A Favorite of the Queen: The Story of Lord Robert Dudley and Elizabeth 1

by Виктория Холт

  And she herself? She was a goddess; she would not be frightened by the encroaching years. All about her were men—men of her Robert’s age and others of young Essex’s age—to tell her she was a goddess who—without Cornelius Lanoy’s elixir—had found eternal youth.

  Anjou had failed in the Netherlands, but William the Silent was waging furious war there for his people’s freedom. All eyes in England were on the Netherlands; the outcome of that war for freedom was of the utmost importance.

  And the eyes of the Spaniards were on England. What sort of a woman is this? was being asked in Spanish Councils. What sort of a country does she rule? It is only part of an island, yet she acts as though she rules the world. Her seamen are arrogant pirates. They are diverting treasure from Spanish coffers. They are bold and adventurous; they have no respect for His Most Catholic Majesty. They insult the Holy Inquisition itself.

  There were names which were spoken of with horror and dread in Spanish ships and Spanish territories: Drake, Hawkins … the fearless ones. How could men be so fearless as these were? How could they always win? It was because they were in the pay of the Devil. They were not men; they were sorcerers.

  Clearly these men and their arrogant Queen would have to be taught a lesson. Francis Drake came sailing home from Chile and Peru with all the treasure plundered from Spanish towns in the new world, and from Spanish galleons. He had rounded the Cape, and by so doing, the world. And what did the Queen do when this pirate arrived home? Did she hang him as he deserved? Did she treat him as a thief, a robber, and a murderer of His Most Catholic Majesty’s subjects?

  No! He was a handsome man, and she liked him for that among other things. She liked his Devon burr and she liked his flashing eyes. He was a man after her own heart, for, in his country way, he could pay a gallant compliment.

  The Queen told him that the Spaniards went in fear of him. They called him a bold and wicked man.

  “Are you such a man, sir?” she asked. “I believe you may be, and I must perforce cut off your head with a golden sword.”

  She thereupon called for a sword, and bade him kneel that she might with all speed perform the task which would put an end to plain Francis Drake.

  She laid the sword on his shoulders and she said: “Arise, Sir Francis.”

  He rose, bowed low and kissed her hand, and said that he would sail the world twenty times and bring back twenty times as much treasure for one smile from Her Majesty’s lips.

  There came a tragic year for Robert. His son—in whom he had taken great pride—died suddenly. They buried him in Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. “Robert Dudley, aged 4 years, the noble Impe,” were the words inscribed on his tomb.

  Robert was distraught and the Queen forgot her jealousy and did her best to comfort him.

  Kneeling at her feet he said: “It is a retribution. I went against Your Majesty’s wishes in my marriage. This is God’s justice.”

  “Nay,” she said gently, “it is not so. The innocent should not suffer. Robert, we are too old and too sad to do aught but comfort each other.”

  She made him sit at her feet, and while she caressed his hair she dreamed that it was black and luxuriant as it had once been.

  Robert tried to forget his loss by taking under his charge that other Robert, his son by Douglass. He railed against a fate which took his legitimate son and left the other—though he loved both boys and wished to keep them.

  He was frequently ill. He had lived too well, and now that he had turned into his fifties he must pay the penalty.

  He could not talk of his ailments to the Queen; she hated talk of illness.

  More troubles came.

  That year, Robert Parsons, a Jesuit, published a book in Antwerp. He was a Catholic, and Leicester was now known throughout the world as England’s Protestant Leader. This book, which was printed on green paper, was referred to as Father Parsons’ Green Overcoat. It was a scurrilous life-study of the Earl of Leicester; and as the Queen had played a large part in that story, she did not escape scandalous references.

  Here was an account of the lust between the Queen and her favorite with no details spared. The numbers of children they were reputed to have produced were mentioned. Robert was credited, not only with the murder of Amy Robsart, but of Douglass’s husband and the husband of his present wife, Essex. Every mysterious death which had occurred—and some natural ones—were laid at the door of the Earl of Leicester and his professional poisoners.

  The book was brought into England and secretly distributed. Copies were passed from hand to hand. The affairs of Leicester were discussed afresh in every tavern. He was the world’s worst villain. He had contaminated the Queen with his own evil. He was the son of the devil.

  Elizabeth raged and stormed and threatened terrible punishment on anyone found with a copy of this foul book, which she swore to be utterly false.

  Philip Sidney, indignant on behalf of the uncle whom he loved as a father, wrote an answer to the base knave who had dared circulate such lies against a great nobleman of England.

  He declared that although through his father he belonged to a noble family, his greatest honor was to know himself a Dudley.

  But no matter what was written and what was said, the memory of Amy Robsart was as fresh now as it had been nearly twenty years before. And those who understood such matters knew that this was more than an attack on Leicester and the Queen. It was a preliminary skirmish in the Catholic-Protestant war.

  In that year William of Orange met his violent death. The Protector of his country, the leader, who had inspired his countrymen to fight against the Spanish tyranny, was gone.

  The Netherlanders were turning desperate eyes toward England, and Elizabeth was uneasy. War, which she longed to avoid, was being thrust on her. She wanted to hold back, to cling to the prosperity she was building up through peace in her land. But there was no shutting her eyes to the position now. Most of the wool markets in the Netherlands had fallen completely under the Spanish yoke, and the prosperity which had come to England through the wool trade was declining. New markets must be found; but would the English be allowed to find them? Philip had his eyes on England, and he was a fanatic with a mission. In his harbors he was building up the greatest fleet of ships the world had ever known—the Invincible Armada, he called it; and its purpose, all knew, was to sail to the shores of that land whose Queen and whose seamen had so long defied his might.

  Elizabeth called her ministers to her. They were in favor of intervention in the Netherlands. They did not feel as she did. They were men who hoped to win power and glory through war. She was only a women, longing to keep her great family of people secure, herself possessing that understanding which told her that even wars which were won brought less gain than continued peace would have brought, without waste of men and gold.

  But she could no longer hold back, and the Netherlands were asking that one to whom they could look as a leader be sent to them, one whom they could follow as they had followed their own William of Orange. This was the man who had put himself at the head of the Protestant Party and was, as the world knew, so beloved of the Queen that she would never set him at the head of an enterprise to which she would not give her wholehearted support.

  The Netherlands were crying out for Leicester.

  And so she gave her consent that he should go.

  As she bade him a fond farewell, she thought how handsome he was, how full of enthusiasm and ambition. He appeared to be almost a young man again.

  He did not suffer at the parting as she did. He was going in search of honor and that military glory which had always appealed to him.

  She must stay behind, following his exploits through dispatches and letters, rejoicing in one fact only: if he were separated from her, he was also separated from his wife.

  Robert rode in state through the clean little towns to the sound of rapturous applause. It was as though a lifelong ambition was at last realized. For so many years he had longed to be a King; and these
people cheered him, knelt before him, as though he were more than a King—their savior.

  It was shortly after his arrival at the Hague that the greatest honor of his life was paid to him.

  It was New Year’s morning, and he was dressing in his chamber when a delegation arrived to see him. Without waiting to finish his dressing he went to the antechamber. There the leader of the delegation knelt and told him that Dutchmen, looking upon him as their leader, wished to offer him all those titles which had belonged to the Prince of Orange. He should be Governor, ruler, Stadholder.

  Robert was overwhelmed with delight. He had longed all his life for something like this: his own kingdom to rule, a kingdom he owed, not to the good graces of the Queen, but to his own statesmanship and popularity.

  This was the great testing time of Robert’s life; and how was he to know that, when honors came easily, the hands did not grow strong enough to hold them, that it was by hard work and achievement only that such strength came? He had been carried up to greatness in a litter prepared for him by a doting woman; when he reached the top the air was too rarified for him without his litter to support him; and these Hollanders were asking him to stand on his own feet. Philip of Spain was close; the Duke of Parma was waiting; and in England there was the Queen, who must give her consent to his acceptance of such honors.

  He hesitated. He wanted to accept, to take his laurels. He longed to ride through the streets and receive the people’s homage. Dare he do so, and later persuade the Queen to support him? It was an irritating shock to realize that he could not maintain his position without that support.

  He hesitated and succumbed to temptation.

  He was the Governor of the Netherlands now. He was to be Stadholder, and the people called him Excellency.

  The news came to England.

  Lettice, seeing herself as the Queen of the Netherlands, decided to join her husband in his new kingdom.

  Great preparations were made. Lettice would travel in state to the Hague, with all the trappings of a Queen.

  Elizabeth, furious because he had dared accept his new position without even consulting her, was writing angry letters to him. He should at once renounce what he had dared to take up.

  “How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to have been used by you, you shall by this bearer understand. We could not have imagined had we not seen it come to pass, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favored by us above any other subject in the land, would have so contemptuously broken our commandment …”

  While she was writing, Kat came to tell her of the preparations Lettice was making to join her husband.

  Elizabeth laid down her pen.

  “She may prepare all she will,” she sneered. “She shall never go.”

  “She plans to go in the state of a Queen, surpassing even Your Majesty’s state.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes blazed. “Let the she-wolf make her plans. She shall ere long wish she had not joined herself to a man whom I shall bring so low as I shall this one. This is the end of the kindness I have shown my lord of Leicester. That man, I promise you, shall wish he had never been born. As for that harlot, that she-wolf, we shall soon see her deserting him. He will see who his friends are. Does he think she has been faithful to him while he has been away?”

  “I know, Your Majesty, there are rumors of that most handsome Christopher Blount.”

  “Years younger than she is!” snapped the Queen. “A friend of her son’s. There is pleasant news for my lord! But I shall make him smart more than she ever can!”

  She picked up her pen and wrote, commanding him to lay aside his newfound honors. He would make an open and public resignation in the very place where he had accepted absolute government without his Queen’s consent. He would show himself to his new “people” as a man of no account, a man unable to make a decision without the consent of his mistress—and most firmly she withheld that consent.

  “Fail you not,” she ended, “as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”

  Then she laid aside her pen and let her anger blaze, while she thought with furious resentment of the wicked woman who had dared betray him with a younger man.

  Robert, in desperation, sent home two men to plead his cause with the Queen. The matter was too far gone for open withdrawal he pointed out. If she repudiated him, the people of the Netherlands would lose heart; and she must think what that would mean to England. He was contrite; he had offended her and he would rather have died than have done that. But for the good of England, she must give him time to slip out gracefully from his terrible blunder; she must see that public repudiation would be playing into the hands of Philip of Spain.

  Her ministers agreed with that view. Robert had to be allowed to disentangle himself with as much tact as possible.

  She was now in turn outraged mistress and apprehensive Queen. Worried by the state of affairs in the Netherlands, fervently she wished that England had not become so involved. She accused Robert of squandering England’s money. To that accusation he made a magnificent gesture by selling his own lands and giving up a great part of his fortune to the campaign in the Netherlands.

  But he was not suited to his task. He had been too long favored, and had never learned to win success through tedious application. His experience of war was limited. He could sense approaching that military disaster, which lack of the Queen’s support must mean.

  His greatest source of consolation was his nephew, Philip Sidney, who was there with him.

  He dearly loved Philip and trusted him completely. Philip had urged him not to send for Lettice, and Philip was proved right; for Robert, knowing Elizabeth, realized that the real cause of her anger was the fact that Lettice had arrogantly prepared to join him with the state of a Queen.

  Philip had sent one of his players, who had accompanied them to Holland, with urgent messages to Walsingham—Philip’s father-in-law—asking him to use all his influence to prevent Lettice making the journey.

  Unfortunately the player had been a head-in-the-clouds fellow—a young man named Will, an actor from Stratford-on-Avon—and, said Philip, recalling the way in which this actor had performed his mission, it would have been a better thing if he had stayed in Stratford; for he had delivered the letters to Lettice herself instead of to Walsingham, and thereby much trouble had been caused which might have been avoided.

  Robert was beginning to hate the Netherlands; he was longing for nothing so much as to return home. He wished he had never thought of leaving England and had not been tempted lightly to take that which had been offered.

  His melancholy turned to bitter grief when, after the battle of Zutphen, in which he himself fought valiantly, the dead were brought in and he found among them the body of his nephew.

  He listened to the accounts of how nobly Philip Sidney had died. This gallant young man had given part of his armor to another man, although he knew himself to be in need of it. When Philip had been fainting from wounds a cup of water had been put to his lips by one of his men; but Philip, seeing a soldier close by groaning in agony, had sent his man over to the sufferer that the water might be given to one who was in greater need of it than he himself. Robert was proud of his nephew, but he felt that he would have given everything that was left to him if he might have brought him back to life.

  So Robert lived through his gloomiest hour. He felt in that moment that death would have been preferable to the plight in which he found himself.

  When Robert was suffering in the Netherlands, news of the Babington Conspiracy swept through England. Babington, a young man fascinated by the charm of the Queen of Scots when he had been a page in her household, had been persuaded by a group of men to communicate with the Queen with a view to effecting the assassination of Elizabeth and the setting of Mary upon the throne.

  Mary had lost none of her impetuosity during the years and, to her, plotting was an exciting pastime.

  The conspirators had forgotten what elaborate spy-systems had
been set in motion by the alert Walsingham.

  Walsingham understood what was happening in the early stages of the plot, for a priest, Gilbert Gifford, having been sent to England secretly to work against Protestantism with the help of the great Catholic families, was captured. Walsingham promised to spare his life if he would become his spy.

  This the priest agreed to do and, when Mary was removed from Tutbury to Chartley, Gifford arranged with the brewer who supplied the Chartley beer to convey letters to and from Mary. These were wrapped in waterproof cases and put through the bunghole of the kegs—letters going to Mary in full kegs, hers coming out in empty ones. Gifford took these letters and, before passing them on to those for whom they were intended, handed them to Walsingham, who, putting them into the hands of an expert decoder, learned their contents and was able to follow every twist and turn of the plot.

  It was arranged that six men should assassinate Elizabeth. One of the six was to be Babington. If the deed were successfully carried out, these men believed that it would be a simple matter to set Mary on the throne.

  Walsingham, as one of the leaders of the Protestant Party, had always deplored the fact that Mary had been allowed to live; and as soon as Mary’s letter to the conspirators—in which she gave her full support to the assassination of Elizabeth—was in his hands, he lost no time in arresting the men and laying the whole plot before the Queen and her Council.

  All England rejoiced as soon as the news was made known. Bonfires were lighted; in the country there was dancing on the village greens; in the towns there was singing in the streets. The beloved Queen had narrowly escaped, and at last the Jezebel of Scotland was shown to her most merciful Majesty for what she was. There were services in the churches and on street corners.

  Elizabeth noted these expressions of love and loyalty with deep gratification; but she knew that the people were demanding the death of Mary.