The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (13 page)

Gift-giving was a very public occasion and precise orders were laid down regarding the gift to the Queen, according to one’s rank and status and gender. A duke, marquis, bishop or earl might give a coloured silk purse containing £20–£30 in gold coins, whilst an archbishop was expected to give £40. In return the Queen would give an appropriate weight of silver gilt plate. The Queen’s ladies and lower-ranking servants also gave presents.
25
All the gifts and plate given and received were recorded on great rolls bearing the royal signature, and many of these survive. While the coins would be delivered to one of the senior male household officers, the gifts were handed to the women of the Privy Chamber, as the Queen looked on and nodded in appreciation. Ornate sleeves, which would be attached separately to the wrists, were particularly popular, as were finely bound books, handkerchiefs, ruffs and bags filled with aromatic herbs
.
Foodstuffs were popular gifts and ginger candy, marzipan structures, a ‘pie of quinces’, and two ‘pots of preserved things’ were among the items recorded in the gift rolls. Elizabeth’s ladies were able to be more inventive in choosing a gift as they were best placed to judge what the Queen might especially like or need. Some gave particular fabrics or linen, others gave buttons, clasps, jewels or tassels of gold to adorn the Queen’s clothing. Elizabeth was inclined to lose or mislay her personal belongings, and her ladies were often sent looking for a missing pair of gloves, a purse, a jewelled feather or fan or some other adornment from the royal gowns. All losses were duly noted in detail by Blanche Parry, Keeper of the Queen’s Jewels; one such entry read: ‘Lost, from her Majesty’s back, the 17th of January. [1568] at Westminster, One Aglet of gold enamelled blue set upon a Gown of (black) purple velvet … set all over with Aglets of two sorts the Aglet which is lost being of the bigger sort’.
26

*   *   *

In early January 1563, the Queen and her court moved to Windsor as the bubonic plague spread through London killing hundreds.
27
Rigorous measures were enforced. No one was permitted to carry wood or other items along the Thames to and from London, upon pain of hanging without judgement, and anyone who received wares out of London into Windsor would be turned out of their homes and their houses shut up.
28
Extra precautions were taken for the Queen’s safety. The court instituted a special code of quarantine regulations, primarily to prevent direct access to the Queen’s person: foreign ambassadors would not be received by the Queen until forty days after their arrival in the country. An anonymous Tudor chronicler recorded the ‘great lamentation made’ at the time of the Queen’s illness, and poignantly added, ‘No man knoweth the certainty for the succession; every man asketh what part shall we take.’
29

11

Devouring Lions

As Elizabeth lay in her Bedchamber at the height of her smallpox, three conspirators – Arthur Pole,
1
his brother Edmund and brother-in-law Anthony Fortescue – were apprehended and thrown into the Tower as they tried to flee to France.
2
They were charged with conspiring ‘to depose the Queen, change the state of the realm, compass the Queen’s death, raise insurrection in the realm and make Mary Queen of Scots Queen of England’.
3
Under interrogation they revealed the involvement of both France and Spain.
4
Elizabeth wrote to Philip asking that his ambassador either be ordered to desist from his interference in English affairs, or be recalled.
5
In the meantime, de Quadra was put under house arrest.

Elizabeth’s near fatal smallpox had provoked the plotters into action. Whilst Pole and his accomplices confessed the details of the plot, they denied acting treasonously against the Queen, claiming they did not intend to enter the kingdom with an army until Elizabeth had died. Months earlier they had consulted John Prestall, a notorious Catholic necromancer, occult conjurer and alchemist who lingered on the margins of the court, who had assured the conspirators that Elizabeth would be long dead before their plan was put into effect.
6
They were tried the following February, found guilty of treason and sentenced to be executed.
7
Elizabeth commuted the sentences and they remained imprisoned in the Tower until their deaths in 1570.

Following the massacre of Vassay earlier in the year, civil war had broken out in France. The Huguenots, led by the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny, sought English support against the Guise relations of Mary Stuart.
8
Elizabeth had been initially reluctant to intervene but was persuaded by Dudley, who was seeking to re-establish his Protestant credentials after his failed attempt to secure marriage to Elizabeth with Spanish and Catholic backing.
9
The plot of the ‘devouring Lions’, as Cecil described it, was supported by the Duke of Guise and so served to allay any lingering doubts about supporting the French Protestants against the Guise.
10
An English army of 6,000 troops was assembled and sent to France in October 1562, under the command of Robert Dudley’s brother, Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick. The letter to Mary Queen of Scots which Elizabeth had been in the middle of writing when she was struck down with smallpox had been an attempt to justify English intervention against her cousin’s French family. As the Queen recovered, Parliament was summoned in order to raise funds to maintain the army in France and their defence of Newhaven. Its business would also be sure to include the question of the succession and the Queen’s marriage in particular.
11

*   *   *

At 11 o’clock on Tuesday, 12 January, a stately procession made its way from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey.
12
The streets had been swept clean, and fresh sand laid for the horses. Elizabeth, wearing her parliamentary robes, a red velvet mantle lined with white ermine spotted with black, arrived in a coach flanked by her Gentlemen Pensioners, dressed in red
.
Robert Dudley, Master of the Horse, followed behind, leading the Queen’s spare horse, and then came her ladies riding two by two.
13

At the abbey, Elizabeth listened to the sermon preached by Dr Alexander Nowell, the Dean of St Paul’s, who set the tone for the parliamentary business that was to follow. He urged the Queen, for the ‘surety of the realm’, to marry and produce an heir of her own body: ‘When your Majesty was troubled with sickness, then I heard continual voices and lamentations, saying, “Alas! What trouble shall we be in?… For the succession is so uncertain and such division of religion! Alack! What shall become of us?”’
14

After the service, the Queen, Lords and Commons left the abbey and moved to the Parliament Chamber where Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon delivered his opening oration. He emphasised the danger of ‘the foreign enemy abroad’, particularly the Guise in France, but also enemies ‘bred and brought up here amongst ourselves’ who had sought to aid the foreign enemy and raise rebellion within the realm.
15
Only if Elizabeth married and secured the succession could the safety of the realm be assured. Cecil wrote to a friend,

The heads of both houses are fully occupied with the promise of surety to the realm if God should, to our plague, call her Majesty without leaving of children. The matter is so deep I cannot reach into it … I think somewhat will be attempted to ascertain the realm of a successor to the crown, but I fear the unwillingness of her Majesty to have such a person known, will stay the matter.
16

The Queen’s recent illness had been a stark reminder of her mortality and the chaos that was likely to ensue in the interregnum if she died without settling the succession. Both houses were now determined to make their voices heard. One draft bill went so far as to propose that in the event of the Queen’s death, her Privy Council should exercise all powers until a Protestant successor had been established.
17
Whilst the bill was never passed, the radical nature of the proposal, which would be revived later in the reign, shows the extreme anxieties of the time.

On 28 January, a Commons petition presented by the Speaker to the Queen at Whitehall, called directly on her to marry. Referring to the ‘great terror and dreadful warning’ brought by her illness with smallpox, and their fears of ‘contentious and malicious Papists’, the petition made clear the Commons’ fears: ‘We see nothing to withstand their desire but only your life … we find how necessary it is for your preservation that there be more set and known between your Majesty’s life and their desire.’
18
The Queen was urged to ensure that the succession would fall to the ‘most undoubted and best heirs of your crown’, by marrying ‘whomsoever it be that your Majesty shall choose’. In the meantime, the MPs requested, she should name her successor. In return they assured her that they would ‘employ their whole endeavours, wits and powers’ to devise the strongest laws for the preservation and surety of her and her issue, ‘and the most penal, sharp and terrible statutes to all that shall but once practise … against your safety’.
19

Elizabeth responded graciously to the petition and, as the clerk noted, ‘thankfully accepted’ their words. She assured them that having survived the smallpox epidemic, when

death possessed almost every joint of me … I know now as well as I did before that I am mortal. I know also that I must seek to discharge myself of that great burden that God hath laid upon me … Think not that I, that in other matters have had convenient care of you all, will in this matter, touching the safety of myself and you all, be careless … I am determined in this so great and weighty a matter to defer mine answer till some other time.
20

Four days later, the Lords presented their own petition.
21
It fully supported the Commons’ position and stressed the practical difficulties following the death of a monarch with no known successor and the fear that the realm would fall into the hands of its enemies. They requested, ‘that it would please your Majesty to dispose yourself to marry, where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’. In the meantime Elizabeth was once more urged to name a successor, as without it the Lords could not see ‘how the safety of your royal person and the preservation of your imperial crown be or can be sufficiently or certainly provided for’.
22

She had listened tolerantly to the Commons petition just days before, but now the twenty-nine-year-old Queen lost her patience, angrily telling the Lords, ‘that the marks they saw on her face were not wrinkles but pits of smallpox, and that although she might be old, God could send her children as He did to Saint Elizabeth’. She insisted that she was not too old to have a child and that if in the meantime she named a successor, it would ‘cost much blood to England’.
23

As the Lords and Commons waited for the Queen to give a more detailed reply to their petitions, Parliament occupied itself with the business of passing laws to preserve the Queen’s safety and enforce the religious settlement. The penalties imposed by the Act of Supremacy of 1559 for those who maintained the authority of the Pope, were stepped up and the obligation to swear the Oath of Supremacy was extended to include anyone who held office in the kingdom. A first refusal to swear the oath would lead to the loss of goods and imprisonment, a second would result in a charge of treason.
24
Whilst Elizabeth did assent to this bill, she was not anxious that it be enforced and, acting on her instructions, Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the bishops not to tender the act a second time and so put anyone in peril of death without a written mandate.
25

The plot for ‘devouring lions’, which had been foiled as Elizabeth lay in her sickbed, had demonstrated the threat to the Queen of sorcery and witchcraft. These offences were no longer covered by common law, that statute having been repealed in 1547, so new legislation was passed.
26
By the terms of the ‘Act Against Conjuration, Enchantments and Witchcrafts’, any magic which proved to be a cause of death would result in the death penalty for the guilty party.
27
An act was also passed ‘against fond and fantastical prophecies’ which could be used to condemn those who foretold the death of the Queen by ‘casting nativities’, as in the Pole conspiracy. Its preamble described the disturbances of the previous few years and ordered that if any person or persons, ‘do advisedly and directly advance publish and set forth in writing, printing, singing, or in any other open speech or deed … and fond fantastical or false prophecy … to the intent thereby to make any rebellion, insurrection, dissension, loss of life or other disturbance within the Queen’s realms’, they would be imprisoned and fined. The penalty for the first offence was a year’s imprisonment and a £10 penalty, for the second offence, imprisonment for life and forfeiture of goods.
28

*   *   *

On the morning of 10 February, with Parliament still in session, the urgency of the succession issue was highlighted by the news that Katherine Grey had given birth to another baby, a boy, Thomas. Elizabeth was enraged; her twenty-two-year-old Protestant heir now had two sons. The Queen ordered an immediate investigation into the night-time liaisons between Katherine and the Earl of Hertford, which Sir Edward Warner the Lieutenant of the Tower had evidently allowed to take place.
29
Hertford was brought before the Court of Star Chamber where he was found guilty of having compounded his original offence of having ‘deflowered a virgin of the blood royal in the Queen’s house’ by having ‘ravished her a second time’. He was fined the ruinous sum of £5,000 for each offence and returned to the Tower.
30