Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  What began to bring Robert out of his grief was a project he had long been working at, a project close to his heart.

  For many years, ever since Robert had fought alongside his two brothers Henry and Ambrose at the Battle of St. Quentin and had seen Henry fatally struck with a cannonball, he had been concerned with the plight of elderly soldiers, especially those left injured and unable to serve. There were many in want of care, and since the closing of the monasteries by Elizabeth’s father there were no longer hospitals run by the monks to provide for them. Robert was slowly building a hospital in Warwick, though he had never been able to spare much time to oversee the works. He now roused himself to complete the building, and by the time winter came he had achieved his task.

  Eighty old men, all survivors of the wars, some who had gone with King Henry to fight the French in the long ago 1540s, took up residence in Robert’s hospital, to receive care and treatment at the hands of skilled physicians and apothecaries. Robert dedicated the hospital to his late brother, and put a commemorative stone by the gate.

  “To my beloved brother Henry Dudley,” it read, “whose valor was proven in battle and whose memory shall never die. May all who serve be forever honored and cared for.”

  I thought it a worthy endeavor, and told Robert so. I did not mention the cost. My husband was extravagant, and always had been. He borrowed against our lands to build his hospital, and endow it for the future. Would the debts ever be repaid? I had my doubts. We always had moneylenders at our gates. Somehow Robert and his bankers managed to keep them satisfied—temporarily. He never spoke to me of money matters, and I had learned not to ask.

  It was when Robert told me that he was going to London to witness the execution of the queen’s would-be assassin that I knew he had fully thrown off his grieving and sour bad temper.

  “They are going to kill the sniveling Welshman,” he announced. “And I intend to be there to see it. Do you know, Lettie, the pope himself promised to pay the man handsomely if he murdered the queen! And promised him forgiveness too—in the eyes of the Catholics, of course.”

  I urged him to go, to see justice done. All the members of his Bond of Association would be there, he said. In strength. As a warning to the many Catholics in England who still hoped that Protestantism would be overturned and put their faith in Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Stuart, who carried the blood royal of the house of Tudor in her veins.

  Robert rode off, with a strong band of soldiers as escort, and I watched him go, rain pelting down and the road a bog under his horse’s hooves. I knew it was what he needed to do, despite his talk of retirement from the queen’s service. Just as I knew, soon afterward, how he would respond to the summons that arrived at Wanstead in his absence—a summons from Elizabeth, appointing him Captain General of her forces being sent to the Dutch provinces, to lead the fight against the menacing armies of Spain.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Robert’s spirits could not have been higher when he went aboard his flagship for the journey to Sluys. The queen had forbidden me to see him off but I went anyway, and we shared a final hug and kiss before he stepped into the longboat that rowed him to his vessel, the Albion Triumphant.

  I was sending him off with a trunk full of new linen shirts and the black silk nightcaps that kept his ears warm in cold weather. Beyond that he had his bathing tub, dozens of soft towels and a looking-glass. There was even a new coach in which he planned to ride among his troops when he celebrated their victories.

  I sent him off in all his finery, his cloak, doublet and breeches of blue and purple velvet lined with scarlet, his tall black hat with blue and purple plumes, his perfumed gloves trimmed in black silk and gold.

  He was a splendid sight as he waved to me from the deck of his ship, colorful banners fluttering from the halyards, flags flying from the masthead, the ship’s great culverins thundering a salute that shattered the still morning air.

  A loud shout went up from the onlookers as the queen’s barge rowed out, delivering her to the Albion Triumphant to join Robert for the first part of his journey, the voyage downriver to Canterbury. As I watched, he received her on board, presenting her with a gift of blue and purple garters trimmed in gold. He had shown them to me before we left Wanstead, saying “She’ll like these. She loves garters,” and trying one on for size, making me laugh.

  I went on watching and waving until the ship rounded a bend and hove out of sight, her fleet of companion vessels following. I hoped all would go well for Robert and his men—five thousand footsoldiers and a thousand mounted men—and in particular, for two of his men, my dear Rob and Chris, our Master of the Horse who had become Rob’s friend and fellow soldier.

  The two boys—I still thought of them as boys—looked strong and stalwart as they embarked, along with the aging Whaffer, who had offered himself as their servant and horse groom. They were high-hearted and optimistic about the outcome of the invasion, joking about how they were going to make short work of the Spaniards and be back in a few brief months, before their armor could rust or their horses’ manes needed trimming.

  Despite the jests and bravado, I knew that the threat to England’s security was very real. My father had been saying so for years, and the majority of those in the royal council agreed. The Spanish King Philip had come to dominate much of the globe, with his vast territories in the New World, his rule over Naples and Sicily and Milan, and his dominance in the Low Countries. With the recent conquest of Portugal, he acquired that country’s farflung empire—plus a large navy and a great many skilled mariners.

  So I had heard—and until recently I had also heard that our queen was very reluctant to go to war. But now she had changed her mind. She had decided to challenge Philip in the area where he was most vulnerable, the rebellious Dutch provinces that owed him allegiance but fought him at every turn. If English arms could shore up the Dutch rebels, then perhaps the Spanish menace could be reversed.

  For a month I waited impatiently for a letter from Robert, and when one came I devoured it at once. He wrote at length (how did he have time, I wondered) of the joyous reception given the English troops by the Protestant Dutch. Of how he might have been the Messiah Himself, so great was the shouting, the adoration, the noisy celebrating that greeted him in every town and village.

  “Save us, good Lord Leicester, save us!” the people called out, making him burst into tears.

  The tears, I knew, were more from exhaustion than emotion. My Robert was surely driving himself too hard, forcing every last ounce of strength from his aging body. It was his way, he could not stop himself.

  I went on reading the letter. Its tone turned from elation to apprehension. He wrote of the sorry state of the Dutch provinces, once thriving and prosperous, with green fields and bustling harbors full of ships, now a weedy wasteland, the harbors silted up, the ships empty and rotting at their moorings.

  “I fear I cannot save them, the good Dutch Protestants,” he wrote. “I fast and pray, I sing psalms with them, to show I am sincerely on their side. But they quarrel among themselves. And we are constantly short of supplies.”

  He wrote that my young Rob was acquitting himself very well, and had been given a command of his own, and that Chris too was proving to be a strong and courageous fighter (and brawler, he added) and that old Whaffer, robust and spry despite his age, was the only one in the company who never got sick and never complained.

  Robert’s letter made me want to join him, there in Flanders, to shore him up in his discouragement. But of course I did not dare. Even if I tried to make the crossing alone, in secret—perhaps taking Mistress Clinkerte with me as my attendant—my presence would soon be discovered by the queen’s spies. Robert would be blamed. He would be made to suffer. So I stayed at Wanstead, waiting for more news.

  While waiting I was distracted by events in my family. My lovely Penelope married the brash, self-important Lord Rich, a tall, burly man of large appetites who tended to muscle others aside and whose shouts
of command to his servants seemed to sing out through every room in our thirty-five-room manor. He was as rich as his name, though poor, I could not help thinking, in kindness and generosity of spirit. Robert didn’t care for him but thought him an excellent match for the strong-willed Penelope, as he could both bring her a title and keep her in check. After a few rebellious outbursts she agreed to marry him, and the wedding went forward. Before two years had passed they had two children, two boys, and Penelope was pregnant again—and repenting her choice of husband.

  Meanwhile there was another wedding in the family, this one unexpected. My dear Dorothy, whose sweet, compliant nature had only grown more affectionate over the years, surprised us all by marrying her longtime love Ned Mudge, a common mariner without lands or a title or any prospect of acquiring even modest wealth.

  We had known for some time that they were sweethearts. But Robert had forbidden Ned to see Dorothy and sent him away. As Dorothy never mentioned him after that, we assumed their infatuation had ended. Yet Ned had not gone very far away, only to the next village and Dorothy continued to meet him in secret. Finally, amid the bustle of preparations for Penelope’s rather grand wedding, Dorothy had slipped away to join Ned and they had gone together to the village church where a sympathetic priest married them, braving Robert’s wrath.

  Dorothy’s courageous, impetuous act took me entirely by surprise. My fiery, self-willed Penelope had always been the one to follow her own daring path, yet in the end she agreed to make a conventional choice in marrying Lord Rich, while Dorothy thrust convention aside and married for love. Her bravery humbled me; I had after all married Walter, the partner my father chose for me, and a man I never loved. Only late in life did I find the daring to marry the man my heart led me to—and then only because it was what he wanted, what he made possible. Ned Mudge was no Robert Dudley, to be sure. He was just a strong, quiet, affectionate man who I knew instinctively would always stand by my daughter and take care of her, however humbly they lived.

  Did Dorothy, in the end, make the wiser choice? I came to think so, though at the time she suffered much criticism and I was blamed for not preventing the perceived tragedy of their wedding.

  I was dismayed as well as surprised by what happened, but not angry. I knew what it was to follow my heart. I only prayed that Dorothy would not, in time, regret being plain Mistress Mudge while her passionate, beautiful sister was Lady Rich living in a grand manor house. But Dorothy was not inclined to be envious, and when she and Ned came to me to admit what they had done and ask my blessing, and she held out her hand with the modest gold ring to show me, I could see how proud she was and how much love she felt for Ned, who clearly treasured her.

  They were full of hope for their future life together. Not for them the dour predictions of death and destruction and the fall of empires. They seemed wrapped in a protective mantle of love—or so I saw them, through a thick veil of sentiment. Love would keep them safe, no matter what darkness fell upon the world.

  And darkness there surely was. The news from Flanders was growing more ominous. Robert wrote of desertions among his men, brought on by hunger and lack of warm clothing, of the quarrelsomeness of the stubborn Dutch and the rising costs of warmaking and the sadly high numbers of English dead. Valiant dead, he wrote. So many fine men lost, their lives sacrificed in what seemed to be a losing cause.

  The land, the canals and rivers that snaked through it, the very skies seemed to be turning against the English, Robert wrote. He cursed the incessant rain and cold, the quagmire underfoot, with horses sinking up to their gaskins in mud and the weeping clouds drenching men, animals and equipment alike.

  “The damnable guns won’t fire, Lettie,” he wrote. “We can’t keep them dry. Our armor rusts on our backs, no one does what they promise to do, all is lies and blame and rot!” he went on, his bitterness fairly burning off the page.

  He asked me to send him more shirts and six pairs of thigh-high boots, and confessed with chagrin that his splendid new coach had sunk beneath the mire of the Sluys marshes, never to be seen again. His poor swollen foot was giving him great pain, and he had run out of goat’s grease to assuage it. (He did not mention Monsieur Ezard’s worm tonic, but he did not need to.)

  Robert saved his most caustic words for Roger Wilbraham who, he insisted, was undermining the entire English venture by his corruption and outright theft. Instead of using his posts as master armorer for the port of Sluys and Master of the Queen’s Ships to buy arquebuses and pikes, powder and ball, salt fish and rice and oil, “the rogue Wilbraham,” as Robert called him, was keeping the money from the queen’s treasury for himself. Meanwhile more men and horses were falling sick and dying and the Dutch cause, like the ill-fated coach, was sinking into the mire. Which meant that the hated Spaniards were coming closer to achieving their goal of conquering England.

  It was the valuable commodity called the white eagle, the saltpeter necessary to fire the gunpowder, that aroused Robert’s worst fury. The rogue Wilbraham, he wrote, was rumored to be taking all the stores of white eagle and selling it to the enemy. “To the enemy!” He underlined the hated words. “They say his son Sebastian smuggles it to England and hides it in a cave somewhere near Fowey. From there the Spanish ships come ashore to buy it, protected by local Catholics who want to see Elizabeth overthrown and Mary Queen of Scots reign in her place.

  “Oh Lettie, I am surrounded by treachery here. Nothing but treachery.”

  I hardly had time to react to Robert’s doleful letter when I heard a furious galloping and then shouts in the courtyard beneath my windows. I looked out and saw a man being carried into the house. My first thought was, is it Robert? Has he been badly hurt? Have they brought him home to die?

  I rushed down the stairs and into the entryway and saw, at once, that the man being carried, moaning, in through the wide doorway was not Robert.

  I felt enormous relief—and then concern. For as I came closer I saw that I was looking into the ashen face of young Chris Blount, whose torn shirt was covered in blood and who was being laid on a table, dying, before my eyes.

  THIRTY-NINE

  His brow was wide and high, his lips bow-shaped and soft, like the lips of a child. He had the face of a noble Roman. A noble nose, with a high prominent bridge, and his eyes, when he opened them on the third day after he was brought to Wanstead, were a deep unfocused blue. He was still very pale, but a little color had come into his cheeks, and his voice, when he struggled to speak, was unmistakably Chris’s voice, the voice I had so often heard saying solicitous things. May I bring out your cloak, milady? Shall I move the bench closer into the shade for you, milady?

  I had thought for certain that he would die, but his underlying strength, the strength and vigor of youth, saved him. Or perhaps, as I thought later, it was at least in part my care of him during those critical days that saved him.

  For just as I had with little Denbigh, I sat by his bedside, making certain that his wound—a terrible wound, a deep gash in his chest and side from a musket ball, red and swollen and oozing a stinking liquid—was tended properly and often by the French bonesetter Monsieur Ezard, who had joined our household and was available to attend to any and all illnesses. Someone was always ill, as our household was large—well over a hundred servants—and Robert and I believed in offering care not only to our servants but to their families when needed.

  I sat beside Chris, looking down into his handsome face, keeping a cool wet cloth on his hot forehead—he had a dreadful fever—and saying my prayers. My prayers were answered on that memorable third day, when for the first time Chris opened his eyes and spoke a few words.

  “Don’t mother him too much,” Mistress Clinkerte said tartly when she passed in and out of the chamber where Chris had been laid in an ornately carved, wide oaken bed. “And don’t forget that you are a married woman, even if your husband is far away!”

  I rebuked her sharply for her suggestive words, implying that my care for Chris arose from a deep
er emotion than concern for a sick member of our household. Yet her remark worried me a little, for she knew me well, and I wondered, in my sleepless state, whether she might be right. Was I more attached to the patient than I ought to be? But no, if Robert were home, he would kiss me and tell me he admired my dedication and care. He would not reprimand me, or hint that I was giving the handsome patient undue attention.

  Over the following days, as Chris began to recover, he talked more and more. I was eager for him to tell me all the news of my husband and son. But sensing that thinking of the warfare and the hardships he had endured might upset him and slow his recovery, I encouraged him to tell me about his family instead, which he seemed eager enough to do.

  His father, he said, was a landless knight, a poor relation of the Blount family whose most notorious member had been Bessie Blount, mistress of Henry VIII. Bessie had been honored with the title Mother of the King’s Son because her boy Henry had been considered the king’s likely heir. But young Henry had died before he reached the age of twenty, and Bessie had retired into obscurity in the countryside.

  “We are poor relations of the Blounts,” Chris said with a smile, adding that his father was long dead and his mother, without resources of her own, lived in Exeter with a distant relative who housed her out of charity.

  “So you see there is nothing distinguished in me or my lineage,” he said.

  “But you are an honored soldier,” was my response, “and a veteran of the wars.”

  “And your husband Lord Leicester has given me the post of Master of the Horse to all his forces. He rewarded me after the Battle of Hondschoote. The post comes with a salary, or at least it will, when payment is finally made. None of us have been paid for months.”

  These last words were uttered in an undertone. I was aware, from Robert’s letters, that his men were in want of pay, and had been for at least a year, while they fought the seemingly endless battles in Flanders.