by Derek Wilson
He had several reasons for wishing to deflect Elizabeth from this alliance. His political concern was that the foreign situation had become much more unstable. Alençon (since the death of Charles IX he had actually become the Duke of Anjou), in defiance of his brother, had blundered into the Netherlands’ situation as a friend and champion of the rebels. It was feared that, if unchecked, he might initiate a Franco-Spanish conflict which could only end in one or other of the major European powers gaining control of the Low Countries. Tying England to an aggressively Catholic power would be unpopular with the people and dynastically pointless since Elizabeth was now past the age of safe childbearing. Dudley and his friends were wedded to a very different strategy – the formation of a Protestant League in which England would be a major player. But the queen really seemed to be in earnest about the Anjou match. She talked excitedly about her French lover, carried his tokens about with her, sighed like an infatuated teenager and remarked what a splendid institution marriage was. Her comments about the blessed state of holy matrimony were pointed, if not barbed. Dudley had deserted her for the arms of another, she implied, so why should she not do the same? To that he could give no answer. But what worried Robert most of all was the queen’s secrecy. She carried on her own correspondence with the French court and refused to take him or anyone else into her confidence. She deprived him of his privileged role as consort/first minister/intermediary. Like other councillors, he found himself groping for an understanding of her true intentions. Like other councillors, he had to handle the French affair with kid gloves, as he advised Walsingham:
You know her disposition as well as I, and yet can I not use but frankness with you . . . I would have you, as much as you may, avoid the suspicion of her majesty that you doubt Monsieur’s love to her too much, or that you lack devotion enough in you to further her marriage, albeit I promise I think she hath little enough herself to it. But yet, what she would others think and do therein you partly have cause to know . . . You have as much as I can learn, for our conference with her majesty about affairs is but seldom and slender . . . For this matter in hand for her marriage, there is no man can tell what to say. As yet she hath imparted with no man, at least not with me nor, for ought I can learn, with any other.15
In January 1579 Anjou sent Jean de Simier, a close friend and accomplished ladies’ man, to conduct his wooing. Simier, whom Elizabeth christened her ‘monkey’, was handsome, charming and audacious and captivated her completely. He showered her with gifts, was ever ready with flattering speeches and ‘stole’ personal items such as kerchiefs and nightcaps for his master to keep as treasured keepsakes. In short, he totally eclipsed Dudley in the arts of courtly love. For six months Elizabeth had eyes for no one but Simier. She luxuriated in his company and flaunted her affection for him before the court, just as she had openly revelled in Robert’s attentions twenty years before. Part of this display was, undoubtedly, for Robert’s benefit. He responded by doing everything he could to prevent the French match.
In the summer Anjou begged to be allowed to come in person. Casting caution and diplomacy aside, Robert pleaded with Elizabeth day after day not to see the Frenchman. He urged all the obvious objections. He prostrated himself at her feet. Not, apparently, without some effect: ‘she hath deferred three whole days with an extreme regret and many tears before she would subscribe the passport, being induced thereunto and almost forced by those that have led this negotiation in despite of the said Leicester.’16
Anjou came and stayed for twelve August days. It was a private visit, kept secret from a hostile populace. Those who were obliged to be about the court apparently shared Leicester’s embarrassment and revulsion at the dalliance between the ill-matched lovers;
The councillors themselves deny that Anjou is here and, in order not to offend the Queen, they shut their eyes and avoid going to court, so as not to appear to stand in the way of interviews with him, only attending the Council when they are obliged. It is said that if she marries without consulting her people she may repent it. Leicester is much put out and all the councillors are disgusted except Sussex.17
The same reporter stated a few days later: ‘A close friend of Leicester’s tells me he is cursing the French and is greatly incensed against Sussex, as are all of Leicester’s dependants.’ Two of his ‘dependants’ certainly demonstrated their loyalty. When, in July, Robert withdrew from court, his sister Mary, still a great favourite with the queen, also left. Her son, Philip Sidney, addressed to Elizabeth a long letter advising against the marriage and calling to mind such proofs of French treachery as the St Bartholomew massacre. He suffered a severe scolding for his pains.
By now public alarm at the proposed marriage was widespread but the more others protested, the more determined Elizabeth became. When a certain Oliver Stubbs published a diatribe against the French prince the queen ordered his right hand to be publicly severed. In October she had petulant tears in her eyes when she told the whole Council that she was resolved to marry and that she looked to them to make all the necessary arrangements.
Despite these brave words inconclusive letters and embassies passed to and fro for another two years. Elizabeth continued to struggle with competing thoughts and emotions. She longed for the strong support of a devoted consort, the role Dudley had vacated. She was determined to assert her own sovereign will. Yet, however much she forced her Council to keep silent on the matter, she could not ignore the mounting disapproval of her court, her advisers and her people at large at the prospect of a French marriage. Meanwhile, foreign affairs did not stand still. The unstable Anjou, determined to demonstrate that he was a person of consequence who would not live in his brother’s shadow, was ambitious for a crown of his own – any crown. He accepted the position of Sovereign Defender of the United Netherlands. Thereafter, he became bogged down in difficult campaigning against Philip II’s forces – difficult and expensive. He turned to Elizabeth for financial help. Nothing could have been more calculated to cool her ardour.
In November 1582 Elizabeth’s Frog was back, protestations of love on his lips and a begging bowl in his hand. Once more the couple behaved in public like lovesick youngsters, while her advisers lamented the political complications into which the queen seemed to be rushing with a headstrong man of little substance who could only become an embarrassment. As one of his own relatives said of him, ‘I cannot persuade myself that he will ever perform anything that is great, nor preserve those honours which are now heaped upon him.’18 The prince stayed three months. It was too long. Elizabeth gave no outward sign of anything other than continued affection but the reality was that she tired of her ardent and importunate suitor. She was now in her fiftieth year and love games had begun to lose their fascination. So, she was actually relieved when, on 8 February 1582, having seen him on his way as far as Canterbury, she eventually took her tearful leave of him. She detailed Dudley to see the prince safely across the Channel. From the Netherlands he wrote to report the successful accomplishment of his mission. He could not restrain himself from a contemptuous observation: ‘The Duke of Anjou is already like an old boat gone aground on the sand and waiting for the wind and tide to release it.’19
Dudley’s scorn for Elizabeth’s Frog was genuine and profound and had a great deal to do with Alençon’s posturing as champion of the Dutch Protestants. It suited the queen to let the prince fight her battles for her. Providing occasional financial aid was far cheaper than sending her own army across the North Sea as the Leicester–Walsingham clique wanted. It also enabled her to keep a diplomatic distance between her and Philip’s rebellious subjects. However, with every passing year her role of pseudo-neutrality became increasingly difficult to sustain. The national mood was becoming more belligerent and Dudley was more in tune with it than his mistress. The political nation was now in favour of England’s Protestant identity being unambiguously asserted. In 1581 parliament called for a public fast, with preachings to that end and passed a bill demanding more rigorous rep
risals against Catholic fifth-columnists. Both were resisted by the queen but she was trying to keep the lid on a pot which was boiling ever more furiously.
Two events in September 1580 pushed England and Spain much closer towards inevitable conflict: Spanish troops under the Duke of Alva overran Portugal and Drake came home. Alva’s success gave the Spanish king the entire Iberian peninsula, the port of Lisbon, command of the Straits of Gibraltar, a large military and mercantile fleet and a colonial empire in the east to be added to his own in the west. Philip now claimed naval supremacy over all the shipping lanes from the Narrow Seas to Magellan’s Strait, from the Main to the Moluccas. Yet the Golden Hind’s arrival in Plymouth, laden to the gunwales with Peruvian silver and Indonesian spices, raised a large question-mark over any such claim. Francis Drake had rifled Philip’s supposedly secure treasure houses, sailed across his supposedly private lake – the Pacific Ocean – and traded in his supposedly reserved markets. He returned with breathtaking wealth. After paying himself and his crew and making lavish presents to the queen and chosen courtiers he was able to pay his backers £47 for every £1 invested. When accounts were settled Robert Dudley was the richer by many thousands of pounds.
The reaction of Elizabeth’s government to these two incidents was a clear pointer to the future trend of events. Mendoza protested at Drake’s piracy in the strongest possible terms, demanding punishment and restitution, but the queen was more impressed by the wealth Drake had brought back and the enormous popularity he now enjoyed. She, therefore, welcomed her corsair to court, had his ship placed on public exhibition and, upon its deck, she knighted him. Subtly she involved France by having Anjou’s representative, Marchaumont, perform the dubbing ceremony (despite all the later representations of the event in genre paintings and films). A few months later the Portuguese pretender, Don Antonio, was also welcomed to England. At Dudley’s instigation he was installed in Baynard’s Castle, which belonged to the Earl of Pembroke. Dudley was much in the company of both Drake and Don Antonio. He had the famous mariner elected to the Inner Temple and he helped to plan an expedition to be led by Drake to seize the Azores in the name of Don Antonio. Preparations for the proposed attack were put in hand: men and ships were mustered, backers were found, but, in August 1581, Cecil managed to sway the majority of the Council and the queen against the enterprise. The voice of caution was not yet entirely silent.
Throughout the 1570s Dudley had been mentally and emotionally involved with the politico-religious struggle convulsing Europe. He consistently backed a policy of active intervention in the Netherlands and his own agents were much involved in discussions with anti-Habsburg activists abroad. Soon after the freedom fighters began their revolt in 1572 he had proposed the sending of an expeditionary force led by Ambrose Dudley, but from this the queen had recoiled in horror. When Walsingham was in Paris he had acted as Dudley’s envoy in liaising with various Protestant princes for a joint invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. There he was later joined by Dudley’s nephew, Philip Sidney. The young man became an important link between Dudley and the leaders of the Dutch revolt. In Frankfurt he met William of Orange’s brother, Louis of Nassau. Dudley established a close link with William of Orange’s circle and messages passed frequently back and forth between them. His principal agent was the long-serving Dudley protégé, Thomas Wilson, who went over to the Low Countries as Elizabeth’s representative in November 1574 and whose anti-Spanish activities were so vigorous that he was suspected of instigating a plot to kidnap the Regent of the Netherlands. The selection of such a man as official representative between 1574 and 1577 was a major triumph for the radicals and prevented the adoption of any accommodation between England and Spain over the Netherlands. Wilson was rewarded with a Council seat in 1579.
Throughout the middle years of the decade Elizabeth made efforts to mediate between the Regent of the Netherlands and his rebellious subjects. Dudley was closely involved in these diplomatic activities and the emissaries reported back to him as well as to the queen. Clearly they were committed to separate agendas by their principals. The man sent to the court of the Regent, Don John of Austria (who nursed his own ambition of marrying Mary Stuart and displacing Elizabeth), in 1576 was Dudley’s intimate, Edward Horsey. For the queen, Horsey tried to bring the two sides to the negotiating table. For Dudley he probed Don John’s military strength. At the same time Thomas Wilson proposed to William of Orange that Dudley should personally lead an army to come to the aid of the Dutch. The idea was warmly received but a change in the diplomatic climate prevented it being acted upon. However the seed had been sown. On Horsey’s return he, like Wilson, was admitted to the Council.
Dudley now sent a more exalted emissary to William’s court. This was Philip Sidney who arrived at Gertruidenberg to stand proxy for his uncle at the christening of William’s daughter. The two men took to each other immediately and afterwards kept up a lively correspondence. Philip was particularly impressed by the depth of William’s religion and the way it permeated all his political actions. The prince thought equally well of his guest and was disposed to a greater affection for his guest’s uncle. There was even a rumour in diplomatic circles that Sidney would marry William’s daughter and become the future ruler of Holland and Zeeland (he actually married Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, in 1583).
Philip had scarcely returned to make his favourable report before Netherlands politics took another violent turn. In July Don John seized the fortress of Namur and, using it as a rallying point, summoned King Philip’s subjects to join him in battle against William of Orange and his supporters. This summons was a tactical blunder: it reunited the Dutch against him and reopened negotiations between the States General and the English court. Now it was the Netherlanders who wanted Dudley to cross the Narrow Sea with an army. The Marquis of Havrech, who headed the Dutch delegation, told the queen that he knew Dudley to be a great leader of men. In fact, he had another reason for favouring Dudley’s generalship: ‘If he is in command the queen will take care to provide him with all that may be needful.’20 Dudley feted Havrech during his weeks in England and made detailed plans for the proposed campaign. He was much encouraged by news from William Davison, who had succeeded Wilson in Antwerp:
You have made a good beginning with the Prince and States of Holland, where, by the report of all men, your name is as well known and yourself as much honoured as in your own country. The same effect cannot but follow here, if you list to march with the like zeal.21
But Dudley was unable to ‘march’. The States General dithered, Elizabeth held back and eventually put her faith in Anjou. The final collapse of his plan early in 1578 plunged Robert into a pit of despair, frustration and embarrassment. As he confided to Davison, ‘I have almost neither face nor countenance to write to the Prince, his expectation being so greatly deceived.’22
When Anjou left England for the last time in February 1582 he was accompanied, as we have seen, by Dudley, who was delighted to be travelling in person to the Netherlands and to be meeting the country’s leaders. He was warmly received by Prince William and the two men rode side by side in the magnificent procession which brought Anjou into Antwerp.
As long as the fiction of Anjou’s rule could be maintained Elizabeth could resist the inevitability of Dudley’s Netherlands policy but in January 1583, the duke departed, discredited, from his principality and eighteen months later he was dead. In the south Parma’s strength steadily increased and the United Provinces looked once more to William of Orange as their saviour. Then, on 10 July 1584, William was gunned down in the Prinsenhof in Delft by a fanatical Catholic.
In England, public anxiety and conciliar desire for action now coalesced in universal alarm. On the very same day that William was assassinated Francis Throckmorton suffered a traitor’s death at Tyburn. This nephew of Dudley’s former intimate had, under torture, revealed a devastating plot involving Philip II; Bernardino de Mendoza; Mary, Queen of Scots; the Guise faction in Paris; Philip Howard, E
arl of Arundel; Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland; and other prominent Catholics in a plan to invade England, enforce religious toleration and have Mary proclaimed as Elizabeth’s heir. This was a threat on an altogether different scale to the fevered schemings of zealots such as John Somerville who had travelled to London the previous year with a pistol, intent on shooting Elizabeth, the ‘serpent and viper’; whether from international intrigue or crazed individuals, the queen could no longer be considered safe.
These events changed – permanently – the mood of the country and the conduct of the government. Robert Dudley took it upon himself to direct both. In May he had written to Elizabeth urging her to abandon the policy of seeking security by means of a foreign alliance. The major powers were all in thrall to Rome and, therefore, could not be relied upon. The practice of playing off the Habsburgs against the Valois that had governed foreign policy ever since her grandfather had come to the throne almost exactly a century before had been rendered obsolete. Now the ‘empire of England’ needed no alien crutch on which to lean. Elizabeth could rely on ‘the mighty and assured strength you have at home’.23 He had his protégés pour forth a flood of Puritan and patriotic propaganda. One of them, Thomas Digges, wrote a pamphlet entitled Humble Motives for Association to Maintain Religion Established. It was a plan for a formal bond to be entered into by all English Protestants for the protection of their queen. It was this project which the whole Council took up months later when they drew up the Bond of Association. This provided for a body of twenty-four councillors and peers who should enquire into all plots against the queen and prosecute not only those responsible but those in whose name they were devised. In the event of a successful attempt on Elizabeth’s life they were to assume control and to ensure that the claimant in whose interests the assassination had been carried out did not succeed to the crown. The Bond was ratified by parliament and copies circulated to all parts of the country where thousands flocked to sign them, thereby committing themselves to ‘pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge all manner of persons of what estate so ever they shall be . . . that shall attempt . . . the harm of Her Majesty’s royal person,’ and ‘never [to] desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons to the uttermost extermination of them.’24 With public paranoia fed by proof of plots at home and rumours that Philip II was preparing an invasion fleet, Elizabeth could no longer dismiss what Dudley, Walsingham, Cecil and others had been telling her for years, that she and her people were embattled against the awesomely powerful forces of Antichrist.