The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (6 page)

Finally Elizabeth would climb into her bed beneath silk sheets embroidered with her royal arms and Tudor roses. Her bed comprised a number of mattresses containing straw, flock and feathers, each more luxurious as they got closer to the top, and each night was made ready by her ladies with warming pans of hot coals, to remove the chill from the bedding. They would check it and the straw and feather mattresses for fleas or bed bugs, or anything more sinister, lest any would-be assassins had hidden daggers or other deadly items to do harm to the Queen. The Bedchamber would also be searched every evening by the women to prevent intruders. Night-time was a time of fear and vulnerability, when noxious airs were meant to circulate and moonlight was thought to cause rheumatic diseases. Walter Bailey, Elizabeth’s physician, believed it was therefore important that the Queen avoid sleeping in a moonlit room and advised that the Bedchamber windows be closed at night to prevent dangerous air from the Thames being inhaled.
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After the 9 p.m. ceremony of the ‘Good Night,’ when the fires were banked and lodgings secured and security handed over to the Queen’s personal guard, the Esquires of the Body, one of her women would climb in alongside Elizabeth or lie on a truckle bed nearby. Insomnia was a recurrent problem for Elizabeth and a number of medical treatises from the time gave advice on how to get a good night’s sleep.
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The physician and author Andrew Boorde believed that to procure sleep one should take a little camphor, mix it with woman’s milk and anoint the temples with the mixture or use rosewater mixed with vinegar to aid sleep. ‘To bedward be you merry,’ Boorde advised, ‘or have merry company about you, so that to bedward, no anger nor heaviness, sorrow nor pensiveness, do trouble or disquiet you.’
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‘Mirth’ and merriment was, it seems, the final task of the day for the women who served in Elizabeth’s Bedchamber.

As some of the candles were blown out, Elizabeth would prepare for slumber by giving thanks, praying for forgiveness for her actions of the day, and appealing for divine protection from nocturnal harm. The curtains would be drawn to ward off dangerous cold drafts and night airs and the Bedchamber locked and guarded from the outside by the Esquires of the Body. Elizabeth demanded quiet in her Bedchamber and there was to be no unwanted noise near it.
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5

Womanish Infirmity

Elizabeth lived under intense scrutiny. All aspects of her body and behaviour, however intimate, were the stuff of ambassadorial dispatches and the subject of prurient interest on both a national and international level. On her accession to the throne, the Count of Feria, the Spanish ambassador, claimed that Elizabeth was ‘not likely to have a long life’. Her constitution, he told Philip of Spain, ‘cannot be very strong’.
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The French ambassador billes de Noailles agreed; ‘those who have seen her do not promise her long to live’.
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Since puberty she had regularly suffered from poor health, ranging from indigestion and occasional fainting fits, frequent and intense headaches which often lasted for weeks at a time, and insomnia and eyestrain.
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She was extremely short-sighted, which must have made even the simplest daily tasks, not to mention the great occasions of state, a real challenge. Given her love of sweet things she very often experienced painful bouts of toothache.

It was generally believed that the body was made up of ‘humours’ – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. In a healthy person all four humours were balanced, but any imbalance was believed to cause ill health. In her early twenties, during the reign of her sister Mary, Elizabeth was described by one of the royal physicians, Dr Wendy, as having ‘many cold and waterish humours, which will not be taken away but by purgations mete & convenient for that purpose’.
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‘Dropsy’, or water retention as we would describe it, would be one symptom of an imbalance of humours as would the irregular menstruation with which Elizabeth also suffered. Amenorrhoea might in turn cause further ills such as ‘hysterical fits’ and ‘melancholy’. Her surgeons would regularly open a vein in her ankle or her arm from which to draw blood and so bring her humours back into line.
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It was not just the health of the Queen’s body, but her fertility and ability to bear children that was also at issue. Women at the time were thought to be more voracious in their sexual appetites than men. Contemporaries found it hard to believe that any woman past puberty could remain chaste of her own free will, especially if she lacked a husband to provide an outlet for her sexual energies.
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The security of the Protestant state rested upon Elizabeth’s ability to produce heirs. Rumours circulated about the Queen having a ‘womanish infirmity’, meaning she was incapable of having children and would therefore never marry.
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When, in the very earliest days of the reign, the Scottish envoy Sir James Melville was asked to deliver a proposal to Elizabeth from the Duke of Casimir, son of the Elector Palatine, he refused the commission, saying, ‘I had ground to conjecture that she would never marry because of the story one of the Gentlewomen of her Chamber told me … knowing herself incapable of children, she would never render herself subject to a man.’
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Had this information come from Kat Ashley or Blanche, or perhaps Katherine Knollys; or was the ambassador simply passing on court gossip? In April the following year, Feria reported similar intelligence that he had gathered: ‘If my spies do not lie, which I believe they do not, for a certain reason which they have recently given me, I understand she will not bear children.’
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When in June 1559, Elizabeth was ‘blooded’ by her physicians this too was taken as proof that something was wrong with her ‘natural functions’. ‘Her Majesty was blooded from one foot and from one arm, but what her indisposition is, is not known,’ reported the Venetian ambassador; ‘many persons say things I should not dare to write.’
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Even the papal nuncio in France had a view on Elizabeth’s menstrual cycle: ‘She has hardly ever the purgation proper to all women.’
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Such rumours were politically toxic. For the European balance of power and for the Queen’s own safety, she needed to be, and be perceived as being, healthy and fertile. Only by Elizabeth’s marriage and the birth of an heir could the line of Tudor succession and Protestant Church be made secure. It was a fact acknowledged both at home and abroad. ‘The more I think about this business,’ wrote Feria four days after Elizabeth’s accession, ‘the more certain I am that everything depends upon the husband this woman will take.’
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A German diplomat, Baron Pollweiler, writing to the Emperor Ferdinand around the same time pronounced, ‘the Queen is of an age where she should in reason, and as is woman’s way, be eager to marry and be provided for … For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’
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When the first Parliament of the reign met in January 1559, the Queen’s marriage was the focus of much attention. ‘Nothing can be more repugnant to the common good, than to see a Princess, who by marriage may preserve the Commonwealth in peace, to lead a single life, like a Vestal Virgin,’ pronounced Thomas Gargrave, Speaker of the Commons.
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Yet Elizabeth’s response to Parliament’s petitions was careful and deliberately ambivalent: ‘whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life, ye may well assure yourselves my meaning is not to do or determine any thing wherewith the realm may or shall have just cause to be discontented.’
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Elizabeth was one of the most eligible women in Europe, ‘the best match in her parish’, and from the earliest months of her reign was never short of suitors, among them Philip II of Spain and Erik XIV of Sweden; the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles of Austria; the Dukes of Savoy, Nemours, Ferrara, Holstein and Saxony, and the Earls of Arran and Arundel. Each was looking for an all-important English alliance to counter the threat of the other. The Habsburgs needed to keep England pro-Spanish at a time when the menace from France was particularly potent, given the threat of the French King’s daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots’s claim to the English crown. While Philip of Spain deplored Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism, strategic considerations dictated the need to maintain an English alliance. In the earliest days of the reign, and with great reluctance, Philip offered himself in marriage to his former sister-in-law on condition that she would embrace Catholicism and that he would not have to live in England.
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It was never likely to be a match that Elizabeth would accept, but, as Feria presented the proposal, Philip described himself as ‘a condemned man, awaiting his fate’. He later added, ‘If it was not to serve God, believe me, I should not have got into this … Nothing would make me do this except the clear knowledge that it would gain the Kingdom [of England] for his service and faith.’
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It was doubtless something of a relief when Elizabeth rejected his offer,
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and another suitable Habsburg candidate was quickly sought.

Many in England favoured a marriage to a natural-born Englishman. The dangers of a foreign match were manifold, and the marriage of the late Queen Mary to Philip of Spain had left a bitter taste in the mouths of many. If Elizabeth married a foreign suitor, a tract (
Dialogue on the Queen’s Marriage
) by young diplomat Sir Thomas Smith argued, she would be taking ‘a pig in the poke’, while an Englishman ‘is here at home, not his picture or image, but himself. His stature, colour, complexion, and behaviour, is to be seen face to face’. And not only that, Smith argued, ‘but his education and his bringing up, his study, exercise, and what things he hath a delight in, what things he doth refuse, every fault, imperfection, deformity and whatsoever should be to his hindrance, is apparent and clear’.
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Among those thought to be suitable English candidates were the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Norfolk, both leading peers of the realm, and Sir William Pickering, a handsome unmarried forty-three-year-old courtier and minor diplomat.
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Pickering and Elizabeth were old friends and when he came to London to see her in May 1559 he was warmly welcomed by the Queen and given rooms at Whitehall. Feria reported that the Queen saw him secretly and then ‘yesterday he came to the palace publicly and remained with her for four or five hours. In London they are giving twenty-five to a hundred that he will be King.’
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But it came to nothing.

The other English candidate, Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, went to considerable lengths to woo Elizabeth but, as Feria reported, the Queen had joked about what was being said of a match with the earl and added in his dispatch, ‘she does not get on with him’.
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Arundel was a staunch Catholic, twenty years older than Elizabeth and, in Feria’s, view ‘a flighty man of small ability’.
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Yet Arundel had high hopes for his suit. In December it was rumoured that he was borrowing money and had spent £600 on jewels with which to bribe any of Elizabeth’s ladies who spoke well of him.
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Yet, to no avail. Elizabeth’s sights were set firmly on another Englishman: Robert Dudley.

6

Disreputable Rumours

Within days of her accession, Elizabeth had appointed Robert Dudley as Master of the Horse, one of the most senior positions in the royal household.
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This made him the only man in England officially allowed to touch the Queen, as he was responsible for helping Elizabeth mount and dismount when she went horse-riding. Whenever she hunted, went on progress or rode in a procession, Dudley would accompany her.

He was tall and strikingly attractive with dark skin and blue eyes. Dudley later told the French ambassador that ‘they had first become friends before she was eight years old’.
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He had been condemned to death after his father, the Duke of Northumberland, led the plot to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne in the summer of 1553, although after eighteen months in the Tower, Dudley was released and pardoned and thereafter worked to regain favour at court particularly in the service of Mary I’s husband, Philip of Spain. Elizabeth and Dudley had both been imprisoned in the Tower at the same time, during Mary’s reign, where their shared torment doubtless forged close bonds. However, Robert Dudley was married. On 4 June 1550, four years before he was taken to the Tower, he had married Amy Robsart, daughter of Sir John Robsart, a powerful Norfolk gentleman.
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William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, had in the early days of the reign proposed that Dudley might be sent overseas as an envoy to Philip of Spain, but Elizabeth quickly overruled him. She needed Dudley to remain close by her side.
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He had arrived at Hatfield on a snow-white horse as soon as he knew of Elizabeth’s accession and from that moment on he rarely left court. Dudley’s position in charge of the royal stables gave him a salary of a hundred marks a year, four horses and his own suite of rooms at court, where for most of the time he would live away from his wife. Husband and wife therefore seldom saw one another; given Elizabeth’s love of riding and hunting, the Queen and Robert Dudley – whom she called her ‘sweet Robin’ – were rarely apart. As a friend of his once remarked, Dudley could claim to ‘know the Queen and her nature best of any man’.
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From the very earliest months of Elizabeth’s reign, courtiers were exchanging scandalous gossip about Dudley’s relationship with the Queen and rumours of their night-time liaisons. The Count of Feria, on the eve of his departure from England in April 1559, wrote to King Philip of the extent of Dudley’s intimacy: