ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history

by Strachey, Lytton

  The quarrels were short, and the reconciliations were delicious. On Twelfth Night there was acting and dancing at Whitehall. From a high throne, sumptuously decorated, the Queen watched the ceremonies, while beside her stood the Earl, with whom “she often devised in sweet and favourable manner.” So the scene was described by Anthony Standen, an old courtier, in a letter that has come down to us. It was an hour of happiness and peace; and, amid the jewels and the gilded hangings, the incredible Princess, who had seen her sixtieth birthday, seemed to shine with an almost youthful glory. The lovely knight by her side had wrought the miracle - had smiled the long tale of hideous years into momentary nothingness. The courtiers gazed in admiration, with no sense of incongruity. “She was as beautiful,” wrote Anthony Standen, “to my old sight, as ever I saw her.”

  Was it possible that to the hero of such an evening anything could be refused? If he had set his heart on the Attorney-Generalship for Bacon, surely he would have it. The time of decision seemed to be approaching. Burghley begged the Queen to hesitate no longer, and he advised her to give the place to Edward Coke. The Cecils believed that she would do so; and Sir Robert, driving with the Earl one day in a coach through the city, told him that the appointment would be made in less than a week. “I pray your Lordship,” he added, “to let me know whom you will favour.” Essex replied that Sir Robert must surely be aware that he stood for Francis Bacon. “Lord!” replied Sir Robert, “I wonder your lordship should go about to spend your strength in so unlikely or impossible a manner. If your lordship had spoken of the solicitorship, that might be of easier digestion to her Majesty.” At that Essex burst out. “Digest me no digestions,” he cried; “for the attorneyship for Francis is that I must have. And in that I will spend all my power, might, authority, and amity, and with tooth and nail defend and procure the same for him against whomsoever; and whosoever getteth this office out of my hands for any other, before he have it, it shall cost him the coming by. And this be you assured of, Sir Robert; for now do I fully declare myself. And for your own part, Sir Robert, I think strange both of my lord Treasurer and you that you can have the mind to seek the preference of a stranger before so near a kinsman.” Sir Robert made no reply; and the coach rattled on, with its burden of angry ministers. Henceforth there was no concealment; the two parties faced each other fiercely; they would try their strength over Coke and Bacon.

  But Elizabeth grew more ambiguous than ever. The week passed, and there was no sign of an appointment. To make any decision upon any subject at all had become loathsome to her. She lingered in a spiritual palsy at Hampton Court; she thought she would go to Windsor; she gave orders to that effect, and countermanded them. Every day she changed her mind: it was impossible for her to determine even whether she wanted to move or to stay still. The whole Court was in an agony, half packed up. The carter in charge of the wagons in which the royal belongings were carried had been summoned for the third time, and for the third time was told that he might go away. “Now I see,” he said, “that the Queen is a woman as well as my wife.” The Queen, who was standing at a window, overheard the remark, and burst out laughing. “What a villain is this!” she said, and sent him three angels to stop his mouth. At last she did move - to Nonesuch. A few more weeks passed. It was Easter, 1594. She suddenly made Coke Attorney-General.

  The blow was a grave one - to Bacon, to Essex, and to the whole party; the influence of the Cecils had been directly challenged, and they had won. There was apparently a limit to the favour of the Earl. So far, however, as Bacon was concerned, a possibility still remained of retrieving the situation. Coke’s appointment left the Solicitor-Generalship vacant, and it seemed obvious that Bacon was the man for the post. The Cecils themselves acquiesced; Essex felt that this time there could be no doubt about the matter; he hurried off to the Queen - and was again met by a repulse. Her Majesty was extremely reserved; she was, she said, against Bacon - for the singular reason that the only persons who supported him were Essex and Burghley. Upon that, Essex argued and expatiated, until Elizabeth lost her temper. “In passion” - so Essex told his friend in a letter written immediately afterwards - “she bade me go to bed, if I would talk of nothing else. Wherefore in passion I went away, saying while I was with her I could not but solicit for the cause and the man I so much affected, and therefore I would retire myself till I might be more graciously heard. And so we parted.” And so began another strange struggle over the fate of Francis Bacon. For almost a year Elizabeth had refused to appoint an Attorney-General; was it conceivable that she was now about to delay as long in her choice of a Solicitor-General? Was it possible that, with a repetition da capo of all her previous waverings, she would continue indefinitely to keep every one about her in this agonising suspense?

  It was, indeed, all too possible. The Solicitor-Generalship remained vacant for more than eighteen months. During all that time Essex never lost courage. He bombarded the Queen, in and out of season. He wrote to the Lord Keeper Puckering, pressing Bacon’s claims; he even wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, to the same purpose. “To you, as to a Councillor,” he told the latter, “I write this, that Her Majesty never in her reign had so able and proper an instrument to do her honourable and great services as she hath now, if she will use him.” Old Anthony Standen was amazed by the Earl’s persistency. He had thought that his patron lacked tenacity of purpose - that “he must continually be pulled by the ear, as a boy, that learneth ut, re, mi, fa”; and now he saw that, without prompting, he was capable of the utmost pertinacity. On the other hand, in the opinion of old Lady Bacon, fuming at Gorhambury, “the Earl marred all by violent courses.” The Queen, she thought, was driven to underrate the value of Francis through a spirit of sheer contradiction. Perhaps it was so; but who could prescribe the right method of persuading Elizabeth? More than once she seemed to be on the point of agreeing with her favourite. Fulke Greville had an audience of her, and, when he took the opportunity of putting in a word for his friend, she was “very exceeding gracious.” Greville developed the theme of Bacon’s merits. “Yes,” said Her Majesty, “he begins to frame very well.” The expression was perhaps an odd one; was it not used of the breaking-in of refractory horses? But Greville, overcome by the benignity of the royal manner, had little doubt that all was well. “I will lay ��100 to ��50,” he wrote to Francis, “that you shall be her Solicitor.”

  While his friends were full of hope and energy, Francis himself had become a prey to nervous agitation. The prolonged strain was too much for his sensitive nature, and, as the months dragged on without any decision, he came near to despair. His brother and his mother, similarly tempered, expressed their perturbation in different ways. While Anthony sought to drown his feelings under a sea of correspondence, old Lady Bacon gave vent to fits of arbitrary fury which made life a burden to all about her. A servant of Anthony’s, staying at Gorhambury, sent his master a sad story of a greyhound bitch. He had brought the animal to the house, and “as soon as my Lady did see her, she sent me word she should be hanged.” The man temporised, but “by-and-by she sent me word that if I did not make her away she should not sleep in her bed; so indeed I hung her up.” The result was unexpected. “She was very angry, and said I was fransey, and bade me go home to my master and make him a fool, I should make none of her…. My Lady do not speak to me as yet. I will give none offence to make her angry; but nobody can please her long together.” The perplexed fellow, however, was cheered by one consideration. “The bitch,” he added, “was good for nothing, else I would not a hung her.” The dowager, in her calmer moments, tried to turn her mind, and the minds of her sons, away from the things of this world. “I am sorry,” she wrote to Anthony, “your brother with inward secret grief hindereth his health. Everybody saith he looketh thin and pale. Let him look to God, and confer with Him in godly exercises of hearing and reading, and contemn to be noted to take care.”

  But the advice did not appeal to Francis; he preferred to look in other directions. He sent a rich je
wel to the Queen, who refused it - though graciously. He let Her Majesty know that he thought of travelling abroad; and she forbade the project, with considerable asperity. His nerves, fretted to ribbons, drove him at last to acts of indiscretion and downright folly. He despatched a letter of fiery remonstrance to the Lord Keeper Puckering, who, he believed, had deserted his cause; and he attacked his cousin Robert in a style suggestive of a female cat. “I do assure you, Sir, that by a wise friend of mine, and not factious toward your Honour, I was told with asseveration that your Honour was bought by Mr. Coventry for two thousand angels…. And he said further that from your servants, from your Lady, from some counsellors that have observed you in my business, he knew you wrought underhand against me. The truth of which tale I do not believe.” The appointment was still hanging in the balance; and it fell to the rash and impetuous Essex to undo, with smooth words and diplomatic explanations, the damage that the wise and subtle Bacon had done to his own cause.

  In October, 1595, Mr. Fleming was appointed, and the long struggle of two and a half years was over. Essex had failed - failed doubly - failed where he could hardly have believed that failure was possible. The loss to his own prestige was serious; but he was a gallant nobleman, and his first thought was for the friend whom he had fed with hope, and whom, perhaps, he had served ill through over-confidence or lack of judgment. As soon as the appointment was made, he paid a visit to Francis Bacon. “Master Bacon,” he said, “the Queen hath denied me yon place for you, and hath placed another. I know you are the least part in your own matter, but you fare ill because you have chosen me for your mean and dependence; you have spent your time and thoughts in my matters. I die if I do not somewhat towards your fortune: you shall not deny to accept a piece of land which I will bestow upon you.” Bacon demurred; but he soon accepted; and the Earl presented him with a property which he afterwards sold for ��1800, or at least ��10,000 of our money.

  Perhaps, on the whole, he had come fortunately out of the business. Worse might have befallen him. In that happy-go-lucky world, a capricious fillip from a royal finger might at any moment send one’s whole existence flying into smithereens. Below the surface of caracoling courtiers and high policies there was cruelty, corruption, and gnashing of teeth. One was lucky, at any rate, not to be Mr. Booth, one of Anthony Bacon’s dependants, who, poor man, had suddenly found himself condemned by the Court of Chancery to a heavy fine, to imprisonment, and to have his ears cut off. Nobody believed that he deserved such a sentence, but there were several persons who had decided to make what they could out of it, and we catch a glimpse, in Anthony’s correspondence, of this small, sordid, ridiculous intrigue, going along contemporaneously with the heroic battle over the great Law Offices. Lady Edmondes, a lady-in-waiting, had been approached by Mr. Booth’s friends and offered ��100 if she would get him off. She immediately went to the Queen, who was all affability. Unfortunately, however, as her Majesty explained, she had already promised Mr. Booth’s fine to the head man in her stables - “a very old servant” - so nothing could be done on that score. “I mean,” said her Majesty, “to punish this fool some way, and I shall keep him in prison. Nevertheless,” she added, in a sudden access of generosity towards Lady Edmondes, “if your ladyship can make any good commodity of this suit, I will at your request give him releasement. As for the man’s ears…” Her Majesty shrugged her shoulders, and the conversation ended. Lady Edmondes had no doubt that she could make a “good commodity,” and raised her price to ��200. She even threatened to make matters worse instead of better, as she had influence, so she declared, not only with the Queen but with the Lord Keeper Puckering. Anthony Standen considered her a dangerous woman and advised that she should be offered ��150 as a compromise. The negotiation was long and complicated; but it seems to have been agreed at last that the fine must be paid, but that, on the payment of ��150 to Lady Edmondes, the imprisonment would be remitted. Then there is darkness; in low things as in high the ambiguous Age remains true to its character; and, while we search in vain to solve the mystery of great men’s souls and the strange desires of Princes, the fate of Mr. Booth’s ears also remains for ever concealed from us.

  VI

  Mr. Booth’s case was a brutal farce, and the splendid Earl, busied with very different preoccupations - his position with the Queen, the Attorney-Generalship, the foreign policy of England - could hardly have given a moment’s thought to it. But there was another criminal affair no less obscure but of far more dreadful import which, suddenly leaping into an extraordinary notoriety, absorbed the whole of his attention - the hideous tragedy of Dr. Lopez.

  Ruy Lopez was a Portuguese Jew who, driven from the country of his birth by the Inquisition, had come to England at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and set up as a doctor in London. He had been extremely successful; had become house physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; had obtained, in spite of professional jealousy and racial prejudice, a large practice among persons of distinction; Leicester and Walsingham were his patients; and, after he had been in England for seventeen years, he reached the highest place in his profession: he was made physician-in-chief to the Queen. It was only natural that there should have been murmurs against a Jewish foreigner who had outdone his English rivals; it was rumoured that he owed his advancement less to medical skill than flattery and self-advertisement; and in a libellous pamphlet against Leicester it was hinted that he had served that nobleman all too well - by distilling his poisons for him. But Dr. Lopez was safe in the Queen’s favour, and such malice could be ignored. In October, 1593, he was a prosperous elderly man - a practising Christian, with a son at Winchester, a house in Holborn, and all the appearances of wealth and consideration.

  His countryman, Don Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese crown, was also living in England. Since the disastrous expedition to Lisbon four years earlier, this unfortunate man had been rapidly sinking into disrepute and poverty. The false hopes which he had held out of a popular rising on his behalf in Portugal had discredited him with Elizabeth. The magnificent jewels which he had brought with him to England had been sold one by one; he was surrounded by a group of famishing attendants; fobbed off with a meagre pension, he was sent, with his son, Don Manoel, to lodge in Eton College, whence, when the Queen was at Windsor, he would issue forth, a haggard spectre, to haunt the precincts of the Court. Yet he was still not altogether negligible. He still might be useful as a pawn in the game against Spain. Essex kept a friendly eye upon him, for the Earl, by an inevitable propulsion, had become the leader of the anti-Spanish party in England. The Cecils, naturally pacific, were now beginning to hope that the war, which seemed to be dragging on by virtue rather of its own impetus than of any good that it could do to either party, might soon be brought to an end. This was enough in itself to make Essex bellicose; but he was swayed not merely by opposition to the Cecils; his restless and romantic temperament urged him irresistibly to the great adventure of war; thus only could his true nature express itself, thus only could he achieve the glory he desired. Enemies he must have: at home - who could doubt it? - the Cecils; abroad - it was obvious - Spain! And so he became the focus of the new Elizabethan patriotism - a patriotism that was something distinct from religion or policy - that was the manifestation of that enormous daring, that superb self-confidence, that thrilling sense of solidarity, which, after so many years of doubt and preparation, had come to the English race when the smoke had rolled away and the storm subsided, and there was revealed the wreck of the Armada. The new spirit was resounding, at that very moment, in the glorious rhythm of Tamburlaine; and its living embodiment was Essex. He would assert the greatness of England in unmistakable fashion - by shattering the power of the Spaniard once for all. And in such an enterprise no instrument must be neglected; even the forlorn Don Antonio might prove serviceable yet. There might - who knew? - be another expedition to Portugal, more fortunate than the last. King Philip, at any rate, was of that opinion. He was extremely anxious to g
et Don Antonio out of the way. More than one plot for his assassination had been hatched at Brussels and the Escurial. His needy followers, bought by Spanish gold, crept backwards and forwards between England and Flanders, full of mischief. Anthony Bacon, through his spies, kept a sharp look-out. The pretender must be protected; for long he could lay his hands on nothing definite; but one day his care was rewarded.

  News reached Essex House that a certain Esteban Ferreira, a Portuguese gentleman, who had been ruined by his adherence to the cause of Don Antonio, and was then living in Lopez’s house in Holborn, was conspiring against his master and had offered his services to the King of Spain. The information was certainly trustworthy, and Essex obtained from Elizabeth an order for the arrest of Ferreira. The man was accordingly seized; no definite charge was brought against him, but he was put into the custody of Don Antonio at Eton. At the same time instructions were sent to Rye, Sandwich and Dover, ordering all Portuguese correspondence that might arrive at those ports to be detained and read. When Dr. Lopez heard of the arrest of Ferreira, he went to the Queen and begged for the release of his countryman. Don Antonio, he said, was much to blame; he treated his servants badly; he was ungrateful to Her Majesty. Elizabeth listened, and the Doctor ventured to observe that Ferreira, if released, might well be employed to “work a peace between the two kingdoms.” This suggestion seemed not to please Elizabeth. “Or,” said the Doctor, “if your Majesty does not desire that course…” he paused, and then added, enigmatically, “might not a deceiver be deceived?” Elizabeth stared; she did not know what the fellow meant, but he was clearly taking a liberty. She “uttered” - so we are told by Bacon - “dislike and disallowance”; and the Doctor, perceiving that he had not made a good impression, bowed himself out of the room.