My Just Desire: The Life of Bess Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter - Softcover

Beer, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345452895 ISBN 13: 9780345452894

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004

Synopsis

Young, beautiful, and connected by blood to the most powerful families in England, Bess Throckmorton had as much influence over Queen Elizabeth I as any woman in the realm—but she risked everything to marry the most charismatic man of the day. The secret marriage between Bess and the Queen’s beloved Sir Walter Ralegh cost both of them their fortunes, their freedom, and very nearly their lives. Yet it was Bess, resilient, passionate, and politically shrewd, who would live to restore their name and reclaim her political influence. In this dazzling biography, Bess Ralegh finally emerges from her husband’s shadow to stand as a complex, commanding figure in her own right.

Writing with grace and drama, Anna Beer brings Bess to life as a woman, a wife and mother, an intimate friend of poets and courtiers, and a skilled political infighter in Europe’s most powerful and most dangerous court. The only daughter of an ambitious aristocratic family, Bess was thrust at a tender age into the very epicenter of royal power when her parents secured her the position of Elizabeth’s Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. Bess proved to be a natural player on this stage of extravagant mythmaking and covert sexual politics, until she fell in love with the Queen’s Captain of the Guard, the handsome, virile, meteorically rising Ralegh. But their secret marriage, swiftly followed by the birth of their son, would have grave consequences for both of them.

Brooking the Queen’s wrath and her husband’s refusal to acknowledge their marriage, Bess brilliantly stage-managed her social and political rehabilitation and emerged from prison as the leader of a brilliant, fast-living aristocratic set. She survived personal tragedy, the ruinous global voyages launched by her husband, and the vicious plots of high-placed enemies. Though Raleigh in the end fell afoul of court intrigue, Bess lived on into the reign of James I as a woman of hard-won wisdom and formidable power.

With compelling historical insight, Anna Beer recreates here the vibrant pageant of Elizabethan England—the brilliant wit and vicious betrayals, the new discoveries and old rivalries, the violence and fierce sexuality of life at court. Peopled by poets and princes, spanning the reigns of two monarchs, moving between the palaces of London and the manor house outside the capital, My Just Desire is the portrait of a remarkable woman who lived at the center of an extraordinary time.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Beer is the author of a critically acclaimed academic book, Sir Walker Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century. A Lecturer in English Literature at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, Beer lives with her two daughters, Becca and Elise.
From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

“My One and Only Daughter”: Growing Up Under Elizabeth

She had been born in April 1565, a precious daughter to relatively elderly parents who had already produced six sons. Bess’s father, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, fifty at the time of her birth, would live only another six years. It was thus her mother, Anne, and one of her older brothers, Arthur, who were to exert the greatest influence upon Bess as a young girl. Anne Throckmorton harbored great hopes for her daughter, hopes rooted in her own traumatic childhood experiences and her intimate and perilous involvement with the power struggles and shifting regimes that characterized the mid-sixteenth century. Historian Alison Plowden, reviewing the early years of the future Queen Elizabeth (whose mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed before her daughter was three, and stepmother Jane Seymour died soon after giving birth to Prince Edward, and a second stepmother was executed for adultery), argues that “it would be hardly surprising if by the time she was eight years old, a conviction that for the women in her family there existed an inescapable correlation between sexual intercourse and violent death had taken root in her subconscious.” But this conviction may well have been shared by an entire generation of women, including the young Anne, who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the actions of their king as he slid into unhappy despotism in his search for a male heir and a loyal wife.

Anne’s father, Nicholas Carew, had been a loyal follower of Henry VIII, and, more problematically, of Henry’s first wife, Katharine of Aragon. Carew survived the dangerous years in which Henry abandoned Katharine because of his desire for Anne Boleyn, and then, when convinced of Anne’s adultery, swiftly married Jane Seymour, a mere eleven days after his second wife’s execution. Throughout this time, Nicholas Carew continued to be one of Henry’s closest friends, a “jolly gentleman” by all accounts. But the king was a dangerous friend, and with a suddenness that by this stage of Henry’s despotism probably surprised no one, Nicholas Carew fell from favor. Execution swiftly followed. One of Anne’s first, and by definition last, memories of her father would have been a visit to him the night before his death on March 3, 1539, to make her farewells. Her mother, Lady Carew, had done all she could to prevent her husband’s fall, exhorting him “to obey the king in everything,” but to no avail. Anne’s mother lived on for another seven years. She would be buried with her “traitor” husband, leaving a few pounds to one daughter, her clothes to another, and nothing to adolescent Anne.

Despite this traumatic start to life and her lack of a dowry, Anne made a respectable marriage, allying herself with another survivor of the troubled closing years of Henry VIII’s reign: Nicholas Throckmorton. Her new husband’s problem was not that he was one of nineteen children (although this would have minimized his inheritance prospects), but that his family remained loyal to the papacy despite England’s move toward reformed religion and eventual Protestantism. Nicholas’s father, George Throckmorton, a leading courtier in the early years of Henry’s reign and the pleased recipient of generous gifts of land from his royal master, opposed the king’s eventually successful plan to an- nul his marriage to Katharine of Aragon. This was politically unwise, and George was advised by Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Crom- well, to “stay at home and meddle little.” Over the following decades, Throckmortons were to fail, extremely conspicuously, to do just that. Home for the defiantly Catholic Throckmortons was (and still remains) Coughton House in Warwickshire: those nineteen children remain in brass effigy in Coughton Church.

The following lines, from a long and execrable poem in which Sir Nicholas looks back over his life (poetic license being deployed since the protagonist actually dies during the poem), give an impression of a childhood surrounded by anxious women:

No joys approached near unto Coughton House: My sisters they did nothing else but whine; My Mother looked much like a drowned Mouse. No butter then would stick upon our Bread: We all did fear the loss of Father’s Head.

Nicholas’s father kept his head, just, but his son presumably learned from the experience and turned his back on the dangerous Catholicism of his family and embraced the new reformed state religion. He was therefore eligible to join the household of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, the staunchly Protestant Catherine Parr, and so began his long career as a courtier in July 1543. In Catherine Parr’s house, Nicholas was joined by two young girls, Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Their futures would become entangled with his for many years, and both Jane’s and Elizabeth’s shadows would fall over Bess, Nicholas’s only daughter, years after his death.

Through the 1540s, young Nicholas would have witnessed the actions of Lord Thomas Seymour, Catherine Parr’s subsequent husband, as he attempted to control Princess Elizabeth both sexually and politically while she was still in her early teens. Historians are divided over the precise nature and extent of the relationship, but it is cer- tain that once Catherine Parr died, Seymour openly courted Elizabeth. Early in 1549, however, the tide turned against him, and his ambition to marry the young princess was construed as treasonous. He was executed in March of that year. Nicholas Throckmorton watched and studied what he saw and continued to rise. Three years later, he made the shrewd move of giving up an annuity of £100 in exchange for the manor of Paulerspury, thus establishing himself as a prominent landowner in Northamptonshire, independent of his Throckmorton relatives in Warwickshire. The deed for Paulerspury identifies him as a gentleman of the Private Chamber, and thus at the heart of the court of the boy king Edward VI, Henry VIII’s youngest child and only son, and thus, successor.

Although the precise date of their marriage is unclear, Anne Carew and the upwardly mobile Nicholas Throckmorton were certainly married when the still teenage King Edward recognized that he was dying and made moves to determine his own successor. Edward’s choice to follow him, or more important, the choice of the Earl of Northumberland, his chief adviser, was the young Lady Jane Grey, daughter of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk. Her tenuous claim to the throne rested on the fact that she was the daughter of the daughter of King Henry VIII’s sister, Mary. But her real value lay in her Protestantism and in the fact that Northumberland could marry her to his own son, Guilford Dudley. Edward VI himself encouraged this marriage as part of his continued attempts to set aside the claims of his older sisters, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. The accession of the fiercely Catholic Princess Mary Tudor to the throne was a disastrous prospect for Northumberland for good political reasons, and in ideological terms, King Edward opposed strongly the idea of a return to Rome. Between them, Edward and Northumberland overturned both Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544, and a rash of dynastic marriages, orchestrated by Northumberland, took place that spring. As the historian Susan Brigden concludes, “Northumberland was kingmaker.”

The pace of events quickened still further as the young king’s health deteriorated. By June, Lady Jane Grey was suffering physically and mentally from the strain of expectation upon her. On July 6, 1553, Edward VI died, but the public announcement of his death was delayed for two days. A further two days later, Lady Jane was brought on a barge from Sion House, the Duke of Northumberland’s house, to the Tower of London, pausing at Westminster and Durham House. At the Tower she was proclaimed queen. Only nine days later, and in the face of a hostile response in London and elsewhere to Queen Jane, Princess Mary Tudor was proclaimed queen in London: “a conciliar conspiracy had put Queen Jane on the throne; a popular rising deprived her of it.”3 It appeared that the issue of legitimacy (Mary was Henry VIII’s daughter; Jane was only his great-niece) counted with the people, that Northumberland was widely distrusted if not hated, and perhaps most important, that the reformed religion that Jane represented had not taken as firm a root in the country as its Protestant leaders had thought or hoped. Lady Jane Grey became yet another casualty of the power struggles of the mid-sixteenth century, one of the many tragic ironies of her situation being that her own father ral- lied support for Queen Mary and renounced the regal claims of his daughter. Jane’s sister Catherine, who had been hastily married to Henry Herbert, was as hastily cast off by her new husband’s family when it became clear that she would not be sister to a queen. The convenient, and possibly valid, excuse was that the marriage had not been consummated.

Jane Grey’s father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, were pardoned by the merciful new Queen Mary, but Jane’s own fate remained uncertain. Only a few months later, however, in the first winter of Mary’s reign, Jane’s father was involved in a new rebellion against the Queen’s authority. His change of allegiance ensured not only his own execution, but that of his daughter, and on February 12, 1554, Lady Jane was beheaded.

Young Anne Throckmorton had backed the wrong queen. She had been dangerously close to the Grey faction, even deputizing for Queen Jane as godmother, on the very day, July 19, 1553, that Queen Mary was proclaimed sovereign in London. The accession of Mary, and the subsequent execution of Lady Jane, were politically disastrous for both Anne and ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0345452895
• ISBN 13: 9780345452894
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336