THE HISTORY ESSAYAL
AM
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courtiers for marrying in secret, but the penalty in their case was
among the most severe. Though released after a few months,
Ralegh lost his offices, was banished from court, and waited five
years before the queen consented to speak to him again. Bess
remained imprisoned until the end of the year and was perma-
nently excluded from the court.
In October 1599, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex – another
royal intimate – was placed under house arrest after storming
unannounced into the queen’s bedchamber while she was still in
her night clothes, minus her wig and heavy make-up. Essex was
seeking to explain to her why he had failed to suppress rebellion
in Ireland, but Elizabeth was unimpressed; she ordered his deten-
tion and refused to see him, despite his many appeals over the
next year or so. Stripped of his offices and lucrative royal patents,
the desperate earl took to the streets of London in February 1601
with the intention of forcing his presence on the queen, or possi-
bly mounting a palace coup. A second leader of the rising was his
friend Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, another
courtier who had lost the queen’s favour after marrying a maid of
honour. Both earls were charged with treason. Southampton was
reprieved; Essex died on the scaffold.
The queen’s treatment of these men is usually regarded as
grossly unfair. In the instances of Ralegh and Southampton, popu-
lar media present Elizabeth as guilty of petty spite against male
courtiers who failed to give her the sole adoration that she craved,
and of sexual jealousy towards the young, pretty maids of honour
who proved successful rivals for her favourites’ attention. As for
Essex, he is often portrayed as a tragic figure who for years
had been forced to dance attendance on the queen
when he would have much preferred to fight in
England’s wars, and who fatally believed that
their personal intimacy gave him the right to
enter her private apartments without leave.
In this narrative, Elizabeth comes off
very badly. Writers sympathetic to Essex
see her as unreasonable in depriving him
of his liberty and offices, and even the
earl’s detractors criticise the queen for her
absurd infatuation with a man young
enough to be her grandson. Her failure torein him in on many earlier occasions, they claim, left him
feeling free to disregard royal orders in Ireland and break court
protocol on his return. A headline in the Daily Mail, advertising
AN Wilson’s book The Elizabethans, said it all: “Elizabeth I and
the men she loved: how the queen gave an Essex toyboy her heart,
then lopped off his head.”
In all these works, the relationships between Elizabeth and her
courtiers – both male and female – are seen in largely personal
terms. Whether displaying affection or anger, Elizabeth is charac-
terised as reacting emotionally as a private person rather than
a public figure. The same kind of analysis predominates when the
queen’s other relationships are described. So, for example, we learn
in many histories that Elizabeth was deeply jealous of Mary, Queen
of Scots; hated and treated cruelly her cousins Katherine and Mary
Grey; and flew into rages when slighted by her councillors.
While not denying that Elizabeth experienced strong emotions
at times, I believe that the queen had no private life. As she well
knew, all her utterances and doings took place on a public stage
and, consequently, had a political purpose and were expected to
conform to political norms. Only very rarely did Elizabeth behave
otherwise, most notably when she fell in love with Robert Dudley
at the outset of her reign. Customarily, when interacting with
her kin, courtiers, or councillors, she operated at a political level,
even when her conduct appeared personal. For all 16th-century
monarchs – not just Elizabeth – the personal was always political.
This can best be appreciated when considering Elizabeth’s rela-
tionships with her so-called favourites. Mistakenly, it is often
stated that the queen promoted Dudley (later Earl of
Leicester), Christopher Hatton, Ralegh and Essex
simply because of their good looks, fine phy-
siques and superficial charm. In these ac-
counts, Elizabeth has a weakness for men
with sex appeal. Certainly, her favourites
were handsome, dashing and athletic, but
such attributes were essential for courtiers
who were to act as a master of the horse,
a gentleman pensioner or an esquire of
the body, their first positions at court.
Even so, their rise to power was not the re-
sult of the queen falling for their good looks.I
n the summer of 1592, Elizabeth I’s captain of the guard, Sir
Walter Ralegh, and her maid of honour, Bess Throckmorton, were
committed to the Tower of London after the queen was told of
their clandestine marriage and the birth of their baby boy. This
was neither the first nor the last time that Elizabeth punished her
Elizabeth’s cousin Katherine Grey with her
son, Edward Seymour. Her marriage to the Earl
of Hertford landed her in the Tower of London