by John Guy
Practically shaking with rage, Elizabeth ordered Burghley to instruct his agent at Holyrood to deliver a sharp note of protest to James, demanding an immediate apology, ‘considering her portion is the greatest part of Britain and his the less’. James, however, was unrepentant, observing that, being descended as he was, he ‘could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of Her Majesty’. He would continue to do so whether she liked it or not.45
• • •
So firmly convinced was Essex that he had secured a glittering future for himself, he was genuinely dumbstruck, a year later, to receive a peremptory summons from an icy Elizabeth. Ushered into her presence in the Privy Chamber at Richmond Palace early on Monday, 3 November 1595 and not emerging until the late afternoon, he was asked to explain how an inflammatory book, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, came to be dedicated to him. When she pointed with her finger to the ‘Epistle dedicatory’, he turned ‘wan and pale’. For it said there, extolling him by name:
No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity at this day in our realm than yourself, whether we respect your nobility or calling or favour with your prince or high liking of the people, and consequently no man [is] like to have a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affair [the succession] . . . than Your Honour, and those that will assist you and are likest to follow your fame and fortune.
These, an eyewitness remarked, were ‘dangerous praises of his valour and worthiness, which doth him harm here’.46
That was a wonderfully deadpan understatement. For some months, Essex’s Catholic enemies had been circulating malicious rumours that he was aiming for the Crown himself.47 Worse, he had only just managed to overcome his belated exposure as the real father of Elizabeth Southwell’s illegitimate son: the storm that had erupted over this sensational disclosure triggered a series of bitter quarrels between Essex and the queen. She was particularly incensed that, by imprisoning Thomas Vavasour for the offence, she had wronged an innocent man.48
A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown was the equivalent of a stick of dynamite thrown into Elizabeth’s coach. A sequel to an earlier, much shorter tract by the same author published in Antwerp in 1593 entitled News from Spain and Holland, it was intended to create an urgent sense of impending crisis about who should be the queen’s heir. In this, it brilliantly succeeded, making the succession the hottest of hot topics. Elizabeth greeted it with undisguised horror: its fake dedication was a deliberate ploy to discredit Essex. The book’s author, writing under the pseudonym of R. Doleman, was known by John Harington, the queen’s favourite godson, to be Robert Parsons, the exiled superior of the English Jesuits.49 Parsons had first drafted A Conference in 1593 while living in Valladolid, at a seminary he had founded there – an early copy was presented to Philip II. In the summer of 1595, two thousand copies were published in Antwerp. And when smuggled into London, they caused a run on the bookshops.50
With the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots dead and her son, James VI, a Protestant, the Jesuit Parsons stole the Calvinists’ clothes and argued – not unlike the younger Burghley, when he had tried for so many years to exclude Mary – that it was within the power of the ‘Commonwealth’ (by which Parsons meant Parliament) to determine the succession on its own. Bad or incompetent rulers like King John or Richard II had in the past been called to account or deposed, and Parliament might, for good reasons, choose to debar an otherwise lawful successor in order to ‘remedy the inconveniences of bare succession alone’.51
Parsons then ran his eye over the rival claimants to the throne in the style of a racing tipster, playing mischievously on the anti-Scottish xenophobia he knew to be rife in England. Native-born Englishmen, he said, would never consent to be ruled by a barbarian Scot and, as a foreigner, James VI was arguably prevented from inheriting the Crown by English law. In any case, as the son and heir of the executed Mary Queen of Scots, the small print of the Bond of Association of 1584 barred him on the grounds that his mother had been an accessory to the Babington Plot. (These were familiar debating points long contested by lawyers on both sides of the Scottish border.)52
Next, Parsons turned to the nineteen-year-old Arbella Stuart, James’s English-born cousin.53 Elizabeth had invited her to Court in 1587, but the following year banished her to deepest Derbyshire, leaving her isolated and unable to build up a following. The two women had clashed after Elizabeth had deliberately staged a scene in which Arbella was forced to stand for hours in the Presence Chamber at Whitehall, waiting to gaze in awe upon the queen when she emerged from the Privy Chamber in all her cosmetically enhanced splendour. Under the misapprehension that, when she finally appeared, she would ‘pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind’, Arbella went along with this charade. When, however, Elizabeth at last caught sight of her teenage kinswoman with her reddish fair hair, beautiful bright blue eyes and pale skin untouched by the ravages of time, she was gripped by jealousy in much the same way as King Lear in an early version of the play (not William Shakespeare’s):
And yet as jealous as the princely Eagle,
That kills her young ones, if they do but dazel [gaze]
Upon the radiant splendour of the Sun.54
Seeking to sow hatred and division among the Protestants, Parsons then artfully pitched the claims of James and Arbella against those of the so-called ‘Suffolk’ line who had been named by Henry VIII as the heirs to the Crown if all his children should die without progeny. With Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey all now dead, Parsons focused on the staunchly Protestant Earl of Hertford and his two sons. Naturally, he concluded that Hertford was disqualified by reason of his father’s divorce. So was the Earl’s elder son, Lord Beauchamp, by virtue of the illegitimacy Archbishop Parker had pronounced in the Court of Arches in 1562. Ingeniously, however, Parsons argued that, far from being illegitimate, too, Thomas, the younger son, was born in lawful wedlock as, before he was conceived, both of his parents had confessed their marriage vows before the Privy Council. Thomas, therefore, had as good a claim as Arbella and a better one than James, since he was male and born in England. Here Parsons sought to make as much mischief as he could: Elizabeth still deeply mistrusted Hertford and his family, despite their professions of loyalty and obedience to her in their Elvetham pageants, whereas whispers had been heard that Burghley secretly favoured their cause.55
Before turning to the Catholic options, Parsons tied up some loose ends. Margaret Clifford, now Dowager Countess of Derby, was yet another descendant of the ‘Suffolk’ line via her mother, Eleanor Brandon. A wilful, self-indulgent, profligate woman, she had been separated from her husband for more than twenty years after quarrelling violently with him. Exiled from Court by Elizabeth for her indiscretions, she had just one of her four sons alive by the summer of 1595, the thirty-four-year-old William, recently married to Burghley’s granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere. He was undoubtedly legitimate, but, despite Parsons’ best efforts, he refused to involve himself with the succession and, as time went on, his case was not helped by rumours of his wife’s infidelities with both Essex and Ralegh.56
Among the Protestants, this left only Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. Better known as the Puritan Earl, he was directly descended from Edward III on both his parents’ sides and a lineal descendant of George, Duke of Clarence, a younger brother of King Edward IV, the last rightful Yorkist king. His wife, Katherine, was Leicester’s youngest sister and a woman close to the queen. During the Northern Rising of 1569, he had been a joint custodian of Mary Queen of Scots and, afterwards, he had served loyally as President of the Council of the North. Huntingdon was also close to Burghley and Essex, but his lack of descent from Henry VII stood against him and he had no ambition for the Crown.57 More fatally, from Parsons’ viewpoint, he died childless barely six weeks after A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown hit the streets of London.
At last, Parsons cut to the quick. I
n what might have seemed to many readers a breathtaking non-sequitur, he suddenly announced that Philip II was Elizabeth’s rightful successor. This was on the convoluted grounds that the Spanish king was the true dynastic heir of John of Gaunt (1340–99),* Edward III’s eldest surviving son, the founder of the House of Lancaster, from whom Henry VII, Elizabeth’s grandfather, had derived his own somewhat tenuous claim to rule.58
Hereditary right was not, however, insisted Parsons, momentarily shifting his ground, the only or even the most important factor in determining the succession to kingdoms. He argued that the defence of true religion was just as important, combined with an ability to defend the realm from foreign invasion.59 He knew well enough that, by this late stage, not even the most hawkish of Philip’s advisers believed that a ruler who for the last few years had rarely left the hallowed portals of the Escorial would be willing to succeed Elizabeth in person.
Failing him, therefore, Parsons’ preferred candidate was the Spanish king’s daughter, the Infanta Isabella. Backed by her father, who had already sought in vain to make her queen of France, she would have the combined military and naval power of Spain and Portugal behind her. Purely on these grounds alone, as Parsons trumpeted, she was ‘by her title and her father’s goodwill’ most likely to ‘bear it away’.60
• • •
Anyone reading A Conference today would think it a chaotically structured polemic, the work of a fantasist with the mind of a demented magpie. But when it first appeared in London it seemed almost apocalyptic, since it shattered a taboo. No one had dared before to publish so extensively on a topic Elizabeth had always insisted was off limits. So outraged and, more to the point, so rattled was she by the book’s appearance that she ordered her palace gates to be slammed shut and a search of all her courtiers’ lodgings made by torchlight to see how many copies could be found. Those that were uncovered were instantly burned. Seasoned observers knew that she regarded the mere possession of this book as treasonable: to discuss its existence, let alone its contents, was a serious risk.61
Bowing to the inevitable, Essex resigned himself to a lengthy period of disgrace, both with the queen and with James, who was even angrier than she was.62 On reflection, the Earl knew that he had seriously misplayed his hand, ignoring crucial warnings: Anthony Bacon had discovered the gist of the offending book from his continental spies shortly after it had first appeared in Antwerp.63 So had Robert Beale, the man who had delivered the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots to Fotheringhay, who still kept an eagle eye on international events.64 But rather than taking credit for being the first to unmask Parsons and his book, as he had with the Lopez Plot, and then preparing Elizabeth (and James) for the more unwelcome aspects of its disclosures, Essex had kept silent, too embarrassed by the fake dedication.
After his gruelling audience with the queen, Essex returned to the Strand, where he withdrew to his bedchamber to nurse another of his psychosomatic illnesses. Two days later, it was said that ‘he continues very ill’, and he would remain in seclusion for at least another week.65 Unnerved by the ferocity of the attacks on him, Essex was also painfully aware of the high stakes involved in his clandestine advocacy of James, who was so obsessed with A Conference that he was unable to part with his copy. As one of Burghley’s spies reported, the book ‘is so charily kept by the King as that it cannot by no means be wanting from him that keeps it above one night’.66 James, in a visible state of agitation, was seen pacing about his bedchamber up to three times a day, clutching the book. Already there were rumours that he was seeking advice, with a view to answering it.67 Meanwhile, a news blackout had been imposed in Scotland. So gravely did James regard the threat of Parsons’ book, he proclaimed that ‘no man shall write anything or news out thereof upon pain of death.’68
Essex, too close for comfort to the offending tome through no fault of his own, knew that he was walking barefoot on shards of glass. Early in 1596, he would turn pale again on hearing reports that the incorrigible but happily Protestant Wentworth had replied to Parsons. Communicating his polemic from the Tower in the form of multiple copies of a long, handwritten ‘letter’ ostensibly to his ‘privy friends’, Wentworth at last explicitly defended James’s right to be Elizabeth’s successor. Up until this point, he had carefully hedged his bets, wary of James’s Catholic friends, such as the Earl of Huntly. Now, desperate to counter Parsons, Wentworth unconditionally endorsed James’s candidacy, ironically citing in his support Elizabeth’s words of 1561 to the Scottish secretary Maitland of Lethington, when she had declared James’s mother to have a near-invincible right of succession to the English throne on grounds of blood.69
Fortunately for Essex, Wentworth made no appeal to him in his tract, nor did he make further overtures to Dr Moffett. As he prudently noted, the topic was ‘dangerous’ and the times ‘ticklish’.70 He took care because A Conference, circulating underground in so many copies, was slowly fuelling what, regardless of Elizabeth’s commands, would gradually ripple outwards into a daring public debate. Just as dangerously, it would feed a growing appetite among London theatre-goers for plays on the theme of dynastic civil wars, usurpation and the nature of legitimacy.71 Almost certainly, the issues raised by Parsons were the inspiration for Shakespeare’s King John and Richard II. Both, strikingly, were written out of sequence in the canon of his English history plays. Both were about royal succession, dynastic ambition, civil war and usurpation, and each is replete with Shakespeare’s most visceral reflections on the action of history and the legitimacy of kingship.72
No longer was the divinity of kings a topic reserved only for princes to consider in private. Now, it seemed, anyone could join in the conversation. Since her very first encounter with the Count of Feria all those years ago, Elizabeth had played on the trope of the broad popular support she claimed to enjoy. Suddenly, with large numbers of ordinary people avidly discussing the succession and doing this flatly against her commands, her attitude changed and ‘popularity’ became a dirty word. For Elizabeth and James equally, Parsons had opened an almighty can of worms.
15. A Counter-Armada
The Earl of Essex’s response to the furore over Parsons’ fake dedication was typically melodramatic. He depicted himself as the victim of a Court conspiracy. ‘I am so handled by this crew of sycophants, spies and delators’, he complained, ‘as I have no quiet myself nor much credit to help my friends.’1
And yet the queen soon came to realize that Parsons had shamelessly libelled him, and her attitude softened. Stricken with remorse, she came to visit him on his sickbed and fed him broth.2 Before a week was out, she was ordering letters from her ambassadors abroad to be delivered straight to him at Essex House. He alone was to answer them. As the Court gossips marvelled, ‘The harm [that] was meant him [is] by Her Majesty’s gracious favour and wisdom turned to his good and strengthens her love unto him.’3
Essex was jubilant, but his joy was short-lived. With the queen’s Accession Day fast approaching and Burghley ill at his house on the Strand, the power-hungry Earl made the mistake of arriving in the tiltyard at Whitehall Palace flaunting his credentials as her next chief minister. To script his lines, he retained Francis Bacon, who devised a glittering pageant on the theme of Essex’s undying passion for the queen. Falling into three parts performed before and after the supper break, it featured the characters of ‘a melancholy, dreaming Hermit’ representing Learning, ‘a mutinous, brainsick Soldier’ representing Fame and ‘a busy, tedious Secretary’ representing Experience. Each sought to persuade Essex to strive for self-fulfilment and to serve their mistress, Philautia, the goddess of Self-Love, for whom they sought to win him.
Through his squire, the Earl rejected their entreaties, rebuking them for their selfish illusions and protesting that ‘this knight would never forsake his mistress’s love.’ This was on the grounds that Elizabeth’s virtue ‘made all his thoughts divine’, her wisdom ‘taught him all true policy’, and her beauty and
worth ‘were at all times able to make him fit to command armies’.4
The drafts of the surviving fragments of the script include a marginal note from Bacon urging Essex to apply the allegory unashamedly to his own ends.5 Since glory in war and politics were the qualities he sought to make his own, he should telegraph to Elizabeth that his only aim in pursuing them was to serve her more faithfully.
Although it became the talk of London, the pageant badly misfired. The spectators saw Essex’s production as little more than a crude attack on his chief rivals.6 By the Hermit, they assumed he meant to lampoon Burghley (unsurprisingly, in view of the chief minister’s earlier pageant on that same theme at Theobalds). They took the pen-pushing Secretary to be Robert Cecil, and suspected the mutinous Soldier to be the hot-headed Sir Roger Williams, who had served Essex at the siege of Rouen but who harboured his own ambitions as a general and military strategist.7
Least impressed of all was the woman in whose honour the entertainment was staged. Elizabeth grew tetchier and tetchier as the night wore on. Not only had Essex upstaged her on her Accession Day, he had put on a show that, for all its prodigious cost, was the most overwrought and pretentious spectacle she had ever endured. Far from creating the impression that he was suppressing his ambition in her honour, he had achieved precisely the opposite effect. He was, it seemed, showing his true colours as a courtier who, for all his fair words of love, loyalty and constancy, loved himself more than her: and that her vanity could not tolerate.