After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James. Leanda Lisle de

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СКАЧАТЬ good reason or right mind’. He had guessed what lay ahead: ‘The Queen well knows how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knows not how to yield.’⁵⁶

Increasingly unstable, Essex was ready to accept the most paranoid theories about Cecil. He knew his rival must be looking for a stronger candidate than Lord Beauchamp, whose candidature had been seriously weakened by the Doleman book. The Jesuit Robert Persons believed that Cecil was interested in Arbella’s claim. Cecil’s wife had died in 1598 and there were rumours in Europe that he even wanted to marry Arbella. Essex, however, became convinced that Cecil was plotting to place the Infanta Isabella on the throne together with her husband and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albert.^* He reasoned that Cecil was the leading exponent of peace with Spain and his suspicions were raised further by the mysterious appearance of Cobham and Ralegh at a peace conference that took place in Boulogne in July 1600. They had not been sent in any official capacity and Essex was convinced they were acting with Cecil to make a secret deal with the Infanta and her husband.

      Essex’s paranoia was fuelled by those around him, notably his sister Penelope Rich and his secretary, Henry Cuffe. The latter pointed out that Cecil was placing men he could trust in the crucial offices on which the defence of the realm rested. Ralegh had been given the governorship of Jersey in September 1600, ‘there to harbour [the Spaniard] upon any occasion’. Meanwhile, ‘In the east, the Cinq Portes, the keys of the realm,’ were in the hands of Lord Cobham, ‘as likewise was the county of Kent, the next and directest way to the Imperial city of this realm’. The navy and Treasury were in the hands of Cecil’s allies, Admiral Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, and Cecil had ‘established his own brother, the Lord Burghley’ as President of the North.⁵⁷ Essex ignored the obvious point, made by the intelligence gatherer Thomas Phelipps, that Cecil was too closely associated with the persecution of Catholics to risk promoting a Catholic claim. Instead he decided to pre-empt Cecil’s supposed plans and seize the court.

      On 7 February 1601, one of Essex’s inner circle of friends, the Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick, paid Shakespeare’s company 40 shillings to perform Richard II, the story of a feeble and indecisive king who allows the country to go to rack and ruin and is deposed by a glorious subject who then becomes king himself. Cecil had introduced Essex to Shakespeare’s play during a brief reconciliation in 1597 and it had since become something of an obsession with the Earl. This was doubtless what Cecil intended: it was part of his modus operandi to give his enemies the rope with which they later hanged themselves.

      The next day, a Sunday, 300 armed men gathered in the courtyard at Essex’s house. About a third of the rebels were soldiers who had served alongside Essex at one time or another. Many were Catholic, and they included several names later associated with the Gunpowder Plot: Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham. Others were Puritan; some, like Sir Henry Bromley, with City connections. A few were blood relatives of Essex. Most strikingly, however, the rebels included what the courtier John Chamberlain called the ‘chief gallants’ of the time: the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, Lords Lumley and Monteagle amongst them, united, above all, by hatred of Cecil.

      Essex led his followers through Ludgate towards Paul’s Cross. A small black taffeta bag containing a letter from the King of Scots hung around his neck. The streets were too narrow for the rebels to ride their horses and so they walked, brandishing their swords and crying out: ‘For the Queen! For the Queen!’ People came out from their tall, narrow, shop-fronted, timber and plaster houses and crowds began to gather – but no one came forward. Essex, sweating freely, shouted that Ralegh, Cobham and Cecil were plotting to put the Infanta on the throne and murder him, but the people simply gaped and ‘marvelled that they could come in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday’.⁵⁸ They did not hold Elizabeth responsible for the actions of her officials, as the court did.

      At noon Essex paused at the churchyard of St Paul’s. He had intended to make a speech but by the time he reached it he knew the revolt had failed. Within a fortnight Elizabeth had signed a warrant for Essex’s execution. She had it recalled, but if she was waiting for her one-time favourite to beg for mercy he did not oblige. When the final warrant was signed his only request was to be executed in the privacy of the Tower, so as not to stir up the multitude.

Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 25 February, 1601, the Lieutenant of the Tower Sir John Peyton ‘gave the Earl warning as he was in his bed to prepare himself to death’. At seven or eight he conducted him to the scaffold. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, was obliged to be present at the execution, but the atmosphere was so charged he withdrew to watch from a window in the Armoury. When Essex had finished praying he took off his doublet. His secretary in Ireland, Fynes Moryson, had noticed that he suffered from the cold, but no one saw him shiver in the winter air, nor did he move after the first of the three blows which it took to sever his head from his body. The long lock of hair Essex grew in Ireland was cut off and kept as a relic.^*

      Elizabeth was careful to show mercy to the young noblemen who had followed Essex. His friend, the Earl of Southampton, was imprisoned in the Tower where he still remained. Of the rest, only four of the principal conspirators were executed: Essex’s father-in-law, Sir Christopher Blount, another Catholic called Sir Charles Davers, his secretary Henry Cuffe and fellow Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick. Blount made amends to Ralegh and Cobham on the scaffold for accusing them of supporting the Infanta’s claim. Their names, he said, had only been used ‘to colour other matters’. He also confessed that he and others had been prepared to take things as far as the shedding of the Queen’s blood. But neither Elizabeth’s mercy, nor this confession did anything to dent the Earl’s posthumous reputation. When the official version of what had occurred was delivered in a sermon at the Cross at St Paul’s weeks later it was ‘very offensively taken of the common sort’ and the minister fled the pulpit in fear of his life.⁵⁹

      In subsequent months Ralegh was accused of blowing smoke in Essex’s face as he mounted the scaffold and Cecil’s life was threatened in places as far apart at Wales, Surrey and Mansfield. But although this anger was not directed against the Queen it was she who felt it most. A few years earlier a French ambassador recorded that Elizabeth had given him ‘a great discourse of the friendship that her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would die rather than see any diminution of the one part or the other’.⁶⁰ Now she believed the bond between them was broken, a view encouraged by those in her government who did not wish to see blame cast upon themselves.

      In the months following the Essex revolt Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated markedly and by the time Harington saw her at court in October of 1601 she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. She was eating little and was dishevelled and unkempt. A sword was kept on her table at all times and she constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news, occasionally thrusting her rusty weapon in the tapestry in blind fury. Every message from the City upset her, as if she expected news of some fresh rebellion. Eventually she sent Lord Buckhurst to Harington with a message: ‘Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to go home: it is no season now to fool it here’.⁶¹ He did as he was told and so missed the opening of Elizabeth’s last parliament, in November 1601, when she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes.

      The Spanish had invaded Ireland in September, hoping to take advantage of Tyrone’s rebellion and gain a stepping-stone to England. Subsidies were needed for the war and MPs soon granted them, but many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks launched against the granting of monopolies. During the 1590s Burghley had altered the system of royal patronage СКАЧАТЬ