Elizabeth
Page 29
Privately, Burghley agreed that the queen should settle the succession, but he had burned his fingers so many times on this explosive issue that he refused to intercede. Wentworth recorded the chief minister’s excuse: Elizabeth, he said, wanted all discussion of ‘that question’ to be suppressed ‘so long as ever she lived’.9 Merely mentioning the topic forced her to confront the prospect of her own mortality and the devastating question of who would wear her crown and jewels once she was laid in her coffin. Ever since her brush with smallpox in 1562, she had lived in the knowledge that her councillors were serving her with an eye firmly fixed on a future without her. Even her beloved ‘Sweet Robin’ had kept in touch clandestinely with Mary Queen of Scots, sneaking off to the spa at Buxton while she was taking the waters there to keep on good terms with her – just in case. Now Elizabeth particularly feared that if she named a successor, even one her advisers could all agree on, she would be assassinated or forced to abdicate.
In despair, Wentworth switched his lobbying to Essex and had already begun to attract his attention through the physician Dr Thomas Moffett, when Moffett’s carelessness in arranging for the copying of a dossier supplied to him by Wentworth led to the contents being leaked.10 The storm had broken just as Elizabeth was leaving Nonsuch Palace for Viscount Montague’s house at Cowdray. In a state of stunned disbelief that her death and the succession were ‘the talk of cobblers and tailors’ (as she graphically put it), she had ordered Wentworth’s arrest and had his house searched for other incriminating papers. Closely questioned by the Privy Council, he was sent to the Gatehouse Prison for four months, then put under house arrest.11
Finally granted his freedom, Wentworth began lobbying friends in the House of Commons to join him in forcing a debate on the taboo subject, whether the queen liked it or not. Two days after the opening of Parliament in February 1593, he dared to organize a secret meeting at which he discussed with his puritan friends how they might engineer just such a debate. Aghast at his subversion, Elizabeth sent him to the Tower. There he would remain, despite Burghley’s best efforts to secure his release on bail, for the rest of his life.12
• • •
Elizabeth was known as far away as Venice to be increasingly prone to sickness.13 Persistent rumours early in 1594 that she was mortally ill or even dead drove third-tier courtiers and officials into unwise speculation about a successor. One story traced back to stallholders at the bustling markets of St Nicholas’ Shambles to the west of St Paul’s had the queen being carried out of her Bedchamber in a coffin at dead of night and rowed downstream to a secret funeral at Greenwich.14
Incurable insomnia coupled with migraine attacks, severe depression and sudden mood swings were Elizabeth’s most frequent afflictions around this time, but she also had recurrent chest and throat infections, gastric disorders, sore eyes and chronic periodontal problems caused by her addiction to sugar in its various forms.15 Although not yet quite sixty-one, her face was grey and marred by deep wrinkles, the unavoidable effects of age, compounded by the seriously harmful effects of the cosmetics she applied so thickly every day.
Not only did wrinkles furrow her neck and cheeks, her teeth had turned yellow or black, and she had lost most of her hair. Like Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth had worn hair extensions, and then wigs, since her early thirties. To disguise the wrinkles on her neck, she either wore a starched cambric (fine linen) ruff or high collar, or put on elaborate pearl choker necklaces or jewelled gold collars. To mask her bad teeth she sometimes placed a perfumed silk handkerchief in her mouth. Soon, to make herself look taller than she really was and also to keep up with the latest Italian fashions, she would order from her shoemaker, Peter Johnson, the first shoes that are described as having high heels and arches: the heels were probably made of wood.16
To achieve her ivory-like complexion, her women would wash her face up to three times a week with a liquid made from egg white, powdered eggshell, alum, borax, camphor oil, lemon juice, white poppy seeds and plant extracts, all mixed together in spring water. The ointments that maintained the myth of her pristine skin included ceruse, vinegar, turpentine and quicksilver. The brilliant rouge dye used to colour her cheeks and lips came from cochineal or vermilion. Several of these ingredients were highly toxic and corrosive: ceruse, for instance, was white lead (a compound of carbonate and hydrate of lead); quicksilver was liquid mercury; and vermilion was red crystalline mercuric sulphide. Alum, too, depending on its form, could severely irritate the skin and the mucous membranes. Applied over many years, the queen’s cosmetics could be expected to trigger allergies, dermatological complaints, memory loss and sensory impairments.17
And, as the queen aged, so, too, did Burghley. After Mildred, his beloved wife to whom he was married for over forty years, died in 1589, his health had never been quite the same. Now nearing seventy-five and mocked behind his back by some of Essex’s supporters, he was regularly crippled by bouts of arthritis in his hands, arms and knees, as well as by gout in his toes. The pain could sometimes be so agonizing that the old man was heard to cry aloud.18 A throbbing in his writing hand and an inability to focus his eyes, despite using spectacles, prevented him from working as he had in his youth. He was still as mentally agile as ever but was forced to retire to bed for days at a time.19 ‘My aching pains so increase that I am all night sleepless,’ he lamented to his son, Robert. ‘If this continue, I cannot . . . I can hardly read what I have written, not being able to bow my head to my paper.’20
Others around him were fast failing as well. Sir Thomas Heneage, whom Elizabeth had made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster despite his advancing renal condition, looked ‘very ghastly’ and within eighteen months would be felled by a stroke.21 Lord Hunsdon, the queen’s oldest living relative, was another veteran of the Privy Council stricken by arthritis. He valiantly soldiered on as Lord Chamberlain for another two years. But the old order was under attack from all sides.
• • •
Elizabeth greeted the birth of an heir in Scotland with stony silence. Although James promptly invited her to be his son’s godmother and named him Henry after her father and grandfather – a choice loudly signalling his own ambition to sit on her throne – she did not deign to reply.22 Still smarting from his refusal to discipline Huntly, she had no intention of breaching royal protocol in order to attend the christening celebrations in person and declined to say who would represent her.
Instead, she ratcheted up a policy she had begun two years before and secretly backed James’s arch-enemy, Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, as a stalking horse to counter Huntly. The Protestant nephew of the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots and a rabble-rouser with a well-earned reputation for violence, sorcery and generally stirring up trouble, Bothwell was adroit at exploiting the old Scottish convention that nobles could walk unannounced into the royal Bedchamber at almost any hour of day or night to ‘advise’ the king, and this despite James’s attempts to bar him.23 Two days after Christmas in 1591, he had famously besieged James and Anne in their apartments, attempting to smoke James out by lighting a fire before breaking down the queen’s door with hammers. Pursuing Bothwell on his horse, James fell into a freezing river, where he almost drowned.24 Equally sensationally, Bothwell had harangued James, sword in hand, for several hours in July 1593. Arriving late one evening in the king’s Bedchamber at Holyrood while James was sitting on his close stool (lavatory), he attempted to broker a role for himself as Huntly’s replacement.25
In the spring of 1594, Elizabeth ordered her Scottish agents to incite Bothwell to wage a private war against Huntly, offering him bribes to raise the necessary troops. In reply, James announced his intention to prosecute the queen’s stalking horse and proclaim him an outlaw. Mustering 2,400 troops himself, James attempted to ambush Bothwell, whom Burghley’s man in Scotland wittily nicknamed ‘Robin Hood’, for his ability to disappear into forests. But he mishandled the assault and the royal forces fled. However, Bothwe
ll’s days as the joker in Anglo-Scottish politics would soon be numbered.26 When Huntly and his allies invited him to switch sides and join them, since he could not beat them, and when the Kirk, rightly questioning his Protestant zeal, condemned him from the pulpit, Elizabeth had no choice but to make an embarrassing retreat, professing once again her support for James and appointing the Earl of Sussex, a handsome young nobleman and protégé of Essex, to ride to Stirling with her christening gifts. And when, in return, James agreed to punish Huntly and Bothwell on equivalent terms, a decidedly smug Elizabeth abandoned her stalking horse to his fate, since she had no longer any use for him.27
• • •
With Anglo-Scottish relations in so delicate a state, Essex seized this opportunity to renew the clandestine contact with James he had first attempted so disastrously after his return from Lisbon in 1589. His chief intelligencer, Anthony Bacon, was an ‘ancient friend’ of the Scotsman David Foulis, one of James’s regular confidants and special envoys. In Foulis’s correspondence with Bacon, which was conducted in French, Essex was Plato or ‘28’, and James Tacitus or ‘10’.28
This time, Essex meant to keep Burghley and his son completely in the dark. He was still smouldering after a series of run-ins with Burghley, of which the most bruising had led to a tersely worded message from Elizabeth informing him that, if he wished to continue to petition her to reimburse the £14,000 he had laid out from his own pocket to pay his troops during the later stages of his expedition to Normandy, he should kindly make his application through Robert Cecil.29
With his fencing with Cecil fast morphing into a feud, Essex was determined to gain an advantage over his pen-pushing rival. In the longer term, that would mean building up a good working relationship with James. Astutely, he recognized that his best bet was to exploit James’s low opinion of Burghley, knowing that James was well aware that Burghley, more than Elizabeth, had been his mother’s nemesis.30
Once Essex convinced himself that he could gain the upper hand, his attitude to Cecil became more actively aggressive. Under the delusion that his own wayward flashes of genius were superior to his rival’s dogged persistence, he wrote him off as a lackey and joked semi-blasphemously about ‘the father and the son’, as if – like the Holy Trinity – Cecil and Burghley were indivisible. Anthony Bacon encouraged him in these smears, lampooning Cecil and calling him ‘a little pot soon hot’, just like Petruchio’s manservant Grumio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.31
More woundingly, Anthony’s brother Francis went a step further and cruelly mocked Cecil’s puny physique, making him appear as the living embodiment of Caliban in The Tempest: a slave, savage and deformed, ‘a born devil, on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick’.32 For whereas Essex was tall and well-proportioned, Cecil stood little more than five feet and was a hunchback. (To boost his self-esteem, he kept a pet parrot who entertained his guests by strutting up and down his dinner table.) Elizabeth nicknamed him ‘Elf’ and sometimes ‘Pygmy’. He claimed not to mind but, privately, he found his nicknames hurtful and demeaning. After receiving a letter addressed by the queen to ‘Pygmy’, he told his father poignantly, ‘Though I may not find fault with the name she gives me, yet seem I only not to mislike it because she gives it.’33
• • •
In the long interval during which Elizabeth had refused to acknowledge James’s invitation to be his son’s godmother, the Scottish king had thrown caution to the wind. In one of the rudest letters he ever wrote, he seized upon her insult that he was ‘a seduced king’ and cast it back at her. Quipping that all he had to do was to repeat her own words but change the sex, he sent her a diatribe:
So many unexpected wonders, madame and dearest sister, have of late so overshadowed my eyes and mind and dazzled so all my senses as in truth I neither know what I should say nor where at first to begin. But thinking it best to take a pattern of yourself since I deal with you, I must, repeating the first words of your last letter, only the sex changed, say ‘I rue my sight that views the evident spectacle of a seduced queen.’ For when I enter betwixt two extremes in judging of you, I had far rather interpret it to the least dishonour on your part, which is ignorant error.
He went on to call her to account for her underhand dealings with Bothwell and for denying that she had been secretly financing him. And he quoted a famous line from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘If I cannot bend the powers above, I will appeal to those of hell.’34
Elizabeth did not take kindly to getting a taste of her own medicine.35 And no sooner had James sealed and dispatched his broadside than he repented of it.36 So, with his secret channel of communication to Essex already up and running, he begged him to intervene on his behalf: it is a rare example of direct contact, although, significantly, the letter was merely to be shown to Essex and then returned to Edinburgh, where it still survives.37 Gratifying the Earl, as Henry IV had done on the eve of the Normandy campaign, by addressing him as his ‘Right trusty and well-beloved cousin’, James urged Essex to do all he could to defend the Anglo-Scottish league and thus, by inference, to champion his claim to succeed Elizabeth. He professed his friendship in the warmest of terms. ‘I look, milord, that a nobleman of the rank ye are of, will move and assist the Queen with your good advice, not to suffer herself to be [de]filed and abused any longer with such as prefer their particular and unhonest affection to the Queen’s princely honour and peace of both the realms.’38 By this, Essex plainly understood that James meant Cecil and Burghley, and it would not be long before the Earl would himself be denouncing Cecil and his minions as ‘flatterers’ and ‘upstarts’, serving the queen solely for their own corrupt advantage.
James laboured under the misapprehension that Essex would be able to intercede for him. To Essex, on the other hand, the Scottish king’s letter seemed to hold out the prospect of a brilliant future after Elizabeth. Through Anthony Bacon, Foulis had already made it plain that it was James’s intention to grant the Earl some spectacular reward in exchange for assisting his smooth accession to the English throne. Nothing could be put on paper but, from this point onwards, Essex began to line himself up for a position of power in the next reign. Beguiled by such intoxicating thoughts and scorning the danger, he would soon be receiving intelligence from Scotland several times a week.39
• • •
In early August 1594, with the Earl of Sussex packing his luggage ready to ride north for Prince Henry’s baptism, Elizabeth decided that the best way to keep the errant King James on side was to renew her friendly exchanges with Queen Anne. Arthritis in her right hand prevented her from writing herself but, after sending for Robert Cecil’s clerk and dictating a letter, she made several amendments in what she liked disparagingly to call her ‘skrating’, or scribbling, hand.40
‘It was no small contentment unto us’, Elizabeth’s letter began, ‘when we were informed by our ambassador of the favour which God hath bestowed upon you in making you mother of a young prince and heir apparent to our dear brother and cousin the King of Scots.’ Disingenuously blaming a diplomatic muddle for her tardy reply to James’s offer, she declared how delighted she was to be asked ‘so honourably and kindly’ to be godmother to Anne’s baby. Addressing the Scottish queen as ‘our dearest sister’, but continuing to use the royal ‘we’ rather than slipping into the first person singular, as she often did when talking intimately to other women, she added that, besides her gifts, Sussex would be delivering her ‘unfeigned well wishes’ both for the child and his mother. Ending on an elegiac note, she assured Anne that memories of her late father, Frederick II, remained as affectionately in her thoughts as ever. She ended by wishing ‘all prosperous increase to the young Prince, whom nature’s bond by his father as well as his noble derivation on both sides hath tied us to hold most dear’.41
But Elizabeth’s actions belied her words. She envied Anne her youth, her good looks and, most of all, her son. When, after delivering the letter, Sussex handed over her g
ifts, everyone could see that they had a good deal more show than substance. Chief among them ‘a fair cupboard of silver overgilt, cunningly wrought, and some cups of gold massy’ (i.e. a cabinet of silver plate, dressed up to look more valuable than it really was because it was skilfully gilded and mixed up with some genuine gold goblets), they were conspicuously outclassed by the gifts from other Protestant states, even those of the hard-pressed Dutch. They were not even in the same league as her gift at James’s own baptism in 1566, when she had sent a font of solid gold weighing 333 ounces that was the talk of Europe.42
Anne, who was fast learning how to hold her own in the maelstrom of international politics, parried the English queen. Replying in her own hand and writing in Lowland Scots, which she had mastered in just four years, she assured Elizabeth seemingly without irony that, after examining her gifts closely, she fully understood ‘how lovingly and worthily you have conceived of us and of our son’. ‘We are’, she said, ‘moved by the greatness of such courteous affection . . . rather the more, seeing it has pleased God to bless us in our son, so near in blood belonging to yourself.’43 Signing herself ‘your most loving and affectionate sister and cousin, Anna R’, she made it crystal clear, nonetheless, that it would be only a matter of time before her son would rule the whole of the British Isles, insinuations all the more offensive to Elizabeth as, in his sermon at the baptism, the archbishop of Aberdeen had spoken for more than an hour on the topic of James’s descent from the kings of England. This was a theme taken to its extreme conclusion in a further set of celebratory verses, personally approved by James and published by his official printer in Edinburgh, that audaciously styled the Scottish ruler as ‘King of all Britain in possession’.44