The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (7 page)

During the last few days Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does what he likes with affairs and it is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far as to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts and that the Queen is only waiting for her to die so she can marry Lord Robert …
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Weeks later, the Venetian ambassador Il Schifanoya reported that Dudley was ‘in great favour and very intimate with her Majesty’. Although Il Schifanoya stopped short of making any accusations of improper behaviour that could damage diplomatic relations, he did allude to the shocking rumours that were circulating at court: ‘On this subject I ought to report the opinion of many, but I doubt whether my letters may not miscarry or be read, wherefore it is better to keep silence than to speak ill.’
7
The ambassador realised that his letters might be intercepted and was therefore unwilling to openly state what everyone was whispering: that Elizabeth and Dudley had become lovers.

Despite suspicions as to the nature of Elizabeth’s relationship with her Master of the Horse, the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, was keen to secure an English alliance and in May 1559 sent his envoy Caspar Breuner, Baron von Rabenstein, formally to open marriage negotiations on behalf of the emperor’s nineteen-year-old son Charles von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria.
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When Elizabeth quickly rejected the proposal, explaining that she intended to remain single for the foreseeable future, Breuner was undeterred:

There is no princess of her compeers who can match her in wisdom, virtue, beauty and splendour of figure and form … Furthermore I have seen several very fine summer residences that belong to her, in two of which I have been myself, and I may say that there are none in the world so richly garnished with costly furniture of silk, adorned with gold, pearls and precious stones. Then she had some twenty other houses, all of which might justly be called royal summer residences. Hence she is well worth the trouble.
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English amity was crucial to the strategic interests of the Habsburgs and so the emperor was quick to dismiss the significance of the scandalous talk surrounding Elizabeth. Writing to his older son, the Archduke Maximilian, he acknowledged the danger and ubiquity of the rumours but argued that they were typical of the gossip targeted at chaste women: ‘The slander proceeds from many persons, the harm done is great, and even though it be granted that it very often happens that a woman of good repute is spoken ill of, I do not wish to waste words on such.’ However, he added, ‘when the outcry is so great, and come from so many sides and always has the same tenor, it is indeed an awkward matter and very dangerous … All this must be deeply pondered.’
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Believing that Elizabeth could be tempted to consider a marriage treaty, Cecil instructed his agent in Germany, Christopher Mundt, to discover all he could about the archduke’s appearance, temperament, religion and attitude towards Protestantism.
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Having talked with the Queen’s ladies, the new Spanish ambassador Don Alvaro de Quadra, Bishop of Aquila, was soon able to report that Elizabeth favoured the Archduke Charles’s suit because, ‘her women all believe such to be the case’.
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However, Emperor Ferdinand was beginning to have doubts of his own, considering the Queen’s very obvious affection for Dudley, and soon was no longer sure he wanted ‘to give her my son, even if she asked for him’.
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In August 1559, Baron Breuner decided to launch an investigation into whether or not Elizabeth was still a virgin or had indeed consummated her relationship with Dudley, as many suspected. As he reported, ‘since the Queen was crowned he has never been away from court; moreover they dwell in the same house and this it is which feeds suspicion’.
14
He told the emperor that he had employed an agent, François Borth, who was on ‘friendly terms with all the Ladies of the Bedchamber’, to find out the truth behind the gossip. Breuner’s investigations revealed little. Writing in cypher to the emperor, he reported that the Queen’s ladies ‘swear by all that is holy that her Majesty has most certainly never been forgetful of her honour’, however they agree that the Queen ‘shows her liking for him more markedly than is consistent with her reputation and dignity. But otherwise they have not noticed anything.’
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It was only Elizabeth’s women who knew the truth of the Queen’s relationship with Dudley. Only they could vouch for her chastity. But while they would always be quick to defend her publicly and could be relied upon to protect the Queen’s reputation, they might very well censure her in private.

*   *   *

In August, Kat Ashley fell on her knees before the Queen in the privacy of the royal Bedchamber at Hampton Court and implored her mistress to marry and put an end to the ‘disreputable rumours’ of her relationship with Robert Dudley. No doubt drawing on her experience of the Seymour scandal ten years before, she believed Elizabeth was now behaving in such a way that would sully her ‘honour and dignity’ and would in time undermine her subjects’ loyalty, and so be ‘the cause of much bloodshed in the realm’. Ashley declared that rather than see this happen she would have ‘strangled her Majesty in her cradle’. They were the words of a woman who regarded Elizabeth with a deep maternal affection. The Queen told Kat everything and had once said, ‘I know nothing but that she shall know it.’
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Elizabeth responded graciously to her gentlewoman’s blunt words, recognising them as the ‘outpourings of a good heart and true fidelity’. She assured Kat that she would consider marrying in order to dispel the rumours and reassure her subjects, but added that, ‘marriage must be well-weighed’ and that at present she had ‘no wish to change her state’. When Ashley suggested that Elizabeth should end her relationship with Lord Robert, the Queen angrily retorted that she had given

no one just cause to associate her with her Equerry or any other man in the world, and she hoped that they never would truthfully be able to do so. But that in this world she had so much sorrow and tribulation and so little joy. If she showed herself gracious towards her Master of the Horse she had deserved it for his honourable nature and dealings … She was always surrounded by her ladies of the bedchamber and maids of honour, who at all times could see whether there was anything dishonourable between her and her Master of the Horse. If she had ever had the will or had found pleasure in such a dishonourable life … she did not know of anyone who could forbid her; but she trusted in God that nobody would ever live to see her so commit herself.
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Elizabeth was nonetheless shaken by Kat’s chiding and when Breuner visited her days later, he found her ‘somewhat dejected’ and ‘daily pestered with petitions to marry’. She would, she told him, ‘rather be dead than that her realm should suffer harm or loss’ and so was prepared even to marry ‘the vilest man in the Kingdom rather than give people occasion to speak ill’.
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The Bedchamber women told Breuner that the Queen had been ‘quite melancholy’ and had slept little more than half an hour at night and woke ‘quite pale and weak’.
19
Shortly afterwards Elizabeth succumbed to a burning fever.
20
The French ambassador described it as a ‘
fiebre quartre
’, a quatrain fever that appeared on every fourth day, and reported that the Queen’s doctors had ‘great doubt about her convalescence’.
21
Already false stories had begun to spread. ‘I have punished several,’ a leading Devon gentleman wrote to the Earl of Bedford in mid-August, ‘for bruiting the death of the Queen’s Majesty and so hath others been in other parts of the shire as I hear.’
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De Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, soon came to the conclusion that Elizabeth was being disingenuous. She had, as de Quadra added, ‘just given £12,000 to Lord Robert as an aid towards his expenses’. He believed that Elizabeth was ‘astutely taking advantage of the general opinion to reassure somewhat the Catholics who desire the match and to satisfy others who want to see her married and are scandalised at her doings’.
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But then, days later and to the ambassador’s surprise, he was given renewed hope. De Quadra received an unexpected visit from Robert Dudley’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney. Mary was a highly educated, pretty and politically accomplished young woman with distinctive reddish yellow hair, who was about the same age as the Queen. The two women had known each other as children and had recently become particularly close given Elizabeth’s relationship with her brother.
24
Mary had joined the Privy Chamber as a gentlewoman ‘without wages’ on the day of Elizabeth’s coronation and would attend thereafter on the Queen, in between the births of Mary’s five children, the running of the family estate in Kent, Penshurst Place, and supporting her husband Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland and the Welsh Marches.
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Mary now sought out de Quadra to tell him that Elizabeth had changed her mind, that she had decided to marry and wanted the match with the Archduke Charles ‘speedily settled’.
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Speaking in Italian, a language in which Mary was fluent, she assured the ambassador that she was acting with the Queen’s knowledge and would never say such a thing if it were not true for fear for her life. She urged de Quadra to broach the matter with the Queen and warned him not to be put off by Elizabeth’s reticence, because ‘it is the custom of ladies here not to give their consent in such matters until they are teased into it’.
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Mary Sidney’s message was confirmed by Sir Thomas Parry, Treasurer of the Household, who told de Quadra that the Queen had summoned both him and Lady Sidney the night before and told them ‘that the marriage had now become necessary’.
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Elizabeth’s change of heart, they told him, had been brought about by the recent discovery of a plot to poison the Queen and Lord Robert at a banquet hosted by the Earl of Arundel. As de Quadra described, ‘the Queen was much alarmed’ and this plot ‘together with the French war preparations for Scotland, seem to have decided the Queen to marry’.
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With high expectation, the ambassador went by barge to Hampton Court Palace but was disappointed to find Elizabeth ambivalent about the match. ‘The only answer I received,’ he reported, was that she had not yet decided to marry, but should she ever do so, I might be quite sure that she would marry only the highest and the best.’ When he found Mary Sidney and expressed his surprise that, ‘her Majesty had not spoken more explicitly’ of her renewed interest in the archduke, Mary quickly reassured him and urged him to persist.
30

Elizabeth appeared worried by the growing scandal of her relationship with Dudley. She had learnt a painful lesson from the Seymour episode, and had witnessed how salacious stories could gather momentum and spread at home and abroad. In a later conversation with de Quadra, Elizabeth told him she feared he ‘might be dissatisfied’ with what he had heard about her, and that ‘there were people in the country who took pleasure in saying anything that came into their heads’. The Queen said all this ‘with some signs of shame’, de Quadra noted earnestly.
31
He reassured her that, ‘if there were anything which the archduke should not hear or learn, the idea of his coming would not have been entertained by us’. Elizabeth was anxious, she said, that if negotiations were broken off, the archduke might use the ‘idle tales’ that were told about her to the detriment of her honour. But, de Quadra wryly observed, ‘from this point of view I was not sorry, as the fear may not be without advantage to us’.
32

By mid-October, the Spanish ambassador felt confident enough to write, ‘She really is as set on this marriage as your Majesty is’, and advised that the archduke be sent to England immediately.
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But it was too late. The Holy Roman Emperor had lost interest in the negotiations and refused to allow his son to leave Austria when the likely success of the mission was so uncertain.
34
Even Mary Sidney’s enthusiasm for the Habsburg marriage appeared to have waned. In November, de Quadra said he believed that Dudley ‘had had words with his sister because she was carrying the affair further than he desired’. When the ambassador met again with Elizabeth, she protested that the match had been encouraged by someone with ‘good intentions but without any commission from her’. As de Quadra wrote afterwards, ‘I am obliged to complain of somebody in this matter and have complained of Lady Sidney only, although in good truth she is no more to blame than I am, as I have said privately.’ In fact it was Mary Sidney’s changed demeanour that had tipped him off: ‘When I found Lady Sidney was doubtful and complained of the Queen and her brother, I thought best to put an end to uncertainty.’
35

There had been no plot to kill the Queen and Dudley at Arundel’s banquet; the story had been concocted to convince de Quadra of Elizabeth’s desire to marry. After the death of Henri II in July 1559 and the succession of Mary Queen of Scots’s fifteen-year-old husband François to the throne, the threat of a Franco-Scottish alliance loomed large. French forces in Scotland were increasing day by day and Elizabeth feared war on the Scottish borders. In October, de Quadra had warned his counterpart in Rome to, ‘take care the French do not get at the new Pope and cause him to proceed against the [English] Queen on the Scotch Queen’s claims. It would do much damage here and elsewhere before the marriage.’
36
By the pretence of marriage negotiations, encouraged by the unwitting Lady Sidney, the Queen had hoped to maintain the goodwill of the Habsburgs in the face of French aggression, and at the same time divert attention from her scandalous relationship with Robert Dudley.