Elizabeth and Leicester

The Lady Douglass Sheffield was some ten years younger than Robert and Elizabeth, and kinswoman to the Queen through her father, the late Lord William Howard of Effingham, who had been half-brother to Anne Boleyn’s mother.⁴⁹ She had married Lord Sheffield when she was seventeen - a decade before Gilbert Talbot’s letter - and for several years, in Sheffield’s Midlands home, they seem to have lived in reasonable amity. But she may have first been attracted to Leicester as far back as 1566, when Elizabeth went on progress through Northamptonshire and stayed at Belvoir Castle. All the nearby gentry came to pay their respects, the Sheffields among them - or that, at least, was the tale of a distant family connection of the Sheffields, Gervase Holles. The beautiful Douglass, he wrote from the romantic distance of the next century, ‘shone like a star’ in that gathering, and Leicester, ‘being much taken with her perfection, paid court to her and used all the art (in which he was master enough) to debauch her. To be short, he found her an easy purchase, and he had the unlawful fruition of her bed and body.’ But to throw a little cold water on the story, Elizabeth is not known ever to have visited Belvoir Castle, though an alternative venue might have been Oxford, where, in honour of the Queen’s visit and that of the university’s Chancellor, Leicester, Lord Sheffield was one of several gentlemen created Master of Arts.

Lord Sheffield being ‘a gentleman of spirit’, so Holles claimed, Douglass was terrified he would find out; and Leicester wrote her a cryptically incriminating letter, saying that he had ‘not been unmindful in removing that obstacle which hindered the full fruit of their contentment’; that he had endeavoured to do so ‘by one expedient already’. One inference is that the goal he was trying to encompass was Lord Sheffield’s death. The letter came into Sheffield’s hands, who ‘that night parted beds, and the next day houses’, and set off for London in pursuit of ‘just and honourable revenge’. In Holles’ version, Leicester bribed an Italian physician to poison the irate husband before he had time to accomplish his fell design . . . In fact, Gervase Holles (a ward of one of Sheffield’s nephews) can have got only a garbled word-of-mouth version of the tale, passed down through a family that viewed Leicester with hostility; and he was writing at a time when tales of poisoning, and particularly of Leicester’s part in them, were standard currency. The story is worth recounting because, like many of the slanders on Leicester, it has stuck. But there is not the faintest hint of corroboration; and indeed, in a letter Leicester later wrote to Douglass, he recalls a time ‘after your widowhood began, upon the first occasion of my coming to you’.⁵⁰

Lord Sheffield did not die until 1568, and there was none of the outcry there would have been if someone of his status had expired suspiciously. And frankly, it does not look as though Leicester felt strongly enough about Douglass Sheffield to have gone to any extraordinary lengths to set her free. After she came to court as a widow, to serve in the privy chamber, it seems to have been she who was making the running, as Gilbert Talbot clearly saw. The lengthy letter Leicester wrote at some time during this period sets out very clearly the reasons why, fond though he might have been of her, he did not feel able to marry her.

I have, as you well know, long both loved and liked you, and found always that earnest and faithful affection at your hand that bound me greatly to you . . . after your widowhood began, upon the first occasion of my coming to you, I did plainly and truly open to you in what sort my good will should and might always remain to you . . . It seemed that you had fully resolved with yourself to dispose yourself accordingly, without any further expectation or hope of other dealing. From which time you have framed yourself in such sort toward me as was very much to my contentation.

It is the familiar note of the aggrieved male, finding that the comfortable, no-strings arrangement he thought convenient all round is no longer enough for the lady; that, though she cannot bring herself to break off (a separation that he, by the sound of it, could have contemplated with remarkable equanimity), she is not prepared to set him free. To be fair to Leicester, emotions apart, he did indeed have compelling reason for not making a public commitment. The woman who could force him to risk the loss of Elizabeth’s whole favour would need to be a strong character indeed - far stronger than Douglass proved herself to be.

A year back, he reminded her, Douglass had begun to press him ‘in a further degree’; and though he ‘did plainly and truly deal with you’, as he protests indignantly, ‘an unkindness began, and after, a great strangeness fell out’. It might have been better had it ended there: instead, she seemed to accept his conditions; they continued to meet ‘in a friendly sort and you resolved not to press me more with the matter.’

They quarrelled again; separated for five or six months. He said he still cared for her; she cried out that instead, ‘the good will I bare you had been clean changed and withdrawn, in such sort as you did often move me by letters and otherwise to show you some cause or to deal plainly with you that [what] I intended toward you’. So they had continued, through reconciliations and estrangements (like his with Elizabeth!), until now he desired Douglass clearly to understand that ‘to proceed to some further degree’ would mean ‘mine utter overthrow’, and that therefore ‘no other or further end can be looked for’.

Earlier historians called his letter ‘ungallant’, and it is true that on one level he is just another man trying to wriggle out of marrying his mistress. But at least he gave her (and, by the sound of it, had always given her) the respect of treating her like a rational creature - took the trouble to explain the position fully, and had the courage to admit his own flaws. ‘For albeit I have been and yet am a man frail, yet am I not void of conscience toward God, nor honest meaning toward my friend; and having made special choice of you to be one of the dearest to me, so much the more care must I have to discharge the office due unto you.’

He is, he says, ‘no competent judge’ of what Douglass should do now. Accept him on these terms or leave him; it is not for him to say. He shows a readiness to have her take the latter course that reflects either a certain lack of interest or a genuine sense of responsibility. He tells her to avoid ‘your casual depending on me’ (since all men are mortal) - a hint that Douglass (to whose character we have few independent clues) is perhaps a little clinging; perhaps a little like the popular perception of Amy. She should take care lest her ‘youthful time be consumed and spent without certainty’. She should beware ‘the daily accidents that hap by grieving and vexing you, both to the hindrance of your body and mind; the care and cumber of your own causes ungoverned; the subjection you are in to all reports to the touch of your good name and fame’. The lady has other suitors, ‘of the best’, who can offer her marriage, ‘and as it is not my part to bid you to take them, so were it not mine honestly, considering mine own resolution, to bid you refuse them . . . to carry you away for my pleasure to your more great and further grief were too great a shame for me’.

The letter shows a certain amount of conflict in Leicester himself. It is not, perhaps, that he is so strongly drawn to Douglass, as that he is drawn to the idea of marriage in itself; to the chance of heirs for his dynasty. His friend Lord North had heard him say how much he wanted to be able to have children with some ‘goodly [or godly?] gentlewoman’. He admitted as much to Douglass, wrote that the same situation that forced him to keep her at arm’s length ‘forceth me thus to be the cause almost of the ruin of mine own House; for there is no likelihood that any of our bodies are like to have heirs; my brother you see long married and not like to have children, it resteth so now in myself’. It had been with huge pomp and the highest hopes that Leicester, eight years before, had arranged his brother Ambrose’s marriage to Anne Russell, daughter to the strongly Protestant Earl of Bedford, and a favourite with the Queen. But of the four Dudley siblings, only Mary was able to leave legitimate heirs behind her.

The problem now for Leicester is that if he should marry, as he has told Douglass, ‘I am sure never to have favour’ from the source he cares for above all, Elizabeth; ‘yet is there nothing in the world next [apart from] that favour that I would not give to be in hope of leaving some children behind me’. Perhaps it was that thought - more even than Douglass’s pressure - that persuaded him to agree to marry her, secretly. If so, of course, he must have hoped that the secret marriage could later be acknowledged. (Conversely, if he had not gone through some sort of ceremony with Douglass, then he could have exercised no rights over any child.) We will never know what hints Elizabeth received as to the importance of the relationship; what private hints she dropped to him. (Remember those ‘spies’, of whom Gilbert Talbot wrote?) But then, the whole affair is shrouded in confusion. We have only Douglass’s much later word for it that, having formally contracted to marry in 1571 (perhaps under pressure from the Duke of Norfolk, as head of the Howards?), they wed secretly at Esher in Surrey, as 1572 turned to 1573.

We are told that the bride was given away by Sir Edward Horsey, a soldier and supporter of Leicester’s own. The other witnesses included the skilled royal physician known to everyone as Dr Julio,⁵¹ who features as the Italian poisoner in all the anti-Leicester stories, and Robert Sheffield, a connection of the bride. To mark the occasion (Douglass said), Leicester presented her with a ring ‘set with five pointed diamonds and a table diamond’. This ring had been given to him by a former Earl of Pembroke (predecessor of the then earl, who had married Leicester’s niece), with instructions that Leicester should bestow it upon none but his wife.

But this story, like others in Leicester’s life, has been the subject of long-running controversy. It’s not in dispute that the two were involved, and when, fifteen months later, Douglass had a child, Leicester acknowledged the boy and would continue to do so; would enter him at university with the rank of an earl’s son, and leave him all the property which (unlike his title) was his to dispose of. He would write of this offspring later, however, as ‘my base [i.e. illegitimate] son’. Was he right to do so? Or had there indeed been a ceremony, which only the fear of Elizabeth kept shrouded in secrecy?

To weigh the evidence, it is necessary to skip forward a few years; and then forward again, to the beginning of the seventeenth century. To cut a long story short (for the longer one, see Chapter 14 and Appendix I), within a few years this passion had run its course and Leicester married someone else - without, apparently, any serious fear he might be accused of bigamy. The Queen, in anger, raised with Douglass the rumour that she and Leicester had been married, and swore that if it were true, Douglass should have her rights; but Douglass denied there had ever been a ceremony and, more significantly, herself married someone else shortly afterwards. It was not until 1604, after Elizabeth and Leicester were both dead, that that same ‘base son’, seeking to prove his legitimacy, put his mother into the witness box to swear that she and Leicester had indeed married; to give those details of rings, and witnesses; to describe a letter from Leicester signing himself ‘your loving husband’, and thanking God for the birth of their son, who ‘might be the comfort and staff of their old age’. Her earlier denial had been from fear, she said; of what Leicester might do if she proclaimed the match.

The Star Chamber, where the case was tried, found against the son’s claim; but in a way that leaves the question open for posterity. The court did not pronounce directly on the question of his legitimacy; merely rejected the evidence by which he tried to prove it.⁵² But then, in an impossibly vicious twist, the Star Chamber accused the ‘base son’ of lèse-majesté in having raised the question at all. The relations who might otherwise claim the Leicester inheritance had the ear of the new King James, and fiercely contested the case. But abroad - when he had left England in disgust - the supposedly bastard scion would be known by his grandfather’s title of Duke of Northumberland. More tellingly, later in the seventeenth century, Charles I formally declared his belief that the ‘base son’ had a legitimate claim; and a nineteenth-century court would refuse to grant to a Dudley descendant titles that could only be given if the ‘base son’ were bastard indeed. The burden of proof was on Douglass, and she failed to provide it; none the less, an uncertainty as inevitable as it is unsatisfactory endures.

But if Douglass and Leicester were married to each other, what were they thinking of, when they subsequently married other people? Perhaps of that unexpected (and, to most of us, little understood) flexibility of Tudor marriage - perhaps particularly relevant in this very period, after the Reformation had done away with one set of rules, and before the new situation first began to be regularized in the early seventeenth century. For all the talk of ‘holy wedlock’, marriage was not actually a sacrament of the Anglican Church. Though banns, a church ceremony and the presence of a clergyman were all desirable, not even the last was actually essential. A couple were bound if they simply declared before witnesses that they took each other as man and wife (or even if they declared that they intended to marry, and then slept together). The logical consequence was that if they subsequently both declared they were not married, then in effect, though not in law, they had undone the ceremony.

Douglass Sheffield (confronting the judges of the Star Chamber) declared that she had been married by a clergyman, and that he had shown a licence (presumably a special licence, used then as now to avoid the publicity of banns). Unfortunately she never knew the clergyman’s name, nor could the issuing of a special licence be found among church records . . . but again, neither clergyman nor licence was necessary.

Contemporary parallels throw some light on the story. Bigamy was not a felony until the start of the seventeenth century. A witness to Leicester’s ‘marriage’, Dr Julio, had himself three years earlier married a woman who was married already; and when in 1573 his case came up before the ecclesiastical courts, it was stalled for another three years before judgement was given against him; nor did he then suffer any diminution of royal favour by way of penalty. Marriages could be airbrushed away. A decade earlier, in 1561, Katherine Grey, the Queen’s near relative and putative heir, had secretly married the Earl of Hertford (finally, pregnant and desperate, imploring a horrified Robert Dudley to break the news to the Queen for her). On that occasion the story had ended unhappily; again, the witness had died and the priest vanished by the time the matter came under investigation, and Elizabeth seized the excuse to declare the union null and void, and any children illegitimate.

Douglass’s baby was born at Sheen, while Leicester was away with the Queen, on progress in the west. A member of the household rode with the news to Bristol, returning to act as proxy for one of the godparents, Sir Henry Lee, at the baptism; the other sponsors were Ambrose Dudley, and Lady Margaret Dacre, for whom Mrs Erisa stood proxy. There seems to have been no particular upsurge of gossip. But then, unsanctioned births were not unknown among the nobility, and scandal came only when the parties concerned proved inept at hushing things up (as when, in 1581, the Earl of Oxford’s mistress, Anne Vavasour, gave birth in the palace, near the Queen’s own chamber).⁵³ By contrast, Douglass lay low for a couple of years - at Leicester’s property in Esher, or at Leicester House in London - with her baby, visited by Leicester when the court was nearby. Since their relationship was an open secret, all they really needed to conceal from the Queen was the question of a marriage ceremony. Douglass later told the Star Chamber that she had herself served as a countess, privately, but that Leicester reproved her, lest the Queen should come to hear of it.

It is hard to get much of a reading on Douglass’s character; not one of any great firmness, one might hazard, surely? But it certainly seems a strange coincidence that the two huge uncertainties in Leicester’s life both have to do with wives; both absent, both shadowy. One might speculate that neither of them was entirely real to him compared to the vivid court and its dynamic, demanding queen.

Still things between Robert and Elizabeth continued outwardly as before. When he gave her a present of a fan of white feathers, its gold handle was engraved with her symbol of the lion and his of the bear. In 1575 Federico Zuccaro was commissioned to paint twin portraits of Elizabeth and Leicester. And in 1575 their official position towards each other was still such that Leicester was able to make the great, grand gesture of hospitality that has often been taken as his last bid for royal matrimony.

That summer - as was usual, in the first part of her reign - Elizabeth took her court on progress. The bald words, today, give little hint of the terrifying scale of an operation that would have been hideously familiar to her contemporaries. True, great households of the sixteenth century were by their nature peripatetic, moving from one house to another, so that crowded rooms could be aired and cleansed. So perhaps the basic concept of the Queen’s taking her own furnishings with her - so that she might dine off silver plate, and sit on a suitably stately seat, even if forced to overnight in the home of a mere member of the minor gentry - would not seem remarkable. Any great lady travelled almost like a snail (and at about the same pace) with her home on her back, encumbered by and enclosed in a protective parade of personal baggage, provisions, and the ever-present parasite throng of servants and minor gentry. But when the lady was the Queen, taking with her the whole apparatus of both state and ceremony, the resemblance to the hordes of Midian spreading over the plain must have been quite extraordinary.

Besides the Queen and her own attendants, there travelled also a baggage train, sometimes of more than three hundred carts, each drawn by several horses (which the Queen’s grooms had the right to requisition from the locals when necessary): a caravan of clothes and bed-linen, books and cooking pots, so cumbrous it could travel only ten or twelve miles in a day. If the Queen were to stay a night in the house of any but the grandest nobility, then one team would have moved in a few days ahead of her in order to get the house ready - putting up hangings, putting better locks on the doors - and would stay on after she left to close the temporary establishment down again. Meanwhile another team would have moved in to the different house where she would spend the next night; and (if a picnic were not on the menu) a third establishment might have to be readied for use in a single thirty-six-hour span: a ‘dining house’ where the Queen could stop to eat along her way.

Few houses, of course, could even begin to accommodate anything like the whole retinue. Leicester would be found a room in the same building as the Queen wherever possible; otherwise, even he would be at another house in the vicinity. The accommodation officer who lamented the year before that he could not tell ‘where to place Mr Hatton, and for my Lady Carew there is no place with a chimney’ - this at an archbishop’s palace - must have had his counterpart on every journey. But in fact Hatton and Lady Carew were lucky: only the Queen’s ladies, the heads of departments, the great officers and leading favourites could hope the Lord Chamberlain’s officers would even try to find them a room. The rest had to cram into inns, to call in favours from nearby friends of friends, or, in the case of the lower orders, simply resort to canvas.

Each department of the royal household, from the bakehouse to the spicery, and the cellar to the laundry, sent its representatives on progress. The Queen’s own cooks must be on hand to prepare her dinner; a matter of security against poisoning as well as of practicality. The royal factotums might have less to do when the Queen was staying in the house of a major member of the nobility; or sometimes, as at Sandwich once, the Queen might compliment the wives of the local burghers by sampling the dishes they had prepared for her without having them tasted first, and then by asking that the remains should be taken back to her lodgings so that she could enjoy them properly. But she herself (and the state visitors, the ambassadors, who might travel down to have an audience with her) were not to be at the mercy of possibly incompetent local cooks. And as for feeding her court, surely not even a noble’s household, unassisted, could have contemplated feeding as many as five hundred extra people.

Then there was the official wing of this extraordinary parade. Except on the shorter, informal progresses - a hunting trip up the Lea Valley, say - the practical business of governing the country happened wherever the Queen was, and it was hardly practical to stop government for months on end, summer though it may be. So there were always enough of the privy council present with the Queen - individual members coming and going; Leicester, when present, a regular attendant - to make up a viable quorum to deal with whatever business came their way. Appeals against the justice system; auditing of officials’ books; matters as elevated as messages from ambassadors and as mundane as authorizing the expenses of the messengers who brought them: all followed the court, and the councillors, around the country.

The privy council, obviously, required its own set of attendants, besides the personal retinues of those great lords who were also councillors. Arrangements had to be made not only for secretaries and officers - for a council chamber with ‘paper pens ink wax and other necessaries’ - but for the couriers bringing the raw fodder of the council’s debates, and taking their decisions away again for implementation by local sheriffs and JPs. In remoter areas this could involve not only a relay of horses stationed every ten miles along the route back to London, but even the clearing of cross-country roads where necessary.⁵⁴

Her councillors did not always find it easy to get the Queen’s attention while she was in holiday mood. As Leicester once wrote to Walsingham from a progress: ‘Our conference with Her Majesty about affairs, more than by necessity urged, is both seldom and slender,’ she being ‘loth to trouble herself’. His role, probably, was to cajole her; but on this occasion even he had to break off his letter ‘In much haste, Her Majesty ready to horseback’. (Cecil, on the same progress, had to take down a letter on a topic as important as authorizing Walsingham to agree help to the Dutch rebels ‘in haste’ while the Queen was ‘making ready to horse’. One has the picture of her desperate to get away.) It was the job of her councillors to scrabble about, and ensure the work got done, as best they might.

Was it worth it? For the Queen, of course, a progress was the visible and audible reassurance as to the success of her monarchy. As the Spanish ambassador wrote once: ‘She was received everywhere with great acclamations and signs of joy as is customary in this country whereat she was exceedingly pleased.’ For the people - besides being a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle - it was a chance for institutions and even individuals to put their petitions and problems to her directly. Elizabeth might have argued that a progress was a vital mechanism in her publicity machine (had she ever felt the need to argue such a point with, say, a Cecil, whom the cost - some £2,000 a year - caused to groan dismally). It was true - though possibly the less true for the fact that her progresses over the years often tended to tramp over much the same ground: an area that ranged from Bristol to Warwick, and Southampton to Stafford, but that none the less represented only perhaps the south-easterly quarter of the entire territory she governed. Still, even in an age before mass media, the ripples of a progress perhaps spread beyond those routes and towns where the Queen’s cavalcade might actually pass by. There was indeed a measure of organization to ensure it should do: when, for example, the Queen visited Norwich for six days in the middle of August 1578, two of the men responsible for setting up the entertainments quickly published accounts of them under the auspices of powerful London patrons. (Leicester had probably had a hand in planning the anti-French masques and politically pointed festivities.) The report of Thomas Churchyard, a professional entrepreneur seconded from the court, came out on 20 September. Bernard Garter went one better. His version came out on 30 August, barely a week after Elizabeth had left the city.

The Queen would expect an expensive present, or several of them, at every visit, and so would courtiers in their different degree. (At court, so Spenser wrote in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’, ‘nothing there is done without a fee / The courtier must recompensed be.’) Elizabeth might be presented with a dress, a hanging, an agate cup from a noble host; leading courtiers might get embroidered gloves from a city. (At Saffron Walden in 1578 the Queen got an engraved silver gilt cup worth some £15 - well over £2,000 today; Leicester got sugar loaf worth 17s 8d - which sounds slight, but was not so bad, considering that the visiting French ambassador had to be content with a gallon of wine at 2s; coals to Newcastle, surely.) The costs of entertaining the Queen were immense and various, even though the royal household would bring their own provisions when necessary. At Lichfield, the host’s expenses included such charges as 5s to a nearby house ‘for keeping Mad Richard while her Ma[jesty] was here’; 3d ‘to Gregory Ballard’s Maid for bringing chickens’; 19s for painting the market cross the Queen would pass by; 6s for salt fish; 12s for a bear (presumably to be baited); 10s to the trumpeters and 3s 4d to the slaughtermen. The largest sums were to officers and scholars: £3 to the Sergeant of Arms, £1 to the Herald, and £5 to ‘Mr Cartwright, that should have made the Oration’; a mere 3s 4d, however, to ‘them of the Privy backhouse’, who presumably had to handle toilet facilities.

The cost was all the more unbearable if the Queen changed her plans, from necessity, or mere caprice, and all that expensive preparation was wasted. For every great man who rebuilt his house with the incomes the Queen had granted him, every lesser light who ardently hoped the Queen might honour him with a visit, there were many who wrote in panic to their friends at court when they heard the Queen might be headed their way. The Earl of Bedford, back in 1570, had pleaded to Cecil that the notice given was not nearly enough to ready his house for ‘so noble a guest and so large a train’. Later in Elizabeth’s reign, in 1601 - when her subjects had perhaps become less inured to progresses, after the stay-at-home years of the eighties and nineties - the Earl of Lincoln simply decamped from his house, so that the offended Queen found only a locked door. (Two of her courtiers were instructed to pursue the earl with the information that she would be back next week, and that meanwhile they would be ordering in the necessary provisions on his behalf . . . farewell any hopes of economy.) Even so senior a man as Sir Henry Lee, at the same later period, could write to Cecil’s son on hearing ‘that her Majesty threatens a progress . . . My estate without my undoing cannot bear it.’ In a sense the smaller people whose houses were requisitioned for a bare overnight stop got off more lightly. They were required merely to let the professionals get on with the job, having moved their own goods and chattels out of the way. But even for them, it must have been like having your home requisitioned by an only marginally friendly army.

Leicester, though, was not of this ill-prepared company. As Master of Horse - besides his informal role as impresario - he was in any case one of the most important officials in arranging a progress, and had often entertained the Queen. She had visited his Warwickshire seat of Kenilworth before (in 1566, 1568 and 1572) but this two-week visit of 1575 is the one that became a legend even in its own day (as attested by a tapestry depiction in nearby Baddesley Clinton); the one against which other Elizabethan entertainments were measured - and the one from which Leicester’s finances never entirely recovered.

‘For the persons, for the place, time, cost, devices, strangeness and abundance of all . . . I saw none anywhere so memorable,’ wrote one contemporary. It had been at Kenilworth that Elizabeth had received news of the massacre in Paris. Did Leicester want to take the taste away? Or perhaps to remind her, subtly, that a marriage to the Valois was now a policy with which he, and many others, could no longer agree?

The oldest parts of the Kenilworth Leicester received had been built in the twelfth century, by which time the estate (first given by Henry I to his chamberlain, Geoffrey de Clinton) had become crown property. In the thirteenth century, in the Barons’ War, Simon de Montfort, that earlier Earl of Leicester, had defended it against the forces of Henry III, and the threat of overweening royal authority. John of Gaunt remodelled the buildings in the fourteenth century; Henry V added a lakeside banqueting house, and Henry VIII a new range of lodgings. Robert’s father, John Dudley, had briefly taken possession of the castle just months before his death and depossession in 1553.

Leicester spent a fortune on improvements to the property. By 1575, John of Gaunt’s medieval palace, already one long step away from its martial origins, had further developed into an Elizabethan showpiece - without, however, changing its essential character. While other Elizabethan nobles only a very few years later built modern and symmetrical houses (Hardwick, Longleat) - while Leicester’s own father had sent an architect to Italy to study the principles of classical style - at Kenilworth there arose a new tower above the old keep, and a block of lodging joining it to the medieval hall and chambers; stables; a tilt yard; and a gatehouse to make a grand new entranceway.

The result was asymmetrical (his architect despaired) but charming; traditional, but admitting the newfangled indulgences of glass and light: ‘every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high roofed within . . . a day time on every side so glittering by glass, a nights by continual brightness of candle, fire, & torchlight, transparent through the lightsome wind[ows], as it were the Egyptian Pharos’. These transports come from the extensive descriptions of the place, and a precise chronicle of the visit, published under the name of Robert Laneham, a minor court official and one in Leicester’s service (though it has been suggested that someone else wrote it in mockery).

Much of Leicester’s money must have gone on the furnishing. The Queen even slept under a hanging spelling out the reassurance that Leicester was ‘Droit et loyal’. An inventory of his possessions made a few years later includes carpets (then so expensive they were often used to cover tables rather than floors) of crimson velvet ‘richly embroidered with my Lord’s posies, bears, ragged staves, etc. of cloth gold and silver’; eight tapestry pieces of Judith and Holofernes; seven of Jezebel; five of Samson; seven sets of hangings in the newly fashionable gilt leather; ‘instruments of Organs, regalles and virginalles covered with crimson velvet’; and portraits that included not only Robert himself ‘with Boye his dog by him’, but several nobles of the Spanish court - families his mother had once known as friends, and whom he would later face in enmity.

That family emblem, the bear with ragged staff, recurs repeatedly. You find it on a chair, of ‘crimson velvet in cloth of gold, and the bear and ragged staff in cloth of silver’; on a ‘fair, rich, new, standing square bedstead of walnut tree, all painted over with crimson and silvered with roses, four bears and ragged staves all silvered standing upon the corners’. The staves alone even featured on the crimson satin quilt and the ‘pillowbeeres’. It was as if Robert, by stamping the family emblem on the place his father had had to vacate, were emphasizing that this time - they hoped - the Dudleys were here to stay.

The complete terrain of parks and chase stretched for nearly twenty miles from the castle walls; but within those walls, the garden boasted ‘a pleasant terrace’ and stone carvings - obelisks, spheres, and those ubiquitous white bears. There were ‘fine arbours redolent by sweet trees and flowers’, fragrant herbs, apples, pears and cherries; alleys of grass, or else of sand, ‘pleasant to walk on as a sea shore when the water is avaled [ebbed]’.

A great aviary was decorated with painted gems; Elizabeth loved the sound of birdsong. The figures of two athletes, supporting a ball upon their shoulders, made a fountain eight feet high, while carp and tench swarmed in the pool below. With ‘the Birds fluttering, the Fountain streaming, the Fish swimming: all in such delectable variety, order, dignity’, this, Laneham said, really was worth the name often bestowed on medieval gardens - that of a Paradise. The story goes that when the Queen rather ungratefully complained to Leicester that she could not see the garden from her own apartments, he brought in an army of workmen at dead of night to make a precise duplicate, so that when she awoke, she was delighted to see it under her window. One may take leave to doubt the story, on looking at the terrain (and these workmen must have laboured very silently), but the magical piece of extravagance has become part of Elizabethan mythology. There is always, to modern eyes, something of the stage set, the fantasy, about Tudor houses. When a royal visitor moved into even so old and seemingly immovable a building as, say, Dover Castle, a temporary ceiling might be put up and painted, walls rehung, to change the appearance of the place considerably. But Kenilworth was the home of fantasy. Even the Gothic style Leicester chose suggests, like his pageantry, an Arthurian theme; that his aim was to evoke the once and future age of chivalry.

The Queen arrived at eight o’clock at night, on Saturday, 9 July. The dusk must have lent an air of unreality. Kenilworth lay by the side of spreading water, a hundred-acre lake curling round the castle (long since drained away). Over this, Leicester had built a 600-foot bridge, its pillars adorned with symbols of bounty. Across the dark water there now floated, on a ‘moveable island, bright blazing with torches’, the Lady of the Lake, claiming that she had kept the lake since Arthur’s day, but now wished to hand it over to Elizabeth. (The Queen was heard to say that she thought she owned it already.) She entered to a ‘great peal of guns and such lighting by firework’ that the noise and flame ‘were heard and seen twenty mile off’. The Italian expert in pyrotechnics had, happily, been dissuaded from his original idea of firing into the air live cats and dogs.

The Robert Laneham account gives her programme. Sunday, a church service, ‘excellent music’, ‘dancing of Lords and Ladies’, more fireworks; ‘streams and hails of fiery sparks, lightings of wild fire on water and land, flight and shoot of thunderbolts; all with such countenance, terror, and vehemence, that the heavens thundered, the waters surged, the earth shook’.

On Monday, she stayed indoors through the heat of the day before going out hunting: ‘the swiftness of the Deer, the running of footmen, the galloping of horses, the blasting of horns, the halloing and shouts of the huntsmen . . . in my opinion there can be no one way comparable to this, and especially in this place, that of nature is formed . . .’ Leicester himself had once written to Cecil from another progress of how they were all ‘altogether hunters and do nothing but ride about from bush to bush with a crossbow in our neck’. A contemporary illustration from Turbeville’s book on hunting shows the Queen, before a chase, being presented with a bowl of fewmets (droppings) that she might judge whether the beast was worthy of her pursuit. Every so often a deer would prove its ingenuity by taking refuge in the lake, and Laneham admires ‘the stately carriage of his head in his swimming’, like the sail of a ship; the hounds following after like skiffs in the wake of a larger vessel. One such swimmer put up such an admirable fight that: ‘the watermen held him up hard by the head, while, at her Highnesses commandment, he lost his ears for a ransom and so had pardon of life’.

Elizabeth was ‘surprised’ on her way home by another of the staged set-pieces she might, in fact, expect to find along her way. The ‘wild man’ she encountered was the soldier-poet George Gascoigne, a member of the minor Bedfordshire gentry whom Leicester had recruited for the occasion and who now, dressed up in moss green and ivy leaves, engaged in a rhyming dialogue with his companion player, ‘Echo’, before breaking his staff over his knee in token of his submission to the Queen’s authority. He snapped, alas, a little too vigorously, and one of the pieces flew near enough to the Queen’s horse to make it rear in terror . . . but she called out ‘No hurt! No hurt!’, and the horrified Gascoigne could live to recite another day.

It was a sport very pleasant, of these beasts: to see the bear with his pink eyes learing after his enemy’s approach, the nimbleness and watch of the dog to take advantage, and the force and experience of the bear again to avoid the assaults . . . with biting, with clawing, with roaring, tossing and tumbling, he would work to wind himself from them: and when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slobber about his physiognomy, was a matter of goodly relief . . .

Friday and Saturday were wet. Perhaps, confined indoors, the Queen found time to catch up with more serious business. The council had been meeting when necessary all this time, and Laneham as council porter had his duties. (His ‘letter’ gives a nice picture of court life at the middling level: up at 7 a.m. and to chapel; bread and ‘a good bowl of Ale’ for breakfast in my lord’s chamber; and ‘if the Council sit, I am at hand’ to watch out for interruptions or interlopers. Sometimes the visit of an ambassador or his servant would give him the chance to show off his French, his Spanish, his Dutch and his Latin. ‘Dinner and supper I have twenty places to go to and heartily prayed to.’ Afternoon and evening he spends among the gentlewomen; a time of eyes and sighs. ‘Sometimes I foot it with dancing; now with my Gittern [guitar]’, now with a song, or at the virginals, ‘they come flocking about me like bees to honey . . . it is sometime by midnight ere I can get from them’.) Inside the house on those wet days, Elizabeth herself would have found both luxury (for Leicester had had her rooms specially furnished, in silver fabric of peach and purple, as well as his favourite crimson) and diversion.

When the Queen’s progress took her near Cambridge in 1578, Cecil presided, in Leicester’s quarters, over a formal three-hour debate on mercy versus severity in a prince. The Queen had withdrawn to her own chambers, possibly feeling that she had heard enough on that theme already. She was perhaps unlikely to get quite such intellectual fare at Kenilworth. But there might have been, besides her daily exercise of dancing, the games Robert Burton describes in his Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘cards, tables and dice, shovelboard, chess-play, the philosopher’s game, small trunks, shuttle-cock, billiards, music, masks, singing, dancing, ulegames [sic], frolicks, jests, riddles, catches, purposes, questions and commands, merry tales . . .’

When Sunday came round again she watched a rustic wedding: novel in its very crudity. The bridegroom was lame from an old injury got playing the rough and downmarket sport of football.⁵⁵ Rather incongruously, he carried pen and inkhorn on his back, ‘for that he would be known to be bookish’. The bride was in her thirties: ‘ugly, foul ill favoured; yet marvellous fain of her office [proud of her role] because she heard say she should dance before the queen’. The wedding party was joined by ‘certain good-hearted men of Coventry’ who, while the ‘bold bachelors of the parish’ were still tilting at a quintain, began to perform, in dumb-show, a battle between King Ethelred and the Danes.

At around four o’clock the Queen, watching from her window the ‘great throng and unruliness’, told the rustic actors to come back and perform again on Tuesday - either because she wanted to see it all again, or because she simply couldn’t face any more that day. In its comedy and confusion the scene resembles the rustic play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (just as Laneham’s lyric descriptions are sometimes evocative of phrases from the plays); and it has been speculated that his father may have brought the eleven-year-old William Shakespeare over from Stratford to see the fun.⁵⁶

The finale to the day was ‘a most delicious ambrosial banquet’ of three hundred dishes. A banquet in sixteenth-century parlance was not a heavy main meal but specifically the dessert course that followed it, often taken in a garden bower or roof-top pavilion: a course of fruits and marmalades, of sugar-wrought ‘subtleties’ and flavoured spirits of wine; of candied peel and gilded ginger-bread; of sweetmeats with names like ‘kissing comfits’ and little mounds of sweetened cream called ‘Spanish paps’ [breasts]. The twin themes of a banquet were the ostentatiously expensive key ingredient, sugar - the very drinking vessels were often made of a stiff sugar paste - and sex; for most of the ingredients (almonds, ambergris, spices and wine) were thought to inflame lust. But even savoury foods could convey a hidden message, as in a salad recipe for the ‘salatte of love’ (asparagus meant the renewing of love; cabbage lettuce, your love feedeth me; rosemary, I accept your love; and radish, pardon me). At this banquet the Queen, as was her custom, ate ‘smally or nothing’. But it is not inconceivable that Leicester - who sent ‘a young man brought up in my kitchen’ to spend a year with a Paris cook - could have coded even the dishes, carefully.

On the second Monday (after yet more hunting: a sport of which the Queen rarely tired), she knighted five gentlemen and touched nine people for the King’s Evil, scrofula, and then saw a water pageant. Triton blew his horn to summon the Queen to the shores of the lake - and this is when she saw Arion riding on the back of a 24-foot dolphin with six musicians concealed in its belly. A song came softly through this ‘evening of the day, resounding from the calm waters, where presence of her Majesty, and longing to listen, had utterly damped all noise and din’. And so it continued - but the prime piece was planned for the penultimate day.

Leicester had commissioned George Gascoigne to write a masque concerning the fate of ‘Zabeta’ (‘Eli-sabeta’), one of Diana’s favourite nymphs. Diana, chaste goddess of hunting, debates with Juno, wife to the king of the gods, as to which is Zabeta’s best destiny: marriage, or virginity. Marriage was to win the debate, needless to say, with Iris descending from the skies to remind the modern Elizabeth (rather pointedly) that Diana had not helped her in the days of her youthful captivity. Alas, rain forbade the performance, which was to have been carefully staged on a site several miles away. Leicester - so the story goes - was confronting the failure of his entire expensive plan; seeing the money he had spent on the whole extraordinary visit simply trickle damply away.

He instructed Gascoigne, overnight, to write some farewell verses that might yet salvage the scenario, since the Queen was determined to leave the next day; and in his character of the god of the woods, Gascoigne duly accompanied her down the drive the next day, boasting his readiness to keep pace with her for twenty miles as she, heedless, spurred away. Gascoigne prated of another of Diana’s nymphs, Ahtebasile (which means Ah, thou queen), served by two brothers, Due Desert and Deep Desire; the latter, Leicester, changed into a holly bush to reflect ‘the restlesse pricks of his privie thoughts’ - and his worry that the Queen’s favour towards him had abated in some way. The nominal message was that the Queen should stay at Kenilworth, ‘among your friends’; hardly a point to affect her life-choices in any way.

One or two historians have postulated, dramatically, that perhaps England would yet have had King Robert, if only the sun had shone the day before, and Gascoigne been able to perform his Zabeta story. But surely by now, fifteen years into her reign, Elizabeth had thought enough about the issue. She was not going to be persuaded by a bit more bad poetry. It is elsewhere we need to look to understand the real drama enacted that day.

Was the Kenilworth entertainment, as has usually been speculated, Leicester’s final throw, his last desperate bid to persuade Elizabeth to marry him (in which case, presumably, Douglass would have stepped silently aside)? It does, on the surface, look that way. Laneham reports that he had the clock dials on the keep stopped at two o’clock, to signify ‘twos, pairs, and couples’. But in fact Leicester must long since have lost real hopes of the Queen’s consenting to marry him.⁵⁷ Yes, the prize was worth a final throw of the dice. He might still have been a winner, even at this late day. But he was tiring of the game itself - tiring of the pretence that he would be a suitor indefinitely.

The dramas enacted at Kenilworth have been viewed more threateningly. One historian has noted that the entertainments Leicester commissioned tended to promote not only marriage, but militarism - his own hopes of leading an army to the Netherlands; that they tended to show women in jeopardy, in need of being rescued by a protective masculinity. The detailed analysis made by Susan Frye shows the Queen (who preferred to be both the hero and the heroine of the show) either redirecting or refusing to watch those entertainments that pushed the point most strongly; and one can accept the basic point without following Frye entirely.⁵⁸

But it does seem clear that the entertainment at Kenilworth - whatever the host originally intended - wound up by dramatizing the increasing distance between Robert and Elizabeth. It might be possible to argue that he knew it would do, and to see the enormous sum he spent as a farewell gift; as guilt money. Because in the time immediately ahead, the real-life protagonists, queen and courtier, would openly be changing partners with the matched precision of a dance, or a French play. In those terms, of course, we might more appropriately see the whole extraordinary Kenilworth entertainment as the beginning, rather than the end, of a story.