The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (12 page)

The palace was also, one Italian visitor noted, ‘replete with every convenience’. Three miles of lead piping brought fresh spring water to the palace for bathing, as well as cooking. Elizabeth had a tile-stove in her bathroom which was fired by sea coal and was likely to have been used to create steamy conditions in the manner of a Turkish bath.
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In early October 1562, while at Hampton Court, the Queen began to feel unwell and decided to take such a bath, before going for a bracing walk in her garden. A day or two later she felt feverish, faint and began to shiver. On the fifteenth she was forced to hastily sign off a letter to Mary Queen of Scots, adding, ‘the fever under which I am suffering, forbids me to write further’.
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Dr Burcot, a highly respected German physician, was sent for immediately. His diagnosis was smallpox.
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The awful manifestations of the disease had recently been described by Thomas Phaer, a lawyer, translator and physician whose
Regiment of Life
(1544) was one of the most widely read medical treatises of the day:

[The signs are] itch and fretting of the skin as if it had been rubbed with nettles, pain in the head and back etc: sometimes as it were a dry scab or lepry spreading over all the members, other whiles in pushes, pimples and whayls running with much corruption and matter, and with great pains of the face and throat, dryness of the tongue, hoarseness of the voice and, in some, quiverings of the heart with sownings.
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Since the Queen was suffering from few of these symptoms, at first she refused to believe Burcot’s diagnosis and demanded that the ‘knave’ be removed from her sight. Doubtless Elizabeth was extremely frightened. Even if she managed to survive the illness it was probable that she would be left with a badly scarred face, a horrific prospect for one so vain. Several women at court had contracted smallpox in the weeks before the Queen’s illness and Margaret St John, the Countess of Bedford, aged twenty-nine, the same age as the Queen, and a mother of seven, had died from it
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The following day Elizabeth’s condition worsened. Writing to the Duchess of Parma from the court, de Quadra described how

The Queen has been ill of fever at Kingston, and the malady has now turned to smallpox. The eruption cannot come out and she is in great danger. Cecil was hastily summoned from London at midnight. If the Queen dies it will be very soon, within a few days at the latest, and now all talk is who is to be her successor.
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Four days passed and still there were no marks on her pale skin, yet her temperature soared and she fell into a coma. Elizabeth was gravely ill; England’s fate depended entirely on the outcome of her illness. As news of the Queen’s condition spread, the country held its breath. This was the crisis that her councillors had feared since the beginning of the reign. Not expecting her to survive, as she lay in feverish delirium at Hampton Court, they called an urgent meeting to agree upon a successor.
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‘There was great excitement that day in the palace,’ reported de Quadra, ‘and if her improvement had not come soon some hidden thoughts would have become manifest.’ The Privy Council discussed the succession twice and failed to reach a consensus. Some ‘wished King Henry’s will to be followed and Lady Katherine declared heiress’; others favoured the Stuart claim of Mary Queen of Scots. Robert Dudley, among others, was said to be ‘much against’ Katherine Grey and instead supported the Yorkist claim of Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, a committed Protestant and descendant of Edward III who was married to Katherine Dudley, Robert Dudley’s youngest sister.
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Discussions went on long into the night, but no decision was reached.

Believing that the end was near, Elizabeth’s councillors gathered anxiously around her bed. After about four hours she regained consciousness and in the event of her death asked them to appoint Lord Robert Dudley as Protector of the Realm with an income of £20,000 a year. According to one report, sensing their unease, ‘the Queen protested at the time that although she loved and always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them’. She also ordered that Tamworth, the groom of Dudley’s chamber, have an income of £500 per year.
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Was Elizabeth rewarding Tamworth for his discretion and for keeping details of the relationship with his master and the Queen secret?

Two men on horseback were urgently sent to bring the physician Dr Burcot back to court. But, still chastened after his earlier encounter with the Queen, he angrily told them, ‘By God’s pestilence, if she be sick, there let her die! Call me a knave for my good will!’ One of the messengers threatened to kill the doctor if he did not come and do all he could to save the Queen. Compelled by the summons, Burcot mounted his horse and galloped back to Hampton Court where he was brought to Elizabeth’s bedside. He arrived almost too late. On the night of the 16 October, the ‘palace people were all mourning for her as if she was already dead’. Then, soon after midnight, small, reddish spots began to appear on the Queen’s hands. Noticing these she apprehensively asked Burcot what they were. ‘’Tis the pox,’ he replied, at which Elizabeth moaned, ‘God’s pestilence! Which is better? To have the pox in the hand or in the face or in the heart and kill the whole body?’
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Adopting ‘the red treatment’, an old Japanese remedy practised for centuries and first used in Europe from the twelfth century onwards, which recommended that the patient be wrapped in red cloth as it was thought the red light given out by the cloth prevented scarring, Elizabeth’s body, with the exception of her head and one hand, was wrapped in a length of scarlet cloth and laid on a mattress in front of the fire in her room.
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Burcot then put a bottle to her lips and told her to drink as much as she could. She said it was ‘very uncomfortable’. As the hours passed the flat spots of the rash became raised pimples, then blisters and then pustules which dried up and turned into scabs or crusts.

Ambassadors urgently pressed for news from the Bedchamber. Martin Kyernberk, the Swedish envoy, reported to Nils Gyllenstierna:

Our Queen is now ill with the smallpox, and before this broke out she was in the greatest danger of her life, so that her whole Council was in constant session for three days; on the third day she was somewhat better, but she is yet not free from symptomatic fever, as part of the poison is still between the flesh and skin.
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At Elizabeth’s bedside sat her loyal attendant Mary Sidney. Following the birth of her fourth child, a daughter, on 27 October 1561, Lady Sidney had returned to court and resumed her service in the Queen’s private chambers. Now, as Elizabeth lay dangerously ill, she performed the most selfless service. By attending the Queen at the height of her illness Mary Sidney risked very probable infection herself. Each sufferer would remain infectious from just before the rash appeared until the last scab dropped off about three weeks later. The virus could spread through blankets and bedding or clothes soiled with scabs or pus or most commonly by inhaling contaminated air. After having been in close contact with the Queen, Mary Sidney did contract the disease, and though she survived she was left disfigured and her skin terribly scarred. As Sir Henry Sidney, her husband later wrote,

When I went to Newhaven [Le Havre] I left her a full fair Lady in mine eye at least the fairest and when I returned I found her as foul a lady as the small pox could make her, which she did take by continual attendance of her Majesty’s most precious person sick of the same disease, the scars of which, to her resolute discomfort ever since hath done and doth remain in her face.
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Lady Sidney had contracted an especially virulent dose of the virus and was forced to withdraw from court and recuperate at Penshurst Place. Philip, her eldest son, then almost eight years old, also caught the disease and bore its facial scars for the rest of his life, something he came to resent bitterly. It was small consolation that her baby daughters Elizabeth and Mary, then aged one and two years old, escaped the infection.
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Gradually the Queen’s condition improved, although only the women of the Bedchamber and Robert Dudley were allowed to be in her presence as she made her recovery. In a letter to the Scottish secretary, William Maitland of Lethington, Dudley alluded to the debate over the succession that the Queen’s illness had provoked:

Thanks be to Almighty God. He has well delivered us for this present, for the Queen’s Majesty is now perfectly well out of all danger and the disease is so well worn away as I never saw any in so short [time]. Doubtless, my Lord, the despair of her recovery was once marvellously great, and being so sudden the more perplexed the whole state, considering all things, for this little storm shook the whole tree so far as it proved the strong and weak branches. And some rotten boughs were so shaken as they appeared plainly how soon they had fallen. Well this sharp sickness hath been a good lesson, and as it hath not been anything hurtful to her body, so I doubt not it shall work much good otherwise. For ye known seldom princes be touched in this sort, and such remembrances are necessary in His sight that governeth all …
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Elizabeth had been extraordinarily lucky: Sybill Penn, a former nurse of Edward VI had died of the disease in November, and thousands of others had been killed in England, as the epidemic spread through Europe. Having attended on the Queen in her gravest hour, Dr Burcot disappeared into obscurity, but as a sign of Elizabeth’s gratitude he was rewarded with a grant of land and a pair of golden spurs that had belonged to the Queen’s grandfather, Henry VII. Thereafter Elizabeth ‘wished never to be reminded of her illness’.
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When Elizabeth heard that, during the emergency sessions, Protestants on the Privy Council looked to Henry Hastings, the Earl of Huntingdon, as her successor, she gave Katherine (nee Dudley) Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a ‘privy nippe [a sarcastic remark]’.
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Although the countess would become a close confidante of the Queen’s towards the end of the reign, in the early years the earl’s royal blood undoubtedly caused ‘some jealous conceit’ of him and his wife. Whereas Lady Mary Sidney had proved her faithful service during the smallpox outbreak, her sister, the countess, managed to provoke the Queen’s resentment. She now felt that the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon had dangerous pretensions to the throne. Elizabeth publicly snubbed the countess at court and was slow to promote the earl to any major office. The relationship did not begin to mend until the early 1570s, when Elizabeth came to appreciate the couple’s unswerving loyalty.

In one of the many prayers that Elizabeth wrote she referred to this time of contagion and fear:

Whether by being heartfully warned or justly punished and, this corrected and amended by grace, Thou has afflicted me in this body with a most dangerous and nearly mortal illness. But Thou hast gravely pierced my soul with many torments; and besides, all the English people, whose peace and safety is grounded in my sound condition as Thy handmaid nearest after Thee, Thou hast strongly disregarded in my danger, and left the people stunned.’
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It was believed that divine intervention had saved Elizabeth’s life and her complexion, and this was celebrated by the production of gold medals to commemorate Elizabeth’s recovery. On the obverse of the medal the face of the Queen appears free of any physical effects of the disease; on the reverse, a hand is shown shaking a snake into the fire. It is an allusion to the biblical account of St Paul being bitten by a snake, an incident that left him similarly unharmed (Acts 28:1-6): ‘If God be with us, who can be against us.’
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The Queen’s recovery from smallpox was hailed as a sign of God’s favour, as was her supposedly blemish-free complexion. But it seems that Elizabeth’s unmarred face was a necessary fiction. On 27 October, de Quadra sent a report to the Duchess of Parma, explaining the ‘Queen is now out of bed and is only attending to the marks on her face to avoid disfigurement’, and in his letter to Philip II in February of the following year, the ambassador described how Elizabeth assured her councillors that she did not have wrinkles, but that they were smallpox scars.
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However, in the years that followed an official narrative of Elizabeth’s immaculate beauty and perfect complexion was adopted, embellished in poems, plays and state-controlled portraits. Elizabeth understood how beauty could amplify her power and it was therefore crucial that, regardless of the reality of smallpox scars and the ravages of time, Elizabeth maintain her reputation as a beautiful and beguiling queen. Such a fiction would also protect the Queen from accusations of promiscuity which might have been levelled against her if people confused her smallpox scars with those of the ‘great pox’, syphilis, which was seen as the product of sexual immorality.

It was perhaps her need to deny her own scarring that led her to regard with hostility other people’s pockmarked faces. Rather than show compassion to Mary Sidney, the woman who had nursed her through her illness and been so badly scarred as a result, Elizabeth regarded her with disdain. Later the Queen would also make very clear her distaste for a marriage with the Duke of Alençon, another smallpox sufferer who, like Mary Sidney, had been left disfigured.

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Following the Queen’s illness, Christmas and the New Year was a time of particular celebration and thanksgiving. Each year the twelve days of Christmas feasting and festivity would take place at Whitehall. Besides the banquets and special entertainments, one of the traditional high points was the exchange of presents with the Queen on New Year’s Day. This year, 1563, Kat Ashley, not long after her transgressions over the Swedish match, gave the Queen twelve handkerchiefs edged with gold and silver. Elizabeth reciprocated with two bowls, a salt cellar, spoon, and pepper box, all in gilt – gifts that showed the Queen’s untarnished affection for her. Dorothy Bradbelt, having also earned the Queen’s disfavour, gave Elizabeth a pair of cambric sleeves.
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Katherine Knollys was absent from the New Year festivities and a portrait at this time shows her heavily pregnant.
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A son, Dudley, the last of Katherine’s fourteen children, had been born on 9 May 1562 but died weeks later. Katherine had yet to return to court. Despite her absence and her mourning, she sent the Queen as her New Year offering a fine carpet, fringed with gold and silk.
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