ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history

by Strachey, Lytton

  III

  The summer idyll passed smoothly on, until, in the hot days of July, there was a thunderstorm. While the Earl conversed with the Queen in her chamber, the Captain of the Guard stood outside the door on duty; and the Captain of the Guard was a gentleman with a bold face - Sir Walter Raleigh. The younger son of a West-country squire, the royal favour had raised him in a few years to wealth and power: patents and monopolies had been showered upon him; he had become the master of great estates in England and Ireland; he was warden of the stannaries, Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall, a Knight, a Vice-Admiral; he was thirty-five - a dangerous and magnificent man. His splendid bearing, his enterprising spirit, which had brought him to this unexpected grandeur - whither would they lead him in the end? The Fates had woven for him a skein of mingled light and darkness; fortune and misfortune, in equal measure and in strange intensity, were to be his.

  The first stroke of the ill-luck that haunted his life had been the appearance at Court of the youthful Essex. Just as Raleigh must have thought that the Queen’s fancy was becoming fixed upon him, just as the decay of Leicester seemed to open the way to a triumphant future - at that very moment the old favourite’s stepson had come upon the scene with his boyish fascinations and swept Elizabeth off her feet. Raleigh suddenly found himself in the position of a once all-conquering beauty whose charms are on the wane. The Queen might fling him three or four estates of beheaded conspirators, might give him leave to plant a colony in America, might even snuff at his tobacco and bite a potato with a wry face - all that was nothing: her heart, her person, were with Essex, on the other side of the door. He knotted his black eyebrows, and determined not to sink without a struggle. During a country visit at Lord Warwick’s, he succeeded in disturbing Elizabeth’s mind. Lady Warwick was a friend of Essex’s sister, Lady Dorothy Perrott, who, owing to a clandestine marriage, had been forbidden to appear at Court, and the rash hostess, believing that the Queen’s anger had abated, had invited Lady Dorothy, as well as her brother, to the house. Raleigh told Elizabeth that Lady Dorothy’s presence was a sign of deliberate disrespect on the part of Essex; whereupon Elizabeth ordered Lady Dorothy to keep to her room. Essex understood what had happened and did not hesitate. After supper, alone with the Queen and Lady Warwick, he made a vehement expostulation, defended his sister, and declared (as he told a friend, in a letter written immediately afterwards) that Elizabeth had acted as she did “only to please that knave Raleigh, for whose sake I saw she would both grieve me and my love, and disgrace me in the eye of the world.“Elizabeth, no less vehemently, replied. “It seemed she could not well endure anything to be spoken against Raleigh and taking hold of one word, disdain, she said there was no such cause why I should disdain him.“This speech”did trouble me so much, that, as near as I could, I did describe unto her what he had been and what he was.” The daring youth went further. “What comfort can I have,” he exclaimed, “to give myself over to the service of a mistress that is in awe of such a man?” All this time, the Captain of the Guard was at his post. “I spake, what of grief and choler, as much against him as I could, and I think he, standing at the door, might very well hear the worst that I spoke of himself.” But his high words were useless; the dispute grew sharper; and when the Queen, from defending Raleigh, went on to attack Essex’s mother, Lady Leicester, whom she particularly disliked, the young man would hear no more. He would send his sister away, he said, though it was almost midnight and “for myself,” he told the agitated Elizabeth, “I had no joy to be in any place, but loth to be near about her, when I knew my affection so much thrown down, and such a wretch as Raleigh so highly esteemed of her.” To this the Queen made no answer, “but turned her away to my Lady Warwick,” and Essex, flinging from the room, first despatched his sister from the house under an escort of armed retainers and then rode off himself to Margate, determined to cross the Channel and take a part in the Dutch war. “If I return,” he wrote, “I will be welcomed home; if not, una bella morire is better than a disquiet life.” But the Queen was too quick for him. Robert Carey, sent galloping after him, found him before he had taken ship and brought him back to Her Majesty. There was a reconciliation; the royal favour blazed forth again; and within a month or two Essex was Master of the Horse and Knight of the Garter.

  Yet, though the cloud had vanished, the sky was subtly changed. A first quarrel is always an ominous thing. In the curious scene at Lord Warwick’s, under the cover of jealousy and wounded affection, a suppressed distrust, almost a latent hostility had, for a moment, come to the surface. And there was more; Essex had discovered that, young as he was, he could upbraid the great Queen with impunity. Elizabeth had been angry, disagreeable, and unyielding in her defence of Raleigh, but she had not ordered those audacious protestations to stop; it had almost seemed that she liked them.

  IV

  The Armada was defeated; Leicester was dead. A new world was opening for the young and the adventurous. It was determined, under Drake’s auspices, to make a counter-attack on Spain, and an armament was prepared to raid Corunna, take possession of Lisbon, detach Portugal from Philip, and place Don Antonio, who laid claim to the kingdom, on the throne. Excitement, booty, glory, fluttered before the imagination of every soldier and of Essex among the rest; but the Queen forbade him to go. He was bold enough to ignore her orders, and, leaving London on horseback one Thursday evening, he arrived in Plymouth on Saturday morning - a distance of 220 miles. This time he was too quick for his mistress. Taking ship immediately, with a detachment of troops under the veteran Sir Roger Williams, he sailed for the coast of Spain. Elizabeth was furious; she despatched messenger after messenger to Plymouth, ordered pinnaces to search the Channel, and, in an enraged letter to Drake, fulminated against the unfortunate Sir Roger. “His offence,” she wrote, “is in so high a degree that the same deserveth to be punished by death, which if you have not already done, then we will and command you that you sequester him from all charge and service and cause him to be safely kept, until you shall know our further pleasure therein, as you will answer for the contrary at your perils; for as we have authority to rule so we look to be obeyed.” If Essex, she continued, “be now come into the company of the fleet, we straightly charge you that you do forthwith cause him to be sent hither in safe manner. Which, if you do not, you shall look to answer for the same to your smart; for these be no childish actions. Therefore consider well of your doings herein.” But her threats and her commands were alike useless. Essex joined the main body of the expedition unhindered and took a brave part in the skirmishes and marches in which it ingloriously ended. It turned out to be easier to repel an invasion than to make one. Some Spanish ships were burnt, but the Portuguese did not rise, and Lisbon shut herself up against Don Antonio and the English. Into one of the gates of the town Essex, as a parting gesture, thrust his pike, “demanding aloud if any Spaniard mewed therein durst adventure forth in favour of his mistress to break a lance.” There was no reply; and the expedition returned to England.

  The young man soon made his peace with the Queen; even Sir Roger Williams was forgiven. The happy days of the Court returned with hunting, feasting, and jousting. Raleigh, with a shrug, went off to Ireland, to look after his ten thousand acres, and Essex was free from even the shadow of a rivalry. Or was Charles Blount a rival? The handsome boy had displayed his powers in the tiltyard to such purpose that Elizabeth had sent him a golden queen from her set of chessmen, and he had bound the trophy to his arm with a crimson ribbon. Essex, when he saw it, asked what it was, and, on being told, “Now I perceive,” he exclaimed, “that every fool must have a favour.” A duel followed in Marylebone fields and Essex was wounded. “By God’s death!” said Elizabeth, when she heard of it, “it was fit that someone or other should take him down, and teach him better manners.” She was delighted to think that blood had been shed over her beauty; but afterwards she insisted on the two young men making up their quarrel. She was obeyed, and Blount became one of the Earl’s most devoted follo
wers.

  The stream of royal kindness flowed on, though occasionally there were odd shallows in it. Essex was extravagant; he was more than ��20,000 in debt; and the Queen graciously advanced him ��3000 to ease his necessities. Then suddenly she demanded immediate repayment. Essex begged for delay, but the reply was sharp and peremptory; the money - or its equivalent in land - must be handed over at once. In a pathetic letter, Essex declared his submission and devotion. “Now that your Majesty repents yourself,” he wrote, “of the favour you thought to do me, I would I could, with the loss of all the land I have, as well repair the breach which your unkind answer hath made in my heart, as I can with the sale of one poor manor answer the sum which your Majesty takes of me. Money and land are base things, but love and kindness are excellent things, and cannot be measured but by themselves.” Her Majesty admired the phrasing, but disagreed with the economics; and shortly afterwards the manor at Keyston in Huntingdonshire, “of mine ancient inheritance,” as Essex told Burghley, “free from incumbrance, a great circuit of ground, in a very good soil,” passed into the royal possession.

  She preferred to be generous in a more remunerative way. She sold to Essex, for a term of years, the right to farm the customs on the sweet wines imported into the country - and he might make what he could out of it. He made a great deal - at the expense of the public; but he was informed that, when the lease expired, it might or might not be renewed - as her Majesty thought fit.

  He was lavish in the protestations of his worship - his adoration - his love. That convenient monosyllable, so intense and so ambiguous, was for ever on his lips and found its way into every letter - those elegant, impassioned, noble letters, which still exist, with their stiff, quick characters and those silken ties that were once loosened by the long fingers of Elizabeth. She read and she listened with a satisfaction so extraordinary, so unprecedented, that when one day she learned that he was married she was only enraged for a fortnight. Essex had made an impeccable choice - the widow of Sir Philip Sidney and the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham; he was twenty-three, handsome, vigorous, with an earldom to hand on to posterity; even Elizabeth could not seriously object. She stormed and ramped; then remembered that the relations between herself and her servant were unique and had nothing to do with a futile domesticity. The fascinating bridegroom pursued and cajoled her with ardours as romantic as ever; and she felt that a queen could ignore a wife.

  Soon enough an occasion arose for showing the world that to be the favourite of Elizabeth involved public duties as well as private delights. Henry IV of France, almost overpowered by the Catholic League and the Spaniards, appealed urgently to England for help. Elizabeth wavered for several months, and then reluctantly decided that Henry must be supported - but only with the absolute minimum of expenditure. She agreed that four thousand men should be sent to Normandy to act with the Huguenots; and Essex, who had done all he could to bring her to this resolution, now begged to be put in command of the force. Three times the Queen refused his entreaties; at last he knelt before her for two hours; still she refused - then suddenly consented. The Earl went off in high feather, but discovered before very long that the command even of the smallest army needs something more than knight errantry. During the autumn and winter of 1591, difficulties and perplexities crowded upon him. He was hasty, rash and thoughtless. Leaving the main body of his troops, he galloped with a small escort through a hostile country to consult with the French King about the siege of Rouen and on his return was almost cut off by the Leaguers. The Council wrote from England upbraiding him with needlessly risking his life, with “trailing a pike like a common soldier,” and with going a-hawking in districts swarming with the enemy. The Queen despatched several angry letters; everything annoyed her; she suspected Essex of incompetence and the French King of treachery; she was on the point of ordering the whole contingent home. Once more, as in the Portuguese expedition, it turned out that foreign war was a dreary and unprofitable business. Essex lost his favourite brother in a skirmish; he was agonised by the Queen’s severity; his army dwindled, from death and desertion, to one thousand men. The English fought with reckless courage at Rouen; but the Prince of Parma, advancing from the Netherlands, forced Henry to raise the siege. The unfortunate young man, racked with ague, was overcome by a sudden despair. “Unkindness and sorrow,” he told the Queen, “have broken both my heart and my wits.” “I wish,” he declared to one of his friends, “to be out of my prison, which I account my life.” Yet his noble spirit soon reasserted itself. His reputation was retrieved by his personal bravery. He challenged the Governor of Rouen to single combat - it was his one and only piece of strategy - amid general applause. The Queen, however, remained slightly cynical. The Governor of Rouen, she said, was merely a rebel, and she saw no occasion for the giving or receiving of challenges. But Essex, whatever the upshot of the expedition, would be romantic to the last; and, when the time came for him to return to England, he did so with a gesture of ancient chivalry. Standing on the shore of France before his embarkation, he solemnly drew his sword from its scabbard, and kissed the blade.

  V

  The spring of youth was almost over; in those days, at the age of twenty-five, most men had reached a full maturity. Essex kept something of his boyishness to the end, but he could not escape the rigours of time, and now a new scene - a scene of peril and gravity appropriate to manhood - was opening before him.

  The circumstances of a single family - it has happened more than once in English history - dominated the situation. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had filled, since the beginning of the reign, the position of Prime Minister, was over seventy; he could not last much longer; who would succeed him? He himself hoped that his younger son, Robert, might step into his place. He had brought him up with that end in view. The sickly, dwarfed boy had been carefully taught by tutors, had been sent travelling on the Continent, had been put into the House of Commons, had been initiated in diplomacy, and gently, persistently, at every favourable moment, had been brought before the notice of the Queen. Elizabeth’s sharp eye, uninfluenced by birth or position, perceived that the little hunchback possessed a great ability. When Walsingham died, in 1590, she handed over to Sir Robert Cecil the duties of his office; and the young man of twenty-seven became in fact, though not in name, her principal secretary. The title and emoluments might follow later - she could not quite make up her mind. Burghley was satisfied; his efforts had succeeded; his son’s foot was planted firmly in the path of power.

  But Lady Burghley had a sister, who had two sons - Anthony and Francis Bacon. A few years older than their cousin Robert, they were, like him, delicate, talented, and ambitious. They had started life with high hopes: their father had been Lord Keeper - the head of the legal profession; and their uncle was, under the Queen, the most important person in England. But their father died, leaving them no more than the small inheritance of younger sons; and their uncle, all-powerful as he was, seemed to ignore the claims of their deserts and their relationship. Lord Burghley, it appeared, would do nothing for his nephews. Why was this? To Anthony and Francis the explanation was plain: they were being sacrificed to the career of Robert; the old man was jealous of them - afraid of them; their capacities were suppressed in order that Robert should have no competitors. Nobody can tell how far this was the case. Burghley, no doubt, was selfish and wily; but perhaps his influence was not always as great as it seemed; and perhaps, also, he genuinely mistrusted the singular characters of his nephews. However that may be, a profound estrangement followed. The outward forms of respect and affection were maintained; but the bitter disappointment of the Bacons was converted into a bitter animosity, while the Cecils grew more suspicious and hostile every day. At last the Bacons decided to abandon their allegiance to an uncle who was worse than useless, and to throw in their lot with some other leader, who would appreciate them as they deserved. They looked round, and Essex was their obvious choice. The Earl was young, active, impressionable; his splend
id personal position seemed to be there, ready to hand, waiting to be transformed into something more glorious still - a supreme political predominance. They had the will and the wit to do it. Their uncle was dropping into dotage, their cousin’s cautious brain was no match for their combined intelligence. They would show the father and the son, who had thought to shuffle them into obscurity, that it is possible to be too grasping in this world and that it is sometimes very far from wise to quarrel with one’s poor relations.

  So Anthony at any rate thought - a gouty young invalid, splenetic and uncompromising; but the imaginations of Francis were more complicated. In that astonishing mind there were concealed depths and deceptive shallows, curiously intermingled and puzzling in the extreme to the inquisitive observer. Francis Bacon has been described more than once with the crude vigour of antithesis; but in truth such methods are singularly inappropriate to his most unusual case. It was not by the juxtaposition of a few opposites, but by the infiltration of a multitude of highly varied elements, that his mental composition was made up. He was no striped frieze; he was shot silk. The detachment of speculation, the intensity of personal pride, the uneasiness of nervous sensibility, the urgency of ambition, the opulence of superb taste - these qualities, blending, twisting, flashing together, gave to his secret spirit the subtle and glittering superficies of a serpent. A serpent, indeed, might well have been his chosen emblem - the wise, sinuous, dangerous creature, offspring of mystery and the beautiful earth. The music sounds, and the great snake rises, and spreads its hood, and leans and hearkens, swaying in ecstasy; and even so the sage Lord Chancellor, in the midst of some great sentence, some high intellectual confection, seems to hold his breath in a rich beatitude, fascinated by the deliciousness of sheer style. A true child of the Renaissance, his multiplicity was not merely that of mental accomplishment, but of life itself. His mind might move with joy among altitudes and theories, but the variegated savour of temporal existence was no less dear to him - the splendours of high living - the intricacies of court intrigue - the exquisiteness of pages - the lights reflected from small pieces of coloured glass. Like all the greatest spirits of the age, he was instinctively and profoundly an artist. It was this aesthetic quality which on the one hand inspired the grandeur of his philosophical conceptions and on the other made him one of the supreme masters of the written word. Yet his artistry was of a very special kind; he was neither a man of science nor a poet. The beauty of mathematics was closed to him, and all the vital scientific discoveries of the time escaped his notice. In literature, in spite of the colour and richness of his style, his genius was essentially a prose one. Intellect, not feeling, was the material out of which his gorgeous and pregnant sentences were made. Intellect! It was the common factor in all the variations of his spirit; it was the backbone of the wonderful snake.