The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys

by Derek Wilson

  It was all a game, with elaborate rules that every player had to abide by. But the stakes involved were so high that the sport was intensely serious. Elizabeth was wagering her own freedom and the well-being of her people. For her partners in the matrimonial charade failure to perform well could spell exile from court and social ruin. Everyone, possibly including herself at this time, believed that Elizabeth would marry. As soon as her first parliament convened in February 1559 members fell to discussing possible husbands and there was a strong feeling, in reaction to Mary’s disastrous marriage, that she should seek a partner within the realm. Some of them favoured the Earl of Arundel, the Catholic peer who had survived the purge of Marian officials, retaining both his position as Lord Steward of the household and his seat on the Council. At forty-seven Arundel was urbane, cultured, a member of the ancient nobility, and recently widowed. He outranked Lord Robert in every way and he was also the Dudleys’ implacable enemy. This was the man who had plotted against Somerset and Dudley, been imprisoned without trial, pardoned, restored, had promised to hold London for Queen Jane and subsequently hastened to Cambridge to arrest Dudley. What future could Robert and his family look to if Arundel became the royal consort? All this added urgency to his own efforts to dazzle the queen. Whatever his feelings for Elizabeth, it was important for him to outplay his rival in the game of courtly love. Whatever Elizabeth’s feelings for Robert, she revelled in the experience of having two men vying for her favour.

  These romantic manoeuvrings should not be viewed separately from their wider political implications. Arundel made no secret of his adherence to Catholicism and his contempt for ‘newfangled’ religious ideas. He was brusque and arrogant in Council, often expressing his opinions forcefully and, on at least one occasion, almost coming to blows with colleagues who opposed him. What he did keep secret was his network of Catholic activists. Not only was he a potential danger to the Dudleys, he was also anathema to Cecil and those councillors who were working to restore the momentum of the English Reformation. As long as Robert could dazzle Elizabeth she might be prevented from ‘throwing herself away’ on the likes of Arundel or some other unsuitable matrimonial candidate.

  Yet, while all members of the royal household were engrossed in mock courtship rituals and while the Council were consumed with the necessity of finding an acceptable consort for the queen, Elizabeth had given her political advisers an absolutely unequivocal answer to their probing questions about her marriage. On 10 February, in response to her parliament’s importunings, she had assured them that they need not fear that she would rush into an unsuitable match. ‘Whensover it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life, ye may well assure yourselves my meaning is not to do or determine anything wherewith the realm may or shall have just cause to be discontented,’ she said. For herself, she declared that she had no desire for the wedded state: ‘in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’13

  Was she serious? Robert in later years would tell people that Elizabeth had pledged herself to the maiden state from the age of eight, but how many children and teenagers go through a phase of insisting that they will never marry, only to abandon their resolve when the hormones kick in or when, later, they become alarmed at being left on the shelf? Some biographers have made great play with the idea that Elizabeth had been put off sex by the abusive behaviour of her step-uncle, Thomas Seymour when she was fourteen or fifteen. Others suggest that she was, by nature, more intellectual than physical, that her head almost invariably ruled her heart. Such simple answers to complex personality issues will not serve.

  Elizabeth was fully possessed of all the normal female instincts. She did want a lover. She did hope for marriage and she resented bitterly that her position made it difficult, if not impossible. Her talk of ‘marble stones’ and ‘living and dying a virgin’ was intended to head off her politicians and assure them that she would not stand on her prerogative and plunge into a disastrous union without their consent, which was what Mary had done. It was only in later years that her advisers made a virtue of necessity by creating the icon of the ‘virgin queen’. Then she became increasingly paranoid about others who could not practise the restraint forced upon her. Nothing annoyed her more than the clandestine marriages of members of her household, and she developed a pathological dislike of non-celibate priests. The young Elizabeth was a very ‘physical’ woman. She loved dancing, especially the more risqué jigs from Italy and France, which involved close contact between the partners. She rode like a wild thing, preferring spirited horses and delighting in outstripping her companions (behaviour which often caused her Master of the Horse genuine alarm).

  At the same time Mary’s unhappy reign had made her acutely aware of the problems marriage would bring. Philip’s indifference had broken his wife’s heart and his involvement in government had restricted her influence. He had also divided the political nation. It was obvious to Elizabeth and to all who understood the personal and ideological rivalries at the centre of national life that no potential suitor would command universal support. Whoever Elizabeth chose, inside or outside the realm, would provoke strife.

  The escape valve for all her pent up emotions and repressed desires was Robert Dudley. With him Elizabeth could allow herself to fall in love, and she did so. For the one great advantage he possessed was that he was already married. Commentators observed then and have observed since then that the queen and her Gypsy were clandestine lovers only waiting for Lady Dudley’s death fully to consummate their union. Nothing could have been further from the truth, at least as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Her relationship with Robert was a bittersweet romance that involved no matrimonial complications. With Robert at her beck and call and Amy obliged to live in the country the queen could have her cake and eat it. There can be no other reason for Robert’s wife being excluded from the court other than Elizabeth wished it to be so. Robert could then play the ardent bachelor suitor and she the object of his passionate devotion. Why else would Lady Dudley not have been allocated a privileged place in the queen’s chamber? Most household officials saw their wives ensconced among Elizabeth’s ladies. Ambrose’s wife enjoyed that honour. So did her sister-in-law, Mary Sidney (fast becoming a favourite with the queen). The truth of the matter must have been as Feria succinctly described it in April 1559: the queen ‘is in love with Lord Robert and never lets him leave her.’14

  It must have been very hard for Amy not to be allowed to bask in her husband’s celebrity or enjoy the exciting life of the court. During the winter, spring and summer of 1559, when lavish entertainments and diversions, of which her husband was a major impresario, followed hard on one another’s heels, Amy was not there to share in the fun. At Christmastide the court enjoyed, among other theatricals a rabid anti-Catholic masque which offended some foreign observers who were obliged to be present

  I [have] not sufficient intellect to interpret . . . the mummery performed after supper . . . of crows in the habits of cardinals, of asses habited as bishops, and of wolves representing abbots, I will consign it to silence . . . Nor will I record the levities and unusual licentiousness practised at the court in dances and banquets . . .15

  Amy missed it. She spent the festival quietly with friends in Lincolnshire. A few weeks later she was staying with relatives in Bury St Edmunds. With the coming of spring she went to be with her maternal kinsfolk in Camberwell. The only place she had to call ‘home’ seems to have been a house belonging to William Hyde, another family friend, at Denchworth, near Abingdon.16

  Those who want to excuse Elizabeth’s responsibility for Lady Dudley’s exile assume that Robert or Amy herself desired it. The most obvious reasons for this would be that the couple were estranged or that Amy was in poor health. In fact, there is no evidence for either. Certainly the couple had been married for eight years and were still childless. Certainly the ups and downs of those eight years had been
traumatic, and since 1553 they had enjoyed virtually no home life together. But adversity does not seem to have driven a wedge between them. A relationship which had begun as a love match still appears to have been strong. Amy had visited Robert in prison and now, amidst his pressing court duties he found time to think of her and occasionally to spend time with her. Curt account book entries reveal an attentive husband who obtained for his wife in the smart London shops ‘sewing silk’, ‘2 pair of hose’, ‘a looking glass’ and ‘2 ell of fine Holland cloth’ for ruffs. Frequent gifts atoned for his long absences from Amy’s side.

  To Thos. Jones to buy a hood for my lady

  35s

  To Gilbert the goldsmith for 6 doz. Gold buttons of ye

  Spanish pattern, and for a little chain delivered to Mr

  Forrest for y lady’s use

  30

  Delivered for my lady’s charge riding into Suffolk

  With 40 pistoles [Spanish coins] delivered to Hogans

  To put into her ladyship’s purse

  25.13s.4d.17

  Other entries show that Robert paid visits to Denchworth, thoughtfully sending on ahead venison and spices so that he and his suite would not overtax his host’s larder. We glimpse Robert and Amy playing cards with their friends, and losing; Robert was obliged to borrow 40 shillings from Hyde to pay his debts. On other occasions Amy visited Robert at court, though she stayed in the vicinity and not under Elizabeth’s roof.

  One of the only two surviving letters by Amy deals with the sale of wool from the Syderstone estate. In it she tells their agent, John Flowerdew, to hasten the business so that a debt could be discharged, ‘for my lord so justly required me, at his departing, to see those poor men satisfied.’ She apologized for not dealing with the matter earlier and explained, ‘I forgot to move my lord thereof before his departing,18 he being sore troubled with weighty affairs and I not being altogether in quiet for his sudden departing.’ Robert’s visit had obviously been brief and snatched from his courtly duties and Amy was upset that he had to hasten back so peremptorily to the queen’s side.

  Fortunately, we know what ‘weighty affairs’ were so urgent that they forced Robert to cut short his visit. Amy’s letter was dated 7 August 1559. Where was the royal court from 6–10 August? Staying at Nonsuch Palace as guests of the Earl of Arundel. It was during this visit that the earl made his most determined attempt to woo the Queen, offering her expensive entertainments such as had not been seen since the days of Henry VIII and overwhelming her with the lavishness of a parting gift, a cupboard of gold plate. Small wonder that Robert had to hurry back from Berkshire, his domestic duties incomplete.

  On all this evidence Robert Dudley emerges as a familiar type of man; a successful, upwardly mobile achiever, trying to balance home and job. In that case, one might have thought that he would provide Amy with a home in or near London where they could spend more time together. Norfolk was too remote and Robert had abandoned the idea of buying a house more commodious than Syderstone. In 1559 he was contemplating acquiring Dudley Castle so he must have either possessed or been able to lay his hands on sufficient funds. But for Robert to have had his wife close to the court and been constantly popping home, instead of constantly available to Elizabeth, would not have pleased his possessive mistress at all.

  A lively and devoted wife such as Amy seems to have been cannot have enjoyed being excluded from the court. The gossip about her husband and the queen cannot have been easy to bear. However, she could comfort herself with the knowledge that she was married to the handsomest and most famous man in all England and he did always come back to her. If she had to share him with Elizabeth Tudor, well that was a price that had to be paid for the royal bounty that she and Robert enjoyed. And she knew better than to protest. The queen’s purse, now open to Robert, could quite easily be snapped shut.

  If Robert did not callously desert his wife and deliberately shut her away in the country, can we accept the contemporary gossip that suggested that Amy was kept from court by illness? Feria reported that Amy had ‘a malady in one of her breasts’. The Venetian ambassador informed his government that ‘many persons believe’, that Amy had ‘been ailing for some time.’19 Once again, any hard evidence we have does not support the idea of Amy Dudley as a reclusive semi-invalid shut away in the country. We have to forget what we know or think we know about Amy’s early death and try to establish the sort of woman she was in 1559. We have already seen that she was capable of dealing with estate business and confident enough to act on her own authority. And if we refer back to the Dudley account books, they do not support the image of someone in decline who had lost all interest in worldly vanities. On the contrary they reveal a woman very interested in the latest fashions. One extensive and detailed account from William Edney, a London tailor, lists gowns, petticoats, bodices, kirtles, sleeves, ruffs, collars, lace trimmings and materials ordered by Amy over several months.20 Then we have to ask ourselves how likely it is that a lady in rapidly declining health would have spent her days travelling the rutted winter highways and dusty summer byways on a constant round of visits to friends. Would she not, rather, have gone to live among her kinsfolk in Norfolk?

  In fact, Syderstone was too far away. Had she stayed there she would have seen even less of her husband and have had virtually no contact whatsoever with his glamorous life at court. Denied a home in the capital, she passed her days as agreeably as she could visiting friends and relatives in the home counties. And the person responsible for imposing this peripatetic life upon her was the queen.

  Elizabeth threw caution to the winds in her impulsive and very public amorous behaviour with Dudley. By her actions she defied anyone to challenge her. And no one dared to do so – except one. In August 1559 her longest serving and most faithful attendant, Katherine (‘Kat’) Ashley, threw herself on her knees before the queen and implored her to break off her affair with Dudley and to find a husband. Katherine upbraided her mistress for his shameful conduct and even went so far as to say that had she been able to see into the future she would have strangled the infant Elizabeth in her cradle. Katherine was right. The situation was serious. The libertine queen and her paramour were setting an appallingly bad example. Was this to be the style of the new reign? Elizabeth and Robert were being widely slandered in bawdy ballads and alehouse gossip. Goodwives in the marketplace assured their neighbours that they had it on good authority that the queen had given birth to a daughter, subsequently smuggled out of the palace and placed in a distant foster home. English diplomats abroad were embarrassed to have to rebut salacious rumours and listen to lewd jokes about their sovereign, and the emperor sent a special envoy to make careful enquiry about the truth of the relationship between the queen and Lord Robert. Elizabeth did not demean herself by responding to the smear campaign but she did react to Kat Ashley’s protestation and her words are significant. She categorically denied that there was any impropriety about her relationship with Lord Robert but, then, petulantly added that even if there was, ‘she did not know of anyone who could forbid her’.

  Elizabeth made the running in this relationship. It could not be otherwise, for she was queen. It was for her to command and, by opening or closing the royal cornucopia, to make or break those in her service. It was for Dudley, as it had been for his forebears, to remain droit et loyal to the sovereign and to give the queen whatever she wanted. In return he received very tangible proofs of Elizabeth’s love. He was admitted to the select Order of the Garter on the first St George’s Day of the reign. During 1559 he received various parcels of land in different counties: Knole in Kent, Burton Lazar Manor and hospital, Leicestershire, Beverley Manor, park and borough, Skidby and the site of Meaux Abbey, all in Yorkshire. On 24 November letters patent were issued appointing Dudley Lord Lieutenant of Windsor Castle and Park, a post made vacant by the death of William Fitzwilliam. At the same time Sir Francis Eaglefield was obliged to surrender to Robert his life constable-ship of Windsor Castle.

 
; What most people at the time saw and what many historians since have seen was an irresponsible clandestine relationship between a headstrong queen and an over-ambitious subject. To outsiders everything about Lord Robert – his extravagance, his princely bearing, his arrogance, his monopoly of the queen’s affections – proclaimed a king in waiting and they would have remembered that, back in 1553, a Dudley had been husband to the proclaimed queen of England. Most observers believed that all the evidence pointed to yet another member of this accursed family grasping for the ultimate prize. Most, but not all. The seasoned diplomat, Sir Thomas Chaloner, who knew Robert well, rejected the gossip about his soaring ambition as ‘most foul slander’, and suggested that Elizabeth should be circumspect in displaying her gratitude and affection: ‘a princess cannot be too wary what countenance of familiar demonstrations she maketh more to one than another . . . No man’s service in the realm is worth the price of enduring such malicious tales.’21

  But for the couple at the centre of national life the situation was much more complicated and, at times, dangerous. The new Spanish ambassador, Alvarez de Quadra, explained in one of his first reports that Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (grandson of that other Thomas Howard who had spent all of King Edward’s reign in the Tower)