Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  But was that rebellion anything more than an empty gesture? The real question is how Elizabeth felt about the fact that, for the moment at least, she still could not marry Robert Dudley. The easiest and most common assumption is that she regretted the situation - that she, as much as he, was the victim of a kind of cosmic irony, the pair of them kept apart by the very event that should have set them free. But that assumes she did, still, truly want to marry Robert Dudley. We have come back to the question of whether she wanted to marry at all, on which historians never will agree.

  In these dizzy months before Amy died, Elizabeth might indeed have been flattered, or rushed, or pressured into marrying Robert Dudley, had he only, at that vital moment, been blamelessly, unimpeachably, free. That much was evident to her horrified contemporaries. They objected to Robert, specifically, on the grounds that he brought no great alliance or foreign friends (had, indeed, many enemies among their own ranks); and that the elevation of one man so far above his fellows could not but shake the foundations of the small aristocratic society that governed England. They failed to realize that when Elizabeth’s eyes were opened, it would not be to the personal unsatisfactoriness of Robert Dudley; it would be to the fact that, in the core of her being, she wanted to keep her own autonomy; to retain in her own hands the sovereignty which was at the core of her identity.

  It is only hindsight that encourages us to ask whether marriage, for Elizabeth, was ever really an emotional possibility. With hindsight we see the many and varied nature of her excuses as having an almost unmistakable import. But at the time, in these early days, it can hardly have been obvious to her contemporaries. What must have been far more evident is that there were genuine problems with every choice.

  Any marriage of a queen regnant offered an insuperable problem: whose would be the mastery? As John Aylmer had tried to argue in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, writing in answer to John Knox’s First Blast: ‘Say you, God hath appointed her to be the subject to her husband . . . therefore she may not be the head. I grant that, so far as pertaining to the bands of marriage, and the offices of a wife, she must be a subject: but as a Magistrate she may be her husband’s head.’ She could be his inferior in ‘matters of wedlock’, and yet his leader in ‘the guiding of the commonwealth’, he claimed. But such a distinction would be almost impossible to make, in practical terms.

  More specifically, marriage to a foreign prince and marriage to a subject of her own carried each its penalty. It is easy for us to underestimate the difficulty Elizabeth would have perceived. We have the experience of those married queens regnant Elizabeth II and Victoria; of Queen Anne, even, whose breeding stallion of a husband nobody even remembers.29 And at that, we are inclined to overlook the initial difficulty Victoria and Albert had in accommodating their different statuses; and the balance of power (so heavily weighted in his favour) between the joint sovereigns William and Mary. But sixteenth-century England offered no such even half-consoling stories.

  If Elizabeth married a foreign prince, she risked the loss not only of her own independence, but of her country’s autonomy. Edward VI’s will (that disregarded but in one way prophetic document) put forward that possibility as one reason for cutting out his still-unmarried sisters: the ‘stranger’ husband of either would work to have the laws and customs of his own native country ‘practised and put in use within this our realm . . . which would then tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth of this our realm, which God forbid’. (Better the princesses should be ‘taken by God’ than that they should so imperil the true religion, thundered one of his bishops, supportively.) If Elizabeth married either a Habsburg or a Valois of France, she plumped England (‘a bone between two dogs’, as one of her own agents put it) irrevocably down on one side of the see-saw balance that dominated European politics. Although everyone agreed that in theory she should marry, to find one candidate who had the support of all her councillors would prove an impossibility.

  The one immediate example, of Philip and Mary, was far from happy. Elizabeth would have only to remember how Mary’s troops had gone over to Wyatt; how a mob of young Englishmen had marched on the Spanish at Hampton Court, so that the palace guards had to drive them away; how cartoons had shown Mary as a crone suckling Spaniards at her breast, below the legend Maria Ruina Angliae. She would have remembered not only her sister’s personal unhappiness and humiliation, but that Philip (and his father) had patently entered into the marriage believing that - whatever lip service was paid to the authority of an anointed queen - it was he who would really rule; that England had been dragged into Spain’s war and had lost Calais. Later, discussing the long-running proposal of the Habsburg archduke, ‘With regard to the Emperor’s remarks showing that he wishes the Archduke to be called King and to govern jointly with [the] Queen, Cecil thinks this would be difficult,’ the envoy concerned wrote all too accurately.

  If she married a subject, she had still to deal with contemporary belief that the dominance of a husband over a wife superseded the claims of her royalty; and with the diminution of Elizabeth’s own royal status. Feria had boasted of having put it to Elizabeth that if she married a commoner, she would be setting her own value below that of her sister: he thought, he crowed, that he could get at her that way. ‘Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet am I your husband and your head,’ Darnley would tell his royal wife Mary Stuart. Such would be Elizabeth’s dilemma if she married Robert Dudley. Moreover, the rise of this particular subject had been too far and too fast, and he had flaunted it too openly. He came from a family with enemies. Better, safer, to keep him as a favourite; as that mushroom, perennial figure of court stories, who could be enjoyed at will and then if need be put away.

  But the question of the favourite itself comes loaded with a baggage of unease, and never more so than in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has been called the ‘great age’ of the European favourite; perhaps because the whole question of power exercised by someone whose only claim to wield it came at second hand, via the personal favour of the ruler, focused an uncomfortable attention on the primary source itself, raising questions about personal rule and the powers and limits of monarchy.

  The nature of the monarchy, and the limitations of its power, were hotly debated throughout this era. As one modern historian (Stephen Alford) writes, the ‘Tudor polity of the second half of the sixteenth century was in a period of transition - from a royal estate, where the monarch was the kingdom, to “state”, a polity conscious beyond the life of the king or queen’. And yet the Tudor age had seen the dynasty arrogate to itself and its central court more and more power and glory. Elizabeth herself believed that ‘absolute princes ought not to be accountable for their actions to any other than to God alone’; had written in an early letter to her father of kings, ‘whom philosophers regard as gods on earth’. Later in her reign she sent a sharp reproof to the Queen of Scots for having dared to write to her privy council rather than to herself. Although Elizabeth ‘doth carry as great a regard unto her Council as any of her progenitors have done’, yet ‘they are but Counsellors by choice and not by birth, whose services are no longer to be used in that public function than it shall please her Majesty to dispose of same’. Everyone agreed that the worthies around the ruler should offer counsel. (They differed on whether those counsellors should be drawn from an aristocracy or a meritocracy.) Whether the ruler had to be bound by that counsel ... That was less easy.

  In this climate there would be a sharp focus of attention on, and equally sharp critical debate about, any person upon whom the ruler’s favour lighted; especially one who could promote his ideas, his counsel, with all the power of personality; and especially one who, like Robert Dudley (and to his detractors, this just made it all the worse), showed no signs of being prepared simply to sit back and passively enjoy what the Queen gave him; to soak up the honours and spend the moneys. He did both of those things, certainly - but he also expected, as soon as opportunity offered (and it soon w
ould), to play an active, practical, daily part in the running of the country. He believed in the ideal of the king/queen counselled; was, after all the son of a man who is now credited with having done much to elevate the power of the privy council, and the grandson of one who had written a book on commonwealth and morality.30 The translation of the tellingly named A very brief and profitable Treatise declaring how many counsels and what manner of counsellers a Prince that will govern well ought to have was published under Robert’s patronage. (And Thomas Elyot’s influential Book Named the Governor, laying down the training that would enable a nobleman to act as the ruler’s watchful adviser and ally, had described the ruler’s ‘friends’ as his ‘eyes and ears and hands and feet’. Her ‘Eyes’ would of course be the nickname Elizabeth gave to Robert Dudley.)

  The question of the favourite was never more controversial than when the ruler was a woman and the favourite a man. Not only was an illegitimate sexual frisson added into the mix, but the accepted balance of power between the sexes seemed more than ever in jeopardy. A male ruler might have, on the one hand, his mistresses for personal recreation, and on the other his minister-favourites - men such as Richelieu or Wolsey. (Philip II in Spain used his childhood friend Ruy Gomez as effectively a mediator between his secretariat and his nobility.) But the two functions were treated as separate. There should not be this confusion, that strained the bounds of safety and decency.

  Of course, the worst had often happened; and when a royal mistress got too much power or patronage, or when a king with homosexual leanings gave power into the hands of a male love object, it did indeed outrage the country. There were (even before Elizabeth’s successor, James, gave far too much power to pretty George Villiers) well-remembered medieval models that provided the context for the fears of Robert Dudley. Edward II had sinned most conspicuously. After Elizabeth’s death, Naunton would praise her not only for having given her favourites only limited power, but for having purposely kept several on the go; ‘for we find no Gaveston, Vere, or Spencer to have swayed alone during forty-four years’. After his adored Piers Gaveston was murdered by his outraged nobles, Edward II had fallen under the sway of Hugh le Despenser, one of the most powerful magnates, and of his son. The Despensers were in turn brought down by Mortimer, another mighty subject, in alliance with Isabella, Edward’s rejected queen; while Robert de Vere was the hated counsellor (some said lover) of Edward II’s grandson Richard II. Just the one scurrilous pamphlet, Leicester’s Commonwealth, would in time compare Robert Dudley with Mortimer (who, when Isabella came to rule for her young son, exercised almost total power behind the scenes); but by and large those who knew Elizabeth in her maturity, or who looked back with hindsight, tended to agree with Naunton. ‘I conclude that she [Elizabeth] was absolute and sovereign mistress of her grace and that those to whom she distributed her favors were never more than tenants at will and stood on no better ground than her princely pleasure and their own good behaviour,’ Naunton wrote.

  In the early seventeenth century, too, Fulke Greville, comparing Elizabeth approvingly if tacitly with her susceptible successor, wrote that, ‘in the latitudes which some modern princes allow to their favourites, it seems this queen reservedly kept entrenched within her native strengths and sceptre’. But Greville, like Naunton, was writing with the benefit of hindsight, having seen Elizabeth destroy her last favourite, Essex, when he grew too high. At this earlier date, no-one yet knew Elizabeth’s strength. They were afraid she might let Robert Dudley exercise unlimited sway.

  In fact, the striking thing would prove to be the versatility - and perhaps the callousness - with which Elizabeth made use of him. A favourite could be a useful and malleable tool; especially in this age, when the distribution of patronage was being increasingly centred on the court (away from the church, away from the regions and the nobility), where the clamour for office, territory, money was deafening.31 The function of the favourite as scapegoat was known even in the figure’s heyday. When James I’s favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated in 1628, ‘it is said at court there is none now to impute our faults unto’. Remember the Imperial ambassador, wondering that no-one had yet assassinated Robert Dudley? Less dramatically, it was noted in Elizabeth, her contemporary John Clapham wrote, ‘that she seldom or never denied any suit that was moved unto her . . . but the suitor received the answer of denial by some other; a thankless office, and commonly performed by persons of greatest place, who ofttimes bear the blame of many things wherein themselves are not guilty, while no imputation must be laid upon the prince’. This did not make the favourite popular, needless to say - especially in so far as he was often brought in from outside the ranks of (and even used as a curb upon) the standing interests of the old nobility.

  There were times when it seemed Elizabeth was using Robert Dudley as a stalking horse; flaunting her interest in him the better to conceal what her real intentions might be. There were times when he seemed to be more like her whipping boy. Her brother Edward, in the schoolroom, would have had a real ‘whipping boy’, to take the stripes protocol forbade a common schoolmaster placing on the royal posterior. Elizabeth’s stripes, in the fragile early moments of the regime, were the lashes of bad publicity. But she too needed an alter ego. Just so had Anne Boleyn known she was blamed for decisions in fact taken by Henry.

  It is interesting to compare the situation of Elizabeth vis-à-vis Robert Dudley with that of other women rulers and their favourites32 - all the more so since the opprobrium heaped on one favourite could be used to reflect on others. When the scandal pamphlet of 1584, Leicester’s Commonwealth, was reprinted in 1706 as the Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, it was meant as an attack on the Duke of Marlborough, famous or infamous as the ‘single minister’ of Queen Anne’s day. Anne’s prime favourite was, of course, less Marlborough himself than Marlborough’s wife, Sarah Churchill, with whom Anne exchanged the most striking series of letters (in the awareness, apparently, that this relationship too could be taken to have a sexual element). Sarah took on the identity of ‘Mrs Freeman’, Anne (still a princess, when their friendship began) that of ‘Mrs Morley’. Mrs Morley would write to Mrs Freeman, in tears, that ‘tis no trouble to me to obey your commands’; or ‘Let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it’; that ‘if you should ever forsake me, I would have nothing more to do with the world, but make another abdication, for what is a crown when ye support of it is gone’. One cannot imagine Elizabeth writing to Robert in such self-abasing terms.

  But then - Sarah said - Anne ‘would not take the air unless somebody advised her to it’. She is blamed for that very overconfidence in Anne’s pliability; since their bitter falling-out came when she failed to realize the difference Anne’s accession to the throne had made in their rapport: blamed by contemporaries for exercising too much power; blamed by Marlborough’s biographers for not having been content to exercise it only in a private, domestic way. Had she been so content - the theory runs - Sarah might have kept influence longer, to the advantage of her husband and his political party. This ignores the fact that her husband’s beliefs were not always altogether hers - and again, it raises the more general concern about the bounds within which a favourite can operate appropriately. Though Sarah was once in a position of emotional dominance over Anne that Robert never had over Elizabeth, her gender ultimately made it easier to sideline her.33

  But move further into the eighteenth century and set Elizabeth and Robert side by side with Catherine the Great of Russia and Grigory Potemkin, and both the similarities and the divergences are extraordinary. A minor German princess married off to the Russian heir, Catherine was a woman who took the throne by coup; and this background of insecurity might have been expected to produce the same edgy, in many ways exploitative, relationship with her favourite that Elizabeth and Robert ‘enjoyed’. Instead, Catherine and Potemkin appear in many ways to have had the pleasures without the penaltie
s. (‘General love me? Me loves General a lot,’ she would write to him tenderly.) They were physical lovers; but then, her sexuality or the absence of it was never invoked as totem of her right to rule, and the question of the succession had already been settled by the birth of a son (albeit fathered by an earlier lover, rather than by her husband). Potemkin too showed no signs of wishing to go off and found his own dynasty - but then, he could hardly have done so, since it seems likely that, early in their relationship, he and Catherine had gone through some form of secret marriage ceremony. His ambition seems to have been satisfied by huge power and military success - but, as the years wore on, he admitted that he found relief in those distant reaches of the empire where he ruled like a monarch, effectively, and where Catherine allowed him to do so. They had more space to share between them, since Russia was a very much larger territory than England. Potemkin seems to have displayed few signs of sexual jealousy, selecting and training for Catherine younger lovers, who were required to address him as ‘Papa’, and whose existence gave him a measure of freedom without challenging him in any way.

  And yet, and yet . . . as you read the story of Potemkin and Catherine, you are struck by a thousand tiny echoes of the earlier pair: right down to the nicknames, to the increased religiosity as Potemkin grew older, to the belief that they were predestined to each other (‘God nominated you to be my friend before I was even born,’ Catherine told Potemkin) - and, inevitably, to the blame of him as an ‘evil counsellor’, though that is something both Potemkin and Leicester shared with every favourite through the centuries.

  Where, then, did the magic difference lie? For there is a huge difference between the places Potemkin and Leicester hold in history. In Potemkin’s far greater abilities, in his hold on the military power base that first brought him to Catherine’s attention? Probably. In the different sexual attitudes - and the very different social and political systems - of the mid-eighteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries? Certainly. In the very flexibility of the Russian succession and monarchy, and the accepted tradition of empresses’ favourites/empresses’ lovers that was already in existence before Catherine’s day? No doubt. But above all it must - must! - lie in the personalities of the two different rulers. Leicester could never have been a Potemkin, because Elizabeth didn’t want him to be.