Elizabeth and Leicester

On 23 November Elizabeth, with a thousand people in her train, left Hatfield for her official entry into London, and all the stages of her ceremonial acceptance into monarchy. For five days she stayed at Charterhouse, hard by Smithfield. (The palace at St James was still occupied by her sister’s body.) On 28 November she formally entered into the City, and passed through to the Tower. She wore ‘purple velvet, with a scarf around her neck’, and the trumpets blared a fanfare as she passed; but she cut the image of majesty with her famous common touch, stopping to speak, so it seemed, to everybody.

Prominent among the retinue, leading her caparisoned palfrey behind the horse litter in which she rode, came Lord Robert Dudley. As Master of Horse, he was responsible for many of the arrangements when the Queen made formal appearances. But often, with his pronounced flair for showmanship, he also took a hand in even the indoor pageantry. On 5 December Elizabeth moved by water from the Tower to her old home of Somerset House, where she stayed until after Mary’s funeral on 13 December formally ended the late Queen’s authority. It was two days before Christmas when she finally moved into Whitehall for the seasonal festivities, and more than merely seasonal revelry. Here at last - after the hard work at Hatfield; after the formal speeches in the streets - came the real, intimate celebrations. Here was the time to party.

Pleasure was important to the Elizabethan aristocracy - all the more so, perhaps, since so many of the country’s traditional festivities had been swept away with the old religion. A tournament displayed chivalry, as well as martial ability, for an audience of London notables and foreign dignitaries; a pageant spelt out a message carefully. (Even a dance showed off the participants’ fitness as well as their cultivation, not to mention opening up a worrying - to the killjoys - suggestion of sexual desirability.) Maybe the court festivities had not yet achieved the peak of hedonism they would reach later in Elizabeth’s reign, when those present at one January masque in the 1570s saw tiny comfits representing hailstones - flavoured with cloves, with musk, with ginger - and snowballs scented with rosewater. But the dancing went on till after midnight; and the court entertainments were organized by Robert Dudley. Amid the more conventional balls and masques was one farce that horrified an Italian observer, already shocked at the general ‘licentiousness’ and levity, with crows dressed up as cardinals, wolves to represent abbots.

The coronation was to take place on 15 January, and by Christmas frantic work was well under way to alter Mary’s coronation robes and produce new finery from the bolts of rare fabric imported from the continent. (Customs officials blocked delivery to any other client, until the Queen and her household had taken what they needed.) On the day before her coronation - the day she was to process through the city - Elizabeth stood up in twenty-three yards of cloth of gold and silver, trimmed with ermine and gold lace. Tradition decreed that she spend the previous night at the Tower, and as she left the place on the fourteenth she paused, so Sir John Hayward later said, and reflected that ‘Some have fallen from being princes in this land to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be a prince in this land.’ Others remembered a different wording, but she must have thought something very like it. So - as they passed the chapel where her mother and his father lay buried with scant ceremony - must Robert Dudley.¹¹

As Elizabeth rode through London, propped up by eight satin cushions in a litter drawn by two ‘very handsome’ mules, again came the pageants, the crowds, the singing. As Hayward says: ‘It is incredible how often she caused her coach to stay, when any made offer to approach her.’ All the way from Fleet Street to Westminster she kept in her hand the gift of one old woman - a sprig of rosemary, the nearest any Londoner could get to flowers in a sixteenth-century January. Richard Mulcaster, who wrote up the official description, quickly published for the benefit of those who could not be there, called the City that day ‘a stage wherein was showed the wonderful spectacle of a noble-hearted princess toward her most loving people and the people’s exceeding comfort in beholding so worthy a sovereign . . . Out at the windows and penthouses of every house did hang a number of rich and costly banners and streamers’ - that Tudor love of fabric, as ostentatious and elaborate as may be, that set silken colours rippling through the air on every royal festivity. At the upper end of Cheapside, they gave her a crimson satin purse containing a thousand marks in gold, and she took it in both hands; as she neared Paul’s Gate they gave her an English Bible, and she pressed it to her breast, promising to read it diligently.

Again Robert Dudley rode right behind her; ahead of the thirty-nine ladies in crimson velvet with cloth-of-gold sleeves, ahead of the guards marching three by three. There can be no doubt that he - and Ambrose, leading one of the mules at the litter’s head - watched with approval the Protestant message the worthies of the City had thus enshrined in their ceremony. (Dudley connections were all over this coronation ceremony: Katherine’s father-in-law bore the Queen’s spurs, and Ambrose’s future father-in-law bore St Edward’s staff.) Perhaps Robert read another message: for the great biblical queens to whom Elizabeth was being compared at this stage of her life - Deborah, Judith, Esther - may have been strong women in their own right, but they were known for their married status, rather than their virginity.

Elizabeth lay at the Palace of Westminster that night and the next day, over a light carpeting of snow, walked the small distance to the abbey. As she left again - after the vows, and the anointing with holy grease that transmuted a mortal woman into the epitome of enduring monarchy - she made no attempt to hide her joy, accepting the acclaim of the people, relishing every evidence of her popularity. ‘In my opinion she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum,’ wrote an Italian envoy sniffily. But even he could not fail to be impressed by the cumulative ceremonies of the past few days and a court so sparkling with jewels and gold collars that, he wrote, ‘they cleared the air’. Behind the scenes, it is true, they had had trouble finding a bishop willing to crown Elizabeth; too many of those recently in office, of course, had been appointed under Mary. But there was no sign of that dissent in the massed ranks of the nobility, nor through the proclamations and the anointings, the banquet, the festivities and the jousts that filled the next days.

For all the rejoicing and merrymaking, though, there were more serious questions on everyone’s mind. The business of having got Elizabeth into power once concluded, thoughts turned immediately to what would happen once she was out of it by process of mortality. After the past decade (and the wars of the previous century) everyone had had enough of uncertainty. They wanted that thing the Tudors had seemed to promise and then at last failed to deliver: a clear linear path of monarchy. Within four days of the old queen’s death, on 21 November, the Spanish ambassador Feria had been writing to Philip that ‘everything depends upon the husband this woman may take’. (Just so had the Emperor Charles V, Philip’s father, written to the newly proclaimed Mary that she needed a husband ‘in order to be supported in the labour of governing and assisted in matters that are not of ladies’ capacity’.) Feria had no doubt who the new queen’s husband should be: Philip himself. But the Spanish would have to move quickly. Both Elizabeth and ‘her people’, Feria warned, ‘will listen to any ambassadors who may come to treat of marriage’; and he pressed the point three weeks later, on 14 December: ‘Everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner, and they cannot make out whom she favours, so that every day some new cry is raised about a husband.’

Whosoever it might be, it was assumed she must and would marry someone. There was, Elizabeth herself would observe wryly, ‘a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married’. Cecil would be one influential voice urging now and later that a husband was her and the realm’s ‘only known and likely surety’. The Holy Roman Emperor’s envoy agreed that she should (‘as is woman’s way’) be eager ‘to marry and be provided for. For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’ But no-one, at this stage, was yet mentioning the name of Robert Dudley - who, apart from anything else, was of course a married man already.

On 4 February the Commons drafted a petition urging Elizabeth to marry quickly, in order to ensure the succession. Her instinct was not to take it kindly - and she might have taken it even less so, had she known that they had contemplated the impertinence of restricting the choice of whom she should marry, hoping that it would be an Englishman and not foreign royalty. If she should remain ‘unmarried and, as it were, a vestal virgin’, it would be ‘contrary to public respects’. It is odd that her parliamentarians should, so very early in the reign, have figured, in repudiating it, exactly the course and image she would choose: as if her views, incredible though they must have seemed, were already clear to this presumably not over-imaginative body of men.

She answered them that ‘from my years of understanding’ - since she first was old enough to understand herself a servant of God - ‘I haply chose this kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure you for mine own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God.’ If ambition for a grand alliance, obedience to the ruler’s will, or the fear of danger ‘could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me; but constant have always continued in this determination’.

Over the next decade she would when necessary vary, even directly contradict, these protestations of determined virginity (albeit equally rapidly to reiterate her devotion to the single life). It would be almost twenty years before England would see the full flowering of the cult of the Queen’s virginity; as if only then, when she was after all passing out of the reproductive years, could her advisers bring themselves to make the best of her decision. But none of her later statements is stronger than this first answer to Parliament’s petition. In the end, she said, ‘this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin’. It looks as though any sort of romantic emotional satisfaction she would allow herself to take would be one that yet allowed her to maintain this publicly professed virginity.

True, it was at this vulnerable early moment in her reign that she most needed something to set her apart from other women - from those fallible female creatures who, it was assumed, were quite incapable of rule. Rather than accept her coding as the weak daughter of sinful Eve, she would do better to borrow from the banned Catholicism, and evoke the heavenly virtue of the Virgin Mary. But it is none the less extraordinarily interesting that she should be defending her virginity in such terms now, well before she was even thirty. It is all the more interesting if these first public professions of Elizabeth’s virginity occurred at very much the time when she was falling in love with Robert Dudley.

These were the months when Elizabeth was most open, most edgy. In these months - when she and Robert were both high on the buzz of power and victory - the personal side of their relationship flowered. On the one hand, Elizabeth had inherited an uncertain throne (in France, Henri II was already proclaiming the rival Catholic claim of his daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots) and an impoverished and vulnerable country. On the other, she had won. She had managed what had so often looked like an impossibility. And as a corollary, a perk, a minor pay-off, after all those years of closely watched constraint, she was free to speak and flirt with whom she pleased - all the freer, no doubt, for the fact that Robert was safely married already.

She was twenty-five years old, vibrant and lively, with an ability to spin from imperiousness to intimacy that would keep a man guessing, pleasurably. If she was not beautiful then she had, like her mother, the ability to project the idea of it. Later in life, she told an ambassador that she had never in fact been a beauty, but had had the reputation of it in her day. ‘Comely rather than handsome, ’ the Venetian envoy had reported her a year or two before; ‘tall and well-formed, with a good skin, although swarthy, she has fine eyes.’ Robert too was ‘of a tall personage’, said the Venetian, who praised his ‘manly countenance’ though regretting his ‘somewhat brown’ complexion. He had hair and beard shading dark to auburn; the legs to stand up to the trying fashion for short breeches, with their padding and pinking, and their prominent codpieces; and the physique, when they danced together the daring Volta, to twirl Elizabeth high. Philip of Spain had made sombre colours fashionable for men’s clothing, instead of the bright colours the English usually preferred. But Robert (who spent more than £800 on ‘apparel and goldsmith’s work’ this first year; whose accounts show repeated purchases of rosewater and ribbon points, and black silk netherstockings) was always resplendent by the standards of the day. Most striking of all Robert’s physical features were his dark, haughty eyes. Elizabeth would play upon them: called him her eyes, so that he signed himself with the symbol of eyes, a pair of circles with lines for eyebrows over them. It may have been a pun, too, on what he could do for her - look out for her interest, watchfully.

When exactly did their personal relationship begin to develop? Probably in the spring of 1559; during the first six months of the reign. On 18 April 1559, Feria was writing that in the last few days ‘Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs. It is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.’ It might, he said, be worth ‘coming to terms’ with Robert immediately; exchanging a reciprocal promise of favour.

Despite Elizabeth’s nerve storms, her bouts of ill-health, she and Robert shared a relish for activity, the kind of eager physicality that made Elizabeth outride half her courtiers and use a bout of intensive dancing exercise to start each day. The whole outdoor world of horse, hunt and hawk represented a huge bond between them, and Robert’s job as Master of Horse had an importance it is hard to grasp today. He was responsible for the breeding, purchase, training and provision of what was not only the chief tool of transport and communication, but in war still a vital piece of armoury; a crucial task for which he was paid a thousand marks a year, with perhaps half as much again in perquisites and his own table at court served with the food considered ‘fit for lords’. It was a job he would keep most of his life, long after other duties might have tempted him away, and one he took very seriously. One of his pet projects would be the improvement of English bloodlines with the Barbary strain; and the recruitment of continental horsemasters, who had at their reins’ end the latest continental tips on manège and cavalry training. On a day-to-day basis, Robert had to provide the kind of mounts suitable for ceremonial occasions - and for the times royal messengers needed to ride swiftly - as well as horses for the Queen’s own personal pleasure and for the haulage of baggage necessary when the court went on its annual progress (in which the schedule records the ominous words ‘from thence to . . .’ almost every day).

But more telling than all that, at this particular moment, was that, as Master of Horse, Robert’s trump card was physical proximity to the Queen. Having provided the horses, he would then ride with her, close as a royal bodyguard today. Even before they left Hatfield, Elizabeth, between the first meetings of state, was out riding with him every day. This privileged aspect of his position was the more valuable since the fact of a female sovereign upset all the usual paths to power. With a king on the throne, ambitious men would normally clamour for positions, like gentleman of the bedchamber, that allowed them to spend off-duty moments with the monarch, and have their voice in his ear that way. With a queen on the throne, of course, most of those other immediate attendants had to be women - except Robert Dudley. As would become ever more apparent in the years ahead, the other men in her administration came before her with problems on their tongue and paperwork in their hands. Small wonder if the urge to shoot the messenger overcame her all too frequently. Robert alone (especially in these early days, before he had political office) appeared to her in the guise of an invitation to play.

They were always riding in these early years, and Elizabeth’s intrepidity could frighten even Robert. Ordering some ‘good gallopers’ from Ireland, he added nervously that ‘she spareth not to try as fast as they can go. And I fear them much but she will prove them.’ Surviving accounts for Robert’s early years as Master of Horse bring the animals themselves back to life (though sadly, only those who incurred some veterinary expenditure!) - Bay Gentle, with the dressing for his forefeet, Bellaface, Delicate, and Great Savoy, who had to be bathed when he came from the mares. But it is still hard to recapture the galloping magic of these springtime days; hard, too, to understand how much greater importance springtime - the return of light and warmth to the world - must have had in an age before electricity.¹² Small wonder that Robert adopted the cinquefoil, the five-petalled form of the green-white, soapy-scented hawthorn blossom, as yet another symbol.

In this early part of the reign - before it became apparent that Elizabeth’s love of peace would be England’s path to prosperity - there loomed slightly larger the militaristic aspects of her monarchy, and the question of which men would represent her in an arena where she, as a woman, could not compete. The chronicles of Elizabeth’s early court are full of tournaments like the one that marked her accession, Robert prominent among the jousters. Though actual warfare was moving into a new age, the traditional armed clash of knight against knight had still a significance that went far beyond the courtly trappings, the role-playing and the pageantry. This was a world where Robert excelled. But he and Elizabeth also shared intellectual interests, to a certain degree.

His mind was not as nimble as hers. Few could be. But he had a wit ‘capable at once of entertaining agreeably and of designing deeply’, besides a ‘Delivery and a Presence’ that commanded respect. He was well grounded (acknowledged one of his future colleagues) in all the writings ‘on the best used governments and chief laws that have been made in all ages’. It sounds almost like the specific training in statecraft that Elizabeth felt herself to lack. His scientific interests (as witness the men who enjoyed his patronage) ranged from mining to medicine, from exploration to alchemy; and as early as 1559 he patronized the troupe of actors who later became known as the Earl of Leicester’s Men. Elizabeth was fond of late-night conferences with all her advisers, calling them in one after the other. Her sessions with Robert Dudley were not all dalliance, necessarily.

For Robert Dudley (who early resumed his seat in Parliament) was not just a pretty plaything. That’s what has tended to be obscured, not only in the romantic, but in the traditional, the censoriously Victorian, version of this story. Born and bred into the world of politics, bound by ties of faith or family to many of the other nobles at the court, he had - even at this early stage - his own clear policies. In the end, they would not always be hers; but if he was able to influence her, it is probably because their underlying attitudes were so similar in many ways.

They shared a measure of hard-headed practicality; Elizabeth was probably grateful rather than otherwise that Robert had not taken active part in any of the abortive rebellions in the days of Mary. They shared a reverence for tradition, for established order, for England’s history. While genealogists traced Elizabeth’s supposed descent from King Arthur, Robert’s pet poet Spenser would be only one of those to figure Arthur himself as Robert Dudley. Indeed, though his family profited from every swing to the new (like the Reformation, and the alienation of lands from the great northern Catholic families), his attitude was possibly more traditional than that of Elizabeth, whose natural conservatism warred with a desire to exalt the monarchy at the expense of that same aristocracy.

In April 1559 Elizabeth named Robert a Knight of the Garter: a remarkable elevation, since the other three men so honoured - the Marquess of Northampton, the Earl of Rutland and the Duke of Norfolk (who would emerge as Dudley’s great enemy) - were all men of rank or seniority. The Garter knights, moreover, were supposed to be men of irreproachable fame and family; their motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense - shame on him who thinks evil - must have seemed all too apt when thinking of Robert’s relationship to the queen. She made several grants to him of land and money, including Knole Park in Kent: a significant gift, this (though he did not long keep it); not only for the spacious sprawl of house and garden, but because the property had once been in the hands of Robert’s father, before his disgrace. It was as if Elizabeth were trying to wipe out all that had happened under Mary.

If so, she had Robert’s enthusiastic co-operation. But to contemporaries, for whom all his long years of service still lay invisible ahead, it must have seemed more as if he were working for his own and his family’s interests than those of his queen. Indeed, those who remembered Edward’s reign, not a decade before, must have been aghast at how much power clustered once again around Dudleys and those associated with Dudleys. It is true the Queen did not immediately move to place either of the Dudley brothers on the privy council, perhaps well aware that members of this family entered the new reign with ready-made enemies. But now, already, those enemies grumbled, the privy chamber was staffed mostly by Robert’s ‘creatures’. (Besides his sisters Mary and Katherine, Robert would later be extremely busy in placing Ambrose’s wife at Elizabeth’s hand.) In this same year of 1559, Mary’s husband Henry Sidney was given the presidency of the council in the Welsh Marches and would go on to become Elizabeth’s viceroy in Ireland; while Robert’s other brother-in-law, soon to inherit his father’s title of Earl of Huntingdon, besides being a possible heir to the throne would later become Lord President of the Council in the north. Within a very few years events would place Ambrose Dudley in charge of an English army; within months, the Spanish ambassador would be reporting that Robert himself was laying in ‘a good stock of arms’ for an unspecified purpose. (Such rumours of suspect private military might would continue throughout his career.)

There is a risk, in picturing Robert as a patriot and a loyal promoter of Elizabeth, of glossing over the huge personal ambition that ran hand in hand with his loyalty, and the lust for control that would be seen in contexts as diverse as his chancellorship of Oxford University (where he stripped power from the main body of teachers to concentrate it into the hands of his own appointees) and the Welsh town where he never forgave the burgesses who dared pass over his own candidate for their parliamentary representation. It is unlikely Elizabeth ever forgot his ambition and the breadth of the power base he would build up. (More than two decades later, in 1581, she told a Spanish ambassador, perhaps somewhat mendaciously, that she could not dismiss Robert Dudley even if she wanted to, since he had placed his friends and kinsmen in every port and stronghold in the country.) But it is also unlikely that she feared it - or that it diminished his attraction in her eyes. On the one hand, a good measure of his ambition was in a sense for her, or at least for her kingdom - for an ‘incomparable British Empire’, in the words of his protégé Dr Dee. On the other, perhaps the harsh politics of the Tudor court had taught her to despise those she could control too easily. Robert’s heraldic symbol would be the bear; among the many significant jewels he would give her was a fan from which dangled ‘a lion ramping, with a white muzzled bear at the foot’.

The years would prove that she was right not to fear; that Robert was her liege man, at the end of the day. Indeed, among this first generation of Elizabeth’s councillors, it would not precisely be true to say that he was the only one devoted absolutely to her interest; but Cecil (to whom that accolade is more often given) arguably gave his loyal and surpassing service less to Elizabeth personally than to the Elizabeth who currently embodied a moderate and successful monarchy. Cecil wrote that he was ‘sworn first’ to God, but that because the Queen was ‘God’s chief minister here, it shall be God’s will to have her commandment obeyed’. There is a suggestion here of ‘first among equals’ with which Elizabeth would hardly have agreed.

The broadly accepted ideal of government was ‘the king counselled’: the king (or queen) guided by the advice of a band of councillors, the majority of them still drawn from the ranks of the nobility; and sanctioned, ultimately, by the voice of the people as represented in Parliament (though Parliament still did not have the voice that it would do in later centuries - still did not meet as often, even). Contemporary belief that the ruler must be swayed by such counsel gained added impetus from that ruler’s being a woman.¹³ To some, indeed, the rule of the female Elizabeth seemed to present a problem almost comparable to that of the adolescent Edward. Even Cecil, in these early days at least, could be found reproaching a messenger with having taken papers directly to the Queen, ‘a matter of such weight being too much for a woman’s knowledge’. There is no record of any such sentiment from Robert Dudley. As a friend, as a sympathizer, and as what has been called the impresario of her public galas, his enduring efforts aimed to elevate Elizabeth, personally.

Later in their long relationship, his ideas would come to diverge from hers. His religious beliefs, in particular, would set him on a different path - but his grumbles against her, when they came, would always be couched in practical and personal, rather than theoretical, terms; and in the end he would always do things her way. And the second important point here is this: there is no evidence that Robert thought theoretically (unlike Cecil, with his background among the Cambridge humanists). That very absence of formulated belief in Robert, while it has helped posterity to put him down as a mere masculine dummy, must have appealed to Elizabeth, herself no lover of unnecessary theory. On the one hand, promoting Robert Dudley must have felt like keeping an attractive man close, rewarding a proven friend, and ensuring the continued loyalty of a major service family, rather than buying into a system of political belief. On the other, it must at least have been possible for her to believe that he came closest of all her immediate advisers to sharing her own conception of her monarchy.

The question was, might he actually share that throne, that monarchy? Ambition as well as attraction must have led him to dream of marriage, when first the Queen began to display such extraordinary familiarity. His family had several times brushed with royalty - his widowed Dudley grandmother marrying ‘My Lord the Bastard’, Henry VIII’s illegitimate uncle; his brother marrying Lady Jane Grey; perhaps he might fulfil the family’s destiny, if only . . .

But it is hard to know quite what he was thinking - he, still a married man. For Robert, Amy Dudley was a known and once beloved quantity; not just an abstract (in)convenience, easily out of mind as she was out of sight, away in the country. Elizabeth had no such tie. Possibly he was not thinking clearly at all: from the few examples we have available, he seems to have been a man who, faced by a strong and attractive woman, was capable of being swept away.

Then again, in that despatch of 18 April Feria had written that ‘they say’ Robert’s wife ‘has a malady in one of her breasts’ and that he and the Queen were simply waiting for Amy to die in order to marry. The Venetian ambassador to the Habsburg court likewise reported that Amy ‘has been ailing some time’, and that if she were to die, various persons believed ‘the Queen might easily take [Dudley] for her husband’. But this may be no more than Chinese whispers; and the Venetian envoy in England, writing on 10 May, was maddeningly discreet: ‘My Lord Robert Dudley is in great favour and very intimate with Her Majesty. On this subject I ought to report the opinion of many, but I doubt whether my letters might not miscarry or be read, wherefore it is better to keep silence than to speak ill.’

It is striking how quickly some observers seem to have come to believe that Elizabeth and Robert would - could! - marry, even while no further details appear on Amy Dudley’s putative illness. But while rhetoric decrees that marriage was for life - while even Henry had had to resort to extreme measures and obscure legal byways to detach himself from his wives - a look around the late Tudor aristocracy shows a slightly different story. Lawrence Stone, in The Road to Divorce, describes how the religious Reformation had thrown canon law into confusion; and how, if you look at practice rather than theological debate, you find a picture even more ‘obscure’. A decree of separation might - or might not, depending on opinion - allow remarriage for the innocent party, that is, the husband who had proved his wife’s adultery. (Robert himself would later be instrumental in pushing through one such second marriage.) But although it is unclear just how this might have worked out for the Dudleys, the long and the short of it was that if you had influence enough, the thing might be manageable - especially if the marriage was childless. That Robert knew this well would be clear in his own later marital history.

But as 1559 wore on it was clear there were many other candidates for Elizabeth’s hand; and better-placed ones, too. It has to be admitted Philip of Spain had made but a reluctant wooer, sighing that while Elizabeth thought over his proposal he felt ‘like a condemned man awaiting his fate’. Nothing would make him contemplate marriage with another Tudor bride except the knowledge that it would gain England ‘for his service and faith’. (March 1559 had seen the end of the negotiations, and thereafter, with unflattering speed, Philip offered instead for a French princess. Was Elizabeth piqued, as well as relieved? Is it a coincidence that right after Philip’s offer was withdrawn she turned more openly to Robert Dudley?)

Other royal suitors waxed more attractively enthusiastic - such as Eric of Sweden, who returned to the assault he had begun in Mary’s day. In the first February of Elizabeth’s reign the Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand, who had inherited Austria from Charles V while Philip inherited Spain) had suggested one of his younger sons. But that proposal too foundered on Elizabeth’s declared reluctance to marry a man she had never even seen. Mischievously, she had suggested that the archduke should come to England for inspection; something to which his father was never likely to agree. But she meant what she said. (Perhaps she remembered her father’s experience with Anne of Cleves - or Philip’s sour words about the too-flattering portrait sent him of Mary - for she swore she would never put her trust in portraits.) When the time finally came to dispose of her Swedish suitor, she would tell him that ‘we shall never choose any absent husband’. Indeed, the chances for personal unhappiness in such a marriage were high. Perhaps many royal princesses would have turned down the alliances proposed for them had they been able to do so; had they had, as Elizabeth did, an alternative destiny.

There remained the question of an English marriage, with a man Elizabeth felt to her taste. Neither of the first highly public front-runners had been Robert Dudley. The 47-year-old Earl of Arundel (father-in-law to the Duke of Norfolk) had little to offer but his money and his long pedigree; still, he thought that might be enough. The diplomat Sir William Pickering had other qualities to recommend him to Elizabeth: the courtly manners she always relished, and a history of loyalty to her interests. When he appeared at court on Ascension Day, Elizabeth treated him with all the warmth she would show to subsequent favourites. He, who had long known Elizabeth, said (like Robert) that he knew ‘she meant to die a maid’. But in any case it had soon become clear that neither of these - swagger, compete, and spend money on entertainments as they might - had the appeal of Robert Dudley.

That summer of 1559, at Greenwich, Robert was organizing for Elizabeth what sounds like an enchanting summer festivity: a tournament and picnic in pavilions decked with boughs of birch and ‘all manner of the flowers of the field and garden’ - lavender, roses, gilliflowers and marigolds. But Elizabeth could still, at the height of Robert’s attraction for her, proclaim her openness to other offers when necessary. When the new young King of France (Henri having died in a tournament of his own) declared that the English throne belonged to himself and his wife Mary, Elizabeth would threaten: ‘I will take a husband who will give the King of France some trouble.’ She meant the Earl of Arran, Protestant heir to the Scottish throne after Mary, and a natural focus for the disaffected nobles of that country. But as the court moved on to Windsor she spent ever more time with Robert, riding and hunting by day, talking and making music by night.

Then comes a puzzle: early in September, the Spanish ambassador received a visit from Lady Mary Sidney, Elizabeth’s favourite lady-in-waiting and Robert’s sister, who told him as representative of the Habsburg interest that it would be worth reviving the archduke’s proposal; that the Queen believed, in view of the French threat, that the marriage had now become necessary. This was confirmed to the ambassador by no less a person than Robert Dudley.

This was the first - but not the last - time Elizabeth would exhibit an odd Janus-face to set the claims of her other suitors against those of Robert Dudley: and the first, but not the last, time he seemed to be acting in a way one would not expect. This time, however, he may have felt that the thing of first importance was to counterbalance Arran’s Scottish suit. That would explain why, the next month, he would be hosting a banquet for Eric of Sweden’s proxy, his brother Duke John - even though, back at Whitehall, when he complained his rooms were too damp, too near the river, the Queen had given him apartments next to her own. It was as if she doled out measures of private reassurance as to her affection in return for his compliance in the public parade of her royal availability. And when the Spanish ambassador told Elizabeth it might after all be possible to have the archduke visit England for her inspection, she told him she had after all no plans to marry at this time; that members of her household often gossiped about her marriage without her authority. This prospect of a flesh-and-blood suitor actually appearing before her seemed to make her ‘frightened’, said the ambassador tellingly. Perhaps the Queen had just been making a subtle ploy for power and time against the Habsburgs, with Robert as her pawn and mouthpiece, fully cognizant of the role he was to play. He must, as a political animal and Elizabeth’s close ally, have recognized the diplomatic importance of the marriage ploy.

In November, the Spanish ambassador worried that Robert was ‘slackening’ in the archduke’s cause, and the Imperial ambassador wrote home: ‘It is generally stated that it is his fault that the Queen does not marry’; that he and the Queen had ‘a secret understanding’, that they would marry when his wife were once sent ‘into Eternity’. But England, he said, would not sit quiet under such a match: ‘if she marry the said Mylord Robert, she will incur so much enmity that she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and rise up the next morning as plain Madam Elizabeth . . . it is a marvel that he has not been slain long ere this.’

The Duke of Norfolk charged Robert with being the impediment to the Habsburg marriage, whereat Robert (in marked contrast to what he had told the Spaniard) answered back that ‘He is neither a good Englishman, nor a loyal subject, who advises the Queen to marry a foreigner.’ Nor was the Duke of Norfolk the only one to look askance at the rise of Robert Dudley. William Cecil was eyeing his progress warily. And Kat Ashley (now First Lady of the Bedchamber) went down on her knees to beseech her erstwhile charge to marry and put an end to the rumours, ‘telling Her Majesty that her behaviour towards the Master of Horse occasioned much evil speaking’. Coming from Kat, Elizabeth took it quietly; said that Robert had deserved much of her ‘for his honourable nature and dealings’, and that to talk scandal was absurd, when she was constantly surrounded by her ladies of the bedchamber, who would know if ‘anything dishonourable’ had passed - adding, as an illogical rider, that if however she had ever sought a dishonourable life (‘from which may God preserve her’), she ‘did not know of anybody who could forbid her’. When Kat, with her usual impetuosity, again urged that, whatever the facts of the case, the damage to her reputation could even lead to civil war, Elizabeth - emotional now - refused an appeal that she see less of Robert. She needed him, she said, because ‘in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy’.

To some of the foreign ambassadors, this was indeed becoming a scandal that could even topple Elizabeth from the throne. The Emperor’s envoy was instructed to institute enquiries lest the imperial Habsburgs marry their young archduke to a woman of proven immorality. The agent employed was, the envoy reported, someone on very friendly terms with the Queen’s ladies. ‘They all swear by all that is holy that Her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour. Yet it is not without significance that Her Majesty shows her liking for Lord Robert more markedly than is consistent with her reputation and dignity.’

But it is important to realize that Elizabeth was by her very existence already a figure of scandal; not only the daughter of an infamous woman and a much-married man but a femme sole - at a time when the law of England did not recognize any status for the average woman beyond daughter, ward, wife or widow. She was a queen regnant and, what is yet more, queen regnant of a Protestant country. The sixteenth century saw a number of women hold the reins of government, among them the regents Mary of Guise in Scotland and Catherine de Medici in France, or Mary of Hungary and Marguerite of Navarre. But not only did most of the others hold their power as temporary substitutes for a dead husband, young son or distant emperor; they were (like Mary Tudor) formally subject - whatever their temporal powers - to the spiritual power of Rome. Elizabeth, then, was in an unprecedented position. Had she been chaste as ice and cold as snow, she would not have escaped calumny.

Increasingly, though, as time passed, observers took the threat of a King Robert more seriously. There were more reports that the only bar to the match was the life of Amy Dudley. In January 1560, the new Spanish ambassador de Quadra could write that ‘If there be any other who knows the Queen’s purpose it is my Lord Robert, in whom it is easy to recognize the King that is to be.’ De Quadra saw no hopeful outcome for such a match: the English people themselves would surely ‘do something to set this crooked business straight. There is not a man who does not cry out on him and her with indignation.’ None the less, Elizabeth ‘will marry none but the favoured Robert’.

At the beginning of March, Elizabeth, so de Quadra complained, was treating the Spanish envoy ‘like a dog’. He was in no doubt of whom to blame. Forget Robert’s earlier offer of himself as the Habsburgs’ intermediary: Lord Robert, the Spanish ambassador wrote now, was ‘heartless, spiritless, treacherous and false. There is not a man in England who does not cry out upon him as the Queen’s ruin.’ All the same, Robert appeared to be treating de Quadra with a measure of confidence: casting out lures to see what foreign backing he could recruit, probably. By the end of the same month, ‘Lord Robert says that if he lives a year he will be in another position from that which he at present holds. Every day he presumes more and more, and it is now said that he means to divorce his wife.’ On another occasion, the ambassador reported a different story: that Amy was to be poisoned, the gossip coming ‘from a person who is accustomed to giving me veracious news’. The same tale was passed on by the Imperial ambassador, de Quadra’s ally. But rumours of poison at sixteenth-century courts were two a penny.

To such a point were the names of Dudley and the Queen coupled that on 29 April ambassadors were writing from Madrid that the government there had given them warning of a plot to murder Elizabeth and Robert together. That summer, the chief opponent to their marriage was sent out of the way. Penmen were out of favour - the Queen said she wanted a swordsman to set against these scribes. And so William Cecil was sent north to the Scottish court, to try to establish more friendly relations with that country. (The close alliance between the Scots to the north and the French to the south had long posed a threat to England’s security.) It may well have been Robert who urged Elizabeth to send Cecil north, while the court set out on a summer progress that was more than usually pleasurable and heady. When Cecil returned at the end of the summer, he was horrified to find the Queen ungrateful for the very favourable terms he had managed to pull off, and Robert even more in the ascendancy.