A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  The conscripted soldiers could hardly be blamed for their low morale. By mid-July only six thousand of the original sixteen thousand troops that sailed for Ireland were fit for battle. Their lot was miserable: food, gunpowder, and even their uniforms were deducted from their meager pay—and, to make matters worse, the lightweight “English stockings and shoes sent over” were worthless for fighting in bogs, where they quickly shrank. The morale of their general wasn’t much better. Essex began to sound increasingly paranoid, convinced that his “enemies in England, who first procured a cloud of disgrace to overshadow me… now in the dark give me wound upon wound.” He complained darkly to the Privy Council that “I am armed on the breast, but not on the back.” His spirits must have sunk even lower when he received the first of a string of abusive letters from Elizabeth, who ordered him to march on the “base bush kern” Tyrone in Ulster without further delay.

  But by the time her letter arrived in Dublin, Essex was already gone, leading a brief foray west into Offaly, at the head of twelve hundred foot soldiers and two hundred cavalry. Little of substance was accomplished on this ten days’ mission, which ended in early August, though much gallantry was demonstrated and thirty more knights were dubbed, including two writers, John Harington and William Cornwallis. Elizabeth wrote again, incensed: “You have broken the heart of our best troops and weakened your strength upon inferior rebels, and run out the glass of time which can hardly be recovered.” Facing the threat of the Spanish invasion in late July and early August, and fearful that Essex, once reports reached him, would use this as an excuse to abandon Ireland and return home at the head of some of his troops, Elizabeth further eroded their relationship by revising the terms of his commission and forbidding Essex from setting foot in England until she said so.

  Essex’s campaign was then struck by another blow: on August 5 a large English force under Sir Conyers Clifford was ambushed by O’Donnell’s forces in the Curlew Mountains. Of Clifford’s 1,500 troops, 241 soldiers (including 10 officers) were killed and another couple of hundred wounded, almost a third of the force. Clifford himself was killed and decapitated, his head sent to O’Donnell. John Harington, who survived the encounter, was sure that the English had been bewitched: “I verily think that the idle faith which possesses the Irishry, concerning magic and witchcraft, seized our men and lost the victory.” He adds that if not for the courage of the gallants on horseback, who “gave a desperate charge upon the hill, among rocks and bogs, where never horse was seen to charge before,” the losses would have been even greater.

  Even before news of this latest defeat reached England, Elizabeth had written yet again, pouring salt in Essex’s wounds, reminding him of what people would think if he failed to attack Tyrone: “What despair will this work in our subjects’ minds, that had greater hopes; what pride it will raise in the rebels, that had greater fears; and what dishonor it will do us in foreign parts, we had rather you had prevented than we had noted.” She did her own arithmetic and imagined that he could scrape together ten or eleven thousand troops (though in truth he had fewer than half that number at his disposal). Elizabeth saw what she wanted to see: “We command you no impossibilities.” Essex knew better: “Those who yesterday I led to the field, fight against me today,” he wrote, “and those who shot at me today, will come in and fight on my side tomorrow. Such is the nature of this people and of this war.” This was not as he imagined things would turn out when he proudly rode out of London to the cheers of thousands.

  On August 14, Essex wrote home promising that “within eight or ten days at the furthest, I hope to be marching.” But marching where? William Camden later wrote that about this time Essex began “to cast in his mind sinister designs of returning into England with select bands, and reducing his adversaries into his power by armed hand, being persuaded that many would side with him, partly out of love, and partly out of desire of innovation.” Sir Christopher Blount later confessed that “a few days before the Earl’s journey into the North,” Essex discussed with him and Southampton at the Castle in Dublin “the best manner of going into England.” Essex’s plan was to take two or three thousand soldiers with him, land at Milford Haven, and drum up support for his cause there. It was a scheme that might have been partly inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, where Henry VII, Elizabeth’s grandfather, “is with a mighty power landed at Milford” (4.4.532–33) on his way to rescue the nation from despotic rule. Rumors would reach Cecil that Essex had been viewing “diverse havens” in Wales in anticipation of returning at the head of an army and that it had been preached in Chester that while the war in Ireland was great, “the greatest was to come.” Blount and Southampton convinced Essex that such a plan would be his ruin and an “irrecoverable blot” upon his reputation. They urged that if he must go, he should lead a small party of choice men, sufficient to secure him from being seized before he could speak with the queen.

  On August 21, Essex held a council of war at which Southampton and his junior officers pointed out the impracticality, if not folly, of mounting an assault on Ulster. Morale had plummeted: “The amazement of our base soldiers upon the late disaster and the fear of a northern journey is such as they disband daily; the Irish go to the rebels by herds… and some force themselves to be sick.” Gallants were quietly stealing home. Essex, for his part, was desperate and self-pitying. He wrote to the queen “from a mind delighting in sorrow; from spirits wasted with travail, care, and grief; from a heart torn in pieces with passion; from a man that hates himself and all things that keep him alive, what service can your Majesty reap?” Elizabeth’s tirades against Essex were increasingly public. Francis Bacon recorded hearing the queen rail against Essex at this time, calling his actions in Ireland “unfortunate, without judgment, contemptuous, and not without some private end of his own.” With her wise old counselor Burghley dead, and the rest of the court badly factionalized, there was nobody left to keep the queen in check or stop the widening gyre of mutual recrimination.

  Faced with Elizabeth’s unrelenting criticism, Essex had no choice but to seek out Tyrone, though badly outnumbered. He gathered his few healthy troops—now reduced to 3,200 on foot and 360 cavalry—to face an enemy force over twice that size. The long-awaited campaign into Ulster lasted all of twelve days. It couldn’t have lasted much longer than that since the troops could carry only three weeks of supplies with them. Without the pressure of Clifford’s forces, Tyrone’s men had no fear of being outflanked from either the north or west. If Essex impetuously drove as far as Cavan, Tyrone’s army could slip behind his troops and invade Dublin itself. The skies themselves seemed to conspire against the English attack, for it was “so monstrous wet as the like hath not been seen.” Tyrone’s superior force shadowed Essex’s but remained tantalizingly out of reach, refusing to meet the desperate English in the field.

  Essex’s last hope was to appeal to Tyrone’s sense of chivalry. He challenged him to solo combat: “Meet me in the field… where we will parley in that fashion which best becometh soldiers.” Tyrone, who was fifty-four, twenty-two years older than Essex, had no interest in such heroics. He had his own plan, one that he hoped would appeal to Essex’s chivalric sensibility if not his love of theater. Though Tyrone clearly had the upper hand, he had nothing to gain from gloating, and that had never been his style. He offered to meet Essex to show deference and submit to his authority in form (if not much more than that).

  Unable to provoke Tyrone or lure his disciplined soldiers into a fight, Essex finally agreed to meet on his enemy’s terms. The place agreed upon was the ford of Bellaclinthe, where, on September 7, Tyrone submissively rode into the strong current, the waters reaching as high as his horse’s belly, while Essex, also on horseback, remained on dry land across from him. It was a remarkable scene. Those watching from a distance recorded how Tyrone “took off his hat, and, inclining his body, did his duty unto his Lordship with very humble ceremony, continuing the same observancy the whole time of the parley.” Tyrone
knew what role he had to play and played it to perfection. They spoke privately for half an hour. What words passed between them went unheard by others. Essex later told Southampton that Tyrone urged him “to stand for himself and he would join with him,” an offer that Essex later said he “utterly rejected.” Nonetheless, the very act of meeting in private with the rebel leader was foolhardy, a tactical error that Essex would pay for dearly. Rumors quickly circulated. One held that “Essex will be King of Ireland.” Another, reported to the King of Spain by a Franciscan in Ireland, was that Tyrone “had almost prevailed upon the Earl of Essex to desert the Queen’s cause and join that of your Majesty.” Tyrone of course had much to gain by spinning such tales. He even hinted darkly at a contemplated coup by Essex when he told an English emissary in late September that within two months he “would see the greatest alteration and the strangest that he could imagine or ever saw in his life.”

  After Essex and Tyrone parleyed, their lieutenants met to confirm the terms of a truce that the two leaders had agreed upon, and on September 15 the terms were drawn up: there was to be a cessation of fighting, to be broken with a fortnight’s notice. Little else was ceded by the Irish, who retained the right to “enjoy what they have now,” including the freedom to pass through the country. Even before news of this feeble armistice reached court, Elizabeth had become fed up with Essex’s “impertinent arguments.” She wrote again to Essex in stinging terms and there was talk at court of her replacing him with Lord Mountjoy: “You had our asking, you had choice of times, you had power and authority more ample than ever any had, or ever shall have. It may well be judged with how little contentment we seek this and other errors. But how should that be hid which is so palpable?” Camden notes that “with these letters the Lord Deputy was incensed.”

  So, too, was Elizabeth, when on Sunday, September 16, a Captain Lawson arrived at Nonsuch Palace from Ireland to report on Essex’s conference with Tyrone (though not on the terms of the truce). The Swiss tourist Thomas Platter happened to be visiting Nonsuch that day, and from his account it seems that Elizabeth gave nothing away. Platter describes how she appeared “most lavishly attired in a gown of pure white satin, gold-embroidered, with a whole bird of paradise for panache.” Although “she was already seventy-four,” he adds (though in fact she was only sixty-seven), she was “very youthful still in appearance, seeming no more than twenty years of age.” A seemingly unruffled Elizabeth played cards with Lord Cobham and the lord admiral, read a bit, heard a sermon, and had lunch served. Poised and resolute, she was still a force to be reckoned with, and Essex had underestimated her. She gave Captain Lawson a letter to carry back to Essex warning that his actions would prove “perilous and contemptible,” that he had merely patched together a “hollow peace,” and that he had better not pardon Tyrone or agree to terms with him without her written permission: “To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust a devil upon his religion.”

  It’s unlikely that Essex ever received this letter. On September 24 he called a meeting of the Irish Council, at which he handed back the sword of state. Determined to leave Ireland and appeal to the queen in person, Essex took ship with a band of his most loyal supporters, pausing only long enough to knight four more followers “on the sands” before embarking. It was “jested at in Ireland,” William Udall wrote at the time, that Essex “made more knights than he killed rebels.” Those who accompanied Essex included the Earl of Southampton, Sir Henry Danvers (who was still recovering from a head wound), Sir Thomas Gerard, Captain Christopher St. Lawrence, and Sir Henry Wotton. Upon landing in England, Essex dispatched letters to his uncle, Sir William Knollys, that offer some insight into his motives: he was “resolved with all speed (and your silence) to appear, in the face of my enemies; not trusting afar off to my own innocency, or to the Queen’s favor, with whom they have got so much power.”

  It’s hard to imagine the exhilaration these men experienced to be out of a war zone, back on English soil. They rode posthaste, aided by a full moon, without fear of bogs or ambush, desperate to reach court before their enemies had word of their return. Their pace was blistering, and within three days of leaving Dublin the small group approached London. At dawn on the twenty-eighth, they raced south on the final leg of their journey, to Nonsuch, where the queen was holding court.

  Much of what we know about what happened next comes from the letters that Rowland Whyte, then at court, wrote to Sir Robert Sidney. Whyte only passed along these sensitive reports after Sidney had assured him that he would destroy the letters as soon as he read them (“Burn my letters,” Whyte wrote, “else shall I be affrighted to write, the time is now so full of danger”). If Sidney hadn’t gone back on his word, a good deal of what next took place would have remained even more mysterious than it is. Whyte writes how Lord Grey, now back from Ireland and still smarting from Southampton’s reprimand, learned of the return of Essex’s band and raced to Nonsuch to alert the court. Essex’s friend Sir Thomas Gerard rode hard and caught up with Grey. The courteous formality of the two men, so recently comrades in arms, barely masks the bitterness of their exchange:

  “I pray you,” said Sir Thomas Gerard, “let my Lord of Essex ride before, that he may bring the first news of his return himself.” “Doth he desire it?” said my Lord Grey. “No,” said Sir Thomas, “nor I think will desire nothing at your hands.” “Then,” said he, “I think I have business,” and made greater haste than before, and upon his arrival went straight to Robert Cecil.

  After Gerard failed to stop him, Christopher St. Lawrence, the bold Irishman, offered to ride ahead and kill Grey and Cecil, too, but Essex wouldn’t “assent to it.”

  Upon arriving at Nonsuch perhaps a quarter hour after Grey, Essex leaped from his horse at the court gate and entered the palace. There was no time to lose. He raced through the presence chamber into the privy chamber, only to discover that, though already ten in the morning, the queen was not yet dressed and up. What followed next was like a scene out of Shakespeare’s Lucrece:

  Now is he come unto the chamber door

  That shuts him from the heaven of his thought,

  Which with a yielding latch, and with no more,

  Hath barred him from the blessed thing he sought.

  (337–40)

  Essex burst into the queen’s bedchamber, where he discovered Elizabeth “newly up, her hair about her face.” “ ’Tis much wondered at,” Whyte writes with considerable understatement, “that he went so boldly to her Majesty’s presence, she not being ready, and he so full of dirt and mire, that his very face was full of it.” No man had ever entered into her bedchamber in her presence, had seen Elizabeth beside her famous walnut bed, hung with cloth of silver, fringed with gold and silver lace and crowned with ostrich plumes. For the queen and her ladies-in-waiting it must have come as an unbelievable shock. It’s next to impossible today to grasp how great a taboo Essex had violated. This was England’s virgin queen and her bedchamber sacrosanct. When Ben Jonson daringly chose to revisit this scene a year later in his play Cynthia’s Revels, he cast Essex’s action as a crime of mythical proportions—like Actaeon, he wrote, seeing the naked Diana:

  Seems it no crime to enter sacred bowers,

  And hallowed places, with impure aspect,

  Most lewdly to pollute? Seems it no crime

  To brave a deity? Let mortals learn

  To make religion of offending heaven.

  (5.11)

  As Jonson’s play suggests, it was a primal scene, one that left a deep impression at court and on England’s writers, including Shakespeare. It may well have informed the play he was now writing, with its fraught closet scene in which a rash Prince Hamlet confronts Queen Gertrude and remonstrates with her there.

  In many ways, the encounter proved to be Elizabeth’s finest hour. She didn’t know if Essex had come at the head of an army, if he had already killed his enemies at court, or even whether she herself was in physical danger. As great an actress as she was, she hadn’t had
time to prepare for the scene, to present herself as a formidable queen. With the advance of years, making herself up for this role had become increasingly time-consuming; Essex’s entry had caught her, embarrassingly, in the midst of her preparations. If Elizabeth was rattled, she didn’t show it. Essex, reports ran, “kneeled unto her, kissed her hands and her fair neck, and had some private speech with her, which seemed to give him great contentment.” He had chosen to play the role of the courtier. His words don’t survive, but there’s a likelihood that his sentiments were mirrored in a sonnet Essex had composed about this time, one that translated the disappointments of the courtier into the language of frustrated courtship:

  To plead my faith where faith hath no reward

  To move remorse where favor is not borne,

  To heap complaints which she doth not regard,

  Were fruitless, bootless, vain, and yields but scorn.

  I loved her whom all the world admired,

  I was refused of her that can love none;