The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (10 page)

When in April, Robert Dudley was given an apartment at court adjoining Elizabeth’s own, the gossip inevitably intensified.
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‘The Lord Robert is in great hope to marry the Queen,’ one observer noted, ‘for she maketh such appearance of good will to him. He giveth her many goodly presents.’
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In mid-April 1561, Father John Coxe, a Catholic priest and chaplain to Sir Edward Waldegrave, formerly a great favourite of Mary I, was arrested by customs officials at Gravesend en route to Flanders. Coxe was carrying a rosary and breviary, some money and letters for Catholic exiles. When examined before Hugh Darrell, a local Justice of the Peace, he confessed to having said mass in the homes of Sir Edward Waldegrave, Sir Thomas Wharton and Lady Carew, with five other priests, all of whom were subsequently arrested and imprisoned.
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Seized papers revealed a plot to ensure a Catholic succession based on the prophecies of sorcerers, who were also Catholic priests. An anonymous source at court had said soothsayers had ‘conjured to have known how long the Queen should reign, and what should become of religion’. Elizabeth was convinced, the Spanish ambassador reported, that they were ‘conjuring and conspiring against her’.
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To Cecil this all seemed to amount to another Catholic plot to overthrow Elizabeth and was clear evidence that the Catholics could not be trusted. Even Lady Waldegrave was subject to harsh interrogations and asked what she knew of the invitation of the Queen to the Council of Trent; what she knew of the coming of a papal nuncio to deliver this invitation; what she knew of the Queen’s marriage plans, and what of the succession to the Crown, ‘if God should not send her issue’. She was questioned as to the help she and her husband had given Catholic priests and where she had heard mass.
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Within weeks Cecil had evidence of what appeared to be a Catholic plot to kill Elizabeth and restore the ‘true faith’ in England. A letter found in Sir Edward Waldegrave’s house about the imminent arrival of the papal nuncio gave Cecil, who feared a return to Rome and the eclipse of his influence, the opportunity to claim that the prisoners had conspired with the Spanish ambassador in seditious political activity aimed at restoring Catholicism in England. As Cecil wrote to Throckmorton, ‘The Bishop of Aquila [de Quadra] had entered into such a practice with a pretence to further the great matter here, meaning principally the Church matter and percase, accidentally, the other matter also, that he had taken faster hold to plant his purpose than was my ease shortly to root up.’ Cecil suggested that the arrests had therefore been deliberately timed:

When I saw this Romanish influence towards, about one month past, I thought it necessary to dull the papists’ expectations by discovering of certain mass-mongers and punishing of them, as I do not doubt but you have heard of them. I take God to record that I meant no evil to any of them, but only for the rebating of the papists’ humours which, by the Queen’s Majesty’s leniety, grew too rank. I find it hath done much good.
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Cecil had achieved exactly what he had intended. The Privy Council refused entry to Martinengo, the papal nuncio; negotiations for England’s attendance at the Council of Trent were immediately broken off and Dudley’s hopes of marrying Elizabeth with Spanish support decisively thwarted. A full account of the supposed conspiracy to kill the Queen and reintroduce Catholicism was widely distributed across the country.
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Despite Cecil’s investigations having frustrated Dudley’s plan to secure Spanish backing for his suit, rumours that Elizabeth and Dudley would marry continued unabated throughout the summer. At the end of June he organised another banquet and river party for the Queen. When Elizabeth, Dudley and de Quadra found themselves together on a barge, Dudley suggested that since the ambassador was also a bishop, he should marry them there and then. As the ambassador reported, ‘They went so far with their jokes that Lord Robert told her that, if she liked, I could be the minister to perform the act of marriage, and she, nothing loath to hear it, she said she was not sure whether I knew enough English.’ De Quadra added that if Elizabeth got rid of her Protestant advisers and restored Catholicism, he would be delighted to marry them whenever they liked.
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In November 1561, in an attempt to quieten the gossip-mongers, Elizabeth went as far as disguising herself as the maid of Katherine Knolly’s niece, Katherine Carey, in order to watch Dudley shoot at Windsor.
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Katherine Carey, the eldest daughter of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon and the Queen’s second cousin, had been appointed a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber on 30 January the year before and had quickly become one of Elizabeth’s most trusted intimates. Two years later she married Charles Howard, son of William Howard, and later Baron Howard of Effingham, and 1st Earl of Nottingham. Howard had reaped the benefit of his father’s support for Elizabeth during the years before her accession and became a loyal servant to her. He was sent as an emissary to the French court and became keeper of the Queen’s house at Oatlands in Surrey. His marriage to Katherine Carey served only to reinforce his already close ties to his monarch. Together Katherine and Charles now became mainstays of the Elizabethan court and high in the Queen’s favour and trust.

Later in the same month that the Queen watched Dudley at the shoot, Lady Fiennes de Clinton, another of Elizabeth’s ladies, helped to arrange for Elizabeth to secretly dine with Dudley at his house. As the Spanish envoy discovered and reported, Dudley ‘came from Greenwich to the Earl of Pembroke’s house on the thirteenth, the rumour being that he was going to his own home. The Queen was there the next day disguised to dine with them, accompanied by the Admiral [Lord Clinton] and his wife.’
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While talk of the Queen’s trysts with Dudley continued to engulf the court, Katherine Grey, her Protestant heir, had been recklessly conducting her own secret affair with Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, another claimant to the English crown.
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When Elizabeth left Whitehall to go hunting the previous December, Katherine had remained behind, complaining of toothache. It was then that the couple took their opportunity and secretly married in the earl’s bedchamber.
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One closely observed testimony describes how Katherine and Hertford ‘unarrayed themselves’ and ‘went into naked bed in the said Chamber where they were so married’, and once in bed they had ‘Company and Carnal Copulation’.
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In the weeks that followed, and still without the Queen’s knowledge, Hertford came regularly to Katherine’s chamber at court. Before long Katherine was pregnant and for the next few months disguised her growing belly from Elizabeth as she continued to attend on the Queen in the privy lodgings. Meanwhile, in May, Hertford was sent to France on a minor diplomatic mission with the intention that he would go from there to Italy.

In mid-August 1561, while the court was on summer progress in East Anglia, the Queen discovered Katherine’s marriage and pregnancy. While attending a communion service with the Queen and the other Ladies of the Privy Chamber at Ipswich, Katherine saw ‘secret talk amongst men and women that her being with child was known and spied out’.
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That Sunday evening she went to Dudley’s lodgings, and ‘by his bedside’ confided the secret of her marriage and pregnancy and begged him ‘to be a means to the Queen’s highness for her’.
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When Dudley told Elizabeth the next morning, she was horrified. Edward Seymour was a descendent of Edward III, and any son of such a union would become Elizabeth’s de facto heir and a possible rival. Moreover, it was treason for a person of royal blood to marry without the Queen’s permission. Katherine Grey was ordered to the Tower under armed guard and messengers sent to France demanding Hertford’s immediate return.
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Elizabeth feared the marriage was part of a larger conspiracy involving some of the other women of her Bedchamber. Her anxiety is clear in the letter of instructions she sent on 17 August to Sir Edward Warner, Lieutenant of the Tower:

You shall … examine the Lady Katherine very straightly how many hath been privy to the love betwixt the Earl of Hertford and her from the beginning; and let her certainly understand that she shall have no manner of favour except she will show the truth, not only what ladies or gentlewomen of this court were thereto privy, but also what lords and gentlemen: for it doth now appear that sundry personages have dealt therein … It is certain that there hath been great practices and purposes.
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While the investigation revealed no wider plot, the stress of discovering Katherine’s pregnancy clearly took its toll on the Queen. She was ‘becoming dropsical’, reported the Spanish ambassador, and had ‘begun to swell extraordinarily’.
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Following the death of her husband François II at the end of the previous year, Mary Stuart, then only eighteen, returned to Scotland in August 1561 after an absence of thirteen years to take up residence in Edinburgh.
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Weeks later the French, Scots, and English signed the Treaty of Edinburgh, in which it was agreed that all foreign soldiers, French and English alike, would withdraw from Scotland. In August, the Scottish parliament passed legislation making the country officially Protestant. Without her French family and away from the Catholicism of the French court, Mary was to find finally securing her position on the Scottish throne an intimidating prospect.

On her arrival in Scotland, Mary expressed her desire ‘to be a good friend and neighbour to the Queen of England’, and stressed the solidarity which she and Elizabeth shared as female rulers: ‘It is better for none to live in peace than for women: and for my part, I pray you think that I desire it with all my heart.’
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Many, however, still distrusted Mary’s true intentions. Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador to Scotland, articulated such fears:

Of this Queen’s [Mary’s] affection to the Queen’s Majesty, either it is so great that never was greater to any or it is the deepest dissembled, and the best covered that ever was. Whatsoever craft, falsehood or deceit there is in all the subtle brains of Scotland, is either fresh in their women’s memory, or can she fett [summon] it with a wet finger.
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In early September, while Elizabeth was considering what further action to take against Katherine Grey, William Maitland of Lethington, Mary Queen of Scots’s adviser, arrived at the royal castle of Hertford where the court was then staying. He found Elizabeth looking depressed and ill, and described how ‘to all appearances she is falling away, and is extremely thin and the colour of a corpse’.
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Having paid his respects, and offering her cousin’s messages of affection and goodwill, Maitland explained how Mary was determined that Elizabeth name her as her successor to the English crown.

This was not what Elizabeth had expected; she had hoped Maitland had come to report Mary’s acknowledgment of Elizabeth’s right to be Queen. Nevertheless her response to Maitland was cautious, though extraordinarily candid. ‘I have noted,’ Elizabeth told him,

that you have said to me … that your Queen is descended of the royal blood of England and that I am obliged to love her as being nearest to me in blood of any other, all which I must confess to be true and I here protest to you, in the presence of God, I for my part know no better [claim than the Queen of Scots] nor that I myself would prefer to her …
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Here Elizabeth made clear that Mary was her preferred successor and she acknowledged her claim to the throne. How Maitland must have rejoiced to hear her words and looked forward to reporting the success of his mission to Mary. But Elizabeth was not yet finished.

In her final audience with Maitland before his departure, Elizabeth made clear that she would, however, never name Mary Queen of Scots as her chosen heir for fear of the unrest it might cause.

The desire is without example to require me in my own life, to set my winding sheet before my eyes … Think you that I could love my own winding sheet? Princes cannot like their own children, that that should succeed them … How then shall I, think you, like my cousin, being once declared my heir apparent?… And what danger it were, she being a puissant princess and so near our neighbour, ye may judge; so that in assuring her of the succession we might put our present estate in doubt.
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Elizabeth was all too aware of the ‘inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed, and naturally men be so disposed:
plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentem
[more men worship the rising than the setting sun]’. As men had looked to her during the reign of her sister, so men might look to Mary now as a focus of their hopes.
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Maitland did not have the successful mission that he had hoped for. Elizabeth offered only the consolation that she would yield to the Scottish Queen’s request that they meet face to face.
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This too proved to be an empty gesture when shocking events in France weeks later forced Elizabeth to change her course. On 1 March 1562, hundreds of Huguenots were murdered in an armed action by troops of François, Duke of Guise, in Vassay in north-eastern France. All thoughts of a meeting between Elizabeth and Mary, the duke’s niece, were quickly dropped. Emnity and suspicion undermined their relationship once more.

With growing fears that the Guises had now embarked on a long-feared Catholic crusade which would be brought to Protestant England, Elizabeth received the news that she had dreaded. On the afternoon of 24 September, Katherine Grey had given birth in the Tower of London to a son, Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp. By the terms of Henry VIII’s will and English law he now followed his mother in the line of succession.
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England simultaneously had a Protestant heir and the promise of a ‘masculine succession’. Elizabeth immediately announced her intention to have the young Edward Seymour ‘declared a bastard by Parliament’.
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