The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court

by Anna Whitelock

  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.*

  * * *

  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.16 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.17 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’.18 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.19 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.1 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.2 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.3

  The effigy was placed on the coffin during her lying-in state and remained there until the burial.4 No monarch was officially dead until that day when he or she would be de-robed of majesty and buried and the great officers of state would break their white wands of office and hurl them into the grave. Until that point the court went on as before; it was now just an effigy of Elizabeth clothed in her parliamentary robes, wearing the crown and carrying the orb and sceptre, that was the focus of attention rather than Elizabeth herself.5 The effigy sustained the image of the Queen’s natural body in the period between death and burial: James could not officially assume the throne until Elizabeth was buried because, theoretically, there could not be two ‘natural bodies’ inhabiting the political body.6 It was at the royal funeral that the body politic, created by the investing rituals of coronation, would be finally separated from the corpse of the dead monarch.

  After James had been notified of Elizabeth’s death he ‘settled the Kingdom of Scotland in good and peaceable order’7 and began his progress south to London. He reached Berwick on 14 April and from there gave orders that Queen Elizabeth’s funeral be observed, ‘with all due rites of honour according to the ancient custom’ at Westminster Abbey.8 As was customary for a monarch James would not attend.

  Preparations in London immediately began in earnest. The funeral procession and ceremony was planned by the College of Arms with the help and advice of the Privy Council. Twelve thousand yards of black cloth were ordered to make mourning clothes.9 All members of the court were mentioned in the Wardrobe accounts individually by name, with the amount of material allotted to each for the making of dresses, suits, cloaks and veils.10 Arrangements were made for the procession through London and the ceremony itself and Arbella Stuart, as the lady of highest rank related to the Queen, was named as chief mourner. She declined the honour, however, saying that ‘sith her access to the Queen in her lifetime might not be permitted, she would not after her death be brought upon this stage for a public spectacle’.11 Instead Helena Parr, the Lady Marchioness of Northampton, was appointed chief mourner, because of her rank and gender rather than her relationship with the Queen.

  * * *

  On Thursday 28 April, a month after Elizabeth’s death, a procession of more than a thousand people made its way from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey with ‘great pomp and magnificence’.12 Led by bell-ringers and knight marshals, who cleared the way with their gold staves, the funeral cortege stretched for miles. First came 260 poor women ‘four in a rank, apparelled in black, with linen kerchiefs over their heads’. Then came the lower ranking servants of the royal household and the servants of the nobles and courtiers. Two of the Queen’s horses, riderless and covered in black cloth, led the bearers of the hereditary standards of the Dragon, the Greyhound and the Lion and the supporters of the arms of England. More members of the Queen’s household and government followed, from apothecaries and musicians, to a large number of clerks, the gentlemen and children of the Chapel in copes and surplices, singing ‘in a mournful tone’. Following them came the Mayor and Aldermen of London.

  The focal point of the procession was the royal chariot carrying the Queen’s
hearse, draped in purple velvet and pulled by four horses trimmed with black. On top of the coffin was the life-size effigy of Elizabeth, a crown upon its head, dressed in parliamentary robes of red velvet and clasping the ball and sceptre. The coffin was covered by a canopy, held aloft by six earls, of twelve embroidered banners that traced the Queen’s ancestry.13 Following behind the chariot was a riderless horse led by the Queen’s Master of the Horse, the Gentlemen Ushers of the Privy Chamber and the Garter King of Arms and then the chief mourner, Helena Parr. She was supported on either side by two officers of state, the Lord Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst and the recently widowed Lord Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham. Fourteen countesses followed, then the ‘Ladies of Honour.’14 Next came the remaining countesses, earls’ daughters and baronesses. The parade of mourners ended with the ‘Maids of Honour of the Privy Chamber’.15 Sir Walter Ralegh and the Guard walking five abreast, brought up the rear, their halberds held downwards as a sign of sorrow.

  ‘Multitudes of all sorts of people’ watched the final procession from all available vantage points; ‘streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters’.16 Even the rooftops were crowded with those who hoped for a glimpse of the spectacle. When the royal chariot went by bearing the effigy of Queen Elizabeth, a ‘sighing, groaning and weeping went up as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man’.17

  * * *

  At Westminster Abbey, the coffin was ‘placed under a sumptuous hearse’ and the ceremony commenced, conducted by the Bishop of Chichester ‘according to the usual manner’.18 The courtier Philip Gawdy claimed that the ceremony ‘held some six hours with the sermon’.19 However, the Venetian ambassador’s source told him that ‘at the actual funeral service little else was done except the chanting of two psalms in English and the delivery of the funeral oration’.20

  After Elizabeth’s coffin was placed in its temporary grave, the Queen’s officers broke their white rods over their heads and threw the broken pieces onto the coffin to signify their duties had ended. It was customary to display the hearse and the coffin in the church for at least a month, but by 15 May, James had ordered the coffin to be buried ‘without the usual delay’ and two weeks later the Queen’s effigy was also removed.21 However, it seems that these early attempts to remove Elizabeth from the hearts and minds of her subjects failed. Scaramelli reported, ‘The glory of that Queen, which they pretended to have buried along with her body, having gone the great length of removing her effigy, now becomes, in such circumstances as these, greater than ever.’22 Elizabeth’s final resting place was the crypt beneath the altar in the sepulchre of her grandfather Henry VII.23

  Of those of Elizabeth’s women present at her funeral it was ironic that the only person to have been at her coronation forty-four years earlier was the woman whom Elizabeth had come to loathe: her cousin Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester, and daughter of Katherine Knollys, her much-loved Lady of the Bedchamber. Of Elizabeth’s other long-serving women, Mary Scudamore was too ill to attend and died just a few months later on 15 August and was buried at Holme Lacy in Herefordshire. Dorothy Stafford also did not attend Elizabeth’s funeral, possibly because of ill health, and died in September 1604. She was buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster, close to the tomb of Blanche Parry. Her funeral monument records that ‘she served Elizabeth for forty years, lying in her Bedchamber’.

  EPILOGUE:

  Secret Histories

  Three years after Elizabeth’s death and burial, on the instruction of King James I, her body was moved from its original resting place in the central tomb of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, to the north aisle and re-buried with her sister and rival, Mary Tudor.1 At the same time James ordered a tomb to be erected on the south side for his mother, Mary Stuart, whose body was then moved from Peterborough Cathedral.2 Mary’s tomb was placed behind that of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, and in front of the monument to Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, daughter of Henry VII and James’s paternal grandmother. As such, James was emphasising his mother’s claim to the English crown and establishing her dynasty as a means of legitimising his own right to the throne.3 Elizabeth, now buried with her sister Mary, both childless Tudor queens, was isolated from the line of inherited power.

  During her lifetime, Elizabeth and her councillors were meticulous curators of her public persona, but upon her death, control of her image was lost.4 Whilst James commissioned a grand monument to Elizabeth, celebrating her achievements, this was deliberately smaller and less costly than the monument he erected for his mother, Elizabeth’s great rival. The figure of the Queen on Elizabeth’s tomb was carved in marble with the face most likely copied from her funeral effigy.5 The ‘mask of youth’ that Elizabeth had sought to maintain was now removed and the Queen was shown as the elderly woman she had become. Representations of Elizabeth, her body and her memory, now became public property free to be used, and abused, to suit new political realities.

  In the days and weeks that followed Elizabeth’s death, poems and pamphlets, verses and eulogies were available for sale to ‘feed plebeian eyes’, praising the Queen and her triumphs, but also depicting her as a decaying corpse or as a now penetrable virgin with death cast as her lover. In his Atropoion Delion (1603), Thomas Newton questioned the Queen’s attendants: ‘Why let ye death approach her Privy Chamber?’ as if death were an unwanted suitor.6 Newton’s elegiac verses vividly describe Elizabeth’s grave as her ‘palace’ with ‘greedy worms’ as her courtiers penetrating her ‘body bare.’7 Portraits too, now free from strict Elizabethan censorship, also began to show a very different image of Gloriana. Marcus Gheeraerts’s portrait of 1620, deliberately parodied the 1588 Armada portrait, and showed Elizabeth no longer triumphant and powerful, but old, tired and dying, slumped over in a chair with the two figures, Time and Death, waiting in the darkness. The painting showed its increasingly nostalgic Jacobean audience, that the age of Elizabeth was now past.

  Long after the Queen’s death, rumour-mongering about illegitimate children, illicit liaisons and physical deformities continued. In 1609 a Catholic book in Latin entitled Purit-Anus was smuggled into England and claimed that Elizabeth had prostituted herself with men of various nationalities, ‘even with blackamoors’, and had given birth to illegitimate children.8 In 1658, Francis Osborne, in his influential Traditional Memoirs on the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, heralded the Queen for her political accomplishments and pragmatic moderation, but also repeated the gossip about Elizabeth’s promiscuity, though dismissing it as ‘strange tales … fit for romance’. Yet he suggested it might be true that ‘the Ladies of her Bedchamber denied to her Body the Ceremony of Searching and Embalming, due to dead monarchs’, to protect her sexual honour or perhaps, a physical abnormality.9

  In 1680, speculation about Elizabeth’s private life exploded into the widest readership yet with the appearance of The Secret History of the Most Renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex.10 This book was translated from the original French text Comte D’Essex, Historie Angloise and thereafter widely reprinted and rehashed during the next century. This and The Secret History of the Duke of Alancon and Queen Elizabeth, which appeared eleven years later, inaugurated a tradition of writing about the Queen’s love life and claiming that her reign could only be understood in terms of secret compulsions and desires. From then on stories about Elizabeth’s innermost passions were marketed at London bookstalls in cheap editions and dramatised on the London stage, appealing to the growing public appetite for scandal in high places. John Banks’s play The Unhappy Favourite, which was performed in 1682, was an adaptation of The Secret History of Elizabeth and Essex. Banks centred his drama on the conflict between the Queen’s private and public self, thereby reworking the concept of the Queen’s two bodies. Elizabeth was championed here as a vulnerable queen, notable for the personal cost of the public sacrifices she was compelled to make.11 Questioning Elizabeth’s virginity was no longer confined to hostile Catholic discourse and there was a growing sen
se that Elizabeth’s private feelings compromised the integrity of her rule and her status as a national icon.

  Fostered by the rise of popular biographies of queens and their courtiers, Elizabeth was now increasingly regarded with a mixture of admiration and contempt for her vanity, jealousy, vindictiveness and secret passions. In 1825 the antiquary and writer Hugh Campbell described her as ‘wanton and licentious’, consumed by lust and repeated long-held suspicions that she was a virgin only because of ‘some obstructions from nature’. In the mid-nineteenth century a public debate over Elizabeth’s ‘morals’ was even played out in popular print. Fraser’s Magazine ran a two-part article in 1853 evaluating the claims of Elizabeth’s ‘wantonness’ and ultimately concluding that whilst the historical evidence was ‘doubtful, at the best’, in such a case when ‘the character of a lady is at issue, to doubt is to condemn’.12 The scandal of Elizabeth’s assumed conduct was in sharp contrast with the much-celebrated wifely and maternal instincts of the reigning queen, Victoria.

  Increasingly attention focussed on Elizabeth’s postmenopausal body, and paintings depicted the ageing Queen in her private apartments. In Augustus Leopold Egg’s Queen Elizabeth Discovers She Is No Longer Young, which appeared at the Royal Academy in 1848, Elizabeth is pictured in her Bedchamber as an old woman amid her ladies who force her to face up to her mortality in the mirror that is held before her. Critics heralded the picture as an unmasking of the real Gloriana. Similar depictions followed of Elizabeth as an old harridan. So obsessed did mid-Victorian culture become with the figure of the elderly Queen that one contemporary commentator observed ruefully that ‘it is much nowadays to find anyone who believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of her as if she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles’.13