No decent man would add to the slanders that have been passed upon this
extraordinary woman, who stood at the head of the English nation when it
was engaged in one of its fiercest struggles for very existence. These
slanders are so numerous in quantity, but in quality so much alike, that
they may all be summed up in one—slander against her sexual morality.
Professor Chamberlin(2), evidently considering that the morals of a
great queen of the sixteenth century should resemble those of a great
queen of the nineteenth, spent many years in ascertaining the nature of
the sicknesses from which she was said to have suffered. The farrago of
somewhat quackish-sounding symptoms that he discovered has no meaning
in modern medicine. She has been slandered quite enough, poor lady, and
I for one shall not add anything to it. Rather than seek an explanation
for the innumerable contemporary physiological slanders I propose to see
whether they are possible.
They may be said to have been summed up by the kindest, most gentle
and most sympathetic of historians, Professor A. F. Pollard(1), whose
immense industry and meticulous fairness will at once absolve him from
any obvious conscious bias, sectarian or otherwise. Writing of her
extraordinary juggling with her numerous suitors he says: “There is
evidence that she had no option in the matter and that a physical defect
precluded her from hopes of issue. On this supposition her conduct
becomes intelligible, her irritation at parliamentary pressure on the
subject pardonable, and her outburst on the news of Mary Stuart’s
motherhood a welcome sign of genuine feeling. Possibly there was a
physical cause for Elizabeth’s masculine mind and temper, and for the
curious fact that no man lost his head over her as many did over Mary
Queen of Scots. To judge from portraits, Mary was as handsome as her
rival; but apparently Elizabeth had no feminine fascination, and even
her extravagant addiction to the outward trappings of her sex may have
been due to the absence or atrophy of deeper feminine feelings. The
impossibility of marriage made her all the freer with her flirtations,
and she carried some of them to lengths which scandalized a public
unconscious of Elizabeth’s real security.”
To analyse such remarkable slanders as those passed by Mary Queen of
Scots(3), and many years after Elizabeth’s death by Ben Jonson(4) in
his tipsy tattling would need a paper more suited for a gynæcological
journal than for general publication. Without emulating Ben by going
into unpleasant physical details I content myself by saying that so far
as I know there is _no_ physical defect of the female form obvious to
the sufferer which will preclude hope of offspring, and yet allow her
to reach the age of nearly seventy. Before coming to that conclusion
the author laid down four postulates to himself[8] which will occur to
every critically minded doctor; and it seems to him that every suggestion
fails miserably in at least one of these postulates. And since, when
tested in this way, every slander founded on the physical appearance of
her body necessarily fails, it is equally possible that the suspicions
thus based may be equally without foundation. Such rumours about her are
founded upon a lamentable want of knowledge of woman’s physiological and
anatomical necessities.(11)
It seems to me, that we can gather better evidence from contemporary
portraits than from contemporary religious slanders; it is well known
that whenever sixteenth-century religion came in at the door objective
truth flew out at the window. No one can study the beautiful portrait
of Queen Elizabeth which Miss Gwen John allows me to publish without
thinking: “That is not the portrait of a loose woman! She may have been
cruel, vindictive, merciless, but she cannot have been loose and sensual.”
Her amazing personality is best explained by the new science of the
ductless glands—endocrinology.[9] Sometimes she seems to have had all
the male qualities, such as swearing, roughness of speech, freedom from
convention. Sometimes she seems to have behaved like a doting old maid,
in her inordinate love of dress, jewellery, and flattery. Rather than
believe that she was abnormal in form, which I think to be impossible
considering the known facts of her physiology, I find it easier to
believe that in some way her “endocrine balance” was abnormal. It is
now rather more than suspected that no individual is entirely male or
entirely female; the psychic qualities of both sexes are more or less
mingled in everybody, and thus we could easily explain the remarkable
fact noted by Professor Pollard that no man ever seems to have fallen
in love with Elizabeth sufficiently to risk his head for her. A century
before, Owen Tudor fell in love with Katherine of Valois(7), and risked
death by marrying her secretly. But no such vehement lover appeared for
Elizabeth; and, if he had, her want of “endocrine balance” would not
have prevented her from child-bearing. When she shouted to Sir Nicholas
Throckmorton, “God’s death, villain, I’ll have thy head,”(3) the violence
of the male in her came to the surface; when she fondled and fooled with
the Duke of Alençon and called him her “little frog”(6) and other silly
names, the doting old maid in her was paramount. Major Hume considers
that it was with the Duke of Alençon that Elizabeth was in love for the
first and only time in her life; and it is quite possible.
The only thing that my speculation does not explain is the bitter cry
from the heart that was wrung from her when she heard of the birth of
King James I to her great rival, Mary Queen of Scots: “The Queen of Scots
is the lighter of a fair son, but I am a barren stock!”(3) How did she
know? Was she thinking of the amazing number of miscarriages that befell
two of her father’s wives, which to us now appear such certain evidence
that he was probably suffering from constitutional syphilis? That is the
best suggestion I am able to make.
Innumerable attempts have been made to explain the slanders upon Queen
Elizabeth, from Miss Gwen John’s explanation given in her little play,
“The Prince,”(12) that probably they arose from accidental episodes that
occurred when she was about her normal duties at Court, to Major Hume’s
idea—which is generally held—that they were the result of purposeful
“hoaxing” by the Great Queen, all done for the sake of her country. True,
like her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth was very patriotic; but, as one of
Professor Chamberlin’s doctors suggests, it is difficult to distinguish
between her patriotism and her desire to keep her own head on her
shoulders. So far as I know the present suggestion—that the contemporary
rumours about her physical malformation were impossible—has never been
put forward before. It again leaves the field open for those who are able
to estimate the effects of sectarian enthusiasm upon the human mind to
find some other explanation than a physical malformation.
Her character has been so much besmirched by slander that we are
sometimes apt to forget that in reality she was as clever and
intellectual as her great father in his youth. She knew several
languages, and to seek consolation in the worries that necessarily befell
her it is said that she translated Boëthius’ “Consolatio Philosophiæ.”(9)
If we are to remember her as the man-struck old maid who philandered with
and petted her favourites, it is equally well for us to remember her as
the intellectual woman who was able to translate a deep philosophical
work. The extremely intellectual qualities that one finds in Elizabeth
are sometimes forgotten in the whirlwind of sectarian slander and
patriotism that had centred itself on her head. Possibly the reason why
she fixed upon Boëthius for translation—he had already been done by
Chaucer—is because he wrote his great “consolation” in prison while he
was awaiting the Roman executioner. Perhaps she thought that his case
somewhat resembled her own.
Her dual personality came out strongly in her last words. According to
Sir Sidney Lee they were “Ad inferos eat melancholia”—“To hell with
melancholy.” Not long afterwards she fell into a deep coma(10)—probably
caused by septic intoxication from an abscess in her tonsils, acting
upon a woman whose arteries were much older than her years—and died in
her sleep. In these words one sees the reckless courage that we suppose
to be male, swearing and laughing in the face of death however unwelcome
he may be, and the feminine desire to charm which led her to paint her
face as she said them.
But after all, the best epitaph upon Elizabeth is the little verse that
she scratched upon a windowpane at Woodstock Manor, where her loving
sister Mary was “entertaining” her much as we entertained Napoleon at St.
Helena:
“Much is suspected of me;
Nothing proved can be;
Elizabeth prisoner.”
And perhaps it is as well that nothing can be proved against the personal
morality of one of the greatest women in history. One imagines that her
wraith would laugh ironically at all our vain efforts, as her young
girlhood evidently laughed at poor Mary as she scratched the words
_Elizabeth prisoner_.(5)
I take from the _British Medical Journal_ of 1910 the description of her
actual death, because it is in accordance with my own experience of the
deaths of fierce and obstinate old ladies.
Lady Southwell, one of her maids of honour, said: “She kept her bed
for fifteen dayes besides the three dayes that she sat upon her stool
without speaking; until one day, being pulled upon her feet by force,
she stood upon her feet for fifteen hours. Her Majestie understood that
Mr. Secretarie Cecil had given forth that she was mad; and therefore in
her sickness she said ‘Cecill, know thou that I am not mad; you must not
try to make Queen Jane of me.’” Queen Jane was “Crazy Jane,” mother of
Charles V, and this recollection of the days of her youth, when Charles
V was the greatest man in the world, is very characteristic of an old
person. “And,” continues Lady Southwell, “though by Cecil’s means many
stories were spread about that she was mad, myself, nor anie that were
about me, could never see that her speeches, so well adapted, proved her
distracted mind.”
Then they lifted her into bed; she fell asleep; and the last of the
great personal monarchs of England died in coma. There was no sectarian
nonsense about her waking from a stupor to press anybody’s hand, when all
she wanted was to get on with her dying.
But though Elizabeth was so great and had such an astonishing effect on
English history(8) it would be a mistake to turn her into the heroine of
a sentimental novel.
(1) A. F. Pollard, _Political History of England_.
(2) F. Chamberlin, _Private Character of Queen Elizabeth_.
(3) F. Chamberlin, _The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth_.
(4) Ben Jonson, _Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden_.
(5) F. A. Mumby, _Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth_.
(6) M. S. Hume, _Courtships of Queen Elizabeth_.
(7) Mabel Christie, _Henry VI_.
(8) Rachel Taylor, _Aspects of the Italian Renaissance_.
(9) _The Australasian Journal of Philosophy_, June, 1924.
(10) Facts from the _British Medical Journal_, 1910; guess my own.
(11) Julian Huxley, _Essays of a Biologist_.
(12) Gwen John, _The Prince_.