by G. J. Meyer
Events with momentous consequences for England were meanwhile taking place in France. King Henry II arranged a lavish celebration both of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis—under which France, Spain, England, and Scotland all were pledging to bring their war-making to an end—and of his daughter’s marriage to Philip II. Henry participated in the jousting that was part of the festivities and suffered a slow, painful death (lingering in agony for ten days) after a sliver from an opponent’s lance entered his eye and exited through his ear. He was succeeded by his eldest son, who took the throne as Francis II. The change proved to have far-reaching consequences in spite—or because, really—of the fact that Francis II was a frail and feeble fifteen-year-old and utterly incapable of taking charge. His accession meant that his bride of less than a year, Mary Stuart, the queen of Scotland and Catholic heir presumptive to the crown of England, was queen of France as well. Mary, now seventeen years old, had been raised in France while her mother, Marie of the House of Guise, one of France’s most powerful families, remained in Scotland as regent. The bond between France and Scotland grew all the closer as young King Francis fell under the domination of his bride’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and his brother Charles of Lorraine, a cardinal. Both countries were effectively under Guise control.
The contract under which the child Mary Stuart had been betrothed to Francis specified that if the couple had a son he would inherit France and Scotland as a single unified kingdom. For England this was an intolerable prospect, one that lifted the girl Mary to a position of stupendous geopolitical importance. But for Philip the situation was even more ominous: if Mary went on to succeed her cousin Elizabeth—such a development was far from impossible, considering the high mortality of the time and the fact that the queen of Scots was the younger of the two by almost a decade—he would be in grave danger. His Spanish base would be separated from his possessions in the Netherlands by a wall of hostile kingdoms extending from the islands north of Scotland to France’s Mediterranean coast. The English Channel, the nautical highway connecting Spain and the Netherlands, would become a gauntlet lined on both sides by the seaports of his rivals. From Elizabeth’s perspective, Philip’s worries had a brilliantly positive aspect: they meant that Spain, with its vast European and global empire, needed the friendship of England at a moment when she, too, was urgently in need of friends. As long as Mary Stuart remained queen of France, there could be no possibility of a French-Spanish crusade to pull Elizabeth from her throne. As in Mary Tudor’s reign, the existence of Mary Stuart gave Philip all the reason any king could have needed to want Elizabeth to survive.
The French-Scottish union would remain conditional, however, until Mary gave her husband a son. And no such thing was in the cards. Francis II, so unlike the vital and virile grandfather whose name he bore, lost his tenuous grip on life after only a year on the throne, almost certainly without having consummated his marriage. His death broke the power of the Guises over the government of France, and when his ten-year-old brother took the throne as Charles IX, control passed into the hands of their mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The tall and rather beautiful Mary Stuart found herself an entirely superfluous second dowager queen, no longer wanted at a court that had been her home since childhood but was now dominated by the enemies of her Guise relatives.
Mary had little choice, really, except to return to the one place where she really was queen. But Scotland, too, had recently been convulsed by radical change and was no longer the kind of kingdom that her mother had struggled for years to preserve for her. Marie of Guise, not long after becoming regent, had found herself embroiled in a civil war with a party of Scottish noblemen, the “lords of the congregation,” who were determined to install a Protestant government and establish a Protestant national church. Under the leadership of radical reformers such as John Knox, who had returned from the continent by ship after being denied permission to travel overland across England, evangelicalism had become popular and potent in Scotland’s lowlands. Its adherents seethed with hatred for a Roman church that, long used as a source of spoils by the Scottish elite (King James V, Mary’s father, had secured lucrative bishoprics for several of his illegitimate sons while they were still boys), had descended to levels of corruption never approached in England. Outnumbered and lacking in resources, despised for her foreign origins in spite of being honest, courageous, and by no means a mere agent of her French kinsmen, Marie of Guise had fought a protracted defensive action that might have been successful if not for two strokes of profoundly bad luck. Her health began to decline precipitously—she was dying, probably of heart disease, though still in her early forties—and England abruptly intervened on the side of the Protestant lords.
England’s involvement was entirely the doing of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary and de facto minister-in-chief. He saw early what his royal mistress had difficulty seeing at all: that Scotland’s internal divisions offered an unprecedented opportunity to drive out the French, establish Protestantism in the only kingdom with which England shared a border, and so turn an ancient enemy into a pacific neighbor if not an actively grateful friend. This was an enormous risk for Cecil, one in which failure could have meant ruin, because he had to labor to get the queen’s assent (threatening to resign at one point) and in doing so took on full responsibility for the intervention’s success. Elizabeth thought the chances of success small and the costs likely to be painful. But the death of Marie of Guise in June 1560 doomed the Catholic cause in Scotland and cleared Cecil’s path. The result was a new Treaty of Edinburgh, a triumph for the Scottish rebels, for Knox and his newborn Church of Scotland, and not least for England. When the young widow Mary returned from France in 1561, it was to a Scotland profoundly different from the one in which she had been born nineteen years earlier. It was under the control of people who reviled her religion and her French associations, had no intention of allowing her to be more than a figurehead, and made her no more welcome than she had been in France in the eight months since her husband’s death. She faced a challenge beyond anything Elizabeth had experienced in England.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was growing steadily more adept at dancing around the subject of marriage when discussion could not be avoided altogether. One need not be Sigmund Freud to find reasons for her lack of interest. She was, after all, the daughter of a queen whose marriage had brought her to the block, the stepdaughter of another queen executed by a wrathful husband and of two queens who died as a result of giving birth, and the sister of a queen who had accepted it as her destiny to marry and paid a high price for doing so. She had seen her own reputation dangerously compromised when, still a mere girl, she became resident in the home of the newly married Catherine Parr and was subjected by Catherine’s husband to advances that were obliquely sexual at least. She had good reason to see matrimony as a dubious portal to fulfillment, or to safety.
And there was another factor at play. Not surprisingly for a healthy and unmarried woman of twenty-five whose position exposed her to the flattering attentions of some of the cleverest, most privileged, and best-educated men in Europe, Elizabeth was in love. Her choice of objects would provide one of the most sustained and dramatic narrative threads in the long story of her reign and an eventful chapter in the saga of that most astonishing of Tudor-era families, the Dudleys. She had fixed her affection, her passion, on her master of horse, Robert Dudley—“Rob” to her—a son of the late and not-much-lamented Duke of Northumberland. The simple animal attraction was understandable: Dudley was handsome and young and distinctly virile, with a fine education, the kind of sophistication and polish that only an upbringing at court could produce, and experience as a fighting man. (As a youth he was with his father at the crushing of Kett’s Rebellion, and in 1557 he participated in the siege of St. Quentin, where his brother Henry was killed in his presence.) He and the last of his brothers, the three-years-older Ambrose, were accepted as leaders by the circle of soldiery that had originally coalesced around their father. The
y would have impressed any monarch, male or female, as living symbols of military potency.
Having grown to manhood during the years when his father was rising to become the most powerful man in England, Robert Dudley was intimately familiar with the royal household and not intimidated by any of it. He would eventually claim, not implausibly, to have known Elizabeth before she was eight years old, and he appears to have been the sort of boy who would have effortlessly impressed almost any younger girl (he was older than Elizabeth by about a year), however exalted her parentage. It is likely that, along with Elizabeth, he became a beneficiary of the scholarly establishment put in place for the education of the boyking Edward VI. At any rate he emerged with the attainments—proficiency in French, Italian, and Latin, for example—that were among the fruits of royal life for the third generation of Tudors. He became a gentleman of Edward’s privy chamber, an honor that any ambitious young Englishman would have hungered for, and from an early age was accustomed to the company of the richest, most powerful people in the kingdom. He even, before his father’s fall, sat as a very young member of Parliament.
Beyond all this, and quite aside from the possibility that early in life the two had formed a bond of which we have been left no record, Elizabeth had reason to regard Dudley as a kindred spirit. Although the Duke of Northumberland died professing himself a Catholic, all his offspring embraced evangelical Protestantism. The male Dudleys who had not been executed were still being held in the Tower when Wyatt’s Rebellion led to Elizabeth’s confinement there. The experience, which for Elizabeth and Robert alike included the very real possibility of execution, gave them a profoundly memorable experience in common. Both were ultimately saved by the intercession of Philip after his arrival from Spain, Elizabeth as a safeguard against Mary Stuart, Dudley and his brothers because of their stature among England’s warrior elite and Philip’s wish for influential friends. Both remained deep in the political wilderness, however, as long as Queen Mary remained alive. The properties bestowed on her in her father’s will had made Elizabeth rich, and during Mary’s reign she was an inherently important personage as heir presumptive, but her life was quiet except for those moments of near-terror occasioned by official suspicion that she was involved in plots against the queen. Dudley, his conviction for treason set aside thanks to Philip’s intervention, settled into the peaceful existence of a country gentleman.
Mary Tudor’s death was a deliverance for the Dudleys almost as much as for Elizabeth. Ambrose and Robert were given military appointments that made them figures of some importance at court, the former as master of ordnance and the latter as master of horse. They received other signs of favor; in Robert’s case these included knighthood in the exclusive Order of the Garter, the lieutenantship of Windsor Castle and, to fatten his purse, a license to export wool without paying duty. (Later he would receive a more important license to import sweet wines.) Their sister Mary, the wife of the courtier Sir Henry Sidney, became a lady of the queen’s privy chamber, her husband president of the council responsible for governing the territories bordering Wales.
It became obvious at court that Elizabeth had a singularly strong liking for Robert’s company and was conspicuously unwilling for him to be absent. Inevitably, quite possibly without anything improper transpiring between them, a whiff of scandal began to emanate from their relationship and give rise to backstairs talk. There can have been no gossip of a possible marriage, however, because for almost two years after Elizabeth became queen such a thing was literally impossible. It would have been problematic for the queen to marry even the noblest of her subjects; such a union would have seemed demeaning to the Crown and would have carried with it the danger of dividing court and country into the husband’s allies and rivals. For Elizabeth to marry a member of the Dudley clan would have provoked resentment among the more ancient noble families. But that was not the worst of it. The fatal fact was that Dudley was married. In 1550, in what would appear to have been a love match because it brought no political and little financial advantage to the bridegroom or his family, John Dudley had allowed Robert to marry a girl named Amy Robsart, only child of a respectable but unimportant East Anglian landowner. It was on his father-in-law’s properties that Robert had passed the years after his release from the Tower, living happily enough with Amy so far as is known but having no children. When the Dudleys were restored to royal favor, Amy was not brought to court with them. Her health may not have been good, and Robert undoubtedly understood that the queen would not have welcomed reminders that he had a wife. Dudley did visit Amy for a while, but with decreasing frequency and finally not at all.
But then came an earthquake. On the evening of September 8, 1560, Amy Robsart Dudley was found dead in her country home in Berkshire. An investigation followed, to the extent that such a thing was possible in the sixteenth century, but the result was a meaningless ruling of “death by misadventure.” Amy’s neck may or may not have been broken. She may or may not have had breast cancer. The possibility of suicide was raised, but her servants insisted that she never would have taken her own life. Naturally a suspicion of murder arose, and inevitably that suspicion focused on the husband. But Dudley had incontrovertibly been at Windsor on the day of Amy’s death, having just returned from accompanying the queen on one of the “progresses” by which, every summer, she displayed herself to her subjects. The death was, and has remained, an impenetrable mystery. It also proved to be of immense political importance. It freed Dudley to marry the queen. But at the same time it spread over both of them the dark question of whether they had somehow conspired to eliminate the one person who stood between them. People were not slow to note that, at the time of her death, Amy had not been visited by her husband in more than a year. And that Dudley, who now became sole owner of his late father-in-law’s holdings in land, neither attended his wife’s funeral (that was actually not unusual at the time) nor arranged for the kind of memorial customarily created when a member of a prominent family died. Gossip turned to scandal, not only across England but in Europe. People eager to believe that Anne Boleyn had been a slut were easily persuaded that her daughter was a slut as well. Even people close to the queen—even Cecil, her trusted secretary—encouraged the foulest of the rumors in hopes of making the marriage impossible.
Background
THE FALL AND RISE OF ENGLISH THEATER
WHEN ELIZABETH BECAME QUEEN, TWO VERY DIFFERENT kinds of theater were alive and well in England. One was old and religious in impulse and tightly woven into the lives of the people. The other was new and boisterously secular and more than a little disreputable. Both were regarded, from Elizabeth’s first days on the throne, as serious problems—as threats to domestic peace if not to true religion, to the morals of the community if not to the efficient functioning of the economy. Over the next forty years the government would systematically suppress the old kind until finally, despite dogged popular resistance, it was extinguished. By the end of the Tudor era the new kind, in spite of a state censorship so strict as to amount almost to persecution, would be emerging as one of the supreme achievements of English cultural history.
Drama, like so much of life in England, had its roots in the early Middle Ages. It made its first, almost childishly simple appearance no later than the tenth century, in the form of little scenes from Scripture acted out by priests and worshippers inside their parish churches. Over the next few centuries these performances grew larger and more elaborate, finally spilling out of the churches and being taken over by the guilds. Three types evolved: mystery plays, in which stories from the Bible were acted out; miracle plays, based on incidents from the lives of saints; and finally morality plays, forerunners of modern drama, in which characters representing good and evil struggled to win the soul of some Everyman. (Mystery plays, by the way, took their name not from the Latin word mysterium, meaning “secret,” but from misterium, meaning “occupation” or “trade.” The name reflected the importance of the various occupational guilds�
��of silversmiths or bakers or carpenters or whatever—as sponsors, underwriters, and producers of dramatic performances, especially in the cities and larger towns.)
Ultimately, and without losing their religious content and purpose, such productions became a major form of popular entertainment and communal celebration. Whole cycles of plays were developed; some cycles included as many as twenty-five or even fifty separate tableaux (enactments of the Genesis account of creation, say, or of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead). The sets for these miniplays would be mounted on wagons called “pageants,” which could be wheeled from place to place in sequence so that in the course of a day spectators could see an entire cycle without having to move. It was not unlike the passage of floats in a parade. The cycles became central to observances of the major events in the liturgical calendar: Christmas of course, but also Twelfth Night (January 6, the feast of the epiphany), Candlemas (February 2), Holy Week with its culmination in Easter, Whitsun (the seventh Sunday after Easter), the feast of Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday), and Hallowtide at the beginning of November. Schools, too, put on regular theatrical productions—which must have been a hugely welcome break from the tedious recitations that formed the core of classroom instruction—as did the universities and the Inns of Court.
As in any society where even simple forms of theater thrive, some individuals found themselves prepared to sacrifice security and stability in order to spend their lives performing. Tiny companies of professional players began to form and to scratch out a living by traveling from place to place. These groups would put on shows wherever they were allowed to, occasionally finding employment in the universities’ Christmas productions or at the courts of the great nobles or even the king. Thus did the professional actor first emerge in post-Roman Britain. With him, inevitably, came nonreligious dramatic works. Few early examples have survived; those available to us tend toward the crude, rude, and unrestrainedly vulgar, but they are also funny enough in their Three Stooges slapstick way and sometimes surprisingly accomplished in character development. One of the oldest survivals, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, is believed to have been written as late as the 1550s but to be one of the first comedies ever written in English. This dating, if correct, puts the play little more than a generation before the start of Shakespeare’s career and marks the beginning of a period of astonishingly rapid artistic development.
