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

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СКАЧАТЬ remained particularly resentful and they joined their Protestant peers in turning to Essex as the new leader of the nobility. Essex’s stepfather, Christopher Blount, was a Catholic, but his own religious allegiance was advertised by his having a Puritan chaplain. The term ‘Puritan’ had been coined as an insult, implying extremist views and the Puritans referred to themselves simply as the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestant or as ‘the Godly’.^* Some had all the bullying fanaticism we associate with the term. There was a joke recorded in the winter of 1602 – 3 that a Puritan was ‘a man who loved God with all his soul and hated his neighbour with all his heart’.⁴¹ But what attracted Essex was their integrity.

      Even the Jesuit Robert Persons admitted: ‘The Puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other … that is to say most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side.’⁴² Many Puritans hoped for political reforms that would sweep away corruption in public life, as well as for religious changes on Calvinist lines. Elizabeth had expected and even hoped that Essex and Cecil would hold differing views and attitudes. She had often used the arguments between Leicester and Burghley to give her the freedom to choose her own path. But Essex and Cecil became more than mere rivals in the Council. They dominated opposing factions with Cecil shoring up his father’s pre-eminence and his agenda of peace with Spain while Essex promoted the aggressive foreign policy previously advocated by Leicester.

      Essex often tried to bully and badger Elizabeth into accepting his policies, but his view that she ‘could be brought to nothing except by a kind of necessity’ was not the best way to gain her trust. It became increasingly clear to Essex that Elizabeth was becoming more, rather than less, reliant on Burghley and the only hope for change would lie with her successor. The first determined attempt to browbeat the Queen into naming her heir had come in February 1593 when the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name her successor. Her reply was to put him in the Tower.

      Harington recalled how from his cell Wentworth wrote ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.⁴³ He remained in the Tower for four years until his death, all the while stubbornly refusing to keep silent on the issue of the succession – a promise that would have given him his liberty.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface of public life, opposing groups continued to make frantic efforts to secure the succession. The question, after all, was not merely one of who would inherit the throne but who would be the leading men in their government. In the autumn of 1593, Catholic exiles approached Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (a junior descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Brandon). Derby was known to have Catholic sympathies and the group appeared to hope that he would accept the role of a candidate for the succession. Derby, however, took their letter to the Queen. The incident had all the hallmarks of an attempt by Robert Cecil to ‘waken’ a plot with agents provocateurs, a much-used method of gaining kudos with Elizabeth and destroying enemies, particularly Catholics. Derby’s action may have saved him from the scaffold, but within a few months he was dead anyway, having endured a violent sickness in which he produced vomit coloured ‘like soot or rusty iron’.⁴⁴ The description indicates bleeding in the stomach and the rumour was that he had been poisoned.^* Some said the Jesuits had murdered Derby in revenge for his betrayal of them, others that the Cecils had arranged it in order to clear the path for Beauchamp. Elizabeth had become dangerously ill with a fever and the issue of the succession had taken on a new urgency.

      Renewed efforts were being made to have the decision on Lord Beauchamp’s legitimacy reversed and the following year Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught stockpiling weapons for Beauchamp’s father the Earl of Hertford in the event of Elizabeth’s death. The Earl was put in the Tower with his son. The Cecils and Hertford’s brother-in-law, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard of Effingham (later the Earl of Nottingham), worked hard for their release, which came remarkably quickly in January.

Essex was by now firmly allied to James with whom he had been in correspondence since 1594.^† The King’s candidature appealed to Essex on several levels. The first was that he was a man. Essex once voiced the view that ‘they laboured under two things at this court delay and inconstancy which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen’.⁴⁵ Secondly James, unlike Beauchamp, was indisputably royal. Thirdly James disliked the Cecils, blaming Burghley for his mother’s death, and resenting his championship of Beauchamp’s cause; and lastly, but significantly, it was believed he could attract support from across the religious spectrum. James had already shown himself to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause. In 1590, for example, he had ordered that prayers be said in Scotland for those in England suffering for the ‘purity’ of religion. Catholics, meanwhile, saw James in terms of his being the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they regarded as virtually a martyr. Some hoped that he might convert when he left Scotland and there was widespread belief amongst Catholics and Protestants that, at the very least, he would offer Catholics toleration. Harington observed that James had never been subject to a papal excommunication and ‘had no particular cause to persecute any side for private displeasure’. James’s accession, therefore, offered a golden opportunity to ‘establish an unity, and cease the strife among us if it be possible’.⁴⁶

Perhaps the most effective enemy of this vision of religious freedom came, however, from amongst the Catholics themselves: the former missionary Robert Persons. Since Campion’s death, Persons had risen to be Prefect of the English Jesuits and was usually resident in Rome where he was described as a courtly figure, of ‘forbidding appearance’. To Persons any Catholic hopes of toleration were a threat to the higher goal of a total restitution of Catholicism and he was now to use his talents as a brilliant propagandist to change the whole basis of arguments on the succession. In November 1595 a book entitled A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England appeared in England published under the pseudonym ‘R. Doleman’.^* It took advantage of the fact the Tudors had failed to assert the strict hereditary principle to claim that ‘ancestry of blood alone’ was not enough to gain a crown. A monarch should have all the attributes of honour necessary to majesty and, the book argued, there was no such candidate within the Tudor family. The Doleman book took advantage of every consideration ever raised against the Tudor candidates, crystallised popular prejudices and added new disqualifications. Readers were invited to reflect that in the Suffolk line, Beauchamp and Lord Derby had damaged their royal status by marrying the daughters of mere knights (the daughters of Sir Richard Rogers and Sir John Spenser respectively).⁴⁷ Beauchamp and Derby were, therefore, simply not royal enough to command respect. Of the senior Stuarts, Arbella was said to be of illegitimate descent because Margaret Tudor’s second husband, the Earl of Angus, had another wife living at the time their marriage, while James was disqualified under the Bond of Association. The book further argued that James’s Scots nationality made him a particularly undesirable choice – and here Persons had hit on a raw nerve.

      Historically, Scotland was ‘the old, beggardly enemy’, and although the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had ended three centuries of armed conflict the English still despised their impoverished northern neighbour.⁴⁸ For many, the idea of a Scot becoming King of England suggested a ridiculous reversal of fortune. Doleman played up to these feelings, claiming that there was no possible advantage to England in joining with an impoverished country whose people were known for their ‘aversion СКАЧАТЬ