In classical Greece, women were seen as perpetual minors: worse off even than the disregarded Victorian child, they were exhorted to be neither seen nor heard. A woman’s name was not given in public unless she was dead or of ill repute. In Pericles’s famous funeral speech, Thucydides set out the aspirations of womankind: ‘Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be less talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.’21 Silence best became her.
This was the philosophical inheritance that informed both Elizabeth and Mary’s view of what it was to be a sixteenth-century woman. Mary’s often quoted saying was, ‘The best woman was only the best of women.’ Elizabeth, while cleverly using her perceived incapacity as a woman to dramatic effect in grand speeches and diplomatic letters, nevertheless in her irony reflected a profound and universally held truth when she spoke in these terms to her Commons: ‘The weight and greatness of this matter [their request that she should marry] might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex.’22 These were the prejudices they had to overcome.
In the most commonly held myth of the birth of Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom springs from the head of her father, Zeus, fully formed, without any contribution from her mother. In this way, the necessarily male source of all that is active and intellectually pre-eminent is not diluted by the female. By stressing all her life her relation to her father, Elizabeth claimed not only some of the lustre of this Tudor Zeus but perhaps also tried to distance herself from the perceived weaknesses of her mother’s (and all women’s) femininity: duplicity, moral deficiency and treachery.
Both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots were of course regnant queens, monarchs in their own right, ordained by God. A female monarch was in a different relationship with the world: she had a public, political and spiritual contract as ruler of her people, while her personal and private relationship as a woman made her naturally dependent on the male. Elizabeth at least was able to counteract the perceived weaknesses of her sex with the certainty that as a queen she was divinely chosen above all men, ‘by His permission a body politic, to govern’.23 This confidence and certainty she could bolster with the knowledge that she had more intellectual and executive competence than almost anyone of her acquaintance.
Mary’s sense of herself as queen had been with her from the dawning of her consciousness. It was never disputed or tested, as was Elizabeth’s. This awareness of her pre-eminence was her companion through life, something taken for granted, the responsibilities to which she did not apply much profound thought nor, in the end, much value. However, philosophers as various as Knox and Aristotle considered even the God-ordained female ruler to be an aberration of the natural order, a phenomenon that could only bring inevitable disorder and strife to the realm. It was a measure perhaps of Elizabeth’s sensitivity to this pervasive point of view that made her react so uncompromisingly against the author of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
But she was assailed too by a potentially more serious discredit than merely being the wrong sex. Just as the death of her sister Mary I transformed Elizabeth’s destiny, so too it altered the course of the life and aspirations of the youthful Queen of Scots. Catholic Europe could not accept Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and considered his only legal wife to have been Catherine of Aragon. Given this fundamentalist approach, Elizabeth was undoubtedly a bastard born to a royal mistress not to a wife. Consequently much of Europe considered the more direct legitimate heir to be Mary Queen of Scotland and Dauphine of France.
This fact caused excitement and consternation abroad. Philip II of Spain, acting from pragmatic and political, rather than religious, principles feared his loss of influence in England especially since France seemed to be establishing an increasing presence in Scotland. Even before the death of his wife he had manoeuvred himself into position as a possible husband for her sister. While Mary I had lived, Spain had been an influential ally, but Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of continuing this relationship by accepting him as a husband for herself.
However, within the triangular tension that maintained a certain balance between England, Spain and France, an outright rejection of Philip would be impolitic. By evading his offer for as long as possible, therefore, Elizabeth could ingeniously sidestep an unequivocal rejection. Then she invoked precedence and the law by pointing out that for her to marry her widowed brother-in-law was no different in fundamentals from the marriage her father had made with his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon. As had been so crucially argued at the time as the basis of her father’s split with Rome, this was a relationship contrary to biblical law. To accept Philip would in effect be to deny her own legitimacy.
But it was in the French court, within the grandiose schemes of King Henri II and the Guise family, that the death of the Queen of England raised the greatest ambitions. With Mary as their tool, her uncles and Henri decided to claim the title Queen of England and Ireland for the house of Valois, and quarter Mary’s arms with those of France, Scotland and England. At this time France was seen as distinctly the more powerful country, England as the weakened neighbour under threat. This was particularly marked with the recent loss of Calais and the accession of another woman to a throne already undermined by disastrous female rule. This act of acquisitiveness was not initiated by Mary, but her acceptance and over-riding pursuit of it altered her destiny for ever. It gave her a compelling idea of herself as rightful heir to the English crown, an aspiration she maintained throughout her life. In the end it was a presumption which cost her that life, and this aggressive early claim on Elizabeth’s throne flung down the gauntlet.
Traditionally English monarchs claimed nominal dominion over France. Mary, however, as Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, both England’s old enemies, was in dangerous territory. To claim England and Ireland as her realms too was considered an insult to Elizabeth, not least because it publicly rehearsed all the hurtful insecurities of her cousin’s anxious youth. All those whispered calumnies she had endured during the wilderness years were given a kind of legitimacy of their own. Mary’s claim implied that Elizabeth’s mother was a whore not a wife; that Elizabeth herself was a bastard child and not the legitimate daughter of the King of England; that she had no claim on a divine right to rule but instead had usurped another’s.
Little over a year later, in the proclamation of her peace treaty with France and Scotland, Elizabeth diplomatically accepted, ‘that the title to this kingdom injuriously pretended in so many ways by the Queen of Scotland has not proceeded otherwise than from the ambitious desire of the principal members of the House of Guise’. And she went on to patronize Mary and her husband François for their youthful folly: ‘the King, who by reason of his youth … the Queen of Scots, who is likewise very young … have [not] of themselves imagined and deliberated an enterprise so unjust, unreasonable and perilous’.24 But these judicious, diplomatic words masked a more troubling recognition that the tacit had been made explicit; the challenge once made could not now be undone.
The earliest authoritative history, written by Camden, recognized the train of events set off by such over-reaching ambition: ‘in very deed from this Title and Arms, which, through the perswasion of the Guises, Henry King of France had imposed upon the Queen of Scots being now in her tender age, flowed as from a Fountain all the Calamities wherein she was afterwards wrapped’. The protagonists were henceforth acutely aware of each other. There were such networks of vested interests surrounding both queens that gossip and intrigue and misrepresentation found their way into every discussion where direct dealing would have been less divisive: ‘For hereupon Queen Elizabeth bare both Enmity to the Guises, and secret Grudge against [Mary]; where the subtile Malice of men on both sides cherished …’25
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