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.37 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’.38 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’.39 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.40 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’.41
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.’42
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’.43 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’.44 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.’45
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.46 People went to churches ‘to be assured whether the Queen was living or dead’ and to pray for her.47
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’.48 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.
60
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’.3 Young Elizabeth Southwell, who cared for Elizabeth in her final days, later described the Queen’s torment as she lay dying.4 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’.5 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’.7 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.9 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.10
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.11 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.12
* * *
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.13
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’.14 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.15 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:
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’.16 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.’17
61
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,1 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’.2 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.3
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.4 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.5 John Chamberlain similarly described how the body ‘was not opened but wrapped in sear cloths and other preservatives’.6 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’.7 Abraham Greene, ‘a plumber’, was paid for ‘Lead solder’ and for ‘the entombing of the corpse of her late Majesty at Richmond’.8
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.’9 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.10 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.11
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.
* * *
On the night of Saturday 26 March, two da
ys 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.12 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.13
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.14 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.15 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.
The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 41
