All the Queen's Men (18 page)

Shortly after marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain were halted, an ambassador from Philip's uncle, Ferdinand I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived at the English Court singing the praises of Ferdinand's younger son, the Archduke Charles. This was to prove a more protracted courtship lasting several years, involving envoys and Privy Councillors, such as the Earl of Sussex, shuttling energetically between London and Vienna, together with extensive meetings of the Privy Council to discuss the merits of the potential marriage. Eventually negotiations floundered as Charles was also a Catholic and declined to make the necessary compromises in practising his faith that would prove acceptable in Protestant England. Again, Elizabeth was not unduly concerned, she had merely been going through the motions in order to please her Council.

Eric XIV of Sweden was at least a Protestant, being a keen Lutheran. The Queen dispatched the Flemish artist Steven van der Muelen to Stockholm to have the royal Swede's portrait painted in order to establish what he looked like. The Swedish King was so pleased with the finished result that he rewarded the artist handsomely. Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Elizabeth was less impressed – Eric's advances were quickly rebuffed despite sending his brother, Duke John of Finland, over to England to plead his cause. This was to prove most unfortunate for Eric, as he was not to last overlong on the Swedish throne, being deposed some seven years later and subsequently poisoned – by his brother Duke John. Eric had first sought Elizabeth's hand some years earlier in 1554 when she was still a princess. Turning down his proposal, Elizabeth wrote to her sister Queen Mary asking, ‘for leave to remain in that state I was, which best pleases me. I am at present of the same mind, and intend to continue with Her Majesty's favour. There is no life comparable to it . . . though I was offered the greatest prince in Europe.'
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And so it was to prove, as the greatest princes in Europe came and went in ever-increasing numbers, continually seeking to claim her hand only to face rejection. The problem appeared to be either a lack of passion or of politically acceptable suitors. In either case, the chemistry never seemed quite right.

Equally irreconcilable considerations inhibited a choice of husband from the ranks of nobility, for to satisfy one was to upset considerably more, thereby causing dangerous divisions within the Royal Court. Elizabeth was mindful of the risk involved in selecting a consort from her own aristocracy following the salutary experience of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. She had been married to the French King François II, who had died barely a year after succeeding to the French throne, leaving Mary to return to her native Scotland. Here she made two short-lived and disastrous marriages with husbands drawn from the nobility. The first was to Elizabeth's young cousin Lord Henry Stuart Darnley, who had been considered by some as a suitable husband for Elizabeth. The marriage was not to last long before Darnley was assassinated, supposedly on the orders of the arrogant James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell, who went on to marry Mary and was also suspected of being implicated in her previous husband's murder. This gruesome, Macbeth-like scenario ended with them both in exile, Mary fleeing to England, Bothwell imprisoned in Denmark. These traumatic events hardly encouraged Elizabeth to choose a husband from the ranks of her own nobility. By this time she had fallen in love with Lord Robert Dudley, but he was already married.

The Queen had created the handsome young Lord Dudley her Master of Horse when she first came to the throne in November 1558. He had previously held the post of Master of the Buckhounds when Elizabeth's half-brother, Edward, had been on the throne, and was widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished riders in the kingdom. The Queen was well aware that he already had a wife, the former Amy Robsart, daughter of a wealthy Norfolk squire, whom Dudley had married when still in his teens; Elizabeth had been a guest at the wedding. When Lord Robert came to Court, Amy was left behind in the country, not an unusual state of affairs for an important royal courtier. However, it was rumoured that their initial loving relationship had already cooled and that Dudley was seeking romance elsewhere.

By the following spring, it had become perfectly obvious that Dudley had become much more to the Queen than merely her Master of Horse; the entire Court was shocked at the intimacy of their passionate relationship and the way in which it was so openly flaunted. Very soon, news of the scandal had spread throughout Europe and scoffing remarks were being made that the English Queen had intentions of marrying her ‘horse keeper'. Elizabeth cared not what people thought. After all those tedious years, interspersed with moments of tension and acute terror, prior to ascending the throne, she was having the time of her life. She was deliciously conscious of the sensation she was creating, and gleefully sensed that many members of the Court were envious of Robert Dudley's increasingly close relationship with her. Meanwhile, the besotted young Queen showered Dudley with gifts and honours, making him a Knight of the Garter and Constable of Windsor Castle, endowing him with extensive country estates and large sums of money. The dispassionate observer would not have found it difficult to see exactly why Elizabeth found Dudley so utterly irresistible. He was physically very attractive, nearly six foot tall, with skin so dark that he was nicknamed ‘the gypsy'. He had the athletic figure of a horseman with the long lanky legs and tight buttocks of a modern-day polo player. Lord Robert Dudley and the young Queen were virtually the same age and had much in common – both were fluent in French and Italian, and enjoyed similar cultural interests such as drama and poetry along with a love of the outdoor pursuits of hunting and hawking. Dancing was one of their favourite pastimes – the entire Court was held spellbound by the intensity of their relationship as their expert and emotionally charged interpretation of the
Gaillard
or the
Volta
elevated mere dance to the heights of the ballet.

The less dispassionate spectator, watching the evolution of this royal romance, was far from pleased. Those such as the conscientious William Cecil regarded it as an unmitigated disaster. Whenever he needed the Queen to discuss important matters of state, she was all too often riding out with Lord Robert. Even when the earnest Principal Secretary was finally successful in gaining an audience with Elizabeth, her mind seemed to be elsewhere. It was all very distasteful and distressing to the anxious Cecil, who pondered where this unwelcome romance would lead. He regarded the dashing Dudley in a far less favourable light than Elizabeth, seeing only an insolent and highly dangerous distraction to a young and impressionable Queen during the all-important early period of her rule, when her attention needed to be firmly focused on the tasks in hand. Wasn't he already married, with a dreadful reputation for chasing every pretty girl in sight? Had not both his father and grandfather been executed as traitors and Dudley himself been a prisoner in the Tower for plotting against Queen Mary? No wonder Cecil considered him to be such a thoroughly undesirable individual from a highly disreputable family. This view was shared by many other senior members of the Royal Court, those who represented the opinion-formers and the decision-makers within the kingdom. To William Cecil and his colleagues, Dudley represented an irrelevant yet highly unwelcome distraction to the important task of ruling the nation, particularly one with so many problems at that particular moment in time.

Dudley appears to have been extremely conceited. The large number of flattering portraits commissioned by him from the leading artists of the day, depicting him in a variety of flamboyant poses, demonstrates either a passionate interest in the visual arts or an obsessive concern for himself. In Steven van der Muelen's portrayal of him, painted around 1565, and now part of the Wallace Collection in London, Dudley stares insolently out of the canvas, hand on hip, expensively attired, madly in love with both the Queen and himself.

Precisely what Dudley ultimately hoped to achieve in this headlong pursuit of the Queen is difficult to imagine. Quite where Elizabeth thought this highly indiscreet romantic and dangerous liaison with a married man was going to end is equally a matter of pure speculation, as tongues wagged furiously across the length and breadth of Europe. Perhaps Elizabeth had given it little thought or did not really care. For a young woman of twenty-five years of age, with a normal healthy sexual appetite, Elizabeth had hitherto led an almost nun-like existence; now all this pent-up emotion had exploded into the relationship with Dudley, and as so often the case, the romance was with a person considered by the majority of the Court to be thoroughly unsuitable.

These considerations were overtaken by events when the body of Lord Dudley's wife was discovered at an isolated house in the Oxfordshire countryside, lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck. There were no witnesses to the cause of Amy's fall; the precise reason for her death was never established and remains a mystery. In the autumn of 1560, the Court buzzed with wild rumours of foul play. These unsubstantiated accusations were to continue despite an inquest reaching a conclusion that Amy's death had been accidental. This tragic situation proved to be a disaster for Dudley and at the same time posed a dilemma for the Queen: although now free to marry should she so desire, the circumstances that made this possible placed a question mark over the wisdom of becoming his wife and probably incurring a huge stain on her character. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador at the French Court, glumly warned the Queen that if she went ahead and married Dudley she would be discredited throughout the whole of Europe. Although this was conceivably true, it was not what Elizabeth wished to hear. It was therefore not surprising that she became deeply enraged a few years later when discovering that Sir Nicholas's daughter, Beth, had fallen in love with Sir Walter Ralegh, by then another of the Queen's favourite young men.

Publicly, the Queen continued to support Dudley but privately gave up any thoughts she might have secretly harboured of becoming his wife. She valued her reputation with the world at large far too highly to risk it in order to satisfy any romantic inclinations. Once again, the Queen's acute grasp of reality was to overrule her personal considerations; she was also acutely aware that Dudley was hugely unpopular in her Court and that marriage to such a controversial character could well alienate the support of her citizens and prejudice her position as Queen at a crucial stage in her reign. By then she was enjoying the power and privilege of being the sovereign far too much to endanger her position – not for Elizabeth any romantic nonsense of ‘giving up the throne for the person I love'. Her career was far more important than love and marriage. Much to everyone's relief, the torrid affair between Elizabeth and Dudley gradually cooled into the warm friendship that was to last until Robert Dudley, by then Earl of Leicester, died in the autumn of 1588, nearly thirty years later, probably from malaria contracted when campaigning in Flanders. The stricken Earl wrote to the Queen from his deathbed, and when she died some fifteen years later his letter was discovered lying in a jewel box beside her bed; written on the letter, in the Queen's own handwriting, the simple phrase ‘his last letter'.
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Dudley had been the great love of Elizabeth's life, an unfulfilled romance that was to remain with her and influence her actions for as long as she lived. Their friendship was to survive Dudley's secret marriage in 1578 to Lettice Knollys, following an intermittent affair with this lively red-haired daughter of Privy Councillor, Sir Francis Knollys, the Queen's cousin. Dudley had first started the relationship with Lettice purely to make Elizabeth jealous – George Gower's portrait of her shows a face that bears more than a passing resemblance to Queen Elizabeth. Lettice was the widow of the 1st Earl of Essex, who had died of dysentery while campaigning in Ireland. Many years later her son, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, was to become the last of the Queen's great favourites. When Elizabeth found out about Dudley's secret marriage to Lettice Knollys, she was incandescent with rage, feeling totally betrayed and humiliated by the only man she had really loved. It was with considerable difficulty that her Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, no friend of Dudley's, was able to persuade the Queen not to consign him to the Tower of London. Some considerable time was to elapse before he was able to regain royal favour and Lettice was never allowed to return to Court. She outlived them all, dying in 1634 at the age of ninety-five, a remarkable age for those days.

In the years that followed the very public affair with Dudley, the Queen was to have a succession of particular court favourites, all equally handsome, attentive and effortlessly charming at all times, all dazzling smiles and witty repartee. These superstar courtiers included Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Thomas Heneage, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and towards the end of her reign, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex and stepson of Robert Dudley.

Although Elizabeth undoubtedly found them all both attractive and amusing, none was regarded as a serious suitor or attempted to be so, nor did they delude themselves that they were likely marriage material. In all probability, only Christopher Hatton was seriously in love with his sovereign and like Elizabeth was destined never to marry. Hatton was intensely jealous of any other handsome courtiers whom Elizabeth showed an interest in, those such as the Earl of Oxford who was every bit as good at dancing and horseriding as Hatton, and at the same time considerably younger. When Hatton was away from Court and separated from his beloved Queen, he bombarded her with passionate love letters, lengthy and sometimes a little ludicrous, hoping for ‘longer life so that his faith and love may be found enviable and spotless towards so royal and fearless a princess',
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as he was to declare in the autumn of 1586. Meanwhile, a stream of suitors from abroad continued unabated. This activity intensified when the formidable Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother and Regent of France, successively offered her three sons for Elizabeth's inspection and possible approval, like prize bulls at auction. First was her eldest son, Charles, who had inherited the French crown at the age of ten after his elder brother, François II died suddenly after less than a year on the throne. Charles was now fourteen, less than half the age of the English Queen, who worried that people might sneer that Charles appeared to be marrying his mother! It was hardly surprising that negotiations soon collapsed amid bitter recriminations between England and France, as a tearful Elizabeth screamed at her Privy Councillors. Undeterred, Catherine de Medici later advanced her next son, the effeminate Prince Henry of Anjou. Once more there was a wide age gap, this time nearly twenty years. The tactless Lady Frances Cobham, one of the Queen's attendants, informed Elizabeth that in her view marriages worked best when the happy couple were of a similar age. There were further problems prejudicing a successful union between the English Queen and the young Frenchman, as in addition to being a well-known transvestite, notorious for his promiscuity with either sex, the French Duke was a devout Catholic, ‘obstinately papistical', as the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Smith, was to pompously declare. None of these characteristics indicated an ideal husband for a Protestant English Queen. Yet again, proceedings were terminated, this time without tears.