Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  But the reality didn’t match the fantasy and Essex made a cock-up of things. He lost his favorite brother in a skirmish, deserted the main body of his troops to go hawking, and rashly challenged the governor of Rouen to a duel. Finally, he left his men to meet Henri, which almost resulted in his being cut off and isolated by the opposing army.

  Hearing about Essex’s raft of blunders, an infuriated Elizabeth considered pulling the plug on the entire campaign. But the immature earl could not handle her scolding. “Unkindness and sorrow have broken my heart and my wits. I wish to be out of my prison which I account my life,” he lamented.

  The pair of them routinely engaged in a twisted tango. Whenever Essex would leave court in one of his sulks, Elizabeth would mirror it, descending into a black and foul mood and becoming even testier than usual. She and Essex quarreled often, but the eruptions, though ugly, were brief. And reconciliation was delicious when her favorite assured her how beloved she was in his eyes.

  In Essex’s company, Elizabeth felt lit from within, girly and coy, but the earl was exhausted by the game. He looked at the vain, wrinkled woman in her inappropriately revealing necklines, her red fright wigs and layers of cosmetics that turned her once-lovely face into a caricature, and he saw an obstinate sixty-something virgin who changed her mind as often as she changed her gowns. She was grasping at her long-lost youth, trying to re-create in him another Dudley. He would collapse from the strain, his body shivering with ague, lying in the dark for days, incapable of action.

  And yet, Essex was insanely jealous of any other courtier on whom Elizabeth bestowed her smiles and favor—particularly Sir Walter Raleigh, his greatest rival in the dash and élan department.

  Early in 1593, Elizabeth appointed Essex to the Privy Council. His new prestige gained him some enemies at court, most notably Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s new secretary, who was assuming his aging father’s duties. But Essex took his new responsibilities very seriously, arriving at the House of Lords at seven in the morning every day, emerging as a burgeoning statesman.

  On December 28, 1597, on Cecil’s genuinely considered recommendation despite his personal dislike for the youth, Elizabeth made Essex Earl Marshal of England, charged with arranging state events, such as the opening of Parliament. But without a military campaign, Essex was bored. In 1598, he began philandering with a number of ladies of the court, fathering a bastard child by Mistress Elizabeth Southwell, even as he slept with other women. His wife was dismayed, and his queen was despondent, lapsing into fits of melancholy. Elizabeth’s temper grew shorter and sharper, and her ladies bore the brunt of it.

  Essex saw his opportunity to distinguish himself in September 1598. That’s when an army of Irish rebels led by Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, ambushed the English forces there, leaving twelve hundred men dead or wounded, and the north of Ireland all the way down to Dublin unprotected.

  Elizabeth was bent on sending Essex’s uncle, Sir William Knollys, to quash the uprising. Essex proposed a counter-candidate and he and the queen nearly came to blows over it. In the middle of their argument, Essex made the cardinal mistake of contemptuously turning his back on the queen.

  Elizabeth literally boxed his ears, shouting, “Go to the Devil!”

  Her arrogant young adversary then did the unthinkable. Swearing loudly, he grasped the hilt of his sword. Getting right up in Elizabeth’s face, he screamed, “This is an outrage that I will not put up with! I would not have borne it from your father’s hands!”

  The room went frighteningly silent. The Earl of Nottingham grabbed hold of Essex before he did something even more rash. Elizabeth remained absolutely still. Either utterly mortified or still in high dudgeon, Essex fled the room.

  What happened next was even more remarkable, given Elizabeth’s penchant for mercilessly castigating those who crossed her.

  She did nothing.

  Not another word was said about the incident.

  Utterly unchastened, Essex reopened the wound by writing to her from Wanstead. In a display of colossal gall, he had the temerity to scold his sovereign for her cruel treatment of him.

  Elizabeth finally grew disgusted. “He hath played long enough upon me. And now I mean to play awhile upon him,” she vowed, “and stand as much upon my greatness as he hath upon stomach.” She instructed her messenger to “tell the Earl that I value myself at as great a price as he values himself.”

  Essex’s disrespectful written reply was “I do confess that, as a man, I have been more subject to your natural beauty than as a subject to the power of a king.”

  Elizabeth had sent Sir Richard Bingham to crush Tyrone’s rebels, but in October, Bingham died. Essex begged Elizabeth to send him to Ireland as Bingham’s replacement—arguing that only he could put down the rebellion and pacify Ireland. Finally, he got his wish. Essex was given the command of the largest army Elizabeth had ever amassed—sixteen thousand infantrymen and thirteen thousand cavalrymen.

  The English settlers welcomed Essex with open arms. But from there, it was all downhill. Filled with bravado, Essex loved the idea of a military campaign, the glory and honors that would come to him for a job well done. But as a tactician and strategist, and as a commander, he was a disaster. He dithered, squandering time and resources, and far worse—lives. In addition to casualties, desertion and disease claimed his men. He dispatched them to distant outposts, thereby reducing the numbers he needed to fight Tyrone. When one of his detachments displayed cowardice in the field, he had every tenth man in the rank and file summarily executed, and cashiered his lieutenants, executing one of them as well. He did not request Elizabeth’s permission to alter his marching orders or inform her of his troop movements. He knighted dozens of men, though Elizabeth had expressly forbidden him to do so. One wag grumpily quipped that Essex unsheathed his sword only to make knights.

  Elizabeth anxiously waited for a dispatch from the front. “I give the Lord Deputy a thousand pounds a day to go on progress,” she lamented bitterly, and ordered Essex to march forthwith into Ulster.

  Essex replied that her command was impossible to fulfill, because the army was vastly depleted. Only four thousand infantrymen remained. At great expense, the queen sent two thousand reinforcements, ordering Essex to attack Tyrone and not to leave Ireland until he had succeeded. Instead of engaging Tyrone in battle, Essex did the most humiliating thing a general could do: meeting Tyrone one-on-one in the middle of a river, Essex negotiated a truce.

  And then, without permission to depart, Essex left for England. To avoid any unpleasant news of his conduct reaching the queen’s ears before he had a chance to explain his actions, Essex headed straight for London. With his riding boots muddy and his clothes dirty and dusty from his long journey, he strode uninvited and unannounced into Elizabeth’s bedroom as she was making her toilette.

  A wizened, bare-faced woman with straggly gray hair glanced up, startled, at the intruder. With queenly aplomb, Elizabeth recovered her composure, and even her vanity, and burst out laughing, once she realized he meant her no harm. She told Essex she would speak with him when they were both properly dressed.

  But it wasn’t long before she ascertained what had happened in Ireland. Elizabeth remanded Essex to the custody of the Lord Keeper at York House until she determined the appropriate course of action.

  On November 29, the Star Chamber met, and Essex’s litany of transgressions was read aloud. He had mismanaged the Irish campaign, had brokered a humiliating treaty, and had deserted his commission without permission, returning to England in direct contravention of the queen’s orders.

  And yet no punishment was meted out. Essex languished under house arrest at York House until the spring, when Elizabeth ordered him back to his own estate. By then she was determined that a tribunal of her own should hear the case.

  On June 5, 1600, after an eleven-hour hearing before Elizabeth’s special commission, Essex was declared guilty and stripped of his offices. Elizabeth granted his wish to return to his own
home.

  Aware that the patent for the duties on the sweet wines was coming due, Essex wrote her honeyed letters in the hope that the queen would renew it. But the rose-colored scales had finally fallen from the royal eyes. Elizabeth told Francis Bacon, “My Lord of Essex has written me some very dutiful letters, and I have been moved by them; but what I took for the abundance of the heart I find to be only a suit for the farm of sweet wines.”

  And yet, the earl still had the power to move her, writing: Haste, paper, to that happy presence, whence only unhappy I am banished; kiss that fair correcting hand which lays new plasters to my lighter hurts, but to my greatest wound applieth nothing. Say thou comest from pining, languishing, despairing ESSEX.

  Nevertheless, she did not renew his warrant. Henceforward the profits from the sweet wines would be reserved for the crown.

  At this, Essex became apoplectic. A friend, Sir John Harington, wrote: He shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind . . . The Queen well knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit, the haughty spirit knoweth not how to yield, and the man’s soul seemed tossed to and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea.

  During a conversation about Elizabeth’s conditions of his return to court, Essex lost command of his temper to such a degree that it finally cost him her love. In his view, she had banished him; and by refusing to renew his license on the sweet wine imports, had reduced him to poverty. “Her conditions!” he exclaimed. “Her conditions are as crooked as her carcase!”

  The remark was repeated to the queen. And finally, after giving Essex enough rope to hang himself ever since she met him, Elizabeth refused to forgive him. Essex had mortally wounded the powerful queen’s most vulnerable spot: her vanity.

  The earl then embarked on the most foolhardy project of his life. He decided that Elizabeth must be deposed. In the early weeks of 1601, he wrote to James VI of Scotland, who sent back a letter of encouragement. Essex wore the letter about his neck in a small black leather purse.

  On February 7, the earl was summoned to present himself before the Privy Council, but he pled illness, assuming that he would be arrested as soon as he arrived. The following day, Essex gathered three hundred supporters and, by telling them that Cecil and Raleigh planned to assassinate him, tricked them into marching behind him through the streets of London, shouting, “For the Queen! For the Queen! The crown of England is sold to the Spaniards! A plot is laid for my life!”

  But the good people of London kept their doors and windows shut. The golden boy’s credit with them had turned to dross. Essex managed to get down to the riverside, where he found a small boat and rowed up the Thames to Essex House, where he sought refuge, but his respite was short-lived. The queen’s guards caught up with him. He surrendered himself into their custody and was immediately brought to the Tower.

  Essex was tried for treason on February 19, 1601. In such proceedings, a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion.

  Elizabeth was heartbroken, not only because her favorite was about to die but because he had betrayed her trust in his ability, and by extension her love for him. Yet she could not, would not, alter the verdict. After years of vacillating where Essex was concerned, Elizabeth showed no regret at ordering his death.

  On the frosty morning of February 25, the thirty-four-year-old Essex walked to the place of execution on Tower Green. In addition to the usual paeans to God and queen, in his final speech on the scaffold Essex confessed that “my sins are more in number than the hairs on my head. I have bestowed my youth in wantonness, lust, and uncleanness; I have been puffed up with pride and vanity, and love of this wicked world’s pleasures.”

  It took the executioner three strikes of the axe to get the job done.

  After her husband’s death, the long-suffering Frances, Lady Essex, remarried twice more. Essex’s ambitious mother, Lettice Knollys, widowed once again by the execution of Christopher Blount, one of her son’s coconspirators, lived to the astonishing age of ninety-four.

  THE STUARTS 1603–1714

  MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

  1542-1587 MONARCH OF SCOTLAND 1542-1567 QUEEN CONSORT OF FRANCE 1559-1560

  MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, THE DAUGHTER OF KING James V and Marie of Guise, his powerfully connected French-born wife, was only a week old when her father died and she became queen. It was a time of civil unrest. By 1548, when Mary was just five years old, her mother sent her to France for her own safety, while she remained in Scotland as Mary’s regent. Mary was raised in the court of Henri II. Slender and pale, she was nicknamed “la reine blanche” (the white queen). In 1558, she married François, the frail and sickly dauphin. A year later, Henri II died, and Mary and her young husband—now François II—became the king and queen of France.

  In June 1560, Marie of Guise died of dropsy. But just as Mary was beginning to cope with her mother’s death, on December 5, her fifteen-year-old husband died of an ear infection. The widowed, eighteen-year-old Mary returned to Scotland in 1561 to claim her crown. The country was in turmoil, governed by a body of regents that included the evangelical Protestant John Knox and Mary’s bastard half brother, James Stewart.

  Mary’s efforts to strip the nobles of their power and instead consolidate it within the purview of the crown angered many of the lairds (the Scottish lords) whose support she needed most—misogynists who were already malcontented at being ruled by a lassie.

  In addition to the crippling poverty facing her wild and rugged nation, Mary had a lot of institutionalized hostility to handle. She was a female, a foreigner (having been raised in France), and she was a devout Catholic in a Protestant country that had embraced the Reformation with a vengeance.

  Mary’s domestic policy was always the pursuit of peace. She had a horror of violence, saying of herself that she would “rather pray with Esther than take the sword of Judith.”

  In a love match, Mary wed her ambitious cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Shortly after Darnley was murdered by a conspiracy of lairds in February 1567, Mary married the alleged ringleader of the plot, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Then, the nobles who had so vociferously supported Bothwell turned traitor, raising their swords against Bothwell and arresting Mary.

  On June 24, 1567, imprisoned at Lochleven Castle, Mary was forced to abdicate her throne in favor of her infant son, James, who was crowned at Stirling that day.

  Aided by some of her sympathetic captors, Mary managed to escape on May 2, 1568, and fled to England, hoping that Elizabeth would grant her asylum as a fugitive queen. Mary’s plan was to regroup an army and return to Scotland to reclaim her crown.

  However, for the next nineteen years, Mary remained in Elizabeth’s “honorable custody,” detained as a potential threat to Elizabeth’s person and her crown because she might stir up Catholic sympathy and challenge the Protestant Elizabeth’s sovereignty. Civil war was unthinkable. In the summer of 1586, Mary indeed implicated herself in a plot to depose Elizabeth, fomented by Anthony Babington, a Catholic zealot.

  Mary was arrested and taken to Fotheringhay Castle. Her trial itself was utterly illegal: she was a foreign queen and therefore was not bound by their laws. And she could not be properly judged by a panel of peers, because a sovereign—who ruled by divine right—by definition had no peers. Nonetheless, Mary was convicted of high treason, and on February 1, 1587, Elizabeth signed her death warrant.

  On the morning of February 8, 1587, the forty-four-year-old Mary Stuart, dowager Queen of Scotland and France, was executed in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay Castle. After three inept chops, the executioner finally raised the severed appendage, and Mary’s red wig came off in his hand. Her head, with its scraggly gray locks, ignominiously thudded to the floor. And then, Mary’s little Westie, who had been hiding within her skirts the entire time, crawled out from beneath her petticoats and nestled himself between Mary’s head and shoulders. The terrier was thoroughly scrubbed of Mary’s blood and every shred of the queen’s
clothes was burned so that they could not become relics of a Catholic martyr, a role in which many of her fellow Papists had cast her since her incarceration in England began.

  Mary’s corpse was encased in a lead coffin that remained at Fotheringhay for nearly half a year until her son, King James VI, arranged a proper funeral at Peterborough Cathedral. It was a Protestant service.

  On the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James VI of Scotland became James I of England, jointly ruling both realms. He erected a white marble monument for his mother in Westminster Abbey, where her body now reposes—la reine blanche forever.

  MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley 1545-1567 and James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell c. 1534-1578

  Though she had once glimpsed him years earlier when he was no more than a gangly boy, Mary, Queen of Scots, met her first cousin, the golden-haired Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, when his pushy mother, Margaret Lennox, sent him to France to express his condolences on the death of Mary’s husband, King François II. Lady Lennox viewed her son as the next candidate for Mary’s hand because Mary and Darnley were both grandchildren of Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of Henry VIII. Like Mary, Darnley’s veins ran thick with both Stuart and Tudor (Scottish and English) royal blood. And, like Mary, he was Catholic.

  At the time, Darnley did not make much of an impression on the grieving eighteen-year-old queen. It was not until five years later, in 1565, that Mary saw him in an entirely new light and fell madly in love with him.

  By then, her English cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, was trying to fob off her own paramour, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, onto Mary. Mary’s advisers thought it was a joke, since Leicester was damaged goods. His father, Northumberland, had been executed for treason and the title attainted (meaning that it, and the appurtenant lands, reverted to the crown); and Leicester’s wife, Amy Robsart, had died under suspicious circumstances, some thought a victim of Leicester himself.