Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  be good warnings to all those that be professors of the true religion to take heed in time . . . seeing it to fall out as we do, we are to look more narrowly to our present estate. We cannot but stand in no small danger except there be a full concurrence together of all such as mean faithfully to continue such as they profess.

  One of the goals of his life, from now on, would be the formation (in the teeth, if need be, of the Queen’s reluctance) of an alliance of all Protestants wherever they might be: in England, Scotland, among the Huguenot community of France or in the Netherlands.

  Amid all the fallout of the massacre, one thing that could be seen was a new consensus among Elizabeth’s ministers as to the danger represented by the Scots queen, Mary. Back in March 1571, Mary’s agent the Bishop of Ross had written that the Queen of Scots’ life had been in great danger, with Cecil and others urging she should be put to death; ‘and, of all the ministers whom Elizabeth admitted to her confidence, Leicester only had opposed her execution’. But there was no more talk now of Leicester’s secret sympathy. Now, Elizabeth’s councillors were almost united in believing that Mary (so recently the Catholic focus of rebellion) should be at the very least excluded from the succession, if not actually put to death. Now, Leicester and Cecil were united in urging a rapprochement with Scotland’s Protestant powers, and in fearing that some around the Queen were too tender to Mary. In November Leicester wrote to Cecil: ‘You see how far this Canker has passed. I fear a fistula irrecoverable.’ In December, when the Queen was proving reluctant to face up to the Scottish question, Leicester wrote summoning an absent Cecil to the cause:

  There will little be done while you are away; if I saw plainly as I think, your Lordship, as the case stands, shall do her Majesty and your country more service here in an hour than in all the court there will be worth this seven years; wherefore I can but wish you here, yea to fly here if you would, till these matters are fully despatched.

  The tone could hardly be more different from his ‘old song’ - the resentment of Cecil’s authority. And here, surely, we need not accuse him of hypocrisy. It was rather a case of ‘now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ - the cause of international Protestantism.

  It sounds as though Leicester and Elizabeth were beginning to draw apart a little on questions of policy. The political and religious tussles of the years ahead have often been presented as a tug of war for Elizabeth’s attention between Leicester’s hawkish faction and the more moderate policies best represented by Cecil. But more recently several historians have pointed out that in these years of Elizabeth’s reign (before the genuinely divided and divisive ‘second reign’ and the fractious 1590s, by which time most of the old guard were dead), Elizabeth’s advisers tended to be broadly united on what should be done. It was the Queen herself with whom they were all in disagreement.

  If Leicester were no longer quite so closely tied to the Queen politically, then, did he need to stick quite so close to her personally? The answer, in a sense, is yes: all her ministers (as increasingly they understood) needed him to do so. He had the best chance of persuading her over to their way. But is the personal shift of tone he now started to take entirely coincidental? Which is the chicken and which the egg?

  Already, before the massacre, those letters of Leicester’s to the Queen which can be provisionally dated to 1571 (and since they bear no year, it can only be provisional) had been breathing great closeness, indeed; but closeness of a calm, almost a marital kind. The Queen and the earl speak much about health, as couples do, in what was by contemporary standards definitely middle age. One February day Robert scolds Elizabeth, as he has scolded her before, about her ‘overlong sojourn in that corrupt air about the city; but you have so earnestly promised remedy as I hope to see you in time this year put it in practice, respecting yourself before others’. He thinks that Grafton, where he is, could be ready for her by May. (Meanwhile he is keeping her messenger with him for a time, after the ‘painful journey’ he had had: ‘he came in such speed as I think he did fly, and therefore deserves some rest’. Leicester himself could sign a letter ‘in haste and in bed’, and it is rather touching to see how often, as the years wore on, Elizabeth’s henchmen mention the need to secure some rest for each other, as well as for themselves. They were clearly all beginning to find the demands of the Queen’s service exhausting to a degree.)

  In another letter, Robert has to satisfy Elizabeth about his own health: ‘your over great care of my present estate’. Though he ‘departed away in some pain, yet in no suspicion at all of what you feared, only it seems, for lack of use, my late exercise wrought some strange accident, through my own negligence, to take more cold than was convenient after such heat. I was well warned by you . . .’ He had been ‘driven to use the commodity of a bath, to ease the pain’ - but really, Elizabeth need not worry. It is warm, it is lovely - but it is not the tone of an ardent suitor. That, Elizabeth would now find elsewhere.

  At court, a new rival had been competing for the Queen’s attention: Christopher Hatton, who had been ‘Master of the Game’ in those Christmastime revels at the Inner Temple where Robert had presided as Prince Pallaphilos, some years before. Third son of an undistinguished Northamptonshire gentleman, Hatton had been born in 1540 and succeeded to the family estate in his minority, on the deaths of his father and elder brothers. After a spell at Oxford he had been sent by his guardians to the Inns of Court, but it is possible he caught the Queen’s eye, still in his early twenties, before he ever had occasion to practise the law he had studied.

  The first date of his coming to court is not recorded. He was not important enough for that, until the Queen’s favour made him so. But Naunton wrote that he came there ‘of a galliard’, since it was his dancing first caught the Queen’s eye; while Camden, more surely, says that ‘being young and of a comely tallness of body and countenance, he got into such favour with the Queen that she took him into her band of fifty Gentleman-pensioners’. From there he rose to be a gentleman of the privy chamber (thanks, Camden says, to ‘the modest sweetness of his manners’), and the few years that changed the 1560s to the 1570s saw a steady stream of grants and offices coming his way. The gifts were certainly enough to arouse the jealousy of Leicester, who is said to have offered to bring in a dancing master who could dance even better than Hatton, since that - he insinuated - was the young man’s only claim to fame; the attribute that had attracted Elizabeth so powerfully. By the coming year, 1573, Christopher Hatton would be captain of the Gentleman Pensioners, that famously tall and good-looking band whose duty it was to provide a ceremonial guard for the Queen’s person.

  It has often been speculated that to Hatton - if not to Leicester - Elizabeth at last gave herself physically. It has been said that the tone of his letters is so frenziedly lover-like that no other interpretation is possible. Sending her a ring said to ward off the plague, he wrote that it was meant to be worn ‘between the sweet dugs [breasts]’. Forced to leave court for his health in the summer of 1573, he wrote her a whole series of letters so extravagant in their terms that a delighted Elizabeth could be forgiven for concluding that here was a man who really might die for love of her.

  No death, no, nor hell, shall ever win of me my consent so far to wrong myself again as to be absent from you one day. God grant my return. I will perform this vow. I lack that I live by. The more I find this lack, the further I go from you . . . Would God I were with you but for one hour. My wits are overwrought with thoughts. I find myself amazed. Bear with me, my most dear sweet Lady. Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me, for I love you.

  And in another letter later in the same month, June, he urged her: ‘Live for ever, most excellent creature; and love some man, to shew yourself thankful for God’s high labour in you.’ Certainly, the tone is more extravagant than what had by now become the rather domestic (and increasingly religious) tone of Leicester’s notes.

  The real ‘evidence’, though, comes not from H
atton’s own words, but from those of a friend, Edward Dyer, who in the autumn of 1572 wrote warning him about his comportment with the Queen: ‘who though she do descend very much in her sex as a woman, yet may we not forget her place, and the nature of it as our Sovereign’.47 If a man ‘of secret cause known to himself’ were to challenge that established order, Dyer told Hatton, he should be very careful, for if the Queen were to mislike it - to ‘imagine that you go about to imprison her fancy’ - he would be wholly undone. He would do better ‘to acknowledge your duty’ to the Queen; ‘never seem deeply to condemn her frailities, but rather joyfully to commend such things as should be in her, as though they were in her indeed’.

  In a letter that serves as a manual of instruction for a favourite, Dyer goes on to warn Hatton against too much importunity, against criticism and jealousy. Particularly, he should beware of displaying his jealousy of ‘my Lord of Ctm’; and though the reference is not explicit, this is possibly the young Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who had come to court in 1571. As handsome and talented as he was erratic and untrustworthy, Oxford’s career saw him bobbing on successive waves of scandal that might have overwhelmed someone less well born than himself. Elizabeth (and Cecil, who rued the day he had ever become Oxford’s father-in-law) came to see that Hatton spoke no more than the truth when he warned Elizabeth to beware of the ‘Boar’ - for so she named Oxford - whose tusks might raze and tear. Better the Sheep (Hatton was often her ‘Mutton’), for ‘he hath no tooth to bite’. But for a brief time in the early 1570s, Oxford put everyone else’s nose out of joint.

  The key passage in Dyer’s letter is this one: that ‘though in the beginning when her Majesty sought you (after her good manner), she did bear with rugged dealing of yours, until she had what she fancied, yet now, after satiety and fullness, it will rather hurt than help you . . .’. The modern age has been quick to read ‘satiety’ in a sexual sense; and indeed it is tempting to do so. But that reading falls into question as soon as we consider Elizabeth’s character. Do we believe that she would have given herself to Hatton, if she had not done so to Leicester? Or that she could have done so without attracting far more comment, not just in the court, but in her own and other countries?

  Yes, a few rumours would always crop up that Hatton, like Leicester, had (in the hostile words of one Mather, a plotter against Elizabeth), ‘more recourse to Her Majesty in her Privy Chamber than reason would suffer if she were so virtuous and well-inclined as some [noiseth] her’. Yes, Hatton, like Leicester, was blamed for some of those supposed illicit pregnancies that Elizabeth was rumoured to have concealed so successfully. But it is notable that Elizabeth’s statesmen did not seem rattled by Hatton to the degree one might have expected if he, alone, had indeed gained that kind of ascendancy over the Queen. And it is worth noting, too, that some of his most impassioned declarations of apparent love come cheek by jowl with what on the face of it are pleas that Elizabeth should marry him - hardly a possibility. (If marriage with an Earl of Leicester, son of the Duke of Northumberland, might have devalued her status around Europe, then marriage with a mere Christopher Hatton - not even ‘Sir’ Christopher until 1577 - would have been an absurdity.) What Elizabeth ‘fancied’ was less sex than adulation; and it was the knowledge that there were firm bounds set on Hatton’s aspiration - that he could never realistically even dream of being king consort, nor could his colleagues suspect him of it - that allowed the flirtation to be indulged in all its delicious folly.48

  If Hatton does as Dyer says, then ‘your place shall keep you in worship, your presence in favour, your followers will stand to you, at the least you shall have no bold enemies, and you shall dwell in the ways to take all advantages wisely, and honestly to serve your turn at times’. Hatton has gone down in history as something of a political lightweight. (There was considerable comment when, in 1587, Elizabeth made him Lord Chancellor - this, when he had no more than the barest legal training.) That reputation is probably unfair. He served Elizabeth’s turn not only in a personal capacity but as a privy councillor from 1578, inclining to conservative policies and tolerance of Catholics, and as a gifted parliamentary orator. Certainly men like Cecil came to regard him too as a valuable cog in the wheels of government; and not only because of the kindliness, the sweetness of disposition, that was conceded to him even by his enemies. Even Leicester’s letters to him - about an exchange of news, the sending of a buck to court, a message from the Queen, or the royal comings and goings - show a half-mollified prickliness that reflects the combination of his own jealousy and Hatton’s amiability.

  In the mid-1570s it seemed, after the shocks of the past few years, that the council’s internal rivalries had lost their edge. Perhaps the blood-red glow of St Bartholomew’s Day made it seem temporarily a little less important whose light at court was shining more brightly. Or perhaps one should see, rather, Leicester and Cecil - and soon, to some extent, Hatton - as prominent figures in a senior group who would join forces against any new pretender to their dignities.

  At the start of 1573 it was Cecil’s turn to fall out with Elizabeth, and Leicester’s to intercede for his old rival, and then to write encouragingly.

  For your own matter I assure you I found Her Majesty as well disposed as ever . . . and so, I trust, it shall always continue. God be thanked, her blasts be not the storms of other princes, though they be very sharp sometimes to those she loves best. Every man must render to her their due, and the most bounden the most of all. You and I come in that rank, and I am witness hitherto [to] your honest zeal to perform as much as man can . . . Hold and you can never fail.

  By the same token, Leicester in a later letter might grumble that Hatton has found a servant for Elizabeth, when he already had ‘a very tall and good footman’ of his own in mind - but, increasingly, even he came to trust Hatton to be his intermediary to the Queen in time of need.

  Leicester, in Elizabeth’s language, was her ‘Eyes’. Her eyes were vital, in order that she should see her kingdom. But Hatton (besides being her ‘Mutton’) was her ‘Lids’ - lids that perhaps enabled her, when she needed to relax, not to see too much. Perhaps Leicester recognized that this was a role he himself was no longer so well able to play. One of the compensations in the years ahead for both Leicester and many of his erstwhile enemies would be their growing ability to live in increasing amity. As the chance of Elizabeth’s marrying Leicester began to look slimmer - as all her councillors, Leicester included, began to feel she would never marry - it was as if they were able to relax with each other, at least to a degree; to work out a kind of modus vivendi. This first generation of Queen’s Men would achieve, in the years ahead, a kind of collegiate relationship - the chief men in Elizabeth’s suite covering for each other in the face of her anger, and consoling each other for her snubs, even when they clashed on policy. (A different analogy might be drawn with the women in a harem, or the wives in a polygamous marriage, who, it is said, may draw considerable support from each other.)

  And in any case - something that may well have encouraged the Queen to turn to Hatton - Leicester’s own eyes, in the early 1570s, were beginning to turn another way.

  13

  ‘I have long both loved and liked you’ 1573-1575

  ON 11 MAY 1573, GILBERT TALBOT WAS WRITING HOME FROM THE court to his father, the Earl of Shrewsbury. The Queen, he said, was as fond of Leicester as ever, and

  of late he hath endeavoured to please her more than heretofore. There are two sisters now in the Court that are very much in love with him, as they have been long; my Lady Sheffield and Frances Howard; they of like striving who shall love him are at great war together, and the Queen thinketh not well of them, and not the better of him; by this means there are spies over him.

  But Talbot’s news was old; the love was indeed ‘long’; and if Leicester was showing himself more assiduous to Elizabeth than had been his recent habit, it may have been because his conscience was pricking him. That same month Leicester and Lady Sheffield went, so
she later claimed, through a form of marriage. And though that claim has often been disputed, a letter he wrote to her this spring shows a relationship of real though not unmixed affection; and one that by 1573 had mileage on it.

  The Lady Douglass Sheffield was some ten years younger than Robert and Elizabeth, and kinswoman to the Queen through her father, the late Lord William Howard of Effingham, who had been half-brother to Anne Boleyn’s mother.49 She had married Lord Sheffield when she was seventeen - a decade before Gilbert Talbot’s letter - and for several years, in Sheffield’s Midlands home, they seem to have lived in reasonable amity. But she may have first been attracted to Leicester as far back as 1566, when Elizabeth went on progress through Northamptonshire and stayed at Belvoir Castle. All the nearby gentry came to pay their respects, the Sheffields among them - or that, at least, was the tale of a distant family connection of the Sheffields, Gervase Holles. The beautiful Douglass, he wrote from the romantic distance of the next century, ‘shone like a star’ in that gathering, and Leicester, ‘being much taken with her perfection, paid court to her and used all the art (in which he was master enough) to debauch her. To be short, he found her an easy purchase, and he had the unlawful fruition of her bed and body.’ But to throw a little cold water on the story, Elizabeth is not known ever to have visited Belvoir Castle, though an alternative venue might have been Oxford, where, in honour of the Queen’s visit and that of the university’s Chancellor, Leicester, Lord Sheffield was one of several gentlemen created Master of Arts.

  Lord Sheffield being ‘a gentleman of spirit’, so Holles claimed, Douglass was terrified he would find out; and Leicester wrote her a cryptically incriminating letter, saying that he had ‘not been unmindful in removing that obstacle which hindered the full fruit of their contentment’; that he had endeavoured to do so ‘by one expedient already’. One inference is that the goal he was trying to encompass was Lord Sheffield’s death. The letter came into Sheffield’s hands, who ‘that night parted beds, and the next day houses’, and set off for London in pursuit of ‘just and honourable revenge’. In Holles’ version, Leicester bribed an Italian physician to poison the irate husband before he had time to accomplish his fell design . . . In fact, Gervase Holles (a ward of one of Sheffield’s nephews) can have got only a garbled word-of-mouth version of the tale, passed down through a family that viewed Leicester with hostility; and he was writing at a time when tales of poisoning, and particularly of Leicester’s part in them, were standard currency. The story is worth recounting because, like many of the slanders on Leicester, it has stuck. But there is not the faintest hint of corroboration; and indeed, in a letter Leicester later wrote to Douglass, he recalls a time ‘after your widowhood began, upon the first occasion of my coming to you’.50