The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (31 page)

Anjou’s departure from England signalled the end of Elizabeth’s courting days, and she knew it. Now that he was gone so too was the chance of any marriage, or children. In her poem ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, which she penned after Anjou left for France, Elizabeth revealed her conflicted feelings; her resistance to marriage but, perhaps also her loneliness and yearning for love:

I grieve, and dare not show my discontent;

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I dote, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate.

I am and am not – freeze and yet I burn

Since from myself my other self I turn.

My care is like my shadow in the Sun–

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it …
38

The Queen and the duke continued to exchange ardent letters and the marriage was talked about long after it had become impossible. Anjou’s campaign in the Low Countries had proved a failure and in the summer of 1584 he died of fever. Elizabeth went into mourning and wrote to Catherine de Medici,

… your sorrow, I am sure cannot be greater than my own. For in as much as you are his mother, so it is that there remain to you several other children. But for me, I find no consolation except death, which I hope will soon reunite us. Madame, if you were able to see an image of my heart you would see the portrait of a body without a soul. But I will trouble you no longer with my plaints, since you have too many of your own.
39

*   *   *

Whilst the negotiations for a French match were finally at an end, rumours persisted as to what had happened between Elizabeth and Anjou during his time in England. On 17 November 1583, Sir Edward Stafford, now the English ambassador in Paris, reported with alarm that lewd pictures of Elizabeth and Anjou had been publicly exhibited across the city. Writing to Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary, Stafford described how a ‘foul picture’ of the Queen’s Majesty had been put up, ‘she being on horseback her left hand holding the bridle of the horse, with her right hand pulling up her clothes showing her hindpart (‘Sir reverence’) … under it was a picture of Monsieur, very well drawn, in his best apparel, having upon his fist a hawk which continually baited and would never make her sit still.’ As Stafford reported, ‘I am afraid some of our good English men here have a part in it for I think there are not many naughty people in the world as some of them be.’
40
The pictures were displayed on the Place de Grève, one of the main public spaces on the Right Bank, directly in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and on the Left Bank, on the corner of the Augustins and outside College Montaigu. The timing and positioning was very deliberate as these sites would have been heavily frequented both by exiles and locals
.

Although the primary intent of such cartoons was to stir up anti-Elizabethan sentiment in Paris, Stafford wrote that ‘in my opinion it toucheth more Monsieur’s honour then the Qu[een’s] if every body interpret it as I do’. Seemingly Anjou was also being mocked and degraded for his unsuccessful attempts to woo the ageing and immoral Elizabeth. The focus of the attack was again the person of the Queen whose regal authority was undermined by the exposure of her lower body and Stafford’s exclamation – ‘Sir reverence’ – is a euphemistic allusion to defecation.
41

Less than a month later, Stafford discovered that this was part of a larger campaign. Visual and written media were being employed to link Elizabeth’s heresy and ‘sexual depravity’ and to portray the cruelty and injustice practised by Elizabeth’s government on its Catholic subjects.
42
Stafford obtained drafts of Richard Verstegan’s broadsheets in late 1583 which referred to Elizabeth as the ‘She-wolf,’ a classic symbol of lewdness. Stafford pushed for a raid on the printing house and finally Verstegan, an English exile and publisher, and his associates were arrested.
43
It was but a temporary reprieve; time and again in the years that would follow, the Catholic League would use images of the English Queen’s corrupt body to challenge the legitimacy of her rule.

32

Semper Eadem

Elizabeth was almost fifty now; with no hope of having a child of her own, it was clear that she would be the last of the Tudor line. Concern over her fertility, the pressure to marry and produce an heir, had dominated her health and politics since the beginning of her reign. Now she began to be celebrated as the Virgin Queen who had selflessly sacrificed the desires of her natural body for that of the inviolable sovereign body politic. A series of seven portraits, painted at the time of the Anjou negotiations, all depict Elizabeth holding a sieve. The sieve was a symbol of virginity by virtue of its reference to the Roman Vestal Virgin Tuccia. When accused of breaking her vestal vows, Tuccia proved her virginity by filling a sieve with water from the River Tiber and carrying it back to the Temple of Vesta without spilling a drop.
1
This imagery was designed to show that Elizabeth’s virginity was her strength, providing her with the ability to make the sieve, which here represented the state, impenetrable.

Whilst Elizabeth’s virginity was now being championed as a great political asset, it was also important that she was not seen to age or be regarded as the post-menopausal woman that she now was. Instead, as the years passed and she continued to refuse to name her successor, it became ever more necessary for the Queen to always appear radiant and youthful to reassure her subjects as to her good health and longevity. In 1586, Elizabeth revealed something of this pressure to maintain a suitable public image when, in the Presence Chamber at Richmond Palace, she addressed a delegation of representatives of the Lords and Commons: ‘We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed; the eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings.’
2

As Elizabeth’s facial imperfections inevitably multiplied, the Ladies of her Bedchamber laboured to perfect a ‘mask of youth’. Smallpox scars, wrinkles, tooth decay and changes in the colour of her complexion increasingly demanded attention and the women of Elizabeth’s intimate entourage patiently ministered to the Queen’s withering face. The marks left by her smallpox, which despite her protestations were definitely there, together with the lines and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, were skilfully hidden with layers of caustic cosmetics. Besides the pungent white lead and vinegar, which created Elizabeth’s famous pale skin, egg white was increasingly used to glaze her face, to help hide her wrinkles and to smooth out her complexion, though making it rather difficult for the Queen to smile. The use of lead over time ate into her skin, making it grey and wrinkled, and so she would have to wear the lead base even more thickly. As Elizabeth aged, more vivid colours were used on her cheeks and lips. Besides using cochineal, she now wore a garish vermilion, also known as cinnabar, which gave an intense red colour.
3
However, vermilion was mercuric sulphide and so every time Elizabeth licked her lips she ingested this toxic substance and may have begun to experience symptoms of mercury poisoning, including lack of coordination, sensory impairment, memory loss, irritability, slurred speech, abominable pain and depression. By painting Elizabeth’s face with these noxious substances, the Queen’s ladies were slowly, unwittingly administering cosmetic poisoning which only accelerated the process of ageing.

The use of cosmetics had other unfavourable associations: make-up was regarded by some as synonymous with moral impurity and wayward sexuality; courtesans and prostitutes were notorious users of make-up. Pamphleteer Philip Stubbes noted that, ‘the women of England colour their faces with certain oils, liquors, unguents and waters made to that end … their souls are thereby deformed and they brought deeper into the displeasure and indignation of the Almighty’.
4
In a court sermon delivered before the Queen and her ladies at Windsor more than ten years earlier, Bishop Thomas Drant had rebuked female vanity and been at pains to stress that face paint, bracelets, jewels and earrings counted for nothing in the contest against death.

God made apparel, and God make the back; and he will destroy both the one and the other; yea, those heads that are now to be seen for their tall and bushy plumes – and that other sex, that have fine fresh golden caules so sheen and glossing – give me but a hundred years, nay, half a hundred years, and the earth will cover all these heads before me, and mine own to.
5

And just to drive home his message, Drant added,

Rich men are rich dust, wise men wise dust, worshipful men worshipful dust, honourable men honourable dust, majesty’s dust, excellent majesty’s excellent dust …
6

Though Elizabeth is now well known for her extravagant use of cosmetics, contemporaries were notably silent on her use of them, the issue seeming to have been something of a taboo at court and the subject of censorship. There are no references to cosmetics on the New Year’s gifts rolls; more likely, creams, paints or dyes for the Queen’s face were not regarded as appropriate presents. The one contemporary mention of Elizabeth’s face-painting that does survive, describing her make-up as being ‘in some places near half an inch thick’, was reported by a Jesuit priest. The same hardly unbiased source also said, ‘her face showeth some decay, which to conceal when she cometh in public, she putteth many fine cloths into her mouth to bear out her cheeks.’
7

Besides being sure to always appear in her ‘mask of youth’, it was also important for an idealised face of the Queen to be captured in portraits as a means to promote her authority. As Nicholas Hilliard, who entered Elizabeth’s service as her principal portraitist, quickly realised, it was less about a need for an accurate portrayal of the Queen but rather an ideal image of delicately drawn and youthful features. Hilliard began painting miniatures for Elizabeth in 1572, but it was two full-size oil portraits, the
Pelican
and
Phoenix
portraits, that began a transformation of the royal image.

Elizabeth’s face in both portraits appears as smooth and emotionless as a mask and other than her delicate hand which holds her glove across her stomach, her body is encased in an overlarge, heavily embroidered gown.
8
At a time when Elizabeth, then in her forties, was beyond the age of fertility, it is no longer her natural body that attention is drawn to, but the body politic. The use of symbols and objects cast Elizabeth as an icon of virginity. The jewels suspended from the necklaces in each picture are motifs of piety, celibacy, self-denial and eternal youth; the phoenix is a symbol of resurrection and the triumph of immortality over death, an image particularly prescient after the papal excommunication and the Ridolfi plot to assassinate her.

Whilst Hilliard’s miniatures and full-size paintings had moved towards the creation of his standard face for images of the Queen, it was very likely an Italian Frederigo Zuccaro, who had come to England at Elizabeth’s request in 1576, that provided the master pattern that was to be adopted as the officially sanctioned image. In Zuccaro’s ‘Darnley’ portrait, Elizabeth’s face is unreal, like a mannequin’s, and she is pictured wearing a simple gown of white and gold brocade with fine lace ruff sleeves and a pearl necklace which is looped to form an oval across her right breast. In her right hand she holds a multi-coloured ostrich feather fan close to her body, and in her left a half-concealed small box. On the table to her left is a sceptre and crown, emphasising her status as queen and her identification with the body politic. Here the placement of the necklace and the fan on her breast and in front of her groin, draw attention to the Queen’s natural, indeed sexual, body, whilst at the same time the prominent use of pearls symbolises her virginity and her triumph over lusts of the flesh and sexual appetite. Here then is a representation of the Queen’s two bodies: the natural, physical and sexual body of a woman and the royal body politic represented by the royal regalia positioned next to her.

Zuccaro’s blanched, mask-like face pattern was thereafter inserted on portraits of every size throughout the 1580s and early 1590s. The first of the so-called ‘sieve portraits’ adopted the Darnley face. No other face pattern of the Queen was to be so widely disseminated and this is testament to the government’s ability to control the royal image during this period. For the women of the Bedchamber, who daily ministered the mask of youth to the Queen’s face, and for the artists who captured it on canvas, Elizabeth’s motto ‘
Semper Eadem
’ – ‘Always the Same’, became a necessary instruction.

33

The Die Is Cast

In Easter week of 1580, a mighty earthquake shook southern England. The earth heaved with a ‘wondrous violent motion’ and in London stones fell from buildings onto people in the streets below. It was feared that this was a portent of terrible things to come and new prayers were introduced into the litany for God’s protection.
1
Within the next few months, Jesuit priests, direct from Rome, began to appear in England, raising fears that they were the vanguard of a Catholic crusade.

In June, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons crossed the Channel from France to Dover. Both were Oxford graduates who had fled to Rome to become Jesuit priests and they now returned to England in disguise, so as to elude capture by the port authorities. Campion and Persons then disappeared into the Catholic community of London and in the months that followed moved around the country, preaching, saying mass and hearing confessions.
2
Shortly after arriving in England, Campion set out an account of the Jesuit mission and his own personal calling in a letter which became known as ‘Campion’s Brag’.

‘My charge,’ he wrote, is ‘to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to refute errors, and, in brief, to cry spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith my poor countrymen are abused.’ He made clear that his Jesuit superiors had strictly forbidden him ‘to deal in any respect with matters of state or policy of this realm, as those things that appertain not to my vocation. The enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood.’
3
Whilst this was written as a letter for the Privy Council, to be read in the event of his capture, copies quickly began to circulate among English Catholics. By October, Persons and a printer called Stephen Brinkley had set up a secret printing press in London, thereby ensuring Catholics could be fed with other inspiring texts, printed books and sermons.