Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  They shared a measure of hard-headed practicality; Elizabeth was probably grateful rather than otherwise that Robert had not taken active part in any of the abortive rebellions in the days of Mary. They shared a reverence for tradition, for established order, for England’s history. While genealogists traced Elizabeth’s supposed descent from King Arthur, Robert’s pet poet Spenser would be only one of those to figure Arthur himself as Robert Dudley. Indeed, though his family profited from every swing to the new (like the Reformation, and the alienation of lands from the great northern Catholic families), his attitude was possibly more traditional than that of Elizabeth, whose natural conservatism warred with a desire to exalt the monarchy at the expense of that same aristocracy.

  In April 1559 Elizabeth named Robert a Knight of the Garter: a remarkable elevation, since the other three men so honoured - the Marquess of Northampton, the Earl of Rutland and the Duke of Norfolk (who would emerge as Dudley’s great enemy) - were all men of rank or seniority. The Garter knights, moreover, were supposed to be men of irreproachable fame and family; their motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense - shame on him who thinks evil - must have seemed all too apt when thinking of Robert’s relationship to the queen. She made several grants to him of land and money, including Knole Park in Kent: a significant gift, this (though he did not long keep it); not only for the spacious sprawl of house and garden, but because the property had once been in the hands of Robert’s father, before his disgrace. It was as if Elizabeth were trying to wipe out all that had happened under Mary.

  If so, she had Robert’s enthusiastic co-operation. But to contemporaries, for whom all his long years of service still lay invisible ahead, it must have seemed more as if he were working for his own and his family’s interests than those of his queen. Indeed, those who remembered Edward’s reign, not a decade before, must have been aghast at how much power clustered once again around Dudleys and those associated with Dudleys. It is true the Queen did not immediately move to place either of the Dudley brothers on the privy council, perhaps well aware that members of this family entered the new reign with ready-made enemies. But now, already, those enemies grumbled, the privy chamber was staffed mostly by Robert’s ‘creatures’. (Besides his sisters Mary and Katherine, Robert would later be extremely busy in placing Ambrose’s wife at Elizabeth’s hand.) In this same year of 1559, Mary’s husband Henry Sidney was given the presidency of the council in the Welsh Marches and would go on to become Elizabeth’s viceroy in Ireland; while Robert’s other brother-in-law, soon to inherit his father’s title of Earl of Huntingdon, besides being a possible heir to the throne would later become Lord President of the Council in the north. Within a very few years events would place Ambrose Dudley in charge of an English army; within months, the Spanish ambassador would be reporting that Robert himself was laying in ‘a good stock of arms’ for an unspecified purpose. (Such rumours of suspect private military might would continue throughout his career.)

  There is a risk, in picturing Robert as a patriot and a loyal promoter of Elizabeth, of glossing over the huge personal ambition that ran hand in hand with his loyalty, and the lust for control that would be seen in contexts as diverse as his chancellorship of Oxford University (where he stripped power from the main body of teachers to concentrate it into the hands of his own appointees) and the Welsh town where he never forgave the burgesses who dared pass over his own candidate for their parliamentary representation. It is unlikely Elizabeth ever forgot his ambition and the breadth of the power base he would build up. (More than two decades later, in 1581, she told a Spanish ambassador, perhaps somewhat mendaciously, that she could not dismiss Robert Dudley even if she wanted to, since he had placed his friends and kinsmen in every port and stronghold in the country.) But it is also unlikely that she feared it - or that it diminished his attraction in her eyes. On the one hand, a good measure of his ambition was in a sense for her, or at least for her kingdom - for an ‘incomparable British Empire’, in the words of his protégé Dr Dee. On the other, perhaps the harsh politics of the Tudor court had taught her to despise those she could control too easily. Robert’s heraldic symbol would be the bear; among the many significant jewels he would give her was a fan from which dangled ‘a lion ramping, with a white muzzled bear at the foot’.

  The years would prove that she was right not to fear; that Robert was her liege man, at the end of the day. Indeed, among this first generation of Elizabeth’s councillors, it would not precisely be true to say that he was the only one devoted absolutely to her interest; but Cecil (to whom that accolade is more often given) arguably gave his loyal and surpassing service less to Elizabeth personally than to the Elizabeth who currently embodied a moderate and successful monarchy. Cecil wrote that he was ‘sworn first’ to God, but that because the Queen was ‘God’s chief minister here, it shall be God’s will to have her commandment obeyed’. There is a suggestion here of ‘first among equals’ with which Elizabeth would hardly have agreed.

  The broadly accepted ideal of government was ‘the king counselled’: the king (or queen) guided by the advice of a band of councillors, the majority of them still drawn from the ranks of the nobility; and sanctioned, ultimately, by the voice of the people as represented in Parliament (though Parliament still did not have the voice that it would do in later centuries - still did not meet as often, even). Contemporary belief that the ruler must be swayed by such counsel gained added impetus from that ruler’s being a woman.13 To some, indeed, the rule of the female Elizabeth seemed to present a problem almost comparable to that of the adolescent Edward. Even Cecil, in these early days at least, could be found reproaching a messenger with having taken papers directly to the Queen, ‘a matter of such weight being too much for a woman’s knowledge’. There is no record of any such sentiment from Robert Dudley. As a friend, as a sympathizer, and as what has been called the impresario of her public galas, his enduring efforts aimed to elevate Elizabeth, personally.

  Later in their long relationship, his ideas would come to diverge from hers. His religious beliefs, in particular, would set him on a different path - but his grumbles against her, when they came, would always be couched in practical and personal, rather than theoretical, terms; and in the end he would always do things her way. And the second important point here is this: there is no evidence that Robert thought theoretically (unlike Cecil, with his background among the Cambridge humanists). That very absence of formulated belief in Robert, while it has helped posterity to put him down as a mere masculine dummy, must have appealed to Elizabeth, herself no lover of unnecessary theory. On the one hand, promoting Robert Dudley must have felt like keeping an attractive man close, rewarding a proven friend, and ensuring the continued loyalty of a major service family, rather than buying into a system of political belief. On the other, it must at least have been possible for her to believe that he came closest of all her immediate advisers to sharing her own conception of her monarchy.

  The question was, might he actually share that throne, that monarchy? Ambition as well as attraction must have led him to dream of marriage, when first the Queen began to display such extraordinary familiarity. His family had several times brushed with royalty - his widowed Dudley grandmother marrying ‘My Lord the Bastard’, Henry VIII’s illegitimate uncle; his brother marrying Lady Jane Grey; perhaps he might fulfil the family’s destiny, if only . . .

  But it is hard to know quite what he was thinking - he, still a married man. For Robert, Amy Dudley was a known and once beloved quantity; not just an abstract (in)convenience, easily out of mind as she was out of sight, away in the country. Elizabeth had no such tie. Possibly he was not thinking clearly at all: from the few examples we have available, he seems to have been a man who, faced by a strong and attractive woman, was capable of being swept away.

  Then again, in that despatch of 18 April Feria had written that ‘they say’ Robert’s wife ‘has a malady in one of her breasts’ and that he and the Queen were simply waiting for Amy to die in order to
marry. The Venetian ambassador to the Habsburg court likewise reported that Amy ‘has been ailing some time’, and that if she were to die, various persons believed ‘the Queen might easily take [Dudley] for her husband’. But this may be no more than Chinese whispers; and the Venetian envoy in England, writing on 10 May, was maddeningly discreet: ‘My Lord Robert Dudley is in great favour and very intimate with Her Majesty. On this subject I ought to report the opinion of many, but I doubt whether my letters might not miscarry or be read, wherefore it is better to keep silence than to speak ill.’

  It is striking how quickly some observers seem to have come to believe that Elizabeth and Robert would - could! - marry, even while no further details appear on Amy Dudley’s putative illness. But while rhetoric decrees that marriage was for life - while even Henry had had to resort to extreme measures and obscure legal byways to detach himself from his wives - a look around the late Tudor aristocracy shows a slightly different story. Lawrence Stone, in The Road to Divorce, describes how the religious Reformation had thrown canon law into confusion; and how, if you look at practice rather than theological debate, you find a picture even more ‘obscure’. A decree of separation might - or might not, depending on opinion - allow remarriage for the innocent party, that is, the husband who had proved his wife’s adultery. (Robert himself would later be instrumental in pushing through one such second marriage.) But although it is unclear just how this might have worked out for the Dudleys, the long and the short of it was that if you had influence enough, the thing might be manageable - especially if the marriage was childless. That Robert knew this well would be clear in his own later marital history.

  But as 1559 wore on it was clear there were many other candidates for Elizabeth’s hand; and better-placed ones, too. It has to be admitted Philip of Spain had made but a reluctant wooer, sighing that while Elizabeth thought over his proposal he felt ‘like a condemned man awaiting his fate’. Nothing would make him contemplate marriage with another Tudor bride except the knowledge that it would gain England ‘for his service and faith’. (March 1559 had seen the end of the negotiations, and thereafter, with unflattering speed, Philip offered instead for a French princess. Was Elizabeth piqued, as well as relieved? Is it a coincidence that right after Philip’s offer was withdrawn she turned more openly to Robert Dudley?)

  Other royal suitors waxed more attractively enthusiastic - such as Eric of Sweden, who returned to the assault he had begun in Mary’s day. In the first February of Elizabeth’s reign the Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand, who had inherited Austria from Charles V while Philip inherited Spain) had suggested one of his younger sons. But that proposal too foundered on Elizabeth’s declared reluctance to marry a man she had never even seen. Mischievously, she had suggested that the archduke should come to England for inspection; something to which his father was never likely to agree. But she meant what she said. (Perhaps she remembered her father’s experience with Anne of Cleves - or Philip’s sour words about the too-flattering portrait sent him of Mary - for she swore she would never put her trust in portraits.) When the time finally came to dispose of her Swedish suitor, she would tell him that ‘we shall never choose any absent husband’. Indeed, the chances for personal unhappiness in such a marriage were high. Perhaps many royal princesses would have turned down the alliances proposed for them had they been able to do so; had they had, as Elizabeth did, an alternative destiny.

  There remained the question of an English marriage, with a man Elizabeth felt to her taste. Neither of the first highly public front-runners had been Robert Dudley. The 47-year-old Earl of Arundel (father-in-law to the Duke of Norfolk) had little to offer but his money and his long pedigree; still, he thought that might be enough. The diplomat Sir William Pickering had other qualities to recommend him to Elizabeth: the courtly manners she always relished, and a history of loyalty to her interests. When he appeared at court on Ascension Day, Elizabeth treated him with all the warmth she would show to subsequent favourites. He, who had long known Elizabeth, said (like Robert) that he knew ‘she meant to die a maid’. But in any case it had soon become clear that neither of these - swagger, compete, and spend money on entertainments as they might - had the appeal of Robert Dudley.

  That summer of 1559, at Greenwich, Robert was organizing for Elizabeth what sounds like an enchanting summer festivity: a tournament and picnic in pavilions decked with boughs of birch and ‘all manner of the flowers of the field and garden’ - lavender, roses, gilliflowers and marigolds. But Elizabeth could still, at the height of Robert’s attraction for her, proclaim her openness to other offers when necessary. When the new young King of France (Henri having died in a tournament of his own) declared that the English throne belonged to himself and his wife Mary, Elizabeth would threaten: ‘I will take a husband who will give the King of France some trouble.’ She meant the Earl of Arran, Protestant heir to the Scottish throne after Mary, and a natural focus for the disaffected nobles of that country. But as the court moved on to Windsor she spent ever more time with Robert, riding and hunting by day, talking and making music by night.

  Then comes a puzzle: early in September, the Spanish ambassador received a visit from Lady Mary Sidney, Elizabeth’s favourite lady-in-waiting and Robert’s sister, who told him as representative of the Habsburg interest that it would be worth reviving the archduke’s proposal; that the Queen believed, in view of the French threat, that the marriage had now become necessary. This was confirmed to the ambassador by no less a person than Robert Dudley.

  This was the first - but not the last - time Elizabeth would exhibit an odd Janus-face to set the claims of her other suitors against those of Robert Dudley: and the first, but not the last, time he seemed to be acting in a way one would not expect. This time, however, he may have felt that the thing of first importance was to counterbalance Arran’s Scottish suit. That would explain why, the next month, he would be hosting a banquet for Eric of Sweden’s proxy, his brother Duke John - even though, back at Whitehall, when he complained his rooms were too damp, too near the river, the Queen had given him apartments next to her own. It was as if she doled out measures of private reassurance as to her affection in return for his compliance in the public parade of her royal availability. And when the Spanish ambassador told Elizabeth it might after all be possible to have the archduke visit England for her inspection, she told him she had after all no plans to marry at this time; that members of her household often gossiped about her marriage without her authority. This prospect of a flesh-and-blood suitor actually appearing before her seemed to make her ‘frightened’, said the ambassador tellingly. Perhaps the Queen had just been making a subtle ploy for power and time against the Habsburgs, with Robert as her pawn and mouthpiece, fully cognizant of the role he was to play. He must, as a political animal and Elizabeth’s close ally, have recognized the diplomatic importance of the marriage ploy.

  In November, the Spanish ambassador worried that Robert was ‘slackening’ in the archduke’s cause, and the Imperial ambassador wrote home: ‘It is generally stated that it is his fault that the Queen does not marry’; that he and the Queen had ‘a secret understanding’, that they would marry when his wife were once sent ‘into Eternity’. But England, he said, would not sit quiet under such a match: ‘if she marry the said Mylord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and rise up the next morning as plain Madam Elizabeth . . . it is a marvel that he has not been slain long ere this.’

  The Duke of Norfolk charged Robert with being the impediment to the Habsburg marriage, whereat Robert (in marked contrast to what he had told the Spaniard) answered back that ‘He is neither a good Englishman, nor a loyal subject, who advises the Queen to marry a foreigner.’ Nor was the Duke of Norfolk the only one to look askance at the rise of Robert Dudley. William Cecil was eyeing his progress warily. And Kat Ashley (now First Lady of the Bedchamber) went down on her knees to beseech her erstwhile charge to marry and put an end to the rumours,
‘telling Her Majesty that her behaviour towards the Master of Horse occasioned much evil speaking’. Coming from Kat, Elizabeth took it quietly; said that Robert had deserved much of her ‘for his honourable nature and dealings’, and that to talk scandal was absurd, when she was constantly surrounded by her ladies of the bedchamber, who would know if ‘anything dishonourable’ had passed - adding, as an illogical rider, that if however she had ever sought a dishonourable life (‘from which may God preserve her’), she ‘did not know of anybody who could forbid her’. When Kat, with her usual impetuosity, again urged that, whatever the facts of the case, the damage to her reputation could even lead to civil war, Elizabeth - emotional now - refused an appeal that she see less of Robert. She needed him, she said, because ‘in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy’.

  To some of the foreign ambassadors, this was indeed becoming a scandal that could even topple Elizabeth from the throne. The Emperor’s envoy was instructed to institute enquiries lest the imperial Habsburgs marry their young archduke to a woman of proven immorality. The agent employed was, the envoy reported, someone on very friendly terms with the Queen’s ladies. ‘They all swear by all that is holy that Her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour. Yet it is not without significance that Her Majesty shows her liking for Lord Robert more markedly than is consistent with her reputation and dignity.’

  But it is important to realize that Elizabeth was by her very existence already a figure of scandal; not only the daughter of an infamous woman and a much-married man but a femme sole - at a time when the law of England did not recognize any status for the average woman beyond daughter, ward, wife or widow. She was a queen regnant and, what is yet more, queen regnant of a Protestant country. The sixteenth century saw a number of women hold the reins of government, among them the regents Mary of Guise in Scotland and Catherine de Medici in France, or Mary of Hungary and Marguerite of Navarre. But not only did most of the others hold their power as temporary substitutes for a dead husband, young son or distant emperor; they were (like Mary Tudor) formally subject - whatever their temporal powers - to the spiritual power of Rome. Elizabeth, then, was in an unprecedented position. Had she been chaste as ice and cold as snow, she would not have escaped calumny.