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

  Now there was no doubt made but that this pleasant sight … would … give him such an edge that he could not forbear, especially having been all his life a valiant cavalier in arms, to give a charge with his lance of lust against the centre of her target of proof, and run his ingredience up to the hard hilts into the unsearchable bottom of her gaping gulf. And if he should not be disposed thereunto of his own accord, it was ordained that every small touch of the chain should drown the member of his virility in the bottomless barrel of her virginity, through which runneth a field of unquenchable fire, which, at every joining together did so hiss his humanity, that he was in continual danger to lose the top of his standard of steel …8

  Given the satire’s derisive allusion to the Pope, the author of the piece was probably not a Catholic; given the critique of Dudley’s abuse of patronage it was perhaps someone at court.

  There were continued rumours of supposed children of the Queen and her favourite. Two years after Dudley’s death a widow named Dionisia Deryck claimed that Elizabeth ‘hath already had as many children as I, and that two of them were yet alive, one a man child and the other a maiden child, and the others were burned’. Deryck claimed the father of the Queen’s children was the Earl of Leicester, and that he had ‘wrapped them up in the embers in the chamber where they were born’. In the same year, 1590, Robert Garner told a similar story: Dudley ‘had four children by the Queen’s Majesty, whereof three were daughters alive, and the fourth a son that was burnt’. Both Deryck and Garner stood in the pillory for their indiscretions.9

  * * *

  Now fifty-five years old, Elizabeth spent the Christmas and New Year festivities at Richmond. Rain and sleet battered the palace as fires blazed high, and the court was entertained with plays, feasting, dancing and the usual exchange of gifts. It was Elizabeth’s first Christmas without Dudley and now she showed especial favour to his twenty-one-year-old stepson, Robert Devereux, with whom she had grown particularly close over the last year.10 Tall, strikingly attractive with dark eyes and auburn hair, the 2nd Earl of Essex was intelligent, witty and flirtatious. Dudley had introduced him at court four years before and, having served under his stepfather’s command in the Low Countries, Essex returned to England where he established himself at court. Elizabeth would grow increasingly captivated by the russet-haired young man whose youth enlivened her and gave her new energy.

  Essex was charming and confident whilst at the same time being stubborn, egotistical, fiercely ambitious and, like the Queen, short-tempered. Elizabeth and Essex spent a great deal of time together and despite the thirty-year age gap, many people began to speculate on the nature of their relationship. At court entertainments he would either sit next to Elizabeth, or adjacent to her; she was often reported to whisper to him or touch him fondly. All through the summer of 1587, Essex had ridden or walked with the Queen and played cards long into the night. Antony Bagot, one of Essex’s servants, boasted that ‘even at night my lord is at cards or one game or another with her, that he cometh not to his own lodging till the birds sing in the morning’. Bagot wrote excitedly to his father in Shropshire about the attention the Queen was paying their master: ‘He [Essex] told me with his own mouth that he looked to be Master of Horse within these ten days.’11 Indeed, Elizabeth bestowed the position on the young earl on 18 June 1587, the role his stepfather, Robert Dudley, had exchanged for that of Lord Steward.

  Elizabeth’s relationship with the earl was impassioned and volatile. In July 1587, the year before Robert Dudley’s death, whilst the court then on progress approached North Hall, Hertfordshire, the home of the Earl of Warwick, Essex quarrelled with Elizabeth over her slighting of his sister, Dorothy, who had incurred the Queen’s wrath by marrying without permission a few years earlier. When Essex told Elizabeth that his sister was already at North Hall, the Queen ordered that Dorothy be detained in her chamber. Essex was furious, accusing Elizabeth of acting to disgrace him and his family honour ‘only to please that knave Ralegh’. He proceeded to pour out his pent-up jealousy of Sir Walter Ralegh who, he believed, dared to compete for the affection of the Queen. Elizabeth soon lost her temper with Essex and began to berate him about the behaviour of his mother Lettice. The earl realised he had gone too far and in the middle of the night ordered his servants to prepare his and Dorothy’s belongings for their departure from North Hall. Essex subsequently reported the encounter in a letter to a friend:

  It seemed she could not well endure anything to be spoken against him [Ralegh]; and taking hold of one word ‘disdain’, she said there was no such cause why I should disdain him. This speech troubled me so much that as near as I could I described unto her what he had been, and what he was, and then I did let her see whether I had cause to disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a man. I spake, what grief and choler, as much against him as I could, and I think he standing at the door might well have heard the worse that I spoke of himself. In the end I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross me. For myself, I told her, I had no joy to be in any place but loath to be near about her when I knew my affection so much thrown down, and such a wretch as Ralegh highly esteemed of her …12

  Essex resolved to leave England for the Low Countries: ‘If I return, I will be welcomed home; if not una bella morire is better than a disquiet life.’13 However, as he rode towards Sandwich in Kent to embark on his voyage, he was overtaken by Robert Carey with a message from the Queen commanding him to return to court. All was forgiven, at least for now. The following year, when Dudley retired from court, Elizabeth asked Essex to move into his stepfather’s lodgings in the palace.

  * * *

  With Dudley’s death, Elizabeth’s reliance on Essex increased; but having spent Christmas and the New Year by the Queen’s side, as she mourned the loss of his stepfather, the young earl began to grow restless. In the spring of 1589 he ignored Elizabeth’s orders to remain at court and slipped away to join Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris’s voyage to Portugal. Their expedition sought to destroy what remained of the Armada and free Portugal from Spanish domination by securing Dom Antonio on the throne, before going on to the Azores to capture the Spanish treasure fleet. When Elizabeth learned of the planned departure, she immediately sent orders for the earl’s return.

  Essex: your sudden and undutiful departure from our presence and your place of attendance [as Master of the Horse] you may easily conceive how offensive it is, and ought to be, unto us. Our great favour bestowed on you without deserts hath drawn you this to neglect and forget your duty; for other constructions we cannot make of those your strange actions … We do therefore charge and command you forthwith, upon receipt of those our letters, all excuses and delays set apart, to make your present and immediate repair unto us, to understand our further pleasure. Whereof see you fail not, as you will be loath to incur our indignation and will answer for the contrary at your uttermost peril.14

  He did not obey, however. The expedition proved a failure on all fronts and Essex was back in England by the end of June to face the Queen’s wrath.

  As Elizabeth became increasingly demanding and irascible, Essex turned his attention to the ladies who surrounded her, particularly Frances Sidney, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney who had died in the Netherlands expedition, and daughter of spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. As Sir Philip lay dying, Essex had reportedly promised to look after his wife. In the spring of 1590, true to his word, he secretly married Frances and soon afterwards she fell pregnant.15 The precise date of the marriage is uncertain but it might well have taken place shortly after Walsingham’s death on 6 April, and perhaps he had given them his blessing as he lay dying at his home in Seething Lane in London. He was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral the following evening in the tomb where his son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney had been placed just weeks before.

  Essex was all too aware of the Queen’s explosive reaction when, a decade earlier, she had discove
red his mother’s marriage to Robert Dudley. The young earl now feared a similar fate. As Frances’s belly swelled through the summer, Essex found excuses to keep her away from court.

  When later that year the Queen found out about the marriage she was furious, but after only a fortnight Essex was welcomed back at her side. His relationship with the Queen was very different from that which Elizabeth had shared with Dudley. There had been – on both sides – genuine love and perhaps unrequited ambition for a marriage; whereas Essex’s relationship with her was a flirtation which made the ageing Queen feel young and attractive again.16 Nevertheless, Elizabeth forbade Frances to return to court, causing Essex long periods of separation from his wife.

  Months later, Essex convinced Elizabeth to place him in command of an army being sent into France to help the Protestant King Henri IV against his French and Spanish enemies. In August 1591 he landed in Dieppe and from there wrote to the Queen assuring her of his love and loyalty:

  The two windows of your Privy Chamber shall be the poles of my sphere, where, as long as your Majesty will please to have me, I am fixed and unmovable. When your Majesty thinks that heaven too good for me, I will not fall like a star but be consumed like a vapour by the sun that draws me up to such a height. While your Majesty gives me leave to say I love you, my fortune is as my affection, unmatchable. If ever you deny me that liberty, you may end my life, but never shake my constancy, for were the sweetness of your nature turned into the greatest bitterness that could be, it is not in your power, as great a queen as you are, to make me love you less.17

  He returned from France at the beginning of 1592, aged twenty-four, and in January, Frances gave birth to their second son. Only weeks before, Mistress Elizabeth Southwell, one of the Queen’s maids of honour with whom Essex had been conducting a secret affair, also gave birth to a son, named Walter Devereux. The illegitimate child’s existence was hushed up and the infant was passed into the care of Essex’s mother Lettice, the Countess of Leicester, and raised at Drayton Basset. Southwell had put her absences from court during the later stages of pregnancy down to a ‘lameness in her leg’. When it emerged that she had been pregnant and given birth, her lover was named as ‘Mr Vavisor’18 – Thomas Vavasour, a Gentleman Pensioner – who was then banished from court for misconduct and imprisoned. The ruse held for a further four years; only then did the Queen discover that the father of Walter Devereux was not Thomas Vavasour but Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. Elizabeth Southwell had by then left court in disgrace and remained banished until her death in 1602.19

  A few months later, another scandal broke; another secret marriage from among the maids of honour and the birth of another illegitimate child.

  * * *

  Sir Walter Ralegh had, like Essex, been unfaithful to the Queen’s affection and favour and in April 1592 his secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton was exposed by the birth of their first child.

  ‘Bess’ Throckmorton had entered the Queen’s service as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber in 1584. Aged nineteen, this was a prestigious position for one so young. She was attractive, passionate, strong-minded and determined. By 1590 she had caught the eye of Sir Walter Ralegh, a dashing courtier and adventurer whose job it was to protect the Queen and her ladies, and before long the two began meeting clandestinely. In July 1591, Bess discovered she was pregnant and begged Ralegh, then in his late thirties, to marry her. He agreed, though he dreaded the Queen’s reaction. They married in secret on 19 November.20 Meanwhile Bess remained in the Queen’s service, disguising her growing belly as best she could, and Sir Walter continued with his preparations for his next military expedition to Panama. At the end of February, in her final month of pregnancy, Bess left court and went to her brother’s house at Mile End to prepare for the birth. She had remained at court until the very last moment knowing that, if she could be away for less than a fortnight, she would not need a licence to authorise her absence.

  After her sudden departure rumours began to circulate about Bess’s relationship with Ralegh. Robert Cecil, the twenty-seven-year-old son of William Cecil, and now a privy councillor, became suspicious and started questioning Ralegh. Sir Walter explicitly denied any relationship with Bess, and swore that there had been no marriage, there would be no marriage and that he was entirely devoted to Queen Elizabeth:

  I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a marriage and I know not what. If any such thing where I would have imparted it unto yourself before any man living. And therefore I pray believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress what you can any such malicious report. For I protest before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.21

  Ralegh was unaware that Robert Cecil had already found out about the marriage and therefore knew that he was being lied to. Bess meanwhile was left to endure childbirth alone and on 29 March was safely delivered of a son, who was later baptised Damerei. A messenger was immediately despatched to Ralegh who sent his wife £50, and then continued with the preparations for his voyage. He was keen to get as far away from the court as possible before the Queen found out about Bess and the child.

  Four weeks later Bess was back in the Queen’s service as if nothing had happened, leaving Damerei in the care of a wet nurse in Enfield. Sir Walter meanwhile embarked on the first leg of his voyage. He was back in Plymouth by mid-May, when the scandal broke. The Queen, then at Nonsuch at the start of her summer progress, immediately ordered the arrest and detainment of her Gentlewoman and the Captain of the Guard, Ralegh at Durham House, Bess in the custody of the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage. On 7 August, both husband and wife were moved to the Tower.22 Ralegh sent urgent messages and poems to the Queen, assuring her of his love, bemoaning his misery and trying to win back her favour. Bess, however, remained unrepentant, signing her letters from the Tower, ‘Elizabeth Ralegh’.

  In mid-September, Ralegh was released to travel to Dartmouth to greet the Portuguese carrack, the Madre de Dios, which his fleet had captured in the Azores and had returned laden with treasure; but Bess remained in the Tower. It was a sweltering late summer and plague was rife throughout the capital. She was freed shortly before Christmas, only to learn that their infant son Damerei had died, most likely in the plague. Bess retired to her husband’s estate at Sherborne in Dorset and by the following spring she was pregnant again. In November she bore another son, named Walter.

  For the time being both Ralegh and his wife remained exiled from court. Bess continued to petition her friends to help her regain the Queen’s favour but Elizabeth proved unforgiving and would never welcome Bess back to court. At the end of the reign, Lord Henry Howard, an enemy of the Raleghs, wrote gloatingly that although ‘much hath been offered on all sides to bring her [Bess] into the Privy Chamber of her old place’, Elizabeth refused to receive her. Sir Walter Ralegh finally returned to court in 1597 and resumed his duties as Captain of the Guard.

  Every scandal involving Elizabeth’s women of the Bedchamber and maids of honour soon became the stuff of alehouse gossip and malicious rumour. Even Anne Clifford, the Countess of Warwick’s young niece, reported that, ‘there was much talk of a Mask which the Queen had at Winchester, & how all the Ladies about the Court had gotten such ill names that it was grown a scandalous place & the Queen herself was much fallen from her former greatness and reputation she had in the world’.23

  45

  Suspected and Discontented Persons

  After the defeat of the Armada, Elizabeth resumed her summer progresses beyond London and the Home Counties, where she had remained for most of the 1580s. Now, despite reports of the gradual build up of a new Spanish fleet, Elizabeth refused to be cowed by fears for her safety and ventured further afield. In an attempt to inspire loyalty across the confessional divide and to seek out signs of disloyalty or discontent, she visited many houses that were owned by open or suspected Catholics.

  The route of Elizabeth’s progress in 1591 was carefully planned through Surrey, Sussex an
d Hampshire with visits to the homes of five Catholic gentlemen. Many of Elizabeth’s councillors regarded such stops as being unnecessarily dangerous and there was real anxiety for the Queen’s safety. One courtier, Richard Cavendish, sought to dissuade her from going to what he believed was a ‘tickle [dangerous] country and places fraught with suspected and discontented persons’.1

  In August, Elizabeth spent six days at Cowdray in Sussex, the seat of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montague, a leading Catholic nobleman.2 Having been employed on a number of embassies at the beginning of the reign and appointed to the lord lieutenancy of Sussex, Montague lost his position in 1585 and had thereafter become increasingly marginalised from Elizabethan political life as actions against Catholics intensified. His household included active supporters of both the Jesuits and the Spanish invasion and he was the owner of a number of houses where missionary priests were thought to have received help and support. Montague had also been implicated in the plot to have Mary Queen of Scots marry Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Whilst he had acted to defend Elizabeth as the Armada threatened, Montague might well have feared that an example would now be made of him, as it had been with Edward Rookwood of Euston Hall in 1578, during the East Anglian progress. However this time, as the government looked to combat accusations of the cruel persecution of Catholics at home, a demonstration of loyalty to the Queen by a prominent Catholic nobleman suited better their purpose.

  Montague was keen to prove his devotion to her Majesty and laid on lavish entertainments at Cowdray Park in August to emphasise his position as the leader of a loyal local gentry. The country dances performed by local people and joined by Montague and his wife pointed to a ‘beautiful relation’ among all classes; speeches by the characters the ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Wild Man’ extended the notion of order and loyalty to the entire county, whilst claiming that the world outside was one of treachery and instability. Montague sought to dismiss claims that Roman Catholicism amounted to treason and threatened the peace of the realm and the life of the Queen. He, like many other Catholics, instead pointed to Protestantism as the main source of ‘rebellion and civil disobedience’, with Protestants being ‘men that are full of affection and passions and that look to wax almighty, and of power, by the confiscation, spoil and ruin of the houses of noble and ancient men’.3