All the Queen's Men by Peter Brimacombe Read Free Book Online

Queen at its head. Thus Sir Robert Cecil married Lord Cobham’s daughter Elizabeth, while Sir Walter Mildmay took Francis Walsingham’s sister as his wife and Sir Philip Sidney’s wife was Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, who went on to marry the Earl of Essex after Sir Philip had been killed in battle.
    On her accession, Elizabeth had acquired more than two dozen palaces of varying shapes and sizes ranging from the vast, sprawling Palace of Whitehall, the largest and ugliest in Europe according to one visiting foreign ambassador, down to smaller palaces tucked away in the depths of the country, places such as Eltham and Hatfield, which Elizabeth had inherited while she was still a princess, and Woodstock where she had once been held as a prisoner. Whitehall Palace, spreadeagled along the banks of the River Thames like an enormous Gothic beached whale, was originally the property of Cardinal Wolsey but had been seized by Henry VIII after the original central London Palace of Westminster was badly damaged in a fire. Henry rapidly redeveloped Whitehall at vast cost, creating a complex labyrinth of narrow, winding corridors and a bewildering variety of rooms, more than two thousand in number, big and small, covering many acres, from which earnest government bureaucrats administered Tudor England. The Privy Council invariably met at Whitehall but occasionally at Hampton Court Palace or Greenwich. Elizabeth was never very keen on Hampton Court, as it held so many bad memories from her childhood.
    Whitehall Palace continued to be much used throughout Elizabeth’s reign and subsequently by her successors up to the time of the serious fire in 1698 which destroyed very large parts of it, never to be rebuilt. At Whitehall the main corridor of power was the Privy Gallery, a broad thoroughfare running straight through the heart of the palace from the Holbein Gate and King Street past the Privy Garden. The Bedchamber, the Queen’s private quarters, faced the Council Chamber across this gallery and at the far end lay the Privy Chamber, Presence Chamber, Guard Chamber, the Hall and Royal Chapel and then finally the Privy Stairs and Whitehall Stairs leading down to the Thames, the river still providing the best form of transport in those days.
    Along the riverbank lay Hampton Court Palace, another palace which had originally been built by Cardinal Wolsey, and Richmond Palace, the Queen’s favourite which she referred to as ‘my warm little box’. Beyond this was Windsor Castle, at that time sited right out in the country. Downstream lay the Tower of London, by now little used as a royal residence, and Greenwich Palace, where the Queen had been born some twenty-five years before she had ascended the throne. One of her other favourite palaces was located deep in the Surrey countryside at Nonsuch, described by the contemporary historian, William Camden, as ‘the highest point of ostentation’. Here the Queen greatly enjoyed hunting and hawking, together with other country pursuits which she continued to partake in almost up to the time of her death in 1603.
    Elizabeth had inherited her father’s relentlessly energetic nature and so the Court was constantly on the move between these various royal palaces, like a hugely colourful travelling circus orbiting elegantly through the countryside of southern England, to her citizens’ delight and her courtiers’ dismay, being highly irritated by this disruption to their well-ordered lives which these royal peregrinations were to cause. Elizabeth was to build no new palaces in her lifetime, not that she required any more, nor was she to carry out much in the way of alteration or addition to those already in existence. The conservative Queen was content with what she already possessed and highly reluctant to indulge in a spending spree; only at Windsor Castle did a limited amount of work take place during her lifetime.
    Elizabeth waged a constant