After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  It was probably Watson’s talk of revolt the Jesuits had picked up on. His friend Sir Griffin Markham had reached the point of despair where he had begun to listen to Watson’s schemes; with the former soldier’s help he was now plotting in earnest.

  Sir Griffin’s creditors had accepted that the King was not going to save him from ruin and by 21 May they were already in pursuit of the man who had secured his debts, his cousin Sir John Harington. Elizabeth’s godson’s first reaction was to write to Robert Cecil asking him to draw the King’s attention to his plight: “I that have never committed crime in my life . . . am betrayed by my kin into a debt of £40,000,” he pleaded. “I look for relief from the King. Your good word may hasten it . . . I beseech you show yourself a friend to us both in this.”17 Harington had been cultivating Cecil for years. Only the previous summer he had given him one of his water closets for Theobalds, but when Cecil responded, on 29 May, it was not to show his gratitude.

  “My noble knight,” Cecil wrote, “I shall not fail to keep your grace and favour quick and lively in the King’s breast, as far as good discretion guides me.” The problem was, Cecil explained, he was not entirely secure in James’s favor and, as Harington knew, keeping a monarch’s goodwill was a tricky business: “You have tasted a little hereof in our blessed Queen’s time, who was more than a man, and (in troth) some times less than a woman.” These were still more uncertain times: “I wish I waited now in her Presence Chamber, with ease at my food, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me . . . We are much stirred about counsels, and more about honours . . . Farewell . . . Your true friend, Cecil.” 18

  There was another royal proclamation issued that day. It ordered all those not in attendance at court, or with some special reason to be in London, to leave until the coronation on 25 July, “for our people’s sake as for the safety of our own person.”19 The plague was spreading rapidly. Deaths in London and the outskirts were thirty-two for the week ending 26 May and the Lord Mayor was issuing new plague orders. The paper bills marked with the words “Lord Have Mercy on Us” that denoted infected households had proved to be too easy to deface and dispose of. They were now to be replaced by a red cross “fourteen inches in length and the like in breadth upon the wall or boards in the most open place.” Some of those shut up were so angry that they set out deliberately to infect others. One such, Henry Ross of St. Bartholomew’s the Great, was flogged and thrown into Newgate, after he did “most lewdly presume to go to the King’s Majesty’s Court at Greenwich and there thrust himself in company amongst his Majesty’s household servants and others.” 20

  Harington was more than happy to obey the King’s orders and flee London for the clean air of his Somerset estate but Sir Griffin’s creditors caught up with him before he had the chance, and on 6 June they threw him into the Gatehouse prison in Westminster. London was now baking in a summer heat wave and deaths from the plague began doubling every week. If there was an outbreak in the prison, Harington would be under a virtual death sentence. Terrified, he wrote a second letter to Cecil from his “unaccustomed lodging,” begging for “some comfortable answer in this my distress.” He hoped that at the very least pressure might be put on Sir Griffin Markham and Sir John Skinner to sell their property and pay their debts.21 But the only news Harington heard in the next few days was that Lord Mountjoy had returned from Ireland with Elizabeth’s “Monster of the North,” Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone.

  Harington could hardly believe that he, a veteran of Essex’s terrible Irish campaign, was in prison and Tyrone was on his way to court. Others had their dead to mourn and the mothers and wives of men who had never come back from Ireland lined the roads from the coast, shouting abuse and throwing mud and stones as Mountjoy’s train and the traitor Earl passed.

  The title of Tyrone was one of three earldoms created by Henry VIII in Ireland. It dated back to a time when the English had hoped to spearhead progress in Ireland by working with the chiefs. For the Irish, Tyrone’s native title, “the O’Neill,” was more significant. It made him the nearest thing Ireland had to a king—and a remarkable king Tyrone would have made, as Harington recalled. By a twist of fate he had met Tyrone in 1600. Essex had asked the knight to follow him back to court when he left Ireland, but Harington had found the ships full of wounded men and Essex’s horses. Left in Ireland, Harington had learned that Sir William Warren had orders to extend the truce Essex and Tyrone had made and he took the opportunity to travel with Warren to Ulster.

  The great rebel was already in his fifties and his red beard had turned gray, but as one contemporary recalled, he was as “fresh and active as if he had not as yet obtained forty.” Courageous and spirited but also wary and patient, Tyrone was a brilliant actor who could “appear serious or joyful, pleased or angry . . . in the most natural manner.” 22 He had greeted the Queen’s godson respectfully and apologized “that he could no better call to mind myself and some of my friends that had done him some courtesy in England saying these troubles made him forget almost all his friends.” Tyrone had traveled to court in the early 1590s with his English wife.

  As Warren and Tyrone discussed the truce, Harington was left to talk to Tyrone’s two children—“of goodly spirit, their age between thirteen and fifteen, in English clothes like a nobleman’s sons; with velvet jerkins and gold lace; of a good cheerful aspect, freckle faced, not tall of stature, but strong and well set; both of them [learning] the English tongue.” He gave them a copy of his English translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Later when the boys showed it to their father, Tyrone asked Harington to read some of it and they sat together gossiping over a meal set on a “fern table and fern forms, spread under the stately canopy of heaven.” Tyrone’s guard, he had noted, “for the most part, were beardless boys without shirts; who, in the frost, wade as familiarly through rivers as water spaniels,” Harington observed, “With what charm such a master makes them love him I know not, but if he bid come, they come; if go they do go; if he say do this, they do it.”23

  Most of those boys were now dead, but although Harington felt pity for the fallen enemy he felt none for their leader: “I have lived to see that damnable rebel Tyrone brought to England, courteously favoured, honoured and well liked.” Harington spat as he wrote to his friend, the Bishop of Bath and Wells: “Oh! My Lord, what is there which doth not prove the inconstancy of worldly matters! How did I labour after that knave’s destruction! I was called from my home by her Majesty’s command, adventured perils by sea and land, endured toil, was near starving, ate horse flesh at Munster; and all to quell that man, who now smiles in peace at those that did hazard their lives to destroy him.”24

  As the crowds at the roadsides grew more volatile the authorities were forced to rush Tyrone to a hiding place a few miles outside London. On 8 June James issued a proclamation “commanding that no man abuse the Earl of Tyrone” so that he could be moved once more. Tyrone remained heavily guarded for his own protection. Harington, meanwhile, had also found himself under close watch, but entirely for the protection of his creditors.

  A new king meant new opportunities on the diplomatic as well as the domestic front, and it was not long before ambassadors began arriving from all over Europe. The Archdukes’ envoy, Charles de Ligne, Count Aremberg, had disembarked at Dover on 3 June. He was old and his gout made the journey to London an uncomfortable one, but there was some good news waiting for him.

  James had announced three principal intentions: union with Scotland, the upholding of the established religion, and peace with his neighbors. 25 The first had been underscored by James’s proclamation on the Union, the second by his conservative choice of Household chaplains (all eleven of those sworn in at Greenwich were veterans of Elizabeth’s pulpit); the third meant that Aremberg’s years of work toward peace with England could at last see a result. The Spanish, however, had not yet sent an ambassador and the Archdukes could not make peace without t
hem. His task was primarily to gather information and prepare the ground for discussion. Aremberg’s chief enemy in this regard was Henri IV’s mighty chief minister, Maximilien de Béthune, the Marquis de Rosni (later the Duke of Sully).

  De Rosni had arrived in England on 6 June with a train of around 250 followers, 1,200 crowns’ worth of presents and a heavy baggage of diplomatic disadvantages. The gossip was that in the weeks before Elizabeth’s death the French had refused to support James’s inheritance unless he left one of his sons behind to rule Scotland; when James refused, their ambassador, de Beaumont, supported the attempted coup supposedly led by Lord Beauchamp on 28 March. De Beaumont had tried to defend himself from these accusations, saying “that all he ever said, when the Queen died, was that it became every good Catholic to protect and favour ladies, and this [meant] to encourage Lady Arabella”—a statement that just incriminated him further.

  One of James’s first actions on reaching England had been to demand that Henri IV repay the debt France owed the English crown. Henri had offered 200,000 francs as a down payment, and James had pointedly replied that he would put this toward the cost of his coronation. He had since heard that Henri gibed that he was a mere “Captain of Arts and Clerk of Arms.” 26 If all this were not bad enough, de Rosni had discovered another potential difficulty while he was in Calais. Henri had ordered his chief minister to arrive at court dressed in mourning for Elizabeth, but de Rosni was warned that this “would most certainly be highly disagreeable to the court, where so strong an affectation prevailed to obliterate the memory of that great princess, that she was never spoke of, and even the mention of her name industriously avoided.”

  Robert Lord Sidney and the Earl of Southampton met de Rosni and his brilliant train in Canterbury and they were escorted to Gravesend. There the French were received on board royal barges— “a kind of covered boat . . . very commodious and richly ornamented,” de Rosni noted with satisfaction. The barges took the French up the Thames as far as the Tower, where they were given the most impressive salute de Rosni had ever heard, “with upwards of three thousand guns, besides the discharges from several shipguns, and the musketry from the mole and fort before the Tower.” They disembarked into around thirty coaches and made their way through the crowded streets.

  De Rosni was placed in temporary lodgings at Sir John Spencer’s palace at Crosby Place in Bishopsgate while the magnificent mansion of Arundel House was made ready for him.27 It had been the residence of Richard III and had huge apartments, but de Rosni needed to find places for those members of his large retinue for whom there was no room, and this was proving difficult. “It is certain that the English hate us and this hatred is so general and inveterate, that one would be almost tempted to number it among their natural dispositions,” he complained.28 The ill will had almost immediate consequences and on only his second night the French minister found himself confronted with a new diplomatic problem.

  De Rosni had spent the evening playing primero with friends while some of the younger gentlemen went out looking for drink and women. They returned in disarray in small groups of three or four. When he demanded to know what was going on he was told that a young cousin of de Beaumont had killed an Englishman in a brawl. The ambassador was desperate to protect the boy, who was the only son of a leading French courtier, but de Rosni decided this was an opportunity to prove France’s goodwill to England. He told de Beaumont that he was determined that “the service of the king my master . . . shall not suffer for such an imprudent stripling,” and asked the Lord Mayor, Robert Lee, to prepare for the young man’s execution. Lee had no desire for things to go this far. It was not uncommon for English gentlemen to kill each other in brawls and they were not usually executed for it. Besides, de Beaumont had offered large sums in compensation to the Englishman’s family. Lee found himself pleading for a more moderate punishment for the foreigner. “This removed at least one obstacle to the success of my negotiation,” de Rosni recalled coolly, “but there remained many to encounter.”29

  Over the next few days de Rosni gathered what information he could from the envoys of other nations opposed to England making peace with Spain. Scaramelli was one such. James had gone out of his way to try to please the Venetian. He had promised he would put an end to attacks on Venetian shipping and had already withdrawn the letters of marque, which enabled privateers to carry out attacks under a cloak of patriotic respectability. He had even allowed Scaramelli to hold one of Piers the pirate’s business partners as prisoner until Piers returned to Plymouth. But Scaramelli’s dispatches to the Senate sketched a merciless portrait of James as an idle, vain and vulgar provincial who merely wanted “ ‘to enjoy the papacy’ as we say, and so desires to have no bother with other people’s affairs and little with his own; he would like to dedicate himself to his books and to the chase and to encourage the opinion that he is the arbiter of peace.” 30 He appeared to think James incapable of actually achieving it.

  The root of Scaramelli’s distaste was James’s treatment of the Catholics. He expressed his disgust to de Rosni over James’s dishonesty in the matter of toleration, warning that the King’s “dissimulation, which his flatterers complimented in him as a virtue, had always consisted in giving hopes to all, but accomplishing none.” James had frequently been heard to say “that it was to such artful conduct alone he owed his security when King of Scotland” and “it was highly probable that he would put those arts into practise again, and pursue them more tenaciously than ever, at the beginning of a reign and at the head of a great kingdom, whose people, affairs, and neighbours, he was utterly unacquainted with.” 31

  De Rosni found the Dutch less heated in their assessment. Their agents informed him that James wanted peace with Spain but was anxious not to drive them into the arms of the French. As yet no decisions had been made as to what help the Dutch would continue to receive and all was marked by irresolution. James had told them he wanted to be close to France and even to conclude a double marriage between the royal families, but as he was notoriously untrustworthy, they were unsure what his true intentions were.

  Aremberg’s audience with James was to be delayed until after de Rosni’s departure, supposedly because of Aremberg’s gout, but more likely to ease diplomatic tensions. In the meantime they exchanged extravagant compliments “in all which nothing was wanting but sincerity.”32 De Rosni’s own audience could not go ahead, however, until he dropped his insistence that his train should come to court in mourning. He was finally forced to do so when the new Captain of the Guard, Thomas Erskine, explained to de Beaumont that arriving at court in such a manner would be taken as a deliberate affront. At last, on 15 June, de Rosni and his train “all got into their most fantastic costumes and went to Greenwich where they found the court in right sumptuous array and very crowded.”33

  Fynes Moryson described French courtiers as wearing their suits with a certain affected carelessness, “which the Germans call slovenly because they many times go without hatbands and garters, with their points untrust and their doublets unbuttoned.”34 De Rosni’s vast, swaggering retinue filed into the Presence Chamber and walked toward the throne, a process that took fifteen minutes, with de Rosni bringing up the rear. When he reached the foot of the platform to the throne James stood up. He took a couple of steps down, but one of his ministers whispered in his ear that he should go no further. James announced that he only wished to show his esteem for an ambassador who shared their religion—de Rosni belonged to France’s tolerated Protestant minority.

  De Rosni dutifully rehearsed the history of alliances between James’s family and that of Henri IV. He then passed on messages of goodwill, which James reciprocated before asking after Henri IV’s health. This was no innocent question. The French king had been seriously ill after a hunting accident. Since his heir was only three years old and of uncertain legitimacy it was feared that France could be plunged back into civil war at any time. James’s apparent concern implied that England would be foolish to mak
e any long-term commitments to France at the expense of a more stable Spain. De Rosni assured James that Henri was quite well (indeed, he would survive another seven years, until killed by an assassin in 1610). The atmosphere then quickly soured as James moved on to attack the French habit of referring to the Pope as “His Holiness,” a title that he declared belonged only to God. De Rosni snapped that it was no worse than “the frequent giving to princes such titles as they were well known not to deserve”—a reference to the English crown’s claim to the title of King of France.35 It was now James’s turn to be annoyed and he concluded the audience after making it brutally clear that if de Rosni was to block his planned peace with Spain he would need to find a satisfactory answer to the question “How can you ask me to live at war in order that you may live in peace?”36

  The Frenchman would, however, develop a higher opinion of James than Scaramelli had. His memoirs recalled James as “upright and conscientious, that he had eloquence and even erudition; but still more of penetration and of the show of learning. He loved to hear discourse of affairs of state, and to have great enterprises proposed to him . . . [although] . . . he naturally hated war and still more to be personally engaged in it.”37 Unfortunately for de Rosni, war was the issue at hand. As the French minister left Greenwich he was approached by Sir Thomas Erskine, who informed him of “his desire to be ranked amongst the number of my friends.” Erskine had said exactly the same thing to Aremberg, and the Venetian ambassador in Madrid, Simon Contarini, had reported in mid-June that “four Scotsmen, newly added to the Council, have for a long time been in receipt of large sums from Spain.” 38 De Rosni believed that, nevertheless, in their hearts, the Scots supported France. English allegiances, however, were more complex.