Elizabeth
Page 33
Over the winter of 1596–7, Essex’s response to his omission from the queen’s choice of hosts was to sulk and brood. One day when she dined at Chelsea Manor, a fine country estate beside the Thames owned by the Crown and given to Kate Carey by Elizabeth as a sign of her special favour, he kept to his chamber and refused to come out.9 On another occasion, after Cecil spent the whole day closeted with her ‘in private and secret conference’, he took to his bed for a fortnight, even though he was not sick. Up to a point, this type of emotional blackmail could still work for him: the queen, piqued by his absence, sent for him several times until, finally, he emerged from his chamber ‘in his gown and night cap’. How much she really wanted to see him, rather than prove to herself that she could still make him dance to her tune, is hard to judge.10
In a more constructive effort to recover Elizabeth’s favour, Essex posed as a reformed character, turning his back on sexual transgressions and embracing religion, making regular appearances at Matins and Evensong in church.11 His attempt to reinvent himself appears not to have lasted long. Shortly before Christmas 1596, Anne Bacon, the mother of Francis and Anthony, upbraided him in a blistering broadside (after first approvingly recording his ‘change of mind’), on account of his alleged flagrant ‘backsliding’.12
Bacon’s source was her friend Dorothy Stafford, now the longest serving of Elizabeth’s Bedchamber women, who had informed her that Essex had embarked on an adulterous liaison with the unhappily married young Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby, Burghley’s granddaughter and Robert Cecil’s favourite niece. Bluntly urging Essex as a man of honour to abstain from ‘carnal dalliance’, Bacon charged him with ‘infaming a nobleman’s wife and so near about Her Majesty’, then prayed that God ‘by his grace’ might speedily intervene to prevent ‘some sudden mischief’, a circumlocution undoubtedly meant to warn him to beware at all costs of getting the Countess pregnant.
Essex indignantly denied the charge, but his reply showed how vulnerable he was to such attacks. ‘What I write now’, he declared, ‘is for the truth’s sake and not for mine own: I protest before the majesty of God, and my protestation is voluntary and advised, that this charge which is newly laid upon me is false and unjust. And that since my departure from England towards Spain, I have been free from taxation of incontinency with any woman that lives.’13
Unfortunately, the rumour was not wholly unfounded as, four months later, when the Countess returned to Court for Easter, Essex slept with her.14 And there was more because, just a few days earlier, the queen had physically attacked two of her more sexually precocious maids of honour, Bess Brydges and Bess Russell, showering them with ‘words and blows of anger’. Their offence was secretly ‘taking physic’, then creeping through the privy galleries to watch Essex playing tennis.15 The link between those charges suggests she believed the two young women had gone to watch Essex armed with pre-coital contraceptives, typically vaginal suppositories made of bitter almonds blanched and ground.16
• • •
Essex would get one last chance to prove his worth against Spain. Now past seventy, Philip II had vowed to be avenged for the sack of Cádiz. Stricken by gout and arthritis to the point where he was almost immobile and a valet had to massage his legs and feet in bed for up to an hour each morning, he had been overheard to protest that he would sell everything he owned, even down to his last candelabra, to get even with Elizabeth.17
So determined was he to wreak fire and havoc that, acting impulsively for perhaps the first time in his life, he had ordered a second Gran Armada to put to sea, on 13 October 1596, far too late in the season for the expedition to have above average prospects of success.18 This was one of those rarer moments when Philip felt so provoked he lost sight of his long-established strategic goals in search of instant results. The best-informed monarch in the world, he was still vulnerable to his own personality traits, chiefly his compulsive tendency to micromanage his commanders.
Originally equipped to capture Brest in Brittany, the new Spanish fleet of some 126 ships, including sixty warships carrying fifteen thousand soldiers, had been instructed to make for Ireland or, if the winds were adverse, for Milford Haven in Wales.19 Should the fleet arrive in one piece, the threat of invasion was potentially greater than in 1588, as the queen’s ships were refitting at Chatham when the news of the earliest sightings off Cape Finisterre arrived. But on the night of 17 October, the Armada was severely battered by a south-westerly gale, losing thirty-two large vessels and many smaller craft. The surviving ships limped into Ferrol and Coruña, unable to continue their journey north, where they were joined by a flotilla of forty warships and pinnaces carrying 4,500 troops which had been immobilized by storms off the coast near Vigo.20
Even before Christmas, while Essex was still under a cloud over his failure to account adequately for the plunder from Cádiz, Lord Howard and Burghley had begun meeting privately at Burghley’s house on the Strand to consider their next move on the chessboard. They quickly agreed in outline a plan for a fresh offensive to put the rest of Philip’s Atlantic fleet out of commission. But who should be put in command? Howard professed himself too old: he had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday and had no wish to expose himself to the rigours of another long and perilous maritime venture. Elizabeth was willing to consider Essex, but the Earl insisted the mission should be turned into another fully-fledged counter-Armada of the sort attempted the previous year. When the queen flatly forbade this, Essex sulked. Then, behind her back, he plotted with Ralegh and Cecil to put the idea into practice on a smaller scale. The final terms of this arrangement, which Cecil inveigled Elizabeth into approving if with the gravest of reservations, were secretly thrashed out on 18 April 1597 in a deal made during a clandestine dinner that Essex, Cecil and Ralegh shared at Essex House.21
According to this deal, Essex was at last to be given the freedom to capture and garrison a major port in Spain as a permanent base for English ships to blockade the Spanish coast, just as he had always wanted. Ralegh was to serve as his deputy and would be allowed back to Court, where he would resume his old position as Captain of the Guard. His support was further bought with a government contract to victual six thousand men for three months, so drawn that he could be sure of a handsome profit. Cecil was to scoop the lucrative office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said to bring in a profit of at least £2,500 a year (£2.5 million today), while Lord Howard would be given valuable land grants in exchange for his non-interference. Everyone gained something.22 And so full of bonhomie at their own ingenuity did the three rivals become, a point was reached where they were soon all sniggering over a risqué joke about the deposed King Richard II, undoubtedly at the queen’s expense and sufficiently hilarious to make Essex ‘wonderfully merry’.23
The loser in this sordid little conspiracy was to be Elizabeth. Except that she saw straight through them. Deeply suspicious of their sudden unexplained rapprochement, she withdrew her consent. Summoning her councillors to an audience in the Privy Chamber on 18 or 19 May, she berated them for urging the necessity of another campaign while failing to prove that any new or specific threat existed. ‘I will not make wars’, she angrily exclaimed, ‘but arm for defence.’ This, she insisted, was fundamental to her ideal of monarchy for, as in 1588, she was no warrior queen. She then spoke at length about the vast sums she had laid out both on land and at sea. She was particularly irked with Burghley for first proposing another large-scale expedition, ‘seeing no great occasion’.24
• • •
What changed Elizabeth’s mind was news of further reversals in France. Under Count Maurice, the Dutch had steadily transformed themselves into an effective fighting force since their victories at Steenwijk and Geertruidenberg. They had stormed Groningen and come close to winning almost full control over the seven northern Dutch provinces after routing a Spanish army in the field near Turnhout in January 1597. But, as yet, they were unable to reach across the front
ier and impede Spanish operations in Picardy, where Henry IV was struggling badly. Early in March, quite shocking reports arrived in London that Amiens had fallen to Archduke Albert’s troops, complete with forty cannon and a large munitions store, giving the enemy a bridgehead to cross the Somme a mere eighty or so miles from Paris. In this dire situation, the French king sent envoys across the Channel to urge Elizabeth to grant him fresh aid, even this time offering to allow her to keep Calais as a security for the repayment of his debts if only she would send an army to recover the town.25
Elizabeth was deeply unimpressed, replying that she could not afford to do more than she was doing already.26 Her rebuff provoked Henry into resolving privately to throw everything he had into a final campaign to recover Amiens, after which he would make peace with Philip, regardless of his treaty with the English queen and his oath to uphold it. Marching to besiege Amiens just as Elizabeth was rebuking Burghley for giving his support to Essex’s combined military and naval strategy, Henry also put out his first tentative feelers in Rome for indirect negotiations with Spain.
The catastrophe at Amiens, however, spurred Elizabeth into reversing her decision to block Essex’s new attack on Spain. Reports had reached her that King Philip had now managed to refit over a hundred and fifty ships at Ferrol, Lisbon and Coruña, ready to put to sea again with sixteen thousand soldiers. On 20 May, shortly after clashing with her privy councillors, she wrote to the Dutch States and Count Maurice, asking to borrow back a thousand of Sir Francis Vere’s veteran auxiliaries and requesting the loan of fifteen flyboats suitable for landing troops ashore instead of the twenty warships they had offered to lend her.27
Essex, meanwhile, put together a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships and came up with an ingenious plan to muster six thousand extra soldiers without drawing further on Vere’s auxiliaries or the rump of the queen’s troops still in France. They were to be drawn from the ablest men in the local militias, who never expected to serve outside their native counties. To conscript them for overseas service was unprecedented and almost certainly illegal, but Essex was undaunted by constitutional niceties. He needed soldiers – and this was the easiest way to recruit good ones.28
Elizabeth signed Essex’s new commission as Lieutenant-General with her customary bold pen strokes at Greenwich Palace on 4 June, and followed up with more specific instructions eleven days later. His first priority was to be the destruction of all Philip’s ships in the harbour at Ferrol, after which she suggested that Essex might sail to the Azores and capture the island of Terceira. Should it be possible to intercept Philip’s New World treasure fleet or the Portuguese carracks expected to arrive from the East Indies to pay for the expedition, so much the better.29
In contrast to her orders for the attack on Cádiz the previous year – the much-amended wording of this clause shows that she acted with obvious misgivings – the queen gave Essex her official sanction to seize and fortify any place within Philip’s dominions.30 From the final version of her instructions, though, it seems she was already having second thoughts. Her preference, clearly, was for Essex to capture and fortify Terceira and nowhere else, and even then only if he could be certain that the garrison he left there could safely defend itself without regular supplies from England.31 As hungry as ever for Spanish silver, Elizabeth opted for Terceira because Philip’s treasure fleets regularly regrouped there before embarking on the final stage of their journey to Spain.
• • •
The queen’s concession that Essex might, at his discretion, seize and fortify any place on Spanish shores, even if she preferred Terceira, had obviously been wrung out of her. At last, the Earl believed he had a realistic prospect of achieving his grand military ambition. And he could have no excuse for failure this time. As he later boasted, punch-drunk with a consuming sense of his own impregnability, ‘When I had defeated that force [at Ferrol], I might go after whither I list, and do almost what I list; I mean in any places along the coast.’32
Unfortunately for him, his hopes were crushed by the appalling summer weather. Shortly before the expedition set sail from Plymouth on 10 July, Essex was in high favour with the queen. As a good-luck token for his voyage, she sent him a portrait miniature of herself, an unusual gesture. He wrote back in ecstasy, thanking her ‘for bestowing on me that fair angel that you sent to guard me’.33 But barely had the fleet reached the coast of Brittany than it was battered almost to pieces by a severe north-westerly gale. Ralegh returned with the timbers of his flagship smashed to splinters in several places. So determined was Essex not to abandon the voyage that he tried to ride out the storm, delaying a return until the last moment, barely making it to Falmouth, with even his most experienced mariners laid low by excessive vomiting. Once back on land, many seized the chance to run away.34
Elizabeth, grudgingly, allowed the Earl to try again, but her confidence and patience were fast waning. And in a letter that now survives only as a copy, she reminded him to beware of the daredevil arrogance of youth. ‘Eyes of youth’, she began in one of her more Shakespearean sentences, ‘have sharp sights, but commonly not so deep as those of elder age, which makes me marvel less at rash attempts and headstrong counsels, which give not leisure to judgement’s warning nor heeds advice, but makes a laughter at the one and despise[s] with scorn the last.’
Trust not to the grace of your crazed vessel that to the ocean may fortune [to] be too humble. Foresee and prevent it now in time, afore, too late, you vex me too much with small regard of what I scape [sic] or bid. Admit that by miracle it would do well, yet venture not such wonders where such approachful mischief might betide you. There remains that you, after your perilous first attempt, do not aggravate that danger with another in a farther off climate . . . Let character serve your turn, and be content when you are well, which hath not ever been your property.
Essex had been put on notice that he was not to fail this time.35
Once more, however, foul weather kept the fleet in port while plague rampaged through the ranks of the soldiers. With his supplies running low, Essex was forced to dismiss all his troops apart from Vere’s thousand veterans, the absolute minimum needed for an attack on Ferrol. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, Elizabeth’s mood lightened. Cecil could write reassuringly, ‘The queen is so disposed now to have us all love you, as she and I do every night talk like angels of you.’36 (It was a true report but, beneath the mask, Cecil had an evil intent, since he had already guessed that the Earl was destined to fail.)37
Hoping to reap advantage of Elizabeth’s mood swing, Essex rode post-haste to Greenwich with Ralegh to see if she would approve a last-minute change of plan. Now, he wanted to sail directly to the Caribbean to intercept Philip’s treasure ships at the dispatching end, as Ralegh had always longed to do. His timing was inopportune. Gone was Elizabeth’s sunny disposition. Instead, the two men found her writhing in agony from arthritis in her right hand. Unwilling to modify her existing instructions, she tetchily ordered her Lieutenant to implement them as best he could. It was he who had sought this command. After all the expense she had incurred in allowing him to get this far, he must shoulder the blame if things went wrong.38
• • •
It was never in Essex’s nature to turn back from an enterprise once begun but, by the time he finally headed for the Bay of Biscay on the night of 17 August, he had to face the unpalatable fact that his expedition was most likely doomed. When, on first glimpsing the Iberian coast, his fleet was dispersed by yet another storm, he decided to abandon the attack on Ferrol and sail directly to the Azores, where he planned to lie in wait for Philip’s treasure fleet.
This was exactly the sort of stopgap plan, made on the spur of the moment, that he had once scathingly described as little better than ‘idle wanderings upon the sea’.39 Now, he was trapped into it himself, making his choice because he was deceived by clever Spanish disinformation that the Ferrol fleet already had its orders to meet the treasure co
nvoy in mid-Atlantic.40 His decision transformed the nature of the expedition. From this point onwards, it was devoid of anything resembling a coherent plan. Everything would come down to luck and quick thinking. A naval venture of this type placed an overwhelming burden on its leader, but Essex was no seaman like Drake or Ralegh. His experience had largely been acquired on land.
He made a litany of mistakes. On arrival at Terceira, he was shocked to be informed that Philip’s fleet was still lying safely at anchor in the harbour at Ferrol. Even knowing that, he refused to return to patrol the Spanish coast, backing a hunch that a third Armada would not be seaworthy until the following spring. He then issued a whole series of ambiguous, contradictory, over-complex orders to his mariners for cruising between the islands of the Azores.41
Tempers quickly frayed. At Faial, where he had sailed in search of plunder, Essex’s shortcomings led to a violent split with Ralegh that would never be healed. The Earl’s supporters, incited by his hot-headed steward Sir Gelly Meyrick, had shrilly demanded that Ralegh be charged with mutiny and then hanged for landing troops to burn and sack the town before Essex had arrived to give the orders. The incident proved hugely destructive as Ralegh’s supporters came to his defence. When Essex, distracted by the quarrel, then failed by a mere three hours to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet as it approached Terceira, he squandered his last chance of retaining Elizabeth’s favour. Twelve million ducats (coincidentally, the same amount the Earl had lost at Cádiz by not taking the thirty-four merchantmen before they were scuttled), laden on six ill-defended ships of no more than three hundred tons apiece, slipped through his fingers. His consolation prize was to capture a ship belonging to the Governor of Havana, which had strayed from the flota, accompanied by two frigates. On board were 400,000 ducats (around £128 million today), ample to cover the expedition’s costs but nothing like enough to satisfy the queen.42