19

‘To end this life for her service’

ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER, WAS BURIED IN HIS FAMILY stronghold of Warwick; in the Beauchamp Chapel of St Mary’s church, built more than a century before.

Five days before the October ceremony, the procession had set out from Kenilworth: a hundred poor; a hundred gentlemen servants to the attending lords ‘in cloaks’ (the mourning garment given to those of this class; anyone who ranked esquire or above was given a whole gown); a hundred of Leicester’s own gentlemen similarly attired; chaplains, doctors and secretaries; the Mayor of Coventry; attendants bearing Leicester’s guidon, and leading his horse. Mourners of rank being customarily of the same sex as the one mourned, the names of the women present come at the end of the long list of attendees preserved in the records of the College of Arms. They include such humble personages as the dairy woman at Wanstead, and ‘Mary the poor scullery’. The body itself was followed by the Earl of Essex, the chief mourner, with Sir Robert Sidney (Philip Sidney’s brother) as his assistant, and a trainbearer behind them, presumably to deal with the yards of black. (From an earlier list of preparations it looks as though Ambrose had planned to attend, but was in the end prevented, perhaps by his health.) Several of Lettice’s male relatives were there, as well as Leicester’s brother-in-law the Earl of Huntingdon; but there is no mention of the ‘base son’, the younger Robert Dudley.

On Leicester’s tomb, in Latin, the inscription lists his titles under Queen Elizabeth (‘who distinguished him by particular favour’), and describes him as ‘the best and dearest of husbands’ to Lettice, who erected it and who shares the vault under the gaudy effigies. Ambrose Dudley lies nearby, as does the ‘noble Impe’, his effigy still dressed in a young child’s gown, rather than the breeches which, had he lived to seven, would have marked his entrance into maturity.

Leicester’s funeral seems to have been unremarkable, for a major nobleman of the sixteenth century - but then, he had planned it that way. In the will he had written a year before his death, in 1587 on his return to the Netherlands, he had required that his friends should bury ‘the wretched Body of mine’ (when it pleased God to separate it from the soul) ‘with as little Pomp or vain Expenses of the World, as may be’; he was ‘persuaded that there is no more vain Expenses’ than a lavish tomb. Unless the Queen’s majesty appointed otherwise, or unless it proved too inconvenient, he had always wished to be buried at Warwick, ‘where sundry of my Ancestors do lie’.

His will, he wrote, was of necessity an amateur effort, since he found himself in the Netherlands, and was ‘no Lawyer, nor have any Counsel now with me’. The result is a document more moving than any lawyer could achieve - and, before anything else, a statement of his religious conviction, and the almost Calvinist trend thereof. ‘First I take it to be the Part of any true Christian, to make a true Testimony of his Faith at all Times . . .’ His continues for a long paragraph, stating his anticipation of the forgiveness of his sins (‘be they never so great or infinite’); his trust in an Almighty whose ‘Graces Goodness and Mercy I most faithfully take hold on, being so promised by himself, who is the only Truth itself, that I am the Child of Salvation’, one of the ‘faithfull Children, and Saints of God’.

Lettice figures in his will as his ‘dear and poor disconsolate wife’. He has, he writes, ‘always found her a faithfull, loving, and a very obedient, carefull Wife’; it was in this perception that he made her his executor. Before a year was out, Lettice was married again - to the 32-year-old Christopher Blount, a friend of her son Essex; a Catholic member of the minor gentry who had served as Leicester’s Master of Horse in the Netherlands. And although remarriage was to be expected, and rapid remarriage common, this might seem almost like Hamlet speed.⁷⁹ On the other hand, the Blounts were connections and clients of the Dudleys - Christopher (to whom Leicester wrote as ‘Kytt’) was a younger son of that ‘Cousin Blount’ to whom Leicester had written on the death of Amy Dudley - and might be said to be ‘in the family’. Blount never publicly claimed Lettice as his wife, referring to her rather as a ‘friend’, and she continued to be known as the Countess of Leicester. When Essex’s outrages and obsessions finally brought him and some of his supporters to rebellion and the headsman’s block, his stepfather Blount was among the fellow victims. Lettice was thus doubly bereft. She spent the rest of her life in comparative retirement, dying only in 1634, in her nineties.

To his ‘most dear, and most gracious Sovereign, whose creature under God I have been, and who hath been a most beautiful, and a most princely Mistress unto me’, Leicester left a ‘Rope of fair white Pearls, to number six hundred’. Elizabeth had exalted him

 

as well in advancing me to many Honours, as in maintaining me many Ways by her Goodness and Liberality. And as my best Recompense to her most excellent Majesty can be from so mean a Man, chiefly in Prayer to God, for whilst there was any Breath in this Body, I never failed it, even as for mine own Soul. And as it was my greatest Joy, in my Life Time, to serve her to her Contentation, so it is not unwelcome to me, being the Will of God to die, and end this Life for her Service.

 

He was thinking of death on a Dutch battlefield - but in fact, since his whole life had been spent in her service, his death could hardly be seen differently whenever it occurred.

If you exclude the sole involuntary betrayal of Leicester’s dying and leaving her, then, for Elizabeth, you might say their relationship had worked. Whether she regretted not marrying him, in the first shock of grief - or whether her wary sense of self-preservation kicked in, to keep the pain at bay - in the course of their thirty-year alliance she had achieved a relationship that gave play both to her power, and to her vulnerability.

And of course, he had not done so badly. The tale of the prince who adventured and won a kingdom and a princess was not new even in the sixteenth century; and if he did not quite win the kingdom, then he went a good way of the journey. As Robert bolstered Elizabeth’s majesty, he had shared the benefits of her sovereignty. But dynastically, he gambled and lost. He was robbed of his posterity. Leicester’s earldom eventually (after being in abeyance for thirty years) was recreated by James I for Leicester’s nephew, Sir Robert Sidney. The great Sidney house of Penshurst in Kent remains one of the chief shrines to the dissipated Dudley legacy.* But effectively the direct line of Dudley dignities dwindled and died out (since Ambrose too died without child), and it is safe to say that Robert would have seen his great failure as this: the failure of his dynasty.

It seems ironic but apposite that, in the same generation, the Tudors died out in much the same way.