Dr Kat and The Virgin Queen

hello and welcome back to the channel if you're new here hi you're very welcome this is reading the past and I'm dr. Kat I would argue that one of our most famous monarchs was Queen Elizabeth the first she presided over a period that is thought of by many as a golden age she's also famously known as the Virgin Queen but just why didn't she get married for us it's perhaps a foregone conclusion we know that she doesn't get married so of course it makes sense to us but I think for people living at the time and particularly for her chief counselors and advisors her choice is confusing and also alarming so why is it the choice that she makes [Music] [Music] in recent years there has been a growing trend to attempt to diagnose prominent figures from our past the process is known as posthumous or retrospective diagnosis and it's what happens when medical researchers team up with historians to bring their modern medical knowledge to bear on our understanding of past figures and it can yield fascinating results they can offer hypotheses about how a person acted looked and even died of course it has its limitations because most the people under study or kings queens princes princesses Dukes duchesses etc there is not going to be granted the permission to exhume the bodies the medical researchers aren't going to have access to the earthly remains to run the tests they would need to to turn hypothesis into proof however there is one notable example where this didn't happen of course and that is in the case of Richard the third when that King was found in the car park and exhumed historians and medical researchers could work on his earthy remains they could find evidence for the injuries he suffered at Bosworth Field they think they know which one may have been the fatal blow and also they believe they found evidence of posthumous desecration of his body we can almost now visualize how it all played out additionally we all saw in the TV documentary of it just how scoliosis his spine was we got a great picture of how rich the third may have looked in life from the facial reconstruction all of this is immensely useful however I don't think anybody is going to be granted a similar level of access to the earthly remains of Queen Elizabeth the first but it does not stop us from hypothesizing and so let's look at the ways in which people have sought to diagnose Queen Elizabeth the first in particular in relation to her decision to never marry there is a psychological hypothesis about Elizabeth's refusal to marry namely that events in her childhood was so traumatic for her that it gave her what some have called a mortal fear of the state of matrimony so let's have a look at a timeline of these events and think about whether or not they might have generated just that level of trauma on the 7th of September 15:33 elizabeth is born at Greenwich palace to Henry the eighth and his second wife Anne Boleyn much has been made of the fact that Henry would have been disappointed that Elizabeth was a girl and not the son and heir that he thought she deserved on the 19th of May 1536 her father has her mother executed on what many believed were trumped-up charges of treason and adultery Elizabeth had not yet turned three years old is it possible that at this formative moment marriage and sex were being connected in Elizabeth mind with death on the 24th of October 1537 her stepmother Jane Seymour dies from childbirth complications when Elizabeth had just turned 4 on the 13th of May 1542 elizabeth is 8 years old when her father execute her stepmother and cousin Catherine Howard for adultery on the 28th of January 1547 Henry dies elizabeth is 13 years old her last step mother remarries quickly her stepmothers new husband is Edward the sixth uncle Thomas Seymour the marriage is viewed by many including Elizabeth's siblings as a scandal Elizabeth lives with Catherine and Thomas Seymour and it seemed clear that he begins to groom her he may have sexually abused the teenager Catherine sends her away in 1548 the dowager queen is at this point a few months pregnant on the 5th of September 1548 the Dowager Queen Catherine Parr dies from childbirth complications on the 17th November 1558 elizabeth is 25 years old and her elder sister Mary the first has died it is earth is now queen of England she would have been aware that her sister short reign had been marred by unrest related to her faith her foreign marriage and her as it would seem the time phantom pregnancies it is perhaps plausible if not totally understandable that the young Elizabeth witnessing the disastrous consequences of marriage firsthand may have been thoroughly put off from the whole process however this psychological diagnosis is not the only one floating around that attempts to explain Elizabeth's reticence to marry in August 1985 an article was published by our Backen in it back in asserts that Elizabeth had testicular feminization which is now known as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome a child is born and a Pierce female but rather than having the internal sex organs of a female instead they have internal testicles as Elizabeth would have grown she would become quite aware that something wasn't right that she wasn't like the other girls she would of course not have been able to menstruate she may therefore have been very aware that she was infertile unable to bear an heir bakken's reasoning behind this diagnosis is however a bit of a stretch for me the symptoms listed include Elizabeth's unusual height well Mary Queen of Scots was taller Elizabeth's long fingers her athletic aptitude and the fact that she denied administration's of doctors close to her death and also refused to allow them to do a post-mortem after it this is a massive stretch as far as I'm concerned because I think if Elizabeth weren't capable of menstruating it would have been recorded the notion to me that there weren't women in her household in the employ of the crowned heads of Europe is incredibly unlikely particularly if those crowned heads were thinking of Elizabeth as a potential bride if they are going to enter into a marriage with the English Queen they're going to want an heir she may be a queen but her is also to be a mother of sons and daughters if she was incapable of doing so if she were not menstruating they would have known about it they would have made it their business to know about it and therefore as records become opened as archives become accessible to more and more people we would also know about it now I wonder if battens hypothesis is actually more influenced by a much older conspiracy theory one given oxygen in Bram Stoker's famous imposters namely that at some point in her childhood Elizabeth died and was replaced by a boy this conspiracy theory is known as the bisley boys story when Elizabeth was around 10 or 11 she was evacuated from London for fear of plague she ends up in bisley Gloucestershire while there she falls ill unexpectedly and quickly passes away the people looking after Elizabeth would of course have been utterly terrified so they start casting around for a replacement for some reason in the village of bisley there are no girls of a like age or hair color or complexion but there is a redheaded fair-skinned boy he is quickly brought in clonked and a dress ready for the visit of Henry the eighth this boy continues to play act the role of Princess Elizabeth this boy becomes Queen Elizabeth undeniably this is a fantastic and fantastical tale but it has many if not more of the problems that I talked about with bakken's assertion about testicular feminization Elizabeth is always being watched she is always in company she is always being served the notion that male courtiers her female courtiers and servants the diplomats that were paying quarter her on behalf of their kings and Dukes and princes would not have noticed that this was a man and a dress are frankly absurd we are centuries out from being able to block testosterone or offer gender reassignment surgery that nobody would have noticed is unthinkable that nobody would have mentioned that this Queen isn't menstruating or that this Queen has an Adam's apple or a five o'clock shadow is also impossible now people have said well she wore heavy LED makeup yes but she didn't push it on herself her maid servants would have done that if they were doing so to cover up her beard I do think that somebody would have mentioned it that is exactly the sort of explosive intelligence that would have been worth a fortune however before we put all of our physical psychological and conspiratorial and eggs in the one basket we should maybe look for a more prosaic reason for Elizabeth not marrying who was on offer at this time I think for many of her counsellors they would have been keen to make a foreign match a foreign prince or Duke or King would have been a very useful Ally for England it would have strengthened its place in the world Elizabeth is a Protestant and most of the crowned heads of Europe who had available males for her to marry were Catholic one exception was King Eric of Sweden who was a Protestant however from 1560 rumors abounded of his mental instability so when it comes to foreign matches her choices are people who are religiously opposed to her Catholics or a madman not potentially a very great dating pool if we're honest of course Elizabeth could had made a domestic match and for a period time there was a clear front-runner Robert Dudley her longtime friend confidant and the master of her horse however at the start of her reign Robert was already married on the 8th September 1560 Roberts wife Amy passed away however this did not clear the way unquestionably him to marry the Queen as I point out in my video the original staircase which I'll link in a card up here Amy died in suspicious circumstances and Robert was implicated any thought that the Queen of England might marry a man who had killed his wife so that he could marry her was simply too toxic to contemplate it would have been political and dynastic suicide had Elizabeth taken on that path just because marriage to Robert Lord Dudley would have been career suicide feliss birth it doesn't mean that she didn't love him if he held her heart it is possible that it made any other domestic or foreign match and anathema to her it's also possible that she learnt well from the example of the two marries in her life her sister Mary Tudor Mary the first of England and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots Mary the first marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain was a cause of personal sorrow and political strife many of her subjects feared the foreign interference of this Spanish King and they rose up against the match similarly once married her pregnancies that turned out to be mistaken pregnancies was a cause of personal sorrow and also in some cases the mockery of her subjects mary had put her woman's body to the test and it seemed it had failed her did Elizabeth learn from this and decide not to make the same mistakes when Elizabeth looked north to the example of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots it's perhaps easy to see that she would have been put off of making a domestic match of her own mary second husband Henry Lord Darnley was a disaster he was a violent jealous drunk who yes gave her a son but was also swiftly killed perhaps on Mary's own orders she then goes on to marry perhaps under duress the man suspected of killing that husband James Lord Bothwell in her third marriage a domestic one Mary shows the seeds for her own fall she marries a subject and she loses the throne her sisters foreign match had been complicated and full of sorrow her cousin's domestic match had being disastrous is it any wonder that Elizabeth thought that following either path was too great a risk to take she was intent to reign to rule and to hold her throne and perhaps seeing these examples she was shown that marriage was simply too great a risk for her to take it is just possible that Queen Elizabeth was attempting to keep a different kind of secret not that she was the busy boy or that she was psychologically traumatized or medically different perhaps the woman who rested so strongly on her status as a Virgin Queen was no virgin at all perhaps it happened under the roof of the Dowager Queen Catherine Parr her new husband Thomas Seymour his inappropriate flirtation may have turned into sexual abuse with the young Elizabeth as its victim it's also possible that she gave in to her strong affection and love for Robert Dudley and went to bed with him there was certainly a rumor that a bastard child of Elizabeth had washed up on the coast of Europe he was a man and he claimed that percent either way if she was not a virgin if she had had a bastard child she would have been I think mortally afraid that a potential husband would have found it out on the wedding night particularly if that husband was a foreign match if one of the crowned heads of Europe had found out that Elizabeth was no virgin and even worse had had a bastard child it would have been ruin the Pope would have had a field day and all of the Catholic states would have thought that everything they knew about her mother and her was true it would have not just been shameful it may have been politically disastrous it may have been just the reason these people needed to invade England and take her throne from her maybe she didn't marry because she simply couldn't risk this being found out whatever her reasons for not marrying by choosing not to Elizabeth bucks the trend kings and queens marry because in doing so they offer their dynasty and their country the chance of a legitimate heir of their bodies with no heir which Elizabeth is consigning herself and her nation - there is the risk of massive unrest after Monica's death when you don't know what's coming next it can be truly frightening for your people so whatever is motivating this choice I think it has to be a fairly big deal I don't think it can just be a whim but I'd love to know what you think why do you think Elizabeth didn't get married let me know in the comment section down below or come and find me over on social media I'll be leaving the links in the description box you can follow me there and we can continue the conversation I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful if you did please let me know by hitting the thumbs up please also subscribe to my channel and click the bellow icon so that YouTube tells you when I've next uploaded I hope you're gonna have a great day whatever you're doing and I look forward to speaking to you in my next video take care of yourselves bye bye for now [Music] [Music]

Channel: Reading the Past

Views: 94,775

Keywords: Education, Literature, Culture, History, Early Modern, Renaissance, Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, Bisley Boy, Retrospective diagnosis, Posthumous Diagnosis

Id: 15_HXkkoaV8

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019