Simier himself was intimately involved in Lettice’s change of fortunes. Within a short space of time, the French courtier became convinced that the Earl of Leicester was foremost among his enemies. Simier was well aware that the Earl had harboured ambitions of matrimony with the Queen himself, and rightly believed that Leicester was doing all that he could to dissuade Elizabeth from making a French marriage alliance. Even so, the portrait of Anjou that now hangs in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, once hung in Leicester House in the 1570s and Wanstead in the 1580s – perhaps a diplomatic gift. Behind the scenes, Leicester was determined to prevent the Queen’s marriage to Anjou, yet his motivation seems to have been based on political and religious rather than personal motives. He had been spreading rumours that Simier had used ‘amorous potions and unlawful arts’, and had ‘crept into the Queen’s mind and insisted her to the love of [Monsieur]’ in his attempts to woo Elizabeth.6 He was playing a dangerous game. Simier had heard the whispers and was himself aware of the Earl’s marriage – and he was determined to use the knowledge to his advantage at the most opportune moment. It was not long before that moment arrived.
In July, after being persuaded by Simier’s smooth words, the Queen signed a passport which allowed Anjou to come to England. Leicester was horrified by this development, and in an act of protest immediately retired to Wanstead where he sent word that he was ill. Lettice was not with him at this time, for shortly after his departure the Queen arrived to visit him – perhaps to reassure herself of the legitimacy of his ‘sickness’. It was an anxious time for Lettice, as she was aware that the French ambassador had urged her husband ‘to confess to the Queen that he was married’.7 She waited to hear whether the Earl would act on the ambassador’s advice, but Leicester did no such thing. Within three days, Elizabeth was back in London, where Lettice almost certainly was too. But any cosy reunion between the couple would be short-lived.
Soon after her return to the capital – with Leicester, now fully recovered, not far behind her – the Queen was found on the afternoon of 17 July travelling down the Thames on the Royal Barge to Greenwich Palace. The summer heat had set in, and as the Queen enjoyed the sunshine and the cool breeze that emanated from the river, she also had the pleasure of the company of her ‘Monkey’ Simier, Leicester and the affable Sir Christopher Hatton. The pleasant serenity of the summer afternoon was shattered when, out of nowhere, a gunshot was fired at the barge. For a moment, panic spread among those on board as the shot came within inches of the Queen. A second later the bargeman began ‘to cry and screech out piteously’ as it became apparent that he had been hit. As those around the Queen scrambled to ensure that the monarch was protected and strove to help the injured man, on land the would-be assassin was seized.8 Though he had escaped unscathed, it was believed that Simier had been the target, for his presence in London was well known and unpopular.
Simier himself was convinced that the shot had been intended for him, and that the assassination attempt had been Leicester’s doing.9 It was this that prompted him to take action against the Earl – and play his winning hand.
The precise circumstances are unknown, but without pause Simier delivered to Elizabeth the poisonous news. The Earl of Leicester, he told her, was unworthy of the Queen’s friendship, and had no right to try and prevent her marriage to the Duc d’Anjou – especially since he himself had been recently married, in secret, to the Queen’s own kinswoman, the Lady Lettice, Countess of Essex. As Elizabeth heard the news, her outward reaction was one of shock and utter fury. It was the ultimate betrayal: for many years Leicester had been her closest male friend and ally, and she had come to rely on him heavily. More than that, she had loved and cared for him deeply, and had once given him the impression that she had strongly considered him as a suitor for her own hand. Though all notions of her marrying Leicester had long since vanished from her mind, she now no longer wielded the same power over him – a realization that shook Elizabeth to the core.
As if his marriage without her consent were not enough, Leicester had then kept it from her for months, in a shocking betrayal of her trust. His bride was her own kinswoman, making the wound all the more painful for Elizabeth. Nobody could fail to notice the physical resemblance between Lettice and the Queen; Lettice too had the dark and sensual eyes so characteristic of the Boleyn family, and the beautiful flame-red hair that marked Elizabeth out as a Tudor. And the similarities did not end there, for like Elizabeth, Lettice had also demonstrated that she was a strong and forceful character, determined to have her way whatever the cost – and it seemed that she had got it.
From Lettice’s point of view, at the time of her wedding at Wanstead she had been a widow for almost two years to the day, and had therefore fulfilled the customary period of mourning that society expected of her. For a woman of her beauty and sensuality, it had always been likely that she would wish to remarry. Elizabeth had heard the rumours that had once circulated about the flirtation between Lettice and her favourite, but she had made her feelings about this perfectly clear, by flying into ‘a great temper’ and upbraiding Leicester in ‘very bitter words’ back in 1565. She had never imagined that the scurrilous whispers would evolve into an appalling reality. The court gossip of a mere flirtation had transformed into something so much worse, and though Elizabeth did not want to face it, Lettice was now the Countess of Leicester, and there was nothing she could do about it.
According to Camden, Elizabeth’s initial reaction was to have Leicester ‘committed to the Tower of London, which his enemies much desired’. However, ‘The Earl of Sussex, though his greatest and deadliest adversary, dissuaded her. For he was of the opinion that no man was to be troubled with lawful marriage, which estate among all men hath ever been held in honour and esteem.’10 Elizabeth clearly felt otherwise.
Sussex was a man of great courage and honesty – almost to the point of tactlessness – and while he was no friend of Leicester and perceived no advantage in the situation for himself, he knew that it would be beneath the Queen’s dignity to send the Earl to the Tower for such a personal issue. He had persuaded his mistress to be merciful, and Leicester and Lettice were fortunate that she was. After all, both of them would have been painfully conscious of the pitiful fate of Lady Katherine Grey among others.11
And so the couple were spared a spell in prison, but it was clear that Elizabeth was by no means prepared to let Leicester and Lettice go completely unpunished; they had broken no law, but in the Queen’s eyes they had still committed a heinous crime. With no opportunity to speak to the Queen personally, Leicester was immediately told to absent himself from court; without seeing Lettice he slipped quietly away to Wanstead, where he laid low to wait on events. Ultimately, though, it was Lettice who bore the brunt of Elizabeth’s anger. Was it because she was a woman? This almost certainly was a significant factor in the affair, for Elizabeth was notoriously jealous of younger members of her own sex. This was exacerbated by Lettice’s personal qualities: she was both strikingly beautiful and ten years younger than the Queen, which added an element of resentment. To add insult to injury, she had been fond of Lettice, who had once been a member of her household and attended to her most personal of needs. Lettice had probably been by Elizabeth’s side since her girlhood and they had shared many important moments. She had witnessed at first-hand her kinswoman’s intense relationship with Leicester, and was aware of how deeply she cared for him. It was, therefore, no wonder that the Queen considered Lettice’s actions to be such a great betrayal. By contrast, Elizabeth’s deep-rooted fondness for Leicester and her reliance on him prevented her from punishing him; she could not bear to lose him from her life altogether.
But that still left Lettice, who was probably in London at this time, although her precise whereabouts are unclear; for the time being there was nothing her husband could do to protect her from the Queen’s wrath. However, Lettice was soon to prove that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. It was now that she chose
to demonstrate her true strength of character, for rather than being apologetic for her actions, throwing herself on her knees to beg the Queen’s forgiveness, Lettice instead appeared to be defiant. In her eyes, she had done nothing of which she ought to be ashamed and she was determined not to hide away. According to one contemporary report, though not at court, ‘She now demeaned herself like a princess, vied in dress with the Queen.’12 Lettice was acutely conscious of her status and her close blood ties with her royal mistress – not to mention her own Tudor blood – and she had always been headstrong. She was adamant that she would not bow down – not even to the Queen. This was unwise behaviour, and did nothing but antagonize Elizabeth further. Quickly, and sharply, Lettice was given a reminder that it was Elizabeth who was Queen of England – not her.
Shortly after the Queen’s discovery of Leicester and Lettice’s betrayal – and with it having become clear that Lettice, at least, was not prepared to ask for her mercy – a dramatic confrontation between the two women took place within the privacy of the Queen’s apartments at the Palace of Whitehall. It is unclear how this interview came about, but the gossips soon seized upon it. Even before the two women were left alone, the atmosphere was tense and frosty as ‘Her Majesty, after sundry admonitions, told her [Lettice] as but one sun lightened the earth, she would have but one Queen in England, boxed her ears, and forbade her the court.’13 This was not the first occasion on which Elizabeth had apparently resorted to violence in a burst of temper, but if true it was shocking nevertheless. She clearly felt threatened by Lettice, and her simmering jealousy came bubbling to the fore.
It says much about Elizabeth’s attitudes towards women that she was prepared to abandon and punish a woman with whom she had shared so much. Similarly, it also says much about Elizabeth’s reaction to betrayal. However much she had loved Lettice’s mother, the days when Elizabeth shared the same warmth of feeling for her daughter were over.
All vestiges of a close relationship between the two kinswomen now vanished. As Lettice was aware, from the moment she said her wedding vows in the chapel at Wanstead, she effectively forfeited the Queen’s favour and goodwill. After her death, her granddaughter’s husband would write that Lettice was ‘content to quit her favour for her favourite’.14 The Countess, who loved Leicester deeply, felt that the sacrifice was one worth making, for whatever her private feelings may have been at her disgrace and the loss of the Queen’s friendship, outwardly she was determined not to show them. Rather than the humiliating meeting with Elizabeth serving to humble her and curb her displays, as was doubtless intended, Lettice too was angry, and vowed not to cower away and hide as if overridden with guilt. This feisty attitude met with astonishment from her contemporaries, and her behaviour drew further disapproving comment, as the observations of the Spanish ambassador reveal:
Yet still she is as proud as ever, rides through Cheapside drawn by four milk-white steeds, with four footmen in black velvet jackets, and silver bears on their backs and breasts, two knights and thirty 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 ambassador.15
This is precisely what Lettice would have intended, for it was normally only the Queen whose carriage was drawn by white horses. The livery of her footmen, which displayed the bear that formed part of her husband’s family crest, was a clear declaration to the world that Lettice was now an integral and legitimate part of that family – it was an alliance that not even the Queen could break. Lettice was proud of her marriage, and in the portrait that now hangs at Longleat, commissioned several years later by the artist George Gower, she took care to ensure that part of the Earl’s family crest was embroidered on to her rich dress in a further, permanent reminder of her new identity.
If these reports of Lettice’s behaviour are accurate, it demonstrates her blatant disregard for the Queen’s feelings. This was, though, incredibly foolish. Everyone, both at court and in the capital, knew that Leicester and his new wife were in disgrace; the authors of Leicester’s Commonwealth wrote that ‘by his known marriage with his Minion Dame Lettice of Essex, [Leicester] hath declared manifestly his own most impudent and disloyal dealing with his sovereign in this report’, while also declaring that he had ‘denied he the same by solemn oath to her Majesty and received the holy communion thereupon’.16
The effects of their marriage were keenly felt elsewhere, too. Lady Mary Sidney, Leicester’s sister and the Queen’s friend, found the scandal surrounding the situation so unbearable that she laid low at her home at Penshurst Place, there to wait until the affair had died down. Lettice and Mary had always been on friendly terms, but the discovery of the clandestine marriage pushed their friendship to the limit, as Mary struggled to absorb the news. It was a slight that Lettice took to heart, and their relationship seems never to have fully recovered.
In a report that was doubtless highly exaggerated by Leicester’s Commonwealth, Lettice’s family are portrayed as exacerbating the situation. The authors reported that her brother Robert had ‘danced disgraciously and scornfully before the Queen in the presence of the French’, for which behaviour the Queen had berated him with ‘a reproachful word or two’. To make matters worse, Lettice’s sister Anne then added fuel to the fire by saying that ‘she nothing doubted but that one day she should see her sister, upon whom the Queen railed now so much, to sit in her place and throne, being much worthier of the same for her qualities and rare virtues than was the other’.17 These comments fortunately never reached the ears of the Queen, and no other contemporary report makes any mention of them. It would have been unwise for Lettice’s family to voice such thoughts, for they were treasonous, but the report does at least lend credence to the notion that Lettice’s family were behind her. With her husband at Wanstead, Lettice probably resided with one of them while she remained in London. Her time in the capital was to be short.
In direct contrast to Lettice’s defiant displays, her husband greatly lamented incurring the Queen’s displeasure. After all, as her close favourite he had far more to lose. But he also resented Elizabeth’s rage, and in a bitter letter to his colleague Lord Burghley complained that ‘I have lost both youth and liberty and all my fortune reposed in her’.18 He had loved Elizabeth, and had spent many years trying to persuade the Queen to marry him, to no avail. Lettice could offer him everything that Elizabeth could not: marriage, with the possibility of begetting heirs, and a stable life of domesticity. According to the Earl’s friend Lord North, this was precisely what Leicester craved, for in his later deposition about the couple’s marriage, North claimed that ‘There was nothing in this life he more desired than to be joined with some godly gentlewoman, with whom he might lead his life to the glory of God, the comfort of his soul, and to the faithful service of Her Majesty.’19 There is no way of knowing precisely how Leicester felt about his wife’s behaviour towards their sovereign – later accounts suggest that he was greatly in awe of her, and was happy to go where she led.
IT WAS NOT long after her disastrous meeting with Elizabeth that Lettice realized that her presence in London served only to inflame the Queen’s anger towards her – and towards Leicester, too. It was one thing for her, the Queen’s own relative and lady, to lose her favour, but it would be quite another if Leicester should permanently do so. He needed the protection of his sovereign, and his new wife’s residence in the city gave his enemies at court further venom to drip into Elizabeth’s ear.
Whether of her own accord, or at her husband’s instigation, Lettice decided that it would be best to retire from London. Having had time to think since her shocking confrontation with the monarch, she hoped that with some distance between them, Elizabeth’s fury would soon be quelled, and that there was a possibility that she might be forgiven. Once the first flushes of anger and pride had cooled, Lettice was able to think more logically. She realized that it would be foolish to abandon all hope of being restored to royal favour, a thought t
hat Leicester also encouraged. In what may have been a further desperate attempt to placate the Queen, although she was now legally entitled to style herself Countess of Leicester, Lettice curiously refrained from doing so. Instead, for several years, she continued to refer to herself as the Countess of Essex – perhaps more for her husband’s sake than for her own. In Elizabeth’s eyes, however, it was a case of too little too late: the damage had been done.
So it was that the newly married Lettice left London under a dark cloud of disgrace that showed no signs of clearing. Her destination is unclear – a year later she was at her childhood home at Rotherfield Greys with her father, awaiting the birth of her first child with Leicester, and it is plausible that it was to this place of familial sanctuary that she came on this occasion, too. The other possibility is Benington, the Hertfordshire residence that had once belonged to Walter. She certainly did not travel to any of Leicester’s estates at this time, for the Queen had made it clear that she loathed the idea of the couple spending time together either in London or elsewhere – thus far their meetings had been discreet, and for the next year they would continue in a similar vein. Elizabeth was not used to having to share her favourite and, in spite of his marriage, she clearly did not expect to have to start now. In the early days of her queenship she had known that Leicester was married, but with his wife Amy living in the remote Oxfordshire countryside the unseen spouse had blended quietly into the background of his life, and was no obstacle to the Queen’s flirtations. Though Lettice had retreated to the country, she could not be trusted to remain there indefinitely. Neither did Lettice have any intention of doing so.
If Lettice did indeed travel the forty miles from London to Rotherfield Greys to be with her family, she would at least have been met with a show of love and support. At the risk of losing his own standing with the Queen, her father, Sir Francis Knollys, had shown himself to be both thoughtful and concerned for her welfare. Despite his being one of the six witnesses at his daughter’s wedding, Elizabeth did not blame Sir Francis in any way for the displeasing union, and he retained her favour. Similarly, her brother Richard, another witness to her nuptials, and Lettice’s other siblings also remained in the Queen’s good graces. It was Lettice, and Lettice alone, who was forced to accept the consequences of her disgrace.
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