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

by Anna Whitelock

  24 Adam Blackwood, Martyre de la royne d’Escosse (Paris, 1587), pp. 345–9.

  25 Ibid.

  26 In his second tract La Mort de La Royne d’Escosse Doubairere de France (Paris, 1588), Blackwood calls on decades of Catholic attacks upon the bastard Elizabeth and her bastard religion to argue for the destruction of the tyrant Elizabeth.

  27 See J. E. Phillips, Images of a Queen; Adam Blackwood, Martyre de la Royne d’Escosse.

  28 Blackwood, Marytre de la Royne D’Escosse, A4v–A5r.

  29 ‘Aliud eiusdem argumenti’ in De Iezabelis Anglæ parricido varii generis poemata Latina et Gallica (France, 1590).

  30 Printed in Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l’opinion française au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1927), p. 294, who attributes it to Perron. Jacques Davy, Cardinal du Perron, was lecteur to Henry III and a spokesman for Catholicism.

  31 Printed in Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne, pp. 296–7. See Phillips, Images of a Queen, pp. 85–116, 143–70.

  32 CSP Ven, 1581–91, p. 264.

  Chapter 42: Secret Son?

  1 See Ettwell A. B. Barnard, Evesham and a Reputed Son of Queen Elizabeth (Evesham, 1926); CSP Span, 1587–1603, pp. 101–12.

  2 CSP Span, 1587–1603, pp. 101–12.

  3 CSP Ven, 1581–91, p. 267.

  4 Ibid., p. 288.

  5 See Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London, 2007).

  6 Ellis (ed.), Original Letters, III, pp. 134–7.

  7 List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth I, vol. II, July 1590–1, no. 697.

  8 See John Cooper, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (London, 2011).

  Chapter 43: Satan’s Instruments

  1 Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols (London, 1807–8), III, pp. 1356–7, 1592.

  2 AGS E949, fol. 28 cited in M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado and Simon Adams, eds, England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 1585–1604: Essays from the Anglo-Spanish conferences, London and Madrid 1988 (Edinburgh, 1991).

  3 William Allen, An Admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland (Antwerp, 1588).

  4 G. Mattingly, ‘William Allen and Catholic propaganda in England’, in Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva), 28 (1957), pp. 325–39.

  5 William Allen, ‘An Admonition to the Nobility, 1588’ in D. M. Rogers (ed.), English Recusant Literature 1558–1640 (Menston, 1979), p. xix.

  6 See Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002), p. 130.

  7 TRP, III, 13–17; TNA SP 12/215 fol. 144; The Execution of Justice in England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca, NY, 1965), pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.

  8 CSP Dom, 1581–91, p. 507.

  9 Wright (ed.), Queen Elizabeth and her Times, vol. II, pp. 374–6; see John S. Nolan, ‘The Militarization of Elizabethan England’, Journal of Military History, 58 (3) (1994), pp. 391–420; and Neil Younger, ‘If the Armada Had Landed: A Reappraisal of England’s Defences in 1588’, History, 93 (2008), pp. 328–54.

  10 CSP Dom, 1581–91, p. 515.

  11 J. K. Laughton, State Papers Concerning the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London, 1898), vol. I, p. 46. Stafford’s original letter has not survived.

  12 CSP Foreign, 1586–8, pp. 597, 641, 652; CSP Foreign, 1588, p. 5.

  13 Rodriguez-Salgado and Adams (eds), England, Spain and the Gran Armada 1585–1604; Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (London, 1999); James McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel (New Haven and London, 2005).

  14 BL Add. MS 44839; TNA SP 12/213/80; SP 12/214/86.

  15 BL Harleian MS 6798, art. 18. Cabala, Mysteries of State and Government: in Letters of Illustrious Persons and Great Ministers of State (London, 1663), p. 373; see Janet M. Green, ‘I My Self: Queen Elizabeth I’s Oration at Tilbury Camp’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), pp. 421–45, and Susan Frye, ‘The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury’, Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992), pp. 95–114; Miller Christy, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit to Tilbury in 1588’, English Historical Review, xxxiv (1919), p. 46; A. J. Collins, ‘The Progress of Queen Elizabeth to the Camp at Tilbury, 1588’, British Museum Quarterly 10 (1936), pp. 164–7.

  16 CSP Span, 1587–1603, p. 481.

  17 Ibid.

  18 A. and C. Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Renaissance Bodies, pp. 15–16.

  19 Roy Strong, Gloriana.

  Chapter 44: Barricaded from Within

  1 CSP Span, 1587–1603, pp. 419–20.

  2 BL Cotton MS Caligula D I, fol. 338.

  3 CSP Span, 1587–1603, p. 481.

  4 BL Cotton MS Caligula D I, fol. 333r.

  5 HMC Bath, V, p. 94.

  6 CSP Span, 1587–1603, p. 481.

  7 TNA SP 12/215/65.

  8 BL Sloane MS 1926, fols 35–43v, reproduced in D. C. Peck, ‘“News from Heaven and Hell”: A Defamatory Narrative of the Earl of Leicester’, English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978), pp. 141–58.

  9 See F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life. Vol. 1: Disorder (Chelmsford, 1971), p. 42; Joel Samaha, ‘Gleanings from Local Criminal-Court Records: Sedition amongst the Inarticulate in Elizabethan Essex’, The Journal of Social History 8 (1975), p. 69.

  10 Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999).

  11 Folger Shakespeare Library, L.a.39.

  12 BL Tanner MS 76, fol. 29.

  13 Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, I, pp. 187–9.

  14 Harrison (ed.), Letters of Elizabeth, p. 195.

  15 LPL MS 3199, p. 116; LPL MS 3201, fol. 208r. The date of the marriage remains uncertain.

  16 Lodge, Illustrations of British History, vol. II, p. 422.

  17 Cited in J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London, 1979), p. 328.

  18 CP 168/55, 20/65 printed in HMC Salisbury, IV, p. 153.

  19 Mistress Southwell did not marry until 1600, by which time she was aged thirty. Her husband, Sir Barantyne Molyns, was notoriously ugly and almost blinded by war wounds, TNA, SP 14/89, fol. 4r. She died in June 1606, having borne a son in 1602, TNA C 142/391/66.

  20 See A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Thockmortons (London, 1962), p. 160.

  21 The works of Sir Walter Ralegh, kt: now first collected: to which are prefixed the lives of the author, by William Oldys and Thomas Birch, vol. 8, Miscellaneous works (Oxford, 1829), p. 659.

  22 Ralegh may have married Elizabeth Throckmorton as early as February 1588; see P. Lefranc, ‘La date du mariage de Sir Walter Ralegh: un document indit’, Etudes Anglaises 9 (1956), pp. 192–211. It seems more likely, however, that the wedding occurred in November 1591, after Throckmorton had become pregnant.

  23 D. J. H. Clifford (ed.), The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud, 1992), p. 27; see Johanna Rickman, Love, Lust and License in Early Modern England: Illicit Sex and the Nobility (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 27–68.

  Chapter 45: Suspected and Discontented Persons

  1 Sir Robert Cecil to Lord Chancellor Hatton, 8 August 1591, printed in Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Ian Archer et al., pp. 228–30 at p. 291.

  2 Michael Questier, ‘Loyal to a Fault: Viscount Montague Explains Himself’, Historical Research 77 (2004), pp. 225–53; Curtis Charles Breight, ‘Caressing the Great: Viscount Montague’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Cowdray, 1591’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 127 (1989), pp. 147–66; Michael Leslie, ‘Something nasty in the wilderness: Entertaining Queen Elizabeth on her Progresses’, Medical and Renaissance Drama in England, 10 (1998), pp. 47–72.

  3 See John Strype, Annals, I, pp. 442, 445, 446. See also for example the comments of Allen in Execution of Justice, ed. Kingdon, pp. 140–1.

  4 Curtis Charles Breight in ‘Duelling Cerem
onies: The Strange Case of William Hacket, Elizabethan Messiah’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 191 (1989), pp. 35–67.

  5 ‘Memorandum of the arraignment at Newgate of William Hacket, of Northamptonshire, for high treason’, 26 July 1591, printed in HMC Fourteenth Report, Appendix, Part IV. The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon, p. 607. See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Frantick Hacket: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 27–66.

  6 G. B. Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, 1591–1594, pp. 41–2.

  7 Ibid., pp. 45–6.

  8 Quoted in C. Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell (London, 1956), p. 243.

  9 TRP, III, pp. 86–93.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, ed. C. R. Markham (London, 1880), p. 104.

  12 CSP Dom, 1591–4, p. 302.

  13 TNA SP 12/113/173; SP 12/247/61.

  14 TNA SP 12/244/112.

  15 TNA SP 12/247/79; Nicholas Owen has been wrongly identified as Hugh Owen.

  16 Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, vol. I, p. 283. See TNA SP 12/247/33; TNA SP 12/247/35; SP 12/247/39; SP 12/247/60; SP 12/247/62.

  17 TNA SP 12/247/78; Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, p. 289.

  18 TNA SP 12/247/78.

  19 Warren Skidmore, ‘Lady Mary Scudamore (c.1550–1603)’, occasional papers, no. 29.

  20 Francis Edwards, Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Dublin, 2002).

  21 TRP, III, pp. 134–6.

  22 TNA SP 12/247/98.

  23 TNA SP 12/247/66.

  24 TRP, III, pp. 134–6; Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, vol. I, p. 286.

  25 TRP, III, pp. 134–6.

  26 Francis Bacon, A Collection of Apophthegms. New and Old (London, 1671), p. 225.

  27 TNA SP 12/249/68; SP 12/249/91.

  Chapter 46: Age and Decay

  1 Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, vol. I, p. 286.

  2 TNA SP 12/247, fol. 79.

  3 Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, p. 43.

  4 Peter Wentworth, A pithie exhortation to her Maiestie for establishing her successor to the crowne (Edinburgh, 1598).

  5 Harington, Nugae Antiquae, II, p. 248.

  6 Clapham, Elizabeth of England, p. 86.

  7 S. P. Cerasano and M. Wynne-Davies, ‘From Myself, My Other Self I Turned’, in S. P. Cerasano and M. Wynne-Davies, eds, Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance (Hemel Hempstead, 1992), pp. 1–24.

  8 See Strong, Gloriana, p. 147.

  9 Harington, Nugae Antiquae, II, pp. 140–1.

  10 See N. Salomon, ‘Positioning Women in Visual Convention: the case of Elizabeth I’, in B. S. Travitsky and A. F. Seeff, eds, Attending to Women in Early Modern England (London, 1994), pp. 64–95; see also R. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977).

  11 BL Add. MS 12506, fols 47, 73; BL Add. MS 12507, fol. 131.

  12 Graves, Brief Memoir, p. 14.

  13 BL Royal, Appendix 68.

  14 CP 37/105 in HMC Salisbury, VII, pp. 41–2.

  15 LPL MS 3198, fol. 552.

  16 CP 37/105 in HMC Salisbury, VII, pp. 41–2.

  17 The tomb was dated according to the old calendar. Parry died in 1590 according to the new calendar.

  18 BL Lansdowne MS 62, no. 51, fol. 123.

  19 BL Add. MS 70038/104/1r–2r.

  20 BL Add. MS 70093; Will of Blanche Parry, BL Lansdowne MS 62, no. 51, fol. 123.

  21 Tomb inscription in Bacton Church. See C. A. Bradford, Blanche Parry. Queen Elizabeth’s Gentlewoman (London, 1935).

  22 Clapham, Elizabeth of England, p. 89.

  23 BLO Ashmole MS 1402, II, fol. 4a.

  24 Cornwallis described Mary as ‘brazen faced’. Rowland Vaughan, Most Approved and Long Experienced Waterworkes (1610); I. J. Atherton, Ambition and failure in Stuart England: the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), p. 28.

  25 TNA SP 12/181, no 77, fol. 238.

  26 CKS, U 1475/L2/4, item 3, m. 80.

  27 Lives of Lady Anne Clifford and of her Parents, ed. J. P. Gilson (London, 1916), pp. 24–5.

  28 TNA SP 46/125, fol. 236. Also BL Add. MS 27401, fol. 21; BL Add. MS 12406, fols 41, 80; BL Lansdowne MS 128, fol. 12; CP 21/33 in HMC Salisbury, IV, p. 199; CP 29/87 in HMC Salisbury, V, 53; CP 36/46 in HMC Salisbury, V, p. 481; CP 45/16 in HMC Salisbury, VI, p. 402; CP 58/108 in HMC Salisbury, IX, p. 21; CP 78/14 in HMC Salisbury, X, p. 86.

  29 Nichols (ed.), Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, III, p. 394.

  30 TNA SP 12/271, no. 106, fol. 171–v.

  31 The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London, 1842), p. 7. For more on Tomasina see John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud, 1998) and Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, pp. 107–8, 146–7, 187, 214, 223.

  Chapter 47: Abused Her Body

  1 The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, ed. Petti, pp. 57–60; BL, Lansdowne MS 72, fol. 48.

  2 The letter is undated but is endorsed 1592 by its recipient, Father Persons; it is printed in Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp. 97–98.

  3 In John Hungerford Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs, Hitherto Unpublished (London, 1891), pp. 118–20.

  4 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936). See also Rosemary Kegl, ‘Those Terrible Approaches: Sexuality, Social Mobility and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’, English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990), pp. 179–208.

  5 The accounts of this phenomenon occur in the diary of the French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, A Journal of All that was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, pp. 25, 36–7. Paul Hentzner’s description of the Queen in 1598 also refers to her exposed bosom, specifically associating it with virginity: ‘her bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry’. Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England, p. 34.

  6 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, in Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1970).

  7 See Hannah Betts, ‘“The Image of this Queene so quaynt”: The Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603’ in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth, p. 161.

  8 Scillaes Metamorphosis, in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, ed. Edmund W. Goose, 4 vols (1883, New York), I, p. 33.

  9 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974). See also Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado with Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 44.176 (1993), pp. 479–504.

  Chapter 48: The Physician’s Poison

  1 Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols (London, 1754), I, p. 150.

  2 See Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘An Elizabethan Spy Who Came in from the Cold: The Return of Anthony Stranden to England in 1593’, BIHR 65 (1992), pp. 277–9; L. Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (London, 1928), p. 27.

  3 See Dominic Green, The Double Life of Doctor Lopez. Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I (London, 2003).

  4 Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James the First, ed. John S. Brewer, 2 vols (London, 1839), I, pp. 152–3.

  5 TNA SP 12/239/142; SP 12/239/150; SP 12/240/4; SP 12/240/5.

  6 CSP Foreign, 1591–2, pp. 322–3.

  7 Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, p. 152; TNA SP 12/247/103. See also BL Add. MS 48027, fols 147r–184v.

  8 Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, p. 281.

  9 CSP Dom, 1591–4, p. 446.

  10 Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, vol. I, p. 289.

  11 HMC Salisbury, IV, p. 512.

  12 Edgar Samuel, ‘Dr Rodrigo Lopes’ last speech from the scaffold at Tyburn’, in Jewish Historical Studies, 30 (1987–8), pp. 51–3.

  13 [Anon] A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies of Late Time Detected to Have (
by Barbarous Murders) Taken Away the Life of the Queenes Most Excellent Maiestie Whom Almighty God Hath Miraculously Conserved Aaginst the Treacheries of Her Rebelles, and the Violence of Her Most Puissant Enemies (London 1594).

  Chapter 49: Love and Self-Love

  1 L. Hicks, ‘Father Robert Persons and the Book of Succession’, Recusant History, vol. 4, no. 3 (1957), p. 104.

  2 R. Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (Amsterdam, 1593, reprinted 1681, London), p. 183.

  3 For her claims see Susan Doran, ‘Three late-Elizabethan succession tracts’, in The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations, ed. Jean-Christophe Mayer (Montpellier, 2004), p. 93.

  4 Doleman, Conference about the Next Succession, p. 196.

  5 Doran, ‘Three late-Elizabethan succession tracts’, p. 95; Peter Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 415–29.

  6 Susan Doran, ‘Revenge her Foul and most Unnatural murder? The impact of Mary Stewart’s execution on Anglo-Scottish relations’, History 85 (2000), pp. 589–612.

  7 13 Eliz I, c.1 printed in Statutes IV: 526–8.

  8 Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State, I, p. 357.

  9 LPL, MS 651, fol. 122r; Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, p. 242.

  10 Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State, I, p. 362. See Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth, p. 209 and Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987), p. 204; Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day celebrations of 1595’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 41–66; R. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: the Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (California, 1989), chapter 1.

  11 CP 36/51 in HMC Salisbury, V, p. 484.

  12 Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State, I, p. 379; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley Papers II, p. 163.

  13 Ibid., pp. 201–2.

  14 Ibid., pp. 203–5.

  15 Harrison, Elizabethan Journal, p. 70.

  16 Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State, II, pp. 17–19, 21.