Royal Marriage Secrets

by John Ashdown-Hill

  Despite her extremely dubious legitimacy as a princess and as a queen, Elizabeth had many suitors.1 These included foreign princes – notably Philip II of Spain (widowed husband of her dead half-sister, Queen Mary) and Monsieur (Hercule-François of France, Duke of Anjou and Alençon, the youngest son of Henri II of France and Catherine de Medici). Philip II sent an official proposal of marriage to Elizabeth after her accession. Of course, she knew him, for he had been in England as the husband of her half-sister, Mary I. Indeed Philip had sought to help Elizabeth when Mary suspected her of disloyalty. From Elizabeth’s point of view, however Philip’s previous relationship with Mary was against him, as, of course, was the fact that he was a Catholic.2

  As for Monsieur,3 the queen’s last foreign suitor, he courted her in person and despite the difference in their ages, he seems to have established a genuinely affectionate relationship with Queen Elizabeth. When the Duke finally left her to return to the European mainland, the queen is said to have penned the following poem to voice her regret at his departure:

  On Monsieur’s Departure 4

  I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

  I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

  I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

  I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

  I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

  Since from myself another self I turned.

  My care is like my shadow in the sun,

  Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

  Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.

  His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

  No means I find to rid him from my breast,

  Till by the end of things it be supprest.

  Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

  For I am soft and made of melting snow;

  Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.

  Let me or float or sink, be high or low.

  Or let me live with some more sweet content,

  Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

  Elizabeth only officially ended her engagement to Anjou in 1583, after the fiasco of his attempt to take the city of Antwerp.5 However, the match had been opposed by notable members of the queen’s council, including the Earl of Leicester, who warned the queen of the dangers of childbearing at her age. Only William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and the Earl of Sussex had given this proposed marriage their full and consistent support.

  At various periods of her life Elizabeth also had suitors in her own kingdom, and it has been suggested that she may have contracted a secret marriage with one of them. The idea of such a secret marriage is by no means impossible. There were several secret marriages in the sixteenth-century royal family! Both her father’s sisters – Margaret, Queen of Scotland and Mary, Queen of France – contracted secret marriages, as did Elizabeth I’s royal cousin, Lady Catherine Grey (younger sister of Jane, the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’).

  Elizabeth’s first domestic suitor (during her youth, before she became queen) was Admiral Sir Thomas Seymour. Later, another serious contender was Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester. Seymour would probably have liked to marry the young Elizabeth, for several reasons. In the end, however, he settled instead for a secret marriage with her widowed stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr. The secret marriage of Thomas with the queen dowager brings him firmly into the context of our present study, irrespective of his aspirations to marry the future Queen Elizabeth I.

  Thomas Seymour was undoubtedly ambitious and he seems to have had his eyes fixed on some kind of royal bride. He had previously made an offer for the hand of Anne of Cleves, whose marriage with his brother-in-law, Henry VIII, had been annulled on 9 July 1540. When this proposal was rejected, Thomas decided to try Catherine Parr instead:

  He courted Katharine in secret and married her with indecent haste in May 1547 – just four months after Henry had died. Their marriage was without permission from his brother [the Lord Protector] or the Privy Council – it would not have been granted as theoretically Katharine could have been pregnant by King Henry.6

  By the end of 1547 Catherine Parr was pregnant – by Thomas Seymour – and reportedly very happy at the prospect of having a child. Meanwhile, however, her husband was romping about in a very inappropriate manner with their stepdaughter, Elizabeth. He is said to have visited the young girl in bed, and on one occasion, to have ripped her gown. Thomas’s behaviour became the subject of gossip and scandal and in 1548 Elizabeth was forced to leave her stepmother’s household. Based on the evidence of subsequent correspondence, the personal relationship between the two women seems to have remained good, but apparently neither of them was happy with the behaviour of the admiral, and Catherine Parr may have felt some concern for her stepdaughter, whom she wished to protect. On 30 August the queen dowager gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Mary. But as a result of the birth, Catherine contracted puerperal fever, and she died five days later.

  Subsequently Seymour’s conduct was investigated by the government, and both he and Elizabeth were arrested. She stoutly maintained that her honour had never been compromised and that she was still a virgin, and nothing to the contrary was ever proved against her. But as for Thomas Seymour, he was executed by his brother, for high treason, on 10 March 1549. If Elizabeth had not already been given sufficient cause to fear marriage by the conduct of her father in respect of her mother and her mother’s cousin, Catherine Howard, then the fate of Thomas Seymour may well have been enough to convince her that marriage could be an extremely dangerous adventure. Meanwhile, however serious Thomas Seymour’s interest in the young Elizabeth may have been, it is difficult to take him seriously as a prospective husband, since he was married to Elizabeth’s stepmother for the entire period of his close relationship with the young girl.

  As for Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert Dudley, this was particularly serious and long-lasting, and there is ample contemporary evidence of a genuine mutual attachment between them. Indeed, the interesting marital history of Robert Dudley contains three secret marriage allegations – one of his alleged partners being the queen. Dudley has also been suspected of murdering his first wife in order to free himself to marry the queen. However, once again chronology seems to rule out the possibility of a royal secret marriage for Dudley.

  Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley is linked to a complex modern theory connected with the authorship of the literary works traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. This theory is variously known as the ‘Tudor Rose’ or ‘Prince Tudor’ hypothesis, and we shall henceforth refer to it here as ‘TR/PT’. Various versions of this theory have advanced claims that Elizabeth was married to Dudley and/or had a child or children by him. They have also produced competing interpretations of the queen’s relationships with Thomas Seymour and with Edward, Earl of Oxford. The ‘TR/PT’ is a most complicated story. However, unfortunately we cannot entirely ignore it, since it impinges directly upon the question of a possible secret marriage of Elizabeth I. We must therefore examine briefly the evidence (such as it is) for the complex ‘TR/PT’. At the same time we shall try to review the contemporary sixteenth-century evidence of Elizabeth I’s relationships with Dudley and others.

  The complex modern ‘TR/PT’ theories concerning Elizabeth I’s supposed relationship with the author of the ‘Shakespeare’ corpus of literature have many variations. What all the versions seem to have in common, however, is the premise that Elizabeth I was the mother of the man (whoever he was – and he has been variously identified) who really wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.

  The first version of ‘TR/PT’ suggested that Elizabeth I was secretly married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by whom she had two sons: Francis Bacon and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. This theory was launched in the 1890s by a writer called Orville Ward Owen, and subsequently developed by Alfred Dodd, who presented his version in 1910. As we have seen, the belief that Elizabeth I was in love w
ith Leicester is an old one, dating back to the lifetime of the couple. Indeed, this belief is almost certainly well founded. The proposition that the queen and the Earl of Leicester were married is also far from new, although this aspect of the story has less evidence to support it.

  During the 1930s, Percy Allen advanced a different ‘TR/PT’ theory: namely that Elizabeth I had been amorously involved with (but not married to) Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, by whom she had an illegitimate son called William Hughes, who was the real author of the ‘Shakespeare’ literature. This version of events has since evolved further variant forms. First, subsequent writers modified the original theory to identify Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (rather than William Hughes) as the illegitimate child of the queen by Oxford – and also the true ‘Shakespeare’. Then, in the 1970s an updated version of the story was used in a novel by Margaret Barsi-Greene. She reverted to the notion of a relationship between the queen and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. However, in her version of the theory this couple never married. Barsi-Greene changed the name of the child yet again, making one William Hastings the illegitimate child of Elizabeth by Robert Dudley. According to her account, Hastings was the real ‘Shakespeare’.

  By 2001 ‘TR/PT’ had progressed to the point where Elizabeth was attributed no less than four illegitimate children by Leicester, including Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Leighton. In addition the ‘Virgin Queen’ was said to have had another son much earlier, by Thomas Seymour. This son was the Earl of Oxford, who later incestuously fathered yet another illegitimate son by his own mother, the queen; this final ‘Tudor’ royal bastard being Henry Wriothesley.

  It was an American actor called Paul Streitz who published this latest, highly complex version of ‘TR/PT’. Not surprisingly, perhaps, his account has been seriously questioned by historians, and grave flaws have been found in the evidence he presented. Moreover, Streitz has been accused of selectivity, since he ‘covers only the evidence that suits his purpose while he omits anything that might conflict’.7

  So what does the contemporary, sixteenth-century factual evidence show us? As we have seen, Elizabeth was born in 1533, seven to eight months after her father’s bigamous marriage with her mother, Anne Boleyn, who was certainly pregnant at the time of the marriage. Although Elizabeth’s birth may have come as something of a disappointment to her father, there is no possible doubt that she was initially recognised as heir to the throne, and the Act of Succession of 1533–34 (see below, Appendix 3. Item 5) was intended to consolidate her position in this respect. Later, however, following her mother’s disgrace, the annulment of her parents’ marriage and the execution of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was declared illegitimate and was removed from the succession. Her childhood and youth were varied and strange. She passed through the hands of an assortment of carers, and eventually, following her father’s death, she settled in the household of her stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr.

  Here she found herself in close proximity to Sir Thomas Seymour, the younger of the two maternal uncles of her half-brother, King Edward VI. Some writers – including, as we have seen, some advocates of the ‘TR/PT’ hypothesis – assert that an illicit relationship then developed between the young Elizabeth and Sir Thomas. It is a fact that there were contemporary rumours that Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour had an illicit sexual relationship, and these rumours may even have contained an element of truth.

  The latest version of the ‘TR/PT’ strongly advocates belief in such a relationship, and Streiz, for example, tries to use letters from Elizabeth to Seymour’s elder brother, the Duke of Somerset (Lord Protector of England during the minority of his nephew, Edward VI) to prove that Elizabeth fell pregnant by Thomas Seymour, and that she subsequently bore a son who became Edward ‘de Vere’, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. However, the evidence for these assertions is highly questionable.

  Thus, Streitz asserts that Thomas Seymour proposed marriage to the young Elizabeth, and he bases this assertion upon a quotation from a published letter alleged to have been written by Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the letter in question is now dismissed as a forgery, fabricated, apparently, by an earlier would-be historian.8 Streitz then goes on to give an account of Elizabeth’s alleged pregnancy by Seymour based on the evidence of an authentic letter written by the young Elizabeth, which however Streitz misinterprets. In point of fact the passage which Streitz takes to refer to a forthcoming child actually refers to Elizabeth’s female custodian of the time!

  Next, in support of his premise that Edward de Vere was the queen’s son by Thomas Seymour, Streitz attempts to argue that de Vere was born some two years earlier than his traditionally accepted birth date of 12 April 1550. But even if de Vere was born earlier, it seems impossible that Elizabeth could have been his mother. There are surviving accounts written by those who saw her during the summer of 1548, which offer no evidence that the future queen then appeared to be pregnant. Streitz also seeks to make much of a Latin phrase in a source from 28 June 1563, which described Edward de Vere as minorem quatordecem annorum. But here again, Streitz misinterprets his source. The Latin phrase actually means that Edward was ‘less than 14 years of age’. When accurately translated, it appears to be entirely compatible with Edward de Vere’s standard and generally accepted birth date of 12 April 1550.9

  We are left, then, with a situation in which all the evidence presented by ‘TR/PT’ advocates in an attempt to prove that Elizabeth had a child by Sir Thomas Seymour appears to be flawed. There may in fact have been an amorous (and possibly sexual) relationship between Elizabeth and Seymour, but there is no evidence that such a relationship (if it existed) ever produced any offspring. Moreover, this alleged relationship is of no direct interest to us in our present context, since not even the ‘TR/PT’ advocates have sought to claim that Elizabeth and Sir Thomas Seymour were ever married.

  Genuine and more intriguing evidence that the ‘Virgin Queen’ may have had offspring is contained in Elizabeth I’s 1571 Act of Treason. This was very strangely worded, so that it appears explicitly to allow for the succession to the throne of bastard offspring of the queen. The phrase used in the text of the act refers to ‘the natural yssus of her Ma’j body’.10 What precisely is meant by this wording is open to interpretation, but the word ‘natural’ was often used to mean ‘illegitimate’. If it does indeed refer to illegitimate children of the queen, as contemporaries seem to have understood, then the act certainly warrants serious consideration. However, there is nothing in it – or in contemporary comments upon it – to justify the assumption made by recent advocates of the ‘TR/PT’ that the act was intended to refer to the Earl of Oxford. In fact, as William Camden wrote later, ‘I my selfe being then a young man have heard them oftentimes say that the word [naturall] was inserted into the Act of Purpose by Leicester, that he might one day obtrude uppon the English some bastard sonne of his, for the Queenes naturall issue’.11 This takes us back to the chief focus of the present chapter – namely the rumours, current in the seventeenth century and subsequently, of a possible marriage between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. As we have noted already, in addition to sixteenth-century rumours of such a relationship, some modern versions of the ‘TR/PT’ argue in support of such a marriage. They suggest that the queen’s union with Leicester led to the birth of a son – variously identified – who was the real author of the works of ‘Shakespeare’. It is time, then, to consider the history of the Earl of Leicester.

  Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester, was born on 24 June 1532 or 1533. Condemned to death in 1553, in the wake of his father’s attempt to alter the succession in England by enthroning Lady Jane Grey, Dudley was saved from the block by the intervention of Philip II of Spain, husband of Queen Mary and King-Consort of England. When Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne in 1558, Dudley was made her Master of the Horse. In 1562 he became a privy councillor, and in 1564 he was created Earl of Leicester. Fina
lly, in the year prior to his death he became Lord Steward of the Royal Household. He died on 4 September 1588.

  Allegations of secret marriages constitute a significant part of Dudley’s life story. Not only has it been alleged that Dudley secretly married the queen, he is also said to have secretly married two of her cousins, Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, and Lady Douglas Sheffield (nee Howard).12 However, Dudley’s first marriage was far from secret. On 4 June 1550, at the Royal Palace of Sheen, and in the presence of King Edward VI, the young Dudley married Amy Robsart, the only daughter of a Norfolk gentleman. Amy was approximately of the same age as Dudley himself. However, their marriage remained childless. Moreover, following the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, Dudley saw very little of his wife, who never accompanied him to court. Indeed, Dudley was rather unkindly commanded by the queen ‘to say that he did nothing with her [Amy], when he came to her, which he seldom did’.13

  If Amy Robsart was not present at the court in person, she was nevertheless well known and much talked about there, being the subject of avid speculation. In fact in the course of 1559, when news reached the court that Amy was unwell, the view was openly expressed that her life was the only thing that stood in the way of her husband’s marriage to the queen. Thus there was speculation on the part of the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, and others, that Dudley was sending Amy poison. Naturally, when Amy finally died in mysterious circumstances, on 8 September 1560, this caused a major scandal. The truth about Amy Robsart’s death has never been established beyond question but, despite widespread contemporary suspicions, it seems unlikely that her husband had her murdered. As things turned out, in the long run Amy’s suspicious death caused Robert Dudley many more problems than it solved!