by John Guy
• • •
As Cecil spun his spider’s web around Essex, determined to trap and devour him, an earlier incident involving Essex and a literary work took on a fresh and highly sinister meaning. Shortly before the Earl had left to take up his command in Ireland, the lawyer John Hayward had published a book entitled The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII. A highly coloured account of Bolingbroke’s deposition of Richard II in 1399, the book described the corruption of Richard’s government in ways that seemed uncannily similar to the complaints the Earl had been levelling against Cecil and his allies ever since his return from Cádiz. Furthermore, the book began with a fulsome dedication to Essex, written in such a way as to appear to be an incitement to his political ambitions.39
An instant bestseller, Hayward’s book had been the talk of London. Furious at what she believed to be its innuendoes, Elizabeth sent its author to the Tower, where he would remain until after her death. Her ‘Little Black Husband’ Whitgift ordered the offending dedication to be excised from all copies of the book (although not a single copy surviving today lacks it), and 1,500 copies of a ‘corrected’ second edition still awaiting binding were seized and burned.40
Gone were the days when Cecil and Ralegh exchanged a risqué joke with Essex about the deposed King Richard II, as they had done after their clandestine dinner on the eve of the Azores expedition. As Cecil now framed the case, Essex had deserted his post in Ulster, poised to summon an army from Ireland. His ‘wicked purpose’ was to give those loyal servants closest to the queen the treatment meted out by Bolingbroke to Bushy, Bagot and Green. After that, Essex would ‘deal’ with Elizabeth as Bolingbroke had ‘dealt’ with King Richard and ‘set the Crown of England upon his own head’.41 Hayward’s book was thus, in Cecil’s opinion, Essex’s manifesto in his bid for the throne.42
Cecil arranged with Chief Justice Popham to put Essex and his chief ally, the Earl of Southampton, on trial for treason at Westminster Hall on Thursday, 19 February. In the interim, an important loose end had to be cleared up. Immediately after his dash back to Essex House following his failed attempt to rouse the city, Essex had hurriedly burned his papers. Or had he? What tore away at Cecil’s brain was the question of what had been inside a little black taffeta bag that the Earl always wore around his neck. When he had rushed in, he had taken a key out of the bag, using it to unlock a small iron chest containing a book about his troubles that he had written himself. This he reluctantly burned, along with a list of names he carried in his pocket and the contents of another chest, which he had to break open, as the key was lost. But there had been a paper inside the bag as well as the key. It was said to be quite small, only about a quarter of a sheet, and with just six or seven lines ‘not of his own hand, but written by another man’.43
Interrogated in the Tower as to the contents of the bag, the Earl’s spin doctor Henry Cuffe testified explosively that the missing paper had been a ciphered message from James VI.44 If it still existed, Cecil was determined to find it. He ordered Sir John Peyton, the newly appointed Lieutenant of the Tower, to subject Essex to the supreme humiliation of a full body search. Peyton did as he was bid, searching the Earl’s person, ‘his body and legs, naked’ in addition to his shirts and other clothing, but he found nothing. What Cecil was looking for but never managed to find was written proof of collusion between Essex, James and Tyrone over the future of Ireland and the succession. Had he found it, the course of British history might have been very different.45
• • •
As prominent aristocrats, Essex and Southampton were entitled to be tried by their peers in the Lord Steward’s Court. (Chief Justice Popham and his fellow judges were present throughout to advise on points of law.) A special platform was constructed for the trial in the shape of a square, with raised seating on opposite sides covered in green cloth for the peers. Nine earls were present, among them Nottingham and Worcester, and sixteen barons. Buckhurst presided as acting Lord Steward, seated on a raised chair at the upper end of the square beneath a canopy of state. Sir Edward Coke, flushed with success after his bravura performance in the trial of Dr Lopez and now well ensconced as Queen’s Attorney, sat opposite him on a low bench, flanked by Francis Bacon, his junior for the day. As at Lopez’s trial, Coke would prove himself a master of hostile advocacy. Bacon, too, hungry for promotion, would stick the knife into his old patron at every opportunity.46
Although it was a long trial, lasting from eight in the morning until seven at night, guilty verdicts were a foregone conclusion. Both defendants were condemned to death and returned to the Tower to await execution. Southampton’s sentence would later be commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds that Essex had led him astray.47 Stripped of his lands and title, he was to be imprisoned at the queen’s pleasure. Essex melodramatically refused to plead for mercy, declaring that it would be beneath his dignity. When Buckhurst offered him the opportunity, as the law required, he replied, ‘I had rather die than live in misery.’48
More important than the trial itself is what happened afterwards. Still obsessed by the missing contents of Essex’s black taffeta bag, Cecil demanded more information on the Earl’s activities in Ireland. To fish for it, he sent a preacher, Dr Thomas Dove, Dean of Norwich, to the Tower, carefully primed to encourage Essex to confess everything so that he could die with his conscience clear. When that failed, Cecil redoubled his efforts, sending Dr Abdias Assheton, one of the Earl’s own chaplains, who knew precisely how to touch Essex’s emotions and play on his weaknesses. Assheton did a psychological demolition job on the Earl, destroying his sense of heroic failure and prompting a flood of fresh evidence that led to the conviction of his stepfather, Christopher Blount, along with Charles Danvers, John Davies, Sir Gelly Meyrick and Henry Cuffe.49
Typically, Essex cast the blame on his followers. Meyrick and Cuffe would be hanged at Tyburn, Blount and Danvers beheaded on Tower Hill. Unfortunately for Cecil, Assheton failed to extract any useful information about what had really happened in Ireland. Or, if he did, Cecil suppressed it on the grounds that it implicated the new Lord Deputy Mountjoy, who was getting the upper hand against Tyrone and the rebels and thus much too valuable to lose. It may be no coincidence that Elizabeth would send Mountjoy a personal letter of pardon without ever stating explicitly what it was he was supposed to have done wrong.50
• • •
Shortly after eight o’clock on the morning of Ash Wednesday (25 February), Essex was beheaded in the inner courtyard of the Tower before a small group of witnesses handpicked by the queen.51 In innumerable biographies of Elizabeth it has been suggested that she found herself psychologically unable to sign his death warrant. After several days of indecision following his trial, so the story goes, she signed it on 23 February, then countermanded the order the next day, so strong still was her emotional tie to Leicester’s stepson.52 Camden in his Annales says that ‘she wavered in her mind’ thanks to ‘her former affection and favour towards him’.53
In truth, her bond to him had long been severed and, if she wavered, it was only for a couple of hours. She signed his death warrant on the afternoon of Shrove Tuesday (24th), as soon as Cecil was satisfied that Assheton could prise no more information from him.54 Cecil told the constable of the Tower that the signed warrant would arrive before nightfall. Later, he instructed Sir John Peyton that Essex was to be told after finishing his supper that he would die the following morning.55
Camden says that Elizabeth sent one ‘Sir Ed. Cary’ to the Tower to reprieve Essex. Later, she sent ‘a fresh command by Darcy that he should be put to death’.56 Sir Edward Carey, a kinsman of Sir Robert Carey, was one of her longest-serving grooms of the Privy Chamber; Edward Darcy was a much younger colleague.57 The crucial detail Camden omits is that Carey was sent on his mission in the early evening, just as Elizabeth was coming down from her Bedchamber to the Great Hall at Whitehall to watch a play by the very same Lord Chamberlain’s Men w
ho had performed Richard II at the Globe barely three weeks before. She sent Darcy to the Tower to reinstate the warrant the minute the play was over.58
The title of this play, almost certainly by Shakespeare, is, maddeningly, not recorded. During it, however, Elizabeth decided that Essex must die. Hubristic, egotistical, selfish, ungrateful, immature, incapable of compromise and with a towering sense of his own entitlement, his focus was himself and always had been. The worst of his many mistakes had been to mutter in Elizabeth’s hearing that ‘her conditions were as crooked as her carcass’ after she had struck him across the face.
• • •
In August 1601, six months after Essex mounted the scaffold, Elizabeth would give an audience to the noted lawyer and antiquary William Lambarde. Recently appointed the Keeper of the Rolls and Records in the Tower of London, he had come to her Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace to present her with what he called a Pandecta Rotulorum, an inventory, or ‘digest’, of the records in his charge.59 As he went through the list with her, reign by reign, beginning with King John, she asked him to explain what some of these documents were, and what some of the more obscure Latin terms and names used in them meant. Lambarde seems to have immensely relished showing off his expertise, until they reached Richard II’s reign, when a lightning bolt struck. ‘I am Richard II,’ Elizabeth suddenly announced sententiously, ‘know ye not that?’ She then went on to add, ‘He that will forget God will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was forty times played in open streets and houses.’60
Fully aware that she was speaking of Essex, Lambarde responded stoutly but tactfully. ‘Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned creature Your Majesty ever made.’ The conversation then switched back to the safer ground of the Tower records, until Elizabeth brought it back to Richard. Had Lambarde seen ‘any true picture or lively representation of his countenance and person’? Lambarde said no, prompting her to offer to ask the keeper of her gallery at Whitehall to show him a portrait she had recently acquired. The conversation ended with Elizabeth remarking, ‘In those days force and arms did prevail, but now the wit of the fox is ever on foot, so as hardly a faithful and virtuous man may be found.’61
She was no fool. Had she come to suspect that Essex’s enemies had plotted to destroy him ever since that terrible day when he turned his back on her and she struck him across the face? Had she guessed that they set him up to fail in Ireland, then tempted him to some suitably rash action on his return? But then he had, after all, invited it: had she not herself called him a ‘rash and temerarious youth’ to his face and an unbridled horse behind his back?
For nearly four hundred years, Elizabeth’s words have been endlessly dissected. Doubt has even been cast on Lambarde’s transcript of their conversation, but these have recently been dispelled by the discovery of a fresh version whose authenticity is beyond question.62 By saying ‘He that will forget God will also forget his benefactors,’ the queen clearly meant that Essex’s conduct was, in her eyes, as much a failure to respect her royal status as a failure to respect God. When she said, ‘this tragedy was forty times played in open streets and houses,’ she was obviously not referring to Shakespeare’s play but to the fact that Essex and others of his acquaintance had wantonly overreached themselves in criticizing her manner of rule ‘in open streets and houses’.63 She particularly suspected Thomas Smythe, whose house in Gracechurch Street Essex had visited early on that fateful Sunday morning. In retaliation, she had dismissed Smythe from his post as sheriff and sent him to the Tower.64
But her words must also in part be taken at face value. When she said, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’, it would seem she really did suspect that, had Essex succeeded in taking Whitehall and the Tower, he would have ‘dealt’ with her as Bolingbroke had ‘dealt’ with Richard. It was a suspicion that brought home to her that monarchy, even if divine, was also transient and mortal. The institution might live on, but its incumbents changed and she soon must die.
And when that time drew nigh, would she, too, feel, like Bolingbroke in the closing scene of Shakespeare’s play, that her own hands were drenched in blood?65 She had told Burghley that, if she signed the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots, she would be condoning a regicide. The ‘divinity of kingship’ would for ever be attenuated, making the monarchy accountable to Parliament and threatening a twilight world darkened with threats, confusion and moral ambiguities.
Like Bolingbroke, she had killed a God-appointed ruler. It was a heavy load she would carry to the grave.
21. The Queen’s Speech
Ever since the Treaty of Vervins, cries for peace with Spain had steadily become more strident.1 Robert Cecil, with his own mercantile investments to think of, had led the peace party in the Privy Council. And, as the long anxious months went by, the queen’s resolve never to make peace with Spain in her lifetime had slowly begun to waver. In September 1599, a bare fortnight after Archduke Albert had made his triumphant entry into Brussels with his new bride, the Infanta Isabella, he had put out an olive branch, assuring Elizabeth of his desire for peace. Lying through his teeth, Albert added that he had received full authority from his new brother-in-law, the Spanish King Philip III, to discuss terms.2
Elizabeth swiftly reassured Count Maurice and the States General that she would do nothing without them.3 She already knew their response: they adamantly opposed a settlement with Spain. Barely was his father cold in the grave than Philip had imposed a trade embargo on the Dutch, aiming to hit them where it hurt most. And she knew only too well, as they did, that Albert’s olive branch had been triggered not by goodwill but by mutinies in his armies.4
On the afternoon of Sunday, 9 March 1600, Lodewijk Verreycken, the Archduke’s special envoy, requested an audience at Richmond Palace.5 To his dismay, Elizabeth gave him a bruising reception, fencing irritably with him. For his part, Verreycken was overconfident. Rather than preparing for the interview, he had been wined and dined by Lord Buckhurst and attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I.6
Deeply vexed with Verreycken for talking down to her as if a peace was a virtual certainty, Elizabeth quibbled that his letters of credence were signed only by Albert and not by Philip. She then ostentatiously changed the topic to the appalling weather, asking him how the Infanta was coping with her move from the Escorial to freezing Brussels.7 Afterwards, Cecil, Nottingham and Buckhurst tore his proposals to shreds. When Verreycken demanded that the queen’s remaining auxiliary troops be withdrawn from the Netherlands and that all trade between England and the Dutch should cease, he was greeted with a deafening silence. Curious to see if a deal could still be done, the privy councillors asked whether Philip would concede English merchants free passage to the trade of the East Indies, but Verreycken refused. Nor was he able to promise that no Spanish aid would be given to Tyrone’s rebels.8
Verreycken was sent back to Brussels with a demand that the Archduke should fundamentally revise the peace terms and was offered a month to provide an answer. The result was a much-heralded peace conference at Boulogne in May, when Spanish, Flemish and English delegates finally sat down together.9 The Dutch held their breath, but the negotiations were doomed to fail. Elizabeth’s instructions to Sir Henry Neville, the new ambassador to France who led the English delegation, ran to ten closely written pages and made it clear that there was to be no compromise over the auxiliaries and no agreement to a hostile move against the Dutch States. Neville was also told to stipulate that free trade to the East Indies would be considered a litmus test of a ‘true amity’ with Spain, without which the two countries must remain at war.10
• • •
With peace once more off the agenda, Philip made fresh plans to invade Ireland, where Mountjoy was fast boxing the rebels into their Ulster homeland. Just as the Spanish delegates to the Boulogne conference were on their way to file their report in Brussels, Tyrone, who had a price
of 4,000 marks (£2.6 million today) put on his head, made a loud appeal for Spanish aid. Without delay, Philip consulted the Council of State. ‘We think that to protect and help these Catholics will be an act most worthy of Your Majesty’s greatness’ was the unanimous reply. ‘Your Majesty will be able to copy what the queen does through the rebels of Holland and Zeeland, and at a very small cost.’11 Juan de Idiáquez, one of the hawks who had encouraged the Portuguese double agent Manuel de Andrada to incite Dr Lopez to poison the queen, argued for a fifth Armada to be sent to southern Ireland to bring Elizabeth to her knees. His fellow councillors urged caution: Spain could barely find enough money to pay the Archduke’s troops and an expedition that went off at half-cock would jeopardize the very interests that Philip hoped to protect.12
But Philip sided with de Idiáquez. On Monday, 24 August 1601, a fifth Armada set sail from the port of Lisbon, destined for Ireland. On board a fleet of thirty-three ships, nineteen of them warships and the rest armed merchantmen and transport vessels, were 4,500 soldiers under the command of Don Juan del Águila. The expedition would be jinxed from the beginning. Many of the mariners were foreign conscripts, pressed into service by a last-minute raid on foreign shipping. They could not understand their officers and had no loyalty to the king or to the cause. As one of Águila’s naval commanders complained, ‘When the action came, I had more need to protect myself from the enemy I was carrying with the Armada than from the enemy without . . . Once in Ireland, many of them left me for the enemy.’13