I
f Sir Francis Bacon and Arthur Dudley are to be discounted, then who could have been Robert and Elizabeth’s son? John Harington is another possibility. Records show that he was born on 4 August 1560 in Kelston, Somerset (near Bath) to John Harington and his second wife, Isabella Markham, who were both in the service of Elizabeth I. Harington Senior was a poet and musician, a courtier and favourite of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. His first wife had been Etheldreda Malte, the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII by Joanna Dingley. As discussed in a previous chapter, Harington Senior and his first wife, Etheldreda, had one child, a daughter, named Hester, who may have actually been the illegitimate child of Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley. This would have made Etheldreda and her husband the foster parents of this royal child. Certainly Harington Senior was extremely loyal to Elizabeth and had served sentences in the Tower of London on two different occasions rather than betraying the princess when she was out of favour. Elizabeth would not forget his loyalty when she became Queen.
In the last days of Mary I’s reign, in November 1556, Elizabeth met with the Spanish Ambassador de Feria to discuss which ministers she would keep and which she would remove when she acceded to the throne. Along with Robert Dudley and William Cecil, she also mentioned John Harington Senior.
After his first wife’s death, John approached Isabella Markham, whom he had loved for many years, to ask for her hand. Isabella, the daughter of a knight, was by then a gentlewoman in the Queen’s Privy Chambers. Unfortunately, Isabella’s father did not give his approval in spite of intervention by the Queen in 1558, so it was not until his death in 1559 that the couple were able to marry. In June that year, before the marriage, records show that Elizabeth granted Harington Senior a life post ‘for his service, to John Harington, the Queen’s servant, of the office of receiver general of the revenues of lands in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire’.
1
After the marriage, a grant of land followed ‘to John Harington [he and his male heirs], the queen’s servant, and Isabel his wife, a gentlewoman of the privy chamber – of lands relating to Lenton and Radford, Nottinghamshire’.
2
In that same year, 1559, they had their first child, Elizabeth, and on 4 August 1560, their first son, John, was christened in the parish of Allhallows, London Wall.
3
Three other sons were to follow: Robert in about 1562, Francis in 1564 and James in 1565.
During these years, Harington Senior and Isabella were faithful members of the royal household. In 1562, they gave New Year gifts to the Queen, Mrs Harington giving a smock ‘all over wrought with black silk’, and Mr Harington offering ‘a pair of sleeves and a partelett [the cloth that covered the upper chest and neck and supported the ruff], embroidered with gold and silver set with pearls’.
4
If John was born in August 1560, that would mean he was conceived in December 1559, but if the Queen were his true mother, would this have been possible? As early as April 1559, foreign ambassadors to the Court were noting that Elizabeth allowed Robert Dudley unprecedented access to her. His
apartments at Court adjoined the Queen’s. As Spanish Ambassador de Feria put it, ‘… her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night’.
5
At the time, Robert was granted honours by the Queen, being awarded the Order of the Garter in April. In May, the Venetian Ambassador remarked that ‘My Lord Robert Dudley is in very great favour and very intimate with her Majesty.’
6
By late 1559, the ever-vigilant Kat Ashley, Elizabeth’s companion and First Lady of the Bedchamber, was warning Elizabeth about her relations with Robert and how they were perceived by those who wished her mischief. In December, von Breuner, the Ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote ‘The Queen has more than once been addressed and entreated by various persons to exercise more prudence and not give people cause to suspect her in connection with this man …’
7
Bearing all this in mind, it is, therefore, not impossible that Elizabeth fell pregnant over the Christmas and New Year festivities in 1559. It is often assumed, given that Arthur Dudley claimed to be born in 1561, the same year as Francis Bacon was born, that Elizabeth’s alleged child was conceived during late 1560, but it could equally have been in late 1559. Elizabeth and Robert would have been 26 years old, she in the first flush of freedom as the new Queen, and he as her favoured courtier. It is known that their relationship was close, so it is not too hard to imagine that it was sexually intimate.
At the time, Robert’s wife, Amy Robsart, was terminally ill. Elizabeth and Robert may have gone through a promissory form of marriage to allow themselves sexual relations until they could officially marry. If Elizabeth found herself pregnant, she would have had to conceal it to full term since Amy’s death did not occur until September and the baby was born in August. In this case the
bonny boy could have been handed over to two people who could be trusted absolutely to look after the child, nurture and protect him, and see him settled in adulthood. It was perhaps even the second time Harington Senior had fostered one of Elizabeth’s children, if she was indeed Hester’s mother.
Provision was made for the child in March 1563, when Elizabeth made a grant of the manor and ex-priory of Lenton in Nottinghamshire to Harington Senior, his wife Isabella and their male heir, their eldest son John. The Queen was his godmother (over the years she would end up with 102 godchildren), while his godfathers were Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, rather illustrious godparents for the son of a country gentleman from Somerset in the Queen’s service.
8
John was a clever child and went to Eton, like most young boys of a certain social standing at the time. By the age of 15, he was attending King’s College, Cambridge, where he may have been quite surprised to receive a letter from his godmother, the Queen of England, containing a copy of a recent speech she had made to Parliament:
Boy Jack, I have made a clerk write fair my poor words for thine use, as it cannot be such striplings have entrance into Parliament Assemblies as yet. Ponder them in thy hours of leisure and play with them till they enter thine understanding, so shalt thou hereafter perchance find some good fruits hereof when thy godmother is out of remembrance, and I do this because thy father was ready to serve us in trouble and thrall.
9
Presumably the intelligent and enquiring mind of the young man had impressed Elizabeth, who seemed to take a discreet interest in
his intellectual development. From 1578, when John was 18 years old, his tutor was Dr John Still, whom he would later describe as:
… my reverent tutor in Cambridge … who, when myself came to him to sue for my grace to a Bachelor [of Arts], first he examined me strictly, and after answered me kindly, that the grace he granted me was not of grace, but of merit, who was often content to grace my young exercises with his venerable preference, who, from that time to this, hath given me some helps, more hopes, all encouragement, in my best studies.
10
John’s tutor obviously made a deep impression on him with his kindness and support, and may have been a positive role model for this young man who would become an author and master of art. John would later help his former tutor reclaim some lands that had been claimed by Sir Thomas Heneage.
Shortly after his arrival at Cambridge, the Lord High Treasurer, William Cecil, his father’s friend, wrote him a typical uncle’s letter on the importance of study and learning, counselling, ‘For at a good lecture you may learn more in an hour that a good teacher, perhaps, hath been studying for a day, and yourself by reading shall not find out in a month.’
11
He said that if John studied hard, he would become ‘a great comfort to your father, and praise to your mother, an honour to the University that breeds you, a fit servant for the Queen and your country, for which you were born, and to which, next God, you are most bound; a good stay to your self, and no small joy to your friends, which I, that loves you, both wish and hope of.’
12
In 1579, the Queen sent her godson a copy of her translation of one of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s familiar epistles (‘Tully to Curio’).
She considered John would enjoy her work as he too had skill as a translator. Like her, he was a talented linguist, fluent in Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian. He was also interested in mathematics and science, which were Robert Dudley’s favoured subjects.
The lucky young man was not only in correspondence with the Queen and her chief minister, but also with one of Elizabeth’s top advisers, the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1580, he wrote the statesman a courtesy letter in Latin to inform him that he planned to study law on leaving Cambridge.
The letter also indicates that he was befriended by one of the Queen’s favourites at the time, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Translated, his letter finished, ‘… a young man of the highest nobility and remarkable virtue, the Earl of Essex, has treated me with great kindness. This he does, partly from the goodness of his nature, partly from consideration for my duties, but most of all because he regards me as numbered among those whose interests and welfare matter to you.’
13
Devereux was a skilled hand at ingratiating himself with promising young men who could be useful contacts at the Royal Court.
John left Cambridge in 1581 and, like many young noblemen, went to Lincoln’s Inn to study law and associated subjects. Then in July 1582, when his father died, John returned to the family home to administer his estates, principally St Catherine’s, Kelston and Batheaston around Bath.
He put his writing talent to use in a poem he penned about his city, which shows his penchant for risqué verse:
Of going to Bathe
A common phrase long used here hath been,
And by prescription now some credit hath:
That divers Ladies coming to the Bathe,
Come chiefly but to see, and to be seen.
But if I should declare my conscience briefly,
I cannot think that is their Arrant chiefly.
For as I hear that most of them have dealt,
They chiefly came to feel, and to be felt.
14
Although he had studied the law, John was drawn by writing. Between 1582 and 1590, his great project was a translation into English of the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance poem
Orlando Furioso
. Apparently after translating a section dealing with the unfaithfulness of women, John, in a spirit of levity, had it circulated among the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, whom he felt must be fed up with their daily routine of needlework (they ‘cannot always be pricking at clouts’).
Elizabeth was apparently not amused, and ordered him to leave the Court until he had translated the whole text (over 33,000 lines of verse) to make amends for his insults to womankind. She may not have believed he would undertake such a challenge, but he completed it in 1591, as well as a biography of Ariosto, a commentary on the text and an index. It was published to great acclaim with a splendid frontispiece of a portrait of John and his favourite dog, Bungey.
15
A support in this major task was John’s wife, Mary Rogers (his ‘sweet Mall’), whom he had married in 1583. It was a happy marriage, despite his wife hating his frequent absences at Court.
16
According to John, the Queen once jestingly asked his wife ‘in merry sort’ how she kept her husband’s love, and Mary replied ‘in wise and discreet manner’ that she did ‘persuade her husband of her own affections, and in so doing did command his.’
17
John wrote a small, gentle verse on sweet Mall that shows his tenderness to Mary:
Your little dog that barked as I came by
I struck by hap so hard, I made him cry;
And straight you put your finger in your eye
And lowering sat. I asked the reason why.
‘Love me and love my dog,’ thou didst reply,
‘Love as both should be loved.’ ‘I will,’ said I,
And sealed it with a kiss …
18
The couple had 15 children, many of whom died in infancy or childhood. The eldest, James, may have married and emigrated to America; the house and estates at Kelston were passed to another son, John, who married Dionysia Ley and established the English family line. (The Kelston Harington family should not be confused with that of a distant cousin, Sir John Harington, 1st Baron Harington of Exton, who became the guardian of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth, and whose son, yet another John, became a close friend and servant to James I’s son, Henry, Prince of Wales.)
Although John wrote on many light-hearted matters (he said of the Queen, ‘Her Highness loveth merry tales’), he also had a more serious side. In 1590, he wrote the scholarly, religious work
A Discourse showing that Elyas must personally come, before the Day of Judgement
, and the unpublished, serious study
A Treatise on Play
, on how gambling (practiced by many nobles) might have ill effects on the young and vulnerable, and how this might be counteracted. He also supported the restoration of Bath Abbey, which had been stripped of its lead and allowed to fall into ruin, spending 20 years persuading sponsors and donors to help renovate the building.
The Queen had apparently forgiven John for the
Orlando Furioso
incident, since just after its publication she visited John at his principal residence at Kelston while on one of her progresses. The royal visit was a success, but painfully expensive, so much so
that John was obliged to sell his house, St Catherine’s Court in Batheaston, to pay all the bills. He thereafter lived at his house in Kelston (this Tudor house was destroyed in 1764).