The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court Page 5
Such rumours were politically toxic. For the European balance of power and for the Queen’s own safety, she needed to be, and be perceived as being, healthy and fertile. Only by Elizabeth’s marriage and the birth of an heir could the line of Tudor succession and Protestant Church be made secure. It was a fact acknowledged both at home and abroad. ‘The more I think about this business,’ wrote Feria four days after Elizabeth’s accession, ‘the more certain I am that everything depends upon the husband this woman will take.’12 A German diplomat, Baron Pollweiler, writing to the Emperor Ferdinand around the same time pronounced, ‘the Queen is of an age where she should in reason, and as is woman’s way, be eager to marry and be provided for … For that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable.’13
When the first Parliament of the reign met in January 1559, the Queen’s marriage was the focus of much attention. ‘Nothing can be more repugnant to the common good, than to see a Princess, who by marriage may preserve the Commonwealth in peace, to lead a single life, like a Vestal Virgin,’ pronounced Thomas Gargrave, Speaker of the Commons.14 Yet Elizabeth’s response to Parliament’s petitions was careful and deliberately ambivalent: ‘whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life, ye may well assure yourselves my meaning is not to do or determine any thing wherewith the realm may or shall have just cause to be discontented.’15
Elizabeth was one of the most eligible women in Europe, ‘the best match in her parish’, and from the earliest months of her reign was never short of suitors, among them Philip II of Spain and Erik XIV of Sweden; the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles of Austria; the Dukes of Savoy, Nemours, Ferrara, Holstein and Saxony, and the Earls of Arran and Arundel. Each was looking for an all-important English alliance to counter the threat of the other. The Habsburgs needed to keep England pro-Spanish at a time when the menace from France was particularly potent, given the threat of the French King’s daughter-in-law Mary Queen of Scots’s claim to the English crown. While Philip of Spain deplored Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism, strategic considerations dictated the need to maintain an English alliance. In the earliest days of the reign, and with great reluctance, Philip offered himself in marriage to his former sister-in-law on condition that she would embrace Catholicism and that he would not have to live in England.16 It was never likely to be a match that Elizabeth would accept, but, as Feria presented the proposal, Philip described himself as ‘a condemned man, awaiting his fate’. He later added, ‘If it was not to serve God, believe me, I should not have got into this … Nothing would make me do this except the clear knowledge that it would gain the Kingdom [of England] for his service and faith.’17 It was doubtless something of a relief when Elizabeth rejected his offer,18 and another suitable Habsburg candidate was quickly sought.
Many in England favoured a marriage to a natural-born Englishman. The dangers of a foreign match were manifold, and the marriage of the late Queen Mary to Philip of Spain had left a bitter taste in the mouths of many. If Elizabeth married a foreign suitor, a tract (Dialogue on the Queen’s Marriage) by young diplomat Sir Thomas Smith argued, she would be taking ‘a pig in the poke’, while an Englishman ‘is here at home, not his picture or image, but himself. His stature, colour, complexion, and behaviour, is to be seen face to face’. And not only that, Smith argued, ‘but his education and his bringing up, his study, exercise, and what things he hath a delight in, what things he doth refuse, every fault, imperfection, deformity and whatsoever should be to his hindrance, is apparent and clear’.19 Among those thought to be suitable English candidates were the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Norfolk, both leading peers of the realm, and Sir William Pickering, a handsome unmarried forty-three-year-old courtier and minor diplomat.20 Pickering and Elizabeth were old friends and when he came to London to see her in May 1559 he was warmly welcomed by the Queen and given rooms at Whitehall. Feria reported that the Queen saw him secretly and then ‘yesterday he came to the palace publicly and remained with her for four or five hours. In London they are giving twenty-five to a hundred that he will be King.’21 But it came to nothing.
The other English candidate, Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, went to considerable lengths to woo Elizabeth but, as Feria reported, the Queen had joked about what was being said of a match with the earl and added in his dispatch, ‘she does not get on with him’.22 Arundel was a staunch Catholic, twenty years older than Elizabeth and, in Feria’s, view ‘a flighty man of small ability’.23 Yet Arundel had high hopes for his suit. In December it was rumoured that he was borrowing money and had spent £600 on jewels with which to bribe any of Elizabeth’s ladies who spoke well of him.24 Yet, to no avail. Elizabeth’s sights were set firmly on another Englishman: Robert Dudley.
6
Disreputable Rumours
Within days of her accession, Elizabeth had appointed Robert Dudley as Master of the Horse, one of the most senior positions in the royal household.1 This made him the only man in England officially allowed to touch the Queen, as he was responsible for helping Elizabeth mount and dismount when she went horse-riding. Whenever she hunted, went on progress or rode in a procession, Dudley would accompany her.
He was tall and strikingly attractive with dark skin and blue eyes. Dudley later told the French ambassador that ‘they had first become friends before she was eight years old’.2 He had been condemned to death after his father, the Duke of Northumberland, led the plot to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne in the summer of 1553, although after eighteen months in the Tower, Dudley was released and pardoned and thereafter worked to regain favour at court particularly in the service of Mary I’s husband, Philip of Spain. Elizabeth and Dudley had both been imprisoned in the Tower at the same time, during Mary’s reign, where their shared torment doubtless forged close bonds. However, Robert Dudley was married. On 4 June 1550, four years before he was taken to the Tower, he had married Amy Robsart, daughter of Sir John Robsart, a powerful Norfolk gentleman.3
William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, had in the early days of the reign proposed that Dudley might be sent overseas as an envoy to Philip of Spain, but Elizabeth quickly overruled him. She needed Dudley to remain close by her side.4 He had arrived at Hatfield on a snow-white horse as soon as he knew of Elizabeth’s accession and from that moment on he rarely left court. Dudley’s position in charge of the royal stables gave him a salary of a hundred marks a year, four horses and his own suite of rooms at court, where for most of the time he would live away from his wife. Husband and wife therefore seldom saw one another; given Elizabeth’s love of riding and hunting, the Queen and Robert Dudley – whom she called her ‘sweet Robin’ – were rarely apart. As a friend of his once remarked, Dudley could claim to ‘know the Queen and her nature best of any man’.5
From the very earliest months of Elizabeth’s reign, courtiers were exchanging scandalous gossip about Dudley’s relationship with the Queen and rumours of their night-time liaisons. The Count of Feria, on the eve of his departure from England in April 1559, wrote to King Philip of the extent of Dudley’s intimacy:
During the last few days Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does what he likes with affairs and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and that the Queen is only waiting for her to die so she can marry Lord Robert …6
Weeks later, the Venetian ambassador Il Schifanoya reported that Dudley was ‘in great favour and very intimate with her Majesty’. Although Il Schifanoya stopped short of making any accusations of improper behaviour that could damage diplomatic relations, he did allude to the shocking rumours that were circulating at court: ‘On this subject I ought to report the opinion of many, but I doubt whether my letters may not miscarry or be read, wherefore it is better to keep silence than to speak ill.’7 The ambassador realised that his letters might be intercepted and was therefore unwilling to openly
state what everyone was whispering: that Elizabeth and Dudley had become lovers.
Despite suspicions as to the nature of Elizabeth’s relationship with her Master of the Horse, the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, was keen to secure an English alliance and in May 1559 sent his envoy Caspar Breuner, Baron von Rabenstein, formally to open marriage negotiations on behalf of the emperor’s nineteen-year-old son Charles von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria.8 When Elizabeth quickly rejected the proposal, explaining that she intended to remain single for the foreseeable future, Breuner was undeterred:
There is no princess of her compeers who can match her in wisdom, virtue, beauty and splendour of figure and form … Furthermore I have seen several very fine summer residences that belong to her, in two of which I have been myself, and I may say that there are none in the world so richly garnished with costly furniture of silk, adorned with gold, pearls and precious stones. Then she had some twenty other houses, all of which might justly be called royal summer residences. Hence she is well worth the trouble.9
English amity was crucial to the strategic interests of the Habsburgs and so the emperor was quick to dismiss the significance of the scandalous talk surrounding Elizabeth. Writing to his older son, the Archduke Maximilian, he acknowledged the danger and ubiquity of the rumours but argued that they were typical of the gossip targeted at chaste women: ‘The slander proceeds from many persons, the harm done is great, and even though it be granted that it very often happens that a woman of good repute is spoken ill of, I do not wish to waste words on such.’ However, he added, ‘when the outcry is so great, and come from so many sides and always has the same tenor, it is indeed an awkward matter and very dangerous … All this must be deeply pondered.’10
Believing that Elizabeth could be tempted to consider a marriage treaty, Cecil instructed his agent in Germany, Christopher Mundt, to discover all he could about the archduke’s appearance, temperament, religion and attitude towards Protestantism.11 Having talked with the Queen’s ladies, the new Spanish ambassador Don Alvaro de Quadra, Bishop of Aquila, was soon able to report that Elizabeth favoured the Archduke Charles’s suit because, ‘her women all believe such to be the case’.12 However, Emperor Ferdinand was beginning to have doubts of his own, considering the Queen’s very obvious affection for Dudley, and soon was no longer sure he wanted ‘to give her my son, even if she asked for him’.13
In August 1559, Baron Breuner decided to launch an investigation into whether or not Elizabeth was still a virgin or had indeed consummated her relationship with Dudley, as many suspected. As he reported, ‘since the Queen was crowned he has never been away from court; moreover they dwell in the same house and this it is which feeds suspicion’.14 He told the emperor that he had employed an agent, François Borth, who was on ‘friendly terms with all the Ladies of the Bedchamber’, to find out the truth behind the gossip. Breuner’s investigations revealed little. Writing in cypher to the emperor, he reported that the Queen’s ladies ‘swear by all that is holy that her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour’, however they agree that the Queen ‘shows her liking for him more markedly than is consistent with her reputation and dignity. But otherwise they have not noticed anything.’15
It was only Elizabeth’s women who knew the truth of the Queen’s relationship with Dudley. Only they could vouch for her chastity. But while they would always be quick to defend her publicly and could be relied upon to protect the Queen’s reputation, they might very well censure her in private.
* * *
In August, Kat Ashley fell on her knees before the Queen in the privacy of the royal Bedchamber at Hampton Court and implored her mistress to marry and put an end to the ‘disreputable rumours’ of her relationship with Robert Dudley. No doubt drawing on her experience of the Seymour scandal ten years before, she believed Elizabeth was now behaving in such a way that would sully her ‘honour and dignity’ and would in time undermine her subjects’ loyalty, and so be ‘the cause of much bloodshed in the realm’. Ashley declared that rather than see this happen she would have ‘strangled her Majesty in her cradle’. They were the words of a woman who regarded Elizabeth with a deep maternal affection. The Queen told Kat everything and had once said, ‘I know nothing but that she shall know it.’16
Elizabeth responded graciously to her gentlewoman’s blunt words, recognising them as the ‘outpourings of a good heart and true fidelity’. She assured Kat that she would consider marrying in order to dispel the rumours and reassure her subjects, but added that, ‘marriage must be well-weighed’ and that at present she had ‘no wish to change her state’. When Ashley suggested that Elizabeth should end her relationship with Lord Robert, the Queen angrily retorted that she had given
no one just cause to associate her with her Equerry or any other man in the world, and she hoped that they never would truthfully be able to do so. But that in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy. If she showed herself gracious towards her Master of the Horse she had deserved it for his honourable nature and dealings … She was always surrounded by her ladies of the bedchamber and maids of honour, who at all times could see whether there was anything dishonourable between her and her Master of the Horse. If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable life … she did not know of anyone who could forbid her; but she trusted in God that nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself.17
Elizabeth was nonetheless shaken by Kat’s chiding and when Breuner visited her days later, he found her ‘somewhat dejected’ and ‘daily pestered with petitions to marry’. She would, she told him, ‘rather be dead than that her realm should suffer harm or loss’ and so was prepared even to marry ‘the vilest man in the Kingdom rather than give people occasion to speak ill’.18 The Bedchamber women told Breuner that the Queen had been ‘quite melancholy’ and had slept little more than half an hour at night and woke ‘quite pale and weak’.19 Shortly afterwards Elizabeth succumbed to a burning fever.20 The French ambassador described it as a ‘fiebre quartre’, a quatrain fever that appeared on every fourth day, and reported that the Queen’s doctors had ‘great doubt about her convalescence’.21 Already false stories had begun to spread. ‘I have punished several,’ a leading Devon gentleman wrote to the Earl of Bedford in mid-August, ‘for bruiting the death of the Queen’s Majesty and so hath others been in other parts of the shire as I hear.’22
De Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, soon came to the conclusion that Elizabeth was being disingenuous. She had, as de Quadra added, ‘just given £12,000 to Lord Robert as an aid towards his expenses’. He believed that Elizabeth was ‘astutely taking advantage of the general opinion to reassure somewhat the Catholics who desire the match and to satisfy others who want to see her married and are scandalised at her doings’.23 But then, days later and to the ambassador’s surprise, he was given renewed hope. De Quadra received an unexpected visit from Robert Dudley’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney. Mary was a highly educated, pretty and politically accomplished young woman with distinctive reddish yellow hair, who was about the same age as the Queen. The two women had known each other as children and had recently become particularly close given Elizabeth’s relationship with her brother.24 Mary had joined the Privy Chamber as a gentlewoman ‘without wages’ on the day of Elizabeth’s coronation and would attend thereafter on the Queen, in between the births of Mary’s five children, the running of the family estate in Kent, Penshurst Place, and supporting her husband Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland and the Welsh Marches.25
Mary now sought out de Quadra to tell him that Elizabeth had changed her mind, that she had decided to marry and wanted the match with the Archduke Charles ‘speedily settled’.26 Speaking in Italian, a language in which Mary was fluent, she assured the ambassador that she was acting with the Queen’s knowledge and would never say such a thing if it were not true for fear for her life. She urged de Quadra to broach the matter with the Queen and warned him not to be put off by Elizabeth’s reticence
, because ‘it is the custom of ladies here not to give their consent in such matters until they are teased into it’.27
Mary Sidney’s message was confirmed by Sir Thomas Parry, Treasurer of the Household, who told de Quadra that the Queen had summoned both him and Lady Sidney the night before and told them ‘that the marriage had now become necessary’.28 Elizabeth’s change of heart, they told him, had been brought about by the recent discovery of a plot to poison the Queen and Lord Robert at a banquet hosted by the Earl of Arundel. As de Quadra described, ‘the Queen was much alarmed’ and this plot ‘together with the French war preparations for Scotland, seem to have decided the Queen to marry’.29
With high expectation, the ambassador went by barge to Hampton Court Palace but was disappointed to find Elizabeth ambivalent about the match. ‘The only answer I received,’ he reported, was that she had not yet decided to marry, but should she ever do so, I might be quite sure that she would marry only the highest and the best.’ When he found Mary Sidney and expressed his surprise that, ‘her Majesty had not spoken more explicitly’ of her renewed interest in the archduke, Mary quickly reassured him and urged him to persist.30
Elizabeth appeared worried by the growing scandal of her relationship with Dudley. She had learnt a painful lesson from the Seymour episode, and had witnessed how salacious stories could gather momentum and spread at home and abroad. In a later conversation with de Quadra, Elizabeth told him she feared he ‘might be dissatisfied’ with what he had heard about her, and that ‘there were people in the country who took pleasure in saying anything that came into their heads’. The Queen said all this ‘with some signs of shame’, de Quadra noted earnestly.31 He reassured her that, ‘if there were anything which the archduke should not hear or learn, the idea of his coming would not have been entertained by us’. Elizabeth was anxious, she said, that if negotiations were broken off, the archduke might use the ‘idle tales’ that were told about her to the detriment of her honour. But, de Quadra wryly observed, ‘from this point of view I was not sorry, as the fear may not be without advantage to us’.32