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

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СКАЧАТЬ French enemies: James would fill English posts with Scottish nobles and might even oppress the English with foreign armies.

      Furthermore, Doleman warned, while some claimed that England and Scotland shared the same religion, the truth was that Scottish Calvinism was ‘opposite to that form which in England is maintained’, with its rituals and bishops. If James became king the nobility would find the church hierarchy torn down and themselves subject to the harangues of mere Church ministers.⁴⁹ His words echoed something the Earl of Hertford had once said of the Puritans: ‘As they shoot at bishops now, so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.’⁵⁰ The fact that episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland in 1593 added credence to the claims.

      Having thus dismissed all the Tudor candidates as unworthy, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion’.⁵¹ If this seems a strange argument now it is worth remembering that the rights of the present royal family have been based on this premise since the reign of William and Mary. It held still greater force at a time when kings were believed to rule by divine right.

      The Doleman book accepted that each faith would prefer to choose a monarch of their own religion, but it expressed no doubt that a Catholic choice would win through since Catholics were strengthened by the persecution ‘as a little brook or river, though it be but shallow … yet if many bars and stops be made therein, it swells and rises to a great force’.⁵² It was a belief shared within the Protestant establishment. Even Walsingham had once observed that the execution of Catholics ‘moves men to compassion and draws some to affect their religion’. The book’s comments were not, however, designed to spread dismay amongst Protestants, so much as to attract the attention of Catholics. Doleman informed Catholics that they were not only bound to choose a Catholic candidate as a religious duty, they were also blessed with an excellent choice: Philip II’s favourite daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her claim through her father (and thus Edward III) was strengthened by that of her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, a descendant of the Dukes of Brittany to whom William the Conqueror had pledged feudal obedience.

      The book claimed Isabella also had the personal attributes necessary in a great monarch. She was ‘a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety’ and, as she came from a rich kingdom, she was less likely to ‘pill and poll’ her English subjects than a poverty-stricken Scot.⁵³ The arguments made the Infanta a powerful and believable candidate overnight. As a final touch Persons mischievously dedicated the book to Spain’s leading enemy at court: the Earl of Essex – he who had attracted such a large Catholic following. ‘No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity,’ Doleman wrote; ‘no man likes to have a greater part or sway in deciding this great affair.’

      In his Tract Harington recalled that, as the pivotal year of 1598 opened, the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge ‘did both light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’.⁵⁴ The Privy Council was half the size it had been at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and Burghley was so old and ill he had to be carried into meetings in a chair. He still pursued the cause of peace with Spain without success and the costs fell on a country burdened by a growing population and a series of harvest failures. As food prices rose, wages fell, men impressed for the war returned to vagrancy and theft and sedition increased. There were reports of the poor claiming that Philip II of Spain was the rightful King of England and that life had been better under his wife Mary I. The greatest danger for Elizabeth, however, was the discontent at court.

      Years of simmering resentment between the Cecil and Essex factions reached boiling point in June when Philip II was dying and there were new hopes of peace. Burghley was keen to press ahead with negotiations with Spain. There was another terrible famine and he warned of ‘the nature of the common people of England [who are] inclinable to sedition if they be oppressed with extraordinary payments’. Essex, however, realised the power of Spain was waning and wanted to push home the advantage. The Queen supported the Cecils, and Essex’s irritation with her came out into the open in dramatic fashion at a Council meeting attended by Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Admiral and Sir Francis Windebank, Clerk of the Signet. The pretext for the argument was the choice of a new deputy for Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice was Essex’s uncle and principal supporter in Council, Sir William Knollys. Essex tried to dissuade her. When he knew he had failed he lost his temper and as the others looked on with horror, Essex suddenly revealed his pent-up contempt for the Queen, turning his back on her with a scornful look. Furious, Elizabeth hit him around the head and ordered him to be gone and be hanged. His hand went to his sword. Admiral Nottingham grabbed him and Essex checked himself, but he swore that he would not have put up with such an indignity from Henry VIII himself.

      As Elizabeth absorbed the implications of her favourite’s behaviour Burghley left court for Bath hoping to recover his deteriorating health. Harington was also making use of the medicinal waters when Elizabeth sent Lady Arundel with a cordial for Burghley’s stomach along with a message, ‘that she did intreat heaven daily for his longer life – else would her people, nay herself stand in need of cordials too’. Burghley’s death, shortly afterwards on 4 August, came as a crushing blow to the Queen; all the more so when it was followed within weeks by the massacre of her troops at Yellow Ford in Ireland. For a decade the administration in Ireland had tried to curtail the power of Ulster’s greatest chieftain, the Earl of Tyrone, feudalising land tenure and centralising power. Tyrone had kept his freedom of action for a time by bribing corrupt officials and fighting proxy wars through followers he claimed he could not control. He had even seduced and married the young sister of Ulster’s chief commissioner Sir Henry Bagenal in an attempt to trap him in a blood alliance. This phoney war had ended on 16 August as Tyrone led an all-out fight for liberation, leaving Sir Henry Bagenal amongst the 2,000 loyalist dead.

      The events that followed haunted Harington, as they did the Queen. Essex and his army had reached Dublin in mid-April 1599. The Irish Council advised him against attacking Tyrone in Ulster before the late summer and so he led the army south into Leinster, ‘the heart of the whole kingdom’, before going on into Munster. It was an arduous and bloody campaign. Harington wrote home thanking God, ‘that among so many as have been hurt and slain … and some shot even in the very ranks I was of, I have escaped all this while without bodily hurt’. Essex furthermore was no longer the confident, handsome young soldier he had once been. At thirty-two his hair had grown thin and he had to wear it short, except for one long lock behind his left ear, which he tucked into his ruff. His once round and amiable face was pinched, ‘his ruddy colour failed … and his countenance was sad and dejected’.⁵⁵ He suffered terrible headaches – possibly a symptom of syphilitic meningitis – certainly his sense of judgement was abandoning him.

      When Essex heard that his military successes were ignored at court and that he was being criticised for his failure to take on Tyrone directly, he considered bringing the army back from Ireland. He intended to use it to force Elizabeth to name James her heir and dispose of Cecil, Cobham and Ralegh once and for all, but his friend, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, dissuaded him. Instead Essex made the fateful decision to make a truce with Tyrone against royal orders and return to court to secure royal support for his military strategy. In the months that followed Essex’s subsequent arrest, his supporters had approached James asking him to invade England in support of the Earl. While James worked to raise the necessary funds they published pamphlets justifying Essex’s actions in Ireland. In the autumn of 1600 Elizabeth responded to these paper darts by stripping the Earl of his right to collect a tax on sweet wines. It left him facing financial ruin and Harington had looked on aghast as Essex СКАЧАТЬ