Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  The trial opened in June 1604, and by this time Douglass had been persuaded by her son’s urgency to rally to the cause. Douglass’s description of her wedding ceremony was supported by five witnesses who had already given written testimony, but these Coke dismissed as being ‘all not worth a frieze jerkin’. The most material among them were, after all, servants or people of lower rank - ‘a base and poor carpenter’, ‘a common drunkard’, ‘a lying tailor’ - the aristocratic witnesses to the wedding being dead. Even the single most important witness, Douglass’s gentlewoman Magdalen Salisbury, was dismissed as being ‘an infamous instrument’, procured for pay.81

  The papers kept in Robert Sidney’s family include reports about one Mr Christmas, a companion of Leicester’s who (said someone who had known Christmas’s servant thirty years before) had tried to dissuade the earl from the match, and claimed until his last hour that ‘had it not been for him’ then Leicester and Douglass would have been married; but, as it was . . . One Owen Jones had been examined. He had been a servant hired by Leicester to wait on the young Robert, and claimed that Leicester once said to him, ‘Owen, thou knowest that Robin, my boy, is my lawful son; and as I do charge thee to keep it secret, so I charge thee be careful of him.’ It was an important part of Robert Dudley’s case; but Owen had taken money from him, and was now described, in the report to Robert Sidney, as ‘a lewd fellow’, who could easily be ‘laid out in his [true] colours’. (And indeed, Sidney’s agent pointed out with some reason ‘how unlikely it was to be true that [Owen] should be of my lord’s secrets and know these matters’.

  There were lists of questions to be put to family friends:

  Do you know or believe in your conscience that the said Earl was ever lawfully married to Douglasse Lady Sheffield?

  Did the Earl ever say to you that he was married to her?

  Hath not the Lady Sheffield many times since the birth of Sir Robert Dudley said unto you that she was never married to the said Earl of Leicester?

  Did not the said Earl in all conferences betwixt you and him always accompte Sir Robert Dudley to be his base son?

  A ‘statement of case for Counsel: together with Counsel’s opinion thereon’ declared that:

  A marriage is pretended [claimed] to be secretly celebrated in a chamber in anno 15 Eliz. [the fifteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign] between A [the Earl of Leicester] and B [the Lady Sheffield]. This marriage is never published: the parties do never cohabit as man and wife ... A and B both subsequently marry. A married C and B marries E. The marriage of A and C is never contradicted by B by suit on the Ecclesiastical Court nor does B ever claim any marriage with A but always . . . protesteth she was never married to A but only promised marriage by A.

  But in fact, it was not the events of 1573, but those of 1603, upon which Robert Sidney and Lettice made their case.

  Robert Dudley’s witnesses in the hearing at Lichfield, so his opponents claimed, were ‘all suborned and long time before and after maintained with meat, drink, lodging and apparel by the plaintiff in this suit’. Three of the witnesses said the marriage had been in ‘anno 15 Eliz.’, but two others said it had been in anno 14. Two out of that first three said it had been at Assher (Esher) House in Surrey in that year, where they had been in Douglass’s service; but other witnesses could be found who claimed Douglass was never at Esher then, and that indeed it was anno 17 before the pair became Douglass’s servants. Counsel’s opinion was that witnesses being once ‘disabled, shall be of no credit’. (And as for Douglass’s own testimony, when counsel was asked, ‘Of what force in law will be the affirmation of B to prove the marriage, being party &c.’, the answer came: ‘We take it the affirmation of the said B not to be anything available in law to prove the said marriage.’)

  Coke’s demand that Dudley’s witnesses ‘should be damned’ formed the basis of the decision of Star Chamber, who took until 10 May 1605 to deliver their judgment, having examined more than 150 witnesses. Dudley’s three chief witnesses were fined and declared for ever suspect, and the Star Chamber further ordained that all the depositions should be ‘sealed up and suppressed until the King should order the enclosures to be broken’, thereby impeding further enquiry. A later lawyer called the judgment ‘infamous’, and even in its day it received some comment. ‘The matter of marriage was not handled at all,’ wrote Rowland White to Gilbert Talbot, now the new Earl of Shrewsbury, ‘only the practice was proved [Dudley’s legal methods were queried] in the proceedings’. Through the centuries since, it has been riveting to trace the labyrinthine path of the legal manoeuvres, but impossible to reach any hard conclusions about the original story.

  The seventeenth-century antiquary Sir William Dugdale (author of Antiquities of Warwickshire, and of Baronage) did manage to see copies of the witness depositions in the library of Sir Robert Cotton; and his conclusion was that on the whole, whatever ceremony had taken place at Esher (and no-one seemed to deny there had been something, in an age when a betrothal was attended by as much ceremonial as a wedding day) would have constituted a valid marriage. (And, he added, in a belt and braces kind of way, the couple’s cohabitation and their child together would be enough, combined with any kind of contract, to constitute a marriage anyway.) Dugdale’s decision was influenced by the claim that Leicester had told a servant (Owen Jones?) that Robert was his true son, and ‘likewise by what Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, had uttered, which for brevity’s sake I omit’. One wishes he had been less brief: in 1731 many of the Cotton manuscripts were destroyed by fire, and later researchers were unable to find Ambrose’s statement, or to echo Dugdale’s certainty.

  In 1824 Sir John Shelley-Sidney of Penshurst tried to establish his claim to the barony of Lisle and Dudley, by then in abeyance, but the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords rejected his request, which could have been granted only if the descendants of Robert Dudley could be declared illegitimate with certainty. But in 1899 Sir George Warner, writing an introduction to The Voyage of Robert Dudley to the West Indies (Hakluyt Society, second series 3) examined all the documents he could lay his hands on and decided the marriage was not valid . . . Perhaps the most one can say with certainty is that the very manner of proceeding of Robert Dudley’s opponents suggests that he did have some sort of a case that could not have been dismissed by more straightforward means.

  Within weeks of the final failure of his claim, Robert Dudley left England in disgust. Though he and Alice had been married almost ten years, and had a bevy of young daughters, he took with him on his travels a page who proved, once safely in France, to be the young beauty of the court (and his own distant kinswoman) Elizabeth Southwell. They were married with the aid of a papal dispensation that forgave them their consanguinity, but made no mention of the fact that Robert was married already, presumably because it had been an Anglican ceremony. He was long a loving husband to Elizabeth, and father to their children, but never again showed any interest in Alice or in their daughters; displaying at last, it was said, almost a resentful pleasure in doing ‘what his father, as he contended, had been allowed to do with impunity’. He abandoned his lands, which were sequestered by the crown; Kenilworth (purchased for a knock-down price) eventually became part of Queen Henrietta Maria’s marriage portion, before falling victim to parliamentary forces when the outer, defensible, portions were ‘slighted’ - destroyed - during the Civil War.82

  Robert and Elizabeth having converted to Catholicism, they made their way to Florence, where Ferdinand de Medici was waging a naval war against the Turks and could use the services of a young man who already had theoretical and practical experience of fitting vessels for the sea. Dudley’s interests were enormously wide, with his mathematics and astronomy, his experiments in medicine and civil engineering, his invention for use in the silk industry (like his father’s concern for the cloth trade!) - and the pamphlet he once wrote, in the hope of regaining King James’s favour, suggesting money-making mechanisms for the monarchy, and control by standing army. ‘In polic
y there is a greater tie of the people by force and necessity than merely by love and affection . . .’ He would be responsible not only for some important new designs in shipbuilding, but for the draining of the Tuscan marshes and the creation of the port of Livorno (and, since many of the thirteen children he had with Elizabeth survived and married well, for a fair proportion of the Italian nobility).83

  Dudley’s career in Tuscany lasted until his death in 1649. Though James sequestered his English estates, Europe acknowledged the titles he claimed - even his grandfather’s title of Duke of Northumberland - and he retained the favour both of the Medici and of the papacy, which gave him the singular honour of allowing him the right of mapping out his own order of chivalry. When he gave up his practical responsibilities he kept high ceremonial rank (though never political power) as Grand Chamberlain at the Florentine court, thanks to the favour of three successive grand duchesses. In his last years, as Charles I finally issued a letter of redress accepting his legitimacy, he published his great work of charts and navigations, Dell’arcano de mare, and plans for the future exploration of the sea. Leicester would have been pleased. Elizabeth too, maybe.

  Appendix II: The Arthur Dudley mystery

  AMONG THE MANY LEGENDS ABOUT ELIZABETH, ONE OLD CHESTNUT of a story has come back into favour very recently. It has, after all, the useful attribute of seeming to offer the most certain proof of all that Elizabeth was no virgin (though it leaves open the question of whether it was from purely political or also psychological motives that she was forced to deny, even as she indulged, her sexuality). The story is worth examining in some detail because it shows just how long-lived any tale about a high-profile woman’s sexuality can be - shows, too, how the same set of facts can also fit a political reading that reinterprets the whole story.

  In the summer of 1587, the year before the Armada, a young man was brought to the Spanish court, claiming to be the son of Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley. The bald statement opens up - if one chooses to follow it - a path of dizzying possibility. The name ‘Arthur Dudley’ has not rated so much as a mention in the index of most biographies of either of his putative parents. Historians almost universally dismiss his claim - and I should say at once that I share the general scepticism. None the less, the past few years have seen a renewed bout of interest - equivalent, in a minor key, to the nineteenth century’s interest in the Amy Dudley mystery. Mystery births and secret bloodlines clearly catch the mood of our moment, as witness The Da Vinci Code.

  The story ‘Arthur Dudley’ told comes to us from four letters sent by Sir Francis Englefield, a Catholic renegade living at the Spanish court, to King Philip. Once a councillor of Mary Tudor (and a correspondent of Leicester), Englefield was now old and blind, but still considered fit to be entrusted with the investigation of this English prisoner, apparently shipwrecked on the Spanish coast and brought to Madrid as a possible spy. The first of these letters is a very lengthy verbatim report of what ‘Arthur Dudley’ had told him. Stripped down to its essentials, the story was this.

  ‘Dudley’ claimed to have been raised by a man called Robert Southern (a former servant of Elizabeth’s confidante Kat Ashley) who, many years before, had been summoned to Hampton Court and there handed a baby, born in secret to one of the Queen’s ladies, which he was told to name Arthur, and raise as his own. This he accordingly did, giving the boy, indeed, a better education than he could give his own offspring. When Arthur was eight years old, Robert Southern was given a post at one of the Queen’s houses, in Enfield. Arthur grew up spending summers there, and winters in London, until he was fourteen or fifteen years old when, in a fit of adolescent rebellion, he stole a handful of silver from his foster-father’s purse and set out to run away to sea. He was stopped, bizarrely, by a letter from seven of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, ordering that he instead be brought to London immediately. The letter, Arthur said, showed him to be ‘a person of more importance than the son of Robert Southern’, but when he was met by John Ashley, Kat’s husband, little more was told to him. Not enough, at any rate, to quench his desire to see those lands beyond the sea. Finally he obtained permission, and, travelling in the care of a servant of the Earl of Leicester’s, was sent abroad into the care of a Monsieur de la Noue, a Frenchman fighting in the Flanders wars. When La Noue was taken prisoner he ran away and adventured around France, until urgent letters recalled him to England, at the end of 1583.

  Robert Southern was dying, and told Arthur he was not his real father. He refused, however, to say who the real parents might be. Arthur left the house in anger, but Southern sent a schoolmaster named Smyth to bring him back, and, on Arthur’s return, admitted the young man was in fact the son of the Queen and Robert Dudley. Arthur begged him to put it in writing, but Southern was paralysed and unable to do this.

  When John Ashley learnt that the secret was out, he was so horrified that Arthur was panicked back into flight. He racketed around France, approaching several Jesuit colleges and Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris, but always found himself unable through nerves to tell his story, or them unwilling to listen to it. (It is, is it not, beginning to sound like a paranoid fantasy?)

  Returning to England, Arthur was brought before Leicester by two of the earl’s officers named Blount and Fludd. (Blount, of course, is a name familiar from Leicester’s service; the name of the man who sent him the reports on Amy’s death. Fludd was indeed really the name of one of Leicester’s Netherlands secretaries. But to some degree these - like, of course, the more senior officials mentioned - were public personages.) In an extraordinary interview, Leicester ‘by tears, words, and other demonstrations’ showed his great affection . . . ‘You are like a ship under full sail at sea, pretty to look upon but dangerous to deal with,’ he told the younger man. Leicester sent Arthur to Walsingham to expedite his safe passage back out of the country, but Walsingham’s manner and his curious questions so put the wind up Arthur that he fled once again, and at Gravesend signed up with a party of English soldiers heading to service in Flanders.

  From there, the narrative becomes yet more confused. (Indeed, Englefield himself said as much, and sent only an abridged version to his master.) It seems that Arthur schemed to hand a Flanders town over to the Spanish, and actually sent his story to the Pope and to the Duke of Parma. He was on pilgrimage in Spain when he learnt of Mary Stuart’s death. The news made him set sail again for France; and it was at this point that shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay landed him on the Spanish shore, where he was seized on suspicion of espionage. (Back in the middle of April, the Venetian envoy in Madrid had heard it slightly differently: that a Catholic Englishman had been arrested at Fontarrabia on the French frontier and that King Philip was ‘in great doubt’ whether to keep him prisoner or let him go.)

  Englefield’s own statement was accompanied by a private letter from Arthur Dudley:

  If God grants that his Majesty [King Philip] should take me under his protection, I think it will be necessary to spread a rumour that I have escaped, as everybody now knows that I am here, and my residence in future can be kept secret. I could then write simply and sincerely to the Earl of Leicester all that has happened to me, in order to keep in his good graces; and I could also publish a book to any effect that might be considered desirable, in which I should show myself to be everybody’s friend and nobody’s enemy . . .

  If real, it was an extraordinary naïveté.

  This account was sent to Philip on 17 June. On the eighteenth, the twentieth and the twenty-second, Englefield sent further, brief letters giving his limited conclusions (of which more later) after successive waves of further questioning. At the end of the first letter he suggested installing Arthur in ‘San Geronimo, the Atocha, or some other monastery’. At the end of the fourth Englefield says clearly: ‘I am of the opinion that he should not be allowed to get away, but should be kept very secure to prevent his escape.’ The letter is endorsed with a note in Philip’s own hand, to the effect that it would indeed be
‘safest to make sure of his person until we know more about it’. A few days later the Venetian ambassador in Madrid reported that Arthur had been sent to the castle of Lameda. By now, so the Venetian understands it, Arthur is definitely believed to be a spy.

  In May 1588 an English agent ‘BC’ was writing to Cecil that Dudley was still in Spanish hands, ‘very solemnly warded and served’, at a cost to the King of six crowns a day, and ‘taketh upon him’ [behaves] ‘like the man he pretendeth to be’. ‘BC’ has been identified by Robert Hutchinson, in Elizabeth’s Spy Master, as Anthony Standen alias Pompeo Pellegrini, one of Walsingham’s chief collectors of news in Spain.84

  In September the same year, another letter mentions in passing that ‘The varlet that called himself Her Majesty’s son is in Madrid, and is allowed two crowns a day for his table, but cannot go anywhere without his keepers, and has a house for a prison.’ From six crowns to two crowns . . . Perhaps his value had dropped, once the Armada was well away. Two years later again, a report sent to England on the state of Spain mentions Alcantara, ‘where an Englishman of good quality and comely personage was imprisoned who avowed himself Leicester’s son by no small personage’. From then on, Arthur Dudley disappears from history. His claim seems never, in his own day, to have been debated more widely.