ABSTRACT
This essay deals with those men and women, numbering about thirty-five at anygiven time, and totalling upwards of seventy-five (at least) in the course of the reign – so far as accurate numbers can be ascertained – who held offices in the Privy Chamber, plus the Esquires of the Body, who superintended the Chamber (or ‘Household above Stairs’) at night, as well as, if to a lesser extent, the nature and functions of the offices which they held. The Privy Chamber was a court department with a clear institutional identity; by contrast, to select the Esquires for the Body, with no more than a glance at two or three other positions, on the one hand, and to pass over the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners, a guard corps of fifty men (and five officers), of whom twenty-five were on duty at any given time, sta - tioned in the Presence Chamber, on the other, may appear arbitrary, but it reflects my own judgement that positions in the ‘outer’ Chamber could confer significant and frequent access to the Privy Chamber personnel, and possibly to the monarch herself. In addition, I have had to set aside the Maids of Honour, who numbered five or six at any given moment, plus the Mother of the Maids, who have hitherto been tangential to my research. These courtiers who form the focus of the essay would have been individuals whose duties in all cases could, and in most cases would, bring them into close personal proximity with the Queen, and with whom, as the following incident, among others related in this essay, illustrates, she would have dealt on a personal level rather than merely on an official one. They were, in other words, the closest approximation that she was to have to a family as queen. (Indeed, I would prefer to use that word, ‘family’, given its original Latin sense as denoting those who dwell together in a house, rather than more ‘distancing’ terms such as ‘attendants’ or ‘entourage’ or ‘servants’ or even ‘companions’, accurate as each of these is in its own way, as it gets us closer to the Rankean ideal, so desirable if unattainable, of seeing ‘how things actually were’.)
On Monday, 1 February 1585, Frances Howard, a daughter of William, 1st Lord Howard of Effingham (d. 1572) and a sister of Charles (d. 1624), the 2nd Lord and the future Earl of Nottingham and commander of the English fleet assembled to withstand the 1588 Spanish Armada, and herself a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Privy Chamber since November 1568, wrote a two-and-one-half-page
letter to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (d. 1621). Although she was not to marry Hertford for well over a year, already she signed the latter as the Earl’s ‘moste faythfull louvyng obedient w.(ife) durynge lyfe’.1 The letter, in fact, concerned the latest episode in the attempt which had already stretched out for nearly a decade to win the Queen’s consent for the match between the couple. For Frances Howard, the marriage, when it came, was to be her first and only one, and childless, but for the Earl it was to be the second of three. His clandestine marriage to Lady Katherine Grey in 1560, the mother of his two sons, had prompted the Queen’s confinement of the couple in the Tower and then their forcible separation, extending down to the hapless Lady Katherine’s death in 1567. Understandably enough, in these circumstances the couple did not care to risk marrying quietly and presenting the Queen with a fait accompli in the manner of other courtiers, such as John Scudamore and Mary Shelton, another Privy Chamber lady and the Queen’s cousin, who had married in that fashion in very late 1573 or very early 1574 and who – or at least Shelton – had to endure both ‘bloes and yevell wordes’ from her mistress as well as some months of banishment from the court before being restored to favour, but rather sought to win her agreement beforehand.2 To that end, her brother Charles had spoken to the Queen to request her to give her consent. As Frances Howard reported, the Queen seemed ‘some thynge moved’ at his words but then asked if Hertford had asked him to speak for the match. Effingham replied no but had been compelled to speak because it had been only the fear of offending her that had delayed its conclusion and that he was certain of Hertford’s honourable intentions. This evidently hit a sore spot in the Queen’s mind, and the exchange took an alarming turn, one which requires an extended quotation from the letter. ‘Her maiestie repleyed agayne’ – evidently a thought she had voiced on previous occasions:
that che was suer you mente it not but that you wolde be contented to geve her a pensyon, to the wyche my brother made aunswar that he wold never lyke of it nor never acounte me for hys syster if I wolde consent to it and that it touched her maiestie in honor to have any gentellwoman aboute her to take a pensyon of any man in suche a maner. Her maiestie rose up and lafte with these wordes, that he had done the part of a good brother and as he ought to doe, but stell che saed che thought it was no parte of your desier.
