Elizabeth I's Secret Lover
Page 1
List of Illustrations
Maps
Map of England
Map of the Netherlands c. 1586
Picture section
Henry VIII
Edward VI
Mary I
Queen Catherine Parr
Sir Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Duke of Somerset
Thomas Seymour, Lord Seymour of Sudeley
John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Duke of Northumberland
William Cecil, Lord Burghley
Amy Robsart, first wife of Lord Robert Dudley
Elizabeth I
Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex and later Countess of Leicester
Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk
Sir Robert Dudley, Lord Robert’s illegitimate son by Douglas Sheffield
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich
Frances Walsingham, Lady Sidney and later Countess of Essex
Sir Henry Sidney, KG
Lady Mary Sidney (née Dudley)
Sir Philip Sidney
Map of England
Drawn by David Atkinson, Hand Made Maps Limited
Map of the Netherlands c. 1586
Drawn by David Atkinson, Hand Made Maps Limited
Family Trees
1. The English Succession
2. The Dudley Family
Introduction
I have spent the last sixteen years making an intensive study of Tudor history, and my lack of any academic preconception has allowed me to stand back from the accepted paradigm of the period. The copious records of the political brilliance of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, focus entirely on his undoubted skills but gloss over his devious methods used to belittle his opponents. One example of the praise showered on this preeminent Elizabethan political figure can be found in The Great Lord Burghley; A Study in Elizabethan Statecraft by Martin Andrew Sharp Hume written in 1898. Hume can see no wrong in Cecil and he makes corresponding attacks on his enemies. One of the casualties is Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic heir to the English throne. Most of the evidence for the murder of Lord Darnley emanates from Cecil’s records and can be shown to have been falsified, but conventional historians of the past have tied themselves in knots attempting to link together conflicting pieces of unsupportable evidence. In his effort to prevent Mary from succeeding the childless Elizabeth, Cecil encouraged a plot for the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. He then connived with the Scottish lords opposing her to persuade her to marry the Earl of Bothwell, known to have masterminded the murder. This made their marriage appear like a crime of passion, when she had played no part in the murder or its planning. It was the marriage not the murder which tarnished her name, leading to her imprisonment. Cecil later tried to entrap her into supporting apparently treasonable plots, which he had fabricated, to provide grounds for her execution. It was Lady Antonia Fraser who started to dispel criticism of Mary in her ground-breaking history of 1969, but even she failed to point out Cecil’s Machiavellian role in the process of defaming her.
It was not just Mary Queen of Scots. Cecil saw Lord Robert Dudley as a threat to his position as Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. It was Cecil who hinted that the untimely death of Robert’s first wife, Amy Robsart, might be murder, the motive for which was to enable him to marry the English Queen. It was Cecil who cajoled Elizabeth into pulling back from the marriage, perhaps preventing a Tudor heir from succeeding to the English Crown. As the ultimate politician, he believed that the ends justified the means. Dudley’s name has been further tarnished by a libellous Catholic tract, later known as Leicester’s Commonwealth designed to highlight his Puritan shortcomings. Nevertheless, traditional historians, including William Camden, accepted its scurrilous content at face value.
As with my histories of Mary Queen of Scots, this biography attempts to redress the balance by rehabilitating another of Cecil’s victims. No one would pretend that Dudley was faultless any more than was Mary Queen of Scots, despite Lady Antonia’s sanitising efforts. Nevertheless, Dudley’s shortcomings should not prevent him from standing out as the most interesting and influential personality of the Elizabethan age.
Surprisingly there have been only two histories of Dudley in more recent years, Elizabeth Jenkins’s Elizabeth and Leicester, published by Victor Gollancz in 1961 and Derek Wilson’s Sweet Robin, published by Allison & Busby Ltd. in 1981. I owe a debt to both authors for their meticulous research. I have also benefited from research on Lady Jane Grey and on Lettice Knollys by Nicola Tallis and on many other histories of the Tudor period. As always, I have reached my own conclusions from the plausible evidence to provide a fresh assessment of Dudley and his achievements and of the personalities that surrounded him. He was a man of many qualities.
I am most grateful to Claire Hopkins at Pen & Sword History for her advice and support on the production of this biography, and to Karyn Burnham, who has edited the text. Most importantly, I have to thank Liz for putting up with my disappearance for long periods into Tudor history and to my son Oliver, who has rescued me when my computer has failed to respond as promptly as I would like to a well-deserved dose of chastisement!
Robert Stedall
PART 1 PRE-ELIZABETHAN UPS AND DOWNS
Prologue
There can be no surprise that after the death of a monarch as dominant as Henry VIII, there was the risk of a power vacuum when it came to establishing government for his 9-year-old son, now Edward VI. Under his will, Henry had proposed a Council of Regency of sixteen equals to govern until Edward came of age. Nevertheless, ruling by committee would never be a viable option for those ambitious men, who now surrounded the Crown. The only real hope for the future was Edward’s quite extraordinary intellect, moral rectitude, and grasp of politics from a very early age.
The family traditionally dominating positions around the English Crown were the Howards of Norfolk. Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke had enjoyed glittering early military success with his father, the 2nd Duke, in defeating the Scots at Flodden in 1513. Although he remained among the first choice of military commander for much of Henry’s reign, Cardinal Wolsey criticised his belligerent foreign policy. Norfolk also conflicted with rival courtiers by promoting family members as spouses for the ageing King. Initially these marriages gained him royal favour, but when his nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, failed to provide Henry with either hoped-for male heirs or matrimonial harmony, they lost their heads. Norfolk shuffled quickly to disassociate himself from their shortcomings, blaming other members of the voluminous Howard clan for their perceived faults.
A second problem for Norfolk was his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith at a time when Henry was seeking a divorce from Katherine of Aragon. His rearguard Catholic stance was supported by Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel; Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Chancellor; Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. Even Henry was a traditionalist at heart. As a young man, he had written Assertio Septem Sacrimentorum defending the Seven Sacraments of the Catholic faith. In 1521, he was created Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) by Pope Leo X. He wanted to retain Catholic dogma but needed the Crown at the head of the English church rather than the Pope. Although Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who masterminded Henry’s break with Rome and divorce from Katherine of Aragon, leaned the Henrican church towards Reformist thinking, Henry hung tenaciously to traditional worship.
Cranmer, with the Council’s support, made several attempts to provide a liturgy to satisfy all sides, but the King remained wary of Reformist dogma. It was only after his marriage to Catherine Parr in 1543 that Reform gained the upper hand. Catherine was d
evoutly Evangelical (the word ‘Protestant’ was not used until the 1550s) and she surrounded the court with likeminded thinkers, all of whom supported Cranmer’s views. These included her brother, William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton; Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford and his brother Thomas Seymour, the uncles of Prince Edward; Henry Grey, 3rd Marquess of Dorset, married to Frances Brandon, the King’s niece, and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, whose mother was a first cousin of the 1st Marquess of Dorset. This caucus was careful not to challenge the views of the ageing King, but Catherine took Henry’s younger children, Elizabeth and Edward, under her wing to ensure that they became well-grounded in Reformed beliefs. With Catherine as queen consort, her allies were able to isolate the traditionalists led by Norfolk, keeping them away from the King.
Henry’s focus was on the military abilities of his advisers. By now, it was Hertford and Lisle, who were considered the two most accomplished military commanders in England. Henry had no respect for Dorset. In 1536, he had been sent north to restore order during the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Yorkshire uprising opposing the break with Rome. Dorset had demonstrated complete incompetence, singularly failing in his objectives.
The Howards remained out in the cold. In late 1546, with the King surrounded by Catherine Parr’s allies, Norfolk and his son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, ‘the most foolish proud boy that ever was in England’,1 attempted a Catholic coup to seize Prince Edward and gain control of the Regency. Not only did this fail, but Surrey had provocatively assumed the royal arms of Edward the Confessor as part of his personal heraldry. They were both arrested and sent to the Tower on charges of treason. On 19 January 1547, Surrey was beheaded and Norfolk was attainted by statute without trial. Although Henry reportedly approved Norfolk’s execution on his deathbed, his life was saved by the King’s demise on the following day. He was lucky. Henry had been quoted as saying: ‘I never spared man in my anger nor woman in my lust.’2
Norfolk’s fall from grace enabled Catherine’s Evangelical allies to surround the new King, Edward VI, who was not yet 10 years old. Although it was the custom for those condemned by the late King to be included in a general amnesty at his successor’s coronation, Norfolk remained imprisoned in the Tower of London throughout Edward’s reign. During this time his estates fell prey to members of the young King’s Council. He was only released and pardoned in 1553, when Mary Tudor became Queen. Meanwhile, his grandson and heir, Thomas, was left to spend his young manhood disgraced in the country.
Although they had been close allies, Henry’s death set the stage for a showdown between Hertford and Lisle. It was never a contest, as Hertford was the uncle of the young King, and Lisle had no immediate ambition to supersede him. Nevertheless, Hertford was extremely suspicious of his rival’s motives. He did his best to demean him, putting their former warm friendship under pressure. What had been extraordinary was Lisle’s mercurial rise from most unpromising beginnings to become the second man behind the throne.
Chapter 1 John Dudley, Viscount Lisle
During the medieval era, the Sutton family was of no great substance or significance, but in the reign of Edward II (1308–27), it acquired the impregnable Dudley Castle as a perquisite of John Sutton’s marriage to Margaret de Somery. In addition to the Lordship of Dudley, Margaret provided estates in Worcestershire and Staffordshire.1 Although family members were initially known as the Suttons of Dudley, by the 1450s they had dropped the Sutton name, so that the 1st Baron called himself John ‘Dudley’. Quite remarkably, he tiptoed unscathed round the pitfalls of the Wars of the Roses and lived to welcome Henry VII as King after the Battle of Bosworth. He was by then aged 84 and had outlived his eldest son. On his death two years later, the title passed to his grandson, Edward. It was John’s second son, Sir John Dudley of Atherington, who demonstrated all the ambition that his nephew, Edward Lord Dudley, lacked. With Henry VII being King, Sir John was picked as Sheriff of Sussex and served the Tudors in local government capacities until his death in 1500.2
Sir John’s eldest son, Edmund, was born in about 1462. Although his father and grandfathers had been soldiers, he had an aptitude for the law and was educated at Oxford University and Gray’s Inn. By 1485, he was already an up-and-coming lawyer, enjoying the patronage of Sir Reginald Bray, one of the most influential of the new King’s advisers. Bray was a member of ‘the King’s Council Learned in the Law’,3 which acted as a special court for trying financial cases, but in practice operated as a royal debt collection agency. Through Bray’s connections, Edmund became Under-Sheriff of London in about 1499 and Speaker of the House of Commons in 1504. Before the year was out, he was a member of the Privy Council and had also joined the Council Learned in the Law in his own right.4 These posts were lucrative, and he soon extended his estates into Sussex and Hampshire and acquired extensive acreages elsewhere. He also had a fine house in Candlewick Street in London, next door to his fellow Council colleague, Sir Richard Empson.
With Henry VII’s thirst to augment the royal coffers, Dudley and Empson had the task of pressurising wealthier subjects by ferreting among private papers to establish land and other revenue sources that had been concealed. ‘They devised ways to exploit long defunct feudal laws to the advantage of the exchequer.’5 Despite being well rewarded by a grateful sovereign, ‘no mean quantity stuck to their fingers’.6 They perverted justice for their own ends as the representatives of a grasping and despotic King. In 1509, when Henry VII lay dying, they took measures for their own protection. ‘At their petition, the Council entered into a recognizance to hold no individual member guilty of crimes permitted in pursuance of Royal policy.’7 Although they had agreed to muster in Candlewick Street in the event of trouble, the new King, Henry VIII, was ready ‘to disembarrass the government of unpopular members’8 and acted quickly to sacrifice them before they could escape.
The Council’s recognisance was deemed ‘contrary to law, reason and good conscience’9 and was set aside. Dudley and Empson were charged with treason on the absurd grounds of having conspired ‘to seize the King and his Council by force and to govern according to [their] will’.10 After conviction, they were confined to the Tower to await attainder and possible execution. It had been Henry VII, in his effort to benefit the Royal exchequer, who had encouraged them to act as they did, shutting ‘his eyes to the way they performed’. This made them ‘rightly the victim[s] of public hatred’.11 Their execution ‘was the only imaginable retribution for a career of enthusiastic villainy’.12
Dudley remained in the Tower for sixteen months, during which time he wrote The Tree of Commonwealth, an allegorical political treatise of advice for the new King. It is a book of breadth and wisdom, revealing the humanity of a man ‘who had thought deeply about the affairs of kings and subjects, a brilliant lawyer, capable of marshalling his thoughts to achieve the utmost clarity and impact’.13 He admitted that his ‘own life hath been so wicked and so openly known’,14 and demonstrated that loyalty to King and loyalty to country could not always be combined.15 He advised Henry VIII ‘to avoid the avarice and the manipulation of the law which had been his father’s weaknesses’.16 The young King disregarded Dudley’s treatise, and it remained hidden in the Royal Archives for centuries, although Dudley’s son held a transcript. On 17 August 1510, Empson and Dudley were beheaded at Tower Hill, but there was some sympathy for their predicament. Edmund avoided a traitor’s grave and was buried at the Church of Blackfriars in the City, with his attainder being reversed.
Dudley left a widow, Elizabeth Grey, and five children. She was the daughter of Viscount Lisle and, within fifteen months as a relatively wealthy lady, she remarried Arthur Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of Edward IV. In 1523, following the deaths of her elder siblings, Arthur became Viscount Lisle in right of his wife. With the Tudors keeping tabs on their Plantagenet rivals, even though illegitimate, Arthur was retained at court as an esquire to the bodyguard of the King with a quarterly salary of £6 13s. 4d. With Edmund’s attainder having been reversed,
Arthur received the benefit of most of the Dudley lands. With Elizabeth’s eldest son, John Dudley, being aged only 8 at his father’s execution, he was made a ward of the Crown. In accordance with usual practice, the wardship was acquired by Sir Edward Guildford, an old friend of his father’s. This entitled Guildford to the benefit of John’s inheritance until he reached his majority in return for providing him with a home and education.
Guildford was a major landowner in Kent and Sussex; he was also Master of the Ordnance and later Warden of the Cinque Ports and Marshal of Calais.17 When he was 9, John Dudley moved to live with Guildford’s family at High Halden near Tenterden in Kent. Guildford ‘was the ideal man to give his young ward a solid grounding both in estate management and also the accomplishments of a courtier’.18 With no sons of his own, he developed a strong bond with his ward, doing much to restore the Dudley family fortunes. ‘At an early age, John was betrothed to Sir Edward’s daughter, Jane, and when they were old enough they were married.’19 Despite this being an arranged marriage, they developed ‘a deep and lasting affection’,20 during which she bore him thirteen children.21 On Guildford’s death, the couple inherited his substantial estates.
Although John arrived at court as a man of comparatively modest means, he soon made his mark. ‘In 1521 he was a member of Cardinal Wolsey’s entourage on a diplomatic mission to France.’22 Yet it was as a soldier that he first achieved recognition. In 1523, he served as an officer in France under Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and was knighted by the Duke for his gallantry while fighting at the crossing of the Somme.23 He also made his name in the lists. At Christmas 1524, he excelled at a tourney at Greenwich, and became ‘one of the great champions of the tilt-yard and frequently rode in the royal team against foreign challengers’.24 Yet he remained at a disadvantage after his father’s execution and attainder. The court was full of ambitious young men, often well-connected to leading noblemen and ministers. Despite enjoying his father-in-law’s patronage, Guildford lacked ‘the prestige to advance Dudley to the topmost rungs of Royal service’.25 Nevertheless, as a young knight Sir John gained the support of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, and later of the King.26 Being a shrewd judge of character, the King ‘saw a man after his own heart, a man who embodied all the virtues of medieval chivalry. Guildford’s protégé was tall, darkly handsome, full of charm and recklessly brave.’27 The young knight was soon ‘marked out as a commander whom foes respected and soldiers happily followed’.28 He became ‘a favourite companion of Henry in the tilt-yard and in the hunting field; an unquestioning supporter of royal policy who proved his loyalty in combat of arms and (later) in House of Commons debate’.29