In this series:
- Lady Southwell on the Final Days of Queen Elizabeth I.
- Queen Elizabeth I’s Heart and the French Ambassador.
- William Camden to Sir Robert Cotton. March 15, 1603 [1602 O.S.].
- Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, to the Doge and Senate; March 20, 1603
- Sir Robert Carey’s Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth
- Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, to the Doge and Senate; March 27, 1603.
Christophe de Harlay, the Count Beaumont, received his
commission as the French ambassador to the Court of Queen Elizabeth on December
11th, 1601,[1]
by the French calendar. He presented
himself in London in January 19th,1602, by the same. The French, being a Catholic nation, had adopted
the New Style Gregorian Calendar in 1582 in accordance with the Papal Bull
declaring the end of the Old Style Julian Calendar. Its New Year Day was January 1st
and its calendar ran 10 days ahead of the English Old Style.
The English being a Protestant nation, and its Queen
excommunicated, it kept the Old Style Julian Calendar and its traditional New
Year Day of March 25th. By
the reckoning of the English Court, then, Beaumont had arrived on the 9th
of January, 1601. Henceforward, the essays in this series will refer to the French dates as N.S. [New Style] and to the English as O.S.
[Old Style].
Beaumont, then, arrived at the English Court, at London, on
January, 9, 1601, O.S. He announced his
arrival and was met by a contingent sent to welcome him and to advise he rest
from his trip “for 3 or 4 days”. The
reason to delay his first audience under this pretext would soon be known.
He was informed on Saturday the 27th, N.S. [the
17th O.S.], that he would be given an audience the next day. In Beaumont’s dispatch to his king, Henry IV,
dated the 29th, 1602,[2]
N.S., we find the following:
By and bye she sat down in a chair, complaining of her left
arm, from which she had suffered four or five days…
I have yet to see that physicians of the time understood
that a pain in the left arm could indicate coronary distress. The Queen, however, at least understood that
the pain was brought about by any exertion.
We, for our part, recognize the signs of possible coronary distress. Perhaps even a minor heart attack.
This was not the first time a French ambassador reported
back to his king that Queen Elizabeth I had suffered coronary distress. On
March 30, 1572,[3] Bertrand
de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon reported to Henry III that
the Queen of England, with the permission of her physicians,
has been able to come out of her private chamber, she has permitted me… to see
her; and she has recounted the extreme pain
which for five days had so shortened her breath and had so clutched her
heart, that she verily believed she was going to die of it, and some judged
that she had already done so…
At this point, Elizabeth was 38 years old. The episode having occurred at the end of the very
active New Year holidays and during a highly stressful marriage negotiation with France,
it is more likely that the pains were due to extreme anxiety.
Even more likely — the Queen having made a point to give an
audience to Fénélon immediately after her recovery — the episode was another of
her tactics to steer the marriage negotiation in the direction she desired. She had years of expertise at such ploys
already in order to keep negotiations active while intending never actually to
marry. Otherwise she was not in the
habit of professing health problems directly to her French ambassadors.
The dispatch of Beaumont, some 30 years later, however, was
an entirely different matter. The Queen was
in the habit of standing, quite regally, imperiously, while giving audience to foreign
ambassadors. On this occasion she was in
sufficient pain that she had to break royal protocol. She tried to minimize the damage by
explaining to him that she had not been well.
The situation seems to have distressed her so deeply that she simply
blurted out the truth without diplomacy.
Of course, there could have been other reasons for the pain specifically
in her left arm. There could have been
other occasions that she felt a similar pain the record of which has yet to be
discovered. What seems clear here is
that the situation worried her. She rested
but it would not go away. In the end, she
toughed it out and determined to fulfill her duties as normally as she could.
Ambassadorial dispatches back to home governments are among
the most fruitful sources of historical detail from many periods and
places. The 19th century British
and European projects to publish calendars and texts of letters and government papers
give us road maps to the letters and documents archived with ever greater care
as modern Europe came into being.
Considerable gaps remain in the publication of the French
record, however. The letters from the
ambassadorship of Count de Beaumont have been archived but only published in
part by various scholars who have perused the manuscripts for their work. They are not generally available to the
public.
[1]
Beaumont would serve well into the reign of James I and would be suspected of
having been aware of the infamous Gunpowder Plot.
[2] “A
French Portrait of the Queen”, Ambassador Beaumont, The Gentleman's Magazine.
July—December, 1859. 557. I have the
exact date from L'ambassade de France en Angleterre sous Henri IV: Mission
de Christophe de Harlay Comte de Beaumont (1895), LI.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Shakespeare’s Barnacles. March 3, 2016. “Prospero will wake, he fears, before they can murder him, and will cast a spell on them.”
- Hedingham Castle Fact Sheet with Virtual Tour Link. January 20, 2019. “The modern entrance to the keep is on the first floor by way of a stone stair, discharging through the W. wall, where a fore-building used to stand.”
- Did Shake-speare Die of a Stroke? August 03, 2014. "In October of 1601 De Vere begins to complain of his health again in letters to his brother-in-law, Robert Cecil, who was representing him in certain legal matters at Court."
- Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time.
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