Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  So, when it was deemed time for the six-year-old Edward no longer to be brought up ‘among the women’, as he himself later put it, but given male tutors, the young nobles and ‘henchmen’ around him were always likely to have included some at least of the young Dudleys. The State Papers mention the appointment of the prince’s tutors ‘for the better instruction of the Prince and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend on him’. The fact that Robert was a few years older than Edward would have been no impediment: royalty was expected to show an unusual precocity.

  Robert’s political education would have continued in the prince’s entourage. Every child in the royal service knew that they carried with them, like a heavy load of schoolbooks, the interests of their family. Robert, of course, was used to seeing his father conducting the business of governance at home, where he presided over sessions of the High Court of Admiralty and meetings of the Navy Board he himself had founded. But he was learning another kind of politics, too (at a different level from Elizabeth): learning how a huge household meshed together; how this microcosm of a world, with its wildly differing social strata, functioned and was managed.

  The young lords around the prince had their own tutors, preachers, masters. But they must surely also have rubbed up against the different rank of rowdy ‘boys’ who feature so regularly in the kitchen ordinances. It is still possible to walk round Hampton Court today and get some sense of the bustle of those huge kitchens, as organized as any factory: kitchens where the game hung in larders on the shady side of the passage, and the pastry chefs and confectioners needed the drier side of this small street to prepare their ‘subtleties’ and their huge pork pies; where rabbits came fresh-killed from pens in the grounds, and carp from the palace fishponds were cooked with prunes to supplement the crab and the bream, the plaice or even porpoise, that arrived packed in seaweed every day.

  During his absence abroad, the King left Queen Katherine to govern in his stead, and to keep her state amid the colour of the great hall: its friezes and tapestries and painted roof; its green and white tiles on the floor (and its carvings from which not quite all the letters HA - Henry and Anne - had been excised successfully). Elizabeth was with her stepmother’s court, watching the skill with which she presided. Until she was eleven or so, Elizabeth’s education had been slightly erratic, requiring lessons from Edward’s teachers, Dr Richard Cox and Sir John Cheke, to supplement the efforts of Kat Ashley. In 1544, however, she was given her own tutor, William Grindal, who was not only a fine Latinist and a notable Grecian but also a pupil of the great Ascham. Ascham himself, a friend of Kat Ashley and her husband, taught the royal brother and sister the difficult italic hand, sent books of prayers, mended Elizabeth’s ‘silver pen’, wrote frequently and, on visits, joined them in archery. Elizabeth owed a lot to his famously progressive ideas, rare at a time when common belief held that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Ascham, by contrast, urged Kat Ashley to ‘favour somewhat’ Elizabeth’s agile young intelligence: ‘the younger, the more tender, the quicker, the easier to break’. Just as influential, however, must have been the position of Ascham, Ashley and all their circle in the vanguard of the reformed faith, along with Katherine Parr’s own advanced views.

  Robert, too, would have been learning strict Protestant tenets - indeed, he would later boast that he had been reared in them ‘from my cradle’. If Robert spent time with his father, he was in the company of one of the two men the Spanish ambassador called ‘these stirrers of heresy’ (the other being Jane Seymour’s brother, the Earl of Hertford) - adding that both men’s wives were using their religious influence on Queen Katherine. If Robert were attendant on the young Edward, then he was living at the court of a prince who (precociously and, it has to be said, not terribly likeably) insisted on being given a copy of every sermon he heard, and quizzing his adolescent companions on the content of it. The latter part of Robert’s career would amount to a crusade for what would come to be called puritanism; a cause pursued with such commitment, so often privately expressed, that it could only be sincere, little though it might seem to fit with the image of the popinjay. His tenets, indeed, would in the end be considerably more radical than Elizabeth’s.

  In 1544 (in a startlingly elaborate showpiece letter) Elizabeth wrote to Queen Katherine that ‘Inimical Fortune, envious of all good, she who revolves things human, has deprived me for a whole year of your most illustrious presence’. But by 1546 Elizabeth was of an age to be brought to court and live under her stepmother’s eye as lady-in-waiting: after Mary, the first of the ladies ‘accustomed to be lodged within the King’s Majesty’s house’. When she arrived, she might have been greeted by a painting (now in Hampton Court, where it had been hung by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign) that embodied in one huge canvas her place in the royal family.

  The shape of the anonymous painting, The Family of Henry VIII, is so oddly elongated as to invite speculation that it may have been designed for deletion as necessary - cut down, perhaps, to the point of leaving only the trinity at its core. In the centre sits Henry himself enthroned, with the young Edward at his right hand, and at his left the long-dead Jane Seymour, as mother of the all-important boy. (No sign of Queen Katherine, although she had married Henry in 1543; and it is unlikely the painting was made that early.) These three are framed in a network of gilded pillars. Outside the magic circle - framed by another set of rather less conspicuous pillars - stand the two royal daughters, separately: Mary, as elder, to Henry’s right, and Elizabeth to his left.

  In December 1546 the message of the portrait was ratified by the King’s will, which confirmed Elizabeth’s place in the succession, after any heirs of her brother or Mary. Each daughter was left £3,000 a year until she married, with a further £10,000 to be made as a single payment on that marriage - but only if it were made with the approval of the privy council. Should Elizabeth marry without such approval, she would be out of the succession itself, ‘as though the said Lady Elizabeth were then dead’.

  But it was Henry himself who was dying. One recent theory suggests that he was suffering from Cushing’s Syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder, which would account for the bloated face that stared grimly out of later portraits, and for the massive bulk of the body. It can cause irritability, depression, aggression, psychosis - and, in men, impotence - as well as the fatty deposits on face and trunk so conspicuous in the pictures. But it remains possible that the fairly unspecific set of symptoms Henry exhibited could have been caused by general self-indulgence and debility; or by the lingering effects of that jousting injury, which produced recurrent agonizing abscesses on his legs, while forbidding him to exercise in any way.

  When, on 28 January 1547, King Henry died, his brother-in-law Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, rode out to Hertfordshire to collect the new child king - telling him only, however, that he had to return to London to be invested as Prince of Wales, and waiting till they halted to spend the night with Elizabeth at Enfield before breaking the news to both children together. Their shared grief, however, was the last moment at which brother and sister would meet together on anything like equal terms. From now on, the one was King and the other subject. While her brother moved straight into the dramas of Henry’s funeral and his own coronation (a rushed progression of less than three weeks), Elizabeth was not present at either ceremony.

  It is far more likely that Robert was there as the new Edward VI heard Archbishop Cranmer assure the congregation that he himself was now accountable only to God; and that to God was he answerable for the reformations of his church. Robert’s father, after all, would wish to display his new dignities as Earl of Warwick, the title bestowed upon him a few days before the ceremony. Edward Seymour, already Earl of Hertford, became also Duke of Somerset and, more to the point, took for himself the title of Lord Protector during Edward’s minority.

  Yet over the next few years, Elizabeth’s were to be the more dramatic adventures. Soon after her brother’s coronatio
n came the sequence of events that would mark the end of her childhood - and, it has always been assumed, colour for ever her relationships with men.

  3

  ‘The occasion of his utter undoing’ 1547-1553

  IT HAD BEEN OBVIOUS BEFORE HENRY DIED THAT EDWARD SEYMOUR and John Dudley would play leading parts in the rule of the country. John Dudley’s closeness to the King had endured through the last months of the monarch’s life - increased, even, with the bond of a shared religious policy added to the masculine good fellowship they had previously enjoyed. In the tug of war between conservatives and radicals, each pulling at Henry’s religious settlement, the King (whatever his personal convictions) finally came down on the reformers’ side. This, in the end, was the legacy he wanted to leave his son. (One of his last acts was to order the arrest of the Duke of Norfolk and the execution of his heir: politically and religiously conservative, they were the kind of over-mighty subjects who might threaten the succession of a vulnerable boy.) And if the future were to be a reformed one, there were only a few people who could administer it. As Charles V’s ambassador put it, in the first weeks of 1547, ‘it is probable that these two men, Seymour and Dudley, will have the management of affairs, because, apart from the King’s affection for them, and other reasons, there are no other nobles of a fit age and ability for the task’.

  But for the moment, by the sacred ties of blood, the pre-eminent individual was Seymour: a slightly shadowy figure, whose strong religious beliefs and altruistic rhetoric masked both his ambitions and his weaknesses. All the same, the Dudley sons - now often at court, in attendance on their father, if not directly on the young King - were close to the heart of the political intrigues that were bound to mark a royal minority. This grounding in every level of court life would later prove to have been invaluable training for Robert Dudley, enabling him rapidly to rise to the top when Elizabeth’s accession brought him his opportunity. He saw at first hand - still, at this point, from the sidelines, but from the favoured position of one whose own family were riding high - the spites, the slights and the endless spying; the webs woven between the men who mattered; the frantic clamour for place and favour; and the drama of disappointment played out every day. Robert’s nephew Philip Sidney would write of the need ‘that obeys no law and forgets blushing’; his protégé Gabriel Harvey of how the courtier should ‘Learn of the dog how skillfully to treat a Lord or King. Endure anything in the way of wrongs, and fawn none the less.’ Though this was a different kind of court from the one that eventually clustered around the dominant figure of Elizabeth, there were particular lessons to be learnt from these years of a royal minority: lessons about the use of counsel and the machinery of state (now more in evidence than it had been under the powerful Henry); lessons about the extent, and the limitations, of monarchy. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was learning lessons of her own; and they - unlike Robert’s, at this stage - would be traumatic to a degree.

  After her father’s death, Elizabeth was sent to join her stepmother Katherine Parr, who had now set up her own establishment at Chelsea. Probably the arrangement pleased her well enough. But Katherine’s life of legendary prudence and piety was about to take a more skittish turn. Before Henry’s eye lighted upon her, she had dreamt of marriage with Thomas Seymour, the younger, less responsible and infinitely more charismatic brother of the Lord Protector. The two resumed their old amour, and were married secretly in April. This - since Elizabeth continued to share a house with her stepmother and her stepmother’s new husband - brought her effectively into Seymour’s guardianship.

  Seymour may have loved Katherine both before and after her life with Henry, but marriage appeared to him first as a political opportunity. Rumour claimed that his immediate thought, on the death of the old King, had been to marry either of the two princesses, Elizabeth herself or Mary. It was of course a grandiose and ludicrous fantasy - but he renewed his attentions to Katherine only after it was made clear to him that the council would never sanction this other, yet more inviting, possibility.

  Now it seemed as if he might be able to have his cake and eat it too, in some confused way. It is unclear whether the advances he made to Elizabeth were consciously sexual or merely inappropriate - or whether sex was just, in dealing with any woman, his normal modus operandi. He may have seen a nubile teenager when he looked at Elizabeth. A portrait she had painted in her early teenage years is a study of seriousness, her hair demurely smoothed, her lips set, her dark eyes veiled and her fingers clasping a book - but perhaps a Thomas Seymour might find a hint of invitation in that very composure. More certainly, when he looked at Elizabeth he saw a chance of advancement. In this, of course, he would be the first man of many.

  In these first months of his nephew’s reign, Thomas Seymour was a disappointed man. He had been given the Lord Admiralship (John Dudley having progressed to Lord Great Chamberlain), and lands, and a barony. But he felt he should have had an equal hand with his brother in the governance of the King and the running of the country. As one contemporary, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, put it neatly and damningly, he was ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent but somewhat empty of matter’. Of much wit and little judgement, as Elizabeth is famously supposed to have summed him up . . . but the quote is probably apocryphal, and the assessment is not a teenager’s. On the plus side, Seymour was tall, and bold, and handsome. Very much, in other words, like the future Robert Dudley.

  What happened next is familiar to any amateur of Tudor history, though our knowledge comes from a very limited number of sources: the testimonies of Elizabeth’s attendants, Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry, extracted under pressure and the less reliable for it. How the Lord Admiral would come bursting into her bedchamber early in the morning, pulling back the bedcurtains to ‘make as though he would come at her’ while she scooted away - all this in the name of play; how, if he caught her getting dressed, he would ‘strike her on the back or buttocks familiarly’. Next, he appeared ‘bare legged’, in his nightgown; tried to snatch kisses from Elizabeth even as she lay in bed.

  Kat Ashley told him he went too far, for ‘These things are complained of, and my lady is evil spoken of.’ He answered hotly that he meant no evil, that he would not leave off. That Elizabeth was like a daughter to him . . . And Elizabeth? She tried (so her servants asserted) to hide, to avoid him, to get away. Small wonder, for these approaches can only have been disconcerting (to put it at its lowest) to a girl of thirteen or fourteen - out of childhood but not yet into maturity. But her feelings were clearly mixed - it would soon be reported that she blushed when his name was mentioned, showing ‘a glad countenance’, that she loved to hear him praised. Modern ideas about exploitation, about power and sexuality, should not obscure the fact that women as young as Elizabeth (or Juliet!) were married in the sixteenth century, and that Seymour was a famously attractive man.

  Katherine seems to have been as uncertain as anybody over what her husband intended, or how best to respond. That, at least, is the best explanation for the fact that (as Kat Ashley told it) she sometimes joined in Seymour’s mock assaults on their stepdaughter, helping him tickle Elizabeth in bed, and once holding her when, in the garden, he cut her dress into pieces. You could, perhaps, take her participation as proof that Seymour’s behaviour was innocent . . . or proof that Katherine was trying to demonstrate it was innocent. Trying to convince herself, maybe.

  But by the spring of 1548 the matter had gone beyond a game. If Kat Ashley’s tearful testimony is to be believed, there came a time when the Queen Dowager, ‘suspecting the often access of the Admiral to my Lady Elizabeth’s Grace . . . came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, he having her in his arms. Wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Admiral and with Her Grace also.’ As well she might have; the more so since Katherine by this time was five months pregnant with Seymour’s child, and in a state of some vulnerability. After a difficult interview between the woman and the girl - in which the younger ‘
answered little’, suggesting she did feel herself guilty - Elizabeth was sent away, to the household of Sir Anthony Denny. It was hardly a punitive measure, since Lady Denny was Kat Ashley’s sister, and the household a prominent and congenial one. The affection between Elizabeth and Katherine had been strained but not broken, if we heed the exchange of loving letters, in which Elizabeth thanked the Queen for the ‘manifold kindnesses’ she continued to show: ‘thank God for providing such friends for me’. But, as so often in her life, sexuality had threatened to spoil a relationship important to her. Thanks to Seymour’s ambition and/or lack of control, the tentative experimentations of an adolescent girl had been distorted into something very risky.

  On 30 August, at her husband’s castle of Sudeley, Katherine gave birth to a daughter. Both mother and baby seemed to be doing well, but within a few days Katherine developed puerperal fever. She died on Elizabeth’s fifteenth birthday. Seymour was at Sudeley, as was Elizabeth’s young kinswoman Lady Jane Grey, but Elizabeth herself remained at Cheshunt with the Dennys - possibly because of her health. Elizabeth had been ill about midsummer, remained unwell and edgy through into July, and was sick in bed when Kat Ashley told her Katherine was dead. (Her new tutor, Roger Ascham - who had succeeded to the post earlier in the year when Grindal had unexpectedly died - had hoped to return to Cambridge for the summer, but could not get Elizabeth’s permission to go, ‘for she favours me wonderfully’; a prime example of the way she would cling to her favourites.) Her illness may well have been emotional in origin; the first but not the last of the nerve storms that would continue to plague her throughout her life. The symptoms - migraine, panic attacks, menstrual problems - certainly fit that diagnosis, but some contemporaries suspected otherwise. It was suggested that Elizabeth had miscarried Seymour’s baby. Later there would be other tales of a country midwife summoned to attend on a very young and obviously noble lady; of a child born only to be killed at birth. For none of this is there any evidence - and improbable tales of secret pregnancies would continue to haunt Elizabeth’s career.