The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  At the end of May the emperor’s ambassador Caspar Breuner, Baron von Rabenstein arrived, and de Quadra requested an audience for Breuner and himself a few days later. They were received at one o’clock on a Sunday, and found the queen in her presence chamber dressed very elegantly, “looking on at the dancing,” where she kept them for a long while. Then de Quadra began verbally to open the courtship dance with the archdukes that Elizabeth was to pace intermittently, now slow, now fast, for nine years.

  “She at once began, as I feared, to talk about not wishing to marry,” de Quadra reported, and so he diplomatically cut her short and left her alone with Breuner. Ambassadors had learned to expect this from Elizabeth when they tried to talk to her of marriage; invariably she would shy away with fine words about preferring her state of maidenhood, so that they were obliged to coax and lure her into negotiating the matter, with the knowledge that she might at any moment retreat to her vantage point of virginity. “We find that we have no wish to give up our solitude and our lonely life,” she was to write to the archdukes’ father, the emperor, with exquisite pathos. “There certainly was a time when a very honourable and worthy marriage would have liberated us from certain great distress and tribulation (whereof we will not speak further), but neither the peril of the moment, nor the desire for liberty, could induce us to take the matter into consideration.” Yet her marriageable status was one of her great political assets, and so, as she never failed to add, the matter must remain open to discussion. Slyly she hinted to the emperor, “We cannot safely assert anything for the future, nor wilfully predict anything rash,” so that a world of hope might be pinned onto her pious observation that God might “in his inscrutable wisdom at any time change our thoughts.”

  Having left Breuner with Elizabeth, de Quadra, that “clever and crafty old fox,” went outside to exchange a few words with Secretary Cecil. On this occasion Cecil used one of Elizabeth’s favorite ploys, innocently telling de Quadra what a great number of suitors the queen had. It seemed to the ambassador that Cecil was now genuinely anxious that she should marry, but the secretary confessed to him that as far as the archduke Ferdinand’s suit was concerned, there were certain drawbacks; Elizabeth had been told that he was as devout a Catholic as his cousin Philip, whilst the archduke Charles was commonly said to be quite unfit to rule.

  At this point, Breuner, uninitiated in Elizabeth’s wayward and elusive manner of negotiating, came out of her chamber, “quite despairing of the business.” De Quadra acted with great presence of mind. He at once returned to the queen himself, and by dint of exceptional skill managed to erase her unfavorable impression of Ferdinand, and win her interest by pretending that she was not being offered Ferdinand at all, but the younger brother, twenty-year-old Charles. It was a masterly stroke. After considerable “demurring and doubting” she came around to the belief that it was indeed Charles, “the younger and more likely to please her,” who was her ardent suitor, and though as de Quadra put it, “she went back again to her nonsense, and said she would rather be a nun than marry without knowing whom and on the faith of portrait painters,” it was settled that Breuner should be called back again, and so the negotiations began in earnest. Though the young queen was evidently apprehensive about marriage, and at times seemed to treat the whole subject of her suitors as a great jest, the question was still whom, and not whether, she would finally bring herself to marry. “For in the natural course of events the queen is of an age when she should in reason and as is woman’s way, be eager to marry and be provided for,” Breuner remarked. “That she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.”

  Elizabeth’s delight in the trappings of romance and flirtation, which was to become her substitute for normal sexual fulfillment, until it cracked into grotesquerie in the raddled old virgin, seemed in the eligible young woman to be mere feminine nonsense—somewhat inappropriate, often irritating, but harmless enough while it appeared that marriage would be the final outcome. “I do not know whether she is jesting, which is quite possible,” de Quadra noted, “but I really believe she would like to arrange for the Archduke’s visit in disguise.” It was a fancy that Elizabeth pursued with some resolution. She was insistent that she could not marry a man whom she had not first seen, for she would not put her faith in portraits; perhaps she remembered the cautionary tale of her second stepmother, dull Anne of Cleves, whom Henry VIII had desired in a picture and spurned in the flesh. In audience with Breuner, who was really not quick or subtle enough to partner Elizabeth in these games, she “plied him with a thousand silly stories,” and then said something that he took seriously but that de Quadra interpreted as a broad hint. One of her jesters, she said, had told her that a member of the ambassador’s retinue was really the archduke Charles himself, come disguised and unrecognized to cast his eyes in secret on the great queen whom he hoped to win. It is not hard to detect a trace of longing beneath the frivolity of that remark.

  Breuner, conscientious but “not the most crafty man in the world,” thought at times that his suit must be progressing well. Elizabeth often made a great fuss of him, and her ladies seemed convinced that she was in earnest. A charming scene took place on the river in June; one evening, after dinner, Breuner took a boat on the Thames, and as he was gliding idly along, past the sprawling palace of Whitehall and the splendid town residences of the nobles, he saw the queen’s barge approaching. Voices called thinly across the water, and then the dip and splash of oars began again as he was rowed over to speak to the queen. She was in one of her charming moods, gay and bantering; she spoke to him for a long while, told him to take a place in the Lord Treasurer’s barge, and had her own boat laid alongside. Then, with the most fetching air, she began to play to him on her lute.

  She was evidently much taken with the pretty scene that she had created, and the following evening, by her wish, it was repeated. “When I arrived there,” Breuner reported, “she took me into her boat, made me take the helm, and was altogether very talkative and merry.” Teasing and chattering on the river on a warm June evening, with the imperial ambassador nervously steering her barge, Elizabeth was evidently enjoying her proxy flirtation with the splendid young archduke whom, if she willed, she could have for a husband. She wanted to be desirable—but she wanted also to be unattainable. When matters became serious, and she saw that she was in danger of being trapped, her attitude changed utterly. Only a few months after her encouraging behavior on the river, when she had long been pressing for the archduke to come over to England in person, de Quadra proposed to her that he should indeed come, just as she had requested. At this she became almost distracted. She insisted with real anxiety that if he came she could not be bound to accept him. “When I pressed her much,” de Quadra recounted, “she seemed frightened, and protested again and again she was not to be bound, and she was not yet resolved whether she would marry.” She kept repeating that she could be put under no obligation, and even demanded that this must be put in writing; when de Quadra took that to be a joke she said agitatedly that she “would write to King Philip herself that he might bear witness that she would bind herself to nothing and had not asked the Archduke to come.” Nothing was certain where Elizabeth’s marriage was concerned; ambassadors found themselves hopeful, bewildered, despairing, and confident by turns, and de Quadra wrote exasperatedly towards the end of 1559: “What a pretty business it is to treat with this woman, whom I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is for ever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying.”

  By the autumn of that year there were more than half a dozen ambassadors wooing her at court, competing for her favor and eyeing one another like hostile dogs. “Here is a great resort of wooers and controversy among lovers,” Cecil wrote, half-amused, but profoundly wishing the queen would take one of them and settle the business. The Swedish and imperial representatives were, as Bishop Jewel remarked, “courting at a most marvellous rate. But the
Swede is most in earnest, for he promises mountains of silver in case of success.” The King of Sweden had sent his younger son, Duke John of Finland, to court Elizabeth on behalf of Crown Prince Eric. Duke John had arrived in superb state, bringing a large retinue of noblemen, horses, and many servants, who wore red velvet coats bearing a design of hearts pierced by a javelin, to symbolize Prince Eric’s consuming passion for the queen whom he had never even met. Before long Duke John and Caspar Breuner were at each other’s throats. “The King of Sweden’s son, who is here, is fit to kill the Emperor’s ambassador, because he said his father was only a clown who had stolen his kingdom,” de Quadra informed Philip. “The matter has reached such a point that the Queen is careful they should not meet in the palace to avoid their slashing each other in her presence.”

  The tragicomic strain persisted through Prince Eric’s courtship as through his bitter life. From the first moment of his uncouth wooing, when, in Mary’s reign, Elizabeth had said she liked his proposal so well that she hoped never to hear of it again, his suit was to be the butt of wit. His father, King Gustavus, spent a fortune in the pursuit of Elizabeth; gold and silver were scattered among her subjects, and she received magnificent presents of tapestries, furs, horses, and money, in return for which it was brought to the Swedes notice that they were being “made fun of in the palace, and by the Queen more than anybody.” Once, Duke John was kept waiting to see the queen so long that he finally gave up, and returned, incensed, to his lodgings. But Elizabeth did not fail to turn the droll affair to her advantage; a rich royal suitor had more than amusement to offer, and so there were occasions when she was charming to the Swedish deputation. As de Quadra once reported,

  The Swedish ambassador was summoned the other day by the Queen, who told him she wished to show her gratitude to his master who had sought her in the day of her simplicity, and asked him to tell her whether his ambassadors were coming, as she was being pressed with other marriages. They are constantly getting presents out of them in this way.

  It was said that Eric would come in person to plead the constancy and strength of his love for Elizabeth, and Londoners speculated about the number of wagons massed with bullion that he would bring with him. The comedy was to continue for two years, but blond-bearded Eric never came. Having been slighted by the Queen of England he finally married a common soldier’s daughter. Having recalled Duke John, believing his brother to be wooing Elizabeth on his own behalf, he was eventually deposed and then murdered by John, through the undignified medium of poisoned yellow-pea soup. From the first to the last, Eric of Sweden was “of those that farthest come behind” in the pursuit of Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had no more intention of accepting Prince Eric or the archduke Charles than she had had of marrying King Philip; for her the object of all the splendid courtships that presented themselves was not marriage, the commitment and capture that would take from her her newfound mastery, but political dalliance. By using her superb mental powers in conjunction with her most aggravating feminine weaknesses she could keep her suitors’ hopes alive for months on end, to suit her needs both as a queen and as a woman. She had been a victim for so long, dependent on others’ humors for her liberty and life, that she found a keen, exultant pleasure in being the coquettish center of extravagant attentions, with absolute power to encourage or spurn, and even to mock if she pleased. However purely political her suitors’ motives, the fact remained that marriage was the most personal of all treaties. And so her demands for detailed descriptions, portraits, and personal facts about the wooers were relayed across Europe. There was no hope for the archduke if he had a big ugly head like the Earl of Bedford; her ambassador at the emperor’s court must send her a lengthy and exact description of Charles, including his habits and character, and even so she continued to insist she must meet him before she could reach a decision. Her husband must be a real man, she informed de Quadra, one who, in her evocative phrase, “would not sit at home all day among the cinders, but in time of peace keep himself employed in warlike exercises.” She was describing the type of man to whom she was always attracted, the Thomas Seymour breed: dashing, brave, and virile.

  “As she is a woman,” de Quadra wrote in October 1559, “and a spirited and obstinate woman too, passion has to be considered.” In the coming years passion was not only to be considered, but to play a central role in Elizabeth’s life. The queen had fallen in love, and the man she loved was to become the most ruthless and persistent of all her suitors.

  5

  The Queen in Love

  While her suitors’ ambassadors were jostling hopefully in the antechambers of Whitehall, and speculation was veering from one great name to another, Elizabeth had fallen recklessly in love with a man who was neither a foreign prince nor an eminent English noble, but a mere younger son of a new and tainted family. Lord Robert Dudley, grandson and son of executed traitors, was an ambitious, devious, married man, but he was to be the great love of Elizabeth’s life.

  For Lord Robert, as for Elizabeth, the wheel of Fortune had turned almost full circle by 1558, when they were both twenty-five. The Dudley family had risen to giddy heights during King Edward’s reign; when his able, dangerous father acquired the title of Duke of Northumberland and the position of virtual ruler of England, young Robert had come to the forefront of court life and had a glimpse of power. The Duke of Northumberland dealt out promising official positions to his brood of sons, and Robert became a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to the boy king as well as Master of the Buckhounds—a post particularly suited to his sporting tastes. At that time he must often have met the Lady Elizabeth when she visited her brother’s court. But the plot in which he supported his father after King Edward’s death was intended to deprive Elizabeth, as well as Mary, of the throne.

  For a few desperate weeks in the summer of 1553, the Duke of Northumberland was poised at the summit of power, his sons, bold and obedient, ranged behind him. If he was to succeed in making little Lady Jane Grey the nominal Queen of England, the rightful heir, Mary, had to be seized and silenced; it was twenty-year-old Robert who was sent clattering down the stone stairs from his father’s council room in the Tower to ride with all speed to Suffolk at the head of a troop of horse and bring Mary in. That was the beginning of the plunge downwards for Robert Dudley. By the end of July he was back in the Tower, no longer an honored son of England’s most powerful man, but a prisoner under guard. Confined alone, chafing his name onto the wall, ROBART DVDLEY, he waited to die as a traitor.

  He was still waiting when the spring came, and the Lady Elizabeth was brought to imprisonment in the nearby Queen’s House. Northumberland had requested at his trial “that Her Majesty will be gracious to my childer, which may hereafter do Her Grace good service, considering that they went by my commandment that am their father, and not of their own free wills”; as the weeks passed it became apparent that Mary was indeed disposed to be gracious to the traitor duke’s remaining sons. Vigor and enterprise such as Robert Dudley’s were wasted on prison pastimes, and after more than a year of narrow confinement in the Tower, he and his brothers were released, to do the queen good service.

  Whether or not Robert had succeeded in communicating with Elizabeth while they were both prisoners behind the same dark walls, their old acquaintance developed into a strong bond during Mary’s reign. As Robert began to rise to honorable status once again, serving Philip and Mary abroad and distinguishing himself as a valiant and capable Master of the Ordnance at the Siege of St. Quentin in 1557, he kept in touch with Elizabeth. A contemporary report said that he gave her generous gifts of money when she was in difficulties; in 1562 the King of Sweden was told by an English visitor to his court that “in her trouble Lord Robert did sell away a good piece of his land to aid her, which divers supposed to be the cause the Queen so favored him.” When the news of Mary’s death brought the dark days to an end, Robert rode to Elizabeth at Hatfield and was one of the close friends and servants whom she swiftly rewarded with p
ublic offices. Kat Ashley became First Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber; Thomas Parry was knighted and appointed Controller of the Household; William Cecil was sworn in as Secretary of State, and Lord Robert Dudley was appointed her Master of the Horse. Through all the years of advancement and honor that were to come to him, he would not relinquish that office, Elizabeth’s first public favor to him.

  The queen clung to old friends and associates. Even such a fallible servant as Parry was dear to her because he had been with her in times of extreme adversity. But Robert had more than loyalty and proven fellowship to recommend him to the young queen. He had the superb looks, the aura of sexual vigor, and the taste for hardy physical activities that Elizabeth found so intensely attractive in a man. By the spring of 1559 her passion for her Master of the Horse could not be concealed. On April 18 Feria wrote to King Philip,