All the Queen's Men (5 page)

Favouritism could in turn incur criticism and outright jealousy in the highly competitive Royal Court, where one man's advancement could be another one's impediment. The Queen's obvious enthusiasm for Ralegh was a case in point. ‘He had gotten the Queene's eare in a thrice . . . which nettled them all',
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wrote a contemporary historian, while one of Ralegh's own poems declared, ‘for those reapes renown above the rest with heapes of hate shall surely be opprest'.

This incestuous trend of patronage bred and multiplied in the hothouse atmosphere of the Court, particularly as the Queen's reign lengthened and she became progressively more conservative in her appointments to high office and at the same time less conscious and critical of promotions made by her senior courtiers. As the Queen grew older and the key members of her Council aged with her, fewer fresh faces came on the scene to revitalize a by now jaded Court. Younger courtiers grew frustrated as they found themselves marginalized and their views ignored. This potentially explosive situation led ultimately to the Earl of Essex's ill-conceived coup in the twilight years of the last of the Tudors. Nevertheless, this Elizabethan system of promotion through patronage had hitherto worked extremely well amid a heady climate of opportunism, greed and the fear of failure.

Traditionally, the English Royal Court had been wholly male-dominated, but the arrival of a female monarch in 1553, when Mary succeeded to the throne, had led to some very significant changes in the way it was run. Some of the most important functions of the household hitherto carried out by men came to be undertaken by women. Elizabeth was therefore fortunate that when she became queen she was able to inherit arrangements within the sovereign's private quarters that were very different to those which had operated in her father's day. Henry VIII's entourage had included eighteen Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and six grooms. By Elizabeth's time this had changed dramatically. The Queen only appointed two Gentlemen of the Chamber throughout her entire reign, one of these being the handsome young Thomas Heneage, whom the Queen would flirt with outrageously in order to make Robert Dudley jealous. Heneage was later knighted and went on to become Treasurer of the Chamber and then Vice-Chamberlain and finally a Privy Councillor in the final years of Elizabeth's reign.

The large number of Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were replaced by four Ladies of the Bedchamber, eight Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber and some half-dozen Maids of Honour. While the majority of these received their board and lodgings, not all of them were paid. A number of these posts were honorary and usually occupied by the wives or sisters of the members of Elizabeth's Privy Council or those holding other important positions in the Court. Some were members of the nobility such as Margaret, Lady Howard of Effingham, wife of the Queen's Lord High Admiral, and Mary, Lady Sidney, sister of Robert Dudley. Lady Frances Cobham, wife of Lord Henry Cobham, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, complained constantly of the amount of time she was separated from her husband, but nevertheless still managed to give him six children.

The Maids of Honour were enticed into royal service by the delicious prospect of meeting and marrying a rich and famous member of the Court; however, husband-hunting could prove to be a perilous course of action unless conducted with the utmost discretion. These nubile young ladies were considered fair game for a temporary fling by any hot-blooded male of the Court, while Elizabeth was very possessive of her lady attendants and envious of sexual pursuits that she had denied herself. Thus, Beth Throckmorton, the homely-looking daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, was permanently banished from Court after being discovered conducting a clandestine affair with Sir Walter Ralegh, even though she later became his wife. Lady Mary Fitton, a luscious brunette thought by some to be Shakespeare's ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets', fell into disgrace after being made pregnant by the new Earl of Pembroke, the Queen's godson. In this particular instance, noblesse declined to oblige and make an honest woman of her, so the unhappy Lady Mary, still heavily pregnant, was sent back to Cheshire from where she had originally come to Court with such high hopes. Lady Mary Grey, sister of the ill-fated Lady Jane, had been appointed one of Elizabeth's Maids of Honour but had the temerity to marry Thomas Keys, the Queen's portly Sergeant Porter, without royal permission. The angry Queen consigned Keys to prison and the distraught Mary was destined never to see her husband again. Nevertheless, she was more fortunate than Anne Vavasour, the luckless Maid of Honour who became pregnant by the lusty young Earl of Oxford. She was sent to the Tower. In many respects, the term ‘Maid of Honour' in Elizabeth's Court seems to have been somewhat of a misnomer.

In the earlier days of the male-dominated royal private quarters, the Groom of the Stool was in charge of the bedchamber. This function was now fulfilled by the Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. The first person to hold this position after Elizabeth became Queen was her long-time servant Kat Ashley. When she died in 1565, her replacement was Elizabeth's long-serving Welsh attendant, Blanche Parry. Blanche's tomb in St Margaret's, Westminster, carries the inscription ‘Chief Gentlewoman of Queen Elizabeth's most honourable Privy Chamber and Keeper of Her Majesty's jewels'.

The other key position in the Privy Chamber was that of Mistress of the Robes, a post that was normally filled by a person of noble rank, such as Lady Frances Cobham who was responsible for all items of clothing within the Privy Chamber. The Queen was a dedicated follower of fashion, and her wardrobe grew continually throughout her reign, bulging with increasingly more exotic outfits that were said to total several thousand in number towards the end of her reign.

A female monarch in command of the Court, destined never to bring a royal husband into the household, resulted in the King's side of the Court being scaled back to purely ceremonial status; the important administrative and financial function which it previously fulfilled passed into the hands of the ever more powerful Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth's Principal Secretary and later her Chief Treasurer. While there was a male monarch on the throne, the Privy Chamber had competed with the Council in an endless power struggle, which saw fortunes fluctuate according to the strength of the individuals involved in either Council or Chamber. However, in Mary and Elizabeth's reigns a predominantly female Chamber ensured that the Council found themselves now in total control. While a degree of ‘petticoat power' lingered on in Court, this did not impinge on affairs of state in the way it had done throughout the time of the male Tudor monarchs. Instead, the Privy Chamber became an exclusive inner sanctum, populated solely by the Queen and her lady attendants, with admittance only to be granted to the privileged few at the behest of the Gentleman Usher, thereby providing an oasis of calm for Elizabeth away from the frenetic atmosphere of the Court. On one particularly notable occasion, even the Queen's long-time favourite Robert Dudley was refused admission; Dudley was greatly upset but the Queen upheld the decision.

One of the important benefits of these new arrangements was that the Royal Court became less prone to the disruptive factions and internal intrigue that had existed in earlier reigns, and while Court rivalries still existed, particularly between such powerful personalities as William Cecil and Robert Dudley and later the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, there was to be far greater harmony in Court during the Elizabethan era, particularly in the late 1570s and 1580s, when England was most at peril as the nation moved remorselessly towards war with Spain.

After Elizabeth had ascended the throne in 1558, it was not surprising that she unceremoniously removed most of the members of Mary's Court in order to replace them with those of her own family, together with those who had stood by her during her long and dangerous journey to the throne. ‘The old flock of Hatfield', as they were sometimes derisorily referred to, included people like Kat Ashley, her husband John Ashley and Blanche Parry, who had known the Queen as a child.

This family stemmed from that of her mother Anne Boleyn, so Elizabeth created her cousin, Henry Carey, to be Baron Hunsdon, at the same time appointing him Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a gorgeously attired body of young nobles eager to make their mark. Part military, part ceremonial in function, the group strutted around the Court looking mean and magnificent. Thomas Parry, who had also been with Elizabeth since she was a child, was made Treasurer of the Household, while the strikingly good-looking Robert Dudley, whom she had also known since childhood, was created Master of the Queen's Horse.

The Queen's lady attendants were similarly drawn from the great Tudor families – the Howards, Careys and Knollys. These were related to Elizabeth on her mother's side and only death terminated their position at Court, whereupon invariably they would be replaced by their daughters. In this way membership of both the Privy Chamber and the Court was virtually a closed shop of long-serving, loyal and hard-working servants dedicated to Elizabeth's well-being with fanatical enthusiasm. In return, the Queen was endlessly demanding in her requirements. Constant attendance at the Court was mandatory unless the Queen gave specific leave of absence, something that could prove particularly irksome to those whose husbands had duties away from the Court. This was something that the Queen appeared blissfully ignorant of, being particularly self-centred, selfishly unaware and uncaring of her courtiers' welfare. The confined nature of the Court meant that it soon became a web of intermarriage and family connection, wherein most of the Court's key members eventually were all relatives, one big Elizabethan family with a matriarchal Queen at its head. Thus Sir Robert Cecil married Lord Cobham's daughter Elizabeth, while Sir Walter Mildmay took Francis Walsingham's sister as his wife and Sir Philip Sidney's wife was Walsingham's daughter, Frances, who went on to marry the Earl of Essex after Sir Philip had been killed in battle.

On her accession, Elizabeth had acquired more than two dozen palaces of varying shapes and sizes ranging from the vast, sprawling Palace of Whitehall, the largest and ugliest in Europe according to one visiting foreign ambassador, down to smaller palaces tucked away in the depths of the country, places such as Eltham and Hatfield, which Elizabeth had inherited while she was still a princess, and Woodstock where she had once been held as a prisoner. Whitehall Palace, spreadeagled along the banks of the River Thames like an enormous Gothic beached whale, was originally the property of Cardinal Wolsey but had been seized by Henry VIII after the original central London Palace of Westminster was badly damaged in a fire. Henry rapidly redeveloped Whitehall at vast cost, creating a complex labyrinth of narrow, winding corridors and a bewildering variety of rooms, more than two thousand in number, big and small, covering many acres, from which earnest government bureaucrats administered Tudor England. The Privy Council invariably met at Whitehall but occasionally at Hampton Court Palace or Greenwich. Elizabeth was never very keen on Hampton Court, as it held so many bad memories from her childhood.

Whitehall Palace continued to be much used throughout Elizabeth's reign and subsequently by her successors up to the time of the serious fire in 1698 which destroyed very large parts of it, never to be rebuilt. At Whitehall the main corridor of power was the Privy Gallery, a broad thoroughfare running straight through the heart of the palace from the Holbein Gate and King Street past the Privy Garden. The Bedchamber, the Queen's private quarters, faced the Council Chamber across this gallery and at the far end lay the Privy Chamber, Presence Chamber, Guard Chamber, the Hall and Royal Chapel and then finally the Privy Stairs and Whitehall Stairs leading down to the Thames, the river still providing the best form of transport in those days.

Along the riverbank lay Hampton Court Palace, another palace which had originally been built by Cardinal Wolsey, and Richmond Palace, the Queen's favourite which she referred to as ‘my warm little box'. Beyond this was Windsor Castle, at that time sited right out in the country. Downstream lay the Tower of London, by now little used as a royal residence, and Greenwich Palace, where the Queen had been born some twenty-five years before she had ascended the throne. One of her other favourite palaces was located deep in the Surrey countryside at Nonsuch, described by the contemporary historian, William Camden, as ‘the highest point of ostentation'. Here the Queen greatly enjoyed hunting and hawking, together with other country pursuits which she continued to partake in almost up to the time of her death in 1603.

Elizabeth had inherited her father's relentlessly energetic nature and so the Court was constantly on the move between these various royal palaces, like a hugely colourful travelling circus orbiting elegantly through the countryside of southern England, to her citizens' delight and her courtiers' dismay, being highly irritated by this disruption to their well-ordered lives which these royal peregrinations were to cause. Elizabeth was to build no new palaces in her lifetime, not that she required any more, nor was she to carry out much in the way of alteration or addition to those already in existence. The conservative Queen was content with what she already possessed and highly reluctant to indulge in a spending spree; only at Windsor Castle did a limited amount of work take place during her lifetime.

Elizabeth waged a constant running war on what she regarded as the extravagant cost of maintaining the Royal Court. ‘I will not suffer the dishonourable spoil and increase that no prince before me did to the offence of God and the great grievance of my loving subjects,'
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thundered Elizabeth during one of her many memorable outbursts. She was assisted in her periodic economy drives by William Cecil who was every bit as miserly in state expenditure as his sovereign, being acutely conscious of the parlous state of the nation's finances. Controlling the spiralling cost of the Court was to be a hopeless task. Elizabeth ruled in an opulent age, one in which ostentation had been elevated to an art form, where the glittering royal courts of Europe constantly strove to outdo each other in ever-increasing magnificence. Trying to curb her courtiers' excesses proved an uphill struggle: indeed, Elizabeth's royal progresses around England in order to display herself to her loyal subjects, were to prove counter-productive in attempting to control expenditure, adding considerably to royal expense. One of the main reasons the Queen never travelled west of Bristol or north of Stafford, thereby never seeing towns as important as Plymouth and York, was the sheer cost of these royal walkabouts as well as the time expended to travel there.