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

  Whatever Parry’s real purpose, his plotting fed the already widespread deep Protestant anxiety. Following his execution, a special service of public worship was published, ‘An Order of Prayer and Thanksgiving for the Preservation of the Queen’s Majesty’s Life and Safety’:

  Thy divine providence from time to time hath many ways mightily and miraculously preserved and kept her from the crafty cruel and traitorous devices of her bloody adversaries and the deadly enemies of Thy Gospel, which with barbarous cruelty have sought to distinguish the light thereof by shedding her Majesty’s most innocent blood.

  But this Thy gracious goodness and mighty providence never so apparently showed itself at any other time as within these few days when a traitorous subject … had of long time retained a wicked and devilish purpose and have often sought occasion and opportunity to lay violent hands upon her royal person and to have murdered her. But still the vigilant eye of Thy blessed providence did either prevent him by sudden interruption of his endeavour or, by the majesty of her person and princely behaviour toward him, didst strike him so abashed that he could not perform his conceived bloody purpose …11

  Preachers were also instructed to read from the pulpit Dr Parry’s confession, which declared that the Pope had authorised him to assassinate the Queen and had granted absolution for the murder. The Parry plot, according to official propaganda, showed that the Catholic powers would readily sponsor Elizabeth’s assassination as a means to bring about the return of Catholicism in England.12

  Given the fears for her safety, Elizabeth chose to remain close to London that summer, cancelling any long progresses and often staying at her own royal houses or making only isolated visits into nearby counties. In June 1585, Sir Thomas Pullyson, the Lord Mayor of London, was so worried about the level of threat against the Queen that, in a letter to Walsingham, he offered to guard her in person as she travelled to Greenwich. As he noted, ‘considering the present perilous times and continual malice and mischievious purposes of the papistical faction’, he was logical and prudent in his concern for the Queen’s well-being.13

  For the next few years, Elizabeth shunned Whitehall, feeling too that her personal security could better be provided in some more compact and less accessible palace. Yet Elizabeth impatiently refused Dudley’s suggestion that courtiers with Catholic leanings should be forbidden access to court, and the proposal of an armed bodyguard. She remained determined to show herself to her people and said she would sooner be dead than ‘in custody.’

  37

  Unseemly Familiarities

  ‘My very good Lord,’ Sir Francis Walsingham wrote to Robert Dudley on 29 September 1584. ‘Yesterday I received from the Lord Mayor enclosed with a letter, a printed libel against your Lordship, the most malicious written thing that was ever penned since the beginning of the world.’1

  The book had come from a secret press in Paris or Antwerp; entitled The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge, it was known almost immediately as Leicester’s Commonwealth. When the work first appeared, written in English, in Paris in August 1584, it proved an overnight sensation and after being smuggled across the Channel it was avidly read at the English court.2 The book took the form of a conversation between a London gentleman, a Catholic lawyer and a Cambridge academic. The Earl of Leicester was attacked for his power at court and his influence over the Queen, ‘his diligent besieging of the prince’s person’, and his ‘taking up the ways and passages about her’. He was also accused of preventing the Queen from marrying by his ‘preoccupation of her Majesty’s person’ and his impudent behaviour in ‘giving out everywhere that he (forsooth!) was assured to her Majesty and that all other princes must give over their suits to him’.3

  The tract included lurid allegations, centring on Dudley’s relationships with various women and his supposedly voracious sexual appetite. It was said that there were not two single noblewomen who attended upon the Queen ‘whom he hath not solicited’;4 he was even accused of paying £300 for sex with one of them. Leicester’s Commonwealth described the extreme lengths to which Dudley had gone to cover up his relationship with Lettice Knollys, hiding her from the Queen, sending her ‘up and down the house, by privy ways, thereby to avoid the sight and knowledge of the Queen’s Majesty’. Lettice was accused of falling pregnant with Dudley’s child before her husband Walter Devereux had died and she and Dudley were held responsible for his ‘murder’. The death of their son, Lord Denbigh, in July, was seen as a sign of God’s vengeance on Dudley: ‘the children of adulterers shall be consumed and the seed of a wicked bed shall be rooted out’.5 He was also accused of having conspired in his wife Amy Robsart’s death and having attempted to assassinate the French envoy Simier.6

  The tract belonged to a swathe of Jesuit propaganda that was being distributed to highlight the threat of the Protestant Earls of Leicester and Huntingdon to Mary Stuart’s succession. For some, Leicester’s Commonwealth was seen as preparing the ground for the Catholic-sponsored murder of the Queen, which could then be blamed on Dudley.7 The piece also suggested that Dudley would try to foist one of his many illegitimate children on the throne by pretending that the child was Elizabeth’s. The Earl of Leicester had ‘contracted to her Majesty’ that ‘he might have entitled any one of his own brood (whereof he hath store in many places, as is known) to the lawful succession of the crown … pretending the same to be by her Majesty’ and that he was behind the decision to put ‘words of natural issue’ into the statute of the succession for the crown; ‘against all order and custom of our realm … whereby he might be able after the death of her Majesty to make legitimate to the crown any one bastard of his own by any of so many hackneys he keepeth, affirming it to be the natural issue of her Majesty by himself’.8

  Elizabeth went out of her way to defend Dudley and issued a proclamation ordering that all copies of the publication be surrendered:

  [In] their most shameful, infamous and detestable libels they go about to reproach, dishonour and touch with abominable lies … many of her most trusty and faithful councillors … greatly touching thereby her Highness’ self in her regal and kingly office, as making choice of men of want both of justice, care and other sufficiency to serve her Highness and the Commonwealth. And further, in the said books and libels they use all the means, drifts, and false persuasions they can devise or imagine to advance such pretended titles as consequently must be most dangerous and prejudicial to the safety of her Highness’s person and state.9

  An amnesty was offered to anyone who instantly submitted their copies to the authorities; thereafter the penalty for retaining a copy was imprisonment.10 It made little difference, and in June, Elizabeth was forced to issue another proclamation in a further attempt to suppress the work. She blamed the ‘great negligence and remissness’ of the authorities in London, ‘where it was likely these books would be chiefly cast abroad’, for not doing enough to enact her initial proclamation:

  The very same and diverse other such like most slanderous, shameful and devilish books and libels have continually spread abroad and kept by disobedient persons, to the manifest contempt of her Majesty’s regal and sovereign authority, and namely, among the rest, one most infamous containing slanderous and hateful matter against our very good Lord the Earl of Leicester, one of her principal noblemen and Chief Counsellor of State, of which most malicious and wicked imputations, her Majesty in her own clear knowledge doth declare and testify his innocence to all the world.

  She added that, before God, she knew in her conscience, ‘in assured certainty, the libels and books against the said Earl, to be most malicious, false and slanderous, and such as none but the devil himself could deem to be true’.11

  Dudley quickly came to the view that Mary Queen of Scots was behind the libel and Walsingham suggested Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent in France, as its author.12 However, Charles Arundell, a known Catholic conspirator who was implicated in the Throckmorton plot, had fled to Paris in December 1583 and had always bee
n hostile to Dudley, emerged as the likely writer. He was the cousin of Lady Douglas Howard, who was formerly the lover and, as she maintained, the wife, of Robert Dudley. She was now married to Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in France. When Arundell fled to France, Walsingham had warned the Staffords not to get involved with him, but the couple ignored the request and entertained Arundell on a number of occasions.

  Leicester’s Commonwealth talked in lurid detail about Dudley’s affair with Lady Douglas. Such was Douglas’s embarrassment at the revelations that Stafford reported it made his wife ill; her ‘sickness’, he later recalled, ‘was so long and almost of life, as in truth I was a good while greatly afraid of’.13 He was worried about the impact of the forthcoming French edition. It seems that Lady Douglas may have considered returning to England, but Stafford persuaded her to ‘pluck up a good heart’ and stay with him.14 Stafford had been assured by the compilers, to whom he must have been sufficiently close, that while Lady Douglas was identified by name in the first edition she would not be in the second. When in the spring of 1585, the French translation of Leicester’s Commonwealth appeared (Discours de la vie abominable … le my Lorde of Leicestre – A Discourse on the abominable lifes, plots, treasons, murders, falsehoods, poisonings, lusts, incitements and evil stratagems employed by Lord Leicester), Lady Douglas’s name was indeed missing. However the book now included a salacious addition, which claimed that the Earl of Leicester had seduced a lady at Elizabeth’s court with an aphrodisiac containing his own semen. Whilst the lady was not identified, the fact that she was said to be still living made Lady Douglas the obvious candidate.

  On 30 March, Stafford wrote to Walsingham recommending that he not be ordered to attempt to suppress the tract, since his ‘nearest have a touch in it’ and so he might be suspected of personal motives. His greatest fear was that he would be blamed or believed to have been implicated and that this would incur Dudley’s anger. ‘If you command me I will send you [one] of them, for else I will not, for I cannot tell how it will be taken.’ He had, he explained, not written to inform the Earl of Leicester, for he ‘would be loth to do anything subject to bad interpretation’.15

  The extent to which Sir Edward and his mother Lady Douglas were involved with the compilers of Leicester’s Commonwealth remains rather puzzling. There is no reason to think that Lady Douglas would have wanted details of her affair with Dudley exposed in such sensational fashion. However, the Staffords were close to Charles Arundell and it is unclear how else he would have got so much of the detail that was contained in the tract. Certainly Walsingham believed Lady Douglas was the source of the incriminating information about Dudley and both she and Sir Edward would have wanted to damage or destroy the earl’s reputation. In late 1585, Walsingham detained and examined William Lilly, Stafford’s servant. He wrote to Sir Edward Stafford informing him that he thought Lilly was involved in the affair, and berating the ambassador’s inadequate efforts to stop the distribution of the book. In his response of 20 January 1586, Stafford sought to excuse himself by saying that he had not thought it fitting for a public official to deal with a private man’s cause, even though he had had orders to the contrary. He also protested that he had still burned what copies he could find (thirty-five of them) until he could no longer keep up with the numbers being printed.16

  Despite Edward Stafford’s protestations of innocence, the Queen was plainly not convinced. In a letter to Cecil on 11 August, Sir Edward wrote how he had

  received from my mother [Lady Dorothy Stafford] to my extreme grief, how much her Majesty is still offended with me (the cause God knoweth, for I do not) and withal her advice to write to her Majesty about it, I have done so and sent my mother the letter, to present it to her when she shall see the best opportunity. But I have told her to show it to you first, and unless you like it, not to present it at all.17

  Lady Dorothy’s importance, both as a means to represent her son’s interests and as one of the Queen’s closest intimates is clear.

  * * *

  The year 1585 also saw the publication of another tract, The Letter of Estate, which vilified Dudley and reiterated the accusations made in Leicester’s Commonwealth.18 In it, Dudley’s arrogance and desire to rule England is mirrored by that of his rapacious wife Lettice Knollys. They are both united in their determination to overthrow the Queen. ‘But now who but his Lordship in the court, and as pride and ambition he passed, so in like manner wedded he in every degree with a countess fitting her husband’s humour, for more liker princess than a subject…’19 According to The Letter, Lettice,

  who seeing her Lord to be the master over all the nobility and conceiving well that they durst do nothing and that, as it were, they had him at a beck, thought in like sort all this were nothing if she in like sort had not all the other good countesses in the court at the like stay, and therefore in all that ever she might, practised and devised to effect the same, in so [sic] as if ever once her Majesty were disposed for the entertainment of some strange prince or ambassador to have any new gown made her she will be sure with [sic] one fortnight after, or at the least afore the departure of the ambassador, to have an other of the same sort and fashion suitable in every degree with her Majesty’s and in every respect as costly as her Majesty’s, if not more costly and sumptuous then hers.20

  Lettice is described as publicly competing with Elizabeth at important state occasions:

  [her] intolerable pride her Majesty noting, after some admonitions for it and the same slightly regarded, told her as one son lightened the earth, so in like sort she would have but one Queen in England, and for her presumption, taking her a wherret on the ear in plain terms strictly forbade her the court.21

  However, as the tract described, while Lettice has been banned from court, her husband continues ‘insinuating with her Majesty, that upon him [as the] chiefest pillar in the land she wholly relies’.22 Ultimately Dudley is able to satisfy his lust for power by becoming the Queen’s favourite; by monopolising her natural body, he monopolises England’s body politic.

  As the gossip circulated at court, Dudley kept a low profile. Writing to a friend he said, ‘In these dangerous days, who can escape lewd or lying tongues? For my part I trust the Lord will give me His grace to live in His fear, and to behave myself faithfully to my sovereign and honestly to the world. And so I shall pass over such calumniations.’23

  * * *

  Around 1584, Mary Queen of Scots sent a scandalous letter to Elizabeth with information which she had apparently been given by Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury.24 It is very likely that Elizabeth did not see the letter and that Cecil intercepted it. Bess had previously served as one of Elizabeth’s Ladies of the Bedchamber, alongside Kat Ashley, Blanche Parry and Dorothy Stafford, but she had lost the Queen’s favour over her role in the secret marriage of Katherine Grey. She married her fourth husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1568, the nobleman becoming Mary Queen of Scots’s gaoler the following year. Bess was forty-one when Mary was moved to Tutbury Castle; Mary was twenty-six. They spent a good deal of the day together, embroidering and gossiping, but had fallen out over Bess’s suspicions over the relationship between Mary and her husband, George Talbot. Mary reported that Bess had been disloyal about Elizabeth and then proceeded to reveal gossip that Bess had told her about her time at the English court.

  Mary prefaced the letter to her cousin,

  I declare to you now, with regret that such things should be brought into question but very sincerely and without any anger, which I call my God to witness, that the Countess of Shrewsbury said to me about you … to the greater part of which I protest I answered, rebutting the said lady for believing or speaking so licentiously of you as a thing which I did not at all believe.

  Bess had allegedly told Mary that Elizabeth had, in front of one of her ladies-in-waiting, made Dudley a promise of marriage, ‘and that she had slept with him an infinite number of times with all the familiarity and licence as between
man and wife’. The letter claimed that Elizabeth had also seduced other men, including Sir Christopher Hatton, the Captain of her Guard, whom she had then taken as her lover. She had kissed the French envoy Simier and had taken ‘various unseemly familiarities with him’ and betrayed to him the secrets of the realm. She had also ‘disported’ herself with the ‘same dissoluteness’ with the Duke of Anjou, ‘who had been to find you one night at the door of your chamber where you had met him with only your nightdress and dressing gown on and that afterwards you let him enter and that he remained with you nearly three hours’.

  In this remarkable letter, Mary alluded to rumours that Elizabeth had some kind of physical defect that would prohibit regular sexual relations and thus make conception impossible: ‘You were not like other women … and you would never lose your liberty to make love and always have your pleasure with new lovers.’25

  Bess of Hardwick denied making any such slanderous accusations and the Privy Council eventually accepted her innocence; the letter, however, demonstrates the dangers of rumours emanating from the Queen’s Bedchamber and how intimate details about the Queen’s body continued to have huge political significance, even when Elizabeth was beyond her childbearing years. Whilst assassins conspired against Elizabeth’s life, Mary Queen of Scots, like other Catholic polemicists, looked to target the Queen’s honour by undermining her claims to be the ‘Virgin Queen’ – which had become so central to her political identity.26