In the previous century it had been noted a king had ‘a prerogative in his array above all others, whereby his dignity is worshipped’. The same held true for a reigning queen, yet there were times when Elizabeth had to remind her attendants of this. A famous story told by Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, described how once she was so irritated by the envious attention being attracted by a maid of honour’s wonderful gold and pearl trimmed velvet gown, that she decided to dress in it herself. It was far too short for her and, as she showed it off, she asked the owner if she agreed it was ‘ill-becoming’. The girl nervously admitted it was; ‘Why then if it become not me, as being too short, I am minded it shall never become thee, as being too fine, so it fits neither [of us] well’, Elizabeth snorted. The girl never wore it again at Elizabeth’s court, but she did put it aside, hoping to wear it when the queen died.8
More dangerous than the impertinence of Elizabeth’s maids were the views of senior figures expressed to de Maisse by the royal favourite, the Earl of Essex (‘a man of great designs’, the ambassador judged). The earl complained bitterly to the Frenchman of Elizabeth’s habit of stalling decisions, saying ‘they laboured under two things at this court, delay and inconstancy’, and these he judged ‘proceeded from the sex of the queen’.9 Essex was keen to pursue the war with Spain vigorously, but was being frustrated at every turn. William Cecil feared the military costs were driving social unrest. The queen shared his concern, although, being a woman, her wish for peace was ascribed merely to a lack of martial qualities. De Maisse reported a strong feeling at court that England would never again submit to female rule.
That new year of 1598, there was, one courtier recalled, ‘a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’.10 William Cecil died on 4 August 1598, aged seventy-seven, leaving the queen bereft. The tenth anniversary of the Armada was approaching, there was no end in sight to that war, and only twelve days later she was faced also with a war of liberation that exploded in Ireland. It was to be there that Essex’s contempt for the queen as a military leader emerged most strongly. Sent by Elizabeth to crush the rebel leader Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Essex ignored her orders and made a truce, before returning to court in September 1599, hoping to justify his actions. Elizabeth had, however, lost all trust in her former favourite. She froze him out and denied him income, leaving him facing financial and political ruin. ‘The queen knows well how to humble the haughty spirit’, her godson Harington observed, but he also predicted ‘the haughty spirit knows not how to yield’.11
On the evening of 7 February 1601, a group of Essex’s inner circle of friends paid the Lord Chamberlain’s players forty shillings to perform William Shakespeare’s play ‘of the deposing and killing of that king, Richard II’. The players warned the men that the play was so old and out of use they would have little company for it. But their clients insisted, and if the stands were largely empty in the Globe for the play, the clients, at least, were there: Sir Charles and Sir Jocelyn Percy, Lord Monteagle, and many other court gallants. As the play unfolded the character of John of Gaunt bemoaned an England that has been allowed to go to rack and ruin: ‘this scepter’d isle . . . This precious stone set in the silver sea . . . This earth, this realm, this England’ was ‘leased out’ and ‘bound in with shame’. The audience of swordsmen in silk and lace were now ready to right such wrongs, with the play signalling the launch of a coup.12
The following day Essex marched from Ludgate to St Paul’s with 300 of his young followers. They included the most glamorous of the new generation of noblemen: the Lords Monteagle and Lumley, the Earls of Southampton and Rutland. All Essex needed was the people to rally to his call and the last of the Tudors would be overthrown. But Londoners, whom Elizabeth had wooed since her smiling appearance following her coronation in January 1559, remained loyal to their queen. As Essex had marched down the narrow streets with his friends they merely gaped at his swordsmen, and ‘marvelled that they could come out in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday’.
Within a fortnight of Essex’s surrender Elizabeth had signed his death warrant – but in death he became the hero he had never quite managed to be in life. Shakespeare’s Gaunt had died with the hope that ‘Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear/My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear’. The anger that had fuelled Essex’s popularity still burned: the ‘scandal’ of the condition of England had not changed, and if William Cecil was dead, his son Robert ‘the devil’ had taken his place. People hoped Elizabeth would now remember Essex’s complaints, and ballads romanticising him were soon heard being sung even at court and despite his traitor’s death.13
Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated over the following months and by October she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. At the opening of her last parliament in November 1601, she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes. Many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks on the monopolies Elizabeth had granted to favoured servants. Robert Cecil had tripled the price of starch since he had been granted the monopoly on it. But, while he and other monopoly holders argued fiercely in their defence, Elizabeth was sufficiently concerned by the expressions of public anger to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.
A few days later Elizabeth received a parliamentary deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall, where they delivered their fulsome thanks. The men then listened in silence as the queen spoke. ‘Although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves’, she told them; ‘Of myself I must say this . . . my heart was never set upon worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good. What you do bestow on me, I will not store up, but receive it to bestow on you again.’ Her speech was described as one of ‘golden words’. But when Parliament was dissolved in December 1601, Elizabeth recalled in her closing statement those who had sought to kill her by ‘many and divers stratagems’.14
Elizabeth feared the bond with her people was breaking. In June 1602 she was overheard complaining desperately to Robert Cecil about ‘the poverty of the state, the continuance of charge, the discontentment of all sorts of people’. She admitted to the French ambassador that she was weary of life, and wept over Essex’s death.15 He had been all she had had left of the man she had loved as a young queen, yet he had betrayed her, and now he was being idolised, even despite the threat he had posed to her life. The last pageants held in Elizabeth’s honour that year venerated her as the ‘queen of love and beauty’, timeless and unchanging; but as Elizabeth’s depression deepened, whispers about the succession became urgent once more.
King James’ agents were working hard to gather support from powerful families offering ‘liberty of conscience, confirmation of privileges and liberties, restitution of wrongs, honours, titles and dignities’. Many responded positively, but this was only because there was no outstanding English candidate. People did not wish to be ruled by either the Spanish Isabella or the Scottish James. There were rumours that, in order to create a viable English successor, a group of courtiers were planning to marry Margaret Douglas’ granddaughter, the twenty-seven-year-old Arbella Stuart, to Katherine Grey’s grandson, the sixteen-year-old Edward Seymour, ‘and carry the succession that way’.16 Such a marriage would recall that between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in that it would unite the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters in a new union dynasty. But did it also offer the promise of peace to a nation on the brink of an uncertain future? That seemed less likely.
42
THE HOLLOW CROWN
ELIZABETH’S GODSON, SIR JOHN HARINGTON, WAS SHOCKED WHEN he saw the queen at Whitehall for Christmas 1602. She was sipping from a golden cup to soothe her sore throat and could only whisper. She confessed she was eating little, and when the subject of the rebellion in Ireland came up, and with it Essex’s name, she wept and struck her breast repeatedly.
Over the next few days it became apparent that E
lizabeth was also growing forgetful. A number of men arrived at her request only to be dismissed in anger for appearing without an appointment. No one dared voice the seriousness of her condition, but Harington was convinced she only had months to live and, he noted, already courtiers were looking to the future, ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.1
A day or two later, on 30 December, Katherine Grey’s widower, the sixty-three-year-old Earl of Hertford, received a visitor at his house in Tottenham. The man was a messenger from Arbella Stuart. It had been ten years since the twenty-seven-year old princess had last appeared at Elizabeth’s court. Blonde and blue-eyed, she had been admired for her elegance of dress, ‘her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music’.2 Elizabeth had become anxious that a party might build behind her claim, and had kept her ever since in rural exile, living at her grandmother Bess’s new Hardwick Hall. Arbella was lonely and desperate to marry, which she knew the queen would never permit. Arbella had heard often, however, about the secret marriage of her father, Charles Stuart, the brother of Lord Darnley, to Bess’s daughter, and also of Hertford’s secret marriage to Katherine Grey (her mother’s godmother). She hoped Hertford would now not only sympathise with her plight, but help her do something about it.
One of Arbella’s pages had suggested to her that Hertford’s grandson Edward Seymour was the perfect groom for her. The child of Arbella’s kinsman, David Owen Tudor, this page was a descendant of her ancestor Owen Tudor, through his illegitimate son, Sir David Owen. Before sinking into obscurity Owen’s ‘other’ family were now poised to play a small but significant role in the last chapter of the Tudors’ royal story. According to the page, Hertford had once approached his father as a possible intermediary with Bess, to test the water for the arrangement of a marriage between Arbella and his grandson. Although she realised this had been some years in the past, Arbella was desperate for Hertford to know that she now wanted such a marriage to go ahead immediately. Her messenger relayed to Hertford her suggestion that Edward Seymour come to Hardwick Hall in disguise. If her grandmother, Bess, realised who he was, he would be shut out, Arbella warned. She suggested that by way of identification Seymour bring ‘some picture or handwriting of the Lady Jane Grey’.3 ‘The best thing’, Arbella proposed, would be the farewell letter Jane wrote to her sister Katherine on the eve of her execution.
Hertford listened to Arbella’s messenger with mounting fear and anger. Essex’s death had enabled Robert Cecil to come to a secret accommodation with King James. Robert was not associated with the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, as William Cecil had been. Hertford accepted that without Robert Cecil’s support, he could not hope to win the crown for his heirs. He was certain James VI of Scots would soon be James I of England, and intended to make the best of it. He certainly did not want any attention drawn to his former plans and hopes. Hertford sent the messenger under guard to Robert Cecil the following day.
The queen took the news of Arbella’s actions badly. It reminded her of the dark time when she had learned of Katherine Grey’s marriage to Hertford over forty years earlier, and which had left her ‘the colour of a corpse’. When Arbella and her servants were interrogated at Hardwick, however, only a few servants and close family were found to have known anything about her plans. Robert Cecil judged it safe to leave Arbella in the care of her grandmother – safer, certainly, than placing her in the Tower where her presence might attract a little too much interest. Elizabeth was relieved and her health even seemed to rally. By mid-February she was well enough to grant an audience to a visiting Venetian ambassador at her grandfather’s favourite palace, Richmond, with its towers and fourteen ‘cloud capped’ cupolas.4
The Venetian’s first sight of Elizabeth was of her seated on her throne, dressed in a low-cut dress of silver and white taffeta trimmed with gold, and wearing a dramatic wig ‘of a colour never made by nature’. Elizabeth’s powerful personal image would prove as durable as any of the palaces the Tudor kings had built, and the Venetian was fascinated by Elizabeth’s crumbling magnificence: her bony forehead wrapped in vast pearls ‘like pears’, her head bearing an imperial crown, her stomacher jewelled, and her wrists wrapped in ropes of yet more pearls. Alongside Elizabeth were her councillors, while the remainder of the Presence Chamber was ‘full of ladies and gentlemen and the musicians who had been playing dance music up to that moment’. Elizabeth had enjoyed dancing in her youth, and in her old age she had continued to take pleasure in watching others do so. As she rose to greet the ambassador, they had a tart exchange, with the ambasador complaining about English piracy, and she observing ‘the Republic of Venice . . . has never made herself heard by me except to ask for something’, and wondering if ‘my sex has brought me this demerit’.5
The Venetian spotted no signs of ill health in the queen, but her long hands were now swollen and, later that week, her coronation ring had to be cut off. Since Mary I had instituted the tradition that the coronation ring symbolised a queen’s ‘marriage’ to her kingdom, its removal triggered new fears that Elizabeth’s reign was soon to end, leaving a vacant throne and a battle for power.6 Arbella’s attempts to contact Hertford had convinced many at court that she was part of a plot to stop King James inheriting the throne. The two grandchildren of Margaret Douglas were, it seemed, being pitted against each other for the crown and the Venetian ambassador dispatched to the senate how their relative chances were being judged.
James believed he was the new ‘Arthur . . . Come by good right to claim my seat and throne’, and it was said he bore the birthmark of a lion, which proved it was his destiny.7 His most significant support came from the Privy Council, but there was much talk about the legal objections to his candidature: ‘first that he was not born in the kingdom and is therefore ineligible for the crown; and the second, that his mother, after her execution was declared a rebel by Parliament, and incapable of succession, and this incapacitates her son’. This put Arbella in the frame. She was English-born, ‘of great beauty and remarkable qualities, being gifted with many accomplishments, among them the knowledge of Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, besides her native English’.8 Elizabeth had forced her to live far from court in the hopes she would be forgotten, but Arbella’s attempted marriage project had ensured she was now very much remembered. It had emerged that the infanta Isabella was uninterested in the English crown, yet there were also reports of a build-up of Spanish naval forces. Some conjectured that Spain hoped now to back Arbella’s candidature against James, and perhaps later marry her to a Spanish ally.
Elizabeth remained concerned not only about Arbella’s actions, however, but also the news from Ireland. There had been times – before Essex’s attempted coup – when Elizabeth had been able to joke with her current Lord Deputy there. After he had moaned once that his task was as disagreeable as that of a kitchen wench, she had written addressing him as ‘Mistress Kitchenmaid’, and praising him for doing more harm to the rebels with his ‘frying pan and other kitchen stuff . . . than those that promised more and did less’.9 The rebel Earl of Tyrone’s war of national liberation was now drawing towards Tyrone’s defeat. Her Lord Deputy was pressing her hard to grant Tyrone a pardon so that a final peace could be agreed. Robert Cecil supported him, arguing that if they were to defend themselves from the Spanish, they had to secure Ireland. Elizabeth refused, concerned about ‘how to terrify future traitors’ if this one was allowed to go free.10 Eventually Cecil persuaded her to change her mind, but her pardoning the enemy Tyrone – where she had been obliged to behead the English hero Essex – triggered another bout of deep depression.
On 25 February, the second anniversary of Essex’s execution, Elizabeth disappeared to her chambers. One of her Boleyn ladies-in-waiting had died the previous day, and this only added to her misery.11 Showing affection to the descendants of her aunt Mary Boleyn had been the only way she had been able to honour the memory of her mother, who
se image she wore secretly in a closed ring. It was days before she appeared in public again and when she did she was described as in such ‘a deep melancholy that she must die herself’. Her misery was made worse by letters that had arrived from Arbella, reminding the queen about Essex’s fate and claiming she had a secret admirer at court. Rambling and accusatory, they were full of the self-obsessed paranoia of a woman who had spent too much time on her own, and Cecil marked one of Arbella’s letters with the comment, ‘I think she has some strange vapours to her brain.’12
Elizabeth remained extremely anxious. She voiced her suspicions that the men around her were ‘ill affected’, and complained frequently about Arbella and whoever might be supporting her.13 On 9 March Cecil wrote to the English ambassador in Edinburgh, George Nicholson, describing the queen as eating little, her mouth and tongue dry and her chest hot; she couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t stay in bed or take physic. Instead, to everyone’s dismay she had spent the previous three days walking restlessly in the garden in summer clothes. The mood at court was gloomy, with everyone ‘in a damp’. Senior figures were stockpiling arms and buying up war horses, while James’ supporters were doing their best to damage Arbella’s reputation, spreading the rumour that she was mad.14
James remained in the strongest position to succeed, but was a far from popular choice, and the Venetian ambassador observed that agents of the Kings of Spain and France had now made it known that their masters both backed Arbella’s cause, rather than accept James. Henri IV of France was horrified at the idea of a united Britain, and the end of the old alliance with Scotland. At the same time, Philip II’s son, the current King Philip III of Spain, was prepared to back anyone – even a Protestant like Arbella – if they could stop James becoming King of England. James was judged a liar, who encouraged Catholics to believe he would allow them to practise their faith while having no intention of doing so, and beyond the pale for his complicity in his mother’s death.
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