Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  The Elizabethans took dreams seriously, but the Queen (in many ways, of necessity, a very private woman) was not in the habit of posting news of hers off to all and sundry. This was a warning - but to whom? Poor Hatton felt understandably a little aggrieved at this blame by association. He had no plans to marry (and, despite some rumours, never did), whatever other favourites might do.

  But Hatton was prepared gently to suggest that Elizabeth was being unreasonable in denying a man the right to find elsewhere what she would not give him.

  I defend that no man can tie himself or be tied to such inconvenience as not to marry by law of God or man, except by mutual consents on both parts the man and woman vow to marry each other, which I know she hath not done for any man, and therefore by any man’s marriage she can receive no wrong. But, my Lord, I am not the man that should thus suddenly marry, for God knoweth, I never meant it.

  It sounds very much as if Hatton had some little idea of what was going on; but it sounds, too, as though Elizabeth and Leicester were, as so often, hovering in a limbo, somewhere between deliberate deception and frank sincerity.

  In August, during the summer progress, when the Queen was as usual vacillating about the question of whether to send aid to the beleaguered Protestants of the Netherlands, Leicester (so a scandalized but admiring Thomas Wilson reported to Walsingham) ‘dealt so plainly, so boldly, so faithfully with our sovereign against delays and unnecessary used allegations as I never heard councillor take the like upon him’. He was, however, ‘heard with great patience’ by the Queen. It sounds as though his influence had not diminished - unless his poor health were affecting his temper, and she making allowances. Elizabeth herself was unwell much of that summer and autumn; depressed and ill-tempered, and tormented with the toothache that was to plague her later years.

  Still, that summer’s progress through East Anglia was in many ways a triumphant one, with a visit to Norwich that became a legend in the city. It was 23 September when the Queen arrived at Wanstead, where she was to dine on her way back to London; less than thirty-six hours after Leicester and Lettice had gone through that second, only semi-secret, marriage ceremony. (It was in theory to prepare the house, and the splendid feast, that Leicester had been allowed to slip away from the progress early.) But there must have been many tensions simmering under the surface at that meal.

  A picture of Elizabeth at Wanstead was painted a few years after this. She stands beside her chair of state, on an expensive carpet spread luxuriously on the ground, the lawns and pavilions of a formal garden just visible behind her. One hand elegantly clasps at glove and fan; in the other is an olive branch, figuring her as ‘Pax’. One foot treads the hilt of a formal, allegorical, sword, and a small dog gazes upwards adoringly. Perhaps that is Leicester’s sign of loyalty. Alternatively, two of the figures glimpsed in the background may be him and the triumphant Lettice. There are pearls in Elizabeth’s hair, and the inevitable ransom’s worth of embroidery on her mantle - but between them this time Marcus Gheeraerts has set something a little different from the usual ageless mask of majesty. It is hard to know whether the expression on the Queen’s face was of pensive relaxation, or of melancholy.

  15

  ‘The greatest prince in Christendom’ 1578-1582

  IT MAY, POLITICS APART, HAVE BEEN THE KNOWLEDGE OF LEICESTER’S desertion that in 1578 prompted Elizabeth to renew her interest in the Duke of Alençon. (Mary in her imprisonment heard so, anyway.) But Elizabeth tended to mix business with pleasure; and the political situation was certainly enough to justify her decision. The brother of the French king remained the route to a useful alliance to hedge England’s lonely vulnerability.

  Alençon had begun agitating for the marriage plans to be resumed as far back as 1573, barely a discreet interval after the infamous massacre; and in the middle years of the decade Elizabeth’s own lengthy letters to her envoys had shown an almost frantic uncertainty. She would love to see Alençon before she decided whether to marry him, yet she feared ‘that if upon the entrevue satisfaction follow not, there is like to ensue thereby instead of straiter amity, disdain, unkindness, and a gall and wound of that good friendship that is already between us’. Yes, her ambassador was discussing a meeting with the French, but now, heaven forbid, the French seemed to have heard she was eager for such a thing, ‘Whereof we had much marvel’ . . . at which point - as once before, immediately after the massacre - it had all seemed to go away.

  But what did not, ever, go away was the need for a European ally. In England, the mid-1570s had seen the start of the great Catholic infiltration of England - committed priests sent under cover from the European seminaries, to remind English Catholics of the papal bull against Elizabeth, ‘the pretended Queen of England, the Servant of Wickedness’, and persuade them of where their loyalties should lie. (The exiled Cardinal William Allen heard that ‘the numbers of those who were daily reconciled to the Catholic church almost surpassed belief’.) Across the Channel, one of the least tractable problems of the 1570s and beyond - another that showed no sign at all of going away - was that of the Netherlands, where the northern Protestants under William of Orange had long been in rebellion against their Spanish Catholic overlords. The Spanish general Alva and his ‘reign of blood’ had battered but not broken the Dutch rebels. Elizabeth was for ever urging them to negotiate with the Spanish; but if they must fight, then religious solidarity and a regard for her own borders - the security of the Channel passage, with a vast Spanish army camped just over the waters! - forbade Elizabeth to let them fight alone. She was constantly being urged to give them open support, and money.

  Leicester’s was one of the most insistent voices in favour of intervention; as far back as 1567 the Spanish ambassador had reported he was ‘very sorry’ that the Spanish cause in the Netherlands was going so prosperously. (His own commitment to the cause of the Dutch Protestants would come to provoke his sharpest ever disagreement with his Queen.) He had an ally in the increasingly important figure of Francis Walsingham, whom at the end of 1573 Elizabeth had appointed as her principal secretary of state, and in the years ahead Walsingham would support Leicester whenever he promoted a more aggressively Protestant and militant policy in the privy council debates than that to which Elizabeth inclined. One of the Queen’s problems with Walsingham - to whom, though she respected him, she never really warmed - was that his vehement religious beliefs represented in her mind the unpalatable facts, silently urging her towards more active involvement in the Low Countries.

  Just to cap it all, the disaffected Alençon, always a Huguenot sympathizer, had himself become embroiled in the Netherlands. In 1574 the death of the French king Charles (probably from congenital syphilis) had placed the violently Catholic Anjou on the throne, and set Alençon more than ever at odds with his country and his family, wandering about Europe with all the irresponsible readiness to take up any convenient cause characteristic of stateless royalty.

  While Elizabeth had been at Norwich, that summer of 1578, news was brought to her as she toured the cathedral that Alençon had actually invaded the Spanish Netherlands and struck an alliance with the Protestant rebels, accepting the title of ‘Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries against Spanish Tyranny’. (And this just when she had spent a year repeatedly patching matters up between Philip and the Dutch Protestants; now, instead of Spain, she was faced with the hardly more welcome prospect of France controlling the Low Countries.) Her immediate reaction was to send a message of solidarity to the said tyrant, King Philip. Philip’s rights in the Netherlands were those of blood - his father Charles had been born there before inheriting, through his mother’s line, the more prestigious throne of Spain in addition - and the kinship of monarchy was more present to her imagination than the kinship of religion, especially a religion with which, in its more violent extremes, she actually felt little sympathy. But the reactivated possibility of a glittering marriage would turn Alençon’s thoughts another way.

  So another story
of greater weight had been running in tandem with Leicester’s; and indeed, the two juggle each other in a letter Leicester wrote to a court official then away in the Netherlands. ‘I perceive the matters there goeth not well, which I am right sorry for . . . touching the other matter at home here for Monsieur [Alençon], which you desire to understand of, for that many speeches are of it, I think none but God can let you know yet.

  ‘Only this I must say,’ he added, disconcerted if slightly unbelieving. ‘Outwardly there is some appearance of good liking . . .’ If Leicester ‘should speak according to former disposition’, he would hardly believe an actual marriage could take place, but on the other hand . . . It was worrying for all her councillors that they knew so little of what the Queen was really thinking; and perhaps for Leicester especially. After Elizabeth received the French envoys on progress, he wrote to Walsingham: ‘no man can tell what to say; as yet she has imparted with no man, at least not with me, nor for ought I can learn with any other’. This time (almost for the first time) he had been cut out of the loop; and it was poor consolation that no-one else fared any better. No wonder that, in the incident Wilson described, he had spoken to her angrily.

  By October, when Philip sent a new Spanish army to the Netherlands under the command of the great Duke of Parma, a secret correspondence between Elizabeth and France was well under way - secret in the sense that Elizabeth did not take anyone fully into her confidence. This fresh outbreak of the Queen’s marital plans was to divide her councillors, who had recently been living in comparative harmony. Cecil was theoretically for the match, albeit without any great conviction it would really happen; Leicester was most prominent among those who believed that Elizabeth’s response to the Netherlands crisis should, instead, be open aid, immediate and military. Already the year before there had been rumours he would himself shortly be sailing to the Netherlands at the head of an English army.

  If he had his secrets, so too did the Queen. At times it seemed to her councillors as if (with the French Guise family intriguing in Scotland, with Philip of Spain eyeing opportunities in Ireland), she no longer merely walked a tightrope, as she had often done before, but trod blindly towards her country’s doom. ‘The more I love her, the more fearful I am to see such dangerous ways taken,’ Leicester had written to Walsingham. ‘God of his mercy help all, and give us all here about her grace to discharge our duties; for never was there more need, nor never stood this crown in like peril. God must now uphold the Queen by miracle: ordinary helps are past cure.’

  But amid the militaristic preoccupations of her menfolk, Elizabeth herself was not prepared to see Alençon’s renewed interest in her as merely political; and in this insistence, perhaps her hurt over her growing distance from Leicester did come into play. So, perhaps, did her age; she may have felt this was her last chance, that she was letting love slip away. In the spring Alençon had written his devotion, and invited her to share the joke of how odd it was ‘that after two years of absolute silence he should wake up to her existence’. It was indeed odd, but when Walsingham said as much, and suggested that Alençon ‘entertaineth her at this present only to abuse her’, she lashed out in fury. Leicester wrote to Walsingham warningly: ‘Surely I suppose she is persuaded he hath more affection than your advertisement doth give her hope of ... I would have you, as much as you may, avoid the suspicion of her Majesty that you doubt Monsieur’s love to her too much.’

  Though his prime concern was probably to protect Walsingham from Elizabeth’s anger, it sounds, again, as though at this stage he could at least seem to regard the possibility of the match with equanimity. The Spanish ambassador reported that the King of France had, after all, sent Leicester a special message, promising that his ‘authority and position should not be injured in any way’, that he should be Alençon’s ‘guide and friend’. Perhaps, having married himself, Leicester felt a certain compunction about standing in Elizabeth’s way. Or perhaps, knowing the Queen so well, he simply doubted whether the project would ever come to fruition.

  But the match took a leap forward towards actuality as 1578 turned to 1579 and Jean (or Jehan) de Simier arrived in England. Alençon’s personal envoy, his close friend and Master of the Wardrobe, was (as Camden put it) ‘a most choice courtier, exquisitely skilled in love toys, pleasant conceits and court dalliances’. The ‘chief darling to Monsieur’, as Thomas Wilson had described Simier to Leicester, was just Elizabeth’s type - a polished man with a smudgy past,63 with whom she could flirt in safety. In February Gilbert Talbot was writing to his father that ‘Her Majesty continues to have very good usage of Monsieur Simier . . . and she is the best disposed and pleasanteth when she talketh with him.’

  Soon - and with Elizabeth, a nickname was always an important sign - Simier became her ‘monkey’. More formal gestures of amity were not lacking; in return for the 12,000 crowns’ worth of jewels Simier brought to distribute around the court, Elizabeth gave a ball, with a masque in which six ladies gave themselves to six lovers. The language of the letters she exchanged with Alençon was that of high romance: Alençon’s, so Elizabeth told him, should be carved in marble, rather than just written on parchment. As spring turned to summer, Leicester took fright - less perhaps at the perfervid prose of an absent Alençon than at the visibly charming presence of Simier. The monkey made a playful sally into Elizabeth’s bedroom to snatch a night-cap to send to his master. Elizabeth visited him in his bedroom, catching him clad in no more than his jerkin. Englishmen might (and did) chunter about filthy French ways of wooing, but in fact it was all looking a little like Leicester’s heyday.

  Leicester even claimed, says Camden, that Simier was using ‘amorous potions and unlawful arts’ to bring Elizabeth to this pitch. She for her part was delighted (after the events of the previous year) to seize the opportunity to snub her old favourite, when one of her ladies spoke out for him. ‘Dost thou think me so unlike myself and unmindful of my royal majesty that I would prefer my servant whom I myself have raised, before the greatest prince in Christendom, in the honour of a husband?’ She seemed prepared even to consider, albeit dubiously, granting Alençon a concession she had denied to every former suitor: the right to practise Catholicism privately. But Simier’s demands that his master should be crowned king (‘a matter that greatly toucheth our regality’, Elizabeth said) and an income of £60,000 a year went a step too far; the more so since they gave the Queen cause to think (she said several times over) that ‘the mark that is shot at is our fortune and not our person’.

  She had, she continued in this letter of spring 1579, always in the royal plural, ‘just cause to think ourselves in this action not so well dealt with as appertained to one of our place and quality, having not without great difficulty won in ourself a disposition to yield to the match’. All the same, it seemed to be the council, rather than the Queen, who were putting on the brakes, while Elizabeth, in any conflict, sided with Simier. (She had, she said of him, great reason to wish ‘that we had a subject so well able to serve us’!) He had ‘very good hope’ of the draft treaty he put to the council in March, and though Londoners were betting three to one against the marriage’s coming off, Leicester was not the only courtier who was laying in a stock of new clothes (velvets and silks as well as gold and silver tissue ‘or such-like pretty stuffs’, ordered from Davison in Flanders). He must have hoped it was only for Alençon’s promised visit, and not for Elizabeth’s wedding day.

  For it was Leicester, so Simier became convinced, who was his greatest enemy. He begged Elizabeth to protect her monkey ‘from the paw of the bear’. It was Leicester, he believed, who dissuaded Elizabeth from signing Alençon’s passport. There had been an incident a few weeks earlier when a shot was fired as Elizabeth, Leicester, Hatton and Simier were travelling in the royal barge down the Thames. Simier was assumed to be the target - but of whom? Of an ordinary Englishman - for the English were as hostile as ever to a match with France, the traditional enemy? Or of an assassin in the Earl of Leicester’s pay
? These were the thoughts, so the theory goes, that at the start of July led Simier to move against his adversary; to exploit what must by now have been a semi-open secret; to tell Elizabeth that Leicester was married.

  As Camden reported it, the Queen ‘intended to have [Leicester] committed to the Tower of London, which his enemies much desired. But the Earl of Sussex, though his greatest and deadliest adversary, dissuaded her. For he was of the opinion that no man was to be troubled with lawful marriage, which estate among all men hath ever been held in honour and esteem.’ A decade later, when Walter Ralegh secretly married Bess Throckmorton, Elizabeth did send them both to the Tower. But that case was a little different, since the young Bess was one of Elizabeth’s maids, and bound over into the Queen’s parental custody. (Ralegh had, in effect, stolen the Queen’s and the Throckmorton family’s property, while Lettice had the independence of the widowed lady.)

  Camden’s Tower story loses much of its point if we accept that Elizabeth had known even something of what was happening a year before, at the time when Hatton had voiced the ‘lawful marriage’ theory. But it is still possible that Elizabeth had not known quite the whole, and reacted accordingly. One tale runs that she ordered Leicester to keep at first to his rooms,64 and then to Wanstead. One slightly unreliable report (wrong in some other important details) describes how the Queen boxed Lettice’s ears when she came to court with a countess’s train of servants: ‘As but one sun lights the East, so I shall have but one queen in England.’ This may be exaggerated hearsay, but the anonymous writer may well have seen the Lettice he described, riding through Cheapside ‘drawn by four milk-white steeds with four footmen in black velvet jackets and silver bears on their backs and breasts, two knights and thirty gentlemen before her, and coaches of gentlewomen, pages and servants behind’: like the Queen herself, the writer suggested, or else some foreign princess. Colourful details apart, it was understood that the earl would in the end have to show his face at court again - but his countess was, indeed, banished, though Leicester would persuade even Cecil to intercede for her. (A few years later, Leicester would be sending Cecil effusive, almost grovelling, thanks for having dealt ‘so friendly and honourably with my poor wife. For truly my lord, in all reason she is hardly dealt with’) It was Lettice’s son, not her second husband, who would finally, twenty years later, win her a small measure of acceptance again - and that only with extreme difficulty.