TRACY BORMAN: Under Tudor rule,
England was taken from a medieval kingdom plagued by civil war
and developed into one of the most powerful nations
in the Renaissance world.
But from phantom pregnancies
to the use of bizarre methods of contraception,
it was often the most intimate and tragic moments
of these monarchs' lives that dictated the fate of country.
In this episode, we look at the life of Queen Elizabeth I.
She was an attractive, charismatic and vivacious young girl
who took the throne at the age of just 25.
But her early years were lived in fear of assassination
by the supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Although she fashioned herself as the Virgin Queen,
she had a series of passionate liaisons.
Obsessed with her personal appearance,
she was also overly fond of sugar,
which left her teeth black and rotten.
As she grew older, there were ever more desperate attempts
to stay attractive and to cover her pock-marked face,
caking on thick layers of white lead and vinegar
to preserve the mask of youth.
Welcome to The Private Lives of The Tudors.
Princess Elizabeth was only third in line to the throne of England.
So when her father, Henry VIII, died, aged 55,
at his palace in Whitehall,
the crown passed to her brother, Edward.
But not wanting to declare Henry dead,
his accession had to be kept a secret.
They didn't want to risk people knowing
that the country was without a king,
so they even had meals delivered to Henry's room
to make it look like he was still alive.
But three days later, on the 31st of January, 1547,
they announced the death of Henry
and proclaimed his son King Edward VI of England.
Aged just nine, and under the charge of the Privy Council,
Edward was put into a rigid routine of ceremony and official business -
a stark contrast to the glittering world of his father's court.
The boy that arrives is a stranger. We know little about him.
We see the king really only from a distance
and darkly, as it were, through a glass.
He has a very strong personality. He's bright.
Like all of these children, he's self-confident about himself.
But there's also this very cool, detached, very wilful personality -
almost cold and peremptory.
Evidence of this still survives in the king's personal writings.
This is now my office at Hampton Court Palace,
but it was originally built for Edward VI.
And it may have been here
that the young prince started his journal, aged about 11.
Edward was the only one of the Tudors to keep a diary,
but, sadly, it's rather lacking in titillating gossip and scandal,
as you might expect for something written by someone so young.
But it's also lacking in emotion.
There's an entry from the day
that Edward's favourite uncle was executed,
and he simply records,
"On this day, the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off on Tower Hill."
The journal ends abruptly in 1553
when Edward falls very seriously ill.
Edward is stricken with a mystery illness -
possibly some kind of chest infection,
brought on by a recent bout of measles.
He is reported to be suffering from shortness of breath
and a dangerous fever.
His reign is one of remarkably good health.
He only has a bout of measles in 1552.
That may be the start of things going wrong.
WOMAN: It can be a much more serious disease
than we often give it credit for being.
Might have been tuberculosis, it might have been sweating sickness,
but he was only weakened at the end of his life.
He wasn't weak from day one.
It was his father's greatest fear -
Henry had obsessed about protecting Edward
from any illness during his lifetime.
But after only six years, five months and seven days on the throne,
Edward was dead at the tender age of 15.
The crown would now pass to his half-sister, Mary.
She had a rocky start to her reign.
Edward had been a staunch Protestant
and didn't want a Catholic to inherit his crown.
A plot to usurp Mary
and place the Protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England
very nearly succeeded.
But Mary was made of stronger stuff, and the attempt was short-lived.
Mary's first priority as queen is to find a husband,
and the man she chooses is Philip of Spain.
The only reason she's having to think about a marriage
is because she's been given the responsibility of being a queen,
she now needs to ensure the succession.
It's the first duty of a monarch.
WOMAN: There are many stories about Mary Tudor.
And one of those stories is that she fell in love
with a portrait of Philip II - or Philip of Spain as he then was.
Your Majesty, it is my pleasure and honour
to present to you this image
of his most Catholic Majesty, King Philip II of Spain!
She falls instantly in love with him after seeing only his portrait.
She's besotted, but she's also naive,
not blessed with good looks,
and, aged 37, is some 11 years his senior.
I trust this is a fair likeness?
The artist, Senor Titian, has captured His Majesty most perfectly.
He pleases us well.
The reality was that the marriage between Mary and Philip
was a political marriage - as indeed all royal marriages were.
She asked Charles V, Philip's father,
who had been her protector for many years,
who he wanted her to marry.
And it was his son Philip that he urged upon her.
Mary tried to present herself as a romantic wife,
and may have gone through certain expressions of romantic love,
but the reality for her was that it was a political marriage.
For Philip, it was even more a political marriage.
He didn't want to marry Mary at all.
He was persuaded, if not coerced, by his father
to accept Mary as his bride.
Your Majesty, welcome.
Upon arriving in England and meeting Mary for the first time,
Philip finds her repugnant.
He confides to a close attendant
that Mary is no good from the point of view of fleshly sensuality.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
But Philip does his duty, and he marries the English Queen.
MURPHY: The marriage, when it happens in July 1554,
goes quite well, really.
Philip, he knows he's buying a woman who's past her best.
WOMAN: Philip had been married before, and he'd fathered a son.
This gave Mary hope that she could conceive a son for herself.
There was also a large age gap between them.
Philip was then 27 and Mary 38, so time was running out for her.
She was very keen to get the marriage started
and to share Philip's bed.
Within days of her wedding to Philip, Mary believes she is pregnant.
As the weeks progress, she shows all the signs -
including morning sickness and a swollen belly.
When the ninth month approaches,
she enters her confinement at Hampton Court.
Everything has been prepared for the royal birth.
Mary believed she was pregnant
because she had the symptoms of pregnancy.
Her stomach swelled, it's even said that she was lactating.
She felt nauseous
and even her doctors were convinced that she was pregnant.
The whole realm thought that Mary was pregnant.
When Mary entered her confinement, her midwives and other attendants
would have given her a special tonic, known as cordial.
This comprised ale mixed with various other ingredients,
such as sugar, honey, saffron, and ginger.
It was believed that this cordial would strengthen the expectant mother
for the labour that lay ahead.
But the reality in Mary's case was that she didn't need it.
SIM: At this stage, there is no way of knowing you're pregnant for sure.
The sort of pregnancy tests that we have today are way in the future.
Very difficult to know if you're definitely pregnant.
Very easy to mistake pregnancy for a whole host of other things.
In November, she thinks that she can feel the baby quicken inside her.
She takes her chamber in May -
this is when you depart into your private apartments
and seal yourself off,
which was a normal thing for a wealthy Tudor woman to do.
But the due date comes and goes,
and many weeks later, there is still no sign of a baby.
Mary's stomach decreases in size
and it becomes obvious that it was a phantom pregnancy.
It has to be said that Mary was not the only woman in the 16th century
who did have symptoms of pregnancy
when they were not, in fact, pregnant.
Phantom pregnancy is actually a known medical condition.
It's basically where a woman is so desperate to get pregnant
that her body is actually deceived into thinking that she is pregnant.
Very sad, because of course Mary is made fun of
by lots of people after the pregnancy is discovered to be false.
It must have been a terrible tragedy for her.
Not only did she have to suffer the public ridicule,
but she was also seemingly abandoned by her husband.
LICENCE: One of the things that happened
as a result of her failing to bear a child
was that Philip then left England
and for over a year she was without him,
begging him to return,
knowing that she couldn't fall pregnant without him.
So on a personal level and a dynastic level,
it was a terrible blow for Mary as Queen and as a woman.
But it wasn't the last time
Mary would be mistaken in thinking she was pregnant,
because two years later, she began to show signs of pregnancy again -
although many had their doubts.
MURPHY: The Queen believes herself to be pregnant.
She can only believe that for two reasons -
one, that Philip is back in England
and, secondly, that they must have had intercourse again.
LICENCE: She wrote to Philip,
telling him that she was expecting a child.
His response was that he was delighted.
But in reality he was...he was quite sceptical, as was Mary's court.
SIM: This time, hardly anybody believes her
and I think it was just the closest of her ladies around her
played along, because they didn't want to upset her.
The gentlewomen of the privy chamber
don't seem to treat her as if she's pregnant,
and by the middle of the year, it's quite clear
that whatever the queen believed was happening, it hasn't happened.
Again, no arrangements were made for her lying-in.
By the time that her due date arrived,
there was a silence in court.
She didn't go into confinement, and again the matter was dropped.
(GROANS)
They were right to doubt her - Mary wasn't pregnant.
But she may have been gravely ill.
By May 1558, Mary had become weak and dangerously sick.
It seems possible that what she mistook for pregnancies
were in fact something far more serious.
There are a number of possibilities.
The sweat was raging through England.
But it seems likely, given these two phantom pregnancies,
that she was suffering from some condition,
possibly some form of cancer, that created these symptoms in her too.
Some doctors have argued that what Mary was experiencing
was a form of stomach bloating that was coming from some form of tumour,
whether it was an ovarian tumour or whether it was a stomach tumour.
There might have been other illnesses too
that created those kinds of symptoms.
Mary died later that year at St James' Palace in London, aged 42.
Her husband, Philip, who was away in Brussels at the time,
wrote of his regret at the passing of his wife.
MURPHY: The idea that Philip doesn't have any feelings for Mary,
I think is probably false.
It may not be a love match, but he sees it as an important match,
a family matter - if I can put it that way -
that touches him deeply and personally,
and he obviously respects her enormously.
And that tells us something about Mary, I think,
because to be respected by somebody like that -
a man brought up to be King of Spain -
I think that implies that Mary herself
must have had more than we often see
from the distance that we're allowed to get.
It had taken the death of both her younger brother and her older sister,
but it was finally time for Elizabeth to take her turn on the throne.
Aged 25, Elizabeth was greeted with open arms by her subjects.
As she paraded through the city on the eve of her coronation,
she was met by enthusiastic and adoring crowds.
This was the start of England's Golden Age.
She was attractive, charismatic and vivacious,
and by the time she became queen,
Elizabeth had already won the love of her people.
But alongside the celebrations that accompanied her accession,
there was an underlying unease among her subjects
that they were, once again, being ruled by a woman.
Women were the possessions of their men,
their husbands, or their fathers.
They didn't own property.
Everything they had, including themselves bodily,
was the possession of their husband.
People even debated in certain circles whether women had souls.
It was that kind of level.
But Elizabeth made it perfectly clear
that she was no ordinary woman - she was a queen ordained by God.
And whether they liked it or not, she was going to rule them.
We think of women during the 16th century
as being second-class citizens.
We have to remember that status always trumped gender.
Women who came from a noble or a gentry background
would be able to exercise authority and power
over men who were of a lower social status.
It was a fairly unnatural concept for most English men,
and English women, to be ruled by a woman
who had the ultimate say politically, dynastically,
over how the country was run.
SIM: Part of people's fear of having a woman on the throne
was practical, in that they didn't think that women could keep order.
That's why Elizabeth's achievement was all the greater
because she did so much manage to keep herself on top.
Elizabeth understood PR and knew how to market herself to the public.
One of the ways she did this
was through the beautiful and elaborate clothes she wore at court.
Elizabeth was an iconic figure. In terms of fashion, she set the style.
Women wanted to look like her. Men wanted to be in her favour.
She was exceedingly clever at making the best of what she had.
She was never a wealthy monarch.
All her clothes were recycled time and time again.
You think of all that beautiful embroidery that she wore,
it could be taken off one dress and put onto another one.
She was style on a budget.
To better understand how Elizabeth would have been dressed,
I've come to meet collections curator Eleri Lynn
in the costume department of Hampton Court Palace.
I want to get some firsthand experience
in what it would have been like to wear one her exquisite dresses.
But to do that, I need to get out of my 21st-century clothes
and into some historic underwear.
So I'm all set in my Tudor undies, and do your worst now.
This very unassuming layer is very, very important.
So, you're in your linen smock.
It absorbs the sweat of the body, keeping the outer garments clean.
Most people would've changed their linens weekly,
but as a member of the royal family,
you're changing it many more times than that -
possibly several times a day.
It's quite a cumbersome procedure, isn't it?
But I have to say, it feels nice.
I suspect the other layers aren't going to feel
quite as comfortable, but shall we get started?
Absolutely. So, the next layer is your bodice.
The Elizabethan bodice was a type of corset worn by the women of the age.
What the Tudors didn't do was to get into their bodice straightaway
and just lace it up, and that was that.
They would do it in increments,
because the whale bone that's in this bodice
would have warmed with your body heat.
So, it actually changes shape to your body?
Yes, and becomes a bit more comfortable and a bit more pliable.
Now you say whale bone. They're not real whale bone, surely.
They don't go out hunting whales just in the name of fashion.
In the 16th century, they had great voyages of discovery,
of crossing the Atlantic and finding these huge whale fisheries,
and they're bringing back all this whale bone.
Whale bone, during the Elizabethan period,
was a highly-prized commodity -
so much so that it was considered a royal fish,
meaning that, to this day, any whale found in English waters
belongs to the monarch.
Elizabeth is dressing not only for fashion,
but to project her might and the power of her expanding empire.
So, she wants to show all of these wonders.
And what better way than to use whale bone
in as many different ways as possible?
Next to go on is the bum-roll,
a kind of padded cushion often filled with feathers
and tied around the waist so it hung at the back.
This would act as support for the hooped skirt known as a farthingale,
which would have been stiffened with either bone or cane
to add the rigid shape we often associate with Elizabethan women.
Now I've got the farthingale and the bum-roll,
I'm beginning to get a feeling of what it must have been like
to be a larger lady, and just the way I'm holding myself -
I have to put my hands in front.
You can't stand with them by your side,
because it's uncomfortable and probably looks a bit stupid.
You can suddenly understand why the Tudors
are in the postures that they are.
Tudor portraiture always shows the ladies
with their hands sort of crossed or holding something.
The next layer is the petticoat,
followed by the elaborately decorated outer garment.
This was the most opulent and expensive layer,
often made from hugely valuable fabrics
such as silk and cotton imported from the Middle East,
or fine velvets from Italy.
And possibly the most recognisable item of Elizabethan clothing,
the ruff - made from the finest linen from Holland.
OK, so I've got my dress, I've got my ruff. Where's the bling?
I need some jewellery.
Elizabeth loved her diamonds and pearls and rubies.
Can we have a little bit of that perhaps?
Elizabeth was particularly keen on her pearls,
and is seen wearing them in many of her portraits.
This was because they were considered to be pure
and were used in Tudor symbolism to represent virginity.
She had a huge collection of jewels,
many of them she'd inherited off her father, from his many wives.
One ring that we know is missing from your fingers now
is a locket ring that she was found wearing when she died.
It was a jewelled ring, like any other,
but it opened, and inside was a silhouette of herself,
but also a lady in much earlier Tudor dress
looking very, very much like
the portraits that we know of Anne Boleyn.
So before we're quite finished there is the piece de resistance,
the crowning glory - of course, the wig.
Thanks to my able dressers here, I have all of my outfit complete -
my wig, my jewels, my beautiful gown, and what lies underneath.
I'm ready to sally forth into court, am I not?
LICENCE: She knew how to make an entrance.
She knew how to capture her image in terms of portraits.
And that was really the prevailing ideal of beauty of the time.
SIM: One big advantage that Elizabeth had
was the fact that she had inherited
her mother, Anne Boleyn's, sense of style.
She did start off reasonably good looking -
she had all that twist of being able to just look particularly good
and also had incredible charisma.
So, Elizabeth was able to stand out amongst her ladies.
Clothing was important to Elizabeth.
It wasn't just an aesthetic question, it was about status.
The more bling, the better.
So if she could incorporate jewels, pearls,
different rich fabrics into her costume,
the more status she projected.
It was a very important status symbol,
a very important sign of her power as queen.
In public, Elizabeth carried herself with an air of self-assurance.
She was confident,
and acted upon matters of state with decisive action,
defying the expectations of many of her critics.
But for the more cynical members of her court,
there could be only one reason for her display of strong leadership.
There were many rumours about Elizabeth's sexuality,
about her gender,
because she exhibited various masculine qualities
such as strength and the ability to make a decision, authority.
And the belief was that a woman couldn't actually display these,
so the logical outcome
was that surely Elizabeth must be a man in disguise.
Elizabeth was well aware of these attitudes,
and played the game very cleverly.
She pretended to regret her sex,
famously lamenting that she was "a weak and feeble woman."
But her reign would prove that this was just play-acting -
far from being constrained by her sex, she used it as a weapon.
Elizabeth used her sexuality at court for certain,
because it was a function of her gender.
As a woman, she interacted with the male courtiers
in a different way than a king would have done.
She played up to them like lovers,
and she had favourites and she gave them nicknames.
This represented a very different style of queen-ship.
She was inventing something new.
She was establishing a court where she was the queen bee.
She expected men to write poetry to her and pay her fulsome compliments,
treat her almost like a mistress.
And I think she enjoyed every minute of it.
DORAN: Elizabeth could be flirtatious,
and she could be teasing,
but for the most part, she used something else, I think,
as a political weapon, and that was courtly love.
She was an object of devotion.
She would have knights who would do her service
and would be utterly devoted to her,
but they did not have any expectation
of a sexual relationship with her.
And Elizabeth played on that a great deal, as did her courtiers.
Like all monarchs, Elizabeth was expected to marry
and produce an heir.
But she made it clear from the outset of her reign
that she had no intention of taking a husband.
It has been assumed that this was pure state-craft.
She did not wish to be ruled by a man.
But the real reason behind Elizabeth's refusal to marry
lay in her private fears, sparked by her childhood traumas.
She had just been shy of three years old
when her mother Anne had been executed at the orders of her father.
Five years later, her stepmother, Catherine Howard,
had followed Anne to the block.
Horrified, the eight-year-old Elizabeth
had confided to her companion Robert Dudley
that she herself would never marry.
Her big problem was that she couldn't marry
without compromising her authority
because, at that time, a man was always thought
to have authority over his wife.
And Elizabeth was certainly not going to do that.
Elizabeth was faced by the question of whether she would marry,
because women were not perceived
to be able to govern themselves independently.
When you married as a woman,
you literally became your husband's chattel.
Anything that you possessed before you were married
became your husband's.
So you could bring a fortune to that marriage
and your husband could spend that entire fortune on his mistress,
and there was nothing that you could do about it.
But there was also another reason - she was afraid of giving birth.
Elizabeth had seen the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth firsthand.
She had experienced the death
of her stepmother, Catherine Parr, during her teens,
and she knew that that was something
that could derail her from the throne.
It also meant if she married, she'd have to give power to her husband.
She would become second place.
And the idea of going through the pregnancy and the birth itself,
with all the physical weakness that would cause,
wasn't particularly compatible
with her presentation of either the Virgin Queen
or the ultimate power that she personally wanted to wield.
Elizabeth was not inclined to marry, but neither was she prepared
to completely restrain her sexual desires.
Whether or not Elizabeth I was really the Virgin Queen
has been one of the most hotly debated subjects in history.
Although her iconic image was rooted in her virginal state,
rumours about her sexual misconduct with a whole host of men
were forever breaking out.
She did have relationships at court,
but just how far these went took place behind closed doors.
She did have a relationship with some of her courtiers
which was more intimate, sometimes expressed even in physical touching.
It was erotically charged,
and this created a style at her court
which was obviously very different
from that of her sister or her brother,
and indeed even that of Henry VIII.
Among Elizabeth's many flirtatious relationships
with her male courtiers,
the one that inspired by far the most gossip
was that with her longstanding confidant, Robert Dudley.
Friends since childhood, by the time that Elizabeth became queen,
they were inseparable.
A year after her accession,
she had Dudley's bedchamber moved
next to her own private apartments,
in order to make it easier
for them to meet in secret.
Before long, their relationship was causing so much scandal
that Elizabeth had to go to great lengths to conceal it.
A very clear favourite from the start was Robert Dudley,
with whom Elizabeth seemed to be very much in love
in the early part of her reign.
She had nicknames for him, she kept his letters,
they spent a lot of time together.
I think it most likely that Elizabeth was aware,
as she said often, that she was married to her kingdom first
and that everything else came second.
Quite possibly, she had to subjugate the personal
into the dynastic, the political.
Was prepared to have emotional connections
but not necessarily physical ones.
What made their relationship all the more scandalous
was that Dudley was already married.
Things came to a head when his wife, Amy Dudley,
was found dead at the bottom of a short flight of stairs.
Elizabeth and her alleged lover were both implicated in the death.
She couldn't marry him,
particularly after his wife, Amy, died in mysterious circumstances.
She simply couldn't allow her name to be linked
to what was possibly a murder plot.
The rumours at court spread like wildfire.
There were accusations that Dudley had his wife killed
so he was free to marry Elizabeth.
Although these claims were unsubstantiated,
they were enough to force the queen to distance herself from Dudley.
There were even those who said she secretly bore him a love child.
Whether the relationship actually became physical,
we can't say for certain.
There was no recorded pregnancy as a result,
but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
DORAN: She was a very cautious lady,
so that I don't think she would've engaged in any sex
that would have risked pregnancy.
But that doesn't mean to say that it wasn't sexual
in the sense of erotic.
Elizabeth probably was bearing in mind, though,
the danger to herself if she did conceive a child.
She didn't want to run that risk.
Sex outside of marriage in Elizabethan England was widespread
and there were even books published on the subject of lovemaking.
But having children out of wedlock was a different matter altogether,
so they had to find ways to prevent this.
Birth control, in the Tudor period, was rudimentary, to say the least.
Some methods admittedly would still be employed today,
such as coitus interruptus,
or the rhythm method - whereby a woman would abstain from sex
during her most fertile period.
But most of the Tudor methods of birth control were outlandish.
Some women wore amulets around the neck or thigh,
often containing herbs that they believed
to have contraceptive properties, such as honeysuckle or oil of mint.
But bizarrely, they would also sometimes contain oddities
such as dried cat's liver, donkey dung, or even weasel's testicles.
But the most common methods involved inserting some kind of barrier,
whether that was - bizarrely - a slice of lemon,
or perhaps a piece of wax moulded to shape.
But the most popular was a sponge.
Now, this would be cut up and soaked in vinegar.
The reason was that vinegar was believed to be doubly effective,
because not only did it help the sponge
to provide some sort of barrier,
but the vinegar itself was thought to naturally repel a man's sperm.
Well, if Elizabeth had relied on any of these methods
in order to prevent herself from falling pregnant,
she would have been taking an enormous risk.
I'm not sure that there was any contraception
that really worked in Tudor England at all.
There was a form of post-coitus contraception -
in other words, a form of early abortion - that was practised,
through herbal remedies being used to induce an abortion.
These were the ways in which historians now think
that contraception was practised.
Whether they worked or not,
most women would have learned about these birth control methods
through their female friends.
Although Elizabeth did not have friends
in the true sense of the word, she did become very close
to a number of her most intimate attendants.
They included Elizabeth Fiennes de Clinton -
who facilitated her royal mistress's meetings with her male courtiers -
and her old governess Kat Astley,
who knew many of her most intimate secrets.
At least one of Elizabeth's ladies
would even sleep in the same room as her.
This meant they were able to run errands for the queen
at a moment's notice.
She did have a lot of ladies who served her faithfully
all the way through her life.
Having said that, she was very bad-tempered,
and when her life got stressy,
the ladies could find themselves treated really quite badly.
They were pinched,
and in fact she even broke the finger of one of her ladies.
So she could be a very difficult woman to work for.
As age began to overtake Elizabeth
and she had to face the fact
that she was no longer the most desirable woman at court,
she underwent an increasingly elaborate routine
of dressing and make-up,
including the use of a series of outlandish wigs
as well as white lead on her face
which, ironically, did more to corrode her skin
than ageing ever could.
LICENCE: Elizabeth notoriously took a long time to get herself ready,
to make herself presentable - it was very much a theatrical process.
She would've had her ladies ready to help prepare her skin.
DORAN: She would use various compounds
in order to make it whiter, to make it softer,
and also to hide the blemishes,
which she had as a result of small pox.
But Elizabeth's looks also fell victim to her ever-expanding empire.
This was the Age of Discovery,
and things that were once rare delicacies
were now commonplace in the royal court.
Elizabethan explorers were bringing back sugar
in greater quantities than ever before,
and nobody benefited more from this than the queen herself.
Elizabeth was said to eat sparingly,
but she had an incredibly sweet tooth.
She would add sugar to everything -
not just cakes and chocolates, but to wine and even salads.
And to make matters worse, Elizabeth used honey to clean her teeth.
Well, not surprisingly, those teeth soon started to rot and fall out,
which made Elizabeth's appearance change.
Her face seemed rather gaunt, so she used what were known as plumpers -
pieces of cloth that she would stuff into her cheek
to make herself appear as she did before.
Well, these had another advantage,
because the plumpers would first be soaked
in some sweet-smelling oil or potion,
which helped to offset the stench of Elizabeth's foul breath.
Towards the latter part of her life,
Elizabeth was practically bald and toothless...
..a secret that the young Earl of Essex accidentally discovered.
The audacious earl, who was more than 30 years her junior,
played court to her, like a lover, and Elizabeth was obsessed with him.
But their liaison came to an abrupt end
when he burst into her bedchamber early one morning.
Who's there? Your Majesty, it's the Earl of Essex.
How dare you come here unannounced? Get away from here.
(ALL GASP)
He was aghast to see her stripped of her usual thick make-up and wigs.
At court he laughed with his friends about what he had seen,
saying she had a "crooked carcass"
But Elizabeth had the last laugh.
She had him executed shortly afterwards.
SIM: This is a time when no person of any standing
is ever left on their own.
You are always surrounded by people,
as a sign to how much influence you have.
So, private life wasn't ever really in it for them.
As time went by, Elizabeth's reign continued with strength
and the love of her people.
But while the years brought her reverence and respect,
they also brought her loneliness.
She had outlived most of her longest-serving confidants
and her flirtatious liaisons and romances had all but ceased.
It was also noted by witnesses at court,
that the once vivacious and beautiful queen had started to fade.
Elizabeth, at the end of her life, in private,
would definitely have been no oil painting.
LICENCE: In later years, as she aged,
she deliberately asked for this to be concealed,
and portraits were created to make her look young still and youthful.
By the age of 69, Elizabeth had sat on the throne for 44 years.
And having been married only to her country,
she was to be the last of the Tudor dynasty.
But her memory and her family's legacy would continue to live on.
I think the Tudors are remembered
the way they'd like to be remembered,
particularly Elizabeth I and Henry VIII,
because I would imagine that most of our first thoughts
would be those famous portraits by people like Holbein, of Henry,
the Armada portrait for Elizabeth -
which show them in full splendour,
exactly the way they wanted to be remembered.
So I think you have to say they got it right.
To the very last,
she continued with her public duties and ruled with authority.
But she began to suffer from ill health,
which made her increasingly debilitated.
Elizabeth's reign was coming to a close.
She died in her private bedchamber at Richmond Palace in March 1603,
surrounded by only her closest female attendants.
It was a death that was both dignified and, fittingly, private.
Captions by Ericsson Access Services (c) SBS Australia 2016