Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  No doubt Elizabeth talked over with Leicester the fate of the woman she had once suggested he marry. No doubt she had done so every step of the way. Melville in his Memoirs said that before he left England, having delivered news of James’s birth, he tried to bring Elizabeth to the point of declaring Mary her heir: ‘for my Lord of Leicester was become my queen’s avowed friend’. Leicester certainly acted as Elizabeth’s mouthpiece in explaining to Throckmorton (who had found his task of mediating between the different Scottish parties an unenviable one) why Elizabeth would not throw her weight more decisively behind the Protestant lords. ‘She is most earnestly affected towards the Queen of Scots ... There is no persuading the Queen [Elizabeth] to disguise or use polity, for she breaks out to all men in this matter, and says most constantly that she will become an utter enemy to that nation if the Queen [Mary] perish.’ When Mary wrote to Elizabeth in the early days of her captivity describing the harshness of her treatment, her ‘bodily fear’, and her particular terror of ‘false reports’, it must have reminded the English queen of her own youthful imprisonment, and perhaps drew her close to one who had shared that terrible experience.

  For Elizabeth’s first instinct was to assist Mary to regain her throne. Queenship called to queenship. This met with disagreement from most of Elizabeth’s councillors, and from Cecil especially. To return Mary to her throne would have been to replace a friendly Protestant government with a Catholic one. Cecil was adamant Mary should instead be sent back to Scotland into the custody of the Protestant lords, but to this Elizabeth could not bring herself to agree. Mary could not be sent abroad, to become a puppet pretender to the English throne in the hands of France or Spain; nor could she be left to roam around England, penniless but at liberty. So she was to be kept fast as Elizabeth’s ‘guest’; and part of the compromise package was that Elizabeth should launch an inquiry into the rumours about Mary’s conduct and her part in her husband’s death. If Mary would agree to have her case heard by her ‘dear cousin and friend’, then ‘I will send for her rebels and know their answer why they deposed their queen’. The inquiry began in the autumn, in York, moving south to London in the spring of 1569, where first Leicester and then also Warwick joined the list of commissioners. The production of the so-called ‘casket letters’, seeming to provide evidence of murderous adultery, ensured that Mary could not be found innocent; the fact that she herself never debated the implication of them meant she could not officially be found guilty.41

  At the English court, another bout of internal strife was brewing, and events were soon to display Cecil and Leicester profoundly at odds in an episode intimately connected with Mary’s story. We are only now beginning to guess that the slightly unsatisfactory tale we have always been told about this perplexing passage in late Tudor history may be no more than a veneer over a far more complex set of events, in which Leicester’s role may well have been less venal than at first it appears.

  The central figure in this episode was the Duke of Norfolk - cast, in the conventional story, not as Leicester’s enemy, but as his ally. The duke had been one of the original commissioners on the inquiry into Mary’s guilt as to the murder of Lord Darnley, and his reaction to the sight of the casket letters had been a disgust - ‘such an inordinate [he crossed out ‘and filthy’] love between her and Bothwell’, he wrote - that one would expect not to be easily done away with. But very shortly afterwards, Norfolk went hawking with one of the Scottish lords, who suggested that the best way of neutralizing and utilizing Mary (her marriage to Bothwell having been annulled) would be for Norfolk himself to marry her, thus keeping her safe under the authority of a loyal English subject, and co-opting her royal genes for a new dynasty which could reasonably inherit Elizabeth’s throne one day.

  The idea did not bear instant fruit. There was, after all, a clause in Norfolk’s instructions as commissioner which said that anyone plotting Mary’s marriage ‘shall be ipso facto acknowledged as traitorous and shall suffer death’. But it was an idea that, once mooted, no scion of the ambitious Howard clan could ever entirely forget. It was in part Norfolk’s dawning partiality towards Mary that had seen the commission moved south, to be under Elizabeth’s eye. When Elizabeth taxed Norfolk, half jokingly, with the rumours she had heard, he protested he had no desire for marriage with ‘so wicked a woman, such a notorious adultress and murderer’. Elizabeth declared herself satisfied, and there, for the moment, the matter seemed to die.

  Soon, however, it was reborn, as bastard love-child to another conspiracy. Norfolk and those around him resented Cecil’s implacable hostility to Mary and the severity with which he proposed to pursue the anti-Catholic laws. More subtly, they saw him as a new man intent on the overthrow of the old regime, and were concerned that the general trend of his policies would throw England and Spain into conflict. These were not, surely, fears likely to recruit Leicester’s support. Yet it seems on the face of it as though his ambition, or his famous hostility to Cecil, weighed more heavily in the balance than his fervent Protestantism.

  There is now good reason to suspect the version of events we have always been told. The trouble is that the veil of secrecy still holds, and there is simply not the evidence to offer a complete alternative narrative for the events of this spring and summer. So let us stick with the old tale for a moment longer. The story goes that at a meeting of the council, with the Queen not present, Cecil (like Thomas Cromwell, in Henry VIII’s reign) was to be charged with being an evil adviser - enough to dismiss him to the Tower. But soon after Leicester finally decided to throw his weight in with the plotters, Elizabeth - ever less easy to hoodwink than was fondly supposed - got wind of the plan. On Ash Wednesday, with Cecil, Norfolk and Northampton also in her chamber, she taxed Leicester first with his folly. Leicester gave his complaints against Cecil; most of her subjects, he said, were in despair because affairs were being so badly managed by Master Secretary. Norfolk spoke to Northampton in an audible aside. ‘You see, my Lord, how the Earl of Leicester is favoured so long as he supports the Secretary [Cecil], but now that for good reason he takes an opposed position, she frowns upon him and wants to send him to the Tower.’ ‘No, no,’ replied Northampton, ‘he will not go alone.’ Elizabeth, standing firm behind Cecil, had shown her position clearly. Leicester was perhaps embarrassed by being thrust into the position of leader, but pleased by the novel popularity with his peers.

  But it is notable that three times in the following weeks Leicester stymied fresh anti-Cecil moves by threatening to tell the Queen (aided by conciliatory moves from Cecil himself, and by Sussex’s urging on Norfolk that this quarrel was the worst thing possible for the country). And it is notable, too, that the famous scene in the privy chamber comes to us from one very particular source - from the French ambassador, de la Mothe Fénelon, a recent arrival in the country who was complaining how hard he found it to get a handle on English affairs and who this spring was being force-fed a picture of England in disarray, with dissent in the government ranks and widespread support for Mary. His informant was a man of whom more would shortly be heard: a Florentine banker called Roberto Ridolfi who used this method to persuade both Fénelon and the Spanish ambassador to join a Catholic alliance with plans for an invasion of England.

  As spring wore on, several strands to the broad conspiracy became discernible. The first proposed merely Norfolk’s marriage with Mary; and here Leicester assured Norfolk of his support, with Throckmorton acting as go-between from him to Norfolk’s party. Robert may indeed genuinely have felt that ‘there could be no better Remedy to provide for so dangerous a Woman’. And he had arguably a personal reason to comply, since with a tamed Mary ratified as heir presumptive, the pressure on Elizabeth to make a dynastic marriage would be relieved.

  But others in this vague alliance, particularly the nobles of the north, were plotting more dangerously. It is unclear whether even Norfolk, let alone Leicester, was in on their plan from the beginning. They envisaged Mary and Norfolk deposing Elizabeth immed
iately, and (with Spanish support) restoring Catholicism to the country. Mary herself - negotiating incessantly on her own account, with nobles both sides of the border - was willing to go with each and any plan that would set her at liberty. For her, concern for Elizabeth’s safety was far from a priority.

  It was Leicester’s supposed power to persuade Elizabeth against her will that made him a figure of such importance in the plan for a marriage between Norfolk and Mary. But, just as the plotters perhaps over-estimated his influence here, they may also have played too many games with his loyalty.

  The summer of 1569 could hardly be other than uneasy. The conventional story runs thus: that Norfolk’s aspirations were something of an open secret, known even to Cecil, who urged Norfolk to speak to the Queen and confess his position honestly. Leicester, by contrast, was in negotiation with Maitland in Scotland, so that the marriage should seem to be suggested by Mary’s own Protestant lords. If this failed, Leicester would broach it to the Queen himself - in which case, he insisted, he must be able to wait for the right moment to do so . . . At the end of July the court moved to Richmond, and Leicester was occupied fishing in the Thames, near his house at Kew, when Norfolk came upon him. The earl told the duke that the Queen had heard some gossip of the matter, and that it was more than ever incumbent upon them to open the subject only carefully. Perhaps that is why when, a few days later, Elizabeth asked if he had no news of a marriage to tell her, Norfolk baulked at the subject and scuttled away. Like a schoolboy looking for help in trouble he went straight to Leicester’s rooms; finding that the earl was out stag-hunting near Kingston, he waited there until Leicester returned at the end of a long day.

  On progress a few days later, Leicester kept his promise, finally. Norfolk himself described the scene in one of the many ‘submissions’ or confessions he was compelled to deliver later. The court was staying at Loseley near Guildford, the home of Sir William More, and as Norfolk came into the Queen’s room one morning, he found one of Sir William’s children ‘playing upon a lute and singing, Her Majesty sitting upon the threshold of the door, my Lord of Leicester kneeling by Her Highness’. Leicester told him the news of Norfolk’s aspirations had gone down ‘indifferent well’, and that Elizabeth would speak to him later in the progress. However, when Elizabeth gave Norfolk a tetchy, but not unforgiving, nudge upon the subject, again he let the opportunity to come clean slip away; and when opportunity arose for him to leave the progress he did so, still silent, leaving Leicester and a wary Cecil to do whatever they could for him.

  By early September, with Norfolk summoned back to court, the best thing Leicester could think of to do was to give the whole story to the Queen, under conditions that would ensure her sympathy. At Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire he took to his bed (so Camden later heard), and when a concerned Elizabeth came to visit he told her of the marriage plan, protesting his own loyalty. When she told him she thought that the marriage, had it happened, would have seen her in the Tower, he could hardly fail to have responded with genuine contrition. Elizabeth rated Norfolk angrily, and charged him on his allegiance that he should ‘deal no further with the Scottish cause’. He could expect no less. He had got away lightly. But still, the other courtiers shunned him - Leicester among them - and when he got permission to retreat to his own house in London, he did so gratefully.

  Might it perhaps have ended there, had the plotting of that summer been limited to the comparatively innocent plan that Norfolk should marry Mary, and - long term - secure the succession that way? But the situation, as Norfolk left court, can hardly have struck Elizabeth, or her ministers, as one of safety. The religious malcontents in the north - they who had planned to replace Elizabeth with Mary - still posed a threat (even without Spanish support). So the ports were closed, the militia alerted, and the Queen of Scots removed to a place of greater security. Leicester and Cecil, on Elizabeth’s instructions, wrote to Norfolk ordering him to come to Windsor immediately. Leicester also wrote him a warning, privately, and this frightened Norfolk so much that, instead of obeying the summons, he set off immediately in the opposite direction. He was in fact heading for the imagined safety of his own estates; but to the authorities it looked as if he were setting out to recruit his forces, planning to return at the head of an army. The whole court ‘hung in suspense and fear lest he should break forth into rebellion’, wrote Camden later. Instead, Norfolk stayed at home, sick and quaking - ruined, as the latest Spanish ambassador, de Spes, put it, by his ‘pusillanimity’ - and it is no wonder the crown seized its opportunity. A messenger was sent to take Norfolk to the Tower - in a litter, if necessary.

  Before he left for London, Norfolk sent a messenger north-wards, to his brother-in-law, the Earl of Westmorland. The message begged that Westmorland and his allies call off the projected rising; but it had the opposite effect. When they too were summoned to court, they feared for their own safety. Sussex (at once Norfolk’s friend, and Elizabeth’s Lord President of the Council in the north, before Robert’s brother-in-law Huntingdon took over that role) urged them that this was folly, and their best course was to comply. But on 9 November the so-called ‘northern earls’ rode with their supporters to Durham, where they proclaimed that ‘to whom of mere right the true succession of the crown appertaineth’ should be determined by themselves, ‘the ancient nobility’. At Ripon they stated their main aim more clearly: ‘evil-disposed persons about the Queen’s Majesty’, they said, had ‘overcome in this our realm the true and Catholic religion’. The wording of the proclamation implicitly recognized that Elizabeth, at least for the moment, was ‘the Queen’s Majesty’; none the less they planned to free Mary. From Ripon they rode south to Selby - near to Tutbury, where Mary had been held until a hasty removal to Coventry. But as November turned to December, as an army led by Elizabeth’s kinsman Hunsdon advanced to meet them, as the weather worsened and they squabbled about what to do next, their forces melted away. They withdrew north (still unaided by the Spanish), the leaders fleeing into Scotland in time to allow Christmas to be celebrated at the English court with all festivity.

  Leicester’s brother Ambrose, the Earl of Warwick, was one of the leaders of the royal forces mustered against the rebellion, and one of those who presided over a suppression so punitive as to damage the north for many years ahead. Some 750 rebels were executed under martial law, many more later tried and fined; clergy were deprived of their livings, great estates alienated from their previous owners and redirected into other, more loyal, hands. It is a glimpse of the harsher side of the Dudley family.

  No dramatic reprisals were taken among the courtiers in on the plot. But Throckmorton was questioned in the Tower, and Leicester was the only one who went quite scot free. If he really had betrayed the Queen, even to the extent of keeping quiet about Norfolk’s marriage plan, would she not have been more angry? At what stage and from what source did he become aware that there was a more dangerous aspect to the marriage fantasy?

  Or . . . should we be thinking more adventurously? It is interesting that Robert’s brother played so large a part in putting down the revolt; and that Elizabeth had contemplated placing Mary in Huntingdon’s charge, for greater security. Interesting, too, that Norfolk’s family ever after felt that if Leicester had not actually been an agent provocateur, then at least he had behaved provocatively. Is it possible that Leicester had been tipping Elizabeth off - even that she had been the puppetmaster who placed him as a spy in the camp of the enemy? That the whole tale of his huge enmity towards Cecil that summer had been to some degree a made-up story, so that England’s enemies, at home and abroad, were being lured into showing their hand by a false display of division and vulnerability?

  In the autumn of 1569, as the revolt was brewing, Roberto Ridolfi, source of many of the rumours about this famous enmity, was arrested and remanded to the house of Francis Walsingham, a notable ally of Leicester’s. It now seems likely that, while Ridolfi was imprisoned, he was persuaded to ‘turn’ and, while still apparently orc
hestrating plans for a Catholic invasion of England, also keep England informed as to their progress. The instructions for Ridolfi’s arrest, his interrogation - and his surprising release ‘under certain conditions’ - were all forwarded from the court by two particular councillors: William Cecil, and Robert Dudley.

  It is hard accurately to gauge the nature of relations between Leicester and Cecil, so universally has the picture of their hostility been accepted - a hostility that even split the council into factions. Of course there is plenty of genuine evidence of quarrels and rivalries. In the spring of 1570 Fénelon reported that Leicester had been complaining that Cecil was trying to get him ousted from the council; that summer, Sir Henry Neville wrote to Cecil that ‘My Lord of Leicester sings his old song unto his friends, that is, that he had the queen in very good tune, till you took her aside, and dealt with her secretly, and then she was very strange suddenly.’ A year later the Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘The Queen’s opinion goes for little, and Leicester’s for less; Cecil rules all, unopposed, with the pride of Lucifer’ . . . but then again, in that crucial autumn of 1569, the Duke of Alva had heard that Leicester and Cecil, together, ‘entirely govern the Queen’. Even Leicester’s far more convincing enmity with Sussex was not such as to prevent him, this autumn, writing Sussex a respectful letter laying out his reasons for advocating a measure of friendship towards the Queen of Scots. ‘In worldly causes men must be governed by worldly policies,’ he said, albeit with the proviso that he would not forget ‘my duty to God’. (Leicester would long continue trying to stay on terms with Mary - but many other nobles also did so. While she remained the next heir, it was an essential insurance policy.)