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

  1

  The Queen’s Two Bodies

  At the heart of the court lay the Queen’s bed. Here the Queen might finally rest and retire from the relentless pressures of the day. Yet it was more than simply a place of slumber. The Queen’s bed was the stage upon which, each night, the Queen would lie. Hers was no ordinary bed; it was the state bed, and at night as by day the Queen was surrounded by all the trappings of royal majesty.

  As Queen, Elizabeth would have a number of beds, sumptuously furnished in bright colours and luxurious fabrics, all ostentatiously decorated and individually designed, each fit for a queen. At Richmond Palace, Elizabeth might sleep in an elaborate boat-shaped bed with curtains of ‘sea water green’ and quilted with light-brown tinsel. At Whitehall her bed was made from an intricate blend of different-coloured woods and hung with Indian-painted silk. Her best bed, which was taken with her when the court moved from place to place, had a carved wooden frame which was elaborately painted and gilded, a valance of silver and velvet, tapestry curtains trimmed with precious buttons and gold and silver lace, and a crimson satin headboard topped with ostrich feathers.

  In her Bedchamber, Elizabeth could de-robe, take off her make-up and withdraw from the hustle-bustle of the court. Here she was waited upon by her ladies who had the most intimate access to the Queen, attending on her as she dressed, ate, bathed, toileted and slept. Elizabeth was never alone and in or adjacent to her bed she also had a sleeping companion – a trusted bedfellow – with whom she might gossip, share dreams and nightmares, and seek counsel. We know Elizabeth was both an insomniac and scared of the dark. All her worries were magnified in the darkness of her Bedchamber at night. It was here that she might have second thoughts about decisions made in the light of day, be haunted by fears of her enemies and plagued by vivid nightmares. Sharing a bed with a sleeping companion of the same sex was a common practice at the time, providing warmth, comfort and security; but being the Queen of England’s bedfellow was a position of the greatest trust, bringing close and intimate access to Elizabeth.1

  The Queen’s Bedchamber was at once a private and public space. The Queen’s body was more than its fleshly parts; her body natural represented the body politic, the very state itself. The health and sanctity of Elizabeth’s body determined the strength and stability of the realm. Illness, sexual immorality and infertility were political concerns and it was her Ladies of the Bedchamber who were the guardians of the truth as to the Queen’s and thus the nation’s well-being.

  An unmarried queen heightened fears. Women were expected to marry and Elizabeth’s decision to remain unwed ran counter to society’s expectations. It was generally believed that women were inferior to men and so subject to them by divine law. Women who ignored religious precepts and did not submit to male authority were potentially a source of disorder and sexual licence. Medical discourse regarded women’s bodies as being in a constant state of flux and so possessing dangerously unstable qualities.2 Such medical axioms were influenced by theology, with the belief that Eve’s moral and intellectual weakness had been the primary cause of the Fall of Man and succeeding generations of women were similarly flawed.

  Whilst for her male predecessors sexual potency might be a sign of political power, the corruption or weakness of Elizabeth’s body would undermine the body politic. Women were to preserve their honour not only through chastity, but also by maintaining a reputation for chaste behaviour. For a woman to be thought unchaste, even falsely, would jeopardise her social standing. Moreover, Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, ‘the King’s whore’, and so the living symbol of the break with Rome.3 For Philip II of Spain, the Guise family in France, and the Pope, Elizabeth was illegitimate by birth and by religion. For them Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was the rightful queen.4 Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who had married James V of Scotland and was daughter of Mary of Guise. The Guise was one of the most powerful, ambitious and fervently Catholic families in France. In April 1558, just six months before Elizabeth’s accession, this Franco-Scottish alliance was cemented by the marriage of sixteen-year-old Mary Stuart and François of Valois, the Dauphin of France. From the day Elizabeth became Queen, Mary Stuart claimed the English throne as her own.5 The stakes could not have been higher; the Queen’s body was at the centre of a drama that encompassed the entirety of Europe. In the war of faith which divided Europe, Elizabeth’s body, with her bed as its stage, was the focal point of the conflict.6 Throughout her reign rumours circulated about her sexual exploits and illegitimate children. Her Catholic opponents challenged her virtue and accused her of a ‘filthy lust’ that ‘defiled her body and the country’.7 The reason Elizabeth was not married, they claimed, was because of her sexual appetites; she could not confine herself to one man. Some alleged that she had a bastard daughter; others that she had a son, and others that she was physically incapable of having children. By questioning the health, chastity and fertility of the Queen’s natural body, opponents in England and across the continent sought to challenge the Protestant state. For half a century the courts of Europe buzzed with gossip about Elizabeth’s behaviour. The King of France would jest that one of the great questions of the age was, ‘whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no’.8

  Over the five decades of her rule, Elizabeth changed from being a young vibrant queen with a pale pretty face, golden hair and slender physique, to a wrinkled old woman with rotten teeth, garishly slathered in jewels and cosmetics to distract from her pitted complexion, and wearing a reddish wig to cover her balding head. As she passed through her twenties and thirties, unmarried and without an heir, and on to middle age and infirmity, the country’s fears intensified. With no settled succession it became increasingly important for Elizabeth to try to disguise the signs of ageing. The physical reality of the Queen’s decaying natural body needed to be reconciled with the enduring and unchanging body politic; only in the Bedchamber was Elizabeth’s natural body and the truth laid bare.

  Access to the Queen’s body was carefully controlled, as were representations of it in portraits. The Queen’s image was fashioned to retain its youthfulness, which necessarily obscured the reality of her physical decline. In paintings she needed to appear as she did outside her Bedchamber, enrobed, bejewelled, bewigged and painted; creating this complex confection as she aged was the daily task of the women of her Bedchamber. Such was Elizabeth’s desire to preserve the fiction of her youth that she sponsored the search for the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’, the elixir of life which would ensure eternal health and immortality.

  Beyond the rumours and the sexual slander, the Queen’s body and Bedchamber were also the focus of assassination attempts, as disaffected religious zealots plotted to kill Elizabeth. The preservation of the Protestant state depended upon the life of the Queen, and the Bedchamber was the last line of defence for would-be assassins looking to subvert the regime. One plan aimed to plant gunpowder in her Bedchamber and blow up the Queen as she slept; others sought to poison her as she rode, hunted or dined. Not only did Elizabeth’s bedfellows, the women who attended on the Queen when she was in bed, help protect her reputation for chastity; they also protected the body of the Queen from attempts to assassinate her; they would check each dish before it was served, test any perfume that had been given to her Majesty and would make nightly searches of the Bedchamber.9 Their presence was for both propriety and security. While the loyalty of her ladies was assured, the families of some of these women sought to use their privileged access to the Queen to serve their own traitorous or licentious ends.

  The Queen’s body was the very heart of the realm and so its care and access to it was politically important. By sleeping with Elizabeth and dressing her, the Ladies of her Bedchamber could observe any bodily changes in the Queen, attend to her if unwell, share her night-time fears, her good humour and her confidences and defend her against hostile rumours. Foreign ambassadors managed to bribe the women on occasions for information about the Queen’s life
, and despatches reported intimate details, such as Elizabeth’s light and irregular periods, and supposed secret sexual liaisons with individuals such as Robert Dudley, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Duke of Anjou, the alleged ‘bedfellows’ who ‘aspired to the honour of her bed’.10

  2

  The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen

  In the flickering candlelight of her Bedchamber at St James’s Palace in London, in the early hours of the morning of Thursday, 17 November 1558, Queen Mary I lay dying. She had been confined to her bed with influenza since her arrival from Hampton Court three months earlier and each day had grown progressively weaker.1 She had made a will earlier in the year, but believing she was then pregnant, had provided only for an heir of her body to succeed her. In late October, now seriously ill, Mary was forced to add a codicil to her will which acknowledged that she was ‘sick and weak in body’, would bear no child and would be succeeded by ‘my next heir and successor by the Laws and Statutes of this realm’.2 Still she could not bring herself to identify her half-sister Elizabeth as her heir. Two weeks later, and under pressure from her council, Mary was forced to bow to the inevitable and name Elizabeth as her successor.3 Jane Dormer, a devout Catholic and one of the Queen’s most trusted women who had ‘slept in Mary’s bedchamber many times with her’, went to Elizabeth at Hatfield and, as a token of fidelity, gave her a number of Mary’s jewels from the Bedchamber. Mary asked for Elizabeth’s assurance that she would be good to her servants, pay Mary’s debts and maintain the Catholic religion in England.4 In carrying this message to Elizabeth, Jane Dormer performed her last significant act as Mary’s bedfellow. Now the country waited for news from the royal Bedchamber of Queen Mary’s death.

  On 16 November just before midnight, Mary received the last rites. A few hours later she heard mass as a small group of her most trusted ladies gathered round her bed, sobbing throughout the service. A little after six o’clock in the morning, Mary died. Her ring was removed from her finger and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton carried it to Hatfield where he informed Elizabeth that she was now Queen of England. By late morning the announcement had been made in Parliament and by mid-afternoon bells were rung in churches across London, and bonfires lit, ‘amid scenes of great rejoicing’.5

  * * *

  The new twenty-five-year-old Queen was radiant, slim, and nubile – and strikingly attractive – with her father’s trademark Tudor red-gold hair, a long oval face, thin lips and a pale complexion, and the dark, penetrating eyes and slender fingers of her mother.6 She was about five foot four inches tall. After the barren reign of her sister Mary, Elizabeth’s accession raised hopes of youth, health and fertility.

  Three days later, Elizabeth made her first public speech in the great hall at Hatfield. It was moving, and struck a perfect note between humility and authority. She expressed sorrow for her sister’s death and amazement at the great burden which had now fallen to her. But she was ‘God’s creature’ and it was His will that she was now called to this royal office. Elizabeth would now have ‘two bodies’: while having the ‘natural body’ of a woman subject to error, infirmity and old age, she also acknowledged that she was to become the ‘body politic to govern’.7 With the ritual anointing in the coronation ceremony, her ‘natural body’ would be fused with the unerring, immortal body politic.8

  Among those listening to the new Queen’s words was William Cecil, whom Elizabeth had appointed Principal Secretary earlier that day. He was astute, loyal and hardworking, and while he had conformed during the Catholic reign of Mary I he was undoubtedly a Protestant. He would be one of the men upon whom Elizabeth would rely for most of her reign. Cecil, like all of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, swore to ‘give such counsel to her Majesty’s person as may best seem … to the safety of her Majesty’s person, and to the common weal of this realm’.9 It would be a promise William Cecil would honour for the rest of his life.

  Elizabeth also favoured those who had opposed the Catholicism of Mary’s reign, had proved their loyalty to her, or were relatives and former allies of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Lord William Howard of Effingham, her mother’s first cousin, was appointed Lord Chamberlain, while Sir Edward Rogers, a staunch Protestant who had been imprisoned for a time during Mary’s reign, became Vice-Chamberlain. Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s second cousin by marriage and also a committed Protestant who had gone into exile during Mary’s reign, was appointed to the Privy Council and later replaced Rogers as Vice-Chamberlain. Nicholas Bacon, another Protestant and brother-in-law of William Cecil, became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Nicholas Throckmorton, a cousin of Katherine Parr who met Elizabeth during the time she lived with her stepmother, rose to become Chief Butler and Chamberlain of the Exchequer. Shortly afterwards he was appointed ambassador to France. Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s adviser when she was princess, became Treasurer of the Household, having been restored to favour after his revelations during the Seymour scandal. As the Count of Feria, Philip II of Spain’s envoy, reported, ‘the Kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors, and the Queen does not favour a single man whom her Majesty, who is now in heaven, would have received’.10

  * * *

  While many in England celebrated Elizabeth’s accession as the promise of a decisive break with the Catholic past, not all were of the same mind. Henry VIII’s will had named Elizabeth as Mary’s successor, however Roman Catholics regarded her as illegitimate because of Henry’s unlawful marriage to her mother Anne Boleyn, after he had spurned Catherine of Aragon. Instead they held that Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, was the legitimate heir to the English throne.

  The French, to whom Mary was bound through her mother Mary of Guise and her marriage to François the French dauphin, immediately questioned Elizabeth’s right to succeed. As Lord Cobham, then Elizabeth’s envoy in France, wrote in December, they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’. As soon as the French King, Henri II, heard of the death of Mary I he proclaimed his Catholic daughter-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots as ‘Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland’. The royal arms of England were now blazoned with those of Scotland and France on her silver dinner plates and furniture.11 Meanwhile, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Mary’s uncle, lobbied the Pope to excommunicate Elizabeth and urged Philip II of Spain to join a combined invasion of England.12

  Philip’s position was, however, less clear cut. France and Spain were still at war. While he instinctively supported Mary Queen of Scots as the Catholic heir to the English throne, this was tempered by the fact that she was the daughter-in-law of his great rival, Henri II. However, when Elizabeth moved to end England’s involvement in the imperial war with France, Philip feared that she might end up agreeing to an Anglo-French alliance which would threaten Spain’s interests. Therefore, while he took no overt action against Elizabeth, he began secret intrigues to support an alternative candidate for the English throne.

  In the event of Elizabeth’s death without heirs, Henry VIII, having excluded the entire Stuart line of his elder sister Margaret Tudor – who had married James IV of Scotland – settled the crown on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk: Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. After the execution of Lady Jane Grey for her attempt to usurp the crown in 1553, Katherine Grey became Elizabeth’s Protestant heir and was soon courted by foreign princes and English noblemen for her hand in what would be a politically significant marriage. It was to her that Philip now turned as Spain looked to counter the threat of Mary Stuart and her French family.

  Unsurprisingly perhaps, Elizabeth could not abide the sight of Katherine and made it clear that she did not wish her to succeed even if she died without an heir of her body.13 On her accession she demoted Katherine Grey and her sister Mary from being Ladies of the Bedchamber, as they had been under Mary I, to maids of honour, largely confined to service in the Presence Cham
ber. Katherine complained bitterly to the Spanish ambassador Feria, and was ‘dissatisfied and offended’ that she had not been accorded the appropriate honour due to her rank.14 In the summer of 1559 and again the following spring, it was widely reported abroad that the Philip II was planning to smuggle Katherine Grey out of England, marry her to his son and from there assert her claim to the English throne.

  On 30 June, King Henri II of France, Philip’s great adversary, was fatally injured in a jousting accident. François and Mary became King and Queen of France and power in the French court passed to her Guise uncles. In an effort to offset the threat Mary Stuart now posed, Elizabeth resolved to court Katherine Grey’s favour and by the new year of 1560 restored her and her sister to their former positions in the inner sanctum of the Queen’s Bedchamber, alongside old friends like Kat Ashley, in a kind of protective custody. 15At least here Elizabeth could keep a watchful eye on them. One of William Cecil’s agents reported that the Grey sisters were ‘straightly’ looked to and their movements closely observed.16

  In the days immediately following Elizabeth’s accession, a number of Catholics were arrested in London. Six men were accused of ‘conjuring’ to calculate ‘the Queen’s life and the duration of her Government’.17 It was the first of a series of conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime in which horoscopes would be cast or spirits consulted to predict the Queen’s imminent death.18 The French Catholic seer Michel Nostradamus had also foreseen imminent catastrophe for Protestant England and his prophecies were widely circulated on both sides of the Channel, fuelling mass anxiety. As one contemporary put it, ‘The whole realm was so troubled and so moved with blind enigmatical and devilish prophecies of that heaven-gazer Nostradamus.’19