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

  The ‘Rainbow’ portrait of around 1600–03, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, for example, conforms to Hilliard’s pattern and portrays an improbably radiant and youthful queen. She wears a golden cloak painted with eyes and ears and bordered with pearls. The motto inscribed on the rainbow grasped by the Queen reads, ‘Non Sine Sole Iris’ – ‘No Rainbow without the Sun’. Elizabeth stands against a dark background, her bare cleavage, smooth, plump skin and unbound hair suggesting improbable youth.5 The painting is rich in symbolism. The ruby heart jewel in the mouth of the serpent embroidered on Elizabeth’s left sleeve signifies wise counsel which is also represented by the symbols of eyes, ears and mouths which cover the golden mantle. We know from the Queen’s inventory that she owned a gown like that depicted in the Rainbow portrait, embroidered with eyes and ears.6 Whilst the face of the Queen is a timeless mask, clearly her clothes are painted from life and likely to have been modelled by Elizabeth’s ladies.

  53

  The Poisoned Pommel

  In 1598, Edward Squires, a middle-aged married man from Greenwich who described himself as a ‘scrivener’, appeared before the Privy Council. He was accused of plotting to kill the Queen by smearing poison on the pommel of her riding saddle, and to kill Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, by applying poison to the arms of his dining chair.

  Edward Squires was employed in the Queen’s stables at Greenwich Palace, but ‘being of wit above his vocation, disliked that condition of life’, and being ambitious for better things, in August 1595, accompanied Sir Francis Drake on his voyage to the West Indies. However the ship, the Frances, on which he sailed became separated from the main fleet off Guadeloupe, and Squires was captured with his companion Richard Rolls and taken to Seville. During his imprisonment he was visited by leading English Jesuits, including Father Richard Walpole, with whom, it was later claimed, he plotted to assassinate Elizabeth and Essex.1 Squires would use his contacts at the Queen’s stable to gain access and then place poison on the pommel of the Queen’s saddle. When she mounted her horse, went for a ride and gripped the pommel, the poison would transfer to her hand and then, transmitted to her ‘face, mouth and nostrils’, whereupon the fatal administration of the dose would be accomplished.

  Squires returned to England in June 1597 and later that month is said to have gone to the stables as the Queen’s horse was being prepared, pricked holes in the bladder, which Father Walpole had supplied him, and applied the poison to the Queen’s velvet saddle.2 The Queen went riding, and returned safely, the poison having had no effect. According to the official account of the plot, the Queen’s life was saved by ‘God’s power and doing’, particularly as in the heat of a July day her ‘pores and veins’ would be open to receive any malign vapour or tincture.

  A week or so later, partly to escape detection and partly to make an attempt on the Earl of Essex’s life, Squires went to sea again, this time on the earl’s ill-fated voyage to the Azores. Between Fayal and St Michael’s he is said to have rubbed some poison on Essex’s chair on his ship. Essex returned to England feeling unwell, but alive.

  Squires quietly resumed his work in the Queen’s stables and settled back into life with his wife and children. Yet, over a year later, on 7 September 1598, he was arrested at Greenwich, following the apparent testimony of John Stanley, a captured soldier and adventurer who had converted to Catholicism and returned to England for interrogation. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with the English government, Stanley proceeded to reveal alleged Jesuit plots and the activities of Catholic exiles, and in doing so named Squires, among others. It is very likely that Squires’s subsequent arrest was as much a product of the government’s own paranoid plottings as Stanley’s unadulterated confession.3

  Squires quietly resumed his work in the Queen’s stables and settled back into life with his wife and children. Yet, over a year later, on 7 September 1598, he was arrested at Greenwich. Fears of assassination had been heightened by rumours of new Spanish and Scottish schemes to kill the Queen that had been circulating since the spring. On 4 May, John Chamberlain, the prolific London-based letter writer and gossip-gatherer, mentioned certain men ‘apprehended for a conspiracy against the Queen’s person and my Lord of Essex, whereof one should be a Scottishman or somewhat that way; much buzzing hath been about it, but either the matter is not ripe or there is somewhat else in it, for it is kept very secret’.4 The conspirator was Valentine Thomas, and he claimed that he had been commissioned by James VI to assassinate Elizabeth. James was furious and feared that Thomas’s accusation would damage his claim to the English throne. Eventually Thomas was exposed as the fraud he was, and Elizabeth assured the Scottish King that she was not ‘of so viperous a nature to suppose or have thereof a thought’. Nevertheless in the climate of the times, any talk of rumoured conspiracies against the Queen naturally raised fears for her safety.5

  After his arrest, Squires was held in the Counter, a gaol in Wood Street, before being transferred to the Tower around 18 October.6 At first he denied all that the investigators put to him. However, after being tortured he broke down and confessed to having returned from his imprisonment in Spain as a ‘resolute papist’ and having plotted with Father Walpole to kill the Queen by means of a poison-covered pommel and the earl by a poisonous chair.7 In the days that followed, Squires made a number of confessions in which he gave varying accounts of what happened. In one he claimed Walpole had written out a prescription for a ‘poisonous confection’ which would remain potent for some time after being spread out; its constituents were opium, white mercury, and two powders, ‘one yellowish, and the other brownish, and called by Latin or Greek names’. Squires had been instructed to get someone else to buy the ingredients, each one at a different place ‘for fear of suspicion’. He was then to beat the powders and opium together, steep them in the mercury water and place them in an earthen pot to stand in the sun for a month. Squires went on to describe how he had purchased the ingredients and then experimented with the concoction on ‘a whelp of one Edwardes of Greenwich’.

  When Squires was examined the next day, he completely changed his story and claimed that Walpole had already prepared the poison and gave it to him, ‘in a double bladder, wrapped about with many parchment wrappers’. He then described the assassination attempt against the Earl of Essex on 9 October 1597. During the voyage, ‘I carried the poison to sea in the Earl’s ship, in a little earthen pot closely corked,’ he explained, and applied it to the Earl of Essex’s chair. ‘I did this of an evening a little before suppertime, when the Earl was at sea between Fayal and St Michael. The confection was so clammy that it would stick to the pommel of the chair, and I rubbed it on with parchment; and soon after, the Earl sat in the chair all supper time.’

  At his trial on 7 November in the great hall at Westminster, Squires was charged with plotting in Seville to poison the Queen and Earl of Essex. Squires denied all that he had previously confessed, but then had an apparent change of heart and was induced to write and sign a full admission of guilt: ‘I confess my sin and acknowledge mine own wickedness.’8 On 13 November, Edward Squires was hanged, disembowelled and quartered at Tyburn for high treason. An official account of the plot was soon published. It took the form of a letter written to an Englishman residing in Padua. It included ‘An Order for Prayer and Thanksgiving’ and was most likely to have been written by Sir Francis Bacon.9 Bacon had been present when Squires was interrogated and maintained that Father Walpole had converted Squires to Catholicism and then used him to carry out his plot against the Queen.

  Although Squires was very likely not guilty of all the charges laid against him, the trial served to reinvigorate loyalty to the Queen and whip up popular indignation against Spain. To Protestants, Edward Squires was a despicable traitor whose activities served to expose the perfidy of English Jesuits overseas. To Catholics, he was an unfortunate creature who, under torture, allowed himself to become the tool of an unscrupulous government in discrediting and calumniating
the Catholic cause. In a letter to his fellow Jesuit Henry Garnet, dated 30 January 1599, Robert Persons denounced the ‘whole fable of poison’ as a fiction intended to discredit Spain and the Jesuits: ‘It seemeth to be one of the most notorious fables and tragical comedies that hath been exhibited in all this time.’10

  54

  Crooked Carcass

  Following the disappointing reception from the Queen after his failed Azores expedition in November 1597, the Earl of Essex had withdrawn to his estate at Wanstead, believing Elizabeth had unjustly favoured and rewarded his rivals with important offices. When, in December 1597 the Queen appointed him Earl Marshal, Essex returned to court and resumed his efforts to influence foreign policy. Whilst Essex remained committed to waging an aggressive war against Spain and continued to urge her to pay heed to the continued threat of Spain, Elizabeth was now looking for peace. By 1598 the Queen let it be known that Essex ‘hath played long enough upon her, and that she meant to play awhile upon him’.1

  At the end of June, the earl’s frustrations erupted during a meeting of the Privy Council over the appointment of a new Lord Deputy in Ireland. Elizabeth suggested Essex’s uncle Sir William Knollys, but Essex wanted to keep his ally at court and so nominated Robert Cecil’s friend Sir George Carew. Elizabeth was livid at the earl’s insolence and responded by striking Essex across the head.2 When Essex impetuously reached for his sword, the Lord Admiral, Nottingham, threw himself between the earl and the Queen. Essex hastily beat a retreat but as he left the room was unwise enough to shout that, ‘he neither could nor would put up [with] so great an affront and indignity, neither would he have taken it at King Henry the Eighth’s hands’.3 Another source claims he told the Queen that ‘she was as crooked in her disposition as in her carcass’.4

  The earl, back on his estate in Wanstead, was petitioned by his friends to make peace with Elizabeth. The Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, urged him to conquer his false pride and show the obedience to the Queen owed by all her subjects. Yet Essex remained defiant and in his reply to Egerton wrote, ‘the Queen is obdurate, and I cannot be senseless. I see the end of my fortunes and have to set an end to my desires … Princes may err and subjects receive wrong, as I have done, but I will show constancy in suffering’.5 The impasse continued for several weeks. In August, one observer wrote that, Essex ‘is still from Court, and vows not to come till sent for; but none is over-hasty to entreat him, so it stands whose stomach comes down first’.6

  * * *

  On 9 August, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, died. He had spent his last few months being carried from room to room in a chair and passed away a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday. Elizabeth sat by his bedside during his final illness, tending to him ‘as a careful nurse’, and feeding him broth with a spoon. Cecil had continually feared an international Catholic conspiracy to depose Elizabeth and destroy the ‘true faith’. He referred to this in the epitaph he composed for his tomb in his hometown of Stamford, Lincolnshire. His life’s achievement, he declared, had been to safeguard the Queen and the Protestant state.

  Having come to London to attend Cecil’s funeral on 29 August, Essex returned to Wanstead. Relations with the Queen remained fractured, but when Essex fell ill with a fever on 7 September, Elizabeth sent her own physicians and showed some concern for his recovery. Soon Essex admitted his error and, as Rowland Whyte described, ‘My Lord is reinstated into the Queen’s favour; he was lately afflicted with a double disease, one in deed and another upon design; but as if one had depended upon the other, he is recovered of the former by the cure of the latter.’7

  However, as Essex was being restored to the Queen’s side, gossip spread about his relationship with another of Elizabeth’s maids: the earl ‘is again fallen in love with his fairest B’, Whyte explained.8 The ‘fairest B’ was likely to have been Mistress Elizabeth Brydges, one of the two maids of honour who had been in trouble with the Queen the previous year for flirting with Essex. The Queen was then said to have exchanged ‘words and blows of anger’ and Mistress Brydges and Mrs Russell, ‘were put out of the Coffer Chamber’, and had to spend three nights lodging with Lady Dorothy Stafford. They had been reprimanded for secretly going through the privy galleries to watch Essex and other male courtiers playing sport, and were only allowed to return to the Queen’s service when they promised not to repeat the offence.9

  Gossip had already revived on Essex’s return from Azores as to his continuing relationship with the Countess of Derby. It was only a matter of time before Elizabeth now found out about Essex’s involvement with Mistress Brydges. As Rowland Whyte continued in his letter, it could not but ‘come to the Queen’s ears’ and then he is ‘undone, and all they that depend upon his favour. I pray God that it may not turn to his harm’.10 In continuing to court the Queen’s ladies, whilst trying to win back the favour of Elizabeth herself, Robert Devereux was playing a very dangerous game.

  * * *

  On 6 September, Paul Hentzner, a German traveller, came to Greenwich Palace having procured an order from the Lord Chamberlain that he be admitted to see the royal apartments. He arrived at court on a Sunday, when there was usually the greatest attendance of nobles, and was taken into the Presence Chamber. The room was full of the Queen’s councillors, bishops, officers of state and other gentlemen, all of whom were waiting for the Queen to emerge from her Privy Chamber and pass through on her way to the chapel.

  The Sunday and holy day procession to and from the chapel royal were major ceremonial events, but the Queen’s appearances in public were becoming rarer making the processions more significant. As the Queen emerged in the late morning, Hentzner described how her guard formed an aisle in the midst of the crowd through which she could pass. The procession through the privy apartments followed a strict order of precedence: ‘First went the Gentlemen, Barons, Earls, Knights of the Garter all … bareheaded.’ Immediately before the Queen walked the Lord Chancellor or Keeper of the Great Seal, who was flanked by two earls, one bearing the sceptre, the other the sword of state. Elizabeth moved slowly through the Presence Chamber, followed by her ladies mostly dressed in white, guarded on each side by the fifty Gentleman Pensioners carrying gilt battleaxes.

  Hentzner describes the Queen, now aged sixty-four, as being of striking appearance, a ‘very majestic’ and ‘stately’ figure. Her face is ‘fair but wrinkled, her eyes small, yet black and pleasant, her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow and her teeth black’. She wore two pearls with ‘very rich drops’ in her ears; on her head red false hair and a small crown; around her neck a string of ‘exceeding fine jewels’. Once again Elizabeth’s dress was low-cut, to show her bare cleavage which, as Hentzner explained, ‘all the English ladies have it till they marry’. She was dressed in a white silk gown, bordered with large pearls ‘of the size of beans’ and a mantle of black silk, shot through with silver threads. A marchioness bore the end of the Queen’s very long train. As she went along in all this ‘state and magnificence, she spoke very graciously, first to one, then to another, whether foreign minister or those who attended for different reasons, in English, French and Italian … whenever she turned her face as she was going along, everybody fell on their knees’. 11

  But beneath the pomp and reverence, there was a feeling of langour at court. After the recent loss of William Cecil, and the deaths of Robert Dudley, Walsingham and Hatton (in 1591) it was as though an era was coming to an end. John Harington later described how, at the beginning of 1598, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did ‘light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of this time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’. And added, ‘Which question I know not how well it was meant, but I know how ill it was taken.’ Alongside the mood of the court, Elizabeth was very aware of the passage of time and of her own mortality.

  55

  Lèse Majesté

  During the Twelfth Night festivities at Whitehall in 1599 all eyes were fixed on the Queen. Elizabeth stepped down from her chair, to
ok the Earl of Essex’s hand and danced with him, ‘very richly and freshly attired’. It was a sign that Robert Devereux had returned to the Queen’s favour, but not that he was to remain at her side. Elizabeth was to give him one more opportunity to prove his worth as a military commander.

  The massacre of English forces at Yellow Ford, County Armagh, in August meant Elizabeth faced a total defeat in the Irish provinces. She needed Essex to lead the English army, to put down the rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Essex knew that this would be his final chance to distinguish himself and secure the rewards of favour that he sought. On 27 March 1599, Elizabeth bade him a tender farewell as he and his army set out from London, along streets thronged with well-wishers crying out, ‘God preserve your Honour’, and ‘God bless your Lordship’.1

  On his arrival in Dublin a month later, Essex faced an alarming situation. His army, despite being the largest yet sent to Ireland, was significantly outnumbered. A Spanish invasion to support the 20,000 Irishmen up in arms under Tyrone was also expected any day. Essex grew increasingly suspicious of Robert Cecil’s activities back in London and believed that he was encouraging Elizabeth to refuse his request for more money, men and horses. ‘Is it now known,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘that from England I receive nothing but discomforts and soul wounds.’2 He believed that his position at court was being undermined in his absence: it was said he aspired to make himself King of Ireland, even to have the crown of England, and of plotting to bring over an Irish army to dethrone the Queen. In the face of such accusations, Essex resolved to return to London and plead his case. In September, having long ignored direct orders to engage the main body of the rebel army, he negotiated a truce with Tyrone, against Elizabeth’s orders, before setting sail for England.