by Lisa Hilton
By the winter of 1600, Essex’s anger and paranoia had reached a boiling point. Sir John Harington recorded that he seemed “devoid of good reason or right mind,” so suddenly did he shift between “sorrow and repentance, rage and rebellion.”5 During his last disgrace, Essex might have written to Elizabeth, begging to be permitted to kiss her hand and claiming that until he was able to see her, “time itself is a perpetual night and the whole world but a sepulchre to your humblest vassal,”6 but among the rowdy cabal of chancers he was assembling around him at Essex House, he sneered at the “treasure of my love” as “an old woman … no less distorted and crooked in mind than she is in body.”7 Until now, Essex’s own plans had been wild and formless. Convinced that Elizabeth was no more than a puppet of the Cecil faction, which he had convinced himself was barring him from his proper place in government, Essex had as early as his service in Ireland talked of collecting “two hundred resolute gentlemen” to take control of the queen’s person. He had also attempted to enlist the services of Lord Mountjoy in bringing over a force from Ireland, and had long been engaged in a correspondence with James VI in an attempt to persuade him that, as he confided in a letter of Christmas Day 1600, James must intervene “to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country which groans under her burden.”8 It has been suggested that James fell for Essex’s arguments as to Cecil’s “unquenchable malice,” and that his agreement to send an ambassador to demand a change of ministers from Elizabeth once Essex had effected his plan was an endorsement of the earl’s aims, but given that Cecil was in covert negotiations with James over his accession from 1601 onwards, his acquiescence is more likely to have been a means of giving Essex a little more rope with which to hang himself. Nonetheless, Essex was sufficiently encouraged to lay out his scheme at a meeting at the Earl of Southampton’s house in early February 1601. Along with Essex and Southampton, the key conspirators were Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Sir John Davies, Sir Christopher Blount, and John Littleton. The object was to isolate Elizabeth, after which Essex would beg her contritely to bring his enemies to trial, “and having called a Parliament, to alter the form of commonwealth.”9 Blount would man the gate, Davies the hall, Danvers the Great Chamber and the Presence Chamber, upon which Essex would emerge from the stable called the Muse with his escort and throw himself upon the queen’s mercy. Once the court was controlled, the plotters would take the Tower and subdue the City.
That Essex was able to convince his supporters that this was a plausible scheme was a testament to his personal charisma, as the project was patently fantastic, if not merely stupid. First, Essex had severely underestimated the scope of Cecil’s intelligence network and therefore overestimated the support of James VI. Second, in believing that he was standing up for the “countless host of the discontented,” he had not considered how paltry his backing was among powerful magnates and wealthy burghers.10 Third, he was utterly unable to keep his mouth shut. Under Essex’s steward, Meyrick, who dished out provisions to anyone with a sword, Essex House had become a general canteen for “bold confident fellows, men of broken fortunes, discontented persons and such as saucily used their tongues in railing against all men.” Obviously, the authorities knew something was going on. Essex gave out that the increase in guests at his home was for the purpose of hearing sermons, but this pretext only made matters worse when it was suggested that “some words … had dropped from the preachers’ mouths as of the superior magistrates had power to restrain kings themselves.”11 Unlike the network Elizabeth herself had constructed around her in the last year of Mary’s reign, this was no efficient courtin-waiting but an inchoate mass of discontents with no real program and no real power.
On 7 February, Essex was summoned to appear before the Privy Council, but he rejected this, and a further summons, claiming that he was ill. He learned that a barricade of coaches had been erected between Whitehall and Charing Cross, preventing access to the palace, and that the guard in the Great Chamber had been augmented. That evening, a specially commissioned performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II was given at the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Supporters of Essex, including Charles and Joscelyn Percy, younger brothers of the Earl of Northumberland, paid 40 shillings to persuade the Chamberlain’s Men to stage the piece, which the actors felt was too out of date to appeal to many spectators. Eleven of Essex’s men (though not the earl himself) were in the house. At ten the next morning, four councilors, headed by Lord Egerton, arrived at Essex House to persuade Essex to petition the queen in correct form if he felt that there was a wrong to be redressed. Essex had already spread a rumor that he had refused to attend council because a fatal ambush was planned for him, and now set off into the city with about two hundred armed followers, having locked the delegation in the library at Essex House. Just as Essex entered the City, en route for the Tower, Thomas, Lord Burghley (Burghley’s older son), Garter King of Arms, arrived, proclaiming Essex and all his followers to be traitors. Elizabeth was at dinner at Whitehall while Essex’s rabble confronted her guards at Ludgate Hill. The only allusion she made to the menace in the streets was that “He that had placed her on that seat would preserve her in it,” and whatever she was feeling, she concealed it “marvellously.”
The skirmish at Ludgate cost the life of Essex’s page, Henry Tracey, but the earl escaped with a couple of bullet holes in his hat. There was never any possibility of attaining the Tower—the rebels scattered at the first sign of a serious engagement, and Essex’s small remaining party commandeered a few boats to row themselves desperately back downriver from Queenhithe, hoping to use the hostages to negotiate a settlement. Back at Essex House, now surrounded on the land side by royal troops, Ferdinando Gorges had had the sense to see that holding the councilors could only make matters worse, and freed them before Essex returned. At about nine that evening, Essex surrendered his sword to the Earl of Nottingham. He spent the night at Lambeth Palace before being rowed to the Tower, already a condemned man. To the last, Essex would maintain that he had never intended any harm to Elizabeth’s person, refusing to sue for pardon and insisting that he had only wished to state his grievance. Might Elizabeth have forgiven him one last time?
Robert Cecil was determined to preclude this possibility. Immediately following the failed coup, the details of the earl’s treason were proclaimed in London and thanks given to the people for refusing to join the rebels. With the citizens’ resistance praised so publicly, Elizabeth could not fail to execute Essex without appearing impossibly weak. Yet this time, the queen gave no sign of wavering. From the moment Essex had exposed her aging frailty in her bedchamber to the staging of Shakespeare’s drama, his actions had struck not only at Elizabeth’s government but at the mystical core of her personal power.
Elizabeth Tudor was the granddaughter of a usurper and the product, according to many, of an illegal marriage, if not of an ignominious adultery. From the moment of her coronation, she had identified herself with Richard II, the last undisputed possessor of the divine right, and linked herself further to him through mystical virginity. These latter had been the compasses of her queenship. But Elizabeth was also a modern ruler, a monarch who had absorbed the principles of Renaissance political theory, combining in her person that uneasy blend of might and right which had fractured the consistency of her father’s theory of kingship, as exposed in Henry VIII. In the drama which was played out with Essex, Elizabeth’s self-identification with Richard inevitably casts Essex as Bolingbroke, the rationalist who sees through the “deeply Machiavellian” construct that royal magnificence is merely a device for control: as the play has it, “Art thou aught else but place, degree and form Creating awe and fear in other men?”12 The tragedy of Richard II is that of the dismantling of the king’s “two bodies,” the gradual and brutal demystification of Richard’s person until he is rendered a man as other men.13 From the moment the king acknowledges that he is human, that he “live[s] with bread like you, feel want T
aste grief, need friends—subjected thus / How can you say to me, I am a king?” to the point when he reverses the sacraments of his consecration as monarch (a scene performed but never printed or published in Elizabeth’s reign), the audience witnesses the undoing of a sacred fiction. Time and time again, Elizabeth herself had played on the distinction between her “body natural” and her “body politic,” but no exposure of the dislocation between those entities could have been more brutal than the scene played out with Essex in her bedroom. But might Elizabeth not be seen as a Bolingbroke? Might that not, ultimately, have been Essex’s error? For, as Marlowe’s Machiavel has it, did not “Might first make kings”?
Essex was a jouster, not a soldier, a sonneteer, not a politician. Elizabeth was serenely assured of her own divine right (or at least, she played it that way), and no one knew better than she the importance of image to the making of monarchy, yet throughout her reign, she had undertaken, albeit sometimes reluctantly, to preserve her state at any cost, the first principle of the Renaissance prince. Essex, not Elizabeth, was the throwback, the believer in chivalric kingship. His glamour and his aristocratic birth may have made him popular, but the future belonged to the “goose-quilled gentlemen,” the pen-pushers, who so offended his sensibilities. Elizabeth suffered from no such delusions. As she wrote to James of Scotland, she was not so unskilled in kingship that she would wink at any fault. To the French ambassador, when he congratulated her on her delivery from the rebellion, she declared that if Essex had made it to Whitehall, she should have gone out to meet him, “in order to know which of them ruled.” Perhaps Elizabeth’s particular qualities as a Renaissance prince can be cast as the inheritance of her mixed Yorkist and Lancastrian blood—York, the house of romance and chivalry; Lancaster as pragmatism and statecraft. If Elizabeth, rather than Essex, was Bolingbroke, then she showed that when it came to an emergency, she was Lancastrian through and through.
PERHAPS ESSEX CAN be seen, like Anne Boleyn before him, as yet another victim of the game of love. He never quite appreciated that Elizabeth only saw it as a game, that he would never be master of his mistress. Essex maintained a jaunty insouciance throughout his trial, which began at Westminster Hall on 19 February, persisting in his refusal to plead for mercy. Only when the Dean of Norwich visited him in the Tower to warn him of the danger to his soul did Essex apprehend that he was actually going to die. His nature had always been depressive and mercurial—Elizabeth dismissed him as a “mad ingrate.” Now he suffered some form of hysterical nervous breakdown. Elizabeth signed his death warrant the next day. Five days later, his head was struck off as he recited Psalm 55. Although she subsequently confided to the French ambassador that she would have spared Essex if she could, this was merely a formulaic echo of Elizabeth’s professed grief at the execution of Mary Stuart. To the public, responsibility for Essex’s death fell firmly upon Cecil, but the promptness of Elizabeth’s action suggests that the decision was hers.
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THE ESSEX REBELLION has been seen as the point of tergiversation in Elizabeth’s rule, the moment when the long and so carefully cultivated image of majesty began to decay. The tinsel was looking tawdry; behind the glittering edifice of the monarch’s person, an old, exhausted woman could be all too clearly seen. Elizabeth’s godson John Harington noted in 1598 that among university scholars, discussion “did light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of this time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old.”
Elizabeth had always been quite aware, as she had remarked early in her reign, that her people would incline more to the rising than the setting sun, and now, finally, she had to acknowledge that the long love affair between queen and subject, in which she had always believed, was coming to an end. On 30 November 1601, the queen addressed 140 members of the Commons in the council chamber at Whitehall. The members had officially come to formally express their gratitude for the resolution of the monopolies question; what they and she knew was that many of them had come to say goodbye. Elizabeth accepted the thanks “with no less joy than your loves can have desire to offer such a present,” which she claimed to “esteem more than any treasure or riches; for those we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks I account them invaluable.” Her greatest happiness as a queen, she went on, had been to reign over “so thankful a people.” As the members stood, she continued, “It is not my desire to live or reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.” As they bent over the queen’s hand in farewell, many of the men were seen to be weeping. Her words became known instantly as “the Golden Speech,” but “its themes, like the Queen, were exhausted.”1
Was Elizabeth herself convinced? “Affection is false” she had remarked tartly to Mistress Fitton at the wedding masque a year before, and yet, still, she had risen and danced. To the end of her life, she performed the role she had been born for, and perhaps the criticisms of her conservatism, her inability to change, her lack of concern for the succession, need to be balanced against the enormous psychological cost of so doing. Elizabeth ruled as a prince, and princes just could not be as other men. Possessed of “two bodies,” Elizabeth could never entirely inhabit either. She has been described, perfectly, as a “political hermaphrodite,” but, as this book has attempted to argue, it was not the division between her “masculine” political body and her “feminine” mortal body which entirely made her unique, but the fusing in that female person of the material and the divine.2 As Shakespeare’s Henry V puts it:
What infinite heart’s ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy?
What kind of god art thou, that suffers’t more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?3
In her Golden Speech, Elizabeth declared that she had no wish to outlive her usefulness to the realm, yet, as Francis Bacon put it in his treatise Of Great Place, “Retire men cannot when they would, neither will they when it were reason, but are impatient of privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow.”4 In her last years, perhaps more than ever before, Elizabeth performed the dance of monarchy, yet the shadows were stealing close.
From 1592 onwards, the queen’s portrait was no longer taken from life. That year she had sat for Isaac Oliver, Hilliard’s pupil, who produced a pattern model for a portrait intended for mass repetition. Described as “the most revealing portrait ever painted of Elizabeth,” in the queen’s eyes it was a disaster.5 For once, we see Elizabeth’s face, the slightly hooked nose, the high forehead with just a suggestion of lines, the lips withered with age. Elizabeth’s large eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, possess the hooded alertness of a resting hawk. If anything, since the picture was painted when Elizabeth was almost sixty, it shows what an attractive woman she must have been, yet Elizabeth expressed herself greatly offended and the Privy Council gave out that “all likenesses of the Queen that depicted her as being in any way old and hence subject to mortality” ought to be impounded.6 The matter was not entirely one of vanity. To suggest that the queen was aging was to allude to the still uncertain matter of the succession. “In the later time,” wrote John Clapham, “when she showed herself in public she was always magnificent in apparel, supposing happily thereby that the eyes of her people, being dazzled with the glittering aspect of those accidental ornaments would not so easily discern the marks of age and the decay of natural beauty.”7 There was a very real fear that, beyond the gleaming aura of the queen’s person, anarchy was waiting.
In a sense, Elizabeth was becoming the victim of her own legend. As the decade progressed, still with no confirmation of the next heir, the demeanor of splendid majesty was too difficult to maintain. A 1591 poem by that most patriotic of writers, Edmund Spenser, entitled The Tears of the Muses, announces a slippage in the process of civilization, a descent into dark savagery. In turn, the Muses lament that their verses have
lost their power and that the only hope they have of stalling the slide into degeneracy is a queen called “Pandora.” Their complaint echoes Elizabeth’s apparent despair as she began to lose control of the court in the sexual free-for-all of the 1590s. The Muses claim that Pandora is the only means by which culture can be preserved, but it was Pandora who unleashed “black Chaos” upon the world. Two years later, Shakespeare’s bestseller Venus and Adonis went further. As the poem opens, the goddess of love is captivated by the beauty of a young man who is more interested in boar hunting than making love. Venus sneers at Adonis for being no man, but “a lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone / Well-painted idol, image dull and dead.” Venus’s failure to consummate her passion descends into an undignified (and very funny) brawl, concluding with Venus departing as a “disappointed and bitter goddess, no longer the goddess of justice, nor even … the goddess of love, retiring in disgust from a wilderness in which she no longer has a place.” Renaissance readers of the racy sensation of the 1590s would have caught the allusion to Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, which begins with Chastity departing the earth in the company of her sister Astraea, who was placed among the constellations at the end of the Golden Age as Virgo. Within the satire is a description of the transience of women’s physical appeal: