The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (24 page)

Once again there was a considerable age gap. Elizabeth aged thirty-eight was far from enamoured with the suit of the sixteen-year-old French prince. She talked of the ‘absurdity’ of the match given their ages and made clear that she disliked the descriptions of Alençon as short with an extraordinarily large nose and hideous smallpox scars.
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The Queen had initially rejected the Alençon proposal out of hand, given the ‘contrary dealing’ of his elder brother. However, Cecil believed the marriage was absolutely necessary and that the survival of England depended on it. Not only had the Ridolfi plot highlighted the threat of Spain and the papacy, but the situation in the Netherlands was deteriorating and Elizabeth and Cecil had reason to fear that the French would seize the opportunity to invade the Netherlands as allies of William of Orange, the leader of the Protestant rebels.

‘You shall understand that I see the imminent perils to this state,’ Cecil wrote to Walsingham, ‘and namely how long so ever Her Majesty shall by course of nature live and reign, the success of this crown, so manifestly uncertain or rather so manifestly pernicious for the state of religion, that I cannot but persist in seeking for marriage for her Majesty.’
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An alliance with Catholic France was the apparent cost of the preservation of Protestant England.

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By the end of April, as Parliament prepared to meet, Elizabeth modified her stance and Cecil informed Fenelon that the Queen was now ready to hear a formal proposal of marriage.
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It was a rather gilded interpretation of Elizabeth’s position, but it demonstrated a desire to conciliate the French. Charles IX instructed de Foix and François Duke of Montmorency, who were being sent to England to ratify a defensive alliance against Spain, the Treaty of Blois, to commence negotiations. Upon their arrival in June, Elizabeth made clear that she considered marriage to a man twenty-two years younger than herself to be ridiculous but, as discussions continued, she admitted that given England’s isolation in Europe and the pressure from her subjects to settle the succession, it was now in her interest to marry. The issue of the duke’s religious demands overshadowed discussions. Whilst Alençon was more flexible in religion than his brother had been, he still demanded the right to hear mass. He did, however, agree to a ban on the public exercise of his religion, exclusion of all the Queen’s subjects from his chamber when mass was celebrated and his own attendance at English church services.

As the council debated the merits of the match, Walsingham was instructed to discover Alençon’s ‘inclination to Religion’ and report in more detail on his appearance and character. Elizabeth also wanted him to investigate the possibility of the French ceding Calais to her or to any child born of the union – compensation for Alençon’s unsuitability.
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Walsingham’s report did little to allay Elizabeth’s doubts. Whilst he believed there was every hope that the duke could be easily ‘reduced to the knowledge of the truth’ and might cease hearing mass after the marriage, the French King and his mother remained committed to their demand for a private mass.

On 23 July, Elizabeth explained that because of Alençon’s age and reports of his scarred face, ‘we cannot indeed bring our mind to like this offer’.
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Four days later and under pressure from Cecil and the French ambassador she agreed that the duke might ‘come hither in person’ before she made up her mind.
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The French had initially been reluctant to agree to a meeting unless assurances were given beforehand, but on 21 August, Catherine de Medici wrote to Fenelon suggesting a secret meeting on a ship somewhere in the Channel.
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Hopes for a marriage between Elizabeth and Alençon were then thrown by the news from France. On St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, a number of the Huguenot leaders, who had gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henri of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, had been murdered on the King’s orders.
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The next three days saw the indiscriminate slaughter of Huguenots in Paris and then across the country in the weeks that followed. By October, some 10,000 Huguenots lay dead. Reports of the events in France reverberated around Europe. The new Pope, Gregory XIII, celebrated the news with a Te Deum at St Peter’s and Philip of Spain congratulated his historic enemies for their decisive rejection of Protestantism.

The Queen was told of events while she was hunting at Woodstock in Oxfordshire.
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The hunt was abandoned and her court went into mourning. The Privy Council immediately held an emergency session and sent an extra twenty-five of the Queen’s men to guard Mary Queen of Scots. Within weeks, coastal counties such as Devon, Sussex, Dorset, Norfolk and Kent had received a call to arms in preparation for a possible invasion.
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In Cecil’s view the massacre demonstrated that the French King had allied himself with the Duke of Guise and ‘the faction of the papists’, and would now move to extirpate heresy in England and Scotland.
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Elizabeth at first refused to give audience to the French ambassador, but after three days agreed to an interview with him. She received Fenelon in her Privy Chamber in the presence of the members of the council and her ladies, all of whom, like her, were dressed in mourning clothes. Fenelon was met by a pointed, solemn silence after which the Queen moved forward and took him to one side. She asked him ‘if it were possible that the strange news she had heard of the prince, whom she so much loved, honoured and confided in, could be true?’ The ambassador said he had come to ‘lament with her over the sad accident that had just occurred’, that he, King Charles, had been forced to act for ‘security of his life’ and that ‘what he had done, was as painful to him as if he had cut off one of his arms to preserve the rest of his body’.
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In late August, Elizabeth left Woodstock and continued on her progress through Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, much to the alarm of many of her councillors and clerics. Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, wrote to Cecil on 5 September from his house at Fulham, of how ‘these evil times trouble all good men’s heads, and make their hearts ache, fearing that this barbarous treachery will not cease in France, but will reach over unto us’. He urged Cecil to, ‘hasten her Majesty homewards, her safe return to London will comfort many hearts oppressed with fear’. With his letter the bishop sent a paper with suggested measures for the Queen’s safety, which included: ‘Forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen’s head’.
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Sandys’s view was shared by many. Cecil urged Elizabeth to follow this advice, telling her ‘that it was the only means of preventing her own deposition and murder’.
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As Walsingham wrote from Paris, having witnessed the Huguenot massacre, ‘Can we think that the fire kindled here in France will extend itself no further?… Let us not deceive ourselves but assuredly think that the two great monarchs of Europe together with the rest of the Papists do mean shortly to put into execution … the resolutions of the Council of Trent.’
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England was, it was feared, their next target.

Robert Beale, a clerk of the Privy Council and Walsingham’s brother-in-law, composed a paper entitled, ‘Discourse after the Great Murder in Paris & other places in France’. In it Beale wrote of the ‘detestable conspiracy’ engineered by the Catholic powers of Europe and the desire by the Queen’s enemies to take her life.
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The House of Guise, the family of Mary Queen of Scots, was in the ascendancy in Paris and the might of Spain was threatening in the Low Countries. It was now time, wrote Beale, ‘and more than time’,

that her Majesty were thoroughly resolved to take some right course [for] both her own safety and wealth of this realm … The French King is become a man or rather an incarnate devil. The Prince of Condé and Admiral be slain. The Spaniard is placed in the Low Countries. The Prince of Orange’s force be like after this to be weakened as he shall never be able to lift up his head again. We are left destitute of friends on every side, amazed and divided at home; and consider not that where there is any such irresoluteness and security, that estate cannot in policy upon any foreign invasion, (as is intended against this) continue long.

‘The chiefest means,’ he continued, ‘is to be found inwardly, I mean the faction of the Queen of Scots and papists in this realm.’ Beale emphasised that there was only one remedy: ‘the death of the Jezebel’. He wrote of how ‘all wise men generally throughout Europe cannot sufficiently marvel at her Majesty’s over-mild dealing with her, in nourishing in her own bosom so pestiferous a viper’.
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But still Elizabeth refused to consider having Mary executed.

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The Queen’s health continued to cause panic. In early August she had become unwell having walked late in the cold night air and hunted too much the previous day; and a little more than a week later she was once again suffering from stomach pains which left her bedridden for two days. As Antonio de Guarras reported, ‘it is said that she was dangerously ill for one or two nights but is now recovered’.
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Then, in late September, amid fears and anxiety about threats abroad and Catholic plotting at home, Elizabeth fell ill at Windsor. On 15 October, Sir Thomas Smith told Cecil, ‘her Majesty hath been very sick this last night, so that my Lord of Leicester did watch with her all night. This morning, thanks be to God! She is very well. It was but a sodden pang. I pray God to long preserve her. These be shrewd alarms.’
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Cecil wrote to Walsingham of the ‘sudden alarm’ the previous night when the Queen ‘being suddenly sick in her stomach, and as suddenly relieved by a vomit’.
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The sickness was thought to be another bout of smallpox, but given that we now know the disease is non-recurring, it is not clear what it was. One unsigned letter of intelligence, dated 26 October, to the Duke of Alba, described how ‘the Queen has been very ill and the malady proved to be smallpox’. As Elizabeth lay in bed ailing, her councillors had once more sought to settle the succession and discussed the prospect, in the event of the Queen’s death, of proclaiming one of the sons of Catherine Grey as King.
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On her recovery, Elizabeth wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary Queen of Scots’s gaoler, explaining that she was well and the suspected relapse had left no marks on her face:

Red spots began to appear in our face, like to be smallpox, but, thanks be to God, and contrary to the expectation of her physicians and others, they vanished away and at this day, we thank God, we are so free from any token or mark of any such disease that none can conjecture any such thing … My faithful Shrewsbury, let not grief touch your heart for fear of my disease, for I assure you, if my credit were not greater than my show, there is no beholder would believe that I had been touched with such a malady.
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A postscript in the Queen’s own hand reiterated her point: ‘I assure you, if my credit were not greater than my show, there is no beholder would believe that ever I had been touched with such a malady.’
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It was important for Elizabeth to emphasise that she had not been left scarred. Special prayers of thanksgiving for the preservation of the Queen and the realm from her enemies were now to be used in churches across the country:

O God, most merciful Father, who in Thy great mercies hast both given unto us a peaceable princess and a gracious Queen, and also hast very often and miraculously saved her from sundry great perils and dangers, and by her government hast preserved us and the whole realm from manifold mischiefs and dreadful plagues, wherewith nations round about us have been and be most grievously afflicted, have mercy upon them, O Lord …
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If Elizabeth died, civil war and invasion would surely follow. Prayers of protection, signs of devotion and demonstrations of loyalty were for many people all that they could do to try and guard against this most feared fate.

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Lewd Fantasy

During the investigations into the Ridolfi plot, stories circulated about Elizabeth’s sexual depravity and her relationships with her male favourites, with disaffected Catholics claiming that both Robert Dudley and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Captain of her Guard, were her lovers. On 29 January 1571, when Kenelm Berney was seized for his involvement in a plot to kill Cecil and depose Elizabeth, he claimed under interrogation that his accomplice, Edmund Mather, had told him

the Queen desireth nothing but to feed her own lewd fantasy, and to cut off such of her nobility as were not perfumed, and court like, to please her delicate eye, and place such as were for her turn, meaning dancers, and meaning Lord Leicester and Mr Hatton, whom he said had more recourse unto her Majesty in her Privy Chamber, than reason would suffer, if she were so virtuous and well inclined, as some noiseth her!
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It was a story which many repeated and, it seems, many believed. Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, became so deeply concerned about Elizabeth’s reputation and the aura of immorality which surrounded her that he wrote to Cecil to warn him about a man who had been seized at Dover and had uttered ‘most shameful words against her’. It was a ‘matter so horrible’ concerning the Queen and both Dudley and Hatton, said the archbishop, that he could not write down the details but would tell Cecil only in person.
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Not only had the slanderer made allegations about Elizabeth’s conduct, he had predicted that such rumours would cause civil war with ‘as many throats cut here in England, as be reported to be in France’. Catholic would rise against Protestant, a Catholic regime would be installed and Elizabeth murdered or executed with her bones then ‘openly burned’ in Smithfield along with those of her father.