The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (18 page)

At the end of August, Zwetkowich and de Silva came to Windsor to take formal leave of the Queen. Elizabeth had specified the conditions for a marriage and Zwetokowich was now to report back to Vienna.
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Given that the ambassadors arrived at the palace late in the evening and were to depart the following day, they were allocated just one chamber to share. Elizabeth was shocked when she learned of the arrangements, believing it was disrespectful not to have given them separate lodgings. ‘My people shall learn in a way they shall not forget how you are to be treated,’ the Queen raged and, turning to the ambassadors said, ‘you shall occupy my own chamber and I will give you my key.’
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Having reassured her that no slight had been felt, the ambassadors went on to their own lodgings whilst Elizabeth remained in hers.

The next morning Dudley took the ambassadors for a tour of Windsor Park. As they made their way back to the palace along the footpath by the riverside, they passed the building which contained the Queen’s privy lodgings. Underneath the Queen’s Bedchamber windows, Robert Dudley’s fool, who walked with them, shouted so loudly that the Queen came to the window only in her nightgown. An hour and a half later, having dressed and been suitably made up, she came downstairs to greet the ambassadors, and no doubt chide Dudley and his fool.
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On another occasion, later in her reign, Gilbert Talbot, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, was wandering in the tiltyard at Greenwich at eight o’clock in the morning and caught Elizabeth looking out of the window:

My eye was full towards her; she showed to be greatly ashamed thereof, for that she was unready in her nightstuff. So, when she saw me after dinner as she went to walk, she gave me a great fillip on the forehead, and told the Lord Chamberlain … how I had seen her that morning, and how much ashamed thereof she was.
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Soon after arriving at Windsor, Elizabeth had received the news that Mary Queen of Scots had secretly married Henry Darnley at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on 29 July.
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The threat to the Queen’s throne escalated significantly; the two Catholic claimants to the English succession were now husband and wife.
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As Thomas Randolph, Elizabeth’s envoy, noted wryly, they ‘went not to bed, to signify unto the world that it was no lust [that] moved them to marry, but only the necessity of her country, not long to leave it destitute of an heir’.
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Relations between Mary and Elizabeth were now in tatters. ‘All their sisterly familiarity was ceased, and instead thereof nothing but jealousies, suspicions and hatred.’
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For the English government, the marriage represented an explicitly aggressive move for the crown of England. Elizabeth refused to acknowledge Darnley as Mary’s husband or as King of Scotland. Mary now began to openly display her Catholicism in Edinburgh, giving hope and heart to Catholics both in Scotland and in England.
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Two years before, the Pope had issued a resolution calling on faithful Catholics to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. A pardon and a ‘perpetual annuity’ in heaven would be granted ‘to any that would assault the Queen, or to any cook, brewer, baker, vintner, physician, grocer, chirurgeon, or of any other calling whatsoever that make her away’.
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Mary’s marriage now heightened fears of all such assassination attempts.
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Suspicious Mind

Whilst at Windsor, Elizabeth received news of a second unwelcome marriage. One of the Grey sisters, nineteen-year-old Mary – the shortest woman at the court and described by de Silva as ‘crook backed and very ugly’ – had secretly married the six-foot Thomas Keyes, the Queen’s Sergeant Porter, responsible for palace security and expected to be of unimpeachable loyalty. He was a widower and twice her age.
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They had married at nine o’clock on the evening of 16 July 1565, when Elizabeth had left court to attend the wedding of Henry Knollys at Durham House. In Keyes’s room over the Watergate at Whitehall, eleven friends and relations had gathered by candlelight as the couple exchanged vows and he gave his tiny bride a tiny wedding ring. They celebrated with wine ‘and banqueting meats’ after which Thomas and Mary were left alone and went to bed. When Elizabeth returned to the palace in the early hours of the next morning, the couple had returned to their own chambers and the Queen was none the wiser.

A month later, with Elizabeth still reeling from the news that Mary Queen of Scots had married Darnley, word of Mary Grey’s marriage leaked out. ‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous,’ wrote Cecil to a friend; ‘the Sergeant Porter, being the biggest gentleman of this court, has secretly married the Lady Mary Grey; the least of all the court … the offence is very great.’
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Elizabeth was furious.
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Lady Mary was imprisoned at Windsor and Keyes was put in solitary confinement in the Fleet, the notorious London prison, his huge frame painfully squashed into a small cell.
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*   *   *

The tensions at court around the marriages of Mary Grey and Mary Queen of Scots, not to mention Elizabeth’s grief at the death of Kat Ashley, impacted on her relationship with Dudley. As Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Smith, ‘The Queen’s Majesty is fallen into some misliking with my Lord of Leicester and therewith he is much dismayed. She is sorry for the loss of time and so is every good subject.’
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In August, Elizabeth began a flirtation with Sir Thomas Heneage, a good-looking and trusted courtier. As de Silva reported, the Queen ‘has begun to smile on a gentleman of the Bedchamber named Heneage which has attracted a good deal of attention’.
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Even though Heneage was a married man, Dudley still regarded him as a serious threat and jealously resented his rise to favour. When Dudley confronted the Queen directly, ‘she was apparently much annoyed at the conversation’. Cecil believed Elizabeth’s flirtation with Heneage was ‘baseless nonsense’ and the Queen ‘made a show of it for purposes of her own’.
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Dudley stormed off to his chamber in ‘deep melancholy’ where he remained for four days ‘showing by his despair he could no longer live’.’
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Dudley retaliated by lavishing attention on Lettice Knollys, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of Elizabeth’s faithful servant and cousin Katherine Knollys. Although she was named as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber on Elizabeth’s accession, Lettice had withdrawn from court after her marriage to Walter Devereux in December 1560. Over the next few years she gave birth to five children in quick succession, although still occasionally attended court. It was during her visit to Windsor in the summer of 1565 when heavily pregnant with her son Robert, that Dudley began paying court to her. When Elizabeth learned of Dudley’s flirtation she flew into ‘a great temper’ and, according to the Spanish ambassador, ‘upbraided’ Dudley ‘with what had taken place … in very bitter words’. Cecil wrote in his diary that, ‘the Queen’s Majesty seemed to be much offended with the Earl of Leicester, and so she wrote an obscure sentence in a book at Windsor’.
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The book survives and Elizabeth’s inscription reads:

No crooked leg, no bleared eye

No part deformed out of kind,

Nor yet so ugly half can be

As is the inward, suspicious mind.

Your loving mistress, Elizabeth R.
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Elizabeth would undoubtedly have been jealous of Dudley’s interest in any other woman, but the fact that Lettice was her second cousin and described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘one of the best looking ladies of the court’ made Dudley’s betrayal even more keenly felt.

Philip of Spain read the dispatches from his ambassadors in London with great interest. ‘The whole affair and its sequel,’ he wrote, ‘clearly show that the Queen is in love with Robert, and for this reason, and in case at last she may take him for her husband, it will be very expedient to keep him in hand.’
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Elizabeth reportedly told Bruener, the imperial envoy, ‘I have never said hitherto to anybody that I would not marry the Earl of Leicester, but Lord Robert was married then and there was no possibility of treating such a thing at the time.’
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At Christmas, de Foix, the French ambassador, reported that Dudley had asked Elizabeth to marry him, to which she had responded that he need only wait until Candlemas in February before she would ‘satisfy him’.
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Then on New Year’s night, de Foix told his Spanish counterpart that Elizabeth had slept with Dudley in her Bedchamber at Whitehall. But, as de Silva wrote in his dispatch, ‘the author of the rumour was a Frenchman who is strongly against the archduke’s marriage’. By now the match with the young French King Charles IX had been abandoned and the French were supporting Dudley’s suit.

Both Dudley and Heneage were in attendance on the Queen during the Christmas and New Year festivities and the drama at the English court was closely followed by diplomats abroad. Giacomo Surian, the Venetian ambassador in France, wrote to the Doge and Senate that Sir Thomas Smith, the English envoy in Paris, had described how Heneage was chosen on Twelfth Night as King of the Revels, which allowed him to rule the court for the evening and direct the festivities. In one of the games, Heneage instructed Dudley to ask the Queen, ‘which was the most difficult to erase from the mind: an evil opinion created by a wicked informer, or jealousy?’ Elizabeth replied that both were difficult, but jealousy was harder. Dudley threatened to chastise Heneage with a stick (rather than a sword as he regarded him as an inferior). The Queen told Dudley that, ‘if by her favour he had become insolent, he should soon reform and that she would love him just as she had, at first raised him’. Again Dudley withdrew to his chamber ‘in deep melancholy’, before the Queen, ‘moved by pity’, restored him to favour.
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It was to be a short-lived reconciliation. Early the following year, after a series of rows with Elizabeth, Dudley sought her permission to leave court on the pretence of visiting his sister Lady Huntingdon who had fallen ill
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‘He thinks that his absence may bring the Queen to her senses,’ reported de Silva, ‘and even may cause her to take steps regarding her marriage with him; although Leicester thinks that if she forgets to call him back and treats him like she treats everything, he will return to his house for a short time, and thus will not lose his place’.
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It was the first time in years that he had been away from the Queen’s side. Initially Elizabeth seemed glad to let him go and told her cousin Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, that ‘it hath often been said that you should be my Master of the Horse, but now it is likely to come true’.
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As Dudley remained absent from court, gossip began to spread. ‘Of my Lord of Leicester’s absence, and of his return to favour,’ Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Smith in Paris, ‘if your man tell you the tales of court or city, they be fond [foolish] and many untrue. Briefly, I affirm that the Queen’s Majesty may be by malicious tongues not well reported; but in truth she herself is blameless, and hath no spot of evil intent.’
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In mid-March, Elizabeth became ill. De Silva told the Spanish King, ‘she is so thin that a doctor who has seen her tells me her bones may be counted, and that a stone is forming in her kidneys. He thinks she is going into consumption, although doctors sometimes make mistakes, especially with young people.’
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For some days the Queen lay in her Bedchamber overlooking the Thames, weak and lifeless. The Queen’s bed once again became the focus of the court, as rumours and prophecies circulated that her death was imminent. This time there was no Mary Sidney on hand. She had left for Ireland with her husband Sir Henry, who had been appointed as Lord Deputy of Ireland. With his sister absent and the Queen’s desire for him undiminished, Dudley was advised by a friend to hurry back to court as soon as he could: ‘Touching your coming here, I hear diverse opinions; some say tarry, others, come with speed. I say, if you come not hastily, no good will grow, as I find Her Majesty so mislikes your absence that she is not disposed to hear of anything that may do you good.’
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He returned, only to leave again on bad terms with the Queen a few weeks later.

Elizabeth grew increasingly resentful of Dudley’s errant behaviour; she wished him back at her side permanently. Blanche Parry urged him to make a ‘hasty repair’ on account of ‘Her Majesty’s unkindness taken with your long absence’.
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Having tried to assure Elizabeth that he would soon return, Blanche warned Dudley that the Queen ‘much marvelled she had not heard from you since last Monday’. Dudley was assured by his agent at court that in the absence of Dorothy Bradbelt, their other ally amongst Elizabeth’s ladies, ‘our best friend in the Privy Chamber is Mrs Blanche’.
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When he was away, Dudley relied on Blanche to intervene with Elizabeth on his behalf and to keep him privy to the Queen’s desires; no one knew Elizabeth better. By the end of May, Dudley was back by her side.

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The Elixir of Life

On 7 February 1565, Cornelius de Lannoy, an alchemist from the Netherlands, wrote to Elizabeth offering her an unimaginable gift. He claimed to be able to transmute base metals like lead into gold and distil the elixir of life, a mythical potion that cured all infirmities and brought eternal life.
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It was all that Elizabeth needed to safeguard her realm. The Philosopher’s Stone, the agent that was believed not only to make alchemical gold, but heal disease and bring immortality, had been the elusive dream of alchemists over the centuries. The compound called ‘pantaura’ which de Lannoy promised to distil, incorporated the virtues of ‘the soul of the world’ to instantly heal diseases, maintain ‘vigour of limbs, clearness of memory’ and be the ‘best and surest remedy again all kinds of poison’.
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It held out the prospect of achieving the beauty that Elizabeth’s women sought to artificially create each day, preserving her health, and making a reality of Elizabeth’s motto ‘
Semper Eadem
’ – ‘Always the Same’.
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