Marriage With My Kingdom by Alison Plowden

Author:Alison Plowden [Plowden, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Royalty, World
ISBN: 9780750921978
Google: cZYTDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0750921978
Publisher: History Press
Published: 1999-09-24T23:00:00+00:00

8

WITHOUT A CERTAIN HEIR, LIVING AND KNOWN

In spite of their recent disappointment, Robert’s dreams of winning the crown matrimonial and de Quadra’s of using him to detach the Queen from the ‘gang of heretics’ who surrounded her proved remarkably tenacious of life. On 24 June, Robert gave a grand water-party on the Thames. De Quadra was among the guests and at one point during the afternoon found himself alone with Robert and Elizabeth on the deck of the vessel from which they were to watch the festivities. ‘They began joking,’ he wrote, ‘which she likes to do much better than talking about business. They went so far with their jokes that Lord Robert told her that, if she liked, I could be the minister to perform the act of marriage and she, nothing loath to hear it, said she was not sure whether I knew enough English.’ The ambassador let them have their fun and then tried to talk some sense into them. If they would only listen to him, they could extricate themselves from the tyranny of councillors like Cecil and his friends, and restore the country to peace and unity by reinstating the Catholic religion. (Like all Philip’s envoys, de Quadra tended to overestimate the strength of Catholic feeling in England.) Once this was done, he went on, they could be married as soon as they liked and, with the King of Spain behind them, could snap their fingers at anyone who dared to object. De Quadra told Philip that he intended to persevere along these lines, for by keeping in with the Queen he would ‘not only maintain her friendliness towards your Majesty, but have still some hopes of persuading her’.1

The Queen did not disillusion him. The longer Philip could be made to believe that her amorous desires might eventually overcome her fear of the heretics and lure her back into the orthodox fold, the better she would be suited – especially at a time when there might well be more trouble brewing north of the border. The young King of France had died the previous December and Mary Queen of Scots, a widow at eighteen, would now become a matrimonial prize second only to the Queen of England. This in itself was worrying, and so was the fact that Mary was about to return to her own kingdom, for who could tell what havoc the pretty creature might create among the volatile Scottish warlords? Who could tell how many simple men might begin to reflect, once she was back in their midst, on their queen’s claims to her neighbour’s throne and be ‘carried away with vain hope and brought abed with fair words’? Mary herself was eloquent in her desire to be friends with her ‘good sister and tender cousin’ Elizabeth, but she was still refusing to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and Elizabeth was not impressed by fair words.2

The end of the summer brought the Queen another tiresome and possibly dangerous complication nearer home, when

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