by G. J. Meyer
Cecil’s return, however, brought a revival of the old half-submerged tension between himself and Essex and the two camps whose leaders they were. The strength of the Cecil party lay in the unchallengeable authority of its patron Burghley, who had enjoyed the queen’s confidence longer than most of the courtiers of 1598 had been alive. Thanks to Burghley, it enjoyed a decided advantage in terms of ability to bestow offices and incomes on its friends. Essex on the other hand attracted, more or less by default, those upon whom Burghley (and therefore the queen) had declined to bestow favors: alienated and disaffected nobles and gentleman-adventurers who hoped that when Burleigh died the tables could be turned. Ultimately it would all depend upon Elizabeth, of course. The people who allied themselves with Essex put their hope less in his aristocratic flair or his not-quite-stable brilliance than in the simple fact that even after years of turbulence the queen remained in some deep way powerfully attached to him. Whether he was Rob Dudley reborn for her, or a surrogate son, or proof that she could still win the adoration of the most sublimely elegant young nobleman in the kingdom—there was no need to speculate about such things so long as whatever it was that bound the queen to her last favorite remained intact.
The bond was fraying, however. A month after Cecil’s return from France, the inevitable happened: France and Spain signed the Treaty of Vervins, by which Philip II formally acknowledged Henry IV as rightful king of France and ended hostilities against him. The pact compromised, if it did not violate outright, the terms of the existing understanding between France and England. It came as a keen disappointment to those Protestants (Essex being the most prominent) who regarded themselves as locked in a war to the death with Spain and had no qualms about allying themselves with a Catholic French king for the sake of victory. It also—with consequences that would prove more fateful for Essex than for anyone else at court—freed queen and council to give the Irish problem the attention that it now urgently required.
Ireland had been a problem for centuries, not least because of its way of absorbing the Englishmen sent to subdue it and gradually turning their descendants into Irishmen. But the problem took on new dimensions when England became Protestant and added a new system of religious belief to the political control it had long sought to impose on its neighbor island. Ironies proliferated. The Irish, who if anything had been less loyally Roman Catholic than the English over the centuries, learned from the 1540s to associate the Reformation with foreign oppression and to resist it ferociously, simultaneously embracing the old religion with a devotion they had not previously displayed. And at the very time when England claimed to be fighting in the Netherlands to defend the religious liberty of the Protestants, it found itself trying to impose its church on Ireland by main force. The Netherlands revolt had been England’s one great opportunity to threaten and torment Philip of Spain, and Elizabeth’s government had seized the opportunity. In the 1590s Ireland was Philip’s best chance to play tit for tat, and though he was perhaps slow to awaken to the possibilities, by 1598 he had done so.
At the end of June 1598 Elizabeth met with her councilors to discuss the worsening of the English position in Ireland. Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was mounting a rebellion bigger and better organized than anything the Irish had previously managed, and, poor worn-out John Norris having died on active service, the council was going to have to dispatch a new commander to restore order. When the queen suggested William Knollys, Essex’s uncle, the earl interpreted this as an attempt to weaken his position at court by removing one of his supporters. In reply, no doubt in an arrogant and even disdainful tone, he proposed a member of the Cecil party. When the queen dismissed this suggestion as ridiculous, a shocking scene unfolded. Essex turned his back on Elizabeth, an unthinkable breach of etiquette. Elizabeth stepped forward and struck him across the head—hit him hard, apparently. Cecil then clutched at the hilt of his sword, but regained control of himself before doing anything more. He stormed out proclaiming that he would accept no such insult from anyone, possibly even saying (historians have been understandably hesitant to believe that even he was capable of such words) that Elizabeth was “as crooked in her disposition as in her carcass.” The witnesses must have looked on in stunned silence.
During the month that followed, while queen and council struggled with the Irish problem, Essex stayed away from court in a deep, self-destructive sulk. He was needed both as the council’s acknowledged military authority and in his capacity as master of ordnance, but he continued to ignore even summonses from the queen herself. Finally he won the test of wills: Elizabeth appointed him earl marshal, which salved his delicate ego by putting him once again above the Earl of Nottingham in order of precedence, and when she heard that he was ill she dispatched her own physician. At last, like an indulged child, Essex was drawn back to court with flattery and favors—but not until, and largely because, an English army had been ambushed and massacred at Yellow Ford in the north of Ireland. That happened on August 14. Ten days earlier Burghley had died. Essex returned to court to find that he, and therefore the men whose patron he was, had missed out on the great redistribution of offices and honors that the lord treasurer’s death had occasioned. The discovery heightened his already poisonous sense of alienation and grievance.
At this point Essex fell into a trap that may or may not have been of his own making. In the wake of the disaster of Yellow Ford, where half the English army had been left dead on the field, Tyrone and his rebels controlled nearly all of Ireland. Unless England decided to give up the fight—but that was unthinkable—somebody was going to have to take a new and bigger army across the Irish Sea. There could hardly have been a more dangerous assignment—Ireland was a notorious graveyard for English reputations and fortunes, those of Essex’s own father included—and Essex knew that his departure would leave Cecil in control of almost everything, including access to the queen.
But he was England’s leading living soldier, or regarded himself as such and was so regarded by many others, and no one in the kingdom had a stronger sense of noblesse oblige. If his queen needed him, he could not do other than serve. Hardly foolish enough to want the job, in effect he talked himself into it by finding every other candidate unacceptable. Whether Cecil and the earl’s other rivals were nudging him on, and were doing so for the purpose of destroying him, it is impossible to say. By early spring 1599 thousands of troops had been sent to Ireland, but they still had no commander. What was perhaps inevitable happened on April 12: Essex was commissioned to depart for Ireland, not as a mere lord deputy but with the grander title of lord lieutenant, and there take command.
His fate was sealed.
Background
A DIAMOND OF ENGLAND
EARLY ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN JULY 1581 A MAN NAMED George Eliot, who had once gone to prison for rape and homicide but was released by the queen’s government to take up a commission as hunter of priests, arrived on horseback at the gates of a country house called Lyford Grange some miles south of Oxford. It was a casual visit, a sort of fishing expedition prompted by the fact that Lyford Grange was locally notorious as a center of underground Catholic activity, its owner currently in a London prison for refusing to repudiate the bishop of Rome. Eliot, earlier in his life, had been employed in Catholic households, even that of Thomas More’s son-in-law. He had become adept at pretending to be Catholic himself, acquiring a knowledge of papist practice and a network of Catholic acquaintances that was proving useful in his new career. Happening to pass through the neighborhood on this Sabbath day, he had thought it worthwhile to stop at Lyford Grange on the off chance of snagging a fugitive priest.
Immediately upon arriving, Eliot began to suspect that something unusual might be afoot: a guard was on duty atop the house’s watchtower, and the gates leading to its courtyard were barred. He was received warily at first, but when he called up that he had come to see the cook and asked for him by name, the guard left his post to fetch him. The cook, who had once worked with Eliot and belie
ved him to be Catholic, welcomed him warmly and ushered him inside. Eliot and his assistant were given ale and invited to stay for a meal. With the assistant remaining behind in the kitchen, Eliot was led through several rooms to a large chamber where—no doubt to his delight—he found a mass in process before a congregation of several dozen men and women, among them two nuns in the habits of their order. When the service was concluded, a second priest went to the altar and began another mass. Eliot remained for it, and for what must have seemed to him an interminable sermon on the subject of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets.” As soon as the mass was over, Eliot collected his assistant, gave thanks for the hospitality, said that he was now too late to remain to eat, and hurriedly departed. By early afternoon he was back with a force of armed and mounted men.
The house was searched all that day and into the night, and though many incriminating discoveries were made (rosaries and other forbidden religious objects, the habits out of which the nuns had changed upon learning of Eliot’s return, even the wanted brother of Lyford Grange’s owner), priests were not among them. The search resumed the following morning, but even stripping away paneling in a number of rooms failed to turn up anything more. The searchers, who had been reinforced the preceding night and now numbered about sixty (Lyford, obviously, was a sprawling and complicated structure), finally concluded that the priests must have been alarmed by Eliot’s swift departure and made their escape before his return. Just as they were preparing to leave, however, Eliot’s assistant noticed a tiny sliver of sunlight in a crack above a stairwell. Using a crowbar to pry an opening, he found not one or two but three priests lying side by side in a tight space along with a supply of food and drink. For Eliot it was a triumph, a bonanza. All the more so when it was established that among the three was the most notorious papist in all of England, a member of that alien and sinister new brotherhood known as the Jesuits, the infamous turncoat Edmund Campion. The following Saturday, his hands tied in front of him and his elbows behind and his feet bound under the belly of his horse, a sign bearing the words “CAMPION THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT” pinned to his hat, Eliot’s prize was put on display in the crowded marketplaces of London. Then he was taken to the Tower and locked in the space known as the Little Ease, where there was no window and not enough room to stand erect or lie down at full length.
His capture was a coup for the government even more than for Eliot. Campion had been in England only a little more than a year, and during that time he had been only one of the dozens of priests moving in secret from one place to another. But his activities had made him an improbably prominent public figure, the most wanted man in the kingdom, an intolerable embarrassment for the government and its church. Not even Catholics could challenge the fact that, according to the statutes as they stood in the 1580s, Campion was guilty of high treason. Now that he was in custody, neither he nor anyone else could be in doubt about his fate: he was a doomed man. As for what exactly he and his fellow priests and the people who harbored them were guilty of, what kind of threat they actually posed—understanding that requires an examination not only of Campion’s activities during the year before his capture and his conduct afterward, but of his life before he became an outlaw.
He was born into very ordinary circumstances, one of several children of a London bookseller, but his talents set him apart from an early age. He became a scholarship boy, his education financed by London’s Worshipful Company of Grocers, and was still in his early teens when selected to deliver a Latin oration to Mary Tudor as she entered London for her coronation. He was sent to Oxford at age seventeen, rose with unusual speed to positions of prominence, and was a fellow and proctor when, at twenty-six, he was chosen to deliver a formal address before Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the university in 1566. The queen not only noticed Campion but singled him out for praise. Her church being in need of distinguished young candidates for advancement in the aftermath of the purging of the Marian hierarchy, this royal attention led to Campion’s being offered the patronage of both William Cecil and Robert Dudley. He became Dudley’s protégé—Dudley was chancellor of Oxford at the time—and was called upon to deliver orations on occasions of state and at events including Amy Robsart’s funeral (which must have been an excruciatingly delicate affair for everyone involved). As part of his preparation for the great things that clearly lay ahead, Campion took holy orders as a deacon in the Anglican church in 1568. He must have been suspected of leaning in the direction of Rome, however, because as part of the government’s reaction to the revolt of the northern earls and the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth he came under pressure to demonstrate his willingness to conform. Upon declining to do so he was repudiated by the Grocers Company and departed for Ireland, where he found influential patrons including the queen’s deputy Sir Henry Sidney and his son Philip and hoped to become involved in the refounding of Dublin University. The stern measures enacted in England in response to the queen’s excommunication—it was made high treason to “absolve or reconcile” anyone in accordance with the Roman rite, or to be absolved or reconciled—were soon extended to the parts of Ireland that England controlled. The authorities were ordered to arrest anyone suspected of being Catholic. Campion, though not yet a professed Catholic, once again came under suspicion and found it advisable to move on. He quietly returned to England for a time, then crossed the Channel. He traveled to Douai, where he was received into the Catholic Church and entered the college that William Allen had established three years earlier for the education of English refugees seeking to become priests. Lord Burghley, upon learning of Campion’s conversion, lamented the loss of “one of the diamonds of England.”
There followed a decade of study and teaching. In three years at Douai—where the discussion of current politics, incidentally, was absolutely forbidden—Campion taught rhetoric while adding a degree in theology to his two Oxford diplomas. He then proceeded to Rome, where he requested and was granted admission to the young, phenomenally fast-growing Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. The order naturally not having a presence in England, he was assigned to its Austrian province. After another six years of preparation in Moravia, Vienna, and Prague, he was ordained a priest, and in 1580 he was called back to Rome to join the faculty of the English seminary recently established there. It happened that at just this time the Jesuits were being asked to send priests into England, to join those who year after year were crossing the Channel after graduating from Allen’s seminaries and one after another were being captured and killed. The Dutchman who was then general of the Jesuits hesitated before agreeing. He feared (with good reason, as time would prove) that even English members of a religious order about which England’s people knew nothing except its evil reputation among Protestants would be all too easily depicted as aliens, subversives, and traitors. That they would, having joined an order founded by the Spaniard ignatius Loyola, be entering an England whose government was relentless in depicting Spain not only as the nation’s arch-enemy but as the principal agent of the Antichrist. And that they were therefore certain to be accused of having come on a political mission. Campion is said to have shared these concerns, and at no point in his career had he shown the smallest interest in anything more than a life of quiet scholarship. Nevertheless, when it was finally decided that Jesuits would be going to England—the general’s agreement was probably inevitable, it having been part of Loyola’s vision that his men should go wherever they were most needed—Campion along with another product of Oxford, the thirty-four-year-old Robert Persons, was chosen to be the first.
Campion and Persons were given highly specific instructions. Their purpose, the “preservation and augmentation of the faith of Catholics in England,” was to be accomplished through the delivery of the sacraments exclusively. They were not to attempt to convert Protestants or engage in disputation. As with Allen’s seminary priests, they were forbidden to give attention to political questions, to send reports on the English political situation bac
k to the continent, or to permit anything to be said against Elizabeth in their presence. Their experience was harrowing from the start. The government was on the lookout for Campion even before his arrival, its agents on the continent having learned of his assignment, and upon landing at Dover he was detained and taken to the mayor for questioning. At first the mayor seemed inclined to disbelieve his claim to be a traveling merchant and to send him to London in custody, but in the end, somehow, Campion was let go. He reconnected with Persons, was taken into the care of the Catholic underground, and was never again out of danger.
Campion was a brilliant rhetorician, a master of Latin and English composition. It was his writing that made him the most talked-about man in England and the living symbol of the old church, the hero of his cause and a monstrously seductive liar to the enemies of that cause. The first thing that he wrote after reaching England, a short piece dashed off in half an hour, was a message to the Privy Council. Campion and Persons both wrote such messages. They did so at the request of a lay member of the underground, solely for the purpose of leaving behind, as they moved out of London and began their travels, a statement of their purpose in England that could be made public if they were captured and had no opportunity to explain themselves before being killed. In his statement, Campion defends his adherence to the old faith and asserts that he and his fellow missionaries seek only to preach the gospel and deliver the sacraments to England’s Catholics. He asks to be given a hearing before the masters of the universities (to consider his theology), the kingdom’s high judges (where the subject would be the legality of his actions), and the Privy Council (for a defense of his loyalty to the queen). The man to whom Campion entrusted the message, instead of holding it for use in case of capture as instructed, made copies and sent them to others. Soon it was being reproduced and circulated everywhere. To its Catholic readers, long without leadership and treated as criminals, it was an inspiration. To the government it was a tissue of lies woven as a cover for conspiracy. Wherever copies were found they were destroyed. It became known by the name given by those who scorned it: “Campion’s Brag.”