Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Queen Elizabeth I’s Heart and the French Ambassador.

In this series:

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.


We are fortunate, then, to have English translations from key portions of the archive in the pseudonymous article “A French Portrait of the Queen” from The Gentleman's Magazine of December 1859.  Limited portions of the text provided can be checked against the Mission de Christophe de Harlay Comte de Beaumont (1895).  With these and other fine scholarly works of the last 200 years a gratifyingly detailed picture of Queen Elizabeth’s final year of life — and, in particular, the very last days — will be recovered here and in the articles that follow.  In them we will find an unmistakable record that the Queen’s health was steadily in decline.


[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.
[3] Chamberlin, Frederick.  The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth (1921).  62.



Also at Virtual Grub Street:


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)