The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (30 page)

Elizabeth was unsure as to what course to follow. At the beginning of October she ordered her council to discuss the question of the Anjou match and give their opinion of it. Meeting after meeting was held, but all ‘without proceeding to any full resolution’. Their final decision was that the Queen should ‘do what best shall please her’. Elizabeth had not wanted her councillors to leave the decision to her; she had wanted them to override her doubts and persuade her that it would be right to marry Anjou. Now she ‘uttered many speeches and not that without shedding of many tears’, as Cecil recorded, in her disappointment that her councillors should have shown ‘any disposition to make it doubtful whether there could be any more surety for her and her realm than to have her marry and have a child of her own body to inherit, and so continue the line of Henry VIII’. The Spanish ambassador reported that she ‘remained extremely sad’, and ‘was so cross and melancholy that it was noticed by everyone who approached her’. She told Walsingham, the arch opponent of the match, to get out of her sight, vowing that ‘the only thing he was good for was a protector of heretics’.
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Finally, despite the chorus of protest, on 20 November, Elizabeth instructed a small group of privy councillors to draw up a draft marriage treaty and within weeks Simier left England to take it to France.
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There was still one major obstacle, however. Elizabeth had promised to sign the treaty on condition that she secured her people’s consent over the next two months.
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If not, as Simier was forced to agree, the marriage articles would be null and void.

After the envoy’s departure, the heady romance of the Anjou courtship began to fade. Sensing the Queen’s growing uncertainty, Simier wrote in January that he could tell her change of heart had been brought about by those wishing to prevent the marriage. In a deliberate reference to Dudley, whose coat of arms contained the bear and ragged staff, he begged Elizabeth to ‘protect her monkey [Simier] from the paw of the bear’. He tried to play on her pride and mused, ‘who would have thought that a queen of the heavens and the earth, a princess of all virtue in the world, could be mistaken in her knowledge of certain people who feel neither love than affection otherwise than ambition for power impels them’. Yet without the attentive presence of either Simier or Anjou, the Queen was drawn back to Dudley for affection and companionship.
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At the end of January, Elizabeth regrettably informed Anjou that, although there was no prince in the world to whom she would rather give herself than him, her subjects’ objections to the match had not been overcome and they would not tolerate a king-consort who openly celebrated his Catholic faith. Whilst refusing to make any such concession over religion, Anjou remained committed to the match and urged Elizabeth to think again.
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For the rest of the year, Elizabeth’s position in respect of the negotiations with the duke remained in a deliberately managed state of limbo as she sought to maintain an alliance with France.

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With each passing month the international Catholic threat appeared to become ever more serious. In January 1580, the new Pope, Gregory XIII, reissued his predecessor’s bull of excommunication against Elizabeth and was known to be plotting a new enterprise against her in Ireland. The Spanish were also consolidating their position. The assertion of Spanish control in the Netherlands continued unrelentingly and following the death of the King of Portugal, Philip II began to prepare a military offensive to assert his claim to the throne. In August, Spanish troops crossed the Portuguese border and captured Lisbon, and in September, Spanish troops landed in the west of Ireland and occupied Smerwick. Despite her incarceration, Mary Stuart had embarked upon a fresh round of plots against Elizabeth, in league with the Spanish ambassador Mendoza. At the same time the young King James VI of Scotland was falling under the influence of the ‘very Catholic’ Esmé Stuart d’Aubigny, whom James had created Earl of Lennox and had also become involved with his mother’s Guise relations, raising fears that he might ‘be conveyed into France and so governed and directed by the Guisians’.
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Sir Christopher Hatton wrote to Walsingham in April 1580, telling him that England was entirely isolated and living in fear of a Catholic invasion, ‘beset on all sides with so great and apparent dangers’.
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To offset the threat, Elizabeth had entered into an alliance with the French, but France was now a much weakened power. The latest outbreak of wars of religion had left the country riven with internal dissent and no effective ally against the might of Spain. Dudley and Walsingham led calls for Elizabeth to send direct military intervention to the Netherlands, but the Queen was reluctant to make such an explicit commitment of troops and instead looked to give Anjou hope for a future alliance and cultivate good relations with the French King, Henri III. When, in late June, the States-General seemed set to offer Anjou sovereignty of the Netherlands, Elizabeth hastily sent Sir Edward Stafford to France to express her renewed commitment to the French match. Anjou immediately agreed to the dispatch of French commissioners to England to conclude the marriage treaty.
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In April 1581, a huge French embassy of some five hundred people arrived in England to agree terms. So fearful was the Queen of disturbances in London that before the French commissioners arrived, she issued a proclamation commanding that due honour be shown to the ambassadors on pain of death.
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During their six-week stay, the commissioners were magnificently entertained with feasts and tournaments. A vast banqueting hall decorated with greenery and a ceiling painted with stars and sunbeams had been specially built on the south-west side of Whitehall Palace. It was a spectacular stage on which to host the large number of French nobility who had come to the English court for a marriage – as would become clear – a marriage that would never take place.

On the 15 May, the play
The Four Foster Children of Desire
was enacted for the visitors in the adjoining tiltyard. In a chivalrous spectacle, ‘Desire’ and his ‘foster children’ endeavoured to storm the ‘Fortress of Perfect Beauty’, using ‘pretty scaling ladders’ and ‘flowers and such fancies’. They addressed the Queen, pleading with her to render up her beauty to the forces of desire, but were driven back by Virtue, leaving the maiden fortress intact. The challengers were rebuked by an angel who proclaimed, ‘If in besieging the Sun you understand what you had undertaken, you would destroy a common blessing for a private profit.’
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Anjou was now vainly pursuing the Queen of England who had resolved that a strategic alliance not a marriage was what she sought with the French. Considering the ‘growing greatness of Spain’ it seemed necessary that ‘some straighter league should be made between the two countries whatsoever became of the marriage’. At an audience with the French commissioners on 28 April, Elizabeth warned that she might not be able to marry Anjou because the earlier obstacles to the match remained and others had intensified with the passing of time: childbirth would be undoubtedly more dangerous to Elizabeth, now aged forty-eight. The arrival of missionary priests to England heightened the difficulties posed by Anjou’s Catholicism and the duke’s activities in the Netherlands threatened war against Spain.
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The French ambassador responded by telling Elizabeth that the most important reason to marry Anjou was to save her honour, a reason ‘of more importance than any namely that it was said that [Anjou] had slept with her’. Elizabeth responded that she could disregard such a rumour. Hardly so, said the ambassador, she might well do so in her own country, but not elsewhere, where it had been publicly stated. Elizabeth angrily insisted that a clear and innocent conscience feared nothing.
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Nevertheless, she now expressed her reluctance to pursue the marriage citing the age gap and in May 1581 wrote to the French envoy that, ‘I am afraid that I am too much advanced in years to please the duke, on which subject I have written him a long letter.’
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Yet Anjou still remained committed to the marriage as a means to secure aid for his military campaign in the Low Countries. He continued to write Elizabeth love letters, which became increasingly explicit, and in which he expressed his desire to be ‘kissing and rekissing all that Your beautiful Majesty can think of’, as well as to be ‘in bed between the sheets in your beautiful arms’.
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He had no doubt that their passion would soon engender a son, ‘made and forged by the little Frenchman who is and will be eternally your humble and very loving slave’. In October 1581, Anjou returned to England, intending to stay for three months. ‘The principal object of his visit is to ask for money,’ the Spanish ambassador Mendoza boldly warned the Queen. Yet once again Elizabeth seemed enthralled and enraptured by Anjou’s presence.

This time his visit was made public and when he arrived in London on 1 November he was placed in a house near the palace of Richmond, where the court was then located. Mendoza noted that ‘the Queen doth not attend to other matters but only to be together with the duke in the chamber from morning till noon, and afterwards till two or three hours after sunset. I cannot tell what the devil they do.’
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It was said that every morning, as Anjou lay in bed, Elizabeth visited him with a cup of broth, and that ‘when the Queen and Anjou were alone together, she pledges herself to him to his heart’s content, and as much as any woman could do to a man, but she will not have anything said publicly’.
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Yet the French delegation became increasingly disillusioned as to whether the match would actually take place and their resentful mutterings even began to cast doubt on the prospect of any alliance between the two countries. Elizabeth promptly took action to show her suitor just how in earnest she was.

At eleven o’clock on 22 November Elizabeth walked with Anjou in her gallery at Whitehall, where the court was assembled to watch the Accession Day festivities. When the French ambassador approached and told her that Henri III had ordered him to ‘hear from the Queen’s own lips her intentions with regard to marrying his brother’, Elizabeth responded decisively: ‘You may write this to the King: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband.’ She turned to the astonished duke, kissed him full on the lips and drew a ring from her finger which she gave to him ‘as a pledge’.
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It was a moment of high drama. When the Queen summoned her ladies and gentlemen and repeated what she had said, many of the women burst into tears. A messenger was immediately despatched to carry the news to the French court. King Henri III announced that his brother would be King of England and would soon be ‘a nasty thorn’ in the leg of the Spanish King.
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Yet whilst Mendoza claimed that ‘people in London consider the marriage as good as accomplished, and the French are of the same opinion’, in his view the Queen’s display ‘is only artful and conditional’. The art lay in her ability to make Anjou believe she was in earnest; the condition was whether or not her people would accept her decision. Elizabeth could remain comfortably certain that Parliament and her councillors would demonstrate their implacable resistance to the marriage. As Mendoza put it, ‘by personally pledging herself in this way, she binds him to her’, and added, ‘she rather prefers to let it appear that the failure of the negotiations is owing to the country and not to herself, as it is important for her to keep him attached to her, in order to counterbalance his brother [Henri III] and prevent anything being arranged to her prejudice’.
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The Privy Council responded with predictable hostility. Sir Christopher Hatton sobbed that she might be deposed if she insisted on marrying against the will of the people. Dudley, unnerved by Elizabeth’s display of affection to Anjou and her pledge to him, went as far as to ask her directly whether she were ‘a maid or a woman’.
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It was an incredibly audacious question to ask of the Queen. Yet despite Dudley’s insolence, Elizabeth responded calmly that she was still a maiden; perhaps she was flattered to be asked the question at her age, and perhaps it was an opportunity to demonstrate her credentials as the Virgin Queen.

The night after Elizabeth made her announcement, her Bedchamber was a place of great torment. Elizabeth lay with Dorothy Stafford, Mary Scudamore and Blanche Parry, who ‘wailed and laid terrors before her, and did so vex her mind with argument’ that the Queen could not sleep. They entreated her ‘not to share her power and glory with a foreign spouse, or to sully her fair fame as a Protestant queen, by vowing obedience to a Catholic husband’.
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Elizabeth barely slept and in the morning sent for Anjou. He found her pale and in tears. ‘Two more nights such as the last,’ she told him, ‘would bring her to the grave.’ She explained that ‘although her affection for him was undiminished, she had, after an agonising struggle, determined to sacrifice her own happiness to the welfare of her people’.
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According to one account, she told him that it would be unfair to marry him as he needed a wife who could bear him children and continue the Valois line. However, she promised to be ‘very much more attached to him as a friend even than if he were her husband’.
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When Anjou left England for the Netherlands in early February 1582, he departed as a protégé of the Queen. Elizabeth made much of being grief-stricken at the loss of her lover, saying she could no longer stay at Whitehall, ‘because the place gives cause of remembrance to her of him, with whom she so unwillingly parted’. After he had gone she professed a sense of grief as to what she had lost. She cried that she would give a million to have her Frog swimming in the Thames again, instead of the stagnant waters of the Netherlands, though Mendoza claimed that in truth, Elizabeth danced for joy in the privacy of her Bedchamber at the prospect of being rid of the Frenchman.
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