The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (54 page)

The Queen of England’s illness is inflammation and a swelling in the throat, contracted by sitting late at court. On retiring she felt the beginning of the mischief, which at once caused the entire loss of appetite the first day, and the second deprived her of sleep; and for two days she went without nourishment, but would never submit to take medicine. She saw some rose water on her table and some currants, and she took a fancy for some. After her forehead was bathed she fell asleep. When she woke the gathering in her throat burst, and the attendants were alarmed lest the blood should suffocate her, or cause her to break a blood vessel.
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De Beaumont’s dispatch, written on 14 March, detailed how

The Queen was given up three days ago; she had lain long in a cold sweat, and had not spoken. A short time previously she said, ‘I wish not to live any longer, but desire to die.’ Yesterday and the day before she began to rest and found herself better after having been greatly relieved by the bursting of a small swelling in the throat. She takes no medicine whatever, and has only kept her bed two days; before this she would on no account suffer it, for fear (as some suppose) of a prophecy that she should die in her bed. She is moreover said to be no longer in her right senses: this, however, is a mistake; she has only had some slight wanderings at intervals.
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Elizabeth’s condition was monitored closely and reported across Europe. On 15 March, Sir Noel de Caron, the Dutch ambassador, wrote to the deputy of the States in Paris with details of the ‘defluxion’ in her throat which left the Queen ‘like a dead person’.
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But de Caron assured the deputy that although Elizabeth had been ill for a fortnight and not slept for ‘10 or 12 days’ she was beginning to recover: ‘for the last three or four nights she has slept four or five hours, and also she begins to eat and drink something’.
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When Robert Cecil and John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, knelt down on their knees to beg Elizabeth to eat and take her medicine, the ambassador reported, ‘she was angry with them for it, and said, that she knew her own strength and constitution better than they; and that she was not in such danger as they imagin’d’.
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But within days her condition deteriorated alarmingly. By 18 March, Cecil’s secretary wrote: ‘She began to be very ill: whereupon the [lords] of the counsel were sent for to Richmond.’
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The Queen’s musicians were also summoned because, de Beaumont speculated, ‘she means to die as cheerfully as she lived’. He described her condition in vivid detail:

The Queen is already quite exhausted, and sometimes, for two or three days together, does not speak a word. For the last two days she has her finger almost always in her mouth, and sits upon cushions, without rising or lying down, her eyes open and fixed on the ground. Her long wakefulness and want of food have exhausted her already weak and emaciated frame, and have produced heat in the stomach, and also the drying up of all the juices, for the last ten or twelve days.
32

As the symptoms worsened, Elizabeth’s councillors began to make preparations for her death and to take steps to avoid a much feared civil war over the succession. John Stow reported that as the Queen grew ‘dangerously sick’ in March, ‘straight watches were kept in the City of London, with warding at the gates, lanterns with lights hanged out to burn all the night’.
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On 12 March, Chief Justice Popham urged Robert Cecil to fortify London because ‘the most dissolute and dangerous people of England are there, and upon the least occasion will repair thither’.
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Three days later warrants were issued to local government officials to assist the Countess of Shrewsbury ‘in suppressing some disorderly attempts and riots intended by certain ill-affected persons’ who wanted Arbella Stuart, in the countess’s custody, to be placed on the throne.
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The following day the Earl of Shrewsbury was ordered by the Privy Council to ‘suppress all uncertain and evil rumours concerning the state of the Queen’s health … and also to prevent all unlawful assemblies and disorderly attempts, which such rumours may breed in the country about [him]’.
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The Earl of Northumberland wrote to James VI to tell him about the steps being taken to maintain order: ‘all such rogues as might be apt to stir … are sent unto the Low Countries’, and, as John Clapham noted, ‘all wandering and suspected persons … in most parts of the realm’ are gaoled.
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On 17 March, Scaramelli reported that ‘five hundred vagrants were seized in the taverns and elsewhere, under pretext of sending them to serve the Dutch, and are still kept as a precaution under lock and key on that pretence’.
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Three weeks later he described how ‘foreigners to the number of five hundred were shipped over to Holland, and a like number of Catholics were imprisoned’.
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Theatres in London, Middlesex and Surrey were shut to prevent public gatherings and ports closed to secure England against rebellion or invasion and to control the flow of information to the continent. The guards at Richmond were doubled and the Queen’s jewels and silver were locked in the Tower with the crown jewels.

On Saturday 19 March, Robert Carey arrived at Richmond. It was likely to have been his sister Lady Philadelphia Scrope that had warned him that the Queen was dying. Carey had ready access to the privy lodgings in the final weeks of her life and witnessed her decline.
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When he was admitted on the Saturday night, he found Elizabeth in one of her ‘withdrawing chambers sitting low upon her cushions’. She called him to her and he kissed her hand. It was his ‘chiefest happiness to see her in safety and in health’, he told her, which he hoped might ‘long continue’. Elizabeth then took him by the hand and, wringing it hard, said, ‘No, Robin I am not well’, and then with long and heavy sighs, proceeded to tell him about her ill health and how her heart had been ‘sad and heavy for ten or twelve days’. Carey was distressed at seeing her ‘plight’ and remarked that ‘for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded’. Despite his best efforts to cheer Elizabeth, he found her ‘melancholy humour’ to be ‘deep-rooted in her heart’. He described how she had ‘come to look upon herself as a miserable forlorn woman’, and talked of how she no longer had anyone she could trust and believed that her authority among the people is now ‘sensibly decayed’.
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The following morning Carey returned to see the Queen at Richmond. He had expected to see her in the chapel for the morning service and gathered with the rest of the congregation in the long narrow room with pews either side. But ‘after eleven o’clock one of the Grooms [of the Chambers] came out, and bade make ready for the Private Closet.’ The Private Closet was a room just off the passage way between the Presence Chamber and the Privy Chamber where the Queen’s chaplain held private religious services. But Elizabeth did not appear there either. Instead ‘she had cushions laid for her in the Privy Chamber, hard by the Closet door; and there she heard service’. As Carey wrote, ‘From that day forward she grew worse and worse.’
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Councillors, courtiers, ambassadors and other visitors at court now waited for news from within the Queen’s privy lodging. John Clapham was among those watching every move of the privy councillors who ‘were seen to pass to and fro, sometimes with heavy countenances, as betraying their fears, and sometimes again more cheerful’.
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The Dutch ambassador Noel de Caron observed those who had access to the Queen, ‘being between the Coffer Chamber and [the Queen’s] Bedchamber, he saw great weeping and lamentation among the lords and ladies’, and ‘perceived that there was no hope that Her Majesty could escape’.
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The capital held its breath. Father William Weston, who was then confined in the Tower of London, described how, ‘a strange silence descended on the whole city, as if it were under interdict and divine worship suspended. Not a bell rang out, not a bugle sounded – though ordinarily they were often heard.’
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As ‘variable rumours’ of the Queen’s death swept across London, those who lived outside the city walls brought their plate and jewels to the city where ‘continual strong watches’ were kept.
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People went to churches ‘to be assured whether the Queen was living or dead’ and to pray for her.
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By mid-March, Elizabeth had stopped eating and bathing, and was refusing to be undressed or put to bed. As John Chamberlain reported, she ‘had a persuasion that if she once lay down she should never rise’ and so the Queen ‘could not be gotten to her bed in a whole week’. Determined not to go to her deathbed, Elizabeth ‘sat up for whole days, supported by pillows mostly awake and speaking not at all’.
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The once iconic beauty, heralded for her magnificence and splendour, now spent her days lying on cushions on the floor, fully dressed, her women kneeling down and tending to her.

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Deathbed

As Elizabeth grew weaker, her physicians and privy councillors sent for the Earl of Nottingham, her Lord Admiral.
1
When he told Elizabeth to have courage and that she should retire to her Bedchamber, she is said to have responded, ‘If you were in the habit of seeing such things in your bed as I do when in mine, you would not persuade me to go there.’ But finally, ‘by fair means’ and ‘by force’, her frail body was carried and placed in her high wooden bed, with its carved beasts and satin headboard, topped with ostrich plumes and spangles of gold.
2

The Queen’s life was drawing to an end, and, according to de Beaumont, ‘had been given up by all the physicians’. Once she was in bed she seemed to feel better and asked for meat broth, ‘which gave some fresh hopes’. However soon after, her voice began to fail; she ate nothing more, and lay motionless on one side ‘without speaking or looking at anybody’.
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Young Elizabeth Southwell, who cared for Elizabeth in her final days, later described the Queen’s torment as she lay dying.
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The Queen requested a ‘true looking glass’ and when she caught sight of her reflection exclaimed that it was the first time in twenty years that she had truly seen herself. ‘All those who had commended and flattered her ‘she now banished from her chamber’.
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This incident also appears in the memoirs of John Clapham: ‘It is credibly reported that not long before her death, she had a great apprehension of her own age and declination by seeing her face, then lean and full of wrinkles, truly represented to her in a glass; which she a good while very earnest beheld, perceiving thereby how often she had been abused by flatterers.’
6

On 23 March, the law student John Manningham went to the court at Richmond Palace to hear Dr Henry Parry preach, and ‘to be assured whether the Queen were living or dead’.
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Later the same day, he dined with Parry in the Privy Chamber and heard reports of the Queen’s condition from him and her other chaplains. They described how Elizabeth ‘took great delight in hearing prayers’ and would ‘often at the name of Jesus lift up her hands and eyes to heaven’. By now Elizabeth had lost the ability to speak and so ‘made signs’ to summon her prelates. She would not hear the archbishop speak of hope of a longer life, but when he ‘prayed or spoke of heaven’ she would hug his hand.
8

That same afternoon, Elizabeth responded to the Privy Council’s request to see her and motioned that they come before her. When asked whether she agreed that King James of Scotland should be her successor, Robert Carey described that she lifted up her hand to her head, as a sign that James should be king.
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At six o’clock in the evening, the Queen motioned for Archbishop Whitgift and her other chaplains to come and pray with her. ‘I went with them,’ Carey recalled, ‘full of tears to see the heavy sight’ as her chaplains surrounded her bed. Elizabeth was lying on her back with one arm hanging out of the bed. The archbishop told her that although she had been a great queen, she now had to yield an account of ‘her stewardship to the King of Kings’. For the next few hours Whitgift knelt quietly praying at her bedside. When he finally rose to leave, Elizabeth ‘made a sign with her hand’ for him to stay on his knees. Carey’s sister, Lady Scrope, knowing her Majesty’s meaning, told the bishop the Queen desired that he continue to pray.
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Finally all but the Queen’s women that were in attendance on her, remained in the Bedchamber, and it was in their company that she breathed her last.
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Elizabeth died between two and three in the morning on Thursday 24 March. ‘Her Majesty departed this life, mildly, like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,’ reported Parry, her chaplain.
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*   *   *

The Privy Council immediately moved from Richmond to Whitehall, where they re-convened. By ten o’clock in the morning the proclamation of the accession of King James I of England was made at the palace gates. Over the next few hours it was read at locations across the city and in the days that followed across the whole country.
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As soon as the Queen was dead, a message was sent to Robert Carey who immediately went to the Coffer Chamber where he found ‘all the ladies weeping bitterly’.
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There his sister, Lady Philadelphia Scrope, passed him a sapphire ring, which had been given to her by King James VI to be used as a sign of the Queen’s death.
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Carey set off for Scotland in haste and reached Edinburgh less than three days later, arriving at Holyrood Palace at six o’clock on the night of 26 March with news of James’s accession.

As the Queen’s passing was made known, John Manningham wrote of the sense of bewilderment and suspense in London. There was a great fear of ‘garboiles’ (disturbances) and uncanny quiet across the capital, as news spread that James was now King of England: