The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (35 page)

Leicester’s Commonwealth
talked in lurid detail about Dudley’s affair with Lady Douglas. Such was Douglas’s embarrassment at the revelations that Stafford reported it made his wife ill; her ‘sickness’, he later recalled, ‘was so long and almost of life, as in truth I was a good while greatly afraid of’.
13
He was worried about the impact of the forthcoming French edition. It seems that Lady Douglas may have considered returning to England, but Stafford persuaded her to ‘pluck up a good heart’ and stay with him.
14
Stafford had been assured by the compilers, to whom he must have been sufficiently close, that while Lady Douglas was identified by name in the first edition she would not be in the second. When in the spring of 1585, the French translation of
Leicester’s Commonwealth
appeared (
Discours de la vie abominable … le my Lorde of Leicestre – A Discourse on the abominable lifes, plots, treasons, murders, falsehoods, poisonings, lusts, incitements and evil stratagems employed by Lord Leicester
)
,
Lady Douglas’s name was indeed missing. However the book now included a salacious addition, which claimed that the Earl of Leicester had seduced a lady at Elizabeth’s court with an aphrodisiac containing his own semen. Whilst the lady was not identified, the fact that she was said to be still living made Lady Douglas the obvious candidate.

On 30 March, Stafford wrote to Walsingham recommending that he not be ordered to attempt to suppress the tract, since his ‘nearest have a touch in it’ and so he might be suspected of personal motives. His greatest fear was that he would be blamed or believed to have been implicated and that this would incur Dudley’s anger. ‘If you command me I will send you [one] of them, for else I will not, for I cannot tell how it will be taken.’ He had, he explained, not written to inform the Earl of Leicester, for he ‘would be loth to do anything subject to bad interpretation’.
15

The extent to which Sir Edward and his mother Lady Douglas were involved with the compilers of
Leicester’s Commonwealth
remains rather puzzling. There is no reason to think that Lady Douglas would have wanted details of
her
affair with Dudley exposed in such sensational fashion. However, the Staffords were close to Charles Arundell and it is unclear how else he would have got so much of the detail that was contained in the tract. Certainly Walsingham believed Lady Douglas was the source of the incriminating information about Dudley and both she and Sir Edward would have wanted to damage or destroy the earl’s reputation. In late 1585, Walsingham detained and examined William Lilly, Stafford’s servant. He wrote to Sir Edward Stafford informing him that he thought Lilly was involved in the affair, and berating the ambassador’s inadequate efforts to stop the distribution of the book. In his response of 20 January 1586, Stafford sought to excuse himself by saying that he had not thought it fitting for a public official to deal with a private man’s cause, even though he had had orders to the contrary. He also protested that he had still burned what copies he could find (thirty-five of them) until he could no longer keep up with the numbers being printed.
16

Despite Edward Stafford’s protestations of innocence, the Queen was plainly not convinced. In a letter to Cecil on 11 August, Sir Edward wrote how he had

received from my mother [Lady Dorothy Stafford] to my extreme grief, how much her Majesty is still offended with me (the cause God knoweth, for I do not) and withal her advice to write to her Majesty about it, I have done so and sent my mother the letter, to present it to her when she shall see the best opportunity. But I have told her to show it to you first, and unless you like it, not to present it at all.
17

Lady Dorothy’s importance, both as a means to represent her son’s interests and as one of the Queen’s closest intimates is clear.

*   *   *

The year 1585 also saw the publication of another tract,
The Letter of Estate,
which vilified Dudley and reiterated the accusations made in
Leicester’s Commonwealth
.
18
In it, Dudley’s arrogance and desire to rule England is mirrored by that of his rapacious wife Lettice Knollys. They are both united in their determination to overthrow the Queen. ‘But now who but his Lordship in the court, and as pride and ambition he passed, so in like manner wedded he in every degree with a countess fitting her husband’s humour, for more liker princess than a subject…’
19
According to
The Letter
, Lettice,

who seeing her Lord to be the master over all the nobility and conceiving well that they durst do nothing and that, as it were, they had him at a beck, thought in like sort all this were nothing if she in like sort had not all the other good countesses in the court at the like stay, and therefore in all that ever she might, practised and devised to effect the same, in so [sic] as if ever once her Majesty were disposed for the entertainment of some strange prince or ambassador to have any new gown made her she will be sure with [sic] one fortnight after, or at the least afore the departure of the ambassador, to have an other of the same sort and fashion suitable in every degree with her Majesty’s and in every respect as costly as her Majesty’s, if not more costly and sumptuous then hers.
20

Lettice is described as publicly competing with Elizabeth at important state occasions:

[her] intolerable pride her Majesty noting, after some admonitions for it and the same slightly regarded, told her as one son lightened the earth, so in like sort she would have but one Queen in England, and for her presumption, taking her a wherret on the ear in plain terms strictly forbade her the court.
21

However, as the tract described, while Lettice has been banned from court, her husband continues ‘insinuating with her Majesty, that upon him [as the] chiefest pillar in the land she wholly relies’.
22
Ultimately Dudley is able to satisfy his lust for power by becoming the Queen’s favourite; by monopolising her natural body, he monopolises England’s body politic.

As the gossip circulated at court, Dudley kept a low profile. Writing to a friend he said, ‘In these dangerous days, who can escape lewd or lying tongues? For my part I trust the Lord will give me His grace to live in His fear, and to behave myself faithfully to my sovereign and honestly to the world. And so I shall pass over such calumniations.’
23

*   *   *

Around 1584, Mary Queen of Scots sent a scandalous letter to Elizabeth with information which she had apparently been given by Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury.
24
It is very likely that Elizabeth did not see the letter and that Cecil intercepted it. Bess had previously served as one of Elizabeth’s Ladies of the Bedchamber, alongside Kat Ashley, Blanche Parry and Dorothy Stafford, but she had lost the Queen’s favour over her role in the secret marriage of Katherine Grey. She married her fourth husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1568, the nobleman becoming Mary Queen of Scots’s gaoler the following year. Bess was forty-one when Mary was moved to Tutbury Castle; Mary was twenty-six. They spent a good deal of the day together, embroidering and gossiping, but had fallen out over Bess’s suspicions over the relationship between Mary and her husband, George Talbot. Mary reported that Bess had been disloyal about Elizabeth and then proceeded to reveal gossip that Bess had told her about her time at the English court.

Mary prefaced the letter to her cousin,

I declare to you now, with regret that such things should be brought into question but very sincerely and without any anger, which I call my God to witness, that the Countess of Shrewsbury said to me about you … to the greater part of which I protest I answered, rebutting the said lady for believing or speaking so licentiously of you as a thing which I did not at all believe.

Bess had allegedly told Mary that Elizabeth had, in front of one of her ladies-in-waiting, made Dudley a promise of marriage, ‘and that she had slept with him an infinite number of times with all the familiarity and licence as between man and wife’. The letter claimed that Elizabeth had also seduced other men, including Sir Christopher Hatton, the Captain of her Guard, whom she had then taken as her lover. She had kissed the French envoy Simier and had taken ‘various unseemly familiarities with him’ and betrayed to him the secrets of the realm. She had also ‘disported’ herself with the ‘same dissoluteness’ with the Duke of Anjou, ‘who had been to find you one night at the door of your chamber where you had met him with only your nightdress and dressing gown on and that afterwards you let him enter and that he remained with you nearly three hours’.

In this remarkable letter, Mary alluded to rumours that Elizabeth had some kind of physical defect that would prohibit regular sexual relations and thus make conception impossible: ‘You were not like other women … and you would never lose your liberty to make love and always have your pleasure with new lovers.’
25

Bess of Hardwick denied making any such slanderous accusations and the Privy Council eventually accepted her innocence; the letter, however, demonstrates the dangers of rumours emanating from the Queen’s Bedchamber and how intimate details about the Queen’s body continued to have huge political significance, even when Elizabeth was beyond her childbearing years. Whilst assassins conspired against Elizabeth’s life, Mary Queen of Scots, like other Catholic polemicists, looked to target the Queen’s honour by undermining her claims to be the ‘Virgin Queen’ – which had become so central to her political identity.
26

38

Especial Favour

During 1584–85, a German noble named Lupold von Wedel journeyed through England and Scotland, observing the countries, its people and visiting a number of royal palaces. On 27 December 1584 he travelled down the Thames to Greenwich where the court was assembled for Christmas and New Year.
1
Elizabeth was still formally in mourning for the deaths of her last suitor, the Catholic Duke of Anjou, and for her leading Protestant ally in Europe, the Prince of Orange, and was dressed in black velvet with silver and pearls. Over the top of her gown was draped a piece of diaphanous silver lace. In private her clothing was said to be simple, almost austere, but her public self was always scrupulously luxuriant.

While Elizabeth attended chapel, von Wedel watched as preparations were made for the Queen to dine. A long table was set in the Presence Chamber beneath her canopy of state. Normally, he noted, the Queen ate in private, in her Privy Chamber, and it was only on festival days when she might eat so ‘strangers may see her dine’. After Elizabeth emerged from the chapel with her ladies, forty silver gilt dishes, some large and some small, were placed on the table as she sat down ‘quite alone by herself’. As the musicians played, she was served by a young gentleman in black who carved her meat, whilst another young man dressed in green, handed her a cup and knelt while she drank watered-down wine. To the right of her table stood a small number of her senior courtiers, including the Earl of Hertford, who, von Wedel wrote, had recovered his favour having ‘deflowered one of the Queen’s ladies’ (a reference to his marriage with Katherine Grey); the Lord Treasurer William Cecil; the Master of the Queen’s Horse Robert Dudley; and Sir Christopher Hatton. Each of the men carried white wands which marked them out as officers of state. Having been in England for some months, von Wedel had heard the gossip about Elizabeth’s relationship with her favourites, and in his subsequent account wrote that ‘the Queen for a long time had illicit intercourse’ with Leicester, and Hatton whom ‘the Queen is said to have loved after Le[ice]ster’.

As Elizabeth dined she would call individual gentlemen to her, who would kneel before her until she ordered them to rise. Von Wedel was evidently struck by the ceremonious reverence of it all and described how when the gentlemen left the Queen, each would ‘have to bow down deeply, and when they have reached the middle of the room they must bow down a second time’. When the food was brought in, the officers of state marched before the gentlemen who bore the dishes. Finally, once all the dishes had been presented, and the Queen had picked at what was before her, she rose from the table and a large silver gilt basin was brought to her in which she washed her hands.

After dinner Elizabeth took a cushion and sat on the floor as the dancing began. First only the senior courtiers danced but then ‘the young people took off their swords and mantles, and in hoses and jackets invited the ladies to the galliard with them’. As Elizabeth sat watching, she summoned whom she pleased among the courtiers to talk with her and joked and laughed with them. Von Wedel noted that with one of them, whom he identified as ‘Ral’, the familiarity extended to particular tenderness and intimacy. When Elizabeth pointed to a spot of dirt on his face and moved to wipe it away with her handkerchief, he shrugged it off, rebuffed the Queen’s hand, and removed the mark himself.
2

‘Ral’ was Walter Ralegh, then around thirty years of age, the son of a Devon gentleman and a nephew of Elizabeth’s favoured intimate, the late Kat Ashley. It was likely that Kat secured his position at court and therefore Elizabeth directly connected him with her affection for Kat Ashley, ‘for the especial care that we have to do him good, in respect of his kindred that have served us, some of them (as you know) near about our person’.
3
Ralegh was strikingly attractive, six foot tall with a trimmed beard and piercing blue eyes and a love of extravagant clothes, jewels and pearls. His boldness, blatant ambition, vanity, and self-confidence all greatly appealed to the Queen. He had first come to court in 1581 and thereafter experienced a rapid rise in his wealth and status as a result of the Queens’ favour.