The timing of the coronation was of crucial moment. With the implicit threat from the French with Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne in their pocket, and the obdurate insistence of two popes that Elizabeth was illegitimate, it seemed politic to claim her crown as soon as possible. By then it was well-established law, ‘that the crown once worn quite taketh away all Defects whatsoever’.35 But these new Elizabethans had a complicated relationship with the supernatural. A teeming spirit world coexisted with the material, and divination, astrology, alchemy and other esoteric beliefs flourished as part of the natural sciences. Nostradamus was closely consulted for his prophecies (Catherine de Medici, the mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, was a particularly fervent devotee). According to this seer, 1559 was an inauspicious year: to anyone who could read or was susceptible to tavern gossip there was not much better to be hoped for than ‘divers calamities, weepings and mournings’ and ‘civil sedition’36 which would sweep the land. It was not the best omen for the beginning of the reign of another woman and it added to the atmosphere of anxious uncertainty.
Lord Robert Dudley was entrusted with a mission to seek out Dr John Dee, a remarkable and learned man, who was to become Elizabeth’s own consultant philosopher and who numbered astrology amongst his many accomplishments. Unlike Nostradamus with his mysticism, Dr Dee was known for his more scientific approach to divination by mapping the positions of the planets. His task was to draw up a horoscope of the most auspicious day and time for Elizabeth’s coronation, the formal birth of her reign. Apparently the best astrological augury pointed to 15 January 1559, with Jupiter, the chief god of the planetary system, positioned satisfactorily in Aquarius, to signify a universality to this Jovian power and Mars, the planet of war and assertive action, placed in indomitable Scorpio. That date of greatest promise was what the queen accepted.
The Christmas of 1558 was even more busy than usual as everyone prepared for the coronation, working ‘day and night both on holidays and week days’.37 There was such a run on crimson silk and cloth of gold and of silver that any sale of it was embargoed until Elizabeth had made her choice for herself and her household. Her noblemen and women were determined to cut a dash and make their mark. With a new reign there was much insecurity and jostling for position and preferment. This was the greatest opportunity for dressing up and showing off, parading one’s wealth or influence, or the wealth and influence to which one aspired. It was a chance to catch the royal eye.
Across the English Channel cloth of gold was in similarly short supply. Mary was caught up in the flurry of preparations for another grand celebration at court. Only nine months after her own magnificent wedding, she was to be one of the leading guests at the wedding of the king’s second daughter Princess Claude, with whom she had grown up. This girl was not yet twelve years old and was marrying the nominal head of the Guise family, Charles, the young Duc de Lorraine. This was yet another triumph for his uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘le Balafré’, whose family consolidated further its position at the heart of the French royal family.
Again no expense was to be spared. In a country still struggling under the levies of war, the young duke spent nearly 200,000 crowns, raised in taxes from his people, on the wedding and the week-long jousting and masquerades which were traditional accompaniments to such regal nuptials. Part of his expenditure was on the livery of cloth of gold and silver for his team of twelve jousters and the matching eight or nine dresses of extravagant construction for the main female guests. Mary was presented with one of these creations, richly embroidered in gold and silver and lined with lynx fur against the January weather. There were countless other beautiful gowns offered as gifts to the ladies of the court.
This display of ostentatious wealth and munificence was commented on even by the worldly-wise Venetian ambassador. Mary herself could not have been oblivious to the grandeur and self-confidence of her family inheritance exhibited at every possible occasion. United in her youthful person was the pride and valour of the Guises with the God-given pre-eminence as both a Stuart queen and – she hoped – a queen of the house of Tudor. This powerful dynastic mix was further enhanced through marriage with the mighty Valois, royal family of France. Born to all this, it was understandable if such a young queen had a share of the hubris of those she had grown up amongst. It made it difficult for her to recognize that even such certainty as her right to be the Queen of Scotland, the kingdom she valued least of all, was not immutable.
Perhaps the same astrological phenomena Dr Dee used were pored over by French diviners looking for auspicious signs, for this marriage was solemnized on 22 January just a week after the coronation of Elizabeth as the new Queen of England.
Elizabeth’s coronation managed to be both a grand spectacle and yet intimately involving of her subjects. This ability to combine ‘a superb show’38 with a certain informality at great state occasions seems to have been a characteristic peculiar to the English at the time, differentiating them from the Italians and the French. A perceptive Italian observer in his eyewitness account commented on this, not entirely favourably: ‘the English having no Masters of the Ceremonies … and still less caring about formalities’39 seemed to rely less on pomp and ceremonial. He thought the cheery way Elizabeth answered back to the jocular crowds who clamoured for her after her coronation was equally deplorable. This informality and sensitivity to the popular mood was to appear to her Catholic observers to extend even into her attitude to religious worship and allow a fatal backsliding, they feared, to her brother’s radicalism.
This ability to unite grandeur with a genuine common touch was memorably displayed in Elizabeth’s state entry into London on the Saturday afternoon, the day before her coronation. The sky was dull with heavy snow clouds, in fact some snow even fell on the waiting crowds, some of whom had been out all night ‘their untired patience never spent, eyther with long expecting (some of them from a good part of the night before) or with unsatiable beholding of the Ceremonies of that day’.40 There was thick mud everywhere, brought on by the rain and churned up by the increased traffic of carts and horses, and each householder had taken it upon himself to strew sand and gravel in front of his house to make the going less difficult. The whole court was present and so brilliantly arrayed the weather hardly mattered. They ‘so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air’.41
Her court preceeded her on horseback, numbering about a thousand, one eyewitness estimated. Then Elizabeth herself finally arrived in an open carriage entirely upholstered in gold. She was dressed in cloth of gold and on her head over her unembellished hair she wore the simple gold crown of a princess studded with precious stones. Her hands held nothing but her gloves. Around her were her footmen in their crimson velvet jerkins with the white rose of York on their chests and the red Lancastrian rose on their backs. They wore too the letters E R in bold silver gilt relief, the first time the crowd had seen their new queen’s insignia.
Behind her carriage rode Lord Robert Dudley, resplendent on his fine horse, followed by the Lord Chamberlain and the lords of her Privy Chamber. At the Tower Elizabeth stopped the cavalcade. So deeply impressed had she been by the terror of her two months imprisonment there, and so struck by the subsequent transfiguration of her life, that once more she felt moved to make a heartfelt speech thanking God for delivering her from that place: as ‘he had delivered Daniell from the lyones denne’ so he had ‘preserved her from those dangers wherwith shee was both invironed and overwhelmed, to bring her to the joye and honour of that daye’.42