After the stormy, tempestuous and blustering windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed and the dashing showers of persecution overpast; it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus from former broils, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.
The last three years of Mary’s life were for the Queen years of increasing ill-health, unhappiness and disillusion. For the English people they were a time of economic depression and political uncertainty, while the religious persecution that has left such an indelible stain on Mary’s memory helped to thicken the general atmosphere of gloom and discontent. The first heretics had been burnt in February 1555, and altogether some three hundred men and women were condemned to suffer this particularly horrible form of death. It was not, by contemporary standards, an especially harsh campaign and affected only a small section of the population, but it remains a thoroughly unpleasant episode; one of its least attractive features being the fact that the great majority of its victims were humble people – poor widows, journeymen and apprentices, agricultural labourers, weavers, clothworkers, artisans and tradesmen – who died in agony for the sake of what they believed to be God’s truth. The better-to-do either conformed just sufficiently to keep out of trouble, or else took their consciences abroad more or less unhindered.
From the point of view of what it hoped to achieve, the Marian persecution was monumentally counter-productive and the fires that consumed the bishops Hooper, Latimer and Ridley, who, with Thomas Cranmer, were virtually the only sufferers of note, did indeed light such a candle in England as, with God’s grace, never was put out. Perhaps the most inept act, both psychologically and politically, of an inept administration was the degradation and martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer. Having once recanted, the former archbishop, that gentle, kindly, diffident man, was driven at last beyond fear or doubt and died publicly proclaiming his Protestant faith. Had his life been spared, he would surely have been one of the most notable apostates in history and worth more to the Catholic cause than all the Protestant martyrs put together. But to Mary, Cranmer was the false shepherd who had deliberately led the silly, credulous sheep into the fires of hell. To the Queen, heresy was a plague of the deadliest kind, destroying the immortal soul rather than the body, and to her it would have been an unforgivable dereliction of the duty so clearly laid upon her by the Almighty if she had not striven by all the means at her disposal to save her poor deluded subjects from certain damnation.
Mary yearned for Philip, but the months passed and there was still no sign of his return. The old Emperor, preparing to bow off the stage and end his days in a monastery, had now handed over all his burdens, save the Empire and Burgundy, to his son and in future Philip would have less time than ever to spare for England. He sent only promises – promises repeatedly and cynically broken – in reply to her self-abasing pleas that he would come back to her. Mary’s last birthday had been her fortieth and she could only rage and despair by turn as her stubborn, unquenchable hopes of bearing children were mocked by her husband’s absence.
Then, at the end of March 1557, Philip did come back. It was for a short visit only, with only one objective – to drag England into the everlasting Franco-Spanish quarrel, just as the King of France had always predicted he would. By July he was gone and this time, as if she guessed she would never see him again, Mary went with him to Dover, down to the water’s edge. But Philip had left a piece of unfinished business behind which continued to nag at him. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that Elizabeth would succeed her sister and Elizabeth, at twenty-three, was still unmarried, still unfettered to the Spanish interest.
The previous September Providence had thoughtfully removed her most dangerous suitor from the scene. Edward Courtenay had been released from the Tower at about the time Elizabeth was sent down to Woodstock (however doubtful his guilt, he would not have been so fortunate under Henry VIII) and, after a period of detention in Fotheringay Castle, had been allowed to go abroad. He had wandered across Europe as far as Venice, where he caught a chill, and about a fortnight later the great-grandson of Edward IV died of fever in lodgings at Padua. Peter Vannes, Queen Mary’s agent in Venice, took the precaution of obtaining sworn statements from Courtenay’s servants and the Italian doctors who had attended him, but even so rumours that he had been poisoned soon got about and his death appears to have been the signal for Philip to renew his efforts to get Elizabeth suitably betrothed.
The princess came to Court that December and, so the King of France told the Venetian ambassador, the Queen had made a strong effort to persuade her sister to accept the Prince of Piedmont. But Elizabeth had burst into tears and declared she would rather die. In the summer of 1557 Philip returned to the attack, sending his confessor, Francisco de Fresnada, to urge the Queen to have the marriage arranged without further delay and, if necessary, without consulting Parliament. Fresnada had instructions to impress on Mary how important this was for considerations of religion, the safety of the realm and to prevent Elizabeth from making some quite unsuitable choice of her own. This time, though, opposition was by no means all on Elizabeth’s side, for Philip now wanted Mary not only to get her sister married off to Emmanuel Philibert but publicly to recognize her as her heiress. The Venetian ambassador heard that de Fresnada found the Queen ‘utterly averse to giving the Lady Elizabeth any hope of the succession, obstinately maintaining that she was neither her sister nor the daughter of the Queen’s father, King Henry. Nor would she hear of favouring her, as she was born of an infamous woman, who had so greatly outraged the Queen her mother and herself.’
Philip, naturally exasperated by the unreasonableness of his wife’s behaviour, made his annoyance plain; but Mary, although miserable in the knowledge that she was displeasing him, could not be blackmailed. Old wrongs cast long shadows and for the sad, sick woman, now facing the ruin of all her hopes, the bitter past was as real, perhaps more real than the bitter present. Once she had acknowledged Elizabeth’s right to succeed her, she would have acknowledged that Anne Boleyn and her daughter had won. Not even for Philip, not even for the Catholic church could Catherine of Aragon’s daughter bring herself to admit that ultimate defeat.
The year 1558 opened with a military disaster. The war in France had begun promisingly with the Anglo-Spanish victory of St Quentin, then things went less well and finally very badly indeed, culminating in the news that Calais had fallen to the French – ‘the heaviest tidings to London and to England that ever was heard of’. The town of Calais and its surrounding Pale might no longer be of much strategic value but, as the last outpost of England’s once great Continental empire, it possessed considerable sentimental value. Its loss was a national humiliation. For Mary it was followed by yet another personal grief. During the Christmas holidays Reginald Pole had written to tell Philip that the Queen once again believed she was pregnant. This time she had kept the news to herself for nearly seven months ‘in order to be quite sure of the fact’. Can she really have believed it, or was it just a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to bring her husband back to her? It did not bring him, but Count de Feria was sent over to England, ostensibly bearing congratulations but with instructions to find out if such a thing could possibly be true. It could not, of course, and by April Mary had once again given up hope.
The gloomy spring gave place to a restless, uneasy summer. The Queen was obviously gravely ill, dying most probably of cancer, and a sense of great changes impending rumbled in the air like distant thunder. By October the news reaching Philip in Flanders was sufficiently disturbing for him to send de Feria back to London ‘to serve the Queen during her illness’. He arrived on 9 November only to find there was nothing now that he or anyone else could do for Mary. Three days earlier, the Council, taking advantage of a brief lucid interval, had gathered at the Queen’s bedside with a request that she would ‘make certain declarations in favour of the Lady Elizabeth’ and Mary had given in. She was too tired to struggle any longer and perhaps it no longer seemed to matter very much. A deputation had gone straight down to Hatfield to tell Elizabeth that the Queen was willing she should succeed but asked two things of her – that she would maintain the old religion as Mary had restored it and pay her sister’s debts.
After this Mary was left alone. The road to Hatfield was crowded with courtiers and place-seekers eager to stake an early claim, while at St James’s Palace the Queen lay waiting for release from the world in which she had known little but sorrow, anxiety and humiliation. She was unconscious for long periods during those last weeks but once, when she drifted to the surface and saw her ladies weeping round her, she is said to have comforted them by telling them what good dreams she had, seeing many little children playing and singing before her. Mary had loved little children, loved christenings and babies (always, tragically, other people’s babies); had revelled in weddings and new clothes, and taken a passionate interest in those small domestic concerns which fill the lives of ordinary women – for Mary Tudor was at heart a very ordinary woman, made to be a busy, devoted, pious wife and mother. She was hopelessly at sea in the world of high politics, where she could only do what she believed to be her duty, what she believed to be right, with predictably disastrous results. Poor Mary, there was so much that was good in her. She had not deserved to be the most unhappy lady in Christendom.
The end came at six o’clock in the morning of 17 November and later that same day, as if to emphasize the ending of a chapter, Reginald Pole, the Cardinal of England, died too, just across the river in his palace at Lambeth. There was little pretence of public mourning. As the news spread the church bells were rung and presently the November dusk was being illuminated by bonfires, while the Londoners set tables in the streets and ‘did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen Elizabeth’.
Despite Mary’s views on the subject, Elizabeth had long been accepted as the heir to the throne and over the last couple of years she had attracted an increasing amount of interest from the outside world. In 1557 the retiring Venetian ambassador had included a detailed description of the princess in his report to the Senate, and from the evidence of Giovanni Michiel and other contemporaries a picture emerges of a slim, active young woman, slightly above average height. Michiel considered her narrow, sharp-featured face to be ‘comely’ rather than handsome, though she had a good complexion, if a little sallow. He also remarked on her fine eyes, which were probably grey, and on her beautiful hands which she took care to display. Elizabeth had the family colouring. Her hair was more red than yellow and curled naturally, at least in her twenties. Michiel noted, with a faint air of disapproval, that although she knew she was born of ‘such a mother’, she did not consider herself of inferior degree to the Queen. She did not, apparently, even consider herself illegitimate, since her parents’ marriage had had the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him’, remarked the ambassador, ‘everybody saying that she also resembles him more than the Queen does.’ In view of Mary’s freely expressed opinion about her origins, this must have given Elizabeth a very understandable satisfaction, but in appearance she seems to have resembled her paternal grandfather more than any other member of the family.
About her mental powers no one was in any doubt. ‘Her intellect and understanding are wonderful’, wrote Michiel, ‘as she showed very plainly by her conduct when in danger and under suspicion’ and he went on to praise her proficiency as a linguist, noting that her Latin was better than the Queen’s. Her Italian, too, was fluent and she liked to show it off in front of the Venetians. Roger Ascham, who had recently been renewing his acquaintance with his former pupil, told Dr Sturm in Strasbourg that they had been reading together in Greek the orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes on the crown and that the Lady Elizabeth ‘at first sight understands everything … in a way to strike you with astonishment’.
The Lady Elizabeth had already proved the quality of her trained and formidable intelligence, and demonstrated that she had inherited her grandfather’s shrewd, cautious, subtle brain. Now, in the first weeks of her reign, she was to show that she had also inherited all her father’s ability to charm the birds off the trees. ‘If ever any person had either the gift or the style to win the hearts of people’, wrote the historian John Hayward, ‘it was this Queen.’
When Elizabeth made her official entry into London, riding through Barbican and Cripplegate and on to Leadenhall and Gracechurch Street to the Tower, the City literally exploded with joy around her. But beneath all the cheering and pealing bells and crashing salutes from the Tower guns there was a rather desperate optimism. For Elizabeth was the last of King Harry’s children and in that winter of 1558 she looked like being England’s last hope of peace and good government. Certainly a quick glance round the other members of the royal house would not have encouraged anyone seeking an alternative – or a successor.
If King Henry’s will was to be followed, then of course the new Queen’s heir must be sought among the descendants of Mary Brandon. Mary’s elder daughter, the widowed Duchess of Suffolk, was now past forty and had, in any case, already renounced her claim in favour of her daughters. Just as well, perhaps, since Frances Suffolk had wasted no time in mourning and within a month of her husband’s execution in 1554 she had married one Master Adrian Stokes, a flashy, red-haired young gentleman of her household. Her two surviving daughters, Katherine and Mary, became maids of honour to Queen Mary, who had gone out of her way to be kind to them. Katherine Grey’s marriage to the Earl of Pembroke’s son had been hastily dissolved after Northumberland’s disaster and in November 1558, the two girls, now aged eighteen and thirteen, were still at Court and still unmarried – their future, especially Katherine’s future, the subject of some speculation. The other child of that long-ago Tudor–Brandon marriage, Eleanor Clifford, was more than ten years dead and her daughter, Margaret, had been married in 1555, with Queen Mary’s blessing, to Lord Strange, the Earl of Derby’s heir. Some people, including young Lady Strange herself, believed her claim to be purer than Katherine Grey’s – there was, after all, no ‘reproach’ of treason on her side of the family – but although Margaret lived on into the 1590s, her life was to be chiefly remarkable for an unhappy marriage, perpetual quarrels with her in-laws and an unfortunate interest in necromancy.
For those who were of the opinion that the natural laws of inheritance should take precedence over royal, even over royal Tudor testamentary provisions, the next heir could only be the descendant of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to James IV of Scotland and that meant Mary Queen of Scots, now rising sixteen and married seven months previously to the French King’s heir. There were those who believed that by rights Mary Stuart and not Elizabeth Tudor should now be wearing the English crown. The King of France certainly did – or said he did – underlining his point by having his daughter-in-law referred to as Queen of England in official documents and causing her to quarter the English royal arms with her own. But although the pretensions of her Scottish cousin were to create increasingly serious problems for Elizabeth as time went by, very few Englishmen – even those Englishmen whose religion obliged them to regard Henry VIII’s second daughter as a bastard – wished to see Mary displace her. Then there was another body of opinion which, although preferring the senior line, regarded Mary Stuart as a foreigner and therefore automatically disabled. For those who held this view, the alternative was Margaret Tudor’s daughter, the Countess of Lennox, who, thanks to her mother’s precipitate flight from Edinburgh forty-three years ago, had at least been born on the right side of the Border. There were also Margaret Lennox’s two hopeful sons, Henry Lord Darnley and Charles Stuart, now being brought up on the family estates at Temple Newsam in Yorkshire.
It was a varied field and offered plenty of scope for argument, perhaps bloody argument, but everyone devoutly hoped the question would never arise. Elizabeth was a young, healthy woman and in 1558 there seemed no reason why she should not be able to provide her country with a Prince of Wales. It was perfectly true that she had steadily refused all the suitors offered for her consideration during the past five years, saying at regular intervals that she did not want to marry; but naturally no sensible person had believed a word of such nonsense and in January 1559 the Speaker of the House of Commons, with a few selected companions, waited on the Queen to deliver an earnest petition that she would by marriage bring forth children – this being ‘the single, the only, the all-comprehending prayer of all Englishmen’. The petitioners got little satisfaction from their sovereign lady who reminded them sharply that she had already joined herself in marriage to a husband, ‘namely, the Kingdom of England’, and taking the coronation ring from her finger, she flourished ‘the pledge of this my wedlock’ (which she marvelled they could have forgotten) under their perplexed noses. As for children: ‘Do not’, snapped Elizabeth Tudor, ‘upbraid me with miserable lack of children; for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children and kinsmen to me.’ After this, the Queen relented sufficiently to give an assurance that if she ever were to consider taking a more conventional husband, it would be someone who would have as great a care of the commonwealth as herself. If, on the other hand, she continued in the course of life she had begun, she had no doubt that, in the fullness of time, God would provide a suitable successor; while she would be more than content to have engraved on her tombstone: ‘Here lieth Elizabeth which reigned a virgin and died a virgin’.
This was only the first of many similar exchanges between an increasingly anxious and importunate Parliament and an obstinately virgin Queen – only the first of many ‘answers answerless’. The reasons for Elizabeth’s determination to remain single have been exhaustively discussed over the centuries but, psychological speculation set aside, it seems that at twenty-five she had already faced and accepted the fact that, in the sixteenth-century world, marriage and a career could not be combined. Mary had always needed a man to lean on, but Elizabeth had learned to rely on herself by the time she was fifteen and was not now going to entrust her body or her soul to any man. This did not mean that she was not fully alive to all the advantages, both personal and political, of being the best match in her parish. She certainly exploited them for all they were worth with every appearance of keen enjoyment – giving her various swains just enough encouragement to keep them hopeful for just as long as it happened to suit her.
One proposal she did reject out of hand – the one which came from, of all people, her former brother-in-law. Philip might be prepared to sacrifice himself a second time for the sake of the Catholic religion and the English alliance, but Elizabeth was quite definitely not going to repeat her sister’s mistakes. She was, though, very interested in Philip’s friendship and she allowed him to suggest his Austrian arch-ducal cousins, Ferdinand and Charles von Hapsburg, as possible alternatives. Ferdinand’s uncompromising Catholicism soon put him out of the running, for by Easter 1559 England had once more become a Protestant country with a national church. The more amenable and long-suffering Charles remained a useful stand-by, to be brought out and reconsidered whenever the marriage question was being pressed, and kept dangling for nearly ten years.
Much as she always delighted in the ritual dance of courtship, Elizabeth had very little leisure to spare for dalliance during the first six months of her reign. She had inherited enough problems to keep her fully occupied with more prosaic matters, and it was not until the late spring of 1559 that she was able to give some attention to her private life – by which time a religious settlement had been hammered out at home, a peace treaty negotiated with France and a loan raised in the money-market at Antwerp to replenish a virtually empty Treasury. It was then, significantly, that the first whispers linking her name with Lord Robert Dudley began to circulate and by the autumn everyone was asking the same question – was Elizabeth, whose marriage was of such vital importance for the country, wasting her time and ruining her chances by having an affair with a married man?
Robert Dudley, the younger of the Duke of Northumberland’s two surviving sons, was, like all his family, immensely ambitious and none too scrupulous about the methods he used to advance himself. He was intensely unpopular – an unpopularity which cannot entirely be accounted for by jealousy – and his contemporaries, almost without exception, loathed and detested him. The most notable exception, of course, was the Queen herself and the relationship, often stormy and in some ways totally mysterious, which existed between Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley was to endure for very nearly thirty years.
No one at the time could begin to understand what the Queen, who could have taken her pick of the bachelors of Christendom, saw in Robert, the son and grandson of convicted traitors, a man who had only narrowly avoided the penalty of treason himself. The historian William Camden, who knew them both, could only hazard a guess that perhaps he gave some shadowed tokens of virtue, visible to the Queen alone, or else that the hidden content of the stars at the hour of his birth had led to ‘a most straight conjunction of their minds’. What did the Queen see in Robert Dudley? He was very good-looking certainly – ‘comely of body and limbs’ – everybody agreed about that and looks were always important to Elizabeth. But Robert was more than just a pretty face. He was a fine athlete and a superb horseman (he held the position of Master of the Horse from the first week of the Queen’s reign until his death), and Elizabeth, like her father, loved a man who was a man and not, as she scornfully remarked of one unfortunate suitor, one who would sit at home all day among the cinders. He was a good dancer – also very important. He was amusing company, witty, sophisticated, accustomed all his life to moving in the highest social and political circles. He had a fine, commanding presence and made a first rate ornament for the Court. But probably what mattered most was the fact that he was already one of the Queen’s oldest friends. They were almost exactly the same age and had known one another from childhood. They had grown up together and been prisoners in the Tower together. They talked the same language, shared the same jokes, the same background. With Robert Elizabeth could relax, unwind and be herself, and she who lived so much of her life at concert pitch needed someone she could relax with, someone to be the companion of her off-duty hours.
Were they lovers in the accepted sense? The answer is almost certainly no – although there was a strong element of sexual attraction in the relationship. Elizabeth always insisted vehemently that they were just good friends and, with the best will in the world, no one was ever able to produce a scrap of evidence to the contrary. Caspar von Breuner, an agent of the Hapsburg family in London to promote the marriage with Archduke Charles, made the most searching enquiries but came to the conclusion that, while the Queen showed her affection to Lord Robert more markedly than was consistent with her dignity, there was no reason to suppose she had ever been forgetful of her honour.
But lack of evidence did nothing to silence gossip, and rumours about the Queen’s intentions proliferated. As early as April 1559 Count de Feria had told King Philip that Lord Robert’s wife was suffering from ‘a malady in one of her breasts’ and Elizabeth was only waiting for her to die to marry the widower. The new Spanish ambassador, Bishop de Quadra, who arrived in London during the summer, soon heard from a reliable source that Lord Robert was planning to poison his wife. In March 1560 the bishop was reporting that Robert was assuming every day a more masterful part in affairs and added ‘they say that he thinks of divorcing his wife’.
Considering that she had become one of the central figures in an international scandal, remarkably little is known about Amy Dudley, born Amy Robsart, the daughter of a wealthy Norfolk landowner. She and Robert had been married nearly ten years and it seems probable that theirs was originally a love match. But country-bred Amy had not been able to keep pace with her brilliant, rapacious husband. Physical passion was soon spent and now she was simply an encumbrance to be kept out of sight and as far as possible out of mind. The Dudleys had no settled home and while Robert remained in constant attendance on the Queen, Amy spent her time moving about from one country house to another, taking her own servants and living as a kind of superior paying guest, usually with friends or connections of her husband’s. During the summer of 1560 she moved into Cumnor Hall near Abingdon and the Dudley affair began to build towards crisis point.
William Cecil, the Queen’s sober Secretary of State, had gone on a diplomatic mission to Scotland and while he was away people noticed that Elizabeth was not ‘coming abroad’ nearly as much as usual. It was said that Robert was keeping her shut up with him and old Annie Dow of Brentwood got into trouble with the magistrates for telling a neighbour that Lord Robert had given the Queen a child. In fact, the Queen and Lord Robert were spending most of their time out riding, and Robert wrote to the Earl of Sussex in Ireland for some hobbys for the royal saddle – ‘especially for strong, good gallopers’. Elizabeth was enjoying herself, but when Cecil got back from the North at the end of July he was seriously worried by the situation which seemed to be developing. The Queen was in her most tiresome mood, refusing to attend to business or, perhaps more accurately, refusing to attend to William Cecil, and Robert was peacocking about the Court in a manner which irritated the Secretary of State profoundly. He told the Spanish ambassador in a burst of calculated indiscretion that he fully expected the ruin of the realm unless someone could bring Elizabeth to her senses. He was very much afraid, he added, that she meant to marry Lord Robert, who was thinking of killing his wife.
Cecil saw de Quadra during the weekend of 7–8 September. On Monday the Court was thrumming with the news that Amy Dudley had been found lying at the foot of a flight of stairs at Cumnor Hall with a broken neck. This was a stunning climax to eighteen months of scandalmongering and it looked as if William Cecil had been quite right in his gloomy forebodings. Certainly things looked black for Robert Dudley and the Queen sent him away to his house at Kew, with orders to stay there until the matter had been investigated. Most people, of course, had already made up their minds and, in the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that no one believed such a remarkably convenient death could possibly have been coincidence. The fact that a coroner’s jury, drawn from the leaders of the local community, could find no ‘presumption of evil’ and, albeit reluctantly, presently returned a verdict of death by misadventure in no way altered the general conviction of Robert’s guilt. Officially, though, he had been exonerated and the world at large held its breath to see what would happen next.
Bishop de Quadra did not know what to make of the situation. He was always disposed to think the worst of the heretical Queen of England and her subjects and told Philip: ‘The cry is that they do not want any more women rulers and this woman may find herself and her favourite in prison any day.’ The bishop very properly considered the whole business most shameful and scandalous but, at the same time, he was not sure whether Elizabeth meant to marry Robert or even whether she meant to marry at all, as he did not think she had her mind sufficiently fixed.
In France no one was in any doubt about what to think and Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador, that sturdy Protestant Nicholas Throckmorton, was being driven to distraction. ‘I wish I were either dead or hence’, he wrote from Paris on 10 October, ‘that I might not hear the dishonourable and naughty reports that are made of the Queen … One laugheth at us, another threateneth, another revileth the Queen. Some let not to say: What religion is this that a subject shall kill his wife and the Prince not only bear withal but marry with him? If these slanderous bruits be not slaked, or if they prove true, our reputation is gone forever, war follows and utter subversion of the Queen and country.’
At home, one man was prepared to disregard gossip and slander and all those rude, low-minded foreigners. The Earl of Sussex could not stand Robert Dudley and could hardly bring himself to be civil to him in public, but, as he reminded William Cecil, the one thing that really mattered was for Elizabeth to have a child. Therefore, she should be left to ‘follow so much her own affection as by the looking upon him whom she should choose, her whole being may be moved to desire.’ For that, as Sussex pointed out, ‘shall be the readiest way, with the help of God, to bring us a blessed prince.’ If the Queen really loved and desired Robert Dudley, then let her marry him and Sussex, for his part, would be prepared to sink his personal prejudices, and love, honour and serve his enemy to the uttermost. But the Earl found few supporters in this humane and generous attitude. When young Mary Queen of Scots exclaimed merrily – ‘So, the Queen of England is to marry her horsekeeper who has killed his wife to make room for her’, she pretty well summed-up foreign and Catholic opinion; while Caspar von Breuner in London believed that if such a marriage took place, the Queen would incur so much enmity that ‘she may one evening lay herself down as Queen of England and rise the next morning plain Mistress Elizabeth.’ Not even for the sake of a blessed prince would the English stomach an upstart and wife-murderer as their king.
How did Amy Dudley die? Had she been murdered by Robert’s hired assassins and her body arranged at the foot of that fatal staircase to make the death look like an accident? Had she killed herself, driven to despair by the knowledge of her own mortal disease and her husband’s callous neglect? Or was the jury’s verdict a true one after all? It has been suggested that if Amy was suffering from advanced breast cancer, secondary deposits may have been present in the bones. The effect of such deposits in the spine is to make it so brittle that the slightest stumble, even the act of walking downstairs, could have caused a spontaneous fracture. The question marks remain, but for Elizabeth Tudor they were scarcely relevant. What mattered was that Robert’s wife had died violently and mysteriously, and that alone made marriage with Robert impossible.
By the late autumn of 1560 the crisis had begun to go off the boil and by the end of the year William Cecil was able to assure Nicholas Throckmorton that whatever the reports and opinions might be, he knew for certain ‘that Lord Robert himself hath more fear than hope and so doth the Queen give him cause’. Lord Robert was back at Court and apparently restored to high favour, but when the Letters Patent for his creation as Earl of Leicester – an honour he greatly coveted – were drawn up, the Queen slashed the document through with her penknife instead of signing it. The Dudleys had been traitors three descents, she exclaimed unkindly, and she would not confer a title on the present generation. Robert sulked and Elizabeth seemed to relent. She patted his cheek and said, with a reference to the Dudley coat of arms, ‘No, no, the bear and ragged staff are not so soon overthrown.’ But when some of Robert’s friends tried to urge his suit, she would only ‘pup with her mouth’ and say she would never marry a subject. She would then be no better than the Duchess of Norfolk and people would come asking for my lord’s grace. Well then, argued Robert’s supporters, let her make him King. No, the Queen would not hear of such a thing.
She would not make him King and nor would she allow him to presume too far on his present somewhat ambiguous position. When, on one occasion, Robert attempted to take a high hand with one of the royal servants, he received a devastating royal snub. Rapping out ‘her wonted oath’, Elizabeth turned on him in a fury. ‘God’s death, my lord, I have wished you well, but my favour is not so locked up for you that others may not participate thereof … And if you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. For I will have here but one mistress and no master!’ This, of course, was the nub of the matter. Robert was a masterful man, that was one of the reasons Elizabeth loved him; but it was also another of the reasons why she would never marry him.
Robert was too intelligent not to take the warning, but he had by no means given up hope of winning the greatest matrimonial prize in Europe and continued to intrigue actively towards that end. Even Elizabeth had not yet entirely abandoned the idea, for in February 1561 she was putting out feelers to Bishop de Quadra as to what the King of Spain would say if she married one of her servitors. In March it was reported that ‘the great matters whereof the world was wont to talk were now asleep’, but in June they woke up again. De Quadra had been invited to a grand water-party and firework display on the Thames given by Lord Robert and he told Philip that ‘in the afternoon we went on board a vessel from which we were to see the rejoicings, and the Queen, Robert and I being alone in the gallery, they began joking, which she likes to do much better than talking about business. They went so far with their jokes that Lord Robert told her that, if she liked, I could be the minister to perform the act of marriage. She, nothing loath to hear it, said she was not sure whether I knew enough English.’ De Quadra let them have their fun and then tried to make them see sense. If Elizabeth would only reinstate the Catholic religion and put herself under King Philip’s protection, she could marry Robert when she pleased and de Quadra would be delighted to perform the ceremony.
And so it went on – and on. The possibility of the marriage continued to be canvassed from time to time. Rumours that it had actually taken place were circulated on more than one occasion, but the cataclysm which everyone had been dreading never materialized. Fortunately for England and for herself, Elizabeth did not suffer from that disastrous lack of emotional control which was to bring Mary Stuart to ruin and she had been able to face and overcome the first and, as it turned out, the only serious conflict between her desires as a woman and her responsibilities as Queen. All the same, the past few months had been a strain and when she left London in July for a summer progress to East Anglia, it was noticed that she looked as pale as a woman who had lately come out of childbed. There were plenty of people ready enough to suggest that this might be literally true, but Bishop de Quadra had seen no sign of such a thing and did not believe it. He had heard other gossip to the effect that the Queen, because of ‘certain physical infirmities’, would never be able to have children. This gossip was to persist and probably originated in the fact that at one time Elizabeth’s monthly periods were very irregular.
The Queen, irritable and in low spirits, seems to have been suffering from a revulsion of feeling on the subject of men in general and marriage in particular. In a burst of bad temper she told the Archbishop of Canterbury that she wished she had never appointed any married clergy, and when Dr Parker reminded her that the idea of a celibate priesthood was Roman Catholic rather than Anglican, Elizabeth, so Parker told William Cecil, ‘took occasion to speak in that bitterness of the holy estate of matrimony that I was in a horror to hear her.’ In the circumstances, therefore, it was particularly unfortunate that Katherine Grey should have chosen this moment out of all others to get married without the Queen’s consent.
As one of Elizabeth’s closest relatives and leading contender for the position of heir presumptive, Katherine had now become a figure of considerable political importance; but unhappily she possessed none of the qualities of tact, discretion or even basic common-sense which might have helped her to survive in the political jungle. To make matters worse, she did not get on with the Queen. Elizabeth had never cared for any of her Grey cousins – there is nothing to suggest that there had ever been any sort of intimacy between her and Jane, in spite of the months they had spent together under Katherine Parr’s roof, and she had no opinion at all of Jane’s younger sister. Katherine, for her part, seems to have regarded Elizabeth, on whom her whole future depended, with an unhealthy mixture of fear and resentment. She knew the Queen despised her and took offence because she was no longer admitted to the Privy Chamber.
The fact that Elizabeth and Katherine Grey were on bad terms was soon being noted with interest in certain circles, and during the second half of 1559 Sir Thomas Challoner, the English ambassador in Brussels, warned the Queen about rumours that the Spaniards were planning to kidnap Lady Katherine. Apparently the idea was to marry her to Don Carlos, Philip’s imbecile son, ‘or with some other person of less degree if less depended on her’, and then to keep her as a possible counter-claimant to France’s Mary Stuart should the occasion arise. Since Katherine was known to be ‘of discontented mind’ and not regarded or esteemed by the Queen, it was thought there would be no difficulty in enticing her away. Elizabeth reacted characteristically by reinstating her cousin as a lady of the Privy Chamber and telling a puzzled de Quadra that she regarded the Lady Katherine as her daughter and was thinking of formally adopting her.
In fact, Katherine was not in the least interested in Spanish intrigues or in the ramifications of the European political scene. She was interested only in her own plans to marry Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, son of the former Protector Somerset. She must have known Edward Seymour since she was a child – he had been suggested as a bridegroom for her sister Jane – but it was during Queen Mary’s reign, when Katherine had been staying with the Duchess of Somerset at Hanworth, that the two young people had first begun ‘to accompany together’ and to think about marriage. The idea of the match had been discussed in the Seymour and Grey families, and in the spring of 1559 Katherine’s mother had agreed to approach the Queen for her consent. But unfortunately the approach was never made. Frances Suffolk, or Frances Stokes as she now was, became ill that summer and by November she was dead. The lovers now had no one to speak for them and the whole affair might well have died a natural death if Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour had not decided to take a hand.
Jane Seymour was one of Katherine’s fellow maids of honour, an ambitious, energetic young woman determined that her brother should not lose the chance of making such a brilliant match. It was Jane who brought the couple together again (they had quarrelled when Hertford began to take an interest in another, quite inferior, girl); and it was almost certainly she who put the disastrous idea of a secret marriage into their hands. The three of them met in Lady Jane’s private closet at Whitehall some time in October 1560 and there Katherine and Edward Seymour plighted their troth. It was agreed that the wedding should take place at the Earl’s house in Cannon Row ‘the next time that the Queen’s highness should take any journey’, and Jane undertook to have a clergyman standing by.
Opportunity came early in December, when the Queen decided to go down to Eltham for a few days’ hunting. Katherine pleaded toothache and Jane, who was already consumptive, was often ailing. As soon as Elizabeth was safely out of the way, at about eight o’clock in the morning, the two girls slipped out of the palace by the stairs in the orchard and walked along the sands by the river to Cannon Row. The marriage ceremony was performed in Hertford’s bedroom and afterwards, while Lady Jane kept guard in another room, the newly married couple went to bed and had ‘carnal copulation’. They did not have long together – awkward questions would be asked if Katherine failed to appear at dinner with the Controller of the Household – and after about an hour and a half they had to start scrambling back into their clothes. This was a point on which they were later to be closely questioned. The authorities found it hard to believe that such gently nurtured young people could have performed the complicated feat of getting dressed unaided. They must, it was felt, have had assistance – and accomplices.
Katherine had achieved her immediate ambition, but her altered status made little practical difference to her circumstances. She and Hertford still had to be content with furtive meetings at Westminster, Greenwich or Cannon Row – a few odd hours snatched whenever they could manage it. How long they intended to try and keep their secret, it is impossible to say. Neither of them appears to have given any serious thought to the problem of how they were going to break the news, but it was not long before events began to catch up with them. Jane Seymour died in March 1561 and without her help it became more difficult for them to meet. Then the Queen decided to send the Earl of Hertford abroad as a companion to William Cecil’s son, who was going to France to finish his education. This was an unexpected complication, to be followed by another, not so unexpected. Katherine thought she might be pregnant but could not, or would not, say for certain. Her husband finally went off to France in April, probably rather relieved to escape, at least temporarily, from a situation which was rapidly getting out of control, but promising to return if she wrote to tell him she was definitely with child.
Left alone, Katherine seems at last to have begun to realize the enormity of what she had done. The reality of her pregnancy could no longer be ignored and already the matrons of the Court were casting suspicious glances at her shape. She wrote to Hertford, begging him to come back and support her, but could not be sure that her letters were reaching him. In July she had to accompany the Queen on the East Anglian progress and at the beginning of August, while the Court was at Ipswich, the secret finally came out.
The Queen, understandably, was furious. She had never liked Katherine but had always treated her fairly. Now the girl had repaid her with ingratitude, deceit and perhaps worse. Anything which touched on the succession touched Elizabeth on her most sensitive spot. She was never to forget her own experiences as a ‘second person’ during Mary’s reign and of the intrigues which inevitably surrounded an heir presumptive. In the activities of Katherine Grey she had caught a sulphurous whiff of treason. Katherine’s choice of husband was also unfortunate. The Seymours had a reputation for being politically ambitious and their connection with the royal family was too close for comfort. If Katherine and Edward Seymour were now to produce a son, it would complicate still further an already complicated dynastic situation. The new Countess of Hertford was therefore promptly committed to the Tower, where her husband soon joined her, and the government’s investigators proceeded to extract from them every detail of that hole-and-corner marriage in the house at Cannon Row.
On 24 September Katherine duly gave birth to a healthy son, who was christened after his father in the chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula and in close proximity to the headless remains of both his grandfathers, two of his great-uncles and his aunt Jane Grey. The most exhaustive enquiries had failed to uncover any evidence of a plot involving the baby’s parents, although the Queen was still not entirely convinced. But the Hertfords resolutely denied that anyone, apart from the strong-minded Jane Seymour, had ever ‘advised, counselled or exhorted them to marry’, and since it was no longer a treasonable act to marry a member of the royal family without the sovereign’s consent, the sovereign was obliged to fall back on the expedient of attacking the validity of the marriage.
As the only witness to the ceremony was now dead and the officiating clergyman had disappeared without trace, this did not present much difficulty – especially as Katherine was predictably unable to produce the one piece of documentary evidence she had possessed. Before he left for France, her husband had given her a deed, signed and sealed with his own hand, assuring her of an income of a thousand pounds a year in the event of his death. This deed, Katherine tearfully informed her interrogators, she had put away in a safe place, but ‘with removing from place to place at progress time, it is lost and she cannot tell where it is become.’ The Queen put the whole matter in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities and on 10 May 1562 the Archbishop of Canterbury gave judgement that there had been no marriage between the Earl of Hertford and Lady Katherine Grey. He censured them for having committed fornication and recommended a heavy fine and imprisonment during the Queen’s pleasure.
The culprits remained in the Tower, but there were some compensations. The Lieutenant, Sir Edward Warner, was a kindly man. He allowed Katherine to keep her pet monkeys and dogs, in spite of the damage these quite un-housetrained creatures were doing to government property, and he also allowed her to see her husband, turning a discreetly blind eye to unlocked doors. Warner later justified himself by explaining that having once been overpersuaded, he thought there was no point in continuing to keep his prisoners apart and during the summer of 1562 the young Hertfords enjoyed the nearest approach to a normal married life they were ever to know. Then, in February 1563 came the inevitable sequel – Katherine had another baby, another healthy son.
This time the Queen was really angry. She found it very difficult to forgive her cousin for her apparently cynical disregard for the authority and prestige of the crown; for the fact that instead of showing contrition, or even any understanding of the nature of her offence, she had gone and done it again. To one of Elizabeth’s highly disciplined intelligence and acute political awareness, it naturally seemed incredible that Katherine’s behaviour stemmed rather from sheer thoughtlessness, a complete inability to grasp the realities of her position, than from deliberate contempt. At all events, the Queen was now determined that both the Hertfords should be made to realize, beyond possibility of mistake, just what it meant to have ‘so arrogantly and contemptuously’ offended their prince. There were no more stolen meetings and during the summer an outbreak of plague in the capital provided an opportunity to separate the little family more completely. The Earl and the elder child were released into the custody of the Duchess of Somerset, while Katherine and the baby Thomas were sent down to Pirgo in Essex to her uncle Lord John Grey.
There was no question now about Katherine’s contrition. John Grey reported that ‘the thought and care she taketh for the want of her Majesty’s favour, pines her away’. She was eating hardly anything and was so permanently dissolved in tears that her uncle became seriously worried about her health. Katherine’s troubles were aggravated by the fact that she appears to have been virtually destitute. She had no money, no plate and, according to John Grey, was so poorly furnished that he was ashamed to let William Cecil have an inventory of her possessions. Lord John reluctantly supplied the deficiencies but he baulked at paying for his charge’s keep and the Queen was soon complaining about his expenses. Lord John retaliated by sending a detailed account to Cecil. The weekly rate for ‘my lady of Hertford’s board, her child and her folks’ amounted to £6 16s 8d. As this included eight servants and even five shillings for the widow who washed the baby’s clothes, it seems reasonable enough but Elizabeth, who was never averse to having things both ways, decided that henceforward the Earl of Hertford should be made responsible for Katherine’s maintenance and he was ordered to pay a sum of over a hundred pounds to the Greys.
The Queen was not normally vindictive and once she felt satisfied that the Hertfords had thoroughly learnt their lesson, she might have responded to their frequent tear-stained appeals for mercy – indeed, hints to this effect had already been dropped. Unfortunately, though, in the spring of 1564 John Hales, a clerk in the Lord Chancellor’s office, was tactless enough to publish a treatise supporting Katherine Grey’s claims to be recognized as heir presumptive and maintaining that her marriage was a valid one. ‘This dealing of his’, remarked William Cecil (who also privately supported Katherine Grey), ‘offendeth the Queen’s majesty very much.’ The succession was a matter which Elizabeth regarded as being entirely her own business and over which she would not tolerate outside interference on any pretext. She was not in the least appeased by Hales’s assurance that his only thought had been to promote the Protestant Tudor line against the Catholic Mary Stuart; nor was her temper improved by the knowledge that there was widespread public sympathy for the imprisoned Katherine and considerable public support for her dynastic claims. She was, after all, an Englishwoman, a staunch Protestant and had already only too effectively proved her ability to bear sons.
In the summer of 1565 an element of black comedy entered the story. On 21 August William Cecil wrote tersely to his friend Sir Thomas Smith: ‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous. The sergeant-porter, being the biggest gentleman in this court, hath married secretly the Lady Mary Grey, the least of all the court. They are committed to separate prisons. The offence is very great.’ The current Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, passing on the news to King Philip, recorded that Mary Grey, who was little, crookbacked and very ugly, had married a gentleman named Keys, sergeant-porter at the palace. ‘They say’, he added, ‘the Queen is very much annoyed and grieved thereat.’
In fact, this grotesquely pathetic attachment between dwarfish, nineteen-year-old Mary Grey and the enormous gate-keeper, a middle-aged widower with several children, was the last straw as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Both the Grey sisters were now under strict house arrest and Katherine had given up all hope of release. She died in January 1568 at the age of twenty-seven of a mixture of tuberculosis and a broken heart. Two years later Hertford was at last allowed to go free, although the Queen never really forgave him. The Earl remained faithful to Katherine’s memory for nearly thirty years, eventually marrying again to a daughter of the powerful Howard clan. But he never gave up the fight to have his first marriage recognized and his sons’ legitimacy established – a fight he finally won in 1606. He lived on until 1621 and was to see his grandson maintain the family tradition by trying to elope with Lady Arbella Stuart, another member of the royal house.
Mary Grey – or rather Mary Keys, for the legality of her improbable marriage never seems to have been challenged – spent about six years as the involuntary house-guest of various unwilling hosts, but was released after her husband’s death; she at least had never compounded her offence by having children. The last sad little remnant of the once great house of Suffolk died in poverty and obscurity in the summer of 1578; but outcast though she had become, under the terms of her great-uncle’s will Mary Keys died heiress to the throne of England – that deadly legacy which had ruined the lives of the descendants of Mary Brandon, born Mary Tudor.