Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  Was he just an adventurer, spinning a yarn for his own advantage? That has been the most popular assumption, but it is one with which the historian and novelist Paul Doherty would not agree. His credence for Arthur’s claim has been recently expressed in a ‘factional’ book, The Secret Life of Elizabeth I, and a television documentary. (A few years earlier, Robin Maxwell’s novel The Queen’s Bastard supported much the same theory.) Doherty can cite a certain amount of circumstantial evidence for his claim. When ‘BC’ wrote in 1588, he described Arthur as being about twenty-seven years of age. That would probably date his birth to 1561, and the records for Elizabeth’s movements that summer are scanty. It was always her progresses that were considered to have given her the best opportunity for closet action. One contemporary scandal-monger said that she never went on progress but to be delivered of an illegitimate infant . . . Though when you think just how many courtiers went on progress with her, it becomes a little harder to envisage her as out of the public eye.

  In the summer of 1561, one woman said she looked like one come from childbed, and the Spanish ambassador reported her as dropsical and ‘swelling extraordinarily’ - though she had been reported as dropsical and swelling on other occasions in her medical history (from February right through to July, in 1554), and though the ambassador also said she was ‘extremely thin and the colour of a corpse’. Still, it all seems to fit together: the probable date of conception (in winter 1560/61, right after the Amy Dudley scandal, when marriage would have been impossible); the name Arthur, which figures in both the Tudor and the Dudley family tree. And of course, it would explain why the next year, when she thought she was dying, Elizabeth wanted Robert made Lord Protector of the country.

  But the convenience of the timing starts to crumble when one looks at it more closely. In mid-June 1561, when Elizabeth was sharing a barge with that same Spanish ambassador, and joking that he might then and there perform a marriage ceremony, de Quadra clearly noticed nothing unusual about her shape. A cleverly cut disguising costume? Well - maybe. But it was high summer when the gentlewoman in Ipswich said that Elizabeth looked pale (not big!), as one come from childbed, and not until September that de Quadra wrote she had begun to swell; October when the full record of her movements resumes again. (It was that summer, too, when Elizabeth’s kinswoman and putative heir Katherine Grey gave up the attempt to conceal her pregnancy, and was put in the Tower for her pains.)

  All the nitpicking over dates, of course, is only to dodge the central great improbability. Do we really believe that someone as closely watched, as incessantly accompanied, as Elizabeth could have carried a pregnancy to term and given birth with no-one knowing? Do we really believe that her ladies and councillors, her chambermaids and doctors, were in on the act? And that no-one, ever, would have breathed a word about the most saleable secret of the century?

  Doherty and Maxwell cite the case of the maid of honour Anne Vavasour, who in the early 1580s did conceal her condition until she gave birth in the maidens’ chamber. But Anne would not have been watched as Elizabeth was watched - even assuming she were at court throughout her pregnancy. It’s easy to hide when no-one is looking for you. Anne might, moreover, had had some help from fashions: a surviving portrait shows her in the long stomacher and huge wheel-shaped French farthingale that first appeared around 1570, though it did not become common wear for more than another decade.

  The Tudor century had seen impostors as plausible and as widely accepted as Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel. It had seen, too, such madwomen as Anne Burnell, who in this same year of 1587 announced in England that she was the daughter of Philip of Spain and that ‘it might be Queen Mary was her mother’, since she had a birthmark like the coat of arms of England ‘upon the reynes of her back’. There had been other reports that Robert had children by Elizabeth: twice in 1560; in 1563, 1570 and 1575 - this last, by a Spanish ambassador, asserting that the two had a daughter. The putative daughter recurs in other reports - along, by the next century, with ‘a Son bred in the State of Venice’. The daughter (said to be thirteen years old, by the end of 1575) was to be married, so Spanish agents reported, to Katherine Grey’s son; and even the papacy briefly took this one seriously, suggesting war between England and Spain might thus be averted, spurred on thereto by the fact that Elizabeth’s own ambassador was said himself to be leaking the story . . . Needless to say, no daughter ever appeared, but it is interesting to see just what games Elizabeth was prepared to play with her own reputation in the sacred causes of peace and policy.

  The conjecture that Arthur Dudley may have been born during Elizabeth’s dropsical episode of 1561 is not a new one. The Catholic historian Lingard hinted at it in the early nineteenth century. (Others have suggested 1562, when Elizabeth was ill of smallpox; but to deny that diagnosis is to forget the scars she - and Mary Sidney - afterwards bore.) The collection of documents described above is not new either; Englefield’s letters, with Philip’s endorsement and the report of ‘BC’, are all reprinted, for example, in Chamberlin’s book of 1920, The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth. Paul Doherty has, however, unearthed one fascinating new piece of evidence: a Robert Southern living in Enfield, as Arthur described, whose will was indeed witnessed by a John Smyth. Of course, it hardly proves the rest of Arthur’s story about his relation to Southern - especially as Southern’s will lists bequests under the name of his children, and there is no Arthur among them. But the real existence of this obscure individual does at least suggest that the story was not one hundred per cent fabrication. It suggests, you might say, either that his story contained some elements of truth, or that he had been well briefed by somebody.

  What it does not do is make me think that Elizabeth and Robert really did have a baby. In the end, I feel like the White Queen in Alice, asked to believe too many impossible things before breakfast. But you could follow all the facts that Doherty adduces, and yet find yourself on a different pathway.

  Francis Englefield says not once, but twice, that he believes Elizabeth herself is aware of Arthur’s claims. At the end of his first letter, Englefield writes:

  I think it very probable that the revelations that this lad is making everywhere may originate in the queen of England and her Council, and possibly with an object that Arthur himself does not yet understand. Perhaps, if they have determined to do away with the Scottish throne, they may encourage the lad to profess catholicism, and claim to be the queen’s son, in order to discover the minds of other princes as to his pretensions, and the queen may thereupon acknowledge him, or give him such other position as to neighbouring princes may appear favourable. Of perhaps in some other way they may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends.

  That is, he effectively suggests that Arthur, wittingly or not, is on an English mission.

  In his last letter, Englefield adds:

  it is also manifest that he [Arthur] has had much conference with the Earl of Leicester, upon whom he mainly depends for the fulfillment of his hopes. This and other things convince me that the queen of England is not ignorant of his pretensions; although, perhaps, she would be unwilling that they should be thus published to the world.

  Does it sound almost as though Englefield is being convinced by Arthur’s story? If it does, then it is only briefly. He seems to have regarded Arthur (‘this lad’) with a certain sympathy - but not, surely, with the excitement that would greet what he believed to be a real Tudor heir, and living proof of Elizabeth’s immorality. He continues: ‘It is true his claims at present amount to nothing, but . . . it cannot be doubted that France and the English heretics, or some other party, might turn it to their advantage . . .’ Spain above all feared an Anglo-French alliance, and it is for this reason that Arthur cannot be allowed to get away.

  Englefield seems to be suggesting that ‘Arthur Dudley’ is a stooge: not of the Catholics, but of Elizabeth I - and, presumably, a government that included Robert Dudley. But it is equally possible (and again, this is not a new theory, having
been mooted by Hume at the very beginning of the twentieth century) that he was not a stooge, but - as the usually shrewd Venetians always believed - nothing more nor less than a spy. Hume saw him as an operative caught out, presumably on a mission to report on Spain’s preparations for warfare, and forced for self-preservation to disgorge a pre-planned cover story. But it is surely also possible that he had been sent on purpose to deliver this very tale.

  If Englefield were right and ‘Arthur Dudley’ were in any sense an English agent or an English tool it would explain, heaven knows, why the Spanish decided to keep him close. It would explain (even better than his being a complete adventurer) why they never made any publicity capital out of his claim, even at a time when nothing would have been more useful than a universal condemnation of the Protestant Elizabeth’s immorality. It would spare us the problem of trying to swallow the spectacle of an Elizabeth surrounded by ‘Argos eyes’ but yet managing to conceal a pregnancy and a delivery. It would also explain another improbability: the chance that supposedly just threw this man of all men - at this moment of all moments - into the hands of those who might receive his claim most favourably. That chance looks a little less implausible if Arthur were not a half-blood prince shipwrecked on the Spanish shore but a professional looking for an opportunity that could be seized - or staged. (We have, after all, no details of this so-convenient shipwreck.) And it would explain why ‘Arthur Dudley’ (who, if he didn’t make his escape and resume his own identity, would surely have been executed by the Spanish) then fades out of the story.

  The question that might be asked is this: what motive could the English have, in sending a fake heir to the Spanish court? The answer may be: plenty.85 In 1587, Elizabeth and her government were trying everything in order, first, to learn what the Spanish plans were, and second, if possible, to trick, force or tempt Spain into postponing them at least for a year, until England could be ready.

  The spring of 1587 saw Drake’s famous raid on Cadiz, which did indeed set Spanish preparations back a year. In these months Walsingham also wrote a lengthy plan of action for gathering information on the Queen’s foreign enemies. Agents were sent into Spain to pose as disaffected Englishmen. (One of Walsingham’s memos to himself was to get a spy into the very Spanish court.) He was, moreover, at the same time conducting against the Spanish a war of propaganda and morale, feeding them disinformation wherever possible. Mendoza (the former Spanish ambassador now expelled from England) wrote to Philip of reports which, although they ‘have some appearance of probability, they are really hatched by Walsingham’s knavery’. From the Spanish side, Englefield himself had written of a war ‘we must fight with paper and pens’, as he laid out suggestions for an extended edition of Leicester’s Commonwealth.

  Neither King Philip nor the daughter to whom he planned to pass his claim showed any sign of wanting to occupy the English throne themselves. Philip’s time in England as Mary’s husband had shown him the difficulty; and one clause in the treaty of July 1587 whereby the papacy gave financial backing to the Armada specifically allowed Philip to bestow the crown on whomsoever he wished. He wanted the restoration of the Catholic faith and an England under Spanish, rather than French, influence. A puppet pretender might have done him nicely, especially one as compliant as ‘Arthur Dudley’. In the summer of 1587, at exactly this time, Elizabeth invited her young kinswoman and putative heir Arbella Stuart to court, suggesting that she might be married to a Spanish prince, and Anglo-Spanish relations secured that way. Or - so Arthur in his statement declared - ‘they’ might instead choose to marry her to Arthur Dudley.

  One of Walsingham’s chief tools in his disinformation campaign was Sir Edward Stafford. Whether he were really a traitor, or playing his own deep game, the English ambassador had long been passing information to the Spanish, taking money also from the Duke of Guise to show him England’s diplomatic correspondence. It may well be he who features as ‘the new friend’ in Philip and Mendoza’s letters. But Walsingham was well aware of whatever Stafford was doing, and used it as a conduit to feed the Spanish erroneous intelligence. (One of the letters of the Armada years shows Mendoza catching Stafford out in inaccuracy, and suggesting his news should be treated with some caution.) It was of course Stafford to whom ‘Arthur Dudley’ had made his initial abortive approach in France.

  It had long been a tactic of Walsingham’s to insert agents provocateurs into the prisons where Catholics were being held, or into the Catholic seminary at Douai. A pretender could trick the Spanish into showing him their hand (remember that offer of writing a book to ‘whatever end’ they considered desirable?). If they were persuaded even to accept him as real, then the English government could expose him at any convenient moment (which never came, since the Spanish didn’t take the fly), dealing a devastating blow to their credibility. It sounds convoluted, but no more than other schemes Walsingham carried out in these years, and not just against the Scots queen Mary. That same year, 1587, it was probably he - desperate to jolt Elizabeth into action against the Catholic powers - who sent William Stafford (Edward’s brother) on a fake attempt to assassinate the Queen, simply in order to convince her of her danger.86

  Is ‘BC”s letter a problem here? A slight one, maybe. It is a puzzling document. ‘BC’ starts out on this subject by telling Cecil the old news of Arthur’s arrival and claim, adding that if only he himself had his ‘alphabet’ or cypher with him he would say more touching Arthur’s ‘lewd speeches’. None the less he assures Cecil that ‘if I may I will do [Arthur] pleasure’. Gain his confidence - or help preserve his cover? ‘BC’ believes he may soon be called on by the Spanish to help establish or disprove Arthur’s identity. His purposes are unclear; but unless he is just taking caution to extremes, it does sound as if he is unaware that Dudley may also be in Walsingham’s pay. But again, this is far from conclusive evidence: the tangled chronicles of these espionage years show countless examples of agents operating in tandem, with a firewall between them; of agents set to spy on (double) agents. (Walsingham had one of his agents spying on Sir Edward Stafford in Paris, and another reporting back to him on Leicester’s activities in the Netherlands.)

  To bring the Arthur Dudley mystery back to the most basic terms: we do not know that Elizabeth slept with any man, still less that she ever had a baby. We do know that she and those around her used agents provocateurs; that the English were using black propaganda against the Spanish at this time. But this remains only the most speculative theory - one I raise, indeed, only as counterweight to that other claim, that Arthur really was the child of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley.

  In the Afterword, I suggested that perhaps the simple fact of sex itself would not have changed everything about their relationship. The knowledge of so potentially explosive a secret as an unacknowledged son might, however, be a different story. It was, after all, a secret Robert could have held over Elizabeth’s head, since she was more vulnerable here than he. I tried to fit such knowledge into the dynamics of this relationship, as our explorations have revealed them, but this time the exercise failed. I no longer saw the relationship ring true.

  That’s the final reason why, at the end of the day, I don’t believe the claims of ‘Arthur Dudley’. In the world of fact, not fiction, I still believe that the ‘Virgin Queen’ was more than just mythology.

  Afterword: Some fictional treatments

  WE ALL MAKE ELIZABETHS AFTER THE IMAGE OF OUR OWN AGE, AND find evidence for them, too. In the long history of writings on the Elizabethan era, our sense of the importance of the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert Dudley has ebbed and flowed, depending on how successive generations have chosen to see the Queen herself.

  Leicester’s near-contemporaries were on the whole hostile to his memory. No-one loves a lost favourite. By the later seventeenth century, however, Elizabeth’s whole era was already beginning to look like a golden age, by contrast with the foibles of the Stuart monarchy. Indeed, Leicester and his queen alike could even be seen as epi
tomes of lost virtue. In the so-called ‘Armada pack’ of playing cards (a protest against the threat of James II’s Catholicism), Leicester’s portrait, clearly labelled, appeared as the King of Hearts. Besides being Elizabeth’s lost love he had, after all, been a Protestant hero. It was, you might say, one of the first fictional versions of their story.

  The latter half of the eighteenth century found a certain peripheral use for the relationship. The cult of female sensibility could accommodate Elizabeth in the character of victim, forced by a cruel fate to throw her chance of love away. The age found it harder to deal with her exercise of power - witness the juvenile History of Jane Austen, who infinitely preferred the romantic Queen of Scots. Schiller’s 1800 play Mary Stuart (recently revived in the West End) had Leicester, a weak if well-meaning man tormented by his own inadequacies, in thrall to a dominant Elizabeth, but yearning for an emotionally powerful Mary.

  The Victorians - while relishing the brave and beruffed ruler as an icon of empire - were troubled by the whole question of Elizabeth’s sexuality (so different from the home life of their own dear queen!). In so far as she had chosen to present herself as an eternal virgin, she was unwomanly; if on the other hand she were in any way sexual without the marriage tie . . . ‘when the character of a lady is at issue, to doubt is to condemn’, as Fraser’s Magazine put it memorably. (Elizabeth, wrote Jacob Abbott in 1849, in what he clearly considered the ultimate put-down, ‘would not have been a desirable wife for any of us’.) The influence of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth in 1821 was slow to die away - Kenilworth, which conflates the stories of Amy Dudley’s death, of the 1575 visit and of Leicester’s subsequent secret marriage. The novel casts him as a murderer who repents too late; though Elizabeth, more forgivingly, is seen as the ruler who had already decided to choose her sovereignty over her suitor when the assassin crept up on Amy. Scott had himself disclaimed any historical veracity - but as the Reverend Canon J. E. Jackson pointed out more than half a century later in his influential article for The Wiltshire Archeological and Natural History Magazine, for every person who read the scholarly refutations, there were many more who knew only the novel, and more again who had seen the subsequent melodrama, complete with hissing villains, at the Covent Garden Theatre. Scott’s book had even (so the canon reported with incredulity) got an early version of a film adaptation - been ‘repeated at the Polytechnic, in Dissolving views!’