The Elizabethans (62 page)

It was the two English rivals, Sir John Perrot and Sir William Fitzwilliam, who succeeded in antagonising Tyrone. The English had hitherto supported his claim to the earldom – it had been hotly contested, not least because he was only the second son, and a second son at that of Matthew O’Neill, whose legitimacy as an O’Neill was questioned by other O’Neills. As the lord and ruler of Ulster, Tyrone wanted to make it his task to drive out the Scottish settlers and rule the area with trusted English and Irish administrators. But neither Perrot nor Fitzwilliam fully trusted him. Perrot wanted to divide the O’Neill lordship into two units and deprive Tyrone of half his power and wealth; Fitzwilliam wanted to devote his final term as Lord Deputy (1588–94) to dividing Ulster into English-style shires. Tyrone resented both procedures and seized the lands that Perrot had assigned to his rival, Turlough Luineach O’Neill. Elizabeth initially conceded Tyrone’s claim. He reciprocated by massacring 500 Spanish Armada survivors and by pursuing his deadly rivals, the MacShanes, who were still importing Scottish mercenaries into Ulster.

The English administrators, however, were suspicious of Tyrone’s enormous power. Sir Henry Bagenal, Marshal of the army, succeeded his father (Sir Nicholas – of Newry in Ulster) as an Irish privy councillor in 1590. He wanted to check Tyrone’s dynastic and political power, not least because there was strong personal antipathy between the two men. Tyrone had been married to a kinswoman by whom he had several children, but this union was put aside on the grounds of consanguinity and he horrified Sir Henry Bagenal by eloping with Bagenal’s sister, Mabel. The pair were married on 3 August 1591 by Thomas Jones, Bishop of Meath, in the house of a friend in County Dublin.

The elopement provoked some psychologically interesting reactions. Tyrone’s former brother-in-law, Hugh Roe O’Donnell, became his ally; Sir Henry Bagenal, his new brother-in-law, became his inveterate foe. O’Donnell escaped from confinement in Dublin Castle and formed a new alliance with Tyrone. In the opening years of the 1590s a number of factors came together, which made it almost inevitable that Tyrone would become the figurehead of anti-English resistance. His refusal to check his Irish allies (new and old) in their attacks on English soldiers was outraging the authorities at the same time as the Counter-Reformation was making inroads in Ireland. Tyrone – in spite of what the English alleged – was not at first involved with this, but some of his allies (the O’Donnells and Hugh Maguire, for instance) backed the appointment of Counter-Reformation bishops who actively encouraged their people to support the deposition of Elizabeth I in support of Philip II. A generation earlier, when Maryborough and Philipstown were established in County Offaly, the patriotic Irish position was to oppose Philip; and had his Catholic English queen, Mary, lived and produced heirs, the land of Ireland would no doubt have rivalled Holland and Switzerland in its collective devotion to the tenets of the Reformation. From the 1590s onwards, however, loyalty to the Church of Rome became part of the heady mix of Irish nationalist mythology, and Tyrone and friends were seen as champions of ‘Christ’s Catholic religion’.
²

The incendiary moment occurred in 1594. Fitzwilliam had been replaced as Lord Deputy by Sir William Russell, and a number of Tyrone’s allies resented having English garrisons planted on their land. The garrison at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, was attacked and routed by Maguire and Macbarron. Even at this late stage Tyrone attended upon Russell in Dublin and presented him with a petition for the garrisons to be removed. Elizabeth told Russell not to concede. The Irish then laid siege to a few more garrisons, including Blackwater Fort on Tyrone’s own land. Then his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Bagenal, was attacked at Clontibret, County Monaghan, and his 1,750 men were forced into retreat by a large Irish army headed by Tyrone himself. His William the Silent moment had come.

In English and in Irish, Tyrone was formally declared a traitor on 24 June 1595 at Dundalk, County Louth. The English, who had been more than happy to support his claim to the earldom when he was on their side, then issued statements about the bastardy of Tyrone’s father. But Tyrone now had the loyalty of thousands of Irish fighters from his own lands, and he also petitioned for 600 or 700 Spanish soldiers to help. Mercenaries were engaged from the Scottish islands. The English now had a major Irish resistance on their hands. On 14 August 1598 Bagenal was killed and thousands of his army were scattered or killed at the Battle of Yellow Ford, between Armagh and Blackwater. It was a major victory for the Irish from a military and a propaganda point of view. And it left Tyrone, in effect, the Lord of all Ireland.

What was Elizabeth to do? What was Philip of Spain to do? What would Lord Burghley advise? These are the familiar questions, which, for the previous forty years of the reign, would have been asked at any time of national emergency. But the old players were no longer able to take the stage. Philip II was dying as he heard the news of Tyrone’s victory at Yellow Ford. He died on 13 September – he was seventy-one years old. Old Burghley had died ten days before Tyrone’s triumph. Elizabeth in her old age must overcome her indecisiveness and face the Irish crisis by herself, and choose a course between the warring factions of her younger courtiers. None of them would be surprised when she chose, as the English hero to defeat the Irish William the Silent, her favourite, the young Earl of Essex.

By the time she was in her mid-sixties the Queen had grown prematurely old, with a ‘goggle throat, a great gullet hanging out’.
³
When the new French Ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, arrived at her court in November 1597, he described an England and a queen long past their springtime. The country between Dover and London was ‘poor and for the most part wild and untilled, and the Spanish could not easily make their entrance, for owing to the scarcity of provisions it would be necessary to bring them from Spain’.
⁴
De Maisse arrived at Whitehall by barge. He found ‘the entrance on the riverside . . . very small and inconvenient; it is a covered alley and rather dark. Thence one enters a low hall, and then by a staircase of fifteen or twenty steps to the rooms above. It is very low and has no great appearance for a royal house.’
⁵
On his first visit, de Maisse was led down a dark corridor where the Queen was sitting in a low chair, all by herself.
⁶
Bishop Goodman (1583–1656) noted that six years later she died ‘very much neglected, which was an occasion of her melancholy’.
⁷

When de Maisse was shown into the Preserve, Elizabeth excused herself for still being in her nightgown and said, gesturing to the ambassador’s entourage, ‘What will these gentlemen say to see me so attired? I am much disturbed that they should see me in this state.’
⁸

She was wearing a dress:

of silver cloth, white and crimson, or silver ‘gauze’ as they call it. This dress had slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta, and was girt about with other little sleeves that hung down to the ground, which she was forever twisting and untwisting. She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot.
⁹

On a later visit de Maisse noted that ‘when she raises her head she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it insomuch that all her belly can be seen’.
¹⁰
Her long, thin face was lined. Her ‘teeth were very yellow and unequal’.
¹¹
On either side of her ears hung two great curls of hair, which hung down to her shoulders. On top of the head was a somewhat fantastical red wig. She was festooned with jewels. A chain of rubies and pearls encircled the turkey-throat. Spangles of gold and silver and more pearls were in the wig. She had six or seven rows of pearl bracelets on each wrist.

This extraordinary apparition was accompanied, when de Maisse called again, by Burghley. The Frenchman thought Burghley was eighty-two. In fact he was only seventy-eight, but stone-deaf and apparently unable to hear, however loud de Maisse shouted. England, which at the beginning of the reign had been a young country, had decayed into a gerontocracy.

Burghley continued to keep his all-but-totally-deaf ear to the ground, attending Council meetings, pushing his son Robert forward, intriguing, weighing, interfering as much as always. In the summer of 1598 he at last began to fail. Elizabeth visited him on his sickbed and spoon-fed him with partridges sent by his son Robert. He had always been there – working as her Secretary at Hatfield before the death of her sister Mary, masterminding her accession and directing her policy, first as Secretary, later as Treasurer.

On his bed of sickness, which turned into a deathbed, he manifested two of his most marked characteristics: physical toughness and piety. ‘Oh, what a heart have I that will not die!’ he complained. He said the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. No one had more consummately played, as with kite-strings, the Queen’s moods and vagaries. He had not always achieved his aims: most notably he had failed to persuade her, in those early days, to marry. When she rebuked him, he did not pretend to be indifferent – ‘I am so wownded in my hart with the late sharp and percyng speeches of hir Majestie to my self in ye hearing of my L of Lecester . . .’
¹²
Some would raise an eyebrow at his claim that he submitted everything that he did to the Christian Gospel: everything? Every piece of intrigue, every word of back-stairs gossip, every piece of evidence falsified against enemies such as Sir John Perrot? Maybe these tainted deeds flitted through his sharp mind as he prayed for the pardon of his enemies, even as he forgave them. The be-all and end-all of his political standpoint had been the strengthening and preserving of Queen Elizabeth; and chief among his reasons for supporting her against all her enemies had been his belief that she was the strongest possible protectress of the Reformed Christianity in which he believed. Had she died before Mary, Queen of Scots, or had the Spaniards been successful in their forwarding of some rival claimant – Arbella Stuart, for example – much more would have been lost than one clever, vain woman in a red wig.

Elizabeth had become the embodiment, for Burghley, of that Reformation in which Sir John Cheke had taught him, at Cambridge, to believe. Therefore, he had served her. At the time of the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560, when Elizabeth was in full flight of hysterical rage against him, he had quoted the Greek verse ‘Blessed is he who serves the blessed ones.’ For the best part of forty years, he had made the motto his life.

‘Serve God,’ he wrote to his son Robert in those last weeks, ‘for all other service is indeed bondage to the devil.’
¹³
They would have been good last words. Not uncomically, however, five days later he had risen from his bed and was attending yet another meeting of the Council. Only at the beginning of August did he go back to bed and resume the Latin prayers, finally yielding up the ghost ‘mildly’ during the night of 3rd–4th of that month.

There is no doubt that, viewed in some lights, Burghley possessed all the virtues that were attributed to him by his friend William Camden: ‘a most excellent man . . . moderation . . . singular piety . . . so great a Councillor . . . and to his wholesome counsels the state of England for ever shall be beholden’.
¹⁴
Another way of looking at Burghley’s record in old age was that he was working for the interests of a faction within the court, and that factionalism enormously diminished the political life of late-Elizabethan England. Such was the strength of the
regnum Cecilianum
that old Burghley was prepared to stop the careers of talented men in their tracks – such as those of Sir Thomas Bodley, Henry Unten, Anthony Standen and Sir William Russell. More than just the careers of courtiers was at stake. The Irish situation became so particularly horrible because of the factionalism at court. Without the
regnum Cecilianum
, there might have been a chance for a less wild creature than the Earl of Essex to come forward as the young head on the old Elizabethan shoulders. As things turned out, the antiquity of the court, and of his enemies within it, were an essential part of the Essex tragedy.

A quarrel in which old people are struggling victoriously against young people is a dismaying archetype to contemplate. Essex was no wounded Balder or Adonis: he had brought his troubles on himself, all right. But those of his generation who watched and followed his career could hardly feel – as a younger generation evidently had felt – that Queen Elizabeth and her councillors were on their side. No wonder Shakespeare (born three years before Essex) could view the old queen’s death with complete equanimity:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured

And the sad augurs mock their own presage . . .

and could proclaim, in his Sonnets, the strength of personal relationships and the inner life:

When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
¹⁵

Robert Devereux was born on 10 November 1567, the child of that beautiful, sexy Lettice Knollys who would capture the fancy of the Queen’s favourite, Leicester, and Walter Devereux. They were at the heart of the story that we have been telling in this book. Whatever master-dramatist was staging the reign of Elizabeth cast Robert Devereux in the supreme role of tragic hero for the closing scenes.

The parents – Walter and Lettice – settled first at Chartley, their Staffordshire seat, which was doomed to be Mary, Queen of Scots’ prison. Walter was caught up in the Irish tragedy and died of illness contracted there. Their daughter Penelope was the ‘Stella’ of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil’, the beautiful inspiration for a sonnet-sequence that in some ways outmatches Shakespeare’s for technical accomplishment, though not for psychological interest. Lettice had been having an affair with the Earl of Leicester before her husband died, and it was her hold over Leicester that always had the power to reduce the Queen to frenzies of jealous fury. For one woman to have such power over
any
other is heady; to exercise it over an absolute monarch who wielded an axe must have induced a heroin-high of some potency. Elizabeth called her the ‘She-Wolf’.