by Jane Dunn
Back in Scotland, her subjects sensing their near success at throwing off the yoke of France, fired ordnance into the air in celebration. ‘They say they wish the young Queen were in the same state as her mother.’56 For a while Elizabeth was more popular with the Scots than their own distant queen. In fact there was an influential movement from the Scottish lords to encourage the talk of a marriage between Elizabeth and the Earl of Arran, next in line after Mary Stuart to the Scottish throne, with an eye eventually to unite the two kingdoms. The Spanish ambassador certainly believed this was more than a possibility for he risked Elizabeth’s displeasure by declaring to her face ‘that her real object was to make herself monarch of all Britain by marrying the Earl of Arran’.57 This anxiety Elizabeth did not attempt to dispel, for a month later in conversation with the same ambassador she casually mentioned that she had heard that the Queen of Scots was very ill, ‘and if she died without an heir the Duke of Châtelherault would be glad for his son the Earl of Arran to succeed to the throne [of Scotland]’.58
From the stresses of making war, Elizabeth had turned with abandon to the pleasures of love. It was summer and Lord Robert was an attentive and seductive companion in all her vigorous pursuits, hunting recklessly by day and dancing most of the night. Cecil, who had laboured long and hard in the prosecution of the war, and then in negotiating the peace, returned to London. It proved indeed to be ‘daungerous Servis and unthankfull’59 for he was welcomed by Elizabeth not with praise and gratitude, and some material reward, but with majestic froideur and the galling sight of his queen gallivanting with her Master of the Horse. Robert Dudley was Cecil’s bête noire, and he feared the ruin of Elizabeth and the country should Dudley ever achieve his grand ambitions.
The queen’s fond old governess and most intimate lady of the bedchamber, Catherine Ashley, the nearest she had to a mother, did not mince her words of warning and reproof. On her knees, she ‘implored her to marry and put an end to all these disreputable rumours’. If Elizabeth did not marry soon, she said, she feared her reputation would be ruined and her subjects discontented. If she was to die without issue there would be ‘much bloodshed in the realm’. Warming to her admonitory role, Mrs Ashley continued, ‘Rather than this should happen she would have strangled her Majesty in the cradle.’60
Elizabeth was conciliatory and reassuring, but she had no wish, she said, to marry. Then, turning disingenuous and appealing to her old nurse’s sympathetic nature and their shared memories, she continued: ‘in this world she had had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy’ and so the ‘graciousness’ she showed towards Lord Robert was nothing more than a reward for his generosity on her behalf and a little light relief for herself. Catherine Ashley would have recognized everything to which Elizabeth alluded, for she knew more than anyone what her young charge had endured. She knew how abandoned and afraid Elizabeth had been. She also knew everything that went on in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, a fact the queen was not slow to point out as she declared that she had never given anyone just cause to doubt her honour. Elizabeth could not resist, however, a flare of imperious defiance: ‘If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable life, from which may God preserve her, she did not know of anyone who could forbid her.’61 That one autocratic phrase (the emphasis mine) so crackles with Elizabethan reality, her character is propelled into the present.
Cecil had written to Elizabeth after his triumphant negotiations were completed with a frankness which would be considered unseemly today, urging her to proceed with her side of the bargain: ‘my continual prayer that God would direct your heart to procure a father for your children, and so shall the children of all your realm bless your seed. Neither peace nor war without this will profit us long.’62 However, Cecil could not believe that Elizabeth would be so rash and wrong-headed as to choose such an opportunist as Lord Robert to provide the fertilization of that precious seed. At this point in her life Elizabeth was behaving as if her reputation and the diplomatic marital manoeuvres counted as nothing against her desire for lovemaking with the glamorous companion of her youth.
The Spanish ambassador described Cecil’s reservations. ‘He clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through Robert’s intimacy with the Queen, who surrendered all affairs to him and meant to marry him.’ He related a strikingly prescient, and indiscreet, comment allegedly made by Cecil: ‘He ended by saying that Robert was thinking of killing his wife, who was publicly announced to be ill, although she was quite well, and would take very good care they did not poison her.’ Elizabeth too, apparently indulged in some premature prognostication, telling the same ambassador, as she returned from hunting, ‘that Robert’s wife was dead or nearly so’,63 and this all, he implied, occurred before the news of Amy Dudley’s death reached London.
Bishop Quadra was a clever politician with his own agenda. He loathed Elizabeth and her heretic court. He had scant regard even for the worthy and redoubtable Cecil of whom he declared there was nobody worse to command such authority in the kingdom. But damning as these rumours were they were just part of a wider, and wilder, set of conspiracies the rest of the country was busy embroidering. Elizabeth seemed quite unashamedly to be besotted with Dudley, a young man, obviously opportunistic with aspirations of the highest kind. His father and grandfather had been executed by their monarchs for excessive ambition, and the whole country and the gossips abroad expected this scion to follow family tradition in lurid style.
These heady summer days for Elizabeth, and the uneasiness of Cecil, were abruptly terminated by the tragic death so many times foretold. It occurred on 8 September, the day after Elizabeth’s twenty-seventh birthday. The electrifying news that Dudley’s wife was found dead at the bottom of a staircase at Cumnor Hall in Oxfordshire, the country house where she had been staying, reached London the next day. It was particularly shocking news because it had been long expected, and carried the most heinous implications. Gossip over Elizabeth and Dudley had centred on the fact that he would have to get rid of one wife before he could claim the greatest prize of all, the Queen of England – in the process becoming king himself. In a society rife with superstition and ulterior motives this sudden and tragic event could only be invested with the most sinister meaning. Rumours of Dudley’s long-planned infamy now became as good as fact. Even though he had been at Windsor on that day, he was popularly thought to have instigated the death of his inconvenient wife, through poison, hired assassin or some black art.
Amy Dudley’s death brought an abrupt end to any pretensions Elizabeth may have had that she could marry the man she loved. She had learned young the dangers of serious scandal being attached to her name. Her position as a monarch ordained by God and sustained by the love and loyalty of her people was something she valued above everything. She had endured fear and suffering to reach this place, and now, just two years into her reign, she had no intention of risking any loss of power or popular affection. Suddenly fate, it seemed, had given her what she had wanted, but the gift had been poisoned in the giving. Thomas Lever, a friend of Roger Ascham and the evangelical Archdeacon of Coventry, wrote to Cecil of his congregation’s unease and urged an enquiry: ‘here in these Parts, semeth unto me, to be a grevous, and dangerous suspition, and muttering of the Death of her, wich was the Wife of my lord Robert Dudlei … if no search, nor inquire be made, and known, the displeasure of God, the dishonor of the Quene, and the Danger of the whole Realme is to be feared.’64
It was not just in the provinces that people were shocked and uneasy. In London too, according to the Spanish ambassador, ‘The cry is that they do not want any more women rulers, and this woman [Elizabeth] may find herself and her favourite in prison any morning.’65 There was even talk of what male heir could be found to succeed her. So desperate were some for the security of a male ruler that Henry Hastings,* Earl of Huntingdon, another more distant cousin, was hurriedly put in the frame. Elizabeth recognized immediately how compromised she appeared to be. She acted quickly. Dud
ley was rusticated to Kew, banished from court and from her presence until the results of an enquiry were known.
Bishop Quadra’s comment implying the rank inferiority of female rule revealed that Elizabeth was still on probation. She had a long way to go before she lived down the bitter memory of her sister’s reign and disproved the religious, intellectual and popular prejudices against women in positions of power. The expectation remained that she would exhibit the moral weakness, intellectual limitation and emotional untrustworthiness thought endemic in her sex. Elizabeth was clear-sighted about the need to earn her people’s loyalty and trust. ‘Her owne state was not well established’, she had told the Scottish lords, ‘as neither herself beinge settled in authoritie nor her subjects in obedience.’66
Impassioned as she was, Elizabeth above all was a tough-minded young woman whose long and hard apprenticeship had prepared in her the self-control necessary for government. Her heart was to be sacrificed for her kingdom. This was the moment when she demonstrated to the world that she was queen first; that her people’s loyalty and trust mattered. Within the month she had told her long-suffering, and relieved, Secretary Cecil that she did not intend to marry Lord Robert. It remained obvious that her feelings for him had not changed but the circumstances and their implications had. Elizabeth knew as queen that in any conflict between private desire and public good it was desire that had to be overruled. With radical insight she told Cecil ‘[her people] have the right of controlling the public actions of their sovereigns’.67
Her cousin Mary never accepted this hard rule of self-control and personal sacrifice. When faced with a similar scandal six and a half years later she showed a watching world she was a woman first – and a reckless one at that – before she was queen. With her too, as with Elizabeth, the drama included an inconvenient spouse and an opportune death, a suspect ambitious lover and a clear need for judicial enquiry. But the responses of both queens could not have been more different, and the resolutions of the crises transformed each reign.
Elizabeth coolly distanced herself from the man who was the cause of the contaminating scandal, and favoured a legal investigation. In the process she strengthened the monarchy and the perception of her ability to rule, while maintaining her relationship with her favourite for the rest of his life. But Mary, compromised, even complicit, in more baleful circumstances, refused all such careful counsel, even from Elizabeth herself. Instead she embraced anarchy and rushed headlong into a union with the prime suspect, casting princely duty to the winds. Humiliation, alienation, danger, immediately engulfed her: the loss of her kingdom and liberty, and finally her life, inexorably followed.
In fact, Mary did have a chance to learn from her cousin’s painful example, although she chose to ignore it. She was at the heart of the French court where details of the Dudley affair offered endless hours of amusement to Elizabeth’s detractors and enemies. The English ambassador Throckmorton, naturally of a pessimistic cast of mind, was beside himself with embarrassment and foreboding: with ‘weeping eyes’ he wrote to the Marquis of Northampton of the ‘dishonourable and naughty reports that are made here of the Queen … which every hair of my head stareth at and my ears glow to hear’.68 The outpouring of schadenfreude from the ‘malicious French’69 sought to discredit the new queen, the new religion and the probity of the English generally. ‘One laugheth at us, another threateneth, another revileth the Queen. Some let not to say, What religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife, and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him?’70 Mary herself was not averse to pouring her own particular scorn on her cousin for she, a Queen of Scotland, was married to no lesser personage than the King of France and yet here the Queen of England, Mary reportedly sneered, was intent on marrying her horsekeeper, ‘who has killed his wife to make room for her’.71 Not only a servant but a criminally murderous one too.
The facts that led to Amy Dudley’s death remained as elusive as the full story of the scandal which seven years later would lose Mary her kingdom. But an enquiry into the Dudley affair was soon under way. For many months before her death there had been rumours that Amy was ill, that she had ‘a malady in one of her breasts’.72 She had many reasons to be unhappy and could well have been in pain. There was a good deal of contemporary speculation as to her state of mind. On the day of her death Lady Robert Dudley had insisted that all her servants leave her to spend the afternoon at a fair in Abingdon. There were those who were unwilling to comply, but she was adamant, they all had to go. Just two women remained with her in the house.
The evidence of her lady’s maid’s was significant. ‘Divers times’, she said in an unguarded moment, she had heard her mistress ‘pray to God to deliver her from desperation.’73 Then, realizing this implied her lady might have committed the irredeemable sin of self-destruction, she was keen to stress what a godly person her mistress was and how her death was most likely a terrible accident. Modern medical opinion also indicates that if Amy Dudley had had a cancer in the breast which had migrated into her bones then theoretically it was possible that she could have broken her neck as a result of even a trivial fall.
She had died in the residence of a man, Anthony Forster, from whom she and Lord Robert rented their apartments. He was universally respected as an honest and honourable man, which soothed some of the wildest speculations of conspiracy. ‘His great honesty doth much curb the evil thoughts of the people.’74 Robert Dudley’s reputation, however, was of a man capable of doing anything to achieve his ends.
In fact, Lord Robert appeared to be genuinely bewildered by the sequence of events, and as keen as anyone to discover the truth. He did seem, however, to be less grieved by the sudden death of his wife than shocked by this abrupt reversal of his fortunes. As the main suspect, he did not feign a widower’s grief, as a guilty man might be expected to do, but rather revealed to Cecil the opportunist’s heartfelt concern over his fall from royal favour and exile from the court. ‘I am sorry so sudden a Chance shall breede me so great a Change’, he wrote after Cecil had visited him at Kew, ‘for methinks I am hear all this while, as it were in a Dreame, and so farr, so farre, from the Place I am bound to be … Forgett me not, though you se me not, and I will remember you, and fayll ye not.’75
The enquiry returned a verdict of accidental death. But the evidence was too sketchy and the popular suspicion of Dudley’s motives too entrenched for the young favourite to cast off the slur that he was somehow implicated in the tragedy. In the Elizabethan mind where the occult and the material world were closely intermingled, wishing for something could be interpreted as actually willing it to happen. After a lavish funeral for his wife, Lord Robert returned to court in mourning, but was soon restored to the queen’s side as if nothing had interrupted the momentum of their relationship. She protected him from his detractors and loyally sprang to his defence when people disdained him, for he was everything to her, long-established brother, lover, friend. But she knew his reputation would not enhance her own. Much as her heart was touched by him, her watchful intelligence did not sleep.
Robert Jones, ambassador Throckmorton’s secretary, was sent from Paris in November to warn the queen exactly what scandals were being spread abroad, just how much the Queen of Scots and the rest of the court enjoyed her discomfiture. Elizabeth tossed aside the accusations, declaring that Lord Robert’s honesty and her own honour had been vindicated by the enquiry. But Jones thought the whole business ‘doth much perplex her’. He remarked that the first time the document creating Dudley an earl, drawn up on the queen’s instructions, was proffered for her signature, she took not a quill but a blade to it, cutting it to shreds, declaring that he came from a long line of traitors.
Despite these temporary setbacks Dudley’s ambitions were as grand as ever, his attractiveness to Elizabeth was undiminished, but her perspective on the conflicting demands of being a great prince and a woman had changed. Inadvertently and inevitably, he had tainted her with his own crisis. But she had never underes
timated the power of public feeling nor the speed with which allegiances could turn. Her position was still precarious, the contenders for her throne were in waiting, the prejudices against female rule were ready to be confirmed. Somehow Elizabeth had to transcend the disadvantages of being a woman, unequal, carnal, fallible, as she was reckoned to be. Somehow she had to become extra human in her relationship with her people but superhuman in her role as queen.
The Virgin Mother was a potent symbol for Elizabeth and for every contemporary in Christendom. Ideologically downgraded by the new reformed church, she nevertheless maintained an enduring place in people’s hearts, in their traditions, stories and spiritual life. The Virgin was thoroughly human and could sympathize with the suffering of others, but was herself chosen by God above the rest of her sex, and through His intervention elevated to the divine. With a decreasing role for the Catholic Virgin Mary, mother of God, any vacuum in people’s imaginations could affectively be filled by the new secular Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, the consort of her people. Adoration for the Virgin Mary could be transmuted without much ado to a personal love and loyalty for Elizabeth, their singular queen who, in remaining unmarried remained theirs alone.
There is no way of knowing whether this was a conscious thought in her own mind. The experiences of Elizabeth’s life, however, increasingly indicated that, even ignoring a natural antipathy to marriage, the political ramifications of any marital choice she might make as queen were complex and troublesome. To remain unmarried, but available to all, proved to be a most successful piece of foreign policy, for to continue a potential ally to every European monarch was to be an enemy of none. This way, equivocation prevailed and Elizabeth’s councillors, ambassadors and suitors drifted in a fog of confusion and doubt. They jumped at shadows, pursued chimeras and constructed fantastic castles of cause and effect around their red-haired maiden queen. There was wild hope too: in imagination anyone stood a chance of claiming the virgin and becoming king. Even her people could believe that in belonging to no one their queen was somehow uniquely theirs.