Virgin: The Untouched History (25 page)

Elizabeth's kingly attitude toward her role as ruler played a significant part in her controversial, wily virginity. Twenty-five years old when she was crowned, Elizabeth had already declared a preference for virginity, having asked for permission to remain unmarried during the time that her younger half-brother, Edward VI, briefly occupied the throne. She had reiterated her desire "to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best lyked me or pleased me" again, during the period when her half-sister Mary was queen, when several continental potentates made offers of marriage to the young princess. But what had been acceptable, if eccentric, behavior coming from a third-place princess whose (hypothetical) children might constitute potential competitors for any children her half-siblings had became unthinkable once Elizabeth was queen.

The third and last of Henry VIII's children to be crowned, Elizabeth was, in light of her brother and sister's ultimate failure to leave any heirs, also the last Tudor standing. Elizabeth could either marry and have children or let the Tudor line die with her. Domestic and international politics added to the marriage pressure. England was a small and isolated country in need of allies on the Continent, and the person next in line for the throne was the staunchly Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret. Mary had the backing of France and other powerful Catholic countries on the Continent (her son, James VI, ultimately succeeded Elizabeth upon her death in 1603). But the notion of another Catholic queen on the throne, particularly in the wake of Bloody Mary's gruesome persecutions during the Catholic interregnum, sat exceedingly poorly with English Protestants for whom those persecutions were a still-ragged wound. When Elizabeth's first Parliament convened in 1559, they lost little time in formally petitioning the queen to marry.

Elizabeth responded with a statement on 10 February, in which she very carefully failed to refuse the prospect of marriage outright, but failed to welcome it either. The newly crowned queen said that if it pleased God to continue to maintain her in her sentiment that it was best she continue to remain unmarried, she would do so with pleasure. On the other hand, she said that she hoped that God would provide "in convenient tyme wherby the realme shal not remayne destitute of an heir that may be fitt to governe and peradyenture more beneficiall to the realm then such an offspring as may come of me." Leaving the whole issue in God's hands was the most politic way of refusing to say either yes or no.

This was the first of two parliamentary petitions that exhorted Elizabeth to marry, and the first of three corresponding statements from the queen. Over the course of the two petitions and the three responses—1559, 1563, and 1569—we can trace a fascinating evolution in Elizabeth's apparent attitudes toward marriage. The brash young queen ducking the will of the Parliament in 1559 had become a bit wiser and cagier by the time her second Parliament issued a similar petition to the now thirty-year-old queen in 1563. Somewhat more forthcoming now, although having in the interim rejected the suits not only of her own subject (and probable love of her life) Robert Dudley, but also of some of the most powerful men in Europe, including Archduke Charles of Austria, King Erik XIV of Sweden, and even her own half-sister Mary's widower, Philip II of Spain,
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Elizabeth appeared to take the question of an heir at least somewhat seriously.

In the first of two responses to this petition, she reminded Parliament of the story of the biblical Elizabeth, whom God had blessed with a miraculous late-life pregnancy. Drawing the parallel between herself and her New Testament namesake, she told Parliament that she had heard and understood their request, even if she might appear to be waiting for divine intervention on the matter. The second response to this petition, in November 1566, shows further softening of Elizabeth's antimarriage stance. For the first time, the thirty-three-year-old queen avowed that she would marry as soon as she could conveniently do so, "yf God take not hym awaye with whom I mynde to marrye." Her reasons for wanting to do so were clear: "I hope to have chylderne, otheryse I wolde never marrie." But she was equally clear, and absolutely unabashed, about the fact that the people who most encouraged the marriage would be the first to declare their disapproval of anyone she chose as a husband. Furthermore, she revealed with arch disdain that there had been some who had told her that "they never requyred more then that theye myght ones here me saye I wold marrie," condemning such facile sentiments with a scathing "there was never so great a treason but myght be cov-eryde under as fayre a pretence."

This was, perhaps, not so much genuine reconciliation to the idea of marriage as it was sheer strategy. Having eluded marriage as long as she had, there was little chance, barring some unprecedented unanimous agreement on the parts of Parliament and the Privy Council as to an appropriate choice of husband, that she would be required to marry. Elizabeth may also have felt that she could finally allow herself to verbally placate Parliament because her subjects were increasingly likely, for political reasons, to back her desire to remain unattached. The queen had many powerful friends among her subjects who treasured her deep commitment to Protestantism. Some of them had begun to realize that given the options available to her in terms of suitable husbands, a married queen might ironically be even less advantageous to the Protestant cause than a virgin queen without an heir.

This was dramatically demonstrated during Elizabeth's last courtship. It would have been a most unusual pairing even by today's standards, let alone by those of the time: in 1579 Elizabeth was forty-six; the Duke of Alencon twenty-five. The intent was clearly political, since a marriage between Elizabeth and Alencon would have destroyed the looming potential of an anti-English alliance between France and Spain. But the English were having none of it. They had become accustomed to their spinster queen, had little love for the French, and, with Mary and Philip still very much in the collective memory, remained disinclined to entertain the idea of another marriage between any English queen and a foreigner. John Stubbs, an anti-Alencon writer whose tract
Discoverie of a gaping Gulf where into England is like to be
Swallowed by an other French manage
appeared in September 1579, earned swift Royal retribution. For his temerity in questioning the queen's right to decide her own affairs, and not at all coincidentally for having been sufficiently impolitic to raise the question of Elizabeth's ability to bear a child in her forties, Stubbs and his publisher were both permanently relieved of their right hands.

The rapidly abandoned Alengon courtship was the turning point for Elizabeth's career as virgin queen. Before it, there had been the lingering possibility, however slight, that she might at long last marry. After it, the idea was no longer seriously raised: Elizabeth was past the point where she could reasonably be assumed to be fertile. From that point on, writes Helen Hackett, "the Queen would be unequivocally celebrated as ever-virgin."

From 1582 until her death in 1603, Elizabeth's virginity became superhuman. Portrayed as Cynthia, Selene, Diana, Vesta, or Athena, Elizabeth and her virginity were poeticized, glorified, and abstracted. Her virginity was no longer a matter affecting a mundane human body and its reproductive functionings but a metaphysical aura attached to a larger-than-life persona. The doctrine of the King's Two Bodies, which held that the king (or queen, if she ruled independently) had a "body naturall" of flesh and blood and a metaphorical "body politicke" the abilities and role of which transcended whatever infirmities might inhere to the physical body, had been invoked at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign to argue that the intrinsic instability and lesser worth of her female "body naturall" were not as important as the intrinsic stability and value of kingship. During the last twenty years of her reign, though, the public image of Elizabeth's, and England's, "body politicke" had become enhanced by the overlay of her hard-won and ultimately mythicized virginity. Prior to Elizabeth's reign, this attribute could have been understood only as belonging to the feminine and frangible physical body that temporarily occupied the throne. Now it stood for something far larger, grander, and much more formidable: virginity as bulwark, standard, and shield.

"Her Treasures Having Never Been Opened"

During Elizabeth's reign, new vistas opened in more areas than just the queen's reputation. For over a century, voyagers and explorers had been returning from fantastic sea journeys with tales of unthinkably profitable lands far beyond Europe's shores. Elizabeth herself, well aware of the trading opportunities such remote locales represented, chartered the East India Company into existence in late 1600 to help her country take advantage of what lay beyond the horizon. Aside from her political and economic interest in efforts of discovery, exploration, and settlement, the queen also shared an unexpected similarity with these exotic locales: a reputation for opulent and well-endowed virginity. Indeed Virginia Colony, the first English settlement in North America, founded in 1607, was named for the recently deceased queen via her most celebrated attribute.

To many, the effulgent virginity rhetoric of the European expansion—Sir Walter Raleigh's characterization of Guiana as "a country that hath yet her maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought," for example—comes as a bit of a shock. Elizabeth's virginity may have been the elegant stuff of classical allusion, but the virginity of the New World was usually the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of the brothel. The soil of the New World was seen as being, as Robert Johnson's
Nova Britannia
(1609) put it, "strong and lustie of its own natur." Even the rocky, difficult shores of the New England coast were praised as "Paradise with all her Virgin Beauties." Indeed, as Thomas Morton wrote in 1632, it seemed to the colonization-minded explorers as if these new territories yearned for the touch of European, Christian settlement "like a faire virgin, longing to be sped / and meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed."

This seductively idyllic vision of eager, fecund virginity was a powerful motif. In illustrations of the era of colonial expansion, the New World is often depicted as a naked or at least bare-breasted woman, her hair loose, her posture unashamed. These female embodiments of the land beckon, sometimes even from a relaxing hammock, just another specimen of the tame-looking game that gambols in lushly fruited forests. The Americas, and by implication the indigenous peoples who lived there, were clearly understood as desirable, forthcoming, and, most important, unspoiled partners who not only failed to resist but indeed received with interest the advances of European men.

Partly this was wishful thinking: Europe and the British Isles had become crowded, arable land was pushed to its limits, and the reward of incessant backbreaking work was often poverty, disease, and, in bad years, famine. The idea of a place where one scarcely had to lift a finger to provide for one's self was understandably tantalizing. What better symbol for such an environment than a welcoming, sexually ready woman?

Indeed the New World did contain vast unsettled land as well as other resources that appeared to be wholly unexploited and ripe for the picking, so the vision was not an empty promise. Not only that, but as explorers began to return from the New World and publish tales of their adventures on the other side of the ocean, they produced a steady stream of stories of sexual encounters with virgin women who, it seemed, yielded to the Europeans as willingly as did the land. In accounts like Carolina explorer John Lawson's, published in 1709, we find goatish and doubtless hyperbolic descriptions of sexual interludes not just with indigenous women and girls, but
eager,
"naturally" promiscuous indigenous women and girls, who began their sexual lives "as soon as Nature prompts them." Even better, Lawson claimed, these were females whose reputations or lives could not possibly be ruined if a horny colonist happened to indulge his desires, "A Multiplicity of Gallants never being a Stain to a Female's Reputation, or the least Hindrance of her Advancement, but the more Whorish, the more Honourable."

There is a strong stench of what we might now call "sex tourism" in some of these descriptions. Virginia planter and chronicler Robert Beverley described a sort of prodigal aboriginal harem of which visiting "Strangers of Condition" were invited by their hosts to partake. "A Brace of young Beautiful Virgins" would be chosen for the European visitor to the native camp, to serve him, undress him, and be his bedmates, one woman to either side of him. It was, Beverley promised, no platonic gesture, for the women would "esteem it a breach of Hospitality not to submit to every thing he [the visitor] desires of them."

Accounts like these stirred multiple reactions both on the ground in North America and back home in Europe. On the one hand, they strengthened the resolve of the religious to send missionaries to try to civilize and Christianize the New World's apparently habitually wanton indigenes. On the other, they represented an alluring prospect for the numerous single men who went to the North American colonies (Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas particularly) to seek their fortunes. These tales were so influential that when some white Europeans, like Virginian planter-statesman William Byrd, visited with Amerind tribes and did not find themselves the recipients of the sort of hot two-girl action promised by accounts like Beverley's, they reacted quite peevishly at not receiving what they obviously thought was their due.

To what extent such stories and claims might have been true is almost impossible to assess at this historical remove. It is likely that at least some of the indigenous peoples intended the sharing of their women to forge reciprocal alliances between the European newcomers and the people already living there. Barriers of language, culture, and custom, on the other hand, assured that such intent would easily (and perhaps sometimes willfully) have gone unperceived by the Europeans. In any event, most European men would not have considered such "savages" as serious partners, despite the fact that numerous early male settlers depended on their indigenous common-law wives to translate, navigate, and help them feed themselves in an unfamiliar land. But as the titillated response to John Rolfe's 1614 marriage to Pocahontas (and their subsequent celebrity when they traveled, sponsored by the Virginia Company, to England) proved, a fully recognized marriage between a European and an indigenous American was a curiosity with few parallels.