Our fascination with the Tudors and the Stuarts continues with a new film at the cinema about Mary Queen of Scots’ relationship with Queen Elizabeth I. The film suggests that the two cousins met – rather bizarrely in a laundry, presumably for visual effect – despite there being no evidence of a meeting. At Knebworth House an inscription above a bedroom fireplace suggests that Queen Elizabeth stayed here with the Lytton family in the year of the Spanish Armada, 1588 – but this inscription too, I’m afraid, we must accept is for visual effect and carries similar dramatic licence.
Inscription in the Queen Elizabeth Room, Knebworth House
A remarkable work of research by the Cambridge academic Marion E. Colthorpe has tracked Queen Elizabeth I’s day-to-day travels – or ‘progresses’ as they were known – throughout her long reign. These reveal that she did come to stay at Knebworth House, not in 1588, but on Tuesday 21st of August 1571. She stayed for three days apparently, almost bankrupting the family with the preparations necessary. The research also reveals that she came to dinner twice at Knebworth House before this, in 1566 and 1568.
Recently we thought that Mary Queen of Scots’ son King James I (of England, James VI of Scotland) chose to spend Christmas at Knebworth House in 1606. We’d misread a quote from a letter saying that the King had been “at an inn in Ware, with his hawks” a couple of days before – but in fact it was the letter-writer that came on to Knebworth House, not the king. Oh well. Maybe we’ll use some dramatic licence there too. Our Dining Parlour does have a couple of King James’s sofas – maybe we’ll say he stopped by for a sleep over at some point!
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH