by Lisa Hilton
Leicester’s presence is not recorded at Hatfield during Elizabeth’s early years. In 1566, he noted to the French ambassador that he had known the queen since she was eight years old (i.e., in 1541). We do not know how and when exactly they met; it is likely, though by no means confirmed, that Robert, who was three months older than Elizabeth, was educated for a time in the household of her brother, Prince Edward. Elizabeth was not present at either her father’s funeral, which was customary, or her brother’s coronation, which was not, and again we do not know if Leicester attended either ceremony. But the children had been within one another’s orbits since birth. Leicester’s detractors subsequently presented him as an arriviste, an opportunist who had risen to power clutching at the skirts of the queen, but, like so much of what was written about their relationship, this was simply untrue. Through his grandmother Elizabeth Grey, Leicester was descended from the thirteenth Earl of Warwick, the father-in-law of Richard Neville, known as the “Kingmaker,” the puppet master of the Wars of the Roses: in his family tree twined the great magnate houses of the period—Neville, Talbot, Beauchamp, Lisle. Robert’s grandfather Edmund Dudley, a member of Henry VII’s council, had his head swept off by that zealous new broom Henry VIII in 1510, but not before he managed to father four children with his wife, Elizabeth Grey. Elizabeth then married Arthur Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of Edward IV. Edmund and Elizabeth’s son John, Robert’s father, became the ward of Sir Edward Guildford, eventually marrying Guildford’s daughter Jane and producing a prodigious thirteen offspring, eight of whom survived into adulthood. John worked assiduously to dispel the shadow of his father’s attainder, and in 1543 was created Viscount Lisle in right of his mother, being promoted again to the Earldom of Warwick (again through his matrilineal connections with the Beauchamp family) in 1547. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, he was not only a close adviser to the king but one of the principal supporters of religious reform. It was clear at the beginning of Edward VI’s reign that the government would be led by his uncle, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, along with his rival John Dudley, who was elevated to the Dukedom of Northumberland in 1551. The ceremony at Hampton Court included two Dudley connections, Henry Sidney and Henry Neville, who were knighted alongside one William Cecil, Secretary to the King since the previous autumn. Until 1550, Cecil had been Somerset’s man, but in adroitly changing sides, he not only saved his own career after Somerset’s Protectorship came to an end but assisted John Dudley in assuming control of both the king and his council. Three months later, Seymour was executed for treason, and Dudley’s power appeared undisputed: “Nothing is done except at his command,” reported the imperial ambassador.3 Far from being a parvenu, Robert Dudley gained his experience in government from his father at a time when he was the most powerful man in the realm. Elizabeth and Dudley were both recorded as being at court at the same time on at least two occasions, in 1549 and 1550, but in the spring of 1553, as her brother lay dying, she was staying quietly in the country. It was Robert, not Elizabeth, who was witness to his father’s attempt at a coup d’état.
When Edward VI died on 6 July, there was no male heir to the English crown, precisely the situation which his father had changed the world to avoid. Edward’s sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, had of course both been declared illegitimate, though their places in the succession had been restored by the Act of Parliament in 1543 and confirmed by their father’s will. The offspring of Henry’s sisters, Margaret and Mary, offered competing claims. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, was officially excluded from the crown, but as the vagaries of Elizabeth’s and Mary’s status over the years had proved, this was not necessarily binding. Margaret’s daughter by her second marriage, Margaret Douglas, was also of dubious legitimacy since her parents had been divorced. Henry’s younger sister, Mary, had produced Frances and Eleanor Brandon by her own second marriage to the Duke of Suffolk, and Frances herself had three girls, Jane, Katherine, and Mary, by her husband, Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset. Eleanor died in 1547; her daughter Margaret Clifford was the last of the nine potential claimants. All of these women would play significant roles in Elizabeth Tudor’s life. According to Henry VIII’s Act of Succession, it was Frances Brandon who led the field after his own daughters—if Elizabeth were ultimately to inherit and die without heirs, then the throne would “wholly remain and come to the heirs of the body of the Lady Frances.” Interestingly, William Cecil was a cousin of the Grey girls, through his wife, Mildred Cooke, but though he aided and supported John Dudley in what he was to attempt, the impetus behind the 1553 coup came very much from the young king himself.
Elizabeth’s own proto-evangelism had been commended by her fanatically reformist brother. In the aftermath of the Seymour scandal, she had been astute in presenting herself as the premiere Protestant princess. But Edward, as well as being considerably more independent minded than has often been assumed, was also something of a prig. Elizabeth was a bastard, and Mary was a Catholic bastard. Surely the crown would be safer on the head of a woman whose religion, as well as her birth, was impeccable? Lady Jane Grey was, to him, the obvious choice. So in the last months of his life, Edward, assisted by Cecil and John Dudley, set about overturning his father’s will. With absolute disregard for the law, and for the consciences of his councilors, who had sworn the oath prescribed by the Succession Act, he finalized his own “Device for the Succession.” When precisely the “Device” was drafted is uncertain, but Edward made one crucial amendment to the document before it was finalized. Originally, he stipulated that the crown should pass to any male heirs of Frances Grey, and then to any male offspring of her daughters in turn. But then the sentence “to the Lady Jane’s heirs male” was altered to “to the Lady Jane and her male heirs” (italics mine). Mary and Elizabeth were set aside: it was the Greys who would become the next royal dynasty of England.
And if the Duke of Northumberland had anything to do with it, those “heirs male” would be Dudleys. On 25 May, Jane Grey was married to Robert’s brother Guildford Dudley at the family’s London home, Durham House. Already, the French and imperial ambassadors were speculating on how long the ailing Edward had to live. In John Dudley’s eyes, his son had just married England’s next queen. Just over two months later, Edward lay dead at Greenwich. On 9 July, Edward’s council swore allegiance to Jane, and the next day at 5 p.m., she was proclaimed in London by the sheriff and the royal heralds. She was residing at the Tower, not only the traditional residence for monarchs before their coronation but London’s most secure fortress. The choice was both ominous and appropriate, as from the first there seemed no chance that her claim would prevail. Mary, who had prudently refused Northumberland’s invitation to visit her brother’s deathbed, had retreated to Norfolk, from where she wrote to the council asserting her right. Cecil had made contingency plans for flight, as well as the extraordinary political backflip he would have to accomplish to preserve his head if Mary prevailed (it is an instance of Cecil’s preternatural political prescience that he had recruited a priest, Henry Watkyns, to serve at his home in Wimbledon at Easter 1553 in anticipation of exactly this). And Elizabeth? She practiced the strategy which as queen she was to turn into such an exasperating art: she waited.
In the Tower, Northumberland grew increasingly frantic. None of the women he had assumed he could manipulate seemed to be behaving. Mary was aggressively mustering her affinity in the eastern counties, while Jane had taken so well to queenship that when the Marquess of Winchester visited her to display the crown jewels, explaining that a new crown would have to be made for her consort, Guildford Dudley, Jane announced that she rather thought she might just make him Duke of Clarence, after all. On 14 July, Northumberland, confirmed in his commission as leader of Queen Jane’s army, rode out with his other sons to confront Mary. At Framlingham in Suffolk, in a gesture more famously imitated by her sister, Mary reviewed her troops on horseback before dismounting when her horse was startled and wa
lking among her men. Even as her popularity soared, half-hearted enthusiasm for Jane was leaching away. Robert Dudley proclaimed her at King’s Lynn on 18 July, but by then most of his father’s troops had deserted. The next day, Jane’s last as queen, her council simply gave up. Orders (signed by Cecil among others) were dispatched to Northumberland to disarm while the Earl of Arundel and Lord Paget set off to grovel to Mary, who was proclaimed at nine o’clock that evening. By August, Northumberland, Leicester, and his four brothers were in the Tower. They were still there on 19 March 1554, when Elizabeth joined them.
O trustless State of miserable Men
That build your Bliss on hope of earthly Thing,
And vainly think yourselves half happy then,
When painted Faces with smooth flattering
Do fawn on you and your wide Praises sing …
All is but feigned.
The lines are Edmund Spenser’s, from his commemorative poem to Leicester, The Ruines of Time, written after the earl’s death, but the sentiments could not have been more appropriate to the circumstances of the Dudley men incarcerated in the Tower. The vagaries of Fortune were a constant reference for medieval and Renaissance poets, not least Elizabeth herself in her later translation of Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy; the vanity of trusting to the caprice of fate could not have been more cruelly illustrated to the two young people imprisoned by the Thames. Elizabeth and Robert did not meet in the Tower, though each was aware of the other’s presence, yet this shared experience not only of imprisonment but of the appalling tension of waiting helplessly as outside the axeman struck again and again was unique to their relationship. But what was Elizabeth doing there?
During the upheavals which had raised her sister to the throne, Elizabeth had remained deliberately aloof. The chronicler William Camden claimed that in response to an envoy from John Dudley, she emphasized that she would do nothing to impede Mary’s claim.4 Ten days after Mary was proclaimed, Elizabeth arrived in London to await her. The brief ascendancy of the Northumberland/Grey party had seen both Tudor women proclaimed as bastards yet again, notably in two sermons preached by the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, at St. Paul’s Cross on the Sundays preceding Mary’s proclamation. Elizabeth’s arrival at her new London residence, Somerset House, was a carefully staged rebuff to such calumnies. It was the procession of a feudal prince, two thousand horsemen strong, the men liveried in the Tudor colors of white and green. It was also a slight—a very slight—hint that Elizabeth, too, had men to command. On 31 July, Elizabeth rode out to meet the new queen at Wanstead, and on 3 August was by her side when she made her formal entry into the city. When Mary was crowned in September, Elizabeth took precedence after the queen in the coronation procession and banquet. Whatever Mary’s personal feelings for her sister at this stage, in public all was concord. After the fraught progress of her accession, Mary needed a display of loyalty from her sister, and Elizabeth provided it with every appearance of good faith.
Yet already there were hints that Mary had been unable to overcome her longstanding hatred of the girl who had displaced her. The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michiel, described Elizabeth in a report of 1557 making three notable points. Elizabeth was “a young woman believed to be no less beautiful in her soul than in her body, though her face is pretty rather than beautiful, her figure is, however, tall and well-shaped, with good color, though olive skinned, and beautiful eyes and hands, as she is well aware.” He went on to describe the superiority of Elizabeth’s learning over Mary’s: “She surpasses the Queen in her knowledge of languages … speaks Italian better than the Queen (and prides herself on it, not speaking any other language with Italians).” Finally, he commented on Elizabeth being “proud and haughty,” despite “being born of such a mother.” Elizabeth “has no less self-esteem, nor does she believe herself less legitimate.” Michiel explained that Elizabeth defended her mother’s marriage, claiming that Anne Boleyn had “wanted nothing but marriage with the King, with the authority of the Church and of its Archbishop, therefore if she was deceived, she acted in good faith, which may not have compromised her marriage, nor her own [i.e., Elizabeth’s] birth, for she was born in the same faith.”5 Here is a picture of a very attractive young woman who is not afraid of displaying her accomplishments at her sister’s expense. Moreover, Elizabeth did apparently speak of her mother, and stood up for her when challenged. The reference to “faith” is particularly interesting. Elizabeth is not saying that she was born into the Protestant faith, but into the same faith as Anne, that is, the reformed Catholicism of the Henrician settlement. She is no heretic, but the faith she was born into, and which, she argues, justified her mother’s marriage, was one which acknowledged the king, not the pope, as head of the Church. It is a spectacularly subtle piece of defiance. No wonder Mary was infuriated. That Elizabeth was making such remarks early in the reign is also supported by the fact that Mary was soon provoked into making the very unqueenly remark that her sister had a look of Mark Smeaton about her, him being such a handsome man. To choose the lowest born of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers was a particularly low blow.
So Elizabeth’s very presence was an irritation, more so because (as ever) the succession was uncertain and she was the next heir. But it was faith which really catalyzed Mary’s loathing. Practically her first action as queen was to repeal the religious statutes of the previous reign, and to reinforce her own status by declaring the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon lawful (a step Elizabeth herself never took). Elizabeth initially refused to appear at Mass, but as Mary’s promises of toleration rapidly evaporated, Elizabeth shrewdly sought an interview with Mary and requested on her knees that she be given books and instruction to guide her towards conformity. When she eventually did attend Mass, it was only after failing to plead illness, and she accomplished the performance with an adolescent display of pique “wearing a suffering air” and grumbling that she had a stomachache. Mary was not deceived, complaining to the imperial ambassador Renard that “she only went to Mass out of hypocrisy, she had not a single servant or maid of honor who was not a heretic, she talked every day with heretics and lent an ear to all their evil designs, and that it would be a disgrace to the kingdom to allow a bastard to succeed.”6 Elizabeth wisely decided to return to the country, but not before requesting some ornaments for her chapel from her sister. Mary sent the accoutrements, as well as an elegant fur hood, but muttered to Renard that she feared great evil from her sister if she was not “dealt with.”7
The best way to preclude Elizabeth’s succession was to produce an heir, and in November Mary angrily rejected a request from the Commons that she should marry an English subject in favor of her own beloved project, a union with Philip of Spain. She would marry as God directed her, she declared, and in a scene of pious melodrama witnessed by Renard, she announced in private that she believed Heaven had selected Philip as her only possible bridegroom. By 14 January 1554 the terms of the marriage were being announced at Whitehall, but in the city streets the same people who had greeted Mary so joyously “with shouting and crying … and ringing of the bells” just six months earlier now stood mute, lowering their heads in ominous silence as Philip’s envoys passed by.8
Silent dissent soon passed into open rebellion. When Mary acceded to the crown, she had released a significant prisoner from the Tower, Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon. Courtenay was descended from Edward IV through his sixth daughter, Catherine of York, and therefore had a tenuous claim of his own. He was also a Catholic whose father had been executed for treason by Henry VIII. Apparently, prison had not done much for Courtenay intellectually, but he was young and English. If Mary had paused to think, she might have done well to marry Courtenay herself, but he was not the royal bridegroom she had set her heart on. Mary’s councilors then suggested that Courtenay marry Elizabeth, but while this might have neutralized her in religious terms, Mary could see that having a married heiress presumptive would be even worse than a defiant single one;
moreover, Charles V counselled against the match. But several English magnates, incensed by Mary’s determination on the Spanish marriage, thought differently. By early January a plot was in train. Four uprisings in Kent, Devon, Leicestershire, and the Welsh March were planned to converge on London with the aim of dethroning Mary and crowning Elizabeth queen with Courtenay as her consort. The scheme, originally timed for mid-March, failed even before it began, as Mary was aware of the ringleaders’ activities by early January, while on the 21st, Courtenay broke down under questioning and confessed. Three of the planned uprisings barely happened at all. Nonetheless, Sir Thomas Wyatt of Kent, the elder son of the Thomas Wyatt who had so loved Anne Boleyn, in poetry if not in fact, mustered his men on 25 January and marched on London. Shockingly for Mary, when the octogenarian Duke of Norfolk confronted him at Rochester, many of his troops gleefully defected, and those who stayed loyal sneaked back through the city with their coats turned inside out to hide Mary’s arms on their liveries. Clearly London’s loyalty was not to be taken for granted, and if London fell, Mary was lost. But she had proved her bravery when she defied John Dudley, and she was the granddaughter of a true warrior queen, Isabella of Castile. Mary rode to the Guildhall on 1 February, and the speech she gave invoked many of the images her sister was later so effectively to employ. And interestingly, though she used the maternal trope which Elizabeth too made use of, she melded the image of a loving, protective mother with that of a prince: