by Derek Wilson
His own love life was getting in a tangle. If he had been able to restrict his amorous activity to Douglas things would not have been quite so bad but even before his marriage he had been stalking other game. Five months after the Kenilworth festivities de Guaras was passing on court gossip:
As the thing is publicly talked about in the streets there is no objection to my writing openly about the great enmity which exists between the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex in consequence, it is said, of the fact that while Essex was in Ireland his wife had two children by Leicester . . . great discord is expected in consequence.8
The affair referred to by the ambassador had been running for a couple of years. Lettice, Countess of Essex, was thirty-five in 1575; no flighty young maid of honour on the lookout for amorous adventure. Her magnificent portrait at Longleat (painted some ten years later) reveals a lady with even, pretty features, auburn curls and a determined set to the mouth. She was the daughter of Sir Francis Knollys, Dudley’s colleague and supporter on the Council. She was married to Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford (later Earl of Essex) when they were both about twenty. For some years the couple lived quietly in the country, but it seems there was little domestic harmony and it may well have been a relief to Lettice when Walter volunteered to lead a colonizing force to Ireland in 1573. It was probably while her husband was over the water conducting himself with conspicuous bravery and total ruthlessness against the ever-troublesome Irish that Lettice began her affair with Dudley. Devereux died of dysentery in September 1576. Rumour concerning Dudley’s relationship with Lettice was sufficiently well established for there to be gossip about poison. Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, immediately ordered a post-mortem. His detailed report to the Council intimated that nothing during Devereux’s last days nor in the subsequent examination suggested foul play. This was supported by a private account written by the late earl’s secretary. Early in 1578 the inevitable happened: Lettice told her lover that she was pregnant. Robert’s immediate reaction was the stratagem that had succeeded with Douglas. In the spring he married Lettice in a secret ceremony at Kenilworth. She was not satisfied. The role of deserted wife was one she had played before and had no intention of playing again. Dudley made another concession: he bought the house and manor of Wanstead, Essex, and the neighbouring manor of Stonehall and set up Lettice on this pleasant estate near the capital.
But still Lettice was not satisfied: her position was essentially no better than Douglas Sheffield’s. Her husband was free to decide which, if either, of his two marriages he would acknowledge. Neither she nor the child in her womb had any security. She insisted that Robert disembarrass himself of the ‘other woman’. His visits to Douglas had already become infrequent and he had probably grown tired of a lady who had little to commend her save her youth and her beauty. It was at a meeting in the gardens of Greenwich Palace that Dudley told his secret wife that she was freed from her obligations to him. He took with him two friends to witness the transaction. There, among the hedges and spring flowers, Robert offered his discarded mistress £700 a year to disavow their marriage and yield up custody of their son. According to Douglas’ account given many years later, she rejected his offer tearfully and he began to shout at her angrily. Then, after mature reflection, she decided to bow to the inevitable because no practical purpose would have been served by doing otherwise and she was afraid of the reprisals Dudley might take if she resisted his will. In 1578, as he had promised five years before, he found a husband for his discarded mistress. There was, just emerging into prominence, a young man of the same age as Douglas. His name was Edward Stafford, he was a distant relation of the dukes of Buckingham and the barons Stafford, and his mother was Elizabeth’s Mistress of the Robes. Edward’s first wife, Robserta Robsart, a close relative of the first Lady Dudley, had recently died. Through his family connections Dudley was able to bring Edward and Douglas together.
Robert’s behaviour throughout this sordid matrimonial muddle was shabby in the extreme. Lettice thought as much and, more to the point, so did her father. Sir Francis Knollys was a senior royal councillor and a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan. He was one of the determined Protestants who had gone into exile during Mary Tudor’s reign rather than compromise his faith. Now, although a friend and supporter of the favourite, he was determined that Leicester should make an irreversible commitment. Therefore, a second marriage ceremony took place at Wanstead on 21 September 1578. There, in the presence of Sir Francis Knollys, Ambrose Dudley and the Earl of Pembroke, Robert and Lettice were joined in matrimony by Humphrey Tindall BD. This seems to have satisfied the bride’s family for the time being but, on 18 February 1580, Tindall was required to make a sworn deposition to the fact that he had performed the rite and copies of this statement were kept by all parties concerned. This must have been to safeguard the legitimacy of the couple’s child. Lettice’s first baby by Robert did not long survive, but at the end of 1579 she was delivered of a boy who was christened Robert and known affectionately by his parents as the ‘noble imp’.
This marriage having taken place and being impossible to hush up, it only remained to break the news to Elizabeth. Dudley used a stratagem which had succeeded before, the confession from the sick-bed. A few days after this interview Dudley thought it wise to absent himself and travel to Buxton to take the waters. He was genuinely ill; his physical health and also his spirit were seriously undermined. These matrimonial exploits had occurred at a time when he was throwing himself wholeheartedly into political activities and experiencing mounting frustration in his attempts to handle the queen. The result was that increasingly he took his own initiatives and went behind Elizabeth’s back. This inevitably brought reprisals which contributed to his estrangement from her. This in turn plunged him into depression and he felt he had to get away. He was absent from court for an unusually long time, not returning until late July. He missed much of the summer progress and had to ask Philip Sidney, his nephew, to deputize for him when the queen visited Wanstead in mid-May. This unprecedentedly long absence may well have been engineered in order to make Elizabeth’s heart grow fonder. An exchange of letters between Dudley and Hatton certainly suggests some such design, and that it was successful. Sir Christopher reported on 18 June that Her Majesty had fallen to brooding about matrimony:
Since your Lordship’s departure the Queen is found in continual great melancholy. The cause thereof I can but guess at, notwithstanding that I bear and suffer the whole brunt of her mislike in generality. She dreameth of marriage that might seem injurious to her, making myself to be either the man or a pattern of him. I defend that no man can tie himself or be tied to such inconvenience as not to marry by law of God or man, except by mutual consents, as both parties, the man and woman, vow to marry each to other, which I know she hath not done to any man and therefore by any man’s marriage she can receive no wrong.9
It is little wonder that Hatton was bewildered: the ‘marriage that might seem injurious to her’ was, surely, not one that she herself was thinking of contracting but one already entered into by another.
Robert rejoined the court in Suffolk during the days of high summer. The tour of East Anglian great houses was not going well. Transport arrangements had run into difficulties without the Master of the Horse around to organize and chivvy. The queen was annoyed at his absence and was showing her petulance to everyone. Elizabeth usually enjoyed her progresses but few members of the court shared her enthusiasm. The queen’s moodiness made the dusty travelling, the packing and unpacking and the finding of new quarters at every halt almost intolerable. Hatton wrote to tell Dudley that everyone was waiting for his return to breathe some life into the dreary routine of the itinerant court. Dudley arrived to discover that Elizabeth was genuinely glad to see him but, inevitably, their relationship had changed. The queen seems to have coped with Robert’s marriage by choosing to ignore it. She banished Lettice from the court and never re-admitted her. She had never acknowledged that there was any
other woman in her favourite’s life and she did not do so now.
This domestic drama was played out contemporaneously with the long-running comedy of Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations and there were several points of contact between the two. In the mid 1560s one of her suitors had been Henri, Duke of Anjou, a brother of Charles IX. That had foundered on the rock of religious incompatibility but Catherine de Medici had never given up the hope of an Anglo–French alliance. She chose to revive it, in favour of her youngest son, Francis, Duke of Alençon, in the summer of 1572. Her timing could hardly have been worse. On 23/24 August she and Charles had unleashed the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. This was the government’s ‘final solution’ to the Huguenot problem. The slaughter began in Paris, where 3,000 Protestants were put to the sword, and spread to the provinces where tens of thousands perished. Walsingham, who as ambassador had been working to achieve a treaty, was forced to take refuge in the embassy where he gave asylum to as many fleeing Huguenots as he could accommodate. A month later Elizabeth wrote to him there, ‘the King to destroy and utterly root out of his Realm all those of that Religion that we profess, and to desire us in marriage for his brother, must needs seem unto us at the first a thing very repugnant in itself.’10 If Elizabeth had seen Alençon, repugnance might also have existed on a personal level. The prince, once handsome, graceful and athletic, had emerged from a bout of smallpox badly scarred in body and spirit. His face was bloated and dotted with lesions. His eyes were bloodshot. He skulked around the court, aware of the covert glance and the snigger behind the hand. Gradually self-pity turned to resentment and resentment to opposition to his brother, the king. That opposition increased after May 1574, when Charles IX died and the crown passed to the fanatically Catholic Anjou. Alençon, determined to make his own individual mark in the world, flirted with Protestantism and pursued with ardour his suit for the hand of Elizabeth Tudor. For twelve years this match was seldom absent from the Council’s agenda, creating divisions among its members and violent arguments between them and the queen.
Elizabeth had never wanted to acknowledge that religious conflict was the main determinant in foreign and domestic affairs, as Dudley, Cecil and their allies had always urged, but the northern rebellion, her excommunication and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre forced her to acknowledge the truth. Emotional reaction to these events throughout the country was turning England into what it had not hitherto been, a Protestant nation. Her Council were now, almost to a man, devotees of the Reformed faith, many of them aggressively so. The Dudley– Walsingham caucus pressed ever more vigorously for her to intervene unequivocally on the side of their co-religionists. The revolt of the Netherlands was the focal point of ideological conflict. Alva’s bloody repression had failed and Philip II’s policy veered between partial toleration and further outbreaks of repression. Spain was gradually losing its grip on the Calvinist northern provinces (which would eventually become the Dutch Republic) and there was no prospect of peace between the colonial power and the nationalists. In France the atrocities of 1572 had only driven the Huguenot minority to more determined defence of their religious liberties. If any lingering doubt remained in Elizabeth’s mind it was dispelled when Catholic troops were sent to Ireland in the hope of using the province as a launch pad for the reconversion of England. At the same time zealous Jesuits were smuggled into England, a canker eating away at the Protestant nation from within. But she was warned by continental events against harsh government measures towards fanatics. Warfare she continued to hate as both bloody and expensive. Diplomacy, preferably between crowned heads of state, was always to be preferred to military conflict.
The result was growing tension between the queen and her councillors, who frequently pressed her to be proactive. The most notable fact about life at the political centre in the 1570s was the edginess of everyone concerned. At times there was an almost complete breakdown of working relationships. Elizabeth was impossible. She refused to make decisions herself and frequently silenced those who urged her to action. At length, only Dudley and Hatton were permitted to broach affairs of state. Then she forbade even them to present suits. On at least one occasion Robert had to resort to his old stratagem of begging the queen to come to his sickbed in order to have a few hours of serious discussion with her. Council members squabbled among themselves. The delicate relationship between Dudley and Cecil was endangered. In September 1578 Robert wrote a tetchy letter to the Lord Treasurer:
. . . we began our service with our sovereign together and have long continued hitherto together. And, touching your fortune, I am sure yourself cannot have a thought that ever I was enemy to [it] . . . [Yet] if I have not both long since and of late perceived your opinion . . . better settled in others than in me, I could little perceive anything. Yet this may I say and boldly think, that all them never deserved so well at your hands as myself, except in such secret friendship as the world cannot judge of . . .11
The fact was that the ‘balance of power’ within the Council had shifted drastically. Dudley, now enjoying the wholehearted support of Secretary Walsingham, had adopted the role of virtual ‘prime minister’. Mendoza accurately analysed conciliar mechanics when he reported:
. . . the bulk of the business depends upon the Queen, Leicester, Walsingham and Cecil, the latter of whom . . . absents himself on many occasions, as he is opposed to the Queen’s 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 very much wedded to the States [Netherlands] . . . They urge the business under cloak of preserving their religion, which Cecil cannot well oppose, nor can he afford to make enemies of them as they are well supported. Some of the councillors are well disposed towards your Majesty, but Leicester, whose spirit is Walsingham, is so highly favoured by the Queen, notwithstanding his bad character, 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.12
The routine procedures by which the board worked were few and simple: the Council handled day-to-day matters and made recommendations. Dudley was the main link with the queen. By and large he represented her wishes and liaised with her, particularly on sensitive matters. His colleagues might resent Robert’s hold on the queen’s affections but they relied on him when there were unpleasant facts or uncongenial decisions to be placed before Her Majesty, or when she had to be cajoled into endorsing their decisions. Dudley understood what another flamboyant politician, Benjamin Disraeli, observed three centuries later, that queens need to be wooed. His charm was a vital lubricant in the political mechanism. Walsingham, by contrast, Elizabeth found irritating (as Victoria found Gladstone irritating) because he was a religious enthusiast who tended to lecture her.
Nothing more clearly demonstrates the clandestine nature of government activity and, more specifically, Cecil’s non-involvement in some important decisions than his deliberate exclusion from the most exciting maritime exploit of the entire reign, Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe (1577–80). When the expedition was in the planning El Draco was straitly charged that ‘of all men my Lord Treasurer should not know if it.’13 This was because he would have been firmly opposed to the concealed objective of the voyage. The official story was that Drake was bound for Alexandria, like some of Dudley’s other ships, to take on a cargo of currants. Only his backers, the queen, Dudley, Hatton, Clinton, Walsingham, John Hawkins and Sir William Winter, knew that the real destination was the Pacific coast of South America, where Drake proposed to make a piratical raid on the silver bullion route from Peru to Panama. The promoters waited till Cecil was away taking the waters at Buxton before finalizing their plans.
However, there was no question of Dudley exercising a controlling influence over the queen. As often as she supported his recommendations, she rejected them. Even more often she did neither. A new tension had entered their relationship, resulting from the worrying
complexities of state affairs, their differences of political viewpoint and Dudley’s ‘betrayal’ of Elizabeth by marrying Lettice. There was often a coolness in her attitude towards her ‘Eyes’ now that had seldom been present before. Certainly there were times when they seemed as close as ever. In October 1578, for example, it was Robert who sat up all night with her when she had toothache. Certainly none of the handsome young men, like Hatton, who seemed to be following in Dudley’s footsteps, were ever admitted to the same degree of intimacy. Yet the estrangements were more frequent. Dudley more often felt the sharp edge of Elizabeth’s tongue or had some suit refused. They did not now share secret laughter or send each other messages couched in terms of cheerful, intimate banter. And, undoubtedly, Elizabeth’s emotional reaction to Robert’s amorous adventures coloured her conduct of the marriage negotiations with Alençon. In its early stages the official courtship of Elizabeth and her ‘Frog’ followed a familiar pattern. By never saying ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ and by instructing politicians and diplomats to raise a succession of ‘points of order’ she kept the French ever hopeful of an eventual alliance and this had distinct advantages for England. It acted as some sort of brake on Philip II’s ambitions: he was less likely to resume war with France or provoke increased opposition to his Netherlands policy as long as there was a real prospect of England joining a league against him.
Dudley knew exactly what game Elizabeth was playing. While men like Walsingham took the queen at face value and complained ‘no one thing hath procured her so much hatred abroad as these wooing matters’,14 he warmly supported the Alençon courtship, appreciating its diplomatic importance and knowing that nothing would ever come of it. He had personal motives for encouraging the proposed match. No one could accuse him of pursuing his own matrimonial ambitions with the queen when he was known to be pushing her towards Alençon’s waiting arms. Predictably the scheme fizzled out in 1576. However, two years later it was energetically revived and this time Dudley was firm in his opposition to it.