Douglas didn’t want to hear that the queen was more important to her lover than she was; but Dudley gave her a choice: to continue the status quo and remain his mistress, or to end the affair. Douglas eventually got what she wanted when she was convinced that she was pregnant with Dudley’s child. She wed the forty-year-old earl in the presence of three witnesses (all of whom would later deny everything) sometime between November 11 and Christmas Day, 1573. Although the reason for the trip to the altar may have been just a false alarm, almost exactly nine months from the “I do’s,” Douglas (who left court before her belly began to show) gave birth to a son whom they christened Robert.
Dudley was on progress with the queen at the time. His congratulatory letter to Douglas signed “your loving husband” subsequently disappeared. And the earl began referring to the boy as “my base [illegitimate] son,” although he would leave most of his property to him, which Dudley might not have done if he had really considered the child to be a bastard.
In any event, the earl didn’t act very married. In 1575 he renewed his pursuit of Elizabeth, urging her to once again consider his suit. As always, she equivocated, refusing to give him a firm answer.
Throughout her reign, the queen toyed with the prospect of wedding a foreign prince, or espousing one of her own subjects, but it was all politics and prevarication. She fully intended to keep the French, the Spanish, the Swedes, Mary, Queen of Scots, and even her own parliament relegated to the role of marionettes, dangling them on a string while she pretended to be considering a match. But the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, remained the love of her life. She heaped him with honors, risking her reputation (and consequently her own value on the marriage market) to spend hours alone with him. But it came with a price. Dudley’s job was to worship and adore her and her alone. In that respect, he betrayed her three times by wedding other women. The last Countess of Leicester would be Elizabeth’s own envious cousin, Lettice Knollys.
Morality was clearly not Dudley’s strong suit. He seemed to want it all, and believed he could get it. So while poor Douglas was relegated to being proverbial chopped liver, Dudley set his sights on the kingdom’s biggest catch. However, during the mid 1570s, as the queen continued to forestall his marriage proposals (which he couldn’t really make in earnest or it would have been bigamy), instead of focusing his attentions on his new wife (Douglas) and their young son, the earl turned in another direction entirely. Perhaps he reasoned that if he couldn’t have Elizabeth, her look-alike cousin Lettice might make an appealing substitute.
There was just a bit of a hitch: at the time, Lettice Knollys was also married—to Walter Devereux, the 1st Earl of Essex. However, Lettice’s marriage to the Earl of Essex, while fruitful, was not a particularly happy one. She was reported to have felt relieved in 1573 when her husband embarked upon a diplomatic mission to Ireland that would keep him there for two years. Essex’s absence gave his wife ample opportunity to flirt with the Earl of Leicester.
Just how much Lettice knew about Dudley’s relationship with Douglas is unclear. But it’s certain that she encouraged his attentions and pressed her advantage with him. She was unhappily married; he was hot and popular, and, more to the point, if she could snag the court favorite, her own prominence would increase. Before long, although it looked to the world like Dudley was still wooing the queen, it was Lettice who was warming his bed. Signs that he was passionately involved with the queen’s doppelgänger were his magnanimous gift to Lettice of a passel of deer from his seat at Kenilworth Castle and a standing invitation to Lettice and her sister Anne West, Lady De La Warr, to hunt there at any time. By the summer of 1575 Lettice was a regular fixture at Kenilworth (just as, centuries later, Camilla Parker Bowles would assume the role of chatelaine at Prince Charles’s Highgrove estate while he was still married to Diana).
In November Lettice’s husband, the earl of Essex, returned to England to discover that he had been cuckolded by Dudley. The extramarital affair was the talk of the court, and false rumors were spreading that in Essex’s absence Lettice had already borne her lover two children. But there would be no duels at dawn. Instead, in 1576 Essex accepted a return posting to Ireland, where he died of dysentery that September. The Tudor rumor mill being what it was, gossip circulated that Dudley had poisoned him.
Lettice was lucky in that Dudley’s less than savory reputation actually worked in her favor, because it gave her the ability to take full advantage of what her cousin Elizabeth had to assiduously avoid. People were always willing to believe the worst about the Earl of Leicester. His first wife, Amy Robsart, whom he had married in 1550, died a decade later after a mysterious fall down a short flight of steps. Although a royal court of inquiry exonerated him of any blame, it was still widely assumed that Dudley had been complicit (perhaps with the queen herself) in his wife’s swift and strange demise so he could clear his path to matrimony with Elizabeth.
But whether Dudley was involved (and Amy might indeed have expired after what was just a freak household accident), he became the Elizabethan equivalent of kryptonite. As a result, the queen could never consider marrying him because their union would always be suspect—the denouement of Amy’s convenient death. This left the door open for Lettice to swan in and pick up the radioactive pieces. Perhaps Elizabeth was somewhat relieved that his wife’s odd demise scotched any notions of a match with Dudley—but in no way did the queen embrace the idea of his marrying anyone else. And just because Lettice may have believed that the earl’s baggage made him ripe for the plucking, that didn’t mean that she’d receive carte blanche to nab him.
She might have captivated Dudley, but the scales had fallen from her husband’s eyes. The ailing Earl of Essex concluded that his wayward and adulterous wife was an unfit mother, and his dying wish was that their children should be removed from Lettice’s custody and placed in the care of one of his relatives, the Earl of Huntingdon. As an added parting shot, in his will Essex left Lettice his estates, which he knew were mired in debt. Unsurprisingly, the queen refused to grant any financial aid to the libidinous cousin who was stealing her beloved bonny Robin.
Essex’s death in September 1576 made Lettice legally available, but to her consternation Dudley evinced no interest in meeting her at the altar. Of course, he was also married to Lady Douglas Sheffield at the time, no matter how much he sought to deny it.
But just as Douglas had been, Lettice was not content to remain Dudley’s mistress while he continued to angle after the biggest fish in the kingdom. Proud of her extraordinary beauty, her kinship to the queen, and her status as the Countess of Essex, she knew she was quite the catch herself—except for that little issue of her lingering debts. She couldn’t exactly go out and get a job, so she desperately needed a man to assume her encumbrances. And the man she’d been shagging fit the bill perfectly. Plus, the fact that the Earl of Leicester was the queen’s acknowledged favorite made him all the more desirable. How delicious it would be to get her debts discharged while sticking it to Elizabeth by stealing her man!
As his ongoing flirtation with Lettice finally blossomed into a full-blown affair, Dudley realized that he needed to ditch Douglas if he wanted to hold on to the queen’s gorgeous cousin. He would begin by contending that his marriage to Douglas had never been legal.
Writing decades after the event, Douglas’s descendant Gervase Holles maintained, “According to the nature of all men who think basely of their prostitutes, after he had used hir body sometime and got a base sonne . . . of hir, [he] rejected hir.”
One day in 1578, Dudley arranged a meeting with Douglas in the gardens of Greenwich Palace, where he offered her the astronomical sum of £700 (more than $242,000 today) to walk away from their relationship and deny that they’d ever been lawfully married. Additionally, he wanted custody of their son.
Douglas became understandably hysterical. But eventually—and possibly in fear of her own reputation—she capitulated, accepting Dudley’s bribe, as well as his offer of a consolat
ion prize: to find her another husband.
The earl was tremendously relieved. With Douglas heading out of sight, their marital indiscretion would also be out of mind—Elizabeth’s mind. Douglas’s departure from his life also left Dudley free to concentrate on his romance with Lettice Knollys.
However, bestowing her sexual favors, particularly as it was generally surmised that the queen withheld them, wasn’t getting Lettice any closer to the altar. So, relying upon Dudley’s honor as a gentleman, the less-than-ladylike Lettice employed the oldest trick in the book. She made certain she got pregnant. Dudley and Amy Robsart had never had children; and Lettice knew that the earl was tired of Douglas and desperately wanted a legitimate heir, as he considered their son to be a bastard.
Just as Lettice had hoped, her lover caved as soon as she informed him of her pregnancy. She married Dudley in a secret ceremony at Kenilworth in the spring of 1578—with the precondition that the earl sever all ties with Douglas Sheffield. Once Dudley had complied with Lettice’s demand, her next move was to insist on a formal wedding ceremony with witnesses present to attest to its legality. But Dudley had his terms, too: The marriage would have to remain a secret, because “it might not be publiquely knowne without great damage of his estate.” No kidding.
Dudley was able to secure a few days’ leave from Elizabeth’s entourage in order to prepare his house for the wedding. He arrived at his estate in Wanstead, Essex, on September 20 and immediately contacted his chaplain, Humphrey Tyndall, informing the cleric “that he had a good seazon for borne marriadge in respect of her Majestie’s displeasure and that he was then for sondry respectes and especially for the better quieting of his own conscience determined to marry the right honourable Countess of Essex.”
The bride’s father, Sir Francis Knollys, was one of the witnesses at her second wedding ceremony. Being all too “acquainted with Leicester’s straying loves,” Sir Francis recognized that it was in his best interests to see his daughter legally wed. So on September 21, 1578, wearing “a loose gown” to conceal her swelling belly, the fecund Lettice married Leicester in a morning ceremony conducted in one of Wanstead’s cozier chambers. Her brother Richard remained by the door, acting as a lookout. The ceremony took place almost two years to the day from Essex’s death, although the formal period of mourning had not deterred Lettice from engaging in a passionate premarital affair with the bridegroom.
The queen arrived at Wanstead with the court two days after Lettice and Dudley’s wedding and the newlyweds acted as though nothing extraordinary had happened. Dudley fawned over Elizabeth as much as he always did, and she was none the wiser—at least for the time being.
Although some sources believe that news of the marriage was whispered around court within two months of the nuptials, it’s difficult to imagine that if everyone else had heard about Lettice’s marriage, the queen wasn’t aware of it as well. Yet if Elizabeth had known about her cousin’s union with Dudley, she would undoubtedly have had a volatile reaction to Lettice’s presence at court over the holidays, and no such explosion is recorded.
A smug Lettice attended the court’s Christmas festivities in 1578 and presented her sovereign and rival with “a greate cheyne of Amber slightly garnished with golde and small perle.” As for the pregnancy that tricked Dudley into popping the question, there is no further historical note about it; Lettice may have miscarried or delivered a stillbirth. She must not have appeared enceinte in December or Elizabeth surely would have noticed. Still, it’s possible, though far-fetched, that Elizabeth didn’t get wind of Lettice’s marriage for a full year. According to her biographer William Camden, she was informed of it by Jean de Simier, the representative of the duc d’Anjou, her prospective bridegroom at the time. Alison Weir is among the historians who believe that Dudley himself may have privately disclosed his marriage to the queen as early as April 1579, because he left court soon afterward, ostensibly to take the waters in Buxton. However, that decision might not have been his own; considering it the ultimate betrayal, Elizabeth may in fact have banished him after hearing that he’d wed her rival.
The “Tudor cub,” as the queen referred to herself, emitted a mighty roar when she discovered the couple’s treachery, announcing that she would send Dudley to “rot in the Tower.”
Lettice was unfazed by her cousin’s rage; instead, she obnoxiously trumpeted her new status as Countess of Essex right under the queen’s envious nose. But when she ostentatiously arrived at court arrayed in finery that rivaled the queen’s, her chutzpah engendered a catfight. Elizabeth literally (and publicly) boxed Lettice’s ears for daring to cross her—and then flaunting her triumph. “As but one sun lighten[s] this earth, [she] would have but one Queen in England,” Her Majesty thundered, livid enough to make the witnesses to this altercation quake in their boots. After berating and humiliating Lettice, Elizabeth demanded that the “flouting wench” quit her sight and never darken a royal doorstep again.
The queen had been enraged at the news that Lettice had wed Dudley, but her ire exponentially intensified when she discovered that her precious Robin had also married Lady Douglas Sheffield, and that they might still be legally united. She became even more livid at the fact that she had not been informed of the situation when it arose, and her network of spies should have discovered it. Elizabeth had learned of the Dudley-Douglas union well after the fact via an anonymously penned letter—probably written by Lettice, who remained intent on crushing any potential rivals and ensuring, undisputedly, that she was the earl’s one and only lawful wife. After receiving the tip-off letter about the nature of Dudley’s liaison with Douglas, Elizabeth commanded the Earl of Sussex to conduct an inquiry for the purposes of determining whether the Earl of Leicester had indeed committed bigamy.
Although Douglas might have testified that she was Dudley’s lawful wife, she was too terrified of the potential consequences of doing so to admit it. So she merely told Sussex that she’d “trusted the said Earl [Leicester] too much to have anything to shew to constrain him to marry her.”
The queen was frustrated that Douglas would not implicate Dudley. Yet an act of vengeance turned into one of kindness (depending on how you look at it). Elizabeth insisted that their son, young Robert Dudley, be given over into her care as a royal ward. True, Douglas was no longer allowed to raise her own son, but as a displaced lady-in-waiting she understood the politics of the court and would have acknowledged that the sacrifice would have a handsome payoff. Her boy would be accorded tremendous royal preferment, which was what all courtiers spent their lives striving to achieve. One also wonders what it cost Elizabeth emotionally to take under her exalted wing the son she never could have with her beloved bonny Robin. The boy grew up to be an accomplished soldier who would have made his father proud.
Precious little took place in a royal court that did not have political undertones and ramifications. The queen’s magnanimous offer to take Douglas’s child into her protection was made partly in revenge against Lettice, whom she now referred to as the “she-wolf” for sinking her teeth into Dudley—the one man at court who was, at least tacitly, off-limits.
The she-wolf became persona non grata at court. Her crimes? Selfishness and arrogance; betrayal of her royal kinswoman; daring to set herself up as a rival to the highest person in the land—one who had no peer by virtue of her sovereignty. Lettice’s role as a lady of the bedchamber was to cater to Elizabeth’s every need and whim, but she sought instead to make herself the star, unwilling to sublimate her own desires to those of the queen. Consequently, Lettice endured an informal exile in the Essex countryside, and had to content herself with periodic visits from her husband, whom Elizabeth kept busy at court.
The queen condescended to forgive Dudley as long as he pretended that his marriage to Lettice had never occurred. Reminding her “sweet bonny Robin” which side his bread was buttered on, the queen wrote to him, “Whosoever professeth to love you best taketh not more comfort of your well doing or discomfort of your ev
ildoing than ourselves.”
Lettice gave birth to Leicester’s son, Robert Dudley, Baron Denbigh, on June 6, 1581, and the earl immediately nicknamed the boy his “noble imp.” In 1583, on the mistaken assumption that Elizabeth had forgotten all about their wedding, Lettice and Dudley began living together openly. However, soon after the earl moved to Leicester House, he discovered that the queen remained just as angry “about his maryage, for he opened up the same more plainly then ever before.”
But Lettice and Leicester were not to enjoy their marital idyll for long. Their son, the little Baron Denbigh, died at Wanstead on July 19, 1584, a few weeks past his third birthday. The earl took a leave of absence from the court, returning to Wanstead for several weeks “to comfort my sorrowfull wyfe.” Although the queen remained livid with Lettice and Dudley, she did send them a letter of condolence.
Lettice’s mere existence so irked Elizabeth she didn’t even need to be present to provoke the royal wrath. Even in her exile, Lettice managed to send the envious sovereign into a paralytic frenzy at the mere mention of her name.
Ironically, the two kinswomen were more alike than not; however, one of them had the added advantage of being queen of England. The other woman behaved as though she were. Vain, ruthless, and endlessly ambitious, Lettice desperately wished to be accorded the preferential treatment she felt was her due as Countess of Leicester and as the monarch’s cousin. In the words of an unnamed courtier, “She now demeaned herself like a princess and vied in dress with the queen,” arraying herself in regal splendor and traveling everywhere with an ostentatious entourage. Lettice’s arrogance, her sense of entitlement, as well as her aspirations, were boundless. The colossal gall she displayed in her eagerness to draw attention to herself and away from the queen was tantamount to an act of disloyalty. The same courtier noted of Lettice, “Yet still she is as proud as ever, rides through Cheapside drawn by 4 milk-white steeds, with 4 footmen in black velvet jackets, and silver bears [Leicester’s device] on their backs and breasts, 2 knights and 30 gentlemen before her, and coaches of gentlewomen, pages, and servants behind, so that it might be supposed to be the Queen or some foreign Prince or other.”
Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Page 14