The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  I turned to face the glass again, and I was pleased by what I could see. Even my face seemed to have more contours to it – or perhaps it was just that, in all those years, I’d taken care never to look too clearly. I took the ruff from its box – yes, I’d bought that too, though only a small one – and pinned it to the collar, unhandily. It framed my face like the petals do the gold heart of a daisy. Tentatively, I fluffed a bit of my hair forwards onto my cheek. It was still boy-short, of course, but it would grow eventually. For the first time, I dared to see a future ahead of me.

  The light coming in through the window seemed to put courage into me. The gillyflowers the queen wore weren’t in season, but I’d buy violets from the flower woman that would smell as sweetly. I’d tuck them into my bodice – the queen wore her flowers for symbols, but I wanted ornament, modesty. But when I went to St Helen’s churchyard, to find Martin Slaughter, I would be as fine as she.

  General Historical Note

  The story of a plea, sent by Essex on the eve of his execution but kept from the queen, was first suggested in 1620 in John Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case. It was however later in the seventeenth century when, in the anonymous A Secret History of the Most Renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, the story of the ring was established in the form we know it today. Essex, so the story goes, passed the ring out of the window to a boy instructed to take it to Philadelphia, Lady Scrope, who would get it to the queen. Alas, the boy gave it instead to Lady Scrope’s sister, the Countess of Nottingham, who physically resembled her, but whose husband the Lord Admiral was Essex’s mortal enemy.

  The countess in malice kept the ring, confessing to Elizabeth only on her deathbed. ‘God may forgive you, but I never can’, said Elizabeth bitterly. The tale never went away – features largely, indeed, in the 1939 Bette Davis and Errol Flynn film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, though by this point the Countess of Nottingham no longer figures, as she had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Essex’s discarded and vengeful lover. The ring itself – gold, with a cameo of the queen – can still be seen in the Chapter House Museum of Westminster Abbey. But sadly, for all its long history, its near-contemporary credentials, the tale is surely apocryphal – no more than a romantic story.

  The Countess of Nottingham was known to be in Chelsea in January 1601: there is no evidence she even returned to court in February. Moreover, two years later, grief at the countess’s death was believed to have played a part in hastening the queen’s own end. That cold the countess suffered in January 1601, a cold her husband mentioned in a letter to Cecil, may have marked the start of a long decline. She died on 24 February 1603, to be followed within weeks by her royal mistress. The news of Elizabeth’s death was carried north to Scotland by the countess’ brother, Robert Carey, who bore with him by way of proof a ring originally sent by King James, and thrown to Carey out of a window by his sister Lady Scrope. Another token ring, another story.

  The execution of the Earl of Essex had marked a further decline in Elizabeth’s already failing fortunes. Her godson John Harington observed how, alone, she would pace her rooms in rage, thrusting into the arras with a rusty sword. For their part the people, it was said ‘were weary of an old woman’s governance’. The question of Elizabeth’s successor, with the frantic canvassing of more than a dozen possibilities, had long been a topic of secret speculation, but though few knew it, Essex’s death was a turning point. Literally within weeks, Robert Cecil (aided by details of Essex’s correspondence with Scotland, wrung under interrogation from Henry Cuffe) took advantage of his rival’s disappearance from the scene to begin his own negotiations with King James, always in the deepest secrecy.

  Cecil kept his loyalty: the condition for his support was that Elizabeth should not be menaced or deposed during her lifetime. But when she finally died James – belying the widespread fears of confusion and civil war – succeeded to the throne of England ‘without so many ripples as would shake a cockle boat’, as Cecil himself put it complacently. In gratitude for his vital part in these negotiations, the new king would eventually create Cecil Earl of Salisbury. The Earl of Nottingham, too, prospered under the new regime. Within months of his wife’s death he had married again, a woman forty years his junior, and was getting something of a reputation as a court dandy. But while Nottingham lived to be almost ninety, Robert Cecil died before he was fifty – due in large part, his contemporaries believed, to his unhealthy habit of eating fruit every day.

  Private letters show Cecil’s grief at the loss of his wife and sensitivity to his disability. The abortive progress of Essex’s rebellion is of course a matter of historical record, but so too are all the incidents I describe in the course of his turbulent relationship with the queen, and with the Cecils. Even the thunderstorm in which Essex set off for Ireland is a matter of historical record, as is the queen’s visit to the dying Burghley, while Essex’s one-man Garter ceremony – even the public comment about the wicked ways of London watermen, even the touring theatrical manager Henslowe’s concerns about his spinach and his stockings, back home – survive in letters and diaries. Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Essex’s father and most notably Francis Bacon were indeed among the many who wrote manuals of advice, from which the maxims I use were taken. Wherever possible, and especially on public occasions, I have tried to use the recorded speech of these very public personalities, while letters quoted are drawn from actuality.

  The government’s role in the demonising of Henry Cuffe is explored in Lacey Baldwin Smith’s book Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia. Smith suggests that Essex’s rebellion was reconfigured into a more acceptable stereotype by making it less a reaction to the pressures of those fraught years, or an unpardonable lapse into folly by one of England’s premier peers, than the results of evil counsel. The fruit of a base man’s ‘motiveless malignity’, in the term Shakespeare used to describe Iago just three years later. Cuffe was sentenced to death in March 1601 and, unlike his employer, suffered the full horror of hanging, drawing and quartering, protesting to the last that he had been victimised.

  As concerns other details of the plots I suggest, the more one reads about the late sixteenth century and its infinitely complex network of spies and informers, the more almost anything comes to seem a possibility. Francis Bacon’s role in Essex’s downfall was a cause of widespread discussion and debate even at the time, with allegations he had been poisoning the queen’s ear against his former patron, and disapproval of the double role – as Essex’s advisor, and as his accuser – that he seemed to play. The suggestion of the leaked letters, however, is my own – though, again, the trade in such potential sources of spin was well established: at one point Francis Bacon was known to have been writing letters purportedly exchanged between Essex and Francis’ brother Anthony, the real purpose of which was to be displayed to Elizabeth as ‘evidence’ of Essex’s fidelity.

  Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a follower of Essex’s and a cousin of Ralegh’s (and, later, a founding father of the state of Maine) did indeed speak against the rebels moving on the court as well as the City and did, on the day before the rebellion, hold a meeting with Ralegh. We cannot know exactly what loyalties Sir Ferdinando carried to that meeting, nor exactly what was said there: though it is recorded that Gorges told (warned?) Ralegh that Essex had been ‘making his house into a Guard’; and went away to inform the earl that he was in danger, a statement that could only foster Essex’s suspicions. Gorges did indeed release the hostages contrary to Essex’s orders and subsequently gave evidence against Essex at his trial. Nonetheless, in the world of sober fact it is certainly possible that he was merely half-hearted in Essex’s cause rather than actively suborned against him. I might offer a putative apology to him, as to Bacon, for aspersions cast, if it were not that the latter at least fits very uneasily into the ‘injured innocent’ category.

  The role played by Jeanne is obviously invented with her character, but that apart, there are on
ly a few, and I hope comparatively minor, ways in which I am aware actually of having contradicted the known historical record. The ‘Rainbow’ portrait of Elizabeth that Jeanne describes was probably painted a few months after the end of this story. Elizabeth did not visit Theobalds in the last summers of her reign: her travels in those years took her mostly south of the Thames. Her comportment there was much as I have described, but her last journey northwards had taken place a few years before. After that, Theobalds had to wait for a royal visit until 1603 when King James stayed there on his journey south, liking it so well he took it from Cecil in exchange for Hatfield, where another great garden, designed by the Tradescants, would soon be underway. In July 1600, however, Theobalds was visited by one Baron Waldenstein, whose diary records its many splendours – now, alas, long passed away.

  The Cecils’ passion for their gardens is in general well documented. In 1597 Lord Burghley gave Elizabeth a copy of John Gerard’s revolutionary Herbal, with eighteen hundred hand-painted colour illustrations. The collection and classification of new plants was a great obsession of the age: Anna Pavord’s Searching for Order paints a riveting picture of the work of men like Matthias de l’Obel (writing as Lobelius: no prizes for guessing to which flower he gave his name); of John Gerard, whom Pavord describes as ‘a plagiarist and a crook’; and indeed even of the Twickenham nursery gardener Richard Pointer.

  On a more practical level these decades marked a great turning point in garden history: Francis Bacon was only one of many who wrote on the subject. Anyone wishing to monitor the seasonal progress of the gardens described here, however, should remember that while on the one hand England was at this point in the grip of the ‘little Ice Age’ of particularly hard winters, the English calendar had not yet been reformed on European lines, so that Jeanne’s February 1 would correspond to our February 11.

  The name Martin Slaughter features several times in the theatrical records of the period. I first encountered it as that of an actor fined for having falsely represented himself as belonging to a licensed theatrical company. But an actor variously called Martin Slater or Slawghter also figures extensively in the documents of the Rose playhouse, as a sharer or partner in the Admiral’s Men, the company patronised by the countess’ husband, Charles Howard: numbered in the first list of the company in 1594, quitting them in 1597 taking with him five books of plays, which had later to be bought back from him. In 1599 he was in Scotland, with an English troupe.

  In an age when everyone traded information, the employment of actors in espionage circles was not uncommon, as the career of Christopher Marlowe shows. It might be though that Jeanne’s cross-dressing is likewise a tradition from the world of the stage and only from that fantastical world: we are all, of course, familiar with it from Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, the conceit of the young woman who dons boys’ breeches can be seen in a number of real life cases from the ‘Roaring Girl’ Moll Cutpurse to the maid of honour Mary Fitton. I first came across it in writing about Arbella Stuart, one of Elizabeth’s potential successors, who donned male dress to flee abroad when her cousin King James forbade her to marry – but that too is another story.

  Elizabeth and Essex

  The relationship of Elizabeth I with the Earl of Essex has always baffled historians: the more so, perhaps, because it does not show either participant in the most attractive light. In 1928 Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex was the last book to be written specifically about the subject and though Strachey’s analysis is very much of its era, it is a little hard to claim that we have moved on in any real degree. Recent work done on Essex’s political role in the decade one historian calls ‘the nasty nineties’ has had little impact on our understanding of his private relationship with the queen. With all our supposed new elasticity in terms of personal relations, this is still a case that both worries and intrigues today. Had I been writing a biography rather than a novel about Elizabeth and Essex, I would of course have paid far more attention to the political part played by other faces and other forces than I have been able to do here; and perhaps that might have cast an alternative light on the events that ushered in the seventeenth century. But I do not think I would have understood the personal situation any differently.

  It was Elizabeth’s great favourite the Earl of Leicester – Essex’s stepfather – who introduced the teenaged Essex into Elizabeth’s favour; he was still only twenty when, in 1587, he was given Leicester’s old job of Master of the Horse, which meant he was by her side whenever she rode out. Perhaps Leicester, now a white-haired fifty-five, knew he himself could no longer offer Elizabeth the warm flirtations they had once enjoyed: perhaps he wanted to provide a counter-attraction to the dashing new Captain of the Queen’s Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. If so the device worked: ‘At night’, it was soon reported, ‘my Lord is at cards, or one game and another with her, that he cometh not to his own lodging till birds sing in the morning.’ Essex was the queen’s ‘wild horse’, whose very gaucheries may have seemed fresh to a palate jaded of more practised flattery. ‘Very comely and beautiful’, as an attendant reported to his onetime guardian Lord Burghley, he was tall and intense, at once educated and athletic – the model, probably, for Nicholas Hilliard’s swooningly romantic ‘Young Man Amongst Roses’. But a prominence based on his personal attractions was never going to satisfy a man who saw himself as England’s champion – as the last representative of the old code of chivalry.

  Over the next few years chance favoured him – or, just possibly, injured him, in allowing him to climb faster and further than his experience and his abilities really justified. The Earl of Leicester died in 1588, within weeks of the Armada victory, leaving Elizabeth so distraught she reputedly locked herself in her room, until her councillors were forced to break down the door. Leaving her, perhaps, more inclined than ever towards Leicester’s stepson and surrogate. The stage was being emptied: the queen’s chancellor Sir Walter Mildmay died in 1589, her spymaster Walsingham in 1590, Christopher Hatton in 1591 while in 1592 Ralegh was disgraced for having made an illicit marriage with one of the queen’s maids of honour. (Essex, in 1590, had married the widow of his hero Sir Philip Sidney, but the queen had forgiven him – the more readily, perhaps, since he did not allow marriage to cramp his sexual style.) By 1591 it was already being said that Essex was ‘like enough, if he had a few more years, to carry Leicester’s credit and sway’.

  In 1591 and 1592 he persuaded Elizabeth to allow him to command the forces sent to help the Protestant Henri IV against the Catholic League. In 1593 he became a Privy Councillor: greedily gulping down influence and honours, in the memorable image of one contemporary, ‘like a child sucking on an over-uberous nurse’. Even Burghley, early in the decade, seemed to be hitching his son Robert’s wagon to this rising star. Yet with all this in 1592 Essex was described as being ‘of all others, the most discontented person of the Court’: convinced, as he complained to his sister, that ‘I live in a place where I am hourly conspired against and practised upon’. He was already in indirect communication with King James of Scotland.

  He was far from alone in his concern for the country’s future – and his own. Elizabeth had been right to fear, as she always had done, that men’s eyes would come to turn towards the rising sun. It is, of course, only hindsight that tells us the queen survived until 1603: as far back as 1589 Essex had been writing that her death could not be far away, and anyone who has ever sat by a protracted deathbed knows how fraying to the nerves the experience can be. These were the years of intense speculation about the succession: speculation all the more desperate for the fact that it had to be conducted in the utmost secrecy. These were the years of debate – in which Essex would play a controversial part – about the very nature of monarchy. And perhaps some of Essex’s frantic ambition might be put down to the spirit of the times – the fin de siècle atmosphere as the end approached, both of the queen’s reign and of the long Tudor century.

  The fifteen years between the Armada and the qu
een’s death make up the bulk of what is now often spoken of as Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’; in which her grip on the country did begin to slacken, in which her council did seize the initiative. The queen’s urge towards vacillation which had once served her so well had now become a disability. She, who had always encouraged and manipulated a measure of competition among her courtiers and advisors, now feared that if her councillors united she would be unable to stand against them. To Essex, her hesitation was anathema. ‘I shall never’, he wrote, ‘do her service but against her will.’

  If we are to see Essex as a man of vision (albeit a vision, aristocratic and militaristic, that we do not admire today) and a man of principle (albeit living proof that the first thing a principle does really is to kill somebody) then his very strengths must have made the situation more frustrating. In so far as he was, as John Guy has called him, ‘dazzling but paranoid’, it can only have fostered his paranoia. Josephine Ross in her book on the queen’s suitors, The Men Who would be King, points out that in many ways, Essex resembled Elizabeth’s first love Thomas Seymour in his vaulting ambition and his death on the block: another man of ‘much wit and little judgement’.

  The Cadiz expedition against Spain in 1596 represented the height of his reputation as a soldier, but the conduct of the expedition, and the division of the glory, was a source of controversy. From the end of that year the court was increasingly divided into factions. One Lord Grey wrote of how Essex demanded he should choose sides: to be friendly towards Robert Cecil was to be his, Essex’s, enemy. The earl’s relationship with the Cecils had not been one of simple uninterrupted hostility, at least during old Lord Burghley’s lifetime; nonetheless he clashed with them over everything from control of patronage to foreign policy. And soon Essex’s anger seemed to encompass not only the Cecils, but almost everyone in a world which was failing to give him the influence he felt his due. By the time he went to Ireland, one observer wrote, Essex’s greatness ‘was now judged to depend as much on her Majesty’s fear of him as her love to him’. His appointment there was a poisoned chalice, as he knew himself, but he was trapped by his own insistence on his role as England’s warrior: ‘tied by my own reputation to use no tergiversation’. His unscheduled return from Ireland is well documented – how he caught the queen ‘newly up, with her hair about her face’ – as is his cruel comment that her conditions were ‘as crooked as her carcase’. Elizabeth’s comments were almost as telling: she said to Sir John Harington that ‘by God’s son, I am no queen; that man is above me’; and declared she would not renew his lucrative grant of the duties on sweet wines because ‘corrupt bodies, the more you feed them, the more hurt they do’. But the earl still kept the people’s sympathy. Though the exact site of his imprisonment in the Tower is not known (the ‘Devereux Tower’ actually takes its name from another source), it is recorded that two headsmen were secretly ordered for his execution ‘because if one faint the other may perform it’.