Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  10 Much later, towards the end of Elizabeth’s life, an observer would write that the Queen was ‘governed’ by Robert’s other sister Katherine, the Countess of Huntingdon.

  11 St Peter ad Vincula holds also the headless bodies of Elizabeth’s uncle George Boleyn, her kinswoman Katherine Howard and her first love Thomas Seymour, besides Guildford Dudley, Jane Grey and Robert’s stepson the Earl of Essex.

  12 Even the putative Hatfield oak is usually pictured in full bud-burst glory. Both Elizabeth R and the BBC’s recent reprise, The Virgin Queen, reinforced the iconography, the latter showing a brand-new Queen Elizabeth - though the accession was in November - under another oak tree in full leaf as she waited for Robert Dudley.

  13 Even Ascham’s friend (and Jane Grey’s tutor) John Aylmer, writing a refutation of John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, had written that Elizabeth’s sex mattered the less because England was not ‘a mere monarchy’, nor yet a mere oligarchy or democracy, but ‘a rule mixt of all three’ - in other words, that Elizabeth’s gender did not matter, because she was not that powerful anyway.

  14 The local pub is called The Bear and Ragged Staff - but this was not its name in Robert Dudley’s day. It was renamed in tribute to the Kenilworth tourist trade in the course of the nineteenth century.

  15 He had been the supporter of Elizabeth’s waiting at Mary’s court to bring word of the Queen’s death.

  16 A letter from a correspondent in England, Henry Killigrew, mentions the rumours but describes the death as an accident. Even when, on the twenty-ninth, Throckmorton wrote to Chamberlain, his fellow ambassador in Spain, he said his friends advised him that Lord Robert’s wife was dead ‘and has by chance broken her own neck’.

  17 Fewer letters from Tudor persons of importance than one might think survive in the author’s own hand, so often was correspondence dictated to a secretary, or subsequently copied for file. Other letters quoted that survive only in copy include John Dudley’s last despairing letter (p. 58); that of Edward Dyer quoted on pp. 221-2; and a good deal of the Netherlands correspondence (pp. 310-19).

  18 Appleyard took his mysterious strangers to be emissaries of the Duke of Norfolk and his party; see p. 177.

  19 Adlard gives a very full exposé of how one source led to another: a paragraph-by-paragraph comparison of how the most popular source, long taken as both authoritative and impartial, actually plagiarizes Leicester’s Commonwealth to an extraordinary degree.

  20 These are also the two theories propounded, respectively, by the two most recent fictional interpretations: the one by the BBC’s The Virgin Queen, and the other by Philippa Gregory’s novel The Virgin’s Lover.

  21 And if he were guilty, this rather implies that Amy was not sick: why on earth should he have her murdered, if a few more weeks might see him a blameless widower?

  22 It is worth noting in this context that Camden, the colouring of whose history of the reign owes a good deal to Cecil’s patronage, though no friend to Robert Dudley, mentions Amy’s death only in passing - writing of Dudley, ‘whose wife (being heir to Robsart) had lately broke her neck’.

  23 Though even here, since the act of putting on his shift had been singled out as signifying particular closeness to King Henry, the point made may just conceivably have been about status, rather than sexuality.

  24 Polite euphemisms serve only to confuse the issue. We cannot ask whether ‘anything was really going on’: clearly, something was. Nor whether the two ‘slept together’: passing whole tranquil nights together is about the one thing we can be sure they didn’t do. As I argued over the relationship - in the usual clumsy, guarded terms - with a historian older than myself, it finally transpired that we were envisaging precisely the same situation . . . But she, growing up before the sexual revolution, had counted that situation as ‘doing it’, while I, from a later generation, had not.

  25 See Appendix II for a full discussion of this claim, and the Afterword for the whole question of Elizabeth’s sexuality as it has appeared in some recent fictional treatments.

  26 A centuries-long movement ‘compared to which’, C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature’.

  27 Some modern historians, too, have surely hinted at that view. Milton Waldman, in the 1940s, elegantly suggested that Elizabeth and Robert exercised ‘just enough continence to avoid the varied dangers of incontinence’. Elizabeth Jenkins wrote of ‘a sexual relationship which stopped short only of the sexual act’, and David Starkey suggests ‘a Clintonesque formula’ as one way of squaring the circle. Martin Hume, who just over a century ago wrote the classic The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth, was inclined to believe that Elizabeth’s various relationships ‘stopped short of actual immorality’, but also hints that she was an exhibitionist in the most literal sense.

  28 In effect, while starting with a wildly different perspective from our own, they might be said to be voicing the twentieth-century, the Lytton Strachey theory. See Afterword.

  29 He sired eighteen short-lived children on his royal wife, and yet who now recalls the unlucky Prince George, son to the King of Denmark?

  30 The Tree of Commonwealth, the political allegory he wrote in the Tower, reveals a good deal about Edmund Dudley’s attitudes: a guilt that he had been tempted too far in the King’s (and his own) interests; a concern that he had collaborated in the King’s use of fiscal penalties to clip the wings of the nobility.

  31 The most plausible explanation of the rise of the favourite in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, writes Ronald G. Asch, lies in his position ‘as the ruler’s patronage manager - often his original and most important duty’.

  32 Or, for that matter, with the choices that confront the woman head of a Fortune 500 company. Do you marry a man of comparable status - and then spend every day of your life battling the assumptions that he will take priority? Or do you choose a consort of dramatically lower status - in effect, a boy toy?

  33 Sweden’s Queen Christina in the seventeenth century might seem an even better comparison. She certainly had her favourites - a French doctor/ adventurer, to whom she gave unpopular licence; her cousin; and two men, a powerful minister and, later in her life, an Italian cardinal, with both of whom rumour linked her, scandalously. But all Christina’s relationships and decisions must be seen as those of a woman who, far from being determined to keep power, was determined to throw it away; to abdicate in favour of that cousin she had always favoured. By the same token, the widowed Queen Victoria had her John Brown, and her Munshi. But in fact - although gossip sneered at the Queen as ‘Mrs Brown’ - their status as servants was so far removed from hers as not to have allowed them political influence, even had real political power still lain with the monarchy.

  34 Her kinsman the Duke of Norfolk had lost three wives to childbirth before the first decade of her reign was out.

  35 According to the Spanish ambassador (writing over a week after the crisis, by which time the rumour mill would have got busy), Elizabeth also insisted that ‘a groom of the Chamber, called Tamworth, who sleeps in Lord Robert’s room’, should be given a pension of £500 a year. It has been taken for hush money. But John Tamworth - if this was he, or even a scion of the same family - while indeed a Dudley associate, was the Keeper of the Privy Purse and a man of status, rather than Robert’s all-knowing body servant, as has sometimes been inferred, and Elizabeth had sworn to her innocence on the threshold of what she believed might be her own judgement day.

  36 It was true that Henry VIII’s will and the Act of Succession had specifically debarred Margaret’s line from inheriting, preferring the line of his younger sister Mary. But the will at least was of dubious legality.

  37 Mary, like Elizabeth, was a constant target of calumny; would even later be suspected of ‘over-great familiarity’ with the young brother of her gaoler, an eighteen-year-old boy.

  38 A duke of Norfolk, this duke’s grandfather, had pr
esided over the trial of Robert’s father, and a Sussex had presided over Robert’s own.

  39 Perhaps she protested too much. Camden, decades later, would describe at length how Leicester used his position at Elizabeth’s ear to urge on her the evils of ‘marrying out of the Realm’: how a queen who married abroad found she had handed her realm to her husband; how the children of such marriages too often turned out ill; how dangerous it was to commit yourself to a man you had never seen; how it might be ‘an extreme misery and grief, to be daily conversant with a man of strange manners and language’.

  40 It was in the spring of 1567 that Appleyard, Amy Dudley’s half-brother, made his allegations; and it had been assumed Norfolk’s party, this previous year, had paid him to do so. But by then the two men were able to present themselves as victims, alike, of a slander campaign.

  41 The most damning of the ‘casket letters’ are now believed to be fakes; and John Guy powerfully suggests that Cecil was a prime mover in the forgery.

  42 Derek Wilson points out that in 1565, for example, Leicester had been present at four-fifths of the council’s hundred or so meetings: more than any other councillor except Cecil or Sir Francis Knollys.

  43 The courtly lover addressed his lady as midons, Lewis pointed out, ‘which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’.

  44 Henri has to be distinguished from his younger brother François, at this time still the Duke of Alençon. Confusingly, François subsequently became the Duke of Anjou when Charles’s premature death brought Henri to the throne, but for simplicity’s sake I shall continue to call François ‘Alençon’.

  45 Throckmorton died at his house on a Monday, Leicester wrote to Walsingham, ‘being taken there suddenly in great extremity on Tuesday before; his lungs were perished, but a sudden cold he had taken, was the cause of his speedy death’.

  46 The letter Norfolk wrote to his children after his sentence is one of the most touching in the period’s history, warning his thirteen-year-old heir that, ‘though very young in years’, he must strive to become a man; that it was all too likely his brothers would be taken from him, as courtiers squabbled for their wardship; that he should, above all else, ‘Beware of high degrees!’

  47 Dyer - who had recently been in Leicester’s service - is better known now as the poet who wrote ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’. When he found himself excluded for years from Elizabeth’s favour, he made a successful comeback by staging a pageant in which he cast himself as a minstrel, singing his ‘tragical complaint’ from the branches of an oak tree.

  48 Josephine Ross, in her 1970s book on Elizabeth’s suitors, made the point that the very extravagance of Elizabeth’s flirtation was not the expression of a consummated love, but a substitute for it. The extravagant attitude of her admirers was of course characteristic of the unconsummated passion of courtly love.

  49 Her somewhat disconcerting name can also be found written as ‘Douglas’, but I have chosen to keep the more unusual spelling as being less firmly associated with masculinity.

  50 This letter, extensively quoted below, is addressed to an unnamed woman who has been identified as Douglass from internal evidence - see Conyers Read’s article of the 1930s, cited in the source notes to this chapter (p. 384 below).

  51 Dr Giulio Borgarucci, or Borgherini - even Borgarutius, in one Latin document.

  52 The only witness Douglass could provide who claimed to have been present at the ceremony was a gentlewoman servant called Magdalen Salisbury. But the prosecutor protested that she at first declared she could not remember anything about it, later putting her name to two contradictory stories. A Mrs Erisa, staying with Douglass when her baby was born, was also called upon to support Douglass’s claim that Leicester’s letter of congratulation was signed ‘your loving husband’. She remembered the letter - but not those words.

  53 Rumour said Douglass had borne Leicester one child already: a daughter delivered in deepest secrecy at Dudley Castle in Staffordshire, home to a kinsman of Leicester’s and his wife, Douglass’s sister. The baby dying within a few hours, it was said, Douglass was rushed back to court, and the matter concealed successfully.

  54 Sometimes the mails were used for less elevated errands. Along with the despatches, Leicester’s servants once sent him doublets, ‘boot hose’ and samples of patterned velvet for a new nightgown.

  55 Football, in contemporary opinion, was ‘a beastly fury and extreme violence; wherof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded . . .’. Leicester inveighed against its popularity at Oxford University.

  56 By the same token, Oberon’s ‘mermaid on a dolphin’s back’ echoes the pageant with a swimming mermaid and Arion seated astride a dolphin that Elizabeth saw one evening. The man playing Arion suddenly pulled off his mask and exclaimed that he was really only Harry Goldingham . . . just as Shakespeare’s Snug the Joiner does in the rustics’ play. See Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester, pp. 208-10.

  57 Potemkin threw a spectacular party for Catherine, at the quarrelsome end of their long liaison, which replicates the mixed messages of the Kenilworth scene almost exactly.

  58 ‘Elizabeth recognized Dudley as being dangerous,’ Frye writes, even though she knew ‘she had the power to check him’. But surely the Earl of Leicester she describes is more like Kenilworth’s earlier owner, Simon de Montfort, than the protagonist of the relationship we see between the mature Elizabeth and Robert Dudley?

  59 One Edward Arden, Catholic and probably distant kin to Shakespeare’s mother, had refused Leicester’s demand that all the local gentry should show up wearing his livery; and, according to Dugdale’s seventeenth-century report, added an unflattering rider touching Leicester’s ‘private access to the Countess of Essex’. Eight years later, Arden was executed for treason - some said, by Leicester’s agency.

  60 He would hardly have been consoled had he seen their future destiny. Penelope - famous as Philip Sidney’s poetic idol ‘Stella’ - was equally notorious for her political meddling and for her infidelity. Dorothy’s first disgrace came from an elopement with an adventurer, and her second marriage - to Henry Percy, the ‘wizard’ Earl of Northumberland - saw the couple quarrelling so bitterly she threatened ‘to eat his heart in salt’.

  61 The signs, according to Camden, were that his body did not change colour, that he showed neither spot nor infection, nor did his hair or nails fall out; these being the infallible stigmata of poison.

  62 By the same token, several sources claimed that Bothwell’s deserted wife had similarly been offered a choice between divorce and poison - though others suggested that her family pushed her into co-operation, in hopes of currying Bothwell’s favour.

  63 He had recently murdered his brother, for having an affair with his own wife.

  64 A more romantic version says he was confined to a tower in the gardens of Greenwich, called ‘the Tower Mireflore’, where Anne Boleyn had once lodged.

  65 Leicester’s nephew Philip Sidney, with all the arrogance of youth, wrote even more pointedly than Stubbs against the match. But he was never likely to suffer a comparable penalty - the more so since his words, at least, were confined to a private and courtly circle, rather than being published for all the blunt Londoners to see.

  66 The so-called ‘sieve’ portraits, for example, showed Elizabeth holding a sieve, in reference to the story of a Roman virgin, the miraculous power of whose chastity was such that she was able to carry a sieve full of water from the Tiber without spilling a drop.

  67 It was said that he asked her whether she were a maid or a woman - which suggests, of course, that he did not already himself have the best of reasons for knowing she was no virgin.

  68 Which newly fashionable vegetable, it was said, ‘provoketh lust in women so it abateth the same in men’, according to Turner’s Herbal.

  69 Almost everything Elizabeth wrote to Robert until the very last years of his life is presumed to have been destroyed in the Civil
War sack of Kenilworth.

  70 The full title was The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Arts at Cambridge.

  71 The caption to a picture in Harmsworth Magazine, from July 1902, describes him as ‘England’s most celebrated poisoner’.

  72 Indeed, one thinks of the successors who called Potemkin ‘Papa’.

  73 Nor was this money he could well afford: in 1587 he was in danger of forfeiting property worth £13,000, and more besides, if his creditors foreclosed on just a percentage - £4,300 worth - of his debts.

  74 One of her frequent digs at Lettice, here!

  75 He was thirty-one. A brilliant career, and then a moment of great danger in his thirty-second year, had been Dr Dee’s prediction for him.

  76 As Potemkin told an Englishman two centuries later, towards the end of his relationship with Catherine, ‘When things go smoothly, my influence is small but when she meets with rubs, she always wants me and then my influence is as great as ever.’

  77 Camden, two decades later, described her as carrying ‘the truncheon of an ordinary Captain’, and walking up and down ‘sometimes like a Woman, and anon, with the countenance and pace of a Soldier’.