by Helen Castor
Instead, most of Walsingham’s work was taken over by Cecil. At seventy and far from well, he remained a fixture at the heart of the regime, bowed by the weight of his duties but as insistent as his queen that he should not relinquish them. From 1591 it was clear that Cecil’s son Robert, an able young man of twenty-eight, was not only assisting his father but being groomed as his political successor. Still, as Cecil aged – and especially after the death of another favoured courtier, Christopher Hatton, her ‘Lids’, in the autumn of that year – Elizabeth found herself confronting a future of intensifying isolation. She had always been set apart by her own majesty and the weight of the responsibilities it entailed; but now she was losing the ministers and servants she had chosen as the mainstays of her life, both in public and in private.
New men emerged, of course, to take their place. The greasy pole was still there to be climbed, especially now that vacancies were beginning to appear at its topmost heights. In 1596 Robert Cecil – whom Elizabeth called her ‘Pygmy’ because he was so short, his frame twisted by scoliosis – finally became Principal Secretary in succession to Walsingham, and his influence within government continued to grow as his father’s health faltered. Others vied to fill the places Dudley and Hatton had formerly occupied in the queen’s favour. Kate Ashley’s charismatic nephew Sir Walter Raleigh, an accomplished poet as well as a soldier and an explorer in the New World, had already attracted Elizabeth’s attention in the 1580s, to the extent that by 1585 ‘it was said’, one German visitor to London noted, ‘that she loved this gentleman now in preference to all others’.19 By the end of 1592, however, Raleigh’s unsanctioned relationship with Bess Throckmorton, one of the queen’s Maids of Honour, had resulted in Bess’s pregnancy, their secret marriage, and a brief stay in the Tower for both. Elizabeth’s profound displeasure at what she saw as this betrayal left no doubt about the ascendancy in her affections, for the time being at least, of Raleigh’s great rival: Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, son of Lettice Knollys, the wife Elizabeth had never quite forgiven Robert Dudley for marrying. Even though Essex too married without the queen’s permission, taking Walsingham’s daughter Frances as his bride in secret in 1590, he was forgiven more easily when the news became known. ‘While your majesty gives me leave to say I love you’, he told Elizabeth in 1591, ‘my fortune is as my affection, unmatchable.’20
But the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex could never replicate the partnership between Elizabeth and Essex’s stepfather Dudley. That bond, however much it had been shaped and conditioned by Dudley’s service to Elizabeth’s sovereignty, had been founded in shared experience and understanding. Between Elizabeth and Essex, on the other hand, the effects of a thirty-two-year age gap were compounded by Essex’s narcissism, his overwhelming ambition and his failure to recognize the value of his queen’s more cautious judgement. This was ritualized performance, not real connection, as though ersatz replacement parts were being fitted into what had once been an organically constructed machine.
While the mechanisms of court and government aged and Elizabeth passed her sixtieth birthday, the mask of her public persona became more rigidly impermeable, even as its artifice became more apparent. She was still graceful and slender, gorgeously dressed and physically restless. But now her thinning hair was covered by an elaborate auburn wig; she was losing teeth, to the extent that her speech was becoming indistinct when she talked at speed; and the dangerously toxic cosmetics that coated her skin became more glazed and more garish. The German visitor who had watched her ride in procession through London in 1585 had thought she ‘looked like goddesses are wont to be painted’.21 Now Elizabeth herself was a daubed and decorated icon, a would-be goddess denying her own agonizing mortality. There, perhaps, lay the roots of her determination that the game of courtly love should continue, however patently hollow it now was. The simulacrum of adoration offered by handsome, vain Essex required no genuine intimacy, no need for self-knowledge or the risk of being known by another. Far easier to play a familiar role, to insist that everything would remain always and for ever the same.
Not that the world would co-operate in that enterprise. With each advancing year, the question of the succession became more urgent, more alive with tension and speculation. And still Elizabeth refused either to speak of the issue herself or to allow any of her subjects to discuss it publicly. One MP, Walsingham’s brother-in-law Peter Wentworth, had been imprisoned for six months in 1591–2 for attempting to present what he called A Pithy Exhortation to her Majesty for Establishing her Successor to the Crown. When he raised the question again in 1593 he was sent to the Tower, where he remained for the last four years of his life. Elizabeth had never liked being lectured, still less when it involved being reminded at interminable length of the inexorable moment, as Wentworth put it, ‘whensoever it shall please God to touch you with the pangs of death (as die most certainly you shall, and how soon is known to none but to the Lord only)’.22
But, pompous and foolhardy though he was, Wentworth was only saying what many were thinking, including the man he believed should be named Elizabeth’s heir: Mary of Scotland’s son James. Relations between the English queen and the Scots king had been cagey and complex for years, and stretched almost to breaking point after his mother’s execution (‘that miserable accident’, as Elizabeth described it in a letter to him a week after the event, ‘which far contrary to my meaning hath befallen’).23 But the unspoken and unresolved possibility that James might one day, if he played his hand with care, inherit Elizabeth’s crown – an incentive reinforced by the annual pension of £3,000 which England paid into Scotland’s coffers – helped to ensure that their discord never escalated into an irreparable diplomatic breach. By the 1590s James was in secret correspondence with those at Elizabeth’s court he believed could help his cause, first among them the queen’s volatile favourite, Essex.
The succession was not the only matter of state in which Essex believed he had a right to involve himself. He was a man of such infinite capacities, he thought, that he should naturally become simultaneously the queen’s principal military commander and her foremost minister of state, as political heir to both Dudley and Cecil. But, however extravagantly he threw himself into the task of establishing his credentials for both roles and a popular profile to match, Essex’s aspirations were repeatedly thwarted by his naivety and egotism, and by his difficulty in accepting that the queen’s orders – compromised by her feminine weakness as he believed they were – should take precedence over his own judgement. The further crippling obstacle in Essex’s way was the fact that the challenges facing English interests at home and abroad were too intractable for either the queen’s caution or the earl’s impulsiveness to counter with any lasting success.
Despite the defeat of the Armada in 1588, war with Spain continued at sea, and spread into France after the French King Henri III was assassinated in 1589, in retaliation for his murder of the ultra-Catholic Duke of Guise. The next heir to the French throne, Henri of Navarre, was a Protestant; and when Philip sent troops to support Catholic resistance to his accession, Elizabeth reluctantly concluded that English military intervention was necessary to assist the new king and to secure the Channel ports on which English shipping relied. English soldiers were still deployed in the Netherlands, at a cost that caused growing unrest among a population struggling to cope with high levels of taxation and inflation. More threats to Elizabeth’s life and rumblings of increasingly vocal religious nonconformity led to a brutal clampdown on both Catholics and dissident hardline Protestants. Meanwhile, tensions within government – over perennial fears that the kingdom might be attacked from without or subverted from within, and newly fraught factional division around the increasingly infirm queen – burst into the open after the death, in August 1598, of William Cecil at the age of seventy-seven.
In his last surviving letter, his handwriting crabbed by arthritis and gout, Cecil told his son Robert to ‘serve God by serving of the queen, for all ot
her service is indeed bondage to the Devil’.24 Elizabeth had cared too little for Walsingham and too much for Dudley to show any public emotion at their deaths, but the loss of Cecil – the minister into whose capable hands she had entrusted her government for forty long years – brought her to tears repeatedly in the months that followed. On the other hand, Robert Cecil – now thirty-five and already emotionally broken by the death of his adored wife the previous year – had no time to grieve for his father. He threw himself into the challenge of taking up the reins of the regime, a task made practically easier but politically more complex by the absence from court of the Earl of Essex, who was sulking in a showy display of temper after an argument with the queen. At a meeting with her councillors that June, Elizabeth had refused to agree to Essex’s choice of a new Lord Deputy in rebellion-torn Ireland. In a rage, he had turned his back on her, at which insult Elizabeth had cuffed his ear, only for Essex, in the heat of the moment, to reach for his sword. Cooler heads than his restrained him, but it seemed the earl’s ego had finally broken free of the bounds of reality: there was no dawning realization of how close he had come to the treason of raising a weapon to his sovereign, but instead an outpouring of resentment and anger at the ‘intolerable wrong’ he believed he had suffered.25
While Essex did not appear to know it, this was a decisive moment in Elizabeth’s assessment of his abilities and her indulgence of his tantrums. A brittle rapprochement was brokered by September, when a bout of illness that briefly confined Essex to bed allowed Elizabeth to enquire after his health, a mark of royal concern that satisfied the earl’s amour propre enough for him to reappear at court. Still, the pressing question remained of what role within the political or military establishment might put Essex to constructive use while containing the destabilizing effects of his obsessive solipsism. In fact, there was urgent need for military leadership in Ireland where, in August, rebels under the Earl of Tyrone had inflicted a devastating defeat on English forces. Essex had already fought on campaigns in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and France, without achieving the glory he craved or the unquestioned power he believed such victory would secure. Now Ireland offered one more chance to prove that Elizabeth could not protect her kingdom without him.
It was an implausible theatre of war for the starring performance he had in mind. The intricacies and impossibilities of English rule in Ireland had seen off many other aspirants before Essex, and it did not take long for the earl to find out why. Arriving in Dublin in April 1599 as the queen’s Lord Lieutenant at the head of a large army, by the end of the summer Essex had exhausted his men, his money and himself and achieved very little other than a truce with Tyrone, which a furious Elizabeth immediately repudiated. Essex’s psychological state, as he wrestled with the dissonance between anticipated triumph and actual failure, now spiralled into paranoia. Believing that Robert Cecil and his other enemies at court were controlling the queen and poisoning her against him, Essex left Ireland in haste, against Elizabeth’s explicit orders, on 24 September. Four days later, mud-spattered from his headlong ride, he burst unannounced into the queen’s bedchamber.
It was early, around ten o’clock, and Elizabeth – who had once wryly observed that she was ‘no morning woman’26 – had not yet undergone her laborious transformation into the physical embodiment of sovereign majesty. She was not yet dressed in one of the heavily jewelled gowns that formed her royal armour; her few remaining wisps of grey hair were not yet concealed by a finely made wig, her lined skin not yet whitened and rouged and glazed. For all the shock of this unlicensed intrusion, the exposure of the vulnerable humanity she took such care to keep from view, and the wildness with which Essex hurled himself at her feet, Elizabeth’s self-possession did not falter. Coolly, she asked him to return in an hour, by which time she would be ready to receive him. But the conclusion was clear. Essex was no courtly counterpoint to the mask of Gloriana. He was no substitute for Dudley as councillor, general or companion. He was a devastating liability.
By the afternoon Elizabeth was not only cool, but icy. He must, she said, account for his actions to the Privy Council. That night he was placed under house arrest. The queen refused to see him again. Over the coming weeks, Essex’s mental and physical health collapsed as charges against him were drawn up. Early in January, as the earl began to recover, Elizabeth considered, but ultimately decided against, a full-scale trial. At the end of August he was released from house arrest on condition that he never return to court. Essex had escaped with his life, but at a heavy cost: now, he faced the certainty of his own political and financial ruin. Desperation fuelled his paranoia and further compromised his always flawed judgement until, by the beginning of 1601, his household had become a febrile cockpit of conspiracy and vauntingly entitled alienation.
On 8 February came the final unravelling. The Privy Council had become alarmed by increasingly disturbing reports of the earl’s activities: Essex had been debating with his allies and followers how best to gain access to the queen and destroy his enemies. On 7 February the council had summoned him for questioning, but Essex refused to go; instead, he took hostage four of their number who came the following day to fetch him. With 200 hastily assembled servants and supporters at his back, he marched from his house on the Strand into the city of London, announcing that he had come to defend the kingdom, the queen and (naturally) himself against the evil counsellors by whom Elizabeth was surrounded. In response, Cecil and his allies acted with implacable purpose and speed. By mid-afternoon the earl had been forced back to his home outside the city walls, where he was besieged by troops with cannon brought on carts from the Tower. Essex, who had sworn he would never surrender (‘the sooner to fly to heaven’, he declared),27 gave himself up the same night. Eleven days later he was tried and found guilty of treason. Just six days after the verdict was handed down, on 25 February 1601, he was beheaded in the Tower’s inner courtyard.
Elizabeth was as unflinching in the face of armed betrayal as she had been when confronted with Spain’s Armada. At Whitehall, when news came that Essex was raising rebellion within reach of the palace, the queen continued calmly with her meal, remarking only that God, who ‘had placed her on that seat, would preserve her in it’.28 Nor did she shrink from signing the warrant for the earl’s death. Still, the loss of a man in whom she had invested trust, and affection of a kind, as well as a desperate hope that time need not bring change, took a heavy toll.
That October her favourite godson, Sir John Harington, was taken aback by the unhappy state in which he found the queen. ‘These troubles waste her much’, he told a trusted friend. She was eating very little, and ‘so disordered is all order’ that the mask of Gloriana was slipping: Elizabeth, he said, was rarely changing her clothes from day to day. Her temper was sharper even than usual, and she kept a sword constantly to hand with which she sometimes angrily stabbed at the tapestries hanging on the walls, despite the fact that, in Harington’s judgement at least, ‘the dangers are over’.29
Yet only six weeks later Elizabeth somehow summoned her last reserves of energy to conjure an exhilarating moment of royal theatre, in seeking to calm the members of a fractious parliament by means of a politically limited but rhetorically magnificent concession to their grievances. ‘To be a king and wear a crown’, she said, ‘is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.’ As always, her charisma shone brightest when insisting that she was no more than a vessel through which God might care for her people:
For myself, I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a king or royal authority of a queen as delighted that God hath made me His instrument to maintain His truth and glory, and to defend this kingdom from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is not my desire to live nor reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your
good. And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will be more careful and loving.30
For a queen who had staked everything on being always the same, the weariness amid the spine-tingling oratory – the implicit acknowledgement of the approaching end of both life and reign – was striking. And from one who, as she noted, had ‘ever used to set the Last Judgement Day before my eyes and so to rule as I shall be judged’,31 there was more reflection at the parliament’s close on her own guiding principles and priorities. ‘I take God to witness’, she declared, ‘that I never gave just cause of war to any prince … nor had any greater ambition than to maintain my own state in security and peace.’32
It was true. Her ministers had questioned her methods – her resistance to change, to war, to marriage, to naming an heir – but Elizabeth’s ambition as queen had been consistent and coherent: wherever possible, to seek security through stillness; to manage the known risks of current circumstances, rather than precipitate unknown dangers through irreversible action. Her strategy itself had been a risk. To remain unmarried, with no direct heir, was to gamble on her own life, and to place control of the present before planning for the future. It was a choice no king had ever had to face; male sovereignty allowed for marriage and children without bodily danger, and without any concession, real or perceived, of independent authority. But a woman who wore a crown had to choose; and Elizabeth had chosen to inhabit the personal sovereignty she had achieved at such perilous cost, rather than to share her throne with a husband, her kingdom with a king. She had been skilful, and she had been lucky, and by the beginning of 1603 she had reached the seventieth year of her life, and the forty-fifth year of her reign.
