He was also determined to prove himself as great a hero as the brave Sir Walter. In 1589 he defied the Queen by persuading the captain of a ship called the Swiftsure to follow Drake and Norris on their madcap raid on Lisbon, in support of Don Antonio’s claim to the Portuguese throne. Elizabeth sent after him an imperious letter: ‘Essex, your sudden and undutiful departure from our presence and your place of attendance, you may easily conceive how offensive it is’ . . . She even called for Sir Roger Williams, the Falstaffian soldier who accompanied Essex on his Portuguese adventure, to be punished by death. But by the time Essex came back from Portugal, having stuck his lance in the city gates of Lisbon, and left Drake and his mates to plunder the port of Vigo, Elizabeth had forgiven him.
Inevitably, as a heterosexual who wished to found a dynasty, Essex knew that sooner or later he would have to commit what – in a favourite of Elizabeth’s – was the ultimate betrayal. He showed the direction of his ambition by marrying Philip Sidney’s widow Frances, the daughter of Francis Walsingham. Essex was in many ways a brilliant person, but he was not in the league of Sidney. The ersatz Renaissance hero that he needed to become was a reflection of a decline at court. He left behind no sonnet sequence, still less a masterpiece to compare with Arcadia. He lacked any of Sidney’s philosophical reserve or moral depth, though, as his noble death showed, Essex shared with Sidney a deep piety that must have surprised some of his enemies. Frances Sidney and Essex had five children, of whom the firstborn, Robert, became the 3rd Earl and a parliamentary general in the Civil War – surely a reflection, among other things, of the 2nd Earl’s fate at the hands of the elderly Queen Elizabeth.
The Queen did forgive him for committing the sin of matrimony, but only just, and only on condition that his wife should live ‘very retired in her mother’s house’.17
Throughout the nineties, Essex punctuated his attentions to the Queen at court with displays of derring-do on the international scene. In 1591 he led 4,000 men into France to support Henri of Navarre in his struggle against the Catholic League. In 1596 he advocated a raid on the Spanish ports as the best way of dampening Spanish aggression. Raleigh was leading the attack – to Essex’s intense annoyance – but Essex himself had command of a squadron and, when the English ships inflicted utter defeat upon the Spanish, Essex could then upstage Raleigh, Lord Howard of Effingham and the other English officers by entering Cadiz and planting his standard on the citadel. During the service of thanksgiving for this campaign, which was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, the congregation burst into applause when Essex was eulogised from the pulpit.
Essex, who was a highly motivated and ambitious politician, was not simply anxious to be regarded as the daredevil of the decade; nor, with all his elaborate courtship of Elizabeth on the dance-floor, and his bravery, kitted out with the Queen’s glove on his arm and hundreds of pounds’ worth of elaborately tailored clothes and armour on the rest of his person, as a latterday piece of camp, court decoration. The Queen was an ageing woman. The overwhelming likelihood was now that she would be succeeded by the King of Scotland, but under this capricious and pathologically indecisive tyrant, anything could happen and no one knew exactly when the yellow-toothed, wrinkly, sad old woman, who had all but given up food and drink, would quit the scene.
Essex, as her ‘favourite’, was openly jockeying for position as the most powerful man, politically, in England. Who would be the man who would exercise power as the Queen slipped into her dotage? Who would have his hand on the tiller when the new captain, whoever that turned out to be, took over? Who would guarantee that the takeover would continue the Protestant, anti-Spanish, university-dominated regime that had been the political creation of William Cecil? Or would it take off in a new direction, with a greater toleration for the papists? In 1593, having accepted military aid from England to maintain his Protestant power-base, Henri IV of France had become a Catholic for the eminently sensible reason that ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ – that is, control of the French capital, and friendship with the largely Catholic governing classes, were more important than narrow theological principle; Elizabeth was disgusted and called Henri ‘an AntiChrist of ingratitude’ – but Essex would have understood, and so would many of the young noblemen in the Essex circle. Not just the Catholic Earl of Southampton, and not just the young – for Lettice Essex, the young earl’s mother, had married for the third time to Sir Charles Blount (future Lord Mountjoy), one of the pivotal senior Catholics in England. In short, anything could happen; and Essex was determined, when the time came, that he would be in a position of supreme power.
It was a cataclysmic blow to his schemes that, while he was away in Cadiz, performing deeds that would win him the applause of the crowd in St Paul’s Cathedral, his old rival Robert Cecil should be appointed as Secretary. Old Burghley was still alive at this juncture. Elizabeth had chosen wisely. The Cecils were not merely astute politicians in their own interest; it was very largely because of the regnum Cecilianum that Elizabeth had maintained a stable government for so long. Robert Cecil, in spite of his physical deformity, and his personal sorrows in the early years of high office (his wife died that year when he was only thirty-three, as did his father-in-law Lord Cobham, leaving him with his daughter Frances, who had inherited her father’s deformity, and a frail son William18), was able to guide the Queen with great astuteness during the few years left to her. Nor did he make the mistake of underestimating Essex’s considerable power-base, with allies in the Privy Council, at court and in the country at large.
Essex’s power was extended by his sister Dorothy Perrot (married to Sir John Perrot’s son, Tom), later to become Countess of Northumberland; and by their mother with all the Blount/Mountjoy lands and connections. This took in much of Wales, a crucially important power-base in Elizabethan England, especially since the Irish situation was so uncertain. Essex had suffered not merely a great personal blow when Sir John Perrot was condemned for treason; it also meant a loss of land and influence for his sister, since a traitor’s lands reverted to the Crown, and it was a great coup for Essex the flatterer that he managed to persuade Elizabeth to allow him and Dorothy to recover so much of the Perrot land in Pembrokeshire. Much of Carmarthenshire, the Welsh country immediately to the east, belonged to the Devereux interest: the fine church of St Peter’s, Carmarthen, was a traditional burying place for the Devereux, and Essex was Constable of Carmarthen Castle. These were not mere sinecures, however rarely Essex visited south Wales. What he was controlling here was, besides much fertile and well-fortified land, the high road between England and Ireland.
As lord of Chartley, the Devereux seat near Stafford where Mary, Queen of Scots had been imprisoned, Essex was also the master of much of the land through which any army, discontented or otherwise, would have to march (north or south) in the event of a great civil disturbance. The North of England was still broadly speaking Catholic – the religion of the Blounts (Essex’s new in-laws) of his sister, Penelope Rich, and of so many of the northern families who supported the Earl of Northumberland, whom Dorothy Devereux (Lady Perrot) had married in 1594.19 Essex had a huge territorial power-base, which Robert Cecil – however much he detested his political rival – was not such a fool as to ignore.
Nor was it a merely territorial strength that Essex possessed. Enough has already been written here to demonstrate that he was a difficult, indeed in many respects an odious, young man. But quite apart from his considerable skills at wowing the public and wooing private political allies, Essex, with all the quarterings of his Devereux forebears and extended relations, was related by blood to a high proportion of the tiny peerage of England. Many of them might cordially loathe him, but they were bound to him by kinship. Through his own marriage, Essex was bound to the Sidneys, and to the Earl of Pembroke (who, it must be said, hated him).
Either through kinship or old family association, Essex was close to the Earls of Worcester and Sussex, Rutland and Southampton, Lords Lumley, Eure, Willoughby d’Eresby and Lord
Henry Howard. ‘This glittering circle of friends was as impressive a grouping of noblemen as any seen in the sixteenth century’.20
Of course, there was a sense in which all these connections and influences were only of use to Essex – and of threat to his rivals at court – for as long as he enjoyed the favour of the Queen. But were the Queen seriously to antagonise a great power-base like this, the country would be facing more than a little local difficulty. What began at the start of the decade as a very embarrassing crush formed by a lonely old woman on someone almost young enough to be her grandson would develop into the greatest political threat that had endangered Elizabeth since the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The steely way in which she dealt with the threat, when it came to the point of crisis, showed that for all her foolish capacity to dote on her favourites, and her physical decrepitude, she had actually lost none of her ruthlessness, none of that political cunning, which, after nail-bitingly long periods of dither, so often served her.
And so we return to the Battle of Yellow Ford, on 14 August 1598, when the Earl of Tyrone, antagonised needlessly but beyond endurance by the English administration, had killed his brother-in-law Sir Henry Bagenal, routed thousands of English soldiers and proclaimed himself the lord of Ulster and the champion of Christ’s Catholic religion. In this moment of supreme national crisis, a crisis almost as serious as the arrival of the Armada ten years before, the Queen forgave Essex – they were in the middle of one of their tiffs – summoned him back from his Achilles-sulk and made him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. ‘By God,’ he declared, ‘I will beat Tyrone in the field.’
He could not have been more wrong. The losers in the tale would be Essex (the most disastrous loser), the people of Ireland – if they had hoped for the freedom to return to the old Gaelic ways of life, independent of English bossing – and the poor English foot-soldiers who followed Essex on his lacklustre campaign. The victor was the Earl of Tyrone, for the time being. In the end, by 1603, the Ulster rebellion would totally collapse. English law would be enforced (by Essex’s successor in Ireland, his Catholic uncle-in-law Mountjoy) upon the whole land of Ireland and, under James VI, the Scottish planting of Ulster would begin, which would lead, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to so bloody and so catastrophic a cohabitation of irreconcilable peoples and cultures. Essex set off to confront Tyrone with the largest army21 ever to leave English shores during the entire reign – 16,000 foot and 1,300 horse.
In the time it took to assemble this force, Tyrone’s triumph at Yellow Ford had led to a virtual collapse of the state’s authority throughout Connaught and Munster and parts of Leinster.
As far as posterity cares about Tyrone’s short-lived victories, the worst consequence was a literary one. The Faerie Queene, the greatest English epic, was everlastingly interrupted, and its author destroyed. Two months after Yellow Ford, Tyrone sent an expedition into Munster and the whole province rose up against the English. Spenser, who was by now Sheriff of Cork, was living in his beautiful seat at Kilcolman with his wife and family when the mob arrived. The house was sacked and burned to the ground. The poet escaped to Cork with his wife and what was left of the family – some say he lost a child in the fire. Sir John Norreys, President of the Province of Munster, gave the Spensers hospitality in Cork, and by the time of Christmas, Spenser was in London, able to present to the Queen his View of the Present State of Ireland, whose genocidal proposals – never to be forgotten or forgiven by Irish scholars of Spenser – can be understood in their political context. He died shortly after reaching the age of forty-seven. He was buried next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey and Essex paid for the funeral.22 It is a loss to literature comparable only to the murder of Marlowe and the premature death of Sidney that The Faerie Queene remained only half-finished.
Essex’s campaign in Ireland was totally ineffectual. He spent twenty-one weeks in the country where his father had died. Unlike Spenser, who was so deeply versed in Irish lore and language and topography, he knew nothing of the place. Unlike his successor Mountjoy, who did manage to subdue Ulster, and with it the whole of Ireland, Essex had no idea of tactics. Mountjoy subdued Ireland by utter ruthlessness, spoiling crops, wrecking land and houses, clocking up small victory after small victory from a military point of view, while applying relentless political pressure on Tyrone. Essex allowed Tyrone to run rings round him. The 16,000-strong English army consisted largely of untrained raw recruits. Essex approached each skirmish and battle, each local uprising in dribs and drabs, rather than having a ruthless policy for Ireland as a whole. In Wicklow, Louth, Kildare and Roscommon the Queen’s armies were humiliatingly defeated. Essex scarcely moved from the Pale. Exasperated, the Queen sent messages telling him to move north. ‘If we had meant that Ireland, after all the calamities in which they have wrapped it, should still have been abandoned,’ she witheringly wrote, ‘then it was very superfluous to have sent over a personage such as yourself.’
On 7 September Tyrone persuaded Essex to meet him for a negotiated truce, at Carrickmacross. Tyrone extracted from Essex the most astonishing concessions. The English would establish no more garrisons or forts. The truce would last six weeks, extendable at further six-weekly intervals until May 1600 – in other words, to give time for Tyrone to receive the invading Spanish reinforcements that he had been promised. Or so it was surmised. Essex made the further blunder of parleying with Tyrone alone, without witnesses or secretaries.
‘We never doubted,’ Elizabeth wrote sarcastically:
but that Tyrone, whensoever he saw any force approach either himself or any of his principal partisans would instantly offer a parley, specially with our supreme general of that Kingdom, having done it with those of subaltern authority, always seeking these cessations with like words, like protestations, and upon such contingents as we gather these will prove. It appeareth by your journal that you and the traitor spoke half an hour together without anybody’s hearing, wherein though we trust you are far from mistrusting you with a traitor, yet both for comeliness example and your own discharge, we marvel you would carry it no better.23
Essex realized that he had blundered, and he then made matters worse by playing the lover’s card. Had he stayed at his post in Ireland and begun to pull off genocidal acts of retribution against the Irish, he might have saved his English political career. Instead he panicked, and hurried back to London, hoping to make a personal appeal to Elizabeth. He rode without interruption as soon as he got to England and, covered with mud and sweat, reached Nonsuch on 28 September at ten in the morning, having been in the saddle all night.
Brooking no warning signals from flunkies, he brushed past the ladies-in-waiting and did what no man had ever done for years – he walked straight into the Queen’s bedroom apartments. He saw the old lady with her ‘grey hairs about her ears’, and the wig several feet away on its stand. She was not dressed. At first, however, it looked as if his gamble had paid off. She patted him softly on the head and told him to return when they had time to prepare themselves. He was able to say, to the awestruck gaggle of courtiers who had assembled in the public rooms, that ‘though he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad he found a sweet calm at home’.24
When he returned at eleven, clean and dressed, his sovereign had also had time to array herself in her accustomed finery. They spoke for more than an hour, during which he tried to justify himself. Cecil, Raleigh, Grey and the Howards waited while the colloquy took place. When the Queen and Essex emerged, they explained to Cecil and the others how the truce with Tyrone had been negotiated. Essex had no idea how badly he had blundered – blundered in conducting such a truce, blundered in leaving his post in Ireland and perhaps, above all, blundered in having seen Elizabeth without a wig, make-up or day-clothes. Only when he came back for a third audience in the afternoon, by which time Elizabeth had had time to consult Robert Cecil, did Essex realise that he had cooked his goose.
In the morning, a swaggering, mud-spattered young horseman, exhausted b
y his ride, but a fully powerful, sexually active man in his thirties, had confronted a poor, withered old lady. By the evening, an incompetent public servant who had outlived his usefulness and overstepped every boundary of royal protocol faced his bejewelled, intelligent, ruthless head of state. Elizabeth, in the presence of her councillors, mercilessly confronted Essex with what he had done. The more she spelt it out to him – his military failure, his diplomatic idiocy in seeing Tyrone without accompaniment, his concession of the truce, his desertion of his post – the more stammeringly inadequate were Essex’s responses. Then the blow fell. She dismissed him from all his offices and placed him under the surveillance of Lord Keeper Egerton at York House. She would never set eyes upon him again.
28
Essex and the End
FOR A YEAR – the year of 1600 to 1601 – both Elizabeth and Essex remained in an inanition, stunned by what had happened; hoping, perhaps, that it had not happened. Essex sank into illness and religious melancholy under house-arrest. Elizabeth sent him broth and a consortium of doctors. Apart from political disgrace, he faced financial ruin. He was £16,000 in debt, and by depriving him of office she removed from him – as privy councillor, Master of the Ordinance, Master of the Queen’s Horse and Earl Marshal of England – innumerable opportunities to take bribes in exchange for favours and jobs. One great source of income remained to him. On Michaelmas Day (29 September) 1590, in their happy golden days, she had bestowed upon him the lucrative Farm of Sweet Wines, the sinecure – worth well over £3,000 per annum – that had been enjoyed by his stepfather Leicester. Should she renew it? Or, tempting prospect to that parsimonious old lady, keep it herself? It was obvious which course would be recommended by Mr Secretary Robert Cecil. Friends tried to put in good words for Essex. ‘This day se’ night,’ he wrote desperately in September 1600:
The Elizabethans Page 48