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

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СКАЧАТЬ Cecil to do now that Essex was dead was to present himself to James as his greatest champion and suggest that Essex had really wanted the crown for himself. This appears to be exactly what he did. Bruce and Mar were delighted to have caught such a fish and tactfully dropped James’s demands for a public statement of his innocence of any plotting against the Queen. Instead they organised a code to enable Cecil to correspond in secret with the Scottish King. Names were to be represented by numbers: James, for example, was 30 and Cecil 10.

      Cecil insisted that absolute secrecy be maintained over their correspondence for, as he later put it, ‘if Her Majesty had known all I did … her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.⁵⁰ He had a narrow escape from being discovered only that summer. Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, later described how the Queen was walking in Greenwich Park when she ‘heard the post blow his horn’. She asked that the bag of letters be brought to her and Cecil, knowing that it would contain letters from Scotland, fell on his knees and begged her not to look at them. He told her that if she did people would think ‘it to be out of a jealousy and suspicion of him’ which would leave him disgraced and unable to continue working for her effectively.⁵¹ Elizabeth chose not to look in the bag, but Cecil remained so nervous of discovery that he risked insulting his future Queen by asking James not to tell Anna of their correspondence.

      Cecil’s first letter to the King assured him that Elizabeth was a dynastic legitimist, not at all inclined to ‘cut off the natural branch and graft upon some wild stock’, but he warned that Elizabeth would perceive any demand for a public recognition of his right as a threat. Furthermore if he invaded England as Essex had suggested all Englishmen would unite against him. James was happy to agree to Cecil’s requests, but in turn he required that Cecil work with two Englishmen he trusted. The first, Lord Henry Howard, was the embittered younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, beheaded for plotting to marry James’s mother – and thus a member of a family who had proven their loyalty to the Stuart cause. The second was Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, who like Howard was a Catholic, though Elizabeth had famously said of him that he ‘reconciled what she believed to be impossible, a stiff papist to a good subject’. Where Howard was a brilliant academic but a tedious companion, Worcester was handsome and charismatic – the perfect courtier – and when Elizabeth had sent him to Scotland in 1590 to congratulate James on his marriage he had impressed the King so much that they had remained in contact thereafter.

James hoped that as a leader of the English Catholics Worcester was well placed to reconcile his coreligionists to the King’s inheritance. Cecil had therefore helped engineer Worcester’s promotion to the Privy Council in the summer of 1601, along with two other new members: Arbella Stuart’s maternal uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Cecil’s protégé, Sir John Stanhope, an old enemy of Shrewsbury’s.^* Howard assured James that Shrewsbury had only been picked because Elizabeth felt she had to respond to complaints that the nobility were under-represented on the Council, adding bitchily that Elizabeth never listened to his advice on anything. In fact James and Cecil recognised the need to have an ally within the Arbella camp on the Council and Cecil had chosen Stanhope as his counterweight. Thomas Wilson’s State of England described how Cecil maintained a tradition of pairing rival with rival in all the great offices of state so that ‘each having his enemies eye to over look him, it may make him look more warily to his charge, and that if anybody should incline to any unfaithfulness … it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head’. They in turn were supported only by ‘base pen clerks … that cannot conceive his master’s drifts and policies’.⁵²

      As Thomas Wilson observed, Cecil was like his father ‘of whom it was written that he was like an aged tree that lets none grow which near him planted be’.⁵³ It was already clear that it would be more difficult for Cecil to maintain his political hegemony under James, but he was determined to cut two of his old allies down to size: his former brother-in-law, Lord Cobham and Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. One of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour, Meg Radcliffe, had predicted years before that the anti-Essex alliance would break up after the Earl’s death and so it was proving. Cobham and Ralegh were not of any further use to Cecil; if anything, they were a liability, unpopular with almost everybody. The women of the court detested Lord Cobham, an ill-tempered individual later described by a courtier as ‘but one degree from a fool’ and the men loathed Ralegh whom they considered an arrogant upstart.

      Born the younger son of a mere tenant farmer from an old but impoverished Devonshire family, Ralegh had caught Elizabeth’s attention early in the 1580s. According to one telling story, Ralegh had been called before the Privy Council to explain why he had fallen out with his commanding officer in Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Ralegh was already an experienced soldier, having spent his teenage years fighting for the Protestant cause in France. Wilton, however, was a notorious one. His infamy rested on his having ordered the cold-blooded killing of 600 mainly Italian and Spanish prisoners at Smerwick Fort, just north of Dingle Bay. Even in an era of endemic violence this massacre had shocked: ‘Truly I never heard of such a bloody barbarous action, as the Lord Grey … committed in Ireland upon the Spaniards’, the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later recalled, ‘for whereas they had submitted himself to their mercy, he put some four or five hundred of them [in effect the whole number] into a yard, weaponless; and then were soldiers sent in with clubs, bills and swords, and slew everyman of them.’⁵⁴

      This massacre was not, however, the subject of Ralegh’s complaints to the Council. The boy who had seen the horrors of the wars in France did not become the man to blanch in Ireland. Ralegh was one of two officers who had led the companies that carried out the killings. Ralegh was instead at the Council table to present his own ideas about winning the war in Ireland and, as the writer John Aubrey described it, he ‘told his tale so well, and with so good a grace and presence that the Queen took especial notice of him, and presently preferred him’. Elizabeth liked to surround herself with a particular type of man – ‘proper men’ was how Aubrey put it and Ralegh exemplified this ideal, as one contemporary recalled: ‘For touching his shape and lineaments of body, they were framed in so just a proportion and so seemly an order, as there was nothing in them that a man might well wish to have been added or altered. In such gifts of the mind as the world generally esteems, he not only excelled most, but matched even the best men of his time.’⁵⁵

      The Queen had showered Ralegh with gifts and honours: the estates of the young Catholic traitor who had given the Babington plot its name, a prized knighthood and the Bishop of Durham’s crumbling palace in London. Ralegh renovated it and made it the centre of an intellectual circle that discussed science and religion. From here he also planned his great expeditions, including that which founded the first English colony in the New World at Roanoke Island. Elizabeth bestowed the name Virginia on it and all things from the New World became fashionable, from smoking tobacco in silver pipes to eating potatoes, which were considered an aphrodisiac. Ralegh, who was said to ‘love a wench well’, had little need of sexual fillips, but he had disadvantages as a courtier. Being an outsider he had no network of powerful relations to protect his interests. He had befriended Lord Cobham because he was an immensely rich peer with all the social contacts he himself lacked. He might, however, have acquired more friends with better judgement if his sarcasm and ‘damnable pride’ had not earned him so many enemies. It was said ‘He was commonly noted for using of bitter scoffs and reproachful taunts which bred him much dislike’ and ‘was so far from affecting popularity as he seemed to take a pride in being hated of the people’.

      Ralegh took great pleasure in annoying those less quick-witted than himself and even ignored religious sensibilities, teasing the pious by ‘perverting СКАЧАТЬ