by Alison Weir
On Saturday, 4 February, the Commons drafted a formal petition to the Queen, asking her to marry as soon as possible in order to safeguard the succession. This petition was delivered to her two days later at Whitehall by a deputation from the House.
The petition reminded Elizabeth that it would be better for her 'and her kingdom if she would take a consort who might relieve her of those labours which are only fit for men', and the Speaker, Sir Thomas Gargrave, kneeling, candidly reminded her that, while princes are mortal, commonwealths are immortal. If she remained 'unmarried and, as it were, a vestal virgin', such a thing would be 'contrary to the public respects'.
When she heard his words, the Queen was plainly astonished at his boldness in broaching such a delicate issue, but she recovered herself and responded graciously, saying, 'In a matter most unpleasing, pleasing to me is the apparent goodwill of you and my people.' She stated that she had chosen to stay single despite being offered marriage by 'most potent princes', and that she considered she already had a husband and children. Showing them her coronation ring, she declared, as she was to do on many subsequent occasions: 'I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England.' As for children, 'Every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children and kinsmen to me.' She was gratified that the deputation had not named any potential husband, 'For that were most unbeseeming the majesty of an absolute princess, and unbeseeming your wisdom, who are subjects born.'
Elizabeth went on to assure her Commons that she would do as God directed her. She had never been inclined towards matrimony, but would not rule it out completely. If she did marry, she would not do anything to prejudice the commonwealth, but would choose a husband who 'would be as careful for the preservation of the realm as she was herself. However, it was possible that it would 'please Almighty God to continue me still in the mind to live out of the state of marriage'.
As for the succession, the Queen promised that 'the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir', yet who that heir was to be she did not specify. If she remained single, she continued, she was certain 'that God would so direct mine and your counsels that ye shall not need to doubt of a successor, who may be more beneficial to the commonwealth than he who may be born of me, considering that the issue of the best princes many times degenerateth'. Her children might 'grow out of kind, and become perhaps ungracious'. She was implying that any son of her body might conspire to overthrow her, a mere woman, a thing which few among her patriarchal advisers would try to prevent. At best, pressure might be put upon her to abdicate in favour of that son. In 1561, she confided to the Scots ambassador her belief that 'Princes cannot like their children, those that should succeed unto them,' quoting many notable examples where there had been discord and strife between monarchs and their heirs. There is little evidence anyway that the young Elizabeth was particularly fond of children, although she was to become godmother to over one hundred of them. All things considered, she continued, she would prefer, for her part, to leave the matter of her successor to Providence, trusting that, with divine help 'an heir that may be a fit governor' would somehow materialise.
Concluding, she declared: 'In the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.' Thus was born the legend of the Virgin Queen, upon which Elizabeth would capitalise to full advantage, and which would achieve cult status in the years to come.
A transcript of the Queen's speech was read out to the Commons on 10 February. Naturally, Parliament was startled and alarmed by Elizabeth's response: if she did not marry, there would be no heirs of her body to counteract the ever-present threats to her safety and security, and no satisfactory resolution to the succession question. The hoped-for religious settlement would be at risk, not to mention the lives of all her Protestant subjects. For a woman to reject marriage was seen as against the laws of nature, and most men concluded that their mistress was merely displaying an innate maidenly modesty, and would soon come to her senses when she realised the necessity for marriage. William Cecil's continual prayer would from henceforth be that 'God would send our mistress a husband, and by and by a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession'. He would repeatedly remind Elizabeth of his hope that God 'would direct Your Highness to procure a father for your children'. To Cecil, this petticoat government was an unnatural aberration; he longed to see a man in control of the government, and that could only be achieved once Elizabeth was married and preoccupied with her proper business of bearing children. Then her husband could rule in her name.
But the fact remained that, although Elizabeth was undoubtedly, as one councillor put it, 'the best marriage in her parish', she had no wish to marry. Politically, there were advantages to her remaining single. Her sister's unhappy example had exposed the dangers of espousing a foreign prince. Such a husband might offer protection against England's enemies, but he might also drain her resources in wars of his own. He might regard England as a mere satellite state of his own country, and -if he were a sovereign in his own right - he would certainly have to spend long periods out of the country. Moreover, the English were an insular, even xenophobic, nation, who had reacted adversely, indeed violently in some cases, to Queen Mary's Spanish match; they were unlikely to accept another foreign consort.
Of course, Elizabeth could always marry one of her own subjects, which was what the majority of Englishmen desired her to do. 'We are all of us in favour of one of our own countrymen in preference to a stranger,' wrote Roger Ascham, and Il Schifanoya reported how everyone 'agreed in wishing her to take an Englishman'. The main exceptions were Cecil, Arundel and the Duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth's cousin, who all foresaw greater advantages from a princely alliance.
However, the Queen had no desire to marry one of her subjects, predicting that to do so would cause dangerous rivalries at court and in the country. Factions would form, as in the Wars of the Roses, and the tensions thus created might even lead to civil war, as was to happen in Scotland within the decade. Furthermore, Elizabeth hesitated to demean her royal blood by marrying a commoner.
Above all, she did not want to lose her newly-gained freedom, having suffered constraints of one kind or other throughout her young life. Sixteenth-century husbands - even those married to queens regnant -were notoriously autocratic, and society regarded them as the masters in their homes. Wives were expected to be submissive and obedient, in honour of their marriage vows. A queen regnant was a novelty in that age, and stood in a virtually impossible position: placed by God in authority over her people, she was yet required to be subject to her husband. Queen Mary had reached an uneasy compromise in this respect, but was much resented by King Philip when she did not heed his advice or requests. Such a situation did not make for marital harmony, and Elizabeth was of a far more independent mind than her sister. Her formidable intellect and pride in her royal blood would have made it difficult for her to become the subordinate of any man. She meant to rule by herself, and had no intention of permitting any interference with her prerogative. If she married, both independence and prerogative would be under threat.
Privately, she was inclined towards a single existence. In 1559, she confided to a German envoy that 'she had found the celibate life so agreeable, and was so accustomed to it that she would rather go into a nunnery, or for that matter suffer death', than be forced to renounce it. The Imperial ambassador was informed by her that she would much prefer to be a 'beggarwoman and single, far rather than a queen and married'. On another occasion she stated that she took the issue of her marriage very seriously, it was a matter of earnest with her, and she could not marry as others did. She once told Parliament, 'If I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with the greatest monarch.' She seems to have regarded marriage as a refuge for those who could not contain their lust: in 1576, she told Parliament that she held nothing again
st matrimony, nor would she judge amiss of such as, forced by necessity, cannot dispose themselves to another life'. She herself was determined not to give in to such fleshly weakness.
Writers have endlessly speculated that there was a more fundamental reason for her aversion to marriage. Robert Dudley later told a French ambassador that, from the age of eight, the Queen had declared that she would never marry. She had been eight when Henry VIII's fifth wife Katherine Howard had been executed for adultery, and this may have awakened a painful awareness of how her father had similarly killed her mother. When she was fifteen, the man who had sexually first aroused her in her early teens - Admiral Seymour - had gone to the block. It is possible that these events so traumatised her that she could only equate marriage with death. She herself told a Scots envoy in 1561 that certain events in her youth made it impossible for her to regard marriage with equanimity or equate it with security. She blamed this on the marital problems of her father and his sisters: 'Some say that this marriage was unlawful, some that one was a bastard, some other to and fro, as they favoured or misliked. So many doubts of marriage was in all hands that I stand [in] awe myself to enter into marriage, fearing the controversy.' In addition to this, the tragic connubial experiences of her sister Mary and the unhappy example of many marriages amongst the peerage cannot have failed to deter the Queen. In that age of arranged marriages, many well-born persons suffered in incompatible unions, and some, such as the Earls of Worcester, Derby and Shrewsbury, even separated from their wives. In each case Elizabeth would act as an unofficial marriage guidance counsellor, insisting - without success - upon reconciliation.
Another reason for her reluctance to marry may have been fear of childbirth. The whole business of childbearing was dangerous in the sixteenth century, and maternal mortality rates were high: two of Elizabeth's stepmothers, Jane Seymour and Katherine Parr, as well as her grandmother, Elizabeth of York, had succumbed to puerperal fever. Queen Mary had suffered the mortifying humiliation of two phantom pregnancies. Young brides, such as the late Duchess of Norfolk, could marry, conceive, give birth and die within the space of a year. The Queen's physician, Dr Huick, once warned her that childbirth might not be easy for her, and succeeded in scaring her profoundly. Time and again Elizabeth would flirt with the idea of marriage, only to shy away from the commitment at the last minute. It is true that there were often good political reasons for doing so, but it is possible that an inherent fear of childbirth was a factor.
It has also been suggested - as it was speculated in her own time - that Elizabeth was reluctant to marry because she knew that she could never bear children. The evidence for this is contradictory. Her ability to conceive was naturally the subject of intense, discreet diplomatic speculation and inquiry, and because of her reluctance to marry rumours abounded. In 1559 de Feria reported: 'If my spies do not lie, which I believe they do not, for a certain reason which they have recently given me, I understand she will not bear children.' In 1561, his successor wrote: 'The common opinion, confirmed by certain physicians, is that this woman is unhealthy, and it is believed certain that she will not bear children.' However, he had also heard other scurrilous rumours: there was 'no lack of people who say she already has some [children], but of this I have seen no trace, and do not believe it'. The Venetian ambassador informed the Doge that Elizabeth was barren, saying he had been told certain secrets about her that he did 'not dare to write'.
Thereafter, it became de rigueur for foreign emissaries to pursue the most delicate investigations in order to safeguard their masters' dynastic interests. Discreet inquiries were made of the royal chamberwomen, and the Spaniards regularly offered bribes to the Queen's laundress to divulge whether or not Her Majesty menstruated regularly. The woman reported that Elizabeth functioned perfectly normally as a woman, and thereafter King Philip always conducted diplomatic negotiations on the assumption that she would marry and produce heirs. He is unlikely to have done so had there been any good reason for believing otherwise.
Elizabeth herself seems to have fuelled the rumours. She once told the Earl of Sussex mysteriously that 'for her part, she hated the idea of marriage every day more, for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul, if she had one, much less to a living creature'. In 1566, the French ambassador's nephew quizzed one of the Queen's doctors on her ability to bear children. He told the doctor that Her Majesty had stated in the past that she understood from her physicians that she was barren, and he needed to know if this was true because, if it was, he would not wish the Queen to marry a member of the French royal house. The doctor stated that his mistress had been talking nonsense, and that she sometimes said such things out of caprice. If she did marry, he himself would answer for it that she was capable of bearing ten children, adding, 'There is not a man in the kingdom who knows her constitution better than I.'
In 1579, when Elizabeth was in her mid-forties, William Cecil himself closely questioned her physicians, laundresses and ladies as to whether she might still hope to bear children, and in a private memorandum he recorded: 'Considering the proportion of her body, having no impediment of smallness in stature, of largeness in body, nor no sickness nor lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children, but contrariwise by judgement of physicians that know her estate in those things, and by the opinion of women, being more acquainted with Her Majesty's body', it could only be concluded that there was an overwhelming 'probability of her aptness to have children'. This investigation was also prompted by fears that bearing children so late in life would endanger the Queen's life. The report was not intended for public - or royal - consumption, and Cecil was apparently satisfied with the results.
But as the years passed, and the Queen remained childless, a lot of people came to believe she had indeed been infertile all along. Mary, Queen of Scots, many years later, claimed that Bess of Hardwick had informed her that Elizabeth was 'not like other women', but she had an ulterior motive tor doing so, since she had quarrelled with Bess and wished to expose her to the Queen as a spiteful gossip; therefore we must not place too much weight on her allegation. A more reliable witness was Elizabeth's godson, Sir John Harington, who in the 1590s voiced the general and widespread viewpoint when he wrote: 'In mind, she hath ever had an aversion and (as many think) in body some indisposition to the act of marriage.' Elizabeth may well have confided to Harington the fact that she had a mental aversion to sex - although this is by no means certain - but he was purely speculating as to the physical indisposition. In fact, in her courtships, Elizabeth usually assumed that her marriage would be fruitful.
When she was dead, the playwright Benjonson - no admirer of hers- told a Scots friend, William Drummond of Hawthornden, whilst they were drinking wine together, that the Queen had 'had a membrane on her, which made her incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many'. His source for this information is unknown, and he was probably repeating mere gossip, or inventing it under the influence of alcohol.
Modern writers have speculated that the gossip had its basis in fact, and that Elizabeth either had an abnormally thick hymen or suffered from an hysterical condition that causes sexual penetration to be excruciatingly painful. Recently, the writer Michael Bloch has suggested that the Queen, like the Duchess of Windsor, was a victim of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In such cases, sufferers are born with male XY chromosomes but, owing to the body's failure to produce male sex hormones, develop outwardly as females. However, they have no ovaries, and only a deformed womb and a shallow vagina. Of course, it is impossible for them to bear children or even, in some cases, achieve sexual intercourse. Adults tend to be tall, mannish, and straight-limbed with 'strident personalities', although they can appear to be very attractive women. Elizabeth, argues Mr Bloch, may well have suffered from AIS. However, unless one takes into account Ben Jonson's highly dubious testimony, there is no proof to support this or any other of these theories.
At the beginning of her reign, Sir Th
omas Challoner warned Elizabeth: 'A young princess cannot be too wary what countenance of familiar demonstration she maketh.' In other words, she could not be too circumspect in her behaviour. But it was not long before fantastic tales of her alleged promiscuity abounded, particularly in the courts of Catholic princes, where she was sometimes reviled - much as her mother had been - as a virtual nymphomaniac. It was said that she refrained from marriage so as to gratify her lusts with numerous lovers. Unfortunately, Elizabeth made no secret of the fact that she was interested in sex, and demonstrated a vicarious pleasure in talking about it. This, along with her known partiality for handsome, virile, intelligent men, her notorious flirtatiousness and sometimes outrageous behaviour led many to believe that rumour did not lie and that she was not the Virgin Queen she claimed to be.
There were numerous stories that she had secretly borne children, although how she could have done so without people knowing of it, given the very public life she led, remained unexplained. The jealous Bess of Hardwick was fond of relaying to Mary, Queen of Scots all the nasty tales she had heard of Elizabeth, such as how she had been discovered often in bed with the Earl of Leicester, or how she had forced Sir Christopher Hatton to make love to her. Mary very rashly repeated all this in a letter to her cousin, in a deliberate attempt to get Bess into trouble. Luckily for Bess, Cecil intercepted the letter and ensured that the Queen never saw it. Bess later confessed to the Council that she had made up all the tales, and Hatton would swear to Sir John Harington, 'voluntarily and with vehement asservation, that he never had any carnal knowledge of Her Majesty's body'.
