Elizabeth I's Secret Lover

by Robert Stedall

  PART 3 POLITICAL ADVISER AND MILITARY COMMANDER

  Chapter 22 Negotiations for Elizabeth to marry the Duke of Anjou

  Although the Massacre of St Bartholomew had seemed to sound the death knell for negotiations of a marriage between Elizabeth and Alençon, maintaining the French alliance suited everyone. Elizabeth had said nothing while her ‘romance’ with Robert wound down, but the suit with Alençon had drifted on in indecisive fashion until 1576, when it appeared to peter out. Although Walsingham recognised that the marriage was unpopular with her Protestant allies, it opened the door for an understanding with France. The paramount objective was to maintain peace between France and Spain to prevent unrest in the Netherlands becoming a major war. War might allow one or other of them to establish absolute control to the great danger of heretic England.

  Following the death of Charles IX in 1574, Alençon’s remaining elder brother, Henry, became King Henry III, leaving Alençon as heir to the French throne. In September 1575, he fled from the French court after falling out with Henry and their mother, Catherine de Medici. He joined up with the Huguenot rebels led by the Prince of Condé in the south. When, in February 1576, they also joined forces with Henry, King of Navarre, Henry III was forced into signing the very one-sided Edict of Beaulieu. Under its terms, Alençon was created Duke of Anjou, Touraine and Berry, and from then on was generally referred to as Duke of Anjou. Although he remained Catholic, his new Protestant alliance made him much more acceptable as a potential spouse for Elizabeth, but she was 43 with no realistic expectation of having children.

  With the European situation changing from week to week, the uncertainty made Elizabeth extremely edgy and indecisive. Only Robert and Hatton were able to broach affairs of state with her and Robert had now become the Council’s most influential member. In August 1577, Walsingham sought his help to persuade Elizabeth to send aid to her Protestant allies in the Netherlands. While Walsingham and Robert were united in their desire to defend Protestantism whatever the risk for England, Elizabeth and Burghley were fearful of the consequences. Walsingham wanted to send Robert’s friend Duke Casimir with a mercenary army to assist the Dutch. Although Elizabeth showed her usual reluctance to become involved, she recognised the imperative of saving the Dutch rebels from defeat.

  ‘The Spanish onslaught in the Netherlands was being so courageously and doggedly resisted that the defence was no longer assumed to be hopeless.’1 The French concluded that if they provided the Dutch with modest support, they might gain ‘the whole terrain as a sphere of influence, a prospect which alarmed the English almost as much as that of a complete Spanish domination’.2 In late 1577, Anjou blundered into the conflict, seeing himself as a champion of the rebels. This greatly irritated Henry III, particularly when Anjou saw an opening for himself as the Netherlands’ Protector. From an English viewpoint, this presented the danger of a Franco-Spanish conflict, which might leave one of them in control. The English objective was to allow the rebellion to drift on inconclusively. Although Robert, Walsingham and Burghley argued over how to deal with Anjou’s interference and the extent of any support to be given to the Dutch rebels, the issue was to establish whether he was acting on his own, or on behalf of France. If he were alone, his involvement was far less dangerous. Walsingham travelled to the Netherlands with Lord Cobham to assess whether Anjou could be manoeuvred to support the English in their balancing act. In 1578, Elizabeth took the initiative and, without consulting her advisers, sent an envoy to Paris to resuscitate her marriage suit with her ‘frog’. It can be no coincidence that the man sent to promote a suit, of which Robert strongly disapproved, was Edward Stafford, soon to be married to Douglas Sheffield. Elizabeth wanted to stop short of her negotiation with Anjou ending in marriage, but the courtship needed to be taken sufficiently seriously to confirm his alliance with the English. This meant keeping all her advisers in the dark. Both Elizabeth and Anjou ‘applied themselves vigorously to its restoration to full health’.3 Robert was extremely nervous of Elizabeth’s initiative realising, correctly, that the prospect for England of having a French King would be devastatingly unpopular. Burghley’s backing for it seems to have been entirely political in his efforts to thwart Robert and deprive him of French support. Walsingham reported to William Davison: ‘The affair of Monsieur takes greater foot than was looked for. She thinks it the best means to provide for her safety that can be offered … though otherwise not greatly to her liking.’4 Elizabeth played her role with complete conviction, giving Anjou the impression that she was an eager participant and the Crown was within his grasp. This left Robert, without realising it, to play the part of her jilted lover.

  In August 1578, while Elizabeth was on her summer progress at Long Melford Hall in Suffolk, she was joined by a French diplomat (apparently named de Bocqueville), who arrived to begin the courtship on Anjou’s behalf.5 Meanwhile Anjou, with Elizabeth’s encouragement, ‘cavorted ineffectually’ in the Netherlands.6 Robert remained in the dark and complained to Walsingham:

  It may be that I do not give you light enough on our doings, so much as you would wish, but I assure you, you have as much as I can learn … For the matter now in hand of her marriage, no man can tell what to say, as yet she has imparted to no man, at least not with me, nor for aught I can learn with any other.7

  Elizabeth set up a four-man committee to provide advice. Of these, Robert and Walsingham strenuously opposed the match, while Burghley and Sussex supported it. No one was expecting an heir to result, but her doctors confirmed her ability to bear children, despite her being aged 46. Robert strongly opposed Anjou’s Catholicism, despite him being sympathetic to the Netherlands rebels. Fearing that Robert could prove a stumbling block to the marriage, Henry III wrote to assure him on his honour that his position would not be injured by it. He would become Anjou’s trusted guide.8 In January 1579, Anjou sent his close friend, Jean de Simier, an ‘accomplished ladies’ man’,9 to conduct his wooing. Simier played his game with great charm, realising that Elizabeth had an obsessive fondness for flattery. He became her ‘monkey’ and she had eyes for no one else, flaunting her affection for him before the court. For six months, he occupied the place that had been held by Robert twenty years before. ‘He gained access to her private apartments at all hours, showered her with flattery and love tokens and ‘stole’ items such as handkerchiefs and nightcaps for his master to keep among his dearest treasures.’10

  Robert and Hatton became increasingly perturbed at Simier’s success and were determined to prevent the marriage. A member of the guard at Greenwich Palace even fired on Simier in an assassination attempt as he travelled in the Queen’s barge with the Queen, Robert and Hatton.11 Robert spread rumours that Simier had ‘crept into the Queen’s mind and had insisted her to the love of [Monsieur]’ with ‘amorous potions and unlawful arts’.12 Elizabeth loved all the attention and was determined to show the ‘unfaithful’ Robert that he was not indispensable. She forced him to go through all the diplomatic motions of entertaining Simier.13 Castelnau reported: ‘She is gayer and more beautiful than she has been these fifteen years. Not a woman or physician who knows her but says there is no lady in the realm more fit for bearing children than she is.’14 Although Robert fought to prevent it, in July 1579 a passport was granted for Anjou to visit London. While Simier seemed able to tangle Elizabeth irretrievably in his web, she adeptly frustrated him by finding some way to escape the cords closing round her. Nevertheless, Robert was genuinely alarmed, retiring in feigned illness to Wanstead, where Elizabeth visited him for two days. Anjou arrived in England in August, spending ten days secretly with Elizabeth, who handled the negotiations herself, leaving her advisers in the dark. He may have been puny and pock-marked, but he enchanted Elizabeth – hitherto an admirer of handsome men – with his brilliant conversation, wit and fascinating manners. She ‘told him that he had been represented to her as hideous, hunch-backed and deformed. But she found the reverse and most handsome in her eyes.’15 To make the best possib
le impression at court, she ordered new suits for her courtiers, but her councillors ‘shut their eyes’16 and avoided being present. When Robert left, his loyal sister Mary Sidney went with him. Her son Philip, now an experienced diplomat in his own right, wrote Elizabeth a long letter opposing the marriage, only to receive ‘a severe scolding’.17

  Robert and Philip were right. Protestant England would not tolerate Anjou as Elizabeth’s consort. John Stubbs, a country gentleman trained in the law, published a pamphlet entitled: The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof. This was written in outrageous language accusing the Valois house of being rotten with disease and endangering Elizabeth with the prospect of childbearing. Stubbs, together with his printer and publisher, were arrested and condemned to lose their right hands, but the printer was pardoned. When Stubbs’s right hand was severed, he lifted his hat with his left and cried: ‘God save the Queen!’,18 before swooning.

  On Anjou’s departure from Elizabeth at Canterbury, ‘she took leave of him in an access of sensibility and grief’, but did not miss the opportunity to show him the dockyards at Chatham, ‘where the sight of the ships under construction made the Frenchman gasp’.19 A parting gift of a cord for Robert’s cap, containing precious stones worth 3,000 crowns, did nothing to sway him.20 In October, Elizabeth called for a vote on the marriage in the Council, but many, both inside and outside politics, were impatient at its futility.21 When the majority opposed the match, as she surely knew they would, she flew into every appearance of a rage. As always, she was a brilliant dissembler. ‘The national temper was now opposed to Burghley’s subtle diplomacy and in favour of positive measures: a definite commitment to the Huguenot cause; a policy of non-appeasement towards Spain; and rigorous reprisals against Catholic fifth columnists.’22

  The feelings of the people found vent in a popular song:

  The King of France shall not advance

  His ships on English sand,

  Nor shall his brother Francis [Anjou] have

  The ruling of the land.

  Therefor, good Francis, rule at home,

  Resist not our desire,

  For here is nothing else for thee

  But only sword and fire.23

  Robert was now the leader of those who favoured a more adventurous foreign policy as an implacable enemy of tyranny and popery. This would lead England inevitably into conflict with Spain. Although negotiations with Anjou continued for another two years, it had become a ‘political courtship’,24 at which Elizabeth was extremely adept.

  Chapter 23 A more aggressive approach to international diplomacy

  Although in years past, the English had gone in large numbers to the support of William of Orange in the Netherlands in a religious war against the Spanish, Elizabeth had always shied away from providing a formal English presence. Robert’s principal agent in the Netherlands, Thomas Wilson, had arrived there as Elizabeth’s representative in 1574. Wilson did much to prevent England coming to any accommodation with Spain and, in 1579, was rewarded with a position on the Council.1 In January 1575, the Dutch had offered Elizabeth the crown of Holland and Zeeland, hoping to gain her wholehearted support for their cause, but her usual prevarication about supporting rebels against a divinely anointed King lost her her credibility. After much negotiation, she refused the offer, while continuing to turn a blind eye to private English participation. In the summer of 1576, Philip’s Spanish garrisons went on the rampage over arrears of pay, causing both Protestant and Catholic Netherlanders to unite against them. They formed an elected assembly, the States General, which was confirmed by the Pacification of Ghent signed between them that November. Philip’s reaction was to appoint as regent his illegitimate half-brother, Don John of Austria, the hero of the Battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571.

  With Robert and Walsingham dictating policy, Elizabeth secretly sent the rebels £20,000 and promised a loan of £100,000. Robert sent an envoy, Sir Edward Horsey, officially to offer Elizabeth as a mediator with the Spanish, but really to ‘gauge Don John’s strength and intentions’.2 At the same time, Wilson tried to arrange for Robert to meet William of Orange to propose that he should lead an English force to support the Dutch (although Elizabeth may not have known of this). Although Robert had not seen military service for twenty years, he was determined to demonstrate to Elizabeth and his Puritan supporters that, even at 43, he was willing to back up his policy with action. Although the States General rejected Elizabeth’s offer of mediation, they were supportive of Robert bringing an army. Despite this, Don John won the diplomatic battle by offering terms acceptable to the States and they wrote to decline offers of military aid.3

  In May 1577, Robert was invited to stand as godfather to William of Orange’s daughter. With Philip Sidney on a diplomatic mission in Germany, Robert asked him to make a diversion to act as his proxy. Sidney met William at Gertruinenberg, after which they maintained a ‘lively correspondence’.4 He was impressed at the depth of William’s faith, which permeated all his decisions. It was even rumoured that Sidney would marry Maria of Nassau, his daughter by an earlier marriage.

  No sooner had Sidney returned to England than Don John took to the offensive, seizing the fort of Namur and rallying Spanish subjects to challenge William’s supporters. This was a tactical blunder as the Netherlanders reunited against him and reopened negotiations with the English. Charles-Philippe de Croy, Marquis of Havrech, led a Dutch delegation to England in late summer. He invited Elizabeth to send Robert with an English army, fully expecting her to provide a sufficient force to protect her favourite. While Robert was entertaining Havrech and making preparations, Don John developed a fever and died on 1 October 1578. Both Walsingham and Robert considered this miraculous.5

  In March 1578, a new Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendosa, had been accredited in London. He was the first envoy since the departure of de Espés six years before, tarnished by his involvement in the so-called Ridolfi plot, but Mendosa also remained hostile to Elizabeth. He reported:

  The bulk of the business depends upon the Queen, [Robert], Walsingham and [Burghley], the latter of whom, though he takes part in the resolution of them by virtue of his office, absents himself on many occasions, as he is opposed to the Queen helping the rebels [in the Netherlands] so effectively and thus weakening her own position. He does not wish to break with Leicester and Walsingham on the matter … they being well supported … Leicester … is so highly favoured by the Queen … that he centres in his hands and those of his friends most of the business of the country and his creatures hold most of the ports on the coast.6

  Mendosa was partially right; Burghley was suffering from gout and was unwell. During his absences, he had been left completely unaware of the venture to send Sir Francis Drake to the Pacific coast of South America on the Golden Hind, even though the voyage was financed by the Queen, Robert, Hatton, Clinton, Walsingham, Hawkins and Winter. Plans were finalised while Burghley was taking the waters at Buxton. Nevertheless, Mendosa had misjudged the extent of Robert’s authority. Robert was having to resort to calling Elizabeth to his feigned sickbed to hold a meaningful conversation with her, but even then he did not always gain her support and often felt the sharp edge of her tongue. The root cause of her frostiness was his infidelity.

  Robert never faltered from his objective of making England an ally of the Dutch Protestants. He wanted to be appointed the leader of a military expedition to drive the Spanish out of the Netherlands. It was of huge strategic and religious importance for England to retain its mercantile and religious allegiance with them. By 1577, he was receiving advice from Davison in Antwerp; Davison had replaced Wilson and was already much in favour with Elizabeth. In October, Robert complained ‘to Davison that the solemn burghers of Brussels had undermined the cordial agreement that he had reached with Havrech’.7 This Flemish change of heart had been caused by
the arrival of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, in Flanders to lead a renewed Spanish effort to establish control. Parma very quickly subsumed Catholic Flanders, including Brussels and Bruges, and was preparing to focus on the ports of Zeeland and Holland and on the United Provinces. This reawakened the States to their need for English support, and Robert was much encouraged when Davison told him that his name was held in great respect. Nevertheless, Elizabeth had again changed her mind, fearful that English aggression would lead to a Spanish invasion across the Channel. She concluded that it was safer secretly to finance a mercenary army under Casimir, rather than overtly to send an English force. Casimir arrived in England in early 1578 to discuss the financing arrangements. Robert took him under his wing, and, to promote his own standing, took him to Oxford, where he was Chancellor of the University. Robert assumed that Elizabeth’s only issue was how to find the money quickly enough. He suggested either that she should borrow from her ‘merchants in Hamburg or Frankfort’, or recall the sum already advanced to the Netherland states.8

  Elizabeth remained non-committal. She mistrusted the Dutch, and the expense of providing support was crippling. They were demanding peace conditions from the Spanish that Philip would consider preposterous.9 She continued to fear that English involvement might provoke the Spanish King into suspending his campaign there to launch a war to crush England. Much of her popularity had depended on her maintaining solvency without having to ask: