The Elizabethans (65 page)

The actual rebellion lasted only for twelve hours. If, on 8 February 1601, Essex and his friends had marched directly on Whitehall, they might have stood a chance of apprehending the Queen and taking the Great Seal. Instead, they marched eastwards up the Strand. ‘To the Court! To the Court!’ shouted the mob: they had the right idea. But Essex had been promised support by the Lord Mayor of London. He hoped to find 1,000 armed men waiting for him in Fenchurch Street, but this was fantasy. By the time they turned back towards Westminster, his followers were in disarray.

There was fighting in the streets and not a few casualties. Cavalry, under the command of the Earls of Cumberland and Lincoln, with Lord Burghley (Robert Cecil’s dim-witted elder brother), Lord Thomas Howard and Lord Compton, blocked the Strand. Between Essex House and the river, Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Fulke Greville, Sir John Stanhope and Lord Cobham had entrenched in the Embankment Gardens. A few, including one of Southampton’s footmen, were shot. Southampton came out on to his roof to declare that they meant no harm to the Queen: they had merely taken up arms to deliver her from the atheists and – that word from
Richard II
– ‘caterpillars’ who clustered around the throne: that is, Cecil and the Privy Council. Within hours, however, the thing had collapsed, the principal insurgents were behind bars and London was placed under martial law: 500 soldiers were stationed at Charing Cross, 400 men guarded the City, another 300 on the Surrey side of the river in Southwark. Within a week twenty-five peers of the realm had been summoned to try Essex and Southampton.

In addition to the twenty-five peers, nine judges had been appointed for what was, in effect, a show trial. Essex demanded the right to challenge three of the judges on the grounds of their known personal enmity to himself, but this demand was refused. When Lord Grey de Wilton, with whom he had quarrelled publicly in Ireland, was called as a witness, Essex let out a loud, contemptuous laugh.

Cynical old Coke, one of the judges, remarked on the extraordinary verbal similarity in the testimony, extracted in the Tower of London, from Essex’s companions Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Christopher Blount, the Earls of Bedford and Rutland, Lord Sandys and Lord Mountjoy. Of friends who turned in evidence against Essex, the most shockingly disloyal was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), destined in the next reign to become the Viscount St Albans and Lord Chancellor of England.

The two Bacon brothers, Francis and Anthony, were the sons of the former Lord Keeper. Essex had striven to get Francis Bacon the office of Attorney General, which had gone to Coke. Cecil wondered that Essex should wish to promote ‘so raw a youth to so great a place’. Essex had fired back, with an insult that was not forgotten by Cecil, ‘I have made no search for precedents of young men who have filled the office of Attorney General, but I could name to you, Sir Robert, a man younger than Francis [that is, Cecil himself], less learned and equally inexperienced, who is suing and striving with all his might for an office of far greater weight’ – that is, the Secretaryship, which Cecil soon got.

It ill became Bacon to testify against his friend and protector, but Bacon had a career to think of. He was one of the most remarkable intellects of his age. In 1597 he had published a tiny octavo volume entitled (copying Montaigne, whose
Essais
were published in Bordeaux in 1580)
Essays
: the first time the word was used in English in that sense. Bacon the philosopher was the first Englishman to express what we mean by a modern scientific outlook – to distinguish between inductive and intuitive processes of reading information, to distinguish really between ‘Art’ and ‘Science’, to use our terminology. For this reason, William Blake, in his copy of Bacon’s Essays, wrote the words ‘Good Advice for Satan’s Kingdom’.

As Francis spoke for the prosecution in Westminster Hall, Essex often interrupted his protégé with reproaches. To those who wished to believe some of the wilder assertions made against Essex (for example, that he had aspired to make himself the King of England), it was all the more damaging that his friend Bacon should have been prepared so fully to denounce him.

Essex must have known that he had no chance of persuading the peers and judges to acquit him. He asserted, as he had done before, that he had heard Cecil dispute the succession and express the wish for the Spanish Infanta to become Queen when Elizabeth died. This Cecil hotly repudiated. Cecil was unlike his father – who, in these circumstances, would have allowed Essex to condemn himself out of his own mouth and would not have descended to verbal exchanges with the prisoner. But Robert Cecil, who was physically deformed and acutely conscious that the comparatively new family of Cecil could not match the high lineage of the Devereux, could not resist a response to the years of swagger and bullying that he had endured at Essex’s hands in the heyday of the Queen’s crush on the young aristocrat:

For wit I give you the pre-eminence – you have it abundantly. For nobility also I give you place – I am not noble, yet a gentleman; I am no swordsman – there also you have the odds: but I have innocence, conscience, truth and honesty to defend me against the scandal and sting of slanderous tongues, and in this court I stand as an upright man, and your lordship as a delinquent.
⁶

Essex and Southampton were returned in procession to the Tower of London, with the axe’s blade pointed towards them. At the age of thirty-four, on 25 February 1601, Essex was beheaded in the courtyard. He had asked the Queen for the privilege of a private death, and she had spared him the crowds on Tower Green. His last days were spent in fervent prayer with his chaplain, Mr Ashton. Southampton remained in the Tower, with the black-and-white cat made famous by the portrait of him there. When James I came to the throne, Southampton was released at once, and he went on to have a life full of honours – being made Knight of the Garter almost instantaneously, as well as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire. His Catholicism weakened with age, and he became a Protestant. Much of his public life was devoted to the defence of the Virginia Company – though he could not stop its Charter being withdrawn in 1624. Much of his time, as in the years before and during his imprisonment, was devoted to study and to literature, and he presented a fine collection of books to the library at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Essex’s memory transmuted into that of folk-hero.

Sweet England’s pride is gone!

welladay! welladay!

In ‘Essex’s Last Good-Night’ as we have seen, they were still singing of the trial when a foreign visitor heard them in 1603:

All you that cry O hone! O hone!

come now and sing O Lord! With me.

For why? Our Jewel is from us gone,

the valiant Knight of Chivalry.

Little Cecil trips up and down,

He rules both Court and Crown,

With his brother Burghley Clown,

In his great fox-furred gown;

With the long proclamation

He swore he saved the Town

Is it not likely.
⁷

So Essex lived on in drinking song and legend, everlastingly preserved in his youth, the victim of the old lady that no one could quite admit was the real cause of the rebellion. For it was not the machinations, real or imagined, of the Cecil faction that caused the atmosphere of frustration in 1600–1 so much as the sense that the country’s head of state was too old, too stubborn, too stingy, too indecisive to be a great national leader any more.

Essex’s circle had an interesting afterlife in the seventeenth century. Frances, the widow both of Philip Sidney and of Essex, married the Earl of Clanricard in 1603 and became a Roman Catholic. Penelope, Essex’s sister and Sidney’s ‘Stella’, divorced Lord Rich and she too became a Roman Catholic. She died in 1607. The old ‘she-Wolf’ – the beautiful Lettice – who had so excited Queen Elizabeth’s jealousy when she married the Earl of Leicester lost her third husband, Sir Christopher Blount, who was executed for his part in the Essex rebellion. Thus she lost both son and husband, but it appeared not to diminish her energies. She lived to the age of ninety-four in 1634. What a very different world it would have been, had Elizabeth been spared for a comparable span!

When her godson Sir John Harington tried to cheer her up by reading to her some of his epigrams, the Queen replied, ‘When Thou dost feel creeping Time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less.’

Yet despite the ravages of time, and the sadness of her life after the death of Essex, Elizabeth retained much of her old physical vigour. She enjoyed dancing almost to the end. Right up to her sixty-ninth birthday she could still ride ten miles in a day and go hunting afterwards. Her mental faculties were undiminished and she retained her linguistic skills. In February 1603 the Doge and Senate of Venice sent Giovanni Scaramelli as ambassador to the English court, the first official Venetian Ambassador since her accession.

She received him at Richmond. The clothes-conscious Italian noted that she no longer dressed fashionably, but the overall effect of her outfit and appearance was overwhelming:

Her skirts were much fuller and began lower down than is the fashion in France. Her hair was of a light colour not made by nature, and she wore great pearls like pears round the forehead. She had a vast quantity of gems and pearls upon her person; even under her stomacher she was covered with golden-jewelled girdles and single gems, carbuncles, balas-rubies and diamonds. Round her wrists in place of bracelets she wore double rows of pearls of more than medium size.
⁸

On her head was an imperial crown. Here was Astraea indeed, a walking emblem.

Scaramelli was awestruck and knelt to kiss the hem of her garment. She offered her right hand to kiss and spoke to him in Italian: ‘Welcome to England, Mr Secretary, it was high time that the Republic sent to visit a Queen, who has always honoured it on every possible occasion.’ The ambassador then made a formal complaint to the Queen about the behaviour of English corsairs in the Adriatic, looting and attacking Venetian and Spanish vessels. Elizabeth haughtily countered with:

I cannot help feeling that the Republic of Venice during the forty-four years of my reign has never made herself heard by me except to ask for something, nor, for the rest, prosperous or adverse as my affairs have been, never has she given a sign of holding me or my Kingdom in that esteem which other princes and other potentates have not refused. Nor am I aware that my sex has brought me this demerit, for my sex [she said confidently] cannot diminish my prestige, nor offend them who treat me as other Princes are treated to whom the Signory of Venice sends its ambassadors.
⁹

Then she added, ‘I will do all in my power to give satisfaction to the serene Republic.’

That was all the Venetians heard on the subject of English pirates. Playfully, she concluded, ‘I do not know if I have spoken Italian well; I think so, for I learned it as a child and believe I have not forgotten it.’

The Venetian was impressed, as well he might be.

About many of her utterances in her latter years there was a hint of valediction, as if she knew that they might be her last great speech on the stage. When she had addressed Parliament the previous November she had said:

I have ever used to set the Last Judgement Day before mine eyes and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before an higher judge, and now if my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offences in my charge. I know the title of a King is a glorious title, but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding, but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. To be a king and to wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King or royal authority of a Queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend this kingdom as I said from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and more wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will be more careful and loving.
¹⁰

From an English perspective, the news from Ireland had improved. Lord Mountjoy won a resounding victory over the Earl of Tyrone and his thousands of Spanish mercenaries, and brought an end to any hope of an independent Ireland. At least Elizabeth could die with that perennial problem, the Irish situation, in a quiescent phase.

But she could not die happy. She was too introspective, too solitary, too intelligent a being for that. At the end of February 1603, Kate Carey, one of her favourite Boleyn cousins – married to Admiral Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, died. It was a bereavement that prostrated her. The loss of a much-loved kinswoman exacerbated the solitude of the motherless, childless woman. The first Boleyn bereavement she had suffered had been that of her mother. She was too young to remember Anne Boleyn with her conscious mind, but events such as this register in a person’s psyche. When Kate’s younger boy Robert Carey was admitted to see the Queen some days after Kate’s death, he kissed her hand and she held on to it; wrung it. He said that he was glad to find her better and she replied, ‘No, Robin, I am not well.’ She let out a groan such as had not been heard since her bout of hysteria following the death of the Scottish queen.