Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  On the last day of Melville’s visit, Elizabeth finally bestowed on Dudley the earldom intended to make him more acceptable to Mary. He joined his brother as one of the only two men Elizabeth raised directly to this rank. The title of Leicester had a resonant history, having previously been held by several royal princes, including John of Gaunt and Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. It was said Elizabeth even considered making Robert a duke. Everything was in order: the motto, ‘Droit et loyal’; the distinguished crowd of titled observers; the new earl behaving with perfect dignity, and indeed, said Melville, ‘great gravity’. But as Elizabeth placed the earl’s chain around Robert’s neck, the watching ambassadors were taken aback to see that the Queen ‘could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to kittle him smilingly’. It is usually assumed that Melville was right in assuming that Elizabeth’s feelings overcame her - that she couldn’t resist tickling that neck, even if it lost her the proposed Scottish marriage. But one suspects Elizabeth could resist anything if she really wanted to.

  In one of their conversations, Elizabeth had told Melville that ‘it was her own resolution at this moment to remain till her death a virgin queen’. He told her the information was unnecessary. ‘I know your stately stomach. You think if you were married, you would be only a queen of England, and now ye are king and queen both. You may not endure a commander.’ But the point about Robert was, she could enjoy him without fear of mastery. The two were ‘inseparable’, Melville concluded firmly.

  If she had ever wanted a husband, she told Melville, ‘she would have chosen Lord Robert, her brother and best friend, but, being determined to end her life in virginity, she wished that the Queen her sister should marry him,’ since the only way she could be free of the fear Mary might usurp her was to see Mary married to one ‘so loving and trusty’. It sounds paranoid, or nearly. But Elizabeth had come out of this episode with her faith in Robert confirmed - though it may have tried him hardly. Maybe, given her jealousy of the younger queen, she had found a personal reassurance in Robert’s reluctance to leave her for Mary. Maybe, just maybe, that was what she had really wanted.

  9

  ‘Majesty and love do not sit Well together’ 1565-1567

  MELVILLE’S VISIT WOULD PROVE TO BE JUST A PARTICULARLY COLOURFUL interlude in a long, long story. In the tale of the relations of Elizabeth and Mary - and of both women with Robert Dudley - the prologue, at this stage, was barely under way. But at the English court, the story was still a roman à deux. In January 1565 the Thames froze so hard that traders could set up stalls on it, as if on a street. The bitter weather, wrote the latest Spanish ambassador, de Silva, ‘has found out the Queen, whose constitution cannot be very strong’. But with the warmer weather she rallied quickly; and as the spring wore on, a playful Elizabeth was still allowing her affection for Robert to be seen, as coyly but boldly as a flash of pretty lingerie.

  De Silva was taken riding by Robert in the park at Windsor early one summer’s morning. As the party came home they passed under Elizabeth’s window, and a call from Robert’s jester brought Elizabeth to an open casement in her nightgown. The ambassador was particularly horrified that the Queen seemed to see nothing unusual in her state of undress; de Silva was clearly yet another Spaniard fated to spend his time in England in a flutter of outraged modesty.

  Thoughts of a match with Robert were still very much on the tapis; Elizabeth herself was fond of telling de Silva as much. As he wrote in June: ‘the Queen has always brought up the matter of the Earl to me and has frankly told me that she would marry him if he were a king’s son.’ But his lineage was a bar that would never go away, and Robert, in the spring of 1565, was far from the only marriage possibility. Not only was the archduke said to be on the verge of putting himself forward again, but in the beginning of the year the new King of France had also sent a proposal, via his mother, Catherine de Medici. On a personal level, Elizabeth had some difficulty taking this one seriously; Charles IX (who five years earlier had succeeded his elder brother, the Queen of Scots’ husband) was fourteen years old to Elizabeth’s thirty-one. People - said Elizabeth - might think she was leading her son to the altar, and Charles’ proxy protestations of love were even less convincing than the usual diplomatic flummery. One of the chief supporters of the match, however, was the new Earl of Leicester - not, one assumes, because he really thought Elizabeth was likely to wed this stammering schoolboy, but because it provided a useful diversion from the far more plausible Habsburg match - with the useful corollary that if and when Elizabeth officially refused Charles, the French would throw their weight behind her marriage with Leicester, since the last thing they wanted was a Habsburg behind the English throne.

  Meanwhile Robert may have been playing matchmaker in another direction. Hoping himself to evade the threatened Scottish marriage, he had urged Elizabeth, in February 1565, to allow young Lord Darnley to go north to Scotland. Darnley was son to the Scottish Earl of Lennox, and his family’s interests in Scotland provided an excuse for the visit. But Darnley had through his mother (daughter to Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret) a potential place in the succession to the English throne, and it was because of this that Darnley had hitherto been forbidden to travel north by the English authorities.36 Not yet twenty, tall, pale and interesting, he had always to be considered as a potential mate for Mary. The English were well aware of Scots interest in Darnley: Elizabeth had signalled as much to Melville during his visit the previous autumn. But from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, Darnley was not entirely a safe candidate: too ambitious, too close in blood to the English throne, too allied to Scottish interests - and, damningly, reared in the Catholic faith.

  Leicester’s motive in forwarding Darnley’s visit is fairly clear. He wanted to get himself off the hook (and perhaps to prove that a queen could marry a commoner?). When Mary rapidly fell for the handsome, swaggering boy, and in April sent south word of her determination to marry Darnley, Leicester was one of the very few privy councillors who did not sign a letter protesting at this ‘unmeet, unprofitable, and perilous proposal’. But what was Elizabeth thinking, when she allowed Darnley to cross the border? Was she, too, secretly pleased by the result? It is hard to believe she did not see it coming. Was she relieved it was no worse - since Mary was clearly going to marry somebody? Was she even so Machiavellian as to be dangling in front of Mary a husband she knew would prove a liability?

  At least now Elizabeth would not have to read any more commendations of Mary’s prudence and virtue. In May Throckmorton himself, who in 1560 had so pointedly praised Mary’s preference for ‘honor’ over ‘fancy’, was sent to the Scottish court to bring Darnley home. He arrived to find a queen ‘seized with love in ferventer passions than is comely’ even for ‘mean persons’. Indeed, so Randolph wrote to Leicester (who was by this point receiving his own reports from England’s emissaries, and so had first-hand news every step of the way), Mary showed so much change in her nature ‘that she beareth only the shape of the woman she was before’. ‘What shall become of her, or what life with him she shall lead, I leave it to others to think,’ Randolph reflected gloomily. As Throckmorton (long since reconciled to Robert’s interest) quoted to Leicester and Cecil: ‘Majesty and love do not sit well together, nor remain on one throne.’ All three must have been aware how easily Ovid’s words could have had a personal application for Robert Dudley.

  There was starting to unfold in Scotland a situation that would offer a strange mirror image - hideously distorted, but all the more revealing for it - to that of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley. While Elizabeth’s failure to marry may be seen as either her blessing or her curse, Mary was damned by her marital history. Indeed, she made poor choices in men (always excluding her first boy husband, the ailing French king Francis, to whom she had simply been contracted as a child). Two years before Darnley appeared on the scene there had been something of a scandal over the attractive French aristocrat Pierre de Chastelard, who had gratifyingly declared his love for her.
He was beheaded after being found in her bedchamber; whether to speak to her, seduce her, or assassinate her was unclear.37 A more fruitful source of scandal was the favour Mary had started to show to her Piedmontese secretary David Rizzio - a foreigner (like Chastelard) who (said Randolph) ‘rules all’. Those who wanted the Queen’s ear had first to bribe the ubiquitous Davie. ‘To be ruled by the advice of two or three strangers, neglecting that of her chief councillors, I do not know how it can stand,’ Randolph wrote disapprovingly.

  But if the Scottish queen’s infatuation with Darnley would do nothing to quiet the turbulence of that court, the English court had its own troubles of division and party. Robert’s peerage and his position on the privy council had brought him a new sort of power base, and newly bitter enemies. Increasingly, the mistrust many nobles felt for the upstart Earl of Leicester attached itself to the hostility of England’s premier peer, the Duke of Norfolk, in 1565 a young man just turning twenty-nine. And Norfolk’s story would prove to be inextricably linked not only with that of the English queen and her new earl, but also with that of the Scots Queen Mary.

  In some ways Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, had a good deal in common with both Elizabeth and Dudley - even ties of blood and family. He was the grandson of that third Duke of Norfolk famous, in Henry VIII’s day, for having seen two of his nieces marry the King (and then finding that the relationship between himself and those nieces in their queenship would prove to be one of enmity). The beheading of his father, the Earl of Surrey, had made Norfolk a member of that small, unhappy club to which Elizabeth and Robert also belonged. But among his father’s legacies, Surrey had left his son a full share of the family pride, and when Elizabeth ascended the throne he expected his rank to make him first of her advisers.

  As Earl Marshal of England, arbiter of all questions of precedence, and second only in precedence to the Queen herself, the young fourth duke, who had already inherited his grandfather’s dignities, had had a huge part to play in Elizabeth’s coronation. But he had left court during the first summer of Elizabeth’s reign, taking his new bride home to his Norfolk estates; and when he had returned in the autumn of 1559, he had been horrified by the rise of Robert Dudley. As early as that October, the Spanish ambassador was writing that Norfolk was behind a plot to murder Dudley - surely a fantasy, but if Norfolk were really talking openly about the Queen’s ‘lightness and bad government’ it was enough to give real concern to Elizabeth as well as to Robert. Small wonder that by the Christmas of 1559, with trouble brewing on the Scottish border, Norfolk had been appointed Lieutenant General of the North. But during his time away, he had heard the most lurid reports from his satellites: that Robert was ‘laying in good stock of arms’, that he was every day ‘assuming a more masterful part in affairs’, that he was ‘ruining the country with his vanity’. When Norfolk returned to court early in 1561 he was reported to be ‘on very bad terms with the Queen’ as a result of his open enmity with her favourite. Nor were subsequent developments likely to improve things. The revival of the Habsburg proposal, which Norfolk passionately supported, brought him back into conflict with Robert Dudley, and by this spring of 1565 relations between the two men were as bad as they could be.

  In March 1565 there was reported an incident which has gone down as an archetypal courtiers’ quarrel. The duke and the earl (so Randolph in Edinburgh heard) were playing tennis while Elizabeth looked on, ‘and my Lord Robert being hot and sweating took the Queen’s napkin out of her hand and wiped his face, which the Duke seeing said that he was too saucy, and swore that he would lay his racket on his face; whereup rose a great trouble and the Queen sore offended with the Duke . . .’ Not that she was particularly pleased with Leicester either, as the year wore on - well aware that he was fanning the flames by boasting of her favour, and making a virtue of the fact that he was ‘a man that never did depend upon any but merely Her Majesty’.

  In the summer of 1565 the Earl of Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, Norfolk’s friend and kinsman, returned to court from five years’ warfare in Ireland and, as Cecil recorded, ‘all that stock of the Howards seem to join in friendship together’.38 In the autumn of 1560 Sussex had written robustly to Cecil that Elizabeth should choose a husband speedily and ‘therein follow so much her own affection as by the looking upon him she would choose omnes eius sensus titillarentur [her whole being may be moved to desire] which shall be the readiest way with the help of God to bring us a blessed prince’. (There was a contemporary belief that for sex to be productive, the woman too had to release a seed, to experience orgasm.) So Sussex wrote: ‘if the Queen will love anybody, let her love where and whom she list and him . . . will I love serve and honour to the uttermost’. But a lot of water had gone under the bridge since then; and the Howards clearly did not feel the Queen’s favourite improved on acquaintance.

  Scandalized observers complained that the quarrels that ensued threatened to convert the court into an armed camp. Indeed, the different armies would soon be wearing what amounted to different uniforms: blue or purple for Leicester’s friends, yellow for Norfolk’s. ‘I am told that Leicester began it, so as to know who were his friends,’ wrote de Silva, ‘and the adherents of the Duke did the same in consequence of some disagreements they had with them about the aid [that] the Duke and his friends had given to the Archduke’s match.’

  This was the chief ground of the controversy. In June 1565 Elizabeth finally refused the French proposal, which left two immediate contenders for her hand: the archduke, and Robert Dudley (whose pretensions the French now supported, faute de mieux). Small wonder that Cecil, as well as Norfolk and Sussex, threw all his weight behind the Habsburg contender. A new envoy from the Holy Roman Emperor had arrived in May (a new envoy from a new emperor, to boot, since Ferdinand had been succeeded by his son Maximilian, the archduke’s elder brother). His tasks were to decide, first, whether Elizabeth were serious about the match this time; and second, whether there were any truth in all the rumours about her and Robert Dudley. No point in the Emperor’s allying his brother with a woman of proven immorality.

  In the interests of reassuring the Emperor that there would be no more embarrassing put-offs, Norfolk now demanded of Leicester that he abandon his pursuit of the Queen, and give his support to the archduke’s suit. In the end, so forcefully did the duke tackle Leicester on his opposition to the match that Robert, taken aback, had little choice but to agree, and promised to give it his support . . . if Norfolk could guarantee that the Queen would not take his volte-face the wrong way; that is, would not believe her Dudley’s affection had turned to distaste, since that ‘might cause her, womanlike, to undo him’. Leicester found himself forced to make part of the team negotiating for the Habsburg marriage. Even if it were at Norfolk’s insistence that he took part, Elizabeth did not protect her favourite from a position that must have chafed him unbearably. Perhaps she was sending him a message, for these two, in moments of anger, did speak to each other in deed and gesture, whatever verbal conversations they also had behind the closet door in the moments of their intimacy.

  Leicester told de Silva he believed Elizabeth ‘had made up her mind to wed some great prince, or at all events no subject of her own’. And Elizabeth herself, strolling with de Silva through the gravelled walks and carved heraldic beasts of the privy gardens, took care to assure him that no-one was ‘more inclining and addicted towards this match’ than Leicester; ‘neither doth any person more solicit us towards the same’.39 But she also reminded the Imperial ambassador that she had ‘never said to anybody that I would not marry the Earl of Leicester’. It seems almost a reflex reaction in her to invoke Robert’s name as talisman or stalking horse whenever the proposal of another suitor took on too much reality.

  Around this time, William Cecil felt it necessary to set down a private memorandum comparing the archduke and Robert Dudley; to the latter’s disfavour, needless to say. The one was ‘an archduke born’; the other ‘an earl made’. The one was in wealth ‘by repor
t 3000 ducats by the year’; the other ‘all of the Queen and in debt’. In knowledge, the one had ‘all qualities belonging to a prince - languages, wars, hunting and riding’; the other knew what was ‘meet [suitable] for a courtier’. In age, and in beauty, he tersely conceded that Leicester was ‘meet’; but against that was his failure to have children with Amy, while the archduke came from a prolific family.

  Cecil made another version of the same memorandum, dwelling less on the personal and more on the political attributes of the pair. It may have been meant for discussion with the council, rather than the Queen. This was less of a point-by-point comparison than the first, but still the contrast was intended to be clear. If the Queen married Leicester: ‘Nothing is increased by marriage of him either in riches, estimation, power.’ ‘It will be thought, that the slanderous speeches of the Queen with the Earl have been true.’ ‘He shall study nothing but to enhance his own particular friends to wealth, to offices to lands, and to offend others.’ Against Leicester’s name Cecil also put down, rather oddly, ‘He is like to prove unkind, or jealous of the Queen’s majesty.’ Perhaps he was thinking of the arrogance and ambition Robert displayed so frequently. Of course, wanting the Habsburg marriage to take place, he had no motive to put down the other side of the case: the archduke’s Catholicism, and the probable hostility of the country to the match.