Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (46 page)

Even the smallish circle of court families provided more suitable girls than the coffer chamber could ever accommodate. At this point, acquaintance helped, which was why even the very smallest girls were dragged to court at first opportunity, to show them off to best advantage. Newsletters from court were often full of the detail of the queens’ responses, even to the young. Paying one’s respects as the court rumbled past on progress was a good moment, as were the gift exchanges on New Year’s Day, or the Accession Day celebrations in Elizabeth’s reign, as was the case when Elizabeth Talbot, then aged nine, was taken to visit the queen in 1590:

Yf I shuld wryt howe muche her Majestie this daye dyd mayk of the lytle ladye yor doughter, with often kyssinge (whiche her Majestie seldom usethe to any) and then amendinge her dressinge with pynns, and styll carynge her with her Majestie in her own barge, & so into the privye lodgings, & so homward from the ronnyng, ye wold scars beleve me: Her Majestie sayd (as trewe it ys) that she is very lycke my Lady her grandmother: She behaved herself with suche modestye as I pray God she may posses at 20 years old.
¹⁴

The crucial element here was the queens’ personal affection for previous generations of the family—“she is very lycke my Lady her grandmother”— Elizabeth Hardwick countess of Shrewsbury, one of the queen’s friends from the start of the reign. Birth and contacts went only so far in obtaining a place close to the queen; the deciding factor was the queen’s liking.

Like their sisters in aristocratic households, all maids of honor left court on marriage, unless they were of sufficient rank to drift in and out as attendants, or a place in the privy chamber happened to fall vacant. It was now when they were in their twenties, as they fanned out across the country, that the age of letter-writing dawned. Friendship, like acquaintance, became something to be maintained by visits—it was not only the queens who went on progress—an endless circuit of dinner parties at their London houses, and correspondence:

i have resevyd your letter mi good ladi to me very wellcom as Frome her i love dearely and most desyr to see. i wolde you had as good caus to com to ley in thes partes as i colde wyshe and thene yow shulde be as grete a stranger in darbi shere as now you ar in London.
¹⁵

This between two women who had served at court together at the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and now, in 1565, found themselves at opposite ends of the country, the one heavily pregnant, the other sorting out her estates after her third husband’s death. Letters such as this were supplemented by a stream of presents, large and small, often of food: game was the gift of choice between the aristocracy, live, dead, or, if the weather required it, parboiled “for the better preservation of him,”
¹⁶
or carefully shipped as one of the vast pies that crisscrossed the country, the bane of any carrier’s life; a more personal touch was achieved with food for which the sender was well-known.
¹⁷
Women in court service were not excluded, although without access to a full kitchen of their own they tended to specialize in smaller items they could prepare themselves, such as confectionery.

Life continued in this vein, with friendships and clientships carefully tended and occasionally utilized, right up to the point of death, for it was one duty of the dying to make sure their associations and alliances were passed intact to the next generation. This concern lay behind many of the careful bequests in the women’s wills throughout the period, particularly in the arrangements made for “the making of certeyn Ringes,” or mourning rings. In the case of Mary’s women who died in service, the mourning rings were “to be bestowyd amongs my felowes” in the privy chamber, and although as evidence of intimate friendship they are somewhat undermined by the fact that all the women in the privy chamber were included, they instead provide a glimpse of the collective from within. Besides, sentiment is not wholly lacking, as in Mary Kempe Mrs. Finch’s bequest to her friend Frances Neville Lady Waldegrave of “my three ringes whiche hange at a bracelett wherof one is a wedding ryng of the late Ladye Dallawarr another is a ringe whiche the saide Ladye Dallawarr gave me at her death the thirde is a crampe ring.”
¹⁸
Jewelry passed from hand to hand, carrying with it a lineage of friendship. And not only that, for the cramp ring, blessed by the queen and considered the embodiment of her healing powers, carried the memory of royal friendship with a chosen few.

IV

In terms of political logistics, Mary and Elizabeth had more in common with each other than with their predecessors. If nothing else, they had to have chaperones, something a king had never needed. This brought a necessary but crucial change to the constitution of the court: it had long been customary for the staff of the privy chamber or its equivalent to be completely changed at the accession—it was the departments “below stairs” that generally went unaltered between reigns—but from 1553 the vast proportion of those recruited to the privy chamber were perforce women. Shared memories of adversity were at their most obvious at the start of both reigns, when the queens took their current women into their privy chambers and then cast about for the extra ten or so needed to make up numbers.

Mary brought in relatives of existing women but was otherwise fairly conservative and seems to have been wary of using her privy chamber to reward her more recent supporters from the succession crisis. This almost certainly reflects the impossibility of discreetly removing married women if they later turned out to be a poor choice of servant—unmarried women could be pushed out on their marriage, but married women, unlike the men in the council, for example, could not be promoted sideways and out, as there was nowhere for them to go. To remove them necessarily meant insulting them and their families, so it was better not to appoint them in the first place. Unsurprisingly, all the women who had distinguished themselves for their animosity toward her during Edward’s reign, from the duchess of Somerset down, were omitted from the coronation and not welcome at court thereafter, although they were never wholly cut off. Anne Cooke Lady Bacon, for example, was a key point of entry for her particular circle, and her position in the privy chamber guaranteed that even the reformist members of her family, such as William Cecil, were not excluded completely. This was a lesson the next queen should have learned much faster.

Mary’s life was made marginally easier by the fact that almost every one she wanted at court and at her coronation was in England at her accession. The start of Elizabeth’s reign, however, saw a mad dash back from the Continent by the upper-class exiles, although even the most determined took two months to arrive, as they had still to put their affairs in order first. In the event, the duchess of Suffolk did not make it back from Poland in time, Dorothy Stafford Lady Stafford got stuck in Paris thanks to her legal battles with Calvin, and Katherine Carey Lady Knollys only just made it to the coronation of her “loving cousin, and redy frende,” arriving in London the day before.

Mary’s later recruitment is hard to track as her reign was short, at least relative to her successor’s, and problematic in terms of the survival of correspondence. Looking at how Elizabeth’s recruitment evolved—or rather failed, since she recruited steadily from the same circle of families and shires—gives an indication of how Mary’s recruitment might have progressed. The divergence was in the surnames, not in the approach: in Mary’s reign, Morton, ap Rhys, Shirlock, Jerningham, Strelley, and Kempe; in Elizabeth’s, Huggins, Marbury, Abington, Harington, Howard, Howard, and, again, Howard. The difference lay elsewhere, not in the queens’ friendships but in their kin. Mary, daughter of a foreign queen, was certainly well served by her father’s steady eradication of their relatives on the Plantagenet side—the surprising element in the accession crisis of 1553 is not that there were rival claimants to the throne, but that there were so few of them—but she had no group of relatives on her mother’s side on which to draw. Meanwhile Elizabeth, a child of the English aristocracy, had a vast pool of relatives, mostly in East Anglia, over and above her aristocratic Howard cousins and the Asteleys to whom she was already closely bound at the start of her reign. True Tudor that she was, Elizabeth thought this extended group a mixed blessing, and most were lucky to get a pension of sorts. As she herself remarked, “do’st thinke I am bound to keepe all my kindred? Why that’s the way to make me a beggar.”
¹⁹
She only really favored the families of those relatives with whom she had been close in her childhood and teens. Friendships made in youth and in times of misfortune were those that mattered.

In both reigns, once the excitement of the coronations was over the only significant influx of women to court service was in the form of maids of honor, although had Mary survived into the sunlit uplands of the 1560s there would have been a considerable shift in her privy chamber as older married women, picked off by the influenza epidemic, would have been replaced by younger counterparts.
²⁰
As it was, Elizabeth’s privy chamber did not suffer from the same decimation, as most of her women came from a younger generation that did not fall victim to the epidemic to the same extent. Elizabeth, of course, had the huge advantage of being able to learn how to be a female monarch from Mary’s example, especially from her mistakes—hence no marriage, no household reform, a tight rein on council numbers, the senior clergy kept away from court, and war avoided at all costs. Mary had only the general lessons to be learned as a Tudor monarch—trust your friends but do not marry them, watch out for Plantagenets, and beware of accepting an heir if not one’s own offspring. Elizabeth did 
not
 learn, however, from one of Mary’s resounding successes: whatever her other policies, Mary ran a reassuringly inclusive court. Even the most belligerent Protestant peers found they had a relative on the inside, the Russell family being a good example, where the elder countess of Bedford held things together by being a welcome attendant at court. At the extreme, even prospective rebels might have relatives who were not only at court but also in the queen’s favor, as was the case for Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose sister-in-law Mary Kempe Mrs. Finch was a gentlewoman of the privy chamber and indeed had been in Mary’s service off and on since the 1530s. All this inclusion evaporated once Elizabeth was queen, at least when it came to her aristocratic attendants. Most strikingly, the Northern earls were without insiders at court from the accession onward, a fact that left the aristocrats and the queen dangerously out of touch with one another. the importance of including or rather not explicitly excluding potential enemies eluded Elizabeth at first, and she never really learned the lesson fully. She made the mistake of recruiting friends, when she should have been recruiting allies.

V

The primary source material for Tudor court history is peppered with references, direct and indirect, to friends and friendship. At a distance of 400 years, we are left with the problem of how to pinpoint the difference between friendship and clientship. One solution is to look for indications of emotional intimacy, of which the prime example was co-sleeping between adults, a custom hallowed by the centuries and without sexual implications. Some of the queens’ bedfellows down the years are known, such as Dorothy Bradbelt Mrs. Abington, who was “oftentimes” Queen Elizabeth’s bedfellow in the 1560s.
²¹
All the women in question held posts in the privy chamber and their closeness to their queens is well documented, so under the circumstances it seems reasonable to say that they were the queens’ friends. That women swore friendship with each other—shades of Helena and Hermia and their “sisters’ vows”—is another tantalizing possibility, but one for which I have yet to find evidence. Oath-taking was not alien to this group; indeed one of the things that made them unique amongst English women was that they held an office into which they had to be sworn. Beyond that lies the intricate mesh of associations and alliances in which friends in need proved themselves friends indeed, but in each specific instance, from exerting influence on behalf of a man facing execution for treason or a woman in disgrace for a secret marriage, down to indicating what the queen might fancy as a new year’s gift, it is not that easy to disentangle whether the reciprocity we are witnessing is that of true and equal friends or that of true and unequal patron and client—or indeed the prudent actions of a clear-sighted 
politique
.

There was no distinctively female form of friendship. There were distinctly female environs in which it flourished—few upper-class men sat with heads bowed over their embroidery hoops or spent interminable hours helping each other to dress and undress—but the nature of friendship, whether 
amicus
– 
amicus
 or 
patronus
– 
cliens
, was the same whichever side of the gender divide one looks. Instead, although their friendships were typical of their age and their class, their impact was unusual; thanks to their access to the queens and the machinery of government, they became and remained a public concern.

At the same time it was the queens’ memories, in the shape of friendship and trust, that determined how the court was constituted and functioned. Elizabeth had not exaggerated when she wrote to her cousin that “good memory hath greatest streame”: that their friendship would not fade, that it would ultimately be amply rewarded, and that part of that reward would be the queen’s continued friendship. Yet it is ironic that of all those present at Elizabeth’s funeral on April 28, 1603, the only person to have played a similar role at the coronation forty-four years earlier was the friend whom Elizabeth had come to hate above all others: Lettice Knollys countess of Leicester, daughter of that much loved cousin. Much of an age with the queen, Lettice Knollys had served in the privy chamber at the very start of Elizabeth’s reign until her first marriage to Walter Devereux, later earl of Essex, and thereafter alternated pregnancies with attendance at court. Despite thus conforming to the usual pattern, she was a very unusual woman precisely because she went on to spend her prime in a political wilderness, banished from the queen’s sight for the heinous crime of marrying the earl of Leicester in 1578. The queen never forgot and never forgave, leaving Lettice Knollys as one of the very few members of the upper classes to whom one can point and say, here is a woman who was denied the opportunities of her sex and class; here is the exception that proves the rule. Whether Mary or Elizabeth, it was the queen’s friendship that transformed each court woman’s influence into power, enabling her to exploit all that birth, status, wealth, and connections had to offer. By the same token, it was the queen’s enmity that overthrew it all.