Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  The Earl of Leicester, with his gaudy clothes and his grandeur, his self-indulgent appetites and the irregularities of his private life, seems a far cry from what we think of as a puritan today. But that is probably an anachronistic perception. The fact is that, even from the very start of Elizabeth’s reign, the ‘hotter’ wing of the Protestant party had had their eye upon Robert Dudley. In that first winter of 1558-9 John Aylmer, dedicating his response to John Knox, had singled him out as one of the two courtiers endowed ‘with a singular favour and desire to advance and promote the true doctrine of Christ’s cross’. (The other was Lord Bedford, Ambrose Dudley’s father-in-law.)

  Those works dedicated to Robert Dudley or published under his protection early in the reign included: in 1561 a treatise against the doctrine of free will, by a Protestant writer; in 1562 a translation of The Laws and Statutes of Geneva (Switzerland being home to the most advanced wing of the Reformation); in 1564 a translation of Peter Martyr’s influential Commentaries on Judges; and in 1572, a refutation of the papal bull against Elizabeth by the important Zurich reformer Henry Bullinger, the publication of which, given the importance of a clear answer to the Pope’s threats, amounts to an official recognition of Leicester’s status as guardian of Protestantism. Early in the reign, the writer of an anonymous note of recommendation had clearly chosen Robert Dudley as the best man to find places in the church for twenty-eight ‘godly preachers which have utterly forsaken antichrist and all his Romish rags’. In the 1560s he was reported by the Spanish ambassador as having ordered the removal from the Queen’s private chapel of several old-style furnishings; it was one of the things that made the ambassador doubt the sincerity of his offers of friendship.

  The religious settlement Elizabeth had chosen back at the start of her reign was Protestant in essentials, but sufficiently familiar in its trappings (the colourful riches associated with the Catholic Church) to give some comfort to ordinary people. It was in many ways the plan that had been laid out under Robert’s father - but times had moved on since then, and in measure as it soothed the traditionalists, so it came to give considerable concern to the real reformers; indeed, it risked being seen, as one anonymous author claimed, as ‘a cloaked papistry or a mingle mangle’. Robert himself had once been prepared to make conciliatory gestures towards Catholicism, if urged by political necessity. But by 1568, the French ambassador wrote, Robert ‘was totally of the Calvinist religion’.

  It used to be assumed that his was merely a faith of convenience - that the puritans, as they were now coming to be called, were strongly against Elizabeth’s marrying a Catholic prince, and so was he - or even that his first motivation was the chance to grab further church lands. But it is hard to square that view with a letter which, in August 1576, Leicester would write to a noted puritan, Thomas Wood, a longtime satellite of the Dudleys. Wood had written to the Dudley brothers, complaining that Leicester seemed to have played a leading part in suppressing the puritan practice of ‘prophesying’ in Southam in Warwickshire, an area of Dudley influence. The puritans were devoted to these sessions of communal study, but the conservatives, and Elizabeth herself, viewed them with mistrust as forums for public dissent. Leicester (and the rest of a largely supportive council) had been acting on royal orders when the prophesyings were put down.

  But the point that strikes any modern reader of this letter is not that Leicester seems, in this case, to have failed the puritans. It is not even the degree to which they had thought of him as an ‘earnest favourer and as it were a patron’, as Wood acknowledged: one who had nudged their men into office (bishops, deans, heads of house at Oxford), pressed for further reforms, protected puritans whose practices laid them open to attack and smoothed the path for the French Protestant refugees who, in the 1560s, had begun trickling into England. What is most striking is the tone in which Leicester chooses to justify himself, in an extremely long and personal letter, to this apparently unimportant man.

  There is, he wrote,

  no man I know in this realm of one calling or other that hath showed a better mind to the furthering of true religion than I have done, even from the first day of her Majesty’s reign to this . . . I take Almighty God to my record, I never altered my mind or thought from my youth touching my religion, and you know I was ever from my cradle brought up in it.

  Perhaps he wrote in the memory of his father’s apostasy.

  Not that he himself was actually in favour of the most extreme puritanism. ‘He that would be counted most a saint I pray God be found a plain true Christian,’ he said.

  I am not, I thank God, fantastically persuaded in religion but, being resolved to my comfort of all the substance thereof, do find it soundly and godly set forth in this universal Church of England . . . which doctrine and religion I wish to be obeyed duly as it ought of all subjects in this land . . . For my own part, I am so resolved to the defence of that [which] is already established as I mean not to be a maintainer or allower of any that would trouble or disturb the quiet proceeding thereof.

  Leicester warned that internecine strife among the different wings of the Protestant religion was not helping anybody except their Catholic adversaries. ‘I found no more hate or displeasure almost between papist and Protestant than is now in many places between many of our own religion.’ He stood fast behind Elizabeth’s position, when it came to it. Elizabeth is famously quoted as saying that there was one Jesus Christ and the rest was ‘a dispute about trifles’. So here he too spoke of ‘dissension for trifles’. Their phrases did still often echo each other’s to a noticeable degree.

  It would be possible to find in Elizabeth’s writings, as well as in Leicester’s, the strong religious rhetoric that strikes modern ears so forcefully. In a prayer published for the edification of her people, Elizabeth had written: ‘Thou seest whereof I came, of corrupt seed; what I am, a most frail substance; where I live, in the world full of wickedness, where delights be snares, where dangers be imminent, where sin reigneth and death abideth. This is my state. Now where is my comfort?’ It is something to set against those more familiar statements, suggestive of an easy pragmatism, that sit so agreeably with our own century; something that may perhaps suggest another strand in the bond she shared with Robert Dudley.

  What is more certain, however, is that the faith which had in Mary Tudor’s day united Robert and Elizabeth would in the years ahead help to divide them. In those times to come, in a world increasingly polarized by religious division, Leicester would declare as the Protestant champion while Elizabeth, on the contrary, would draw further away from the radical reformers, as the demands of their faith clashed with the functions and prerogatives of her monarchy.

  The political froideur between them gained impetus from the personal. Leicester’s relationship with the Queen - baulked likewise of any natural fulfilment and of a natural end - seemed to be foundering into sterility. Up with the rocket, down with the stick. And up, and down again . . . On one of his absences from the court, the Queen had sent after him a communiqué which evidently shocked him. Elizabeth’s letter is long lost, as is whatever response Robert finally felt emboldened to send to her directly. But the letter he wrote to Throckmorton paints the situation vividly. He had ‘never wilfully offended’, he wrote plaintively; and even if he had done so inadvertently,

  Foul faults have been pardoned in some; my hope was that only one might be forgiven - yea, forgotten - me. If many days’ service and not a few years’ proof have [not] made trial of unremovable fidelity enough, what shall I think of all that past favour, which [when] my first oversight [brings about] as it were an utter casting off of all that was before . . .

  The shock had been all the worse for the fact the letter had been written in the Queen’s own hand: an honour, but one he could have done without, for ‘then I might yet have remained in some hope of mistaking’. No need for him to make haste home to court - a ‘cave in a corner of oblivion, or a sepulchre for perpetual rest’ would be more suitable, Leicester adde
d in a postscript, bitterly.

  In these tetchy years we find the Chancellor, Sir Walter Mildmay, writing that he cannot do Leicester’s bidding for fear of displeasing the Queen, ‘who is in no wise disposed to hear anything that may do you good’. The Queen (Mildmay said once) could even be heard telling her cousin, Lord Hunsdon: ‘My lord, it hath often been said that you should be my Master of the Horse, but it is now likely to come true.’ One has the strong sense that both Elizabeth and Robert, while each communicating nominally with a third party, were actually speaking for each other’s ears - as is clearly evident in a letter Throckmorton wrote to Robert towards the end of the 1560s. (There was more than one occasion on which Leicester, having clearly offended the Queen in some way, used Throckmorton as the conduit to make his peace.)

  The Queen read Leicester’s letter thrice,

  and said you did mistake the cameleon’s property, who doth change into all colours according to the object, save white, which is innocency . . . Then she willed me to show her what your lordship had written to me. She read my letter twice and put it in her pocket. Then I demanded of her whether she would write to your Lordship. She plucked forth my letter and said, ‘I am glad at the length he hath confessed a fault in himself, for he asketh pardon.’

  Throckmorton, correctly assessing the climate of her mood, saw that she was eager to picture Leicester as repentant, and dared charge her with harshness. The idea of her favourites being dismayed by her frowns always went down well with Elizabeth, for now she smiled: pleased, clearly.

  So far, it is true, their estrangements had never lasted long. But there was an increasingly strained note about the squabbles and the reconciliations, as if each tug were stretching the elastic of their affection a little more taut; each release revealing it to have grown a little more slack. It could be suggested that Elizabeth - like a temperamental top seed throwing tantrums on the tennis court - fuelled herself by these teacup tempests. But there is no reason at all to suppose Robert Dudley felt the same way. Backwards and forwards, in favour and out of it: it was (to use a later idiom) enough to exhaust a cow. Of course, Robert was not just the victim here. He, as much as Elizabeth, had his own game to play: supporting a foreign match proposed for her, and then turning against it; speaking favourably in public, but perhaps taking a different tone in private, in those conversations to which we never will be privy; taking what he could get from her, even while baulked of the thing he couldn’t: a relationship of patronage that shaped and warped their bond. (Leicester’s enemies said of him that he made money out of every quarrel - ‘was never reconciled to the Queen under £5,000’, in one account from the eighteenth century.) On the other hand, it is hard not to see Robert as the greater sufferer. Such, over the next few years, he increasingly felt himself to be. It was becoming apparent that Elizabeth had no interest in altering the status quo. If she could hold everyone and everything in stasis then she would be happy: foreign suitors proposing; Robert Dudley adoring; the country complaisant; and the years at bay. It was he who wanted to move the game on - by marriage to Elizabeth, if that were possible; but, if it were not, then maybe another way.

  Again, perhaps Robert’s feelings, his attitude towards Elizabeth’s other suitors, bear looking at more closely. In the years ahead, he would seem not to be automatically opposed to all possible foreign alliances. It was partly pretence, but not entirely. As his own hopes began imperceptibly to fade, a measure of pragmatism was a self-preserving necessity. Best, if it really came to that, for Elizabeth to marry a foreign prince who had some reason to be grateful to him, Robert, because a hostile royal husband would have a mere subject at his mercy.

  Robert’s real position was becoming clear. Whenever another marriage possibility came too close, whenever the calls for her marriage became too pressing, Elizabeth could brandish his name at the aggressor. In these terms, Robert was as much a lay figure - ‘The Suitor’, the ever-ready - as a puppet in a Punch and Judy show.

  Once he began slowly to realize Elizabeth would never marry him, then what did Robert Dudley think? Did he subscribe to the old courtly story, the credo that ‘the Queen can do no wrong’? Again, it is extraordinary just how many points of connection can be found between the rules of courtly love and the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert Dudley - right down to the Queen’s ‘two bodies’: her dual identity as a flesh-and-blood woman and as a genderless, presumed masculine, epitome of monarchy;43 right down to the repeated rivalry, in the literature of courtly love, between the knight and the clerk - Robert Dudley and William Cecil? - for the favour of the lady.

  The links extend to the relevance of courtly love to the Arthurian fantasy, which attracted both Elizabeth and Robert; to the importance of courtly love as a gesture against (in the words of one expert) ‘the harsh authoritarian world of masculine kingship’ in general, and the Holy Roman Empire in particular; to the habitual use of symbols (like Robert’s sketched ‘Eyes’); and of course to the fact that no history of the literature of courtly love can be complete without the afternote of The Faerie Queene, the long poem written by Robert’s protégé Spenser and perhaps intended by the poet’s patron (before his untimely death put paid to the idea) to buy his way back into Elizabeth’s wandering favour.

  But alongside the long devotion to lost causes that belonged to the old tradition of courtly love, there was a sharper strand in Elizabethan poetry. It spoke of cynicism:

  My sovereign sweet her countenance settles so

  To feed my hope, while she her snares might lay.

  And when she saw that I was in her danger,

  Good God, how soon she proved then a ranger.

  (lyric, anon.)

  And it spoke of resolution:

  Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part:

  Nay, I have done; you get no more of me;

  And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart

  That thus so cleanly I myself can free.

  (Michael Drayton)

  Whatever Robert Dudley’s sexual relationship with Elizabeth had been, it was surely fading away. In 1565 the Imperial ambassador - having made the most ‘diligent enquiries’ concerning her ‘maiden honour and integrity’ - had felt able to reassure his master that Robert was ‘a virtuous, pious, courteous and highly moral man whom the Queen loves as a sister her brother in all maidenly honour, in most chaste and honest love. She speaks publicly with him as with a dear brother, but that she desires to marry him or entertains any but the purest affection is quite out of the question.’ Suggestions to the contrary were ‘the spawn of envy and malice and hatred’ merely. Now, five years later, the French envoy likewise concluded that Elizabeth was ‘good and virtuous’, adding that with so many watching her it were impossible she could be so admired if she were anything else.

  Did Robert, as the years wore on, as his first high hopes flagged, bring himself to the pragmatic position: that he had done pretty well out of the situation, even if he had not got the biggest prize? If so, perhaps he had also arrived at this proviso: that though he too could do worse than maintain the status quo, he would not allow it to keep him from another relationship, fulfilled and fruitful, indefinitely. And perhaps he had come to realize that a foreign marriage for Elizabeth - to the right person, under the right circumstances - could even set him free.

  12

  ‘Our estate requireth a match’ 1570-1572

  FOR ELIZABETH TOO, THE NEW DECADE OPENED ONTO THE FAINT rumours of change. One way or another, the possibility of the Queen’s linking herself to a Valois prince was to occupy much of the 1570s, though the full impact of the latest set of proposals - the moment when the purely political turned to the personal, when the fantasy of marriage nearly became reality - would not come until almost the end of that decade.

  But already, in 1570, there was clear and pressing need for England to find allies, and France (ancient enemy though it might be) was the obvious ally against the ever-growing might of Spain; a might that threatened to upset the
precarious balance of power in Europe. At home, too, Elizabeth was feeling vulnerable. In February 1570 Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in excelsis, depriving Elizabeth, in the eyes of all loyal Catholics, of ‘her pretended right to her realm’. The fact of the Queen of Scots’ presence in her country put her under ever more pressure to marry. And so the year that first saw Elizabeth’s Accession Day celebrated as a public holiday - that first saw the worship of the Virgin Queen, you might say - saw also the start of the long negotiations with the French royal house of Valois; negotiations that did at last come close to ending her virginity.

  In the September of 1570 the French sent a proposal that Elizabeth should marry the Duke of Anjou, brother to the French king Charles IX. Henri was nineteen to Elizabeth’s almost forty; but the age gap that had worried Elizabeth so much when negotiating for Charles seemed not to concern her this time. But then, it is possible that the alliance was theoretical on both sides, anyway. Anjou was certainly reluctant. His fervent personal Catholicism was bound to prove a major problem; so indeed was his promiscuous bisexuality.44

  Perhaps the conspicuous complications explain why Leicester himself sounded a note of cautious optimism about the potential match. On a personal level, he must have known Elizabeth’s heart was never likely to be engaged; on a political one, he had learnt the usefulness of a marriage negotiation from his royal mistress. As he wrote to his ally Francis Walsingham, then serving as ambassador to the French court: ‘I concede our estate requireth a match, but God send us a good one and meet for all parties.’ (An exile for his faith during Mary Tudor’s reign, Walsingham would become ever more important in the years ahead. The man who became the organizing genius behind Elizabeth’s network of spies and informers - ‘a most subtle searcher of secrets’, as Camden said - would also be bound to Leicester and his family by a number of ideological and personal ties.)