Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Pleasure was important to the Elizabethan aristocracy - all the more so, perhaps, since so many of the country’s traditional festivities had been swept away with the old religion. A tournament displayed chivalry, as well as martial ability, for an audience of London notables and foreign dignitaries; a pageant spelt out a message carefully. (Even a dance showed off the participants’ fitness as well as their cultivation, not to mention opening up a worrying - to the killjoys - suggestion of sexual desirability.) Maybe the court festivities had not yet achieved the peak of hedonism they would reach later in Elizabeth’s reign, when those present at one January masque in the 1570s saw tiny comfits representing hailstones - flavoured with cloves, with musk, with ginger - and snowballs scented with rosewater. But the dancing went on till after midnight; and the court entertainments were organized by Robert Dudley. Amid the more conventional balls and masques was one farce that horrified an Italian observer, already shocked at the general ‘licentiousness’ and levity, with crows dressed up as cardinals, wolves to represent abbots.

  The coronation was to take place on 15 January, and by Christmas frantic work was well under way to alter Mary’s coronation robes and produce new finery from the bolts of rare fabric imported from the continent. (Customs officials blocked delivery to any other client, until the Queen and her household had taken what they needed.) On the day before her coronation - the day she was to process through the city - Elizabeth stood up in twenty-three yards of cloth of gold and silver, trimmed with ermine and gold lace. Tradition decreed that she spend the previous night at the Tower, and as she left the place on the fourteenth she paused, so Sir John Hayward later said, and reflected that ‘Some have fallen from being princes in this land to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be a prince in this land.’ Others remembered a different wording, but she must have thought something very like it. So - as they passed the chapel where her mother and his father lay buried with scant ceremony - must Robert Dudley.11

  As Elizabeth rode through London, propped up by eight satin cushions in a litter drawn by two ‘very handsome’ mules, again came the pageants, the crowds, the singing. As Hayward says: ‘It is incredible how often she caused her coach to stay, when any made offer to approach her.’ All the way from Fleet Street to Westminster she kept in her hand the gift of one old woman - a sprig of rosemary, the nearest any Londoner could get to flowers in a sixteenth-century January. Richard Mulcaster, who wrote up the official description, quickly published for the benefit of those who could not be there, called the City that day ‘a stage wherein was showed the wonderful spectacle of a noble-hearted princess toward her most loving people and the people’s exceeding comfort in beholding so worthy a sovereign . . . Out at the windows and penthouses of every house did hang a number of rich and costly banners and streamers’ - that Tudor love of fabric, as ostentatious and elaborate as may be, that set silken colours rippling through the air on every royal festivity. At the upper end of Cheapside, they gave her a crimson satin purse containing a thousand marks in gold, and she took it in both hands; as she neared Paul’s Gate they gave her an English Bible, and she pressed it to her breast, promising to read it diligently.

  Again Robert Dudley rode right behind her; ahead of the thirty-nine ladies in crimson velvet with cloth-of-gold sleeves, ahead of the guards marching three by three. There can be no doubt that he - and Ambrose, leading one of the mules at the litter’s head - watched with approval the Protestant message the worthies of the City had thus enshrined in their ceremony. (Dudley connections were all over this coronation ceremony: Katherine’s father-in-law bore the Queen’s spurs, and Ambrose’s future father-in-law bore St Edward’s staff.) Perhaps Robert read another message: for the great biblical queens to whom Elizabeth was being compared at this stage of her life - Deborah, Judith, Esther - may have been strong women in their own right, but they were known for their married status, rather than their virginity.

  Elizabeth lay at the Palace of Westminster that night and the next day, over a light carpeting of snow, walked the small distance to the abbey. As she left again - after the vows, and the anointing with holy grease that transmuted a mortal woman into the epitome of enduring monarchy - she made no attempt to hide her joy, accepting the acclaim of the people, relishing every evidence of her popularity. ‘In my opinion she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum,’ wrote an Italian envoy sniffily. But even he could not fail to be impressed by the cumulative ceremonies of the past few days and a court so sparkling with jewels and gold collars that, he wrote, ‘they cleared the air’. Behind the scenes, it is true, they had had trouble finding a bishop willing to crown Elizabeth; too many of those recently in office, of course, had been appointed under Mary. But there was no sign of that dissent in the massed ranks of the nobility, nor through the proclamations and the anointings, the banquet, the festivities and the jousts that filled the next days.

  For all the rejoicing and merrymaking, though, there were more serious questions on everyone’s mind. The business of having got Elizabeth into power once concluded, thoughts turned immediately to what would happen once she was out of it by process of mortality. After the past decade (and the wars of the previous century) everyone had had enough of uncertainty. They wanted that thing the Tudors had seemed to promise and then at last failed to deliver: a clear linear path of monarchy. Within four days of the old queen’s death, on 21 November, the Spanish ambassador Feria had been writing to Philip that ‘everything depends upon the husband this woman may take’. (Just so had the Emperor Charles V, Philip’s father, written to the newly proclaimed Mary that she needed a husband ‘in order to be supported in the labour of governing and assisted in matters that are not of ladies’ capacity’.) Feria had no doubt who the new queen’s husband should be: Philip himself. But the Spanish would have to move quickly. Both Elizabeth and ‘her people’, Feria warned, ‘will listen to any ambassadors who may come to treat of marriage’; and he pressed the point three weeks later, on 14 December: ‘Everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner, and they cannot make out whom she favours, so that every day some new cry is raised about a husband.’

  Whosoever it might be, it was assumed she must and would marry someone. There was, Elizabeth herself would observe wryly, ‘a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married’. Cecil would be one influential voice urging now and later that a husband was her and the realm’s ‘only known and likely surety’. The Holy Roman Emperor’s envoy agreed that she should (‘as is woman’s way’) be eager ‘to marry and be provided for. For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’ But no-one, at this stage, was yet mentioning the name of Robert Dudley - who, apart from anything else, was of course a married man already.

  On 4 February the Commons drafted a petition urging Elizabeth to marry quickly, in order to ensure the succession. Her instinct was not to take it kindly - and she might have taken it even less so, had she known that they had contemplated the impertinence of restricting the choice of whom she should marry, hoping that it would be an Englishman and not foreign royalty. If she should remain ‘unmarried and, as it were, a vestal virgin’, it would be ‘contrary to public respects’. It is odd that her parliamentarians should, so very early in the reign, have figured, in repudiating it, exactly the course and image she would choose: as if her views, incredible though they must have seemed, were already clear to this presumably not over-imaginative body of men.

  She answered them that ‘from my years of understanding’ - since she first was old enough to understand herself a servant of God - ‘I haply chose this kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God.’ If ambition for a grand alliance, obedience to the ruler’s will, or the fear of danger ‘could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me; but constant have always cont
inued in this determination’.

  Over the next decade she would when necessary vary, even directly contradict, these protestations of determined virginity (albeit equally rapidly to reiterate her devotion to the single life). It would be almost twenty years before England would see the full flowering of the cult of the Queen’s virginity; as if only then, when she was after all passing out of the reproductive years, could her advisers bring themselves to make the best of her decision. But none of her later statements is stronger than this first answer to Parliament’s petition. In the end, she said, ‘this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin’. It looks as though any sort of romantic emotional satisfaction she would allow herself to take would be one that yet allowed her to maintain this publicly professed virginity.

  True, it was at this vulnerable early moment in her reign that she most needed something to set her apart from other women - from those fallible female creatures who, it was assumed, were quite incapable of rule. Rather than accept her coding as the weak daughter of sinful Eve, she would do better to borrow from the banned Catholicism, and evoke the heavenly virtue of the Virgin Mary. But it is none the less extraordinarily interesting that she should be defending her virginity in such terms now, well before she was even thirty. It is all the more interesting if these first public professions of Elizabeth’s virginity occurred at very much the time when she was falling in love with Robert Dudley.

  These were the months when Elizabeth was most open, most edgy. In these months - when she and Robert were both high on the buzz of power and victory - the personal side of their relationship flowered. On the one hand, Elizabeth had inherited an uncertain throne (in France, Henri II was already proclaiming the rival Catholic claim of his daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots) and an impoverished and vulnerable country. On the other, she had won. She had managed what had so often looked like an impossibility. And as a corollary, a perk, a minor pay-off, after all those years of closely watched constraint, she was free to speak and flirt with whom she pleased - all the freer, no doubt, for the fact that Robert was safely married already.

  She was twenty-five years old, vibrant and lively, with an ability to spin from imperiousness to intimacy that would keep a man guessing, pleasurably. If she was not beautiful then she had, like her mother, the ability to project the idea of it. Later in life, she told an ambassador that she had never in fact been a beauty, but had had the reputation of it in her day. ‘Comely rather than handsome, ’ the Venetian envoy had reported her a year or two before; ‘tall and well-formed, with a good skin, although swarthy, she has fine eyes.’ Robert too was ‘of a tall personage’, said the Venetian, who praised his ‘manly countenance’ though regretting his ‘somewhat brown’ complexion. He had hair and beard shading dark to auburn; the legs to stand up to the trying fashion for short breeches, with their padding and pinking, and their prominent codpieces; and the physique, when they danced together the daring Volta, to twirl Elizabeth high. Philip of Spain had made sombre colours fashionable for men’s clothing, instead of the bright colours the English usually preferred. But Robert (who spent more than £800 on ‘apparel and goldsmith’s work’ this first year; whose accounts show repeated purchases of rosewater and ribbon points, and black silk netherstockings) was always resplendent by the standards of the day. Most striking of all Robert’s physical features were his dark, haughty eyes. Elizabeth would play upon them: called him her eyes, so that he signed himself with the symbol of eyes, a pair of circles with lines for eyebrows over them. It may have been a pun, too, on what he could do for her - look out for her interest, watchfully.

  When exactly did their personal relationship begin to develop? Probably in the spring of 1559; during the first six months of the reign. On 18 April 1559, Feria was writing that in the last few days ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs. It is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.’ It might, he said, be worth ‘coming to terms’ with Robert immediately; exchanging a reciprocal promise of favour.

  Despite Elizabeth’s nerve storms, her bouts of ill-health, she and Robert shared a relish for activity, the kind of eager physicality that made Elizabeth outride half her courtiers and use a bout of intensive dancing exercise to start each day. The whole outdoor world of horse, hunt and hawk represented a huge bond between them, and Robert’s job as Master of Horse had an importance it is hard to grasp today. He was responsible for the breeding, purchase, training and provision of what was not only the chief tool of transport and communication, but in war still a vital piece of armoury; a crucial task for which he was paid a thousand marks a year, with perhaps half as much again in perquisites and his own table at court served with the food considered ‘fit for lords’. It was a job he would keep most of his life, long after other duties might have tempted him away, and one he took very seriously. One of his pet projects would be the improvement of English bloodlines with the Barbary strain; and the recruitment of continental horsemasters, who had at their reins’ end the latest continental tips on manège and cavalry training. On a day-to-day basis, Robert had to provide the kind of mounts suitable for ceremonial occasions - and for the times royal messengers needed to ride swiftly - as well as horses for the Queen’s own personal pleasure and for the haulage of baggage necessary when the court went on its annual progress (in which the schedule records the ominous words ‘from thence to . . .’ almost every day).

  But more telling than all that, at this particular moment, was that, as Master of Horse, Robert’s trump card was physical proximity to the Queen. Having provided the horses, he would then ride with her, close as a royal bodyguard today. Even before they left Hatfield, Elizabeth, between the first meetings of state, was out riding with him every day. This privileged aspect of his position was the more valuable since the fact of a female sovereign upset all the usual paths to power. With a king on the throne, ambitious men would normally clamour for positions, like gentleman of the bedchamber, that allowed them to spend off-duty moments with the monarch, and have their voice in his ear that way. With a queen on the throne, of course, most of those other immediate attendants had to be women - except Robert Dudley. As would become ever more apparent in the years ahead, the other men in her administration came before her with problems on their tongue and paperwork in their hands. Small wonder if the urge to shoot the messenger overcame her all too frequently. Robert alone (especially in these early days, before he had political office) appeared to her in the guise of an invitation to play.

  They were always riding in these early years, and Elizabeth’s intrepidity could frighten even Robert. Ordering some ‘good gallopers’ from Ireland, he added nervously that ‘she spareth not to try as fast as they can go. And I fear them much but she will prove them.’ Surviving accounts for Robert’s early years as Master of Horse bring the animals themselves back to life (though sadly, only those who incurred some veterinary expenditure!) - Bay Gentle, with the dressing for his forefeet, Bellaface, Delicate, and Great Savoy, who had to be bathed when he came from the mares. But it is still hard to recapture the galloping magic of these springtime days; hard, too, to understand how much greater importance springtime - the return of light and warmth to the world - must have had in an age before electricity.12 Small wonder that Robert adopted the cinquefoil, the five-petalled form of the green-white, soapy-scented hawthorn blossom, as yet another symbol.

  In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

  When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding

  Sweet lovers love the spring,

  wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It, and Robert’s relationship with Elizabeth flowered now against the backdrop of an eternal May.

  In this early part of the reign - before it became apparent that Elizabeth’s love of peace would be England’s path to prosperity - there loomed slightly larger the militaristic aspects of her monarchy, and the question of which
men would represent her in an arena where she, as a woman, could not compete. The chronicles of Elizabeth’s early court are full of tournaments like the one that marked her accession, Robert prominent among the jousters. Though actual warfare was moving into a new age, the traditional armed clash of knight against knight had still a significance that went far beyond the courtly trappings, the role-playing and the pageantry. This was a world where Robert excelled. But he and Elizabeth also shared intellectual interests, to a certain degree.

  His mind was not as nimble as hers. Few could be. But he had a wit ‘capable at once of entertaining agreeably and of designing deeply’, besides a ‘Delivery and a Presence’ that commanded respect. He was well grounded (acknowledged one of his future colleagues) in all the writings ‘on the best used governments and chief laws that have been made in all ages’. It sounds almost like the specific training in statecraft that Elizabeth felt herself to lack. His scientific interests (as witness the men who enjoyed his patronage) ranged from mining to medicine, from exploration to alchemy; and as early as 1559 he patronized the troupe of actors who later became known as the Earl of Leicester’s Men. Elizabeth was fond of late-night conferences with all her advisers, calling them in one after the other. Her sessions with Robert Dudley were not all dalliance, necessarily.

  For Robert Dudley (who early resumed his seat in Parliament) was not just a pretty plaything. That’s what has tended to be obscured, not only in the romantic, but in the traditional, the censoriously Victorian, version of this story. Born and bred into the world of politics, bound by ties of faith or family to many of the other nobles at the court, he had - even at this early stage - his own clear policies. In the end, they would not always be hers; but if he was able to influence her, it is probably because their underlying attitudes were so similar in many ways.