Essex then grasped his sword-hilt. Howard rushed between them, and thereby prevented the earl from drawing his sword against his sovereign; it would have been a capital offence. Essex swore an oath, however, ‘that he would not have taken that blow from King Henry, her father, and that it was an indignity that he could nor would endure from anyone’. He muttered some words about ‘a king in petticoats’ before rushing from the royal presence and withdrawing from the court.
The chancellor, Egerton, implored him to write a letter of submission to the queen. But he demurred, stating that ‘if the vilest of indignities is done to me, does religion enforce me to sue for pardon? Cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Let Solomon’s fool laugh when he is stricken . . .’ He now raged even more furiously against Robert Cecil, demanding of Lord Cobham, for example, ‘to declare myself either his only or friendly to Mr Secretary, and his enemy; protesting that there could be no neutrality’. To create factions, however, was to risk the dangers of isolation.
This was the period in which Lord Burghley was dying. Elizabeth sent one of her ladies for news of him every day, bearing with her a cordial. She said that ‘she did entreat heaven daily for his longer life, else would her people, nay herself, stand in need of cordials too’. Her ‘saucy godson’, John Harrington, observed that ‘the lord treasurer’s distemper doth marvellously trouble the queen’. He died, at the age of seventy-seven, on 4 August. Harrington also reports that ‘the queen’s highness doth often speak of him in tears, and turn aside when he is discoursed of, nay, even forbiddeth his name to be mentioned in the council’.
In the following month Philip II, king of Spain, died covered with putrefying sores. So in quick succession the two men who helped to define Elizabeth’s reign were gone. Elizabeth, however, did not necessarily replace her deceased councillors. They had now been reduced to ten, only half the number who had surrounded her at the beginning of her rule. Essex himself did not appear at court for five months after his precipitate withdrawal; he returned, in the autumn of the year, when he wished once more to display his martial skills. Ireland was in the balance. A native revolt, led by Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, had ambushed an English army sent out to defeat him; as a result the territory held by the English was left undefended. No English estate was safe and most of the settlers fled. Only Leinster remained to the English Crown. It was considered to be ‘the greatest loss and dishonour the queen hath in her time’.
Essex now saw his opportunity of redeeming himself in her eyes, and he sent her a letter offering his services. Before he received a reply he had hurried to London, but the queen refused to see him. ‘I stay in this place,’ he said, ‘for no other purpose but to attend your commandments.’ ‘Tell the earl,’ she replied, ‘that I value myself as at great a price as he values himself.’ A period of silence was followed by tense negotiations in which Essex finally received the post he had requested, that of lord deputy of Ireland. One courtier wrote that ‘if the Lord Deputy performs in the field what he hath promised in the council, all will be well . . .’
The relations between the sovereign and the earl were still strained, however, and the easy affection of earlier years did not return. They argued over the size of the army to be sent to Ireland. At one moment of low spirits he wrote that ‘how much so ever Her Majesty despiseth me, she shall know she hath lost him who, for her sake, would have thought danger a sport and death a feast’. True to his mercurial temper, he even thought of abandoning the idea of Ireland altogether. Yet he knew well enough that ‘his honour could not stand without undertaking it’.
At the end of March 1599, he set off with an army of 16,000 men, the largest ever to be dispatched to Ireland. He had decided to attack Tyrone in the north, both by sea and by land; unfortunately both ships and horses were in short supply and so, while awaiting reinforcements, he launched an expedition against Munster and Limerick. He occupied two months in this pursuit but achieved very little. Elizabeth was now growing impatient; time, for her, meant money. She was also angry at Essex for appointing the earl of Southampton to be the general of his horse, against the queen’s express order; he had also exercised his right of making knights, which she deemed to be a privilege reserved for herself. Was he trying to become a king? Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter to him, ordering him to seek out the principal enemy. Why was Tyrone, ‘a base bush kern’, now accounted to be ‘so famous a rebel’?
So at her instigation he marched north with 4,000 men to confront Tyrone. The Irish leader countered with a much larger force and, at a ford on the River Lagan, Essex agreed to meet him for a private conference without the presence of witnesses. It is therefore not known what was discussed or agreed but, when the reports of the meeting reached London, the enemies of Essex were only happy to spread rumours of treachery. Tyrone and Essex had indeed agreed a truce, but the rest is silence. He now persisted in disobeying her commands. He had been ordered to remain with his men, but on 24 September he left Dublin and sailed back to England.
As he had feared and anticipated, his ill-omened expedition had been beset by rumour and suspicion at court. His enemies had taken advantage of his absence to spread malicious reports about his conduct. Even before he left Ireland he wrote a querulous letter to his mistress. ‘But why do I talk of victory or success? Is it not known that from England I have received nothing but discomfort and soul’s wounds? Is it not spoken in the army that Your Majesty’s favour is diverted from me and that already you do bode ill both to me and to it?’
It was said that he planned to stay in Ireland at the head of his troops until the queen’s death; he could then return as the conquering hero. The queen herself believed that he had colluded with Tyrone. She told Francis Bacon that ‘his proceedings were not without some private end of his own’. Some of the rivals of Essex had also prospered in his absence. The queen promoted Robert Cecil to be master of the Court of Wards, a lucrative post that Essex himself had hoped to occupy. Cecil’s older brother became president of the council in the north, another enviable position.
Essex was anxious to reach the court, now at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, as quickly as possible. Four days after his departure from Dublin he arrived at the palace and ran to the privy chamber, where Elizabeth was ‘newly up, her hair about her face’. Essex knelt before her while they conducted a conversation that seemed to comfort him. Yet her mood changed to anger after his departure. When her godson, John Harrington, knelt before her she complained ‘By God’s Son, I am no queen! That man is above me! Who gave him command to come here so soon? I did send him on other business.’
Essex was summoned before the privy council and questioned by Robert Cecil about his conduct in Ireland. The councillors accused him of disobeying the queen’s direct orders and deserting his command in Ireland; he was berated for making too many ‘idle’ knights, and for intruding without permission into the queen’s bedchamber. His responses were then relayed to the queen, who said that she ‘would pause and consider of his answers’. He was meanwhile committed to the charge of the lord keeper at York House while the queen herself removed to Richmond. A contemporary, Rowland Whyte, wrote that the servants of Essex ‘are afraid to meet in any place, to make merry, lest it might be ill taken’. Meanwhile the enemies of Essex dined happily together.
A courtier wrote, in the autumn of 1599, that ‘it is a very dangerous time here, for the heads of both factions being here a man cannot tell how to govern himself towards them. For here is such observation and prying into men’s actions that I hold them happy and blessed that live away.’ It was Whyte again who named the members of the factions. With Sir Robert Cecil were the earls of Shrewsbury and Nottingham and the lords Howard and Cobham, together with Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir George Carew. With the earl of Essex were the earls of Southampton, Worcester and Rutland, together with the lords Mountjoy and Rich. It might be surmised, therefore, that the queen’s grasp upon the life of her court was not as firm as it once had been. The courtiers were
no longer a coherent body following her will.
By the beginning of 1600 the temperature of the court was rising. Somebody had scrawled on Cecil’s door ‘here lieth the Toad’. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a letter to Cecil in which he warned him not to be ‘mild’ with Essex. ‘The less you make him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours; and if her Majesty’s favour fail him, he will again decline to a common person . . .’ Essex in turn wrote to Elizabeth that ‘as if I were thrown into a corner like a dead carcass, I am gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures upon the earth’. When in February Mountjoy was sent to Ireland in place of Essex, Francis Bacon argued to the queen that his master was still the person most fitted for the service. ‘Essex!’ she replied. ‘When I send Essex back into Ireland, I will marry you. Claim it of me.’
In June 1600, a special court met at York House to examine the case of the earl of Essex. He was asked to kneel at the lower end of the council table; after a while he was allowed a cushion; he was then permitted to lean against a cupboard and eventually he was granted leave to sit upon a stool with his hat lying beside him on the floor. One courtier wrote that ‘it was a most pitiful and lamentable sight to see him that was the minion of fortune, now unworthy of the least honour he had of so many. Many that were present burst out into tears at his fall to such misery.’
He was charged with ‘great and high contempts and points of misgovernance’ in Ireland; he was acquitted of disloyalty but found guilty of ‘contempts’. Whereupon he was suspended from his offices and ordered to remain a prisoner in his own house at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He now seemed destined to remain in private life for the rest of the queen’s reign. On an ally’s pleading with him to seek her pardon he replied that his enemies would ‘never suffer me to have interest in her favour’. When at a dance in the summer of the year one of the ladies took on the role of ‘Affection’, Elizabeth said to her ‘Affection! Affection’s false.’ In that summer, by order of the privy council, all engravings of Essex and of other noblemen were called in. A further command ordered ‘that hereafter no personage of any nobleman or other person shall be ingraven and printed to be put to sale publicly’.
On Michaelmas, at the end of September, the licence that Essex held for the customs revenue from imported sweet wine fell due; it was not renewed, thus depriving him of a substantial income. Elizabeth is reported to have said that ‘an unruly horse must be abated of his provender, that he may the more easily and better be managed’. He was already deeply in debt, with his creditors waiting to claim the money from any of his servants. He fell into a fury in which, according to Harrington, he ‘shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason . . .’
The word ‘rebellion’ was a dangerous one. Essex wrote to James VI of Scotland proposing that they act together to remove from England Robert Cecil and Walter Raleigh; he told the Scottish king that ‘now am I summoned on all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under their burden’. James seems to have responded with caution. It is likely that Elizabeth and Cecil had some warning of these manoeuvres, but they did nothing; they were waiting, perhaps, for more open treason. Essex heard, for example, that the council was already interrogating certain prisoners in the Tower who had been allied with him. Elizabeth danced the coranto at court that Christmas.
At the beginning of 1601 Essex began to draw up further plans with the more vainglorious of his supporters whom he met at Drury House, the London residence of the earl of Southampton. He had conceived a plan whereby he and his followers would seize the guard of the palace at Whitehall in order to allow him to enter the queen’s presence; Essex would then, with the threat of force behind him, ask her to remove his enemies from the court. If this were not successful he would demand the recall of parliament to give him justice.
Elizabeth and her councillors watched events with some trepidation. Would Essex strike more quickly than they anticipated? Harrington reported that ‘the madcaps are all in riot, and much evil threatened . . . she is quite disfavoured and unattired, and these troubles waste her much. She disregards every costly cover that comes to the table, and takes little but manchet [fine wheat bread] and savoury pottage. Every new message from the city disturbs her, and she frowns on all her ladies.’ He reported on a later occasion that ‘she walks much in her privy-chamber, and stamps with her foot at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword, at times, into the arras, in great rage’. The last touch is worthy of Shakespeare.
On 7 February Essex was summoned to appear before the privy council, but he declined the invitation. On the following morning, a Sunday, he gathered 300 of his supporters at Essex House; his plan was to proceed with them to Paul’s Cross, where the Londoners were accustomed to hear sermons on this day. He hoped to persuade the citizens and apprentices to join his forces, no doubt on the cry that he would ‘save the queen from her evil councillors’. To his intimates he had said that ‘the old woman was grown crooked in her mind as well as in her body’. There was a spy in his camp, one Ferdinando Gorges, who betrayed the scheme to Cecil. The lord mayor of London was ordered to keep the people of London within their houses, and the palace of Whitehall was given a double guard.
At approximately ten o’clock in the morning the lord chancellor and other royal officers arrived at Essex House and demanded admittance; after a delay, they were allowed to enter. Essex was asked why his supporters were gathered in arms, and he replied with an account of the wrongs to which he had been subject. ‘You lose time,’ his supporters urged him. ‘Away with them! They betray you.’ Essex then took the unfortunate step of imprisoning them within his house and, with his allies, of riding out into the streets. They wielded pistols and rapiers, calling out ‘England is sold to Spain by Cecil and Raleigh! Citizens of London, arm for England and the queen!’
The citizens of London did not respond. The streets were quiet. Essex rode to Ludgate Hill, where he ordered a charge. Yet now his supporters, realizing their desperate plight, began to desert him. The queen had been given news of the tumult, and reacted calmly. While her attendants were in some disarray she proposed that she should go into the city and confront her opponents and that ‘not one of them would dare to meet a single glance of her eye’.
The confrontation was not necessary. Discomfited by his failure to raise the citizens, Essex rode on to Queenhithe, where he took a boat to Essex House; he then discovered that Ferdinando Gorges had released his prisoners. The house was soon surrounded by the royal forces and, after some tense negotiations from the leads of the mansion, he surrendered himself to the lord admiral. He and his principal supporters were taken to Lambeth Palace and on the following day were removed downriver to the Tower. Elizabeth told the French ambassador that ‘a senseless ingrate had at last revealed what had long been in his mind’. She issued a proclamation on the day after the failed rebellion, thanking the people of London for their loyalty.
Some residual support for Essex still existed in the purlieus of the court. Thomas Leigh, who had served under him in Ireland, proposed that four or five resolute men should force themselves into the queen’s presence and obtain from her a warrant for the release of Essex and Southampton. Leigh was denounced and arrested that night outside the queen’s supper room. On the following day he was tried, convicted and executed. In the middle of February the queen issued another proclamation in which she ordered all vagabonds, idlers, newsmongers and tavern frequenters to leave London on pain of death.
On 19 February Essex and Southampton were tried by their peers in Westminster Hall. Both men denied the charge of treason, but their guilt was taken for granted. They argued with their prosecutors, but to no avail. Essex, dressed all in black, declared ‘I have done nothing but that which by the law of nature and the necessity of my case I was enforced into.’ These were not concepts recognized by common law, and seem to be borrowed from what might be called the chivalric c
ode. They could not save him. After sentence of execution was passed against him, he remained calm enough. ‘Although you have condemned me in a court of judgment,’ he told his judges, ‘yet in the court of conscience you would absolve me.’ Two days later Cecil and some other councillors were asked to visit Essex in the Tower. They found him much changed, declaring himself to be ‘the greatest, most vilest and most unthankful traitor that has ever been in the land’. He admitted that, while he lived, the queen would not be safe.
It was the last of the aristocratic risings of England, like that of the Percys in the early fifteenth century; Essex did not have the same level of regional or territorial support, but the complex motives of honour and of valour were the same. It was almost a medieval event. As the earl of Southampton had said to Sir Robert Sidney in the final siege of Essex House, ‘You are a man of arms, you know we are bound by nature to defend ourselves against our equals, still more against our inferiors.’ A band of brothers, many of them related by blood, Essex and his supporters were aroused by the old and noble code of honour but, in the court of Elizabeth, it was no longer enough.
The admission of Essex that he had committed treason came too late. Elizabeth graciously consented to his private execution by beheading, and at the same time she commuted Southampton’s sentence to that of life imprisonment. On 25 February Essex was brought to a scaffold that had been erected in the courtyard of the Tower. He was wearing doublet and breeches of black satin, covered by a black velvet gown; he also wore a black felt hat. He always played his part. At the last moment he turned his neck sideways and called out, ‘Executioner, strike home!’ It took three strokes to sever his head from his body. ‘Those who touch the sceptres of princes,’ the queen observed, ‘deserve no pity.’
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 52