The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  During the last few days Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does what he likes with affairs, and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert. I can assure Your Majesty that matters have reached such a pass that I have been brought to consider whether it would not be well to approach Lord Robert on Your Majesty’s behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.

  In those succinct lines Feria introduced the major themes of Robert Dudley’s lifelong relationship with the queen. Political power, scandal, talk of murder and marriage, and furtive dealings with Spain and other foreign powers were to recur like scarlet threads in the bright, sometimes tawdry, fabric of Elizabeth’s greatest love affair.

  For a queen who was so committed to the state of virginity that she had to be coaxed into considering the suits of mighty princes, Elizabeth seemed remarkably abandoned in her behavior towards her favorite. As she herself said, “in this world she had had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy,” that in her newfound freedom she grasped avidly at the pleasure of Robert’s company. There was a little flutter of intrigue when Pickering arrived at court, in May 1559, soon after Elizabeth’s feelings for Robert had become evident; on one occasion the Master of the Horse went off to hunt at Windsor and the queen took advantage of his absence to spend some cozy hours with her attractive suitor Pickering. “They tell me Lord Robert is not so friendly with him as he was,” de Quadra reported ingenuously. But there could be no real doubt as to where Elizabeth’s true affections lay, and as though to prove it, at the end of the same month she was reported to have given Robert the enormous sum of £12,000 “as an aid towards his expenses.” Official honors, such as the Order of the Garter, which she bestowed upon him on the first possible occasion, were matched by constant informal signs of love; the queen smiled at Lord Robert, danced with him, rode with him, made indecorous visits to his rooms with a freedom that could not fail to give rise to gossip. Ambassadors hinted in their dispatches at “extraordinary things about this intimacy,” unspecified goings-on vouched to by nameless witnesses; and the rumors that reached foreign courts were to cause more than one important suitor to express disquieting doubts about the chastity of the Queen of England. Among her own subjects, whispers of scandal filtered into London streets and country lanes, to be echoed back in garbled form, with folk-song embellishments about a game of legerdemain and a gift of a fine petticoat—“Thinkst thou that it was a petticoat? No, no, he gave her a child, I warrant thee.” At the heart of all the talk, sophisticated insinuations and illiterate gossip alike, was the one very basic allegation that a drunken inhabitant of Totnes expressed in its simplest form. “Lord Robert,” he asserted, “did swive the Queen.”

  The emperor, father of the archdukes, was perturbed by the “somewhat discreditable rumours” that reached him concerning his son’s prospective bride. Breuner was ordered to find out the truth of the matter, and the ambassador’s response was illuminating. Informing his imperial master that “my Lord Robert is preferred by the Queen above all others, and that Her Majesty shows her liking for him more markedly than is consistent with her honour and dignity,” he nevertheless stressed that all his “most diligent enquiries into the calumnies that are current about the Queen, not only abroad but also here in England” had produced no firm evidence, and all the people who knew the queen intimately “swear by all that is holy that Her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour.” Then he recounted a dramatic scene that took place early in August between Kat Ashley and the queen.

  Kat, still Elizabeth’s most intimate personal attendant, had suddenly fallen to her knees and begged the queen to marry and put an end to all the disreputable rumors, “telling Her Majesty that her behavior towards the said Master of the Horse occasioned much evil-speaking; for she showed herself so affectionate to him that Her Majesty’s honour and dignity would be sullied.” Elizabeth gave a restrained reaction to her former governess’s exhortations, half-excusing herself: “If she had shown herself gracious to her Master of the Horse, he had deserved it for his honourable nature and dealings”; half-denying the accusations: “She was always surrounded by her Ladies of the Bedchamber and Maids-of-honour, who at all times could see if there was anything dishonourable between her and her Master of the Horse”; and working up to a splendidly regal climax: “If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable kind of life, from which may God preserve her, she did not know of anyone who could forbid her; but she trusted in God that nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself.” She had spoken in her own defense, and she had spoken convincingly. Nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself.

  Her affair with Lord Robert Dudley was an intensely sexual relationship that was never consummated. The exhibitionism of it all was part of the excitement for Elizabeth; it was a form of acting that required an audience, for the extravagance of her indiscreet familiarity with her favorite was not proof of sexual surrender, but rather a tantalizing, titillating substitute. With his hard eyes and bold air, standing an athletic five feet ten in his tilt armor, dark-haired Lord Robert typified the masculine splendor that Elizabeth had been brought up to worship in her mighty father. To keep such a strong, desirable man in a state of flattering passion for her without ever quite permitting him to gain the mastery over her was for Elizabeth a heady form of power. She could enjoy all the intimate communion and outward signs of love while clutching, with an instinct beyond the reach of reason, onto the state of virginity that would be her shield against the tragedies that had befallen her mother and stepmothers. It was because the normal physical purpose was missing from Elizabeth’s dealings with the man she loved that the preambles became so disproportionately important to her, to the point where she indulged in such antics as mischievously tickling Robert’s neck in full view of the court and the Scottish envoy, on the solemn and politically delicate occasion of his creation as Earl of Leicester. With the same Scottish envoy she afterwards enacted a pretty little scene over a portrait of Robert—marked in her handwriting “My Lord’s picture”—which she conspiratorially extracted from her private cabinet and then feigned not to let the Scottish diplomat see, until he played his part in the charade by pressing to be allowed a glimpse of it. There was much in Elizabeth’s emotional behavior and demands that suggested an adolescent girl rather than a mature woman. She felt both passion and tenderness for Robert, but she would never yield herself entirely to him or any man, and in the teasing, posing coquetry for which she became notorious lay the evidence of her lack of fulfillment.

  From the very beginning of his relationship with the queen, even while he was the husband of another woman, Lord Robert’s presence was felt in Elizabeth’s marriage dealings. At times his very existence seemed likely to hinder the business of selecting a suitable consort for the queen; reporting on the progress of the archduke Ferdinand’s wooing, in April 1559, de Quadra noted, “Sometimes she appears to want to marry him, and speaks like a woman who will only accept a great prince, and then they say that she is in love with Lord Robert and never lets him leave her.” In a political situation glittering with possibilities, Northumberland’s most promising son would not be content to play a passive role for long. In September, when there was a strong possibility that the queen might marry the Earl of Arran for the sake of settling the Scottish question, Robert took an active hand in affairs, stealthily approaching de Quadra to offer support and encouragement in the archduke’s cause, to counter Arran’s suit. The means by which he negotiated with the ambassador, using his sister Lady Sidney as go-between and ally, was one which he would later employ again, in his own pursuit of the queen. At first de Quadra succumbed to the young adventurer’s charm and air of forthright integrity. “Lord Robert and his sister are certainly acting splendidly
, and the King will have to reward them well,” he wrote warmly. “Robert professes to be the most faithful servant our King has here.” But disillusionment followed. “I am anything but pleased with his dissimulation,” de Quadra complained in December, and by the following March he had come to the irate conclusion that Robert was “the worst and most procrastinating young man I ever saw in my life, and not at all courageous or spirited.” The truth was that the queen’s beloved Lord Robert was, first and foremost, a devoted servant of his own interests.

  De Quadra was far from alone in his bad opinion of Elizabeth’s favorite. Robert Dudley acquired a vile reputation in many quarters. His obvious ambition and his influence with the queen made him a figure either to be courted or opposed; those who envied him, resented his undeserved greatness, or genuinely feared his presence at the center of affairs all contributed to his ill fame. “Beware of the gypsy, for he will be too hard for you all. You know not the beast as I do,” warned the Earl of Sussex on his deathbed. There was certainly something gypsyish in Dudley’s dark good looks and bold opportunistic nature, but the beastliness alleged in tales of his insatiable lust and predeliction for poisoning people entered the realms of myth. What was real was the dislike that he inspired at court. De Quadra asserted that “all the principal people in the kingdom” were his enemies, and, even more dramatically, “Not a man in England but cries out at the top of his voice that this fellow is ruining the country with his vanity.” England’s highest peer, the young Duke of Norfolk, was Dudley’s chief opponent. He felt his rightful hereditary authority to be undermined by the presence of the powerful favorite, and he was disturbed by the queen’s apparent irresponsibility. “The Queen and Robert are very uneasy about the Duke of Norfolk, as he talks openly about her lightness and bad government,” de Quadra wrote. Norfolk was heard to say menacingly that “if Lord Robert did not abandon his present presumptions and pretensions, he would not die in his bed.” Robert’s attitude bred mistrust, his advancement aroused fear; even though he was a married man, he was from the outset suspected of aiming at the ultimate prize—the consort’s crown. “I think this hatred of Lord Robert will continue, as the Duke and the rest of them cannot put up with his being King,” de Quadra informed King Philip, and soon after reported, “He has again been warned that there is a plot to kill him, which I quite believe, for there is not a man in the realm can suffer the idea of his being King.” It was curious, the persistent talk of marriage for a man who already had a wife. Towards the end of November Robert had a furious quarrel with Norfolk, who was urging the match with the archduke, “and Robert told him he was neither a good Englishman nor a loyal subject who advised the Queen to marry a foreigner.” The question hung in the air: if Elizabeth was to be dissuaded from marrying a foreigner, which Englishman did Robert have in mind for her husband? De Quadra believed he knew. “Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife,” he asserted. “Certainly all the Queen has done with us and with the Swede, and will do with the rest in the matter of her marriage, is only keeping Lord Robert’s enemies and the country engaged with words until this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated.” The atmosphere was charged with violence.

  Mild, wise Secretary Cecil became almost distracted with worry over the situation. Elizabeth showed no signs of making a proper match and providing the country with an heir, but seemed quite given up to reckless dalliance with her unsuitable favorite. “The Queen, thanks be to God, is in very good health and is now become a great huntress and doth follow it daily from morning to night,” Dudley wrote cheerfully in September 1560, adding that she was sending over to Ireland for some new horses, “especially for good strong gallopers, which are better than her geldings, which she spareth not to try as fast as they can go. And I fear them much, but yet she will prove them.” While Elizabeth was enjoying thrilling breakneck gallops with her Master of the Horse, her greatest minister, Cecil, was proposing to resign, utterly despairing. “God send Her Majesty understanding what shall be her surety,” he wrote mournfully to Throckmorton, the ambassador in France. To de Quadra, who inferred that Cecil was in disgrace, “and that Robert was trying to turn him out of his place,” he confided a good deal of his anxiety. “He said it was a bad sailor who did not enter port if he saw a storm coming, and he clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through Robert’s intimacy with the Queen, who surrendered all affairs to him and meant to marry him. He said he did not know how the country put up with it.” With ominous emphasis, reminiscent of Norfolk’s threats, Cecil repeated twice “that Lord Robert would be better in Paradise than here.” His concluding remarks were, in the light of events, still more sinister. According to de Quadra, “He ended by saying that Robert was thinking of killing his wife, who was publicly announced to be ill, although she was quite well, and would take very good care they did not poison her.” When Secretary Cecil spoke those words to the Spanish ambassador, Robert’s young wife, Amy Robsart, had only hours to live.

  She was found dead, with her neck broken, at the bottom of a staircase at Cumnor Place, on September 8, 1560. She had sent all her servants off to the fair that day, her husband was away, as usual, hunting with the queen at Windsor, and so no one could say for sure how she had died. “I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use, but one, which is the very plain truth to be known,” Robert wrote to a relation, begging him to investigate the accident with the utmost diligence, “as the cause and the manner thereof doth marvellously trouble me, considering my case many ways.” Elizabeth kept her presence of mind when she learned of it. Lord Robert was sent to his house at Kew, and she told de Quadra the news in a phrase which suggested that she was by no means certain of the facts. But de Quadra’s mind at once leaped from murder to marriage. “Certainly this business is most shameful and scandalous,” he wrote, “and withal I am not sure whether she will marry the man at once or even if she will marry at all, as I do not think her mind sufficiently fixed.”

  That Elizabeth had played no deliberate part in the affair was clear, but the “very plain truth” of the matter was never conclusively proved. The possibility could not be ruled out that Lord Robert had played the beast and fulfilled the expectations of the world by sending assassins to rid him of the frail obstacle which “stood in his light, as he supposed,” barring his way to marriage with the queen. But physical violence may not have been necessary; perhaps the subtle poison of neglect killed Dudley’s wife. According to local opinion, she had been “a strange woman of mind,” and one of her close attendants said she had often heard Amy “pray to God to deliver her from desperation.” Amy Dudley had lost her husband to the queen, and in his absence, while she tended his household affairs, the salacious rumors of his dealings at court must have drifted back to her. In a brief business letter, written a year before she died, she included the pathetically revealing phrase “I forgot to move my Lord thereof before his departing, he being sore troubled with weighty affairs, and I not being altogether in quiet for his sudden departing.” The love had drained from their relationship, and Amy Dudley was left alone, though not in quiet, until all jealousy, loneliness, and fear ended for her at the foot of a flight of stairs. Some reports had said she was very ill with cancer of the breast; such a condition, in an advanced state, might cause a spontaneous fracture of the spine as a result of even such a mild exertion as walking downstairs. But whatever mental or physical pain Amy suffered at the end of her short life, the husband who had married her for love was not with her to comfort her and see to her welfare. And after it had happened, the murder, suicide, or sheer accident that made him a free man, Robert showed no grief, nor any sign of regret, only care for his own reputation. He was, after all, Northumberland’s son.

  The official verdict was misadventure, but rumor at home and abroad proclaimed Robert’s guilt. At the French court Mary, Queen of Scots, sneered that the Queen of England was going to marry “her horsekeeper,” who had killed his wife to make room for her, and Throckmorton,
goaded almost to distraction, wrote from Paris, “The bruits be so brim and so maliciously reported here touching the marriage of the Lord Robert and the death of his wife, as I know not where to turn me nor what conclusion to bear.” Unnecessarily, considering the recipient’s views, he begged Cecil, “As you bear a true and faithful heart to Her Majesty and the realm, and do desire to keep them from utter desolation, I conjure you to do all your endeavor to hinder that marriage.” He sent his confidential secretary Robert Jones to England to impress upon the queen the danger that her reputation was facing. However matters might turn out, however plainly Robert’s innocence might eventually be proved, his active courtship of the queen had begun in the most unpropitious of circumstances.

  Elizabeth looked strained and ill in the weeks that followed Amy Dudley’s death. When Jones had an audience with her at Greenwich, and told her plainly what was being said about Lord Robert and herself, she moved restlessly in her chair, and covered her face with her hands, then broke into one of her characteristic nervous laughs. She told Jones firmly that the investigations into the affair had utterly vindicated both Lord Robert’s honesty and her own honor, and he left feeling somewhat reassured. “Surely the matter of Lord Robert doth greatly perplex her,” he decided, “and it is never like to take place.” In such an explosive situation, it would have been dangerous folly for Elizabeth to have married Lord Robert out of hand, even if she had wished to. She loved him dearly, and she undoubtedly believed him to be innocent of the crime of murder, but her instinct for self-preservation and her care for the quietness of her realm were stronger than any passion she could ever feel. As early as October de Quadra reported that Cecil had told him “that the Queen had decided not to marry Lord Robert, as he had learnt direct from her.”