ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history

by Strachey, Lytton

  It was very fine - thrilling, adorable! But the sequel was less so. If the desperate knight had indeed flung himself to death amid the arrows of the barbarians … but what happened was altogether different. In a few days he was in touch with Tyrone’s army, which, though it outnumbered his own, refused to give battle. There was some manoeuvring, a skirmish, and then Tyrone sent a messenger, demanding a parley. Essex agreed. The two men met alone, on horseback, at a ford in a river, while the armies watched from either bank. Tyrone, repeating his old tactics, offered terms - but only verbally; he preferred, he said, not to commit them to writing. He proposed a truce, to be concluded for six weeks, to continue by periods of six weeks until May Day, and not to be broken without a fortnight’s warning. Essex again agreed. All was over. The campaign was at an end.

  Of all possible conclusions, this surely was the most impotent that could have been imagined. The grand expedition, the noble general, efforts, hopes, vaunting - it had all dwindled down at last to a futile humiliation, an indefinite suspension of hostilities - the equivocal, accustomed triumph of Tyrone. Essex had played all his cards now - played them as badly as possible, and there was nothing left in his hand. Inevitably, as the misery of his achievement sank into his consciousness, the mood of desperate resolutions returned. He decided that there was only one thing now that could save the situation - he must see the Queen. But - such was the wild wavering of his spirit - whether he was to come into her presence as a suppliant or as a master, he could not tell: he only knew that he could bear to be in Ireland no longer. With Blount’s suggestion of a coup d’��tat indeterminately hovering in his mind, he summoned round him the members of his household, and, accompanied by them and a great number of officers and gentlemen, embarked at Dublin on September 24th. Early on the morning of the 28th the troop was galloping into London.

  The Court was still at Nonesuch, in Surrey, about ten miles southward; the river lay between; and, if an attack were to be made, it would be necessary for the cavalcade to ride through the City and cross the Thames at London Bridge. But by this time the notion of deliberate violence had become an unreality - had given place to the one overmastering desire to be with the Queen at the earliest possible moment. The quickest way was to take the ferry from Westminster to Lambeth, and Essex, leaving the bulk of his followers to disperse themselves in London, had himself rowed across the river with six of his chosen friends. At Lambeth the weary men seized what horses they could find and rode on. They were soon passed by Lord Grey of Wilton, a member of the Cecil party, who, on a fresher mount, was also riding to Court that morning. Sir Thomas Gerard spurred after him. “My Lord, I beg you will speak with the Earl.” “No,” was Lord Grey’s reply, “I have business at Court.” “Then I pray you,” said Sir Thomas, “let my Lord of Essex ride before, that he may bring the first news of his return himself.” “Doth he desire it?” said Lord Grey. “No,” said Sir Thomas, “nor I think will desire anything at your hands.” “Then I have business,” said Lord Grey, and rode on with greater speed than ever. When Gerard told his friends what had occurred, Sir Christopher St. Lawrence cried out with an oath that he would press on and kill Lord Grey, and after him the Secretary. The possibility of a swift, dramatic, irretrievable solution hovered in the air for a moment amid the group of angry gentlemen. But Essex forbade it; it would be mere assassination; he must take his chance.

  Directly Lord Grey reached Nonesuch he went to Cecil, and told him the astounding news. The Secretary was calm; he did nothing - sent no word to the Queen, who was dressing in her upper chamber - but waited quietly in his chair. A quarter of an hour later - it was ten o’clock - the Earl was at the gate. He hurried forward, without a second’s hesitation; he ran up the stairs, and so - oh! he knew the way well enough - into the presence chamber, and thence into the privy chamber; the Queen’s bedroom lay beyond. He was muddy and disordered from his long journey, in rough clothes and riding boots; but he was utterly unaware of any of that, as he burst open the door in front of him. And there, quite close to him, was Elizabeth among her ladies, in a dressing-gown, unpainted, without her wig, her grey hair hanging in wisps about her face, and her eyes starting from her head.

  XIII

  She was surprised, she was delighted - those were her immediate reactions; but then, swiftly, a third feeling came upon her - she was afraid. What was the meaning of this unannounced, this forbidden return, and this extraordinary irruption? What kind of following had the man brought from Ireland and where was it? What had happened? Was it possible that at this very moment she was in his power? Completely in the dark, she at once sought refuge in the dissimulation which was her second nature. Her instinctive pleasure in his presence, her genuine admiration of his manner and his speech, served her purpose excellently, and, covered with smiles, she listened while he poured out his protestations and told his story - listened with an inward accompaniment of lightning calculations and weighings of shifting possibilities and snatchings at dubious hints. Very soon she guessed that she was in no immediate danger. She laughingly bade him begone and change his clothes, while she finished her toilet; he obeyed, returned, and the conversation continued for an hour and a half. He came downstairs to dinner in high spirits, flirted with the ladies, and thanked God that after so many storms abroad he had found so sweet a calm at home. But the calm was of short continuance; he saw the Queen again after dinner and found the breezes blowing. She had made her inquiries, and, having sufficiently gauged the situation, had decided on her course of action. She began by asking disagreeable questions, disagreeably; when he answered, she grew angry; finally she declared that he must explain himself to the Council. The Council met, and when the Earl had given an account of his proceedings, adjourned in vague politeness. Perhaps all was well - it almost seemed so; but the Queen, apparently, was still vexed and inaccessible. At eleven o’clock at night the Earl received a message from Her Majesty; he was commanded to keep to his chamber.

  Every one was mystified, and the wildest speculations flew about. At the first blush it was supposed that Essex had completely triumphed - that in one bold stroke he had recaptured the favour and the power that were slipping from his grasp. Bacon sent off a letter of congratulation. “I am more yours than any man’s and more yours than any man,” he wrote. A little later, the news of the Queen’s displeasure brought doubts; yet it seemed hardly possible that anything very serious should happen to the Earl, who, after all, had only been blundering in Ireland, like so many before him. But meanwhile the Queen proceeded with her plan. Having waited a day, during which no news came of any suspicious movements in London, she felt she could take her next step. She committed Essex to the custody of the Lord Keeper Egerton, to whose residence - York House, in the Strand - he was forthwith removed. All still remained calm, and Elizabeth was satisfied: Essex was now completely at her mercy. She could decide at her leisure what she would do with him.

  While she was considering he fell ill. He had been seriously unwell before he left Ireland, and the fatigue of his three days’ ride across England, followed by the emotion and disgrace at Nonesuch, had proved too much for his uncertain and suggestible physique. Yet, while he lay in captivity at York House, he still - though crying out from time to time that he only longed for a country obscurity - had not given up hopes of a return to favour and even a reinstatement as Lord Deputy. He wrote submissive letters to the Queen; but she refused to receive them, and sent no word. John Harington, who had been among those he had knighted in Ireland, returned at this moment, and Essex begged him to be the bearer of yet another missive, filled with contrition and adoration. But the sprightly knight preferred to take no risks. He had been threatened with arrest on his arrival in London, and he felt that his own affairs were as much as he could manage; charity, he said, began at home, and he had no desire to be “wracked on the Essex coast.” His conscience, too, was not quite clear. He had had the curiosity to pay a visit to Tyrone after the pacification, and had behaved, perhaps, in too friendl
y and familiar a fashion with the recreant Earl. He had produced a copy of his Ariosto, had read aloud some favourite passages, had presented the book to the elder of Tyrone’s sons - “two children of good towardly spirit, in English clothes like a nobleman’s sons, with velvet jerkins and gold lace,” - and finally had sat down to a merry dinner with the rebels at a “fern table, spread under the stately canopy of heaven.” Possibly some rumour of these proceedings had reached Elizabeth’s ears, and she was not altogether pleased by them. Nevertheless he believed that all would be well if only he could obtain an audience. He knew that she had a liking for him; he was her godson - had been familiar with her from his childhood, and was actually connected, in an underground way, with the royal family, his stepmother having been a natural daughter of Henry VIII. At last he was told that the Queen would receive him; he went to Court in considerable trepidation; and as soon as he entered the presence he thanked his stars that he had had the sense to refuse to deliver any message from Essex.

  He never forgot the fearful scene that followed. Hardly had he knelt before her than she strode towards him, seized him by the girdle, and, shaking it, exclaimed, “By God’s Son, I am no Queen! That man is above me! Who gave him command to come here so soon? I did send him on other business.” While the terrified poet stammered out some kind of answer, she turned from him in fury, “walked fastly to and fro,” and “looked with discomposure in her visage.” “By God’s Son!” she burst out again, “you are all idle knaves and Essex worse!” He tried to pacify her, but “her choler did outrun all reason,” she would listen to nothing, and, in the storm of her invective, seemed to forget that her unfortunate godson was not, after all, the Lord Deputy. At last, however, she grew calmer, asked questions, was amused by Harington’s little jokes and stories, and made no account of his hobnobbing with Tyrone. He described the rebel to her, and his curious Court - how “his guard for the most part were beardless boys, without shirts, who in the frost wade as familiarly through rivers as water-spaniels.”

  “With what charm,” he added, “such a master makes them love him, I know not; but if he bid them come, they come; if go they do go; if he say do this, they do it.” She smiled; and then, suddenly changing countenance, told him to go home. He “did not stay to be bidden twice,” but rode away to his house in Somersetshire “as if all the Irish rebels had been at his heels.”

  The author of the Metamorphosis of Ajax was no fit confidant for a perplexed and injured sovereign. Elizabeth looked elsewhere for an adviser, or at any rate a listener, and she found what she wanted in Francis Bacon. Recalling the conversation of the summer, she took advantage of his official attendance upon her on legal business to revert to the subject of the Earl. She found his answers pertinent; she renewed the topic; and so began a series of strange dialogues in which, during many months, in confidential privacy, the fate of Essex, with all its hidden implications of policy and passion, became the meeting-point of those two most peculiar minds. Elizabeth was, as usual, uncertain how to treat the situation in which she found herself: was there to be forgiveness or punishment? and, if the latter, of what kind? Revealing little, she asked much. As for Bacon, he was in his element. He felt that he could thread his way through the intricacies that surrounded him with perfect propriety. To adjust the claims of personal indebtedness and public duty, to combine the feelings of the statesman and the friend, to hold the balance true between honour and ambition - other men might find such problems difficult, if not insoluble; but he was not frightened by them; his intellect was capable of more than that. As he talked to Elizabeth, he played upon the complex theme with the profound relish of a virtuoso. He had long since decided that, in all human probability, Essex was a ruined man; he owed the Earl something - much; but it would be futile to spoil his own chances of fortune by adhering to a hopeless cause; it was essential to win the good graces of Robert Cecil; and now, there was this heaven-sent opportunity - which it would be madness to miss - for acquiring something more important still - the confidence of the Queen. Besides - he could doubt it no longer - Essex was a mischievous person, whose activities were dangerous to the State. While he was clearly bound to give him what help he could as a private individual, he was certainly under no obligation to forward the return of such a man to power; it was even his duty to insinuate into the Queen’s mind his own sense of the gravity of the situation. And so, with unhesitating subtlety, he spun the web of his sagacious thought. He had no doubt of himself - none; and when, a few years later, under the pressure of the public disapproval, he wrote an account of his proceedings, it still seemed to him that a recital of his actual conduct was all that was necessary as a justification.

  Elizabeth listened with interest to everything he had to say - it was always impossible to do otherwise. He was profuse in his expressions of sympathy and attachment to the Earl; but, he must needs say it, there were some positions to which he thought him ill-suited; to send him back to Ireland, for instance - “Essex!” interrupted the Queen. “Whensoever I send Essex back again into Ireland, I will marry you. Claim it of me.” No, that was not her thought - far from it; she intended rather to bring him to justice; but by what process? She inclined to a trial before the Star Chamber. But Bacon demurred. It would, he said, be a dangerous proceeding; it might be difficult to produce cogent proof in public of the Earl’s delinquencies; and his popularity was so great that a severe punishment on insufficient evidence might produce most serious consequences. She glared angrily, and dismissed him. She did not like that suggestion; but the words sank into her mind, and she veered away from the notion of a public prosecution.

  For, as time passed, everything seemed to show that Bacon’s warning was justified. There could be no doubt about the Earl’s popularity. It was increased by his illness, and, when it was whispered that he lay near to death in his captivity, the public indignation made itself heard. Pamphlets, defending the Earl and attacking his enemies, were secretly printed and scattered broadcast. At last, even the white walls of the palace were covered with abusive scrawls. Bacon was singled out for particular denunciation; he was a traitor, who was poisoning the Queen’s mind against his benefactor. He was threatened - so he declared - with assassination. This was unpleasant, but some use might be made of it: it might serve to put beyond a doubt his allegiance to the Secretary. He wrote to his cousin, telling him of these threats of violence, against which, he said, “I thank God I have the privy coat of a good conscience.” He looked upon them “as a deep malice to your honourable self, upon whom, by me, through nearness, they think to make some aspersion.”

  Cecil smiled gently when he read the letter; and he sent for his cousin. He wished to make his own position quite clear. He had indeed heard, he said, that Francis had been doing some ill office to Essex; but … he did not believe it. And then he added: “For my part, I am merely passive and not active in this action; and I follow the Queen, and that heavily, and I lead her not… The Queen indeed is my Sovereign, and I am her creature, I may not leese her; and the same course I wish you to take.”

  So he explained himself, and the explanation was a perfectly true one. Robert Cecil was indeed merely passive, merely following, with the sadness which his experience of the world had brought him, the action of the Queen. But passivity, too, may be a kind of action - may, in fact, at moments prove more full of consequence than action itself. Only a still, disillusioned man could understand this; it was hidden from the hasty children of vigour and hope. It was hidden, among others, from Walter Raleigh. He could not conceive what the Secretary was doing; he was letting a golden opportunity slip through his fingers; he was leaving the Queen to her own devices - it was madness - this was the time to strike. “I am not wise enough,” he wrote to Cecil, “to give you advice; but if you take it for a good counsel to relent towards this tyrant, you will repent it when it shall be too late. His malice is fixed, and will not evaporate by any your mild courses. For he will ascribe the alteration to Her Majesty’s pusillanimity and not t
o your good nature: knowing that you work but upon her humour, and not out of any love towards him. The less you make him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours. And if Her Majesty’s favour fail him, he will again decline to a common person…. Lose not your advantage; if you do, I rede your destiny. Yours to the end, WR” It was true - he was not “wise enough” to give a Cecil advice. Could he not see that the faintest movement, the slightest attempt to put pressure upon the Queen, would be fatal? How little he understood that perverse, that labyrinthine character! No! If anything was to be done, she herself, in her own strange way and with her own strange will, must do it. And the Secretary sat motionless - waiting, watching, and holding his breath.

  Elizabeth, certainly, needed watching very carefully. For the moment she seemed to be occupied with entirely frivolous pursuits. The ceremonies of Accession Day absorbed her; she sat for hours in the tiltyard - where Essex had so often shone in all his glory - careless and amused; and when at last there was a grotesque surprise and Lord Compton came in, as an eye-witness described it, “like a Fisherman, with 6 men clad in motley, his capariesons all of nett, having caught a Frogge,” the old creature’s sides shook with delighted laughter. A week later she came to a sudden decision: she would justify her treatment of Essex before the world by having a statement of his delinquencies read out by the Council in the Star Chamber. He himself could not be present - he was too ill. But was he? She could not feel quite sure; he had been known before now to convert a fit of the sulks into a useful malady; she would see for herself. And so, at four o’clock in the evening of November 28th, accompanied by Lady Warwick and Lord Worcester, she stepped into her barge and had herself conveyed to York House. We know no more. Essex was in truth very ill - apparently dying. Was he conscious of her visit? Were there words spoken? Or did she come and look and go, unseen? Unanswerable questions! The November night falls, gathering her up into its darkness.