Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

SUSAN BRIGDEN

F OR THE CELEBRATION of your 60th birthday I essayed a paper on romance at the early Tudor court. Now twenty years on, I move twenty years on to consider a putative romance at Elizabeth’s court. Romance at Elizabeth’s court was a subject close to your heart as you pondered brilliantly and profoundly upon the queen’s greatly dreaded marriage to the duke of Anjou, on Sir Philip Sidney and his Old Arcadia , and penetrated the ethical and political meanings of that work. The romance I now imagine involves, perhaps, no deep ethical considerations. I take you to the English court, to the London streets, to the loggia of St Mark’s in Venice, and to foreign courts where the talk in 1558 and 1559 and later turned on the question of Queen Elizabeth of England’s marriage. Would she marry a foreign prince and turn her kingdom into the apanage of another state, or choose a subject as consort, thereby disparaging herself and bringing jealousy and disdain to disrupt her court? Would she be governed by her senses or by reason, by love or by duty? Memories of Catherine Parr’s marriage to Sir Thomas Seymour, and of Queen Mary’s to Philip of Spain were bright, and the example of Mary Queen of Scots’ marital adventures was instructive. Whom would Elizabeth choose, if anyone? Marriage did seem to be her most likely course. On 23rd January 1559 Il Schifanoya, a Venetian agent, reported to the Mantuan ambassador to King Philip on the varying opinions of whom the queen would marry. Some thought that she would choose ‘an individual who till now has been in France on account of his religion’, who had not yet returned to England, ‘it being known how much she loved and loves him. He is a very handsome gentleman, whose name I forget’. 1 A week later he knew his name: ‘the vulgar’ believed that ‘one Master Pickering ( Pincurin ) will be her husband’. Sir William Pickering had been lying ill in Dunkirk for three months, but ‘should he recover, I hear that he has something good in hand’. 2 A letter sent to Venice early in February reported the view that Elizabeth ‘will marry to please herself … and perhaps a person of not much lineage’. The person most fancied was a gentleman who was ill in Flanders.

1 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy , VII, 1558-1580 , ed. Rawdon Brown and G. Cavendish Bentinck (London, 1890) ( CSPVen. ), 11, p. 19. 2 CSPVen. , 18, p. 27.

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