The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  Later, while traveling in the heavily Catholic north, Campion produced a longer statement in response to the Protestant pamphleteers who were, under government auspices, flooding England with condemnations of the church of Rome. He titled it Decem Rationes, because it sketched out ten reasons why he believed as he did. It was printed by Persons at a secret press in the Thames valley and given wide distribution: dignitaries arriving for Oxford University’s commencement exercises in June 1581 were shocked to find copies on their chairs. The resulting hubbub made Campion the personification of Catholicism in England, his elimination a matter of urgency for the Burghley administration.

  The government disgraced itself with its treatment of Campion after his capture. After some days in the Little Ease he was taken to Leicester House, where his onetime patron Dudley and other officials questioned him about his actions before and after coming to England. Having heard him out, they told him they could fault him for nothing beyond his acceptance of Rome. “Which is my greatest glory,” Campion replied. He was offered not only his freedom but preferment in the Church of England if he would change his allegiance. Upon declining—one is reminded of Reginald Pole at the time of Henry VIII’s divorce—he was returned to the Tower. At the end of July he was stretched on the rack (evidently his fingernails were also torn out), his examiners trying to make him confess that he had taken the immense sum of £30,000 to Ireland to support rebellion there. He was tortured still more savagely some three weeks later, just before being put on display in a series of so-called “conferences” at which senior members of the Anglican clergy presented their positions on various theological and ecclesiastical questions, invited him to respond, and repeatedly interrupted his attempts to do so. In spite of having been given no opportunity to prepare and being allowed neither books nor pen and paper nor even a table or chair, Campion was sufficiently effective in rebuttal, and public revulsion at his mistreatment was so strong, that a scheduled fifth session was abruptly called off and the conferences brought to an end. He was then given a third racking, saying later that he thought the man in charge, the sadist Richard Topcliffe, had intended to kill him. (Asked how he felt after Topcliffe had finished with him, Campion replied, “Not ill, because not at all.”) Even three weeks later, when with other captured priests he was brought to court to face charges of high treason, he was unable to raise his right hand to take the required oath. One of his codefendants took his hand, kissed it, and elevated it for him.

  The trial was more of the same, a travesty no less outrageous than the show trials of Henry VIII half a century before. Campion and others were charged with having conspired, at Rome and later at Reims, to murder the queen, encourage a foreign invasion, and incite rebellion in support of the invasion. It was easily established that some of the accused had never been in Rome or in Reims, and that some had never set eyes on each other before being brought together in court. Such facts counted for nothing, as did an absence of evidence that would have been laughable under less appalling circumstances. Campion conducted the defense in spite of his shattered health, and by all accounts he was once again impressive. He was helped by the fact that the Crown’s witnesses were an unsavory crew of demonstrably bad moral character, and by the prosecution’s inability to provide corroboration of transparently perjured testimony. Though some observers naïvely thought it inconceivable that such proceedings could possibly end in conviction, a finding of guilty was never less than inevitable.

  “In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors—all the ancient priests, bishops and kings—all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints and the most devoted child of the See of Peter,” Campion told the court before he and the others were sentenced. “For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach?” When condemned to death he began to lead the others in singing the Te Deum, the old song of thanksgiving, and they continued to sing while being led away. He lay in chains and in darkness for eleven more days, at the end of which he was lashed to a hurdle and dragged through muddy streets to Tyburn. There, as the implements of butchery were being made ready, one of the members of the Privy Council who had turned out to witness the event suggested that Campion might best end his life by asking the queen’s forgiveness.

  “Wherein have I offended her?” Campion replied. “In this I am innocent. This is my last speech. In this give me credit—I have and do pray for her.”

  Lord Howard of Effingham, no doubt thinking of Mary, Queen of Scots, and suspecting that Campion was being as devious as all Jesuits were supposedly trained to be, asked him just what queen it was for whom he prayed.

  “Yea,” came the answer, “for Elizabeth your queen and my queen, unto whom I wish a long quiet reign with all prosperity.”

  With that the cart on which he stood was rolled away, and Campion fell to the end of the rope around his neck. In short order he was cut down, and the executioner, knife in hand, began the horrible part of his work. Throughout the four centuries since, the story of how Elizabeth and her government were ahead of their time in wishing for religious toleration, of how they would never have killed hundreds of priests if those priests had not persisted in seeking their destruction, has remained central to the mythology of the Tudor era. But Campion himself showed that story to be a fable. He did so at his own trial, pointing out that not only he but all the defendants, men whom the government supposedly believed had devoted their lives to the conquest of England by foreign powers and the killing of England’s queen, had been offered full pardons in return for nothing more than attending Anglican services.

  29

  The Last Act

  The England that the Earl of Essex left behind when he set out for Ireland bore all too little resemblance to the merry, prosperous, and even glamorous Renaissance kingdom that television and the movies persist in offering us as the glorious culmination of the Elizabethan age.

  The country’s economy was not only primitive by the standards of later times—that could go without saying—but provided most of its people with a lower standard of living than they had experienced not just in decades but in centuries. The royal treasury, which had never recovered from the profligate spending of Henry VIII, was chronically bare after a decade and a half of inconclusive and arguably unnecessary war. Five Parliaments had had to be called between 1586 and 1597 to vote the special subsidies (the double, triple, and even quadruple subsidies) without which the Crown’s credit would have been ruined. Hundreds of thousands of pounds had been extracted from a church that no longer had anything approaching its pre-Reformation resources, and even all this was not nearly enough. Elizabeth and her council levied taxes whenever and wherever they thought it safe to do so, sold monopolies and licenses that gave special (not to say flagrantly unfair) advantage to a lucky few while burdening everyone else, and borrowed at home and abroad. As these measures too proved insufficient, attention turned to sale of the Crown lands that were the centerpiece of the queen’s inheritance, assets that if husbanded could have ensured the security and autonomy of untold generations of her successors.

  No one could remember a time when conditions had been so miserable for the population at large. The rise in taxes became particularly onerous as market conditions changed, reducing, for example, continental demand for English wool. This combined with the disruptive effects of war to increase unemployment and reduce incomes. Starting in 1594 there had been an unbroken sequence of wet summers leading first to crop failures, then to chronic and widespread hunger, and finally to rioting by the desperate poor and a savage response by frightened authorities. Prices of necessities soared, malnutrition increased the death rate, and the income of a common laborer had not bought so little since the mid-1300s.

  The Tudor propaganda machine worked hard (underwriting and promoting the work of friendly poets and balladeers, for example) to keep the people mindful of how devoted their queen was to them and how much they presumably loved her. He
r acts of charity, infrequent and niggardly as they generally were, were aggressively publicized. Behind the theatrics, however, there was ample reason for cynicism, and disillusion was widespread. The nobility became a minority as pampered as it was tiny and, by the meager standards of the day, fabulously wealthy. In 1534, at the dawn of the English Reformation, the average amount paid by holders of hereditary titles when Parliament voted a subsidy was £921, and fifteen nobles paid more than £1,000 each. The average declined to £487 by 1571 and would be down to £311 by 1601, when in all of England only one nobleman was assessed more than £1,000. This change—between Elizabeth’s first Parliament and her last it amounted to a 38 percent drop—is especially striking in light of the 500 percent inflation experienced in England during the sixteenth century, and the increasing tax burden imposed on the rest of the population. Elizabeth’s government remained fearful enough of the landowning magnates to be unwilling to risk offending them even when the Crown’s need for revenue was urgent.

  Subjects lacking the ability to retaliate when aggrieved, on the other hand, could count themselves fortunate if they were merely ignored. By the 1590s a long generation had passed since Queen Mary’s brief restoration of the old religion, decades of officially prescribed preaching had persuaded increasing numbers of churchgoers that to be Catholic was to be pro-Spanish and therefore disloyal, and the fear of Catholic resistance with which Elizabeth had begun her reign was no longer necessary. A statute passed in 1593 took religious repression in new directions, forbidding Catholics to travel more than five miles from their homes and making exile the penalty for failure to pay the ruinous fines imposed on recusants—those refusing to attend Church of England services. There was some easing of pressure between 1595 and 1598, when England was allied with France in opposition to Spain. When Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, with its broad grant of freedom to the Huguenots, English Catholics briefly hoped for similar treatment by their government. Exactly the opposite happened, however: the government resumed the aggressive hunting down, torture, and killing of priests and the harsh punishment of anyone who harbored them. The regime was sufficiently secure by this point to be able also to complete its expulsion of militant Puritans from the established church and the destruction of Presbyterianism as an open expression of Puritan belief.

  Elizabeth herself, from her position at the privileged center of a national network of misery and exclusion, continued to bend the economic, religious, and political life of the whole kingdom to whatever shapes seemed best suited to ensure her own safety. Approaching seventy now, she had already lived much longer than any other member of the dynasty and was still in good enough health to ride ten miles. At close range, however, she was a wretched approximation of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen celebrated in the poetry of the likes of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. Even as a young woman she had been comically, almost childishly insecure about her appearance and desperately needful of praise. (At thirty, upon being told that Mary Stuart was taller than herself, she had exclaimed in jealous triumph that the queen of Scots was therefore obviously “too high—I myself am neither too high nor too low!”) Forty years later foreign visitors were writing home of their encounters with a haggard crone, her wig off center and her face a stiff white mask of makeup, who persisted in dressing like a young woman, had lost so many teeth that she was impossible to understand when she spoke rapidly, but remained so hungry for flattery that when it was not offered freely she would call herself an old and foolish woman and wait eagerly to be contradicted. Insiders described the experience of serving an evil-tempered harridan, a thrower of shoes who could bear no signs of independence in the people around her. It took two hours of preparation every morning, the ladies attending the queen noted, before she was in a condition to be seen outside the privy chamber. Before receiving visitors she would stuff a perfume-soaked handkerchief into her mouth in the hope of taming her breath.

  Four decades of painstakingly building and maintaining a theatrically regal persona, of projecting a manufactured image across not only her kingdom but all of Europe in order to compensate for being a female monarch in a world ruled by men, had reduced Elizabeth to the tiresome shabbiness of a trouper whose prime was long past. The show went on—her wardrobe at the end included 102 French gowns, 67 “round” gowns (dresses not opening in the front), 100 loose gowns, 126 kirtles or skirts, 96 cloaks, and more than two dozen fans—but it no longer carried much conviction. The audience, no longer impressed, was looking forward to the next act whatever it might turn out to be. The queen herself, however, not only showed no interest in removing herself from center stage but forbade her councilors to so much as raise the question of what, or who, might follow her final bow.

  Throughout her reign Elizabeth had been careful to maintain her own authority by balancing faction against faction, party against party, at court and in council. Thus she had prevented any one group (William Cecil’s circle, for example, or even that of Robert Dudley) from becoming dominant. Now, however, she appeared to have lost the energy for such calculations, or to have ceased to find them necessary. She was allowing her world to grow narrower; only eleven men remained on the Privy Council by 1597, all of them either aged associates of long standing or the sons of personages from the early days of the reign. Virtually all authority over the setting and execution of policy had been gathered into the hands of the Cecils. Perhaps she was satisfied that Robert Cecil, the careful and hardworking little son of Lord Burghley, was too much the bureaucrat ever to dare to threaten her authority, never mind her survival. No doubt she was confident that she had in him a chief of staff who, if even more attentive to the filling of his own pockets than his father had been, could be depended upon to manage the affairs of the Crown with sufficient care to free her of the burden of having to pay close and sustained attention. Elizabeth had never been willing to sacrifice for the sake of any grander goal than simply keeping herself on the throne, and Cecil was perfectly suited to making sure that she could do that with minimal difficulty. That she had little interest—no discernible interest at all, really—in what would happen to England’s government or people after her passing became all too apparent as old age settled upon her. It was obvious in her willingness to sell off the assets of the Crown. It was even clearer in her failure to make a will or otherwise prepare for a transfer of power after her death, her refusal even in her final decline to so much as suggest whom she wished to succeed her.

  This was the queen—irascible, distrustful, incorrigibly selfish—who sent the Earl of Essex off to Dublin. She sent him because she understood that an Ireland free of English domination could become a platform for her continental enemies. She understood too, however, that there was no money for another long war like the one that had still not ended in the Netherlands. She wanted, therefore, a quick and decisive victory, she wanted it on the cheap, and she was prepared to tolerate nothing less. Essex knew this from the start; his understanding of the queen’s expectations, and of her certain reaction if those expectations were not met, is the only possible explanation for his later behavior. He was certainly capable of understanding that in taking on the Irish mission he was putting himself at mortal risk, and it was not paranoid of him to suspect that his rivals at court rejoiced to think that in going to Ireland he was embracing his own destruction. But by 1599 his situation was so bad as to justify desperate measures. Every mark of favor that the queen had bestowed on Burghley and then Cecil—putting them into the most powerful and lucrative positions, allowing them to share the royal bounty with their friends and supporters—had been another nail in the coffin of Essex’s aspirations, another affront to his sense of entitlement. By 1599 he was the leader less of a faction on the Privy Council than of a gang made up largely of outsiders and misfits—men who shared his sense of being unfairly excluded and were therefore more disposed than they otherwise might have been to resent the status quo and seek opportunities to challenge it. He still had friends and family connections at c
ourt, but he consistently failed in his efforts to boost their careers. He tried repeatedly to win the office of attorney-general for his cousin Francis Bacon, for example, but never came close to succeeding.

  It was long customary to interpret what happened to Essex in Ireland as the necessary consequence of arrogance, incompetence, and sheer foolishness. Such a verdict, however, is more easily delivered than defended. The earl encountered daunting obstacles almost from the day of his arrival in Dublin, and his conduct remained rational even as the pressures on him mounted. The Ireland that he entered was, and long had been, a cesspit of ethnic and religious hatred. Attitudes and behaviors that would endure for half a millennium were already in place: the English, seen inevitably as invaders and oppressors, regarded the Irish as not only uncivilized but barely human. The Reformation’s success in England became a reason for its rejection by Ireland, giving both sides rich new reasons to despise each other. Rebellions had been brutally crushed in the 1570s and 1580s (at the same time that Essex’s father, Walter Devereux, was coming to ruin with his failed effort to establish English settlements), only to be followed by the much bigger, better organized rising led by the charismatic, tactically adroit Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Tyrone’s bloody victory at Yellow Ford had caused Irishmen to think that it might be possible to expel the English altogether.