78 Later, too, came the epitaph of one Thomas Digges, who in 1601 wrote that ‘when the Earl of Leicester lived, it went for current, that all Papists were Traitors, in action, of affection. He was no sooner dead, But . . . Puritans were trounced, and traduced as troublers of the state.’
79 It is a reasonable speculation that Shakespeare (who worked with several former ‘Leicester’s Men’) based the character of Hamlet in part on Lettice’s son Essex - whether or not we take Shakespeare (as do the authors of a new book) actually to have been the diplomat Neville, with whose family the Dudleys were at enmity. The said authors point out that this leaves Leicester as Claudius: the second husband who killed the first. His advocates might resent that characterization of Robert Dudley - but Lettice as Gertrude, with her ‘fever in the blood’, would work out nicely!
80 Leicester had been barely cold when James had been writing south to Elizabeth his hopes that Robert Sidney, then on a mission to Scotland, should not suffer from having been absent when the ‘unfortunate and displeasant’ event of his uncle’s death occurred - that ‘in anything concerning this gentleman fallen out by the death of his uncle, ye will have a favorable consideration of him for my sake’.
81 A cryptic letter from Robert Dudley to his father’s one-time secretary Arthur Atye, quoted by Adlard from Lansdowne MSS, 89, refers to ‘an instrument my father made, of this last reputed marriage, under the hands and seals and oathes of them that were at it’ - and yet, this putative document itself seems to have a dubious history, to have been the subject of some controversy. No wonder Atye, whatever he was able to reply to the younger Robert Dudley, ‘refused my father to be any actor in this matter’.
82 Over the subsequent centuries, only Leicester’s gatehouse, converted into a private dwelling, stood aloof from the decay; today English Heritage, which runs the property, has completed a considerable restoration project.
83 Sadly, one of his surviving sons, Carlo, instead took to brigandry. A granddaughter of Carlo’s would marry the Duke of Shrewsbury - descendant of Leicester’s friend - but her brother, accompanying her to London, was hanged at Tyburn for stabbing his manservant to death; he asked to be hung separately from the other convicts in his cart, lest they should touch him in their plebeian death throes.
84 Standen was a member of Lord Darnley’s household in 1565; soon after that (it has been suggested), Darnley was murdered by the English.
85 I am assuming that if ‘Arthur Dudley’ was an agent, he was not Elizabeth’s real son. It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that a baby born with Elizabeth’s bloodline just happened to have also the qualities that make a successful agent - but there might surely be better uses for a real Arthur Dudley, and Elizabeth never squandered her resources. In an age before genetic testing, the most general resemblance - height, dark or red hair - would qualify an experienced, and expendable, professional for the role.
86 Doherty hints that Englefield, who was still allowed to collect his English revenues while in Spain, may himself have been a double agent; and of course there is a chance that Edward Stafford - who similarly never suffered any penalties for his treachery - was actually playing a triple, rather than a double, game. But perhaps this is taking paranoia a step too far.
87 In the mid-1980s, copies of Neale’s 1930s biography of Elizabeth circulated among Tory MPs. Among the marked passages were some felt particularly appropriate to the favour Margaret Thatcher showed towards, for example, Cecil Parkinson and Jeffrey Archer. Which presumably means that Blackadder II, first screened in 1985, should rank as political satire . . .
Elizabeth and Leicester Page 47
