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

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СКАЧАТЬ Stuart. They too were married in secret, but Bess made sure that this union had plenty of witnesses. It never paid out the prize of a male heir, but Arbella was legitimate, royal and English born. When Arbella was orphaned at the age of six in 1581, Bess – who was then married to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury – took her in and gave her a Protestant education suitable for a future ruler. Elizabeth, in addition to seeing her as a pawn in European politics, saw her rather as a useful counterpoint to James’s ambitions and she was the focus of considerable curiosity when Elizabeth invited her to court early in the summer of 1586. Elizabeth was then based at Burghley’s palace, Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, where the Earl of Essex had begun to supplant Sir Walter Ralegh as the Queen’s favourite.

      Arbella arrived at court accompanied by her Cavendish aunts and uncles, a slim, full-faced girl with dark blonde hair and slightly bulging blue eyes. Elizabeth allowed her the honour of dining in the Presence Chamber and courtiers showered the eleven-year-old with attention. Essex had talked to Arbella loudly of his devotion to the Queen and Burghley invited her to supper. Arbella went accompanied by her youngest uncle, Charles Cavendish, who reported all that passed in a letter to his mother.²⁹ Ralegh, whose fate would later become strangely bound up with Arbella’s, was sitting next to Burghley, the elder statesman with his long grey beard, Ralegh, dark and sleek, ‘long faced and sour-eye lidded’.³⁰ Cavendish was struck by how polite, even ingratiating, Ralegh was with Burghley: the fading favourite needed a powerful ally to match the support that Essex had in his stepfather, Elizabeth’s first and greatest love, the ageing Earl of Leicester.

      Burghley ‘spoke greatly in Arbella’s commendation, as that she had the French and the Italian; danced and writ very fair’ and wished ‘she were fifteen years old’. Cavendish then saw him whisper in Ralegh’s ear. Ralegh replied in his distinctive low voice and Devonshire accent ‘it would be a happy thing’.³¹ The two men appeared to be discussing a possible marriage. The name soon circulating as the most likely groom was that of Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, Philip II’s Lieutenant in the Spanish Netherlands, and, like him, a descendant of John of Gaunt. Elizabeth hoped that personal ambition might dull Parma’s effectiveness in the coming invasion. She also hoped that the promise of marrying Arbella to a Catholic might salve feeling about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and, with this in mind, she advertised to the French ambassador’s wife that Arbella ‘would one day be as I am’. The ambassador duly reported the conversation home, observing that Arbella ‘would be the lawful inheritress of the crown if James of Scotland were excluded as a foreigner’.³²

      Childish and spoilt Arbella was delighted ‘that it pleased her Majesty to … pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind’, but she would soon discover that her position depended on the prevailing political climate. When the Armada was defeated in August 1588, Arbella ceased to be seen as useful, though she failed to sense the change in her circumstances and continued to play the role of Elizabeth’s heir. On one notorious occasion she insisted on taking precedence over all the other ladies at court. Elizabeth seized on it as an excuse to order her to return home to Derbyshire.

      In December 1591 Burghley began pursuing fresh attempts for a settlement with Spain. Burghley had always been the most enthusiastic advocate for peace and his chief rivals from the war party, Leicester and Walsingham, were now dead (Leicester had died in September 1588 and Walsingham in November 1591). New plans were made for Arbella’s marriage to Farnese and in order to underscore her importance in the line of succession she was invited back to Whitehall for the Christmas celebrations.

      Harington recalled that Arbella had matured into an attractive young woman. He often admired her elegance of dress, ‘her virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music’.³³ Elizabeth, however, began to fear that a party was building behind her and, according to Harington, Essex or his followers had made some ‘glancing speeches’ that suggested she had cause for concern. When the Duke of Parma died the following December, Elizabeth let the marriage plans drop. The friendship with Farnese was now of no use to her and she decided to put the eighteen-year-old Arbella back in her Derbyshire box. She would not be invited back to court during Elizabeth’s lifetime. While Arbella’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the latest political gossip – a Catholic plot to kidnap her, a new husband who had been found for her – it was only as a bit part in a much bigger story.

      In 1593, the first year of Arbella’s exile, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Essex was appointed to the Privy Council. The average age of his fellow councillors was almost sixty, with the sclerotic Burghley holding a position of unrivalled authority. The only other young member was Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, who had been appointed to the Privy Council in 1591 when he was twenty-eight. Just as Leicester had marked Essex out as his heir, so Burghley was grooming Cecil for his. A contemporary described Cecil as having a ‘full mind in an imperfect body’.³⁴ He was short – no more than five foot two – and hunchbacked. His face was almost feminine with large, vivid eyes that suggested his quick wit. Elizabeth would sometimes refer to Cecil as her ‘pygmy’ and sometimes as her ‘elf’. Others preferred the sobriquet ‘Robert the Devil’.

      Unfailingly polite, watchful and measured, Cecil had been raised a courtier from infancy. He was therefore completely familiar with the complex network of human relations that bound people at court by blood, marriage, love, friendship, honour and dependency and he was precisely attuned to its mores. Here the normal rules of morality did not apply. Harington complained you ended up a fool at court if you didn’t start out a knave – but this did not trouble Cecil. As one discourse argued: ‘The courtier knows the secrets of the court, judges them not, but uses them for his particular advantage.’³⁵ Essex did his best to push his young clients forward for high office, but as Elizabeth’s old Councillors died she preferred to leave their posts vacant than replace them, arguing that younger men were too inexperienced – and Burghley was no keener on finding new talent than the Queen. He surrounded himself with fifth-rate men who could pose no threat to him. In this stagnant pool corruption flourished.³⁶

      Burghley’s servant John Clapham admitted that ‘purveyors and other officers of [the Queen’s] household, under pretence of her service, would oft-times for their own gain vex with many impositions the poorer sort of the inhabitants near the usual places of her residence’. And it wasn’t only the poor who suffered. ‘Certain it is,’ he recalled, ‘that some persons attending near about [the Queen] would now and then abuse her favour and make sale of it, by taking bribes for such suits as she bestowed freely.’³⁷ There had always been bribery: since official salaries were very low it was expected, but the scale shocked court and country alike. Burghley claimed to be dismayed by it, but his son was well known for his predilection for taking large bribes and Burghley himself covered up or ignored financial scandals involving his appointees at the Treasury and the Court of Wards. Some cost the crown tens of thousands of pounds.³⁸ This mismanagement, combined with the problems of an outdated system of taxation, encouraged Elizabeth’s carefulness with money to become obsessive. As the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later wrote, the ageing queen ‘was ever hard of access, and grew to be very covetous in her old days … the court was very much neglected, and in effect the people were weary of an old woman’s government’.³⁹

Harington’s tract complained that a few servants got everything and he had observed even then that ‘envy doth haunt many and breed jealousy’.⁴⁰ СКАЧАТЬ