The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (19 page)

The Queen received de Lannoy’s letter with keen interest and enthusiasm. Her knowledge of ‘all parts of Philosophy’ and ‘favour of science’, including alchemy, was known throughout Europe.
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Alchemists dedicated books to her and on at least one occasion she received an alchemical book as a New Year’s gift.
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She invested in distilling houses at Hampton Court and one Millicent Franckwell also distilled in her Privy Chamber, for a fee of £40 per annum, what was described as ‘the Queen’s medicine’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s potion’. This was thought to be a purgative she used twice a year.
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As testament to her patronage of alchemy, an emblem was later built into a window at Whitehall Palace describing her as the ‘true elixir’, the ultimate icon of perfection and immortality.
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Whilst alchemy was a felony punishable by death and forfeiture of goods, it was a practice highly prized by the Queen and her court and would-be practitioners were required to obtain a royal dispensation.
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De Lannoy offered to transmute gold worth £33,000 and precious stones on an annual basis.
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Faced by an empty treasury and the pressure of war, both Elizabeth and Cecil wanted to believe de Lannoy’s claims. He was granted a generous £120 pension per annum, living expenses for his family and servants, and an alchemical laboratory was set up for him in Somerset House in London under the supervision of Cecil’s agent Armagil Waad.
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Later that year, Thomas Charnock, an alchemist from Somerset, wrote a
Book Dedicated vnto the Queen’s Majesty,
in which he too sketched out a scheme to transmute gold for her and discover the Philosopher’s Stone.
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He promised to produce a medicine, ‘an elixir’, that would ‘prolong her grace’s most royal life … heal more diseases than any other medicine of physic, gladden the mind, comfort youth, renew age and will not allow blood to putrefy or phlegm to have domination nor choler to become melancholy and exalted’.
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Despite having a wife and children, Charnock urged the Queen to commit him to the [White] Tower where he would be cloistered to complete his work. He even offered his own beheading on Tower Hill as guarantee of his scheme.
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However, Charnock was disappointed to discover that he was too late: de Lannoy was already installed in Somerset House and at work to deliver on his promises of health and riches.
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Having promised quick results but with nothing to show after a few months, de Lannoy began complaining about the poor quality of the English laboratory supplies which he claimed were of ‘insufficient strength to sustain the force of his great fires’ and hindering his process. He informed the Queen that he had sent to Antwerp and Kassel for suitable replacements to ensure his success. Elizabeth and Cecil both readily accepted his explanation for the delay and showed no concern that de Lannoy’s evasions masked fraud.
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They continued to believe de Lannoy’s claims and keenly anticipated the fruits of his labours. Indeed it was a growing sense that de Lannoy was being distracted from his task by the presence of a young Swedish princess now living adjacent to Somerset House, rather than doubts about the efficacy of his promises, that led to de Lannoy being placed under careful watch.

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Princess Cecilia of Sweden, the younger sister of King Erik XIV, arrived in England in September 1565. She had come to visit the Queen, about whom she had heard so much, and to persuade Elizabeth to accept her brother’s hand in marriage.
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The princess was an attractive, learned woman with a keen sense of adventure and a taste for extravagant living. During the past few years she had been at the centre of a series of scandals at the Swedish court. At the wedding of her eldest sister, Princess Catherine to Edward II of Ostfriesland in 1559, a man had been spotted climbing into her window several nights in a row. When the matter was investigated, the brother of the groom was found in Cecilia’s room half-naked. He was thrown into gaol and, according to some sources, castrated.

In 1564, the princess was married to Christopher II, Margrave of Baden-Rodemachern. Immediately after the wedding they travelled to England. After a circuitous journey that took more than a year, they arrived in September 1565 and were warmly received by the Lord and Lady Cobham who accompanied them to London. The arrival of Princess Cecilia, who was by then heavily pregnant, was greeted with great enthusiasm. As de Silva, the Spanish ambassador, wrote:

On the 11th instant [of September] the King of Sweden’s sister entered London at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. She is very far advanced in pregnancy, and was dressed in a black velvet robe with a mantle of black cloth of silver, and wore on her head a golden crown … she had with her six Ladies dressed in crimson taffeta with mantles of the same.
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She was lodged at Bedford House in London, which had been furnished with beds and hangings belonging to the Queen. Four days after her arrival in the city she gave birth to her first child, Edward. His christening took place with great ceremony at Westminster Abbey with the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Norfolk standing as godparents. Thereafter Cecilia and her entourage became regular visitors at Whitehall and were welcomed at court banquets and entertainments.

Cecilia was to remain in England for more than a year, but after several months her extravagant lifestyle caught up with her and she fell heavily into debt. When she announced her intention to return to Sweden, the Queen demanded that she pay her creditors in full and sell whatever she could to raise the funds. Meanwhile her husband, who had already tried to flee the country, was arrested at Rochester.

It was then that the princess, whose lodgings were close to Somerset House, sought out Cornelius de Lannoy. He had formerly served the King of Sweden and his ambitious alchemical claims drew Cecilia to him. Now desperate to pay her creditors, Cecilia petitioned him for help. In mid-January 1566, de Lannoy agreed to lend her £10,000 and a further £13,000 in early March. When Cecil learned of the bond between them he worried that Lannoy was not focussing on his work for the Queen and that the development of the elixir might be impeded. All future correspondence between de Lannoy and Cecilia was intercepted.
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When Elizabeth was informed as to de Lannoy’s agreement with Cecilia she immediately forbade the Dutchman to have any further contact with the princess. Aware that he had aroused the Queen’s suspicions, de Lannoy wrote to her swearing ‘on the Holy Gospels’ that he would ‘carry through successfully’ his promise to produce the elixir and would ‘hold no communication’ with Cecilia. But by the end of March, Waad believed that both de Lannoy and Cecilia were plotting to escape to the Netherlands.
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On discovering their designs de Lannoy and his laboratory were removed to the Tower. Yet still Elizabeth remained confident that the alchemist would fulfil his promises.
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Indeed Waad claimed that de Lannoy had already created the alchemical elixir and planned to take it with him. However, if de Lannoy could be caught as he made his escape, ‘her Majesty shall come by the Art [the method] and the thing itself’.
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Finally Princess Cecilia left for Sweden in April 1566, declaring that she was ‘glad enough to get out of this country’.
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De Lannoy remained under close surveillance, with Elizabeth and her councillors waiting anxiously for the elixir he had promised. In July he addressed a letter to the Queen:

I know how grievous this delay must be to you. I have nothing to offer you in this kingdom but my life, which would be a heavy loss to my innocent wife. As to the business of transmuting metals and precious gems to greater perfection, either the work has been disturbed or some wicked man had been present, or I have erred through syncopation. Pray permit me to write to my friends for help, for I can indubitably perform what I have promised.
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De Lannoy’s attempts to prove his innocence failed and in July 1566 he was confined to the Tower of London charged with having ‘greatly abused her Majesty’.
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Waad was sent to examine the alchemist and reported that de Lannoy admitted having made mistakes, but only because of the demands of haste from the Queen, Cecil and Dudley.
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In desperate letters, de Lannoy assured them that if he was allowed to write to his friends for help, he would be able to fulfil his promises within a month and produce a ‘medicine’ capable of producing over thirty million times its own weight in gold.
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After leaving the distressed alchemist to stew for several weeks, Cecil wrote to Waad and Sir Francis Jobson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, ordering them to arrange the immediate resumption of de Lannoy’s alchemical operations within the Tower and his furnaces were moved there.
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But it appears that de Lannoy continued to deceive Cecil and the Queen, and by early 1567, Cecil’s patience was exhausted. Again de Lannoy defended his process and promised the Principal Secretary that he would ‘transmute lead into gold with only a further two days’ work’.
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It was all too late. In February, Cecil recorded in his diary that Cornelius de Lannoy had been imprisoned for ‘abusing the Q[ueen’s] Majesty in Somerset House in promising to make the Elixir’ and ‘to convert any Metal into Gold’.
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While Cecil continued to urge the patronage of other alchemists, Elizabeth was reluctant to pursue another alchemical dream; as Cecil explained, she ‘will in no wise hear of such offers, which she thinketh are but chargeable without Fruit’.
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Barren Stock

On New Year’s Day 1566 the announcement was made at the Scottish court that Mary Queen of Scots was pregnant.
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She was in her third month. Whilst Elizabeth had been waiting for de Lannoy to produce his elixir of unlimited riches and eternal life to secure her hold on the English throne, her Scottish rival’s pregnancy now promised a more certain outcome. Queen Mary was now twenty-three, married and pregnant. Elizabeth was thirty-two, with no prospect of a match and with her childbearing years fading fast. The Queen reacted by urgently reviving marriage negotiations with the Archduke Charles, and by sending an envoy to encourage him to visit England.
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Around the same time, de Silva reported that he had received information so ‘strange and fickle’, that the Queen had expressed a renewed interest in the French match with Charles IX, King of France.
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But as Mary continued in her pregnancy, her relationship with Lord Darnley grew ever more embittered. As Randolph wrote on 13 February, ‘I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth the King and all his kin.’
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Darnley had proved to be a violent drunkard and he had become convinced that David Rizzio, Mary’s Italian secretary with whom Darnley himself ‘would lie sometime in one bed together’, was the father of Mary’s unborn child.
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On Saturday 9 March, fuelled with alcohol and murderous ambition, Darnley led a group of nobles into Mary’s Bedchamber where they found Rizzio and fatally stabbed him with their daggers. A murder had been committed at the very heart of the royal palace.

Elizabeth was shocked by news of the events that had been played out in Mary’s private apartments. De Silva described Elizabeth’s ‘great sorrow’ and her ‘desire to assist the Queen of Scotland’.
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She told the ambassador that if she had been Mary and faced with the assault on Rizzio and insult to herself, she ‘would have taken her husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it’ – although she added that she would not want Philip II to think that if her current suitor, the Archduke Charles, were to become her husband she would be ready to stab him.
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The murder in Mary Queen of Scots’s apartments added to the climate of fear at Elizabeth’s court. The locks were changed on the doors of her Privy Chamber and Bedchamber at all her palaces. ‘The Queen has ordered all the keys of doors leading to the chambers to be taken away and the only entrance in by one door. Great care has been ordered in the guard of her house,’ noted de Silva. ‘I do not know whether the Scotch business is the cause of this, or if there have been any signs of disaffection in the city which has made a special guard necessary.’
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In May 1566, Elizabeth fell ill again, this time with a fever. Sir James Melville described how ‘no man believed any other but death to be the end of it, all England being the overthrow in a great perplexity’.
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Elizabeth wrote an embittered letter to Dudley, petitioning him to return to court and he professed his despair at the Queen’s unkind manner and harsh treatment towards him: ‘If many days service and not a few years proof have made trial of unmovable fidelity enough without notable offences what shall I think of all that past favour which in some unspeakable sort remained towards me.’ ‘In times past,’ he admitted, ‘it would have been of great comfort to receive a letter from the Queen,’ but the situation had ‘so changed as I dare scarce now think what I have been told before to say and write.’

Instead of writing to her in person, Dudley requested that Throckmorton ‘give humble thanks’ to Elizabeth, ‘for the pain taken with her own hands, although I could wish it had been of any other’s report or writings; then I might yet have remained in some hope of mistaking’. The contents of the Queen’s letter had so upset him, he said, ‘it makes me another man, but towards them ever faithful and best wishing, whilst my life shall last’. Dudley added a desperate postscript: ‘I see I need not to make so great haste home, when no good opinion is conceived of me; either a cave or in a corner of oblivion, or a sepulchre for perpetual rest, were best homes I could wish to return to.’
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It was typical of the man: melodramatic and attention-seeking; he knew that the Queen would want him to return. Despite his initial refusal to do so, he did write directly to Elizabeth and signed his letter with a new cipher – a black heart representing his grief. After reading it three times, Elizabeth was reported to have shown ‘sundry affections, some merry, some sorrowful, some betwixt both’. Within days her favourite was back at court.
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