Favourite in the Queen’s shadow

Press, 30 May 1981, Page 17

Favourite in the Queen’s shadow

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by Alan Kendall. Cassell, 1980. 259 pp. $30.95.

(Reviewed by David Gunby)

Save Queen Elizabeth herself, and possibly her last favourite. Robert Devereaux. Earl of Essex, no member of the ‘ Elizabethan Court needs less introduction than Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Born in 1533, the same year as Elizabeth, he passed, as she did, through dangerous times during the reign of her sister Mary, and might well have died upon the scaffold for his part in the attempt to make his sister-in-law. Lady Jane Grey, Queen. As it was, he survived to hasten to join Elizabeth at Hatfield when, in 1558, she succeeded to the throne, was rapidly made her Master of the Horse — a post which kept him virtually always at the Queen's side — and became one of her most trusted advisors as well as her chief favourite. He remained both, with only brief and partial falls from favour, until .his death in 1588.

As the first and greatest favourite of the virgin Queen, Leicester has been the subject — or more usually joint subject — of numerous books, films and. more recently, television series. The majority, focusing joyfully on his long, ambiguous and (for him) tantalising, relationship with Elizabeth, have no pretensions to history and often only scant regard for facts. Yet

watching Glenda Jackson and Robert Hardy acting out the constant sexual skirmishing which seems to have characterised the relationship in its early years, particularly, we can see why the subject is perennially interesting.

It has been so ever since Leicester's own time, and indeed the first "inside account" (so to speak) of Leicester's life appeared in 1584. Known generally as Leicester's Commonwealth, the book found a ready audience amongst those eager to read of scandals in high places and those, too. who had cause to hate Robert Dudley. Gathering together all the gossip that had surrounded Leicester since the death of his first wife, Amye Robsart, in 1560. and asserting as fact what can be no more than surmise. Leicester's Commonwealth testifies eloquently, if malevolently, to the fascination he held for his contemporaries. Clearly, subsequent generations feel the fascination also. . Does Alan Kendall, author of the latest account of Leicester's life share that fascination? Perhaps, though he does not quite say so. and the general tone of the book, and the author's summing up in the; final pages suggests rather that like many of his predecessors he finds his subject less interesting in himself than in his relationship with the Queen. Francis Bacon wrote, early in the seventeenth century, that Elizabeth had

kept Leicester about her as "society ... and for an honour and ornament” for herself and her Court. As Mr Kendall remarks, such a role is a hard one to play, and for one as proud and ambitious as Robert Dudley, doubly hard. What is fascinating, therefore, is the way in which Elizabeth managed to make Dudley platsuch a role so much of the time. Marshalling what evidence there is of the ways in which the Queen "managed" her favourite, Mr Kendall is often unable to prevent a shift in focus from the subject of this biography to the Queen. In literature as in life, it seems. Elizabeth the Queen seems easily able to best and outshine her favourite.

There is. then, a fundamental ambiguity about Mr Kendall's biography. It is comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and generally lucid and well-written ’=■- the only failing here being an occasional excess of zeal in presenting evidence — but it is only intermittently able to maintain the focus on Dudley himself. For much of the time the Queen dominates this biography as she dominated its subject, and the result is less than entirely satisfying. But then, perhaps the truth is that there is just not enough to Dudley for an independent biography or. to put it another way, that the life of Dudley can only be written as much of it was lived, in the shadow of that most remarkable woman. Elizabeth Tudor.