Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry and Spectacular Design by Trea Martyn

Elizabeth I adored entertainment, preferably at someone else's expense. She also yearned for private space, where she could escape the bustle and intrigue of politics. She found both in gardens: some at her own palaces, others at the prodigy houses of her courtiers during her famous summer “progresses”, when she perambulated with a small army of attendants around the countryside within 100 or so miles of London.

Trea Martyn teaches garden and landscape history, and Elizabeth in the Garden is her first book. She makes a striking debut, because she uncovers a “lost” history: how Elizabeth’s two leading councillors, Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, competed for her attention (and in Dudley’s case for her love) by creating ever more lavish and exotic pleasure gardens. Not only could she quietly relax there, but these gardens also provided the perfect settings for the outdoor pageants, masques and candlelit parties that she enjoyed.

No expense was spared. At Kenilworth Castle, five miles from Warwick, Dudley carved out the first, and one of the largest, English gardens in the new Italian Renaissance style, ready for Elizabeth’s visit in 1575. His men dug out a vast artificial lake, occupying 111 acres. An entire village had to be demolished to make way for it. His formal gardens, internally arranged in knot-like shapes, literally dazzled: their borders were of gilded rosemary. Dozens of painters had worked for weeks, applying a special gum to a million or more needle-like leaves, before coating them with gold leaf. In a few hours, the sun’s heat would harden the gum and bind the gold to it, making it glint by torchlight.

Terraces were built to create an illusion of space: Dudley wanted to achieve a single, unified landscape in which castle, gardens, orchard, park, fountains, statues and banqueting houses could be viewed as a panorama from above. When Elizabeth, early on in her visit, had to crane her neck to see it properly, Dudley, overnight, had an extra garden laid out for her directly beneath her window.

Undeterred, Cecil set out to trump him by designing a still more spectacular garden at his house at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth stayed 13 times. His scribbled plans still survive, showing a fountain, canals, avenues leading to banqueting houses, a bowling alley (“ye longe alley”) and a maze garden. Everything is wonderfully set down: the sketch (one of Martyn’s fine illustrations) might have been done yesterday. Later improvements included neoclassical arcades, pyramid-shaped buildings, pools and water courses, and a “great sea” with an island and a swan’s nest at its summit. Cecil made sure nothing could spoil Elizabeth’s evenings. Thus, mint was burnt in outdoor stoves to ward off gnats, and lanterns placed at the side of the pool to prevent the frogs from croaking.

Cecil also hired the best gardeners, notably John Gerard, whose encyclopaedic Herbal, running to 1,400 pages, is dedicated to him. As a showman, Gerard was unsurpassed: his secret weapons were his hothouses and his botanical friends, from whom he obtained the rarest, flashiest plants. Cecil’s garden had 16 kinds of roses, dozens of carnations and pinks, even yellow gillyflowers. Gerard grew oleander, yucca and hibiscus plants from seed. He imported orange, lemon and pomegranate trees from France and Spain, and a giant species of marigold, 14ft tall, from Peru.

Martyn describes gardens with verve and authority. Her research is based on an exhaustive trawl of the surviving documents, but she draws too much of her information about politics from outdated monographs and often gives contemporary rumours more credence than they deserve. She claims, in particular, that Dudley and Cecil were engaged in a deadly feud, citing the opinion of the Spanish ambassador that “more than once … Dudley had tried to have Cecil killed”.

Undoubtedly, there was rivalry, for Cecil was a workaholic, a driven man, whereas Dudley, 12 years his junior, was a dashing dilettante, a popinjay with whom Elizabeth had once been infatuated – dangerously so, since he was already married. Cecil had cautioned Elizabeth, helping to save her from herself. But despite several bitter clashes, Cecil and Dudley cooperated in the Privy Council after 1562. Martyn spots the difficulty here, and at one point concedes that “current historians” think the feud has, traditionally, been overstated.

Her most compelling evidence for something stranger and nastier than straightforward one-upmanship is that Cecil, immediately after Elizabeth’s stay at Kenilworth, commissioned one of his many flunkies to write a phoney “eulogy” of Dudley’s overblown efforts, a hilarious spoof, written in a fake Warwickshire dialect, mocking Dudley and making him look ridiculous. A letter from Cecil’s flunky proves that advance copies of the tract were sent to Cecil, his brother-in-law, and his chief propagandist and hatchet man. Martyn treats this episode superficially, but she is onto something important: commissioning phoney tracts in fake dialects was one of Cecil’s trademarks.

It was an extremely risky strategy, one he used only to discredit truly significant enemies such as Mary, Queen of Scots. So it very much looks as though, while Cecil and Dudley as royal councillors were obliged to co-operate on the public stage, their private animosities were being funnelled into gardening wars. They may not have been out to kill each other, but they were certainly determined to clip each other’s wings.

That Cecil’s victory would be complete was shown when, in 1584, Dudley arrived at Theobalds, unannounced, to snoop on his rival’s plants. By then, Cecil had invested heavily in the latest mechanical water features and animated statues, powered by hydraulics, which could compare with almost anything in Italy. Thereafter, his watery fairyland would become the model for anyone else who could afford one.

Martyn’s argument is weakened by her reliance on unsubstantiated rumours, but this is still a delightful, absorbing read, a cornucopia of amazing new facts about the Virgin Queen. For who can resist a book that informs you that Dudley, when showing Elizabeth round at Kenilworth, stopped to pick strawberries for her, or that Cecil was her first host, ever, to greet her with roast potatoes served with oil, vinegar and pepper?