16

‘In times of distress’ 1582-1584

THERE IS A PAINTING THAT HANGS AT PENSHURST PLACE IN KENT, described as Elizabeth and Leicester dancing the Volta. It is said to have represented one of the many stops Alençon’s farewell party made along the way. As the two central figures leap, musicians play; and the watching throng of lavishly dressed ladies, gentlemen and court dwarves gaze on admiringly. In fact, it was never likely to have been a simple representation - more like a propaganda piece using a set of established images and designed (since the figure meant to be Alençon is ignoring the central spectacle, and slyly squeezing another woman’s waist) as a final thrust of the Dudley faction against a marriage Leicester so vehemently opposed.

Its reproduction is placed, dampingly, in the box file labelled ‘Elizabeth I: borderline false’ in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. A note says that a larger version can be found in the Musée de Rennes, labelled ‘the ball of Henri III’. But Penshurst has a copy of an old Country Life article (23 January 1973) arguing that it forms one of a series of French-inspired marriage ball scenes (and that the lecherous figure does indeed represent Alençon, whose short doublet and tights were then characteristic, though not common, wear), albeit that it is likely to be less a straight depiction than a sort of allegory . . . Perhaps it is the youthful vigour of the central pair, bounding athletically - almost aerobically! - straight up into the air, that gives the game away. True, the Queen was always painted as youthful, or at least ageless. But the same consideration was not extended to Robert Dudley.

As the 1570s edged towards the 1580s - with Elizabeth’s Robert transformed, past all denial, into ‘Benedick, the married man’ - the two seemed to be leading very separate lives in a way they had not done for twenty years. For the first time since Elizabeth came to the throne, we are telling two very different emotional stories. Where Elizabeth is concerned, we have been reading her intimate, revelatory letters to a man other than Robert Dudley. Leicester, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his new wife and baby. Even Camden admitted that - after all those years, after all the rumours, after the two wives who had had little joy of him - when finally committed, he was uxorious, ‘a good husband in excess’.

It is a lucky chance that among the stray survivals of Leicester’s papers is the ‘disbursement book’ that, albeit patchily, covers his expenditure for these very years. It gives an extraordinary insight into his daily life at this point, just when the records of court life feature him less prominently; and gives also, perhaps, a picture of the man. There are many records of sums lost ‘at play’, but more records of smaller sums given out in tiny acts of charity: 12d ‘to a poor woman of Leighton’, 6d to another poor woman of Knightsbridge, 5s to one of Stepney and 10s for one who had come all the way from Devonshire; £30 to a sick gentleman servant; £10, handed over to Leicester’s chaplain, to be distributed among the London prisons; the odd 20s ‘in small money’ delivered ‘to your lordship own hands’ for distribution that same day; 5s given ‘by your lordship’s commandment’ to ‘the blackamoor’. Every such casual gift or payment - as opposed to the regular wages given to the keepers, to the French cook (and, less obviously to our eyes, the French gardener), to ‘Jesper that mends instruments’, to Roger Gillions the bargeman and the laundress his wife - bears that magic, grandeur-affirming phrase ‘by your lordship’s commandment’. Three pounds to the musicians who came to Wanstead from London, more than a guinea to four gardeners who made a ‘knot’ in the garden there; money to those who gravelled its walks or tended its ponds.

Leicester obviously loved his gardens and his garden produce. Just one six-month period (October 1584 to March 1585) shows a ‘reward’ to ‘young Adams’ for making a dial in the garden at Leicester House; 20s to a gardener who gave pink seeds and ‘philbud’ [filbert] trees; money for transporting a basket of violets to Wanstead; and then again ten days later, money to the servant of William Hunnis (master of the famous child players) for picking more violets for Leicester’s benefit. Later in the year there would be pots of gillyflowers, and hyssop and thyme, and radish seeds brought to him at Nonsuch; oranges and lemons, rosewater and peas. Leicester appears to have paid a retainer to ‘Edyth Eryth a poor woman that follows the Court’ to keep his chamber there supplied with flowers and boughs, and one of the most frequent rewards, as the year wore on, would be for the man who brought artichokes.⁶⁸ Luck the fool got 6s 8d for presenting Leicester with a basket of apples, the keeper of the gatehouse at Westminster 3s 4d for presenting grapes. When spring came the same keeper offered vine slips; sadly, we don’t know whether or not Leicester’s gardeners grew them successfully.

His household now comprised something like a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, as opposed to the thirty to fifty he had had at the start of Elizabeth’s reign. When not on the road, or following the court, Leicester joined his wife, dividing his time between Wanstead and Leicester House (where rooms were set aside for his stepchildren’s use), and many of his servants moved with him. One of the most often recorded costs was boat hire for transport along the Thames: 6s for Leicester’s servant to transport his clothes from Oatlands to London; 10s to the Queen’s watermen for taking Leicester home from Arundel House. Everything went by water where possible, from Leicester’s yeomen of the wardrobe and his groom of the chamber, travelling from Leicester House to the court at Greenwich, to a brace of does, and a servant headed the other way carrying ‘a short gown furred with sables to show the skinner’.

Travel further, by land - to Oxford, in this instance - meant paying for the dinners of dozens of retainers on the journey. Six of Leicester’s servants, sent on as an advance guard, had to be bought dinner at Henley; Mr Clinton and Mr Devereux had to have their ‘horsemeate’ paid when they came to see Leicester at Woodstock; and ‘Paid more the same day for the charges of your lordship’s servants being xxx in number for Saturday night and Sunday breakfast at Henley as appeareth by a bill.’ Then as now, travel threw up a myriad odd expenses. There is even a payment to the man who washed Leicester’s linen along the way.

Clothing himself and his retinue in appropriate style absorbed a good deal of money. Four pairs of ‘dry perfumed gloves’ at 3s 4d the pair; 24s for two pairs of large gloves, lined, perfumed, and trimmed with black silk and gold. There were stomachers, and scarlet to line them; girdles and ‘hangers’ trimmed with gold lace to hold short swords. Black silk nightcaps at 6s the piece were a present for the Earl of Shrewsbury. Shortly before Christmas time, £22 bought two doublets for Lettice. The mentions of Lettice are less frequent than one might at first expect: one occasion when Roger Gillions was paid for ‘carrying my lady from Leicester House to Putney and back again’; a mention of shirts that Lettice bought for Leicester; one item of money delivered to her when she was clearly losing at play. But the bulk of Lettice’s personal expenses, and the salaries of the women who served in her chamber, seem to have been paid out of her own income as the Earl of Essex’s widow.

Robert clearly attended to his family. There is a present of £20 to Lettice’s daughter, and his stepdaughter, Dorothy; £30 went to the schoolmaster who taught ‘Mr Robert Dudley’, while on the same visit to see young Robert in his schoolroom in Oxfordshire, Leicester gave the boy himself a 10s tip. (The young Robert probably spent most of his time in Sussex, however; and indeed another bill records his transport from there.) On another occasion the boy is getting a hat; on yet another a gilt rapier and dagger with a velvet scabbard. Other donations are more curious. Lady Stafford - the former Douglass Sheffield, or her mother-in-law? - was given £5. Another equally puzzling item records payment for transport of ‘the bathing tube [tub?]’; another is to the baker, for ‘horse bread’.

A new coach; dozens of towels. Reams of paper; a looking glass. Wine from abroad; three bottles of Warwickshire water. Lots of payments to ‘your lordship’s spaniel keeper’, who seems to have been paid per day, per dog. To the lark catcher, 2s 6d; to Robert the trumpeter, £40 - but he did have to buy a new trumpet out of that. And there is a whole handful of items, all together, about the purchase of cases of pistols, and dozens of crossbow arrows - sign of the edgy times, maybe.

Messengers got money, like the man who brought letters from Sir Francis Drake (in whose projected West Indies voyage Leicester was to be an investor; and who features occasionally as a fellow card player). More money to the men who held torches to light the earl from ‘the Bishop of Canterbury’s’, or the Scottish ambassador’s, and home to Leicester House again. Servants attached to noble friends, and to Leicester’s own client gentry, had also to be rewarded. The keeper of a royal park might get several shillings just for opening a gate. Six shillings and eightpence went to Hatton’s coachman for carrying Leicester from Syon to Colbrook; 5s ‘to the cooks of the Star Chamber when your lordship passed through the kitchen there’; more than £5 to the Queen’s officers, when she dined with him; 5s to his own gentleman usher’s man ‘for presenting a dozen and a half of partridges to your lordship’; 2s 6d to Sir Horatio Palavicino’s man for presenting Leicester with dried peaches; 20s when he made the same gift to the Queen. (Leicester supervised the sending of presents of horses, in the Queen’s name, and hounds, and a bow, to King James in Scotland, whom the English were trying to woo.) But at least he also got many gifts himself, even if there were always this indirect payment to be made.

Venison was a favourite gift to send him. Fat coneys, ‘two swans and a lamprey pie’, even ‘two fat wethers’, or a boar, or a peacock. The French ambassador offered wine and cheese. He got dogs, and hawks, and horses (a ‘pyde nag’); and glasses - still a luxury. Occasionally it was a book; though Leicester himself was prepared to pay out good money for a book of martyrs and one of Psalms, and Calvin’s Sermons on Job: standard reading for the ardent Protestant.

By and large, the disbursement book records the story of a personal life. It is the letters of the period that reflect the political one, and they still show Leicester and his queen as bound together, willy nilly - Leicester instrumental in promoting new anti-Catholic measures; sending congratulations on the putting down of a minor outbreak of disorder; warning Heneage that the Queen still held him out of favour and the time for an approach was not yet ripe - show, in other words, business as usual among the court’s inner circle. And they show, more specifically, Leicester concerned still for the Queen’s business and the Queen’s image ... It was in this period that he wrote the letter that most clearly shows him as consciously promoting that image, building Elizabeth’s support base; acting in effect as campaign manager in the constant popularity parade that was Elizabeth’s monarchy.

Elizabeth was on progress, and Leicester was writing from the house of one ‘hearty noble couple’, Lord and Lady Norris, at whose home she had been expected, but where she had failed to appear. Leicester had had, he writes to Hatton, to pretend that they two had been the chief ‘dissuaders’ - that they were responsible for the disappointment, having told Elizabeth that the weather had made the roads too bad. Lady Norris had taken the excuse poorly: ‘Trust me, if it had not been so late, I think I should have sought me another lodging, my welcome awhile was so ill.’ He had ‘more than half’ won the irate hostess over - especially by offering the Norrises his own rooms at Elizabeth’s next port of call - but her Majesty herself ‘must help somewhat’ in placating Lady Norris, ‘or else we have more than half lost this lady’. In another incident at this time, a sailor arrested in the Queen’s presence was, by Elizabeth’s order, carried to Leicester’s chamber. The man was accused of being part of a Spanish plot, in what looks rather like a darker kind of PR exercise.

Clearly, Robert was still travelling the country on the Queen’s business. (Horses and hounds feature largely in the disbursement book.) No doubt he was still an active man: he went with the court to the races; drew out 9s ‘to put in your lordship’s pocket’ when he went on a fishing trip. But he was getting older, and less fit. The book shows a payment of £30 to ‘Ezard your lordship’s bonesetter’, and six pairs of ‘spactakells’ at 12d the pair. There is repeated mention (though paid only at 10s) of ‘one that did cut your lordship’s corns’. In one of his bouts of what was probably a malarial fever, Leicester wrote of himself to the Queen as ‘your old patient, that has always from [your] holy hand been relieved’. (‘I have no more to offer again but that which is already my bond and duty: the body and life, to be as ready to yield sacrifice for your service, as it has from you received all good things . . .’)

As Leicester got older, he was getting more difficult. John Aylmer wrote of some ‘unhappy paroxysm’ that had rocked their friendship. He wished only, he wrote, that he could ‘appeal from this Lord of Leicester’, whom something has ‘incensed with displeasure’, ‘unto mine old Lord of Leicester, who in his virtue of mildness and of softness . . . hath carried away the praise from all men’. A Catholic divine who had fled the country in 1582 wrote to Sussex that he had done so through extreme fear of Leicester’s ‘cruelty’. Indeed, Leicester could now be less tolerant of the foibles even of his queen. In July 1583 Leicester was ‘in great disgrace about his marriage’, having dared to refer to it more openly than before, wearied perhaps by Elizabeth’s almost hysterical insistence on her wilful blindness. He was believed, too, to have been indulging in a spot of dynastic scheming - one of the offences Elizabeth found it hardest to forgive.

Leicester had proposed to Bess of Hardwick a match between his son Lord Denbigh and Bess’s royal granddaughter Arbella Stuart. Such an alliance could (if Arbella ever inherited the crown) have made him the power behind England’s throne. If that failed, it was rumoured Leicester hoped to marry his stepdaughter - Lettice’s younger daughter Dorothy - to James of Scotland, though Dorothy foiled any such scheme when she made a runaway match with adventurer Thomas Perrot. Elizabeth was inclined to blame Dorothy’s whole family both for the mésalliance with Perrot and for the ambition of an alliance with Scottish royalty; Lettice was a ‘she-wolf’, and Dorothy the wolf’s cub. When Leicester invited the French ambassador, Mauvissière, to dine with himself and his wife, he lamented that he had lost the Queen’s favour. (Mauvissière wrote that Lettice had ‘much influence’ over Leicester, and noticed that Leicester seemed ‘much attached’ to his wife; whom, however, he introduced ‘only to those to whom he wishes to show a particular mark of attention’. One wonders how the ambitious Lettice relished the retirement that implied.) Yet by the end of the summer it was observed once more that Leicester had ‘grown lately in great favour with the Queen’s Majesty, such as this ten years he was not like to outward show’. Still, always, he bounced back. Earlier in the summer of 1583, Leicester’s old enemy Sussex had died, warning from his deathbed: ‘beware of the gypsy [Leicester]; for he will be too hard for you all. You know not the beast as well as I do.’

A letter Leicester wrote to Elizabeth and dated September speaks of his prayers ‘that God will long, safely, healthfully, and most happily preserve you here among us, and as He hath begun, so to continue in discovering and overthrowing all unloyal hearts towards you’. As so often, no year is given, but the letter would fit with the events of 1583. By September the Queen’s inner circle would have been aware of what has become known as the Throckmorton conspiracy. One Francis Throckmorton - Catholic nephew to the dead Sir Nicholas - had been paying secret visits to the French embassy. Through the spring and summer of 1583, he had been carefully watched, and the mischief was clear. ‘This is the goodness of God, my sweet lady, that hath thus saved you against so many devils,’ wrote Leicester ecstatically.

 

You may see what it is to cleave unto Him; He rewardeth beyond all deserts, and so is it daily seen how He payeth those that be dissemblers with Him. Who ever, of any Prince, stood so nakedly assisted of worldly help as Your Majesty has done these many years? Who has had more enemies in show, and yet whoever received less harm?

The long letter breathes sincere belief, as well as the consciousness of a great danger passed. True, Robert’s letters, by the standards of the age, were never flowery. But this was very far from the usual vein of courtly flattery. By the end of the month, after all, both he and Elizabeth had turned fifty.

When Throckmorton was finally arrested in November and racked, he revealed that it was predominantly the Spanish king whose ‘Enterprise of England’ had planned to set Mary on the English throne - but that the four separate invasion forces would also have been backed by the Pope, Mary’s Guise family in France, and the Jesuits. This was the nightmare foreshadowed in Ridolfi’s schemes and now almost come true at last - the grand, united Catholic conspiracy. Once again, to her councillors’ despair, Elizabeth baulked at bringing Mary to trial, despite the damning evidence of several cipher letters, but the Scots queen’s frustration at the foiling of her plans found vent in the famous ‘scandal letter’ - a missive supposedly from Mary herself discovered among Cecil’s papers and presumed never to have been delivered by him in its full enormity.

Mary was writing to Elizabeth nominally to clear herself of the charge that she had become involved with her gaoler, the Earl of Shrewsbury - but she also vented a stream of spiteful gossip that, she said, had been passed on to her by the earl’s wife, Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury. Bess (wrote Mary) had said that one to whom Elizabeth

 

had made a promise of marriage before a lady of your chamber, had made love to you an infinite number of times with all the license and intimacy which can be used between man and wife. But that undoubtedly you were not like other women . . . and you would never lose your liberty to make love and always have your pleasure with new lovers.

 

(She also accused Elizabeth of sleeping with Simier as well as Alençon, and of pursuing Hatton with her attentions until he was forced to leave court to protect his modesty.) Mary must have been almost the only highly placed personage still to see Elizabeth and Robert as lovers in the physical sense. But their relationship was still a target for scandal that was meant to be spread wider afield, and aimed at an audience less discriminating. As 1584 wore on, that would be proved in the most horrible way.

It was indeed an annus horribilis. On 10 June Alençon died, and Elizabeth wrote to Catherine de Medici that his mother’s grief ‘cannot be greater than my own . . . I find no consolation except death, which I hope will soon reunite us. Madame, if you were able to see the image of my heart, you would see the portrait of a body without a soul.’ Next came the assassination (by handgun; a new menace) of William of Orange by a Catholic fanatic presumed to be in Spain’s pay. One result - as of any Catholic activity - could only be tighter security around the Queen of Scots. But the threat to Elizabeth was very real, as witness the assassination attempt made by a Welsh MP named Parry. One of the expenses in Leicester’s disbursement book was for a ‘standing’ at Parry’s execution.

Leicester was (Camden says) a prime mover behind the Bond of Association by which the loyal gentlemen of Elizabeth’s realm vowed to band together and avenge her death, if necessary. It was in many ways a dubious document - essentially a charter for vigilante action, since the document’s first form, before the Queen’s own amendments, swore vengeance not only against Elizabeth’s putative assassin but against the person they had hoped to put on the throne (and a document, moreover, which tied its signatories for eternity, since its terms spelt out that to renege on it was to make oneself the enemy). But in the climate of the times it must have seemed the only defence against a situation where anyone who wanted the throne could be placed there by a casual assassin, not officially connected to them in any way.

But these things were as nothing compared to the body blow that struck Leicester in July: the dangerous sickness of the ‘noble Impe’, the adored young Denbigh. Leicester was with the court at Nonsuch when the news of Denbigh’s condition came; he rushed straight to Wanstead and Lettice’s side, without stopping to take formal leave of the Queen.

We do not know why the child died, nor whether there was any warning illness: the only hint is the unreliable Leicester’s Commonwealth comment that he suffered from ‘the falling-sickness [epilepsy], in his infancy’. It has been suggested that the tiny suit of armour rumoured to have been made for him seems to have one leg slightly shorter than the other: key to some underlying malady? But in an age of such high infant mortality no-one felt it necessary to spell out the details.

Robert and his wife had both suffered a great personal loss. Leicester seems to have been fond of children in general (William of Orange’s wife, when he escorted Alençon to the Netherlands, wrote of how kind he had been to her little daughter), and this longed-for son had been cosseted with all the magnificence of crimson velvet cradles, a portrait to display his naked form and a little chair decked out in green and carnation tinsel cloth. The inscription on his tomb wrote that he was a child ‘of great parentage but far greater hope and towardness’. But now, since Lettice was in her mid-forties, and he himself in poor health, Leicester must have known he had probably lost the last chance of a dynasty. He wrote to Shrewsbury that the loss of his young son was indeed great, ‘for that I have no more and more unlike to have, my growing now old’. The surviving pages of the disbursement book do not cover the period of Denbigh’s death itself. But, with aching frequency, they record Leicester’s gifts to the nurses and midwives of other people’s babies.

Hatton wrote to Leicester:

 

What God hath given you, that hath He chosen and taken to Himself, whereat I hope you will not grudge . . . if the love of a child be dear, which is now taken from you, the love of God is ten thousand times more dear, which you can never lack or lose. Of men’s hearts you enjoy more than millions, which, on my soul, do love you no less than children or brethren. Leave sorrow, therefore, my good Lord, and be glad with us, which much rejoice in you.

 

He had told Elizabeth the reason for Leicester’s sudden departure, ‘whereof I assure your Lordship I find her very sorry, and wisheth your comfort, even from the bottom of her heart’. She would write herself, ‘and therefore she held no longer speech with me of the matter’. That letter has not survived, sadly.⁶⁹ But from the letters she wrote under other similar circumstances, we might guess that she would have taken the same tone of religious forbearance. Three years later, on the death of his adult son, she wrote to Shrewsbury:

 

remember that God, who hath been the worker thereof and doth all things for the best, is not to be controlled. Besides, if we do duly look into the matter in true course of Christianity, we shall then see that the loss hath wrought so greater gain to the gentleman whom we now lack, as we have rather cause to rejoice than lament.

 

Leicester’s letter to Hatton, thanking him for ‘your careful and most godly advice’, has on the surface of it the requisite resigned and religious tone. But underneath there is a more stormy story. ‘I must confess I have received many afflictions within these few years, but not a greater,’ he wrote, adding carefully, ‘next [after] her Majesty’s displeasure.’ Disconcertingly, he seems to be striking almost a bargain with fate (though not, he says punctiliously, with God). He hopes that ‘the sacrifice of this poor innocent might satisfy’ those who are offended, who have taken ‘long hard conceits’ of him; ‘if not, yet I know there is a blessing for such as suffer; and so is there for those that be merciful’. In what sounds like an implied rebuke to Elizabeth, he says that princes are never the best for mercy, ‘therefore men fly to the mighty God in times of distress for comfort’, even though they may have neglected Him when younger in order to ‘run the race of the world’. He had, after all, good reason to feel that everyone’s hand was against him at this time.

For the summer and autumn of 1584 also saw the publication in Antwerp of the laboriously entitled work more snappily known as Leicester’s Commonwealth,⁷⁰ that scurrilous publication that took every action in his life and imputed to it the worst possible motives - ‘the most malicious-written thing’, as Walsingham wrote to Leicester, ‘that ever was penned since the beginning of the world’. It would take far too long to detail its two hundred pages’ worth of accusations (and the chief of them have been dealt with already), but, in sum, he stood accused of treachery, lechery, murders in plenty. The murders of Amy Dudley and of Douglass’s and Lettice’s husbands, certainly: ‘His Lordship hath a special fortune, that when he desireth any woman’s favour, then what person so ever standeth in his way hath the luck to die quickly for the finishing of his desire’; but also the murders of Throckmorton (who had died at his house ‘after eating salads’), of the Earl of Sussex, and of several foreign dignitaries.

Then there was ‘the intolerable license of Leicester’s carnality’, as evidenced in ‘the keeping of the mother with two or three of her daughters at once or successively’. There was the accusation that none of the Queen’s gentlewomen was safe from his lustful eye; and another that, conversely, he was now so worn out by his efforts that he had to buy pint bottles of an ‘Italian ointment’ in order ‘to move his flesh’ (and that he had ‘a broke belly on both sides of his bowels’).

Of course, the real accusation, to which these were only the salacious trimmings, was that he ruled the Queen completely, that he had on all occasions prevented her marriage, that his ambition knew no bounds; that ‘his reign is so absolute . . . as nothing can pass but by his admission’. It was the old ‘evil counsellors’ argument, as Francis Bacon noted of a similar pamphlet directed at Cecil; a way ‘to cover undutiful invectives’ that might not so safely be aimed against the Queen herself.

The Queen and council moved to suppress the book’s circulation in England; Philip Sidney wrote a spirited defence. But of course some copies were still passed around secretly. And it is possible that Elizabeth - for all her proclamation that ‘none but an incarnate devil himself’ could dream of believing such malicious slurs - also half resented the man who had been the unwitting instrument of involving her name in such ignominy.

The publication has to be seen in context: Elizabeth herself, and Leicester on other occasions, had been and would be the victim of other such calumnies. They were a fact of political life. But this one was particularly extensive, and particularly damaging. Its slurs have haunted Leicester’s reputation through the centuries.⁷¹ Some of the mud stuck even with contemporaries. (Camden, writing within thirty years of Leicester’s death and from a broadly anti-Leicester stance, spoke of ‘defamatory libels’ launched against him, ‘which contained some slight untruths’, and mentions the suspicions held against him in the deaths of Throckmorton and Essex, even while he describes the evidence to the contrary; however, by his sheer lack of comment he tacitly acquits him of the murders of Lord Sheffield and of Amy Dudley.)

The author of Leicester’s Commonwealth was of course anonymous, and various theories have been put forward as to his identity. It may have been to some degree a group effort, with English Catholics in France such as Lord Paget and Charles Arundel (a member of the Howard clan whom Leicester had persecuted for his Catholic sympathies) among the moving spirits. Both Cecil and Edward Stafford have also been mooted as contributors; but for a long time the most popular contender was the exiled Jesuit Robert Persons, and Jesuit missionaries were certainly instrumental in getting the book into the country. There were personal animosities involved, and the publication’s modern editor, D. C. Peck, has also drawn attention to its specific political goals, like the promotion of the Scottish claim to the throne. But surely you could also see this broadside as a perverse, back-handed tribute to Leicester’s importance as acknowledged leader of the aggressive puritan party. That was certainly the opinion of the Italian Protestant (and legal expert) Alberico Gentili, who wrote that Leicester’s praise lies not only in those who took his part, but in the very hostility of his Catholic enemies, with their ‘infamous howling against a good man and true’.

Later that year, Leicester would call a two-day conference in which he attempted to mediate between Elizabeth’s bishops and the puritan ministers. But he cannot be said to have succeeded to any great degree. Indeed the conservative Whitgift, Elizabeth’s new Archbishop of Canterbury, blocked his moves in every way. Elizabeth’s difficult ‘second reign’ has been dated from this point in the middle 1580s; certainly a new generation of servants and favourites was waiting in the wings.

The ever-changing parade of personalities at court no longer affected Leicester quite as it had done. He did take the warmest interest in the career of his golden nephew Philip Sidney - ‘my boy’ - including his perennial quarrels with the Earl of Oxford and his growing reputation as a writer. (Even when Philip, as a twelve-year-old, had been taken to see the Queen, it had been Leicester who, with the boy’s father away, had sent his own tailor scurrying around to make the child doublets of green taffeta and crimson velvet, bright trunk hose with their matching stockings, and six pairs of double-soled shoes.) But the appearance of the new star Walter Ralegh, with his own dark good looks and his Devon accent, his rough brand of charm and his big dreams, could not really affect his position. Ralegh, after all, was knighted only in 1584 and would not become Captain of the Guard for three years after that; and though he would by then be one of the chief ‘backbiters’ against Leicester, it was not the attack of an equal. (Indeed, when Ralegh first came to court at the start of the decade, he was one of the many who clung to Leicester for patronage.) Whatever Leicester’s present relationship with Elizabeth, they had done the damage themselves; and though Ralegh made himself felt as a thorn in the flesh of all the established courtiers, it pricked Leicester less deeply. It was Hatton who had to be warned by Heneage that ‘water’ (‘Walter’ Ralegh) had been ‘more welcome than were fit for so cold a season’; and then reassured by the Queen’s message that water and the creatures who belong to it were not so appealing to her as some thought, ‘her food having been ever more of flesh than of fish’, and that (Heneage reassured Hatton) the Queen swore she ‘would rather see [Ralegh] hanged than equal him with you’. But Hatton’s own letters to Elizabeth were becoming less lover-like than they had been; more practical, more prone to quarrel and apology.

All the same, it was 1584 when Robert Cecil, William Cecil’s son, took his Westminster seat; the first step in what would be a towering career. Perhaps it was to counter these new influences that Leicester, also in 1584, first brought his stepson Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, to court. Eighteen years old, with auburn hair like his mother’s and eyes dark like Leicester’s own, he was ardent and athletic, his egotism and ambition hardly apparent, yet, under the veil of his undoubted brilliance and his youthful charm. ‘Your son,’ he signed himself in his letters to Leicester, ‘most ready to do you service’; though nothing more fundamental than step-parenthood can be read into his words, by the language of the sixteenth century.⁷²

It was only a short space of time before (with Leicester himself occupied elsewhere) Essex became such a favourite with Elizabeth that he often sat up with the Queen in her rooms over music or cards ‘until the birds sing in the morning’; and it is worth stepping out of time and sequence again to look at Essex’s future attitudes, because of what the comparison - the contrast - says about Robert Dudley.

Yes, both Roberts made themselves champions of the Protestant cause. Yes, they both believed that England’s cause should be aggressively promoted abroad. Yes, they both (for Essex entered into negotiations with James of Scotland, far more autonomously than Leicester had done) wanted a hand in shaping the future of their country. But if you make a direct comparison between their letters, between their very different comportments under rebuke, the difference shows up clearly.

Perhaps Leicester might in the end have been brought to write, as Essex did: ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to these principles.’ But the quarrel that had provoked this letter had seen Elizabeth box Essex’s ears at the privy council table - and seen Essex, momentarily, reach for his sword. It is impossible to imagine Leicester committing such lèse-majesté. Essex said once, in anger, that ‘The Queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcass.’ Leicester could never have said that, and not only because of his ability to ‘put his passions in his pocket’. His affection would have forbidden it.

It was estimated that Elizabeth had four favourites of the first rank: Leicester and Hatton, Ralegh and Essex. (The Cecils, father and son, were in a different category.) Perhaps it was the loss of Leicester’s undivided allegiance that prompted Elizabeth to turn to other men. On the other hand, there was something almost vampiric in the way Elizabeth moved on to younger ‘lovers’.

Another picture hanging at Penshurst, dated just four years later than the supposed date of the ‘Volta’ tableau, shows Leicester portly and plump of face, a man whose square beard, now, is nearly white and bushy. Only the lambent, wary eyes could even begin to be recognizable as belonging to the dashing earl of earlier days. (Ambrose, whose portrait hangs alongside Robert’s, seems with his trim, grizzled crop and quirking eyebrows to have aged more gracefully.) A foreigner who saw Leicester, and Hatton, and all the Queen’s old circle at this time described them as ‘charming old gentlemen’; and, as one of their contemporaries noted, forty heralded ‘the first part of the old man’s age’. No, certainly Leicester was no longer the figure he once had been: the dancer, the jouster, the darling of the Queen’s eye; no longer the slim, youthful (and blond!) figure who, in the ‘Volta’ tableau, twirls ‘Elizabeth’ aloft so confidently. Perhaps that is why she had let him get away.