Elizabeth and Leicester

by Sarah Gristwood

  But the underlying problems - the uncertainty of the mission, the inexperience of the command, the inadequacy of the army’s supplies - did not go away. In an army plagued by ‘danger, want and disgrace’, Philip Sidney complained that ‘if her Majesty were the fountain, I would fear . . . that we should wax dry’. He put his faith in God’s support, in what seemed a holy war to him and to many of his contemporaries.

  That summer Leicester wrote to Elizabeth in unusually straight terms.

  As the cause is now followed it is not worth the cost or the danger. Your Majesty was invited to be sovereign, protector, or aiding friend. You chose the third, and . . . if your Majesty had taken their cause indeed to heart, no practices could have drawn them from you. But they now perceive how weary you are of them, and how willing that any other had them so that your Majesty were rid of them.

  It had, he said, ‘almost broken their hearts’ - and it is hard to doubt he meant his own, too. (‘I pray God I may live to see you employ some of [his critics], to see whether they will spend £20,000 of their own for you in seven months . . .’) To do the best he could for England still, he would try to get into his hands three or four most significant places in the northern states, and then she would ‘make war or peace as you will’. ‘But your Majesty must deal graciously with them at present, and if you mean to leave them keep it to yourself. Whatever you mean really to do, you must persuade them now that you mean sincerely and well by them. They have desperate conceit of your Majesty.’

  His raising again that old question of Elizabeth’s taking the crown herself, instead of reassuring her that he had at least had no thought of usurping her, provoked another hysterical outburst. But this time at least she followed it up with a letter of explanation to Leicester himself, and what was in effect an apology. ‘Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month . . .’ She signed off:

  Now will I end, that do I imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell, [eyes symbol], though ever I pray God bless you from all harm, and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and care. As you know, ever the same, E.R.

  Perhaps Elizabeth, too, had felt the distress of their real, their shattering, quarrel. That autumn, addressing a deputation from a Parliament she had felt unable formally to open, she spoke of how she had ‘found treason in trust, seen great benefits little regarded, and instead of gratefulness, courses of purpose to cross’. She saw, she said, no great reason to live.

  In September 1586 came the battle of Zutphen and, famously, the death of Philip Sidney, the young man seen as the flower of England’s chivalry. His friend Fulke Greville described the scene much later: how, ‘the weather being very misty’, the English came suddenly upon the enemy - almost literally fell over them - and found themselves caught in the range not only of the great guns from the town ramparts but of musket fire from the trenches; how Sidney’s thigh bone was broken by a musket shot (he having lent his leg armour to a friend), and his panicked horse swept him from the field.

  In this sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the General [Leicester] was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine!’

  ‘Your son and mine’, as Leicester wrote of him to Walsingham, whose daughter Sidney had married, died of gangrene, almost an agonizing month later.75

  Leicester had now lost ‘the comfort of my life’. If ‘I could buy his life with all I have to my shirt I would give it’, he wrote to Heneage bitterly. He continued to write of Philip’s pregnant widow as his daughter, and enquired often and urgently after the fate of her child. Both Philip Sidney’s parents - Sir Henry, and Robert’s sister Mary - had died that summer. But there was no shortage of mourners. Though the young man who dared to criticize her planned marriage with Alençon had never been a personal favourite of Elizabeth’s, she was sufficiently in tune with the public mood to order a state funeral for him, and crowds followed the body to its tomb in St Paul’s.

  But Zutphen (where Parma won only by a thread; where Leicester’s stepson Essex fought valiantly, and was knighted by Leicester upon the field) proved a high point for the English force. Things went from bad to worse after that, until Leicester could only write: ‘My trust is that the Lord hath not quite cast me out of your favour.’ But it was probably as much because the Queen was missing him as for the poverty of his performance that, at the end of the year, she acceded to his request to come back home.

  There was, after all, a crisis in England, and Elizabeth needed his support to sustain her through it. Holding Elizabeth’s hand was always the best, the real, way that he could help his country.76 The question of Mary, Queen of Scots was coming to a head. Early that summer Walsingham’s spies had got wind of yet another plan to set Mary on the throne of England, with the help of a foreign Catholic army; the plan that would be known as the Babington conspiracy. This time, instead of stifling the plot in its infancy, it was decided to let it run - even to foster it a little - effectively, to give the Scots queen enough rope to hang herself. The opportunity never needed to be proffered twice; not with Mary. Besides Walsingham and his assistants, Leicester and the Queen herself were probably among the very few to know about what amounted to a set-up. By the end of the summer, Walsingham had what he needed: direct documentary proof of Mary’s treasonable complicity.

  In September, Babington and his fellow plotters died the horrible traitor’s death. In October a commission was called (Warwick among the commissioners) to try Mary under the terms of the Act of Association, which had decreed that one on whose behalf the throne was attempted was herself guilty. There could be only one verdict. Both Houses of Parliament called for her death. From the Netherlands, Leicester too had urged that due process of law should go ahead. ‘It is most certain if you would have Her Majesty safe,’ he wrote to Walsingham in October, ‘it must be done, for justice doth crave it besides policy.’ When the verdict was published, it caused a bell-ringing, bonfire-lighting explosion of savage relief throughout the country.

  But councillors, and even country, had called for Mary’s death before. The problem was bringing the Queen to agree. So, from the viewpoint of his colleagues, Leicester’s return on 23 November was timely. ‘Never did I receive a more gracious welcome,’ he wrote. It was a welcome from Elizabeth - and from everybody. That evening Leicester had supper with the Queen. That night, she sent word that she would proclaim the sentence against Mary. His was still the only voice (as the rest of the council were now happy to acknowledge) that could persuade her to proceed against the Scots queen. Archibald Douglas, one of the Scots commissioners, wrote in the first week of December that Leicester ‘doth govern the Court at this time at his pleasure’.

  But a warrant drawn up was not a warrant signed. As the Queen dithered still, Leicester’s brief was communication with Mary’s son James, who to everyone’s relief proved more interested in preserving his place in the English succession than in preserving his mother - although when it came to public pronouncements, as he warned Leicester, ‘Honour constrains me to insist for her life.’ A paper dedicated to Leicester (which suggests the writer was under his patronage) called for Mary’s death, but also described Elizabeth’s merciful reluctance: now as ever Leicester was safeguarding his queen’s image, was giving Elizabeth an ‘out’.

  In December the council were forced reluctantly to deliver to Elizabeth a letter from Mary herself which, in its requests about the fate of her servants and the disposal of her body, was calculated to bring home the full enormity of the prospective death. Leicester wrote to Walsing
ham: ‘There is a letter from the Scottish Queen, that hath wrought tears, but I trust shall do no further herein: albeit, the delay is too dangerous.’ Elizabeth kept herself very private as the new year came in, but Camden reported that as she sat alone she could be heard murmuring: ‘Strike, or be stricken, strike, or be stricken.’ In the end it was her kinsman Lord Howard of Effingham (Douglass Sheffield’s brother) who on 1 February persuaded her that this excruciating delay was shredding the nerve of the whole country. This is the day she sent for Davison and signed the warrant for Mary’s execution, famously handing it back to him with just enough vagueness (on second thoughts, she said, perhaps Mary’s gaoler should be sounded out about having her quietly put out of the way . . .) as to allow her later to claim she had never meant for it to be sealed and delivered immediately.

  Leicester - with Walsingham, and Howard, and Knollys - was among the ten councillors who, under Cecil’s leadership, agreed to take upon themselves the responsibility for the warrant’s being put into effect. On 8 February the great hall at Fotheringhay saw a famous scene. A report sent to Cecil described how the executioners helped Mary’s women strip her of her ornaments and outer clothes, and how she herself helped them make speed, ‘as if she longed to be gone’.

  All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words: ‘that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company’ . . . groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied ... Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift[ed] up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade ‘God save the Queen’.

  Her lips, Cecil’s correspondent wrote, ‘stirred up and down a quarter of an hour’ after she was dead.

  Again, it had been the councillors - including Leicester - against the Queen, rather than Leicester against the rest of the councillors. Perhaps he had been in a particular position, as having persuaded her to the first move. But when the news was brought to Elizabeth at 9 a.m. the next day, all those responsible shared in her terrible anger (and none more so than the unhappy Davison, who found himself in the Tower). As Camden put it, she ‘gave herself over to grief’ - a hysterical and histrionic paroxysm, meant to convince a watching Europe of her innocence, but doubtless springing from a real and complex cocktail of emotions. Leicester, like Cecil, was told to stay away from the court (a fellow councillor, suffering the Queen’s continued ill-humour, wrote to him that he was ‘happy to be absent from these broils’). He betook himself that spring to the health-giving spa waters of the west, to Bath and Bristol. But, like Cecil, he was forgiven with revealing rapidity. At the end of March the ten councillors, with Cecil as their spokesman, were called upon to justify their actions before the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But by the beginning of April, an unidentified correspondent was writing to Leicester the universal gratitude owed to Ambrose Dudley, their intermediary to the Queen, who had been ‘the only means from God to qualify the Queen’s bitter humour, and to stay the ruinous course provoked at home and abroad’. By June, good relations were restored; and debate turned once again to the foreign situation.

  Philip of Spain had stepped up hostilities in the Netherlands, in preparation for using them as a springboard to launch his English invasion. The execution of the Queen of Scots gave him a pretext - and meant that he need no longer fear Elizabeth would be replaced by a Francophile Mary. In April, Drake’s famous raid on the harbour of Cadiz had damaged enough of Spain’s ships and property to force a delay in the invasion, but no-one doubted it was on the way. (And in January, two of the captains Leicester had left behind him in the Netherlands turned the defences at their command over to the Spanish enemy, choosing their Catholicism over their country. It must have been yet another blow to his confidence: Leicester had said he would stake his life on their loyalty.)

  Again Leicester argued for more active armed intervention in the Netherlands; again the Netherlands begged for his return; again Elizabeth protested. He wrote to Walsingham: ‘Seeing I find her Majesty’s hardness continue still to me as it doth, I pray you lend me your earnest and true furtherance for my abode at home and discharge, for my heart is more than half broke.’ Finally, at the end of June 1587, Leicester sailed back to the Netherlands, taking with him several thousand more men, but leaving behind him his stepson Essex who, by his stepfather’s express permission, stayed in Leicester’s apartments while he was away.

  Leicester arrived just in time to preside, humiliatingly, over the loss of Sluys. The all-important port fell through what sounds horribly like an idiot blunder, and one that owes a lot to the poor communications between Leicester and his Dutch allies. ‘Never were brave soldiers thus lost for want of easy succour,’ wrote the commander of the English battalion inside the besieged town, bitterly. But the fact is that this second phase of Leicester’s mission was from the start compromised even more gravely than the first had been. Even as he turned to war again, his queen (knowing that Philip of Spain did indeed have an ‘Enterprise of England’ in preparation), began making overtures of peace to Parma - overtures Parma received with a tactical show of interest worthy of Elizabeth at her best. In November Leicester was recalled, having advised the Queen that he could be of no further use to her. He had failed - but it is hard to know exactly where success would have lain; nor, given the conflicting interests involved, was pleasing everyone a possibility.

  Before he left he had a medal struck. It read: ‘I reluctantly leave, not the flock, but the ungrateful ones.’ Ungrateful, too, was what he found the Queen on his return; gracious enough in public, and prepared to defend him against the complaints of the States General, but ready to let him leave court to spend Christmas at his own house. He must have faced the year ahead, 1588, with small hope and less certainty.

  18

  ‘A thing Whereof We can admit no comfort’ 1588

  EVERYONE KNEW THAT 1588 WOULD BE AN EXTRAORDINARY YEAR; and not only those who were aware that Philip’s Armada was on the way. To students of the Bible the history of the world followed a discernible series of small cycles, each culminating in some great event; and the cycle of cycles would end in the grand climacteric of 1588. Even if land and seas did not collapse (in the words, translated, of the fifteenth-century mathematician Regiomontanus), then, at the very least, will ‘the whole world suffer upheavals, empires / will dwindle and from everywhere will / be great lamentation’. The prophecies were discussed throughout Europe - everywhere, that is, government did not clamp down on them, as it did in England where, worst of all, the threatened second eclipse of the moon was forecast to come shortly before the Queen’s birthday, and at the beginning of the season of Virgo, her ruling sign.

  It hardly needed rumours of a Spanish fleet in the Channel in the December of 1587 to rattle the country (to rattle, particularly, anyone who, like Robert and Elizabeth, was old enough to remember 1539, and the child-scaring stories of the Catholic invasion force that had been awaited then). Even before Christmas, Howard of Effingham was appointed England’s Lord Admiral, and the fleet put on standby. Harbours and ships were repaired, men and stores recruited. Next it was the turn of England’s rusty land defences: seaport batteries and town walls unused for more than a century. A system of warning beacons was set up upon the hilltops, to spread the news of an invasion and summon the ‘trained bands’ of each locality.

  At first it seemed as if Leicester’s punishment was to be denied any part in this great national effort. In January he was reduced to begging the Queen (‘aft
er having so many months sustained her indignation’) ‘to behold with the eyes of your princely clemency my wretched and depressed state’. Had that situation continued, no doubt his enforced idleness would have hurt him bitterly - and Leicester must have known that the composition of the privy council had changed during the time he had spent in the Netherlands, had seen the addition of several of Cecil’s conservative allies. ‘The world was never so dangerous, nor never so full of treasons and treacheries, as at this day,’ he had written to her from the Netherlands. ‘God, for his mercy sake, preserve and keep you from them all! And it is one great part of my greatest comfort in coming home near your presence, that if these attempts fall out against your Majesty, that I shall be in place to do you a day’s service.’ As always when the pressure became too much for her, Elizabeth did send for him; and, as it became ever clearer that war was ahead, he was given a part to play in putting the country on a war footing, commissioned as Her Majesty’s Lieutenant Against Foreign Invasion.

  Just how important a part this was is perhaps up for dispute. It has been argued that Leicester, in being given titular command of the camp at Tilbury, was in fact being safely sidelined; that Parma’s invasion force was far more likely to land either some distance away in Essex, or more probably on the south coast, in which case it would approach towards the other bank of the Thames. But it would have been risky, surely, knowingly to put up a straw man against a steel army, and Tilbury did command the route up the Thames to guard London. In any case, perhaps all such assessments founder on the sheer confusion of the preparations that summer. Elizabeth, again, was still negotiating frantically for peace: still negotiating as the Armada set sail; still negotiating as it neared English waters. It was only two days before the Armada was sighted off the Scilly Isles on 19 July - a fleet so great that they said the ocean groaned under it - that she brought negotiations to a close. For the past decade Leicester had been calling for a strengthening of England’s coastal defences, a modernization of its methods of warfare. All this spring and summer, at the council table, Leicester’s had been the leading voice urging Elizabeth that, in this latest crisis, to rely on words alone simply would not do; and his name headed the Spaniards’ list of arrests to be made after their victory, first among ‘the principal devils that rule the court’.