Great Bastards of History Read online

  Elizabeth knew that her half-sister would always regard her as a potential rival, especially given their profound religious differences. She understood that her life was now in more peril than ever before and decided, therefore, to make a show of worshiping in the Catholic manner and expressing at every opportunity both loyalty to and love for the queen.

  It was to no avail.

  One year after she succeeded to the throne, Queen Mary I wed Spain’s Philip II, the son of the Holy Roman emperor and, of course, a Catholic. The union rocked all of England—creating discontent among the Protestant majority, who now feared persecution at the hands of a powerful Catholic minority, but also among the realm’s Catholics, who did not trust Spaniards, regardless of their religion. Into this turmoil, Sir Thomas Wyatt—a courtier whose father had loved Anne Boleyn and whose mother may well have been an object of Henry VIII’s lustful attentions—fomented in Kent an uprising against the crown and led 4,000 rebels to London Bridge and Ludgate, where forces loyal to Mary turned them back. As his army instantly dissolved about him, Wyatt surrendered, throwing himself on the queen’s mercy. He found none. But worse for Elizabeth, he was charged with plotting to overthrow Mary for the purpose of putting her half-sister on the throne. It was for this reason that Mary ordered her conveyed to the Tower of London.

  On the death of Henry VIII’s short-lived heir, Edward VI, in 1553, young Elizabeth follows her half-sister, Mary, into London to witness Mary’s coronation. Within a year, “Bloody Mary” would order the arrest of Elizabeth. This historical fresco was created in 1910 to decorate the British Parliament. Queen Mary (1516-1558) and Princess Elizabeth (1533-1603) entering London, 1553, 1910 (fresco), Shaw, John Byam Liston (1872-1919) / Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  Though bastardized, exiled, and stripped of any official power, Elizabeth had devoted much of her childhood and young womanhood to winning the sympathy and loyalty of influential figures in government. They now rallied to her support, prevailing on Mary for her release. The queen yielded to the extent of setting her free from the Tower, but she exiled her to Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where the young woman was housed in a gatehouse of Woodstock Manor, because the main residence was too broken down to accommodate her. Here Elizabeth spent nearly a year under house arrest.

  During her youth, Elizabeth learned that, save for the friends she might contrive to win, she was ultimately alone and finally dependent most upon herself. Nevertheless, as she was conveyed from the Tower to Woodstock, she was amazed to see crowds thronging the streets and country lanes to get a look at her and cheer her. If the love and loyalty of kings, queens, and courtiers could not be relied upon, it may have been at this moment that she began to believe that her greatest strength might lie with the common people of England, who saw in her her father’s daughter and a faithful champion of the Protestant cause.

  THE WHEEL TURNS—AGAIN

  On April 17, 1555, riders called at Woodstock to summon Elizabeth to attend what all assumed was to be the birth of a child; the queen’s belly had been growing prodigiously for nearly nine months. Doubtless, Elizabeth was moved by Mary’s desire to have her present, and doubtless Mary knew that she now needed all the support she could get. Her efforts to restore the realm to Catholicism entailed England’s involvement in a ruinous military alliance with Spain and, at home, a reign of persecution against those Protestants who protested the rollback of the Reformation. By the time Elizabeth had been summoned to her side, the queen had already earned the epithet of Bloody Mary for having sent some three hundred souls to burn at the stake for heresy.

  Pregnancy came to Mary as a joyous relief—for she had thought herself barren—but days became weeks and weeks months, and she neither delivered nor miscarried, yet her belly continued to swell. After some time, Elizabeth returned to Woodstock, but now as the presumptive heir to the throne. For two things were clear to everyone at the court of Mary I. She would have no children, and what grew in her womb would certainly kill her. On November 17, 1558, the queen died of ovarian cancer.

  Legally still the bastard child of an adulterous traitor, Elizabeth was crowned on January 15, 1559. On the eve of this event, she was greeted and cheered by the people of London, who were (an eyewitness wrote) “wonderfully ravished” by their graceful and charismatic twenty-five-year-old monarch.

  THE VIRGIN QUEEN

  Three days after becoming queen, Elizabeth confessed, “The burden that has fallen upon me maketh me amazed.” Years of distractions during the tumultuous reign of her father, added to more years of misrule under her half-sister, created an England that was (in the words of a contemporary observer) “most afflicted, embroiled on the one side with the Scottish, on the other side with the French war; overcharged with debt … the treasury exhausted; … the people distracted with different opinions in religion; … bare of potent friends, and strengthened with no alliance of foreign princes.” The realm that was now Elizabeth’s to rule was a marginal power compared with most of the rest of Europe, poor, possessed of virtually no army or navy, verging on religious civil war, menaced by Scotland (at the time a foreign country), burdened by Irish rebellion, and greedily watched by the monarchs of France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, all of whom regarded it as something of an overripe fruit ready to fall from the branch and into the hands of whomever was quickest to catch it.

  But Elizabeth the bastard queen was accustomed to adversity and long odds. She was determined not only to restore England to the road of the Reformation but also to carry it to preeminence in trade and influence among nations. Her long, lonely, perilous political apprenticeship had taught her the necessity of strategic patience. Far too long, England had been jerked violently to and fro on fortune’s wheel, and she resolved to work the transformation of the kingdom slowly, always retaining enough of the familiar to provide her subjects with an ample measure of confidence. Although she correctly counted herself among the best-educated monarchs in Europe, she aggressively sought the advice of the best minds she could find, stocking her Privy Council with these men and only these, and taking care to retain on the Council the best people from the reigns of her predecessors, including a few Catholics, while gradually adding her own nominees, foremost among whom were William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who served as secretary of state and, subsequently, lord treasurer, and the dashing Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, who was master of the horse and lord steward of the royal household as well as a privy councilor.

  In 1588, the English fleet drove the Spanish Armada into a storm, thereby preventing what seemed an inevitable invasion against which Elizabeth had eloquently and courageously rallied her troops at Tilbury Camp, pledging, if necessary, to die by their side. Photo by MPI / Getty Images

  Illegitimacy had severed Elizabeth from the luxury of taking anything for granted. Purported friends were often enemies, and family members were the most treacherous enemies of all. Her survival had depended on cultivating a savvy understanding of individual character, and so she came to the throne an avid and skilled reader of people, possessed of an uncanny faculty for separating actual from feigned motives, true loyalty from counterfeit, as when she saw through the protestation of loyalty made to her by her first cousin and principal rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, or recognized the dangerous military incompetence of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who had long been a favorite of hers.

  The modern science of anthropology is founded on the belief that a given culture may be best understood by a well-trained outsider. The circumstances of Elizabeth’s birth and upbringing had made her an outsider in her own culture, and she came to the throne with a profound, objective understanding of the people over whom she would now reign. She understood that she was a queen in a culture that valued and respected men far more than women, yet she also understood that men respected and valued—indeed, worshiped—two idealized images of womanhood: the virgin of chivalric lore, pale, fair, nearly ethereal, and the Virgin of Christia
nity, a holy intercessor whose love for her people was as pure as it was unbounded. It was from this understanding that Elizabeth I presented herself as the “Virgin Queen,” simultaneously courtly and worthy of quasi-religious adoration.

  Part of the presentation was physical. Elizabeth had the good fortune to possess the fair hair and willowy stature essential to the image, but she was also an enthusiastic horsewoman and hunter. Rather than give this up, she shielded her face from the tanning rays of the sun by wearing a mask on clear days, holding it in place by a button clamped between her teeth. She enhanced her fairness of complexion with makeup powders compounded of finely ground alabaster, and she applied unguents and lotions of beeswax, ass’s milk, and the ground-up jawbones of hogs. Other steps were almost certainly more extreme. Renaissance women were known to work into their skin compounds of white lead dissolved in vinegar or borax combined with sulfur, setting off the lips with an application of red ocher and red mercuric sulfide or cochineal, a red dye prepared from the ground-up bodies of the red cochineal insect. As for freckles, these were assiduously bleached with birch-tree sap and sulfur dissolved in a solution of turpentine and mercury sublimate. All such preparations were expensive, but the true cost was eventual semi-mummification of the skin.

  The other component of the presentation was the queen’s very way of life. Despite the persistent entreaties of Parliament that she wed—producing an heir was paramount—Elizabeth persistently refused. A virgin, after all, does not marry, and Elizabeth argued that neither does a true queen. To place a husband above herself would diminish her power. Moreover, if she married a foreign prince (as Mary had), her loyalty would be divided between her country and her husband’s, and the union might (as was the case in Mary’s reign) lead to entangling alliances. If instead she wed an Englishman, all those at court who were not chosen would find themselves driven by jealousies and suspicions. To Parliament and others who begged her to marry, Elizabeth finally and firmly replied that she was married: wedded to England.

  FROM POWERLESSNESS TO POWER

  A modern psychologist would almost certainly dismiss all of the queen’s strategic and political explanations of her refusal to marry and point squarely to the portrait of marriage her childhood had painted for her—of women serially discarded or, like her own mother, discarded and killed.

  And who could deny that Elizabeth’s journey from bastard daughter to Virgin Queen was deeply scarred by searing psychic wounds? Yet equally undeniable is that a girl who had suffered the most devastating rejections imaginable found the strength and wisdom in her early experience of life to lead her people safely through diplomatic, economic, religious, and military crises with foreign powers in Scotland as well as continental Europe; to heal the religious divisions that threatened to tear England apart; to steer the nation from economic stagnation to growth that would eventually build the kingdom into a global empire; to send intrepid men in explorations of the New World; and generally to set England on a course that would transform it from an island backwater into a center of culture, commerce, and imperial power whose influence has made itself felt not only across geographical distances but also throughout time itself.

  Among the many crises conquered and achievements made during Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign—1558 to her death in 1603—one instance stands out as emblematic of Elizabeth at her finest. On July 19, 1588, some 130 ships of the Spanish Armada were sighted in the English Channel. With invasion clearly imminent, Elizabeth parried the pleas of Privy Council and courtiers that she remain under guard in London and instead went to Tilbury, where England’s small army prepared to repel the anticipated Spanish landings. There were those among her advisers who warned of the danger of exposing herself among so many armed men in so perilous a time. “I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people,” she declared, and as she freely walked through the encampment, to a man, the army fell on its knees before her. The next day, having donned the shining steel cuirass of a cavalry officer, she rode among her soldiers astride “a prancing steed attired like an angel bright.” She spoke to the troops:

  Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you as you see at this time not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all. To lay down for God and for my kingdom and for my people my honour and my blood even in the dust.

  Betrayed by family, menaced by scheming rivals at court, Elizabeth placed her reliance on herself—and on her people. This was enough. She proclaimed to her soldiers the fearlessness and defiance founded in the bond, stronger than family, stronger than marriage, she had forged between herself and England, its people, and its defenders:

  I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare invade the borders of my Realm to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your General, Judge, and Rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

  In the end, it was the Royal Navy, which Elizabeth had nurtured and financed, that prevented the mighty Spanish Armada from delivering the thirty thousand invaders it carried. Driven by the British fleet into the teeth of severe storms, half the Armada was lost at sea and never again returned to menace the realm. That the men of the army gathered at Tilbury did not have to fight came to them almost as a disappointment, for their queen had inspired them to a greatness far beyond their meager numbers. Elizabeth’s example at Tilbury endured far beyond the vanished danger posed by the Armada, however. It was to her that Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned some 350 years later when it fell to him to lift Britain on the wings of sublime oratory through its darkest days in World War II to what he himself called the nation’s “finest hour.”

  CHAPTER 5

  JAMES SCOTT

  1ST DUKE OF MONMOUTH THE BASTARD WHO WOULD BE KING

  1649–1685

  BARRED BY HIS ILLEGITIMATE BIRTH FROM REIGNING OVER WHAT HAD BEEN HIS FATHER’S KINGDOM, THE DASHING DUKE OF MONMOUTH FASHIONED HIMSELF INTO A POPULAR MILITARY HERO WHO SOUGHT BY SKILL AT ARMS AN ALTERNATIVE PATH TO THE ENGLISH THRONE.

  HE WAS THE BASTARD SON OF CHARLES II, LATE THE KING OF ENGLAND, Scotland, and Ireland, and like his father, Monmouth was a tall man, powerfully built, and made for a life in the saddle, yet with good looks perpetually boyish in their delicacy. All of this made his abject pleas for mercy and his protestations (quite false) that he had converted to the Catholic religion of the new king, his uncle James II, all the more heart wrenching. Well, heart wrenching to some, but to those who had known him as a fearless military hero, unseemly, even disgusting. As his neck was forced down upon the block stained black with years of bloodshed, he cried out the name of William Russell.

  The sweating crowd pressing close around the scaffold on London’s infamous Tower Hill, some weeping, others jeering, fell suddenly silent. All understood what the condemned man meant by invoking Lord Russell. And none understood better than the man holding the axe, Jack Ketch, executioner in the service of James II Rex. On July 21, 1683, he had executed a sentence of death upon Russell at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. On that occasion, Ketch wielded the instrument of death either with such sadistically nuanced skill or with such lack of simple dexterity—nobody could tell which—that the victim suffered horrifically under blow after blow, each excruciating but not one in itself lethal.

  James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. A born military leader, he quickly raised an army to seize the English throne—and even more quickly saw that army dissolve around him. Portrait of James Scott KG (oil on canvas), Wissing or Wissmig, William (1656-87) (school of) / Private Collection / © Philip Mould Ltd, London / The Bridgeman Art Library International

  Even among the bloodthirsty throng
s that habitually attended English beheadings, the gory and agonizing display had created such outrage that Ketch felt moved to write and publish a pamphlet titled Apologie, in which he excused his performance with the claim that Lord Russell had failed to “dispose himself as was most suitable” and that he was therefore distracted while taking aim on his neck.

  Monmouth’s reminder of Russell’s execution either unnerved or angered Ketch. Even as the first blow fell upon the duke, those who counted themselves connoisseurs of the headsman’s art knew the axe had missed its mark. Ketch stood back, regarding his botched handiwork, and dealt another blow, then another, as Monmouth writhed, screamed, and moaned.

  According to the official record of the Tower of London, there were five blows in all, though some onlookers counted seven and others eight. Whether five, seven, or eight, none proved sufficient to sever the man’s head from his suffering body, and Ketch pulled a butcher’s knife from the sheath on his hip, which he drew across the last cords of sinew and flesh that prevented the head from dropping to the scaffold floor. With that, the life of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, ended on July 15, 1685.