The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (40 page)

In 1588, William Allen wrote an
Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland concerning the Present Warres.
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It was a tract calling on English Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth, whom Allen denounced in familiar terms as ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin’ to Henry VIII and his ‘Protestant whore’ Anne Boleyn, and a sacrilegious heretic guilty of ruining the Commonwealth.
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Elizabeth’s sexual depravity was its central theme. He wrote that with Robert Dudley, ‘and diverse others, she hath abused her body, against God’s laws, to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nations reproach, by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust’.
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Allen accused Elizabeth of having ‘made her Court as a trap, by this damnable and detestable art, to inta[n]gle in sin and overthrow the younger sort of nobility and gentlemen of the land’.
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According to Allen, Elizabeth was not simply unfit to rule because of her governance, but because of her illegitimacy and debauchery.

Allen’s pamphlet was printed and copies were prepared to be shipped over to England once the Armada had made a successful landing. Cecil immediately ordered that the
Admonition
be suppressed as treasonous. A royal proclamation was issued on 1 July 1588, subjecting to martial law ‘the importation, transcription, distribution and possession’ of

false, slanderous and traitorous libels, books and pamphlets … in covert and secret manner dispersed through this realm, wherein they do not only go about with most false and abominable lies to slander and dishonour her Majesty … but also by subtle and pestilent persuasions to withdraw her highness’s subjects from their due obedience, and to excite and stir the people to take arms against God and their sovereign and to join with foreign enemies …
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Throughout the spring and early summer, as fears were raised that a Spanish invasion was imminent, England’s defences were strengthened. In June a letter from the Queen to the Marquis of Winchester and the Earl of Sussex, Lieutenants of the County of Southampton, informed them of the ‘great preparations of foreign forces, made with full intent to invade this our realm and other our dominions’. Elizabeth ordered them to ensure that her subjects within their lieutenancies, be ‘in readiness for defence of any attempt, that might be made against us and our realm’. Watches were to be set in all towns at night and all suspicious persons to be detained. The hunt for priests and those that concealed them was intensified. To block the passage of enemy ships up the Thames, a makeshift barrier of huge, heavy chains and ship’s cables was locked together and stretched across the river from Gravesend to Tilbury, held in place by a cordon of small boats anchored in the river and by the masts of over a hundred tall ships laid end to end.
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Whilst Lord Hunsdon was to command the army to defend the Queen, Lord Thomas Howard was to lead the fleet and Robert Dudley, now in his fifties, was given command of the troops at Tilbury that were being mustered to engage the enemy.
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It marked a return to favour for the Earl of Leicester, who, ever since his ignominious return from the Netherlands had experienced Elizabeth’s aloofness.
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As preparations for England’s defence were made at home, the Queen’s ambassador in France, Sir Edward Stafford, continued to deceive his government by repeatedly sending assurances that the Spanish Armada was being disbanded and the threat to England had abated. A copy of one letter, in January 1588, was forwarded to Admiral Thomas Howard, in command of the English fleet. He greeted Stafford’s words with incredulity:

I cannot tell what to think of my brother[-in-law] Stafford’s advertisement; for if it be true that the King of Spain’s forces be dissolved, I would not wish the Queen’s Majesty to be at this charge that she is; but if it be a device, knowing that a little thing makes us too careless, then I know not what may come of it.
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If Stafford had made a mark in the margin to indicate this was deliberately false, then the government had forgotten its significance; otherwise to advise his government that Spain no longer intended to launch an invasion at a time when every effort was being made to get the Armada to sea, clearly amounted to treason.

On 3 May 1588, Stafford suggested the Armada was intended for Algiers. When, the following day, he finally reported that he had seen a letter in the study of Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, mentioning an enterprise against England, he speculated that it had been left out deliberately to deceive him and so was further evidence that the Armada was intended for some other place and purpose. His subsequent dispatches back to the English court reported similar spurious intelligence, designed again to mislead. On 16 June he told Walsingham that he thought the Armada was bound for the Indies; on 8 July he claimed that an outbreak of plague had driven it back to Spain and on 13 July he asserted that bets of six to one were being made in Paris against it ever reaching the Channel.
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Clearly the Elizabethan government did not rely on Sir Edward’s information alone and received other, more accurate, intelligence; however, the fact that no action was taken against the ambassador is striking. Perhaps the close position of favour that Lady Dorothy Stafford, Edward’s mother, enjoyed in the Bedchamber accounted for the Queen’s lenient treatment of him.

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On Friday 19 July, after months of rumour and false alarms, the Armada was sighted in the Channel off the Isles of Scilly. All along the English coast, beacons were lit to spread word of imminent invasion. The next day English and Spanish ships engaged in skirmishes along the Channel. On the night of the twenty-eighth, with the Spanish fleet anchored just off Calais, English fireships were sent downwind, forcing the Spanish fleet to scatter.
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The Queen’s forces, however, were far from ready and would not be fully mobilised for several weeks.

On 8 August, putting aside concerns for her own safety, Elizabeth sailed out on the tide from St James’s Palace to rally Dudley’s forces, the royal barge surrounded by a flotilla of boats carrying her Gentlemen Pensioners and Yeoman of the Guard. At Tilbury, Elizabeth was met with a fanfare of trumpets. Riding a huge white horse, she inspected the ranks of her infantry, accompanied by Dudley and the marshal of the camp, Lord Grey. Eight footmen rode with her, the Queen’s ladies behind them, and a troop of guardsmen bringing up the rear. Every man fell to his knees as the Queen passed and called on God to preserve her.
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In a speech which has come to define her, Elizabeth reconciled the contradiction of her womanly sex and her masculine courage:

Although I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too – and take foul scorn that Parma [the Duke of Parma, who was to invade from the Netherlands] or any other Prince of Europe dare to invade the borders of my realm.
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Here Elizabeth identified her virginal, impenetrable female body with her inviolable island realm. As her natural body was pure and unpenetrated so too would the body politic withstand any invading force. Elizabeth stayed at Tilbury until 10 August, when she returned to St James’s Palace.

Ultimately, Philip II’s Armada would be defeated by a combination of the English weather – storms and ill winds – and the skill of naval officers under the command of Elizabeth’s Lord Admiral, Baron Howard. The Spanish fleet had been forced out of formation by the attack of the fireships and at dawn the following day was attacked by the English off Gravelines in a decisive battle. What was left of the Armada was forced to retreat north to Scotland where, battered by storms and for want of supplies, it sailed hard back to Spain.

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At the end of August, the Dean of St Paul’s officially announced the defeat of the Armada, although weeks of uncertainty followed and with it the fear that the Spanish fleet would return. As Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London, described, ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They rather look like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’
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Even Elizabeth was persuaded by her council to stay away from the service of thanks at St Paul’s, ‘for fear that a harquebus might be fired at her’.
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Before the year was out, the Queen’s Sergeant Painter, George Gower, was commissioned to paint a huge portrait fanfaring the English victory over the Armada.
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Elizabeth is pictured in the centre between two scenes, one depicting English fireships being sent to wreak havoc on the Spanish fleet, the other showing the remnants of the Spanish vessels as they limp home. The Queen’s body, which is less a representative image and more an icon of sovereignty, fills the whole canvas: she is almost entirely encased in a magnificent gown, with huge, pearl-encrusted billowing sleeves, and velvet skirts. A large ruff and jewelled headdress dwarf Elizabeth’s ageless, smooth-skinned face. In her left hand she holds a feather; her right rests on a globe with her tapering white fingers pointing to America. By 1588 the Colony of Virginia had been founded, thereby establishing an empire in the New World. An imperial crown is pictured by her right elbow. Elizabeth is shown as the sun conquering the forces of darkness. A lace ribbon with a large bow is placed where a codpiece for a male monarch would otherwise be, and from it hangs a large teardrop pearl pendant. The pearl symbolises her virginity and is linked with the inviolable boundaries of the body politic. Elizabeth’s slight, feminine frame is subsumed within this exaggerated spectacle of her body representing the state. A direct link is made between Elizabeth’s virtuous chastity and the English nation’s emerging power; the strength and integrity of the English body politic depending on the strength and inviolability of the Queen’s natural body.
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Barricaded from Within

On 26 August 1588, Robert Devereux, the young 2nd Earl of Essex, staged a triumphant military review at Whitehall to celebrate the Armada victory. The Queen watched seated alongside Robert Dudley, Essex’s stepfather, from a window at the palace. Dudley was now restored to favour and regularly dined with Elizabeth in her Privy Chamber.
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Days later Dudley left court for Kenilworth and then on to the medicinal springs at Buxton, in the hope that taking the waters would restore his failing health. On the morning of Thursday 29 August, he wrote to Elizabeth from Rycote in Oxfordshire:

I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case, I continue still your medicine, and it amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my wonted prayer for Your Majesty’s most happy preservation I humbly kiss your foot.
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But just a few miles later, Dudley grew sicker and was forced to take refuge in the hunting lodge in Cornbury House in the forest of Wychwood in Oxfordshire. He was suffering with a ‘continual burning fever’ and ‘sore pains in his stomach’. He died at four o’clock in the morning of 4 September, probably from a malarial infection, aged fifty-six. His wife, Lettice, was with him when he died, though Dudley’s death would do little to ease Elizabeth’s hostility towards her.

Whilst the court celebrated the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth confined herself to her Bedchamber at St James’s Palace, locking the door and ordering her ladies away so that she might grieve alone. She had lost her greatest love, the man whom she had grown up with, had become infatuated with and adored. According to the report of a Spanish agent, the Queen remained in her Bedchamber refusing to speak to anyone ‘for some days’, as her anxious women and councillors gathered outside.
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Walsingham described how he was unable to conduct any state business with the Queen, by ‘reason that she will not suffer anybody to access unto her, being very much grieved with the death of the Lord Steward’.
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Finally, as concern for the Queen’s state of mind grew, Cecil ordered that the doors of her Bedchamber be broken down. Elizabeth now accepted that it was time to return to her duties; she rose from her bed, signalled that her ladies be admitted and prepared to have her public face re-applied.

In response to a letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury congratulating her on the Armada victory and offering his condolences for the Earl of Leicester’s death, Elizabeth made clear her distress and that she never wished to discuss the loss of her favourite again:

We desire rather to forebear the remembrance thereof as a thing whereof we can admit no comfort, otherwise by submitting our will to God’s inevitable appointment. Who notwithstanding His goodness by the former prosperous news hath nevertheless been pleased to keep us in exercise by the loss of a personage so dear unto us.
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Marco Antonio Micea reported to Philip of Spain that, ‘the Queen is much aged and spent and is very melancholy. Her intimates say that this is caused by the death of the Earl of Leicester’, but Marco Antonio thought it was more likely brought on by the ‘fear she underwent [of a revenge attack by Spain] and the burden she has upon her’.
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Elizabeth always rejected the idea that she had ever been in love, or at least allowed herself the time to love.

I am too much burdened with cares to turn my attention to marriage, for Love is usually the offspring of leisure, and as I am so beset by duties, I have not been able to think of Love. As therefore, nothing has yet urged me to marry, I have not been able to mediate on this man or that man.