After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  16 It is notable that one of Gowrie’s first actions in Scotland had been to oppose James’s proposal to raise the taxes to pay for an army in the Scots parliament.

  17 The latter was to be made Lord of Kinloss on 22 February 1603, a mark of his continued importance.

  18 The origin of Shrewsbury and Stanhope’s enmity was a long-running dispute over whether the Stanhopes had a right to build a weir on the River Trent. Such questions were considered matters of honor, as they reflected on a family’s status within their county, and the argument had run to bloodshed on more than one occasion. The most recent incident had taken place in 1599. Stanhope and a band of twenty armed and mounted men had attacked Mary Shrewsbury’s favorite brother, Charles Cavendish, his two attendants and his page. Cavendish and his men had fought off Stanhope’s party, killing two or three of their assailants and wounding two others, but Cavendish had been left injured with a bullet in the thigh. Even in Elizabethan England, where duels and brawls were commonplace, such an incident was scandalous, but the hatred it created clearly had its uses to Cecil.

  19 Some have since blamed Arbella’s mental collapse on variegate porphyria, a disease that she and Mary, Queen of Scots, are reputed to have inherited through Margaret Tudor, and which eventually caused the “madness” of George III. Symptoms include loss of appetite and abdominal pain as well as anxiety, depression, confusion and restlessness. But the diagnosis, which is necessarily speculative when a patient has been dead so long, may only serve to make us underestimate her anguish.

  20 Stock enjoyed a respected career as a parochial public speaker until his death in 1626. He even returned to the subject of the oppression of the poor in a sermon at the election of another lord mayor near the end of his life when he remarked that “a gray-head spake now what a greenhead had done formerly”: Dictionary of National Biography (CD-ROM, 1995).

  21 Bishop Goodman’s memoirs quote Elizabeth as saying, “They have yoked my neck—I can do nothing—I have not one man in whom I can repose trust,” and William Camden’s as “They have yoked my neck; I have none whom I can trust; my condition is turned strangely upside down.” Both may simply be repeating Southwell, but other ladies could also have told them the same story. Note regarding Ludwig’s angina that the word “angina” comes from the Latin angere, which means “to strangle.”

  22 The law against the Macgregors would not be repealed until 1774, during which time supplementary laws were passed that no more than four Gregors could meet together at any time or carry any weapon, save a pointless knife for their meat. Their enemies were encouraged to hunt them down with bloodhounds known as “black dogs.” If any of the Macgregors were caught, their heads were sold to government officials or they were sent into slavery in America. The survivors hid in the hills and became known as “the Children of the Mist.”

  23 There was almost no intermarriage between the subjects of the two kingdoms and very few Scots took the high road south for work. It is estimated that in the late sixteenth century there were no more than sixty Scots in the whole of London. On English attitudes to Scots it is worth recalling Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, who commented to Sir John Harington on Robert Carr in 1606: “The King teacheth him Latin every morning, and I think someone should teach him English too; for, as he is a Scottish lad, he hath much need of better language.” Harington, Nugae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 395.

  24 The garrison at Berwick would close that summer, as it was no longer needed after the Borders became the Middle Shires of Britain. Many of the old soldiers who fired the salute to James that April were thrown into destitution.

  25 Before leaving Berwick James knighted Robert Cecil’s godson Ralph Grey on the bridge.

  26 Sir William Read claimed that he was so honored it made him “feel the warmth of youth stir in his frost nipped blood.”

  27 Several gentlemen involved in the suppression of the “Busy Week” were knighted at Widdrington, including Nicholas Forster, Henry Widdrington, High Sheriff of Northumberland, William Fenwick and Edward Gorges.

  28 The younger two were married to the sisters of the brilliant missionary Jesuit John Gerard. Bishop Matthew’s son and namesake actually became a Jesuit.

  29 Nearly one-sixth of all recusant Catholics registered with the Exchequer between 1590 and 1625 came from Yorkshire. It was possible that one of them might try to kill James, but a particular comparison with Elizabeth is instructive. The Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman recalled a night in December 1588 when he and a group of friends had seen the Queen on her way to Council. A huge crowd gathered and she stopped to speak to them although, as he recalled, this was the year of the Spanish Armada, “when she had most enemies and how easily might they have gotten into the crowd and multitude to have done her a mischief.” Goodman, Court of James, vol. 1, p. 163.

  30 The town was then famous for its manufacture of stockings—a commodity of which James VI had once been so short that he had to borrow a pair from a courtier so as not to look too shabby in front of a visiting ambassador.

  31 The Pierreponts were parents to Mary Stapleton, whose recusant husband, Richard, had tried to help Arbella escape from Hardwick in March. Mary Stapleton was also goddaughter to Mary, Queen of Scots, and was raised in her retinue from the age of four, often sharing the Queen’s bed. Greaves’s Songs of Sundry Kinds was published in 1604: my thanks to Robin Brackenbury for this information.

  32 Cutpurses and pickpockets were very common in England and it was usual for them to dress as gentlemen—according to a disgusted Fynes Moryson, even actors did so. A report written by Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, in 1585 described how these cutpurses and pickpockets operated. A school for such scoundrels had been founded at an alehouse near Billingsgate. Young thieves were shown “two devices, the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters, and was hung about with hawks bells.” The purse was similarly dressed with bells hanging over the top. Those who could take the counters out of the pocket without ringing the bells graduated as pickpockets and those who could do so from the purse as cutpurses. When they graduated they worked in pairs. But the teammate of the Newark cutpurse escaped and was never tried (Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners, p. 268n; Ashton, James I, p. 65).

  33 Another possible source is Lord Hunsdon, who greeted James in Newark with the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. Having lost his post as Chamberlain, he had reason to spread malicious stories about James, as did his servants.

  34 Sir Anthony’s father had at least had the foresight to refuse to house Mary’s executioners. James would return several times to Apethorpe and it is here that he is believed to have met his greatest favorite, George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham. Apethorpe is now in poor condition, but it still retains its magnificent plaster ceilings bearing James’s arms and houses a statue of the King. Its then owner, Sir Anthony Mildmay, was a diplomat, although not always a very diplomatic one: Henri IV of France had taken against Sir Anthony for listening coldly to his praise for Essex and on one occasion in 1597 Henri was so irritated by Mildmay that he actually struck him.

  35 Nichols, Progresses, Processions, p. 97. James had little time for such food, but if Grace Mildmay’s confectionery was wasted on the King, her herbal medicines—for everything from headaches to syphilis—would surely have come in useful in easing the pain of James’s broken collarbone. (Her cures are still extant.) Grace was a pious Protestant,

  36 Spencer had been Mayor of London during the riots of 1595, when a scaffold had been built in front of his house.

  37 The former French ambassador, de Maisse, recorded that “at London there are infinite houses of charity and hospitals, and almost throughout the whole realm . . . insomuch that one hardly sees a beggar.” There were also “several fair colleges where the children are taught at the expense of the Queen and the public,” and, he commented, “there is no youth in the world, poor or rich, that has greater chance of learning than in England.” De Maisse, Journal, pp. 12–13.

>   38 James’s itinerary for the next day included more sightseeing—“the Ordinance house and after that the Mint houses, and last of all the lions.” James had his own lions at Holyrood and thought the lion house in the Tower rather poor. He would order extensive building work on the menagerie over the course of his reign.

  39 Men as well as women in this period were much more open and dramatic in their displays of emotion than we are today. The macho Earl of Essex would throw himself to the ground and beat himself in rage—and expect Queen Elizabeth to be told about it.

  40 Sterrell had already benefited from his master’s success and been a recipient of James’s favor. On or around 19 May, when James granted a license to Shakespeare’s company, Sterrell was given the post of Keeper of the Palace of St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, which housed the Office of the Revels. In his position there, and through his connections with Worcester and Lord Thomas Howard, he would have a great deal of influence on which plays and masques were performed in the years ahead. I am grateful to Professor John Finnis for this information.

  41 You can still see the engraving made on the porch by Sir Thomas’s father, Sir Edward, who had been Mary I’s Attorney General: “Anno 1558. In the rayne of Felep and Marey. After darkness . . . cometh light.” It refers to the darkness under the Protestant King Edward VI and the light of the restored Catholic faith under Mary. Queen Elizabeth had brought the darkness of Protestantism to Northamptonshire once more and an archway built two years after her accession was stubbornly engraved “God save the King 1560”—meaning King Philip of Spain (see Country Life, 16 and 23 April 1921).

  42 The lives of ordinary couples were more easily controlled. The Duke of Stettin’s diary describes a wooden horse—“a long large tree or beam, with a seat made upon it, reaching far over the water”—which he and his secretary spotted outside the gates of Rochester. When they asked about it they were told that in England neighbors were expected to spy on each other and if any marital differences were noted the couple had to appear before a magistrate. If it was determined that the husband was at fault, he had to pay a fine; if the wife was at fault, then he was punished anyway, “for not having been able to keep up his authority.” The wife, meanwhile, was “placed on the above mentioned chair and ducked three times into the water up to the neck by the boys who roam about in the streets. When she is well drenched and well shamed, she returns home to her husband, who after the custom of the country, gives her comfort by getting her dried with warm cloths, especially in winter time.” Gerschow, “Stettin,” p. 65.

  43 In 1605 Mountjoy eventually persuaded his chaplain, William Laud, to marry them, despite the fact that Lady Rich’s husband was still living. Laud complained that this deferred his preferment through Church ranks for some years, but in the end it did not prevent him being made Archbishop of Canterbury.74

  44 Henry Howard’s letters to James the previous year had complained that Arbella’s aunt, Lady Shrewsbury, was trying to persuade Elizabeth to accept Lady Ralegh back at court, from which she had been banished for marrying Ralegh behind the Queen’s back. Usually this letter has been taken to refer to Bess of Hardwick, but Bess was the dowager Lady Shrewsbury and the current Lady Shrewsbury was Mary Cavendish.

  45 Thomas Tresham built the famous triangular lodge at Rushton. His son was later involved in the Gunpowder Plot.

  46 The Prince’s chief officer was the linguist and naturalist Sir Thomas Chaloner, whom Cecil had sent to Scotland before Elizabeth’s death and who had become a great favorite of James.

  47 The tradition dates back to the reign of Richard the Lionheart.

  48 It was returned to Scotland just a few years ago.

  49 Elizabeth had employed Bilson to write an answer to Dr. William Allen’s “Defence of English Catholics” in the 1580s and the result had been a powerful and brilliant work. However, it argued that a king’s subjects could rise against him if he broke his coronation oath. His arguments would one day be used against Charles I.

  50 James I was the last monarch to kneel for the anointing.

  51 The ritual of making a knight in the later Middle Ages included the buckling of a pair of spurs to his heels and probably inspired this part of the ceremony.

  52 The ruby was rivaled in value only by the sapphire, which was considered more feminine and often represented chastity. The blue ring carried to Scotland on Elizabeth’s death was a sapphire.

  53 Patrick Ruthven’s life has an interesting postscript. When he was eventually released he married the widow of Lord Gerard and one of their daughters married the artist Sir Anthony Vandyke.

  54 Anthony Copley had also named several others as being interested in a future “Catholic” action that never occurred. They included Lord Windsor, who was a friend of Shrewsbury, Leicester’s son, Sir Robert Dudley, who became a Catholic and ran off with Elizabeth’s former Maid of Honor Elizabeth Southwell in 1605, and Lord Byrdges, who later married Lady Anne Stanley, the daughter of Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, and a descendant of Mary Tudor.

  55 As soon as the gunpowder had done its work, the plotters intended to kill every Scot in London.

  56 Clark left a mark behind on the wall of his cell in the Tower, “W. Clarke P [priest] 1603,” along with the merchants’ mark, number eight.

  57 Stories later circulated that Cobham had died of starvation in the house of his laundress. These were not true, but his real fate was not much less dreadful.

  58 Arbella’s closeness to the Markham family was also illustrated by the fact that Sir Griffin Markham’s sister, Lady Skinner, nursed her through smallpox in 1609.

  59 Ralegh, Essex and Kit Marlowe were among the more famous smokers of the period, though we can be certain none of them died as a result of its effects—two having been beheaded and one murdered.

  60 In the summer the judicial murder of Catholics would begin anew with a priest and his servant executed at Warwick in July and two laymen at Lancaster in August. The persecution of Catholics was to be less intense than it had been under Elizabeth, but as the Gunpowder Plot demonstrated, the despair was greater.

  2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2005 by Leanda de Lisle

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  De Lisle, Leanda.

  After Elizabeth : The rise of James of Scotland and the struggle for the throne of England / Leanda de Lisle.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41447-2

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