A Journey Through Tudor England (23 page)

Fatally, on 17 July 1586, Mary wrote to Babington that she accepted the plan. It was the evidence that Walsingham and Burghley needed to secure her execution. Babington and the other conspirators were arrested and died horrific deaths: first hanged, they were cut down while still alive in order to watch while their ‘privies’ were cut off. They were then disembowelled, before finally being quartered. Even the inured London spectators were aghast at this cruelty.

Mary, meanwhile, was sent to Fotheringhay Castle. To Elizabeth, Mary was still a queen, and so it was only with great reluctance that she signed her death warrant in February 1587. Mary was beheaded for treason and buried at Peterborough, only later being moved to Westminster Abbey.

While imprisoned, Mary had adopted her mother, Mary of Guise’s motto, ‘In my end is my beginning’, and her badge, the phoenix rising from the ashes. Mary was right: she died, but her son lived on to claim the English throne. Along with its dreaded buildings, at Tutbury you can see replicas of her embroidery depicting this subversive message to the world.

‘An “ambrosial banquet” of 300 sweet dishes, “very strange and sundry kinds of fireworks” including one that “burnt unquenchably beneath the water”… thirteen bears baited with mastiffs … and water spectacles including a twenty-four-foot dolphin that emerged from the lake with six musicians in its belly.’

T
he vast, magnificent ochre ruins of Kenilworth Castle have a baleful and crestfallen air. How the mighty have fallen. At its height, in 1575, mercer Robert Laneham extolled ‘the stately seat of Kenilworth Castle, the rare beauty of building … every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high roofed within’. These walls have seen many great persons and wondrous events over the centuries.

There was first a castle at Kenilworth in the 1120s, but its glory days began when King John built a defensive dam and withstood a great siege here in 1266. John of Gaunt built the Great Hall in the 1370s, which was unchanged when Elizabeth I visited 200 years later. Henry V erected a luxury manor house retreat, ‘the Pleasance in the Marsh’, here in 1415—20, while Henry VII had a tennis court built in the early 1490s. Under Henry VIII, the castle was surveyed and maintained. During the Civil War, Kenilworth
was slighted (partially destroyed) and, in the early nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott made Kenilworth famous in his novel of the same name.

The story Scott told — if in a highly fictionalised version — is the one that remains most associated with the castle: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester entertaining Queen Elizabeth I here on a grand scale in 1575.

In 1563, Kenilworth had been granted to Dudley, who was made the Earl of Leicester in 1564. His father, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had also briefly held the castle, but as the man who had put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, he had been executed as a traitor in 1553 (Leicester would never entirely shrug off his father’s disgrace).

Nevertheless, very soon after Elizabeth became Queen, Leicester had become her greatest favourite. His position as Master of the Horse, one of the most senior royal posts, gave him a highly coveted physical proximity to the Queen and, on 23 April 1559, Elizabeth created Leicester a Knight of the Garter, a singular and prestigious honour.

The conspicuous affection displayed between Leicester and Elizabeth caused much comment at court. The Venetian ambassador, Paulo Tiepolo, noted that Leicester was ‘in great favour and very intimate with her Majesty’, while the Spanish ambassador the Count de Feria wrote scandalously that ‘during the last few days, Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night’. The tanned and dark-eyed Robert, whose looks earned him the nickname ‘the Gypsy’, disported himself as the Queen’s consort in all but name.

To marry Leicester would have provoked the opprobrium of the nobility, and would have demeaned the Crown, especially as Leicester was the lowly son of a traitor. The real problem, though,
was that Leicester was already married. So, when on 8 September 1560, Leicester’s wife, Lady Amy Dudley, was found dead at the base of a staircase with a broken neck, the worst was suspected, and the scandal was enough to make any marriage impossible. Yet, Elizabeth continued to tease and taunt Leicester, and to deploy him as a shield when the diplomatic courtships she was equired to consider came her way.

It was in this context that Leicester entertained Elizaoeth at Kenilworth four times, in 1566, 1568, 1572 and, most remarkably, for nineteen days in the summer of 1575: the longest stay at any courtier’s house during any progress.

In preparation, Leicester had building works done at the castle to make it fit for Elizabeth. He constructed what is now called Leicester’s Building in 1571 to provide private apartments for the Queen and her close servants. This sumptuous house included a dancing chamber. He also built the gatehouse to provide an impressive new entrance to the castle. Converted in the 1640s by Colonel Joseph Hawkesworth into a private house, this building features some of the only surviving pieces of the lavish interiors created by Leicester, which were moved here in the 1650s from Leicester’s Building. The fine alabaster fireplace with its ornately carved overmantle in the Oak Room probably came from Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber. It is inscribed with Leicester’s initials, the year 1571, his ragged staff badge and his motto ‘
Droit et loyal’
(‘Just and loyal’).

An elaborate temporary garden was also designed and installed for Elizabeth’s visit in 1575. It featured two ‘fine arbours [made] redolent by sweet trees and flowers’; an aviary decorated with gems; obelisks, spheres and white bears carved from stone; fragrant herbs; and apple, pear and cherry trees. Described in detail in Laneham’s contemporary account, it has now been very successfully recreated by English Heritage, with the planting designed to peak each July, the month of the Queen’s visit.

Elizabeth arrived on horseback on 9 July. At this time, Kenilworth was surrounded by a 100-acre lake and, as Elizabeth crossed it via the 600-foot bridge, she was met by a moving island carrying the Lady of the Lake and two nymphs. Such pageantry was a sign of things to come. Over the next two and a half weeks, Elizabeth was entertained with all manner of gorgeous spectacle: every detail recorded in a long letter by Laneham and an account by author George Gascoigne.

The festivities included music, dancing, hunting, boating, an ‘ambrosial banquet’ of 300 sweet dishes, ‘very strange and sundry kinds of fireworks’ including one that ‘burnt unquenchably beneath the water’, an Italian acrobat performing feats of agility, Morris dancers, thirteen bears baited with mastiffs, jousting, ceremonial gunfire, skirmishes or mock battles, a ‘Savage Man’ who appeared from the forest ‘himself for grown all in Moss and Ivy’, and water spectacles including a twenty-four-foot dolphin that emerged from the lake with six musicians in its belly — one can only imagine what on earth such a thing would have looked like. All the pageants and plays shared the same theme: marriage.

Was this Leicester’s last lavish attempt to win Elizabeth’s hand in marriage: a final extravaganza to win her round? Or was it instead an ultimatum — marry me or release me — with this extraordinary, unsurpassed revelry a parting gift? Certainly, the enormous cost half-crippled Leicester’s finances. But was it all in vain?

In December 1575, Leicester revived an old flirtation with Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, the Queen’s cousin. When Elizabeth discovered that they had secretly married in September 1578, she was incandescent with rage. She had regarded Leicester as her own possession, and it took him five long years to claw his way back into her affections, while his wife was never welcome at court in his lifetime.

In 1588, Leicester died, aged fifty-six, on his way to Kenilworth. In his will, he left the Queen a string of 600 pearls with a great diamond and emerald jewel as a ‘token of an humble faithful heart and the last gift that ever I can send her’. According to the Spanish ambassador, on hearing the news of his death, Elizabeth locked herself away and refused to come out for several days, until William Cecil, Lord Burghley ordered the doors to be broken down. Two months later, it was reported that the Queen was ‘much aged and spent, and very melancholy’.

Elizabeth outlived Leicester by fifteen years. He was buried in St Mary’s Church, Warwick with his elder brother Ambrose, and Kenilworth was left to Leicester’s illegitimate son, also named Robert Dudley (1574—1619). The castle would never see such magnificence again.

‘An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers … with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide.’

O
n William Shakespeare’s death, his cantankerous rival, Ben Jonson, paid the bard a compliment that continues to define our attitude to Shakespeare: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time.’ Shakespeare was such a rare talent that his creativity still permeates the cultural fabric of society, and his works have never been more performed, adapted or imitated than they are today. So it is easy to think of him as a man out of time. But, in fact, he was born in a rural market town in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and was formed by the social, religious and political world-view of the period. His plays were written to meet the commercial demands of the flourishing theatre culture of London in the 1590s, and his heyday straddled the last days of Gloriana and the early years of James I’s reign.

You can experience Shakespeare anywhere you can see or read his plays but, as the thriving tourist industry attests, the best place to remember the man himself is in his hometown of Stratfordupon-Avon. (The controversy over whether the man from Stratford actually wrote the plays, or whether it was someone else,
is an old one that flares up from time to time, including during the time of writing. Until otherwise proven, let’s assume the man from Avon and the Bard are one and the same.)

Between 20 and 25 April 1564, William was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden in part of the house in Henley Street, Stratford now known as ‘Shakespeare’s birthplace’. The house, built in 1530, is a timber-framed building made of wattle-and-daub. Inside, it is recreated to look as it may have done in Shakespeare’s day, and the parlour retains its original sixteenth-century floor of blue limestone across which, as a child, William might have crawled and tottered.

William’s family on both sides came from the Forest of Arden: the derivation of his mother’s maiden name. His father, John, practised the highly skilled trade of glove making — which is recreated here today — and was respected in the town: four years after William’s birth, he became bailiff (mayor) of Stratford.

William survived the devastating outbreak of plague in 1564 and lived in the Henley Street house — which was probably extended to its current size in 1575 — until the age of fourteen. He attended the excellent local grammar school, King’s New School, where he was trained in Latin literature including Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Livy and Cicero, and was taught his Bible and Book of Common Prayer. During these years, he almost certainly saw one of the fifteen companies of players who called on Stratford between 1568 and 1582, and his love of theatre must have started here.

In the summer of 1582, as an eighteen-year-old, he started to pay visits to the cottage of orphaned siblings Anne and Bartholomew Hathaway, in the nearby village of Shottery. This fifteenth-century thatched cottage survives with the basic medieval ‘cruck’ or A-frame design [see T
HE
T
YPICAL
T
UDOR
H
OUSE
]. It had been extended from a simple two-room abode in the 1560s, exchanging the central hearth for a fireplace with a smoke hood
and adding a second storey. It also had two ‘joyned’ (four-poster) beds (two from the 1580s are there now).

William certainly enjoyed his visits, for on 27 November 1582, in a rush to beat the ban on marriages in Advent, a marriage licence was issued for William and Anne. His twenty-six-year-old bride was pregnant, and their daughter, Susanna, was born six months later.