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Read an excerpt from Elizabeth & Leicester (Continued...)

So on 17 November Elizabeth was already well prepared; surrounded by those who would be central to her reign. And soon among them — arriving, story says, on the hero's traditional white horse — was Lord Robert Dudley.

For the known, the certain, story of Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley begins with her accession day. It is only from this time onwards that we can see surviving evidence of contact: letters sent and docketed; bills; records of ceremonies. We know, from the later statements they both made, and from the easy assumptions of agents and ambassadors in the first days of the new queen's reign, that theirs was no brand new acquaintance-ship. But the precise information is scarce.

On the other hand, perhaps we hardly need the time and the place where the two first met among the palaces and courts of Henry VIII's day. The history of the Dudleys and the Tudors had been so closely linked that they have been compared to the ivy and the oak tree around which it wraps. (And it is only in recent years that it has been conceded that the Dudleys were not necessarily the parasites—indeed, that he Dudleys had a better record of fidelity in giving service than the Tudors did of gratitude in receiving it; that the Dudleys' motto, 'Droit et loyal', was one they could claim in all honesty.)

Even their contemporaries felt that the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert transcended the details of practicality. There had to be some explanation for their lifelong fidelity, and those contemporaries put it down to 'synaptia', a hidden conspiracy of the stars, whose power to rule human lives no-one doubted: 'a sympathy of spirits between them, occasioned perhaps by some secret constellation', in the words of the historian William Camden, writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Theirs was a relationship already rooted in history and mythology. And that moment when Elizabeth heard she had come to the throne encapsulated much about their story. If our well-loved picture of Elizabeth's accession is something of a fantasy—if the reality is on the whole more interesting—you might say the same about our traditional picture of her relationship with Robert Dudley.

The site of the oak under which Elizabeth is said to have heard of her accession is marked in Hatfield House today. But a neighbouring estate—then belonging to Sir John Brockett, and still in the family—has, like Hatfield, its own marked oak where they claim Elizabeth heard the news. The pretty picture of a girl surprised by destiny, complete with biblical quotation, was written down seven decades after the event by Sir Robert Naunton, and even then, the author doesn't mention any tree. The first known records of the Hatfield oak are of its being displayed to later royal visitors—as late as the nineteenth century.* Was the romantic story an antiquarian's invention, or accurate folk memory? Or was it constructed in Elizabeth's own day? Two avenues of trees converge on the very spot where the royal oak stands. They were planted almost within living memory of that day, in the great Hatfield rebuilding of the early seventeenth century. One might speculate that Elizabeth and those around her are unlikely to have ignored so promising a piece of symbolism as England’s stout-hearted queen, declared under England's stout-hearted tree. Coincidentally, of course, the oak (since robur is the stout oaken wood in Latin) was the self-appointed symbol of Robert Dudley, the man who understood Elizabeth's image—and Elizabeth herself—better than any.

These two met each other now not just as courtier and queen, but as a man and a woman who would draw each other enormously. She was tawny-haired and slender, with the long fingers of which she was so proud and 'a spirit full of incantation', as one ambassador memorably had said. (Or see her in Sir John Hayward's words: 'her forehead large and fair…her eyes lively and sweet, but short-sighted, her nose somewhat rising in the middlest; the whole compass somewhat long, but yet of admirable beauty…a most delightful composition of majesty and modesty'.) Robert, too, was notably good-looking: tall, for the sixteenth century, at almost six feet, 'and singularly well-featured', Naunton later wrote, with the dark eyes that gave him the nickname of 'the Gypsy'. But that easily understood attraction is only part of the story.

At that time of her accession, Elizabeth would have needed her spiritual kin about her; her 'old flock of Hatfield'. This was a moment of extraordinary triumph—the realization of everything she had worked for, as well as waited for, so long. After the careful watchings of Mary's reign—the keys turned in the lock by a gaoler's hand, the covert dealings, the constant fear of being caught up in some foolish fellow traveller's rebellious fantasy—it must have seemed like day after night. But it was also a moment of extraordinary tension, a moment at which huge demands were made of her, when she would need to call upon all the resources available her. She was, after all, a female ruler—at the time, a contradiction in terms—of an impotent kingdom, many of whose inhabitants viewed her religion with scant sympathy. She would have wanted her friends beside her, and not just the fair-weather friends but those of proven loyalty: those who (like Robert Dudley) had known her as a child; those who perhaps (like Robert) had sold lands, in her time of need, to raise money for her.

Now that Elizabeth was queen, she could expect to be surrounded by a mob of good-time glad-handlers, eager to assure her that they had always supported her…really. But the people she needed (she, with her long history of nervous strain, of illness following on a period of exhilarating effort) were the ones who had always known where their loyalties lay—and who had seen the bad side of life under her Catholic sister Mary.

When Robert kissed Elizabeth's hand at Hatfield—when she made him instantly her Master of Horse, a position his father and brother had held before him—we have no sound reason to believe he already had a place in her heart. That, perhaps, still lay ahead. We cannot know with certainty. But, looking back through the shared years of their common childhood, at a hundred tiny ties, it is hardly surprising that he certainly did have a place waiting in her hierarchy.

*When the tree died in the 1970s, another sapling was planted by another Queen Elizabeth, while the dead trunk was temporarily resurrected in the Hatfield gift shop, sheltering a waxwork effigy of the princess.

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