The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (47 page)

In the months that followed, Knollys became infatuated with the young Mary Fitton. When she spurned his advances, he wrote a series of letters to her sister, Anne Newdigate, in which he confided the pains of his unrequited love. Sir William was already married to the dowager Lady Chandos and in flowery parables he wrote to Mary’s sister of how ‘my looking for any fruit of my garden is in vain, unless the old tree be cut down and a new graft of a good kind planted’. If his wife died he could freely press his suit for Mary Fitton; ‘hope is the only food I live by & patience is my pillow to rest upon’.
3
In another letter he described himself as ‘cloyed with too much and yet ready to starve for hunger’ and expressed the frustrations of sleeping next door to Mary’s chamber: ‘My eyes see what I cannot attain to, my ears hear what I do scant believe, and my thoughts are carried with contrary conceits. My hopes are mixed with despair and my desires starved with expectation; but were my enjoying assured, I could willingly endure purgatory for a season to purchase my heaven at the last.’ He closed his letter explaining that he could write no more being so distempered with toothache and ‘your sister’s going to bed without bidding me goodnight’.
4

John, the son of another of Elizabeth’s bedfellows, the late Isabella Harington and Sir John Harington, also proved to be a dubious influence on the maids of honour and risqué in his choice of literature. As Elizabeth’s first godson, John was regarded with obvious affection by the Queen. She appreciated his intelligence and enquiring mind. When he was studying at Cambridge, aged fifteen, he received a letter from the Queen containing a copy of a recent speech she had made to Parliament in which she defended her right not to marry. ‘Boy Jack’, she affectionately addressed him,

I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into Parliament Assemblies as yet. Ponder them in thy hours of leisure and play with them till they enter thine understanding, so shalt thou hereafter perchance find some good fruits hereof when thy godmother is out of remembrance, and I do this because thy father was ready to serve us in trouble and thrall.
5

Following his father’s death in July 1582, John Harington returned to the family home of Kelston in Somerset and there began to translate into English the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance
Orlando Furioso
(‘The Frenzy of Orlando’). It was a herculean task and it took, Harington described, ‘some years, & months, & weeks, and days’.
6

The twenty-eighth sonnet contained the racy tale of Giacondo.
7
It tells of the adventures of Jocundo and Astolfo who, having discovered that both their wives had been unfaithful, begin a journey across Europe to see if a faithful woman can be found. Having tried many ladies and even been ‘beguiled’ in their own bed by their maid, they conclude that ‘fidelity was no part of woman’s nature’, and there is not a woman in the world whose favours could not be won by wooing or by money.

In February 1591, having completed the translation of this piece, Harington circulated his manuscript among the Queen’s maids of honour, whom he felt needed relief from the daily routine of needlework. When Elizabeth discovered what her maids were reading, she reprimanded them, believing it was an improper ‘bawdy’ text for the young ladies in her charge. When she discovered that her godson was responsible, she summoned him and ‘severely censured him for endangering the manners of her ladies with such an indelicate tale’.
8
As a punishment, she told Harington to stay away from court until he had translated Ariosto’s entire poem – some 33,000 lines of verse. Harington took her at her word and by the end of 1592 had completed the full translation. When Elizabeth visited him at his home near Bath, he presented her with a splendidly bound copy of it with a frontispiece displaying a portrait of himself and his beloved dog Bungay.
9

Harington’s next offering was
A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject
, subtitled
The Metamorphosis of Ajax
, which he presented to the Queen in 1596
10
(Ajax being a play on ‘a
jakes
’, the Elizabethan word for a privy). In the book Harington unveiled his new invention, a ‘flushing close stool’. He claimed the idea came to him during a conversation with a group of men, including Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, while at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, the home of Sir Matthew Arundell. Although Harington wrote the
New Discourse
under the pseudonym ‘Misacmos’, he dropped many clues to his identity throughout, and would soon become known as Sir Ajax Harington.

Whilst Harington’s main purpose in his
New Discourse
was to popularise his invention, he also used the privy as a metaphor to criticise court corruption and urge moral and spiritual reform. ‘May not I, as a sorry writer among the rest, in a merry manner, and in a harmless manner, professing purposely of vaults and privies … draw the reader by some pretty draught to sink into a deep and necessary consideration, how to mend some of their privy faults?’
11
The book is divided into three sections. The first consists of two letters exchanged between Misacmos and his cousin Philostilpnos (a lover of cleanliness) in which Philostilpnos exhorts Misacmos to make his invention public. Philostilpnos, who can be identified as John’s cousin, Sir Edward Sheldon, encourages Misacmos to use ‘homely’ words in his descriptions by christening the new device in ‘plain English, a shitting place’.

The book then goes on to present, ‘An Anatomy of the Metamorphosed Ajax’ – or ‘A Plain Plot of a Privy in Perfection’. Written and illustrated by Harington’s servant Thomas Combe, it is a practical guide to the construction and workings of the privy and includes details of where the parts can be obtained and at what price. When a handle in the seat is pulled, releasing a valve, water was drawn from a cistern (pictured in the book with fish swimming in it) into the pan of the bowl, and flushed into a cesspool beneath.

Throughout the text, Harington is particularly concerned with the bad odours emanating from privies. It is the ‘breath’ of Ajax that makes those using a privy ‘glad to stop their noses’. Miasmic theory attributed disease to ‘corruption of air’ and given the poor sanitation of the palaces, the court could never stay long in one place before the pungent smells forced the Queen to move on. Harington describes how the removal of excrement had long been a problem and cites Deuteronomy 23: 12–14, in which the Israelites leave camp to relieve themselves by digging a hole for the excrement, which they then cover. He notes that the problem of dealing with excrement extends to everyone, ‘even in the goodliest & stateliest palaces of this realm, notwithstanding all our provisions of vaults, of sluices, of grates, of pains of poor folks in sweeping and scouring, yet still this same whoreson saucy stink’. He extols his readers to better themselves by cleaning their household privy latrines and correcting their personal shortcomings: ‘To keep your houses sweet, cleanse privy vaults/To keep your souls as sweet, mend privy faults.’

Harington rightly saw the ‘standing close stool’ as a radical improvement in sanitation.

I think I might also lay pride to their charge, for I have seen them in sugared cases of satin and velvet – which is flat against the Statute of Apparel – but for sweetness or cleanliness I never knew yet any of them guilty of it; but that if they had but waited on a lady in her chamber a day or a night, they would have made a man, at his next entrance into the chamber, have said ‘So, good speed ye.’
12

One of his epigrams, which he addressed, ‘To the Ladies of the Queen’s Privy Chamber at the Making of their Perfumed Privy at Richmond’, is evidence that one of Harington’s water closets was installed at Richmond Palace and was working well.

Fair Dames, if any took in scorn and spite,

Me, that Misacmos Muse in mirth did write,

To satisfy the sin, lo, here in chains

For aye to hand, my master he ordains.

Yet deem the deed to him no degradation,

But doom to this device new commendation

Sith here you see, feel, smell that his conveyance

Hath freed this noisome place from all annoyance.

Now judge you, that the work mock, envy, taunt,

Whose service in this place may make most vaunt:

If us, or you, to praise it, were most meet,

You, that made sour, or us that made it sweet?
13

The
New Discourse
ends with a lengthy ‘Apology’, in which during a dream of a trial for slander, Harington answers charges which he says have been brought against the book and apologises for his subject matter. Certainly Elizabeth did not outwardly encourage her godson’s book, particularly as she believed it contained a ribald reference to the late Robert Dudley – ‘the great Bear that carried eight dogs on him when Monsieur [the Duke of Alençon] was here’.
14
When Elizabeth refused to grant Harington a licence to publish it he defied her and it enjoyed considerable, if short-lived popularity. Four editions were printed in 1596, and whilst Harington avoided an appearance before Star Chamber, he was for a time banished from the court. However, as his cousin Robert Markham was soon able to report,

Your book is almost forgiven and I may say forgotten; but not for its lack of wit or satire. Those whom you feared most are now bosoming themselves in the Queen’s grace; and tho’ her Highness signified displeasure in outward sort, yet did she like the marrow of your book … The Queen is minded to take you to her favour, but she sweareth that she believes you will make epigrams and write
misacmos
again on her and all the court; she hath been heard to say, ‘that merry poet, her godson, must not come to Greenwich, till he hath grown sober, and leaveth the ladies sports and frolics’. She did conceive much disquiet on being told you had aimed a shaft at Leicester. I wish you knew the author of that ill deed: I would not be in his jerkin for a thousand marks.

Markham reassured Harington that ‘You yet stand well in her Highness’s love.’
15
Harington maintained that his aim in writing the pamphlet had been to ‘give some occasion to have me thought of and talked of’, and in this he undoubtedly succeeded.
16

51

Foolish and Old

During Lent 1596, Dr Anthony Rudd, Bishop of St David’s, preached a tactless sermon before the Queen and the court at Richmond. Taking as his text from Psalm 90:12, ‘Lord, teach us how to number our days, that we may incline our hearts unto wisdom’, Rudd spoke of the infirmities of old age and the necessity that Elizabeth prepare her soul for death.

Let me now come to the most revered age of my most dear and dread Sovereign, who hath (I doubt not) learned to number her years, that she may apply her heart unto wisdom.

Not only did Rudd draw attention to the Queen’s exact age, sixty-three, but by the prayer he imagines her saying, he puts morbid words into her mouth:

I conceive in mind, that in her
soliloquia
or private meditations, she frameth her speech in this way: ‘O Lord, I am now entered a good way into the Climacterical year of mine age, which mine enemies wish & hope to be fatal unto me … I have now put foot within the doors of that age, in the which the Almond tree flourisheth: wherein men begin to carry a Calendar in their bones … I have outlived almost all the Nobles of this Realm whom I found possessed of Dukedom, Marquises, Earldoms & Baronies at mine entering into the Kingdom: and likewise all the Judges of the land, and all the Bishops set up by me after my coming to the Crown’.
1

Here Bishop Rudd publicly discussed the unmentionable: the Queen’s preparations for her impending death. Considering the extreme lengths Elizabeth and her ladies went to to ensure that she always appeared with a ‘youthful radiance’, the Queen was not surprisingly appalled at his observation that time had ‘furrowed her face and besprinkled her hair with meal’.
2
In the prayer that Rudd imagines the Queen intoning, Elizabeth begs that she will not die until she has ‘met with dangers present, or imminent, and established the state for the time to come’.
3

As the Queen listened to the bishop’s words her anger soared. Eventually she called out loudly that he should ‘keep his arithmetic for himself’ and she was ‘so able a sovereign that she required no advice and was quite competent to manage her own affairs’. At the end of the sermon she made her feelings known, observing, ‘that the greatest Clerks are not the wisest men’.
4
Rudd was put under house arrest and all printed copies of his sermon were suppressed. It was a short punishment and the bishop was soon released and forgiven. He had, he apologised, been ‘deceived in supposing her limbs … were of a similar nature of decay than his own … and thanked God that neither her stomach nor her strength … nor sight nor wit decayed’.
5

Yet the signs of the Queen’s decrepitude were hard to ignore, as were the outlandish attempts to try and maintain her former appearance. As she aged, she imagined, observed Sir Francis Bacon, ‘that the people, who are more influenced, by externals, would be diverted, by the glitter of her jewels, from noticing the decay of her personal attractions’.
6
Despite her failing health and desire to retreat within her private chambers, John Clapham wrote that, not long before her death, the Queen, ‘would often show herself abroad at public spectacles, even against her own liking, to no other end but that the people might the better perceive her ability of body and good disposition, which otherwise in respect of her years they might perhaps have doubted; so jealous was she to have her natural defects discovered for diminishing her reputation.’
7
The concealing of her ‘natural defects’, the smallpox scars, wrinkled skin, sagging face and rotting teeth, to protect her reputation, was increasingly an art form, perfected by the women of the Bedchamber.