Elizabeth and Leicester Read online

  In the spring of 1552 Edward had fallen sick of measles and smallpox - from which, however, he seemed rapidly to recover. But that summer’s progress was a demanding one; and by August, it was noted on all sides how ill he looked. By the autumn it was obvious within court circles that the feverish and coughing King was suffering from (probably) tuberculosis. The medicines available included spearmint syrup mixed with red fennel and turnip, and the raw meat of a nine-day-old sow. No wonder (so Hayward later reported) a rumour would spread that Edward was being poisoned - even, that his malady dated from the time Robert was first placed in close proximity to him. But in fact there was nothing John Dudley desired less than Edward’s death. Upon Edward’s life depended John Dudley’s power and safety, and that of his family. He could expect only the harshest treatment from the Catholic Mary.

  We should not exaggerate the degree to which the turmoils of the next year should really be put down to John Dudley’s slate. As 1552 turned to 1553 and Edward’s health worsened, the King himself, committed to his position as defender of the new faith, was determined his throne should not pass to Mary. It was in many ways a reasonable decision. Even to contemporaries, without benefit of hindsight, it was obvious that the clashes of Mary’s will with that of her people were likely to bring dissent; and that her complete and proven reliance on Habsburg advice and interests made her a dubious candidate for ruler of an independent country. It remains less clear why it was decided that Elizabeth had to be excluded along with her. Because Elizabeth was too much her father’s daughter to consent to the overturning of his will? Because Dudley knew she would never be his puppet? Or because he knew he would be able to marry his son Guildford to Lady Jane Grey, and fulfil his enemies’ worst suspicions by getting his blood onto the throne that way?

  But Guildford did not marry Jane (or Dudley’s daughter Katherine marry Lord Hastings, descended from a brother of Edward IV) until late May 1553. The paper in Edward’s hand which bears the title ‘My device for the succession’ must have been written well before that; and Edward, by this point, was mature enough to be no mere puppet, even of a man as forceful as John Dudley.

  Henry’s will had ordained that after his daughters (or heirs of their body), the throne should pass to the descendants of his younger sister Mary, bypassing the senior Scottish line. Edward followed the basic principle of disinheriting the Catholic Scots - but there was still a measure of chicanery. If Elizabeth and Mary were ruled out, the throne should by right have gone to Lady Suffolk, Henry VIII’s niece and mother of Lady Jane Grey (and of two other daughters, but no sons). But though England had no Salic law actually to forbid a woman’s rule, a woman had never ruled England successfully.8 So Edward’s ‘device’ was that the throne should pass to the ‘heirs male’ of Lady Suffolk’s eldest daughter, Lady Jane.

  By the end of May the King was - as one young doctor recorded - ‘steadily pining away. He does not sleep except when he is stuffed with drugs. The sputum which he brings up is livid black, foetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure. His feet are swollen all over. To the doctors, all these things portend death.’ No-one could afford to wait nine months, even in the unlikely event that Lady Jane were already pregnant with a boy. While a desperate Dudley brought in a ‘wise woman’ - whose potions for the dying King, probably containing arsenic, prolonged Edward’s life but horribly increased his suffering - the words about Lady Jane’s heirs male were altered to read ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’, so that Jane herself could ascend the throne and a dangerous vacuum be avoided. It was Edward himself who, in the middle of June, put forward this plan to the chief lawyers of the country; Edward who forced them reluctantly to agree. The justification for the exclusion of Mary and Elizabeth from the succession was to be that they were both bastards. They could marry abroad, they would condescendingly be told. No wonder Elizabeth looked on marriage as a poor consolation prize.

  As it became clear that Edward’s life was ending, the Dudleys were clustered around the court. We do not know if Robert was in the stuffy death chamber, but it was his brother-in-law Henry Sidney who, in the fading light of an ominously stormy evening, held the dying fifteen-year-old in his arms. Edward has gone down in history as a chillingly inhuman boy, whose journal recorded the death of his uncle Somerset with the most laconic brevity; who was said once to have torn a pet hawk in pieces, (and, as he did so, to have been seen to smile, twice). The elevation of an anointed king would have set clear limits to intimacy. But though sickness was the close companion of everyone in the sixteenth century - though Robert’s and Elizabeth’s letters would be full of ailments - Edward’s sufferings could surely not fail to move those who had watched him so long and so closely.

  But there was no time for sentiment. Edward’s sisters - kept away from the court - should be given no chance to rally a party. The King died on 6 July; the following day, the great stronghold of the Tower was put into readiness. The officers of the City of London were bound over to Queen Jane, and on 10 July she was proclaimed. Long before that - possibly even before Edward was dead - a party of guards several hundred strong had been sent towards Mary’s house at Hunsdon near Hertford to ‘escort’ - effectively, to secure - the princess. Their commanders were Robert Dudley and his eldest brother John. We simply don’t know whether they had any qualms to weigh against their family loyalty; but Robert’s later opinions make it possible that he was as committed to preserving the Protestant religion as even Edward himself could be.

  But Mary had been warned, and had ridden north to Norfolk, the heart of her own lands, where many of the people owed her loyalty. When the Dudley brothers arrived at Hunsdon to find the bird had flown, Robert set off in pursuit with most of the troops, while John returned to London to consult with the council. But Robert, riding through the night, missed Mary, who had taken the back roads to Sawston. Arriving at Sawston Hall early the next morning only to find that Mary had left an hour before, in (one must suppose) a young man’s frustration he told his soldiers to set the place on fire. Hearing that the gentry of East Anglia were turning out to join Mary as she rode, he fell back on Cambridge, where the Protestant faith had many friends, to await fresh troops, instructions, and his brother John.

  The day after Jane was proclaimed Queen, Mary set up her rival banner, and many were now flocking to what they saw as the true Tudor monarchy. In other parts of England, too, the people were rallying to her standard. Robert rode north to his own and his father-in-law’s Norfolk lands, where with Robsart help he made a brief stand for Queen Jane’s authority, proclaiming her in King’s Lynn on 18 July with the support of the mayor and several hundred of the citizens. But on that day, had he but known it, the councillors holding the Tower, where Jane was lodged for safety, turned it over to the supporters of Queen Mary.

  Four days before, John Dudley senior himself had set out for East Anglia with his remaining sons and an army. But no-one cheered them as they rode through the sullen city streets. His troops slipped away from him; the ill-health of which he had complained for months meant that he himself was operating at only half his strength. He could not fight the will of the country. The council, left to its own devices, was only too relieved to abandon a policy of which it had never really approved. On 19 July, Mary was proclaimed Queen in London, and on the twenty-first John Dudley himself proclaimed her at Cambridge. In the Tower, the trappings of queenship were stripped from Lady Jane Dudley. On the twenty-fourth John Dudley and two of his sons were arrested. Robert, in King’s Lynn, stayed free (but isolated) a little longer. It must have been nearing the end of the month when he, too, arrived in the Tower to join the rest of the fraternity.

  4

  ‘This night I think to die’ 1553-1559

  VISITORS TO THE TOWER CAN STILL SEE THE CARVINGS THE DUDLEYS left on the thick stone walls. Near the locked door, in the lower chamber of the Beauchamp Tower, is a whole name: ROBART [sic] DUDLEY. The lines are faint - almost illegible - but no more imaginative effort could have spoke
n as eloquently. Each groove speaks of the frustration born of fear and anger; of the need for some activity to damp down panic and occupy the surface of the mind.

  At first the five brothers were scattered around the Tower, but as the prison quarters became more crowded than at any time in the place’s history, they were squashed together into the upper room of the Beauchamp Tower, hard by the Lieutenant’s lodging, while their father was held in what is now called the Bloody Tower, under conditions of even stricter security. By the fireplace in their one cramped room is carved an entire four-line verse.

  You that these beasts do well behold and see

  May deem with ease wherefore here made they be

  With borders eke wherein [there may be found?]

  4 Brothers names who list to search the ground

  The positions of the various Dudley carvings suggest almost that they may each have taken a corner, and it is tempting to envisage them each working away. It was the eldest, John, who made himself responsible for a representation of the Dudley devices - a bear and ragged staff, and a double-tailed lion - and his name in a border of leaves and flowers. But in the embrasure of the upper chamber window, looking inwards onto Tower Green, Robert himself is also represented by a deeply etched spray of sprightly oak leaves and his initials, R.D. Perhaps he, ever energetic, was the first of the brothers to pass time this way: the very few earlier carvings in the room are in the same window embrasure, while (from those inscriptions that are dated) it looks as if John, by the fireplace, was striking out onto fresh territory.

  Below Robert’s oak leaves someone has carved the name ‘Jane’ - written again, and larger, elsewhere in the room. Guildford, perhaps? It is unclear whether he was sometimes with his wife or - since the verse speaks of John’s ‘four’ brothers - held always with John and Ambrose, Robert and Henry. It is certain that the Dudleys helped spark a positive craze for carving: the walls of the Tower are littered with carvings today. (It used to be thought professional help was called in for some of the Tower’s myriad carved graffiti, but in fact it is easier than you might expect to make a mark in the soft Reigate stone.) In the Beauchamp Tower, by a strange irony, most are the work of Elizabeth’s Catholic prisoners, held there in the last part of the sixteenth century.

  On 18 August John was taken with his father to be tried, in Westminster, on charges of high treason. The verdict was a foregone conclusion even though - as the elder John Dudley pointed out - half the peers trying them were as guilty as they. They were sentenced to be hung; cut down before they were dead; their entrails dragged out and their private parts cut off while they were living; and the four quarters of their bodies stuck up on posts. They might reasonably hope that the sentence would be commuted to a mere beheading, as was usual for the aristocracy - but the events of the next few days produced a different, a wholly unforeseen, horror for the Dudleys.

  On the twenty-first, the brothers were taken out to watch their father’s public recantation ‘from the bottom of my heart’ of the faith which he had propounded so vigorously. He has gone down in history as a turncoat; as one whose apparent Protestantism can only ever have masked ambition or, alternatively, one who turned coward in the end. Eve-of-execution confession and recantation was par for the course in Tudor history. But John Dudley’s letters show a long history of self-doubt and sickness. The day before his public change of heart, right after the Lieutenant told him to prepare for his ‘deadly stroke’, he wrote a letter to the Earl of Arundel that seems to suggest that his tumble into panic was a genuine one, whether you care to call it cowardice (odd in a professional soldier), or frank humanity:

  An old proverb there is and that most true that a living dog is better than a dead lion. Oh that it would please her good Grace to give me life, yes the life of a dog that I might but live and kiss her feet . . . Oh that her mercy were such as she would consider how little profit my dead and dismembered body can bring her, but how great and glorious an honour it will be in all posterity when the report shall be that so gracious and mighty a Queen had granted life to so miserable and penitent an abject.

  It is possible that, in his recantation, Dudley was gambling not only for his own life, but for the life of his sons. If so, he lost only half the throw. The day after his abject letter he was taken out to Tower Hill. Blindfolded, he knelt - but the blindfold slipped, and he had to struggle up from his knees and put it on again, which all too obviously strained his nerves unbearably. He was beheaded; but, for the moment at least, all his sons lived on, in physical safety but in mental agony. Did Robert blame his father for his recantation? Or was it the Catholic faith he blamed more bitterly?

  In the Beauchamp Tower the brothers must have been cramped indeed, even by Tudor standards. But the most crippling effects of their confinement were the fear and the boredom; for, though a later Beauchamp resident, the Catholic Earl of Arundel, complained of the ‘unwholesome air’, the actual living conditions of life in the Tower were not always too difficult. Prisoners could bring with them their own servants, pay for their own furnishings and food (the Dudleys certainly had bedding, and books) - even have their pets brought in. The daily diet of Somerset’s widow in the Tower the year before had included a supper (after an even more substantial dinner) of beer and wine, mutton and potage, coneys, sliced beef, a dozen larks and roast mutton with bread; plate, mustard and salads to be provided by the Lieutenant of the Tower.

  While the Dudleys and Mary Tudor had contested for the country, Mary’s sister, by contrast, had stayed completely silent. Enclosed at Hatfield, Elizabeth took no part in the fray. To have staked a claim of her own to the throne would have been neither a practical nor, for her, an ethical possibility. Too many of the Protestant party might have followed Jane (though many were in fact supporting Mary, out of civil rather than religious loyalty). More important, by the dynastic rules to which Elizabeth herself subscribed, the throne did for the moment belong to Mary - their father had willed it so - even though she must already have hoped that Mary would not hold it for too long. Now she wrote to Mary, offering her congratulations, and herself rode into London just ten days after her sister had been proclaimed in the city. Her huge escort - some said as many as two thousand horse - constituted, perhaps, a silent reminder of what she might have done had she too cast her hat into the ring; a convoluted demonstration of loyalty. On 3 August she rode directly behind Mary when the new Queen formally entered the city. Family pride and practicality, this time, had set Elizabeth in direct opposition to any Dudley. Elizabeth and Mary had both alike been publicly declared ‘illegitimate and not lawfully begotten in the estate of true matrimony’. But it would be interesting to know what was in her heart as - smiling and dressed in white - she watched her sister ride ahead, triumphantly; an apparently smooth moment in Elizabeth’s fortune, at a time of fear and distress for the Dudleys.

  Elizabeth can have had at best mixed feelings about John Dudley’s death. He had tried to deprive her of her place in the succession. But the moment when it seemed Dudley loss was the triumph of both Tudor sisters proved to be brief indeed. And if it had seemed that, of the Dudley family and Elizabeth, one was in and the other out, like figures on a weather vane, then very soon it became clear that they were more like companions in adversity.

  Elizabeth would later describe the relationship between queen and country as a marriage. In Mary’s case the honeymoon was over almost immediately - as, too, was the brief community of interest between the sisters. Religion was the sticking point, needless to say. As early as September, Elizabeth felt it necessary to make the first move, begging an interview with her sister in which she pleaded mere ignorance of, rather than hostility to, the Catholic faith, ‘having been brought up in the [Protestant] creed which she professed’, and requested instructors. A few days later she duly attended Mary’s Chapel Royal, but with an ostentatiously ‘suffering air’ that gave a coded message to her supporters; a typically Elizabethan compromise. At the end of September she rode behind the new Que
en on the way to her coronation - but very soon, the Venetian ambassador noted that Mary was treating her sister with fresh hostility. As Mary painfully, obstinately, rerouted the past - causing Parliament to declare valid the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon - so old bitterness revived. Mary even contemplated having her sister removed from the succession, but that was not so easy. And she, like her advisers, must have hoped it would soon be unnecessary. When Elizabeth asked permission to leave court in December, her absence must have been the more welcome - to both sisters - for the fact that Mary was about to marry.

  In the event, the repercussions of Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain would give Elizabeth as good a reason as anything in her childhood to decide that queens regnant (they, at least!) should never marry: a political, rather than a personal, urge to chastity. Some of the dangers inherent in the match were already obvious now, at the end of 1553. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had proposed his son Philip as Mary’s husband almost before the ink was dry on the letters that announced her accession. At the end of October, Mary had agreed. Only a fortnight later Parliament (more unanimous than her divided councillors) had presented a petition that she reconsider, and marry within the realm. Mary’s reply was singular, based less on the protection of a powerful Spanish alliance than on her personal preference. ‘Where private persons in such cases follow their own private tastes, sovereigns may reasonably challenge an equal liberty.’ Mary’s sister Elizabeth, when the time came, would order her priorities differently.

  From the start, the Spanish marriage met with the deepest public hostility: when an Imperial embassy arrived in London in the first days of 1554, even the schoolboys in the streets threw snowballs at them. Within weeks came news of the so-called Wyatt rebellion, the aim of which was to depose Mary, replacing her on the throne with Elizabeth. Its underlying impetus was the fear that if nothing were done, England would become a mere adjunct to the vast Habsburg empire. The Wyatt rebellion was in theory an impressive plan - a series of co-ordinated risings (with possible backing from France) to take place across Kent, the south-west, the Midlands and the Welsh Marches. But the plots were leaked in early January, and it was only Wyatt himself who, at the end of that month, marched on London with a Kentish army.