THE FAVOURITE OF A QUEEN
When Robert Dudley was cradled in the year 1532 the ball of Fortune was
already at his feet, awaiting the necessary vigour and enterprise to
kick it. He had, it is true, no great lineage to boast of. Cecil spoke
contemptuously of him in later and envious years as grandson of a mere
squire and son of a knight; but the so-called squire was none other than
Edmond Dudley, the shrewd financier and crafty-tongued minion of Henry
VII., who, with Empson for ally, filled his sovereign's purse with
ill-gotten gold, and paid for his enterprise with his head when the
eighth Henry set himself to the paying off of old scores. His father,
the knight, was that John Dudley, King Henry's trusted friend and
executor of his will, Admiral and Earl Marshal of England, whose
splendid gifts and boundless ambition won a dukedom for him, and made
him for a time more powerful than his King.
[Illustration: ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER]
Such was the parentage of Robert Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland's
fifth son, who inherited, with his grandfather's scheming brain and
plausible tongue, the ambition and love of splendour which made his
father the most brilliant subject of two kings. And this great, if
dangerous heritage was not long in manifesting itself in the young
lordling, who was destined to add to his family's story a chapter more
romantic and dazzling than that of which his father was the hero.
As a boy in the schoolroom he was quick to show gifts of mind almost
phenomenal in one so young. Latin and Italian, mathematics and abstruse
sciences came as easily to this scion of the Dudleys as reading and
arithmetic to less-dowered boys. And with this precocity of mind he
developed physical graces and skill no less remarkable until, by the
time he was well in his 'teens, few grown men could ride a horse, couch
a lance, or speed an arrow with such skill as he.
At the Royal Court, where his ducal father was autocrat, the handsome
boy of all the accomplishments found immediate favour and rapid
promotion. He was dubbed a knight when most youths of his years were
still wrestling with their Latin Grammar; he was appointed for life
Master of the Buckhounds; and was chosen one of the six gilded youths
who ministered to the King in the Privy Chamber. And in love he was as
precocious as at the Royal Court and in mental and manly
accomplishments, for at eighteen we find him standing at the altar in
the King's Palace at Sheen, near Richmond, with his youthful Sovereign
as best man.
Whether it was really a love-match or not is open to doubt, perhaps;
for Robert Dudley seems to have had little voice in the choice of his
bride. For his elder brother, Guildford, the Duke chose a wife of
exalted rank, none other than the Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of Louis
XII.'s Queen and Henry VIII.'s sister. But for his boy, Robert, a plain
knight's daughter seems to have been good enough in his eyes; and she
was Amy, child of Sir John Robsart, of Siderstern, a lady whose fate was
to be as full of pathos and tragedy as that of his brother Guildford's
wife.
For a time, however, Fortune seemed to smile on this union of the Duke's
son and the Knight's daughter, who was as fair as she was to be
unfortunate, and who was not without a goodly dower of Norfolk lands, on
which her youthful husband settled for a few years of peaceful life. He
soon became a man of mark in the county of his adoption, taking the lead
in local affairs, administering his estates with skill, and finally
blossoming into a Member of Parliament to represent his neighbours at
Westminster. But the call of Court life was always in his ears; and many
a long spell he stole from his wife and his rural duties to spend among
the gaieties of Whitehall or the splendours of Henri II.'s French
_entourage_.
With the death of the boy-king, Edward VI., a change tragic and
unexpected came in the young knight's life. His ambitious father coveted
a crown for his daughter-in-law, the Lady Jane Grey, whom he had induced
Edward, on his death-bed, to nominate as his successor; and
Northumberland, thus armed with Royal authority and spurred by his
insatiable ambition, sought by force of arms to give effect to his
scheme almost before the breath had left the late Sovereign's body. How
his daring project failed is well-known history--how the Princess Mary
on her way southward to her throne eluded Robert Dudley, who was sent to
intercept her; how she equally outwitted Northumberland and his army,
and made her triumphant entry into London as Queen; and how her
vengeance fell on those who had sought to snatch the crown from her.
From the Duke and Lady Jane to Robert Dudley, all the traitors who had
conspired to do this dastardly deed were sent to cool their misguided
ardour in the Tower, from which Northumberland, Jane and her husband
were led to the headsman's block; while Robert Dudley was among those
who were left to languish in durance, and to while away the tedious
hours of captivity by carving their emblems and names on the walls of
their cells, where they may be seen to this day, or to stroll
disconsolately on the Tower leads by way of melancholy exercise.
Robert, it is said, found many of these hours of duress far from
unpleasant; for among the prisoners in the Tower was none other than the
Princess Elizabeth, sister to the Queen (and her successor on the
throne); and we are told, on what authority does not appear, that there
were many sweet and stolen meetings between the fair young Princess and
the captive knight, when bribed warders turned a blind eye on their
dallying. And rumour even goes so far as to speak of secret nuptials,
the fruits of which were, in late years, to bear such high names as my
Lord of Essex and Francis Bacon.
"Fairy tales," no doubt; but, stripped of such ornamental embellishment,
there can be little doubt that it was within the Tower's grim walls that
Dudley first learnt to love the lady who was to be his Queen, and in
whose life he was destined to play such a romantic part, when she should
wear her crown, and he should be her avowed lover and aspirant to her
hand.
A year of such pleasantly-qualified captivity, and Robert Dudley was a
free man again, sent to purge his treason, by a Queen, indulgent to his
youth and it may be to his good looks, by wielding a sword in the war
then raging between Spain and France; and here he acquitted himself so
valiantly for Mary's Spanish allies that, on his return in 1558, covered
with glory, the ban on the Dudleys was removed; and Robert and his
brothers and sisters were restored to all the rank and rights their
father's treason had forfeited.
A few months later Queen Mary died; and when Elizabeth ascended the
throne, Dudley's sun burst into splendour. The romance which had been
cradled amidst the fearful joys of prison-meetings, was now to flourish
under vastly-changed conditions. That the new Queen had lost her heart
to the handsome and accomplished cavalier, whose prowess in war had set
the seal on the favour won by his graces of person and mind and his
ingratiating charm, there can be small doubt; and as little that Dudley,
forgetful of the wife left to pine in solitude in her Norfolk home,
returned the devotion of the lady, now his Sovereign, who had made his
Tower prison a palace of delight.
Nor did Elizabeth make any concealment of her passion. She was a Queen;
and none should question her right to smile on any man, be he subject or
king. Before she had been a year on the Throne, Dudley was proudly
wearing the coveted Garter; was a Privy Councillor and Master of Her
Majesty's horse. She gave him fat lands and monasteries to add to the
large possessions with which her brother Edward had endowed his
favourite; and wherever she went on her Royal progresses, Robert Dudley
rode gallantly at her right hand, a King in all but name. And no Queen
ever had more splendid escort.
He was, indeed, a man after her own heart, the _beau ideal_ of a
cavalier; a lover, like herself, of pomp and splendour, a past-master of
the arts of pageantry and pleasure, and the owner of a tongue as skilled
in the language of adroit flattery as in the use of honeyed words. Such
was Robert Dudley who loved his Queen; and such the Queen who returned
undisguised admiration for flattery, and love for love.
That the greatest Kings and Princes of Europe sought the young Queen's
hand; that ambassadors tumbled over each other in their eagerness to
press on her this splendid alliance and that, mattered nothing to her.
Her hand was her own as much as her Crown--she would dispose of it as
she wished, and none should say her nay. To the fears and anger of her
people at the prospect of her alliance with a subject she was as
indifferent as to the jealousies of Dudley's Court rivals. She could
afford to smile at them all--and she did.
And, while Dudley was thus basking in the smiles of his Sovereign, the
Lady Amy was eating her heart out in loneliness and a futile jealousy in
Norfolk. Her husband, it is true, paid her a duty visit now and then,
and kept her purse well supplied for dresses she had not the heart to
wear. She knew she had lost his love, if, indeed, she had ever had it;
and she spent her days, as was known too late, in tears and prayers for
deliverance from a burden she was too weary to bear longer.
One day, in September 1560, an ominous rumour began to take voice.
Dudley's wife had been poisoned--by her husband, it was said with bated
breath. The Queen herself heard, and repeated the report to the Spanish
Ambassador; varying it on the following day by the statement that "Lord
Robert's wife had broken her neck. It appears that she fell down a
staircase." And this amended version proved to be tragically true. While
Dudley was dallying with his Queen amid the splendours of the Court, his
devoted wife was found, with her neck broken, lying at the foot of a
staircase in the house of a Norfolk neighbour, whose guest she was.
How had this tragedy happened? and had Dudley any hand in it? were the
questions that passed fear-fully from mouth to mouth, from end to end
of England. The story, as told at the inquest, throws little light on
what must always remain more or less a mystery.
This story was as simple as it was tragic. It seems that Amy Robsart
(for by her maiden name she will always live in memory and in pity) rose
early on Sunday morning, the 8th of September, the day of her death, and
suggested that the entire household at Cumnor Place, at which she was
staying, should leave her alone and spend the day at a neighbouring fair
at Abingdon. "As for me," she said, "I shall be quite happy alone. I
have no taste for pleasure; but I always like to know that others are
enjoying themselves, even if I cannot." Eagerly responsive to such a
welcome suggestion the entire household repaired to the fair, except the
hostess (Mrs Owen) and a lady guest; and with them as companions Amy
Robsart spent a quiet and peaceful day. During the evening she rose
suddenly from the card-table, at which the three ladies were playing,
and left the room; and nothing more was seen of her until the servants
returning from the fair found her dead body at the stair-foot.
Was it suicide or a brutal murder? The bucolic jury shrank from either
conclusion, and gave as their verdict "accidental death." That Amy
Robsart ended her own life is far from improbable; for it was no secret
to her friends that she was weary of it, and would welcome the release
death alone could bring. But the general opinion, so far from supporting
this plausible theory, turned to thoughts of murder, and branded Dudley
as slayer of his wife. It was even commonly whispered that he had bribed
one of his minions, Anthony Foster, to hurl her down the stairs to her
death.
Whatever may be the truth, none could prove it then; and who shall
succeed now? It is more generous and certainly more probable to suppose
that Amy Robsart by her own act--wilful, at the dictate of a brain
disordered by grief, or accidental--removed the barrier to her husband's
passion for his Queen. Certain it is that Dudley affected, if he did not
actually feel, deep sorrow at his wife's death, and that he spared no
pains to solve the mystery that surrounded it.
His grief, however, seems to have been short-lived; for before the
unhappy Amy had been many months in her grave we find him more ardent
than ever in his devotion to Elizabeth, whose hand he was now free to
claim. But the Queen, who was nothing if not an arrant coquette, was in
no mood to be caught even by the man she loved. She drove him to
distraction by her caprices. One moment she would "rap him on the
knuckles," only to smile her sweetest on him the next. One day she would
flaunt in his face a patent of peerage, as evidence of her affection;
the next she would cut the parchment to pieces under his nose, laughing
the while. She roused him to frenzies of jealousy by dallying with one
Royal offer of marriage after another--now it was Philip, the Spanish
King, now His Majesty of Sweden--canvassing their respective merits and
charms in his presence, and flaring into angry retorts when he ventured
to ridicule his august rivals.
She carried her tortures even to the extent of seeming to encourage a
match between her favourite and Mary Queen of Scots; and, to make him a
worthy suitor for a Royal hand, granted him the peerage she had so long
dangled before him. Robert Dudley as Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester
was no unfit husband for her "Royal sister"; certainly a much more
possible personage than "Sir Robert" could have been. But she never
intended thus to lose her most acceptable admirer, and was
relieved--though she affected to be angry--when news came that Mary had
chosen Darnley for her husband. Thus was Leicester's loss Elizabeth's
gain; and his reward was that he took still a higher place in her
favour.
If he was not now King Consort in name, he was, at least, in place and
power. When the Queen fancied she was dying of small-pox she announced
her wish that he should be appointed Protector of the Realm at a
princely salary; and, when she recovered, he was empowered to act as her
deputy--to receive ambassadors, to interview ministers, and to sit in
her seat at the deliberations of her council. To such an eminence had
the favour of a Queen raised the grandson of the "country squire."
No wonder it was commonly rumoured either that she was actually Dudley's
wife or that her relations with him were open to grave suspicion. "I am
spoken of," she once bitterly said to the Spanish Ambassador, "as if I
were an immodest woman. I ought not to wonder at it. I have favoured him
because of his excellent disposition and his many merits. But I am
young, and he is young, and therefore we have been slandered. God knows,
they do us grievous wrong, and the time will come when the world knows
it also. I do not live in a corner; a thousand eyes see all I do, and
calumny will not fasten on me for ever."
But neither Elizabeth nor Dudley (or Leicester, as we must now call him)
allowed these rumours and suspicions to affect even their familiarities,
which were proclaimed to all on many a public occasion; as when the Earl
once, during a heated game of tennis, snatched the Queen's handkerchief
from her hand and proceeded to wipe his perspiring forehead with it.
To Elizabeth's passion for pomp and pageantry Leicester was
indispensable. It was he who arranged to the smallest detail her
gorgeous progresses and receptions, culminating in that historic visit
to Kenilworth in 1575, every hour of which was crowded with
cunningly-devised entertainments--from the splendid pageantry of her
welcome, through banquets and masquerades, to hunting and
bear-baiting--all on a scale of lavish prodigality such as even that
most gorgeous of Queens had never known.
Thus for thirty long years Leicester held his paramount place in the
affections of his Sovereign--a pre-eminence which was never seriously
endangered even when he seemed most disloyal, and transferred to other
women attentions of which she claimed a monopoly. When he flirted
outrageously with my Lady Hereford, one of the loveliest women at Court,
she responded by coquetting openly with Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord
Ormonde, or Sir Thomas Heneage; and only laughed at the jealousy she
aroused. "If a man may flirt," she would mockingly say, "why not a
woman, especially when that woman is a Queen?" And, of course, to this
question there was no other answer for my lord than to "kiss and be
friends," and to promise to be more discreet in the future.
But the Earl was ever weak in the presence of beauty; and in spite of
all his vows could not long be true even to his Queen. He lost his heart
to the lovely wife of Lord Sheffield; and when her husband died
conveniently and mysteriously (it was said that Leicester, with his
doctor's help, removed him by a dose of poison) it was not long before
he wedded her in secret, only just in time to make her child, whose
name, "Robert Dudley," made no concealment of his parentage, legitimate.
Before the child was many months old, however, the father was caught in
the toils of another charmer, my Lady Essex, and after deserting his
wife and, it is said, unsuccessfully trying to poison her, he made Lady
Essex his Countess, in defiance of that secret wedding with Sheffield's
widow.
When news of this double treachery, with the ugly suspicions that
attended it, reached the Queen's ears, her rage knew no bounds. She
vowed that she would send her faithless lover to the Tower, that his
head should pay forfeit for his false heart; and it was only when her
anger had had time to cool that more moderate counsels prevailed, and
she was content to banish him to a virtual prison at Greenwich.
It was not long, however, before her heart, always weak where her "sweet
Robin" was concerned, relented; and he was summoned back to Court to
resume his place at her side. In fact his very falseness and his follies
seemed to make him even dearer to the infatuated woman than his loyalty
and his love-making had ever done.
These days of silken ease were, however, soon to be changed. When, in
1585, Elizabeth wished to send her soldiers to help Holland in the
struggle with Spain, her choice fell on Leicester to take command of the
expedition, though his only experience of war had been more than a
quarter of a century earlier, when young Dudley had left the Tower and
his fellow Princess-captive's side to give his sword its baptism of
blood in Picardy. At Flushing and Leyden, Utrecht and Rotterdam, the
great English Earl and friend of England's Queen was received with the
rapturous homage due to a Sovereign deliverer rather than to a subject.
All Holland abandoned herself to a delirium of joy and festivity, and
before he had been many weeks in the Netherlands a heroic statue rose at
Rotterdam in his honour; and he was invited with one clamorous and
insistent voice to take his place as governor and dictator of the land
he had come to save.
Such a splendid lure was too potent for Leicester's ambition to resist.
Without troubling to consult his Sovereign at home he accepted the
"throne" that was offered to him; and it was only after ten days had
elapsed that he deigned to despatch a messenger to Elizabeth with news
of his promotion. Meanwhile, and long before his envoy, who was delayed
by storms on his journey, could reach the English Court, Elizabeth had
heard news of her favourite's presumption, and her Royal anger blazed
into flame at his insolence in daring to accept such honours without
consulting her pleasure.
She promptly despatched Sir Thomas Heneage, his whilom rival, to the
Netherlands armed with a scathing letter in which the Queen poured out
the vials of her wrath on Leicester's head.
"How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to have been
used," she wrote, "you shall by the bearer understand. We
could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in
experience, that a man raised up by ourself, and
extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of
this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken
our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in
honour ... and therefore, our express pleasure and
commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart,
you do presently, upon the duty of your allegiance, obey
and fulfil whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you
to do in our name. Whereof fail you not, as you will
answer the contrary at your uttermost peril."
One can imagine Leicester's feelings on reading such words of Royal
anger and reproach from the woman who had always shown such indulgence
to him. His impulse was to resign his governorship forthwith, and to
hasten back to London to beg forgiveness on his knees; but before he
could give effect to this decision he had learned that Burghley had
interceded for him with the Queen to such effect that, supported by a
petition from the States-General, he was to be allowed to retain his
office with Elizabeth's reluctant consent.
A few months of rule, however, were sufficient to disillusionise the
Dutchmen. Leicester proved as incapable to govern a country, as to lead
an army. His arrogance, his outspoken contempt for his subjects, his
incompetence and his capricious temper, so thoroughly disgusted the
nation that had welcomed him with open arms, that he was asked to resign
his office as unanimously as he had been invited to accept it; and in
November of 1587, the Earl returned ignominiously to England, eager to
repair his damaged credit by at least making peace with his Queen.
To his delight he was received with as much cordiality as if he had done
naught at all to earn his Lady's displeasure. Elizabeth had undoubtedly
missed her favourite, her right-hand man. She had in fact become so
accustomed to him that she could not be long happy unless he was at her
side; and it was by her side that he rode and shared the acclamations
with which her soldiers greeted her when she paid that historic visit to
the camp at Tilbury on the eve of the Armada.
But Leicester's adventurous life was now drifting to its close. His
health had for some time given him cause for alarm, and in August 1588,
he left his Kenilworth home to seek relief by taking baths and drinking
healing waters; and from Rycott he wrote the last of his many letters to
the Queen.
"I most humbly beseech your Majesty," he wrote, "to
pardon your poor old servant to be thus bold in sending
to know how my gracious Lady doth and what ease of her
late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in this
world I do pray for is for her to have good health and
long life. For my own poor case I continue still your
medicine, and find it amend much better than with any
other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find
perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my
wonted prayer for your Majesty's most happy preservation,
I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycott
this Thursday morning ready to take on my journey. By
your Majesty's most faithful and obedient servant,--
R. LEYCESTER."
But the Earl was not destined to reach the baths. His course was run. He
got as far on his journey as Coventry; and there, on the 4th of
September, he drew his last breath. Some said that his end was hastened
by a dose of poison administered by his Countess, eager to pursue
unchecked her intrigue with Christopher Blount; others that she
accidentally gave him a draught from a bottle of poison which he had
designed for her. But neither suspicion seems to have any evidence to
support it.
Thus perished, little past the prime of life, a man who more than any
other of his day drained the cup of pride and pleasure, to find its
dregs exceeding bitter to the taste.