Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  For their part, the French - as Walsingham wrote in response - were understandably sceptical about England’s apparent welcome of their approach. ‘They think here you do but dally,’ Walsingham explained to the Queen, and Leicester must have understood their feeling precisely. He himself felt, he wrote to Walsingham, that the match should be agreed or abandoned: ‘that either upon very good deliberation it may be embraced, or in time, and in best sort, put from too much entrance; for neither is our cause meet to dally nor [Anjou’s] person to be abused’. Nevertheless, Elizabeth, Leicester said, was ‘more bent to marriage than heretofore she hath been’; though still insisting on conditions the French would find it hard to meet, still complaining of princes who ‘would rather marry the kingdom than marry the Queen’. Over the next few months he would harp to Walsingham on the same theme: that ‘assuredly I do verily believe her Majesty’s mind herein is other than it has been, and more resolutely determined than ever yet at any time before’. He wrote of Anjou’s strong suit in terms that showed he now accepted the weakness of his own. When it came to the question of ‘estate’, he said, Elizabeth ‘is of mind to marry with the greatest and he [Anjou] is almost alone the greatest to be had. The conditions will be all . . .’

  Leicester was ready, Walsingham was to assure the French, accurately or otherwise, ‘to allow of any marriage we shall like’. Everyone seemed to feel he had effectively a measure of veto, or at the least that his support would be well worth having. (At one point, the French commissioners were even instructed to sweeten him with the hand of a Valois princess if necessary.) But Leicester seemed to have abandoned all thought of sexual jealousy. Indeed, in December it was he who ushered Fénelon into Elizabeth’s private rooms for the all-important discussion. And when in January 1571 Elizabeth told the French ambassador she was worried that Anjou would always be younger than she, Leicester quipped ‘so much the better for you’, with hearty bonhomie.

  Anjou, on the other hand, was publicly grumbling that his brother the King and his mother Catherine de Medici wanted to marry him off to ‘an old creature with a sore leg’. The French terms were as demanding as the English (at one point Elizabeth even demanded the return of Calais!): that Henri should be crowned king, should rule England jointly with his wife, and should be allowed to practise his own religion freely. Most of Europe reckoned it would never happen; but the English ministers and the French queen mother between them were determined to drag the two reluctant principals to the altar - and the threat that if Elizabeth did not take him, Anjou might instead seek to marry the Queen of Scots provided a powerful disincentive to the English to abandon the proposal too quickly. ‘Of all impending perils that would be the greatest,’ Leicester was warned, ominously.

  Contemporaries, understandably, seem to have found it hard to grasp Leicester’s own policy. The Spanish ambassador claimed that while on the surface he was all for the match, ‘por tercera mano’ (‘with the third hand’) he was telling the Queen that Anjou was infected with loathsome diseases. Cecil was grumbling to Walsingham that ‘It was strange any one man should give comfort to the Ambassador in the cause, and yet the same man to persuade the Queen’s Majesty to persist.’ The one man was surely Leicester - but such behaviour is not at odds with his convictions. He could not but applaud the Queen’s cavils, in so far as they sprang from her ‘true zeal to Religion’, since the strength of his own conviction was increasingly coming to colour his public as well as his private life. But he could still send a private piece of advice that the French should not press their point (that Anjou should be allowed to practise his own Catholicism) before the signing of an agreement. The Queen was more likely to ‘yield to reason’ afterwards, to the persuasions of one ‘that shall be her husband’, than to a formal treaty.

  In the spring of 1571, as the negotiations wore on, William Cecil was elevated to the peerage as Lord (Baron) Burghley. Leicester stood at his right hand during the ceremony; and the next year he deputized for the Queen at the Garter ceremony at which Cecil was accorded that honour, too. In February 1571 Throckmorton died, after falling ill at Leicester’s house - after eating salads, so Camden said - and though it would later be rumoured Leicester had poisoned him, the fact is the earl had lost his subtlest political ally.45 And early that same year, there came yet another story of political chicanery that shows Leicester acting equivocally.

  Back in the summer of 1570, Norfolk had been released from the Tower into a form of house arrest on the pleas of Leicester and of Cecil and the promise of good behaviour. He was still hoping to regain a measure of favour; and the letter Leicester wrote on 2 January 1571 sounds (though of course his sincerity has been questioned) as if he were genuinely trying to help him. ‘I know not almost with what face I may in this sort write to you, my good Lord,’ the letter starts out. Leicester had tried to get the Queen to accept a New Year gift Norfolk had sent her; had persuaded her to read the accompanying letter, which she admitted to be ‘very wisely and dutifully written’, and then to examine what was inside: ‘she took the jewel in her hand, and, I perceive, did not think before it had been so rich or so fair as it was indeed till she had seen it. Then did she commend it beyond measure, and thought there had not been such a one to be got in all London, and valued it with the pearl at least £500.’ She looked at it for almost a quarter of an hour and, said Leicester shrewdly, seemed sorry to have to refuse it; but - ‘contrary to all my knowledge and expectation’, Leicester writes, and in spite of ‘all the persuasions’ - refuse it she did. To accept the gift was to accept the giver; and Elizabeth had by now little belief in Norfolk’s loyalty.

  The very month after this proffered gift, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to Norfolk with details of what has become known as the Ridolfi plot: the Florentine banker’s plan for the Catholic powers of Europe to invade England, and set Mary and Norfolk on Elizabeth’s throne. Ridolfi’s touting of the plan round the European courts would have been bound to attract the attention of Cecil’s agents, even had they not almost certainly had inside information early. In the Parliament that met in May 1571 (a Parliament at which Leicester held the proxies of seven of the absent peers), three acts were passed to raise the level of national security. All the potential conspirators were closely watched. By the summer, in fact, it had become apparent that Ridolfi’s plan was unworkable. It was Philip of Spain’s general in the Netherlands, the Duke of Alva, who sounded its death knell, refusing to order his troops on an invasion he knew would fail. But it was too late for the conspirators to retreat successfully. A courier reported the suspicious communications issuing from the Duke of Norfolk’s house; and the dawn of 8 September saw him back in the Tower.

  There is still considerable debate as to just who betrayed the Ridolfi plot. Ridolfi himself is the likeliest; but he may have had among his allies one or more double agents as expert as he. One such was the sailor and freebooter John Hawkins; another was Hawkins’s shipmate George Fitzwilliam. These two were supposedly prepared to bring English ships over to an invading Spanish enemy, but in fact handed Spanish plans over to the English authorities, triggering Norfolk’s rearrest. That Fitzwilliam really owed ultimate allegiance to Spain was always the less likely for the fact that he was related to William Cecil, as well as to Leicester’s brother-in-law Henry Sidney.

  The full revelation of just how far an anti-England Catholic coalition had gone increased the need for a defensive alliance. But the very tension in the air perhaps heightened Elizabeth’s instinctive reluctance to marry, her fear of putting herself and her realm in the hands of another power. In July Leicester had been writing to Walsingham: ‘For her desire to marriage, I perceive it continueth still as it was, which is very cold, nevertheless, she seeth it is so necessary, as I believe she yieldeth rather to think it is fit to have a husband, rather than willing to have any found indeed for her.’ By late September he was even less hopeful: ‘surely I am now persuaded that her Majesty’s heart is nothing inclined to marriage at all . . . For my part it grieveth
my heart to think of it seeing no way, in so far as I can think, serveth, how she can remain long quiet and safe without such a strong alliance as marriage must bring.’

  While various contacts were interrogated, while the Queen of Scots tried to excuse herself and while Norfolk languished in the Tower, the French negotiations wound towards their weary end. First it was Elizabeth who blew cold: Cecil told the Queen at the end of August that he would try to find another route to safety for her, and for her isolated kingdom; Leicester told Walsingham that clearly, after all, ‘Her Majesty’s heart is nothing inclined to marry at all, for the matter was ever brought to as many points as we could devise, and always she was bent to hold with the difficultest.’ Then, as the revelations of the Ridolfi plot forced Elizabeth to realize just how much she needed allies, it was the French who drew back. In December, Leicester was writing to Walsingham that ‘I find now a full determination in her Majesty to like of marriage . . . So she earnestly and assuredly affirms to me.’ But Anjou made no secret of his distaste; Elizabeth, besides being a heretic, at thirty-eight was losing her looks. Her hair was thinning behind and she had taken to a front of false curls: ‘The more hairy she is before, the more bald she is behind,’ said England’s ambassador Sir Thomas Smith ungallantly. No portraits of Elizabeth reflect her age accurately. She took care they should not; that they should broadcast, rather, the image of unchanging glory. But the grumbles of her ministers reveal the backstage story - that the cracks were beginning to show, in her aptitude as well as her appearance. Elizabeth was becoming more dilatory (a development which perhaps made Leicester’s ability to handle her all the more valuable). Her natural bent had always been to procrastinate: to dislike innovation, to resent those who forced her to contemplate problems which, ignored, might go away. She preferred always to keep her own counsel, to reserve her judgement in her own heart, as her motto Video et taceo (I see all and speak nothing) might suggest. But now secretary after secretary complained (as Sir Thomas Smith put it in 1574) that ‘The time passeth almost irrecuperable, the advantage lost, the charges continuing, nothing resolved.’

  She was about to show just that character trait yet again. In January 1572 the Duke of Norfolk came to trial before a jury of his peers. (Almost the only witness called was a man of Leicester’s, the writer Richard Cavendish, whose daughter would later marry Leicester’s ‘base son’.) The verdict of guilty, and the death sentence, were foregone conclusions. The execution itself, however, was another matter. The Queen vacillated almost hysterically, the enormity of Norfolk’s repeated and incorrigible offences weighing against his nearness of blood, his ‘superiority of honour’. In March she was ill, with ‘heavy and vehement pains’ that ‘straightened her breath and clutched her heart’. For three days and nights Leicester and Cecil sat up with her. The doctors believed she had eaten bad fish - the idea of poison was ever-present - but her emotional distress must surely have played some part. She signed a warrant that Norfolk should be executed on 9 April; then cancelled it just hours before the time. Members of the Parliament that met again this May declared themselves unable to sleep in their beds at night for fear of more conspiracies. Great suit was made for the execution, Leicester told Walsingham, ‘but I see no likelihood’. But this time he underestimated Elizabeth. Another warrant was signed, that Norfolk should die on 2 June, and this time, it was carried out: the first beheading of Elizabeth’s reign.46

  England, meanwhile, had more reason than ever to pursue the safety of a French alliance against the increasing power and aggression of Spain. If not the reluctant bisexual Henri, then perhaps another Valois brother might do? In December 1571 had come the first suggestion that Elizabeth might marry François, the Duke of Alençon, instead of Anjou. François was (so his mother observed coolly) ‘much less scrupulous’ than his brother in matters of religion; sympathetic, even, to the Huguenots - altogether less ‘like a mule’, as Smith chimed in enthusiastically; and ‘more apt than th’other’ when it came to getting children. Not being heir presumptive to the French throne, he would be free to live in England. Against that, he was seventeen, small, and pockmarked. In April 1572 England and France concluded the Treaty of Blois, whereby they agreed to support each other against the Spanish enemy. Leicester arranged the celebratory banquet at Whitehall - the greatest, he boasted, in memory. It now seemed more desirable than ever that this alliance should be cemented dynastically.

  In June came the formal offer of Alençon’s hand, on the lips of a special envoy. Though the Queen remained non-committal, Walsingham was instructed to compile a report on the prospective bridegroom. The pockmarks on the end of Alençon’s nose were the worst of it, he reported; that, and his general lack of beauty: ‘when I weigh the same with the delicacy of Her Majesty’s eye, I hardly think that there will ever grow any liking’. All the same, when the court set off on progress that summer, things looked as hopeful as they had ever done where Elizabeth’s marriages were concerned - which is to say, moderately.

  The July progress took her to Warwick, to stay as the guest of Ambrose Dudley. She watched a display of country dancing from the window, ‘and made very merry’; herself played on a spinet to delight the company. The highlight of the visit - besides a mock water battle - was a spectacular firework display. Unfortunately, a spark from one firework set four Warwick houses ablaze, but the Queen organized a whip-round, raising £25 to be given to the residents in compensation; probably unusual consideration in the sixteenth century. But as Elizabeth moved on to Leicester’s house at Kenilworth, nearby, an event was brewing across the Channel that would put an end to all festivities.

  The summer before, Walsingham had written to Leicester that ‘if neither marriage nor Amity may take place, the poor Protestants here do think their case then desperate; they tell me so with tears, and therefore I do believe them’. They were right to worry. On 24 August came what has gone down in history as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

  It is remembered, perhaps, as just another atrocity in the religious tussles of the sixteenth century, which had already seen the dungeons of the Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield. But in fact, at the time, it was one of those days that do shake the world; one of those days (and it is not hard to think of modern parallels) when an act of aggression so dramatizes an ideological or religious conflict that suddenly a polarity of conviction is set forth for all to see.

  It started as the attempted assassination of a single man. The intensely Catholic Guises (the Queen of Scots’ family), with the support of Catherine de Medici, who had been persuaded the French Protestants might draw the country into a war with Spain, set out to murder the Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny. The attempt failed, but it provoked riots in Paris, and from there the violence escalated sharply. Soon the Catholics of the capital were killing every Protestant they could lay hands on. As the Spanish ambassador to France sent home in a vivid, if horrifying, despatch: ‘While I write, they are casting them out naked and dragging them through the streets, pillaging their houses and sparing not a babe. Blessed be God, who has converted the Princes of France to His purpose. May He inspire their hearts to go on as they have begun!’ Three to four thousand died in Paris alone. As the violence spread to the provinces, the death toll rose to some ten thousand. When Philip in Spain received his ambassador’s despatch, it was said that he danced for joy; as did the imprisoned Queen Mary.

  Elizabeth was out riding when the despatches bearing the news arrived, still on horseback as she read them. Instantly, she turned back towards Kenilworth Castle. There could be no further thought of pleasure on this or many a subsequent day. As the court set off back towards London it was not until several days later, at Woodstock, that the Queen at last consented to receive the French ambassador. Not a courtier would speak to or look at him as he approached the presence chamber. There he found the Queen, her ladies, and her privy councillors all dressed in mourning black. What the Queen said to Fénelon was mild compared to the reproaches of the councillors. Ceci
l told him it was the greatest crime since the crucifixion. No-one on the English side, now, could think of a Valois marriage. If the French king had been ‘Author and doer of this Act, shame and confusion light upon him’, Leicester wrote to Walsingham. The question was whether anything could be saved of the Anglo-French treaty.

  As Elizabeth wrote to Walsingham - a message for the French king - the murder of the supposed Huguenot conspirators, without ‘answer by law’, was bad enough: ‘we do hear it marvellously evil taken and as a thing of a terrible and dangerous example . . . But when more added unto it - that women, children, maids, young infants and sucking babes were at the same time murdered and cast into the river . . . this increased our grief and sorrow.’ Those of the reformed religion in France were driven now ‘to fly or die’.

  To the Queen’s Protestant councillors, to the Earl of Leicester, the question was whether the massacre had been mere mob violence - bad enough - or the fruit of a deep-laid Catholic conspiracy. Opinion (though probably wrong) tended to the latter theory; and this fear was to fling Europe’s beleaguered Protestants into a defensive frenzy. As Leicester wrote to the Earl of Morton (representing the Protestant lords of Scotland) on 7 September, the events in France