After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  Once tongues were set wagging some spoke openly about Elizabeth dying; others went so far as to claim she was already dead, giving the very hour that she had died and insisting it was being kept secret for the security of the state. The result was just as the government had anticipated: “the wealthier sort feared sudden uproars and tumults, and the needy and loose persons desired them.”44

  On 15 March the Privy Council was convened in perpetual session at Richmond; guards were doubled at the royal palace, pensioners were armed and the peers summoned. According to a French report, the Earl of Northumberland arrived at Richmond at the head of a hundred men declaring that he would kill anyone who opposed James’s succession. The only other peers present were Lord Thomas Howard, nephew to James’s correspondent Henry Howard, and Lord Cobham, who sent word to Ralegh in Plymouth to return to court immediately.

  After the meeting, Northumberland wrote to inform James that Elizabeth’s death was imminent and to reassure him that the Council had come out in support of him as Elizabeth’s heir. He reported that orders were being made for the suppression of rumors and disturbances in the provinces and that the rest of the nobility had been called for. Potential troublemakers were being press-ganged into the army and sent to the Low Countries, known recusants such as Robert Catesby were locked up and the City of London was ordered “to keep strong watch lest discontented persons make any head there.”45 The change there was felt immediately. A Londoner noted in his diary that guards were put at “every gate and street” and Scaramelli reported that 500 vagrants were seized from the taverns and placed under lock and key in one night alone.

  The rich took advantage of the new security, carrying their plate and treasure from the suburbs to safehouses in the City, and the crown jewels were locked away in the Tower. Admiral Nottingham closed the ports and the navy was placed on alert against any foreign attempts.46 Thus far, however, everything was peaceful, and Northumberland emphasized:

  In all this likelihood of so mighty a change, not one man hath stirred save Sir Edward Baynham, a wild and free-speaking youth, who braving it, and protesting that he would lose his life and so would forty thousand Catholics more, ere your Majesty should come in. This man is committed to prison, and I assure your Majesty condemned by all of them, or the most part, that are Catholicly inclined.47

  The rumor mill was, however, grinding ever more furiously, fueled by the contents of Arbella’s last letter. On Wednesday the sixteenth, Scaramelli wrote to the Senate claiming that the Queen had begun to have doubts about Essex’s treachery in Ireland, that “her dear intimate, might have been quite innocent after all; for . . . he concluded an agreement with Tyrone that was more advantageous for the kingdom, and more honourable for the Queen than the present one.”48 This was, of course, nonsense. Essex’s truce had left Tyrone’s armies intact while Mountjoy had utterly defeated him. But Scaramelli had been told that Elizabeth had felt so deeply about her supposed misjudgment of Essex that on the anniversary of his execution, she had “burst into tears and dolorous lamentation, as though for some deadly sin she had committed and then fell ill of a sickness which the doctors instantly judged to be mortal.”49 The symptoms he describes give us some clues as to what she was dying from:

  The Queen’s illness is want of sleep, want of appetite, labour of the lungs and heart, cessation of the natural motions, irresponsiveness to remedies. There is but little fever but also little strength; nor are there any good symptoms except that a slight swelling of the glands under the jaw burst of itself, with a discharge of a small amount of matter.50

  The burst swelling was probably a ruptured abscess. Elizabeth’s teeth were in poor condition and an infection in a rotten tooth could have turned into a fatal condition called Ludwig’s angina. With this illness Elizabeth would have been generally unwell for some time. Abscesses under the tongue and in the throat would then have made it difficult to swallow, speak or breathe. At this stage death would follow within days.51 Two days later, on 18 March, the French ambassador, de Beaumont, described Elizabeth as being unable to speak for long periods. She sat on her cushions, staring at the ground, her finger in her mouth. James’s agents now made frantic last-minute efforts to gain waverers to his cause. One arrived at Scaramelli’s residence that same day “with great secrecy; looking carefully round about him so as not to be noticed.”52

  Once inside, the agent showered compliments on the Serene Republic, telling Scaramelli that James called it the “Splendour of the World.” Eventually he asked whether Venice would support James’s succession. Scaramelli gave a neutral reply and mentioned his concerns about English piracy. The agent promptly “professed a profound hatred of the English, and declared that when it came to his master’s turn he would put an end to this general buccaneering.” Scaramelli observed that he “spoke quite openly and with absolute confidence of his master’s succession to the throne, and went to the length of saying that there was not a family of any importance wherein, by promises and hopes, he had not won over father, brother or so.” The Scottish agent had also let slip James’s fear that Henri IV was in some way involved in Arbella’s rebellion.53

  The agent pressed Scaramelli as to how long he would be staying in England. “I told him that if the Queen got better I hope to finish my business in two audiences; that would occupy April and a few days of May. He said, ‘That is a long time; you may hear great news before that.’ ” 54

  Brouncker, meanwhile, had arrived in Derbyshire. He found no stocks of pikes or shot, no groups of armed men in the villages around Hardwick, no evidence of a powerful conspiracy in support of Arbella. Henry Cavendish had met Brouncker and he had agreed to travel to court to be interviewed by Cecil. Brouncker’s only concern was that Richard Stapleton had fled to London. He wrote to warn Cecil that Stapleton “had long practised to convey my Lady Arbella into Norfolk, and there to keep her amongst seminaries and priests, and to defend her by a strong party if need required, as Arbella herself told me, though after she would have denied it.”

  Arbella had shut up like a clam when she had heard that the Queen was dying, and she warned Brouncker that he would have no right to hold her after the Queen’s death. He asked Cecil anxiously what he could do without a warrant under the Great Seal: “I know not how to direct my course unless you advertise me whether anything be resolved concerning a successor.” 55 But there was no time for a reply. Events were overtaking the post horse.

  The playwright Thomas Dekker’s Wonderful Year of 1603 recalls the harbingers of Elizabeth’s decline as “a hideous tempest, that shook cedars, terrified the tallest pines, and cleft asunder even the hardest hearts of oak.” Dekker’s storm takes on an almost physical form: “her thighs being whirlwinds and her groans thunder” to deliver a “pale, meagre, weak child, named Sickness.” When Sickness is fully grown Death makes him his herald—without even a bribe, Dekker jokes (“and that’s a wonder in this age”). The herald is then ordered “to go into the Privy Chamber of the English Queen, to summon her to appear in the Star Chamber of heaven.” Dekker describes him as being sent dressed as a courtier. He did not name which one, but Sir Robert Carey would have been appropriate.

  Carey was the youngest grandson of Elizabeth’s aunt Mary Boleyn. It was he whom Elizabeth had sent to Scotland in 1587 with the letter assuring James that she was not responsible for Mary, Queen of Scot’s death. Carey arrived at Richmond on Saturday 19 March; when he left he was carrying another message to the waiting King. He later claimed that he had traveled to court from Northumberland for no better reason than to catch up with friends. But it is more likely that his sister, Lady Scrope, had sent him a warning that the Queen was dying. As soon as Elizabeth was informed that her cousin was at court she asked to see him. Carey recalled that he found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety and health which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand and wrung it
hard and said: “No Robin I am not well” and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days and, in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight: for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh but when the queen of Scots was beheaded.56

  Carey tried to raise the Queen’s spirits but found that her “melancholy humour . . . was too deep rooted in her heart; and hardly to be removed.”

  It was clear that the Queen was dying, and as Carey left that evening he anxiously considered “in what a wretched estate I should be left; most of my livelihood depending on her life.” As a younger son, Carey had inherited only “that which the cat left on the malt heap.” Earlier in his life the Queen had hoped that Carey would improve his situation by marrying an heiress; instead he had fallen in love with and married the widowed Elizabeth de Widdrington, whose fortune was as modest as his tastes were expensive. Elizabeth had been very angry at the time but eventually she had forgiven him. Now he enjoyed the rewards of her favor, among which was his office as Warden of the Middle Marches. If he did not gain favor with her successor, he could lose everything.

  Carey was aware that James had given Lady Scrope a sapphire ring with instructions for it to be returned on the Queen’s death. She may have suggested to him that a possible answer to his problems was to be the man to carry it to Scotland. In any event, immediately after supper Carey wrote to tell James that Elizabeth would not last above three days and that when she did die, he “would be the first man that should bring him news of it.” As Carey retired to bed that night his sister remained with the Queen, along with two other ladies-in-waiting from the so-called tribe of Dan: his niece Lady Kildare and his great-niece, the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Southwell. For weeks the women had watched the Queen weaken. “I am not sick,” she would sometimes exclaim; “I feel no pain, and yet I pine away.”57 It had seemed mysterious and rumors of foul play had begun to circulate. “They even name the person,” Scaramelli noted, “and say that actions of this magnitude begin in danger and end in reward.”58

  Bizarre stories abounded, many said to have been spread by Catholics. None were recorded at the time but Elizabeth Southwell recounted several strange tales in her memoirs. She accused Cecil and “his familiar,” the Vice Chamberlain, John Stanhope, of killing the Queen by witchcraft, claiming that they gave Elizabeth an enchanted coin to hang around her neck and that playing cards were found with nails struck through the head of the queen of hearts. She also recalled that Lady Gifford said that she had seen Elizabeth’s ghost walking abroad while her physical body was sleeping in bed. Elizabeth’s ladies would have expected to see strange things: supernatural signs were widely believed to mark great events such as the death of a ruler. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the earliest known version of which appeared in print in 1603—the death of Julius Caesar was foretold by the dead walking in the streets and by “stars with trains of fire and dews of blood.” But some have since taken the view that Southwell embroidered her recollections with the supernatural in order to smear Cecil and the heretic Queen. The young Maid of Honor converted to Catholicism after eloping with Leicester’s son Robert Dudley in 1605 and only subsequently did she describe the details of Elizabeth’s last days. Southwell’s accusations do, however, show the sense of widespread paranoia during Elizabeth’s last days—and much of what she wrote is echoed in contemporary reports and other memoirs.

  The Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman and Burghley’s servant John Clapham both related versions of another of Southwell’s supernatural stories. Elizabeth was lying in bed at night when she caught sight of her wasted body in the firelight. Come the morning she demanded to see a true mirror for the first time in twenty years. Horrified by her reflection, she railed against the flatterers who had lied to her, and fell “into an extremetie.” Here Elizabeth’s supposed preference for false mirrors is no longer a comment on her vanity or unease at the false image she gave to the world. The Queen is recognizing that she has been listening to dishonest men and not to her true servants. As with the story Scaramelli repeated, in which Elizabeth regrets executing honest Essex at the behest of false men, her heart breaks at the moment she realizes her mistake.

  Such allegories would not have been lost on contemporaries. Listening to the “wrong” people was an error courtiers were anxious for her successor to avoid, and time and again in the following weeks they would express fears that James would be seduced by flatterers and government corruption would persist.

  On the morning of Sunday 20 March, Carey returned to Richmond Palace from his lodgings expecting to see the Queen in the Royal Chapel for the morning service. He waited with the rest of the congregation in the long, narrow room with its handsome cathedral seats and pews until “after eleven o’clock one of the Grooms [of the Chambers] came out, and bade make ready for the Private Closet.” The Private Closet was in the passageway between the Privy and Presence Chambers, and near to her sleeping quarters. Elizabeth, however, was incapable even of going that far. She never arrived at the Private Closet. Instead “she had cushions laid for her in the Privy Chamber, hard by the Closet door; and there she heard service.” 59 When it was finished Elizabeth remained on her cushions, unable to speak, refusing to go to bed, convinced “that if she lay down she should never rise.”60 The congregation, however, went home, taking their news with them.

  London was ringing with the sound of bells. The Duke of Stettin, traveling around England the previous summer, had remarked how popular bell-ringing was in England. He was told that Elizabeth enjoyed hearing them even when the bells rang late into the evening, considering it “a sign of the health of the people.” Stettin also learned that when someone was in extremis the parish bells were “touched gently with the clappers,” which was taken as a signal for everyone in the street and in their house to fall on their knees and pray for the invalid.61 As word spread of Elizabeth’s condition, however, the bells were not tolled but stilled. The Jesuit William Weston, who was in the Tower awaiting banishment, noticed a strange silence descending on the city, “as if it were under interdict and divine worship suspended. Not a bell rang out. Not a bugle sounded—though ordinarily they were often heard.”62

  Elizabeth remained on her cushions all that Sunday night. On Monday Scaramelli reported that “Her Majesty’s life is absolutely despaired of, even if she is not already dead. For the past six days she has become quite silly and indeed, idiotic.” The reservations many felt about James’s inheritance came to the fore, with Catholics condemning him as a schismatic and Protestants rejecting him as a foreigner and threatening death to all foreigners. People dashed hither and thither, tying up their affairs before shutting themselves in their houses, while at Richmond Palace Elizabeth remained immobile, refusing medical help and food. Eventually Admiral Nottingham persuaded her to take some broth and Cecil told the Queen that “to content the people her majesty must go to bed.” Elizabeth, however, merely smiled and told him “the word must was not to be used to princes,” adding pointedly: “Little man, little man, if your father had lived ye durst not have said so much but thou knowest I must die and that makes thee so presumptuous.”63 She then asked him to leave the room.

  According to Elizabeth Southwell, when Cecil had gone, Elizabeth turned to Admiral Nottingham, “to whom she shook her head and with a pitiful voice said, ‘My lord I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck . . . I am tied and the case is altered with me.’ ” Her comments were taken to refer not merely to the swelling and pain around her neck but also to the power ebbing into the hands of her leading Councillors. 21

  On Tuesday 22 March Elizabeth’s death was reported in Leicester, though the suspected culprits were soon arrested. Elizabeth was still on her cushions, refusing to go to bed until that evening, when at last Admiral Nottingham helped pull her up onto her feet.64 She stood rock still for what seemed like hours until, “What by fair means, what by forc
e he got her to bed.”65

  The next day Elizabeth’s chaplain, Dr. Parry, invited his friend John Manningham to dine in the Privy Chamber. Manningham, a young lawyer from the Middle Temple, found the clerics in garrulous form on the subject of the Queen’s health. There had been “some whispering that her brain was somewhat distempered,” but they told him that although Elizabeth had sat “very pensive and silent” over the past two days, her eyes fixed on one object for hours at a time, she had kept her senses and her memory. The only thing that suggested confusion to them was her stubborn refusal to accept any medical help—possibly she remembered how her half-brother Edward VI suffered at the hands of doctors during his last days. Manningham closed his diary for the day with the comment, “A royal majesty is no privilege against death.”66

  The knowledge that Elizabeth had not named her successor weighed heavily on everyone; without her word her father’s will, sanctioned by Parliament, remained extant and it excluded the Stuart line. Admiral Nottingham suddenly recalled a conversation he had with the Queen on the journey to Richmond. He claimed that in response to his questioning she had told him: “My throne has been the throne of kings, neither ought any other than he that is my next heir succeed me,” but this was worthless without the corroboration of witnesses. A decision was therefore made to ask the dying queen to name her heir one last time.

  That afternoon, 23 March, Elizabeth responded to the Council’s request to see her and called for them. She lay on a walnut bed, carved with gilded and painted beasts. Above her were hung ostrich plumes spangled with gold. Elizabeth asked for liquid to ease her sore throat in order that she might speak, but, seeing her in pain, the Councilors suggested that she instead raise a finger when they named the successor “whom she liked.” 67