Down the Rabbit Hole

While working on a future post related to 17th century dental health I repeatedly came across breathlessly relayed (and uncited) facts about Queen Elizabeth I and her teeth:

1. Elizabeth ate so many sweets that her teeth rotted. Her favorites were candied violets. Or marzipan.
2. Elizabeth used something called “Tudor Toothpaste” which was unfortunately made of sugar.
3. Others rotted or blackened their teeth in emulation of the queen.
4. The poor blackened their teeth in order to appear wealthy and thus able to afford sugar.

In the absence of citations I can’t say that any of these things are true. So I thought I’d do a quick bit of searching to nail some sources down. No such luck. There’s a lot of stuff to wade through out there, so this is going to be multi-part. So let’s start with the first claim, which seems like the easiest to prove, as Elizabeth was a powerful monarch for 44 years whom was observed by many, many people.

I was able to find hundreds of websites making this claim, with very little sourcing. I was finally able to locate these 4 quotes, arranged in chronological order:

• Elizabeth reportedly suffered from toothache, but was afraid to have her teeth pulled, so the Bishop of London had one of his extracted in 1578 (when she was 45) to show her Majesty that it wasn’t so bad.: “And now it seems it was that the Bishop of London being present, a man of high courage, persuaded her that the pain was not so much, and not at all to be dreaded ; and to convince her thereof told her, she should have a sensible experiment of it in himself, though he were an old man, and had not many teeth to spare ; and immediately bade the surgeon come and pull out one of his teeth, (perhaps a decayed one,) in her Majesty s presence. Which accordingly was done : and she was hereby encouraged to submit to the operation herself.”

• Elizabeth’s favorite and suitor Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester apparently wrote a letter to Elizabeth’s chief advisor William Cecil, Lord Burley on October 17, 1578, saying “The Queen has been marvellous ill many days with a pain in her cheek.”

• The French ambassador de Maisse observed on December 8, 1597, : “As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly.”(As They Saw Her — Elizabeth I by Alison Plowden.)

• German traveler Paul Hentzner reported in 1598 that “next came the queen, in the sixty-sixth year of her age, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; he eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black; (a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar.)”
• Paul Hentzner’s travels in England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, translated by Horace, late Earl of Oxford, and first printed by him at Strawberry Hill: to which is now added, Sir Robert Naunton’s Fragmenta regalia; … with portraits and views. 1797..

Some thoughts:

• In Aylmer’s case we have the issue of provenance. Biographer John Strype never met Bishop Aylmer and it’s still not clear if Aylmer wrote this anecdote down himself or if Strype read a third person’s account. What is also not clear is Strype’s motivation in including this story in what is otherwise a history of the Reformation. Dr. Ralph Stevens of the Worth Library writes that Strype “omitted Aylmer’s more inflammatory and obnoxious language when paraphrasing his letters, crafting the image of a selfless public servant…” Is this story an attempt at reputation burnishing?
• I say apparently wrote because the author of the book I found this in used this method of citation: “—Leicester to Burghley. C. of St. Pap. Dom. 1547-1580, p. 601.” As of now I can’t find the original letter online. I am grouping the cheek pain in with the dental issues, as decaying teeth can cause abscesses in the gums and mouth.
• De Maisse met Elizabeth when she was in her 60s, 4 years before she died. He did have a personal audience with her and observed her behaving strangely. Life expectancy of a 16th century woman who obtained 15 years was only 48. So Elizabeth was quite elderly by the standards of the day and had substandard dental care regardless of diet. Why wouldn’t she be missing teeth?
• Hentzner’s travels through England provide a remarkable description of that place and time. (I will note that one of the things he reported seeing on his journey was a unicorn horn at Windsor Castle.) How did he gain access to Queen Elizabeth, exactly? He was a lawyer and a tutor. His pupil was a Silesian noble, of no particular importance in England. His account is that “We were admitted, by an order Mr. Daniel Rogers had procured from the Lord Chamberlain.” It’s not clear who Mr. Rogers is (both likely suspects were dead by then) but the Lord Chamberlain (which was the highest position in the royal household) at the time was Sir William Brooke. Hentzner did not have a private audience with the Queen but observed her speaking to nobles on her way to the chapel at Greenwich Palace. Was this enough access to assess her Majesty’s teeth?
• Also, Hentzner originally wrote his travelogue in Latin in 1612. The parts pertaining to England were translated in 1797. One detail I noticed is that Hentzner originally used the Latin word fuliginous to describe the Queen’s teeth. This term means sooty or dusky, rather than black (niger, for shiny black or āter, for dull black). Hentzner is also the only writer to attribute the state of the Queen’s teeth to her sugar consumption, which he also extends to all the English.

So what does this add up to? Taken as a whole, the evidence points to Elizabeth having troublesome teeth. But was Hentzner (and the entire Internet) correct in blaming sugar consumption? We’ll see in second post.