The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  By the time of Essex’s arrival, Tyrone had under his command a larger, better-equipped and -led, more modern rebel force than any the English had ever encountered in Ireland. Essex for his part commanded the largest English army ever sent there: sixteen thousand foot soldiers and thirteen hundred horse. Nevertheless, the council responsible for the management of the English “pale” centered on Dublin, upon meeting with the new lord lieutenant, advised him that conditions were not yet right for a direct attack. Essex, seeing that he possessed neither the ships nor the draft horses that an offensive against Tyrone would require—the geography was such that in order to engage the Irish he would have to move his troops by water—wrote to the queen to request more of both. While waiting for a reply he moved part of his force through the northern counties of Munster and Leinster to relieve besieged garrisons, establish new ones, and so secure his rear against a rumored Spanish landing. (This move is sometimes characterized as a flagrant act of disobedience on Essex’s part, but in fact he had requested and received permission for it before leaving England.) As time passed and Essex received little of what he had asked, he and the queen began an acrimonious exchange of letters. The earl’s requests became complaints, and Elizabeth responded with angry demands that he get on with his assignment and stop squandering her money. Almost certainly it was the sharpness of the queen’s words that caused Essex to launch an offensive that she would regard as too little too late and that he believed to be premature; he undertook it only because to refuse would be to risk recall and a disgrace from which there might be no recovery. And so in September, with the problematic weather of autumn beginning, he took his available troops, by now greatly reduced in number, northward into Ulster in search of Tyrone. The only alternative would have been to suspend operations until the end of winter, and it was inconceivable that Elizabeth would accept such a delay. (Maintaining Essex’s army had cost £300,000 in the five months since his arrival in Ireland.) In the end he was unable to bring the rebels to battle. Instead he had to settle for a parley at a river crossing; the unarmed Tyrone sat on a horse that was belly-deep in midstream while Essex stood on the bank and the two talked for half an hour. They agreed on a truce, the details of which hardly matter because a furious Elizabeth repudiated the agreement as soon as she was informed of it. She sent off an order for Essex to remain where he was pending further instructions.

  At this point, no doubt because he thought that Elizabeth’s rejection of his truce meant that she had given up on him, something snapped in Essex. He lost control of himself and his destiny. Fear of the queen’s wrath, certainty that Cecil and others must be encouraging the queen to be wrathful, news that in his absence Cecil had been given the lucrative mastership of wards that he himself had badly wanted—perhaps all these things together drove the earl to decide that unless he seized the initiative he was lost. He had already been talking recklessly of taking his army back across the Irish Sea to Wales and advancing from there to London and a showdown with the rivals who—or so he told himself—had gained control of the queen and needed only to destroy him in order to ensure their mastery of the kingdom. Such an undertaking would have been as difficult as dangerous, however, and Essex put it aside in favor of a headlong dash back to court and the mistress who had so often forgiven him in the past. He must have hoped that if he could see Elizabeth, talk with her and explain himself, all would be well.

  And so on September 24 he sailed back from Ireland accompanied by only a small party of companions. Once across, he began the long, hard gallop across Wales, the marches, and the midlands to where the queen and court were gathered at Nonsuch Palace, the massive folly begun so many years before by Henry VIII. He arrived, having left a long string of spent horses in his wake, on the morning of September 28. Still filthy from what under happier circumstances might have been considered an epically heroic ride, he burst into the queen’s privy chamber and found her neither dressed nor bewigged. She induced him to leave, promising that they could meet again an hour later, when both had had an opportunity to compose themselves. The day became a sequence of meetings in which Essex talked first with the queen, then with the queen and members of the council, finally with his fellow councilors only. Thus Elizabeth gradually extracted herself from a situation that she must have found intensely uncomfortable, leaving it to Cecil and others to question Essex about the conduct of his campaign in Ireland and the meaning of his disobedience.

  The day ended with the earl under arrest and sinking into a state of physical and emotional collapse from which he would never entirely recover. Preparations were put in motion to try him for treason, but they were suspended when he became so ill that (much to Elizabeth’s annoyance) his admirers had church bells rung in anticipatory mourning. His recovery was followed by a renewal of planning for a trial, but this time Essex saved himself by sending the queen a letter sufficiently submissive and repentant to drain off the worst of her fury. After a thirteen-hour hearing at which Essex found the strength to mount an eloquent defense against numerous charges of misconduct—a defense that inspired his followers and increased the popularity that the Cecil party found so threatening—he was “sequestered” from all his offices, meaning that until further notice he could neither perform their duties nor draw income from them. He was returned to house arrest under restraints that were gradually relaxed until at last, in August, his liberty was restored.

  He had, by the narrowest of margins, been spared permanent imprisonment or worse. But he had not emerged undamaged. Indeed he was, in almost every sense, mortally wounded: his health shattered, his nerves in disarray, his political career at a dead end, and his financial position nearly hopeless. The conditions under which he was freed included a prohibition against his appearing at court; this destroyed any possibility that he might charm his way back into the queen’s good graces, and shows just how great a danger he seemed to the Cecil party. Theoretically, the way remained open for Essex to retreat gracefully to a life of rural retirement, but in practical terms not even that was possible. Like his stepfather Dudley, he had incurred unmanageable debts in the service of the Crown. Being left at the mercy of his creditors would mean the lowest depths of humiliation not only for the earl himself but for his wife and their children.

  Essex’s only hope—literally his last hope—lay in the income generated by his monopoly on imports of sweet wines. This “concession” must have seemed like something very close to family property by 1600: it had originally belonged to Dudley, and after bestowing it on Essex in 1589 the queen had routinely renewed it in 1593 and 1597. It was up for renewal yet again in 1601, but this time the decision was in no way routine. It put into Elizabeth’s hands the power to save her onetime favorite, whom she had in so many ways encouraged to expect so much, or to crush him utterly. Any inclination that the queen might have felt to allow Essex to withdraw into dignified failure would have been discouraged by Cecil himself. Cecil had long since arrived at the conclusion that the only plausible successor to the aging queen was James VI of Scotland, and he knew that Essex in his younger days had taken pains to cultivate a friendly long-distance relationship with James on the basis of their shared Protestantism. The possibility that as king of England James might rehabilitate the fallen earl was both real and, from Cecil’s perspective, ominous.

  The decision therefore was to show no mercy, and it brought the Essex story to a swift, dramatic, and pathetic close. The final chapter opened with the queen’s refusal to renew the sweet-wine concession, which left the earl with no way of extracting himself from his financial predicament. His London residence, Essex House (it had been Leicester House when owned by Robert Dudley), was by this point a gathering place for all the malcontents and adventurers who had not won places for themselves at the Cecil court and found all routes to advancement blocked as a result. Like Essex himself, those men were easily persuaded that Robert Cecil and his cohorts were not only their enemies but, because of their unwillingness to keep the struggle against Spa
in at a fever pitch whatever the cost, the enemies of England and Elizabeth and the whole Protestant cause. They had no difficulty believing that the queen had become the prisoner and the tool of self-serving schemers, and that those who knew the truth had a duty to free her. Essex with his medieval-romantic code of honor was particularly vulnerable to being seduced by such thinking, especially now that he was cornered. He embraced the delusion that if he rose against the council, the people of London would rise with him.

  Robert Cecil was aware that Essex House had become a hotbed of sedition (though the “Essexians” would have denied being guilty of any such thing), and he had infiltrated the place with his agents. He could have moved early to arrest the ringleaders and scatter their followers, but that might not have been sufficient to ensure the earl’s destruction. He waited until February 8, 1601, more than three months after the termination of Essex’s monopoly, before sending a delegation of Privy Council members with a summons for him to appear at court for questioning. Essex panicked. After making prisoners of his visitors—itself an outrageous act, considering their eminence—he rallied his followers and took to the streets, proclaiming his loyalty to the queen and declaring that he had been forced to take up arms because of a plot against his life. At no point was there the smallest possibility of his succeeding, and within a few hours he was under arrest. Thomas Cecil, himself Lord Burghley now that his father was dead, commanded the troops that rounded up Essex and his companions and was made a knight of the garter as his reward. (The first Lord Burghley would have regarded his whole career as justified if he had witnessed this triumph of his two sons—both of whom would become earls during the next reign, and both of whom have descendants who are marquesses today.)

  Essex, at the end of a trial in which he responded to charges of treason with icy contempt, was found guilty and condemned to death. The situation remained explosive, however. A member of Essex’s circle managed to burst in on the queen and demand that she grant the earl an audience; his reward was immediate execution. Essex remained so popular a hero, however, that the council ordered the preachers of London to denounce him from their pulpits. He was beheaded not at Tower Hill, where crowds of his admirers might have gathered, but in one of the Tower’s interior courtyards, in the presence of only a few witnesses.

  The end of Essex was in a real sense the end for Elizabeth as well. There would be no more favorites; Walter Ralegh, once Essex’s chief rival for the queen’s affection, was again at court but, perhaps because he was alive and Essex was not, he was no longer doted on by the queen. Elizabeth showed a marked aversion to almost everyone known to have played a part in bringing Essex to ruin or to have denounced him after his fall, telling the French ambassador that she knew she had a share in responsibility for his death. War continued in the Netherlands and in Ireland; though Essex’s successor in Ireland was slowly getting the upper hand over Tyrone, he was doing so in ways that ensured perpetual Irish hatred. The costs continued to be nearly insupportable. A Parliament summoned in 1601 was asked to vote a quadruple subsidy, one twice as onerous as the double subsidies extracted from its two immediate predecessors. The news that a Spanish force had been landed in Ireland made it impossible for members to refuse. They did, however, mount an unprecedented challenge to Elizabeth’s view of her prerogatives, demanding an end to the monopolies that she had long been either selling to the highest bidder or (as with Dudley and Essex and their wine concession) giving to those she wished to enrich at no direct cost to herself. These monopolies were a burden on the public and had a distorting effect on the economy, and when Parliament first complained of them in 1597 the queen had promised corrective action but done nothing. This time Commons was determined, and when the queen resisted it began work on a bill that would have taken the matter out of her hands and possibly precipitated a crisis. Faced with this defiance, Elizabeth delivered a speech in which she claimed to be surprised to learn that the monopolies had caused so much unhappiness. She committed herself to their elimination. This has often been represented as a victory for the queen, a climactic demonstration of her political skill. Such a verdict is mystifying. She avoided a showdown by surrendering, abandoned a cherished prerogative at the insistence of Parliament, and established no precedent that did her or her successors the slightest good.

  In spite of Parliament’s approval of unprecedented subsidies, the state of the treasury remained so alarming that the government was selling not only great expanses of Crown land but the queen’s jewels. Revenues from the land sales totaled some £800,000 over the last two years of the reign, and even that did not save the government from remaining hundreds of thousands in debt. That much if not all of this land was sold for less than fair market value is suggested by the behavior of Robert Cecil. In 1601 and 1602 he became the leading speculator in the kingdom, using £30,000 of his own money to buy up as much as possible of the property being sold by the government he headed and borrowing heavily to buy still more. Meanwhile he had quietly taken up Essex’s old lines of communication with James of Scotland, positioning himself for the next reign by making himself the mastermind behind a transfer of power that the queen had never approved.

  Death, when it came, was an enigmatic affair. Elizabeth remained in excellent health through almost all of 1602, continuing to ride, to hunt, and even on occasion to dance. But in December an abrupt decline began, and by the time she moved to Richmond Palace the following month she needed help dismounting her horse and could not climb stairs without the help of a walking stick. Her hands began to swell so badly that the coronation ring she had never removed in four and a half decades had to be cut off. (A second ring, one given to her by Essex, remained.) By March she was feverish, chronically unable to sleep, and unwilling to take nourishment or allow her physicians to attend her. We have already observed her strange final days: the long hours spent standing in a kind of semi-trance, the days and nights on the floor with her finger in her mouth, the final removal to the deathbed when she lost the ability to resist. Though it was later claimed that in her final moments she signaled her wish to be succeeded by the king of Scotland, the people who said so were the very ones who had arranged things that way.

  Her passing was not nearly as lamented as legend would have us believe. One wonders what her grandfather would have thought of the dynasty he had started at Bosworth, of what it had wrought and how it ended. One wonders too what her father would have thought. Whether he possibly could have cared.

  An Epilogue in Two Parts

  The world, as is its way, got along perfectly well without the Tudors. England in particular—which is to say the thin but highly visible slice of the population that reaped the fruit of the Tudor revolution—did very well indeed, not least over the very long term. If it took two centuries to turn the descendants of looters and speculators into the ladies and gentlemen of Jane Austen’s novels, for the lucky few the transformation process was as agreeable as it was prolonged. As for the mass of the people, their numbers, their poverty, and their powerlessness simply added to the comforts of the comfortable, providing a virtually limitless supply of desperately needy, all-but-free domestic and agricultural labor. Those unable to find work in the houses and fields of the gentlefolk would become the manpower—and womanpower and childpower—for the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, which could never have proliferated as they did or been so staggeringly profitable without them. Those unable to do even that work would eventually populate the underworld described by Dickens in Oliver Twist.

  The Tudor juggernaut left problems of ideology in its wake, but time dissolved most of them. First to go was the Catholic-Protestant split. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, many of his subjects still retained an at least sentimental attachment to the old religion, and a considerable number took it more seriously than that. But before he had been king three years, the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot—a plan by despairing and fanatically foolish Catholics to blow up the royal family and th
e entire Protestant establishment—quickly and permanently changed everything. Catholicism became indefensible, the long campaign to eradicate it accepted as not only justifiable but necessary. Anti-Catholicism became integral with British patriotism. (Catholics were long barred from the universities and from public office, and even today any member of the royal family who so much as married a Catholic would be removed from the line of succession.) Though the Catholic part of the population did not disappear entirely, it became tiny, peculiar, and politically irrelevant. The old religion became the hereditary foible of a minuscule minority of stubbornly eccentric noble and gentry families. Catholics continued to be persecuted, often with brutal harshness, but from now on the only religious differences that mattered would be among Protestants of various kinds.

  Less easily settled was the conflict between the Tudor theory of kingship—Henry VIII’s expansive view of the authority of the Crown—and the economic and political power that Henry’s plundering of the church had bestowed upon a new landowning elite. When James and then his son Charles I persisted in claiming that they, like Henry, were accountable to God only, and when a Parliament now dominated by the gentry refused to agree, a showdown became almost inevitable. It came in the form of the years-long unpleasantness known as the English Civil War, the cutting off of King Charles’s head, and Parliament’s triumphal emergence as the most powerful institution in the kingdom. By the time all this was sorted out, England was beginning to assemble its global empire. It had begun its rise to a position of astounding preeminence in the family of nations.