Elizabeth

by John Guy

  And yet, two weeks after his first report and ten days after the second, de Beaumont would recount a radically different version of events. The shift came directly after Cecil and Nottingham summoned him and spun him a yarn. Elizabeth, a few days before her death, these councillors now claimed, had told them ‘in confidence’ that she recognized no other successor but James. She did not ‘want her kingdom to fall into the hands of scoundrels, that is to say of Rascals (c’est à dire des Canailles)’. When, later, they asked her to attest her wishes before other privy councillors, she – being unable to speak – had made a sign by putting her hand to her head.40

  The reference to des Canailles (the ‘Rascals’) strongly suggests that Cecil and Nottingham, speaking two weeks after the events they claimed to be describing, were working to a script. Cotton, Camden and John Manningham were deceived, but de Beaumont was always sceptical.41 Why had the queen’s declaration about not wanting her throne to fall into the hands of rascals only now become known?

  • • •

  Elizabeth died before she knew the outcome of Mountjoy’s mission. Armed with her second letter to him, he had been able to track Tyrone down to his hideout in the great forest of Glenconkyne and entice him to a rendezvous with the offer of three weeks’ safe conduct. On the eve of the meeting, a messenger, riding ‘haste-post-haste’ from London and making an unusually swift crossing over the Irish Sea, arrived late at night with a report of the queen’s death. He was led instantly to Mountjoy’s secretary and sworn to keep this sensational news absolutely secret from all except the Lord Deputy himself.42

  Mountjoy decided to press ahead urgently before news of the queen’s passing leaked out. Kneeling before him on Wednesday, 30 March, the rebel leader made his humble submission on oath to Elizabeth and received his pardon, oblivious of the fact that she was already dead.43 Swearing allegiance to the English monarchy, he promised to renounce foreign alliances, especially with Spain, to resign his ancestral title and to put his lands at the disposal of the Crown. A secret memorandum records that, shortly before the ceremony, Mountjoy had signed an irrevocable agreement promising to restore Tyrone’s title and all of his lands save for some two thousand or so acres.44

  It was the closest of finishes. Had Elizabeth died a month or so earlier, Tyrone’s supporters might well have rallied and he could have played a confident pan-Britannic game from a position of strength as a broker for Ireland’s future with James. He might even have taken a decisive role in determining the English succession itself. At the very least, he might have secured Catholic toleration in Ireland. With the convert Henry IV now secure on the French throne and James married to another convert to Catholicism, that would have seemed entirely feasible.45

  • • •

  In Valladolid, meanwhile, the Spanish Council of State had been sharply split for months over how hard to press Henry IV and the pope to agree a compromise Catholic candidate for Elizabeth’s throne.46 While Philip III greeted the news of the death of the heretic bastard queen with jubilation, his satisfaction was bittersweet. Briefly, the Council debated compelling James to declare himself a Catholic by force as the alternative to a last-ditch, highly risky attempt to make the Infanta Queen of England. In a fit of wishful thinking, Philip ordered his forces to be put in readiness so that ‘the King of Scotland or any other contender for the English throne might see how much help such forces might be if they were with him, and if not, how much of a threat’. There was even rash talk of capturing or demanding secession of the Isle of Wight as a bargaining tool.47

  The Constable of Castile knew better. A former Governor of Milan and Captain-General of the Spanish forces allied to the French Catholic League, he drew on his extensive military and naval experience. Besides, his mother, Lady Jane Dormer, the widow of the same Count of Feria who had met Elizabeth on the eve of her accession and judged her to be ‘a very vain and clever woman’, had for many years been a supporter of James, to whom she had written several times, urging him to embrace Catholicism. She had told her son precisely how badly the Scottish king would be likely to react to Spanish intimidation.48

  The Constable’s proposal, eventually adopted in a modified form, was to set aside 200,000 gold escudos (roughly £75 million today) as bribes to secure goodwill in England once James was crowned. It was a case of sheer necessity: through his quiet diplomacy with France and Rome over several years, and most especially by pretending until the very last moment that he planned to join his wife in converting to Catholicism, James had outwitted the Catholic powers. And Philip, for all his efforts and expenditure, had proved himself incapable of identifying a viable candidate of his own.49

  • • •

  When Cecil had first used that fatal word ‘mortality’ in his letter to his ‘pigeon’ George Nicolson on 9 March, he and his allies began preparing for a smooth transition of power to James.50 Noblemen within a radius of fifty miles were summoned to Richmond. Promising them honours and rewards to win their loyalty, Cecil made a pact with them to prop up the privy councillors’ authority until it could be renewed by the new king, for, technically, their power would legally expire when Elizabeth breathed her last.51 At Court, the queen’s guard was doubled.52 In London, the city watches were put on maximum alert, large public gatherings outlawed, dissident Catholics rounded up and theatres closed.53 Cecil had Arbella Stuart moved from Derbyshire to Woodstock in Oxfordshire and placed under close guard as an added precaution.54

  On Saturday, 19 March, Cecil sent James a draft of the proclamation the Privy Council would issue announcing his accession. It was, observed the Scottish king’s intermediary Edward Bruce, now Lord Kinloss, ‘set of music that soundeth so sweetly in the ears of “30” [King James] that he can alter no notes in so agreeable a harmony’.55 To the consternation of foreign ambassadors, the ports were then closed as part of a more general information blackout. Neither people nor letters were allowed to leave the country.56 Scaramelli managed to circumvent this by sending his dispatches ‘by many different routes in the hope that one copy’ would get through.57 Other envoys were not so lucky.

  Determined to be the first to deliver the news of James’s succession to Scotland if he could, Robert Carey had bribed a Court insider to send him word the moment Elizabeth died. When the messenger arrived at his lodgings, breathless, shortly before half-past three on the morning of Thursday the 24th, Carey rushed to the palace to check, but the gates were securely bolted. Luckily, he managed to talk his way in. Led to the Privy Chamber, where the councillors were huddled in close session, he was ordered point-blank not to leave the precincts ‘till their pleasures were farther known’.58

  Quietly slipping away all the same and evading the guards, Carey rode to London and set off shortly after nine on the four-hundred-mile ride to Edinburgh, bearing a blue sapphire ring given to him by his sister Philadelphia. Changing horses many times along the way and surviving an ugly fall near Norham, the last village in northern Northumberland before the frontier, he reached Holyrood late on Saturday evening, just after James had retired.

  Carey was immediately led up to the king’s bedchamber and saluted him by his new title of King of England, Scotland and Ireland. He then handed him the ring, which James had sent to Philadelphia Scrope sometime before so that it could serve as proof of Elizabeth’s death ahead of any official notification.59 From James’s own detailed description of the encounter early the next morning, it is clear that Carey did not give him any reason to believe that Elizabeth had designated him as her heir by a deathbed gesture, further proof perhaps of the murky ambiguity of that reputed sign.60

  At Richmond Palace on the early morning of the 24th, Cecil, flanked by his fellow privy councillors, proclaimed James to be king an hour or so before first light. All then rode to London, where at ten o’clock the proclamation was read again in a stage-managed ceremony at the gates of Whitehall. Shortly afterwards, four earls, four peers, the whole Privy Council, the judges, and
the mayor and aldermen processed through the city in their scarlet robes, led by trumpeters, heralds and the Garter King of Arms. Once more, Cecil proclaimed James to be king, this time at Temple Bar, then at St Paul’s, at Ludgate, in Cheapside and in Cornhill. It was then ordered that the proclamation be printed for general distribution throughout the realm.61

  In London, the crucible of the nation, says an eyewitness, ‘The proclamation was heard with great expectation and silent joy, no great shouting.’ But, by evening, all that had changed. Now, there were bonfires in the streets and the church bells pealed. ‘No tumult, no contradiction, no disorder in the city: every man went about his business as readily, as peaceably, as securely as though there had been no change, nor any news ever heard of competitors,’ John Manningham recorded in his diary.62

  And yet nothing could be taken for granted. Rumours of plots hatched by the Jesuits and the Catholic exiles were as rife as ever. One story doing the rounds was that Archduke Albert and the Infanta had been proclaimed King and Queen of England in Brussels and that Catholics all over Europe were mobilizing to assist them.63 Secret cells of well-placed fifth-columnists were said to be active in Sussex and the north.64 In York, it was reported that many of the citizens expected their houses to be ransacked.65

  Such swirling undercurrents were enough to persuade the Privy Council to order local magistrates to arrest all ‘letter carriers’, suspicious persons, strangers, rumour-mongers ‘tending to the disturbance of the common peace’ and dubious-looking foreigners. Sermons were to be preached from the pulpits on Sundays, admonishing the people and calling them to their true obedience to the newly proclaimed King James.66 Most dangerous were those rumours that claimed James had turned Catholic. One sinister report had it that James had already promised the pope that, if he succeeded Elizabeth, he would grant Catholic toleration in England as well as Ireland. Not only that, all those exiled by Elizabeth for their religious faith and stripped of their estates over the years would be welcomed home and invited to reclaim their lands.67

  To counter such reports, Cecil’s agents put out their own stories, and soon the printing presses would be pouring out pamphlets and verses praising the new king and welcoming him to his new kingdom. According to these, James was a grown man, an experienced ruler with a strong dynastic claim. Unlike the late queen, he was male and blessed with a wife and children to safeguard the succession. The panegyric was predictable, if expressed in execrable rhyme:

  Let all the true and noble hearts,

  Wherewith England abounds:

  Unto their king, of rarest parts,

  Be loyal subjects found.

  Sing they melodious harmony,

  Sing welcome, welcome heartily.

  Therefore rejoice, rejoice therefore, rejoice and sing,

  For it hath pleas’d God to give us a King.68

  • • •

  In accordance with Elizabeth’s dying wishes, her corpse was not embalmed.69 Those of most monarchs, and the very wealthy, were embalmed after their deaths to keep the cadaver in a reasonable state of preservation. Professional embalmers would cut the corpse open from throat to groin, remove the entrails, which could be buried separately, then wash the cavities with vinegar before stuffing them with salt and spices. The body would then be carefully wrapped in cerecloth, a special cloth made of fine linen or silk soaked in molten wax. After that, it could be dressed in all its finery for display in state before interment.70

  Elizabeth was not alone in refusing to be embalmed. Mary, Countess of Northumberland, had stipulated in 1572 that no embalmer was to be allowed near her corpse: ‘I have not loved to be very bold afore women, much more would I be loath to come into the hands of any living man, be he physician or surgeon.’71 For Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, the same sentiments may well have applied, but practicalities meant that the process of decomposition would have to be delayed. Cerecloth, if correctly applied, would work for a month or so, but not much longer. Unfortunately, those wrapping Elizabeth’s cadaver did a botched job, charging the full fee but embezzling a proportion of the cloth with which they had been supplied, which meant that the seals were not properly airtight.72

  The queen’s body was moved by night on a black-draped barge lit by torches along the Thames from Richmond to Whitehall. There it was placed on a bed of state, but no funeral could take place without the new king’s assent.73 And James declared himself to be in no hurry to complete his journey south – all the more so when a fresh plague epidemic struck London, killing thousands.

  On 6 April, James protested from the safety of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the border that he would ‘do all honour that we may unto the queen defunct’.74 His sincerity may be doubted, as he assiduously refused to put on mourning dress for the woman who had left him a throne. Neither would he allow Queen Anne, his courtiers, or foreign ambassadors and their retinues to wear black in his presence. The Marquis de Rosny, Henry IV’s special envoy, sent to congratulate James on his succession, left Paris supplied with fine mourning attire only to be told on arrival that ‘no one, whether ambassador, foreigner or English, was admitted . . . in black.’ He had no choice but to order all his retinue ‘to change their apparel, and provide themselves others as well as they could’.75

  Between the queen’s last breath and the lowering of her body into her tomb, it was as though she had never died. As Scaramelli reports, ‘The Council waits on her continually with the same ceremony, the same expenditure, down to her very household and table service, as though she were not wrapped in a fold of cerecloth, and hid in such a heap of lead, of coffin, of pall, but was walking as she used to do at this season, about the alleys of her gardens.’76

  In the end, the funeral could be delayed no longer.77 On Thursday, 28 April, four days after Easter, the cortège, half a mile long, beginning with 260 poor women recruited from local almshouses, clad in black and walking in rows of four, their heads covered with linen handkerchiefs, made its way towards Westminster Abbey. Next came the officers of the late queen’s household, the mayor and aldermen of London and the judges. Behind them walked the Privy Council, the bishops, the archbishop of Canterbury and the nobles in order of their rank, followed by the queen’s women. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, brought up the rear, marching at the head of his soldiers, five in a row, all pointing their halberds downwards, draped in black.78

  A symbolic riderless horse, the palfrey of honour, was led by the Earl of Worcester, who had replaced Essex as Master of the Horse. The French ambassador, de Beaumont, enveloped in a hood and long, black mourning cloak, also walked in the procession, his train six yards long. Scaramelli refused to attend, excusing himself on the grounds that entering a Protestant church might offend the pope and jeopardize his soul.79

  Elizabeth’s body took pride of place in the ceremony. Her purple-velvet-covered coffin lay on an open chariot pulled by four great horses, each trapped in black velvet emblazoned with the arms of England and Ireland. On the top of the lead-lined wooden coffin, now firmly sealed, was a skilfully crafted wooden effigy of the queen dressed in her Parliament robes, with a crown on her head and a sceptre in her hand. An eyewitness described the carefully painted model as ‘very exquisitely framed to resemble the life’.80 Six knights wearing their coats of arms supported a canopy above the chariot, while twelve barons, six to each side, held aloft heraldic banners around the coffin in a blaze of colour. Immediately behind them walked the woman chosen by Cecil to be the chief mourner, the Marchioness of Northampton, flanked by his chief allies, Nottingham and Buckhurst, wearing deepest black.

  James had suggested his cousin Arbella Stuart as chief mourner on the grounds that she was his closest living relative, but Arbella had refused. Since she had been snubbed by Elizabeth and packed off to Derbyshire for so many years, she said ‘she would not after her death be brought upon the stage for a public spectacle.’81

  Inside the abbey, the funeral service began with a ser
mon, followed by a eulogy read by the late queen’s almoner, Anthony Watson, bishop of Chichester. Psalms and prayers ensued, after which the coffin and Elizabeth’s effigy were lowered into her tomb in the crypt beneath the altar of the Henry VII Chapel.82 Only later would her mortal remains be moved by James to their present location in a specially constructed monumental tomb in the north aisle of the Chapel.83

  James was still on his leisurely journey south on the day of the queen’s funeral. By then, he and his Scottish entourage had reached Hinchingbrooke House, near Huntingdon, where he spent the day hunting and feasting with his intimates on the finest meats, game, fish and wines, ‘the like . . . not seen in any place before since his first setting forward out of Scotland’.84 Afterwards, James was greeted by the masters of the Cambridge colleges, bowing low in their scarlet gowns and doffing their caps.

  Hinchingbrooke House was owned by the uncle of the future regicide and Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, and where young Oliver often played as a boy.

  Epilogue

  On the morning of Elizabeth’s death, Robert Cecil sent James a copy of the proclamation of his title as king and pressed him to renew the Privy Council’s authority, which he did.1 As the new king’s cavalcade made its snail-like way south from Edinburgh and James was besieged by suitors seeking offices or knighthoods, or simply yearning for change, Cecil and Lord Henry Howard strained every nerve to keep Ralegh and Cobham – the ‘accursed duality’, as Howard had nicknamed them – out of sight.2 They failed, however, to prevent James, who continued to hold the memory of Essex and his supporters in high esteem, from releasing the Earl of Southampton from the Tower.3