Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  There was and is no categorical answer. In the 1590s, when she was sixty, Henri IV of France would jest that one of the three great questions of Europe was ‘whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no’. The question had practical import for contemporaries, and it continues to fascinate today. There seems no doubt that she was passionately in love with Robert Dudley; little that the pair enjoyed a degree of physical intimacy marked enough to strike contemporaries. But knowing that only makes it harder to be sure at what point that intimacy stopped, precisely. Elizabeth herself, defending her honour, would later point out indignantly that ‘I do not live in a corner - a thousand eyes see all that I do’. It is true that at least one court lady would habitually share her bedchamber, which opened onto the room of the ladies of the privy chamber. Had Robert passed whole nights under an earlier version of those painted silks and nodding plumes, it is unlikely the secret would have survived for centuries. But of course a queen might speak alone with a close adviser, and we have to remember that Elizabeth’s consultations often took place late at night, and in her private chambers. If we accept that Elizabeth and Robert would have spent time alone, then we have also to accept that no third party can ever be sure precisely what they did or did not do in that privacy.

  In many ways, sexuality was in the open in Elizabethan society. Shakespeare’s bawdry had a ready audience. The language and letters addressed to the Queen habitually breathed an extravagance, a pleasurable sensuality, that might seem more suggestive to later ages than it would to contemporaries. Even a royal suitor, whose courtship was half ritual, could write some years later that he kissed her ‘everywhere you can imagine’, that he longed to share her big bed. The normal conditions of Elizabethan court life - the very lack of privacy, the living of life in public - itself presented both opportunities for and restrictions on a certain amount of sexual play. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel, Robert’s enemies, would later complain of him not that he entered the Queen’s bedchamber - as any other officer of state might have occasion to do - but that he pushed the privilege of doing so to its limits, appearing (like Thomas Seymour . . .) before the Queen was out of bed, and handing her the shift she would put on.23 Likewise, Norfolk and Arundel complained not that Robert had been seen to kiss her - the English kiss of greeting full on the lips was much remarked by foreigners - but more specifically that he had been seen ‘kissing the Queen’s Majesty without being invited thereto’. The thing was a sliding scale, and Elizabeth and Robert played it with virtuosity.

  In less rarefied circles, legislators at the church court in Havering decided that for two unmarried people of different sexes to share a bed was suspect. But to share a room was acceptable - inevitable, in most households. In terms of homosexual sex, sodomy was punishable by death, but open expression of affection between men might pass without remark.

  Satirists and moralists, later in Elizabeth’s reign, fulminated that public gardens were no better than brothels, that the theatres saw young men shamelessly ‘wallowing in ladies’ laps’, that the ‘forward virgins of the day’ could hardly wait until their teens to shed that virginity. As many as one in five brides were pregnant on their wedding day. Pre-marital sex was comparatively acceptable if it were to lead to marriage. This might provide one explanation for the statement reported by the Spanish ambassador at the beginning of 1561. Robert’s brother-in-law Henry Sidney told de Quadra that Robert and Elizabeth ‘were lovers’ - ‘eran amores’, in the Spanish - but that nothing had happened that could not be put right with King Philip’s help; that is, his support for their marriage. (A great deal can come down to precise points of translation and semantics; another rendering of the same phrase says that ‘it was a love affair’.) If so, then we have to imagine that they did have full, penetrative sex, right back at the very start of their relationship - with the proviso that the liaison had been so scant, so secret, as to enable Elizabeth actually to perform a feat of self-hypnosis and subsequently, through all their long years, to put it from her mind entirely.24

  But there is still a problem, and it is hard to believe it did not loom very large indeed in Elizabeth’s mind: the risk of an unthinkable pregnancy. An ordinary woman might risk pregnancy in the knowledge that marriage would surely follow, but a queen regnant, as closely watched and as vulnerable to scandal as Elizabeth was? Hardly. These early years when Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert flowered most passionately, moreover, were the very years when it would have been hardest for them to rush into marriage if it became necessary: first because of Amy Dudley’s living presence, and then because of the scandalous manner of her death.

  The veiled nature of any contemporary discussion makes it hard to be sure about contemporary contraceptive practices beyond withdrawal. The uses of a physical barrier - half a lemon rind, strategically inserted, or a primitive condom made from sheepskin or the less reliable brine-soaked linen - were known in certain circles. Elizabethan medical writings, moreover, often describe herbs - rue, marigold, mandrake - that could be used to bring on a woman’s ‘courses’, in what may or may not be coded references to an abortifacient. But anyone sophisticated enough to have known about such closet devices must also have known that they were far from trustworthy.

  In some of her later prayers, Elizabeth would ask forgiveness ‘for sin committed in youthful rashness’, for her flesh that was corrupt, ‘frail and weak’. Is it tempting to read into them a particular meaning? Maybe. But all the heirs of Adam and Eve were so weak, so corrupted. Eighteen months after this time, on what might easily have been her deathbed, Elizabeth (so the Spanish ambassador reported) would declare that ‘although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness nothing unseemly [desconveniente] had ever passed between them’.

  What can be gleaned from the reports of contemporaries? Throughout her life, those who spread scandal about Elizabeth would prove, on closer investigation, to be those far away from her - agents abroad, humble subjects who could never have met her face to face - rather than those in her immediate circle. You might argue that her own courtiers would not dare: the humbler souls who gossiped in the alehouses certainly paid the penalty, like the Marsham who was condemned to lose both his ears or a hefty sum of money for saying Elizabeth had borne Robert two children.

  But even the ambassadors to her court, in their coded, privileged letters home, displayed a mixture of opinions. In 1560, the Swedish chancellor wrote that ‘I saw no signs of an immodest life, but I did see many signs of chastity, virginity, and true modesty, so that I would stake my life itself that she is most chaste.’ One Spanish ambassador, in the time immediately after Elizabeth’s accession, had been quick to repeat every damaging report, yet one of his successors would ‘doubt sometimes whether Robert’s position is irregular as many think’. Her own ministers and spy-masters - partial witnesses, but enquiring and not besotted ones - would in the years ahead show every sign of believing the great story of her virginity.

  Perhaps there was a measure of ‘forgive and forget’ about Elizabethan sexual morality. Those of her maids who were caught out in affairs were damaged, but not always irrevocably ruined. Perhaps if Elizabeth did have sex with Robert, but then turned her face firmly away, her society would collude with the reinvention (in much the same way as, in the film Elizabeth, the formerly fully sexual heroine was allowed to remake herself as a virgin). But then again, do we think that for Elizabeth herself her chastity was only and entirely a question of her public reputation? Surely Elizabeth saw her ‘virtue’ in its original Latin sense of virtus, strength, and would not relinquish it easily.

  All through her life, and far beyond it, the rumours would continue. There were rumours that she had borne children to Robert Dudley and to others; as late as 1587 a young man presented himself at the Spanish court claiming that his name was Arthur Dudley, and that he was Elizabeth’s son.25 There were rumours that her favourites treated her with all the freedom a man might a wife (as the imprisoned Mary, Queen of S
cots would later put it). But there were always rumours about the rare public woman. Even Catherine de Medici - no sure friend to Elizabeth, but one who was herself in a position to know - once spoke supportively on the subject to Elizabeth’s ambassador: ‘we of all Princes that be women are subject to be slandered wrongfully’.

  The evidence of her life is that Elizabeth saw some of the games of courtship and foreplay as fulfilling ends in themselves, rather than as precursors to the inevitable main event. It is possible that in putting the old, crude, question - in asking just: did they, didn’t they? - we are seeing things too simplistically.

  The romance of Elizabeth and Robert would be played out by the rules of a game that was old in their own day - the rules of courtly love, that time-honoured but still potent fantasy.26 The cruel, superior mistress rules the lover, who eternally yearns, may never attain, but must always obey. It was a veritable religion of earthly love, modelled at once on the devotion man owes to God, and the service a feudal vassal owed his lord. Born in the courts of Provence, finding its English apogee in the days of that other desirable and powerful Queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, this was the cult that would, centuries later, give a form and a vocabulary to Elizabeth’s and Robert’s long romantic loyalty. All the more so, as those years wore on, for the fact that courtly love, in essence adulterous and often of necessity chaste, was never meant to end in marriage; for the lady was already married, just as Elizabeth claimed to be married to her country. (And - usefully, as it would prove, for Robert and Elizabeth - the tradition allowed the man, in the end, to marry another lady of his own rank without its affecting his feeling for his more elevated mistress.)

  Courtly love produced adoration unbounded but no heirs, sublimated ambition into desire unsatisfied . . . It gave respectability to the most lavish protestations of love made not just by Robert (who, after all, cherished real hopes) but even by Elizabeth’s other courtiers. It meant that a man who spent his whole life publicly positioned in a posture of yearning for a woman he might never attain looked romantic - even heroic - rather than merely ridiculous. It gave licence, too, to Elizabeth’s extreme delight in all the flattering games of flirtation: her eagerness to play and her reluctance to pay. Most writers of modern days have seen this lust for the simulacrum of love as a pathology, an expression of a miserably frustrated sexuality. But in terms of courtly love, it was something closer to artistry.

  One song written to Eleanor, that earlier queen, neatly fits the romantic devotion Elizabeth demanded:

  Were all lands mine

  From Elbe to Rhine

  I’d count them little worth

  If England’s Queen

  Would lie my arms between.

  Robert Dudley would be the first and the greatest - but not the last - of those required to live his life according to this theory. You might say, what is more, that Robert’s courtship, and that of her other suitors, would give point to the great mythology of Elizabeth’s maidenhood. For, after all, if no-one assaults it, where is the virtue in virginity?

  Writers in the courtly love tradition varied in their opinion as to whether the lover would or would not have full enjoyment of his mistress in the end, or whether the question should be left in decent obscurity. But one text at least lays down the rules precisely. In the late twelfth century Andreas Capellanus, author of the classic De Arte Honeste Amandi and chaplain to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter, wrote that amor purus ‘goes so far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely’. (Love being once constrained within these boundaries, he claimed that even a young unmarried woman should take a lover. Her husband, when she eventually marries, would understand that a woman who had followed ‘the commands of love’ showed more, rather than less, probitas than one who had not.) On a less elevated note, the satirist and playwright Thomas Nashe wrote of a successful prostitute who takes her pleasure with a sex toy that ‘will refresh me well / And never make my tender belly swell’. Some Elizabethans, at least, clearly understood sexual pleasure in a sense broader than the procreative act.

  Some contemporaries certainly thought that Elizabeth was only technically a virgin.27 After her death the playwright Ben Jonson claimed that ‘she had a membrane on her, which made her incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many’. (He also claimed that when Elizabeth contemplated marriage with Alençon, a French surgeon ‘took in hand to cut it, yet fear stayed her’ - an image horribly evocative of female circumcision.) Jonson would hardly have been in a position to have inside information about the Queen’s physique, but as a sometime Catholic he would have been in touch with all the scurrilous propaganda spread about her. He was not, however, alone in the basic assumption behind his slur.

  Some of the contemporary observers suggested not only that Elizabeth was a virgin, but that there was something unnatural about the fact.28 Soon after her accession the Spanish ambassador had reported that ‘for a certain reason which [my spies] have recently given me, I believe she will not bear children’ - a theory repeated by his successor, de Quadra (just before he also repeated the story that Elizabeth had borne several children illegitimately). The Venetian ambassador similarly reported that she was barren, a conclusion he had reached for reasons that ‘I dare not write’. Envoys on the continent heard tales of her irregular menstruation - that (as the papal nuncio in France put it) ‘she has hardly ever the purgation proper to all women’. Others heard that she had to be bled from the leg, or the foot, instead; and it is hard not to see this emphasis on Elizabeth’s lack of the ‘proper’ womanly functions as an attack on her as an improper womanly ruler.

  In the twentieth century, Michael Bloch gave a scientific gloss to this gossip by suggesting that Elizabeth (like the Duchess of Windsor, whose biographer he was) suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: that is, that she was born with male chromosomes but, failing to produce also male hormones, developed outwardly as a woman. Such androgens, he claimed, are often handsome women - tall, long-limbed, with ‘strident personalities’ - but have no viable reproductive organs and, yes, only a shallow vagina. But it is notable that none of the prying ambassadors who questioned Elizabeth’s doctors and ladies, nor even any of the laundresses who washed her bloodstained linen, ever actually concluded, in the end, that she was not a viable dynastic possibility. Even Philip of Spain, whatever tittle-tattle his envoys reported, went on negotiating for her as for a successful brood mare. A French diplomat in 1566 - rushing to Elizabeth’s doctor in a fluster, having heard that the Queen herself believed she was barren - would be roundly told that the Queen was capable of bearing ten children, and claimed otherwise only out of caprice (or to give some rationale for a decision she herself could not otherwise explain?). In 1579, with Elizabeth entering the second half of her forties, William Cecil would institute enquiries with all the usual backstairs sources and expressed himself as wholly satisfied as to the ‘probability of her aptness to bear children’: that, in other words, she could if she would.

  It was Elizabeth’s will to marriage that was the real question; and never more so than in the months that followed the death of Amy Dudley. Whatever had passed between her and Robert, in her tortuous mind, as 1560 turned to 1561, the situation was still a flexible one. Nothing had been done that could not be undone. Or, from Robert’s standpoint, everything was still to do.

  Robert’s aims at this point were simple. He had no conceivable reason - political or personal - not to desire marriage with Elizabeth. She was the key to the attainment of every worldly goal. There is certainly no indication that he saw the scandal over Amy’s death as putting that marriage outside his reach. He saw it as a passing threat, an obstacle he had triumphantly surmounted. And the fact that Elizabeth sometimes - though not always - behaved every bit as if their relationship were still in full romantic flame must have raised his hopes unbearably.

  Elizabeth is less easy to gauge. She t
ook the public reaction to Amy’s death, at home and abroad, more seriously than he; understood that if she married him now, it would be widely assumed she had conspired with him to murder his wife. (And this would be murder for an ignoble, a wholly personal, motive. Perhaps few royal hands were wholly free of blood, but such a killing would confirm every suspicion about the frailty of her sex, the immorality of her religion.) The issue was not just whether Robert had been declared innocent of his wife’s murder. The wildfire spread of the scandal had in itself shown the hostility such an alliance would provoke at home; the contempt it would draw down upon her internationally. The start of 1561 brought still more letters from Nicholas Throckmorton in France. On New Year’s Eve he had sat down to pen to Cecil yet another lamentation on the dire consequences ‘if her Majesty do so foully forget herself’, when he was interrupted by the Spanish envoy who asked, as a piece of hot gossip, ‘whether the Queen’s Majesty was not secretly married to the Lord Robert, for, said he, I assure you this court is full of it’.

  Cecil, in fact, shortly warned Throckmorton to leave matters alone. Attacking the Queen’s favourite only made her defend him more protectively. Did it also attract her in some way? When her self-appointed guardians warned her off, the object of their warning acquired the savour of forbidden fruit. Robert was her rebellion.