The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (55 page)

The proclamation was heard with great expectation, and silent joy, no great shouting: I think the sorrow for her Majesty’s departure was so deep in many hearts. They could not so suddenly show any great joy, though it could not be less then exceedingly great for the succession of so worthy a King.

By evening, the streets of London were lit up by bonfires, and bells rang across the city. There was no disorder, ‘no tumult, no contradiction, no disorder in the city; every man went about his business as readily as peaceably, as securely, as though there had been no change, nor any news ever heard of competitors’.
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As one court official wrote, ‘Such is the condition of great princes more unhappy in this respect than their own subjects, in that, while they live, they are followed by all men, and at their death lamented of none.’
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Regina Intacta

In the hours immediately following the Queen’s death, as her councillors left Richmond for Whitehall, Elizabeth’s ladies remained, watching over her body, ‘with charge [for it] not to be opened, such being her desire’.

Given the time taken to make the necessary preparations for a suitably lavish funeral, it was common practice for the bodies of monarchs to be disembowelled and embalmed upon their death. The bodies of Henry VIII, Mary I and Mary Queen of Scots had all been prepared in this way. The process, usually performed by surgeons, involved slicing the corpse open from the sternum to the pelvis and taking out the organs and other viscera. The chest and abdominal cavity would then be washed and filled with preservatives, herbs and spices, or sawdust, to prevent further decay. The body was then closed, wrapped in sear-cloth, and soldered shut into a lead casket, before being placed in a wooden coffin.

Yet Elizabeth, her body having long been a subject of prurient interest, slanderous gossip and speculation, had left specific instructions that her body should not be disembowelled or examined. Early modern anatomists believed changes in the size and shape of a woman’s uterus proved whether or not she had borne children,
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and Elizabeth may well have been anxious about what the surgeons might have found and the impact of rumours that an examination of her body might have spawned. Any finding that indicated she had been sexually active, physically malformed or had at some stage given birth would have rewarded her enemies, undermined the Tudor legacy, the religious settlement, and the late Queen’s claim to have lived and died a virgin.

Stories that Elizabeth was physically incapable of having sex had been commonplace for years. Ben Jonson and others had claimed that the Queen had ‘a membrane on her which made her incapable of man, though for delight she tried many’.
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Sir John Harington had repeated the rumours in his
Tract for the Succession
and, drawing on the testimony of his mother Isabella Harington, declared that the Queen’s virginity was a ‘secret of state’, yet one about which he had intimate knowledge:

To make the world think she should have children of her own, she entertained till she was fifty years of age, notions of marriage; and though in mind she hath ever had an aversion and (as many think) in body some indisposition to the act of marriage, yet hath she ever made show of affection to some men which in Court were her favourites, to hide that debility, enduring rather to run into some oblique among strangers of a fault that she could not commit, then to be suspected to want anything that belongs to the perfection of a fair lady …

Sir Christopher Hatton … did swear voluntarily, deeply and with vehement assertion, that he never had any carnal knowledge of her body, and this was also my mother’s opinion, who was until the XXth year of her Majesty’s reign of her Privy Chamber, and had been sometime her bedfellow.
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For Harington, both the Queen’s formal marriage negotiations and her courtly dalliances constituted an elaborate and extended charade: Elizabeth exposed herself to the defamatory gossip to mask her physical ‘indisposition’. Here the son of her former bedfellow reveals the Queen’s ultimate ‘secret of state’ by claiming intimate knowledge of the Queen’s intact condition.
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An intimate examination of the Queen’s body would have revealed the truth as to these rumours and speculations.

Most sources agree that the Queen’s wishes not to have her body opened or ‘embowelled’, though most unusual, were obeyed. The Venetian ambassador described how Elizabeth’s body was carefully guarded by her ladies and, ‘meantime the body of the late Queen by her own orders has neither been opened, nor, indeed, seen by any living soul save by three of her ladies’ – the Countess of Warwick, Helena Marchioness of Northampton and Elizabeth Southwell.
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John Chamberlain similarly described how the body ‘was not opened but wrapped in sear cloths and other preservatives’.
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Surviving financial records from 1603 also point to the fact that Elizabeth’s body was embalmed, wrapped in sear cloth, sealed in a leaden shroud and then placed in a wooden coffin which was ‘sumptuously lined with purple velvet, and finished with gilt nails’.
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Abraham Greene, ‘a plumber’, was paid for ‘Lead solder’ and for ‘the entombing of the corpse of her late Majesty at Richmond’.
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Whilst John Manningham’s account also insists that there was no disembowelling of Elizabeth’s body, he suggests that those responsible for preparing her corpse might not have done their job properly: ‘It is certain the Queen was not embowelled, but wrapped in sear cloth, and that very ill to, through the covetousness of them that defrauded her of the allowance of cloth was given them for that purpose.’
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Sear cloth – linen coated with wax – was extremely costly, and several yards of it would have been required to wrap a corpse properly.

However, there is one exception to the narrative that the Queen’s body was not opened that should not be readily dismissed. Elizabeth Southwell, in attendance upon the Queen’s body at the time, described how, as the Queen’s councillors left the Bedchamber to proclaim James King of England, Robert Cecil gave a secret warrant for a surgeon to open the Queen’s body.
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Elizabeth Southwell was about eighteen or nineteen years old in March 1603, granddaughter of the Earl and Countess of Nottingham and one of the Queen’s godchildren. Four years after Elizabeth’s death, Southwell converted to Catholicism and, having been in contact with Jesuits including Father Robert Persons, she wrote or dictated her account of Elizabeth’s death. No other account corroborates Southwell’s claim that the Queen’s body was opened, nor do any of the Privy Council records mention a warrant, secret or otherwise.
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By refusing to allow the Queen’s corpse to be opened and embalmed, the Ladies of the Bedchamber were very likely acting to suppress questions about Elizabeth’s virginity. In so doing they, and her councillors, may have been performing a final act of loyalty to their Virgin Queen by allowing her to remain
regina intacta.
Her councillors would also have been keen to avoid uncertainties over the succession by avoiding any difficult questions that an inspection of her body might have raised about possible illegitimate heirs.

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On the night of Saturday 26 March, two days after Elizabeth’s death, a torchlit procession of black-draped barges carried the Queen’s coffin along the Thames to Whitehall. Elizabeth was accompanied for one final time by her ladies, her Gentlemen Pensioners and household officers, together with a number of privy councillors.
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Upon reaching the palace, the coffin was carried to her Bedchamber which had been hung with yards of black cloth covering the walls, ceiling and floor. The coffin was laid upon her bed, which had been covered in black velvet trimmed with taffeta, and surmounted by huge new bunches of ostrich plumes.
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During the days and nights that followed, the Queen’s body was never left alone; her ladies were in constant attendance as it lay in state.
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Elizabeth Southwell claimed that as she attended the body, she heard a crack; kneeling down before the coffin she realised that the decomposing corpse had burst, splitting the ‘bord coffin’ and releasing the ‘breath’ of the corpse.
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It is not impossible that this had happened. The body had been soldered into a lead casket which could trap gases produced by decomposing tissues and cause the splitting of the body, lead, and wood. It is also true that if Elizabeth’s orders had been obeyed and her corpse had not been opened, then decomposition would have processed more quickly than in a disembowelled and embalmed corpse. Yet, no other account corroborates Southwell’s claims, and one would have expected such a spectacular incident to have been widely reported.

Southwell afterwards maintained that ‘no man durst speak it publicly’ for fear of Robert Cecil, who dominated the court during the days before and after Elizabeth’s death and who oversaw the succession of James I. Fear of ‘displeasing Secretary Cecil’ might have silenced other witnesses to the story. However, there may have been rumours of it suggested by John Chamberlain’s letter on 30 March to Dudley Carelton, who wrote that ‘even here the papists do tell strange stories, as utterly void of truth, as if all civil honesty or humanity’. It is also possible that the indecency of an exploding corpse, with its association with moral corruption, might explain why other accounts do not mention it. It is however more likely that the account of the exploding corpse was deliberately fabricated by Southwell after she became a Catholic. Such a story provided Rome with the final verification of Elizabeth’s innate depravity and moral corruption.
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In 1608, Robert Persons wrote
The Judgement of a Catholic Englishman, Living in Banishment for His Religion
. The tract was written against the Oath of Allegiance that the new King of England, James I, insisted his subjects take.
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Persons argued that James had been misled by bad councillors to enforce the oath which would require Catholics to deny the supremacy of the Pope. The supporters of the oath had portrayed Elizabeth as a godly monarch who had ruled with clemency and God’s favour and had only executed Catholics for treason, not for religion.
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Persons believed James was being wrongly encouraged to follow his predecessor’s example and so proceeded to enlighten him about Elizabeth’s character and the details of her reign. She was, he claims, a godless tyrant who persecuted loyal Catholics for their religion, and, to prove his point, he focused on the circumstances of Elizabeth’s death.

At the time, an individual’s death was believed to indicate whether or not they had lived a good life and had achieved salvation. Robert Persons therefore attacked Elizabeth’s virtue with his knowledge about her ‘lamentable end’ which he had received from ‘a person of much credit that was present at all her last sickness, combats and death and related all that passed as eyewitness’.
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This was clearly a reference to Elizabeth Southwell. Persons then went on to talk of the Queen’s dishonourable birth to a woman who ‘was never King Henry’s lawful wife’ and Elizabeth’s role in the Thomas Seymour affair. All these events, Persons claimed, connected her sexual immorality with political illegitimacy. It was the charge that Catholic propaganda had been making for years, but now, it seemed, there was actual corroboration that Elizabeth’s body was corrupt.

Following a rebuttal of Persons’s account by William Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, the Queen’s chaplain who had been present at her death, Persons wrote a longer and more detailed tract.
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A Discussion of the Answer of Mr William Barlow
included the majority of Elizabeth Southwell’s account of the Queen’s last days, culminating in her death, including the opening of her body against her wishes and the explosion of her corpse. In both of Persons’s accounts, Elizabeth’s natural, corrupt body is connected to the illegitimate and corrupt body politic. Although he does not identify any of the people he mentioned, in his retelling of Southwell’s account, he constantly refers to the women who were physically or emotionally close to the Queen to verify his version of events. Just as ambassadors at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign needed her Privy Chamber women for information about the health, fertility and virginity of her natural body, now Robert Persons, a Catholic Jesuit, was invoking the women to authenticate his account. As such the Queen’s closest women and their knowledge of the Queen’s body could be used to attack or defend her monarchical authority.

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The Queen’s Effigy

Immediately after Elizabeth’s death, instructions were issued for the construction of a life-like waxwork and wooden effigy of the Queen. This was a medieval custom which was used to maintain continuity and sustain the fiction of the Queen’s ‘two bodies’ during the period before the funeral. As the natural body would begin to decay and the political body was threatened by disorder and usurpation, the effigy sought to preserve an ‘immortal dignity’ for the deceased monarch.
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The face of the effigy which, as Scaramelli described, was ‘carved in wood and coloured so faithfully that she seems alive’, representing Elizabeth’s forever youthful face, and completed with a flaming red wig, would therefore become the focus of attention and grief.
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The Venetian ambassador reported with some surprise that at Whitehall:

The council waits on [the Queen] continually with the same ceremony, the same expenditure, down to her very household and table serve, as though she were not wrapped in many a fold of sear cloth, and hid in such a heap of lead, of coffin, of pall, but was walking as she used to do at this season, about the alleys of her gardens. And so, in accordance with ancient custom will it continue till the King gives orders for her funeral.
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