Elizabeth and Leicester

In one sense, his political importance was now an established fact; something that had to be recognized, whether or not the Queen’s romantic interest seemed to be turning away from him. If the strength of her feelings was waning, then perhaps that is what encouraged him, over the years ahead, to operate more autonomously. For Leicester had his own information networks, bringing in reports from Europe and from Scotland, transcripts from the interrogations of state prisoners, letters from the embassies. He was a JP in several counties, Steward of Cambridge University and of several towns, Chancellor of Oxford University. And though Elizabeth discouraged all the old badges of allegiance that had shown the strength of a great lord’s following, it was said that in every shire there were many JPs who openly wore Leicester’s livery.

But all this, in a sense, was secondary. It was Leicester’s special ability to persuade his royal mistress which made him especially useful to the council as a whole - an asset his colleagues increasingly recognized, once they had ceased automatically to regard him as the enemy. It was his handling of Elizabeth that ‘amounted almost to a separate function of government’, as Milton Waldman put it memorably in the 1940s. And here lay both his strength and his weakness. For whatever efforts he made to win himself an independent power base, his whole life and status had still been built upon the suspect foundation of that one relationship. His enemies would not forgive him that. Neither would posterity.

As a favourite, he was of necessity the ultimate courtier, with all that implied. ‘He was very graceful in behaviour, of a liberal diet, and much addicted to sensual pleasures. He was commonly accounted a good courtier, which in other terms is called a cunning dissembler,’ wrote Clapham after his death, dismissively. Castiglione (in his book on the courtier, of which Leicester possessed a copy) had written that the courtier’s role was ‘to be attractive, accomplished, and seem not to care, to charm and to do so coolly’. In asking a favour, the courtier ‘will skillfully make easy the difficult points so that his lord [sic] will always grant it’. This is the way women have traditionally exercised influence: no wonder that Froude, the great Elizabethan historian of the nineteenth century, who despised Elizabeth’s favourites and mistrusted her femininity, wrote of Robert Dudley that he had ‘the worst qualities of both sexes’. It was another reason to regard a queen’s favourite suspiciously.

The most lucrative single gift Elizabeth gave Leicester was that of influence; every penny he was given or sent enhanced his prestige among other, minor, courtiers, hopeful for their own lesser share of royal bounty. He was at the top of the patronage tree; and he was consistent in his efforts to do his best for his clients, albeit also fierce in his demand for their loyalty. (A series of letters he wrote to Francis Walsingham, then in France, show him pursuing a servant he felt had done him wrong, even when the man had fled the country. He could be both vengeful and territorial, clearly.)

Surviving letters between Leicester and his many contacts show the hothouse atmosphere of this perfervid world, where all rights and revenues emanated ultimately from the Queen herself, diffused through her favourites and officers; and where power and personality were thus inextricably intertwined. They show the anxiety of the client: when to chase up a favour promised, and when to hold back; how to keep yourself in mind without being obnoxious, through a gift of a pair of gloves, a cash present, a pie. But they also show the pressure on the great men approached: their tetchiness at the unending demands - and their wounded anger when an impatient client showed signs of following another star. The favourites were pikes among minnows, to be sure; but still themselves dependent on the Queen’s favour, a position of responsibility without power.

On the one hand (like any other great noble) Leicester kept what was in effect his own court. The bill of wages he paid shows that he had not just his grooms and huntsmen, his watermen, cooks and laundresses, but his gentlemen servants and his officers, his grooms of the chamber. In this he was, like Elizabeth herself, seated in dramatic state at the very tip of a huge antheap of industry. (Like Elizabeth, he might sometimes dine alone when away from court, apart from the huge main company of his entourage, on the grounds that there was no-one present of rank high enough appropriately to eat with him.) On the other hand, when Elizabeth herself entered the picture, he himself joined the busy throng, rushing to make arrangements for her court and her convenience, her party or her journey; became, in effect, another worker bee.

And if, in this pyramidal structure, the great Earl of Leicester was subservient only to Elizabeth herself, then she could be cruelly dismissive. A French ambassador, telling her that his master approved the idea of her marrying Robert Dudley, and wished to meet him, had been told that ‘It would scarcely be honourable to send a groom to meet so great a king’ - and, laughing, ‘I cannot do without my Lord Robert [as then he was], for he is like my little dog, and whenever he comes into a room, everyone at once assumes that I myself am near.’ Robert was standing there, and one can imagine how he had to laugh politely, and how anyone else there probably laughed sycophantically, and how, yes, he probably did go away and kick the cat - or the nearest client, anyway.

True, he was a very great man in the country (and, indeed, beyond it - to half Europe he was now ‘the great Lord’). He swam the teeming waters of the court and court politics like a leviathan. To crowds of minor satellite gentry - to hordes of others hoping for employment, or for his intercession with some hostile authority - it was his momentary attention that was the prize; his smile or frown that set the climate for the day. But faced with Elizabeth herself, he was still - in public at least - just another subject who had to address her on his knees; as Elizabeth herself had had to address her brother Edward in his day. (Even Bothwell, after he had married Mary, found it more politic to doff his cap in his wife’s presence, though his new rank would have entitled him to keep it on.) Robert’s power came from positions and properties the Queen had given; and what the Queen had given, she could take away. His only counterstroke could be armed revolt, and even if she had ever feared that, Elizabeth now - with her long knowledge of Leicester, with the confidence of a decade’s successful rule - knew it was extremely unlikely.

There is a story from April 1566 that dramatizes Leicester’s position, and that of Elizabeth, as clearly as if they were set out in a problem play. The Queen, being at her palace in Greenwich, agreed to travel up to Southwark to meet Robert returning from a journey. Robert entered the City in staggering splendour; with a train ‘all in their rich coats and to ye number of 700’. From Temple Bar, he passed Ludgate and St Paul’s on his way to the rendezvous at Lord Oxford’s house, just north of London Bridge. Meanwhile the Queen was being rowed across the Thames in a wherry with a single pair of oars, accompanied only by two ladies. By the time they had stepped out of the boat, and into their ‘coach covered with blue’, Leicester - finding neither the Queen, nor any rumour of her coming such as his own grand arrival had made - had left Lord Oxford’s house, and ridden over the bridge.

The chapter of accidents had a happy ending: Elizabeth’s coach, in its turn, set off in pursuit of Leicester’s party, who had halted on the road back to Greenwich where he knew she would pass. On overtaking him, the Queen ‘came out of her coach in the highway and she embraced the Earl and kissed him three times’, as the beady-eyed spectators noted carefully. But the story has a complex moral. On the surface, it is true, it was the Queen who had been forced to chase the over-impatient earl. But look at the reason for all the confusion - Elizabeth’s desire for privacy. The earl would arrive with a splendid retinue: it was in his interest that as many people as possible should know the Queen was coming to meet him. The Queen, by contrast, had no reason at all to broadcast the fact she was meeting the Earl of Leicester; her private pleasure, her Robert Dudley. That same year, the French ambassador had reported a conversation with Leicester who ‘confessed to me, smiling and sighing at the same time, that he does not know what to hope or fear’.

Small wonder, then that as time passed Leicester would demonstrate an increased dissatisfaction with the court and its world. His letters to Elizabeth show a mounting distaste for London, with its ‘corrupt air’, urging ‘exercise with open air’ as the best remedy for ‘those delicate diseases gotten about your dainty city’. To a young man, the court was opportunity - ‘the nurse of dignity’, as Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s nephew later put it. But a man in his mid-thirties might begin to tire of the foetid atmosphere. (‘Go tell the court it glows, and stinks like rotten wood,’ Walter Ralegh would write, famously.) In one letter to the Queen, Leicester wrote with obvious feeling of the failing health of one elderly nobleman, and of the distress and concern of the man’s wife. It sounds as though he were beginning to appreciate the domestic virtues. His circle by now included his nephews - son and son-in-law to his sister Mary - the young Philip Sidney and the Earl of Pembroke. But he had still no heir of his own.

If he wanted to absent himself from the court’s peregrinations, he had the London base of Leicester House: one of those great old noble houses whose courts and gardens stretched between the Strand and the river (the latter being by far the more important highway). He had his newly purchased retreat of Wanstead, to the east of London but still accessible, and eminently suitable for hunting trips up the Lea Valley. And he had Kenilworth, where his programme of building work and improvement was just getting under way. One letter, to Anthony Forster (he of Cumnor fame), written before the Queen’s first visit to Kenilworth, shows the earl’s concern for even the minutiae of his showpiece. He had sent £12 ‘to buy trifles withal for fireworks and such like’; and demanded in return a provision of spices, to be obtained at the Queen’s own, presumably lower, price. Furthermore,

I willed Ellis to speak with you and Mr Spinola again for that I perceive that he hath word from Flanders that I cannot have such hangings thence as I looked for for my dining chamber at Kenilworth ... deal with Mr Spinola hereabout for [he] is able to get such stuff better cheap than any man and I am sure that he will do his best for me. And, though I cannot have them so deep as I would, yet if they be large of wideness and twelve or thirteen foot high it shall suffice . . .

Leicester could write to Shrewsbury as enthusiastically as a boy about the new voyage of the Muscovy Company, ‘and I am sorry your lordship is no deeper an adventurer’. Some of those activities aimed primarily at increasing his revenues - for Leicester ‘lived always above any Living I had’ - would prove also to have implications for the nation: his support for the great mariners (and great privateers); his backing of Hawkins’s first voyage to the West Indies and of Drake’s circumnavigation, of the Merchant Adventurers and the Company of Kathai. He and Ambrose would be the chief supporters of Frobisher’s search for the north-west passage. Other activities would be to do with keeping his huge client base happy, and justifying the regular ‘presents’ they gave him; whether they were the Corporation of Yarmouth, the Dean and Chapter of Norwich, or mere members of the minor gentry. (White bears and white gerfalcons from the trader Jerome Horsey; fourteen pounds of marmalade from Southampton’s worthies.)

But his interests extended far beyond the practical concerns of a landowner and a politician. There were considerable charitable concerns - to be expected of a great man, maybe; but there is surely something unexpected in his detailed suggestions to the local burghers for the cloth industry in Warwick: ‘I could wish there were some special trade devised wherewith having a good stock both reasonable profit might arise and your poor set on work. Whereunto I would be glad to help . . .’ One of his most enduring building projects was the old soldiers’ hospital in Warwick, still in use today. Nor were his involvements, whether charitable or ruthlessly commercial, confined to the West Midlands; he was also lord of a huge tract of land just over the border in North Wales. It was there, at Denbigh, that he would in the decade ahead begin to build a church which, had it been completed before his death, would have had an honoured place in ecclesiastical history: for while existing church architecture reflected the pattern of the old Catholic service, this vast building was to be constructed on ardently Protestant lines, suitable for the popular preaching that was so important a part of the new theology. We have to understand his religious beliefs if we are ever to see the mature Robert Dudley clearly.

The Earl of Leicester, with his gaudy clothes and his grandeur, his self-indulgent appetites and the irregularities of his private life, seems a far cry from what we think of as a puritan today. But that is probably an anachronistic perception. The fact is that, even from the very start of Elizabeth’s reign, the ‘hotter’ wing of the Protestant party had had their eye upon Robert Dudley. In that first winter of 1558-9 John Aylmer, dedicating his response to John Knox, had singled him out as one of the two courtiers endowed ‘with a singular favour and desire to advance and promote the true doctrine of Christ’s cross’. (The other was Lord Bedford, Ambrose Dudley’s father-in-law.)

Those works dedicated to Robert Dudley or published under his protection early in the reign included: in 1561 a treatise against the doctrine of free will, by a Protestant writer; in 1562 a translation of The Laws and Statutes of Geneva (Switzerland being home to the most advanced wing of the Reformation); in 1564 a translation of Peter Martyr’s influential Commentaries on Judges; and in 1572, a refutation of the papal bull against Elizabeth by the important Zurich reformer Henry Bullinger, the publication of which, given the importance of a clear answer to the Pope’s threats, amounts to an official recognition of Leicester’s status as guardian of Protestantism. Early in the reign, the writer of an anonymous note of recommendation had clearly chosen Robert Dudley as the best man to find places in the church for twenty-eight ‘godly preachers which have utterly forsaken antichrist and all his Romish rags’. In the 1560s he was reported by the Spanish ambassador as having ordered the removal from the Queen’s private chapel of several old-style furnishings; it was one of the things that made the ambassador doubt the sincerity of his offers of friendship.

The religious settlement Elizabeth had chosen back at the start of her reign was Protestant in essentials, but sufficiently familiar in its trappings (the colourful riches associated with the Catholic Church) to give some comfort to ordinary people. It was in many ways the plan that had been laid out under Robert’s father - but times had moved on since then, and in measure as it soothed the traditionalists, so it came to give considerable concern to the real reformers; indeed, it risked being seen, as one anonymous author claimed, as ‘a cloaked papistry or a mingle mangle’. Robert himself had once been prepared to make conciliatory gestures towards Catholicism, if urged by political necessity. But by 1568, the French ambassador wrote, Robert ‘was totally of the Calvinist religion’.

It used to be assumed that his was merely a faith of convenience - that the puritans, as they were now coming to be called, were strongly against Elizabeth’s marrying a Catholic prince, and so was he - or even that his first motivation was the chance to grab further church lands. But it is hard to square that view with a letter which, in August 1576, Leicester would write to a noted puritan, Thomas Wood, a longtime satellite of the Dudleys. Wood had written to the Dudley brothers, complaining that Leicester seemed to have played a leading part in suppressing the puritan practice of ‘prophesying’ in Southam in Warwickshire, an area of Dudley influence. The puritans were devoted to these sessions of communal study, but the conservatives, and Elizabeth herself, viewed them with mistrust as forums for public dissent. Leicester (and the rest of a largely supportive council) had been acting on royal orders when the prophesyings were put down.

But the point that strikes any modern reader of this letter is not that Leicester seems, in this case, to have failed the puritans. It is not even the degree to which they had thought of him as an ‘earnest favourer and as it were a patron’, as Wood acknowledged: one who had nudged their men into office (bishops, deans, heads of house at Oxford), pressed for further reforms, protected puritans whose practices laid them open to attack and smoothed the path for the French Protestant refugees who, in the 1560s, had begun trickling into England. What is most striking is the tone in which Leicester chooses to justify himself, in an extremely long and personal letter, to this apparently unimportant man.

no man I know in this realm of one calling or other that hath showed a better mind to the furthering of true religion than I have done, even from the first day of her Majesty’s reign to this . . . I take Almighty God to my record, I never altered my mind or thought from my youth touching my religion, and you know I was ever from my cradle brought up in it.

I am not, I thank God, fantastically persuaded in religion but, being resolved to my comfort of all the substance thereof, do find it soundly and godly set forth in this universal Church of England . . . which doctrine and religion I wish to be obeyed duly as it ought of all subjects in this land . . . For my own part, I am so resolved to the defence of that [which] is already established as I mean not to be a maintainer or allower of any that would trouble or disturb the quiet proceeding thereof.

Leicester warned that internecine strife among the different wings of the Protestant religion was not helping anybody except their Catholic adversaries. ‘I found no more hate or displeasure almost between papist and Protestant than is now in many places between many of our own religion.’ He stood fast behind Elizabeth’s position, when it came to it. Elizabeth is famously quoted as saying that there was one Jesus Christ and the rest was ‘a dispute about trifles’. So here he too spoke of ‘dissension for trifles’. Their phrases did still often echo each other’s to a noticeable degree.

It would be possible to find in Elizabeth’s writings, as well as in Leicester’s, the strong religious rhetoric that strikes modern ears so forcefully. In a prayer published for the edification of her people, Elizabeth had written: ‘Thou seest whereof I came, of corrupt seed; what I am, a most frail substance; where I live, in the world full of wickedness, where delights be snares, where dangers be imminent, where sin reigneth and death abideth. This is my state. Now where is my comfort?’ It is something to set against those more familiar statements, suggestive of an easy pragmatism, that sit so agreeably with our own century; something that may perhaps suggest another strand in the bond she shared with Robert Dudley.

What is more certain, however, is that the faith which had in Mary Tudor’s day united Robert and Elizabeth would in the years ahead help to divide them. In those times to come, in a world increasingly polarized by religious division, Leicester would declare as the Protestant champion while Elizabeth, on the contrary, would draw further away from the radical reformers, as the demands of their faith clashed with the functions and prerogatives of her monarchy.

The political froideur between them gained impetus from the personal. Leicester’s relationship with the Queen - baulked likewise of any natural fulfilment and of a natural end - seemed to be foundering into sterility. Up with the rocket, down with the stick. And up, and down again . . . On one of his absences from the court, the Queen had sent after him a communiqué which evidently shocked him. Elizabeth’s letter is long lost, as is whatever response Robert finally felt emboldened to send to her directly. But the letter he wrote to Throckmorton paints the situation vividly. He had ‘never wilfully offended’, he wrote plaintively; and even if he had done so inadvertently,

Foul faults have been pardoned in some; my hope was that only one might be forgiven - yea, forgotten - me. If many days’ service and not a few years’ proof have [not] made trial of unremovable fidelity enough, what shall I think of all that past favour, which [when] my first oversight [brings about] as it were an utter casting off of all that was before . . .

The shock had been all the worse for the fact the letter had been written in the Queen’s own hand: an honour, but one he could have done without, for ‘then I might yet have remained in some hope of mistaking’. No need for him to make haste home to court - a ‘cave in a corner of oblivion, or a sepulchre for perpetual rest’ would be more suitable, Leicester added in a postscript, bitterly.

In these tetchy years we find the Chancellor, Sir Walter Mildmay, writing that he cannot do Leicester’s bidding for fear of displeasing the Queen, ‘who is in no wise disposed to hear anything that may do you good’. The Queen (Mildmay said once) could even be heard telling her cousin, Lord Hunsdon: ‘My lord, it hath often been said that you should be my Master of the Horse, but it is now likely to come true.’ One has the strong sense that both Elizabeth and Robert, while each communicating nominally with a third party, were actually speaking for each other’s ears - as is clearly evident in a letter Throckmorton wrote to Robert towards the end of the 1560s. (There was more than one occasion on which Leicester, having clearly offended the Queen in some way, used Throckmorton as the conduit to make his peace.)

and said you did mistake the cameleon’s property, who doth change into all colours according to the object, save white, which is innocency . . . Then she willed me to show her what your lordship had written to me. She read my letter twice and put it in her pocket. Then I demanded of her whether she would write to your Lordship. She plucked forth my letter and said, ‘I am glad at the length he hath confessed a fault in himself, for he asketh pardon.’

So far, it is true, their estrangements had never lasted long. But there was an increasingly strained note about the squabbles and the reconciliations, as if each tug were stretching the elastic of their affection a little more taut; each release revealing it to have grown a little more slack. It could be suggested that Elizabeth - like a temperamental top seed throwing tantrums on the tennis court - fuelled herself by these teacup tempests. But there is no reason at all to suppose Robert Dudley felt the same way. Backwards and forwards, in favour and out of it: it was (to use a later idiom) enough to exhaust a cow. Of course, Robert was not just the victim here. He, as much as Elizabeth, had his own game to play: supporting a foreign match proposed for her, and then turning against it; speaking favourably in public, but perhaps taking a different tone in private, in those conversations to which we never will be privy; taking what he could get from her, even while baulked of the thing he couldn’t: a relationship of patronage that shaped and warped their bond. (Leicester’s enemies said of him that he made money out of every quarrel - ‘was never reconciled to the Queen under £5,000’, in one account from the eighteenth century.) On the other hand, it is hard not to see Robert as the greater sufferer. Such, over the next few years, he increasingly felt himself to be. It was becoming apparent that Elizabeth had no interest in altering the status quo. If she could hold everyone and everything in stasis then she would be happy: foreign suitors proposing; Robert Dudley adoring; the country complaisant; and the years at bay. It was he who wanted to move the game on - by marriage to Elizabeth, if that were possible; but, if it were not, then maybe another way.

Again, perhaps Robert’s feelings, his attitude towards Elizabeth’s other suitors, bear looking at more closely. In the years ahead, he would seem not to be automatically opposed to all possible foreign alliances. It was partly pretence, but not entirely. As his own hopes began imperceptibly to fade, a measure of pragmatism was a self-preserving necessity. Best, if it really came to that, for Elizabeth to marry a foreign prince who had some reason to be grateful to him, Robert, because a hostile royal husband would have a mere subject at his mercy.

Once he began slowly to realize Elizabeth would never marry him, then what did Robert Dudley think? Did he subscribe to the old courtly story, the credo that ‘the Queen can do no wrong’? Again, it is extraordinary just how many points of connection can be found between the rules of courtly love and the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert Dudley - right down to the Queen’s ‘two bodies’: her dual identity as a flesh-and-blood woman and as a genderless, presumed masculine, epitome of monarchy;⁴³ right down to the repeated rivalry, in the literature of courtly love, between the knight and the clerk - Robert Dudley and William Cecil? - for the favour of the lady.

The links extend to the relevance of courtly love to the Arthurian fantasy, which attracted both Elizabeth and Robert; to the importance of courtly love as a gesture against (in the words of one expert) ‘the harsh authoritarian world of masculine kingship’ in general, and the Holy Roman Empire in particular; to the habitual use of symbols (like Robert’s sketched ‘Eyes’); and of course to the fact that no history of the literature of courtly love can be complete without the afternote of The Faerie Queene, the long poem written by Robert’s protégé Spenser and perhaps intended by the poet’s patron (before his untimely death put paid to the idea) to buy his way back into Elizabeth’s wandering favour.

Whatever Robert Dudley’s sexual relationship with Elizabeth had been, it was surely fading away. In 1565 the Imperial ambassador - having made the most ‘diligent enquiries’ concerning her ‘maiden honour and integrity’ - had felt able to reassure his master that Robert was ‘a virtuous, pious, courteous and highly moral man whom the Queen loves as a sister her brother in all maidenly honour, in most chaste and honest love. She speaks publicly with him as with a dear brother, but that she desires to marry him or entertains any but the purest affection is quite out of the question.’ Suggestions to the contrary were ‘the spawn of envy and malice and hatred’ merely. Now, five years later, the French envoy likewise concluded that Elizabeth was ‘good and virtuous’, adding that with so many watching her it were impossible she could be so admired if she were anything else.

Did Robert, as the years wore on, as his first high hopes flagged, bring himself to the pragmatic position: that he had done pretty well out of the situation, even if he had not got the biggest prize? If so, perhaps he had also arrived at this proviso: that though he too could do worse than maintain the status quo, he would not allow it to keep him from another relationship, fulfilled and fruitful, indefinitely. And perhaps he had come to realize that a foreign marriage for Elizabeth - to the right person, under the right circumstances - could even set him free.