Behind the Palace Doors by Michael Farquhar Read Free Book Online Page B

reported, “wearing a suffering air.”
    Mary was furious that her sister would prevaricate on a matter as essential as faith, and grew even more hardened in her mistrust. The queen confided to Renard “that it would burden her conscience too heavily to allow Elizabeth to succeed [her on the throne], for she only went to mass out of hypocrisy, she had not a single servant or maid of honor who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to alltheir evil designs, and it would be a disgrace to the kingdom to allow a bastard to succeed.”
    Given her sister’s hostility, Elizabeth requested permission to leave court and retire to the country. While she was away, a massive rebellion broke out in opposition to the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain. London was nearly taken over before the rebels were finally subdued. How much Elizabeth knew about the plot to place her on the throne remains a mystery, but as far as Mary was concerned, she was the prime mover. The queen ordered her sister back to London. Elizabeth refused, claiming she was too ill to travel. This only served to heighten Mary’s suspicions, and Elizabeth was practically dragged back. Swollen and pale, she arrived in London on February 22, 1554, less than two weeks after the execution of her cousin Lady Jane Grey. “It was Renard’s fervent hope,” wrote biographer Anne Somerset, “that Elizabeth would shortly suffer the same fate.”
    Despite the intensive interrogations of the uprising’s leaders, no evidence against Elizabeth emerged. Still, she was ordered to the Tower as the investigation continued. The queen was convinced of her sister’s culpability in the attempted coup and determined to prove it. Elizabeth’s character, Mary told Renard, “was just what she had always believed it to be.”
    Before she was escorted away to the place where her mother had met her doom, Princess Elizabeth begged leave to write her sister, permission for which was reluctantly given by the two peers charged with her removal. It was a letter upon which Elizabeth was certain her life depended. In it, she swore to the queen that she had “never practiced, counseled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way, or dangerous to the state by any means. And therefore I humbly beseech your Majesty to let me answer afore yourself.”
    Two specific allegations had been laid against Elizabeth: that she had corresponded with one of the rebel leaders,Thomas Wyatt, and also with the king of France. Both charges she hotly denied. “As for the traitor Wyatt,” Elizabeth declared, “he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of my letter sent to the French King, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter, by any means. And this truth I will stand in till my death.”
    Elizabeth appealed to Mary to remember her promise—delivered as Elizabeth prepared to remove herself to the country—that she would never condemn her “without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am.” And she reminded the queen of a situation with which they were both very familiar—that of the Seymour brothers and their lethal conflict during the reign of Edward VI.
    “I have heard of many in my time cast away for want of coming to the presence of their Prince,” Elizabeth wrote, “and in late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered [allowed] to speak with him he had never suffered; but persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give consent to his death.”
    As historian David Starkey noted in his study of Elizabeth’s struggle, Simon Renard was persuading Mary of the threat her sister posed the same way Somerset had been turned against his brother. Indeed, Renard had just written to Charles V: