CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
A portrait of Robert Dudley, commissioned from an unknown artist
shortly before Elizabeth’s 1575 visit, shows him wearing rich red –
the colour of love; in the companion portrait of Elizabeth, also believed
to have been commissioned in 1575, she wears a white doublet given to
her by Dudley; a sketch for a painting by Zuccaro shows Elizabeth with
a pillar, a dog and an ermine, symbolising constancy, fidelity and purity;
Dudley wears armour in Zuccaro’s sketch
BOOK
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and
the World of Elizabethan Art by Elizabeth
Goldring (Yale University Press, 2014)DISCOVER MOREElizabeth Goldring is honorar y associate
professor at the University of Warwick. Her
biography of Nicholas Hilliard, favourite
portrait painter of Dudley and Elizabeth, will
be published by Yale University Press in 2019to England at Dudley’s behest in the spring
of 1575 – Dudley is depicted in armour,
while the queen appears alongside a column
(representing constancy) topped with a dog
(fidelity) and an ermine (purity). Zuccaro’s
paintings do not survive, but his preliminary
drawings give a sense of what the finished
works must have looked like.
Significantly, in both sets of portraits
Dudley and Elizabeth are shown facing
the same direction rather than each other,
the latter style by convention reserved
for husbands and wives. But the implicit
depiction of them as a couple – and of Dudley
as consort manqué – is unmistakable.
Dudley’s proposals of marriage
culminated in a speech, delivered at the
queen’s departure on 27 (or possibly 28) July:
“Vouchsafe, O comely Queene,
yet longer to remaine,
Or still to dwell amongst us here!
O Queene commaunde againe
This Castle and the Knight,
which keepes the same for you;
... Live here, good Queene, live here...”
By all accounts, Elizabeth left Kenilworth
earlier than expected – perhaps because
the weather took a turn for the worse, or
perhaps because Dudley’s extravagant
assertions of devotion struck the wrong note
when, just the previous year, he had fathered
a ‘base’ son by the much younger Douglas
Howard, Lady Sheffield.Abandoned hopes
After the festivities, Dudley seems to have
abandoned any real hope that Elizabeth
would ever agree to marry him. But that
was not the end of their relationship. Queen
and favourite remained close, even after
Dudley’s 1578 marriage to Lettice Knollys.
When, in 1588, Dudley died unexpectedly,
Elizabeth was so distraught that she spent
several days alone in her chamber. Upon
receiving a letter from him thanking her for
some medicine, sent just before his death,
the queen treasured it as “his last letter”,
keeping it in a box by her bedside until her
own death over 14 years later. Dudley may
not have won Elizabeth’s hand, but there
can be little doubt that he won her heart.©^READING^MUSEUM(READINGBOROUGH^COUNCIL^ ALLRIGHTSRESERVED)