by John Guy
Eager for a swift return to the centre of affairs, Essex sought to make Walsingham the arbiter of his destiny. Mixing business with pleasure, he began assiduously courting the spymaster’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Frances, Philip Sidney’s widow. Sexually precocious, with a winning smile and long, elegant fingers, she was one of the women of the Court most sought after for her looks. Precisely when Essex began sleeping with her is uncertain, but they secretly exchanged wedding vows in the spring of 1590 when she knew she was already pregnant. Discretion was essential, for Essex was all too well aware that the queen would be enraged if she found out, as she had made it plain she considered Walsingham and his wife and daughter to be far inferior socially to the exalted Earl.34
Essex shamelessly courted Frances for political advantage. He was never seriously in love with her and, after their marriage, she would have to endure his growing notoriety as a philanderer. Within eighteen months, he was said to be pursuing the queen’s maids of honour. One of them, Elizabeth Southwell, Kate Carey’s granddaughter, would become pregnant by him.35 The penalty for jeopardizing what the queen regarded as her quasi-parental duty to protect the younger female members of her Bedchamber and Privy Chamber staff from male lasciviousness could be severe. Elizabeth took a dim view of illicit sex, and where marriage was concerned what mattered most to her was that a couple were suitably matched socially; that her courtiers recognized their marriages were a matter for her to negotiate – conjointly with the girl’s father, should he still be alive – and that courtships should not lead to pre-marital pregnancy.36 Essex broke every one of these rules. In the short term, he would successfully shield himself by bribing Thomas Vavasour, another of the queen’s servants and an older man, to confess to the paternity of Southwell’s baby and face imprisonment. But his secret marriage to Frances Walsingham and his seduction of Southwell were time bombs waiting to explode.37
• • •
Essex’s hope that his father-in-law would serve as a lever to advance his career quickly went awry. Frequently sick for some years, Walsingham was much troubled by ‘the stoppage of my water’ and a ‘defluction into one of my eyes’.38 In August 1589, he wrote to Burghley, ‘I have caused these [letters] enclosed, sent me by your Lordship, to be read to me, being advised by my physicians to keep my bed, waiting whether I shall be visited with another fit of my fever.’39 He was able to retain his seat in the Privy Council, but on 1 April the following year he suffered a stroke. For some time since he had successfully trapped Mary Queen of Scots, he had wanted to retire. Now, that moment had arrived, and he petitioned the queen to allow him to step down after his many years of service. His clerk wrote next day to reassure him: ‘I told Her Majesty of your last night’s fit’, he explained, ‘whereunto she answered that shortly she would call another to the place, so that I hope when a full presence of councillors shall be here the effect of her resolving will take place.’40
Four days later, Walsingham was dead. At ten o’clock the next evening, he was quietly buried at St Paul’s, ‘without any such extraordinary ceremonies as usually appertain to a man serving in my place’. These were the careful instructions he had set out in his will. (The reason had nothing to do with his Protestant convictions: he had stood surety for Philip Sidney’s debts to the tune of £17,000, which he could not repay.)41 If Elizabeth felt any grief at his passing, she hid it well. Much of her could never forgive him for his role in the trapping and destruction of Mary Stuart.
On 30 June, Burghley wrote to Count Giovanni Figliazzi, one of Walsingham’s important Italian contacts and the Florentine ambassador to Madrid:
I cannot otherwise think but you have afore this time heard, or else I am sure you shall hear, before this letter can come to your hands, of the death of Mr Secretary Walsingham, who left this world the 6th of April as we account by ancient custom: whereby, though he hath gained a better state, as I am fully persuaded, for his soul in heaven, yet the Queen’s Majesty and her realm and I and others his particular friends have had a great loss, both for the public use of his good and painful long services and for the private comfort I had by his mutual friendship.
Anxious for their future as their career prospects dimmed, many of Walsingham’s former protégés joined Essex’s followers and advised their new leader to ‘seek a domestical greatness’, gradually working his way up the ladder at Court in the old-fashioned manner, by hard graft in a series of offices. But this was never Essex’s way. As the Court gossips remarked, the Earl was ‘impatient of so slow a progress’.42 Restless, precocious, presumptuous, he wanted instant glory, to rise from zero to hero just like a character from one of the Arthurian chivalric legends or Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Twice Essex burned his fingers playing at politics in the year after his return from Lisbon. On the first occasion, he made an abortive overture to James VI, a move as naïve and clumsy as it was potentially treasonable. Sending a messenger to James carrying letters from himself and his elder sister, Penelope, the queen’s god-daughter, he used the alias Ernestus and described himself as a ‘Weary Knight’ who accounted it ‘a Thrall that he now lives in’. Offering the Scottish king his ‘service and fidelity’, he pointed out that since Elizabeth was now fifty-six – he called her Venus and James Victor – she might soon die. Essex’s intermediary, however, proved indiscreet and unreliable, and soon the whole affair had been reported to Burghley by his agent in Edinburgh. Appalled by Essex’s recklessness, Burghley and Hatton decided that the incident was best hushed up before whispers of it reached the queen. As yet, they were still backing Essex as the antidote to Ralegh.43
Then, acting out of a sense of misdirected honour, Essex attempted to persuade Elizabeth to rehabilitate William Davison and appoint him to Walsingham’s vacant position. But when Davison petitioned the queen, he met with a resounding rebuff. She could never overcome her loathing for the man she still blamed for allowing the signed death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots to leave his possession. For the time being, she refused to promote anyone in Walsingham’s place, throwing an additional burden on to the shoulders of Burghley and Hatton. As Elizabeth grew older, she found it increasingly difficult to appoint new men to important positions. Partly this was because she could not bring herself to face up to the prospect of her own mortality; partly it reflected a distaste for change and for forging new working relationships.44
• • •
Frustrated in his hopes for rapid advancement at home, Essex turned his mind once again to the prospect of military glory overseas. Ever since Henry III’s assassination, he had been closely following the fortunes of the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre, now Henry IV, who was locked in an unrelentingly merciless civil war with the Catholic League and its ally Philip II. Once tantalizingly close to recovering Paris from the Leaguers, by the end of August 1589 Henry had been driven back to the port of Dieppe in Normandy, where he was boxed in. To rescue him, Elizabeth lent him £22,000 in gold and silver coins and four thousand English troops, initially for a month. She gave the command not to Essex, but to Lord Willoughby, who had done the difficult job of replacing Leicester in the Netherlands with considerable skill, paving the way for the queen to reduce her forces there to a bare minimum of auxiliaries. Under the command of Sir Francis Vere, a veteran of Leicester’s expedition, these auxiliaries reinforced the armies of the new Dutch leader, Count Maurice of Nassau, William of Orange’s son.45
By the time Willoughby’s reinforcements landed in Normandy, Henry had fought his way out of Dieppe. Helped by Willoughby, whose stay in France was extended to three months, he recaptured several fortresses between Normandy and the Loire over the course of a gruelling winter campaign. In March 1590, he was further able to inflict a crushing defeat on the Leaguers at the Battle of Ivry, thirty miles west of Paris, reopening the way to the capital.46
Henry’s triumph was like a scorpion with a sting in its tail. King Philip now ordered the Duke of Parma to march from the Netherland
s to defend Paris from a Huguenot siege. By late July, Parma’s vanguard was beyond Amiens and, within two weeks, he was on the outskirts of Paris. For another month, Henry tried to hold him off, while dreaming of defeating him in a pitched battle, but the odds were stacked against him. By mid-September, he was forced to begin a retreat. Paris was still in the hands of the Leaguers, and Parma would soon make the long, slow march back to the Netherlands. Then, to Elizabeth’s horror, three thousand Spanish troops landed on the right bank of the Loire and hastened north to the Blavet estuary in Brittany. There, they constructed a heavily fortified deep-water naval base ready for a force of Spanish warships, conjuring up the nightmare of a new Armada. As if in concert, the Leaguers once again took over large tracts of Normandy, establishing a stronghold in Rouen and more than doubling the size of its garrison.47
Essex had begun a correspondence with Henry IV even before Willoughby’s forces landed in France. When the French king addressed him warmly as ‘Mon Cousin’, and in terms that indicated he took him seriously, the Earl was deeply gratified.48 He had discovered a cause which he could not only believe in passionately but which offered the prospects of plunder and martial glory, too. He began to cultivate the new French ambassador to London, Jean de la Fin, Sieur de Beauvoir-la-Nocle, visiting his house and feeding him intelligence. Meanwhile, he pressed Elizabeth to allow him to fight in France, stepping up his lobbying in November 1590 after Henry sent Viscount Turenne, chief gentleman of the Chambre du Roi, to visit her before travelling on to Germany to recruit mercenaries.49
Elizabeth warmly welcomed Turenne, preparing lodgings for him in the Dean’s house when he came to see her at Windsor Castle and building a temporary banqueting house at Whitehall to receive him after he had attended the Accession Day tilts.50 But it was Essex who provided Turenne and his entourage with the bulk of their lavish entertainment, throwing open York House to them and feasting them, even offering to contribute £1,000 towards the cost of hiring German Reiter (cavalry). He raised the money by selling lands that had been in his family for over a century.51
Admiringly observed by Turenne from a place of honour in Elizabeth’s open-air gallery above the Whitehall tiltyard, Essex staged a dramatic entry into the lists on the queen’s Accession Day to the applause of a large crowd seated on specially erected stands.52 He was clad in shiny black armour, loosely covered by a surcoat intricately embroidered from top to bottom with pearls. Riding in a stately chariot pulled by coal-black steeds, he sat erect with his back to a driver dressed as ‘gloomy Time’. His squires and pages were also dressed in black, bearing aloft his tilting lances, which were disguised as the staves that mourners carried at funerals.53
Elizabeth pretended hardly to notice her brash young favourite. Instead, she showered most of her attention on her young god-daughter Aletheia, daughter of Lord Talbot and his wife, Mary Cavendish, who was spending the day with her. According to Richard Brakenbury, the queen’s senior gentleman usher, she was seen ‘often kissing’ the six-year-old Aletheia, ‘which Her Majesty seldom useth to any, and then amending her dressing with pins . . . and so into the privy lodgings’.54
Elizabeth’s seeming indifference to Essex stemmed from the fact that she had only just learned of his secret marriage. She had made the shocking discovery entirely by chance in the course of an impromptu visit to Somerset House, when she had been informed on arrival that Frances Walsingham, ‘waited on as the Countess of Essex’, had vacated the building a few days before. As Sir John Stanhope informed Aletheia’s father, ‘If she could overcome her passion against my Lord of Essex for his marriage, no doubt she would be much the quieter.’55
Modelling his tactics on his stepfather’s before him, Essex came up with a solution that, for the moment, was enough to calm down the angry queen. According to Stanhope, he promised her that, in future, ‘my Lady [the Countess] shall live very retired in her mother’s house’.56 For the first time since his return from Portugal, he had hit the right note. Within a month, Stanhope could report that the queen had partially relented and ‘her favour holdeth in reasonable good terms to the Earl of Essex’.57
• • •
After months of indecision while she weighed up the pros and cons, Elizabeth finally informed Beauvoir, the French ambassador, that she would support a short, sharp, decisive blow to defeat the Leaguers and oust the Spaniards from France. As in 1588, however, she was unwilling to commit herself prematurely to a costly, risky conflict that might last for years. Unlike Essex, who thirsted for glory and yearned for instant results, she looked at the war against Spain and the Catholic League in the round and regarded England’s role in northern France as that of an army of reserve, to be used cautiously and sparingly. She knew that Henry IV’s war aims were different from her own. He hoped to defeat Parma in a set-piece battle and recapture Paris. Her goal, by contrast, was to secure the Channel ports of Le Havre, Caen and Dieppe, as well as the Blavet estuary, which is why she offered to focus her troops on the liberation of Normandy and Brittany.58
In April 1591, Elizabeth sent Sir John Norris with three thousand troops to reinforce Henry’s meagre strength in Brittany. Half of his men were seasoned auxiliaries from the Netherlands, where they had been fighting under Vere’s command alongside the Dutch. She then detached from their number a company of six hundred, whom she placed under the command of Sir Roger Williams and diverted to assist Henry elsewhere.59
No sooner had her forces arrived in France than she had second thoughts and wrote to Henry, who had just recaptured Chartres, urging him to march into Normandy and besiege Rouen before Parma could return with his army. If he would agree, she would supply him with 3,400 extra troops and give them two months’ pay.60 With Rouen safely in his hands, she thought he could expel the Leaguers from the coastal zone once and for all, after which he could safely launch a sustained defence of Brittany.
From the moment an expedition to Rouen was first mooted, Essex staked his claim to lead the army. He thought it had all the makings of the glorious triumph for which he and his followers yearned. He had been deeply jealous of Lord Willoughby when the older, more experienced man had been chosen to relieve the siege of Dieppe, but Willoughby was now tired and sick and only too pleased to support Essex in his bid to replace him.61
Elizabeth was sceptical at first.62 She knew that allowing Essex to lead such an important campaign would be a clear signal, both at home and abroad, that he was more than just another young favourite. It would mean that, eclipsing Ralegh, she would be seen to have marked him out as someone upon whom she must increasingly rely as she grew older, who would expect to join her Privy Council on his return. It is sometimes said that she gave him the command only after he had pleaded with her three times on bended knee, on each occasion for at least two hours, and that her decision was solely the result of an ageing woman’s infatuation for a bewitching young man.63 Romantic as this may be, it is wrong: what clinched her decision was Burghley and Hatton’s emphatic support for the mission and for Essex’s leadership.64
After much frantic correspondence between Burghley and Beauvoir, some written at three o’clock in the morning, Elizabeth at last relented. On 25 June, she agreed that Essex could serve as Lieutenant-General of her forces in France, a decision he had cheekily anticipated five days before when he began the mobilization of his tenants.65 But she made one condition. She had recently recalled Sir Edward Stafford from his position as ambassador to France, his debts cancelled by a grateful queen unaware of his treachery as ‘Julio’. His replacement was Sir Henry Unton, a protégé of Hatton, who was given strict orders to act as Essex’s minder. Widely travelled and a natural linguist, Unton was to supervise and advise the Earl and send Burghley regular reports. He was instructed in particular to ensure that the main Huguenot army was fully deployed alongside the English forces and that Essex did not indulge in a series of futile and dangerous heroics. Unton was to be assisted in this challenging role by Sir Thomas Leighton, a
veteran of several military campaigns and also a fluent French speaker.66
Elizabeth, still far from confident that she could rely on Essex, meant to leave no room for ambiguity. His written instructions, issued on 21 July, required him to consult at all times with Leighton so as to avoid anything that proved to be ‘inconvenient or over desperate to the manifest overthrow of our people’. He was to discuss strategy jointly with Henry and, if the two men were separated, Unton was to act as his liaison: on no account should Essex make important decisions on his own.67
Next, she wrote directly to Henry, in fluent French. Not mincing her words in a letter she had no hesitation in handing over to Essex to deliver to cause him maximum embarrassment, she cautioned the French king that her Lieutenant would do him worthy service, provided he was carefully kept in check:
If, which most I fear, the rashness of his youth does not make him too precipitate, you will never have cause to doubt his boldness in your service, for he has given too frequent proofs that he regards no peril, be it what it may, and you are entreated to bear in mind that he is too impetuous to be given the reins. But, my God, how can I dream of making any reasonable requests to you, seeing you are so careless of your own life. I must appear a very foolish creature, only I repeat to you that he will require the bridle rather than the spur.68