Cecil insisted that absolute secrecy be maintained over their correspondence for, as he later put it, “if Her Majesty had known all I did . . . her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her.”50 He had a narrow escape from being discovered only that summer. Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, later described how the Queen was walking in Greenwich Park when she “heard the post blow his horn.” She asked that the bag of letters be brought to her, and Cecil, knowing that it would contain letters from Scotland, fell on his knees and begged her not to look at them. He told her that if she did people would think “it to be out of a jealousy and suspicion of him” which would leave him disgraced and unable to continue working for her effectively.51 Elizabeth chose not to look in the bag, but Cecil remained so nervous of discovery that he risked insulting his future Queen by asking James not to tell Anna of their correspondence.
Cecil’s first letter to the King assured him that Elizabeth was a dynastic legitimist, not at all inclined to “cut off the natural branch and graft upon some wild stock,” but he warned that Elizabeth would perceive any demand for a public recognition of his right as a threat. Furthermore, if he invaded England as Essex had suggested, all Englishmen would unite against him. James was happy to agree to Cecil’s requests, but in turn he required that Cecil work with two Englishmen he trusted. The first, Lord Henry Howard, was the embittered younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, beheaded for plotting to marry James’s mother—and thus a member of a family that had proven its loyalty to the Stuart cause. The second was Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, who like Howard was a Catholic, though Elizabeth had famously said of him that he “reconciled what she believed to be impossible, a stiff papist to a good subject.” Where Howard was a brilliant academic but a tedious companion, Worcester was handsome and charismatic—the perfect courtier—and when Elizabeth had sent him to Scotland in 1590 to congratulate James on his marriage he had impressed the King so much that they had remained in contact thereafter.
James hoped that as a leader of the English Catholics Worcester was well placed to reconcile his co-religionists to the King’s inheritance. Cecil had therefore helped engineer Worcester’s promotion to the Privy Council in the summer of 1601, along with two other new members: Arbella Stuart’s maternal uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and Cecil’s protégé, Sir John Stanhope, an old enemy of Shrewsbury’s. 18 Howard assured James that Shrewsbury had been picked only because Elizabeth felt she had to respond to complaints that the nobility were underrepresented on the Council, adding bitchily that Elizabeth never listened to his advice on anything. In fact James and Cecil recognized the need to have an ally within the Arbella camp on the Council and Cecil had chosen Stanhope as his counterweight. Thomas Wilson’s State of England described how Cecil maintained a tradition of pairing rival with rival in all the great offices of state so that “each having his enemies eye to over look him, it may make him look more warily to his charge, and that if anybody should incline to any unfaithfulness . . . it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head.” They in turn were supported only by “base pen clerks . . . that cannot conceive his master’s drifts and policies.” 52
As Thomas Wilson observed, Cecil was like his father, “of whom it was written that he was like an aged tree that lets none grow which near him planted be.”53 It was already clear that it would be more difficult for Cecil to maintain his political hegemony under James, but he was determined to cut two of his old allies down to size: his former brother-in-law, Lord Cobham, and Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. One of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honor, Meg Radcliffe, had predicted years before that the anti-Essex alliance would break up after the Earl’s death and so it was proving. Cobham and Ralegh were not of any further use to Cecil; if anything, they were a liability, unpopular with almost everybody. The women of the court detested Lord Cobham, an ill-tempered individual later described by a courtier as “but one degree from a fool,” and the men loathed Ralegh, whom they considered an arrogant upstart.
Born the younger son of a mere tenant farmer from an old but impoverished Devonshire family, Ralegh had caught Elizabeth’s attention early in the 1580s. According to one telling story, Ralegh had been called before the Privy Council to explain why he had fallen out with his commanding officer in Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Ralegh was already an experienced soldier, having spent his teenage years fighting for the Protestant cause in France. Wilton, however, was a notorious one. His infamy rested on his having ordered the cold-blooded killing of 600 mainly Italian and Spanish prisoners at Smerwick Fort, just north of Dingle Bay. Even in an era of endemic violence this massacre had shocked: “Truly I never heard of such a bloody barbarous action, as the Lord Grey . . . committed in Ireland upon the Spaniards,” the Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman later recalled, “for whereas they had submitted himself to their mercy, he put some four or five hundred of them [in effect the whole number] into a yard, weaponless; and then were soldiers sent in with clubs, bills and swords, and slew everyman of them.”54
This massacre was not, however, the subject of Ralegh’s complaints to the Council. The boy who had seen the horrors of the wars in France did not become the man to blanch in Ireland. Ralegh was one of two officers who had led the companies that carried out the killings. Ralegh was instead at the Council table to present his own ideas about winning the war in Ireland and, as the writer John Aubrey described it, he “told his tale so well, and with so good a grace and presence that the Queen took especial notice of him, and presently preferred him.” Elizabeth liked to surround herself with a particular type of man—“proper men” was how Aubrey put it, and Ralegh exemplified this ideal, as one contemporary recalled: “For touching his shape and lineaments of body, they were framed in so just a proportion and so seemly an order, as there was nothing in them that a man might well wish to have been added or altered. In such gifts of the mind as the world generally esteems, he not only excelled most, but matched even the best men of his time.”55
The Queen had showered Ralegh with gifts and honors: the estates of the young Catholic traitor who had given the Babington plot its name, a prized knighthood and the Bishop of Durham’s crumbling palace in London. Ralegh renovated the palace and made it the center of an intellectual circle that discussed science and religion. From here he also planned his great expeditions, including the one that founded the first English colony in the New World at Roanoke Island. Elizabeth bestowed the name “Virginia” on it and all things from the New World became fashionable, from smoking tobacco in silver pipes to eating potatoes, which were considered an aphrodisiac. Ralegh, who was said to “love a wench well,” had little need of sexual fillips, but he had disadvantages as a courtier. Being an outsider, he had no network of powerful relations to protect his interests. He had befriended Lord Cobham because he was an immensely rich peer with all the social contacts that Ralegh himself lacked. He might, however, have acquired more friends with better judgment if his sarcasm and “damnable pride” had not earned him so many enemies. It was said that “he was commonly noted for using of bitter scoffs and reproachful taunts which bred him much dislike” and “was so far from affecting popularity as he seemed to take a pride in being hated of the people.”
Ralegh took great pleasure in annoying those less quick-witted than himself and even ignored religious sensibilities, teasing the pious by “perverting the words and sense of Holy Scripture.” Many assumed he was an atheist, something considered almost synonymous to being evil.56 There was considerable relief, therefore, when Essex replaced Ralegh as Elizabeth’s favorite in 1587, and no little delight when he fell into disgrace in May of 1592 after he married one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honor behind the Queen’s back and then lied to her about it. It was Cecil who had eventually smoothed Ralegh’s path back to royal favor. In 1597 he had returned to his former post as Captain of the Guard and thereafter he had proved a ruthless ally of
Cecil’s in the factional struggle with Essex. He had even suggested that Cecil murder Essex in January 1600 when there appeared to be a danger that the Queen might accept him back in favor.
The beginnings of the split between the old allies came the following summer, when Ralegh and Cobham turned up uninvited at the peace conference of Boulogne—the event that had convinced Essex that Cecil was seeking to come to an accommodation with the Archdukes of the Netherlands, the Infanta Isabella and her husband, Albert. In fact, as Cecil complained to a friend, they had kept him ignorant of their activities.57 What they appear to have been involved in were unilateral negotiations concerning a collection of treasure known as the “Burgundy jewels.” It had belonged to ancestors of the Archdukes who once ruled the ancient Kingdom of Burgundy, a traditional ally of England against France. The jewels had been given to Elizabeth in pawn by the Dutch rebels in exchange for a loan of £28,000, a fraction of the value of the treasure, and Albert and Isabella were desperate to redeem them.58 They hoped that paying generously would help pave the way for better relations with England and perhaps even lead to a revival of the old Anglo-Burgundian alliance— something that might have appealed to Ralegh, who recognized, as Essex did, that Spanish power was in decline. The debts of the Spanish crown were escalating and the population dropping, with plague and famine killing hundreds of thousands. Their new King, Isabella’s half-brother Philip III, was a slow, fat, pink-skinned man, incapable of energizing his country, and the national mood was encapsulated in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the hero who tilted at windmills. France, by contrast, was emerging as a great power. Henri IV had restored royal authority after decades of civil war and the peace made with Spain in 1598 allowed French trade to flourish. “France,” Ralegh had warned in 1600, “is already one of the greatest kingdoms in Europe, and our farthest friend.”59
But Ralegh’s actions were not all about politics. He was also keen to make money and Cobham, whom Elizabeth had employed to negotiate for peace with the Archduke’s emissary, the Count of Aremberg, since 1597, was easy to manipulate. In the event, however, the negotiations came to nothing and Ralegh only succeeded in losing Cecil’s trust.
The first indication of Secretary Cecil’s anger came in 1601. After Cecil’s wife died in 1598, the Raleghs had often taken care of his son, William. The boy adored Ralegh, whom he called his “captain,” but he was now taken away from their home for good. Cecil, however, was careful to disguise his ill will toward his erstwhile allies: “in show we are great,” he told a friend, “and all my revenge shall be to heap coal on their heads.”60 Cobham and Ralegh were therefore shocked to find that they were not among those invited to join the Privy Council in the summer, though Ralegh still hoped that he would be made a councillor when Parliament opened in November 1601.61 Just before then an opportunity arose for the two friends to make contact with James, as Cecil had done.62
James’s latest envoy, Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, son of his beloved Esmé, had arrived at Dover. Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, was there to attend on him. He seized the opportunity to express to Lennox his wish to forward James’s claim, but unfortunately he then boasted about it to Cecil, who, after listening to his excitable brother-in-law, delivered an icy warning. He told Cobham that if James informed Elizabeth of what he had done, he would be in terrible trouble. Cobham protested that he had only spoken from excessive zeal, to which Cecil piously retorted that he hoped the Queen would outlive him and that no dealings with James would thus be necessary. Cobham and Ralegh were desperate to retain the Queen’s favor, which appeared to be mysteriously evaporating, and it was a shaken Cobham who relayed Cecil’s words to Ralegh. He fell straight into the Secretary’s trap. Instead of pursuing Lennox, Ralegh told Cecil that Lennox had approached him, but he had told him that he was “too deeply engaged . . . to his own mistress” to seek favor elsewhere.63 Come November, however, Ralegh still did not have a place on the Privy Council and it was an embittered figure that took his seat in Parliament that month.
As Cecil spelled out Elizabeth’s requests for subsidies to support the war in Ireland to Parliament, Ralegh made sarcastic interventions. Infuriated, Cecil resolved to blacken Ralegh’s and Cobham’s names with James, telling Howard that these “two hedgehogs . . . would never live under one apple tree” with him.64 Howard was happy to do the dirty work and the Scottish King was soon complaining about the “ample, Asiatic and endless volumes” that Howard sent him on the wickedness of Ralegh, Cobham and a third figure, an old friend of Ralegh’s, Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. “You must remember,” Howard wrote on 4 December 1601, “that I gave you notice of the diabolical triplicity that is Cobham, Ralegh, and Northumberland, that meet every day at Durham house.” He claimed they had hatched a plan that “Northumberland . . . a sworn enemy to King James,” should pretend to Cecil that he supported his candidature. This ploy had failed, Howard continued, so Northumberland had told his wife: “He had rather the King of Scots was buried than crowned.”65
Northumberland’s marriage to one of Essex’s sisters was an unhappy one and it seems she was content to betray her husband’s confidences—or even to invent stories against him. And she wasn’t the only wife to do so. Howard found another useful instrument in Cobham’s wife, the widowed Countess of Kildare. Born Frances Howard, she was the daughter of Cecil’s ally the Earl of Nottingham and had married Cobham in 1600—as the tenth richest man in England he had one obvious attraction to an ambitious woman. Like several other Howard women of the day, Lady Kildare (it was usual to keep the name of one’s first husband in cases where the first husband’s title was superior) was beautiful but scheming and she had a reputation as a vicious gossip. Essex had once labeled her “the spider of the court,” and whether she intended to harm her husband or not, she provided Howard with plenty of ammunition against him, complaining that he and Ralegh frequently railed against James’s title. Cecil’s letters to James supported Howard’s efforts, praising the “wisdom and sincerity” of “faithful 3 [Howard],” and assuring James that if he did not “cast a stone into the mouths of these gaping crabs [Cobham and Ralegh] they would not stick to confess daily how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to be under your sovereignty.”66
As James absorbed these missives, Howard began to suggest to Cecil ways in which Ralegh and Cobham might be finished. Elizabeth was extremely anxious about the unpopularity of her government and Howard suggested that she be encouraged to be suspicious of Cobham and Ralegh and “taught the peril that grows unto princes by protecting, countenancing or entertaining persons odious to multitudes.”67 Ralegh and Cobham soon felt the deepening royal chill and struggled to retrieve the Queen’s good opinion, on one occasion complaining to Elizabeth that the prisoners from the Essex revolt were being treated too leniently and on another drawing up a paper supporting her decision not to name an heir.68 Such actions took them further from any hope of James’s favor and Howard intended that in the longer term other matters could be used against them. Howard had discovered that Cobham and Ralegh had decided to divide their labors so that if the policy of peace with Spain prospered, Cobham would benefit; if war, then Ralegh. Howard hoped that Spain could be used to bring them both down: “The glass of time being very far run, the day of the queen’s death may be the day of their doom,” he wrote to Cecil in June 1602.69 Northumberland, however, was going to prove more difficult to destroy.
The thirty-eight-year-old Northumberland was an unconventional figure with an equally unconventional background. His father, Thomas Percy, the eighth Earl, had faced execution for his involvement in the 1569 revolt of the northern earls but was found dead in his cell from gunshot wounds. It was said to be a suicide, although some had suspected murder. Either way his escape from the executioner saved his vast estates from being forfeited to the crown under the rules of attainder, and young Northumberland inherited land stretching over eight counties across England and Wales. His immense wealth had allowed him to stand apart from
the Cecil and Essex factions during the 1590s, which was just as well since he cared for neither of them. He saw Cecil, who was descended from Welsh farmers, as a social upstart and felt no commensurate warmth for Essex, whose enemy, Ralegh, shared his interests in navigation, astronomy and mathematics.
Science was a risky area for study at a time when it was confused with magic, and Howard had deliberately laced his letter to James with references to diabolic meetings at Durham House to stir up James’s horror of the occult. To Howard’s dismay, however, James was anxious to gain the support of a man who might otherwise have blocked his route south and in the winter of 1602–3 they were in close contact. Northumberland used his links with James to defend Cobham and Ralegh from accusations of disloyalty to James’s cause but he did not wish to be too closely associated with them and told James that Ralegh “will never be able to do you much good nor harm”: in other words, that he was expendable. Northumberland had a much bigger agenda than Ralegh’s career to consider—the cause of toleration of religion. While Northumberland was content to conform in religious matters, Catholicism remained strongly rooted in the north of England where he had most of his land base and he saw himself as a natural protector of Catholics.
As Elizabeth’s health deteriorated, Northumberland offered James a detailed analysis on how toleration would help achieve a bloodless and successful accession. According to Northumberland, there were two outstanding questions that concerned James’s supporters: would he succeed peacefully without opposition, and would he invade England and try to seize the crown before Elizabeth was dead?
Northumberland explained to James that widespread fear of a Scots invasion sprang from the knowledge that the Scots had invaded England in the past, that they had many allies among England’s traditional enemies and that England was vulnerable. Large numbers of her military men were employed in Ireland, in the Netherlands and on the high seas, while in England itself “all men are discontented in general [and] . . . look rather for the sun rising than after the sun setting.” In his Tract to the King Harington had suggested that things were so bad a Scots invasion might succeed, but Northumberland warned James that even if it did, a small country like Scotland would never be able to maintain its domination of its richer southern neighbor. It would be best for James to wait for nature to take its course with Elizabeth, for “it is most certain young bodies may die, but old ones must out of necessity.”70 Once Elizabeth was dead, Northumberland was certain James’s cause would prove a powerful one:
After Elizabeth Page 9
