A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Despite the strong arguments in favor of peace, decades of anti-Catholic propaganda and deep distrust of Spanish motives proved powerful counterweights. From the perspective of those in the war camp, the notion that Spain would change its ways and embrace peace on terms acceptable to England was naïve. Even if this were imaginable, the risks to England were too great to take such a chance. Without the threat of English ships harassing their American treasure fleets and raiding their ports, the Spanish, they argued, would soon “heap up such a mass of treasure that if he brake forth into war again, he will be far stronger than all his neighbors.” And if English troops pulled out of the Low Countries, it opened the way for Spain to outflank and invade England.

  Court observers were at a loss to tell which faction would prevail. “It is still in deliberation,” John Chamberlain wrote to his friend Dudley Carleton in early May, “Whether we shall join with France in a peace and leave the Low Countries… and the balance sways not yet on either side.” The jockeying for influence at court tends to obscure how differently the two camps saw England’s national, religious, and economic interests best served. With so much hanging in the balance, the debate became heated. At one exchange in the council chamber, after Essex yet again insisted that “no peace could be made with the Spaniards but such as would be dishonorable and treacherous,” the imperturbable Burghley famously reached for his Psalter and opened it up to Psalm 55 before conspicuously passing the book to Essex with his finger on verse 23: “Men of blood shall not live out half their days.”

  Burghley’s rebuke hit close to home. Essex’s father had died in the queen’s service in Ireland in 1576, of chronic dysentery. His funeral sermon was published a year later along with a letter to his eleven-year-old son and heir, reminding the boy that Essex men didn’t live long (neither Essex’s father nor grandfather lived past his mid-thirties). The letter went on to urge the young Essex to be daring in pursuit of fame: “rather throw the helve [or handle] after the hatchet, and leave your ruins to be repaired by your prince than any thing to degenerate from honorable liberality.” Essex took that advice to heart.

  Once principled disagreements over national policy turned personal, it was inevitable that opponents began accusing one another of acting in self-interest. Essex, stung by such charges, wrote an Apology defending himself from allegations of war-mongering. While ostensibly written as a letter to a friend, Essex’s supporters made sure that the Apology circulated widely, first in manuscript and then in print. There’s a good chance that a copy passed through Shakespeare’s hands, and not simply because he was a voracious reader who knew how to get his hands on this sort of thing. Through his former patron, the Earl of Southampton, a close friend of Essex, he was well placed to see it. Or he might have had access to it through one of the many writers who congregated around Essex House.

  Shakespeare would have found Essex’s Apology fascinating both as a character study and as a daring political tract. Essex saw the current crisis in grand terms, “as holy a war” as those fought against God’s enemies in the Old Testament. But, knowing his queen, he understood that such enterprises were also judged by their price tags: for £100,000, the war with Spain could be successfully maintained. And, for a serious investment of £250,000, Essex guaranteed that “the enemy shall bring no fleet into the seas for England, Ireland, and the Low Countries, but it shall be beaten.” In his effort to inspire Englishmen to rally to this call for war, Essex indirectly invoked the example of Henry V, the most celebrated of heroic English conqueror-kings: “Could our nation in those former gallant ages, when our country was far poorer than it is now, levy arms, make war, achieve great conquests in France, and make our powerful arms known as far as the Holy Land? And is this such a degenerate age, as we shall not be able to defend England? No, no, there is some seed yet left of the ancient virtue.”

  Essex had done his best to embody this chivalric code. He had taken his place in the charge at Zutphen in the Netherlands campaign of 1586, where Sir Philip Sidney fell. And, having taken up Sidney’s sword (and his widow), he had led the English attack three years later at Lisbon, where he had “thrust in his pike” in the city gates, challenging any “Spaniard mewed therein… to break a lance.” In 1591, this time in the fields of France, Essex challenged the governor of Rouen. In his subsequent campaign in the Azores, to gain the glory of being the first to land on an island, Essex, though under fire, had leaped unprotected into a boat, disdaining “to take any advantage of the watermen that rowed him.” His daring earned Essex the praise of poets like George Chapman, who describes him in the dedication to his translation of The Iliad as “most true Achilles, whom by sacred prophecy Homer did but prefigure.” But Essex’s martial aggressiveness was also dangerously destabilizing: he had personally challenged Sir Walter Ralegh, fought a duel with Charles Blount, and most recently had even challenged the lord admiral.

  Essex’s nostalgia in his Apology for the great age of English chivalry echoes Thomas Nashe’s similar praise of those times as reenacted in English history plays, “wherein our forefathers valiant acts… are revived and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion and brought to plead their aged honors in open presence.” For Nashe, too, Henry V is the exemplar of English greatness: “what a glorious thing it is to have Henry V represented on stage, leading the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty.” Having promised to write a new version of Henry the Fifth, Shakespeare knew exactly how much political baggage the story carried, all the more so after Essex’s Apology began to circulate.

  For an alternative to this martial, masculine stage image, the English only had to look at how their own queen was depicted on Continental stages. In June 1598, an English merchant described a “dumb show” or silent play staged lately in Brussels on the hotly debated question of peace between France and Spain. In the midst of Henri IV’s onstage negotiations, a fawning, flattering woman enters and attempts to eavesdrop on his conversations before finally “plucking the French King by the sleeve.” The woman is none other than Queen Elizabeth of England—and, the English merchant angrily reports, the audience members in Brussels “whisper and laugh at the conceit.” It wasn’t just the English who used the stage to satirize contemporary politics; theater was counted on for its political and topical edge on both sides of the Channel.

  News reaching England in September 1598 that King Philip II of Spain had died a slow and agonizing death failed to resolve the debate over the proposed peace treaty. Advocates of war were even more distrustful of his successor, Philip III. As far as Essex was concerned, the young prince’s “blood is hotter.” And even as the dying Philip II had extended tentative feelers toward peace, he was also sending assassins to kill Elizabeth.

  During this anxious time, when England badly needed his leadership, Essex withdrew from the court in a sulk. While he briefly returned to town for Burghley’s funeral, observers wondered whether his heavy countenance that day was best explained by genuine grief or self-pity. In either case, Essex retired once more to his estate at Wanstead, where, rumor had it, “he means to settle, seeing he cannot be received in court.” Essex had relied on this strategy of Achilles-like withdrawal before. It had worked well enough following his disappointing reception after the amateurish Islands Voyage in October 1597. At that time Essex felt that the queen had unjustly rewarded his rivals with important offices while he was fighting abroad. Essex was reconciled only after being appointed earl marshal. But even outsiders could see that this was a dangerous game to play.

  The intimate relationship between Elizabeth and her most popular courtier was fast unraveling. Essex refused to conform to the mold of Elizabeth’s previous favorites, Hatton and Leicester. Leicester, who nearly became Elizabeth’s husband, had also been her age-mate, and there was an understanding and respect between them. Hatton, also of her generation, had ultimately deferred to Elizabeth. Not Essex. He was thirty years younger than Elizabeth, and her relationship to him veered w
ildly between the maternal and the erotic. For his part, Essex offered protestations of devotion to Elizabeth while waxing indignant when she refused to pursue the policies he advocated. While Essex chafed when he couldn’t get his way, Elizabeth grew frustrated at his petulance and his refusal to be subject to her fading mystique. By 1598, the queen let it be known that Essex “hath played long enough upon her, and that she means to play awhile upon him.”

  By June of that year, their quarrel turned violent. The escalation occurred, William Camden reports, in the context of “this business of the peace” with Spain, and was triggered by a disagreement over a seemingly minor and long-delayed appointment in Ireland. Since Lord Burgh had died the previous autumn, Elizabeth’s administration in Dublin had been clamoring for a replacement. But the English court failed to take the Irish problem very seriously. Potential candidates saw the Irish posting as a disastrous career move; the word around court was that Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Sidney, and Christopher Blount had all refused the assignment.

  When Elizabeth finally proposed sending Essex’s uncle, Sir William Knollys, Essex, wary of losing a trusted ally at court, urged instead that she pack off his enemy Sir George Carew to the Irish bogs. When the queen balked at the suggestion, Essex then stepped over the line of what was allowable in her presence. Only a handful of courtiers—including Sir Robert Cecil (who probably leaked the story to William Camden)—witnessed what happened next. Essex, “forgetting himself and neglecting his duty, uncivilly turneth his back, as it were in contempt, with a scornful look.” Elizabeth had put up with a lot from her headstrong earl, but this insolence was intolerable. Astounded that Essex would sneeringly turn his back on her, Elizabeth boxed him on the ear “and bade him be gone with a vengeance.”

  Smarting from the royal blow and insult, Essex reached for his sword. He was fortunate that the lord admiral restrained him before he treasonously drew on the queen. As far as Essex was concerned, it was the queen who in publicly striking him had transgressed, and he swore “a great oath that he neither could nor would swallow so great an indignity.” Before stalking out of the royal presence he added one more choice insult, letting Elizabeth know that he wouldn’t have submitted to such mortifying treatment at the hands of her father, King Henry VIII. Henry would have beheaded him for such impudence.

  Both in the wrong, neither Elizabeth nor Essex would budge. She needed Essex but wasn’t about to humble herself to a subject. Essex badly needed to return to court, not only to steer the queen and council toward a more confrontational stance toward Spain, but also to ensure that he and his followers reaped the benefits of royal patronage. So Essex boldly wrote to Elizabeth, offering his version of who was at fault, castigating “the intolerable wrong you have done both me and yourself, not only broken all laws of affection, but done so against the honor of your sex.” Such arrogance led nowhere. Friends tried to intercede, desperate to heal the rift. Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the seal, urged Essex to back down, reassuring him that “you are not so far gone, but you may well return.” And then, in words that must have stung: “You forsake your country when it hath most need of your help and counsel…. Policy, duty, and religion enforce you to sue, yield, and submit to your sovereign.”

  The accusation that he was unpatriotic could not go unanswered. Essex wrote back in words that bordered on sedition: “Say you, I must yield and submit…. Doth religion enforce me to sue? Or doth God require it? Is it impiety not to do it? What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?” More was going on here than raging egotism. When the principles of honor collided with those of an unconditional submission to a political authority, which prevailed? Essex’s challenge to a monarch’s absolute power derived from radical Continental political philosophers like the anonymous author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos—A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants —whose attacks on the unlimited authority of God’s annointed were so politically volatile that they could not be printed in England until the revolutionary 1640s. At the same time, Essex invokes an ancient prerogative, a knight’s code of honor. From a monarch’s perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more dangerous combination.

  News of a military disaster in Ireland finally forced both Elizabeth and Essex to retreat from their hardened positions—without, however, fully reconciling. The report of the annihilation of English troops at Blackwater in Ulster spread quickly. On August 30, John Chamberlain wrote somberly to Dudley Cartleton: “We have lately received a great blow in Ireland…. This is the greatest loss and dishonor the Queen hath had in her time.” Chamberlain was amazed that the enormity of the defeat hadn’t sunk in: “it seems we are not moved with it, which whether it proceed more of courage than of wit I know not, but I fear it is rather a careless and insensible dullness.” Out of overconfidence or perhaps disrespect for the military skill of the Irish rebels, the English had not as yet woken up to what was in store for them. The crushing loss dashed hopes of peace with Spain, put a severe strain on England’s financial resources, and made the office of lord deputy of Ireland a far more vital post than it had been just a month earlier.

  The root causes of the disaster can be traced back as far as the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, after which the kings of England declared themselves lords of Ireland. The English presence in Ireland over the following centuries had never really displaced the power of local Gaelic lords. Irish politics remained decentralized: clans and their feuding chieftains—who ruled over people, not territory—remained the dominant political force. The influence of the Old English, as the Anglo-Norman settlers were called, didn’t extend much farther than the major ports, towns, and the area around Dublin, known as the Pale, where the English administration was concentrated. The English made few inroads in the north and west. Successive English kings were content to let surrogate feudal lords, to whom lesser lords paid tribute in exchange for protection, manage things in their absence. This often anarchic state of affairs took a turn for the worse under the Tudors, when Henry VIII decided to declare himself King of Ireland, and also, for good measure, supreme head of its Church. Hereafter the Irish would speak English and abandon their Catholic faith. The Tudor fantasy of imposing English religion, law, language, primogeniture, dress, and civility failed to have the desired effect. To the bewilderment of English observers, the rude Irish clung to their strange and barbarous customs. And to their consternation, many of the Old English settlers had, over the course of several centuries, gone native, adopting Irish customs and marrying into local families, vastly complicating loyalties and alliances between Gaelic, Old English, and New English inhabitants—and unnerving those committed to preserving a pure and unsullied Englishness.

  Elizabeth’s Irish policies were characterized by incoherence and neglect. The queen was too miserly to pay the huge price to subdue Ireland and too distracted by other concerns to acknowledge the weaknesses of her colonial policies. The impression left on the visiting French diplomat André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, was that the “English and the Queen herself would wish Ireland drowned in the sea, for she cannot get any profit from it; and meanwhile the expense and trouble is very great, and she cannot put any trust in that people.” The Elizabethan policy of expropriating huge swaths of Irish land and inviting Englishmen over to settle on these “plantations” provoked local resentment. Irish rebels looked to Spain for support and rallied followers around their threatened Catholic identity. Meanwhile, each short-lived English viceroy—suspected back at the English court, lacking support for ambitious reforms, bewildered by Ireland’s complex political landscape, and often corrupt and brutal—failed in turn to establish either peace or stability. Elizabeth’s muddled and halfhearted strategies were penny-wise and pound-foolish: in the last two decades of her reign she would spend two million pounds and the lives of many English conscripts in ongoing efforts to pacify Ireland.

  By the mid-1590s, chieftains opposed to English rule managed to put their differences
aside long enough to unite under the leadership of a small group of Irish lords, most prominent among them the Ulsterman Hugh O’Neill, known to the English as the Earl of Tyrone. Tyrone, now around fifty, had spent some of his formative years among the English of the Pale, was fully versed in English military strategy, and was a brilliant if overcautious commander. William Camden’s thumbnail sketch conveys the grudging admiration the English had for this adversary: Tyrone “had a strong body, able to endure labor, watching, and hunger. His industry was great, his soul large and fit for the weightiest business. Much knowledge he had in military affairs, and a profound dissembling heart.” Tyrone’s fellow Irishman, Peter Lombard, rounds out this portrait, describing him as a leader who knew how to keep his “feelings under control,” yet one who also knew how to exercise his charisma: “He quite captivates the feelings of men by the nobility of his looks and countenance, and wins the affection of his soldiers or strikes terror into them.” By 1598, Tyrone and his allies O’Donnell and Maguire were ready to strike hard at the English when the opportunity—at Blackwater—presented itself.

  The immediate cause of the defeat at Blackwater—also known as the Battle of Yellow Ford—can be traced back a year to the summer of 1597, when Lord Burgh led three thousand foot soldiers and five hundred cavalry from Dublin to the Blackwater River, a strategic junction near Armagh leading to Ulster. The English military in Ireland were convinced that the only way to cut off the head of the Irish rebellion was to go after Tyrone in his home base of Ulster. And the sure way to do that was to land forces by sea in Lough Foyle in the far north—tying up Tyrone’s defenses and laying waste to his native grounds—while at the same time controlling the entry into Ulster from the south by establishing key garrisons along the way from Dublin through Dundalk, Newry, and Armagh.