The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (2 page)

While Elizabeth and her governess remained silent and loyal to one another, Sir Thomas Parry succumbed to the pressure and a month after his arrest began to tell Tyrwhit everything that had taken place between Seymour and Elizabeth:

I do remember also, she [Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved her but too well, and had so done a good while; and the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone (he having her in his Arms) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral and her grace also.
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It was this incident, it seems, that led to Elizabeth leaving Katherine Parr’s household.

Kat Ashley now had little option but to give up the details she had sought to withhold. Seymour had ‘come at’ Elizabeth in her Bedchamber, tickled her and kissed her and, yes, Kat had latterly ‘wished both openly and privately’, that Elizabeth and Seymour ‘were married together’.
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She acknowledged her ‘great folly’ in speaking of such a marriage and promised, if returned to Elizabeth’s side, that she would never do any such thing again.

A messenger was swiftly despatched to Hatfield, the red-brick palace some thirty miles north of London where the princess was then staying. Elizabeth was shown her governess’s confession.
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She was horrified that the details of her relationship with Seymour had come out, but still she would not implicate Kat Ashley or Parry. ‘In no ways she will confess that our Mistress Ashley or Parry willed her to any Practise with my Lord Admiral, whether by Message or Writing,’ Tyrwhit reported.
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Elizabeth refused to either corroborate or deny rumours of the romps with Seymour and insisted that she would never have married without the Privy Council’s consent. Tyrwhit remained unconvinced: ‘I do see it in her Face that she is guilty.’
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The council ruled that Ashley was ‘unmeet’ to oversee the ‘good Education and Government’ of Elizabeth, and she was replaced as governess by Lady Tyrwhit, wife of Elizabeth’s interrogator.
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Elizabeth was devastated at Kat Ashley’s dismissal and, ‘took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next day’. Sir Robert Tyrwhit added in his report to the council, ‘the Love that she beareth her [Kat Ashley] is to be wondered at’.
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In early March, when Elizabeth received the news that Seymour had been found guilty of treason and condemned to death, she wrote to the Lord Protector pleading for Kat’s release, fearing her former governess was to suffer the same fate. She asked the Lord Protector to consider Kat’s service to her: ‘She hath been with me a long time, and many years, and hath taken great labour, and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty.’ She pointed out that whatever Kat had done to promote the match between Seymour and Elizabeth, Ashley would have told the council. Finally she argued that the continuing imprisonment of Ashley, ‘shall and doth make men think that I am not clear of the deed myself, but that it is pardoned in me because of my youth, because that she I loved so well is in such a place’.
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Elizabeth’s tactic paid off and both Ashley and Parry were released from the Tower, though Kat and her husband John would not be permitted to return to Elizabeth’s household for another two years.
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Kat’s absence was always keenly felt. Elizabeth had grown up with Ashley and during what was a motherless childhood, following the execution of Anne Boleyn when she was two, Kat cared for Elizabeth with a deep maternal concern. Elizabeth relied on her governess for support and comfort as she grew older. Despite their temporary separation, the bond between them endured and Kat Ashley would remain a constant and ever-faithful figure in Elizabeth’s life, dying eighteen years later, when Elizabeth was at the height of her powers as Queen.

The vulnerability of Elizabeth to gossip and scandal, even at this early age, had been thrown into sharp relief by the lurid suggestions of sexual intrigue with her stepfather and the intense questioning of the princess and her household illustrates the seriousness of the accusations.
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For an unmarried woman, chastity was everything. Juan Luis Vives, author of
The Instruction of a Christian Woman,
commissioned by Catherine of Aragon for her daughter Mary in 1523, wrote expansively about the dangerous suspicions that a tarnished reputation could produce. Once a girl loses her virginity, he wrote, everyone continually gossips about her and men who might otherwise have offered to marry her ‘avoid her completely’. Chastity was the equivalent of all virtue. Parents, Vives advised, should pay special attention to their daughters at the beginning of puberty and keep them away from all contact with men, for during that period, ‘they are more inclined to lust’. Vives’s guidance went as far as the preparation of a young woman’s bed. It should be ‘clean, rather than luxurious so that she may sleep peacefully not sensuously’.
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The goal of female education, Vives argued, was also to protect chastity, to school young women towards virtuous conduct and away from the temptations of the flesh.
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As such their curriculum should include the study of ‘that part of philosophy that had assumed as its task the formation and improvement of morals’. Vives therefore recommended the Gospels, Acts ‘and the epistles, the historical and moral books of the Old Testament’, the Church fathers; early Christian writers such as Plato, Seneca and Cicero and Christian poets such as Prudentius. Women should also write down and learn by heart ‘wise and holy sentiments from the Holy Scriptures or … philosophers’.
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While Roger Ascham, who became Elizabeth’s schoolmaster in 1548, would extol Elizabeth’s chaste, feminine virtues, he would also celebrate Elizabeth’s more ‘unfeminine’ accomplishments: her learning and scholarship ‘exempt from female weakness’ and her precocious intellect ‘with a masculine power of application’. She was a skilled translator and linguist, speaking French and Italian fluently, and developed interests in science, philosophy and history. In short, Elizabeth had a ‘manly wisdom’ and intelligence encased in a body which was held to be physically inferior and morally weak and in need of the guidance of men. Regardless of her intellectual accomplishments, her standing would always be subject to her ability to preserve a chaste reputation.
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Alongside her schoolroom lessons, the experience of 1547–48 with her stepfather had taught Elizabeth that her sexual reputation was an important political currency and the ladies who attended on her were the key custodians of her honour.

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The Queen’s Two Bodies

At the heart of the court lay the Queen’s bed. Here the Queen might finally rest and retire from the relentless pressures of the day. Yet it was more than simply a place of slumber. The Queen’s bed was the stage upon which, each night, the Queen would lie. Hers was no ordinary bed; it was the state bed, and at night as by day the Queen was surrounded by all the trappings of royal majesty.

As Queen, Elizabeth would have a number of beds, sumptuously furnished in bright colours and luxurious fabrics, all ostentatiously decorated and individually designed, each fit for a queen. At Richmond Palace, Elizabeth might sleep in an elaborate boat-shaped bed with curtains of ‘sea water green’ and quilted with light-brown tinsel. At Whitehall her bed was made from an intricate blend of different-coloured woods and hung with Indian-painted silk. Her best bed, which was taken with her when the court moved from place to place, had a carved wooden frame which was elaborately painted and gilded, a valance of silver and velvet, tapestry curtains trimmed with precious buttons and gold and silver lace, and a crimson satin headboard topped with ostrich feathers.

In her Bedchamber, Elizabeth could de-robe, take off her make-up and withdraw from the hustle-bustle of the court. Here she was waited upon by her ladies who had the most intimate access to the Queen, attending on her as she dressed, ate, bathed, toileted and slept. Elizabeth was never alone and in or adjacent to her bed she also had a sleeping companion – a trusted bedfellow – with whom she might gossip, share dreams and nightmares, and seek counsel. We know Elizabeth was both an insomniac and scared of the dark. All her worries were magnified in the darkness of her Bedchamber at night. It was here that she might have second thoughts about decisions made in the light of day, be haunted by fears of her enemies and plagued by vivid nightmares. Sharing a bed with a sleeping companion of the same sex was a common practice at the time, providing warmth, comfort and security; but being the Queen of England’s bedfellow was a position of the greatest trust, bringing close and intimate access to Elizabeth.
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The Queen’s Bedchamber was at once a private and public space. The Queen’s body was more than its fleshly parts; her body natural represented the body politic, the very state itself. The health and sanctity of Elizabeth’s body determined the strength and stability of the realm. Illness, sexual immorality and infertility were political concerns and it was her Ladies of the Bedchamber who were the guardians of the truth as to the Queen’s and thus the nation’s well-being.

An unmarried queen heightened fears. Women were expected to marry and Elizabeth’s decision to remain unwed ran counter to society’s expectations. It was generally believed that women were inferior to men and so subject to them by divine law. Women who ignored religious precepts and did not submit to male authority were potentially a source of disorder and sexual licence. Medical discourse regarded women’s bodies as being in a constant state of flux and so possessing dangerously unstable qualities.
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Such medical axioms were influenced by theology, with the belief that Eve’s moral and intellectual weakness had been the primary cause of the Fall of Man and succeeding generations of women were similarly flawed.

Whilst for her male predecessors sexual potency might be a sign of political power, the corruption or weakness of Elizabeth’s body would undermine the body politic. Women were to preserve their honour not only through chastity, but also by maintaining a reputation for chaste behaviour. For a woman to be thought unchaste, even falsely, would jeopardise her social standing. Moreover, Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, ‘the King’s whore’, and so the living symbol of the break with Rome.
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For Philip II of Spain, the Guise family in France, and the Pope, Elizabeth was illegitimate by birth and by religion. For them Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was the rightful queen.
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Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who had married James V of Scotland and was daughter of Mary of Guise. The Guise was one of the most powerful, ambitious and fervently Catholic families in France. In April 1558, just six months before Elizabeth’s accession, this Franco-Scottish alliance was cemented by the marriage of sixteen-year-old Mary Stuart and François of Valois, the Dauphin of France. From the day Elizabeth became Queen, Mary Stuart claimed the English throne as her own.
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The stakes could not have been higher; the Queen’s body was at the centre of a drama that encompassed the entirety of Europe. In the war of faith which divided Europe, Elizabeth’s body, with her bed as its stage, was the focal point of the conflict.
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Throughout her reign rumours circulated about her sexual exploits and illegitimate children. Her Catholic opponents challenged her virtue and accused her of a ‘filthy lust’ that ‘defiled her body and the country’.
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The reason Elizabeth was not married, they claimed, was because of her sexual appetites; she could not confine herself to one man. Some alleged that she had a bastard daughter; others that she had a son, and others that she was physically incapable of having children. By questioning the health, chastity and fertility of the Queen’s natural body, opponents in England and across the continent sought to challenge the Protestant state. For half a century the courts of Europe buzzed with gossip about Elizabeth’s behaviour. The King of France would jest that one of the great questions of the age was, ‘whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no’.
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Over the five decades of her rule, Elizabeth changed from being a young vibrant queen with a pale pretty face, golden hair and slender physique, to a wrinkled old woman with rotten teeth, garishly slathered in jewels and cosmetics to distract from her pitted complexion, and wearing a reddish wig to cover her balding head. As she passed through her twenties and thirties, unmarried and without an heir, and on to middle age and infirmity, the country’s fears intensified. With no settled succession it became increasingly important for Elizabeth to try to disguise the signs of ageing. The physical reality of the Queen’s decaying natural body needed to be reconciled with the enduring and unchanging body politic; only in the Bedchamber was Elizabeth’s natural body and the truth laid bare.

Access to the Queen’s body was carefully controlled, as were representations of it in portraits. The Queen’s image was fashioned to retain its youthfulness, which necessarily obscured the reality of her physical decline. In paintings she needed to appear as she did outside her Bedchamber, enrobed, bejewelled, bewigged and painted; creating this complex confection as she aged was the daily task of the women of her Bedchamber. Such was Elizabeth’s desire to preserve the fiction of her youth that she sponsored the search for the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’, the elixir of life which would ensure eternal health and immortality.

Beyond the rumours and the sexual slander, the Queen’s body and Bedchamber were also the focus of assassination attempts, as disaffected religious zealots plotted to kill Elizabeth. The preservation of the Protestant state depended upon the life of the Queen, and the Bedchamber was the last line of defence for would-be assassins looking to subvert the regime. One plan aimed to plant gunpowder in her Bedchamber and blow up the Queen as she slept; others sought to poison her as she rode, hunted or dined. Not only did Elizabeth’s bedfellows, the women who attended on the Queen when she was in bed, help protect her reputation for chastity; they also protected the body of the Queen from attempts to assassinate her; they would check each dish before it was served, test any perfume that had been given to her Majesty and would make nightly searches of the Bedchamber.
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Their presence was for both propriety and security. While the loyalty of her ladies was assured, the families of some of these women sought to use their privileged access to the Queen to serve their own traitorous or licentious ends.