Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  That summer, on physicians’ orders, Leicester went north to take the cure at the springs of Buxton in Derbyshire, newly developed and made popular by his friend the Earl of Shrewsbury. (Shrewsbury’s famous ‘guest’-cum-prisoner, the Queen of Scots, herself took the waters when the authorities allowed. A few years previously Cecil had met her there, as would Leicester, and had spent his time ever since trying to convince Elizabeth that they had not become too friendly.) Patients at the spa took the medicinal water both externally and internally. The place was fully equipped with a specially built accommodation block; chairs around the hot springs; waterside chimneys where your servant could build a fire to air your clothes; and healthful games, for the evening, of bowling or archery. Leicester wrote to Cecil that he and Ambrose were taking great pleasure in bathing in the waters, and drinking them too: dining off ‘one dish or two at most, and taking the air afoot or on horseback, moderately’. The regime was probably a good detox after the rich diet of the Elizabethan aristocracy; and Leicester was not usually abstemious even by the standards of the day. That emerges clearly from two letters (or rather, a letter and the draft of a letter) that Elizabeth wrote, during his visit north, to his hosts the Shrewsburys.

  The more formal letter expresses Elizabeth’s thanks for all the kindness the Shrewsburys had shown to ‘our cousin of Leicester’ - the hospitality at Chatsworth, the stay at Buxton, the ‘very rare present’ they had given him. (The next year Shrewsbury’s son Gilbert Talbot was writing that Leicester again ‘threateneth’ a visit to Buxton. A visit of his, by now, must have been almost as expensive an honour as one of Elizabeth’s own.) She wanted them to understand that ‘holding him in that place of favour we do’, she took this lavish hospitality ‘not as done unto him but to our own self, reputing him as another ourself’. Any debt incurred by him would find her a grateful debtor. The formal letter sent goes on to thank the Shrewsburys for their ‘loyal and most careful’ care of Mary, their dangerous charge - but the draft, which seems never to have been sent, continues very differently.

  Mischievously, the Queen suggests that the Shrewsburys should reduce Leicester’s diet, lest the debt should grow too great; should ‘allow him by the day for his meat two ounces of flesh’, and just ‘the twentieth part of a pint of wine to comfort his stomach’. On festival days they might enlarge his diet by ‘the shoulder of a wren’ for his dinner and a leg of the same for his supper; ditto for Ambrose (who was obviously with Leicester) - except that he should do without the wren’s leg, since ‘his body is more replete than his brother’s’ and ‘light suppers agree best with rules of physic’.

  A modern dietitian would have agreed - and approved the Queen herself, who was famously ‘temperate’ in her diet, ‘as eating but few kinds of meat, and those not compounded’, as Clapham put it, and mixing her wine with three parts water. But more even than Leicester’s lusty appetite, what emerges from the draft letter is his enduring, cosy, almost marital closeness to the Queen. Perhaps, in the end, Elizabeth hesitated to expose this note of playful intimacy even to such friends as the Shrewsburys. But it is no wonder that Shrewsbury (and his wife, the famously thrusting Bess of Hardwick) thought Leicester’s friendship so well worth having that he sent back to the Queen his ecstatic thanks for her thanks, stressing his fondness for ‘our dearest friend, my kinsman, my Lord of Leicester’. (No wonder, too, that when Leicester later proposed a marriage tie between his family and theirs, they were only too delighted to agree.)

  Charles Stuart, the younger brother of Lord Darnley, had fathered a child on Bess of Hardwick’s daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish - having married her in defiance of Elizabeth’s authority. The child, Arbella Stuart, was a promising toddler when Leicester went into Derbyshire; and the scarcity of Tudor heirs meant the claim to the throne she had inherited from her father had to be taken seriously. From the start, the Shrewsburys had recruited Leicester’s aid in promoting the cause of their infant heiress and securing her a pension from the Queen. He had already been called on to mediate between the couple (whose quarrels were legendary), and it would be fascinating to know whether, in return, he confided anything at all about his own marital history - or his future plans.

  For Leicester was about to embark on the third and final chapter of that odd, muddled marital history. In the spring of 1578, at Kenilworth, he underwent a secret marriage ceremony with Lettice Knollys. Or so she later claimed . . . It was probably only thanks to firm action by her father that this situation, unlike that of Douglass Sheffield, was subsequently regularized; that there was, later, another ceremony; one even the Queen could not ignore indefinitely.

  There remained, of course, something else to be regularized: Leicester’s relationship with Douglass Sheffield. That year - or so she declared a quarter of a century later - he had a meeting with her in the gardens of Greenwich Palace where, in the presence of two witnesses, he told her their relationship was at an end. He offered her an annuity of £700 if she would ‘disavow marriage’ and surrender custody of her son. When she, in tears, refused, then he swore that ‘he would never come at her again’ and shouted that the marriage had never been lawful anyway. Douglass said that her compliance - now and later, when she denied her marriage and gave up her child to Leicester - was down to fear; that her hair had begun to fall out, and she thought she was being poisoned.62 But then, by the time Douglass made that statement, at the start of the seventeenth century, Leicester was safely dead, and his reputation already blackened by the slurs of the 1580s. He could be impugned quite safely.

  One does not have to subscribe to the full theory of his villainy, to the poison slurs, to believe that a good deal of pressure was put on Douglass Sheffield. Leicester would hardly have needed to threaten her directly. It would have been sufficiently obvious that he could either help or hinder the future careers of herself, and anyone close to her: obvious, too, that there would be no refuge in a queen whose instinctive reaction would be to regard any rival claimant to Leicester’s loyalty with extreme hostility.

  If Lettice had not bowled Leicester over, would he now have admitted to his relationship with Douglass - a relationship which, whether or not he was aware of a formal marriage tie, had already produced what he longed for, a healthy and promising baby boy? We do not know enough about her, or about their (scant) life together to know if he would in any way regret losing her. But he must have regretted the son - as an heir, and for the boy’s promise - as is evident from the future affection he showed him. Maybe the longer he failed to announce that he and Douglass were married, the harder it had become? Maybe he wanted to break a deadlock in some way? He was taking a gamble, but he had the temperament of a gambler - and after all, he must have assumed he and Lettice would have more heirs. Although she was by now in her late thirties, they had both proved their fertility.

  Did he simply fall in love with Lettice, and decide that a marriage with Douglass, where love had died, was hollow mockery? It sounds anachronistic and oddly modern. But so, of course, do the actions of Henry VIII, if we accept the view voiced by many historians, new and old - that what Henry did, he did in search of love - above the more political explanations for his ‘six wives’ history. Does the answer to Leicester’s actions lie purely in the attractions of Lettice? Certainly she was a forceful woman, we must infer from her later history; and, from a wonderful portrait of her, equally certainly a beauty. The portrait is thought to have been painted almost a decade later, when Lettice was forty-five. If it were, then she shared the ability of her kinswoman Elizabeth to hypnotize the viewer into ignoring her real age and frailties. Lettice gazes out, smooth-faced, luscious, faintly smiling; her hair a shouting auburn, while the magnificent embroideries of her padded dress show the ragged staff of the Dudleys.

  If Douglass Sheffield’s pliability makes it tempting to postulate a similarity between her and Amy Dudley, then Lettice must have had more in common with her kinswoman Elizabeth. She would prove the wife to whom Robert remained in lifelong thrall. We do
, thankfully, have more information about Lettice than we do about Douglass, let alone Amy - and if much of it comes from later in her extraordinarily long life, then time can have had little impact on her forceful personality.

  Like Elizabeth, she had a physical vigour. It was after Leicester’s death that a courtier wrote of Elizabeth’s normal exercise as being six or seven galliards of a morning; Lettice was over ninety when it was reported of her that she ‘can yet walk a mile in the morning’. Her career rings with a lust for grandeur and a longing for court life. (No country mouse, no Amy Dudley, she.) In her letters to her son we can see the strength of her clinging; begging that other ‘Sweet Robin’, as she called him, ‘to bestow some time a few idle lines on your mother who otherwise may grow jealous that you love her not so well as she deserves’. This at a time when Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was not only a prisoner in danger of his life, but a man of more than thirty. It sounds a little like Elizabeth’s own unseasonable demands for reassurance and flattery.

  That same fierce possessiveness could show itself as a determination to take what Lettice felt was hers - as in her trying, after Leicester’s death, even to seize by force the property, Kenilworth, he had left to his ‘base son’. And in her third marriage (made in widowhood and in haste, to a much younger man of lesser rank) we can trace the strength of her appetites. Yet despite that subsequent marriage she would choose to be buried with Leicester in Warwick, the chapel that is resting place for so many of the Dudleys; and a verse on the nearby plaque written by her great-grandson Gervase Clinton, glossing over the many controversies of her life, describes the tomb as being that of an ‘excellent and pious lady’:

  There may you see that face that hand

  That once was fairest in the land

  She that in her younger years

  Matched with two great English peers

  She that did supply the wars

  With thunder and the court with stars

  She that in her youth had been

  Darling to the maiden Queen

  Till she was content to quit

  Her favour for her favourite

  It might be possible, however, to trace a less personal, a more political, element to Leicester’s marital history. Lettice had been born a Knollys, a family (like the Howards) that ‘appertaineth to us in blood’, as Elizabeth wrote. Her mother was Katherine Carey, Anne Boleyn’s niece - but, almost more to the point, her father was Sir Francis Knollys, a fellow privy councillor and Leicester’s close colleague. (Apart from anything else they were two of the three household officers most responsible for organizing those shattering progresses.) Knollys was also a leading and an ardent Protestant, high on the Catholic hit list in the rebellions of 1569. It had been he who escorted the Duke of Norfolk to the Tower. As for Lettice’s first husband, the Devereux Protestantism was evident not only in Essex’s Irish career, but in his choice of guardians for their children: Cecil, and Leicester’s brother-in-law the Earl of Huntingdon, whose wife Katherine took a number of girls into her house and boasted of her ability ‘to breed and govern young gentlewomen’.

  By contrast Douglass, while another of the Queen’s relations, had been a Howard; member of a family notorious for their crypto-Catholic inclinations. Leicester’s relationship with Douglass Howard must have begun at the time he was flirting with the crypto-Catholic causes of the Howard clan. One of the godfathers of Douglass’s and Leicester’s son was Sir Henry Lee, whom Norfolk embraced on the scaffold. Douglass’s next marriage would be to a man, Sir Edward Stafford, whose Catholic sympathies may have led to his being recruited, while England’s ambassador in Paris, as a Spanish agent; and when Douglass’s son by Leicester grew up, he would himself later convert to Catholicism, reproving those who assumed he had done so only to facilitate his new life in Catholic Europe.

  One cannot take this theory too far. Lettice too would later marry a man from a noted recusant family, while Douglass’s brother, later Elizabeth’s Lord Admiral, does not seem to have had his career blighted by any rumour of Catholic sympathies. But it does look a little as though Leicester’s marriage to Lettice, personal attraction apart, both signalled and reflected the clear new trend of his position and his religious convictions. He was effectively moving from one wing to another of Elizabeth’s maternal family. If it came to slighting Douglass and her child, or Lettice and - potentially - hers, then it is easy to see why his face would have turned the Knollys way.

  For this looks very much like a shotgun wedding. In September, Francis Knollys insisted that his daughter and Leicester should be married properly and formally, whatever half-baked ceremony they may have gone through before. The chaplain who married them - Humphrey Tyndall, one of Leicester’s staff - later recalled the event that took place at Wanstead, with just sufficient privacy that the Queen would not need to know about the ceremony. Leicester, Tyndall said, told him that he had ‘a good season forborne marriage in respect of her Majesty’s displeasure’, but wished now to marry the Countess of Essex ‘especially for the better quieting of his own conscience’. The wedding took place between seven and eight on a Sunday morning, in the presence of Ambrose, of the Earl of Pembroke (who had recently married Leicester’s niece, Mary Sidney) and of Lord North - to whom Leicester had earlier confided his desire to marry ‘some goodly gentlewoman’, and the ‘hearty love and affection’ he felt for Lettice. His version of events confirmed Tyndall’s. Lettice’s brother Richard was there too - standing half inside the doorway, perhaps to keep a lookout? - while Sir Francis gave his daughter away, Tyndall binding them together ‘in such manner and form as is prescribed by the communion book’. The bride was dressed ‘in a loose gown’, Tyndall remembered - taken as coded reference to a pregnancy. But, if there were a child in Lettice’s womb, then this one died stillborn and Elizabeth, officially at least, continued in ignorance of the whole story.

  Or did she? As so often, it is hard to be sure of exactly what Elizabeth allowed herself to know. But looking back across this summer of 1578, to the spring when Leicester first committed himself to Lettice, one can (as so often!) trace a version of events different from the traditional story; see successive layers of wilful blindness, layering over the (to Elizabeth) unpalatable truth as effectively as the oyster covers the irritating grain of sand in layers of mother-of-pearl.

  In that April of 1578 - right after his first secret ceremony with Lettice - Leicester came south to London; but to his own Leicester House, rather than to the court. He pleaded illness, perhaps with truth; his doctors did send him to Buxton again that summer. But it may also have been a ploy, at once to provoke Elizabeth’s sympathy and to speak to her privately. As the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, reported at the end of April,

  the Queen had fixed the 28th for my audience with her, but as she was walking in the garden that morning she found a letter which had been thrown into the doorway, which she took and read, and immediately came secretly to the house of the Earl of Leicester, who is ill here. She stayed there until ten o’clock at night, and sent word that she would not see me that day as she was unwell. I have not been able to learn the contents of the letter, and only know that it caused her to go to Leicester’s at once.

  Our chances of discovering the contents of the letter are no better than Mendoza’s were - but it seems at least possible that on that visit, which clearly shocked Elizabeth greatly, Leicester confessed the whole story; whether forced to do so by an anonymous letter from a third party, or by his own contrivance.

  If Leicester did confess his attachment to Lettice, then Elizabeth, in the end, brought herself to take it comparatively calmly. (And if Elizabeth had to any degree accepted Leicester’s attachment to Lettice as a fait accompli, then the pressure on Douglass not to stake her claim would have been that much greater.) Perhaps the nature of her own attachment to him was changing - or perhaps, after all, he told her part but not quite all of the story. She must long have come to a tacit agreement that he would have relationships with other wome
n; can hardly have expected to keep him, like herself, in perpetual celibacy. It was only the public attachment that would provoke her to fury.

  That May, when she went on a ‘little progress’ hunting through the Lea Valley, she stayed at Wanstead; Leicester himself being absent, his place as host was taken by his nephew Philip Sidney, who wrote ‘A Contention between a Forester and a Shepherd for the May-Lady’, for the occasion.

  Like sparkling gems her virtue draws the sight,

  And in her conduct she is always bright.

  When she imparts her thoughts, her words have force

  And sense and wisdom flow in sweet discourse.

  The masquers surprised the Queen walking in the woods of what was still a rural setting; the tale was of a lady asked to choose between her suitors. The generalized, ritualized air of courtship was still being nominally sustained. And maybe Leicester did make only half a confession; told of the attachment, but could not bring himself to admit to anything about a wedding ceremony. For in June, while Leicester was still away, Christopher Hatton, from the court, wrote to his one-time rival that Elizabeth had been dropping odd hints.

  Since Your Lordship’s departure, the Queen is found in continual and great melancholy; the cause thereof I can but guess at, notwithstanding that I bear and suffer the whole brunt of her mislike in generality. She dreameth of a marriage that might seem injurious to her: making myself to be either the man, or the pattern of the matter.