Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, was buried with a letter. Queen Elizabeth I had received it six days before his death on the 4th of September 1588, and she never parted with it. She kept it in her bedside treasure box, writing "his last letter" on the outside in her own hand. It was still there when she died fifteen years later, on the 24th of March 1603. Her nickname for Dudley had been "Eyes", symbolised in their private correspondence by the sign of two small circles.

  For thirty years, Dudley stood closer to Elizabeth than almost any person alive. He was her Master of the Horse from the morning after her accession, her privy councillor, her dancing partner, her unofficial consort at state ceremonies, and, for most of that time, her suitor. When he was absent from court for a few weeks in 1578, Sir Christopher Hatton described a growing emergency: "This court wanteth your presence. Her majesty is unaccompanied and, I assure you, the chambers are almost empty."

  Yet Dudley's name has come down to us tangled in scandal. His first wife died at the bottom of a flight of stairs. His secret second marriage enraged the Queen. A vicious Catholic libel published in 1584 depicted him as a poisoner, an atheist, and a man plotting to seize the Crown. Sorting out what was true, what was slander, and what lay somewhere in between occupied historians for centuries. The answers, when they came, made him a far more substantial figure than the caricature suggested.

• 2. A Family Falls

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  Edmund Dudley, Robert's paternal grandfather, had served King Henry VII as an adviser and was executed for treason in 1510 by Henry VIII. The family's pattern of proximity to power followed by catastrophic disgrace would repeat itself.

  Robert was born on the 24th of June 1532, the fifth son of John Dudley, who would become the 1st Duke of Northumberland. The household was, by contemporary accounts, a notably happy one; John and Jane Dudley had thirteen children in all. Among the tutors the siblings shared were John Dee, Thomas Wilson, and Roger Ascham. Ascham believed Robert possessed a rare talent for languages and writing, including in Latin, though he regretted that his pupil preferred mathematics.

  Robert came of age in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, learning the craft of the courtier firsthand. In 1549 he helped suppress Kett's Rebellion, and the following year he married Amy Robsart on the 4th of June 1550, in the presence of the young King Edward himself. She was the daughter and heiress of Sir John Robsart, a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, and the match appears to have been a genuine love match. Robert served as a Member of Parliament for Norfolk in 1551-52, March 1553, and again in 1559.

  The crisis came on the 6th of July 1553, when Edward VI died. Robert's father tried to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne; Jane was married to Robert's younger brother Guildford. Robert led a force of three hundred men into Norfolk to secure towns for Jane. After about ten days, he took King's Lynn and proclaimed her queen in the marketplace. The very next day, the 19th of July, Jane's reign collapsed in London. The townspeople of King's Lynn seized Robert and sent him to Framlingham Castle.

  What followed was total ruin. Robert was imprisoned in the Tower, attainted, and condemned to death, alongside his father and four brothers. His father went to the scaffold. His brother Guildford was executed in February 1554. In the Tower, Dudley found himself imprisoned alongside his childhood friend, the future Elizabeth I, who had been sent there on suspicion of involvement in Wyatt's Rebellion. Their shared captivity in that bleak fortress was one of the formative experiences of both their lives.

  The surviving brothers were released in the autumn of 1554. Their mother, who died the following January, and their brother-in-law Henry Sidney had worked for their freedom by befriending the Spanish nobles around Philip of Spain, Mary's husband. Robert's rehabilitation was gradual; he and his brother Ambrose fought for Philip II at the Battle of St. Quentin in August 1557. Their youngest brother Henry was killed there by a cannonball, before Robert's own eyes, according to Robert himself. All surviving Dudley children were restored in blood by Mary's parliament in 1558, clearing the way for what came next.

• 3. The Queen's Favourite

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  Philip II's envoy counted Robert Dudley among Elizabeth's special friends a week before Queen Mary died. On the morning of the 18th of November 1558, the day after Elizabeth's accession, Dudley witnessed the surrender of the Great Seal at Hatfield and was made Master of the Horse that same day. It was an ideal post for a man described as an excellent horseman with serious professional interest in horse breeding and royal transport. He was also entrusted with organising a large portion of the Queen's coronation festivities.

  By April 1559 Dudley had been elected a Knight of the Garter. Philip II was already receiving detailed intelligence about the relationship: "Lord Robert has come so much into favour that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that her majesty visits him in his chamber day and night." Within a month the Spanish ambassador Count de Feria counted Dudley among three persons who ran the country.

  His apartments at court were next to the Queen's. He was perceived as knowing "the Queen and her nature best of any man", and foreign princes visited on state occasions partly to bid for his goodwill. When several European rulers were vying for Elizabeth's hand in the autumn of 1559, their frustrated envoys concluded that the Queen was stalling them until, as one dispatch put it, "this wicked deed of killing his wife is consummated."

  This was the world Dudley occupied: intimate enough to be assumed to be king-in-waiting, prominent enough to attract murderous enemies. He took to wearing a light coat of mail under his clothing. Plans to kill him circulated among the nobility, who could not tolerate the prospect of him becoming king. Gossip spread, in England and on the Continent, that the Queen had children by him, rumours that never fully died for the rest of her life.

  In October 1562, Elizabeth fell gravely ill with smallpox. Believing she was dying, she asked the Privy Council to make Dudley Protector of the Realm and to grant him a suitable title together with £20,000 a year. She recovered, and he was made a privy councillor. In 1564 he was created Earl of Leicester, partly to make him a more credible candidate as a husband for Mary, Queen of Scots. He was not, as Elizabeth's political manoeuvrings required, going to cooperate with that plan. He was never merely her instrument.

• 4. Amy Robsart's Death

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  Amy Dudley had been living in different parts of the country since her ancestral manor house was uninhabitable. Her husband visited her for four days at Easter 1559 and she spent a month near London in early summer of the same year. They never saw each other again.

  On the 8th of September 1560, Amy was found dead at her residence, Cumnor Place near Oxford, at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Dudley, who had been with the Queen at Windsor Castle, wrote immediately to his contact: "There came to me Bowes, by whom I do understand that my wife is dead and as he sayeth by a fall from a pair of stairs. Little other understanding can I have of him. The greatness and the suddenness of the misfortune doth so perplex me, until I do hear from you how the matter standeth, or how this evil should light upon me, considering what the malicious world will bruit, as I can take no rest."

  He retreated to his house at Kew and pressed for an impartial inquiry. A coroner's jury had already convened. Their verdict was accident: Lady Dudley, staying alone in a chamber, had fallen down the adjoining stairs, sustaining two head injuries and breaking her neck. The scandal, however, was devastating. Those who wanted to prevent Elizabeth from marrying Dudley exploited it fully. Most historians have since considered murder unlikely.

  The coroner's report came to light in The National Archives in 2008, and it is compatible with an accidental fall, suicide, or other violence. A medical theory first proposed in 1956 by Ian Aird, a professor of surgery, suggested that Amy Dudley had suffered from breast cancer, which through metastatic deposits in the spine could have caused her neck to break under only limited strain, such as a short fall. This explanation has been widely accepted, though suicide has also been considered, given evidence that she was ill and possibly depressed.

  A detail that appeared for the first time in the libel Leicester's Commonwealth in 1584, describing Amy's headdress still standing undisturbed on her head when she was found, was satirical in origin but was long repeated as fact. The shadow of that morning at Cumnor Place never left Dudley. For eighteen years he did not remarry, partly for the Queen's sake. Whether or not he was guilty of anything, he was never free of the accusation.

• 5. Kenilworth and Ambition

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  After the Duke of Northumberland's attainder, the Dudley family had lost everything. Robert financed his early years as a royal favourite through large loans from City of London merchants until, in April 1560, Elizabeth granted him his first export licence, worth £6,000 per year. In June 1563 she granted him Kenilworth Manor, Castle, and Park, along with the lordships of Denbigh and Chirk in North Wales. Further grants followed, and eventually Leicester and his elder brother Ambrose came to preside over the greatest aristocratic interest in the West Midlands and North Wales.

  At Denbigh, Dudley inherited a region in tenurial chaos that had persisted for more than half a century. He negotiated settlements with the tenants, raising copyholders to the status of freeholders in exchange for newly agreed rents and securing tenants' rights of common, in what the historian Simon Adams called "an ambitious resolution of a long-standing problem... without parallel in Elizabeth's reign". He also began large building projects in the town of Denbigh, including a church planned on a scale that would have been the largest post-Reformation church in England and Wales. It was never finished. He tried, and failed, to have the nearby episcopal see of St Asaph transferred to Denbigh. He supported the translation of the Bible and Common Prayer Book into Welsh.

  Kenilworth Castle became the centre of his territorial ambition. He added a gatehouse, a formal garden, and a residential wing whose thin walls and grids of windows became characteristic of Elizabethan architecture. His fascination with the Beauchamp inheritance, which he and his brother Ambrose shared through their paternal grandmother, gave the West Midlands a special personal significance; they adopted the ancient heraldic device of the earls of Warwick, the Bear and Ragged Staff. He also founded Lord Leycester's Hospital in Warwick, a charity for aged and injured soldiers that still functions today.

  The climax of Kenilworth was a nineteen-day festival in July 1575. There was a Lady of the Lake, a swimming papier-mache dolphin with a small orchestra in its belly, fireworks, masques, hunts, and bear baiting. The source reads this extravaganza simultaneously as a final allegorical bid for the Queen's hand and as an oblique request for leave to marry someone else. In either reading, the spectacle was extraordinary enough to resonate in the memory of Elizabeth's court for years.

• 6. Patron and Statesman

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  Around a hundred books were dedicated to Robert Dudley during Elizabeth's reign. In 1564 and 1567 Arthur Golding dedicated his popular translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses to him. Dudley suggested to the tailor John Stow in 1559 that he should become a chronicler, which Stow recalled in print in 1604.

  As Chancellor of Oxford University, Dudley enforced the Thirty-nine Articles, obtained an incorporation by Parliament under the Oxford and Cambridge Act 1571, and was instrumental in founding the official Oxford University Press. He installed the pioneer of international law Alberico Gentili and the controversial theologian Antonio del Corro at Oxford; over del Corro's case he sacked the university's Vice-Chancellor.

  His theatre patronage was equally vigorous. From at least 1559 he maintained his own company of players. In 1574 he obtained for them the first royal patent issued to actors to allow them to tour the country without interference from local authorities. He also protected the Children of St. Paul's and of the Royal Chapel against hostile bishops and landlords. His separate company of musicians performed before the King of Denmark in 1586; travelling with them was William Kempe, described as "the Lord Leicester's jesting player".

  Leicester possessed one of the largest private collections of paintings in Elizabethan England. He was a principal patron of Nicholas Hilliard and took a wide interest in Italian culture. The circle at Leicester House on the Strand included his nephew Philip Sidney, his niece Mary Sidney Herbert, John Dee, the secretaries Edward Dyer and Jean Hotman, John Florio, and Gabriel Harvey. Through Harvey, Edmund Spenser found employment at Leicester House, where he wrote his first poetry. Spenser recalled that time in his Prothalamion and in 1591 honoured the late Earl in his poem The Ruins of Time.

  In exploration and trade, Dudley was an enthusiastic backer of the Muscovy Company and the Merchant Adventurers. He was a principal funder of Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world and, with his brother Ambrose, a principal patron of Martin Frobisher's 1576 search for the Northwest Passage. He later acquired his own ship, the Galleon Leicester. He also handled English relations with Morocco and supported Dom António, the exiled claimant to the Portuguese throne after 1580, in a policy shaped as much by Protestant solidarity and English seapower as by commercial calculation.

  A talk with Leicester about the sanitary conditions at the royal palaces inspired John Harington to construct a water closet, one of the more unexpected products of their acquaintance.

• 7. The Netherlands Disaster

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  Leicester built a relationship with Prince William of Orange throughout the 1570s and became genuinely popular in the Dutch provinces. After the Prince of Orange was murdered in 1584 and Antwerp fell to the Duke of Parma in August 1585, an English intervention became unavoidable. Leicester had been pressing for it since 1577.

  On the 9th of December 1585, he set sail from Harwich and crossed the Channel in less than twenty-four hours, landing at Flushing. His reception was remarkable; one correspondent described it as resembling a second Charles V's progress. On the 1st of January 1586, the States General of the United Provinces urged him to accept the title of governor-general in The Hague. He accepted on the 25th of January, having received no word from England because of persistent adverse winds.

  Elizabeth was furious. She had expressly declined to accept sovereignty over the Netherlands while still expecting her lieutenant-general to direct their government. She sent Sir Thomas Heneage to read her letters of disapproval before the States General, with Leicester required to stand nearby. She demanded he resign the post in a formal ceremony at the very place where he had taken it. "My credit hath been cracked ever since her Majesty sent Sir Thomas Heneage hither", Leicester wrote in October 1586.

  Elizabeth also instructed her Lieutenant-General to avoid any decisive engagement with the Duke of Parma, the opposite of what Leicester and the Dutch wanted. His forces were small and chronically underfinanced. A long-running quarrel with Sir John Norris, his own deputy, undermined cohesion. In September 1586 there was a skirmish at Zutphen in which Philip Sidney was wounded; Sidney died a few weeks later. His uncle's grief was considerable.

  In his absence in December 1586, two Catholic officers Leicester had placed in command of Deventer and the fort of Zutphen, William Stanley and Rowland York, defected to Parma along with their key fortresses. When Leicester returned to the Netherlands in June 1587, the port of Sluis fell to Parma because Dutch allies refused to cooperate in relieving it. By December 1587 the political differences had become insurmountable; he asked to be recalled and gave up his post. He was irredeemably in debt, having mortgaged his estate to £25,000 to finance the expedition personally. The campaign was a military and political failure by every measure.

• 8. Legacy and Reputation

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  Leicester was in overall command of the English land forces during the Spanish Armada. At Tilbury on the Thames he erected a camp for London's defence, vigorously counteracting the disorganisation he found there. On the day Elizabeth gave her famous speech to the troops he walked beside her horse, bare-headed. After the Armada passed, he rode through London in visible triumph and for his last weeks dined regularly with the Queen, a unique favour.

  He died on the 4th of September 1588, at Cornbury Park near Oxford, on his way to take the baths at Buxton in Derbyshire. His health had been declining; historians have considered malaria and stomach cancer as possible causes. His death came unexpectedly. Elizabeth locked herself in her apartment for several days until Lord Burghley had the door broken open. Leicester was buried, as he had requested, in the Beauchamp Chapel of the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick on the 10th of October 1588, in the same chapel as Richard Beauchamp and his own small son. His widow Lettice was buried there beside him when she died in 1634, under an epitaph describing him as "the best and dearest of husbands".

  The libel Leicester's Commonwealth, printed anonymously in 1584 by Catholic exiles in Paris, established a very different image. It presented him as an atheistic hypocrite, a perpetual dictator, an expert poisoner of high-profile figures, and a man plotting to seize the English throne. Smuggled into England, it became an underground best-seller and was translated into French the following year. Many of the most familiar characterisations of Leicester, including his nickname "the Gypsy" and the reprimand attributed to Elizabeth, "I will have here but one mistress and no master", were set down by Sir Henry Wotton and Sir Robert Naunton nearly half a century after his death.

  The Victorian historian James Anthony Froude called him Elizabeth's "soft plaything", while Conyers Read in 1925 contrasted "a selfish, unscrupulous courtier" with Burghley the wise patriot. Geoffrey Elton in 1955 described him simply as "a handsome, vigorous man with very little sense."

  Since the 1950s the academic consensus has shifted substantially. Eleanor Rosenberg established his importance in literary patronage in 1955. Patrick Collinson's reassessment of Elizabethan Puritanism in the 1960s and 1970s gave better purchase on Dudley's genuine religious convictions. Alan Haynes called him "one of the most strangely underrated of Elizabeth's circle of close advisers". Simon Adams, who researched many aspects of Leicester's career from the early 1970s onward, concluded that Leicester was as central a figure to the first reign of Elizabeth as Burghley himself, a verdict that thirty years of scholarship has done nothing to contradict.