The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (4 page)

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Familia Reginae

The coronation marked the first ceremonial outing of Elizabeth’s new court. One witness described how, as the snow fell, it seemed ‘the whole court so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they clear the air’.
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Before the Queen, who was carried on an open litter surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen, processed her household, her bishops, the peers of the realm and foreign ambassadors. Directly behind her rode Robert Dudley, her newly appointed Master of the Horse. The procession was flanked by a thousand horsemen and by royal guards in crimson jackets, each adorned with Elizabeth’s initials and the Tudor rose.
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The court as a whole was a vast institution of more than a thousand servants and attendants, ranging from brewers and bakers, cooks, tailors and stable hands to courtiers and ambassadors. While it was a place of provision, patronage, power and display, it was also, of course, Elizabeth’s home, albeit an itinerant one. The Queen and her court would regularly move between the royal palaces which lined the Thames – Whitehall, Hampton Court, Richmond, and Windsor – so that each could be cleaned, ‘sweetened’ and aired. Some three hundred carts of furniture, tapestries, gowns and ornaments would be moved with meticulous organisation. The court generally followed a fairly regular pattern in its movement between royal palaces, spending six weeks or so at Whitehall in the winter, then moving between Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Nonsuch in Surrey, and then perhaps to Windsor or Whitehall for Easter. Each summer, when the plague was often rife in London, the Queen and her entourage would venture beyond the capital on a series of visits to towns and aristocratic homes in southern England.

In whichever residence Elizabeth found herself she required a suite of rooms – the privy lodgings – where she would be largely secluded from the hustle and bustle of the main court. The privy lodgings consisted of a series of rooms – a Presence Chamber, a Privy Chamber and a Bedchamber – which led off from the great hall. Entry into each room denoted greater intimacy with the monarch’s natural body. The Privy Chamber formed the frontier between Queen’s public and private worlds; while the outer rooms of the palaces swarmed with courtiers, the inner rooms beyond it were closely guarded and only few would have access. The Presence Chamber, a large reception room with a throne and canopy of state, was accessible to anyone entitled to appear at court. A throng of suitors, foreign ambassadors, bishops and courtiers would regularly gather there hoping to catch the Queen as she passed through. The Privy Chamber was where Elizabeth would spend most of her day, surrounded by her favoured ladies, transacting government business, listening to music, dancing, playing cards, sewing or gossiping. It was heavily guarded with 146 Yeomen of the Guard.
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Elizabeth had two to three Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and between five and ten grooms, who supervised the outer chamber, and four Esquires of the Body, who took charge of the whole chamber through the night. There were two rooms which led off from the Privy Chamber. The first of these was the Privy Closet, a small private chapel and the second, the Queen’s Bedchamber. This was the very centre of the court and the most private place in the Elizabethan realm. Here the Queen’s natural body would be laid bare and Elizabeth’s trusted women would take it in turns to sleep either with the Queen or on a truckle bed adjacent to her.

During the reign of her father Henry VIII and brother Edward VI, the privy lodgings had been an exclusively male preserve. However, for Elizabeth, as for her sister Mary, these rooms were principally staffed by a small group of women.
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The first women to serve Elizabeth in her privy lodgings are listed in the coronation account book. Here the women are divided into groups of different status denoting the different kinds of cloth for their coronation clothes; purple tinsel for the more senior ladies, crimson velvet for the others.
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There were four women who served specifically in the Bedchamber, three women identified as ‘Chamberers’, seven women who served ‘in the Privy Chamber without wage’, and six young, unmarried girls served as maids of the Privy Chamber under the supervision of the ‘mother of the maids’, who would be solely responsible for their care and conduct. Under the heading ‘Ladies and Gentlewomen of the Household’, eighteen women are listed.
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In total twenty-eight women served in Elizabeth’s private chambers at some time during her reign. It was a small number and this meant there was fierce competition for places. Ultimately it was the women and their individual relationships with Elizabeth that mattered most and those most favoured might even find themselves in bed with the Queen. The friendships and intimacies between Elizabeth and her women underpinned her reign.

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In the years before she became Queen, Elizabeth was surrounded by the ‘old flock of Hatfield’, a tightly knit group of loyal female attendants who were now drawn to the heart of the new court.
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Some were Boleyn cousins; others had been appointed by her father and had since become old friends and political allies. Now on Elizabeth’s accession their loyalty was to be rewarded with positions of intimacy and trust in the new royal household. Other women returned from having been in religious exile and took up positions in the queen’s entourage.

Katherine Carey was first cousin to the Queen through Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary Boleyn Carey.
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She was born around 1524 and had served as a maid of honour to Anne of Cleves, Henry’s third wife, before marrying Sir Francis Knollys in 1540. Katherine and Francis’s adherence to Protestantism led to them, with their five children, leaving England during the reign of Mary Tudor and moving to Frankfurt.
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A letter dated 1553 from Elizabeth to Katherine may have been written in response to the news that Katherine was leaving the country. Perhaps Katherine had already spent some time in the Princess Elizabeth’s household, as the letter suggests a close relationship and the promise of favour to come. Elizabeth then signed her letter
cor rotto,
or ‘broken heart’.

Relieve your sorrow for your far journey with joy of your short return, and think this pilgrimage rather a proof of your friends, than a leaving of your country, the length of time, and distance of the place, separates not the love of friends, nor deprives not the show of good will … when your need shall be most you shall find my friendship greatest … My power but small my love as great as those whose gifts may tell their friendships tale …

Your loving cousin and ready friend
cor rotto
.
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As soon as Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, Lady Katherine Knollys and her husband returned to England and they, together with their daughters Lettice, then just fifteen, and Elizabeth, then only nine, were appointed to her household.
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Lady Katherine became one of the Queen’s most senior ladies-in-waiting and for the first ten years of the reign combined this with motherhood to thirteen children. Less than a year after Elizabeth’s coronation Katherine temporarily withdrew from court to give birth to her thirteenth child, before returning to the Queen’s side weeks later, having left her baby in the care of a wet nurse. Her nieces, Katherine and Philadelphia Carey, were also appointed to the Queen’s entourage shortly after her accession.
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Beyond her mother’s kith and kin, Elizabeth also had strong emotional ties with a number of women whom she had known almost all her life, and certainly from her earliest infancy. Blanche Parry, a no-nonsense Welshwoman from Herefordshire, had ‘rocked’ the cradle of the young princess, and was twenty-five years older than Elizabeth. Unusually for the time, Blanche never married and for the rest of her long life remained devoted and unswervingly loyal to Elizabeth.
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Kat Ashley was Elizabeth’s other longest-serving and most-trusted woman. She had taught her, defended her honour against the scandalous talk of her relationship with her stepfather, and had on two occasions found herself imprisoned for her loyal devotion to the princess. Ashley was now appointed First Lady of the Bedchamber, the most prestigious position in the royal household, while her husband, John, a cousin of Anne Boleyn’s, was given the important post of Master of the Jewel House, which he retained until his death in 1596.
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A number of Elizabeth’s other trusted women were themselves of royal blood or had distant claims to the throne. Elizabeth Fiennes de Clinton, known in her youth as ‘Fair Geraldine’ and considered one of the beauties of the age, was one such woman. Her mother Lady Elizabeth Grey was the granddaughter of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, and first cousin to Henry VIII. After her father Gerald Fitzgerald, 9th Earl of Kildare, was imprisoned on corruption charges and then died in the Tower in 1534, Henry had taken pity on his cousin Lady Elizabeth Grey and invited her youngest daughter Elizabeth, then about eight years old, to join the household of the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire. Elizabeth, who was just two or three years old at the time, became particularly fond of her older cousin and their relationship lasted into adulthood. In the weeks immediately before Mary I’s death, Elizabeth Fitzgerald married Edward Fiennes de Clinton, 9th Lord High Admiral, rejoined Elizabeth’s household and became one of the leading ladies of the new Queen’s court.
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Dorothy Stafford, the Protestant daughter of Henry Stafford, a Catholic nobleman, also returned from religious exile on the continent soon after Elizabeth’s accession.
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She had married her cousin Sir William Stafford, widower of Elizabeth’s aunt Mary Boleyn, and together they had fled England for Geneva during Mary’s reign as the persecution of Protestants gathered pace.
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Dorothy returned to England a widow with six children and entered Elizabeth’s service in the Bedchamber where she would remain until the Queen’s death more than forty years later.
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It was women such as these who formed the close entourage that surrounded Elizabeth and each, richly clad in specially ordered clothes, proudly formed the train behind Elizabeth in her coronation procession and attended on her during the various changes of robes in the ceremony itself.
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For the Ladies of the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber their duties were to wash the Queen, attend to her make-up and her hair, choose her clothes and jewels and assist her in putting them on. They would also help serve her food and drink, to monitor it for poison or other harmful substances. The Chamberers would carry out more menial duties, such as cleaning the Queen’s rooms, emptying her wash bowls and arranging her bed linen, while the young unmarried maids of honour provided companionship and entertainment. The maids of honour were girls of good birth who, generally dressed in white, attended the Queen in public, carried her train, sat and walked with her in the Privy Chamber and kept her entertained with dancing
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The women received only modest payment for the myriad of duties they had to perform. Some, like the maids of honour, were rarely paid at all. The Ladies of the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber received an annual salary of around £33 6s.8d (about £5,600 today). While the wages were not large, the women received board and lodgings for themselves and their own servants, together with clothing for day wear and for special occasions and sometimes even received the Queen’s own cast-offs. The size and quality of the lodgings varied enormously from palace to palace; space was at a premium and privacy unusual. Privy Chamber staff generally slept where they worked and only when they were off duty did they have the luxury of private lodgings. The maids of honour all slept together in the Coffer Chamber, which was very often cramped and uncomfortable. At Windsor their apartments were so primitive they had to ask ‘to have their chambers ceiled, and the partition, that is of boards there, to be made higher, for that the servants look over’.
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Elizabeth expected all her women to be in constant attendance and to put her needs above any personal concerns. Illness, unless it was severe, was no excuse for absence; neither were marriage or children. Elizabeth required complete loyalty and commitment. If any of her married ladies fell pregnant they were expected to continue to attend the Queen until very late in their pregnancy, when they could retire for the ‘lying-in’, and then return to court as soon as possible after the birth, leaving their children in the care of wet nurses and governesses. In an age where motherhood and marriage were deemed to be the highest state to which a woman could aspire, here was a group of ladies in attendance on an unmarried queen who defied convention without losing status.

Together these were among the most favoured women who would be at the very heart of the court day and night. While they were valuable companions, sleeping alongside the Queen in the dark or candle-lit Bedchamber, they were also bodyguards who played an important role in attending to and protecting the body of the Queen. As long as Elizabeth had neither husband nor successor, her life always would be in danger. Across the reign the risk of assassination was greater than the Queen being killed in open rebellion. Similarly, the women of the Bedchamber were closest to the Queen’s thoughts and moods, and courtiers and ambassadors continually looked to curry favour with this elite group of women in order that they might promote their interests and present their petitions. Indeed Robert Beale, then a clerk of the Privy Council, later prepared a memorandum of advice about the post of Principal Secretary to the Queen and explicitly acknowledged the importance of the women: ‘Learn before you access her Majesty’s disposition by some in the Privy Chamber, with whom you must keep credit.’
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To know the Queen’s mood would prove vital for her ministers.