The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Read online

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  FOR KATE

  We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed; the eyes of many behold our actions, a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish noted quickly in our doings.1

  Elizabeth I

  He did swear voluntarily, deeply and with vehement assertion, that he never had any carnal knowledge of her body, and this was also my mother’s opinion, who was till the XXth year of her Majesty’s reign of her Privy Chamber, and had been sometime her bedfellow.2

  John Harington, the Queen’s godson, on her relationship with Sir Christopher Hatton

  The state of this crown depends only on the breath of one person, our sovereign lady.3

  William Cecil, Lord Burghley

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Shameful Slanders

  1. The Queen’s Two Bodies

  2. The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen

  3. Familia Reginae

  4. Not a Morning Person

  5. Womanish Infirmity

  6. Disreputable Rumours

  7. Ruin of the Realm

  8. Carnal Copulation

  9. Arcana Imperii

  10. Smallpox

  11. Devouring Lions

  12. Ménage à Trois

  13. Visitor to the Bedchamber

  14. Sour and Noisome

  15. Untouched and Unimpaired

  16. Greatly Grieved

  17. Suspicious Mind

  18. The Elixir of Life

  19. Barren Stock

  20. Wicked Intentions

  21. Secret Enemies

  22. Want of Posterity

  23. Compass Her Death

  24. Beside Her Bed

  25. Lewd Fantasy

  26. Blows and Evil Words

  27. Kenilworth

  28. Badness of Belief

  29. Toothache

  30. Amorous Potions

  31. Froggie Went A-Courtin’

  32. Semper Eadem

  33. The Die Is Cast

  34. The Enemy Sleeps Not

  35. In Defence of the Queen’s Body

  36. Agent Provocateur?

  37. Unseemly Familiarities

  38. Especial Favour

  39. The Deed Shall Be Done

  40. Blow Up the Bed

  41. Nightmares

  42. Secret Son?

  43. Satan’s Instruments

  44. Barricaded from Within

  45. Suspected and Discontented Persons

  46. Age and Decay

  47. Abused Her Body

  48. The Physician’s Poison

  49. Love and Self-Love

  50. Privy Matters

  51. Foolish and Old

  52. Mask of Youth

  53. The Poisoned Pommel

  54. Crooked Carcass

  55. Lèse Majesté

  56. Dangerous and Malicious Ends

  57. No Season to Fool

  58. Age Itself Is a Sickness

  59. All Are in a Dump at Court

  60. Deathbed

  61. Regina Intacta

  62. The Queen’s Effigy

  Epilogue: Secret Histories

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Also by Anna Whitelock

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  The dates in this book are all, unless otherwise specified, Old Style – that is, according to the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. In February 1582 a new calendar was established by Pope Gregory XIII in a bull which prescribed that the day following 4 October 1582 should be 15 October, and that the new year should begin on 1 January instead of on Lady Day, 25 March. England, having repudiated papal authority, ignored the new calendar and, until 1751, English time continued ten days behind that of the Catholic states of Europe.

  All quotations are in modern English spelling.

  PROLOGUE:

  Shameful Slanders

  At thirteen, Elizabeth was serious yet striking, with fair skin, reddish-gold hair, a slender face and piercing coal-black eyes. A portrait from the time shows her in a crimson damask gown with long, wide sleeves and a magnificent underskirt richly worked in gold embroidery.1 A tight bodice faintly outlines her breasts and offers the slightest hint of her burgeoning sexual maturity. Her face is framed with a French hood which, together with her necklace, dress and girdle, is trimmed with pearls – a symbol of her virginity. Her long slim fingers, adorned with rings, clasp a book of prayers with a ribbon marking a page within. She is standing in front of a bed; her body is thrown into sharp relief by the dark curtains which are pulled back on either side.

  It was here, in Elizabeth’s Bedchamber, that one of the most formative incidents of her early life took place. For the first of many times, Elizabeth’s chastity became a subject of gossip, her body the object of rumour and speculation, and her Bedchamber a place of alleged sexual scandal.

  * * *

  Following the death of her father Henry VIII in January 1547, the teenage Elizabeth made her home with her stepmother Katherine Parr at the Old Manor in Chelsea, situated near the River Thames. Katherine and Elizabeth had grown close in the few years before, and shared similar intellectual and religious interests.2 But their relationship was soon tested. In April, just four months after Henry’s death, Katherine married Thomas Seymour, uncle to the young King Edward VI and brother to Edward Seymour, now Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset.3 He was a youthful and attractive forty-year-old bachelor. Tall, well built with auburn hair and a beard, Seymour was flamboyant, ruthless and insatiably ambitious. He had hoped initially to marry either the Princess Mary or Princess Elizabeth as a means of gaining power, but when he realised he would never secure the Privy Council’s consent, he turned to the next best thing, the queen dowager Katherine Parr. Katherine was reported to have been in love with Seymour for years, even before she married Henry VIII, and so responded enthusiastically to his advances. They married, in secret, in mid-April 1547 and Seymour now became Elizabeth’s stepfather, moving in with the princess and Katherine at Chelsea.

  It was here that on many mornings during the next year, Thomas Seymour would go to Elizabeth’s Bedchamber, unlock the door and silently enter. If the princess were up he would ‘bid her good Morrow’, ask how she was and ‘strike her upon the back or the buttocks familiarly’. On other days, if Elizabeth was in bed, he would pull back the curtains and ‘make as though he would come at her’ and she would retreat to the furthest corner of the bed. One morning when he tried to kiss Elizabeth in her bed, her long-serving governess, Kat Ashley, ‘bade him go away for shame’.4 Yet the encounters continued.

  On one occasion when the household was staying at his London residence, Seymour made an early morning visit to Elizabeth in her Bedchamber, ‘bare legged’, wearing only his nightshirt and gown. Kat Ashley reprimanded him for such ‘an unseemly Sight in a Maiden’s Chamber!’ and he stormed out in a rage.5 On two mornings, at Hanworth in Middlesex, another of Katherine’s residences, the queen dowager herself joined Seymour in his visit to Elizabeth’s Bedchamber and on this
occasion they both tickled the young princess in her bed. Later that day, in the garden, Seymour cut Elizabeth’s dress into a hundred pieces while Katherine held her down.6

  The involvement of Katherine here is even more puzzling than that of the others. She had fallen pregnant soon after the marriage, so perhaps this made her jealousy more intense and her behaviour more reckless; maybe she was seeking to maintain Seymour’s affection and interest in her by joining in his ‘horseplay’. Perhaps she feared that Elizabeth was developing something of a teenage infatuation with her stepfather. In any case Katherine soon decided that enough was enough and in May 1548, Elizabeth was sent to live with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife Joan at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. Denny was a leading member of the Edwardian government and Joan was Kat Ashley’s sister. Before Elizabeth left her stepmother’s house, Katherine, then six months pregnant, had pointedly warned her stepdaughter of the damage malicious rumours might do to her reputation.7

  Elizabeth was kept in seclusion at Cheshunt and this led to whispers that she was pregnant with Thomas Seymour’s child. Kat Ashley reported that the princess was only sick, but still the gossip continued. A local midwife claimed she had been brought from her house blindfolded to assist a lady ‘in a great house’. She came into a candlelit room and saw on a bed ‘a very fair young lady’ in labour. She alleged that a child was born and then killed. The midwife had assumed that it had been a lady of importance because of the need for secrecy. Knowing that Elizabeth was close by at Cheshunt, her suspicions were raised.8

  On 5 September, Katherine Parr died having fallen ill of puerperal fever a week after giving birth to a daughter, Mary.9 Showing little grief for his wife’s death, Thomas Seymour began to pursue his political ambitions with renewed energy and revived his original plan to marry the Princess Elizabeth. Kat Ashley, after her earlier disapproval of Seymour’s behaviour as a married man, now became an enthusiastic supporter of a union between Seymour and her young charge. But when Protector Somerset became aware of his brother’s treasonous ambitions, Seymour was arrested and accused of plotting to overthrow the protector’s government and marry the King’s heir.10

  Days later, Kat Ashley and Sir Thomas Parry, Treasurer of the Household, were taken to the Tower and questioned by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, Master of the Horse in the household of Katherine Parr, as to what they knew of Seymour’s plotting and his plans to marry Elizabeth. When the princess was told of the arrests she was ‘marvellously abashed and did weep very tenderly a long time’. Whilst the interrogations went on, rumours intensified that Elizabeth was pregnant with her stepfather’s child. In a spirited letter to Protector Somerset of 28 January, she refuted the claims and urged the Privy Council to take immediate steps to prevent the spread of such malicious gossip: ‘Master Tyrwhit and others have told me that there goeth rumours Abroad, which be greatly both against my Honour and Honesty … that I am in the Tower and with Child by my Lord Admiral.’ These were, she continued, ‘shameful slanders’ which the council should publicly denounce. Elizabeth urgently petitioned the Lord Protector to allow her to come to court so that she could put pay to the accusations and show that she was not with child.11

  In an effort to crush her spirit and force her to confess, Kat Ashley was now taken to one of the darkest and most uncomfortable cells in the Tower; she begged to be moved to a different prison: ‘Pity me … and let me change my prison, for it is so cold that I cannot sleep, and so dark I cannot see by day, for I stop the window with straw as there is no glass.’ She remained loyal to Elizabeth, however, and revealed nothing of the goings on in the household or the princess’s relationship with her stepfather. ‘My memory is never good,’ Kat told her interrogators, ‘as my Lady, fellows and husband can tell, and this sorrow has made it worse.’12

  While Elizabeth and her governess remained silent and loyal to one another, Sir Thomas Parry succumbed to the pressure and a month after his arrest began to tell Tyrwhit everything that had taken place between Seymour and Elizabeth:

  I do remember also, she [Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved her but too well, and had so done a good while; and the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone (he having her in his Arms) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral and her grace also.13

  It was this incident, it seems, that led to Elizabeth leaving Katherine Parr’s household.

  Kat Ashley now had little option but to give up the details she had sought to withhold. Seymour had ‘come at’ Elizabeth in her Bedchamber, tickled her and kissed her and, yes, Kat had latterly ‘wished both openly and privately’, that Elizabeth and Seymour ‘were married together’.14 She acknowledged her ‘great folly’ in speaking of such a marriage and promised, if returned to Elizabeth’s side, that she would never do any such thing again.

  A messenger was swiftly despatched to Hatfield, the red-brick palace some thirty miles north of London where the princess was then staying. Elizabeth was shown her governess’s confession.15 She was horrified that the details of her relationship with Seymour had come out, but still she would not implicate Kat Ashley or Parry. ‘In no ways she will confess that our Mistress Ashley or Parry willed her to any Practise with my Lord Admiral, whether by Message or Writing,’ Tyrwhit reported.16 Elizabeth refused to either corroborate or deny rumours of the romps with Seymour and insisted that she would never have married without the Privy Council’s consent. Tyrwhit remained unconvinced: ‘I do see it in her Face that she is guilty.’17

  The council ruled that Ashley was ‘unmeet’ to oversee the ‘good Education and Government’ of Elizabeth, and she was replaced as governess by Lady Tyrwhit, wife of Elizabeth’s interrogator.18 Elizabeth was devastated at Kat Ashley’s dismissal and, ‘took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next day’. Sir Robert Tyrwhit added in his report to the council, ‘the Love that she beareth her [Kat Ashley] is to be wondered at’.19 In early March, when Elizabeth received the news that Seymour had been found guilty of treason and condemned to death, she wrote to the Lord Protector pleading for Kat’s release, fearing her former governess was to suffer the same fate. She asked the Lord Protector to consider Kat’s service to her: ‘She hath been with me a long time, and many years, and hath taken great labour, and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty.’ She pointed out that whatever Kat had done to promote the match between Seymour and Elizabeth, Ashley would have told the council. Finally she argued that the continuing imprisonment of Ashley, ‘shall and doth make men think that I am not clear of the deed myself, but that it is pardoned in me because of my youth, because that she I loved so well is in such a place’.20 Elizabeth’s tactic paid off and both Ashley and Parry were released from the Tower, though Kat and her husband John would not be permitted to return to Elizabeth’s household for another two years.21

  Kat’s absence was always keenly felt. Elizabeth had grown up with Ashley and during what was a motherless childhood, following the execution of Anne Boleyn when she was two, Kat cared for Elizabeth with a deep maternal concern. Elizabeth relied on her governess for support and comfort as she grew older. Despite their temporary separation, the bond between them endured and Kat Ashley would remain a constant and ever-faithful figure in Elizabeth’s life, dying eighteen years later, when Elizabeth was at the height of her powers as Queen.

  The vulnerability of Elizabeth to gossip and scandal, even at this early age, had been thrown into sharp relief by the lurid suggestions of sexual intrigue with her stepfather and the intense questioning of the princess and her household illustrates the seriousness of the accusations.22 For an unmarried woman, chastity was everything. Juan Luis Vives, author of The Instruction of a Christian Woman, commissioned by Catherine of Aragon for her daughter Mary in 1523, wrote expansively about the dangerous suspicions that a tarnished reputation could produce. Once a girl loses her virginity,
he wrote, everyone continually gossips about her and men who might otherwise have offered to marry her ‘avoid her completely’. Chastity was the equivalent of all virtue. Parents, Vives advised, should pay special attention to their daughters at the beginning of puberty and keep them away from all contact with men, for during that period, ‘they are more inclined to lust’. Vives’s guidance went as far as the preparation of a young woman’s bed. It should be ‘clean, rather than luxurious so that she may sleep peacefully not sensuously’.23 The goal of female education, Vives argued, was also to protect chastity, to school young women towards virtuous conduct and away from the temptations of the flesh.24 As such their curriculum should include the study of ‘that part of philosophy that had assumed as its task the formation and improvement of morals’. Vives therefore recommended the Gospels, Acts ‘and the epistles, the historical and moral books of the Old Testament’, the Church fathers; early Christian writers such as Plato, Seneca and Cicero and Christian poets such as Prudentius. Women should also write down and learn by heart ‘wise and holy sentiments from the Holy Scriptures or … philosophers’.25

  While Roger Ascham, who became Elizabeth’s schoolmaster in 1548, would extol Elizabeth’s chaste, feminine virtues, he would also celebrate Elizabeth’s more ‘unfeminine’ accomplishments: her learning and scholarship ‘exempt from female weakness’ and her precocious intellect ‘with a masculine power of application’. She was a skilled translator and linguist, speaking French and Italian fluently, and developed interests in science, philosophy and history. In short, Elizabeth had a ‘manly wisdom’ and intelligence encased in a body which was held to be physically inferior and morally weak and in need of the guidance of men. Regardless of her intellectual accomplishments, her standing would always be subject to her ability to preserve a chaste reputation.26 Alongside her schoolroom lessons, the experience of 1547–48 with her stepfather had taught Elizabeth that her sexual reputation was an important political currency and the ladies who attended on her were the key custodians of her honour.