There has long been debate over whether or not Elizabeth ever had any intention of marrying. Historians have differed over this, as over much else concerning Elizabeth, precisely because she herself was once more deliberately obscure and ambiguous about her intentions. Even at the start of her reign, when foreign princes jostled for the privilege of marriage to Europe’s most eligible spinster, there were hints of ambivalence circulating around the queen’s court. The rumour that Elizabeth had some physical incapacity for marriage is frequently reported from the earliest days, as are comments from Elizabeth’s own lips in favour of virginity and against marriage in general and childbirth in particular. Dr Huick, her personal physician, who had known her many years, reckoned in the 1560s that she was physically incapable of sexual relations. On the other hand, at much the same time a committee of physicians judged her fit to bear children. Many years later, when she was forty-five and in the midst of negotiations for a marriage with the Duke of Anjou, another committee of physicians and ladies in waiting convinced Cecil that there was no reason why Elizabeth should not, even at this improbable age, bear a child. But despite their privileged knowledge of Elizabeth’s bodily functions, the sceptical historian might observe that, if the truth really was otherwise, neither of these committees had much reason to report it. Elizabeth was notoriously sensitive to what she chose to see as aspersions upon her beauty and charm - the Earl of Leicester’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys was interpreted as one such affront - and might not have reacted too well to aspersions upon her essential femininity, notwithstanding her own explicit contempt for marriage and childbirth.
If there was not in fact a physical incapacity for marriage, it has been suggested, then perhaps she had some sort of psychological hang-up about it, although opinions
Differ as to whether this went back to her experiences in the household of Sir Thomas Seymour - which today would be classified as child abuse - or was simply a result of jealousy and frustration or indeed of sexual orientation. What is clear is that Elizabeth reacted extremely badly to marriage or even contemplation of marriage on the part of men who were close to her. Sometimes this can be put down to political rather than personal considerations. Members of the royal family were not allowed to marry without the consent (in effect, without the arrangement) of the sovereign. Thus when in the 1560s Lady Catherine Grey married Edward Seymour, Elizabeth’s reaction - to throw them both in gaol - was no different from that of her father to the marriage of Lord Thomas Howard and Lady Margaret Douglas in the 1530s. The Duke of Norfolk’s plan to marry Mary Queen of Scots comes into the same category. Even though Mary was not Elizabeth’s subject, it was clearly incumbent upon the duke to inform his queen of his intentions, and the expectation of refusal which understandably deterred him from broaching the issue need not have rested upon any perception of the queen’s emotional hostility to marriage.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth’s peculiar reactions to marriage extended beyond the blood royal to almost any marriage contracted by men or women of her court. Her favourites almost invariably concealed their marriages from her as long as possible, a subterfuge which inevitably exacerbated her wrath when the marriages inevitably came to light. After the row following Leicester’s second marriage, he was in due course forgiven and restored to favour. But his wife was never again allowed to come to court. Similar stories of royal rage at the marriages of courtiers or maids of honour could be almost endlessly duplicated. One victim remained in disgrace so long that he died in prison. Elizabeth’s bishops and clergy also suffered from her attitude to marriage. She refused to allow the wives of bishops to accompany their husbands to court, and as long as she remained on the throne, the law permitting the marriage of priests, which had been repealed by Mary, was not restored to the statute book. It certainly looks as though Elizabeth had a rooted dislike for the concept of matrimony.
Doubts or speculations about the queen’s sexual orientation, however, may be easily laid to rest. Whatever her attitudes to marriage and sexual intercourse, she manifestly enjoyed the company of men. Her relationship with Robert Dudley in the early years of her reign appeared to court and council alike as nothing less than courtship. The complex rituals of flirtation and courtly love with which she often surrounded her dealings with men at court and on the council likewise reflected conventional assumptions about relations between the sexes, besides providing a convenient grammar and vocabulary with which to negotiate the existential discomfort for noble adult males of finding themselves in the unaccustomed position of dependence upon and service to a woman. Their situation could be rendered more palatable by being decked out as that of lovers seeking the favour of some damsel out of a chivalric romance. Hence the renewed vogue for chivalric and Arthurian literature which arose in Elizabethan times (and soon fell out of fashion thereafter, remaining in obscurity until rescued in the age of romanticism and the neo-gothic),
Elizabeth’s falcon downs a heron. Illustration from George Turberville, The Book of Faulconrie or Hauking (1575), p.81. The books of Gascoigne and Turberville were issued as a pair and are usually found bound within a single cover. Although neither book explicitly states that the princely lady in the illustrations is meant to be Queen Elizabeth, the Tudor roses on the liveried servants in the scenes make her identity obvious.
Below left & right: Illustrations from George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), pp.90 and 133. Right: Elizabeth enjoys a picnic during a hunt. Left: the huntsman presents Elizabeth with a knife to make the first cut in butchering the deer.
Seen at its most elaborate in the complex allegories of Spenser’s unfinished Protestant epic, The Faerie Queene.
If, in her relationships with her more handsome courtiers, Elizabeth indulged in that language of formal flirtation which scholars call ‘courtly love’, she has nevertheless gone down in history as the ‘Virgin Queen’. Although base rumour and the more malicious tongues of her Catholic enemies were quick to impugn her virginity, especially in the early years when her intimacy with Robert Dudley was an open secret, there has never been any serious reason to question her boast. For Elizabeth to have lost her virginity before marriage would have been an intolerable political risk. Kings and princes might sow their wild oats: royal bastards were nothing more than testimony to royal virility. But the sexual double standard was firmly in place in Tudor England, and for a queen to bear an illegitimate child would have been political suicide, earning her the fatal contempt of her own nobility. Mary Queen of Scots provided Elizabeth with an object lesson in this respect. Mary’s tangled matrimonial and sexual career certainly did nothing to cement the loyalty of a traditional aristocracy. Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley aroused enough resentment as it was. There is no telling what the Duke of Norfolk, or even the impeccably loyal Earl of Sussex, might have done if Elizabeth had borne Dudley’s love-child.
For all the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Elizabeth on the subject of her own marriage and on marriages contracted in her court circle, it would be risky to attempt long-distance psychoanalysis in search of the explanation. Her own objections to marriage are expressed in thoroughly rational terms, ranging from her own disinclination to the married state to her clear perception of the political problems attendant upon marrying a foreign prince. The Tudor age was not sentimental about marriage, and Elizabeth was shrewd enough to draw reasonable conclusions from what she saw around her. Her own mother’s marriage had ended on the block, and the rest of her father’s matrimonial record would hardly have filled her with enthusiasm for the holy state. The one wife of Henry’s with whom she had established a close relationship, Catherine Parr, had died in labour. Her elder sister’s marriage was a palpable disaster. Nor was her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, conspicuously well served by the immature boy, the feckless youth, and the reckless adventurer with whom she successively linked herself. Leicester’s first marriage, another failure, had ended in obscure tragedy. Elizabeth herself knew well enough the authority that contemporary opinion vested in husbands over their wives, and was probably reluctant to imperil her sovereign position by submitting herself to any man in any degree. Mary Tudor had looked on marriage as her destiny. Elizabeth certainly did not, and given her inclinations and her experience, her decision not to marry was in many ways a coolly sensible one.
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