by John Guy
Elizabeth’s letter of 1593 has disappeared, and Burghley, maddeningly, kept no copy, but even if this is likely to have been far from a candid personal correspondence, Sāfiye replied courteously and effusively. ‘Let there be a salutation so gracious’, she had declared in the course of a raft of diplomatic compliments, ‘that all the rose-garden’s roses are just one petal from it and a speech so sincere that the whole repertoire of a garden’s nightingales is but one stanza of it.’ Advised by Barton that ‘a suit of princely attire being after the Turkish fashion’ would be the ideal gift, Sāfiye sent the queen a fine gown of cloth of gold, together with a kirtle of cloth of silver and ‘a girdle of Turkey work, rich and fair’.60
When, in 1599, acting on the advice of Barton’s replacement as ambassador, Henry Lello, Elizabeth wrote again, she sent more gifts. As before, the queen’s letter is lost, and the gifts, a richly upholstered coach for Sāfiye and a magnificent mechanical organ for her son, were to be paid for by the Levant Company. Elizabeth’s Ottoman diplomacy did not extend so far as spending her own money.
Sāfiye sent two letters in reply, each to similar effect, reassuring Elizabeth that she would not cease to intervene on her behalf with her son, not least to the benefit of mutual trade, and thanking her for the coach. The gift was presented to her on 11 September by Lello’s secretary, Paul Pindar. ‘It has arrived and has been delivered,’ reported Sāfiye. ‘It had our gracious acceptance.’61
As Lello later informed the queen, Sāfiye received the gift ‘very gratefully’. She ‘made a great demonstration of joy’, handsomely rewarding the coachman. She then proceeded to ride out with her son in the coach ‘often times’. Afterwards, she ‘sent to me to send her the queen’s picture to behold, which I have here given order to make by one that came with the ship’ – by which he probably meant Rowland Buckett, the organ-painter.62 She also ‘did take a great liking to Mr Pindar, and afterwards she sent for him to have his private company, but their meeting was crossed [prevented]’.63
The queen’s gifts had travelled on the Hector, which had sailed from Gravesend, along with the organ-maker Thomas Dallam, a coachman Edward Hale and their assistants.64 The coach, built in Cow Lane, near Smithfield in London, was modelled on the queen’s own.65 Said to be worth £600 and thus more valuable than the organ, it closely resembled another built in 1604 with ironwork by Elizabeth’s former locksmith, Thomas Larkin, and with decorations by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. A gift from James I to Tsar Boris Godunov of Russia, this coach is still intact and now preserved in the Armoury Museum in Moscow.
Also crated up on board the Hector during the six-month voyage was the Sultan’s organ.66 Dallam and his assistants toiled day and night to repair it on arrival in Istanbul, as it had been severely damaged by heat and storms during its journey. At last assembled in the Topkapi Palace, the instrument stood sixteen feet high and was adorned with ‘very curious work of gold and other rich colours’. Four or five feet above the keyboard was a twenty-four-hour striking clock, framed by the organ’s pipework, cased in Corinthian columns carved from gilded oak. Higher up was a platform with angels holding silver trumpets to their lips, and above that a cornucopia of baroque wood-carving surmounted by a holly bush on which silver thrushes and blackbirds perched.
Every hour, on the hour, once the clockwork was wound up and a pin moved, a peal of bells went off, after which the trumpeters sounded a tantarra. The organ then played a series of voluntaries, all by itself, the keys of the instrument going up and down. When the music stopped, the thrushes and blackbirds burst into song and flapped their wings.67
Mechanical instruments were a particular favourite of Elizabeth’s. Before Dallam left Gravesend, she had made him set up the organ at Whitehall for a bespoke performance. And while in the Privy Chamber, he would have seen ‘a certain jewel’ specially made for her by her resident instrument-maker and tuner, Edmund Schetz: ‘a pair of virginals with three thousand rich stones’ that came complete ‘with trees, branches, herbs, flowers, weeds, birds, beasts and such like of perfect sterling silver’. When Elizabeth played the instrument, as Schetz helpfully recorded, the birds and animals moved ‘without rattling or any noise’ so that it seemed as if Orpheus by his melodies had ‘made the brute beasts to rejoice’.68
So entranced was the Sultan with his gift, he asked Dallam to repeat the mechanical display and then to give a brief solo recital. The second of these requests struck terror into Dallam, since it meant turning his back on the Sultan, which he had been warned that ‘no man on pain of death might do’.69 Fortunately, Mehmed was sufficiently delighted by Dallam’s virtuoso performance to overlook the breach of protocol, rewarding him with forty-five pieces of gold. In fact, he was so overcome he begged Dallam to stay with him for ever, offering him two royal concubines or any two virgins he cared to select for himself as wives. Dallam managed to extricate himself only by the skin of his teeth.70 But before he could return home, he had to dismantle the organ and move it to Mehmed’s favourite spot, a pavilion on the shore of the Golden Horn known as the Pearl Kiosk, where he liked to relax.71
• • •
On 18 October, a week before Dallam finished his second reassembly of the organ, the Hector left Istanbul and began its homeward journey.72 To Sāfiye’s dismay, it departed without the letters and further gifts she had prepared for Elizabeth, which included a gown of cloth of silver, a matching pair of sleeves, gold-embroidered handkerchiefs and a crown studded with pearls and rubies.73 Liaising with Sāfiye’s chief gentlewoman Esperanza Malchi, a Venetian Jewess, Lello arranged for Paul Pindar to travel to Greece with Dallam and his assistants on a Turkish vessel, and from there to cross to the island of Zante, where he could rejoin the Hector. Pindar’s task was to deliver Sāfiye’s messages and gifts safely to London.74
Pindar finally reached Dover in mid-May 1600. When he handed over the gifts to the queen in the Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace, she was said to be ‘very well’ and enjoying herself as if she had stripped twenty years from her true age. ‘This day she appoints to see a Frenchman do feats upon a rope . . . Tomorrow, she hath commanded the bears, the bull and the ape to be baited in the tiltyard. Upon Wednesday she will have solemn dancing.’75
Whatever triggered her sunny mood, though, it was not Sāfiye’s gifts. Elizabeth barely glanced at them. With the threat from Spain’s fourth Armada finally dissipated, but with Tyrone’s revolt now commanding ever more of her time and attention, she had lost all interest in the prospect of opening up a new front in the Mediterranean. Pressure from the London merchants had also largely evaporated. For the sensational news had just arrived from Aleppo that a flotilla of Dutch merchant ships had successfully sailed to the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, defying Portuguese claims to exclusive rights to navigation in the region. Once the astronomical value of the cargoes they had returned with became known, the London merchants forgot about Turkey and rapidly switched their attention to Asia.76
It was another nail in the coffin of the more fully joined-up ways of devising a war strategy that men like Walsingham, Ralegh and Essex had pioneered. Since the assassination of William of Orange in 1584, all three, in their radically different ways, had advocated a more aggressive, better coordinated strategy for dealing with Spain and Catholicism, one that at the same time could transform England’s economic and commercial position in the world, but always the queen had proved to be the obstacle. Now, it was to be a matter of defeating Tyrone as quickly as possible, and at almost any cost, before Philip III sent a fifth Armada to land in southern Ireland.
19. Defying the Queen
With Burghley joining Leicester, Walsingham, Hatton and Hunsdon in the grave, Elizabeth’s bouts of black depression multiplied. Crippling arthritis in her right hand and arm, and severe toothache prevented her from writing and forced her to postpone audiences at short notice. In moments of remission, she gave full play to her old sardonic humour. ‘Mortua sed non sepulta
!’ she would exclaim with macabre aplomb (‘Dead but not yet buried!’).1
Robert Markham, John Harington’s cousin, was struck by the impact of Burghley’s death on the queen:
There is little heed to be had to show of affection in state business . . . If my Lord Treasurer had lived longer, matters would go on surer. He was our great pilot, on whom all cast their eyes and sought their safety. The queen’s highness doth often speak of him in tears, and turns aside when he is discoursed of. Nay, [she] even forbiddeth any mention to be made of his name in the Council.2
Others spoke to similar effect. ‘I do see the queen often,’ Robert Sidney, Leicester’s nephew and Philip’s younger brother, confided to Harington. Another veteran of the Battle of Zutphen, Sidney divided his time between the queen’s service in the Privy Chamber and in the Netherlands, where he served as the governor of Vlissingen, one of a handful of so-called ‘cautionary towns’ the Dutch had granted Elizabeth as security for the loans she had provided. ‘She doth wax weak since the late troubles,’ he declared, ‘and Burghley’s death doth often draw tears from her goodly cheeks. She walketh out but little, meditates much alone and sometimes writes in private to her best friends.’3 Sidney had once looked to Essex to advance his career but had become disillusioned by the Earl’s inability to help him. His position at Vlissingen had required him to correspond regularly with Burghley and his son, and he had taken this opportunity to build bridges to Robert Cecil. After Essex sailed with his army to Ireland, Sidney distanced himself further from him and his acolytes, as they became the subject of frenzied speculation, mainly hostile. ‘The queen is not well pleased. The Lord Deputy [Essex] may be pleased now, but I sore fear what may happen hereafter,’ Markham commented, before adding menacingly, ‘Essex hath enemies; he hath friends too . . . but when a man hath so many showing friends, and so many unshowing enemies, who learneth his end here below?’4
Meanwhile, the threat of a new Spanish invasion in southern Ireland and the murky circumstances of Essex’s parley with Tyrone at Ballaclinch ford made Elizabeth increasingly jumpy. What exactly, she wondered on reflection, was it that Essex had really promised the rebels in that ill-advised encounter?
In a sign of her growing impatience, she had instructed Essex to march immediately north to Ulster and attack Tyrone in his lair. In the same letter, she had also flatly and unambiguously countermanded her original licence that he might temporarily put a deputy in his place and return to Court to consult her when he should find cause. ‘Our will and pleasure is, and so we do upon your duty command you’, she had ordered in language ominously reminiscent of her rebuke to Leicester, when he had accepted the position of Governor-General of the Netherlands, ‘that notwithstanding our former licence provisionally given . . . you do now in no wise take that liberty.’5
Now, if Essex wished for any reason to leave his post, he would first have to secure Elizabeth’s explicit consent. Only after receiving a royal warrant of approval with clear instructions for his deputy might he leave Ireland, ‘without which we do charge you, as you tender our pleasure, that you adventure not to come out of that kingdom by virtue of any former licence whatsoever’.6
Nine weeks later, Essex defied these orders and returned in haste to London. Utterly convinced – not without reason, in view of their refusal to establish a garrison at Lough Foyle – that his enemies on the Privy Council were setting him up to fail and that disaster was imminent, he believed his only way of turning the course of events in his favour was to see the queen unannounced and put his case in person.
Almost completely isolated from his fellow privy councillors thanks to his egotism, he was paying the price for his failure to build and retain a network of supporters at the heart of the Court. For all his dubious liaisons with the queen’s maids of honour, he had even failed to build allies among the women of the Privy Chamber, relying purely on the shaky foundations of his favour with the queen. And whereas he had once been backed by Burghley, Hatton and Hunsdon, he had antagonized them and those who had risen to take their places, chiefly Cecil, Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, whom the queen had appointed to Burghley’s old post of Lord Treasurer.7
• • •
Reaching Whitehall shortly before dawn on Friday, 28 September 1599, Essex took a boat across the chilly, misty Thames to Lambeth. There, he commandeered horses waiting for their owners and started riding as fast as he could to Nonsuch, where Elizabeth was relaxing for a few days.8 By sheer chance, Lord Grey, a bitter enemy of the Earl of Southampton, Essex’s confidant, was also at Lambeth that morning. Refusing a request to let Essex break the news of his return himself to the queen, Grey rode straight to Nonsuch and reached the palace shortly before ten in the morning, fifteen minutes before Essex. This gave him just enough time to let Cecil know that Essex was on his way, but not enough to double the queen’s guards or to warn her.9
Elizabeth, who was by her own admission ‘no morning woman’, was just getting up. Not yet dressed, without the make-up her women painstakingly applied to disguise the wrinkles and blemishes of old age, wigless and with what remained of her wispy grey hair hanging around her face, this was the queen whom no man was ever meant to see.
Suddenly, the door burst open and Essex barged into the room. Mud-spattered and filthy from his breakneck ride from Lambeth, he threw himself at the shocked queen’s feet, kissed her hand and began to harangue her. Unable to judge whether this violation might be the beginning of some sort of coup and imagining that his followers had overcome her guards and taken control of the palace, Elizabeth kept her nerve. She did not panic. Her words, as reported by Robert Sidney’s Court agent, gave him ‘great contentment’. Emerging from the bedroom a short while afterwards so that he could make himself presentable while the queen’s horrified women worked their customary magic on her, he remarked how he thanked God that, having suffered so ‘much trouble and storms’ in Ireland, he had found a ‘sweet calm’ at home.10
An hour or so later, he returned to the queen and was closeted with her until the early afternoon. As far as he was concerned, all was well, ‘her usage very gracious towards him’. He was fatefully wrong. That afternoon, in his third interview with Elizabeth that day, he found ‘her much changed’.11 Once she realized that this was no coup, she turned on him, icily berating him for defying her orders not to leave Ireland ‘at so great hazard’ without her prior warrant and making her displeasure only too clear. Although neither of them realized it at the time, this would be their very last meeting.
Between ten and eleven o’clock that night, an order came from the queen that Essex should remain in his chamber.12 The following afternoon he was told to present himself to a hastily convened Privy Council meeting. While he was received with great courtesy, it was clear from the outset that his career was in jeopardy. Made to stand bareheaded at the far end of the table like a prisoner, he was sternly rebuked for his flagrant defiance of the queen’s orders in abandoning his post, for his ‘presumptuous letters written from time to time’, for his ‘overbold’ approach to the queen, as well as for his ‘rash manner of coming away from Ireland’. So serious were the charges, the clerks of the Council, normally always present, were asked to leave the room.13
Essex carried himself well. Citing chapter and verse during a long interrogation lasting some three hours, he attempted to justify himself. When, after a short discussion among themselves, the councillors reported back to the queen, she told them she would ponder the Earl’s responses and ‘pause and consider of her answers’. On a question as serious as this – for she considered Essex’s unlicensed return to be little short of lese-majesty – she had no intention of making a snap decision.14
By Monday, she had made up her mind: Essex was taken to London and incarcerated in York House on the Strand while evidence was gathered against him. ‘The time is now full of danger,’ warned the Court gossips. ‘Be very careful what you write here or what you say,’ Robert Sidney’s agen
t advised him. ‘I must beseech your lordship to burn my letters or else I shall be afraid to write . . . If you write by post, take heed what you write, for now letters are intercepted and stayed.’15
While Essex had been awaiting Elizabeth’s decision on Sunday, her fury had been mounting to the point where she was so angry she refused him permission even to write to his long-suffering wife, Frances, who had just given birth to a daughter.16 Still smarting from the deep humiliation she had suffered when he had burst into her bedchamber unannounced, she could not bring herself to forgive him. This time, he had gone too far. Harington, who saw her shortly afterwards, reported her saying, ‘By God’s Son, I am no Queen; that man is above me: who gave him command to come here so soon? I did send him on other business.’17
• • •
Essex was kept at York House in Lord Keeper Egerton’s custody while the Privy Council considered potential charges. On 29 November, he was summoned to the Star Chamber to be given a vituperative dressing-down.18 The seven charges included wasting the queen’s money, ‘tarrying’ in England for two months instead of crossing to Ireland the moment he was directed to go there, parleying with Tyrone without authority, not prosecuting the war against Tyrone when he had first arrived and relinquishing his post and returning home when he had been forbidden to do so.19 He defended himself ably, but his answers concerning Tyrone were considered sufficiently ambiguous to warrant his imprisonment while further evidence was assembled.
In preparation for the worst, Essex’s secretary, Edward Reynolds, instructed Henry Cuffe, by now the Earl’s most assiduous spin doctor, to search through his private papers to find anything that might help ‘clear any of those points’ about his conduct in Ireland.20 Essex’s attitude and demeanour, though, worried Reynolds. If he wanted ‘an end of his troubles’, Reynolds confided to Cuffe, the best approach would be to ‘use humble respect to Her Majesty’; but ‘if he contest[s] and speak[s] in a high style’ he would ‘plunge himself further, and overthrow his fortune for ever’. Humble submission, however, would never come easily to a man who had questioned whether princes might ‘err’.21