The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (44 page)

Hereunder is entombed Blanche Parry, daughter of Henry Parry of New Court in the County of Hereford, Esquier, Gentlewoman of Queen Elizabeth’s most honourable Bedchamber and keeper of her Majesty’s jewels whom she faithfully served from her Highness’ birth. Beneficial to her kinsfolk and countrymen, charitable to the poor, insomuch that she gave to the poor of Bacton and Newton in Herefordshire seven score bushels of wheat and rye yearly for ever with divers sums of money to Westminster and other places for good uses. She died a maid in the eighty-two years of her age the twelfth of February, 1589.
17

Cecil helped Blanche draw up her will in 1589, which she had signed in a shaky hand.
18
She was clearly a wealthy woman when she died and she bequeathed more than six diamonds, eight pieces of plate, some weighing as much as sixty ounces, one set of wall hangings, three carpets, approximately £2,000, nine pieces of jewellery that did not contain diamonds including ‘one chain of gold and girdle which the Queen gave me’, twelve napkins, one towel, over six annual annuities from rents of various people and some clothing.
19
The first item in Blanche’s will was the bequest of her ‘best diamond’ to Elizabeth. She also bequeathed to the Queen ‘a pair of sables garnished with 8 chains of gold’, possibly those that Elizabeth had given Blanche after she recovered from serious illness many years before. Blanche also made generous bequests to her relatives and to friends at court, including William Cecil, Sir Christopher Hatton, Lady Dorothy Stafford, and to her ‘very good friend the Lady Cobham, one gold ring’.
20

Blanche left provision for a magnificent tomb to be erected in her home church of Bacton, Herefordshire. She had originally intended to be buried there, in the Parry family mausoleum, but by 1589 she had changed her mind and instead decided to be buried in St Margaret’s. The epitaph on the Bacton tomb which again depicts her kneeling before the figure of the Queen was composed by Blanche herself and attests to the personal sacrifice that her service to Elizabeth entailed and the pride which she derived from it:

… I lived always as handmaid to a queen

In chamber chief my time did overpass

… Not doubting want whilst that my mistress lived

In woman’s state whose cradle saw I rocked.

Her servant then as when she her crown attached

And so remained till death my door had knocked …

So that my time I thus did pass away

A maid in Court and never no man’s wife

Sworn of the Queen Elizabeth’s Bedchamber always

With maiden queen a maiden did end my life.
21

*   *   *

As her ladies faded and passed away, Elizabeth’s own infirmity seemed to become more pronounced. Her eyes had become severely strained from short-sightedness which increasingly caused her headaches. Although still partial to sweets and candied fruits, she remained frugal in her diet and now ate even less and took care to mix a greater proportion of water to her wine, so ‘her faculties might remain unclouded’.
22
Her women nursed her through illnesses and looked after her minor complaints, but there was a growing sense that the ravages of old age could not be held at bay for much longer. One apothecary bill submitted by Mary Scudamore to the Treasurer of the Household, in 1588 contains the entry, ‘
Thragea regal cum rhabarbaro incisso, ex mandate Regina pro Domina Scudamore, xvi d
’. Rhubarb was frequently prescribed at that time as both a general tonic and as a cathartic. Purges were also popular as a form of preventative medicine intended to cleanse the system of the ‘evil humours’ that could cause disease. One recipe notes, ‘This was made use of by Queen Elizabeth twice a year.’ The concoction contained cypress nuts, senna, rhubarb, dried fruit and seeds, which would be boiled together in water and administered in quarter-pint doses. The recipe claimed to, ‘purgeth Choler, and melancholy, helpeth much the consumption of the Lungs, Cureth the Liver, and strengthenth the Back. Also it Cleareth the Kidneys, and breaketh the wind Colic, purgeth ill humours’.
23
At least, so was the intention. Clearly Elizabeth was doing all she could to sustain her health and vigour, in spite of her age.

With the death of Blanche and Lady Elizabeth Clinton a year earlier, the Queen relied even more on her remaining long-serving intimates. Anne Dudley, Countess of Warwick, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Bedford, had served her continuously throughout the 1570s and 1580s, and she and her husband, the Lord High Admiral, lived either at court or at North Hall, his house at Northaw, Hertfordshire.
24
When Anne, Countess of Warwick, heard she was being ignored by the Queen over an important suit, her husband had written an angry letter to Walsingham, insisting she should be better treated, ‘considering she hath spent the chief part of her years both painfully, faithfully and serviceably, yea after such sort as without any dishonour to her Majesty any kind of wage nor yet any blemish to her poor self’.
25

Little over a week after Blanche’s death, the Earl of Warwick died and Anne was left distraught. They appear to have enjoyed a genuinely loving and companionable marriage; when Sir Edward Stafford had visited the dying earl he found Anne, ‘sitting by the fire so full of tears that she could not speak’.
26
The countess remained an honorary Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber until Elizabeth’s death and, according to her thirteen-year-old niece Anne Clifford, was ‘more beloved and in greater favour with the Queen than any other woman in the kingdom’.
27
No longer with a husband to care for, the countess could devote herself entirely to the service of the Queen. Lady Warwick received more requests for favour than any other of the Queen’s ladies.
28
By virtue of her marriage and then her relationship with the Queen, she had a wide range of allies in England and abroad and was kept abreast of international affairs through her contacts with English ambassadors. When George, Lord Hunsdon was appointed ambassador to Hesse in 1596 he sent Anne secret reports on the Landgrave of Hesse.
29
Following her husband’s death, when Anne fell ill, her sickness was reported as far afield as Venice.
30

Other trusted women like Mary Scudamore rarely got time away from the Queen and Elizabeth would only agree to very short absences. When the court was at Oatlands Palace in June 1590, Mary and her husband left for a short visit to see John Dee at his home Mortlake in Surrey. They were old friends and Mary had been one of the sponsors at the christening of Dee’s daughter Katherine in June 1581. In his diary Dee records the visit by Mr and Mrs Scudamore. Accompanying the party, he noted, was the Queen’s jester, a dwarf called Mistress Tomasin – also known as Tomasina – an Italian woman who had been at court since the 1570s and was greatly favoured by Elizabeth. She wore clothes adapted from those in the Queen’s wardrobe and regularly received gifts from Elizabeth including gilt rings, Spanish gloves, taffeta aprons, table napkins and towels and several ivory combs, a ‘penner’ (pen case) and ‘Inkhorne’ (vessel for holding writing ink).
31

The Scudamores spent the night at Mortlake and next day rejoined the Queen and the court. Although Mary Scudamore appears from the surviving accounts to have remained officially a Chamberer in 1589, she had undoubtedly become a close intimate of the Queen and, as an earlier letter reveals, was one of Elizabeth’s regular bedfellows.

47

Abused Her Body

In September 1591, Thomas Pormant, a Catholic priest who had returned to England from the English seminary in Rome, was apprehended and interrogated by Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe had designed his own torture rack which he was authorised to keep at his house at Westminster to ‘examine’ priests.
1
The rack consisted of an open iron framework with wooden rollers at each end. The victim was stripped off and laid on his back in the centre of the frame whilst his hands and feet were tied with ropes to the rollers. The rollers were then turned and when the ropes were drawn to full tension, interrogation would begin. The prisoner would be in terrible pain as tendons were ripped, joints separated and bones fractured. Refusal to answer questions or an unsatisfactory reply would induce another click of the ratchet mechanism, gradually stretching the limbs until ‘the bones started from their joints’. Topcliffe also claimed to have invented the use of ‘manacles’ as a torture instrument whereby the prisoner’s wrists would be placed into iron gauntlets and then he would be hung up on an iron bar for hours on end. All the body weight would be put on the wrists resulting in excruciating pain to the victim.

Topcliffe quickly got a reputation for the ferocity of his examinations and many were horrified by his excesses. For twenty-five years Topcliffe zealously hunted and examined recusants, Jesuits and seminary priests. Thomas Pormant was one such seminary priest that he arrested and brought to his house to be interrogated for information about Catholic designs on England.

Later that year, Richard Verstegan, an exiled English Catholic polemicist, printer and engraver, sent a letter from Flanders to Robert Persons, the Jesuit priest who was then resident in Madrid. With his letter, Verstegan enclosed a document headed, ‘A copy of certain notes written by Mr Pormant Priest and Martyr, of certain speeches used by Top[cliffe] unto him while he was prisoner in the house and custody of the said Topcliffe…’ In it Pormant claimed that during the course of his interrogation, Richard Topcliffe, an honorary Esquire of the Body in the Queen’s household, told him of his favour and intimacy with Elizabeth. According to Pormant, Topcliffe declared that ‘he himself was so familiar with her Majesty that he hath very secret dealings with her’, having not only seen her legs and knees but ‘feeleth them with his hands above her knees, he had also felt her belly, saying to her that it was the softest belly of any womankind’. She said to him, ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ to which he answered, ‘Yea’.

So, great and ‘familiar’ with the Queen was Topcliffe, that ‘he many times putteth [his hands] between her breasts and paps, and in her neck’. The intimacy they shared was demonstrated, Topcliffe had told him, by the fact that the Queen bestowed on him not the conventional glove or handkerchief but rather ‘a white linen hose wrought with white silk’.
2
According to Pormant, Topcliffe boasted that if he wanted Elizabeth, he could take her away from any company, although he added that she did not save her favours for him alone and, she is ‘as pleasant with every one that she doth love’.

According to the independent account of another Catholic priest named James Younge, Pormant had made these charges openly at his trial, where he suggested that Topcliffe had hoped to persuade him to recant by suggesting he might then come to preferment through Topcliffe, because of his ‘great favour’ with the Queen. The rhetorical question that Elizabeth was said to have asked, ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ would have extra resonance as the Privy Chamber at Whitehall was dominated by Holbein’s imposing image of Henry VIII. The implication is therefore that the alleged intimacies took place there within the privy lodgings.

Both at Pormant’s trial and later at his execution, Topcliffe strongly denied the priest’s allegations, but by then the damage had been done. Even if the reported salacious exchange did not take place, the account was spoken in court and the recorded notes read by the Privy Council were highly significant and hugely embarrassing; the Queen’s body had been discussed in a highly sexualised and erotic way and the alleged intimacies that she had had were being discussed in open court. When Pormant was executed for treason on 21 February 1592, he was forced to stand outside only in his shirt for almost two hours while Topcliffe pressed him to deny his story, but he refused and finally went to his death.
3

Pormant’s account was printed and circulated by Verstegan as one of the many printed defamations and attempts by Catholics abroad to undermine Elizabeth’s authority by focussing on her body and her sexual conduct. However, rather than Pormant having irreverently discussed the Queen sexual proclivities, Catholics could claim that Pormant had remained loyal to the crown and was simply repeating the lewd accusations that Topcliffe had made.

*   *   *

During the 1590s, anxieties about the succession and the anger felt towards the Elizabethan government refocused on the Queen’s gender. A number of English poems drew on explicit sexual imagery and referred to her in sexually compromising contexts.

In 1589,
The Arte of English Poesie,
published anonymously but attributable to George Puttenham, depicted the Queen’s two bodies and the improper accessibility of both. Access to the monarch is characterised in the form of sexual availability and particular attention is paid to her mouth and breasts, areas of the body that suggest privileged sexual contact. The breasts, depicted as the very source of Elizabeth’s authority, from which issue the rays ‘of her justice, bounty and might’, are described in bawdy detail:

Her bosom sleak as Paris plaster,

Held up two balls of alabaster,

Each byas was a little cherry

Or else I think a strawberry.
4

The Queen’s breast, the emblem of royal beneficence, is here transformed, in the tasting or biting of the succulent royal nipples, into an erotic image. The intimacy suggested draws on contemporary accounts of Elizabeth’s habit of revealing her bosom as she grew older, as a means to suggest her youth and virginity.
5

Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
(1590) also drew on the image of the Queen’s two bodies: ‘the one of a most royal Queen or Empress’, Gloriana; the other a ‘most virtuous and beautiful lady’ whom Spenser identifies as the virgin huntress, Belphobe.
6
Whilst Puttenham chose the Queen’s mouth and breasts as symbols of royal authority, Spenser’s focus is on Belphobe’s genitalia, with her vulva styled as the focus of royal power. Ultimately Belphobe is open to sexual misinterpretation. Braggadocio, a knight, misunderstands the nature of their relationship, interpreting her body as an invitation to sexual rather than political intimacy, a misreading that culminates in attempted rape.
7
Here Spenser draws attention to the problems inherent in a political rhetoric that aims to celebrate a commitment to virgin authority.