Elizabeth was twenty-two, and she needed her sister's permission to go home. The house belonged to her. That meant little.
On 18 October 1555, Elizabeth Tudor received her half-sister Queen Mary I's leave to withdraw from court to her estate at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. She would not be sent back to confinement at Woodstock. After months in which other people had decided where she should live, whom she could see and how she could communicate, she was allowed to return to a household of her own.
Hatfield was a familiar place. Its palace had housed the children of Henry VIII, and it had been part of Elizabeth's childhood long before her brother Edward VI granted the estate to her as her own. She was returning to a home with her family's history in it, rather than somewhere chosen to keep her securely out of the way. But possession of a house and permission to occupy it had become two quite separate things. A king's daughter could own an estate and still have to wait to be told she might go there.
Her sister was the Queen.
The distinction had governed Elizabeth's life since the spring of 1554. In March that year, after the failure of Wyatt's rebellion against Mary, she had been taken to the Tower on suspicion of involvement. She denied complicity and was never brought to trial. Leaving the Tower that May took her not home but to Woodstock, where Sir Henry Bedingfield was responsible for her custody. A change of residence had not meant the end of confinement. By October 1555, Elizabeth had good reason to know that a journey could leave the essential arrangement untouched.
At Woodstock, even the business of sending a formal letter exposed the peculiarities of her position. In September 1554 she had drafted a letter to the privy council and asked Bedingfield to copy it in his own hand. She explained that she normally wrote to the council through a secretary, and she was not being allowed one. The daughter of Henry VIII had to ask the man keeping her under guard to supply the handwriting for her letter to the government.
That was the life to which she would not be returning.
The months immediately before the October permission had brought a different kind of waiting. In the spring of 1555 Mary summoned Elizabeth from Woodstock to Hampton Court, where the Queen was preparing to give birth. Elizabeth arrived at the end of April under guard. The baby was expected in May. For Mary, the birth would bring a child to her marriage with Philip of Spain. For Elizabeth, it would place another person ahead of her in the succession. The two sisters were waiting for the same event from very different positions.
Mary withdrew into seclusion at Hampton Court to await the birth while the court carried on around her. The expected date came and went with no child, and there was still none when Mary left Hampton Court for Oatlands in August. Elizabeth's stay at court had outlasted the pregnancy for which she had been summoned.
By the autumn, the Queen remained childless and her younger sister remained a possible successor. Going home could take Elizabeth out of the royal household. It could not take her out of that calculation. Her birth made her important whether or not she did anything at all, and the previous year had shown how readily opposition to Mary could turn into suspicion of Elizabeth.
In the weeks before she received permission to leave, Elizabeth took part in the religious life of her sister's court. On 4 September, she, Mary and the court abstained from meat and received the Pope's jubilee and pardon. Here was Anne Boleyn's daughter observing the restored Catholic order alongside the Catholic Queen. Whatever else divided them, on that day Elizabeth's conduct placed her with the court, doing what the court did.
Religious observance was no small matter that autumn. On 16 October, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned for heresy at Oxford. Two days later, Elizabeth received permission to go to Hatfield. The two events belonged to the same kingdom and the same week, and the leave given to one royal woman did not mean the danger surrounding religion had passed.
What it did mean was that Hatfield, rather than Woodstock, could be her residence again. Elizabeth would spend most of the rest of Mary's reign there, with visits elsewhere and occasional returns to court. In nineteen months she had been moved from the Tower to Woodstock to Hampton Court, each time to a place chosen by someone else. This time the place was her own, even if the leave was not.
The familiar palace at Hatfield had remained hers through the Tower, Woodstock and the long months at court. Ownership had not brought her back to it. Her sister's leave did. Three years later, in November 1558, it was at Hatfield that Elizabeth learned Mary had died, and she would never again need to ask anyone's permission to go home.
