by Derek Wilson
As the aged queen went into her last decline in March 1603. Sir Robert, now in his thirtieth year, was among the many hopefuls who aimed to achieve prominence in the service of the new king. Dudley considered that the first thing he needed to do was lay claim to the family titles. In this he, not unnaturally, had the eager support of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Leigh. Before James reached his new capital Robert wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking him to hear evidence that would prove that his father and mother had been lawfully married and that, therefore, he was the rightful holder of the earldoms of Leicester and Warwick. He knew that this action would distress several people and would prove particularly painful to his step-mother, whom he had no wish to annoy and would embarrass his mother. When he approached his mother Douglas Sheffield (now Lady Stafford) for evidence that he had been born in lawful wedlock she, understandably, did not want to rake up painful memories or testify in court that she and her current husband, Sir Edward Stafford, had lived for years in what was technically an adulterous relationship.
Other social and emotional barriers stood between Robert and the establishment of his legitimacy. On the deaths of his father and uncle their peerage titles had fallen into abeyance and some of the lands attached to them had escheated to the crown. The nearest claimant, failing the appearance of a male heir, was Robert Sidney, the only surviving brother of the hero of Zutphen. The two Roberts were the only living grandsons of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Robert Sidney, like his late brother, was a courtier-soldier, actively involved in campaigning in the Low Countries throughout the 1590s. Had he perished in the war against Spain (something Robert Dudley might secretly have hoped for) there would have been no obstacle to his cousin’s ambitions. Not only did Sidney not conveniently get himself killed, he proved himself a far more effective intriguer than Dudley. The possibility of reviving the Dudley titles had been virtually non-existent during the lifetime of the old queen. Elizabeth was extremely niggardly when it came to handing out peerages. When Sidney had approached her with a petition for the Lisle barony (appended to the Earldom of Warwick) she had returned him a cold answer. Therefore, like Dudley, he fastened his hopes on James Stuart. In 1588 he had been sent as an envoy to the Scottish king and had, thereafter, worked assiduously on James’s behalf at the English court. The tactics worked perfectly. The over-emotional James embraced him as a friend and treated him generously in the flurry of grants which marked the beginning of the reign. On 13 May, Robert became Baron Sidney of Penshurst and within weeks Queen Anne had appointed him her chamberlain.
Technically such displays of royal favour to a potential rival claimant should have made no difference to Dudley’s action in the ecclesiastical court. Matrimonial issues fell within the purlieus of canon law and Robert had received permission to present his evidence before Dr Zachary Babington, the archbishop’s chancellor in his Court of Audience. The proceedings were, essentially, very simple: the court would hear sworn depositions from witnesses and decide whether or not they proved that a lawful wedding had taken place in May 1573. If the decision was in Robert’s favour it would then have been a matter for the heralds to examine the legitimacy of his claim to the family honours. An unusually virulent outbreak of plague delayed the sitting of the court, which was eventually moved – significantly – to the Consistory Court of Lichfield, Dudley country. Sir Robert, however, did not wait in idleness throughout the summer months. He instituted a civil proceeding against one of his own servants for calling him ‘bastard’. This was almost certainly a contrived case, since once the taunt of illegitimacy was adjudged slanderous, it logically followed that Sir Robert had been born in wedlock. The Court of Audience was convened on 27 September.
By now the confrontation between the two Roberts had become a cause célèbre. Court and capital were buzzing with gossip about this deliciously sensational case. Dudley’s opponents matched his energy, their activity being largely taken up with securing the support of king and Council. The main thrust of their argument was that Dudley had been guilty of lese-majesty in assuming a title which it was in the king’s prerogative alone to grant. They accused him of publicly calling himself Earl of Leicester and providing his servants with livery incorporating the bear and ragged staff badge. All this formed the basis of a charge of criminal conspiracy brought against Dudley, Leigh and Babington, as a result of which an order in council was issued on 18 October for the staying of the case in Lichfield and the impounding of all documents. Three months later Lettice, Countess of Leicester, followed this with a charge of defamation against her stepson. Robert Dudley, whose only offence was trying to prove something that, if true, was inconvenient to some members of the Stuart establishment, now found himself on the defensive, his initial claim indefinitely shelved. It was all turning very nasty.
The trial of Dudley and his assoociates did not begin until 22 June 1604, the vitriolic Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke leading the prosecution. Coke’s personal agenda consisted of two items: he wished to further his own career by energetically pursuing those identified by the king as his enemies and he was determined to assert the supremacy of the common law over canon law. On the first day of the trial he did little but harangue the defendants and disparage their witnesses. Then the case was adjourned – for eleven months.
As week followed frustrating week Robert became increasingly despondent. He was being outmanouevred and he knew it. But it was not just the blatant manipulation of justice that upset him. Everything he saw and heard about the new regime was depressing. James dispensed with the services of some of Elizabeth’s most able servants, replacing them with accomplished sycophants or his own countrymen. The manners of the king and his Scottish cronies seemed uncouth to those who had been trained in the household of the Virgin Queen. Council members and court officials complained that James paid little attention to business and more to the pleasures of the chase. In his dealings with parliament he was insensitive in the extreme. Gone were the well-practised, honeyed speeches with which Elizabeth had wooed or bamboozled her Lords and Commons. James harangued them and made it clear that he expected them to do his bidding. The deterioration seemed to be symbolized by the new king’s treatment of Sir Walter Raleigh. Robert can have taken no plesure from the news that this accomplished Elizabethan had been arrested on a trumped-up treason charge, violently denounced in the courtroom by Coke and condemned to death, only to have the sentence commuted in a melodramatic last-minute show of royal clemency. The injustice and indignities that Dudley was suffering seemed to be symptomatic of the misfortunes being visited on the country.
It is likely that, by the time his trial was resumed in May 1605, he had abandoned any hope of a fair outcome and already had in mind the course of action he would take if the case went against him. His defence was that since he had evidence of his parents’ lawful marriage he was within his rights to test that evidence in court. Coke ensured that the substantive issue was never considered. He devoted his energies to denouncing Dudley for bribing men and women to testify on his behalf and to branding the witnesses as rogues and jail fodder. If there remained any shred of possibility that the Council and the king were remotely interested in the truth it was shattered during the course of the trial by a royal act of breathtaking, cynical disregard for the proprieties. In a display of support for his friend and a deliberate snub of Dudley, James bestowed upon Robert Sidney the title of Viscount Lisle. Days later, when the Lord Chancellor handed down his verdict, he left no doubt as to what the entire proceedings had been about. The principal defendants were acquitted but Dudley’s witnesses were fined and denounced as perjurers who were to be permanently debarred from ever giving evidence in a court of law. All the documents in the case were to be seized and suppressed at the king’s pleasure.
Among those who risked loss of royal favour by supporting Sir Robert in court were Lord Howard of Effingham, Baron Dudley and Edmund, Lord Sheffield (Douglas’s son). This stain on the reputation of James I was eventually acknowl
edged by his son. In 1644 Charles I felt bound to do what he could by way of recompense. Kings, like modern politicians, are not prone to apologizing for their blunders and misdemeanours, which makes Charles’s letter patent a remarkable document:
our dear father, not knowing the truth of the lawful birth of the said Sir Robert (as we piously believe), granted away the titles of the said Earldoms to others . . . we having a very deep sense of the great injuries done to the said Sir Robert Dudley, and the Lady Alice Dudley, and their children; and that we are of opinion that in justice and equity these possesions so taken from them do rightly belong unto them . . . [we hold] ourselves in honour and consicence obliged to make them reparation.6
It is easy to imagine the sense of outrage and alienation Robert must have felt, after all that he had done for the Crown and all that his family had done over four generations. He immediately applied for permission to spend three years in foreign travel. On July 2 he left England with a small entourage. For his enemies at court this only sweetened their triumph. Leicester’s base son, the presumptuous upstart, was crawling away from England with his tail between his legs. It was several days before news arrived from Calais that put a wholly different – and scandalous – complexion on his flight.
On his departure Dudley had been attended by a smooth-faced young page. Once clear of the country this young ‘man’ was revealed to be Elizabeth Southwell, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Howard of Effingham. More than that, she was one of Queen Anne’s maids of honour. Worse was to come. When the king dispatched officials to demand that the French return them he was informed that Robert and Elizabeth had declared themselves Catholics and claimed sanctuary. The French king refused to send them back to face inevitable persecution in their own country and they were allowed to continue their journey. Dudley had successfully cocked a snook at James Stuart by dramatically rejecting all the new regime stood for.
How much of all this was a spontaneous reaction and how much had been planned? Robert’s love affair with Elizabeth was genuine. The couple remained together until Elizabeth’s death in 1631, by which time she had borne thirteen children. Their relationship took everyone by surprise but is unlikely to have been a whirlwind romance. They had known each other for several years for they were distant cousins and Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir Robert Southwell, a seasoned mariner and one of Dudley’s old comrades in arms. She was obviously as spirited as her lover and ready to renounce everything for him. The elopement meant, of course, that Dudley was abandoning Alice, his wife, and the four daughters she had given birth to in their seven years of married life. When the runaways reached Lyon they obtained a papal dispensation to marry, on the highly dubious grounds that Robert’s union with Alice was voided by a previous contract. Robert’s relationship with his wife had gone sour during the recent time of stress and may have been undermined by the ‘pushiness’ of the ambitious Leigh family, who unremittingly nagged and pestered Robert to claim his ancient rights. (Alice’s campaign continued unhampered by her husband’s defection and, in 1644, her persistence was rewarded by a royal licence granting her permission to style herself ‘Duchess Dudley’.) The extent to which religion played a part in Robert’s decision to quit Protestant England may be doubted. He later claimed that he had long been a covert Catholic but this did not prevent him advising James, in 1612, to increase his revenues by stringent fines imposed on stubborn Catholics. Claiming the protection of the Roman church was a clever way of ensuring that diplomatic efforts to secure his arrest and forcible return to England would be unsuccessful. We must conclude that Dudley’s flight in July 1605 was well prepared. It certainly achieved the result he had intended. Every scrap of news of the celebrity outlaws was eagerly snapped up in England and the widespread sympathy expressed for them added to the discomfiture of the Sidneys and their allies.
Dudley had no doubt about his eventual destination. Florence was a magnet for men of refinement and talent. The miraculous days of the High Renaissance were past but they left a long radiant afterglow and no capital in Europe was more cultured and civilized under the rule of the enlightened and immensely wealthy Medici grand dukes. The current incumbent was Ferdinando I, an exuberant and conscientious governor and a generous patron of the arts and sciences. It was he who gave employment to Galileo and he who commissioned the first opera, Jacopo Peri’s Daphne. No one threw a better party than Ferdinando. The celebrations of his marriage in 1589 had gone on for three weeks and were reckoned as the most sumptuous that had ever been seen in any European court. This was the kind of heroic spectacle that would certainly have appealed to the son of the man who had masterminded the grand Kenilworth entertainments, of which people still spoke. The grand duke was an avid collector and builder – and not just for his own, private satisfaction. The Boboli Gardens and the Uffizi as well as the extended Pitti Palace were just some of the projects upon which he lavished enthusiastic attention.
But it was not as an expert in state showmanship that Dudley sought the patronage of Ferdinando I. The grand duke was assiduously strengthening Tuscany’s political and commercial position. To achieve his goals he was willing to buy the best brains in Europe. Scholars, businessmen and technical experts came from many lands to the city which was governed by a remarkably welcoming, tolerant and broadminded regime. Two of Ferdinando’s projects in particular attracted Dudley. One was the development of Livorno (Leghorn). The grand duke’s father had begun the transformation of this fishing village on the Tyrrhenian coast into a major port in order to provide Tuscany with its own commercial and military outlet to the Mediterranean and Ferdinando energetically continued the building of the Porto Medicio. As Tuscany emerged as a major player in Mediterranean maritime endeavour it needed protection from the scourge of the shipping lanes – the Barbary corsairs. Ferdinando determined to build up a formidable navy for this purpose. Robert Dudley offered his undoubted expertise and experience in this area. The Grand Duke Ferdinando agreed and warmly welcomed the runaway couple from England. They never returned. Robert Dudley lived out the rest of his life as a servant of the Medicis and died at his villa just outside Florence in 1649.
It is at this point that our story – though not the Dudley line – comes to an end. It does so in a spectacular fashion, for Robert Dudley’s life at the court of a foreign prince provides the final irony in a family saga replete with ironical twists and turns. Put very simply, Robert was the most talented member of the dynasty. Had the first Stuart had the intelligence to recognize, as each of the Tudors had recognized, that the Dudleys were a loyal and gifted family, there is no doubt that Robert would have achieved great things for his native country. A list of his accomplishments in Italy strikingly makes the point:
He oversaw the development of Livorno.
He drained the Pisan marshes which gave the city access to the sea and Livorno.
He wrote the three volume Dell ’Arcano del Mare, a magnificent treatise covering all matters to do with navigation and shipbuilding.
He designed and supervised the building of several new ships for the Tuscan navy.
He invented new navigational instruments.
His highly innovative mind turned itself to subjects as varied as training gundogs to retrieve and publishing a collection of herbal remedies.
He enjoyed a reputation as a leading member of the Tuscan intelligentsia.
Dudley’s achievements and qualities were openly recognized and rewarded in his adopted land. The Grand Duchess Maria Maddelena appointed him her Chamberlain. The pope enrolled him among the papal nobility. In 1620, the Emperor, Ferdinand II, recognizing Robert’s ‘singular integrity of life and morals, his prudence, knowledge of affairs and rare ingenious inventions’ proclaimed him Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick in the Holy Roman Empire, making it clear that this was not a new creation but an acknowledgement of Dudley’s hereditary rights.
This made no apparent impact on James I. Nor did various approaches essayed by Robert Dudley. Between 1
612 and 1614, when his reputation was firmly established and his popularity in Florence much spoken of on the diplomatic network, he wrote a clutch of pamphlets aimed at drawing himself to the attention of the English king. Most of them related to naval matters but the most remarkable was a highly Machiavellian treatise entitled, How to Bridle the Exhorbitances of Parliament. In it Dudley gave various items of advice designed to appeal to a monarch who had fallen out with the Commons, which James described as the ‘house of hell’. The writer recommended the strategic placing of manned royal forts throughout the kingdom as a means of nipping in the bud any signs of disaffection. This and other measures might be funded by an annual land tax to be collected by royal officials without parliamentary ratification. Among the various other financial levies Dudley recommended to enhance government revenue were a series of imposts on Catholics as payment for adherence to their religion. All subjects should be required, on pain of death, to swear an oath of allegiance. The king, Dudley advised, should normally rule by proclamation, ‘without further consent of a Parliament, or need to call them at all in such cases, considering that the Parliament in all matters . . . ought to be subject unto your Majesty’s will.’7 Such advice, assuming James ever read it, would have reinforced his own divine right prejudices. They did not, however, remove the prejudice he entertained about the man who had so insolently snubbed him seven years before. Six years later he drew a final line under the exile’s hope by reviving the earldom of Leicester in favour of Robert Sidney. The rift was complete and neither Robert Dudley nor his progeny would ever pledge themselves to be ‘droit et loyal’ to the Stuart line as they had to their Tudor predecessors. Robert and Elizabeth’s thirteen children included five strapping sons who survived into adulthood. We may regard this as the last reproach of fate to the shrivelled Tudor dynasty.