Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 24
Chapter Fifteen
ОглавлениеLord Robert Dudley (later Earl of Leycester) had several earthly siblings, but he had also, in the fires of Hell, according to many people, one far nearer to him in spirit:
... that first archetype
Of pride, and paragon of all creation,
Who, of the light impatient, fell unripe.
(‘of the light impatient’: intolerant, unable to endure the light.)
But Leycester did not fall unripe. He lived until his usefulness was finished, and then died, a few weeks after the victory over the Armada.
There is practically no evil, physical or spiritual, that has not been ascribed to him: (for was he not, in the eyes of the world, most highly favoured by fortune, and must he not therefore, if possible, be pulled down into the mud, made equal with those who envied him?) But not one crime or other evil has ever been proved against him, or could, I think, be believed in by any serious reader.
His sin in the eyes of the world was that he had that fallen angel’s glittering beauty, look of fiery pride, and dark magnificence; that he was tall, of great physical strength, was not one to ‘sit among the cinders’, and that he was loved by a Queen.
The accusations against him are so multitudinous, the sins ascribed to him of such a magnitude as to be most impressive.
‘What a monster of a man was Leycester, who first brought the art of poysoning into England.’[1]
‘If any of his enemies’, wrote Edmund Bohun, in 1693,[2] ‘had at any time a little too freely expressed their resentment against his Dishonesty, Wickedness, Injuries, Power, or Perfidy ... he seldom failed to have them treacherously murdered. Many fell in his time (saith a great man of that age)[3] who saw not the hand that pulled them down; and as many died that knew not their own disease. He would not trust his Familiars above one year, but either transported them to Foreign Services, or wafted them to another World. And then it is said that some noble families he utterly extinguished.’ Mr. Frederick Chamberlin, quoting this, says that ‘no man of that age ... said anything of the sort’, as far as he could learn.
It was said that he murdered his first wife. The jury found that she died through an accident. He was supposed to have ‘procured by an artificial catarrh that stopped his breath’ the death of Lord Sheffield, in order that he might marry his widow, Douglas.
The only thing against that story is that Lord Sheffield died two years after Leycester was supposed to have killed him, and that the teller of the tale was an old lady over a hundred years of age, who had lost her memory.
He is said to have married the widow secretly, and then deserted her. There is no proof of the marriage, and her suit to have it acknowledged after Leycester’s death was dismissed by the Courts. She did, however, bear him a son, and to that story we shall come later.
He was supposed to have murdered Lord Essex (father of Queen Elizabeth’s young favourite) and yet, according to an eye-witness of Essex’s death (the Master of the Rolls, writing from near Dublin, in September 1576, to his ‘Dear Good Lord Burleigh’), ‘I was much in the later ende of his sicknes.... He doubted that he had bene poysoned ... and of that suspicion acquitted this land.’ And Sir Henry Sidney told Walsingham, ‘When he was opened, it could not appeare that one Intrall within his Body, at any Tyme, had bene enfected with any Poyson’.
But that, no doubt, was because (according to Leycester’s Commonwealth) he had in his employ, besides Dr. Dee and Dr. Lopez, and Julio the Italian, Doctors Bayly and Culpeper, ‘once Papists, now Galenists, poysoners so subtle that they can make a man die of any sickness as long after as they like’.
Leycester married Lady Essex, not immediately, but two years all but a day after her husband’s death, and, according to The Dictionary of National Biography, ‘there is no proof that the Countess intrigued with Leycester in her husband’s lifetime’.
Amongst other accusations, he was supposed to have poisoned Cardinal Châtillon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and the Countess of Lennox, and attempted the murder of the French Envoy, Simier. But indeed his assassinations were so numerous that it would be tedious to mention them all.
As for his morals! According to Edmund Bohun[4] ‘he gave himself up entirely to the exercise of a most wicked and universal Luxury ... and brought into England from Foreign Countries many new and unheard of Pleasures.... He would drink dissolved Pearls and Amber to excite his Lust.’
And ‘as his lust and lyking shal varie’ (said the anonymous author of Leycester’s Commonwealth) ‘wherein by the judgment of all men he surpasseth, not onlie Sardanapalus and Nero, but even Heliogabalus himself; so his Lordship also chaungeth wives and minions, by killing the one, denying the other, using the third for a time, and then fawning upon the fourth’.
He was accused, also, of incest—with ‘the keeping of the mother wyth two or three of her daughters at once or successively ...’ this being ‘no more with him, then the eating of a hen and her chicken together’.
One of the shocked protagonists of Leycester’s Commonwealth, on hearing that at one time Leycester was living simultaneously with Lady Sheffield and Lady Essex—(he did nothing of the kind)—declared, ‘I never heard or red the like to this ... yet have I red especialie of the Emperor Heliogabalus who passed all other, and was called Varius, of the varitie of filth that he used in this kind of carnalitye, or carnall beastliness. Whose death was, that being ... slaine by his own souldiers [he] was drawen through the Citie upon the Ground like a dogge, & caste into the common privie, with this Epitaphe.... “Here is thrown in a Whelp of unrewlie and raging luste”: which epitaphe, may also one day chance to serve my L of Leycester.’
It is strange that, as far as the present writer knows, the only women in Leycester’s life, apart from the Queen (with whom his relationship was platonic), were his first and second wives, and Douglas Sheffield, to whom he does not seem to have behaved dishonourably.*
According to his detractors, his frauds, his sales of benefits, his treacheries, were as numerous and shone as brightly as the stars. In addition, he was a fool. And yet the Queen, who was not supposed to be one, placed him in supreme command of the army at the time of the Armada!
The Commonwealth is supposed to have consisted of a conversation between three persons, the anonymous author, (under the pseudonym of ‘Scholar’), ‘a verye worshypfull and grave Gentleman’, and ‘an Auncient man that professed the law’. It is pleasant to know that the Gentleman, as befitted his status, ended the conversation with ‘Craving pardon of my Lord of Leycester for my boldness, yf I have bene to plaine wyth him. And so I pray you let us go to supper.’
But although this delightful person was, according to himself, a gentleman, Lord Leycester, according to the same authority, was not.
To this, his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Leycester, answered, ‘Now to the Dudleys ... When he [the author of the Commonwealth] saith they are no gentlemen, affirming that the Duke of Northumberland was not born so ... I am a Dudley in blood, that Duke’s daughter’s son, and do ... say, that my chiefest honour is to be a Dudley....
‘In one place of his book he greatly extolleth the great nobility of the house of Talbot.... And yet this Duke’s [Leycester’s father’s] own grandmother, whose blood he makes so base, was a Talbot, and sole heir to the Viscount of Lisle ...
‘The house of Grey is well known; to no house in England inferior in great continuance of honour, and for number of great houses sprung from it, to be matched by none; but by the noble house of Nevill, his mother was a right Grey, and a sole inheritrix of that Grey of the house of Warwick which ever strove with the great house of Arundel, which should be the first Earl of England; he was likewise so descended ... being the only heir to the oldest daughter, and one of the heirs of that famous Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, that was Regent of France ... and of the house of Berkeley, which is affirmed to be descended lineally from a King of Denmark ... this Duke was the only heir general.... So that I think it would seem as great news as if they came from the Indies, that he, who by right of blood, and so accepted, was the ancientest Viscount in England, heir in blood and arms to the first or second Earl of England, in blood of inheritance a Grey, a Talbot, a Beauchamp, a Berkeley, a Lisle, should be doubted to be a gentleman....’
•••••
He had inherited danger and tragedy.
His grandfather had been beheaded in 1510, ‘as a sacrifice to the importunate clamours of the people’. His father, the Duke of Northumberland, was restored in blood by King Henry VIII; but after the rebellion, he, too, was condemned to die by the axe.
All five of his sons, including the twenty-year-old Robert, were condemned (the latter was reprieved). These youths, waiting for death, occupied themselves with carving their devices in their cells—Warwick’s name appearing with two bears and ragged staves surrounded by acorns, roses, honeysuckles, and gilliflowers, representing the initials of his four brothers—with Robert Dudley’s device, a sprig of oak.
On the 22nd of August (1553) the father was beheaded on Tower Hill—his death witnessed by his five sons from the windows of their cells.
On the 13th of November, Guildford, the husband of the little usurper Queen Jane, was condemned to be beheaded, and his sixteen-year-old wife to be burnt to death or beheaded at the Queen’s pleasure. She went to her release from her most unhappy life without flinching.
Five days before her death, she, who with her husband and their brothers had been brought into the rebellion through the ambition of their fathers, wrote to hers: ‘Father, although it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened, yet can I patiently take it, that I yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woeful days, than if all the world had been given into my possession, with life lengthened at my own will.... My dear father, if I may, without offence, rejoice in my own mishap, herein I may account myself blessed, that washing my hands with the innocence of the fact, my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord “Mercy to the innocent”.... The Lord ... so continue to keep you, that at last we may meet in heaven with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. I am, your obedient Daughter till Death, Jane Dudley.’
She saw, from her window, the body and the head of her young husband carried away. Then, an hour afterwards, went to her own death. Four hours after that death, her body and her head, lying on the straw in such a sea of blood that de Noailles, the French Ambassador, wondered so much could come from so little a body, could still be seen by her four brothers-in-law from their cells.
Next would come the turn of Robert Dudley. On the 22nd of January 1554, brought up before the Lord Mayor of London and the Earl of Sussex, he did not deny the treason (that of loyalty to his father, brother, and sister-in-law) and was condemned to death. But for some reason that death was delayed.
•••••
After the execution of Guildford, only six of the Duke’s children were left—the four brothers, and their sisters, Mary (Lady Mary Sidney), and Catherine (the Countess of Huntingdon).
Their unhappy mother, like some forlorn little bodiless air, haunted the Court.... If only someone would listen to her, she felt sure that her remaining sons would be spared—would be set free. But her voice could not make itself heard in the noise of the preparations for Queen Mary’s marriage.
Then came the dark foreign faces; and some of these were kind. Besides, the ladies had not overmuch to do. They did not care to venture often into the city, for their lords were hated. So they listened, and received, from time to time, small presents of little value from this old woman, reduced now to extreme poverty, whose husband, and one of whose sons, had been executed, and whose other sons were in the Tower.
On the very day of her death, the 22nd of January 1555, the kindness of the Spanish lords and ladies to her bore fruit. ‘We, the aforesaid King and Queen, moved to pity of our own special grace and certain knowledge ... have pardoned, remitted and released ... in as much as is in us ... Robert Dudley.’
Three days after he and his brothers were set free, the eldest, Warwick, worn out by his long imprisonment and by the horror of those deaths he had witnessed, died.
About two years after that pardon, the property of Robert Dudley was restored to him, by the King’s and Queen’s goodness.
Then, on the 17th of March 1557, ‘cam rydyng from King Phelype from beyond the sea unto the Court at Grenwyche, to our Quen, with letters in post, my lord Robert Dudley ... [saying] that the Kyng would com to Cales the xvii day of March’—on his way to Greenwich, to complete her ruin.
The Duchess of Northumberland, on her death-bed, did not forget her benefactors. She had not much to bequeath them; but to one among ‘those that did my sonnes good’—‘a Spanish lord that is beyond the seas’, the Lord Dondagoe Damondesay, she left her ‘book clock that hath the sun and the moone on it’, to the Duchess of Alva her green parrot, ‘having nothing worthy of her else’, with a prayer to ‘continue a good ladye to my children, as she has begun’. To Robert’s wife Amye, whom he had married when he was nineteen, she left ‘a gown of wrought velvet’.
