Elizabeth and Leicester

Satirists and moralists, later in Elizabeth’s reign, fulminated that public gardens were no better than brothels, that the theatres saw young men shamelessly ‘wallowing in ladies’ laps’, that the ‘forward virgins of the day’ could hardly wait until their teens to shed that virginity. As many as one in five brides were pregnant on their wedding day. Pre-marital sex was comparatively acceptable if it were to lead to marriage. This might provide one explanation for the statement reported by the Spanish ambassador at the beginning of 1561. Robert’s brother-in-law Henry Sidney told de Quadra that Robert and Elizabeth ‘were lovers’ - ‘eran amores’, in the Spanish - but that nothing had happened that could not be put right with King Philip’s help; that is, his support for their marriage. (A great deal can come down to precise points of translation and semantics; another rendering of the same phrase says that ‘it was a love affair’.) If so, then we have to imagine that they did have full, penetrative sex, right back at the very start of their relationship - with the proviso that the liaison had been so scant, so secret, as to enable Elizabeth actually to perform a feat of self-hypnosis and subsequently, through all their long years, to put it from her mind entirely.²⁴

But there is still a problem, and it is hard to believe it did not loom very large indeed in Elizabeth’s mind: the risk of an unthinkable pregnancy. An ordinary woman might risk pregnancy in the knowledge that marriage would surely follow, but a queen regnant, as closely watched and as vulnerable to scandal as Elizabeth was? Hardly. These early years when Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert flowered most passionately, moreover, were the very years when it would have been hardest for them to rush into marriage if it became necessary: first because of Amy Dudley’s living presence, and then because of the scandalous manner of her death.

The veiled nature of any contemporary discussion makes it hard to be sure about contemporary contraceptive practices beyond withdrawal. The uses of a physical barrier - half a lemon rind, strategically inserted, or a primitive condom made from sheepskin or the less reliable brine-soaked linen - were known in certain circles. Elizabethan medical writings, moreover, often describe herbs - rue, marigold, mandrake - that could be used to bring on a woman’s ‘courses’, in what may or may not be coded references to an abortifacient. But anyone sophisticated enough to have known about such closet devices must also have known that they were far from trustworthy.

In some of her later prayers, Elizabeth would ask forgiveness ‘for sin committed in youthful rashness’, for her flesh that was corrupt, ‘frail and weak’. Is it tempting to read into them a particular meaning? Maybe. But all the heirs of Adam and Eve were so weak, so corrupted. Eighteen months after this time, on what might easily have been her deathbed, Elizabeth (so the Spanish ambassador reported) would declare that ‘although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness nothing unseemly [desconveniente] had ever passed between them’.

What can be gleaned from the reports of contemporaries? Throughout her life, those who spread scandal about Elizabeth would prove, on closer investigation, to be those far away from her - agents abroad, humble subjects who could never have met her face to face - rather than those in her immediate circle. You might argue that her own courtiers would not dare: the humbler souls who gossiped in the alehouses certainly paid the penalty, like the Marsham who was condemned to lose both his ears or a hefty sum of money for saying Elizabeth had borne Robert two children.

But even the ambassadors to her court, in their coded, privileged letters home, displayed a mixture of opinions. In 1560, the Swedish chancellor wrote that ‘I saw no signs of an immodest life, but I did see many signs of chastity, virginity, and true modesty, so that I would stake my life itself that she is most chaste.’ One Spanish ambassador, in the time immediately after Elizabeth’s accession, had been quick to repeat every damaging report, yet one of his successors would ‘doubt sometimes whether Robert’s position is irregular as many think’. Her own ministers and spy-masters - partial witnesses, but enquiring and not besotted ones - would in the years ahead show every sign of believing the great story of her virginity.

Perhaps there was a measure of ‘forgive and forget’ about Elizabethan sexual morality. Those of her maids who were caught out in affairs were damaged, but not always irrevocably ruined. Perhaps if Elizabeth did have sex with Robert, but then turned her face firmly away, her society would collude with the reinvention (in much the same way as, in the film Elizabeth, the formerly fully sexual heroine was allowed to remake herself as a virgin). But then again, do we think that for Elizabeth herself her chastity was only and entirely a question of her public reputation? Surely Elizabeth saw her ‘virtue’ in its original Latin sense of virtus, strength, and would not relinquish it easily.

All through her life, and far beyond it, the rumours would continue. There were rumours that she had borne children to Robert Dudley and to others; as late as 1587 a young man presented himself at the Spanish court claiming that his name was Arthur Dudley, and that he was Elizabeth’s son.²⁵ There were rumours that her favourites treated her with all the freedom a man might a wife (as the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots would later put it). But there were always rumours about the rare public woman. Even Catherine de Medici - no sure friend to Elizabeth, but one who was herself in a position to know - once spoke supportively on the subject to Elizabeth’s ambassador: ‘we of all Princes that be women are subject to be slandered wrongfully’.

The romance of Elizabeth and Robert would be played out by the rules of a game that was old in their own day - the rules of courtly love, that time-honoured but still potent fantasy.²⁶ The cruel, superior mistress rules the lover, who eternally yearns, may never attain, but must always obey. It was a veritable religion of earthly love, modelled at once on the devotion man owes to God, and the service a feudal vassal owed his lord. Born in the courts of Provence, finding its English apogee in the days of that other desirable and powerful Queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, this was the cult that would, centuries later, give a form and a vocabulary to Elizabeth’s and Robert’s long romantic loyalty. All the more so, as those years wore on, for the fact that courtly love, in essence adulterous and often of necessity chaste, was never meant to end in marriage; for the lady was already married, just as Elizabeth claimed to be married to her country. (And - usefully, as it would prove, for Robert and Elizabeth - the tradition allowed the man, in the end, to marry another lady of his own rank without its affecting his feeling for his more elevated mistress.)

Courtly love produced adoration unbounded but no heirs, sublimated ambition into desire unsatisfied . . . It gave respectability to the most lavish protestations of love made not just by Robert (who, after all, cherished real hopes) but even by Elizabeth’s other courtiers. It meant that a man who spent his whole life publicly positioned in a posture of yearning for a woman he might never attain looked romantic - even heroic - rather than merely ridiculous. It gave licence, too, to Elizabeth’s extreme delight in all the flattering games of flirtation: her eagerness to play and her reluctance to pay. Most writers of modern days have seen this lust for the simulacrum of love as a pathology, an expression of a miserably frustrated sexuality. But in terms of courtly love, it was something closer to artistry.

Writers in the courtly love tradition varied in their opinion as to whether the lover would or would not have full enjoyment of his mistress in the end, or whether the question should be left in decent obscurity. But one text at least lays down the rules precisely. In the late twelfth century Andreas Capellanus, author of the classic De Arte Honeste Amandi and chaplain to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter, wrote that amor purus ‘goes so far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely’. (Love being once constrained within these boundaries, he claimed that even a young unmarried woman should take a lover. Her husband, when she eventually marries, would understand that a woman who had followed ‘the commands of love’ showed more, rather than less, probitas than one who had not.) On a less elevated note, the satirist and playwright Thomas Nashe wrote of a successful prostitute who takes her pleasure with a sex toy that ‘will refresh me well / And never make my tender belly swell’. Some Elizabethans, at least, clearly understood sexual pleasure in a sense broader than the procreative act.

Some contemporaries certainly thought that Elizabeth was only technically a virgin.²⁷ After her death the playwright Ben Jonson claimed that ‘she had a membrane on her, which made her incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many’. (He also claimed that when Elizabeth contemplated marriage with Alençon, a French surgeon ‘took in hand to cut it, yet fear stayed her’ - an image horribly evocative of female circumcision.) Jonson would hardly have been in a position to have inside information about the Queen’s physique, but as a sometime Catholic he would have been in touch with all the scurrilous propaganda spread about her. He was not, however, alone in the basic assumption behind his slur.

Some of the contemporary observers suggested not only that Elizabeth was a virgin, but that there was something unnatural about the fact.²⁸ Soon after her accession the Spanish ambassador had reported that ‘for a certain reason which [my spies] have recently given me, I believe she will not bear children’ - a theory repeated by his successor, de Quadra (just before he also repeated the story that Elizabeth had borne several children illegitimately). The Venetian ambassador similarly reported that she was barren, a conclusion he had reached for reasons that ‘I dare not write’. Envoys on the continent heard tales of her irregular menstruation - that (as the papal nuncio in France put it) ‘she has hardly ever the purgation proper to all women’. Others heard that she had to be bled from the leg, or the foot, instead; and it is hard not to see this emphasis on Elizabeth’s lack of the ‘proper’ womanly functions as an attack on her as an improper womanly ruler.

In the twentieth century, Michael Bloch gave a scientific gloss to this gossip by suggesting that Elizabeth (like the Duchess of Windsor, whose biographer he was) suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: that is, that she was born with male chromosomes but, failing to produce also male hormones, developed outwardly as a woman. Such androgens, he claimed, are often handsome women - tall, long-limbed, with ‘strident personalities’ - but have no viable reproductive organs and, yes, only a shallow vagina. But it is notable that none of the prying ambassadors who questioned Elizabeth’s doctors and ladies, nor even any of the laundresses who washed her bloodstained linen, ever actually concluded, in the end, that she was not a viable dynastic possibility. Even Philip of Spain, whatever tittle-tattle his envoys reported, went on negotiating for her as for a successful brood mare. A French diplomat in 1566 - rushing to Elizabeth’s doctor in a fluster, having heard that the Queen herself believed she was barren - would be roundly told that the Queen was capable of bearing ten children, and claimed otherwise only out of caprice (or to give some rationale for a decision she herself could not otherwise explain?). In 1579, with Elizabeth entering the second half of her forties, William Cecil would institute enquiries with all the usual backstairs sources and expressed himself as wholly satisfied as to the ‘probability of her aptness to bear children’: that, in other words, she could if she would.

It was Elizabeth’s will to marriage that was the real question; and never more so than in the months that followed the death of Amy Dudley. Whatever had passed between her and Robert, in her tortuous mind, as 1560 turned to 1561, the situation was still a flexible one. Nothing had been done that could not be undone. Or, from Robert’s standpoint, everything was still to do.

Robert’s aims at this point were simple. He had no conceivable reason - political or personal - not to desire marriage with Elizabeth. She was the key to the attainment of every worldly goal. There is certainly no indication that he saw the scandal over Amy’s death as putting that marriage outside his reach. He saw it as a passing threat, an obstacle he had triumphantly surmounted. And the fact that Elizabeth sometimes - though not always - behaved every bit as if their relationship were still in full romantic flame must have raised his hopes unbearably.

Elizabeth is less easy to gauge. She took the public reaction to Amy’s death, at home and abroad, more seriously than he; understood that if she married him now, it would be widely assumed she had conspired with him to murder his wife. (And this would be murder for an ignoble, a wholly personal, motive. Perhaps few royal hands were wholly free of blood, but such a killing would confirm every suspicion about the frailty of her sex, the immorality of her religion.) The issue was not just whether Robert had been declared innocent of his wife’s murder. The wildfire spread of the scandal had in itself shown the hostility such an alliance would provoke at home; the contempt it would draw down upon her internationally. The start of 1561 brought still more letters from Nicholas Throckmorton in France. On New Year’s Eve he had sat down to pen to Cecil yet another lamentation on the dire consequences ‘if her Majesty do so foully forget herself’, when he was interrupted by the Spanish envoy who asked, as a piece of hot gossip, ‘whether the Queen’s Majesty was not secretly married to the Lord Robert, for, said he, I assure you this court is full of it’.

But was that rebellion anything more than an empty gesture? The real question is how Elizabeth felt about the fact that, for the moment at least, she still could not marry Robert Dudley. The easiest and most common assumption is that she regretted the situation - that she, as much as he, was the victim of a kind of cosmic irony, the pair of them kept apart by the very event that should have set them free. But that assumes she did, still, truly want to marry Robert Dudley. We have come back to the question of whether she wanted to marry at all, on which historians never will agree.

In these dizzy months before Amy died, Elizabeth might indeed have been flattered, or rushed, or pressured into marrying Robert Dudley, had he only, at that vital moment, been blamelessly, unimpeachably, free. That much was evident to her horrified contemporaries. They objected to Robert, specifically, on the grounds that he brought no great alliance or foreign friends (had, indeed, many enemies among their own ranks); and that the elevation of one man so far above his fellows could not but shake the foundations of the small aristocratic society that governed England. They failed to realize that when Elizabeth’s eyes were opened, it would not be to the personal unsatisfactoriness of Robert Dudley; it would be to the fact that, in the core of her being, she wanted to keep her own autonomy; to retain in her own hands the sovereignty which was at the core of her identity.

It is only hindsight that encourages us to ask whether marriage, for Elizabeth, was ever really an emotional possibility. With hindsight we see the many and varied nature of her excuses as having an almost unmistakable import. But at the time, in these early days, it can hardly have been obvious to her contemporaries. What must have been far more evident is that there were genuine problems with every choice.

Any marriage of a queen regnant offered an insuperable problem: whose would be the mastery? As John Aylmer had tried to argue in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, writing in answer to John Knox’s First Blast: ‘Say you, God hath appointed her to be the subject to her husband . . . therefore she may not be the head. I grant that, so far as pertaining to the bands of marriage, and the offices of a wife, she must be a subject: but as a Magistrate she may be her husband’s head.’ She could be his inferior in ‘matters of wedlock’, and yet his leader in ‘the guiding of the commonwealth’, he claimed. But such a distinction would be almost impossible to make, in practical terms.

More specifically, marriage to a foreign prince and marriage to a subject of her own carried each its penalty. It is easy for us to underestimate the difficulty Elizabeth would have perceived. We have the experience of those married queens regnant Elizabeth II and Victoria; of Queen Anne, even, whose breeding stallion of a husband nobody even remembers.²⁹ And at that, we are inclined to overlook the initial difficulty Victoria and Albert had in accommodating their different statuses; and the balance of power (so heavily weighted in his favour) between the joint sovereigns William and Mary. But sixteenth-century England offered no such even half-consoling stories.

If Elizabeth married a foreign prince, she risked the loss not only of her own independence, but of her country’s autonomy. Edward VI’s will (that disregarded but in one way prophetic document) put forward that possibility as one reason for cutting out his still-unmarried sisters: the ‘stranger’ husband of either would work to have the laws and customs of his own native country ‘practised and put in use within this our realm . . . which would then tend to the utter subversion of the commonwealth of this our realm, which God forbid’. (Better the princesses should be ‘taken by God’ than that they should so imperil the true religion, thundered one of his bishops, supportively.) If Elizabeth married either a Habsburg or a Valois of France, she plumped England (‘a bone between two dogs’, as one of her own agents put it) irrevocably down on one side of the see-saw balance that dominated European politics. Although everyone agreed that in theory she should marry, to find one candidate who had the support of all her councillors would prove an impossibility.

The one immediate example, of Philip and Mary, was far from happy. Elizabeth would have only to remember how Mary’s troops had gone over to Wyatt; how a mob of young Englishmen had marched on the Spanish at Hampton Court, so that the palace guards had to drive them away; how cartoons had shown Mary as a crone suckling Spaniards at her breast, below the legend Maria Ruina Angliae. She would have remembered not only her sister’s personal unhappiness and humiliation, but that Philip (and his father) had patently entered into the marriage believing that - whatever lip service was paid to the authority of an anointed queen - it was he who would really rule; that England had been dragged into Spain’s war and had lost Calais. Later, discussing the long-running proposal of the Habsburg archduke, ‘With regard to the Emperor’s remarks showing that he wishes the Archduke to be called King and to govern jointly with [the] Queen, Cecil thinks this would be difficult,’ the envoy concerned wrote all too accurately.

If she married a subject, she had still to deal with contemporary belief that the dominance of a husband over a wife superseded the claims of her royalty; and with the diminution of Elizabeth’s own royal status. Feria had boasted of having put it to Elizabeth that if she married a commoner, she would be setting her own value below that of her sister: he thought, he crowed, that he could get at her that way. ‘Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet am I your husband and your head,’ Darnley would tell his royal wife Mary Stuart. Such would be Elizabeth’s dilemma if she married Robert Dudley. Moreover, the rise of this particular subject had been too far and too fast, and he had flaunted it too openly. He came from a family with enemies. Better, safer, to keep him as a favourite; as that mushroom, perennial figure of court stories, who could be enjoyed at will and then if need be put away.

But the question of the favourite itself comes loaded with a baggage of unease, and never more so than in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has been called the ‘great age’ of the European favourite; perhaps because the whole question of power exercised by someone whose only claim to wield it came at second hand, via the personal favour of the ruler, focused an uncomfortable attention on the primary source itself, raising questions about personal rule and the powers and limits of monarchy.

The nature of the monarchy, and the limitations of its power, were hotly debated throughout this era. As one modern historian (Stephen Alford) writes, the ‘Tudor polity of the second half of the sixteenth century was in a period of transition - from a royal estate, where the monarch was the kingdom, to “state”, a polity conscious beyond the life of the king or queen’. And yet the Tudor age had seen the dynasty arrogate to itself and its central court more and more power and glory. Elizabeth herself believed that ‘absolute princes ought not to be accountable for their actions to any other than to God alone’; had written in an early letter to her father of kings, ‘whom philosophers regard as gods on earth’. Later in her reign she sent a sharp reproof to the Queen of Scots for having dared to write to her privy council rather than to herself. Although Elizabeth ‘doth carry as great a regard unto her Council as any of her progenitors have done’, yet ‘they are but Counsellors by choice and not by birth, whose services are no longer to be used in that public function than it shall please her Majesty to dispose of same’. Everyone agreed that the worthies around the ruler should offer counsel. (They differed on whether those counsellors should be drawn from an aristocracy or a meritocracy.) Whether the ruler had to be bound by that counsel ... That was less easy.

In this climate there would be a sharp focus of attention on, and equally sharp critical debate about, any person upon whom the ruler’s favour lighted; especially one who could promote his ideas, his counsel, with all the power of personality; and especially one who, like Robert Dudley (and to his detractors, this just made it all the worse), showed no signs of being prepared simply to sit back and passively enjoy what the Queen gave him; to soak up the honours and spend the moneys. He did both of those things, certainly - but he also expected, as soon as opportunity offered (and it soon would), to play an active, practical, daily part in the running of the country. He believed in the ideal of the king/queen counselled; was, after all the son of a man who is now credited with having done much to elevate the power of the privy council, and the grandson of one who had written a book on commonwealth and morality.³⁰ The translation of the tellingly named A very brief and profitable Treatise declaring how many counsels and what manner of counsellers a Prince that will govern well ought to have was published under Robert’s patronage. (And Thomas Elyot’s influential Book Named the Governor, laying down the training that would enable a nobleman to act as the ruler’s watchful adviser and ally, had described the ruler’s ‘friends’ as his ‘eyes and ears and hands and feet’. Her ‘Eyes’ would of course be the nickname Elizabeth gave to Robert Dudley.)

The question of the favourite was never more controversial than when the ruler was a woman and the favourite a man. Not only was an illegitimate sexual frisson added into the mix, but the accepted balance of power between the sexes seemed more than ever in jeopardy. A male ruler might have, on the one hand, his mistresses for personal recreation, and on the other his minister-favourites - men such as Richelieu or Wolsey. (Philip II in Spain used his childhood friend Ruy Gomez as effectively a mediator between his secretariat and his nobility.) But the two functions were treated as separate. There should not be this confusion, that strained the bounds of safety and decency.

Of course, the worst had often happened; and when a royal mistress got too much power or patronage, or when a king with homosexual leanings gave power into the hands of a male love object, it did indeed outrage the country. There were (even before Elizabeth’s successor, James, gave far too much power to pretty George Villiers) well-remembered medieval models that provided the context for the fears of Robert Dudley. Edward II had sinned most conspicuously. After Elizabeth’s death, Naunton would praise her not only for having given her favourites only limited power, but for having purposely kept several on the go; ‘for we find no Gaveston, Vere, or Spencer to have swayed alone during forty-four years’. After his adored Piers Gaveston was murdered by his outraged nobles, Edward II had fallen under the sway of Hugh le Despenser, one of the most powerful magnates, and of his son. The Despensers were in turn brought down by Mortimer, another mighty subject, in alliance with Isabella, Edward’s rejected queen; while Robert de Vere was the hated counsellor (some said lover) of Edward II’s grandson Richard II. Just the one scurrilous pamphlet, Leicester’s Commonwealth, would in time compare Robert Dudley with Mortimer (who, when Isabella came to rule for her young son, exercised almost total power behind the scenes); but by and large those who knew Elizabeth in her maturity, or who looked back with hindsight, tended to agree with Naunton. ‘I conclude that she [Elizabeth] was absolute and sovereign mistress of her grace and that those to whom she distributed her favors were never more than tenants at will and stood on no better ground than her princely pleasure and their own good behaviour,’ Naunton wrote.

In the early seventeenth century, too, Fulke Greville, comparing Elizabeth approvingly if tacitly with her susceptible successor, wrote that, ‘in the latitudes which some modern princes allow to their favourites, it seems this queen reservedly kept entrenched within her native strengths and sceptre’. But Greville, like Naunton, was writing with the benefit of hindsight, having seen Elizabeth destroy her last favourite, Essex, when he grew too high. At this earlier date, no-one yet knew Elizabeth’s strength. They were afraid she might let Robert Dudley exercise unlimited sway.

In fact, the striking thing would prove to be the versatility - and perhaps the callousness - with which Elizabeth made use of him. A favourite could be a useful and malleable tool; especially in this age, when the distribution of patronage was being increasingly centred on the court (away from the church, away from the regions and the nobility), where the clamour for office, territory, money was deafening.³¹ The function of the favourite as scapegoat was known even in the figure’s heyday. When James I’s favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated in 1628, ‘it is said at court there is none now to impute our faults unto’. Remember the Imperial ambassador, wondering that no-one had yet assassinated Robert Dudley? Less dramatically, it was noted in Elizabeth, her contemporary John Clapham wrote, ‘that she seldom or never denied any suit that was moved unto her . . . but the suitor received the answer of denial by some other; a thankless office, and commonly performed by persons of greatest place, who ofttimes bear the blame of many things wherein themselves are not guilty, while no imputation must be laid upon the prince’. This did not make the favourite popular, needless to say - especially in so far as he was often brought in from outside the ranks of (and even used as a curb upon) the standing interests of the old nobility.

There were times when it seemed Elizabeth was using Robert Dudley as a stalking horse; flaunting her interest in him the better to conceal what her real intentions might be. There were times when he seemed to be more like her whipping boy. Her brother Edward, in the schoolroom, would have had a real ‘whipping boy’, to take the stripes protocol forbade a common schoolmaster placing on the royal posterior. Elizabeth’s stripes, in the fragile early moments of the regime, were the lashes of bad publicity. But she too needed an alter ego. Just so had Anne Boleyn known she was blamed for decisions in fact taken by Henry.

It is interesting to compare the situation of Elizabeth vis-à-vis Robert Dudley with that of other women rulers and their favourites³² - all the more so since the opprobrium heaped on one favourite could be used to reflect on others. When the scandal pamphlet of 1584, Leicester’s Commonwealth, was reprinted in 1706 as the Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, it was meant as an attack on the Duke of Marlborough, famous or infamous as the ‘single minister’ of Queen Anne’s day. Anne’s prime favourite was, of course, less Marlborough himself than Marlborough’s wife, Sarah Churchill, with whom Anne exchanged the most striking series of letters (in the awareness, apparently, that this relationship too could be taken to have a sexual element). Sarah took on the identity of ‘Mrs Freeman’, Anne (still a princess, when their friendship began) that of ‘Mrs Morley’. Mrs Morley would write to Mrs Freeman, in tears, that ‘tis no trouble to me to obey your commands’; or ‘Let me beg you once more not to believe that I am in fault, though I must confess you may have some reason to believe it’; that ‘if you should ever forsake me, I would have nothing more to do with the world, but make another abdication, for what is a crown when ye support of it is gone’. One cannot imagine Elizabeth writing to Robert in such self-abasing terms.

But then - Sarah said - Anne ‘would not take the air unless somebody advised her to it’. She is blamed for that very overconfidence in Anne’s pliability; since their bitter falling-out came when she failed to realize the difference Anne’s accession to the throne had made in their rapport: blamed by contemporaries for exercising too much power; blamed by Marlborough’s biographers for not having been content to exercise it only in a private, domestic way. Had she been so content - the theory runs - Sarah might have kept influence longer, to the advantage of her husband and his political party. This ignores the fact that her husband’s beliefs were not always altogether hers - and again, it raises the more general concern about the bounds within which a favourite can operate appropriately. Though Sarah was once in a position of emotional dominance over Anne that Robert never had over Elizabeth, her gender ultimately made it easier to sideline her.³³

But move further into the eighteenth century and set Elizabeth and Robert side by side with Catherine the Great of Russia and Grigory Potemkin, and both the similarities and the divergences are extraordinary. A minor German princess married off to the Russian heir, Catherine was a woman who took the throne by coup; and this background of insecurity might have been expected to produce the same edgy, in many ways exploitative, relationship with her favourite that Elizabeth and Robert ‘enjoyed’. Instead, Catherine and Potemkin appear in many ways to have had the pleasures without the penalties. (‘General love me? Me loves General a lot,’ she would write to him tenderly.) They were physical lovers; but then, her sexuality or the absence of it was never invoked as totem of her right to rule, and the question of the succession had already been settled by the birth of a son (albeit fathered by an earlier lover, rather than by her husband). Potemkin too showed no signs of wishing to go off and found his own dynasty - but then, he could hardly have done so, since it seems likely that, early in their relationship, he and Catherine had gone through some form of secret marriage ceremony. His ambition seems to have been satisfied by huge power and military success - but, as the years wore on, he admitted that he found relief in those distant reaches of the empire where he ruled like a monarch, effectively, and where Catherine allowed him to do so. They had more space to share between them, since Russia was a very much larger territory than England. Potemkin seems to have displayed few signs of sexual jealousy, selecting and training for Catherine younger lovers, who were required to address him as ‘Papa’, and whose existence gave him a measure of freedom without challenging him in any way.

And yet, and yet . . . as you read the story of Potemkin and Catherine, you are struck by a thousand tiny echoes of the earlier pair: right down to the nicknames, to the increased religiosity as Potemkin grew older, to the belief that they were predestined to each other (‘God nominated you to be my friend before I was even born,’ Catherine told Potemkin) - and, inevitably, to the blame of him as an ‘evil counsellor’, though that is something both Potemkin and Leicester shared with every favourite through the centuries.

Where, then, did the magic difference lie? For there is a huge difference between the places Potemkin and Leicester hold in history. In Potemkin’s far greater abilities, in his hold on the military power base that first brought him to Catherine’s attention? Probably. In the different sexual attitudes - and the very different social and political systems - of the mid-eighteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries? Certainly. In the very flexibility of the Russian succession and monarchy, and the accepted tradition of empresses’ favourites/empresses’ lovers that was already in existence before Catherine’s day? No doubt. But above all it must - must! - lie in the personalities of the two different rulers. Leicester could never have been a Potemkin, because Elizabeth didn’t want him to be.

Elizabeth herself provided, over the years, a cloud of rhetoric to cloak her lasting reluctance to marry. ‘I have already joined my self in marriage to an husband, namely the kingdom of England,’ she had said when, in the first spring of the reign, Parliament had urged her to wed. More significantly, she said - even thus early, long before one might have expected her to be paranoid about a ‘rising sun’ - that children, if she had them, might ‘grow out of kind, and become perhaps ungracious’. Only two years later, in 1561, she told the Scottish ambassador that ‘Princes cannot like their children, those that should succeed unto them’ - a chilling enough remark. She suspected that a male heir might usurp her throne. Perhaps her suspicion was a symptom of that throne’s insecurity - but remembering the terms of her brother’s scheme, whereby all the Brandon/Grey heiresses were to defer to their own ‘heirs male’, her fear was not such an unreasonable one.

But it is also a truism that nothing in Elizabeth’s youthful experience could have taught her to view marriage without a shrinking of the flesh. None of Henry’s wives failed to suffer from marriage; even Katherine Parr, who survived Henry, then suffered from another husband’s roving eye, and from female biology. Camden wrote that Robert Huicke, one of Elizabeth’s doctors, dissuaded her from marriage ‘for I know not what womanish Impotency’. Any suggestion that she might not find childbirth easy could only be horrifying, for a woman two of whose stepmothers, as well as her grandmother, had died that way.³⁴ There had been her sister Mary, in political and emotional thrall to a husband who did not care for her; Jane Grey, married off to a boy for whom she did not care. There had been the women who had formed her circle at Hatfield, who had had in common a disastrous marital history: the Marchioness of Northampton, second wife to a divorced man, left in legal limbo when the Catholic Mary came to the throne and refused to recognize the divorce; the Countess of Sussex, who had entered Elizabeth’s service after her husband had divorced her for extreme religious views, and for the practice of sorcery.

Elizabeth would later tell the Earl of Sussex that she hated the idea of marriage more each day, ‘for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul, if she had one, much less to a living creature’. Is it just our prurience to envisage the ‘reasons’ physically? At the end of Elizabeth’s life her godson, Sir John Harington, wrote of her that ‘In mind, she hath ever had an aversion and (as many think) in body some indisposition to the act of marriage.’ But by then, the mood of the times - the advent of a fertile new ruling family - dictated a need to puncture the mystique of her elective virginity.

When she tried to make up her mind to marriage, ‘it is as though her heart were being torn out of her body’, the French ambassador once reported her telling him, unforgettably. (She added that if ever she did take a husband, she would use his ‘services’ to procure an heir, but give him ‘neither a share of her power nor the keys of her treasury’.) Pending medical evidence that is never likely to appear, it is to reasons psychological and political, rather than to physiology, that we should first look for Elizabeth’s decision not to marry and, after the experiences of her youth, to retain control in this most personal of ways. But even the word ‘decision’ makes it sound too fixed and too conscious. Elizabeth’s failure to marry (itself an even more loaded way of putting it!), and her courtiers’ realization that this was not going to change, happened not in one giant stride but in a hundred tiny stages.

In the end, surely, the best proof that she did not really want to marry Robert Dudley was that she never did. True, the scandal of Amy Dudley’s death would have made their marriage impossibly dangerous in the short term - but five, ten, fifteen years down the line? Does any scandal retain its white heat indefinitely? In the years that followed Amy’s death, the 1560s, various ambassadors tried to recruit Robert to their countries’ causes, and then to thrust him into a marital bed with the Queen. They at least clearly thought that after the first fuss had died down, a marriage would still be politically viable. And they should know, surely. As she herself would tell the Spanish ambassador in a few years’ time: ‘They said of me that I would not marry because I was in love with the Earl of Leicester, and that I could not marry him because he had a wife already; yet now he has no wife, and for all that I do not marry him.’

Again, we have here the advantage over Elizabeth’s contemporaries. We know that Elizabeth chose never to marry - never to marry anybody. We know that she never bowed to what everyone assumed were the proclivities of her sex, determined not to throw her own rule away. But none of that was apparent to her courtiers, as a new year dawned after the end of 1560. They assumed, still, that she had to marry somebody. They could only hope it would not be Robert Dudley.