Early life: reversals of fortune

The most comprehensive account of Elizabeth's early life is found in David Starkey's Elizabeth. Apprenticeship (Vintage 2001)

Reversals of fortune

Before Elizabeth was three, her life had seen an astonishing reversal of fortune. There were more reversals to follow.

She was born at Greenwich Palace on 7 September 1533. In spite of the disappointment at her sex, she was named Princess of Wales and the heir to the throne. Then in May 1536, her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed. Her marriage to Henry was declared invalid, leaving Elizabeth illegitimate. She was no longer a princess but simply 'the Lady Elizabeth'.

After her mother’s death she experienced a series of stepmothers – Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr. Her relationship with the devout and scholarly Katherine Parr was warm and friendly, and Elizabeth's first extant letter (written in Italian and surviving as a fragment) was sent to her.

By 1544, Henry VIII had achieved the male heir he had been seeking, but in an age of high child mortality, that was not enough to secure the succession. By the Act of Succession of that year, his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were named as heirs to their half-brother, Edward, though they were not legitimised. After eight years of exclusion, Elizabeth was back in the succession, though her status remained ambiguous. 

Elizabeth at about the age of thirteen,
restored to the succession but
still illegitimate.
Public domain.

The Thomas Seymour affair

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, Elizabeth went with her governess, Katherine Ashley, to live with the widowed Katherine Parr and her new husband, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, uncle of the young Edward VI and brother of the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. 

Thomas Seymour: uncle to a king,
 husband to a queen,
guardian to a princess.

Now that he had the king's sister in his house, Seymour began to play a dangerous game. He and Katherine indulged in horseplay with her, behaviour that to modern eyes might seem very like sexual grooming. In May 1548, possibly realising that matters had got out of hand, Elizabeth left for the Hertfordshire home of Kate Ashley's brother-in-law. 


From December 1548, she was head of her own household of between 120 and 140, based mainly at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. She was a woman of property, having inherited £3,000 p.a. from her father’s will. She used this money to buy manor houses and became a substantial landowner.

Hatfield House, the Old Palace

Three months earlier - on 5 September 1548 - Katherine Parr had died following complications after childbirth. Seymour was now a widower and he set his sights on Elizabeth. This was a recklessly dangerous plan, and in January 1549 he was arrested. A few days later, her governess, Kat Ashley, and her financial administrator, Thomas Parry, found themselves in the Tower. When they were interrogated the story emerged of Seymour’s conduct. 

At the age of fifteen, Elizabeth was in danger. She had not repulsed Seymour’s attentions – so had she been preparing to marry him? She was interrogated by Sir Robert Tyrwhitt who wrote to Protector Somerset, ‘I do see in her face she is guilty’. But could he prove anything against her? On the following day he wrote, 

I do assure your grace she has a very good wit, and nothing is gotten off her but by great policy.

She survived her interrogations, but Seymour was executed on 20 March 1549.

Elizabeth had learned the dangers of her proximity to the throne: she could be exploited by an ambitious man. She cultivated the image of a demure and learned young lady, committed to her brother’s Protestant policies. 

The reign of Mary I

Elizabeth's period of greatest danger came in the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary.

In the spring of 1553 Edward VI’s health collapsed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He drew up in his own hand ‘My Device for the Succession’ by which he sought to disinherit both his sisters - the Protestant Elizabeth as well as the Catholic Mary -  in favour of his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. On 21 May Jane married Guildford Dudley, the son of the Duke of Northumberland, his chief counsellor. On 6 July Edward died and Northumberland proclaimed Queen Jane.

But his cynical attempt to replace the rightful heir with his daughter-in-law failed. Mary successfully rallied her troops and in August she rode triumphantly into London with Elizabeth at her side in a display of sisterly harmony. But Elizabeth was now facing a new danger. Would she have to abandon her Protestantism once Mary reinstated the Catholic Church? The only weapons at her disposal were dissimulation and procrastination (weapons she would continue to use as queen). She found excuses not to attend Mass at the Chapel Royal, and expressed her wish to learn more about the Catholic faith. 

Elizabeth faced another moment of danger when in February 1554 Thomas Wyatt led a Kentish rebellion against Mary’s projected marriage to Philip of Spain. Did Elizabeth know in advance? 

After the rebellion was put down, Jane Grey and her husband were beheaded. Elizabeth seems at this period to have been in a state of genuine terror and emotional collapse. On 17 March she was about to be rowed to the Tower, where her mother had been imprisoned. In desperation, she wrote a letter to her sister begging for an audience, and wrote it deliberately slowly so that she would miss the tide and gain another day. This famous 'tide letter' is in the National Archives. (Note the crossings at the end of the letter to prevent additions.)

The ‘Tide Letter’,
Noon, 17 March 1554 (NA, SP 11/4/2 f.3- 3v)

Once in the Tower, she withstood interrogations, and because there was no hard evidence of her complicity, she was released in May and put under house arrest at Woodstock. There, for the next year, she played a cat-and-mouse game with her gaoler, Sir Henry Bedingfield. She continued to press her innocence and lobby the Council. 

In April 1555 she was summoned to court, and in May she met her sister, in a tense stand-off. But the balance of power was shifting. Mary had believed that she was pregnant, but this, tragically for her, had turned out to be a fake. Elizabeth was clearly her heir, and her Spanish husband, Philip, was prepared to support her in order to keep Mary Queen of Scots, a puppet of the French king, off the English throne. In October she was allowed to return to Hatfield. 

Over the next three years, power drained away from Mary as Elizabeth was recognised as the queen-in-waiting. On 6 November 1558 Mary acknowledged Elizabeth as her heir. She died on 17 November and Elizabeth became queen. She had survived.

Conclusion

From observing her sister’s reign, Elizabeth learned two valuable lessons.

1. A queen could lose power by making an unpopular marriage.
2. She could be undermined by a successor waiting in the wings.