The Men Who Would Be King (17 page)

The bond between Elizabeth and Robert was often subjected to heavy strain, but it was never entirely severed. Not even infidelity could divide them for long; their jealousies ended in weeping, caressing reunions that brought them yet closer together. When Elizabeth entered into a heady flirtation with the handsome young courtier Thomas Heneage in the autumn of 1565, Robert was both aggrieved and unnerved; Throckmorton, who had become his close confidant, urged him to put the queen's affection to the test by starting a love affair of his own in retaliation, watching “how the Queen took it,” and then asking permission to leave the court “to go to his own place to stay as other noblemen do.” Robert took the advice. The woman whom he chose as the instrument of his vengeance was “one of the best-looking ladies of the court,” the lovely redhead Lettice Knollys, Viscountess Hereford. Tempers and passions rose high; Robert had a furious quarrel with Heneage, then tersely asked for “leave to go,” but Elizabeth too “was in a great temper, and upbraided him with what had taken place with Heneage and his flirting with the Viscountess in very bitter words.” For three days Robert stayed glowering in his apartments, while the Earl of Sussex and Cecil, although “no friends of Lord Robert in their hearts,” tried to smooth over the unpleasant affair, which was not really very difficult. “The result of the tiff was that both the Queen and Lord Robert shed tears, and he has returned to his former favour.” Feuding with Norfolk, infuriating Cecil and the wise councillors, negotiating with foreign powers for their support in his wooing: it seemed that there was nothing Robert could do for which Elizabeth would not forgive him, as long as he remained devotedly hers. As years went by he would hazard a mistress, even a passionate clandestine love affair, but the prime of his life was dedicated to Elizabeth; marriage, and the lawful heirs for which he longed, were thus denied him. He wrote emphatically, at the beginning of the 1570s, that he would rather never have a wife than marry and lose the queen's favor thereby. His attraction to Lettice Knollys was not quenched by the joyous tears of his reunion with Elizabeth, but he was to spend fourteen more years in sterile dalliance with the queen before he could bring himself finally to give the coup de grâce to his fallen hopes, and take the voluptuous widow Lettice for his lawful wife.

The constant vigilant presence of Lord Robert cast a long shadow over Elizabeth's other courtships. The true nature of his relationship with the queen, and the extent of his influence over her, were questions anxiously investigated by prospective foreign suitors. The answers they received were, however, as contradictory as Elizabeth's own declarations. The imperial envoy reported enthusiastically in 1565 that Lord Robert was “a virtuous, pious, courteous and highly moral man, whom the Queen loves as a sister her brother, in all maidenly honour, in most chaste and honest love”—a verdict as propitious for the archduke's suit as the rival French ambassador's equally exaggerated assertion, that Lord Robert had slept with the queen on New Year's night, was damaging. Elizabeth's own statements only added to the uncertainty; her intentions regarding Lord Robert and marriage seemed to change from day to day. “Beggarwoman and single, far rather than Queen and married,” was the dramatic preference that she expressed to the gullible Austrian envoy, but she also informed him encouragingly that if she were to wed it would be as a queen, and therefore she could only take a great prince as her husband—which, in turn, was in marked contrast to her statement to the Spanish ambassador that she must marry an Englishman, to satisfy the will of her people, and that the most fitting consort would thus be Lord Robert Dudley. It was de Quadra's successor, de Silva, who best summed up the situation when he commented perceptively, “I do not think anything is more enjoyable to this Queen than treating of marriage, although she assures me herself that nothing annoys her more. She is vain, and would like all the world to be running after her, but it will probably end in her remaining as she is, unless she marry Lord Robert, who is still doing his best to win her.”

In doing his best to win her for so many years, Lord Robert gave Elizabeth the unstinting attention and admiration for which she longed. She dared not rely on the affection of a husband, but from an ever eager, unsatisfied suitor she could expect constant devotion. Though he never achieved his life's desire of taking the Queen of England for his wife, Robert won from her all that she was able to give as a woman, except the ultimate possession of her body and mind. There was in their deep and enduring relationship a sense of underlying reality that set it apart from all Elizabeth's other flirtations, wooings, and love-dealings, and above all from the cult of fantastical adoration of the queen that grew up in the later years of her reign. When the affair began they had been two lively, attractive young people, the king's daughter and the duke's son, yet when it ended some thirty years later, with his death, their feelings for one another had not greatly altered, in spite of his marriage, and her courtships, and the difficult, demanding temperament of the queen who was often “more than a man, and in truth, sometimes less than a woman.” As much as she ever could be, Elizabeth was in love with Robert Dudley, the dearest of all her suitors.

6

“The Weal of the Kingdom”

W
hile there was “but one mistress and no master” in England, there would be no heirs born to the queen. Admirable as her desire to remain a virgin might be, it was not royal chastity that would make England secure from wars of the succession, coups d'état, and the treacheries that thrived on an uncertain inheritance to the throne. For as long as Elizabeth could remember, the stability of the realm had been threatened by the weak state of the succession; the desperate lack of male heirs that had driven Henry VIII through six marriages had caused even the faded old maid Mary to marry in haste, and now that the last of his line, Elizabeth, had succeeded to the throne the situation was graver than ever. If she were to die young and unmarried, the resultant confusion over the rival claims of Mary, Queen of Scots; the sisters of Lady Jane Grey; and others still more distant would undoubtedly “divide and ruin the country.” For the sake of her people, for the weal of the kingdom that she was pledged to protect, it seemed that Elizabeth must marry with all speed, and bear children.

A state of crisis came perilously close in the autumn of 1562, when, after three years as queen, she still considered herself “as free from any engagement to marry as the day she was born.” At Hampton Court, early in October, Elizabeth began to feel ill, and decided that she would take a bath. It was thought that she caught a chill “by leaving her bath for the air,” then her illness was found to be smallpox, and the ensuing fever was very nearly fatal. Her condition grew steadily worse, until she lost consciousness. “She was all but gone,” it was reported. While the queen was lying close to death her council was hurriedly meeting, trying to reach a decision about the succession. No one spoke for Mary, Queen of Scots, who already regarded herself as Queen of England and Elizabeth as a bastard usurper; the lovely Scottish queen was the senior great-granddaughter of Henry VII, but she was an alien and a papist, and had been passed over in Henry VIII's will in favor of the Suffolk line—Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, Catherine and Mary Grey. Some believed that King Henry's will should be obeyed and Lady Catherine named heiress, while others supported the Earl of Huntingdon, who was descended from Edward III. Opinions were dangerously divided. As de Quadra reported: “There was great excitement that day in the palace, and if her improvement had not come soon some hidden thoughts would have become manifest.” But before discussion could erupt into aggression, the queen's condition began to improve, and as she regained consciousness her flickering thoughts focused on her kingdom. The first words she managed to speak astounded her anxious hearers. She asked that Lord Robert Dudley should be made protector of the realm, with a title and an income of £20,000.

Weak and feverish though Elizabeth was, she knew what a flood of speculation her demand would unleash, and she roused herself to defend her honor and her suitor's character as though for the last time, protesting feebly but earnestly “that although she loved and had always loved Lord Robert dearly, as God was her witness nothing improper had ever passed between them.” With death still lurking among the hangings of her bedchamber it was not an oath that she would have taken lightly. Hiding their dismay, hastening to soothe her, the council promised to carry out all that she asked.

The queen recovered and life at court returned to normal, with Lord Robert enjoying greater favor than ever, but Elizabeth's illness had left deeper marks than the smallpox scars on her face. It had been a “great terror and dreadful warning,” and Englishmen took heed of it. They had seen how fine the thread was upon which England's security hung, they had glimpsed the confusion that would follow if that thread were to snap while the succession question remained unresolved, and now there was a new urgency in their talk of “the Queen's marriage, and succession of the crown.” Just before Parliament met, in January 1563, Dr. Nowell preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey in which he publicly exhorted Elizabeth to marry. “For as the marriage of Queen Mary was a terrible plague to all England,” he declaimed, “the want of your marriage and issue is like to prove as great a plague,” then, his rhetoric swooping between the dynastic and the personal, he argued, “If your parents had been of your mind, where had you been then? Or what had become of us now?” Though Parliament addressed the queen in very different tones from Nowell's ill-advised harangue, they developed his theme. Humbly but fervently, Parliament petitioned Elizabeth to secure the succession, and marry.

The Commons' petition boldly stressed “the great dangers, the unspeakable miseries of civil war, the perilous intermeddlings of foreign princes with seditious, ambitious and factious subjects at home” that would rend the kingdom if Elizabeth were to die without an acknowledged heir; the Lords dwelled rather on the pleasures and benefits that marriage would bring to herself and her realm, before making subdued reference to their grave fears during her recent illness. The Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, drafted a speech in which he appealed to the queen's maternal feelings, begging her to “imagine the comfort, surety and delight that should happen to yourself by beholding an imp of your own, that should in time to come by God's grace inherit and enjoy the imperial crown of this realm, to the great rejoicing of all your loving subjects.” The queen to whom all their pleas were addressed was not yet thirty years old; she was a lively, elegant young woman whose liking for male company was only too well known. That she should marry and have babies appeared to be both a natural and a necessary solution to the whole question.

Elizabeth's response to the petitions of this Parliament was characteristically moving and impressive. Though she committed herself to nothing, she implied a great deal—observing, somewhat tartly, that “none other tree's blossom should have been minded ere ever hope of my fruit had been denied you,” and declaring that any who thought she was bound “by vow or determination” to remain unmarried were entirely wrong. “For though I can think it best for a private woman, yet do I strive with myself to think it not meet for a prince,” she conceded. “And if I can bend my liking to your need, I will not resist such a mind.” She brought her speech to a climax with an assurance about the succession: “I hope I shall die in quiet with
nunc dimittis,
which cannot be without I see some glimpse of your following surety after my graved bones.” Her profound antipathy to marriage, her fear of naming a successor who could become the focus of constant plots, as she herself had been in her sister's reign, were thus hidden for the time being beneath fine noncommittal pledges, while she sought to find a means by which the “following surety” of her people would be secured. Evasive though her reply was, her profound concern was unfeigned; as she reminded the Commons: “This matter toucheth me much nearer than it doth you all, who, if the worst happen, can lose but your bodies; but if I take not that convenient care that it behoveth me to have therein, I hazard to lose both body and soul.” What Parliament did not know was that even while they were debating the tortuous question, Elizabeth, harassed, isolated, and perplexed, had taken a tentative step towards solving it, by a proposition so utterly unexpected that at first it seemed outrageous. In audience with the Scottish envoy, Maitland of Lethington, in March, she had casually suggested that Lord Robert Dudley should be married to Mary, Queen of Scots.

The idea seemed in every way preposterous. Maitland, taken quite unawares, “could not reply for confusion” as the Queen of England, curled and jeweled and shining with smiles, sweetly informed him that “if his mistress would take her advice, and wished to marry safely and happily, she would give her a husband who would ensure both, and this was Lord Robert.” Mary Stuart of Scotland had been Queen of France and was now contemplating marriage with the heir of Philip of Spain, while other princes of noble houses vied for her attention; that she should marry the cast-off favorite of her greatest rival, a man who was the son of traitors and had once been condemned as a traitor himself, a courtier of blemished reputation, whose wealth and position had been given to him like lovers' favors by Elizabeth, was a proposal that amounted almost to an insult. It was with difficulty that Maitland rallied his wits and tried to turn aside her words with chaffing compliments. Elizabeth had announced that Lord Robert was endowed with such graces that if she herself had wished to marry he was the man whom she would take rather than all the princes in the world; Maitland responded that “this was a great proof of the love she bore his Queen, as she was willing to give her a thing so dearly prized by herself.” Gallantly he told her that even if his mistress, Queen Mary, loved Lord Robert as dearly as she, Elizabeth, did, Mary would refuse to marry him, since that would deprive Elizabeth “of all the joy and solace she received from his companionship.” But Elizabeth was not to be deterred; she went on to say that she wished to God that the elder Dudley brother, the Earl of Warwick, had as great an abundance of “grace and good looks” as Lord Robert, for then she might have married one brother and Mary the other. Elizabeth was obviously enjoying herself, but for Maitland it was all very difficult and embarrassing. At last, longing to escape, he steered the conversation around to the succession, “which he knew would shut her mouth directly,” and suggested, with calculated facetiousness, that since his mistress, Queen Mary, was still very young, Elizabeth might first marry Lord Robert herself, and have children by him—“which was so necessary for the welfare of the country”—and then when God should call her from this life she could leave Mary both her kingdom and her husband. Maitland can hardly have intended that joke to afford Elizabeth much amusement.