cause, as she calls it, with the French.... Religious matters make me believe that in case she determines to marry, she will rather lay hands on any of these heretics than on the Archduke. I understand now that the Earl of Arran is excluded as being poor and of small advantage, and also because he is not considered personally agreeable. They all favour the Prince of Sweden as he is both heretical and rich, and especially Secretary Cecil, who would expect to remain at the head of affairs as at present.” Shortly afterwards, in September, 1560, Cecil took the Bishop aside and complained bitterly of Dudley, who he said was trying to turn him out of his place; and then, after exacting many pledges of secrecy, said that the Queen was conducting herself in such a way that he, Cecil, thought of retiring, as he clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through the Queen’s intimacy with Dudley, whom she meant to marry. He begged the Bishop to remonstrate with the Queen, and ended by saying that Dudley was thinking of killing his wife, “who was said to be ill although she was quite well.”26 “The next day,” writes the Bishop, “as she was returning from hunting, the Queen told me that Robert’s wife was dead, or nearly so, and asked me not to say anything about it. Certainly this business is most shameful and scandalous; and, withal, I am not sure whether she will marry the man at once or even at all, as I do not think she has her mind sufficiently fixed. Cecil says she wishes to do as her father did.” In a postscript of the same letter the writer gives the news of poor Amy Robsart’s death. “She broke her neck—she must have fallen down a staircase, said the Queen.” Thenceforward Dudley was free, and the marriage negotiations had another factor to be taken into account.

About a month afterwards Cecil came to the Bishop and said that as the Queen had personally assured him she would not marry Dudley, he urged him once more to bring the Archduke forward; but Quadra was wary now, for he saw the design was only to arouse the fears of the French, and he would take no hasty step. It is difficult to see how he could have done so, for, after sending three ambassadors, the Emperor had now quite made up his mind that the Queen should not again play with him. Every weapon in the feminine battery had been employed—maiden coyness, queenly reserve, womanly weakness, and the rest of them, had been tried in vain. A good portrait of the Archduke had been sent, and her own agents had seen him. If, said the Emperor, this were not enough, the young man should come himself; but only on a distinct pledge that she would marry him if he did. Beyond this the Emperor would not go, and the Queen always stopped short at a binding promise. Nor, indeed, would the match have pleased the extreme reform party in England led by Cecil, Bedford, and Clinton, which was now the paramount one. It was useful to Cecil, in order to play it as a trump card whenever the negotiations with the French rendered it necessary, but, at the time, undoubtedly the Swedish match was most in favour with the Protestant party. Prince Eric was very persevering. When his brother returned to Sweden he proposed to come to England himself, but was induced to delay his visit; according to Throgmorton,27 in order that his father might abdicate, and he might get better terms. “Both father and son, however, have sent to propose very advantageous conditions to the Queen, should she consent to the marriage. They will bind themselves to send to England annually 200,000 crowns to be expended for the benefit of English subjects, and in time of war to keep fifty armed ships at their own cost, with other private conditions very profitable for England, which the King defers making known until his coming to her.” It is evident that Eric was too much in earnest to suit Elizabeth, and she had to behave rudely enough to him on several occasions to prevent his ardour from causing inconvenience. It is more than probable that she deceived Cecil and the rest of her advisers as to her matrimonial intentions as completely as she did the suitors themselves, and that she never meant to marry—except perhaps on two occasions, which will be specified, when circumstances or her feelings nearly drove her to the irrevocable step. Her own motives were less complicated than those of her advisers, and the lifelong playing off of France against Spain, of which her matrimonial negotiations were a part, was obviously only possible whilst she kept single; whereas party, religious, and personal affinities all operated on the minds of her courtiers and ministers, and, to a certain extent, separated their interests from hers.