Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  The spectre of royal death was ever-present in the sixteenth century. That Mary should die childless - and early - was beginning to look likely. If so, Elizabeth (suspect heretic though she might be) was from Spain’s viewpoint the best candidate to succeed to the throne. The alternative - the right heir by Catholic rules: Mary, Queen of Scots - was a wholly committed Francophile, raised in that country and married to the heir of the French king. With England under French control, the Channel passage would be barred between Spain and Spain’s Netherlands territories. Better a heretic; especially one who could be safely married to a Catholic prince, and converted that way.

  So, for the rest of Mary’s reign, Elizabeth would be protected by Philip against Mary’s suspicions; and behind this shield she was able to move with increasing freedom. In theory, she was living retired. In practice, she was building her political support as surely as she studied to increase her Greek vocabulary. Nothing illustrates the strength of this shield better than the events of the next winter, 1555-6, when another plot aimed to replace Mary with Elizabeth on the throne; a plot of which Elizabeth almost certainly knew, in which she was almost certainly guilty. Yet it is less well known than the Wyatt rebellion, in part because Elizabeth suffered none of the same dramatic penalties. Indeed, she suffered none at all - because Philip (policy outweighing any passion for justice he may have felt) decreed that she should not.

  It is interesting, to say the least, that the name of the leader in that conspiracy should be Sir Henry Dudley. Though a distant cousin only, he had been employed by Robert’s father. Still, there was no trace of the involvement of any of Robert’s immediate family. It was only ten years later, with Elizabeth on the throne, that William Cecil would make a list of those he considered to be close to Robert and there, one on a list of many plotters against the Marian regime, was the name of Henry Dudley. Perhaps it was just as well for Robert that Jane Dudley had taken such care to make friends among the Spanish clan, and that Philip, for his part, had every motive to forge links with the disaffected English nobility. It seems ironic that both Elizabeth and Robert should owe their rehabilitation to Philip of Spain - later, so famously, the enemy of both.

  But the worst threat to Elizabeth’s position came also through Philip of Spain, and it came in the shape of a possible marriage. In November 1556 Elizabeth (bored in her country exile) received a welcome invitation to come to court for Christmas, where she was received with unexpected warmth - received very, very briefly; for in the first week of December she was on her way back to Hatfield. She had, almost certainly, been instructed to marry a suitor of her sister’s choosing. And she had, almost certainly, rejected the instruction, frantically.

  The proposed husband was the titular Duke of Savoy, a cousin of Philip of Spain whose dukedom, however, had been seized by the French. If he married where Spain suggested, he would effectively get the hope of a kingdom in exchange, since he and Elizabeth would be named heirs after Mary. If Elizabeth did not agree, Mary threatened, she would be punished with an official declaration of bastardy and the loss of any place in the succession. In her misery (or so the French ambassador recalled years later), Elizabeth even contemplated flight across the Channel. But that would lose her any chance of inheriting and ruling her own country, just as surely as enforced marriage to a foreign prince and a future of Catholic domesticity.

  In the spring of 1557 Philip returned to England. After a brief truce, France and Spain had resumed active hostilities; he needed to secure both England’s involvement on Spain’s side and a marriage that would keep the Duke of Savoy - Spain’s general in the north - happy. There was (so the French ambassador warned her) even a plot to carry Elizabeth abroad by force. But one can easily imagine that this very atmosphere of coercion and urgency reinforced her determination to refuse. Clearly she already hoped to rule, and contemplated doing so alone. Maybe she saw spinsterhood as a price she was prepared to pay for power. But perhaps everything in her life - even this latest attack on her autonomy - conspired to lead her to a more radical conviction; to make her view marriage as a punishment, a sentence, a second best.

  Though the most pressing, this was neither the first nor the last of the marriage proposals made for her in Mary’s reign. Other candidates included Don Carlos, Philip’s mad pre-teenage son by his first marriage, and, later, the crown prince (soon to be king) of Sweden. Once Elizabeth ‘said plainly that she would not marry’ - ‘no, though I were offered the greatest prince in all Europe’. Then she said she liked her single status too well to change it. (That she liked it so well ‘as I persuade myself’ there was no other comparable . . . One wonders whether the very fact of having endlessly to repeat refusals were not driving her into an entrenched position; whether she did not wind up talking herself into conviction, to some degree.) So now Elizabeth continued to refuse, saying, so the Venetian ambassador reported, that ‘the afflictions suffered by her were such that they had . . . ridded her of any wish for a husband’. And Mary refused further to coerce her - less out of affection, it would seem, than because she did not want Elizabeth (even an Elizabeth transformed into Catholic wife) ruling her, Mary’s, country.

  Also in the spring of 1557, the three surviving Dudley brothers - Ambrose, Robert and Henry - were allowed access to the revenues of which their father’s attainder had deprived them (though they would not be ‘restored in blood’ for another year). Coincidentally or not, Robert was among the young Englishmen who volunteered to sell some of his lands and raise troops to swell Spain’s army. Parliament and council long opposed Mary’s desire to send troops and money to her husband’s war, a war they felt was none of their own. The French ambassador commented that she was on the eve ‘of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom’. But French support for yet another minor rebellion helped persuade the English government, and in June a herald was sent to the French court, literally to throw down the gauntlet. All three Dudley brothers sailed to France the next month, with Philip’s six-thousand-strong English army.

  They sailed into battle, and into the horrors of the siege of St Quintin. It was considered a notable Anglo-Spanish victory. Robert in particular was judged to have done well, in charge of the artillery. But the game was hardly worth the candle; whatever praise it brought Robert in Spanish circles, the fighting at St Quintin also saw the death of the youngest Dudley brother, Henry, struck by a cannonball before Robert’s eyes. Of the thirteen children Jane Dudley had borne, only four were now left alive: two sisters (Katherine, married to the Earl of Huntingdon, and Mary, married to Henry Sidney), and two brothers, Ambrose and Robert.

  Even the campaign itself went sour when the French took Calais in January 1558. England’s last remaining continental outpost, it had been in the country’s possession for two centuries. Its loss was a humiliation for England abroad and a personal failure for Mary, widely blamed for taking the country into Spain’s war. A few years later Sir Thomas Smith would recall: ‘I never saw England weaker in strength, money, men and riches . . . Here was nothing but fining, headinging [sic], hanging, quartering and burning, taxing, levying and beggaring, and losing our strong-holds abroad.’ If Robert on the continent had at least had his first taste of personal military success - his first hint he might emulate his father on the real field of battle, as well as in the tilt yard - Elizabeth was learning that war was an evil to be avoided at all costs; a reason to be wary of foreign alliances, and foreign allies.

  Philip had left England again in July 1557.9 In the spring of 1558 Mary once again hoped to be delivered of a baby. But few this time thought the pregnancy anything other than an illusion. Elizabeth was in London briefly, at the end of February, bringing (so legend said) a layette long thought to be of her own making that is in Hever Castle today. But she did not stay around for an event everyone really knew to be unlikely. Possibly she had other concerns. For Elizabeth was not passive in these years (a point raised by the interesting question of what - since she was richly endowed, and prudent, and yet const
antly in debt at this time - she was doing with her money). She was scheming, preparing, setting up a virtual shadow government. The Venetian ambassador had written the year before that ‘all eyes and hearts’ were turned towards her as Mary’s successor; that she or her people were found behind every plot; and, most tellingly, that ‘there is not a lord or gentleman in the kingdom’ who did not seek a place in her service for himself or his relations. The picture of a powerful and professional opposition politician is at odds with the more romantic vision of a red-headed, white-faced girl transported in an instant from poverty to power. But it explains how, when she did come to the throne, she was already politically involved with Robert Dudley.

  When Robert came back from the continent, he probably spent a good deal of his time at the London houses of various family connections, having always an eye to the various Norfolk properties inherited by himself and Amy. Apparently, he was lying dormant; but a few years later Elizabeth would say - to the Duke of Saxony’s envoy - that, personal liking apart, she would always be grateful to Robert because, in her time of need, he sold lands to raise funds for her. (Schemes and shadow governments cost money.) There is no other hard evidence - no evidence that he mortgaged lands, no evidence as to what he did with the proceeds; what went to Elizabeth, and what to buying the Dudleys’ way into the Spanish army. But the Protestant circles with which she was in touch were the circles in which he moved; indeed, he was at the centre of a useful network to a striking degree. He had connections to William Cecil (who was in regular touch with the princess) and to the other Cambridge scholars; to the disaffected plotters who had followed Sir Henry Dudley; and, simultaneously, to the Spanish courtiers.

  If we doubt that there were dealings done, in these days of waiting and watching - dealings too secret to leave a paper trail - we have only to consider the story of John Dee. The one-time tutor in the Dudley household, who had secretly cast Elizabeth’s horoscope for her, was himself close to Cecil as well as to the old royal tutor Cheke. Dee’s name crops up repeatedly in the chronicles of Mary’s reign, appearing first as a suspected heretic - and then as a Catholic inquiry agent in the service of the regime! One might assume that he had simply turned traitor to his beliefs ... but in that case why would Robert Dudley approach him, of all available astrologers, to select a propitious day for Elizabeth’s coronation, when the time came? It seems more likely that Dee was playing an underhand role not towards his Protestant friends, but to the Catholic authorities, and that these covert dealings would be known to such an ambitious insider as Robert Dudley.

  We have no surviving records to show exactly where Robert Dudley was in these months. There is nothing to place him at Hatfield itself - but what information there is suggests he may have been living in a family house not too far away. Near or far, he was clearly in close enough communication that when, in the late summer of 1558, it became clear that Mary was very ill, he was one of the network waiting, ready. In early October the Queen’s condition worsened; and Elizabeth’s ever-loyal Parry began contacting supporters, ever more openly.

  On 28 October Mary added a codicil to her will. Acknowledging that she had as yet no ‘fruit nor heir of my body’, she conceded that in the absence of such she would be followed by ‘my next heir and successor by the laws of this realm’. Ten days later, she was brought to acknowledge Elizabeth more specifically.

  Philip’s special ambassador Feria, travelling rapidly towards Hatfield, wanted Elizabeth to acknowledge that her throne would come to her through Spain’s favour. Instead, he found an Elizabeth well mounted on her high horse; an Elizabeth who claimed that the throne would come to her through the affection of the people, who told him, moreover, that Mary had lost that affection ‘because she had married a foreigner’.

  Feria thought that he knew the men she would favour: William Cecil for secretary of state; the faithful Parry, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Earl of Bedford, Lord Robert Dudley . . . But he added that ‘she is determined to be governed by no-one’. It was not a bad prophecy. When, in the early morning of 17 November, Mary slipped quietly away, Elizabeth’s inner cabinet were ready. In the first hours of the new reign, her new secretary William Cecil recorded in a memo that messengers should be sent to various ambassadors, to the kings of Spain and Denmark - and, again, to Lord Robert Dudley.

  5

  ‘The King that is to be’ Spring 1559-summer 1560

  IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE DAY MARY DIED, ELIZABETH WAS ALREADY holding her first meeting with many of the men who would become her close advisers. There were changes to be made to the composition of the privy council: no surprises there, surely. The most aggressively Catholic of the Marian councillors were out, with the exception of a few whose rank gave them automatic passage into power. What made their dismissal less personal is that Elizabeth was reducing the number considerably. William Cecil was already beside her when she held that first meeting in Hatfield’s Great Hall - the one that is rented out as a banqueting hall today. Now, it looks archaic: a vault of warm red brick, with carved heads on the corbels, and pigeons flying in; oddly domestic, too, as the setting for a piece of political history. But then - though the Great Hall as a centre for communal life was already fading into the medieval past - it would have seemed modern enough, and suitable for a regime that planned to ground its reforms on ancient authority.

  There at Hatfield, with the new Queen’s future councillors clustered about her, the big questions that would haunt the reign already loomed: questions about the Queen’s marriage, and the succession; questions about the extent and the limitations of her (female) monarchy. In another one of those revealing early prayers, Elizabeth acknowledged that ‘I Thy handmaiden am slight of age, and inferior in understanding of Thy law . . . Grant me faithful councillors, who by Thy counsel will advise me.’

  The days when Robert would take official place among those councillors still lay some way ahead. But in the 38-year-old William Cecil - able administrator, bureaucrat of genius - there could already be plainly seen the germ of the venerably bearded Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s famous elder statesman and éminence grise of later days. His three strongest characteristics were his pragmatism, his Protestantism, and his patriotism. He had a long association with the Tudors, since his grandfather had fought for Henry VII at Bosworth, but his own background had lain among the Cambridge humanists (his first wife was a sister of John Cheke) and the lawyers of Gray’s Inn, and he had been secretary to John Dudley before falling out with Robert’s father over the plan to proclaim Jane Grey queen.

  Throughout Mary’s reign Cecil had veiled his Protestant beliefs, but had kept in touch with Elizabeth herself, officially in his capacity as surveyor of her lands. (He was a distant kinsman of Thomas Parry.) She appreciated his discretion as well as his rectitude. ‘This judgement I have of you,’ she told him now, ‘ that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the State and that, without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel which you think best.’ But in moments of temper, inevitably, she would turn from him to those who took her ‘private will’ more seriously; above all, to the man who might have been cast as Cecil’s temperamental opposite - Robert Dudley.

  So mild-mannered that his potential for ruthlessness was hardly apparent, studious but shrewd, too secretive ever to have any ‘inward companion’, the commoner Cecil at first sang pianissimo around the more glamorous nobles of the royal court. But behind the scenes he would come to wield a formidable power in the role Elizabeth now bestowed on him - that of state secretary. He and Robert would be locked in a relationship as long as that of the favourite and the Queen herself: often, at first, in opposition, but finally in a kind of reluctant amity.

  Others of those first appointments did credit to Elizabeth’s heart as well as her head. Wherever sense permitted, she not only acknowledged the claims of her mother’s family, but gave reward for loyalty. The appointment of Robert Dudley as Master of Horse was in no way surprising; h
is elder brother had held the post before him, under Edward VI. But when she came to give Robert political influence in the time ahead, Elizabeth could again feel she was following her father’s tradition: had not Henry trusted John Dudley? In the policies he would promote, Robert, too, could feel he was living out his father’s legacy. Robert’s brother Ambrose Dudley was appointed Master of the Ordnance (doing the same job his father had, early in his career) and their sister Mary Sidney became lady of the bedchamber, and one of the closest of that select band.10

  On 23 November Elizabeth, with a thousand people in her train, left Hatfield for her official entry into London, and all the stages of her ceremonial acceptance into monarchy. For five days she stayed at Charterhouse, hard by Smithfield. (The palace at St James was still occupied by her sister’s body.) On 28 November she formally entered into the City, and passed through to the Tower. She wore ‘purple velvet, with a scarf around her neck’, and the trumpets blared a fanfare as she passed; but she cut the image of majesty with her famous common touch, stopping to speak, so it seemed, to everybody.

  Prominent among the retinue, leading her caparisoned palfrey behind the horse litter in which she rode, came Lord Robert Dudley. As Master of Horse, he was responsible for many of the arrangements when the Queen made formal appearances. But often, with his pronounced flair for showmanship, he also took a hand in even the indoor pageantry. On 5 December Elizabeth moved by water from the Tower to her old home of Somerset House, where she stayed until after Mary’s funeral on 13 December formally ended the late Queen’s authority. It was two days before Christmas when she finally moved into Whitehall for the seasonal festivities, and more than merely seasonal revelry. Here at last - after the hard work at Hatfield; after the formal speeches in the streets - came the real, intimate celebrations. Here was the time to party.