by Derek Wilson
Now the true value of Dudley’s inglorious Netherlands campaign could be appreciated. Parma’s failure to overrun the United Provinces meant that he had not gained command of the ports of Holland and Zeeland and had not neutralized the United Provinces’ navy. As a result his invasion barges remained pinned down in Nieuport and Dunkirk and Medina-Sidonia’s harassed ships could find no haven in which to repair, revictual and regroup. The Spaniards found themselves running before a gathering storm and between two alien shores.
This did not mean that Leicester’s work was done. He was responsible for the defence of the realm. Medina-Sidonia or Parma might yet succeed in getting men ashore somewhere. Catholic dissidents at home, anticipating Spanish aid, might raise the standard of revolt. Dispatches poured in and had to be responded to. On 9 August there came a report of a rumoured Spanish landing at Dungeness. On 12 August, the Earl of Huntingdon wrote from Newcastle deploring the lack of preparedness in the North
‘. . . if there be doubt of the enemy his looking this way, I trust the defences will soon be repaired. If I thought otherwise my mislike of my case here would be greater than yet it is, though, in truth, it is such as, happily, your Lordship would not think it to be . . .’26
He even received appeals from the Netherlands where Dutch and English garrison commanders still looked to him for help. Sir William Russell at Flushing reported his continual altercations with the States General who were trying to undermine his authority and asked Dudley ‘by all means to frustrate their purposes’ or else arrange his own replacement by ‘someone more plausible and more agreeable unto their honours’.27
Not for another week was it clear that the threat of invasion had passed. Just as earlier Dudley had been pressed to gather together and equip his force at great speed, so now he was instructed by money-conscious politicians to break up his camp without delay. He was not reluctant to comply. The strain of the last weeks had taken its toll. His old stomach ailment was troubling him again and he was running a temperature. This did not stop him returning to court in triumph. His army had not fired a single shot in anger but he might well feel vindicated. Elizabeth’s England had at last, as he had always advocated, stood defiant and alone against the might of the Catholic tyrant, trusting only in the stout hearts of the people and the protection of the Lord of Hosts. As he rode back through London at the head of a contingent of picked soldiers and received the cheers of the relieved citizens lining the streets and leaning from upper windows it seemed that his unpopularity had, temporarily at least, been put aside and he was welcomed as a hero. At the height of the crisis Elizabeth had once again contemplated raising Dudley to a position of pre-eminence under the Crown. She had letters patent drawn up naming Dudley Lieutenant Governor of England and Ireland. In the event she was only dissuaded from signing them by the fervent arguments of Cecil and Hatton. It was a return to events of 1562. Their relationship since then had gone through violent ups and downs but still in Elizabeth’s eyes there was only one man who could govern the country in the event of anything happening to her. That man was Robert Dudley.
Dudley was not well enough to stay more than a couple of days at court. Elizabeth readily gave permission for her Robin to take the waters at Buxton and gave him some medicine prescribed by her own physicians. Robert and Lettice left Wanstead on 26 August to make their way by easy stages to the Midlands spa. On the 28th they were guests of Lady Norreys at Rycote and from there, the following morning, Dudley wrote one of those many inconsequential letters to Elizabeth, enquiring after her health, assuring her of his loyalty, thanking her for a ‘token’ just received. Whatever this ‘token’ was, it was yet further proof that even in the press of affairs following on the defeat of Spain, he was not far from the queen’s thoughts. He assured her majesty that ‘I continue still your medicine and find that [it] amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me.’28
He was putting a brave face on it for he was now very ill. He managed to travel another twenty-five miles, perhaps with an overnight stay in Oxford, and reached his lodge at Cornbury. There he took to his bed. After several days and nights of pain he died on 4 September.
V
THE EXILE
18
Tudors and Dudleys
Elizabeth was heartbroken by the death of her old friend and constant companion, so much so that she was incapacitated by grief. Three days later Walsingham reported ‘she will not suffer anybody to [have] access to her, being very much grieved with the death of the Lord Steward.’1 According to the, perhaps exaggerated, story that reached Bernardino de Mendoza in Paris, Elizabeth went into purdah until Cecil ordered the doors to her privy apartments to be forced open. The ex-ambassador’s informant added the comment that if the queen was distraught by Dudley’s death she was quite alone in experiencing such an emotion. He was wrong. Many people mourned Robert Dudley’s passing. It was an immense loss to the Puritan movement, to his many protégés and to his wide circle of friends. His widow had him buried in the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick and raised over his remains one of the most spectacular, polychrome monuments of the age. The Latin inscription on the tomb listed all his offices and ended with the words that ‘his most sorrowful wife’ had raised the memorial ‘to the best and dearest of husbands’. Despite being thrice married, Lettice elected to be interred beside Robert when she died. The Beauchamp Chapel became a Dudley mausoleum rather than, as had been originally intended, a chantry chapel for Richard Beauchamp, the great warrior baron. Thus linked in death with a chivalrous past, the Dudleys through this magnificent memorial still compel our attention.
Over the next few years numerous tributes were written to Dudley’s memory by men who had nothing to gain from flattering the dead. The popular dramatist, John Lyly, eulogized Dudley in his play, Endimion, The Man in the Moon, which was acted before the queen at New Year 1591, told the Robert and Elizabeth story under the allegorical guise of a lovesick shepherd’s devotion to Cynthia, the moon goddess. The piece ends with Endimion being admitted to immortality by a kiss from his chosen deity. One wonders if it brought a tear to the royal eye. Elizabeth’s continuing devotion to the memory of her Sweet Robin is well known, as is the story that she kept among her dearest treasures ‘his last letter’.
Elizabeth was no proto-feminist who insisted that anything a king could do she could do better. ‘This kingdom hath had many noble and victorious princes,’ she conceded. ‘I will not compare with any of them in wisdom, fortitude and other virtues but . . . in love, care, sincerity and justice I will compare with any prince you ever had or ever shall have.’2 It was to represent the masculine qualities she lacked that, for thirty years, she kept Robert Dudley beside her. Just as Victoria felt incomplete without her Albert, so for Elizabeth Robert’s death left a gap in her life that could not be filled. She had looked to him for emotional support and to give expression to those aggressive aspects of governance that did not come easily to her. She did not always accept his advice and she was wary about allowing him to be thought of as her master but he was always a part of that phenomenon that was Elizabeth Regina.
Notwithstanding the queen’s profound affection for Leicester, it was she who inflicted on him the cruellest disaster – the dashing of his dynastic hopes. Her all-consuming jealousy had obliged Robert to disavow one marriage and to suffer the distress of having his second (or third) wife denied her place among the social elite. But, not only did Lettice have to endure this perpetual snub, she also experienced the painful failure of being unable to fulfil her first wifely duty. She was forty-four when her only son by Robert died and there was no realistic possibility of her producing further heirs. There is, therefore, an underlying sadness about the magnificent Dudley tombs in the Beauchamp Chapel at St Mary’s Warwick. Ambrose’s monument is also here. He survived his brother by only seventeen months. The wound which he had sustained in the 1563 campaign had never fully healed and, in February 1590, he had to endure a gruesome leg amputation. He did not survive the o
peration. His body was brought to the chapel where Robert and the ‘Noble Imp’ were already interred. The ‘Good Lord Warwick’ had no children by any of his three wives. Therefore, what we witness today in the Beauchamp Chapel is the end of a dynasty. The legitimate line of descent from Sir John of Atherington, after providing the Tudor crown with a remarkable succession of loyal and talented servants, had come to an end.
Or had it?
Leicester did leave behind him a son, another Robert Dudley. The ‘base son’, born of Lady Douglas Sheffield, was a lively stripling of fourteen when his father died. He inherited the bulk of his father’s estate and, shortly afterwards, his uncle’s. Young Robert was now one of the richest men in England. He was also the most talented member of the family. He displayed all his father’s charm, athleticism and showmanship and early developed the courtly graces necessary to commend him to the queen. But, beneath such surface attributes, lay a keen intellect and an enquiring mind. Robert studied at Oxford where Leicester hired Thomas Chaloner as the boy’s tutor. Chaloner was one of the leaders of a new generation of philosopher-scholars, fascinated by travel and the natural phenomena. No one could have been better suited to train the mind of a young man of catholic tastes, eager to experience everything life had to offer. Robert was naturally excited by the events of 1588 and, though too young to see action, he was well placed to experience something of the thrill of those anxious and stirring months. Not only was his father in charge of the queen’s land forces, but his maternal uncle, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, was the Lord Admiral who saw off Spanish Philip’s invasion attempt. Robert was present at Tilbury when Elizabeth reviewed her troops there and his father commissioned him as colonel of a regiment of foot. The ardent teenager who had been brought up in awe of his cousin, Sir Philip Sidney, was determined to follow in the hero’s footsteps and show that he, too, had inherited a full measure of the Dudley spirit.
When Robert was subsequently welcomed at the royal court it was as much for his own sake as in memory of his father. He was of course, only a minor figure in Elizabeth’s entourage and extant records make little mention of him. However, such references as do exist suggest that the young man was being watched – doubtless to see if he was a chip off the old block. One gossip recorded with glee that Dudley had suffered a period of banishment for kissing one of the queen’s maids of honour in full view of her majesty. However, Robert did have an excuse for such wanton behaviour: the lady in question, Margaret Cavendish, was his wife. The match must have had royal approval, for otherwise the groom’s punishment would have been much more severe. Perhaps Margaret’s father had obtained the wardship of this wealthy young man of such prestigious stock. The Cavendishes themselves were a long-established Suffolk family with strong court connections but they were not socially of the first rank. Whatever his feelings for his young bride, Robert may well have had very specific reasons for welcoming the match. It brought him into close contact with Margaret’s cousin, Thomas Cavendish, the hero of the hour.
On 10 September 1588, Cavendish added a cherry to the cake of national triumph when he sailed his storm-battered ship, the Desire, and its exhausted crew into Plymouth and became the second captain to make a successful circumnavigation of the globe. When, in 1591, Cavendish set sail again on an expedition to follow up the commercial contacts he had already made in the Orient, he took with him two ships provided by his seventeen-year-old cousin, the galleon Leicester and the smaller Roebuck. Meanwhile Robert set himself to study all he could about shipbuilding, navigation, marine warfare and everything to do with mastering the sea and establishing England’s place among the leading maritime nations. Cavendish’s new venture proved to be a lamentable failure and the admiral himself was among those who did not survive. That did nothing to deter his cousin from committing his energies and more of his fortune to trans-oceanic adventure.
The first fruits of this enthusiasm and industry took the form of a voyage to the West Indies, which set sail in December 1594. For this venture Robert had not only gathered his own charts and rutters and handpicked his officers from among England’s most experienced mariners, he had also designed his own flagship, proudly dubbed after the heraldic device of Warwick – the Bear. The original plan had been for a joint expedition with Sir Walter Raleigh to search for the fabled El Dorado but the other leader could not assemble his ships and men in time and Dudley eventually departed without him. In doing so he made a worrisome enemy. Raleigh later claimed that Dudley intended to steal a march on him and could not be content to be guided by a more experienced partner. How much truth there was in this we cannot now know. It seems likely that a shared venture would not have been a happy one. Both captains were strong individualists and disagreements at sea might have had more disastrous consequences than the quarrels which later broke out between them.
Historians are rightly wary of highly-coloured tales about Elizabeth’s bold, romantic, adventure-loving, Spaniard-bashing ‘sea dogs’, more suited to Hollywood spectaculars than sober historical analysis, but it is difficult to read the accounts of Dudley’s voyage, which appeared soon afterwards among the collection of ‘principal navigations’ made by Richard Hakluyt, without being seduced by the patriotic and chivalric braggadocio displayed by this young English conquistador. Here he claims the island of Trinidad for his queen:
. . . we caused the trumpets to sound solemnly three several times, out company trooping round. In the midst marched Wyatt, bearing the Queen’s arms wrapped in a white silk scarf edged with deep silver lace . . . having the General’s colours displayed . . .3
He fastened to a tree a lead plaque proclaiming that Robert Dudley had taken possession of the land in the name of her sacred majesty and swearing, ‘with his sword’ to defend this claim ‘against any knight in the whole world’.
During the six-month voyage, Dudley dispatched a party of men several kilometres up the Orinoco to see what could be discovered of the land of gold, took some Spanish merchant prizes, sank nine other vessels and picked a fight with a larger man-o’-war. He then returned to great acclaim at court. A eulogistic, not to say sycophantic, account of the voyage was written by one of Robert’s captains, Thomas Wyatt. Its objective seems to have been to commend the young admiral to some prominent member of the government and the author omitted no opportunity to paint Dudley in the most heroic of colours. Thus, when trying conclusions with the Spanish warship, Dudley, ‘came forth unarmed, having only his leading staff in his hand, saluted, and took his standing on the open deck, where he might best see and be seen of his enemies’. In the thick of battle round shot and wooden splinters were flying all round him but he stood his ground unflinching even when a missle ‘struck the very blade of his leading staff into many pieces, going within a handful of his head, having before torn the sails, cut the shrouds, and pierced the ship very near the place of his standing’.4
We live in an age that tends to be cynical of such tales of heroism and views with suspicion any idealism that expresses itself in terms of national pride or colonial ambition. John Guy has written, ‘Although eulogized as naval commanders, strategists and imperial pioneers, the Elizabethan “sea dogs” were motivated by greed not altruism’.5 Such black and white judgements obscure the mindset of a man like Robert Dudley. His motives were mixed. While he undoubtedly looked for financial return in his quest for prizes and new sources of commercial wealth, there can be no doubt of his intense national pride and his passionate interest in maritime adventure. The defeat of the 1588 Armada was very far from being the end of the conflict with Spain. The navy, augmented by privateers and hired merchantment, was the realm’s first line of attack and defence. Robert Dudley was eager to serve prominently in its ranks.
The next campaign in the sea war with Spain was planned for the summer of 1596. Howard of Effingham was given command of a vast Anglo–Dutch fleet of well over a hundred ships (sources number the force at between 110 and 150 vessels) which was to convey to Spain 10,000 troops under the comman
d of the Earl of Essex, Robert’s stepbrother. The expedition’s objective was to destroy as many of Philip’s ships as possible and frustrate his invasion plans. In this great national endeavour Dudley was given command of the 500-ton Nonpareil. He was in the thick of the action when the invaders fell upon Cadiz, fired the town and destroyed twenty-six men-o’-war as well as several smaller vessels. At Faro, on the Portuguese coast, the outward-bound Indies fleet was burned at anchor by its own leaders to prevent it falling into enemy hands. All in all, the English captains could congratulate themselves on a successful piece of work, especially those who profited handsomely from the plunder of Cadiz. Dudley’s full satisfaction had to wait until the triumphant return to Plymouth. There he was publicly knighted, ‘in the open street, when the Lords General came from the sermon’.
Returned to his estates, Sir Robert now gave his mind to establishing himself as a figure of consequence in English society. His wife, Margaret, had died of the plague while he had been away in the Caribbean and he now married Alice Leigh, the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, a Warwickshire neighbour. Throughout the remaining years of the dying reign he divided his time between court and county, largely pursuing his maritime interests. Most of his energies were absorbed in fitting out a new and more ambitious enterprise; a trading venture to exploit the contacts that Cavendish had made in the Orient. Having dispatched his three ships at the end of 1596, he waited impatiently for their return as the century drew towards its close. But no news of their fate ever came, and Robert never discovered what a later generation was able to piece together from Portuguese records, that his sailors had all perished from storm, disease and enemy action in the Indian Ocean. Further misfortune awaited him at home. In 1601, the Earl of Essex fell from favour and, gathering around him a motley band of malcontents and hotheads impatient with the regime of the aged queen and her greybeard advisers, attempted an armed coup. When it failed, the earl and his closest confederates were executed. Several others spent shorter or longer terms in prison. Still more found themselves under the cloud of suspicion and royal disfavour. Dudley was among this latter group. Whether he had taken any part in his step-brother’s foolish plotting or whether he simply fell foul of the anti-Essex faction (of which Raleigh was a prominent member) we do not know.