The Elizabethans (63 page)

Her son Robert inherited the gift for mayhem. Without remotely suggesting that he was the man to whom Shakespeare wrote any of his sonnets, we could say to Essex – who possessed Lettice’s curly auburn hair, dark eyes, curling satirical mouth, fiery temper and total selfishness:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime . . . 
¹⁶

Essex (the Queen’s kinsman via his Boleyn-descended mother) first appeared at court at the age of ten – at Christmas 1577. From the first, his relationship with his monarch was arch and combatively flirtatious. He refused to allow her to kiss him, and kept his hat on in her presence. As Burghley’s ward, he was sent to Cambridge as early as possible – he matriculated aged thirteen at Trinity – and from the first he wished to combine, as Philip Sidney had done, the Renaissance qualities of book-learning, military heroism and the exercise of statecraft. At eighteen he was accompanying his stepfather Leicester as ‘general of the horse’ on the Netherlands campaign. By twenty he had returned and become the whirlwind success as a courtier. ‘When she is abroad,’ noted another courtier wistfully on 3 May 1587, ‘nobody with her but my Lord Essex, and at night my lord is at cards, or one game or another with her, that he cometh not to his own lodging till birds sing in the morning.’

He knew how to play the game, and how to flatter the wrinkled old crone for her beauty, whisper in her ear and lead her round the dance floor in the elaborate steps of the galliard. At the same time, there was something new in this last attachment of the Queen’s. Essex behaved with the conscious bullying of the toy-boy towards a pathetically older woman who was grateful for his love. She in turn, having allowed him to get away with outbursts of rage or with disobedience that would have cost others their liberty, or their head, would then check herself and insist upon his penitence – or even banish him for a while from her favours. He liked living dangerously, and he did not guard his tongue. He became a Knight of the Garter aged twenty-two and when, a few months later, his stepfather Leicester died, he let it be known that he thought he should succeed him as Chancellor of Oxford University (the Queen gave the honour to the faithful Sir Christopher Hatton). Essex made no secret of his contempt for her other favourite courtiers, and since Raleigh had been the greatest of these before Essex’s star rose in the sky, it was not to be wondered at that Essex reserved some of his bitterest expressions of contempt for Raleigh.

He was also determined to prove himself as great a hero as the brave Sir Walter. In 1589 he defied the Queen by persuading the captain of a ship called the
Swiftsure
to follow Drake and Norris on their madcap raid on Lisbon, in support of Don Antonio’s claim to the Portuguese throne. Elizabeth sent after him an imperious letter: ‘Essex, your sudden and undutiful departure from our presence and your place of attendance, you may easily conceive how offensive it is’ . . . She even called for Sir Roger Williams, the Falstaffian soldier who accompanied Essex on his Portuguese adventure, to be punished by death. But by the time Essex came back from Portugal, having stuck his lance in the city gates of Lisbon, and left Drake and his mates to plunder the port of Vigo, Elizabeth had forgiven him.

Inevitably, as a heterosexual who wished to found a dynasty, Essex knew that sooner or later he would have to commit what – in a favourite of Elizabeth’s – was the ultimate betrayal. He showed the direction of his ambition by marrying Philip Sidney’s widow Frances, the daughter of Francis Walsingham. Essex was in many ways a brilliant person, but he was not in the league of Sidney. The ersatz Renaissance hero that he needed to become was a reflection of a decline at court. He left behind no sonnet sequence, still less a masterpiece to compare with
Arcadia
. He lacked any of Sidney’s philosophical reserve or moral depth, though, as his noble death showed, Essex shared with Sidney a deep piety that must have surprised some of his enemies. Frances Sidney and Essex had five children, of whom the firstborn, Robert, became the 3rd Earl and a parliamentary general in the Civil War – surely a reflection, among other things, of the 2nd Earl’s fate at the hands of the elderly Queen Elizabeth.

The Queen did forgive him for committing the sin of matrimony, but only just, and only on condition that his wife should live ‘very retired in her mother’s house’.
¹⁷

Throughout the nineties, Essex punctuated his attentions to the Queen at court with displays of derring-do on the international scene. In 1591 he led 4,000 men into France to support Henri of Navarre in his struggle against the Catholic League. In 1596 he advocated a raid on the Spanish ports as the best way of dampening Spanish aggression. Raleigh was leading the attack – to Essex’s intense annoyance – but Essex himself had command of a squadron and, when the English ships inflicted utter defeat upon the Spanish, Essex could then upstage Raleigh, Lord Howard of Effingham and the other English officers by entering Cadiz and planting his standard on the citadel. During the service of thanksgiving for this campaign, which was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, the congregation burst into applause when Essex was eulogised from the pulpit.

Essex, who was a highly motivated and ambitious politician, was not simply anxious to be regarded as the daredevil of the decade; nor, with all his elaborate courtship of Elizabeth on the dance-floor, and his bravery, kitted out with the Queen’s glove on his arm and hundreds of pounds’ worth of elaborately tailored clothes and armour on the rest of his person, as a latterday piece of camp, court decoration. The Queen was an ageing woman. The overwhelming likelihood was now that she would be succeeded by the King of Scotland, but under this capricious and pathologically indecisive tyrant, anything could happen and no one knew exactly when the yellow-toothed, wrinkly, sad old woman, who had all but given up food and drink, would quit the scene.

Essex, as her ‘favourite’, was openly jockeying for position as the most powerful man, politically, in England. Who would be the man who would exercise power as the Queen slipped into her dotage? Who would have his hand on the tiller when the new captain, whoever that turned out to be, took over? Who would guarantee that the takeover would continue the Protestant, anti-Spanish, university-dominated regime that had been the political creation of William Cecil? Or would it take off in a new direction, with a greater toleration for the papists? In 1593, having accepted military aid from England to maintain his Protestant power-base, Henri IV of France had become a Catholic for the eminently sensible reason that ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ – that is, control of the French capital, and friendship with the largely Catholic governing classes, were more important than narrow theological principle; Elizabeth was disgusted and called Henri ‘an AntiChrist of ingratitude’ – but Essex would have understood, and so would many of the young noblemen in the Essex circle. Not just the Catholic Earl of Southampton, and not just the young – for Lettice Essex, the young earl’s mother, had married for the third time to Sir Charles Blount (future Lord Mountjoy), one of the pivotal senior Catholics in England. In short, anything could happen; and Essex was determined, when the time came, that he would be in a position of supreme power.

It was a cataclysmic blow to his schemes that, while he was away in Cadiz, performing deeds that would win him the applause of the crowd in St Paul’s Cathedral, his old rival Robert Cecil should be appointed as Secretary. Old Burghley was still alive at this juncture. Elizabeth had chosen wisely. The Cecils were not merely astute politicians in their own interest; it was very largely because of the
regnum Cecilianum
that Elizabeth had maintained a stable government for so long. Robert Cecil, in spite of his physical deformity, and his personal sorrows in the early years of high office (his wife died that year when he was only thirty-three, as did his father-in-law Lord Cobham, leaving him with his daughter Frances, who had inherited her father’s deformity, and a frail son William
¹⁸
), was able to guide the Queen with great astuteness during the few years left to her. Nor did he make the mistake of underestimating Essex’s considerable power-base, with allies in the Privy Council, at court and in the country at large.

Essex’s power was extended by his sister Dorothy Perrot (married to Sir John Perrot’s son, Tom), later to become Countess of Northumberland; and by their mother with all the Blount/Mountjoy lands and connections. This took in much of Wales, a crucially important power-base in Elizabethan England, especially since the Irish situation was so uncertain. Essex had suffered not merely a great personal blow when Sir John Perrot was condemned for treason; it also meant a loss of land and influence for his sister, since a traitor’s lands reverted to the Crown, and it was a great coup for Essex the flatterer that he managed to persuade Elizabeth to allow him and Dorothy to recover so much of the Perrot land in Pembrokeshire. Much of Carmarthenshire, the Welsh country immediately to the east, belonged to the Devereux interest: the fine church of St Peter’s, Carmarthen, was a traditional burying place for the Devereux, and Essex was Constable of Carmarthen Castle. These were not mere sinecures, however rarely Essex visited south Wales. What he was controlling here was, besides much fertile and well-fortified land, the high road between England and Ireland.

As lord of Chartley, the Devereux seat near Stafford where Mary, Queen of Scots had been imprisoned, Essex was also the master of much of the land through which any army, discontented or otherwise, would have to march (north or south) in the event of a great civil disturbance. The North of England was still broadly speaking Catholic – the religion of the Blounts (Essex’s new in-laws) of his sister, Penelope Rich, and of so many of the northern families who supported the Earl of Northumberland, whom Dorothy Devereux (Lady Perrot) had married in 1594.
¹⁹
Essex had a huge territorial power-base, which Robert Cecil – however much he detested his political rival – was not such a fool as to ignore.

Nor was it a merely territorial strength that Essex possessed. Enough has already been written here to demonstrate that he was a difficult, indeed in many respects an odious, young man. But quite apart from his considerable skills at wowing the public and wooing private political allies, Essex, with all the quarterings of his Devereux forebears and extended relations, was related by blood to a high proportion of the tiny peerage of England. Many of them might cordially loathe him, but they were bound to him by kinship. Through his own marriage, Essex was bound to the Sidneys, and to the Earl of Pembroke (who, it must be said, hated him).

Either through kinship or old family association, Essex was close to the Earls of Worcester and Sussex, Rutland and Southampton, Lords Lumley, Eure, Willoughby d’Eresby and Lord Henry Howard. ‘This glittering circle of friends was as impressive a grouping of noblemen as any seen in the sixteenth century’.
²⁰

Of course, there was a sense in which all these connections and influences were only of use to Essex – and of threat to his rivals at court – for as long as he enjoyed the favour of the Queen. But were the Queen seriously to antagonise a great power-base like this, the country would be facing more than a little local difficulty. What began at the start of the decade as a very embarrassing crush formed by a lonely old woman on someone almost young enough to be her grandson would develop into the greatest political threat that had endangered Elizabeth since the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The steely way in which she dealt with the threat, when it came to the point of crisis, showed that for all her foolish capacity to dote on her favourites, and her physical decrepitude, she had actually lost none of her ruthlessness, none of that political cunning, which, after nail-bitingly long periods of dither, so often served her.

And so we return to the Battle of Yellow Ford, on 14 August 1598, when the Earl of Tyrone, antagonised needlessly but beyond endurance by the English administration, had killed his brother-in-law Sir Henry Bagenal, routed thousands of English soldiers and proclaimed himself the lord of Ulster and the champion of Christ’s Catholic religion. In this moment of supreme national crisis, a crisis almost as serious as the arrival of the Armada ten years before, the Queen forgave Essex – they were in the middle of one of their tiffs – summoned him back from his Achilles-sulk and made him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. ‘By God,’ he declared, ‘I will beat Tyrone in the field.’

He could not have been more wrong. The losers in the tale would be Essex (the most disastrous loser), the people of Ireland – if they had hoped for the freedom to return to the old Gaelic ways of life, independent of English bossing – and the poor English foot-soldiers who followed Essex on his lacklustre campaign. The victor was the Earl of Tyrone, for the time being. In the end, by 1603, the Ulster rebellion would totally collapse. English law would be enforced (by Essex’s successor in Ireland, his Catholic uncle-in-law Mountjoy) upon the whole land of Ireland and, under James VI, the Scottish planting of Ulster would begin, which would lead, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to so bloody and so catastrophic a cohabitation of irreconcilable peoples and cultures. Essex set off to confront Tyrone with the largest army
²¹
ever to leave English shores during the entire reign – 16,000 foot and 1,300 horse.

In the time it took to assemble this force, Tyrone’s triumph at Yellow Ford had led to a virtual collapse of the state’s authority throughout Connaught and Munster and parts of Leinster.

As far as posterity cares about Tyrone’s short-lived victories, the worst consequence was a literary one.
The Faerie Queene
, the greatest English epic, was everlastingly interrupted, and its author destroyed. Two months after Yellow Ford, Tyrone sent an expedition into Munster and the whole province rose up against the English. Spenser, who was by now Sheriff of Cork, was living in his beautiful seat at Kilcolman with his wife and family when the mob arrived. The house was sacked and burned to the ground. The poet escaped to Cork with his wife and what was left of the family – some say he lost a child in the fire. Sir John Norreys, President of the Province of Munster, gave the Spensers hospitality in Cork, and by the time of Christmas, Spenser was in London, able to present to the Queen his
View of the Present State of Ireland
, whose genocidal proposals – never to be forgotten or forgiven by Irish scholars of Spenser – can be understood in their political context. He died shortly after reaching the age of forty-seven. He was buried next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey and Essex paid for the funeral.
²²
It is a loss to literature comparable only to the murder of Marlowe and the premature death of Sidney that
The Faerie Queene
remained only half-finished.