Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  There is no reason to doubt that Leicester and Cecil did indeed sometimes disagree; that each could be made uneasy by the mounting influence of the other. (And at least one letter from a Spanish ambassador suggests that Spain had actively been fanning any visible spark of enmity.) But the trend of recent scholarship is to feel that any antagonism has been greatly exaggerated; that, in essence, over the years they achieved a fairly amicable working relationship. Reading three decades’ worth of often warm and chatty letters between and about them, it is hard to disagree. As Cecil himself had written to Sir Thomas Smith earlier in the 1560s, he may hear ‘that things are not sound betwixt my Lord Robert and me, but surely all is well . . . although either of us do understand well enough, how busy many be to move the contrary’. And again, on another occasion: ‘all the Lords are bent towards her Majesty’s service, and do not so much vary among themselves, as lewd men do report’. Leicester himself, for what it is worth, would claim repeatedly to be not ‘a peace breaker but a peace maker’; to have ‘never loved or favoured factious dealing’, nor been ‘willing to make quarrels in the court’. If it is true that Elizabeth, seeking often to play her courtiers off one against the other, found material ready to her hand in Leicester and in others, it may also be true that these were often no more than sibling rivalries among the courtly family.

  Though Leicester had been kept with Elizabeth at Windsor while the revolt of the northern earls was in progress, after Christmas he went home to Kenilworth, and the surviving letters he wrote to Elizabeth in the early weeks of 1570 do not suggest that he felt any particular need to curry favour. They lack the particular tone of abasement that all her courtiers - himself included - felt necessary to assume when they had offended her in any way. Despite his grumbles about the ‘cold and scarcity’ of the place and the times, there is a note almost of cheerful optimism in the letter of 10 January, which he sends ‘only to hear of your good estate, which I pray to continue longer in this world than ever earthly prince has done’.

  He reminds Elizabeth that she had promised to send him a treasurer, ‘although in respect of the weather, I shall pity his travel in so hard a time as I never found the like’ - perhaps, he suggests in a malicious joke, she should amuse herself by choosing a man who really wouldn’t want to come. He says his brother the Earl of Warwick has but just arrived, on horseback despite that same hard weather, jokes that Ambrose ‘has left his gout behind him among the northern worse-natured subjects’, but emphasizes that he plans to take only a few days’ rest before returning to his duty again. A postscript is taken up with the repercussions of the rebellion: the letter is to be brought south by one Richard Topcliffe (later famous or infamous for the sadistic zeal with which he persecuted Catholics), who had brought thirty horsemen to join Warwick at his own expense, and Warwick had advice about the examining of two prisoners.

  A few days later Robert (on behalf of both Dudley brothers), was penning a punning metaphor on the Dudley emblem of the bear and the ragged staff: ‘We two here, your poor thralls, your ursus major and minor, tied to your stake, shall for ever remain in the bond chain of dutiful servitude, fastened above all others by benefits past, and daily goodness continually showed’. The stake itself prevents ‘curs from biting behind’, and therefore, ‘so long as you muzzle not your beast, nor suffer the match over hard, spare them not; I trust you shall find they fear not who come before’.

  It was a rather laboured effort at courtly wordplay, and it is with some relief that Robert warns the Queen he will now ‘return to my wonted manner’ in offering the best prayers for her safety of himself and his brother, of ‘Sister Mary’, and of Sister Kate, ‘who is here with me’. It sounds as if the Dudley siblings felt a need to be together at this time. Perhaps, even, they were making a highly visible show of solidarity, a firebreak in a part of England that had so nearly been contested territory. In the years ahead Robert as well as Ambrose would be both active and aggressive in enforcing the Protestant party political line through the Midland territories where they held sway. The earl was in the process of making Kenilworth into a pleasure palace; but it was also a highly defensible stronghold, should that have proved necessary. (The Spanish ambassador certainly thought that he had gone north to fortify it.) The Norfolk matter, the northern revolt, could all have gone so very badly.

  11

  ‘The great Lord’ The 1570s

  IN A PORTRAIT PAINTED IN THE MID-1560S, ROBERT DUDLEY CUTS A resplendent figure. His left hand rests on the hilt of his sword, the other haughtily on his thrusting hip. His tawny suit, embroidered and pearl-encrusted, matches the feather in his cap. His collar, with its small, discreet ruff, is so high he can hardly have been able to move his head. It is the picture of a lover, a swordsman, a grandee - but these were no longer the only roles Leicester had to play.

  From the time of his appointment to the privy council, he had taken avidly to its powers and duties. As the Spanish ambassador wrote, later in the 1570s, though there were seventeen councillors, ‘the bulk of the business really depends upon the queen, Leicester, Walsingham and Cecil’.42 This - an active part in government - was what he felt was expected of him; the purpose for which he had been bred and indeed educated. Leicester (so one grateful scholar reported) was one who ‘accepted the practical help of the historians’ in the problems of ruling a country.

  In one sense, his political importance was now an established fact; something that had to be recognized, whether or not the Queen’s romantic interest seemed to be turning away from him. If the strength of her feelings was waning, then perhaps that is what encouraged him, over the years ahead, to operate more autonomously. For Leicester had his own information networks, bringing in reports from Europe and from Scotland, transcripts from the interrogations of state prisoners, letters from the embassies. He was a JP in several counties, Steward of Cambridge University and of several towns, Chancellor of Oxford University. And though Elizabeth discouraged all the old badges of allegiance that had shown the strength of a great lord’s following, it was said that in every shire there were many JPs who openly wore Leicester’s livery.

  But all this, in a sense, was secondary. It was Leicester’s special ability to persuade his royal mistress which made him especially useful to the council as a whole - an asset his colleagues increasingly recognized, once they had ceased automatically to regard him as the enemy. It was his handling of Elizabeth that ‘amounted almost to a separate function of government’, as Milton Waldman put it memorably in the 1940s. And here lay both his strength and his weakness. For whatever efforts he made to win himself an independent power base, his whole life and status had still been built upon the suspect foundation of that one relationship. His enemies would not forgive him that. Neither would posterity.

  As a favourite, he was of necessity the ultimate courtier, with all that implied. ‘He was very graceful in behaviour, of a liberal diet, and much addicted to sensual pleasures. He was commonly accounted a good courtier, which in other terms is called a cunning dissembler,’ wrote Clapham after his death, dismissively. Castiglione (in his book on the courtier, of which Leicester possessed a copy) had written that the courtier’s role was ‘to be attractive, accomplished, and seem not to care, to charm and to do so coolly’. In asking a favour, the courtier ‘will skillfully make easy the difficult points so that his lord [sic] will always grant it’. This is the way women have traditionally exercised influence: no wonder that Froude, the great Elizabethan historian of the nineteenth century, who despised Elizabeth’s favourites and mistrusted her femininity, wrote of Robert Dudley that he had ‘the worst qualities of both sexes’. It was another reason to regard a queen’s favourite suspiciously.

  The most lucrative single gift Elizabeth gave Leicester was that of influence; every penny he was given or sent enhanced his prestige among other, minor, courtiers, hopeful for their own lesser share of royal bounty. He was at the top of the patronage tree; and he was consistent in his efforts to do his best for his clien
ts, albeit also fierce in his demand for their loyalty. (A series of letters he wrote to Francis Walsingham, then in France, show him pursuing a servant he felt had done him wrong, even when the man had fled the country. He could be both vengeful and territorial, clearly.)

  Surviving letters between Leicester and his many contacts show the hothouse atmosphere of this perfervid world, where all rights and revenues emanated ultimately from the Queen herself, diffused through her favourites and officers; and where power and personality were thus inextricably intertwined. They show the anxiety of the client: when to chase up a favour promised, and when to hold back; how to keep yourself in mind without being obnoxious, through a gift of a pair of gloves, a cash present, a pie. But they also show the pressure on the great men approached: their tetchiness at the unending demands - and their wounded anger when an impatient client showed signs of following another star. The favourites were pikes among minnows, to be sure; but still themselves dependent on the Queen’s favour, a position of responsibility without power.

  On the one hand (like any other great noble) Leicester kept what was in effect his own court. The bill of wages he paid shows that he had not just his grooms and huntsmen, his watermen, cooks and laundresses, but his gentlemen servants and his officers, his grooms of the chamber. In this he was, like Elizabeth herself, seated in dramatic state at the very tip of a huge antheap of industry. (Like Elizabeth, he might sometimes dine alone when away from court, apart from the huge main company of his entourage, on the grounds that there was no-one present of rank high enough appropriately to eat with him.) On the other hand, when Elizabeth herself entered the picture, he himself joined the busy throng, rushing to make arrangements for her court and her convenience, her party or her journey; became, in effect, another worker bee.

  And if, in this pyramidal structure, the great Earl of Leicester was subservient only to Elizabeth herself, then she could be cruelly dismissive. A French ambassador, telling her that his master approved the idea of her marrying Robert Dudley, and wished to meet him, had been told that ‘It would scarcely be honourable to send a groom to meet so great a king’ - and, laughing, ‘I cannot do without my Lord Robert [as then he was], for he is like my little dog, and whenever he comes into a room, everyone at once assumes that I myself am near.’ Robert was standing there, and one can imagine how he had to laugh politely, and how anyone else there probably laughed sycophantically, and how, yes, he probably did go away and kick the cat - or the nearest client, anyway.

  True, he was a very great man in the country (and, indeed, beyond it - to half Europe he was now ‘the great Lord’). He swam the teeming waters of the court and court politics like a leviathan. To crowds of minor satellite gentry - to hordes of others hoping for employment, or for his intercession with some hostile authority - it was his momentary attention that was the prize; his smile or frown that set the climate for the day. But faced with Elizabeth herself, he was still - in public at least - just another subject who had to address her on his knees; as Elizabeth herself had had to address her brother Edward in his day. (Even Bothwell, after he had married Mary, found it more politic to doff his cap in his wife’s presence, though his new rank would have entitled him to keep it on.) Robert’s power came from positions and properties the Queen had given; and what the Queen had given, she could take away. His only counterstroke could be armed revolt, and even if she had ever feared that, Elizabeth now - with her long knowledge of Leicester, with the confidence of a decade’s successful rule - knew it was extremely unlikely.

  There is a story from April 1566 that dramatizes Leicester’s position, and that of Elizabeth, as clearly as if they were set out in a problem play. The Queen, being at her palace in Greenwich, agreed to travel up to Southwark to meet Robert returning from a journey. Robert entered the City in staggering splendour; with a train ‘all in their rich coats and to ye number of 700’. From Temple Bar, he passed Ludgate and St Paul’s on his way to the rendezvous at Lord Oxford’s house, just north of London Bridge. Meanwhile the Queen was being rowed across the Thames in a wherry with a single pair of oars, accompanied only by two ladies. By the time they had stepped out of the boat, and into their ‘coach covered with blue’, Leicester - finding neither the Queen, nor any rumour of her coming such as his own grand arrival had made - had left Lord Oxford’s house, and ridden over the bridge.

  The chapter of accidents had a happy ending: Elizabeth’s coach, in its turn, set off in pursuit of Leicester’s party, who had halted on the road back to Greenwich where he knew she would pass. On overtaking him, the Queen ‘came out of her coach in the highway and she embraced the Earl and kissed him three times’, as the beady-eyed spectators noted carefully. But the story has a complex moral. On the surface, it is true, it was the Queen who had been forced to chase the over-impatient earl. But look at the reason for all the confusion - Elizabeth’s desire for privacy. The earl would arrive with a splendid retinue: it was in his interest that as many people as possible should know the Queen was coming to meet him. The Queen, by contrast, had no reason at all to broadcast the fact she was meeting the Earl of Leicester; her private pleasure, her Robert Dudley. That same year, the French ambassador had reported a conversation with Leicester who ‘confessed to me, smiling and sighing at the same time, that he does not know what to hope or fear’.

  Small wonder, then that as time passed Leicester would demonstrate an increased dissatisfaction with the court and its world. His letters to Elizabeth show a mounting distaste for London, with its ‘corrupt air’, urging ‘exercise with open air’ as the best remedy for ‘those delicate diseases gotten about your dainty city’. To a young man, the court was opportunity - ‘the nurse of dignity’, as Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s nephew later put it. But a man in his mid-thirties might begin to tire of the foetid atmosphere. (‘Go tell the court it glows, and stinks like rotten wood,’ Walter Ralegh would write, famously.) In one letter to the Queen, Leicester wrote with obvious feeling of the failing health of one elderly nobleman, and of the distress and concern of the man’s wife. It sounds as though he were beginning to appreciate the domestic virtues. His circle by now included his nephews - son and son-in-law to his sister Mary - the young Philip Sidney and the Earl of Pembroke. But he had still no heir of his own.

  If he wanted to absent himself from the court’s peregrinations, he had the London base of Leicester House: one of those great old noble houses whose courts and gardens stretched between the Strand and the river (the latter being by far the more important highway). He had his newly purchased retreat of Wanstead, to the east of London but still accessible, and eminently suitable for hunting trips up the Lea Valley. And he had Kenilworth, where his programme of building work and improvement was just getting under way. One letter, to Anthony Forster (he of Cumnor fame), written before the Queen’s first visit to Kenilworth, shows the earl’s concern for even the minutiae of his showpiece. He had sent £12 ‘to buy trifles withal for fireworks and such like’; and demanded in return a provision of spices, to be obtained at the Queen’s own, presumably lower, price. Furthermore,

  I willed Ellis to speak with you and Mr Spinola again for that I perceive that he hath word from Flanders that I cannot have such hangings thence as I looked for for my dining chamber at Kenilworth ... deal with Mr Spinola hereabout for [he] is able to get such stuff better cheap than any man and I am sure that he will do his best for me. And, though I cannot have them so deep as I would, yet if they be large of wideness and twelve or thirteen foot high it shall suffice . . .

  His papers show evidence of a huge range of interests, of affairs both large and small. It was clearly a matter not just of practicality, but of personality.

  Leicester could write to Shrewsbury as enthusiastically as a boy about the new voyage of the Muscovy Company, ‘and I am sorry your lordship is no deeper an adventurer’. Some of those activities aimed primarily at increasing his revenues - for Leicester ‘lived always above any Living I had’ - would prove also to have implications f
or the nation: his support for the great mariners (and great privateers); his backing of Hawkins’s first voyage to the West Indies and of Drake’s circumnavigation, of the Merchant Adventurers and the Company of Kathai. He and Ambrose would be the chief supporters of Frobisher’s search for the north-west passage. Other activities would be to do with keeping his huge client base happy, and justifying the regular ‘presents’ they gave him; whether they were the Corporation of Yarmouth, the Dean and Chapter of Norwich, or mere members of the minor gentry. (White bears and white gerfalcons from the trader Jerome Horsey; fourteen pounds of marmalade from Southampton’s worthies.)

  But his interests extended far beyond the practical concerns of a landowner and a politician. There were considerable charitable concerns - to be expected of a great man, maybe; but there is surely something unexpected in his detailed suggestions to the local burghers for the cloth industry in Warwick: ‘I could wish there were some special trade devised wherewith having a good stock both reasonable profit might arise and your poor set on work. Whereunto I would be glad to help . . .’ One of his most enduring building projects was the old soldiers’ hospital in Warwick, still in use today. Nor were his involvements, whether charitable or ruthlessly commercial, confined to the West Midlands; he was also lord of a huge tract of land just over the border in North Wales. It was there, at Denbigh, that he would in the decade ahead begin to build a church which, had it been completed before his death, would have had an honoured place in ecclesiastical history: for while existing church architecture reflected the pattern of the old Catholic service, this vast building was to be constructed on ardently Protestant lines, suitable for the popular preaching that was so important a part of the new theology. We have to understand his religious beliefs if we are ever to see the mature Robert Dudley clearly.