In Lisbon there was difficulty finding a ship bound for the New World, so many had been impounded for the Armada. Every day battered remnants of that once proud fleet came limping back from their hellish journey round Scotland and Ireland. But I prowled the docks daily till I found a merchantman newly mended and seaworthy — so they said — and bound for the New World. That land of promise. The Atlantean land of Doctor Dee. And tis from that journey, in search of my love and my destiny, that I write.
The weather is turning ugly, and soon I shall pack up my ink and quill and journal and go below. I should like to say that I have conquered my fear of the sea, but this would be a lie. I have found a means of comfort, however, when the terror of the waves threatens to overwhelm me. I hie to the hold where my sweet Mirage is stabled, and sit with her. The Lorcas had left her with the Bishop, saying that one day an Italian named Reggio would return for her. The sound of my voice seems to soothe Mirage, as her scent and strength and beauty soothe me. Together, thus, we have ridden out many a storm and banished fear, if only for a time.
Tho I have suffered the twin griefs of loss and separation, yet there is thanksgiving every day in my heart for the love and many blessings with which I have been gifted. The wide world is mine to explore, and hope is my constant companion.
My Father is dead, but never in my life forgotten. And my Mother is Queen of England.
ARTHUR DUDLEY
A Historical Perspective
That a man claiming to be the son of Elizabeth and Leicester, and calling himself Arthur Dudley, lived in the late sixteenth century is indisputable fact. Whether he was who he professed to be is a matter of conjecture. Though this problem is, to my way of thinking, one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Renaissance, and while there are numerous references to illegitimate children born to Elizabeth and her horsemaster, Robin Dudley, Earl of Leicester, during the first years of her reign when the love affair with Dudley was a generally accepted fact, specific mentions of Arthur Dudley are scarce.
Contemporary explanations of how the closely watched Queen could get away with such a thing ran thus: Every summer Elizabeth would depart on her summer progress, which lasted for up to five months. During this time, it was suggested, she would, using proxies and feigned illnesses and specially designed clothing, “disappear into the countryside” for the final months of pregnancy and lying-in.
Such rumors might of course be no more than idle backstairs gossip, but I found as I researched The Queen’s Bastard that while Arthur Dudley’s story had many gaps in its chronology, the scenario was entirely plausible. In fact, nothing in his story conflicted with any part of Elizabeth’s or Leicester’s minutely documented lives. I began wondering why biographers of Elizabeth, with only a few exceptions, had ignored so interesting a personage, or at best relegated him to a footnote in history.
I reasoned that most writers subscribed to the hypothesis that Elizabeth was, in the strictest sense, the Virgin Queen she purported to be. If this were true, anyone claiming to be her offspring must, of course, have been an impostor. But recently several Tudor biographers have examined the possibility that the Elizabeth-Dudley relationship was indeed a carnal one. My own opinion is that the two were intimate in the fullest sense of the word. It is a fact that during the first year of her reign, when William Cecil was away in Scotland negotiating the Treaty of Edinburgh, Elizabeth and Dudley were closeted together day and night for weeks on end. This behavior was so scandalous that when Cecil returned he sternly rebuked her for it.
If one considers heredity a factor, it should be remembered that Elizabeth was the child of two outrageous and passionate parents, Henry and Anne, and was herself a vigorous and healthy young woman with a great appetite for many physical pleasures including dancing, hard riding, and hunting. She was decidedly willful. She was queen and reveled in the fact that she could do as she pleased. And she was deeply in love with her childhood friend Robin Dudley. Even after the scandal of his wife’s suspicious death, Elizabeth had the audacity to move him into apartments at Greenwich Castle adjoining her own. These do not seem to me the actions or the attributes of a chaste woman.
My search for the story of Elizabeth’s and Dudley’s illegitimate child began when I came upon a reference to him in Carolly Erickson’s The First Elizabeth that was so brief and dismissive that it hardly registered: “ … in the 1580’s a boy representing himself as their son was making himself known at Catholic Courts abroad.” A few allusions to Arthur Dudley in other books were similarly brief, with one as long as a paragraph, and all of them parroting the notion that he could not have been anything but an impostor.
Imagine my delight upon finding an entire page devoted to him in what had become my bible on the relationship of the Queen and her horsemaster, Elizabeth Jenkins’s Elizabeth and Leicester. While admitting that the early part of Arthur Dudley’s story, which rested “entirely on his own assertion … had been got up by somebody with considerable knowledge of the events of twenty-five years before,” she ultimately rejected his claim to royal blood on the basis of his age. “Dudley was said to be twenty-five years old, and 1562 was the year in which Elizabeth had nearly died of smallpox. An illness of the Queen’s was there established in the probable year of his birth.” Carol Levin in The Heart and Stomach of a King concurs. “We know that Elizabeth was seriously ill in 1562 with smallpox; this was not a cover for her having given birth to a child.” I agree with that, but from my reading, his age being twenty-five was approximate. Much of the dating from that part of history is imprecise. It cannot tell us, for example, the exact year of Queen Anne Boleyn’s birth. If, in fact, Arthur Dudley was twenty-six at the time of his arrest in Spain, his year of birth would have been 1561, and during that year Elizabeth’s summer progress is completely undocumented from the middle of the month of June till the end of October — a huge hole in history. Plenty of time for her to “disappear into the countryside.”
The bulk of what we know of young Dudley comes from a deposition he gave to Francis Englefield, Philip II’s English secretary in 1587, the year that Arthur, disguised as a pilgrim, was arrested in the north of Spain as a spy for England, the year before the Spanish Armada. The document, gleaned from five days of interrogation by Englefield, complete with Philip’s handwritten comments in his loopy scrawl, survives among his State Papers in the archives of Salamanca. Englefield clearly believed Dudley’s account.
Certainly the story is sketchy, but it was sufficient to serve as a skeleton for the plot of The Queen’s Bastard. Arthur claimed to have been born to the Queen, and handed over as an infant by Kat Ashley to Robert Southern, who became keeper of Enfield Chase. He was brought up by Southern in ignorance of his true lineage. At age fifteen he ran away from home and was inexplicably brought back from Milford Haven by a warrant from the Privy Council. Later he fought for the Protestants in the Netherlands War until he was recalled to England when his father lay dying. On his deathbed Southern revealed Arthur’s true identity, after which the young man took himself to confront his birth father, Lord Leicester. Arthur claimed Leicester acknowledged him as his son, then sent him with his secretary, Mr. Fludd, to Walsingham’s house for a passport. Not wishing to be interrogated by the head of Elizabeth’s secret service, Arthur fled to the Continent. Leicester is said to have observed of his son, “You’re like a ship under full sail at sea. Pretty to look at, but dangerous to deal with,” a statement that David Howarth in The Voyage of the Armada claims “has a ring of truth to it.” Once in Spanish custody Arthur apparently suggested that he assassinate the Scottish king James, and implied that he himself was the true successor to the English throne.
Another superb “hole in history” that I discovered was the explosion aboard the Spanish vessel San Salvador during the voyage of the Armada. It was, at the time, believed to be an act of sabotage by a disgruntled foreign mercenary, but the actual identity of the saboteur has remained a mystery and I used this, happily to my advantage, in Arthur’s story.
Howarth’s account of the Armada from the Spanish perspective was the last piece on Arthur that I discovered, fully halfway through the writing of Bastard. The author’s analysis of Philip’s motivations and behavior surrounding his Great Enterprise was the most detailed and well observed of any I’d read, and I was gratified by the seriousness with which the author regarded the person of Arthur Dudley. The King of Spain, he wrote, was — though no one was then aware of it — planning to take the crown of conquered England for himself and his daughter the Infanta Isabella. When he was confronted with Arthur, Philip took him seriously enough to consider him having “a stronger claim to the throne than anyone else.” The King therefore saw him as a potential rival and someone who, for reasons of national security, needed locking up. “It will certainly be safest,” Philip wrote in the margins of Englefield’s report, “to make sure of his person until we know more about the matter.” Arthur was clapped in a Spanish prison and from that moment on was lost to history.
I was struck by the realization that if the King of Spain as well as Francis Englefield, each of whom knew both parents personally, considered that the young man might be telling the truth, then perhaps readers of history as well as historical fiction should finally be made aware of Arthur Dudley’s existence so that they might decide for themselves if he was, in fact, the bastard child of Lord Leicester and the Virgin Queen.
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