by John Guy
According to Burghley, the serried ranks of soldiers spontaneously acclaimed the queen’s speech with a chorus of cheers, shouts and ‘all tokens of love and obedience’.57 With these sounds ringing in her ears, Elizabeth rode with her women to dinner in Leicester’s tent. It seemed to all those present that the speech had become her apotheosis and Tilbury the setting for her greatest triumph.
And there was more, for barely had the queen begun to eat her meal than a breathless George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, a handsome courtier and naval officer who had fought courageously in the sea battle off Gravelines and who Elizabeth had nicknamed ‘Rogue’, galloped into the camp bearing news.58 Lord Admiral Howard, he said, had pursued the fleeing Spaniards north until they had passed Harwich, where he had turned back, his supplies and ammunition exhausted.59 Drake, who had joined in and continued the pursuit beyond the border with Scotland as far as the Firth of Forth, later confirmed that the Armada had been scattered by the storms.60
Elizabeth’s victory seemed complete. Yet it would not be long before the very same soldiers who had cheered the queen and laid down their weapons as she passed by would be cursing her. Her oratory may have been superb, but her moral victory would be hollow. She was about to make choices, and condone others taken by her councillors, that would create a stain on her reputation that could never be erased. Her triumph over Philip’s Gran Armada of 1588 was undoubted. But it would be all too brief.
6. A Funeral and a Wedding
Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury was a glorious moment, but after bidding Leicester farewell and returning to London by barge, she bunkered down once more at St James’s Palace, just in case reports of the Armada’s dispersal turned out to be false. There she stayed until early October, by which time a flurry of news bulletins graphically describing the wrecks of many Spanish vessels on the north and west coasts of Ireland gave her the reassurance she needed to move back to her more spacious apartments at Whitehall and Greenwich.1
For almost twenty years, the anniversary of the queen’s Accession Day, Sunday, 17 November, had been one of the more spectacular fixtures on the courtly calendar. Its high point was a great tournament of ritualized jousting in the tiltyard at Whitehall at which the participants wore fancy dress. This year it took on a new dimension. The bells of the parish churches pealed out as far north as Northumberland for the very first time, and Thomas Cooper, bishop of Winchester, who had done more than anyone else to promote the idea of a ‘gaudy day’ in the queen’s honour, preached a thanksgiving sermon at Paul’s Cross, a large outdoor pulpit in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. The queen announced her intention to attend, then abruptly changed her mind.
She had a very good reason. In the opening days of September, the Earl of Leicester had suddenly become gravely ill. Our information comes from a report sent to Philip II by a Genoese spy. After the camp at Tilbury had been disbanded in mid-August, Leicester set out for his estate at Kenilworth with the intention of travelling on to the spa at Buxton in Derbyshire to take the waters. He broke his journey at Rycote, near Thame in Oxfordshire.2 From there, before moving on to nearby Cornbury House in the royal forest of Wychwood, he hastily scribbled Elizabeth a brief note that she would forever afterwards carry around with her.3
In the tense weeks and months immediately before the Armada’s arrival, their relations had considerably softened. Their clashes over his marriage to Lettice, his unsanctioned actions while in the Netherlands and his opposition to her peace negotiations with the Duke of Parma had largely been forgotten, and he regularly dined alone with her again. In another remarkably intimate letter, this time written from the camp at Tilbury on 3 August, two weeks before it was broken up, he addressed her as ‘my most dear lady’. This letter, once in private ownership, was recently rediscovered after it was sold to a library in Washington DC:
I am loath my most dear lady to trouble you without some just cause, when at this time, God be thanked, there is none touching your army here, but all things as well as quiet and as forwardly bent to your service as any soldiers or subjects in the world can be, but yet I may not forget upon my knees to give to your most sweet Majesty all humble and dutiful thanks for your great comfort I receive from your own sweet self. I am sorry that I can write your Majesty no news, yet most glad that I may hold up my hands to God for the merciful dealings he useth towards you, for by the news now here he fighteth for you and the enemies fall before you. Let all honour, praise and glory be given him therefore.
He ended his letter, ‘God ever more preserve my most dear lady that she may to the comfort of his people and church end in peace as she hath begun.’ Twice, he inserted little eyebrows over the letter ‘o’ in the word ‘most’, rendering it as ‘môôst’, on both these occasions to remind her of his pet nickname, and he drew the ‘eyes’ symbol again immediately before his signature.4
His other letter, written from Rycote on 29 August, was equally affectionate. Calling himself ‘your poor old servant’, he asked her pardon for his ‘boldness’ in ‘sending to know how my gracious lady doth and what ease of her late pains she finds, being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for, and for her to have good health and long life’. Under the stress of waiting for news of the Armada, her migraines had resumed again, and when he had himself complained of vomiting she had given him some physic prepared by her apothecaries. ‘For mine own poor case’, he said, ‘I continue still your medicine and find it amended much better than with any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find perfect cure at the bath with the continuance of my wonted prayer for Your Majesty’s most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your foot.’5 These are the last words he ever wrote. He died at Cornbury House six days later, with Lettice at his bedside. The room in which he is believed to have died still bears his name. The cause was said to be a ‘tertian fever’, meaning a fever now known to be malarial in type, triggering paroxysms on alternate days. He was just fifty-five.
Leicester had asked to be buried in the Beauchamp Chapel at St Mary’s Church in Warwick, ‘where sundry mine ancestors do lie’. As a younger man, dressed all in white with velvet shoes and silk stockings, he had proudly celebrated his admission to the French Order of St Michael there. Roger, Lord North, a close friend and witness at his secret marriage to Lettice, wrote an obituary. The Earl’s death, he said, ‘is a great and general loss to the whole land’.6 For Elizabeth, the loss was immeasurable. It was also a searing reminder of her own mortality.
Following royal protocol, the queen did not attend the funeral. Pride of place went to Leicester’s stepson, the twenty-three-year-old Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Lettice’s son by her first marriage. He would head the solemn cortège of over a hundred mourners, all dressed in black, as it wound its way in state from Kenilworth to Warwick. Lettice could not bring herself to attend, but sent an epitaph in which she described Leicester as ‘the best and dearest of husbands’.7 Elizabeth’s letters of condolence were normally generous and supportive, showing she was capable of genuine human sympathy, but she did not extend any to her arch-enemy. Never reconciled to the rival who looked so like herself and whom she believed to have betrayed her by stealing away her beloved ‘Rob’, she pettily took revenge by refusing to release Lettice from the nightmare of her husband’s vast debts.
To Lettice’s dismay, first Kenilworth and then all of her husband’s other lands in Warwickshire were legally sequestered by the queen’s bailiffs, including lands intended to provide her with an income during her widowhood.8 Next, Leicester House, with its magnificent gardens overlooking the Thames, was seized and its contents and artworks auctioned off: these included the matching portraits of Leicester and the queen, and many more of classical heroes, notably Julius Caesar.9 Finally, the fairy-tale manor of Wanstead in Essex, already heavily mortgaged, was taken.10
Leicester’s debts, mainly the loans and mortgages he had taken out to fund his expedition to the Netherlands, amounted to som
e £50,000, double the rental income from the Crown lands and more than the annual cost of financing the entire royal household. They left Lettice with a run of legal battles with the queen’s officers lasting for many years. In a desperate attempt to protect herself, she quickly married again, doing what other aristocratic women in her dire situation had done earlier in the century to help avoid their creditors, as one of the peculiarities of English law was that it was much more difficult to sue a married woman for debt than a widow. She chose a commoner, Sir Christopher Blount, Leicester’s gentleman of the horse, as her new husband. At the time, her son Robert described the match as ‘an unhappy choice’, since Blount was so far beneath Lettice socially. Later, however, he would find that he could count on Blount as one of his staunchest allies.11
• • •
Her heart weighed down with grief after Leicester’s death, Elizabeth withdrew to her inner Bedchamber and locked the doors. Now bitterly regretting her harsh treatment of him after his return from the Netherlands, she refused to come out. Burghley and his fellow councillors had to order the doors to be broken down. Early in November 1588, she was said to be ‘much aged and spent, and is very melancholy’.12 Walsingham confirmed that she ‘will not suffer anybody to have access unto her, being very much grieved’.13 Vigorous efforts would later be made by her women to persuade her to join in the traditional Christmas festivities, but even when players and tumblers were summoned to distract and entertain her, they brought her little consolation.14
Without Leicester by her side, Elizabeth felt intensely vulnerable. She had lost the love of her life, her escort on state occasions, a respected confidant, the man who had stood by her chair at Court festivals. She had even sometimes allowed him to take up residence overnight in the vacant consort’s apartments at Whitehall Palace, last occupied by King Philip while married to Mary Tudor. For all the attention she had lavished on younger men like Ralegh, no one could ever compensate for the loss of her own dear ‘Rob’, and she reacted as she often did when overcome by bouts of black depression. She surrounded herself with flowers, boughs and sweet-smelling herbs: her florist’s bill for these months came to £13 6s. 8d. (some £13,000 today).
To brighten up her apartments, she had her Serjeant Painter, George Gower, cover some of the untreated wall surfaces with a special wash made of ‘blue bice’ (a brilliant shade of blue obtained from smalt) mixed with rose-water perfume. And she ordered extensive improvements to the orchards and gardens in the palaces where she most loved to walk, setting a small army of ‘women weeders’ to work at Greenwich and Hampton Court. She had always loved gardens, especially those with Italian-style alleyways, terraces, sunken groves, fountains, and arcades lined with statuary. She would walk, either in company or unobserved, depending on her mood, along paths shaded from the heat by tall shrubs and trees, or sit on raised cushions in an arbour or gazebo.15
• • •
The climax of the festivities to celebrate the defeat of the Armada was originally planned to follow directly on from Accession Day and Cooper’s sermon at Paul’s Cross but had been postponed at the very last moment to the following Sunday. Elizabeth attended, persuaded by Burghley not to put off the event for a second time. Spectacularly dressed in silver and white, she emerged from her Bedchamber and was driven in a canopied chariot pulled by two white horses from Somerset House on the Strand to St Paul’s Cathedral. In front of her rode the royal trumpeters, followed by the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and their footmen, bearing their poleaxes aloft. Directly behind her came the young Earl of Essex. Only the previous year, Elizabeth had granted him his stepfather Leicester’s old place as Master of the Horse. Now, he was in daily attendance, riding behind her carriage wherever she went.16
When, around noon, the queen’s chariot arrived at the great west door of St Paul’s, Elizabeth was greeted by the clergy in rich silver copes, and a service of thanksgiving for the victory over King Philip was held. After the prayers, the queen took her seat in a side chapel built out from the north wall of the church, open to the air and facing Paul’s Cross, where she heard a sermon. The banners taken from the captured Armada ships were on display for all to see.17
To his deep chagrin, Ralegh, who had played only a minor part in the victory over the Spanish fleet, had been relegated to a place much further back in the procession than he was used to. He was forced to accept this demotion, because the queen’s new Master of the Horse was already superseding him in influence. Not long after Essex had returned from the Netherlands as a war hero after leading his light-cavalry charge at the Battle of Zutphen, Elizabeth had begun inviting him into the Privy Chamber to play cards with her in the evenings. ‘Nobody [is] near [the queen] but my lord of Essex,’ boasted one of his servants, with pardonable hyperbole. ‘At night my lord is at cards or one game or another with her that he cometh not to his own lodging till the birds sing in the morning.’ During the Armada campaign while his stepfather had been absent, she had even urged him to move temporarily into Leicester’s rooms at St James’s so as to be nearer to her.18
Some three or four months on from Leicester’s death, Elizabeth resumed her card games with Essex, looking for some form of cathartic release. She was more than thirty years older than the dazzling Earl, old enough to be his mother. She knew she should not allow him to pay her this amount of attention or stay up with her so late, but she could not help herself. Even before Leicester’s death, a psychological bond had been developing between the two of them. She may perhaps have regarded him as the son she never had; at the very least, he would be a constant reminder of his stepfather. She was not in love; that could never be. Her ‘Sweet Robin’, her ‘Eyes’, had always been the only man for her. In any case, Essex had to tread carefully. When he dared to berate the queen for taking Ralegh’s side in a quarrel and stormed out of the room, she raged viciously against him and against his mother for stealing away her beloved ‘Eyes’ from her.19
Around this time, Essex had himself painted by Nicholas Hilliard, the finest and most celebrated of the Elizabethan miniaturists. In this delightful image, he posed as ‘The Young Man among the Roses’. Tall, lissom, supremely poised, with fair skin, brown eyes and a mop of curly, dark brown hair brushed away from his forehead, he certainly looked the part. He had persuaded Hilliard to paint him outdoors, leaning nonchalantly with his legs crossed against a tree-trunk entwined with eglantine (a sweet-smelling, white briar rose with five petals, and the queen’s favourite flower). A blue-blooded aristocrat who could trace his ancestry back to the Plantagenet kings and beyond, Essex always knew that his high birth gave him an advantage over Ralegh, a mere commoner. Where blood was concerned, Elizabeth was known to be a fierce defender of the social hierarchy.20 For instance, her greatest objection to married bishops had nothing at all to do with theology but was because their wives, generally of low social origin, expected to be treated as if they were the wives of noblemen.
• • •
To commemorate Spain’s defeat, silver coins and medals were struck in London and Holland, depicting the Spanish ships fleeing or the English fire-ships driving them off, and with such aphoristic inscriptions (bowdlerized from Julius Caesar and the Old Testament) as Venit, vidit, fugit (‘It came, it saw, it fled’) and Flavit Jehovah et dissipati sunt (‘God blew and they were scattered’).21 And of the more vividly enduring attempts to immortalize Elizabeth, several courtiers, Drake among them, commissioned versions of a so-called ‘Armada’ portrait in which, for the first time, all semblance of realism was abandoned. In this celebrated image, sometimes attributed to George Gower and his studio, Elizabeth stands unashamedly resplendent before her chair of state. She wears a black velvet gown thickly trimmed with lustrous gold and rainbow silks and bedecked with pearls and pink-and-blue ribbons. Embroidered on her sleeves and skirt is a delicate design of suns-in-splendour, embellished with square, pointed diamonds and stylized flowers with pearl centres. She sports an elaborate collar with pendant pe
arls, partly concealed by an enormous ruff, and her right hand rests on a globe. Beside her elbow stands the imperial crown, and to the left and right of her head are scenes of Drake’s fire-ships sailing out to meet the Armada at anchor off Calais and of the destruction of the enemy forces off a rocky coastline.22
What immediately challenges the viewer, however, is that the sitter is not Elizabeth. Her face bears only a passing resemblance to the very few known portraits for which she sat personally. The long, angular features for which the real Elizabeth was renowned are at strange variance with Gower’s image. In real life, the queen’s nose was famously elongated, with a slight hook at the end, whereas the face in the portrait is rounder and fuller, its eyes larger and less piercing.23 The face belongs instead to a different, much younger woman: most likely one of the queen’s Bedchamber women who posed for the artist wearing Elizabeth’s clothes and jewels.
Biographers conventionally assume that Elizabeth sat regularly for her portrait. In reality, according to Burghley, who had attempted in vain to grapple with this difficulty in 1563, she found the whole business irksome. ‘She hath been always of her own will and disposition very unwilling,’ he commented then.24 Despite the hundreds of images painted during her lifetime, she is only known for certain to have sat for an artist five times.25 One of the great paradoxes of Elizabeth is that she surrounded herself with men who were fascinated by the visual arts, whereas she herself was profoundly diffident about her own image. Notoriously touchy over her appearance, she was highly mistrustful of artists. The exception was Hilliard, her favourite artist, for whom she most famously sat outdoors in 1572, when (as he remembered) she had quizzed him as to why the Italians, ‘[who] had the name to be cunningest and to draw best, shadowed not’. To this, Hilliard replied that shadow was used only by painters whose pictures possessed a ‘grosser line’. ‘Here Her Majesty conceived the reason, and therefore chose her place to sit in for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all.’26