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

  The uproar in London caused by William Hacket, a fanatical Protestant, little more than a fortnight earlier appeared to be evidence of just the kind of disorder that Montague described. In July, Hacket claimed to be the Messiah and on the streets of London he and his two followers preached the overthrow of the government and the usurpation of the Queen.4 Having declared the Day of Judgement to be near at hand, he then took an ‘iron instrument’ to a picture of the Queen hanging in his lodgings and ‘villainously and treacherously’ defaced it, especially that part of the picture which represented Elizabeth’s heart, and railed ‘most traitorously against her Majesty’s person’.5 By one o’clock on 26 July 1591, the three men had been arrested.6 Hacket was found guilty of high treason, and was executed two days later at the Cross at Cheapside.7

  Whilst other Protestants were anxious to disassociate themselves from Hacket and regarded him as a madman, the Attorney General at Hacket’s trial dismissed arguments about the defendant’s ‘frantic humours’ and instead stated that he had led a carefully constructed plot to overthrow the state. Even though Hacket was a fanatical puritan, Elizabeth’s government was quick to cast him as a Catholic. As the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell wrote in a letter to Rome, ‘the puritan Hacket had been posted over to us as a papist and is named to the vulgar sort’. 8

  In the face of such disorder, Montague represented his estate at Cowdray as a bastion of stability and loyalty. Yet his show of loyalty to the Queen did not serve its purpose, for on 18 October, Elizabeth issued a new anti-Catholic proclamation which further criminalised anyone found harbouring Catholic priests.9 The proclamation, which may have been drafted by privy councillors whilst they were being hosted by Montague, referred to Catholic activity as ‘treasons in the bowels of our Realm’.10 Sir John Harington observed that as the laws against Catholics became more and more harsh, ‘their practices grew fouler and fouler’, yet he wondered which came first: whether Catholics’ ‘sinister practices drew on these rigorous laws, or whether the rigour of these laws moved them to these unnatural practices?’11

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  The following year there were reports of another major plot abroad. Thomas Phillipes, an agent working for the Earl of Essex and formerly used by Walsingham, had acquired intelligence from Flanders about a plot to kill Elizabeth and hasten a foreign invasion supported by the Pope and the Duke of Parma and led by recusant officer Sir William Stanley.

  When fighting under Robert Dudley in the Low Countries, Stanley had spectacularly defected to the Spaniards, handing over the town of Deventer which he was then occupying. He remained in post as governor of Deventer for a year, during which time he became involved with the English Catholic exile community in Flanders and came into contact with Cardinal Allen. Stanley would become one of the Elizabethan government’s most implacable enemies among the exiles abroad and he and his disaffected regiment were perceived to be plotting tirelessly against the Queen and her realm.

  In the general confusion that would follow Elizabeth’s assassination, when ‘the people will be together by the ears about the succession’, it was anticipated that Stanley would give support to James VI. Phillipes explained that this plot had been brewing ‘since the Great Enterprise was disappointed’. The Pope was said to have ‘revoked the assassin from the camp of the French King [Henri IV], whom he was to have killed, to attempt the like on the Queen’.12

  Stanley and his conspirators aimed to target Elizabeth during her progress into Wiltshire that summer, which would give them the ‘means and opportunity fit for this practice’.13 In 1592, Phillipes reported that, ‘Sir William Stanley’s force has long been preparing, and it is fully expected that the desperate Italian that is to come over [to kill the Queen] will do the deed.’ The plot was foiled because of Phillipes’s intelligence, as was another conspiracy the following year, also sponsored by Stanley and other English exiles, which saw Father Persons and Gilbert Laton debating how best to kill the Queen and ‘show how it might be performed – her Majesty being in the progress – and to be executed with a wire made with jemos or with a poignard’.14 Over the next few months and on into the new year, the activities of Jesuit priests, factions at the English court, disaffected soldiers and impressionable young men seduced by the promise of a fortune, combined to produce a deluge of assassination plots, most of which seemed to have Sir William Stanley at their heart.

  In 1594 it was reported that a number of former soldiers from Stanley’s regiment came secretly to England with the aim of murdering Elizabeth. In February, an Irish soldier called Patrick O’Collun was captured and imprisoned in the Tower. It was alleged that he had been sent to England by Stanley and the Jesuit priest Nicholas Owen to carry out the deed.15 Two witnesses testified to O’Collun’s mission, one of whom was William Polwhele. Polwhele was also a soldier in Stanley’s regiment who had been arrested and had admitted to having been sent by Stanley to assassinate Elizabeth. He described how that summer, Captain ‘Jacques’, Stanley’s deputy in the regiment, had urged him to go to England and kill the Queen, saying that ‘no action could be more glorious than cutting off so wicked a member, who is likely to overthrow all Christendom’. Polwhele was instructed to go to England, gain William Cecil’s trust and then ingratiate himself at court. The plan was to be put into action ‘when the Queen went for a walk or to the sermon: that she might be shot or stabbed’, for, they claimed, ‘she takes no care’.16

  Around the same time, Hugh Cahill, another Irish soldier from Stanley’s regiment, was examined at William Cecil’s House in Westminster, where he revealed that, like O’Collun and Polwhele, he had been approached by the Jesuit priests Fathers Holt, Archer and Walpole at Stanley’s behest to assassinate the Queen.17 The plan was that he should go to England, enter the service of a courtier, ‘and then manage to waylay her (the Queen) in some progress, and kill her with a sword or a dagger at a gate or narrow passage, or, as she walked in one of her galleries’. Cahill approved the scheme and a fee was agreed. However, upon arriving in England, Cahill divulged the plot to William Cecil.18 It was claimed that John Scudamore, stepson of Elizabeth’s long-standing Lady of the Bedchamber Mary Scudamore, was party to the plot. Scudamore was arrested and questioned, but released soon afterwards, presumably having proved his innocence or perhaps because of a timely intervention from his stepmother, and then returned to Rome, where he had become a priest.19

  All of the prisoners denied any serious intent to kill the Queen. Beyond their confessions there is no proof as to what had been planned, though it seems likely that there had been an intention by some to assassinate Elizabeth. Hugh Owen protested that, ‘neither he, Owen, nor Sir William Stanley, had any more to do with killing the Queen than the man in the moon’. He said that John Annais, another accused solider, ‘is a sorry fellow, who can make a white powder, but would not kill a cat if she looked him on the face’. He denied ever seeing Cullen and protested that he barely knew Cahill or Polwhele.20

  In February 1594, Henry Walpole, the Jesuit whom Cahill had accused, was arrested on landing near Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. The Queen’s priest-hunter–interrogator Richard Topcliffe was sent to York to question Walpole, who was subjected to long and painful torture. Again and again Walpole insisted that his mission was a purely religious one: to administer the sacraments and urge English Catholics to remain faithful to their queen. He rejected with horror the suggestion that he had encouraged the assassination of Elizabeth. His pleas were rejected and on 7 April he was hanged, drawn and quartered. There was no evidence beyond Cahill’s claims, but the fact that he was a Jesuit seemed sufficient to condemn him.

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  William Cecil now introduced new defensive measures to protect the Queen and tighten access to court. He advised barring unnecessary people and limiting the numbers of servants. The ushers and clerks of the household would inspect all petitioners seeking an audience with the Queen. By proclamation, it was declared that ‘her Majesty forbiddeth all persons that are not servitors upon
the council or upon other lords and ladies or gentlemen attending on her Majesty, to forbear to come to the court or near to the court’.21 No one should use the back doors at palaces, except for the designated servants who should keep them locked. Most importantly, the Knight Harbinger and Knight Marshal should prevent crowds from lodging within two miles of the court when on progress: ‘If any are found not allowed they shall be examined, and if they cannot give just cause be committed to prison.’22

  On 17 February the council sent officers to every English port to search, interrogate and, if needed, detain anyone entering the country.23 Special precautions were to be taken against Irishmen in London and near Elizabeth’s court, and particularly those who had served in Sir William Stanley’s rebel regiment. A royal proclamation was issued announcing that some men had come secretly into the kingdom, ‘with full purpose, by procurement of the Devil and His Ministers, her Majesty’s enemies, and rebels on the other side of the sea, to endanger her Majesty’s noble person’. The proclamation ordered the arrest of vagabonds and deportation of Irishmen: ‘No manner of person born in the realm of Ireland without proper purpose or residence shall remain in this realm.’24

  Whilst the proclamation attempted to restrain suspect persons from approaching the Queen, particularly when she went on progress, opportunities to do her harm abounded.25 Elizabeth and her advisers knew that royal progresses especially exposed her to attack, but she refused to limit contact with her subjects and declared she would rather be dead than ‘in custody’.26 As it was, suspicions of a second suspected invasion in 1593 kept her close to London and she spent most of the late summer and early autumn at Windsor.

  The following year, Edmund Yorke, formerly a captain in Stanley’s regiment, gave himself up to the Privy Council. Under harsh interrogation, Yorke confessed to having plotted with Sir William Stanley, Father William Holt and Charles Paget, a ruthless English émigré, to kill Elizabeth. Detailed plans had been laid including what weapons Yorke and his accomplice Richard Williams would use. Whilst some of the group thought using a small steel crossbow with poison arrows would be most effective, Yorke ultimately agreed to shoot the Queen with a small pistol while Williams would carry a rapier tipped with a ‘poison’ made from bacon, garlic juice and juniper.27 By February 1595, both Captain Yorke and Richard Williams had been sent to the gallows.

  These were times of heightened fear for the Elizabethan government. The Queen had come close, sometimes very close, to having been killed, and it was only the ruthless investigations of Cecil and Essex to unearth the threats, and so prove their own devotion to her, that had saved her from harm. The factional politics of the court, the anxieties wrought by the succession issue and the ambitions of disaffected English exiles abroad, all conspired to produce an atmosphere of intense fright and panic in the kingdom.

  46

  Age and Decay

  ‘There is a rumour in London that the Queen is dead and hath been carried away to Greenwich, but it is being kept very secret in Court.’1 The gossip was traced to William Hancock, a tailor and servant to a musician at court, who vigorously denied spreading the story. He said he had heard from John Rogers, a chandler in Whitechapel, that the Queen was ill and that her sickness had caused her removal from Hampton Court to Greenwich.2 He was not discussing her death, he said; he was expressing concern for her recovery.

  Soon all discussion of the Queen’s health and the succession was banned. Anyone who ignored the ruling risked charges of sedition and libel. When in February 1593 the puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name a successor he was promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. John Harington, the Queen’s godson, later recalled how, from his cell, Wentworth wrote, ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.3 Wentworth remained in the Tower for four years until his death, though he refused to keep silent on the succession.4

  In early 1596, Dr Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, expressed similar sentiments in a bold sermon delivered before the Queen and the Lords in the chapel royal at Whitehall. After a brief survey of English history and a tribute to the blessings of the current reign, Hutton spoke of the duty Elizabeth owed, both to God and her people, to unequivocally appoint a successor. The uncertainty of the succession gave hope to foreigners to attempt invasion and bred fears in her subjects of a new conquest; ‘the only way to quiet these fears, was to establish the succession’. Sir John Harington subsequently recalled how after Hutton had finished the sermon everyone assumed the Queen would be highly offended and ‘imagined such a speech was as welcome as salt to the eyes’, or in Elizabeth’s own words, ‘to pin up a winding-sheet before her face, so as to point out her successor, and urge her to declare him’. But she responded magnanimously. She

  supposed many of them were of his opinion, and some of them might have persuaded him to this motion; finally, she ascribed so much to his years, place and learning, that when she opened the window of her closet we found ourselves all deceived, for very kindly and calmly, without show of offence, as if she had but waked out of some sleep, she gave him thanks for his very learned sermon.

  But that was not to be her last word. Having ‘better considered the matter, and recollected herself in private’, she sent Hutton a ‘sharp message’ which left the archbishop scarcely knowing whether ‘he were a prisoner or a free man’.5

  The political pressures caused by war, poverty, disease and the torrent of conspiracies against the Queen, were all exacerbated by creeping signs of Elizabeth’s physical deterioration, her body the living symbol of an exhausted government. As Elizabeth approached her sixties, this prompted urgent and increasingly desperate attempts to recreate her former youthful appearance and reassure her subjects of her health and vigour. John Clapham, a servant of William Cecil, was in attendance at court in the early 1590s and in his ‘Certain Observations’ described what he saw:

  In the latter time, when she showed herself in public, she was always magnificent in apparel, supposing happily thereby, that the eyes of her people, being dazzled with the glittering aspect of those accidental ornaments would not so easily discern the marks of age and decay of natural beauty. But she began to show herself less often so as to make her presence the more grateful and applauded by the multitude, to whom things rarely seen are in manner as new.6

  With age came a greater need to control images of the Queen, to overcome the discrepancy between her weakening body, revealed only to the ladies of her Bedchamber, and her public image of strength and fortitude.7 In 1592 the artist Isaac Oliver produced one of the few images ever painted from life of Elizabeth as an older woman. Oliver had been granted a rare sitting with the Queen and, contrary to her own preference, he positioned her next to a window so a natural revealing light shone on her face. The painting was intended to be a pattern, kept in his studio for future repetition and so the details of her dress and jewels were left unfinished. Instead the focus is on Elizabeth’s pale and rather sallow face with tightly drawn lips and lively eyes. It was undoubtedly the most revealing, realistic portrait ever produced of the ageing Elizabeth; as far as the Queen was concerned it was therefore not a success. Elizabeth let her Privy Council know that portraits based on this model were unacceptable and her councillors swiftly issued instructions that ‘all likenesses of the Queen that depicted her as being in any way old and hence subject to mortality’ were to her ‘great offence’ and should be sought out and destroyed.8 Oliver was to be left in no doubt as to his mistake. He received no further patronage from the Queen, who looked elsewhere for a more flattering portrait painter.

  Around the same time that Oliver was granted a sitting with Elizabeth, Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, the future brother-in-law to Oliver, was also admitted to the Queen’s presence. He had been commissioned by Sir Henry Lee to paint a full-length picture of the Queen to commemorate her visit to his home at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. The picture is huge; nearly eight feet high, the largest painted o
f Elizabeth and very deliberately intended to make a visual statement identifying her as the embodiment of the nation. She stands at the top of a globe, her feet positioned on England adjacent to Ditchley in Oxfordshire, her body encased in a richly embroidered and bejewelled white dress that sweeps across the country. She appears, Goddess-like, her face framed by a lace ruff and jewelled veil. Her body spans heaven and earth and is captured between two sky scenes; one dark and stormy on the left, another calm and serene on the right. Elizabeth is presented as having calmed tempestuous heavens and the sunshine after storms. As Sir John Harington later said of his godmother, ‘When she smiled, it was a pure sunshine, that everyone did choose to bask in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.’9

  The ‘Ditchley portrait’ established the pattern of portraying the Queen in her later years. In future versions the face was rejuvenated somewhat and its features softened in order to conform to the obligatory ‘mask of youth’ pattern which was soon to be imposed by the government. From the mid-1590s, Elizabeth’s face ceased to be painted from life.10 With no heirs to the throne, all signs of ageing and infertility were removed in order to present a reassuring image of longevity and continuity.