The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  the lease which I hold by your Majesty’s beneficence expireth, and that farm [of sweet wines] is both my chiefest maintenance and mine only means of compounding with the merchants to whom I am endebted . . . If my creditors will take for payment as many ounces of my blood, or the taking away of this farm would only for want finish me of this body, your Majesty should never hear of this suit. For in myself I can find no boldness to importune, and from myself I can draw no argument to solicit.1

  It was a useless letter. Essex was finished. Such was his personal magnetism, however, and such was the personal detestation in which Robert Cecil was held, that a significant number of Essex’s friends joined with him in a rebellion, even though it was plainly a madcap scheme – and they were a formidable collection of people.

  This was a sign not only of Essex’s extraordinary charisma, but also of how desperate things had become at court, and at the heart of the Elizabethan machine. In the glory days there had been terrible factions at court, but William Cecil, Robert Dudley, Francis Walsingham, Nicholas Bacon and the rest had, in extremis, been prepared to sink their differences for a common purpose. Not only were they devoted to a young queen: their political lives depended upon her survival. Now things were very different. It was inevitable that the old Queen would die – perhaps soon. The Essex faction saw no possibility of being reconciled with the Cecil faction, short of actually taking up arms.

  Or perhaps they needed to focus their feelings of dissatisfaction upon Robert Cecil, rather than admit to themselves that the real reason for discontent was the Queen – increasingly indecisive, irascible, parsimonious, capricious. One of Essex’s friends, who did not desert him in his troubles, was the Earl of Southampton. Like Essex, he had been a ward of Burghley and brought up at Cecil House, that strange aristocratic boarding school in the Strand. Southampton was now one of those, with Lord Mountjoy, who began to hatch the crazy plan of an armed coup d’état. Already, Essex and Mountjoy had been in secret correspondence with King James VI of Scotland, assuring him of their loyalty and hoping to assure him that, in the event of his succeeding, it was to them, and not to Cecil, that he should look for support. Compared with Sidney, Marlowe and Spenser, William Shakespeare, of all the great Elizabethan writers, cultivated a superb detachment from political involvement. But with his patron Southampton so deeply involved with Essex, total disengagement was not entirely possible.

  In 1599 one Dr John Hayward had written a book, which he dedicated to Essex, on the subject of Henry IV. The dedication compared Essex with Bolingbroke, the man who successfully overthrew Richard II and made himself King. When the time of the rebellion approached, Essex’s Chief Steward, a fiery Welshman called Sir Gelli Meyrick, was also happy to remember how the Welsh had rallied to Bolingbroke’s cause. Among notable supporters of the Essex rebellion were John and Owen Salusbury, who had accompanied Essex on the Cadiz expedition. Sir John Salusbury’s coat of arms bears the motto ‘posse et nolle nobile’. ‘To be able to do harm, but to abstain from doing so, is noble’ would be one rendering; another ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’ – the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. It is all but inconceivable that this is a coincidence, though exactly what it suggests or proves (beyond some connection between Shakespeare and the Salusburys) is another matter. Salusbury was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1595. We know that Shakespeare had many associations with that Inn, where Twelfth Night was first performed in 1602. There is abundant evidence in his plays of Shakespeare’s affectionate, sometimes humorous feeling for the Welsh. He would certainly have appreciated it, had he been a witness, when Sir John Salusbury celebrated his readmission to the Inn, after his elder brother Thomas’s involvement in the Babington Conspiracy, and a royal pardon, with ‘seven bards, four harpists and two crowthers to Lleweni to celebrate his newly recovered status.’2

  The Salusburys of Lleweni were cousins of Queen Elizabeth, yet here was their cousin Owen involving himself with the Essex rebellion. Any analogy between themselves and the fiery Owain Glyndŵr uniting with Bolingbroke to overthrow Richard II would not have been lost on anyone at Lleweni. Before the rising, Lord Mounteagle, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and others of Percy’s friends took a barge over the river to Bankside to the Globe Theatre. They offered a supplement of forty shillings if the Lord Chamberlain’s company would put on a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. It was an old play, so the actors could self-protectively claim that the public had no particular interest in it any more; they had forgotten the lines, it would not be popular. But in the end they relented. Was Shakespeare among them? On the afternoon of Saturday, 7 February 1601 an enthusiastic audience of Essex supporters watched the play: it was the eve of the rebellion. To William Lambarde, one of her more learned courtiers, when ‘caterpillars of the kingdom’ were making their obeisance to her, Elizabeth had once remarked, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye that?’3

  One of the functions of court rituals, of Coronation Day tilts, of bowing before the monarch and walking backwards – as of all the quasi-ritualised Platonic adoration of the monarch in Spenser’s poetry, in the formalised portraiture of the Queen and in the clothes with which she was decked out – was to disguise from monarch and people alike the uncomfortable truths that Richard II so mercilessly exposes. At the beginning of the play it is Richard who is the dressed doll at the centre of the power-game; by the third act, he is ironically enquiring, ‘What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty/Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?’4 Elizabeth had known as a young girl that the division between absolute power and absolute ruin was no wider than the blade of an axe. Richard, in Shakespeare’s masterpiece, asks the existential question:

  I live with bread, like you, feel want,

  Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus,

  How can you say to me, I am a king?5

  More than 400 years after it happened, the Essex rebellion still almost beggars belief – both that they thought they could get away with it and that so many powerful men, with so much to lose, were prepared to take part. The Earls of Southampton, Rutland, Sussex and Bedford, as well as Lords Mounteagle, Cromwell and Sandys, were all part of it. And the roll-call shows that Essex was (potentially) uniting malcontents from across the whole politico-religious spectrum. On the one hand, the Cromwells represented extreme Puritan opinion (an opinion with which Essex himself personally sympathised); on the other hand – fatally to Essex himself – there were Catholics here, such as Southampton, who would as lief place Arbella Stuart on the throne of England as the Presbyterian Scottish king. Lord Mounteagle, who half-heartedly supported Essex, would also be in the secret of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and it was he who betrayed the conspirators on that occasion. Some of them, such as Francis Tresham and Robert Catesby, joined Essex evidently in the hope that they could produce, if not an actually Catholic monarch, a regime more favourable to their recusant standpoint.

  So, all sorts of grievances came together at the time of the Essex rebellion, and not least the grievances of the London mob, who felt impoverished by years of bad crops and rising food prices. Eighteen months after the whole fiasco was over, and Essex was dead, a German visitor to the English capital found Londoners still singing the ballad ‘Essex’s Last Good-Night’ and pointing out the spot in the Tower where ‘the brave hero’ perished.

  The actual rebellion lasted only for twelve hours. If, on 8 February 1601, Essex and his friends had marched directly on Whitehall, they might have stood a chance of apprehending the Queen and taking the Great Seal. Instead, they marched eastwards up the Strand. ‘To the Court! To the Court!’ shouted the mob: they had the right idea. But Essex had been promised support by the Lord Mayor of London. He hoped to find 1,000 armed men waiting for him in Fenchurch Street, but this was fantasy. By the time they turned back towards Westminster, his followers were in disarray.

  There was fighting in the streets and not a few casualties. Cavalry, under the command of the Earls of Cumberland and Lincoln
, with Lord Burghley (Robert Cecil’s dim-witted elder brother), Lord Thomas Howard and Lord Compton, blocked the Strand. Between Essex House and the river, Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Fulke Greville, Sir John Stanhope and Lord Cobham had entrenched in the Embankment Gardens. A few, including one of Southampton’s footmen, were shot. Southampton came out on to his roof to declare that they meant no harm to the Queen: they had merely taken up arms to deliver her from the atheists and – that word from Richard II – ‘caterpillars’ who clustered around the throne: that is, Cecil and the Privy Council. Within hours, however, the thing had collapsed, the principal insurgents were behind bars and London was placed under martial law: 500 soldiers were stationed at Charing Cross, 400 men guarded the City, another 300 on the Surrey side of the river in Southwark. Within a week twenty-five peers of the realm had been summoned to try Essex and Southampton.

  In addition to the twenty-five peers, nine judges had been appointed for what was, in effect, a show trial. Essex demanded the right to challenge three of the judges on the grounds of their known personal enmity to himself, but this demand was refused. When Lord Grey de Wilton, with whom he had quarrelled publicly in Ireland, was called as a witness, Essex let out a loud, contemptuous laugh.

  Cynical old Coke, one of the judges, remarked on the extraordinary verbal similarity in the testimony, extracted in the Tower of London, from Essex’s companions Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Christopher Blount, the Earls of Bedford and Rutland, Lord Sandys and Lord Mountjoy. Of friends who turned in evidence against Essex, the most shockingly disloyal was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), destined in the next reign to become the Viscount St Albans and Lord Chancellor of England.

  The two Bacon brothers, Francis and Anthony, were the sons of the former Lord Keeper. Essex had striven to get Francis Bacon the office of Attorney General, which had gone to Coke. Cecil wondered that Essex should wish to promote ‘so raw a youth to so great a place’. Essex had fired back, with an insult that was not forgotten by Cecil, ‘I have made no search for precedents of young men who have filled the office of Attorney General, but I could name to you, Sir Robert, a man younger than Francis [that is, Cecil himself], less learned and equally inexperienced, who is suing and striving with all his might for an office of far greater weight’ – that is, the Secretaryship, which Cecil soon got.

  It ill became Bacon to testify against his friend and protector, but Bacon had a career to think of. He was one of the most remarkable intellects of his age. In 1597 he had published a tiny octavo volume entitled (copying Montaigne, whose Essais were published in Bordeaux in 1580) Essays: the first time the word was used in English in that sense. Bacon the philosopher was the first Englishman to express what we mean by a modern scientific outlook – to distinguish between inductive and intuitive processes of reading information, to distinguish really between ‘Art’ and ‘Science’, to use our terminology. For this reason, William Blake, in his copy of Bacon’s Essays, wrote the words ‘Good Advice for Satan’s Kingdom’.

  As Francis spoke for the prosecution in Westminster Hall, Essex often interrupted his protégé with reproaches. To those who wished to believe some of the wilder assertions made against Essex (for example, that he had aspired to make himself the King of England), it was all the more damaging that his friend Bacon should have been prepared so fully to denounce him.

  Essex must have known that he had no chance of persuading the peers and judges to acquit him. He asserted, as he had done before, that he had heard Cecil dispute the succession and express the wish for the Spanish Infanta to become Queen when Elizabeth died. This Cecil hotly repudiated. Cecil was unlike his father – who, in these circumstances, would have allowed Essex to condemn himself out of his own mouth and would not have descended to verbal exchanges with the prisoner. But Robert Cecil, who was physically deformed and acutely conscious that the comparatively new family of Cecil could not match the high lineage of the Devereux, could not resist a response to the years of swagger and bullying that he had endured at Essex’s hands in the heyday of the Queen’s crush on the young aristocrat:

  For wit I give you the pre-eminence – you have it abundantly. For nobility also I give you place – I am not noble, yet a gentleman; I am no swordsman – there also you have the odds: but I have innocence, conscience, truth and honesty to defend me against the scandal and sting of slanderous tongues, and in this court I stand as an upright man, and your lordship as a delinquent.6

  Essex and Southampton were returned in procession to the Tower of London, with the axe’s blade pointed towards them. At the age of thirty-four, on 25 February 1601, Essex was beheaded in the courtyard. He had asked the Queen for the privilege of a private death, and she had spared him the crowds on Tower Green. His last days were spent in fervent prayer with his chaplain, Mr Ashton. Southampton remained in the Tower, with the black-and-white cat made famous by the portrait of him there. When James I came to the throne, Southampton was released at once, and he went on to have a life full of honours – being made Knight of the Garter almost instantaneously, as well as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire. His Catholicism weakened with age, and he became a Protestant. Much of his public life was devoted to the defence of the Virginia Company – though he could not stop its Charter being withdrawn in 1624. Much of his time, as in the years before and during his imprisonment, was devoted to study and to literature, and he presented a fine collection of books to the library at St John’s College, Cambridge.

  Essex’s memory transmuted into that of folk-hero.

  Sweet England’s pride is gone!

  welladay! welladay!

  In ‘Essex’s Last Good-Night’ as we have seen, they were still singing of the trial when a foreign visitor heard them in 1603:

  All you that cry O hone! O hone!

  come now and sing O Lord! With me.

  For why? Our Jewel is from us gone,

  the valiant Knight of Chivalry.

  Little Cecil trips up and down,

  He rules both Court and Crown,

  With his brother Burghley Clown,

  In his great fox-furred gown;

  With the long proclamation

  He swore he saved the Town

  Is it not likely.7

  So Essex lived on in drinking song and legend, everlastingly preserved in his youth, the victim of the old lady that no one could quite admit was the real cause of the rebellion. For it was not the machinations, real or imagined, of the Cecil faction that caused the atmosphere of frustration in 1600–1 so much as the sense that the country’s head of state was too old, too stubborn, too stingy, too indecisive to be a great national leader any more.

  Essex’s circle had an interesting afterlife in the seventeenth century. Frances, the widow both of Philip Sidney and of Essex, married the Earl of Clanricard in 1603 and became a Roman Catholic. Penelope, Essex’s sister and Sidney’s ‘Stella’, divorced Lord Rich and she too became a Roman Catholic. She died in 1607. The old ‘she-Wolf’ – the beautiful Lettice – who had so excited Queen Elizabeth’s jealousy when she married the Earl of Leicester lost her third husband, Sir Christopher Blount, who was executed for his part in the Essex rebellion. Thus she lost both son and husband, but it appeared not to diminish her energies. She lived to the age of ninety-four in 1634. What a very different world it would have been, had Elizabeth been spared for a comparable span!

  When her godson Sir John Harington tried to cheer her up by reading to her some of his epigrams, the Queen replied, ‘When Thou dost feel creeping Time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less.’

  Yet despite the ravages of time, and the sadness of her life after the death of Essex, Elizabeth retained much of her old physical vigour. She enjoyed dancing almost to the end. Right up to her sixty-ninth birthday she could still ride ten miles in a day and go hunting afterwards. Her mental faculties were undiminished and she retained her linguistic skills. In February 1603 the Doge and Senate of Venice sent Giovanni Scaramelli as ambassador to the English court, the first official Venet
ian Ambassador since her accession.

  She received him at Richmond. The clothes-conscious Italian noted that she no longer dressed fashionably, but the overall effect of her outfit and appearance was overwhelming:

  Her skirts were much fuller and began lower down than is the fashion in France. Her hair was of a light colour not made by nature, and she wore great pearls like pears round the forehead. She had a vast quantity of gems and pearls upon her person; even under her stomacher she was covered with golden-jewelled girdles and single gems, carbuncles, balas-rubies and diamonds. Round her wrists in place of bracelets she wore double rows of pearls of more than medium size.8

  On her head was an imperial crown. Here was Astraea indeed, a walking emblem.

  Scaramelli was awestruck and knelt to kiss the hem of her garment. She offered her right hand to kiss and spoke to him in Italian: ‘Welcome to England, Mr Secretary, it was high time that the Republic sent to visit a Queen, who has always honoured it on every possible occasion.’ The ambassador then made a formal complaint to the Queen about the behaviour of English corsairs in the Adriatic, looting and attacking Venetian and Spanish vessels. Elizabeth haughtily countered with: