by Caro, Jane;
I turned to my old friend and champion. ‘Send an armed guard to Essex House, Sir Henry, and arrest the earl and his fellow conspirators.’
As I gave the order, a messenger stepped into the room and whispered something in Cecil’s ear.
He looked up. ‘It seems it may be too late for that.’
The capital of my kingdom is a small place. Rumours fly through the streets and alleyways faster than even the fleetest of my messengers could possibly carry them. All my people, from the greatest to the most humble, were gripped by the unfolding drama between Essex and me. All knew it must come to a head. All knew that it was Essex who would act first. Once he knew that we were aware of his plans, he had no choice.
Despite it being the Lord’s Day – not that such a consideration would likely have given the earl pause – at eleven in the morning, Essex marched through London. Behind him in lock-step were more than two hundred armed men. They walked with their swords drawn. As Cecil had said, his original plan was to surprise the court, but my spies (the very same who once took orders from the earl) had put paid to that. Instead, thinking on the fly, he had turned his men towards Ludgate Hill in the hope of commanding the city from its heights. As he made his way through the streets, he called out to the watching Londoners, exhorting them to take up arms and join him.
‘For the queen!’ he cried, explaining to passers-by, many of whom were returning from church, that my kingdom had been sold to the Infanta of Spain and that his life was in peril.
But, as the earl’s erstwhile friend Sir Francis Bacon explained to me afterwards, my faithful people just watched the traitor in silence. ‘In so populous a city where he thought himself held so dear, there was not, Your Majesty, one man from the chiefest citizen to the meanest artificer or prentice that armed with him.’
Despite my fright – and I could not contemplate an armed band in my own capital without feeling fear – I almost found it in my heart to feel sorry for the foolish, half-mad earl.
‘The people stood silently as Essex and his men marched by. All that disturbed the peace of this Sunday morning was his hollering traitorous lies at the top of his voice and the crunching of the rebels’ boots on the cobblestones. Not one man or woman cried back to him. They did not call out in encouragement; nor did they hurl insults.’
‘It is a foolhardy man who insults an armed horde.’
‘There is that, but their mulish silence was almost worse than the foulest language. It emphasised how mightily the earl had miscalculated, how delusional he had become. He seemed pathetic in the face of their indifference, rather than frightening. I did wonder whether some who came out to see him might not begin to laugh.’
‘He could not have abided that.’
‘As the terrible realisation that no one else was joining him began to dawn on the earl, he went quite white, and became drenched in sweat. Not from exertion, you understand, but from humiliation and fear. Eventually he stopped at a sheriff’s house and went inside to change his shirt—’
I laughed out loud at this detail, interrupting Bacon’s tale. ‘He was always vain about his appearance, no matter what the circumstances. Go on, Bacon, go on!’
‘Thank you, Your Grace. No sooner had he entered the premises than the sheriff smartly exited from the rear. I am afraid that the sight of the earl going in the front door, shortly followed by the sheriff coming out the back, did cause some hilarity among those who watched.’
I snorted again, but as much in sympathy as derision. ‘Poor, foolish man.’
I could not help remembering – as Sir Francis told me of the earl’s utter humiliation at the hands of my loyal people – another similar incident, many years in the past, when John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland and coincidentally Essex’s step-grandfather, tried to whip the English people into armed resistance against the accession of my sister Mary. Just as they did now, the people stood by then, silent and unmoving as armed men marched past them. I gave thanks for the good sense and loyalty of the ordinary men and women of England. Without their refusal to rebel, I would not be on my throne.
Bacon had not finished regaling us with the details. All the men and women in the room were hanging on his every word. ‘When the futility of his enterprise became obvious even to him, Essex decided to turn back towards his own house. Your watchmen had already dispatched heralds into the streets to proclaim the earl a traitor and their voices could be heard ringing through boulevards and alleyways. In response to their cries, the mood of the people began to change. Their anger was not, as the earl had hoped, turned against you. It was focused on him. Someone bent down and picked up a mess of horse dung. They threw it. It landed harmlessly enough at the earl’s feet, but the shock of it made him flinch. He was losing his nerve, Your Grace. In response the people closest to him began to mutter ominously and jostle him. It was then, I think, that he realised the full extent of his folly.’
‘He has always believed only what he wanted to believe. It is a fatal flaw.’ I spoke softly, almost to myself. The emotions I was experiencing were complicated. I felt relief and gratitude to the people of London. I felt fear and anger at the audacity of Essex and his men taking up arms against me, but I also felt pity for the man I had once regarded with such affection.
‘Such was his terror, Essex fled down a side street to the river, commandeered a boat and made his way up the Thames to the water-gate at Essex House. And that is where he is now, barricaded behind locked doors.’
‘Where he cannot remain, my lord.’ I had taken a step towards Sir Francis in my alarm.
Cecil had been listening to Bacon’s report as intently as I had been, and he also now stepped forward to reassure me. ‘I have already dispatched Charles Howard and Sir Robert Sidney to Essex House with orders to arrest the earl and take him to the Tower.’
But I was not so easily soothed. ‘I doubt he will leave his own home meekly, my lord, just because we ask him to. Sir Henry warned me he was a cornered animal, and he is now a mortally wounded one. I hope you gave Howard and Sidney the men they will require to get the job done.’
I was right. Essex refused to leave his house. He conveyed his intentions to the two men sent to arrest him from the roof of that establishment. My emissaries were forced to shout up at him from the garden. Despite everything, the earl was still attempting to dictate terms. He was adamant that he would surrender only as long as he was promised an audience with me.
What delusions was he still labouring under? Did he really think that I knew nothing of what was occurring? Had he convinced himself that I did my council’s bidding rather than the other way around? If so, he did not know me at all and never had. I could not help wondering if he would ever have thought so little of the authority of a king. It was my sex that enabled him to think that I did not know what was done in my name.
Yet there was even greater insult. Did Essex really believe such was his personal charm that I had only to see him face to face and I would be putty in his hands? It pains me to admit it now, but I was hurt by the realisation that all of Essex’s attention to me was due to my office. He had seen nothing of the flesh-and-blood woman beneath the crown. And he had not seen me because he was not interested in me. To him my all-too-human carcass had always been crooked. It was my crown that dazzled his eyes.
I had cause to be grateful that the redoubtable Charles Howard was sent to detain the rebellious earl. In reply to Essex’s demands, Howard sent some men to fetch gunpowder from the Tower. He then delivered his own ultimatum to the Essex household. He would give the earl an hour so that his sister, wife and their children and gentlewomen could leave and get to safety and then, said Charles Howard, matter-of-factly (if at the top of his voice), he would blow the house up. Some of the ladies set to shrieking as they listened to the admiral, and who could blame them?
As I think back on the fall of Essex, memories of Henry, Lord Darnley, rise up. It is impossib
le not to see the parallels between the situation at Essex House and the peculiar episode of the explosion at Kirk O’Field that was meant to kill the estranged husband of the Queen of Scots – but didn’t. Who had blown up the house and strangled Darnley and his servant in the garden as they tried to flee? The world points its finger at Mary’s lover, the Earl of Bothwell, and some at Mary herself. But I shall die not knowing for certain.
It was not until the kegs of gunpowder were being unloaded from the boat onto the earl’s lawn that the earl and his confederate Southampton accepted reality and came down from the roof. At the point of muskets, they knelt on the lawn and presented their swords.
Both were charged with high treason.
I reprieved Southampton, he was Essex’s follower, not his leader, but there could be no reprieve for Essex himself.
I was playing the virginals when a messenger arrived with news from Tower Green. He fell to one knee and I paused at the keyboard.
‘Your Majesty, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, I am sent to inform you that on this day of our Lord, the twenty-fifth of February, 1601, the sentence of death has been carried out and the Earl of Essex has paid the ultimate price for his crime of high treason. May God have mercy upon his soul.’
No one in that room said a word: not Raleigh, nor yet Francis Bacon or Robert Cecil. We all stood (or sat, in my case) as still and silent as if we had been cast in stone. Then I returned to my instrument and played the song through to the end.
‘I am Richard the second! Know ye not that?’
The man opposite me took a step backwards, frightened by the ferocity of my tone. I was also surprised at the power of the emotion that suddenly had me in its grip. My eyes filled with tears and I had to fight to retain my composure. I had not expected that this simple audience would excite such feelings. I was speaking with Mr Lambarde, an antiquarian who had collected and transcribed all the records at the Tower of London and gathered them into a book. He had come to present me with a copy. I had looked forward to this interlude. I have always been interested in history and in my ancestors. Lambarde’s book encompassed both. At first, the interview proceeded as I had expected. I asked him some questions about his research and how he had arranged his narrative, and he answered eagerly and enthusiastically. Then he began to take me through various sections and it was when he opened the pages devoted to the betrayed and murdered Richard that the wave of – of I knew not what – overwhelmed me. Richard II, of course, had lost his throne to the rebel Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. The betrayed king had then been murdered in his cell.
I had grieved a little over the death of Essex. Indeed, once he was no longer a threat to me or to my authority, my memory turned towards our earlier, happier experiences. I remembered his sense of fun and, yes, his handsome, mercurial face. He had added youth and energy to my court, elements that now were sadly lacking. I regretted that I had been forced to execute a man with so much vigour, of course I did. I am not a monster and I always hate to shed blood. But I did not fret as I had over the execution of the Queen of Scots or the Duke of Norfolk or even Dr Lopez. Had I become hardened? Were my softer emotions worn thin? Or was my lack of grief or any guilt really because Essex had been so utterly the author of his own fate?
It was not until I was reminded of my tragic ancestor that the full import of what had occurred became clear to me. But it was not just Richard losing the throne and his terrible death that brought me undone. The ghost of Richard had been haunting me for some time.
The night before Essex’s attempt at rebellion, his supporters paid the Earl of Southampton’s players forty shillings to give a special performance. The Earl of Southampton’s players included Master Shakespeare and it was his play Richard II that they were specifically asked to perform. Their intent in having this text produced was obvious. It is a play about the betrayal of a foolish king by a good man forced against his will into rebellion. Subtlety had never been Essex’s strong point. In the end the king is foully murdered. I have no doubts that the aim of the special performance was to stir up those who saw it and persuade them that Essex was like the rebellious Bolingbroke. In which case, I was Richard.
I did not hear about this special performance until Essex had been arrested and was awaiting his fate behind the thick walls of the Tower. Once I knew, I insisted on hearing about every detail.
My informants told me that the atmosphere in the playhouse was febrile and excitable. Many in the audience, including the two earls, must have known they were on the brink of rebellion. They must have known they were preparing to act out in real life many of the themes presented in the play. I had seen the play when Shakespeare first presented it a few years earlier. I had obtained a copy of the manuscript from the playwright and had often read one speech in particular. I returned to it so frequently I had committed it to my memory.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchise, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Poor, foolish Essex. If only he could have kept his powder dry and stilled his impatience but a little while, God would have done his work for him, and with his little pin, bored through my castle wall. I can feel its sharp point now, penetrating my flesh and sucking out my life’s blood. Had Essex but found it within himself to come to me cap in hand and beg my forgiveness, he could have been here now, standing there, in that corner, clustered about with lords and ladies waiting for the new king to take my place. Instead, if he is here at all, he joins the ranks of those ghostly phantoms who stand about me, waiting impatiently for me to join their throng.
… let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
The phrase had lodged itself in my brain. Whenever I was alone and unoccupied, it repeated itself inside my skull. A feeling settled upon me – a heavy feeling, as if everything I did was a great effort. I felt as if I were dragging a heavy chain. It weighed me down. I often caught myself staring into space, my mind wandering. I had begun the habit of stalking about the grounds while I wrestled with what to do about Essex. I continued this practice after the earl’s execution, heaving great sighs, walking at a fast pace, despite the great phantom chain I now dragged behind me. I was determined not to allow its weight to restrain me.
It was not only by walking that I fought the invisible shackles as stubbornly as I could. I still rode to the hunt whenever the weather permitted. I returned to my court aching and exhausted, my legs, as I complained loudly and often, benumbed by their time in the saddle, but I refused to stop. It was hard that the pastimes that had given me pleasure now exacted a price, but it was the nature of my work that gave me the greatest difficulty. Despite my bone-deep weariness, the business of governing my kingdom went on, without ceasing. It ground me down. I greeted each day, each new missive, each arriving messenger with more great sighs. There was no rest from this, no rest except the grave.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Lying upon these cushions, I suppose I am as close to the ground as I am ab
le to get. Cecil and the Archbishop of Canterbury keep exhorting me to go to my bed. I ignore them. I wish to sit upon the ground and tell myself my own story. I am not quite ready to loosen my grip on these last few hours of my life. There are things about my sixty-nine years that are not completed and I feel I must try to understand them – at last.
Maybe that is why, only a few scant years ago, I still saw some kind of earthly future for myself. Perhaps it was this sense of events, relationships and experiences left unfinished that kept me struggling to go on despite everything, despite my sense of a heavy chain. I feared that each phantom link was a sin. One was the Queen of Scots; another Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; another Edmund Campion; the Earl of Essex; poor Dr Lopez and many, many more, both great and small. I remembered some whose death I caused, but there were many I did not. And there were many other sins too, both big and small. It is not possible to rule over others and commit no sins. I had no one I could talk to about these feelings, no one to whom I could unburden myself. I sighed because I could not speak. I was lonely after Essex was gone. I had always been lonely but now my isolation felt profound.
Nonetheless, chained by my multitude of unspoken sins or not, I fought to carry on. Perhaps it was the thought of my many sins that made me determined to keep living. I cringed at the idea of God’s judgment.
After Essex’s execution (he required three strokes of the axe before the bloody business was done) there arose mutterings among my people. If there is one thing I have learnt in my long years of rule it is that nothing is as changeable as the common folk. One day, they throw dung at a would-be rebel; the next they weep over his fate and grumble against her whose hand was forced.
Essex was only dead to himself. He was still very much alive to my people. I began to worry that he would be more successful at undermining my kingdom from the grave than he had ever been in life. It was Robert Cecil, growing in skill daily, particularly as I left more and more of the business of ruling in his hands, who found the answer to the growing discontent.