The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (27 page)

On 30 November 1577, Cuthbert Mayne was the first of 200 priests and laypeople to die for their faith during Elizabeth’s reign. He had arrived in the country two years before with a copy of Pope Pius V’s bull of excommunication and had managed to elude the government agents who were keeping watch on the ports. Thereafter Mayne had worked as a chaplain in the household of a Cornish gentleman named Francis Tregian. When the house at Probus was searched on 8 June, Mayne was arrested, paraded through local villages and imprisoned in chains in Launceston Castle.

During the course of his examination, Mayne admitted that if a foreign prince invaded a realm to restore it to the ‘Bishop of Rome’ then Catholics were bound to assist to ‘the uttermost of their powers’. Mayne’s alarming words opened Walsingham’s eyes to the enemy within England: Mayne and other missionary priests like him threatened to be the vanguard of a crusade to reclaim England for the Holy See.
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Mayne was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On 30 November he was dragged through the streets of Launceston, fastened to a hurdle and then hanged in the market place. While he was still alive he was cut down, disembowelled, and quartered. His head was placed on the gate of Launceston Castle.

The tide of government policy had now turned against the Catholics and Mayne’s execution marked the beginning of a rabid period of persecution against the missionary priests and those harbouring them.

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On Friday 11 July 1578, the Queen left Greenwich Palace to begin her summer progress into Norfolk and Suffolk. She was accompanied by a huge entourage of courtiers, chamber officers, privy councillors, all their servants and her ladies, plus an escort of 130 Yeomen of the Guard and their captain, Sir Christopher Hatton. From Greenwich, Elizabeth first travelled to her own palace of Havering in Essex, where she remained for ten days, transacting business and receiving messengers and ambassadors. She left Havering early on Monday 21 July and the progress resumed a familiar pattern of arranged stops along the route including Audley End which she left on 30 July.
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Elizabeth now visited parts of East Anglia that she had not been to before. She was hosted by loyal country gentlemen until she reached Melford Hall, the house of Sir William Cordell, Master of the Rolls, where for three days the Queen and the court were extravagantly entertained. On the evening of 5 August, Elizabeth arrived at Bury St Edmunds where she knighted a few local young men and visited the recently rebuilt manor house of Sir William Drury at Hawstead. Sir William was well known to the Queen. He had married Elizabeth Stafford, one of the women of the Bedchamber, who had had a baby early in the year but was probably now travelling with the court. Having left Bury after dinner on Saturday 9 August, Elizabeth arrived a few hours later at Euston Hall, near Newmarket, the home of a young Catholic gentleman, Edward Rookwood. It was a rather unlikely stopping place, and the very public disgrace of Rookwood that followed suggests it had been deliberately planned to be the first show of the Queen’s power and authority in East Anglia.

A vivid account of events during the Queen’s stay exists in a letter written three weeks later by Richard Topcliffe, honorary Esquire of the Body and the Queen’s notorious persecutor of Catholics, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, then custodian of Mary Queen of Scots.
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On her arrival all seemed amiable and when Rookwood was first brought into Elizabeth’s presence, she gave him her hand to kiss and thanked him for the use of his house. Then Rookwood was called before the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, who knew that Rookwood had been excommunicated for his Catholicism, and berated him for daring to come before the Queen. Sussex ordered him to leave the court – indeed, to remove himself from his own house. But events then intervened and Rookwood was publicly exposed as a practising Catholic. A statue of Our Lady was found hidden in a hayrick and brought before the Queen as she watched some country dancing.
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On Elizabeth’s orders, the statue was burnt in front of a large crowd, ‘to her content’, as Topcliffe described, and the ‘unspeakable joy of everyone but some one or two who had sucked of the idol’s poisoned milk’.
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Within a few days Edward Rookwood and seven other local Catholic gentlemen, who were also arrested for ‘badness of belief’, were summoned to appear before the council sitting in Norwich.
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Rookwood and one Robert Downes of Melton Hall were imprisoned in the city’s gaol whilst the others were put under house arrest and required to pay a bond of £200 guaranteeing that they would take daily instruction from a bishop or another cleric until such time as they were willing to conform to the Established Church. It seems probable that the icon was planted in the hayrick as a means to expose and punish papistry and in this, Topcliffe suggests, Elizabeth was complicit: ‘Her Majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her counsel two notorious Papists, young Rookwood … and one Downes, a gentleman, were both committed [to prison] … for obstinate Papistry.’
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This signalled the Queen’s own determination to enforce the anti-Catholic measures, particularly in East Anglia, where loyalty to the Howards was still evident. Thomas Howard’s arrest and execution had taken place only six years before. Although the duke had remained loyal to the Elizabethan Church, the Catholic sympathies of his friends and supporters were well known. Elizabeth’s action in respect of Rookwood demonstrated her commitment to the reformed faith, as well as being a dramatic assertion of her royal authority.

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From Euston Hall the Queen moved to Kenninghall Palace and then on to Norwich, the second largest city in the kingdom. The Queen reached the city boundary on the afternoon of 16 August where a vast crowd of dignitaries, officials and common people had gathered to greet her. Great preparations had been made in advance of the royal visit; roads had been widened and cleared; inhabitants ordered to repair and paint their houses ‘towards the streets side’, and to see that their privies were emptied and their chimneys swept. The city council had ordered that for the month of August, the city had to be clear of livestock and all butchers’ waste carted away and buried. The market cross had been repainted, ‘timber colour’ and white, and the pillory and cage, which had been there for miscreants, was removed a few days before she arrived. Elaborate pageants and entertainments had also been prepared to welcome the Queen.
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Elizabeth arrived in the city on Saturday 16 August and was greeted by the mayor, the officers of the city and other wealthy gentlemen before moving through the city towards the cathedral. Over the next few days the Queen was entertained and hosted with elaborate ceremony, but then four days into her visit she received dramatic news from London. Reports from the commissioners responsible for security in the city described how evidence of witchcraft had been found. Under a dunghill in Islington they had discovered three wax images about twelve inches high, one with ‘Elizabeth’ etched on its forehead and two dressed like her ministers and pierced with hog’s bristles.
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The images had been deliberately placed so the heat of the decomposing dung would melt the wax and slowly ‘kill the Queen’. The Privy Council ordered that the London committee, ‘learn by some secret means where any persons are to be found that delighted are thought to be favourers of such magical devices’.
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According to Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the new Spanish ambassador, ‘When it reached the Queen’s ears she was disturbed, as it was looked upon as an augury’, and heralded a Catholic assassination plot against her.
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The Privy Council immediately called upon John Dee, the Queen’s ‘philosopher’, to ‘prevent the mischief’ that they ‘suspected to be intended against her Majesty’s person’.
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Within hours of arriving in Norwich he had performed some ‘counter magic’ to nullify the enchantment of the images.
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What Dee had done to neutralise the threat of the malevolent witchcraft is unclear and only Secretary Thomas Wilson found the courage to observe his ‘godly’ magic and report to Elizabeth.
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Dee then returned to London to assist with the investigation and hunt down the likely suspects.
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On 30 August, a young Catholic named Henry Blower was arrested and committed to the Poultry Compter in London, a small and filthy prison near Cheapside
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Ten days later the commissioners moved Blower to the Tower of London to be tortured, whilst at the same time arresting his father, also called Henry Blower.
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On the rack, the younger Blower accused Thomas Harding, the vicar of Islington, of making the wax images.
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The previous April, Harding had been accused of conjuring, but then the Privy Council had had insufficient proof to press charges. Now he was arrested and brutally tortured.
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The fact that Elizabeth was suffering from excruciating facial pain at the time cast the wax image plot into a particularly sinister light. To her Protestant councillors this proved that the wax images were Catholic magic. Fears were heightened because it was widely believed that the death of Charles IX of France four years earlier had been caused by the same type of witchcraft. One Cosmo Ruggieri, a native of Florence, was accused of a conspiracy to destroy the King by magic. It was alleged that Ruggieri had made a wax figure of the monarch which he had pierced with pins.
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He was immediately arrested and imprisoned but Charles’s death of an unidentified disease, little more than a month later, raised suspicions that he had been fatally enchanted by Protestant sorcerers who had melted wax images of him.
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Yet the investigations into the wax image conspiracy soon stalled and the Privy Council now tried to tie in other Catholics who had been previously suspected of treasonous activity. John Prestall was arrested in early October, four years after being released under bonds for good behaviour. He had been indicted and imprisoned in 1571 for a treasonous conspiracy to kill Elizabeth by necromancy. In this highly charged political atmosphere, Prestall’s track record of ‘magical devices’ against Elizabeth meant he was suspected of involvement in the wax image conspiracy and was now rearrested. Both Prestall and Harding were condemned to death for high treason.
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The Privy Council now began seeing conspiracies everywhere and Dudley used pamphlets and ballads to stir up a national scandal against the Catholics and their ‘conjured images’.
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In January 1579 the council fretted over some witches in Windsor – worryingly close to the court – who used wax images like those used against ‘her Majesty’s person’.
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On 3 February there was information before the council of certain persons in the bishopric of London who were ‘privy to the secret keeping of certain images which are reserved to some ill purpose of sorcery or idolatry’. The council wrote at the same time to the Bishop of Norwich to report that at Thetford and other places in his diocese, ‘there hath been seen, not long since, in some men’s houses certain images’ of a similarly dubious character.
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As the government moved to make a lesson of the wax image suspects, the notorious ‘conjuror’ Thomas Elkes, confessed that he had created the images ‘not to destroy the Queen’, but to enable a wealthy young client to obtain a woman’s love.
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The Privy Council were now forced to face the reality that innocent men had been tortured. In April the younger Blower was quietly moved from the Tower and released shortly afterwards,
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and Harding and Prestall’s sentences were commuted to indefinite detention in the Tower. The conspiracy, Catholics gleefully recalled, ‘being a little too foolishly handled by the accusers at the beginning, was for very shame in the end, let fall and sink away’. The French lawyer Jean Bodin gave the affair European publicity in his
De la Demonomanie des Sorciers – ‘On the Demon-mania of Sorcerers
’ – in which he reported the true identity of the wax image caster.
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Dudley had been determined to uncover the conspiracy to justify action against his Catholic rivals at court and to demonstrate his personal loyalty to the Queen. However, whilst the wax image investigation was continuing, on the morning of Sunday 21 September, he secretly married Lettice Knollys, the Countess of Essex. Her husband, Walter Devereux, had died in Dublin in September 1576 and some suspicions were raised that he had been poisoned. The covert ceremony was performed by Dudley’s chaplain at Wanstead House in Essex, with Lettice being given away by her father, Sir Francis Knollys.
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Just two days later, Dudley hosted a magnificent feast for the Queen at Wanstead, to mark the end of her summer progress. The beautiful Lettice doubtless attended on the Queen in her usual role as one of the ladies of the court. The marriage remained a closely guarded secret; no open mention was made of it for some months. At New Year, ‘the Countess of Essex’ gave the Queen a ‘great chain of Amber slightly garnished with gold and small pearls’. This would be the last time Lettice would appear on the New Year’s gift rolls.
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Toothache

Elizabeth was now approaching her forty-fifth birthday and had suffered persistently poor health during her progress. By the time she arrived at Richmond in mid-September she felt distinctly unwell.
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John Dee was called to Elizabeth’s bedside where he described her as suffering from what he called a ‘fit’ from nine o’clock in the evening until one o’clock the next morning. Only days before, Dr Bayly, her personal physician, had talked about ‘her Majesty’s grievous pang and pains’.
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