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

by Derek Wilson

  The two most celebrated comedians of the age certainly began their careers in Dudley’s employ. Richard Tarlton was a Shropshire swineherd until one of Robert’s servants found him and, impressed by Tarlton’s native wit, introduced him to his master. He became a jester and, probably, one of Leicester’s Men. Soon he made himself the reputation of being one of the funniest men on the London stage, famous for his playing of clown parts, his dancing and his extemporizing of jokes and rhymes. He was one of the actors taken over into the Queen’s Company on its formation in 1583. His death five years later was a great loss, for, but the gap was largely filled by Will Kemp, a colleague of Shakespeare, later to attain a bizarre fame for his dance from London to Norwich. Kemp was a member of Dudley’s company by 1585. Perhaps he was employed when Tarlton left to join the Queen’s players. He accompanied Dudley when he went as Elizabeth’s representative to the Netherlands and received payments for such antics as ‘leaping into a ditch before your Excellency and the Prince Elector as you went a walking at Amersfoort.’

  Elizabeth was surrounded by image makers and she knew the importance of iconography, she certainly did not see herself as a warrior queen, an identity increasingly projected for her by the Dudley circle as the reign wore on. Wherever they looked around the political horizon they saw angry clouds and lightning flashes. Scotland was in turmoil. Mary’s marriage to Darnley in 1565 and the birth, eleven months later, of her son James did not bring peace and security to her realm. The boorish and jealous Darnley had his wife’s secretary, David Rizzio, hacked to death on suspicion of being the queen’s lover and himself was assassinated within the year. Mary rushed into another disastrous marriage with her protector, James Bothwell. Scotland plunged back into war between aristocratic factions, Mary was deposed, imprisoned, escaped and in May 1568 fled across the border to seek Elizabeth’s protection. For the next eighteen years she was a prisoner who could only find any meaning in life by plotting her restoration and encouraging her devotees to help turn the tables on her jailer. Meanwhile, north of the border anarchy and religious strife resumed their devastating work.

  At the same time Anglo-Spanish relations progressively worsened. Elizabeth and her councillors entertained Habsburg suitors for the royal hand but the reign of Mary and Philip had left a lingering, unpleasant aftertaste and public opinion was against any such match. Dudley had originally supported the suit of the Archduke Charles, which was on and off between 1559 and 1570 but eventually fell in with the common view. Inevitably, his enemies believed or affected to believe that the only reason for his opposition was his own ambition to marry Elizabeth

  In the Spanish Netherlands Protestant and nationalist fervour had grown steadily over the years and by 1567 outrages against Spanish officials and Catholic churches were frequent. Faced with a breakdown of law and order, Philip resolved upon a reign of terror. He sent the fanatical Don Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, with an army of 10,000 men (soon increased to 50,000) to suppress the rebellious provinces.

  Alva’s savagery shocked the whole of Europe. He had around 9,000 people convicted of heresy or treason, at least 1,000 of whom were executed. Most leaders of Dutch Calvinism were disposed of, the duke having a penchant for grisly, public spectacles of vengeance, but William of Orange, the nationalist ringleader, escaped to Germany. The outrage of English Protestants, who had tasted something of counter-Reformation atrocities during Mary Tudor’s reign, can easily be imagined. The current best seller was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (The Book of Martyrs), a catalogue of men and women who had suffered for their faith from earliest times. First published in 1559, it went through six editions, each larger than its precursors as the author added yet more tales of Christian heroism. In 1570 the government ordered every church to buy a copy, which was to be accessible for all to read. It was a masterpiece of politico-religious propaganda and it influenced English attitudes for generations. No one could fail to see the relevance of this mammoth catalogue of past atrocities to contemporary events and few doubted that England should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with persecuted saints abroad.

  The Council was divided, not on their attitude towards events in the Netherlands but on what should be done about them. In 1567 de Silva lamented that there were no Catholics left among Elizabeth’s senior advisers and he was in no doubt as to the identity of the arch-apostate:

  Lord Robert is now a strong heretic, and I am told is very sorry that affairs in Flanders are prospering, speaking evil of the Prince of Orange and saying that he has deceived the sectaries by promising them help and then abandoning them.7

  Dudley was all for going to the aid of his co-religionists. Elizabeth was more cautious. Although worried about the existence of a massive Spanish garrison just across the Narrow Seas, she remembered the expensive fiasco of the Le Havre venture. For the moment she contented herself with formal protests.

  Matters were no better in France. The 1560s were years of sporadic warfare between the forces of the Huguenots, at first under the Prince de Condé and, after his death in battle, Admiral Coligny and Henry of Navarre, and the army of the young King Charles IX and his indefatigable mother. Catherine de Medici was constantly being pressed by Philip II of Spain to deal firmly with the Protestants but the royal position was too weak and the political life of the nation lurched from open war to truce to treaty and back to open war. Dudley continued to advocate military aid for the Huguenots but Elizabeth refused to have her fingers burned again.

  Thus on every hand the forces of the old religion and the new were locked in deadly combat. Dudley, Cecil and the majority of their colleagues were right in seeing this ideological conflict as one from which England could not remain aloof. In February 1570 this was made crystal clear. A fanatical reforming pope who had expelled prostitutes from Rome, forbidden citizens to enter taverns and outlawed bullfighting throughout Europe (the Spaniards simply ignored the instruction) turned his attention to the queen of England. In the bull Regnans in Excelsis he excommunicated Elizabeth and declared that ‘the lords, subjects and peoples of the said kingdom and all others who have sworn allegiance to her are perpetually absolved from any oath of fidelity and obedience.’ The previous year he had supported with money and papal benedictions an attempt to remove Elizabeth by force. Although it had failed, it had come far closer to success than any document sealed with his bulla.

  The northern rebellion of 1569 came about through a mingling of Catholic disaffection, muddled policy towards Scotland and personality clashes at court. Dudley became embroiled in the confused sequence of events and was hard put to it to extricate himself and regain the queen’s favour. He and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, had continued to clash. Elizabeth persisted in believing that the two rivals balanced each other but their mutual hostility was a blight on the smooth running of court and Council. Early in 1565 the well-known ‘kerchief incident’ occurred. Howard and Dudley were playing tennis before the queen in one of the Whitehall courts built by Henry VIII. After a while Robert went across to Elizabeth and borrowed her napkin to mop his sweating brow. At this Howard lost control of himself. He raged at Dudley for his presumption and ‘swore that he would lay his racket upon his face.’ The queen was naturally angry with Howard, who now hated Dudley even more for giving rise to his public humiliation.

  Petulance was a characteristic of Thomas Howard. He was a man tortured by the conviction that his talents and his position as England’s premier peer had not brought him the political eminence he believed to be his due. He readily made common cause with his cousin Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex. Both men loathed Dudley and this coloured their view of the wider political scene. To them anything seemed preferable to the possibility of Dudley’s marriage to the queen and they rejected the Protestant interventionism of the Leicester circle. They were convinced that England could not stand alone and must seek a matrimonial alliance either with the Habsburgs or the Valois.

  Radcliffe had but recently returned from nine years as Lord Lieutenan
t of Ireland, where his government had been marked by vigour, ferocity and failure. He knew that Dudley was his sternest critic and he easily convinced himself that Elizabeth’s favourite was the main agent of his loss of favour. By midsummer 1565 the rival earls and their followers were carrying arms at court. Six months later the two factions were wearing coloured favours: yellow for the Howard–Radcliffe alliance, purple for Dudley. There were occasional brawls between groups of supporters and Radcliffe complained directly to the queen that his life was in danger.

  Elizabeth found the macho posturings of the rival courtiers tiring in the extreme and made more than one attempt to reconcile the fractious earls. When Charles IX of France expressed a desire to confer the Order of St Michael on two of the queen’s subjects, she selected Dudley and Howard. At the time appointed the two peers met in the ‘great closet’ at Whitehall and embraced each other before proceeding to the investiture. Then, magnificently arrayed in white and russet velvet, tricked out with fur, lace, gold and silver, they proceeded to the chapel to receive their chains of office from Charles’ deputies. The reconciliation was as hollow as the honour. Soon afterward Dudley and Howard both absented themselves from the court. Although Robert was back before the end of March, he confided to Cecil that he would gladly have stayed away longer.

  Like his father before him, he was going through a period of depression and disillusionment. He was trapped in the cage of Elizabeth’s possessiveness and the fact that he had walked into it with his eyes wide open did not make his fate any easier to bear. What rankled with him most was the implication for the Dudley dynasty. In a very frank letter to a friend he pointed out that Elizabeth’s monopoly of his time and affections

  . . . forceth me . . . to be [the] cause almost of the ruin of my own house. For there is no likelihood that any of our bodies of men kind [are] like to have heirs. My brother you see long married and not like to have children. It resteth so now in myself, and yet . . . if I should marry I am sure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose . . . yet is there nothing in the world next that favour that I would not give to be in hope of leaving some children behind me, being now the last of our house. But yet, the cause being as it is, I must content myself . . .8

  There is no evidence that Dudley was wildly promiscuous but he certainly had affairs. When criticized by one of his own protégés he conceded he was ‘a sinner and flesh and blood as others be . . . I may fall many ways and have more witnesses thereof than many others who perhaps be no saints either.’9 Elizabeth knew, but chose not to know, that her ‘eyes’ sometimes wandered. The game of courtly love permitted discreet infidelities. She flirted with other men about the court as well as encouraging formal suitors. Yet always she expected Robert to stick to the convention of being her amorous slave. Only once did he defy this convention by paying court to one of the ladies in waiting so openly that Elizabeth could not ignore it. This was at the time that the match with Archduke Charles had been revived and Robert actually advised the queen to accept the Habsburg’s offer. He was fairly confident that, for political reasons, she would not do so and he was totally opposed to any alliance with the royal house of Spain but he saw this as an opportunity to discover whether Elizabeth would loosen the cords which bound him to her. He painfully discovered that she would not. There was no volcanic outburst of royal wrath. Instead Elizabeth grew cold towards her favourite. In conversation with others she lamented that she had wasted her time on Robert Dudley. She refused him favours, such as his request for a Council place for his close associate, Nicholas Throckmorton. Cecil cryptically noted in his diary that the queen ‘wrote an obscure sentence in a book at Windsor’ which was, presumably, a private expression of her displeasure which only Dudley would understand. Not until he had left the court again to attend to estate business in Norfolk did Elizabeth unburden herself of her deep anger in a letter that threw him into utter despair, as he told Throckmorton:

  Time has been when my doings should never have been worse taken than they were meant, nor my meaning so scanned as [to] stretch . . . an unwilling stepping aside to a wilful slipping away . . . Foul faults have been pardoned in some; my hope was that one only might have been forgiven – yea, forgotten – [in] me. If many days’ service and not a few years’ proof have made trial of unremovable fidelity enough, without notable offences, what shall I think of all that past favour [when] my first oversight [results in] an utter casting off of all that was before? . . .10

  It was not only the queen’s disfavour that worried Dudley. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was painfully aware that loyalty to the regime almost inevitably carried with it unpopularity. The role of favourite was synonymous with the role of royal scapegoat. When the government made decisions that people liked, they praised Elizabeth. When royal policies were resented, they blamed Dudley.

  Dudley suffered in extreme measure the ambitious courtier’s constant dilemma. When attending the queen he was embroiled in feuds with jealous rivals. When absent from court those rivals had the freedom to work all manner of mischief. While Robert was away in 1566 Howard’s agents were assiduously digging up whatever dirt they could with which to besmirch the favourite. They found a willing accomplice in John Appleyard, Amy Robsart’s half-brother. This malcontent, who believed he had not benefited sufficiently from Lord Robert’s rise to fame and fortune, was heard to mutter that he knew things about Lady Dudley’s death that had not come out at the inquest. Howard had Appleyard summoned to a secret meeting with one of his dependants, who proceeded to offer him a down payment of £1,000, with more to follow, in return for any evidence that would implicate Dudley in Amy’s death. Significantly, the paymaster also asked what Appleyard knew about Dudley’s attempt to thwart plans for the queen’s marriage to the Archduke Charles. Dudley got to hear about it, confronted his kinsman and obtained an apology. But the activities of Appleyard and his backers did not cease. It was a year later that the troublemaker was confined to the Fleet and subsequently examined by the Council, to whom he confessed that he had acted out of malice and in hope of reward for accusing Dudley of murdering his wife, sending Lord Darnley into Scotland, and advising the queen not to contract a foreign marriage.

  In 1568 the Archbishop of York, President of the Council of the North died. Sussex was appointed in his stead, so by the closing weeks of 1568, and with Mary Stuart lodged, unwillingly, in Bolton Castle, all the lead players were in place for the greatest crisis of the reign. The trouble had actually begun in November when storms and French pirates forced a number of Spanish ships to take refuge in Plymouth and Southampton. They were carrying about £85,000 to pay Alva’s troops in the Netherlands. On the shallowest of pretexts the English government decided to seize the money. Alva was furious at this serious blow to his suppression of the Dutch rebels. He retaliated by seizing the goods and ships of Elizabeth’s subjects in the Netherlands and closing the markets to English merchants. The pro-Spanish element in the Council were scarcely less outraged than Philip II’s regent. They believed, probably correctly, that Cecil had ordered the seizure on his own initiative. Urged on by the Spanish ambassador de Spes, Norfolk and Arundel set about recruiting support for the overthrow of the Secretary. The first man they had to recruit was Dudley. That was not easy, and Robert only joined them after several weeks of persuasion. They presented their argument in terms of the necessity of restoring true conciliar government and preventing overpowerful individuals controlling affairs of state. Dudley agreed that Sir William had overstepped the bounds of his authority and that it would be good for him to be taken down a peg or two. Apart from anything else he was the major obstacle to the policy which a group of councillors and noblemen had decided to adopt towards Mary Stuart. This plan seems to have originated in the Dudley circle, although Howard and his allies readily fell in with it for their own reasons. It involved marrying Mary to the Duke of Norfolk and restoring her to her throne on condition that the Protestant religion was maintained north o
f the border and a permanent alliance entered into between the two nations. This was far from being the ultimate objective of the Howard clique.

  The real plans of Norfolk and Arundel were much more sweeping. In collusion with some of the northern magnates they intended to purge all ‘heretics’ from the Council, reintroduce Catholicism with Spanish (and perhaps French) help, and restore Mary Stuart to her throne without conditions. When Robert realized how he had been duped by his old enemies, he was appalled and at a loss to know how he could expose the plot without taking his share of the blame. His opportunity came when the court was on progress at the Earl of Southampton’s house at Titchfield, Hampshire. There Robert took to his bed with a diplomatic illness. He implored the queen to come and comfort him – a plea he knew she would not ignore. As she sat at his bedside he poured out the whole story, assuring Elizabeth that he had been a reluctant conspirator (this was true of his attitude in recent weeks though not of his initial involvement in the marriage plan), had only supported Howard because he knew of his mistress’s concern for Mary Stuart’s restoration (there was certainly some truth in that) and had never deviated from his loyalty to her majesty. Of course, Elizabeth forgave him and preserved all her spleen for Howard. Rather than wait to see what action she would take, the duke fled to Kenninghall.