by Derek Wilson
17
Fair Means and Foul
It may be difficult for us to understand the intensity of the religious and nationalistic emotions that divided Europe in these years. By 1584 a vicious propaganda war was raging. Hundreds of anti-papal tracts were in circulation, some dedicated to Dudley, carrying the bear and ragged staff on their title pages and eulogizing the piety of their patron. Many of them focused on the sins and crimes of Mary Stuart, castigated in Protestant diatribes as a wanton creature who had instigated the horrendous murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, in order to marry her lover, James Bothwell. Catholic controversialists hit back. Needing to find a counterweight to Mary in infamy and unable to vilify Elizabeth, they characterized her closest friend as a debauched monster. In this summer of 1584, from a secret press in Paris or Antwerp, there emerged what may be the vilest libel ever printed, commonly known as Leicester’s Commonwealth. The English version of this diatribe was set forth under a much more innocent sounding title: The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Arts at Cambridge. Its central thesis was that Dudley was an accomplished, amoral conspirator set upon a Machiavellian scheme to remove, one by one, all rightful claimants to the throne until Elizabeth stood alone, and then to assassinate her. He would then back the Yorkist claim of his brother-in-law Huntingdon, but only as a step to his own ultimate assumption of supreme power. Stated thus baldly, the scheme seems too absurdly far-fetched to attract any credence and had it been declared in such simple terms few contemporaries would have paid it any attention. The anonymous author’s skill was shown in the way he dressed up his central argument with titillating gossip, half-truths, innuendoes and fearful suspicions.
His personal attack on Robert had three elements: he impugned Dudley’s ancestry, his morals and his policies. In reminding the reader of the treasons of Edmund and John the author was on safe ground. Both men had been unpopular. Both had ended their lives on the scaffold. It was easy to draw attention to their cunning, deceitfulness, disloyalty and manipulation of the sovereign and to suggest that these traits had been inherited by the third generation of their accursed house.
When he shifted his aim to Dudley’s private life the author had an even more substantial target to hit. Dudley’s failings were well known and commonly exaggerated, an embarrassment to his friends and a comfort to his enemies. He was a celebrity and could not avoid the attentions of the Elizabethan equivalent of the tabloid press. Leicester’s Commonwealth added hugely to the old stock-in-trade of gossip. It credited Dudley with an impressive list of assassinations, murders and attempted murders. Thus, he killed his first wife, the husbands of his mistresses, Douglas Sheffield and the Countess of Essex, Cardinal de Chatillon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Lady Lennox, and made an unsuccessful attempt to dispose of Jean de Simier, Anjou’s agent. On his orders William Killigrew tried to murder Lord Ormonde. He employed ‘cunning men’ to keep him supplied with ‘secret poisons’, and his patronage of Italian scholars was regarded as being particularly sinister in this connection. As far as women were concerned, the book asserted that ‘no man’s wife can be free from him whom his fiery lust liketh to abuse . . . kinswoman, ally, friend’s wife or daughter, or whatsoever female sort besides doth please his eye . . . must yield to his desire . . . There are not (by report) two noblewomen about her majesty . . . whom he hath not solicited.’1 There were pages more of the same sort of muck-raking nonsense.
Leicester’s Commonwealth was only one item in what became almost an anti-Dudley literary sub-genre in the 1580s. Elizabeth responded by ordering local authorities to suppress such scurrilous canards. She identified them for what they were; attacks on herself in the guise of attacks on her closest adviser:
as though her Majesty should have failed in good judgement and discretion in the choice of so principal a counsellor about her, or be without taste or care of all justice and conscience in suffering such heinous and monstrous crimes (as by the said libels and books be infamously imputed) to have passed unpunished.2
As for Dudley, he treated these diatribes with the contempt they deserved, but they went on to provide an excellent example of how vigorous but unsubstantiated testimony can colour the historical record. The book did not see the light of day again until 1641. In that year Charles I’s favourite, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was on trial for treason. His enemies rediscovered Leicester’s Commonwealth and published a new edition. In that totally different context it seemed to provide a telling object lesson about the corrupting influence of an overmighty subject. Seventeenth-century readers, knowing nothing of its origins and coming to the calumnious pamphlet as a moralizing tale, accepted its assertions uncritically. And thus was put in place the coping stone of the black legend of the Dudleys.
The suggestion in Leicester’s Commonwealth that Dudley was bent on the destruction of Mary Queen of Scots was quite wrong. He had no interest in plotting Mary’s death for two very good reasons. The first is that Elizabeth would not for a moment have contemplated such a dire act. She had a stubborn regard, if not for the person of the Scottish queen, certainly for her status. Mary was a royal person and, therefore, bound to her by steel-strong, mystic ties. It was Elizabeth’s dearest wish to allow Mary’s return to her own country, if only the political situation there would permit it. Dudley supported the queen in this until the late 1580s, when the atmosphere in international relations deteriorated drastically as a result of Catholic attempts at subversion. The second was that he had an eye to the future. It was by now obvious that the Tudor dynasty his family had served so faithfully was coming to an end. The next occupant of the throne would almost certainly be a Stuart and he wanted to make sure that his son and his son’s son enjoyed the favour of that future regime. As we have seen, he had his own contacts among the Scottish rulers and he maintained good relations with them.
This included, as far as possible, getting on with Mary. He was well placed to achieve this, for Mary was in the guardianship of his old friend George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. This amiable peer was the henpecked husband of the notoriously ambitious Elizabeth Talbot, commonly known as Bess of Hardwick. Through the Talbots Robert came into personal contact with their unwilling guest. Robert spent some time with Mary on at least one occasion, in June 1577. This tête-à-tête between two of the great sex symbols of the age must have been fascinating. Although little of political import passed between them, the meeting itself was sufficient to make William Cecil request permission to visit the royal prisoner a few weeks later. The request was denied.
Any mutual respect or admiration between Mary and Dudley had, by 1584, been destroyed by the worsening international situation and in the spring of that year Mary tried to make serious mischief for Dudley. A coded letter she sent to the French ambassador was intercepted by Walsingham. It contained the following passage:
I would wish you to mention privately to the Queen that nothing has alienated the Countess of Shrewsbury from me but the vain hope which she has conceived of settling the crown of England on the head of her little girl, Arabella, and this by means of marrying her to a son of the Earl of Leicester. These children are also educated in this idea, and their portraits have been sent to each other.3
Do we have here real, solid evidence of a plot to replace the Tudor dynasty with the house of Dudley? Bess Talbot’s daughter by a previous husband had, to the queen’s great displeasure, been married to Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, brother of the murdered Lord Darnley. Lennox had died (December 1576) but not before siring a daughter, Arabella Stuart, now in the care of her domineering grandmother. This little girl, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, stood high in the succession to the English throne besides being of the Scottish blood royal and her scheming grandmother energetically advanced Arabella’s claim over that of Mary’s son James on the grounds that the former was securely Protestant and was being brought up in England. Bess even tried to persuade Elizabeth to contribute to the household expenses of her ‘princess’. Elizabeth, of course
, rejected these pretensions but she kept a close eye on little Arabella, as she did on all potential claimants. All this is undisputed fact but was Dudley an active partner in these dynastic schemes?
The first point to make is that Mary’s claim has to be seen in the context of the domestic situation at Sheffield Castle and Chatsworth, the Shrewsbury homes where she was incarcerated. The married life of the Talbots had degenerated to the point at which they could not bear the sight of each other. Mary was caught in the middle and for years had to endure the jibes and insults thrown by Bess who had taken it into her head that her husband was having an affair with his royal prisoner. The Countess of Shrewsbury deliberately spread unpalatable rumours about Mary and even wrote to Elizabeth to complain of her conduct and attitude. It was to this constant goading that Mary responded in kind in 1584. She listed all the countess’s schemes, ambitions and disloyal comments about the queen and sent them to the French ambassador (and perhaps, also, to Cecil). They included the supposed marriage agreement made by Bess and Dudley. We can trace this ‘agreement’ no further back. It would have been wholly in character for Bess to have dreamed it up, but she might have discussed such a proposal with Dudley. It is quite likely that she hinted to Mary that a deal had been struck which would forever debar her and her son from the English throne. However, none of this proves Dudley’s active involvement in the scheme.
It would, in fact, have been very much out of character for him to have been snared. If the queen had learned that he was interfering in the succession issue, that he was making plans about what would happen after her death, it would have been the one sin she would have found impossible to forgive. Dudley knew full well how hypersensitive she was on this matter and would not have been so stupid as to risk her wrath. Also, he would not have wanted to alienate his friends at the Scottish court by giving his backing to any rival claimant to James. Whatever rumours or half-rumours Mary may have heard while under the Shrewsburys’ roof, there can have been no truth whatsoever in her claim. Had there been, or had the story been widespread among Leicester’s enemies they would not have failed to make maximum use of such splendid propaganda material. The suggestion that once again, as in the days of Jane Grey, the Dudleys were reaching out for the Crown would have been a gift they could not refuse. Yet the author of Leicester’s Commonwealth made no mention of it, nor did any other Catholic pamphleteer.
However, within weeks any speculation became academic. In July the noble imp fell suddenly ill at Wanstead and died a few days later. Robert was devastated. As well as the natural grief of a father for a dead son he was now experiencing the extinction of all his dynastic hopes and plans. He was on progress with the court when the news arrived. Without waiting for royal permission he left Nonsuch suddenly in order to be with Lettice. He asked Hatton to make his excuses to Elizabeth. The letter he wrote to Hatton a few days later is reminiscent of the world-weary reflections his father had penned in the early fifties:
I must confess I have received many afflictions within these few years, but not a greater, next her Majesty’s displeasure: and, if it pleased God, I would the sacrifice of this poor innocent might satisfy; I mean not towards God . . . but for the world. The afflictions I have suffered may satisfy such as are offended, at least appease their long hard conceits . . . I beseech . . . God to grant me patience in all these worldly things, and to forgive me the negligences of my former time, that have not been more careful to please Him, but have run the race of the world.4
This sad misfortune was a turning point in the life of Robert Dudley. It came as the last of a series of blows which had sent his spirit reeling. Like his father he felt more deeply than he was prepared to show his widespread unpopularity. The queen continued to be estranged from Lettice; his religious policy was being overthrown; his influence was waning; he had recently become the object of a particularly vicious libel and now the legitimate Dudley line had come to an end, for Lettice was beyond childbearing. Well might he despair of human aid and pray for ‘patience in all these worldly things’. He chose a magnificent restingplace for his four-year-old son. The Beauchamp Chapel in St Mary’s, Warwick had been built in the mid-fifteenth century at enormous expense as a chantry chapel for Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and remains to this day one of the glories of Perpendicular church architecture. Robert had already designated the chapel as the final resting place for himself and others of his family so that there would be a permanent reminder of their descent from one of the great aristocratic families of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and it was there, close to the altar, that his son, the infant Baron Denbigh, was buried and an affecting monument raised over him. After this tragedy there was little that brought Robert Dudley any joy. His remaining years were ones of frustration, failure, anxiety and ill-rewarded service to the queen.
Many of Robert’s letters reveal how keenly he felt the queen’s antagonism towards Lettice and how he sought the aid of friends and colleagues in assuaging it. After their son’s funeral Robert and Lettice spent a few days at Cecil’s house, Theobalds. Apparently even a mother’s grief had not softened Elizabeth’s heart. Leicester wrote to thank his absent host: ‘. . . that it pleased you so friendly and honourably to deal in the behalf of my poor wife. For truly, my Lord, in all reason she is hardly dealt with. God must only help it with her majesty . . . for which, my Lord, you shall be assured to find us most thankful to the uttermost of our powers . . .’5
It was to check the erosion of his influence that Dudley now advanced his stepson, Robert Devereux, to royal favour. The eighteen-year-old Earl of Essex was all that Dudley had been at his age, athletic, vigorous and flamboyant. Dudley brought him to court to be a leader of the coterie of young gallants supporting his own vigorous radical policies, and also to be one of Elizabeth’s ‘lovers’. For the queen was not allowed to grow old. While advancing age took its obvious toll of her attendants, cosmetics and determined vigour maintained for Elizabeth an aura of eternal youth. Still she commanded the attentions of beardless, smooth-cheeked men young enough to be her own sons. Unable himself to compete any longer, Robert had no alternative but to put forward his own champion.
Only those in the innermost circle of royal intimates could be aware how profoundly, if subtly, the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert was changing. To most men Dudley must have seemed as secure as ever. By 1584, if not before, he was officially designated as Lord Steward, thereby enjoying in nomine as well as de facto the central place at the court. He continued to be Elizabeth’s closest adviser and to convey messages to and from the Council. He was still permitted to advocate policies and courses of which the queen did not approve. Indeed, he did so more energetically as the years passed. Now, however, Robert was not so much a romantic consort as an old friend.
Life at the political centre was also changing as death removed former colleagues and foes from the scene. In 1583 Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex had died. This left Dudley and his allies with no effective opposition in the Council but it was also a reminder, to a man conscious of his own declining health, that his own days and his ability to make a real contribution to the well-being of his queen and country were diminishing. Radcliffe had remained hostile to the last. It is said that he warned those gathered round his deathbed, ‘beware of the Gypsy, for he will be too hard for you all. You know not the beast so well as I do.’6 Death must have been a welcome relief for Archbishop Grindal who passed away a month after the earl. He had never been summoned back to the warmth of royal favour and Elizabeth was glad to see the back of him.
In his place she appointed John Whitgift, a man much more to her taste. Whitgift was the worst kind of ecclesiastical martinet, pompous, prejudiced and stubborn. Macaulay labelled him, ‘a narrow-minded, mean and tyrannical priest’, a judgement with which it is difficult to disagree. He appealed to the queen because of his pathological hatred of Puritans as well as Catholics and his determination to uphold episcopal authority and impose uniformity on the English clergy.
Dudley and the majority of the Council had worked for ecclesiastical unity rather than uniformity. Whitgift began dismantling what it had taken almost three patient decades to build up.
In December 1584 Robert tried, before it was too late, to reconcile the Puritans and the episcopal rigorists by holding a conference at Lambeth but the two-day event generated more heat than light. Dudley and the Archbishop were soon at loggerheads, and in March 1585 Dudley delivered a blistering attack on Whitgift’s policies in the House of Lords. Cecil too protested, ‘This kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Roman Inquisition and is rather a device to seek offenders than to reform any.’7