Did Queen Elizabeth I sleep with Sir Robert Devereux, Sir George Clifford, Sir James Scudamore, or Sir Robert Dudley?
Elizabeth was called “The Virgin Queen” but I keep reading about all of these “Favourites” that she had - did she sleep with these men, or what?
I’m not sure anyone knows anything concrete about Elizabeth’s sex life. Usually, speculation focuses on Thomas Seymour when she was a young teen. As queen, it would have been quite dangerous and very impolitic indeed for Elizabeth to indulge in sexual affairs. She was almost certainly too smart to make herself so politically vulnerable for the sake of a little pleasure. She used her single status, keeping various marital prospects dangling and playing them against each other, but steadfastly refused to marry because it would have made her subject to her husband. Mary Queen of Scots would have been a good lesson in the dangers of love affairs and matrimony to reigning queens, and I’m sure Elizabeth paid close attention.
No one can really say for sure. I have read reputable books that said there was no way, and others that have said that she probably did have a sexual relationship with Dudley, who had been a childhood friend and was close to her his whole life.
P.S. “Virgin Queen” doesn’t mean exactly what we take it to mean at face value. It wasn’t a declaration that she was necessarily a virgin (although she worked to encourage that view, esp. in light of the episodes regarding Thomas Seymour), but also that she was unmarried and, in essence, married to England.
What were her options had she gotten pregnant? Was there any effective birth control, or was abortion reasonably safe? Because wouldn’t a child cause succession issues?
No effective birth control, with the possible exception of condoms (which had been invented, but I don’t know whether they were widely used in England at the time). Definitely no safe abortions. If she had gotten pregnant, her only options would have been marrying immediately, having a risky, clandestine abortion, or concealing the pregnancy and giving birth to the child in secret, and she was almost certainly too shrewd to risk any of the above.
The succession was all unknown territory at the time (she was only the second British reigning queen* and her sister Mary, the first, had no children). Most likely, though, any child of the queen would have been seen as the heir and actually would have reduced succession issues (notably those with Mary, Queen of Scots).
It seems likely that Elizabeth was wary of sexual relationships with men. Her mother was beheaded, setting a bad example for how one might end, and her teenage dalliance with Thomas Seymour nearly got her executed herself.
*I don’t count Matilda.
Tangentially, speaking of queens, Queen Victoria married her cousin and had nine kids. If she lived in Arkansas… 
Hmm…interesting. Thanks for these responses. You think Elizabeth had been somewhat traumatized by Henry’s very strange series of relationships with women? I guess my biggest question is, what was the purpose of all these “favourites” if not to be a quasi-gigolo to the queen? Were they simply a status symbol, a way of Elizabeth to say to England, “Look at me, look at all the noblemen who compete for my favor!” or was there something genuine there?
In the 1998 movie Elizabeth, she noticed that most of her enemies were named Mary, and she felt a rivalry with the Blessed Virgin to the point of offering herself as an alternative iconic figure. She apparently didn’t call herself the “Virgin Queen” until later in her career, when she started wearing that freaky lead-based makeup.
Whether historians bear this out, I honestly do not know.
Third British reigning Queen:
first British reigning Queen was Mary, Queen of Scots (ascended to the Scottish throne, 14 December 1542);
second was Mary I (Tudor), Elizabeth’s older half-sister (ascended to the English throne, 19 July 1553);
third was Elizabeth I (ascended to the throne on Mary I’s death, 17 November 1558).
That’s not counting Matilda, as you comment, nor the Maid of Norway, who never set foot in Scotland, nor Lady Jane Grey.
Most historians attribute her desire not to marry at least partially to Henry’s history of marriages. Elizabeth was a toddler when her own mother was beheaded, but she was old enough to know & be fond of Katherine Howard. And, of course, she was aware of the fates of all the other wives as well.
She also was very intelligent, and knew that any marriage would effectively give the power of the crown to her husband.
Nobody knows for sure what went through her head, but she can’t have been oblivious to those two things.
The purpose? Power & money, of course. Men always gathered around the reigning ruler and tried to get in his/her good graces, because good graces usually meant political appointments (and the money & power that came with them.)
It was no different with Elizabeth, with the exception, of course, that she was a woman. I don’t think she could have gotten rid of the people competing for her favor if she had wanted to; that was just the way things worked back then.
I thought this thread was going to be about Corgis.
The same as any regnant’s favourites. In her case they also could dance with her, but every regnant king and queen had councilors, viceroys and dilettantes around them. Some went as far as to leave the kingdom pretty much in a favourite’s hands (see some of the Hapsburgs and Borbons in Spain), which neither Elizabeth I or England nor as another example Blanca of Navarra (whose husband was king of a neighboring kingdom and refused to grasp the concept of “here you’re only the consort”) would do.
And Lady Jane Grey’s husband was Sir Guilford Dudley, brother of Sir Robert Dudley. And he was executed after the plot to install Jane as queen failed - along with his father, Sir John Dudley. Sir John Dudley was the son of Sir Edmund Dudley, who had also been executed (by Henry VIII, only eighteen at the time) on a baseless charge of “treason.”
The Dudleys seem to have been a thorn in the side of the English monarchy for quite a while.
Most of her male favourites, including Leicester, Hatton and Essex, held major political offices. They were heavyweight politicians, not just eye-candy.
This relates to Nava’s point. This was a period in which kings were just as likely to have hetrosexual minister-favourites - Wolsey, Sully, Lerma, Olivares, Richelieu - to whom they routinely delegated the more boring bits of government business. Just as Elizabeth had the Cecils. We might have a strong sense that such minister-favourites were rather different, but contemporaries tended to blur the distinctions, using the same words (‘favourite’, ‘privado’) interchangeably for sexual and non-sexual favourites.
Also, how were male courtiers meant to interact with a queen? Royal favour always depended on being able to charm the monarch. With a queen, the simplest, easiest and most obvious way to do so was to flirt. It also tended to be the most effective. Why would Elizabeth not be flattered?
Quite the contrary. Although there were a number of uncertainties left unresolved (or created by) the series of Henrician Succession Acts, the rights of any children Elizabeth might have were not among them. The principle that the children of a queen regnant would be her heirs was as well-established in English law as it could be. The 1544 Act, as confirmed by Henry VIII’s will, had explicitly stated that Elizabeth’s heirs would be those of her body. Indeed, the only persons who disputed the validity of the 1544 Act were Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI, and they did so on the basis of strict cognatic primogeniture. In any case, by the time Elizabeth became queen, all possible successors, whether Tudor or Lancastrian, could only have claimed the throne via female lines.