Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England

Illicit Sex and the Nobility

Johanna Rickman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754661351
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351921220
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor infraction, others, directed by a religious moral code, viewed it as a serious sin. seeks to illuminate the place of noblewomenin early modern aristocratic culture, both as historical subjects (considering personal circumstances) and as a social group (considering social position and status).She argues that two different gender ideals were in operation simultaneously: one primarily religious ideal, which lauded female silence, obedience, and chastity, and another, more secular ideal, which required noblewomen to be beautiful, witty, brave, and receptive to the games of courtly love.

Chapter One
Illicit Sex at the Court of the Virgin Queen

When Elizabeth Tudor came to the English throne in 1558, none of her subjects knew that their new queen would rule for over forty years and that she would remain unmarried. Historians have since wrestled with the problems presented by the rule of a single woman in a society where gender norms dictated that men rule and women obey.¹ Some scholars have focused on how Elizabeth attempted to overcome her female “handicap” by creating – or accepting – the notion of the Virgin Queen and Gloriana.² Other historians have looked at Elizabeth’s masterful use of marriage negotiations in order to gain political and personal goals.³ Yet the topic of illicit sex at the court of Elizabeth has not received much scholarly attention to date, with one exception: in an article published in 2000, Paul Hammer draws some preliminary conclusions about the effect of illicit sex among Elizabeth’s courtiers on her ability to rule.⁴ Hammer correctly argues that Elizabeth viewed the illicit sex among her courtiers as a challenge to her royal authority and that the increasing number of cases of illicit sex among her courtiers during the last decade of her reign is evidence of a decline in the queen’s authority among her courtiers. However, Hammer admits that his article only “offers some preliminary and rather impressionistic comments about aristocratic promiscuity and its impact on the court.”⁵ He does not fully explore the gendered dynamics in the relationships between Elizabeth and her courtiers, both male and female, and he also does not address the nature of and the circumstances around the punishments meted out by the queen. Instead, Hammer and others have focused primarily on Elizabeth’s ability or inability to rule because of her gender and single status. While I certainly address that aspect, I turn the tables and focus on how Elizabeth’s gender and single status affected the sexual lives of the nobility at her court.

While the nobility largely escaped the censure of the ecclesiastical courts for adultery and fornication, they were instead subject to direct punishment from the royal head.⁶ Elizabeth usually acted swiftly when her courtiers misbehaved sexually: she punished the offenders by either imprisoning them or banishing them from court and in some cases both. However, the punishments were not uniform but depended on the gender of those involved, as well as on personal, political, social, and financial circumstances.

Why did Elizabeth react so strongly when faced with illicit sex among her courtiers? Some historians have argued that Elizabeth had a neurotic dislike of marriage, sex, and childbearing, considering her personal history that included her father condemning her mother to death for adultery and incest, her sister Mary’s unhappy marriage and false pregnancies, as well as her own brush with scandal in the Seymour incident when she was in her early teens.⁷ These experiences doubtlessly played their part in making Elizabeth wary of the consequences of sex and marriage, but it is more productive to view the problem through the lens of gender: Elizabeth’s unusual and unique role as an unmarried sovereign created specific dynamics in the relationship between the queen and her courtiers, which in turn affected her responses to their sexual offenses. Elizabeth was a reigning queen who wanted to assert her authority as a sovereign. For political reasons, she needed to be able to control the sexual activity of the men and women at her court, much like an early modern husband and father needed to control his wife and his daughters in order to claim his own authority. Moreover, as an unmarried woman, Elizabeth needed her court to appear to be a place of virtue. Elizabeth acted as a guardian of her female servants, so when they misbehaved, it reflected poorly on her. Elizabeth also defended her own sexual reputation by arguing that she was never alone, but rather always attended by her maids or gentlewomen.⁸ If her attendants were behaving inappropriately, the queen was also at risk for criticism. Lastly, Elizabeth’s interactions with her male courtiers often took the form of a lover-mistress relationship: Elizabeth was an unmarried woman and male courtiers who wanted her favor often approached her as lovers and declared themselves willing to do almost anything in order to gain her love. The lover-mistress relationship made the illicit affairs – as well as the legitimate marriages – of male favorites appear as a personal betrayal against their mistress-queen. If the flirtations that were part of the courtly game of love turned into actual sexual relationships, it questioned the virtue of the courtly love games and subsequently also the virtue of the queen.

Elizabeth’s treatment of offenders also illuminates the limits of noble privilege in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Most courtiers were acutely aware of Elizabeth’s reactions to – and punishments for – illicit sexual behavior, and some clearly felt that the punishments did not fit the crime and that the queen overreacted. Courtiers caught in forbidden sexual entanglements were imprisoned “during the queen’s pleasure,” which basically meant that Elizabeth rather arbitrarily decided how long they would remain incarcerated, without following any particular legal procedure. In the cases of illicit sex at the Elizabethan court, noble privilege was pitted against royal prerogative.

There was no single view of noble sexual morality: the multitude of responses to illicit sex show that several sexual paradigms operated simultaneously. The gendered double standard was the most obvious paradigm: male sexual offenses were often considered as minor missteps, whereas female sexual offenses were condemned more heavily. In contrast, elite views on sexual morality were sometimes in tune with the prescriptive literature, which condemned fornication and adultery of both men and women as a sin against God and against the godly community. The ideals of courtly love were also connected to literature, but literature of a different kind. Love poems and novels often described illicit and impossible love, and the practice of courtly love (ideally platonic romantic flirtations between men and women not married to each other) sometimes allowed for a greater freedom of action – and less moral condemnation – for noble women. Both of these paradigms were tempered by the personal circumstances of each case: the Elizabethan nobility often reacted to illicit sex in a practical manner, trying to manipulate the situation to suit individual needs.

Sometime in July of 1580, Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, “forg[ot] himself with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour.”⁹ The words are those of a servant of the fabulously wealthy Fugger family, a German merchant and banking family who liked to keep abreast of the news at the royal courts throughout Europe. The result of Oxford’s temporary memory problems was the birth of a child to Anne Vavasour in mid-March, 1581. The Fugger connection did not quite get it right: Anne Vavasour was the queen’s gentlewoman of the bedchamber, not a maid of honor.¹⁰ What both Oxford and Vavasour had forgotten, presumably, was that unmarried women who served the queen were not supposed to be sexually active, and married men were not supposed to sleep with women other than their wives. Oxford’s wife, Anne Cecil, was the daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and most trusted privy counselor. Oxford was in this case a prime example of moral hypocrisy: he was temporarily estranged from his wife, because he accused her of having cuckolded him, since he claimed the timing of the birth of their first child meant that he could not be the father. He later admitted his mistaken calculations (he had counted on a twelve month gestation period), reconciled with his wife, and accepted the child as his own.¹¹

It appears as if Oxford’s mistress Anne was able to hide her pregnancy from the queen up until the very birth, which took place in the maidens’ chamber at court on a Tuesday night. As soon as Elizabeth heard about the birth, she did not give Anne any respite: she sent her away from court the very same night. The following morning, Anne was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Oxford, who had made himself scarce, was thought to plan an escape to the continent, and the queen’s men at the seaports were commanded to stay alert to apprehend the earl should he come there.¹² Oxford soon found himself in the Tower as well.

It is not clear how long Anne remained imprisoned, but in any case, Elizabeth did not allow her back to court. We do not know very much about the illegitimate child that was born either, other than that it was a boy, that a relative of Oxford was his guardian, and that he was eventually knighted by King James and died in 1631 as a military man.¹³ It is easier to establish what happened to Oxford: he remained in the Tower for three months until June 8, 1581, but he was still under house arrest in July of that year.¹⁴ He was not allowed back to court until late May 1583, two years later, when he was “reconciled and received to her majesty’s favour.”¹⁵

The fates of Anne Vavasour and the earl of Oxford were rather typical of an Elizabethan sexual court scandal: the discovery of an illegitimate pregnancy led to temporary imprisonment and banishment from court. Oxford was certainly not the only male courtier “forgetting himself” with one of Elizabeth’s female attendants. For example, in October 1591, Thomas Vavasour (Anne Vavasour’s brother) briefly found himself banished from court and imprisoned when the maid of honor Elizabeth Southwell became pregnant.¹⁶ A few years later, it became apparent that Thomas Vavasour was not the one responsible for Elizabeth Southwell’s pregnancy: the real father turned out to be the earl of Essex.¹⁷ Just after the discovery of the pregnancy of Elizabeth Southwell, Sir Francis Darcy, a follower of the earl of Essex, was committed to the Tower when the maid of honor Katherine Lee gave birth to his child in court. Darcy claimed he was married to Lee.¹⁸ A year later, in 1592, Elizabeth threw Sir Walter Ralegh in the Tower when she realized he had impregnated and secretly married her maid of honor Elizabeth Throckmorton.¹⁹ Likewise, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, had to spend a few months in the Fleet prison in 1598 when the queen was informed of the pregnancy and secret marriage of the maid of honor Elizabeth Vernon.²⁰ Elizabeth Vernon learned she was pregnant while her lover Southampton was on an ambassadorial trip to France, and the earl secretly slipped back to England for a few days and married her and then returned to France. In 1601, maid of honor Mary Fitton was “proved with child,” and when William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, was examined, he soon admitted his paternity.²¹ Elizabeth promptly sent him to the Fleet for a few months, then bid him “go keep house in the country” and to stay away from the court.²²

As the case of Anne Vavasour illustrates, the women involved in these affairs usually suffered punishments similar to the male offenders. For example, a nameless maid of honor who became pregnant by the squire of the body, the unfortunately named Mr. Boner, was imprisoned in the Tower in 1578.²³ Likewise, Elizabeth Throckmorton and Mary Fitton were both imprisoned. Elizabeth Throckmorton had to stay in the Tower for five months in 1592 before she was released, and Mary Fitton was committed to the custody of Lady Hawkins while awaiting the birth of her child.²⁴ When the queen discovered the pregnancies of Katherine Lee and Elizabeth Southwell in 1591, they both had to leave their places at court in disgrace. Elizabeth Vernon likewise left the court when her pregnancy started to show and went to stay with her cousin, the earl of Essex.²⁵ When Elizabeth found out about Vernon’s condition and her secret marriage to Southampton, she threatened to send the maid to the Tower, although she never made good on that threat.²⁶

Although the punishments for these men and women look very similar at first glance, the circumstances in each case made for subtle differences. Sometimes, political motives were intertwined with sexual scandal. In the case of the earl of Oxford, for example, it is not quite clear how much of Oxford’s punishment was due to his sexual indiscretion and how much to his temporary involvement in a Catholic plot with the duke of Norfolk, Charles Arundel, and the earl of Northumberland, because both Anne’s pregnancy and the plot were discovered in the spring of 1581. In fact, Oxford had just been released from the Tower for his involvement in the plot when Elizabeth found out about his relationship with Anne Vavasour.²⁷ The queen’s anger must have intensified when she found out that the man who had just narrowly escaped treason charges had debauched one of her female servants. Notwithstanding Oxford’s double offenses, he did find his way back into Elizabeth’s favor in 1583. The fact that Oxford, the seventeenth earl, was the head of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Tudor England probably helped. Elizabeth had a keen sense of Oxford’s high social rank: she once reminded the celebrated Sir Philip Sidney of it when Sidney and Oxford had quarreled, insisting that Sidney was in the wrong for threatening violence to a person who was socially superior to him.²⁸ Furthermore, Oxford received very helpful – if sometimes reluctant – support from his father-in-law, Burghley, and later on Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil.

Political considerations played a role in the punishment of Sir Walter Ralegh as well. Because the queen needed Ralegh’s expertise in naval matters at a time when England was at war with Spain (the war lasted 1585–1603), his imprisonment was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Illicit Sex at the Court of the Virgin Queen
• 2 Illicit Sex at the Court of James I
• 3 Conscience and Contention: Penelope Rich and Charles Blount
• 4 Love and Letters: Mary Wroth and William Herbert
• 5 Preserving Honor: Frances Villiers and Robert Howard
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix: Simplified Genealogies of the Cecil, Devereux, Dudley, Howard, and Sidney Families
• Bibliography
• Index