Royal Bedfellows

The title of Anna Whitelock’s The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court makes is sound like a soap opera about royal lovers. Elizabeth’s regular bedfellows were not male lovers but female attendants. As the TLS reviewer , Helen Hackett, notes, “Sharing a bed was common practice in Tudor England, for warmth and comfort. In the case of Elizabeth I, female sleeping companions were especially important, to protect her from potential assassins and to preserve her reputation as the Virgin Queen. She was never alone: every night one of her trusted attendants would have slept either in or next to her bed. These favoured women also helped her dress and undress, applied and removed her make-up, tested her food, and looked after her personal hygiene. Such service on the royal body could involve tasks that seem to us menial and even degrading, such as dealing with the Queen’s “close-stool”; but these women were mostly aristocrats, and their role was regarded as a mark of high honour because of the privileged access that it conferred.”

The book does widen out to consider the men of the court, especially the ones who had dalliances with Elizabeth’s women:

“although the book is partly presented as a kind of group biography of the ladies of the bedchamber and a study of their role, this is not really what it turns out to be. Their stories surface from time to time, but the volume is more accurately described by its subtitle, An intimate history of the Queen’s court .”

And the book includes some intriguing details about Elizabeth’s accommodations: Some of the best parts are the material details of Elizabeth’s domestic surroundings, such as her various beds: a boat-shaped one at Richmond Palace, curtained with sea-water green and quilted with light brown tinsel; an enormous gilded one at Whitehall Palace, carved with eight beasts and dressed with purple velvet and damask and silver tassels. Her close-stools too were sumptuous, covered with velvet and fringed with golden silk (though also, practically, lined with canvas and containing chamber pots of pewter). We learn that Elizabeth cleaned her teeth with a mixture of white wine, vinegar and honey; that she kept various pets, including a monkey and a parrot; and that the furnishings of Hampton Court Palace included a jewelled water-clock, a walking stick supposedly made from a unicorn’s horn, and a bust of Attila the Hun.”

Whitelock also digresses to talk about the ideology of the Queen’s body: “One detects the ghost of another book, about the royal body, and indeed Chapter One is entitled ‘The Queen’s Two Bodies.’ This refers to the Elizabethan legal theory that the monarch possessed a ‘body natural’ (the personal body of the human incumbent, which might have such infirmities as advancing age, or being female) and a ‘body politic’ (the timeless institution of monarchy, not subject to infirmity or decay). The monarch was also identified with the “body politic” in the sense that the royal body symbolized the commonwealth. Whitelock frequently discusses the ideological uses and meanings of the Queen’s body, the political potency of access to it, and its vulnerability to illness, slander and assassination attempts, so much so that this often seems to be her real subject.”

Any book that makes a play on Kantorowicz has got to be worth a look.