Elizabeth I and Her Circle by Doran Susan;

Author:Doran, Susan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

The combination of persuasion and veiled threat was sufficient to ensure the wedding took place.95

By contrast, Elizabeth was always unforgiving when her maids engaged in sex outside marriage. She seldom employed a double standard, and would punish male and female transgressors alike. On learning in March 1581 that Burghley’s son-in-law (Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford) had impregnated the 15-year-old Anne Vavasour, who was both a gentlewoman of the bedchamber and maid of honour, Elizabeth was said to be ‘greatly grieved with the accident’. On the very night that Anne gave birth to a son in the ‘maidens’ chamber’, she was turfed out of court and, the following morning, committed to the Tower. Oxford, who tried to flee the country, was waylaid and also sent to the Tower, where he remained for three months. Barred from court for many years afterwards, the earl was ‘punished as far or farther than any like crime hath been’, despite the protests of Burghley, who was hoping for the rehabilitation of his son-in-law.96

As for Anne Vavasour, she re-emerged in 1590 as the wife of a John Finch and mistress of Sir Henry Lee, the queen’s champion at the tilts. It is thought that the married Lee paid Finch a small annuity to wed Anne and give her some respectability. After the death of Lee’s own wife, the couple lived together openly. What the queen knew or thought about these arrangements is unrecorded; all we know is that they did not stop her continuing to show Lee favour, including a visit to his estate at Ditchley in Oxfordshire during her 1592 progress, but she would not see Anne then or at any other time.97

Anne could not wed the father of her child, but, whenever it was possible, the best solution for an extramarital pregnancy was thought to be marriage. ‘Shotgun weddings’ salvaged the reputation of the gentlewomen, but they did not usually win back royal favour. Sir Francis Darcy secretly and belatedly married a maid of honour, a Mistress Legh, who ‘was brought abed in the court’ with a daughter in 1591, but this did not protect him, or his new wife, from the queen’s wrath. Indeed the mother of the maid ended up in the Tower alongside Darcy for failing to supervise her charge properly.98 When Elizabeth Vernon learned that she was pregnant by Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, in 1598, they too were secretly married. Nevertheless, the queen was ‘grevousely offended’ and considered that Southampton had behaved ‘very contemptuousely’. He therefore spent several months in the Fleet prison, and the queen never forgave him or received his wife at court, despite her elevated status as a countess.99

In some cases, these pregnancies may have occurred after the informal exchange of vows between the lovers. The maid of honour Mary Fitton, who ‘proved with chyld’ in early February 1601, swore that she had been promised marriage by her 20-year-old lover William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke. He, however, refuted the claim and ‘utterly renounceth all marriage’.

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