His Last Letter

by Jeane Westin

  There was a last letter of a single page. But was there a second page to the surviving letter from Robert to the queen? He knew he was dying. I could not imagine that he would have gone from her after a lifetime of intimacy without expressing his deepest feelings and memories . . . more than, “I kiss your feet.” If there were a second page to his last letter, Elizabeth could not have allowed it to survive, though she saved the page she could and kept it beside her bed in her treasure box until she died.

  The intensity of Elizabeth’s grief expressed when she locked herself into her privy chamber for three days (some sources say four days), refusing drink and food, tells us that she was shaken profoundly. What she felt during those long days and nights, I have imagined.

  What happened to Douglass Sheffield after she was sent from court? She eventually remarried and spent years in Paris. She always claimed that the Earl of Leicester had married her, but there were no witnesses, no priest and no documentation. A few years after Elizabeth died, Douglass petitioned an English court to recognize the marriage and name her son Robert as the earl’s heir. The court denied each petition, after which Douglass’s son, the younger Robert Dudley, took himself to Italy, leaving his wife and children, remarried and became wealthy and titled on his own.

  Lettice, Robert’s second wife, was hastily remarried to her son Essex’s young friend Sir Christopher Blount, only to lose both son and husband to the headman’s ax when Essex rebelled against Elizabeth’s rule a decade later. Lettice did not marry a fourth time, but lived on well into the next century, dying at the exceptional age, for that or any other time, of ninety-one years.

  Learning that Lettice and Blount were with Robin at Rycote when he died, Elizabeth ordered an autopsy to rule out rumors that the Earl of Leicester had been poisoned. Not satisfied with a negative finding, she hounded Lettice to pay back all that Leicester owed the Crown, which took most of what he had left his wife. With matters of money, Elizabeth did not forgive.

  Although Essex at the height of his influence with the queen managed to gain an audience for his mother, Elizabeth hedged again and, according to most historians, did not meet with her.

  Did Lettice come to Leicester’s bed dressed as Elizabeth? The story is apocryphal, but possible. Her resemblance to the queen was well-known and discussed by many and could not have escaped the Earl of Leicester’s notice.

  The resemblance between Leicester in his youth and his stepson, the Earl of Essex, Lettice’s son, was also noted by several contemporaries and was hinted at in the 2006 movie starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth. We’ll never know for certain if Essex was Leicester’s son, but the dates match. If I have further maligned Lettice’s already blemished legacy, I apologize.

  In the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, many in her court, including foreign ambassadors, thought she and Robert would marry, and rumors circulated throughout England and the Continent that they were married and that Elizabeth was pregnant. It was everywhere observed that they behaved with intimacy, touching, whispering and having furious arguments, with Robert stalking off and Elizabeth calling him back as they both cried. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and the councilor closest to her for nearly forty years, thought the queen and the Earl of Leicester were lovers as late as 1572. We will never know for a certainty, which leaves the door wide-open for a writer’s imagination and novels like this one.

  As always, I thank Shirley Parenteau, my first gentle reader; “Lady” Ashley Lucas, my beck-and-call IT savior; and any number of booksellers in the U.S. and the U.K. who found requested books by long-out-of-print and almost forgotten scholars, especially the wonderful biographer Frederick Chamberlin, who deserves not to be forgotten.

  Finally, and as always, I acknowledge the genius of my editor, Ellen Edwards, and the encouragement and support of my agent, Danielle Egan-Miller. Recognition also should go to my patient, supportive husband, Gene, and my wonderful daughter, Cara.

  COPY OF HIS LAST LETTER IN MODERN ENGLISH

  I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon your poor 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 find that (it) amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my wonted prayer for your Majesty’s most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycote, this Thursday morning, ready to take on my Journey, by Your Majesty’s most faithful and obedient servant,

  R. Leicester

  Even as I had writ thus much, I received Your Majesty’s token by Young Tracey.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeane Westin began her writing life as a freelance journalist, then wrote a number of nonfiction books and finally came to her first and true love, historical novels. She published two novels, with Simon & Schuster and Scribner, in the late 1980s and after a long hiatus is once again indulging her passion for history. She lives in California with her husband, Gene, near their daughter, Cara, and has been rehabilitating a two-story Tudor cottage complete with dovecote for over a decade. You can reach her at www.jeanewestin.com.

  READERS GUIDE

  HIS LAST LETTER

  ELIZABETH I AND THE EARL OF LEICESTER

  JEANE WESTIN

  A CONVERSATION WITH JEANE WESTIN

  Q. Much has been written about Elizabeth I.What inspired you to write His Last Letter and how does it differ from other novels about the Virgin Queen?

  A. So much of my research into Elizabeth I’s reign from 1559 until 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada’s defeat, involved her relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.They seldom parted without great pain on each side, and his almost immediate illnesses brought her running to him. I wanted to explore just what this relationship had meant in their private times, the parts of their lives they kept hidden forever. Elizabeth, although severe at times in her desire to be a supreme ruler, was a conflicted woman. I wondered what that conflict meant to Elizabeth and to her Robin in terms of everyday denial; the changing but constant hope and rejection Robert suffered; and the queen’s overarching fear of losing him, which made her reluctant to allow him out of her sight.

  Also, I wondered how their love affected the important events of her reign and, especially, why such a charismatic man clung to the dream of marrying her for so long. . . . What reason could he have had other than the tantalizing promise of marriage and his own deeply felt emotion?

  Including Leicester, Elizabeth had thirty-four suitors during her lifetime. She used foreign marriage negotiations as a way to forge alliances or to delay attacks by France and Spain on her half-island, as Pope Sixtus termed it, and succeeded brilliantly.The constant threat of a foreign marriage, which would have meant Robert’s inevitable dismissal from court, or even death, must have taken a toll on him. I wondered how he coped with that fear and his gradually fading hopes.

  Q. How does His Last Letter differ from other Tudor novels?

  A. I’ve read many, but I don’t claim to have read them all. I believe that there are as many possible “portraits” of this great but ultimately unknowable queen as there are authors and historians. We all bring different perspectives to bear because we’ve lived different lives and our experiences influence how we view her.This makes the possibility of novels about Elizabeth Tudor limitless. I, for one, am not bothered by this conundrum. It is difficult to say what author has been more right. . . . Elizabeth is the only one who really knows, and she took her secret to the grave.

  Q. Tell us about the real letter from Robert Dudley to Elizabeth I around which this novel is conceived.

  A. The surviving letter, inscribed His Last Letter in Elizabeth’s hand, rests in the United Kingdom’s National Archives, London, England. I could not believe this was all Leicester would have written, though I knew an
ything that questioned her virginity could not have been allowed to survive. Even in her later years the Virgin Queen was as determined as ever to protect her reputation for all time. How could she possibly have known that society’s concepts of behavior for women would change so much in succeeding centuries?

  Q. Did Elizabeth really lock herself in a room for three days upon hearing of Robert Dudley’s death?

  A. Yes, although accounts vary as to whether it was for three or four days and nights.The court must have been alarmed. There would have been consensus among the queen’s council that the door be forced. It was splintered and broken on the order of William Cecil, Baron Burghley. No one knows what happened behind those doors while they were locked. I imagined the scene as I thought Elizabeth would have lived it, given her temper, her penchant for drama and her sense that with Robert gone she was without a living soul who truly knew and loved her.

  Q.You strongly suggest in the novel that Elizabeth was not technically a virgin, that she did consummate her love for Dudley on at least one occasion. Is there a historical basis for this perspective?

  A. There is no hard evidence, but many in the court of that time thought they were lovers, including Burghley, who seldom left court.There was also talk about the queen having other lovers: Sir Thomas Heneage, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Raleigh and even de Simier, the French stand-in for the Duc d’Alençon. At that time, it was beyond belief that a woman could exist without a man. (That attitude has only recently changed, if it really has.) Considering Elizabeth’s flirtatious nature and her constant need for adoration, it seems logical that she would have returned Robert’s devotion, especially after he had stood by her during troubled times.

  Q.When did Elizabeth first come to be known as the Virgin Queen, and how much of a hand did she have in promoting this identification?

  A. I don’t believe it happened quite as deliberately as portrayed by Cate Blanchett in her first Elizabeth movie (1998), although it’s possible that the queen calculatedly imitated the Virgin Mary to replace the banned icon worship of the English people. It’s certainly an intriguing and dramatic idea. I believe it was more gradual, because the people, the Parliament and Elizabeth’s council repeatedly urged and expected her to marry and produce an heir until she was in her midforties. It appears to have been almost impossible for the people of that time to imagine an attractive woman of power and wealth not to be in need of a husband, to turn Jane Austen’s famous line upside down.

  As for advancing the idea of her own “divinity,” Elizabeth was a consummate public relations practitioner. Because she had produced no heir and had no intention of doing so, she set about to make herself immortal to quiet fears or possible unrest since she would die without issue. In countless portraits, she had her face portrayed as youthful long after it had begun to age. (The lead in her cosmetics would have pitted and aged her skin.) Until the very end of her reign, she maintained her athletic ability, hunting and walking, as a sign to others and perhaps to herself that she retained her youthful vigor.

  Q. Discuss attitudes toward sex during the Tudor period. How knowledgeable were people? Did men know how to please women, or were most of them clumsy lovers? Did women expect to experience orgasms? Did couples know how children were conceived? Did the Elizabethans know there were ways to enjoy one another that were much less likely to result in pregnancy? Did Elizabeth and Leicester take advantage of that?

  A. Most of these questions are impossible to answer with any surety, although pornography is as ancient as sexual attraction. Sexual pictographs had their uses in very ancient times as a stimulant to the sex act, for visual gratification, or for the record . . . Cro-Magnon bragging rights, if you will. Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island writes: “An animal is prepared to sacrifice its happiness, its physical well-being and even its life in the hope of sexual intercourse alone.”As animals, humans cannot be so different. For a more detailed account of practice and beliefs, read Sex in Elizabethan England by Alan Haynes.

  If you read Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is impossible not to acknowledge the sexual tension. It’s even more evident in Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella.” When young Sidney was in love with Lettice’s daughter Penelope Devereux, he wrote:O think I then, what paradise of joy

  It is, so fair a Vertue to enjoy.

  He may have been talking about hearing her read his poetry out loud, but I don’t think so.As it turned out, Penelope had very little virtue, but Sidney’s sexual desire was, and still is, very plain.

  We must remember that for a great many centuries, including the Elizabethan era and beyond, the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, frowned on sex for pleasure and only reluctantly agreed that it might be necessary for procreation. Some people then, as now, probably went their own way in bed. In the London of that time, sex of every description was on sale in streets and alleys. For women flocking to London from the country (which happened more and more, especially after the enclosure laws turned cottager plots into sheep pastures and forced people off the land), the only possible occupations were as wives, servants or prostitutes.

  Well into the seventeenth century it was thought that if a woman experienced an orgasm during sex, she would become pregnant. Naturally, since couples often wished to avoid pregnancy, they also wished to avoid a woman’s orgasm. Nevertheless, despite whatever efforts they made, families were large, and children tended to arrive at regular intervals.

  It was known that to prevent pregnancy the man needed to use a sheath, but these were primitive devices, made from sheeps’ intestines and tied on with ribbon. You can guess at how eagerly or effectively they were used.

  Elizabeth and Leicester lived in a sensual time and the court’s atmosphere was superheated. To think that they abstained from intimate contact, or at least experimentation, for all their lives together taxes my imagination.Whatever they did away from other eyes, we can only guess at and never know.

  We do know that Elizabeth had menstrual problems during most of her life, which gave rise to questions about her being fully female. In His Last Letter I’ve dramatized Elizabeth and Leicester’s physical relationship as I thought it could have been.

  Q. Compared to the Tudor period, our culture is so sexually free, it might be hard for some readers to understand why Elizabeth was so obsessed with retaining her identity as a virgin. Can you explain the consequences if people could prove she’d had sex with Dudley?

  A. Her worth on the marriage market would have been lost, or greatly diminished. It was important for a queen’s heirs to be “certified,” because they were in line for the throne. If there was the slightest doubt, other claimants could be expected to rebel against a bastard heir. Single women were considered suspect in that society; it was deemed almost impossible for them to be virginal. Elizabeth’s insistence on her virginity made her into a lasting icon.

  Q. Do you think Elizabeth decided early on that she would never marry? If so, why? What problems did that create for her? What problems did it solve?

  A. She told her childhood playmate, Robert Dudley, when she was only eight years old that she would never marry. Her father’s marriages and her disappearing “mothers” most certainly played a role in her decision; the question of a husband’s dominance over a wife must have also influenced her choice. I think we see the problems it created for her. She toyed with the idea of marriage, most of the time facetiously, but occasionally, I believe she was truly conflicted, especially when the time left in which to have children was almost gone.

  Q. Just how ambitious was Robert Dudley? From a historical perspective, which was stronger—his love for Elizabeth or his desire for power?

  A. Robert Dudley was very ambitious. It was in his blood. Both his father and grandfather had risen high in their Tudor king’s favor and then fallen so far as to suffer the ax. But whether his lust for power was stronger than his lust for Elizabeth is unknowable. I do know that long after Robert’s marriage to Lettice Knollys, Elizabeth cou
ld still hurt him and he could hurt her. What does that indicate to you? When all passion and caring are gone, so is the ability to be touched by deep emotion.

  Q. What do we really know of Lettice Knollys, and was she actually the jealous, spiteful woman you portray in this book?

  A.We know a great deal, although perhaps not deep into her heart. We know that she found her way to Leicester’s bed more than once and over a decade or more. Whether, at first, he was persuaded that she was Elizabeth is unknown, but I couldn’t resist the idea. Also, there is no evidence that she killed her first husband or Leicester’s young son. Historically, Leicester was accused of poisoning both. No one could die without suspicion falling on Leicester. He had risen too far, too fast and stayed there for too long to be widely loved.Although in later life he became a devout Protestant, almost a Puritan, it did not serve to rehabilitate him with the public.

  Q. It’s intriguing to contemplate Dudley’s reasons for marrying Lettice. Does history suggest he was sincerely drawn to her because she looked like Elizabeth? Or, knowing that Elizabeth hated her cousin, in marrying Lettice was Dudley getting back at Elizabeth, as only he could, for refusing to marry him?