Elizabeth I was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen.
Elizabeth’s carefully crafted image of chastity couldn’t drown out the gossip about her sex life. From her youth, Elizabeth was championed as an embodiment of chaste maidenhood and so a highly desirable marriage prospect. As she aged and moved beyond her childbearing years, but remained unmarried and childless, Elizabeth was styled ever more spectacularly as the Virgin Queen. She had sacrificed herself to the realm, and her body, fused with that of the state, remained impregnable. In countless images she is adorned with pearls symbolising chastity, and is represented as the vestal virgin Tuccia in portraits, and the Virgin Mary in pageants, images and other entertainments.
Yet from the earliest months of the reign there was much talk at home and abroad that the queen was behaving in a manner that challenged this image of chastity. Foreign ambassadors’ reports are full of intimate details such as Elizabeth’s supposed sexual liaisons with Christopher Hatton and the Duke of Alençon.
Yet it was Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, that got most tongues wagging. No sooner had she ascended the throne than courtiers were exchanging scandalous gossip about the queen and earl’s night-time liaisons.
Of course, it was only Elizabeth’s women who knew the truth; only they could vouch for her chastity. But while they were quick to defend her publicly, they might very well censure her in private. Early in the reign, Kat Ashley fell on her knees before the queen in the royal bedchamber at Hampton Court and implored her mistress to marry and put an end to the “disreputable rumours” of her relationship with Dudley. Ashley declared that rather than see these rumours spread she would have “strangled her Majesty in her cradle”.
Women at the time were thought to possess more voracious sexual appetites than men and so contemporaries found it hard to believe that any woman past puberty could remain chaste of her own free will, especially if she lacked a husband to provide an outlet for her sexual energies. The king of France would jest that one of the great questions of Europe was “whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no”. The courts of Europe were abuzz with gossip about her behaviour.
By refusing to allow the queen’s corpse to be opened and embalmed on her death, the ladies of the bedchamber were likely acting to prevent a postmortem examination that may have raised further questions about her virginity. In so doing they, and her councillors, may have been performing a final act of loyalty to their Virgin Queen by allowing her to remain the virgin queen.
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