Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  After the ceremony, Elizabeth coyly asked Melville, “How like you my new creation?” Elizabeth had recently conceived the notion that her bonny sweet Robin should marry Mary, Queen of Scots. Perhaps she’d chosen this moment to make Dudley Earl of Leicester so that he might be a stronger candidate for her cousin’s hand. That way he would get his kingdom, and Elizabeth would be assured that her northern neighbor was being governed just the way she would rule it herself.

  But the idea met an early demise. None of the parties truly wanted it, not even Elizabeth. And Dudley (Leicester) didn’t want to be just any redheaded queen’s king consort—he wanted Elizabeth.

  After the notion to marry Leicester to Mary was tabled, Elizabeth and her paramour were as close as ever. People saw them kiss when Leicester visited her chamber in the morning, the queen still in her night-shift or spilling out of her dressing gown.

  So close, and yet so far. Leicester’s willpower could not be expected to last forever.

  In 1565, he commenced a flirtation with “one of the best looking ladies of the court,” Elizabeth’s married cousin and former waiting woman, the beautiful, red-haired Lettice Knollys. Lettice, a granddaughter of Mary Boleyn who had been married at twenty to Walter Devereux, the 1st Earl of Essex, was a near look-alike for Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth retaliated by flirting with other courtiers, which had the intended effect of inflaming Leicester’s jealousy. The two quarreled furiously, accusing each other of casting them aside for another. Elizabeth’s nerves grew raw; where Leicester was concerned, she could not muster her famous ability to conceal her feelings. When Elizabeth learned that he had been arrogant to one of her servants, she exploded in front of the entire court, venting the full measure of her thwarted sexual and emotional frustration.

  “God’s death, my lord, I have wished you well, but my favor is not so locked up for you that others shall not participate thereof. And if you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but one mistress and no master.”

  Their relationship had turned a corner. Leicester didn’t love her any less, but he could no longer hold out hope of being her lover in every sense of the word. He would never bed her. He was tired of being blamed for Elizabeth’s not marrying a foreign prince, and thereby making a politically advantageous match for England. He was tired of her humiliating flirting with other men in front of everyone. He was even tired of her flirting with him, stringing him along for so many years, and never making a commitment.

  But he made one more try. At Christmas 1565, Leicester again asked the queen to marry him. Elizabeth equivocated, telling him she couldn’t give him a reply until early February, at Candlemas, a date that seems rather arbitrary. Buoyed by hope, Leicester began to act as though his marriage and kingship were in the bag, alienating yet more nobles.

  But Elizabeth did not say yes. And the years dragged on.

  In May 1573, Leicester was the object of affection of the twenty-five-year-old widow of Lord Sheffield, a woman with the unfortunate first name of Douglas. Douglas became Leicester’s mistress, but soon demanded marriage from him, since he had compromised her reputation. Leicester—perhaps hoping against hope that Elizabeth would finally come around—caddishly offered Douglas an alternative: she could remain his mistress or he would help her find a suitable husband.

  The lady rejected his offer and instead got her way. That May, Leicester secretly married Douglas. But by the end of 1575, he had tired of her, and the thirty-five-year-old Lettice Knollys, still beautiful, came back into the romantic picture. By now, she had given her husband, the 1st Earl of Essex, five children, although the marriage was not a happy one. When Essex died of dysentery in 1576, his nine-year-old son, Robert, inherited the title. Lettice was now marriageable, although she was deeply in debt.

  Leicester was no longer the dashing figure he had been in his youth. By 1577, he was forty-four years old and past his prime. He’d grown portly, “high colored and red faced,” and had not waged a military campaign in twenty years.

  Despite the wildfire spread of gossip at court, Lettice may not have known about Leicester’s clandestine marriage to Douglas Sheffield. In any event, both Lettice and Leicester behaved as if he were available. Then Lettice discovered she was pregnant and insisted that her lover legitimize the child. Leicester capitulated. In the spring of 1578, he wed Lettice in secret at his estate of Kenilworth, in Wanstead, Essex—a home he had purchased so that he could sneak away from court to be with her.

  An anonymously written note was left at Elizabeth’s garden doorstep, which one can safely assume spilled the beans on Leicester’s marriage to Lettice.

  True, the queen had strung him along for decades, but it stung to learn that he had well and truly moved on. Elizabeth banished him from court for marrying without her permission— which she likely never would have granted. In May, Leicester traveled north to Buxton for the spa waters, and remained away from court for two months.

  And yet, Elizabeth missed him dreadfully. When Leicester returned to court, he still behaved toward her as he had always done, and Lettice’s name—like Amy Robsart’s—was never mentioned. Elizabeth detested Lettice with a vengeance. And now that the woman had taken her bonny sweet Robin from her, Elizabeth did her level best to pretend the new Lady Leicester didn’t exist.

  In her famous speech to the final Parliament of her reign in 1601, known as “the Golden Speech,” Elizabeth remarked, “to be a king and wear a crown is more glorious to them that see it than it is a pleasure to them that bear it.” It was a sentiment that she carried with her daily. Discovering that Leicester had married another—and a near relation who had always been a rival for beauty—must have been the single occasion when Elizabeth most wished herself a mere mortal, a “normal” noblewoman free to choose love with one of her own. The weight of the crown must have felt very heavy during those long days. Leicester’s marriage had put her in a perpetually foul mood. He might be welcomed at court, at her pleasure, but Lettice was pointedly persona non grata.

  Lettice showed up once, so opulently dressed that her appearance rivaled the monarch’s, and Elizabeth utterly lost her temper. In the presence of several courtiers and ladies, she strode up to Lettice and boxed her ears. “As but one sun lights the East, so I shall have but one queen in England!” Elizabeth shouted. The new Countess of Leicester dared not show her face again for years.

  Technically, Leicester was a bigamist; his marriage to Douglas Sheffield, though performed in secret, had been perfectly legal. And although their ardor had mutually cooled, Douglas was devastated when Leicester told her it was over and tried to buy her off with an annuity of £700 per annum (almost $270,000 today) on the proviso that she pretend their marriage never took place. Leicester also demanded custody of their son.

  Douglas ultimately agreed to all of Leicester’s proposals, fearful of some sort of retribution if she did not comply.

  On September 21, 1578, Leicester and Lettice had a more public wedding ceremony. The bride was pregnant, but the baby was stillborn at the end of the year.

  Still smarting from what she viewed as Leicester’s betrayal, in 1579, Elizabeth headed full tilt toward marriage. The youthful duc d’Anjou had sent his envoy, Jean de Simier, to woo Elizabeth in Anjou’s name. Elizabeth behaved like a giddy schoolgirl in his presence—so much so that her councilors got very nervous as to just what sort of proxy wooing de Simier was engaging in.

  Leicester was insanely jealous. Envy gnawed at him even further when the duc d’Anjou himself arrived in England, and proved to be an extremely pleasant surprise to Elizabeth. Rumors of his pockmarked condition had been greatly exaggerated. Anjou was handsome, debonair, charming, suave—and, okay, so he was only twenty-three years old to her forty-five—and she was nuts about him from the start. Despite the vast difference in their ages, their sexual chemistry was powerful. And indeed, despite her years, she still hoped to beget an heir.

  But the queen dithered and delayed and second
-guessed herself, politically, diplomatically, and emotionally. Finally, the French determined that the match was a bad idea after all. Her own Parliament was discouraging the marriage as well. On October 7, Elizabeth burst into tears in front of them, realizing that Anjou represented her last, best hope for some semblance of a normal marriage.

  During the summer of 1580, Douglas Sheffield married Sir Edward Stafford. Elizabeth remained jealous over Douglas’s relationship with Leicester, and she sought to make trouble for Lettice by revealing that Leicester had legally married Douglas, had never divorced her, and therefore, Lettice’s marriage to Leicester was invalid. But when no one could attest to a wedding between Douglas and Leicester, Elizabeth’s attempt to create a rift fizzled.

  That December, Lettice gave birth to another child, Robert, Baron Denbigh, whom she and Leicester lovingly called their “noble imp.”

  In 1584, the duc d’Anjou died of a fever. When the news reached England, Elizabeth erupted in a flood of tears and cried in public for three full weeks. She wore black for six months and referred to herself as “a widow woman who has lost her husband.”

  Leicester lost his noble imp during the summer of 1585 and the grief aged him considerably. He considered retiring to private life in the country, but Elizabeth had need of his martial skills. She dispatched him to the Netherlands in command of an expedition, leading an army of six thousand men and one thousand horses. His young stepson, the Earl of Essex, accompanied him as Master of the Horse. The Dutch treated Leicester like the prince he’d always aspired to be, urging him “to declare himself chief head and Governor General.”

  Perceiving this as an attempt at self-aggrandizement, Elizabeth was so incensed that she withheld the soldiers’ pay and removed Leicester from his commission. But on June 25, 1587, she sent him back to the Netherlands with three thousand troops. However, Anglo-Dutch relations were becoming increasingly tense and Elizabeth recalled him on November 10, displeased with his failure to forge a union with the Netherlands and put the Spanish alliance in check. Back on English soil, he relinquished his post as Master of the Horse, persuading Elizabeth to bestow it on his stepson, Essex.

  In August of 1588, after enjoying the triumphant victory celebrations over the Spanish Armada, the fifty-five-year-old Leicester asked Elizabeth to give him permission to leave London for the healing waters of Buxton. He took the journey by stages, an exhausted and ailing campaigner who had fought his last good fight commanding Elizabeth’s army against the threat of the Spanish invasion.

  On August 29, suffering from ague and fever, he wrote to Elizabeth from Rycote in Oxfordshire: I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon your old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case, I continue still your medicine, and it amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me . . .

  At four a.m. on September 4, Leicester died at his hunting lodge in Cornbury Park, near Woodstock. He was buried beside his son in the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin at Warwick.

  Elizabeth had lost her “brother and best friend,” and was too heartbroken to attend to affairs of state. She shut herself in her bedchamber, refusing to speak to or see anyone, until her treasurer broke down the door, needing to discuss a matter of urgency.

  On the missive from Rycote Elizabeth scrawled “his last letter” and tucked it into a little box that she kept beside her bed. After that came the process of sorting out. She took back Leicester’s estates without a care for Lettice’s welfare. However, as he had acquired it through marriage and not by the crown, Leicester’s town house on the Strand passed to his eldest stepson, Robert, the dashing Earl of Essex, who renamed it Essex House.

  Lettice landed on her feet, though. Within the year she married Sir Christopher Blount, a young friend of her son’s.

  As for Elizabeth . . . after her brilliant defeat of the Spanish Armada, the queen was at the zenith of her powers—“Eliza Triumphant.” If only Leicester had lived to see it.

  ELIZABETH I and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex 1566-1601

  It was a May-December romance between two strong-willed egomaniacs that would end up destroying them both. Elizabeth lost all dignity. And Essex lost his head.

  Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth’s first cousin twice removed, the son of Lettice Knollys, her former lady-in-waiting. His stepfather was Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s precious favorite and platonic paramour.

  A precocious youth, Essex entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of ten, and at fourteen graduated as a Master of Arts. He first came to court in 1584, an eighteen-year-old stripling in the company of his stepfather. Because of his special relationship to Elizabeth’s favorite courtier, Essex secured her preferment as well.

  He accompanied Leicester in 1585 on a successful campaign in the Netherlands—where, for his valor, Leicester knighted him on the field. By May of 1587, Essex was one of the brightest lights at a court renowned for its brain trust. He was a handsome twenty-one-year-old, tall and dashing, with soft auburn hair that grazed his broad shoulders, graceful hands, a lively wit, and an infectious energy.

  Although thirty-three years separated them, Elizabeth could not bear to be a moment without Essex. By day they enjoyed sparkling conversation, long walks, and rides through the royal parks. In the evenings, there was music and dancing, and after everyone had departed for bed, the queen and her young protégé would remain together into the wee hours of the morning, playing cards.

  Ever the clever courtier, Essex knew what his queen desired most. His letters to her contained fervent protestations of love, and the L word was always on his lips. Elizabeth and Essex were “lovers” in the old-fashioned, high-flown style of courtly love. What physical intimacy passed between them—and Elizabeth, though ostensibly a virgin, always had an amorous and flirtatious disposition—was only of the most innocuous variety. No matter how head over heels she seemed, Elizabeth was a canny politician. It seems unlikely she would ever allow any man, especially a callow youth, a power over her by dominating her sexually.

  After England’s spectacular defeat of the Spanish Armada, Essex became hungry to distinguish himself on the field of battle, although it was not where his strengths lay. An older, wiser courtier and philosopher, the twenty-seven-year-old Sir Francis Bacon, took Essex under his wing. Bacon coached Essex on how to behave in the queen’s presence, cautioning him against his customary displays of petulance and bad temper when he didn’t get his way.

  “A man must read formality in your countenance,” Bacon told his friend. There were better ways to accomplish his purpose: “Your Lordship should never be without some particulars afoot, which you should seem to pursue with earnestness and affection, and then let them fall, upon taking knowledge of Her Majesty’s opposition and dislike.”

  Bacon also tried to instill a sense of realism into the idealistic upstart. He urged Essex to aim for an appointment to the Privy Council, astutely suggesting that the witty cavalier fared better in the rarefied atmosphere of the court than amid the deprivations and din of a battlefield.

  But Essex wasn’t listening. He begged Elizabeth to let him join Sir Francis Drake’s Counter Armada, leading the English fleet to raid Corunna and detach Portugal from Philip of Spain’s rule. Elizabeth refused him leave; but Essex flagrantly disobeyed her order. The queen dispatched an angry and frantic letter to Drake: . . . We will and command you that you sequester him from all charge and service and cause him to be safely kept. . . . If [Essex] be now come into the company of the fleet, we straightly charge you that you do forthwith cause him to be sent hither in safe manner. Which, if you do not, you shall look to answer for the same to your smart. For these be no childish actions. Therefore consider well of your doings herein.

  But Essex remained with the English fleet. And on his return, Elizabeth forgave him,
a pattern that characterized their relationship. Aware that the queen’s fondness for him allowed him to get away with just about anything, Essex played the court-favorite card at every possible opportunity. He continually behaved as though he were Elizabeth’s equal, bragging to fellow courtiers that he was capable of mastering her. He treated her with such abominable disrespect that any other man who spoke so rudely to the queen would have been beheaded within the day.

  Elizabeth even bailed him out financially. When Essex’s extravagant spending put him £20,000 (about $7 million today) in the hole, she advanced him £3,000. But then she called in the debt right away. Essex didn’t have the funds. So Elizabeth demanded one of his estates as repayment. Essex forfeited his precious manor at Keyston in Huntingdonshire, but Elizabeth then turned around and gave him a perquisite—the right to farm the customs duties on the imports of sweet wine for a period of years, thereby enabling him to have a steady source of income.

  Elizabeth notoriously bridled with thinly veiled rage when a courtier married, and her reaction was no different when she learned in 1589 that the twenty-three-year-old Essex had wed Frances Sidney, the widowed daughter of Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster. Elizabeth’s objections were voiced loud and clear, but before long she recognized the prudence of the match. The age-appropriate Frances was a virtuous girl from a good family. Nevertheless, Elizabeth pretended that, as his wife, Frances didn’t exist, and continued her flirtations—which, at age fifty-six, were getting a bit gruesome. Elizabeth consoled herself with the notion that the love that she and Essex enjoyed was on a higher plane. Frances could have her cozy domesticity.

  In 1591, after the French king, Henri IV, appealed to Elizabeth for aid to help the Protestant Huguenots fight the Spaniards and the Catholic League, she agreed to send four thousand men.

  Three times Essex begged his sovereign lady to put him in command of this special force, and each time, Elizabeth refused. Finally, he knelt before her for two hours and refused to budge until she relented.