THE UNCROWNED KINGS OF ENGLAND: The Black Legend of the Dudleys
by Derek WilsonConstable £20 pp416
Historians avidly seek fresh ways of telling stories that people know and care about. Derek Wilson has found a marvellous vehicle for this. His theme is the Dudleys, one of the families closest to four out of five Tudor monarchs. For a century, they bestrode court and country, privy to the innermost controversy. All played for the highest possible stakes and three of them were executed for treason.
Edmund Dudley, a brilliant London lawyer recruited by Henry VII, led the way. The first Tudor’s policy of “law and order” relied on fiscal intimidation. Henry bound over the rich and powerful to “good behaviour” while Dudley trawled for legal infringements. Anyone caught out had to buy an expensive pardon. Dudley and his associate, Richard Empson, were reviled as the Tudor equivalent of the Krays. Wilson claims this is unjust, since Henry VII ordered everything. Probably he did, but Henry VIII won instant popularity for beheading his father’s minions.
Edmund’s son, John, attempted to learn from this. A soldier-courtier, he rose steadily through military service on land and sea. He deftly sidestepped the falls of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell and was raised to the peerage. Although a man of action and a skilled administrator rather than an intellectual, he enjoyed the company of scholars and converted to Protestantism. Naturally he kept his views quiet. Henry VIII might have quarrelled with the Pope, but he loathed heretics.
John Dudley stretched his wings in Edward VI’s reign, allying with Archbishop Cranmer to make the Protestant Reformation official.
It was a period of social and economic upheaval, which Dudley helped to stabilise. It was also a perilous time. When Edward reached the age of 14, he was impatient to pull the levers. It was — and here Wilson convincingly challenges academic orthodoxy — the sickly youth’s own plan to divert the succession from his hated sisters, Mary and Elizabeth.
When Edward knew he was dying, he drafted his “Device for the Succession”, naming the Protestant Jane Grey and her future sons as his heirs. Since John Dudley married his own son, Guildford, to Jane, he has been pilloried as a Machiavellian schemer, but Wilson shows the wedding had taken place before the “Device” was disclosed. The “Device” was Edward’s idea. If John Dudley was taken by surprise, his uncharacteristic dithering is fully explicable. He hesitated before declaring for Queen Jane, and his delay proved fatal. Mary Tudor acted swiftly to reclaim her birthright; her counter coup was decisive. John and Guildford Dudley were inevitably among its victims, their family once more tainted by convictions for treason.
And yet (unlike the Tudors) the Dudleys were fecund. John had fathered six sons, two of whom were spared. One of these was the most famous scion of their dynasty, the glittering, ambitious, charming and astute Robert, whom Elizabeth made Earl of Leicester. He was her favourite, her unofficial consort, the only man she ever really loved, and so a towering presence in the politics of the reign.
For 18 months, Elizabeth and Robert cavorted together. As the Spanish ambassador put it, she “visits him in his chamber day and night”. Their intimacy stopped at heavy petting. Elizabeth kept her virginity, but the affair was scandalous because Robert was already married. The gossip reached fever pitch when his wife Amy died in suspicious circumstances. Elizabeth quickly cooled it; she realised then she could never marry him. Perhaps part of the attraction had all along been that he wasn’t available as a husband, and so as king.
Still, their romance lasted on and off for 30 years. Only Leicester’s death in 1588 ended it, and Elizabeth kept the final note he had sent her close beside her, annotating it “His last letter”. He was the single most important constant in her life.
Wilson’s account of the ebbs and flows, highs and lows, of the “Elizabeth-Robert” story is masterly. He has a deep understanding of their characters, reaching out across the centuries to touch them as if they were old friends. He is no uncritical admirer of either party: the Queen eulogised as Gloriana could be “double-minded and confused”. Her policy at times was chaotic, and she was herself to blame.
Elizabeth’s possessiveness over Robert crippled both of them emotionally. After 15 or so years, Leicester found it hard to bear. He wanted a son and heir, even if Elizabeth didn’t. This led him into messy affairs and at least one clandestine marriage. His union with Lettice Knollys became official, but his son by Lady Sheffield was illegitimate. As for Elizabeth, despite relentless pressure from her privy councillors and parliaments to marry and save the Tudor succession, she could bring herself to marry no one else.
Leicester’s sexual escapades destroyed his good name. As a patron of church reform and champion of the Dutch Protestants, he was a sitting duck for Catholic polemicists. In 1584, “Leicester’s Commonwealth” castigated him as a lecher, traitor, tyrant and assassin. The tract was a coruscating libel. When William Camden incorporated whole chunks of it into his Annals of Queen Elizabeth some 20 years later, the result was the “black legend” of the Dudleys.
Wilson sets the record straight. His book is stimulating and authoritative, explaining how the Tudors and Dudleys were indeed intertwined like a tree with its ivy. Wilson approves of this metaphor, but says it is conventionally put the wrong way round. It wasn’t the Dudleys who sucked life from the Tudors, but vice-versa. Whether the Dudleys were the “uncrowned Kings of England” is a point of debate. What can no longer be contested is that their story is the Tudor story. Their family history is also the history of England.
John Guy’s My Heart is My Own: A Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Fourth Estate) has won this year’s Whitbread biography prize. The Uncrowned Kings of England is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585
