A Tudor Biographer Reviewing Another Tudor Biographer's Book

Linda Porter and Anna Whitelock wrote biographies of Mary I, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon's daughter and first Queen Regnant of England. Now, in the current issue of the Literary Review: Porter reviews Whitelock's new book about Elizabeth's Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen's Court:

What Whitelock gives us is a new account of Elizabeth's reign, seen largely from the queen's personal perspective. It is a memorable portrait, though not one that unquestioning admirers of the Virgin Queen may find palatable. The Elizabeth who emerges from these pages is a thoroughly unpleasant woman when stripped of her undoubted statecraft. She was endlessly demanding, vacillating, self-absorbed, vain and occasionally capable of cruelty rivalling that of her father, Henry VIII. Her treatment of the women of her household does not make pleasant reading. To enter her service was, effectively, to give up your own life in order to dance attendance and cater to her every whim. Most of her women were married, but their own lives and families were always subordinated to the needs of the queen. If they became pregnant, they remained at court until shortly before their babies were due and were seldom allowed to stay away for more than a month after the birth. Ladies who married secretly or became pregnant out of wedlock felt, like poor Katherine Grey, the full force of the monarch's wrath. Their treatment grew worse with the passing years, as age withered the toothless and bald queen, despite the best efforts of her ladies to present her to the world as the red-headed vision of perfection she had been in her twenties. Even her memory began to play tricks with her after the Earl of Essex's execution. Sic transit Gloriana.

Of course, Elizabeth was not ultimately the brute her father had been. Acknowledgement of her devoted women's sufferings may often have been belated, but she could be tender and concerned for their recovery. The deaths of Kat Ashley and Blanche Parry, who had been with her since infancy, struck her hard. And Whitelock provides some nice details that allow us to see a more human side of Elizabeth. She was afraid of the dark and suffered from insomnia. Mornings were not her best time, but the whole process of dressing her and making her up provided her ladies with an intimacy simply not afforded to her male councillors. These women really did know everything about her bodily functions, dealing with such things as the lengths of linen used as sanitary towels and the special belt that held them in place. That such accessories existed at all appears to give the lie to the suspicion that Elizabeth never menstruated. It was not a topic her women would ever have talked of openly, and they, like Elizabeth, took such secrets with them to the grave.

It was this proximity to the queen and the unrivalled access it brought, rather than any financial reward, that made what to us seems like a life of self-sacrifice so attractive to high-born ladies. But did intimacy truly carry influence? Elizabeth actually reduced the size of the Privy Chamber when she became queen and made it very clear that her women were not to interfere in politics or have any political role. This did not stop everyone, from their husbands and suitors to foreign ambassadors, courting them, in the hope that they would be a means of gaining the queen's favour. The advancement of one's own family was everything in 16th-century England and the women of her bedchamber, who shared her life and slept beside her, forfeited much in pursuit of this wider goal. As Anna Whitelock notes, Mary Sidney left the court feeling aggrieved and neglected. She lost her looks and three small daughters when in Elizabeth's service, at the same trying to manage the family estates at Penshurst Place in Kent while her husband served the Crown in Wales and Ireland. It was a high price to pay for being one of Elizabeth's bedfellows.

Linda Porter's next book, Crown of Thistles: The Fatal Inheritance of Mary Queen of Scots will be in print in August--will Anna Whitelock review it?