Elizabeth and Leicester Read online

  Perhaps what interests us so much today is this very blurring of conventional gender identities - and the feeling that sex, present or absent, is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of a relationship. Perhaps today we are inclined to look beyond the hearts and flowers love story; to feel that sex often comes easy, and that the holy grail is a relationship with longevity.

  As I began to work on this book, I became fascinated by two things in particular. The first was the question of evidence: what we know, as opposed to what we guess. The notes on sources that follow at the end of this book are purposely limited. Almost all available quotations that have any direct bearing on Elizabeth I have been batted around like ping-pong balls for centuries. Such notes as there are aim to offer the general reader some insight into the patchwork of different accounts of her reign - fragmentary, prejudiced, often contradictory as they are. These are the materials from which the traditional story has been drawn; but, when questioned more closely, when set side by side with one another, they sometimes serve instead to undercut it.

  The second thing that struck me was that very question of the longevity of this relationship. After the first phase of their love, Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley settled down into a platonic alliance that yet had the frisson of passion about it, a political partnership with the personal pique still fresh. But it still surprises me to reflect on quite how brief a patch of time was occupied by what everyone thinks of as that relationship: a bare eighteen months from the moment the evidence first places Robert and Elizabeth together as adults to the scandal that followed the death of Robert’s wife Amy. This out of an association that in fact lasted the first three decades - decades! - of Elizabeth’s reign . . . Even icebergs only boast a submerged nine-tenths. Here, we seem to have lost nineteen-twentieths of the story. It is hard to think of a better reason for a new biography.

  1

  ‘Some secret constellation’ 1533-1536

  THE TALE OF ELIZABETH’S ACCESSION IS A FAMOUS ONE. IT MAKES A favourite ‘scene from history’. We see the princess walking in the park at Hatfield when the councillors came to tell her that her sister Mary was dead and she was Queen of England; caught by surprise, overtaken by her destiny under a great oak tree . . . We all know the words she is supposed to have uttered, after catching her first startled breath: ‘This is God’s doing, and it is glorious in our eyes.’ The words come, so appropriately, from the Psalms.

  But in fact Elizabeth was far from surprised by the news that came to her that autumn day. When the cold light dawned on 17 November 1558, a loyal supporter of her own was waiting at the court in London, to make sure she got word early; and William Cecil, Elizabeth’s future secretary, was waiting at Hatfield, ready to send out the letters that would get a new government under way. As for Elizabeth herself, she had been waiting all her life: more than twenty years since her mother was beheaded, during her own infancy; eleven years since her father’s death plunged the country into uncertainty; five since another death, that of her brother Edward, brought England back under the Pope’s sway, and Elizabeth herself closer to death than any twenty-year-old ought to be.

  How many years had it been since she had realized Mary was unlikely to have a child, and that her own accession, could she but survive, was a real possibility? Three, maybe - since Mary’s first phantom pregnancy? A year - since Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain, sailed away from a barren wife and a hostile country? It was hardly more than a month since Mary’s ill-health had taken a turn that could end only one way; three weeks since Mary had added a codicil to her will, accepting that if God continued to give her ‘no fruit nor heir of my body’, then England would go to the one ‘the laws of this realm’ decreed (she still could not bear to name her heretic sister, Elizabeth, directly); ten days since one of Mary’s most trusted ladies brought her jewels north to Hatfield, in token of everything else Elizabeth would inherit shortly. Mary begged only that Elizabeth would pay her debts and preserve the Catholic faith. To the Catholics and to the Protestants alike, Elizabeth seemed to promise everything, readily. It was a week since King Philip’s ambassador had brought word to both sisters that Spain, with all its vested interests in England, would not oppose Elizabeth’s accession; six days since the last Protestants of ‘Bloody’ Mary’s reign had been burned, at Canterbury. In the final days of her life Mary had lapsed into a semi-coma, murmuring about the absence of her husband, and of England’s loss of its French stronghold, Calais. She was given the last rites at midnight on 16 November and died before dawn the next day.

  So on 17 November Elizabeth was already well prepared; surrounded by those who would be central to her reign. And soon among them - arriving, story says, on the hero’s traditional white horse - was Lord Robert Dudley.

  For the known, the certain, story of Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley begins with her accession day. It is only from this time onwards that we can see surviving evidence of contact: letters sent and docketed; bills; records of ceremonies. We know, from later statements they both made, and from the easy assumptions of agents and ambassadors in the first days of the new queen’s reign, that theirs was no brand new acquaintanceship. But precise information is scarce.

  On the other hand, perhaps we hardly need the time and the place where the two first met among the palaces and courts of Henry VIII’s day. The history of the Dudleys and the Tudors had been so closely linked that they have been compared to the ivy and the oak tree around which it wraps. (And it is only in recent years that it has been conceded that the Dudleys were not necessarily the parasites - indeed, that the Dudleys had a better record of fidelity in giving service than the Tudors did of gratitude in receiving it; that the Dudleys’ motto, ‘Droit et loyal’, was one they could claim in all honesty.)

  Even their contemporaries felt that the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert transcended the details of practicality. There had to be some explanation for their lifelong fidelity, and those contemporaries put it down to ‘synaptia’, a hidden conspiracy of the stars, whose power to rule human lives no-one doubted: ‘a sympathy of spirits between them, occasioned perhaps by some secret constellation’, in the words of the historian William Camden, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Theirs was a relationship already rooted in history and mythology. And that moment when Elizabeth heard she had come to the throne encapsulated much about their story. If our well-loved picture of Elizabeth’s accession is something of a fantasy - if the reality is on the whole more interesting - you might say the same about our traditional picture of her relationship with Robert Dudley.

  The site of the oak under which Elizabeth is said to have heard of her accession is marked in Hatfield House today. But a neighbouring estate - then belonging to Sir John Brockett, and still in the family - has, like Hatfield, its own marked oak, where they claim Elizabeth heard the news. The pretty picture of a girl surprised by destiny, complete with biblical quotation, was written down seven decades after the event by Sir Robert Naunton, and even then, the author doesn’t mention any tree. The first known records of the Hatfield oak are of its being displayed to later royal visitors - as late as the nineteenth century.1 Was the romantic story an antiquarian’s invention, or accurate folk memory? Or was it constructed in Elizabeth’s own day? Two avenues of trees converge on the very spot where the royal oak stands. They were planted almost within living memory of that day, in the great Hatfield rebuilding of the early seventeenth century. One might speculate that Elizabeth and those around her are unlikely to have ignored so promising a piece of symbolism as England’s stout-hearted queen, declared under England’s stout-hearted tree. Coincidentally, of course, the oak (since robur is the stout oaken wood in Latin) was the self-appointed symbol of Robert Dudley, the man who understood Elizabeth’s image - and Elizabeth herself - better than any.

  These two met each other now not just as courtier and queen, but as a man and a woman who would draw each other enormously. She was tawny-haired and slender, with the long fingers of which she
was so proud and ‘a spirit full of incantation’, as one ambassador memorably had said. (Or see her in Sir John Hayward’s words: ‘her forehead large and fair . . . her eyes lively and sweet, but short-sighted, her nose somewhat rising in the middlest; the whole compass somewhat long, but yet of admirable beauty . . . a most delightful composition of majesty and modesty’.) Robert, too, was notably good-looking: tall, for the sixteenth century, at almost six feet, ‘and singularly well-featured’, Naunton later wrote, with the dark eyes that gave him the nickname of ‘the Gypsy’.2 But that easily understood attraction is only part of the story.

  At that time of her accession, Elizabeth would have needed her spiritual kin about her; her ‘old flock of Hatfield’. This was a moment of extraordinary triumph - the realization of everything she had worked for, as well as waited for, so long. After the careful watchings of Mary’s reign - the keys turned in the lock by a gaoler’s hand, the covert dealings, the constant fear of being caught up in some foolish fellow traveller’s rebellious fantasy - it must have seemed like day after night. But it was also a moment of extraordinary tension, a moment at which huge demands were made of her, when she would need to call upon all the resources available to her. She was, after all, a female ruler - at the time, a contradiction in terms - of an impotent kingdom, many of whose inhabitants viewed her religion with scant sympathy. She would have wanted her friends beside her, and not just the fair-weather friends but those of proven loyalty: those who (like Robert Dudley) had known her as a child; those who perhaps (like Robert) had sold lands, in her time of need, to raise money for her.

  Now that Elizabeth was queen, she could expect to be surrounded by a mob of good-time glad-handers, eager to assure her that they had always supported her . . . really. But the people she needed (she, with her long history of nervous strain, of illness following on a period of exhilarating effort) were the ones who had always known where their loyalties lay - and who had seen the bad side of life under her Catholic sister Mary.

  When Robert kissed Elizabeth’s hand at Hatfield - when she made him instantly her Master of Horse, a position his father and brother had held before him - we have no sound reason to believe he already had a place in her heart. That, perhaps, still lay ahead. We cannot know with certainty. But, looking back through the shared years of their common childhood, at a hundred tiny ties, it is hardly surprising that he certainly did have a place waiting in her hierarchy.

  Camden said that, though young to rule at twenty-five, Elizabeth was ‘rarely qualified by resolution and adversity’. So was Robert Dudley. Like the phoenix that was her emblem, she had risen from what (given the fate meted out to heretics) could almost literally have been her ashes. She had survived by shrewdness, by her sharply honed wits and by a self-control so savage it must have hurt a young soul - and yet, it was of Dudley that Robert Naunton wrote he could ‘put his passions in his pocket’ to keep them safely hidden away. Robert Dudley too had had to make some harsh decisions to survive, had had to curb his young man’s impetuosity. Camden wrote of him, with dubious approval, that he was ‘very skillful in temporising, and fitting himself to the times’; but Elizabeth, who had no use for hotheads, valued this determined resilience.

  A prayer Elizabeth published in the first years of her reign cast an eye back over her youthful history.

  Thou hast willed me not to be some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people, who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom Thou has destined me, born of royal parents and nurtured and educated at court. When I was surrounded and thrown about by various snares of enemies, Thou has preserved me with Thy constant protection from prison and the most extreme danger; and though I was freed only at the very last moment, Thou has entrusted me on earth with royal sovereignty and majesty.

  Robert Dudley too had been educated at the court; though born of the nobility, he too had been imprisoned and in danger. The scaffold that had claimed her mother had taken his father and brother. There is no evidence for the pretty timeworn tale of a stolen romance between the two when they were both imprisoned in the Tower. But though they may never have loved or lusted there, the place represented a bond between them - a shared experience of fear and loss unusual in even the Tudor century.

  Legend says they were born on the same day. In fact Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533, Robert Dudley on 24 June (as he mentioned many years later, in a letter to William Cecil), either of that year or of the year before; no-one was recording his life precisely. Not that he was a nobody. Many years later, Philip Sidney - Robert’s nephew, remembered as the epitome of a young aristocrat - wrote, in rebutting an attack on his uncle, that ‘my chiefest honour is to be a Dudley, and truly I am glad to have cause to set forth the nobility of that blood whereof I am descended’.

  The Dudleys - like Elizabeth’s maternal relations, the Boleyns - live in legend as arch-arrivistes, with all the implied sneers about those who rose too rapidly. They were undoubtedly - like the Boleyns - arch-servants of the state. But, just as Anne Boleyn (with the Duke of Norfolk for her uncle) was not entirely the outsider of legend, so there were some of the famous old names in Robert Dudley’s family tree. Even Richard Neville, Richard ‘the Kingmaker’ - Earl of Warwick, the title Robert’s brother would bear - was related to the Dudleys, a connection that cast an interesting sidelight on the position the family might occupy in relation to the monarchy. (Previous earls of Leicester, Robert’s own future title, had included Simon de Montfort, who in the thirteenth century led an aristocratic revolt against the incompetent government of Henry III, and Henry ‘Bolingbroke’, who deposed the equally inefficient Richard II.) Over the years it had often been descent in the female line that had given the Dudleys their claims to the aristocracy, the Lisle title and the Warwick earldom; and it was the female line that linked them, so they would boast, even to the Saxon nobility.

  Robert’s great-grandfather was a younger son of the great Midlands landholder Baron Dudley. His grandfather Edmund Dudley trained as a lawyer, and was already known as a coming man when Henry VII achieved the throne. Twenty years later he was Speaker of the House of Commons, and a member of the royal council; prominent and wealthy. The tactics which made him rich (with his neighbour and partner, Sir Richard Empson) still more greatly enriched the monarchy. Dudley and Empson increased the royal revenue by squeezing the nobility: hunting out carefully hidden assets, exploiting old laws to claim fines for their king. If they also accepted bribes for themselves, it was hardly more than common practice.

  Men did not love Henry VII for what they saw as his mercenary attitudes, but you did not complain of an anointed king with impunity. Safer by far to blame Empson and Dudley: ‘his horse-leeches and shearers’, that partial historian Francis Bacon called them a century later, ‘bold men and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master’s grist’. When Henry VIII succeeded to the throne in 1509, one of his first acts was to order the arrest of his father’s hated agents. It was a singularly ruthless bid for popularity. That it was nothing more is shown in the details of the two men’s trial and treatment: the absurdity of the charge that they had tried to take over the country, and the fact that their bodies were never subject to the torments and disgraces that would have been inflicted upon genuine traitors. None the less Dudley, like Empson, was beheaded - nominally for treason - in August 1510.

  John Dudley, Robert’s father, was a child of seven when his father Edmund went to the block. His mother rapidly remarried, taking as her new husband one Arthur Plantagenet, illegitimate son of Edward IV, and the boy was sent as ward to another gentleman, the Kentish landowner and family friend Sir Edward Guildford, who, having no sons of his own, effectively adopted John, and betrothed him to his own daughter Jane. The marriage was to be a long and unusually happy one: witness the many references, in Jane’s eventual will, to her ‘lord, my dear husband’; witness the loving messages that found their way into her husband’s official despatches.

  John
found early prominence as a fighting man: first as a youthful veteran of the French wars of the 1520s and then as star jouster of many a court tournament. But if the King valued him in tilt yard and hunting field, the King’s ministers found John equally apt and enterprising in political tasks. First employed by Cardinal Wolsey, he was then - after Wolsey fell from power, having failed to secure the King his annulment - employed by Thomas Cromwell, who rose to prominence alongside Anne Boleyn. He was, in fact, an intelligent and dutiful tool for any government of the day. By the time of Robert’s birth, he had begun to purchase the old territories of Baron Dudley, and had succeeded his surrogate father as Master of the Tower Armouries. A year later Sir Edward Guildford died, and John (through his wife) inherited Sir Edward’s seat in the House of Commons and his lands around Tenterden in Kent. (Robert may have been born at Halden Place near Rolvenden - or ‘Rounden’ - rather than in London. A font in the village still bears the arms of the Guildford family. Indeed, the Dudley children probably did much of their growing up in the country, since besides the inherited estates in Kent and Sussex, John Dudley went on buying lands in the West Midlands, close to the Welsh border, and transformed the ancient family seat of Dudley Castle.

  The Dudleys were an intensely clannish family. All his life, Robert would stick close to those siblings who survived into adulthood, bonded to them in a strong defensive alliance based not only on loyalty, but on a communality of ideas and ideals. Perhaps this explains the two different faces John Dudley seemed to show: one often inimical to the outside world, the other warm and indulgent to his own brood. Two more boys were born after Robert, and another four girls; and of the thirteen children born to the prolific Jane Dudley, nine survived infancy, at a time when half of all babies died before they were five years old. Robert’s earliest youth seems to have been uneventful; there is no reason (with all those acres, and all those siblings to play with in them) to doubt it was also happy. But the hard facts about it are not many.