Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Some of the staff of the Queen’s own chamber came along, inevitably: ushers, grooms and pages; the royal ladies and maids, all with their own servants. She was escorted by the Yeomen of the Guard - perhaps the whole body, some 130 strong - and a double handful of the ceremonial mounted bodyguard, the Gentleman Pensioners, with their distinctive gilt armour.

  Then there was the official wing of this extraordinary parade. Except on the shorter, informal progresses - a hunting trip up the Lea Valley, say - the practical business of governing the country happened wherever the Queen was, and it was hardly practical to stop government for months on end, summer though it may be. So there were always enough of the privy council present with the Queen - individual members coming and going; Leicester, when present, a regular attendant - to make up a viable quorum to deal with whatever business came their way. Appeals against the justice system; auditing of officials’ books; matters as elevated as messages from ambassadors and as mundane as authorizing the expenses of the messengers who brought them: all followed the court, and the councillors, around the country.

  The privy council, obviously, required its own set of attendants, besides the personal retinues of those great lords who were also councillors. Arrangements had to be made not only for secretaries and officers - for a council chamber with ‘paper pens ink wax and other necessaries’ - but for the couriers bringing the raw fodder of the council’s debates, and taking their decisions away again for implementation by local sheriffs and JPs. In remoter areas this could involve not only a relay of horses stationed every ten miles along the route back to London, but even the clearing of cross-country roads where necessary.54

  Her councillors did not always find it easy to get the Queen’s attention while she was in holiday mood. As Leicester once wrote to Walsingham from a progress: ‘Our conference with Her Majesty about affairs, more than by necessity urged, is both seldom and slender,’ she being ‘loth to trouble herself’. His role, probably, was to cajole her; but on this occasion even he had to break off his letter ‘In much haste, Her Majesty ready to horseback’. (Cecil, on the same progress, had to take down a letter on a topic as important as authorizing Walsingham to agree help to the Dutch rebels ‘in haste’ while the Queen was ‘making ready to horse’. One has the picture of her desperate to get away.) It was the job of her councillors to scrabble about, and ensure the work got done, as best they might.

  Was it worth it? For the Queen, of course, a progress was the visible and audible reassurance as to the success of her monarchy. As the Spanish ambassador wrote once: ‘She was received everywhere with great acclamations and signs of joy as is customary in this country whereat she was exceedingly pleased.’ For the people - besides being a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle - it was a chance for institutions and even individuals to put their petitions and problems to her directly. Elizabeth might have argued that a progress was a vital mechanism in her publicity machine (had she ever felt the need to argue such a point with, say, a Cecil, whom the cost - some £2,000 a year - caused to groan dismally). It was true - though possibly the less true for the fact that her progresses over the years often tended to tramp over much the same ground: an area that ranged from Bristol to Warwick, and Southampton to Stafford, but that none the less represented only perhaps the south-easterly quarter of the entire territory she governed. Still, even in an age before mass media, the ripples of a progress perhaps spread beyond those routes and towns where the Queen’s cavalcade might actually pass by. There was indeed a measure of organization to ensure it should do: when, for example, the Queen visited Norwich for six days in the middle of August 1578, two of the men responsible for setting up the entertainments quickly published accounts of them under the auspices of powerful London patrons. (Leicester had probably had a hand in planning the anti-French masques and politically pointed festivities.) The report of Thomas Churchyard, a professional entrepreneur seconded from the court, came out on 20 September. Bernard Garter went one better. His version came out on 30 August, barely a week after Elizabeth had left the city.

  The Queen would expect an expensive present, or several of them, at every visit, and so would courtiers in their different degree. (At court, so Spenser wrote in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’, ‘nothing there is done without a fee / The courtier must recompensed be.’) Elizabeth might be presented with a dress, a hanging, an agate cup from a noble host; leading courtiers might get embroidered gloves from a city. (At Saffron Walden in 1578 the Queen got an engraved silver gilt cup worth some £15 - well over £2,000 today; Leicester got sugar loaf worth 17s 8d - which sounds slight, but was not so bad, considering that the visiting French ambassador had to be content with a gallon of wine at 2s; coals to Newcastle, surely.) The costs of entertaining the Queen were immense and various, even though the royal household would bring their own provisions when necessary. At Lichfield, the host’s expenses included such charges as 5s to a nearby house ‘for keeping Mad Richard while her Ma[jesty] was here’; 3d ‘to Gregory Ballard’s Maid for bringing chickens’; 19s for painting the market cross the Queen would pass by; 6s for salt fish; 12s for a bear (presumably to be baited); 10s to the trumpeters and 3s 4d to the slaughtermen. The largest sums were to officers and scholars: £3 to the Sergeant of Arms, £1 to the Herald, and £5 to ‘Mr Cartwright, that should have made the Oration’; a mere 3s 4d, however, to ‘them of the Privy backhouse’, who presumably had to handle toilet facilities.

  The cost was all the more unbearable if the Queen changed her plans, from necessity, or mere caprice, and all that expensive preparation was wasted. For every great man who rebuilt his house with the incomes the Queen had granted him, every lesser light who ardently hoped the Queen might honour him with a visit, there were many who wrote in panic to their friends at court when they heard the Queen might be headed their way. The Earl of Bedford, back in 1570, had pleaded to Cecil that the notice given was not nearly enough to ready his house for ‘so noble a guest and so large a train’. Later in Elizabeth’s reign, in 1601 - when her subjects had perhaps become less inured to progresses, after the stay-at-home years of the eighties and nineties - the Earl of Lincoln simply decamped from his house, so that the offended Queen found only a locked door. (Two of her courtiers were instructed to pursue the earl with the information that she would be back next week, and that meanwhile they would be ordering in the necessary provisions on his behalf . . . farewell any hopes of economy.) Even so senior a man as Sir Henry Lee, at the same later period, could write to Cecil’s son on hearing ‘that her Majesty threatens a progress . . . My estate without my undoing cannot bear it.’ In a sense the smaller people whose houses were requisitioned for a bare overnight stop got off more lightly. They were required merely to let the professionals get on with the job, having moved their own goods and chattels out of the way. But even for them, it must have been like having your home requisitioned by an only marginally friendly army.

  Leicester, though, was not of this ill-prepared company. As Master of Horse - besides his informal role as impresario - he was in any case one of the most important officials in arranging a progress, and had often entertained the Queen. She had visited his Warwickshire seat of Kenilworth before (in 1566, 1568 and 1572) but this two-week visit of 1575 is the one that became a legend even in its own day (as attested by a tapestry depiction in nearby Baddesley Clinton); the one against which other Elizabethan entertainments were measured - and the one from which Leicester’s finances never entirely recovered.

  ‘For the persons, for the place, time, cost, devices, strangeness and abundance of all . . . I saw none anywhere so memorable,’ wrote one contemporary. It had been at Kenilworth that Elizabeth had received news of the massacre in Paris. Did Leicester want to take the taste away? Or perhaps to remind her, subtly, that a marriage to the Valois was now a policy with which he, and many others, could no longer agree?

  The oldest parts of the Kenilworth Leicester received had been built in the twelfth century, by which time the estate (first given by Henry
I to his chamberlain, Geoffrey de Clinton) had become crown property. In the thirteenth century, in the Barons’ War, Simon de Montfort, that earlier Earl of Leicester, had defended it against the forces of Henry III, and the threat of overweening royal authority. John of Gaunt remodelled the buildings in the fourteenth century; Henry V added a lakeside banqueting house, and Henry VIII a new range of lodgings. Robert’s father, John Dudley, had briefly taken possession of the castle just months before his death and depossession in 1553.

  Leicester spent a fortune on improvements to the property. By 1575, John of Gaunt’s medieval palace, already one long step away from its martial origins, had further developed into an Elizabethan showpiece - without, however, changing its essential character. While other Elizabethan nobles only a very few years later built modern and symmetrical houses (Hardwick, Longleat) - while Leicester’s own father had sent an architect to Italy to study the principles of classical style - at Kenilworth there arose a new tower above the old keep, and a block of lodging joining it to the medieval hall and chambers; stables; a tilt yard; and a gatehouse to make a grand new entranceway.

  The result was asymmetrical (his architect despaired) but charming; traditional, but admitting the newfangled indulgences of glass and light: ‘every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high roofed within . . . a day time on every side so glittering by glass, a nights by continual brightness of candle, fire, & torchlight, transparent through the lightsome wind[ows], as it were the Egyptian Pharos’. These transports come from the extensive descriptions of the place, and a precise chronicle of the visit, published under the name of Robert Laneham, a minor court official and one in Leicester’s service (though it has been suggested that someone else wrote it in mockery).

  Much of Leicester’s money must have gone on the furnishing. The Queen even slept under a hanging spelling out the reassurance that Leicester was ‘Droit et loyal’. An inventory of his possessions made a few years later includes carpets (then so expensive they were often used to cover tables rather than floors) of crimson velvet ‘richly embroidered with my Lord’s posies, bears, ragged staves, etc. of cloth gold and silver’; eight tapestry pieces of Judith and Holofernes; seven of Jezebel; five of Samson; seven sets of hangings in the newly fashionable gilt leather; ‘instruments of Organs, regalles and virginalles covered with crimson velvet’; and portraits that included not only Robert himself ‘with Boye his dog by him’, but several nobles of the Spanish court - families his mother had once known as friends, and whom he would later face in enmity.

  That family emblem, the bear with ragged staff, recurs repeatedly. You find it on a chair, of ‘crimson velvet in cloth of gold, and the bear and ragged staff in cloth of silver’; on a ‘fair, rich, new, standing square bedstead of walnut tree, all painted over with crimson and silvered with roses, four bears and ragged staves all silvered standing upon the corners’. The staves alone even featured on the crimson satin quilt and the ‘pillowbeeres’. It was as if Robert, by stamping the family emblem on the place his father had had to vacate, were emphasizing that this time - they hoped - the Dudleys were here to stay.

  The complete terrain of parks and chase stretched for nearly twenty miles from the castle walls; but within those walls, the garden boasted ‘a pleasant terrace’ and stone carvings - obelisks, spheres, and those ubiquitous white bears. There were ‘fine arbours redolent by sweet trees and flowers’, fragrant herbs, apples, pears and cherries; alleys of grass, or else of sand, ‘pleasant to walk on as a sea shore when the water is avaled [ebbed]’.

  A great aviary was decorated with painted gems; Elizabeth loved the sound of birdsong. The figures of two athletes, supporting a ball upon their shoulders, made a fountain eight feet high, while carp and tench swarmed in the pool below. With ‘the Birds fluttering, the Fountain streaming, the Fish swimming: all in such delectable variety, order, dignity’, this, Laneham said, really was worth the name often bestowed on medieval gardens - that of a Paradise. The story goes that when the Queen rather ungratefully complained to Leicester that she could not see the garden from her own apartments, he brought in an army of workmen at dead of night to make a precise duplicate, so that when she awoke, she was delighted to see it under her window. One may take leave to doubt the story, on looking at the terrain (and these workmen must have laboured very silently), but the magical piece of extravagance has become part of Elizabethan mythology. There is always, to modern eyes, something of the stage set, the fantasy, about Tudor houses. When a royal visitor moved into even so old and seemingly immovable a building as, say, Dover Castle, a temporary ceiling might be put up and painted, walls rehung, to change the appearance of the place considerably. But Kenilworth was the home of fantasy. Even the Gothic style Leicester chose suggests, like his pageantry, an Arthurian theme; that his aim was to evoke the once and future age of chivalry.

  The Queen arrived at eight o’clock at night, on Saturday, 9 July. The dusk must have lent an air of unreality. Kenilworth lay by the side of spreading water, a hundred-acre lake curling round the castle (long since drained away). Over this, Leicester had built a 600-foot bridge, its pillars adorned with symbols of bounty. Across the dark water there now floated, on a ‘moveable island, bright blazing with torches’, the Lady of the Lake, claiming that she had kept the lake since Arthur’s day, but now wished to hand it over to Elizabeth. (The Queen was heard to say that she thought she owned it already.) She entered to a ‘great peal of guns and such lighting by firework’ that the noise and flame ‘were heard and seen twenty mile off’. The Italian expert in pyrotechnics had, happily, been dissuaded from his original idea of firing into the air live cats and dogs.

  The Robert Laneham account gives her programme. Sunday, a church service, ‘excellent music’, ‘dancing of Lords and Ladies’, more fireworks; ‘streams and hails of fiery sparks, lightings of wild fire on water and land, flight and shoot of thunderbolts; all with such countenance, terror, and vehemence, that the heavens thundered, the waters surged, the earth shook’.

  On Monday, she stayed indoors through the heat of the day before going out hunting: ‘the swiftness of the Deer, the running of footmen, the galloping of horses, the blasting of horns, the halloing and shouts of the huntsmen . . . in my opinion there can be no one way comparable to this, and especially in this place, that of nature is formed . . .’ Leicester himself had once written to Cecil from another progress of how they were all ‘altogether hunters and do nothing but ride about from bush to bush with a crossbow in our neck’. A contemporary illustration from Turbeville’s book on hunting shows the Queen, before a chase, being presented with a bowl of fewmets (droppings) that she might judge whether the beast was worthy of her pursuit. Every so often a deer would prove its ingenuity by taking refuge in the lake, and Laneham admires ‘the stately carriage of his head in his swimming’, like the sail of a ship; the hounds following after like skiffs in the wake of a larger vessel. One such swimmer put up such an admirable fight that: ‘the watermen held him up hard by the head, while, at her Highnesses commandment, he lost his ears for a ransom and so had pardon of life’.

  Elizabeth was ‘surprised’ on her way home by another of the staged set-pieces she might, in fact, expect to find along her way. The ‘wild man’ she encountered was the soldier-poet George Gascoigne, a member of the minor Bedfordshire gentry whom Leicester had recruited for the occasion and who now, dressed up in moss green and ivy leaves, engaged in a rhyming dialogue with his companion player, ‘Echo’, before breaking his staff over his knee in token of his submission to the Queen’s authority. He snapped, alas, a little too vigorously, and one of the pieces flew near enough to the Queen’s horse to make it rear in terror . . . but she called out ‘No hurt! No hurt!’, and the horrified Gascoigne could live to recite another day.

  Tuesday saw dancing, and music on the water; Wednesday hunting again. Thursday saw thirteen bears baited by a pack of mastiffs.

  It was a sport very pleasant, of these beasts: to see the bear with his pin
k eyes learing after his enemy’s approach, the nimbleness and watch of the dog to take advantage, and the force and experience of the bear again to avoid the assaults . . . with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling, he would work to wind himself from them: and when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slobber about his physiognomy, was a matter of goodly relief . . .

  Thus Laneham’s report. (Perhaps it really was a satire . . .) There were more fireworks, reflected in the water and some even burning below it, and the tumbling of an Italian acrobat whose limbs seemed to be made ‘of lute strings’, so that Laneham ‘began to doubt whether he was a man or a spirit’.

  Friday and Saturday were wet. Perhaps, confined indoors, the Queen found time to catch up with more serious business. The council had been meeting when necessary all this time, and Laneham as council porter had his duties. (His ‘letter’ gives a nice picture of court life at the middling level: up at 7 a.m. and to chapel; bread and ‘a good bowl of Ale’ for breakfast in my lord’s chamber; and ‘if the Council sit, I am at hand’ to watch out for interruptions or interlopers. Sometimes the visit of an ambassador or his servant would give him the chance to show off his French, his Spanish, his Dutch and his Latin. ‘Dinner and supper I have twenty places to go to and heartily prayed to.’ Afternoon and evening he spends among the gentlewomen; a time of eyes and sighs. ‘Sometimes I foot it with dancing; now with my Gittern [guitar]’, now with a song, or at the virginals, ‘they come flocking about me like bees to honey . . . it is sometime by midnight ere I can get from them’.) Inside the house on those wet days, Elizabeth herself would have found both luxury (for Leicester had had her rooms specially furnished, in silver fabric of peach and purple, as well as his favourite crimson) and diversion.