The true test of the old queen's acuity, of course, was her ability to come to terms with affairs of state. Here he found her to be not only shrewd, calculating and utterly statesmanlike, but minutely informed about recent events and conditions in many parts of Europe. She had spies everywhere, she confided, and especially in the port cities of Spain. She paid them well, but expected complete loyalty and diligence from them. "If they failed to send true advertisement of all that was being
done," she remarked simply, "she caused them to be hanged." De Maisse had occasion to see for himself how the queen insisted on being the first to be informed. A courier arrived at Whitehall bringing letters from France. When he made the mistake of giving the ambassador his letters before delivering Elizabeth's, she made her extreme displeasure known and "caused him to be reprimanded for it."
The business on which he had come to England was urgent, yet De Maisse found himself staying on, week after week, without being able to conclude it. Elizabeth beguiled him by her digressions—which he knew full well were meant to delay the negotiations as well as being "her natural way." They talked of the classics ("she knows all the ancient histories, and one can say nothing to her on which she will not make some apt comment"), of her pleasure in dancing and music (she had some sixty musicians, she said, watching her maids dance and "following the cadence with her head, hand and foot"), of how she still liked to play the virginals and how, in her youth, she had "known six languages better than her own."
"A great virtue in a princess," the Frenchman commented at this.
"It is no marvel to teach a woman to talk," the queen shot back wryly. "It were far harder to teach her to hold her tongue."
They talked of religion, with Elizabeth firmly denying as "malice and lying" all the stories then current about her in Rome. It was not true, she insisted with vehemence, that she had ordered a house burned to the ground knowing that over a hundred Catholic women were taking refuge there; in fact there had been only "one or two" women. It was also an absolute falsehood that she had ordered Catholics to be wrapped in bearskins and baited by dogs; the Roman spies sent to London to touch the bears and see for themselves could confirm this. No matter what scandalmongers said, she had never allowed any Catholic to be harmed who was not a traitor, and no one could condemn her for ordering traitors to be punished. Her conscience was "clear and transparent as crystal," she said, sounding very much like her father when pressed on a sensitive topic. And echoing a famous saying of her sister's, she added "that she wished they could see the inside of her heart in a picture and that it was at Rome, so that all could see it as it was."
Christmas came and went, with its elaborate feasting and music and merriment. No doubt the queen danced with Essex—after displays of pique on both sides, they made up their quarrel—and there was entertainment by companies of actors, among them the lord chamberlain's company with its actor and playwright Will Shakespeare.
In the third week of the new year De Maisse pressed for definitive word to take back to King Henry. What did Elizabeth mean to do about the war
with Spain, and, more specifically, about the English troops she had in France?
The subject galled her. 'They were but thieves and ought to hang," she said, becoming so angry that the ambassador was alarmed. Seeming to forget his presence she ranted on about the worthless soldiers, lisping through her bad teeth and muttering so that he could not make out her words. She had already sent for them to return home, she told him when she became calmer. But they both knew that the larger issue of peacemaking hung over them, unaddressed and unsettling. King Henry was desperate to make peace with Philip II, yet Elizabeth, peace-loving though she was, had to urge him to continue the war—even if it had to be, as in the past, at her expense. She had no choice. Only months before a vast fleet of Spanish ships had sailed against England, and though bad weather had forced it back to its home port there were reports of a fresh fleet being prepared.
She called De Maisse to come closer, and talked to him in a low voice so that none of her advisers could hear. She gave him a private message to take to King Henry. She said to tell him that she was an old woman, and capable of nothing on her own; her nobles were unstable, and changeable in their moods and opinions, and her ordinary subjects, no matter how loudly they might swear their love for her, were nonetheless fickle and inconstant.
She had to fear everything, Elizabeth went on—hostile Parliaments, a depleted treasury, a bitter and war-weary populace that had already sent twenty thousand men to die in the wars abroad. At this she quoted an appropriate Latin tag, and looked "greatly sorrowful."
No one knew King Philip better than she did. In fact she had talked of him often to De Maisse, telling the ambassador again and again how over the years he had sent fifteen assassins to England to kill her. Yet her spies now told her that Philip was little more than a walking corpse, being kept alive "by force" by his physicians and by his daughter who nursed and fed him.
If only King Henry would wait. Only a few months more, at the most, and the old enemy would be dead.
The message would not please his master, De Maisse knew, nor would it stop him from making peace with Spain. King Henry would desert Queen Elizabeth, and there would be a diplomatic rupture. He cannot have enjoyed taking his leave of the great queen with this knowledge weighing on his mind, but her graciousness lightened the parting. She talked briefly of personal things, saying how pleased she was to have befriended De Maisse and complimenting him on his diplomatic finesse.
She embraced him twice, and then embraced the gentlemen who attended him, charming them all as she had on the first audience.
Then she turned to Admiral Howard, who had come up to join the group, and commanded him to give De Maisse a good swift ship for his homeward voyage. Her last words were a dark jest. Watch out, she warned with a laugh, that the Spaniards don't take you prisoner.
Fly from her, Age; sleep, Time,
before her throne; Our strongest wall falls down,
when she is gone.
T
he government had run perilously short of money by 1600, and Elizabeth, calculating the value of the heirlooms in her Jewel House, was forced to lay sentiment aside and pawn her family treasures.
Many of them had been her father's. There was his gold admiral's whistle, which he had once worn when he strode the deck of his flagship the Great Harry, wearing a sailor's uniform of cloth of gold. There were his thick gold bracelets—far too large for his daughter's reed-thin wrists— enameled with his motto, Dieu et mon droit. There was his great seal, and the gold chains he had worn for the annual feasts of the Garter Knights, and even two pairs of spectacles, "garnished with gold," which he had worn when he read his books and perused his documents. These and other precious things—jeweled crucifixes, objects in Venice gold, an enormous sapphire (had it belonged to Anne Boleyn?) "in the shape of a heart, with a hole in it"—brought nearly ten thousand pounds from the merchants who bid on them, while the "coarse rubbish" that remained was sent to the mint to be melted down into gold and silver coins.
There was simply not enough income to cover the painfully high expenses of war. "The receipts are so short of the issue," wrote Robert Cecil, "that my hair stands upright to think of it." It was not only that the costs of government were greatly swollen by bills for weaponry and military
393
provisions, and by the unending demands for soldiers' pay, it was also that severe inflation had caused the actual value of crown revenues to shrink. Parliamentary subsidies were large but inadequate, and when Elizabeth tried to collect on the promissory notes she held from the French and Dutch she had little success. There was nothing for it but to sell crown lands, raise loans and, finally, auction off the heirlooms in the Jewel House.
If the queen was in want the men of the court who looked to her for their livings were fighting to the death for the crumbs from her table. The great fortunes of the 1570s and 1580s were long gone, and the richest courtiers
of that era had died greatly in debt to the crown. Hatton left unpaid an immense sum he had borrowed from Elizabeth, and Leicester, however sincerely grieved by his bereaved sovereign, was hardly in his grave before she forced his widow to sell off the contents of his magnificent houses and turn over the proceeds to the royal treasury. Walsingham found at the end that the godly did not invariably prosper; he died so overwhelmed by debt that his coffin had to be hidden away from his creditors, and buried at night.
The "grasping days" of the 1590s clutched at the elegantly ruffed throats of the courtiers and turned their customary greed and acquisitiveness to clawing theft. With trade withered by the war, monopolies were the only route to solvency, and the men in power battled one another for the right to control the sale of soap and leather and wine and starch. That the sale of monopolies led to disastrous inflation for the people at large and to court corruption on a massive scale did not make the system any less appealing to those caught up in it, for if they blamed anything or anyone for the twilight madness of the late Elizabethan economy, they blamed the queen.
It was the old queen's "nearness" with her money, people whispered to one another, that was at the bottom of all the trouble. That, and her damnable spite, which led her to keep men waiting months, even years longer than necessary for appointments or licenses and made her set faction against vicious faction merely for her own amusement. What in a younger ruler they might have admired as political skill they condemned in Elizabeth as an old woman's malice—and to an extent they were right. To the young men at her court she was thrice alien: as sovereign, as female, and as a relic of an earlier, irrecoverably different age and generation. By 1600 they had become 'Very generally weary of an old woman's government," and were overheard to make "turbulent speeches" calling for a change of reigns.
And in truth, however admirably regal she might seem when appearing in public on Accession Day or the Queen's Birthday, with the fresh young waiting maids around her and the sumptuously attired gentlemen of her
guard in her train, Elizabeth was rapidly aging and lapsed at times into slatternly disarray or senile fury.
Usually garish with jeweled coiffure and layers of finery, she sometimes forgot adornment and went "quite disfavored, and unattired." She lost interest in food entirely, even in the sugared sweets she was normally greedy for, and ate only plain bread and soup. No doubt her swollen gums and black teeth gave her much pain, and made chewing a torment.
But it was her black moods that frightened her servants and made the councilors shake their heads and remark that she could not live long. "She walks much in her privy chamber," wrote John Harington, one of the elderly queen's favorites, "and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage." 1 She always kept a sword beside her now, Harington wrote, for the "evil plots and designs" against her life had become so commonplace that she never felt safe.
The Spanish assassins she had kept such close count of, sent by King Philip, came no more after 1598 when the old king died. But there were others, prompted by revenge or political impatience or lunacy. A desperate military captain with a few sworn companions burst into her private apartments as she sat dining with her ladies; at the last instant, when he was at the threshold of the room where she was sitting, he was captured. In the presence chamber a burly madman, a sailor by profession, drew his dagger and would have plunged it into Elizabeth's heart had the guards not rushed to stop him.
It was no wonder that the frowning queen stamped her feet in rage and lay about her with her rusty sword, for she was closing out her reign as she had begun it, in imminent peril from enemies at home and abroad. France had, as she feared, made peace with Spain in 1598, leaving England completely isolated. Under Essex's supervision, the country was being organized for semi-permanent war, with the county levies brought under the coordinated direction of military superintendents and with new military districts designated. There was talk of compulsory military training for all men aged eighteen to fifty, and there was talk, too, of how much better off the country would be with a bold, vigorous young man to rule it.
He was at hand, that bold young man, and his ill-timed, ill considered bid for power brought to a head all the war weariness and growing popular grievances that blighted the last years of the reign.
Essex, the queen's brilliant, exasperating "Wild Horse," had by the late 1590s outgrown his court offices and was impatient for a new challenge. His breakneck ambition had reached the bursting point, and he felt that his aristocratic, chivalrous spirit was being enervated by the besmirching vulgarities of court politics. His respected enemy, old Cecil,
died in 1598 and Essex had no taste for direct combat with Robert Cecil or his allies.
Essex had the rudiments of true nobility: high-heartedness, eloquence, purity of aim and raw courage. Honor, especially his own personal honor, meant a great deal to him and it was an instinct beyond simple arrogance that made him want to keep himself pure from the corrupting influence of ignoble men.
"AD the world shall witness," he wrote of his ambitions, "that it is not the breath of me, which is but wind, or the love of the multitude, which burns as tinder, that I hunt after, but either to be valued by her above them that are of no value, or to forget the world and to be forgotten by it."
To be valued by Elizabeth was one thing, to be ruled by her was, for Essex, quite another. The eccentric old queen and the blazing young swordsman confronted one another again and again in a one-sided battle of wills. She invariably won, but he saw each loss as only a temporary setback, and steeled himself for the next encounter. When she struck him at the council table and "bade him get him gone and be hanged," his pride was cut to the quick, and forgetting where he was and whom he threatened, he put his hand to his sword to avenge the insult. He did not strike—others checked him—but with the full force of his outraged manhood he swore that he would never take such treatment from anyone, not even Henry VIII, and left the chamber in a rage.
It was undoubtedly best for all concerned that Essex was allowed early in 1599 to leave court to take on the most galling of England's immediate troubles: the rebellion in Ireland. In the latest and most grave of a series of rebellions Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, had with Spanish aid so weakened England's hold on Ireland that the situation called for an urgent and heavy counterstroke.
Ireland was a purgatory for common soldiers and commanders alike, a militantly uncivilized region where for many generations the English had tracked the long-haired, treacherous Irish through a quagmire of malarial bogs. Essex set out in the spring of 1599 with an army of reconquest seventeen thousand strong, yet his chance for glory was blighted by the impossible conditions he found once he arrived, as well as by his own mercurial moods and wayward judgment. Six months after he left England he was on his way back, his army reduced to a quarter of its strength and his own fighting Fervor quenched by dysentery.
Elizabeth took one look at Essex's muddy face and exhausted body— with typical brashness he had not stopped to think or to wash before rushing into her privy chamber at Nonsuch—and saw that he had become too weak and too unstable to be of further use to her. "An ungovernable
beast," she remarked cryptically, "must be stopped of his provender." Essex was tried for misconduct, denied his court offices, and, worst of all, denied the income from his monopolies. More than this the queen dared not do, however, for the hero had grown dangerously popular, and his admirers dangerously numerous and angry.
It was not only that London was full of swaggering swordsmen who toasted Essex and sang ballads about his exploits in the taverns; he had become the cherished idol of the impoverished, embattled populace at large. For the 1590s were a "famine decade," when four successive years of disastrously poor harvests brought the anxious, overtaxed people to the edge of starvation. The number of "poor folks who died for want in the streets" was rising rapidly, and throughout the north and west the years of scarcity led to bread riots and to impassi
oned outbursts of violence against the royal government. Elizabeth's reign was coming to a close, not with the prosperity and contentment she might have hoped for two decades earlier, but amid groans of hunger and the rancorous shouts of protesters forced, as they said, to feed their children on "dogs, cats and nettle roots." Such people cried for a savior, and with very little provocation they might have been persuaded to follow Essex into rebellion.
When put to the test, however, in February of 1601, their loyalty remained with the queen. Essex, consumed by ambition and maddened by frustration, plotted to seize the court and the Tower, and then to raise the Londoners in rebellion. Elizabeth, forearmed, saw to it that her court was well defended, forcing the earl either to submit or to appeal directly to the people.
He made a hotheaded dash through the London streets, shouting "For the queen! For the queen! A plot is laid for my life!" But though he caused great excitement with his mad alarm, and with the several hundred swordsmen who thundered at his heels, his dash for glory was deadborn. The royal officials were in the streets too, proclaiming Essex a traitor and ordering barricades raised to prevent his passage. Lacking allies on the council, deprived of the income he might have used to finance a civil war, Essex had only his soldierly rabble and the common folk to rely on. These might have been enough, had the rising been carefully timed, but without planning or preparation it could not succeed, and Essex was soon captured and executed.
It was to prove the last crisis of the reign. Disaffection continued, and "turbulent spirits" went on vilifying the queen and wishing her dead, but no new Essex arose to rally them and besides, the next ruler was already hovering over the court like a disembodied spirit waiting to take form.
In Edinburgh, King James VI was "giving it out very constantly but in
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