The Life of a Royal Attendant to Elizabeth I: Cuddling the Queen in Boat Beds, Dealing with Her…
The Life of a Royal Attendant to Elizabeth I: Cuddling the Queen in Boat Beds, Dealing with Her “Close-Stool”
At the Times Literary Supplement, a review of a new book called Elizabeth’s Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court gives us some important intel about what it was like for women who were allowed the honor of getting close to the Queen:
Female sleeping companions were especially important to protect [Elizabeth I] from potential assassins and to preserve her reputation as the Virgin Queen. She was never alone: every night one of her trusted attendants would have slept either in or next to her bed. These favoured women also helped her dress and undress, applied and removed her make-up, tested her food, and looked after her personal hygiene. Such service on the royal body could involve tasks that seem to us menial and even degrading, such as dealing with the Queen’s “close-stool”; but these women were mostly aristocrats, and their role was regarded as a mark of high honour because of the privileged access that it conferred.
I got worried for a second there, but it turns out “close-stool” means the stool container rather than the stool itself. More details about the domestic surroundings of the Queen:
Her various beds: a boat-shaped one at Richmond Palace, curtained with sea-water green and quilted with light brown tinsel; an enormous gilded one at Whitehall Palace, carved with eight beasts and dressed with purple velvet and damask and silver tassels. Her close-stools too were sumptuous, covered with velvet and fringed with golden silk (though also, practically, lined with canvas and containing chamber pots of pewter). We learn that Elizabeth cleaned her teeth with a mixture of white wine, vinegar and honey; that she kept various pets, including a monkey and a parrot; and that the furnishings of Hampton Court Palace included a jewelled water-clock, a walking stick supposedly made from a unicorn’s horn, and a bust of Attila the Hun.
The walking stick was probably Queens Only; it would be hard for an attendant to use that kind of contraption, especially if she were missing one of her arms.