The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (28 page)

By early October, the Queen was in constant facial pain. In a letter to Sir Christopher Hatton, Walsingham wrote of how Elizabeth had agreed that her physicians should confer with other expert practitioners in London. However, Walsingham, now Principal Secretary, wrote they could not reach agreement ‘touching the disease, nor the remedy’.
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Once again, the thought of the wax images that had killed King Charles IX of France loomed large in the minds of Elizabeth’s ladies and the councillors that thronged the privy lodgings.
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As had always been the case at her times of most need, Elizabeth called for Dudley. He sat up all night at her bedside giving comfort as her pains persisted, the Queen unaware of his betrayal just a month before.
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In early November, with no diagnosis confirmed, Dudley and Walsingham instructed John Dee to go abroad to seek the advice of foreign experts.
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Dee vividly described the ‘very painful and dangerous’ 1,500-mile winter journey, which he undertook ‘to consult with the learned physicians and philosophers beyond the seas for her Majesty’s health-recovering and preserving’.
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He had been entrusted with a flask of Elizabeth’s urine to take to the physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser in Frankfurt on the Oder, who had invented a famous device to diagnose illnesses using urine distillation. This consisted of a square glass bottle divided into twenty-four horizontal bands, each corresponding to a part of the body. When filled with the urine and set in a lukewarm bath, steam settled on the band corresponding to the diseased part.
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As Elizabeth’s pain persisted through November, seventy-one-year-old Blanche Parry, one of Elizabeth’s most trusted and long-serving intimates, fell seriously ill. Few expected her to survive and Cecil came to Blanche’s bedside to allow her to dictate her will.
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Blanche clearly retained her intelligence and meticulous attention to detail as she asked that only proved debts be paid and that a discharge certificate for her heirs be obtained. She made provision for a tomb for herself in the family mausoleum at Bacton Church, Herefordshire. However, the indomitable Blanche rallied and recovered and before long resumed her duties in the Queen’s chambers.

As Christmas approached, Elizabeth remained in her Bedchamber at Greenwich, tormented by the agonies in her face. John Anthony Fenotus, ‘an outlandish physician of some note’, was sent for. It was a perilous thing to entrust the sacred person of the sovereign to a foreign practitioner, who might well be a papist. Fenotus was therefore not permitted to see Elizabeth in person but wrote a prescription.
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Only now had Elizabeth’s doctors started to consider that the pain might be caused by her rotting teeth and infected gums. In a long and elaborate letter, Fenotus prescribed numerous remedies: ‘If the tooth were hollow, when all was said and done, it was best to have it drawn, though at the cost of some short pain.’ However, the physician had heard of Elizabeth’s anxieties and added that if her Majesty could ‘not bring herself to submit to the use of surgical instruments’, he advised, that the juice of
chelidonius major
(fenugreek) might be put into the tooth, and then stopped with wax. This, Fenotus explained, would then loosen the tooth so that in a short time it might be pulled out with the fingers.
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With Elizabeth unable to sleep and in extreme discomfort, her physician decided the extraction was necessary, even though he knew she was afraid of pain and perhaps given her vanity did not want to lose a tooth. Elizabeth proved resistant and Sir Christopher Hatton and her councillors tried to convince her that her tooth needed to come out. Finally the aged John Aylmer, Bishop of London, offered that one of his few remaining teeth might be extracted to reassure the Queen and encourage her to submit to a similar procedure.
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Having watched Aylmer’s extraction, Elizabeth finally agreed, and after nine months of agony her doctors were permitted to remove her tooth. This would be the first and only time she would agree to an extraction and thereafter, as her teeth continued to decay, Elizabeth experienced intermittent pain in her face and neck from gum disease.

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For the New Year celebrations of 1579, just weeks after her tooth extraction, Elizabeth received her favourite sugary confectionary. John Smythesone, alias Taylor, her master cook, gave a ‘fayre marchpane’ (flavoured marzipan) and John Dudley, Sergeant of the Pastry, made her a quince pie. Other regular offerings to the Queen included comfits (crystallised lemons, oranges, and other fruit) and boxes of ginger and nutmeg.
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As Elizabeth grew older she often ate little else but cakes, sweets, custards and puddings, comfits, gingerbread and custard tarts.

Lady Mary Sidney’s offering to the Queen for the New Year of 1579 is also recorded in the gift rolls. She gave Elizabeth a ‘smock and two pillowbiers [pillowcases] of cambric, fair wrought with black work and edged with a broad bone lace of black silk’, doubtless the product of her own handiwork.
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These Christmas and New Year festivities were to be the last that Lady Mary would spend resident at court and the following summer she retired to her Welsh estates.
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The pressures of trying to supervise the running of the family home at Penshurst while her husband was away for long periods in Wales or Ireland, as well as attending on the Queen, proved too much for her failing health. The smallpox from which she had suffered fifteen years before, together with the premature death of three of her daughters and the family’s ongoing financial troubles had all taken their toll. It had been a constant battle for Mary to protect her position at court and to maintain suitable lodgings for her and her husband. She left the court feeling aggrieved and neglected, and concluded that she was ‘ill thought on’, despite her years of loyal service. As Sir Henry wrote to her, ‘When the worst is known, old Lord Harry and his old Moll will do as well as they can in parting, like good friends the small portion allotted our long service in court; which as little as it is, seems something too much.’
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Her departure the following summer prompted no acknowledgement from the Queen and it was left only for Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who was clearly unaware of the deterioration of Mary’s relationship with her Majesty, to report that ‘the sister of the Earl of Leicester, of whom the Queen was very fond and to whom she had given rooms at court, had retired to her own home’.
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Just weeks before the Queen and her ladies had mourned the death of Isabella Harington. Isabella had been one of the most favoured and long-serving ladies, who had been imprisoned with the Princess Elizabeth during the years before her accession. She had become one of the Queen’s most intimate companions and had served in the Queen’s Bedchamber as her bedfellow. She died at her house in London on 20 May 1579 and was buried five days later at the church of St Gregory’s in St Paul’s Churchyard.
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Blanche Parry meanwhile remained in the Queen’s service and at the heart of the court, despite having been seriously ill. It was likely to have been Blanche’s unexpected recovery that led the Queen to give her a gift of ‘two pieces of old sables taken out of a cloak and two pieces of like sables being taken out of a night gown of chequered velvet’ on 9 April 1579.
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The skins of beautiful soft fur were brought into England from Russia by the Muscovy Company. This was the second or third pair of sables that Blanche now had, highly unusual as the sumptuary laws specifically reserved sables for the nobility; Elizabeth treated Blanche as if she were a baroness. Around this time, John Dee, who had returned from his European travels, asked Blanche to be godmother to his son Arthur and when his daughter was born, he asked the same of Mary Scudamore. Clearly Dee saw the benefits of courting the favour of Elizabeth’s most trusted women as a means to secure his own advancement.
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Amorous Potions

The progress of 1578 through East Anglia to Norwich had been dominated by Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations. The prospect of a match with François – formerly the Duke of Alençon, but after his brother’s accession to the throne the Duke of Anjou – had been revived as a means to contain the threat of him gaining control of the Netherlands by coming to terms with the States-General.
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As the progress wound its way through Norfolk and into Suffolk, Elizabeth’s councillors debated the merits of the match. Would Anjou keep the French out of the Netherlands, or would he draw them in? Was he sincere in his overtures to renew his suit or was he merely looking for English aid to finance a new army to shore up his position in the Low Countries and continue to fight against Spain? Was it necessary for the Queen to marry him? Sir Francis Walsingham remained firmly opposed to the match believing Anjou was deceiving the Queen.
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The Earl of Sussex wrote of the benefits which might ‘grow by this marriage at this time’, and about the perils which would follow ‘if she married not at all’.
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Whilst Anjou was now a more respectable twenty-three years old, and Elizabeth forty-five, they still remained an odd couple. Elizabeth had always felt uneasy about the age difference, considering herself to be an old woman compared to this ‘beardless’ youth and her reservations had begun to be shared by Anjou’s mother and brother, Catherine de Medici and Henri III. Now Anjou was heir presumptive they believed the duke should not be thinking about marrying a woman in her mid-forties who was unlikely to deliver a son. The question of Elizabeth’s age and fertility were central to the negotiations: the French needed a fertile bride. Elizabeth attempted to allay fears by promising to agree to an annulment if she proved to be barren.

Whilst having for so long petitioned the Queen to marry, many of Elizabeth’s councillors now began to have doubts about whether she was now too old to contemplate marriage and children. Walsingham believed ‘the danger that women of her Majesty’s years are most commonly subject unto by bearing of children’ was too high. If Elizabeth conceived she ran the risk of dying in childbirth and, if she failed to conceive, her husband might ‘seek by treason to be delivered of her’ in the hope of having children by another wife.
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The desire for an heir now had to be considered against the risk that Elizabeth would die in the attempt.
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Cecil, typically methodical and judicious, weighed the ‘objections’ against the ‘benefits’ of the marriage. In an attempt to discover the truth as to Elizabeth’s health and fertility, he questioned her doctors, her laundress, and the Ladies of the Bedchamber about the Queen’s general health, menstrual cycle and the likelihood of her conceiving. He recorded his findings in a memorandum in which he concluded that

considering the proportion of her body, having no impediment of smallness in stature, of largeness in body, nor no sickness nor lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children, but contrary wise, by judgement of physicians that know her estate in those things and by the opinion of women, being more acquainted with her Majesty’s body in such things as properly appertain, to show probability of her aptness to have children, even at this day. So as for anything that can be gathered from argument, all other things, save the numbering of her years, do manifestly prove her Majesty to be very apt at the procreation of children … it may be by good reasons maintained that by forbearing from marriage her Majesty’s own person shall daily be subject to such dolours and infirmities as all physicians do usually impute to womankind for lack of marriage, and especially to such women as naturally have their bodies apt to conceive and procreate children.
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While Cecil admitted that it would have been better if the forty-five-year-old Queen had married when she was younger, he believed that she had five or six fertile years left. He wrote of the Duchess of Savoy, ‘a woman of sallow and melancholy complexion, and in all respects far inferior to her Majesty’, who had been older than Elizabeth when she gave birth to a baby son. Following the medical theory of the day, Cecil argued that Elizabeth suffered ill-health ‘for lack of marriage’, in other words sexual intercourse. Cecil attributed the pains in her cheek and face to her spinsterhood. Marriage would, he argued, improve the Queen’s general health. A more serious problem, Cecil concluded, lay in ‘the mislike of the people to be governed by a foreign prince and especially by the blood of France’.
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Robert Dudley stood firmly opposed to the match and he too believed the danger to Elizabeth’s health of attempting to conceive an heir was too great. In a revealing letter to Walsingham, he wrote of how ‘the more I love her, the more fearful am I to see such dangerous ways taken. God of his mercy help all’
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– at the same time keeping the secret of his marriage to Lettice Knollys from the Queen and fearing that the arrival of a foreign suitor for Elizabeth might lead to the extent of his betrayal being revealed.

In August, Anjou sent two envoys, ‘M[onsieur] de Bacqueville’ and ‘M[onsieur] de Quissy’, to England to reopen the marriage negotiations. They were to reassure Elizabeth that the duke was ‘at her Majesty’s devotion’ and would follow her directions in the Netherlands. Anjou promised that he had no expansionist aims in Flanders and wanted only to help the people of the Netherlands gain ‘their liberties by force of armies against the Spanish tyranny’.
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He was also anxious for Elizabeth to know that his feelings for her had ‘nothing to do with avarice or ambition’ but were inspired by her beauty and virtue. Yet one later report described how Catherine de Medici had claimed that her son ‘was somewhat embarrassed, when as a young man devoted to pleasure, he called to mind the advanced age and repulsive physical nature of the Queen, she being, in addition to other ailments, half-consumptive [a reference to her weight loss] … but the lust to reign will contend with the lust of the flesh, and we shall see which of these two passions possesses the greater force’.
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