The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (15 page)

Late one evening after supper, Elizabeth invited Melville into her Bedchamber. It was a dark and airless place; weak candlelight lit up the gold ceiling and rich tapestries of glistening threads which hung on the walls. Next to the Queen’s lavish bed, adorned with sumptuous embroidered quilts, was a table entirely covered with silver and a chair with no actual seat but built up from the floor with cushions. There were ‘two little silver cabinets of exquisite work in which the Queen kept her paper and which she used as writing boxes, a silver inkstand and a Latin prayer book that the Queen had written and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father’.
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Next door to the Bedchamber was Elizabeth’s bathroom containing an exotic bath into which the water poured from ‘oyster shells and different kinds of rock’. A room on the east side of the Bedchamber contained the Queen’s musical instruments, including a virginal and an organ, and a clock ‘which played tunes by striking on bells’. A library close by was filled with Greek, Latin, Italian and French books, bound in red velvet ‘with clasps of gold and silver’, some with pearls and precious stones set in their bindings. A secret entrance led from the Bedchamber into the garden, where there was a walkway down to the gatehouse on the river, from which the Queen could depart in her royal barge. When she travelled along the Thames, perfumed oils were burned to camouflage the odours from the river.

In the flickering candlelight of her Bedchamber, Elizabeth led Melville to a ‘little desk’ in which there were several portrait miniatures that she kept wrapped in paper. On each she had written the names of the sitters. She had intended to show him a picture of Mary, which she said she ‘delighted often’ to look at, but the first she unwrapped was that of Robert Dudley upon which she had written, ‘My Lord’s picture’. When Melville asked if he might take the picture back to Scotland for Mary, Elizabeth refused saying that she ‘had but one of his picture’. Melville quipped that ‘she had the original’ – Dudley was ‘at the farthest part of the chamber, speaking with Secretary Cecil’. Elizabeth then took out the miniature of Mary Queen of Scots and kissed it. Melville responded by kissing Elizabeth’s hand, ‘for the great love I saw she bore to my mistress’. He suggested that she might send to Mary either the picture of Dudley or a ruby – ‘great like a tennis ball’ – which she also showed him. If Mary ‘would follow her counsel, then she would, in the process of time, get both, and all she had’. In the meantime she agreed to send her cousin a diamond as a token of her intentions.
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During his time at Whitehall, Melville often sat next to Dorothy Stafford so that, ‘I might be always near her Majesty that she might confer with me’. He knew Lady Stafford and her daughter from their time in exile on the continent, during the reign of Mary I, and spoke of how he made ‘their acquaintance when they passed through France’.
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Dorothy and her husband Sir William, together with two of their children, Elizabeth and Edward Stafford, had taken up residence in Geneva and joined the English Church there soon in October 1556. Another son, John, was born and baptised in Geneva and became godson to Jean Calvin. Sir William died several months later.
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Having then travelled to France in the early months of Elizabeth’s reign, Lady Dorothy returned to England and joined the Queen’s entourage.

Elizabeth was keen to impress Melville with her extensive wardrobe. Each day she wore something different, showing off the styles of France, Italy and England. ‘She asked me which of them became her best?’ Melville noted, to which he replied, ‘the Italian dress’. This, ‘pleased her well, for she delighted to show her golden coloured hair, wearing a caul and bonnet as they do in Italy. Her hair was more reddish than yellow, curled in appearance naturally.’ When Elizabeth asked, ‘What colour of hair was reputed best; and which of the two queens was the fairest?’ Melville replied diplomatically, ‘I said she was the fairest Queen in England and ours the fairest Queen in Scotland.’ Elizabeth pressed Melville who was forced to respond that, ‘they were both the fairest ladies of their courts, and that Her Majesty was whiter, but our Queen was very lovely’. Elizabeth then quizzed the Scot as to who was taller. Melville said Mary, but that Elizabeth was neither too high nor too low.

Then Elizabeth asked what sort of exercises Mary did. I answered that [when] I was despatched out of Scotland, the Queen was lately come from the Highland hunting, that when she had leisure from the affairs of her country, she read good books, the histories of diverse countries, and sometimes would play upon the lute and virginals.

She asked if she played well, to which Melville responded, ‘reasonably for a queen’.

One evening, Melville was taken to a ‘quiet gallery’ and stood outside one of the Queen’s rooms to hear her playing the virginals. Elizabeth was an accomplished musician; she sang well and also played the lyre and the lute.
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After a while, Melville drew aside the tapestry covering the door and seeing that Elizabeth had her back to him, entered. A few moments later the Queen noticed him and rose and, rather than chastise him, explained that she was not used to playing before men but normally played when she was alone to ‘shun melancholy’. Melville spoke apologetically of how he was walking with Lord Hunsdon, brother of Katherine Knollys, past her chamber door and having heard ‘such a melody as ravished me’ was drawn to the chamber. As he spoke, Elizabeth sat down low on a cushion and Melville fell on his knees before her but she passed him a cushion to rest under his knee. He refused the honour at first but she insisted that he take it. She called Dorothy Stafford from the next room to join them and then asked whether she or the Scottish Queen played best. ‘In that I gave her the praise,’ Melville recorded.

After a few days, the young envoy prepared to return to Scotland, but Elizabeth was reluctant to let him go. ‘She said I was weary sooner of her company than she was of mine,’ and urged him to stay for another two days so that he might see her dancing, one of her favourite pastimes. Every morning to keep fit, Elizabeth practised the demanding galliard – a court dance involving vigorous leaps and hops; she always loved to dance with her courtiers and visiting ambassadors. After performing, Melville was asked the inevitable question, ‘Whether she or my queen danced best.’ The Scotsman replied that Mary ‘danced not so high and disposedly as she did’.

Elizabeth had repeatedly expressed her desire to meet Mary in person and Melville urged her not to wait for a formal royal meeting but to come with him back to Scotland, disguised as a page. He suggested that the Queen’s Bedchamber, ‘might be kept in her absence as though she was sick’, and that she need only tell Lady Stafford and one of the grooms of her chamber. According to Melville, Elizabeth replied, ‘Alas! If I might do it.’ The envoy pressed her again: no one else need know; the court could be told she was ill and not to be disturbed. Elizabeth resisted although, as Melville noted, she used ‘all the means she could to cause me to persuade the Queen of the great love she did bear unto her, and that she was minded to put away all the jealousies and suspicions, and in times coming to entertain a straighter friendship to stand between them than ever had been of before’.

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Melville returned to Scotland with an agreement that the English and Scottish commissioners should meet at Berwick to discuss a possible marriage between Mary and Robert Dudley. In an attempt to make Dudley a more attractive proposition for the Scottish Queen, Elizabeth raised him to the peerage and on 29 September, Melville witnessed Dudley’s ennoblement as the Earl of Leicester. It was an act of enormous honour and, as the Spanish ambassador Diego Guzman de Silva reported, a title ‘usually given to the second sons of the Kings of England’.
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Elizabeth also gave Leicester the manor of Kenilworth, along with a number of other grants and offices. He might now be considered of the appropriate status to marry a queen.

At the formal ceremony at Westminster it was still possible to see the intimacy that Dudley and the Queen shared. As Dudley knelt before her and she girded the sword on his neck, Elizabeth could not ‘refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him smilingly’. The two were ‘inseparable’, Melville observed. Elizabeth asked the Scotsman how he liked Dudley and he responded that Leicester was a worthy subject and he was happy she could discern and reward good service. ‘Yet,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you like better of yonder long lad’ – pointing to Lord Darnley, who attended the ceremony as Dudley’s nearest prince of the blood. Mary’s agent again responded carefully:

My answer was that no woman of spirit would make choice of such a man, that was more like a woman than a man; for he was very lusty, beardless and lady-faced. And I had no will that she should think that I liked him, or had any eye or dealing that way … Albeit, I had a secret charge to deal with his mother, my Lady Lennox, to procure liberty for him to go to Scotland that he might see the country and convey the earl, his father, back again to England.
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Elizabeth had talked of Dudley as ‘her brother and best friend’, the man ‘she would herself have married had she ever minded to have taken a husband’; but now she appeared adamant that she was happy to see him marry Mary Queen of Scots. She had ‘determined to end her life in virginity’, and therefore wished the Queen, ‘her sister’, to have him secure in the knowledge that ‘being matched with [Dudley], it would best remove out of her mind all fear and suspicion, to be offended by usurpation before her death; being assured that he was so loving and trusty that he would never give his consent nor suffer such thing to be attempted during her time’.
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Yet as Cecil wrote to a friend, ‘I see the Queen’s Majesty very desirous to have my Lord of Leicester placed in this high degree to be the Scottish Queen’s husband, but when it cometh to the conditions which are demanded, I see her then remiss of her earnestness.’
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Elizabeth soon began to change the terms in which she imagined the union, and talked of how Mary and Dudley might instead live at her court, in a ménage à trois that would allow Elizabeth to see Dudley daily. She would ‘gladly bear the charges of the family’ of the couple, ‘as shall be mete for one sister to do for another’, she said.
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Dudley was horrified by Elizabeth’s designs.
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As he and Melville travelled by barge along the Thames, the new Earl of Leicester said that he was not worthy of Mary, not even to ‘wipe her shoes’, and claimed the plan for them to marry was the invention of ‘Mr Cecil, his secret enemy’. As Dudley continued, if he appeared keen on the marriage he would lose the favour of both Mary and Elizabeth. He begged Melville to tell Mary that ‘it would please Her Majesty not to impute unto him that clumsy fault, but unto the malice of his enemies’.
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On his return to Edinburgh, Mary quizzed her ambassador about his time with her cousin. ‘In my judgement,’ Melville told her, ‘there was neither plain-dealing nor upright meaning, but great dissimulation, emulation and fear that [Mary’s] princely qualities should over soon chase her out and displace her from the kingdom.’
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Meanwhile, Elizabeth wrote to Cecil, who was at home ill in bed. In a scrappy note written in Latin she told him, ‘I am in such a labyrinth that I do not know how I shall be able to reply to the Queen of Scots after so long a delay. I am at a loss to know how to satisfy her, and have no idea as to what I now ought to say.’
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Sour and Noisome

In early December 1564, after a short sojourn at St James’s Palace the court returned to Whitehall for Christmas and the New Year. Though only a distance of about a mile, with heavily laden horse and carriages and in bitter winter weather, it was a slow and difficult journey. The River Thames was frozen and people walked on it ‘as they did on the streets’.
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Courtiers indulged in games such as football, bowls and skittles on the ice, as the business of the city ground to a halt.

On 9 December, the Saturday shortly after the court was due to move, Elizabeth fell ‘perilously ill’ with what her councillors called a ‘flux’ (gastric flu) or ‘diarrhoea’. It was so serious that for the next five days there was a panic that she might die.
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However by the following Friday she was recovering, ‘weakened but in health’ as Cecil described in a letter to Sir Thomas Smith and added, ‘for the time she made us sore afraid’. He thanked God that they might take ‘good warning by her sickness and comfort from her recovery’.
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Mary Queen of Scots wrote, sending Elizabeth her good wishes, for ‘she is every day more dear to me than any other, and I am assured that her life, and that company that I trust to have with her, shall be more worth to me then her whole kingdom with her death, if she were disposed to leave it me’.
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But the distrust ran deep; Elizabeth discerned something more sinister and believed that Mary ‘doth look for her death, and that all this kindness is pretended only to hunt a kingdom!’
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Cecil was already receiving reports from Scotland that moves were afoot for Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, to marry Mary.
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Christmas was bleak. Though Elizabeth was out of danger, she suffered through the festivities with ‘very bad catarrh’ and a fever. When Guzman de Silva met with her on Christmas Eve, she ‘complained of pains in the stomach and all over the body’. She spent long hours resting in her dark and stuffy Bedchamber, attended to by her women, including Kat Ashley, Blanche, Dorothy Stafford and Katherine Knollys, who now returned to court after the loss of her baby son Dudley. Mary Sidney remained at Penshurst Place after the birth of her fifth child just weeks before.
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Particularly when Elizabeth was ill, but also on a regular monthly basis, John Hemingway, the Queen’s apothecary, would supply her and her ladies with various pills, lotions and fragrances. Hemingway kept precise records listing various medicines and scents despatched to the royal household. Kat Ashley was, it appears, the ‘home doctor’ in the Bedchamber and was regularly supplied with chamomile flowers, rose leaves, oil or roses and vinegar. She also had a regular order for lotions, oxicrocin plaster, pectoral powders, Venice turpentine and almond milk in addition to her ‘accustomed pills’.