QUEEN ELIZABETH AND ROBERT DUDLEY: THE REAL STORY
Published: 02 February 2022
Posted by: Dr Charles Kightly
Category: History In-depth
The story of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley has fascinated people for more than 450 years. Their relationship has been explored in books, films and on TV, most recently by Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes in the film Elizabeth, and by Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons in the series Elizabeth I. They were certainly emotionally dependent on each other throughout their lives, but were they ever really lovers? Over the centuries, layer upon layer of myth and fiction have obscured their true story.
The mythmaking began during the couple’s lifetime with the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Leicester’s Commonwealth. This masterpiece of character assassination gleefully recounts every morsel of scurrilous gossip about Dudley, portraying him as a serial killer, extortioner, and criminal. Like the ‘black legend’ of Richard III, it became accepted truth for generations of historians. When Sir Walter Scott embroidered the legend even further in his wildly inaccurate novel Kenilworth (1821), the seal was set on Dudley’s infamous reputation.
Dudley was no saint; indeed, he was probably the most unpopular man in England. But the real story of his relationship with Elizabeth portrays them both in a more nuanced, human light.
Robert was born in 1532 and Elizabeth in 1533, and they had known each other since they were children. Both had been in real danger of losing their heads during the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Queen Mary, and Elizabeth never forgot that Dudley had befriended her during this traumatic time.
The minute Elizabeth became queen in 1558, Dudley rushed to her side, literally mounted on a white charger. She immediately appointed him her Master of Horse, responsible for the travels of the court and its entertainment. It soon became plain that this was no mere reunion of childhood friends. Lord Robert was ‘singularly well-featured, almost six feet tall with long shapely legs. The queen was violently attracted to him, and he was to her. Day after day, they rode and danced together or whispered in alcoves. Rumors that they were lovers were rife, and not only at court. Old Mother Dowe of Brentwood was jailed for assuring her neighbors that ‘My Lord Robert hath given Her Majesty a red petticoat’–that is, had taken her virginity.
An image from Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) featuring Cate Blanchet as Elizabeth and Joseph Fiennes as Robert Dudley.
© PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
Were they ever physically lovers? There is absolutely no real evidence that they were, and on what she believed to be her deathbed, Elizabeth solemnly swore that ‘though she loved him dearly…nothing unseemly had ever passed between them’.
To make matters worse, everyone knew that Dudley was already married. As a teenager, he’d made ‘a carnal marriage, begun for pleasure’ to Amy Robsart, daughter of a Norfolk squire. But Amy never appeared at court. It was rumoured that she had ‘a malady in her breast’ and that Elizabeth was only waiting for her to die to marry Robert. In September 1560 Amy was found dead with a broken neck; whether the cause was murder or (more likely) suicide, accident or disease has never been proved. Dudley was almost certainly innocent of anything beyond neglecting her. He was now technically free to marry Elizabeth, but the cloud of suspicion that now hung over him meant that she could never accept him. To do so might have cost her the throne.
Yet she would not let him go. ‘I cannot do without my Lord Robert’, she told the French ambassador, ‘for he is like my little dog’. He remained her ‘Bonny Sweet Robin’, constantly needed by her side. She even hatched a scheme to marry him off to Mary Queen of Scots — on condition that the pair lived with her at court. She also mollified him with the gift of Kenilworth Castle in 1563 and with the title Earl of Leicester a year later.
Dudley didn’t give up hope of wedding her. After she evaded his outright proposal at Christmas 1565, he left court in a sulk, only to be dragged back and ordered never to leave her again. But now he was turning to others. In 1573 he may even have secretly married a beautiful widow, Lady Sheffield (the validity of this marriage has never been confirmed), with whom he certainly had a son.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Robert continued their bickerings and reconciliations. She ostentatiously honoured him with four visits to Kenilworth Castle, which he was developing at immense cost into a ‘wonder house’ for her entertainment. During her last and most famous visit, in 1575, she stayed for 19 days, the longest she ever remained in a courtier’s mansion. The ‘princely shows’ included fireworks which were heard 20 miles away and the garden created for her visit, now splendidly recreated by English Heritage. When, with characteristic obtuseness, she complained that she couldn’t see it properly from her purpose-built lodgings in ‘Leicester’s Building’, Dudley’s gardeners worked all night to create a pop-up version under her window.
A reconstruction drawing by Ivan Lapper of Queen Elizabeth I being welcomed at Kenilworth Castle by Robert Dudley in July 1575
The final entertainment should have been a masque urging Elizabeth to marry her host. But it was rained off. Elizabeth wouldn’t wait for the panting actor who pursued her with pleas to stay, and rode away.
The rainstorm also extinguished Dudley’s last hopes. In 1578 he married Lettice Knollys, the queen’s extremely attractive, red-headed cousin. Robert had long flirted with her, and she was now possibly pregnant. Two days after their private wedding at Wanstead House, Elizabeth arrived there on a progress, but nobody breathed a word. Not until much later did someone reveal to the queen both Robert’s affair with Lady Sheffield and his marriage to Lettice. She was furious, and never spoke to Lettice again. But with Dudley–after a period of coolness–her relationship continued, amazingly, much as before. They were now old friends, bound together by nearly forty years of shared experience and affection.
So they remained until the Armada year of 1588, when Dudley’s last great triumph was stage-managing Elizabeth’s famous visit to the army camp at Tilbury. Less than a month later, worn out and probably suffering from stomach cancer, Dudley died at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire, aged about 55. Grieving for her ‘brother and best friend’, Elizabeth barricaded herself into her chambers, seeing nobody. She treasured his final hurried message to her, inscribed in her own hand ‘his last letter’, in a casket by her bedside until she died in 1603.
Lettice, ‘the other woman’, may have had the last laugh. Though she promptly married again, she lived to be 91, and had herself buried beside Dudley, beneath an epitaph calling him ‘the best and dearest of husbands’. Ironically, Dudley’s role as Elizabeth’s favourite would be taken over by another ‘Sweet Robin’; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. He was Lettice’s son.
The tomb of Lettice Knollys and Robert Dudley in St Mary’s Church Warwick.
Did the Virgin Queen have a secret love child?
By SARAH CHALMERS, Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:20 14 June 2006
A new TV documentary reveals evidence that could shatter one of the enduring myths about the British monarchy – that Elizabeth I had a secret love child with her courtier Robert Dudley:
Unkempt and exhausted, 800 miles from England the shipwrecked young man prepared to meet his interrogators in a Madrid courtroom one June day in 1587. Suspected of spying after his ship ran aground just days earlier in the Bay of Biscay, the unshaven sailor feared for his life.
But it was not the threat of incarceration that troubled him, but the repercussions of the secret he was about to reveal. Asked to identify himself, he replied: “I am the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth of England and her lover Robert Dudley.”
At the time, his confession threatened to undermine the already-tense relationship between Catholic Spain and Protestant England, just a year before the Spanish Armada set sail, intent on conquering her enemy.
Courtiers moved swiftly to dismiss it as fantasy, part of a plot by the Roman Catholic interrogator – Sir Francis Englefield, an English exile in Spain – who recorded the
statement, to overthrow Elizabeth I. And there it might have remained, a footnote in history, were it not for a new investigation by an Oxford-educated historian and author of 70 historical novels.
During the course of his research, Dr Paul Doherty re-examined the original account of the so-called ‘bastard son’ and unearthed what he insists is corroborating evidence.
Could it really be true that the monarch known as The Virgin Queen carried out an illicit affair, bore her lover a child, then abandoned him – rather than face a public scandal?
In November 1558, Elizabeth, last surviving child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, became England’s sovereign. The nation was on the verge of a religious war between Catholics and Protestants and needed peace and stability.
In the first week of her reign, the unmarried Elizabeth, aged just 25, sought to allay the
fears of her subjects by promising them her devotion, insisting there would be no marriage or children to distract her from duty.
Holding her coronation ring aloft, she declared: “Behold the pledge of this, my wedlock and marriage with my kingdom. And do not upbraid me with miserable lack of children: for every one of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children and kinsmen to me.”
It was one of history’s most enduring images and set the stage for one of the most talked-about reigns in England. When the Queen died 45 years later, the coronation ring was so embedded in her skin that it had to be filed from her finger.
She knew only too well the dangers of being a woman ruler in a man’s world. Her own mother had been executed on suspicion of adultery, when Elizabeth was just two years old.
Rumours
Nevertheless, there were rumours of affairs even during her lifetime – the majority of which surrounded her intense friendship with Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, a cousin of the Queen’s and a friend from childhood.
Although Dudley married a woman called Amy Robsart – a union of convenience between two wealthy families – he and Elizabeth remained close in adulthood. In 1559 she had his bedchamber moved next to her personal apartments, further igniting rumours of a sexual liaison.
In a famous encounter, reported at the time, the Queen’s childhood governess Katherine Ashley begged her to prove she was still chaste and not involved with Dudley.
So worried were courtiers of an illicit relationship that William Cecil, the Queen’s most trusted adviser, wrote at the time that he feared the pair were planning to marry, and predicted the “ruin of the realm”.
“To say it was a platonic love is to use 21st-Century notions to describe 16th-Century practices,” says Doherty. “In the 16th Century, sex was seen as the expression of love, of chivalrous love and I don’t think Elizabeth was against that. She would have seen it as a logical conclusion.”
Gossipgathered speed a year later on September 8, 1560, when Dudley’s wife Amy died in suspicious circumstances at the couple’s Oxfordshire home, House, near Abingdon. Earlier that day she had sent all the servants out for the day to a local fair and shortly after was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs, her neck broken.
The scandal tarnished Dudley’s reputation and put paid to any likelihood of him marrying the Queen. But by the end of 1561 Elizabeth was confined to bed with a mysterious illness – one that suggests any relationship between the two remained ongoing.
According to witnesses she was suffering from dropsy – now known as oedema – an abnormal swelling of the body due to a build-up of fluid.
The Spanish ambassador reported she had a swelling of the abdomen, and Doherty insists it is not too much of a jump to imagine this might also have been due to a pregnancy. After all, it is known that several ladies-in-waiting at the Queen’s court successfully concealed their own pregnancies at the time.
Testimony
But by far the most compelling evidence is the testimony of the man who claimed to be the product of that pregnancy.
Shortly after his shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay, Arthur Dudley was brought to Madrid to be questioned by Sir Francis Englefield. Sir Francis’s accounts of the conversation were recorded in three letters, known collectively as the Englefield Papers.
The story they contain is an intriguing one of shame, subterfuge and ultimately exposure. According to Arthur Dudley, one of the royal governess Katherine Ashley’s servants – a man called Robert Southern – was summoned to Hampton Court one night in 1561 and asked to obtain a nurse for a newborn infant.
Staff at the palace told him the child was the offspring of a careless employee and must be quickly concealed before news of the birth reached the Queen. On this proviso, Southern was asked to take the boy, christened Arthur, with him to London and raise him as one of his own children.
The only guidance he was given was that the youngster was to receive the education of a gentleman. Arthur learned of the controversy surrounding his birth only in 1583, when Southern, the man he thought of as his father, lay on his deathbed.
The old man confessed the truth to a bewildered Arthur, in front of a witness, a local schoolmaster. Throughout this time, Elizabeth was revered as the Virgin Queen, and maintained a public facade of chastity. Yet there were hints that she was not as pure as she professed.
In 1562 the Queen contracted smallpox and was not expected to survive. Delirious and fearing death, she made a number of unusual demands from her bedchamber. Rallying what remained of her ebbing energy, she implored her advisers to make Robert Dudley Lord Protector with a pension of £20,000 a year, fuelling speculation that he had indeed been her lover.
Even more strangely, she insisted on a £500-a-year stipend for a servant of Dudley’s, a man called John Tamworth. Was he, asks Doherty, being rewarded for his part in the concealment of an illegitimate child?
In fact the Queen did survive her brush with smallpox, but later the same year wrote an astonishing set of prayers which deviated greatly from her usual, rather bland, style. She suddenly composed a very personal set of prayers that seemed to refer to a great sin she had committed.
“For my secret sins cleanse me,” she wrote. “For the sins of others spare your handmaiden. Many sins have been forgiven her because she hath loved too much.”
This, says Doherty may be evidence of a breakdown, prompted by the abandonment of her child. “Elizabeth was writing about herself and it makes you pause and think,” he says.
“She made some harsh decisions during her reign – dispatching fleets and waging wars – but in these prayers she is confessing to a sexual sin and one of the greatest sacrifices of her life: the abandonment of a child by its mother.”
Three other documents unearthed by Doherty seem to bear out his claim. The first is a letter in the British Library dated May 28, 1588, from an English spy – known only as BC – to his bosses in London. In it, BC describes the interrogation of Arthur Dudley and hints that the Spanish authorities took his claim seriously – housing him at the court of King Philip II and giving him a pension.
Not only that but the spy, who previously served in the court of Queen Mary, said that Arthur Dudley bore more than a passing resemblance to the man he claimed was his father. (This is not something Sir Francis Englefield, who was blind and ageing, would have been able to confirm.)
The second piece of corroboration Doherty highlights is the will of Robert Southern, a document that not only confirms Southern’s existence, but also a series of personal details such as where he lived, names of friends, his occupation and so on – details that Dudley relayed later under interrogation.
“If Arthur Dudley was a fake,” says Doherty, “why would he have gone to the trouble of naming a genuine person (Southern) as his guardian, and providing so many personal details?
“Surely, if we have been able to prove that this part of his statement was true, it is not too difficult to imagine that the rest of it was.”
Finally, Doherty travelled to Simancas in Northern Spain, site of the country’s National Archive, where he found a letter Arthur Dudley wrote, begging to be kept safe. The letter, however, makes no demands for money, position or special treatment – proof, says Doherty, of the sincerity of his plea.
For if Arthur Dudley truly was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth, he had every reason to be afraid. Had it been publicised at the time, the story of his lineage would surely have sparked an international crisis, a civil war and an astonishing revision of history.
Only Robert Dudley and the Queen knew the truth. Dudley died in September 1588, a year after Arthur made his claims. The woman he loved followed him to the grave 25 years later on March 24, 1603.
Her passing marked the end of one of the most controversial reigns in English royal history. Few monarchs have been subject to as much speculation as she was. Buried a virgin and lauded for sacrificing her own happiness for her country – the truth about Elizabeth’s romantic life and possible parenthood will continue to fascinate generations to come.
The Secret Life Of Elizabeth I is on Channel Five at 8pm tonight.
