Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  With Katherine’s death came the possibility, again, of Elizabeth’s marrying Seymour. Seymour, at least, obviously thought so. When he refused to disband his wife’s household of ladies, there was debate as to whether they were to attend on his second royal wife, or merely on the ever-present Lady Jane Grey. His thoughts of Elizabeth must be seen in the context of his ever more frantic political forays; for Thomas Seymour, by now, was even travelling to the West Country to assure himself that the fleet would be on his side in the event of his launching a coup against his brother. So noticeable had his intentions become by late autumn, when Parliament reassembled, that the Lord Privy Seal, Lord Russell, took the occasion to warn Seymour that if he - or any other Englishman - attempted to set himself so far above his peers as to marry either of the princesses, he would ‘procure unto himself the occasion of his utter undoing’. (So much for the theory put forward by Seymour - and those who came after him - that ‘It is convenient for princesses to marry, and better it were that they are married within the realm than in any foreign place.’)

  Thomas Seymour was in fact (possibly encouraged by John Dudley, who hoped to divide the brothers) using presents and pocket money to win the affection of the young King, who was kept by the Lord Protector under a somewhat oppressive regime, and planning in the end to take possession of the King’s person, by force if necessary. In the middle of January 1549 he burst into Edward’s bedroom with a party of armed men and, when the barking of Edward’s pet spaniel aroused the guards, shot the dog dead. The council had almost no choice but to arrest him, and to call in for questioning his associates, who by now included Kat Ashley and Elizabeth’s cofferer Thomas Parry. Seymour had bribed or flattered these key members of Elizabeth’s household into support of his plans; nor did it seem that Elizabeth heard of his ambitions unwillingly. But the key question was, with precisely what provisos had Elizabeth even tacitly conceded she and Seymour might possibly marry? With Elizabeth’s favourite servants on their way to the Tower, her household was taken over by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, with instructions from the council to obtain evidence of Seymour’s treasonable activity. He had, he said confidently, good hopes ‘to make her cough out the whole’.

  But in Elizabeth Tyrwhit had met his match. Parry and Kat Ashley talked quickly, terrified, and Elizabeth, once her first tears were over, was brought to confirm the basics of what they had to say. They ‘all sing one song’, Tyrwhit reported disgustedly. Yes, Seymour had quizzed Parry about exactly what lands and possessions Elizabeth had. Yes, she had been in contact with the Admiral, but only about matters of business, open for anyone to see. Yes, there had been rumours, but was that her fault? Hardly. Even if it were true that Kat and Parry had discussed the possible marriage between themselves, the point - the only real point - was that (as Elizabeth declared) Kat Ashley ‘would never have me marry, neither in England nor out of England, without the consent of the King’s Majesty, Your Grace’s [Somerset’s] and the Council’s’. Elizabeth’s servants - frailer (and more vulnerable to threat) than she was - were none the less loyal to her, by their lights, and she (as Tyrwhit wonderingly noted) remained wholly committed to them. Indeed, the whole long night she wept when she heard Kat Ashley was to be taken away from her, the way she clung to familiar faces over the next months, foreshadowed the way she would hold fast to Robert Dudley, clamping him in fetters at the same time as she gave him his opportunity.

  In February she had to hear the distasteful news that Kat had been pressurized into blabbing details of those early-morning romps. Elizabeth was never one to take humiliation lightly. She wrote indignantly to Somerset. She had to accept the further indignity of hearing that Lady Tyrwhit would replace the disgraced Kat Ashley. But effectively, she had got away with it; had kept her head, literally. It was only Seymour who, faced with thirty-three counts of treason, was sentenced to the death penalty. His brother refrained from any effort to save him - urged to this harshness by John Dudley. Elizabeth, as Tyrwhit reported, ‘beginneth now a little to droop’. But when, on 20 March, Seymour’s head was cut off, she was safe in the country.

  David Starkey has discussed this formative episode in Elizabeth’s history, noting that ‘Almost all the men that she subsequently loved, or pretended to love, resembled Seymour. And all the affairs ended in the same way, in frustration and, in the case of the last [Robert’s stepson, Essex], again in death.’ To a psychologist - he says - Elizabeth might seem the victim of abuse, who herself would become a kind of abuser. To the eyes of a religious age, on the other hand, she would simply have learnt a great truth: that sex is sin and sin is danger. Both explanations, as he says, are far too simple. But there can be no doubt that her relationship with Thomas Seymour both affected and foreshadowed that with Robert Dudley - and perhaps not least in this: that marriage with royalty had been too dangerous an advancement for Seymour’s rivals to stomach; a rehearsal for the way Robert Dudley’s contemporaries would regard the possibility of Elizabeth’s marrying him. (Anne Boleyn, too, of course, had died for daring to mate too high.) Nor can the similarities have failed to strike Elizabeth herself: is it conceivable that, in the curbs she would eventually place upon Robert, she was trying to protect him in some way? Aspiring to marry her, after all, had brought Thomas Seymour to the block, as well as bringing Elizabeth herself into the spotlight of a dangerous and damaging inquiry. Paradoxically, the episode can only have reinforced the link in her mind between sex and danger: teaching not only that sex brought danger, but that the dangerous was somehow sexy. It is possible that Robert would not have held her interest so long had she not known he was both forbidden fruit, and a man from an ambitious family.

  As the dust of the Seymour affair settled, Elizabeth retreated for the moment into her own household and what seemed a life of almost monastic study. Kat Ashley’s husband John later recalled the companionship of the household that centred on Elizabeth and her tutor, Ascham: the ‘free talk’ and ‘trim conferences’, the ‘friendly fellowship’ and ‘pleasant studies’ of Aristotle and Cicero. The picture was an idyllic one, somewhere between a reading group and an office awayday. Spoiling the image slightly are Elizabeth’s continued bouts of illness, which do indeed sound as if they may have been nervous in origin. But, in so far as she could lose herself in study, she was wonderfully placed to do so. Ascham described how the beginning of the day was devoted to the New Testament in Greek, followed by Greek literature and Latin literature, both carefully chosen to polish Elizabeth’s style, and by oral studies in the modern languages. Ascham praised not only his pupil’s aptitude but the ‘simple elegance’ of her personal appearance. With hindsight it seems odd to hear Elizabeth - Edward’s ‘Sweet Sister Temperance’ - praised for her contempt for adornment (though plainness was the fashion in the advanced Protestant circles to which the Dudleys also belonged).

  But in the January of 1550 Ascham left Elizabeth’s service in a squabble that casts a slightly odd light on all his eulogies. He had, as he wrote to Cheke, been overcome by the ‘court violence’ that impinged on her circle. In the curious settlement left behind by King Henry - government by nobles, without clear division of authority, tough religious reform urged through by a King Edward who was still in his minority - neither court nor country was easy.

  The rebellion which broke out in the summer of 1549 was, on the face of it, a poor man’s revolt against poverty - against the enclosures and speculation of the landowning classes; against the inflation that made the lives of common people a misery. But the fact that it was led by a landowner, Robert Kett, shows that it cannot be seen so simplistically. The rebels hoped to appeal to the ‘good duke’ Somerset to right their wrongs; but it was Somerset, as Lord Protector and head of the government, who ordered Dudley to put down the rebellion. When Dudley rode towards the Midlands in August, his sons Ambrose and Robert (the latter little more than sixteen) rode with his army.

  It was no toy soldiery. The armies that faced each other, government and rebel, were each perhaps ten thousa
nd strong. When conciliation failed, and the battles moved into East Anglia, it came down to savagery. Robert was there as his father led the fighting through the streets of Norwich; there when his father used all his gifts of speech and drama to rally the quaking city. Nominally, at least, the teenaged Robert was in command of a company of infantry; and though it would be Ambrose who first took on the role of the family soldier in the decades ahead, Robert did well enough in the military campaigns of his young manhood to be able to see himself as his father’s son. Later, he could still see himself as a warrior, even when advantage and affection kept him home, at Elizabeth’s side; and he still chose to have his likeness drawn with the gauntlet and helmet of armed chivalry.

  As the victorious army rode back towards London, it became obvious that the young Dudley brothers were being blooded politically, as well as militarily. Perhaps they were already no strangers to this game, but this was to be politics with the gloves off. It has been speculated that it was the internecine bloodshed of the Kett rebellion that led Dudley to decide the time had come for Somerset’s rule to end. But he did not go quietly. October 1549 saw a series of frightening and dramatic scenes, with Somerset effectively kidnapping his nephew and taking the young King by night to Windsor on a plea of safety. When the dust settled, Somerset was in the Tower, and government was in the hands of John Dudley.

  Few political figures have been the subject of such diverse opinions as John Dudley. He has (under his last title, Northumberland) been vilified for more than four centuries as ruthless, cruel, in the end cowardly as well, and above all as overweeningly ambitious. Yet some, recently, have seen him very differently - so differently that to reconcile the two opinions is impossible, in the context of this, the next generation’s story. Even so, the problem itself casts a kind of pall over anyone attempting to follow the Dudley family through the early 1550s. Certainly, the question of his heritage would not be forgotten by Robert’s contemporaries. His rise was watched by the hostile eyes of those who remembered the days when it was said that ‘the great devil Dudley ruleth’. Yet despite the ‘black legend’ that has grown up around the Dudleys, John Dudley was a loyal as well as an able soldier and administrator; one who - faced with the dangerous challenges of a child king, and, in Somerset, a weak and untrustworthy co-ruler - tried to educate that king for kingship as fast and well as possible, and to forge a collegiate relationship with even the most unpromising of colleagues. Many modern historians are inclined to suggest that while Somerset had been arrogating near-royal authority, Dudley ruled through council and in the name of the rightful monarch; and that if Edward had lived, history might have seen his mentor very differently.

  Robert must have remembered his father, later, as powerful and, yes, ambitious. He must have felt he had large shoes to fill. But it seems possible (though Robert, like Elizabeth, seems hardly to have spoken of his disgraced parent) that he would also remember his father as fiercely loyal to the monarchy; as blamed unfairly. Here, then, may lie the explanation for Robert’s odd blend of touchiness and fidelity.

  As the star of the Dudleys rose that autumn of 1549, Elizabeth came up to court for the Christmas festivities. Her complete rustication had not lasted long. She was preferred to Mary by the new elite, being, as the Habsburg ambassador put it, ‘more of their kidney’. Indeed, a year later it was reported that John Dudley was to divorce his wife and marry her. It was an extraordinary story and unlikely - but again, Dudley’s motive was thought to be that through Elizabeth he could ‘aspire to the crown’. One wonders at what stage she wearied of being regarded as a means to an ambitious end.

  A few weeks later Elizabeth was finally granted possession of the formidable land holdings that should have come to her from her father’s death, including a swathe of manors and lands to the north-west of London, and Durham House in London for her town residence. (In the spring of 1553 she agreed, rather reluctantly, to hand the latter over to the Dudleys in return for the recently refurbished Somerset House - the keeper of which was Robert Dudley.) It was, if not a kingdom, at least a fiefdom. But she had sole possession only for her spinsterhood, her virginity.

  Of John Dudley, the Habsburg ambassador wrote home that he was ‘absolute master here. Nothing is done except at his command.’ And his command had altered life for King Edward - and for his entourage, presumably. There were still the intensive lessons, still the emphasis on the reformed religion; more emphasis than ever on statecraft, since John Dudley seems to have been trying to fit his charge to assume the real rulership. But there were also more shooting, more tilting, more water tournaments and military displays, mock battles and mastiff baitings recorded in the young King’s journal. All these were fitting arenas to display the talents of the young male Dudleys; for John Dudley packed the royal apartments with his followers. Robert was learning another useful lesson - about the importance of proximity to the monarch’s person.

  But in 1550, for Robert, private life came to the fore. He was betrothed to the daughter of a Norfolk landowner, Amy Robsart, at whose Norfolk house the Dudleys had stayed on their way to put down the Kett rebellion. It is possible the two knew each other already; they were much of an age, Amy perhaps a year the elder. It would seem to have been a love match - a carnal marriage, as William Cecil (now John Dudley’s secretary) would later put it disapprovingly. Certainly the eighteen-year-old Robert might have attracted any girl - many years later one observer, besotted with the ‘proportions and lineaments of his body’, called him ‘the goodliest male personage in England’. As for his side of the bargain, although John Dudley could now have made far grander alliances for his children, Amy was her father’s heiress, and by this alliance Robert would become a significant landholder in the contentious territory of Norfolk. They were married at Sheen on 4 June - the day after Robert’s eldest brother John was married to the daughter of Somerset, now out of the Tower and restored to a seat in government, in a limited way. John’s wedding was public and formal; Robert’s seems to have been marked by bucolic festivity. A live goose was tied to a pole (as King Edward noted in his diary), and the young male guests competed to cut off its head. The elder John Dudley, plagued by ever-worsening bouts of ill-health, was too unwell to be present at the ceremonies.

  Elizabeth, however, was in higher and higher visibility. The Christmas celebration of 1550 brought her to London ‘with a great suite of gentlemen and ladies’, escorted by a hundred of the King’s horse and formally welcomed by the council - the point being, as Charles V’s ambassador bitterly pointed out, to show that she who had embraced the new religion had ‘become a very great lady’, by contrast with her sister, who so obstinately clung to the old. Fourteen months later, in 1552, she was back with an even greater train: two hundred of the gentry on horse, besides the walking soldiery. As she rode through the park of St James towards Whitehall and the court, along a highway specially strewn with clean sand, John Dudley himself was among her escort. He was now Duke of Northumberland, his eldest son Earl of Warwick, the title the father had previously held. The younger sons automatically became ‘Lord’ Ambrose, ‘Lord’ Robert and ‘Lord’ Guildford Dudley; titles they used by courtesy even after their father’s attainder.

  On all these visits, if Elizabeth did not meet Robert - and why would anyone bother to mention it, if she did? - she certainly met Dudleys. And although Robert’s marriage saw him spending some time on those Norfolk estates, he too was climbing the ladder of court in a more modest way, appointed gentleman of the privy chamber in August 1551 and one of the welcoming escort for the Dowager Queen of Scotland in October. In 1552 (the year when, in January, Somerset was finally executed for treason and conspiracy) he was Member of Parliament and Lieutenant of Norfolk, and Master of Buckhounds as well when his eldest brother John was upgraded from that position to Master of Horse.

  In 1553 Robert, with his father-in-law, was charged with removing all superstitious objects from the churches in their part of Norfolk - and, more frivolously, with taking o
n the office of the King’s carvery. Not that this was a sinecure, at a time when every piece of flesh, fish or fowl had its own techniques and its own special vocabulary. You would ‘break that deer’, ‘trush that chicken’, ‘disfigure that peacock’ and ‘splat that pike’. You would ‘undertranch that porpoise’ - not a task many could contemplate with equanimity. All this had to be mastered - and then you had to add the appropriate sauce to each dish. Small wonder that this was regarded as no menial task: John Dudley’s stepfather, Arthur Plantagenet, had been carver to his own half-nephew Henry VIII. None of Robert’s tasks made the wheels of government spin. Still, it was not a bad haul for a young man of only twenty.

  But a time was soon coming when life would cease to be so easy for the Dudley clan - and when Elizabeth’s interests would diverge from theirs, radically. So far Mary’s loss of favour had been Elizabeth’s gain (and when in 1553 Mary seemed to be back in favour it seemed, again, to Elizabeth’s detriment). Nevertheless, when push came to shove, they were both the daughters of King Henry - and, as such, had a place in the succession; a place enshrined in their father’s will; a place that now seemed significant, in view of King Edward’s increasing frailty.