ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history

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ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history Page 7

by Strachey, Lytton


  By a curious irony, the very circumstance which finally led the Cecils to abandon Lopez has afforded to posterity the means of vindicating him. Papers have been discovered among the Spanish archives showing that his tale was substantially true. It was indeed under the pretext of a peace overture that Andrada visited Madrid. He was not permitted to see Philip in person, and the story of the royal embrace was a fabrication; but the diamond and ruby ring was actually handed to the spy by the Spanish Secretary of State. Other matters, it is true, were discussed besides peace; it was agreed that Dr. Lopez should endeavour to obtain either the imprisonment of Don Antonio, or his exile from England; a hint was thrown out that he might usefully be poisoned; but not the faintest suggestion was made which could possibly point to the murder of Elizabeth. As a matter of fact, however, and this was unknown to Lopez - the Spaniards were not taken in. They saw through Walsingham’s stratagem, and they determined to hoist him with his own petard. Persuaded by their gold, Andrada became a double spy. He agreed to return to England and to carry on, nominally, the negotiation for peace, but, in reality, to use his position for furnishing Madrid with inside information of the state of affairs in England. Walsingham’s death spoilt the plan. Andrada was unable to explain his conduct, and Burghley became convinced that he was sold to Spain. He was indeed; but the guilt of Lopez did not follow from that premise, as Walsingham, could he have returned to earth for two minutes, would have explained.

  When the Cecils were won over to the view of Essex, the Doctor’s doom was sealed. He was unable to cope with the ordeal that had come upon him so suddenly in the comfortable prosperity of his old age. Shut up in Essex House, humiliated, badgered, terrified, when his resistance was once broken down he completely lost his head. He alternated between frantic asseverations of utter ignorance and wild revelations of complicated impossible plots. There can be little doubt that he had something discreditable upon his conscience. His secret note to Ferreira indicated that. It seems highly probable that he was engaged in some conspiracy to ruin Don Antonio; it is possible that he was actually prepared, in return for a sufficient bribe from the Spaniards, to poison him. As to his murdering the Queen, not only is the evidence for any such intention quite insufficient, but the improbability of such a design is, on the face of it, overwhelming. What would he gain if he effected the death of Elizabeth? Some wretched pittance from Philip. And he would lose everything - his position, his income, the royal favour - to say nothing of the risk of detection. It would have been madness to think of such a thing; but the enraged persecutors who surrounded him thought of nothing else. They were determined to complete their case against him by forcing a confession from his own lips. A few twists of the rack would have produced this soon enough; but that would be crude; true virtuosity lay in obtaining the required words without the rack, without even an open threat of it, without more than a glance, perhaps, a gesture, a significant silence. Before very long it was done. To the question, constantly repeated, whether he had promised the Spaniards to murder the Queen, the Doctor, worn out at last by weeks of anxiety, suddenly collapsed, and assented. That was enough. The odds, indeed, had been decidedly unequal. On one side were Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon, Lord Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil, and the Earl of Essex; and on the other an old Portuguese Jew. One can understand, perhaps, the intellectuals and the politicians; but Essex! Generous, strong, in the flush of manhood, is it possible that he failed to realise that what he was doing was, to say the least of it, unfair? Years afterwards, when Spain was no longer a bugbear, his animosity against Dr. Lopez seemed only to be explicable on the ground of some violent personal grudge. But in truth no such explanation was necessary. The Earl’s mind was above personalities; but it was not above the excitement of political rivalry, the cruel conventions of human justice, and the nobility of patriotism.

  A form of trial followed. Ferreira and Tinoco, far from saving themselves by their incriminations of the Doctor, were arraigned beside him as accomplices in his guilt. Tinoco in vain pleaded the protection of his safe-conduct; the lawyers solemnly debated the point, and decided against him. All three were sentenced to the death of traitors. The popular excitement was intense. As Essex had foreseen, the hatred of Spain, which had been dying down, rose again to a frenzy throughout the country. Dr. Lopez became the type of the foreign traitor, and his villainy was sung in ballads, and his name hissed with execrations from the boards of theatres. That he was a Jew was merely an incidental iniquity, making a shade darker the central abomination of Spanish intrigue. Modern critics have seen in him the original of Shylock, who appeared upon the stage a few years later; but such a supposition is wide of the mark. In fact, if Shakespeare thought of Dr. Lopez at all in connection with Shylock, it must have been because of his unlikeness, and not of his resemblance, to the great figure in “The Merchant of Venice.” The two characters are antithetical. The whole essence of Shylock lies in his colossal, his tragic, Hebraism; but Dr. Lopez was Europeanised and Christianised - a meagre, pathetic creature, who came to his ruin by no means owing to his opposition to his gentile surroundings, but because he had allowed himself to be fatally entangled in them. Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to imagine that Shakespeare, in his tragedy of the Venetian outcast, glanced for a moment, under cover of a piece of amorous jesting, at that other tragedy of the royal physician. “Ay,” says Portia to Bassanio,

  “but I fear you speak upon the rack,

  Where men enforc��d do speak anything.”

  The wisdom and the pity of the divine poet exquisitely reveal themselves in those light words.

  The Queen hesitated even more than usual before she allowed the sentences to be carried into execution. Possibly she was waiting for some confirmation or some denial from the authorities in Spain or Flanders; possibly, in spite of all the accumulated proof of the Doctor’s guilt, she was unable to obliterate from her mind her instinctive perception of his innocence. Four months elapsed before she allowed the law to take its course. Then - it was June, 1594 - the three men, bound to hurdles, were dragged up Holborn, past the Doctor’s house, to Tyburn. A vast crowd was assembled to enjoy the spectacle. The Doctor standing on the scaffold attempted in vain to make a dying speech; the mob was too angry and too delighted to be quiet; it howled with laughter, when, amid the uproar, the Jew was heard asseverating that he loved his mistress better than Jesus Christ; no more was heard, and the old man was hurried to the gallows. He was strung up and - such was the routine of the law - cut down while life was still in him. Then the rest of the time-honoured punishment - castration, disembowelling, and quartering - was carried out. Ferreira was the next to suffer. After that, it was the turn of Tinoco. He had seen what was to be his fate, twice repeated, and from close enough. His ears were filled with the shrieks and the moans of his companions, and his eyes with every detail of the contortions and the blood. And so his adventures had ended thus at last. And yet, they had not quite ended; for Tinoco, cut down too soon, recovered his feet after the hanging. He was lusty and desperate; and he fell upon his executioner. The crowd, wild with excitement, and cheering on the plucky foreigner, broke through the guards, and made a ring to watch the fight. But, before long, the instincts of law and order reasserted themselves. Two stalwart fellows, seeing that the executioner was giving ground, rushed forward to his rescue. Tinoco was felled by a blow on the head; he was held down firmly on the scaffold; and, like the others, castrated, disembowelled, and quartered.

  Elizabeth was merciful to the Doctor’s widow. She allowed her to keep the goods and chattels of the deceased, forfeited by his attainder - with one exception. She took possession of King Philip’s ring. She slipped it - who knows with what ironical commiseration? - on to her finger; and there it stayed till her death.

  VII

  The Spanish question grew ever more acute. A war that was no war might exactly suit the temper of Elizabeth; but it seemed an infamy to Essex, and was no less distasteful to Henry of France, pressed hard by the Spaniards on h
is northern frontier and by the Catholic Leaguers in his own dominions. The French king and the English peer came together in a curious combination. Their joint object was to propel Elizabeth into an alliance with France, which would involve the active participation of England in an attack on the Spaniards. Between them flew, backwards and forwards, uniting and enflaming their energies, the stormy petrel, Antonio Perez, in whom a frantic hatred of King Philip had become the very breath of life.

  A few years earlier Perez had fled from Spain in the wildest circumstances. Philip’s principal Secretary of State, he had quarrelled with his master over a murder, had taken refuge in his native town of Saragossa and had there, at the King’s instigation, been seized by the Inquisition. His fate seemed certain; but unexpected forces came to his rescue, and Perez lives in history as the one man, who, having once 94fallen into the clutches of the Holy Office, escaped with a whole skin. The charges against him were, indeed, highly serious. Exasperated in a dungeon, the misguided secretary had allowed himself, in his ravings, to insult not only the King but the Deity. “God sleeps! God sleeps!” he had exclaimed, and his words had been heard and noted. “This proposition,” the official report declared, “is heretical, as if God had no care for human beings, when the Bible and the Church affirm that He does care.” That was bad enough, but worse followed. “If it is God the Father,” said the miscreant, “who has allowed the King to behave so disloyally towards me, I’ll pull God the Father’s nose!” “This proposition,” said the official report, “is blasphemous, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, and savouring of the heresy of the Vaudois, who affirmed that God was corporeal and had human members. Nor is it an excuse to say that Christ, being made man, had a nose, since the words were spoken of the First Person of the Trinity.” The stake was the obvious retribution for such wickedness, and the proper preparations were being made when the people of Saragossa suddenly rose in arms. The ancient liberties of Aragon, its immemorial rights of jurisdiction, were being infringed, they asserted, by the King and the Holy Office. They invaded the prison, beat to death the royal governor, and set Perez free. He escaped to France; but his safety proved expensive to Saragossa. For soon afterwards the King’s army appeared upon the scene, and the ancient liberties of Aragon were finally abolished, while seventy-nine of the popular party were burnt alive in the market-place, the ceremony beginning at eight in the morning and ending at nine in the evening, by torchlight.

  The hectic hero of this affair was now leading the life of an exile and an intriguer. He was obviously a rogue, but he might, for the moment at any rate, be a useful rogue; and on that footing he had won his way into the good graces of Essex and Henry. He was active and unscrupulous; he was full of stories that were infinitely discreditable to the King of Spain, and he was master of an epistolary style of Euphuistic Latin which precisely hit off the taste of the great ones of that generation. How delightful to weave plots, change policies, and direct the fate of Europe in learned antitheses and elegant classical allusions!

  When the conclave at Essex House judged that the time was ripe, a letter was despatched from the Earl to Perez, hinting that, if Henry really wished for Elizabeth’s alliance, his best course was to threaten to make peace himself with Spain. If Juno was France and Philip the King of the Underworld, was not the conclusion clear? For who was so ignorant as not to know that Juno, when she had implored for help many times and in vain, had at last burst out with - “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo”? “But silence, my pen! And silence Antonio! For methinks I have read the poets too much.”*

  (Note:*Juno autem, quum saepius frustra spem implorasset, tandem eripuit ���Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.��� .Sed tace, calame, et tace, Antoni, nimium enim poetas legisse videor.)

  Perez at once showed the letter to Henry, who was not slow to catch its drift. Taking the advice of his English friend, he despatched a special envoy to Elizabeth, with instructions to inform her that he had received favourable offers of peace from Spain, and was inclined to accept them. Elizabeth was apparently unmoved by this intelligence; she wrote a letter of expostulation to Henry, but she was unable, she declared, to give him further help; yet she was secretly uneasy, and soon afterwards despatched, on her side, a special envoy to France, who was to discover and report to her the real inclinations of the King.

  This envoy was Sir Henry Unton, one of those remarkable ambassadors who divided their allegiance between the Government and Essex House. He went to France armed with the instructions, not only of Elizabeth, but of Anthony Bacon. A letter exists in which Unton is directed, with minute detail, to inform the French King that he must hold firm; in which he is told so to arrange matters as to be received with public coldness by Henry; and to “send us thundering letters, whereby he must drive us to propound and to offer.” Unton did as he was bid, and the thundering letters duly arrived. At the same time, Perez had been ordered to write to the Earl “such a letter as may be showed, wherein he shall say that the sending of Unton hath made all things worse than ever.” Perez too was all obedience; he sent off, in elaborate Latin, a report of Henry’s asseverations in favour of peace; he himself, he added, could not understand the policy of the English Government; but perhaps there was some mystery that was unrevealed - “the designs of Princes are a deep abyss.”*

  (Note:*Fines principum abyssus multa.)

  It was perfectly true. All the letters were shown to the Queen, who read them carefully through, with a particular relish for the latinity of Perez. But the result of this extraordinary intrigue was not at all what might have been expected. Perhaps Elizabeth had smelt a rat. However that may be, she calmly wrote to Henry that she was very ready to help him against Spain with men and money - on one condition: that he should give into her keeping the town of Calais. The charming proposal was not well received. “I had as lief be bitten by a dog as scratched by a cat,” exclaimed the infuriated Bearnais. But in a few weeks he found that he had spoken more truly than he thought. A Spanish army advanced from Flanders, laid siege to Calais, and stormed the outworks of the town. The roar of the besieging guns could be distinctly heard - so Camden tells us - in the royal palace at Greenwich.

  Elizabeth did not like that. Not only was the noise disturbing, but the presence of the Spaniards in a port commanding the narrow seas would be distinctly inconvenient. The next news was that the town of Calais had fallen, but that the citadel still held out. Something might yet be done, and a hasty levy of men was raised in London, and sent down with all speed, under the command of Essex, to Dover. With luck, the French might be relieved and the situation saved; but it suddenly occurred to Elizabeth that, with luck also, the French might relieve themselves, and that in any case the whole thing was too expensive. Accordingly, when the troops were actually on board, a courier galloped down to the shore with a letter from the Queen countermanding the expedition. Essex raved and implored with his usual energy; but, while the messengers were posting to and fro between Dover and London, the Spaniards took the citadel (April 14th, 1596).

  This was too much, even for the hesitancy of Elizabeth. She could not conceal from herself that, in this instance, at any rate, she had failed; that the beautiful negation, which was the grand object of all her policy, had eluded her; that, in fact, something had actually occurred. She was very angry, but the necessity for some sort of action on her own part gradually forced itself upon her; and for the first time she began to listen seriously to the suggestions of the war party.

  There were two possibilities of attack. A really effective army might be sent to France which would be strong enough to enable Henry to deal with the Spaniards. This was the course that Perez, accompanied by the Duc de Bouillon, was immediately despatched across the Channel to urge, with all the fury of his eloquence, upon Elizabeth. But when the emissaries arrived they found to their astonishment that the wind had changed in England. Another project was on foot. For months a rebellion had been simmering in Ireland, and there was reason to beli
eve that Philip was busy fitting out an expedition to give succour to his Catholic friends. It was now proposed to forestall his offensive by delivering a naval attack upon Spain. Essex was suddenly converted to the plan. Throwing over Henry and Perez with gay insouciance, he pressed upon the Queen the formation of a powerful armament to be sent not to Calais, but to Cadiz. Elizabeth consented. She appointed Essex and the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham joint commanders of the force; and, within a fortnight of the fall of Calais, the Earl was in Plymouth, collecting together in feverish energy an army and a fleet.

  Elizabeth had consented; but, in the absence of Essex, the suggestions of Perez sounded sweetly in her ear. She began wavering once again. Perhaps, after all, it would be wiser to help the French King; and surely it would be dangerous to send off the fleet on a wild-cat expedition - the fleet, which was her one protection against a Spanish invasion. The news of her waverings reached Essex, and filled him with agitation. He knew too well the temper of his mistress. “The Queen,” he wrote, “wrangles with our action for no cause but because it is in hand. If this force were going to France, she would then fear as much the issue there as she doth our intended journey. I know I shall never do her service but against her will.” He had racked his wits, he added, to bring her to agree to the expedition, and if it fell through now he swore he would “become a monk upon an hour’s warning.”

 

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