The Elizabethans (11 page)

Jane Seymour continued to act as the lovers’ friend, and it was Jane who arranged their clandestine and, by definition, treasonable marriage in December 1560. She found a clergyman to read the marriage service (no one else present appeared so much as to catch his name). It was Jane who organised a secret wedding breakfast – ‘comfects and other Banquetting meates and beare and wyne’. No sooner had these been consumed than the young couple ‘unarrayed themselves’ and ‘went into naked bedd in the said Chamber where they were so married’. Once in bed they had ‘Companie and Carnall Copulation . . . divers tymes’ . . . and ‘laie sometimes on th’ outside of the Bedd and sometymes on th’ other’. The lightly pornographic nature of the testimony suggests it is invented or half-invented, based on servants’ tittle-tattle, but it gives the flavour of contemporary gossip about Lady Catherine. Similar gossip circulated, inaccurately, about the Queen and Dudley. But in that case it was not true, and this must have heightened Elizabeth’s jealous hatred of Catherine when, inevitably, the story leaked out. It is even quite possible that the whole union between these easily led, highly sexed teenagers was politically engineered by Dudley’s enemies when it was feared he would marry the Queen. That was what Bishop de Quadra thought. ‘Cecil was at the bottom of it.’
³²

For a few weeks the couple kept the marriage a secret, but they could not do so for long. When Cecil came to hear of it he warned the young earl that there were rumours of ‘good will’ between him and Catherine. Hertford denied it. Soon all the women of the court were jabbering of it. It was said (perhaps the story is apocryphal) that Blanche Parry, the Queen’s trusted Welsh attendant and lady-in-waiting, did her best to warn Catherine by telling her fortune and claiming to see in her palm that ‘the lines say, madam, that if you ever marry without the Queen’s consent in writing, you and your husband will be undone, and your fate worse than that of my Lady Jane [Grey]’.
³³

Catherine Grey was now pregnant. The Earl of Hertford had serious reason to panic. This was not just the usual panic that would afflict any boy of less than twenty who had got his girl ‘into trouble’. Even he, idiotic as he must have been, would now realise that what he had been doing was treasonable; that in a Tudor court, people had been beheaded for less than this. His own father had been beheaded on Tower Hill for treason, and the Seymours had been deeply distrusted as the enemies of the Dudleys and the Tudors ever since all the post-Reformation power-brokering of Edward VI’s reign. It was arranged that Hertford should be sent to France with Thomas Cecil, son of Mr Secretary Cecil. In every major crisis of Elizabeth’s reign there is William Cecil, trying to save the Queen, which often meant saving her from herself. There was much unconscious Polonius-like comedy in Cecil sending his son Thomas abroad with Hertford. This was the child he had had with his first wife, Mary Cheke. By now, Thomas was nineteen years old. Though Mildred, the thin-lipped bluestocking second wife, had borne him three children (two daughters and a son), only one – a daughter, Anne – had survived infancy. But in May 1561 she had a second son. (This was Robert, destined to succeed his father as Secretary.)

‘I have foreborne to send my son Thomas Cecil out of the realm for that I had no more [sons], and now that God hath given me another I am disposed to send him abroad, meaning only to have him absent about one year, so as, at his return, if God so grant, to see him married for that he shall then be full 20.’ So, Mr Secretary Cecil to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the British Ambassador in Paris. Cecil was candid enough to add, ‘I never showed any fatherly fancy to him but in teaching and correcting.’
³⁴
Cecil had the idea of making his son reside with Admiral Coligny, where it was hoped he would master French, as well as improving his horsemanship, playing the lute, dancing and perfecting his tennis. To the boy himself he imparted a tedious list of instructions, above all insisting upon the habit of daily prayer. ‘My meaning is that you shall use the manner of the Church of England in Latin.’

It goes without saying that Thomas Cecil did not heed much of this advice. By the end of a year his father felt obliged to catalogue his son’s vices as ‘slothfulness in keeping his bed, negligent and rash in expenses, careless in his apparel, an immoderate lover of dice and cards; in study, soon weary, in game never’.

In later years, the bad influence of the tiny Earl of Hertford was blamed for these habits of dissipation, unjustly according to the writer Thomas Seccombe.
³⁵
Cecil remained in Paris after the Earl had left, and found plenty of others with whom to indulge his juvenile tastes. Throckmorton kept his eye upon him, and took him into his own household. In July 1561 Throckmorton presented Cecil (and Hertford?) at the French court. It was just six months since King Francis II had died. His widow, not yet twenty years old, was still in France. Her mother, Mary of Guise, the Regent of Scotland, had died the previous year. Thomas Cecil was presented to her – Mary, Queen of Scots: tall, with a beautifully modulated voice and an instantaneous sexual appeal. Perhaps it was for this moment that William Cecil had really dispatched his son to Paris, for Cecil was obsessed by the Scottish queen and the danger she posed to Elizabeth’s power.
³⁶

Mary, having lost her young husband, felt sidelined in the French court by the new queen, Catherine de’ Medici. In her Scottish kingdom the Protestants who held power barely acknowledged her. In England, it was otherwise. Although she had no legal claim to the court – the will of Henry VIII did not mention her as a successor – she was the focus of hopes for those who wished to see England revert to Catholicism, and from the moment of Mary Tudor’s death, Mary Stuart, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, declared herself to be the rightful Queen of England.

Meanwhile, Hertford was by now the father of a rival claimant to the throne of England, and in August the young man returned to London to face the awful consequences.

Things had not gone well for his wife, even though, before he left for France, Hertford had given Catherine a deed of jointure and settled on her £1,000 per annum. The first catastrophe was that Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour, died in 1561. The Queen was distraught and ordered a lavish funeral in Westminster Abbey. The sole surviving witness to Catherine Grey’s marriage to the Earl of Hertford was thereby buried, while Thomas Cecil and the Queen were on a progress through Suffolk and Norfolk. At Norwich, the Queen complained of the squalid conditions to which the presence of wives and children had reduced the cathedral close. She immediately drafted an ordinance to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York forbidding cathedral-clergy to marry. It was plainly contrary to the intentions of the founders.

Meanwhile, an exhausted Catherine Seymour, in the entourage of the Virgin Queen, was seven months pregnant. The Queen was seen to have taken a great dislike to Catherine, and she had probably heard the rumours. But she allowed the young fool to sweat it out. Desperate, Catherine confided in another of the women of the court, Elizabeth St Loe, always known as Bess, who wept, and reprimanded her for her foolishness, saying that ‘she was sorrie therefore because that shee had not made the Queene’s Majestie pryvie thereunto’.
³⁷

That night Catherine, disturbed by Bess St Loe’s failure to take her side, crept into the bedroom of her kinsman, Robert Dudley, and threw herself on his mercy. It was a fatally stupid thing to do. He could not possibly keep such information to himself, and when he was obliged to tell the Queen, not only of the circumstances, but of how, where (his bedroom) and when (midnight) he knew them, it was an occasion for a Tudor hysterical outburst of gale force.

Catherine Seymour was dispatched at once to the Tower, where her child was born. So was Bess St Loe. Catherine, who had got herself into all this trouble by seriously considering herself worthy to take over the cares of government from the great Queen Elizabeth, now found that she had mislaid the essential deed of jointure from her husband. She could not remember the name of the clergyman who had married her. The one witness – Jane Seymour – was dead. When the Earl of Hertford returned from France he was also sent to the Tower. Their second child, rather touchingly named Thomas, after the Earl’s fellow Parisian reveller, was born on 10 February 1563. (The godfathers were two warders in the Tower.
³⁸
) Elizabeth had the marriage, if it ever had been a legal marriage, annulled by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The children were declared bastards and the Earl of Hertford was fined a ludicrous £15,000, later commuted to £10,000. Rather like an extortioner of the modern criminal underworld, the Queen, ever avid for cash, in the event accepted £1,000 down.

This is the pair – the hopeless Catherine Grey and her diminutive earl – who would have been declared Queen of England and Consort, had Elizabeth died of smallpox in 1562. But she pulled through.

Dudley’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney, was the chief victim of that crisis. She, and Sybil Penne, the Queen’s childhood nurse, tended Elizabeth during the illness. Though the Queen was all but unscarred, Mary Sidney was less lucky. Her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, could recall, ‘I lefte her a full faire Ladye in myne eye at least the fayerest, and when I returned I found her as fowle a ladie as the smale pox could make her, which she did take by contynuall attendance of her majesties most precious person (sicke of the same disease) the skares of which (to her resolute discomforte) ever syns hath doss and doth remayne in her face.’
³⁹

Sir Henry Sidney remained a just-about loyal, if often exasperated, servant of the Queen, both in Wales and Ireland. When one remembers his wife’s fate, Sidney’s ambivalence about Elizabeth is understandable. The Queen’s infatuation with Sidney’s brother-in-law, Robert Dudley, went on unabated, though with many a tiff and storm to make the relationship more exciting.

When she recovered from her smallpox, though it was Mary Dudley/Sidney who bore the scars, it was her brother Robert who reaped the reward. She appointed Robert Protector of the Realm, with the enormous salary of £20,000. This meant that in the event of her death he would be, like his father before him, the effective Regent. She also gave his body-servant, Tamworth, a salary of £500. This was the man who slept in Dudley’s bedchamber, and who would know the truth, if any, of the rumours circulating that the Queen visited Dudley by night.
⁴⁰
Good hush-money? If she did so, she would never have been such a fool as Lady Catherine Grey and become accidentally pregnant. So it must be assumed that, if in any physical sense they were lovers, the intimacies stopped short of total intimacy.

In October 1562, to Cecil’s chagrin, Elizabeth appointed Dudley, and the Duke of Norfolk, to the Council. In 1563 she granted him possession of the castle and estates of Kenilworth in Warwickshire – it had briefly belonged to his father and was in the heart of Dudley country. In 1564 she created him the Earl of Leicester.

The primary reason for this, however, was not to deepen their intimacy. Indeed, the ennoblement reminds us of the impenetrable paradox of the relationship between Elizabeth and her ‘sweet Robin’. He was made into a great earl so that he could be a plausible husband – not for the English, but for the Scottish queen. However deeply her heart was engaged with Dudley, she never stopped being the political operator. If Dudley married Mary Stuart, he would neuter the Scottish queen’s power, and strengthen the power of the Protestant government in Edinburgh. Neither Dudley nor the Scottish queen were enthusiasts for the idea, but Elizabeth seriously considered it.

One advantage, from her point of view, was that it would skewer the prospects of another Stuart, Henry, Lord Darnley, whose fervently ambitious mother, Lady Margaret Lennox, longed for her son to marry Mary Stuart and become in effect the King of Scotland. Henry VII’s daughter Margaret married, first, James IV of Scotland. Her son, James V, married Mary of Guise, and their child was Mary Stuart, now Queen of Scots. Margaret Tudor had married
en secondes noces
the Earl of Angus, Archibald Douglas. His daughter, Lady Margaret Douglas, married Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, and their child was Henry Stuart – Mary, Queen of Scots’s cousin, Lord Darnley.

Darnley and his parents were brought to London and kept under close supervision; not quite house-arrest, but under the eye of Elizabeth and her court. And they were present during the great court spectacular, when Robert Dudley was made Earl of Leicester on Michaelmas Day 1564. Elizabeth knew what was passing through all the minds of the key players in this great piece of political theatre. She knew that Lady Margaret Lennox and her son Lord Darnley could easily be the grandmother and father of English kings. And so they were destined to become. ‘Thou shalt get kings though thou be none’
⁴¹
as the third of the weird sisters tells Banquo in that Scottish play, perhaps performed at the court of Darnley’s son, James I.
⁴²
Elizabeth knew that Cecil wanted Dudley to marry Mary Stuart, partly for religious and diplomatic reasons, partly to get his hated rival out of London. She knew that, little though ‘sweet Robin’ wanted to marry Mary Stuart from an emotional or sexual point of view, no Dudley would give up the chance of fathering a line of kings.

And so the great ceremony took place, and there they all were to witness it: Sir James Melville, Mary, Queen of Scots’s representative; Lady Margaret Lennox, who must have squirmed uncomfortably throughout; wily Cecil; and the ambassadors of France and Spain, with the Council and all the court. Lord Darnley entered the Presence Chamber in front of the Queen, nineteen years old, and for this ceremony the official sword-bearer to the monarch. This was a nice touch by Elizabeth, reminding Lord Darnley’s mother that if she had control of events, he would do no more than be an attendant lord. But Elizabeth did not have control over the future, and the fates had a cruel and unhappy destiny in store for this youth and his descendants. He would, in the event, marry the Scottish queen and she would murder him. As he carried the sword in front of Queen Elizabeth, Henry Darnley had not three years to live. His future wife, Mary, Queen of Scots, would perish on the block at Fotheringay in 1587; his grandson, Charles I, would die, our English royal martyr, by beheading on 30 January 1649; his great-grandson, James II, would be sent into exile; and the doomed cause of the House of Stuart would be the ruin of many an English and Scottish life in the first half of the eighteenth century before the Young Chevalier, Bonnie Prince Charlie, died his sordid alcoholic death in Rome in 1788. With the death in 1807 of his brother, Henry Benedict Maria Clement, Cardinal of York (styled by loyalists Henry IX), the extraordinary Stuart tapestry may be deemed finally to have unravelled.