Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (29 page)

Elizabeth was fully aware of the gossip, confiding in 1564 to the Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, that “they charge me with a good many things in my own country and elsewhere, and, amongst others, that I show more favour to Robert than is fitting; speaking of me as they might speak of an immodest woman.” Elizabeth then added, “but God knows how great a slander it is, and a time will come when the world will know it. My life is in the open, and I have so many witnesses that I cannot understand how so bad a judgment can have been formed of me.”
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Elizabeth always insisted on her innocence with a remarkable candor, perhaps most notably in 1562 when she was ill with smallpox; from what she thought was her deathbed, she insisted that there had been nothing inappropriate in their relationship.
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And yet the rumors about Dudley continued throughout Elizabeth’s reign. As late as 1584, German traveler Lupold Von Wedel wrote about Dudley, by then Earl of Leicester, “with whom, as they say, the queen for a long time has had illicit intercourse.”
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For the queens under discussion here, there are more rumors and reports about their sexual misconduct than we can review, but the slanderous words against Elizabeth are especially substantial, in part because of her long rule, but more likely because her unmarried status made her particularly vulnerable. Carole Levin, Louis Montrose, and others have thoroughly examined the stream of attacks on Elizabeth’s sexual life that continued throughout her reign, which were not just rumors of promiscuous behavior with Leicester but with Christopher Hatton and several others.
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As with the suspect fairy tale queens whose sexual misdeeds—alleged or actual—are depicted as utterly monstrous, the rumors against Elizabeth, like the charges against Anne Boleyn, accumulate with increasing hyperbole.

Elizabeth’s intimate relationship with Leicester understandably gave rise to speculation, but reports that she conceived numerous illegitimate children and went on progresses primarily to deliver them; that she “was an arrant whore since the Queen is a dancer and all dancers are whores;” and even the posthumous slur that she had slept with numerous men of all ilk, “even with blackamoors,” aim to depict a queen whose behavior was transgressive, sinful, and monstrous.
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Mary Stuart

Though Elizabeth was seen variously both as virgin and as whore, so was the queen with whom she was most frequently juxtaposed, her cousin, rival, and would-be usurper, Mary Stuart. Montrose points out that how each queen was portrayed “depended on whether they were viewed from the Catholic or the Protestant side of the confessional divide,”
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but if much of the vilification of Mary came from anti-Popish sentiment, much of it was also self-inflicted. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of blame and vilification was harsh.

If Elizabeth’s unmarried state was considered anomalous, Mary Stuart’s tumultuous marital history was also unusual, with the most dramatic episodes over by the time she was 26 and entering captivity in England where she would remain for the last 19 years of her life. Mary was born in Scotland in 1542 and became queen just months later when her father, James V, died suddenly. While her mother, Mary of Guise, ruled as regent, Mary was sent at the age of 5 to the court of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis as the future wife of François II, heir to the French throne. In 1558, the 15-year-old queen married the 14-year-old dauphin, but in 1560 the young king died. Mary returned to Scotland in 1561 where she ruled for a few years and considered two unusual marriage prospects: Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Don Carlos, the mentally unstable heir of Philip II. In 1565, when neither match materialized, she married Henry, Lord Darnley, though Elizabeth objected to the marriage given Darnley’s distant claims to the English throne. Mary named Darnley king but granted him no significant power. The marriage was contentious from the beginning, and in its first year Darnley conspired to assassinate David Riccio, Mary’s secretary and alleged lover, and seize the Scottish throne. Riccio was murdered in front of Mary, who was pregnant at the time with James. Mary and Darnley briefly reconciled after this horrific event and in June of 1566, Mary gave birth to their son, but her relationship with Darnley remained contentious, with dramatic periods of reconciliation and estrangement.

In February 1567 Darnley was killed when assassins attempted to blow up his lodge. He escaped but was caught and strangled. One of the supposed murderers was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who subsequently abducted and allegedly raped Mary. After Bothwell divorced his wife, Mary and Bothwell married, but a violent outburst of protest forced Bothwell to flee and Mary to surrender. During her imprisonment she miscarried the twins she was carrying by Bothwell and was forced to yield the throne to her infant son, James. Mary fled to England, but instead of finding support to regain the Scottish throne, she was held in captivity for the next 19 years until she was beheaded for her complicity in assassination plots against Elizabeth.
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The personal, political, and religious controversy that Mary engendered continues to be debated by scholars who argue about culpability and innocence, fitness to rule, and incompetence. What is undeniable is the rage against her sexual conduct, but it is interesting that some of the slander occurred before her troubled second and third marriages. In 1562, when Mary was still a widowed queen of France, she was walking in the garden with one of Elizabeth’s envoys, Sir Henry Sidney. A Captain Hepburn approached them and handed the queen a document which “contained as ribald verses as any devilish could invent, and under them drawn with a pen the secret members both of men and women in as monstrous a sort as nothing could be more shamefully devised.”
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The outraged queen ordered Hepburn’s arrest but the episode suggests not only suspicion of Mary’s chastity, at least by Hepburn, but an utter lack of respect for her position.

Another occurrence of seditious words came ironically from Bothwell, who implied—before his marriage to Mary—that she had an inappropriate history with the Cardinal of Lorraine when she was still queen in France. Bothwell called her the “cardinal’s whore” and added that both the queens (Elizabeth and Mary) together “could not make one honest woman.”
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The rants became even worse in the volatile period after Darnley’s murder and Mary’s marriage to Bothwell. In the public outcry—which included “women and boys with the throwing of stones”—rebel groups demanded Mary’s abdication. When she was captured and led through the streets of Edinburgh, the people shouted, “Burn the whore!...burn her, burn her, she is not worthy to live, kill her, drown her.” The fury, which reportedly “amazed her and bred her tears,” is reminiscent of the many fairy tale queens who are so quickly and violently consigned to grisly punishments.
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Whether Bothwell raped Mary or she conspired in her own abduction is still debated, but few argue that Mary made disastrous judgments in her relationships with men. One Scottish noble, who clearly believed in Mary’s complicity, said, “This [Scottish] queen will never cease until such time as she have wrecked all honest men of this realm. She was minded to cause Bothwell to ravish her, to the end that she may sooner end the marriage which she promised before she caused the murder of her husband.”
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In spite of the degree of Mary’s participation, she is depicted in extreme terms as the guilty agent, the virago who would ruin “all honest men of the realm.”

In England, the rants against Mary continued even as she was in captivity. In 1576 Puritan leader Peter Wentworth railed publicly against the Catholic queen. According to Montrose, “When cautioned for having called Mary a Jezebel in a Parliamentary speech, Peter Wentworth responded, ‘Did I not publish her openly in the last parliament to be the most notorious whore in all the world? And wherefore should I then be afraid to call her so now again?’”
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A few years later, more salacious charges were leveled against Mary, which appear largely unfounded. The Earl of Shrewsbury and his powerful wife, more familiarly known as Bess of Hardwick, were charged with overseeing Mary’s imprisonment in England. But when the Shrewsbury marriage began to dissolve over property disputes, Bess spread rumors of inappropriate sexual relations between her husband and Mary. This gossip provoked further claims that Mary had two bastard children by Shrewsbury and numerous “lewd speeches on the subject.”
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The Countess of Shrewsbury eventually recanted her accusations but not without considerable damage: when Shrewsbury was finally relieved of his custodianship, he thanked Queen Elizabeth for having “freed him from two devils, namely the Queen of Scotland and his wife.”
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As in fairy tales, enmity between women was often seen as the cause and the site of sexual conflict and monstrosity.

Katherine Howard

Although the legacies of these queens are all tarnished with claims of sexual impropriety, other accomplishments balance the slander: Anne Boleyn’s support of Protestant reform, Elizabeth’s long and successful reign, Mary Stuart’s devotion to the Catholic cause. But Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, is remembered for virtually nothing but her foolish and unchaste behavior. Although there is some uncertainty surrounding Katherine’s actual conduct, this much is known: she had sexual experiences in varying degrees with three men other than Henry.

Katherine was part of the powerful Howard family and a cousin to Anne Boleyn. She was raised in the household of her step-grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and it was there that she had an encounter, more abusive than consensual, with her music teacher Henry Manox, and later a relationship with Francis Dereham, a gentleman of her household, with whom it is widely agreed she had sexual intercourse. Although these events took place before her courtship and marriage to Henry, Katherine failed to inform him or his advisors of these previous experiences. Once Katherine was queen, on several occasions she corresponded and privately met with Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. Scholars disagree about whether Katherine and Culpepper actually had sexual intercourse, but it is accepted that Katherine’s behavior was clandestine and ill-advised.
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Henry first noticed Katherine when she became a lady-in-waiting in Anne of Cleves’s court; he most likely selected her for that position himself. Katherine was 17 or 18 and Henry 49. By all accounts, he was immediately smitten; according to Katherine’s grandmother, “the King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to [Katherine] the first time that ever his grace saw her.”
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Cranmer’s secretary wrote, “The King’s affection was so marvelously set upon that gentlewoman as it was never known that he had the like to any woman.”
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Henry’s infatuation quickly escalated, and rumors circulated that he and Katherine had consummated their union well before their marriage in the summer of 1540. Shortly after, the French ambassador Marillac noted that “the new queen has completely acquired the King’s Grace and the other [Anne of Cleves] is no more spoken of as if she were dead.”
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Henry’s feelings may not have been entirely reciprocated, for in the next two years of their marriage Katherine entertained some advances from Culpepper until their relationship was exposed.

The details of this particular scandal have been thoroughly examined elsewhere, but in the context of queenly behavior in fairy tales, two points deserve emphasis. The most obvious is the gendered difference in expectations of sexual conduct; as in many fairy tales, the sexual activity of kings is usually overlooked or erased, whereas royal women are violently punished. Neither Henry nor Katherine came to their union a virgin, and both had sexual experiences outside the confines of marriage, but only Katherine’s behavior was condemned. Moreover, Henry’s impulsive infatuations embody the “love at first sight” cliché, a common phenomenon in fairy tales; it is also the case in both fact and fairy tale that a king’s sudden attraction could mean the swift replacement of one queen with the next.

Henry was said to be devastated when he first heard of Katherine’s misdeeds, but Henry, like his fairy tale counterparts, was nothing if not resilient. Shortly after Katherine’s arrest, Chapuys reported that “although till the present time the King has shown no inclination whatever to a fresh marriage, nor paid attention to any lady of his court, there is no knowing what he may do one of these days.”
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Chapuys predicted wisely as it did not take long for Henry to begin “paying attention to the ladies”: once Henry received news of Katherine’s death sentence, he “considerably changed, for on the night of that day he gave a grand supper, and invited to it several ladies and gentlemen of his court... The lady for whom he showed the greater predilection on the occasion was no other than the sister of Monsieur Cobham...a pretty young creature... It is also rumoured that the King has taken a fancy for the daughter of Madame Albart.”
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Right after Katherine’s execution, Henry’s jovial spirits continued amid feasting and banqueting: “On Sunday the privy councillors and lords of his court were invited...and on Tuesday the ladies, all of whom passed the night in the Palace. The King himself did nothing else on the morning of that day than go from one chamber to another to inspect the lodgings prepared for the ladies, all of whom, generally speaking, he received with much gaiety.”
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This time, however, Henry’s elimination of one queen and subsequent replacement with another did not quite occur with fairy tale rapidity, for the eligible women now had good reason to be cautious. As Chapuys explained, “There are few, if any, ladies at Court now-a-days likely to aspire to the honor of becoming one of the King’s wives, or to desire that the choice should fall on them.” Their caution was due to a law passed in Parliament in response to the Katherine Howard debacle, “enjoining that should the King or his successors wish to marry a subject of theirs, the lady chosen will be bound to declare, under pain of death, if any charge of misconduct can be brought against her.”
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As desirable as the queen consort position might have been, few ladies seemed eager to have their past lives publicly examined, particularly in the wake of Katherine Howard’s execution.