Elizabeth
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The strain made Essex ill. Unlike some of his earlier, psychosomatic, illnesses, which had waxed and waned according to the queen’s temper and his own, this one was genuine. He became weak and was confined to bed: his legs swelled, his strength was dissipated. Doctors were summoned, but an appeal to the queen for an examination by her own chief physician, Dr Brown, fell on deaf ears, although she reluctantly allowed the Earl’s physicians to consult Brown, provided he did not see Essex himself.22 A month later, when it looked as though Essex might actually die and was about to make his will, she relented, sending Dr Brown and granting the Earl permission to walk in the garden.23 As yet, her vindictiveness did not stretch to allowing him to die: when his condition deteriorated further, she dispatched eight doctors to his bedside, sent broth to aid his recovery and commanded that he should be carried into Egerton’s own bedchamber, as it was more comfortable.24
Even so, his family despaired for his life. Frances, desperate to see him, despite the shameless neglect he had shown her when at the height of his career, was finally allowed to visit him, although only during the daytime; at night, she returned to Walsingham House.25 His sister Penelope begged for the same privilege, but Elizabeth froze her out.26 Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys, tried to win the queen’s sympathy by sending her a gown worth £100, but in vain.27 Elizabeth even refused ostentatiously to accept the Earl’s New Year’s gift, while handsomely rewarding Cecil for his.28 And when some well-meaning but ill-advised preachers in London offered public prayers for the Earl, they were threatened with prosecution for sedition in the Star Chamber.29
Throughout his six weeks of illness, Essex’s enemies on the Privy Council continued to collect evidence against him, but they found nothing damning enough to justify a treason trial. Essex then handed them evidence of his own making by commissioning from Thomas Cockson, one of the finest art engravers in London, an equestrian portrait of himself in armour modelled closely on Robert Vaughan’s posthumous image of his stepfather, which had famously included an inscription below background scenes of the defeat of the Armada and the Battle of Zutphen. In imitation of this design, Essex had himself depicted against similar background scenes of his triumphs in Cádiz and the Azores, and, less plausibly, Rouen and Ireland. But whereas the inscription below Leicester’s portrait had merely listed his titles and honours, Essex’s acclaimed him as ‘Virtue’s honour, Wisdom’s nature, Grace’s servant, Mercy’s love, God’s elected’. More provocatively still, the Earl chose to circulate among his friends copies of his exchange of letters with Egerton the previous year in which he had asked, ‘Why, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?’30
The publication of Cockson’s engraving with its description of Essex as ‘God’s elected’, coupled with his letter to Egerton, was enough to support the charge of lese-majesty of which Elizabeth so clearly believed him to be guilty. So, when his health had sufficiently recovered, he was summoned to a trial in the Court of Star Chamber: the case was set to begin on Thursday, 13 February 1600. The Star Chamber could not inflict the death penalty, but it could impose unlimited fines and life imprisonment. For Essex, who valued his honour more than his life, death would be preferable.
Essex was at last persuaded by his friends to appreciate the gravity of his position. For once prepared to humble himself, he wrote to the queen in just the sort of obsequious terms she liked.31 Drafted by Reynolds, in whose handwriting the only surviving text of the letter is preserved, he said that he was ‘humbly and unfeignedly’ willing to acknowledge his offence; he had undergone her indignation ‘patiently’; he begged ‘that this cup may pass’ from him. And he appealed to her vanity, entreating her to consider ‘how much more it will agree with your princely and angel-like nature to have your mercy blazed by the tongue of Your Majesty’s once happy, but now most sorrowful orator, than to have a sentence given to ruin and disable him who despiseth life when he shall be made unfit for your service’.32
It worked. Just as Elizabeth had been unwilling to leave him to die, so she was unwilling completely to destroy him. The spell that had bound her to him had been broken when he had impudently turned his back on her and insulted her shortly before he had been sent to Ireland. But, for all that, she decided to stop a trial she might not be able to control once it started.
Her intervention came at the very last moment, on the evening of 12 February. By then, Cecil had returned to his house in the Strand from Richmond to prepare for the hearing the following day. The queen, who was also at Richmond, told Thomas Windebank, still acting as her confidential secretary, while also serving Cecil, to contact him verbally and by letter. She was ‘loath’, she explained beguilingly to Windebank, who had the difficult job of relaying her exact words, ‘to let slip’ the Star Chamber proceedings, but if Cecil, Nottingham, Buckhurst and Chief Justice Popham ‘did think that that might be done at some other time and place with her honour’, then so be it. Otherwise, naturally, she ‘would not have forborne tomorrow, and this Her Highness’s will is Your Honour should impart to her said Council’.33
Packed with weasel words, her statement was carefully designed to create the impression that in stopping the trial she had merely given way to advice, so keeping her fingerprints off the decision. As Cecil had so insightfully mused in a memo he had written when he had found himself in a not dissimilar position a few years earlier: ‘This argueth the queen would have her ministers do that she will not avow.’34
Even then, reluctant to commit herself to anything on paper, she called Windebank back, perused his letter three or four times ‘before it were closed [sealed]’, then ordered him not to send it, saying, ‘My Lord Admiral and they knew her pleasure and meaning sufficiently, and therefore that she needed not to write.’35
Unlike William Davison at the time of the sending of the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots, Windebank knew exactly where he stood and what to do. Racing to the stables and mounting his horse, he rode ‘haste-post-haste’ into London to warn Cecil that he should call off the trial – at least for now, until the queen’s mood changed.36
Essex’s gratitude was suitably effusive. ‘I acknowledge, upon the knees of my heart, Your Majesty’s infinite goodness in granting my petition’, he began in another letter drafted for him by Reynolds, which again would not disappoint Elizabeth. ‘God that hath all hearts in witness’, he continued, knew ‘how faithfully I do vow to dedicate the rest of my life . . . in obedience, faith and zeal to Your Majesty’. And he protested ‘I shall live and die your most humble vassal.’37
Of course, his problems were far from over. Although he was allowed to return to Essex House in March, he would now be a prisoner of Sir Richard Berkeley, who kept all the keys to the house, slept in the very next room and had orders from the queen to allow no one to visit without her permission.38 In an effort to alleviate his plight, Essex threw himself on Elizabeth’s mercy in a series of self-pitying letters. In him, he assured her, she had ‘a servant whose humble and infinite affection cannot be matched’; in her, he had ‘a lady, a nymph or an angel, who, when all the world frowns upon me, cannot look with other than gracious eyes’. All he wanted on this earth, he declared, was to ‘expiate my former offences’ and ‘recover Your Majesty’s more than gracious favour’.39
Yet still he was not a free man. He was not at Court, and his enemies on the Council continued to pursue him. In this, they were cheered on relentlessly from the sidelines by Ralegh, who, with Cecil’s help, had recovered much of Elizabeth’s lost favour and been fully rehabilitated to his old position as Captain of the Guard. Their moment came in May 1600, when a London printer, possibly incited by Henry Cuffe, attempted to publish a vigorous defence of all Essex’s actions since the siege of Rouen, a work Essex had begun writing on his voyage home from Cádiz in 1596 and which he had already circulated widely in manuscript among his friends and admirers.40
Couched in the form of a letter t
o Anthony Bacon and entitled An Apologie of the Earle of Essex against Those Which Jealously and Maliciously Tax Him to be the Hinderer of the Peace and Quiet of His Country, the book gave Cecil his chance. Coming hard on the heels of Cockson’s provocative engraving and despite Essex’s efforts to defuse the situation by insisting that the printed version of his Apologie had not been authorized by him, it seemed to the queen as if he was once again courting fame and popularity in a manner she most despised and feared.41
On 5 June, therefore, by royal command, Essex was brought back to York House as a prisoner to face a whole day’s interrogation by eighteen special commissioners, including Cecil, Egerton, Buckhurst, Nottingham and Archbishop Whitgift. A repeat of his former tactic of writing an abject letter to the queen shortly before the commissioners met failed, and this time the case was heard.42
Essex was charged with failing to prosecute the Ulster campaign as directed, dishonourable parleying with Tyrone and defiantly returning to Court. His sentence, pronounced by Egerton, was to be stripped of his offices of state and remain under house arrest until Elizabeth decided otherwise.43 While she thought about it, she allowed the Earl to recuperate at his wife’s country house at Barn Elms, on the south bank of the Thames, near Richmond. On 1 July she relieved him of Berkeley’s supervision. On 26 August, after much deliberation, she finally declared she was prepared to grant him his freedom. But she refused to see him, and she banished him from Court for ever, declining to listen to his appeals to return, no matter how often he wrote, flattered and begged.
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As the weeks passed without an audience, Essex became increasingly convinced that Elizabeth would not renew his highly lucrative lease of the farm of the customs on sweet wines, which was due to expire in October 1600. This lease had been the mainstay of his finances since the concession had first been granted to him in 1589, and without it he would be utterly ruined. Quite realistically, he took renewal as a key indicator of whether he would ever regain his former positions. When questioned later, his friend and confidant Sir Charles Danvers recalled that Essex had told him that ‘by the renewing [of] it, or taking it from him, he should judge what was meant him.’44
He would soon find out. After reportedly saying that an ‘ungovernable beast must be stinted of his provender’, Elizabeth chose not to continue the lease, nudging Essex further towards the edge of the precipice.45 In conversation with Danvers, he had spoken of taking his cause into Parliament, where he might muster his followers should the lease not be renewed, but he thought better of it and instead suggested ‘sending emissaries’ into Ireland, where the queen had appointed his close ally and his sister Penelope’s lover, Lord Mountjoy, to be the new Lord Deputy.46
Elizabeth had first outlined Mountjoy’s task to him at Richmond in October 1599. He was to finish the work that Essex had failed to do by defeating Tyrone and defending Ireland against Spanish invasion.47 Over the course of the next eighteen months, Mountjoy would successfully reverse most of the earlier English losses with far smaller resources than the Earl had been given. While delighted by his friend’s success, however, it would greatly rankle with Essex that the Privy Council allowed his successor to tighten the noose on Ulster and north Connacht by establishing a strong military garrison behind enemy lines at Lough Foyle – the very strategy he was himself denied.48
The sinister aspect of Essex’s plan for ‘sending emissaries’ into Ireland emerges from the fact that, starting in 1598, he had renewed in earnest the clandestine correspondence with James VI begun four years earlier through the Scotsman David Foulis. According to Cuffe, his intent ‘hath been principally that by assuring that prince of his good affection’, he might improve James’s prospects of succession (and of course his own career) and at the same time ‘hinder the designs of the Infanta of Spain’.49
Ignorant of the true extent of Essex’s slide towards disaster, James totally overestimated his potential value. The letters that passed between them at this stage no longer survive and are known only from reports by Essex’s intimates extracted under interrogation, but as the Earl fell deeper into disgrace his plans for both Scotland and Ireland began to stray into waters that were at best questionable and at worst treasonable. Working hand in glove with Mountjoy, Essex reassured the Scottish king that he would fully support his claim to the throne after Elizabeth’s death. In a decidedly murky manoeuvre, he then promised him that a mechanism would be devised by which his accession might, under certain unspecified circumstances, be contrived while the queen still lived.50
One possible stratagem secretly discussed between Essex and Mountjoy was that the new Lord Deputy should leave Ireland safely guarded, then cross over to England with an army of four thousand or five thousand men to join a force that Essex himself would raise.51 At the same time, James, as Essex imagined, ‘would enter into the cause’. Whether this meant actually invading England or merely giving a show of strength on the border, he did not specify. When Sir Henry Lee, Essex’s friend and admirer, hurriedly rode to James to sound him out, though, nothing came of it: the canny Scottish king made soothing noises but chose not to commit himself to anything so hazardous.52
With Essex now free but banished from Court, he was far from out of danger, as he was prevented from reaching the queen to plead his cause: he still arrogantly believed that, if he could only see her and talk to her, he could bend her to his will. The problem was how to get past Ralegh as Captain of the Guard. Never known for his patience, Essex tried again for outside help, sending the Earl of Southampton to Ireland and calling once more on Mountjoy to prepare an invasion force. But, to Southampton’s astonishment and dismay, Mountjoy refused. Seeing the extent of the collapse of Essex’s fortunes and the danger to himself, he ‘utterly rejected’ the venture.53 Acting to save Essex’s life while he was still a prisoner or to assist the putative heir to the throne, he declared, was one thing. But if what was at stake now was merely to ‘restore his fortune only . . . and to satisfy my Lord of Essex’s private ambition’, he would not risk his own skin ‘by discovery of the former project’.54
Mountjoy could hardly have been more candid. Accordingly, the increasingly desperate Essex changed tack, asking Mountjoy simply to write a letter that he might show to the queen, denouncing his enemies, now identified as Cecil, Ralegh and the handsome young Lord Cobham, Cecil’s brother-in-law, who had succeeded to the barony on his father’s death.55 Essex meant to present this letter personally to Elizabeth, to which end he asked Mountjoy to send him ‘divers captains and men of quality, such as he could spare’.56 Their role was to secure the Court against Ralegh’s men, whom Essex knew were under orders to deny him admission should he seek to attempt an entry. With the help of these captains, Essex would arrest Cecil and Ralegh. He would then be able to make his way freely through the Privy Chamber and into Elizabeth’s presence once more.57
As before, Mountjoy prudently declined to get involved. So, as Christmas approached, feeling himself boxed firmly into a corner, Essex tried one last approach to James.58 A trusted intermediary, ‘Norton the bookseller’, who frequently travelled to Scotland on business and would arouse no particular suspicion, collected a letter penned by Essex and took it to James.59 In the smuggled note, Essex melodramatically alleged that Cecil and his allies were suborning his servants, stealing his papers, forging letters and negotiating with Spain to put the Infanta on the throne. He went on to assure James that he was ‘summoned of all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under her burden’. The Scottish king, he said, could best protect his own interests by sending an ambassador to Elizabeth calling for her agreement to his accession, and asking her at the same time to reinstate Essex to all his former offices. He proposed the Earl of Mar for this delicate mission. And as Cuffe later claimed under interrogation, Essex even wrote a list of instructions and general information to present to Mar when he arrived in London.60
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The Earl of Mar would indeed be sent by James, but only when it was too late. Around noon on Sunday, 8 February 1601, Patrick Brewe, one of the wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company, was standing outside his house in Lombard Street in the City of London.61 Suddenly, he saw Essex, flanked by the Earls of Southampton, Rutland and Bedford and closely followed by Sir Christopher Blount, riding down Cheapside at the head of some three hundred of their supporters, all armed with rapiers. In the ensuing investigations, Brewe repeated what he had heard Essex cry out to the startled Londoners: ‘God save the Queen’s Majesty, and pray for her, and pray to God to bless and keep her, and to keep this city from the Spaniards, for the Crown of England is sold to strangers.’62 Thomas Curson, a London armourer, confirmed that Essex had shouted to anyone who would listen that ‘the Crown of England was sold to Spain.’63
Although neither Brewe nor Curson knew it at the time, they were witnesses to the final act in the drama that was Essex’s life. Robert Cecil, addressing his fellow privy councillors in the Star Chamber a few days later, would describe the Earl as ‘traitorous’, ‘more like a monster than a man’, someone who had been clandestinely plotting treason for many years.64 A Catholic fifth columnist, a sympathizer of Robert Parsons and the Jesuits, he was out to dethrone Elizabeth and restore the old faith. After reaching a secret deal with Tyrone during their infamous parley, he had conspired to raise the city on the false report that his own life was in danger as a prelude to capturing the queen and the Court and making himself king. Assiduously cultivating ‘popularity’, ‘insinuating himself into the favour of the people’, he had postured as a successful war leader so as to build up a military following. After he had ‘removed’ all those privy councillors loyal to Elizabeth, he would ‘put beside [depose]’ the queen herself. For his grand finale, he would then make the whole of England the prey of Irish kerns.65