by John Guy
In April, James fully restored Southampton to his lands and title.4 Essex’s family was not forgotten either. When his widow, the much-slighted Frances Walsingham, married Richard Burke, Earl of Clanricarde, an Irish nobleman she had taken as her lover, James created him Viscount Tunbridge. Essex’s twelve-year-old son, Robert, who had barely known his father and was left an orphan when his mother moved away, was brought to Court and made a page to Prince Henry. Within a year, he, too, received back the lands and titles due to him. Last but not least, Essex’s sister Penelope married her lover Lord Mountjoy, this within days of securing a scandalous divorce on the grounds of her own confessed adultery.5
And yet, Cecil appeared to have little to worry about. Before leaving Holyrood, James had scribbled him a message: ‘How happy I think myself by the conquest of so faithful and so wise a councillor, I reserve it to be expressed out of my own mouth to you.’6 Working hand in glove, Cecil and Howard planned to shape the new government in their own interests.7 Thus, at the first meeting of the Privy Council since Elizabeth’s funeral, held at Whitehall on Easter Monday, Mountjoy was sworn in as a new member.8 Nine days later, at Burghley’s old house – now Cecil’s – at Theobalds, where James spent his final nights on his journey southwards, Howard took the councillor’s oath, as did the Earl of Mar and Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss, James’s intermediaries for his secret correspondence with Cecil.9 That same day, James invited Cecil, Nottingham and Buckhurst to appoint the officers of the new royal household in consultation with his Scottish advisers. Cecil could do little to limit the number of Scots flooding into James’s Court, especially in the Bedchamber. But he and Nottingham could at least keep out their own rivals.
Not for nothing did James tell his privy councillors that he would ‘be moved to multiply our princely favours to you accordingly in such sort as all the faithful subjects of the land shall be encouraged by your example’.10 Cecil would rise in remarkably short order to be Lord Cecil of Essendon, Viscount Cranborne and Earl of Salisbury. Buckhurst was made Earl of Dorset and Lord Treasurer for life. Howard became Earl of Northampton. Nottingham, too, was showered with grants, his cupidity egregious even by the standards of James’s Court. Finally, Mountjoy was created Earl of Devonshire and Egerton made Lord Chancellor, with the title of Baron Ellesmere, in which capacity he cheerfully advised James that ‘whatsoever the king directed in any case he would decree accordingly.’11
When James decided to do what Elizabeth had failed to finish and correct the abuses of monopolies, things followed a similar pattern.12 Cecil made sure that Egerton was put in charge, with powers to limit the scope of these investigations.13 He then turned the spotlight on those he wished to punish. Ralegh’s monopoly for the sale of wine was among the first to be called in, causing his credit to collapse. The haberdasher Thomas Allen, whose plucky campaign against Edward Darcy’s monopoly for playing cards had resulted in a legal victory in court, was threatened with the Tower if he did not ‘utterly relinquish the same’ and allow Darcy to enjoy his former privileges.14 Ralegh, to his fury, was even sent a peremptory notice to quit Durham House, which he had occupied for almost twenty years. His wine licence, once revoked, would be granted to Nottingham.15
On Sunday, 8 May, at a special session of the Privy Council, Ralegh appeared by Cecil’s special command and was informed that James meant to strip him of his office of Captain of the Guard.16 Ostensibly, the move was innocent: James, long used to Scottish bodyguards, wanted them in England, too.17 Except that Sir Thomas Erskine, the Earl of Mar’s cousin and another of Cecil’s confidants, was chosen as the new Captain.18
Malicious rumours were soon mysteriously put about that Ralegh and Cobham had plotted Essex’s downfall by forging letters.19 The Comte de Beaumont, still the resident French ambassador, conjectured that what lay at the root of all these stories was a villainous intrigue masterminded by Cecil to destroy Ralegh and Cobham. When Ralegh requested an audience with James in a bid to exonerate himself, he was curtly refused.20
• • •
James made his ceremonial entry into London to the cheers of the adoring crowds on the morning of Wednesday, 11 May. Carrying the sword of state in the procession was Essex’s young son, Robert. By then, Elizabeth’s portraits had been cleared away and replaced by more politically correct images of the king’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots.21 After a brief unofficial visit to Whitehall to feast his eyes on the old queen’s jewels and gold and silver plate, James took possession of the Tower and was treated to a 250-gun salute.22 He slept there for only a single night before leaving in the royal barge early the next morning for Greenwich, where he felt safer from the plague.23
With Cecil and Howard pulling so many of the levers of power, it was only a matter of months before the careers of Ralegh and Cobham would be destroyed.24 Through his spies, Cecil learned of a madcap plot involving some forty conspirators, among them Cobham’s wayward brother George Brooke, to kidnap James on Midsummer Night (24 June) and imprison him in the Tower until he granted religious toleration for Catholics and purged Cecil from the Privy Council.25 Under interrogation, Brooke (strangely, a Protestant himself) claimed to be an agent provocateur working for James (his claim was never vindicated but may have been true). All that mattered, however, was that he went on fleetingly to accuse Cobham of something far more serious – and, this time, the charges appeared to have more substance to them.
The gist of these new allegations was that Cobham, dismayed by his exclusion from power, had talked to Ralegh of removing ‘the king and his cubs’ and putting Arbella Stuart on the throne. After multiple interrogations, Cobham confessed that he was to be paid the astonishing sum of 600,000 crowns (around £100 million today) by Archduke Albert’s envoy, Charles de Ligne, Comte d’Aremberg, who had arrived in London to congratulate James on his accession. Cobham was to travel to Brussels, then Valladolid or Madrid, to collect the money. He was to return via Jersey, from where he and Ralegh were to direct a rebellion.26
Cobham and Ralegh spoke of putting Arbella on the throne, but whether they meant to act on their conversations is a quite different matter. To extricate himself after his arrest, Ralegh turned on Cobham.27 In retaliation, Cobham turned on Ralegh, accusing him of offering to sell state secrets to the Archduke for a pension of £1,500.28
Brought to trial in November in Winchester, where Sir Edward Coke led the case for the prosecution, Ralegh put on a bravura performance. He admitted listening to Cobham’s loose talk but vehemently denied a conspiracy. He demanded the right to confront Cobham face to face and, when this was denied him, he pulled out of his pocket a letter in Cobham’s hand smuggled to him while in prison:
Seeing myself so near my end, for the discharge of my own conscience and freeing myself from your blood, which else will cry vengeance against me, I protest upon my salvation I never practised with Spain by your procurement. God so comfort me in this my affliction as you are a true subject for anything that I know.29
Coke then produced an affidavit from Cobham that confirmed his original accusation, which the jury believed.30 Ralegh and Cobham were found guilty and condemned to death, but James spared their lives, in Cobham’s case only after he had tempered mercy with a touch of sadism, waiting until the very moment Cobham was about to face the executioner.
Cobham was to spend the next fourteen years in the Tower: he would die of a stroke within a year of his release. Ralegh spent thirteen years there, writing, studying history and geography, doing scientific experiments, even advising the heir to the throne, the teenage Prince Henry, on navigation and the rudiments of shipbuilding.31 Finally, in 1616, he would be freed on licence to lead a second expedition up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and its fabled gold mines.32 The profligate James desperately hoped that Ralegh’s new venture would rescue the Crown’s finances from catastrophe. But when Ralegh returned empty-handed after allowing his company to kill a number of Spanish colonists and burn their settlement, frustratin
g James’s pro-Spanish diplomacy, the original death warrant was put into effect.
• • •
Concluding his Annales in 1617, William Camden failed to write Elizabeth’s obituary. He chose merely to remark that in her final years her courtiers ‘ungratefully in a manner forsook her’, preferring to ‘curry favour’ with the new king: ‘they adored him as the rising Sun, and neglected her as being now ready to set.’33 A more outspoken eyewitness, Godfrey Goodman, observed that ‘the people were very generally weary of an old woman’s government.’ ‘After a few years,’ however, ‘when we had experience of the Scottish government, then . . . in hate and detestation of them, the queen did seem to revive. Then was her memory much magnified.’34
By the middle of James’s reign, Elizabeth’s gender, so fraught a subject in her lifetime, would become immaterial. With those around her so often regarding a queen as inferior to a king, she had been forced, as the years went by, to devise methods of reducing her vulnerability. Writing in the 1620s, Sir Robert Naunton, who had spied in Holland, France and Spain for Essex before shifting his allegiance to Cecil, famously wrote of her, ‘The principal note of her reign will be that she ruled much by faction and parties, which herself both made, upheld and weakened as her own great judgement advised.’35 Persistently cited by her biographers as one of the shrewdest assessments ever made of Elizabeth’s style of ruling, the passage is thoroughly misleading, as it maps the political practices of James’s last decade back on to hers.
Elizabeth’s methods of control were different. Sometimes she deliberately distanced herself from what she had done, shifting the blame on to others. Most spectacularly, she denied all responsibility for the regicide of Mary Queen of Scots, ruthlessly destroying William Davison’s career and reputation. Then again, there was her weasel-worded halting of Essex’s first trial in the Star Chamber after his defiant return from Ireland. As Cecil had remarked of such ploys, ‘This argueth the queen would have her ministers do that she will not avow.’
Her privy councillors did not always agree on policy, and she could exploit these differences to reduce risk and let time work to her advantage, especially where the debate concerned a policy that she did not really like. In a valedictory speech to Parliament at the end of the 1601 session, she had turned this tendency into a virtue, claiming she had always made her advisers fully debate pro and contra, ‘as all princes must that will understand what is right’.36 Where personality clashes at Court caused friction, she manipulated them to divide and rule, a method that worked well in controlling Ralegh and Essex. She could also play on her courtiers’ fears of what it would be like if she were no longer there. This method was especially effective against Burghley, who knew that James despised him as his mother’s nemesis.
She was only human, and a marked susceptibility for the sort of unctuous flattery Hatton had mastered to perfection and for dashing young men were her main weaknesses: these could, and sometimes did, cloud her judgement. Hatton, fortunately, was too loyal and devoted to betray her. Ralegh she handled better than Essex, never allowing him to become a privy councillor. Although it is true that Essex, at first, had the backing of Leicester, Hatton and Burghley as a counterweight to Ralegh, she indulged him for far too long before cutting him off. If she had ever thought that he could be a surrogate for his stepfather, she was sadly mistaken.
After the deaths of Walsingham, Leicester, Hatton and, later, Burghley, it was Robert Cecil, Nottingham, Buckhurst and Archbishop Whitgift who took centre stage as the advisers she trusted implicitly, leaving Essex to struggle to assert his primacy as a war leader. With the arrival of this close-knit circle at the heart of her Court, Elizabeth would discover that her technique of playing individuals off against each other did not work so well. Yet, even at the height of the deadly feud between Essex and Cecil, she would never lose control of her Court. Knowing that the final choice was always hers, her ministers were forced to iron out their differences before making any final recommendation. To attempt to approach her individually, as Essex would so often do, would almost always prove to be counter-productive. It was a mistake her own ‘Sweet Robin’, her beloved ‘Eyes’, had never made, for all his many faults.
Towards the end, her Court could feel claustrophobic, even oppressive. The wise watched what they said or wrote, for letters could be read and intercepted. ‘Danger goeth abroad, and silence is the safest armour,’ wrote Robert Markham in a letter to John Harington shortly before Harington’s departure with Essex for Ireland.37 On his return, Harington summed up the situation in an epigram: ‘Who liveth in Courts must mark what they say;/ Who liveth for ease had better live away.’38
The queen’s vanity and temper added to the often feverish atmosphere of the Court. She could lash out at anyone from maids to privy councillors if in the mood to do so, and there were times when she was best avoided. In her correspondence with James, she could be so vituperative that they several times ended up having a slanging match. Once, when emerging from her presence with ‘ill-countenance’, Hatton advised Harington not to ask her for anything. ‘If you have any suit today, I pray you put it aside. The sun doth not shine.’39 But often these outbursts were more directed towards keeping other people in their place than might appear at first sight. And, if Elizabeth had a sharp tongue, she did not indulge in the wholesale bloodbaths that had scarred her father’s reign as nobleman after nobleman, courtier after courtier, minister after minister, had mounted the scaffold for alleged treason. Her Court was a safer place than his, despite the atrocities of her chief pursuivant, the perverse and paranoid Catholic hunter, Richard Topcliffe.
With uncanny accuracy, Henry VIII had predicted two areas in which a female ruler would be particularly vulnerable: war and the succession. Whereas he had personally led his armies into battle on two noted occasions, Elizabeth could not. She might address her troops with martial vigour, but war was essentially a male preserve. Yet, for almost twenty years, she successfully held off the might of Catholic Spain. Without her military and financial aid, Henry IV and the Dutch would have succumbed, but her victory had as much to do with luck and Philip II’s own failings as with her leadership. Encouraged by heroic dreams of martial glory, Leicester would defy her in the Netherlands, Ralegh at the beginning of his aborted expedition to Panama, Essex in Portugal, Rouen and Ireland. Moreover, during both his Cádiz and Azores campaigns, Essex either seriously deviated from or consciously chose to misinterpret his instructions, believing he knew better than she did.
Once she had given him his head and he had failed her, she was determined never again to allow him (or Ralegh) to talk her into an aggressive military and naval strategy. This, together with her more obvious financial concerns, helps explain her generally defensive approach to the war effort. Broadly speaking, her war aims centred more on survival and safety than on victory.
Reflecting wistfully on the war effort after James had made peace with Spain in 1604, Ralegh would declare, ‘If the late Queen would have believed her men of war as she did her scribes, we had in her time beaten that great empire in pieces, and made their kings of figs and oranges, as in old times. But Her Majesty did all by halves.’40 This most memorable of quotations is frequently used by her biographers to argue that Elizabeth’s caution and female dithering stripped the war effort of the strategic vision and unstinting allocation of resources needed to win. Had the war been run more aggressively by a leader with a fully integrated approach to military and naval strategy, or so Ralegh claimed (meaning, of course, someone like him), it would quickly have become self-financing and the brave military men whom she had marginalized could have revolutionized the country’s future.
Elizabeth held such thinking to be a chimera. Her minimalist, almost entirely defensive approaches were, she confidently believed, not second best but the only way to match the tolerance of taxpayers to the measures needed to protect Protestant England from the Catholic powers. In any case, the idea that she was more
than usually cautious or indecisive where the war effort is concerned comes less from the facts than from contemporary stereotypes about the alleged weakness and capriciousness of women and wives. Sometimes, she would deliberately exploit such tropes. Sometimes, she would invert them to resounding effect rhetorically, as when, at Tilbury, she protested, ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too.’
It is, of course, entirely true that she hated risk. And when unable to extricate herself from difficult corners, she preferred to wait and see what time might do to rescue her. In the case of her great adversary, Philip II, such caution generally passed for admirable prudence, but for Elizabeth the opposite almost always held true. Nothing was more dangerous in her eyes than military over-extension. She was already lending vast sums to Henry IV and the Dutch, on top of her own massive expenditure at sea, in northern Europe and latterly in Ireland, and yet she managed to leave James with Crown debts of only £365,000. It was James, not she, who, in under ten years of peace, would drive the country to the edge of bankruptcy.
In her last, chiding letter to James, Elizabeth would give us her side of the story. Set down for posterity as her political testament as much as it was intended for James, she laid out in the clearest terms the aims she had attempted to uphold since the outbreak of the Dutch revolt. Everything, she said, went back to the offer she had received in 1576 from the States General to be their sovereign. She had been confronted with a profound moral dilemma: how to reconcile the legitimacy of the Dutch cause with her ideal of God-appointed monarchy. Throughout the long war, it had never been her intention to steal or encroach on another ruler’s territory. Rather than breach her principles, she said, she had tried to broker a settlement between Spain and the Dutch, designed to help the Dutch to recover their ancient liberties and free themselves from an occupying army. When Philip II had refused to negotiate, she had offered the Dutch purely defensive assistance. For that, Philip had declared war on her. Afterwards, she had been forced to help Henry IV to prevent France from falling into the Catholic tyrant’s hands. She had done no more, no less, than attempt to restore the status quo in northern Europe. In return, Philip had sought to have her deposed and killed, and to conquer her realm.