The Elizabethans (30 page)

By 1563, Leicester had spent £60,000 on extensions and improvements to the castle and by the time of the Queen’s 1575 visit – her third to Kenilworth – it was spoken of as one of the three most splendid estates in the country. In addition to all the new buildings and the newly planted parks Leicester had created, in readiness for Elizabeth’s arrival, there was an Italianate garden, with a (fake) jewelled aviary and a (real) marble fountain. The garden was like a theatrical set designed especially for the Queen and her court. Yet although it was spoken of for centuries afterwards as one of the most splendid extravaganzas ever to occur on English soil, there was something lacking in the entertainments. She stayed for a shorter time than Leicester had hoped. Nineteen days were long enough to be ruinously expensive for him and she did not actually insult him by leaving earlier. But neither of them could hide from the other that there was now something a little sad about their relationship, and she never visited Kenilworth again.

A number of factors dampened the hoped-for exuberance. One was that Elizabeth’s digestion, never very strong, was upset even before she arrived. She had stopped on her way through Oxfordshire at Grafton, where she had a house of her own. It was a hot July, and when she arrived at Grafton ‘there was not a drop of good drink for her’. The local beer was too strong for her. She liked a very weak ‘small beer’ and, upon being presented with the stronger stuff, threw one of her tantrums.

Leicester’s entertainment of the Queen at Kenilworth was intended to be momentous. Was there even the hope, or the thought, in the minds of the host (or of the royal guest) that they might revive their old love of fifteen years earlier? Or if this thought is too sentimental, was there the hope in Leicester’s mind that it was not too late, even now, for the Dudleys to resume their all-but-regal status by his marriage to Elizabeth? In so doing he would not only advance himself, but also put an end to her capricious suggestion that she might after all marry François, Duc d’Alençon. This prospect – of Elizabeth marrying into the family that had initiated the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre – was a nightmare of the forward Protestant party in government, of which Leicester was the figurehead, the ‘captain-general of the Puritans’.
⁶

Kenilworth marked for many a turning point in their perceptions of Elizabeth. And perhaps for Elizabeth and Leicester it marked a turning-point in their perceptions of one another. Their relationship was, and remains, a puzzle. The likeliest explanation of the puzzle is that it was never quite clear, even to Elizabeth and Leicester themselves, exactly what they wanted or needed from one another. In July 1575 they were both forty-two years old. He had begun to go bald, and florid in complexion. Relatively tall, he was able to carry off the increase in his weight, and he was never – as was claimed in libellous Catholic pamphlets, such as ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ – gluttonous or obese. But health problems dogged him throughout this decade and in the later 1570s he had swellings in his legs, for which he paid visits to Buxton and Harrogate. He prided himself upon his active life, as a sportsman and a countryman, and in 1573 had lectured the Queen, ‘So good a medycyne I have alway found exercise with the open good ayre as yt hath ever byn my best remedye ageynst those dellycate deceases gotton about your deynty city of London’. When she was in the right mood (an important conditional), she was able to allow herself to be lectured by him in this way. And she, the stingiest of monarchs and patrons, was always generous to her beloved Robin.

Throughout the 1570s she lavished him with large estates, adding to his holdings in 1572 with the lordships of Arwystili and Cyfeiliog, and the lordship of Denbigh. She let him have a ten-year lease on the farm of the customs on sweet (Mediterranean) wines – he collected the tax on wines such as Marsala and pocketed it. Thousands of tons of wine were imported yearly. Over the previous two centuries England (thanks to global cooling) had ceased to be a wine-producing country, and the English had become especially fond of Bordeaux wines, which they called claret, and of sherry sack from Spain. (The wine of Jerez, sack, was an Anglicisation of
sec
= dry, but by modern tastes all these wines would have tasted sweet.) They loved all sweet alcoholic drinks: mead, which had gone out of fashion in the late-medieval period, became popular again, and hippocras – sweet mulled wine with spices and hot pear or apple cider.
⁷
So having the tax on sweet wine was a huge concession to Leicester. She also lent him £15,000. Leicester was not a notably extravagant man except in the matter of clothes. He would appear to have spent most of his money on patronage, ensuring that he had a finger in every pie. He was high steward of ten boroughs (Bristol, Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Abingdon, Windsor, Reading, Wallingford, Tewkesbury, St Albans and Evesham). He was an active, and popular, Chancellor of Oxford University. At least ninety-eight books were dedicated to him, which made him one of the most active literary patrons of the reign. He was a keen backer of explorations and voyages, from which, obviously, he hoped to profit – investing in Frobisher’s voyage of 1576, Hawkins’s second voyage and Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. From the Drake voyage he would have profited, but he also sank money in losers, such as the voyage of Fenton in 1582.

And another drain on his pocket was Kenilworth.

We who are used to reliably fresh water to drink, and who have tea and coffee whenever we like it, need to make a mental adjustment when we travel in our imaginations to sixteenth-century England, reminding ourselves that it was not safe to drink the water and, even if you were the Queen, there were some occasions when there was nothing to drink but beer. The crisis passed; ‘God be thanked, she is now perfect well and merry,’
⁸
said Leicester on the day that he was due to bring her to Kenilworth. But it was not a good start. At the ‘ambrosial banquet’ prepared for her, Leicester had ordered more than 300 dishes. ‘Her majesty eat smally or nothing; which understood, the coorsez wear not so orderly served and sizely set doun, but wear by and by az disorderly wasted and coorsly consumed, more courtly the thought then courteously,’ said one observer. The next sweltering day, the Queen spent the entire time in the castle, ‘for coolness’.
⁹

Most of the food at an ‘ambrosial banquet’ such as this would have been sweet. The 300 dishes would have been chiefly sweetmeats of a kind that have now disappeared altogether from the English table, or would only be served with fruit and nuts for a ‘dessert’ at a formal dinner in, say, an Oxford college or a city Livery Company. Even savouries, if they formed part of the banquet, would have had sweet admixtures. Their herring pies were made with currants, raisins and minced dates;
¹⁰
capons would come roasted with orange peel, sugar and prunes;
¹¹
a chicken pie would contain brown sugar and raisins.
¹²
All disgusting to a modern palate. Vegetables, if served at all, would be overcooked and, yet again, sweetened. Their artichoke pie was made with sherry, sugar, orange peel and raisins. The English critic Walter Pater thought all art aspired to the condition of music. All Elizabethan cooking aspired to the condition of marmalade.

The splendour of pageantry, and the jangling lack of harmony between the two great protagonists at Kenilworth – Elizabeth and Leicester – are perhaps both recalled in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. The gunfire and fireworks that greeted the Queen’s arrival at the castle were seen and heard more then twenty miles away,
¹³
so they would surely have been seen and heard five miles away in Stratford-upon-Avon. Only ten miles north-east of Stratford, at Long Itchington, Leicester put on a stupendous hunting picnic for the Queen, and she spent much of her time at Kenilworth, in the cool of the late summer afternoons and early evenings, pursuing the deer. She loved hunting. (She personally killed six deer during this visit, as the surviving game-books show.
¹⁴
)

A modern visitor might have found the Kenilworth pageants and games spectacular, even the deer-hunting. The one activity that would surely not appeal even to the most thick-skinned time-traveller would have been the bear-baiting in the outer wood of the castle. It is good to know that even in Elizabethan times there were those who abominated this gratuitous cruelty. Philip Stubbes, in his
Anatomy of Abuses
(1583) asked, ‘What Christian heart can take pleasure to see one poor beast to rend, tear and kill another, and all for his foolish pleasure?’ The answer to this rhetorical question must be: the Earl of Leicester and his guests, including – we must presume – Queen Elizabeth herself, for he would surely not have had his hounds slavering at the prospect of fighting and tormenting the bears if he had not thought this would be diverting for his monarch?
¹⁵

Even the hunting parties were punctuated with pageantry. As she came riding home one evening, she was met by Gascoigne dressed as the Savage Man. On another evening he was Sylvanus, god of the woods, who told her that all the forest-dwellers, the fauns, dryads, hamadryads and wood-nymphs were in tears at the rumour that she might be about to leave. In one of his entertainments it would seem that Gascoigne blundered. Most of his verses and entertainments at Kenilworth seem to have been written spontaneously, but the masque of
Zabeta
had been commissioned long in advance. The reason given for the Queen’s refusal to see this masque was that the weather had broken and the banquet in a temporary partition had to be called off. But it could have been rescheduled for another night. Clearly the Queen had cast her eye, at least once, over an argument of the masque and had censored it. The show was to have been acted by James Burbage and Leicester’s own players, and Diana the Virgin-Goddess was to have lamented the loss of [Eli]zabeta her famous nymph, seventeen years ago – that is, the exact length of time [Eli]zabeta had been on the throne. But Gascoigne’s clumsy text reminded the nymph of her captivity under Queen Mary, attributed her preservation to the Dudley family and told her:

A world of wealth at wil

You henceforth shall enjoy

In wedded state, and there with all

Holde up from great annoy

The staffe of your estate.
¹⁶

The ‘staff’ is the heraldic device of the Dudleys. The masque was offering Elizabeth one last chance to marry her Robin. No wonder she did not wish to cringe her way through this appalling ‘entertainment’, and moved the royal progress on from Kenilworth only a week later.

Like many with a strong love of ceremony, Elizabeth also possessed a keen sense of the absurd. One evening at Kenilworth the Queen stood on the bridge by Mortimer’s Tower and watched a pageant on the lake where a mermaid swam, drawing her tail through the water, and Harry Goldingham (a Bottom-like comic actor) was performing the role of Arion astride a splendidly constructed dolphin. After a melodious six-part song emanated from the belly of the dolphin, Harry/Arion took off his mask and declared that ‘he was none of Arion not he, but honest Harry Goldingham’. The Queen broke into peals of laughter and afterwards said this had been the best part of the show.
¹⁷

In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Oberon says to Puck:

thou rememb’rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song,

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

To hear the sea-maid’s music.

Yet Oberon’s memory of the pageantry was of Cupid’s arrow-shot misfiring:

That very time, I saw but thou couldst not

Flying between the cold moon and the earth

Cupid all armed; a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronèd by the west

And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts . . .

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound

And maidens call it love-in-Idleness.
¹⁸

As well as admiring the fireworks, the floating islands, the jousting, the bear-baiting, the feasting and all the other spectacles at Kenilworth, the Warwickshire locals (including the Shakespeare family) would have gossiped freely about the Queen and Leicester and his other
amours
. What great ones do the lesser prattle of. It has long been acknowledged that Oberon’s words contain some memory of the Kenilworth pageant and its prodigious floating islands, mermaids and musical dolphins. It is not too fanciful to go further and see in the contentious, playful, spiteful and sexually frustrated relationship between Oberon and Titania the flavour of what common gossip had to say concerning Elizabeth and Leicester.

But with Leicester, as with his new protégé Gascoigne, Elizabeth was prepared to be indulgent. She did not banish either of them. They accompanied her on her progress when the court left Kenilworth and moved on to the Earl of Essex’s house at Chartley in Staffordshire. Essex (Walter Devereux
¹⁹
) was in Ireland. Leicester had probably by now begun an affair with Lady Essex – an earlier affair, with Douglas Sheffield, having seemingly petered out in this or the previous year. The affair with Douglas Sheffield began in 1570–1 when she would have been about thirty. She was the daughter of William Howard, first Baron Howard of Effingham (1510–73), a cousin of the Dukes of Norfolk and widow of a Lincolnshire nobleman, Lord Sheffield. She had two legitimate children. With Leicester she certainly had one, Sir Robert Dudley, who was born on 7 August 1574. Gossip at court that suggested there had also been a daughter born stillborn was something Lady Sheffield vigorously denied. Her sister Frances was also said to be ‘very far in love’ with Leicester. Douglas Sheffield married Sir Edward Stafford in 1579. He was a friend of Leicester’s, but there is no evidence that Leicester ‘arranged’ the marriage. The evidence would suggest that both Howard sisters were free-and-easy girls who could be expected to have colourful and varied love lives. No one knows why Leicester did not marry her. Perhaps he was still holding back in the hope of marrying the Queen, or perhaps the relationship with Douglas Sheffield was simply too volatile to turn into a marriage. In the only surviving personal letter among Leicester’s correspondence, he advised her, before 1574, to break off relations with him and find someone else: