by Jones, Nigel
In a bitter January in 1568, depressed after her continual requests to be reunited with her husband had been refused by the vindictive Elizabeth, Catherine, living at Cockfield in Suffolk, succumbed to tuberculosis probably incubated in the damp Tower. Her husband eventually married again. But he never forgot his Catherine and after Elizabeth’s death, when the priest who had wed them finally came forward, the union was at last recognised as legitimate and the unfortunate couple’s elder son inherited his family titles. By an astonishing coincidence, Edward and Catherine’s grandson, William Seymour, would also infuriate an irate monarch by marrying too close to the throne – and would also be confined to the Tower for his pains. As we shall see, he would not tamely accept that fate.
Queen Elizabeth’s aversion to her courtiers marrying, or still worse having babies, only increased as it became clear that she would neither wed nor give birth herself. As she passionately lamented when informed that Mary, Queen of Scots had given birth to James Stuart, the infant who would eventually succeed her on the English throne, ‘The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son – but I am of barren stock.’ It made things still worse when the miscreants who sought a sexual or family life outside Elizabeth’s jealous orbit were themselves her former favourites. The pre-eminent case is that of a man who, perhaps more than any other figure in its long history, is most tragically associated with the Tower – Sir Walter Ralegh.
Ralegh epitomises in one extraordinary life, the great explosion of adventurous achievement that was Elizabethan England. Soldier, sailor, scientist, statesman, courtier, explorer, poet, plotter, philosopher, historian – Ralegh was all these and more. His second, lengthy imprisonment in the Tower was the major milestone in his life – producing children, herbal remedies, and his History of the World, a landmark in English literature. But who was this superman? And why did he outrage not one but two monarchs, to the point where the Tower was thought to be the only place fit to hold his fiery spirit?
Ralegh was quintessentially a Devon man. He was born in 1552 into the county’s Protestant seagoing squirarchy who provided the ‘Sea Dogs’ of Elizabeth’s reign: Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert, John Hawkins and Richard Grenville were all kin, and Ralegh shared their assumptions and aspirations. After Oxford, Ralegh spent years as a volunteer mercenary fighting in the French Wars of Religion and in Ireland. By the time he arrived at Elizabeth’s court around 1581, he was a ruthless buccaneer who had seen much of the darker side of life.
The perfumed elegance of the Elizabethan court masked a ceaseless struggle for power every bit as brutal as the atrocities Ralegh had witnessed on the battlefield. To survive and prosper Ralegh had to capture the capricious monarch’s fickle favour. Related to Kat Ashley, Elizabeth’s childhood nurse, Ralegh had a flying start in gaining the queen’s attention. Fortunately he also had those qualities that Elizabeth appreciated in a man. Good-looking, supremely masculine, Ralegh had brains and brawn – swapping poetic tags with this most literate of female rulers.
Most of all, he had charm. That fleeting quality is seen in the legend that he spread his cloak across a puddle to keep Elizabeth’s feet dry. Such attention-seeking tactics rapidly achieved their purpose. By early 1583 he was the queen’s favourite – deferred to even by her chief minister, Lord Burghley.
Appointed captain of the queen’s Yeoman Guard, who supplied the Tower’s garrison, Ralegh was at the peak of his power in the 1580s. To extensive Irish estates were added a London town home, Durham House off the Strand; and the substantial country estate of Sherborne Castle in Dorset. An MP for Devon and Cornwall, Ralegh’s many political and economic interests there made him the virtual uncrowned king of the West Country; and he was in charge of defending its coastline against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Ralegh also drew income from a monopoly of Cornwall’s tin mines and his investments in voyages to the developing Americas. A keen coloniser, Ralegh was involved in the first tentative attempts to found settlements in Virginia, where he famously grew and imported tobacco and potatoes. Then, in 1592, his world collapsed.
Naturally this warrior with culture cut a swathe through the hearts of the queen’s ladies. According to the antiquary John Aubrey, Ralegh’s wooing style was rough but effective:
He loved a wench well and one time getting up one of the maids-of-honour up against a tree in a wood … who seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her honour and modest, she cried ‘Sweet Sir Walter, what do you ask me? Will you undo me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter!’ At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried in ecstasy ‘Swisser, Swatter! Swisser, Swatter!’ She proved with child …
If there is any truth in Aubrey’s tale, the lady could well be Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Throckmorton, the woman who would be Ralegh’s wife and lifelong love – and the cause of his first great fall. Born into a distinguished Tudor family, Bess, a dozen years younger than the forty-year-old Ralegh, fell pregnant by him, and in 1590 he secretly married her. The pregnancy was temporarily hidden from the queen, as Bess left court for her confinement in March 1592. She gave birth to a boy named Damerai, and, leaving him in the country, returned to court.
When gossip brought news of the marriage and birth to the queen’s ears, she erupted in fury. Ralegh attempted to flee on a long voyage, but contrary winds prevented his departure. In August 1592, as a feline courtier, Sir Edward Stafford, wrote to fellow courtier Anthony Bacon, ‘If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mistress Throckmorton you may speak to them tomorrow at the Tower.’
The Raleghs – along with their baby – were arrested and taken to the dread fortress. Ralegh was immured away from his wife and child in the Brick Tower. The queen’s drastic action was not entirely motivated by jealousy, however. The fact that Bess had drops of royal blood in her veins; that another rising favourite, Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, had stood godfather to the Raleghs’ baby; and the Raleghs’ foolishly snobbish boasts to friends that the child was ‘a Plantagenet’ rang dynastic alarm bells in the queen’s Tudor ears, ever alert to rival claims on her crown.
Ralegh’s first bout in the Tower was short. He used his enforced leisure and his literary gifts to try to write his way out. His initial effort was a self-pitying sonnet – a verse form recently imported from Italy – on the frugal conditions of his captivity.
My body in the walls captived
Feels not the wounds of spiteful envy,
But my thrilled mind, of liberty deprived,
Fast fettered in her ancient memory,
Does naught behold but sorrow’s dying face.
Such prison erst was so delightful
As it desired no other dwelling place;
But time’s effects and destinies despiteful
Have changed both my keeper and my fare.
Love’s fire, and beauty’s light I then had store;
But now close kept, as captives wonted are,
That food, that heat, that light I find no more.
Despair bolts up my doors, and I alone
Speak to dead walls, but those hear not my moan.
An early practitioner of Disraeli’s dictum that ‘everyone loves flattery, and when it comes to royalty you must lay it on with a trowel’, Ralegh next wrote a lengthy ode to his angry sovereign, calling it Book of the Ocean to Cynthia. The title was a pun on Elizabeth’s familiar pet name for Ralegh – ‘Water’ – and ‘Cynthia’ – his polite name for her. A mixture of self-pity, pleading and his hallmark arrogance, the poem was addressed to the queen in twelve sections, one for each year they had known one another.
Ralegh’s effusion hit heights of absurdity and plumbed lows of self-abasement:
Such force her angel-like appearance had
To master distance, time or cruelty,
Such art to grieve, and after to make glad,
Such fear in love, such love in majesty.
He had almost completed it, when, on 15 September, a month after his imprisonment beg
an, he was suddenly freed. It was not Elizabeth’s melting heart that caused this unexpected deliverance, but a more basic emotion: greed. A Portuguese galleon, the Madre de Dios, loaded with spices, herbs, ebony, ivory, jewels, silks, silver and gold had been hijacked by an English privateering expedition to the Caribbean that Ralegh had organised and funded. (This was the voyage that Ralegh had planned to take to escape the Queen’s wrath.) The vessel had been brought to Dartmouth in Devon, and furious squabbling had broken out over the spoils. There was only one man, advised the head of England’s navy, Sir John Hawkins, who could sort out the problem: Ralegh himself.
Momentarily forgetting her rage, the avaricious queen ordered Ralegh’s release. But as he distributed the booty – reserving the lion’s share for himself – his wife Bess remained in the Tower. In October an outbreak of plague reached the fortress. The Tower’s moat was a stinking open sewer, filled with offal, excrement and the foul outpourings of the warren of streets surrounding London’s castle. Such a cesspit was a breeding ground for pestilence, and little Damerai Ralegh died. In December the queen finally relented and released the bereaved Bess a few days before Christmas.
Though free, the Raleghs were not restored to favour. They retired to their country estate, Sherborne in Dorset, where Ralegh built a fine new residence in a fashionable style. A volcano of energy, he then organised an expedition to the Amazon in search of the mythical city of gold, El Dorado; helped capture the Spanish port of Cadiz, where he was wounded and lamed for life; and at his London town house dabbled in dangerous debates about God, the Devil, atheism and heaven and hell with a private circle of intimates – including the playwright Christopher Marlowe – that became known as the School of Night. Though Ralegh intrigued constantly to regain his place at court, and partially succeeded, he never recaptured his former pre-eminent place in the queen’s affections.
Ralegh’s place in Elizabeth’s heart was usurped by a young man almost as charismatic as himself. Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, born in 1566, was as handsome as Ralegh, as rich as Ralegh, as bold as Ralegh and at least as arrogant as the man dubbed ‘the Great Lucifer’. Moreover, unlike Ralegh, he was born into the highest of aristocratic court circles, being the stepson of Elizabeth’s long-term favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, via Leicester’s third wife Lettice. Essex cemented his place in the queen’s charmed circle by his marriage to Frances Walsingham, widow of the archetypal Elizabethan gallant gentleman Sir Philip Sidney, and daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s renowned spymaster.
Essex consequently rose even more rapidly than Ralegh in the queen’s favour, becoming her Master of the Horse, and after Leicester’s death in 1588, stepping neatly into his stepfather’s shoes as a new ‘sweet Robin’: her closest confidant. The young blade and the queen thirty years his senior gamed together, hunted together and of course flirted together. Elizabeth was an ageing woman by this time, her lead-painted white face raddled and cracked; her fiery red hair replaced by wigs to cover her baldness. But her conceit had only increased with the years, and courtiers who wanted to get on were expected to prolong the myth of ‘Gloriana’: the ever youthful, ever beautiful object of love and devotion. At first Essex was prepared to flatter with a fervour putting even Ralegh to shame.
In 1596, Ralegh suffered the humiliation of having Essex put over his head to command the expedition which took Cadiz and burned a Spanish fleet, with Ralegh serving as his deputy. The closeness that had seen Essex act as godfather to Ralegh’s first child had been replaced by a jealous mistrust curdling into mutual hatred. Ralegh resented Essex for having taken his place in the queen’s heart; while Essex became convinced that Ralegh was conspiring with Robert Cecil – who had replaced his father Lord Burghley as Elizabeth’s senior statesman – to destroy him. But Essex needed no extra enemies; he was, as Francis Bacon would point out at his trial, his own most dangerous foe.
Elizabeth was determined to quell a grumbling guerrilla war led by the Irish nobleman, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, against rapacious English colonisation. In 1599 Essex was given command of a large army, with orders to crush the revolt. But instead of ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ as Shakespeare flatteringly wrote of him in Henry V, Essex negotiated a truce with Tyrone, before rushing back to England after only six months’ absence to explain his actions to a furious Elizabeth.
Deliberately defying the queen’s orders to stay at his Irish post, Essex, sweaty and mud spattered, stormed unannounced through the queen’s privy chamber into her bedchamber. It was early and he caught the old lady at her toilette. Bald and wrinkled as she was, denuded of the powders, potions, wigs and stays she used to prop up the illusion of youth, it was a cruel revelation of the Goddess Gloriana’s mortality. Icily, Elizabeth refused to listen to Essex’s excuses and his furious denunciations of his enemies. He was placed under arrest. Kept sequestered from his family, Essex’s disgrace can be judged from the fact that Elizabeth denied him permission to write to his wife after she had given birth to a baby girl. Only when Essex sank into what appeared a terminal decline did the queen allow him home.
Brooding on his wrongs in Essex House, his luxurious riverside home on London’s Strand, Essex plunged deeper into the mire. Believing that Cecil and Ralegh had poisoned the queen’s mind against him, he took the final, fatal step into treason. Cursing the queen as ‘crooked in her mind as she is in her carcass’, he gathered a wild assortment of malcontents: unemployed former officers who had served under him, Catholic conspirators, and Puritan preachers. He sent messages to King James VI in Scotland appealing for aid to overthrow Elizabeth. The messages were intercepted by Cecil’s secret service as he allowed Essex to stretch his neck further on the block awaiting him. He was only too obliging.
On the morning of Sunday 8 February 1601, Essex assembled a small army in the courtyard of Essex House. His chief lieutenant was the dandified Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. The grandson of the Henry Wriothesley who had been Henry VIII’s chief enforcer and Tower torturer, young Southampton was a thug who also appreciated the arts. A close friend and patron of Shakespeare, and the dedicatee of the Bard’s poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Southampton has been plausibly suggested as the mysterious ‘Mr W. H.’ to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated. The Bard and his patron may have enjoyed a homosexual affair. Southampton was certainly reported to have had a gay relationship with a fellow officer in Ireland, where he served Essex as captain of the cavalry. It was probably Southampton who suggested bribing Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Company to revive Richard II, with its theme of the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch, to put Londoners in the mood to back Essex’s revolt. Although the cast were innocent of any prior knowledge, the play was indeed staged at the Globe Theatre on Saturday 7 February: the eve of the rebellion.
The government, learning what was afoot, sent a Privy Council delegation to dissuade the rebels. For their pains they were locked in a room in Essex House. Then Essex’s 300 braves, with the earl at their head, sallied into the streets and headed east to capture the Tower. As he galloped along Essex yelled to bemused onlookers that there was a court plot to kill him. But Cecil had already proclaimed Essex a traitor and rebel, and no one joined him as he headed up Fleet Street to Ludgate. Surrounded, as Wyatt had been in the same streets half a century before, Essex and his men defended themselves with their swords, and in the melee several men were killed.
Essex and Southampton cut their way through to the river, found a boat, and rowed back to Essex House. They barricaded themselves in, refusing to surrender until guns were brought from the Tower armoury and fired a warning cannonade. At last, the earls bowed to the inevitable and gave up. The confused rebellion had lasted less than twelve hours. Soon, in the dead of night, Essex and Southampton were back on the river – this time being rowed downstream to the Tower. On arrival at Traitor’s Gate, Essex was taken to his new quarters: the tower in the north-west corner of the fortress behind St Pet
er ad Vincula that ever since has been called the Devereux Tower in honour of Essex’s family name. Southampton’s first thought was for his wife, and in a hurried note he told her of the failure of their revolt:
Sweet hart I doute not but you shall heare ere my letter come to you of the misfortune of your frendes, bee not to[o] apprehensive of it, for gods will must be donn, & what is allotted to us by destiny cannot bee avoyded …
The queen had had a narrow escape. London was placed under martial law and Lord Thomas Howard was made constable of the Tower, charged with guarding the two earls. Eighty of Essex’s followers were examined at the Tower – none too gently – to provide the necessary evidence, and on 19 February the earls were rowed to Westminster Hall to stand trial.
Tried by their peers, the earls sat within a square of benches surrounded by their judges. Essex was dignified in black, while Southampton wore a gown with long sleeves in which his trembling hands were concealed. In an eloquently vicious speech, the chief prosecutor, Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke, called attention to the earl’s black garb, saying that if he had succeeded he would have worn ‘a gown of blood’. ‘It hath pleased God,’ Coke concluded, ‘that he who sought to be Robert the First of England should be Robert the last of his earldom.’ Essex replied that Coke’s eloquence was ‘the trade and talent of those who value themselves upon their skill in pleading inocent men out of their lives’. The trial was full of high drama. At one point, the tiny, hunchbacked figure of Robert Cecil appeared to deny Essex’s claim that he had plotted to put the Infanta of Spain on England’s throne. At another, Southampton claimed unconvincingly that he had tried to talk Essex out of their enterprise.
At last, as the wintry shadows gathered in the ancient hall, and candles were lit, the lords called for food, beer and baccy. The French ambassador, Monsieur de Boissise, wrote scornfully:
