The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (52 page)

Shortly after Harington’s departure, Sir Robert Sidney was able to write and tell him that the Queen had been ‘very pleased’ with his presents – some verses, prose and sweets: ‘The Queen hath tasted your dainties and saith, you have marvellous skill in cooking of good fruits.’ But, he added, ‘she doth wax weaker since the late troubles, and Burghley’s death often draws tears from her goodly cheeks. She walketh out but little, meditates much alone and sometimes writes in private to her best friends.’

Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth visited Sidney’s house at Baynard’s Castle, near Blackfriars. She came finely dressed in a ‘marvellous suit of velvet borne by four ladies’ and sat on an improvised throne to watch the entertainments. She ate and drank a little, ‘two morsels of rich comfit cake’ and a ‘small cordial from a gold cup’ and ‘smiled with pleasure’ as she watched her ladies dance and then went on a tour of the house.
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She tired quickly and on ‘going upstairs she called for a staff and, much wearied in walking about the house’, said that she would instead come another day.
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On 27 October, Elizabeth opened what was to be her final Parliament. Its primary purpose was to raise funds to repeal the Spanish invasion that, just weeks before, had landed in Ireland to support Tyrone’s rebellion against the English. At the opening ceremony her frailty was evident: the ceremonial robes of velvet and ermine had proved too heavy for her and on the steps of the throne she had become unsteady on her feet and would have fallen, ‘if some gentleman had not suddenly cast themselves under that side that tottered and supported her’.
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Yet despite her weak and ageing body, her mind remained powerful and Elizabeth, nearly seventy, could still rise magnificently to the occasion. On the afternoon of 30 November, a delegation of some 150 members of the House of Commons entered Whitehall Palace for an audience with the Queen. As the assembly kneeled before her and after the Speaker of the Commons addressed her, Elizabeth replied with one of the most celebrated speeches of her reign. She thanked members of the house for their loyalty and love and pledged her continued commitment to their welfare. ‘There will never [be a] queen sit in my seat,’ she told them, ‘with more zeal to my country, care for my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good.’ Elizabeth spoke with the courage and conviction of her younger self at Tilbury, boasting that God had given her ‘a heart that yet never feared any foreign or home enemy’. She told them, ‘thou God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my Crown that I have reigned with your loves … I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen as to be a Queen over so thankful a people.’As Sir John Harington remarked, ‘We loved her, for she said she did love us.’

But the realities belied such declarations of mutual love. When Parliament was dissolved in December, Elizabeth spoke of the many ‘strange devices, practices and stratagems’ that had been attempted against her and the realm.
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In October
,
customs officials had intercepted a chest bound for France. It contained a small box in which was found, ‘her Majesty’s picture in metal, and a kind of mercury sublimate which had eaten the metal’. The owner of the chest was identified as one Thomas Harrison who was promptly questioned as to why an image of the Queen was contained in such poison.
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Once again it seemed that image magic had sought to bring harm to the Queen.
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Harrison claimed that he was merely concerned with the substance from which the image was made and that it was alchemy not witchcraft that he was interested in. However, he had close ties with Catholic clerics in France and the image of Elizabeth was made for the second Great Seal of the reign. The seal was the ultimate symbol of royal authority, and so raised suspicions as to Harrison’s motives and left him open to charges of treason and sacrilege.
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As Elizabeth concluded her speech in Parliament, she said that ultimately only God had delivered the state from ‘danger’ and herself from ‘dishonour’.
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Elizabeth once again identified threats to the body of the state with threats to her honour. Her virginity was not simply a personal preference, but an act of self-sacrifice made for the defence of the realm.

*   *   *

More and more Elizabeth was tormented by, ‘the questions of the succession every day rudely sounding in her ears’. Bishop Godfrey Goodman recalled that ‘the court was very much neglected and in effect the people were very generally weary of an old woman’s government’.
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Increasingly ministers looked north of the border. The topic that the Queen had long refused to discuss could be ignored no longer: hope and expectation were now directed at her heir, not at her.

Robert Cecil had begun a covert correspondence in cypher with the Scottish King. Cecil told James that all knowledge of their communication should be kept from the Queen because, ‘that language, which would be tunable in other princes’ ears would jar in hers, whose creature I am’. Whilst knowing that Elizabeth would thoroughly disapprove of their contact, he said it was justifiable for the good of the state: ‘I know it holdeth … even with strictest loyalty and soundest reason for faithful ministers to conceal sometimes both thoughts and actions from princes when they are persuaded it is for their greater service.’ The two men agreed a secret code for their correspondence: Cecil was ‘10’, Elizabeth ‘24’ and James ‘30’. An element of concealment was in the Queen’s own interest, Sir Robert explained, ‘if her Majesty had known all I did … her age and orbity joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.
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The subject of the succession was so ‘perilous to touch among us’, Cecil continued, ‘as it setteth a mark upon his head for ever that hatched such a bird; next, on the faith I owe to God, that there is never a prince or state in Europe with whom either mediate or immediate her Majesty hath entered into speech these xii years of that subject’.
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James accepted Cecil’s advice to ‘enjoy the fruits of my pleasure, in the time of their greatest maturity’ rather than ‘hazard my honour, state and person, in entering the Kingdom by violence as a usurper’.
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The Pope, meanwhile, issued a secret brief to his nuncio in Flanders ordering all English Catholics to oppose any Protestant successor to Elizabeth, ‘whenever that wretched woman should depart this life’. Led by William Allen and Robert Persons, many English Catholics who were implacably opposed to James’s succession after he had shown himself to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause, championed the claim of Isabella, the Spanish Infanta.

There was also another potential claimant to the throne whose actions were causing Elizabeth some unease. Arbella Stuart was of royal blood and, some believed, was better placed than her cousin King James to inherit Elizabeth’s crown as she had been born on English soil. Arbella was also favoured by Catholic nobles with Spanish sympathies, after James had strengthened his ties with France. Arbella had been linked to a whole host of suitors in the late 1590s and it was even rumoured that Sir Robert Cecil sought the throne for himself by marrying her.
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Her grandmother Bess of Hardwick had always been determined to secure Arbella’s place in the succession and when she had visited court in 1592, she was confident that Elizabeth would use the opportunity to name her as her heir, but Elizabeth stopped short of doing so.
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During the years that followed, Lady Arbella was kept in strict custody by her grandmother first at Chatsworth and then at Hardwick Hall. The tight control forced Lady Arbella to the edge of a reckless insanity, which made her an uncertain and potentially dangerous threat to the Queen and to a peaceful succession.

So ‘thus you see,’ wrote the privy councillor Thomas Wilson, ‘the crown is not likely to fall to the ground for want of heads that can wear it’.
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58

Age Itself Is a Sickness

As Elizabeth approached her seventieth birthday, Bishop Anthony Rudd – undaunted by his blundering sermon years before – now delivered another. The diary entry of John Manningham, a London student at the Middle Temple, records that, ‘Dr Rudd made a sermon before the Queen upon the text, “I said yee are Gods, but you shall all die like men”, wherein he made such a discourse of death that her Majesty, when his sermon was ended, said unto him, “Mr Rudd you have made a good funeral sermon, I may die when I will.
”
’
1

Elizabeth, always reluctant to admit to any frailty or illness, invariably withdrew to her Bedchamber when she felt unwell or was in pain, ‘retiring herself from all access for three or four hours together’.
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That spring she began complaining of an ache in one of her arms. She had summoned a ‘cunning bonesetter’, a surgeon, who told her that a ‘cold rheumatic humour’ (rheumatism) had settled there which might be removed by rubbing and applying ointments.
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Elizabeth was indignant, her blood and constitution was of its very nature very hot and so she could not be suffering from a ‘cold humour’. According to Father Anthony Rivers, a Jesuit priest who was in London during these years reporting on events at court, Elizabeth banished the bonesetter from her presence and was ‘most impatient to hear of any decay in herself, and thereupon will admit no help of physic or surgery’.
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But her pain persisted,
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and it was soon reported that ‘the ache in the Queen’s arm is fallen into her side’. Rivers described how she remained, ‘thanks to God, frolic and merry’, ‘only her face showing some decay, yet sometimes she felt so hot that she would take off her petticoat while at other times she would shake with cold’.
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In June, Elizabeth told the French ambassador, the Comte de Beaumont, ‘that she was a-weary of life’.
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That summer Elizabeth made a short two-week progress in the vicinity of London through Buckinghamshire, Middlesex and Surrey.
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It was a desperate attempt to maintain her yearly routine. By August, Elizabeth’s pains had moved to her hip, but, defiantly, she continued to hunt every two or three days. Writing to Lord Cobham on 6 August, the Earl of Northumberland described how on, ‘Wednesday night, the Queen was not well, but would not be known of it, for the next day she walked abroad in the park, lest any should take notice of it … the day of her remove, Her Majesty rode on horseback all the way, which was ten miles, and also hunted, and whether she was weary or not I leave to your censure’.
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Elizabeth was determined to regain her health and vigour lest her courtiers think she was too exhausted by her activities. Rivers reported that a countrywoman who saw the Queen on her progress had commented that her Majesty looked very old and ill. A guard terrified the woman by warning that ‘she should be hanged for those words’.
10

Yet when it was necessary, Elizabeth could still rise to the occasion. Early in 1602, she had entertained the Duke of Bracciano, ‘very graciously; and, to show she is not so old as some would have her, danced both measures and galliards in his presence.’ In April, during the visit of the Duke of Nevers, John Chamberlain noted in his diary, how ‘the Queen graced him very much, and did him the favour to dance with him’, with a ‘disposition admirable for her age’ as the French ambassador noted.
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Normally the Queen no longer danced but watched others instead. The ambassador de Maisse sat next to her on one of these occasions and reported that ‘when her Maids dance she follows the cadence with her head, hand and foot. She rebukes them if they do not dance to her pleasure, and without doubt she is an expert.’
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Sometimes Elizabeth still could not resist dancing, when she thought she was alone. In 1599 was seen by the Scottish ambassador doing a ‘Spanish panic’, a dance with single and double steps and leaps to the music of a whistle and tabor, in her privy lodgings. Elizabeth retained her instinct for political opportunism and on one occasion when Sir Roger Aston, the ambassador from the King of Scotland, came for his audience she kept him waiting in a place behind a deliberately turned-back tapestry, from where he could see her dancing in her Privy Chamber to the sound of a small fiddle, performing
corantos
(a French dance) and other feats of dancing. He might then report to his sovereign how vigorous and sprightly she was, and that James’s inheritance would be long in coming.
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When the Queen was at Oatlands, celebrating her sixty-ninth birthday, she was visited by the Duke of Stettin-Pomeramia who observed her walking in the grounds as briskly as though she were eighteen years old. He was told she had been ‘never so gallant many years, nor so set upon jollity’.
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Shortly afterwards, the courtier Fulke Greville was able to inform Lady Shrewsbury, ‘The best news I can yet write your ladyship is of the Queen’s health and disposition of body, which I assure you is excellent good, and I have not seen her every way better disposed these many years.’
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However, there were now signs that Elizabeth’s memory was fading and this, together with her failing eyesight, meant she found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on state business. Robert Cecil warned the clerk of the Privy Council that he must now read out letters to her. On 8 October at Greenwich, some courtiers arrived to pay their respects to her; although she could remember their names she had to be reminded of the offices that she herself had bestowed upon them. Gradually Elizabeth was becoming weaker and at times now struggled to maintain the dignity of her royal office. Her councillors increasingly played host to Elizabeth at their own houses, to keep her in London and to avoid her travelling. In early October, Robert Cecil entertained the Queen at his new house on the Strand and found her ‘marvellously contented’, but on her departure, refusing any help to enter the royal barge, she fell and ‘strained her foot’.
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Weeks later when the Queen was expected to move from Whitehall to Richmond with ‘great pomp’, Father Rivers reported how she was ‘taken with some sudden distemper by the way, and so went in her closed barge, whereby our Lord Mayor and citizens, that rode out to meet her, lost their labour. She is not yet perfectly well.’
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