Elizabeth and Leicester

The last quarter-century alone has seen an impressive list of biographies of Elizabeth, notably those by (in alphabetical order) Carolly Erickson (The First Elizabeth, Macmillan, 1983), Christopher Hibbert (The Virgin Queen: The Personal History of Elizabeth I, Viking, 1990; Wallace MacCaffrey (Elizabeth I, Edward Arnold, 1993), Maria Perry (The Word of a Prince: A Life from Contemporary Documents, The Folio Society, 1990), Jasper Ridley (Elizabeth I, Constable, 1987), Anne Somerset (Elizabeth I, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) and Alison Weir (Elizabeth the Queen, Jonathan Cape, 1998; following on from Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII, 1996, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 1991).

Of the recent more academic studies, I was especially interested by the work of Susan Doran (Monarchy and Matrimony, Routledge, 1996), Carole Levin (The Heart and Stomach of a King, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), and Julie M. Walker, ed. (Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, Duke University Press, 1998).

Among the older biographers of Elizabeth, first place now and always must go to Agnes Strickland, whose Lives of the Queens of England (vols 7 and 8, London, 1844) is an invaluable guide back to original sources (even though she does occasionally cite the late-seventeenth-century chronicler Gregorio Leti, some of whose most succulent ‘finds’ appear to have begun and ended in his own imagination). The works of Frank Arthur Mumby are useful in that his ‘lives in letters’ reprint much original correspondence in full. See The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth (1909); Elizabeth and Mary Stuart (1914); The Fall of Mary Stuart (1922), all published by Constable. Queen Elizabeth and Her Times, edited by Thomas Wright in 1838, is likewise a collection of contemporary correspondence.

No-one can ignore the biography by J. E. Neale (Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Cape, 1934); or that of Elizabeth Jenkins (Elizabeth the Great, Victor Gollancz, 1958) - who, of course, is also the author of Elizabeth and Leicester (Victor Gollancz, 1961). Earlier books on the pair include those of Milton Waldman (Elizabeth and Leicester, Collins, 1944) and Frederick Chamberlin (Elizabeth and Leycester, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1939), whose The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth (John Lane, 1920) includes such invaluable oddities as the collection together of all Elizabeth’s medical records, and of all the ambassadorial statements concerning the existence or otherwise of her sexual relations; while his The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth (John Lane, 1923) groups together her most famous and/or revealing remarks. Perhaps it is here, too, that one should mention Martin Hume’s classic The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth (extended edition, Eveleigh Nash, 1904), and Josephine Ross’s Suitors to the Queen (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975).

Three biographies of Robert Dudley appeared in less than a decade: Alan Kendall’s Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Cassell, 1980); Alan Haynes’s The White Bear: Robert Dudley, the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester (Peter Owen, 1987); and Derek Wilson’s important Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1553-1558 (Allison & Busby, 1988). Anyone writing on Leicester now must acknowledge a particular debt to Wilson’s work, not only in Sweet Robin but in The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys (Constable, 2005). The study of Robert - unlike that of Elizabeth herself, but with obvious ramifications for their relationship - is still one where new material may be explored; the other immense debt one must acknowledge here is to Simon Adams, whose Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics was published by Manchester University Press in 2002; his edition of the Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558-1561, 1584-1586 was published by Cambridge University Press (for the Royal Historical Society) in 1995. See also Adams’s articles: ‘The Papers of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’, in Archives, xx (1992), 63-85; xx (1993), 131-44; xxii (1996), 1-26.

A selection of Elizabeth’s own letters, and a collection of her speeches, prayers and poems were recently gathered together into an authoritative and comprehensively annotated volume (superseding the older collection edited by G. B. Harrison in 1935): Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (University of Chicago Press, 2000). The poem quoted by way of epigraph can be found on pp. 303-5, with a discussion of the attribution to Elizabeth. The letters selected include those Elizabeth wrote to Alençon; her teasing letters to the Shrewsburys about Leicester’s diet; and of course her letters to Leicester and others concerning his acceptance of the governorship of the Netherlands. In this volume can also be found some other relevant documents from the collections of state papers - for example, Parliament’s pleas to Elizabeth to marry (as well as her responses to those pleas) and Cecil’s letter urging her to the Alençon match; also the most important correspondence on the Thomas Seymour affair.

State and official papers

As always, the HMSO Calendars are an essential source; we today are all indebted to those tireless Victorians (and neo-Victorians) who docketed and in some cases transcribed the collections of manuscripts that are the building blocks for any attempt at Tudor history.

Several volumes of the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, ed. Robert Lemon and M. A. E. Green, 1856-72, hereafter abbreviated to CSP Dom., contain letters to, from and about Elizabeth and Leicester. (See also Miscellaneous State Papers from 1500 to 1726, ed. the Earl of Hardwicke, London, 1778, which has, for example, in vol. I interesting correspondence from Mary to Norfolk, and Walsingham to Stafford.)

CSP Dom. 1547-1580: This and the following volume are often frustrating, in giving abstracts of or extracts from letters, rather than the whole thing. Among the multitude of more political documents, however, are several letters from Robert either to or about Elizabeth (see e.g. pp. 448, 503).

CSP Dom. 1581-1590: This volume includes on p. 116 a memo of a letter from Robert to the Queen suggesting that he was indeed behind the Bond of Association; on p. 265 his letter to Walsingham about the ‘very pitiful words’ she used to keep him back from the Netherlands; on p. 276 his plea (after returning from there) that she should pity his ‘wretched and depressed estate’; on p. 514 his letter inviting her to Tilbury; and on p. 538 his last letter.

The two volumes labelled ‘Addenda’ are more satisfying, as usually containing complete letters. CSP Dom. Addenda 1566-79 includes Leicester’s despairing letter to Throckmorton (pp. 28-9) and the letters from Kenilworth in the winter of 1569-70 (pp. 575, 198-9); for others of his letters to the Queen in this period, see pp. 231-2, 339-40, 360, 361. There is also a good deal of material about the Norfolk affair. In CSP Dom. Addenda 1580-1625, see pp. 95-6 for Leicester’s ‘goodness of God’ letter to Elizabeth; also pp. 99, 141.

Letters to and from English emissaries abroad are to be found in the Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, ed. Joseph Stevenson et al., 1863-1950. For example, the volume that covers 1558-59 includes, on the first page, Cecil’s memorandum about sending out the news of Elizabeth’s accession; the next (1560-61, from p. 347 on) contains the letters Throckmorton in Paris wrote after Amy Dudley’s death.

Letters exchanged with Ireland, however, get their own series of volumes - as (more importantly in this particular context) do those with Scotland. The Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, 1547-1603, ed. Joseph Bain et al., Edinburgh, 1898-1952 (CSP Scottish), contains in the second volume (1563-69) much correspondence concerning Elizabeth’s attempt to marry Robert to Mary, and in the fourth (pp. 32-40) Norfolk’s confession.

The reports home of the Spanish ambassadors are an invaluable source on this relationship - especially the letters of Feria and de Quadra on Elizabeth’s early relationship with Robert and the Amy Dudley affair. See the Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas, ed. M. A. S. Hume et al., 1892-99 (CPS Spanish). The all-important letter about Amy’s death is on pp. 174-6 of vol. I (but see the proviso under Chapter 6 below); that on Elizabeth’s near-fatal smallpox attack on pp. 262-4 of the same volume. The scene in which Elizabeth promised to marry the Duke of Alençon is pp. 226-8 of vol. III; Englefield’s correspondence on the Arthur Dudley affair is in vol. IV, pp. 101-12.

The other ambassadorial calendar of especial relevance is perhaps that of the Venetians (Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, preserved in the Archives of Venice and in the other Libraries of Northern Italy, ed. Rawdon Brown et al., 1864-98) - though Venice did not keep an envoy at Elizabeth’s court for much of her reign. Other vital ambassadorial sources are the Correspondance Diplomatique de Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (London and Paris, 1838); particularly the first volume, pp. 233-7, for his account of the famous scene where Leicester and Norfolk challenged Cecil; also vol. II, p. 112, on the aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

The important letters of the envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign are reproduced in Queen Elizabeth and Some Foreigners, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. Prof. T. H. Nash (John Lane, 1927).

Private papers

Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Bath Preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire, vol. V, Talbot, Dudley and Devereux Papers 1533-1659, ed. G. Dyfnallt Owen, HMSO, 1990. The Talbot Papers contain some relevant material (running in tandem, you might say, with that which appears in Lodge; see notes for Chapter 13 below); as do the Devereux Papers. But the real point, here, is some ninety pages of transcripts of Robert Dudley’s own papers: inventories of the contents of his properties; letters of business addressed to him about everything from the manipulation of the patronage networks to the mulcting of estates; from the total of his debts at his death to the excellence of his dogs. Tyndall’s statement as to Leicester’s marriage with Lettice is on pp. 205-6; Hatton’s letters about the Queen’s dream of a marriage on p. 197.

Calendar of Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House (published in the 1880s). This huge collection of the papers in William Cecil’s possession - the cogs that made the wheels that ran the Elizabethan state - includes, for example: in vol. I, a good deal about the Norfolk affair; in vol. II, letters written by Simier and Anjou/Alençon to Elizabeth; in vol. III, materials on the execution of Mary and on Netherlands affairs. However, perhaps its real point, in this particular context, is that it serves to show just how large a part Robert Dudley played in greasing those wheels - just how many, and how varied, bits of business involved him.

For some particularly interesting documents, readers of this Calendar will sometimes find themselves referred back to ‘Murdin’, i.e. to A collection of State Papers relating to affairs from the years 1542-1570 left by William Cecil Lord Burghley, ed. William Murdin, 1759. Other sources refer one back to ‘Haynes’, i.e. to the collection under the same title edited by Samuel Haynes in 1740, which includes, for example, on pp. 361-2 Robert’s letter to Cecil after Amy’s death, on p. 444 one version of Cecil’s memo about Robert’s unsuitability as a husband as compared to the archduke, and (pp. 52ff.) a great deal of self-exculpatory correspondence from the accused Norfolk.

Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley preserved at Penshurst Place, ed. C. L. Kingsford and William A. Shaw, 1925-36. Vol. II includes the inventory of the contents of Kenilworth. These Sidney papers, however, are chiefly notable for what light they can throw on Lettice, her later relations with Robert Sidney, and (vol. III, pp. 142-7) her efforts to overthrow the claims of the younger Robert Dudley.

Report on the Pepys Manuscripts preserved at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1911). The first 175 pages of the volume are very largely concerned with Leicester and his affairs: letters to Leicester from Throckmorton and from Mary, Queen of Scots; a letter (pp. 178-9) concerning that plan to use cats and dogs in the Kenilworth fireworks; and (p. 180) one to Christopher Blount (‘Mr Kytt’). Only a note (p. 3) is made of the Blount letters of 1560, since these are reproduced elsewhere (see notes for Chapter 6, below); however, Blount’s evidence in the Appleyard inquiry is given on pp. 111-13.

Some contemporary chroniclers

Camden, William (1551-1623): antiquary and headmaster of Westminster School, whose Annales rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha, the first part of which was published in 1615, provides one of the chief sources for contemporary opinion on Elizabeth’s reign (albeit always in the knowledge that, since Camden wrote in Latin, the English quotes with which we are familiar were penned by other hands).

Foxe, John (1516-87): Protestant martyrologist whose Actes and Monuments, more popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, was first printed in English in 1563. Appended to it was a tract from which come many of the old tales about Elizabeth’s time in the Tower: The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England.

Holinshed, Raphael (d. 1580?): historian famous for his Chronicles, a collection of pieces - some by other hands - which in some editions include, for example, Richard Mulcaster’s description of Elizabeth’s passage through the City on the day before her coronation, and which continued to be revised by others after his death.

Naunton, Sir Robert (1553-1635): staunchly Protestant professional courtier who eventually rose to high office under James. Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on Queen Elizabeth her Times and Favorites, published posthumously in 1641, was probably intended to provide an example to the Stuart monarchy.

Speed, John (1552?-1629): most widely remembered now as a cartographer, Speed was also a member of the Society of Antiquaries and author (with help from Camden et al.) of The History of Great Britain ... with the Successions, Lives, Acts and Issues of the English Monarchs from Julius Caesar to . . . King James, published in 1611.

Other Works particularly relevant for individual chapters

Chapter 1

The comparison of Tudors and Dudley to a tree and the ivy that twines around it comes from David Starkey’s Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (Chatto & Windus, 2000). Of course, anyone writing today on Elizabeth’s youth - a subject he revitalized - is indebted to Starkey for a great deal more than that. Apart from anything else, it was he who pricked the balloon of myth concerning the different sources on Elizabeth’s accession day. To the classic popular studies on the reign of Henry VIII (Alison Weir’s and Antonia Fraser’s; and of course Starkey’s own Six Wives, Chatto & Windus, 2003) one should add two biographies of Anne Boleyn: Eric Ives’s The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Blackwell, 2004) and Retha M. Warnicke’s revisionist work The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Besides the works of Derek Wilson, noted above, further information on the background of Robert’s family can be found in the recent The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500-1700 by Michael G. Brennan (Ashgate, 2006). I am grateful to Robin Harcourt Williams of Hatfield House for his help on ‘the oak story’.

Chapter 2

For the Dudley connection with Prince Edward, see the ‘biographical memoirs’ in the Literary Remains of Edward VI, vol. I, ed. J. G. Nichols, Roxburghe Club, 1823.

The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee is by Benjamin Woolley (HarperCollins, 2001).

Chapter 3

For the new trends in thinking about Edward’s reign I found particularly helpful Stephen Alford’s Kingship and Polity in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547-1558 by David Loades (Longman, 2004). For John Dudley’s role in particular, see Loades, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, 1504-1553 (Oxford University Press, 1996), especially pp. vii-viii for the growth of the ‘bad duke’ bogey; also B. L. Beer, Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley (Kent State University Press, 1973).

Starkey’s interpretation of the Seymour affair quoted is found on pp. 76-7 of Elizabeth; see also Sheila Cavanagh’s article in Walker’s Dissing Elizabeth.

Chapter 4

Simon Adams’s work on Robert’s early adulthood has corrected some important errors, notably the assumption that he was living wholly retired in the country - and thus presumably out of touch with affairs - for the last years of Mary’s reign: see Leicester and the Court, p. 160. By the same token David Starkey has done much to redraw the picture of an Elizabeth living simply retired. An analysis of Dee’s role under the Marian regime is to be found in Benjamin Woolley’s The Queen’s Conjuror.

Chapter 5

The Collected Works (pp. 53-5 and notes) not only gives accounts of but discusses the sources for different accounts of Elizabeth’s coronation. Susan Frye’s The Competition for Representation (Oxford University Press, 1993) is particularly interesting on the coding of the festivities. On the likelihood of dissolving a marriage, see Lawrence Stone’s The Road to Divorce (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 301-5.

Chapter 6

I am indebted to Faith Marshall-Harris for her opinion, as a coroner, on the evidence as to Amy’s death. On the theory that breast cancer could have caused it, see I. Aird, ‘The Death of Amy Robsart’, English Historical Review, lxxi (1956), pp. 69-79.

The Victorian period was the great age of writing on Amy Dudley. George Adlard, whose Amye Robsart and the Earl of Leicester was printed in London in 1870, gives the Blount correspondence in full; the originals are in the Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge. Walter Rye’s The Murder of Amy Robsart: A Brief for the Prosecution (Norfolk, 1885) reprints, by way of appendices, the documents on Appleyard’s accusation. Among the substantial body of other writings, I found particularly helpful the article by Canon J. E. Jackson, ‘Amye Robsart’, Wilts. Archeological Magazine, xvii, 1898.

I do have, however, in sourcing this chapter to add a big ‘NB’. The conventional - the invaluable! - source for the quotations from foreign ambassadors is the relevant Calendar. The version of the all-important letter from de Quadra I have used comes not from the CSP Spanish, however, but from the twelve-volume History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada published by James Anthony Froude between 1856 and 1870.

No-one with the faintest sympathy or respect for Robert Dudley can take very much from Froude’s commentary. However, Froude did his own research in the archives at Simancas (writing evocatively of how he often found grains of sand still glittering on the pages - sand scattered when the letters were written, and untouched until that day), and his translation sometimes varies significantly from Hume’s in the Calendar. One phrase in particular (‘se ha hecho senor de los negocias y de la persona de la Reyna’ - ‘had made himself master of the business of the state, and of the person of the Queen’) is hardly recognizable in the Calendar version.

To replace all quotations from the Calendar with the equivalents from Froude is not an option: he himself quotes only as and when he chooses. I am aware, moreover, that errors have been detected in his work: he made his own transcriptions, and worked at great speed. (Mind you, no less a person than J. E. Neale, in the article on Stafford cited under Chapter 14 below, pointed out that Hume in the Calendar could also be challenged; at least that his footnotes frequently make identifications ‘with a certainty that others cannot share’.) None the less, in this and the following two chapters (Chapters 6-8, after which the Spanish reports become less crucial for a time), the quotations I use are taken from his book: see esp. pp. 277-81. I prefer Froude’s version on aesthetic grounds if no other: they read far more naturally, to me.

Wherever possible I have also referred back to the Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la historia de España, better known as Codoín, vols 87 and 89; however, these too are often frustrating, with some of the most relevant letters absent. De Quadra’s letter of 11 September 1560, for example, appears not in Codoín, but in Relations Politiques des Pays-Bas et de l’Angleterre sous la règne de Philippe II, ed. M. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1883), vol. 2, pp. 529-33. I am indebted to Daniel Hahn for his help in reading it.

Chapter 7

On favourites in general, see Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, eds, Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: the Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Simon Adams, ‘Favourites and Factions’, in John Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy (Arnold, 1997); also J. H. Elliott and Laurence Brockliss, eds, The World of the Favourite, c.1550-1675 (Yale University Press, 1999). My picture of the relationship between other rulers and their favourites is drawn particularly from Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000); also Virginia Rounding’s Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power (Hutchinson, 2006); Ophelia Field’s The Favourite: Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002); and Maureen Waller’s Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole their Father’s Crown (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). See also Stella Tillyard, A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings (Chatto & Windus, 2006), for Caroline Mathilde’s relationship with Johann Struensee.

On ideas of monarchy, see John Guy’s essay on Tudor monarchy and its critiques in the anthology he edited, cited above. See also several other essays in the same volume: David Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy’; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’; Stephen Alford, ‘Reassessing William Cecil in the 1560s’.

On Elizabeth’s relationships, see Susan Doran’s article, ‘Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry?’, in Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth; her own Monarchy and Matrimony is a fuller exploration of the practical difficulties that beset any choice of husband Elizabeth might make, and of Doran’s belief that, had her advisers all united to promote any one suitor, Elizabeth might have ceased to resist. See also Alan Haynes, Sex in Elizabethan England (Sutton, 1997), and Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1760 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). For contemporary opinions as to the nature of Elizabeth’s sexual relationships with Robert and others, see Chamberlin, Private Character, pp. 276-81.

For courtly love, see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1936) and Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962); also the more recent works by Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (Manchester University Press, 1977), and Bernard O’Donoughue, The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester University Press, 1982).

For references on the Arthur Dudley story, see the section below on Chapter 19, Afterword and Appendices.

Chapter 8

There has obviously accrued an enormous literature on Mary Queen of Scots. Notable recent additions, however, are: Jane Dunn’s Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens (HarperCollins, 2003); John Guy’s My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Fourth Estate, 2004); Alison Weir’s Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (Jonathan Cape, 2003).

The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill were reprinted by the Folio Society in 1969.

Chapter 9

For sources for this chapter, see the Calendars noted under ‘General’ above, especially CSP Scottish. For Norfolk himself, see Neville Williams’s Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (Barrie & Rockliff, 1964); also the sections on the Howards in David Starkey, ed., Rivals in Power: Lives and Letters of the Great Tudor Dynasties (Macmillan, 1990).

Chapter 10

Neville Williams’s All the Queen’s Men (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972) has a lucid and readable reprise of the conventional story as to the events of 1569. For more recent thinking see G. Parker’s article, ‘The Place of Tudor England in the Messianic Vision of Philip II of Spain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, xii (2002) - to which my attention was first drawn by John Guy’s picture of the Ridolfi plot in his biography of Mary. To this I would add CSP Dom. 1547-1580, p. 345, for evidence of Leicester and Cecil acting in concert.

For current thinking on Cecil see Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and M. A. R. Graves, Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Longman, 1998).

Chapter 11

Most of the biographies of Leicester have extensive chapters on his financial affairs and enterprises. Rye, The Murder of Amy Robsart, prints as appendix XV a list of Elizabeth’s gifts and grants to him. For the tale of the missed meeting, see Old London Bridge by Patricia Pierce (Headline, 2001).

For Leicester’s discussion of his religious position, see the Letters of Thomas Wood, Puritan, ed. Patrick Collinson (Athlone, 1960); the introduction offers an extensive and authoritative discussion of his attitudes. See also the religious implications of his patronage in Eleanor Rosenberg’s Leicester, Patron of Letters (Columbia University Press, 1962).

Chapter 12

It is possible to trace the progress of the Valois marriage negotiations from, so to speak, both angles. Walsingham’s correspondence with Leicester (and Cecil) is transcribed as The Compleat Ambassador, ed. Dudley Digges (1655), while the French ambassador’s version can be seen in Correspondance Diplomatique de la Mothe Fénelon.

The letter Leicester wrote to Norfolk is reprinted in Starkey, ed., Rivals in Power.

Dyer’s letter is in Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, K.G., by Sir Harris Nicolas (London, 1847), which also quotes Hatton’s letters to Elizabeth; the bulk of the book is an important source for court correspondence of the period, including that between Hatton and Leicester himself, the supposed rivals.

Chapter 13

Gilbert Talbot’s letter about the sisters in love with Leicester is to be found in Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History (1791; edition used 1838), which indeed contains the bulk of the Talbot (Shrewsbury) family correspondence quoted, a good deal of it with Leicester himself.

Information on Douglass’s background is to be found in the first chapter of Arthur Gould Lee’s biography of her offspring, The Son of Leicester: The Story of Sir Robert Dudley (Victor Gollancz, 1964); chapters IX and X give an account of the trials, with an appendix on the validity or otherwise of the supposed marriage. While the surviving Cotton manuscripts wound up in the British Library, other manuscripts are in the Dudley Papers at Longleat, boxes 6-8, and the Sidney Papers from Penshurst, now held in the Centre for Kentish Studies at Maidstone, vols 698, 699, 755; the Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle transcribes three of them. For the identification of Douglass Sheffield as the recipient of Leicester’s letter see Conyers Read, ‘A Letter from Robert, Earl of Leicester, to a Lady’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, April 1936.

The main first sources on Elizabeth’s progresses in general, and her visit to Kenilworth in particular, are respectively The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. J. G. Nichols (Roxburghe Club, 1823), and Robert Laneham’s A letter; wherein the Entertainment and Killingworth Castle is signified (1575), which is reproduced therein. An important modern source, however, is Zillah Dovey’s An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen’s Journey to East Anglia, 1578 (Farleigh Dickinson Press, 1996). For Susan Frye’s analysis of the entertainments Leicester provided, see The Competition for Representation, esp. p. 61.

Chapter 14

For the Irish situation, see Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1465-1603 (Allen Lane, 2000); also Walter Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex (1853).

For the marriage day, see Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress, p. 74. For Lettice’s subsequent life, see Sylvia Freedman’s Poor Penelope: Lady Penelope Rich, an Elizabethan Woman (Kensal Press, 1983); also E. W. Dormer, ‘Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, xxxix, 1935.

Information on Stafford’s dubious activities can be found in Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), which is also fascinating on the machinations of the years ahead: see esp. pp. 224-5. A belief in Stafford’s guilt was shared by Conyers Read, who expressed it in his classic biographies of Walsingham and also of Cecil: the opposite view, however (that Stafford was himself trying to deceive Spain in England’s best interests) was expressed by J. E. Neale in ‘The Fame of Sir Edward Stafford’, English Historical Review, xliv (1929).

Chapter 15

It is the delicate mating game with Alençon (or, properly, ‘Anjou’) that sees Hume’s Courtships really come into its own; out of all Elizabeth’s ‘philanderings’, this was the single episode that most interested Hume in the entire chronicle of what he called ‘the longest and most eventful comedy in the history of Europe’. See especially chs 9 and 10. See also C. F. H. de la Ferrière, Les Projets de mariage de la Reine Elisabeth (1882).

Once again, Simon Adams (Leicester and the Court, p. 232) has corrected an important error in redating the birth of Leicester’s son.

Chapter 16

See Nicolas, Memoirs of Sir Christopher Hatton, for Aylmer’s letter (p. 348), for changes in Leicester (p. 351), for his letter about Lord and Lady Norris (p. 269), and for letters about Denbigh’s death.

A modern edition of Leicester’s Commonwealth (ed. D. C. Peck, Ohio University Press, 1985) has a valuable introduction; for authorship of the book, see also Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents (HarperCollins, 2005), p. 172n.

Chapter 17

The first and most significant of Leicester’s two sojourns in the Netherlands, and his quarrels with the Queen, are chronicled in The Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, during his Government of the Low Countries in the Years 1585 and 1586, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Society, 1844). Wright’s Queen Elizabeth and Her Times, vol. ii, gives what you might call the behind-the-scenes view. For an analysis of the ceremonials, see Roy Strong and J. A. Van Dorsten, Leicester’s Triumph (Oxford University Press, 1964); Strong’s many books on the significance of Elizabeth’s own portraits are obviously also essential reading for anyone working on her today.

Chapter 18

Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (Jonathan Cape, 1959) was the book that converted many of us to history. More recently, see James McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel (Yale University Press, 2005); Neil Hanson, The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada (Bantam, 2003); and Bertrand T. Whitehead, Brags and Boasts: Propaganda of the Year of the Armada (Sutton, 1994).

The Collected Works, pp. 325-6n, has a discussion of the sources for Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech: two contemporary poetical accounts of the visit are James Aske’s Elizabetha Triumphans, with a Declaration of the Manner how her Excellency was entertained by her Souldyers into her Campe Royall at Tilbery, in Essex, and Thomas Deloney’s The Queen . . . at Tilsburie (in Edward Arber’s An English Garland, 1877-96, vol. VII). See also Miller Christy’s important article, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit to Tilbury in 1588’, English Historical Review, xxxiv, 1919, and A. J. Collins’s ‘The Progress of Queen Elizabeth to the Camp at Tilbury’, British Museum Quarterly, x (1936).

Chapter 19, Appendices and Afterword

For the theory that Shakespeare was Neville, see Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare (Longman, 2005).

On Essex, see Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970); G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (Cassell, 1937); John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-1597 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

On Sir Robert Dudley, see Gould Lee, The Son of Leicester; G. K. Warner, The Voyage of Robert Dudley to the West Indies, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, iii (1899); J. Temple Leader, Sir R. Dudley (1895); Vaughan Thomas, Italian Biography of Sir R. Dudley (1881).

On ‘Arthur Dudley’, see Paul Doherty, The Secret Life of Elizabeth I (Greenwich Exchange, 2006); letters reprinted in Chamberlin, Private Character, pp. 309-18; also the additional chapter of Hume’s Courtships. Englefield’s letter about the propaganda war is quoted in Peck’s introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, p. 12. For espionage practices in general, see Hutchinson, Walsingham; also Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Service 1570-1603 (Sutton, 1992).

For the fascinating saga of Elizabeth’s posthumous reputation, see Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2002). For that of Robert, the best source is Chamberlin, Elizabeth and Leycester. In the first fifty pages of his book, and in a series of appendices, Chamberlin analyses the picture of Leicester presented in some eighty books from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth.