The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (17 page)

‘I have through several persons made diligent inquiries concerning the maiden honour and integrity of the Queen,’ Zwetkowich reported, ‘and have found that she has truly and verily been praised and extolled for her royal honour, and that nothing can be said against her, and all the aspersions against her are but the spawn of envy and malice and hatred.’ Dudley is a ‘virtuous, pious, courteous and highly moral man,’ he continued, ‘whom the Queen loves as a sister her brother in all maidenly honour, in most chaste and honest love … that she desires to marry him or entertains any but the purest affection is quite out of the question.’
16
Elizabeth had assured Zwetkowich that she was ‘mindful of her royal and virginal honour’ and that she would ‘vindicate herself’ to the emperor ‘against all the slander that had been cast at her’, and she hoped that he would find that she had ‘all the time acted in all matters with due decorum and attention’.
17
She said she ‘had heard of the great love that the late Emperor Ferdinand had had for his wife, and therefore hoped that the same could be expected of his son.’ Zwetkowich assured her that Archduke Charles had inherited the virtues of his father and ‘would hold his wedded consort dear all his life long’. Zwetkowich concluded, ‘The Queen was pleased to hear this and told me that she had a Lady of the Bedchamber who told her everything and who had said that even if her husband was not handsome, she, the Queen, should be content, if he but loved her and was kind to her.’
18
One might confidently assume that the lady to whom Elizabeth referred was Kat Ashley. Kat had been long married to her husband John and as such could offer Elizabeth the benefit of her experience. Since Elizabeth’s early infancy she had guided her with counsel and reassurance.

Despite the Queen’s apparent enthusiasm, Zwetkowich remained cynical about Elizabeth’s motives, and feared ‘subterfuge’. He believed, ‘she was determined not to marry and therefore found none who pleased her; that if she were to marry she would take none but the Earl of Leicester’. Indeed, as negotiations went on, rumours continued as to Elizabeth and Leicester’s latest indiscretions. Shortly before the arrival of the emperor’s envoy, the feud between Dudley and his great enemy, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, England’s leading nobleman and a cousin of the Queen, had become very public. When Norfolk and Dudley were playing tennis in front of the Queen, Dudley ‘being very hot and sweating’, took the Queen’s napkin out of her hand and wiped his face. It was an action that implied great intimacy and was highly disrespectful. Norfolk was incensed and threatened to hit Dudley, who he believed was ‘too saucy’, across the face with a racket. Elizabeth naturally took Dudley’s side and was ‘offended sore with the duke’, one observer recalled.
19

A delegation of noblemen led by Norfolk later approached Dudley and ordered him to stop touching the Queen or visiting her Bedchamber early in the morning before she was up. Norfolk claimed that Dudley often, ‘took upon himself the office of her lady-in-waiting, by handing to her a garment which ought never to have been seen in the hands of her Master of the Horse’. He also accused Dudley of ‘kissing her Majesty, when he was not invited thereto’.
20
The Duke of Norfolk threatened Dudley if he did not support the archduke’s suit, saying, ‘Evil could not fail to befall him since all those who wished to see the Queen married, the whole nation in short, blamed him alone for the delay that had taken place.’
21

16

Greatly Grieved

One afternoon in May 1565, tensions at court, anxieties about Mary Queen of Scots’s marriage and pressures to settle the succession finally got the better of Elizabeth and she erupted with a hysterical outburst. Hurling wild reproaches at Dudley, Cecil and Throckmorton, she claimed that all those who pressed her to marry were in reality seeking her ruin. She knew Mary’s marriage would only mean louder calls for her to find a husband and produce an heir and the prospect filled her with dread. Cecil reassured her that no one would force her to do anything against her will and that whatever course she chose to follow, her subjects would always remain loyal. However they both knew that such assurances would do nothing to silence the calls for her to wed.
1

As fears for the unsettled succession continued, so too did malicious talk. In conversation with de Silva, Elizabeth revealed her frustration at the constant rumours about her conduct and behaviour:

They charge me with a great many things in my own country and elsewhere, and amongst others, that I show more favour to Robert than is fitting; speaking of me as they might speak of an immodest woman. I am not surprised that the occasion for it should have been given by a young woman and young man of good qualities, to whose merits and goodness I have shown favour, although not so much as he deserves, but God knows how great a slander it is, and a time will come when the world will know it. My life is in the open and I have so many witnesses that I cannot understand how so bad a judgement can have formed of me.
2

These were difficult months for Elizabeth. As she grew weary with the business of government and the pressures upon her, she relied ever more heavily on the comfort and companionship of her Bedchamber women. When in the early summer Katherine Knollys fell ill, Elizabeth immediately sent her own physician Dr Robert Huick to attend on her. Not only was Elizabeth concerned as to the seriousness of Katherine’s condition but she knew that Katherine needed to regain her health quickly. Indeed the timing of her illness could not have been more inauspicious. In just a few weeks, Katherine’s eldest son Henry was to marry Margaret Cave, one of the Queen’s maids of honour, at Durham House on the Strand. The Queen was to be the guest of honour and with urgent preparations still to be made it was important that Katherine be restored to full health.

Fortunately Huick’s visit appears to have served its purpose and Katherine’s condition quickly improved so she could enjoy her son’s wedding on 16 July.
3
It was a splendid lavish occasion with plentiful food, entertainments and dancing which continued long into the night. After Katherine’s period of ill health and Elizabeth’s fear and fretting, it was the perfect event to raise the spirits.

*   *   *

The Queen was at this time at Richmond, a palace famed for its turrets, its bulbous domes surmounted by gold and silver weather vanes which ‘sang’ on windy days, and for the beauty of its gardens. Elizabeth referred to the palace as her ‘warm box’; its covered passages – paved, glazed and painted with badges of gold, roses and portcullises – connected each building to the next and meant it was not necessary to go outside to enter any of its buildings. The great hall measured a huge one hundred by forty feet, and was decorated with the murals of heroic English kings. The privy lodgings were in a large three-storey stone building comprising twelve rooms, and the extra rooms were used by Elizabeth’s most favoured women. The palace grounds covered ten acres, with a large orchard producing magnificent peaches, apples and damsons for the royal household. The royal gardens also supplied salads, herbs to the eighteen kitchens in the palace, whilst rosewater and masses of flowers were sent from Richmond to other palaces.

Then, just two days later after the celebrations of the Knollys’ wedding, Elizabeth was thrown into a deep and all-consuming grief. On 18 July, her beloved Kat Ashley, the closest thing Elizabeth had had to a mother, died. Kat had fallen ill some months earlier but had then recovered. Her final illness was quick and her condition rapidly deteriorated. The Queen had spent the previous day at her bedside, and the following morning was told that her most devoted woman was dead. The privy lodgings were immediately thrown into a state of mourning and in quiet whispers and with sombre reflection the Queen and her women shared their grief. A sense of shared loss bound them together as over the following weeks and months they struggled to get used to life without the woman upon whom they had all come to rely.

Zwetkowich wrote to the Emperor Maximilian that the death of Kat Ashley ‘grieved the Queen so much that she did not command me to appear until the 22nd of July’. However, even in the midst of her mourning Elizabeth realised the need to continue with the business of government and gave her attention to the proposed marriage with the Archduke Charles. ‘On this day,’ wrote Zwetkowich, ‘I apprised her of Your Imperial Majesty’s resolve, in order that she might forget her sorrow. She, however, informed me that in such an important matter she must have time for consideration and I left her in a somewhat more joyous mood.’
4

The news of Kat Ashley’s death quickly spread beyond the court and overseas. Her death ‘greatly grieved’ the Queen, wrote the Spanish ambassador in his dispatch to Madrid. On receiving de Silva’s letter Philip added in the margin, ‘What a heretic she was’.
5
Hugh Fitzwilliam, an English agent at the French court lamented that now ‘Mistress Ashley is gone he has no friend about her to make his moan to’.
6
Her absence was a great loss for those ambassadors and agents who had used her for gossip and information.
7

Blanche Parry, Elizabeth’s longest-serving lady, now became Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, an unrivalled position close to the Queen. As her nephew Rowland Vaughan described, the court was now ‘under the command of Mistress Blanche Parry’.
8
Since the earliest days of her life, when Blanche had rocked the princess’s cradle, Elizabeth and her devoted Welshwoman had a close bond which evolved and deepened as Elizabeth grew up. They shared a love of books and horses, and until Blanche grew too old and blind, they would often ride out together. To Blanche alone was paid an allowance of ‘horse-meat’ over and above her ordinary wage, a testament to the Queen’s gratitude and affection for her.

With Kat Ashley’s passing, Elizabeth now relied on a handful of her other women for day-to-day attendance and for the friendship and comfort which she had long enjoyed with Kat. Frances Newton, the daughter of Sir John Newton from Gloucestershire, had served as a Chamberer in the privy lodgings since the beginning of the reign, before marrying William Brooke, Baron Cobham, in February 1560 at Whitehall Palace.
9
Alongside her service to Elizabeth, Lady Frances Cobham had six children, all of whom feature along with Lady Frances, her husband and sister in
The Cobham Family
portrait dated 1567. In spite of her frequent pregnancies and absences from court, she rose in the Queen’s favour and having returned from her second pregnancy at the end of the previous year, by 1565 she was Mistress of the Robes, with responsibility for the Queen’s clothes, a position hitherto occupied by Lady Dorothy Stafford.

Following Kat Ashley’s death, Elizabeth became increasingly reliant on Lady Frances who, then pregnant, was not given leave to withdraw from court until her delivery drew near.
10
During her period of confinement at the family home in Kent, Lady Frances, a skilled seamstress, and spent the final weeks of her pregnancy working on some needlework as a New Year’s gift for the Queen.
11
She had been working on the dress alongside her great friend Bess St Loe (later to be known as Bess of Hardwick). Bess had been appointed as a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Privy Chamber at the beginning of the reign but had lost Elizabeth’s favour over her alleged involvement in Katherine Grey’s illicit marriage five years before, and had been dismissed from the Queen’s service. Whilst in the years that followed her relationship with Elizabeth became amicable once more, she was not restored to her place in the Queen’s trusted entourage. Now, in a letter to Bess at her estate at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, Lady Cobham described how she was making the sleeves ‘of a wideness that will best suit the Queen … they are fine and strange. I have sent you enclosed the braid, and lengths of caulle [netting] for the Queen of the same work, for your to suit with the sleeves … The fashion is much altered since you were here. Ten yards is enough for the ruffs of the neck and hands.’
12
Lady Frances’s son Henry was born on 22 November 1566 and within weeks Frances was back at court having left her baby in the care of a wet nurse.

In the months of mourning that followed Ashley’s death there was also an event of much excitement. In November 1565, Anne Russell, the Earl of Bedford’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who had become a maid of honour soon after Elizabeth’s accession, married Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, twenty years her senior and brother of the Queen’s favourite, in the chapel royal at Whitehall. The marriage was a great court occasion and represented the coming together of two leading Protestant families at court. Anne, now the Countess of Warwick, was promoted to the position of Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and thereafter remained in close attendance on the Queen who came to regard her as a dear friend and confidante. Her niece, Anne Clifford, would later claim that her aunt was ‘more beloved and in greater favour with the Queen than any other woman in the Kingdom, and no less in the whole Court and the Queen’s dominions’.
13

*   *   *

On 29 July 1565 the court moved to Windsor. Elizabeth tended to stay here only in the summer months as the old castle was particularly cold and damp and difficult to heat. A stone terrace had been added beneath the windows of the Queen’s apartments along which she could ‘take the air’ before supper or briskly walk each morning ‘to get up a heat’.
14
In Windsor Great Park she would indulge her passion for riding and hunting. She loved to show off her horsemanship in the chase. As Guzman de Silva described, ‘she went so hard that she tired everybody out, and as for the ladies and courtiers who were with her, they were all put to shame. There was more work than pleasure in it for them.’
15
Elizabeth and her ladies would also sometimes shoot game from specially constructed stands north-east of the castle.