His household now comprised something like a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, as opposed to the thirty to fifty he had had at the start of Elizabeth’s reign. When not on the road, or following the court, Leicester joined his wife, dividing his time between Wanstead and Leicester House (where rooms were set aside for his stepchildren’s use), and many of his servants moved with him. One of the most often recorded costs was boat hire for transport along the Thames: 6s for Leicester’s servant to transport his clothes from Oatlands to London; 10s to the Queen’s watermen for taking Leicester home from Arundel House. Everything went by water where possible, from Leicester’s yeomen of the wardrobe and his groom of the chamber, travelling from Leicester House to the court at Greenwich, to a brace of does, and a servant headed the other way carrying ‘a short gown furred with sables to show the skinner’.
Travel further, by land - to Oxford, in this instance - meant paying for the dinners of dozens of retainers on the journey. Six of Leicester’s servants, sent on as an advance guard, had to be bought dinner at Henley; Mr Clinton and Mr Devereux had to have their ‘horsemeate’ paid when they came to see Leicester at Woodstock; and ‘Paid more the same day for the charges of your lordship’s servants being xxx in number for Saturday night and Sunday breakfast at Henley as appeareth by a bill.’ Then as now, travel threw up a myriad odd expenses. There is even a payment to the man who washed Leicester’s linen along the way.
Clothing himself and his retinue in appropriate style absorbed a good deal of money. Four pairs of ‘dry perfumed gloves’ at 3s 4d the pair; 24s for two pairs of large gloves, lined, perfumed, and trimmed with black silk and gold. There were stomachers, and scarlet to line them; girdles and ‘hangers’ trimmed with gold lace to hold short swords. Black silk nightcaps at 6s the piece were a present for the Earl of Shrewsbury. Shortly before Christmas time, £22 bought two doublets for Lettice. The mentions of Lettice are less frequent than one might at first expect: one occasion when Roger Gillions was paid for ‘carrying my lady from Leicester House to Putney and back again’; a mention of shirts that Lettice bought for Leicester; one item of money delivered to her when she was clearly losing at play. But the bulk of Lettice’s personal expenses, and the salaries of the women who served in her chamber, seem to have been paid out of her own income as the Earl of Essex’s widow.
Robert clearly attended to his family. There is a present of £20 to Lettice’s daughter, and his stepdaughter, Dorothy; £30 went to the schoolmaster who taught ‘Mr Robert Dudley’, while on the same visit to see young Robert in his schoolroom in Oxfordshire, Leicester gave the boy himself a 10s tip. (The young Robert probably spent most of his time in Sussex, however; and indeed another bill records his transport from there.) On another occasion the boy is getting a hat; on yet another a gilt rapier and dagger with a velvet scabbard. Other donations are more curious. Lady Stafford - the former Douglass Sheffield, or her mother-in-law? - was given £5. Another equally puzzling item records payment for transport of ‘the bathing tube [tub?]’; another is to the baker, for ‘horse bread’.
A new coach; dozens of towels. Reams of paper; a looking glass. Wine from abroad; three bottles of Warwickshire water. Lots of payments to ‘your lordship’s spaniel keeper’, who seems to have been paid per day, per dog. To the lark catcher, 2s 6d; to Robert the trumpeter, £40 - but he did have to buy a new trumpet out of that. And there is a whole handful of items, all together, about the purchase of cases of pistols, and dozens of crossbow arrows - sign of the edgy times, maybe.
Messengers got money, like the man who brought letters from Sir Francis Drake (in whose projected West Indies voyage Leicester was to be an investor; and who features occasionally as a fellow card player). More money to the men who held torches to light the earl from ‘the Bishop of Canterbury’s’, or the Scottish ambassador’s, and home to Leicester House again. Servants attached to noble friends, and to Leicester’s own client gentry, had also to be rewarded. The keeper of a royal park might get several shillings just for opening a gate. Six shillings and eightpence went to Hatton’s coachman for carrying Leicester from Syon to Colbrook; 5s ‘to the cooks of the Star Chamber when your lordship passed through the kitchen there’; more than £5 to the Queen’s officers, when she dined with him; 5s to his own gentleman usher’s man ‘for presenting a dozen and a half of partridges to your lordship’; 2s 6d to Sir Horatio Palavicino’s man for presenting Leicester with dried peaches; 20s when he made the same gift to the Queen. (Leicester supervised the sending of presents of horses, in the Queen’s name, and hounds, and a bow, to King James in Scotland, whom the English were trying to woo.) But at least he also got many gifts himself, even if there were always this indirect payment to be made.
Venison was a favourite gift to send him. Fat coneys, ‘two swans and a lamprey pie’, even ‘two fat wethers’, or a boar, or a peacock. The French ambassador offered wine and cheese. He got dogs, and hawks, and horses (a ‘pyde nag’); and glasses - still a luxury. Occasionally it was a book; though Leicester himself was prepared to pay out good money for a book of martyrs and one of Psalms, and Calvin’s Sermons on Job: standard reading for the ardent Protestant.
By and large, the disbursement book records the story of a personal life. It is the letters of the period that reflect the political one, and they still show Leicester and his queen as bound together, willy nilly - Leicester instrumental in promoting new anti-Catholic measures; sending congratulations on the putting down of a minor outbreak of disorder; warning Heneage that the Queen still held him out of favour and the time for an approach was not yet ripe - show, in other words, business as usual among the court’s inner circle. And they show, more specifically, Leicester concerned still for the Queen’s business and the Queen’s image ... It was in this period that he wrote the letter that most clearly shows him as consciously promoting that image, building Elizabeth’s support base; acting in effect as campaign manager in the constant popularity parade that was Elizabeth’s monarchy.
Elizabeth was on progress, and Leicester was writing from the house of one ‘hearty noble couple’, Lord and Lady Norris, at whose home she had been expected, but where she had failed to appear. Leicester had had, he writes to Hatton, to pretend that they two had been the chief ‘dissuaders’ - that they were responsible for the disappointment, having told Elizabeth that the weather had made the roads too bad. Lady Norris had taken the excuse poorly: ‘Trust me, if it had not been so late, I think I should have sought me another lodging, my welcome awhile was so ill.’ He had ‘more than half’ won the irate hostess over - especially by offering the Norrises his own rooms at Elizabeth’s next port of call - but her Majesty herself ‘must help somewhat’ in placating Lady Norris, ‘or else we have more than half lost this lady’. In another incident at this time, a sailor arrested in the Queen’s presence was, by Elizabeth’s order, carried to Leicester’s chamber. The man was accused of being part of a Spanish plot, in what looks rather like a darker kind of PR exercise.
Clearly, Robert was still travelling the country on the Queen’s business. (Horses and hounds feature largely in the disbursement book.) No doubt he was still an active man: he went with the court to the races; drew out 9s ‘to put in your lordship’s pocket’ when he went on a fishing trip. But he was getting older, and less fit. The book shows a payment of £30 to ‘Ezard your lordship’s bonesetter’, and six pairs of ‘spactakells’ at 12d the pair. There is repeated mention (though paid only at 10s) of ‘one that did cut your lordship’s corns’. In one of his bouts of what was probably a malarial fever, Leicester wrote of himself to the Queen as ‘your old patient, that has always from [your] holy hand been relieved’. (‘I have no more to offer again but that which is already my bond and duty: the body and life, to be as ready to yield sacrifice for your service, as it has from you received all good things . . .’)
As Leicester got older, he was getting more difficult. John Aylmer wrote of some ‘unhappy paroxysm’ that had rocked their friendship. He wished only, he
wrote, that he could ‘appeal from this Lord of Leicester’, whom something has ‘incensed with displeasure’, ‘unto mine old Lord of Leicester, who in his virtue of mildness and of softness . . . hath carried away the praise from all men’. A Catholic divine who had fled the country in 1582 wrote to Sussex that he had done so through extreme fear of Leicester’s ‘cruelty’. Indeed, Leicester could now be less tolerant of the foibles even of his queen. In July 1583 Leicester was ‘in great disgrace about his marriage’, having dared to refer to it more openly than before, wearied perhaps by Elizabeth’s almost hysterical insistence on her wilful blindness. He was believed, too, to have been indulging in a spot of dynastic scheming - one of the offences Elizabeth found it hardest to forgive.
Leicester had proposed to Bess of Hardwick a match between his son Lord Denbigh and Bess’s royal granddaughter Arbella Stuart. Such an alliance could (if Arbella ever inherited the crown) have made him the power behind England’s throne. If that failed, it was rumoured Leicester hoped to marry his stepdaughter - Lettice’s younger daughter Dorothy - to James of Scotland, though Dorothy foiled any such scheme when she made a runaway match with adventurer Thomas Perrot. Elizabeth was inclined to blame Dorothy’s whole family both for the mésalliance with Perrot and for the ambition of an alliance with Scottish royalty; Lettice was a ‘she-wolf’, and Dorothy the wolf’s cub. When Leicester invited the French ambassador, Mauvissière, to dine with himself and his wife, he lamented that he had lost the Queen’s favour. (Mauvissière wrote that Lettice had ‘much influence’ over Leicester, and noticed that Leicester seemed ‘much attached’ to his wife; whom, however, he introduced ‘only to those to whom he wishes to show a particular mark of attention’. One wonders how the ambitious Lettice relished the retirement that implied.) Yet by the end of the summer it was observed once more that Leicester had ‘grown lately in great favour with the Queen’s Majesty, such as this ten years he was not like to outward show’. Still, always, he bounced back. Earlier in the summer of 1583, Leicester’s old enemy Sussex had died, warning from his deathbed: ‘beware of the gypsy [Leicester]; for he will be too hard for you all. You know not the beast as well as I do.’
A letter Leicester wrote to Elizabeth and dated September speaks of his prayers ‘that God will long, safely, healthfully, and most happily preserve you here among us, and as He hath begun, so to continue in discovering and overthrowing all unloyal hearts towards you’. As so often, no year is given, but the letter would fit with the events of 1583. By September the Queen’s inner circle would have been aware of what has become known as the Throckmorton conspiracy. One Francis Throckmorton - Catholic nephew to the dead Sir Nicholas - had been paying secret visits to the French embassy. Through the spring and summer of 1583, he had been carefully watched, and the mischief was clear. ‘This is the goodness of God, my sweet lady, that hath thus saved you against so many devils,’ wrote Leicester ecstatically.
You may see what it is to cleave unto Him; He rewardeth beyond all deserts, and so is it daily seen how He payeth those that be dissemblers with Him. Who ever, of any Prince, stood so nakedly assisted of worldly help as Your Majesty has done these many years? Who has had more enemies in show, and yet whoever received less harm?
The long letter breathes sincere belief, as well as the consciousness of a great danger passed. True, Robert’s letters, by the standards of the age, were never flowery. But this was very far from the usual vein of courtly flattery. By the end of the month, after all, both he and Elizabeth had turned fifty.
When Throckmorton was finally arrested in November and racked, he revealed that it was predominantly the Spanish king whose ‘Enterprise of England’ had planned to set Mary on the English throne - but that the four separate invasion forces would also have been backed by the Pope, Mary’s Guise family in France, and the Jesuits. This was the nightmare foreshadowed in Ridolfi’s schemes and now almost come true at last - the grand, united Catholic conspiracy. Once again, to her councillors’ despair, Elizabeth baulked at bringing Mary to trial, despite the damning evidence of several cipher letters, but the Scots queen’s frustration at the foiling of her plans found vent in the famous ‘scandal letter’ - a missive supposedly from Mary herself discovered among Cecil’s papers and presumed never to have been delivered by him in its full enormity.
Mary was writing to Elizabeth nominally to clear herself of the charge that she had become involved with her gaoler, the Earl of Shrewsbury - but she also vented a stream of spiteful gossip that, she said, had been passed on to her by the earl’s wife, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. Bess (wrote Mary) had said that one to whom Elizabeth
had made a promise of marriage before a lady of your chamber, had made love to you an infinite number of times with all the license and intimacy which can be used between man and wife. But that undoubtedly you were not like other women . . . and you would never lose your liberty to make love and always have your pleasure with new lovers.
(She also accused Elizabeth of sleeping with Simier as well as Alençon, and of pursuing Hatton with her attentions until he was forced to leave court to protect his modesty.) Mary must have been almost the only highly placed personage still to see Elizabeth and Robert as lovers in the physical sense. But their relationship was still a target for scandal that was meant to be spread wider afield, and aimed at an audience less discriminating. As 1584 wore on, that would be proved in the most horrible way.
It was indeed an annus horribilis. On 10 June Alençon died, and Elizabeth wrote to Catherine de Medici that his mother’s grief ‘cannot be greater than my own . . . I find no consolation except death, which I hope will soon reunite us. Madame, if you were able to see the image of my heart, you would see the portrait of a body without a soul.’ Next came the assassination (by handgun; a new menace) of William of Orange by a Catholic fanatic presumed to be in Spain’s pay. One result - as of any Catholic activity - could only be tighter security around the Queen of Scots. But the threat to Elizabeth was very real, as witness the assassination attempt made by a Welsh MP named Parry. One of the expenses in Leicester’s disbursement book was for a ‘standing’ at Parry’s execution.
Leicester was (Camden says) a prime mover behind the Bond of Association by which the loyal gentlemen of Elizabeth’s realm vowed to band together and avenge her death, if necessary. It was in many ways a dubious document - essentially a charter for vigilante action, since the document’s first form, before the Queen’s own amendments, swore vengeance not only against Elizabeth’s putative assassin but against the person they had hoped to put on the throne (and a document, moreover, which tied its signatories for eternity, since its terms spelt out that to renege on it was to make oneself the enemy). But in the climate of the times it must have seemed the only defence against a situation where anyone who wanted the throne could be placed there by a casual assassin, not officially connected to them in any way.
But these things were as nothing compared to the body blow that struck Leicester in July: the dangerous sickness of the ‘noble Impe’, the adored young Denbigh. Leicester was with the court at Nonsuch when the news of Denbigh’s condition came; he rushed straight to Wanstead and Lettice’s side, without stopping to take formal leave of the Queen.
We do not know why the child died, nor whether there was any warning illness: the only hint is the unreliable Leicester’s Commonwealth comment that he suffered from ‘the falling-sickness [epilepsy], in his infancy’. It has been suggested that the tiny suit of armour rumoured to have been made for him seems to have one leg slightly shorter than the other: key to some underlying malady? But in an age of such high infant mortality no-one felt it necessary to spell out the details.
Robert and his wife had both suffered a great personal loss. Leicester seems to have been fond of children in general (William of Orange’s wife, when he escorted Alençon to the Netherlands, wrote of how kind he had been to her little daughter), and this longed-for son had been cosseted with all the magnificence of crimson velvet
cradles, a portrait to display his naked form and a little chair decked out in green and carnation tinsel cloth. The inscription on his tomb wrote that he was a child ‘of great parentage but far greater hope and towardness’. But now, since Lettice was in her mid-forties, and he himself in poor health, Leicester must have known he had probably lost the last chance of a dynasty. He wrote to Shrewsbury that the loss of his young son was indeed great, ‘for that I have no more and more unlike to have, my growing now old’. The surviving pages of the disbursement book do not cover the period of Denbigh’s death itself. But, with aching frequency, they record Leicester’s gifts to the nurses and midwives of other people’s babies.
Hatton wrote to Leicester:
What God hath given you, that hath He chosen and taken to Himself, whereat I hope you will not grudge . . . if the love of a child be dear, which is now taken from you, the love of God is ten thousand times more dear, which you can never lack or lose. Of men’s hearts you enjoy more than millions, which, on my soul, do love you no less than children or brethren. Leave sorrow, therefore, my good Lord, and be glad with us, which much rejoice in you.
He had told Elizabeth the reason for Leicester’s sudden departure, ‘whereof I assure your Lordship I find her very sorry, and wisheth your comfort, even from the bottom of her heart’. She would write herself, ‘and therefore she held no longer speech with me of the matter’. That letter has not survived, sadly.69 But from the letters she wrote under other similar circumstances, we might guess that she would have taken the same tone of religious forbearance. Three years later, on the death of his adult son, she wrote to Shrewsbury:
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