The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (43 page)

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William Cecil now introduced new defensive measures to protect the Queen and tighten access to court. He advised barring unnecessary people and limiting the numbers of servants. The ushers and clerks of the household would inspect all petitioners seeking an audience with the Queen. By proclamation, it was declared that ‘her Majesty forbiddeth all persons that are not servitors upon the council or upon other lords and ladies or gentlemen attending on her Majesty, to forbear to come to the court or near to the court’.
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No one should use the back doors at palaces, except for the designated servants who should keep them locked. Most importantly, the Knight Harbinger and Knight Marshal should prevent crowds from lodging within two miles of the court when on progress: ‘If any are found not allowed they shall be examined, and if they cannot give just cause be committed to prison.’
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On 17 February the council sent officers to every English port to search, interrogate and, if needed, detain anyone entering the country.
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Special precautions were to be taken against Irishmen in London and near Elizabeth’s court, and particularly those who had served in Sir William Stanley’s rebel regiment. A royal proclamation was issued announcing that some men had come secretly into the kingdom, ‘with full purpose, by procurement of the Devil and His Ministers, her Majesty’s enemies, and rebels on the other side of the sea, to endanger her Majesty’s noble person’. The proclamation ordered the arrest of vagabonds and deportation of Irishmen: ‘No manner of person born in the realm of Ireland without proper purpose or residence shall remain in this realm.’
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Whilst the proclamation attempted to restrain suspect persons from approaching the Queen, particularly when she went on progress, opportunities to do her harm abounded.
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Elizabeth and her advisers knew that royal progresses especially exposed her to attack, but she refused to limit contact with her subjects and declared she would rather be dead than ‘in custody’.
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As it was, suspicions of a second suspected invasion in 1593 kept her close to London and she spent most of the late summer and early autumn at Windsor.

The following year, Edmund Yorke, formerly a captain in Stanley’s regiment, gave himself up to the Privy Council. Under harsh interrogation, Yorke confessed to having plotted with Sir William Stanley, Father William Holt and Charles Paget, a ruthless English émigré, to kill Elizabeth. Detailed plans had been laid including what weapons Yorke and his accomplice Richard Williams would use. Whilst some of the group thought using a small steel crossbow with poison arrows would be most effective, Yorke ultimately agreed to shoot the Queen with a small pistol while Williams would carry a rapier tipped with a ‘poison’ made from bacon, garlic juice and juniper.
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By February 1595, both Captain Yorke and Richard Williams had been sent to the gallows.

These were times of heightened fear for the Elizabethan government. The Queen had come close, sometimes very close, to having been killed, and it was only the ruthless investigations of Cecil and Essex to unearth the threats, and so prove their own devotion to her, that had saved her from harm. The factional politics of the court, the anxieties wrought by the succession issue and the ambitions of disaffected English exiles abroad, all conspired to produce an atmosphere of intense fright and panic in the kingdom.

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Age and Decay

‘There is a rumour in London that the Queen is dead and hath been carried away to Greenwich, but it is being kept very secret in Court.’
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The gossip was traced to William Hancock, a tailor and servant to a musician at court, who vigorously denied spreading the story. He said he had heard from John Rogers, a chandler in Whitechapel, that the Queen was ill and that her sickness had caused her removal from Hampton Court to Greenwich.
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He was not discussing her death, he said; he was expressing concern for her recovery.

Soon all discussion of the Queen’s health and the succession was banned. Anyone who ignored the ruling risked charges of sedition and libel. When in February 1593 the puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name a successor he was promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. John Harington, the Queen’s godson, later recalled how, from his cell, Wentworth wrote, ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.
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Wentworth remained in the Tower for four years until his death, though he refused to keep silent on the succession.
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In early 1596, Dr Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, expressed similar sentiments in a bold sermon delivered before the Queen and the Lords in the chapel royal at Whitehall. After a brief survey of English history and a tribute to the blessings of the current reign, Hutton spoke of the duty Elizabeth owed, both to God and her people, to unequivocally appoint a successor. The uncertainty of the succession gave hope to foreigners to attempt invasion and bred fears in her subjects of a new conquest; ‘the only way to quiet these fears, was to establish the succession’. Sir John Harington subsequently recalled how after Hutton had finished the sermon everyone assumed the Queen would be highly offended and ‘imagined such a speech was as welcome as salt to the eyes’, or in Elizabeth’s own words, ‘to pin up a winding-sheet before her face, so as to point out her successor, and urge her to declare him’. But she responded magnanimously. She

supposed many of them were of his opinion, and some of them might have persuaded him to this motion; finally, she ascribed so much to his years, place and learning, that when she opened the window of her closet we found ourselves all deceived, for very kindly and calmly, without show of offence, as if she had but waked out of some sleep, she gave him thanks for his very learned sermon.

But that was not to be her last word. Having ‘better considered the matter, and recollected herself in private’, she sent Hutton a ‘sharp message’ which left the archbishop scarcely knowing whether ‘he were a prisoner or a free man’.
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The political pressures caused by war, poverty, disease and the torrent of conspiracies against the Queen, were all exacerbated by creeping signs of Elizabeth’s physical deterioration, her body the living symbol of an exhausted government. As Elizabeth approached her sixties, this prompted urgent and increasingly desperate attempts to recreate her former youthful appearance and reassure her subjects of her health and vigour. John Clapham, a servant of William Cecil, was in attendance at court in the early 1590s and in his ‘Certain Observations’ described what he saw:

In the latter time, when she showed herself in public, she was always magnificent in apparel, supposing happily thereby, that the eyes of her people, being dazzled with the glittering aspect of those accidental ornaments would not so easily discern the marks of age and decay of natural beauty. But she began to show herself less often so as to make her presence the more grateful and applauded by the multitude, to whom things rarely seen are in manner as new.
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With age came a greater need to control images of the Queen, to overcome the discrepancy between her weakening body, revealed only to the ladies of her Bedchamber, and her public image of strength and fortitude.
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In 1592 the artist Isaac Oliver produced one of the few images ever painted from life of Elizabeth as an older woman. Oliver had been granted a rare sitting with the Queen and, contrary to her own preference, he positioned her next to a window so a natural revealing light shone on her face. The painting was intended to be a pattern, kept in his studio for future repetition and so the details of her dress and jewels were left unfinished. Instead the focus is on Elizabeth’s pale and rather sallow face with tightly drawn lips and lively eyes. It was undoubtedly the most revealing, realistic portrait ever produced of the ageing Elizabeth; as far as the Queen was concerned it was therefore not a success. Elizabeth let her Privy Council know that portraits based on this model were unacceptable and her councillors swiftly issued instructions that ‘all likenesses of the Queen that depicted her as being in any way old and hence subject to mortality’ were to her ‘great offence’ and should be sought out and destroyed.
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Oliver was to be left in no doubt as to his mistake. He received no further patronage from the Queen, who looked elsewhere for a more flattering portrait painter.

Around the same time that Oliver was granted a sitting with Elizabeth, Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, the future brother-in-law to Oliver, was also admitted to the Queen’s presence. He had been commissioned by Sir Henry Lee to paint a full-length picture of the Queen to commemorate her visit to his home at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. The picture is huge; nearly eight feet high, the largest painted of Elizabeth and very deliberately intended to make a visual statement identifying her as the embodiment of the nation. She stands at the top of a globe, her feet positioned on England adjacent to Ditchley in Oxfordshire, her body encased in a richly embroidered and bejewelled white dress that sweeps across the country. She appears, Goddess-like, her face framed by a lace ruff and jewelled veil. Her body spans heaven and earth and is captured between two sky scenes; one dark and stormy on the left, another calm and serene on the right. Elizabeth is presented as having calmed tempestuous heavens and the sunshine after storms. As Sir John Harington later said of his godmother, ‘When she smiled, it was a pure sunshine, that everyone did choose to bask in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.’
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The ‘Ditchley portrait’ established the pattern of portraying the Queen in her later years. In future versions the face was rejuvenated somewhat and its features softened in order to conform to the obligatory ‘mask of youth’ pattern which was soon to be imposed by the government. From the mid-1590s, Elizabeth’s face ceased to be painted from life.
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With no heirs to the throne, all signs of ageing and infertility were removed in order to present a reassuring image of longevity and continuity.

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Many of Elizabeth’s longest-serving ladies, who had been with her since her youth, were approaching their final years. In March 1589, Elizabeth lost her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Fiennes de Clinton, who had been at the heart of the court for more than thirty years. Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, as she was then known, had joined the household of her young cousins Mary and Elizabeth in the 1530s, before entering the Princess Elizabeth’s service in June 1539. One contemporary described her as a woman in whom Elizabeth ‘trusted more than all others’ and they spent many hours in one another’s company. Lady Clinton’s favour was widely acknowledged and she was besieged by petitioners who urged her to present their suits to the Queen.
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When ‘Fair Geraldine’, as the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, described Lady Clinton, died, Elizabeth was heartbroken. Another link with her childhood had gone. The Queen ordered a magnificent funeral to be conducted at Windsor where her cousin’s body was interred next to that of her second husband, Edward Fiennes de Clinton, the Lord High Admiral.
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Less than a year later, Elizabeth was in deep mourning again. On 12 February 1590, Blanche Parry died, after fifty-seven years of loyal service. She was eighty-two and up until the final few weeks of her life remained in attendance on the Queen. Three years earlier, because of her failing eyesight, Blanche had been forced give up her responsibility for the Queen’s jewels to Mary Radcliffe, a former maid of honour, who was then promoted to become a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. In July 1587, ‘a book of such jewels and other parcels delivered to the charge and custody of Mrs Radcliffe, one of the Gentlewomen of the Queen’s Majesty’s Privy Chamber, as were parcel of the jewels as were in the charge of Mrs Blanche Parry’ was drawn up.
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Radcliffe, like Blanche, never married and would go on to serve Elizabeth to the end of the reign.

Despite her advanced years, Blanche’s death shook the Queen. One letter from court described the ‘great sorrow’ of the Queen and her ladies.
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For the first time in her life, Elizabeth had no one left who had been with her since infancy, and after the death of Kat Ashley, Blanche had been the closest thing to a mother that Elizabeth had. The news of Mistress Parry’s passing soon spread from the court. On 17 February, the Earl of Shrewsbury received a letter from Thomas Markham at Westminster informing him that ‘on Thursday last Mrs [sic] Blanche Parry departed; blind she was here on earth, but I hope the joys in heaven she shall see’.
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Blanche’s funeral took place in the late evening of Friday 27 February at the church of St Margaret’s chapel, directly in front of Westminster Abbey. Blanche had left £300 towards the cost of her burial but Elizabeth paid all the expenses for a ceremony befitting a baroness.
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Monarchs were not expected to attend funerals and so the chief mourner for Blanche’s obsequies was her great-niece, Frances Lady Burgh. Blanche was interred in St Margaret’s near her nephew John Vaughan, as she had requested in her final will. Five years later, a beautifully carved and richly decorated marble and alabaster monument was erected, with a painted effigy of Parry kneeling on a cushion placed beneath an arched recess. The effigy, which survives in the chapel, is dressed soberly in a black gown with a modest neck ruff and a black French hood. Her face is full of character, unlike the usual rather bland countenance of Elizabethan tombs, so it is likely that the effigy was sculpted by someone who knew Blanche. She has high cheekbones, pursed lips, slightly slanting eyebrows and piercing eyes. Underneath Parry’s kneeling figure is a plaque with the following inscription: