In the autumn of 1562 Elizabeth I was twenty-nine, four years into her reign, unmarried and with no named heir. Then, at Hampton Court, she fell ill.
The Horror
Elizabeth fell ill on October 10, 1562. At first it was taken for a bad cold. Within days it was clear that it was smallpox, the disease that had recently killed the young Countess of Bedford. By October 16 the physicians knew what they were dealing with. According to Tudor Times, they had at first expected her to die because no spots had appeared. The court blamed a bath she had taken beforehand, which they thought had left her open to infection.
A physician was found. Tudor Times says her cousin Lord Hunsdon summoned a German doctor named Burcot, who had her wrapped in red flannel and laid close to the fire. She woke after two hours and found she could speak again. That account comes from a later biographical retelling, so treat the details of the cure with care. What the records agree on is the outcome: by October 25 she was back on her feet, and within a further week the pox had gone.
The danger was the point. The queen believed she was dying, and she asked her Council to make Robert Dudley, her favourite, Lord Protector, with an income reported as £20,000 a year. The Council, which had little love for Dudley, was horrified. It was equally unable to say who should reign if she died.
Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544 had excluded the Stuart line, which ruled out Mary, Queen of Scots, a committed Catholic. The History of Parliament’s account lists the remaining names. Lady Katherine Grey had perhaps the best claim, but her secret marriage had put her in the Tower. The Earl of Huntingdon, aged twenty-five, was a Protestant and had Dudley connections. Margaret, Countess of Lennox, was Catholic, and William Paulet, the Lord Treasurer, leaned towards her. Different councillors backed different candidates, and none had a majority. Less than a century had passed since the Wars of the Roses. When Elizabeth recovered, she refused to name anyone. The question did not go away: Katherine Grey, for one, had notable support in the Commons when Parliament met in 1563.
Someone else paid for her life. Lady Mary Sidney, Dudley’s sister, was one of the queen’s attendants and nursed her through the illness. She caught the disease herself, and unlike the queen she was badly marked. Her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, wrote that he had left her “a full fair Lady” and found her “as foul a lady as the smallpox could make her”, and that she kept to herself afterwards. His words survive in a letter that popular sites quote but do not date, and the phrase comes to us at second hand. Mary did not die of it, and she went on serving at court. She died on August 9, 1586, three months after her husband, and was buried beside him at Penshurst.
The Modern Relic
Hampton Court Palace is open to visitors, run by Historic Royal Palaces. It is not a shrine to the smallpox, and nothing on display marks that fortnight, but some of the Tudor palace Elizabeth knew survives. Henry VIII’s Great Hall, built between 1532 and 1535, still has its hammerbeam roof. The Great Kitchens, the Tudor ceiling in the chapel and Anne Boleyn’s Gate also remain. Elizabeth built the eastern privy kitchen, now a tea room. No source places her sickbed in any particular room that can be visited today, so a guide who claims to show it should not be trusted.
Two legends have grown around the episode, and neither is documented.
The first is that smallpox left Elizabeth so scarred that she hid her face under thick white lead make-up for the rest of her life. The surviving accounts point the other way: Tudor Times says the pox disappeared apparently leaving her unscarred, and the entry on Mary Dudley, summarising the Oxford biographical dictionary, says Elizabeth suffered only light pocking. The make-up itself is real enough, since white ceruse was fashionable, but the claim that she wore it to hide scars rests on reasoning rather than on any source that states her motive. The same goes for the story that Mary Sidney hid behind a mask afterwards. The Mary Dudley article calls that a myth.
The second is the Bisley Boy. In this tale the real Elizabeth died as a child at Overcourt House in Bisley, Gloucestershire, and was replaced by a red-haired local boy, who then reigned as the Virgin Queen for forty-four years. Believers use her unmarried state, her wigs and her high necklines as evidence. It was promoted in the nineteenth century by a local vicar, Thomas Keble, and spread by Bram Stoker’s Famous Imposters in 1910. Historians reject it for the total lack of physical evidence. The coffin Keble claimed to have found has disappeared, and servants who bathed and dressed monarchs make a concealed sex implausible. Smallpox does not feature in the legend at all, although the make-up and scar rumours are sometimes folded into it.
