AUTUMN
– 13 –
Things Dying, Things Newborn
Essex had landed in Ireland on April 14, joining his troops after a rough passage. Almost three weeks had passed since his inspiring if ominous departure from London. Even before embarking Essex knew how much was at stake: “For myself, if things succeed ill in my charge, I am like to be a martyr.” He was worried, too, about what effect “moist, rotten” Ireland might have upon his “sad mind” and his “rheumatic body” prone to the dysentery that had killed his father. What he discovered upon his arrival in Dublin could only have depressed him further.
Almost immediately, Essex saw that he had to abandon his longstanding plans to seize the initiative by marching on Tyrone in Ulster. The Irish Council explained that there wouldn’t be enough grass for fodder there until June. Nor was there sufficient transport to supply troops heading into Ulster. Essex also had to scrap plans to establish a garrison at Lough Foyle in the north, so crucial for flanking Tyrone’s forces. He lacked sufficient shipping and men to accomplish this and the Privy Council rejected his request for four thousand reinforcements, encouraging him to make do with what he had.
Essex was surprised by the number of rebels he now faced. Initial reports spoke of Tyrone with six or seven thousand men near Armagh; O’Donnell, in Connaught, with four thousand more; and another four thousand in Munster commanded by the Earl of Desmond. A few days later the Irish Council raised their estimate of enemy combatants to thirty thousand; the rebels outnumbered Essex’s expeditionary force by almost two to one. The council—motivated by self-interest and fearful of what would happen if the raw English troops were overwhelmed by Tyrone’s battled-tested veterans—persuaded Essex to turn his attention first to the south, to suppress the rebellion in Leinster and Munster, a strategy that Elizabeth and her Privy Council reluctantly approved.
Rather than cutting the root of the rebellion in Ulster, Essex was now committed, as he put it, to shaking and sawing its branches in the south and west. The problem was with the metaphor itself: Essex would have been better off taking a torch to the entire tree—branches, trunk, roots, and all. A scorched earth policy, the kind that Edmund Spenser had advocated, would starve the Irish into submission, destroying their crops as well as the trees behind which they hid and fought. But Essex considered a war of attrition dishonorable. “To speak plainly,” Essex gamely wrote the Privy Council, “our numbers are inferior to those which come against us, but our cause is better, our order and discipline stronger; our courage likewise, I doubt not, shall be greater.”
If Essex was unsure of how the war should be waged, he was fully committed to his band of brothers, the gentleman-adventurers who had followed him at their own expense to fight in Ireland. One of his first acts after landing was appointing his close friend the Earl of Southampton as general of the horse in Ireland, though Elizabeth had warned him not to. But Essex stood upon prerogative: his commission entitled him “to make free choice of all officers and commanders of the army,” and he would do so. He also made another loyal friend, the Earl of Rutland—who had come to Ireland against the queen’s command—lieutenant general of the infantry. Elizabeth responded by calling Rutland home. And she refused to let Essex appoint his father-in-law, Sir Christopher Blount, to the Irish Council. From Essex’s perspective, the queen, unlike her father and grandfather, had no firsthand experience of war and was simply meddling in affairs she knew nothing about. Elizabeth, for her part, feared that such appointments, along with Essex’s right to knight those who followed him to Ireland, would bind men more closely to him than to her. She wouldn’t stand for that nor would she tolerate a shadow court in Ireland.
Behind these maneuvers, behind the entire Irish campaign, was a struggle over a culture of honor. In the early fourteenth century there had been twelve hundred knights in England; by the time Elizabeth became queen that number had been halved through attrition. Midway through her reign that number had been halved again. It was a quietly efficient way for Elizabeth to consolidate power and break the will of an ancient nobility that had periodically risen up against the English monarchy. Since her unflinching response to the Northern Rebellion thirty years earlier, the aristocracy had been submissive. By the end of her reign the noblemen who bore the titles that had struck fear into the hearts of monarchs in Shakespeare’s history plays—the Percys, Pembrokes, Buckinghams, Westmorelands, Northumberlands, and Norfolks—were poor shadows of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, men whose power had been rooted in land and armed followers. So weakened was the nobility that Shakespeare’s depiction of their ancestors’ martial exploits in his history plays, while nostalgically recalling the great age of English chivalry, also reminded audiences how far, and how irrevocably, that culture of honor had declined. Essex, who had little land and less money, was more dependent on Elizabeth’s largesse than most. He was the last upstart, the last, in the Earl of Northumberland’s words, to wear “the crown of England in his heart.” Even if his ambitions stopped short of the throne, Essex was determined to restore English knighthood in both numbers and prestige.
Which explains why he had so coveted the post of earl marshal, whose responsibilities included presiding over the court’s chivalric activities. Essex refused to see the post as largely ceremonial and set scholars to work delving into the long-forgotten powers of the office, including the responsibility for judging all questions of honor in the realm. And he sought to strengthen his authority by combining this post with that of the office of constable, which, some believed, carried with it the right to arrest anyone in England, including the monarch. Essex began to sign his letters to the queen as her “vassal,” bound in feudal traditions of homage and allegiance, rather than her “servant” (“What I owe as a subject, I know, and what as an Earl, and Marshal of England; to serve as a servant and a slave I know not”). A month before departing for Ireland, at a hearing of the College of Arms held at Essex House, he had publicly declared that England was “most mighty when the nobility led and commanded in war” and that even as “God hath tied himself to the honor of men,” so “should the prince do likewise.” “When nobility is suppressed,” he added, “all government [is] subverted.”
Essex had taken advantage of the prerogative of command to dub twenty-one knights in the siege of Rouen in 1591, and another sixty-eight in Cádiz, many of whose allegiance to him was now unquestioned. “Knights be not born,” William Harrison reminded readers in his Description of England (1577), not even “the king.” Essex knighted eighty-one of his followers in Ireland, so many that it was hard to persuade Elizabeth not to revoke some of them. Sir John Chamberlain spoke for those who saw that this explosion in the number of knights undermined the authority of the monarch and “draw the order” of knighthood “into contempt”: “it is noted as a strange thing” that Essex “in the space of seven or eight years” should “make more knights then are in all the realm besides.”
The chivalric culture Essex was determined to restore and whose future was at stake in this Irish campaign had its apotheosis in the Order of the Garter, celebrated annually on St. George’s Day, April 23. The chance to hold a garter feast immediately after his arrival in Ireland enabled Essex to showcase the chivalric values he felt were unappreciated in Elizabeth’s court, which rewarded “little men” (a jab here at the diminutive Cecil, who preferred “ease, pleasure, and profit”). It would be a replay of the famous Garter feast held by the Earl of Leicester in Utrecht in 1586, where, at the fighting at barriers, Essex, at age twenty, had first burst onto the scene, and “gave all men great hope of his prowess in arms.”
The celebration Essex arranged in Dublin beggared description. Sir Anthony Standen confided to Edward Reynolds, Essex’s secretary back in London, that the ceremonies “on St. George’s Day passed all the service that I ever saw done to any prince in Christendom.” Standen knew how poorly this would be received at home: “Though all was to her Majesty’s honor, yet what malice may hew out
of this, you know.” Another account was provided by the famously blunt Sir James Perrot (who had said of Elizabeth’s tendency to pay attention to her skilled soldiers only in time of war, “Now she is ready to piss herself for fear of the Spaniard, I am again one of her white boys”). As for Essex’s show in Dublin, Perrot, who was there, wrote, “There was not greater state, plenty, and attendance used at that time in the Court of England on the Queen and all her Knights of the Order.” Even Irish writers, who had few good words for the English, conceded that Essex “displayed a regal pomp the most splendid that any Englishman had ever exhibited in Ireland.” It was high romance, fit to be immortalized by ballad makers:
In Ireland, St. George’s Day
Was honored bravely every way,
By lords and knights in rich array,
As though they had been in England.
The chivalric display in Dublin could not have stood in starker contrast to what was taking place that very day at Windsor, where Elizabeth saw to it that Garter celebrations were muted, owing to the “sedition and flames of rebellion in Ireland.” Nonetheless, she decided that three knights were to fill the depleted ranks of the Order that day at Windsor: Thomas Scrope; Robert Ratclyffe, the Earl of Sussex; and Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, deeply despised by Essex and his martial followers (and recently mocked onstage by Shakespeare). It must have struck many on both sides of the Irish Sea that day that England’s true knights were with Essex while those rewarded at Windsor were foppish imposters, none more so than Cobham, whose train was called “the bravest” (in the sense of sumptuous, not courageous), and who had spent lavishly on the event. Cobham outfitted his gentlemen followers “in purple breeches, and white satin doublets and chains of gold,” and his “yeomen in purple cloth breeches, and white fustian doublets, all in blue coats, and faced with white taffeta, and feathers of white and blue.”
It was the kind of performance that interested Shakespeare. Two years earlier, at the previous induction ceremony at Windsor (which fell on or near his thirty-third birthday), Shakespeare had almost certainly been part of the procession of gentlemen retainers following his patron Henry Carey, the lord chamberlain, all of them arrayed “in blue coats faced with orange-colored taffety, and orange-colored feathers in their hats.” It may have been the gaudiest costume Shakespeare ever wore. The ceremonies at Windsor, which had brought him in such close proximity to the traditions of English chivalry, made a strong impression on him. And they were still on his mind when not long after he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which he included an otherwise gratuitous allusion to “Each fair installment, coat, and several crest / With loyal blazon” of the Order, and even quoted its motto—“Honi soit qui mal y pense”—“Evil to him who thinks evil” (5.5.62–68).
Shakespeare’s fascination with the Order and with the decline of chivalry in England goes back to the beginning of his career. In The First Part of Henry the Sixth, brave Talbot strips the Garter off Sir John Fastolfe, demanding to know if “such cowards ought to wear / This ornament of knighthood, yea or no?” (4.1.28–29). Shakespeare went out of his way here to draw attention to the devaluation of the Order, and the speech that follows, which is not based on anything in his sources, would have resonated with England’s martial faction:
When first this order was ordained, my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars.
(4.1.33–36)
Shakespeare’s long-standing interest in his history plays in the struggle over chivalric values, coupled with his strenuous efforts in the late 1590s to secure for his family a coat of arms, suggests that he himself was torn by the tension between past and present, between the form and substance of what it meant to bear arms.
As for Elizabeth, when reports trickled back to England of Essex’s extravagant celebration, paid for out of her pocket, she responded in characteristic fashion, punishing Essex by giving the juiciest plum of all monopolies in England—the lucrative mastership of wards that had enriched Burghley and which she had dangled before Essex for months—to her dutiful bureaucratic servant Sir Robert Cecil.
BY THE TIME THIS NEWS REACHED IRELAND IN EARLY MAY, ESSEX HAD already marched out of Dublin, leading four thousand foot soldiers and five hundred cavalry against the rebels in Leinster and Munster. His army headed southwest, through Newcastle, Naas, Kilcullen, Athy, Maryborough, Ballyragget, Kilkenny, and Clonmel. There were a few skirmishes but no serious battles with the Irish, who preferred to fight on their own terms, frustrating the gentlemen on horse who were anxious for glory and prone to making foolhardy cavalry charges. One of these adventurers, the young Lord Grey, had to be reined in for his aggressiveness by the Earl of Southampton, a stinging insult that Grey, who packed up and went home, never forgot.
Essex reported to the Privy Council that “the rebels fight in woods and bogs, where horse are utterly unserviceable; they use the advantage of lightness and swiftness.” And Essex’s spies reported that the enemy was deliberately avoiding a fight, relying instead on “the three furies, Penury, Sickness, and Famine,” to wear down the English invaders. There were a few token demonstrations of submission to English authority by rebel leaders, and Essex was greeted with orations in towns like Kilkenny and Clonmel, his path strewn with rushes—leading Elizabeth to complain aloud that she was spending a thousand pounds a day so that Essex might “go in progress.”
The last week of May also witnessed the campaign’s first victory, the taking, with artillery, of Castle Cahir, a major rebel stronghold. Elizabeth, when told of this, remained unimpressed with the capture of “an Irish hold from a rabble of rogues,” but it was a fine piece of tactical warfare. The same cannot be said of the disastrous defeat visited that same week upon Sir Henry Harrington’s troops at Wicklow. Harrington had been dispatched by Essex to suppress Phelim McFeagh, the O’Tooles, and their followers. In a replay of the defeat at Blackwater, command broke down. Outnumbered by the surrounding rebel forces, Harrington struggled to return his forces to Wicklow, five miles or so from where they were encamped. There was apparently collusion between Adam Loftus, who led an Irish company fighting for the English, and the rebel forces. Under attack, the English troops broke and ran, “possessed with such a fear, that they cast away their arms, and would not strike one blow for their lives.” Nearly half of the English force of 450 men was cut down.
Meanwhile, the main body of Essex’s expeditionary force trudged on, reaching as far west as Limerick and Askeaton before doubling back and completing a loop that took them through Mallow, Waterford, Arklow, and Wicklow, before they returned, exhausted, to Dublin on July 2, nearly two months since their departure, a month after the Ulster campaign should have begun. Aside from a few more submissions and orations they had little to show for their efforts, the sea of rebellion simply closing behind them. A disappointed John Harington wrote to a friend in England that in “all that journey” nothing was “done greatly worthy of speaking of.” Essex’s men, William Camden records, were “weary, distressed, and their companies incredibly wasted.” The knighting of over a score of gentlemen who had been part of the force no doubt kept other hopeful gallants, though “lousy as beggars,” from heading home. Elizabeth, all too conscious of how news of this ragged campaign was playing both in foreign capitals and in England, was furious, and let Essex know that the people “groan under the burden of continual levies and impositions, which are occasioned by these late actions.”
Essex, deteriorating mentally and physically, was further disheartened by the news that his daughter Penelope had died in his absence, while his wife, sick and pregnant, feared miscarriage. While recuperating in Dublin, he dealt harshly with the survivors of the defeat at Wicklow. He held a court-martial on July 11, after which Lieutenant Walsh, who served under Captain Loftus, was executed for cowardice. Other officers were cashiered and imprisoned. Every soldier who fought in that batt
le was “condemned to die,” then “most of them pardoned and for example’s sake every tenth man only executed.” Decimation, literally killing every tenth man, wasn’t English military practice. Essex had come across the idea in a scholarly footnote in the 1598 translation of Tacitus (where he read that when soldiers had “thrown away their weapons and run cowardly out of the field” their general would “put all standard bearers, centurions, etc., to death, and of the common sort every tenth man”). It may have kept other troops from deserting, but it was poorly received at home: John Chamberlain writes that “my Lord’s decimating of Sir Harry Harrington’s companies is much descanted of, and not greatly liked here.”
Beyond the confines of the court, news of the Irish campaign remained anecdotal. Deserters returning into England told tall tales of how badly Essex was faring in Ireland. One of them, Harry Davis, a Welshman pressed into service at Windsor, was apprehended and confessed to the local authorities in Rye that “the Earl of Essex traveling from Waterford to Dumdarricke in a wood was met withal by the wild Irish and set upon, where he lost fifty thousand men and the Earl himself was wounded in the right arm in such sort as he was like to lose his arm.” None of this was true, but in the absence of any official word on the course of the war, news like this—“stuffing the ears of men with false reports” (Induction, 8) as Shakespeare had put it in The Second Part of Henry the Fourth—was deeply disconcerting and could only have eroded support for the costly war. Venice’s ambassador in London reported home this summer that “Ireland may well be called the Englishman’s grave.”
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 30
