Elizabeth
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But John Harington and others close to her knew the cold truth. When he had seen her two days after Christmas, Harington had noticed a profound deterioration. Writing to his beloved wife, Mary, whom he affectionately called ‘Sweet Mall’, he said he found Elizabeth ‘in most pitiable state’. She was eating little and, when she put a golden cup to her lips and tried to drink, ‘her heart seemeth too full to lack more filling.’ Although she rallied enough to ask him what he had been writing, her reply, when he began to read some of his verses, ‘to feed her humour’, was poignant: ‘When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters.’
Still worse, she began suffering from intermittent bouts of memory loss. She sometimes sent for people, only to dismiss them ‘in anger’ when they arrived. ‘But who’, Harington mused sorrowfully, ‘shall say “Your Highness hath forgotten?”’74
The killer blow would be the death of a woman who had served her faithfully for well over forty years and ended up, as it was now said, her closest female friend. This evidently referred to Kate Carey, Countess of Nottingham. The precise nature of her relationship with the queen remains infuriatingly obscure: the loss of Kate’s family papers is to blame. But it was said that Elizabeth fell into a deep ‘melancholy’ when the news was brought to her, complaining of pains in her head, aches in her bones and continual cold in her legs, so that none of her privy councillors except Cecil dared to approach her.75
Kate died at her London home on Thursday, 24 February after suffering numerous ‘fits’.76 She was no more than fifty-seven.* Her youngest brother, Robert, claimed he had not seen the queen so afflicted since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. ‘No, Robin, I am not well,’ she had answered in response to his solicitous enquiries. Her heart, she said, was ‘sad and heavy’, and then, to Carey’s great alarm, she gave ‘forty or fifty great sighs’.77
Kate had been one of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen since she was barely fifteen and a maid of honour before that. Although her younger sister Philadelphia Scrope was still alive and in the Privy Chamber, it was said she had never been as intimate with the queen as Kate. All those closest to Elizabeth before or shortly after she came to the throne were now gone. To lose Kate was yet another intimation of her own mortality. Had she not already lived longer than her father, her grandfather Henry VII and her siblings?
But if Elizabeth was preparing to die, who was to succeed her? Tyrone had yet to submit and was still pursuing his guerrilla war in Ulster. And what of Spain’s fresh search for a Catholic candidate for her throne? Momentous, menacing uncertainties faced the country and the state: the course of events rested on a knife’s edge.
23. The Final Vigil
On Wednesday, 16 February 1603, Elizabeth finally accepted that if she was to keep Ireland safely in her possession before she died, she would have to come to terms with Tyrone. She considered it to be her sacred duty to preserve the monarchy in the same state as she had received it at her coronation. Believing death to be fast approaching, she dictated a letter to Mountjoy in which she conceded that she must yield:
We conceive the world hath seen sufficiently how dear the conservation of that kingdom and people hath been unto us, and how precious we have been of our honour that have of late rejected so many of those offers of his, only because we were sorry to make a precedent of facility to show grace or favour to him that hath been the author of so much misery to our loving subjects. Nevertheless because it seemeth that there is a general conceit that this reduction may prove profitable to the state by sparing the effusion of Christian blood . . . we are content to lay aside anything that may herein contrary our own private affections and will consider that clemency hath as eminent a place in supreme authority as justice and severity.1
Even then, she hobbled her Lord Deputy. ‘We require you to be careful to preserve our dignity in all circumstances,’ she cautioned. ‘[Tyrone] shall have his life and receive upon his coming-in such other conditions as shall be honourable and reasonable for us to grant him.’ As Mountjoy complained to his secretary when they pored over her letter together, this meant no more and no less than that he was ‘to send for Tyrone, with promise of security for his life only’ in exchange for his humble submission. Anything else needed Elizabeth’s personal approval.2
After sleeping on it, she dramatically changed tack, writing again the following day offering Mountjoy more flexibility. Now, he might offer Tyrone his life, liberty and pardon. Religion was to be excluded from the conversation, but even on this sensitive point, she made it clear that the rebel leader need have ‘little fear of prosecution’ if he remained a Catholic. He must surrender his lands in Ulster but, once his garrisons and fortified places had been demolished and free traffic assured, he might have them back. The queen’s one sticking point was that he must resign his title and take a different one. The name of Tyrone, indistinguishable as it was from the cause of revolt, was to be proscribed for ever.3
The following day, Cecil echoed and amplified Elizabeth’s instructions. In a postscript that plainly underlined her vulnerability and inner turmoil, he explained that she ‘was in a conflict with herself’. She believed she was on a slippery slope to Hades if she discussed terms with a traitor; on the other hand, talks with Tyrone were the only way to pacify Ireland. Well aware that Tyrone would never abandon his ancestral title, Cecil advised Mountjoy first to make a show of obedience to her orders, making sure his efforts were recorded in writing. Choosing his words with extreme caution for fear they might be misinterpreted by the queen, Cecil then privately urged the Lord Deputy to strive for a settlement by whatever means he saw fit, underhand if necessary. Sometimes, he revealingly confided, ‘honest servants must strain a little when they serve princes.’ It was a latitude he had never allowed his hated rival Essex.4
• • •
Elizabeth’s downward slide, meanwhile, continued. ‘I am not sick, I feel no pain, and yet I pine away,’ she was reputed to have said.5 The agony from her arthritis was briefly in remission, but she was suffering from an extreme ‘melancholy’ and refusing to move from Richmond to Whitehall.6 She had little appetite for food. She was plagued by her old insomnia, even though she managed to snatch an hour or two of sleep during daylight hours. She then came down with bronchitis, called in the sources ‘an inflammation from the breast upwards’.7
On Tuesday, 15 March, a visiting Dutch diplomat, writing in French, sent a more detailed report to the States General. The queen, he said, had been ill for more than fifteen days. For ten or twelve of them, she had been unable to sleep. For the last three or four, she had managed four or five hours a night. She had begun to eat again but would not hear of medicine. A sudden ‘defluxion’ of foul matter into her throat had almost choked her. Said to be caused by mouth abscesses (quelques petites apostumes dans la bouche) rather than by phlegm or catarrh, this particular episode (if it happened this way) would have been linked to her periodontal problems. For almost half an hour, she could scarcely speak.8
Cecil had waited until the 9th before briefing his spy and chief intelligencer in Edinburgh, George Nicolson, alias ‘the pigeon’, who carried the secret correspondence between Cecil and James VI up and down the Great North Road. ‘All flesh’, he warned, ‘is subject to mortality.’ In a doomed attempt to pre-empt rumours of her imminent demise, he declared the queen to be ‘free from any peril’. But ‘I must confess to you that she had been so ill disposed these eight or nine days as I am fearful lest the continuance of such accidents should bring Her Majesty to future weakness, and so to be in danger of that which I hope mine eyes shall never see.’9
When Robert Carey, Kate’s youngest brother, saw Elizabeth ten days later, she was in seclusion in her inner Bedchamber.10 Hearing that she had expressed a desire to attend chapel the next morning, he waited hopefully with the other courtiers, expecting her to take her usual place. But she did not appear. Instead, she said she
would hear the service from her privy closet, a small space with a clerestory window squeezed in off a narrow gallery linking the chapel to the Privy Chamber. Like her father, she always made her real devotions there, after which she would show herself in public in the chapel.
But, at the last moment, she changed her mind again. When the familiar liturgy began, she listened to it prostrate on cushions set out for her in the Privy Chamber, ‘hard by the closet door’.11 This was eerily like her old adversary Philip II, who, when dying, had listened to the chanting of the monks and priests at the altar in the monastic church at the Escorial through an interior window in his bedchamber.
After that, Elizabeth rapidly deteriorated. Eating less and stubbornly refusing to go to bed for two days and three nights, she sat immobile on a stool in her nightgown, staring into space. She ‘had a persuasion that if she once lay down, she would never rise’, said the well-informed John Chamberlain.12 Elizabeth Southwell thought she knew why. In a dream some nights before, affirmed Southwell, the queen said she had seen a ghoulish apparition of herself ‘in a light of fire’, and she feared a similar nightmare if she returned to bed, taking it to be a terrible portent of the torments of hell.13
If her women had only seen such a thing, the queen had continued, they would not try to persuade her to sleep as they did. When Cecil dared to force her to take to her bed, she berated him, calling him ‘Little man, little man’ and reminding him that ‘must’ was a word ‘not to be used to princes’. ‘If your father had lived,’ she is said to have growled, ‘ye durst not have said so much: but thou knowest I must die, and that maketh thee so presumptuous.’14
Southwell’s somewhat lurid, repeatedly recycled account must be questioned, coming as it does from someone who, in 1605, would convert to Catholicism and flee the country disguised as a page in order to marry her new (and already married) lover, Robert Dudley, Leicester’s illegitimate son by Douglas Sheffield.15 While the queen’s alleged put-down of Cecil was highly characteristic of a woman who had cruelly nicknamed him ‘Elf’ and ‘Pygmy’, Southwell’s assertion that her source was her great-aunt Philadelphia Scrope does not ring true: Scrope would have been unlikely to keep such a sensational snippet from her brother Robert Carey, and he does not mention it in his otherwise effusive Memoirs. Another of Southwell’s stories of the discovery of a playing card, the queen of hearts, nailed to the bottom of Elizabeth’s chair is even more implausible. The card had supposedly been hammered straight through the forehead, suggesting a plot to kill the queen through sorcery in the inner Bedchamber.16
• • •
Kate Carey’s bereaved husband, Lord Admiral Nottingham, at last managed to coax the queen into her bed.17 When she spurned all medication, he was sent for as a last resort. He had not seen Elizabeth since Kate’s death, which he had taken badly, absenting himself from Court and shutting himself up in his own chamber to mourn in private.18
The diarist John Manningham, who sometimes dined with one of the queen’s chaplains, Dr Parry, reported that she had been troubled by ‘melancholy’ on and off for more than three months. Her physicians, he said, were certain that she could have lived many more years if only she had taken medicine, chiefly for her chest.19 It was as though she had given up: she seemed to be ‘weary of life’, as she had reputedly told de Beaumont, the French ambassador.20
By Wednesday, 23 March, when Robert Carey saw her for the last time, it was clear that she was wasting away. Speechless by midday, she rallied a little during the course of the afternoon, demanding some broth, but by the evening she was sinking fast.21 And she knew it. Just as her father, when facing death, had called for Archbishop Cranmer, so she now summoned Archbishop Whitgift, the man she had nicknamed ‘Little Black Husband’.
At about six o’clock that evening, no longer able to speak, she made signs that he should be sent for, along with her almoner and chaplains. Carey was allowed to kneel beside her bed. ‘[I] sat upon my knees full of tears to see that heavy sight,’ he wrote.22 The queen ‘lay upon her back, with one hand in the bed, and the other without’, and he listened as she did her best to respond to Whitgift’s gentle questions about her faith in God by ‘lifting up her eyes, and holding up her hand’. Although a great queen, Carey heard the archbishop say, she would soon have to ‘yield an account of her stewardship to the King of kings’.23
When, after he had been ‘long in prayer’, Whitgift stopped, the dying queen made a sign which Carey’s sister Philadelphia Scrope understood. Elizabeth wanted the archbishop to continue praying. By now, Whitgift was exhausted, his knees ‘weary’, for he was over seventy himself and would die from a stroke within a year. Stalwart to the last, he prayed for another half an hour, and then another. By then, Elizabeth, too, had tired and the archbishop was at long last able to rise from his knees and leave her. Carey left with him. ‘By this time it grew late, and everyone departed,’ he tells us, ‘all but her women that attended her.’ They did not have to attend her for long: she died peacefully at about three o’clock on Thursday morning.24 Among a small packet of letters found beside her bed tied up with ribbon, the writing slightly blotted from her tears, was Leicester’s final letter to her, on to the back of which she had scribbled in her own distinctive handwriting ‘his last letter’.25
• • •
The queen’s body was barely cold before what Carey called ‘false lies’ began to circulate as to whether she had named her successor.26 Speechless by Wednesday midday, she had been able to make only signs.27 Possibly relying on information from his sister Philadelphia, Carey claims in his Memoirs that, on her last afternoon, Elizabeth had made a sign for her Privy Council to be summoned to her bedside. Then, when James’s name was mentioned, she put her hand to her head.28
Whether she meant to signal her assent to James as she touched her head because that was where she wore her crown, or whether she was just touching it because it hurt her, is open for debate. In the light of a newly discovered final letter she sent to James shortly before Kate Carey’s death, it is most unlikely that Elizabeth meant to make things easy for the Scottish king. Battling against her arthritis to write in her own hand, she sarcastically mocked his over-enthusiastic response to Spanish overtures for a rapprochement with the Catholic powers. She had always known, she remarked reproachfully, that ‘you had no particular love to me.’ In fact, she said, James’s eagerness to treat with Catholics had dishonoured her and everything she had ever stood for.29
Psychologically, too, it seems doubtful that she named her successor. She had airily swept aside such requests for so many long years. ‘I care not for death,’ she had told members of Parliament in 1566, when they had pleaded with her to do so. ‘For all men are mortal. And, though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything.’30
The meaning of Elizabeth’s gesture on that final afternoon will always remain enigmatic, but to smooth James’s path to the throne and so advance their careers and their fortunes in the new reign, the privy councillors standing around her bedside conspired to interpret it as an explicit designation of James. ‘By putting her hand to her head when the King of Scots was named to succeed her,’ wrote Carey, ‘they all knew he was the man she desired should reign after her.’31
The ‘false lies’ Carey denounced in his Memoirs were first fed by Cecil and Nottingham to Scaramelli, who describes how, ‘with tears and sighs’, Elizabeth begged her advisers to care for her realm and to bestow the Crown on the candidate they judged to be most deserving. This, she purportedly said, ‘in her secret thought’, had all along been James, for the Scottish king was far better entitled than she had ever been to rule, ‘both in right of birth and because he excelled her in merit having been born a king, while she was but a private person’. James, she implausibly added, was all the more credible as her heir ‘in that he brought with him a whole kingdom, whi
le she had brought nothing but herself, a woman.’32
Scaramelli’s colleague Marin Cavalli, the Venetian ambassador to France, elaborated on this fairy tale. He would have us believe that, shortly before she died, Elizabeth found her speech miraculously restored, enabling her to name James as her successor and explain her reasons. She then made something of a speech, exhorting her councillors to be loyal to the new king, before handing Cecil a ‘casket’ intended for James which contained all manner of papers, one being ‘A Memorial on the Methods of Governing Well’.33
The most finely detailed, widely credited of these fictions sprang from the pen of Sir Robert Cotton, the historian and antiquary who helped his good friend and former schoolmaster William Camden to research the Annales. Cotton reports that Elizabeth, first ‘falling into speech’ with Nottingham on or about 14 January, had protested, ‘My seat hath been ever the throne of kings, and none but my next heir of blood and descent should succeed me.’34 Prompted by Nottingham to repeat this to Cecil and Egerton on 22 March – conveniently for them, the last day on which she fully retained the power of speech – she was said to have repeated, ‘I told you my seat had been the seat of kings, and I will have no Rascal to succeed me, and who should succeed me but a king.’ Cecil, claims Cotton, asked her to explain more precisely what she meant: ‘Whereunto she replied that her meaning was a king should succeed her, and who, quoth she, should that be but “Our cousin of Scotland.”’ Cecil asked her whether that was ‘her absolute resolution’. To that, she purportedly retorted, ‘I pray you trouble me no more, I’ll have none but him.’35
Wary of offending James when finishing up in manuscript the second instalment of his Annales in 1617, Camden included this story, which appears in all the printed versions of his work.36 His narrative is taken as fact by many of Elizabeth’s biographers. But the story is flatly contradicted by de Beaumont’s far more credible dispatches to Henry IV and his principal secretary, Nicolas de Neufville, Sieur de Villeroy.37 Now rediscovered in their original, accurate French texts and crammed with verifiable detail, they show that this meticulous French diplomat, who was either a guest at Court or travelling to Richmond every single day to garner news, had access to the highest-placed sources. Writing to Villeroy on the late evening of 22 March, de Beaumont was adamant that Elizabeth had made no will and named no successor.38 And, late in the day following her death, he confirmed this in another dispatch to his opposite number in Valladolid.39