The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (26 page)

Mary did, however, receive the Queen’s full sympathy with the death of her nine-year-old daughter Ambrosia in February the following year. The Sidneys received a touching letter of condolence from the Queen offering to accept their last surviving daughter Mary into her entourage of ladies at court:

Good Sidney. Right trusty & wellbeloved … Yet for as much as we conceiving the grief you yet feel thereby (as in such cases natural parents are accustomed) we would not have you ignorant (to ease your sorrow as much as may be) how we take parts of your grief upon us … He [God] hath yet left unto you the comfort of one daughter [Mary] of very good hope, whom if you shall think good to remove from those parts of unpleasant air (if it be so) into better in these parts, & will send her unto us before Easter, or when you shall think good, assure youself that we will have a special care of her, not doubting but as you are well persuaded of our favour towards yourself, so will we make further demonstration thereof in her, if you will send her unto us.
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The continued rehabilitation of the Sidneys culminated in July 1575 with their invitation to join the Queen at Kenilworth, Robert Dudley’s Warwickshire residence.

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Kenilworth

At eight o’clock on the warm summer evening of Saturday 9 July, Elizabeth and her entourage approached Kenilworth Castle, some twelve miles north-east of Stratford-upon-Avon. As the Queen’s cavalcade came into view, illuminated by 200 horsemen holding thick waxen torches, a round of artillery sounded from the battlements.

Over the large artificial lake which surrounded the castle, Dudley had built a 600-foot bridge with pillars decorated with a cornucopia of fruits and vines, representing bounty and munificence. On the lake itself was a specially erected floating island ‘bright blazing with torches’ from which the ‘Lady of the Lake’ addressed Elizabeth with an oration in which she claimed that she had kept the lake since the days of King Arthur but now wished to hand it over to Elizabeth:

Pass on, Madame, you need no longer stand:

The Lake, the Lodge, the Lord are yours for to command.
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As the Queen entered the castle precinct, musicians on stilts played outsize trumpets, guns were fired and a spectacular fireworks display, which could be seen and heard over twenty miles away, lit up the night sky.

The gold and blue enamelled clock on the turret of the keep had been stopped at the moment of her arrival to suggest that during the royal visit time stood still. The Queen was then led from the inner courtyard to the three-storey tower where Elizabeth, her ladies and her most favoured courtiers would be lodged, and which Dudley had built for her use. It had been designed to face east for the sunrise. Elizabeth’s chambers at the top had the biggest windows and the best views and Dudley occupied the floor directly beneath her. Decorated with dazzling plasterwork, hung with rich tapestries and furnished sumptuously, this would have been the height of Elizabethan luxury. Dudley had also ordered a beautiful privy garden to be created for Elizabeth, closed to all but the Queen and her closest companions.

For the next nineteen days, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was to host Elizabeth in what came to be regarded as the most elaborate festivities of her reign. Although Dudley had previously received Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1565 and 1572, the festivities and entertainments laid on in 1575 were on an unprecedented scale, with various dramatic interludes designed to promote his matrimonial suit.
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This was Dudley’s most extravagant and, as it turned out final, attempt to demonstrate his suitability as a husband for the Queen and he had recruited the soldier-poet George Gascoigne to write and produce spectacular masques and pageants that he hoped would encourage Elizabeth to marry him.

In hot summer weather, with only a few days of light showers, Elizabeth enjoyed hunting in the park and chase, which had been well stocked with deer and game, and bear-baiting in the courtyard. Thirteen bears were baited by snarling mastiffs as the Queen looked on from a safe distance. According to the Spanish ambassador, de Guaras, whilst the Queen was hunting at Kenilworth ‘a traitor shot a crossbow at her. He was immediately arrested, although other people maintained that the man was only shooting at the deer and meant no harm.’
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Perhaps the ambassador’s account was deliberately exaggerated; nevertheless the rumour and the swift action taken demonstrated a heightened climate of fear following the events of the years before.

Out of the heat of the day or to shelter from the rain, Elizabeth and her ladies would withdraw to their chambers to play cards, to read or gossip away from the crowds that filled the castle and the grounds. Each day the Queen would also enjoy the gardens with their long expanses of grass, arbours of fruit trees and fragrant flowers and herbs. An enormous fountain decorated with the stone figures of Neptune and Thetis and scenes from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
stood at the centre of the garden and would ‘squirt water over bystanders when they least expected it’. There was also a huge aviary filled with exotic birds from Europe and Africa, ‘delightsome in change of tune, and harmony to the ear’.

On the second Sunday of her visit, after attending the local parish church, Elizabeth was entertained in the tiltyard with a folk wedding feast, ‘or bride ale’, by country people from the surrounding areas. It was a strange sight. The bride was in her thirties and ‘ugly, foul and ill-favoured’; the groom was young but was lame from playing football. After morris dancing and a pageant performed in the open air by a company of players from Coventry, the Queen, who had watched ‘the great throng and unruliness’ from her window, requested that the pageant be performed again two days later.

The finale of each day was a lavish feast. Although typically Elizabeth ate ‘smally or nothing’, every kind of animal, bird and fish was offered to her, including roast veal, lamb, wild boar, stag, partridge, capon, sliced beef, sirloin steak, mutton and chicken, gammon and venison pies and pasties. And this was just the first course. Elizabeth was then presented with a host of fish and fowl dishes; salmon, turbot, roach, cod, pike, perch, red herring, lobster, shrimp, crayfish and oysters. The range of fowl and game birds was especially impressive: duck, duckling, turkey, quail, gull, goose, crane, heron, peacock, pheasant, swan and the list went on. Later in the evening a vast array of sweets, designed to appeal to Elizabeth’s famous sweet tooth – sweetmeats such as candies containing aniseed, caraway or coriander seeds as well as gingerbread, fruit tarts, candied flowers and almond macaroons – were served in the banqueting house in the garden. Special sweets had been prepared including sugar-work bears holding ragged staffs (Dudley’s emblem) and a gilded marzipan model of Kenilworth castle. Everything was presented on sugar plates and in sugar glasses which could be smashed or eaten at the end of the meal.

Then, in the illuminated grounds of the castle, the Queen enjoyed spectacular ‘interludes’ and entertainments, with musicians performing in rowing boats around the lake, fireworks lighting up the night sky, acrobats turning somersaults along the paths and on one evening an Italian contortionist tumbling ‘with sundry windings, gyrings and circumflexions’.
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Such entertainments were open to the public and some three to four thousand visitors came each day.
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*   *   *

On the second Monday of her visit, after a morning’s hunting and before watching a water pageant in the evening, time was set aside for royal ceremony. Five young men, including William Cecil’s son Thomas, were knighted and afterwards Elizabeth received nine men and women afflicted with the ‘King’s evil’ – scrofula – an inflammation of the lymph glands in the neck. It was a condition which anointed monarchs were believed to have the power to heal by laying their hands on the sufferer’s afflicted areas.
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It was a practice Elizabeth carried out often. First she knelt in prayer, then, having washed her hands in the basin held before her, she would press the sores and ulcers of the sufferers, ‘boldly and without disgust’ and make the sign of the cross. In his
Charisma sive Donum Sanationis
, a tract celebrating the power of English monarchs to cure scrofula, William Tooker, her chaplain, described how he had often seen Elizabeth with her ‘very beautiful hands, radiant as whitewashed snow, courageously free from all squeamishness, touching their abscesses not with finger tips, but pressing hard and repeatedly with wholesome results, and how often did I see her handling ulcers as if they were her own’.
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Elizabeth took the ceremony very seriously and at times did not feel that she had the inspiration to cure by touching. At Gloucester, when throngs of the afflicted came to Elizabeth for her aid, she had to deny them, telling them, ‘Would that I could give you help and succour. God is the best and greatest physician of all – you must pray to him.’ It is possible that Elizabeth may have refused to touch because she was menstruating, which would have made her touch ‘polluting’. Popular culture in medieval and early modern England believed the touch of a menstruating woman could have disastrous effects on men, on animals such as cows and insects like bees as well as on produce such as milk and wine, even if medical authorities of the time refuted it.
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Touching for the ‘Queen’s evil’ became ever more popular over the course of her reign. Both her chaplain, William Tooker,
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and her surgeon, William Clowes,
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wrote books about scrofula and Elizabeth’s remarkable talent for healing it through touch. Indeed English Protestants discounted the papal bull of excommunication on the grounds that Elizabeth still had the God-given ability of a true monarch to cure by touch.
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Elizabeth generally held healing ceremonies every Sunday and on holy days and feast days at St Stephen’s Chapel in the ancient Palace of Westminster but, as at Kenilworth, she would also touch when on progress in order to demonstrate her royal majesty and power.
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*   *   *

The climax of the entertainments at Kenilworth was the performance of Gascoigne’s
Masque of Zabeta
, the tale of one of Diana’s ‘best-loved Nymphs’ who had resisted marriage for ‘near seventeen years past’. Gascoigne’s commentary was intended to draw direct parallels between the figure of Zabeta and Elizabeth with the ‘seventeen years’ which Zabeta had remained a virgin – the length of time Elizabeth had then been on the throne. In the masque, commissioned by Dudley, Diana, chaste goddess of hunting, would debate with Juno, wife to the king of the gods, as to which was Zabeta’s best destiny: marriage or virginity, with marriage winning the debate and Juno’s messenger Iris explaining, ‘How necessary were for worthy Queens to wed/That know you well, whose life always in learning hath been led.’

Yet the masque was cancelled. Gascoigne’s printed account of the Queen’s visit,
The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth,
subsequently blamed ‘lack of opportunity and [un]seasonable weather’. However, it is most likely that the Queen censored the entertainment given its blunt message.
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Indeed Elizabeth had declared her dislike for the masque of Juno and Diana presented to her in March 1565, in which ‘Jupiter have a verdict in favour of matrimony’.
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*   *   *

Elizabeth announced her intention to leave Kenilworth the following day. It was a sudden and unexpected departure. The blissful ease of her days in Warwickshire had been shattered by someone daring to tell her what the whole court had been whispering about: Robert Dudley had begun an affair with Lettice Knollys, former Gentlewoman of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber. There had been rumours of a flirtation between Lettice and Dudley ten years before, when Lettice had come to court heavily pregnant with her son Robert. Then it seemed that Dudley was acting out of jealousy of the Queen’s relationship with Sir Thomas Heneage, and he stopped courting Lettice as soon as Elizabeth displayed hurt and anger at his betrayal. Now it seemed Dudley had renewed his suit. In the autumn of 1573, after the departure of her husband Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, for Ireland that July, rumours spread that Lettice and Dudley, who had now tired of Lady Douglas Howard, had grown close once more.

Elizabeth was devastated to learn of the renewal of Dudley’s romance with Lettice. She refused to attend supper and with the evening’s specially prepared entertainment cancelled she got ready to depart; the scandal robbed Dudley of a last chance to appeal to Elizabeth. He swiftly instructed Gascoigne to write some farewell verses overnight to be delivered before the Queen left.

The following day, as Elizabeth was leaving the castle, Gascoigne, playing the part of Sylvanus, god of the woods, delivered a final farewell song. The Queen was reminded of ‘Deep Desire’s Loyalty’: ‘Neither any delay could daunt him, no disgrace could abate his passions, no time could tire him, no water quench his flames, nor death itself could amaze him with terror.’ His passion for the Queen had turned him into a holly bush, ‘now furnished on every side with sharp pricking leaves, to prove the restless pricks of his Privy thoughts’. Then a familiar voice came from out of the holly bush, speaking of his continuing love for the virgin Zabeta and urging Elizabeth to

Stay, stay your hasty steps.

O Queen without compare …

Live here, good Queen, live here.
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Yet it was all too late. Elizabeth knew of Dudley’s betrayal with one of her own gentlewomen; worse, her own cousin. How could she ever forgive him?

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Badness of Belief

From the mid-1570s, Catholic priests trained on the continent in Rome, Rheims and Douai, returned to England to supplement the dwindling number of Marian priests who had remained since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. It was from Douai in the Netherlands, the seminary, founded by Cardinal William Allen in 1569, that the first missionary priests arrived in 1574. The mission’s attempts to reinvigorate the English Catholic community swiftly led to more intense English government surveillance and persecution, raids on suspect recusant homes with priests often forced to assume false identities in order to elude government spies.
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By 1580 there were some hundred missionary priests in England. Their impact was disproportionate to their number; they hardened Catholic resistance, strengthened leadership and provided a boost to morale.
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Tougher legislation against Catholics had already been passed in 1571, but it was not until now that the law began to be enforced with full rigour and determination.