ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history (7 page)

Characteristically enough, in spite of the Queen's anger and the Cecils' scepticism, the case against the Doctor was not allowed to drop. He was still kept a prisoner at Essex House; he and the rest of the suspected Portuguese were still subjected to endless examinations. And now began one of those strange and odious processes which fill the obscure annals of the past with the ironical futility of human justice. The true principles of criminal jurisprudence have only come to be recognised, with gradually increasing completeness, during the last two centuries; the comprehension of them has grown with the growth of science - with the understanding of the nature of evidence, and the slow triumph, in men's mental habits, of ordered experience and reason. No human creature can ever hope to be truly just; but there are degrees in mortal fallibility, and for countless ages the justice of mankind was the sport of fear, folly, and superstition. In the England of Elizabeth there was a particular influence at work which, in certain crucial cases, turned the administration of justice into a mockery. It was virtually impossible for any one accused of High Treason - the gravest offence known to the law - to be acquitted. The reason for this was plain; but it was a reason, not of justice, but expediency. Upon the life of Elizabeth hung the whole structure of the State. During the first thirty years of her reign, her death would have involved the accession of a Catholic sovereign, which would inevitably have been followed by a complete revolution in the system of Government, together with the death or ruin of the actual holders of power. The fact was obvious enough to the enemies of the English polity, and the danger that they might achieve their end by the Queen's assassination was a very real one. The murder of inconvenient monarchs was one of the habits of the day. William of Orange and Henry III of France had both been successfully obliterated by Philip and the Catholics. Elizabeth on her side had sought - though, indeed, rather half-heartedly - to have the Queen of Scots secretly put out of the way, in order to avoid the public obloquy of a judicial execution. Her own personal fearlessness added to the peril. She refused, she said, to mistrust the love of her subjects; she was singularly free of access; and she appeared in public with a totally inadequate guard. In such a situation, only one course of action seemed to be possible: every other consideration must be subordinated to the supreme necessity of preserving the Queen's life. It was futile to talk of justice; for justice involves, by its very nature, uncertainty; and the government could take no risks. The old saw was reversed; it was better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape. To arouse suspicion became in itself a crime. The proofs of guilt must not be sifted by the slow processes of logic and fair play; they must be multiplied - by spies, by
agents provocateurs
, by torture. The prisoner brought to trial should be allowed no counsel to aid him against the severity of iron-hearted judges and the virulence of the ablest lawyers of the day. Conviction should be followed by the most frightful of punishments. In the domain of treason, under Elizabeth, the reign of law was, in effect, superseded, and its place was taken by a reign of terror.

It was in the collection of evidence that the mingled atrocity and absurdity of the system became most obvious. Not only was the fabric of a case often built up on the allegations of the hired creatures of the government, but the existence of the rack gave a preposterous twist to the words of every witness. Torture was constantly used; but whether, in any particular instance, it was used or not, the consequences were identical. The threat of it, the hint of it, the mere knowledge in the mind of a witness that it might at any moment be applied to him - those were differences merely of degree; always, the fatal compulsion was there, inextricably confusing truth and falsehood. What shred of credibility could adhere to testimony obtained in such circumstances - from a man, in prison, alone, suddenly confronted by a group of hostile and skilful examiners, plied with leading questions, and terrified by the imminent possibility of extreme physical pain? Who could disentangle among his statements the parts of veracity and fear, the desire to placate his questioners, the instinct to incriminate others, the impulse to avoid, by some random affirmation, the dislocation of an arm or a leg? Only one thing was plain about such evidence: - it would always be possible to give to it whatever interpretation the prosecutors might desire. The Government could prove anything. It could fasten guilt upon ten innocent men with the greatest facility. And it did so, since by no other means could it make certain that the one actual criminal - who might be among them - should not escape. Thus it was that Elizabeth lived her life out, unscathed; and thus it happened that the glories of her Age could never have existed without the spies of Walsingham, the damp cells of the Tower, and the notes of answers, calmly written down by cunning questioners, between screams of agony.

It was, of course, an essential feature of the system that those who worked it should not have realised its implications. Torture was regarded as an unpleasant necessity; evidence obtained under it might possibly, in certain cases, be considered of dubious value; but no one dreamt that the judicial procedure of which it formed a part was necessarily without any value at all. The wisest and the ablest of those days - a Bacon, a Walsingham - were utterly unable to perceive that the conclusions, which the evidence they had collected seemed to force upon them, were in reality simply the result of the machinery they themselves had set in motion. Judges, as well as prisoners, were victims of the rack.

The case of Dr. Lopez was typical. One can trace in it the process by which suspicion, fear, and preconceived theories were gradually, under the pressure of the judicial system, blended into a certainty which, in fact, was baseless. Essex was an honest young lord, who would have recoiled in horror from the thought of doing an innocent man to death for political purposes; but he was not very strong in the head. He mistrusted the Cecils, he mistrusted Spain, he perceived - what was true enough - that there was something fishy about Dr. Lopez. The scorn poured by the Queen upon his sagacity was the final inducement: he was right, in spite of them all; he would not rest till he had probed the matter to the bottom. And there was only one method of effecting this - it was obvious; the Portuguese must be cross-examined until the truth was forced from them. Lopez himself had baffled him, but there remained Ferreira and Tinoco, who had already shown themselves more pliable. They were accordingly, in their separate cells, relentlessly questioned. Each was ready enough, in order to exculpate himself, to incriminate the other, and to declare, when pressed further, that the Doctor was the centre of the plot. But what was the plot? If it was merely aimed at Don Antonio, why this elaboration of mystery? But if it was aimed at someone else? If...? It needed no genius to unravel the enigma. One had only to state the circumstances, for the solution to arise spontaneously to the mind. Spain - a plot - the royal physician: such a concatenation was enough. It was one more attempt on the part of King Philip to assassinate the Queen of England.

This point once reached, the next step inevitably followed. The belief in the mind of the questioner became a statement in the mouth of the questioned. At one point in his examination, Ferreira asserted that Dr. Lopez had written to the King of Spain, professing his willingness to do everything his Majesty required. The question was then asked - "Would the Doctor have poisoned the Queen if required?" and Ferreira replied in the affirmative. He was then forced to elaborate the supposition with a mass of detail; and the same process was applied to Tinoco; with the same result. After that, supposition very soon slipped into fact. "I have discovered," wrote Essex to Anthony Bacon, "a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was her Majesty's death. The executioner should have been Dr. Lopez; the manner poison. This I have so followed that I will make it appear as clear as noonday."

Luck was against the Doctor. The case against him depended on a complicated construction from the evidence of two perjured rogues, Ferreira and Tinoco - evidence extorted under fear of the rack, and made up of a mass of hearsay and the recollections of years' old conversations and of letters never produced. The Cecils, with their pro-Spanish and anti-Essex bias, would have been sharp enough to see through such stuff, but for one unfortunate circumstance. Early in the proceedings the name of Andrada, a Portuguese spy, had been mentioned by Ferreira, who had asserted that he had been sent to Spain by Lopez to arrange for the murder of Don Antonio. Andrada was well known to Burghley. It was true that the man had been to Spain, at the period mentioned, in most suspicious circumstances. Burghley had no doubt that, while nominally in the service of Don Antonio, he had been bought by the Spanish authorities. He was now in Brussels; and, if it was a fact that there had been a secret connection between him and Lopez, something really damaging would at last have been discovered about the Doctor. As the examinations proceeded, Andrada's name recurred more and more frequently. It appeared that he had been the principal intermediary between the Spanish Court and the intriguers in Flanders. Tinoco repeated - or purported to repeat - a long description that Andrada had given of his visit to Madrid. King Philip had embraced him, and told him to pass on the embrace to Dr. Lopez; he had handed him a diamond and ruby ring, with a similar injunction. Could all this be true? Elizabeth was told of it, and she remembered that, some three years previously, the Doctor had offered her a diamond and ruby ring, which she had refused to accept. The Doctor was now pressed once more with searching questions. He denied, with violent oaths and imprecations, that he knew anything of the matter; but at last, when cross-examined on the ring, he changed his tone. It was true, he admitted, that he had been privy to Andrada's visit to Spain; but he added that the explanation of that visit was entirely different from any that had been put forward. Andrada had been in the pay of Walsingham. He had been sent to Madrid on the pretext of a peace negotiation, with the object of spying out the state of affairs at the Spanish Court. The Doctor, at Walsingham's special request, had agreed to allow his name to be used, to give colour to the proceedings. Andrada was to represent to Philip that he had been sent by Lopez, who was eager for peace and influential with the Queen. The deceiver, in fact, was to be deceived. The scheme had worked, Philip had been taken in, and his ring had been intended, not for the Doctor, but for Elizabeth. Walsingham was perfectly aware of all this, and could substantiate every detail. Could, that is to say, if only... Essex laughed outright. The Cecils, convinced that Andrada was in the pay of the Spaniards, were incredulous. It would not do. The Doctor's story was ingenious - it was too ingenious; the whole - it was obvious - hung upon one thing - the corroboration of Walsingham; and Walsingham was dead.

By a curious irony, the very circumstance which finally led the Cecils to abandon Lopez has afforded to posterity the means of vindicating him. Papers have been discovered among the Spanish archives showing that his tale was substantially true. It was indeed under the pretext of a peace overture that Andrada visited Madrid. He was not permitted to see Philip in person, and the story of the royal embrace was a fabrication; but the diamond and ruby ring was actually handed to the spy by the Spanish Secretary of State. Other matters, it is true, were discussed besides peace; it was agreed that Dr. Lopez should endeavour to obtain either the imprisonment of Don Antonio, or his exile from England; a hint was thrown out that he might usefully be poisoned; but not the faintest suggestion was made which could possibly point to the murder of Elizabeth. As a matter of fact, however, and this was unknown to Lopez - the Spaniards were not taken in. They saw through Walsingham's stratagem, and they determined to hoist him with his own petard. Persuaded by their gold, Andrada became a double spy. He agreed to return to England and to carry on, nominally, the negotiation for peace, but, in reality, to use his position for furnishing Madrid with inside information of the state of affairs in England. Walsingham's death spoilt the plan. Andrada was unable to explain his conduct, and Burghley became convinced that he was sold to Spain. He was indeed; but the guilt of Lopez did not follow from that premise, as Walsingham, could he have returned to earth for two minutes, would have explained.

When the Cecils were won over to the view of Essex, the Doctor's doom was sealed. He was unable to cope with the ordeal that had come upon him so suddenly in the comfortable prosperity of his old age. Shut up in Essex House, humiliated, badgered, terrified, when his resistance was once broken down he completely lost his head. He alternated between frantic asseverations of utter ignorance and wild revelations of complicated impossible plots. There can be little doubt that he had something discreditable upon his conscience. His secret note to Ferreira indicated that. It seems highly probable that he was engaged in some conspiracy to ruin Don Antonio; it is possible that he was actually prepared, in return for a sufficient bribe from the Spaniards, to poison him. As to his murdering the Queen, not only is the evidence for any such intention quite insufficient, but the improbability of such a design is, on the face of it, overwhelming. What would he gain if he effected the death of Elizabeth? Some wretched pittance from Philip. And he would lose everything - his position, his income, the royal favour - to say nothing of the risk of detection. It would have been madness to think of such a thing; but the enraged persecutors who surrounded him thought of nothing else. They were determined to complete their case against him by forcing a confession from his own lips. A few twists of the rack would have produced this soon enough; but that would be crude; true virtuosity lay in obtaining the required words without the rack, without even an open threat of it, without more than a glance, perhaps, a gesture, a significant silence. Before very long it was done. To the question, constantly repeated, whether he had promised the Spaniards to murder the Queen, the Doctor, worn out at last by weeks of anxiety, suddenly collapsed, and assented. That was enough. The odds, indeed, had been decidedly unequal. On one side were Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon, Lord Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil, and the Earl of Essex; and on the other an old Portuguese Jew. One can understand, perhaps, the intellectuals and the politicians; but Essex! Generous, strong, in the flush of manhood, is it possible that he failed to realise that what he was doing was, to say the least of it, unfair? Years afterwards, when Spain was no longer a bugbear, his animosity against Dr. Lopez seemed only to be explicable on the ground of some violent personal grudge. But in truth no such explanation was necessary. The Earl's mind was above personalities; but it was not above the excitement of political rivalry, the cruel conventions of human justice, and the nobility of patriotism.