Penguin.com (usa)

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

Camden said that, though young to rule at twenty-five, Elizabeth was 'rarely qualified by resolution and adversity'. So was Robert Dudley. Like the phoenix that was her emblem, she had risen from what (given the fate meted out to heretics) could almost literally have been her ashes. She had survived by shrewdness, by her sharply honed wits and by self-control so savage it must have hurt a young soul—and yet, it was of Dudley that Robert Naunton wrote he could 'put his passions in his pocket' to keep them safely hidden away. Robert Dudley too had had to make some harsh decisions to survive, had had to curb his young man's impetuosity. Camden wrote of him with dubious approval, that he was 'very skillful in temporizing, and fitting himself to the times'; but Elizabeth, who had no use for hotheads, valued this determined resilience.

A prayer Elizabeth had published in the first years of her reign cast an eye back over her youthful history.

Thou hast willed me not to be some wretched girl from the meanest rank of common people, who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom Thou has destined me, born of royal parents and nurtured and educated at court. When I was surrounded and thrown about by various snares of enemies, Thou has preserved me with Thy constant protection from prison and the most extreme danger; and though I was freed only at the very last moment, Thou has entrusted me on earth with royal sovereignty and majesty.

Robert Dudley too had been educated at court; though born of nobility, he too had been imprisoned and in danger. The scaffold that had claimed her mother had taken his father and brother. There is no evidence for the pretty timeworn tale of stolen romance between the two when they were both imprisoned in the Tower. But through the may never have loved or lusted there, the place represented a bond between them—a shared experience of fear and loss unusual in even the Tudor century.

Legend says they were born on the same day. In fact Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533, Robert Dudley on 24 June (as he mentioned many years later, in a letter to William Cecil), either of that year or of the year before; no-one was recording his life precisely. Not that he was a nobody. Many years later, Philip Sidney—Robert's nephew, remembered as the epitome of a young aristocrat—wrote, in rebutting an attack on his uncle, that 'my chiefest honour is to be a Dudley, and truly I am glad to have cause to set forth the nobility of that blood whereof I am descended'.

The Dudleys—like Elizabeth's maternal relations, the Boleyns—live in legend as arch-arrivistes, with all the implied sneers about those who rose too rapidly. They were undoubtedly—like the Boleyns— arch-servants of the state. But, just as Anne Boleyn (with the Duke of Norfolk for her uncle) was not entirely the outsider of legend, so there were some of the famous old names in Robert Dudley's family tree. Even Richard Neville, Richard 'the Kingmaker'—Earl of Warwick, the title Robert's brother would bear—was related to Dudleys, a connection that cast an interesting sidelight on the position the family might occupy in relation to the monarchy. (Previous earls of Leicester, Robert's own future title, had included Simon de Montfort, who in the thirteenth century led an aristocratic revolt against the incompetent government of Henry III, and Henry 'Bolingbroke', who deposed the equally inefficient Richard II.) Over the years it had often been descent in the female line that had given the Dudleys their claims to the aristocracy, the Lisle title and the Warwick earldom; and it was the female line that linked them, so they would boast, even to the Saxon nobility.

Robert's great-grandfather was a younger son of the great Midlands landholder Baron Dudley. His grandfather Edmund Dudley trained as a lawyer, and was already known as a coming man when Henry VII achieved the throne. Twenty years later he was the Speaker of the House of Commons, and a member of the royal council; prominent and wealthy. The tactics which made him rich (with his neighbour and partner, Sir Richard Empson) still more greatly enriched the monarchy. Dudley and Empson increased the royal revenue by squeezing the nobility: hunting out carefully hidden assets, exploiting old laws to claim fines for their king. If they also accepted bribes for themselves, it was hardly more than common practice.

Men did not love Henry VII for what they saw his mercenary attitudes, but you did not complain of an anointed king with impunity. Safer by far to blame Empson and Dudley: 'his horse-leeches and shearers', that partial historian Francis Bacon called them a century later, 'bold men and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master's grist'. When Henry VIII succeeded to the throne in 1509, one of his first acts was to order the arrest of his father's hated agents. It was a singularly ruthless bid for popularity. That it was nothing more is shown in the details of the two men's trial and treatment: the absurdity of the charge that they had tried to take over the country, and the fact that their bodies were never subject to torments and disgraces that would have been inflicted upon genuine traitors. None the less Dudley, like Empson, was beheaded—nominally for treason—in August 1510.

John Dudley, Robert's father, was a child of seven when his father Edmund went to the block. His mother rapidly remarried, taking as her new husband one Arthur Plantagenet, illegitimate son of Edward IV, and the boy was sent as ward to another gentlemen, the Kentish landowner and family friend Sir Edward Guildford, who, having no sons of his own, effectively adopted John, and betrothed him to his own daughter Jane. The marriage was to be a long and unusually happy one: witness the many references, in Jane's eventual will, to her 'lord, my dear husband'; witness the loving messages that found their way into her husband's official dispatches.

John found early prominence as a fighting man: first as a youth veteran of the French wars of the 1520s and then as star jouster of many a court tournament. But if the King valued him in the tilt yard and hunting field, the King's ministers found John equally apt and enterprising in political tasks. First employed by Cardinal Wolsey, he was then—after Wolsey fell from power, having failed to secure the King his annulment—employed by Thomas Cromwell, who rose to prominence alongside Anne Boleyn. He was, in fact, an intelligent and dutiful tool for any government of the day. By the time of Robert's birth, he had begun to purchase the old territories of Baron Dudley, and had succeeded his surrogate father as Master of the Tower Armouries. A year later Sir Edward Guildford died, and John (through his wife) inherited Sir Edward's seat in the House of Commons and his lands around Tenterden in Kent. (Robert may have been born at Halden Place near Rolvenden—or 'Rounden'— rather than in London. A font in the village still bears the arms of the Guildford family Indeed, the Dudley children probably did much of their growing up in the country, since besides the inherited estates in Kent and Sussex, John Dudley went on buying lands in the West Midlands, close to the Welsh border, and transformed the ancient family seat of Dudley Castle.

The Dudleys were an intensely clannish family. All his life, Robert would stick close to those siblings who survived into adulthood, bonded to them in a strong defensive alliance based not only on loyalty, but on a communality of ideas and ideals. Perhaps this explains the two different faces John Dudley seemed to show: one often inimical to the outside world, the other warm and indulgent to his own brood. Two more boys were born after Robert, and another four girls; and of the thirteen children born to the prolific Jane Dudley, nine survived infancy, at a time when half of all babies died before they were five years old. Robert's earliest youth seems to have been uneventful; there I s no reason (with all those acres, and all those siblings to play with in them) to doubt it was also happy. But the hard facts about it are not many.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6