After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  The peace conference was arranged for the following spring; meanwhile, the conference of religion was delayed. It was apparent that the plague had not subsided sufficiently for the conference to occur in November and so the date was moved until after Christmas, when it would be held at Hampton Court. The winter months were to be dominated instead by the trials of the Bye and Main plotters.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “THE GOD OF TRUTH AND TIME” Trial, Judgment and the Dawn of the Stuart Age

  Sir Walter Ralegh recovered his courage after his failed suicide bid in July and determined to fight for his life. He knew that those who were indicted for treason were almost never found innocent. A treason trial was considered to be a public demonstration of guilt, not an opportunity to clear one’s name. The evidence against him was, however, largely circumstantial. In Bishop Goodman’s words, the Main plot to overthrow James with Spanish backing was “as yet but in embryo.” Not enough had happened for anyone to be certain what his role would have been in it—if any.

  Ralegh wrote to the Council in August warning them that their case was so weak that to put him on trial for treason could be interpreted as an act of murder. People would not believe that someone with his record in fighting the Spanish would betray his country to them and leaving him “to the cruelty of the law of England” would damage their own reputations. The Council, however, was unmoved by Ralegh’s threat. “Who is Sir Walter Ralegh?” the prosecution document drawn up in August asked. “A man by nature of an extraordinary wit, and thereby the better furnished to shadow his misdoing.”1 People would expect Ralegh to cover his tracks and the Council believed that he was so unpopular they would also be happy to believe the worst of him. The indictments were read in September and the gossip was that “there is a strong purpose to proceed severely in the matter” against all the principals with the exception of the young Grey of Wilton, for whom there were hopes of compassion.2

  The plague was by now in the Tower, where it had already killed several warders, and Cobham, who had been so stalwart when he was first arrested, was now in a state of absolute misery. He wept bitterly to his jailers “that the ladies of the court loved him not, who had they been his friends he was sure to have found more comforts in his affliction.” 3 He was being bombarded with demands from Lady Kildare that he sue for his life by giving a full account of Ralegh’s role in the plot and from Ralegh that he retract all accusations against him. Ralegh had managed to contact Cobham as early as July, having befriended the young Sir John Peyton, son of the Lieutenant of the Tower, and persuaded him to send messages for him. He assured Cobham that he could yet be found innocent of treason. Ralegh’s father-in-law, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, had received an acquittal after Wyatt’s revolt against Mary I because only one witness had spoken against him and two were required for a conviction. Ralegh pointed out that they also had only one accuser: George Brooke in Cobham’s case—and Cobham in Ralegh’s.

  It wasn’t long before the Council intercepted a letter from Cobham to one of his servants in which he outlined how he hoped to use the “two witnesses” argument in his defense. He was already withdrawing most of his accusations against Ralegh and they quickly guessed that Ralegh must have found himself an errand boy. That it proved to be the first man James had knighted was an embarrassment. To prevent it from becoming common knowledge, Peyton senior was promoted to Ralegh’s old post as Governor of Jersey and his family left the Tower for the new posting in August. Far from proving despondent about this double blow, however, Ralegh used the full force of his personality to recruit other messengers: first a servant in the Tower, Edward Cottrell, and eventually Gawen Harvey, the son of the incoming governor, Sir George Harvey. By a stroke of good fortune Gawen had been on Ralegh’s voyage in search of El Dorado in the 1590s.

  Come October Cobham cracked under Ralegh’s assault and sent a letter that Ralegh hoped would save him. It swore: “To clear my conscience, satisfy the world and free myself from the cry of your blood, I protest upon my soul and before God and his angels, I never had any conference with you in any treason; nor was ever moved by you to the things I hereto accused you of . . . and so God deal with me and have mercy on my soul, as this is true.” Ralegh hid the letter for future use before sending Cobham another message hidden in an apple, reminding Cobham how the Earl of Essex had been persuaded to clear his conscience by betraying his friends and relations. Ralegh warned Cobham to be careful not to fall into the same trap. He then wrote to Cecil pleading with him for mercy and, in another lesson learned from the Essex affair, laid the blame for his situation on unnamed enemies. His wife had already had some success in circulating passages from his “suicide” letter, with the French ambassador, de Beaumont, dispatching home Ralegh’s argument that his attempt on his life “arose from no feeling of fear, but was formed in order that his fate might not be seen as a triumph to his enemies, whose power to put him to death despite his innocence is well known.” 4

  Ralegh was determined that his reputation would be restored, even if he did not survive the accusations of treason. Cecil, however, was equally determined not to have his traduced, as it had been in the aftermath to the Essex revolt. He went out of his way to distance himself from any impression of prejudice against Ralegh and told courtiers that he thought Ralegh “bedashed, but not bemuddied,” by the accusation of treason and that his old friend would “clear himself of hanging work.”5 Not everyone was convinced and there were some who were happy to take Ralegh at his word, or even to promote the suggestion that the whole case against Ralegh was fabricated—among them Sir John Harington. Harington’s hope that Cecil would come to his rescue had persisted even when he had realized that he was not going to be included in the general pardon at the coronation. He had written to Cecil on 27 July with the good news that Sir Thomas Erskine had assured him that James “has said in his Princely word” that he would have the forfeiture of Sir Griffin Markham’s estates. They could then be sold to pay his debts. He asked only that Cecil should push for the decision to be confirmed. But Cecil had done nothing and as the summer weeks passed with the plague raging across London, the sense that he was trapped became almost unbearable.6

  On the evening of 22 September there was a mass breakout of thirty prisoners from the King’s Bench prison in the suburban slum of Southwark. The prisoners were soon rounded up and committed to an even stricter ward, but when plague broke out in the Gatehouse, Harington determined that he too had to try to escape. His “Sweet Mall” used her dowry to bribe his jailers to release him behind the backs of his creditors, and to his great relief he succeeded in fleeing all the way to Somerset, where he waited for Mary to join him. In the meantime Harington’s creditors went straight to Cecil, who proved so sympathetic that he signed a warrant giving them permission to smash down the doors of Harington’s London house in Channon Row and seize him or his goods. When they broke into his hallway, however, they found themselves confronted not by a terrified knight but by his angry wife and her friends.

  As the creditors battered in the door, Lady Harington had fled to her neighbors, begging for help. They had returned with her and one of them pronounced that the creditors’ warrant was legal only if her husband had been accused of treason. As he had not, she ordered the men to leave her house, and they were then ejected. The creditors went straight back to Cecil, who promptly sent her a sharp letter berating her for dismissing a warrant from the Secretary of State and for her cruelty toward the creditors. This was too much for Harington. “My escape was an honest escape, I shunned the plague and not the debt,” he wrote furiously to Cecil; “they cannot deny the plague to be in the Gatehouse and seven dead and the eighth sick; and therefore I might think him as much my friend [as one who] would wish me to the gallows as to the Gatehouse.” Harington apologized if his wife had caused Cecil any offense, but observed acidly that it was understandable that she found it hard to believe that a Secretary of State would “lend the countenance of state to such a wrangle as debt.”
He added that it also seemed extraordinary that Cecil should show so much sympathy for the “suffering” of his creditors and not “me and nine children.” He wondered if Cecil himself owed the creditors money and if, perhaps, Sir Griffin Markham’s troubles also had some private cause. Sir Griffin’s mother had often attacked Cecil, he recalled.

  Cecil fired a letter back hotly denying Harington’s accusations and warning him that if he thought that his attacks on Elizabeth’s reputation the previous winter had gained favor with James, he was wrong.7 Cecil, however, was nervous. Harington had some powerful friends. The Earl of Shrewsbury was giving him loyal support in furthering his suit for the Markham estates, as were Sir Thomas Erskine, the Earl of Mar and Lord Kinloss. He decided to leave Harington alone. The knight, for his part, kept away from court. “I will leave you all now to sink or swim as seems best to your own liking,” Harington wrote to a friend from Bath; “I only swim now in our baths wherein I feel some benefit and more delight.” He did, however, continue to keep in touch with events, and to spite Cecil he wrote a letter to the Bishop of Bath and Wells intimating that the Bye and Main plots were fabrications.

  Harington claimed that Lady Ralegh’s uncle, Nicholas Carew, had been asking questions about Anthony Copley’s role in exposing the plots. Copley was a well-known government agent and Harington commented, “I much fear for my Lord Grey and Ralegh . . . Cecil doth bear no love to Ralegh as you well understand.” He suspected that Ralegh’s reputation as an atheist would be used against him and unfairly so:

  He seems wondrously fitted, both by art and nature, to serve the state, especially as he is versed in foreign matters, his skill therein being wonderfully estimable and praise worthy. In religion he hath shown (in private talk) great depth and good reading, as I once experienced at his own house, before many learned men. In good troth, I pity his state, and doubt the dice not fairly thrown, if his life be the losing stake.8

  Harington’s letters to the Bishop also expressed his continuing anger about the Earl of Tyrone’s welcome at court, from where the rebel was now departing for home and a bleak future.

  Although there were no repeats of the terrible famine of the previous winter, James’s rule was to prove a bitter experience for the Irish people. Harington, despite his resentment of Tyrone, had hoped for a policy of reconciliation. Now that the war was over, as he later told James, his was a vision of an Ireland where “noble men might build palaces and solace themselves with parks and ponds, and their tenants live in as good peace and plenty as here in England.”9 But harsher voices prevailed and it drove Tyrone to attempt another revolt. In 1607 Tyrone left Ireland with his ally the Earl of Tyrconnell, hoping to gather Spanish support for his rebellion. He soon discovered that James’s policy of peace with Spain had put paid to such schemes and he was abandoned by the Spanish as absolutely as the English Catholics had been. The so-called flight of the earls came to mark the end of a Gaelic polity in the north of Ireland, and James introduced Scottish settlers and new English immigrants, who reduced the Irish and old English to impoverished tenants.

  On 26 October Cobham and Grey were taken from the Tower under an escort of fifty horses to Wolvesey Castle, the ancient episcopal palace at Winchester, where the trials were to take place. They were followed on 13 November by Sir Walter Ralegh, George Brooke, Sir Griffin Markham, Sir Edward Parham, Anthony Copley, the priests William Watson and William Clark and a Catholic gentleman from Leicestershire called Bartholomew Brookesby. The crowds lining the streets screamed abuse as Ralegh’s carriage passed, and hurled stones, clods of earth and tobacco pipes—an allusion to the story that he had blown smoke in Essex’s face as he had been led to his execution. Ralegh viewed the abuse with evident contempt, “as proceeding from base and rascally people,” and he puffed defiantly on his silver pipe.10 His warders commented that he seemed much changed from the shaken figure who had entered the Tower in July.

  The Bye plotters—Grey of Wilton, Sir Griffin Markham, Anthony Copley and the priests Watson and Clark—all came to trial on 15 November, along with Bartholomew Brookesby and Sir Edward Parham. Several other Catholic gentlemen had been linked to the plot, but it was clear to Scaramelli that “the Council does not think it wise to press deeply into this.” Putting too many members of the gentry on trial for treason would have exposed the government’s unpopularity. Brookesby and Parham appear to have been chosen as examples to the rest and Scaramelli reported that the Council let it be known, verbally and in writing, that if Catholics gave up their plots, “they may rest assured that all intention of shedding blood will from now onward vanish from the king’s mind.” 11 James sent similar assurances to the Pope that month, adding a detailed outline of his hopes for the calling of a General Council that would lead to the reunification of Christendom.12 But just as his hopes for a Council would fall on deaf ears in the Vatican so did his message among the most radical sections of the Catholic gentry. Two of the future gunpowder plotters had signed Watson’s oath: Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham (as well as a third name associated with it, that of Sir Edward Baynham). Of them Catesby was already trying to arrange a meeting with his cousin Thomas Wintour to discuss a plan that would “at one instant deliver us from our bonds without foreign help.” The explosion at the gunpowder mill at Redriffe on the day before Elizabeth’s funeral had suggested that it might be possible for a handful of men to wipe out the entire establishment. 54

  The proceedings against the Bye plotters were to be held in Wolvesey’s great hall. On its eastern wall hung what was believed to be the simulacrum of King Arthur’s Round Table with its portrait of the mythical king gazing blankly ahead. Courtiers and other curious onlookers crowded in to watch the proceedings, among them friends and foes of the men being tried.

  The first defendant was Anthony Copley. He had no legal representation—those tried for treason had to make their own defense— but he had the advantage of being the government’s main witness and it was evident that he had been carefully coached. Onlookers thought that “his declaration was extraordinarily well penned” and concluded that he would “live for the service he did.”

  The priest William Clark went up next. A well-built man in his mid-thirties with red-blond hair and a close-cut beard, he delivered his testimony with conviction, insisting that he had broken no laws because no king had any authority before his coronation. The judges rejected his argument, but he had made a good impression. The same could not be said of the cross-eyed William Watson. He explained to the judges that he had wanted to preempt a Jesuit plot to invite the Spanish into England, but then damaged his case by insisting loudly that his plot was also the result of James having reneged on promises of toleration.

  Some Protestants feared that James secretly intended still to offer toleration and voices were expressing concern that James was too pro-Catholic. “It is hardly credible in what jollity [the papists] now live,” one gentleman had complained on 12 November; “They are already labouring tooth and nail for places in the Parliament, and do so mightily prevail . . . as I cannot see how their dangerous course can be stopped unless some higher authority speedily interpose itself.”13 When Sir Griffin Markham stepped forward to make his declaration and confessed that he too had believed that James would offer toleration, Cecil intervened and assured the court that “the king had promised a moderation of religion but not a toleration.” By “moderation” he meant the end to recusancy fines—which punished all Catholics regardless of their loyalty—and this had been agreed to in June, although James was already regretting the move. Not only was it costing him the significant sum of £7,000 in lost revenue but large numbers of church papists who previously attended Protestant services to avoid the fines were now staying away. He feared that further leniency could result in an explosion of Catholic numbers, and after he received a negative response from the Vatican regarding his call for a General Council in February he reintroduced them.14 By 1605 much of the money raised was going to Scots favorites, a factor in the ferocio
usly anti-Scots character of the Gunpowder Plot. 55

  Sir Griffin Markham handled the rest of his case admirably. He freely admitted himself guilty of treason and expressed regret that he had accepted the argument that James was not king until he was crowned, making “many men sorry for him, and my Lord Cecil weep abundantly.”15 The tears indicated that Cecil intended to save Sir Griffin’s life—but it is notable that he had no tears left for his former brother-in-law, George Brooke. Here was the one figure connected to the Bye, the Main and Lord Grey’s plots. Brooke insisted that the links were explained only by the fact he was working for the government and he relayed how he had told the King in Berwick that he hoped to expose any plots against him. His argument was demolished, however, when the government lawyers passed on James’s answer that although he had “embraced” Brooke’s offer to expose plots against him, “since that time, [Brooke] having long speech with the king, he touched not that string at all, but only spoke of his own private business.”