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

by Anna Whitelock

  Whilst early twentieth-century academic biographies, led by John Neale’s Queen Elizabeth I (1934), focused on strictly political motives rather than on Elizabeth’s sexual self, historical novels, plays and operas continued to cast Elizabeth as a queen with a private life.14 The old charges that Elizabeth was malformed or infertile were revived with some going so far as to claim that Elizabeth was in fact a man,15 or at least a hermaphrodite.16 Others dealt with Elizabeth’s sexuality in more subtle, psychological ways, underpinned by a sense that her chastity was distinctly odd if not perverse. Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex (1928) read the Queen’s life in a post-Freudian fashion, with her sexual desires and dysfunction traceable to her childhood and adolescence.17 Many reviewers criticised Strachey’s portrayal of Elizabeth as tawdry and salacious, and a similar critique was levelled at Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana (1953), which was based on Strachey’s book. The opera’s central theme was the clash between public responsibility and private desires, and contrasted the public persona of the Queen with the reality of a tragic, vain old woman. For the young, newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, in whose honour the production had been staged, and for most of the audience, the opera was not well received. The scene in the Bedchamber where the elderly Queen ‘removed her wig from her head and was revealed as almost bald’ was regarded as being in particular ‘bad taste’.18

  Meanwhile Elizabeth was increasingly becoming the focus of Hollywood attention, and from Bette Davis’s portrayal of her in the Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and The Virgin Queen (1955), to those of Glenda Jackson (Elizabeth R, 1971), Judy Dench (Shakespeare in Love, 1998), Helen Mirren (Elizabeth I, 2007) and Cate Blanchett (Shekar Kapur’s Elizabeth, 1998 and Elizabeth, The Golden Age, 2010), the quest for the true woman behind the crown continued. Each film, in the tradition of the ‘secret histories’, portrayed Elizabeth’s sexuality in different ways. Whilst Kapur’s Elizabeth shows the Queen having a sexual relationship with Dudley, by the end of the film she makes the ultimate sacrifice, renouncing her sexual self, thereby becoming the ‘Virgin Queen’ complete with the dramatic cropped hair and white, leaded face. In the BBC drama The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, played by Anne-Marie Duff, also appears in bed making love with Dudley but then wakes up screaming in dread; it was only a dream. Elizabeth’s unconscious desire for intimacy conflicted with her primal fear of it.

  The opening scene of Helen Mirren’s much-celebrated portrayal shows Elizabeth, in her forties, as she is being undressed by her ladies, slowly, piece by piece, laces untied, sleeves removed until she remains only in her white embroidered chemise. She lies back on her bed, a sheet is draped over her legs and a doctor appears at her side holding a speculum. This is the ultimate exposure, her body bared for the sake of the country. She shows no emotion as the doctor pronounces, ‘All is as it should be, ma’am’ and then, illustrating the political nature of such private affairs, immediately reports his findings to Cecil and Walsingham, who are waiting in the corridor outside: the Queen is still virgo intacta and is capable of having children.

  Such dramatic portrayals, together with historical novels such as those by Jean Plaidy and more recently Philippa Gregory, feed a perennial appetite for new interpretations of the ‘life and loves’ of the Virgin Queen.19 The questions that the ‘secret histories’ raised at the end of the seventeenth century continue to intrigue popular audiences today. In life Elizabeth and the ladies of the Bedchamber had tenaciously defended the chastity of her body to protect her reputation and defend her crown. In death, it is the very questioning and searching for the true story of the Virgin Queen, and the possibility that she was not chaste, that continues to fascinate and has ensured her enduring popularity and appeal.

  Notes

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography

  AGS

  Archivo General de Simancas

  APC

  Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J. R. Dasent, 46 vols, (London, 1890–1964)

  BIHR

  Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

  BL

  British Library, London

  BLO

  Bodleian Library, Oxford

  CKS

  Centre for Kentish Studies

  CP

  Cecil Papers, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

  CSP Dom

  Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, 1547–1625, ed. C. S. Knighton, 12 vols (London, 1856–72)

  CSP Foreign

  Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the reigns of Elizabeth, 1558–89, ed. J. Stevenson et al., 23 vols (London, 1863–1950)

  CSP Rome

  Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Vatican Archives, vol. 1, 1558–1571, ed. J. M. Rigg (London, 1916)

  CSP Scot

  Calendar of State Papers, Scotland, 1547–1603, ed. J. Bain et al., 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1898–1969)

  CSP Span

  Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. G. A. Bergenroth at al., 13 vols (London, 1862–1954)

  CSP Ven

  Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, ed. H. F. Brown, 3 vols (London, 1864–1947)

  Dudley Papers

  Dudley Papers at Longleat House

  HMC Rutland

  HMC, Twelfth report, appendix, part iv–v. fourteenth, part I, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland, GDC, preserved at Belvoir Castle, 4 vols (London, 1888–95)

  HMC Salisbury

  HMC, A calendar of the manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., & c, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 24 vols (London, 1883–1976)

  HMC Bath

  HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Bath (London, 1968)

  LP

  Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–1547, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 21 vols and addenda (London, 1862 –1932)

  LPL

  Lambeth Palace Library, London

  NLS

  National Library Scotland

  ODNB

  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004)

  Paget Papers

  Paget Papers, Keele University

  SP

  State Papers, National Archives, London

  Statutes

  Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al.

  TNA

  The National Archives, Kew, London

  TRHS

  Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

  TRP

  Tudor Royal Proclamations

  Epigraphs

  1 ‘Elizabeth’s Address to Parliament’, 12 November 1586, in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, eds, Elizabeth I, Collected Works (London, 2002), p. 194.

  2 Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, AD 1602 (London, 1880), pp. 40–1.

  3 BL Cotton MS Caligula B 10 fol. 350v.

  Prologue: Shameful Slanders

  1 Janet Arnold, ‘The Picture of Elizabeth I When Princess’, in The Burlington Magazine, 113, No. 938 (1981), pp. 303–4.

  2 Maria Perry, Elizabeth I: The Word of a Prince: A Life from Contemporary Documents (London, 1990), pp. 31–5. See David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London, 2001), pp. 42–9.

  3 A Chronicle during the Reigns of the Tudors from 1485–1559 by Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, ed. W. D. Hamilton, 2 vols, Camden Society NS 11 and 20, 2 vols (London, 1875–77), vol. I, p. 182.

  4 Samuel Haynes, A Collection of State Papers … Left by William Cecil Lord Burghley and Now Remaining at Hatfield House (London, 1740), p. 99.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Haynes, Burghley State Papers, p. 96; Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 17–18.

  8 J. Stevenson, ed., The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria by Henry Clifford (London, 1887), pp. 86–7.

  9 Mary Seymour disappears from the histo
rical record after 1550 and it seems likely that she died by the age of two.

  10 APC (1547–50), pp. 236–8. See G. W. Bernard, ‘The Downfall of Sir Thomas Seymour’ in his edited collection, The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), pp. 212–40.

  11 Haynes, Burghley State Papers, pp. 89–90.

  12 TNA SP 10/6, fol. 57.

  13 Haynes, Burghley State Papers, p. 96.

  14 Ibid., pp. 99–101.

  15 Ibid., p. 102.

  16 CSP Dom, 1547–53, p. 82; APC (1547–50), p. 240.

  17 Haynes, Burghley State Papers, p. 70.

  18 Ibid., p. 107.

  19 Ibid., pp. 108–9.

  20 BL Lansdowne MS 1236 fol. 35; Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 11 vols (London, 1824–46), third series, II, pp. 153–5.

  21 See Sheila Cavanagh, ‘The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident’, in Julia M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (London, 1998), pp. 9–29. See Janel Mueller, ‘Elizabeth Tudor. Maidenhood in Crisis’, in Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’, Essays in Literature, History and Culture, Donald Stump and Linda Shenk, eds, (Arizona, 2011), pp. 15–28.

  22 Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1993). See J. Dewhurst, ‘The Alleged Miscarriages of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn’, Medical History, 28 (1984), pp. 49–56.

  23 J. L. Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen eds, 2 vols (Leiden, 1996), pp. 63, 65, 71.

  24 Ibid., pp. 40–1.

  25 Ibid., pp. 41, 51–3.

  26 See Frank A. Mumby, The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth: A Narrative in Contemporary Letters (London, 1909), pp. 69–72.

  Chapter 1: The Queen’s Two Bodies

  1 See Vincent Joseph Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, Will Stockton, eds, Queer Renaissance Historiography, Backward Gaze (Farnham, 2009). Alan Bray’s seminal study of male friendship showed how habits of touching, eating and sleeping were shared between men outside of a sexual context. See A. Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 2003). It is more difficult to chart this for women given the greater political invisibility of women’s friendship.

  2 See Judith M. Richards, ‘To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England’, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, 28. 1 (1997), pp. 101–21; Constance Jordan, ‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), pp. 421–51; Paula Louise Scalingi, ‘The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1515–1607’, The Historian, 42 (November, 1978), pp. 59–75. See Margaret R. Somerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society (London, 1995); Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England: 1500–1700 (London, 1998); P. Crawford, ‘Sexual Knowledge in England, 1500–1700’ in R. Porter and M. Teich, eds, Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82–106. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977).

  3 See, for example, LP, 1536, pp. 47–54. Elizabeth is here referred to by Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, as ‘the Little Bastard’, p. 51.

  4 Elizabeth had been included in the third Succession Act (1544) and Henry VIII’s will two years later, but was declared illegitimate in 1536. The Act was never repealed. This opened the way for Mary Stuart’s claim, even though Henry VIII had always tried to block it. Henry believed that by his will he could determine the order of the succession and eliminate the Stuart claim. His settlement set aside the strict rules of hereditary descent. If his children died without heirs, then the throne was to pass to the offspring of the Duchess of Suffolk. For details of succession see Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571 (London, 1973) and his The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558–68 (Stamford, 1996).

  5 A. N. McLaren, ‘The Quest for a King: Gender, Marriage and Succession in Elizabethan England’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (July, 2002), pp. 259–90.

  6 Susan Dunn-Hensley, ‘Whore Queens: The Sexualised Female Body and the State’, in Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds, High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 101–16.

  7 William Allen, An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland … (Antwerp, 1558), p. xviii.

  8 Francis Osborne, Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James (London, 1658), p. 61.

  9 BL Cotton MS Galba C IX fol. 128.

  10 Edmund Bohun, The Character of Queen Elizabeth; or a full and clear account of her policies (London, 1693), p. 73. These also included Edward Courtenay, Philip of Spain, Eric of Sweden, the two French dukes, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Arundel, Sir William Pickering, Robert Dudley.

  Chapter 2: The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen

  1 Stevenson, ed., Life of Jane Dormer, p. 69.

  2 BL Harleian MS 6949 is a transcript of the will.

  3 CSP Span, 1554–8, p. 438.

  4 Stevenson, ed., Life of Jane Dormer, p. 72; CSP Span, 1554–8, p. 438.

  5 J. G. Nichols, ed., The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen, and Merchant Taylor of London, 1550–63, Camden Society, 43 (London, 1848), p. 178.

  6 R. Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on the Late Queen Elizabeth, her Times and Favourites, 1641, ed. E. Arber (London, 1879), p. 15.

  7 TNA SP 12/1/ fol. 12.

  8 Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), p. 12; see also Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957) and Albert Rolls, The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare, Studies in Renaissance Literature, 19 (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter, 2000). For the purposes of law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. See Edmund Plowden, ‘The Treatise of the Two Bodies of the King’, BL Cotton MS Caligula B IV, fols 1–94. See also Marie Axton, ‘The Influence of Edmund Plowden’s Succession Treatise’, Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (3) (1974), pp. 209–26.

  9 TNA SP 12/1 fol. 3v.

  10 CSP Span, 1558–67, p. 7.

  11 TNA SP 70/5 fol. 31r–v; William Murdin, A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth left by Lord Burghley, from the year 1571 to 1596 (London, 1759), pp. 748–9.

  12 CSP Span, 1558–67, p. 45.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid., p. 122.

  15 HMC Salisbury, I, p. 158.

  16 TNA PC 2/8 fol.198; APC, 1558–70, pp. 6–7; John Strype, Annals of the Reformation … 4 vols (Oxford, 1820–40), I, p. 7.

  17 APC, 1558–70, p. 22; however, there was no legislation against conjuring, and so the culprits were sent for ‘severe punishment’ under ecclesiastical law to Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. APC, 1558–70, p. 22; CSP Span, 1558–67, pp. 17–18.

  18 Francis Coxe, A Short Treatise Declaring the Detestable Wickednesse of Magicall Sciences as Necromancie, Coniurations of Spirites, Curiouse Astrologie and Such Lyke (London, 1561), sigs. A4v–A5v.

  19 The Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 185. For English responses to Nostradamus see, for example, William Fulke, Antiprognosticon, that is to saye, an invective against the vayne and unprofitable predictions of the astrologians as Nostradame etc (London, December 1560), sig. A8r–v. See also V. Larkey, ‘Astrology and Politics in the First Years of Elizabeth’s Reign’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, III (1935), pp. 171–86.

  20 ‘The Compendious Rehearsal of John Dee’, in T. Hearne, ed., Joannis, confratis & monachi Glastoniensis, chronica sive historia de rebus Glastoniensibus, 2 vols (Oxford, 1726), II, pp. 509, 521.

  21 As recorded by Richard Mulcaster in his The passage of our most drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to Westminster the daye before her coronacion (London, 1558).

  22 1 Eliz.c.2., Statutes IV, pp. 358–9.

  23 See W. P. Haugaard, ‘Elizabeth Tudor’s Book of Devotions: A
neglected clue to the Queen’s life and character’, The Sixteenth-Century Journal 12:2 (1981), pp. 79–106, at p. 93.

  24 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584–1601, 3 vols (London, 1957), I, p. 128.

  25 CSP Ven, 1558–80, pp. 22–3.

  26 1 Eliz I, c.1, ‘The Act of Supremacy’ and 1 Eliz I, c.2, ‘The Act of Uniformity’, printed in Statutes IV, pp. 355–8.

  Chapter 3: Familia Reginae

  1 CSP Ven, 1558–80, p. 12.

  2 J. R. Planché, Regal Records, or a Chronicle of the Coronations of the Queen Regnants of England (London, 1838), p. 35.

  3 See Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, 1999); Julian Munby, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Coaches: The Wardrobe on Wheels’, Antiquaries Journal, 83 (2003), pp. 311–67.

  4 TNA SP 12/6/36 fol. 78.

  5 Pam Wright, ‘A change in direction: the ramifications of a female household, 1558–1603’, in D. Starkey et al., eds, The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 147–72; C. Merton, ‘The Women Who Served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: Ladies, Gentlewomen and Maids of the Privy Chamber, 1553–1603’, (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1992). See also K. Bundesen, ‘Circling the crown: political power and female agency in sixteenth-century England’, in J. Jordan, ed., Desperate Housewives: Politics, Propriety and Pornography, Three Centuries of Women in England (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 3–28 and William Tighe, ‘Familia Reginae: The Privy Court’, in Susan Doran and Norman Jones, eds, The Elizabethan World (Oxford, 2011), pp. 76–91.