The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  It was remarked that the good-looking West Country gentleman Raleigh had “gotten the Queen’s ear in a trice” after he strode into court life. He was just the kind of man who had always fascinated her, a virile, hardy adventurer who was also artistic and intellectual in his tastes, and he shared Elizabeth’s love of magnificently showy clothes, in which he far outsparkled such former favorites as Hatton. Elizabeth was fascinated by him. A friend of Spenser and Marlowe, he too was a poet, and he wooed the queen with verses celebrating her loveliness, depicting her as the Moon Goddess, and delicately dismissing the question of her age in such lines as

  Time wears her not, she doth his chariot guide,

  Mortality below her orb is placed.

  By her the virtue of the stars down slide,

  In her is virtue’s perfect image cast.

  In his poetry she was half divine, but she was a woman too, one whose feminine beauties had set his pulses racing with desire:

  Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire,

  Those crispéd hairs, which hold my heart in chains,

  Those dainty hands, which conquered my desire,

  That wit, which of my thoughts doth hold the reins.

  His words reassured her that it was not her sovereignty alone that gave her power, but her own beauties of body and mind:

  O eyes that pierce our hearts without remorse,

  O hairs of right that wear a royal crown,

  O hands that conquer more than Caesar’s force,

  O wit that turns huge kingdoms upside down.

  Raleigh was a worthy admirer, and the queen flirted delightedly with him. In an obvious play on his christian name she nicknamed him “Water,” which prompted poor jealous Hatton to send her a little gold bucket, as a pointed gesture. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the more admirers she had, looking languishingly at her and glowering at one another, the merrier; she had learned long ago, in the days of her serious courtships, that the presence of a rival did much to heighten a suitor’s desire for her. She exulted in the knowledge that, despite her advancing age and dwindling charms, she could still rouse jealousy in her gallants; the total sterility of these postmenopausal love dealings did nothing to lessen their intensity. Now that her failure to marry had been transformed from a fault into a virtue, Elizabeth could indulge her craving for the amorous pursuit without the fear of being captured, for all could see the noli me tangere that was “graven in diamonds, in letters plain” about her inviolable beauties.

  Raleigh became sickened with the sham by the time the queen had done with him. In 1592, when the queen was nearly sixty and he was in his late thirties, he committed the offense of loving and marrying one of her Maids-of-Honour. The punishment that had nearly fallen on Leicester in the same situation was meted out to Raleigh—he and his wife were sent to the Tower for having married without royal leave. The disgraced favorite poured out a highly colored version of his feelings, in hopes that the letter would come to the queen’s eyes; hearing that she was going away on a royal progress through the realm, he wrote,

  My heart was never broken until this day, that the Queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet near at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less, but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph, sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel, sometime playing like Orpheus; behold! the sorrow of this world, once amiss hath bereaved me of all.

  But he had lost his hold over Elizabeth’s changeable fancy. He wrote in a very different style in his poem “The Lie,” expressing a fallen courtier’s resentment and defiance:

  Tell potentates they live

  Acting on others’ action

  Not loved unless they give,

  Not strong but by affection.

  If potenates reply,

  Give potentates the lie.

  A contemporary wrote that Raleigh was one whom Fortune picked out to use as a tennis ball, “for she tossed him up of nothing, and to and fro to greatness, and from thence down.” Court favorites were vulnerable beings.

  Only Leicester weathered all storms to retain his supreme place in Elizabeth’s heart. There was an essential reality about their relationship that set it apart from all her other courtships and flirtations. Leicester was always uneasy at the emergence of a rival for the Queen’s favor, just as he had feared and schemed through each of her political courtships, but she never lost her need for him, and no quarrel or jealousy could destroy the tender intimacy that had grown up between them over the years. Real affection, not merely an elaborate pretense of stylized adoration, shone through the letters that passed between them. “Rob,” Elizabeth wrote fondly in July 1586, when he was serving abroad as Governor of the Netherlands, “I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month, but you must needs take things as they come in my head, though order be left behind me.” She concluded lovingly, “Now will I end, that do imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell ÔÔ . . . With my million and legion of thanks, for all your pains and cares. As you know, ever the same, E.R.” Leicester had then little time left in which to take “pains and cares” in serving his queen. The fateful year 1588 saw the end of the long love affair between Elizabeth and the most persistent of all her suitors. Within weeks of the glorious defeat of the Armada launched against her by another man who had once been a suitor to the queen, her beloved Robin had left her side forever. This time she could not call him back.

  He had been ill, and he had gone to take the waters at Buxton; from Rycote, on August 29, he wrote to the queen whom he had for so many years hoped to make his wife. The vigorous, ambitious young Robert Dudley, who had first taken up the pursuit when Elizabeth was a slender, graceful girl, was stout and white bearded now, but his thoughts and his handwriting were still clear as he addressed her for the last time:

  I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to pardon your old servant to be thus bold in sending to know how my gracious Lady doth, and what ease of her late pain she finds, being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for, for her to have good health and long life. For my poor case, I continue still your medicine, and find it amends much better than any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath, with the continuance of my wonted prayer for Your Majesty’s most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your feet. From your old lodging at Rycote, this Thursday morning, ready to take on my journey, by Your Majesty’s most faithful and obedient servant, R. Leicester.

  He died six days later. Leicester’s letter from Rycote, simple as it was, was more precious to Elizabeth than all the florid effusions of her other wooers; she kept it in a casket by her bed for the rest of her life. After her own death, in 1603, it was discovered. Pathetically, she had written on it, “His last letter.”

  Her grief at Leicester’s death was intense. She shut herself away from the world in her despair, while England rang with rejoicings at the defeat of the Armada, and she did not come out until Burghley finally had the door of the chamber forced open. Elizabeth had always clung tenaciously to her old and trusted friends, and the loss of her Robin, the dearest of them all, left her desolate. Time and again she had flirted with the idea of marrying him, pretending, to ambassadors and to herself, that she only refrained from doing so because he was her subject and her inferior; perhaps in the first dark distress of his death she wished with all her heart that she had married him, and that she might now have had a son of his, to be her comfort and her successor. By rejecting all her suitors she had protected herself from the horrors that her childhood had taught her to expect from marriage, but she had made hersel
f vulnerable to loneliness. Lacking husband, child, or lover in the fullest sense of the word, she could only grasp at artificial substitutes for those natural sources of emotional satisfaction. Leicester had, within the limitations that her personality imposed, fulfilled the role of a husband for Elizabeth; in her relationship with his stepson, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, she found a curious outlet for a measure of her dormant maternal feelings.

  Essex had made his debut at court in 1587, as Leicester’s protégé; if Leicester had hoped to see the boy outshine bright Raleigh he was well satisfied. Essex was in his twentieth year, but he had already been to the wars, fighting valiantly at Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney was killed, and besides strength and courage he possessed the magnetic qualities of beauty, wit, and charm. With his height, his thick curling hair, and his red lips he drew interested glances from all the women of the court, and Elizabeth’s keen eyes were on him at once. Soon he was riding with her, sitting by her; soon he was privileged to be the subject of the scandalous whispers that had always surrounded the Virgin Queen. “At night,” wrote one of Essex’s servants, “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.” Strolling back through the quiet galleries of the palace as the dawn broke, Essex must have been whistling like the birds, in the exhilaration of youth and hope and confidence, knowing that the elderly woman whom he had just left had power over all England, and that he was gaining power over her.

  Significantly, he was given the post of Master of the Horse when Leicester vacated it; it seemed that young Essex was destined to wear the mantle of his stepfather. He was anxious to do so. He showed himself flatteringly belligerent towards his rivals for the Queen’s affection; during the winter that followed the defeat of the Armada and Leicester’s death, Essex twice hazarded his life in jealous quarrels with other royal favorites. In the tiltyard one day, handsome Sir Charles Blount acquitted himself superbly, and Elizabeth, who loved to preside at the jousts, as though the contenders were doing battle for her smiles, graciously sent the young man the reward of a golden queen from her set of chessmen. Elated, Blount obeyed the dictates of courtly tradition by tying the favor ostentatiously to his arm; when Essex spied this proof of the queen’s interest he was furious. “Now I perceive every fool must have a favour,” he sneered, at which, not surprisingly, Blount challenged him to a duel. Instead of emerging as a contemptuous victor, Essex found himself wounded in the thigh, and, still more galling, Elizabeth was not sorry. “By God’s death,” she said sharply, “it was fit that some one or other should take him down and teach him better manners, otherwise there will be no rule with him.” The lesson in manners was not sufficient, however, for within a month Essex had challenged Raleigh to fight over some minor dispute. Dangerous as such aggression could be among her courtiers, Elizabeth was no doubt secretly gratified that the handsomest young men at court should be moved to fight over her. She had yet to discover the truth of her words, that there would never be any ruling Essex.

  Like a wayward but lovable child he was forgiven again and again when his reckless pride and troublesome personality led him to flout authority. He was greedy for power just as Elizabeth was greedy for admiration; in their strange relationship each sought to feed on the other, and each, ultimately, was left hungry. Fascinated as she was by him, Elizabeth gave way to him and put up with his escapades from the outset. When, in defiance of her express refusal of permission, he slipped away to join Drake’s expedition in 1589, she summoned him back with royal anger. “Our great favours bestowed on you without deserts, hath drawn you thus to neglect and forget your duty,” she trounced him, but once he was back by her side her anger could not last. In 1591, when he begged for hours to be permitted to command the force bound for France, Elizabeth finally gave him his way. She forgave him when, against all her known wishes, he bestowed knighthoods upon his followers. And Essex, when kept in good humor, rewarded her with exquisitely wrought proofs of his love. From France he wrote,

  The two windows of your Privy Chamber shall be the poles of my sphere, where, as long as Your Majesty shall please to have me, I am fixed and unmoveable. When Your Majesty thinks that heaven too good for me, I will not fall like a star, but be consumed like a vapour by the sun that drew me up to such a height. While Your Majesty gives me leave to say I love you, my fortune is as my affection, unmatchable. If ever you deny me that liberty, you may end my life, but never shake my constancy, for were the sweetness of your nature turned into the greatest bitterness that could be, it is not in your power, as great a Queen as you are, to make me love you less.

  There was no doubt that Essex was a man of remarkable talents, for all his faults. Elizabeth was not merely attracted by his looks and his challenging charm, she also recognized in him talents that should be fostered. The great statesmen of the older generation were dying off; with maturity, Essex might climb high to become a brilliant servant of the realm. But, prudent in all matters of state, Elizabeth steadfastly resisted his attempts at political maneuvering, blocking one after another of his attempts to have his own candidates appointed to public offices. There was no way in which she could stem the flood tide of Essex’s ambition, however. Reckless, self-confident, heedless of warnings, Essex in many ways resembled the first man to whom Elizabeth had ever been attracted, her first real suitor, Thomas Seymour. By coincidence, he, like Seymour, was to hold the post of Master of the Ordnance. He, like Seymour, could never be content with a measure of success, a portion of power, but was driven always to strive for more, until, in striving, he would lose everything he had. Essex, like Seymour, would follow blindly the path of pride and ambition, until it ended at the block.

  Essex’s wilfullness made his moments of adoring compliance all the sweeter for Elizabeth; again and again she forgave him for his offenses, and brought him back to her side. But the dangerous aspects of his nature were not to be quelled. When the appointment of a new lord deputy for Ireland was being discussed, in the summer of 1598, Essex pressed to have a friend of the Cecil faction appointed. The reason for his nomination was obvious—the man was known to be his enemy, and he was anxious to have him removed to a distant and dangerous post. Smiling, the queen refused the suggestion, but instead of yielding, Essex became angry. He argued vehemently, until Elizabeth was thoroughly annoyed with him. In the petulant gesture of a thwarted child, Essex turned his back on his sovereign; the queen, furious at the insult, boxed his ears resoundingly, and told him to get out. At that Essex lost control entirely; in an instant his hand was on his sword.

  Such an action constituted the most blatant transgression of every rule and principle of a subject’s conduct towards his sovereign. Essex was shouting that he would not endure such treatment from anyone, would not have suffered it even at Henry VIII’s hands; such violent insolence could only be answered by an extreme form of punishment. As the news of the young earl’s incredible temerity spread, his enemies must have rejoiced, sure that this display must damn him at last in the eyes of the queen. But Elizabeth’s righteous wrath as a sovereign was, again, less potent than her intense feelings for Essex. A period of disgraced retirement to the country followed; soon Elizabeth wanted him back. By the autumn he had returned to court and the queen’s favor, and by the following spring, 1599, he was riding out of London at the head of a mighty army as Elizabeth’s commander in Ireland, bound for fresh glories.

  He was too volatile and irresponsible even to make a success of his military career. As his failures in Ireland mounted, he became increasingly fearful for his position in Elizabeth’s heart. He determined, in flagrant disobedience of his instructions, to return unexpectedly to court, where he could woo the queen again with his fair looks and persuasive words, and rekindle the heat of her feelings for him. On September 24 he left for England; on the morning of September 28 he reached Nonsuch Palace. Once there, he did not pause. Without stopping even to change his rumpled, sweat-stained clothes or take off his muddied boot
s, he strode past the startled attendants to burst unceremoniously into Elizabeth’s bedchamber. There he fell to his knees to kiss her hand; he raised his eyes; he was looking at an old woman not yet attired for the day, bare alike of the trappings of regality and of femininity. The sixty-six-year-old woman at whose feet he knelt had not yet put on her “crisped hairs,” the great wig of red-golden curls, nor her alabaster complexion, nor the massive ruff that should stand out like a fine halo about her face, nor the sparkling jewels that should lend their radiance to her as she moved. She sat there, startled, a plain old woman.

  The queen was calm, but this time Essex had gone too far. His disobedience in returning without permission was an offense not merely against herself but against the security of her realm. Not all his charm could disguise the infamy of his actions in Ireland, and in a profoundly significant phrase, Elizabeth swore that if it had been her own son who had transgressed so in his conduct, she would have committed him to the highest tower in England. Yet still she was not severe. He was reprieved from state trial, and judged instead by a special commission, after which he was confined in relative comfort and suspended from his offices. Elizabeth still believed that he might be reformed through chastisement. The smell of treason that lingered about his handsome form was still faint enough to be covered by more pleasing scents.

  Through the spring and summer of 1600 Essex remained in confinement. Elizabeth had been merciful to him, and she missed him, but his offenses were too great for him to be allowed to return to court. Essex sought to recapture her favor with mounting anxiety as the year drew on. He put his talent for writing sweet, glib letters to good use: “Haste, paper, to that happy presence whence only unhappy I am banished,” he wrote in September, “kiss that fair correcting hand which lays now plasters to my lighter hurts, but to my greater wound applieth nothing. Say thou comest from shaming, languishing, despairing SX.” The boyish impetuousness of the fluent phrases and the punning signature concealed agonies of worry. The lease of his principal source of income, the duties on sweet wines, was about to run out; if the queen chose not to renew it he would be in heavy financial difficulties. This time Elizabeth was determined to have the ruling of him. She chose not to renew it. Deprived of his income, debarred from her presence, Essex turned in the fury of his rash pride to a desperate alternative—open rebellion.