After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  The next day Ralegh found the strength to write to the commissioners and deny Cobham’s story but the fire had gone out of him and he pleaded for his execution to be stayed, if only for a year, “to give to God in prison and to serve him.” Cobham was in no better state than Ralegh. He was brought before the court for his trial on 25 November. The hall at Wolvesey was packed with leading Scots and English courtiers hoping for a great spectacle, but Cobham cowered and shook as the indictment was read. In response to the questions he bleated that the plot was all Ralegh’s idea and that Ralegh had wanted the Spanish to invade at Milford Haven; he called his brother a viper and added that Brooke was guilty of incest as well as treason and that he had a child by his wife’s sister. “Having thus accused all his friends, and so little excused himself,” the courtier Dudley Carleton wrote to Chamberlain, “the Peers were not long in deliberation what to judge; and after sentence of condemnation given, he begged a great while for life and favour, alleging his confession as a meritorious act.” 18

  On 28 November came the last trial, that of Lord Grey of Wilton. The hot-blooded young peer spoke “with great assurances and alacrity” and made eloquent speeches to the Lords, the Council and the judges until eight at night. Despite the strong evidence given by Markham and Brooke, the judges took a long time to agree on Grey’s sentence. Finally, however, the Lord Chief Justice prepared to deliver judgment and Grey was asked if he had anything to say before the sentence of death was pronounced. He replied that “the house of the Wiltons had spent many lives in their Princes’ service and Grey cannot beg his.” This flash of pride irritated his judges but Dudley Carleton could not help but admire “so clear and fiery a spirit.” The executions were set to proceed immediately. “They say the priests shall lead the dance tomorrow,” Dudley Carleton wrote to Chamberlain on the twenty-seventh, “and Brooke next after; for he proves to be the knot that tied together the three conspiracies; the rest hang indifferent betwixt mercy and justice.”19

  Watson and Clark were brought to the scaffold in the first week of December. The two men showed no fear although they faced the full horror of being hung, drawn and quartered. Clark insisted to the last that he had broken no laws. He told the crowd he was dying because he was a priest and therefore faced a kind of martyrdom. Watson wished he could die for everyone that he had brought into his plot, and regretted writing against the Jesuits. The man in charge of their executions, Benjamin Tichborne, was the first sheriff in England to proclaim James king and he and his son had been rewarded with a pension of £100 a year for their loyalty. As a Catholic, he might have ensured that the priests were hanged until they were dead, but he chose not to. Instead they were “very bloodily handled,” as Carleton recorded with disgust, “and Clark, to whom more favour was intended had the worse luck; for he both strove to help himself and spake after he was cut down.” When at last the grisly rituals of castration and disembowelment were over and the corpses dismembered, the priests’ quarters were set on Winchester gates and their heads mounted on the first tower of the castle. 56

  On Monday 6 December it was George Brooke’s turn to die. As a member of a noble family, Brooke had had his sentence commuted to beheading. The Bishop of Chichester accompanied him to the scaffold, where a small crowd had gathered, no bigger than that for an ordinary execution. The court was in the grip of a new hedonism and had no interest in watching the conclusion of a failed life. While Brooke faced his maker, Anna’s ladies were playing children’s games, from ten at night until two or three in the morning. Arbella listed several of these to her uncle Shrewsbury: “Viz, I pray my Lord give me a course in your park. Rise pig and go. One penny follow me etc.” Often the games were fueled by drink and she confessed, “I daily see some even of the fairest amongst us and willingly and wittingly ensnared by the prince of darkness.”20 Only two significant courtiers, both Catholic, had torn themselves away from the flirting and drinking— the young Earl of Arundel and one of Worcester’s sons.

  Brooke delivered a short speech to the few townsfolk and others who looked on, claiming his faults had been errors rather than capital crimes, “which he referred to the God of truth and time to discover; and so left it, as if somewhat lay yet hid, which would one day appear for his justification.” It was a desperate, last-minute bid to salvage his reputation, and Carleton, who was also there, observed that one of Brooke’s final views was of the medieval buildings of the St. Cross hospital, whose lucrative mastership he had been denied. Brooke nevertheless “died constantly (and so seeming) religiously.” The crowd remained subdued and when the axeman held his head aloft only Tichborne replied: “God save the King.”21 The Bishop of Chichester, who had attended Brooke, immediately left to see Cobham and offer confession, while the Bishop of Winchester was sent to Ralegh, on the express orders of the King.

  Ralegh had written another farewell letter to his wife and in this one it seems he really had accepted he was going to die:

  You shall now receive (my dear wife) my last words in these my last lines. My love I send you, that you may keep it when I am dead, and my counsel, that you may remember it when I am no more. I would not by my will present you with sorrows (dear Bess). Let them go into the grave with me and be buried in the dust . . . Remember your poor child for his father’s sake, who chose you and loved you in his happiest times. Get those letters (if it be possible) which I writ to the Lords wherein I sued for my life. God is my witness, it was for you and ours I desired life. But it is true I distain myself for begging it. For know it (dear wife) that your son is the son of a true man, and one who, in his own respect, despises death, and all his misshapen and ugly shapes. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I steal this time while others sleep, and it is also high time that I should separate my thoughts from this world. Beg my dead body which living was denied thee and either lay it at Sherborne (if the land continue) or in Exeter church by my mother and father. I can say no more, time and death call me away . . . My dear wife farewell. Bless my poor boy. Pray for me and let my good God hold you both in his arms. Written with the dying hand of sometime thy husband but now (alas) overthrown, Wa. Ralegh.22

  If in sending the Bishop of Winchester James hoped for new revelations, he was to be disappointed. Neither Cobham nor Ralegh had anything new to say. If there was news, it came when Arundel and Somerset returned to court from Brooke’s execution with the doomed man’s last words about “hidden matters” yet to be revealed. It triggered yet more gossip on whether the plots had been fabricated or at least “awakened” by powerful figures to dispose of their enemies. Sir Thomas Tresham, who had led the delegation of Catholic gentlemen to Hampton Court in July, had no sympathy for the priests Watson and Clark, but having seen Catholics encouraged into plots in the past, he admitted, “I partly . . . do suspect: Latet anguis in herba [a snake lies hidden in the grass].” 23 His suspicion must have hardened in February when the Bye plot was used as the pretext for a royal proclamation ordering all Jesuit and seminary priests to depart the kingdom before 19 March. Others suspected that Grey, Cobham and Ralegh were paying the price for their demand that James be accepted as king with conditions. Their dismay increased when they discovered James was to hand some of Cobham’s great estates to a Scot. Within three days of Elizabeth’s death there had been rumors that a Scots woman had complained “nothing did discontent them more than that their king should be received peaceably,” since it meant they would not be getting their hands on attainted land. 24 It seemed their wish had now come true—with James’s Scots huntsman, Sir Roger Aston, having already been promised Cobham’s park at Cowling in Kent. The day after Brooke’s death, 7 December, a Scots divine further embittered the atmosphere by delivering a sermon before the King in which he implied that clemency to traitors was a deadly sin. Councilors, nervous about the effect on their reputations if so many former luminaries of Elizabeth’s court were to die, petitioned the King for mercy and the Countess of Pembroke asked her son, who was James’s host at Wilton, to use his influ
ence to gain a pardon for Ralegh if he could. Large bribes were offered to the Scots to put in a word and Sir Griffin Markham’s friends assured him that his life at least was safe— though James had, in fact, signed his death warrant that day, along with those of Grey and Cobham. The date of their executions was set for the tenth, Ralegh’s for the thirteenth, and another, less significant Englishman also found himself in James’s sights.

  On Thursday 8 December two new envoys arrived from Venice for an audience with James. Councilors argued with the Venetians that James could not legally retract the general pardon that had freed the pirate William Piers, whatever he might wish. The Venetians wanted to know from James directly whether he was going to accept that or fulfill his promise to have Piers executed. James, angry that his wishes had so far been denied, readily agreed that the pirate should hang and on 9 December he appeared at a meeting of the Privy Council to insist in person that Piers should die for his crimes. They reluctantly agreed to have him rearrested.

  The next morning at ten o’clock Cobham, Markham and Grey were brought to the scaffold in torrential rain. Dudley Carleton, who was once more a witness to events, thought, “A fouler day could hardly have been picked out, or a fitter for such a tragedy.” Markham was the first to be taken up onto the platform where the block was placed in the castle yard. His stricken face registered his shock that he was to die despite the promises he had been given. He gave a speech complaining that he had been fed false hopes and that he wished he were better prepared. A friend offered him a cloth to tie over his eyes, but “he threw it away, saying he could look upon death without blushing.” He said goodbye to his friends who were standing nearby and recited his prayers in Latin, the language of the Catholic Church. The ten-year-old Prince Henry stood near the scaffold, having been sent by his father.

  As Markham prayed, John Gibb, a Scots groom of the Bedchamber, pushed desperately through the crowd toward Tichborne. Eventually he found himself stuck and, still struggling, he shouted out. The sheriff turned and, having spotted him, ordered him to come aside. The execution was stayed for a few moments as Gibb showed Tichborne a new warrant from the King. Carleton watched as Markham was “left upon the scaffold to entertain his own thoughts which, no doubt, were as melancholy as his countenance.” When Tichborne had finished reading the warrant he informed Markham that since he had been poorly prepared for death his beheading would be delayed by a couple of hours. Markham was then escorted off the scaffold and locked in the hall, where Prince Henry was waiting to walk with him. James had hoped the boy might persuade the condemned man to a last-minute confession. Lord Grey was now led to the scaffold by a troop of young courtiers. Two of his best friends walked on either side of him and Carleton thought there was “such gaiety and cheer in his countenance that he seemed a dapper young bridegroom.”

  Grey prayed at length for the King, keeping the crowd standing in the icy rain for half an hour. But as he made himself ready for the block Tichborne again interrupted the proceedings, this time to say that the King had decided that Cobham should be beheaded first. A confused Grey was taken to the hall and Lord Cobham brought out. He was a changed man compared to the trembling creature who had appeared before the court. He calmly craved pardon of the King and swore that, “for Sir Walter Ralegh, he took it, upon the hope of his soul’s resurrection, that what he had said of him was true.” It seems likely that he had been told his life was to be spared and been asked, in return, to convict Ralegh from the scaffold. The sheriff duly stayed the execution, telling him he had to face some other prisoners. Grey and Markham were then brought from the hall, “and the three, looked strange one upon the other like men beheaded and met again in the other world,” Carleton observed.

  The sheriff announced that the King had mercifully granted the lives of all three men—and Ralegh, who was watching this grotesque theater from his window, realized that he too was safe. Relief and delight swept the crowd and as the news spread first the town began to celebrate and then the court.25 Even Arbella took the risk of expressing to her uncle her pleasure at “the royal and wise manner of the King’s proceeding therein.”26

  Almost unbelievably, Piers was also to evade execution. Six pirates were hanged at Southampton on 22 December, but he was not among them. James was so angry when he heard about it that he threatened to hang the Admiralty judge instead. The judge, however, persisted in keeping the young man alive, and he appears to have persuaded the Venetians to accept money and information on the whereabouts of their goods in exchange for his life. Piers disappears from the Venetian state papers in the spring of 1604 and no mention is made of his ever having been hanged. James would prove equally unsuccessful in stamping out Piers’s profession. As this story suggests, pirates made too much money for their investors to be sacrificed by them to the hangman.

  Predictably, the Bye plotters, Copley and Sir Griffin Markham, were sent into exile to join Sir Edward Parham as spies for the government. Sir Griffin’s wife, who remained in England, made strenuous efforts to infiltrate the Gunpowder Plot, in the hopes that she could earn her husband a passport home, but without success. His estates were granted to Sir John Harington in June 1604. The Main plotters were no use as spies and they suffered worse fates. Cobham, who had been one of the ten richest men in England, fell into utter destitution in the Tower while his wife and his former brother-in-law, Robert Cecil, shared the spoils of his ruin. Most unusually, Lady Kildare was granted his attainted estates in May 1604 and eventually Cecil acquired the bulk of Cobham’s estates by buying Lady Kildare’s interest in her husband’s land and helping her to break the male entail to George Brooke’s son. Cobham was released from the Tower on grounds of ill health in 1617 and died the following year. His corpse was left unburied for some time after his death, as no one could be found to pay his funeral expenses. 57

  The fiery-spirited Grey of Wilton died in the Tower in 1614, the last of his line, but Sir Walter Ralegh was released in 1617 after thirteen years. James was desperate for money and prepared to listen to Sir Walter’s promises that he would succeed in doing what he had failed to do in the 1590s: find El Dorado, the land of the golden man. By then Ralegh’s cherished estate at Sherborne had been lost to James’s Scots favorite, the handsome young Robert Carr, and he hoped El Dorado would restore his own fortunes as well as the King’s. Instead the quest cost him the life of his elder son, Wat, who died during an assault on the town of San Tomé in what is now Venezuela. The action infuriated the Spanish, and James, anxious to keep on good terms, agreed to lift the stay of execution bestowed on Ralegh in December 1603. He was beheaded in front of a large crowd in 1618. On the scaffold Ralegh denied the story that he had blown smoke in Essex’s face before his execution in 1601 and observed that those who had destroyed Essex had also destroyed him. It took only two blows to strike off Ralegh’s head and it fell amid the groans of a sullen crowd.

  There is a famous story about Ralegh, written later in the seventeenth century, in which as a young man walking with Elizabeth he took a diamond ring from her and scratched on a window: “Fain would I climb, yet I fear to fall.” Elizabeth immediately scratched underneath: “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.” Among those possessions found on his body after his death was a diamond ring Elizabeth had given him.27 Ralegh remains an extraordinarily romantic figure; given his striking good looks and his brilliant mind, it is sometimes hard to envisage the other side of Ralegh—the murderer with blood-soaked hands and scented hair, who his friend Lord Cobham believed was ready to sacrifice him on the altar of his ambition. But many of his contemporaries had no such difficulty and his fate, like that of Grey of Wilton, was often linked to the massacre of unarmed prisoners at Smerwick Fort in Ireland. In December 1603 Sir John Harington recalled that it was Ralegh who had carried out the orders of Grey’s father to kill his Italian and Spanish prisoners, and after Ralegh’s death Bishop Goodman recorded that “a soldier who was then present [at Smerwick] and did see the execution done, told me that in h
is certain knowledge most of those soldiers who were employed therein came to a very unhappy end.” 28 The bones of the victims of the massacre at Smerwick Fort are still being unearthed.

  The object of the Main plot, Arbella Stuart, suffered a fate every bit as grim as those who had plotted for her to become Queen. The French emissary de Rosni, now the Duke of Sully, recalled how the Sultan of Turkey, Mahomet the Third, had twenty of his brothers strangled in 1603 “to secure himself, as he thought, on the throne.”29 Arbella was merely kept “without mate and without estate,” as a Venetian neatly phrased it. The humiliation of her dependence on James, however, encouraged her obsession with the Seymour family to return. In 1610 she married Edward Seymour’s younger brother, William, without royal permission. James placed Arbella under house arrest and William was put in the Tower. He escaped to France, but Arbella was caught on her way to join him. The bill of arrests of those who had tried to help her flee to France included many names associated with the Bye and Main plotters: her Catholic aunt, the Countess of Shrewsbury, who had been a friend of Lady Ralegh; William Markham, a cousin of Sir Griffin Markham; and Edward Kirton, whose wife was a kinsman of Cobham. 58 Arbella was placed in the Tower, where she starved herself to death in 1615. Dodderidge, the servant who had taken her message to the Earl of Hertford in December 1602, was with her until the end.