Gloves and Poison

Gloves and Poison

The giving of gifts to the monarch was something done personally, an intimate act that required access to the royal person, which was therefore fraught with security problems because perfume was intimately connected with poison; the glove in Elizabethan England – when access to the queen was strictly controlled – was a much more effective assassin’s weapon than the knife. Gifts of poisoned gloves were not unknown, so much so that they were dramatized in Christopher Marlowe’s play Massacre at Paris (1593), in which the character of the Old Queene fatally accepts poisoned gloves, remarking:

“Me thinks the gloves have a very strong perfume, The scent whereof doth make my head to ache…… the fatal poison
Doth within my heart: my brain-pan breaks, My heart doth faint, I die.”

Rather than being absorbed through the skin by wearing the glove, the poison was administered through the fumes of its smell. Elizabeth’s reign is notable for the almost constant threat of assassination which hung over her. Early in her reign in 1563, draft precautions in the hand of William Cecil, Secretary of State, regarding the ‘apparel and dyett’ of the newly installed queen warned her not to accept ‘Apparel or Sleves’ or ‘Gloves’ from any stranger, lest they ‘be corrected by some other fume’ – in other words, in case the gloves’ perfume was poisoned.

Source ~ ‘History of Unexpected ‘ by Sam Wills and James Daybell