In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (33 page)

Like her father’s, Elizabeth’s reign was punctuated by the question of inheritance. A number of suitors, English and European, were suggested at varying stages of her life and some appeared to be in with a serious chance of leading her up the aisle but ultimately, she remained wedded to her kingdom, as she famously declared to Parliament. With hindsight, her resistance is consistent and logical: she did not wish to be dominated by a husband’s will nor run the risks of childbirth and the policy of flirtatious relations with her male courtiers and suitors allowed her to exploit male expectations of feminine indecision, which she used as a successful manipulative tool. Yet at the time, Elizabeth herself may not have been so certain of her marital future. At certain intervals she promised she would wed and energetically wooed several possible husbands, suggesting that perhaps she was a victim of her own vacillation and found herself surprised by time. Theories of her physical deformation or inability to bear children, ranging from the bizarre claims that she was in fact a man, to the supposed gynaecological blockage preventing intercourse or the existence of illegitimate children have yet to find any basis in historical fact.

Elizabeth’s early flirtation with the dangerous Thomas Seymour had exposed her to the dangers of failing to control her behaviour and emotions. The fates of her mother and her step-mother, Catherine Howard, illustrated the potential dangers of marital life whilst the deaths of Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr were a reminder that childbirth was a very real threat. Her decision not to marry may have been influenced by these factors: equally, there may not have been a conscious ‘decision’; motherhood may have been a secondary casualty of her choice that there was ‘one mistress and no master’ in her realm. Many romantic theories have been spun concerning the supposed secrets of her heart, her wishes and stifled desires, particularly in regards to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. From her accession in 1558, Elizabeth did exhibit many signs of being in love with the already-married Dudley, including moving his bedchamber next to her private rooms a year later. His wife’s death in suspicious circumstance in 1560 created a potential threat to her throne that she was not prepared to risk; although some, including Dudley, believed she would now make him her husband. Elizabeth saw the dangers of association with such scandal. No matter what her private feelings were, she was probably too cautious to become Dudley’s lover even if the overcrowded court could have allowed them opportunities; Elizabeth herself answered the rumours by saying she was never alone and therefore had no chance to be intimate with any man. As a woman, her private chambers became her sanctuary, removing more of the daily business of government to more public arenas in comparison with the court of her father, yet the constant presence of her women gave them a privileged and exclusive role, meaning an affair would have been almost impossible to conceal.

However, in 1587, a young man claiming to be Arthur Dudley, illegitimate son of the ‘lovers’ was shipwrecked on the Spanish coast. His age placed his conception early in 1561, when Elizabeth was bedridden with serious illness, possibly dropsy, which causes the body to swell. This gave the theory credence, as had the ability of several of Elizabeth’s waiting women to conceal their own pregnancies until the final month under voluminous clothing. Arthur Dudley stated that a servant named Southern had been summoned to Hampton Court at night, to find a nurse for an infant who had been born to a careless employee and needed to be concealed from the queen; Southern raised the child as his own, only confessing the truth on his death bed in 1583. The Spanish believed his claim as it served them in the run-up to the Armada, and it still persists in modern scholarship, but Tudor imposters were common and it seems incredible that no rumours of his existence derive from the 1560s and particularly ironic, as a male heir was the one thing Elizabeth’s parliaments urged her to produce. For her to have conceived, carried and delivered a male heir in 1561 seems to stretch credibility to the limits. In all likelihood, she and Dudley were never lovers, as the situation would have placed her under too much political and gynaecological danger, besides having to submit to the will of another and constant fear of exposure. Later events in Scotland demonstrated that she was wise to have done so. When the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, found herself embroiled in a similar situation in 1566, Elizabeth saw her cousin’s life unravel as the result of an impulsive romantic match.

Born in 1542, Mary became queen before her first birthday, after the death of her father, James V, at the Battle of Solway Moss. Brought up in France from the age of six, she had been married in 1558 to Francis II, grandson of Henry VIII’s old rival Francis I, and became Queen of France the following year. Her dual titles made her an impressive opponent to Elizabeth and one of a pool of possible heirs to the English throne. Her seniority over the Grey sisters, descendants of Mary Rose Tudor, made her the main focus of Catholic hopes throughout her lifetime. Her first husband died young, aged only sixteen; various illnesses have been suggested for his frailty, including his undescended testicles, but ultimately he was killed by an ear infection leading to an abscess on the brain. The widowed Mary returned to Scotland and, in 1565, married her cousin Henry Lord Darnley, bearing him a son, the future James VI of Scotland and I of England. James’ cradle from 1566 still survives; a broad semi-circular band of gold jewel moulding and sides inlaid with panels of dark and light wood. By the time of his birth, though, the marriage was already in crisis. Darnley was immature and unpopular; his despotic and irrational behaviour, peaking in the murder of Mary’s favourite Italian musician, David Rizzio, whilst she was heavily pregnant, eventually led to his own murder in 1567. While the palace of Holyrood was blown apart by gunpowder, Darnley’s strangled corpse was found neatly lain out on the grass outside. Soon after this, Mary married his supposed murderer, the Earl of Bothwell, an act her opponents could not stomach, which led to her deposition and flight to England. She would spend the rest of her life in captivity and lose her head in 1587 for plotting to gain the English throne. Mary’s ungoverned behaviour was a powerful sign to Elizabeth of the dangers of allowing the heart to rule the head. With Dudley forever tainted by his wife’s murder, no matter how carefully he established an inquest to investigate matters, marriage to him was too great a risk for Elizabeth. Rejecting the other suitors suggested by Parliament, including the ageing Sir William Pickering and Mary’s cast-off, Edward Courtney, as well as outright refusing her brother-in-law Philip of Spain, she turned abroad for a possible husband. Perhaps the miles between the rulers of Sweden, Austria and France were part of her delaying tactics and allowed her to distance herself from the reality of marriage, as well as giving her a powerful bargaining tool in foreign politics.

Elizabeth’s most significant suitors were the youngest two sons of Catherine de Medici and Henri II of France. In 1570, it was first proposed that she marry the Duke of Anjou, the future Henri III. He was a rebellious young man who had veered towards Protestantism in youth whilst still technically Catholic and was beset by rumours of homosexuality, although the biggest stumbling block was the disparity in their ages. She was thirty-seven, he was nineteen, easily young enough to have been her son by Tudor standards and vocally critical of her age, appearance and supposed limp. Inheriting the throne of Poland in 1573, he abdicated the following year on the death of his brother Charles, when he became King of France. All negotiations with Elizabeth were abandoned by the time of his union with Louise of Lorraine in 1575; their fourteen-year marriage produced no children despite one rumoured miscarriage and her numerous pilgrimages and religious offerings. Towards the end of the decade, Catherine de Medici offered Elizabeth her youngest son, Francis, Duke of Alençon. The queen was then forty-six to his twenty-four and he had suffered terrible scarring after a bout of smallpox at the age of eight. Still, there seemed to be a fondness and flirtation between them that her advisers took so seriously as to warn her against the dangers of childbearing at her advanced age. It may have been the closest Elizabeth came to marriage but she gave the duke a decisive refusal in 1581, writing a formal yet passionate goodbye in a short poem entitled ‘On Monsieur’s departure’. He went on to become King of France eight years later, when Henri III, Elizabeth’s previous suitor, was assassinated.

In her final years, Elizabeth increasingly cherished her identity as the Virgin Queen. Concurrent with a lamentation of the loss of sites such as Walsingham, she shrewdly deployed the previous national devotion to the cult of Mary to create a semi-divine, detached and iconic image of her own. Using the heavy cosmetics and dyes of the era, coupled with a typical Tudor appreciation of pageantry and ceremony, she embraced her virginity and gave it mythical status. Her face would be daubed in ceruse, a poisonous mixture of white lead and vinegar; cochineal, madder and vermilion dyed the cheeks and lips, kohl accentuated the eyes and hair, while wigs were dyed with celandine, lye, saffron and cumin. These efforts, coupled with her supposed ‘masculine’ qualities and the length of her rule gave rise to the theories that have refused to accept her identity at face value, even into the twenty-first century. Just as her mother Anne Boleyn encountered, women were expected to conform to particular types and exhibit certain forms of submissive behaviour. This was not compatible with successful queenship. Some strains of Tudor misogyny dictated that Elizabeth’s ‘mannishness’ must be genuine; the inability of her enemies to believe a woman could have the necessary qualities to rule led them to deduce that she must be either a man or a defective woman. The state of androgyny was feared and women who never married were considered deviant. This is not to suggest though, that all Tudor society regarded her with suspicion; if the anomaly of a female ruler could be embraced, so could that of an unmarried one. The celebration of her virgin state and purity developed over time and retrospectively; it was partly Victorian prudery that gave rise to many theories about Elizabeth’s identity that have lingered anachronistically.

So was the Virgin Queen Elizabeth actually a man? Probably not. Perhaps the most persistent theory is that of the Bisley boy, supported by the Gothic writer Bram Stoker. According to the story, the young Elizabeth had died at around the age of eleven, whilst staying in a local country house. Henry was absent on a French campaign, so she was rapidly substituted for a male playmate of the same colouring, who proceeded to take her place. Most of the ‘evidence’ for this is based on descriptions of her having mannish qualities and features, such as her long fingers, height and love of hunting and riding, as well as the layers of make-up being used to hide stubble. Additionally, her fashionable high collars and ruffs were supposed to hide her Adam’s apple and suspicion was raised by her forbidding an autopsy after her death. Apparently though, this tale was invented by an imaginative local clergyman in the nineteenth century. Following this idea, recent suggestions have been made that Elizabeth had a form of male pseudo-hermaphroditism, now called ‘complete androgen insensitivity syndrome’; a congenital defect where suffers develop male and female genitals. Although appearing female at birth, the condition of those affected becomes apparent at the onset of puberty. It affects one in every 20,000 babies, presenting with undescended testicles, no womb or uterus and a body producing testosterone.
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Many such theories abound, prompted by the inability to accept Elizabeth’s qualities or her unmarried status. The truth may have been much simpler, as the queen herself explained; that she was married to her kingdom and would have one mistress and no master. It did not solve the problem of her succession.

The will of Henry VIII had bypassed the heir of the Scottish descendants of Margaret Tudor in favour of Mary Rose and the Greys. The two younger sisters of the ill-fated Lady Jane had been born in the 1540s and stood in line as Elizabeth’s immediate successors until their secret marriages lost them royal favour. Forbidden from taking husbands without the knowledge of the queen, Catherine was the first to incur the Virgin’s wrath. At twelve, she had been married once before to Henry Herbert, son of the Duke of Pembroke, as part of the Northumberland-Grey power base but after failure of their coup, Pembroke promptly dissolved the match, which had never been consummated on account of the couple’s youth. As an older teenager, Catherine fell in love with Edward Seymour, son of the Lord Protector, and the couple determined to marry against parental wishes. Legal marriages could take place anywhere, so long as the vows were properly made, enabling them to wed in secret in his bedroom in 1560 and immediately go on to consummate what became a doomed match. Edward’s sister, their only witness, died soon after. Edward went overseas and Catherine found herself trying to conceal her pregnancy at court, unable to prove her marriage was legal. She maintained her secret until the eighth month, finally begging for help from Bess of Hardwick and Robert Dudley, who took the news straight to Elizabeth. Catherine was confined to the Tower, where she delivered a son. She was later allowed secret visits from Seymour by her gaolers, during which she conceived and delivered a second son. Eventually released but living under house arrest, she refused to eat and died, probably of some wasting illness exacerbated by anorexia, at the age of twenty-eight. It was a similar story for her sister Mary, born in 1545. Famously short and hunch-backed, Mary secretly married the royal gatekeeper Thomas Keyes, a very tall man, for which she was imprisoned by Elizabeth in 1565; the couple had no children and Mary died in 1578. Another potential claimant to the throne was Arbella Stuart, the granddaughter of Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second husband. She was born in 1575 and following the death of her mother, lived with grandmother Bess of Hardwick at Hardwick Hall. Elizabeth’s advisers never seriously considered her claim however, as the birth of Mary Queen of Scots’ only son, James, in 1566 offered a better candidate. In 1594, the arrival of James’ first son Henry confirmed the line and it was James who ultimately succeeded Elizabeth as King of England.