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Read an excerpt from Elizabeth & Leicester (Continued...)

Elizabeth's babyhood, on the other hand, gets the careful chronicle due to royalty—and to a royal baby awaited with especial eagerness. This was, after all, the early 1530s, a times when the English Reformation was just barely under way: almost a decade since Henry VIII's interest had first been piqued by Anne Boleyn.; six long years since he had started trying to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon; for years since the overthrow of Anne's enemy, Cardinal Wolsey. But no papal court had yet granted the King a degree nisi. Now past forty, he was beginning to change from the Adonis of his early reign into the bloated and temperamental autocrat of story. But it would not be until the middle of the decade that Henry (conservative by temperament and no Lutheran) finally broke off relations with the Pope, declared himself Supreme Head of the English church and launched a general visitation of the monasteries. It would be more than a decade after that before, under a new young king, the old church rites were swept away.

With hindsight, we tend to see the reformation in England as the logical, the inevitable, fruit of the European movement. Look backwards to how, in Martin Luther's Germany, the call for reformation of corrupt church practices grew to become a revolution in doctrine and belief. Look onwards to the rise of English puritanism, and how Protestantism came to be strongly associated with the national identity. But at the time of Elizabeth's birth, the English Reformation was so new as hardly to be firmly established as an ideal. Contemporaries, when they looked at the King and his new queen, must have seen first and foremost the consequences of a wild, unsanctioned passion; everything done for Anne, and for Anne's expected baby. At the time Elizabeth was born, her parent's marriage was very recent—a secret ceremony in January, when Anne was already pregnant, with the coronation festivities postponed until the very end of May. Even so, Europe had had ample time to be scandalized by the love story: not by the King's taking a mistress (the thing was commonplace; Henry's mistresses had already included Anne's sister Mary) but by the way in which, over the course of the six-year wooing, he had come to confuse the roles of consort and concubine. The Hapsburg ambassador Chapuys, commenting before the relationship was official, had described how Anne was made 'to sit by the King's side, occupying the very place allotted to a crowned Queen…After dinner there was dancing and carousing, so that is seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.' Thirty years on, another Spanish ambassador would be saying much the same about Robert Dudley.

Anne had performed well as mistress, both in the sense of unwedded lover and in the old courtly sense of unattainable adored. Now she had to perform as a married woman. Even the pageantry of her longed-for coronation had told the new queen her duty. 'Queen Anne, when thou shalt bear a new son of the King's blood; there shall be a golden world unto they people!' The play was over. It was time to pay.

The hour of Elizabeth's birth is a matter of public record—three o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, at Greenwich, the Thames-side birthplace of her father Henry VIII. There was, of course, overwhelmingly special reason to note this particular accouchement. Everyone had hoped—and almost every physician and astrologer had predicted— that it would bring forth the longed-for male heir. For this (or so it must have seemed) Henry had cast off his first wife Katherine and bastardized his daughter Mary; offended Queen Catherine's nephew Charles V, and cut himself and his country off from the mainstream of Europe; and, at the risk of his eternal damnation, defied the Pope, whom he and all his subjects had been raised to believe God's representative on earth. For this: that Queen Anne's son should be born legitimately.

Everyone put a good face on the arrival, instead, of a daughter, expressing their pleasure and relief that Anne had at least come through her ordeal safely, and had, moreover, produced a healthy child at her first attempt. Sure a boy would follow shortly. The splendid tournament planned for the arrival of a prince was cancelled, but the pre-written letters of announcement were sent out with 'prince' altered to 'princes[s]', the Te Deum was sung, and Elizabeth's first progress, the brief journey back from her christening, was accompanied by five hundred men carrying lightened torches.

Underneath this public show of rejoicing, however, there was a darker story. There are no records of what her parents actually felt when the child's sex was announced. But then, there hardly need to be. The disappointment can only have been overwhelming—a new and intolerable strain on a relationship that was already carrying a crushing burden of guilt and responsibility. Anne has to have known, from the moment the midwife held up the long baby, that she had failed to deliver on her implicit promise—and to have known, too (since she was very far from a stupid or an imperceptive woman), that it was in Henry's nature to try and rid himself of any guilt for the trauma that surrounded this marriage, and to throw the blame her way. To Henry the sex of this child was not just a misfortune, it was a gesture from God; a potential warning that perhaps, after all, His will had not been interpreted clearly. From the moment of her actual delivery, you could say, Elizabeth's potential importance declined rapidly.

Henry, in accordance with contemporary thinking, had long believed that God was showing His displeasure in allowing him no living male issue—he had, indeed, promised the Pope he would go on crusade, if he were only granted a male heir. (What a contrast with the Dudley's fecundity.) Possibly, Anne herself had encouraged the idea that Henry's marriage to Katherine was demonstrably wrong, since it could produce only Mary. Had she borne a son, she would have had a position in the country and hierarchy secure enough no longer to need the constant endorsement of Henry's passion. As long as she was mother only to a daughter, there was no reason her many enemies should abate their attack.

For the first three months of her life Elizabeth remained at Greenwich, with her mother—not that Anne was expected to take the primary role in her care. In the special nursery suite, a wet nurse fed the child under the supervision of the Lady Mistress of the Nursery, Lady Bryan, who has similarly had charge of Princess Mary, and would perform the same function for Edward. The seventeen-year-old Mary—now disinherited by the annulment of her parent's marriage—was required to yield the jewels and the titles of princess to her half-sister, and to acknowledge her own bastardy. Her refusal on the latter two points confirmed her on a collision course with Anne.

At three months, Elizabeth and her dozen or so attendants were sent away from the court to reside in the fresher air of Hertfordshire. This meant the formation of a separate household for England's new heiress, including a host of mostly male servants to run everything from the stables to the buttery. To the hostile eyes of the Habsburg ambassador, it seemed to be Anne herself who decreed that Mary should form part of Elizabeth's entourage and dance attendance on the infant who had supplanted her. Mary was compelled to move to Hatfield where, in everything from diet to seating, she would be treated as a person of secondary importance. She fought a formidable rearguard action—even down to eating a large breakfast in her room, in order to avoid having to go into hall and accept a lower place at dinner. Anne lashed back with savagery. If Mary called herself princess, her ears should be boxed 'as the cursed bastard that she was', Anne declared—or so Chapuys reported—and she should be starved into hall. No-one (least of all Anne) seems to have considered what it might mean for a baby and toddler to grow up in the enforced presence of someone with reason to resent her so bitterly. That was not the thinking of the sixteenth century.

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