Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  In the new year of the new decade it was noticed that Elizabeth was ‘not showing as much favour as formerly to the Earl of Leicester’. And yet, gradually observers noticed that Elizabeth was beginning to relent once more; the most maddening thing for Leicester’s many opponents must have been that the bond between him and his royal mistress never, ever, quite went away.

  She continued to cast it up to him, whenever she was out of temper, that he had stood in the way of her marriage. ‘Better for me to sell my last lands than to fall into these harsh conditions’, he said. But when the French ambassador blamed Leicester for having raised the question of Alençon’s religion, he found, as so many others had done, that it was never safe for anyone else to attack the Queen’s dear ‘brother’. That was a privilege she guarded jealously to herself.

  Probably, Leicester had ceased to parade his opposition to Alençon - or his affection for Lettice. The tacit deal between him and the Queen would be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (and Lettice would never again be a star of the court in Leicester’s lifetime). Possibly, now that a little water had gone under the bridge, Elizabeth found that his marriage did not make so very much difference to what, after all, had long ceased to be an ardent love story. Possibly, too, now that Alençon was no longer there to charm her with all that youth and potential, the real problems with the match - the national hostility for which Leicester might be seen as the mouthpiece - loomed ever larger in her mind. Perhaps, even, her old aversion to marriage, her turning to Leicester as a shield against it, began to hold sway. She had been glad to play - but not necessarily to pay.

  For his part, Alençon was reluctant to press his suit. (Suspiciously so, maybe.) The two-month deadline laid down in the articles of marriage came and passed without commentary. He seems to have decided that his best technique was to play Elizabeth’s waiting game, and meanwhile to try to endear himself to the English nobility. He wrote to Elizabeth (so Mendoza said) asking that Stubbs should be released from gaol, so that people should see this marriage with a foreign prince would not signal a return to Catholic tyranny. Elizabeth complained to Cecil that she was ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’; but Cecil for one was beginning to suspect that her real objective was just to keep the French on a string for as long as possible, and was appalled at the danger of such a policy. If she did not intend to marry she should undeceive Alençon at once, since ‘those that would trick princes, trick themselves’. Walsingham chimed in to the same tune; if Elizabeth did not soon declare some resolution, then ‘greater dishonour than I dare commit to paper’ would soon be heading her way. (After all, people, so the French ambassador said once, trying to put pressure on her, were convinced she had slept with Alençon already.)

  But Elizabeth continued to pursue the course of procrastination - that hallmark of her policy and personality alike - that for years had worked so well. She wore the frog jewel Alençon had presented to her; she kissed the gloves that he had given her, frequently and publicly. In a stream of letters she lavished Alençon with praise for his ‘constancy’; insisted her people needed more time to come to terms with the idea, but that their souls would be united - eventually. In August 1580 (with a fresh papal bull issued against Elizabeth; with James VI in Scotland assuming his own rule and upsetting a well-established modus vivendi; with Philip of Spain increasing his empire by the annexation of the Portuguese throne), Elizabeth was rattled enough to invite France to send commissioners to discuss the marriage treaty. Dismayingly, they did not instantly respond. Alençon may simply have set his sights on another kingdom - in September he accepted the Netherlands crown - but the Venetian ambassador in Paris heard that he was remembering, too, Elizabeth’s ‘advanced age and repulsive physical nature’. The French court, moreover, was at least as divided as the English one, with brother pitted against brother; at one point there were even rumours Leicester was being bribed by the French king not to help his brother to an English crown!

  In January 1581, to Elizabeth’s relief, came news that the French commissioners were on their way. (Alençon’s Netherlands campaign had run out of money.) But his necessity was her and her subjects’ greatest fear: that England would be drawn into a war of her husband’s, of the sort that had lost them Calais.

  In March 1581 the commissioners arrived, to be greeted by a flurry of fêtes designed to prove England’s (if not Elizabeth’s) desirability. Once again the fantasy of love was resumed - though the game was getting a little threadbare, surely? The commissioners offered Elizabeth a symbolically unwithered posy of flowers plucked, they said, by Alençon’s own hand (‘the hand with the little fingers that I bless a million times’ as she wrote to him, in an effusive thank-you note). She wore a gold tissue gown to the banqueting house especially built in the gardens of Whitehall. (The creation of wood and canvas, painted to resemble stonework outside, and the heavens within, took 375 men to build it and cost £1,744.)

  When she took the French envoys to dine on board the Golden Hind, less than a year back from Drake’s epic circumnavigation of the globe, she dropped one of her gold and purple garters, which the Frenchman begged as a prize for his master. Not then and there - she had nothing else to keep her stocking up, she said. But she sent it round later. The banquet was the finest that had been seen ‘since the time of King Henry’. Drake’s crew danced for the Queen in Red Indian dress; the captain himself told stories of his adventures (for a solid four hours . . .); and one of the French envoys was himself asked to act as the Queen’s proxy and knight Drake on the deck of his ship. No wonder Mendoza (who had signally failed to get either Drake or Elizabeth to disgorge the £80,000 of Spanish treasure the adventurer had liberated along his route) sniped that she seemed more interested in ‘ostentation and details of no moment’ than in the serious conclusion of a marriage treaty.

  May saw an allegorical Triumph in the tilt yard, where the ‘Fortress of Perfect Beauty’, defended by knights who were really the Knollys brothers, was beset by Desire and his foster children, as impersonated by Philip Sidney and his friends. The identity of the participants suggests that this was Leicester’s show. Cannons fired balls of scented powder and toilet water and the foot soldiers threw flowers, while the fortress - the Queen’s unassailable virtue - refused to yield. At the end of a two-day spectacle, Desire’s party sent to the Queen a boy ‘clad in the ash coloured garments of humble submission’. Ironically - or tellingly? - the imagery of Elizabeth’s virginity flowered in these very years when her maiden status was under assault.66

  The frolics and the feasting went on throughout the ambassadors’ long visit. But when it came to the serious negotiations, Elizabeth herself proved unassailable; just like the Fortress of Perfect Beauty. She said she was still concerned about the age gap, about the Catholic question, about being sucked into war against Spain. She said - after all that pageantry - that she wanted a marriage-free treaty, a simple league of alliance between the two countries. In June she apparently changed her mind, telling the commissioners to go ahead and draw up terms for a marriage - but also that Alençon would have to come himself to ratify them. But in one of her letters to the duke, she warned him that, though her soul was ‘wholly dedicated to him’, ‘her body was hers’. Perhaps she was piqued into it by news that, at the beginning of that month, Lettice’s son had been born into the security of legitimacy and with the honorary title of Lord Denbigh. He was named Robert after his father, and his parents doted on the ‘noble Impe’. Leicester may have been out of the Queen’s favour, and pained by it personally as well as politically. But at last he had an heir. In one sense, in the first years of the 1580s, emotionally he must have been in the money.

  Walsingham, meanwhile, when sent back to France to persuade the French of Elizabeth’s sincerity, said that he would count it ‘a great favour’ to be sent to the Tower instead; and if Leicester and Hatton joined him in begging her to end the pretence, who can blame them, really? ‘When Her Majesty is pressed to marry she seemeth to affect a league,’ Walsingham
wrote to Cecil, ‘and when a league is proposed then she liketh better a marriage.’ It was the same old story.

  As October turned to November Alençon arrived back in England, clutching a diamond ring for Elizabeth. (She gave him a jewel-encrusted arquebus, and a key that fitted every room of the palace.) They moved back instantly into the private language of lovers: rumour said she took him a cup of broth in bed each morning. The ever-jealous Mendoza noted that they spent hours together each day. ‘I cannot tell what the devil they do.’ By November he reported that the French ‘look upon marriage as an established fact’, but that the English ‘scoff at it’. When they were alone, he heard, Elizabeth would pledge herself to Alençon ‘as much as any woman could to a man’, but she would not have anything said publicly. Again, it was the pattern familiar long ago to Robert Dudley. But the Valois prince was no traitor’s son on his preferment: was it to placate him that she staged the famous scene of late November? Was it consciously a charade, or an expression of her real inner uncertainty? The French ambassador came to her as she was walking with Alençon in the gallery of Whitehall Palace; Leicester and Walsingham trailing behind. He said the King his master wanted to know the Queen’s intention from her own lips. ‘She replied, “You may write this to the King: that the Duke of Anjou [Alençon] shall be my husband,” and at the same moment she turned to Alençon and kissed him on the mouth, drawing a ring from her own hand and giving it to him as a pledge.’ She then called her ladies and gentlemen, and repeated to them her intention. Word spread like wildfire. The Spanish ambassador put the tale into a despatch. The Venetian envoy in Paris passed on a description given him by a servant of Alençon. The French, of course, rejoiced; but (as Camden put it), Leicester, Hatton and Walsingham ‘fretted as if the Queen, the Realm and religion were now undone’.

  Leicester’s opposition to the French match he had once, long ago, promoted was based on sincere political and religious principles. But it is not implausible also that, just as Elizabeth blew hot and cold on him, so he felt more threatened by the proposal once it began to look more likely - and once it seemed it might involve her heart as well as head.67

  But by the next day Elizabeth had changed her mind - though that is a cold way of stating one of the puzzles that have intrigued her biographers for centuries. If Camden is to be believed, it was her ladies who managed to ‘terrify her from marrying’, ‘wailing and laying terrors before her’, primed by Leicester and Hatton to do so. And so it was after a sleepless night that she sent for Alençon and told him that two more such would see her in her grave and that she could not marry him.

  Over the next few weeks Alençon still hung around the court, perhaps hoping her mind would change yet again (as indeed it did - and back - and back again). But politically, things seemed to have worked out - as they so often did, despite or because of Elizabeth’s baffling machinations. Spain was forced to be more conciliatory, which gave England more security. The parade of marriage had done its job. The French king unwittingly played his part by rejecting the admittedly excessive terms Elizabeth had sent him on the day she promised to marry. And Alençon for his part was something less than heartbroken; muttering about ‘the lightness of women and inconstancy of islanders’, he recovered sufficiently rapidly to convert his demand for Elizabeth into a demand for money.

  A contribution of £60,000 to Alençon’s Netherlands campaign was the agreed price, and Elizabeth thought it cheap: Mendoza heard that in her own bedchamber she danced for joy (also - in another echo of her relationship with Leicester - that she assured Alençon she would be happy for him to stay on in England as her brother, friend and good companion - anything but her husband). But by the end of December Alençon’s continued presence in England, his declaration that he would rather die than leave England a bachelor, looked like an attempt to up the stakes: Leicester said that £200,000 would not be too high a price to get rid of him. (People said that Robert Dudley exploited Elizabeth. But he was not alone by a long way.)

  It was the spring of 1582 before Alençon finally set out towards the south coast, accompanied as far as Canterbury by Elizabeth herself, and across the Channel by Leicester and several other prominent nobles. Gilbert Talbot wrote to his father: ‘The departure was mournful betwixt her Highness and Monsieur, she loth to let him go and he as loth to depart.’ (He also reported that Leicester had taken over with him ‘50 bives [beefs] and 500 muttons for his provision during his abode’.) But it was also said that the earl carried a secret message from the Queen, asking William of Orange to ensure Alençon never returned to England. Leicester stayed in the Netherlands feasting a little too long: Elizabeth began commenting ominously to Hatton that men never knew how fortunate they had been until fortune had left, which caused Hatton to summon Leicester hastily home again. Leicester described the Alençon he had left behind him as stranded like a hulk upon a sandbank - and Elizabeth, having once despatched her froggy wooer to Flushing, began sighing how much she would give to have him swimming in the Thames again.

  16

  ‘In times of distress’ 1582-1584

  THERE IS A PAINTING THAT HANGS AT PENSHURST PLACE IN KENT, described as Elizabeth and Leicester dancing the Volta. It is said to have represented one of the many stops Alençon’s farewell party made along the way. As the two central figures leap, musicians play; and the watching throng of lavishly dressed ladies, gentlemen and court dwarves gaze on admiringly. In fact, it was never likely to have been a simple representation - more like a propaganda piece using a set of established images and designed (since the figure meant to be Alençon is ignoring the central spectacle, and slyly squeezing another woman’s waist) as a final thrust of the Dudley faction against a marriage Leicester so vehemently opposed.

  Its reproduction is placed, dampingly, in the box file labelled ‘Elizabeth I: borderline false’ in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. A note says that a larger version can be found in the Musée de Rennes, labelled ‘the ball of Henri III’. But Penshurst has a copy of an old Country Life article (23 January 1973) arguing that it forms one of a series of French-inspired marriage ball scenes (and that the lecherous figure does indeed represent Alençon, whose short doublet and tights were then characteristic, though not common, wear), albeit that it is likely to be less a straight depiction than a sort of allegory . . . Perhaps it is the youthful vigour of the central pair, bounding athletically - almost aerobically! - straight up into the air, that gives the game away. True, the Queen was always painted as youthful, or at least ageless. But the same consideration was not extended to Robert Dudley.

  As the 1570s edged towards the 1580s - with Elizabeth’s Robert transformed, past all denial, into ‘Benedick, the married man’ - the two seemed to be leading very separate lives in a way they had not done for twenty years. For the first time since Elizabeth came to the throne, we are telling two very different emotional stories. Where Elizabeth is concerned, we have been reading her intimate, revelatory letters to a man other than Robert Dudley. Leicester, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his new wife and baby. Even Camden admitted that - after all those years, after all the rumours, after the two wives who had had little joy of him - when finally committed, he was uxorious, ‘a good husband in excess’.

  It is a lucky chance that among the stray survivals of Leicester’s papers is the ‘disbursement book’ that, albeit patchily, covers his expenditure for these very years. It gives an extraordinary insight into his daily life at this point, just when the records of court life feature him less prominently; and gives also, perhaps, a picture of the man. There are many records of sums lost ‘at play’, but more records of smaller sums given out in tiny acts of charity: 12d ‘to a poor woman of Leighton’, 6d to another poor woman of Knightsbridge, 5s to one of Stepney and 10s for one who had come all the way from Devonshire; £30 to a sick gentleman servant; £10, handed over to Leicester’s chaplain, to be distributed among the London prisons; the odd 20s ‘in small money’ delivered ‘to your lordship own hands’ f
or distribution that same day; 5s given ‘by your lordship’s commandment’ to ‘the blackamoor’. Every such casual gift or payment - as opposed to the regular wages given to the keepers, to the French cook (and, less obviously to our eyes, the French gardener), to ‘Jesper that mends instruments’, to Roger Gillions the bargeman and the laundress his wife - bears that magic, grandeur-affirming phrase ‘by your lordship’s commandment’. Three pounds to the musicians who came to Wanstead from London, more than a guinea to four gardeners who made a ‘knot’ in the garden there; money to those who gravelled its walks or tended its ponds.

  Leicester obviously loved his gardens and his garden produce. Just one six-month period (October 1584 to March 1585) shows a ‘reward’ to ‘young Adams’ for making a dial in the garden at Leicester House; 20s to a gardener who gave pink seeds and ‘philbud’ [filbert] trees; money for transporting a basket of violets to Wanstead; and then again ten days later, money to the servant of William Hunnis (master of the famous child players) for picking more violets for Leicester’s benefit. Later in the year there would be pots of gillyflowers, and hyssop and thyme, and radish seeds brought to him at Nonsuch; oranges and lemons, rosewater and peas. Leicester appears to have paid a retainer to ‘Edyth Eryth a poor woman that follows the Court’ to keep his chamber there supplied with flowers and boughs, and one of the most frequent rewards, as the year wore on, would be for the man who brought artichokes.68 Luck the fool got 6s 8d for presenting Leicester with a basket of apples, the keeper of the gatehouse at Westminster 3s 4d for presenting grapes. When spring came the same keeper offered vine slips; sadly, we don’t know whether or not Leicester’s gardeners grew them successfully.