There’s been times of plague in the past, genuine plague and
the word used in a wider sense for a
nasty disease that creeps its way round the planet.
Here, we have seen many people upsticks and take to the highlands
in their caravans and motorhomes to get away from the virus…. Though leaving a
city well served by the NHS and critical care units to a remote location with
bad weather, bad roads and no hospital beds nearby does need a certain
internal logic,
or lack of.
It has been banned now of course and the travel of a positive testing Prince
Charles to Scotland, has become a
… yes you’ve
guessed it, a
nationalist issue.
It’s human nature I suppose, to get away from the epicentre
of any disease and the city centres where population is dense.
In the past, children were often first shipped out,
So think of a
pleasant walled
garden at the
hunting lodge of a small sleeping village called Bisley. England, in the
summer,
children playing outside.
There’s two of them, a boy and a girl,
both aged ten. The kids get on very well, in fact
they do look quite similar, slightly long faced, a titian hint to the hair.
They are
distantly related
on the father’s side,
the blue eyes and red hair genes are easy to see.
The girl
had been
sent out from London city to escape the bubonic
plague, to stay at her father’s hunting lodge
in the village of Bisley.
The boy was local,
from Bisley itself.
One day, as they play in the garden, the girl begins to feel
unwell and collapses.
The servants in
the house come out and take her up to her bed room, lying her on her bed, where
later, she passes away.
She was
only ten
years old. The year was 1543.
The servants in the house are horrified, the nurse in
particular. They are more than a
little
scared that they are going to be accused of neglect in the care of the wee girl.
Then, in the worst
timing possible, it was
announced that
the girl’s dad was going to be visiting his
hunting lodge, and by extension, his daughter. The nurse panicked,
and
looking
out the window she and the rest of the servants, developed a plan. The boy is
very similar, could they… swap?
The boy
was to be
known from that day onward at The Bisley Boy
The girl was, or became to be, Elizabeth I, the Renaissance
queen of England.
The obvious question is, did nobody notice. Well, if you were
close to the princess, the chances are you’d get your head chopped off if you admitted
what was going on.
If you were not close to the princess ( and
that includes her father Henry 8
th . )The girl rarely saw the courtiers,
rarely saw her father and how much can a
child change in 6 months at the age of ten.
She was the child of King Henry VIII and his second wife,
Anne Boleyn and was really
only ever
third
in line to the throne. The other
two died leaving her a free rein.. free reign??
Nobody had any idea that this
ten year old child would ever become reigning
monarch,
never mind become one of England’s
greatest ever monarchs.
So, let’s accept for a moment that the
king didn’t
notice and the Bisley boy
grew up to rule the kingdom. As queen.
To this day the crowned Queen Of the Bisley Fete will be a boy.
It's easy to see how
this theory has
some traction. There is much
about the gender presentation of the Queen that is interesting.
She never
married, despite legitimate offers and many
times when it would have been politically prudent to do so, she still never tied
the knot. Most monarchs desire,
more
than anything,
an heir ( and heir and a
spare as the saying goes). Elizabeth? Nope. She told one of her nobleman, that
she had her reasons and that she would never bear a child.
There is, it is rumoured, a
perceivable difference in the letters the princess wrote before and
after her stay at the hunting lodge in Bisley.
Her physical appearance as an adult was ‘manly’. She could
outride most of her male companions on a horse, she was robust, had great
endurance, hunting and horseriding were her passion.
When out in public she wore a wig, she set
the fashion of
high ruffs – to hide an Adam’s
apple?
She wore blanket cover white make
up, as many did because of plague scars, but in her case
was it to hide a five o’clock shadow?
It’s stated that she had very long fingers for a woman,
rather strong hands for the delicate sex. It’s seen in her portraits.
Although she suffered illness frequently, she only saw her physicians
as a last resort and even then,
it was a
very few trusted doctors that she allowed
anywhere near her.
She also stated,
very clearly that she was not to have a post mortem carried out after death,
There exists
a document
written
in the 1800’s by a church cleric
in the village of Bisley. He states that he found a coffin
and that coffin held the skeleton of a young
girl wearing
the fashion of the
Renaissance aristocracy.
Bram Stoker believed it. Well he didn’t but he liked the
idea of it enough to include it in
his
non- fiction book “Famous Imposters.”
I’ve read somewhere that the book supports the theory while privately
Stoker didn’t believe
a word of it but I can see why he might find
the story attractive.
There are many who dispute this and it’s probably totally untrue
and much of what is put forward as supporting
evidence
for this theory
be explained by the queen
being
some kind of mixed gender physically due to
birth malformation or DNA mutation.
But it is a good story to ponder why staring out the window
waving at the neighbours.
Caro Ramsay
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