Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  The trouble was that his Netherlands wars had cost a lot of money - too much of it frittered away - that England (especially with its once-lucrative cloth trade through the Netherlands in tatters) could ill afford. A cash-in-hand national balance of £270,000 just before Leicester first sailed had dwindled, by the eve of the Armada, to a mere £3,000. So now the ships put on war footing early in the spring were decommissioned again before the summer, and the sailors sent ashore to live at their own expense, not that of the government. (Some of the naval leaders would wind up feeding their starving sailors themselves, just as Leicester himself had done for his army in the Netherlands.)

  Predictably, Leicester bickered with his experienced deputy, Sir John Norris. It was precisely the difficult relationship they had had in the Low Countries. As July ended (with the Armada and the English fleet engaging inconclusively off the Isle of Wight) there was still no camp at Tilbury. Leicester protested that even the men from Essex, ordered to report on Monday, had still not arrived by Thursday. ‘If it be five days to gather the very countrymen, what will it be, and must be to look for those who are forty, fifty and sixty miles off?’ He had to provide for those who did turn up; when the four thousand men from Essex did arrive, ‘there was neither a barrel of beer nor a loaf of bread for them’. The victuallers for whom he had been appealing by town criers in every market square had not yet appeared - nor, for that matter, had the official commission that would give him his authority. The boom that was to close the river broke; the bridge of boats to allow the army to cross the river if necessary was not ready . . . and yet, even hungry men ‘said they would abide more hunger than that to serve her Majesty and the country’.

  Nevertheless, as flustered county officers were set dragging men from the ungathered harvest to muster at armed camps through England’s southern counties, Leicester wound up with perhaps something between 12,000 and 17,000 men at Tilbury, besides the 6,000 at Sandwich who also fell under his command. By August he could boast that his men appeared ‘soldiers rather of a year’s experience than of a month’s camping’. But then again, by August - as we now know - the danger was past. As so often, his real achievement was an oddly anomalous one, for which he himself has had little credit down the years, though it might cast him as one of the spin doctors of history. It was, of course, the great, the iconic publicity coup of Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury.

  As the Armada drew close, towards the end of July, Elizabeth’s nerve storms had given way to calm. She spoke brave words to Leicester, who ‘spared not to blaze them abroad as a comfort to all’. A lack of personal courage was never her problem, any more than it was his. In that she was a woman, she had said in a prayer once, she was inevitably ‘weak, timid, and delicate’ - but in that she was queen, God had caused her to be ‘vigorous, brave, and strong’. Now, at Leicester’s camp down on the Thames shore, her councillors, so the story goes, had at least persuaded her to wear a breastplate, though in Elizabeth’s hands, the basic armour had become a piece of graven burnished fantasy.

  She had set out from London on 8 August accompanied by her yeomen and gentlemen of the household. Careless of her personal safety Elizabeth might seem to be, but she was not, at this moment when she held the reins of history, so crazy as quite to ignore security. But her guards had been impotent to help her through the risky passage out of London, when unseasonable rains had raised the tide rush through the arches of London Bridge; and now, once her barge had successfully shot the rapids, and borne her downriver to the Essex marshlands, she put them away. Elizabeth disembarked at Tilbury fort (that bare gunpowder store, set up by her father Henry). There she ordered the men of her household to line up there on the shore and - in one of those gestures too risky to be altogether premeditated - advanced almost alone, with just four men and two boys, to meet her army.

  In the famous image the Earl of Ormonde walked in front of her, carrying the sword of state. He was followed by two pages dressed in white velvet; one carrying her helmet on a cushion, the other leading her white horse. At the rear of the small procession walked Sir John Norris - but on either side of Elizabeth rode her Lieutenant General and her new Master of Horse: the Earls of Leicester and of Essex. Her old and her new favourites, you might say.

  For almost thirty years Leicester had supported her, stood in for her, whenever she was required to display the masculine aspect of monarchy. And he was beside her now, as she rode towards the small hill where the army was encamped, above the stagnant pools of the waterside. How could he be anywhere else, at what both had every reason to believe was a moment of crisis in their country’s history?

  Elizabeth lay that night at a house in the vicinity, and returned the next day for a formal review of the army.

  The speech Elizabeth gave that day to the troops that Leicester had, after all, so hastily assembled lives in posterity. It was always meant to have a resonance far beyond those muddy fields at Tilbury.

  My loving people, I have been persuaded by some that are careful of my safety to take heed how I committed myself to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I tell you that I would not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people . . . Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honor and my blood even in the dust.

  Her words were written down by Lionel Sharp, a chaplain in the Earl of Leicester’s service, who described Elizabeth riding through her squadrons like ‘an armed Pallas’, and who was, he says, commanded to read her ‘excellent oration’ to all the troops all over again on the next day. Reports of the scene, and of Elizabeth’s stirring battle cry, were printed up and sent skimming through Europe within a week. Leicester had always intended that this scene should play widely.

  Now for your person, being the most sacred and dainty thing we have in this world to care for, a man must tremble when he thinks of it; specially finding your Majesty to have that princely courage, to transport yourself to the utmost confines of the realm to meet your enemies and defend your people. I cannot, most dear Queen, consent to that,

  he had written, urging her, instead of taking up position on the south coast, to make the brief trip to see the troops at Tilbury. ‘You shall comfort not only these thousands, but many more that shall hear of it. And thus far, and no further, can I consent to venture your person.’

  It was (with the hindsight of some modern historians) an unreal and unnecessary heroism. ‘God’s wind’ had already done its work and the Spanish fleet had been scattered. The pursuing English ships cleared Margate and Harwich as Elizabeth entered her barge in London. But the sneer is too easy. At the time, no-one yet knew that the Spanish fleet would be unable to regroup - and Spain had always planned a dual assault. While the Armada was to smash England’s navy, transport vessels were to bring over from duty in the Netherlands the huge, waiting land army. As Elizabeth spoke at Tilbury, that army still waited, threateningly. The Duke of Parma had not yet finally decided that invasion without sea support was an impossibility. His first responsibility, after all, was to continue to hold the Netherlands for Spain, against that resistance the English had fostered so painfully.

  The communications of the sixteenth century, moreover, guaranteed that word of England’s salvation came only slowly. Indeed, as Elizabeth and her captains sat at dinner on 9 August, a false report had come to them that the Spanish army had embarked the day before, ‘with 50 thousand men foot and 6000 horse’. The story was not disproved by the time one of Leicester’s household officers put pen to paper on Sunday, adding that he himself was staying at the camp ‘to see the end of so unhappy a matter’. An even more optimistic report reached Paris, where the Spanish diplomat Don Bernadino de Mendoza (expelled from England a few years before) took his sword in his hand and rushed into Notre Dame shouting ‘Victory! Victory!’ Others heard that England had been ‘subdued, the Queen taken and s
ent prisoner and sent over the Alps to Rome, where, barefoot, she should make her humble reconciliation’. No wonder people in England itself needed a morale boost, a propaganda victory, after the years of painful uncertainty, years of waiting for the blow to fall.

  The contemporary chroniclers on whose reports we depend recorded the gold-chased truncheon Elizabeth held in her right hand, and her stately ‘King-like’ pace.77 One wrote of a coach decked with emeralds and rubies. To the balladeer Thomas Deloney she was ‘attired like angel bright’. It is only later chroniclers who mention a white dress and a helmet with white plumes - but then Elizabeth usually wore black and white, the colours of perpetual virginity, and this time she would choose shining white; for impact and visibility, and to cast a flattering light on a 55-year-old’s careworn face. (As for the armour, again, no-one at the time mentioned that piece of cross-dressing - but many years earlier, an ambassador had reported Elizabeth even as practising riding war horses to lead a charge against Spain; quite like a Boudicca of latter day.) No-one mentioned the clouds of stinging insects in which Tilbury abounds, either; or the absence of any money to pay Elizabeth’s troops; or Leicester’s complaint that he had had to be ‘cook, caterer and huntsman’ to the whole company.

  It seemed like just another triumph of publicity - great, but of the kind Elizabeth and Leicester together had so often pulled off before. No-one, except the Queen herself, understood her image better than he.

  ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,’ she had continued, as Leicester looked on approvingly,

  but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too - and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. To the which rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will venter my royal blood; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field . . . In the meantime, my lieutenant general shall be my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject.

  There is no reason to suppose either of them troubled with foreknowledge that their long association was drawing to a close; that it was Leicester’s body which would prove all too ‘weak and feeble’, and that very shortly.

  It took weeks, after Tilbury, for sure news to filter through that the Spanish had lost two-thirds of their men and forty-four ships, to the English one ship and a hundred men. In the middle of August Leicester was writing optimistically to Shrewsbury that he trusted the Spaniards ‘be too much daunted to follow their pretended enterprise’; that God - he said, foreshadowing the words Shakespeare gave to Henry V - ‘hath also fought mightily for her Majesty’; and that, should invasion still come, Elizabeth’s visit ‘hath so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects, as I think the weakest person amongst them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dares land in England’. It was 17 August before Leicester had word that the camp at Tilbury was to be disbanded (and in September, Mendoza in France was still writing optimistic despatches, believing the Armada could re-form). But then at least Leicester had the pleasure of returning to London like - as spectators remarked - a king.

  His is not one of the names associated with England’s triumph in popular history. That credit (rather forgetting the part played by wind and weather) has gone to sailors like Francis Drake - himself once Leicester’s protégé. But the Queen, at least, felt he had played a major part in the events of that summer - unless, again, she was simply feeling guilty. In the weeks following the Armada’s defeat, as she wrote to James about the failure of ‘this tyrannical, proud and brainsick attempt’, as she triumphed that ‘[the Spanish king] hath procured my greatest glory that meant my sorest wrack’, Camden says she was also having papers drawn up to make Leicester ‘Lieutenant Governor’ of the country. She was, he says, dissuaded only by Hatton and Cecil from placing so much power in one man’s hands, and setting up what was in effect a vice-regency. (They clearly saw it as a danger. But one wonders whether, alternatively, Elizabeth were not specifically trying to set up a safe ‘second person’ in the realm, now that she was finally rid of the woman who had shown what a threat the position could be.)

  But even without that extraordinary title, Leicester was still riding high. When the Earl of Essex led the first victory celebrations, Leicester watched from a window with the Queen. He dined every night with her, and a Spanish agent reported to Mendoza in Paris that he had seen the earl driving through London in a coach alone, accompanied by his household and a troop of light horse, as though at this late date he had indeed become the royal consort he had so long aspired to be.

  His health was poor, but then so was Elizabeth’s own; and when Leicester set off towards his beloved Kenilworth and the medicinal springs at Buxton late that summer, as he had so often done before, exhaustion must have warred with satisfaction. From Rycote in Oxfordshire on 29 August he wrote Elizabeth a note, the note of a man who expects to write many more.

  I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case, I continue still your medicine . . . hoping to find perfect cure at the bath . . .

  It was not to be. Only a few miles later, he grew sicker, and was forced to take refuge at the manor of Cornbury near Oxford (and also, ironically, near Cumnor). It is usually described as his own house, and indeed he had for several years exercised control over the deer and timber of the ancient, evocatively named, Wychwood Forest that lowers over the site. But there is nothing to suggest that this was a home to him - that, had he been able to choose a place and a moment, this was where he would choose to die.

  But his ague turned into ‘a continual burning fever’ - perhaps a bout of malaria, made worse by his experience on the Tilbury marshes. That, at least, was the official conclusion, when his fellow councillors were called on to consider the results of the post-mortem. He died early in the morning on 4 September; and when the rumours gathered steam this time, he featured as victim, rather than villain. In the next century it was whispered that he ‘hath ratsbane put in his porridge at Cornbury’; that a gentleman of his chamber, one William Haynes, said ‘that he had seen the Lady Lettice give the fatal cup to the Earl’. Camden reported gossip that Leicester had suspected Lettice’s lust for the younger man she married shortly thereafter - that Leicester, from the Netherlands, had attempted the assassination of his rival; and the scandal story ran that this was her pre-emptive strike. But in reality, it is hard to be sure Lettice was even there at Cornbury (and harder still truly to suspect the two men investigated by the privy council on the charge that they had procured his death by sorcery). It is just another one of the sticky smears that have dogged Leicester’s memory. He had been unwell a long time - had complained of ‘the stone’, that catch-all name for an intestinal malady. It has been speculated that he had stomach cancer, and if this were the underlying cause of his death, then it would have accounted for any gastric symptoms that suggested poison to the suspicious minds of his contemporaries.

  We have no record as to how Lettice mourned him. But Elizabeth was condemned to an extraordinary conjunction of public rejoicing and private agony. This was her own personal sorrow - it would be folly to try to damp the mood of the country - and against a background of the national victory celebrations she shut herself into her own chamber to grieve. According to the report from a Spanish agent, indeed, she shut herself in ‘for some days’, until her councillors had the doors broken forcibly; and though that may be an exaggeration, Walsingham too wrote that she would not tackle affairs ‘by reason that she will not suffer anybody to have access to her’. Nothing in her early life - the fraught deaths of her mother, brother, Thomas Seymour and more - could have taught her to see grief as anything other than a dangerous emotion, best indulged solitary. A Genoese resident in London, one Marco Antonio Micea, noted, when she
was seen about again, that she looked ‘much aged and spent’.

  Elizabeth kept that final note from Cornbury in a box in her closet until the end of her life. Labelled in her own hand as ‘His last letter’, it is held in the National Archives today. But no-one else seems to have mourned him, said the ubiquitous ambassadors, smugly. Though the Queen was ‘much grieved’ at Leicester’s death, yet the joy of the country as a whole ‘was never a whit abated’, wrote Camden wryly. Worse than that: ‘All men, so far as they durst, rejoiced no less outwardly at his death than for the victory lately obtained against the Spaniard,’ lamented the writer and antiquarian John Stow, who said he owed his career to Leicester’s encouragement. As another of his protégés, the poet Spenser, wrote a year later, with a certain amount of sharp sympathy:

  He now is dead, and all his glories gone.

  And all his greatness vapoured to nought.

  His name is worn already out of thought,