The Boleyns (23 page)

Throgmorton’s distress was typical of that suffered by loyal defenders of the Queen’s position, and it became obvious that to marry Dudley would be political suicide. The rumours did not go away, and years later the author of
Leicester’s Commonwealth
accused Sir Richard Verney, the owner of Cumnor, of making away with Amy on the orders of her husband. This was admittedly a virulently polemical tract, but it reflected what was widely believed in London at the time.
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Dudley did all the right things. He spent nearly £2,000 on his wife’s funeral, and wore mourning for about six months, but when he returned to court in October he received a number of marks of personal favour, and believed, unrealistically, that his hopes of marriage were still alive. Quite typically, Elizabeth sent out ambiguous signals, and frictions within the court built up again. The nobility were rumoured to be ready to rebel if the marriage took place, and there was an affray between Dudley’s servants and those of the Earl of Pembroke.
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Nevertheless, anyone who openly slandered the favourite was in danger of the royal wrath, and William Cecil (who was as opposed to the marriage idea as anyone) was forced to behave with the utmost discretion. At the same time, in November 1560, the Queen drew back from the idea of conferring a title on Robert, and since this would have been a necessary precursor to marriage, it may be that by then she had decided that the idea was impossible, although that is by no means clear. She would not have forgotten that her father had conferred the title of Marquis of Pembroke upon her mother nearly thirty years before, with just such an intention. What is clear is that Elizabeth was in considerable distress of mind. As a woman she desired Dudley wholeheartedly, and could barely keep her hands off him in public, but as a queen she recognised the likely outcome of any decision to marry him. It would probably cost her crown, and that meant more to her than any man. It is even possible that she was party to a devious ploy by Lord Robert in February 1561 to secure the backing of King Philip for the match, in return for some form of toleration for English Catholics.
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The only evidence for these exchanges comes from De Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, who may have misrepresented their intention, but it seems that Dudley was in earnest, and it can only be surmised that Elizabeth was playing her usual double game. It is hard to credit that she was aware of Lord Robert’s alleged offer to reconvert the realm to Catholicism in return for the King of Spain’s support. Her Church, like her Crown, meant more to her than sexual gratification.
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Elizabeth nearly died of the smallpox in October 1562, and for about a week anxiety was intense. There was much speculation about the succession in the event of her death, one party supporting Lady Catherine Grey, and another the Earl of Huntingdon. The Queen was powerless to prevent these discussions, but she said two things which relate to her relationship with Dudley, and which in the circumstances are highly revealing. In the first place she swore that, in spite of appearances, they had never had sexual intercourse, and in the second place she wanted him made protector of the realm if she should die.
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This provision indicates that she was prepared to leave the succession to be decided by her council, and that her trust in Lord Robert was undiminished, but that she had not committed herself to him physically, and would never do so. Although he remained her favourite, he was henceforth confined politically to membership of the Privy Council, where he quickly assumed a dominant role, usually in opposition to Sir William Cecil. It was largely through his influence that the Queen intervened in the affairs of France in 1562–3, and burned her fingers badly when the Huguenots settled with the government and turned against her.
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Her trust in his judgement was never entirely restored. Ironically enough, his elevation to the earldom of Leicester, which occurred on 29 September 1564 had more to do with her rather far-fetched idea that he would be a suitable husband for the Queen of Scots than for herself. How seriously this idea was intended is not very clear, and Mary was not amused at being offered Elizabeth’s ‘cast off lover’, but whether this was ever more than a game played between them is not apparent. Dudley apparently professed himself willing to do his duty, but never regarded it as a realistic proposition.
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As Earl of Leicester he was properly endowed with landed estates, including the magnificent castle of Kennilworth where in 1575 he entertained his royal mistress with lavish splendour, endued with dramatic representations of true love, perhaps in a forlorn and belated hope that she would change her mind about marrying him. By the time of these entertainments Robert was in an adulterous relationship with Lettice, Countess of Essex. This was, of course, kept secret, but after her husband died in September 1576, their intimacy increased and she became pregnant. In the spring of 1578 he secretly married her at Kennilworth.
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Inevitably Elizabeth found out, and became immensely and quite irrationally angry. Robert was man like any other, and could not be satisfied indefinitely with the kind of platonic relationship which was the most that she was prepared to offer. The fact that he had enjoyed a rather similar association with Lady Douglas Sheffield remained unknown to her. He seems to have made his peace privately with his irate mistress, because although his wife was banished from the court, it appears that his reign as royal favourite continued unchecked. Lettice was not satisfied with secrecy. A secret marriage could be too easily repudiated if circumstances should change, so they went through a public ceremony before witnesses in September, and Elizabeth seems to have reconciled herself to the situation.
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It was, after all, only a return to that which had appertained before September 1560, except that the Queen was now over forty, and even the keenest advocates of matrimony now recognised that it was probably too late to secure the succession. She had been conducting a diplomatic flirtation with the Duke of Anjou since 1572, and that continued in a fitful fashion, with endless wrangling over religious rights, and what powers the Duke would enjoy in England. At this stage there was no sexual frisson in those discussions whatsoever.
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Meanwhile, Elizabeth ruled as no man could have done. A king, if he were of suitable age, was expected to show military prowess, ideally on the field of battle, but a least in the war games of the tilt and the tournament. Such a role was not possible for a queen, and Mary had deliberately distanced herself from all such entertainments, but Elizabeth embraced them enthusiastically. She became the ‘Queen of Fairie’, presiding glamorously, where every courtier was supposed to wear her favour in the lists, and to offer her their tribute of daring-do. Using the tropes of the courtly love tradition, she became the unattainable but desirable lady, with whom all her servants were supposed to be in love.
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Even aging ministers of State were required to play this game, accepting the reward of a smile or a small favour in lieu of the more substantial rewards that they might reasonably have expected. She also made remorseless use of the female stereotype. A woman was supposed to be fickle, and to change her mind? Very well, she would procrastinate endlessly, in order to demonstrate that she alone could make certain critical decisions. Let them wait! She would not be taken for granted, and probably rejoiced when her council was divided, because that gave her more freedom of action.
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This was particularly demonstrated in her relations with Spain, where she continued to give Philip’s ambassadors bland assurances of goodwill while allowing (and even encouraging) the remorseless depredations of her freebooting subjects, particularly John Hawkins and Francis Drake. She was a mere woman; how could she know about such things? Two other aspects of her foreign policy especially demonstrate this feminine style of diplomacy – her relationship with the Dutch rebels and her search for a husband. This latter was a unique operation which took her agents and representatives to Sweden, Vienna and Paris over more than twenty years.
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There they were expected to respond positively to all the suggestions made, but also to insist on personal visits by the prospective grooms, and to avoid any outright commitment, particularly on the question of religious concessions. Over the years she was pursued in this fashion by Eric of Sweden, the Archduke Charles (as we have seen), Henri, Duke of Anjou and Francois, Duke of Alencon. With Eric the lack of real interest soon became mutual, and he went in pursuit of Mary of Scotland. With Charles and Henri the negotiations broke down over religion, and with Francois time eventually foreclosed the exercise in a very interesting way in 1581. From 1578 onward the Queen was endeavouring to persuade her council to accept Anjou (as he had then become), largely, it would seem, as a means of forestalling his proposed intervention in the Netherlands, but the negotiations hung fire.
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Then in August 1581 the Duke resolved to come in person to secure his prize, and Elizabeth succumbed to those charms which were so lacking in the eyes of her subjects. In what looks like an onrush of menopausal sexuality, she kissed him and swore that she would marry him. Her councillors and the ladies of her chamber were alike appalled, and spent the whole of the following night talking her out of her resolution. They succeeded and the next day she told the Duke that she had changed her mind. He departed, cursing the fickleness of women, and that was the end of her matrimonial adventures.
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Contemporaries and historians alike have debated this curious episode. Was the Queen serious, even briefly, or was it another ploy aimed at getting rid of him? In a way it was symbolic of her whole attitude to marriage, in which the needs of the woman and of the politician were in constant tension. She probably would have married, if the conditions had been right, but they never were, and in the end she backed out of each negotiation on the ground of incompatibility, usually religious. This makes all her proposals look like episodes of foreign policy, unrelated to real emotion, but that was probably not the case. She metaphorically dangled her person before the courts of Europe in the hope of finding a satisfying relationship, but at the end the price in terms of surrendered authority, was always too high. Like her sister, Mary, although in a different way, Elizabeth was a victim of that culture which made it impossible to be both a ruler and wife. At the beginning of her reign, John Aylmer had proposed that a solution could be found, but it turned out not to be the case, and the Queen paid with a lifetime of frustration for the power which she cherished. God, who had given her a realm to rule, did not chose to find her a husband who would share that burden in a satisfactory way, and perhaps it could not be done.
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Her relationship with the Dutch was female mainly in its deviousness, because for more then twenty years she continued to express goodwill towards Spain, which ruled the country, while permitting her subjects to support the rebels there in any way that they chose. It was an exercise in brinkmanship, postulated on the theory that Philip did not wish to add her to his list of enemies, and it worked. In 1565 the obvious English sympathy with the Protestant ‘Compromise’ movement led the Regent, Margaret of Parma, to impose a trade embargo, until that proved to be more damaging to Antwerp than it was to London, and in 1568 Elizabeth anticipated the Duke of Alba’s money, intended to pay his troops, leading to another embargo.
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Between 1568 and 1572, while negotiating with Alba to get this lifted, she was giving refuge to those fugitives from his regime known as the Sea Beggars – pirates in effect – who preyed on Flemish shipping. In 1572, in what was ostensibly a conciliatory gesture, she expelled the Sea Beggars, only for them to cross to Brill, seize the town and give the revolt against Alba a new lease of life. Nobody knows whether that outcome was intended or not.
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Thereafter there were always rebels in arms against the Spanish authorities, and Elizabeth turned a blind eye to those military volunteers who went over in considerable numbers to help them. Such service not only got hot-headed young men out of the country, but enabled professional soldiers to secure the up-to-date experience which they needed to train the local levies upon which the English government relied for the defence of the realm, whether against foreign invasion or domestic rebellion. Most of the county muster-masters of the 1570s had seen service in the Low Countries, and short of going to war herself that provided the best means of supplying such a need.
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It was not until 1585 that this ambiguous policy was finally exposed by the situation following the assassination of William the Silent. Then the Queen was faced with the stark alternatives of open intervention or standing aside while the revolt was suppressed. That was no choice, faced with the prospect of unchallenged Spanish power on the other side of the North Sea, and the result was open war, but Elizabeth was still negotiating with the Duke of Parma as the armada sailed up the Channel.