The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (57 page)

Whilst early twentieth-century academic biographies, led by John Neale’s
Queen Elizabeth I
(1934), focused on strictly political motives rather than on Elizabeth’s sexual self, historical novels, plays and operas continued to cast Elizabeth as a queen with a private life.
14
The old charges that Elizabeth was malformed or infertile were revived with some going so far as to claim that Elizabeth was in fact a man,
15
or at least a hermaphrodite.
16
Others dealt with Elizabeth’s sexuality in more subtle, psychological ways, underpinned by a sense that her chastity was distinctly odd if not perverse. Lytton Strachey’s
Elizabeth and Essex
(1928) read the Queen’s life in a post-Freudian fashion, with her sexual desires and dysfunction traceable to her childhood and adolescence.
17
Many reviewers criticised Strachey’s portrayal of Elizabeth as tawdry and salacious, and a similar critique was levelled at Benjamin Britten’s opera
Gloriana
(1953), which was based on Strachey’s book. The opera’s central theme was the clash between public responsibility and private desires, and contrasted the public persona of the Queen with the reality of a tragic, vain old woman. For the young, newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, in whose honour the production had been staged, and for most of the audience, the opera was not well received. The scene in the Bedchamber where the elderly Queen ‘removed her wig from her head and was revealed as almost bald’ was regarded as being in particular ‘bad taste’.
18

Meanwhile Elizabeth was increasingly becoming the focus of Hollywood attention, and from Bette Davis’s portrayal of her in the
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(1939) and
The Virgin Queen
(1955), to those of Glenda Jackson (
Elizabeth R
, 1971), Judy Dench (
Shakespeare in Love
, 1998), Helen Mirren (
Elizabeth I
, 2007) and Cate Blanchett (Shekar Kapur’s
Elizabeth
, 1998 and
Elizabeth, The Golden
Age, 2010), the quest for the true woman behind the crown continued. Each film, in the tradition of the ‘secret histories’, portrayed Elizabeth’s sexuality in different ways. Whilst Kapur’s
Elizabeth
shows the Queen having a sexual relationship with Dudley, by the end of the film she makes the ultimate sacrifice, renouncing her sexual self, thereby becoming the ‘Virgin Queen’ complete with the dramatic cropped hair and white, leaded face. In the BBC drama
The Virgin Queen
, Elizabeth, played by Anne-Marie Duff, also appears in bed making love with Dudley but then wakes up screaming in dread; it was only a dream. Elizabeth’s unconscious desire for intimacy conflicted with her primal fear of it.

The opening scene of Helen Mirren’s much-celebrated portrayal shows Elizabeth, in her forties, as she is being undressed by her ladies, slowly, piece by piece, laces untied, sleeves removed until she remains only in her white embroidered chemise. She lies back on her bed, a sheet is draped over her legs and a doctor appears at her side holding a speculum. This is the ultimate exposure, her body bared for the sake of the country. She shows no emotion as the doctor pronounces, ‘All is as it should be, ma’am’ and then, illustrating the political nature of such private affairs, immediately reports his findings to Cecil and Walsingham, who are waiting in the corridor outside: the Queen is still
virgo intacta
and is capable of having children.

Such dramatic portrayals, together with historical novels such as those by Jean Plaidy and more recently Philippa Gregory, feed a perennial appetite for new interpretations of the ‘life and loves’ of the Virgin Queen.
19
The questions that the ‘secret histories’ raised at the end of the seventeenth century continue to intrigue popular audiences today. In life Elizabeth and the ladies of the Bedchamber had tenaciously defended the chastity of her body to protect her reputation and defend her crown. In death, it is the very questioning and searching for the true story of the Virgin Queen, and the possibility that she was not chaste, that continues to fascinate and has ensured her enduring popularity and appeal.

Notes

Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography

Epigraphs

  
1
‘Elizabeth’s Address to Parliament’, 12 November 1586, in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, eds,
Elizabeth I, Collected Works
(London, 2002), p. 194.

  
2
Sir John Harington
, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, AD 1602
(London, 1880), pp. 40–1.

  
3
BL Cotton MS Caligula B 10 fol. 350v.

Prologue: Shameful Slanders

  
1
Janet Arnold, ‘The Picture of Elizabeth I When Princess’, in
The Burlington Magazine
, 113, No. 938 (1981), pp. 303–4.

  
2
Maria Perry,
Elizabeth I: The Word of a Prince: A Life from Contemporary Documents
(London, 1990), pp. 31–5. See David Starkey,
Elizabeth: Apprenticeship
(London, 2001), pp. 42–9.

  
3
A Chronicle during the Reigns of the Tudors from 1485–1559 by Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald
, ed. W. D. Hamilton, 2 vols, Camden Society NS 11 and 20, 2 vols (London, 1875–77), vol. I, p. 182.

  
4
Samuel Haynes,
A Collection of State Papers … Left by William Cecil Lord Burghley and Now Remaining at Hatfield House
(London, 1740), p. 99.

  
5
Ibid.

  
6
Ibid.

  
7
Haynes,
Burghley State Papers
, p. 96;
Elizabeth I: Collected Works
, pp. 17–18.

  
8
J. Stevenson, ed.,
The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria by Henry Clifford
(London, 1887), pp. 86–7.

  
9
Mary Seymour disappears from the historical record after 1550 and it seems likely that she died by the age of two.

10
APC
(1547–50), pp. 236–8. See G. W. Bernard, ‘The Downfall of Sir Thomas Seymour’ in his edited collection,
The Tudor Nobility
(Manchester, 1992), pp. 212–40.

11
Haynes,
Burghley State Papers
, pp. 89–90.

12
TNA SP 10/6, fol. 57.

13
Haynes,
Burghley State Papers
, p. 96.

14
Ibid., pp. 99–101.

15
Ibid., p. 102.

16
CSP Dom
, 1547–53, p. 82;
APC
(1547–50), p. 240.

17
Haynes,
Burghley State Papers
, p. 70.

18
Ibid., p. 107.

19
Ibid., pp. 108–9.

20
BL Lansdowne MS 1236 fol. 35; Henry Ellis (ed.),
Original Letters Illustrative of English History
, 11 vols (London, 1824–46), third series, II, pp. 153–5.

21
See Sheila Cavanagh, ‘The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident’, in Julia M. Walker, ed.,
Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana
(London, 1998), pp. 9–29. See Janel Mueller, ‘Elizabeth Tudor. Maidenhood in Crisis’, in
Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’, Essays in Literature, History and Culture,
Donald Stump and Linda Shenk, eds, (Arizona, 2011), pp. 15–28.

22
Marc Shell,
Elizabeth’s Glass
(Lincoln, Nebraska, 1993). See J. Dewhurst, ‘The Alleged Miscarriages of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn’,
Medical History
, 28 (1984), pp. 49–56.

23
J. L. Vives,
De Institutione Feminae Christianae
, C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen eds, 2 vols (Leiden, 1996), pp. 63, 65, 71.

24
Ibid., pp. 40–1.

25
Ibid., pp. 41, 51–3.

26
See Frank A. Mumby,
The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth: A Narrative in Contemporary Letters
(London, 1909), pp. 69–72.

Chapter 1: The Queen’s Two Bodies

  
1
See Vincent Joseph Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, Will Stockton, eds,
Queer Renaissance Historiography, Backward Gaze
(Farnham, 2009). Alan Bray’s seminal study of male friendship showed how habits of touching, eating and sleeping were shared between men outside of a sexual context. See A. Bray,
The Friend
(Chicago, 2003). It is more difficult to chart this for women given the greater political invisibility of women’s friendship.

  
2
See Judith M. Richards, ‘To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England’,
The Sixteenth-Century Journal
, 28. 1 (1997), pp. 101–21; Constance Jordan, ‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought’,
Renaissance Quarterly
, 40 (1987), pp. 421–51; Paula Louise Scalingi, ‘The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1515–1607’,
The Historian
, 42 (November, 1978), pp. 59–75. See Margaret R. Somerville,
Sex and Subjection:
Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society
(London, 1995); Jacqueline Eales,
Women in Early Modern England:
1500–1700
(London, 1998); P. Crawford, ‘Sexual Knowledge in England, 1500–1700’ in R. Porter and M. Teich, eds,
Sexual Knowledge
,
Sexual Science:
The History of Attitudes to Sexuality
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82–106. See also Lawrence Stone,
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
,
1500–1800
(New York, 1977).