The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

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  In retrospect it seems clear that Elizabeth never seriously considered marrying Archduke Charles, but throughout most of 1559 she succeeded in giving the appearance of being serious about him, and so in distressing the French. Cecil, Parry, the young duke of Norfolk—not to mention many others on the council—were well disposed toward the Hapsburg marriage, though as time went on their desire for it was fed more and more by their growing apprehension about Dudley.

  "Not a man in the realm can suffer the idea of his being king," wrote De Quadra in November, and new rumors of attempts against the lives of Dudley and Elizabeth lent weight to his words. In October stories of a plot to poison the queen and her horse master at a banquet given by Arundel had the queen "much alarmed." A second plot was disclosed a few weeks afterward, and the subject of Dudley's murder was "all common talk and threat" among the courtiers. 16

  Dudley was "very vigilant and suspicious," Elizabeth uneasy, unable to brazen out her danger. Her advisers, normally divided by bitter personal rivalries, now appeared to be uniting in their determination to ensure Dudley's ruin by any means necessary. And the queen, her energies drawn in many directions by the rhythms and necessities of government affairs, now had an added anxiety. One of her chamber staff, a servant named Drury, was, along with his brother, suspected of being part of the plotting. There were assassins, or accomplices of assassins, among her personal servants. How could she, or the man she loved, be safe?

  Meanwhile the scandal brewing around the presumed lovers was becoming so ugly and so corrosive that Elizabeth's chances to marry abroad were imperiled. Her good repute was crumbling under the massive weight of accusation. "I have heard great things of a sort that cannot be written about and you will understand what they must be by that," De Quadra reiterated. Elizabeth was a Medea ruled entirely by her lusts, a woman of neither "brains nor conscience," a "passionate ill-advised woman" with "a hundred thousand devils in her body." 17 The slander came from all sides; so many voices were raised in frank, unambiguous accusation, so very few in the queen's defense.

  And in the last analysis, as her advisers fully realized, what mattered was not the sin—if sin there was—but the appearance of sin. Never mind the facts: before long Elizabeth would be so cheapened by the presumptions alone that no man would risk staining his own honor by marrying her. It was this obvious, cruel truth that she refused to face—unless, as some hinted darkly, she was so diabolically lecherous that she wanted to destroy all opportunity for marriage, so that she would be free to enjoy not only Dudley but many lovers.

  Emperor Ferdinand was becoming protective of his son the archduke. He asked his ambassador in England, Baron von Breuner, to discover as best he could "on what foundation the somewhat discreditable rumors that are being spread from certain quarters touching the honor of the queen, are based." The calumnies could no longer be dismissed as groundless gossip, as they came from "so many sides" and "always had the same tenor." Von Breuner, no doubt terrified that if he confirmed the scandal he would forever discredit himself as a diplomat—for it would mean admitting that for some months he had been working to betroth the archduke to a dishonorable woman—wrote back that the love between Elizabeth and Dudley was no more than an innocent romance. But Emperor Ferdinand was far from being convinced. He allowed the negotiations to proceed, but would not allow his son to visit England. And unless he came to England, Elizabeth declared, she could not possibly even consider marrying him. 18

  By the spring of 1560 the alarm over Dudley approached panic when he himself announced that "if he lived another year he would be in a very different position from now." It was a ringing challenge, a defiant boast that he would soon have Elizabeth entirely in his power. 19 Queen Elizabeth and King Robert: it was only a question of time.

  But what would he do about his wife? She lived obscurely in the country, never coming to court and never seeing anyone who did. She was ill, some said, but others denied it. She was despondent—as who in her situation would not be?—and seemed at times to hint at taking her own life. That she felt abandoned by her husband, humiliated by the stories all Europe knew, fearful of the impetuous, attractive queen may be surmised. Did she feel that she was in danger as well?

  As Elizabeth and Dudley spent a blissfully companionable summer together, enjoying the long warm afternoons, riding and hunting together in the forests far from the accusing tongues of the court, the common conviction grew adamant. The lovers must be plotting to remove the one obstacle to their happiness. By divorce, or poison, or by the hand of a murderer they meant surely to do away with Dudley's wife.

  O Besse the knave is growne to proude take him downe take him downe Such twiges must needes be bound.

  A

  my Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, her neck broken, on the eighth of September, 1560. Robert Dudley was now a widower. He could marry the queen.

  On the day of Amy's death Elizabeth went hunting, as she had been doing for some days past, and Dudley was almost certainly with her. Only the day before he had described in a letter how well she felt—the fresh air and exercise invigorated her—and how she had "become a great huntress," following the chase "from morning till night." She was mad for reckless speed, the horse master wrote. Her own geldings, though she "spared not to try them as fast as they can go," were too tame for her; she wanted "strong, good gallopers" from Ireland, hobbies barely broken in and with the wildness of the open country about them. 1

  She was thoroughly enjoying her summer. Only a few weeks earlier she had been joking and flirting with seventy-five-year-old Paulet, marquess of Winchester, when she stayed at his house at Basing. His hospitality was so munificent, she said, that it made her "bemoan him to be so old." If only he were a younger man, she swore, she could "find in her heart to have him to her husband before any man in England." Here in the country there were fewer censorious stares and accusing tongues; even Cecil, who strove to be the voice of reason and conscience, had been absent much of the time

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  in Scotland, and when he returned he found that Dudley was working effectively to undermine his influence with his mistress.

  Elizabeth was returning from the hunt, in fact, when she remarked to the Spanish ambassador that "Robert's wife was dead or nearly so," and asked him not to make the knowledge public.

  De Quadra was stupefied. There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Dudley, very likely with Elizabeth's complicity, had murdered his wife, either personally or through hired assassins. The circumstances could hardly have been more suspicious. Lady Dudley had been alone in the house when she fell to her death; the servants had conveniently been sent away. Tales of her ill health were an obvious smokescreen, spread by Dudley or his agents to disguise the murder. After all, Cecil had sworn to De Quadra only a few days earlier that Amy Dudley was in truth "quite well, and would take very good care they did not poison her." 2 Evidently she had eluded the poison, and her husband had had to use more violent means to rid himself of her.

  And what of Elizabeth's role? Dudley would not risk taking such drastic action without her approval; the matter touched her far too closely. And she hardly seemed distraught at the news. Beyond her announcement to De Quadra, she had told the courtiers of Amy Dudley's death by saying, in Italian, that "she had broken her neck." Nothing more. Elizabeth was frequently offhanded, even high-handed, in her treatment of weighty matters, but this seemed unusually flippant and heartless even for her. Having outraged her entire kingdom during the months of her intimacy with Dudley, she had at last taken the irrevocable, criminal step of condoning murder. This scandal she could never live down.

  Shocking as the event was, De Quadra was not entirely unprepared for it. Cecil, beside himself with anxiety over Elizabeth's irresponsibility and in despair about his own position, had only recently spoken to the ambassador with uncharacteristic openness.

  Elizabeth, he said, was abandoning the business of government entirely, and turning everyt
hing over to her lover—a disastrous course, given his selfish greed and inexperience, not to mention the passionate hatred he inspired from "all the principal people in the kingdom." 3 She meant to marry Dudley in time, Cecil said, and with this catastrophe in view he was thinking very seriously of retiring. His pleas that the queen "act aright, live peacefully and marry" went unheeded; her mind was made up, and the "ruin of the realm" was sure to follow.

  Then Cecil told De Quadra a curious thing. Elizabeth, he said, "wished to do as her father did." Certainly she had been following in the old king's footsteps so far, giving rise to gossip, deliberately provoking scandal, indulg-

  ing her personal desires at the expense of her reputation. All this and more Henry VIII had done when he found himself at the center of a romantic triangle, with an unwanted wife, Katherine of Aragon, and a much desired mistress, Anne Boleyn.

  But in a larger sense what King Henry had done was to assert his personal sovereignty in the sexual realm as ruthlessly as he asserted it in the political realm. The women he became entangled with, whether as wives or lovers, emerged much the worse from the encounter, while the king remained unshackled and dominant. By proclaiming her preference for the single life, by refusing the suitors who pursued her, by her seeming indifference to the urgent issue of the succession, and most of all, by her shameless liaison with Dudley, Elizabeth was achieving the same results her father had achieved: sovereign mastery of her sexual life, at the expense of others.

  The secretary stopped far short of the ultimate conclusion, that the queen would continue to "do as her father did" to the end of her reign. That she might not marry at all was inconceivable to him; therefore she must intend to marry Dudley. De Quadra, who had watched her closely for over a year and had learned to be wary of both her capacity for deception and her inner incertainties, made a more cautious assessment. "Certainly this business is most shamdful and scandalous," he wrote of the Amy Dudley affair, "and withal I am not sure whether she will marry the man at once or even if she will marry at all, as I do not think she has her mind sufficiently fixed." 4

  But this was an exceptionally sophisticated judgment. Most people, in court and out, leaped to the simplest and most sordid conclusion, that the queen had allowed her lust for Dudley and her jealousy of his wife to mislead her into joining her lover in murder.

  Even as they put on mourning for Amy Dudley and came to pay their formal respects to her bereaved husband the courtiers cursed him as a murderer and struggled to keep their violent emotions in check. Affronted beyond measure by Dudley's presumptuous crime, insulted by his preeminence with the queen, nonetheless their fear forced them to treat him with outward respect, for they thought it likely he would become king before long. And they were furious with themselves for giving in to their fear, instead of standing up to him and accusing him to his face, or, better, coming up behind him with a sword and running him through.

  In the country at large the uproar was immediate and strident. "The cry is that they do not want any more women rulers, and this woman may find herself and her favorite in prison any morning." The guilty death of Amy Dudley confirmed every other scandalous tale that had ever been told about Elizabeth and Dudley, including recent rumors that she had borne his

  child. People recalled every detail of her questionable past, the accounts of her indiscretions with Thomas Seymour, the stigma she bore as the child of Anne Boleyn, her less than regal upbringing as Henry VIII's bastard daughter—and maybe not his daughter at all, despite her resemblance to him.

  Incriminating stories surfaced. The queen had been returning from a banquet at Dudley's London house, one of Arundel's servants said, and had fallen into conversation with the torchbearers who were lighting her way back to the palace. She had talked freely of Dudley, saying that she would make him "the best that ever was of his name." His father had been a duke; to better that rank, Dudley would have to be king. 5

  Before Amy Dudley had been dead ten days Francis Knollys, Elizabeth's second cousin, warned of the "grievous and dangerous suspicion and muttering" throughout the Warwickshire countryside. There must be a formal investigation—an "earnest searching and trying out of the truth," with due punishment to follow if it was merited. Knollys knew well that he was recommending, at the very least, close scrutiny of Dudley's activities, and that they might not bear scrutiny. Yet the alternative to Dudley's incrimination was rebellion, and in view of that he was emboldened "faithfully, reverently and lovingly" to write as he did. 6

  And what of the object of all the suspicion and vituperation? Dudley, presumed villain and absolute master of Elizabeth, was before long sent away from court, to his house at Kew. There he stayed, frustrated, anxious, more than a little bewildered, while she coped with the tumult.

  The letter Dudley wrote to Cecil—the man whose security in office he had only recently shaken—betrays little of the arrogance or mastery ascribed to him. He thanked Cecil for a visit he had made, and asked him "what he thought best for him to do." He begged the secretary to voice any suspicions he had, so that Dudley could lay bare what he knew and be better advised how to act. The letter lacked clarity, though it had the half-poetic, half-rhetorical wording and cadence of its highly educated (if not highly intelligent) author. "I am sorry so sudden a chance shalt breed me so great a change," Dudley lamented elegantly. He "sued to be at liberty, out of so great bondage," and found himself "too far, too far from the place he was bound to be"—at court, by the side of his beleaguered lady the queen.

  "Methinks I am here all this while, as it were in a dream," he mused, lost in reverie. But he gathered his senses sufficiently to remind Cecil not to forget the "humble sacrifice" he had promised him, and to plead that, though he was out of sight, he might remain strongly in mind—an absolute certainty, given the angry mood of the court. 7

  Elizabeth may have sent Dudley to Kew to protect him. Norfolk, "chief of Lord Robert's enemies," was so incensed by the latest example of Dudley's "presumption" that he was beside himself with rage. As England's only duke he saw himself as defender of the privileges of the nobility against arrogant parvenus of all sorts, and the horse master who aspired to be king —by any means necessary—had now given him intolerable provocation. Norfolk had been overheard to warn that if Dudley "did not abandon his present pretensions" he would not die in his bed. And Cecil, for one, feared that the murderous temper the duke (and many others) displayed would prove to be a danger not only to Dudley, but to the queen.

  With Dudley away from court Cecil resumed his former preeminence, still shaking his head over Elizabeth's wrong-headedness but no longer in such despair about his own future role as her chief councilor. The queen's safety was paramount, and he was attending to it, drawing up "Certain Cautions for the Queen's Apparel & Diet" meant to protect her from the wrath and treachery of her alienated courtiers.

  More care should be taken, the secretary noted, to preserve the orderly guarding of the privy chamber, with an usher and the prescribed complement of gentlemen and grooms at all times. Too often the back doors of the "chamberers' chambers"—where the queen's gentlewomen were quartered—were left open and unattended, and little notice was taken of the stream of "laundresses, tailors, wardrobers, and such" that came and went through them. Anyone could slip in and attack the queen. Or more fearful still: anyone could introduce into her chambers one of those refined and subtle agents of death that were the hallmark of the age.

  Poisons, slow-acting or immediate, ingested by mouth or through the skin; they came in a hundred forms, and had to be guarded against in a hundred ways. From now on, Cecil cautioned, no meat or other food prepared outside the royal kitchens should be allowed into the privy chamber, without "assured knowledge" of its origins. Perfumed gloves or sleeves or other garments were to be kept away from Elizabeth, unless their hazardous odors were "corrected by some other fume." And even the royal underwear—"all manner of things that shall touch any part of her majesty's body bare"—had to be "circumspectly looked to" i
n future. No unauthorized person was to be allowed near it, lest some harmful substance be hidden in the folds of the linen to menace the queen's person. But all precautions were imperfect, and as an extra safeguard Cecil strongly advised that Elizabeth should take some medicinal preservative "against plague and poison," just in case some evil reached her unawares. 8

  Amy Dudley's funeral was very grand. The queen did not attend it but many of the black-robed courtiers did, whispering to one another that the

  mourners and attendants and ceremonial accouterments must have cost Dudley two thousand pounds or more. He paid it in order to ease his conscience, they may have added—but (officially at least) only to atone for adultery, not murder. The inquiry Knollys had begged for had been held, and the final pronouncement was that Amy Dudley's death had been accidental.

  Of course, no one believed it; not in 1560, and not for centuries afterward. Now, however, the verdict seems plausible. Twentieth-century medical studies have reconstructed the incident to show that Amy Dudley, a victim of breast cancer, probably suffered a spontaneous fracture of the spine just before she plunged down the stairway to her death. Why such a gravely ill woman was left alone that day, why she was out of bed, above all why her husband was not with her are mysteries beyond the reach of medicine, then or now.