Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  When the Queen’s progress took her near Cambridge in 1578, Cecil presided, in Leicester’s quarters, over a formal three-hour debate on mercy versus severity in a prince. The Queen had withdrawn to her own chambers, possibly feeling that she had heard enough on that theme already. She was perhaps unlikely to get quite such intellectual fare at Kenilworth. But there might have been, besides her daily exercise of dancing, the games Robert Burton describes in his Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘cards, tables and dice, shovelboard, chess-play, the philosopher’s game, small trunks, shuttle-cock, billiards, music, masks, singing, dancing, ulegames [sic], frolicks, jests, riddles, catches, purposes, questions and commands, merry tales . . .’

  When Sunday came round again she watched a rustic wedding: novel in its very crudity. The bridegroom was lame from an old injury got playing the rough and downmarket sport of football.55 Rather incongruously, he carried pen and inkhorn on his back, ‘for that he would be known to be bookish’. The bride was in her thirties: ‘ugly, foul ill favoured; yet marvellous fain of her office [proud of her role] because she heard say she should dance before the queen’. The wedding party was joined by ‘certain good-hearted men of Coventry’ who, while the ‘bold bachelors of the parish’ were still tilting at a quintain, began to perform, in dumb-show, a battle between King Ethelred and the Danes.

  At around four o’clock the Queen, watching from her window the ‘great throng and unruliness’, told the rustic actors to come back and perform again on Tuesday - either because she wanted to see it all again, or because she simply couldn’t face any more that day. In its comedy and confusion the scene resembles the rustic play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (just as Laneham’s lyric descriptions are sometimes evocative of phrases from the plays); and it has been speculated that his father may have brought the eleven-year-old William Shakespeare over from Stratford to see the fun.56

  The finale to the day was ‘a most delicious ambrosial banquet’ of three hundred dishes. A banquet in sixteenth-century parlance was not a heavy main meal but specifically the dessert course that followed it, often taken in a garden bower or roof-top pavilion: a course of fruits and marmalades, of sugar-wrought ‘subtleties’ and flavoured spirits of wine; of candied peel and gilded ginger-bread; of sweetmeats with names like ‘kissing comfits’ and little mounds of sweetened cream called ‘Spanish paps’ [breasts]. The twin themes of a banquet were the ostentatiously expensive key ingredient, sugar - the very drinking vessels were often made of a stiff sugar paste - and sex; for most of the ingredients (almonds, ambergris, spices and wine) were thought to inflame lust. But even savoury foods could convey a hidden message, as in a salad recipe for the ‘salatte of love’ (asparagus meant the renewing of love; cabbage lettuce, your love feedeth me; rosemary, I accept your love; and radish, pardon me). At this banquet the Queen, as was her custom, ate ‘smally or nothing’. But it is not inconceivable that Leicester - who sent ‘a young man brought up in my kitchen’ to spend a year with a Paris cook - could have coded even the dishes, carefully.

  On the second Monday (after yet more hunting: a sport of which the Queen rarely tired), she knighted five gentlemen and touched nine people for the King’s Evil, scrofula, and then saw a water pageant. Triton blew his horn to summon the Queen to the shores of the lake - and this is when she saw Arion riding on the back of a 24-foot dolphin with six musicians concealed in its belly. A song came softly through this ‘evening of the day, resounding from the calm waters, where presence of her Majesty, and longing to listen, had utterly damped all noise and din’. And so it continued - but the prime piece was planned for the penultimate day.

  Leicester had commissioned George Gascoigne to write a masque concerning the fate of ‘Zabeta’ (‘Eli-sabeta’), one of Diana’s favourite nymphs. Diana, chaste goddess of hunting, debates with Juno, wife to the king of the gods, as to which is Zabeta’s best destiny: marriage, or virginity. Marriage was to win the debate, needless to say, with Iris descending from the skies to remind the modern Elizabeth (rather pointedly) that Diana had not helped her in the days of her youthful captivity. Alas, rain forbade the performance, which was to have been carefully staged on a site several miles away. Leicester - so the story goes - was confronting the failure of his entire expensive plan; seeing the money he had spent on the whole extraordinary visit simply trickle damply away.

  He instructed Gascoigne, overnight, to write some farewell verses that might yet salvage the scenario, since the Queen was determined to leave the next day; and in his character of the god of the woods, Gascoigne duly accompanied her down the drive the next day, boasting his readiness to keep pace with her for twenty miles as she, heedless, spurred away. Gascoigne prated of another of Diana’s nymphs, Ahtebasile (which means Ah, thou queen), served by two brothers, Due Desert and Deep Desire; the latter, Leicester, changed into a holly bush to reflect ‘the restlesse pricks of his privie thoughts’ - and his worry that the Queen’s favour towards him had abated in some way. The nominal message was that the Queen should stay at Kenilworth, ‘among your friends’; hardly a point to affect her life-choices in any way.

  One or two historians have postulated, dramatically, that perhaps England would yet have had King Robert, if only the sun had shone the day before, and Gascoigne been able to perform his Zabeta story. But surely by now, fifteen years into her reign, Elizabeth had thought enough about the issue. She was not going to be persuaded by a bit more bad poetry. It is elsewhere we need to look to understand the real drama enacted that day.

  Was the Kenilworth entertainment, as has usually been speculated, Leicester’s final throw, his last desperate bid to persuade Elizabeth to marry him (in which case, presumably, Douglass would have stepped silently aside)? It does, on the surface, look that way. Laneham reports that he had the clock dials on the keep stopped at two o’clock, to signify ‘twos, pairs, and couples’. But in fact Leicester must long since have lost real hopes of the Queen’s consenting to marry him.57 Yes, the prize was worth a final throw of the dice. He might still have been a winner, even at this late day. But he was tiring of the game itself - tiring of the pretence that he would be a suitor indefinitely.

  The dramas enacted at Kenilworth have been viewed more threateningly. One historian has noted that the entertainments Leicester commissioned tended to promote not only marriage, but militarism - his own hopes of leading an army to the Netherlands; that they tended to show women in jeopardy, in need of being rescued by a protective masculinity. The detailed analysis made by Susan Frye shows the Queen (who preferred to be both the hero and the heroine of the show) either redirecting or refusing to watch those entertainments that pushed the point most strongly; and one can accept the basic point without following Frye entirely.58

  But it does seem clear that the entertainment at Kenilworth - whatever the host originally intended - wound up by dramatizing the increasing distance between Robert and Elizabeth. It might be possible to argue that he knew it would do, and to see the enormous sum he spent as a farewell gift; as guilt money. Because in the time immediately ahead, the real-life protagonists, queen and courtier, would openly be changing partners with the matched precision of a dance, or a French play. In those terms, of course, we might more appropriately see the whole extraordinary Kenilworth entertainment as the beginning, rather than the end, of a story.

  14

  ‘Dishonorable brutes’ 1576-1579

  LEICESTER’S EVER-TANGLED MARITAL AFFAIRS WERE ABOUT TO TAKE another turn. Just a year after the great Kenilworth gala, he found himself caught up in a web of rumour. It was in August 1576 that the puritan Thomas Wood was writing to Ambrose Dudley about the many ‘very ill and dishonorable brutes’ - rumours - concerning Leicester, ‘which I do often hear to my great grief’. Wood was concerned first and foremost that the puritans’ erstwhile patron and protector seemed to have turned against them - but ‘common report’, he said, offered other tales of Leicester’s ‘ungodly life’, and if all this rest were true, then ‘God’s judgement in the opinio
n of all godly men without speedy repentance is not far off’.

  Ambrose replied indignantly - and Leicester too, when the accusations were passed on to him, defended himself hotly.

  I will not justify my self for being a sinner and flesh and blood as others be. And besides, I stand on the top of the hill, where I know the smallest slip seemeth a fall. But I will not excuse my self; I may fall many ways and have more witnesses thereof than many others who perhaps be no saints neither, yet their faults less noted though someways greater than mine . . . And for my faults, I say, they lie before him who I have no doubt but will cancel them as I have been and shall be most heartily sorry for them.

  I have many ill willers, and I am none of those that seek hypocritically to make my self popular . . . And he had need be a perfect saint that should escape in any place slanderous tongues.

  True enough - but by 1576 (perhaps even as he fêted the Queen at Kenilworth the year before) Leicester seems, if we interpret Wood’s hints correctly, to have been giving material to slanderous tongues. Back in 1565, Leicester’s name had been linked with that of Lettice Knollys, and it seems the old feeling had never entirely gone away.

  The exact timing of their affair is crucial here - both crucial and, alas, uncertain, like several pieces of timing in Leicester’s story. Wood’s ‘common report’ might seem to suggest that an affair was already established by the summer of ’76. Report since has even suggested that the old attraction really never went away - that Lettice’s son, the second, the famous Earl of Essex, who was born in November 1567, could, besides becoming Leicester’s stepson, also be his natural son. But there is no real evidence to support this (unless one counts the assertion of the slightly later courtier Sir Henry Wotton that Essex’s supposed father had had ‘a very cold conceit’ of this one of his offspring) - and, for what it is worth, the notably fresh complexion and gingery hair of the father’s portrait at Baddesley Clinton do seem to bear a certain resemblance to portraits of his supposed son. But if either fact were true, it was indeed a scandal. For back in the early 1560s - even before Lettice’s first flirtation with Robert Dudley - she had married Walter Devereux, whom Elizabeth subsequently created first Earl of Essex. When Wood wrote his letter in the August of 1576, Essex was still alive, and a relationship between Lettice and Leicester would thus have been adultery; certainly on her side, perhaps also on his.

  A letter written by a Spanish agent in December 1575 had been far more explicit than anything Wood ventured. It mentioned ‘the great enmity that exists between the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex in consequence, it is said, of the fact that, while Essex was in Ireland, his wife had two children by Leicester. Great discord is expected.’ The two children seem to have been just two more of the anonymous phantom infants rumour was so fond of crediting to the Tudor nobility; all Lettice’s named and visible offspring had been born well before her husband went away. But the relationship was ‘publicly talked of in the streets’, the agent said, explaining why he felt discretion on his part unnecessary.

  The pair would not have lacked for opportunities to meet. Lettice may have been present at Kenilworth for Leicester’s grand entertainment of 1575; may even have been the cause of that tussle of wills, that anger of the Queen’s, at which the tale of the final festivities seemed to hint.59 Another tale sets their important encounter as occurring at the same time, but at Sir George Digby’s house at Coleshill, just a dozen miles away. It may have been at the Essex seat of Chartley itself that they renewed their interest in each other; for when the court visited on that same progress, Lettice acted as the host, since her husband was away. But we cannot know for sure the single most important fact: whether Robert and Lettice were already indeed ‘an item’ by the time Essex went to Ireland on military service in 1573; by the time that (after a return home in the autumn of ’75) he was sent back to Ireland in July 1576; or even by the time he died there, at the end of September 1576, in circumstances that struck the gossip-mongers as suspicious.

  Leicester has been blamed for his part in sending Essex to Ireland - sending him to what proved to be his death. But in fact Essex’s career there is hard to assess without some knowledge of the Irish situation, that perpetual running sore in the side of the English body politic. The project - crusade, almost, one might say - to impose a Protestant and, it seemed, civilizing influence upon the wild and Catholic Irish was one beloved of the bulk of Elizabeth’s leading counsellors: of Essex himself and in time of his son; of Sir Henry Sidney (Lord Deputy of Ireland to Essex’s Earl Marshal) and his son, Sir Philip Sidney; and of Leicester himself. Though Cecil (and in the years ahead, his son too!) are usually identified with all Elizabeth’s more pacific policies, even they had no sympathy with the Irish cause, but rather feared unrest in a country that could so easily become a back door into England, and let through a Catholic conspiracy. To the Irish, English policy looked more like a piece of pure colonial oppression, often conducted with extreme brutality . . . But that was a perspective with which English nobles like Leicester were hardly likely to agree.

  So if Leicester - with his broad interest in promoting the Protestant religion, in pushing England’s frontiers, in supporting the Tudor ideal of an imperial monarchy - supported Essex’s missions to Ireland, it does not have to have been from personal enmity. Essex, back in 1573, had volunteered for the task of crushing the Irish rebellion. And he looks a little less like a sainted victim if one remembers this was the man who once invited Irish leaders to a feast, on pretext of discussing peace terms, and then had them massacred; feeling, no doubt, that it was no crime to treat a barbarous people with barbarity. There is a hint of fanaticism about the eyes of the Baddesley Clinton portrait. All the same, when Essex died at Dublin Castle on 22 September, the rumour mill was bound to be busy.

  Those who stood around his deathbed - the Archbishop of Dublin among them - made a martyr’s story out of it, telling how Essex took the news of his approaching end with a bearing ‘more like that of a divine preacher or a heavenly prophet than a man’; how he ‘never let pass an hour without many most sweet prayers’; and how he ‘prayed much for the noble realm of England, for which he feared many calamities’. But in fact, to modern ears, the narrative is more horrifying than uplifting. The dying Essex saw around him nothing but ‘infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; aetheism, aetheism; no religion, no religion’. He repeated the angry words as his breath began to run short and, lamenting ‘the frailty of women’, prayed that his daughters should not learn too much of ‘the vile world’.60

  In the first days of his illness, at the very end of August, Essex had himself suspected poison - ‘some evil received in my drink’: the more so, since his page and a third person who drank with him were taken ill in the same way; though the others recovered. He suspected some of the Irish - none of his own household - he said. His doctors, after a week passed with no improvement, dosed him with unicorn’s horn, that well-known specific against poison, which just made him vomit violently - though the men available there in Ireland were ‘of small experience’, wrote his secretary dismissively, summoning a better-known physician with the vivid description of the earl’s ‘20 or 30 stools every day’, bloody or else ‘black burnt color’. It sounds like dysentery, and it almost certainly was. But whenever any well-known person died, the rumours of poison spread; and would have done, even if there hadn’t been friction between Essex and Sir Henry Sidney, his close colleague and Leicester’s brother-in-law.

  Sir Henry ordered an immediate post-mortem, which found that Essex had died of natural causes.61 But the following February, 1577, Sidney still felt the need to offer Leicester further reassurance in a private letter about the ‘false and malicious bruit’. The man responsible for spreading the rumours had now himself died of the same disease, Sir Henry said, ‘which most certainly was free from any poison; a mere flux, a disease appropriate to this country and whereof there died many in the later part of the last year, and some of mine own household, and yet
free from any suspicion of poison’. But why did Leicester need the reassurance? Concern for his own reputation, as after the death of Amy Dudley? Perhaps - but not necessarily. The lasting slur, that Leicester may have had his rival murdered, in fact springs chiefly from a slanderous pamphlet not published until the 1580s. Right then and there in 1577, the worst canard seems to have been rather that it was Lettice - Essex’s ‘wellbeloved wife’, as she was described in a will just three months old - who had had her husband put away. (Froude says that a few years earlier, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been warned to beware of Lettice, for precisely her facility with poisons.)

  But whatever Lettice, guilty or innocent, may have hoped might follow her husband’s death, in fact, in the short term at least, it left her almost destitute, since her husband’s debts were enough to crush his heir and sink his estates, and her attempt to get some maintenance from the Queen did not prosper quickly or smoothly. If she had already been involved with Leicester, could he not have helped her in some way? In fact, as with the death of Douglass Sheffield’s husband, the best evidence for the fact that Leicester did not kill Lettice’s husband in order to marry her is that he showed no signs of wishing to do so the minute she was free. Instead, Lettice drops out of the picture for a year or two. In 1577, as far as the sources are concerned, it was the same old Robert and Elizabeth story.