Elizabeth (36 page)
Their attitude and obvious agitation at his news persuaded Arthur that his new-found knowledge might be dangerous, and he returned to France as soon as possible. He went to the Jesuit College at Eu in Normandy, where he told the rector part of his story, but did not reveal everything. The rector recommended that he visit the Count of Eu, Henri, Duc de Guise, but Arthur went
instead to the Jesuit School in Paris, where he had heard there was an English priest, Father Thomas. Again, Arthur did not reveal the full story, fearing that the French might use the information against England if they found out his true identity. He wrote to Ashley, who never replied. He then wrote to Edward Stafford, the English Ambassador in Paris, telling him only that he had been the foster-child of Robert Southern ‘whose memory she [Queen Elizabeth] had reason to have graven on her heart’.
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When it looked as if there was a possibility of war between France and England, Arthur set sail for home on a vessel belonging to a Mr Nicholson of Ratcliff. When they arrived at Gravesend, Arthur must have appeared suspicious to Nicholson, who threatened to have him arrested. Arthur wrote a letter to Robert Dudley and persuaded Nicholson to have it delivered; years later, Nicholson was proud to report that the great Earl of Leicester had thanked him most kindly for this service. As they passed Greenwich, two of Robert Dudley’s attendants came on board and transported Arthur to Greenwich Palace. There, Arthur met Robert Dudley in person. Arthur reported that Robert had taken him to his rooms where he confirmed that he was, indeed, his father. He claimed that Robert had cried over him, and left Arthur to believe that he would do all he could for his beloved son.
The arrival of this mysterious youth, however, had not gone unmarked. Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster, had informants in the other ships in the convoy back to England, and Arthur’s appearance was reported to him. Robert duly contacted Walsingham, stating that Arthur was a friend. Robert told his son, ‘You are like a ship under full sail at sea, pretty to look upon but dangerous to deal with.’
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At first, Walsingham accepted the story and agreed to issue a licence to allow Arthur to travel freely without molestation. But
when Robert took Arthur to meet Walsingham in person, once the spymaster had seen the young man, he began to drag his heels about the document. After their first meeting, he asked to see Arthur again. Frightened that he was about to be unmasked and fearing the consequences, Arthur went to the French Ambassador de la Mauvissière to ask for a passport for France. This was arranged; Arthur was to travel as the Ambassador’s servant.
When they got to Gravesend the next morning, Arthur found his passport would only be validated if he presented it to William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, Lord Warden of the Port, who was presumably checking the papers of everyone using the port. However, fortune smiled on Arthur that day; he was able to leave the country after joining English soldiers on a troop transport sailing for Flanders; he landed with them at Bergen-op-Zoom.
It seems that, at this point, Arthur’s allegiance to England and her Queen began to wane and he became involved in various plots to forward the Catholic cause. Englefield’s report of his interview with Arthur relates ‘Arthur's plot with one Seymour to deliver the town of Tele to the Spaniards, which plot was discovered … He opened up communications with the elector of Cologne and the Pope … After many wanderings about Germany he received a messenger from the Earl of Leicester at Sighen, but to what effect he does not say.’
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Had Robert become aware of his son’s activities? Was he trying to bring him back to the English camp? Whatever the reason for that contact, Arthur went on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia, visiting the shrine in October 1586. While in Spain in early 1587 he heard of the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and decided to go to France by ship. It was at this point that in June 1587 he was found off the Spanish coast and questioned. As he was an Englishman, Arthur’s tale that he was a
Catholic and had just completed a pilgrimage was felt to be suspicious, so he was arrested and held in San Sebastian. When he asked to speak to Sir Francis Englefield, he must have decided that he risked being imprisoned or worse by the Spanish and so revealed his incredible story.
Arthur said he had decided to go to France because he was terrified that his fate would be the same as Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been executed. Robert Dudley, he believed, had plotted against Mary and this had contributed towards her death. He wrote in a letter to Englefield that he was worried that agents of the Queen would seek him out and arrange to have him murdered so that the secret of his birth would never be known.
He reminded his captors that there were other claimants to the throne of England apart from James VI of Scotland: he named Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon (a descendant of the house of Plantagenet), and Edward Seymour, the eldest son of Catherine Grey. He added, presumably with himself in mind, ‘… both of them are descendants of Adam, and perhaps there is someone else who is their elder brother.’
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If Philip II would protect him, he offered to write an account of the truth of his birth and life, which the Spanish could use as they liked. In the book he would reveal all, but show that he was ‘… everybody's friend and nobody’s foe’.
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He suggested that once this had been done, he could write to Robert, his father, so as to keep his good opinion.
Englefield did not know what to think of the young man’s story. Arthur seemed to be as well educated and well travelled as he claimed to be, but there were many possibilities and Englefield certainly suspected that Elizabeth’s Court ‘may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends’.
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Perhaps it was all a plot engineered by Elizabeth, to dupe the Spanish into acknowledging the young man as her son so that he could be offered as a possible heir to the
throne, cutting James VI of Scotland out of the succession? Perhaps he was just a spy with a cover story so strange that he would either be believed or thought a lunatic; in either case, he would be released and allowed to go on his way?
Finally, Englefield came to the tentative conclusion that there was a good chance that Arthur was telling the truth:
… it is also manifest that he has had much conference with the Earl of Leicester, upon whom he mainly depends for the fulfilment of his hopes. This and other things convince me that the queen of England is not ignorant of his pretensions; although, perhaps, she would be unwilling that they should be thus published to the world, for which reason she may wish to keep him [Arthur] in his low and obscure condition as a matter of policy, and also in order that her personal immorality might not be known (the bastards of princes not usually being acknowledged in the lifetime of their parents), and she has always considered that it would be dangerous to her for her heir to be nominated in her lifetime, although he alleges that she has provided for the Earl of Leicester and his faction to be able to elevate him (Arthur Dudley) to the throne when she dies, and perhaps marry him to Arabella (Stuart). For this and other reasons I am of opinion that he should not be allowed to get away, but should be kept very secure to prevent his escape.
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Although Arthur’s claim was by no means proved, the Spanish Crown clearly felt it was sufficiently believable that it could cause political troublemakers to latch onto the story and create problems for them. As neither Englefield nor Philip II were willing to take any chances, it was ordered that Arthur be sent to a monastery for
the time being. As his name does not occur again in Spanish or English records, it may be that he remained in the monastery until his death, or that he escaped and his elaborate cover story, no longer needed, was simply discarded.
So was Arthur Dudley, as he reported himself to be, the son of Elizabeth and Robert? His upbringing and experiences seem to make this unlikely. Firstly, it seems odd to go to the effort to bring up a child in secret only for the custodian to later tell him of his true parentage. The whole point of a secret child is that it remains secret. Also, a royal child would have been more likely to be placed in a household of minor nobility or gentry, rather than with an assistant estate manager who ended up as an innkeeper. Secondly, a potential, albeit illegitimate, heir to the throne would hardly have been allowed to roam around Europe unchaperoned for ten years. Countries hostile to England could have used him for their own ends or had him terminated if he had told his story to anyone. Thirdly, while Robert was apparently fond of Arthur, Elizabeth seems to have had no maternal feelings for the man. If she had felt her throne was threatened, she would have had no qualms about ordering his death for the good of the country.
What is more plausible is that part of the story is true. A child may have been handed over to Robert Southern at the palace in 1561. At this time, Robert Dudley was still courting Elizabeth, but perhaps had liaisons with other women as well. It is possible that Arthur was indeed the son of Robert, but by a lady at Court, not by the Queen. We know from the Queen’s reaction to Robert’s marriage to Lettice Knollys in 1578 that Elizabeth would have reacted badly to any lady who had an affair with her beloved Robert. She might expect, at the very least, to spend some time in the Tower and to be exiled from the Court, never to return. It was therefore exceedingly likely that such a baby would be born and
smuggled out of the Court as soon as possible without any word of it getting back to the Queen.
Perhaps Arthur himself invented the story that Elizabeth was his mother, or may have come to this conclusion of his own accord since rumours about Robert and Elizabeth’s relationship were rife. Or it is possible that Robert may have allowed this myth to take shape. In an attack on Robert Dudley published in 1584,
Leicester’s Commonwealth
, the writer suggests that Robert would try to foist one of his illegitimate children on the throne by pretending that the child was Elizabeth’s, and to this end the wording of the Act of Succession had been changed to allow the Queen’s ‘natural issue’ as opposed to ‘lawful issue’.
The book charged that Robert had ‘contracted to her Majesty’ that ‘he might have entitled any one of his own brood (whereof he hath store in many places, as is known) to the lawful succession of the crown … pretending the same to be by her Majesty’ and that he was behind the decision to put ‘words of Natural Issue … into the statute of succession for the crown, against all order and custom of our realm … whereby he might be able after the death of her Majesty to make legitimate to the crown any one bastard of his own by any of so many hackneys as he keepeth, affirming it to be the natural issue of her Majesty by himself.’
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Another possibility is that Arthur’s life history is more fiction than fact, and that Robert Dudley was not his father. Perhaps the exceptionally intelligent son of an estate manager was educated beyond his social class and invented a much grander parentage for himself than the dull and humble Mr and Mrs Southern. All the grand Court officials that intervened in his life may simply have been trying to straighten out the son of one of the Ashleys’ servants who seemed to be set on creating chaos for his parents and himself. His rushing from one European Royal Court to another, involved
in plots and chases, could just have been the fertile imagination of a young man who had to embroider an otherwise normal life. If this was the case, he must have loved his time at the Spanish Court, where he was the centre of attention. Philip II himself read Arthur’s story and his future was discussed at the highest levels. He would live out the rest of his days in comfort, supported by the Spanish exchequer, perhaps in the calm and quiet of a monastery.
The last possibility, one that Englefield himself considered, is that Arthur was a spy. Here was a young Englishman who had travelled in France, Spain and the Netherlands, all political hot spots where English intelligence was needed. The story Arthur presented would explain why he might have been seen at places from Normandy to Paris, Flanders to Cologne, and why he moved so freely between England and Europe, returning home to renew his finances or meet with Robert Dudley. If a run-of-the-mill spy were to be apprehended, he might claim to be a sailor, a student, a merchant or a minor diplomat, trying to create some credible persona that would pass the scrutiny of the secret services springing up all over Europe.
Perhaps Arthur, justly concerned about ending up in prison or on the gallows, invented a magnificent, quite spectacularly original alibi that he was the illegitimate son of the Queen of England, wandering Europe trying to make sense of his life and avoiding the English agents sent after him. If his research was good and his story plausible, as it seems it was, then even a faint chance that he was telling the truth would be enough to save him. Perhaps the reason he is never again mentioned in the Spanish records is that, after a suitable period of grateful retreat paid for by the King of Spain, Arthur simply slipped away and came home, dropping the character of ‘Arthur Dudley’ that had so usefully served its turn, and reporting back to Robert Dudley and the spymaster Francis Walsingham all that he had learned during his travels.
The Case of John Harington
