Elizabeth and Leicester

The contemporary chroniclers on whose reports we depend recorded the gold-chased truncheon Elizabeth held in her right hand, and her stately ‘King-like’ pace.⁷⁷ One wrote of a coach decked with emeralds and rubies. To the balladeer Thomas Deloney she was ‘attired like angel bright’. It is only later chroniclers who mention a white dress and a helmet with white plumes - but then Elizabeth usually wore black and white, the colours of perpetual virginity, and this time she would choose shining white; for impact and visibility, and to cast a flattering light on a 55-year-old’s careworn face. (As for the armour, again, no-one at the time mentioned that piece of cross-dressing - but many years earlier, an ambassador had reported Elizabeth even as practising riding war horses to lead a charge against Spain; quite like a Boudicca of latter day.) No-one mentioned the clouds of stinging insects in which Tilbury abounds, either; or the absence of any money to pay Elizabeth’s troops; or Leicester’s complaint that he had had to be ‘cook, caterer and huntsman’ to the whole company.

It seemed like just another triumph of publicity - great, but of the kind Elizabeth and Leicester together had so often pulled off before. No-one, except the Queen herself, understood her image better than he.

‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,’ she had continued, as Leicester looked on approvingly,

but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too - and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. To the which rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will venter my royal blood; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field . . . In the meantime, my lieutenant general shall be my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject.

There is no reason to suppose either of them troubled with foreknowledge that their long association was drawing to a close; that it was Leicester’s body which would prove all too ‘weak and feeble’, and that very shortly.

It took weeks, after Tilbury, for sure news to filter through that the Spanish had lost two-thirds of their men and forty-four ships, to the English one ship and a hundred men. In the middle of August Leicester was writing optimistically to Shrewsbury that he trusted the Spaniards ‘be too much daunted to follow their pretended enterprise’; that God - he said, foreshadowing the words Shakespeare gave to Henry V - ‘hath also fought mightily for her Majesty’; and that, should invasion still come, Elizabeth’s visit ‘hath so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects, as I think the weakest person amongst them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dares land in England’. It was 17 August before Leicester had word that the camp at Tilbury was to be disbanded (and in September, Mendoza in France was still writing optimistic despatches, believing the Armada could re-form). But then at least Leicester had the pleasure of returning to London like - as spectators remarked - a king.

His is not one of the names associated with England’s triumph in popular history. That credit (rather forgetting the part played by wind and weather) has gone to sailors like Francis Drake - himself once Leicester’s protégé. But the Queen, at least, felt he had played a major part in the events of that summer - unless, again, she was simply feeling guilty. In the weeks following the Armada’s defeat, as she wrote to James about the failure of ‘this tyrannical, proud and brainsick attempt’, as she triumphed that ‘[the Spanish king] hath procured my greatest glory that meant my sorest wrack’, Camden says she was also having papers drawn up to make Leicester ‘Lieutenant Governor’ of the country. She was, he says, dissuaded only by Hatton and Cecil from placing so much power in one man’s hands, and setting up what was in effect a vice-regency. (They clearly saw it as a danger. But one wonders whether, alternatively, Elizabeth were not specifically trying to set up a safe ‘second person’ in the realm, now that she was finally rid of the woman who had shown what a threat the position could be.)

But even without that extraordinary title, Leicester was still riding high. When the Earl of Essex led the first victory celebrations, Leicester watched from a window with the Queen. He dined every night with her, and a Spanish agent reported to Mendoza in Paris that he had seen the earl driving through London in a coach alone, accompanied by his household and a troop of light horse, as though at this late date he had indeed become the royal consort he had so long aspired to be.

His health was poor, but then so was Elizabeth’s own; and when Leicester set off towards his beloved Kenilworth and the medicinal springs at Buxton late that summer, as he had so often done before, exhaustion must have warred with satisfaction. From Rycote in Oxfordshire on 29 August he wrote Elizabeth a note, the note of a man who expects to write many more.

I most humbly beseech your Majesty to pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my own poor case, I continue still your medicine . . . hoping to find perfect cure at the bath . . .

It was not to be. Only a few miles later, he grew sicker, and was forced to take refuge at the manor of Cornbury near Oxford (and also, ironically, near Cumnor). It is usually described as his own house, and indeed he had for several years exercised control over the deer and timber of the ancient, evocatively named, Wychwood Forest that lowers over the site. But there is nothing to suggest that this was a home to him - that, had he been able to choose a place and a moment, this was where he would choose to die.

But his ague turned into ‘a continual burning fever’ - perhaps a bout of malaria, made worse by his experience on the Tilbury marshes. That, at least, was the official conclusion, when his fellow councillors were called on to consider the results of the post-mortem. He died early in the morning on 4 September; and when the rumours gathered steam this time, he featured as victim, rather than villain. In the next century it was whispered that he ‘hath ratsbane put in his porridge at Cornbury’; that a gentleman of his chamber, one William Haynes, said ‘that he had seen the Lady Lettice give the fatal cup to the Earl’. Camden reported gossip that Leicester had suspected Lettice’s lust for the younger man she married shortly thereafter - that Leicester, from the Netherlands, had attempted the assassination of his rival; and the scandal story ran that this was her pre-emptive strike. But in reality, it is hard to be sure Lettice was even there at Cornbury (and harder still truly to suspect the two men investigated by the privy council on the charge that they had procured his death by sorcery). It is just another one of the sticky smears that have dogged Leicester’s memory. He had been unwell a long time - had complained of ‘the stone’, that catch-all name for an intestinal malady. It has been speculated that he had stomach cancer, and if this were the underlying cause of his death, then it would have accounted for any gastric symptoms that suggested poison to the suspicious minds of his contemporaries.

We have no record as to how Lettice mourned him. But Elizabeth was condemned to an extraordinary conjunction of public rejoicing and private agony. This was her own personal sorrow - it would be folly to try to damp the mood of the country - and against a background of the national victory celebrations she shut herself into her own chamber to grieve. According to the report from a Spanish agent, indeed, she shut herself in ‘for some days’, until her councillors had the doors broken forcibly; and though that may be an exaggeration, Walsingham too wrote that she would not tackle affairs ‘by reason that she will not suffer anybody to have access to her’. Nothing in her early life - the fraught deaths of her mother, brother, Thomas Seymour and more - could have taught her to see grief as anything other than a dangerous emotion, best indulged solitary. A Genoese resident in London, one Marco Antonio Micea, noted, when she was seen about again, that she looked ‘much aged and spent’.

Elizabeth kept that final note from Cornbury in a box in her closet until the end of her life. Labelled in her own hand as ‘His last letter’, it is held in the National Archives today. But no-one else seems to have mourned him, said the ubiquitous ambassadors, smugly. Though the Queen was ‘much grieved’ at Leicester’s death, yet the joy of the country as a whole ‘was never a whit abated’, wrote Camden wryly. Worse than that: ‘All men, so far as they durst, rejoiced no less outwardly at his death than for the victory lately obtained against the Spaniard,’ lamented the writer and antiquarian John Stow, who said he owed his career to Leicester’s encouragement. As another of his protégés, the poet Spenser, wrote a year later, with a certain amount of sharp sympathy:

He now is dead, and all his glories gone.
And all his greatness vapoured to nought.
His name is worn already out of thought,
(Nor) any poet seeks him to revive,
Yet many poets honoured him alive.

But that was for the future. So, too, was Camden’s not wholly unsympathetic epitaph:

He was reputed a complete Courtier, magnificent, liberal, a protector and benefactor of Soldiers and Scholars . . . very officious, and cunning towards his ill-willers; for a time much given to Women, and finally, a good husband in excess . . . to say the truth, he was openly held to be in the rank of those which were worthy of praise, but the things which he secretly plotted displeased many.⁷⁸

For the moment, when Shrewsbury (in nervous association with his guest the Earl of Derby) wrote to Elizabeth the difficult letter that combined congratulations on her victory with commiserations on ‘so great a loss’, she replied to him as if writing of a green wound that cannot bear the touch: ‘Although we accept and acknowledge your careful mind and good will, yet we desire rather to forbear the remembrance thereof as a thing whereof we can admit no comfort, otherwise [than] by submitting our will to God’s inevitable appointment.’ There is no letter that really reveals Elizabeth’s feelings - no equivalent, even, to that she wrote to Catherine de Medici after Alençon’s death. But then there was really no-one to write to: the death of Robert certainly would not bring her closer to Lettice in any way.

Court cynics might whisper that Elizabeth always got over her grief. (When Cecil died a decade later, Lettice’s brother Sir William Knollys would sneer that the Queen ‘seemeth to take [it] very grievously, shedding tears and separating herself from all company. Yet I doubt not but she in her wisdom will cast this behind her, as she hath done many other before time of like nature.’) Elizabeth had, indeed, to develop a measure of hardihood, when her own life was so much longer than that enjoyed by most of her contemporaries. Nor would she place private feelings above public responsibilities. But for the moment at least - perhaps for ever - the loss of ‘a personage so dear unto us’, as she described Robert to Shrewsbury, was without remedy.

But while Elizabeth, shutting herself away, was capable of the sudden, savagely dramatic gesture, she also expressed herself less directly. As in life, so in death she and Leicester often spoke to each other obliquely. Perhaps it is to the years ahead that we should look for Elizabeth’s last (and almost disastrous) great loving gesture towards her lost companion - to her relationship with Leicester’s stepson and surrogate, Essex. Leicester had brought Essex to court as he himself began to tire and age, willing still to perform necessary duties, but unable any longer to flatter Elizabeth with the conviction he had once had; unable to provide the energetic, exciting pageant of eager masculinity. Elizabeth obediently would follow his programme almost to her destruction; would try to believe Essex was another Leicester. The Queen’s long, her extraordinary, indulgence towards Robert Devereux was her long lament for Robert Dudley.

The so-called ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth painted in 1588 must be one of the glummest ever celebrations of victory. Her right hand resting possessively on the globe, the crown at her side and pictures of the sea defeat behind her, she is clad with an almost unimaginable magnificence of embroidery and jewellery. But her pouched and hooded eyes gaze into the distance, past the viewer, with an effect almost of melancholy. Against the black velvet of her dress, her pearls - perhaps those Leicester bequeathed to her - stand out clearly. Nothing can be read, in the Armada portrait, into Elizabeth’s choice of black and white clothes. They had become, as the years wore on, her favourite colours. But she might well have been in mourning, and not for one man merely. The end of the glory years of her reign was upon her, even as it reached its apogee.

While the Spanish war wore on - while Elizabeth at last, too late for Leicester, was forced to commit to it wholeheartedly - over the next few years all the greatest aides and adorers of her heyday would slip away. Ambrose died in 1590 - of gangrene, ten days after the amputation of the leg that had been wounded in France almost thirty years earlier. Walsingham too died in 1590; and Hatton in 1591, also without a son to inherit his dignities. Cecil lived until 1598, but as the decade passed even he began to take less part in affairs. There remained Cecil’s son Robert and Leicester’s stepson Essex (as well as the maverick Walter Ralegh). With these young men Elizabeth would try to recreate the pattern of earlier years; but those days, when bickering would in the end be subsumed into co-operation, were never again to be. The 1590s - a difficult decade of famine and uncertainty, with the succession still unsettled and Elizabeth’s death ever more likely - did at last see the outbreak of the factionalism once attributed to Leicester’s day. Arguments concerning the nature of monarchy became more explicit. Courtiers split into camps, with Essex positioning himself in opposition to the Cecils, and the Queen’s efforts to balance opposites leading to stasis, rather than to a fruitful collegiality.

Essex’s career is too well known to need more than the briefest description here. It was speculated early in his heyday, in 1591, that he was ‘like enough, if he had a few more years, to carry Leicester’s credit and sway’. That was before it became clear that Essex’s ambition went much further that his stepfather’s (fired, perhaps, by the smidgin of royal blood running through his veins; the thought that if only the line of succession had run differently . . .). Then came his bid for political as well as personal power; his increasing dissatisfaction with the limitations on a favourite; his disastrous campaign in Ireland; and his famous intrusion into Elizabeth’s bedroom to explain it away. Think of Leicester’s very different reaction when Elizabeth criticized his conduct in the Netherlands. Think, too, of Elizabeth’s horrified reaction, all those years ago, when men had burst into the chamber of the Scots Queen Mary.

Time and again Elizabeth forgave Essex; punished him, at most, but leniently. It was probably the withdrawal of his income that pushed him into armed rebellion; maybe Elizabeth’s refusal to renew his ‘farm’ of sweet wines, which Leicester had held before him, was a symbolic rejection. Leicester’s stepson died on the headsman’s block as Leicester’s father and grandfather had done. But even before Essex’s downfall, the Queen was turning away from him. She knew the difference between the presence, and the absence, of loyalty. Elizabeth’s first and last favourites were in essence very different men.