Elizabeth

by John Guy

  To pull off this extraordinary intelligence coup, Burghley had re-employed Walsingham’s former expert cryptographer, Thomas Phelippes, who was prudently distancing himself from Essex. For so spectacularly assisting Essex in uncovering the Lopez Plot, Burghley had spitefully sent Phelippes to prison, ostensibly because of debts owed to the queen. Anthony Bacon had secured his release and, when Burghley pretended to forgive Phelippes, he was able to plug into the cryptographer’s network of informants. One of these, John Petit, an Oxford-educated canon of Liège whose mother was English and who filed his reports using the monogram ‘J. P. B.’, had an agent at the very heart of the Archduke’s entourage. The result was a steady flow of intercepted correspondence between Brussels and Madrid, most of it in cipher.47 This was where Phelippes came into his own. The cipher was fiendishly difficult to decrypt, but Phelippes, who ran his agents in Brussels under the alias of Pieter Halyns, cracked it.48

  To protect his sources, Burghley disingenuously claimed that the originals of these intercepted documents had, by a miraculous stroke of luck, been plucked from the sea by some passing Dover fishermen, having been thrown overboard by Spanish sailors whose ship was taken by Dutch warships as they left the harbour at Calais.49 No one, least of all the queen, believed a word of it. She knew Burghley’s methods well enough by now, but all that mattered to her was the contents of the intercepted letters, which confirmed her worst fears: that Henry meant to make a separate peace with Spain. Taking no chances, however, Burghley made sure to silence Phelippes by promptly sending him back to prison once his job was done.50

  Without delay, Elizabeth dictated and signed peremptory instructions to Cecil and Dr John Herbert, the secretary to the English delegation in France, ordering them to demand that Henry inform her of his true purpose. Her letter was sharp and imperious, but at the very last moment she sweetened her tone by scribbling a note in her own hand, saying, ‘God bless you both with his grace for your best.’51

  • • •

  Cecil secured a second audience with Henry, in his study on 6 April at Nantes. Without standing on ceremony, he asked the French king point-blank whether he sought war or peace and demanded that he prove his good faith by answering honestly. He then reminded him yet again that he had taken an oath not to make a separate peace behind Elizabeth’s back.

  Put on the spot, Henry protested that either he must ruin himself or offend the queen. ‘My necessities’, he declared, ‘are such as I cannot stand out, for I should get by the hazard of war no more than I should have with assurance of peace.’ Only he could know where his own best interests lay, and it had become clear to him after the catastrophe at Amiens that he must make peace or face utter ruin. Had not many of the Huguenots failed to come to his aid at Amiens, fearful of his conversion to Catholicism? And had not Elizabeth refused to send him the necessary reinforcements? ‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘it is now past. And am I like a man clothed in velvet that hath not meat to put to his mouth?’

  When Cecil answered that however often he invoked the vocabulary of ruin, such words could never justify his breathtaking breach of faith, Henry angrily retorted, ‘I care not for the world’s satisfaction.’ His conscience, he resumed, was a sufficient witness, and if the world chose to abuse him, so be it. ‘As for the queen, she has done very favourably for me, and yet her succours might have been better employed than they were, for I never had them in time, nor half the number.’52

  For Cecil, this criticism of Elizabeth was close to blasphemy. Daringly, he brought the interview to an abrupt close by asking for his passport home. His excuse was that he had no commission from the queen to join in the Treaty of Vervins, least of all without the consent of her Dutch allies. Wary of incurring her wrath, he had no wish to be seen to be condoning the peace negotiations, although this did not stop him from handing over to Henry a memo outlining the terms on which he believed, unofficially, she might be willing to agree to a peace.53

  Before Cecil left Nantes on 15 April, Henry sought to draw the sting of the peace by publishing the Edict of Nantes. This gave all the king’s subjects (as he declared) ‘a general law, clear, precise and absolute to be applied in all disputes that have arisen among them’ and assured to the Huguenots a large measure of religious toleration within certain areas.54 Although the Edict fell far short of the more extreme demands of the loyal Protestants who had risked their lives and careers fighting for him during his darkest hours, only to see him convert to Catholicism, it mended his fences with them sufficiently to ensure their compliance and allow them to be re-employed in public capacities.

  Henry then sought to buy time with Elizabeth by promising Cecil that he would not ratify the Peace of Vervins before forty days were out. This would give her enough time to send Cecil back to France with new instructions, or to continue the war if she so chose, either alone or alongside her Dutch allies.55 At least it would have, if Henry had not almost immediately broken this promise, too, and signed the treaty with Spain on the 22nd, protesting that he had already given the English and Dutch three months to make up their minds and claiming he could not afford to delay a moment longer.56

  Eventually given his passport, Cecil left France on the 27th by way of Caen and Ouistreham, landing on the Isle of Wight two days later. A coach was waiting for him in Portsmouth, and between ten and eleven o’clock at night he reached Whitehall, where he went directly to see the queen.57

  To say that she was disappointed with Henry is a grave understatement. Despite a recurrence of the arthritis that had made her so tetchy with Essex and Ralegh shortly before they had sailed for the Azores, Elizabeth sat down and wrote him a blistering letter:

  If you search among the affairs of men to seek out the very worst iniquity and the thing by which this earth on which we live is most brought to ruin, it is breach of faith, mistrust of friendship, loss of love – especially where there is absolutely no justification for it. Whatever they may say, I am never quick to think evil of someone I hold in high regard, and yet I can do no more than roundly assure you and ask you to consider that if there were a mortal sin called ingratitude, then among men it would be justly called the sin against the Holy Ghost.

  If he succeeded in securing favourable terms for himself from Spain, he had only her to thank. She therefore demanded, without prevarication or deceit, a prompt and truthful response, enlightening her as to just what it was he had done for her in his peace treaty.58

  ‘Forsake not an old friend, for a new one will not be like him’ was the famous aphorism put into her mouth by Camden in his Annales when summing up her diatribe. To a considerable degree, it captures the mordant tone of her letter, but the reader of the original French text, still preserved in the archives, will search in vain for this quotation.59

  By the time Henry’s conciliatory reply arrived, Elizabeth had calmed down. As a fellow practitioner of realpolitik, it was difficult to quarrel with his argument that the ‘public necessity’ of France had forced him to act. And, with the peace now proclaimed throughout France, there was little point in mutual reproaches.60 Strikingly, it was the queen’s religious faith that restored her spirits. ‘That [same] God who hath hitherto enabled us to prevail against all malice whatsoever’, she confided to Sir Thomas Edmonds, Unton’s replacement as ambassador to France, ‘will bless our kingdom and people still with like success.’61 Now, Elizabeth made it clear that the key to her actions would be the behaviour of the Dutch. Her concern for their fate owed little to moral principle and everything to her desire to get back the huge sums she had lent them.

  When, in May, envoys from the States General at last arrived at Greenwich Palace, she upbraided them for demanding reinforcements to continue the war. ‘God alive! God alive!’ she exclaimed. ‘How am I to defend myself? What repayment shall I get?’ Already, she said, she had helped the Dutch to fight Spain for longer than the Trojan War had lasted: she had been a fool to give them and the French so much costly aid.62
<
br />   After some two months of insistent diplomacy, the Dutch States finally agreed to acknowledge an outstanding debt to the queen of £800,000 (£800 million in modern values), of which they would immediately begin to repay half, at the rate of £30,000 a year. The balance was to be left to a future treaty once all parties had made peace with Spain. From this point onwards, the Dutch were also to pay for half the cost of the three thousand or so English auxiliaries who continued to fight for Count Maurice. This would still leave the queen with a considerable annual commitment for the other half, running to at least £40,000.63

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, rejected an impassioned plea from Essex to continue the war, declaring that she meant only to delay peace negotiations.64 In a characteristically ambiguous way, she kicked the bigger issues into the long grass. Despite yearning for an end to the years of war, she could not find it in her to make overtures to her old adversary, as she had in 1588. She was no more prepared than he was to end a costly and exhausting war with the slightest tarnish on her honour.

  Instead, she preferred merely to slim down drastically her commitments. From this moment onwards, she intended Protestant England largely to become a sleeping partner in the struggle for the soul of Europe. Her mistrust of Philip was implacable, and she had come to suspect that she would not be able to begin peace negotiations with Spain in her lifetime. As things stood, the cessation of hostilities in France, combined with Archduke Albert’s more conciliatory attitude, meant that, once the Dutch had offered at least partial repayment of their debts, she could choose to step back and satisfy her conscience, at the same time shaving more than £120,000 a year from her regular outgoings.65

  Burghley now lay mortally ill at his house on the Strand. In April, he had secured the queen’s permission to be absent from Court by reason of his ‘want of health and weak estate of body yet remaining’ from his ‘late great sickness’. He had returned in July, but was very frail. At the end of the month, he tried to get out of bed but was too weak to sit up. His throat was swollen and sore, and he found it impossible to swallow without pain. There is no reliable account of his final days, but the news from France and Holland must have brought him delight, since it seemed at long last as though the European land war that had cost the queen so dearly and destroyed so many ordinary soldiers’ lives would end less with a bang than with a whimper. He also had the satisfaction of knowing that, during the final stages of their haggling with the Dutch envoys, his fellow privy councillors had been led by his son. Essex was in deep disgrace, and he would remain so throughout the summer.66

  Burghley died shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of Friday, 4 August, just two days before the treaty with the Dutch was signed. He was seventy-seven years old. His last words were said to have been ‘Lord, receive my spirit; Lord, have mercy on me.’67 Not long before, the queen had ridden in her coach to see the man who had first become her backstairs fixer almost exactly fifty years before.68 On this, her last farewell, she fed him broth ‘with her own princely hand, as a careful nurse’, as Burghley thankfully recorded in his parting letter to his son. His final words to Robert, ‘Serve God by serving of the Queen for all other service is indeed bondage to the Devil,’ were replete with unintended irony, given the twists and turns of his earlier career.69 In more ways than one, it was the end of an era. And Elizabeth knew it.

  18. Opening New Fronts

  Elizabeth was enjoying the final few days of her summer progress at Nonsuch late in September 1598 when the news filtered down via Paris, Venice and The Hague that Philip II was dead. After more than two months of unrelieved torture from his arthritis, the seventy-one-year-old Spanish king had taken the last rites of the Catholic Church in his study-cum-bedroom at the Escorial and died with his son and heir, the future Philip III, and the Infanta at his bedside. So severely afflicted by bedsores was he in these last, lingering days that his doctors were forced to wriggle underneath his bed and cut holes in his mattress from below to drain out the pus.1

  The Venetian ambassador to Madrid observed that Philip’s twenty-year-old son had the same prominent Habsburg jaw as his father and grandfather before going on to praise him as a man of peace: ‘affable, grave, temperate, beloved by those who serve him’.2 His assessment, many times repeated, helped to foster a myth that Philip was mild-mannered and agreeable, a keen horseman who loved music and magnificence and believed that the Spanish monarchy’s dignity was best preserved by peace, pomp and parade.3

  In reality, the new king of Spain was nothing of the sort. He demanded that force be met with force, agreeing with Don Baltasar Álamos de Barrientos, who wrote a steely memorandum to him on his accession, advising:

  It would be neither proper nor profitable to make peace with England: nor would any such peace be firm, for this Crown has been extremely offended by that woman. She is a schismatic and utterly contrary to our religion, and will consequently never trust us; peace with her will be very unsure.4

  Philip III needed little persuasion. His feelings for the heretic bastard queen were no warmer than his father’s; he did, however, recognize the extent of Spain’s human and material losses since the failure of the Gran Armada of 1588. After his father’s bankruptcy, nothing on such a scale could be attempted again. Instead, the Treaty of Vervins presented an opportunity for the young king to open a new, limited front in the war against Elizabeth, one where he believed he could win a lasting victory. The result was a policy in which he decided to attack Ireland, England’s soft underbelly. He believed far fewer troops would be needed, as it was said in Spain that the English defences in Ireland outside Dublin were no more than rudimentary, while the Gaelic Irish were loyal Catholics almost to a man. The Protestant Reformation had made minimal inroads into Ireland. Henry VIII had even failed to dissolve many of the more remote Irish monasteries. Still better from the Spanish viewpoint, Ireland was now in open rebellion and had been for the last four years.5

  The revolt had begun in 1594 as little more than a regional uprising in the northern province of Ulster led by the wily and ambitious Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, but by the summer of 1598 much of Gaelic Ireland had been set aflame. Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy, based in Dublin, Lord Burgh, had mounted a strong offensive, building a new fort on the River Blackwater three miles north of the garrison town of Armagh to guard the main road to Dungannon.6 He had then fallen fatally ill on his return from revictualling it. Seeing his opportunity, Tyrone tripled the stakes, demanding liberty of conscience for all Catholic Irishmen and redress for English offences against the Irish over the past fifty years. When he was rebuffed, Tyrone laid siege to the Blackwater fort. On 14 August, after ambushing a relief force in the thick woods south of Armagh, his forces killed some two thousand English troops at the Battle of the Yellow Ford.7 It was the greatest victory ever achieved by Irish arms against the English and seemed to threaten the complete loss of Ireland.8

  And the reverberations echoed still further through the British Isles as Elizabeth increasingly suspected King James of colluding in Tyrone’s rebellion. Her quarrels with James had entered a new phase some two years into the revolt, when he had condoned a cross-border raid into England by the Laird of Buccleuch, who rescued one of the queen’s closely guarded prisoners in a midnight assault on Carlisle Castle.9 Elizabeth retaliated by slashing his pension again, and when negotiations for a new treaty for the regulation of the border did not go her way, she fumed to her ambassador in Edinburgh, ‘I wonder how base minded that king thinks me that with patience I can digest this dishonourable slur. Let him therefore know that I will have satisfaction, or else.’10

  In January 1598, Anglo-Scottish relations further deteriorated when Elizabeth levelled a raft of obscurely phrased but stinging accusations against James for criticizing her in the Scottish Parliament:*

  I do wonder what evil spirits have possessed you, to set forth so infamous devices void of any show of truth . . . I see well we two be of very different natures, for
I vow to God I would not corrupt my tongue with an unknown report of the greatest foe I have, much less could I detract my best-deserving friend with a spot so foul as scarcely may ever be outraised . . . I never yet loved you so little as not to moan your infamous dealings which you are in mind. We see that myself shall possess more princes’ witness of my causeless injuries, which I could have wished had passed no seas, to testify such memorials of your wrongs. Bethink you of such dealings, and set your labour upon such mends as best may. Though not right, yet salve some piece of this overslip. And be assured that you deal with such a king as will bear no wrongs and endure no infamy.11

  After this, James began to ignore her, claiming, ‘It becomes me not to strive with a lady, especially in that art wherein their sex most excels’ (i.e. in trading insults).12

  Elizabeth’s misgivings about James’s intentions in Ireland were fuelled by his secret overtures to the European Catholic powers and by highly disturbing reports that Anne of Denmark was very close to converting to Catholicism. Up until Prince Henry’s christening, Anne had been safely Protestant, but afterwards her chief gentlewoman, the French-born Henrietta, Countess of Huntly, had slowly but surely begun to convert her.13 Late in 1596, a St Andrews clergyman noted for his attacks on the anti-English, pro-Spanish Earl of Huntly and his wife preached a sermon denouncing Anne as a renegade ‘papist’. ‘As to the queen,’ he declared, ‘we have no cause to pray for her. We hear no good of her. She will never do us good. It may be she [will] trouble us all shortly.’14

  James positively revelled in this growing appreciation of Anne’s apostasy: he found it an invaluable diplomatic tool in his quest to persuade the Catholic powers that he was the best candidate to succeed Elizabeth. Pope Clement VIII prayed for his conversion, and James went out of his way to foster this hope. Shortly before Philip II’s death, the Scottish king had sent Lord Robert Sempill to Madrid to rebuild commercial links between Scotland and Spain, armed with secret instructions to secure recognition of James’s title to the English throne.15 After Philip III’s coronation, Sempill’s mission encouraged the new king’s advisers to consider sending an ambassador to Edinburgh with instructions to work towards partitioning the British Isles into pro- and anti-Spanish spheres of influence. When Elizabeth learned of this, she raged against James, whom Cecil had also caught out drumming up Catholic support for his claim to the throne in Venice, Florence and Paris.16