Elizabeth
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The coup de grâce came when Essex limped home in October, only to discover that the vanguard of a Spanish fleet had recently been sighted reconnoitring near Falmouth. While he had been cruising between the islands of the Azores, Philip had sent his third Gran Armada from Ferrol with orders to seize a Cornish port and establish a military base there, just as Essex sought to do at Lisbon or Cádiz.43 By now, the Spanish king was confined to his sickbed, tended lovingly by the Infanta, who moved into the vacant queen’s apartments at the Escorial adjacent to Philip’s own. By spooning broth down her ailing father’s throat, it was she who kept alive his hopes that, before he died, he might still triumph over the heretic bastard queen he had once thought of marrying.44
Little had Essex known as he set sail homewards that his ships and this third Armada, each unaware of the other, were on a collision course. By 12 October, the bulk of the Spanish fleet lay off the coast of Blavet, waiting for troops to board. Quite oblivious to the impending threat, the Privy Council was horrified to receive on the 26th a scribbled note from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the captain of the harbour defences at Plymouth, informing them that Spanish ships had been sighted.45
By then, luckily, the threat was minimal. A sudden, powerful north-easterly gale had scattered the Armada and forced it to make for home with similar losses to the year before. When Essex landed at Plymouth, he would nonetheless be appalled to discover that he had missed the Spanish warships by a relatively short distance. His hope of a decisive victory was once again thwarted, his limitations as a war leader cruelly highlighted.46
• • •
Arriving in London on 5 November, Essex briefly visited the Court at Whitehall, then retreated straight to his bedchamber to sulk, declining to attend Parliament, which the queen had summoned to secure the fresh taxes she needed to finance the war. He even failed to put in an appearance in the tiltyard on Accession Day.47 He had just learned that Elizabeth had sent him an icy rebuke in a letter he had not received while still at sea for his failure either to attack Ferrol or to intercept the treasure fleet.48
Her dissatisfaction was plain:
When we do look back to the beginning of this action which hath stirred so great expectation in the world and charged us so deeply, we cannot but be sorry to foresee already how near all our expectations and your great hopes are to a fruitless conclusion.
For his lamentable performance, she declared, ‘We should think ourselves in much worse case than when the action did begin, not only in point of honour and charge, but also for safety.’49 At one moment, she even threatened that, if she could be sure he was to blame for missing Philip’s treasure fleet as it approached Terceira, she ‘would have struck off his head’.50 As the Court gossips chorused in glorious understatement at the news, she was ‘not well pleased with him for his service at sea, wherein it is alleged he might have done more than he did’. She did, however, quickly seize all the treasure he had captured from the Governor of Havana’s ship for the royal coffers, before it slipped away into the hands of the mariners and soldiers.51
Most cuttingly of all, Essex discovered that, while he had been away fighting, the queen had promoted Lord Admiral Howard to be Earl of Nottingham, with a pension of £100 a year. This promotion gave the newly created Earl precedence over Essex in the House of Lords and also in royal processions. To rub salt in the wound, Nottingham was a royal title: previous incumbents had included Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV; and Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son by his mistress Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) Blount. To crown it all, the wording of Nottingham’s patent of creation seemed to give him all the credit for the victory at Cádiz.52
In an unashamedly hierarchical society, precedence really mattered. As Ulysses puts it in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, ‘Take but degree away, untune that string,/ And hark what discord follows.’53 Essex felt his honour had been infringed, his triumph at Cádiz stolen from him. His towering sense of entitlement began to eat away at him and destroy him. He even challenged Nottingham, or any of his sons, to a duel.54 His ego cut to the quick, he insisted that Elizabeth either amend the patent or that Nottingham surrender it.55 When these provocative demands yielded no result, he went on strike, refusing to carry out the duties of his various offices and petulantly indicating that he would not return to the queen’s service until she gave him some superior reward to salve his pride.56
Essex withdrew to his country estate at Wanstead for over a fortnight in a sulk: he seemed to be provoking the queen to a direct test of wills.57 His insolence encouraged Cecil and Ralegh, once again working together, to renew all their old antagonisms to him. Whereas they had made their peace with Essex at the time of their clandestine dinner, now they went about traducing him as a dangerous maverick.58 To compound matters, the Earl’s brief affair with Burghley’s granddaughter, the Countess of Derby, suddenly became public knowledge, infuriating the queen, uniting all the Countess’s many relatives against Essex and marginalizing him even further.59 All of this severely dented his carefully crafted image as a serious politician and war leader.
Weary of Essex’s unremitting harassment, Nottingham left Court for his Chelsea estate, declaring himself sick and taking his wife, Kate Carey, with him.60 Elizabeth urged Ralegh to mediate but, when Essex declined to cooperate, the stand-off continued.61 When Essex finally returned to Court, he chose to boycott the Privy Council.
For once, Elizabeth decided to end the quarrel the easy way.62 Much against her better judgement, she allowed Essex to exercise the post of Earl Marshal, which she had kept vacant since the Earl of Shrewsbury’s death in 1590. This uneasy promotion put him in charge of the College of Arms, making him the chief officer responsible for organizing royal coronations, marriages, christenings and funerals.63 His duties would be purely ceremonial but, by virtue of Henry VIII’s 1539 Act for the Placing of the Lords, they allowed him to recover his former precedence over Nottingham in the seating arrangements in the House of Lords.64
Elizabeth had indulged him. She knew better, but it seemed to be the least bad option for now. The one thing she knew was that she could not afford to lose Nottingham or Kate Carey: it seems they had become too close to her personally. And she failed to see why Nottingham should be demoted from his new honours merely to appease Essex. Even then, Essex quibbled over the small print of his patent, rejecting the wording first suggested by Cecil and insisting on his own alternatives. He volubly protested, ‘I reach at nothing to which I lay not a true claim.’
It was far from the end for Essex, but this was the episode that first signalled his enduring estrangement from the queen and his colleagues in the Privy Council. From this point onwards, there would be no turning back. Ever since his stepfather’s death, he had sought to make himself an indispensable war hero and Burghley’s heir as chief minister. But all he had achieved was to infuriate the queen and make himself generally odious. And when Elizabeth took umbrage, those who had given her offence tended fairly quickly to suffer damaging reprisals.65
• • •
It would take barely six months for Essex to receive his comeuppance. The moment arrived when Elizabeth sought to choose a new Lord Deputy for Ireland on the death from typhus of Thomas, Lord Burgh. After sounding out Nottingham, Cecil and Essex in the Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace, she proposed Sir William Knollys, Essex’s uncle. He was, she declared, ‘the fittest of any’ to be sent over as chief governor to the Tudor equivalent of Siberia. But Essex obstinately dissented, eager instead to get rid of Sir George Carew, whom the Earl had unsuccessfully accused of stealing 44,000 ducats’ worth of plundered gold at Cádiz. Losing his temper and quite forgetting where he was when the queen refused to budge, Essex gave her a scornful look, then turned his back on her in a calculated gesture of contempt. Such effrontery on the part of a subject and a man to whom she had given so much sent her into an apoplexy. Unable to restrain herself, she struck him across the face and told him t
o go and be hanged.
Instinctively, Essex reached for his sword and had to be forcibly restrained by Nottingham. Escorted by guards from the Privy Chamber, Essex swore a great oath, informing the queen and his thunderstruck colleagues that ‘he neither could nor would put up [with] so great an affront and indignity, neither would he have taken it at King Henry the Eighth his [sic] hands.’66
To say that to Elizabeth, who revered her father, despite all that he had done to her mother, was fatal enough. But Essex had not quite finished. He then, according to Ralegh’s account, compounded his offence by muttering in her hearing as he left the room that ‘her conditions were as crooked as her carcass.’ Ralegh reckoned that to say this to a woman was as bad as to tell a king that he was wicked or a coward. ‘It is one and the same error.’67
In a well-intentioned letter of advice, Sir Thomas Egerton, now promoted on the death of Sir John Puckering from his post of Queen’s Attorney to be Keeper of the Great Seal, urged the Earl to apologize to the queen and plead for her forgiveness. ‘You are not yet so far gone’, he said, ‘but you may well return. The return is safe, the progress dangerous and desperate. In the course you hold, if you have any enemies, you do that for them which they could never do for themselves.’68
But Essex refused to listen. ‘You must give me leave to tell you’, he replied, ‘that in some cases I must appeal from all earthly judges; and if in any, then surely in this, when the highest judge on the earth hath imposed upon me the heaviest punishment without trial or hearing.’
Nay, when the vilest of all indignities is done unto me, doth religion enforce me to sue? Doth God require it? Is it impiety not to do it? Why, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to these principles.69
By asking these rhetorical questions and then seemingly answering them with a resounding ‘No,’ Essex made himself vulnerable to a charge of atheism, since it could be made to appear that he was denying the God-given authority of kingship. From now on, far more even than Ralegh, who had dreamed of the success of his Roanoke colony or of tapping the untold riches of El Dorado, the reckless Earl came to inhabit a fantasy world of his own making. If ever Elizabeth, ageing or not, had found him irresistible and longed to make him a surrogate for her beloved Leicester to remind her of her youth, it was no more. She was a queen as well as a woman: he was quite mistaken in imagining that he could conquer her by the sheer force of his will. The spell that had bound them together was finally broken. It simply remained to discover how precisely the drama would end.
17. Seeking Détente
By the time Essex returned to Plymouth from the Azores in October 1597, the war with Spain had dragged on for longer than the First and Second World Wars combined. The fiscal burden on Philip II had become unsustainable. The Spanish king had never fully understood his own finances. Despite silver and gold arriving regularly from the New World, he had to endure a series of financial crises brought about by almost constant warfare, colossal military spending and ever-increasing debt repayments. In its written advice in November 1596, his Council of Finance estimated that he would have to lay out 11 million ducats (around £3.2 billion in modern values) over the following thirteen months and could expect Spain’s accumulated deficit to approach 16 million ducats by the end of 1598 and 26 million by 1599.1 With such amounts far exceeding his ability to pay the interest or restructure his loans, Philip declared bankruptcy. His approach was ingenious. He simply told the Italian and German bankers operating in the markets of Antwerp, Genoa and Seville that their credit agreements, or asientos, with him infringed the canon law of usury and were to be replaced by Spanish state securities, or juros, carrying a much lower rate of interest. The inevitable result was a run on the banks, a sudden collapse in liquidity, violent exchange-rate fluctuations and large-scale paralysis in international trade.
And yet, the psychological effects of bankruptcy were far greater. No longer could Philip pose convincingly as the hammer of the heretics and the upholder of the Spanish-Habsburg world order. He had defaulted before – in 1557, 1560 and 1575 – but this time the amounts involved were much larger and it was obvious that Spain could not continue to regard its New World assets as inexhaustible. For the first time since the beginning of the war, Philip had to confront the possibility of defeat. So far, he had flatly repudiated any suggestion of peace with Elizabeth or the rebellious Dutch. But his councillors’ advice was firm. ‘The objective of wars’, they declared sententiously, ‘is peace, always provided the proper conditions may be obtained.’2
Henry IV was also eager for peace. The catastrophic loss of Amiens in March 1597 had seriously compromised his campaign to reunify France. Throughout the ensuing summer, he had struggled desperately to recover the town from its Spanish garrison before Archduke Albert ordered the main body of his forces across the border from the southern Netherlands into Picardy.
On 9 September, Henry was able to write jubilantly to Elizabeth announcing that, with the assistance of her auxiliaries, he had finally recovered Amiens.3 Albert, severely weakened by the effects of Philip’s bankruptcy, had been unable to raise a large enough relief force to hold the town. By letting Count Maurice and the Dutch take full control of the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands, he had mustered 20,000 infantry and 4,500 cavalry, whereas Henry, by a herculean effort, managed to scrape together sufficient funds to support an army of 23,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry for just long enough to win a victory.4
Peace talks between France and Spain could now begin in earnest under the auspices of Alexander de’ Medici, the legate of the new pope, Clement VIII. Notwithstanding his oath to Elizabeth not to entertain a peace proposal without consulting her, Henry felt he was unable to continue fighting unless the English and the Dutch would join him in a final, costly, all-out offensive to clear all the remaining Spaniards from the war zones, including Brittany. And that was well-nigh impossible.
Philip, for his part, fully aware that he was fast approaching death, was eager to clear the path for his only surviving son, nineteen-year-old Philip, the fourth child of his last wife, Anne of Austria. As the bedridden king gradually came to terms with the harsh reality that Spain was no longer as supremely powerful as it had been at the time of the abdication of his own father, Charles V, he knew that his son would only be able to rule effectively without the distractions of this crippling conflict across northern Europe.
• • •
Making overtures to Albert shortly after recovering Amiens, Henry discovered enough common ground to persuade him that it was time to take counsel with his allies. To Elizabeth, he sent André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, a former French ambassador to Venice. Arriving in London on 22 November 1597, de Maisse, an experienced lawyer-diplomat, delivered a very similar message to one Henry had sent to the Dutch States General. Unless, he said, the English queen was willing to engage in a full-scale land war to evict the Spaniards from France and the Netherlands rather than wage a sea war against Spain’s Atlantic naval power, Henry would feel obliged to make peace whether she liked it or not.5
Never someone who reacted well to an ultimatum, Elizabeth was in no hurry to make up her mind. She veered instinctively towards détente but still bitterly remembered Philip’s perfidy in 1588, when he had allowed her talks with the Duke of Parma’s representatives at Bourbourg to drag on fruitlessly until a month after the first Gran Armada had set sail from Lisbon. Towards Henry, she had mixed feelings. He, too, was perfidious – she had never forgiven him for his conversion to Catholicism – but foremost in her mind were the debts of her French and Dutch allies, which, allowing for accumulated interest, had soared to £1.6 million.6 Whether or not she decided to entertain a peace proposal would most likely depend on the prospects for repayment of a significant proportion of these debts.
De Maisse’s arrival therefore began a lengthy process of debate a
nd deliberation, as much in the queen’s own mind as in the Privy Council.7 And a fresh dimension was added when, shortly after de Maisse presented his credentials, Philip betrothed his daughter, the Infanta, to Archduke Albert and announced that he would shortly be transferring sovereignty over the old Burgundian lands of Franche-Comté and the Netherlands to the couple as Isabella’s dowry.8 Elizabeth cautiously welcomed this news, which seemed to offer a chance that the southern provinces of the Netherlands would recover at least some of their ancient liberties. Remembering an Italian joke with vaguely obscene connotations she had learned as an adolescent, she twice quipped per molto variar natura è bella (‘Nature’s beauty comes from these sorts of surprises’).9
The result was that de Maisse, who had a keen eye for detail and was a shrewd judge of character, stayed in England for over six weeks, keeping a fascinating diary in which he recorded the details of his audiences with the queen. This was hitherto known only from brief, paraphrased extracts in French and from a questionable early-twentieth-century translation, but a complete French text has now been rediscovered in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and, for the first time, more accurate descriptions of his encounters with the queen can be given.10
• • •
Elizabeth gave de Maisse six audiences, but he never knew very far in advance when she would see him. She would send for him only when she was ready, laying on her coach or barge to fetch him. Once, she cancelled their meeting at the very last moment. Later, de Maisse discovered she had looked in the mirror and decided her appearance was too ghastly for her to receive him.11
Age had increased rather than tempered her vanity. In times of stress, she would lash out at the younger, prettier members of her Bedchamber staff, accusing them of insolence or insubordination. Shortly before de Maisse’s arrival, she had caused a series of ugly scenes in the Privy Chamber, accusing Mary Howard, one of her maids of honour, of wilfully neglecting her duties, whereas the girl’s true offence was flaunting her good looks and fine clothes and flirting with Essex.12 As John Harington famously put it, when Elizabeth smiled, ‘it was a pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bake in if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.’13