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

  Anjou was now vainly pursuing the Queen of England who had resolved that a strategic alliance not a marriage was what she sought with the French. Considering the ‘growing greatness of Spain’ it seemed necessary that ‘some straighter league should be made between the two countries whatsoever became of the marriage’. At an audience with the French commissioners on 28 April, Elizabeth warned that she might not be able to marry Anjou because the earlier obstacles to the match remained and others had intensified with the passing of time: childbirth would be undoubtedly more dangerous to Elizabeth, now aged forty-eight. The arrival of missionary priests to England heightened the difficulties posed by Anjou’s Catholicism and the duke’s activities in the Netherlands threatened war against Spain.24

  The French ambassador responded by telling Elizabeth that the most important reason to marry Anjou was to save her honour, a reason ‘of more importance than any namely that it was said that [Anjou] had slept with her’. Elizabeth responded that she could disregard such a rumour. Hardly so, said the ambassador, she might well do so in her own country, but not elsewhere, where it had been publicly stated. Elizabeth angrily insisted that a clear and innocent conscience feared nothing.25 Nevertheless, she now expressed her reluctance to pursue the marriage citing the age gap and in May 1581 wrote to the French envoy that, ‘I am afraid that I am too much advanced in years to please the duke, on which subject I have written him a long letter.’ 26

  Yet Anjou still remained committed to the marriage as a means to secure aid for his military campaign in the Low Countries. He continued to write Elizabeth love letters, which became increasingly explicit, and in which he expressed his desire to be ‘kissing and rekissing all that Your beautiful Majesty can think of’, as well as to be ‘in bed between the sheets in your beautiful arms’.27 He had no doubt that their passion would soon engender a son, ‘made and forged by the little Frenchman who is and will be eternally your humble and very loving slave’. In October 1581, Anjou returned to England, intending to stay for three months. ‘The principal object of his visit is to ask for money,’ the Spanish ambassador Mendoza boldly warned the Queen. Yet once again Elizabeth seemed enthralled and enraptured by Anjou’s presence.

  This time his visit was made public and when he arrived in London on 1 November he was placed in a house near the palace of Richmond, where the court was then located. Mendoza noted that ‘the Queen doth not attend to other matters but only to be together with the duke in the chamber from morning till noon, and afterwards till two or three hours after sunset. I cannot tell what the devil they do.’28 It was said that every morning, as Anjou lay in bed, Elizabeth visited him with a cup of broth, and that ‘when the Queen and Anjou were alone together, she pledges herself to him to his heart’s content, and as much as any woman could do to a man, but she will not have anything said publicly’.29 Yet the French delegation became increasingly disillusioned as to whether the match would actually take place and their resentful mutterings even began to cast doubt on the prospect of any alliance between the two countries. Elizabeth promptly took action to show her suitor just how in earnest she was.

  At eleven o’clock on 22 November Elizabeth walked with Anjou in her gallery at Whitehall, where the court was assembled to watch the Accession Day festivities. When the French ambassador approached and told her that Henri III had ordered him to ‘hear from the Queen’s own lips her intentions with regard to marrying his brother’, Elizabeth responded decisively: ‘You may write this to the King: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband.’ She turned to the astonished duke, kissed him full on the lips and drew a ring from her finger which she gave to him ‘as a pledge’.30 It was a moment of high drama. When the Queen summoned her ladies and gentlemen and repeated what she had said, many of the women burst into tears. A messenger was immediately despatched to carry the news to the French court. King Henri III announced that his brother would be King of England and would soon be ‘a nasty thorn’ in the leg of the Spanish King.31

  Yet whilst Mendoza claimed that ‘people in London consider the marriage as good as accomplished, and the French are of the same opinion’, in his view the Queen’s display ‘is only artful and conditional’. The art lay in her ability to make Anjou believe she was in earnest; the condition was whether or not her people would accept her decision. Elizabeth could remain comfortably certain that Parliament and her councillors would demonstrate their implacable resistance to the marriage. As Mendoza put it, ‘by personally pledging herself in this way, she binds him to her’, and added, ‘she rather prefers to let it appear that the failure of the negotiations is owing to the country and not to herself, as it is important for her to keep him attached to her, in order to counterbalance his brother [Henri III] and prevent anything being arranged to her prejudice’.32

  The Privy Council responded with predictable hostility. Sir Christopher Hatton sobbed that she might be deposed if she insisted on marrying against the will of the people. Dudley, unnerved by Elizabeth’s display of affection to Anjou and her pledge to him, went as far as to ask her directly whether she were ‘a maid or a woman’.33 It was an incredibly audacious question to ask of the Queen. Yet despite Dudley’s insolence, Elizabeth responded calmly that she was still a maiden; perhaps she was flattered to be asked the question at her age, and perhaps it was an opportunity to demonstrate her credentials as the Virgin Queen.

  The night after Elizabeth made her announcement, her Bedchamber was a place of great torment. Elizabeth lay with Dorothy Stafford, Mary Scudamore and Blanche Parry, who ‘wailed and laid terrors before her, and did so vex her mind with argument’ that the Queen could not sleep. They entreated her ‘not to share her power and glory with a foreign spouse, or to sully her fair fame as a Protestant queen, by vowing obedience to a Catholic husband’.34 Elizabeth barely slept and in the morning sent for Anjou. He found her pale and in tears. ‘Two more nights such as the last,’ she told him, ‘would bring her to the grave.’ She explained that ‘although her affection for him was undiminished, she had, after an agonising struggle, determined to sacrifice her own happiness to the welfare of her people’.35 According to one account, she told him that it would be unfair to marry him as he needed a wife who could bear him children and continue the Valois line. However, she promised to be ‘very much more attached to him as a friend even than if he were her husband’.36

  When Anjou left England for the Netherlands in early February 1582, he departed as a protégé of the Queen. Elizabeth made much of being grief-stricken at the loss of her lover, saying she could no longer stay at Whitehall, ‘because the place gives cause of remembrance to her of him, with whom she so unwillingly parted’. After he had gone she professed a sense of grief as to what she had lost. She cried that she would give a million to have her Frog swimming in the Thames again, instead of the stagnant waters of the Netherlands, though Mendoza claimed that in truth, Elizabeth danced for joy in the privacy of her Bedchamber at the prospect of being rid of the Frenchman. 37

  Anjou’s departure from England signalled the end of Elizabeth’s courting days, and she knew it. Now that he was gone so too was the chance of any marriage, or children. In her poem ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, which she penned after Anjou left for France, Elizabeth revealed her conflicted feelings; her resistance to marriage but, perhaps also her loneliness and yearning for love:

  I grieve, and dare not show my discontent;

  I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

  I dote, yet dare not say I ever meant;

  I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate.

  I am and am not – freeze and yet I burn

  Since from myself my other self I turn.

  My care is like my shadow in the Sun–

  Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it …38

  The Queen and the duke continued to exchange ardent letters and the marriage was talked about long after it had become impossible. Anjou’s campaign in the Low Countries had proved a failure and in the summer of 1584 he died o
f fever. Elizabeth went into mourning and wrote to Catherine de Medici,

  … your sorrow, I am sure cannot be greater than my own. For in as much as you are his mother, so it is that there remain to you several other children. But for me, I find no consolation except death, which I hope will soon reunite us. Madame, if you were able to see an image of my heart you would see the portrait of a body without a soul. But I will trouble you no longer with my plaints, since you have too many of your own.39

  * * *

  Whilst the negotiations for a French match were finally at an end, rumours persisted as to what had happened between Elizabeth and Anjou during his time in England. On 17 November 1583, Sir Edward Stafford, now the English ambassador in Paris, reported with alarm that lewd pictures of Elizabeth and Anjou had been publicly exhibited across the city. Writing to Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary, Stafford described how a ‘foul picture’ of the Queen’s Majesty had been put up, ‘she being on horseback her left hand holding the bridle of the horse, with her right hand pulling up her clothes showing her hindpart (‘Sir reverence’) … under it was a picture of Monsieur, very well drawn, in his best apparel, having upon his fist a hawk which continually baited and would never make her sit still.’ As Stafford reported, ‘I am afraid some of our good English men here have a part in it for I think there are not many naughty people in the world as some of them be.’40 The pictures were displayed on the Place de Grève, one of the main public spaces on the Right Bank, directly in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and on the Left Bank, on the corner of the Augustins and outside College Montaigu. The timing and positioning was very deliberate as these sites would have been heavily frequented both by exiles and locals.

  Although the primary intent of such cartoons was to stir up anti-Elizabethan sentiment in Paris, Stafford wrote that ‘in my opinion it toucheth more Monsieur’s honour then the Qu[een’s] if every body interpret it as I do’. Seemingly Anjou was also being mocked and degraded for his unsuccessful attempts to woo the ageing and immoral Elizabeth. The focus of the attack was again the person of the Queen whose regal authority was undermined by the exposure of her lower body and Stafford’s exclamation – ‘Sir reverence’ – is a euphemistic allusion to defecation.41

  Less than a month later, Stafford discovered that this was part of a larger campaign. Visual and written media were being employed to link Elizabeth’s heresy and ‘sexual depravity’ and to portray the cruelty and injustice practised by Elizabeth’s government on its Catholic subjects.42 Stafford obtained drafts of Richard Verstegan’s broadsheets in late 1583 which referred to Elizabeth as the ‘She-wolf,’ a classic symbol of lewdness. Stafford pushed for a raid on the printing house and finally Verstegan, an English exile and publisher, and his associates were arrested.43 It was but a temporary reprieve; time and again in the years that would follow, the Catholic League would use images of the English Queen’s corrupt body to challenge the legitimacy of her rule.

  32

  Semper Eadem

  Elizabeth was almost fifty now; with no hope of having a child of her own, it was clear that she would be the last of the Tudor line. Concern over her fertility, the pressure to marry and produce an heir, had dominated her health and politics since the beginning of her reign. Now she began to be celebrated as the Virgin Queen who had selflessly sacrificed the desires of her natural body for that of the inviolable sovereign body politic. A series of seven portraits, painted at the time of the Anjou negotiations, all depict Elizabeth holding a sieve. The sieve was a symbol of virginity by virtue of its reference to the Roman Vestal Virgin Tuccia. When accused of breaking her vestal vows, Tuccia proved her virginity by filling a sieve with water from the River Tiber and carrying it back to the Temple of Vesta without spilling a drop.1 This imagery was designed to show that Elizabeth’s virginity was her strength, providing her with the ability to make the sieve, which here represented the state, impenetrable.

  Whilst Elizabeth’s virginity was now being championed as a great political asset, it was also important that she was not seen to age or be regarded as the post-menopausal woman that she now was. Instead, as the years passed and she continued to refuse to name her successor, it became ever more necessary for the Queen to always appear radiant and youthful to reassure her subjects as to her good health and longevity. In 1586, Elizabeth revealed something of this pressure to maintain a suitable public image when, in the Presence Chamber at Richmond Palace, she addressed a delegation of representatives of the Lords and Commons: ‘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 quickly noted in our doings.’2

  As Elizabeth’s facial imperfections inevitably multiplied, the Ladies of her Bedchamber laboured to perfect a ‘mask of youth’. Smallpox scars, wrinkles, tooth decay and changes in the colour of her complexion increasingly demanded attention and the women of Elizabeth’s intimate entourage patiently ministered to the Queen’s withering face. The marks left by her smallpox, which despite her protestations were definitely there, together with the lines and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, were skilfully hidden with layers of caustic cosmetics. Besides the pungent white lead and vinegar, which created Elizabeth’s famous pale skin, egg white was increasingly used to glaze her face, to help hide her wrinkles and to smooth out her complexion, though making it rather difficult for the Queen to smile. The use of lead over time ate into her skin, making it grey and wrinkled, and so she would have to wear the lead base even more thickly. As Elizabeth aged, more vivid colours were used on her cheeks and lips. Besides using cochineal, she now wore a garish vermilion, also known as cinnabar, which gave an intense red colour.3 However, vermilion was mercuric sulphide and so every time Elizabeth licked her lips she ingested this toxic substance and may have begun to experience symptoms of mercury poisoning, including lack of coordination, sensory impairment, memory loss, irritability, slurred speech, abominable pain and depression. By painting Elizabeth’s face with these noxious substances, the Queen’s ladies were slowly, unwittingly administering cosmetic poisoning which only accelerated the process of ageing.

  The use of cosmetics had other unfavourable associations: make-up was regarded by some as synonymous with moral impurity and wayward sexuality; courtesans and prostitutes were notorious users of make-up. Pamphleteer Philip Stubbes noted that, ‘the women of England colour their faces with certain oils, liquors, unguents and waters made to that end … their souls are thereby deformed and they brought deeper into the displeasure and indignation of the Almighty’.4 In a court sermon delivered before the Queen and her ladies at Windsor more than ten years earlier, Bishop Thomas Drant had rebuked female vanity and been at pains to stress that face paint, bracelets, jewels and earrings counted for nothing in the contest against death.

  God made apparel, and God make the back; and he will destroy both the one and the other; yea, those heads that are now to be seen for their tall and bushy plumes – and that other sex, that have fine fresh golden caules so sheen and glossing – give me but a hundred years, nay, half a hundred years, and the earth will cover all these heads before me, and mine own to.5

  And just to drive home his message, Drant added,

  Rich men are rich dust, wise men wise dust, worshipful men worshipful dust, honourable men honourable dust, majesty’s dust, excellent majesty’s excellent dust …6

  Though Elizabeth is now well known for her extravagant use of cosmetics, contemporaries were notably silent on her use of them, the issue seeming to have been something of a taboo at court and the subject of censorship. There are no references to cosmetics on the New Year’s gifts rolls; more likely, creams, paints or dyes for the Queen’s face were not regarded as appropriate presents. The one contemporary mention of Elizabeth’s face-painting that does survive, describing her make-up as being ‘in some places near half an inch thick’, was reported by a Jesuit priest. The same hardly unbiased source also said, ‘
her face showeth some decay, which to conceal when she cometh in public, she putteth many fine cloths into her mouth to bear out her cheeks.’7

  Besides being sure to always appear in her ‘mask of youth’, it was also important for an idealised face of the Queen to be captured in portraits as a means to promote her authority. As Nicholas Hilliard, who entered Elizabeth’s service as her principal portraitist, quickly realised, it was less about a need for an accurate portrayal of the Queen but rather an ideal image of delicately drawn and youthful features. Hilliard began painting miniatures for Elizabeth in 1572, but it was two full-size oil portraits, the Pelican and Phoenix portraits, that began a transformation of the royal image.

  Elizabeth’s face in both portraits appears as smooth and emotionless as a mask and other than her delicate hand which holds her glove across her stomach, her body is encased in an overlarge, heavily embroidered gown.8 At a time when Elizabeth, then in her forties, was beyond the age of fertility, it is no longer her natural body that attention is drawn to, but the body politic. The use of symbols and objects cast Elizabeth as an icon of virginity. The jewels suspended from the necklaces in each picture are motifs of piety, celibacy, self-denial and eternal youth; the phoenix is a symbol of resurrection and the triumph of immortality over death, an image particularly prescient after the papal excommunication and the Ridolfi plot to assassinate her.

  Whilst Hilliard’s miniatures and full-size paintings had moved towards the creation of his standard face for images of the Queen, it was very likely an Italian Frederigo Zuccaro, who had come to England at Elizabeth’s request in 1576, that provided the master pattern that was to be adopted as the officially sanctioned image. In Zuccaro’s ‘Darnley’ portrait, Elizabeth’s face is unreal, like a mannequin’s, and she is pictured wearing a simple gown of white and gold brocade with fine lace ruff sleeves and a pearl necklace which is looped to form an oval across her right breast. In her right hand she holds a multi-coloured ostrich feather fan close to her body, and in her left a half-concealed small box. On the table to her left is a sceptre and crown, emphasising her status as queen and her identification with the body politic. Here the placement of the necklace and the fan on her breast and in front of her groin, draw attention to the Queen’s natural, indeed sexual, body, whilst at the same time the prominent use of pearls symbolises her virginity and her triumph over lusts of the flesh and sexual appetite. Here then is a representation of the Queen’s two bodies: the natural, physical and sexual body of a woman and the royal body politic represented by the royal regalia positioned next to her.