The Queens undercover angels

It was my first day in court as a to become 'maid of honour. I was one of only a very few of Queen Elizabeth's maids of honour which, at the time, were not the same as ladies in waiting (or modern day bridesmaids). Ladies-in-waiting were hirelings that were waiting to help the queen or the Maids-of-Honour which had already helped the queen significantly far beyond the normal call of duty and were her friend as well. There were only five of us being so honored as to be allowed to be around her in court  (and her unlimited supply of money and men to which we had her carte blanc permission to play with). One of the others was my good friend from childhood who was made a Maid -of-honour for life since she sat and let birds shit on her for about 12 years which anyone will agree had to be far beyond the call of duty.  These were not the only two categories of females in Queen Elizabeth's court. There were at least six categories all told but I can't recall what they all were. One was courtesan which we think of as French but I have forgotten the rest. 

It was standard practice and a standard requirement to become Maids-of-Honour I had to train as a lady-in-waiting for a few weeks. It was an act of obeisance to instill a sense of subservience to the queen by mimicking one of those fancy servants. 

It didn't work with me. Oh I always had the greatest of respect for Queen Elizabeth which is quite different. Subservience lowers yourself until you are lower than the other person. If you have 'the greatest of respect' for a person it places the person much higher than yourself without lowering yourself at all. Respect causes the other person to rise even further for greater respect. Subservience demeans both persons. If you continue with the practice then you will both end up scraping the ground.

Strangely the ladies in waiting fell into two categories.

There were the women in waiting with legs and there were those without any legs of note and I liked the first group more so I talked more often with them.

The second group was the kind you expected to find in the Royal Courts of Europe. They were aristocratic and the kind I used to teach to ride horses at the Downs when I was a child. They seem to not actually have legs but instead their butts were attached to wheels. Whenever they moved it appeared as though they were floating and it made me sick to watch! Why did it make me sick? I felt this was what was inside me.

Those women moved about once an hour it seemed or about one twentieth as often as the ladies with legs did. The ladies with legs also didn't wear corsets and that was surprising. However the worse part was that they didn't need them! That made me very uncomfortable because I always had the smallest waist of anyone but theirs was 3 inches less than even mine. Most of the women with legs had antelope legs. They literally bounced across the room and it made me sicker to watch them bouncing across the floor than it did watching the other women rolling across it.

When I first arrived I was talking with two of the ladies with legs and right in the middle of the conversation one stopped and pointed to a man that had walked in about five minutes earlier (I was keeping an eye out for men) and said to the other lady, 'What about that one?' The other one simply said 'Lets go check him out.' And off they went. Pretty soon they were climbing all over him, hanging on to him like they were his lovers for years. They had their hands all over him, I mean almost every part of his body. Then after four minutes they lost interest in him and came back over to resume our conversation as it nothing had happened. That seemed to be pretty cold. These women must even be more 'casual' than the ladies in the French court.

Then another man came in and his close fitting clothing told me he had come from Navarr near Portugal and. He had nothing I was interested in as a woman. Then in two seconds the two ladies interrupted the conversation again and went right to him, those two fools. There is/was a saying that we used: 'they'd make him crack his own codpiece' and they came close in the next three minutes. They were completely on him all over him and around him. Then they engaged him a long conversation about who he was. I just said to myself these women want him together and together they will make gumbo out of him in five hours. Then they came back again and then repeated it all over again when another man came in. That went on with most men that came in the court and every foreign one. Even the Portuguese Ambassador or representative got a peck on the cheek. I got tired of being upstaged. Like most people, I am highly resentful of being exposed to acts of moral turpitude when I am not the one being turpituded.

I said to myself when those ladies off with another man again, I am never going to catch a man's interest around this court, I might as well go get something to eat because I keep thinking of a chopped meat stew or gumbo and something was telling me it was time for me to leave.

I left for three hours to get food and relax far away from the gazelles and roller women. I felt miserable but it turned out I wasn't the only one to feel miserable that afternoon. That man felt miserable for about three seconds that afternoon as his assassination attempt was failing.

It turns out those two ladies made gumbo of him after all. While they were all over him they searched his body. They missed his sword because he had none. Another man who was a government official of perhaps Portugal and personally vouched for at the highest levels had the sword hidden. He handed to the assassin seconds before he attempted to kill the queen. One of the women with 'legs' in the back of the room was a lookout and she screamed 'MOUSE' when she saw him charge at the queen. He did it from half way down the hall.

Queen Elizabeth who it was said (falsely) was deathly afraid of mice, quickly ducked out of the room. All the women with legs converged right behind her and blocked the man.

The two women I said would make gumbo out of him were standing in his way so he pushed between them cutting one badly. As he pushed past them they each slid two small swords into his body. Each lady shoved one in his abdomen and another in his lower back as he passed them and then directed the blades up into his heart and lungs, all before he had moved two feet forward. They wiggled the blades back and forth inside his chest making everything in there 'chopped meat gumbo'. That is exactly what I had seen in my vision except I could not figure out it was a warning for Queen Elizabeth. It was a vision of the inside his chest and I did not know what it was or how to interpret it. I was just aghast at the thought of our being without the queen. It would have made me sick for years, such was the effect of good queen Bessie on everyone in England.

Before he felt the pain the man was unconscious and before they lowered his body to the floor he was dead. The whole thing took seconds and looked like nothing happened except a man was running and then passed out and some ladies caught his fall and then lowered him carefully to the floor.

Six other women dragged the dead assassin out the door in less than six seconds, while everybody was still looking for the mouse that never was. Then the queen called it quits for the day and everyone left but her squad and the man who had smuggled in the sword.

They kept in the room for over two hours. They even all moved away from the queen and on one side of the hall. The ladies had crossbows under the hoops of their dress on slings and now these were out and 28 of them were pointed at the man.

They intended to use them on him as soon as he made a single step towards our queen.

The queen just sat there baiting and daring him.

This is where it got put on hold a half an hour before I got back so it was pretty tense when I first got there and it just got worse from here. The fire in the ladies eyes scared me until they told me what had happened. Oh, I was brought back by guards to allay suspicions about me.

I was put in the middle of this strange scene to see if I knew this guy or if he knew me. If that man had noticed me it would have shown that I was perhaps involved. It had been my first day so I was suspect though I could not have been involved because I was in the position to decide the day I came there. I was asked to come that day by the queen so I had a part in it, so did she.

The problem was solved since the man didn't look at anyone but the queen. She didn't suspect me. She had known of me my entire life through her spies though I didn't know it. More importantly the ladies with legs liked me for being at ease about showing my innocence.

These women were the unsung heroes of Elizabeth's reign and they actually saved her life over twenty times during her reign.* (They were really needed because the Pope had decreed and even openly sponsored assassination attempts against the Queen. The assassins came out of the woodwork to do the popes dirty work.)

The queen mocked the man and made fun of everyone he was acting in behalf of. 'So try to kill me if that is what you want to do. Someone give him a knife. Do you think the pope is going to intervene as that soul of yours drops into hell? Come on what are you waiting for. That is the same chance you were intending to give me.'

The man's was against the back wall and he wasn't about to move even one last step. 'It was a Spanish organized attempt' the man was saying and he talked as fast as he could to fill in the details.

That man was already dead, he just didn't know when his breathing was going to be stopped for him. The queen was quickly getting impatient and tired of it all. Finally she started to yell at him to just rush her and try to kill her. I knew something was going to happen pretty soon.

It was turning into a major drama that I had not written. Since it wasn't mine and it wasn't my cup of tea, I left.

These ladies had at least one more assignment that I want to tell you about that was very important. They destroyed the Spanish Armada, or at least the confidence their sailors had in their cannons which were the best in the world. It was a trick that Drake taught them.

The ladies worked in groups of five and there were four groups the Queen sent to Spain undercover. They went to the Spanish Armories in 1587, a year before the invasion and went to where the cannons were stored. They were amazed because all the cannons were left in open fields without any guards. Children and their dogs chased rabbits among the cannons.

The ladies had arrived prepared to use anything to get any guards out of the way they didn't have to. They had brought rum spiked with Castor oil and opium to make guards sick, they brought knives to kill them with and they were willing to offer their own bodies for sex to gain entrance to where the cannons were stored. They even had several female dogs in heat in case there were dogs guarding the cannon. However the rabbits didn't seem to want any of those items but the dogs wanted the rabbits and they chased them so it looked like the ladies were out taking a walk with their dogs if anyone came by.

A brass or iron cannon has basically the same physical properties as a bell and it can be considered as a bell with a very thick case. If you tap a cannon it will ring like a bell for a few seconds. When a bell get cracked the ringing sound last for only a fragment of it's normal time. If the cannon gets cracked then the time of the ringing is cut in half or even more.

Drake showed them how to take a small hand cannon weighing about 50 pounds and put it on a stick like a ramrod. (Drake had used several things when they were in Panama and elsewhere perfecting this technique including the other end of a ramrod.). Then all five of the women would ram that little cannon down the big cannon until it hit the backside and cracked it. If the did this about 20 times it would be undetectable but it would put hundreds of very small cracks in the barrel. Those cracks would grow over time and it would guarantee a sudden and catastrophic failure when the whole back of that cannon would blow up killing half the men in the boat sometimes. Maybe 50 would be killed as a result. It's called 'spiking' a cannon but it was unknown before Drake invented especially for Spanish cannons.

when it exploded with a great loss of life. the cannon and being on the inside, the cracks could not be seen.

Then Drake showed them how if you hit the mounts on the outside with a sledge or other heavy object you can do the same damage and you don't have to hit it as hard. The marks can't be seen there since the mounts get beat up anyway.

It didn't work on all the cannons and when it did it was just a blow out on one side...

..just like it did to this one which was brought up by a University of Scotland team from a Spanish Armada wreck recently. These failures appear to occurred so often that they were not even recorded by the Spanish.

These were not half as dramatic or one tenth as deadly as when the entire back end of a cannon blew up. When that happened there were bodies all over the place and the entire crew would want to go home suddenly. Not only them but the neighboring boats would want to go home too. Those chunks of metal weighed up to four pound and they would fly 400 meters and one injured the second in command of another Spanish ship at Gravelines.

All those cannons will eventually blow up if they are shot. With just small cracks it might take up to four shots before it exploded but it would explode. If they reduced the powder charge and used only one forth as much gunpowder the Spanish thought that the cannons would not blow up. That would be the case if the walls of the cannons were just too thin and the problem was what would be called metal fatigue where the metal gets stretched until it 'breaks' essentially.

Cracks in metal are totally different, cracks keep growing every time the cannon is shot until the cannon blows up.

It's exactly like the crack on my car windshield that started out last year only an inch long and then grew to six inches longs and grows daily.

At one forth charge it may take 20 rounds instead of four but that cannon will still blow up. The Spanish did not know this or did not want to hear it so they just ordered their captains to use one forth charge and the results were disastrous.

To get any distance from the cannons the Spanish had to fire smaller cannon balls wrapped in cloth or in carved out wood (to make what would later be called a sabot round). They also brought in a lots of field cannons as substitutes. And this is exactly what expedition's to the wreck sites have found. However they don't know the 'why' of what the Spanish did.

The Spanish had test fired some of the cannons and they blew up. It is known that the Spanish sent men to buy cannons all over Europe but it is not known why when they had the best foundries except for maybe in the south of France. Their foundries were huge and if not the largest then the second to the largest in Europe. They invented the cannon itself and they even invented the word 'cannon'. They developed the cannon from a huge siege weapon to a useful artillery piece that could not only support ground troops in the field but sinks ships. Except they had not calculated for these ladies of England.

If you were not in with the leaders in England here is what appears to have happened. Spain with half the riches in world spared no expense in making well designed ships that took many months or even years to build but nobody thought of making any cannons until about a month before the Armada was due to set sail the second time after being delayed over a year by Drake attacks. Then suddenly right before they were ready to leave and take over England they realized they did not have any cannons. This would be the same as if our navy produced the latest and fastest nuclear powered submarines with extensive fire training for all the sailors but forgot to produce any weapons for them so they had to put on them old torpedoes from WWII. The Spanish were too experienced for this to happen.

Either that was the case, which is highly unlike the Spanish or else there was something wrong with the cannons they had. Indeed there was something wrong with those cannons and the thing that was 'wrong' with those cannons was that they were 'gotten to' by the ladies of Queen's Elizabeth's court after they took lessons from England's master of Spanish/Catholic destruction, the dragon himself Sir Francis Drake.

They found out about two months before they were to set sail that many of the cannons were malfunctioning and blowing up.

Lets go back to that cannon. It appears as though it was cracked where the mount is located and that means someone used 'The Drake method number two'. Someone, somehow sledgehammered the mount that protrudes out and that is where it blew up. The thing about this blown up cannon is that there were so many blown up cannons that nobody even bothered to report this one even though this one could have cost the lives of half the gun crews on that ship when it exploded.

They never figured out what was happening to their cannons because if they had they would not have continued to leave in the open for another 200+ years and that's what they did. And even Napoleon did some spiking of the Spanish cannons.

The Spanish just didn't trust their own foundries that much after they started blowing up. My idea on this is that they thought the cannons were being cooled so fast after their manufacture that it was causing cracks in the metal. That will cause any metal to crack, even that 'Terminator II metal'..

..when he got the super cool liquid Nitrogen on him.

The Spanish later figured out something was wrong with many of the cannons and estimated that half the cannons were cracked but the never figured out it was the English.

However, the ladies who walk like gazelles did not have big arms and having to slam a 50 pound cannon inside a big one was a lot of work and it took a lot out of them. They could only do a few cannons and then they had to take a break. In the end they could only do about 15% of the cannons. The biggest problem was that the ringing of the cannons was useless in telling them when they had cracked the cannon. Drake always did it when the cannon were mounted so they rang like bells but these were on the ground and that ground stopped the ringing right away. They did not know if they had done it right but it appears as though they did.

Today these cracks could be seen easily with an x-ray machine but back then there was no way to know how many were cracked. The cannons blew up with regularity and some of them have been located in the wrecks of the Spanish Armada.

The Spanish did not learn to protect their cannons even after this. Their foundries and stores left cannons in open fields without guards where they could be sabotaged until the 1800's. Englishmen did this to the Spanish over and over again through the years. until possibly Napoleon over did it and the Spanish found out the whole thing.

*Even the regular Queens Guards didn't know the real purpose of these women but I was trusted from the first with this information. I found out that I was literally standing in the middle of about 35 of them (much later I found out that there were over 100 undercover women guarding her at all times). Even a few of the women on wheels were protectors and could grow 'legs' faster in a second. Even some of the old ladies in waiting were protectors because they had done the same service for her father King Henry VIII and continued to serve Elizabeth in the same way.

Wily King Henry VIII was the one who had started it, not Elizabeth!

I also served her in that capacity and at times as a games mistress. That was later when I burned out on writing the plays.

People often came to us to ask about having sex on horse back and we told them they would fall off and hurt themselves. Then they would ask us a second time and then they would ask another of the family. Being a small child did not matter since we were considered as though we were small adults and got asked too.

These ladies in waiting had asked me, 'how do you make a horse go fast while you are facing backwards?'

I thought it was another 'how do you have sex on a horse question and I was about to get married and I didn't know yet. My uncles started sending me everyone who asked that question but I don't know why. These ladies did not want to have sex on the back of a horse like everybody else seemed to want to.

They had this wild idea. They got these new saddles with no backs or sides on them and while they were riding (side saddle) they wanted to flip their left legs over the back of the horse and then they would be facing backwards. Something like that is easy to do while sitting side saddle but nearly impossible to do easily when using a normal saddle. They wanted to perform tricks for visiting aristocrats was my immediate guess.

They had taken the time to get it all together so it would work for them. They got new saddles and everything. Then they trained but the horses would stop every single time they turn backwards. They demanded to know how to keep the horses running flat out as fast as they could when they were facing backwards.

I didn't like that demand too much so I told them simply 'You train them.' Then I waited a few seconds intending to stare them down but I torn apart in my head from their stare right back! So I added. 'Treat them very nice when you want them to do something out of the ordinary, like now.' They just continued to stare and that surprised me to all end.

Then I thought about it and said 'oh my gosh. If they flip their leg over their saddles to face backwards then they can take very careful aim with their bows and arrows and kill any body who is chasing them and the person will have not one chance in a thousand surviving it! Those ten women could kill 30 men in about 30 seconds.

This was about the queens safety and thwarting a kidnapping attempt or worse, not about sex or an acrobatic show. What kind of ladies in waiting were they?

I thought for two seconds and then I changed back to being a nice person for the Queen and her safety. They had not thought the horses would stop and there was a deadline for getting it all to work right. I figured it out in two minutes. They needed one person to guide all the horses. So we made one lady the lead and she did not turn around. She took all the reins from the ten other ladies and then she just guided the horses while the ten ladies moved around on the backs of the horses until they got used to the gymnastics.

In two days time the horses were trained to follow 'Red' (see below) and she didn't needed to take the reins anymore. Whenever the ten ladies flipped their legs over the saddles and were sitting backwards the horses would speed automatically and they all followed the lead who was to be Queen Elizabeth as it turned out. The horses expected her to go fast as possible too. So it worked out perfectly and the assassination attempt (which spies had reported earlier) was not only foiled but every man was killed and none of the ladies were hurt. The queen decreed that It never happened so don't bother looking for it in any history books. It was a situation where the public knowledge of these attempts on Elizabeth's life would have aroused her people to react by declaring war and she did not want that unless it was an absolute necessity. So when these attacks occurred, they didn't occur.

Four times during the Queens reign she was ambushed and chased while on horse back and her entourage swung into action every time, saving her life.

Update March 06 2004: Today, I met one of these ladies that guarded the queen. They just turn up when you need them. It was this afternoon while doing my research and it shocked me. 'Red' was the second in command of these young women who guarded the Queen. At least I think she is/was. She is the first person out of one hundred people I asked who has the absolutely correct attitude about the bards plays.

She is smart enough to even question all the accepted interpretations of those plays and not just question who the author was. She makes no qualms about her attitude either and that says that nobody taught her this answer.

I sense there is one more of these ladies around this neck of the woods.

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