ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history

by Strachey, Lytton

  The rising had been followed by no repercussions among the people, but the Government remained slightly uneasy. It was anxious to convince the public that Essex had not been made a martyr to political intrigue, but was a dangerous criminal who had received a righteous punishment. The preacher in St. Paul’s was instructed to deliver a sermon to that effect, but this was not enough; and it was determined to print and publish a narrative of the circumstances, with extracts from the official evidence attached. Obviously Bacon was the man to carry out the work; he was instructed to do so; his labours were submitted to the correction of the Queen and Council; and the “Declaration of the Practices and Treasons of Robert Late Earl of Essex and his Complices … together with the very Confessions, and other parts of the Evidences themselves, word for word taken out of the Originals” was the result. The tract was written with brevity and clarity, and, as was to be expected, it expressed in a more detailed form the view of the case which Bacon had outlined in his speeches at the trial. It showed that the rising had been the result of a long-thought-out and deliberately planned conspiracy. This result was achieved with the greatest skill and neatness; certain passages in the confessions were silently suppressed; but the manipulations of the evidence were reduced to a minimum; and there was only one actually false statement of fact. The date of the Earl’s proposal to invade England with the Irish army was altered; it was asserted to have taken place after the expedition against Tyrone, and not before it; and thus one of the clearest indications of the indeterminate and fluctuating nature of Essex and his plans was not only concealed but converted into a confirmation of Bacon’s thesis. By means of a clever series of small omissions from the evidence, the balance of the facts just previous to the rising was entirely changed; the Earl’s hesitations - which in truth continued up to the very last moment - were obliterated, and it was made to appear that the march into the City had been steadily fixed upon for weeks. So small and subtle were the means by which Bacon’s end was reached that one cannot but wonder whether, after all, he was conscious of their existence. Yet such a beautiful economy - could it have arisen unbeknownst? Who can tell? The serpent glides off with his secret.

  As a reward for his services Francis Bacon received ��1200 from the Queen. And very soon his financial position was improved still further. Three months after the final catastrophe, Anthony Bacon found the rest which this world had never given him. The terrible concatenation of events - the loss of his master, the loss of his brother, the ruin of his hopes, the triumph of folly, passion, and wickedness - had broken the last prop of his shattered health - his fierce indomitable spirit. He died, and Francis inherited his small fortune. The future was brightening. Property - prosperity - a multitude of satisfactions, sensual and intellectual - a crowded life of brilliance, learning, and power - were these things coming then at last? Perhaps; but when they came they would be shared in no family rejoicings. Only a strange cackle disturbed the silence of Gorhambury. For old Lady Bacon’s wits had finally turned. Gibbering of the Lord and the Earl, of her sons and her nephew, of hellfire and wantonness, she passed the futile days in a confusion of prayers and rages. Frantic, she tottered on into extreme senility. Oblivion covers her.

  Mastery had come into Robert Cecil’s hands; but it was mastery tempered by anxiety and vigilance. No sooner was his great rival gone than a fresh crisis, of supreme importance in his life, was upon him. The Earl of Mar arrived in London. The situation had completely changed since his departure from Scotland, and it now seemed as if James’s emissary could have little to do at the English Court. While he was waiting indecisively, he received a message from Cecil, asking for a private interview. The Secretary had seen where the key to the future lay. He was able to convince Mar that he was sincerely devoted to the cause of the King of Scotland. If only, he said, James would abandon his policy of protests and clandestine manoeuvring, if he would put his trust in him, if he would leave to him the management of the necessary details, he would find, when the hour struck, that all would be well, that the transition would be accomplished and the crown of England his, without the slightest difficulty or danger. Mar, deeply impressed, returned to Edinburgh, and succeeded in making James understand the crucial importance of these advances. A secret correspondence began between the King and the Secretary. The letters, sent round, by way of precaution, through an intermediary in Dublin, brought James ever more closely under the wise and gentle sway of Cecil. Gradually, persistently, infinitely quietly, the obstacles in the path of the future were smoothed away; and the royal gratitude grew into affection, into devotion, as the inevitable moment drew near.

  To Cecil, while he watched and waited, one possibility was more disturbing than all the rest. The rise of Raleigh had accompanied the fall of Essex; the Queen had made him Governor of Jersey; she was beginning to employ him in diplomacy; where was this to end? Was it conceivable that the upshot of the whole drama was merely to be a change of dangerous favourites - but a change for the worse, by which the dashing incompetence of Essex would be replaced by Raleigh’s sinister force? And, even if it was too late now for that bold man to snatch very much more from Elizabeth, what fatal influence might he not come to wield over the romantic and easily impressible James? This must be looked to; and looked to it was. The King’s mind was satisfactorily infected with the required sentiments; Cecil himself said very little - only a sharp word, once; but Lord Henry Howard, who, as Cecil’s closest ally, had been allowed to join in the secret correspondence, poured out, in letter after letter, envenomed warnings and bitter accusations; and soon James felt for Raleigh only loathing and dread. Raleigh himself was utterly unsuspecting; there seemed to be a warm friendship between him and the Secretary. Once again he was the victim of bad luck. His earlier hopes had been shattered by Essex; and now that Essex was destroyed he was faced by a yet more dangerous antagonist. In reality, the Earl’s ruin, which he had so virulently demanded, was to be the prologue of his own. As he had looked out from the armoury on his enemy’s execution, his eyes had filled with tears. So strangely had he been melted by the grandeur of the tragedy! But did some remote premonition also move him? Some obscure prevision of the end that would be his too, at last?

  The great reign continued for two years longer; but the pulses of action had grown feeble; and over public affairs there hovered a cloud of weariness and suspense. Only in one quarter was history still being made - in Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice of Mountjoy had been completely justified. With relentless skill and energy he had worn down the forces of Tyrone. It was in vain that all Catholic Europe prayed for the rebel, in vain that the Pope sent him a phoenix’s feather, in vain that three thousand Spaniards landed at Kinsale. Mountjoy was victorious in a pitched battle; the Spaniards were forced to capitulate; Tyrone was pressed back, pursued, harried, driven from pillar to post. Once more he negotiated and yielded; but this time the dream of a Catholic dominion in Ireland was finally shattered, and Elizabeth’s crowning triumph was achieved. Yet Tyrone’s strange history was not ended; some unexpected sands were still waiting for him in Time’s glass. A great lord once again on his estates in Ulster, rich and proud with his adoring vassals about him, he suddenly plunged into a fresh quarrel with the English Government. All at once he took fright - he fled. For long he wandered with his family and retinue through France, Flanders, and Germany, a desperate exile, an extraordinary flitting focus of ambiguous intrigue. At length the Pope received him, housed him, pensioned him; his adventures silently ceased. And he, too, passes from us - submerged by the long vague years of peace, indolence, and insignificance - sinking away into forgetfulness through the monotony of Roman afternoons.

  Elizabeth had resisted the first onslaughts of rage and grief with the utmost bravery, but an inevitable reaction followed, and, as the full consciousness of what had happened pressed in upon her, her nervous system began to give way. Her temper grew more abrupt and capricious than ever; for days at a time she sat silent in moody melancholy. She could hardly brin
g herself to eat; “little but manchet and succory potage” - so Sir John Harington tells us - passed her lips. She kept a sword continually by her, and when a nerve-storm came upon her she would snatch it up, stamp savagely to and fro, and thrust it in fury into the tapestry. Sir John, when he begged for an audience, received a sharp reply. “Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to get home; it is no season now to fool it here.” It was too true, and he obeyed her, sad at heart. Sometimes she would shut herself up in a darkened room, in paroxysms of weeping. Then she would emerge, scowling, discover some imagined neglect, and rate her waiting-women until they, too, were reduced to tears.

  She still worked on at the daily business of Government, though at times there were indications that the habits of a lifetime were disintegrating, and she was careless, or forgetful, as she had never been before. To those who watched her, it almost seemed as if the inner spring were broken, and that the mechanism continued to act by the mere force of momentum. At the same time her physical strength showed signs of alarming decay. There was a painful scene when, in October, she opened Parliament. As she stood in her heavy robes before the Lords and Commons, she was suddenly seen to totter; several gentlemen hurried forward and supported her; without them, she would have fallen to the ground.

  But in truth the old spirit was not yet extinct, and she was still capable of producing a magnificent sensation. The veteran conjurer’s hand might tremble, but it had not lost the art of bringing an incredible rabbit out of a hat. When the session of Parliament began, it was found that there was great and general discontent on the subject of monopolies. These grants to private persons of the sole right to sell various articles had been growing in number, and were felt to be oppressive. As the long list of them was being read aloud in the House of Commons, a member interjected. “Is not bread there?” “If order be not taken,” another replied, “it will be, before next Parliament.” The monopolies - Essex’s lease of the sweet wines had been one of them - were Elizabeth’s frugal method of rewarding her favourites or officials; and to protest against them amounted to an indirect attack on the royal prerogative. Elizabeth had not been accustomed to put up with interferences of this kind from the Commons; how often, for less cause than this, had she railed at them in high displeasure, and dismissed them cowering from her presence! And so no one was surprised when she sent for the Speaker, and the poor man prepared himself for a tremendous wigging. Great was his amazement. She greeted him with the highest affability; told him that she had lately become aware that “divers patents, which she had granted, were grievous to her subjects,” assured him that she had been thinking of the matter “even in the midst of her most great and weighty occasions,” and promised immediate reform. The Speaker departed in raptures. With her supreme instinct for facts, she had perceived that the debate in the House represented a feeling in the country with which it would be unwise to come into conflict; she saw that policy dictated a withdrawal; and she determined to make the very best use of an unfortunate circumstance. The Commons were overwhelmed when they learnt what had happened; discontent was turned to adoration; there was a flood of sentiment, and the accumulated popularity of half a century suddenly leapt up to its highest point. They sent a deputation to express their gratitude, and she received them in state. “In all duty and thankfulness,” said the Speaker, as the whole company knelt before her, “prostrate at your feet, we present our most loyal and thankful hearts, and the last spirit in our nostrils, to be poured out, to be breathed up, for your safety.” There was a pause; and then the high voice rang out: -

  “Mr. Speaker, we perceive your coming is to present thanks unto us; know I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desired to offer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches, for those we know how to prize, but loyalty, love, and thanks I account them invaluable; and, though God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves.” She stopped, and told them to stand up, as she had more to say to them. “When I heard it,” she went on, “I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it, and those varlets, lewd persons, abusers of my bounty, shall know I will not suffer it. And, Mr. Speaker, tell the House from me that I take it exceeding grateful that the knowledge of these things have come unto me from them. Of myself, I must say this, I never was any greedy scraping grasper, nor a strict fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set upon any worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good.” Pausing again for a moment, she continued in a deeper tone. “To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. The cares and troubles of a crown I cannot more fitly resemble than to the drugs of a learned physician, perfumed with some aromatical savour, or to bitter pills gilded over, by which they are made more acceptable or less offensive, which indeed are bitter and unpleasant to take. And for my own part, were it not for conscience’ sake to discharge the duty that God hath laid upon me, and to maintain His glory, and keep you in safety, in mine own disposition I should be willing to resign the place I hold to any other, and glad to be freed of the glory with the labours; for it is not my desire to live nor to reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And, though you have had and may have many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have any love you better.” She straightened herself with a final effort; her eyes glared; there was a sound of trumpets; and, turning from them in her sweeping draperies - erect and terrible - she walked out.

  XVII

  The end approached very gradually - with the delay which, so it seemed, had become de rigueur in that ambiguous Court. The ordinary routine continued, and in her seventieth year the Queen transacted business, went on progress, and danced while ambassadors peeped through the hangings, as of old. Vitality ebbed slowly; but at times there was a sudden turn; health and spirits flowed in upon the capricious organism; wit sparkled; the loud familiar laughter re-echoed through Whitehall. Then the sombre hours returned again - the distaste for all that life offered - the savage outbursts - the lamentations. So it had come to this! It was all too clear - her inordinate triumph had only brought her to solitude and ruin. She sat alone, amid emptiness and ashes, bereft of the one thing in the whole world that was worth having. And she herself, with her own hand, had cast it from her, had destroyed it … but it was not true; she had been helpless - a puppet in the grasp of some malignant power, some hideous influence inherent in the very structure of reality. In such moods, with royal indifference, she unburdened her soul to all who approached her - to her ladies, to an ambassador, or to some old scholar who had come to show her his books. With deep sighs and mourning gestures she constantly repeated the name of Essex. Then she dismissed them - the futile listeners - with a wave of her hand. It was better that the inward truth should be expressed by the outward seeming; it was better to be alone.

  In the winter of 1602, Harington came again to Court, and this time he obtained an audience of his godmother. “I found her,” he told his wife, “in most pitiable state.” Negotiations with Tyrone were then in progress, and she, forgetful of a former conversation, asked Sir John if he had ever seen the rebel. “I replied with reverence that I had seen him with the Lord Deputy; she looked up with much choler and grief in her countenance, and said, ‘Oh, now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere,’ and hereat she dropped a tear, and smote her bosom.” He thought to amuse her with some literary trifles, and read her one or two of his rhyming epigrams. She smiled faintly. “When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate,” she said, “these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters.”

  With the new year her spirits revived, and she attended some state dinners. Then she moved to Richmond, for change of air; and at Richmond, in March, 1603, her strength finally left her. There were no very definite symptoms, besides the growing physical weakness and the profound depression of mind. She would allow
no doctors to come near her; she ate and drank very little, lying for hours in a low chair. At last it was seen that some strange crisis was approaching. She struggled to rise, and failing, summoned her attendants to pull her to her feet. She stood. Refusing further help, she remained immovable, while those around her watched in awe-stricken silence. Too weak to walk, she still had the strength to stand; if she returned to her chair, she knew that she would never rise from it; she would continue to stand, then; had it not always been her favourite posture? She was fighting Death, and fighting with terrific tenacity. The appalling combat lasted for fifteen hours. Then she yielded - though she still declared that she would not go to bed. She sank on to cushions, spread out to receive her; and there she lay for four days and nights, speechless, with her finger in her mouth. Meanwhile an atmosphere of hysterical nightmare had descended on the Court. The air was thick with doom and terror. One of the ladies, looking under a chair, saw, nailed to the bottom of it, a queen of hearts. What did the awful portent mean? Another, leaving the Queen’s room for a little rest, went down a gallery, and caught a glimpse of a shadowy form, sweeping away from her in the familiar panoply of Majesty. Distracted by fear, she retraced her steps, and, hurrying back into the royal chamber, looked - and beheld the Queen lying silent on the pillows, with her finger in her mouth, as she had left her.

  The great personages about her implored her to obey the physicians and let herself be moved - in vain. At last Cecil said boldly, “Your Majesty, to content the people, you must go to bed.” “Little man, little man,” came the answer, “the word must is not used to princes.” She indicated that she wished for music, and the instruments were brought into the room; with delicate melancholy they discoursed to her, and for a little she found relief. The consolations of religion remained; but they were dim formalities to that irretrievably terrestrial nature; a tune on the virginals had always been more to her mind than a prayer. Eventually she was carried to her bed. Cecil and the other Councillors gathered round her; had she any instructions, the Secretary asked, in the matter of her successor? There was no answer. “The King of Scotland?” he hinted; and she made a sign - so it seemed to him - which showed agreement. The Archbishop of Canterbury came - the aged Whitgift, whom she had called in merrier days her “little black husband” - and knelt beside her. He prayed fervently and long; and now, unexpectedly, she seemed to take a pleasure in his ministrations; on and on he prayed, until his old knees were in an agony, and he made a move as if to rise. But she would not allow it, and for another intolerable period he raised his petitions to heaven. It was late at night before he was released, when he saw that she had fallen asleep. She continued asleep, until - in the cold dark hours of the early morning of March 24th - there was a change; and the anxious courtiers, as they bent over the bed, perceived, yet once again, that the inexplicable spirit had eluded them. But it was for the last time: a haggard husk was all that was left of Queen Elizabeth.