Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Elizabeth herself provided, over the years, a cloud of rhetoric to cloak her lasting reluctance to marry. ‘I have already joined my self in marriage to an husband, namely the kingdom of England,’ she had said when, in the first spring of the reign, Parliament had urged her to wed. More significantly, she said - even thus early, long before one might have expected her to be paranoid about a ‘rising sun’ - that children, if she had them, might ‘grow out of kind, and become perhaps ungracious’. Only two years later, in 1561, she told the Scottish ambassador that ‘Princes cannot like their children, those that should succeed unto them’ - a chilling enough remark. She suspected that a male heir might usurp her throne. Perhaps her suspicion was a symptom of that throne’s insecurity - but remembering the terms of her brother’s scheme, whereby all the Brandon/Grey heiresses were to defer to their own ‘heirs male’, her fear was not such an unreasonable one.

  But it is also a truism that nothing in Elizabeth’s youthful experience could have taught her to view marriage without a shrinking of the flesh. None of Henry’s wives failed to suffer from marriage; even Katherine Parr, who survived Henry, then suffered from another husband’s roving eye, and from female biology. Camden wrote that Robert Huicke, one of Elizabeth’s doctors, dissuaded her from marriage ‘for I know not what womanish Impotency’. Any suggestion that she might not find childbirth easy could only be horrifying, for a woman two of whose stepmothers, as well as her grandmother, had died that way.34 There had been her sister Mary, in political and emotional thrall to a husband who did not care for her; Jane Grey, married off to a boy for whom she did not care. There had been the women who had formed her circle at Hatfield, who had had in common a disastrous marital history: the Marchioness of Northampton, second wife to a divorced man, left in legal limbo when the Catholic Mary came to the throne and refused to recognize the divorce; the Countess of Sussex, who had entered Elizabeth’s service after her husband had divorced her for extreme religious views, and for the practice of sorcery.

  Elizabeth would later tell the Earl of Sussex that she hated the idea of marriage more each day, ‘for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul, if she had one, much less to a living creature’. Is it just our prurience to envisage the ‘reasons’ physically? At the end of Elizabeth’s life her godson, Sir John Harington, wrote of her that ‘In mind, she hath ever had an aversion and (as many think) in body some indisposition to the act of marriage.’ But by then, the mood of the times - the advent of a fertile new ruling family - dictated a need to puncture the mystique of her elective virginity.

  When she tried to make up her mind to marriage, ‘it is as though her heart were being torn out of her body’, the French ambassador once reported her telling him, unforgettably. (She added that if ever she did take a husband, she would use his ‘services’ to procure an heir, but give him ‘neither a share of her power nor the keys of her treasury’.) Pending medical evidence that is never likely to appear, it is to reasons psychological and political, rather than to physiology, that we should first look for Elizabeth’s decision not to marry and, after the experiences of her youth, to retain control in this most personal of ways. But even the word ‘decision’ makes it sound too fixed and too conscious. Elizabeth’s failure to marry (itself an even more loaded way of putting it!), and her courtiers’ realization that this was not going to change, happened not in one giant stride but in a hundred tiny stages.

  In the end, surely, the best proof that she did not really want to marry Robert Dudley was that she never did. True, the scandal of Amy Dudley’s death would have made their marriage impossibly dangerous in the short term - but five, ten, fifteen years down the line? Does any scandal retain its white heat indefinitely? In the years that followed Amy’s death, the 1560s, various ambassadors tried to recruit Robert to their countries’ causes, and then to thrust him into a marital bed with the Queen. They at least clearly thought that after the first fuss had died down, a marriage would still be politically viable. And they should know, surely. As she herself would tell the Spanish ambassador in a few years’ time: ‘They said of me that I would not marry because I was in love with the Earl of Leicester, and that I could not marry him because he had a wife already; yet now he has no wife, and for all that I do not marry him.’

  Again, we have here the advantage over Elizabeth’s contemporaries. We know that Elizabeth chose never to marry - never to marry anybody. We know that she never bowed to what everyone assumed were the proclivities of her sex, determined not to throw her own rule away. But none of that was apparent to her courtiers, as a new year dawned after the end of 1560. They assumed, still, that she had to marry somebody. They could only hope it would not be Robert Dudley.

  8

  ‘Not yet towards a marriage’ 1561-1565

  IT SEEMED, IN THESE FIRST YEARS OF ELIZABETH’S REIGN, AS IF EVERYONE was pressing her to marry. (Everyone, that is, who did not believe her secretly married already.) Leaf through the Calendars of State Papers, studying the reactions to her relationship with Robert Dudley, and you find also a subsidiary story. Just a few days in December 1560 produce several epistles all harping on the same theme: the implications of the marriage of a queen regnant. Elizabeth’s own ambassador in Spain was writing to her of ‘the opinion in the Spanish Court about her marriage’. (True, she had politely asked for Philip’s own advice, but it seems Philip’s courtiers were also getting in on the act.) The Lords of Scotland were writing to the English privy council also regretting that Elizabeth ‘is not yet towards a marriage’ and again offering their own Earl of Arran ‘for the preservation of the whole isle’. And Throckmorton (whose own outspoken Protestantism was becoming a threat to his diplomacy) was writing to the council - not, for once, directly about Elizabeth’s own actions, but about the newly widowed Mary, Queen of Scots, whose husband Francis had lasted a bare eighteen months on France’s throne.

  The question of Mary’s remarriage immediately sprang to Europe’s mind - a marriage, for England, of import second only to Elizabeth’s own. Mary, Throckmorton wrote admiringly, ‘more esteemeth the continuation of her honor, and to marry one that may uphold her to be great, than she passeth to please her fancy by taking one that is accompanied by such small benefit or alliance as thereby her estimation and fame is not increased’. Compare and contrast, obviously. And yet, there was another lesson to be had from what the ambassadors wrote of Mary. As Throckmorton put it a few weeks later: ‘During her husband’s life there was no great account made of her, for that, being under band of marriage and subjection to her husband (who carried the burden of care of all her matters) there was offered no great occasion to know what was in her.’ And this was the noose into which even her closest advisers wanted Elizabeth - the proud, the poised, the dazzlingly clever - to run her head? Small wonder that, as Throckmorton’s secretary had reported to him: the Queen ‘uses all means not to marry; the Council does the contrary’.

  She must have felt both nagged and beleaguered. And in response to all that paternalistic pressure, it is not surprising if, in the time ahead, in the intervals of the most subtle diplomacy, she allowed herself occasionally to behave brattishly; childishly, almost, you might say. Not that the two aspects of her behaviour - the poise and the petulance, the assurance and the adolescence - were in fact even as divorced as two sides of the same coin. They were both aspects at once of her nature and of her technique. Elizabeth’s greatest strength, as a female ruler in a male world, was that she managed the qualities of her defects so peerlessly.

  These first years of the 1560s would see several of the more puzzling episodes in Robert’s and Elizabeth’s common history. The first arguably shows Elizabeth taking the widespread belief that Robert held sway over her and, inventively, using it to her advantage. Two of them at least may in the end show her treating him with calculated caprice - calculated for its effect on him, yes, but on others too maybe. Only when the chips were really down would the depth of her underlying affection show clearly.

/>   Early in 1561 (when Cecil could write in confidence to Throckmorton: ‘I know surely that my Lord Robert hath more fear than hope, and so doth the Queen give him cause’) the Spanish ambassador was taken aback to be approached by Robert’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, ‘a high-spirited noble sort of person’. Sir Henry’s message for King Philip was this:

  The marriage was now in everybody’s mouth, he said; and the Queen, I must be aware, was very anxious for it. He was surprised I had not advised your Majesty to use the opportunity to gain Lord Robert’s good will. Your Majesty would find Lord Robert as ready to obey you and do you service as one of your own vassals . . . The Queen and Lord Robert were lovers, but they intended honest marriage, and nothing wrong had taken place between them which could not be set right with your Majesty’s help. As to Lady Dudley’s death, he said that he had examined carefully into the circumstances, and he was satisfied that it had been accidental, although he admitted that others thought differently . . . He allowed that there was hardly a person who did not believe that there had been foul play. The preachers in their pulpits spoke of it, not sparing even the honour of the Queen, and this, he said, had brought her to consider whether she could not restore order in the realm in these matters of religion. She was anxious to do it, and Lord Robert to his own knowledge would be anxious to assist.

  It sounds as if Robert, so often hailed as champion of the new faith, were offering to help return England to the old in return for Philip’s support for the marriage. This has often been seen as proof of his venal cynicism - proof that he was a turncoat, like his father. But in fact Robert was far from the only English player in the affair. De Quadra prudently insisted on getting this extraordinary offer from a better authority than Sidney. In February he had an interview with Robert himself - followed by one with the Queen. Elizabeth, as ever, refused to speak out directly: ‘she replied after much circumlocution that she would make me her ghostly father’ - de Quadra was in orders - ‘and I should hear her confession. It came to this, that she was no angel. She could not deny that she had a strong regard for the many excellent qualities which she saw in Lord Robert. She had not indeed resolved to marry either him or anyone; only every day she felt more and more the want of a husband . . .’ But the ambassador believed it was at least possible she too might be prepared to return to the Catholic faith - although it was also possible, he advised Philip, ‘that she may be playing a game to keep in favour with your Majesty, and to deceive her Catholic subjects with hopes which she has no intention of fulfilling’.

  There was, after all, good reason to hold out an olive branch to Spain at this time. Towards the end of 1560 the Council of Trent, herald of the Counter-Reformation movement, presented the threatening possibility that all Catholic Europe would at last ally against heretics. The sudden re-entry of Mary, Queen of Scots onto the marriage market only made the threat more acute. Early in 1561 Elizabeth had indeed every reason to show herself amenable to the possibility of a Spanish-backed marriage - but it would hardly be politic to do so too openly.

  But there is another twist to the story. In March Cecil entered the fray, saying that Elizabeth wanted de Quadra to have King Philip write a letter supporting the marriage. This, he said, the Queen could show to Parliament and thereby gain their approval. But Parliament, of course, was highly unlikely to respond with approval to any such piece of Spanish interference. Cecil knew it; de Quadra knew it; and Elizabeth would certainly have known it too. The next month, April, all pretence of the Spanish sponsoring Robert to a matrimonial crown was at an end, when Cecil saw to it that de Quadra was accused (almost certainly without reason) of involvement in a Catholic conspiracy against the Queen. Word that Philip had promised to support the Dudley marriage, if Elizabeth would restore the Pope’s supremacy, was used to whip up an anti-Spanish frenzy. Of course, it also whipped up a good deal of anti-Dudley feeling . . . It is possible that Cecil, once again, was manipulating events to ensure Robert’s continued unpopularity. But it is also possible that Elizabeth herself had indeed all along been using Robert as a mouthpiece - whether or not what she said was sincerely meant.

  There is no need to make Robert out as wholly the injured innocent here. He could, at this stage of his career, be politique, of course he could, and throughout the early 1560s he went on offering himself as Spain’s advocate and as Elizabeth’s potentially Catholic consort, though the ambassadors approached did occasionally express doubts about his sincerity. Even decades ahead, after the Armada, English statesmen (Cecil’s son among them) could be found calmly accepting Spanish pensions; and Robert’s youthful experience would have encouraged him to regard Spain as a viable ally. But all the same, one might also wonder just how callously were Cecil and the Queen using Robert Dudley?

  Certainly Robert’s already battered reputation was further damaged by the affair. One report claims he asked Elizabeth, if she would not marry him, to allow him to move abroad, and serve as captain in the Spanish army. To this, of course, she was never likely to agree. That summer she was treating him even more warmly. Summer was always a time of fun and fantasy in their courtship, when Elizabeth might slip out with her ladies, all disguised, to watch Robert shooting in Windsor park; or when de Quadra, sharing a boat with the Queen and Robert to watch a water pageant on the Thames, was a little disgusted to find them talking ‘nonsense’ about marriage again. ‘Lord Robert at last said as I was on the spot there was no reason they should not be married if the Queen pleased. She said that perhaps I did not understand sufficient English. I let them trifle in this way for a time ...’

  She was offering Robert alternately the carrot and the stick. In June she refused, again, to grant him a peerage; but she gave him rooms next to her own in all the palaces; a licence to export eighty thousand undressed cloths, to be followed by an annual pension of £1,000; and rights over the customs duties on imports of sweet wines, silks and velvets, oil and currants. The first alone brought him £2,500 a year; Robert was - not altogether to his credit - a leader in the unwelcome new practice that allowed a courtier to cream off a layer of profits from an industry. Among the lands she was to give him was the lordship of Denbigh in North Wales, hitherto kept within the royal family. In 1563 she would give him Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, representing not only - since Kenilworth had once briefly belonged to his father - a significant gift, but also recognition of his family’s influence across a broad swathe of the West Midlands. At the end of the year Elizabeth restored Robert’s elder brother Ambrose to the earldom of Warwick, which their father had held, with the mighty fortress of Warwick Castle, close to Kenilworth, and large land holdings. Soon Robert had estates in more than twenty counties; and he would develop and exploit them, not necessarily with the rapacity of which he has been accused, but with the fixed intent of restoring the territorial status of the Dudleys.

  At the end of the year, too, Robert was admitted to membership of the Inner Temple in London’s law courts, having supported its cause in a land dispute. Effectively he became patron of this exclusive association of professional men, and with them celebrated in legendary style the festive revels that ended 1561. A procession of a hundred gentlemen - noblemen and councillors among them - rode through the streets in gorgeous disguises, under the leadership of a lord of misrule, that old festive figure reinvented by John Dudley to cheer Edward VI’s last Christmas. In his guiser’s identity of Prince Pallaphilos, it was Robert who received the homage of his supposed army, the ‘Knights of the Order of Pegasus’; he who was served with such ‘tender meats, sweet fruits and dainty delicates’ that the world wondered at it, while trumpets signalled his every course, as they did Claudius’ carouse in Hamlet. The masque staged on this occasion was an allegory of Perseus (who but Robert?) ridding England of the many-headed monster; the play performed was Gorboduc, the tragedy of a king who died without heir. The message was clear . . . it was a rehearsal perhaps; a fantasy parade of kingship, certainly.

  For a moment, in the summer of 1562
, it looked as though fantasy might have become fact. Rumours were rife that Elizabeth had actually married Robert secretly, at Baynard’s Castle, home to the Earl of Pembroke, a friend of his. Elizabeth teasingly told de Quadra that her ladies had been asking whether they should now kiss Robert’s hand. One can only imagine the parade of unconsciousness, the mixture of tension and delighted hope, with which Robert himself must have greeted such stories. Perhaps they made him incautious in his optimism; weeks later, the Swedish diplomat Robert Keyle was reporting the Queen as telling him ‘in the Chamber of Presence (all the nobility being there) that she would never marry him, nor none so mean as he’. All this with ‘a great rage and great checks and taunts’; a dreadful humiliation.

  It was only a few months earlier that Elizabeth, speaking to the Duke of Saxony’s ambassador, had made her famous explanation of the mutual fidelity that persisted between her and Robert. She

  was more attached to him than any of the others because when she was deserted by everybody in the reign of her sister not only did he never lessen in any degree his kindness and humble attention to her, but he even sold his possessions that he might assist her with money, and therefore she thought it just that she should make some return for his good faith and constancy.