The Plantagenet Who Became a Queen's Favourite Sleeping Companion

On 1 October 1526, Dorothy Stafford was born, a woman of Plantagenet blood who would spend forty years at the heart of Elizabeth I’s privy chamber. In this episode, I trace Dorothy’s remarkable path:

• Family webs: Stafford–Pole lineage (Buckingham & Clarence), and marriage to Sir William Stafford, Mary Boleyn’s widower.
• Exile & faith: Under Mary I she fled to Geneva; in 1556 John Calvin stood godfather to her son (then they famously fell out, and she moved to Basel).
• Return & rise: With Elizabeth’s accession (1559), Dorothy joined the privy chamber and became one of the queen’s trusted sleeping companions. When she broke her leg in 1576, the court scrambled for a replacement so the queen could sleep peacefully.
• Storms weathered: Even the Stafford Plot involving her son didn’t unseat her. Dorothy died in 1604, remembered at St Margaret’s, Westminster, as a “continual remembrancer of the suits of the poor.”
• A royal confidante. Mediator. Quiet backbone of a court.

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