The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 20
Then, in the illuminated grounds of the castle, the Queen enjoyed spectacular ‘interludes’ and entertainments, with musicians performing in rowing boats around the lake, fireworks lighting up the night sky, acrobats turning somersaults along the paths and on one evening an Italian contortionist tumbling ‘with sundry windings, gyrings and circumflexions’.4 Such entertainments were open to the public and some three to four thousand visitors came each day.5
* * *
On the second Monday of her visit, after a morning’s hunting and before watching a water pageant in the evening, time was set aside for royal ceremony. Five young men, including William Cecil’s son Thomas, were knighted and afterwards Elizabeth received nine men and women afflicted with the ‘King’s evil’ – scrofula – an inflammation of the lymph glands in the neck. It was a condition which anointed monarchs were believed to have the power to heal by laying their hands on the sufferer’s afflicted areas.6 It was a practice Elizabeth carried out often. First she knelt in prayer, then, having washed her hands in the basin held before her, she would press the sores and ulcers of the sufferers, ‘boldly and without disgust’ and make the sign of the cross. In his Charisma sive Donum Sanationis, a tract celebrating the power of English monarchs to cure scrofula, William Tooker, her chaplain, described how he had often seen Elizabeth with her ‘very beautiful hands, radiant as whitewashed snow, courageously free from all squeamishness, touching their abscesses not with finger tips, but pressing hard and repeatedly with wholesome results, and how often did I see her handling ulcers as if they were her own’.7
Elizabeth took the ceremony very seriously and at times did not feel that she had the inspiration to cure by touching. At Gloucester, when throngs of the afflicted came to Elizabeth for her aid, she had to deny them, telling them, ‘Would that I could give you help and succour. God is the best and greatest physician of all – you must pray to him.’ It is possible that Elizabeth may have refused to touch because she was menstruating, which would have made her touch ‘polluting’. Popular culture in medieval and early modern England believed the touch of a menstruating woman could have disastrous effects on men, on animals such as cows and insects like bees as well as on produce such as milk and wine, even if medical authorities of the time refuted it.8
Touching for the ‘Queen’s evil’ became ever more popular over the course of her reign. Both her chaplain, William Tooker,9 and her surgeon, William Clowes,10 wrote books about scrofula and Elizabeth’s remarkable talent for healing it through touch. Indeed English Protestants discounted the papal bull of excommunication on the grounds that Elizabeth still had the God-given ability of a true monarch to cure by touch.11 Elizabeth generally held healing ceremonies every Sunday and on holy days and feast days at St Stephen’s Chapel in the ancient Palace of Westminster but, as at Kenilworth, she would also touch when on progress in order to demonstrate her royal majesty and power.12
* * *
The climax of the entertainments at Kenilworth was the performance of Gascoigne’s Masque of Zabeta, the tale of one of Diana’s ‘best-loved Nymphs’ who had resisted marriage for ‘near seventeen years past’. Gascoigne’s commentary was intended to draw direct parallels between the figure of Zabeta and Elizabeth with the ‘seventeen years’ which Zabeta had remained a virgin – the length of time Elizabeth had then been on the throne. In the masque, commissioned by Dudley, Diana, chaste goddess of hunting, would debate with Juno, wife to the king of the gods, as to which was Zabeta’s best destiny: marriage or virginity, with marriage winning the debate and Juno’s messenger Iris explaining, ‘How necessary were for worthy Queens to wed/That know you well, whose life always in learning hath been led.’
Yet the masque was cancelled. Gascoigne’s printed account of the Queen’s visit, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth, subsequently blamed ‘lack of opportunity and [un]seasonable weather’. However, it is most likely that the Queen censored the entertainment given its blunt message.13 Indeed Elizabeth had declared her dislike for the masque of Juno and Diana presented to her in March 1565, in which ‘Jupiter have a verdict in favour of matrimony’.14
* * *
Elizabeth announced her intention to leave Kenilworth the following day. It was a sudden and unexpected departure. The blissful ease of her days in Warwickshire had been shattered by someone daring to tell her what the whole court had been whispering about: Robert Dudley had begun an affair with Lettice Knollys, former Gentlewoman of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber. There had been rumours of a flirtation between Lettice and Dudley ten years before, when Lettice had come to court heavily pregnant with her son Robert. Then it seemed that Dudley was acting out of jealousy of the Queen’s relationship with Sir Thomas Heneage, and he stopped courting Lettice as soon as Elizabeth displayed hurt and anger at his betrayal. Now it seemed Dudley had renewed his suit. In the autumn of 1573, after the departure of her husband Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, for Ireland that July, rumours spread that Lettice and Dudley, who had now tired of Lady Douglas Howard, had grown close once more.
Elizabeth was devastated to learn of the renewal of Dudley’s romance with Lettice. She refused to attend supper and with the evening’s specially prepared entertainment cancelled she got ready to depart; the scandal robbed Dudley of a last chance to appeal to Elizabeth. He swiftly instructed Gascoigne to write some farewell verses overnight to be delivered before the Queen left.
The following day, as Elizabeth was leaving the castle, Gascoigne, playing the part of Sylvanus, god of the woods, delivered a final farewell song. The Queen was reminded of ‘Deep Desire’s Loyalty’: ‘Neither any delay could daunt him, no disgrace could abate his passions, no time could tire him, no water quench his flames, nor death itself could amaze him with terror.’ His passion for the Queen had turned him into a holly bush, ‘now furnished on every side with sharp pricking leaves, to prove the restless pricks of his Privy thoughts’. Then a familiar voice came from out of the holly bush, speaking of his continuing love for the virgin Zabeta and urging Elizabeth to
Stay, stay your hasty steps.
O Queen without compare …
Live here, good Queen, live here. 15
Yet it was all too late. Elizabeth knew of Dudley’s betrayal with one of her own gentlewomen; worse, her own cousin. How could she ever forgive him?
28
Badness of Belief
From the mid-1570s, Catholic priests trained on the continent in Rome, Rheims and Douai, returned to England to supplement the dwindling number of Marian priests who had remained since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. It was from Douai in the Netherlands, the seminary, founded by Cardinal William Allen in 1569, that the first missionary priests arrived in 1574. The mission’s attempts to reinvigorate the English Catholic community swiftly led to more intense English government surveillance and persecution, raids on suspect recusant homes with priests often forced to assume false identities in order to elude government spies.1 By 1580 there were some hundred missionary priests in England. Their impact was disproportionate to their number; they hardened Catholic resistance, strengthened leadership and provided a boost to morale.2 Tougher legislation against Catholics had already been passed in 1571, but it was not until now that the law began to be enforced with full rigour and determination.
On 30 November 1577, Cuthbert Mayne was the first of 200 priests and laypeople to die for their faith during Elizabeth’s reign. He had arrived in the country two years before with a copy of Pope Pius V’s bull of excommunication and had managed to elude the government agents who were keeping watch on the ports. Thereafter Mayne had worked as a chaplain in the household of a Cornish gentleman named Francis Tregian. When the house at Probus was searched on 8 June, Mayne was arrested, paraded through local villages and imprisoned in chains in Launceston Castle.
During the course of his examination, Mayne admitted that if a foreign prince invaded a realm to restore it to the ‘Bishop of Rome’ then Catholics were bound to assist to ‘the uttermost of th
eir powers’. Mayne’s alarming words opened Walsingham’s eyes to the enemy within England: Mayne and other missionary priests like him threatened to be the vanguard of a crusade to reclaim England for the Holy See.3 Mayne was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On 30 November he was dragged through the streets of Launceston, fastened to a hurdle and then hanged in the market place. While he was still alive he was cut down, disembowelled, and quartered. His head was placed on the gate of Launceston Castle.
The tide of government policy had now turned against the Catholics and Mayne’s execution marked the beginning of a rabid period of persecution against the missionary priests and those harbouring them.
* * *
On Friday 11 July 1578, the Queen left Greenwich Palace to begin her summer progress into Norfolk and Suffolk. She was accompanied by a huge entourage of courtiers, chamber officers, privy councillors, all their servants and her ladies, plus an escort of 130 Yeomen of the Guard and their captain, Sir Christopher Hatton. From Greenwich, Elizabeth first travelled to her own palace of Havering in Essex, where she remained for ten days, transacting business and receiving messengers and ambassadors. She left Havering early on Monday 21 July and the progress resumed a familiar pattern of arranged stops along the route including Audley End which she left on 30 July.4
Elizabeth now visited parts of East Anglia that she had not been to before. She was hosted by loyal country gentlemen until she reached Melford Hall, the house of Sir William Cordell, Master of the Rolls, where for three days the Queen and the court were extravagantly entertained. On the evening of 5 August, Elizabeth arrived at Bury St Edmunds where she knighted a few local young men and visited the recently rebuilt manor house of Sir William Drury at Hawstead. Sir William was well known to the Queen. He had married Elizabeth Stafford, one of the women of the Bedchamber, who had had a baby early in the year but was probably now travelling with the court. Having left Bury after dinner on Saturday 9 August, Elizabeth arrived a few hours later at Euston Hall, near Newmarket, the home of a young Catholic gentleman, Edward Rookwood. It was a rather unlikely stopping place, and the very public disgrace of Rookwood that followed suggests it had been deliberately planned to be the first show of the Queen’s power and authority in East Anglia.
A vivid account of events during the Queen’s stay exists in a letter written three weeks later by Richard Topcliffe, honorary Esquire of the Body and the Queen’s notorious persecutor of Catholics, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, then custodian of Mary Queen of Scots.5
On her arrival all seemed amiable and when Rookwood was first brought into Elizabeth’s presence, she gave him her hand to kiss and thanked him for the use of his house. Then Rookwood was called before the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, who knew that Rookwood had been excommunicated for his Catholicism, and berated him for daring to come before the Queen. Sussex ordered him to leave the court – indeed, to remove himself from his own house. But events then intervened and Rookwood was publicly exposed as a practising Catholic. A statue of Our Lady was found hidden in a hayrick and brought before the Queen as she watched some country dancing.6 On Elizabeth’s orders, the statue was burnt in front of a large crowd, ‘to her content’, as Topcliffe described, and the ‘unspeakable joy of everyone but some one or two who had sucked of the idol’s poisoned milk’.7
Within a few days Edward Rookwood and seven other local Catholic gentlemen, who were also arrested for ‘badness of belief’, were summoned to appear before the council sitting in Norwich.8 Rookwood and one Robert Downes of Melton Hall were imprisoned in the city’s gaol whilst the others were put under house arrest and required to pay a bond of £200 guaranteeing that they would take daily instruction from a bishop or another cleric until such time as they were willing to conform to the Established Church. It seems probable that the icon was planted in the hayrick as a means to expose and punish papistry and in this, Topcliffe suggests, Elizabeth was complicit: ‘Her Majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her counsel two notorious Papists, young Rookwood … and one Downes, a gentleman, were both committed [to prison] … for obstinate Papistry.’9
This signalled the Queen’s own determination to enforce the anti-Catholic measures, particularly in East Anglia, where loyalty to the Howards was still evident. Thomas Howard’s arrest and execution had taken place only six years before. Although the duke had remained loyal to the Elizabethan Church, the Catholic sympathies of his friends and supporters were well known. Elizabeth’s action in respect of Rookwood demonstrated her commitment to the reformed faith, as well as being a dramatic assertion of her royal authority.
* * *
From Euston Hall the Queen moved to Kenninghall Palace and then on to Norwich, the second largest city in the kingdom. The Queen reached the city boundary on the afternoon of 16 August where a vast crowd of dignitaries, officials and common people had gathered to greet her. Great preparations had been made in advance of the royal visit; roads had been widened and cleared; inhabitants ordered to repair and paint their houses ‘towards the streets side’, and to see that their privies were emptied and their chimneys swept. The city council had ordered that for the month of August, the city had to be clear of livestock and all butchers’ waste carted away and buried. The market cross had been repainted, ‘timber colour’ and white, and the pillory and cage, which had been there for miscreants, was removed a few days before she arrived. Elaborate pageants and entertainments had also been prepared to welcome the Queen.10
Elizabeth arrived in the city on Saturday 16 August and was greeted by the mayor, the officers of the city and other wealthy gentlemen before moving through the city towards the cathedral. Over the next few days the Queen was entertained and hosted with elaborate ceremony, but then four days into her visit she received dramatic news from London. Reports from the commissioners responsible for security in the city described how evidence of witchcraft had been found. Under a dunghill in Islington they had discovered three wax images about twelve inches high, one with ‘Elizabeth’ etched on its forehead and two dressed like her ministers and pierced with hog’s bristles.11 The images had been deliberately placed so the heat of the decomposing dung would melt the wax and slowly ‘kill the Queen’. The Privy Council ordered that the London committee, ‘learn by some secret means where any persons are to be found that delighted are thought to be favourers of such magical devices’.12 According to Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the new Spanish ambassador, ‘When it reached the Queen’s ears she was disturbed, as it was looked upon as an augury’, and heralded a Catholic assassination plot against her.13
The Privy Council immediately called upon John Dee, the Queen’s ‘philosopher’, to ‘prevent the mischief’ that they ‘suspected to be intended against her Majesty’s person’.14 Within hours of arriving in Norwich he had performed some ‘counter magic’ to nullify the enchantment of the images.15 What Dee had done to neutralise the threat of the malevolent witchcraft is unclear and only Secretary Thomas Wilson found the courage to observe his ‘godly’ magic and report to Elizabeth.16 Dee then returned to London to assist with the investigation and hunt down the likely suspects.17
* * *
On 30 August, a young Catholic named Henry Blower was arrested and committed to the Poultry Compter in London, a small and filthy prison near Cheapside. Ten days later the commissioners moved Blower to the Tower of London to be tortured, whilst at the same time arresting his father, also called Henry Blower.18 On the rack, the younger Blower accused Thomas Harding, the vicar of Islington, of making the wax images.19 The previous April, Harding had been accused of conjuring, but then the Privy Council had had insufficient proof to press charges. Now he was arrested and brutally tortured.20
The fact that Elizabeth was suffering from excruciating facial pain at the time cast the wax image plot into a particularly sinister light. To her Protestant councillors this proved that the wax images were Catholic magic. Fears were heightened because it was widely believed that the death of Charles
IX of France four years earlier had been caused by the same type of witchcraft. One Cosmo Ruggieri, a native of Florence, was accused of a conspiracy to destroy the King by magic. It was alleged that Ruggieri had made a wax figure of the monarch which he had pierced with pins.21 He was immediately arrested and imprisoned but Charles’s death of an unidentified disease, little more than a month later, raised suspicions that he had been fatally enchanted by Protestant sorcerers who had melted wax images of him.22
Yet the investigations into the wax image conspiracy soon stalled and the Privy Council now tried to tie in other Catholics who had been previously suspected of treasonous activity. John Prestall was arrested in early October, four years after being released under bonds for good behaviour. He had been indicted and imprisoned in 1571 for a treasonous conspiracy to kill Elizabeth by necromancy. In this highly charged political atmosphere, Prestall’s track record of ‘magical devices’ against Elizabeth meant he was suspected of involvement in the wax image conspiracy and was now rearrested. Both Prestall and Harding were condemned to death for high treason.23