After poor Lady Catherine took Lady Loe into her confidence, she made frantic application for help to Lord Robert Dudley—not yet Earl of Leicester—so high in the Queen’s good graces. In this there is sheer drama as well as pathos—this confession and piteous appeal from the young and comely lady of quality, whose only fault was that she had married for love, to the handsome, pampered, arrogant cavalier, the Queen’s darling. Lady Hertford went to his very chamber in Court to implore him to stand between her parlous state as prospective mother and the Queen’s anger. Yet nothing in such contingencies could divert Elizabeth’s fury, or make her act in a humane fashion. Lord Hertford was summoned to England to undergo trial with his wife, and very soon both were committed separately to the Tower. But before this could be done the farce of a public enquiry had to be played. A commission was ordained, pompously headed by no less a person than Archbishop Parker. The accused were requested to produce, within a given time, witnesses of their marriage. That they failed to do this is extraordinary. The priest seems to have disappeared, and Lady Jane Seymour appeared unable to find him or to assist in furnishing the required evidence. But as this couple could not satisfy the Commission in time they were sentenced to be imprisoned during the Queen’s pleasure. “Displeasure” would be the correct word. For Elizabeth knew little but vanity and vexation of spirit at this period. The very word marriage must have been a red rag to her. With the strong vitality and virility of her father warring within her against the heritage of the feminine instincts of her mother, Anne Boleyn, with countless suitors and innumerable flatterers to encourage and keep at bay alternately, with one eye fixed on Mary of Scotland and another on the “devildoms of Spain,” her life just now was a constant turmoil. Her whole entourage was forced to share in it. She would not decide upon a consort to help her; she belittled the estate of marriage one day and dallied with it the next. No wonder that poor Mr. Treasurer Cecil wrote as he did on the eve of the New Year of 1564. Schemes matrimonial whirled round him like the winter snow. Elizabeth was being wooed by a French monarch and an Austrian Emperor at the same moment; the Lennox family and Mary of Scotland were working to achieve the marriage of the latter with Darnley, and the Lady Mary Grey, fired no doubt by her sister’s intrigue and sick of loneliness, had actually surreptitiously married John Keys, the Serjeant Porter to the Queen. Meanwhile the Earl and Countess of Hertford were in the Tower. In addition, the Queen was putting up her beloved Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, to oppose Darnley as a possible consort for Scottish Mary. Shrewd old Cecil shows, however, that she is only half-hearted about it: “I see the qn Mty very desyroos to have my L. of Lecester placed in this high degree to be the Scottish Queen’s husband, but whan it commeth to the conditions which are demanded I see her then remiss of her earnestness.”[[7]]
He concludes wearily enough:—
“This also I see in the Qn Maty, a sufficient contentation to be moved to marry abrood, and if it is so may [it] plese Almighty God, to leade by the hand some mete person to come and lay hand on her to her contentation, I cold than wish my self more helth to endure my yeres somewhat longar to enjoye such a world here as I trust wold follow: otherwise I assure yow, as now thyngs hang in desperation, I have no comfort to lyve.”
My Lady St. Loe, as confidante, was forced to weather the storm and endure reprimand. The married lovers, meanwhile, dragged out their days in durance. Their son was born in the Tower. In vain they languished, pined, and implored the intercession of friends. In 1562 the Earl was allowed a little more ease. Husband and wife managed to meet again. Another child was born to them, and my Lord was duly fined fifteen thousand pounds by the Star Chamber, for this event was construed into a new State offence. In 1563 the dreaded plague caused Elizabeth to remove her poor love-birds from the Tower. Lady Catherine went to the house of her uncle, Sir John Grey, in Essex, and he was roused to uttermost compassion and distress by her wretched mental and physical condition. It was in mid-Lent that he wrote to Cecil emphatically and ironically:—
“It is a great while me thinkethe, Cousin Cecile, since I sent unto you, in my neices behalf, albeit I knowe, (opportunitie so servinge) you are not unmindful of her miserable and compfortlesse estate. For who wantinge the Princes favor, maye compt himselfe to live in any Realme? And because this time of all others hathe ben compted a time of mercie and forgevenes I cannot but recommende her woefull liffe unto you. In faithe I wolde I were the Queen’s confessor this Lent, that I might joine her in penaunce to forgive and forget; or otherwise able to steppe into the pulpett to tell her Highness, that God will not forgive her, unleast she frelye forgeve all the worlde.”
This letter is worth quoting because it shows the prevailing attitude of the Elizabethan courtier. No one who lacked the favour of the sovereign could be accounted as one living. Lady Catherine, once under that heavy cloud of disfavour, never emerged, but died broken and miserable within six years of her unhappy marriage. Wherefore Lady St. Loe had chance enough to learn her lesson, and was fortunate in that her share of the affair was visited only by a cross-examination and warning. She was not at all the sort of woman to brook being left out in the cold. She was too wise, of course, ever to have engulfed herself in a marriage of this sort, but in such a case, had she not managed to divert Elizabeth’s anger by some master stroke of wit and diplomacy, she would certainly not have languished of “woofull griefe” nor starved herself to death, like Lady Catherine, for sorrow.
At such a time and in face of the fresh hubbub caused at Court by the marriage of Lady Mary Grey (“an unhappy chance and monstruoos,” comments Cecil, in a letter to the English Ambassador in France), the peace and security of Chatsworth offered themselves as a happy refuge against all complications. There is a grotesque humour in Cecil’s use of that word monstrous, for Lady Mary was almost a dwarf, and Keys, whom Cecil calls “the biggest gentleman in this Court,” had secured his post of Serjeant Porter owing to his magnificent size and height. He was twice Lady Mary’s age, and was a widower with several children. The Queen clapped him in the Fleet, and condemned Lady Mary to confinement in the houses of successive friends. The pair never met after their hasty wedding.
Thus, on all sides, Court was a place of “dispeace,” while in Derbyshire Lady St. Loe had good neighbours, people of quality and substance, and was safe within her parks and palings. She did not share her royal mistress’s distrust of matrimony, for she was free to choose her next lord, and there was no reason why she should remain a widow longer than she could help.
It is not to be suggested for a moment that she had no suitors and that she was not the subject of all kinds of matrimonial gossip. One Fowler (subsequently committed to the Tower in connection with the discovery of suspicious papers) opines in his “notes” that “either Lord Darcy or Sir John Thynne are to marry my Lady St. Loe, and not Harry Cobham.” Doubtless the Cobham match would have pleased her well, and she would have been quite in her element in the place which afforded a seat and a surname to that noble and splendid family upon whom the evil days of Jacobean confiscation and the betrayal of Sir Walter Raleigh had not yet fallen. A sister of Lord Cobham was married to Mr. Secretary Cecil, “and the match would have been advantageous, but possibly my Lady, with her deep insight into character, divined that the gentleman was not of the steady stuff which makes for worldly security.” Moreover the best matches are by no means to be found near the Court, and close at hand, in the same county, lived one greater than the Cobhams, a man whom many a maid and every widow would be proud to espouse. He was a widower, an earl, the owner of seven seats, bearer of a high government post, and he came of a long line of distinguished soldiers. Lady St. Loe went to work wisely. She had the assistance of her dear gossip and contemporary, Lady Cobham. No one could have acted the go-between more discreetly. Before long the fashionable world had something to talk about in the announcement of the fourth marriage of Bess Hardwick.