In fact, although the queen did not fall out with either husband or stepdaughter for long, this episode propelled Elizabeth and her retainers out of her stepmother’s house. As Parry continued in his confession: ‘as I remember, this was the Cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember whether … she went of herself, or was sent away.’13 It was sometime in the summer of 1548 and late in Catherine’s pregnancy and the queen’s tolerance and patience had run out. She certainly lectured Mrs Ashley on her responsibilities in keeping Elizabeth’s behaviour within bounds and her reputation free from scandal. It is evident that she also pointed out to Elizabeth the necessity of guarding her good name and the dangers of indiscreet behaviour giving rise to unwelcome talk.
It was a humiliating and unhappy situation for the fourteen-year-old princess. She had betrayed her stepmother’s kindness and trust and her pride was wounded. Her own feelings for Seymour were distressing and confusing, with elements of fear and desire, of longing and recoil. The chastened girl replied in a letter to Catherine: ‘truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me; for if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way.’14
Thus in exile from her stepmother’s house for her own unseemly behaviour, Elizabeth was denied any further exposure to this lively intellectual household, where her cousin Lady Jane Grey had also spent some time. Instead she was sent to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire to stay with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife. It was not a particularly lively household for Sir Anthony was a scholar and had been a loyal chief gentleman to her father but now was very near the end of his life. Elizabeth turned increasingly to the consolation of study.
At the beginning of 1548 her tutor Grindal had died of the plague. This young man had been an inspirational tutor to the princess since she was just eleven years old. The excellence of her grounding in Greek, Latin and foreign languages was so outstanding that his mentor Roger Ascham admitted he did not know ‘whether to admire more the wit of her who learned, or the diligence of him who taught’.15 The commonplace but tragic death of someone so young and close to Elizabeth stripped more security from her life. Both Ascham and Elizabeth’s step-parents had other suggestions for a successor for the talented Grindal, but she insisted, against some resistance, on replacing him with his friend and teacher, Roger Ascham himself. This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisers and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons. Although for the old queen, Leicester’s stepson the Earl of Essex was a less happy replacement as favourite, the young princess’s insistence on replacing Grindal with his own mentor and tutor was inspired. This was to prove a most successful marriage of teacher with pupil, with the princess impressing the scholar from the start with her native intelligence, diligence and remarkable aptitude for learning.
During those difficult months after her banishment Elizabeth’s health suffered ‘an affliction of my head and eyes’16 and she did not like either her governess or her tutor to leave her side. This suggested a kind of nervous collapse; perhaps these familiars provided the only security and family feeling left to her in an increasingly menacing world. On the last day of August, Catherine Parr’s difficult pregnancy came to an end with the birth, not of the expected son, but of a daughter, Mary. However the relief and happiness at a safe delivery were short-lived. Instead a commonplace tragedy was set in motion. Almost immediately the queen started to sicken with a fever. She became delirious as the infection took hold and within six days was dead of puerperal fever.
Apart from Catherine Ashley’s passing mention that she was sick in the period immediately after the queen’s death, we have no further record of how Elizabeth took this latest loss. She had left her stepmother’s company only a few months before, when she was healthy, hopeful of the birth of her first baby, the ‘little Knave’17 as she called it, full of life and love. But Catherine’s death showed just how dangerous love could be to life. To a clear-sighted logical young woman like Elizabeth there was no denying the evidence that if a woman’s destiny involved sex it was fraught with pain and danger. Her own mother had survived Elizabeth’s difficult birth only to die because the baby was the wrong sex; her brother’s mother, Queen Jane, had died in giving birth to him; now Catherine, the closest the young princess had come to having a mother and a female intellectual mentor, was dead herself, in the process of giving life.
Given the general sacrifice of young women to their reproductive functions it was understandable that the gods, and even God Himself, was seen to value women less highly than men. Men died prematurely in war as a result of man’s will but the risks to women’s lives through childbirth seemed inextricably bound up with some divine plan. It was not surprising if any clever, perceptive girl came to the conclusion that women were more expendable than men, but only if they succumbed to sexual desire and the usual consequence, childbirth, with its handmaidens of pain and possible death.
But sexual desire was dangerous for a woman too if it compromised her reputation. Catherine Howard, one of the more racy and fleeting of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, had lost her life for her sexual incontinence and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s own mother, had been vilified with terrible accusations of immorality and incest. Trumped up as they almost certainly were, such charges were enough to merit her death. Princes could be murderous, mad, licentious, fathering bastards at any opportunity, and still continue to rule. Princesses had to be very careful.
We cannot know what factors contributed to Elizabeth’s decision to remain celibate, despite the stirrings of her own heart and the most telling pressure from her advisers throughout her life. We only know that by the time she ascended to the throne at the age of twenty-five this revolutionary decision had already been made. It is not too fanciful to think that in her mid-teens, steeped in her classical and religious texts, drawing conclusions from sharp observations of society around her, this thoughtful girl was pondering her fate and deciding what she wanted to make of her life.
There was danger too for Elizabeth in Catherine’s death. Almost immediately Seymour reprised his ambitions to marry her, thereby dragging the young princess into a scandal which rapidly evolved into treason, with all the peril that entailed. Seymour’s jealous politicking against his brother, the Lord Protector Somerset, had alerted the Privy Council to his reckless schemes: ‘the World beginneth to talk very evil favourable of him, both for his Slothfulness to serve, and for his Greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous Men living’.18 It transpired that Seymour had tried to undermine King Edward’s confidence in his elder uncle. He had bribed the boy, who resented how short he was kept of funds, with gifts of money. He corrupted an official at the Bristol Mint fraudulently to raise thousands of pounds in readiness for any possible uprising. He put into action his ambitious wooing of the Princess Elizabeth.
To be so indiscreet in his rapacity was suicidally risky, for all these activities could be interpreted as treason. Nicholas Throckmorton, in conversation with one of Seymour’s servants, spelt out the danger. ‘My Lord is thought to be a very ambitious Man of Honour; and it may so happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his Advancement to match with one of the King’s Sisters.’ Then in confirmation of the servant’s response that seeking to marry Elizabeth without the consents of the King and his Council would bring upon his master ‘his utter Ruin and Destruction’, Throckmorton replied: ‘it is most true, for the Desire of a Kingdom knoweth no Kindred’.19