Appendix I: The second Robert Dudley
THE YOUNGER ROBERT DUDLEY - LEICESTER’S ACKNOWLEDGED BUT illegitimate son - was brought up under his father’s auspices, his mother having (she said) been frightened into relinquishing him before her own marriage to Edward Stafford at the end of 1579, when the boy was around five years old. The young Robin went to live with his father’s kinsman John Dudley, in Stoke Newington, and it seems Leicester (like Douglass) visited him there, since a servant later remembered that Leicester did ‘very often times discover his love and care he had of his son, and the desire he had to have him receive good usage and education’. By 1583 (with Douglass and her new husband in Paris, and the elder but illegitimate boy’s prospects having fallen on the birth of Leicester’s legitimate heir), Leicester had sent the child to be tutored at Offington near the Sussex coast, Ambrose having property nearby.
He was only fourteen when Leicester entered him at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1587, with the rank of ‘an earl’s son’ and a notable tutor in the shape of Thomas Chaloner, who would go on to tutor James’s son Prince Henry. The following year he begged to be allowed to volunteer for Elizabeth’s army at Tilbury, where (or so he boasted) his father commissioned him as a colonel of foot, under the guidance of an older officer. Leicester’s sudden death put an end to a relationship that seems to have been unmarred by any resentment, and two years after that the death of Ambrose (to whom Leicester had left a life interest in his disposable lands, his son being still ‘young and casual’) left young Robert in possession of a great inheritance.
Leicester had died with huge cash debts: little short of £60,000, of which his wife would be required to repay the crown more than £20,000. ‘Touching my Bequests, they cannot be great, by Reason my Ability and Power is little, for I have not dissembled with the World my Estate, but have lived always above any Living I had (for which I am heartily sorry) lest that, through my many Debts, from Time to Time, some Men have taken Loss by me.’ (There were those moneys to the London merchants, from whom he had raised cash for the Netherlands . . . he desired his executors to satisfy everybody.) Elizabeth moved instantly to recover those moneys owed to her, even those that had been spent in her cause. (Fondness, as Camden noted, never lessened her sense of what was owed to her treasury.) But she concentrated her attentions on those properties that had been left to Lettice rather than those destined for the young Robert Dudley.
By the time the young Robert successfully took full possession of Kenilworth at last, another avenue of opportunity had opened up when his mother returned from Paris and was appointed lady of the bedchamber. He joined the fringes of the court - a young man ‘of exquisite stature, with a fair beard and noble appearance’, as he was later described - before being briefly banished for marrying (and kissing, in Elizabeth’s presence!) Margaret Cavendish, cousin to the famous explorer Thomas and sister-in-law to the travel writer Richard Hakluyt. The sea had, from his childhood, drawn young Robert’s ‘natural sympathy’; and now began his own long involvement with affairs maritime when he fitted out three ships to go venturing in the south seas - the Queen having firmly vetoed his desire to sail with them.
The failure of this expedition left him undaunted, and in 1594 he did indeed set sail himself, to test his carefully acquired skills in navigation on a voyage to the West Indies. The records of the journey show him to advantage, not only taking possession of the island of Trinidad in the Queen’s name, but winning the admiration of his sailors and establishing friendly relations with the Arawak people - ‘a finely shaped and gentle people, all naked and painted red’.
The ore he found proved to be not gold but marquisite; though he was given word of a town called El Dorado, only a few of his men were able to penetrate up the Orinoco; and back home, he found his voyage eclipsed by the almost simultaneous venture of Ralegh. But he had put into personal action his father’s dream of empire and interest in the sea. Shortly afterwards he sailed on the Cadiz expedition against the Spanish led by his half-brother Essex, who knighted him at the end of the voyage. The young Dudley had some part in Essex’s rebellion; but his involvement was not such as to incur any major penalty.
His first wife Margaret Cavendish having died of plague while he was in the West Indies, he married the daughter of a Kenilworth neighbour, Alice Leigh, and it may have been his new wife’s family who encouraged him to press the cause of his legitimacy. He first approached an ecclesiastical court, where less stringent inquiries would be made into the supposed marriage, and where his reluctant mother would not be asked to testify. This attempt, however, came to an end when, in October 1603, Robert Sidney arrived with a mandate from the privy council, moving the case to the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber.
Dudley’s timing had been appalling. Elizabeth, had he launched his claim some months earlier, might well have been sympathetic. But the new King James was determined to reward those who had been helpful to him, which included the martyred Essex (as represented by his mother Lettice) and Robert Sidney; while Leicester had been high on the list of those James felt necessary to blame for his mother’s execution. The identification of the crown with the opponents to young Dudley’s case was shown when it was announced they would be represented by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke, on whose advice Lettice charged Dudley and all his associates with defamation of character.
80The trial opened in June 1604, and by this time Douglass had been persuaded by her son’s urgency to rally to the cause. Douglass’s description of her wedding ceremony was supported by five witnesses who had already given written testimony, but these Coke dismissed as being ‘all not worth a frieze jerkin’. The most material among them were, after all, servants or people of lower rank - ‘a base and poor carpenter’, ‘a common drunkard’, ‘a lying tailor’ - the aristocratic witnesses to the wedding being dead. Even the single most important witness, Douglass’s gentlewoman Magdalen Salisbury, was dismissed as being ‘an infamous instrument’, procured for pay.
81The papers kept in Robert Sidney’s family include reports about one Mr Christmas, a companion of Leicester’s who (said someone who had known Christmas’s servant thirty years before) had tried to dissuade the earl from the match, and claimed until his last hour that ‘had it not been for him’ then Leicester and Douglass would have been married; but, as it was . . . One Owen Jones had been examined. He had been a servant hired by Leicester to wait on the young Robert, and claimed that Leicester once said to him, ‘Owen, thou knowest that Robin, my boy, is my lawful son; and as I do charge thee to keep it secret, so I charge thee be careful of him.’ It was an important part of Robert Dudley’s case; but Owen had taken money from him, and was now described, in the report to Robert Sidney, as ‘a lewd fellow’, who could easily be ‘laid out in his [true] colours’. (And indeed, Sidney’s agent pointed out with some reason ‘how unlikely it was to be true that [Owen] should be of my lord’s secrets and know these matters’.
There were lists of questions to be put to family friends:
Do you know or believe in your conscience that the said Earl was ever lawfully married to Douglasse Lady Sheffield?
Did the Earl ever say to you that he was married to her?
Hath not the Lady Sheffield many times since the birth of Sir Robert Dudley said unto you that she was never married to the said Earl of Leicester?
Did not the said Earl in all conferences betwixt you and him always accompte Sir Robert Dudley to be his base son?
A ‘statement of case for Counsel: together with Counsel’s opinion thereon’ declared that:
A marriage is pretended [claimed] to be secretly celebrated in a chamber in anno 15 Eliz. [the fifteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign] between A [the Earl of Leicester] and B [the Lady Sheffield]. This marriage is never published: the parties do never cohabit as man and wife ... A and B both subsequently marry. A married C and B marries E. The marriage of A and C is never contradicted by B by suit on the Ecclesiastical Court nor does B ever claim any marriage with A but always . . . protesteth she was never married to A but only promised marriage by A.
But in fact, it was not the events of 1573, but those of 1603, upon which Robert Sidney and Lettice made their case.
Robert Dudley’s witnesses in the hearing at Lichfield, so his opponents claimed, were ‘all suborned and long time before and after maintained with meat, drink, lodging and apparel by the plaintiff in this suit’. Three of the witnesses said the marriage had been in ‘anno 15 Eliz.’, but two others said it had been in anno 14. Two out of that first three said it had been at Assher (Esher) House in Surrey in that year, where they had been in Douglass’s service; but other witnesses could be found who claimed Douglass was never at Esher then, and that indeed it was anno 17 before the pair became Douglass’s servants. Counsel’s opinion was that witnesses being once ‘disabled, shall be of no credit’. (And as for Douglass’s own testimony, when counsel was asked, ‘Of what force in law will be the affirmation of B to prove the marriage, being party &c.’, the answer came: ‘We take it the affirmation of the said B not to be anything available in law to prove the said marriage.’)
Coke’s demand that Dudley’s witnesses ‘should be damned’ formed the basis of the decision of Star Chamber, who took until 10 May 1605 to deliver their judgment, having examined more than 150 witnesses. Dudley’s three chief witnesses were fined and declared for ever suspect, and the Star Chamber further ordained that all the depositions should be ‘sealed up and suppressed until the King should order the enclosures to be broken’, thereby impeding further enquiry. A later lawyer called the judgment ‘infamous’, and even in its day it received some comment. ‘The matter of marriage was not handled at all,’ wrote Rowland White to Gilbert Talbot, now the new Earl of Shrewsbury, ‘only the practice was proved [Dudley’s legal methods were queried] in the proceedings’. Through the centuries since, it has been riveting to trace the labyrinthine path of the legal manoeuvres, but impossible to reach any hard conclusions about the original story.
The seventeenth-century antiquary Sir William Dugdale (author of Antiquities of Warwickshire, and of Baronage) did manage to see copies of the witness depositions in the library of Sir Robert Cotton; and his conclusion was that on the whole, whatever ceremony had taken place at Esher (and no-one seemed to deny there had been something, in an age when a betrothal was attended by as much ceremonial as a wedding day) would have constituted a valid marriage. (And, he added, in a belt and braces kind of way, the couple’s cohabitation and their child together would be enough, combined with any kind of contract, to constitute a marriage anyway.) Dugdale’s decision was influenced by the claim that Leicester had told a servant (Owen Jones?) that Robert was his true son, and ‘likewise by what Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, had uttered, which for brevity’s sake I omit’. One wishes he had been less brief: in 1731 many of the Cotton manuscripts were destroyed by fire, and later researchers were unable to find Ambrose’s statement, or to echo Dugdale’s certainty.
In 1824 Sir John Shelley-Sidney of Penshurst tried to establish his claim to the barony of Lisle and Dudley, by then in abeyance, but the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords rejected his request, which could have been granted only if the descendants of Robert Dudley could be declared illegitimate with certainty. But in 1899 Sir George Warner, writing an introduction to The Voyage of Robert Dudley to the West Indies (Hakluyt Society, second series 3) examined all the documents he could lay his hands on and decided the marriage was not valid . . . Perhaps the most one can say with certainty is that the very manner of proceeding of Robert Dudley’s opponents suggests that he did have some sort of a case that could not have been dismissed by more straightforward means.
Within weeks of the final failure of his claim, Robert Dudley left England in disgust. Though he and Alice had been married almost ten years, and had a bevy of young daughters, he took with him on his travels a page who proved, once safely in France, to be the young beauty of the court (and his own distant kinswoman) Elizabeth Southwell. They were married with the aid of a papal dispensation that forgave them their consanguinity, but made no mention of the fact that Robert was married already, presumably because it had been an Anglican ceremony. He was long a loving husband to Elizabeth, and father to their children, but never again showed any interest in Alice or in their daughters; displaying at last, it was said, almost a resentful pleasure in doing ‘what his father, as he contended, had been allowed to do with impunity’. He abandoned his lands, which were sequestered by the crown; Kenilworth (purchased for a knock-down price) eventually became part of Queen Henrietta Maria’s marriage portion, before falling victim to parliamentary forces when the outer, defensible, portions were ‘slighted’ - destroyed - during the Civil War.
82Robert and Elizabeth having converted to Catholicism, they made their way to Florence, where Ferdinand de Medici was waging a naval war against the Turks and could use the services of a young man who already had theoretical and practical experience of fitting vessels for the sea. Dudley’s interests were enormously wide, with his mathematics and astronomy, his experiments in medicine and civil engineering, his invention for use in the silk industry (like his father’s concern for the cloth trade!) - and the pamphlet he once wrote, in the hope of regaining King James’s favour, suggesting money-making mechanisms for the monarchy, and control by standing army. ‘In policy there is a greater tie of the people by force and necessity than merely by love and affection . . .’ He would be responsible not only for some important new designs in shipbuilding, but for the draining of the Tuscan marshes and the creation of the port of Livorno (and, since many of the thirteen children he had with Elizabeth survived and married well, for a fair proportion of the Italian nobility).
83Dudley’s career in Tuscany lasted until his death in 1649. Though James sequestered his English estates, Europe acknowledged the titles he claimed - even his grandfather’s title of Duke of Northumberland - and he retained the favour both of the Medici and of the papacy, which gave him the singular honour of allowing him the right of mapping out his own order of chivalry. When he gave up his practical responsibilities he kept high ceremonial rank (though never political power) as Grand Chamberlain at the Florentine court, thanks to the favour of three successive grand duchesses. In his last years, as Charles I finally issued a letter of redress accepting his legitimacy, he published his great work of charts and navigations, Dell’arcano de mare, and plans for the future exploration of the sea. Leicester would have been pleased. Elizabeth too, maybe.