The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 35

  As the Earl of Huntingdon’s health continued to deteriorate, Elizabeth ordered that the news be kept from his wife, Katherine, Countess of Huntingdon, for fear of worrying her unnecessarily. Katherine spent long periods of time at their estate in Ashby-de-la Zouch in Leicestershire and also made regular visits to the court. By the early 1590s, Lady Katherine was in almost permanent attendance on Elizabeth and was sufficiently rehabilitated for her husband to thank the Queen, for being ‘so gracious to my poor wife, which I can no ways in any sort do anything to deserve’.11 Such was her favour with the Queen that in September, Rowland Whyte, Robert Sidney’s agent at court, urged his master, ‘I pray you write to my Lady Huntingdon by every passage, for tis looked for, and desire her favour to obtain your leave to return to see her, which will much advance it; for the Queen is willing to given any such contentment that may comfort her.’12

  When a messenger arrived on 14 December 1595 with the news that the Earl of Huntingdon had died, the court was away from London. Elizabeth set off at once for the capital determined to tell the countess herself. ‘The Queen is come to Whitehall on such a sudden that it makes the world wonder when it is but to break it unto her herself,’ observed Rowland Whyte.13 On learning of her husband’s death, Katherine was distraught. ‘I am not able to deliver unto you the passions she fell into and which yet she continues in,’ Whyte told his master. Elizabeth was so concerned about Katherine that she returned again the following day to console her. ‘The Queen was with my Lady Huntingdon very private upon Saturday,’ said Whyte, ‘which much comforted her.’14

  Overcome by her loss, Katherine fell seriously ill and it was feared her death was imminent. On 3 January it was reported that ‘my lady of Huntingdon continues so ill of grief that many doubt she cannot live. She is so much weakened by sorrow that no officers of hers dare go to her sign to know her pleasure, either in her own private fortune or to know what shall be done with the dead body of my Lord.’15 The countess, with no children of her own, was now desperate to see her nephew, Sir Robert Sidney, who was away serving in the Netherlands. The Queen’s concern for Lady Huntingdon was such that she recalled Sir Robert so that her dear friend had all the comfort she required. Lady Katherine’s condition improved and for the next few years she lived at Chelsea, made regular visits to court and remained close to Elizabeth until the Queen’s death. The countess also devoted herself to advancing the career of her nephew Sir Robert Sidney, and delighted in having his young children in her care during his embassies abroad. Robert Sidney now had the influential favour of both his aunts, the Countess of Huntingdon and Lady Anne, the Countess of Warwick who would also further his suits at court.

  Essex returned from the north early in 1596. Whilst he remained the Queen’s favourite, the honeymoon period between them was clearly over. When Elizabeth seemed reluctant to admit the earl to his favoured place at her side, Essex retired to his chamber and feigned illness in order to regain the Queen’s attentions. On 19 February, Rowland Whyte reported, ‘My Lord of Essex keeps his Chamber still’. Three days later: ‘My Lord of Essex kept his Bed the most Part of all Yesterday, yet did one of his Chamber tell me, he could not weep for it, for he knew his Lord was not sick.’ Elizabeth was taken in by this charade. ‘Not a Day passes,’ Whyte told Sir Robert Sidney, ‘that the Queen sends not often to see him, and himself every Day goeth privately unto her.’ On 25 February, Whyte wrote, ‘My Lord of Essex comes out of his Chamber in his Gown and Night Cap … Full 14 Days, his Lordship kept in; her Majesty … resolved to break him of his Will, and to pull down his great Heart … but all is well again, and no Doubt he will grow a mighty Man in our state.’16

  For now, Essex was restored to favour, as Elizabeth continued to entertain his petulance.

  * * *

  The daring raid on the Spanish port of Cadiz in the summer of 1596 was the Earl of Essex’s finest hour. Throughout the previous year he had grown frustrated as Elizabeth ignored his intelligence that Spain was preparing a fresh invasion. However, after a Spanish naval squadron attacked the west coast of Cornwall, and the Irish rebels led by the Earl of Tyrone became increasingly militant, Elizabeth ordered that her own forces be made ready. In the first days of April, while the fleet awaited Elizabeth’s permission to sail, a Spanish army from the Netherlands had marched on Calais, taken the town and laid siege to the garrison. Spain now had a foothold just across the Channel. Finally in June, the English fleet set sail for Cadiz, a major port on the Andalusian coast some forty miles from Seville and raided in an audacious attack by Sir Francis Drake ten years before. Three weeks later the fleet rounded the cape into the Bay of Biscay and began demolishing the Spanish navy. Essex led the troops ashore and stormed Cadiz in a dramatic coup, plundering the city’s vast riches.

  In August, Essex returned to England and was given a hero’s welcome when his ship dropped anchor at Plymouth. However, when he went to court, he did not receive the reception he had anticipated: Elizabeth was furious. She had heard reports of the great booty brought back from Cadiz which everyone had seemed to benefit from bar her. After an investigation led by the Cecils into Essex’s conduct of the campaign, the earl was cleared of incompetence. Nevertheless, the relationship between Queen and Essex had undoubtedly soured.

  It was not only Elizabeth who gave Essex a frosty reception on his return from Cadiz. In December he received a furious letter from Lady Anne Bacon, the mother of his close friends, Anthony and Francis Bacon. She rebuked Essex for the ‘lust of concupiscence’ and charged him with ‘inflaming a noble man’s wife and so near about her Majesty’. Lady Anne warned the earl that in doing so he courted ‘God’s severe displeasure’, and risked provoking violence from the woman’s husband; ‘if a desperate rage, as commonly followeth, he will revenge his provoked jealousy and most intolerable injury’.17 Essex refuted Lady Bacon’s claims and denied any improper dealings with ‘the lady you mean’. Nevertheless, his response was not entirely reassuring. He claimed that ‘since my departure from England towards Spain, I have been free from taxation of incontinency with any woman that lives’, suggesting he may have been guilty of philandering before he left for Cadiz.18

  The woman to whom Lady Anne Bacon referred was Elizabeth Stanley, the granddaughter of William Cecil, who, with the Queen’s encouragement, had married the Earl of Derby in January 1595. Just five months later rumours circulated about the Earl of Essex and the ‘new crowned countess’, although these claims were energetically denied by the earl. Essex’s enemies maintained however that ‘he lay with my Lady of Derby before he went [to the Azores’].19 The Earl of Derby had been prepared to overlook his wife’s indiscretions with Essex at the time because he needed her help with a family financial dispute. But when Essex returned from his expedition later in the year, gossip about the earl and the countess revived. The news, Cecil wrote of his rival, left Essex ‘in no great grace’ with the Queen;20 the affair clearly demonstrated that the earl was ‘to fleshly wantonness … much inclined’.21

  50

  Privy Matters

  Elizabeth’s late bedfellow, the greatly mourned Katherine Knollys, had nine children. One son in particular, William, cousin to the Queen, profited from his mother’s favour and secured a career at court. Elizabeth had promised to take care of Katherine’s children in the event of her death and in 1560, Sir William became a Gentleman Pensioner and under his father, Sir Francis, responsible for guarding Mary Queen of Scots at Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. Sir William later spent time as a captain under the command of his brother-in-law Robert Dudley, and eventually became Comptroller of the Royal Household in 1596, a position formerly occupied by his father.

  When Mary Fitton, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Sir Edward Fitton, a Cheshire knight, came to court as a maid of honour in 1595, Sir William Knollys, then in his fifties, earnestly promised Mary’s father that he would play ‘the good shepherd and will to my power defend the innocent lamb from the wolvish cruelty and fox-like subtlety of the tame beasts of this pla
ce, which when they seem to take bread at a man’s hand will bite before they bark’. He assured Fitton that he would ‘be as careful of her well doing as if I were her true father’.1 But instead, Sir William’s behaviour towards Mary turned lecherous.

  The maids of honour slept together, dormitory-style, in the Coffer Chamber, which was right next door to Sir William’s room. He protested that their ‘frisking and heying about’ kept him awake. One night, having grown particularly frustrated, he walked in on the maids wearing only his spectacles and nightshirt and carrying a copy of a book by Aretino.2 He then began pacing around their chamber reading aloud the obscene sonnets of the Italian author, which had been written to accompany a series of engravings depicting sexual positions, by Marcantonio Raimondi in I Modi or The Sixteen Pleasures published in 1524, for which the artist was imprisoned by the Pope.

  In the months that followed, Knollys became infatuated with the young Mary Fitton. When she spurned his advances, he wrote a series of letters to her sister, Anne Newdigate, in which he confided the pains of his unrequited love. Sir William was already married to the dowager Lady Chandos and in flowery parables he wrote to Mary’s sister of how ‘my looking for any fruit of my garden is in vain, unless the old tree be cut down and a new graft of a good kind planted’. If his wife died he could freely press his suit for Mary Fitton; ‘hope is the only food I live by & patience is my pillow to rest upon’.3 In another letter he described himself as ‘cloyed with too much and yet ready to starve for hunger’ and expressed the frustrations of sleeping next door to Mary’s chamber: ‘My eyes see what I cannot attain to, my ears hear what I do scant believe, and my thoughts are carried with contrary conceits. My hopes are mixed with despair and my desires starved with expectation; but were my enjoying assured, I could willingly endure purgatory for a season to purchase my heaven at the last.’ He closed his letter explaining that he could write no more being so distempered with toothache and ‘your sister’s going to bed without bidding me goodnight’.4

  John, the son of another of Elizabeth’s bedfellows, the late Isabella Harington and Sir John Harington, also proved to be a dubious influence on the maids of honour and risqué in his choice of literature. As Elizabeth’s first godson, John was regarded with obvious affection by the Queen. She appreciated his intelligence and enquiring mind. When he was studying at Cambridge, aged fifteen, he received a letter from the Queen containing a copy of a recent speech she had made to Parliament in which she defended her right not to marry. ‘Boy Jack’, she affectionately addressed him,

  I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into Parliament Assemblies as yet. Ponder them in thy hours of leisure and play with them till they enter thine understanding, so shalt thou hereafter perchance find some good fruits hereof when thy godmother is out of remembrance, and I do this because thy father was ready to serve us in trouble and thrall.5

  Following his father’s death in July 1582, John Harington returned to the family home of Kelston in Somerset and there began to translate into English the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso (‘The Frenzy of Orlando’). It was a herculean task and it took, Harington described, ‘some years, & months, & weeks, and days’.6

  The twenty-eighth sonnet contained the racy tale of Giacondo.7 It tells of the adventures of Jocundo and Astolfo who, having discovered that both their wives had been unfaithful, begin a journey across Europe to see if a faithful woman can be found. Having tried many ladies and even been ‘beguiled’ in their own bed by their maid, they conclude that ‘fidelity was no part of woman’s nature’, and there is not a woman in the world whose favours could not be won by wooing or by money.

  In February 1591, having completed the translation of this piece, Harington circulated his manuscript among the Queen’s maids of honour, whom he felt needed relief from the daily routine of needlework. When Elizabeth discovered what her maids were reading, she reprimanded them, believing it was an improper ‘bawdy’ text for the young ladies in her charge. When she discovered that her godson was responsible, she summoned him and ‘severely censured him for endangering the manners of her ladies with such an indelicate tale’.8 As a punishment, she told Harington to stay away from court until he had translated Ariosto’s entire poem – some 33,000 lines of verse. Harington took her at her word and by the end of 1592 had completed the full translation. When Elizabeth visited him at his home near Bath, he presented her with a splendidly bound copy of it with a frontispiece displaying a portrait of himself and his beloved dog Bungay.9

  Harington’s next offering was A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject, subtitled The Metamorphosis of Ajax, which he presented to the Queen in 159610 (Ajax being a play on ‘a jakes’, the Elizabethan word for a privy). In the book Harington unveiled his new invention, a ‘flushing close stool’. He claimed the idea came to him during a conversation with a group of men, including Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, while at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, the home of Sir Matthew Arundell. Although Harington wrote the New Discourse under the pseudonym ‘Misacmos’, he dropped many clues to his identity throughout, and would soon become known as Sir Ajax Harington.

  Whilst Harington’s main purpose in his New Discourse was to popularise his invention, he also used the privy as a metaphor to criticise court corruption and urge moral and spiritual reform. ‘May not I, as a sorry writer among the rest, in a merry manner, and in a harmless manner, professing purposely of vaults and privies … draw the reader by some pretty draught to sink into a deep and necessary consideration, how to mend some of their privy faults?’11 The book is divided into three sections. The first consists of two letters exchanged between Misacmos and his cousin Philostilpnos (a lover of cleanliness) in which Philostilpnos exhorts Misacmos to make his invention public. Philostilpnos, who can be identified as John’s cousin, Sir Edward Sheldon, encourages Misacmos to use ‘homely’ words in his descriptions by christening the new device in ‘plain English, a shitting place’.

  The book then goes on to present, ‘An Anatomy of the Metamorphosed Ajax’ – or ‘A Plain Plot of a Privy in Perfection’. Written and illustrated by Harington’s servant Thomas Combe, it is a practical guide to the construction and workings of the privy and includes details of where the parts can be obtained and at what price. When a handle in the seat is pulled, releasing a valve, water was drawn from a cistern (pictured in the book with fish swimming in it) into the pan of the bowl, and flushed into a cesspool beneath.

  Throughout the text, Harington is particularly concerned with the bad odours emanating from privies. It is the ‘breath’ of Ajax that makes those using a privy ‘glad to stop their noses’. Miasmic theory attributed disease to ‘corruption of air’ and given the poor sanitation of the palaces, the court could never stay long in one place before the pungent smells forced the Queen to move on. Harington describes how the removal of excrement had long been a problem and cites Deuteronomy 23: 12–14, in which the Israelites leave camp to relieve themselves by digging a hole for the excrement, which they then cover. He notes that the problem of dealing with excrement extends to everyone, ‘even in the goodliest & stateliest palaces of this realm, notwithstanding all our provisions of vaults, of sluices, of grates, of pains of poor folks in sweeping and scouring, yet still this same whoreson saucy stink’. He extols his readers to better themselves by cleaning their household privy latrines and correcting their personal shortcomings: ‘To keep your houses sweet, cleanse privy vaults/To keep your souls as sweet, mend privy faults.’

  Harington rightly saw the ‘standing close stool’ as a radical improvement in sanitation.

  I think I might also lay pride to their charge, for I have seen them in sugared cases of satin and velvet – which is flat against the Statute of Apparel – but for sweetness or cleanliness I never knew yet any of them guilty of it; but that if they had but waited on a lady in her chamber a day or a night, they would have made a man, at his next entrance
into the chamber, have said ‘So, good speed ye.’12

  One of his epigrams, which he addressed, ‘To the Ladies of the Queen’s Privy Chamber at the Making of their Perfumed Privy at Richmond’, is evidence that one of Harington’s water closets was installed at Richmond Palace and was working well.

  Fair Dames, if any took in scorn and spite,

  Me, that Misacmos Muse in mirth did write,

  To satisfy the sin, lo, here in chains

  For aye to hand, my master he ordains.

  Yet deem the deed to him no degradation,

  But doom to this device new commendation

  Sith here you see, feel, smell that his conveyance

  Hath freed this noisome place from all annoyance.

  Now judge you, that the work mock, envy, taunt,

  Whose service in this place may make most vaunt:

  If us, or you, to praise it, were most meet,

  You, that made sour, or us that made it sweet?13

  The New Discourse ends with a lengthy ‘Apology’, in which during a dream of a trial for slander, Harington answers charges which he says have been brought against the book and apologises for his subject matter. Certainly Elizabeth did not outwardly encourage her godson’s book, particularly as she believed it contained a ribald reference to the late Robert Dudley – ‘the great Bear that carried eight dogs on him when Monsieur [the Duke of Alençon] was here’.14 When Elizabeth refused to grant Harington a licence to publish it he defied her and it enjoyed considerable, if short-lived popularity. Four editions were printed in 1596, and whilst Harington avoided an appearance before Star Chamber, he was for a time banished from the court. However, as his cousin Robert Markham was soon able to report,

  Your book is almost forgiven and I may say forgotten; but not for its lack of wit or satire. Those whom you feared most are now bosoming themselves in the Queen’s grace; and tho’ her Highness signified displeasure in outward sort, yet did she like the marrow of your book … The Queen is minded to take you to her favour, but she sweareth that she believes you will make epigrams and write misacmos again on her and all the court; she hath been heard to say, ‘that merry poet, her godson, must not come to Greenwich, till he hath grown sober, and leaveth the ladies sports and frolics’. She did conceive much disquiet on being told you had aimed a shaft at Leicester. I wish you knew the author of that ill deed: I would not be in his jerkin for a thousand marks.