Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  (Nor) any poet seeks him to revive,

  Yet many poets honoured him alive.

  But that was for the future. So, too, was Camden’s not wholly unsympathetic epitaph:

  He was reputed a complete Courtier, magnificent, liberal, a protector and benefactor of Soldiers and Scholars . . . very officious, and cunning towards his ill-willers; for a time much given to Women, and finally, a good husband in excess . . . to say the truth, he was openly held to be in the rank of those which were worthy of praise, but the things which he secretly plotted displeased many.78

  For the moment, when Shrewsbury (in nervous association with his guest the Earl of Derby) wrote to Elizabeth the difficult letter that combined congratulations on her victory with commiserations on ‘so great a loss’, she replied to him as if writing of a green wound that cannot bear the touch: ‘Although we accept and acknowledge your careful mind and good will, yet we desire rather to forbear the remembrance thereof as a thing whereof we can admit no comfort, otherwise [than] by submitting our will to God’s inevitable appointment.’ There is no letter that really reveals Elizabeth’s feelings - no equivalent, even, to that she wrote to Catherine de Medici after Alençon’s death. But then there was really no-one to write to: the death of Robert certainly would not bring her closer to Lettice in any way.

  Court cynics might whisper that Elizabeth always got over her grief. (When Cecil died a decade later, Lettice’s brother Sir William Knollys would sneer that the Queen ‘seemeth to take [it] very grievously, shedding tears and separating herself from all company. Yet I doubt not but she in her wisdom will cast this behind her, as she hath done many other before time of like nature.’) Elizabeth had, indeed, to develop a measure of hardihood, when her own life was so much longer than that enjoyed by most of her contemporaries. Nor would she place private feelings above public responsibilities. But for the moment at least - perhaps for ever - the loss of ‘a personage so dear unto us’, as she described Robert to Shrewsbury, was without remedy.

  But while Elizabeth, shutting herself away, was capable of the sudden, savagely dramatic gesture, she also expressed herself less directly. As in life, so in death she and Leicester often spoke to each other obliquely. Perhaps it is to the years ahead that we should look for Elizabeth’s last (and almost disastrous) great loving gesture towards her lost companion - to her relationship with Leicester’s stepson and surrogate, Essex. Leicester had brought Essex to court as he himself began to tire and age, willing still to perform necessary duties, but unable any longer to flatter Elizabeth with the conviction he had once had; unable to provide the energetic, exciting pageant of eager masculinity. Elizabeth obediently would follow his programme almost to her destruction; would try to believe Essex was another Leicester. The Queen’s long, her extraordinary, indulgence towards Robert Devereux was her long lament for Robert Dudley.

  The so-called ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth painted in 1588 must be one of the glummest ever celebrations of victory. Her right hand resting possessively on the globe, the crown at her side and pictures of the sea defeat behind her, she is clad with an almost unimaginable magnificence of embroidery and jewellery. But her pouched and hooded eyes gaze into the distance, past the viewer, with an effect almost of melancholy. Against the black velvet of her dress, her pearls - perhaps those Leicester bequeathed to her - stand out clearly. Nothing can be read, in the Armada portrait, into Elizabeth’s choice of black and white clothes. They had become, as the years wore on, her favourite colours. But she might well have been in mourning, and not for one man merely. The end of the glory years of her reign was upon her, even as it reached its apogee.

  While the Spanish war wore on - while Elizabeth at last, too late for Leicester, was forced to commit to it wholeheartedly - over the next few years all the greatest aides and adorers of her heyday would slip away. Ambrose died in 1590 - of gangrene, ten days after the amputation of the leg that had been wounded in France almost thirty years earlier. Walsingham too died in 1590; and Hatton in 1591, also without a son to inherit his dignities. Cecil lived until 1598, but as the decade passed even he began to take less part in affairs. There remained Cecil’s son Robert and Leicester’s stepson Essex (as well as the maverick Walter Ralegh). With these young men Elizabeth would try to recreate the pattern of earlier years; but those days, when bickering would in the end be subsumed into co-operation, were never again to be. The 1590s - a difficult decade of famine and uncertainty, with the succession still unsettled and Elizabeth’s death ever more likely - did at last see the outbreak of the factionalism once attributed to Leicester’s day. Arguments concerning the nature of monarchy became more explicit. Courtiers split into camps, with Essex positioning himself in opposition to the Cecils, and the Queen’s efforts to balance opposites leading to stasis, rather than to a fruitful collegiality.

  Essex’s career is too well known to need more than the briefest description here. It was speculated early in his heyday, in 1591, that he was ‘like enough, if he had a few more years, to carry Leicester’s credit and sway’. That was before it became clear that Essex’s ambition went much further that his stepfather’s (fired, perhaps, by the smidgin of royal blood running through his veins; the thought that if only the line of succession had run differently . . .). Then came his bid for political as well as personal power; his increasing dissatisfaction with the limitations on a favourite; his disastrous campaign in Ireland; and his famous intrusion into Elizabeth’s bedroom to explain it away. Think of Leicester’s very different reaction when Elizabeth criticized his conduct in the Netherlands. Think, too, of Elizabeth’s horrified reaction, all those years ago, when men had burst into the chamber of the Scots Queen Mary.

  Time and again Elizabeth forgave Essex; punished him, at most, but leniently. It was probably the withdrawal of his income that pushed him into armed rebellion; maybe Elizabeth’s refusal to renew his ‘farm’ of sweet wines, which Leicester had held before him, was a symbolic rejection. Leicester’s stepson died on the headsman’s block as Leicester’s father and grandfather had done. But even before Essex’s downfall, the Queen was turning away from him. She knew the difference between the presence, and the absence, of loyalty. Elizabeth’s first and last favourites were in essence very different men.

  19

  ‘To end this life for her service’

  ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER, WAS BURIED IN HIS FAMILY stronghold of Warwick; in the Beauchamp Chapel of St Mary’s church, built more than a century before.

  Five days before the October ceremony, the procession had set out from Kenilworth: a hundred poor; a hundred gentlemen servants to the attending lords ‘in cloaks’ (the mourning garment given to those of this class; anyone who ranked esquire or above was given a whole gown); a hundred of Leicester’s own gentlemen similarly attired; chaplains, doctors and secretaries; the Mayor of Coventry; attendants bearing Leicester’s guidon, and leading his horse. Mourners of rank being customarily of the same sex as the one mourned, the names of the women present come at the end of the long list of attendees preserved in the records of the College of Arms. They include such humble personages as the dairy woman at Wanstead, and ‘Mary the poor scullery’. The body itself was followed by the Earl of Essex, the chief mourner, with Sir Robert Sidney (Philip Sidney’s brother) as his assistant, and a trainbearer behind them, presumably to deal with the yards of black. (From an earlier list of preparations it looks as though Ambrose had planned to attend, but was in the end prevented, perhaps by his health.) Several of Lettice’s male relatives were there, as well as Leicester’s brother-in-law the Earl of Huntingdon; but there is no mention of the ‘base son’, the younger Robert Dudley.

  On Leicester’s tomb, in Latin, the inscription lists his titles under Queen Elizabeth (‘who distinguished him by particular favour’), and describes him as ‘the best and dearest of husbands’ to Lettice, who erected it and who shares the vault under the gaudy effigies. Ambrose Dudley lies nearby, as does the ‘noble Impe’, his effigy stil
l dressed in a young child’s gown, rather than the breeches which, had he lived to seven, would have marked his entrance into maturity.

  Leicester’s funeral seems to have been unremarkable, for a major nobleman of the sixteenth century - but then, he had planned it that way. In the will he had written a year before his death, in 1587 on his return to the Netherlands, he had required that his friends should bury ‘the wretched Body of mine’ (when it pleased God to separate it from the soul) ‘with as little Pomp or vain Expenses of the World, as may be’; he was ‘persuaded that there is no more vain Expenses’ than a lavish tomb. Unless the Queen’s majesty appointed otherwise, or unless it proved too inconvenient, he had always wished to be buried at Warwick, ‘where sundry of my Ancestors do lie’.

  His will, he wrote, was of necessity an amateur effort, since he found himself in the Netherlands, and was ‘no Lawyer, nor have any Counsel now with me’. The result is a document more moving than any lawyer could achieve - and, before anything else, a statement of his religious conviction, and the almost Calvinist trend thereof. ‘First I take it to be the Part of any true Christian, to make a true Testimony of his Faith at all Times . . .’ His continues for a long paragraph, stating his anticipation of the forgiveness of his sins (‘be they never so great or infinite’); his trust in an Almighty whose ‘Graces Goodness and Mercy I most faithfully take hold on, being so promised by himself, who is the only Truth itself, that I am the Child of Salvation’, one of the ‘faithfull Children, and Saints of God’.

  Lettice figures in his will as his ‘dear and poor disconsolate wife’. He has, he writes, ‘always found her a faithfull, loving, and a very obedient, carefull Wife’; it was in this perception that he made her his executor. Before a year was out, Lettice was married again - to the 32-year-old Christopher Blount, a friend of her son Essex; a Catholic member of the minor gentry who had served as Leicester’s Master of Horse in the Netherlands. And although remarriage was to be expected, and rapid remarriage common, this might seem almost like Hamlet speed.79 On the other hand, the Blounts were connections and clients of the Dudleys - Christopher (to whom Leicester wrote as ‘Kytt’) was a younger son of that ‘Cousin Blount’ to whom Leicester had written on the death of Amy Dudley - and might be said to be ‘in the family’. Blount never publicly claimed Lettice as his wife, referring to her rather as a ‘friend’, and she continued to be known as the Countess of Leicester. When Essex’s outrages and obsessions finally brought him and some of his supporters to rebellion and the headsman’s block, his stepfather Blount was among the fellow victims. Lettice was thus doubly bereft. She spent the rest of her life in comparative retirement, dying only in 1634, in her nineties.

  To his ‘most dear, and most gracious Sovereign, whose creature under God I have been, and who hath been a most beautiful, and a most princely Mistress unto me’, Leicester left a ‘Rope of fair white Pearls, to number six hundred’. Elizabeth had exalted him

  as well in advancing me to many Honours, as in maintaining me many Ways by her Goodness and Liberality. And as my best Recompense to her most excellent Majesty can be from so mean a Man, chiefly in Prayer to God, for whilst there was any Breath in this Body, I never failed it, even as for mine own Soul. And as it was my greatest Joy, in my Life Time, to serve her to her Contentation, so it is not unwelcome to me, being the Will of God to die, and end this Life for her Service.

  He was thinking of death on a Dutch battlefield - but in fact, since his whole life had been spent in her service, his death could hardly be seen differently whenever it occurred.

  If you exclude the sole involuntary betrayal of Leicester’s dying and leaving her, then, for Elizabeth, you might say their relationship had worked. Whether she regretted not marrying him, in the first shock of grief - or whether her wary sense of self-preservation kicked in, to keep the pain at bay - in the course of their thirty-year alliance she had achieved a relationship that gave play both to her power, and to her vulnerability.

  And of course, he had not done so badly. The tale of the prince who adventured and won a kingdom and a princess was not new even in the sixteenth century; and if he did not quite win the kingdom, then he went a good way of the journey. As Robert bolstered Elizabeth’s majesty, he had shared the benefits of her sovereignty. But dynastically, he gambled and lost. He was robbed of his posterity. Leicester’s earldom eventually (after being in abeyance for thirty years) was recreated by James I for Leicester’s nephew, Sir Robert Sidney. The great Sidney house of Penshurst in Kent remains one of the chief shrines to the dissipated Dudley legacy.* But effectively the direct line of Dudley dignities dwindled and died out (since Ambrose too died without child), and it is safe to say that Robert would have seen his great failure as this: the failure of his dynasty.

  It seems ironic but apposite that, in the same generation, the Tudors died out in much the same way.

  Appendix I: The second Robert Dudley

  THE YOUNGER ROBERT DUDLEY - LEICESTER’S ACKNOWLEDGED BUT illegitimate son - was brought up under his father’s auspices, his mother having (she said) been frightened into relinquishing him before her own marriage to Edward Stafford at the end of 1579, when the boy was around five years old. The young Robin went to live with his father’s kinsman John Dudley, in Stoke Newington, and it seems Leicester (like Douglass) visited him there, since a servant later remembered that Leicester did ‘very often times discover his love and care he had of his son, and the desire he had to have him receive good usage and education’. By 1583 (with Douglass and her new husband in Paris, and the elder but illegitimate boy’s prospects having fallen on the birth of Leicester’s legitimate heir), Leicester had sent the child to be tutored at Offington near the Sussex coast, Ambrose having property nearby.

  He was only fourteen when Leicester entered him at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1587, with the rank of ‘an earl’s son’ and a notable tutor in the shape of Thomas Chaloner, who would go on to tutor James’s son Prince Henry. The following year he begged to be allowed to volunteer for Elizabeth’s army at Tilbury, where (or so he boasted) his father commissioned him as a colonel of foot, under the guidance of an older officer. Leicester’s sudden death put an end to a relationship that seems to have been unmarred by any resentment, and two years after that the death of Ambrose (to whom Leicester had left a life interest in his disposable lands, his son being still ‘young and casual’) left young Robert in possession of a great inheritance.

  Leicester had died with huge cash debts: little short of £60,000, of which his wife would be required to repay the crown more than £20,000. ‘Touching my Bequests, they cannot be great, by Reason my Ability and Power is little, for I have not dissembled with the World my Estate, but have lived always above any Living I had (for which I am heartily sorry) lest that, through my many Debts, from Time to Time, some Men have taken Loss by me.’ (There were those moneys to the London merchants, from whom he had raised cash for the Netherlands . . . he desired his executors to satisfy everybody.) Elizabeth moved instantly to recover those moneys owed to her, even those that had been spent in her cause. (Fondness, as Camden noted, never lessened her sense of what was owed to her treasury.) But she concentrated her attentions on those properties that had been left to Lettice rather than those destined for the young Robert Dudley.

  By the time the young Robert successfully took full possession of Kenilworth at last, another avenue of opportunity had opened up when his mother returned from Paris and was appointed lady of the bedchamber. He joined the fringes of the court - a young man ‘of exquisite stature, with a fair beard and noble appearance’, as he was later described - before being briefly banished for marrying (and kissing, in Elizabeth’s presence!) Margaret Cavendish, cousin to the famous explorer Thomas and sister-in-law to the travel writer Richard Hakluyt. The sea had, from his childhood, drawn young Robert’s ‘natural sympathy’; and now began his own long involvement with affairs maritime when he fitted out three ships to go venturing in the south seas - the Queen having firmly vet
oed his desire to sail with them.

  The failure of this expedition left him undaunted, and in 1594 he did indeed set sail himself, to test his carefully acquired skills in navigation on a voyage to the West Indies. The records of the journey show him to advantage, not only taking possession of the island of Trinidad in the Queen’s name, but winning the admiration of his sailors and establishing friendly relations with the Arawak people - ‘a finely shaped and gentle people, all naked and painted red’.

  The ore he found proved to be not gold but marquisite; though he was given word of a town called El Dorado, only a few of his men were able to penetrate up the Orinoco; and back home, he found his voyage eclipsed by the almost simultaneous venture of Ralegh. But he had put into personal action his father’s dream of empire and interest in the sea. Shortly afterwards he sailed on the Cadiz expedition against the Spanish led by his half-brother Essex, who knighted him at the end of the voyage. The young Dudley had some part in Essex’s rebellion; but his involvement was not such as to incur any major penalty.

  His first wife Margaret Cavendish having died of plague while he was in the West Indies, he married the daughter of a Kenilworth neighbour, Alice Leigh, and it may have been his new wife’s family who encouraged him to press the cause of his legitimacy. He first approached an ecclesiastical court, where less stringent inquiries would be made into the supposed marriage, and where his reluctant mother would not be asked to testify. This attempt, however, came to an end when, in October 1603, Robert Sidney arrived with a mandate from the privy council, moving the case to the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber.

  Dudley’s timing had been appalling. Elizabeth, had he launched his claim some months earlier, might well have been sympathetic. But the new King James was determined to reward those who had been helpful to him, which included the martyred Essex (as represented by his mother Lettice) and Robert Sidney; while Leicester had been high on the list of those James felt necessary to blame for his mother’s execution. The identification of the crown with the opponents to young Dudley’s case was shown when it was announced they would be represented by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke, on whose advice Lettice charged Dudley and all his associates with defamation of character.80