The Elizabethans (64 page)

Essex’s campaign in Ireland was totally ineffectual. He spent twenty-one weeks in the country where his father had died. Unlike Spenser, who was so deeply versed in Irish lore and language and topography, he knew nothing of the place. Unlike his successor Mountjoy, who did manage to subdue Ulster, and with it the whole of Ireland, Essex had no idea of tactics. Mountjoy subdued Ireland by utter ruthlessness, spoiling crops, wrecking land and houses, clocking up small victory after small victory from a military point of view, while applying relentless political pressure on Tyrone. Essex allowed Tyrone to run rings round him. The 16,000-strong English army consisted largely of untrained raw recruits. Essex approached each skirmish and battle, each local uprising in dribs and drabs, rather than having a ruthless policy for Ireland as a whole. In Wicklow, Louth, Kildare and Roscommon the Queen’s armies were humiliatingly defeated. Essex scarcely moved from the Pale. Exasperated, the Queen sent messages telling him to move north. ‘If we had meant that Ireland, after all the calamities in which they have wrapped it, should still have been abandoned,’ she witheringly wrote, ‘then it was very superfluous to have sent over a personage such as yourself.’

On 7 September Tyrone persuaded Essex to meet him for a negotiated truce, at Carrickmacross. Tyrone extracted from Essex the most astonishing concessions. The English would establish no more garrisons or forts. The truce would last six weeks, extendable at further six-weekly intervals until May 1600 – in other words, to give time for Tyrone to receive the invading Spanish reinforcements that he had been promised. Or so it was surmised. Essex made the further blunder of parleying with Tyrone alone, without witnesses or secretaries.

‘We never doubted,’ Elizabeth wrote sarcastically:

but that Tyrone, whensoever he saw any force approach either himself or any of his principal partisans would instantly offer a parley, specially with our supreme general of that Kingdom, having done it with those of subaltern authority, always seeking these cessations with like words, like protestations, and upon such contingents as we gather these will prove. It appeareth by your journal that you and the traitor spoke half an hour together without anybody’s hearing, wherein though we trust you are far from mistrusting you with a traitor, yet both for comeliness example and your own discharge, we marvel you would carry it no better.
²³

Essex realized that he had blundered, and he then made matters worse by playing the lover’s card. Had he stayed at his post in Ireland and begun to pull off genocidal acts of retribution against the Irish, he might have saved his English political career. Instead he panicked, and hurried back to London, hoping to make a personal appeal to Elizabeth. He rode without interruption as soon as he got to England and, covered with mud and sweat, reached Nonsuch on 28 September at ten in the morning, having been in the saddle all night.

Brooking no warning signals from flunkies, he brushed past the ladies-in-waiting and did what no man had ever done for years – he walked straight into the Queen’s bedroom apartments. He saw the old lady with her ‘grey hairs about her ears’, and the wig several feet away on its stand. She was not dressed. At first, however, it looked as if his gamble had paid off. She patted him softly on the head and told him to return when they had time to prepare themselves. He was able to say, to the awestruck gaggle of courtiers who had assembled in the public rooms, that ‘though he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad he found a sweet calm at home’.
²⁴

When he returned at eleven, clean and dressed, his sovereign had also had time to array herself in her accustomed finery. They spoke for more than an hour, during which he tried to justify himself. Cecil, Raleigh, Grey and the Howards waited while the colloquy took place. When the Queen and Essex emerged, they explained to Cecil and the others how the truce with Tyrone had been negotiated. Essex had no idea how badly he had blundered – blundered in conducting such a truce, blundered in leaving his post in Ireland and perhaps, above all, blundered in having seen Elizabeth without a wig, make-up or day-clothes. Only when he came back for a third audience in the afternoon, by which time Elizabeth had had time to consult Robert Cecil, did Essex realise that he had cooked his goose.

In the morning, a swaggering, mud-spattered young horseman, exhausted by his ride, but a fully powerful, sexually active man in his thirties, had confronted a poor, withered old lady. By the evening, an incompetent public servant who had outlived his usefulness and overstepped every boundary of royal protocol faced his bejewelled, intelligent, ruthless head of state. Elizabeth, in the presence of her councillors, mercilessly confronted Essex with what he had done. The more she spelt it out to him – his military failure, his diplomatic idiocy in seeing Tyrone without accompaniment, his concession of the truce, his desertion of his post – the more stammeringly inadequate were Essex’s responses. Then the blow fell. She dismissed him from all his offices and placed him under the surveillance of Lord Keeper Egerton at York House. She would never set eyes upon him again.

28

Essex and the End

FOR A YEAR
– the year of 1600 to 1601 – both Elizabeth and Essex remained in an inanition, stunned by what had happened; hoping, perhaps, that it had not happened. Essex sank into illness and religious melancholy under house-arrest. Elizabeth sent him broth and a consortium of doctors. Apart from political disgrace, he faced financial ruin. He was £16,000 in debt, and by depriving him of office she removed from him – as privy councillor, Master of the Ordinance, Master of the Queen’s Horse and Earl Marshal of England – innumerable opportunities to take bribes in exchange for favours and jobs. One great source of income remained to him. On Michaelmas Day (29 September) 1590, in their happy golden days, she had bestowed upon him the lucrative Farm of Sweet Wines, the sinecure – worth well over £3,000 per annum – that had been enjoyed by his stepfather Leicester. Should she renew it? Or, tempting prospect to that parsimonious old lady, keep it herself? It was obvious which course would be recommended by Mr Secretary Robert Cecil. Friends tried to put in good words for Essex. ‘This day se’ night,’ he wrote desperately in September 1600:

the lease which I hold by your Majesty’s beneficence expireth, and that farm [of sweet wines] is both my chiefest maintenance and mine only means of compounding with the merchants to whom I am endebted . . . If my creditors will take for payment as many ounces of my blood, or the taking away of this farm would only for want finish me of this body, your Majesty should never hear of this suit. For in myself I can find no boldness to importune, and from myself I can draw no argument to solicit.
¹

It was a useless letter. Essex was finished. Such was his personal magnetism, however, and such was the personal detestation in which Robert Cecil was held, that a significant number of Essex’s friends joined with him in a rebellion, even though it was plainly a madcap scheme – and they were a formidable collection of people.

This was a sign not only of Essex’s extraordinary charisma, but also of how desperate things had become at court, and at the heart of the Elizabethan machine. In the glory days there had been terrible factions at court, but William Cecil, Robert Dudley, Francis Walsingham, Nicholas Bacon and the rest had,
in extremis
, been prepared to sink their differences for a common purpose. Not only were they devoted to a young queen: their political lives depended upon her survival. Now things were very different. It was inevitable that the old Queen would die – perhaps soon. The Essex faction saw no possibility of being reconciled with the Cecil faction, short of actually taking up arms.

Or perhaps they needed to focus their feelings of dissatisfaction upon Robert Cecil, rather than admit to themselves that the real reason for discontent was the Queen – increasingly indecisive, irascible, parsimonious, capricious. One of Essex’s friends, who did not desert him in his troubles, was the Earl of Southampton. Like Essex, he had been a ward of Burghley and brought up at Cecil House, that strange aristocratic boarding school in the Strand. Southampton was now one of those, with Lord Mountjoy, who began to hatch the crazy plan of an armed coup
d’état
. Already, Essex and Mountjoy had been in secret correspondence with King James VI of Scotland, assuring him of their loyalty and hoping to assure him that, in the event of his succeeding, it was to them, and not to Cecil, that he should look for support. Compared with Sidney, Marlowe and Spenser, William Shakespeare, of all the great Elizabethan writers, cultivated a superb detachment from political involvement. But with his patron Southampton so deeply involved with Essex, total disengagement was not entirely possible.

In 1599 one Dr John Hayward had written a book, which he dedicated to Essex, on the subject of Henry IV. The dedication compared Essex with Bolingbroke, the man who successfully overthrew Richard II and made himself King. When the time of the rebellion approached, Essex’s Chief Steward, a fiery Welshman called Sir Gelli Meyrick, was also happy to remember how the Welsh had rallied to Bolingbroke’s cause. Among notable supporters of the Essex rebellion were John and Owen Salusbury, who had accompanied Essex on the Cadiz expedition. Sir John Salusbury’s coat of arms bears the motto ‘posse et nolle nobile’. ‘To be able to do harm, but to abstain from doing so, is noble’ would be one rendering; another ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’ – the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. It is all but inconceivable that this is a coincidence, though exactly what it suggests or proves (beyond some connection between Shakespeare and the Salusburys) is another matter. Salusbury was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1595. We know that Shakespeare had many associations with that Inn, where
Twelfth Night
was first performed in 1602. There is abundant evidence in his plays of Shakespeare’s affectionate, sometimes humorous feeling for the Welsh. He would certainly have appreciated it, had he been a witness, when Sir John Salusbury celebrated his readmission to the Inn, after his elder brother Thomas’s involvement in the Babington Conspiracy, and a royal pardon, with ‘seven bards, four harpists and two crowthers to Lleweni to celebrate his newly recovered status.’
²

The Salusburys of Lleweni were cousins of Queen Elizabeth, yet here was
their
cousin Owen involving himself with the Essex rebellion. Any analogy between themselves and the fiery Owain Glynd
ŵ
r uniting with Bolingbroke to overthrow Richard II would not have been lost on anyone at Lleweni. Before the rising, Lord Mounteagle, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and others of Percy’s friends took a barge over the river to Bankside to the Globe Theatre. They offered a supplement of forty shillings if the Lord Chamberlain’s company would put on a production of Shakespeare’s
Richard II
. It was an old play, so the actors could self-protectively claim that the public had no particular interest in it any more; they had forgotten the lines, it would not be popular. But in the end they relented. Was Shakespeare among them? On the afternoon of Saturday, 7 February 1601 an enthusiastic audience of Essex supporters watched the play: it was the eve of the rebellion. To William Lambarde, one of her more learned courtiers, when ‘caterpillars of the kingdom’ were making their obeisance to her, Elizabeth had once remarked, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye that?’
³

One of the functions of court rituals, of Coronation Day tilts, of bowing before the monarch and walking backwards – as of all the quasi-ritualised Platonic adoration of the monarch in Spenser’s poetry, in the formalised portraiture of the Queen and in the clothes with which she was decked out – was to disguise from monarch and people alike the uncomfortable truths that
Richard II
so mercilessly exposes. At the beginning of the play it is Richard who is the dressed doll at the centre of the power-game; by the third act, he is ironically enquiring, ‘What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty/Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?’
⁴
Elizabeth had known as a young girl that the division between absolute power and absolute ruin was no wider than the blade of an axe. Richard, in Shakespeare’s masterpiece, asks the existential question:

I live with bread, like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?
⁵

More than 400 years after it happened, the Essex rebellion still almost beggars belief – both that they thought they could get away with it and that so many powerful men, with so much to lose, were prepared to take part. The Earls of Southampton, Rutland, Sussex and Bedford, as well as Lords Mounteagle, Cromwell and Sandys, were all part of it. And the roll-call shows that Essex was (potentially) uniting malcontents from across the whole politico-religious spectrum. On the one hand, the Cromwells represented extreme Puritan opinion (an opinion with which Essex himself personally sympathised); on the other hand – fatally to Essex himself – there were Catholics here, such as Southampton, who would as lief place Arbella Stuart on the throne of England as the Presbyterian Scottish king. Lord Mounteagle, who half-heartedly supported Essex, would also be in the secret of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and it was he who betrayed the conspirators on that occasion. Some of them, such as Francis Tresham and Robert Catesby, joined Essex evidently in the hope that they could produce, if not an actually Catholic monarch, a regime more favourable to their recusant standpoint.

So, all sorts of grievances came together at the time of the Essex rebellion, and not least the grievances of the London mob, who felt impoverished by years of bad crops and rising food prices. Eighteen months after the whole fiasco was over, and Essex was dead, a German visitor to the English capital found Londoners still singing the ballad ‘Essex’s Last Good-Night’ and pointing out the spot in the Tower where ‘the brave hero’ perished.