Perhaps it was this sense of a long exchange of loyalties between them, of shared experiences, that in her mind lent a kind of legitimacy to their relationship. That would explain what happened next - something that made her games with him, her mixture of slaps and strokes, seem as frivolous a game as the Prince Pallaphilos parody of royalty.
There was neither feint nor fantasy about what happened in the autumn of 1562: Elizabeth caught smallpox, and caught it badly. The sickness that year was in especially virulent form, and Elizabeth’s treatment for the first symptoms - a bath, followed by a chilly walk outdoors - drove up her fever. Dismissing her German physician Dr Burcot, who dared name to her the dread disease, she simply took to her bed and waited. Within a week she had lapsed into a semi-conscious state. As she herself put it later: ‘Death possessed every joint of me.’
To her councillors, to her courtiers, to Robert Dudley, it seemed indeed as if she would die, and that shortly. To whatever personal agonies Robert felt must have been added the sharpest awareness of his own danger. His position depended upon her absolutely. Without her, he might find himself at the mercy of his many enemies. But to a lesser degree, his uncertainty was shared by the whole country. If Elizabeth did die, who would succeed her? One possibility was the Earl of Huntingdon, husband to Robert’s sister Katherine, with his strongly Protestant sympathies. But though some of the council might have supported him, the earl himself had stood so aloof from politics, had so played down his Plantagenet blood, that even the jealous Elizabeth was always content to let him be, confining herself to the occasional ‘privy nip’ to squash the faintest hint of pretensions. Others (as de Quadra reported) spoke up for Lady Katherine Grey, younger sister to Lady Jane, currently in prison for having married and borne a son without Elizabeth’s authority. Others wanted Parliament and the legal authorities to decide . . . No-one was fool enough to speak for the Catholic Queen of Scots, or at least not openly, for that was the most dangerous of all possible options; a recipe for strife, uncertainty, even civil war.
In this nightmare situation, with the court on the verge of ordering their mourning clothes, Dr Burcot was forced back into the bedroom of the unconscious Queen. The treatment he ordered was that she should be wrapped in red flannel and laid beside the fire, and given a potion of his own. Within two hours she was able to speak; and the words de Quadra reported were extraordinary. With the councillors gathered round her bed, with the Queen herself making no pretence that her situation was not still desperately dangerous, she demanded that in the event of her death they appoint Lord Robert Dudley, with a staggering annual salary of £20,000, Lord Protector of the country.
She was in no fit state to be argued with. The councillors promised everything that was asked - but, de Quadra added, it would not be fulfilled. He could say so with some certainty. What Elizabeth demanded was frankly ludicrous; a sick woman’s fantasy. Not only was Robert at this stage not even a privy councillor (the power he wielded was considerable, but informal); a protectorship was no answer to the long-term question of who would head the government. Somerset had been Lord Protector for his nephew Edward, but that had been intended as a temporary measure, until a minor came of age. The real significance of Elizabeth’s request lies elsewhere. It shows how much, in her moment of extremity, Elizabeth actually cared for Robert, how desperate she was to ensure his safety. It shows that she not only trusted, but respected him; that to her at least, when push came to shove he was no mere lapdog.35
The question was never put to the test. On Elizabeth’s famously elegant hands appeared the pustules that showed the pox was moving into its less dangerous, though potentially disfiguring, phase. Elizabeth recovered rapidly. There was not too much permanent damage to her looks - and while her face was scarred, so the Spanish ambassador heard, only Robert of all the court had access to her. The real victim was Robert’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney, who caught the disease herself through nursing her mistress, and was so lastingly scarred that she retired from court. Her husband was abroad at the time, and, having left his wife, as he put it ‘a full, fair lady, in mine eyes at least the fairest’, returned to find her ‘as foul a lady as the smallpox could make her’. He voiced no regrets about the price of waiting on ‘Her Majesty’s most precious person’ - and Elizabeth remained fond of her friend and attendant. But it seems a harsh payment for loyalty.
Shortly after her recovery Elizabeth did at last make Robert a member of the privy council. It looks rather suspiciously coincidental that not long after this, the question of the Queen’s marriage was once more on the council’s table. But in fact, that can hardly have needed Robert’s intervention. The smallpox, along with the return of the widowed and available Queen Mary to Scotland, had put the succession right at the top of the agenda; not that it had ever gone away. Scotland’s ambassador had long been pressing Elizabeth to recognize Mary as her heir. (The point was, more or less tacitly, tied to the terms of that 1560 peace treaty of Edinburgh that Cecil had negotiated, but Mary had been reluctant to ratify.) Elizabeth resisted, pleading the stipulation of her father’s will and Act of Succession, but adding more honestly: ‘If it became certainly known in the world who should succeed me, I would never think myself in sufficient security.’ There were many eager to press an heir towards the throne itself, as she had found in her sister’s day. ‘Think you that I could love my winding sheet?’ she demanded rhetorically.
But the Parliament that met in January 1563 was determined Elizabeth should marry. Robert himself was behind some of the more vehement voices, like that of the Dean of St Paul’s, who asked her bluntly, if her parents had been of like mind, where would she have been? Both Houses united in sending petitions urging on Elizabeth the delight of beholding ‘an imp of your own’; the comfort to the kingdom, the discomfiture of her adversaries. The Commons refrained from discussing who the father of the imp might be. ‘Whomsoever it be that your Majesty shall choose, we protest and promise with all humility and reverence to honor, love, and serve as to our most bounden duty shall appertain.’ The Lords went further; and here perhaps Robert may have been at work. They urged her against Mary’s claim, since as ‘mere, natural Englishmen’ they did not wish to be subject to a foreign prince. And they urged her to marry ‘where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’. Whatever cocktail of desperation and determination had brought them finally to this point, it was an endorsement for Robert Dudley.
If Elizabeth truly wanted - still - to marry Robert Dudley, now was the moment, surely. But we are forced to wonder whether, instead, she saw this permission as a threat rather than an opportunity. When they pressed her to marry other men, she would flaunt her affection for him. When instead they indicated, through gritted teeth, that even Robert Dudley might be better than no-one, then, instead of announcing the wedding ceremony, she put the whole question away, fobbing Parliament off with one of her expert ‘answers answerless’. Though she thought celibacy best for a private woman, ‘yet do I strive with myself to think it not meet for a prince. And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind . . .’ And then Elizabeth did something far more extraordinary. She offered her own beloved Robert as a husband for the Scots queen, Mary.
When, in the spring of 1563, Elizabeth first suggested the idea to the Scottish ambassador, William Maitland of Lethington, he tried to pass it off as a joke. Yes, Lord Robert might - possibly - be a man in whom, as Elizabeth put it, ‘nature had implanted so many graces that, if she wished to marry, she would prefer him to all the princes in the world’. But he was also damaged goods in several different ways. Mary, said Maitland, would never wish to deprive her sister queen of all the ‘joy and solace’ she had from Robert’s company; and he asked, rather maliciously: Why did she not marry Robert herself, so that she could later bequeath both her husband and her kingdom to Mary? For ‘that way, Lord Robert could hardly fail to have children by one or other of them’. It was a suggestion Elizabeth, with her s
ensitivities about death and inheritance, might easily have taken badly.
Cecil supported the plan with enthusiasm. Besides ensuring a friendly Protestant Scotland, it would be a great way to get rid of Robert Dudley. He wrote to Maitland with unconvincing warmth that Lord Robert was ‘a nobleman of birth, void of all evil conditions that sometimes are heritable to princes, and in goodness of nature and richness of good gifts comparable to any prince born . . . He is also dearly and singularly esteemed of the Queen’s Majesty.’ Cecil had crossed out ‘beloved’ of the Queen’s Majesty, but that of course was the rub; that, and the fact Robert was still not even a peer, let alone a prince. Maitland, when he returned to Scotland, dared not even pass on Elizabeth’s proposal to Mary. But he had told the Spanish ambassador, who told the rest of Europe, who laughed heartily. (When de Quadra was among the many who died of the plague in England that summer, there were probably some who thought fate had dealt appropriately.)
Was Elizabeth genuinely trying to settle the vexed succession question by placing her own Protestant candidate beside Mary on the Scottish throne, preparatory to declaring them her heirs? In favour of this interpretation is the fact that, as an alternative to Robert, she also offered Ambrose Dudley. ‘Would to God the Earl of Warwick was as charming as his brother - we might then each have had our own.’ (Not that Ambrose was ‘ill-looking or ungraceful, but he is rough, and lacks the sweet delicacy of Robert [though] he is brave enough and noble enough to deserve the hand of a princess’. The romantic emphasis always placed upon Robert has rather obscured the memory of Ambrose Dudley. But ‘the good earl’ - as posterity knows him - had also grown up around the Tudor palaces; had shared that formative time in the Tower.)
Was Elizabeth trying to steer Mary away from a choice more dangerous to English security? Was she even, conceivably, with this frankly rather insulting offer, making a subtle mock of Mary - trying to needle the Scots queen into making a foolish choice, one that would threaten Scottish stability? (In which case, as events would prove, she succeeded spectacularly.)
To this day it is unclear what she was trying to achieve. Did she think Mary would find Robert as irresistible as she did? Was she really prepared to relinquish him, or did she never really mean for Robert to move north? Perhaps not: she actually suggested that she, Robert and Mary should live all at the English court (admittedly more important and more agreeable than the Scottish one) as an extended royal ‘family’, a virtual ménage à trois. There was always that strange near-flirtation, the thought - voiced by Throckmorton in a letter to Robert - that if only Mary and Elizabeth could marry . . .
Was Elizabeth trying to make amends to Robert for her own rejection by giving him another queen to marry? Or was she, in the end, indulging herself? Not ‘simply’ indulging herself, for Elizabeth did nothing simply. But was she permitting herself a gesture - insulting, incalculable - that would silence and baffle all those men who had so patronizingly urged and arranged for her to marry? One that, as a bonus, a personal bonne bouche, would offer a smiling snub to the queen with whom - especially now they were competitors on the marriage market - she already felt a personal rivalry? For Elizabeth did indulge herself, though only when it did not really matter. (One of her best gifts as a ruler was an unerring, if idiosyncratic, order of priorities.)
If we go back to that Calendar of State Papers in the British Library, it is certainly clear from the start how dangerous was the possibility of Mary’s marrying to disoblige England, and allying her northern kingdom to a southern Catholic prince, who would then have England in the jaws of a nutcracker. Almost from the moment Mary’s husband died, Throckmorton had been writing to the council his hope that her next husband might be ‘not so prejudicial to us’ as the French king had been.
But in that calendar, besides the political, you can also trace a personal story. That same letter was the one in which Throckmorton went on to sing the praises of the Queen of Scots, who set her honour so high and her personal desires so low. The very next day, the Scottish lords had been pressing Elizabeth to marry the Earl of Arran. Very well - in return for their Earl of Arran, she would offer them an Earl of Leicester (as Robert Dudley would shortly be). And it would annoy the French, who had mocked at her and stalled her over the treaty; and one way or another it might silence the demanding Robert. It would give a gratifying jolt to the Throckmortons of the world, and to Cecil too, they with their endless demands that she marry.
But from the outset it was clear there were insuperable problems, even beyond the plan’s core improbability. Robert Dudley was far from keen. Whether from real love, or just real hopes, of Elizabeth herself, he had no mind to go to the wild lands beyond the border, however much he might approve of England’s coming to terms with Mary. And keen, of course, is hardly the word to describe the proud Queen Mary.
Throughout the rest of that year, however, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Scotland, Randolph, was told to keep urging Mary that if she married Elizabeth’s choice, she might do well by it - without, however, mentioning who the proposed suitor might be. At least the ongoing negotiations helped keep Mary from putting Scotland’s ha’p’orth into the French wars. The Huguenots, the French Protestants, were rebelling against the Catholic powers of France’s regent, Catherine de Medici, and Mary’s Guise relations. In 1562 Elizabeth (sweetened by a loan of the French port Le Havre, which the Huguenots commanded, until she could regain Calais) had sent to their assistance a force of six thousand men. It was Robert’s plan, fuelled by Robert’s Protestant passion. But Elizabeth could not bear to let him go away from her, so the force was commanded by Ambrose Dudley.
Ambrose failed to hold Le Havre (Newhaven), hampered by plague that decimated his men - and still more by the fact that France’s Protestants and Catholics negotiated a peace, before uniting against their old English enemy. When he returned to England in the summer of 1563, with a wound that would trouble him for the rest of his life, Robert rushed off without permission to Portsmouth, from ‘natural care and love toward my brother’, as he wrote in a self-exculpatory letter to the Queen, who was afraid he would catch plague from the returning army. Elizabeth did not blame the Dudleys for England’s failure. During the siege of Le Havre she had written to Ambrose: ‘If your honour and my desire could accord with the loss of the needfullest finger I keep, God so help me in my utmost need as I would gladly lose that one joint for your safe abode with me.’ The careful lack of exaggeration may be typical (it would certainly be more conventional, now, to offer one’s right hand!), but the letter again shows the regard Elizabeth had for the whole Dudley family. All the same, in the future she would show herself even less willing to be drawn into religious wars. The episode had shown both the strengths and the limits of Robert’s influence on her - and the growing strength of his own conviction as leader of the Protestant party. Perhaps that helped foster his reluctance to marry the Catholic Mary.
When, in the spring of 1564, Randolph named Robert Dudley to the Queen of Scots as the husband Elizabeth suggested, Mary was as incredulous as angry at this suggestion that she should so far ‘abase my state’. For one who had been wife to the King of France, the proposed comedown must have seemed extraordinary. In the meantime Elizabeth had been attempting, half-heartedly, to revive her own plans for a Habsburg marriage with the Archduke Charles, though braced for marriage only ‘as Queen and not as Elizabeth’, she said dauntingly. But there were many obstacles in the way: Charles’s Catholic religion; the Emperor’s suspicion as to Elizabeth’s motives in pursuing what she had formerly rejected; and Elizabeth’s continued closeness to Robert Dudley.
Mary long avoided a direct refusal of Elizabeth’s proposal, instead demanding as a condition that she be declared heir of England if she married Robert, with her rights duly ratified by Parliament. In the end, Elizabeth said bluntly that that was impossible, setting aside as it did the laws of England, her father’s will, and Parliament’s desire for a Protestant heir of her own body. The most she could do was to promise
to work for Mary behind the scenes. In the end there was no price that Scotland would accept and England was prepared to pay.
Robert was no more willing than his prospective bride. Mary later said he even wrote to her, claiming it was all just a diplomatic ploy: Robert, for his part, told the Scottish ambassador that it was all a scheme of Cecil, his ‘secret enemy’. He himself was not fit to wipe the shoes of the Scottish queen, he added definitively. Indeed, Randolph found, to his consternation, that ‘Now I have got this Queen’s goodwill to marry where I would have her, I cannot get the man to take her for whom I was a suitor.’ He had, at Cecil’s urging, to write to the reluctant bridegroom, that if he indeed put obstacles in the way of ‘so good a cause’, then ‘as all men hitherto have judged your Lordship worthy to marry the greatest queen, so will they alter their opinion of you’. He had to urge, via Henry Sidney, the pleasure of having so famously beautiful a woman ‘in his naked arms’.
But the Scottish match was never likely to happen. By the autumn of 1564, the Earl of Lennox was writing to Randolph: ‘He has not descended from a great old house, and his blood is spotted. I fear we shall not accept him.’ But Elizabeth would not give up the game so easily. In September Mary sent a fresh ambassador south, in the polished shape of Sir James Melville, who might at least, she hoped, ensure the negotiations ended amicably. Melville’s later memoirs give glimpses of Elizabeth that live in the memory. Here at last was a Scotsman in whose courteous, consoling company she could give safe vent to her jealousy of Mary. She spoke to him in the different languages they both shared; dressed each day in the style of a different country. Which did he prefer, she asked him? He said the Italian, knowing that that fashion showed off her red hair, ‘curled in appearance naturally’.
For years, Elizabeth had heard all too much about Mary: her charm and her femininity; her passion for pets; her game of domesticity, whereby she and her maids made conserve in a toy kitchen; her exquisite embroidery - and her beauty (and the worst of it was, she had Elizabeth’s own style of beauty: curling auburn hair, height, and an alabaster skin). The Scottish queen had even pre-empted Elizabeth’s accession, earlier the same year, with a more traditionally female ceremony. When Mary wed the French Dauphin, clad in untraditional white, six mechanical ships had circled the party afterwards, each bearing a prince to claim his princess. Now Elizabeth plagued the ambassador with questions: which was the fairer, Mary or she? He seems to have handled his role as mirror, mirror on the wall with considerable tact; Elizabeth was the fairest queen in all England, Mary in all Scotland, he said diplomatically; Elizabeth ‘was whiter, but my Queen was very lovely’. Mary, he said, when asked, played the lute and virginals ‘reasonably, for a queen’. Elizabeth made sure he ‘happened’ to come upon her playing expertly the next day. (Elizabeth surrounded herself by such seeming accidents.) When she took Melville into her closet to show him Mary’s portrait on which she ‘delighted oft’ to gaze, the wrapped miniature on top of the pile was inscribed ‘My Lord’s picture’ in Elizabeth’s own hand. Melville says it took all his powers to persuade her to unwrap it. It was of Robert, needless to say . . . Another accident? Maybe.
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