Elizabeth and Leicester

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 spoken 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.

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 Queen 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.

Some of the government troops, even, went over to Wyatt, rather than be ruled by ‘Spaniards or strangers’. But Mary herself showed to advantage in this crisis, riding to rally her troops in the City. She loved her subjects, she told them, ‘as the mother doth the child’. She would never marry ‘but [unless] all her true subjects shall be content’. The subtext would prove to be that if you weren’t content, you weren’t true, but at the time it went down nicely. London stood; Wyatt surrendered his arms and was taken to the Tower, already a dead man walking. Within a few days of the rebellion’s end, a stream of fresh prisoners were headed for the crowded fortress, there to join the Dudleys.

Wyatt’s revolt brought a new climate of toughness. It may be no coincidence that in January 1554 Robert too had to walk through the streets with a headsman before him, and to give the automatic plea of guilty; had to hear a court pronounce the verdict that he should be hung, drawn and quartered, knowing that the sentence would not necessarily be carried out - or not immediately - and not in its full enormity . . . but that anything was still a possibility. Almost half a century before, in the same Tower, his grandfather Edmund, in the weeks between his arrest and his trial, had described himself as ‘a dead man by the king’s laws’, and was then kept waiting for almost another year before the time came for him to die. Robert was the last of his family to come to trial. Henry and Ambrose Dudley had been tried and sentenced back in November, along with Guildford Dudley and his wife Lady Jane Grey. It is possible that since most of Robert’s activities had been in Norfolk (and in an area that owed him loyalty), evidence could not easily be gathered against him.

Mary’s councillors - and the Spanish ambassador - urged that there should be an end to mercy. On 12 February 1554, the death sentence was carried out on Guildford Dudley. He was beheaded on Tower Hill: his wife (and presumably brothers) saw his body brought back, ‘his carcass thrown in a cart and his head in a cloth’. More was to follow. From their room in the Beauchamp Tower, the remaining brothers could have heard the thunk of the axe as Jane Grey too was beheaded, but this time within the Tower precincts, privately. Unless access was barred to them, the window of the Beauchamp Tower, where Robert stood to carve, would have given them a close, an immediate, a balcony view. But in any case, tales must have gone round the Tower, with all the details of the scene. How she struggled to adjust her clothing for the axe; how the executioner offered to help her until, revolted, she shrank away. How - with the scarf tied round her eyes, and panicking for a moment - she groped for the block, blindly. How (dignified still, but fearful at last) the seventeen-year-old had asked the headsman: ‘I pray you despatch me quickly.’

Elizabeth had been much more closely implicated in the Wyatt rebellion than Jane. Older, guiltier, more dangerous - if she escaped punishment, it could only be by a miracle. On 19 March the fallout from the revolt also brought Elizabeth to the Tower; and if the traditional arrival at Traitor’s Gate has proved to be a myth, the real drama was just as deadly.

On 9 February, two days after Wyatt’s rebellion folded, three privy councillors and a troop of soldiers had arrived at Elizabeth’s house at Ashridge to bring her to court. Her pleas of ill-health were not accepted, though her face and body were swollen with what might have been nephritis, or might have been a psychosomatic illness, and when she entered London on the twenty-third it was with the curtains of her litter thrown back, to defy rumours (the French ambassador said) that the swelling was a pregnancy from ‘some vile intrigue’ - the anonymous lover with whom gossip so regularly credited her. The sound of the axe might have beat the time to her journey: Jane Grey died on the day Elizabeth set out, and Jane’s father on the day she arrived. The Spanish ambassador had long reported that Elizabeth too would die, surely.

In Whitehall Palace, while the Queen refused to see her sister, the process of collecting evidence went on. There was no difficulty in showing that the rebels had suggested to Elizabeth trouble might be brewing; that members of her household had been in touch with Wyatt; even that she had kept the French informed of her movements. But had she known, specifically, that rebellion was planned? Had she agreed to it, specifically? Wyatt himself, throughout his trial on 15 March, played down all contact with her. On 17 March, a Friday, the council none the less came to Elizabeth and charged her with conspiracy. She denied it, passionately - but her servants were taken away. The next day the councillors came to take her to the Tower; Elizabeth implored, first, to be allowed to make a written plea to her sister - a document with desperation breathing through every line. (She even scored across the blank space below where her writing ended to prevent anyone’s adding in any other matter that could be interpreted treasonably.) That letter bought her the turn of the tide, and it was Palm Sunday before her boat set off downriver in the rain.

We do, now, have to add a pinch of salt to the old pretty stories that once painted such a romantic picture of the captive princess. Elizabeth arrived not by water through Traitor’s Gate, but by land past the roaring lions of the menagerie. She was held not in the fairytale turret of the Bell Tower, but more prosaically in the old royal palace - since the Tower was a royal dwelling place as well as a prison; and a mint, and a zoo, and an armoury. Physically, the terms of her imprisonment were not harsh; though the Tower had dark dungeons, they were not for such as her. She had four rooms; permission to walk in the privy gardens (though other prisoners, so her chronicler John Speed reported, were not even to look in that direction while she was there); and a dozen servants in close attendance. But when the councillors left her there, they turned the keys in the door - albeit with a few doubts as to whether it were really appropriate to her royalty. And there was a mixed message to be read even in the rooms themselves: rebuilt for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, they were also those in which she stayed before her execution, and the omen cannot but have struck Elizabeth unpleasantly.

Other romantic stories about her imprisonment were told by the chroniclers of her own day - for Protestants like Foxe and Speed made much of Elizabeth’s near-martyrdom in the Tower. One told of gaolers’ children who brought her flowers, and an old bunch of keys, in the infantine belief that the pretty lady captive could use them to get away. Another story - a whole long-lived legend! - told that the romance of Elizabeth and Robert began here, on the high walkway that connects the Beauchamp to the Bell Tower; began with snatched meetings as they were allowed each to take the warming spring air, promises of allegiance exchanged as they gazed westwards on the forbidden city . . . Sadly, there is no evidence for this at all; and indeed the scenario on the walkway loses some of its point now we know that Elizabeth was held not in the Bell Tower, but the whole width of the fortress away (and that Robert had permission to be visited by his wife, Amy).

But to prick the romantic bubble is not to deny that there could be a powerful and enduring emotional punch in this common experience of captivity. When Anne Boleyn heard that her brother George was also in the Tower, accused of incestuous adultery with her, she had said: ‘I am very glad that we both be so nigh together.’ Is there any kind of echo in these words for Elizabeth and Robert Dudley? Whether or not they actually met there, each would have known of the other’s presence and, if they already shared some measure of friendship, they could not fail to have felt an increased bond of sympathy. Both had now lost a parent to the headsman; and, even in the Tudor century, there were not many in that fraternity. But in some ways their experience of the Tower highlights the differences, as well as the similarities, between them. Elizabeth’s time there was more comfortable than Robert’s, as well as briefer; and her situation no more menacing. But through all these years she was wheeling and dealing alone. ‘Help me now, O God, for I have none other friend but Thee alone,’ she prayed. Those closest to her (like Seymour; like those servants who had been forced to tell damaging tales) served only to endanger her.

In the end, Elizabeth was in the Tower for only two of the eighteen months the Dudleys spent in captivity. Though her nerve may have quivered as she entered the place, it held fast as she was questioned. She admitted nothing. What written evidence there was proved nothing, really. And when Wyatt was executed on 11 April, his speech from the scaffold exonerated her completely. The terms of her imprisonment became lighter. When fresh guards appeared at the Tower early in May, she was still in a state to be terrified - asked whether Lady Jane’s scaffold had been taken away. But in fact, the guards were there to escort her away from the Tower, to house arrest in Woodstock. She left on 19 May.

No-one bounces back from a shock like that; not immediately. London legends have her leaving the Tower in a burst of bravado, and going straight to the London Tavern. But in fact, after leaving the Tower she slept at Richmond Palace, telling her servants, ‘[this night] I think to die’. Assassination might have been a possibility; her enemies at court had hoped to send her to Pontefract Castle, where Richard II had disappeared. But the slow journey to Woodstock showed how difficult such a procedure would be. The women of High Wycombe, the schoolboys of Eton and the villagers of Oxfordshire all turned out to greet her. When she reached the rusty and rambling old palace of Woodstock, outside Oxford (in what are today the grounds of Blenheim Palace), it was clear that she would have a fighting chance of controlling the terms of this comfortable captivity - of a tenancy that would last for a year. The council’s instructions had been that Elizabeth should communicate with nobody. But that was hard to enforce, when her own servants might come and go, and the Bull Inn in Woodstock (‘a marvellous colourable place to practice in’, in the bitter words of her gaoler) had become the headquarters of her trusted Thomas Parry.

As 1554 wore on, with Elizabeth at Woodstock and the Dudley brothers in the Tower, at the end of July Mary married Philip of Spain; and if the old Catholic marriage service she used had seemed to promise unqueenly compliance on her part, it seemed, too, as if Philip and his Spanish entourage were determined to prove that the worst fears of the English would not be fulfilled and to use his position as queen’s consort tactfully. Parliament would never grant Philip a matrimonial crown, nor any official authority. It would become a bone of dissent between Philip and Mary. But for the moment, everyone strove to do their duty smilingly. In Mary’s case there was no pretence. She loved her unenthusiastic husband passionately. In the autumn Mary, ecstatic, was convinced she was pregnant - with a child who would consolidate her marriage, confirm her husband’s status and ensure a Catholic future for the country.

The time was right for some improvement in the lives of the Dudley brothers. All the months of their imprisonment, their widowed mother had been working frantically for their freedom, attempting to bring all her old family contacts with Mary, and with Mary’s Spanish kindred, into play. No English courtier would help Jane Dudley - but the Spaniards proved more receptive, spurred thereto by the efforts of her son-in-law Sir Henry Sidney (married to Robert’s sister Mary), who was one of the diplomats sent to Spain on the marriage negotiations. Philip of Spain even stood godfather to Sir Henry’s new son, the baby who became Sir Philip Sidney. He arrived in England anxious to prove himself a friend to all the English nobility. Jane Dudley was allowed back to court; found friends in the Duchess of Alva and Don Diego de Mendoza, and other of Philip’s advisers, who were remembered in her will as those ‘who did my sons good’. ‘I give my lord Don Diego de Acevado the new bed of green velvet with all the furniture to it . . . to the duchess of Alba my green parrot, I have nothing worthy for her else.’

Still, her sons’ release was not easily won. In October John, the eldest, was set free to go to Sir Henry Sidney’s home of Penshurst - but only because he was sick of Tower fever. He died three days later: yet another loss in the terribly depleted family. Perhaps this last death took the heart from Jane Dudley. At the house in Chelsea which was all that remained to her, she too fell ill. She died on 22 January 1555 - and by now at last, on compassionate grounds, the three surviving brothers had been set free, to pay their mother’s debts and arrange for her obsequies. For the next few months they (and their wives) would live a strange half-life. Still under attainder, they were not allowed to enjoy the fruits of their estates, yet they had few other sources of income and no real employment; though it seems they were allowed some vestige of court life, since they were recorded as taking part in an Anglo-Spanish tournament that winter. It would not be surprising if they fell in with disaffected sections of society, as is suggested by the Venetian envoy’s report that they had been ordered back to the country.

These were grim times in the city. That year of 1555 saw the worst of the burning of heretics at Smithfield. The martyrologist John Foxe’s description of the burning of John Rogers who, when the fire ‘had taken hold upon both his legs and shoulders . . ., as one feeling no smart, washed his hands in the flame as though it had been in cold water,’ masked a hideous reality. Perhaps the Dudley brothers, with their Protestant background, hung out with the malefactors and miscontents who clustered around St Paul’s, where coney-catchers waited for their gulls, and gallants loitered before their dinner (perhaps as fashionably late as midday). ‘What swearing is there,’ Thomas Dekker later wrote, ‘what facing and out-facing? What shuffling, what shouldering, what jostling, what jeering, what biting of thumbs to beget quarrels . . . what casting open of cloaks to publish new clothes, what muffling in cloaks to hide broken elbows ... ?’ They might dice or drink the afternoon away; go to a bull or a bear baiting. (London had as yet no theatres, and fishing or walking in the fields around the city’s edge was probably unfashionably healthy.) It sounds an aimless sort of life - but it seems possible that his time in the Tower, with all that he had seen there, had changed Robert in some way. In the years immediately ahead it was Robert, though he was not the eldest brother, who seemed to be taking the lead in the family - trying to act politically; trying, like his father, to take the long view (if not actually to have always three or four purposes in his mind, as people had said of that same father, not altogether admiringly).

Just as there can be a survivor’s guilt, so there can be a kind of zest in the survivor - a determination to make the most of the life that has been returned to you so unexpectedly. Robert Dudley’s adolescence had seen his family riding very high. Now the red carpet had been pulled out from beneath his feet, and did he determine to climb back on it, in some way? He would live his life fully, greedily - but now, perhaps, he also became the person who could be useful (as well as merely attractive) to Elizabeth; the person whose experience of loss and danger following after indulgence matched her own; her spiritual ‘brother’, as she called him so frequently.

When, in the second half of April 1555, Elizabeth was summoned from Woodstock to Hampton Court, it was that she might be on hand to witness her sister’s triumph: the birth of a child who would finally sweep her out of the succession. Instead, she would watch - in horror, surely, and perhaps also in pity - one of the age’s more drawn-out tragedies. There were rumours, at the end of the month, that the Queen had been delivered of a son. The bells rang out joyfully. But it was a mistake - or perhaps, a miscarriage. Or perhaps, as the French ambassador heard early in May, the whole thing, swollen belly and all, had been the result of ‘some woeful malady’.

Hunched, with her knees drawn up to her chin in pain, but still, appallingly, in hope, Mary waited in her birthing chamber through May - through June - through July. Elizabeth, still at court, had ample time to reflect yet again on female destiny. In August, Mary quietly left her chamber; only to hear that Philip - faced with a choice between barren marriage in England and his duties in the vast continental realm from which his father planned to abdicate - had unsurprisingly decided to go away. Elizabeth was there for the parting; there too when Mary prayed for her absent husband. She witnessed Mary’s humiliation; the crumbling of the pretence that Philip had sought anything other than political advantage in this marriage, that he had any interest in Mary personally. In October, Elizabeth received permission to leave court, not for a return to Woodstock but for her own estate at Hatfield; there to begin what, for the next three years, would effectively be a waiting game.

But Philip had left behind him a legacy. There is a story, from those months at Hampton Court, of a famous meeting between the sisters. Elizabeth, summoned from her rooms at ten in the evening, was taken to the chamber where Mary awaited what she still thought would be a happy outcome to her pregnancy. As Mary again pressed her sister to admit her guilt in the Wyatt conspiracy, there was - as Foxe later claimed - a hidden witness to the meeting: Philip, who, from behind an arras, was listening secretly. Legend says that as he listened, he looked; and as he looked, he lusted . . . More certainly, Philip now saw Elizabeth as a valuable pawn in Habsburg policy.

The spectre of royal death was ever-present in the sixteenth century. That Mary should die childless - and early - was beginning to look likely. If so, Elizabeth (suspect heretic though she might be) was from Spain’s viewpoint the best candidate to succeed to the throne. The alternative - the right heir by Catholic rules: Mary, Queen of Scots - was a wholly committed Francophile, raised in that country and married to the heir of the French king. With England under French control, the Channel passage would be barred between Spain and Spain’s Netherlands territories. Better a heretic; especially one who could be safely married to a Catholic prince, and converted that way.

So, for the rest of Mary’s reign, Elizabeth would be protected by Philip against Mary’s suspicions; and behind this shield she was able to move with increasing freedom. In theory, she was living retired. In practice, she was building her political support as surely as she studied to increase her Greek vocabulary. Nothing illustrates the strength of this shield better than the events of the next winter, 1555-6, when another plot aimed to replace Mary with Elizabeth on the throne; a plot of which Elizabeth almost certainly knew, in which she was almost certainly guilty. Yet it is less well known than the Wyatt rebellion, in part because Elizabeth suffered none of the same dramatic penalties. Indeed, she suffered none at all - because Philip (policy outweighing any passion for justice he may have felt) decreed that she should not.

It is interesting, to say the least, that the name of the leader in that conspiracy should be Sir Henry Dudley. Though a distant cousin only, he had been employed by Robert’s father. Still, there was no trace of the involvement of any of Robert’s immediate family. It was only ten years later, with Elizabeth on the throne, that William Cecil would make a list of those he considered to be close to Robert and there, one on a list of many plotters against the Marian regime, was the name of Henry Dudley. Perhaps it was just as well for Robert that Jane Dudley had taken such care to make friends among the Spanish clan, and that Philip, for his part, had every motive to forge links with the disaffected English nobility. It seems ironic that both Elizabeth and Robert should owe their rehabilitation to Philip of Spain - later, so famously, the enemy of both.

But the worst threat to Elizabeth’s position came also through Philip of Spain, and it came in the shape of a possible marriage. In November 1556 Elizabeth (bored in her country exile) received a welcome invitation to come to court for Christmas, where she was received with unexpected warmth - received very, very briefly; for in the first week of December she was on her way back to Hatfield. She had, almost certainly, been instructed to marry a suitor of her sister’s choosing. And she had, almost certainly, rejected the instruction, frantically.

The proposed husband was the titular Duke of Savoy, a cousin of Philip of Spain whose dukedom, however, had been seized by the French. If he married where Spain suggested, he would effectively get the hope of a kingdom in exchange, since he and Elizabeth would be named heirs after Mary. If Elizabeth did not agree, Mary threatened, she would be punished with an official declaration of bastardy and the loss of any place in the succession. In her misery (or so the French ambassador recalled years later), Elizabeth even contemplated flight across the Channel. But that would lose her any chance of inheriting and ruling her own country, just as surely as enforced marriage to a foreign prince and a future of Catholic domesticity.

In the spring of 1557 Philip returned to England. After a brief truce, France and Spain had resumed active hostilities; he needed to secure both England’s involvement on Spain’s side and a marriage that would keep the Duke of Savoy - Spain’s general in the north - happy. There was (so the French ambassador warned her) even a plot to carry Elizabeth abroad by force. But one can easily imagine that this very atmosphere of coercion and urgency reinforced her determination to refuse. Clearly she already hoped to rule, and contemplated doing so alone. Maybe she saw spinsterhood as a price she was prepared to pay for power. But perhaps everything in her life - even this latest attack on her autonomy - conspired to lead her to a more radical conviction; to make her view marriage as a punishment, a sentence, a second best.

Though the most pressing, this was neither the first nor the last of the marriage proposals made for her in Mary’s reign. Other candidates included Don Carlos, Philip’s mad pre-teenage son by his first marriage, and, later, the crown prince (soon to be king) of Sweden. Once Elizabeth ‘said plainly that she would not marry’ - ‘no, though I were offered the greatest prince in all Europe’. Then she said she liked her single status too well to change it. (That she liked it so well ‘as I persuade myself’ there was no other comparable . . . One wonders whether the very fact of having endlessly to repeat refusals were not driving her into an entrenched position; whether she did not wind up talking herself into conviction, to some degree.) So now Elizabeth continued to refuse, saying, so the Venetian ambassador reported, that ‘the afflictions suffered by her were such that they had . . . ridded her of any wish for a husband’. And Mary refused further to coerce her - less out of affection, it would seem, than because she did not want Elizabeth (even an Elizabeth transformed into Catholic wife) ruling her, Mary’s, country.

Also in the spring of 1557, the three surviving Dudley brothers - Ambrose, Robert and Henry - were allowed access to the revenues of which their father’s attainder had deprived them (though they would not be ‘restored in blood’ for another year). Coincidentally or not, Robert was among the young Englishmen who volunteered to sell some of his lands and raise troops to swell Spain’s army. Parliament and council long opposed Mary’s desire to send troops and money to her husband’s war, a war they felt was none of their own. The French ambassador commented that she was on the eve ‘of bankrupting either her own mind or her kingdom’. But French support for yet another minor rebellion helped persuade the English government, and in June a herald was sent to the French court, literally to throw down the gauntlet. All three Dudley brothers sailed to France the next month, with Philip’s six-thousand-strong English army.

They sailed into battle, and into the horrors of the siege of St Quintin. It was considered a notable Anglo-Spanish victory. Robert in particular was judged to have done well, in charge of the artillery. But the game was hardly worth the candle; whatever praise it brought Robert in Spanish circles, the fighting at St Quintin also saw the death of the youngest Dudley brother, Henry, struck by a cannonball before Robert’s eyes. Of the thirteen children Jane Dudley had borne, only four were now left alive: two sisters (Katherine, married to the Earl of Huntingdon, and Mary, married to Henry Sidney), and two brothers, Ambrose and Robert.

Even the campaign itself went sour when the French took Calais in January 1558. England’s last remaining continental outpost, it had been in the country’s possession for two centuries. Its loss was a humiliation for England abroad and a personal failure for Mary, widely blamed for taking the country into Spain’s war. A few years later Sir Thomas Smith would recall: ‘I never saw England weaker in strength, money, men and riches . . . Here was nothing but fining, headinging [sic], hanging, quartering and burning, taxing, levying and beggaring, and losing our strong-holds abroad.’ If Robert on the continent had at least had his first taste of personal military success - his first hint he might emulate his father on the real field of battle, as well as in the tilt yard - Elizabeth was learning that war was an evil to be avoided at all costs; a reason to be wary of foreign alliances, and foreign allies.