Lord Sheffield did not die until 1568, and there was none of the outcry there would have been if someone of his status had expired suspiciously. And frankly, it does not look as though Leicester felt strongly enough about Douglass Sheffield to have gone to any extraordinary lengths to set her free. After she came to court as a widow, to serve in the privy chamber, it seems to have been she who was making the running, as Gilbert Talbot clearly saw. The lengthy letter Leicester wrote at some time during this period sets out very clearly the reasons why, fond though he might have been of her, he did not feel able to marry her.
I have, as you well know, long both loved and liked you, and found always that earnest and faithful affection at your hand that bound me greatly to you . . . after your widowhood began, upon the first occasion of my coming to you, I did plainly and truly open to you in what sort my good will should and might always remain to you . . . It seemed that you had fully resolved with yourself to dispose yourself accordingly, without any further expectation or hope of other dealing. From which time you have framed yourself in such sort toward me as was very much to my contentation.
It is the familiar note of the aggrieved male, finding that the comfortable, no-strings arrangement he thought convenient all round is no longer enough for the lady; that, though she cannot bring herself to break off (a separation that he, by the sound of it, could have contemplated with remarkable equanimity), she is not prepared to set him free. To be fair to Leicester, emotions apart, he did indeed have compelling reason for not making a public commitment. The woman who could force him to risk the loss of Elizabeth’s whole favour would need to be a strong character indeed - far stronger than Douglass proved herself to be.
A year back, he reminded her, Douglass had begun to press him ‘in a further degree’; and though he ‘did plainly and truly deal with you’, as he protests indignantly, ‘an unkindness began, and after, a great strangeness fell out’. It might have been better had it ended there: instead, she seemed to accept his conditions; they continued to meet ‘in a friendly sort and you resolved not to press me more with the matter.’
They quarrelled again; separated for five or six months. He said he still cared for her; she cried out that instead, ‘the good will I bare you had been clean changed and withdrawn, in such sort as you did often move me by letters and otherwise to show you some cause or to deal plainly with you that [what] I intended toward you’. So they had continued, through reconciliations and estrangements (like his with Elizabeth!), until now he desired Douglass clearly to understand that ‘to proceed to some further degree’ would mean ‘mine utter overthrow’, and that therefore ‘no other or further end can be looked for’.
Earlier historians called his letter ‘ungallant’, and it is true that on one level he is just another man trying to wriggle out of marrying his mistress. But at least he gave her (and, by the sound of it, had always given her) the respect of treating her like a rational creature - took the trouble to explain the position fully, and had the courage to admit his own flaws. ‘For albeit I have been and yet am a man frail, yet am I not void of conscience toward God, nor honest meaning toward my friend; and having made special choice of you to be one of the dearest to me, so much the more care must I have to discharge the office due unto you.’
He is, he says, ‘no competent judge’ of what Douglass should do now. Accept him on these terms or leave him; it is not for him to say. He shows a readiness to have her take the latter course that reflects either a certain lack of interest or a genuine sense of responsibility. He tells her to avoid ‘your casual depending on me’ (since all men are mortal) - a hint that Douglass (to whose character we have few independent clues) is perhaps a little clinging; perhaps a little like the popular perception of Amy. She should take care lest her ‘youthful time be consumed and spent without certainty’. She should beware ‘the daily accidents that hap by grieving and vexing you, both to the hindrance of your body and mind; the care and cumber of your own causes ungoverned; the subjection you are in to all reports to the touch of your good name and fame’. The lady has other suitors, ‘of the best’, who can offer her marriage, ‘and as it is not my part to bid you to take them, so were it not mine honestly, considering mine own resolution, to bid you refuse them . . . to carry you away for my pleasure to your more great and further grief were too great a shame for me’.
The letter shows a certain amount of conflict in Leicester himself. It is not, perhaps, that he is so strongly drawn to Douglass, as that he is drawn to the idea of marriage in itself; to the chance of heirs for his dynasty. His friend Lord North had heard him say how much he wanted to be able to have children with some ‘goodly [or godly?] gentlewoman’. He admitted as much to Douglass, wrote that the same situation that forced him to keep her at arm’s length ‘forceth me thus to be the cause almost of the ruin of mine own House; for there is no likelihood that any of our bodies are like to have heirs; my brother you see long married and not like to have children, it resteth so now in myself’. It had been with huge pomp and the highest hopes that Leicester, eight years before, had arranged his brother Ambrose’s marriage to Anne Russell, daughter to the strongly Protestant Earl of Bedford, and a favourite with the Queen. But of the four Dudley siblings, only Mary was able to leave legitimate heirs behind her.
The problem now for Leicester is that if he should marry, as he has told Douglass, ‘I am sure never to have favour’ from the source he cares for above all, Elizabeth; ‘yet is there nothing in the world next [apart from] that favour that I would not give to be in hope of leaving some children behind me’. Perhaps it was that thought - more even than Douglass’s pressure - that persuaded him to agree to marry her, secretly. If so, of course, he must have hoped that the secret marriage could later be acknowledged. (Conversely, if he had not gone through some sort of ceremony with Douglass, then he could have exercised no rights over any child.) We will never know what hints Elizabeth received as to the importance of the relationship; what private hints she dropped to him. (Remember those ‘spies’, of whom Gilbert Talbot wrote?) But then, the whole affair is shrouded in confusion. We have only Douglass’s much later word for it that, having formally contracted to marry in 1571 (perhaps under pressure from the Duke of Norfolk, as head of the Howards?), they wed secretly at Esher in Surrey, as 1572 turned to 1573.
We are told that the bride was given away by Sir Edward Horsey, a soldier and supporter of Leicester’s own. The other witnesses included the skilled royal physician known to everyone as Dr Julio,51 who features as the Italian poisoner in all the anti-Leicester stories, and Robert Sheffield, a connection of the bride. To mark the occasion (Douglass said), Leicester presented her with a ring ‘set with five pointed diamonds and a table diamond’. This ring had been given to him by a former Earl of Pembroke (predecessor of the then earl, who had married Leicester’s niece), with instructions that Leicester should bestow it upon none but his wife.
But this story, like others in Leicester’s life, has been the subject of long-running controversy. It’s not in dispute that the two were involved, and when, fifteen months later, Douglass had a child, Leicester acknowledged the boy and would continue to do so; would enter him at university with the rank of an earl’s son, and leave him all the property which (unlike his title) was his to dispose of. He would write of this offspring later, however, as ‘my base [i.e. illegitimate] son’. Was he right to do so? Or had there indeed been a ceremony, which only the fear of Elizabeth kept shrouded in secrecy?
To weigh the evidence, it is necessary to skip forward a few years; and then forward again, to the beginning of the seventeenth century. To cut a long story short (for the longer one, see Chapter 14 and Appendix I), within a few years this passion had run its course and Leicester married someone else - without, apparently, any serious fear he might be accused of bigamy. The Queen, in anger, raised with Douglass the rumour that she and Leicester had been married, and swore that if it were true, Douglass should have her rights; but Douglass denied there
had ever been a ceremony and, more significantly, herself married someone else shortly afterwards. It was not until 1604, after Elizabeth and Leicester were both dead, that that same ‘base son’, seeking to prove his legitimacy, put his mother into the witness box to swear that she and Leicester had indeed married; to give those details of rings, and witnesses; to describe a letter from Leicester signing himself ‘your loving husband’, and thanking God for the birth of their son, who ‘might be the comfort and staff of their old age’. Her earlier denial had been from fear, she said; of what Leicester might do if she proclaimed the match.
The Star Chamber, where the case was tried, found against the son’s claim; but in a way that leaves the question open for posterity. The court did not pronounce directly on the question of his legitimacy; merely rejected the evidence by which he tried to prove it.52 But then, in an impossibly vicious twist, the Star Chamber accused the ‘base son’ of lèse-majesté in having raised the question at all. The relations who might otherwise claim the Leicester inheritance had the ear of the new King James, and fiercely contested the case. But abroad - when he had left England in disgust - the supposedly bastard scion would be known by his grandfather’s title of Duke of Northumberland. More tellingly, later in the seventeenth century, Charles I formally declared his belief that the ‘base son’ had a legitimate claim; and a nineteenth-century court would refuse to grant to a Dudley descendant titles that could only be given if the ‘base son’ were bastard indeed. The burden of proof was on Douglass, and she failed to provide it; none the less, an uncertainty as inevitable as it is unsatisfactory endures.
But if Douglass and Leicester were married to each other, what were they thinking of, when they subsequently married other people? Perhaps of that unexpected (and, to most of us, little understood) flexibility of Tudor marriage - perhaps particularly relevant in this very period, after the Reformation had done away with one set of rules, and before the new situation first began to be regularized in the early seventeenth century. For all the talk of ‘holy wedlock’, marriage was not actually a sacrament of the Anglican Church. Though banns, a church ceremony and the presence of a clergyman were all desirable, not even the last was actually essential. A couple were bound if they simply declared before witnesses that they took each other as man and wife (or even if they declared that they intended to marry, and then slept together). The logical consequence was that if they subsequently both declared they were not married, then in effect, though not in law, they had undone the ceremony.
Douglass Sheffield (confronting the judges of the Star Chamber) declared that she had been married by a clergyman, and that he had shown a licence (presumably a special licence, used then as now to avoid the publicity of banns). Unfortunately she never knew the clergyman’s name, nor could the issuing of a special licence be found among church records . . . but again, neither clergyman nor licence was necessary.
Contemporary parallels throw some light on the story. Bigamy was not a felony until the start of the seventeenth century. A witness to Leicester’s ‘marriage’, Dr Julio, had himself three years earlier married a woman who was married already; and when in 1573 his case came up before the ecclesiastical courts, it was stalled for another three years before judgement was given against him; nor did he then suffer any diminution of royal favour by way of penalty. Marriages could be airbrushed away. A decade earlier, in 1561, Katherine Grey, the Queen’s near relative and putative heir, had secretly married the Earl of Hertford (finally, pregnant and desperate, imploring a horrified Robert Dudley to break the news to the Queen for her). On that occasion the story had ended unhappily; again, the witness had died and the priest vanished by the time the matter came under investigation, and Elizabeth seized the excuse to declare the union null and void, and any children illegitimate.
Douglass’s baby was born at Sheen, while Leicester was away with the Queen, on progress in the west. A member of the household rode with the news to Bristol, returning to act as proxy for one of the godparents, Sir Henry Lee, at the baptism; the other sponsors were Ambrose Dudley, and Lady Margaret Dacre, for whom Mrs Erisa stood proxy. There seems to have been no particular upsurge of gossip. But then, unsanctioned births were not unknown among the nobility, and scandal came only when the parties concerned proved inept at hushing things up (as when, in 1581, the Earl of Oxford’s mistress, Anne Vavasour, gave birth in the palace, near the Queen’s own chamber).53 By contrast, Douglass lay low for a couple of years - at Leicester’s property in Esher, or at Leicester House in London - with her baby, visited by Leicester when the court was nearby. Since their relationship was an open secret, all they really needed to conceal from the Queen was the question of a marriage ceremony. Douglass later told the Star Chamber that she had herself served as a countess, privately, but that Leicester reproved her, lest the Queen should come to hear of it.
It is hard to get much of a reading on Douglass’s character; not one of any great firmness, one might hazard, surely? But it certainly seems a strange coincidence that the two huge uncertainties in Leicester’s life both have to do with wives; both absent, both shadowy. One might speculate that neither of them was entirely real to him compared to the vivid court and its dynamic, demanding queen.
Still things between Robert and Elizabeth continued outwardly as before. When he gave her a present of a fan of white feathers, its gold handle was engraved with her symbol of the lion and his of the bear. In 1575 Federico Zuccaro was commissioned to paint twin portraits of Elizabeth and Leicester. And in 1575 their official position towards each other was still such that Leicester was able to make the great, grand gesture of hospitality that has often been taken as his last bid for royal matrimony.
That summer - as was usual, in the first part of her reign - Elizabeth took her court on progress. The bald words, today, give little hint of the terrifying scale of an operation that would have been hideously familiar to her contemporaries. True, great households of the sixteenth century were by their nature peripatetic, moving from one house to another, so that crowded rooms could be aired and cleansed. So perhaps the basic concept of the Queen’s taking her own furnishings with her - so that she might dine off silver plate, and sit on a suitably stately seat, even if forced to overnight in the home of a mere member of the minor gentry - would not seem remarkable. Any great lady travelled almost like a snail (and at about the same pace) with her home on her back, encumbered by and enclosed in a protective parade of personal baggage, provisions, and the ever-present parasite throng of servants and minor gentry. But when the lady was the Queen, taking with her the whole apparatus of both state and ceremony, the resemblance to the hordes of Midian spreading over the plain must have been quite extraordinary.
Besides the Queen and her own attendants, there travelled also a baggage train, sometimes of more than three hundred carts, each drawn by several horses (which the Queen’s grooms had the right to requisition from the locals when necessary): a caravan of clothes and bed-linen, books and cooking pots, so cumbrous it could travel only ten or twelve miles in a day. If the Queen were to stay a night in the house of any but the grandest nobility, then one team would have moved in a few days ahead of her in order to get the house ready - putting up hangings, putting better locks on the doors - and would stay on after she left to close the temporary establishment down again. Meanwhile another team would have moved in to the different house where she would spend the next night; and (if a picnic were not on the menu) a third establishment might have to be readied for use in a single thirty-six-hour span: a ‘dining house’ where the Queen could stop to eat along her way.
Few houses, of course, could even begin to accommodate anything like the whole retinue. Leicester would be found a room in the same building as the Queen wherever possible; otherwise, even he would be at another house in the vicinity. The accommodation officer who lamented the year before that he could not tell ‘where to place Mr Hatton, and for my Lady Carew there is no place with a chimney’ - this at an archbishop’s palace -
must have had his counterpart on every journey. But in fact Hatton and Lady Carew were lucky: only the Queen’s ladies, the heads of departments, the great officers and leading favourites could hope the Lord Chamberlain’s officers would even try to find them a room. The rest had to cram into inns, to call in favours from nearby friends of friends, or, in the case of the lower orders, simply resort to canvas.
Each department of the royal household, from the bakehouse to the spicery, and the cellar to the laundry, sent its representatives on progress. The Queen’s own cooks must be on hand to prepare her dinner; a matter of security against poisoning as well as of practicality. The royal factotums might have less to do when the Queen was staying in the house of a major member of the nobility; or sometimes, as at Sandwich once, the Queen might compliment the wives of the local burghers by sampling the dishes they had prepared for her without having them tasted first, and then by asking that the remains should be taken back to her lodgings so that she could enjoy them properly. But she herself (and the state visitors, the ambassadors, who might travel down to have an audience with her) were not to be at the mercy of possibly incompetent local cooks. And as for feeding her court, surely not even a noble’s household, unassisted, could have contemplated feeding as many as five hundred extra people.
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