King Elizabeth I

As much time as I have spent in my life reading weird historical theories, I find it startling that I never heard until today about the theory that Queen Elizabeth I was really a man. It's an old idea, featured in one of Bram Stoker's lesser-known potboilers. It goes like this:

the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire. The king, Henry VIII, was due at any hour. He was travelling from London, in great discomfort — for the 52-year-old monarch was grossly overweight and crippled by festering sores — to visit his daughter, Elizabeth. The young princess had been sent there that summer from the capital to avoid an outbreak of plague.

But she had fallen sick with a fever and, after weeks of bleeding, leeches and vomiting, her body was too weak to keep fighting. The night before the king’s arrival, his favourite daughter, the only child of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, had been dangerously ill. In the morning, Elizabeth lay dead. Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Kat Ashley, and her guardian, Thomas Parry, had good reason to fear telling the king this awful news. It would cost them their lives. . . .

So they did what anyone would do; found a substitute and dressed her up as Elizabeth!

Their only chance of concealing the truth, and perhaps buying themselves a few days to flee the country, was to trick the king. Kat Ashley’s first thought was to find a village girl and dress her up in the princess’s robe, with a mantle, to fool the king. Bisley was a tiny hamlet, however, and there were no female children of Elizabeth’s age. But there was a boy, from a local family called Neville. He was a gawky, angular youth a year or so younger than Elizabeth, who had been the princess’s companion and fellow pupil for the past few weeks. And with no time to look further afield for a stand-in, Parry and Lady Ashley took the desperate measure of forcing the boy to don his dead friend’s clothes. 

You're thinking, wait, if this his Henry's favorite daughter, wouldn't he recognize the deception?

Remarkably, the deception worked. Henry saw his daughter rarely, and was used to hearing her say nothing. The last time she had been presented in court, meeting the new Queen Catherine Parr, she had been trembling with terror. The princess was known as a gentle, studious child, and painfully shy — not a girl to speak up in front of the king who had beheaded her mother. So when ‘she’ stood at Bisley manor, in the dimness of an oak-beamed hall lit by latticed windows, it was not so surprising that the king failed to realise he was being duped. He had no reason to suspect his daughter had been ill, after all, and he himself was tired and in pain. But after he left later that afternoon, the hoax began in earnest. Parry and Lady Ashley realised that if they ever admitted what they had done, the king’s fury would be boundless. They might get out of the country to safety, but their families would surely be killed.

So much is explained! No wonder Elizabeth never married! No wonder she was always making those comments about having a man's heart and what all!

This also explains how the attractive, feminine young Elizabeth (top) somehow evolved in the ugly, mannish Elizabeth of later years (above), why she always wore a ruff (to hide her adam's apple), why she wore all that white makeup (to hide her stubble) and so on. It all fits!

Sadly, it ignores, the basic reality of royal life in the Renaissance, which that kings and queens were never, ever alone. They were attended every minute by a flock of servants who tended to their most intimate bodily functions; their stools and urine were minutely inspected by royal physicians. Elizabeth's monthly bleeding was the subject of much discussion as she aged, among men wondering if she could still bear a child. Not to mention the three years she spent in the Tower, imprisoned there by her sister; does it seem likely that this secret could have survived three years of closely watched confinement? And that picture at the top was painted when Elizabeth was 13, three years after the alleged body switch.

So I think I'll stick to my own view, which is that Elizabeth was a woman but a complete weirdo.