The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (3 page)

The Queen’s body was the very heart of the realm and so its care and access to it was politically important. By sleeping with Elizabeth and dressing her, the Ladies of her Bedchamber could observe any bodily changes in the Queen, attend to her if unwell, share her night-time fears, her good humour and her confidences and defend her against hostile rumours. Foreign ambassadors managed to bribe the women on occasions for information about the Queen’s life, and despatches reported intimate details, such as Elizabeth’s light and irregular periods, and supposed secret sexual liaisons with individuals such as Robert Dudley, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Duke of Anjou, the alleged ‘bedfellows’ who ‘aspired to the honour of her bed’.
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The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen

In the flickering candlelight of her Bedchamber at St James’s Palace in London, in the early hours of the morning of Thursday, 17 November 1558, Queen Mary I lay dying. She had been confined to her bed with influenza since her arrival from Hampton Court three months earlier and each day had grown progressively weaker.
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She had made a will earlier in the year, but believing she was then pregnant, had provided only for an heir of her body to succeed her. In late October, now seriously ill, Mary was forced to add a codicil to her will which acknowledged that she was ‘sick and weak in body’, would bear no child and would be succeeded by ‘my next heir and successor by the Laws and Statutes of this realm’.
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Still she could not bring herself to identify her half-sister Elizabeth as her heir. Two weeks later, and under pressure from her council, Mary was forced to bow to the inevitable and name Elizabeth as her successor.
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Jane Dormer, a devout Catholic and one of the Queen’s most trusted women who had ‘slept in Mary’s bedchamber many times with her’, went to Elizabeth at Hatfield and, as a token of fidelity, gave her a number of Mary’s jewels from the Bedchamber. Mary asked for Elizabeth’s assurance that she would be good to her servants, pay Mary’s debts and maintain the Catholic religion in England.
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In carrying this message to Elizabeth, Jane Dormer performed her last significant act as Mary’s bedfellow. Now the country waited for news from the royal Bedchamber of Queen Mary’s death.

On 16 November just before midnight, Mary received the last rites. A few hours later she heard mass as a small group of her most trusted ladies gathered round her bed, sobbing throughout the service. A little after six o’clock in the morning, Mary died. Her ring was removed from her finger and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton carried it to Hatfield where he informed Elizabeth that she was now Queen of England. By late morning the announcement had been made in Parliament and by mid-afternoon bells were rung in churches across London, and bonfires lit, ‘amid scenes of great rejoicing’.
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The new twenty-five-year-old Queen was radiant, slim, and nubile – and strikingly attractive – with her father’s trademark Tudor red-gold hair, a long oval face, thin lips and a pale complexion, and the dark, penetrating eyes and slender fingers of her mother.
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She was about five foot four inches tall. After the barren reign of her sister Mary, Elizabeth’s accession raised hopes of youth, health and fertility.

Three days later, Elizabeth made her first public speech in the great hall at Hatfield. It was moving, and struck a perfect note between humility and authority. She expressed sorrow for her sister’s death and amazement at the great burden which had now fallen to her. But she was ‘God’s creature’ and it was His will that she was now called to this royal office. Elizabeth would now have ‘two bodies’: while having the ‘natural body’ of a woman subject to error, infirmity and old age, she also acknowledged that she was to become the ‘body politic to govern’.
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With the ritual anointing in the coronation ceremony, her ‘natural body’ would be fused with the unerring, immortal body politic.
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Among those listening to the new Queen’s words was William Cecil, whom Elizabeth had appointed Principal Secretary earlier that day. He was astute, loyal and hardworking, and while he had conformed during the Catholic reign of Mary I he was undoubtedly a Protestant. He would be one of the men upon whom Elizabeth would rely for most of her reign. Cecil, like all of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, swore to ‘give such counsel to her Majesty’s person as may best seem … to the safety of her Majesty’s person, and to the common weal of this realm’.
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It would be a promise William Cecil would honour for the rest of his life.

Elizabeth also favoured those who had opposed the Catholicism of Mary’s reign, had proved their loyalty to her, or were relatives and former allies of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Lord William Howard of Effingham, her mother’s first cousin, was appointed Lord Chamberlain, while Sir Edward Rogers, a staunch Protestant who had been imprisoned for a time during Mary’s reign, became Vice-Chamberlain. Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s second cousin by marriage and also a committed Protestant who had gone into exile during Mary’s reign, was appointed to the Privy Council and later replaced Rogers as Vice-Chamberlain. Nicholas Bacon, another Protestant and brother-in-law of William Cecil, became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Nicholas Throckmorton, a cousin of Katherine Parr who met Elizabeth during the time she lived with her stepmother, rose to become Chief Butler and Chamberlain of the Exchequer. Shortly afterwards he was appointed ambassador to France. Thomas Parry, Elizabeth’s adviser when she was princess, became Treasurer of the Household, having been restored to favour after his revelations during the Seymour scandal. As the Count of Feria, Philip II of Spain’s envoy, reported, ‘the Kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors, and the Queen does not favour a single man whom her Majesty, who is now in heaven, would have received’.
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While many in England celebrated Elizabeth’s accession as the promise of a decisive break with the Catholic past, not all were of the same mind. Henry VIII’s will had named Elizabeth as Mary’s successor, however Roman Catholics regarded her as illegitimate because of Henry’s unlawful marriage to her mother Anne Boleyn, after he had spurned Catherine of Aragon. Instead they held that Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, was the legitimate heir to the English throne.

The French, to whom Mary was bound through her mother Mary of Guise and her marriage to François the French dauphin, immediately questioned Elizabeth’s right to succeed. As Lord Cobham, then Elizabeth’s envoy in France, wrote in December, they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’. As soon as the French King, Henri II, heard of the death of Mary I he proclaimed his Catholic daughter-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots as ‘Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland’. The royal arms of England were now blazoned with those of Scotland and France on her silver dinner plates and furniture.
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Meanwhile, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Mary’s uncle, lobbied the Pope to excommunicate Elizabeth and urged Philip II of Spain to join a combined invasion of England.
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Philip’s position was, however, less clear cut. France and Spain were still at war. While he instinctively supported Mary Queen of Scots as the Catholic heir to the English throne, this was tempered by the fact that she was the daughter-in-law of his great rival, Henri II. However, when Elizabeth moved to end England’s involvement in the imperial war with France, Philip feared that she might end up agreeing to an Anglo-French alliance which would threaten Spain’s interests. Therefore, while he took no overt action against Elizabeth, he began secret intrigues to support an alternative candidate for the English throne.

In the event of Elizabeth’s death without heirs, Henry VIII, having excluded the entire Stuart line of his elder sister Margaret Tudor – who had married James IV of Scotland – settled the crown on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk: Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. After the execution of Lady Jane Grey for her attempt to usurp the crown in 1553, Katherine Grey became Elizabeth’s Protestant heir and was soon courted by foreign princes and English noblemen for her hand in what would be a politically significant marriage. It was to her that Philip now turned as Spain looked to counter the threat of Mary Stuart and her French family.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Elizabeth could not abide the sight of Katherine and made it clear that she did not wish her to succeed even if she died without an heir of her body.
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On her accession she demoted Katherine Grey and her sister Mary from being Ladies of the Bedchamber, as they had been under Mary I, to maids of honour, largely confined to service in the Presence Chamber. Katherine complained bitterly to the Spanish ambassador Feria, and was ‘dissatisfied and offended’ that she had not been accorded the appropriate honour due to her rank.
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In the summer of 1559 and again the following spring, it was widely reported abroad that the Philip II was planning to smuggle Katherine Grey out of England, marry her to his son and from there assert her claim to the English throne.

On 30 June, King Henri II of France, Philip’s great adversary, was fatally injured in a jousting accident. François and Mary became King and Queen of France and power in the French court passed to her Guise uncles. In an effort to offset the threat Mary Stuart now posed, Elizabeth resolved to court Katherine Grey’s favour and by the new year of 1560 restored her and her sister to their former positions in the inner sanctum of the Queen’s Bedchamber, alongside old friends like Kat Ashley, in a kind of protective custody.
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At least here Elizabeth could keep a watchful eye on them. One of William Cecil’s agents reported that the Grey sisters were ‘straightly’ looked to and their movements closely observed.
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In the days immediately following Elizabeth’s accession, a number of Catholics were arrested in London. Six men were accused of ‘conjuring’ to calculate ‘the Queen’s life and the duration of her Government’.
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It was the first of a series of conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime in which horoscopes would be cast or spirits consulted to predict the Queen’s imminent death.
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The French Catholic seer Michel Nostradamus had also foreseen imminent catastrophe for Protestant England and his prophecies were widely circulated on both sides of the Channel, fuelling mass anxiety. As one contemporary put it, ‘The whole realm was so troubled and so moved with blind enigmatical and devilish prophecies of that heaven-gazer Nostradamus.’
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To counteract Nostradamus’ prophecies, Elizabeth called on the services of mathematician, astrologer and necromancer Dr John Dee, who had been a keen supporter of Elizabeth during the years before her accession.
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Dee performed an electionary horoscope about the day that had been appointed for Elizabeth’s coronation. The configuration of the heavens on Sunday 15 January, would, he determined, presage a long and successful reign.
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As the traditional procession on the eve of the coronation passed through the City of London, en route to Westminster, pageants lined the streets heralding the new reign as a decisive break from the Catholic past with tableaux depicting ‘pure religion’ treading upon ‘superstition and ignorance’.
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At the Little Conduit in Cheapside, Elizabeth took the English Bible proffered her by an allegorical figure of Truth, kissed the book, held it aloft, and then clasped it to her breast.

Once she was crowned, Elizabeth moved quickly to end the years of uncertainty over her royal title and establish her legitimacy to the throne. In the first Parliament of the reign, which met ten days after the coronation, a statute was passed which declared the Queen ‘rightly, lineally and lawfully descended from the blood royal’, and pronounced ‘all sentences and Acts of Parliament derogatory to this declaration to be void’.
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She was no longer a royal bastard.

Elizabeth’s very existence was a result of England’s breach with Rome and therefore, as Queen, and not acknowledged as such in many parts of Catholic Europe, she was bound to restore the royal supremacy which her sister Mary had repudiated. While she had outwardly conformed to Catholicism during her youth, in her prayers Elizabeth thanked God that he had from her ‘earliest days’ kept her away from the ‘deep abysses of natural ignorance and damnable superstitions’.
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She later confirmed her longstanding devotion to the reformed religion: ‘When I first took the sceptre, my title made me not forget the giver, and therefore [I] began as it became me, with such religion as both I was born in, bred in, and, I trust, shall die in’.
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She had also absented herself from mass at the opening of Parliament and when greeted at Westminster Abbey by the abbot and his monks carrying lighted torches she exclaimed, ‘Away with these torches, for we see very well.’
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All the religious legislation of the previous reign was swiftly repealed and the Act of Uniformity imposed a Book of Common Prayer, which was essentially the 1552 Edwardian book with a few significant alterations designed to reconcile confessional differences. Most notably the words of the communion had been altered to allow a Catholic interpretation of the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. Nevertheless the celebration of the mass was now illegal and all subjects were to attend the services of the new Church on Sundays and holy days on penalty of a shilling fine for every absence. By the Act of Supremacy which was passed on 29 April 1559, Elizabeth was proclaimed Supreme Governor of the Church of England, not Supreme Head in deference to objections because she was a woman. All office holders – clergymen, judges, Justices of the Peace, mayors and royal officials – were now required to swear an oath acknowledging Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the Church. Refusal to do so would result in loss of office. Anyone writing, teaching or preaching that Elizabeth should be subject to the authority of a foreign power (including the Pope) would lose all his or her property and moveable possessions. Repeated offences would be judged high treason and incur the death penalty.