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

and later at his execution, Topcliffe strongly denied the priest’s allegations, but by then the damage had been done. Even if the reported salacious exchange did not take place, the account was spoken in court and the recorded notes read by the Privy Council were highly significant and hugely embarrassing; the Queen’s body had been discussed in a highly sexualised and erotic way and the alleged intimacies that she had had were being discussed in open court. When Pormant was executed for treason on 21 February 1592, he was forced to stand outside only in his shirt for almost two hours while Topcliffe pressed him to deny his story, but he refused and finally went to his death. 3
    Pormant’s account was printed and circulated by Verstegan as one of the many printed defamations and attempts by Catholics abroad to undermine Elizabeth’s authority by focussing on her body and her sexual conduct. However, rather than Pormant having irreverently discussed the Queen sexual proclivities, Catholics could claim that Pormant had remained loyal to the crown and was simply repeating the lewd accusations that Topcliffe had made.
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    During the 1590s, anxieties about the succession and the anger felt towards the Elizabethan government refocused on the Queen’s gender. A number of English poems drew on explicit sexual imagery and referred to her in sexually compromising contexts.
    In 1589, The Arte of English Poesie, published anonymously but attributable to George Puttenham, depicted the Queen’s two bodies and the improper accessibility of both. Access to the monarch is characterised in the form of sexual availability and particular attention is paid to her mouth and breasts, areas of the body that suggest privileged sexual contact. The breasts, depicted as the very source of Elizabeth’s authority, from which issue the rays ‘of her justice, bounty and might’, are described in bawdy detail:

    Her bosom sleak as Paris plaster,
    Held up two balls of alabaster,
    Each byas was a little cherry
    Or else I think a strawberry. 4

    The Queen’s breast, the emblem of royal beneficence, is here transformed, in the tasting or biting of the succulent royal nipples, into an erotic image. The intimacy suggested draws on contemporary accounts of Elizabeth’s habit of revealing her bosom as she grew older, as a means to suggest her youth and virginity. 5
    Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) also drew on the image of the Queen’s two bodies: ‘the one of a most royal Queen or Empress’, Gloriana; the other a ‘most virtuous and beautiful lady’ whom Spenser identifies as the virgin huntress, Belphobe. 6 Whilst Puttenham chose the Queen’s mouth and breasts as symbols of royal authority, Spenser’s focus is on Belphobe’s genitalia, with her vulva styled as the focus of royal power. Ultimately Belphobe is open to sexual misinterpretation. Braggadocio, a knight, misunderstands the nature of their relationship, interpreting her body as an invitation to sexual rather than political intimacy, a misreading that culminates in attempted rape. 7 Here Spenser draws attention to the problems inherent in a political rhetoric that aims to celebrate a commitment to virgin authority.
    From around the 1590s until the end of Elizabeth’s reign, satirists would often refer to the vulva in terms of a metaphorical space, describing it in sensual detail as smooth, soft, and moist and a place of delicious, intoxicating tastes. Such sexually explicit descriptions of the Queen’s genitalia in some late Elizabethan verse suggest a rejection of the Queen’s self-styled cult of virginity, perhaps in reaction to what many saw as the hypocrisy of her own court and Bedchamber. In Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) – dedicated to ‘the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court and Chancery’ – Glaucus, the amorous sea-god, blazes his mistress’s body in sexually explicit terms:

    But why alas should I that Marble hide
    That doth done