Elizabeth and Leicester

Elizabeth was not reared specifically for the throne. She had no actual training in statecraft, of the sort that was crammed into Edward (and had, at one time, been given to Mary, who before she was ten had been declared Princess of Wales, while governorship of the principality was formally - if briefly - turned over to herself and her advisers). All the same, Elizabeth too was given a royal training in the most important sense: that she was educated like a boy, instead of being fobbed off with the informal and domestic training traditional for a girl.

Katherine of Aragon had received her education at the hands of her formidable mother, Isabella of Castile, and it had been formal and rigorous. Anne Boleyn had had her - also impressive - training, with a different gloss, at what was effectively the finishing school of the great European households. She was still a child when she was entrusted to the care of Margaret, the Regent of the Netherlands, and reared with the three Habsburg girls who would become the queens of France (and Portugal), of Denmark and of Hungary. In a centre of humanist studies, famed for its painting and music, Anne was trained in not only the literary but the worldly arts of the courtier. Elizabeth, of course, would end up skilled in both spheres; but the actual training she got was more akin to the model Katherine had instituted for her daughter: the model of royalty.

In 1536 Elizabeth’s household had been augmented by a Devonshire gentlewoman, Kat (Katherine) Champernowne, whose subsequent marriage to a cousin of Anne Boleyn’s gave her her better-known name of Kat Ashley (or Astley). It was she who first, Elizabeth later said, took ‘great labour and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty’; and though Kat’s later career has left lasting doubts as to her sense and scruples, her learning seems to have been well up to the task of instructing Elizabeth’s first steps. The young princess started to acquire fluent French (though a Frenchman later mocked her clumsy accent), Italian, Spanish and even Flemish; history and geography, astronomy and mathematics, as well as dancing and riding, music and embroidery. As she would write later, in her teens: ‘the face, I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present’.

In later years, Elizabeth’s formidable list of skills and accomplishments made up part of her equipment as a ruler. But at the time it must have been a little unclear for just what destiny, in fact, she was being educated. The grand marriage that was conventional for royal daughters already looked unlikely for her (or for Mary). When she was a baby she had been displayed ‘quite naked’ to French ambassadors, with a view to betrothing her to the French king’s younger son - but that was before she was declared bastard. When illegitimate Elizabeth, daughter of the Protestant adulteress, was offered for a Habsburg nephew, Charles V received the offer coldly. Even Henry’s own council noted that the girls were unlikely to be marriageable abroad unless they were made ‘of some estimation’ at home. The mature Elizabeth would be famous for her appetite for flattery - her urge to keep herself desirable, but ultimately unattainable. Perhaps that later attitude was coloured by this experience of knowing herself a drug on the market, before she was restored to the succession and to marriageability.

Robert’s education, meanwhile, was not being neglected. Through the boy’s early years, his father’s fortunes rose steadily. At the time Anne Boleyn died, John Dudley was already a friend and sometimes business partner of Edward Seymour, the brother of Henry’s third queen, Jane. John and his wife held office under Anne of Cleves as Master of Horse and lady-in-waiting. (They would also be close to Katherine Parr. You could say that they did well out of Henry’s marital history.) Their sons were educated at home, not - as was so common among the English nobility - sent away to another noble house or, as would soon become possible, to a school. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, as Edmund Dudley had once written, the English nobility were ‘the worst brought up for the most part of any realm in Christendom’. John Dudley would not make that mistake; though possessed himself of only moderate linguistic and literary training, he had all the respect for book-based education to be expected from one who enthusiastically followed his royal master into the new religion and the new learning. Robert’s mother Jane Dudley had herself been well educated on elevated lines; her uncle was one of Katherine of Aragon’s closest supporters, so that Jane’s youthful times at court had brought her into contact not only with Princess Mary, but also with the future Katherine Parr, whose mother was one of Katherine of Aragon’s most respected ladies-in-waiting.

The programme laid down some years later for the twelve-year-old Earl of Oxford gives some idea of that the Dudley boys might have followed. (There was little idea of segregating children, or their studies, according to age.) Dancing, French, Latin, writing and drawing from early in the morning (for even lie-abed Londoners rose at six) until the ten-thirty break for prayers and dinner; then from one o’clock more of the same, with a little cosmography. This - a mixture of geography and astrology, with oddments from natural science and anthropology - was likely, to judge by the eagerness of his future patronage of explorers and merchant adventurers, to have been one of Robert’s favourite subjects.

John Dudley’s personal interests led him towards the more practical subjects of study. Astronomy could be used for navigation, and mathematics had, after all, an application in ballistics; like history, it was considered useful to a nobleman for the conduct of a war. Dudley’s professional interests were naval as well as military, and the presence of seafarers and explorers like Cabot around his house must have meant that his sons were vividly aware of the romantic possibilities offered by the new frontiers of the sixteenth century. At some point in his early career, Robert came under the extraordinary influence of ‘Dr’ John Dee, the scientist and astrologer who had himself been a pupil at Cambridge of John Cheke, and who would later be called in to give lessons in cosmography to the explorers Elizabeth and Robert both patronized.⁶ Such company cannot but have helped fire an imagination to which the age gave ample fuel. The adventurers of the late Tudor era brought back stories of ‘extreme and horrible cold’, of perpetual days ‘upon a huge and mighty sea’, where might be found the unicorn’s horn (probably from a narwhal) that Frobisher would present to the crowned Elizabeth; of the giant ‘oliphant’ and its strange snout; of lands dripping with sweet gums.

Besides lecturing the explorers, Dee, in the years Robert and his siblings remained close to him, would speak to spirits through his mediums - or so he said, and why should any doubt it? If the tales of the travellers could be true, then why should those other realms of the imagination not also open themselves to man’s curiosity? Why should the grown-up Robert not subscribe with the same hopes to an experiment to turn iron into copper and to the Muscovy Company? Elizabeth and Robert both shared the age’s belief in the supernatural: how could Elizabeth not, when her mother had been suspected of witchcraft? (And what besides magic, after all, was the coronation ceremony that transformed a fallible, fleshly, ‘natural’ woman into the earthly embodiment of the body politic, a being so endowed with grace that even her touch could cure certain maladies?) If Robert was to become Elizabeth’s ‘Eyes’, as she called him, then perhaps one thing he helped to show her was this amazing new world of earth and sky.

Noble children read the classical authors like Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Livy, to pick up precepts, pithy pieces of wisdom and an elegant turn of phrase; they might be taught logic and rhetoric to the same end. Robert’s linguistic and literary gifts would never compare with Elizabeth’s. In later life the great educationalist Roger Ascham, famous for his part in Elizabeth’s training, would chide him: ‘I think you did yourself injury in changing Tully’s wisdom for Euclid’s pricks and lines.’ But other Renaissance scholars valued more highly the newly fashionable geometry of Euclid, as well as the observations of Pliny and Ptolemy. And Robert seems, later in life, to have acquired a working knowledge of the languages he needed. Music was essential; even barber shops kept a lute so that customers might amuse themselves while waiting in the queue. Robert’s later inventory included lutes, flutes and virginals, a particularly fine collection of paintings, and chessmen of crystal set with precious stones. The old requirements that a gentleman should be a fighter and a sportsman were changing (like the old medieval curriculum of learning); Castiglione’s The Courtier had been published in Italy in 1528, and although it was not published in England for more than thirty years after that, the Italian’s ideal of a connoisseur and conversationalist, a dancer and a diplomat, was current far earlier.

Even the idea of a young gentleman’s education given by so dedicated a scholar as Roger Ascham included ‘courtly exercises’ as well as book learning: ‘to ride comely, to run fair at the tilt or ring, to play at all weapons, to shoot fair in bow and surely in gun, to vault lustily, to run, to leap, to wrestle, to swim, to dance comely, to sing and play at instruments cunningly, to hawk, to hunt, to play at tennis . . .’; and Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor (first published in 1531 and often reprinted) describes the training that would build a young nobleman’s ‘hardness, strength and agility and to help therewith himself in peril, which may happen in wars or other necessity’. The hunting in which Robert and Elizabeth both delighted was seen as a training for war. Robert would early have been taught to fight with a variety of weapons: not only the staff and the pike, and the broadsword, but also the rapier. Archery was a required skill for boys and men of all ranks; with invasion from abroad a recurrent possibility, it was obligatory to keep bows for children over seven. At the time of Robert Dudley’s death (a time when archery, while still compulsory, was becoming perhaps a little old-fashioned), the inventory of his possessions would include 280 bows, with their arrows.

As the years wore on and the children grew, John Dudley took a lease on Ely Place, Holborn, as a town base in which to house his brood. The rambling fourteenth-century mansion, once the London residence of the Bishop of Ely, was a huge sprawling complex of courtyards and cloisters, state rooms and gardens. Robert thus had an early training in the ways not only of the court, but of London. Those who lived there knew the problems of the overcrowded city, where pestilence was a perennial threat. But the criers offering fresh periwinkles and ripe cowcumbers, the footpads and great fairs, the busy sparkling river and stinking alleys must have been colourful and romantic enough to attract a rich man’s son, escorted by servants through the cramped, lively streets on an occasional holiday. For in the sixteenth century Ely Place itself would almost have been in the country, or at least the healthy suburbs where plague was less of a danger. Contemporary maps show the rectangular flower and fruit beds of the huge enclosed space behind the palace, large as a market garden. Shakespeare wrote of the strawberry beds of Ely Place; and when Queen Elizabeth forced a later bishop of Ely to lease the house to another favourite, he stipulated that he should be able to pick a bushel of roses - some versions said an extraordinary twenty bushels - from the garden each year.⁷

This was a time when London meant the City of London; when royalty could ride in the green spaces between the city walls and the royal complex of Westminster and Whitehall, and hounds kill their quarry in St Giles; when laundrywomen laid their sheets to dry on Moorfields; and when Covent Garden was literally the property of a monastery - one of the many whose inhabitants were turned out of doors in the first years of Robert’s childhood, in the successive depredations of the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1536 London saw its smaller monasteries, like Kilburn Priory, fall; in 1539, the larger, like Southwark and St Bartholomew’s, went the same way; and in 1540, finally, there followed the suppression of Westminster Abbey. No-one was better placed to profit from this dispossession than the King’s henchman John Dudley. But the head of the Holy Maid of Kent (executed for daring to prophesy disaster if the King married Anne Boleyn) on London Bridge, and the limb of the executed prior of Charterhouse nailed up over his monastery doors, must have spelt a kind of warning to any family for whom Edmund Dudley’s death was a recent memory. Violent death by process of law haunted both Tudors and Dudleys.

In later life Robert and Elizabeth each made one recorded statement - just one - concerning their relationship before her accession day. Robert’s, made to the French ambassador in 1566, was that he had known Elizabeth ‘from her eighth year’ (known her ‘better than any man on earth’; and that, since that time, she had invariably declared she would never marry). The passing of that eighth year brings us to the autumn of 1541 - a point at which several things were about to happen.

In 1542 Robert’s father was elevated to the peerage, increasing the possibility that his sons might be placed in the young Prince Edward’s household; and Elizabeth, for the first time since babyhood, spent time with her father Henry. Over the next few years, both Robert and Elizabeth would be in and out of court circles. The children of prominent courtiers were often roped in as classroom companions for juvenile royalty, and the scholars who enjoyed John Dudley’s patronage included the tutor to the royal children, John Cheke. It is dangerous to paint, as some writers have done, too sure a picture of a childhood friendship between Robert and Elizabeth. But their circles overlapped to such an extent that some degree of contact is a virtual certainty - and would have been even without the friendship between Katherine Parr, the King’s last wife, and Jane Dudley.

Because something else had happened in 1542. That February, Elizabeth’s kinswoman - giddy, sexy Katherine Howard - died on the block, with unexpected bravery. Where her cousin Anne had cracked jokes about her ‘little neck’, Katherine asked to have a rehearsal of the execution ceremony: this, at least, she wanted to do properly. But Elizabeth was not close enough to Kat to suffer in her fall (unlike her aunt, George Boleyn’s widow, Lady Rochford). When, in the summer of 1543, the King married Katherine Parr, Jane Dudley was one of the few present at the ceremony. The first surviving letter to contain some hint of the news was written by John Dudley, reporting that Katherine was ‘here at court’ in Greenwich with Mary and Elizabeth.

After the wedding, while Mary stayed at court, Elizabeth was returned to the schoolroom - to the company of Edward, and those around him. But the new couple’s progress brought them round to Ashridge, and to the inhabitants of the royal schoolroom. English ambassadors abroad, used to passing off the latest scandal, found themselves asked, as a novelty, whether it was true that the English royal family lived now as one household? For Elizabeth, it was perhaps the nearest thing she would ever know to ordinary family life. At the beginning of 1544 Henry - now aged fifty-two, and with no sign of the longed-for second son - laid down another Act of Succession. If he had no further child, if Edward died without heir, then the throne passed to Mary; if she too died childless, to Elizabeth. That is a lot of ‘ifs’ - and nothing was done about removing the stigma of bastardy. But all three of Henry’s children were there at a formal dinner in May 1544 to mark the betrothal of the King’s niece Margaret Douglas to the Scottish Earl of Lennox.

In July came a kind of break-up of the family group. As the King himself set off to the wars in France, Prince Edward was to move into Hampton Court, where there had been constructed a ‘Prince’s side’, a shadow establishment above a sunny small court, next to the Chapel Royal, with the prince’s chamber between that of the master of his horse and his bowling alley; rooms that, to protect the prince’s most precious person from infection, were washed down three times a day.

It was those French wars of the 1540s that gave John Dudley his real opportunity. Appointed a general (like Edward Seymour, now Earl of Hertford), he had been raised to the peerage as Viscount Lisle in 1542 and, within another year, to the posts of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and Keeper of the Scottish Marches; to the head of the Admiralty and the Order of the Garter; and even to the privy council. In 1544 he was at the head of the army that quelled Scotland with professional ferocity, and then (heading rapidly southwards again) in command of the fleet that carried an English army to France. The recapture of Boulogne was in part his triumph - a coup of limited practical use, but a huge propaganda victory. Boulogne made Dudley a public hero, but at great personal cost: his eldest son, Robert’s elder brother, died in the affray.

So, when it was deemed time for the six-year-old Edward no longer to be brought up ‘among the women’, as he himself later put it, but given male tutors, the young nobles and ‘henchmen’ around him were always likely to have included some at least of the young Dudleys. The State Papers mention the appointment of the prince’s tutors ‘for the better instruction of the Prince and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend on him’. The fact that Robert was a few years older than Edward would have been no impediment: royalty was expected to show an unusual precocity.

Robert’s political education would have continued in the prince’s entourage. Every child in the royal service knew that they carried with them, like a heavy load of schoolbooks, the interests of their family. Robert, of course, was used to seeing his father conducting the business of governance at home, where he presided over sessions of the High Court of Admiralty and meetings of the Navy Board he himself had founded. But he was learning another kind of politics, too (at a different level from Elizabeth): learning how a huge household meshed together; how this microcosm of a world, with its wildly differing social strata, functioned and was managed.

The young lords around the prince had their own tutors, preachers, masters. But they must surely also have rubbed up against the different rank of rowdy ‘boys’ who feature so regularly in the kitchen ordinances. It is still possible to walk round Hampton Court today and get some sense of the bustle of those huge kitchens, as organized as any factory: kitchens where the game hung in larders on the shady side of the passage, and the pastry chefs and confectioners needed the drier side of this small street to prepare their ‘subtleties’ and their huge pork pies; where rabbits came fresh-killed from pens in the grounds, and carp from the palace fishponds were cooked with prunes to supplement the crab and the bream, the plaice or even porpoise, that arrived packed in seaweed every day.

During his absence abroad, the King left Queen Katherine to govern in his stead, and to keep her state amid the colour of the great hall: its friezes and tapestries and painted roof; its green and white tiles on the floor (and its carvings from which not quite all the letters HA - Henry and Anne - had been excised successfully). Elizabeth was with her stepmother’s court, watching the skill with which she presided. Until she was eleven or so, Elizabeth’s education had been slightly erratic, requiring lessons from Edward’s teachers, Dr Richard Cox and Sir John Cheke, to supplement the efforts of Kat Ashley. In 1544, however, she was given her own tutor, William Grindal, who was not only a fine Latinist and a notable Grecian but also a pupil of the great Ascham. Ascham himself, a friend of Kat Ashley and her husband, taught the royal brother and sister the difficult italic hand, sent books of prayers, mended Elizabeth’s ‘silver pen’, wrote frequently and, on visits, joined them in archery. Elizabeth owed a lot to his famously progressive ideas, rare at a time when common belief held that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Ascham, by contrast, urged Kat Ashley to ‘favour somewhat’ Elizabeth’s agile young intelligence: ‘the younger, the more tender, the quicker, the easier to break’. Just as influential, however, must have been the position of Ascham, Ashley and all their circle in the vanguard of the reformed faith, along with Katherine Parr’s own advanced views.

Robert, too, would have been learning strict Protestant tenets - indeed, he would later boast that he had been reared in them ‘from my cradle’. If Robert spent time with his father, he was in the company of one of the two men the Spanish ambassador called ‘these stirrers of heresy’ (the other being Jane Seymour’s brother, the Earl of Hertford) - adding that both men’s wives were using their religious influence on Queen Katherine. If Robert were attendant on the young Edward, then he was living at the court of a prince who (precociously and, it has to be said, not terribly likeably) insisted on being given a copy of every sermon he heard, and quizzing his adolescent companions on the content of it. The latter part of Robert’s career would amount to a crusade for what would come to be called puritanism; a cause pursued with such commitment, so often privately expressed, that it could only be sincere, little though it might seem to fit with the image of the popinjay. His tenets, indeed, would in the end be considerably more radical than Elizabeth’s.

In 1544 (in a startlingly elaborate showpiece letter) Elizabeth wrote to Queen Katherine that ‘Inimical Fortune, envious of all good, she who revolves things human, has deprived me for a whole year of your most illustrious presence’. But by 1546 Elizabeth was of an age to be brought to court and live under her stepmother’s eye as lady-in-waiting: after Mary, the first of the ladies ‘accustomed to be lodged within the King’s Majesty’s house’. When she arrived, she might have been greeted by a painting (now in Hampton Court, where it had been hung by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign) that embodied in one huge canvas her place in the royal family.

The shape of the anonymous painting, The Family of Henry VIII, is so oddly elongated as to invite speculation that it may have been designed for deletion as necessary - cut down, perhaps, to the point of leaving only the trinity at its core. In the centre sits Henry himself enthroned, with the young Edward at his right hand, and at his left the long-dead Jane Seymour, as mother of the all-important boy. (No sign of Queen Katherine, although she had married Henry in 1543; and it is unlikely the painting was made that early.) These three are framed in a network of gilded pillars. Outside the magic circle - framed by another set of rather less conspicuous pillars - stand the two royal daughters, separately: Mary, as elder, to Henry’s right, and Elizabeth to his left.

In December 1546 the message of the portrait was ratified by the King’s will, which confirmed Elizabeth’s place in the succession, after any heirs of her brother or Mary. Each daughter was left £3,000 a year until she married, with a further £10,000 to be made as a single payment on that marriage - but only if it were made with the approval of the privy council. Should Elizabeth marry without such approval, she would be out of the succession itself, ‘as though the said Lady Elizabeth were then dead’.

But it was Henry himself who was dying. One recent theory suggests that he was suffering from Cushing’s Syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder, which would account for the bloated face that stared grimly out of later portraits, and for the massive bulk of the body. It can cause irritability, depression, aggression, psychosis - and, in men, impotence - as well as the fatty deposits on face and trunk so conspicuous in the pictures. But it remains possible that the fairly unspecific set of symptoms Henry exhibited could have been caused by general self-indulgence and debility; or by the lingering effects of that jousting injury, which produced recurrent agonizing abscesses on his legs, while forbidding him to exercise in any way.

When, on 28 January 1547, King Henry died, his brother-in-law Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, rode out to Hertfordshire to collect the new child king - telling him only, however, that he had to return to London to be invested as Prince of Wales, and waiting till they halted to spend the night with Elizabeth at Enfield before breaking the news to both children together. Their shared grief, however, was the last moment at which brother and sister would meet together on anything like equal terms. From now on, the one was King and the other subject. While her brother moved straight into the dramas of Henry’s funeral and his own coronation (a rushed progression of less than three weeks), Elizabeth was not present at either ceremony.

It is far more likely that Robert was there as the new Edward VI heard Archbishop Cranmer assure the congregation that he himself was now accountable only to God; and that to God was he answerable for the reformations of his church. Robert’s father, after all, would wish to display his new dignities as Earl of Warwick, the title bestowed upon him a few days before the ceremony. Edward Seymour, already Earl of Hertford, became also Duke of Somerset and, more to the point, took for himself the title of Lord Protector during Edward’s minority.