Elizabeth's Sexuality |
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Elizabeth once explained that she loved a man who was a man and would not ‘sit at home all day among the cinders,’(i) and her preference for men of action, highly-sexualised men was apparent from an early age. Her great difficulty was that a man like this would not play second-string to the Queen of England, so the very men she desired, she did not dare to marry. Elizabeth’s high libido was not untypical of women of her age: for example: Laetitia Knollys, Elizabeth Shrewsbury, or Mary Queen of Scots were all known to be women with high sexual desires. Elizabeth was the child of a father who experienced emotions and sexual desires very powerfully, and a mother who was a byword for allure. Her name was first linked with the husband of her step-mother Catherine Parr. In a pattern which would continue throughout her life Elizabeth preferred a married man, and enjoyed her triumph over his wife. Catherine Parr took the young Princess into her home as her guardian after the death of Henry VIII; but Elizabeth became involved in romping with her stepfather the handsome Thomas Seymour. A government inquiry into the activities suggested that he would come into her bedroom when she was still in her bed, slap her, tickle her, and tease her throughout the day. Elizabeth claimed that she did not encourage him, but when rumours spread, and her half-sister Mary offered her a home far away from the dashing Admiral, Elizabeth refused to leave. Matters came to a head when Catherine Parr caught them in a passionate embrace and sent Elizabeth away. After the death of Catherine, Thomas Seymour was accused of plotting to marry Elizabeth and seize the throne. Elizabeth protested her innocence and let her admirer go to the gallows without protest.(ii) She was next connected in scandal with her brother-in-law King Philip of Spain, again a man married to a female relation who had trusted Elizabeth in her household. Philip first saw the Princess when he intervened with his wife, Queen Mary Tudor, to save Elizabeth from a charge of treason and almost certain death. Philip was probably hiding behind a curtain at the secret midnight meeting, and saw Elizabeth, dressed in her best, when she knelt before Mary to pledge her allegiance (as in the scene in The Queen’s Fool).(iii) Elizabeth’s flirtation with Philip, which continued through Queen Mary’s painful false pregnancy, was well-known at the time, and in later life King Philip was reported as saying that whatever troubles came to him from Elizabethan England it was only God’s justice since when he was married to Queen Mary he could not love her, but was ‘enamoured of her (Elizabeth) being a fair and beautiful woman.’(iv) Elizabeth’s next admirer was her childhood friend, another dark-haired man with a raffish reputation, Robert Dudley. She made him Master of Horse at her new court, and allowed him into her bedroom when she was undressed. The passionate connection between the two of them, went as far as sexual play, if not full intercourse. It was the foundation of a deep love which lasted their lifetimes. Some commentators have wondered why, since Elizabeth was keenly demanding of male attention, she did not marry. Most people think this is because of political astuteness – she feared the power of a King-consort, and was wary of men – based on the trauma of her early childhood. I believe that she was a highly-sexed woman who was prevented at one time and another from choosing a husband, and then found that she had left it too late to conceive an heir, and was habituated to the courtship of the whole court. Elizabeth’s image as a virgin queen is based on the mythology of her own time, when she recognised that she would not marry and deployed artists, musicians and poets to create an iconographic image. This was accepted by later historians, especially the Victorians, who believed in an absence of female desire. Modern historians see Elizabeth’s covert and clandestine sexual activity as a result of childhood damage. Elizabeth had been abused by Seymour. Like many abused children, she had fallen in love with her abuser.(v) I would disagree with Starkey’s analysis of Elizabeth as victim. She was not a child in Tudor terms at the time of the romps, she was 14, nearly old enough for marriage. She was the willing participant and sometimes the instigator of the sex-play, though it seems likely that it went farther than she expected. If we free this story both from Victorian conventional views of women, and from the modern belief in the innocence of teenagers, we find a story of a healthy young woman experimenting with sex. Elizabeth’s plotting Since most of the histories of Britain are written by Protestant historians there is a widescpread belief in the Papist plots and less attention given to Protestant treason. In fact, Elizabeth was implicated in a series of plots against her sister Mary, most notably the Wyatt uprising.(vi) Also involved in the conspiracy was Dr John Dee the famous alchemist who probably joined the Roman Catholic Bishop Bonner in his inquisition of the Protestant martyrs to protect the Protestant conspiracy from awkward confessions. The evidence for this is that Dr Dee was named in the first edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and his name removed in the second. His is the only name to be censored and it seems likely that one of the Protestant conspirators had explained to John Foxe that Dee was a spy in the Papist camp. i. Alison Plowden, The Young Elizabeth, Sutton, 1999, p 119. |