Was John Dudley Behind the Death of Thomas Seymour?

A key element of John Dudley’s Black Legend, often repeated to this day, is that he was responsible for “the hatred” between the Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas, which resulted in the latter’s execution at the hands of the former in March 1549. The notion first appeared more than four years later, in the aftermath of Dudley’s spectacular downfall in the summer of 1553, and whenever it was recounted or alluded to it was from the perspective of hindsight, as a piece of moralité, such as in this early Elizabethan rendition:

After the death of Henry the Eight it appeared that the duke of North feared much the amity between the two brethren, the duke of Somerset, [and] Sir Thomas Seymour, then Lord Admiral of England, seeking with all diligence to understand their humours; and so little by little to compass them both; as he did; and brought the matter so to pass that the one was condemned by act of parliament indicta causa; and the other condemned to death for suspicion of felony …; and so his aspiring head brought them both to confusion without … reason; who after died himself by the order of law without reason, wherein the scripture was fulfilled: look what measure you measure to others, the same shall be measured to you again.¹

Thomas Seymour’s political antics, which included schemes to marry the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth and breaking into the king’s bedchamber, brought him to the scaffold in 1549

Among the earliest narratives containing John Dudley’s alleged manipulation of the Lord Protector was that by the Spanish merchant Antonio de Guaras, who claimed Seymour’s death came about “by the contrivance of Dudley, who upheld and counselled Somerset in all things”. This statement has sometimes been used by modern writers to argue Dudley’s guilt and Somerset’s innocence (or, most recently, that of his wife).² It is easily overlooked, though, that Guaras represented the opinion at the court of Queen Mary,³ not the realities of 1549. His account is trustworthy for the events of August 1553, which the author witnessed himself, but as its main purpose is to celebrate Mary’s triumph over the forces of evil and heresy it is again a morality tale, that of the rise and fall of the monstrous Duke of Northumberland, who between 1546 and 1553 engineers the downfall of the Howards, the executions of the Earl of Surrey, of Thomas Seymour, and of the Duke of Somerset, until finally, fearing Edward’s coming of age, he also poisons the king (“The poor innocent languished for seven months.”).⁴

At Mary’s court John Dudley was the obvious hate figure, not least in the eyes of the queen herself who even declined to collect Edward VI’s last parliamentary subsidy in full, declaring it had only been raised because of the Duke of Northumberland’s greed. It is not surprising therefore that two of Mary’s court poets, in their condemnations of Dudley, should have included the charge that he destroyed Thomas Seymour,⁵ especially as Mary had been on excellent terms with the Somersets ever since the protector’s removal from power in 1549. This was also the reason why Princess Elizabeth, when desperately writing for her life in 1554, chose to remind her sister:

I have heard in my time of many cast away, for want of coming to their Prince: and in late days I heard my Lord Somerset say, that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered: but the persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief he could not live safely if the Admiral lived.⁶

Other than sometimes claimed, this letter does not refer to Elizabeth’s “conversation with Somerset”,⁷ but rather gives her impression of what she claimed to have overheard, the message to her sister being that she should not listen to “evil councillors”, a commonplace of the mirror of princes literature. The last phrase in Elizabeth’s letter indeed bears an uncanny resemblance to earlier gossip that had accused the Duchess of Somerset, “who pressed the matter, and said to her husband: ‘My lord, I tell you that if your brother does not die he will be your death.’”⁸

Why “Edward by the grace of god Duke of Somersett” – a de facto king⁹ – should have been unable to speak with his imprisoned brother whenever he wished remains a mystery. Later, the Duke of Northumberland certainly had long talks in the Tower with the imprisoned Duke of Somerset, and Queen Elizabeth likewise visited the condemned Duke of Norfolk there in 1572. If Somerset really made the lame excuse that he would have spared his brother had he not been hindered by others to see him (and there is no pre-1554 source that would indicate he regretted his brother’s fate), there are basically two possibilities: either he had a psychological problem, or, after his fall from power, he was trying to broaden his popular support by dropping hints. Evidence from both the French and the Imperial embassies make clear the ex-protector campaigned and intrigued against Dudley and his policies during 1550 and 1551, and there can be little doubt that this pattern of behaviour led to his final arrest and his execution in January 1552.¹⁰

Posthumously Edward Seymour became a Protestant hero, but the sin of fratricide did not look good on the emerging image of the “good duke”, as he became in a 1556 treatise by the exiled bishop John Ponet. Thomas Seymour, barely eligible even for eternal salvation in a 1549 court sermon, had meanwhile become an innocent; to exonerate the protector, “those that conspired the death of the two brethren”¹¹ had to step in as villains. Due to his “apostasy”, which contrasted conveniently with Somerset’s godliness, John Dudley was perfect for the role.

Under Elizabeth, in the early 1560s, it was probably John Hales, the former chief ideologue of Somerset’s “social policy”, who jotted down notes on recent events for a history that was never written. The author had presumably been a member of Somerset’s household, in the function of a clerk, but he had never been a privy councillor. A fanatical Protestant and a hater of both the Dudley family and Somerset’s former right hand man William Paget, he wrote about the beginnings of the troubles between the duke and his younger brother:

How after it was concluded by the council that the duke of Somerset should be protector and governor of the king, the earl of Warwick [John Dudley] said to the admiral, Sir Thomas Seymour, that he should do well to move in council that his brother being protector, he might be the king’s governor, as though that office had not been granted when he knew certainly it was determined before, and promised the admiral all his help and furtherance, and that if he would it, he would declare it he meant as he said. The admiral accordingly did move it in the council which as soon as the duke heard, he suddenly arose and spake not one word, and so the council was dissolved. After, Warwick came unto the duke and said thus, your grace may see this man’s ambition. After such sort he procured and maintained hatred between the brethren, that so he might the rather dispatch one and at length the other, and in the end rule alone himself.

On the next page Hales started all over again, however, this time:

The cause of the falling out of the protector and the admiral was ambition of the admiral and the envy he had that his brother should be more advanced than he.

How immediately after King H. Death, he began to make bands to keep a great house, and how he conferred with divers of the government of the realm, and condemned his brother because of his simplicity. …

Of the hatred between the queen [Katherine Parr] and the duchess of Somerset, and how the duchess hated the admiral, and contrariwise, and how the admiral sought the disinheritance of her children and would have had the duke’s children by his first wife to be his heirs.

How the brethren were once pacified but the love continued not.¹²

Thus, in the space of two pages, several versions of the “falling out” of the brothers were offered.

It would not have been entirely unreasonable of John Dudley to suggest Thomas Seymour receive Edward’s governorship: Never before had a protector of the realm held both offices, and Somerset made Sir Michael Stanhope, his wife’s half-brother, de facto governor of the king, a position which had the potential of enormous influence and patronage. Thomas Seymour may well have felt that he, another uncle of the king, should be in such a position rather than Stanhope and his assistant Sir Richard Page, who were just relations of the Duchess of Somerset.¹³ Of course John Dudley may himself have coveted the office: At the time of Henry VIII’s death he and Edward Seymour were seen as the obvious candidates to lead the country, Seymour’s superior “qualification” being his position of uncle. More likely, though, Dudley regretted to part with his cherished post of lord admiral, which he had ceded to Thomas Seymour. If he did, he would have been disappointed to see it vacant between Thomas Seymour’s death and the protector’s own downfall, among the first acts of the new junta being his own re-appointment as lord admiral.

There is of course no evidence that such considerations played any part, the accusations against Dudley being all written under the impression of later events and preoccupied with his alleged lust for power for power’s sake. However, it would have been impossible for him to know the future and to plan from the outset of Edward’s reign to get rid of “the two brethren”. He always supported Somerset, until September 1549, and seems to have warned Thomas Seymour at some point,

“using strong language to the Admiral, remonstrating with him that he had come to occupy such a high position through the favour of his brother and the council … ‘Be content, therefore.’ … These words, and threats he used besides, had such good effect that the Admiral went off at once and made up the quarrel with his brother.”¹⁴

The common notion in the later sources that John Dudley was striving to divest Edward VI of all uncles is wrong for yet another reason: Edward had a further Seymour uncle, Henry, who lived to a respectable age and whose help Somerset called upon during the council’s revolt in the autumn of 1549. Thomas Seymour was dead by then; it would be misleading, though, to believe that Somerset’s rule was undermined by Thomas’ removal, that was just another tradition informed by hindsight. His real problems were an empty treasury, a war in Scotland, and rebellions at home.

The attainder and execution of Thomas Seymour in March 1549 was strongly backed by the nobility and parliament; still, it rested on Somerset’s will. He had developed a very peculiar government style in which the king’s councillors were only called in to lend their signatures to decisions already taken in the duke’s small circle of his own household servants (like William Cecil). Senior royal councillors were in an awkward position when dealing with the lord protector, whose “great choleric fashions” erupted “whensoever you are contraried in … that which you have conceived in your head”, as William Paget, who held a unique position of trust, reminded him. – “No man shall dare speak to you what he thinks, though it were never so necessary for you to know it.”¹⁵

Edward VI, on the right side at the window on the left, listens to a Lenten sermon by Hugh Latimer in 1549. The sermon would have featured a condemnation of the king’s uncle, Thomas Seymour.

It was again Paget who on 25 January 1549 reminded Somerset to order “the committinge of thadmiral and his complices”.¹⁶ John Hales later claimed that John Dudley lived in the duke’s house during the crisis, being “always at hand” until Seymour’s death, when he moved out; the implication is of course a sinister one.¹⁷ It is, however, extremely unlikely that Dudley was so physically close to the protector. If he was, it is odd that he wrote letters intended for the duke’s attention in March and April 1549 – at about the same time he is supposed to have urged Seymour’s execution on Somerset in person. Dudley never addressed his letters to the duke personally, but always to men like William Cecil and Sir John Thynne, Somerset’s “familiars”, even when suggesting solutions to policy and military matters that greatly alarmed him.¹⁸ The protector had become unapproachable by 1548/1549, as appears from William Paget’s desperate letters, but also from Dudley’s: “for my meaning towards his Grace, I would his Grace knew it as God doth.”¹⁹

Somerset consulted crown jurists about whether his brother’s doings amounted to treason: Two of three judges giving a negative answer, he arranged for Seymour’s attainder in parliament rather than a trial; the resulting death sentence (for treason) he described as “indifferent justice”.²⁰ The indiscriminate condemnation he left to Hugh Latimer, who preached a series of vitriolic sermons in front of the eleven-year-old king: in the first, Latimer urged on Thomas Seymour’s execution, denouncing his marriage to Katherine Parr as treason and likening her to one of King David’s concubines in the process.²¹ The late queen’s brother and brother-in-law were not amused; nearly a year later they would still not allow any criticism of Thomas Seymour:

The Marquis of Northampton then accused me … when I accused the late Admiral of robbery, wishing to palliate his actions, as he had married his sister, widow of the late King. … As for the Admiral, I asked him to tell me himself whether he had been blameless or not. He did not answer at once, but after a little thought he said: “I don’t blame him.” And then he began to get exceedingly angry. Then Master Herbert, the King’s Master of the Horse, who married another sister of the said Marquis, and who knows no other language but his native English and can neither read nor write, started shouting at the top of his voice. He is also in Warwick’s party, and he made it plain. I heard nothing but the words “my Lord Admiral”, and saw him make some strange gestures; but as I could not understand all he said I must presume that he wished to confirm the Marquis of Northampton’s defence of the late Admiral, and insisted that I should be sent to the Admiralty Court with my solicitations, the Earl of Warwick being now Admiral.

The political landscape having changed, it was clear to the Imperial ambassador that John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, had the “the whip hand of them all, using for his own ends these Marquises and Master Herberts whom no one dares to contradict.“²² Indeed, William Parr, Marquess of Northampton was Dudley’s old friend, and William Herbert’s importance in the new administration was evident: from the start Herbert sat with Warwick on key commissions, and on 11 October 1551 he rose to Earl of Pembroke, on the day Dudley became Duke of Northumberland. A few days later the Duke of Somerset was arrested, and when Northumberland wavered in his resolution to execute him it was Northampton and Pembroke who became alarmed and angry and pushed for it.²³ Was there some element of revenge in their demands, retribution for Thomas Seymour’s death? That these men were opportunists does not mean they could not have had more archaic and irrational feelings as well. It seems almost unthinkable that Northampton and Pembroke, especially the former, would have maintained a close friendship with Dudley if they had suspected him of instigating their brother-in-law’s death.

Not even Somerset’s adherents blamed John Dudley for Thomas Seymour’s death, as is obvious from the remarks of Elizabeth Huggones, a former servant of the executed duke and his imprisoned wife, who very outspokenly had laid her master’s death at Northumberland’s door together with suspecting him of hankering after the crown (the king she had called an “unnaturall nephew”). In September 1552 she made things clear:

Being examined upon these words, ‘that she did only impute the death of the duke of Somerset to the duke of Northumberland, and no other man, who she thought was better worthy to die than he’, these words she utterly denieth, albeit, she saith that she then said she thought that those which were the procurers of the duke of Somerset’s death, his blood would be required at their hands, even like as the lord admiral’s blood was at the duke’s hands … And further, she saith, that next the duke of Somerset, who was her master, she hath born greatest favour and affection to the duke of Northumberland’s grace of any other nobleman; and specially since her husband was his grace’s servant.²⁴

Having denied her remarks about King Edward as well, Mistress Huggones could go free and a year later would have been pleased to see the Duke of Somerset’s blood required at the hands of the man who had procured his death. In August 1553 Northumberland was condemned for raising an army and being in the field against Queen Mary, but on the day before his execution, in a public ceremony where he returned to the Catholic faith, he asked to see Somerset’s teenage sons to ask their forgiveness for their father’s death, wich he confessed to have “falsely procured”. – “Nothing had pressed so injuriously upon his conscience”, he said according to one of the eyewitnesses.²⁵ It is most unlikely that he would not have mentioned the undoing of Thomas Seymour as well, had he been guilty.

Notes
1 Adams, Archer, Bernard 2003b p. 123
2 Hoak 1976 p. 240; Skidmore 2007 p. 108; Warnicke 2012 p. 93
3 Hoak 1976 p. 240
4 Ives 2009 p. 107
5 Warnicke 2012 pp. 93 – 94
6 Original Letters pp. 256 – 257
7 Warnicke 2012 p. 94; Skidmore 2007 p. 107
8 Spanish Chronicle p. 164
9 Hoak 1976 pp. 153, 257
10 Hoak 1976 pp. 74 – 76
11 Hoak 1976 p. 240
12 Adams, Archer, Bernard 2003a pp. 53 – 55
13 Hoak 2004
14 CSP Span 8 February 1549
15 Hoak 1976 p. 178
16 Hoak 1976 p. 190
17 Adams, Archer, Bernard 2003b pp. 124 – 125
18 Alford 2002 pp. 81 – 82; Loades 2004 pp. 44 – 45
19 Loades 2004 p. 57; Hoak 1976 pp. 167 – 190
20 Hoak 2004
21 MacCulloch 1996 p. 408
22 CSP Span 31 January 1550
23 CSP Span 27 December 1551
24 Literary Remains I pp. clxvi – clxvii
25 CSP Span 27 August 1553; Hoak 1980 p. 203

Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Spain. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/catalogue.aspx?gid=136&type=3

Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England … written in Spanish by an unknown hand. (ed. M. S. Hume, 1889)

Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth. (ed. G. J. Nichols, 1857). Roxburghe Club.

Original Letters Illustrative of English History. Second Series. Volume II. (ed. by Henry Ellis, 1827).

Adams, Simon; Archer, Ian; Bernard, G. W. (eds.) (2003a): ‟A ‘Journall’ of Matters of State happened from time to time as well within and without the Realme from and before the Death of King Edw. the 6th untill the Yere 1562“ in: Ian Archer (ed.): Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press.

Adams, Simon; Archer, Ian; Bernard, G. W. (eds.) (2003b): ‟Certayne Brife Notes of the Controversy betwene the dukes of Somerset and Nor[t]humberland“ in: Ian Archer (ed.): Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press.

Alford, Stephen (2002): Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge University Press.

Beer, B. L. (1973): Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. The Kent State University Press.

Hoak, Dale (1976): The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge University Press.

Hoak, Dale (1980): ‟Rehabilitating the Duke of Northumberland: Politics and Political Control, 1549–53“ in: Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (eds.): The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560. Macmillan.

Hoak, Dale (2004): “Edward VI (1537–1553)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Loach, Jennifer (2002): Edward VI. Yale University Press.

Loades, David (1996): John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland 1504–1553. Clarendon Press.

Loades, David (2004): Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547–1558. Pearson/Longman.

Loades, David (2008): The Life and Career of William Paulet (c.1475 – 1575): Lord Treasurer and First Marquess of Winchester. Ashgate.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996): Thomas Cranmer: A Life. Yale University Press.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2001): The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. Palgrave.

Skidmore, Chris (2007): Edward VI: The Lost King of England. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Smith, L. B. (2006): Treason in Tudor England. Politics and Paranoia. Pimlico.

Warnicke, R. M. (2012): Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners. Palgrave.

Royal Blood! So What?

Ambrose, Robert Dudley’s elder brother, may have been married to secret royal blood, we learn in a new book, Bessie Blount, by Elizabeth Norton. In recent years it has become fashionable to enlarge Henry VIII’s family of illegitimate children, Elizabeth Tailboys, daughter of Bessie Blount, being the most recent addition. Unlike her brother (or half-brother), the Duke of Richmond, Elizabeth was never officially recognized as Henry’s child, which is why her maiden name was that of the man her mother married when the affair with the king was over. In legal terms (at least) this man was also her father. And perhaps this is everything worth saying about the matter.

King Henry VIII. His putative posthumous son-in-law Ambrose Dudley was not impressed.

However, egalitarian and democratic societies seem to be endlessly fascinated by anything to do with royalty; therefore both readers and writers of popular biographies tend very much to emphasize the political significance of royal descent, whether legitimate, illegitimate, or secret. In the natural absence of positive evidence for the last, a conspiracy of silence among contemporaries is assumed and circumstantial evidence looked for. But did it really matter to be a king’s bastard, let alone a secret one? Was every marriage with a royal cousin a conspiracy to gain the crown? Where not more ordinary prospects of enrichment, ties of kinship, friendship, and religion as important?

There can be no doubt about the dynastic paranoia among Tudor monarchs and their servants. For example, the Duke of Northumberland – nearly 70 years after the Battle of Bosworth – found that the Countess of Sussex, being imprisoned for witchcraft, should “be somewhat better tried and searched; the rather for that she is charged to have spoken and said that one of King Edward’s sons should be yet living.”¹ This letter was written on 30 May 1552, a few days after the death of Ambrose Dudley’s first wife; his father’s mind therefore was surely already engaged in finding him a new one. Northumberland’s choice fell on Elizabeth Tailboys.

This, according to Elizabeth Norton, points to Elizabeth Tailboys’ “royal background”;² while she and Ambrose Dudley were relatives on their mothers’ side, “it is unlikely that this was sufficient in itself to recommend Elizabeth to such a prestigious husband; although reasonably wealthy, she was no match for her powerful and prominent cousin.”³ It is true that, as Norton says, Ambrose was “the future Earl of Warwick”. However, before October 1554 he was only the second son of the family, his brother John Dudley, Earl of Warwick being very much alive. For the spare rather than the heir, Elizabeth Tailboys, a baroness in her own right with landed possessions in Lincolnshire, was certainly a good catch.

Whether she was also a good match is another question, for she was a good decade older than her husband. They had no children, but she underwent a phantom pregnancy in 1555 after he had been released from the Tower with her help. Her petition to King Philip, received favourably, is again interpreted as a sign of her royal parentage and her “unusual level of royal access”;⁴ however, this ignores that the rest of the Dudley brothers had already gone free a few weeks earlier – their mother and their brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney having lobbied the Spanish nobles around Philip, including in Spain itself, for about a year.⁵ Ambrose presumably was kept longer in prison because his eldest brother was dying and he became the family heir on the latter’s death.⁶ The last captive member of the Dudley family, Sir Andrew (Ambrose’s uncle), was released in January 1555 without any special intervention; Philip and Mary had clearly decided to close this chapter. Meanwhile, only weeks after Elizabeth Tailboys’ letter (which survives because it was written by Roger Ascham at her behest; petitions from other people may not have survived), Philip of Spain agreed to be godfather to the baby Philip Sidney, alongside the widow of “th’arche traitor”⁷ Northumberland. If “King Philip took a personal interest”⁸ in anyone of the Dudley family circle it was Sir Henry Sidney.

Elizabeth Tailboys and her husband received back their confiscated lands in 1555, but Ambrose’s participation in Philip’s campaigns left the couple deeply in debt. The accession of Queen Elizabeth dramatically changed the Dudley family’s prospects. Unlike Robert, Mary, and Ambrose, though, Elizabeth Tailboys seems not to have enjoyed her possible half-sister’s special favour, on the contrary, she was reminded to fully pay her taxes.⁹ She was evidently devoted to her husband and asked her brother-in-law for help in organizing his duties at court, a place Ambrose abhorred; he preferred to live in Lincolnshire on his wife’s estates, yet by April 1560 he had apparently thrown her out of the house. Unhappy, Lady Tailboys once again turned to Robert Dudley, asking him to help towards a reconciliation.¹⁰ If Elizabeth Tailboys was indeed Henry VIII’s daughter – and her husband knew about it – he was not impressed.

According to Elizabeth Norton, Robert Dudley may have been more appreciative. When finally wedding his old flame Lettice Knollys he was marrying “into the Carey family”, it is implied to profit from Elizabeth’s fondness for them (because they were not just her cousins on her mother’s side but Henry VIII’s secret children also).¹¹ Now, as he knew very well, from the queen’s viewpoint he could not commit a greater sin than marry, and he paid the price. If he had wanted to advance himself through marriage he anyway did not need Henry VIII’s secret illegitimate grandchildren: French, German, Dutch princesses, yeah, Mary Queen of Scots herself had been on offer, and for once at Elizabeth’s suggestion; for over a year Robert Dudley resisted considerable pressure to woo her.

It is intriguing that just at the same time Northumberland must have been considering his son Ambrose’s options for a second marriage, he was also engaged in matching his son Guildford with the daughter of the Earl of Cumberland. Margaret Clifford was a grandniece of Henry VIII and behind the three Grey sisters, Jane, Katherine, and Mary, in the royal succession. Edward VI ostensibly wished the union, as appears from letters of 4 July 1552;¹² in January 1553 Cumberland appointed commissioners to negotiate a marriage settlement, whose articles survive.¹³ In contrast to Ambrose’s marriage with a supposed daughter of Henry VIII this marriage proposal did elicit cynical comments, from a servant of the executed Duke of Somerset, Elizabeth Huggones:

She tould also the night before at supper for newse that my lord Guilford Dudleye should marrye my lorde of Cumberlandes daughter, and that the Kinges majestie should devise the marriage. ‘Have at the Crowne with your leave’, she said with a stoute gesture.

Of course she later retracted her words:

And, moreover, she beinge examined of the laste article, concerninge the marriage of the lord Guilforde Dudleye with the earle of Cumberland’s daughter, she deposeth that she hearde it spoken in London (but by whome she now remembreth not) that the Kinges majestie had made such a marriage; and so she tould the first night she came to Eocheford at supper, showinge herselfe to be glad thereof. And so she thought that all her hearers were also glad at that marriage. But as concerninge these wordes, ‘Have at the Crowne with your leave’, she utterly denieth to have spoken them, or any other like; and deposeth that she never spake nor thought any such matter, nor meant evell of any man, by any of her aforesaid wordes.¹⁴

If Northumberland was so keen to marry his sons into royalty, why did he not suggest Ambrose as a husband for Lady Margaret? True, Ambrose would have been some seven years older than Margaret, while Guildford was almost her age; but Ambrose’s brother John, Earl of Warwick at 19 had also married the Duke of Somerset’s daughter, who was between five and seven years his junior. The fact remains that Northumberland pursued the “royal” match with Margaret Clifford for his second youngest son at a time he was seeking a new bride for his second eldest.

Elizabeth Huggones’ opinion notwithstanding, the duke’s principal aim in all likelihood was an alliance with one of the great noble houses of England’s North. During the royal minority he needed to stabilize his regime by building a united front among the ruling classes.¹⁵ A similar aim lay at the root of the matrimonial alliance between Northumberland’s youngest daughter Katherine and Lord Hastings, the heir of the Earl of Huntingdon. It is often claimed that the duke once more had no other purpose in mind than to marry into the royal house (this time into the Plantagenets), for “Huntingdon had never been close to Northumberland”, in the words of Leanda de Lisle.¹⁶ The last statement could not be further from the truth, for Huntingdon had been an ally of the duke for years,¹⁷ and letters and inventories demonstrate: Huntingdon and his teenage son Hastings were regular house guests of the Dudleys and as early as 1550 the younger John Dudley moved in the earl’s household, playing cards or dice with him and giving his servants presents.¹⁸

Yet it is more attractive to claim that John Dudley was an “outsider”, desperately wanting “to marry into the royal family”, for example “the Grey family”.¹⁹ In this scenario even his youngest son Henry’s match to Margaret Audley at some unknown date is subsumed under a category of supposedly six conspirational May marriages of 1553, for was not Margaret a niece of Lady Jane Grey’s father, the Duke of Suffolk? Yes, she was, but she was also a rich heiress and she had as little royal blood as her uncle; furthermore, Northumberland, on his mother’s side, was himself a Grey, a second cousin once removed of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. This detail is not once mentioned by de Lisle in a book otherwise obsessed with kinship as a key factor.

What should not be overlooked is that Ambrose Dudley’s and Elizabeth Tailboys’ wedding day is as unknown as is Henry Dudley’s and Margaret Audley’s; the one thing reasonably certain is that the couples would have married at some point before the death of Edward VI on 6 July 1553. Because it was Guildford Dudley who married Jane Grey on 25 May 1553, and because this match has traditionally been interpreted as a bid for the throne, it is assumed that Ambrose – the elder brother – had meanwhile remarried, but there is no explicit source for this. There is no reason to see the Dudley-Tailboys and the Dudley-Audley marriages as anything else but “normal aristocratic unions”, and there are very good reasons to view the three marriages of 25 May 1553 as “routine actions of dynastic politics” as well.²⁰

Following these, preparations began in early June, “at the king’s request”, for a match between Margaret Clifford and Sir Andrew Dudley, Northumberland’s younger brother. In the end this marriage was never concluded, but Sir Andrew had sent his most precious stuffs and jewels to the North as a pledge. Of course, at this particular time, the alliance may have been intended by Northumberland to strengthen his power in a crisis which was now imminent; but the Earl of Cumberland, having welcomed a match of his daughter with Guildford Dudley,²¹ may also have accepted Andrew Dudley as an alternative candidate. – Margaret Clifford lost her own place in the royal succession with the letters patent of 21 June 1553; only her heirs male should be able to ascend the throne. Stipulations as these stemmed from Edward’s original “Device”,²² and it would have been absurd for Northumberland to have masterminded or even insisted on them. Edward, in his last months, showed his capacity to assert his royal will.²³

At whose suggestion Guildford Dudley became the husband of Lady Jane must remain speculation; Edward was once again enthusiastic about it, and afterwards a handful of aristocratic “culprits” were named, but no reporter had cared for such details before the young couple’s downfall. Public opinion had been absorbed with Northumberland’s designs on the crown for his own person, which, the emperor’s ambassador was convinced, the duke had been entertaining for at least three or four years. All along he had been “seeking to devise means” to poison the king and “to cast off his wife and marry my Lady Elizabeth”.²⁴ The French ambassadors were even less preoccupied with royal blood: They actually suggested to Northumberland at the very end of Edward’s life that he take the crown for himself. The duke’s answer was that he was “unworthy of such an estate” and that he would “consider himself unfortunate to think of it”.²⁵

Notes
1 Tytler 1839 p. 109 (referring to the Princes in the Tower).
2 Norton 2011 p. 148
3 Norton 2011 pp. 148 – 149
4 Norton 2011 p. 145
5 Adams 2002 pp. 133 – 134
6 Adams 2004
7 Bellamy 2005 p. 151
8 Norton 2011 p. 145
9 Adams 2002 p. 134; HMC Bath V p. 140
10 HMC Bath V pp. 146, 147, 156, 166
11 Norton 2011 p. 149
12 Loades 1996 p. 226
13 Higginbotham 2012a with comments
14 Literary Remains I pp. clxvii, clxviii
15 Loades 2004
16 de Lisle 2009 pp. 92, 184
17 Cross 1966 pp. 9, 13
18 CSP Dom p. 239; HMC Second Report p. 102
19 de Lisle 2009 pp. 118, 92
20 Loades 1996 p. 239
21 Higginbotham 2012a with comments
22 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 95; Ives 2009 p. 147
23 Hoak 2004
24 CSP Span 7 November 1550, 11 June 1553, 12 June 1553, 15 June 1553
25 Skidmore 2007 pp. 255 – 256

Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553. Revised Edition. (ed. C. S. Knighton, 1992). HMSO.

Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 10 – 1550–1552. (ed. Royall Tyler, 1914): http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=972

Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 11 – 1553. (ed. Royall Tyler, 1916): http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=973

The Chronicle of Queen Jane. (ed. J. G. Nichols, 1850). Camden Society.

Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth. (ed. G. J. Nichols, 1857). Roxburghe Club.

Manuscripts of The Marquess of Bath, Volume V: Talbot, Dudley and Devereux Papers 1533–1659. (1980) Historical Manuscripts Commission. HMSO.

Adams, Simon (2002): Leicester and the Court: Essays in Elizabethan Politics. Manchester University Press.

Adams, Simon (2004): ‟Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick (c.1530–1590)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Bellamy, John (2005): Strange, Inhuman Deaths: Murder in Tudor England. Sutton.

Cross, Claire (1966): The Puritan Earl: The Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon 1536-1595. Jonathan Cape.

de Lisle, Leanda (2009): The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey. A Tudor Tragedy. Ballantine Books.

Higginbotham, Susan (2011): ‟How Old Was Guildford Dudley? (Beats Me).“ http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog/posts/how-old-was-guildford-dudley-beats-me/

Higginbotham, Susan (2012a): “Henry VIII’s Other Niece: Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland”. http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog/posts/henry-viiis-other-niece-eleanor-clifford-countess-of-cumberland/

Higginbotham, Susan (2012b): “It’s A Boy! No, It’s A Girl! Some Seymour Birth Dates”. http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog/posts/its-a-boy-no-its-a-girl-some-seymour-birth-dates/

Hoak, Dale (2004): “Edward VI (1537–1553)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Jordan, W. K. (1970): Edward VI: The Threshold of Power. The Dominance of the Duke of Northumberland. George Allen & Unwin.

Loades, David (1996): John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland 1504–1553. Clarendon Press.

Loades, David (2004): ‟Dudley, John, duke of Northumberland (1504–1553)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (ed.) (1984): ‟The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham“. Camden Miscellany. Volume XXVIII. Royal Historical Society.

Norton, Elizabeth (2011): Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII. Amberley.

Skidmore, Chris (2007): Edward VI: The Lost King of England. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Stopes, C. C. (1918): Shakespeare’s Environment. Bell.

Tytler, P. F. (1839): England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Volume II. Richard Bentley.

My Lord Steward

The Earl of Leicester dressed in the full attire of a Knight of the Garter is not one of his better known portraits. In the 1580s, though, it became fashionable for Elizabeth’s favourite knights to have themselves painted in their Garter robes, and Robert Dudley was no exception when he commissioned the above portrait in the last year of his life. He had recently received his appointment as Lord Steward of the Royal Household; it meant a lot to him, and he celebrated it by commissioning a number of new likenesses of himself, all displaying his new wand of office. However, when exactly he became the second most important official of the royal household, second only to the Lord Chamberlain, has long been a historiographical conundrum.

Although the chronicler John Stow, who enjoyed his patronage, wrote that Leicester was appointed on 18 June 1587, historians used to ignore this statement and rather speculated that he became Lord Steward in 1584, or even 1570, following the death of the last holder of the office, the Earl of Pembroke. There are good reasons for this. Robert Dudley performed many of the tasks of a Lord Steward long before he actually held the office, while he was at the same time a very innovative Master of the Horse. To the latter office he held a strong attachment and – according to the Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza, who operated an excellent spy network in England – the earl was disinclined to give it up in return for the lord stewardship when asked to do so by Elizabeth in 1584. He was only prepared to cede the post three years later, to his stepson and the queen’s new favourite, the Earl of Essex. If Stow is correct, he received his reward on the day Essex became Master of the Horse.

During the later years of Henry VIII’s and his son Edward’s reign, an extended version of the office of Lord Steward had been known as the Great Master of the Household; Leicester’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, had effectively controlled the Privy Chamber in this function under the boy king. Robert Dudley also occupied a central position in Elizabeth’s household,¹ and indeed he seems to have seen himself in this light. In 1581 he could assure his friend and colleague Christopher Hatton:

I trust her Highness will give me leave, as all other my predecessors in this office have done, to place these rooms with such persons as I shall prefer, and if I place any unfit men, let me have blame with their removal.²

A decade earlier there had already been widespread gossip about Robert Dudley’s “forthcoming” appointment, as is indicated by the exchange of two unsympathetic residents of the Tower of London:

Powell … said unto Bannister …, ‘How say you, you shall see shortly a horse keeper made Lord Steward of England’, and did speak the same with so loud a voice that these words were heard of such as stood without the Tower upon the wharf and, as they say that heard it, might easily have been heard to the further side of the Thames.³

Four years later, in 1576, the Italian horse expert Prospero d’Osma dedicated his Report on the Royal Studs to the “Grand Master to her Majesty”, Robert Dudley; and the Journal of the House of Lords referred to him as Lord Steward in November 1584. Still, it was only after the earl’s final return from his Netherlands campaign, in December 1587, that “My Lord of Leicester” became “My Lord Steward” in correspondence and news reports.

Of Elizabeth’s Lord Stewards “Leicester alone made any impact on the household”.⁴ He was responsible for the “below stairs” department, which meant basically the supply of the court with the commodities of everyday life, such as food and drink, fuel and lighting. The Lord Steward chaired the Board of Green Cloth, the household’s treasurer and comptroller operating under him. These two were Sir Francis Knollys and Sir James Croft, respectively. Knollys was the earl’s father-in-law, Croft a protegé and kinsman of whom he had grown foul because of Croft’s habit of selling information to Mendoza. Both Knollys and Croft regarded the royal larder as their private perk,⁵ and it could hardly be expected of Leicester to change anything in this behaviour, but his resolution was not in question:

It hath pleased her Majesty to call me to the place of lord steward within her most honourable house and to give me special charge as principal officer unto whom reformation of such abuses does chiefly appertain to have care of.⁶

The Lord Steward with his white wand of office, c.1588

The court was victualled by “purveyors”, merchants who held the privilege to supply the royal household. They were much resented by other tradesmen because they could buy from the market at substantial discounts on behalf of the crown, which of course invited large-scale corruption. This was possible due to an ancient feudal royal privilege, namely that (in theory) the local population was obliged to pay for the court’s needs wherever it stayed. Parliament had repeatedly tried to restrict purveyors, and local exemption from purveyance was a highly prized privilege.

Expenses of the royal household, on the other hand, grew alarmingly, year by year. In 1584, not as yet Lord Steward, Leicester embarked on a cost cutting programme. He began with restarting the activities of a royal brewing house, which was cheaper than to buy all the ale and beer from a cartel of 60 London brewers. This scheme died in March 1588, though, probably due to lack of funds to buy malt. Leicester still was proud to have saved the queen £1,000. In another case he sacked a purveyor after a public outcry at the court’s enormous demand of poultry; the royal purveyor and his men had turned to confiscating fowl in the shops and markets!⁷ The next year, 1588, Leicester died; Elizabeth never again appointed a Lord Steward.

Notes
1 Wilson 1981 p. 327
2 Hatton p. 204
3 Wilson 1981 p. 214
4 Adams 2002 p. 29
5 Haynes 1987 p. 142
6 Haynes 1987 p. 142
7 Haynes 1987 pp. 143 – 144

Sources
Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton. (ed. Harris Nicolas, 1847).

State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1588. Volume I. (ed. J. K. Laughton, 1894). The Navy Records Society.

Adams, Simon (2002): Leicester and the Court: Essays in Elizabethan Politics. Manchester University Press.

Hammer, P. E. J. (1999): The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597. Cambridge University Press.

Haynes, Alan (1987): The White Bear: The Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. Peter Owen.

Hoak, Dale (2004): “Edward VI (1537–1553)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Wilson, Derek (1981): Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1533–1588. Hamish Hamilton.

http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1666962

Leicester in Oils, c.1575

Apart from the queen herself, the Earl of Leicester was the most often portrayed person in Elizabethan England. William Cecil’s likeness was also much in demand, yet he rarely sat for one, while Robert Dudley survives in many different postures and costumes. The portrait above is just such a copy, one of several of its prototype; the earl is wearing a white and gold doublet and hose, with a black jacket and a black velvet cap – his typical accessory. In 1571, on a spectacular visit to the town of Warwick, the onlookers were dazzled by the earl’s outfit, which bore some resemblance to this portrait:

apparelled all in white, his shoes of velvet, his stocks of hose knit silk, his upper stocks of white velvet lined with cloth of silver, his doublet of silver, his jerkin white velvet drawn with silver, beautified with gold and precious stones, his girdle and scabbard white velvet, his robe white satin embroidered with gold a foot broad, very curiously, his cap black velvet with a white feather, his collar of gold beset with precious stones, and his garter about his leg of St. George’s order, a sight worthy the beholding.

The chief difference being the black “robe” instead of the white, and the application of gold instead of silver, the original version of this portrait might well date to the earlier 1570s; the National Portrait Gallery in London dates this copy to c.1575. The style of Leicester’s beard is very peculiar in this painting, and by 1575 he had yet again changed it, as can be seen in the portrait below, which seems to have been commissioned for the grand Kenilworth festivities in the same year. Dudley wanted a picture “of my lord in whole proportion … in a russet satin and velvet welted”. The similarity of the dress in the picture below and the inventory, dated 1578, seems obvious. The panel was significantly trimmed at the bottom, so that it is thought to be a truncated version of a full-length likeness. The quality of the painting suggests it may be an original rather than a copy.

The portrait in russet (or red) is believed to have been intended as a companion piece to a full-length portrait of Elizabeth. Leicester did commission a further pair of likenesses of himself and the queen for the same occasion, when he invited the Italian mannerist artist Federico Zuccaro to England to do work for him. Of the results there survive only two fine drawings in the British Museum, but there were also finished oil paintings. From Zuccaro, Leicester wanted a full-length portrait in armour; one such version, possibly even by Zuccaro himself, was destroyed in a German air raid in 1940. Only a black and white photograph (reproduced badly in Alan Haynes’ biography, and very beautifully in the English Heritage Review) shows that it is based on the drawing in the British Museum. The earl’s black velvet cap also features in it, the jewelled hatband being the same as in the NPG’s white doublet painting.

Sources
Goldring, Elizabeth (2007): “The Earl of Leicester’s Inventory of Kenilworth Castle, c.1578″. English Heritage Review. Volume 2.

Haynes, Alan (1987): The White Bear: The Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. Peter Owen.

Hearn, Karen (ed.) (1995): Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630. Rizzoli.

Warwick, Frances Countess of (1903): Warwick Castle and its Earls. Volume I. Hutchinson & Co.

National Portrait Gallery: “Two Portraits of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester”. http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/case-studies/robertdudley.php

The Melancholy Duke

John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland was no stranger to melancholy, the malady of princes. “Highest aucthoritie”¹ took its toll on his health, which seems to have taken a turn downward from the early years of Edward VI’s reign. Dudley had been a “dashing commander at sea”² and a fearless³ soldier of great strength: On one occasion during the Pinkie Campaign in 1547 he fought his way out of an ambush and, spear in hand, chased his Scottish counterpart for some 250 yards, nearly running him through. On the same campaign, when the Duke of Somerset, on grounds of his own superior rank, declined the Earl of Huntly’s challenge to decide the war by personal combat, Dudley immediately stepped in, offering himself for a duel in Somerset’s place – “but my Lord’s Grace would in no wise grant to it”.⁴

Civilian life being less attractive than martial exploits, Dudley’s absences from court and council became extended. He kept his chamber for weeks on end and received visitors in bed, being, for example, “troubled with a rheum in the head”, as Richard Scudamore observed in November 1549.⁵ Some complaints were real enough and have been diagnosed as a stomach ailment, possibly an ulcer. Doctors tried to stop his “inward bleeding”, and to “restore corrupted blood” as well as “the bloody flux from the lungs”.⁶ A French diplomat and eyewitness summarized in 1553 that the duke had suffered from instances of severe pain, and that one of his arms had been rendered useless, probably by an injury.⁷

From the later 1540s John Dudley suffered from repeated attacks of illness and melancholy.

Whatever the causes, his ill-health never prevented him from doing serious business and from attention to detail. And so some historians – by no means all – have suspected that John Dudley may have been a victim to hypochondria. In October 1552 the “falling of the uvula” troubled him so much that he was “forced to keep my chamber for it is now a fortnight since it began to fall and continueth worse and worse so that I can scarcely eat any meat for it”.⁸ By December and January he was obsessed with “cure and medicine”, suffering from what may have been a heavy cold: “my health daily worsens, neither close keeping, furs nor clothing can bring any natural heat to my head and I have no hope of recovery.” – “I fear to be sick as I burn hot as fire; so did I yesterday … having great pain in the nether part of my belly. But feeling no such grief now, the heat is nevertheless fervently upon me.”⁹

Thus in the autumn and winter of 1552/1553 the Duke of Northumberland experienced a long time of recurring illness and melancholy, as is evident from his frequent letters to Secretary Cecil, who had won his complete trust. The duke keenly felt his unpopularity. Radical reformers who owed him their positions were preaching about covetous men in high places instead of collaborating in the reorganization of the church for the crown’s benefit. John Knox, whom he had picked up in Newcastle and made a court preacher (and in vain had offered a bishopric), had even questioned the duke’s own faith, to his very face: “he cannot tell whether I am a dissembler in religion or not”. King Edward, though, wholeheartedly supported “these new obstinate doctors”.¹⁰

In these circumstances Edmund Dudley came to mind; even though it had not been safe to name any of his grandsons after him, he was unforgotten:

my poor father, who, after his master was gone, suffered death for doing his master’s commandments, who was the wisest prince of the world living in those days, and yet could not his commandment be my father’s [dis]charge after he was departed this life; so, for my part, with all earnestness and duty I will serve without fear, seeking nothing but the true glory of God and his Highness’ surety: so shall I most please God and have my conscience upright, and then not fear what man doth to me.

So, in the early days of 1553 the duke’s mood was not as cheerful as the season required. Feeling misunderstood, he made some valid general points:

Forasmuch as it seemeth to me, yesterday, by your friendly persuasions for my coming to the court, that the same, with some others my friends, either did not thoroughly understand mine estate, or might judge in me some great negligence for being so long absent, I have thought good with these further to declare unto you, that whosoever do think that for any respect I do now withdraw or absent myself from the King’s affairs, saving for lack of sufficient health, he judgeth me wrong.

Albeit, I must needs think that if all things were considered in me, as I am able to declare by myself, and easy enough to be judged of others, mine absence might be the better borne; but this moveth me to remember the Italian proverb, which, though it become me not to say of myself, yet the saying is true, that of a faithful servant shall become a perpetual ass. So, though I were able to bear the burden, I trust my Lords do not mind so to use me once, if my body were as healthful as any man’s. I assure you, both for the King’s honour and my poor estimation, it is high time for me to seek away to live of that which God and his Highness hath sent me; and to keep the multitude of cravers from his court, that hangeth now daily at my gate for money, so long have I passed forth this matter in silence and credit, that shame almost compelleth me to hide me. What comfort think you may I have, that seeth myself in this case after my long travail and troublesome life, and towards the end of my days?

And yet, so long as health would give me leave, I did as seldom fail mine attendance as any others did; yea, and with such health as, when others went to their sups and pastimes after their travail, I went to bed with a careful heart and a weary body; and yet abroad no man scarcely had any good opinion of me. And now, by extreme sickness and otherwise constrained to seek some health and quietness, I am not without a new evil imagination of men. What should I wish any longer this life, that seeth such frailty in it? Surely, but for a few children which God hath sent me, which also helpeth to pluck me on my knees, I have no great cause to desire to tarry much longer here. And thus, to satisfy you and others whom I take for my friends, I have entered into the bottom of my care, which I cannot do without sorrow:

but if God would be so merciful to mankind as to take from them their wicked imaginations, and leave them with a simple judgment, men should here live angels’ lives; which may not be, for the fall of Adam our forefather procured this continual plague, that the one should be affliction to the other while we be in this circle, out of which God grant us all his grace to depart in his mercy. And so I leave, wishing the good unto you that your own self can desire.

At Chelsey, the 3rd of January 1552 [1553].
Your assured loving friend,
Northumberland

To my very loving friend,
Sir Wm. Cycill, Knight

Notes
1 Alford 2002 p. 12
2 Loades 1996 p. 85
3 Hoak 2004
4 Loades 1996 p. 100
5 Ives 2009 p. 125
6 Skidmore 2007 pp. 236 – 237
7 Ives 2009 pp. 311, 125
8 Skidmore 2007 p. 236
9 Ives 2009 pp. 124 – 125
10 Tytler 1839 pp. 148, 153

Sources

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553. Revised Edition. (ed. C. S. Knighton, 1992). HMSO.

Alford, Stephen (2002): Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge University Press.

Hoak, Dale (1980): “Rehabilitating the Duke of Northumberland: Politics and Political Control, 1549–53”. In Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (eds.): The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560.

Hoak, Dale (2004): “Edward VI (1537–1553)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Jordan, W. K. (1970): Edward VI: The Threshold of Power. The Dominance of the Duke of Northumberland. George Allen & Unwin.

Loades, David (1996): John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland 1504–1553. Clarendon Press.

Skidmore, Chris (2007): Edward VI: The Lost King of England. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Tytler, P. F. (1839): England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Volume II. Richard Bentley.

The Young Earl of Warwick, Part III

On 21 June 1553 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick signed the letters patent that declared his sister-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s heir. His name was one of 102 on the document. Three weeks later, on 10 July, the court of Queen Jane took residence in the Tower of London. On the same day a letter arrived from Princess Mary, announcing that she was the rightful queen and demanding the council’s allegiance. The Duchesses of Suffolk and Northumberland burst into to tears, but nevertheless it was decided to send an army (which as yet had to be assembled) to Norfolk to get hold of Mary. The Duke of Northumberland hesitated to leave the council and go himself, but in the end gave in to their entreaties: “Well … since ye think it good, I and mine will go, not doubting of your fidelity to the queen’s majesty, which I leave in your custody.”¹ With “I and mine” the duke was referring to himself and his sons John, Ambrose, and Henry, who was perhaps 14 or 15. Also included were the boys’ uncle, Sir Andrew Dudley, and their 15-year-old brother-in-law Lord Hastings with his father, the Earl of Huntingdon.

They marched to Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, and then retreated to Cambridge again, before hearing on 20 July that the council in London had declared for Mary. John Dudley accompanied his father and Dr. Sandys, the university’s vice-chancellor, to the market-place, where Northumberland proclaimed Queen Mary:

The duke cast up his cap with others, and so laughed, that the tears ran down his cheeks for grief. He told Dr. Sandys, that queen Mary was a merciful woman, and that he doubted not thereof; declaring that he had sent unto her to know her pleasure, and looked for a general pardon.²

He then dissolved his remaining army, on the council’s orders. The city, which the previous week had welcomed the duke splendidly, was now nervous to please the new queen: the mayor and a large force of university and town’s men surrounded King’s College, where Northumberland and his party were lodged. They sent a delegation to the duke’s apartments; he gave no resistance, but his son Warwick and the Earl of Huntingdon “did not surrender as easily”.³ Soon afterwards another missive arrived from London, saying that “all men should go each his way”:

“Ye do me wrong to withdraw my liberty”, Northumberland told his captors, “see you not the council’s letters, without exception, that all men should go whether they would?” At which words they than set them again at liberty, and so continued they all night; insomuch that the Earl of Warwick was booted ready to have ridden in the morning.

Alas, they had tarried too long, for Warwick could now see the Earl of Arundel, whom a week earlier he had seen assuring Northumberland of his wish to spill his blood at the duke’s feet, in the antechamber: “and when the duke knew thereof he came out to meet him; and as soon as ever he saw the Earl of Arundel he fell down on his knees and desired him to be good to him, for the love of God.”⁴

A few days later the prisoners reached the outskirts of the capital, and “the duke was brought unto London worshipfully as he had deserved”, although “all the people reviled him and called him traitor and heretic, and would not cease for all they were spoken unto for it.” Among the other captives were “the Earl of Warwick, Ambrose Dudley, Henry Dudley, Andrew Dudley, the Earl of Huntingdon, Lord Hastings, Sir John Gates that was Captain of the Guard, and Sir Henry Gates his brother, Sir Thomas Palmer, Dr. Sandys.”⁵ Charles V’s ambassadors noted:

Though on his way to the Tower the Duke preserved tint bonne myne [a quite good countenance], when he reached his prison they say his only care was to have nobles to judge him, as is the custom in England, and that his remorse and evil conscience were astonishing. His younger son wept when he was near the Tower.⁶

Northumberland was imprisoned in St. Thomas Tower, in apartments located right above Traitor’s Gate, the Tower’s entrance from the waterside. His sons were lodged in the Beauchamp Tower.⁷ On 18 August 1553 the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquess of Northampton, and the Earl of Warwick were tried, by their peers, at Westminster Hall. Northumberland said that he deserved death but had acted on the orders of prince and council, and asked “whether any such persons as were equally culpable of that crime … might be his judges”;⁸ naturally, the judges were unimpressed by this, “and once the sentence was passed, he asked the Council that he might desire the penalty, and the manner of death to be moderated; but above all to have compassion for his sons, the which had erred, like youths, and ignorantly, in obedience to him”.⁹

The Marquess of Northampton, the man in whose entourage John had travelled to France, must have surprised his fellow accused with the statement that “he was not himself ever in government”, and that he had been away hunting throughout Jane’s reign. When reminded that he had been caught in arms with the Duke of Northumberland at Cambridge, he confessed his guilt, “weeping openly”. It was then the Earl of Warwick’s turn, who pleaded his youth and his obedience to his father, “without knowing much else”, which was doubtless true.¹⁰ However:

The Earl of Warwick, finding that the judges, in so great a cause, admitted no excuse of age, with great resolution heard his condemnation pronounced against him, craving only this favour, that, whereas the goods of those who are condemned for treason are totally confiscated, yet her majesty would be pleased, that out of them his debts might be paid. After this they were all returned again to the Tower.¹¹

Executions had been scheduled for 21 August, but were suddenly postponed. Instead an assembly of invited onlookers saw the Duke of Northumberland, Sir Andrew Dudley, Sir Thomas Palmer, the Marquess of Northampton, and Sir Henry Gates take the sacrament in the Tower Chapel St. Peter ad Vincula, with ‟all the … rites and accidents of old time appertaining“. The duke then made a speech in which he declared that

you and I have been seduced these 16 years past, by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers, the which is the only cause of the great plagues and vengeance which hath light upon the whole realm of England, and now likewise worthily fallen upon me and others here present for our unfaithfulness.

Of the men so far convicted, only the young Earl of Warwick and Sir John Gates were missing at this memorable performance. It seems plausible that the two needed a day longer to convince themselves to reject the “new doctrine” and go to mass. Gates was known to be a fanatical Protestant. The younger John Dudley, on the other hand, although 17 when his family’s household abolished mass in 1547, had grown up in a climate of religious reform. When John was four or five the French émigré Nicholas Bourbon urged the Dudleys “to continue to follow the banners of Christ”;¹² and to discontinue the mass a few months into Edward VI’s reign was, according to English standards, a signal of reform. For Warwick to accept the old ways of religion would thus have presented a much greater psychological change than for his father, who after all returned to the faith of his childhood, a psychological allurement of its own kind.

No source records when the government decided to spare most of the convicted men and execute only the Duke of Northumberland with John Gates and Thomas Palmer. Quite possibly the reprieved prisoners were unaware they had escaped death until the very morning of the beheadings on Tower Hill. At least for Warwick this seems to have been the case, as appears from the eyewitness account of an unidentified Tower resident:

On Tuesday the xxiith of August there came into the Tower all the guard, with their weapons, and about ix of the clock the Earl of Warwick and Sir John Gates were brought to the chapel and heard mass, receiving the sacrament. A little before the receipt whereof, they kneeling before the altar, one doctor Boureman, which said the mass, turned to them from the altar, and said these words, or much like, “And if ye do require to receive this holy sacrament of the body and blood of our saviour Christ, ye must not onely confess and believe that he is there really and naturally, very God and very man, yea the same God that died on the cross for our redemption, and not a phantastical God, as the heretics would make him; but also ye must here openly acknowledge and grant your abuse and error therein of long time … and then I assure you ye shall receive him to your salvation, were ye never so detestable an offender.” Then said Sir John Gates, “I confess we have been out of the way a long time, and therefore we are worthily punished; and, being sorry therefore, I ask God forgiveness therefore most humbly; and this is the true religion.” In much like sort said the Earl of Warwick; and then one asked the other forgiveness, and required all men to forgive them as they forgave every man freely.

Next Gates turned to Edward Courtenay, who had only recently been released from the Tower after a stay of 15 years, asking to pardon him for holding him a state prisoner as Captain of the Guard, “not for any hatred towards you, but for fear that harm might come thereby to my late young master.” Everyone being in forgiving mood, Warwick likewise asked Courtenay’s pardon. It is possible that he also asked his young brothers-in-law Edward and Henry Seymour (who were standing by) for forgiveness. The Duke of Northumberland had explicitly done so the day before at the same place. The service then continued, the priest explaining:

“I would ye should not be ignorant of God’s mercy, which is infinite; and let not death fear you, for it is but a little while, to wit, ended in one half-hour. What shall I say? I trust to God it shall be to you a short passage (though somewhat sharp), out of innumerable miseries into a most pleasant rest; which God grant.” The priest having spoken these or much like words, gave them the host, which being finished, and the mass ended, they came forth again; and the Earl of Warwick was led to his lodging, and Sir John Gates to the lieutenant’s house, where he remained about half an hour and more.¹³

Carving in the Tower of London made by John Dudley. The border around the coat of arms in the centre depicts flowers symbolizing his brothers' names. Photo by Archangeli. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

He remained there until Sir Thomas Palmer and the Duke of Northumberland were led out of their Tower cells, the three men proceeding towards the scaffold after a short farewell chat. There was no farewell between father and son on this morning, and it can be ruled out that Northumberland was allowed visits from family members during his imprisonment; he would have been able to write farewell letters, though.

Lodged in the Beauchamp Tower, John and his brothers were ideally placed to watch their father on his last walk out of the fortress and his return in a coffin. A month later the young men’s confinement was somewhat relaxed when they were allowed to take exercise on the leads of the Beauchamp and neighbouring towers, the Earl of Warwick especially “being crazed for want of air”.¹⁴ Also, from 24 September 1553, “or the day before, my lady of Warwick had licence to come to her husband”.¹⁵

Perhaps hopeful of his family’s future, John Dudley made a beautiful carving on one of the walls of the Beauchamp Tower: the bear and ragged staff of the earls of Warwick and the double-tailed lion of the Dudleys (of Dudley Castle). Beneath the heraldic beasts he inscribed his name: “IOHN DVDLI”. Around this heraldic shield he carved a rebus in form of a flowery border, the meaning of which he explained in an (incomplete) verse below:

Yow that these beasts do wel behold and se
May deme with ease wherefore here made they be
Withe borders eke wherein [there may be found]
4 Brothers names who list to serche the grounde

The plants shown in the border symbolized his younger brothers’ names: roses for Ambrose, gillyflowers for Guildford, honeysuckle for Henry, and oak leaves and acorns for Robert, from the Latin word for oak, robur.¹⁶

In late 1553 and early 1554, the four boys were all condemned to death, their mother’s incessant efforts to obtain a pardon for them notwithstanding. Wyatt’s Rebellion must have added to the feeling of crisis, the key battle taking place right outside the Tower. On 12 February 1554 the brothers took leave of Guildford, before watching him walk away and seeing the return of his remains, “his carcas thrown into a cart, and his head in a cloth”.¹⁷

On 18 October 1555 John Dudley was released from the Tower, with his brothers Robert and Henry, leaving behind only Ambrose. He died three days later at Penshurst Place in Kent, the house of his brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney, “at midnight”.¹⁸ It is unknown from what he died, but his death came not unexpected, it seems, which would explain why Ambrose, now the family heir, was as yet not set free.¹⁹ John had been a healthy young man, a regular jouster, strong enough to carry the sword of state before King Edward on 23 April 1552 all through Westminster Hall “unto the chapel” of the palace.²⁰ Possibly later in the same year his father prayed God to “restore you to perfect health”, and his mother wished him “health daily”; while these may be mere phrases, they may as well indicate some illness or ailment. 16 years after the young earl’s – the young soldier’s – death, John Dee honoured him in his Mathematicall Praeface:

And so in sundry his other accounts, reckonings, measurings, proportionings, the wise, expert, and circumspect captain will affirm the science of arithmetic, to be one of his chief counsellors, directors and aiders. Which thing (by good means) was evident to the noble, the courageous, the loyal, and courteous John, late Earl of Warwick. Who was a young gentleman, thoroughly known to very few. Albeit his lusty valiantness, force, and skill in chivalrous feats and exercises: his humbleness, and friendliness to all men, were things, openly, of the world perceived. But what … vertue had fastened in his brest, what rules of godly and honourable a life he had framed to himself: what vices (in some then living notable) he took great care to eschew: what manly vertues, in other noble men (flourishing before his eyes) he aspired after: what prowesses he purposed and ment to achieve: with what feats and arts he began to furnish … himself, for the better service of his king and country, both in peace & war. These (I say) his heroical meditations, forecastings and determinations, no-one (I think) beside myself can so perfectly and truly report. … This noble earl, died Anno. 1554. scarce of 24 years of age: having no issue by his wife, daughter to the Duke of Somerset.

continued from:
The Young Earl of Warwick, Part I
The Young Earl of Warwick, Part II

Notes
1 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 5
2 Foxe p. 591
3 MacCulloch 1984 p. 266; Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 10
4 Chronicle of Queen Jane pp. 10, 7
5 Greyfriars Chronicle pp. 80 – 81
6 CSP Span 27 July 1553
7 Chronicle of Queen Jane pp. 27, 33
8 Ives 2009 p. 97; Guaras p. 103
9 Rosso f. 30
10 Rosso f. 31
11 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 121
12 Loades 2004
13 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 19 – 20
14 Loades 2004; Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 27
15 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 27
16 Wilson 1981 p. 61
17 Chronicle of Queen Jane p. 55
18 Machyn p. 72
19 Adams 2004a
20 Machyn p. 17

Sources
The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe. Volume VIII. (ed. S. R. Cattley, 1839).

Calendar of State Papers, Spain. Volume 11 – 1553. (ed. Royall Tyler, 1916) http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=973

Chronicle of the Greyfriars of London. (ed. J. G. Nicholls, 1852). Camden Society.

The Chronicle of Queen Jane. (ed. J. G. Nichols, 1850)

John Dee: The Mathematicall Praeface. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22062/22062-h/main.html

The Diary of Henry Machyn. (ed. G. J. Nichols, 1848). Camden Society.

Antonio de Guaras: The Accession of Queen Mary. (ed. Richard Garnett, 1892).

Report on the Pepys Manuscripts Preserved at Magdalen College, Cambridge. (ed. Historical Manuscript Commission, 1911)

Giulio Raviglio Rosso: History of the Events that Occurred in the Realm of England in Relation to the Duke of Northumberland after the Death of Edward VI. (ed. J. S. Edwards, 2011) http://www.somegreymatter.com/rossointro.htm

Adams, Simon (2004a): ‟Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick (c.1530–1590)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Adams, Simon (2004b): ‟Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester (1532/3–1588)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Higginbotham, Susan (2011): ‟How Old Was Guildford Dudley? (Beats Me).“ http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog/posts/how-old-was-guildford-dudley-beats-me/

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Loades, David (2004a): ‟Dudley, John, duke of Northumberland (1504–1553)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (ed.) (1984): ‟The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham“. Camden Miscellany. Volume XXVIII. Royal Historical Society.

Sil, N.P. (2001): Tudor Placemen and Statesmen: Select Case Histories. Rosemont Publishing.

Wilson, Derek (1981): Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1533–1588. Hamish Hamilton.

The Young Earl of Warwick, Part II

Between 12 and 14 years old at the time of her marriage, Anne Seymour was a learned young lady, a correspondent of Continental reformers and poet, who was, with her sisters, eulogized by Ronsard. In view of the younger John Dudley’s library she may not have been an unsuitable wife for him, but nothing has survived as to the material settlement for the young couple. It cannot have been overwhelming, as John always seems to have had difficulties to support himself out of his own pocket. He lived in style, as is shown by “a note of all the velvet shoes that my Lord Lisle hath had since [December 1545] which are in number 46 pair, and 2 pair of velvet slippers.”¹

When, sometime in 1552, his parents got wind of his financial difficulties he received a remarkably generous letter:

I had thought you had had more discretion than to hurt yourself through fantasies or care, specially for such things as may be remedied and holpen. Well enough you must understand that I know you cannot live under great charges. And therefore you should not hide from me your debts whatsoever it be for I would be loath but you should keep your credit with all men. And therefore send me word in any wise of the whole sum of your debts, for I and your mother will see them forthwith paid and whatsoever you do spend in the honest service of our master and for his honour, so you do not let wild and wanton men consume it, as I have been served in my days, you must think all is spent as it should be, and all that I have must be yours, and that you spend before, you may with God’s grace help it hereafter by good and faithful service wherein I trust you will never be found slack, and then you may be sure you cannot lack serving such a master as you have toward whom the living God preserve, and restore you to perfect health and so with my blessing I commit you to his tuition.
Your loving Father.
Northumberland.

Your loving mother that wishes you health daily
Jane Northumberland.²

Still, John was as yet without a suitable income of his own, although he had been appointed Master of the Buckhounds in April 1551 and even Master of the Horse a year later. In 1552 and 1553 he also joined his father in the lord-lieutenantship of Warwickshire, the family’s home turf. In September 1550 John took his brothers Robert and Guildford on a trip there, and on the way he presented them with “a pair of red boot hose” and “a hat of unshorn velvet”, respectively.

One of his next trips went further afield, to France, where he accompanied William Parr, Marquess of Northampton on a diplomatic voyage in May 1551, the marquess and the elder John Dudley being old friends. The English had hoped to revive the engagement between Edward and Mary Queen of Scots, but since this was totally unrealistic they were happy to secure the little princess Elisabeth de Valois for their king. The Viscount Lisle’s role in all this was entirely ceremonial, and quite generally he seems not to have been interested in politicking of any sort.

As Master of the Horse he would have been “the personal body servant of the monarch once he or she was outside the chamber – whether in the gardens or in the parks; whether on the hunt, playing tennis, in a maze or in festive tents or temporary banqueting halls”.³ John did not treat his office as a sinecure, although he was clearly in tow with his father; the duke simply referred to him as “my son” in his letters, while his next son was “my son Ambrose” or simply “Ambrose”.⁴ A typical scene of the Dudley circle between home and court appears from this message of June 1552:

I have received your letters for staying myself and my sons until the full moon next Monday, lest there is another infection in my house. As yet there is none among my children and my family. If it so continues I intend to be at court with my son, Huntingdon, Lord Hastings, and my son Sydney.

Despite his privileged access to the king, the young Warwick is never mentioned as one of the persons influential with Edward, nor seems his father to have been able to use him otherwise to promote his policies. This became apparent when he proposed to bring “in by writ some heirs-apparent into the parliament-house, whereby they may the better be able to serve his Majesty and the realm hereafter.”⁵ Indeed, Warwick was summoned to attend the Lords in March 1553, but he left no mark on proceedings and it is unclear whether he was allowed to participate in debates at all.⁶

In February 1553 King Edward fell ill with a fever and the Princess Mary made a state visit to London, where the Lords of the Council entertained her “as if she had been Queen of England”. The Master of the Horse had his finest hour receiving her into the city with 100 lords and gentlemen of the king’s household.⁷ Four months later the Imperial ambassador de Scheyfye reported that King Edward was “wasting away daily” and that Lady Jane Grey had recently married Lord Guildford Dudley; he added the latest speculations, from which the newlyweds were strikingly absent:

The Duke’s and his party’s designs to deprive the Lady Mary of the succession to the crown are only too plain. … It is said that if the Duke of Northumberland felt himself well supported, he would find means to marry his eldest son, the Earl of Warwick, to the Lady Elizabeth, after causing him to divorce his wife, daughter of the late Duke of Somerset; or else that he might find it expedient to get rid of his own wife and marry the said Elizabeth himself, and claim the crown for the house of Warwick as descendants of the House of Lancaster.⁸

The last story de Scheyfye had already reported three years before, but a divorce of John Dudley from Anne Seymour would certainly have been worth considering: According to one observer the Duke of Somerset had started intriguing against his daughter’s father-in-law even before the wedding, and during the next year he took to “contemplating” the permanent removal of his de facto successor.⁹ Northumberland struck first, in October 1551, and within little more than three months Anne Seymour was the daughter of an executed felon, politically worthless.

She had probably lived with her husband and in-laws ever since her marriage, for in the wake of her father’s execution she was described by Somerset’s evangelical adherents as having “been married nearly three years to the earl of Warwick, son and heir of the duke of Northumberland, and is happily and honourably settled.”¹⁰ Her two brothers were lodged with the Marquess of Winchester, who pocketed still £2,400 p.a. out of Somerset’s former estate on behalf of the elder boy. Finally, on 30 March 1553, the young Earl of Warwick was granted his brother-in-law Edward Seymour’s wardship, which brought him £510 p.a.¹¹ Whether he had consummated his marriage with Anne is impossible to know, but given her young age it would have been entirely plausible if Northumberland and Warwick had pursued an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation.

This idea was obviously never seriously entertained, though. On the contrary, she had been fully accepted into the Dudley family and Northumberland felt genuine remorse at having instigated her father’s death, something nobody had asked of him.¹² It is interesting that his heir had apparently lived for some time in Somerset’s household, making gifts of fine clothes to the duke’s cooks and kitchen boys, so he would also have come to know his future bride. One of the very few surviving details of their married life is this entry in John’s wardrobe account for 1551: “a shirt of blackwork that my lady gave my lord for his Lordship’s New Year’s gift”.¹³

continued from: The Young Earl of Warwick, Part I
continued at: The Young Earl of Warwick, Part III

Notes
1 HMC Second Report p. 101
2 HMC Pepys pp. 1 – 2
3 Murphy 2012
4 CSP Dom pp. 238, 239, 287
5 Tytler 1839 p. 163
6 Loades 1996 p. 236
7 Ives 2009 p. 94
8 CSP Span 30 May 1553
9 Hoak 1976 pp. 74 – 75
10 Original Letters I p. 340
11 Loades 2008 p. 162; Loades 1996 p. 224
12 Hoak 1980 pp. 48, 203; CSP Span 27 August 1553
13 HMC Second Report pp. 101 – 102; Loades 1996 p. 224

Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553. Revised Edition. (ed. C. S. Knighton, 1992). HMSO.

Calendar of State Papers, Spain. Volume 11 – 1553. (ed. Royall Tyler, 1916) http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=973

Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation. (ed. Hastings Robinson, 1847). Cambridge University Press.

Report on the Pepys Manuscripts Preserved at Magdalen College, Cambridge. (ed. Historical Manuscript Commission, 1911)

Second Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. (ed. 1874).

Higginbotham, Susan (2012): “It’s A Boy! No, It’s A Girl! Some Seymour Birth Dates”. http://www.susanhigginbotham.com/blog/posts/its-a-boy-no-its-a-girl-some-seymour-birth-dates/

Hoak, Dale (1976): The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge University Press.

Hoak, Dale (1980): “Rehabilitating the Duke of Northumberland: Politics and Political Control, 1549–53”. In Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (eds.): The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560.

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Loades, David (1996): John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland 1504–1553. Clarendon Press.

Loades, David (2004): ‟Dudley, John, duke of Northumberland (1504–1553)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Loades, David (2008): The Life and Career of William Paulet (c.1475 – 1575): Lord Treasurer and First Marquess of Winchester. Ashgate.

Murphy, John (2012): “The Royal Household of Mid Tudor England”. http://john-murphy.co.uk/?page_id=1258

Stevenson, Jane (2004): “Seymour, Lady Jane (1541–1561)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Tytler, P. F. (1839): England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Volume II. Richard Bentley.

The Young Earl of Warwick, Part I

Robert Dudley was 12 when he lost his eldest brother, Henry, during the siege of Boulogne, in the late summer of 1544. The brother to succeed the 19-year-old Henry as the family heir was John, the third son of his parents, John Dudley and Jane Guildford. John the Younger was then 13 years old; when his father became Earl of Warwick in early 1547 he was styled Viscount Lisle, and later, when John Dudley senior became the Duke of Northumberland, John Dudley junior became the Earl of Warwick.

John’s birth in, most probably, late autumn of 1530¹ had been followed by that of his brothers Ambrose and Robert, and, not far apart in age, the three were educated together, it seems. The Cambridge scholar Thomas Wilson explained to Robert Dudley in 1572 that

I am to deal thus with your honour before others, because I have known you, and that noble race your brethren, even from their young years. And with your honour, and that famous Earl of Warwick deceased, and your noble brother now Earl of Warwick living [i.e. Ambrose Dudley], I have had more familiar conference than with the rest.²

The brothers’ tutors included Michelangelo Florio for Italian, and Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham for “the new learning”. As heir to his powerful father, John was the dedicatee of two important works of English Protestant Humanism, Walter Haddon’s Cantabrigienses (1552) and Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoricke (1553). Wilson had passed an agreeable summer vacation at Sir Edward Dymock’s house, which gave him the leisure to write his Ciceronian work:

I therefore commend to your Lordship’s tuition and patronage this treatise of rhetoric to the end that ye may get some furtherance by the same & I also be discharged of my faithful promise this last year made unto you. For whereas it pleased you among other talk of learning earnestly to wish that ye might one day see the precepts of rhetoric set forth by me in English as I had erst[while] done the rules of logic.

The Dudley children, but also their parents, seem to have been fascinated by mathematics and cosmography, a field that originally came to their attention through the elder John Dudley’s career as vice-admiral and Lord Admiral in the 1530s and 1540s. The young mathematician and astrologer John Dee resided in the Dudley household as an intellectual companion for a time, where he was commissioned to write two treatises for the Duchess of Northumberland. As late as 1570 he remembered in the dedication of his masterwork, The Mathematicall Preface, how the younger John Dudley used to wear round his neck a little book – “his … counsellor most trusty”, with “rules and descriptions arithmetical”.

The title page of The Mathematicall Praeface by John Dee, dedicated to the memory of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick in 1570

Perhaps this book, kept in “a rich case of gold”, was the “boke of Arthmetrik in Lattyn” found in John’s remarkably vast collection of literature. Apart from Tullius Cicero, Horace, Terence, and Virgil’s Aeneid, there were to be found a Greek grammar, a “King’s grammar”, “a boke to write the Roman hand”, as well as a “boke to speake and write Frenche”. Next two “bokes of cosmografye” and a number of plays by John Heywood, as well as two volumes in Italian, there were religious works like “a Testament in Frenche, covered with black velvet”, an “Anglishe Testamente”, “Aurilius Augustinus”, “a Frenche boke of Christ and the Pope”, and “a Tragidie in Anglishe of the unjust supremicie of the Bisshope of Rome” by the Italian reformer Bernardino Occhino.³

Young noblemen were brought up as sportsmen and warriors, of course, and John Dudley was made a Knight of the Bath at Edward VI’s coronation in February 1547. Jousts and tilts, as well as appearances in masques and pageants were on schedule for the young courtiers: Entertaining French visitors in May 1550, the Viscount Lisle and the Vidame de Chartres with their fellow contenders wore yellow in “a pastime of ten against ten at the ring”; their counterparts wore blue. In December 1551 the young Earl of Warwick issued a challenge against all comers – taken up by the Lord Ambrose and the Lord Robert, among others. The season went on with the three brothers performing in Twelfth Night celebrations and at least two jousts.⁴

John, Ambrose, and Robert Dudley all married within little more than half a year. The first was Ambrose, in about December 1549, after he and Robert had returned with their father from the suppression of Ket’s Rebellion. Robert had met his sweetheart Amy Robsart on the campaign, in which John seems not to have taken part; still, the latter’s marital history was determined by the following upheavals that removed Protector Somerset from the political scene. The boys’ father, then Earl of Warwick, emerged as the new strong man, but on realizing that some of his fellow councillors worked for both Somerset’s and his own execution, he decided to save the ex-protector, arranging for his release and rehabilitation in the early months of 1550. In the meantime, the Countess of Warwick and the Duchess of Somerset had organized banquets on an almost daily basis in order to reconcile their husbands, and now the two ladies embarked on arranging a wedding between their respective eldest son and daughter, John Dudley and Anne Seymour. At the wedding on 3 June 1550, King Edward recorded, there was “a fair dinner made”, among plenty of other entertainments. The next day saw the marriage of Amy Robsart and Robert Dudley, and again Edward amused himself. Notably absent from the festivities was the elder John Dudley who, it was later claimed, feared to be poisoned.⁵

continued at: The Young Earl of Warwick, Part II

Notes
1 U Penn MS 1070 f. 18r; Mathematicall Praeface
2 Chamberlin 1939 p. 56
3 HMC Second Report p. 102; MacCulloch 2001 p. 52 – 53
4 Wilson 1981 pp. 42 – 43; Literary Remains II p. 389
5 Adams, Archer, Bernard 2003 p. 52

Sources
John Dee: The Mathematicall Praeface. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22062/22062-h/main.html

Genelogies of the Erles of Lecestre and Chester: U Penn Ms. Codex 1070. http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/detail.html?id=MEDREN_4218616

Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth. (ed. G. J. Nichols, 1857). Roxburghe Club.

Second Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. (ed. 1874).

Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoricke. (ed. G. H. Mair, 1909). Clarendon Press.

Adams, Simon (2004): ‟Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick (c.1530–1590)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Adams, Simon; Archer, Ian; Bernard, G. W. (eds.) (2003): ‟A ‘Journall’ of Matters of State happened from time to time as well within and without the Realme from and before the Death of King Edw. the 6th untill the Yere 1562“ in: Ian Archer (ed.): Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press.

Beer, B. L. (1973): Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. The Kent State University Press.

Chamberlin, Frederick (1939): Elizabeth and Leycester. Dodd, Mead & Co.

French, Peter (2002): John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. Routledge.

Haynes, Alan (1987): The White Bear: The Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. Peter Owen.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2001): The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. Palgrave.

Sherman, W. H. (1995): John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. University of Massachusetts Press.

Wilson, Derek (1981): Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1533–1588. Hamish Hamilton.

Jewels and ‟Such Other Pretty Stuff ‟: Robert Dudley Goes Shopping

Robert Dudley’s personal tastes were hardly more extravagant than those of his fellow noblemen, except that Queen Elizabeth expected her ‟honorary consort“ to dress magnificently.¹ Thus, when the earl celebrated the Feast of the Order of St. Michael at Warwick in 1571, the onlookers were duly impressed:

And then came my said Lord the Earl of Leicester by himself, apparelled all in white, his shoes of velvet, his stocks of hose knit silk, his upper stocks of white velvet lined with cloth of silver, his doublet of silver, his jerkin white velvet drawn with silver, beautified with gold and precious stones, his girdle and scabbard white velvet, his robe white satin embroidered with gold a foot broad, very curiously, his cap black velvet with a white feather, his collar of gold beset with precious stones, and his garter about his leg of St. George’s order, a sight worthy the beholding.²

Unsurprisingly, almost no price was too high for such luxury; on 25 April 1579 Robert Dudley instructed the English representative at the court of the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands, William Davison:

Touching the silks I wrote you about, I wish you to take up and stay for me 4,000 crowns worth of crimson and black velvet, and satins and silks of other colours; and if there be any good cloth of tissue, or of gold, or such other pretty stuff, to stay for me to the value of £300 or £400, whatever the charge shall be. You shall be no loser though I should not go through with the bargain; but I mind certainly to go through with it, and will take order for payment as soon as I hear what you have stayed, and what the prices are.

P.S. Make stay of as much stuff as I have written for, and the money shall be sent you immediately, upon your answer that you have made bargain for me. Let it be of the best sort of every kind I have written for, according to the price, as the best, the second, and third sort to be worth their value, and to bargain accordingly, and I will send one over upon your answer, to take order for payment.³

When it came to furnish his castle of Kenilworth for the queen’s visit in 1572, the earl did exhibit some sense of economy, relying on his favourite Italian, Benedict Spinola, and instructing his trusty treasurer Anthony Forster with the details:

I willed Ellis to speak with you and Spinola again for that I perceive that he hath word from Flanders that I cannot have such hangings thence as I looked for for my dining chamber at Kenilworth. Yet he thought there would very good be had at this present in London and as good cheap as in Flanders. Palmer’s wife told me at Hatfield that she was offered very good for 11s or 12s an ell. In any wise deal with Mr. Spinola hereabout for [he] is able to get such stuff better cheap than any man and I am sure he will do his best for me. And, though I cannot have them so deep as I would, yet if they be large of wideness and twelve or thirteen foot high it shall suffice … I hope you have made the provision of spice for me and … I pray you send down with speed some such spice as is needful for all other matters against my chiefest day.

I have no mistrust of your care of such things as is to be sent thither. I have given this bearer £12 to buy trifles withal for fireworks and such like. When he hath provided his stuff, cause it to be safely sent hereafter, for that I have appointed him after four or five days to go to Kenilworth for a banqueting house that must be made. I have no leisure as you may see by my haste. If I forget you may judge meet to be thought of for this present, I refer it to further order. So fare you well Anthony, in much haste, this 16 July.

Your loving master.

Leicester⁴

Robert Dudley was always looking for precious things he could add to his collections. In 1571, as the Duke of Norfolk was about to plunge himself into political adventures, he sold much of his plate and jewellery to acquire ready cash; Leicester spent £335 to secure his item of choice, and he may have been happy to receive a ‟ship of crystal glass“ under the duke’s will when the latter’s plots had brought him to the scaffold a year later.⁵

The whole court had to present the monarch with a precious gift on New Year’s Day, but sometimes Leicester must have received a more personal gift from Elizabeth than the usual ounces of plate she bestowed on all the courtiers who had done their duty. A witness to that is ‟a ring of gold enamelled black with a fair diamond in it, cut lozenge wise with these letters in it ‘E.R.’“ Another personal piece from the earl’s collections were ‟the portraitures of the Queen’s majesty and my lord, cut in alabaster“.⁶ In the same vein, Leicester’s own gifts often were very special. In 1571 he gave the queen what must have been one of the first wristwatches: a ‟ruby and diamond bracelet with a ‘clock’ set in the clasp“.⁷ Another bracelet was of gold, inscribed: ‟Serviet eternum dulcis quem torquet Eliza (May it serve forever the sweet Eliza it intwines)“.⁸ He often gave a necklace – with which came his privilege to hang it round the queen’s neck: in 1583 it consisted of letters of diamonds and pearls, with ‟a cypher in the midst“. ‟Ciphers“ were the secret letters used in cryptography, a flourishing art in this age of plots and counterplots. In 1584 the necklace was once again of diamonds, made of cinquefoils, one of Leicester’s personal emblems, and interspersed with lover’s knots.⁹

His intimacy with Elizabeth entailed that he did her shopping as well; in January 1565, Robert Dudley wrote to his Flanders agent, Baroncelli: ‟The patterns of bodices which you have sent me for the Queen are beautiful, but not what she wants, having several of that make. She wants the kind used in Spain and Italy, worked with gold and silver.“ Baroncelli did his best, yet ‟if her Majesty had sent me a pattern I would have tried to supply her before now“.¹⁰

Thus, Leicester was always on the lookout to organize the most beautiful things for his queen, and he seems not to have failed her on his short trip to Antwerp in 1581, when he accompanied the Duke of Anjou (formerly Alencon) back from a visit to England. The rebels against Spanish rule in the Low Countries had long been hoping for Elizabeth’s support, and the appearance of her great favourite – who was known to have favoured their cause for many years – elicited scenes of jubilation. During his stay, he, the Prince of Orange, and Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s cousin, ‟met in a room alone“, conversing for some time till they were joined by two pairs of burgesses of the cities of Antwerp and Ghent. The four burgesses brought with them four keys for a casket with four locks which contained very precious gems, including a carbuncle called the ‟Landsjewel“, indicating it was used as an official symbol:

Leicester was so much enamoured with it that he asked them why they had not sent it to London, as if the Queen had seen it she would have done anything they liked. They then closed the casket and Leicester put his seal upon the lock, a deed then being drawn up, and signed by him, Hunsdon, Orange, and the four burgesses.

‟I have not been able to learn … whether the casket came hither“, Philip II’s London agent concluded his report.¹¹

Notes
1 Adams 2004; Starkey 2001
2 Warwick 1908 pp. 363 – 364
3 CSP Dom VII p. 558
4 Wilson 1981 p. 150
5 Williams 1964 pp. 112, 248
6 Wilson 1981 p. 80
7 Jenkins 2002 p. 174
8 Jenkins 2002 p. 271
9 Jenkins 2002 pp. 275, 283
10 Jenkins 2002 p. 113
11 CSP Span III p. 312

Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, Addenda 1566-1579. (ed. M. A. E. Green, 1871)

Calendar of … State Papers Relating to English Affairs … in … Simancas, 1558–1603. (ed. by Martin Hume, 1892–1899). HMSO.

Adams, Simon (ed.) (1995): Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–1586. Cambridge University Press.

Adams, Simon (2004b): ‟Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester (1532/3–1588)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, Elizabeth (2002): Elizabeth and Leicester. The Phoenix Press.

Starkey, David (2001): Elizabeth: Apprenticeship. Vintage.

Warwick, Frances Countess of (1903): Warwick Castle and its Earls. Volume I. Hutchinson & Co.

Williams, Neville (1964): Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk. Barrie & Rockliff.

Wilson, Derek (1981): Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester 1533–1588. Hamish Hamilton.

Daughter Or Daughter-In-Law?

On 2 June 1552 the Duke of Northumberland wrote an urgent letter to William Cecil, his de facto private secretary. He wrote to excuse his and his eldest son’s absence from court duties on account of the death of a family member and the possibility of an infectious disease in his household. The first editor of the letter, Patrick Fraser Tytler, understood the deceased to be a child, a daughter, while the editor of the Victorian Calendar of the State Papers Domestic, Robert Lemon, without further explanation catalogued the document as concerning the death of an adult daughter-in-law. This has been followed, again without comment, by the editor of the revised edition of the calendar of 1992, C. S. Knighton.

The change of the dead female’s identity apparently came about by reading the letter to Cecil as a follow-up to one from the previous day, 1 June, to Lord Thomas Darcy and Sir John Gates (the Lord Chamberlain and the Vice-Chamberlain, Northumberland’s “special friends” about the king). From this letter (which was equally printed by Tytler) it appears that Ambrose, the second eldest son of the duke, had recently lost his first wife, Anne Whorwood, daughter of the former Attorney-General William Whorwood. It says nowhere, however, when exactly she died, the letter dealing exclusively with property issues, only one of which resulted from her demise:

After my most hearty commendations to your good Lordship, with the like to you Mr. Vice Chamberlain. … And where it hath pleased God to call out of this life the wife of my son Ambrose, and hath left no child alive, her next heir now is the son of one Harwood, whose father was my servant, and slain at Musselburgh Field, and held his lands of me. – Now, by the death of my said son’s wife, he is ward to the King’s Majesty for such lands as he shall have after my son Ambrose’s life, which he holdeth by courtesy of England, because he had a child by her.

It may therefore please you, at this my request, to move his Majesty only if I may have of his Highness the preferment of the child [i.e. the young Harwood]; which child, before the death of this woman, was my ward: and thus I cease not to molest you both in all my pursuits, which I know not how to recompense but with my faithful goodwill and friendship, as knoweth God, who grant you the desires of both your own gentle hearts.

From Otford, the 1st of June 1552.
Your Lordship’s and your assured faithful friend,
Northumberland

The letter to William Cecil, of 2 June, one of a series of messages back and forth on the same day, clearly reports a development that has only just occurred; it thus seems unlikely that the ‟daughter“ and “child” of this letter is the same person as the “wife” and “woman“ of the letter to Darcy and Gates. The letter is generally different in tone:

After my most hearty commendations. Whereas I perceive by your letter of this instant, that, except the death of my daughter might seem dangerous and infectious, the King’s Majesty’s pleasure is that neither I should absent myself nor stay my son; whereupon I have thought good to signify unto you what moveth me to suspect infection in the disease whereof my daughter died. First, the night before she died, she was as merry as any child could be, and sickened about three in the morning, and was in a sweat, and within a while after she had a desire to the stool; and the indiscreet woman that attended upon her let her rise, and after that, she fell to swooning, and then, with such things as they ministered to her, brought her again to remembrance, and so she seemed for a time to be meetly well revived, and so continued till it was noon, and still in a great sweating; and about twelve of the clock she began to alter again, and so in continual pangs and fits till six of the clock, at what time she left this life. And this morning she was looked upon, and between the shoulders it was very black, and also upon the one side of her cheek; which thing, with the suddenty, and also [that] she could brook nothing that was ministered to her from the beginning, moveth me to think that either it must be the sweat or worse, for she had the measles a month or five weeks before, and very well recovered, but a certain hoarseness and a cough remained with her still. This [is] as much as I am able to express, and even thus it was: wherefore I think it not my duty to presume to make my repair to his Majesty’s presence till further be seen what may ensue of it. Neither my son, nor none that is in my house, except his Majesty, shall command the contrary, or that your Lordships’ wisdom shall think it without peril, being no more nor no less than before is declared requiring your Lordships’ farther answer hereupon, and accordingly I will [endeavour] myself. Thus I commit your good Lordships to the tuition of the Almighty.

From Otford in Kent, this 2d of June.
Your own most assured,
Northumberland

P. F. Tytler, writing in 1839, after remarking upon the businesslike tone of this letter, concluded that ‟the deepest is often the stillest grief.”¹ More recently, the popular authors Hester W. Chapman and Alison Weir cited the letter as proof of the duke’s wickedness – his ‟icy heartlessness“² (or “terrifying heartlessness”³) being apparent in the description of the corpse of his child; the academic historians Barrett L. Beer and Eric Ives, meanwhile, were impressed by John Dudley’s affection for his daughter-in-law.

Simon Adams, another academic historian and an authority on the Dudleys, wrote in 1995: “Ann Whorwood had died in childbirth in 1552″;⁴ nine years later he stated that she “died of the sweating sickness on 26 May 1552, shortly after the birth of a daughter (possibly named Margaret), who died about the same time.”⁵ From these contradictory statements it is unclear whether he sees Anne Whorwood as the deceased “daughter” and “child” of the letter of 2 June. The letter’s contents and the careful report of the hourly progress of the disease suggest, though, that a real child had only just died, apparently the previous evening; and indeed one of John Dudley’s daughters may have died on 1 June 1552.

Due to a lack of reliable documentation the birth dates of most of John Dudley’s 13 children are hopelessly difficult to ascertain. Two of his five daughters were named Katherine: the later Countess of Huntingdon, and the youngest daughter, who died as a child. Two manuscript pedigrees give her age as seven years old, and it may have been this youngest daughter to whom Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk stood godmother in 1545.⁶ If she was born in 1545 and seven years old at the time of her death, she must have died around 1552.

Notes
1 Tytler 1839 p. 114
2 Chapman 1962 p. 65
3 Weir 2008 p. 93
4 Adams 2002 p. 328
5 Adams 2004
6 Adams 1995 p. 44; U Penn Ms. Codex 1070 f. 18v

Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547–1580. (ed. Robert Lemon, 1856). Longmans.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553. Revised Edition. (ed. C. S. Knighton, 1992). HMSO.

Genelogies of the Erles of Lecestre and Chester: U Penn Ms. Codex 1070 http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/detail.html?id=MEDREN_4218616

Adams, Simon (ed.) (1995): Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–1586. Cambridge University Press.

Adams, Simon (2002): Leicester and the Court: Essays in Elizabethan Politics. Manchester University Press.

Adams, Simon (2004a): ‟Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick (c.1530–1590)“. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Beer, B. L. (1973): Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. The Kent State University Press.

Chapman, Hester (1962): Lady Jane Grey. Jonathan Cape.

Ives, Eric (2009): Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Wiley-Blackwell.

Tytler, P. F. (1839): England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. Volume II. Richard Bentley.

Weir, Alison (2008): Children Of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII 1547-1558. Vintage.