17

‘Her Majesty Will make trial of me’ 1585-1588

IN THE DARK TIME AFTER LITTLE DENBIGH’S DEATH, ROBERT DUDLEY had talked of retiring - told Cecil he did ‘more desire my liberty, with her Majesty’s favour, than any office in England’. But his public career was not yet over. It was both ironic and significant that his moment of greatest official responsibility - and what should have been the fulfilment of his dream - should come so close to the end of his life, at a time when he was perhaps beginning to feel himself unfit for heavy duties. For years he had been pressing for closer involvement in the Netherlands. Almost a decade ago, he had already been holding himself in readiness to lead an English army to the aid of his co-religionists. When in autumn 1585 Elizabeth was finally persuaded she had to send a force to help the Dutch Protestants, Leicester was the obvious, the only, choice to command the expedition. But he was in the position of the understudy in a long-running play finally called in front of the footlights; just when hope deferred, after making the heart sick, has worked its own cure and bred a kind of resignation.

There is no reason to doubt he seized the chance. When Elizabeth’s summons back to court reached him he was at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, and wrote at once that he wished he had a hundred thousand lives to spend in her service (although that service might be delayed a little: he could not yet pull his boot on after a bad fall from his horse). Camden later wrote that he went ‘out of an itching desire of rule and glory’, but the cause, to one of his belief, was a holy war. Spain used the seventeen Netherlands provinces as a milch cow for the whole Spanish empire; but Spanish rule was about more than cold politics and economic calculation. In this police state, where each man was required to inform on his neighbours, stories spread of religious persecution on an appalling scale. Fifty thousand Netherlanders died (in the Prince of Orange’s admittedly partial estimate) during the first seven years alone of Philip’s rule. The numbers Mary Tudor had had killed were tiny by comparison - but this must have looked like a chance to reverse the Marian story. Moreover, Leicester must have hoped at long last to follow in his father’s military footsteps, and set an unequivocally glorious seal on what was hitherto a rather amorphous and unpopular career.

But the fact was that he had not seen active service since his twenties (when, ironically, he had been fighting for the Spanish). Ever since, it was Ambrose who had been the warrior in the Dudley family; now it was possibly Ambrose’s health - that old leg injury, which had never completely healed - that prevented him taking part in the new campaign. Island England had not bred commanders for a land army in quite the way it had for its navy; and there could be no thought that an army might be commanded by anyone but a senior member of the nobility, which reduced a poor field considerably. It was Leicester’s bad luck that he would be facing the Duke of Parma; not another gentleman amateur but a general of wide experience, who combined noble blood with the abilities that might have made him a military genius in any century.

An inexorable pressure of events had brought Elizabeth’s government to this point; had made war seem inevitable even to a moderate like Cecil. The appearance of Spanish troops in Ireland at the turn of the decade had been followed by Spain’s annexation of Portugal, with Portugal’s foreign territories, and its sea-going fleet; the voluntary return of the southern provinces of the Low Countries to Spain’s rule, further isolating the rebellious north; and the assassination of William of Orange. Key, perhaps, had been Spain’s alliance with France, raising the unacceptable spectre of a Europe dominated by the Habsburgs as far as the Channel coast.

Though the privy council’s discussions were long and hard, Cecil reluctantly concluded that it was better to act now, to prevent Philip reaching the ‘full height of his designs and conquests’, rather than wait to suffer the full brunt of his ‘insatiable malice’. Now he too was ‘greatly discouraged’ by the Queen’s ‘lack of resolutions’, as he wrote to Leicester. But when Spain seized English vessels lying in Spanish harbours (while Antwerp, besieged and starving, finally fell that August), the Queen was left with no choice but to act. The treaty between England and the rebellious Netherlands, the States General, was concluded at Nonsuch, that lovely fantasy palace of stucco, in August 1585 - albeit not without further debate and acrimony.

This is no place to try to analyse the Netherlands campaign, or Leicester’s performance in it. His failure - for so it has always been called - was perhaps inevitable. His personal skills and Parma’s apart, he was up against the staggering Spanish war machine, equipped himself with only a ludicrously underfunded army, and under the authority of a queen never really committed to the war. Historians have regretted that the war was not better fought; that it was fought at all; or that it had not been fought a good decade earlier, when William of Orange was himself in the field against a less well-prepared Spain. But England, too, was in one way better equipped in the second half of the 1580s than it had been in the early 1570s. Its naval defences were far better. If England’s open intervention in the Netherlands can be seen as one of the triggers for the launch of the Spanish Armada, then in the end the English team, Leicester among them, did not do so badly. Their worst fears, after all, never came to pass: England never became a Spanish-speaking, Catholic colony.

Leicester’s commitment (like his personal courage, when it came to it) cannot be doubted. It was, he said, ‘God’s cause and her Majesty’s’. His qualms (as he wrote to Walsingham at the beginning of September) were that the Queen had not ‘a full persuasion indeed that the cause was as it was’. How well he knew her. By contrast, Leicester himself raised £25,000 (more than £4 million today) by sale and mortgage of his own land to fit himself out for the expedition. Mortgaging the lordship of Denbigh raised £15,000 from a group of London merchants; and he borrowed £13,000 from the Queen to pay for another troop of horse. He sent out some two hundred letters to the gentry of his affinity - ‘gentlemen of good likings and callings in their countries, though my servants’ - to rally a thousand heavy cavalry. This should be remembered when he is blamed for raising his own salary as Lieutenant-General from £6 to £10 13s a day. (He also raised the salaries of his men, to the level of campaigners in the Irish wars.)⁷³ He was doing no more than might be expected of a man of his rank, since to raise their own troops in time of war was a moral obligation of the nobility. And, of course, much of what he mortgaged would originally have been given to him by Elizabeth. But still, it shows that he cannot be viewed entirely as a parasite.

He had the devil’s own work to make Elizabeth let him go. A dozen times she bade him farewell, and then summoned him back again, saying she could not do without him. One Tuesday in September he was writing to Walsingham of how desirous she was to stay his journey; of how she was doubtful of herself ‘by reason of her oft-disease taking her of late, and this night worst of all’; of how ‘she used very pitiful words’, her ‘fear that she shall not live, and would not have me from her’; of how he ‘did comfort her as well as I could’ . . . and of how Walsingham should send word to Lettice that there was no way her husband could get away from the court immediately. He was - he wrote to Walsingham again, as the delays continued - ‘weary of life and all’.

‘Her Majesty I see will make trial of me how I love her and what will discourage me from her service, but resolved I am that no worldly respect shall draw me back from my faithful discharge of my duty towards her, though she shall show to hate me, as it goeth very near, for I find no love or favour at all.’ Elizabeth, for her part, when her claims of illness did not move him, accused Leicester of seeking more his ‘own glory than her true service’. Finally, he got away. But on the very eve of sailing, he knew that he and his men were being sent without the backing they needed. As he wrote to Walsingham:

 

I am sorry her Majesty doth deal in this sort, content to overthrow so willingly her own cause. Look to it, for by the Lord I will bear no more so miserable burdens; for if I have no money to pay the soldiers, let them come away, or what else. I will not starve them or stay them. There was never gentleman or general so sent out as I am. My cause is the Lord’s and the Queen’s. If the Queen fail I trust in the Lord, and on him I see I am wholly to depend.

 

In the Netherlands they took it very kindly that the Queen was sending someone so close to her: a personage, as she herself wrote to them, ‘whom she did make more accompt of than any of her subjects’. Philip Sidney told Leicester that his coming was awaited like that of ‘the Messiah’. In Middleburg he was given the lodgings which had been deemed worthy of Alençon, and a firework display with the like of which the Valois prince had been honoured. Everyone - so Leicester wrote home ecstatically - was crying Elizabeth’s name ‘as if she had been in Cheapside’. Delft staged for him ‘the greatest shows that ever I saw’. He made his torchlit entrance into The Hague, where he was to keep ‘his standing court’, under arches made like the Dudleys’ ragged staff, and past galleries staffed with maidens who made obeisance as he passed. Town gates were hung with his arms, as well as those of the Queen and of Prince William’s son, Maurice, and banners twinned him with Elizabeth as saviour of the people:

 

Blessed be the Virgin Queen, that sent this Good,
And blessed be he that comes to save our blood.

Poems were hung up in streets decked with Tudor roses. ‘Never was there people I think in that jollity that these be.’ Elizabeth, he wrote, in a rare moment of blindness as to her character, ‘would think a whole subsidy well spent’ if she could only see a few of these towns as he had, and know they held for England.

The States had repeatedly offered Elizabeth sovereignty, after the assassination of their own prince, William the Silent. Now, in the spring of 1586, they offered a proxy version to Leicester. It was the very official recognition Elizabeth in England had always denied him. Perhaps he was simply tempted - and fell: ‘tickled’, Camden said, ‘with such flatteries, as if he had been seated in the highest and amplest degree of honour; he began to assume royal and Kingly thoughts of Majesty’. (Alençon, as a jealous Leicester would have been well aware, had gone further in accepting an elected sovereignty before abdicating in 1583. But then, Elizabeth had not taken that kindly, reacting almost hysterically to the idea that the putative marriage between them might have meant involvement in the Netherlands war for her country: ‘shall it ever be found true that Queen Elizabeth hath solemnized the perpetual harm of England under the glorious title of marriage with Francis, heir of France? No, no, it shall never be.’)

If Leicester did simply fall, he did so (he said) only after a week of negotiations in which he himself was careful to take no part, spending the time in fasting, prayer and even, it was said, psalm-singing. He presented himself, even in his letter to Cecil, as being ‘far unprovided’ to answer the States’ request. But in fact it is at least possible that some of the council in England, himself among them, had long decided that this would be the only way to establish ‘some well settled government’ in the fractious States - and that the only way to handle Elizabeth would be to present her with a fait accompli. By contrast, Mary, Queen of Scots took a different view: that it was Leicester who, by over-reaching himself, had fallen into a trap: ‘and there be instruments that help to push forward this subject to his ruin’.

He had every reason to claim he needed a fairly free hand, if he were to stand any chance of doing the job successfully. From the start, he said that if his hands were to be tied, he ‘had as lief be dead’. As the States seemed happy to give him, in their own words, ‘absolute power and authority’, so he seemed eager to do his part in opening England’s purse-strings, writing in strong terms to Cecil, after his arrival, that any slackening of English support would be ‘a sin and a shame’. But for Leicester, in many ways, this was also the enactment of a fantasy.

An allegorical entertainment played out before him embodied the city of Leiden as a female figure assaulted by Spanish soldiers, before leaping off stage to take refuge under Leicester’s cloak. He led her off to his lodgings, delightedly; at last, a woman who wanted to be rescued by the protective male! One of the first spectacles that greeted him represented a symbolic marriage between himself and Elizabeth: their personal emblems joined along with the inscription ‘Quod Deus coniunxit homo non separet’. Received as a prince - named as a prince in legal documents - he made no bones about accepting the title of governor general, rather than merely captain general. When Leicester told Cecil about his access of honours, he wrote optimistically: ‘It is done for the best, and if so her Majesty accepts of it, all will be to the best.’

But Davison, the royal secretary Leicester sent, rather belatedly, to inform Elizabeth he had accepted the ‘absolute governorship’, was delayed by bad weather and arrived only after she heard of it from another source. She railed at Davison ‘in most bitter and hard terms’; and the letter she sent to Leicester himself was coruscating in its fury.

 

How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to be used by you . . . We could never have imagined (had we not seen it fall out in experience) that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us, above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honor . . . And therefore our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently of your allegiance obey and fulfill whatever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.

The words ‘of your allegiance’ signal that this was regarded as possibly a treasonable offence, and what Leicester was commanded to do was to relinquish his new honour, publicly. ‘At the least I think she would never have so condemned any other man before she heard him,’ wrote Leicester painfully. ‘For my faithful, true and loving heart to her and my country, I have undone myself.’

To the States General Elizabeth wrote that she found it ‘very strange’ they would offer such a position to her subject without consulting her, ‘as though she wanted judgement to accept or refuse what was competent’. Besides the personal affront, of course, she feared the fact of an English governor general would make it appear that England had accepted sovereignty.

It was not Leicester who was at odds with public opinion here. He was backed up by most of the privy council, including even Cecil. At the very time Leicester was sailing off to fight, Elizabeth had secretly been opening negotiations for peace with Parma, and Cecil’s sympathies in this lay Elizabeth’s way. But all her ministers, even the least hawk-like, accepted that at least an initial show of strength was necessary in order to establish a good negotiating position. Cecil knew (and, later, wrote to Walsingham) that only disaster could come from this blatantly half-hearted attempt to prosecute a war. As he left England, Leicester had begged Cecil (‘seeing that mine and other men’s poor lives are adventured for her [Majesty’s] sake’) to ‘have me thus far only in your care that ... I be not made a metamorphosis, that I shall not know what to do’. Now Cecil told Leicester that ‘I, for my own part, judge this action both honourable and profitable,’ reassuring the distant earl he had told the Queen that if she continued her hostility, he himself would wish to be ‘discharged of the place I held’. But Elizabeth ‘would not endure to hear speech in defence’ of her old favourite. Cecil found her attitude, as he said several times, to be ‘both perilous and absurd’.

Elizabeth had probably been unrealistic in expecting that a commander in a foreign country, given the slowness of communications, could do anything other than act autonomously. But to her, surely, it was just as if the consort she had feared to take were indeed sidelining her and sweeping England towards a war of his own making . . . that old, bad, bogey.

Thomas Heneage - once Leicester’s rival - was designated the Queen’s emissary, to tell Leicester he had to relinquish his office, on the spot where he had accepted it in a formal ceremony. Heneage protested, which brought him his own slashing rebuke from the Queen. ‘Jesu! What availeth wit when it fails the owner at greatest need? Do that you are bidden and leave your considerations to your own affairs . . . I am assured of your dutiful thought but I am utterly at squares with this childish dealing.’ The States General too protested, and Elizabeth was finally persuaded that thus to reveal the divisions in her ranks could only be of comfort to the enemy. So Leicester was allowed to keep an emasculated title; but his prestige had been seriously damaged (as had that of the Queen, shown up as having been kept in the dark for weeks about a matter of such sensitivity). What had annoyed her most may have been that Leicester was preparing to act politically, rather than as merely her obedient military arm - though his instructions had ordered him to ‘use all good means to redress the confused government’ of the Low Countries.

But worst of all may have been the rumour that Lettice had been planning to join her husband, ‘with such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches, litters and side-saddles as her Majesty had none such, and that there should be a court of ladies as should far pass her Majesty’s court here’. She ‘would have no more courts under her obeisance than her own’, Elizabeth declared furiously; and in early March Ambrose was warning his brother that the Queen’s anger seemed to grow rather than diminish; that she seemed set on a course to make England the slave of Spain - ‘and that which passeth all the rest, the true religion of Jesus Christ to be taken from us. She giveth out great threatening words against you,’ Ambrose said.

 

Make the best assurance you can for yourself. Trust not her oath, for that her malice is great and unquenchable . . . Have great care for yourself, I mean for your safety, and if she will needs revoke you, to the overthrowing of the cause, if I were you, if I could not be assured there, I would go to the furthest part of Christendom rather than ever come into England again.

 

Incredible though such a thought might be, it sounds as if Ambrose Dudley at least was remembering the Tudors’ record of abruptly turning on their ministers: Wolsey and Cromwell; Empson and Dudley . . .

Leicester was curiously slow to write to Elizabeth himself. Whether he was simply ‘extremely overtoiled with business’, as he complained, or whether there was some deeper resentment at work, it was a failure with which his adherents reproached him anxiously. Davison urged him to use ‘more diligence entertaining her with your wise letters and messages, your slackness wherein hitherto appears to have bred a great part of this unkindness’. Finally he wrote, and the old charm worked: at the end of March, Ralegh (to whom Leicester had written asking for the services of some foot-soldiers) was reassuring the earl that ‘the queen is in very good terms with you, and, thanks be to God, well pacified, and you are again her “sweet Robin” ’. In April the Queen’s next letter to Leicester was haughty, but conciliatory.

 

Right trusty and well-beloved cousin and councillor, we greet you well. It is always thought in the opinion of the world a hard bargain when both parties are leasoned [slandered], and so doth fall out the case between us two . . .

We are persuaded that you that have so long known us cannot think that ever we could have been drawn to have taken so hard a course herein, had we not been provoked by an extraordinary cause. But for that your grieved and wounded mind hath more need of comfort than reproof . . . whosoever professeth to love you best⁷⁴ taketh not more comfort of your welldoing or discomfort of your evildoing than ourself.

 

Elizabeth herself was feeling battered by the pressure of events. (That May, Walsingham wrote to Leicester that he found her ‘daily more and more unapt to embrace any matter of weight’.) Perhaps she could face a permanent estrangement no more than could he. At the St George’s Day banquet, Leicester - protesting that he was ‘not ceremonious for reputation’ - was careful to have an empty chair of state laid for the absent queen, while he himself took a stool.

Leicester continued to be widely addressed as ‘Excellency’; to be allegorized, in the entertainments that marked his progresses, as ‘a second Arthur’. But a great price had been paid; not only in terms of his relationship with the Queen, but, more seriously, in terms of the fate of the English soldiery. The task of the Netherlands was one to which Leicester had always been ill-suited. Maybe it was an impossible task. But it was certainly no job for this ill, ageing and irascible Leicester, smarting from the wound Elizabeth had dealt his dignity. His letters to his fellow councillors were full of reproaches for what he saw as their lack of support: Elizabeth’s men tended to scatter like scolded schoolboys, faced by the full display of her authority. But Cecil for one wrote to him with a personal sympathy. Leicester would find the Queen’s latest letters to contain ‘as much comfort from her as you have recent discomfort’ - but that earlier anger ‘I know hath deeply wounded your heart and these [letters] cannot suddenly sink so low as the wound is but your lordship must add to this your own fortitude of mind’.

Many of the troops he had were disaffected ones; he would have needed the tact he was lacking to deal not only with his allies, but with his own army. A lot of his puritan friends had joined up - as well as a lot of the far from puritanical Thames watermen! - but too many of the men were ragged conscripts who started the active campaign already owed a backlog of pay. ‘There is much due to them,’ he wrote in March 1586. ‘They cannot get a penny; their credit is spent; they perish for want of victuals and clothing in great numbers.’ He would write of them, with feeling, that he had ‘no soldier yet able to buy himself pair of hose, and it is too too great shame to see how they go, and it kills their hearts to show themselves among men’. This was a problem to which he often returned: ‘I assure you it will fret me to death ere long to see my soldiers in this case and cannot help them.’ Elizabeth might grumble (so Leicester himself had heard, with pain) that there ‘lacked a Northumberland in his place’ - that he could not do the job his father did - but amid all the stories of his huffiness and hauteur, his quarrels with the experienced deputy whose advice should have saved him, one’s heart warms to Leicester as he writes again: ‘pity to see them’. When the ‘poor starved wretches’ deserted, he could not bring himself to execute too many of those recaptured: he understood too well why they had run away.

There were problems with corruption: money handed out to captains who were supposed to pay their men, but instead hung on to the loot and left the soldiers in penury. Leicester himself has been accused of peculation, but it looks more like a lack of financial competence all round, in which he was far from the only offender. The treasurer sent out to assist him was summoned back to account for his mistakes, but could never be charged, since no-one could understand his paperwork. There were endless disputes with the States General over who was to pay what; and over far more besides. ‘I never did deal with such heady people as these States are,’ he would complain. There was dissent among his own commanders: ‘I will be master whilst I remain here, will they nill they.’ While he protested that he would not be overbearded by ‘churls and tinkers’, the Queen was lamenting that she had ever let herself in for this war, calling it ‘a sieve, that spends as it receives to little purpose’.

As early as that same March, Leicester was writing pathetically to Walsingham of how he longed to be at his own ‘poor cottage’ again. In May he wrote from Arnhem: ‘I am weary, indeed I am weary, Mr. Secretary, but neither of pains nor travel [travail?]; my ill hap that can please her majesty no better hath quite discouraged me.’ By August, writing to Walsingham again, he was thoroughly demoralized: ‘if I have wanted wit, the fault is hers and yours among you for the choice, and that would not better assist me’. ‘Would to God I were rid of this place!’, he said bitterly.

And yet, when the summer campaign got finally under way, the army under Leicester’s command did not at first do so badly; well enough, indeed, if you consider he was fighting on behalf of a queen who actually expected him to avoid too punishing a conflict with the enemy. Parma certainly wrote of the toughness of those ragged English troops. For much of 1586, the Spanish general had to battle for every small victory, while the long descriptions Leicester wrote of his first battles show the sense of vindication he felt in acting like a soldier at last.

But the underlying problems - the uncertainty of the mission, the inexperience of the command, the inadequacy of the army’s supplies - did not go away. In an army plagued by ‘danger, want and disgrace’, Philip Sidney complained that ‘if her Majesty were the fountain, I would fear . . . that we should wax dry’. He put his faith in God’s support, in what seemed a holy war to him and to many of his contemporaries.

That summer Leicester wrote to Elizabeth in unusually straight terms.

 

As the cause is now followed it is not worth the cost or the danger. Your Majesty was invited to be sovereign, protector, or aiding friend. You chose the third, and . . . if your Majesty had taken their cause indeed to heart, no practices could have drawn them from you. But they now perceive how weary you are of them, and how willing that any other had them so that your Majesty were rid of them.

 

It had, he said, ‘almost broken their hearts’ - and it is hard to doubt he meant his own, too. (‘I pray God I may live to see you employ some of [his critics], to see whether they will spend £20,000 of their own for you in seven months . . .’) To do the best he could for England still, he would try to get into his hands three or four most significant places in the northern states, and then she would ‘make war or peace as you will’. ‘But your Majesty must deal graciously with them at present, and if you mean to leave them keep it to yourself. Whatever you mean really to do, you must persuade them now that you mean sincerely and well by them. They have desperate conceit of your Majesty.’

His raising again that old question of Elizabeth’s taking the crown herself, instead of reassuring her that he had at least had no thought of usurping her, provoked another hysterical outburst. But this time at least she followed it up with a letter of explanation to Leicester himself, and what was in effect an apology. ‘Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month . . .’ She signed off:

 

Now will I end, that do I imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell, [eyes symbol], though ever I pray God bless you from all harm, and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and care. As you know, ever the same, E.R.

 

Perhaps Elizabeth, too, had felt the distress of their real, their shattering, quarrel. That autumn, addressing a deputation from a Parliament she had felt unable formally to open, she spoke of how she had ‘found treason in trust, seen great benefits little regarded, and instead of gratefulness, courses of purpose to cross’. She saw, she said, no great reason to live.

In September 1586 came the battle of Zutphen and, famously, the death of Philip Sidney, the young man seen as the flower of England’s chivalry. His friend Fulke Greville described the scene much later: how, ‘the weather being very misty’, the English came suddenly upon the enemy - almost literally fell over them - and found themselves caught in the range not only of the great guns from the town ramparts but of musket fire from the trenches; how Sidney’s thigh bone was broken by a musket shot (he having lent his leg armour to a friend), and his panicked horse swept him from the field.

 

In this sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the General [Leicester] was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine!’

 

‘Your son and mine’, as Leicester wrote of him to Walsingham, whose daughter Sidney had married, died of gangrene, almost an agonizing month later.⁷⁵

Leicester had now lost ‘the comfort of my life’. If ‘I could buy his life with all I have to my shirt I would give it’, he wrote to Heneage bitterly. He continued to write of Philip’s pregnant widow as his daughter, and enquired often and urgently after the fate of her child. Both Philip Sidney’s parents - Sir Henry, and Robert’s sister Mary - had died that summer. But there was no shortage of mourners. Though the young man who dared to criticize her planned marriage with Alençon had never been a personal favourite of Elizabeth’s, she was sufficiently in tune with the public mood to order a state funeral for him, and crowds followed the body to its tomb in St Paul’s.

But Zutphen (where Parma won only by a thread; where Leicester’s stepson Essex fought valiantly, and was knighted by Leicester upon the field) proved a high point for the English force. Things went from bad to worse after that, until Leicester could only write: ‘My trust is that the Lord hath not quite cast me out of your favour.’ But it was probably as much because the Queen was missing him as for the poverty of his performance that, at the end of the year, she acceded to his request to come back home.

There was, after all, a crisis in England, and Elizabeth needed his support to sustain her through it. Holding Elizabeth’s hand was always the best, the real, way that he could help his country.⁷⁶ The question of Mary, Queen of Scots was coming to a head. Early that summer Walsingham’s spies had got wind of yet another plan to set Mary on the throne of England, with the help of a foreign Catholic army; the plan that would be known as the Babington conspiracy. This time, instead of stifling the plot in its infancy, it was decided to let it run - even to foster it a little - effectively, to give the Scots queen enough rope to hang herself. The opportunity never needed to be proffered twice; not with Mary. Besides Walsingham and his assistants, Leicester and the Queen herself were probably among the very few to know about what amounted to a set-up. By the end of the summer, Walsingham had what he needed: direct documentary proof of Mary’s treasonable complicity.

In September, Babington and his fellow plotters died the horrible traitor’s death. In October a commission was called (Warwick among the commissioners) to try Mary under the terms of the Act of Association, which had decreed that one on whose behalf the throne was attempted was herself guilty. There could be only one verdict. Both Houses of Parliament called for her death. From the Netherlands, Leicester too had urged that due process of law should go ahead. ‘It is most certain if you would have Her Majesty safe,’ he wrote to Walsingham in October, ‘it must be done, for justice doth crave it besides policy.’ When the verdict was published, it caused a bell-ringing, bonfire-lighting explosion of savage relief throughout the country.

But councillors, and even country, had called for Mary’s death before. The problem was bringing the Queen to agree. So, from the viewpoint of his colleagues, Leicester’s return on 23 November was timely. ‘Never did I receive a more gracious welcome,’ he wrote. It was a welcome from Elizabeth - and from everybody. That evening Leicester had supper with the Queen. That night, she sent word that she would proclaim the sentence against Mary. His was still the only voice (as the rest of the council were now happy to acknowledge) that could persuade her to proceed against the Scots queen. Archibald Douglas, one of the Scots commissioners, wrote in the first week of December that Leicester ‘doth govern the Court at this time at his pleasure’.

But a warrant drawn up was not a warrant signed. As the Queen dithered still, Leicester’s brief was communication with Mary’s son James, who to everyone’s relief proved more interested in preserving his place in the English succession than in preserving his mother - although when it came to public pronouncements, as he warned Leicester, ‘Honour constrains me to insist for her life.’ A paper dedicated to Leicester (which suggests the writer was under his patronage) called for Mary’s death, but also described Elizabeth’s merciful reluctance: now as ever Leicester was safeguarding his queen’s image, was giving Elizabeth an ‘out’.

In December the council were forced reluctantly to deliver to Elizabeth a letter from Mary herself which, in its requests about the fate of her servants and the disposal of her body, was calculated to bring home the full enormity of the prospective death. Leicester wrote to Walsingham: ‘There is a letter from the Scottish Queen, that hath wrought tears, but I trust shall do no further herein: albeit, the delay is too dangerous.’ Elizabeth kept herself very private as the new year came in, but Camden reported that as she sat alone she could be heard murmuring: ‘Strike, or be stricken, strike, or be stricken.’ In the end it was her kinsman Lord Howard of Effingham (Douglass Sheffield’s brother) who on 1 February persuaded her that this excruciating delay was shredding the nerve of the whole country. This is the day she sent for Davison and signed the warrant for Mary’s execution, famously handing it back to him with just enough vagueness (on second thoughts, she said, perhaps Mary’s gaoler should be sounded out about having her quietly put out of the way . . .) as to allow her later to claim she had never meant for it to be sealed and delivered immediately.

Leicester - with Walsingham, and Howard, and Knollys - was among the ten councillors who, under Cecil’s leadership, agreed to take upon themselves the responsibility for the warrant’s being put into effect. On 8 February the great hall at Fotheringhay saw a famous scene. A report sent to Cecil described how the executioners helped Mary’s women strip her of her ornaments and outer clothes, and how she herself helped them make speed, ‘as if she longed to be gone’.

All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words: ‘that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company’ . . . groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied ... Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift[ed] up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade ‘God save the Queen’.

 

Her lips, Cecil’s correspondent wrote, ‘stirred up and down a quarter of an hour’ after she was dead.

Again, it had been the councillors - including Leicester - against the Queen, rather than Leicester against the rest of the councillors. Perhaps he had been in a particular position, as having persuaded her to the first move. But when the news was brought to Elizabeth at 9 a.m. the next day, all those responsible shared in her terrible anger (and none more so than the unhappy Davison, who found himself in the Tower). As Camden put it, she ‘gave herself over to grief’ - a hysterical and histrionic paroxysm, meant to convince a watching Europe of her innocence, but doubtless springing from a real and complex cocktail of emotions. Leicester, like Cecil, was told to stay away from the court (a fellow councillor, suffering the Queen’s continued ill-humour, wrote to him that he was ‘happy to be absent from these broils’). He betook himself that spring to the health-giving spa waters of the west, to Bath and Bristol. But, like Cecil, he was forgiven with revealing rapidity. At the end of March the ten councillors, with Cecil as their spokesman, were called upon to justify their actions before the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But by the beginning of April, an unidentified correspondent was writing to Leicester the universal gratitude owed to Ambrose Dudley, their intermediary to the Queen, who had been ‘the only means from God to qualify the Queen’s bitter humour, and to stay the ruinous course provoked at home and abroad’. By June, good relations were restored; and debate turned once again to the foreign situation.

Philip of Spain had stepped up hostilities in the Netherlands, in preparation for using them as a springboard to launch his English invasion. The execution of the Queen of Scots gave him a pretext - and meant that he need no longer fear Elizabeth would be replaced by a Francophile Mary. In April, Drake’s famous raid on the harbour of Cadiz had damaged enough of Spain’s ships and property to force a delay in the invasion, but no-one doubted it was on the way. (And in January, two of the captains Leicester had left behind him in the Netherlands turned the defences at their command over to the Spanish enemy, choosing their Catholicism over their country. It must have been yet another blow to his confidence: Leicester had said he would stake his life on their loyalty.)

Again Leicester argued for more active armed intervention in the Netherlands; again the Netherlands begged for his return; again Elizabeth protested. He wrote to Walsingham: ‘Seeing I find her Majesty’s hardness continue still to me as it doth, I pray you lend me your earnest and true furtherance for my abode at home and discharge, for my heart is more than half broke.’ Finally, at the end of June 1587, Leicester sailed back to the Netherlands, taking with him several thousand more men, but leaving behind him his stepson Essex who, by his stepfather’s express permission, stayed in Leicester’s apartments while he was away.

Leicester arrived just in time to preside, humiliatingly, over the loss of Sluys. The all-important port fell through what sounds horribly like an idiot blunder, and one that owes a lot to the poor communications between Leicester and his Dutch allies. ‘Never were brave soldiers thus lost for want of easy succour,’ wrote the commander of the English battalion inside the besieged town, bitterly. But the fact is that this second phase of Leicester’s mission was from the start compromised even more gravely than the first had been. Even as he turned to war again, his queen (knowing that Philip of Spain did indeed have an ‘Enterprise of England’ in preparation), began making overtures of peace to Parma - overtures Parma received with a tactical show of interest worthy of Elizabeth at her best. In November Leicester was recalled, having advised the Queen that he could be of no further use to her. He had failed - but it is hard to know exactly where success would have lain; nor, given the conflicting interests involved, was pleasing everyone a possibility.

Before he left he had a medal struck. It read: ‘I reluctantly leave, not the flock, but the ungrateful ones.’ Ungrateful, too, was what he found the Queen on his return; gracious enough in public, and prepared to defend him against the complaints of the States General, but ready to let him leave court to spend Christmas at his own house. He must have faced the year ahead, 1588, with small hope and less certainty.