It may have been now that Leicester wrote a tetchy letter to Christopher Hatton. He had been sent for to the council, but as it was clearly a general summons, rather than a particular, he hopes they will
excuse me that I forbear to come, being, as I wrote to you this morning, troubled and grieved both in heart and mind. I am not unwilling, God knows, to serve her Majesty wherein I may, to the uttermost of my life, but most unfit at this time to make repair to that place, where so many eyes are witnesses of my open and great disgraces delivered from her Majesty’s mouth.
Then again, Mendoza reported that it was Leicester who had chosen to retire to Wanstead, angry that Alençon’s passport had been issued against his wishes, and that the Queen went to visit him there, secretly, and ‘remained two days because he feigned illness’. One would give a great deal to know of what they spoke, so privately.
In August 1579, at last, Alençon arrived on the long-discussed visit - so while Leicester (with whatever qualms and regrets) could divide his time between everyday business and his newly public bride, Elizabeth could console herself with the attentions of a new wooer. This was the first time she had met one of her foreign suitors (unless you count Philip of Spain); the first time she had been able to play the game of royal courtship on a level of near-equality.
From the start, the visit was conducted on a note of amorous high fantasy. Alençon arrived at Greenwich early in the morning of 17 August, after travelling through the night, and had to be dissuaded (Simier said) from going instantly to Elizabeth to kiss her hand. Instead, so Simier told Elizabeth in a note, he had forced his master to go to bed: ‘Would to God it was by your side.’ When they met, later that day, Elizabeth declared that she had ‘never in my life seen a creature more agreeable to me’ - and though she would in any event have had to say something polite, though she would have found it hard to reject him on personal grounds having encouraged him to break with protocol and come on approval, she probably was relieved by what she saw. Though much had been made in reports of the pockmarks on his face, and of his lack of height, the Venetian ambassador in Paris once gave of him a cool but not wholly unattractive appraisal: ‘his stature small but well set, his hair black and curling naturally’.
The French ambassador was of course delighted, reporting to Catherine de Medici that Elizabeth had only ‘with difficulty been able to entertain the Duke, being captivated, overcome with love’, that she ‘had never found a man whose nature and actions suited her better’. The Spanish ambassador Mendoza reported much the same, albeit less happily. Soon Alençon was Elizabeth’s ‘Frog’, the recipient of her presents and her promises of eternal love. This parade of instant affection, however, did not please everybody. Alençon’s visit was shrouded in a thin veil of official secrecy - he was not supposed to be known to be there at all - and while the frisson of stolen meetings lent zest to Elizabeth’s games, Mendoza reported that Elizabeth’s councillors were giving the court a wide berth, aware that almost anything they did, in these odd circumstances, was bound to annoy Elizabeth in some way. ‘It is said that if she marries before consulting her people, she may repent it,’ Mendoza warned. ‘Leicester is much put out, and all the councillors are disgusted except Sussex. A close friend of Leicester tells me he is cursing the French, and is greatly incensed against Sussex.’
Elizabeth seemed determined to flaunt the fact that another man admired her. When she arranged for Alençon secretly to watch a court ball, she not only showed off every dance step she knew, but waved excitedly towards his hiding place behind a tapestry. Describe it coldly, and it sounds as if Elizabeth were making a fool of herself - or, alternatively, playing the ongoing political game of passionate promise with scant regard for her personal dignity. (The more so, of course, since there were rumours not only about his brother’s but about Alençon’s own sexuality.)
Two days later Leicester, in what was described as ‘great grief’, arranged an interview with Elizabeth, from which he emerged clearly disturbed. That evening the opponents of the match held a council of war, as a result of which Leicester withdrew from the court, as did his sister Mary Sidney. Their chief hope now was that public opinion would put an end to Alençon’s pretensions; the public opinion that had once stood in his, Leicester’s, way. But circumstances came to their aid. Just ten days after his arrival, the death of a friend summoned Alençon back to France; and it may have been now that Elizabeth wrote a poem, ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, which reflects a genuine confusion of emotion.
I grieve, yet dare not show my discontent;
I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I dote, but dare not what I meant;
I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate.
I am, and am not, freeze, and yet I burn,
Since from myself my other self I turn.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lives by me, does what I have done.
Oh, let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant.
It sounds almost like a younger Elizabeth speaking - one with an adult ruler’s responsibilities, true, but beset by the fears and conflicts she must have felt in the dangerous days under her brother Edward and her sister Mary. It sounds almost as though something - the imminence of the menopause? The loss of Robert? - had thrown her back into girlish uncertainty. Elizabeth, now in the second half of her forties, may well have found that it was one thing to dismiss the idea of marriage and children when her mind could be changed another day; another to give a final negative when the last chance was slipping away.
Perhaps she was persuading herself into love, but she wrote to Alençon now with all the intimacy she might have written to Leicester. ‘My dearest, I give you now a fair mirror to see there very clearly the foolishness of my understanding . . .’ ‘I muse as do those on night watch, dreaming, not having slept well.’ ‘See where the love that I bear you carries me - to act against my nature.’ At one point in their relationship, she compared herself to a beaten dog he could not turn away. Perhaps it is significant that she did so only after she had sent him away - the familiar pattern of push-pull. But all the same, would she ever have abased herself to a subject in this manner? (Although, as they might have done with Leicester, her letters turn in the end to a note of reproach. ‘It seems to me that in commemorating the history of the dealings between us, it pleases you to tell me at length of the hazards, losses, and machinations that you have endured for my sake . . . I think that the king will repute me for such a one as goes a-wooing, which will always be a fine reputation for a woman!’, she would write in 1582.) Not to be outdone, Alençon claimed to say his prayers before her portrait; wrote letters (so the French envoy Castelnau claimed proudly) ‘ardent enough to set fire to water’.
But Cecil was quick to take advantage of her yielding mood while it lasted, and of her insecurities. ‘If your majesty tarry till all the clocks strike and agree of one hour, or tarry till all the oars row the barge, you shall never ’point the time and you may slip the tide that yet patiently tarryeth for you.’ Elizabeth, he flattered her, was a woman of high aspiration. She had found much delight in ‘the morning of your time’; now she sought not just still to reign, but still ‘to reign and rule honored, pleased, and contented; and to have the morning dew all the whole day of your life’. Even putting all considerations of policy aside, would the pleasure of rule seem always as fresh, unless she added a new delight to the mix? Would she still feel the morning dew?
Some, Cecil wrote, found all they needed in ‘a good dinner, a supper, a soft bed, a carpet and a cushion, coin and crowns’. But she was not such a one. ‘Is it mirth, meat, or music, honor, duty, and service done by your servants, that doth satisfy, if there be not some partner of the delight, honor, and pleasure, and that your majesty may love and esteem above the rest? Or lives the man and speaks he English that you highly esteem and l
ove at this day?’ Subtly, he needled her again and again with the fact that (with Leicester married) she now had no such companion, unless it were her Frenchman; and ‘without that person you are alone though a hundred be about’.
Of course, he agreed, there were those who spoke against the marriage - some out of fear for their religious freedom; some from political motives; some ‘for loathness and doubt lest such as have had the highest credit should come down’. The last group would be reassured when they find their leaders ‘take no hurt’ - and ‘doubt not, lady, for when lions make a leap, the bears and other beasts lie down’. It is a clear reference to Robert Dudley.
But the fact is that neither Leicester, nor any other man who mattered in the kingdom, could ignore the question of the French marriage. Indeed, this was an affair on which everyone in the kingdom felt entitled to have their say: the great problem the pair faced, as Elizabeth wrote frankly to her potential betrothed, was how to persuade the public to cede their Virgin Queen to a man who was, after all, the embodiment of England’s traditional enemy. Though once they had longed for her to marry, the English had come to identify their unmarried ruler with peace and prosperity. The popular mood was vehemently against the French match, and voiced by the patriotic and puritan John Stubbs, who in September, with Alençon barely gone and Elizabeth feeling all the pangs of loss, published a pamphlet entitled A Gaping Gulphe wherein England is like to be swallowed.
Stubbs’s motives were of the purest. He spoke as most Englishmen felt, but his words had the unpalatable bluntness of John Bull, uttered with all the appalling honesty of one who felt himself within the national family circle. To the fundamental problem he stated - that the English equated a foreign marriage with subjection, and a Catholic prince with tyranny - he added more personal facts of the sort Elizabeth (at this moment, with the public humiliation of Leicester’s defection still fresh) must have been particularly unwilling to hear.
The Queen was too old to face childbirth for the first time, he wrote: ‘how fearful the expectation of death is to mother and child’; and Alençon’s motive in seeking to marry a woman so much older than himself could not be other than mercenary. This was the very spot on which Elizabeth was most sensitive - as Leicester had had occasion to warn Walsingham recently. Even the paternalism of Stubbs’s tone (England’s dear Elizabeth, he wrote, was being ‘led blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter’) could not but grate on a woman who increasingly felt herself at odds with the majority of her councillors.
While the council, in a flurry of meetings throughout October, debated the very same points Stubbs had raised, Elizabeth turned on the author himself with fury. Stubbs was arrested on a charge of seditious libel; and though the law forbade her to impose the death penalty, what happened was almost as horrible. On Westminster Palace Green, a shocked and silent crowd of spectators saw a cleaver slice through flesh and bone to sever Stubbs’s right hand. With his remaining arm, Stubbs swept off his hat and cried ‘God save the Queen!’ before he fainted. A ballad popular in the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign had figured itself as a love song, with Elizabeth holding out her hand to ‘my dear lover England’. If the relationship between Elizabeth and her people were indeed a marriage, this was perhaps her one striking act of real infidelity.65
But politics as well as personal liking conspired to drive the French marriage negotiations onwards. The Protestant rebels in the Netherlands were by October suffering the full force of the ‘Spanish Fury’ as Parma was carried in a litter through the streets of Maestricht over a rubble of mutilated corpses. The times when Leicester and Elizabeth had joked of their marriage with a Spanish ambassador seemed very far away.
When the Queen asked the council for advice in October, it was Leicester and Hatton who mustered a majority of councillors against the match, Cecil who led the smaller party in favour. Never can Elizabeth have felt more profoundly at odds with her Robert. For years, she had wanted nothing more than permission not to marry. Now, when at last most of her councillors were urging her to refrain, she displayed uncertainty. Perhaps we may wonder what would have happened if her councillors had not opposed Alençon; what part their and the country’s hostility played in allowing her to indulge her domestic fantasy? But certainly she sounded like a woman in love, a woman who did truly want to marry. After that meeting of 7 October, when the council debated from eight in the morning until seven at night, ‘without stirring from the room, having sent the clerks away’, a deputation of four councillors - Cecil and Leicester, Lincoln and Sussex - waited on her to know ‘the inclination of her mind’. Cecil had persuaded them to return an open verdict on the match. It was for the Queen to say.
Elizabeth marvelled that ‘her councillors should think it doubtful whether there could be any more surety for her and her realm than to have her marry and have a child to inherit and continue the line of Henry VIII’. She had anticipated - so she said, in tears - ‘a universal request made for her to proceed in this marriage’. The council returned the next day, duly vowing their commitment to the furtherance of the match, ‘if so it shall please her’. For years, she had hammered home the point that her marriage was a decision for herself alone. Now, when she wanted real support, if not guidance, she must have wondered if she had done so too successfully. She spoke bitter words against those who had opposed the match, and thus incited the tolerant majority. After the conversation, so Mendoza noted, she remained ‘extremely sad’; prohibitively ‘cross and melancholy’. On 10 November, dressed in an embroidered cloud of French fleurs de lis, she told her councillors ‘she had determined to marry’. Who could say whether it was her real purpose, or her hope that useful negotiations should be spun out indefinitely?
On 24 November she agreed that she and Simier (as Alençon’s proxy) should sign the marriage articles - which, however, gave her two months to convince her people to ‘rejoice and approve’ (as she wrote to Alençon, ‘my dearest’). If they failed to do so, the contract would be rendered null and void . . . Was Parliament ever likely to approve? Did Elizabeth really think it would? It seems extremely unlikely. Effectively, Leicester and his party were being used as her stalking horse again; though this time without their complicity. At the end of November Simier returned to France, taking some splendid presents with him and sending in return a series of ardent love letters tied up in ribbon of pink silk.
That same month Douglass Sheffield also left for Paris, as bride to Sir Edward Stafford, who accompanied Simier to lay the English position before the French king. (Stafford’s father, though a prominent Catholic, had long been Leicester’s friend; and Leicester assured Sir Edward, on his departure, that he would take care of his interests, though Sir Edward came to feel that the earl reneged on his promise when Douglass was once safely out of the way.) Elizabeth took the opportunity to launch an inquiry into the question of whether Douglass and Leicester had not, as was rumoured, secretly married. If it were found that they had, then the triumphant - and now pregnant - Lettice was a bigamist. The Earl of Sussex (kinsman to Douglass, and no friend of Leicester) was appointed to look into the matter; but all questions foundered on the rock of Douglass’s inability or unwillingness to stake her claim. Stafford later recorded that Elizabeth told him ‘to importune his wife whether there had been a contract between her and the Earl of Leicester, which if it were, then she would have him make good her honour with a marriage, or rot in the Tower’. Douglass ‘answered with great vows, grief and passion that she had trusted the said Earl too much to have anything to show to constrain him to marry her’. She said she had ‘told her husband the truth’ - that she was free - ‘when she married him’.
Probably Douglass knew that, once she had served her turn, Elizabeth was unlikely to treat her with any more favour than she showed Lettice, should she be once securely established as the woman who had stolen the Queen’s Robin away. She would, moreover, have incurred the wrath of Leicester and the powerful Knollys clan . . . better, surely, to escape away to Paris and be
happy. And if she had no documentary evidence to produce, far safer not to launch what was likely to prove an abortive inquiry, which might leave her stranded indefinitely in the limbo of the unsuccessful claimant.
But being thwarted in this attempt at revenge is unlikely to have made Elizabeth feel more warmly towards Leicester. Throughout the early autumn the pressure of events had forced them to work together, and the presence of the French - an urge to keep friction under wraps in the family - had perhaps put a lid on any open display of hostility. But in November Leicester wrote a painful letter to Cecil, excusing himself from coming to court.
I perceive by my brother of Warwick your lordship hath found the like bitterness in her majesty towards me that others (too many) have acquainted me lately withal. I must confess it grieveth me not a little, having so faithfully, carefully and chargefully served her Majesty these twenty years as I have done. Your lordship is a witness I trust that in all her services I have been a direct servant unto her, her state and crown, that I have not more sought my own particular profit than her honour.
Cecil, besides himself, has been ‘best acquainted’ with all their dealings: ‘I have ere now broken my very heart with you . . .’ Leicester had carried himself, he said, ‘almost more than a bonds-man many a year together, so long as one drop of comfort was left of any hope . . . methinks it is more than hard to take such an occasion to bear so great displeasure for. But the old proverb sayeth, they that will beat a dog will want no weapon.’
Elizabeth and Leicester Page 31
