After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  Years of simmering resentment between the Cecil and Essex factions reached boiling point in June when Philip II was dying and there were new hopes of peace. Burghley was keen to press ahead with negotiations with Spain. There was another terrible famine and he warned of “the nature of the common people of England [who are] inclinable to sedition if they be oppressed with extraordinary payments.” Essex, however, realized the power of Spain was waning and wanted to push home the advantage. The Queen supported the Cecils, and Essex’s irritation with her came out into the open in dramatic fashion at a Council meeting attended by Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Admiral, and Sir Francis Windebank, Clerk of the Signet. The pretext for the argument was the choice of a new deputy for Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice was Essex’s uncle and principal supporter in Council, Sir William Knollys. Essex tried to dissuade her. When he knew he had failed he lost his temper and as the others looked on with horror Essex suddenly revealed his pent-up contempt for the Queen, turning his back on her with a scornful look. Furious, Elizabeth hit him around the head and ordered him to be gone and be hanged. His hand went to his sword. Admiral Nottingham grabbed him and Essex checked himself, but he swore that he would not have put up with such an indignity from Henry VIII himself.

  As Elizabeth absorbed the implications of her favorite’s behavior Burghley left court for Bath hoping to recover his deteriorating health. Harington also was making use of the medicinal waters when Elizabeth sent Lady Arundel with a cordial for Burghley’s stomach along with a message “that she did intreat heaven daily for his longer life—else would her people, nay herself stand in need of cordials too.” Burghley’s death shortly afterward, on 4 August, came as a crushing blow to the Queen, all the more so when it was followed within weeks by the massacre of her troops at Yellow Ford in Ireland. For a decade the administration in Ireland had tried to curtail the power of Ulster’s greatest chieftain, the Earl of Tyrone, feudalizing land tenure and centralizing power. Tyrone had kept his freedom of action for a time by bribing corrupt officials and fighting proxy wars through followers he claimed he could not control. He had even seduced and married the young sister of Ulster’s chief commissioner, Sir Henry Bagenal, in an attempt to trap him in a blood alliance. This phony war had ended on 16 August as Tyrone led an all-out fight for liberation, leaving Sir Henry Bagenal among the 2,000 loyalist dead.

  The events that followed haunted Harington, as they did the Queen. Essex and his army had reached Dublin in mid-April 1599. The Irish Council advised him against attacking Tyrone in Ulster before the late summer and so he led the army south into Leinster, “the heart of the whole kingdom,” before going on into Munster. It was an arduous and bloody campaign. Harington wrote home thanking God “that among so many as have been hurt and slain . . . and some shot even in the very ranks I was of, I have escaped all this while without bodily hurt.” Essex furthermore was no longer the confident, handsome young soldier he had once been. At thirty-two his hair had grown thin and he had to wear it short, except for one long lock behind his left ear, which he tucked into his ruff. His once round and amiable face was pinched, “his ruddy colour failed . . . and his countenance was sad and dejected.”55 He suffered terrible headaches—possibly a symptom of syphilitic meningitis—and certainly his sense of judgment was abandoning him.

  When Essex heard that his military successes were ignored at court and that he was being criticized for his failure to take on Tyrone directly, he considered bringing the army back from Ireland. He intended to use it to force Elizabeth to name James her heir and dispose of Cecil, Cobham and Ralegh once and for all, but his friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, dissuaded him. Instead Essex made the fateful decision to make a truce with Tyrone against royal orders and return to court to secure royal support for his military strategy. In the months that followed Essex’s subsequent arrest, his supporters approached James, asking him to invade England in support of the Earl. While James worked to raise the necessary funds they published pamphlets justifying Essex’s actions in Ireland. In the autumn of 1600 Elizabeth responded to these paper darts by stripping the Earl of his right to collect a tax on sweet wines. It left him facing financial ruin, and Harington looked on aghast as Essex shifted “from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proves him devoid of good reason or right mind.” He had guessed what lay ahead: “The Queen well knows how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knows not how to yield.”56

  Increasingly unstable, Essex was ready to accept the most paranoid theories about Cecil. He knew his rival must be looking for a stronger candidate than Lord Beauchamp, whose candidature had been seriously weakened by the Doleman book. The Jesuit Robert Persons believed that Cecil was interested in Arbella’s claim. Cecil’s wife had died in 1598 and there were rumors in Europe that he even wanted to marry Arbella. Essex, however, became convinced that Cecil was plotting to place the Infanta Isabella on the throne together with her husband and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albert. 10 He reasoned that Cecil was the leading exponent of peace with Spain and his suspicions were raised further by the mysterious appearance of Cobham and Ralegh at a peace conference that took place in Boulogne in July 1600. They had not been sent in any official capacity and Essex was convinced they were acting with Cecil to make a secret deal with the Infanta and her husband.

  Essex’s paranoia was fueled by those around him, notably his sister Penelope Rich and his secretary, Henry Cuffe. The latter pointed out that Cecil was placing men he could trust in the crucial offices on which the defense of the realm rested. Ralegh had been given the governorship of Jersey in September 1600, “there to harbour [the Spaniard] upon any occasion.” Meanwhile, “in the east, the Cinq Portes, the keys of the realm,” were in the hands of Lord Cobham, “as likewise was the county of Kent, the next and directest way to the Imperial city of this realm.” The navy and Treasury were in the hands of Cecil’s allies, Admiral Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, and Cecil had “established his own brother, the Lord Burghley,” as President of the North.57 Essex ignored the obvious point, made by the intelligence gatherer Thomas Phelipps, that Cecil was too closely associated with the persecution of Catholics to risk promoting a Catholic claim. Instead he decided to preempt Cecil’s supposed plans and seize the court.

  On 7 February 1601 one of Essex’s inner circle of friends, the Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick, paid Shakespeare’s company 40 shillings to perform Richard II, the story of a feeble and indecisive king who allows the country to go to rack and ruin and is deposed by a glorious subject who then becomes king himself. Cecil had introduced Essex to Shakespeare’s play during a brief reconciliation in 1597 and it had since become something of an obsession with the Earl. This was doubtless what Cecil intended: it was part of his modus operandi to give his enemies the rope with which they later hanged themselves.

  The next day, a Sunday, 300 armed men gathered in the courtyard at Essex’s house. About a third of the rebels were soldiers who had served alongside Essex at one time or another. Many were Catholic, and they included several names later associated with the Gunpowder Plot: Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham. Others were Puritan; some, like Sir Henry Bromley, had City connections. A few were blood relatives of Essex. Most strikingly, however, the rebels included what the courtier John Chamberlain called the “chief gallants” of the time: the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, Lords Lumley and Monteagle among them, united above all by hatred of Cecil.

  Essex led his followers through Ludgate toward Paul’s Cross. A small black taffeta bag containing a letter from the King of Scots hung around his neck. The streets were too narrow for the rebels to ride their horses and so they walked, brandishing their swords and crying out: “For the Queen! For the Queen!” People came out from their tall, narrow, shop-fronted timber-and-plaster houses and crowds began to gather—but no one came forward. Essex, sweating freely, shouted that Ralegh, Cobham and Cecil were plotting to pu
t the Infanta on the throne and murder him, but the people simply gaped and “marvelled that they could come in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday.”58 They did not hold Elizabeth responsible for the actions of her officials, as the court did.

  At noon Essex paused at the churchyard of St. Paul’s. He had intended to make a speech but by the time he reached it he knew the revolt had failed. Within a fortnight Elizabeth had signed a warrant for Essex’s execution. She had it recalled, but if she was waiting for her onetime favorite to beg for mercy he did not oblige. When the final warrant was signed his only request was to be executed in the privacy of the Tower, so as not to stir up the multitude.

  Early on the morning of 25 February 1601, Ash Wednesday, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, “gave the Earl warning as he was in his bed to prepare himself to death.” At seven or eight he conducted him to the scaffold. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, was obliged to be present at the execution, but the atmosphere was so charged he withdrew to watch from a window in the Armory. When Essex had finished praying he took off his doublet. His secretary in Ireland, Fynes Moryson, had noticed that he suffered from the cold, but no one saw him shiver in the winter air, nor did he move after the first of the three blows it took to sever his head from his body. The long lock of hair Essex grew in Ireland was cut off and kept as a relic. 11

  Elizabeth was careful to show mercy to the young noblemen who had followed Essex. His friend the Earl of Southampton was imprisoned in the Tower, where he still remained. Of the rest, only four of the principal conspirators were executed: Essex’s stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount; another Catholic, called Sir Charles Davers; his secretary, Henry Cuffe; and fellow Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick. Blount made amends to Ralegh and Cobham on the scaffold for accusing them of supporting the Infanta’s claim. Their names, he said, had been used only “to colour other matters.” He also confessed that he and others had been prepared to take things as far as the shedding of the Queen’s blood. But neither Elizabeth’s mercy nor this confession did anything to dent the Earl’s posthumous reputation. When the official version of what had occurred was delivered in a sermon at the Cross at St. Paul’s weeks later it was “very offensively taken of the common sort” and the minister fled the pulpit in fear of his life.59

  In subsequent months Ralegh was accused of having blown smoke in Essex’s face as he mounted the scaffold and Cecil’s life was threatened in places as far apart as Wales, Surrey and Mansfield. But although this anger was not directed against the Queen it was she who felt it most. A few years earlier a French ambassador recorded that Elizabeth had given him “a great discourse of the friendship that her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would die rather than see any diminution of the one part or the other.”60 Now she believed the bond between them was broken, a view encouraged by those in her government who did not wish to see blame cast upon themselves.

  In the months following the Essex revolt Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated markedly and by the time Harington saw her at court in October 1601 she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. She was eating little and was disheveled and unkempt. A sword was kept on her table at all times and she constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news, occasionally thrusting her rusty weapon in the tapestry in blind fury. Every message from the City upset her, as if she expected news of some fresh rebellion. Eventually she sent Lord Buckhurst to Harington with a message: “Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to go home: it is no season now to fool it here.”61 He did as he was told and so missed the opening of Elizabeth’s last parliament, in November 1601, when she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes.

  The Spanish had invaded Ireland in September, hoping to take advantage of Tyrone’s rebellion and gain a stepping-stone to England. Subsidies were needed for the war and MPs soon granted them, but many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks launched against the granting of monopolies. During the 1590s Burghley had altered the system of royal patronage based on the leasing and alienation of crown lands in their favor in order to shift the cost of reward away from the crown. It had since fallen on ordinary people. The price of starch, for example, had tripled over the three years that Cecil had held the monopoly on it.62 He railed in the Commons against those “that have desired to be popular without the house for speaking against monopolies” and Ralegh defended his monopoly in tin so vehemently that it almost brought the debate to a halt. Elizabeth, however, was sufficiently concerned by the attacks on her prerogative to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.63 When the news was announced MPs wept and cheered.

  A few days later Elizabeth received a deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall. Once they had delivered their thanks, she took the opportunity to remind them of what was later seen as the central philosophy of her reign.

  Mr Speaker, We perceive your coming is to present thanks to us. Know I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desire to o fer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches; for these we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks, I account them invaluable. And although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves . . . Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strict, fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set upon worldly goods but only for my subjects’ good. What you do bestow on me, I will not hoard up, but receive it to bestow on you again; yea, my own properties I account to be yours, to be expended for your good, and your eyes shall see the bestowing of it for your welfare.64

  They were described as “golden words” but Elizabeth was only too aware that things had changed, and when Parliament was dissolved in December she recalled the bitter truth of “so many and diverse stratagems and malicious practises and devises to surprise us of our life.” 65 That spring, Elizabeth began complaining of an ache in one of her arms. A doctor suggested that her discomfort was rheumatism and might be helped with ointments. She reacted furiously, telling him he was mistaken and ordering him from her presence, but it was soon reported that “the ache in the Queen’s arm is fallen into her side.” She was “still thanks to God, frolicy and merry, only her face showing some decay,” yet sometimes she felt so hot she would take off her petticoat while at other times she would shake with cold.66 Depression dogged her and in June Elizabeth was overheard complaining desperately to Cecil about “the poverty of the state, the continuance of charge, the discontentment of all sorts of people.”67 She told the French ambassador, the Comte de Beaumont, that she was weary of life. Then, sighing as her eyes filled with tears, she spoke of Essex’s death, how she had tried to prevent it and failed.68

  By August Elizabeth’s pains had gone to her hip. Defiantly she continued to hunt every two or three days, but a Catholic spy writing under the name “Anthony Rivers” reported that a countrywoman who saw her on her progress had commented that the Queen looked very old and ill. A guard terrified the woman by warning that “she should be hanged for those words.” Courtiers, however, were less easily intimidated and whispers about the succession were on everyone’s lips.69 The spy described how James’s 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, with increase according to desert etc.” Individuals were responding with shows of affection: “for the most part it is thought rather for fear than love.” He named Cecil as one such, adding, “All is but policy it being certain he loves him as little as the others.” 70 It is now believed that the spy “Rivers” was William Sterrell, secretary to the Earl of Worcester, which would have placed him at the heart of Elizabeth’s court.71 His letters to Persons and others make it clear that few actively wanted a Scots king, and he reported that a group of courtiers was planning to marry Arbella Stuart to Beauchamp’s seventeen-year-old elder
son, Edward Seymour, “and carry the succession that way.” To all outward appearance, however, it was business as usual.

  In October 1602 Cecil entertained Elizabeth at his new house on the Strand and presented her with ten gifts, mostly jewels. She left in excellent spirits, refusing any help to enter the royal barge. As she climbed aboard, however, she fell and bruised her shins badly. It left her in considerable pain. She began to talk of moving from Whitehall to the comforts of Richmond Palace, but in the end the lassitude of depression kept her at Whitehall, where Harington found her weeping at Christmas.

  Now that Elizabeth’s godson was certain she was dying he intended to follow the Tract on the Succession sent to James in Scotland with a gift for New Year’s, the traditional time for giving presents. He designed a lantern constructed as a symbol of the dark times of Elizabeth’s last years and the splendor that was to come with James’s rising sun. It was engraved with the words “Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” and, a little underneath, “After the cross, light.”72

  CHAPTER TWO

  “A BABE CROWNED IN HIS CRADLE” The Shaping of the King of Scots

  William Shakespeare is said to have written Macbeth to flatter James. It certainly did not flatter Scotland. The play, which was first performed in 1606, depicted a violent, medieval country inhabited by witches. It was supposedly set in the eleventh century but as Shakespeare knew, many at the English court believed the picture held true of the Scotland of their day— and not without some reason. For the most part Scottish society was divided between feudal lairds and their tenantry. What meager surpluses the land produced were used to feed the lairds’ private armies before any remainder could be traded in the towns. These consequently remained small and trade was underdeveloped, while an inordinate amount of energy was expended on the detection and killing of witches. There were, however, signs of growing wealth and improvement.1