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

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  In early January 1563, the Queen and her court moved to Windsor as the bubonic plague spread through London killing hundreds.27 Rigorous measures were enforced. No one was permitted to carry wood or other items along the Thames to and from London, upon pain of hanging without judgement, and anyone who received wares out of London into Windsor would be turned out of their homes and their houses shut up.28 Extra precautions were taken for the Queen’s safety. The court instituted a special code of quarantine regulations, primarily to prevent direct access to the Queen’s person: foreign ambassadors would not be received by the Queen until forty days after their arrival in the country. An anonymous Tudor chronicler recorded the ‘great lamentation made’ at the time of the Queen’s illness, and poignantly added, ‘No man knoweth the certainty for the succession; every man asketh what part shall we take.’29

  11

  Devouring Lions

  As Elizabeth lay in her Bedchamber at the height of her smallpox, three conspirators – Arthur Pole,1 his brother Edmund and brother-in-law Anthony Fortescue – were apprehended and thrown into the Tower as they tried to flee to France.2 They were charged with conspiring ‘to depose the Queen, change the state of the realm, compass the Queen’s death, raise insurrection in the realm and make Mary Queen of Scots Queen of England’.3 Under interrogation they revealed the involvement of both France and Spain.4 Elizabeth wrote to Philip asking that his ambassador either be ordered to desist from his interference in English affairs, or be recalled.5 In the meantime, de Quadra was put under house arrest.

  Elizabeth’s near fatal smallpox had provoked the plotters into action. Whilst Pole and his accomplices confessed the details of the plot, they denied acting treasonously against the Queen, claiming they did not intend to enter the kingdom with an army until Elizabeth had died. Months earlier they had consulted John Prestall, a notorious Catholic necromancer, occult conjurer and alchemist who lingered on the margins of the court, who had assured the conspirators that Elizabeth would be long dead before their plan was put into effect.6 They were tried the following February, found guilty of treason and sentenced to be executed.7 Elizabeth commuted the sentences and they remained imprisoned in the Tower until their deaths in 1570.

  Following the massacre of Vassay earlier in the year, civil war had broken out in France. The Huguenots, led by the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny, sought English support against the Guise relations of Mary Stuart.8 Elizabeth had been initially reluctant to intervene but was persuaded by Dudley, who was seeking to re-establish his Protestant credentials after his failed attempt to secure marriage to Elizabeth with Spanish and Catholic backing.9 The plot of the ‘devouring Lions’, as Cecil described it, was supported by the Duke of Guise and so served to allay any lingering doubts about supporting the French Protestants against the Guise.10 An English army of 6,000 troops was assembled and sent to France in October 1562, under the command of Robert Dudley’s brother, Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick. The letter to Mary Queen of Scots which Elizabeth had been in the middle of writing when she was struck down with smallpox had been an attempt to justify English intervention against her cousin’s French family. As the Queen recovered, Parliament was summoned in order to raise funds to maintain the army in France and their defence of Newhaven. Its business would also be sure to include the question of the succession and the Queen’s marriage in particular.11

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  At 11 o’clock on Tuesday, 12 January, a stately procession made its way from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey.12 The streets had been swept clean, and fresh sand laid for the horses. Elizabeth, wearing her parliamentary robes, a red velvet mantle lined with white ermine spotted with black, arrived in a coach flanked by her Gentlemen Pensioners, dressed in red. Robert Dudley, Master of the Horse, followed behind, leading the Queen’s spare horse, and then came her ladies riding two by two.13

  At the abbey, Elizabeth listened to the sermon preached by Dr Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St Paul’s, who set the tone for the parliamentary business that was to follow. He urged the Queen, for the ‘surety of the realm’, to marry and produce an heir of her own body: ‘When your Majesty was troubled with sickness, then I heard continual voices and lamentations, saying, “Alas! What trouble shall we be in?… For the succession is so uncertain and such division of religion! Alack! What shall become of us?”’14

  After the service, the Queen, Lords and Commons left the abbey and moved to the Parliament Chamber where Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon delivered his opening oration. He emphasised the danger of ‘the foreign enemy abroad’, particularly the Guise in France, but also enemies ‘bred and brought up here amongst ourselves’ who had sought to aid the foreign enemy and raise rebellion within the realm.15 Only if Elizabeth married and secured the succession could the safety of the realm be assured. Cecil wrote to a friend,

  The heads of both houses are fully occupied with the promise of surety to the realm if God should, to our plague, call her Majesty without leaving of children. The matter is so deep I cannot reach into it … I think somewhat will be attempted to ascertain the realm of a successor to the crown, but I fear the unwillingness of her Majesty to have such a person known, will stay the matter.16

  The Queen’s recent illness had been a stark reminder of her mortality and the chaos that was likely to ensue in the interregnum if she died without settling the succession. Both houses were now determined to make their voices heard. One draft bill went so far as to propose that in the event of the Queen’s death, her Privy Council should exercise all powers until a Protestant successor had been established.17 Whilst the bill was never passed, the radical nature of the proposal, which would be revived later in the reign, shows the extreme anxieties of the time.

  On 28 January, a Commons petition presented by the Speaker to the Queen at Whitehall, called directly on her to marry. Referring to the ‘great terror and dreadful warning’ brought by her illness with smallpox, and their fears of ‘contentious and malicious Papists’, the petition made clear the Commons’ fears: ‘We see nothing to withstand their desire but only your life … we find how necessary it is for your preservation that there be more set and known between your Majesty’s life and their desire.’18 The Queen was urged to ensure that the succession would fall to the ‘most undoubted and best heirs of your crown’, by marrying ‘whomsoever it be that your Majesty shall choose’. In the meantime, the MPs requested, she should name her successor. In return they assured her that they would ‘employ their whole endeavours, wits and powers’ to devise the strongest laws for the preservation and surety of her and her issue, ‘and the most penal, sharp and terrible statutes to all that shall but once practise … against your safety’.19

  Elizabeth responded graciously to the petition and, as the clerk noted, ‘thankfully accepted’ their words. She assured them that having survived the smallpox epidemic, when

  death possessed almost every joint of me … I know now as well as I did before that I am mortal. I know also that I must seek to discharge myself of that great burden that God hath laid upon me … Think not that I, that in other matters have had convenient care of you all, will in this matter, touching the safety of myself and you all, be careless … I am determined in this so great and weighty a matter to defer mine answer till some other time.20

  Four days later, the Lords presented their own petition.21 It fully supported the Commons’ position and stressed the practical difficulties following the death of a monarch with no known successor and the fear that the realm would fall into the hands of its enemies. They requested, ‘that it would please your Majesty to dispose yourself to marry, where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’. In the meantime Elizabeth was once more urged to name a successor, as without it the Lords could not see ‘how the safety of your royal person and the preservation of your imperial crown be or can be sufficiently or certainly provided for’.22

  She had listened tolerantly to the Commons petition j
ust days before, but now the twenty-nine-year-old Queen lost her patience, angrily telling the Lords, ‘that the marks they saw on her face were not wrinkles but pits of smallpox, and that although she might be old, God could send her children as He did to Saint Elizabeth’. She insisted that she was not too old to have a child and that if in the meantime she named a successor, it would ‘cost much blood to England’.23

  As the Lords and Commons waited for the Queen to give a more detailed reply to their petitions, Parliament occupied itself with the business of passing laws to preserve the Queen’s safety and enforce the religious settlement. The penalties imposed by the Act of Supremacy of 1559 for those who maintained the authority of the Pope, were stepped up and the obligation to swear the Oath of Supremacy was extended to include anyone who held office in the kingdom. A first refusal to swear the oath would lead to the loss of goods and imprisonment, a second would result in a charge of treason.24 Whilst Elizabeth did assent to this bill, she was not anxious that it be enforced and, acting on her instructions, Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the bishops not to tender the act a second time and so put anyone in peril of death without a written mandate.25

  The plot for ‘devouring lions’, which had been foiled as Elizabeth lay in her sickbed, had demonstrated the threat to the Queen of sorcery and witchcraft. These offences were no longer covered by common law, that statute having been repealed in 1547, so new legislation was passed.26 By the terms of the ‘Act Against Conjuration, Enchantments and Witchcrafts’, any magic which proved to be a cause of death would result in the death penalty for the guilty party.27 An act was also passed ‘against fond and fantastical prophecies’ which could be used to condemn those who foretold the death of the Queen by ‘casting nativities’, as in the Pole conspiracy. Its preamble described the disturbances of the previous few years and ordered that if any person or persons, ‘do advisedly and directly advance publish and set forth in writing, printing, singing, or in any other open speech or deed … and fond fantastical or false prophecy … to the intent thereby to make any rebellion, insurrection, dissension, loss of life or other disturbance within the Queen’s realms’, they would be imprisoned and fined. The penalty for the first offence was a year’s imprisonment and a £10 penalty, for the second offence, imprisonment for life and forfeiture of goods.28

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  On the morning of 10 February, with Parliament still in session, the urgency of the succession issue was highlighted by the news that Katherine Grey had given birth to another baby, a boy, Thomas. Elizabeth was enraged; her twenty-two-year-old Protestant heir now had two sons. The Queen ordered an immediate investigation into the night-time liaisons between Katherine and the Earl of Hertford, which Sir Edward Warner the Lieutenant of the Tower had evidently allowed to take place.29 Hertford was brought before the Court of Star Chamber where he was found guilty of having compounded his original offence of having ‘deflowered a virgin of the blood royal in the Queen’s house’ by having ‘ravished her a second time’. He was fined the ruinous sum of £5,000 for each offence and returned to the Tower.30

  Meanwhile Katherine remained in custody, trying to care for her newborn child as well as an eighteen-month-old son. In August, with the plague in London, Katherine was relocated to the home of her uncle, Lord John Grey, at Pyrgo in Essex, where she was kept under strict house arrest. Over the next few years she was moved to a number of other residences, and would remain in close custody for the rest of her life, never seeing her husband again. As there was no evidence that a marriage had taken place, her children were pronounced illegitimate, yet as long as debate raged on the succession, Katherine Grey and her two sons would remain significant challengers to Elizabeth’s throne.31

  Mary Stuart, Elizabeth’s Catholic heir, also became the subject of court gossip, when a young and infatuated French courtier and poet Pierre de Bocosel, Seigneur de Chastelard, was found hiding under her bed armed with a sword and dagger.32 When he was discovered by the grooms of the chamber he protested that he had nowhere else to sleep. He was kept in the custody of the Captain of the Guard overnight and Mary, unaware of events in her own Bedchamber, was informed the next morning. When Chastelard was examined before the council he claimed he had been sent by ‘persons of distinguished position’ in France, presumably Huguenots, to try and make himself ‘so familiar’ with Mary and her ladies that he could ‘seize an opportunity or obtain some appearance of proof sufficient to sully the honour of the Queen’.33 Mary ordered him from court, but the Frenchman followed her when she moved to Dunfermline days later, and was again found hidden in her Bedchamber, protesting that he was there to profess his innocence. The news soon reached the English court, provoking the lewd gossip that the young Chastelard did ‘privily convey himself behind the hangings of the Queen’s chamber, and in the night would have lain with her’, had Mary not discovered him.34 The Frenchman was arrested and then beheaded in St Andrew’s marketplace. The episode left Mary terrified and provided a timely warning to Elizabeth as to the importance of scrupulous security surrounding the Bedchamber.

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  At three o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 10 April 1563, Elizabeth travelled by royal barge from Whitehall to Westminster for the final session of Parliament, and there took her place in the Parliament Chamber. The Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, read on her behalf the speech that she had written. In it, the Queen thanked the Lords and Commons for their efforts throughout the session and gave her assent to the bills brought before her. She then responded directly to the marriage petitions presented by both houses. It had, she said, saddened her that they had pressed her to name a successor when there was still a good chance that she would marry and produce an heir of her body. Though she had little personal inclination to take a husband, she realised that her duty as Queen might compel her to do so and assured them, ‘And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind.’35

  Amongst their urgent petitions for the Queen to marry, Parliament had voted the funds Elizabeth needed to support the English expedition in France. Writing to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, in command of the English army, she assured him that she would now send reinforcements and do all she could to ensure the troops were well supplied. However her efforts proved futile. The Huguenots had become increasingly suspicious of Elizabeth’s intentions and when the warring French factions made peace, they united to drive the English forces out of Le Havre. Then, as the English struggled to mount a defence, plague spread through the town killing countless soldiers. On 28 July the English were forced to surrender and the remnants of the army returned to England.36 Within weeks London was in the grip of a serious epidemic as the returning soldiers brought the plague with them. Orders were issued for every London householder to lay a fire in his street at seven in the evening to ‘consume the corrupt airs’.37

  By August, deaths from the plague in London were reaching a thousand a week. Among the victims was the Spanish ambassador, Don Alvaro de Quadra, who had done so much to undermine relations between England and Spain.38 Fears for the Queen’s health forced her to leave London in September and move to Windsor, where she remained for the rest of the year. The castle was cold and draughty and Elizabeth, Cecil and other members of the court soon fell ill with an affliction known as ‘pooss’. Cecil suffered so badly that he could hardly see and Elizabeth complained of a pain in her nose and eyes. Many people died of similar complaints that winter. Gallows were set up on the edge of the town and anyone suspected of bringing the plague from the capital was hanged. Even passing up and down the Thames through Windsor could be punished by hanging without trial.39

  12

  Ménage à Trois

  ‘I thank God with all my heart, especially since I knew the danger you were in, and how you have escaped so well, that your beautiful face will lose none of its perfections.’ In her letter, written to Elizabeth after her recovery from smallpox, Mary Queen of Scots referred to her own experience of the disease as a
child and gave thanks that Elizabeth was now restored to health. Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador in Scotland, had asked Mary on Elizabeth’s behalf for the recipe of a potion that would prevent the disease recurring, which Mary had been given years earlier. Unfortunately, the Scottish Queen explained, Fernel, the French King’s chief physician who administered it, was now dead and he ‘would never tell me the recipe of the lotion that he applied to my face having punctured the pustules with a lancet’.1

  Mary’s warm words of comfort and concern did little to mask the reality of the continued threat to Elizabeth’s crown. In January news reached Scotland of a plan to exclude Mary from the succession to the English throne, and it was reported that Mary was ‘in great choler’ because of it.2 English intervention in support of the Huguenots against the Guise had further antagonised the Scottish Queen. With little chance of Elizabeth naming her cousin as heir, Mary resolved to seize the initiative and choose a husband for herself, thereby enabling her to secure her dynastic rights in England.