The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (8 page)

Elizabeth had taken advantage of Mary Sidney’s political prowess as well as her family connections to the Spanish court; Sir Henry Sidney had been sent on a number of missions to Spain in recent years and such was King Philip’s relationship with him that he stood godfather to Sir Henry and Mary’s first-born son, Philip Sidney, in November 1554. Mary had been used and when she discovered the truth she demanded to see the Queen. Despite being warned of Elizabeth’s ‘ill humour’, Lady Sidney remained defiant. She was not, she said, ‘asking anybody’s opinion and would go to the Queen just to spite them all’. She told de Quadra that even if she was sent to the Tower ‘she will not cease to proclaim what is going on, and that her worst enemy is her brother [Lord Robert]’.
37
She would defend what she had said, even if it ‘should cost her her life’.
38
Frances, Lady Cobham, whom de Quadra described as ‘the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes’, had also ‘favoured the suit of the archduke’, Mary Sidney explained, and she too had lobbied in favour of the Archduke Charles.
39

The Spanish ambassador now saw through Elizabeth’s charade. ‘She is not in earnest,’ wrote de Quadra, ‘but only wants to amuse the crowd with the hope of the match in order to save the life of Lord Robert, who is very vigilant and suspicious, as he has again been warned that there is a plot to kill him, which I quite believe, for not a man in the realm can suffer the idea of his being King.’
40
This time it was no mere rumour. ‘A plot was made the other day to murder Lord Robert, and it is now common talk and threat’, wrote de Quadra. Thereafter, Dudley was known to wear beneath his clothes a ‘privy coat’, a doublet, made by the armourer at Greenwich – suggesting that he was taking very seriously the threats against him.
41

De Quadra had learned ‘some extraordinary things’ and said Dudley’s enemies in the Privy Council were making no secret of ‘their evil opinion of his intimacy with Elizabeth.’ There were mutterings that Dudley intended to poison his wife so he would be free to marry Elizabeth. ‘It is generally stated that it is his fault that the Queen does not marry and his own sister and friends bear him ill-will.’ Elizabeth had been repeatedly warned to ‘exercise more prudence and not give people cause to suspect her in connection’ him.
42
De Quadra was growing tired of Elizabeth’s protestations of innocence; she was for ever telling him that she yearned to be a nun and pass her time in a cell praying. He had heard ‘great things of a sort that cannot be written about’ and in a letter to the Count of Feria, described Elizabeth as having ‘a hundred thousand devils in her body’.
43

By the end of January 1560, the marriage negotiations with the Archduke Charles formally ended and the malicious talk that Elizabeth had tried so hard to stave off now engulfed the imperial court. Sir Thomas Challoner wrote from Brussels of his shock at how far, ‘these folks are broad mouthed … of one too much in favour, as they esteem. I think ye guess whom they named … as I count the slander most false’. But as Challoner warned, while the rumours might be untrue, Elizabeth should nevertheless be careful of her behaviour in order to prevent tongues from wagging:

A young Princess cannot be too wary, what countenance or familiar demonstration she maketh, more to one, than another … this delay of ripe time for marriage, besides the loss of the realm (for without posterity of her Highness what hope is left unto us) ministreth matter to those lewd tongues to descend upon, and breedeth contempt.
44

7

Ruin of the Realm

As Elizabeth approached the first anniversary of her accession to the throne, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador to France, wrote repeatedly from Paris of the dangers to her crown. ‘We have great cause to suspect the French meaning towards us; and the suspicion thereof on this side doth daily rather increase than decrease.’
1

In November 1559, Anthony Browne, Viscount Montagu – a renowned Francophobe – reported to the Queen a conversation he had had with the emperor’s ambassador Gaspar Pregnor about new dangers facing her. Pregnor warned that ‘the Queen and all England is in no small peril’ and that there was a French plot to kill her. He spoke of ‘talks and devices’ in ‘no small places’ that Elizabeth ‘shall be slain’. Pregnor advised that to guard against the French threat the Queen should ‘please the King of Spain and lose him by no means’ and so be ‘temperate’ in those matters ‘which may and do’ offend him. Elizabeth also needed to ensure ‘
fidele satellitium
’ – faithful companions – for the guard of her person.
2

In a memorandum to Elizabeth in March the following year, William Cecil confirmed the threats. ‘We do all certainly think that the Queen of Scots and for her sake her husband and the House of Guise be in their hearts mortal enemies to your Majesty’s person.’
3
Weeks later, Throckmorton wrote warning of a ‘pestilent and horrible device of the Guises’ to poison Elizabeth by means of a ‘burly Italian man with a black beard’ called Stephano. He had come to England on the pretence of offering his services to the Queen as an engineer. Throckmorton reassured Elizabeth that being forewarned of this danger she ‘need not fear, but in lieu thereof give good order that he may be taken, to the Guises’ confusion and example to such hirelings’.
4
It was one of the first of many threats against Elizabeth, in her own court, that would be intercepted over the course of her reign.

With warnings of plots coming thick and fast, Cecil now took action to tighten security around the Queen herself and drew up a memorandum entitled ‘Certain Cautions for the Queen’s Apparel and Diet’. More care should be taken, he noted, to preserve the orderly guarding of the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber. Too often the back doors of the chambers where the Queen’s gentlewomen were quartered were left open and unattended; little notice was taken of the stream of ‘laundresses, tailors, wardrobers, and such’ that came and went through them; anyone could slip in and attack the Queen or introduce into her chambers a poison, slow-acting or immediate, that could be ingested by mouth or through the skin. From now on, no meat or other food prepared outside the royal kitchens should be allowed into the Privy Chamber without ‘assured knowledge’ of its origins. Perfumed gloves or sleeves or other garments were to be kept away from the Queen unless their hazardous odours were ‘corrected by some other fume’. And in future even the royal undergarments – that is ‘all manner of things that shall touch any part of her Majesty’s body bare’ – would be ‘circumspectly looked unto’. No unauthorised persons besides Elizabeth’s trusted women were to be allowed near them, lest some harmful substance be hidden in the folds of the linen to menace the Queen’s person.
5
As an extra safeguard Cecil strongly advised that the Queen should take some medicinal preservative ‘against plague and poison twice weekly’, just in case some evil attacked her unawares. Elizabeth was reluctant to be guided by these rules, and would remain stubborn about such matters throughout her life.
6

*   *   *

Having introduced tighter controls in an attempt to safeguard the natural body of Elizabeth, Cecil also urged the Queen to shore up the body politic by offering direct support to the Protestant lords in Scotland who had taken up arms against the French presence in Scotland. Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart’s mother, had remained in Scotland following the death of her husband, King James V, so she could protect the throne of her then baby daughter who, having been betrothed to the French dauphin, had been taken to be brought up in the French court. Yet Mary of Guise had become increasingly unpopular with the Scottish lords due to her attempts to enforce Catholicism and strengthen French control. When more French troops were sent to Scotland to assist her, Elizabeth’s councillors feared that the northern kingdom would become a military base for an invasion of England on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scotland, and Queen Consort of France.
7

On 29 March 1560, English soldiers crossed the border and besieged the French garrison at Leith. The campaign proved to be a disaster, culminating in the failed assault of 7 May, but the French also made little headway with their campaign. After two French relief fleets were driven back by storms, and following the death of the regent Mary of Guise on 11 June, peace was sought by both sides. As Cecil left for Edinburgh to negotiate terms he feared what might happen between Elizabeth and Dudley in his absence.

*   *   *

Cecil was right to worry. The Queen and Dudley were spending all their days together, dancing, feasting and hunting throughout the summer progress of 1560.
8
The story that Elizabeth and Dudley were lovers and that Elizabeth was pregnant had spread across the country that year. In the spring, John White from Devon confessed that ‘Drunken Burley had said to him in his own house that the Lord Robert Dudley did swive the Queen’.
9
In June, a sixty-eight-year-old widow from Essex, ‘Mother Dowe’, was arrested for ‘openly asserting that the Queen was pregnant by Robert Dudley’.
10
The local JPs were charged with investigating the case and wrote to the Privy Council with details of Dowe’s outburst. They sought to try the case
in camera
in order to prevent the scandalous tales from spreading ‘amongst the common people’, but it was already too late. Around the same time, the Earl of Oxford wrote to Cecil asking direction concerning Thomas Holland, vicar of Little Burstead in Essex, who was told by a former vicar that a man had gone to the Tower for ‘saying the Queen’s Majesty was with child’. Oxford wanted to know whether he should follow usual punishment for rumour-mongers and cut off Holland’s ears.
11
De Quadra’s dispatch to King Philip of Spain underlined the seriousness of the situation and the threat to the Queen of such persistently slanderous talk: ‘If she does not marry and behave herself better than hitherto, she will everyday find herself in new and greater troubles.’
12

*   *   *

It was a summer of births for Elizabeth’s women. Dudley hosted a banquet for the Queen at his house in Kew, during which time his sister Lady Sidney, then in the later stages of pregnancy, withdrew from service in the Queen’s privy lodgings to take up residence at Kew in advance of the birth in October of her third child, named Elizabeth most likely in honour of the Queen.
13

In late July, Isabella Harington, one of the Queen’s Ladies of the Privy Chamber, was delivered of her first-born son, John, at Kelston in Somerset. On 4 August he was baptised in the church of All Hallows in London Wall, with the Queen standing as one of his godparents.
14
Isabella was six years older than Elizabeth and had been in her service for a number of years. She was a loyal servant and indeed it is likely that she was one of the maids attendant on Elizabeth when, in the wake of Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary I in 1554, the princess was imprisoned in the Tower. In 1559, she married John Harington, a courtier and a writer who had become a favourite of Henry VIII. His first wife was Etheldrada Malte, supposedly the illegitimate daughter of the King by Joanna Dingle, but passed off as the illegitimate daughter of a tailor named John Malte in exchange for grants of land and revenues. By the spring of 1546, Harington had entered the service of Sir Thomas Seymour. After Seymour’s arrest in January 1549, Harington was imprisoned and questioned about his master’s relationship with the young princess. However, Harington remained loyal to Elizabeth and revealed nothing to compromise her honour under questioning. He was later rewarded with a position in the Queen’s household. Following the death of his first wife, Harington married Isabella Markham, the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir John Harington, in 1559.
15

Now, little more than a year after their marriage, Isabella and John celebrated the birth of the first of their five children. John, or ‘boy Jack’ as Elizabeth would affectionately call him, was among the first of Elizabeth’s godchildren and doubtless she accepted the role as a reward for the couple’s fidelity in the years before Elizabeth’s accession.
16
The young John later described how, ‘till the XXth year of her Majesty’s reign’, his mother Isabella was the ‘queen’s bedfellow’.
17

*   *   *

While in Edinburgh working on the peace negotiations with the Scots, Cecil wrote regularly to the Queen expressing his anxiety for her reputation and the unsettled succession, and offering his ‘continual prayer that God would direct your heart to procure a father for your children, and so shall the children of all your realm bless your seed. Neither peace or war without this will profit us long.’
18
On his return to London, having successfully secured the French withdrawal from Scotland, Cecil told de Quadra his franks views on Robert Dudley. He had ‘made himself lord of all affairs and of the Queen’s person, to the extreme injury of all the Kingdom, intending to marry her and that he led her to spend all day hunting with much danger to her life and health’.
19
He ‘foresaw the ruin of the realm’ through Elizabeth’s intimacy with him, and such was Cecil’s despair that he told the ambassador that he planned to resign his position.
20
‘So great is the common dissatisfaction with the Queen and her mode of life that it is quite marvellous that so much delay should occur without some disaster happening to her, and it will not be from any fault of the French if it be not attempted,’ de Quadra reported.
21
And matters were set to get worse. Cecil had made the startling revelation to the Spanish ambassador, that ‘they intended to kill the wife of Robert and now published that she was ill, although she was not but on the contrary was very well and protected herself carefully from being poisoned, and that God would never permit that so great an evil nor could a good result come of an evil business’.