Elizabeth and Leicester Read online

  Table of Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1 - ‘Some secret constellation’ 1533-1536

  Chapter 2 - ‘Her eighth year’ 1536-1547

  Chapter 3 - ‘The occasion of his utter undoing’ 1547-1553

  Chapter 4 - ‘This night I think to die’ 1553-1559

  Chapter 5 - ‘The King that is to be’ Spring 1559-summer 1560

  Chapter 6 - ‘So sudden a chance’ Autumn 1560

  Chapter 7 - ‘Maiden honour and integrity’ 1560-1561

  Chapter 8 - ‘Not yet towards a marriage’ 1561-1565

  Chapter 9 - ‘Majesty and love do not sit Well together’ 1565-1567

  Chapter 10 - ‘The daughter of debate’ 1568-1569

  Chapter 11 - ‘The great Lord’ The 1570s

  Chapter 12 - ‘Our estate requireth a match’ 1570-1572

  Chapter 13 - ‘I have long both loved and liked you’ 1573-1575

  Chapter 14 - ‘Dishonorable brutes’ 1576-1579

  Chapter 15 - ‘The greatest prince in Christendom’ 1578-1582

  Chapter 16 - ‘In times of distress’ 1582-1584

  Chapter 17 - ‘Her Majesty Will make trial of me’ 1585-1588

  Chapter 18 - ‘A thing Whereof We can admit no comfort’ 1588

  Chapter 19 - ‘To end this life for her service’

  Appendix I: The second Robert Dudley

  Appendix II: The Arthur Dudley mystery

  Afterword: Some fictional treatments

  Notes on sources

  Acknowledgements

  Picture acknowledgements

  Index

  Praise for Elizabeth and Leicester

  “Quite simply one of the most enthralling history books I’ve ever read. Packed with riveting detail, it is full of engaging and perceptive insights into the truth about the Virgin Queen and the man who meant more to her than any other. You must read this!”

  —Alison Weir, author of The Life of Elizabeth I

  “Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley first crossed paths as children, in the court circles of her father, King Henry VIII. . . . Many accounts emphasize the early, passionate phase of the relationship; Gristwood chronicles an enduring bond at turns romantic, affectionate, quarrelsome, and distant, and she skillfully explores the intersection of personal relations and politics. . . . The book is especially engaging in suggesting what drew the two together, what made them friends and working partners.... Whether they had sex or not, Gristwood convinces us, theirs was a great love story.” —The Boston Globe

  “Sarah Gristwood manages to contribute something new to the colorful noise of ‘the Elizabeth industry’ . . . [and] distills the mighty queen and her thwarted lover down to two very real, very complicated human beings. . . . [The] success with this book is even more impressive considering the heightened expectations readers have about private details and public lives. . . . For anyone with an appetite for history, Gristwood pulls off a neat feat. She offers a lively and real picture of this pair that draws heavily on the absence of fact.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Vivacious and absorbing. Gristwood is a mistress of the trivial details that enthrall. Full of intriguing suggestions, stimulating analogies and shrewd connections.” —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Gristwood disentangles the many myths and stories that have, since the start of Elizabeth’s reign, been spun around the lifelong love and loyalty between the queen and her ‘Sweet Robin.’ This is rich terrain, taking us into the heart of our feelings about femininity, power, and nationhood. Makes one feel that Freud’s question ‘What do women want?’ might have been inspired by the enigmatic behavior of Elizabeth herself.”

  —Telegraph (London)

  “As well as producing an enthralling account of one particular relationship, Gristwood crams her book with fascinating details of life at court.”

  —The Mail on Sunday (London)

  “The tangled and enigmatic relationship of Leicester and Elizabeth has always fascinated posterity. . . . One of the most gratifying aspects of Gristwood’s exhaustive and perceptive new look at Leicester and the queen is that it traces the whole arc of the relationship as it both cooled and deepened with the dramatic changes in the political landscape through the long decades of Elizabeth’s reign.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood worked as a journalist specializing in the arts and women’s issues. She was a regular contributor to the Times, Guardian, Independent, and Evening Standard.

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  First published in Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers 2007

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007

  Published in Penguin Books 2008

  Copyright © Sarah Gristwood, 2007

  All rights reserved

  Illustration credits appear on pages 389-91.

  eISBN : 978-0-143-11449-9

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  When I was fair and young, and favour graced me,

  Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.

  But I did scorn them all, and answered them therefore,

  ‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere,

  Importune me no more.’

  How many weeping eyes I made to pine with woe;

  How many sighing hearts I have no skill to show.

  Yet I the prouder grew, and answered them therefore,

  ‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere,

  Importune me no more.’

  Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy,

  And said: Fine dame, since that you be so coy,

  I will pluck your plumes that you shall say no more

  ‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere,

  Importune me no more.’

  When he had spake these words, such change grew in my

  breast

  That neither night nor day since that, I could take any rest.

  Then lo, I did repent that I had said before,

  ‘Go, go, go seek some o
therwhere,

  Importune me no more.’

  Finis

  Elizabetha Regina

  c.1580s

  O! mistress, why

  Outcast am I

  All utterly

  From your pleasaunce?

  Since ye and I

  Or this, truly,

  Familiarly

  Have had pastaunce.

  And, lovingly,

  Ye would apply

  Thy company

  To my comfort:

  But now truly,

  Unlovingly,

  Ye would deny

  Me to resort.

  But since that ye

  So strange will be

  As towards me

  And will not meddle,

  I trust, percase,

  To find some grace

  To have free chase

  And speed as well.

  Anon.

  earlier sixteenth century

  Preface

  IT IS ALMOST HALF A CENTURY SINCE THERE HAS APPEARED A NON-FICTION book specifically on Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley. It seems almost incredible to write it. There has, of course, been every other kind of version of the story. Two major new television series on England’s most frequently filmed monarch; Philippa Gregory’s best-selling novel about the relationship itself; a great theatrical revival of Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, with Robert caught between a queen of hearts and a queen of heads . . . and before that, the feature film entitled simply Elizabeth, its themes echoed in the sequel, The Golden Age. And this is to ignore all new biographies of Elizabeth, popular or academic, and all the new work on Robert Dudley; to ignore, too, those old enough to have seen Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R, or to have read the myriad novels by Margaret Irwin or Jean Plaidy.

  This is clearly an appetite that grows by what it feeds on - luckily for me. There is, it might seem, a risk in offering a factual version of the Elizabeth and Leicester story: a risk that, with all the necessary cavils, all the quibbles about the fluidity of the source material (rumours of doubtful attribution; ambassadors’ letters we’ve read only in translation), it may always be less palatable than quick, colourful fantasy. But in fact, the more attractive and convincing the recent fictions have been, the more one’s curiosity is sparked for the real story. We want to weigh the evidence for ourselves - like successive generations of historians; like Robert and Elizabeth’s contemporaries.

  The last book specifically on this subject was published in 1961 by Elizabeth Jenkins, whose earlier biography of the Queen had pictured her repeatedly rescued from herself by ‘protective masculine authority’. More recently, feminist study of Queen Elizabeth has tended, inevitably, to downplay the role of the men in her life, while fresh work on the long-maligned Robert has concentrated on his own background, beliefs, financial affairs - on viewing him as an independent entity. I set out, in beginning this book, to examine the relationship in its long entirety (rather than just the first few years of it, as has more often been done); to try to discover what it meant not only personally, but politically. What was its impact on Elizabeth’s reign and on her kingdom? What might one learn by using the relationship (and the perceptions of Robert Dudley himself, a man who knew his queen better than any) as a prism through which to re-examine one of the best-known, and still most fascinating, pieces of English history?

  If the Elizabeth industry in general will never go into recession, then the love of Elizabeth and Leicester has a particular fascination - and the question, of course, is why? The answer is not just simple prurience, our greedy curiosity about the private lives of royalty. Perhaps it is that the unusual balance of power in this relationship gives it a peculiar modernity. And perhaps, too, we feel the need, today, to explore those relationships that were of memorable, enduring, support and passion - and yet did not follow the course of the traditional romantic story.

  For in many ways this is unpromising material. Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was perhaps the most important in her life. The savage possessiveness with which she wrote of him - ‘a creature of our own’, as she described him, with all the imperiousness of the royal ‘we’ - in no way diminished his importance in her eyes. For a woman so short of surviving blood relations, he was the nearest thing she had to family. By the time Robert died in 1588 (at which point Elizabeth shut herself up in grief, until her ministers broke down the door of her room), he had been her councillor, her unofficial consort and commander of her army. He had loved her, advised her, understood her, sat by her bed in sickness and represented her on state occasions; she had raised him, the son and grandson of convicted traitors, to be the greatest man in the land.

  But she had also humiliated him, held him dangling on a string, made him dance attendance on her other suitors and tried to have him clapped in prison when finally he broke loose; and he had made commitments to two other women, even after the shocking death of his first wife Amy Robsart. This is no easy Romeo and Juliet love story. It is, what is more, a relationship in which we have to come to terms with several lasting uncertainties.

  One of them, of course, concerns the couple’s sexual relationship. The King of France in Elizabeth’s own lifetime would jest that one of the three great questions of Europe was ‘whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no’. The fascination has not gone away. Indeed, in the course of writing this book, I found, somewhat to my consternation, that this was the one question every single person asked on hearing that I was to write on Elizabeth and Robert Dudley. (I had - before I stopped counting - been asked it by several journalist friends, a Cambridge paleontologist, a retired diplomat, an eleven-year-old, a brigadier and the man who came to mend the dishwasher. Several of them prefaced the question with: ‘I’m not really interested in history, but . . .’) When Helen Mirren’s television portrayal came out in the autumn of 2005, every single one of the hugely popular listings magazines devoted some of their valuable space to a feature. Then, when the BBC’s series came out four months later, they did it all over again. Every article asked the same question - did they or didn’t they?

  The massive interest in this point is not just simple prurience - at least, I don’t think so. (Anyone who just wants to read about the sex lives of royalty can do it without trawling through four hundred years of history.) In part, perhaps, there is a genuine interest in just how Elizabeth’s private life meshed with her public career: she is, after all, a rare early female role model. But far more importantly, it’s because Elizabeth’s iconic maiden status is one of the things we all think we know about our past. The Virgin Queen has always been at once as magical a myth as Arthur’s Camelot and - we hope - as solid and splendid a fact as Nelson’s Trafalgar victory. But now we need to know if we’ve been sold a pup. We want (in an age of spin and of its converse: the debunking of many of the old popular stories) to know if this legend too will crumble, or if it is trustworthy.

  And yet it is a question to which there can never be a wholly authoritative answer. All one can do is to present the evidence - the stories and the statements that have been fuelling speculation since Elizabeth’s own day. At the end of them, I felt had an answer. Others may think differently. In an afterword and an appendix, I briefly discuss the different historical views of Elizabeth and Leicester, some of the most popular of the recent fictional treatments, and the old canard that Robert and Elizabeth secretly had a son called Arthur Dudley. It’s fascinating to see how the sexual scandals are always the ones that persist. (And, since I’ve tried to keep intrusive modern references out of the text itself, let me just remember here all those stories that circulated around the death of Diana, and her supposed secret pregnancy.) By the same token, we will never know for sure whether Robert Dudley killed his wife Amy to enable him to marry Elizabeth - or whether Elizabeth had Amy killed in the most scandalous fashion possible so as not to have to marry Robert Dudley. But we seem happy to live with, even to relish, the uncertainty. I say ‘we’ because it would be naïve to think tha
t anyone comes to this story fresh. It is one with which we all have some sort of a history.

  That, indeed, is one of the problems for a researcher. It would be all too easy to turn to sources only to confirm what we have been told is there. We gaze at an established icon of Elizabeth, and mouth the familiar sayings. But if, instead, you turn an enquiring eye onto your subjects’ own words, you can find yourself struck with surprise - and with gratitude for being granted material so extraordinary.

  The picture of Elizabeth painted in recent decades has shown a woman of sexual impulses, indeed, but one in whom those impulses were subdued to political necessity. Her priorities seemed part of her modernity. Our picture of Robert Dudley has been less successfully updated; and here is an area where we have something to gain from taking a broader historical view. The romantic hero of fictional tales - tall, dark and handsome, arriving on his white horse - has never meshed easily with the venal and impotent hanger-on of the older histories. But then, the position of a favourite (and in particular a male favourite) has never been easy; has represented, indeed, an unease that echoes down the centuries.

  Of course, restoring Robert to his due dignity as a politician and a patriot has prepared the way for our being able to take his relationship with Elizabeth seriously. While he was regarded as something of an embarrassment, capable of no motive beyond unenlightened self-interest, his alliance with the Queen represented a problem, a bone in the throat, to even her most ardent admirers. Remove that obstacle, and we may understand Robert as an independent political and social intelligence, while still accepting that much of his function was so personal - so bound into his emotional link with Elizabeth - as to be close to what we think of as feminine.