Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Now, as always, Cecil steered something of an independent course among the court parties of the aristocracy. Their shared experience in Scotland at the beginning of the decade had briefly bred in him an amity with Norfolk; but it had not lasted, though for the moment they found themselves allies again. By the same token, in the years ahead he would often be found working with, rather than against, Robert Dudley.

  In the summer of 1565 Robert was flirting with another lady. The Spanish ambassador heard it was by Throckmorton’s advice, to pique Elizabeth’s jealousy. But if he were not merely trying to make Elizabeth jealous, then it is a sure sign that he at least was coming to see his situation with the Queen less hopefully. Perhaps her attempt to marry him to the Queen of Scots had taught him something about Elizabeth’s feelings. Perhaps he knew already. Whatever the case, he now turned to Lettice Knollys, Viscountess Hereford, the Queen’s kinswoman (her mother being Mary Boleyn’s daughter) and sometime favourite: twenty-five years old, another redhead and a famous beauty. The flirtation seems to have passed off quietly, for the moment, with just a mention in Cecil’s notebooks that the Queen had shown herself ‘much offended’. Lettice was, after all, at this time a married lady.

  That summer, too, Elizabeth had a flirtation of her own - with a court gentleman called Thomas Heneage, a man famed ‘for his elegancy of life and pleasantness of discourse’, who had come to public notice under Cecil’s auspices. This was another relationship with clear boundaries on it: Heneage too was married (and one who had been at court for five years: plenty of time to catch the Queen’s eye, had she had any serious interest in him). But Leicester quarrelled with Heneage and, furious, asked permission to leave the court at Windsor ‘to go to stay at my own place as other men [do]’. The Queen refused even to answer; they fought violently. As Cecil wrote to a friend: ‘The Queen was in a great temper, and upbraided him with what had taken place with Heneage, and his flirting with the Viscountess, in very bitter words.’ In ‘many overt speeches’, he noted, the Queen was letting it be known that she was sorry for the time she had wasted on Robert - ‘and so is every good subject’. It seems likely Elizabeth was using Heneage to keep Robert in line, and display the fact that she would not necessarily always bend his way.

  At Windsor that summer she wrote a verse on the flyleaf of her French psalter: Cecil noted she had written an ‘obscure sentence in a book’ at the time when she was much annoyed with Robert Dudley:

  No crooked leg, no bleared eye,

  No part deformed out of kind,

  Nor yet so ugly half can be

  As the inward, suspicious mind.

  She took care to give Robert the occasional humiliatingly public reproof. Naunton describes one incident when a satellite of Leicester’s was refused admission to the privy chamber, and the earl swore to have the official concerned turned out of his place. The man threw himself on the Queen’s mercy, asking ‘whether my Lord of Leicester were king or Her Majesty queen’. Elizabeth’s response to this skilful goad was predictably savage. ‘God’s death, my Lord, I have wished you well,’ she told Leicester, ‘but my favour is not so locked up for you that others shall not participate thereof. And if you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but one mistress and no master.’ A quarrel would end in a sulk - in Leicester’s withdrawal from Elizabeth’s presence - and then in a weeping reconciliation. Kat Ashley died that summer, to Elizabeth’s great distress (Thomas Parry had died as far back as 1560), and she was less able than ever to do without her old friend. But each quarrel was another straw in the wind.

  In Scotland (and did this heighten Elizabeth’s sensitivity?) Mary married Darnley at the end of July. It would be just two headlong years until her abdication. The marriage was only months old when it became apparent that the worst fears would be fulfilled. Darnley quickly proved ‘wilful, haughty and vicious’, in the words of one Scots counsellor. His overriding belief - fuelled by a mixture of arrogance and alcohol - that his gender gave him the right to rule his wife’s kingdom was equalled only by his complete lack of any qualification for the task. Already furious that Mary refused to grant him the Crown Matrimonial, he became convinced that Rizzio (whom he blamed for Mary’s obstinacy) was far more than her secretary; was, in fact, ‘a filthy wedlock breaker’, as a hostile Randolph described him. Randolph warned Leicester: ‘Woe is me for you when David’s son shall be a King of England.’ Darnley’s jealous suspicion of Rizzio was only heightened by the fact that he himself may have been sleeping with the Piedmontese secretary. But by the autumn Mary was pregnant. The marriage had to limp on as best it might.

  That Christmas Leicester again asked Elizabeth to marry him. She said she could not answer him at once; that he must wait until Candlemas in February - which at least suggested she was giving it serious consideration. But Leicester’s satisfaction - and arrogance - were given a much-needed check by the fact that Heneage was also much in evidence that Christmas. The Venetian envoy described how he was chosen, on Twelfth Night, as king of the revels, which allowed him to rule court for that evening and to give the direction to the festivities. In one of the games of wit and wordplay, Heneage in his new role of command instructed Leicester to ask the Queen ‘which was the most difficult to erase from the mind, an evil opinion created by a wicked informer, or jealousy’. The Queen answered that both were difficult, but jealousy was the harder.

  Afterwards, Leicester sent to Heneage threatening to chastise him with a stick. Clearly, he assumed that so pointed a question could only have been chosen pointedly. Heneage replied hotly (the stick, rather than the sword, was used only against inferiors), and finally complained to the Queen, who told Robert that ‘if by her favour he had become insolent he should soon reform and that she would lower him just as she had, at first, raised him’. Robert flung himself into ostentatious despair, ‘placing himself in one of the rooms of the palace in deep melancholy’ until the Queen, ‘moved by pity’, restored him to favour. But the watching ambassadors - still waiting for Elizabeth to ‘proclaim him duke and marry him’, considered that he had misplayed his hand. And Candlemas passed without an answer, needless to say.

  Robert left court in the February of 1566, by permission, and was not back until April, despite the Queen’s sending to protest at his ‘long absence’ and desire his ‘hasty repair’. He had, he said, been delayed by the need of his sister Katherine, who had been sick, or possibly suffered a miscarriage, and ‘with whom I tarried continually, because I would do her all the comfort I could, for the time’. When he did return to court, he was there only a month before he received permission to go to his estates for a while. He was a courtier born, who wrote of the court as ‘home’; but small wonder if he wearied of it occasionally, and sought permission to go to his own lands, where it was his will that held undisputed sway. He still gained considerable status from being acknowledged as even a possible pretender to the Queen’s hand, but he had undoubtedly begun to suspect his suit would never lead to matrimony.

  But relations around the throne of Scotland were far, far worse. On 13 February Randolph was writing to Leicester that ‘I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth the King [Darnley] and all his kin.’ Darnley (prompted by a disaffected Scottish faction) had driven himself into a jealous fury, convinced Rizzio was the father of the child Mary now carried. ‘I know that, if that take effect which is intended, David, with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days,’ Randolph predicted. It took a little longer, but on 9 March a party of nobles, Darnley among them, burst into Mary’s chamber and hacked Rizzio to pieces almost before her eyes. Within the next few days she rallied enough to persuade Darnley that his life as well as hers would ultimately be in danger from these over-mighty subjects, and managed to regain a measure of control over her monarchy. Elizabeth was genuinely and profoundly horrified at the insults heaped upon Mary, expressing to the Spanish ambassador her indignation that Rizzio’s
killers had broken into Mary’s chamber ‘as if it were that of a public woman’. If this could happen to one of the two queens in the isle, how much harder it might be for the other to preserve any sense of invulnerability. But she would have had to be more than human - and Elizabeth was very human - not also to enjoy her moral superiority. Mary had made mistakes Elizabeth would always have foreseen, and some of them included her misunderstanding of the role of a favourite. Her heedless reliance upon Rizzio had allowed him - a foreigner, and a Catholic - to be cast as the archetypal ‘evil counsellor’.

  On the surface, the Scottish royal marriage was patched up, after a fashion. With an heir in Mary’s womb, it had to be. Mary’s son James was born in June, but not even this could repair the breach, and by the end of the year it was with dismay that Mary heard there could be no legal way of freeing her from Darnley. (The Scottish ambassador took care to give Elizabeth all the gory details of the birth, telling the Queen his mistress had been ‘so sore handled that she wished she had never been married’ - in order, as he himself said, ‘to give her a little scare’ off any marriage of her own.) That October, when Elizabeth, in order to raise funds, was forced to call the first Parliament in three years, the members returned to London even more determined to tackle the question of the succession than when they had gone away. They let it be known, in fact, that some decision was the price of their voting her any more money. But to this infringement, as she saw it, of her prerogative, Elizabeth reacted angrily. Had she not told them at the outset that ‘by the word of a prince, she would marry’ . . . eventually?

  When the Commons none the less began to put pressure upon her, having heard her vague promises before, the Lords backed them up every inch of the way. What is more, it was Robert who persuaded her to receive the Lords’ deputation; and he, along with his erstwhile great rival, was prominent among those on the receiving end of her anger when the pressure did not abate. De Silva had accounts of the incident from Elizabeth herself, as well as from Norfolk, whose affection for the idea of a Habsburg marriage and half-Habsburg heir had never gone away.

  The Queen was so angry that she addressed hard words to the Duke of Norfolk, whom she called traitor or conspirator . . . The Earls of Leicester and Pembroke, the Marquess of Northampton and the Lord Chamberlain spoke to her on the matter, and Pembroke remarked to her that it was not right to treat the Duke badly, since he and the others were only doing what was fitting for the good of the country ... She told him [Pembroke] he talked like a swaggering soldier, and said to Leicester that she had thought if all the world abandoned her he would not have done so, to which he answered that he would die at her feet; and she said that had nothing to do with the matter.

  Leicester, like Pembroke, was commanded not to appear before her. If Leicester and Norfolk appeared to be finding a kind of amity, then conversely Leicester too had - at least for the moment - become one of the enemy in Elizabeth’s eyes.40

  The Imperial marriage was going on the back burner, as Elizabeth took to complaining about the size of the archduke’s ‘dowry’, and as the diplomats on both sides began to despair of compromise (though it would be the end of 1567 before the negotiations finally ran into the sand and Elizabeth definitively refused the archduke’s proposal). Leicester - it was said - had been urging Protestant divines to inveigh from the pulpit against the archduke’s Catholicism, and the plan that he should be allowed to celebrate mass in private. It was a bad time to suggest toleration for any Catholic practice, with Philip of Spain ferociously crushing Protestant rebels in the Spanish Netherlands just across the Channel, and diplomatic relations between Spain and England growing unprecedentedly chilly.

  But attention was soon to be focused to the north, rather than the south, of England’s bounds. Mary’s reconciliation with Darnley was not working. ‘Things are going from bad to worse,’ the French ambassador warned. Darnley ‘will never humble himself as he ought’, while the Queen - understandably, after Rizzio’s murder - suspected him of plotting with her nobles. In February 1567 came the shock of the explosion at Kirk o’Field, and Darnley’s murder amid rumours of Mary’s complicity. This is not the place to tell in detail the crowded story of the next months, far less to assess Mary’s guilt or otherwise in the murder. (Most now believe, at the least, that the evidence against her was unreliable.) But the shock waves that followed showed up the events at Cumnor, and Amy Dudley’s death, as a mere storm in a teacup.

  Mary now compounded error with error, submitting herself in May to a marriage with the Earl of Bothwell, whom most at the time blamed for the murder of Darnley. Debate still rages as to whether his seduction of her was a rough wooing or a rape; either way, she turned to him because she felt herself so isolated. Scotland ‘being divided into factions as it is’, she said in self-exculpation, ‘cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man’. If Elizabeth used faction at her court to her advantage, Mary was allowing the Scottish factions to make use of her.

  Certainly Scotland could not be contained under this particular man. As Bothwell swaggered through the streets of Edinburgh after Darnley’s death, challenging any man who believed he had killed the Queen’s husband to a duel, he had also summoned the nobility to a dinner and, by way of dessert, produced a petition to which they were asked to put their names, imploring their queen not only to marry, but to marry the earl who had done Mary such ‘affectionate and hearty service’. But his aggressive attempts to coerce support did him no more good than Leicester’s comparative passivity had done. He dominated Mary - insisting she saw no adviser without his presence - but every sign of his power over her increased the hostility of her nobility.

  In July, with Scotland openly at war with itself, and Mary’s forces defeated by those of the Protestant lords under her illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her own infant son. The excuse her lords made for keeping her imprisoned after she had signed her throne away was that they feared that, if free, she might turn again to Bothwell, that ‘notorious tyrant.’ Truly, passion was dangerous for a queen regnant. For any woman, maybe.

  The scene when a defeated Mary was brought weeping back into her own capital city was something from Elizabeth’s worst nightmare. Where now were Mary’s jokes about the Queen of England’s marrying a man who had murdered his wife to be rid of her? Elizabeth could not but reflect on how much better she had behaved over the mysterious death of Amy Dudley; the instant distancing of herself from Robert, the formal inquiry - how much better, indeed, she had handled the whole matter of favouritism, handled Robert Dudley. In so far as he was, like Darnley, an ambitious commoner, she had enjoyed him but managed never to marry him. In so far as he was, like Rizzio, an employee and conduit to her, she had chosen more appropriately. (Ironically, the question of Mary was to set Elizabeth more sharply at odds with her ministers than the question of Robert Dudley had ever done.) And as for Bothwell, apart from anything else, he was another married man, whom only a patched-up divorce had set free. ‘With what peril have you married him that hath another wife alive,’ as Elizabeth wrote to Mary, from the moral high ground of outraged respectability.

  On the one hand, Elizabeth had sought and would continue to seek to protect the position of a sister monarch. She was profoundly shaken at what was in effect a diagram of just how badly her own story might have turned out. But, as she adjured Mary to clear her reputation of ‘a crime of such enormity’ as a husband’s murder - as she told her ‘an honourable burial’ was better than a soiled life - the sense of schadenfreude must have been extraordinary.

  10

  ‘The daughter of debate’ 1568-1569

  AT THE BEGINNING OF MAY 1568 ELIZABETH, NOW IN AMICABLE communication with the Scottish lords, had been only too happy to purchase from them some of the imprisoned Mary’s jewellery. When a glorious rope of pearls arrived, she showed them off to Leicester and Pembroke: her offer of 12,000 écus had outbid Catherine de M
edici. But the very next day, 2 May, Mary escaped from Lochleven, and from her lords’ custody. Her attempt to rally supporters and to regain her throne lasted but briefly, and on 16 May she crossed the Solway Firth and fled across the border into England, taking refuge from humiliation and defeat in her own country.

  Mary had believed all Elizabeth’s protestations of sisterly solidarity; believed Elizabeth would restore her to her throne, and instantly. She had made the mistake of confusing what Elizabeth said and what she did. It was not a mistake that would ever be made by Elizabeth’s own councillors, least of all by Robert Dudley.

  In the short term, the situation might seem to have played into Elizabeth’s skilled and manipulative hands. She had Mary, a royal pawn in the great political game, in her hands, to be held in reserve and deployed as necessary. But in the long term Mary would have her revenge; would prove to be a ‘daughter of debate / That discord aye doth sow’, as Elizabeth would write of her ruefully. If Mary’s life as a free woman was over, then life in the country of her cousin Elizabeth would also never be the same again. For almost twenty years to come, Mary would provide a focus for plot and rebellion; a romantic personification of the possibility of an alternative, Catholic monarchy; a bone of contention between Elizabeth and her ministers. Elizabeth always tended to prolong a situation beyond its real viability; witness her tenacious hold on Robert Dudley. But this time she found herself hoist with her own petard, caught in a stasis from which she could not break free.