The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (45 page)

From around the 1590s until the end of Elizabeth’s reign, satirists would often refer to the vulva in terms of a metaphorical space, describing it in sensual detail as smooth, soft, and moist and a place of delicious, intoxicating tastes. Such sexually explicit descriptions of the Queen’s genitalia in some late Elizabethan verse suggest a rejection of the Queen’s self-styled cult of virginity, perhaps in reaction to what many saw as the hypocrisy of her own court and Bedchamber. In Thomas Lodge’s
Scillaes Metamorphosis
(1589) – dedicated to ‘the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court and Chancery’ – Glaucus, the amorous sea-god, blazes his mistress’s body in sexually explicit terms:

But why alas should I that Marble hide

That doth done the one and other flank,

From whence a mount of quickened snow doth glide;

Or else the vale that bounds this milkwhite bank.

Where Venus and her sisters hide the fount,

Whose lovely Nectar doth all sweete surmount.

In its suggestion of cunnilingus and its explicit sexualisation of the female body, the poem describes a means by which aspiring men might gain favour.
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In Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis,
(1599) which became an instant commercial success, Venus is the sexual aggressor and it is she who dominates her lover, Adonis, and is consumed with sexual excitement. Rather than the traditional form of an aspiring youth courting his queen, Shakespeare creates a fantasy in which an older, sexually voracious Queen/Empress is forced to plead for the attentions of her younger male lover.
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48

The Physician’s Poison

Elizabeth celebrated Twelfth Night at the beginning of 1594 at Whitehall. As she sat watching the entertainments with Essex at her side, she was observed caressing him in a ‘sweet and favourable manner’.
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The earl flirted and laughed with the Queen, and they danced as the court looked on. The courtier and former spy Anthony Standen wrote, she ‘was so beautiful to my old sight as ever I saw her’.
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Elizabeth was in her element, dancing, displaying to all her health and vigour, with a handsome young knight, despite having now passed her sixtieth birthday. Yet the carefree scene belied a shocking truth. Essex had just uncovered a plot against Elizabeth and the principal offender, someone very close to her, had just been arrested.

Dr Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, had come to London in the winter of 1558 when he was in his mid-thirties. In 1581 he had become personal physician to the Queen, having formerly attended on high-ranking courtiers including Robert Dudley, Walsingham and until recently the Earl of Essex himself. As the Queen’s physician, Lopez had a dual task: the preservation of the body of the Queen and with it the survival of the Elizabethan state. He was one of a few men who would have had permission to attend on the Queen in her Bedchamber. Elizabeth liked and trusted him and granted him a valuable perquisite: a monopoly for importing aniseed and other herbs essential to the London apothecaries. Yet it appeared that Lopez used his position to mask treason; he had been leading a double life as a physician and a spy, a servant of the Queen of England and an agent of the King of Spain. On 28 January 1594, Essex placed his discovery in a simple written statement: ‘I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was her Majesty’s death. The executioner should have been Doctor Lopez. The manner by poison. This I have so followed that I will make it appear as clear as the noon day.’

Lopez had recently incurred Essex’s anger by revealing that he had treated the earl for syphilis.
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Besides seeking revenge for this awkward indiscretion, Essex was also keen to demonstrate his loyalty to the Queen and usurp the dominance of the Cecils.
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Since the death of Walsingham, Essex had been hugely active at the centre of an intelligence-gathering network. He had employed two of Walsingham’s former counter-intelligence agents as agent provocateurs to infiltrate the Portuguese-Jewish community in London. At first his agents intended to ‘plant’ evidence of a plot, so that Essex could rush to Elizabeth and claim credit for ‘discovering’ it. However, his agents had uncovered a ring of real Portuguese-Jewish spies who were found to be working for Philip of Spain.

Unbeknown to Essex, William Cecil had already infiltrated the group and was using a Portuguese-Jewish double agent called Manuel de Andrada, with the Queen’s physician, Dr Lopez, acting as mediator.
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Moreover, for the last three years Cecil had been encouraging Lopez as a double agent and using him to penetrate the Spanish spy network in England. However, what William Cecil did not know was that Andrada had encouraged the Spanish King to use Dr Lopez as a spy.

Essex’s agents discovered a number of incriminating letters, including one which Andrada had sent to William Cecil in 1591, claiming that, ‘The King of Spain had gotten three Portuguese to kill her Majesty and three more to kill the King of France.’
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Now that a clandestine correspondence with Spain had been unearthed, Essex moved to unmask Andrada’s three unnamed Portuguese assassins. They were found to be Manuel Luis Tinoco, Esteban Ferreira da Gama and Dr Roderigo Lopez. Tinoco revealed to Essex, under interrogation, that the Jesuits in Spain had sent him to England to help de Gama persuade Lopez to work for Philip. When asked whether Lopez would have been willing to poison the Queen, he confirmed that he would have been.

On 21 January, at Essex’s instigation, Roderigo Lopez was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.
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He was confined to Essex House, the earl’s home on the Strand, while his own house was searched. Nothing incriminating was found. He was then examined by William Cecil, Robert Cecil and Essex and gave convincing answers. After the first day of examination, both Cecils went to Hampton Court to tell the Queen that they were certain Lopez was innocent and the whole episode had been blown out of proportion by Essex in an attempt to whip up popular support for a new offensive against Spain. The Queen sided with the Cecils; she accused Essex of being a ‘rash and temerarious youth’ and said she knew Lopez’s innocence ‘well enough’. Angered by Essex’s impudence, Elizabeth sent him away, forbidding ‘access to her except only of four persons, besides the council and the ladies of nearest attendance’.
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Essex left court bent on proving Lopez’s guilt. His efforts reaped almost immediate rewards. Little over a week later, Lopez was committed to the Tower. Early the following morning, the doctor was examined before Essex and William Cecil and confessed, as Anthony Standen put it, ‘more than enough’. Under torture, or the threat of it, other suspects were also interrogated and insisted that Lopez was at the heart of the plot and that he had agreed to poison the Queen for 50,000 crowns paid by Philip II. This was the evidence Essex had been looking for. Worn down by relentless interrogation, Lopez agreed to all manner of improbable plots, signed his confession and so sealed his fate.

By the end of February, Essex had gathered enough evidence to have Lopez tried for high treason. Special commissioners were immediately appointed for his trial, and he was indicted at the Guildhall two days later. Tinoco and da Gama were also tried for treason. Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, opened the trial by claiming that Lopez, like so many other conspirators, has been seduced by Jesuit priests with great rewards to kill the Queen, ‘being persuaded that it is glorious and meritorious, and that if they die in the action, they will inherit heaven and be canonised as saints’. As Coke continued, ‘This Lopez, a perjuring murdering traitor and Jewish doctor, more than Judas himself, undertook the poisoning, which was a plot more wicked, dangerous and detestable than all the former.’
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Even graver was Lopez’s sin as, he was ‘her Majesty’s sworn servant, graced and advanced with many princely favours, used in special places of credit, permitted often access to her person, and so not suspected, especially by her who never feareth her enemies nor suspecteth her servants’.
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Lopez denied any intention to poison the Queen and claimed he had only confessed to save himself from torture. Now Lopez’s defence was premised on the very intimacy with Elizabeth which his accusers claimed he had abused. He had promised de Gama, his fellow conspirator, that he would ‘minister the poison in a syrup’, which, as Lopez explained during his interrogation, he had said ‘because I knew her Majesty never doth use to take any syrup’. Lopez was aware, as were the Queen’s ladies, that Elizabeth was wary of attempts to poison her and never took medication in the dilute form, because the thick, sugary liquid of syrup might hide the bitter taste of toxins; a last defence against her enemies. By saying he would poison her syrup, Lopez was saying he would never kill her.

Ultimately Lopez was found guilty of leaking secret intelligence to the King of Spain and his ministers, of attempting to stir up rebellion within the realm, and of conspiring to poison the Queen. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, as were the two Portuguese agents, his alleged intermediaries. However, the Queen remained doubtful of her doctor’s guilt and delayed giving the approval needed to carry out the death sentences. This provoked what government officials described as ‘the general discontent of the people, who much expected this execution’.
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Lopez was the Queen’s prisoner while he was in the Tower and her permission was needed for either release or execution. Doubtless Elizabeth intended to play a waiting game, perhaps until the affair had blown over and then Lopez could be released and go into exile, as he desired.

Such was her delay that the jurisdiction of the commission appointed to deal with the Lopez case collapsed and its members discharged. Elizabeth had resolved neither to release Lopez nor sanction his execution. However, six weeks later, and unbeknown to Elizabeth, new writs were issued out of the Court of Queen’s Bench, the senior criminal court in England. Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower, was ordered to bring Lopez, da Gama and Tinoco to the Court of the Queen’s Bench at Westminster Hall on the following Friday. The prisoners were then sentenced again before being delivered to the custody of the Marshal at the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark. Lopez and the others were now beyond Elizabeth’s protection: the warrant for their execution could no longer be blocked on grounds of the Queen’s special reprieve. Lopez and his accomplices were executed, without Elizabeth ever having signed a death warrant. William Cecil wanted to ensure that Lopez was executed to protect himself from a possible investigation and intelligence coup by Essex into his links with the Portuguese double agent Andrada. From Cecil’s point of view Lopez knew too much and therefore had to be silenced.

On 7 June, Lopez and his accomplices were hanged, drawn and quartered on Tyburn Hill; when Lopez announced that he loved the Queen as he loved Christ, the assembled crowd hooted with derision.
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Elizabeth allowed his widow Sarah to retain the whole of her late husband’s estate and to carry on living with her family in Mountjoy’s Inn in Holborn, a sign of her continued affection for, and perhaps belief in, her Portuguese physician.

The government quickly published an official account of the plot,
A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies of Late Time Detected to have (by barbarous murders) taken away the life of the Queen’s most excellent Majesty,
stressed that the King of Spain had attempted to take away Elizabeth’s life not only by arms or other warlike actions but by secret murder. Once again, ‘Almighty God, the just avenger of such horrible wickedness’ and ‘rewarded of piety and innocency’ had preserved the life of the Queen.
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49

Love and Self-Love

Early in November 1595, Rowland Whyte wrote to his master Sir Robert Sidney, son of the late Mary Sidney, from court: ‘My Lord of Essex, as I wrote unto you in my last, was infinitely troubled with a printed book the Queen showed him … yet doth he keep his chamber.’ The book which had been smuggled into England from Antwerp, was titled,
A Conference about the next Succession to the Throne of England,
and was dedicated to Essex. The preface was signed with the pseudonym ‘R. Doleman … from my chamber in Amsterdam’, but was soon recognised to be the work of Robert Persons, leader of the English Jesuits.
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The
Conference
discussed the claims of fourteen potential successors for the English crown. ‘Doleman’ disingenuously styled himself as an impartial commentator on the debate and declared that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion’.
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As such, the book rejected the Tudors’ right to sit on the throne and dismissed all claimants descended from them, including King James of Scotland and his cousin Arbella Stuart. The ideal successor to Elizabeth was held to be Philip II’s daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia,
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who could claim English descent through her father’s line back to Edward III. As ‘a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety’, who came from a rich kingdom, Isabella was less likely to ‘pill and poll’ her English subjects than the King of Scotland, it declared.
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‘Doleman’ also considered the benefits that would be brought if Thomas Seymour, the youngest son of Lady Katherine Grey, then married the infanta in return for the throne, thereby both satisfying the religious conditions and creating a good match, ‘for making of compositions of peace and union with the opposite parties’.

The book was not the first to be published abroad on the subject of the English succession, but Elizabeth’s government and James VI viewed it more seriously than the others. The English authorities interrogated captured priests closely about the work and anyone who was found to possess a copy of it came under suspicion of treason.
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In response to the
Conference
, Elizabeth showed a new wariness towards the Seymours. In July 1595 she ordered the book, which recounted the legal process that had been taken against the ‘pretended matrimony’ of Katherine Grey to the Earl of Hertford, to be placed on record in the Tower and forbade its removal without her express permission. A few months later she ordered Hertford’s imprisonment for the offence of trying to prove his son’s legitimacy.
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