Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Some of the government troops, even, went over to Wyatt, rather than be ruled by ‘Spaniards or strangers’. But Mary herself showed to advantage in this crisis, riding to rally her troops in the City. She loved her subjects, she told them, ‘as the mother doth the child’. She would never marry ‘but [unless] all her true subjects shall be content’. The subtext would prove to be that if you weren’t content, you weren’t true, but at the time it went down nicely. London stood; Wyatt surrendered his arms and was taken to the Tower, already a dead man walking. Within a few days of the rebellion’s end, a stream of fresh prisoners were headed for the crowded fortress, there to join the Dudleys.

  Wyatt’s revolt brought a new climate of toughness. It may be no coincidence that in January 1554 Robert too had to walk through the streets with a headsman before him, and to give the automatic plea of guilty; had to hear a court pronounce the verdict that he should be hung, drawn and quartered, knowing that the sentence would not necessarily be carried out - or not immediately - and not in its full enormity . . . but that anything was still a possibility. Almost half a century before, in the same Tower, his grandfather Edmund, in the weeks between his arrest and his trial, had described himself as ‘a dead man by the king’s laws’, and was then kept waiting for almost another year before the time came for him to die. Robert was the last of his family to come to trial. Henry and Ambrose Dudley had been tried and sentenced back in November, along with Guildford Dudley and his wife Lady Jane Grey. It is possible that since most of Robert’s activities had been in Norfolk (and in an area that owed him loyalty), evidence could not easily be gathered against him.

  Mary’s councillors - and the Spanish ambassador - urged that there should be an end to mercy. On 12 February 1554, the death sentence was carried out on Guildford Dudley. He was beheaded on Tower Hill: his wife (and presumably brothers) saw his body brought back, ‘his carcass thrown in a cart and his head in a cloth’. More was to follow. From their room in the Beauchamp Tower, the remaining brothers could have heard the thunk of the axe as Jane Grey too was beheaded, but this time within the Tower precincts, privately. Unless access was barred to them, the window of the Beauchamp Tower, where Robert stood to carve, would have given them a close, an immediate, a balcony view. But in any case, tales must have gone round the Tower, with all the details of the scene. How she struggled to adjust her clothing for the axe; how the executioner offered to help her until, revolted, she shrank away. How - with the scarf tied round her eyes, and panicking for a moment - she groped for the block, blindly. How (dignified still, but fearful at last) the seventeen-year-old had asked the headsman: ‘I pray you despatch me quickly.’

  Elizabeth had been much more closely implicated in the Wyatt rebellion than Jane. Older, guiltier, more dangerous - if she escaped punishment, it could only be by a miracle. On 19 March the fallout from the revolt also brought Elizabeth to the Tower; and if the traditional arrival at Traitor’s Gate has proved to be a myth, the real drama was just as deadly.

  On 9 February, two days after Wyatt’s rebellion folded, three privy councillors and a troop of soldiers had arrived at Elizabeth’s house at Ashridge to bring her to court. Her pleas of ill-health were not accepted, though her face and body were swollen with what might have been nephritis, or might have been a psychosomatic illness, and when she entered London on the twenty-third it was with the curtains of her litter thrown back, to defy rumours (the French ambassador said) that the swelling was a pregnancy from ‘some vile intrigue’ - the anonymous lover with whom gossip so regularly credited her. The sound of the axe might have beat the time to her journey: Jane Grey died on the day Elizabeth set out, and Jane’s father on the day she arrived. The Spanish ambassador had long reported that Elizabeth too would die, surely.

  In Whitehall Palace, while the Queen refused to see her sister, the process of collecting evidence went on. There was no difficulty in showing that the rebels had suggested to Elizabeth trouble might be brewing; that members of her household had been in touch with Wyatt; even that she had kept the French informed of her movements. But had she known, specifically, that rebellion was planned? Had she agreed to it, specifically? Wyatt himself, throughout his trial on 15 March, played down all contact with her. On 17 March, a Friday, the council none the less came to Elizabeth and charged her with conspiracy. She denied it, passionately - but her servants were taken away. The next day the councillors came to take her to the Tower; Elizabeth implored, first, to be allowed to make a written plea to her sister - a document with desperation breathing through every line. (She even scored across the blank space below where her writing ended to prevent anyone’s adding in any other matter that could be interpreted treasonably.) That letter bought her the turn of the tide, and it was Palm Sunday before her boat set off downriver in the rain.

  We do, now, have to add a pinch of salt to the old pretty stories that once painted such a romantic picture of the captive princess. Elizabeth arrived not by water through Traitor’s Gate, but by land past the roaring lions of the menagerie. She was held not in the fairytale turret of the Bell Tower, but more prosaically in the old royal palace - since the Tower was a royal dwelling place as well as a prison; and a mint, and a zoo, and an armoury. Physically, the terms of her imprisonment were not harsh; though the Tower had dark dungeons, they were not for such as her. She had four rooms; permission to walk in the privy gardens (though other prisoners, so her chronicler John Speed reported, were not even to look in that direction while she was there); and a dozen servants in close attendance. But when the councillors left her there, they turned the keys in the door - albeit with a few doubts as to whether it were really appropriate to her royalty. And there was a mixed message to be read even in the rooms themselves: rebuilt for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, they were also those in which she stayed before her execution, and the omen cannot but have struck Elizabeth unpleasantly.

  Other romantic stories about her imprisonment were told by the chroniclers of her own day - for Protestants like Foxe and Speed made much of Elizabeth’s near-martyrdom in the Tower. One told of gaolers’ children who brought her flowers, and an old bunch of keys, in the infantine belief that the pretty lady captive could use them to get away. Another story - a whole long-lived legend! - told that the romance of Elizabeth and Robert began here, on the high walkway that connects the Beauchamp to the Bell Tower; began with snatched meetings as they were allowed each to take the warming spring air, promises of allegiance exchanged as they gazed westwards on the forbidden city . . . Sadly, there is no evidence for this at all; and indeed the scenario on the walkway loses some of its point now we know that Elizabeth was held not in the Bell Tower, but the whole width of the fortress away (and that Robert had permission to be visited by his wife, Amy).

  But to prick the romantic bubble is not to deny that there could be a powerful and enduring emotional punch in this common experience of captivity. When Anne Boleyn heard that her brother George was also in the Tower, accused of incestuous adultery with her, she had said: ‘I am very glad that we both be so nigh together.’ Is there any kind of echo in these words for Elizabeth and Robert Dudley? Whether or not they actually met there, each would have known of the other’s presence and, if they already shared some measure of friendship, they could not fail to have felt an increased bond of sympathy. Both had now lost a parent to the headsman; and, even in the Tudor century, there were not many in that fraternity. But in some ways their experience of the Tower highlights the differences, as well as the similarities, between them. Elizabeth’s time there was more comfortable than Robert’s, as well as briefer; and her situation no more menacing. But through all these years she was wheeling and dealing alone. ‘Help me now, O God, for I have none other friend but Thee alone,’ she prayed. Those closest to her (like Seymour; like those servants who had been forced to tell damaging tales) served only to endanger her.

  Robert, too, is credited with putting his pen to a religious writing in the Tower. In a prayer based on the psalms, he
wrote of a time

  Where, when the wicked ruled / And bore the sway by might No-one would [preace] to take my part / or once defend my right So that for want of help / I had been sore oppressed If that the Lord had not with speed / my woeful plight redressed.

  But, bad though Robert’s situation might be, at least he was, as he had always been, wrapped in family companionship and loyalty. In the years ahead, it would often seem as though, in his relationship with Elizabeth, Robert had the emotional stability though she had the worldly authority.

  In the end, Elizabeth was in the Tower for only two of the eighteen months the Dudleys spent in captivity. Though her nerve may have quivered as she entered the place, it held fast as she was questioned. She admitted nothing. What written evidence there was proved nothing, really. And when Wyatt was executed on 11 April, his speech from the scaffold exonerated her completely. The terms of her imprisonment became lighter. When fresh guards appeared at the Tower early in May, she was still in a state to be terrified - asked whether Lady Jane’s scaffold had been taken away. But in fact, the guards were there to escort her away from the Tower, to house arrest in Woodstock. She left on 19 May.

  No-one bounces back from a shock like that; not immediately. London legends have her leaving the Tower in a burst of bravado, and going straight to the London Tavern. But in fact, after leaving the Tower she slept at Richmond Palace, telling her servants, ‘[this night] I think to die’. Assassination might have been a possibility; her enemies at court had hoped to send her to Pontefract Castle, where Richard II had disappeared. But the slow journey to Woodstock showed how difficult such a procedure would be. The women of High Wycombe, the schoolboys of Eton and the villagers of Oxfordshire all turned out to greet her. When she reached the rusty and rambling old palace of Woodstock, outside Oxford (in what are today the grounds of Blenheim Palace), it was clear that she would have a fighting chance of controlling the terms of this comfortable captivity - of a tenancy that would last for a year. The council’s instructions had been that Elizabeth should communicate with nobody. But that was hard to enforce, when her own servants might come and go, and the Bull Inn in Woodstock (‘a marvellous colourable place to practice in’, in the bitter words of her gaoler) had become the headquarters of her trusted Thomas Parry.

  As 1554 wore on, with Elizabeth at Woodstock and the Dudley brothers in the Tower, at the end of July Mary married Philip of Spain; and if the old Catholic marriage service she used had seemed to promise unqueenly compliance on her part, it seemed, too, as if Philip and his Spanish entourage were determined to prove that the worst fears of the English would not be fulfilled and to use his position as queen’s consort tactfully. Parliament would never grant Philip a matrimonial crown, nor any official authority. It would become a bone of dissent between Philip and Mary. But for the moment, everyone strove to do their duty smilingly. In Mary’s case there was no pretence. She loved her unenthusiastic husband passionately. In the autumn Mary, ecstatic, was convinced she was pregnant - with a child who would consolidate her marriage, confirm her husband’s status and ensure a Catholic future for the country.

  The time was right for some improvement in the lives of the Dudley brothers. All the months of their imprisonment, their widowed mother had been working frantically for their freedom, attempting to bring all her old family contacts with Mary, and with Mary’s Spanish kindred, into play. No English courtier would help Jane Dudley - but the Spaniards proved more receptive, spurred thereto by the efforts of her son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney (married to Robert’s sister Mary), who was one of the diplomats sent to Spain on the marriage negotiations. Philip of Spain even stood godfather to Sir Henry’s new son, the baby who became Sir Philip Sidney. He arrived in England anxious to prove himself a friend to all the English nobility. Jane Dudley was allowed back to court; found friends in the Duchess of Alva and Don Diego de Mendoza, and other of Philip’s advisers, who were remembered in her will as those ‘who did my sons good’. ‘I give my lord Don Diego de Acevado the new bed of green velvet with all the furniture to it . . . to the duchess of Alba my green parrot, I have nothing worthy for her else.’

  Still, her sons’ release was not easily won. In October John, the eldest, was set free to go to Sir Henry Sidney’s home of Penshurst - but only because he was sick of Tower fever. He died three days later: yet another loss in the terribly depleted family. Perhaps this last death took the heart from Jane Dudley. At the house in Chelsea which was all that remained to her, she too fell ill. She died on 22 January 1555 - and by now at last, on compassionate grounds, the three surviving brothers had been set free, to pay their mother’s debts and arrange for her obsequies. For the next few months they (and their wives) would live a strange half-life. Still under attainder, they were not allowed to enjoy the fruits of their estates, yet they had few other sources of income and no real employment; though it seems they were allowed some vestige of court life, since they were recorded as taking part in an Anglo-Spanish tournament that winter. It would not be surprising if they fell in with disaffected sections of society, as is suggested by the Venetian envoy’s report that they had been ordered back to the country.

  These were grim times in the city. That year of 1555 saw the worst of the burning of heretics at Smithfield. The martyrologist John Foxe’s description of the burning of John Rogers who, when the fire ‘had taken hold upon both his legs and shoulders . . ., as one feeling no smart, washed his hands in the flame as though it had been in cold water,’ masked a hideous reality. Perhaps the Dudley brothers, with their Protestant background, hung out with the malefactors and miscontents who clustered around St Paul’s, where coney-catchers waited for their gulls, and gallants loitered before their dinner (perhaps as fashionably late as midday). ‘What swearing is there,’ Thomas Dekker later wrote, ‘what facing and out-facing? What shuffling, what shouldering, what jostling, what jeering, what biting of thumbs to beget quarrels . . . what casting open of cloaks to publish new clothes, what muffling in cloaks to hide broken elbows ... ?’ They might dice or drink the afternoon away; go to a bull or a bear baiting. (London had as yet no theatres, and fishing or walking in the fields around the city’s edge was probably unfashionably healthy.) It sounds an aimless sort of life - but it seems possible that his time in the Tower, with all that he had seen there, had changed Robert in some way. In the years immediately ahead it was Robert, though he was not the eldest brother, who seemed to be taking the lead in the family - trying to act politically; trying, like his father, to take the long view (if not actually to have always three or four purposes in his mind, as people had said of that same father, not altogether admiringly).

  Just as there can be a survivor’s guilt, so there can be a kind of zest in the survivor - a determination to make the most of the life that has been returned to you so unexpectedly. Robert Dudley’s adolescence had seen his family riding very high. Now the red carpet had been pulled out from beneath his feet, and did he determine to climb back on it, in some way? He would live his life fully, greedily - but now, perhaps, he also became the person who could be useful (as well as merely attractive) to Elizabeth; the person whose experience of loss and danger following after indulgence matched her own; her spiritual ‘brother’, as she called him so frequently.

  When, in the second half of April 1555, Elizabeth was summoned from Woodstock to Hampton Court, it was that she might be on hand to witness her sister’s triumph: the birth of a child who would finally sweep her out of the succession. Instead, she would watch - in horror, surely, and perhaps also in pity - one of the age’s more drawn-out tragedies. There were rumours, at the end of the month, that the Queen had been delivered of a son. The bells rang out joyfully. But it was a mistake - or perhaps, a miscarriage. Or perhaps, as the French ambassador heard early in May, the whole thing, swollen belly and all, had been the result of ‘some woeful malady’.

  Hunched, with her knees drawn up to her chin in pain, but still, appallingly, in hope, Mary waited in her birthing chamber thro
ugh May - through June - through July. Elizabeth, still at court, had ample time to reflect yet again on female destiny. In August, Mary quietly left her chamber; only to hear that Philip - faced with a choice between barren marriage in England and his duties in the vast continental realm from which his father planned to abdicate - had unsurprisingly decided to go away. Elizabeth was there for the parting; there too when Mary prayed for her absent husband. She witnessed Mary’s humiliation; the crumbling of the pretence that Philip had sought anything other than political advantage in this marriage, that he had any interest in Mary personally. In October, Elizabeth received permission to leave court, not for a return to Woodstock but for her own estate at Hatfield; there to begin what, for the next three years, would effectively be a waiting game.

  But Philip had left behind him a legacy. There is a story, from those months at Hampton Court, of a famous meeting between the sisters. Elizabeth, summoned from her rooms at ten in the evening, was taken to the chamber where Mary awaited what she still thought would be a happy outcome to her pregnancy. As Mary again pressed her sister to admit her guilt in the Wyatt conspiracy, there was - as Foxe later claimed - a hidden witness to the meeting: Philip, who, from behind an arras, was listening secretly. Legend says that as he listened, he looked; and as he looked, he lusted . . . More certainly, Philip now saw Elizabeth as a valuable pawn in Habsburg policy.