by John Guy
The next year, very possibly with Leicester’s connivance, Lady Sheffield cut her losses and also married, without plucking up the courage to tell Elizabeth. She chose Sir Edward Stafford, an up-and-coming diplomat who was then about to leave for Paris to conduct negotiations with King Henry III on the queen’s behalf. Turning twenty-seven, Stafford had first been noticed when he had befriended the Duke of Anjou, who briefly stayed with him during his first visit to England. His mother, Dorothy, was Elizabeth’s distant kinswoman and Bedchamber servant. She had first served her in Mary Tudor’s reign before fleeing to Geneva, then returned to join the queen’s Bedchamber women by 1562. For thirty years or more after that she was one of three or four whom the queen particularly wished to sleep close by her on a pallet bed.40
Lettice’s secret marriage transformed her into the queen’s arch-enemy almost overnight, although despite the waves of jealous passion and revulsion that engulfed Elizabeth when she first heard of it, she chose initially to turn a blind eye. She hated her ‘Sweet Robin’, her ‘Eyes’, for his callous act of betrayal with every fibre of her body, but for all that she still loved him. So long as he behaved with circumspection, so long as his wife lived quietly with her father in the country, well away from Court, she felt she could deny what had happened. There was in any case very little she could do about it besides mourn losing him to another woman.41
In November 1579, her attitude had changed dramatically when Jean de Simier, the Duke of Anjou’s chamberlain, whom Elizabeth had nicknamed ‘Monkey’, came to London to discuss a possible Anglo-French marriage treaty.42 Leicester had opposed Anjou’s suit in the Privy Council, where he had sat alongside Burghley since 1562 and wielded considerable influence on the shaping of foreign policy, and Simier, keen to blacken his name, had drip-fed Elizabeth some of the more salacious details of his amours.43 What most infuriated her was Simier’s disclosure, based on rumours circulating in Paris, that Leicester had gone through some sort of marriage ceremony with Sheffield and so was a bigamist. In February 1580, she summoned Sir Edward Stafford to an urgent interview and grilled him pruriently about his wife’s sexual history, falsely claiming to have firm proof that she had been secretly married to Leicester. Offering to bribe him when her bullying failed, she tried to persuade him to compel his wife to testify in court about her marital status. When this failed, she turned spitefully on Leicester and demanded early repayment of some of his loans and debts, forcing him to sell her valuable estates at knock-down prices and to mortgage others, notably Wanstead, his fairy-tale country retreat in Essex.44
The following year, Lettice was pregnant. The child, named Robert after his father, was to die at Wanstead shortly after his third birthday, but his arrival on the scene, coupled with Leicester’s decision in the summer of 1583 to throw discretion aside and move his wife into Leicester House, his London town house by Temple Bar beside the Strand, meant that Elizabeth could no longer deny the truth of their marriage. He and Lettice lived together openly there: they even invited Castelnau to dinner. His Catholic enemies put it about that the queen had banned Lettice from coming within five miles of the Court.45 She was said to be seething at a report that her favourite was thinking of engineering a marriage between Dorothy, the younger of his newly acquired stepdaughters, and the young and impressionable James VI of Scotland. (When told of his intention, she retorted that she would never allow James to marry ‘the daughter of such a she-wolf’.)46 For several weeks, Leicester was in deep disgrace; but the queen’s mood softened again and before long it seemed he was back in her favour.47 But the next year, she was as incensed as ever, prompting him to lament, ‘God must only help it with Her Majesty.’48
• • •
In 1585, then, no one knew for certain whether Elizabeth would agree to send Leicester to the Netherlands to save the cause of the Dutch rebels. The uncertainty prevailed, since everyone remembered how she had refused to allow him to leave her side in the winter of 1562–3 when, against her better judgement, she had briefly succumbed to his and Burghley’s pressure to send a force to occupy the French port of Le Havre to aid the Huguenots. On that occasion, she gave the command to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Robert’s elder brother. Robert had been forced to write her a grovelling letter of apology to excuse his absence from Court merely to greet his badly wounded brother on his return.49
Once the main treaty with the Dutch representatives was signed in August, Leicester came to think that, this time, he would secure the command as the queen’s Lieutenant-General. Supremely confident, he began mustering troops from among his own tenants in the West Midlands and North Wales, then decided to take Lettice on an extended summer holiday to Kenilworth. It was a foolish mistake. Not only was the castle a gift from Elizabeth, its restoration had been financed with her money and he had entertained her there several times, most awesomely in 1575, when he had put on marine pageants and a breathtaking firework display in her honour. From 1566 onwards, he had been the impresario of her large-scale summer progresses, and the two had regularly ridden out and hunted together. Elizabeth’s memories of these happy days were vivid.50 But in the summer of 1585, it was Lettice, the queen’s rival, who was offered six weeks of pleasure and relaxation with the man she loved, while Elizabeth was forced to kick her heels at Wimbledon, and Beddington in Surrey. Walsingham had accepted an invitation to join Leicester and his wife at Kenilworth, but on second thoughts he wisely cancelled, giving as his excuse the bad weather.51
Burghley and Walsingham both backed Leicester’s claim to the Lieutenancy, and each wrote to ask him that summer if he was still willing to serve. Then, shortly before his commission was sealed, the queen revoked it. In dismay, Leicester appealed to Walsingham. Writing in bed after injuring his leg in a riding accident, he complained that ‘she doth take every occasion by my marriage to withdraw any good from me.’ ‘I pray God,’ he scrawled almost illegibly at the side of this letter after running out of paper, ‘Her Majesty be resolute to help the States.’52
Elizabeth yielded in late September and named him Lieutenant, but then backtracked again. She loved him and might never see him again; she despised him for betraying her so utterly and wanted to deny him the one thing he wanted. Her inner turmoil triggered a run of migraine headaches. Leicester cautioned Walsingham in a scribbled note that the ‘often disease’ from which she had suffered so badly as a teenager had returned, ‘and this last night worst of all’. She was ‘very desirous to stay me’, he confided. ‘She used very pitiful words to me of her fear she shall not live and would not have me from her.’ This time Leicester was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, not knowing which way she would jump if he were to say anything. ‘And therefore,’ he reported back to Walsingham, ‘I would not say much for any matter but did comfort her as much as I could. Only I did let her know how far I had gone in preparation. I do think for all this, if she be well tonight, she will let me go, for she would not have me speak of it to the contrary to anybody.’ No one doubted that the decision would be hers alone.53
At last, Leicester’s commission was published and he embarked for Vlissingen in Zeeland to take up his command. He left Harwich on 9 December. The weather was fair and by the next morning he was within sight of Ostend. Sailing north, he disembarked at Vlissingen, the gateway to Holland, at around two o’clock in the afternoon.
On top of a personal staff of seventy-five and their hundred or so servants, he had raised at his own expense some four hundred infantry and six hundred and fifty cavalry as the nucleus of his forces. Despite allowing him to go, Elizabeth could never bring herself to provide him with troops or funds in excess of those she had agreed contractually with the Dutch. She had promised to supply some 1,000 cavalry and 6,400 infantry and an annual sum of £125,800 to maintain them. But at the height of his campaign, Leicester had some eleven to twelve thousand men at his disposal, including volunteers and those in Dutch service. He raised hefty loans to pay for all of these extra soldiers, th
e largest of which, from a consortium of City of London merchants, was secured by a crippling mortgage on lands in North Wales that were already mortgaged to the queen. These funds were quickly exhausted as Leicester unwisely undertook what was tantamount to a royal progress, travelling in great splendour as he made his way towards Holland. He established a rival ‘Court’ at The Hague and later at Utrecht, complete with feasting, dancing and entertainments of regal magnificence. To pay for this, he was obliged to lay out £1,000 a month from his own purse.54
• • •
On 14 January 1586, the new Lieutenant-General made a fatal miscalculation. Boxed into a corner by the Dutch Council of State and worried about the disarray into which much of the government of the northern provinces had fallen since William of Orange’s assassination, he decided to accept the Governor-Generalship, the supreme executive power, and a position which clearly implied that Elizabeth had agreed to become sovereign of the Netherlands. He took this step with full knowledge that she had expressly forbidden it both in writing and in person. He felt he had no choice if he hoped to hold the States together, sending William Davison to London from Holland to explain his reasons. Davison was delayed by adverse winds, but he was in any case too closely linked to the cause of the Dutch Calvinists for his advocacy to carry much weight.55
Elizabeth’s reaction was savage. Jealous, still hurt by his marriage and with her pride deeply wounded, she was determined to be frustrated no longer by the unwillingness of her advisers to obey her. She would be a monarch first and a woman second. Reasons of state would triumph over personal loyalties. On 10 February, she sent Sir Thomas Heneage, the smooth-tongued gentleman of the Privy Chamber who had so annoyed Burghley when he had once presumed to offer Elizabeth his advice, to present her defiant favourite with a cuttingly worded rebuke.56 ‘How contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you’, her letter began, ‘you shall by this bearer understand.’
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 honour . . . And therefore, our express pleasure and commandment is that – all delays and excuses laid apart – you do presently, upon the duty of your allegiance, obey and fulfil whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.57
The tone and even the words of this last sentence were exactly the same as those Elizabeth used to address the lowest and most undeserving of offenders. Leicester found the letter hugely insulting. Worse, Heneage was armed with written instructions ordering him to renounce the Governorship. Heneage was, said the queen, to inform Leicester ‘how highly upon just cause we are offended with his last late acceptation of the government of those provinces . . . which we do repute to be a very great and strange contempt least looked for at his hands, being as he is a creature of our own’.58
Part of the explanation for Elizabeth’s volcanic reaction may lie in rumours swirling around in London and later proved to be false that Lettice was planning to join her husband ‘with such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches . . . that there should be such a court of ladies as would far surpass Her Majesty’s Court here’. Elizabeth was said to have uttered a barrage of ‘great oaths’ – her favourite expletives were ‘God’s death!’ and ‘God alive!’ – insisting that ‘she would have no more courts under her obeisance but her own.’59 Later, she acknowledged her mistake, grudgingly conceding that Leicester had meant well. But still she was furious about the Governorship.60
Months of fighting followed, during which Leicester was repeatedly let down by his Dutch allies. Fearing an English takeover, the already quarrelsome Dutch leaders were particularly upset when Leicester ordered restrictions on their trade and imposed martial law.61 His clashes with his own generals were a further distraction, depleting the morale of his troops. His character scarcely helped: prone to outbursts of self-pity, he suffered from the classic vice of Elizabethan politicians – a tendency to personalize disputes. His enemies both in the Netherlands and in London made capital out of these failings, fatally undermining his position with the queen.
• • •
In the spring of 1586, Elizabeth offered an olive branch to Parma behind Leicester’s back, using a variety of intermediaries.62 Andreas de Loo, a wealthy Flemish merchant based in London and a passionate art collector who owned several important paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger, shuttled between London and Antwerp, putting out peace feelers. Meanwhile, an Italian silk merchant, Agostino Grafiña, travelled to Parma’s camp and talked his way in by presenting the Duke with two fine geldings and two greyhounds. Parma was unimpressed: Elizabeth’s proposal that he persuade Philip to put the clock back largely to where it had been before the Dutch revolt began was utterly unrealistic. So was her demand that Spain should indemnify the English merchants who had suffered losses through Philip’s trade embargo.63
When reports of her overtures to Parma leaked out over the summer months, Elizabeth issued a strong denial. All was due, she said disingenuously, to ‘a great error’ made ‘in our name, without our knowledge’. Keen to safeguard her reputation as the saviour of the Dutch Protestants even as she tried to wriggle out of the role, she declared that she was obliged to assist them ‘for no better reason than the defence of our own State, which is inexorably linked with the security of our ancient neighbours in the Low Countries’.64 The denial was dictated in fluent Italian, which, along with French, Latin and some rudimentary Greek, she had first learned in childhood and adolescence. She had always had a special love of Italian: her very first surviving autograph letter is one written in Italian to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, when she was ten.65
Leicester struggled to know what to make of these overtures to Parma. One thing was clear: his relationship with Elizabeth did not function well at a distance. Even Heneage took pity on him, reassuring him that the queen would never make a treaty with Spain without the consent of the Dutch States. By saying this, Heneage was exceeding his brief and Elizabeth soon rounded on him, too. ‘Jesus,’ she expostulated when word was reported back to her, ‘what availeth wit when it fails the owner at greatest need?’ ‘Do that you are bidden’, she snarled, ‘and leave your considerations for your own affairs . . . Think you I will be bound by your speech to make no peace for mine own matters without your consent? . . . I am utterly at squares with this childish dealing.’66
And then, as failure and bankruptcy stared Leicester in the face and he hardly knew which way to turn, Elizabeth’s love for him seemed to rekindle and she wrote him the most intensely personal letter of her whole life. Tearing off the mask of royalty, calling him ‘Rob’ and addressing him in the first person singular rather than the royal ‘we’, she spoke of ‘a midsummer moon’ taking possession of her:
Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month, but you must needs take things as they come in my head though order be left behind me. When I remember your request to have a discreet and honest man that may carry my mind and see how all goes there, I have chosen this bearer, whom you know and have made good trial of. I have fraught him full of my conceits of those country matters, and imparted what way I mind to take and what is fit for you to use. I am sure you can credit him and so I will be short with these few notes.
She even came close to an apology for her stinginess: ‘It frets me not a little that the poor soldier that hourly ventures life should want their due, that well deserve rather reward.’ For all its colloquialisms and apparent warmth, however, the letter was starkly non-committal. It was also relatively brief:
Now will I end that do imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell ôô [i.e. ‘Eyes’ – his nickname], though ever I pray God
bless you from all harm and save you from all foes, with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and cares.67
On reading her letter, Leicester came to think that, despite his debts and tribulations, all yet might end well. He was too weak to offer open battle to Parma but believed he could liberate some of the newly fortified Spanish garrison towns and so free up the river traffic along the Scheldt towards the Rhine. He was roundly disabused of this notion after laying siege to Zutphen, one of Spain’s most important military garrisons in Gelderland. The move forced Parma to march north to relieve it. Tipped off by a Spanish defector that the Duke would send in a supply convoy early on Thursday, 22 September, Leicester planned to ambush it at dawn. The morning was dull, with a thick autumn fog. When the English attacked, Leicester’s stepson, the young Robert Devereux, Lettice’s son by her first marriage, won his spurs in a triumphant light-cavalry charge. But then things went disastrously awry. As the mist suddenly cleared, some three hundred English infantry found themselves yards away from three thousand of Parma’s crack troops. They were hopelessly outnumbered and, for all Leicester’s bravado, his forces failed to prevent the convoy from relieving the town. Casualties were lighter than might have been expected, but towards the end of the fighting, Leicester suffered a personal blow when his favourite nephew, the renowned poet and courtier Philip Sidney, was hit by a musket shot. The bullet entered the left thigh ‘three fingers above the knee’ after one horse died beneath him and he was mounting another. Carried in Leicester’s own barge along the River Ijssel to Arnhem, Sidney appeared to be convalescing well, but the bullet lay too deep to be removed. He developed gangrene and died a month after the battle.68
