Elizabeth

by John Guy

  Elated at its success so far, the Council at first agreed to delay the fleet’s return home until the queen could be consulted. But their initial enthusiasm gave way to serious doubts as Essex began to exhibit disturbing signs of paranoia and hubris. In the end, the Council decided that Cádiz should be razed to the ground and burned. Only the churches and monasteries were to be spared.45

  In London, Burghley and his son strenuously opposed Essex’s plan. With considerable relish, they showed the Earl’s letter to a furious queen, thereby securing the outcome for which they had hoped for so long. Within a fortnight, she would announce Robert Cecil’s appointment to the vacant post of principal secretary, despite having faithfully promised Essex that she would do nothing of the kind while he was away.46 When the news reached Cádiz, the Earl was beside himself. He interpreted Elizabeth’s change of heart as nothing less than a personal betrayal. Unable to mask his emotions, he groaned and sulked, ‘exceedingly dejected in countenance and bitterly passionate in speech’.47

  On 5 July, the very same day Cecil took his oath as the queen’s new principal secretary, Essex sailed to Faro in southern Portugal with the intention of looting the town. But the inhabitants saw him coming and, by the time he arrived, they had fled, clutching their valuables. All that was to be found worth plundering was a collection of rare books and manuscripts from the bishop’s library, most of which the Earl would eventually present to Sir Thomas Bodley’s newly founded library at Oxford.48

  On returning to sea, Essex urged Lord Howard to allow him to sail to the Azores with a dozen ships to intercept a combined convoy of Portuguese and Spanish treasure ships that was expected. Since a diversion of exactly this sort had been authorized by the queen, Howard agreed, but he was vigorously contradicted by Ralegh. This split in the Council of War stemmed from Essex’s catastrophic failure to capture the cargoes of the merchantmen in the harbour at Cádiz before the ships were set on fire. As a result, the soldiers had scooped the lion’s share of the available booty, leaving the mariners with little more than scraps. Defending Essex, Sir Francis Vere rounded on the mariners for neglecting to plunder the ships, but Ralegh protested, rightly, that Essex had failed to give them the necessary orders.49

  In a fit of pique, Essex demanded that each member of the Council of War set down his opinion in writing as to the propriety of his conduct, so he could later exonerate himself before the queen. This was typical of his conceit: he was a man who had to be proved right every time.

  • • •

  Disembarking at Plymouth on Tuesday, 10 August, Essex raced to see Elizabeth, demanding that his colleagues who had attacked him in the Council of War be censured, especially Ralegh.50 In this he would partially succeed, but only because it turned out that he had all along been right about the incoming treasure convoy. By being denied the chance to sail for the Azores, he had missed it by a mere two days. Mortified by this failure and the untold wealth that had once again slipped through her fingers, Elizabeth was furious with Ralegh.51

  But she was angrier still at how small a proportion of the plunder taken by the soldiers at Cádiz had been handed over to her officials. She had contributed in excess of £50,000 (£50 million in modern values) to the costs of the expedition. Cádiz, she had been reliably informed, had been stripped of everything of value, down to the very last farthing. And yet all she had to show for it were the two captured warships, some 1,200 cannon, a paltry amount of coin and gold and silver plate and small quantities of jewellery, silks, sugar, ginger, hides, bells and armour.52

  All the more galling, thanks almost entirely to Essex’s fatal misjudgement, was the loss of the cargoes of the thirty-four merchantmen. If only that sort of money had become available to her, Elizabeth believed, the whole course of the war might have been very different.53

  On 8 September, Burghley and his son humiliated Essex in front of the queen in a carefully staged, widely publicized scene over his failure to account adequately for the missing booty. ‘This day I was more braved by your little cousin than ever I was by any man in my life,’ he grumbled to Anthony Bacon. Most telling was that Elizabeth did nothing to save him. In an effort to defend himself, Essex struck back by accusing Cecil’s ally Sir George Carew of embezzling 44,000 ducats’ worth of plundered gold, but he fell flat on his face when he failed to prove the charge.54

  Unlike Ralegh, who stood uncharacteristically aloof from the infighting, still hoping to be allowed back to Court as Captain of the Guard, Essex’s response was to recruit a new spin doctor. He chose Henry Cuffe, a brilliant Oxford scholar weary of the dreaming spires, a man said to harbour ‘secret ambitious ends of his own’, who offered to concoct a highly partisan account of the expedition.55 Closely supervised by Essex, who meant to use the piece to foist upon Elizabeth his own conception of how the war should be waged, the tract, artfully disguised in the form of a private letter from a soldier in the field to Anthony Bacon, was to be published under the title A True Relation of the Action at Cádiz the 21st of June under the Earl of Essex and the Lord Admiral.56

  But there was a mole at the heart of Essex’s entourage. Caught out by Cecil with a small fortune in undeclared spoils, Sir Anthony Ashley became a turncoat, pleading for his pardon and leaking a draft of Cuffe’s tract to the queen to save his skin. So irate that, for once, she struggled to find words to express her feelings, Elizabeth ordered it not to be printed, on pain of death. Essex was forced to restrict its circulation to handwritten copies sent to his friends and supporters at home and abroad.57

  Cecil pushed home his advantage, daring to have Essex’s correspondence from abroad intercepted and copied before it was returned to the courier and delivered to Essex House. Suspecting this sinister turn of events, Anthony Bacon fed the Earl’s sense of grievance by telling him he was being baited by dogs like a bear in a pit.58

  Never prepared to admit that he might be losing the battle for power and fame, Essex made the spade-shaped, military-style beard he had grown at Cádiz his personal trademark. From now on, he adopted a fixed facial image to remind everyone of his victory.59 The prime version, hanging at Woburn Abbey, was created by the fashionable Court artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Painted from life in the closing months of 1596, in the portrait Essex affects a regal bearing, as if he were himself a king, his head and shoulders leaning slightly forwards, and dressed in a white satin doublet and hose, sporting the insignia of the Order of the Garter and clutching his sword. In the background is a view of Cádiz in flames. The image is that of a man who felt himself born to greatness and at liberty to ignore Elizabeth’s commands.60

  Numerous variants of this portrait type survive in full-length, half-length and head-and-shoulders versions, suggesting that, as with Hilliard’s depiction of him in his tournament garb, Essex meant his new image to be widely disseminated. A portrait miniature by another rising young artist, Isaac Oliver, also featuring Essex’s spade-shaped beard, would be copied even more frequently. Now at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, the composition is especially telling. Deliberately left unfinished, it was drawn in grey ink and gouache on parchment laid on to card as a pattern for replication, chiefly in printed engravings.61 The victor of Cádiz, it is clear, had embarked on a visual propaganda campaign that outclassed anything ever imagined by the queen. She, it is now understood by art historians, rarely distributed her image in any significant quantities, except perhaps in miniature, and then usually for diplomatic ends, leaving it to her courtiers to propagate her brand as part of the ‘cult’ of Gloriana.62

  • • •

  Foreseeing all too clearly the dangers inherent in this unrelenting campaign of self-advertisement, Francis Bacon urged his patron to tread warily. In a penetrating letter of advice written on 4 October, he begged Essex to disabuse himself of the notion that he could bend the queen to his will over the conduct of the war. Rather than antagonizing her, he must do all he could to win her love through gracio
us speeches and (where necessary) unctuous flattery – but flattery that avoided any suspicion of hypocrisy, something Essex’s verses and sonnets, with their double-edged innuendo, had so far failed to achieve.63

  Warming to his theme, Bacon urged Essex to model himself on the examples set by Leicester and, still more, Hatton, favourites who had learned how to flatter Elizabeth with effortless warmth and (as it seemed to her) unimpeachable sincerity. Spin doctoring, confessed Bacon – and here he spoke with the voice of a master craftsman – was a matter of calculating how one’s message was likely to be received. Essex had got it all wrong. Unlike Leicester, he was cultivating his image as a man of war even at moments when this was entirely inappropriate. Time and place were of the essence. He should remember that Elizabeth was a ruler who ‘loveth peace. Next, she loveth not charge.’ ‘You say the wars are your occupation and go on in that course; whereas, if I might have advised your Lordship, you should have left that person at Plymouth.’64

  Given the queen’s inclinations and opinions, Bacon concluded, Essex could only appear to her to be an unbridled horse – the very phrase she had used of him on the eve of the Rouen campaign. Imagining her to be listening in like a fly on the wall, Bacon had her judge Essex to be ‘a man of a nature not to be ruled; that hath the advantage of my affection, and knoweth it; of an estate not grounded to his greatness; of a popular reputation; of a military dependence’. ‘I doubt’, warned Bacon, delivering his punchline, ‘whether there can be a more dangerous image than this represented to any monarch living, much more to a lady of Her Majesty’s apprehension?’65

  It was a brilliant vignette. And of all the dangers he enumerated, the greatest and most threatening to Essex was his quest for fame or popularity. For this, said Bacon, he must quickly learn to lose his appetite. ‘Take all occasions’, he cautioned, ‘to speak against popularity and popular courses vehemently.’66 The Earl had to learn – Bacon might have added like Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, had the play yet been written – to know the distinction between civilian and military conduct, and to act appropriately in each of those spheres.

  This was the sagest counsel Essex would ever receive. Some doubt exists as to whether Bacon actually sent this letter or merely drafted it and consigned it to a drawer but, if he did send it, his advice fell on deaf ears.67 For the moment, Elizabeth still found herself psychologically bound to Essex, even as she chose to blame and furiously upbraid him. It would not be long, however, before the spell would be broken, even if she still expected him to stand beside her chair on New Year’s Day, or Twelfth Night, as his stepfather had done before him. A tragedy was in the making, but before then the war would still require Essex’s services and he would live to fight another day.

  16. One Last Chance

  On his return from Cádiz, a crestfallen Essex set about reversing the shattering blow he believed he had suffered while fighting for the queen. In a matter of months, Robert Cecil had gained the coveted role of the queen’s principal secretary, the route to succeeding his father as Elizabeth’s chief minister. Then, when the ailing Lord Hunsdon died, Cecil had secured for his father-in-law, Lord Cobham, the influential post of Lord Chamberlain, which gave him overall control of access to the queen. Archbishop Whitgift’s close friend ever since they had hunted for the author of the Marprelate tracts together, Cobham would have proved to be a formidable enemy to Essex had he not sickened and died in March 1597, six weeks after his daughter suffered a fatal miscarriage. Cecil, understandably, was stunned and for a while unravelled by the shock of his wife’s sudden death. Ralegh, who never lacked human sympathy in such tragic circumstances, wrote him a moving letter of condolence:

  Sir: Because I know not how you dispose of yourself, I forbear to visit you, preferring your pleasing before mine own desire. I had rather be with you now than at any other time if I could thereby either take off from you the burden of your sorrows or lay the greatest part thereof on mine own heart. In the meantime I would but [re]mind you of this, that you should not overshadow your wisdom with passion but look aright into things as they are . . . Sorrows draw not the dead to life but the living to death, and if I were myself to advise myself in the like I would never forget my patience till I saw all and the worst of evils, and so grieve for all at once, lest lamenting for some one, another might yet remain in the power of destiny of greater discomfort. Yours ever beyond the power of words to utter, W. Ralegh.1

  Money troubles slowed Essex down. Debts in excess of £10,000, chiefly arising from the huge sums he had invested in his Normandy and Cádiz expeditions, were about to fall due, whereas his guaranteed annual income was rarely higher than £2,500 from rents and £3,500 from the lease of the farm of the customs on sweet wines. Up until now, he had been regularly bailed out by gifts from the queen, a few as generous as £2,000 or £4,000, and had bridged the gap by converting grants worth £1,000 a year into one-off payments, one of which yielded as much as £38,000.2

  In June 1596, however, Burghley had intervened. He persuaded Elizabeth shortly after Essex sailed for Cádiz that no more immediate warrants for grants signed off by her alone were to be processed, whether for Essex or for anyone else. From now on, warrants must be countersigned by three or four privy councillors, of whom he was always to be one. It was an audacious move, usually interpreted by Elizabeth’s biographers to reflect a decline in her mental powers with the onset of age.3

  But, in reality, it had nothing to do with her losing her grip. Burghley’s timing was politically charged. For his new orders were issued immediately after he had shown the queen Essex’s letter addressed to his fellow privy councillors signalling his intention to defy her orders and capture Cádiz as a permanent garrison town. Not surprisingly, in the light of her rooted hostility to the proposal, Elizabeth raised no objection to Burghley’s move to save her money. While she found it difficult to resist the dashing young Earl in person, she knew she had spoiled him over the years, but now all this must come to an end. She could afford to indulge him only if she were prepared to assume a financial burden beyond the resources of her kingdom which she could not sustain. It was, though, entirely consistent with her devious ways of doing unpleasant things that she would disavow responsibility for the sudden block on her patronage, instead blaming her advisers, whose shoulders were broad.

  Smarting from this blow, Essex, whose growing paranoia about Robert Cecil clouded his judgement, meant to expose the Lord Treasurer and his son for the corrupt dealings he believed were at the root of his humiliation. As he boasted to a steadily growing cabal of disaffected aristocrats and swordsmen who clustered around him at Essex House like hornets around a honey jar, ‘I will perhaps jerk some of our gallants with their own rods, and then the queen shall see truth and fraud opposite one against the other, yet that I do not persecute my very enemies but as I am forced.’4

  Chief among Essex’s latest recruits were Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Lord Henry Howard, the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk executed in 1572 after the Ridolfi Plot. Angry, idle, fashionable, rich, effeminate and bisexual, Southampton, still in his mid-twenties, was one of William Shakespeare’s patrons, the man to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his Ovidian narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. For more than three years, Southampton pursued an on-off love affair with Elizabeth Vernon, one of the queen’s maids of honour, whom (having initially broken off the relationship) he hastily married after getting her pregnant.5

  Henry Howard, who had just turned fifty-six, was a crypto-Catholic supporter of Mary Queen of Scots. Five times Burghley had him arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of treasonable conspiracy while Mary was alive. Older, wiser, subtler, less partisan than Southampton, and far more slippery, he had long been out of favour with Elizabeth and was consumed by frustrated ambition. Regularly the first to be admitted to Essex’s bedchamber in the morning, he managed the Earl’s more sensitive correspondence, replacing Anthony Bacon when Ba
con became terminally ill.6 An ardent student of the lute and, like Elizabeth, an avid patron of the Catholic musician William Byrd, Howard drafted detailed political advice for Essex, ferreting out rumours and laconically describing himself as a ‘sponge’ from which the Earl could wring the lurid details of Court intrigues. All the same, he knew how to stay on the right side of Cecil, towards whom he would steadily gravitate as Essex’s political paranoia became more pronounced.7

  A third high-born supporter was Lord Rich, the husband of Essex’s elder sister, Penelope, and once the wealthiest and most eligible bachelor in England. Virile, rash, opinionated and with a penchant for duelling, Rich loathed Burghley and did not seem to mind when another of the Earl’s aristocratic friends, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, took Penelope as his lover. Famously tall and handsome, with a freckled complexion and balding fair hair, Mountjoy had the makings of a high-flyer. Whether he would achieve his potential remained to be seen.

  • • •

  It did not help Essex that Elizabeth, now sixty-three and travelling longer distances only in her coach or barge, rarely ventured very far from her principal palaces of Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond, Hampton Court and Nonsuch. The courtiers whose houses she regularly visited, usually just for dinner, narrowed to Burghley at Theobalds, Robert Cecil on the Strand, Whitgift at Lambeth and Lord Admiral Howard and his wife, Kate Carey, in Chelsea, a group that to Essex resembled a hostile praetorian guard. His suspicions only increased when, while still not deigning to favour him with a pet nickname, Elizabeth bestowed one on Whitgift after a visit to Lambeth for dinner, calling him her ‘Little Black Husband’.8