Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  He had the devil’s own work to make Elizabeth let him go. A dozen times she bade him farewell, and then summoned him back again, saying she could not do without him. One Tuesday in September he was writing to Walsingham of how desirous she was to stay his journey; of how she was doubtful of herself ‘by reason of her oft-disease taking her of late, and this night worst of all’; of how ‘she used very pitiful words’, her ‘fear that she shall not live, and would not have me from her’; of how he ‘did comfort her as well as I could’ . . . and of how Walsingham should send word to Lettice that there was no way her husband could get away from the court immediately. He was - he wrote to Walsingham again, as the delays continued - ‘weary of life and all’.

  ‘Her Majesty I see will make trial of me how I love her and what will discourage me from her service, but resolved I am that no worldly respect shall draw me back from my faithful discharge of my duty towards her, though she shall show to hate me, as it goeth very near, for I find no love or favour at all.’ Elizabeth, for her part, when her claims of illness did not move him, accused Leicester of seeking more his ‘own glory than her true service’. Finally, he got away. But on the very eve of sailing, he knew that he and his men were being sent without the backing they needed. As he wrote to Walsingham:

  I am sorry her Majesty doth deal in this sort, content to overthrow so willingly her own cause. Look to it, for by the Lord I will bear no more so miserable burdens; for if I have no money to pay the soldiers, let them come away, or what else. I will not starve them or stay them. There was never gentleman or general so sent out as I am. My cause is the Lord’s and the Queen’s. If the Queen fail I trust in the Lord, and on him I see I am wholly to depend.

  In the Netherlands they took it very kindly that the Queen was sending someone so close to her: a personage, as she herself wrote to them, ‘whom she did make more accompt of than any of her subjects’. Philip Sidney told Leicester that his coming was awaited like that of ‘the Messiah’. In Middleburg he was given the lodgings which had been deemed worthy of Alençon, and a firework display with the like of which the Valois prince had been honoured. Everyone - so Leicester wrote home ecstatically - was crying Elizabeth’s name ‘as if she had been in Cheapside’. Delft staged for him ‘the greatest shows that ever I saw’. He made his torchlit entrance into The Hague, where he was to keep ‘his standing court’, under arches made like the Dudleys’ ragged staff, and past galleries staffed with maidens who made obeisance as he passed. Town gates were hung with his arms, as well as those of the Queen and of Prince William’s son, Maurice, and banners twinned him with Elizabeth as saviour of the people:

  Blessed be the Virgin Queen, that sent this Good,

  And blessed be he that comes to save our blood.

  Poems were hung up in streets decked with Tudor roses. ‘Never was there people I think in that jollity that these be.’ Elizabeth, he wrote, in a rare moment of blindness as to her character, ‘would think a whole subsidy well spent’ if she could only see a few of these towns as he had, and know they held for England.

  The States had repeatedly offered Elizabeth sovereignty, after the assassination of their own prince, William the Silent. Now, in the spring of 1586, they offered a proxy version to Leicester. It was the very official recognition Elizabeth in England had always denied him. Perhaps he was simply tempted - and fell: ‘tickled’, Camden said, ‘with such flatteries, as if he had been seated in the highest and amplest degree of honour; he began to assume royal and Kingly thoughts of Majesty’. (Alençon, as a jealous Leicester would have been well aware, had gone further in accepting an elected sovereignty before abdicating in 1583. But then, Elizabeth had not taken that kindly, reacting almost hysterically to the idea that the putative marriage between them might have meant involvement in the Netherlands war for her country: ‘shall it ever be found true that Queen Elizabeth hath solemnized the perpetual harm of England under the glorious title of marriage with Francis, heir of France? No, no, it shall never be.’)

  If Leicester did simply fall, he did so (he said) only after a week of negotiations in which he himself was careful to take no part, spending the time in fasting, prayer and even, it was said, psalm-singing. He presented himself, even in his letter to Cecil, as being ‘far unprovided’ to answer the States’ request. But in fact it is at least possible that some of the council in England, himself among them, had long decided that this would be the only way to establish ‘some well settled government’ in the fractious States - and that the only way to handle Elizabeth would be to present her with a fait accompli. By contrast, Mary, Queen of Scots took a different view: that it was Leicester who, by over-reaching himself, had fallen into a trap: ‘and there be instruments that help to push forward this subject to his ruin’.

  He had every reason to claim he needed a fairly free hand, if he were to stand any chance of doing the job successfully. From the start, he said that if his hands were to be tied, he ‘had as lief be dead’. As the States seemed happy to give him, in their own words, ‘absolute power and authority’, so he seemed eager to do his part in opening England’s purse-strings, writing in strong terms to Cecil, after his arrival, that any slackening of English support would be ‘a sin and a shame’. But for Leicester, in many ways, this was also the enactment of a fantasy.

  An allegorical entertainment played out before him embodied the city of Leiden as a female figure assaulted by Spanish soldiers, before leaping off stage to take refuge under Leicester’s cloak. He led her off to his lodgings, delightedly; at last, a woman who wanted to be rescued by the protective male! One of the first spectacles that greeted him represented a symbolic marriage between himself and Elizabeth: their personal emblems joined along with the inscription ‘Quod Deus coniunxit homo non separet’. Received as a prince - named as a prince in legal documents - he made no bones about accepting the title of governor general, rather than merely captain general. When Leicester told Cecil about his access of honours, he wrote optimistically: ‘It is done for the best, and if so her Majesty accepts of it, all will be to the best.’

  But Davison, the royal secretary Leicester sent, rather belatedly, to inform Elizabeth he had accepted the ‘absolute governorship’, was delayed by bad weather and arrived only after she heard of it from another source. She railed at Davison ‘in most bitter and hard terms’; and the letter she sent to Leicester himself was coruscating in its fury.

  How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to be used by you . . . We could never have imagined (had we not seen it fall out in experience) that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us, above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honor . . . And therefore our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently of your allegiance obey and fulfill whatever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.

  The words ‘of your allegiance’ signal that this was regarded as possibly a treasonable offence, and what Leicester was commanded to do was to relinquish his new honour, publicly. ‘At the least I think she would never have so condemned any other man before she heard him,’ wrote Leicester painfully. ‘For my faithful, true and loving heart to her and my country, I have undone myself.’

  To the States General Elizabeth wrote that she found it ‘very strange’ they would offer such a position to her subject without consulting her, ‘as though she wanted judgement to accept or refuse what was competent’. Besides the personal affront, of course, she feared the fact of an English governor general would make it appear that England had accepted sovereignty.

  It was not Leicester who was at odds with public opinion here. He was backed up by most of the privy council, including even Cecil. At the very time Leicester was sailing off to fight, Elizabeth had secretly been opening negotiations for peace with Parma, and Cecil’s sympathies in this lay Elizabeth’s way.
But all her ministers, even the least hawk-like, accepted that at least an initial show of strength was necessary in order to establish a good negotiating position. Cecil knew (and, later, wrote to Walsingham) that only disaster could come from this blatantly half-hearted attempt to prosecute a war. As he left England, Leicester had begged Cecil (‘seeing that mine and other men’s poor lives are adventured for her [Majesty’s] sake’) to ‘have me thus far only in your care that ... I be not made a metamorphosis, that I shall not know what to do’. Now Cecil told Leicester that ‘I, for my own part, judge this action both honourable and profitable,’ reassuring the distant earl he had told the Queen that if she continued her hostility, he himself would wish to be ‘discharged of the place I held’. But Elizabeth ‘would not endure to hear speech in defence’ of her old favourite. Cecil found her attitude, as he said several times, to be ‘both perilous and absurd’.

  Elizabeth had probably been unrealistic in expecting that a commander in a foreign country, given the slowness of communications, could do anything other than act autonomously. But to her, surely, it was just as if the consort she had feared to take were indeed sidelining her and sweeping England towards a war of his own making . . . that old, bad, bogey.

  Thomas Heneage - once Leicester’s rival - was designated the Queen’s emissary, to tell Leicester he had to relinquish his office, on the spot where he had accepted it in a formal ceremony. Heneage protested, which brought him his own slashing rebuke from the Queen. ‘Jesu! What availeth wit when it fails the owner at greatest need? Do that you are bidden and leave your considerations to your own affairs . . . I am assured of your dutiful thought but I am utterly at squares with this childish dealing.’ The States General too protested, and Elizabeth was finally persuaded that thus to reveal the divisions in her ranks could only be of comfort to the enemy. So Leicester was allowed to keep an emasculated title; but his prestige had been seriously damaged (as had that of the Queen, shown up as having been kept in the dark for weeks about a matter of such sensitivity). What had annoyed her most may have been that Leicester was preparing to act politically, rather than as merely her obedient military arm - though his instructions had ordered him to ‘use all good means to redress the confused government’ of the Low Countries.

  But worst of all may have been the rumour that Lettice had been planning to join her husband, ‘with such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches, litters and side-saddles as her Majesty had none such, and that there should be a court of ladies as should far pass her Majesty’s court here’. She ‘would have no more courts under her obeisance than her own’, Elizabeth declared furiously; and in early March Ambrose was warning his brother that the Queen’s anger seemed to grow rather than diminish; that she seemed set on a course to make England the slave of Spain - ‘and that which passeth all the rest, the true religion of Jesus Christ to be taken from us. She giveth out great threatening words against you,’ Ambrose said.

  Make the best assurance you can for yourself. Trust not her oath, for that her malice is great and unquenchable . . . Have great care for yourself, I mean for your safety, and if she will needs revoke you, to the overthrowing of the cause, if I were you, if I could not be assured there, I would go to the furthest part of Christendom rather than ever come into England again.

  Incredible though such a thought might be, it sounds as if Ambrose Dudley at least was remembering the Tudors’ record of abruptly turning on their ministers: Wolsey and Cromwell; Empson and Dudley . . .

  Leicester was curiously slow to write to Elizabeth himself. Whether he was simply ‘extremely overtoiled with business’, as he complained, or whether there was some deeper resentment at work, it was a failure with which his adherents reproached him anxiously. Davison urged him to use ‘more diligence entertaining her with your wise letters and messages, your slackness wherein hitherto appears to have bred a great part of this unkindness’. Finally he wrote, and the old charm worked: at the end of March, Ralegh (to whom Leicester had written asking for the services of some foot-soldiers) was reassuring the earl that ‘the queen is in very good terms with you, and, thanks be to God, well pacified, and you are again her “sweet Robin” ’. In April the Queen’s next letter to Leicester was haughty, but conciliatory.

  Right trusty and well-beloved cousin and councillor, we greet you well. It is always thought in the opinion of the world a hard bargain when both parties are leasoned [slandered], and so doth fall out the case between us two . . .

  We are persuaded that you that have so long known us cannot think that ever we could have been drawn to have taken so hard a course herein, had we not been provoked by an extraordinary cause. But for that your grieved and wounded mind hath more need of comfort than reproof . . . whosoever professeth to love you best74 taketh not more comfort of your welldoing or discomfort of your evildoing than ourself.

  Elizabeth herself was feeling battered by the pressure of events. (That May, Walsingham wrote to Leicester that he found her ‘daily more and more unapt to embrace any matter of weight’.) Perhaps she could face a permanent estrangement no more than could he. At the St George’s Day banquet, Leicester - protesting that he was ‘not ceremonious for reputation’ - was careful to have an empty chair of state laid for the absent queen, while he himself took a stool.

  Leicester continued to be widely addressed as ‘Excellency’; to be allegorized, in the entertainments that marked his progresses, as ‘a second Arthur’. But a great price had been paid; not only in terms of his relationship with the Queen, but, more seriously, in terms of the fate of the English soldiery. The task of the Netherlands was one to which Leicester had always been ill-suited. Maybe it was an impossible task. But it was certainly no job for this ill, ageing and irascible Leicester, smarting from the wound Elizabeth had dealt his dignity. His letters to his fellow councillors were full of reproaches for what he saw as their lack of support: Elizabeth’s men tended to scatter like scolded schoolboys, faced by the full display of her authority. But Cecil for one wrote to him with a personal sympathy. Leicester would find the Queen’s latest letters to contain ‘as much comfort from her as you have recent discomfort’ - but that earlier anger ‘I know hath deeply wounded your heart and these [letters] cannot suddenly sink so low as the wound is but your lordship must add to this your own fortitude of mind’.

  Many of the troops he had were disaffected ones; he would have needed the tact he was lacking to deal not only with his allies, but with his own army. A lot of his puritan friends had joined up - as well as a lot of the far from puritanical Thames watermen! - but too many of the men were ragged conscripts who started the active campaign already owed a backlog of pay. ‘There is much due to them,’ he wrote in March 1586. ‘They cannot get a penny; their credit is spent; they perish for want of victuals and clothing in great numbers.’ He would write of them, with feeling, that he had ‘no soldier yet able to buy himself pair of hose, and it is too too great shame to see how they go, and it kills their hearts to show themselves among men’. This was a problem to which he often returned: ‘I assure you it will fret me to death ere long to see my soldiers in this case and cannot help them.’ Elizabeth might grumble (so Leicester himself had heard, with pain) that there ‘lacked a Northumberland in his place’ - that he could not do the job his father did - but amid all the stories of his huffiness and hauteur, his quarrels with the experienced deputy whose advice should have saved him, one’s heart warms to Leicester as he writes again: ‘pity to see them’. When the ‘poor starved wretches’ deserted, he could not bring himself to execute too many of those recaptured: he understood too well why they had run away.

  There were problems with corruption: money handed out to captains who were supposed to pay their men, but instead hung on to the loot and left the soldiers in penury. Leicester himself has been accused of peculation, but it looks more like a lack of financial competence all round, in which he was far from the only offender. The treasurer sent out to assist him was summoned back to acco
unt for his mistakes, but could never be charged, since no-one could understand his paperwork. There were endless disputes with the States General over who was to pay what; and over far more besides. ‘I never did deal with such heady people as these States are,’ he would complain. There was dissent among his own commanders: ‘I will be master whilst I remain here, will they nill they.’ While he protested that he would not be overbearded by ‘churls and tinkers’, the Queen was lamenting that she had ever let herself in for this war, calling it ‘a sieve, that spends as it receives to little purpose’.

  As early as that same March, Leicester was writing pathetically to Walsingham of how he longed to be at his own ‘poor cottage’ again. In May he wrote from Arnhem: ‘I am weary, indeed I am weary, Mr. Secretary, but neither of pains nor travel [travail?]; my ill hap that can please her majesty no better hath quite discouraged me.’ By August, writing to Walsingham again, he was thoroughly demoralized: ‘if I have wanted wit, the fault is hers and yours among you for the choice, and that would not better assist me’. ‘Would to God I were rid of this place!’, he said bitterly.

  And yet, when the summer campaign got finally under way, the army under Leicester’s command did not at first do so badly; well enough, indeed, if you consider he was fighting on behalf of a queen who actually expected him to avoid too punishing a conflict with the enemy. Parma certainly wrote of the toughness of those ragged English troops. For much of 1586, the Spanish general had to battle for every small victory, while the long descriptions Leicester wrote of his first battles show the sense of vindication he felt in acting like a soldier at last.