The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys Read online

  THE

  UNCROWNED

  KINGS OF ENGLAND

  Other titles by the author

  The Circumnavigators

  In the Lion’s Court

  All the King’s Women

  THE

  UNCROWNED

  KINGS OF ENGLAND

  The Black Legend of the Dudleys

  Derek Wilson

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005

  Copyright © Derek Wilson 2005

  The right of Derek Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been identified by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1-84119-902-8

  eISBN 978-1-47211-249-1

  Printed and bound in the EU

  Jacket images: Warwick Castle, Canaletto, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library;

  Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, Steven van der Muelen, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/Bridgeman Art Library;

  Jacket design by Joe Roberts

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Dudley Alliances 1553

  The Dudley Pedigree

  I The Lawyer

  1 Broad is the Path and Wide the Gate

  2 Notoriety

  3 A Tree and its Fruit

  II The Soldier

  4 Connections

  5 Crises and Calculations

  6 The Pendulum and the Pit

  7 King’s Knight and God’s Knight

  8 Tempestuous Seas

  III King John

  9 Feast in the Morning

  10 The Cares that Wait upon a Crown

  11 Desperate Measures

  IV The Lover

  12 De Profundis

  13 The Gypsy

  14 Death and Transfiguration

  15 Politics, Puritanism and Patronage

  16 Love’s Labours Lost

  17 Fair Means and Foul

  V The Exile

  18 Tudors and Dudleys

  References

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick, Warwick Castle and its Earls, The Countess of Warwick, vol. I, 1903

  Dudley Castle, photograph by the author

  The offer of the crown to Lady Jane Grey (1537–54), engraved by Charles George Lewis (1808–80) (engraving), Leslie, Charles Robert (1794–1859) (after)/Private Collection/www.bridgeman.co.uk

  Inscription by John Dudley in the Beauchamp Tower at the Tower of London

  Execution of John Dudley, from a 19th century engraving

  Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532?–1588) from a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London, London in the Time of the Tudors, Sir Walter Besant, 1904

  Kenilworth Castle, an engraving of 1817 from a drawing made in 1716 by Henry Beighton, Elizabethan England, being the history of this country ‘In Relation to all Foreign Princes’ A Survey of Life and Literature, vol. 3, 1575–1580, E. M. Tenison, 1933

  Queen Elizabeth I in Coronation Robes, c.1559 (panel), English School, (16th century)/National Portrait Gallery, London

  Henry VII’s Palace at Richmond, The Histories and Antiquities of Richmond, Kew, Petersham, Ham &c, E. Beresford Chancellor, 1894

  The Leicester Hospital, Warwick, Warwick Castle and its Earls, The Countess of Warwick, vol. I, 1903

  Opener for the ‘Ninth Book, containing the Acts and things done in the Reign of King Edward the Sixth’, Acts and Monuments, John Foxe, vol. 2, 1684

  The tomb of Sir Robert Dudley and his wife Lettice in St Mary’s Church at Warwick, photograph by the author

  Sir Robert Dudley, ‘The Noble Impe,’ son of Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester and the Lady Douglas Sheffield, Warwick Castle and its Earls, The Countess of Warwick, vol. I, 1903

  The tomb of Sir Robert Dudley ‘The Noble Impe, in the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, Warwick Castle and its Earls, The Countess of Warwick, vol. I, 1903

  Introduction

  This is the story of the royal dynasty that England almost had. The Tudors were powerful and impressive monarchs who gave the crown a permanence and inviolability that had eluded their predecessors but, ironically, their hold on power was weakened by their inability to sire a line of healthy male heirs and within little more than a century, after only three generations, they had disappeared. If Edward VI or Elizabeth I had had their way the house of Tudor would have been succeeded by the house of Dudley, the first and only wholly English dynasty in the nation’s history. The Plantaganets sprang from French stock. The Tudors were Welsh. The Stuarts were Scottish, and when England had had its fill of them, search had to be made in far distant German palaces for a suitable prince to fill the constitutional gap. Had sovereignty passed to the Dudleys the history of Britain would have been vastly different.

  There was much to be said for the Dudleys as prospective rulers of England. They were fecund. Their sixteenth-century family tree bristled with sons. They came from solid baronial stock, could boast ancestors who had fought with Henry V at Agincourt and served successive monarchs in court and council. They were well connected and proud of their links with the great medieval families of Beauchamp and Neville. Just how much store they set by their noble origins can be seen in St Mary’s Church, Warwick. Here Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick caused a sumptuous chantry chapel to be raised for the repose of his earthly remains in the mid 1400s. A century later, it was appropriated by the Dudleys and, to this day, houses a group of spectacular Dudley tombs. Every Tudor sovereign, with the exception of Mary, reposed high trust in members of this family, and not without good reason. They proved themselves accomplished courtiers, politicians, administrators and generals.

  Yet, not only did they fail to achieve all that their talents promised, they have also gone down in popular legend as perhaps the most execrated noble family in English history. Ironically, it was their very closeness to the throne which destroyed the male line of the Dudleys and earned them their evil reputation, which, utterly undeserved, has led to their neglect by historians for four centuries. It is extraordinary that scholars have until very recent years been content to accept the moral judgements of Tudor contemporaries who were either sworn enemies of the Dudleys or jealous of their influence. The assumption has largely gone unchallenged that the Dudleys were an avaricious, power-hungry brood interested in nothing but feathering their own nest. They have appeared in chronicles of the sixteenth century as unmitigated villains whose designs were, fortunately, thwarted by the magnificent Tudor monarchs. Edmund Dudley was presented as the evil councillor who urged on Henry VII’s draconian financial policies and took his cut from increased royal revenues. Henry VIII unmasked him and sent him to the block. Edmund’s son, John, heartlessly pursued to death the ‘good duke’ of Somerset, Edward Seymour, during the reign of the boy king Edward VI
and crowned his villainy by trying to place his own daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne. Mary Tudor made short work of him and the would-be king, Guildford Dudley. Yet, within a few years, Robert Dudley, Guildford’s brother, had wormed his way into the affections of Elizabeth I and was moving heaven and earth to marry her, not forbearing to dispose of his own wife in the process.

  The ‘black legend’ of the Dudleys is a monstrous injustice. It is based on the testimony of preachers, pamphleteers and rabble-rousers who rejected the policies Edmund and his descendants stood for but who, for the most part, did not dare to direct their criticisms at the sovereign. Edmund Dudley made powerful enemies among the aristocratic and mercantile communities for carrying out policies devised by the king. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had multiple enemies. The old noble families regarded him as an upstart while activists among the common people hated him for executing Edward Seymour, whom they looked upon as their champion. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, felt the brunt of virulent Catholic propaganda because he was the premier patron of the Puritans. What may well be the world’s worst example of pernicious libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth, accused him of every crime its author could think up, including a ‘kind hearts and coronets’ conspiracy in which the queen and all claimants to the crown were to be murdered so that Dudley could take their place. With all this mud being thrown it was inevitable that much of it would stick.

  However, this book is not simply an attempt to rebut such calumnies; to right ancient wrongs. I have tried to avoid the hagiographical trap. It is the rescuing of the Dudleys from scholarly neglect that provides the justification for the following pages. Even if all the libels were true the story of this family would be well worth the telling. It is remarkable that, not once but twice, the Dudleys bounced back from total disgrace and ruin to occupy a major place in national life. Their destiny was closely interwoven with that of England’s greatest royal dynasty and without them the history of sixteenth-century England would have been very different. Would Henry VII have found a lawyer/administrator as inventive and energetic as Edmund Dudley to lay down the financial foundations of centralized monarchy? Without John Dudley, would Edward Seymour’s incompetence and ill-advised policies have led to the collapse of government? If Robert Dudley had not been at her side as unofficial consort, would Elizabeth have been able to bear the burden of solitary rule throughout three tense and troubled decades?

  The adult Tudors were all strong characters and it might be thought fanciful to conceive of the Dudleys as being powers behind the throne. Yet it was precisely that reality which so scandalized observers of Elizabeth’s court. The Spanish ambassador reported that Lord Robert ‘does whatever he likes with affairs’ and the queen herself envisaged that, in the event of her sudden death, her favourite would become Protector of the Realm as his father had been before him. When her own marriage to Robert became impossible Elizabeth seriously proposed him as a husband for Mary, Queen of Scots – which would have meant that his progeny would have been the inheritors of two crowns. When the Dudleys did not actually have their hands on the levers of power they were seldom more than a shadow away. Nor must we forget that, on two occasions, the House of Tudor really did come very close to being by the House of Dudley.

  The unpredictable twists and turns of fate denied that experience to both the family and the nation. We can only speculate what kind of rulers Edmund Dudley’s descendants might have made had they legitimately come by the Crown. They were crucial and, until now, overlooked players in England’s story. Like them or loathe them, the Dudleys were remarkable people who lived, loved and died at the very centre of political life, and left an indelible mark upon it.

  I

  THE LAWYER

  1

  Broad is the Path and Wide the Gate

  A large crowd had gathered on the no-man’s-land of trampled grass and bare earth which separated the eastern edge of the City from the intimidating bulk of the Tower of London. Executions of ‘top people’ were always major attractions but when the victims were the most hated men in England everyone who could do so wanted to get to Tower Hill to see them receive their just desserts. What they believed they were witnessing, on 17 August 1510, was the final act in the deliverance of England from a dark regime of tyranny and financial oppression into the sunlit rule of a young Adonis who would bring freedom and glory to his realm. It probably occurred to no spectator of that gruesome scene that a king who could bow to public opinion by sacrificing ministers whose only crime had been loyalty to their royal master might in the years ahead send many of his subjects to death for no better reason than that it would serve his interests.

  The Dudley hate club sprang into existence very early and by 1510 it was already being noised abroad that Edmund Dudley was a jumped-up nobody, the son of a Midlands carpenter who had wormed his way into Henry VII’s favour, then used his position to enrich himself and urge the king to pursue rapacious and unjust policies. In the highly stratified society of sixteenth-century England people were highly suspicious of men who rose from humble origins. It was assumed, and not only by the nobility, that kings should select their principal officials and advisers from among the nation’s leading families. Renaissance princes, of whom Henry VII was one, swam vigorously against the powerful current, refusing to place their government in pawn to baronial clan leaders. In doing so they created a class of royal servants who formed a barrier between themselves and the petty princelings of the shires. Members of this class were rarely popular and always vulnerable. It was Edmund Dudley’s fate to be considered of their number. In fact, he was very far from being a man of obscure origins. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer who perished as a traitor beneath the headsman’s axe was descended from a long line of Midlands landowners and royal servants. Their family name was Sutton but from the mid-fifteenth century they began to call themselves the lords of Dudley, Worcestershire after the manor which formed the basis of their power and wealth. Dudley Castle in Worcestershire, the impressive remains of which can still be seen, was begun soon after the Conquest, and testifies that these landowners had been men of substance for centuries. It is not surprising, then, that they played a significant part in what we have come to call the Wars of the Roses. Their motto, ‘droit et loyal’, indicated allegiance to the reigning monarch as liege lord but during the tumultuous decades of the conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster these petty barons had frequently had to question where their real allegiance lay. Their own survival was tied up with staying on the winning side and this they achieved with remarkable success.

  The man who may be regarded as the founder of Dudley greatness was Edmund’s grandfather, John, sixth Baron Dudley. Lord John was a burly man of war who fought beside Henry V at Agincourt and accompanied the king throughout his French campaigns. He bore the royal standard at Henry’s funeral in 1422 and became a pillar of the government during the reign of the infant Henry VI. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1428 to 1430, a position of great power and prestige, and became a highly trusted diplomat and man-at-arms. In 1451 he was admitted to the exclusive brotherhood of Garter knights. In the previous year, when much of Kent rose in rebellion under Jack Cade, one of the king’s men singled out for special complaint for brutishness and rapacity was John Dudley, a sure indication that the baron was a no-nonsense man of action, not squeamish in carrying out what he conceived to be his duty.

  But we do not need such generalized complaints to obtain an understanding of Lord Dudley’s turbulent character and the turbulent age which produced men like him. Thanks to fifteenth-century law court records we can see him in action in his locality. After his return from Ireland John received a stream of complaints about John Bredhill, rector of Kingswinford, some five miles from Dudley and a part of his estate. By all accounts Bredhill was the worst kind of arrogant, rapacious and immoral incumbent, more assiduous in collecting his tithes than in ministering to the needs of his flock. The crimes charged against him included ar
son, theft, poaching the lord of the manor’s game, affray and rape. It was useless for the villagers to seek legal redress, for, when they did, Bredhill ‘claimed his clergy’, that is he demanded the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical court, knowing that he could rely on his peers to do no more than order him to perform an easy penance. Thus he avoided imprisonment, branding or death, the sentences that might have been imposed by a secular court, and remained in office to punish those who had presumed to raise their voices against him.

  Whether John Dudley tried sweet reason with this unholy incumbent we cannot know. What we do know is that his temper soon snapped. The soldier who had laid about him with his broadsword against the king’s enemies and ridden down rebels in Ireland was not about to tolerate clerical misdemeanours on his own patrimony. He gathered a small body of armed retainers and rode over to Kingswinsford where he, with,

  John Sheldon, John Clerk, Thomas Young and Thomas Bradley, the Tuesday in the feast of Whitsuntide last past, [1432] wrongfully entered into the parsonage . . . and there they broke up 4 coffers and bore away the goods that were in the same coffers and all other goods that your said suppliant had. Also they put his servants out of their place.1

  This was no mindless orgy of spontaneous revenge; the spoliation was thorough and cold-blooded. The raiders waited until the incumbent was away and then removed everything that belonged to him: clothes, books, furniture, kitchen utensils, grain and hay from the barns and stock from the fields. Then they broke down his fences, filled his ditches, lopped his trees and trampled his standing crops. Bredhill reckoned the cost of the burglary and damage at £133.10s., some £150,000 in modern-day values. The parson sought legal redress but there is no record of Lord Dudley ever being brought to book. Bredhill, therefore, stoked up the feud by carrying out his own raids on the property of those he believed to be implicated in the outrage.