The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court by Anna Whitelock

 
    47
    Abused Her Body
    In September 1591, Thomas Pormant, a Catholic priest who had returned to England from the English seminary in Rome, was apprehended and interrogated by Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe had designed his own torture rack which he was authorised to keep at his house at Westminster to ‘examine’ priests. 1 The rack consisted of an open iron framework with wooden rollers at each end. The victim was stripped off and laid on his back in the centre of the frame whilst his hands and feet were tied with ropes to the rollers. The rollers were then turned and when the ropes were drawn to full tension, interrogation would begin. The prisoner would be in terrible pain as tendons were ripped, joints separated and bones fractured. Refusal to answer questions or an unsatisfactory reply would induce another click of the ratchet mechanism, gradually stretching the limbs until ‘the bones started from their joints’. Topcliffe also claimed to have invented the use of ‘manacles’ as a torture instrument whereby the prisoner’s wrists would be placed into iron gauntlets and then he would be hung up on an iron bar for hours on end. All the body weight would be put on the wrists resulting in excruciating pain to the victim.
    Topcliffe quickly got a reputation for the ferocity of his examinations and many were horrified by his excesses. For twenty-five years Topcliffe zealously hunted and examined recusants, Jesuits and seminary priests. Thomas Pormant was one such seminary priest that he arrested and brought to his house to be interrogated for information about Catholic designs on England.
    Later that year, Richard Verstegan, an exiled English Catholic polemicist, printer and engraver, sent a letter from Flanders to Robert Persons, the Jesuit priest who was then resident in Madrid. With his letter, Verstegan enclosed a document headed, ‘A copy of certain notes written by Mr Pormant Priest and Martyr, of certain speeches used by Top[cliffe] unto him while he was prisoner in the house and custody of the said Topcliffe…’ In it Pormant claimed that during the course of his interrogation, Richard Topcliffe, an honorary Esquire of the Body in the Queen’s household, told him of his favour and intimacy with Elizabeth. According to Pormant, Topcliffe declared that ‘he himself was so familiar with her Majesty that he hath very secret dealings with her’, having not only seen her legs and knees but ‘feeleth them with his hands above her knees, he had also felt her belly, saying to her that it was the softest belly of any womankind’. She said to him, ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ to which he answered, ‘Yea’.
    So, great and ‘familiar’ with the Queen was Topcliffe, that ‘he many times putteth [his hands] between her breasts and paps, and in her neck’. The intimacy they shared was demonstrated, Topcliffe had told him, by the fact that the Queen bestowed on him not the conventional glove or handkerchief but rather ‘a white linen hose wrought with white silk’. 2 According to Pormant, Topcliffe boasted that if he wanted Elizabeth, he could take her away from any company, although he added that she did not save her favours for him alone and, she is ‘as pleasant with every one that she doth love’.
    According to the independent account of another Catholic priest named James Younge, Pormant had made these charges openly at his trial, where he suggested that Topcliffe had hoped to persuade him to recant by suggesting he might then come to preferment through Topcliffe, because of his ‘great favour’ with the Queen. The rhetorical question that Elizabeth was said to have asked, ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ would have extra resonance as the Privy Chamber at Whitehall was dominated by Holbein’s imposing image of Henry VIII. The implication is therefore that the alleged intimacies took place there within the privy lodgings.
    Both at Pormant’s trial