The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (39 page)

Other attacks used similar imagery. In 1587,
De Jezebelis Anglae
, a collection of French and Latin poems reviling Elizabeth was printed. The ‘de Jezebelis’ poem was posted at the door of Notre Dame and described how Anne Boleyn had slept both with her own brother and with Henry VIII and that it was unclear who Elizabeth’s father was.
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The
Vers Funebres
attributed to Cardinal du Perron developed the theme of Elizabeth as a ‘monster, conceived in adultery and incest, her fangs bared for murder, who befouls and despoils the sacred right of sceptres and vomits her choler and gall at heaven’.
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Other poems claimed that Elizabeth had illegitimate children who were the fruit of her promiscuous conduct with members of the Privy Chamber, especially the Earl of Leicester, and that Elizabeth deliberately avoided marriage because she wanted to be free to enjoy these licentious pleasures.
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While with Mary’s death, English Catholics lost the figurehead and focus for their plots, the threat of Spain came into sharper relief. Mary had made Philip II of Spain a written promise that she would bequeath him her right to the English succession. In the event she never did so, but her death left him the leading Catholic candidate for the succession. As a descendent of John of Gaunt and Edward III, he had English royal blood and had the military might to enforce his claim. The English Jesuits, William Allen and Robert Persons, now back on the continent, pressed Philip to take action against Elizabeth, and Philip was urged by his confessor to attack England, ‘to avenge the wrongs done to God and to the world by that woman, above all in the execution of the Queen of Scotland’.
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Secret Son?

In June 1587 a young Englishman found shipwrecked off the northern coast of Spain was arrested and taken for questioning, suspected of being a spy. He was sent to Madrid, to the house of Sir Francis Englefield, formerly Catholic councillor to Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I, and now Philip II’s English secretary. The details of the interrogation were recorded by Englefield in four letters he subsequently wrote to Philip.
1

The Englishman, who was thought to be about twenty-five, proceeded to reveal an incredible story. His name, he told Englefield, was Arthur Dudley. He had been raised by Robert Southern, whose wife had been a servant to Queen Elizabeth’s most senior Bedchamber woman, ‘the heretic’ Kat Ashley. Her husband, John, a Gentleman of the Chamber and Master of the Jewel House, had given Southern the post of Keeper of one of the Queen’s houses in Enfield; and it was to here, each summer, or if there was any plague or sickness in London, that Arthur from the age of eight would be taken and schooled in Latin, Italian, French, music, arms and dancing.

When he was about fifteen, Arthur told Ashley and Southern that he wanted to seek adventure and go abroad. When they refused to let him go he stole a purse of coins and fled to the port of Milford Haven in Wales, where he planned to board a ship for Spain. Before he could do so he was arrested by order of the Privy Council and returned to London. He was taken to Pickering Place, the home of Sir Edward Wotton, where, in the presence of Sir Thomas Heneage, he was reunited with John Ashley.

Finally, four years later, Arthur was granted permission to go abroad as a soldier in the service of the French Colonel de la Noue in the Netherlands, and was accompanied there by a servant of Robert Dudley’s. When de la Noue was subsequently captured, Arthur fled to France but was called back to England by news that Robert Southern was gravely ill. He found Southern in a tavern in Evesham, where he had been working as an innkeeper. On his deathbed, Southern revealed to him the true circumstances of Arthur’s birth. One night in 1561, Southern had been sent for by Kat Ashley who instructed him to go to Hampton Court. There he met ‘Lady Harington’, probably Isabella Harington, one of the Queen’s ladies and the mother of the Queen’s godson, John, who handed him a newborn baby boy. He was told that the child belonged to a lady at court, ‘who had been so careless of her honour’ that if it became known, it would ‘bring great shame on all the company and would highly displease the Queen if she knew of it’. The boy was called Arthur and Southern and his wife were ordered to take him home and bring him up with their own children, in place of their son who had died in infancy.

The dying man refused to tell Arthur any more, but under pressure, and saying he wished to clear his conscience before his death, Southern then confessed that the true identities of the boy’s parents were Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester. Arthur then travelled to London to confront John Ashley with the information. Ashley told him to repeat what he had been told to no one and to remain near court, but fearing he might be in danger, Arthur left London and headed for France. There, he explained to Englefield, he learned of the Duke of Guise’s plans for a league against England and so warned Ashley and Sir Edward Stafford of the threat. It was soon after this, at Greenwich Palace, that he was first introduced to Robert Dudley, who took him to his chamber and confirmed that he was his father. Dudley showed ‘by tears, words and other demonstrations’ so much affection for him that Arthur recognised Southern’s deathbed confession to be true. Walsingham, who had been notified of Arthur’s arrival, was suspicious of the mysterious youth and began asking questions. Arthur fled the court and joined a ship carrying English soldiers to the Netherlands.

In Englefield’s report to Philip, he described how the Englishman claimed to be a Catholic and to have become involved in various plots to forward the Catholic cause: he had opened up a dialogue with the Elector of Cologne and the Pope, and had undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia. In early 1587 after hearing of Mary Queen of Scots’s execution he decided to head for Spain. During this voyage he was shipwrecked on the Biscay coast and taken to Madrid for questioning by Englefield. He told Englefield that he believed Robert Dudley had plotted against Mary Stuart and this had led to her being condemned to death. He was now worried, he said, that agents of Queen Elizabeth would seek him out and arrange to have him murdered so that the secret of his birth would never be known. He promised the King’s secretary that if Philip would protect him, he would write an account of his birth and life which the Spanish could use as they wished.
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Arthur’s account, written in English, filled three sheets of paper and was translated by Englefield for Philip. Thereafter Arthur was sent to the Castle of La Alameda and spent the next year under interrogation. Hieronimo Lippomano, the Venetian ambassador in Spain, reported to the Doge and Senate that the young man ‘gives himself out as the son of the Queen of England, but is in disgrace with her because he is a Catholic, has been arrested’.
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In another despatch he described Arthur as being ‘spirited’, with ‘the air of a noble’, and able to speak Italian and Spanish, though ‘he is thought to be a spy’.
4
Arthur’s claims caught the interest of the Spanish government, his revelations coming at the time when Philip II was preparing to claim the crown of England for himself and for his daughter the Infanta Isabella. ‘It will certainly be safest,’ Philip wrote in the margins of Englefield’s report, ‘to make sure of his person until we know more about the matter.’ Neither he nor Englefield was willing to take any chances.

A letter to Cecil, dated 28 May 1588, from an English agent known only as ‘BC’ recounted Arthur Dudley’s claim to be have been ‘begotten between our Queen and the Earl of Leicester’. It has been suggested that ‘BC’ was Anthony Standen alias Pompeio Pellegrini, one of Walsingham’s chief intelligence-gatherers in Spain.
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The letter reported that Arthur, identified as being ‘around twenty-seven years old’, was still in Spanish hands ‘very solemnly warded and served’, at a cost to the King of six crowns a day, and ‘taketh upon him’ [behaves] like the man he pretendeth to be’. Another letter, written in September, mentioned that ‘the varlet that called himself her Majesty’s son is in Madrid, and is allowed two crowns a day for his table, but cannot go anywhere without his keepers, and has a house for a prison’. The spy explained that Arthur bore more than a passing resemblance to the man he claimed was his father, though this was not something that Philip’s secretary, Sir Francis Englefield, who was aged and virtually blind, would have been able to confirm.
6

Two years later, a report sent to England on ‘the State of Spain’ spoke of Alcantara, ‘where an Englishman of good quality and comely personage was imprisoned who avowed himself Leicester’s son by no small personage’.
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Thereafter Arthur Dudley disappears from the record. Perhaps he remained there until his death, or perhaps he escaped and simply discarded his elaborate claim.

*   *   *

Sir Francis Englefield clearly did not know what to make of the tale he had been told by the young Englishman, but he suspected that Elizabeth and her councillors ‘may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends’. Perhaps it was a plot intended to dupe the Spanish into acknowledging Arthur as the Queen’s son so that he could be offered as a possible heir to the throne, thereby cutting James VI of Scotland out of the succession. Or perhaps he was a spy who was being used by the English government to learn of Spain’s preparation for the invasion of England. During the spring of 1587, Walsingham certainly drew up detailed plans of how to gather information on the Queen’s foreign enemies and determined that agents should be sent into Spain to pose as disaffected Englishmen. One of his memos specifically noted the need to get a spy into the very heart of the Spanish court.
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Ultimately Englefield came to the conclusion that there was a good chance that Arthur was telling the truth and was unaware of how he was being used:

I think it very probable that the revelations that this lad is making everywhere may originate with the Queen of England and her Council, and possibly with an object that Arthur does himself not yet understand. Perhaps, if they have determined to do away with the Scottish throne, they may encourage the lad to profess Catholicism and claim to be the Queen’s son, in order to discover the minds of other princes, as to his pretensions, and the Queen may thereupon acknowledge him, or give him such other position as to neighbouring princes may appear favourable. Or perhaps in some other ways they may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends.

Englefield continued:

It is also manifest that he [Arthur] has had much conference with the Earl of Leicester, upon whom he mainly depends for the fulfilment of his hopes. This and other things convince me that the Queen of England is not ignorant of his pretensions, although, perhaps, she would be unwilling that they should be thus published to the world, for which reason she may wish to keep him [Arthur] in his low and obscure position as a matter of policy, and also in order that her personal immorality might not be known (the bastards of princes not usually being acknowledged in the lifetime of their parents) and she has always considered that it would be dangerous to her for her heir to be nominated in her lifetime, although he alleges that she has provided for the Earl of Leicester and his faction to be able to elevate him (Arthur Dudley) to the throne when she dies, and perhaps marry him to Arbella (Stuart) … For this and other reasons I am of opinion that he should not be allowed to get away, but should be kept very secure to prevent his escape … it cannot be doubted that France and the English heretics, or some other party, might turn it to their own advantage, or at least make it a pretext for obstructing the reformation of religion in England (for I look upon him as a very feigned Catholic) and the inheritance of the crown by its legitimate master; especially as during the Queen’s time they have passed an Act in England, excluding all but heirs of the Queen’s body.

If Englefield was right and Arthur Dudley was an English agent, or an English stooge, it would explain why the Spanish kept him close and did not make capital out of his claims, even at a time when it might have been used to decisively prove Elizabeth’s immorality. Rather it seems that Elizabeth, and her advisers, had skilfully played on the rumours that had for so many years emanated from the Bedchamber, and used them for their own ends, as a means of infiltrating the Spanish court.

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Satan’s Instruments

Astrologers and prophets were predicting disaster for 1588. Raphael Holinshed, the contemporary chronicler, described an ancient prophecy which was ‘now so rife in every man’s mouth’ that this year would see great change or final dissolution. Holinshed’s chronicle ended with a prayer asking God ‘to bless the realm of England; and the precious jewel of the same – good Queen Elizabeth – to save her, as the apple of His eye’, from all the ‘pernicious practices of Satan’s instruments … We beseech God … that the gospel … may be glorified in the Commonwealth of England: a corner of the world, O Lord, which Thou hast singled out for the magnifying of thy Majesty’.
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Since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in February 1587, the main focus of Catholic exiles abroad, led by Cardinal William Allen and the Jesuit priest Robert Persons, had become ‘the Enterprise of England’, an invasion of Elizabeth’s realms by the combined forces of Spain and papal Rome. Allen and Persons petitioned Philip of Spain to take action and assured him that they would support his claim to the throne through his descent from the royal house of Lancaster.
2
Philip had already made the strategic decision to support the Enterprise and preparations for an invasion were underway. Detailed proposals for the plan of attack were being considered, the fleet readied, munitions procured, and men recruited. In July 1587, Pope Sixtus V promised money to support the venture and granted the right for Philip to be nominated as a suitable Catholic successor for the English throne.