Elizabeth's Rival

by Nicola Tallis

  Roger Edwardes made ‘the Lady Lettice Viscountess of Hereford’ the dedicatee of his A Boke of Very Godly Psalmes and Prayers, a book designed to ‘increase the plenty of heavenly comforts’.49 As Edwardes himself explained in the first line of his dedication, ‘amongst many my gracious Lord your husband’s bounden and faithful vassals, whom his Lordship’s bounty and noble virtues do daily purchase abroad (unknown to your Honour) I am one’.50 It is unclear how he was connected with the Devereux household, but he was not known to Lettice. Yet he continued to urge her to ‘let my poor little labour, have liberty to bestow itself, where it would gladdest show the token of a thankful heart’.51 He also hoped that Lettice would circulate his work, for he implored her to take the book ‘to your use and tuition, that by your estimation of the same, it may grow common and acceptable amongst the virtuous sort of ladies and gentlewomen’.52 Whether she did so or not is unknown, but she would at least have been gratified by the dedication.

  FOR LETTICE, THE first half of the 1560s had been a whirlwind of domestic duties and childbearing, broken up by occasional visits to court. No further mention is made of her at this time in relation to the Earl of Leicester, and she and Walter, now with a growing family, had settled into a routine. But change was coming, and that not all of these changes would be welcome.

  CHAPTER 6

  Death with his Dart hath us Bereft

  WHILE LETTICE REMAINED at Chartley with her husband and her three children, at court the Queen’s marriage remained a talking point. Elizabeth continued to stall on the issue, and no doubt the court gossip wound its way from London to Chartley. Matters in England, though, were about to take a more serious turn, and Lettice’s family were to become fully embroiled in them.

  IN SCOTLAND, THE personal rule of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been a disaster. Having married Henry Darnley, the son of Lady Margaret Lennox, Mary’s feelings towards him had quickly turned sour. She was appalled to discover that he was both a drunk and sexually promiscuous, and he in turn was outraged by her refusal to grant him the crown matrimonial – the right to rule equally alongside Mary. Had she done so, in the event of her dying childless, Darnley would have been able to succeed her in his own right. Mary’s previous affection for her husband turned to a deep-seated hate when, on the evening of 9 March 1566, a group of the Queen’s Scottish lords burst into her apartments at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Mary was enjoying supper with a small group of friends, among whom was her Italian secretary, David Rizzio. Rizzio was unpopular, and Darnley had long been jealous of the influence the secretary exerted over his wife. Despite clinging desperately to his mistress’s skirts, Rizzio was dragged out of the supper chamber and brutally stabbed fifty-six times.1 Mary, who was heavily pregnant with her first child, was in fear for her life, and after witnessing this horrific scene was afraid of miscarrying.

  It quickly became apparent that Darnley had colluded with the Scottish lords in the plot to kill Rizzio; Mary was horrified. Despite her personal feelings of distaste, she put on a show of reconciliation with her husband, and on 19 June she gave birth to a son at Edinburgh Castle. The baby was named James, and Queen Elizabeth was his godmother.

  Matters in Scotland did not end there, and in February 1567 Darnley was murdered following an explosion at his house at Kirk o’Field in Edinburgh. The bodies of him and his servant were found in the garden, untouched by the explosion; they had probably been suffocated – Leicester later owned a print depicting the scene of the murder.2 It was widely suspected that the Queen was implicated in the plot, and the situation was about to become infinitely worse. On 15 May, just months after Darnley’s death, Mary married the man that most people suspected was guilty of his murder: James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. From then, events moved swiftly. Mary’s Scottish lords rebelled and raised an army against her. The two forces met at Carberry Hill on 15 June, but there was no battle: the Queen was captured and taken to the remote Lochleven Castle in Kinross, while Bothwell was forced into exile abroad.3 In July Mary miscarried of twins, and, taking advantage of her weakened state, the lords forced her to abdicate her throne in favour of her infant son, James. The following May, after nearly a year’s imprisonment, Mary managed to escape from Lochleven and rallied her forces.4 Her attempt to regain her throne was unsuccessful: she was defeated at the Battle of Langside on 13 May, and in desperation she fled across the border into England. Once there, she was hopeful of receiving aid from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. Mary was immediately conducted to Carlisle Castle, and it was here that Elizabeth called upon the services of Lettice’s father.

  Sir Francis Knollys had been active in the Queen’s service throughout the 1560s; in 1562 he had been made Governor of Portsmouth, necessitating several visits to the port, and in 1565 he was appointed Captain of the Guard. In his role as Governor of Portsmouth, his duties included ensuring that the men of the Newhaven garrison received their wages and regular supplies – no mean task. The Queen had great confidence in his knowledge of military affairs, and it was here that he excelled. His work had required a great deal of travel, and he had journeyed to France, Scotland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight and Ireland all in the Queen’s service. It was while he was in the latter that he applied for the post of Treasurer of the Chamber, an appointment that he was awarded on 4 January 1567 at an annual salary of £133 (£22,500). He was later made Treasurer of the Household in 1570, an even more lucrative position. Francis had always been loyal to the Queen, to whom he often spoke with more frankness than many of her fawning courtiers. However, he was never elevated to the peerage, and it is difficult to believe that this would not have rankled, given his family’s history with Elizabeth. Both she and Cecil trusted Francis’s judgement, and so it was to him that she was about to thrust the ultimate responsibility.

  WHEN NEWS OF the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots, in England reached London, Elizabeth made the decision to send Sir Francis north to Carlisle to assume the role of her guardian. That he was stringently Puritan meant that he was unlikely to have any sympathy for the Catholic Mary, which in Elizabeth’s eyes made him a good choice. For Francis this was completely new territory, and it was not an assignment he desired. He would later write that the Queen, by reason of her trust, ‘putteth me to more pains, more careful perils, and more tedious grief’s than she doth any other man’.5 He had no choice, though, but to obey his orders. He was further disheartened when the Queen refused his request for permission to take his wife with him. The Queen could not bear to be parted from Lettice’s mother, and to her dismay, Katherine was forced to remain at court. Accompanied by Lord Scrope and his twenty-three-year-old son William, Francis began to make the arduous journey north to Carlisle. He had been instructed to supervise the fallen Scottish Queen until Elizabeth had decided what to do next, but it was a task that Francis was deeply unhappy about. He felt sure that Mary was a threat to the security of the realm, and he constantly worried that she would escape from Carlisle. Even so, he found that, despite the great differences in their religious beliefs, he rather liked Mary. As her native tongues were both French and Scots, he even began to teach her English. Her first letter in that language, in which she begged him to ‘excuse my evil writing’, was addressed to him.6 Mary took less notice, however, of Francis’s attempts to lecture her on Protestantism, and remained a devoted Catholic. On one occasion she even sent a gift of ‘a pretty chain of pomander beads, finely laced with gold wire’ to Francis’s wife, much to his distaste; ‘see how she corrupts me’, he complained to Cecil.7 Security at Carlisle was still an issue, and in July Francis instigated the removal of Mary to Lord Scrope’s stronghold of Bolton Castle. Situated in the heart of Wensleydale in Yorkshire, Bolton was a little over seventy-five miles south of Carlisle, and was a mighty medieval fortress.8

  Francis was now slightly closer to London, but his pleas to return home fell on deaf ears. His desire may have been exacerbated by the fact that he had been informed that his wife had fallen ill. The nature of Katherine’s ma
lady is unclear, but news of it had reached Francis by 29 July. On that day he wrote to Katherine, and in his usual frank manner he came immediately to the point: ‘I am very sorry to hear that you are fallen into a fever, I would to God I were so dispatched hence that I might only attend and care for your good recovery.’9 He was genuinely concerned for her welfare and grieved not to be with her at this time, but added that ‘I trust you shall shortly overcome this fever and recover good health again.’10 For Lettice, ensconced at Chartley, the news that her mother was ill must have come as a concern too, and she is likely to have found a way to keep herself informed of her progress – perhaps by means of her sister Elizabeth, who was at court with their mother. She may even have written to her mother herself, perhaps in similar terms to Francis, who reminded his wife to take better care of herself. For, he admonished her, ‘although in your health you do often forget to prevent sickness by due and precise order, yet when you are fallen into sickness, you will then (although it be late) observe very good order’.11 Katherine had clearly suffered previous health problems, and since she had borne sixteen children this is hardly surprising.

  It was not only Lettice’s mother, but also her brother, twenty-one-year-old Edward, who was sick at this time. Suffering from ‘an ague’, it was this that had prevented him from joining his father in the north.12 Edward’s absence was not an issue, for as his father explained to his mother, he would not have used himself half so well as his brother William had done: ‘for with his courtesy and good discretion he hath gotten here a very good opinion of all sorts’.13 This included the Queen of Scots, with whom William had ‘uttered his French tongue often times’.14 Both Lettice’s father and her younger brother William were trying to make the best of the situation in which they found themselves, but Francis was still desperate to return home. Katherine too was anxious to be reunited with her husband, and Francis informed Cecil that ‘she is desirous to come hither if my return be not shortly’.15 Once again, though, Elizabeth thwarted any such hopes, on the grounds that the journey ‘might be to her danger or discommodity’.16 Realizing that there was no hope of Katherine being permitted to travel north, Francis instead entreated his wife to ‘help that I may be revoked and return again’.17 There was little for him to do in any case, he claimed, and so he could very easily be spared. Signing himself ‘your loving husband’, Francis hoped for a favourable reply.18

  Unbeknown to Francis, his wife had recovered from her illness. Much to his relief, he received word from two of his servants, Robert Bestney and Francis Fryer, that ‘My Lady God be thanked is in ye way of recovering, having in effect altogether escaped her fit once or twice.’19 This happy news was reiterated by the Earl of Leicester, who wrote to Francis on 7 August to inform him that ‘my lady your wife is well again. But I fear her diet and order.’20 Katherine’s health had evidently plagued her before, to such an extent that it had attracted the notice of her contemporaries.

  It is also clear that all of their years spent in the Queen’s service had taken their toll on Lettice’s family. While Lettice prepared to spend Christmas with her family at Chartley, her father was still no closer to returning home. Winter was never a good time to be away from court, particularly in the cold north, and Francis longed for his home comforts; ‘we are utterly unprovided, as you know’, he had complained to Cecil. Katherine had become ill once more, and once again she recovered. However, this had caused Francis such anxiety that, as he related to his wife on 30 December, he had almost written ‘somewhat plainly to her Majesty in her own matters’.21 He was disappointed by ‘her Majesty’s ungrateful denial of my coming to the Court this Christmas’, and had been on the verge of informing her that he had been told that ‘my wife is ready to die in discomfort and in miserable state towards her children even in your Majesty’s Court’.22 The only thing that had prevented him from doing so was his receiving word that Katherine was once more recovered.

  LETTICE AND HER family spent the New Year of 1569 at Chartley. There is no record of either she or Walter sending a gift to court for the Queen, as Lettice had done on previous occasions. In 1567, for example, she had given her kinswoman a selection of pretty items, including ‘a pair of ruffs and a pair of sleeves wrought with Venice gold and blue silk’.23 In the north, meanwhile, there was still no word from court, and Lettice’s father was forced to remain in his role as custodian to the Queen of Scots. He may have exchanged New Year’s gifts with Lettice, for he informed his wife that he had sent their younger daughter Elizabeth, affectionately known as Bess, ‘a new milled piece of gold to lay up in her store box’, while she in turn had given him a pair of gloves.24 By 17 January, Francis had had enough of the separation from his family, and in plain language he wrote to the Queen expressing his dissatisfaction: ‘if your majesty think as I do, that you can never make me a good courtier, I most humbly beseech you dismiss me to the country, rather than aggravate my grief with noisome and fruitless service’.25 That same day, he added a postscript to a letter to Cecil in which he wrote: ‘Her majesty promised me I should shortly be rid of this Queen: but the resolution is long a coming. I trust you hasten it.’26 Francis always spoke frankly to Elizabeth, and she in turn came to expect nothing less from him. As he himself once related to his wife, ‘her Majesty sayeth she trusts me, and I believe she thinks me not false’.27

  Unbeknown to Francis and probably also Lettice, at court all was not well with Lady Knollys. Despite her brief recoveries from the bouts of illness from which she had been suffering, after Christmas her health had rapidly declined. The court was in residence at Hampton Court, on the outskirts of London, and when Katherine once again fell ill she had been moved to a room closer to the Queen’s. Nicholas White, a protégé of Cecil’s, remarked that here Katherine ‘was very often visited by her Majesty’s own comfortable presence’, but even this could not cure her.28 The person she really craved was her husband, but despite his desperate pleas to be allowed to return home to her, Francis was not by his wife’s side when she died on 15 January. Lettice’s devoted parents, cruelly separated in the final months of Katherine’s life, had never been reunited.

  Following Lady Knollys’s death, an unbearable sadness descended on Hampton Court. Given her place in the Queen’s household, it is possible that Lettice’s sister, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth, was by her mother’s side at her end, but neither Lettice nor any of her other siblings were there to say their final farewells. The Queen was left heartbroken by Katherine’s death, and fell into such ‘passions of grief … for the death of her kinswoman and good servant’, that she fell ill; ‘being forgetful of her own health, she took cold, wherewith she was much troubled’.29 So affected was Elizabeth that, White noted soon afterwards, she could talk of nothing else. ‘From this she returned back again to talk of my Lady Knollys.’30

  The news of her mother’s death took several days to reach Chartley. Four days later, at Bolton Castle, Francis was still oblivious, and complained to Cecil that ‘It seems by your letter you cannot promise my wife that I shall be discharged.’31 By now it had been decided that the Scottish Queen was to be moved further south, this time to Tutbury, a grim castle that stood not far from Lettice’s home of Chartley.32 Francis had taken this opportunity to inform Cecil that if he had not been relieved of his post by the time he had escorted Mary there, then ‘I must repair to court and suffer any punishment her majesty pleases.’33 However, word of his wife’s death reached him on 20 January, when his brother Henry arrived at Bolton with the heavy tidings. It left him stunned, and the following day Henry informed Cecil that his brother was ‘distracted with sorrow for his great loss’.34 Francis was utterly devastated by the death of the woman that he had loved wholeheartedly for almost thirty years, and he would never remarry. In a letter to the Privy Council on 29 January, he complained that ‘I am much disquieted with this service in these strange countries, which melancholy humour grows daily on me since my wife’s death … My case is pitiful, for my wife disburdened me of many cares
, kept all the monuments of my public charges, as well as my private accounts – now, my children, my servants and all other things, are loosely left without good order.’35 Katherine had been the glue that had held the Knollys family together, and they were all thrown into deep mourning at her passing.

  The Queen gave orders that Lettice’s mother was to receive a costly funeral, and in April she charged the Earl of Leicester and the Duke of Norfolk with ensuring that this was done. By royal command the funeral took place in Westminster Abbey, and the total cost of £640 (£111,300) was borne entirely by the Queen.36 The sum was staggering, and was a great deal more than Elizabeth would spend on burying other cousins, even those of royal birth. The funeral was conducted on an almost royal scale, and although the Queen and Katherine had been close this seems to indicate something more – perhaps an acknowledgement not only of kinship, but also of Katherine’s royal blood.37 The documents relating to her funeral were later discovered alongside those of seven monarchs and their consorts – significantly, Katherine was the only non-royal among them.38

  There is no record of Lettice attending her mother’s funeral, and once the ceremony had been concluded Lady Knollys ‘was honourably buried in the floor of this chapel’ – St Edmunds Chapel in Westminster Abbey, where her tomb can still be seen. Her elaborate marble and alabaster monument is decorated with a border of swans, a bull’s head and a maiden’s head, while among the four shields the arms of the families of Knollys, Boleyn and Carey appear. The epitaph on her tomb remembered Lady Knollys as ‘Chief Lady of the Queen’s Majesty’s Bedchamber’, and also contained a poignant Latin memorial: