In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I

by Amy Licence

  Within months, the queen believed herself pregnant. Her menstruation ceased, she felt queasy in the mornings and rapidly put on weight: there seemed little cause to doubt the evidence. Given the history of her step-mothers, Mary was aware of the potential dangers of childbirth; in addition, her triumphal entry into London in July 1553 had coincided with the death of her favourite, Jane Browne, whilst giving birth to twins. An added danger existed in the scope for Philip’s control over her heirs, in the event of her premature death. In January 1555, an ordinance was passed to provide for the education of the children of the king and queen, if the worst were to occur. In the spring of 1555, Mary anticipated her arrival, suggesting a conception date around the wedding night. Froude suggests she retired to Hampton Court at the end of April, with rockers, nurses and cradle at the ready: circulars were printed and signed by Philip and Mary, ready for the insertion of day and month, spreading news of the arrival of a prince. Retiring to her sumptuously provided chambers looking down to the palace gardens and Thames, all Mary had to do was wait. At the end of the month a false report that she had given birth was recorded by London diarist Henry Machyn: tidings ‘came to London that the Quen’s grace was delevered of a prynce and so ther was great ryngyng through London … and the morrow after yt was turned odur-ways to the plesur of God’.11 The Venetian Ambassador reported that bonfires were lit and bells were rung, whilst the whole of London feasted in celebration. Embarrassingly, though, no child had been born. Other reports claimed that Mary was not in fact pregnant, but that a plot existed to smuggle a child into the palace and pass it off as her heir. This was a long-established fable, found back in the twelfth-century life of Hugh of Lincoln, where a desperate woman faked a pregnancy by putting a pillow up her dress, then adopting the child of a peasant. Mary continued to wait; in late May she was seen walking about the garden, ‘stepping’ so well it seemed unlikely the birth was imminent. Her doctors revised her due date but Philip was already having doubts. She remained at Hampton Court through the summer until it became clear there was no child; the decisive failure was sealed when in August she left for Whitehall. Did Mary think of her mother during those months? If so, it must have felt like history was repeating itself. It is unclear how much she knew of Catherine’s gynaecological history. Was this an inherited problem, a psychosomatic phantom pregnancy or perhaps an illness? With hindsight, Mary’s death, following soon after second occurrence of these symptoms, might suggest some form of ovarian cancer or similar condition. The early onset of ovarian cancer can produce bloating, back pain, tiredness, loss of appetite and constipation as well as the build-up of fluid in the abdomen, all of which can be confused with signs of pregnancy. At such a remove, it is impossible to claim whether this was directly related to her death or whether she was suffering from such a condition by the summer of 1558, but it remains a possibility.

  Almost as soon as Mary had accepted there would be no child, Philip left the country. A crisis in the Netherlands required his attention but Mary was heartbroken at his absence and felt it as a personal criticism of her gynaecological failure. It is this combination of circumstances that historians12 have sometimes used to explain the sharp increase in the persecution of Protestants that then began in earnest: to Mary’s mind, God had punished her for failing to restore the ‘true’ religion and she needed to redress this. The years 1555 to 1558 were witness to a savage campaign using the Spanish inquisition method of burning heretics, rather than the usual English hanging, drawing and quartering. Recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of 1563, this earned Mary the popular epithet of ‘bloody’ and has understandably coloured interpretations of her reign. Women numbered among the martyrs included those who not only held fast to their faith but administered or sheltered others; many of those burned were from the artisan and lower classes such as Alice Driver, who had driven her father’s plough, Agnes Potten, the wife of a shoemaker, Joan Trunchfield, wife of a brewer, and Joan Waste, a blind rope-maker. However, in terms of Mary’s religious conviction, the remedy was beyond her control whilst Philip was out of the country. God could hardly bless her with a child whilst she was unable to conceive; additionally, gossip about her husband’s liaisons with women at the Flemish court may have reached her. She wrote to his father, Charles, begging for the return of her ‘chief joy and comfort’, without whom the kingdom was in a ‘miserable plight’.13 Yet foreign commitments kept Philip abroad until March 1557, when he returned to England to organise a campaign against the French. They were reunited at Greenwich where Mary might have worn the embroidered sleeves of cloth of silver given to her by Elizabeth or the dress of white tissue or the Spanish gown of black velvet furred with sable Mary herself had ordered for his return: no doubt she was keen to impress him after such a lengthy absence. By the time Philip departed to lead the forces against the French in early July, Mary was again convinced she had conceived. This time, few people believed her. It was also the last time she would see her husband.

  In January the following year, Mary was convinced that she was drawing towards the end of her pregnancy and anticipated the birth of a child sometime within the next few weeks. Philip learned the news from Reginald Pole, Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury; Philip wrote to Pole that the news had given him ‘greater joy’ than he could express, ‘as it is the one thing in the world I have most desired and which is of the greatest importance for the cause of religion and the welfare of our realm’.14 Privately, he was sceptical, as were the majority of her court, although they dared not contradict the queen. Her own doubts are indicated by her claim that she delayed announcing the news until she was herself certain. By the time March arrived in 1558, eight months had elapsed since Philip’s departure, yet no lying-in plans had been made nor prayers said for the queen’s delivery. That month she made her will; ‘thinking myself to be with child … foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children’.15 As the weeks passed and no child arrived, the matter was dropped; courtiers and doctors went about their business with no mention of the queen’s latest humiliation, which must have been ignominious enough for the ageing Mary. She begged Philip to return to her but they disagreed over the question of Elizabeth’s marriage to the Duke of Savoy and their letters became acrimonious. The country was on high alert in case of invasion by the French, who had regained Calais; seditious anti-Spanish pamphlets flooded the capital and disease struck. Wriothesley recorded that ‘divers strange and new sickenesses’ were claiming many lives: it has been variously estimated that the death rate that summer was 40 per cent, or 124 per cent above the national average in afflicted places. The illness may have been a form of influenza, which did not act so swiftly as the dreaded plague or sweat, which had last broken out in 1551.16 It spread rapidly and did not discriminate. Before the disease had run its course, it was to claim a royal victim.

  Mary showed the first signs of being ill that August. Travelling from Hampton Court to St James’ Palace, she felt unwell on arrival and retired to her rooms. Seized by a fever, she remained secluded as the following weeks saw her briefly rally only to become weakened even further. By October it became apparent that her condition was not going to improve: she and her councillors had to face the likelihood of her death and the succession of the Protestant Elizabeth. At the end of the month she added a codicil to her will recognising that she would not bear ‘fruit nor heir’ and asking her sister to honour her religious changes: Elizabeth learned of her formal nomination and impending accession at the start of November. Early in the morning of 17 November 1558, Mary heard Mass and then quietly died, surrounded by her ladies. Henry VIII’s youngest daughter was now queen. While Mary was notorious for her desperation to have a child, Elizabeth would become known for her efforts to evade it.

  Like her father’s, Elizabeth’s reign was punctuated by the question of inheritance. A number of suitors, English and European, were suggested at varying stages of her life and some appeared to be in with a serious chanc
e of leading her up the aisle but ultimately, she remained wedded to her kingdom, as she famously declared to Parliament. With hindsight, her resistance is consistent and logical: she did not wish to be dominated by a husband’s will nor run the risks of childbirth and the policy of flirtatious relations with her male courtiers and suitors allowed her to exploit male expectations of feminine indecision, which she used as a successful manipulative tool. Yet at the time, Elizabeth herself may not have been so certain of her marital future. At certain intervals she promised she would wed and energetically wooed several possible husbands, suggesting that perhaps she was a victim of her own vacillation and found herself surprised by time. Theories of her physical deformation or inability to bear children, ranging from the bizarre claims that she was in fact a man, to the supposed gynaecological blockage preventing intercourse or the existence of illegitimate children have yet to find any basis in historical fact.

  Elizabeth’s early flirtation with the dangerous Thomas Seymour had exposed her to the dangers of failing to control her behaviour and emotions. The fates of her mother and her step-mother, Catherine Howard, illustrated the potential dangers of marital life whilst the deaths of Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr were a reminder that childbirth was a very real threat. Her decision not to marry may have been influenced by these factors: equally, there may not have been a conscious ‘decision’; motherhood may have been a secondary casualty of her choice that there was ‘one mistress and no master’ in her realm. Many romantic theories have been spun concerning the supposed secrets of her heart, her wishes and stifled desires, particularly in regards to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. From her accession in 1558, Elizabeth did exhibit many signs of being in love with the already-married Dudley, including moving his bedchamber next to her private rooms a year later. His wife’s death in suspicious circumstance in 1560 created a potential threat to her throne that she was not prepared to risk; although some, including Dudley, believed she would now make him her husband. Elizabeth saw the dangers of association with such scandal. No matter what her private feelings were, she was probably too cautious to become Dudley’s lover even if the overcrowded court could have allowed them opportunities; Elizabeth herself answered the rumours by saying she was never alone and therefore had no chance to be intimate with any man. As a woman, her private chambers became her sanctuary, removing more of the daily business of government to more public arenas in comparison with the court of her father, yet the constant presence of her women gave them a privileged and exclusive role, meaning an affair would have been almost impossible to conceal.

  However, in 1587, a young man claiming to be Arthur Dudley, illegitimate son of the ‘lovers’ was shipwrecked on the Spanish coast. His age placed his conception early in 1561, when Elizabeth was bedridden with serious illness, possibly dropsy, which causes the body to swell. This gave the theory credence, as had the ability of several of Elizabeth’s waiting women to conceal their own pregnancies until the final month under voluminous clothing. Arthur Dudley stated that a servant named Southern had been summoned to Hampton Court at night, to find a nurse for an infant who had been born to a careless employee and needed to be concealed from the queen; Southern raised the child as his own, only confessing the truth on his death bed in 1583. The Spanish believed his claim as it served them in the run-up to the Armada, and it still persists in modern scholarship, but Tudor imposters were common and it seems incredible that no rumours of his existence derive from the 1560s and particularly ironic, as a male heir was the one thing Elizabeth’s parliaments urged her to produce. For her to have conceived, carried and delivered a male heir in 1561 seems to stretch credibility to the limits. In all likelihood, she and Dudley were never lovers, as the situation would have placed her under too much political and gynaecological danger, besides having to submit to the will of another and constant fear of exposure. Later events in Scotland demonstrated that she was wise to have done so. When the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, found herself embroiled in a similar situation in 1566, Elizabeth saw her cousin’s life unravel as the result of an impulsive romantic match.

  Born in 1542, Mary became queen before her first birthday, after the death of her father, James V, at the Battle of Solway Moss. Brought up in France from the age of six, she had been married in 1558 to Francis II, grandson of Henry VIII’s old rival Francis I, and became Queen of France the following year. Her dual titles made her an impressive opponent to Elizabeth and one of a pool of possible heirs to the English throne. Her seniority over the Grey sisters, descendants of Mary Rose Tudor, made her the main focus of Catholic hopes throughout her lifetime. Her first husband died young, aged only sixteen; various illnesses have been suggested for his frailty, including his undescended testicles, but ultimately he was killed by an ear infection leading to an abscess on the brain. The widowed Mary returned to Scotland and, in 1565, married her cousin Henry Lord Darnley, bearing him a son, the future James VI of Scotland and I of England. James’ cradle from 1566 still survives; a broad semi-circular band of gold jewel moulding and sides inlaid with panels of dark and light wood. By the time of his birth, though, the marriage was already in crisis. Darnley was immature and unpopular; his despotic and irrational behaviour, peaking in the murder of Mary’s favourite Italian musician, David Rizzio, whilst she was heavily pregnant, eventually led to his own murder in 1567. While the palace of Holyrood was blown apart by gunpowder, Darnley’s strangled corpse was found neatly lain out on the grass outside. Soon after this, Mary married his supposed murderer, the Earl of Bothwell, an act her opponents could not stomach, which led to her deposition and flight to England. She would spend the rest of her life in captivity and lose her head in 1587 for plotting to gain the English throne. Mary’s ungoverned behaviour was a powerful sign to Elizabeth of the dangers of allowing the heart to rule the head. With Dudley forever tainted by his wife’s murder, no matter how carefully he established an inquest to investigate matters, marriage to him was too great a risk for Elizabeth. Rejecting the other suitors suggested by Parliament, including the ageing Sir William Pickering and Mary’s cast-off, Edward Courtney, as well as outright refusing her brother-in-law Philip of Spain, she turned abroad for a possible husband. Perhaps the miles between the rulers of Sweden, Austria and France were part of her delaying tactics and allowed her to distance herself from the reality of marriage, as well as giving her a powerful bargaining tool in foreign politics.

  Elizabeth’s most significant suitors were the youngest two sons of Catherine de Medici and Henri II of France. In 1570, it was first proposed that she marry the Duke of Anjou, the future Henri III. He was a rebellious young man who had veered towards Protestantism in youth whilst still technically Catholic and was beset by rumours of homosexuality, although the biggest stumbling block was the disparity in their ages. She was thirty-seven, he was nineteen, easily young enough to have been her son by Tudor standards and vocally critical of her age, appearance and supposed limp. Inheriting the throne of Poland in 1573, he abdicated the following year on the death of his brother Charles, when he became King of France. All negotiations with Elizabeth were abandoned by the time of his union with Louise of Lorraine in 1575; their fourteen-year marriage produced no children despite one rumoured miscarriage and her numerous pilgrimages and religious offerings. Towards the end of the decade, Catherine de Medici offered Elizabeth her youngest son, Francis, Duke of Alençon. The queen was then forty-six to his twenty-four and he had suffered terrible scarring after a bout of smallpox at the age of eight. Still, there seemed to be a fondness and flirtation between them that her advisers took so seriously as to warn her against the dangers of childbearing at her advanced age. It may have been the closest Elizabeth came to marriage but she gave the duke a decisive refusal in 1581, writing a formal yet passionate goodbye in a short poem entitled ‘On Monsieur’s departure’. He went on to become King of France eight years later, when Henri III, Elizabeth’s previous suitor, was assassinated.

  In her final
years, Elizabeth increasingly cherished her identity as the Virgin Queen. Concurrent with a lamentation of the loss of sites such as Walsingham, she shrewdly deployed the previous national devotion to the cult of Mary to create a semi-divine, detached and iconic image of her own. Using the heavy cosmetics and dyes of the era, coupled with a typical Tudor appreciation of pageantry and ceremony, she embraced her virginity and gave it mythical status. Her face would be daubed in ceruse, a poisonous mixture of white lead and vinegar; cochineal, madder and vermilion dyed the cheeks and lips, kohl accentuated the eyes and hair, while wigs were dyed with celandine, lye, saffron and cumin. These efforts, coupled with her supposed ‘masculine’ qualities and the length of her rule gave rise to the theories that have refused to accept her identity at face value, even into the twenty-first century. Just as her mother Anne Boleyn encountered, women were expected to conform to particular types and exhibit certain forms of submissive behaviour. This was not compatible with successful queenship. Some strains of Tudor misogyny dictated that Elizabeth’s ‘mannishness’ must be genuine; the inability of her enemies to believe a woman could have the necessary qualities to rule led them to deduce that she must be either a man or a defective woman. The state of androgyny was feared and women who never married were considered deviant. This is not to suggest though, that all Tudor society regarded her with suspicion; if the anomaly of a female ruler could be embraced, so could that of an unmarried one. The celebration of her virgin state and purity developed over time and retrospectively; it was partly Victorian prudery that gave rise to many theories about Elizabeth’s identity that have lingered anachronistically.