Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  remember that God, who hath been the worker thereof and doth all things for the best, is not to be controlled. Besides, if we do duly look into the matter in true course of Christianity, we shall then see that the loss hath wrought so greater gain to the gentleman whom we now lack, as we have rather cause to rejoice than lament.

  Leicester’s letter to Hatton, thanking him for ‘your careful and most godly advice’, has on the surface of it the requisite resigned and religious tone. But underneath there is a more stormy story. ‘I must confess I have received many afflictions within these few years, but not a greater,’ he wrote, adding carefully, ‘next [after] her Majesty’s displeasure.’ Disconcertingly, he seems to be striking almost a bargain with fate (though not, he says punctiliously, with God). He hopes that ‘the sacrifice of this poor innocent might satisfy’ those who are offended, who have taken ‘long hard conceits’ of him; ‘if not, yet I know there is a blessing for such as suffer; and so is there for those that be merciful’. In what sounds like an implied rebuke to Elizabeth, he says that princes are never the best for mercy, ‘therefore men fly to the mighty God in times of distress for comfort’, even though they may have neglected Him when younger in order to ‘run the race of the world’. He had, after all, good reason to feel that everyone’s hand was against him at this time.

  For the summer and autumn of 1584 also saw the publication in Antwerp of the laboriously entitled work more snappily known as Leicester’s Commonwealth,70 that scurrilous publication that took every action in his life and imputed to it the worst possible motives - ‘the most malicious-written thing’, as Walsingham wrote to Leicester, ‘that ever was penned since the beginning of the world’. It would take far too long to detail its two hundred pages’ worth of accusations (and the chief of them have been dealt with already), but, in sum, he stood accused of treachery, lechery, murders in plenty. The murders of Amy Dudley and of Douglass’s and Lettice’s husbands, certainly: ‘His Lordship hath a special fortune, that when he desireth any woman’s favour, then what person so ever standeth in his way hath the luck to die quickly for the finishing of his desire’; but also the murders of Throckmorton (who had died at his house ‘after eating salads’), of the Earl of Sussex, and of several foreign dignitaries.

  Then there was ‘the intolerable license of Leicester’s carnality’, as evidenced in ‘the keeping of the mother with two or three of her daughters at once or successively’. There was the accusation that none of the Queen’s gentlewomen was safe from his lustful eye; and another that, conversely, he was now so worn out by his efforts that he had to buy pint bottles of an ‘Italian ointment’ in order ‘to move his flesh’ (and that he had ‘a broke belly on both sides of his bowels’).

  Of course, the real accusation, to which these were only the salacious trimmings, was that he ruled the Queen completely, that he had on all occasions prevented her marriage, that his ambition knew no bounds; that ‘his reign is so absolute . . . as nothing can pass but by his admission’. It was the old ‘evil counsellors’ argument, as Francis Bacon noted of a similar pamphlet directed at Cecil; a way ‘to cover undutiful invectives’ that might not so safely be aimed against the Queen herself.

  The Queen and council moved to suppress the book’s circulation in England; Philip Sidney wrote a spirited defence. But of course some copies were still passed around secretly. And it is possible that Elizabeth - for all her proclamation that ‘none but an incarnate devil himself’ could dream of believing such malicious slurs - also half resented the man who had been the unwitting instrument of involving her name in such ignominy.

  The publication has to be seen in context: Elizabeth herself, and Leicester on other occasions, had been and would be the victim of other such calumnies. They were a fact of political life. But this one was particularly extensive, and particularly damaging. Its slurs have haunted Leicester’s reputation through the centuries.71 Some of the mud stuck even with contemporaries. (Camden, writing within thirty years of Leicester’s death and from a broadly anti-Leicester stance, spoke of ‘defamatory libels’ launched against him, ‘which contained some slight untruths’, and mentions the suspicions held against him in the deaths of Throckmorton and Essex, even while he describes the evidence to the contrary; however, by his sheer lack of comment he tacitly acquits him of the murders of Lord Sheffield and of Amy Dudley.)

  The author of Leicester’s Commonwealth was of course anonymous, and various theories have been put forward as to his identity. It may have been to some degree a group effort, with English Catholics in France such as Lord Paget and Charles Arundel (a member of the Howard clan whom Leicester had persecuted for his Catholic sympathies) among the moving spirits. Both Cecil and Edward Stafford have also been mooted as contributors; but for a long time the most popular contender was the exiled Jesuit Robert Persons, and Jesuit missionaries were certainly instrumental in getting the book into the country. There were personal animosities involved, and the publication’s modern editor, D. C. Peck, has also drawn attention to its specific political goals, like the promotion of the Scottish claim to the throne. But surely you could also see this broadside as a perverse, back-handed tribute to Leicester’s importance as acknowledged leader of the aggressive puritan party. That was certainly the opinion of the Italian Protestant (and legal expert) Alberico Gentili, who wrote that Leicester’s praise lies not only in those who took his part, but in the very hostility of his Catholic enemies, with their ‘infamous howling against a good man and true’.

  Later that year, Leicester would call a two-day conference in which he attempted to mediate between Elizabeth’s bishops and the puritan ministers. But he cannot be said to have succeeded to any great degree. Indeed the conservative Whitgift, Elizabeth’s new Archbishop of Canterbury, blocked his moves in every way. Elizabeth’s difficult ‘second reign’ has been dated from this point in the middle 1580s; certainly a new generation of servants and favourites was waiting in the wings.

  The ever-changing parade of personalities at court no longer affected Leicester quite as it had done. He did take the warmest interest in the career of his golden nephew Philip Sidney - ‘my boy’ - including his perennial quarrels with the Earl of Oxford and his growing reputation as a writer. (Even when Philip, as a twelve-year-old, had been taken to see the Queen, it had been Leicester who, with the boy’s father away, had sent his own tailor scurrying around to make the child doublets of green taffeta and crimson velvet, bright trunk hose with their matching stockings, and six pairs of double-soled shoes.) But the appearance of the new star Walter Ralegh, with his own dark good looks and his Devon accent, his rough brand of charm and his big dreams, could not really affect his position. Ralegh, after all, was knighted only in 1584 and would not become Captain of the Guard for three years after that; and though he would by then be one of the chief ‘backbiters’ against Leicester, it was not the attack of an equal. (Indeed, when Ralegh first came to court at the start of the decade, he was one of the many who clung to Leicester for patronage.) Whatever Leicester’s present relationship with Elizabeth, they had done the damage themselves; and though Ralegh made himself felt as a thorn in the flesh of all the established courtiers, it pricked Leicester less deeply. It was Hatton who had to be warned by Heneage that ‘water’ (‘Walter’ Ralegh) had been ‘more welcome than were fit for so cold a season’; and then reassured by the Queen’s message that water and the creatures who belong to it were not so appealing to her as some thought, ‘her food having been ever more of flesh than of fish’, and that (Heneage reassured Hatton) the Queen swore she ‘would rather see [Ralegh] hanged than equal him with you’. But Hatton’s own letters to Elizabeth were becoming less lover-like than they had been; more practical, more prone to quarrel and apology.

  All the same, it was 1584 when Robert Cecil, William Cecil’s son, took his Westminster seat; the first step in what would be a towering career. Perhaps it was to counter these new influences that Leicester, also in 1584, first brought his stepson Robert Devere
ux, the young Earl of Essex, to court. Eighteen years old, with auburn hair like his mother’s and eyes dark like Leicester’s own, he was ardent and athletic, his egotism and ambition hardly apparent, yet, under the veil of his undoubted brilliance and his youthful charm. ‘Your son,’ he signed himself in his letters to Leicester, ‘most ready to do you service’; though nothing more fundamental than step-parenthood can be read into his words, by the language of the sixteenth century.72

  It was only a short space of time before (with Leicester himself occupied elsewhere) Essex became such a favourite with Elizabeth that he often sat up with the Queen in her rooms over music or cards ‘until the birds sing in the morning’; and it is worth stepping out of time and sequence again to look at Essex’s future attitudes, because of what the comparison - the contrast - says about Robert Dudley.

  Yes, both Roberts made themselves champions of the Protestant cause. Yes, they both believed that England’s cause should be aggressively promoted abroad. Yes, they both (for Essex entered into negotiations with James of Scotland, far more autonomously than Leicester had done) wanted a hand in shaping the future of their country. But if you make a direct comparison between their letters, between their very different comportments under rebuke, the difference shows up clearly.

  Perhaps Leicester might in the end have been brought to write, as Essex did: ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to these principles.’ But the quarrel that had provoked this letter had seen Elizabeth box Essex’s ears at the privy council table - and seen Essex, momentarily, reach for his sword. It is impossible to imagine Leicester committing such lèse-majesté. Essex said once, in anger, that ‘The Queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcass.’ Leicester could never have said that, and not only because of his ability to ‘put his passions in his pocket’. His affection would have forbidden it.

  It was estimated that Elizabeth had four favourites of the first rank: Leicester and Hatton, Ralegh and Essex. (The Cecils, father and son, were in a different category.) Perhaps it was the loss of Leicester’s undivided allegiance that prompted Elizabeth to turn to other men. On the other hand, there was something almost vampiric in the way Elizabeth moved on to younger ‘lovers’.

  Another picture hanging at Penshurst, dated just four years later than the supposed date of the ‘Volta’ tableau, shows Leicester portly and plump of face, a man whose square beard, now, is nearly white and bushy. Only the lambent, wary eyes could even begin to be recognizable as belonging to the dashing earl of earlier days. (Ambrose, whose portrait hangs alongside Robert’s, seems with his trim, grizzled crop and quirking eyebrows to have aged more gracefully.) A foreigner who saw Leicester, and Hatton, and all the Queen’s old circle at this time described them as ‘charming old gentlemen’; and, as one of their contemporaries noted, forty heralded ‘the first part of the old man’s age’. No, certainly Leicester was no longer the figure he once had been: the dancer, the jouster, the darling of the Queen’s eye; no longer the slim, youthful (and blond!) figure who, in the ‘Volta’ tableau, twirls ‘Elizabeth’ aloft so confidently. Perhaps that is why she had let him get away.

  17

  ‘Her Majesty Will make trial of me’ 1585-1588

  IN THE DARK TIME AFTER LITTLE DENBIGH’S DEATH, ROBERT DUDLEY had talked of retiring - told Cecil he did ‘more desire my liberty, with her Majesty’s favour, than any office in England’. But his public career was not yet over. It was both ironic and significant that his moment of greatest official responsibility - and what should have been the fulfilment of his dream - should come so close to the end of his life, at a time when he was perhaps beginning to feel himself unfit for heavy duties. For years he had been pressing for closer involvement in the Netherlands. Almost a decade ago, he had already been holding himself in readiness to lead an English army to the aid of his co-religionists. When in autumn 1585 Elizabeth was finally persuaded she had to send a force to help the Dutch Protestants, Leicester was the obvious, the only, choice to command the expedition. But he was in the position of the understudy in a long-running play finally called in front of the footlights; just when hope deferred, after making the heart sick, has worked its own cure and bred a kind of resignation.

  There is no reason to doubt he seized the chance. When Elizabeth’s summons back to court reached him he was at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, and wrote at once that he wished he had a hundred thousand lives to spend in her service (although that service might be delayed a little: he could not yet pull his boot on after a bad fall from his horse). Camden later wrote that he went ‘out of an itching desire of rule and glory’, but the cause, to one of his belief, was a holy war. Spain used the seventeen Netherlands provinces as a milch cow for the whole Spanish empire; but Spanish rule was about more than cold politics and economic calculation. In this police state, where each man was required to inform on his neighbours, stories spread of religious persecution on an appalling scale. Fifty thousand Netherlanders died (in the Prince of Orange’s admittedly partial estimate) during the first seven years alone of Philip’s rule. The numbers Mary Tudor had had killed were tiny by comparison - but this must have looked like a chance to reverse the Marian story. Moreover, Leicester must have hoped at long last to follow in his father’s military footsteps, and set an unequivocally glorious seal on what was hitherto a rather amorphous and unpopular career.

  But the fact was that he had not seen active service since his twenties (when, ironically, he had been fighting for the Spanish). Ever since, it was Ambrose who had been the warrior in the Dudley family; now it was possibly Ambrose’s health - that old leg injury, which had never completely healed - that prevented him taking part in the new campaign. Island England had not bred commanders for a land army in quite the way it had for its navy; and there could be no thought that an army might be commanded by anyone but a senior member of the nobility, which reduced a poor field considerably. It was Leicester’s bad luck that he would be facing the Duke of Parma; not another gentleman amateur but a general of wide experience, who combined noble blood with the abilities that might have made him a military genius in any century.

  An inexorable pressure of events had brought Elizabeth’s government to this point; had made war seem inevitable even to a moderate like Cecil. The appearance of Spanish troops in Ireland at the turn of the decade had been followed by Spain’s annexation of Portugal, with Portugal’s foreign territories, and its sea-going fleet; the voluntary return of the southern provinces of the Low Countries to Spain’s rule, further isolating the rebellious north; and the assassination of William of Orange. Key, perhaps, had been Spain’s alliance with France, raising the unacceptable spectre of a Europe dominated by the Habsburgs as far as the Channel coast.

  Though the privy council’s discussions were long and hard, Cecil reluctantly concluded that it was better to act now, to prevent Philip reaching the ‘full height of his designs and conquests’, rather than wait to suffer the full brunt of his ‘insatiable malice’. Now he too was ‘greatly discouraged’ by the Queen’s ‘lack of resolutions’, as he wrote to Leicester. But when Spain seized English vessels lying in Spanish harbours (while Antwerp, besieged and starving, finally fell that August), the Queen was left with no choice but to act. The treaty between England and the rebellious Netherlands, the States General, was concluded at Nonsuch, that lovely fantasy palace of stucco, in August 1585 - albeit not without further debate and acrimony.

  This is no place to try to analyse the Netherlands campaign, or Leicester’s performance in it. His failure - for so it has always been called - was perhaps inevitable. His personal skills and Parma’s apart, he was up against the staggering Spanish war machine, equipped himself with only a ludicrously underfunded army, and under the authority of a queen never really committed to the war. Historians have regretted that the war was not better fought; that it was fought at all; or that it had not been fought a good d
ecade earlier, when William of Orange was himself in the field against a less well-prepared Spain. But England, too, was in one way better equipped in the second half of the 1580s than it had been in the early 1570s. Its naval defences were far better. If England’s open intervention in the Netherlands can be seen as one of the triggers for the launch of the Spanish Armada, then in the end the English team, Leicester among them, did not do so badly. Their worst fears, after all, never came to pass: England never became a Spanish-speaking, Catholic colony.

  Leicester’s commitment (like his personal courage, when it came to it) cannot be doubted. It was, he said, ‘God’s cause and her Majesty’s’. His qualms (as he wrote to Walsingham at the beginning of September) were that the Queen had not ‘a full persuasion indeed that the cause was as it was’. How well he knew her. By contrast, Leicester himself raised £25,000 (more than £4 million today) by sale and mortgage of his own land to fit himself out for the expedition. Mortgaging the lordship of Denbigh raised £15,000 from a group of London merchants; and he borrowed £13,000 from the Queen to pay for another troop of horse. He sent out some two hundred letters to the gentry of his affinity - ‘gentlemen of good likings and callings in their countries, though my servants’ - to rally a thousand heavy cavalry. This should be remembered when he is blamed for raising his own salary as Lieutenant-General from £6 to £10 13s a day. (He also raised the salaries of his men, to the level of campaigners in the Irish wars.)73 He was doing no more than might be expected of a man of his rank, since to raise their own troops in time of war was a moral obligation of the nobility. And, of course, much of what he mortgaged would originally have been given to him by Elizabeth. But still, it shows that he cannot be viewed entirely as a parasite.