The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (53 page)

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In early December, Sir John Harington arrived at Whitehall in advance of the Christmas celebrations. He had just completed his
Tract on the Succession to the Crown
, although this was not something he shared with Elizabeth.
18
The work was dedicated to King James of Scotland and asserted James’s right to succeed to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death. Harington intended to send the tract to the Scottish King with a New Year’s gift, by way of currying favour. Knowing the Queen’s determination not to have the question of her succession discussed, Harington dared not have the work made public during the Queen’s lifetime.

Harington was granted an audience with the Queen and was escorted into the Presence Chamber and then down the corridor into the Privy Chamber where, seated on a raised platform, his godmother awaited him. His letter to his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at home in Kelston, Somerset, caring for their nine children, presents a vivid image of Elizabeth in decline:

Sweet Mall, I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity, too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery …
19

Elizabeth was troubled not only by illness but by ‘choler and grief’ prompted by thoughts of the Irish rebel the Earl of Tyrone and of the Earl of Essex. As she talked of Essex and his execution, Harington describes how she ‘dropped a tear, and smote her bosom’. Towards the end of the audience, the Queen rallied a little and asked her godson to come back at seven that evening with some of his witty verses. The poetry cheered her a little but after a time she told him, ‘When thou dost find creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters. Thou see my bodily meat doth not suit me well; I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since yesternight.’
20
The following day when Harington saw the Queen again, he described how her memory was playing tricks on her. She had sent for a number of men but when they arrived she angrily dismissed them for arriving without an appointment. Yet, as Harington wrote to his wife, ‘Who shall say that your Highness hath forgotten?’
21
No one dared to point out the Queen’s mistake or openly voice their concerns as to the seriousness of her condition.

Much attention at court had turned to life beyond Elizabeth, with some courtiers, as Harington described, ‘less mindful of what they are soon to lose than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.
22
Such apparent disregard for the Queen prompted Harington to reflect on his own relationship with her and the kindness she had shown him throughout his life:

I cannot blot from my memory’s table, the goodness of our Sovereign Lady to me, even (I will say) before [I was] born; her affection to my mother who waited in her Privy Chamber, her bettering the state of my father’s fortune, (which I have, alas! so much worsted), her watching over my youth, her liking to my free speech, and admiration of my little learning and poetry, which I did so much cultivate on her command, have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn
askante
from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude.
23

Nevertheless, as Harington admitted, he now looked forward to the accession of a king instead of, ‘a lady shut up in a chamber from her subjects and most of her servants, and seen seld[om] but on holy-days’.
24
He talked of the unpopularity of Elizabeth’s government, and contrasted the growing weakness and infirmity of the aged Queen with the youth of James VI. ‘Age itself is a sickness,’ he wrote.
25

In a letter to Dudley Carleton, John Chamberlain wrote that, having heard the Queen was unwell in December; he was expecting ‘no show of any great doings at court this Christmas’. Yet he was pleasantly surprised to find that the court ‘flourished more than ordinary’. There was, he said, ‘much dancing, bear-baiting and many plays’, as well as a great deal of gambling which the Queen continued to enjoy.
26
But by the end of the year, Elizabeth succumbed again to depression, described by Chamberlain as ‘a settled and unremovable melancholy’. She spent more and more of her time in her privy lodgings, surrounded by her friends, among them Catherine Howard, the Countess of Nottingham, the Countess of Warwick, Mary Scudamore and Dorothy Stafford.
27

59

All Are in a Dump at Court

On 21 January, Elizabeth left Whitehall and made the ten-mile journey to Richmond Palace, her ‘warm winter box’. Despite the ‘very foul and wet weather’, the Queen refused to put on her furs and instead wore ‘summer-like garments’, much to her courtiers’ exasperation.
1
Thomas, Lord Burghley, warned his brother Robert Cecil that, ‘Her Majesty should accept that she is old and have more care of herself, and that there is no contentment to a young mind in an old body.’
2

The Queen’s physical well-being evidently continued to impress visitors to her court although as De Beaumont, the French ambassador wryly noted, the ‘Queen’s confidence respecting her age’ is an illusion ‘promoted by the whole court, with so much art, that I cannot sufficiently wonder at it’.
3
Shortly after arriving at Richmond, she was reported to have begun to ‘grow sickly’ but continued her official duties through February, attending to the final negotiations for the Earl of Tyrone’s surrender in Ireland and on the nineteenth, entertaining the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli.
4
When Scaramelli arrived at Richmond he was escorted by the Lord Chamberlain to the Presence Chamber where Elizabeth waited to receive him. She sat on a chair on a raised platform surrounded by members of the Privy Council and many ladies and gentlemen, all being entertained by musicians. After many hours of preparation by her ladies, Elizabeth appeared resplendent, possessing the confidence of a much younger woman. The Venetian ambassador described her as dressed in silver and white taffeta trimmed with gold, her dress ‘somewhat open’ in the front which showed a throat encircled with gems and rubies down to her breast. Her hair was of ‘light colour never made by nature’, and she wore great pearls ‘like pears’ round her forehead. She had ‘a coif arched round her head and an Imperial crown, and displayed a vast quantity of gems and pearls upon her person; even under her stomacher she was covered with golden jewelled girdles and single gems, carbuncles, balas-rubies, diamonds; round her wrists in place of bracelets she wore double rows of pearls of more than medium size’.
5
It was an ostentatious and, to some, an absurd sight.

As the Queen rose to greet Scaramelli, he knelt down to kiss her robe but she raised him up with ‘both hands’ and offered him her right hand to kiss. The envoy then delivered his prepared speech on behalf of the Republic and congratulated the Queen on ‘the excellent health’ in which he found her.
6
Elizabeth greeted him in Italian, welcoming him to England, and then rebuked the Doge for not having sent an envoy to her before. It was ‘high time’, she said, ‘that the Republic sent to visit a queen who has always honoured it on every possible occasion.’ Scaramelli described Elizabeth as ‘almost always smiling’ and that she remained standing throughout his audience.
7

It was the first visit of an Italian envoy since the beginning of her reign, when the Doge and Senate had refused diplomatic ties with Elizabeth on the grounds that she was a heretic. Now, as English piracy threatened Venetian trade in the Mediterranean, Scaramelli had been sent in an effort to broker peaceful relations, and to see that Elizabeth’s government brought the pirates under control. As the ambassador handed Elizabeth a letter from the Senate, she responded gravely, ‘I cannot help feeling that the Republic of Venice, during the forty-four years of my reign, has never made herself heard by me except to ask for something.’ However she now assured him that, ‘as the question touches my subjects … I will appoint commissioners who shall confer with you and report to me, and I will do all that in my lies to give satisfaction to the Serene Republic, for I would not be discourteous.’
8

Scaramelli later reported that the Queen was ‘in perfect possession of all senses’, and added, ‘as she neither eats nor sleeps except at the call of nature, everyone hopes and believes that her life is much further from its close than is reported elsewhere’. He added, ‘the safety of her Realm is on secure foundation’.
9

In fact it was the Queen’s age and ‘her Majesty’s bodily troubles’ that were becoming the matter of most intense interest, anxiety and speculation.
10
Shortly after Scaramelli’s audience, Elizabeth had to have her coronation ring, worn on her wedding ring finger, filed off because ‘it was so grown into the flesh’. It was an event that her courtiers read as ‘a sad presage, as if it portended that the marriage with her kingdom, contracted by the ring, would be dissolved’.
11

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On 20 February, Catherine Howard, the Countess of Nottingham, died. She was the Queen’s cousin, the longest-serving Lady of the Bedchamber and one of her closest friends. The courtier Philip Gawdy wrote to his brother that the Queen had taken the death ‘much more heavily’ than had the countess’ husband, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard.
12
De Beaumont reported that the Queen was so overwhelmed by her grief for the countess, ‘for whom she has shed many tears, and manifested great affliction’, that she refused his request for an audience.
13
Elizabeth remained secluded within her privy lodgings, while the whispers of concern for her health grew louder.

By March, Elizabeth’s symptoms had become more alarming. On the ninth, Robert Cecil wrote to George Nicholson, the Queen’s agent in Edinburgh, that Elizabeth ‘hath good appetite, and neither cough nor fever, yet she is troubled with a heat in her breasts and dryness in her mouth and tongue, which keeps her from sleep, greatly to her disquiet’. Cecil then assured Nicholson that despite this, Elizabeth ‘never kept her bed, but was within these three days in the garden’.
14
Cecil proceeded to write a fuller report to Sir John Herbert, one of the secretaries of state.

It is very true that her Majesty hath of late for eight or nine days been much deprived of sleep, which you know was ever wont to moisten her body, and whenever she lacked it, she was ever apt to be impatient. This continuance for nine or ten days decays her appetite somewhat, and drieth her body much, wherein, though she be free from sickness in stomach or head, and in the day catcheth sleep, yet I cannot but affirm unto you that if this should continue many months, it promiseth no other than a falling into some great weakness of consumption which would hardly be recovered in old age.
15

Another letter from court by Father Anthony Rivers to a Venetian correspondent claimed that Elizabeth, ‘rests ill at nights, forbears to use the air in the day, and abstains more than usual from her meat, resisting physic and is suspicious of some about her as ill-affected’.
16
Rivers also wrote to Giocomo Creleto in Venice.

[The Queen now] complaineth much of many infirmities wherewith she seemeth suddenly to be overtaken; as imposthumation in her head, aches in her bones and a continual cold in her legs, besides a notable decay of judgement and memory, insomuch as she cannot abide discourses of government and state, but delighteth to hear old Canterbury tales, to which she is very attentive; at other times impatience and testy so as none of her Council, but [her] Secretary dare to come into her presence.
17

De Beaumont reported that the Queen,

Has not had any sleep during this time, and eats much less than usual. Though she has no actual fears, she suffers much from incessant restlessness, and from so great a heat of the mouth and stomach that she is obliged to cool herself every instant, in order that the burning phlegm, with which she is oppressed may not stifle her … she has been obstinate in refusing everything prescribed by her physicians during her sickness.
18

The ninth of March was the second anniversary of the execution of the Earl of Essex and this added to the Queen’s ‘melancholic humour’. On the same day an anonymous correspondent described Elizabeth as ‘infinitely discontented’. Her courtiers found the Queen’s low mood contagious, and Anthony Rivers reported that ‘all are in a dump at court’.
19
Elizabeth believed that since Essex’s death, ‘the people’s affection towards her wax more cold than had been accustomed’.
20
Lady Arbella Stuart had taken the opportunity of the anniversary to call for those who had loved Essex to act in
her
defence, claiming that her life was being threatened by the same faction that ended his.
21
As Scaramelli wrote, ‘it is well known that this unexpected event has greatly disturbed the Queen, for she has suddenly withdrawn into herself, she who was wont to live so gaily – specially in these last years of her life’. He added, ‘so anxious is she that rumours of this beginning of troubles should not spread beyond the Kingdom, that she forbade either persons or letters to leave any of the ports although when realising it was too late, she abandoned this’.
22
Another letter sent to Venice describes how ‘every man’s head is full of proclamations as to what shall become of us afterwards’.
23

Elizabeth then appeared to improve. On 12 March, Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland, reported to his brother, ‘it has been a troublesome and heavy time here owing to the Queen’s dangerous sickness; but now we rest in better hope, because yesterday she found herself somewhat better’.
24
Three days later William Camden noted that the ‘excessive sleepless indisposition of her Majesty is now ceased, which being joined with an inflammation from the breast upward, and her mind altogether averted from physic in this her climacterical year, did more than terrify us all’.
25
The Venetian ambassador to France, Marin Cavali, described how