by John Guy
54 SP 12/247, no. 84; BL, Additional MS 48029, fo. 169; True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies, pp. 28–30.
55 BL, Additional MS 48029, fo. 174; SP 12/247, no. 97.
56 SP 12/248, no. 16 and KB 8/52, Pt. 1.
57 SP 12/247, no. 102 (quotation at stamped fo. 167).
58 SP 12/248, no. 16.
59 SP 12/247, no. 97. For Elizabeth’s location, see E 351/542 (entries for February and March 1594).
60 SP 12/248, nos. 12, 19, 20 (I), 22. On the eve of the arraignment, Chief Justice Popham, the president of the trial commission, was suddenly taken ill and had to withdraw. A replacement judge was quickly found and the trial went ahead as planned. See SP 12/248, nos. 26, 26 (I). (SP 12/248, no. 26 [I] is dated ‘at Lincoln’s Inn, this 14th of March’, but the sense clearly shows that Attorney-General Egerton misdated the letter, since he refers to the scheduled date and time set for the case to begin. Also, the trial records prove that the case was heard on the 14th. SP 12/247, no. 103 [stamped fos. 172v–5]; KB 8/52, Pt. 1.)
61 SP 12/247, no. 103 (stamped fos. 172v–5); Dimock, ‘Conspiracy of Dr Lopez’, pp. 467–8, where the date is mistaken.
62 SP 12/248, no. 68 (II).
63 CP 26/30; HMC, Hatfield MSS, IV, p. 513.
64 CP 26/29; HMC, Hatfield MSS, IV, p. 512.
65 CP 26/30; HMC, Hatfield MSS, IV, p. 513. See also SP 97/2, fo. 261v.
66 KB 8/52, Pt. 1.
67 CP 26/39; HMC, Hatfield MSS, IV, p. 515. Elizabeth’s instructions put Blount on the spot. He would obey her, he said, but what should he do about da Gama and Tinoco? Could they be executed on their own?
68 BL, Harleian MS 6996, fos. 160, 162. The date on fo. 160 is hard to read. It could be either 1st or 4th. I’ve inclined to the 1st, since the writs definitely emanated from the Queen’s Bench on the 4th.
69 KB 8/52, Pt. 1 (postea section), where it is recorded that the accused separatim dixerunt quod nihil aliud pro seipsis dicere.
70 KB 8/52, Pt. 1 (postea section); BL, Harleian MS 6996, fo. 162.
71 Camden, pp. 484–5.
72 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge, 2002; 2nd edn), pp. 21–4; Harrison, I, pp. 296–7, 302–3, 304, 306, 307; English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. G. Wickham, H. Berry and W. Ingram (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 328, 431–2; S. L. Lee, ‘The Original of Shylock’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 246 (1880), pp. 185–200.
73 SP 97/2, fo. 261v. See also SP 97/2, fos. 211–14, 255, 263; SP 94/4, fos. 158–9; Stewart, ‘Portingale Women and Politics’, in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Daybell, p. 93.
Chapter 14: Games of Thrones
1 T. Birch, The Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 1760), pp. 1–2; National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation, ed. N. Mears, A. Raffe, S. Taylor and P. Williamson, Church of England Record Society, 20 (2013), p. 206.
2 SP 52/50, no. 83; SP 52/53, no. 35; G. Donaldson, Scotland: James V–James VII (Edinburgh, 1971), pp. 189–93; R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 456–60.
3 SP 52/52, pp. 30–31 (this entry book of dispatches is paginated, not foliated).
4 SP 52/51, no. 75.
5 ‘Lethington’s Account of Negotiations with Elizabeth in September and October 1561’, in A Letter from Mary Queen of Scots to the Duke of Guise, January 1562, ed. J. H. Pollen (Edinburgh, 1904), Appendix 1.
6 ‘Lethington’s Account’, p. 41.
7 J. Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, ed. C. R. Markham (London, 1880), p. 40.
8 SP 12/240, no. 21; J. E. Neale, ‘Peter Wentworth’, EHR, 39 (1924), pp. 182–202. For a recent reappraisal of this question, see P. Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, in Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late-Elizabethan England, ed. S. Doran and P. Kewes (Manchester, 2014), pp. 48–57, 60–66.
9 A treatise containing M. Wentworth’s iudgement concerning the person of the true and lawfull successor to these realmes of England and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1598), p. 3. Published as the final part of A pithie exhortation to her Maiestie for establishing her successor to the crowne. Whereunto is added a discourse containing the author’s opinion of the true and lawfull successor to her Maiestie (Edinburgh, 1598). Both works, published posthumously by Wentworth’s friends, derive from Wentworth’s (now lost) manuscripts, each written much earlier. For a full explanation and reconstruction of these intriguing documents, see Neale, ‘Peter Wentworth’, pp. 182–202.
10 SP 12/240, no. 21 (I); P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 168; Neale, ‘Peter Wentworth’, p. 184; J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (London, 1969), II, p. 255; Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, in Doubtful and Dangerous, ed. Doran and Kewes, p. 53.
11 APC, XXI, pp. 392–3; SP 12/240, no. 21 (I).
12 HMC, Hatfield MSS, VII, pp. 284, 286, 303; Neale, ‘Peter Wentworth’, pp. 186–97; Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, II, pp. 256–62; Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, in Doubtful and Dangerous, ed. Doran and Kewes, pp. 54–7.
13 SP 101/95, fos. 121–2.
14 SP 12/247, no. 50; J. Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 2 vols. (London, 1720), I, p. 75; R. B. Manning, ‘The Prosecution of Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, 1595’, BIHR, 57 (1984), p. 216.
15 SP 78/32, fo. 393v; SP 78/36, fos. 10, 96; Annals of the Reformation, ed. J. Strype (4 vols., London, 1824), IV, pp. 331–2.
16 Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. H. Walpole (London, 1797), pp. 34–5; England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, ed. W. B. Rye (London, 1865), pp. 104–5; J. Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds, 1988), pp. 214–15, 223–6; F. Moryson, An itinerary written by Fynes Moryson Gent. First in the Latine tongue, and then translated by him into English (London, 1617), Pt. III, iv, 1, p. 172.
17 Cosmeticks or, the beautifying part of physick. By which all deformities of nature in men and women are corrected [based on the writings of Johann Wecker (1528–86)] (London, 1660), pp. 17–25, 27–30, 53–5, 92–3; A. Whitelock, Elizabeth’s Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court (London, 2013), pp. 24–5, 190–91; A. Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (New York, 2010), pp. 57–8.
18 Collins, I, pp. 357–8.
19 Wright, II, pp. 440–44.
20 CSPD, 1595–7, p. 114; SP 12/254, no. 26 (the original document is now misplaced at the NA).
21 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 355.
22 W. Fowler, A True Reportarie of the Most Triumphant, and Royal Accomplishment of the Baptisme of the Most Excellent, Right High, and Mightie Prince, Frederik Henry (Edinburgh, 1594), sig. A3.
23 E. J. Cowan, ‘The Darker Vision of the Scottish Renaissance: The Devil and Francis Stewart’, in The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland, ed. I. B. Cowan and D. Shaw (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 125–37.
24 D. Calderwood, The History of the Kirk in Scotland, 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1844), V, pp. 140–42, 144.
25 Calderwood, The History of the Kirk in Scotland, V, pp. 256–7.
26 SP 52/53, no. 20; SP 52/54, no. 118.
27 Calderwood, The History of the Kirk in Scotland, V, pp. 306–45; Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 177–8; Cowan, ‘Darker Vision of the Scottish Renaissance’, in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Cowan and Shaw, pp. 133–6; Donaldson, Scotland: James V–James VII, pp. 193–5.
28 Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 162–3, 178, 181–6, 192, 221, 276, 278, 299, 312, 343, 355, 377, 399, 425, 440, 445, 447, 462; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 167–70.<
br />
29 Murdin, pp. 655–7; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 344–5.
30 The Warrender Papers, ed. A. Cameron, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1931–2), II, p. 43.
31 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 346; Taming of the Shrew, 4, i, ll. 5–6.
32 The Tempest, 4, i, ll. 211–12.
33 SP 15/30, no. 80.
34 LQEJ, pp. 100–103.
35 LQEJ, pp. 103–5.
36 James would shortly be forced to apologize for his use of the words ‘seduced queen’ and his quotation from Virgil, see LQEJ, pp. 105–8.
37 LSP, James VI, pp. 7–8; Birch, Memoirs, I, p. 175.
38 LSP, James VI, p. 8.
39 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 170–71. See also A. Courtney, ‘The Scottish King and the English Court: The Secret Correspondence of James VI, 1601–1603’, in Doubtful and Dangerous, ed. Doran and Kewes, pp. 135–6.
40 SP 52/54, no. 5 (corrected draft in English); SP 52/54, no. 4 (fair copy translated into French of the version actually sent); Fowler, A True Reportarie, sig. D3. For the phrase ‘skrating’ or ‘scratting hand’, see SP 52/69, no. 53.
41 SP 52/54, no. 5.
42 Memoirs of His Own Life by Sir James Melville of Halhill (Edinburgh, 1827), pp. 412–13; D. Moysie, Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland . . . From Early Manuscripts (Edinburgh, 1830), pp. 118–19; Birch, Life of Henry, Prince of Wales, pp. 9–10; J. Guy, ‘My Heart is My Own’: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004), p. 285.
43 SP 52/54, no. 36.
44 SP 52/54, nos. 24, 34. The offending verses were by A. Melville, and were printed by Robert Waldegrave, the king’s printer, under the title Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia (Edinburgh, 1594).
45 SP 52/54, no. 34.
46 Collins, I, p. 357; Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 312–13; R. Doleman [i.e. R. Parsons], A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (Antwerp, 1594), Dedication, sig. *2v–3. Although written in 1593 and printed in 1594, the book was not published and smuggled into England until the summer of 1595. See P. J. Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England’, HJ, 23 (1980), pp. 421–2.
47 SP 12/232, nos. 16, 19; SP 12/248, no. 53; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 139.
48 Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 238, 313; HMC, Hatfield MSS, V, p. 213; P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Sex and the Virgin Queen: Aristocratic Concupiscence and the Court of Elizabeth I’, SCJ, 31 (2000), pp. 83–4; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 319–20. Birch mistakenly associates the first of these references with the clandestine relationship of Essex’s cousin Elizabeth Vernon, one of the queen’s maids of honour, and his friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, which occurred in 1598.
49 Harington, Tract on the Succession, ed. Markham, pp. 4, 34, 45.
50 Holmes, ‘Authorship and Early Reception’, pp. 415–29.
51 Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 1, pp. 12–14, 56–7, 59–63, 129–31. For more general arguments about the significance of the book, see ‘Introduction: An Historical Perspective’, in Doubtful and Dangerous, ed. Doran and Kewes, pp. 3–15.
52 Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 111–20.
53 Arbella, like James VI, was a granddaughter of Henry VIII’s niece Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of Henry’s elder sister Margaret by her second husband, Archibald, Earl of Angus. When the dying Henry made his will, he had not mentioned Douglas. Equally, he had not specifically excluded her. Legally, her descendants were entitled to stake their claim, failing the ‘Suffolk line’, as ‘the next rightful heirs’. Foedera, XV, pp. 110–17.
54 The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed. S. J. Steen (Oxford, 1994), pp. 20–21, 161–2; J. Clapham, Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. E. P. Read and C. Read (Philadelphia, 1951), p. 114; Harington, Tract on the Succession, ed. Markham, p. 42; CSPV, 1592–1601, no. 1143 (for Elizabeth’s version of the story); The true chronicle history of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordell (London, 1605), sig. B4v; Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 124–5, 127–9.
55 Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 130–39; C. C. Breight, ‘Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony: The Earl of Hertford’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham, 1591’, RQ, 45 (1992), pp. 37–8.
56 CSPSp, 2nd Series, 1568–1579, nos. 592-3; Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 132–3.
57 Harington, Tract on the Succession, ed. Markham, p. 41; Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 141–9.
58 These lines of descent, Parsons claimed, trumped the claims of Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII, as the descendant of John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, Gaunt’s eldest (and illegitimate) son from his affair with his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford. In addition, Gaunt’s legitimate son and heir, Henry Bolingbroke, had become King of England after deposing Richard II in 1399. Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 37–107, 160–93.
59 Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 2, pp. 193–267. In his enthusiasm for this line of argument, Parsons claimed (Pt. 1, pp. 180–81) that bastard sons might more likely become military heroes as rulers than legitimate heirs, since they were conceived in sexual vigour. See also Rodríguez-Salgado, ‘The Anglo-Spanish War: The Final Episode in the Wars of the Roses?’, in England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 1585–1604, ed. M. J. Rodríguez-Salgado and S. Adams (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 29–30.
60 Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 1, p. 11; Pt. 2, pp. 150–59, 263–4. Such impudent pro-Spanish claims had a familiar ring. While the Armada was preparing to sail, Parsons had helped to improvise something very similar for King Philip and the crockery-throwing Pope Sixtus V. Said to have been ‘in the greatest credit’ with Philip around this time, Parsons had introduced him to a skilled genealogist, Robert Heighington, a Catholic exile who had fled to Paris in 1569 after the defeat of the Northern Rising. It was Heighington who had first conjured up, for Count Olivares and shortly afterwards for Philip and the pope, the ingenious ‘proof’ that, chiefly through his dynastic claim to the throne of Portugal, Philip was the ‘true and rightful’ heir of John of Gaunt. See CSPSp, 2nd Series, 1587–1603, nos. 176–7; Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession, Pt. 1, pp. 6–9.
61 Collins, I, p. 358; LASPF, 1595, p. 214. Arguably Parsons’ book fell within the scope of the extended 1571 Treason Act passed in response to the Ridolfi Plot. SR, IV, i, pp. 526–8. But this would need to have been tested in the courts.
62 SP 59/31, fos. 40–41; P. Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s’, TRHS, 6th Series, 14 (2004), pp. 246–7.
63 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 145, n. 179.
64 Collins, I, p. 350.
65 Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 312–14.
66 SP 59/31, fo. 40.
67 SP 59/31, fo. 38.
68 SP 59/31, fo. 40.
69 A pithie exhortation to her Maiestie, ‘To the Reader’, p. [1]. The defence of James is from A treatise containing M. Wentworth’s iudgement, pp. 7–60 (especially pp. 39–42); Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, in Doubtful and Dangerous, ed. Doran and Kewes, pp. 64–5.
70 A treatise containing M. Wentworth’s iudgement, p. 2.
71 Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit’, pp. 244–5.
72 R. Lane, ‘“The Sequence of Posterity”: Shakespeare’s King John and the Succession Controversy’, Studies in Philology, 92 (1995), pp. 460–81; M. Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), pp. 107–11; R. Dutton, ‘Shakespeare and Lancaster’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998),
pp. 1–21.
Chapter 15: A Counter-Armada
1 HMC, Hatfield MSS, VI, p. 280; P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 318–21.
2 Birch, Memoirs, I, pp. 312–14.
3 Collins, I, p. 360.
4 Collins, I, p. 362; Spedding, I, pp. 374–91; Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 1996), pp. 61–8, 535–7; R. Strong, ‘Elizabethan Pageantry as Propaganda’, Courtauld Institute Ph.D. (1962), pp. 131–5.
5 This important discovery was made by Brian Vickers. See Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, p. 537.
6 Essex’s impatience with Burghley in particular at this time was well understood in Paris. See SP 78/36, fos. 73–4.
7 Collins, I, p. 362; P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day Celebrations in 1595’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. D. Bevington and P. Holbrook (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 41–66; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 144–6.
8 Collins, I, p. 362.
9 Spedding, I, p. 377.
10 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 330–31.
11 J. Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, ed. C. R. Markham (London, 1880), pp. 40–41.
12 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, pp. 248, 331.
13 CUL, MS Ee.3.56, nos. 85, 87; BNF, MS FF 15974, fo. 185v.
14 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 330.
15 H. Wotton, A Parallel between Robert, Late Earl of Essex, and George, Late Duke of Buckingham (London, 1641), p. 3; S. W. May, ‘The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex’, Studies in Philology, 77, special issue 5 (1980), p. 44.
16 Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 332.
17 SP 78/36, fos. 115–16, 117–18, 119–26; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 331.
18 SP 78/37, fos. 25–8, 29–30, 36, 37–8; Murdin, pp. 706–16.