Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Soon after Anne Boleyn was executed, Lady Bryan was complaining to Cromwell that

  my Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her, nor myself, nor none of hers that I have the rule of - that is, her women and grooms, beseeching you . . . that she may have some raiment. For she hath neither gown, nor kirtle, nor petticoat, nor no manner of linen, nor smocks, nor kerchiefs, nor rails, nor body-stitchets [nightgowns or corsets], nor handkerchiefs, nor sleeves, nor mufflers, nor biggens [nightcaps].

  The white damask and the russet velvet had clearly been outgrown and would not necessarily be fast replaced. They were, in a sense, representative of the devoted care which Elizabeth would never again be able to take for granted, as her right, from those in authority.

  2

  ‘Her eighth year’ 1536-1547

  IN FACT, ELIZABETH’S DAILY LIFE DID NOT CHANGE INSTANTLY WHEN her mother died. It is both tempting and easy to paint too gloomy a picture. (In the same letter as she bemoans Elizabeth’s lack of clothing, the lady governess discusses how frequently Elizabeth should dine under her canopy of state.) When, later that year, the north rose in revolt against the dissolution of the monasteries, Mary and Elizabeth were both brought to court for safety; and though Elizabeth was placed less prominently than Mary, a French agent reported that the King was ‘very affectionate’ to her. The royal daughters moved between Hatfield and Hunsdon, Ashridge and Hertford Castle, when one great set of rooms needed to be cleansed and ‘sweetened’ as fresh herbs were strewn on the floor and the old unhygienic layer carted away. Each house was an encampment as large as a village, with its kennels and stables, its brewery and bakery. Most of those Hertfordshire houses where the princesses spent their time are long gone today, but a glowing red wing of old Hatfield still stands, facing the ancient church dedicated to St Etheldreda - another queen who took a hand in the destiny of her realm.5

  Elizabeth was not reared specifically for the throne. She had no actual training in statecraft, of the sort that was crammed into Edward (and had, at one time, been given to Mary, who before she was ten had been declared Princess of Wales, while governorship of the principality was formally - if briefly - turned over to herself and her advisers). All the same, Elizabeth too was given a royal training in the most important sense: that she was educated like a boy, instead of being fobbed off with the informal and domestic training traditional for a girl.

  Katherine of Aragon had received her education at the hands of her formidable mother, Isabella of Castile, and it had been formal and rigorous. Anne Boleyn had had her - also impressive - training, with a different gloss, at what was effectively the finishing school of the great European households. She was still a child when she was entrusted to the care of Margaret, the Regent of the Netherlands, and reared with the three Habsburg girls who would become the queens of France (and Portugal), of Denmark and of Hungary. In a centre of humanist studies, famed for its painting and music, Anne was trained in not only the literary but the worldly arts of the courtier. Elizabeth, of course, would end up skilled in both spheres; but the actual training she got was more akin to the model Katherine had instituted for her daughter: the model of royalty.

  In 1536 Elizabeth’s household had been augmented by a Devonshire gentlewoman, Kat (Katherine) Champernowne, whose subsequent marriage to a cousin of Anne Boleyn’s gave her her better-known name of Kat Ashley (or Astley). It was she who first, Elizabeth later said, took ‘great labour and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty’; and though Kat’s later career has left lasting doubts as to her sense and scruples, her learning seems to have been well up to the task of instructing Elizabeth’s first steps. The young princess started to acquire fluent French (though a Frenchman later mocked her clumsy accent), Italian, Spanish and even Flemish; history and geography, astronomy and mathematics, as well as dancing and riding, music and embroidery. As she would write later, in her teens: ‘the face, I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present’.

  In later years, Elizabeth’s formidable list of skills and accomplishments made up part of her equipment as a ruler. But at the time it must have been a little unclear for just what destiny, in fact, she was being educated. The grand marriage that was conventional for royal daughters already looked unlikely for her (or for Mary). When she was a baby she had been displayed ‘quite naked’ to French ambassadors, with a view to betrothing her to the French king’s younger son - but that was before she was declared bastard. When illegitimate Elizabeth, daughter of the Protestant adulteress, was offered for a Habsburg nephew, Charles V received the offer coldly. Even Henry’s own council noted that the girls were unlikely to be marriageable abroad unless they were made ‘of some estimation’ at home. The mature Elizabeth would be famous for her appetite for flattery - her urge to keep herself desirable, but ultimately unattainable. Perhaps that later attitude was coloured by this experience of knowing herself a drug on the market, before she was restored to the succession and to marriageability.

  Robert’s education, meanwhile, was not being neglected. Through the boy’s early years, his father’s fortunes rose steadily. At the time Anne Boleyn died, John Dudley was already a friend and sometimes business partner of Edward Seymour, the brother of Henry’s third queen, Jane. John and his wife held office under Anne of Cleves as Master of Horse and lady-in-waiting. (They would also be close to Katherine Parr. You could say that they did well out of Henry’s marital history.) Their sons were educated at home, not - as was so common among the English nobility - sent away to another noble house or, as would soon become possible, to a school. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, as Edmund Dudley had once written, the English nobility were ‘the worst brought up for the most part of any realm in Christendom’. John Dudley would not make that mistake; though possessed himself of only moderate linguistic and literary training, he had all the respect for book-based education to be expected from one who enthusiastically followed his royal master into the new religion and the new learning. Robert’s mother Jane Dudley had herself been well educated on elevated lines; her uncle was one of Katherine of Aragon’s closest supporters, so that Jane’s youthful times at court had brought her into contact not only with Princess Mary, but also with the future Katherine Parr, whose mother was one of Katherine of Aragon’s most respected ladies-in-waiting.

  The programme laid down some years later for the twelve-year-old Earl of Oxford gives some idea of that the Dudley boys might have followed. (There was little idea of segregating children, or their studies, according to age.) Dancing, French, Latin, writing and drawing from early in the morning (for even lie-abed Londoners rose at six) until the ten-thirty break for prayers and dinner; then from one o’clock more of the same, with a little cosmography. This - a mixture of geography and astrology, with oddments from natural science and anthropology - was likely, to judge by the eagerness of his future patronage of explorers and merchant adventurers, to have been one of Robert’s favourite subjects.

  John Dudley’s personal interests led him towards the more practical subjects of study. Astronomy could be used for navigation, and mathematics had, after all, an application in ballistics; like history, it was considered useful to a nobleman for the conduct of a war. Dudley’s professional interests were naval as well as military, and the presence of seafarers and explorers like Cabot around his house must have meant that his sons were vividly aware of the romantic possibilities offered by the new frontiers of the sixteenth century. At some point in his early career, Robert came under the extraordinary influence of ‘Dr’ John Dee, the scientist and astrologer who had himself been a pupil at Cambridge of John Cheke, and who would later be called in to give lessons in cosmography to the explorers Elizabeth and Robert both patronized.6 Such company cannot but have helped fire an imagination to which the age gave ample fuel. The adventurers of the late Tudor era brought back stories of ‘extreme and horrible
cold’, of perpetual days ‘upon a huge and mighty sea’, where might be found the unicorn’s horn (probably from a narwhal) that Frobisher would present to the crowned Elizabeth; of the giant ‘oliphant’ and its strange snout; of lands dripping with sweet gums.

  Besides lecturing the explorers, Dee, in the years Robert and his siblings remained close to him, would speak to spirits through his mediums - or so he said, and why should any doubt it? If the tales of the travellers could be true, then why should those other realms of the imagination not also open themselves to man’s curiosity? Why should the grown-up Robert not subscribe with the same hopes to an experiment to turn iron into copper and to the Muscovy Company? Elizabeth and Robert both shared the age’s belief in the supernatural: how could Elizabeth not, when her mother had been suspected of witchcraft? (And what besides magic, after all, was the coronation ceremony that transformed a fallible, fleshly, ‘natural’ woman into the earthly embodiment of the body politic, a being so endowed with grace that even her touch could cure certain maladies?) If Robert was to become Elizabeth’s ‘Eyes’, as she called him, then perhaps one thing he helped to show her was this amazing new world of earth and sky.

  Noble children read the classical authors like Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Livy, to pick up precepts, pithy pieces of wisdom and an elegant turn of phrase; they might be taught logic and rhetoric to the same end. Robert’s linguistic and literary gifts would never compare with Elizabeth’s. In later life the great educationalist Roger Ascham, famous for his part in Elizabeth’s training, would chide him: ‘I think you did yourself injury in changing Tully’s wisdom for Euclid’s pricks and lines.’ But other Renaissance scholars valued more highly the newly fashionable geometry of Euclid, as well as the observations of Pliny and Ptolemy. And Robert seems, later in life, to have acquired a working knowledge of the languages he needed. Music was essential; even barber shops kept a lute so that customers might amuse themselves while waiting in the queue. Robert’s later inventory included lutes, flutes and virginals, a particularly fine collection of paintings, and chessmen of crystal set with precious stones. The old requirements that a gentleman should be a fighter and a sportsman were changing (like the old medieval curriculum of learning); Castiglione’s The Courtier had been published in Italy in 1528, and although it was not published in England for more than thirty years after that, the Italian’s ideal of a connoisseur and conversationalist, a dancer and a diplomat, was current far earlier.

  Even the idea of a young gentleman’s education given by so dedicated a scholar as Roger Ascham included ‘courtly exercises’ as well as book learning: ‘to ride comely, to run fair at the tilt or ring, to play at all weapons, to shoot fair in bow and surely in gun, to vault lustily, to run, to leap, to wrestle, to swim, to dance comely, to sing and play at instruments cunningly, to hawk, to hunt, to play at tennis . . .’; and Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor (first published in 1531 and often reprinted) describes the training that would build a young nobleman’s ‘hardness, strength and agility and to help therewith himself in peril, which may happen in wars or other necessity’. The hunting in which Robert and Elizabeth both delighted was seen as a training for war. Robert would early have been taught to fight with a variety of weapons: not only the staff and the pike, and the broadsword, but also the rapier. Archery was a required skill for boys and men of all ranks; with invasion from abroad a recurrent possibility, it was obligatory to keep bows for children over seven. At the time of Robert Dudley’s death (a time when archery, while still compulsory, was becoming perhaps a little old-fashioned), the inventory of his possessions would include 280 bows, with their arrows.

  As the years wore on and the children grew, John Dudley took a lease on Ely Place, Holborn, as a town base in which to house his brood. The rambling fourteenth-century mansion, once the London residence of the Bishop of Ely, was a huge sprawling complex of courtyards and cloisters, state rooms and gardens. Robert thus had an early training in the ways not only of the court, but of London. Those who lived there knew the problems of the overcrowded city, where pestilence was a perennial threat. But the criers offering fresh periwinkles and ripe cowcumbers, the footpads and great fairs, the busy sparkling river and stinking alleys must have been colourful and romantic enough to attract a rich man’s son, escorted by servants through the cramped, lively streets on an occasional holiday. For in the sixteenth century Ely Place itself would almost have been in the country, or at least the healthy suburbs where plague was less of a danger. Contemporary maps show the rectangular flower and fruit beds of the huge enclosed space behind the palace, large as a market garden. Shakespeare wrote of the strawberry beds of Ely Place; and when Queen Elizabeth forced a later bishop of Ely to lease the house to another favourite, he stipulated that he should be able to pick a bushel of roses - some versions said an extraordinary twenty bushels - from the garden each year.7

  This was a time when London meant the City of London; when royalty could ride in the green spaces between the city walls and the royal complex of Westminster and Whitehall, and hounds kill their quarry in St Giles; when laundrywomen laid their sheets to dry on Moorfields; and when Covent Garden was literally the property of a monastery - one of the many whose inhabitants were turned out of doors in the first years of Robert’s childhood, in the successive depredations of the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1536 London saw its smaller monasteries, like Kilburn Priory, fall; in 1539, the larger, like Southwark and St Bartholomew’s, went the same way; and in 1540, finally, there followed the suppression of Westminster Abbey. No-one was better placed to profit from this dispossession than the King’s henchman John Dudley. But the head of the Holy Maid of Kent (executed for daring to prophesy disaster if the King married Anne Boleyn) on London Bridge, and the limb of the executed prior of Charterhouse nailed up over his monastery doors, must have spelt a kind of warning to any family for whom Edmund Dudley’s death was a recent memory. Violent death by process of law haunted both Tudors and Dudleys.

  In later life Robert and Elizabeth each made one recorded statement - just one - concerning their relationship before her accession day. Robert’s, made to the French ambassador in 1566, was that he had known Elizabeth ‘from her eighth year’ (known her ‘better than any man on earth’; and that, since that time, she had invariably declared she would never marry). The passing of that eighth year brings us to the autumn of 1541 - a point at which several things were about to happen.

  In 1542 Robert’s father was elevated to the peerage, increasing the possibility that his sons might be placed in the young Prince Edward’s household; and Elizabeth, for the first time since babyhood, spent time with her father Henry. Over the next few years, both Robert and Elizabeth would be in and out of court circles. The children of prominent courtiers were often roped in as classroom companions for juvenile royalty, and the scholars who enjoyed John Dudley’s patronage included the tutor to the royal children, John Cheke. It is dangerous to paint, as some writers have done, too sure a picture of a childhood friendship between Robert and Elizabeth. But their circles overlapped to such an extent that some degree of contact is a virtual certainty - and would have been even without the friendship between Katherine Parr, the King’s last wife, and Jane Dudley.

  Because something else had happened in 1542. That February, Elizabeth’s kinswoman - giddy, sexy Katherine Howard - died on the block, with unexpected bravery. Where her cousin Anne had cracked jokes about her ‘little neck’, Katherine asked to have a rehearsal of the execution ceremony: this, at least, she wanted to do properly. But Elizabeth was not close enough to Kat to suffer in her fall (unlike her aunt, George Boleyn’s widow, Lady Rochford). When, in the summer of 1543, the King married Katherine Parr, Jane Dudley was one of the few present at the ceremony. The first surviving letter to contain some hint of the news was written by John Dudley, reporting that Katherine was ‘here at court’ in Greenwich with Mary and Elizabeth.

  After the wedding, while Mary stayed at court, Elizabeth was r
eturned to the schoolroom - to the company of Edward, and those around him. But the new couple’s progress brought them round to Ashridge, and to the inhabitants of the royal schoolroom. English ambassadors abroad, used to passing off the latest scandal, found themselves asked, as a novelty, whether it was true that the English royal family lived now as one household? For Elizabeth, it was perhaps the nearest thing she would ever know to ordinary family life. At the beginning of 1544 Henry - now aged fifty-two, and with no sign of the longed-for second son - laid down another Act of Succession. If he had no further child, if Edward died without heir, then the throne passed to Mary; if she too died childless, to Elizabeth. That is a lot of ‘ifs’ - and nothing was done about removing the stigma of bastardy. But all three of Henry’s children were there at a formal dinner in May 1544 to mark the betrothal of the King’s niece Margaret Douglas to the Scottish Earl of Lennox.

  In July came a kind of break-up of the family group. As the King himself set off to the wars in France, Prince Edward was to move into Hampton Court, where there had been constructed a ‘Prince’s side’, a shadow establishment above a sunny small court, next to the Chapel Royal, with the prince’s chamber between that of the master of his horse and his bowling alley; rooms that, to protect the prince’s most precious person from infection, were washed down three times a day.

  It was those French wars of the 1540s that gave John Dudley his real opportunity. Appointed a general (like Edward Seymour, now Earl of Hertford), he had been raised to the peerage as Viscount Lisle in 1542 and, within another year, to the posts of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and Keeper of the Scottish Marches; to the head of the Admiralty and the Order of the Garter; and even to the privy council. In 1544 he was at the head of the army that quelled Scotland with professional ferocity, and then (heading rapidly southwards again) in command of the fleet that carried an English army to France. The recapture of Boulogne was in part his triumph - a coup of limited practical use, but a huge propaganda victory. Boulogne made Dudley a public hero, but at great personal cost: his eldest son, Robert’s elder brother, died in the affray.