Elizabeth and Leicester

Perhaps the conspicuous complications explain why Leicester himself sounded a note of cautious optimism about the potential match. On a personal level, he must have known Elizabeth’s heart was never likely to be engaged; on a political one, he had learnt the usefulness of a marriage negotiation from his royal mistress. As he wrote to his ally Francis Walsingham, then serving as ambassador to the French court: ‘I concede our estate requireth a match, but God send us a good one and meet for all parties.’ (An exile for his faith during Mary Tudor’s reign, Walsingham would become ever more important in the years ahead. The man who became the organizing genius behind Elizabeth’s network of spies and informers - ‘a most subtle searcher of secrets’, as Camden said - would also be bound to Leicester and his family by a number of ideological and personal ties.)

For their part, the French - as Walsingham wrote in response - were understandably sceptical about England’s apparent welcome of their approach. ‘They think here you do but dally,’ Walsingham explained to the Queen, and Leicester must have understood their feeling precisely. He himself felt, he wrote to Walsingham, that the match should be agreed or abandoned: ‘that either upon very good deliberation it may be embraced, or in time, and in best sort, put from too much entrance; for neither is our cause meet to dally nor [Anjou’s] person to be abused’. Nevertheless, Elizabeth, Leicester said, was ‘more bent to marriage than heretofore she hath been’; though still insisting on conditions the French would find it hard to meet, still complaining of princes who ‘would rather marry the kingdom than marry the Queen’. Over the next few months he would harp to Walsingham on the same theme: that ‘assuredly I do verily believe her Majesty’s mind herein is other than it has been, and more resolutely determined than ever yet at any time before’. He wrote of Anjou’s strong suit in terms that showed he now accepted the weakness of his own. When it came to the question of ‘estate’, he said, Elizabeth ‘is of mind to marry with the greatest and he [Anjou] is almost alone the greatest to be had. The conditions will be all . . .’

Leicester was ready, Walsingham was to assure the French, accurately or otherwise, ‘to allow of any marriage we shall like’. Everyone seemed to feel he had effectively a measure of veto, or at the least that his support would be well worth having. (At one point, the French commissioners were even instructed to sweeten him with the hand of a Valois princess if necessary.) But Leicester seemed to have abandoned all thought of sexual jealousy. Indeed, in December it was he who ushered Fénelon into Elizabeth’s private rooms for the all-important discussion. And when in January 1571 Elizabeth told the French ambassador she was worried that Anjou would always be younger than she, Leicester quipped ‘so much the better for you’, with hearty bonhomie.

Anjou, on the other hand, was publicly grumbling that his brother the King and his mother Catherine de Medici wanted to marry him off to ‘an old creature with a sore leg’. The French terms were as demanding as the English (at one point Elizabeth even demanded the return of Calais!): that Henri should be crowned king, should rule England jointly with his wife, and should be allowed to practise his own religion freely. Most of Europe reckoned it would never happen; but the English ministers and the French queen mother between them were determined to drag the two reluctant principals to the altar - and the threat that if Elizabeth did not take him, Anjou might instead seek to marry the Queen of Scots provided a powerful disincentive to the English to abandon the proposal too quickly. ‘Of all impending perils that would be the greatest,’ Leicester was warned, ominously.

Contemporaries, understandably, seem to have found it hard to grasp Leicester’s own policy. The Spanish ambassador claimed that while on the surface he was all for the match, ‘por tercera mano’ (‘with the third hand’) he was telling the Queen that Anjou was infected with loathsome diseases. Cecil was grumbling to Walsingham that ‘It was strange any one man should give comfort to the Ambassador in the cause, and yet the same man to persuade the Queen’s Majesty to persist.’ The one man was surely Leicester - but such behaviour is not at odds with his convictions. He could not but applaud the Queen’s cavils, in so far as they sprang from her ‘true zeal to Religion’, since the strength of his own conviction was increasingly coming to colour his public as well as his private life. But he could still send a private piece of advice that the French should not press their point (that Anjou should be allowed to practise his own Catholicism) before the signing of an agreement. The Queen was more likely to ‘yield to reason’ afterwards, to the persuasions of one ‘that shall be her husband’, than to a formal treaty.

In the spring of 1571, as the negotiations wore on, William Cecil was elevated to the peerage as Lord (Baron) Burghley. Leicester stood at his right hand during the ceremony; and the next year he deputized for the Queen at the Garter ceremony at which Cecil was accorded that honour, too. In February 1571 Throckmorton died, after falling ill at Leicester’s house - after eating salads, so Camden said - and though it would later be rumoured Leicester had poisoned him, the fact is the earl had lost his subtlest political ally.⁴⁵ And early that same year, there came yet another story of political chicanery that shows Leicester acting equivocally.

Back in the summer of 1570, Norfolk had been released from the Tower into a form of house arrest on the pleas of Leicester and of Cecil and the promise of good behaviour. He was still hoping to regain a measure of favour; and the letter Leicester wrote on 2 January 1571 sounds (though of course his sincerity has been questioned) as if he were genuinely trying to help him. ‘I know not almost with what face I may in this sort write to you, my good Lord,’ the letter starts out. Leicester had tried to get the Queen to accept a New Year gift Norfolk had sent her; had persuaded her to read the accompanying letter, which she admitted to be ‘very wisely and dutifully written’, and then to examine what was inside: ‘she took the jewel in her hand, and, I perceive, did not think before it had been so rich or so fair as it was indeed till she had seen it. Then did she commend it beyond measure, and thought there had not been such a one to be got in all London, and valued it with the pearl at least £500.’ She looked at it for almost a quarter of an hour and, said Leicester shrewdly, seemed sorry to have to refuse it; but - ‘contrary to all my knowledge and expectation’, Leicester writes, and in spite of ‘all the persuasions’ - refuse it she did. To accept the gift was to accept the giver; and Elizabeth had by now little belief in Norfolk’s loyalty.

The very month after this proffered gift, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to Norfolk with details of what has become known as the Ridolfi plot: the Florentine banker’s plan for the Catholic powers of Europe to invade England, and set Mary and Norfolk on Elizabeth’s throne. Ridolfi’s touting of the plan round the European courts would have been bound to attract the attention of Cecil’s agents, even had they not almost certainly had inside information early. In the Parliament that met in May 1571 (a Parliament at which Leicester held the proxies of seven of the absent peers), three acts were passed to raise the level of national security. All the potential conspirators were closely watched. By the summer, in fact, it had become apparent that Ridolfi’s plan was unworkable. It was Philip of Spain’s general in the Netherlands, the Duke of Alva, who sounded its death knell, refusing to order his troops on an invasion he knew would fail. But it was too late for the conspirators to retreat successfully. A courier reported the suspicious communications issuing from the Duke of Norfolk’s house; and the dawn of 8 September saw him back in the Tower.

There is still considerable debate as to just who betrayed the Ridolfi plot. Ridolfi himself is the likeliest; but he may have had among his allies one or more double agents as expert as he. One such was the sailor and freebooter John Hawkins; another was Hawkins’s shipmate George Fitzwilliam. These two were supposedly prepared to bring English ships over to an invading Spanish enemy, but in fact handed Spanish plans over to the English authorities, triggering Norfolk’s rearrest. That Fitzwilliam really owed ultimate allegiance to Spain was always the less likely for the fact that he was related to William Cecil, as well as to Leicester’s brother-in-law Henry Sidney.

The full revelation of just how far an anti-England Catholic coalition had gone increased the need for a defensive alliance. But the very tension in the air perhaps heightened Elizabeth’s instinctive reluctance to marry, her fear of putting herself and her realm in the hands of another power. In July Leicester had been writing to Walsingham: ‘For her desire to marriage, I perceive it continueth still as it was, which is very cold, nevertheless, she seeth it is so necessary, as I believe she yieldeth rather to think it is fit to have a husband, rather than willing to have any found indeed for her.’ By late September he was even less hopeful: ‘surely I am now persuaded that her Majesty’s heart is nothing inclined to marriage at all . . . For my part it grieveth my heart to think of it seeing no way, in so far as I can think, serveth, how she can remain long quiet and safe without such a strong alliance as marriage must bring.’

While various contacts were interrogated, while the Queen of Scots tried to excuse herself and while Norfolk languished in the Tower, the French negotiations wound towards their weary end. First it was Elizabeth who blew cold: Cecil told the Queen at the end of August that he would try to find another route to safety for her, and for her isolated kingdom; Leicester told Walsingham that clearly, after all, ‘Her Majesty’s heart is nothing inclined to marry at all, for the matter was ever brought to as many points as we could devise, and always she was bent to hold with the difficultest.’ Then, as the revelations of the Ridolfi plot forced Elizabeth to realize just how much she needed allies, it was the French who drew back. In December, Leicester was writing to Walsingham that ‘I find now a full determination in her Majesty to like of marriage . . . So she earnestly and assuredly affirms to me.’ But Anjou made no secret of his distaste; Elizabeth, besides being a heretic, at thirty-eight was losing her looks. Her hair was thinning behind and she had taken to a front of false curls: ‘The more hairy she is before, the more bald she is behind,’ said England’s ambassador Sir Thomas Smith ungallantly. No portraits of Elizabeth reflect her age accurately. She took care they should not; that they should broadcast, rather, the image of unchanging glory. But the grumbles of her ministers reveal the backstage story - that the cracks were beginning to show, in her aptitude as well as her appearance. Elizabeth was becoming more dilatory (a development which perhaps made Leicester’s ability to handle her all the more valuable). Her natural bent had always been to procrastinate: to dislike innovation, to resent those who forced her to contemplate problems which, ignored, might go away. She preferred always to keep her own counsel, to reserve her judgement in her own heart, as her motto Video et taceo (I see all and speak nothing) might suggest. But now secretary after secretary complained (as Sir Thomas Smith put it in 1574) that ‘The time passeth almost irrecuperable, the advantage lost, the charges continuing, nothing resolved.’

She was about to show just that character trait yet again. In January 1572 the Duke of Norfolk came to trial before a jury of his peers. (Almost the only witness called was a man of Leicester’s, the writer Richard Cavendish, whose daughter would later marry Leicester’s ‘base son’.) The verdict of guilty, and the death sentence, were foregone conclusions. The execution itself, however, was another matter. The Queen vacillated almost hysterically, the enormity of Norfolk’s repeated and incorrigible offences weighing against his nearness of blood, his ‘superiority of honour’. In March she was ill, with ‘heavy and vehement pains’ that ‘straightened her breath and clutched her heart’. For three days and nights Leicester and Cecil sat up with her. The doctors believed she had eaten bad fish - the idea of poison was ever-present - but her emotional distress must surely have played some part. She signed a warrant that Norfolk should be executed on 9 April; then cancelled it just hours before the time. Members of the Parliament that met again this May declared themselves unable to sleep in their beds at night for fear of more conspiracies. Great suit was made for the execution, Leicester told Walsingham, ‘but I see no likelihood’. But this time he underestimated Elizabeth. Another warrant was signed, that Norfolk should die on 2 June, and this time, it was carried out: the first beheading of Elizabeth’s reign.⁴⁶

England, meanwhile, had more reason than ever to pursue the safety of a French alliance against the increasing power and aggression of Spain. If not the reluctant bisexual Henri, then perhaps another Valois brother might do? In December 1571 had come the first suggestion that Elizabeth might marry François, the Duke of Alençon, instead of Anjou. François was (so his mother observed coolly) ‘much less scrupulous’ than his brother in matters of religion; sympathetic, even, to the Huguenots - altogether less ‘like a mule’, as Smith chimed in enthusiastically; and ‘more apt than th’other’ when it came to getting children. Not being heir presumptive to the French throne, he would be free to live in England. Against that, he was seventeen, small, and pockmarked. In April 1572 England and France concluded the Treaty of Blois, whereby they agreed to support each other against the Spanish enemy. Leicester arranged the celebratory banquet at Whitehall - the greatest, he boasted, in memory. It now seemed more desirable than ever that this alliance should be cemented dynastically.

In June came the formal offer of Alençon’s hand, on the lips of a special envoy. Though the Queen remained non-committal, Walsingham was instructed to compile a report on the prospective bridegroom. The pockmarks on the end of Alençon’s nose were the worst of it, he reported; that, and his general lack of beauty: ‘when I weigh the same with the delicacy of Her Majesty’s eye, I hardly think that there will ever grow any liking’. All the same, when the court set off on progress that summer, things looked as hopeful as they had ever done where Elizabeth’s marriages were concerned - which is to say, moderately.

The July progress took her to Warwick, to stay as the guest of Ambrose Dudley. She watched a display of country dancing from the window, ‘and made very merry’; herself played on a spinet to delight the company. The highlight of the visit - besides a mock water battle - was a spectacular firework display. Unfortunately, a spark from one firework set four Warwick houses ablaze, but the Queen organized a whip-round, raising £25 to be given to the residents in compensation; probably unusual consideration in the sixteenth century. But as Elizabeth moved on to Leicester’s house at Kenilworth, nearby, an event was brewing across the Channel that would put an end to all festivities.

It is remembered, perhaps, as just another atrocity in the religious tussles of the sixteenth century, which had already seen the dungeons of the Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield. But in fact, at the time, it was one of those days that do shake the world; one of those days (and it is not hard to think of modern parallels) when an act of aggression so dramatizes an ideological or religious conflict that suddenly a polarity of conviction is set forth for all to see.

It started as the attempted assassination of a single man. The intensely Catholic Guises (the Queen of Scots’ family), with the support of Catherine de Medici, who had been persuaded the French Protestants might draw the country into a war with Spain, set out to murder the Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny. The attempt failed, but it provoked riots in Paris, and from there the violence escalated sharply. Soon the Catholics of the capital were killing every Protestant they could lay hands on. As the Spanish ambassador to France sent home in a vivid, if horrifying, despatch: ‘While I write, they are casting them out naked and dragging them through the streets, pillaging their houses and sparing not a babe. Blessed be God, who has converted the Princes of France to His purpose. May He inspire their hearts to go on as they have begun!’ Three to four thousand died in Paris alone. As the violence spread to the provinces, the death toll rose to some ten thousand. When Philip in Spain received his ambassador’s despatch, it was said that he danced for joy; as did the imprisoned Queen Mary.

Elizabeth was out riding when the despatches bearing the news arrived, still on horseback as she read them. Instantly, she turned back towards Kenilworth Castle. There could be no further thought of pleasure on this or many a subsequent day. As the court set off back towards London it was not until several days later, at Woodstock, that the Queen at last consented to receive the French ambassador. Not a courtier would speak to or look at him as he approached the presence chamber. There he found the Queen, her ladies, and her privy councillors all dressed in mourning black. What the Queen said to Fénelon was mild compared to the reproaches of the councillors. Cecil told him it was the greatest crime since the crucifixion. No-one on the English side, now, could think of a Valois marriage. If the French king had been ‘Author and doer of this Act, shame and confusion light upon him’, Leicester wrote to Walsingham. The question was whether anything could be saved of the Anglo-French treaty.

As Elizabeth wrote to Walsingham - a message for the French king - the murder of the supposed Huguenot conspirators, without ‘answer by law’, was bad enough: ‘we do hear it marvellously evil taken and as a thing of a terrible and dangerous example . . . But when more added unto it - that women, children, maids, young infants and sucking babes were at the same time murdered and cast into the river . . . this increased our grief and sorrow.’ Those of the reformed religion in France were driven now ‘to fly or die’.

To the Queen’s Protestant councillors, to the Earl of Leicester, the question was whether the massacre had been mere mob violence - bad enough - or the fruit of a deep-laid Catholic conspiracy. Opinion (though probably wrong) tended to the latter theory; and this fear was to fling Europe’s beleaguered Protestants into a defensive frenzy. As Leicester wrote to the Earl of Morton (representing the Protestant lords of Scotland) on 7 September, the events in France

Amid all the fallout of the massacre, one thing that could be seen was a new consensus among Elizabeth’s ministers as to the danger represented by the Scots queen, Mary. Back in March 1571, Mary’s agent the Bishop of Ross had written that the Queen of Scots’ life had been in great danger, with Cecil and others urging she should be put to death; ‘and, of all the ministers whom Elizabeth admitted to her confidence, Leicester only had opposed her execution’. But there was no more talk now of Leicester’s secret sympathy. Now, Elizabeth’s councillors were almost united in believing that Mary (so recently the Catholic focus of rebellion) should be at the very least excluded from the succession, if not actually put to death. Now, Leicester and Cecil were united in urging a rapprochement with Scotland’s Protestant powers, and in fearing that some around the Queen were too tender to Mary. In November Leicester wrote to Cecil: ‘You see how far this Canker has passed. I fear a fistula irrecoverable.’ In December, when the Queen was proving reluctant to face up to the Scottish question, Leicester wrote summoning an absent Cecil to the cause:

It sounds as though Leicester and Elizabeth were beginning to draw apart a little on questions of policy. The political and religious tussles of the years ahead have often been presented as a tug of war for Elizabeth’s attention between Leicester’s hawkish faction and the more moderate policies best represented by Cecil. But more recently several historians have pointed out that in these years of Elizabeth’s reign (before the genuinely divided and divisive ‘second reign’ and the fractious 1590s, by which time most of the old guard were dead), Elizabeth’s advisers tended to be broadly united on what should be done. It was the Queen herself with whom they were all in disagreement.

Already, before the massacre, those letters of Leicester’s to the Queen which can be provisionally dated to 1571 (and since they bear no year, it can only be provisional) had been breathing great closeness, indeed; but closeness of a calm, almost a marital kind. The Queen and the earl speak much about health, as couples do, in what was by contemporary standards definitely middle age. One February day Robert scolds Elizabeth, as he has scolded her before, about her ‘overlong sojourn in that corrupt air about the city; but you have so earnestly promised remedy as I hope to see you in time this year put it in practice, respecting yourself before others’. He thinks that Grafton, where he is, could be ready for her by May. (Meanwhile he is keeping her messenger with him for a time, after the ‘painful journey’ he had had: ‘he came in such speed as I think he did fly, and therefore deserves some rest’. Leicester himself could sign a letter ‘in haste and in bed’, and it is rather touching to see how often, as the years wore on, Elizabeth’s henchmen mention the need to secure some rest for each other, as well as for themselves. They were clearly all beginning to find the demands of the Queen’s service exhausting to a degree.)

In another letter, Robert has to satisfy Elizabeth about his own health: ‘your over great care of my present estate’. Though he ‘departed away in some pain, yet in no suspicion at all of what you feared, only it seems, for lack of use, my late exercise wrought some strange accident, through my own negligence, to take more cold than was convenient after such heat. I was well warned by you . . .’ He had been ‘driven to use the commodity of a bath, to ease the pain’ - but really, Elizabeth need not worry. It is warm, it is lovely - but it is not the tone of an ardent suitor. That, Elizabeth would now find elsewhere.

At court, a new rival had been competing for the Queen’s attention: Christopher Hatton, who had been ‘Master of the Game’ in those Christmastime revels at the Inner Temple where Robert had presided as Prince Pallaphilos, some years before. Third son of an undistinguished Northamptonshire gentleman, Hatton had been born in 1540 and succeeded to the family estate in his minority, on the deaths of his father and elder brothers. After a spell at Oxford he had been sent by his guardians to the Inns of Court, but it is possible he caught the Queen’s eye, still in his early twenties, before he ever had occasion to practise the law he had studied.

The first date of his coming to court is not recorded. He was not important enough for that, until the Queen’s favour made him so. But Naunton wrote that he came there ‘of a galliard’, since it was his dancing first caught the Queen’s eye; while Camden, more surely, says that ‘being young and of a comely tallness of body and countenance, he got into such favour with the Queen that she took him into her band of fifty Gentleman-pensioners’. From there he rose to be a gentleman of the privy chamber (thanks, Camden says, to ‘the modest sweetness of his manners’), and the few years that changed the 1560s to the 1570s saw a steady stream of grants and offices coming his way. The gifts were certainly enough to arouse the jealousy of Leicester, who is said to have offered to bring in a dancing master who could dance even better than Hatton, since that - he insinuated - was the young man’s only claim to fame; the attribute that had attracted Elizabeth so powerfully. By the coming year, 1573, Christopher Hatton would be captain of the Gentleman Pensioners, that famously tall and good-looking band whose duty it was to provide a ceremonial guard for the Queen’s person.

It has often been speculated that to Hatton - if not to Leicester - Elizabeth at last gave herself physically. It has been said that the tone of his letters is so frenziedly lover-like that no other interpretation is possible. Sending her a ring said to ward off the plague, he wrote that it was meant to be worn ‘between the sweet dugs [breasts]’. Forced to leave court for his health in the summer of 1573, he wrote her a whole series of letters so extravagant in their terms that a delighted Elizabeth could be forgiven for concluding that here was a man who really might die for love of her.

No death, no, nor hell, shall ever win of me my consent so far to wrong myself again as to be absent from you one day. God grant my return. I will perform this vow. I lack that I live by. The more I find this lack, the further I go from you . . . Would God I were with you but for one hour. My wits are overwrought with thoughts. I find myself amazed. Bear with me, my most dear sweet Lady. Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me, for I love you.

The real ‘evidence’, though, comes not from Hatton’s own words, but from those of a friend, Edward Dyer, who in the autumn of 1572 wrote warning him about his comportment with the Queen: ‘who though she do descend very much in her sex as a woman, yet may we not forget her place, and the nature of it as our Sovereign’.⁴⁷ If a man ‘of secret cause known to himself’ were to challenge that established order, Dyer told Hatton, he should be very careful, for if the Queen were to mislike it - to ‘imagine that you go about to imprison her fancy’ - he would be wholly undone. He would do better ‘to acknowledge your duty’ to the Queen; ‘never seem deeply to condemn her frailities, but rather joyfully to commend such things as should be in her, as though they were in her indeed’.

In a letter that serves as a manual of instruction for a favourite, Dyer goes on to warn Hatton against too much importunity, against criticism and jealousy. Particularly, he should beware of displaying his jealousy of ‘my Lord of Ctm’; and though the reference is not explicit, this is possibly the young Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who had come to court in 1571. As handsome and talented as he was erratic and untrustworthy, Oxford’s career saw him bobbing on successive waves of scandal that might have overwhelmed someone less well born than himself. Elizabeth (and Cecil, who rued the day he had ever become Oxford’s father-in-law) came to see that Hatton spoke no more than the truth when he warned Elizabeth to beware of the ‘Boar’ - for so she named Oxford - whose tusks might raze and tear. Better the Sheep (Hatton was often her ‘Mutton’), for ‘he hath no tooth to bite’. But for a brief time in the early 1570s, Oxford put everyone else’s nose out of joint.

The key passage in Dyer’s letter is this one: that ‘though in the beginning when her Majesty sought you (after her good manner), she did bear with rugged dealing of yours, until she had what she fancied, yet now, after satiety and fullness, it will rather hurt than help you . . .’. The modern age has been quick to read ‘satiety’ in a sexual sense; and indeed it is tempting to do so. But that reading falls into question as soon as we consider Elizabeth’s character. Do we believe that she would have given herself to Hatton, if she had not done so to Leicester? Or that she could have done so without attracting far more comment, not just in the court, but in her own and other countries?

Yes, a few rumours would always crop up that Hatton, like Leicester, had (in the hostile words of one Mather, a plotter against Elizabeth), ‘more recourse to Her Majesty in her Privy Chamber than reason would suffer if she were so virtuous and well-inclined as some [noiseth] her’. Yes, Hatton, like Leicester, was blamed for some of those supposed illicit pregnancies that Elizabeth was rumoured to have concealed so successfully. But it is notable that Elizabeth’s statesmen did not seem rattled by Hatton to the degree one might have expected if he, alone, had indeed gained that kind of ascendancy over the Queen. And it is worth noting, too, that some of his most impassioned declarations of apparent love come cheek by jowl with what on the face of it are pleas that Elizabeth should marry him - hardly a possibility. (If marriage with an Earl of Leicester, son of the Duke of Northumberland, might have devalued her status around Europe, then marriage with a mere Christopher Hatton - not even ‘Sir’ Christopher until 1577 - would have been an absurdity.) What Elizabeth ‘fancied’ was less sex than adulation; and it was the knowledge that there were firm bounds set on Hatton’s aspiration - that he could never realistically even dream of being king consort, nor could his colleagues suspect him of it - that allowed the flirtation to be indulged in all its delicious folly.⁴⁸

If Hatton does as Dyer says, then ‘your place shall keep you in worship, your presence in favour, your followers will stand to you, at the least you shall have no bold enemies, and you shall dwell in the ways to take all advantages wisely, and honestly to serve your turn at times’. Hatton has gone down in history as something of a political lightweight. (There was considerable comment when, in 1587, Elizabeth made him Lord Chancellor - this, when he had no more than the barest legal training.) That reputation is probably unfair. He served Elizabeth’s turn not only in a personal capacity but as a privy councillor from 1578, inclining to conservative policies and tolerance of Catholics, and as a gifted parliamentary orator. Certainly men like Cecil came to regard him too as a valuable cog in the wheels of government; and not only because of the kindliness, the sweetness of disposition, that was conceded to him even by his enemies. Even Leicester’s letters to him - about an exchange of news, the sending of a buck to court, a message from the Queen, or the royal comings and goings - show a half-mollified prickliness that reflects the combination of his own jealousy and Hatton’s amiability.

In the mid-1570s it seemed, after the shocks of the past few years, that the council’s internal rivalries had lost their edge. Perhaps the blood-red glow of St Bartholomew’s Day made it seem temporarily a little less important whose light at court was shining more brightly. Or perhaps one should see, rather, Leicester and Cecil - and soon, to some extent, Hatton - as prominent figures in a senior group who would join forces against any new pretender to their dignities.

For your own matter I assure you I found Her Majesty as well disposed as ever . . . and so, I trust, it shall always continue. God be thanked, her blasts be not the storms of other princes, though they be very sharp sometimes to those she loves best. Every man must render to her their due, and the most bounden the most of all. You and I come in that rank, and I am witness hitherto [to] your honest zeal to perform as much as man can . . . Hold and you can never fail.

Leicester, in Elizabeth’s language, was her ‘Eyes’. Her eyes were vital, in order that she should see her kingdom. But Hatton (besides being her ‘Mutton’) was her ‘Lids’ - lids that perhaps enabled her, when she needed to relax, not to see too much. Perhaps Leicester recognized that this was a role he himself was no longer so well able to play. One of the compensations in the years ahead for both Leicester and many of his erstwhile enemies would be their growing ability to live in increasing amity. As the chance of Elizabeth’s marrying Leicester began to look slimmer - as all her councillors, Leicester included, began to feel she would never marry - it was as if they were able to relax with each other, at least to a degree; to work out a kind of modus vivendi. This first generation of Queen’s Men would achieve, in the years ahead, a kind of collegiate relationship - the chief men in Elizabeth’s suite covering for each other in the face of her anger, and consoling each other for her snubs, even when they clashed on policy. (A different analogy might be drawn with the women in a harem, or the wives in a polygamous marriage, who, it is said, may draw considerable support from each other.)