by John Guy
After Orange’s murder, the beleaguered Dutch had been desperate enough to invite King Henry III of France to be their new sovereign. Walsingham, who for many years had been among the keenest to assist the Dutch rebels on both religious and military grounds, received a full report of their offer from his agent in Delft in early October 1584.1 Although a Catholic, Henry – unlike the Duke of Guise – was no friend to Philip, and at first it was believed that he might accept the sovereignty. At a Privy Council meeting on 10 October, it was decided to send ‘some wise person’ to Holland to see if Elizabeth could in some way become a co-signatory, or guarantor, of a Franco-Dutch entente. This was her preferred position. If, however, the French king refused to protect the Dutch States ‘from Spanish tyranny’, she had already decided that she would not make a counter-offer to be their sovereign but would do what she could to rescue them. ‘Her Majesty’, wrote Burghley, summarizing the Council’s position in a series of confidential memos, ‘would strain herself as far forth as with preservation of her own estate she might, to succour them at this time.’ She would do this knowing full well that it would mean war with Spain.2
Shortly after the Council meeting, Elizabeth came down with a severe gastric disorder, partly caused by stress and partly by her choice of breakfast, ‘a confection of barley, sodden with sugar and water, and made exceeding thick with bread’.3 When she recovered, she sent William Davison, Walsingham’s ablest assistant and a passionate supporter of the Dutch rebels, to Holland to gather news. And with the Duke of Guise poised to launch a war of succession in France, she would need highly placed sources there, too. She therefore sent Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, a trusted kinsman by marriage and a man with astonishingly elegant handwriting – to boost his credentials, she would shortly make him a privy councillor – to ingratiate himself in Paris on the ingenious pretext that he was to invest King Henry with the Order of the Garter. In this way, Elizabeth would quickly discover how the French meant to respond to the Dutch offer.
• • •
On Friday, 5 March 1585, a muddy horseman riding post-haste from Paris clattered over the cobblestones into the courtyard at Greenwich Palace. His name was Charles Merbury and he was Derby’s courier, bringing the news that Henry had declined the Dutch offer of sovereignty.4 Burghley immediately summoned a second Council meeting.5 Eleven councillors assembled first thing on Monday morning at Cecil House on the Strand, with its thick brick walls, turrets reaching up towards the sky, banqueting house, and pleasure gardens with exotic plants leading on to the open fields of Covent Garden.
By then, the mood in the capital was close to fever pitch. The previous Tuesday, Dr William Parry, a Welshman and one of Burghley’s former spies, who had been suborned by papal agents in Venice and Rome and turned traitor, had been gruesomely hanged in Westminster Palace Yard. A self-indulgent social climber, Parry had converted to Catholicism and received communion at the Jesuit College in Paris to seal a vow to assassinate Elizabeth. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, watched him die from the vantage point of a wooden stand built specially for the occasion. Cut down from the gallows on the queen’s orders the moment the ladder was kicked away after just one swing of the rope, Parry had his heart and bowels ripped from his body with a meat cleaver by the executioner while he was still fully conscious.* As the blade plunged deep into his body, he gave what a stunned spectator described as ‘a great groan’. Finally, the hangman severed head and limbs from the corpse, to be impaled on London Bridge and above the gates of the city as a warning to others of the terrible price of treason.6
In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the Duke of Parma’s army was crushing the Calvinists so mercilessly and effectively that it seemed as if the Dutch revolt would soon be confined to little more than the three northernmost provinces, Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht. With Antwerp predicted to fall at any moment, the Privy Council strongly urged the queen at its Monday meeting to intervene to save the Dutch. Burghley delivered their advice to her in writing, and the very next day she sent Edward Burnham, another of Walsingham’s trusted assistants, to inform the Dutch States that, ‘seeing it [is] a matter of so great peril in case the King of Spain should come to the possession of those countries . . . she is fully resolved to take the protection of them.’7 (Mistaken claims by previous biographers, relying on Camden’s Annales, that Elizabeth had to bludgeon Burghley into compliance can be explained by confusion over the authorship of certain crucial memoranda.)8
Negotiations over the precise terms of the Anglo-Dutch treaty were still pending when Burghley gave orders that the fortifications at the key ports of Dover and Portsmouth should be reinforced and stocks of artillery made ready at the Tower. Fierce storms delayed the Channel crossing of the Dutch representatives sent to finalize the terms of the treaty: they landed at Margate on the Kent coast only on 24 June. They signed the main points of agreement, or ‘heads’, on 10 August at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, another of Henry VIII’s pleasure palaces, whose gardens and Italian-style stucco decorations had been modelled on Fontainebleau (‘Nonsuch’ meant ‘second to none’). Elizabeth, it was agreed, would send ‘a nobleman of rank and reputation’ to assist the Dutch in their fight against Philip, at the head of a large and well-equipped expeditionary force.9 No time was to be lost. The Spaniards were mobilizing for war. They had already placed an embargo on English and Dutch shipping at anchor in Iberian ports, a worrying fact Walsingham learned from the captain of the London merchant vessel Primrose, which had made a plucky escape from Bilbao when Philip’s agents had attempted to seize it.10
• • •
On both sides of the North Sea, the ‘nobleman of rank and reputation’ most widely canvassed for the command of the English expeditionary force was the Earl of Leicester. Acclaimed as ‘that valiant and mild leader’, Leicester had been an unrivalled champion of the Protestant cause in northern Europe for almost twenty years. Many now hoped that he would lead the Dutch out of captivity, just as Moses had led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.11 Leicester himself was desperate to secure the posting. The biggest obstacle in his path stemmed from the fact that he was Elizabeth’s favourite, the only man she ever truly loved. He was not alone in fearing she would not be able to bring herself to let him leave her side to take on so risky a venture.
Lithe, athletic and relatively tall, with piercing bluish-grey eyes, soft, flowing auburn hair and a moustache heavily flecked with silver-grey, Leicester had the flashy good looks Elizabeth found irresistible in a man. Their relationship went back almost forty years, to the time when he was plain Robert Dudley and she was a young girl living in Hertfordshire in the charge of a governess.12 When she was nine and Robert a year or so older, her father, a distant presence in her life but someone whom she always revered as a God-appointed monarch and fount of true wisdom, had made her household a satellite of her half-brother Edward’s.13 Sir William Sidney, whose teenage son, Henry, was one of the young prince’s constant companions and shared in his education, was in overall charge. The Sidneys and Dudleys were always close: Elizabeth first met the young Robert Dudley when he came to visit as a boy. In 1551, Henry Sidney would marry Robert’s sister Mary, a woman who very likely introduced Elizabeth to the trashy Italian novellas she enjoyed reading.14 It was Mary Sidney who nursed the queen through a near-fatal attack of smallpox, at a harrowing cost to herself: so badly pocked was her face when she, too, caught the disease, it ruined her life. Elizabeth, whose face was only lightly marked, shabbily rejected her friend, distancing herself from her both emotionally and physically in her eagerness to deny her own minor scarring, which she concealed with the careful use of ointments.15
By July 1553, when the fifteen-year-old Edward had died in Henry Sidney’s arms, Elizabeth had named the dashing twenty-one-year-old Robert to the post of Keeper of Somerset Place, her London mansion.16 Within a month of her gaining the throne, King Philip’s roving ambassador, the Count of Feria, had singled him out as second only to Burghley in
her inner circle.17 It was Elizabeth’s habit to give pet nicknames to her closest intimates. She addressed Burghley as ‘Sir Spirit’ and Walsingham as ‘Moor’ but Robert, more affectionately, as ‘Rob’ or ‘Sweet Robin’ and as her ‘Eyes’.
Elizabeth did so little to conceal her feelings for Robert Dudley that in 1560 Nicholas Throckmorton, then in France, bewailed to Burghley the scandalous – Robert was a married man – gossip circulating about the couple. Many felt Elizabeth had allowed him to presume too much, even to hope that she might one day consent to marry him. Feria, who let no opportunity slip to score points off the Protestant queen, was one of the chief sources of rumours of their alleged sexual trysts. (Elizabeth took her revenge by keeping Feria’s wife standing for over two hours waiting for an audience while heavily pregnant.)18 And yet, when the queen believed she was about to die from smallpox, she had made a declaration that ‘although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness, nothing improper had ever passed between them.’19 Few were convinced. What doubly fuelled the scandal were reports that Robert was simply waiting for his wife to die: then he would marry the queen. He had married his wife, Amy Robsart, the daughter of a wealthy Norfolk landowner, in 1550. They had separated around the time of Elizabeth’s coronation in 1559, after which Robert visited Amy scarcely once a year, and, when he did go, he was reputedly under the queen’s strict orders ‘to do nothing with her’ and to go dressed all in black.20
Shockingly, on the afternoon of Sunday, 8 September 1560, Amy was found mysteriously dead with a broken neck and two deep gashes in her skull after supposedly falling down a stone spiral staircase while lodged at Cumnor Place, near Oxford.21 Immediately judged guilty of murder in the court of public opinion, Robert strained every nerve to uncover the true cause of his wife’s death. Even though the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of accidental death, loose ends remained. What troubled many was that the jury’s foreman, Sir Richard Smith, had once been Elizabeth’s servant; that Dudley knew another juror personally; and that Thomas Blount, his agent, had dined with two of the other jurors before they reached their verdict.
Robert still believed that he could marry Elizabeth – but her survival instinct kicked in. After brooding over the matter for several days, she decided that it was impossible if she hoped to keep her throne. She could not be thought to be an accessory to murder, however innocent Robert might actually be.
That, at least, is how the story traditionally goes. But the evidence of Elizabeth’s own words invites scepticism. Although passionately in love with Robert before and shortly after her accession to the throne, three months later she was dropping broad hints of a firm intention to remain single. ‘I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself,’ she told Parliament then.22 In his Annales, Camden claimed she emphatically added, ‘I have already joined myself in marriage to a husband, namely, the Kingdom of England,’ but he made that bit up.23 What she actually went on to say was: ‘In the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’24
In 1576, she spoke further on this theme, saying, ‘If I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm . . . I would not forsake that single state to match myself with the greatest monarch of the world.’ The most she would concede, under intense pressure from Parliament, was that she would marry if she met the right man and if conditions were suitable at the time – ‘I can say no more except the party were present.’ On one point she was adamant, or so she made it appear: ‘I hope to have children, otherwise I would never marry.’25 But even this seemingly uncomplicated remark collapses into ambiguity on closer reading.
Psychologically, Elizabeth appears to have had serious doubts about marriage. This is not perhaps altogether surprising, given that her father had her mother beheaded after accusing her of multiple adultery and incest, and in the light of the searing experiences Elizabeth had endured as a teenager while living with Katherine Parr, her stepmother. Within weeks of Henry VIII’s death, Parr had married her true love, the seductively handsome, sexually predatory, recklessly ambitious Thomas Seymour. Much admired by women for his ‘strong limbs and manly shape’, he would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber early in the mornings before she had risen or was dressed: ‘And if she were up, he would bid her good morrow and ask how she did, and strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly, and so go forth through his lodgings . . . And if she were in her bed, he would open the curtains and bid her good morrow, and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the bed, so that he could not come at her.’ One morning he ‘strove to have kissed her in her bed’.26
A notorious incident then took place in a garden when Parr and Seymour frolicked with Elizabeth and Seymour ‘cut her gown in[to] a hundred pieces, being black cloth’.27 Soon, rumours of a sex scandal spread far and wide. Elizabeth had survived but, after that, she was a changed woman. This was the moment she was thrust into adulthood. She was especially humiliated by the need to deny a report that she was pregnant by Seymour. Such ‘shameful slanders’, she insisted, be ‘greatly both against my honour and honesty, which above all other things I esteem’.28
• • •
Over the first twenty or so years of Elizabeth’s reign, some thirty suitors had offered themselves to her, among them Philip II, Eric XIV of Sweden and the Archduke Charles of Austria. The earliest negotiations for her hand had begun long before, in 1535, when she was just eighteen months old: her mother and her uncle George Boleyn had sought to betroth her to Charles, Duke of Angoulême, the third son of Francis I of France.29 Her last suitor had been Francis, Duke of Anjou, the failed ‘Protector’ of the Netherlands. All of these marriage negotiations collapsed, for a variety of reasons, not least among them the fact that Elizabeth’s councillors believed they had a duty to decide themselves who her husband should be.30
At the climax of her supposed romance with the Duke of Anjou in the winter of 1581–2, Elizabeth had been play-acting to protect her defensive entente with France. True, she had given Anjou a ring and announced their betrothal, but only after he had demanded that she give a straight yes or no to the marriage proposal and Castelnau had handed her a letter from Henry III declining to support her in a possible confrontation with Spain unless she first married his brother. It was the talk of London that, at the Duke’s final departure, she had danced with glee around her Bedchamber ‘for very joy of getting rid of him’.31
Fifteen years earlier, in 1566, during a rare exchange of confidences, Leicester – the man best in a position to know – had told Jacob de Vulcob, Sieur de Sassy, a visiting French diplomat, that ‘she would never marry’. He went on to reveal that, both before and after she was old enough to marry, she had said ‘she had never wished to do so.’32 This was an opinion supported almost forty years later by John Harington, who said ‘in mind she hath ever had an aversion . . . to the act of marriage.’33
Leicester, admittedly, had been at pains to qualify his remarks. ‘If by chance she should change her mind,’ he observed, ‘he was practically assured that she would choose no one else but him, as she had done him the honour of telling him so quite openly on more than one occasion.’34 Of course, it suited him to cultivate a belief among foreign diplomats that she might one day marry him. The idea that he could wield a degree of influence that other councillors lacked lay at the heart of his skill as a politician.35 And there could be no doubt about Elizabeth’s romantic feelings for him. She was several times seen kissing him, and when she had invested him as Earl of Leicester in 1564, the French and Scottish ambassadors had caught her tickling his chin.
• • •
In 1575, in anticipation of a visit from the queen, Leicester had commissioned and openly displayed at Kenilworth Castle, his cherished country estate five miles from Warwick, a full-length portrait of himself with a
matching one of her.36 To do so was decidedly audacious: it presumed that he was practically a surrogate husband. Elizabeth brushed the ensuing criticism aside by claiming their relationship was like that between brother and sister, but the gossip continued, and over the years disgruntled Catholics repeatedly told Philip II and the pope that the queen went on her summer progresses only to have Leicester’s babies. If, however, he was for all practical purposes the only man in her life, the reverse could not be said of him. In or around 1571, he had begun a lengthy affair with the widowed Douglas Howard, Lady Sheffield. Named after her godmother, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, Sheffield was Elizabeth’s half-cousin.37 Leicester had fathered a son, Robert, by her, and, long after their affair was over, Lady Sheffield attempted to establish his legitimacy by claiming that she had been clandestinely married to Leicester.38
Leicester had abruptly ended their relationship in September 1578, when, early one Sunday morning, he secretly married one of the acknowledged beauties of the Court, who was also Elizabeth’s close kinswoman.39 Her name was Lettice Knollys. The eldest daughter of Sir Francis Knollys and his wife, Katherine Carey, she was a great-niece of Anne Boleyn and the queen’s first cousin once removed. A powerfully intelligent woman with strong opinions and a striking physical resemblance to Elizabeth, but ten years younger, Lettice combined chic and a taste for display with a quick, tart wit. She had been the wife of Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex and Earl Marshal of Ireland, and had five children by him. Recently widowed, she had been involved in a passionate liaison with Leicester for some time.