The Men Who Would Be King (14 page)

By the autumn of that year there were more than half a dozen ambassadors wooing her at court, competing for her favor and eyeing one another like hostile dogs. “Here is a great resort of wooers and controversy among lovers,” Cecil wrote, half-amused, but profoundly wishing the queen would take one of them and settle the business. The Swedish and imperial representatives were, as Bishop Jewel remarked, “courting at a most marvellous rate. But the Swede is most in earnest, for he promises mountains of silver in case of success.” The King of Sweden had sent his younger son, Duke John of Finland, to court Elizabeth on behalf of Crown Prince Eric. Duke John had arrived in superb state, bringing a large retinue of noblemen, horses, and many servants, who wore red velvet coats bearing a design of hearts pierced by a javelin, to symbolize Prince Eric's consuming passion for the queen whom he had never even met. Before long Duke John and Caspar Breuner were at each other's throats. “The King of Sweden's son, who is here, is fit to kill the Emperor's ambassador, because he said his father was only a clown who had stolen his kingdom,” de Quadra informed Philip. “The matter has reached such a point that the Queen is careful they should not meet in the palace to avoid their slashing each other in her presence.”

The tragicomic strain persisted through Prince Eric's courtship as through his bitter life. From the first moment of his uncouth wooing, when, in Mary's reign, Elizabeth had said she liked his proposal so well that she hoped never to hear of it again, his suit was to be the butt of wit. His father, King Gustavus, spent a fortune in the pursuit of Elizabeth; gold and silver were scattered among her subjects, and she received magnificent presents of tapestries, furs, horses, and money, in return for which it was brought to the Swedes notice that they were being “made fun of in the palace, and by the Queen more than anybody.” Once, Duke John was kept waiting to see the queen so long that he finally gave up, and returned, incensed, to his lodgings. But Elizabeth did not fail to turn the droll affair to her advantage; a rich royal suitor had more than amusement to offer, and so there were occasions when she was charming to the Swedish deputation. As de Quadra once reported,

The Swedish ambassador was summoned the other day by the Queen, who told him she wished to show her gratitude to his master who had sought her in the day of her simplicity, and asked him to tell her whether his ambassadors were coming, as she was being pressed with other marriages. They are constantly getting presents out of them in this way.

It was said that Eric would come in person to plead the constancy and strength of his love for Elizabeth, and Londoners speculated about the number of wagons massed with bullion that he would bring with him. The comedy was to continue for two years, but blond-bearded Eric never came. Having been slighted by the Queen of England he finally married a common soldier's daughter. Having recalled Duke John, believing his brother to be wooing Elizabeth on his own behalf, he was eventually deposed and then murdered by John, through the undignified medium of poisoned yellow-pea soup. From the first to the last, Eric of Sweden was “of those that farthest come behind” in the pursuit of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had no more intention of accepting Prince Eric or the archduke Charles than she had had of marrying King Philip; for her the object of all the splendid courtships that presented themselves was not marriage, the commitment and capture that would take from her her newfound mastery, but political dalliance. By using her superb mental powers in conjunction with her most aggravating feminine weaknesses she could keep her suitors' hopes alive for months on end, to suit her needs both as a queen and as a woman. She had been a victim for so long, dependent on others' humors for her liberty and life, that she found a keen, exultant pleasure in being the coquettish center of extravagant attentions, with absolute power to encourage or spurn, and even to mock if she pleased. However purely political her suitors' motives, the fact remained that marriage was the most personal of all treaties. And so her demands for detailed descriptions, portraits, and personal facts about the wooers were relayed across Europe. There was no hope for the archduke if he had a big ugly head like the Earl of Bedford; her ambassador at the emperor's court must send her a lengthy and exact description of Charles, including his habits and character, and even so she continued to insist she must meet him before she could reach a decision. Her husband must be a real man, she informed de Quadra, one who, in her evocative phrase, “would not sit at home all day among the cinders, but in time of peace keep himself employed in warlike exercises.” She was describing the type of man to whom she was always attracted, the Thomas Seymour breed: dashing, brave, and virile.

“As she is a woman,” de Quadra wrote in October 1559, “and a spirited and obstinate woman too, passion has to be considered.” In the coming years passion was not only to be considered, but to play a central role in Elizabeth's life. The queen had fallen in love, and the man she loved was to become the most ruthless and persistent of all her suitors.

5

The Queen in Love

W
hile her suitors' ambassadors were jostling hopefully in the antechambers of Whitehall, and speculation was veering from one great name to another, Elizabeth had fallen recklessly in love with a man who was neither a foreign prince nor an eminent English noble, but a mere younger son of a new and tainted family. Lord Robert Dudley, grandson and son of executed traitors, was an ambitious, devious, married man, but he was to be the great love of Elizabeth's life.

For Lord Robert, as for Elizabeth, the wheel of Fortune had turned almost full circle by 1558, when they were both twenty-five. The Dudley family had risen to giddy heights during King Edward's reign; when his able, dangerous father acquired the title of Duke of Northumberland and the position of virtual ruler of England, young Robert had come to the forefront of court life and had a glimpse of power. The Duke of Northumberland dealt out promising official positions to his brood of sons, and Robert became a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to the boy king as well as Master of the Buckhounds—a post particularly suited to his sporting tastes. At that time he must often have met the Lady Elizabeth when she visited her brother's court. But the plot in which he supported his father after King Edward's death was intended to deprive Elizabeth, as well as Mary, of the throne.

For a few desperate weeks in the summer of 1553, the Duke of Northumberland was poised at the summit of power, his sons, bold and obedient, ranged behind him. If he was to succeed in making little Lady Jane Grey the nominal Queen of England, the rightful heir, Mary, had to be seized and silenced; it was twenty-year-old Robert who was sent clattering down the stone stairs from his father's council room in the Tower to ride with all speed to Suffolk at the head of a troop of horse and bring Mary in. That was the beginning of the plunge downwards for Robert Dudley. By the end of July he was back in the Tower, no longer an honored son of England's most powerful man, but a prisoner under guard. Confined alone, chafing his name onto the wall,
ROBART
DVDLEY
, he waited to die as a traitor.

He was still waiting when the spring came, and the Lady Elizabeth was brought to imprisonment in the nearby Queen's House. Northumberland had requested at his trial “that Her Majesty will be gracious to my childer, which may hereafter do Her Grace good service, considering that they went by my commandment that am their father, and not of their own free wills”; as the weeks passed it became apparent that Mary was indeed disposed to be gracious to the traitor duke's remaining sons. Vigor and enterprise such as Robert Dudley's were wasted on prison pastimes, and after more than a year of narrow confinement in the Tower, he and his brothers were released, to do the queen good service.

Whether or not Robert had succeeded in communicating with Elizabeth while they were both prisoners behind the same dark walls, their old acquaintance developed into a strong bond during Mary's reign. As Robert began to rise to honorable status once again, serving Philip and Mary abroad and distinguishing himself as a valiant and capable Master of the Ordnance at the Siege of St. Quentin in 1557, he kept in touch with Elizabeth. A contemporary report said that he gave her generous gifts of money when she was in difficulties; in 1562 the King of Sweden was told by an English visitor to his court that “in her trouble Lord Robert did sell away a good piece of his land to aid her, which divers supposed to be the cause the Queen so favored him.” When the news of Mary's death brought the dark days to an end, Robert rode to Elizabeth at Hatfield and was one of the close friends and servants whom she swiftly rewarded with public offices. Kat Ashley became First Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber; Thomas Parry was knighted and appointed Controller of the Household; William Cecil was sworn in as Secretary of State, and Lord Robert Dudley was appointed her Master of the Horse. Through all the years of advancement and honor that were to come to him, he would not relinquish that office, Elizabeth's first public favor to him.

The queen clung to old friends and associates. Even such a fallible servant as Parry was dear to her because he had been with her in times of extreme adversity. But Robert had more than loyalty and proven fellowship to recommend him to the young queen. He had the superb looks, the aura of sexual vigor, and the taste for hardy physical activities that Elizabeth found so intensely attractive in a man. By the spring of 1559 her passion for her Master of the Horse could not be concealed. On April 18 Feria wrote to King Philip,

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 the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert. I can assure Your Majesty that matters have reached such a pass that I have been brought to consider whether it would not be well to approach Lord Robert on Your Majesty's behalf, promising him your help and favour and coming to terms with him.

In those succinct lines Feria introduced the major themes of Robert Dudley's lifelong relationship with the queen. Political power, scandal, talk of murder and marriage, and furtive dealings with Spain and other foreign powers were to recur like scarlet threads in the bright, sometimes tawdry, fabric of Elizabeth's greatest love affair.

For a queen who was so committed to the state of virginity that she had to be coaxed into considering the suits of mighty princes, Elizabeth seemed remarkably abandoned in her behavior towards her favorite. As she herself said, “in this world she had had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy,” that in her newfound freedom she grasped avidly at the pleasure of Robert's company. There was a little flutter of intrigue when Pickering arrived at court, in May 1559, soon after Elizabeth's feelings for Robert had become evident; on one occasion the Master of the Horse went off to hunt at Windsor and the queen took advantage of his absence to spend some cozy hours with her attractive suitor Pickering. “They tell me Lord Robert is not so friendly with him as he was,” de Quadra reported ingenuously. But there could be no real doubt as to where Elizabeth's true affections lay, and as though to prove it, at the end of the same month she was reported to have given Robert the enormous sum of £12,000 “as an aid towards his expenses.” Official honors, such as the Order of the Garter, which she bestowed upon him on the first possible occasion, were matched by constant informal signs of love; the queen smiled at Lord Robert, danced with him, rode with him, made indecorous visits to his rooms with a freedom that could not fail to give rise to gossip. Ambassadors hinted in their dispatches at “extraordinary things about this intimacy,” unspecified goings-on vouched to by nameless witnesses; and the rumors that reached foreign courts were to cause more than one important suitor to express disquieting doubts about the chastity of the Queen of England. Among her own subjects, whispers of scandal filtered into London streets and country lanes, to be echoed back in garbled form, with folk-song embellishments about a game of legerdemain and a gift of a fine petticoat—“Thinkst thou that it was a petticoat? No, no, he gave her a child, I warrant thee.” At the heart of all the talk, sophisticated insinuations and illiterate gossip alike, was the one very basic allegation that a drunken inhabitant of Totnes expressed in its simplest form. “Lord Robert,” he asserted, “did swive the Queen.”

The emperor, father of the archdukes, was perturbed by the “somewhat discreditable rumours” that reached him concerning his son's prospective bride. Breuner was ordered to find out the truth of the matter, and the ambassador's response was illuminating. Informing his imperial master that “my Lord Robert is preferred by the Queen above all others, and that Her Majesty shows her liking for him more markedly than is consistent with her honour and dignity,” he nevertheless stressed that all his “most diligent enquiries into the calumnies that are current about the Queen, not only abroad but also here in England” had produced no firm evidence, and all the people who knew the queen intimately “swear by all that is holy that Her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour.” Then he recounted a dramatic scene that took place early in August between Kat Ashley and the queen.