Читать книгу After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James - Leanda Lisle de - Страница 9

SIR JOHN HARINGTON arrived at Whitehall in December 1602 in time for the twelve-day Christmas celebrations at court. The coming winter season was expected to be a dull one, though the new Comptroller of the Household, Sir Edward Wotton, was trying his best to inject fresh life into it. Dressed from head to toe in white he had laid on dances, bear baiting, plays and gambling. The Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, lost up to £800 a night – an astonishing sum, even for one who, according to popular verse, ruled ‘court and crown’. Behind the scenes, however, courtiers gambled for still higher stakes. Harington observed that Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, was sixty-nine and although she appeared in sound health ‘age itself is a sickness’.¹ She could not live forever and after a reign of forty-four years the country was on the eve of change.

To Elizabeth, Harington was ‘that witty fellow my godson’. Courtiers knew him for his invention of the water closet, his translations of classical works, his scurrilous writings on court figures and his mastery of the epigram, which was then the fashionable medium for comment on court life. In the competition for Elizabeth’s favour, however, courtiers were expected to reflect her greatness not only in learning and wit but also in their visual magnificence. They did so by dressing in clothes ‘more sumptuous than the proudest Persian’. A miniature depicts Harington as a smiling man in a cut silk doublet and ruff, his long hair brushed back to show off a jewelled earring that hangs to his shoulder. Even a courtier’s plainest suits were worn with beaver hats and the finest linen shirts, gilded daggers and swords, silk garters and show roses, silk stockings and cloaks.²

This brilliant world was a small one, though riven by scheming and distrust. ‘Those who live in courts, must mark what they say,’ one of Harington’s epigrams warned, ‘Who lives for ease had better live away.’³ Harington, typically, knew everyone at Whitehall that Christmas, either directly or through friends and relations.⁴ Elizabeth herself was particularly close to the grandchildren of her aunt Mary Boleyn, known enviously as ‘the tribe of Dan’. The eldest, Lord Hunsdon, was the Lord Chamberlain responsible for the conduct of the court. His sisters, the Countess of Nottingham, and Lady Scrope, were Elizabeth’s most favoured Ladies of the Privy Chamber. But Harington also had royal connections, albeit at one remove. His estate at Kelston in Somerset had been granted to his father’s first wife, Ethelreda, an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. When Ethelreda died childless the land had passed to John Harington senior. He remained loyal to Elizabeth when she was imprisoned following a Protestant-backed revolt against her Catholic sister Mary I, named after one of its leaders as Wyatt’s revolt, and when Elizabeth became Queen she rewarded him with office and fortune, making his second wife, Harington’s mother Isabella Markham, a Lady of the Privy Chamber. It was the hope of acquiring such wealth and honour that was the chief attraction of the court.

Harington once described the court as ‘ambition’s puffball’ – a toadstool that fed on vanity and greed, but it was one that had been carefully cultivated by the Tudor monarchy. With no standing army or paid bureaucracy to enforce their will the monarchy had to rely on persuasion. They used Arthurian mythology and courtly displays to capture hearts, while patronage appealed to the more down-to-earth instincts of personal ambition. Elizabeth could grant her powerful subjects the prestige that came with titles and orders; the influence conferred by office in the Church, the military, the administration of government and the law; there were also posts at court or in the royal household. She could bestow wealth with leases on royal lands and palaces, offer special trading licences and monopolies or bequeath the ownership of estates confiscated from traitors.⁵ Those who gained most from Elizabeth’s patronage were themselves patrons, acting as conduits for the Queen’s munificence.

Harington and his friends worked hard to ingratiate themselves with the great men at court, often spending years, as he complained, in ‘grinning scoff, watching nights and fawning days’.⁶ When a great patron fell from grace a decade of personal and financial investment could be lost. The precise standing of all senior courtiers was therefore tracked and discussed by gossips and intelligencers. Every tiny fluctuation in their fortunes stoked what one observer described as, ‘The court fever of hope and fear that continuously torments those that depend upon great men and their promises.’⁷ The ‘fever’ reached a pitch when the health of the monarch was a cause for concern since their death could mean a complete revolution in government.

Harington arrived at court having completed, on 18 December, his Tract on the Succession to the Crown – a subject on which the pulse of the nation was now said to ‘beat extremely’ but which was strictly forbidden. As Harington had recorded in his tract, Elizabeth had ‘utterly suppressed the talk of an heir apparent’ in the year of his birth, 1561, ‘saying she would not have her winding sheet set up before her face’. Her concern, he explained, was ‘that if she should allow and permit men to examine, discuss and publish whose was the best title after her, some would be ready to affirm that title to be good afore hers’.⁸

Forty years earlier there had been those who had claimed that Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a superior claim to the English throne; others that it belonged to her Protestant cousin Catherine Grey. Both claimants had since died: Catherine in a country house prison in 1568, Mary on the executioner’s block in 1587. But their sons, James VI of Scotland and Lord Beauchamp had succeeded them as rivals to her throne, together with more recent candidates such as James’s cousin, Arbella Stuart, and the Infanta Isabella of Spain. The dangers to Elizabeth were such that the publication of any discussion of the succession had been declared an act of treason by Parliament only the previous winter. Her advancing age meant, however, that an heir would soon have to be chosen, if not by her, then by others.

Harington had dedicated his tract to his preferred choice, James VI, the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots. As the senior descendant of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, and her first husband, James IV, he was Elizabeth’s heir by the usual dynastic rules of primogeniture, but James was far from being the straightforward choice that this suggests.

The Stuart line of the Kings of Scots was barred from the succession under the will of Henry VIII, which was backed by Act of Parliament. James was also personally excluded under a law dating back to the reign of Edward III precluding those born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm of England’. His hopes rested on the fact that the claims of his rivals were equally problematic. Elizabeth had declared Catherine Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, illegitimate, and, as men had delved ever deeper into the complex question of the right to the throne, the numbers of potential heirs had proliferated. By 1600 the sometime writer, lawyer and spy Thomas Wilson had counted ‘twelve competitors that gape for the death of that good old princess, the now queen’.⁹ Spain, France and the Pope all had their preferred candidates while the English were divided in their choice by religious belief and contesting ambitions.

Courtiers feared that the price of Elizabeth’s security during her life would be civil war and foreign invasion on her death – but the future was also replete with possibilities. A new monarch drawn from a weak field would need to acquire widespread support to secure their position against their rivals. That meant opening up the royal purse: there would be gifts of land, office and title. Harington’s tract was a private gift to James made in the hope of future favour. The gamble was to invest in the winning candidate – for as Thomas Wilson observed ‘this crown is not likely to fall for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted’.¹⁰

The Palace of Whitehall, built by Cardinal Wolsey and extended by Henry VIII, sprawled on either side of King Street, the road linking Westminster and Charing Cross. On the western side were the buildings designed for recreation: four covered tennis courts, two bowling alleys, a cockpit and a gallery for viewing tournaments in the great tiltyard. Up to 12,000 spectators would come to watch Elizabeth’s knights take part in the annual November jousts held to celebrate her accession. When the jousts were over the contestants’ shields were hung in a gallery, where, that summer, the visiting German Duke of Stettin-Pomerania had been directed to admire the insignia of Elizabeth’s last great favourite, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. He had broken fifty-seven lances in the course of fighting fifteen challengers during the Accession Tilts of 1594. There was, however, much more to Essex than his prowess at the tilt. He had represented the aspirations of Harington’s generation, born after Elizabeth became Queen and kept from office by her stifling conservatism.

Elizabeth is still remembered as the Queen who defied the Armada in 1588, and the figure of Gloriana as encapsulated in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene the following year. But as one court servant warned, this was to see her ‘like a painted face without a shadow to give it life’¹¹. Elizabeth had reached the apogee of her reign in the 1580s. Thereafter came a decline that lasted longer than the reigns of her siblings, Mary I and Edward VI, put together. Her victory over the Armada was tarnished by the costs of the continuing war with Spain and the woman behind the divine image had grown old. To Essex’s vast following of young courtiers Elizabeth was a dithering old woman, dominated by her Treasurer Lord Burghley and his corrupt son, Sir Robert Cecil. Her motto ‘Semper Eadem’ (I never change), once perceived as a promise of stability, came to be taken as a challenge.

When Burghley died in August 1598, Essex hoped to become the new force in Elizabeth’s government but within weeks a long simmering rebellion in Ireland had turned into a war of liberation. Essex, as Elizabeth’s most experienced commander, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and sent to confront the rebel leader, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Instead, in September 1599, in defiance of royal orders, Essex arranged a truce and returned to court. Elizabeth was furious and as Essex fell into disgrace he turned his hopes to finding favour with the candidate he hoped to succeed her. In February 1601 he led 300 soldiers and courtiers in a palace revolt to force her to name James VI of Scotland her heir and overthrow Robert Cecil together with his principal allies, Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh. The revolt quickly failed and the Earl was executed, but Essex remained a popular figure in national memory. Stettin’s journal records that ballads dedicated to Essex were being ‘sung and played on musical instruments all over the country, even in our presence at the royal court though his memory is condemned as that of a man having committed high treason’.¹² They mourned England’s ‘jewel … The valiant knight of chivalry’, destroyed, it was said, by the malevolence of the Cecil faction.

Brave honour graced him still,Gallantly, gallantly,He ne’er did deed of ill,Well it is known But Envy, that foul fiend,Whose malice ne’er did endHath brought true virtue’s friendUnto his thrall.¹³

Beneath the smiles of the courtiers as they played cards that Christmas lay the deep bitterness of old enemies; those who had admired Essex and those who had rejoiced in his downfall.

The gallery above the tiltyard where Essex had jousted was linked to the second group of buildings through a gatehouse over King Street. Here, in the Privy Gardens, thirty-four mythical beasts sat on thirty-four brightly coloured poles overlooking the low-railed pathways. The buildings had a similarly fairy-tale quality. They were decorated in elaborate paintwork, the Great Hall in chequerwork and the Privy Gallery in black and white grotesques. The theme of these distorted animal, plant and human forms extended into the interior where they were highlighted with gold on the wood pillars and panelling. The visiting Duke of Stettin thought the ceilings rather low and the rooms gloomy. Elizabeth’s bedroom, which overlooked the Thames ‘was very dark’ with ‘but little air’. Nearby in Elizabeth’s cabinet, where she wrote her letters, Stettin observed a marvellous silver inkstand and ‘also a Latin prayer book that the queen had written nicely with her own hand, and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father’.¹⁴

Harington had been granted an audience with the Queen soon after his arrival at Whitehall. As usual he was escorted from the Presence Chamber, where courtiers waited bareheaded to present their petitions, along a dark passage and into the Privy Chamber where his godmother awaited him.¹⁵ A mural by Hans Holbein the Younger dominated the room. The massive figure of Henry VIII stood, hand on hips, gazing unflinchingly at the viewer. His third wife Jane Seymour, the mother of his son Edward VI, was depicted on his left and above him his mother, Elizabeth of York, with his father, Henry VII. The mural boasted the continuity of the Tudor dynasty, a silent reproach to the childless spinster Harington now saw before him. Contemporaries remarked often on Elizabeth’s similarity to her grandfather. When she was young they saw it in her narrow face and the beautiful long hands of which she was so proud. As she grew older she developed her grandfather’s wattle, a ‘great goggle throat’ that hung from her chin.¹⁶ But she did not now look merely old. She appeared seriously ill.

Harington was shocked by what he saw and frightened for the future. Elizabeth had been increasingly melancholic since the Essex revolt, but he was now convinced that she was dying. He confided his thoughts in a letter to the one person he trusted: his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at home in Somerset caring for their nine children.

Sweet Mall,

I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity, too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery. Dear Mall, How shall I speak what I have seen, or what I have felt? – Thy good silence in these matters emboldens my pen … Now I will trust thee with great assurance, and whilst thou dost brood over thy young ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in the court …¹⁷

Elizabeth received Harington seated on a raised platform. Her ‘little black husband’ John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose plain clerical garb contrasted so starkly with her bejewelled gowns and spangled wigs, was beside her.^* It was believed that Elizabeth used her glittering costumes to dazzle people so they ‘would not so easily discern the marks of age’, but if so, she no longer considered them enough. Increasingly afraid that any intimation of mortality would attract dangerous speculation on her successor she had taken to filling out her sunken cheeks with fine cloths and was also ‘continually painted, not only all over the face, but her very neck and breast also, and that the same was in some places near half an inch thick’.¹⁸ There were some things, however, that make-up could not hide. When Elizabeth spoke it was apparent that her teeth were blackened and several were missing. Foreign ambassadors complained it made her difficult to understand if she spoke quickly. But during Harington’s audience this was not a problem; her throat was so sore and her state of mind so troubled that she could barely speak at all.

The rebellion in Ireland that had cost Elizabeth so much in men, money and peace of mind was near its end. The arch rebel Tyrone was offering his submission, but it brought Elizabeth no joy; memories of Essex’s betrayals were crowding in. She whispered to Whitgift to ask Harington if he had seen Tyrone? Harington had witnessed Essex making the truce with Tyrone in 1599 and later met him in person. He still trembled at the memory of Elizabeth’s fury with him about it when he had returned to England, and he now answered her carefully, saying only, ‘I had seen him with the Lord Deputy.’ At this, Elizabeth looked up with an expression of anger and grief and replied ‘Oh, now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere,’ and she began to weep and strike her breast. ‘She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in sooth her heart seemed too full to lack more filling,’ Harington told his wife.

As the audience drew to a close Elizabeth rallied and she asked her godson to come back to her chamber at seven o’clock and bring some of the light-hearted verses and witty prose for which he was famous. Harington dutifully returned that evening and read Elizabeth some verses. She smiled once but told him, ‘When thou dost find creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters. Thou seeest my bodily meat doth not suit me well; I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since yesternight.’¹⁹ The following day Harington saw Elizabeth again. A number of men had arrived at her request only to be dismissed in anger for appearing without an appointment: ‘But who shall say that “Your Majesty hath forgotten”?’ Harington asked Mall.

No one dared to voice openly the seriousness of Elizabeth’s condition, but Harington did find ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.²⁰ He told his wife he had attended a dinner with the Archbishop and that many of Elizabeth’s own clerics appeared to be ‘well anointed with the oil of gladness’. But the spectacle of Elizabeth’s misery amidst the feasting pricked Harington’s conscience. In his Tract on the Succession he had wasted no opportunities to dwell on the unpopularity of her government and to contrast her failings as an aged Queen with James VI’s youth, vigour and masculinity. Now he could not suppress memories of all the kindness she had shown him, ‘her watchings over my youth, her liking to my free speech and admiration of my little learning … have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn askant from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude’.²¹

Harington’s eyes, however, tear-filled or not, remained as fixed on the future as those of everyone else, and he was comforted by the realisation that his examination of the succession issue had been completed with exquisite timing.

The question of the succession had dominated the history of the Tudor dynasty and would shape events to come. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had been a rival claimant to a reigning monarch until his army killed Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victory came at the end of a long period of civil strife in which Harington’s great-grandfather, James Harington, was allied with the losing side – an error that cost the family much of their land in the north of England. Henry was fearful that such families would rise up against him if a rival candidate to his crown emerged and so he worked hard to achieve a secure succession. He had two sons to ensure the future of his line and he bolstered his claim by creating a mythology that anchored the Tudors in a legendary past.

Henry VII claimed that his ancestor, Owen Tudor, was a direct descendant of Cadwallader, supposedly the last of the British kings. This made the Tudors the heirs of King Arthur and through them, it was said, Arthur would return.²² Henry even named his eldest son Arthur, but the boy died aged fifteen not long after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was thus his second son, Henry VIII, who inherited the crown, as well as his brother’s bride. Henry and Catherine had a daughter, the future Mary I, but no sons. Henry saw this lack of a male heir as an apocalyptic failure fearing that the inheritance of the throne by a mere queen regnant could plunge England back into civil war. He became convinced that God had punished him for having married his brother’s wife and sought an annulment from the Pope. When the Pope, under pressure from Catherine’s Hapsburg nephew, Charles V, denied it to him, he made himself the head of the Church in England. Justifications for Henry’s new title were found in the various ‘histories’ of Arthur, but his actions had coincided with the revolution in religious opinion in Europe begun by the German monk, Martin Luther. One of Henry’s chief researchers was a keen follower of Luther’s teachings and although Henry had once written against Luther he chose to reward Thomas Cranmer’s service in ‘discovering’ the royal supremacy by making him Archbishop of Canterbury. Centuries of Catholic culture and belief were to be overturned in favour of new Protestant ideas as Henry divorced Catherine, declared Mary illegitimate and married ‘one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn’, as the Abbot of Whitby called her.

The Reformation changed England forever. The simple fact that the country was no longer part of the supra-national Roman Church encouraged a stronger sense of separateness from the Continent and enabled Henry to develop a full-blooded nationalism to which his dynasty was central. Elizabeth, the child of this revolution, was not, however, her father’s heir for long. Anne Boleyn was executed before she was three years old and Elizabeth, already a bastard in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was declared illegitimate by her father in order that any children of the marriage to his new love, Jane Seymour, should take precedence over her, as she had once done over her sister, Mary. When Jane Seymour had her son, Edward, in 1537, it seemed to Henry that the question of the succession was answered. As Henry had no further children by the three wives that succeeded Jane Seymour he eventually restored Elizabeth and Mary in line to the succession after Edward, in default of Edward’s issue or any further children by his last wife, Catherine Parr. His decision was confirmed in the Act of Succession in 1544 – the year before Elizabeth had made her father the gift of the prayer book that the German Duke saw on her desk.

The Act of Succession allowed the King to alter the succession by testament, that is, in his will. This was significant for Henry’s will wrote into law who Elizabeth’s heirs should be if all his children died without issue. Henry had sought Elizabeth’s heirs amongst the descendants of his sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. Margaret, the eldest, had married James IV of Scotland, who was killed fighting the English at Flodden in 1513. Their son, James V, died after losing a later battle against the English and left his infant daughter, Mary Stuart, as Queen of Scots. She should have been Elizabeth’s heir under the laws of primogeniture, but Henry’s will disinherited the Stuart line in favour of that of the Suffolks in vengeance for the Stuart enmity to England and the Scots’ refusal to marry their Queen to his son.

Harington’s tract explained that the Scots had feared that if Mary Stuart married Prince Edward their country would have become a mere province of England. In the winter of 1602/3 the English had similar concerns that if James VI of Scotland inherited the throne their country might be subsumed into a new kingdom called ‘Britain’. Machiavelli had argued that changing a country’s name was a badge of conquest and Harington warned James that ‘some in England fear the like now’. The name Britain had an unpleasantly Celtic ring and people believed that the creation of a new united kingdom could nullify English Common Law.

Many believed that James was also precluded from the succession by the medieval law excluding heirs born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm’.²³ Edward VI had drawn attention to this law in drawing up his will in 1553, which had also excluded the Stuart line. Harington’s tract attempted to counter it by arguing that Scotland was not really a foreign country at all, since all Englishmen considered it ‘subject to England in the way of homage’. But it was a view with which James himself was unlikely to concur.^*

Elizabeth had inherited the throne in 1558, following the death of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I. As a woman the twenty-five-year-old queen fitted awkwardly into the chivalric legend of the Tudors being the heirs to Arthur but Elizabeth proved adept at reshaping it. From the day of her coronation, where she greeted the crowds with ‘cries, tender words, and all other signs which argue a wonderful earnest love of most obedient servants’, Elizabeth worked to build an image that was at once feminine and supremely majestic. She became the mother of her people, the wife married to her kingdom, the unobtainable love object of the knights and nobles; a Virgin to rival the Queen of Heaven to whom medieval England had once been dedicated, the summation of the dynasty’s mythology.

Even in 1558, however, courtiers were considering the vital question of who would succeed her. The last three reigns had seen violent swings in religious policy, from Henry VIII’s Reformation, to the radical Protestantism of Edward VI, to the Catholicism of Mary. No one had believed Elizabeth would be able to bring stability to a kingdom still bitterly divided by religion unless she produced an heir to guarantee the future of her Protestant supporters: men such as Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, who had sat on Edward VI’s Privy Council, but lost his post when Mary I succeeded him. A petition urging Elizabeth to marry was drawn up by the House of Commons on the first day of her first parliament. Her reply was that she preferred to remain unmarried. Whether she intended this to be her last word on the subject is questionable, but, in the event, the dangers of making a bad or divisive choice would always outweigh any advantages of love and companionship. Fear and jealousy arose in one quarter or another whenever a potential bridegroom looked to be a likely candidate for her hand. Harington, however, could not see that Elizabeth’s decision might be a consequence of their own prejudice that a woman was invariably ruled by her husband. Instead he shared the widespread view that her disinclination to marry was the result of some personal failing.

Harington claimed that Elizabeth had a psychological horror of the state of marriage and ‘in body some indisposition to the act of marriage’, but he admitted that she had made the world think that she might marry until she was fifty years old and ‘she has ever made show of affection, and still does to some men which in court we term favourites’.²⁴ These flirtations or dissimulations took some of the pressure off her to produce an actual spouse, but in the absence of one she was continually pushed to name a successor. It was only with hindsight Harington realised that Elizabeth had given her definitive answer, that she would never name an heir, in August of 1561, the year when she was confronted by the claims of her Suffolk heir, the Protestant Lady Catherine Grey, and her Catholic Stuart rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 10 August Elizabeth had learnt that the twenty-year-old Catherine was heavily pregnant and that the father was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Now in his sixties, he was then young, dark and handsome; more significantly he was also a descendant of Edward III and the heir of Edward VI’s uncle, the Protector Somerset, who had ruled England during Edward’s early minority. A marriage between such a couple would be a very suitable royal match – too suitable from Elizabeth’s perspective since any son of such a union would have become her de facto heir and a possible rival. It was to Elizabeth’s horror then, that Catherine confessed they had wed in a secret ceremony in December 1560. Angry and fearful Elizabeth had her sent to the Tower and Hertford joined her soon after.

While Elizabeth was considering what to do next, an envoy arrived at court from the likely beneficiary of this fiasco, her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1561 James’s mother was a charming, willowy, eighteen-year old, who at five foot eleven towered over most of her contemporaries. She had been raised the adored daughter of the French court destined to be Queen of France and at sixteen that destiny was fulfilled when she married Francis II. Francis, however, had died the previous December and that August she had returned to the violent country of her birth. Scotland had undergone its own Reformation the previous year, making Mary the Catholic Queen of a Protestant country. It was a possible template for her future as Queen of England and Mary’s emissary, William Maitland of Lethington, hoped that Elizabeth’s anger with Catherine Grey would encourage her to name Mary her heir. Instead Elizabeth announced that she would never name her successor.

‘I was married to this kingdom, whereof always I carry this ring for a pledge’, she informed Maitland, pointing to her coronation ring, ‘and howsoever things go I shall be queen of England so long as I live, when I am dead let them succeed who have the best right.’²⁵ Maitland had stayed at court hoping to change Elizabeth’s mind, but in the days that followed she had only expanded on her motives for refusing to name an heir. ‘I know the inconstancy of the people,’ she told Maitland, ‘how they loathe always the present government; and have their eyes continually set upon the next successor; and naturally there are more that look, as it is said, to the rising than to the setting sun.’ She recalled how malcontents had looked to her when Mary I was on the throne and concluded such men might now feel differently towards her. A prince, she warned, could not even trust ‘the children who are to succeed them’.²⁶ She would certainly not trust those of Catherine Grey or Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 21 September 1561, Catherine gave birth in the Tower to a son, Edward, Lord Beauchamp, heir to the throne under the will of Henry VIII and under English law. Elizabeth was, however, already working towards the destruction of his claim. Catherine and Hertford were closely questioned about their marriage. It emerged that the only witness to the ceremony and the only person who knew the name of the priest, had subsequently died. There was, therefore, only the couple’s word that they had been married and that was hardly likely to be enough. Their son was declared illegitimate by a church commission later that autumn.^*

Over the next four decades Elizabeth’s own former illegitimacy kept alive the hope that Beauchamp’s might also be reversed, and William Cecil would remain an advocate of Beauchamp’s claim until his death. But Elizabeth’s actions had undoubtedly damaged the Suffolk cause and its immediate effect was to strengthen that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth’s brush with smallpox in 1562 reminded the Protestant elite that their wealth and power were entirely dependent on her life and the Commons once again drew up a petition begging Elizabeth to marry. It drew attention to the dangers of civil war and foreign invasion if England were to be disputed among rival claimants of different religions after her death; France – where Huguenots and Catholics were fighting a savage civil war – illustrated just how grim that fate would be. Elizabeth assured them that there was time for her to marry, but in 1565, it was the Queen of Scots who made a dynastic marriage and with the English crown in mind.

Mary Stuart’s husband, the twenty-year-old Henry Darnley, was descended from Margaret Tudor through her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. He was, therefore, second only to Mary herself in the line of succession. His English birth was a significant bonus as it went some way to answering objections about Mary’s foreign birth. Harington used it to counter fears that James VI would give official posts and royal land to Scots, arguing: ‘It is without all question that he which is … by both his parents descended of English blood will in England become English and a favourer chiefly of Englishmen’ – a popular argument amongst James’s supporters. Whatever the dynastic advantages of the marriage, however, it would prove fatal for Mary. Darnley was a handsome youth: six foot one, fair-haired, ‘beardless and lady faced’, but he was also insufferably arrogant and the strain of playing second fiddle to his wife soon proved too much for him. He began to drink heavily and conducted several affairs. Mary, anxious not to give him any real power, refused to grant him the crown matrimonial and instead invested her trust in her personal secretary, the Italian musician David Riccio.

In March 1566, when Mary was six months pregnant, the jealous Darnley and a group of nobles came for her secretary. They walked into the tiny room off the Queen’s bedchamber where she was having supper with the Countess of Argyll and Riccio, demanding he leave the room. The terrified man grabbed Mary’s skirts, but with a pistol pointing at Mary’s pregnant belly, he was dragged away screaming to be stabbed to death. James had survived the trauma to his mother to be born at Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, between nine and ten in the morning. A caul was stretched over James’s face in what has traditionally been seen as a sign of good fortune. The first sign of it came later that morning when his father recognised his legitimacy with the seal of a kiss, but a rapid series of events had followed that endangered his life and then that of his mother.

When James was nine months old Darnley’s house was destroyed by gunpowder and his body was found strangled in grounds nearby. Three months later Mary married his suspected murderer, the Earl of Bothwell. The scandal triggered a revolt led by her Protestant Lords, including Bothwell’s former ally in the murder of Darnley, James Douglas, Earl of Morton. It ended with her thirteen-month-old son put on her throne in her place, to be raised a Protestant. Mary fled to England in May 1568. Elizabeth had warned that a prince could not even trust the children who were to succeed them, but she could hardly rejoice at being proved right. Catherine Grey had died only four months earlier. Her younger sister, known as ‘crookback Mary’, was in custody after secretly marrying Thomas Keyes, the Sergeant Porter.^* But Elizabeth was now confronted with a far greater threat than that posed by the Grey sisters, for here was a queen regnant and no mere subject.

William Cecil dissuaded Elizabeth from helping Mary regain her throne and since Elizabeth could not risk allowing Mary to leave for Europe, where she might have raised support for an invasion force, she was left with no choice but to keep her cousin imprisoned in a succession of great houses in the English Midlands. There she became a focus for Catholic discontent fuelled by envy of Cecil’s power and influence. Mary was barely south of the border before the great Catholic families of the north, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, backed the Duke of Norfolk’s secret bid to marry her and return with her to Scotland. Elizabeth discovered the plan and the earls, fearing execution, led the north in rebellion in November 1569. It was crushed with great savagery and in its wake a still greater disaster fell on English Catholics. Pope Pius V issued a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from their obedience to her.^*

A divide that had existed since the Reformation began widening once more. The Pope’s bull allowed William Cecil – Lord Burghley from 1571 – to paint Catholics as traitors by virtue of their faith. New laws were immediately introduced to prevent Catholics entering Parliament and they began to be ousted from local power in towns and counties. This appeared to be justified when, late in 1571, Mary and Norfolk were discovered to be involved in a plot to depose Elizabeth with the possible backing of a Spanish invasion. Norfolk was executed for his role and Elizabeth was put under pressure from her Councillors to behead Mary as well. She refused to set a precedent of regicide but the Protestant elite was soon fearful that the Catholic threat was growing ever greater.

In 1574, a new breed of secular priest (the equivalent of today’s diocesan priests) arrived in England as missionaries from the continent. Protestant hopes that Catholicism would die out were dashed and the reaction was ferocious, with the first of many priests to be executed dying in 1577. In June 1580 the Jesuits arrived in England spearheaded by Robert Persons and Edmund Campion. The pair would convert such important figures as the Queen’s champion Robert Dymoke and set up a printing press to disseminate Catholic literature and propaganda. Professional priest hunters were quickly put on their trail and in 1581 Persons was forced to flee back to the continent. Campion, however, was caught. ‘In condemning us,’ he told his judges, ‘you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient priests, bishops and kings, and all that was once the glory of England.’ He was hung, cut down while still alive, drawn of his bowels, castrated and quartered.

Campion’s terrible death marked the beginning of the harshest yet period of repression. Those Catholics who refused to attend Protestant services – known as recusants (from the Latin recusare, to refuse) – faced ever more ruinous fines, while priests and those who harboured them were executed every year for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. This did not stamp out Catholicism. Even three generations after the Reformation, Wales and the north of England remained predominantly Catholic. The west of England had a substantial Catholic minority and as much as 20 per cent of the entire nobility and gentry were Catholic. But it did radicalise Catholics and it also gained the sympathies of many young Protestant courtiers. The explosion of opinion and argument that followed the Reformation not only led to wars of religion, but also to the sceptical humanism of the late Renaissance. By 1602 it was illustrated in the works of Shakespeare and Montaigne, and found political expression in Henri IV’s secular state in France and a desire in English court circles for toleration of religion.

Harington, who although a Protestant, had many Catholic friends and relations, would refer to Campion’s death in his Tract with the comment that ‘men’s minds remain rather the less satisfied of the uprightness of the cause; where racks serve for reasons’.²⁷ It was, however, the older generation who remained in power in the 1580s and they remained convinced that the persecution was a matter of personal survival.

In 1584 Burghley and Elizabeth’s then Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, took steps to block Mary’s accession, drafting a so-called ‘Bond of Association’ whose members agreed to murder Mary if Elizabeth’s life was threatened. The wording indicated that if James VI claimed the throne his life would also be forfeit. Burghley had hoped to follow this with a neo-republican law that would bring a Great Council into effect on Elizabeth’s death with the power to choose her successor. Elizabeth put paid to that scheme, but in 1585 she did agree to sign a statute which decreed that anyone who plotted against her – or whose supporters plotted against her – would lose their right to the throne.²⁸ It was often used against James’s claim for in 1586 Mary was at last found in correspondence with a rich young Catholic traitor called Anthony Babington. In essence Babington and his co-conspirators were accused of planning a Catholic uprising backed by an invading army financed by Spain and the Pope. Elizabeth was to be deposed and assassinated. Here at last was the means for Burghley to dispose of Mary and, with the help of Walsingham, he seized it with both hands.

Mary was tried and convicted of her involvement in the Babington plot and in February 1587, at three strokes of the axe, the Protestant James VI became the leading Stuart candidate for the throne. The majority of Catholics conceded that all hope for the restoration of Catholicism had died with Mary, Queen of Scots. But some others – idealists, zealots and leading Jesuits – remained determined to have a Catholic monarch, if necessary by force of arms. And already the numbers of Elizabeth’s possible heirs were increasing.

Mary, Queen of Scots made Philip II of Spain a written promise that she would bequeath him her right to the English succession the year before her execution. In the event she never did so, but her death left him the leading Catholic candidate for the succession. As a descendant of John of Gaunt and Edward III he had English royal blood, as king of the greatest power in Europe he had the might to back his right, and in 1587 he was already building the Armada with which he intended to invade England.

Elizabeth needed allies in Europe, but at fifty-four she was too old to gain them by offering her hand in a marriage alliance. She had therefore introduced a new candidate for the succession: James’s English-born first cousin, the eleven-year-old Arbella Stuart, who remained a serious rival to his claim. Her father, Charles Stuart, was the younger brother of Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband, Henry Darnley. She was therefore a great-great-granddaughter of Margaret Tudor. Her mother was the daughter of a courtier called William Cavendish whose formidable wife, known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, remained her guardian.

Bess had been a friend of Catherine Grey and she had used the example of Catherine’s marriage to plan that of her daughter Elizabeth with Charles Stuart. They too were married in secret, but Bess made sure that this union had plenty of witnesses. It never paid out the prize of a male heir, but Arbella was legitimate, royal and English born. When Arbella was orphaned at the age of six in 1581, Bess – who was then married to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury – took her in and gave her a Protestant education suitable for a future ruler. Elizabeth, in addition to seeing her as a pawn in European politics, saw her rather as a useful counterpoint to James’s ambitions and she was the focus of considerable curiosity when Elizabeth invited her to court early in the summer of 1586. Elizabeth was then based at Burghley’s palace, Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, where the Earl of Essex had begun to supplant Sir Walter Ralegh as the Queen’s favourite.

Arbella arrived at court accompanied by her Cavendish aunts and uncles, a slim, full-faced girl with dark blonde hair and slightly bulging blue eyes. Elizabeth allowed her the honour of dining in the Presence Chamber and courtiers showered the eleven-year-old with attention. Essex had talked to Arbella loudly of his devotion to the Queen and Burghley invited her to supper. Arbella went accompanied by her youngest uncle, Charles Cavendish, who reported all that passed in a letter to his mother.²⁹ Ralegh, whose fate would later become strangely bound up with Arbella’s, was sitting next to Burghley, the elder statesman with his long grey beard, Ralegh, dark and sleek, ‘long faced and sour-eye lidded’.³⁰ Cavendish was struck by how polite, even ingratiating, Ralegh was with Burghley: the fading favourite needed a powerful ally to match the support that Essex had in his stepfather, Elizabeth’s first and greatest love, the ageing Earl of Leicester.

Burghley ‘spoke greatly in Arbella’s commendation, as that she had the French and the Italian; danced and writ very fair’ and wished ‘she were fifteen years old’. Cavendish then saw him whisper in Ralegh’s ear. Ralegh replied in his distinctive low voice and Devonshire accent ‘it would be a happy thing’.³¹ The two men appeared to be discussing a possible marriage. The name soon circulating as the most likely groom was that of Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, Philip II’s Lieutenant in the Spanish Netherlands, and, like him, a descendant of John of Gaunt. Elizabeth hoped that personal ambition might dull Parma’s effectiveness in the coming invasion. She also hoped that the promise of marrying Arbella to a Catholic might salve feeling about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and, with this in mind, she advertised to the French ambassador’s wife that Arbella ‘would one day be as I am’. The ambassador duly reported the conversation home, observing that Arbella ‘would be the lawful inheritress of the crown if James of Scotland were excluded as a foreigner’.³²

Childish and spoilt Arbella was delighted ‘that it pleased her Majesty to … pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind’, but she would soon discover that her position depended on the prevailing political climate. When the Armada was defeated in August 1588, Arbella ceased to be seen as useful, though she failed to sense the change in her circumstances and continued to play the role of Elizabeth’s heir. On one notorious occasion she insisted on taking precedence over all the other ladies at court. Elizabeth seized on it as an excuse to order her to return home to Derbyshire.

In December 1591 Burghley began pursuing fresh attempts for a settlement with Spain. Burghley had always been the most enthusiastic advocate for peace and his chief rivals from the war party, Leicester and Walsingham, were now dead (Leicester had died in September 1588 and Walsingham in November 1591). New plans were made for Arbella’s marriage to Farnese and in order to underscore her importance in the line of succession she was invited back to Whitehall for the Christmas celebrations.

Harington recalled that Arbella had matured into an attractive young woman. He often admired her elegance of dress, ‘her virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music’.³³ Elizabeth, however, began to fear that a party was building behind her and, according to Harington, Essex or his followers had made some ‘glancing speeches’ that suggested she had cause for concern. When the Duke of Parma died the following December, Elizabeth let the marriage plans drop. The friendship with Farnese was now of no use to her and she decided to put the eighteen-year-old Arbella back in her Derbyshire box. She would not be invited back to court during Elizabeth’s lifetime. While Arbella’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the latest political gossip – a Catholic plot to kidnap her, a new husband who had been found for her – it was only as a bit part in a much bigger story.

In 1593, the first year of Arbella’s exile, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Essex was appointed to the Privy Council. The average age of his fellow councillors was almost sixty, with the sclerotic Burghley holding a position of unrivalled authority. The only other young member was Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, who had been appointed to the Privy Council in 1591 when he was twenty-eight. Just as Leicester had marked Essex out as his heir, so Burghley was grooming Cecil for his. A contemporary described Cecil as having a ‘full mind in an imperfect body’.³⁴ He was short – no more than five foot two – and hunchbacked. His face was almost feminine with large, vivid eyes that suggested his quick wit. Elizabeth would sometimes refer to Cecil as her ‘pygmy’ and sometimes as her ‘elf’. Others preferred the sobriquet ‘Robert the Devil’.

Unfailingly polite, watchful and measured, Cecil had been raised a courtier from infancy. He was therefore completely familiar with the complex network of human relations that bound people at court by blood, marriage, love, friendship, honour and dependency and he was precisely attuned to its mores. Here the normal rules of morality did not apply. Harington complained you ended up a fool at court if you didn’t start out a knave – but this did not trouble Cecil. As one discourse argued: ‘The courtier knows the secrets of the court, judges them not, but uses them for his particular advantage.’³⁵ Essex did his best to push his young clients forward for high office, but as Elizabeth’s old Councillors died she preferred to leave their posts vacant than replace them, arguing that younger men were too inexperienced – and Burghley was no keener on finding new talent than the Queen. He surrounded himself with fifth-rate men who could pose no threat to him. In this stagnant pool corruption flourished.³⁶

Burghley’s servant John Clapham admitted that ‘purveyors and other officers of [the Queen’s] household, under pretence of her service, would oft-times for their own gain vex with many impositions the poorer sort of the inhabitants near the usual places of her residence’. And it wasn’t only the poor who suffered. ‘Certain it is,’ he recalled, ‘that some persons attending near about [the Queen] would now and then abuse her favour and make sale of it, by taking bribes for such suits as she bestowed freely.’³⁷ There had always been bribery: since official salaries were very low it was expected, but the scale shocked court and country alike. Burghley claimed to be dismayed by it, but his son was well known for his predilection for taking large bribes and Burghley himself covered up or ignored financial scandals involving his appointees at the Treasury and the Court of Wards. Some cost the crown tens of thousands of pounds.³⁸ This mismanagement, combined with the problems of an outdated system of taxation, encouraged Elizabeth’s carefulness with money to become obsessive. As the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later wrote, the ageing queen ‘was ever hard of access, and grew to be very covetous in her old days … the court was very much neglected, and in effect the people were weary of an old woman’s government’.³⁹

Harington’s tract complained that a few servants got everything and he had observed even then that ‘envy doth haunt many and breed jealousy’.⁴⁰ The old Catholic chivalric families, who had lost most to the ‘goose-quilled gents’ in the Cecilian elite, remained particularly resentful and they joined their Protestant peers in turning to Essex as the new leader of the nobility. Essex’s stepfather, Christopher Blount, was a Catholic, but his own religious allegiance was advertised by his having a Puritan chaplain. The term ‘Puritan’ had been coined as an insult, implying extremist views and the Puritans referred to themselves simply as the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestant or as ‘the Godly’.^* Some had all the bullying fanaticism we associate with the term. There was a joke recorded in the winter of 1602 – 3 that a Puritan was ‘a man who loved God with all his soul and hated his neighbour with all his heart’.⁴¹ But what attracted Essex was their integrity.

Even the Jesuit Robert Persons admitted: ‘The Puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other … that is to say most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side.’⁴² Many Puritans hoped for political reforms that would sweep away corruption in public life, as well as for religious changes on Calvinist lines. Elizabeth had expected and even hoped that Essex and Cecil would hold differing views and attitudes. She had often used the arguments between Leicester and Burghley to give her the freedom to choose her own path. But Essex and Cecil became more than mere rivals in the Council. They dominated opposing factions with Cecil shoring up his father’s pre-eminence and his agenda of peace with Spain while Essex promoted the aggressive foreign policy previously advocated by Leicester.

Essex often tried to bully and badger Elizabeth into accepting his policies, but his view that she ‘could be brought to nothing except by a kind of necessity’ was not the best way to gain her trust. It became increasingly clear to Essex that Elizabeth was becoming more, rather than less, reliant on Burghley and the only hope for change would lie with her successor. The first determined attempt to browbeat the Queen into naming her heir had come in February 1593 when the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name her successor. Her reply was to put him in the Tower.

Harington recalled how from his cell Wentworth wrote ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.⁴³ He remained in the Tower for four years until his death, all the while stubbornly refusing to keep silent on the issue of the succession – a promise that would have given him his liberty.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface of public life, opposing groups continued to make frantic efforts to secure the succession. The question, after all, was not merely one of who would inherit the throne but who would be the leading men in their government. In the autumn of 1593, Catholic exiles approached Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (a junior descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Brandon). Derby was known to have Catholic sympathies and the group appeared to hope that he would accept the role of a candidate for the succession. Derby, however, took their letter to the Queen. The incident had all the hallmarks of an attempt by Robert Cecil to ‘waken’ a plot with agents provocateurs, a much-used method of gaining kudos with Elizabeth and destroying enemies, particularly Catholics. Derby’s action may have saved him from the scaffold, but within a few months he was dead anyway, having endured a violent sickness in which he produced vomit coloured ‘like soot or rusty iron’.⁴⁴ The description indicates bleeding in the stomach and the rumour was that he had been poisoned.^* Some said the Jesuits had murdered Derby in revenge for his betrayal of them, others that the Cecils had arranged it in order to clear the path for Beauchamp. Elizabeth had become dangerously ill with a fever and the issue of the succession had taken on a new urgency.

Renewed efforts were being made to have the decision on Lord Beauchamp’s legitimacy reversed and the following year Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught stockpiling weapons for Beauchamp’s father the Earl of Hertford in the event of Elizabeth’s death. The Earl was put in the Tower with his son. The Cecils and Hertford’s brother-in-law, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard of Effingham (later the Earl of Nottingham), worked hard for their release, which came remarkably quickly in January.

Essex was by now firmly allied to James with whom he had been in correspondence since 1594.^† The King’s candidature appealed to Essex on several levels. The first was that he was a man. Essex once voiced the view that ‘they laboured under two things at this court delay and inconstancy which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen’.⁴⁵ Secondly James, unlike Beauchamp, was indisputably royal. Thirdly James disliked the Cecils, blaming Burghley for his mother’s death, and resenting his championship of Beauchamp’s cause; and lastly, but significantly, it was believed he could attract support from across the religious spectrum. James had already shown himself to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause. In 1590, for example, he had ordered that prayers be said in Scotland for those in England suffering for the ‘purity’ of religion. Catholics, meanwhile, saw James in terms of his being the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they regarded as virtually a martyr. Some hoped that he might convert when he left Scotland and there was widespread belief amongst Catholics and Protestants that, at the very least, he would offer Catholics toleration. Harington observed that James had never been subject to a papal excommunication and ‘had no particular cause to persecute any side for private displeasure’. James’s accession, therefore, offered a golden opportunity to ‘establish an unity, and cease the strife among us if it be possible’.⁴⁶

Perhaps the most effective enemy of this vision of religious freedom came, however, from amongst the Catholics themselves: the former missionary Robert Persons. Since Campion’s death, Persons had risen to be Prefect of the English Jesuits and was usually resident in Rome where he was described as a courtly figure, of ‘forbidding appearance’. To Persons any Catholic hopes of toleration were a threat to the higher goal of a total restitution of Catholicism and he was now to use his talents as a brilliant propagandist to change the whole basis of arguments on the succession. In November 1595 a book entitled A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England appeared in England published under the pseudonym ‘R. Doleman’.^* It took advantage of the fact the Tudors had failed to assert the strict hereditary principle to claim that ‘ancestry of blood alone’ was not enough to gain a crown. A monarch should have all the attributes of honour necessary to majesty and, the book argued, there was no such candidate within the Tudor family. The Doleman book took advantage of every consideration ever raised against the Tudor candidates, crystallised popular prejudices and added new disqualifications. Readers were invited to reflect that in the Suffolk line, Beauchamp and Lord Derby had damaged their royal status by marrying the daughters of mere knights (the daughters of Sir Richard Rogers and Sir John Spenser respectively).⁴⁷ Beauchamp and Derby were, therefore, simply not royal enough to command respect. Of the senior Stuarts, Arbella was said to be of illegitimate descent because Margaret Tudor’s second husband, the Earl of Angus, had another wife living at the time their marriage, while James was disqualified under the Bond of Association. The book further argued that James’s Scots nationality made him a particularly undesirable choice – and here Persons had hit on a raw nerve.

Historically, Scotland was ‘the old, beggardly enemy’, and although the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had ended three centuries of armed conflict the English still despised their impoverished northern neighbour.⁴⁸ For many, the idea of a Scot becoming King of England suggested a ridiculous reversal of fortune. Doleman played up to these feelings, claiming that there was no possible advantage to England in joining with an impoverished country whose people were known for their ‘aversion and natural alienation … from the English’ and for their close ties with England’s Irish and French enemies: James would fill English posts with Scottish nobles and might even oppress the English with foreign armies.

Furthermore, Doleman warned, while some claimed that England and Scotland shared the same religion, the truth was that Scottish Calvinism was ‘opposite to that form which in England is maintained’, with its rituals and bishops. If James became king the nobility would find the church hierarchy torn down and themselves subject to the harangues of mere Church ministers.⁴⁹ His words echoed something the Earl of Hertford had once said of the Puritans: ‘As they shoot at bishops now, so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.’⁵⁰ The fact that episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland in 1593 added credence to the claims.

Having thus dismissed all the Tudor candidates as unworthy, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion’.⁵¹ If this seems a strange argument now it is worth remembering that the rights of the present royal family have been based on this premise since the reign of William and Mary. It held still greater force at a time when kings were believed to rule by divine right.

The Doleman book accepted that each faith would prefer to choose a monarch of their own religion, but it expressed no doubt that a Catholic choice would win through since Catholics were strengthened by the persecution ‘as a little brook or river, though it be but shallow … yet if many bars and stops be made therein, it swells and rises to a great force’.⁵² It was a belief shared within the Protestant establishment. Even Walsingham had once observed that the execution of Catholics ‘moves men to compassion and draws some to affect their religion’. The book’s comments were not, however, designed to spread dismay amongst Protestants, so much as to attract the attention of Catholics. Doleman informed Catholics that they were not only bound to choose a Catholic candidate as a religious duty, they were also blessed with an excellent choice: Philip II’s favourite daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her claim through her father (and thus Edward III) was strengthened by that of her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, a descendant of the Dukes of Brittany to whom William the Conqueror had pledged feudal obedience.

The book claimed Isabella also had the personal attributes necessary in a great monarch. She was ‘a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety’ and, as she came from a rich kingdom, she was less likely to ‘pill and poll’ her English subjects than a poverty-stricken Scot.⁵³ The arguments made the Infanta a powerful and believable candidate overnight. As a final touch Persons mischievously dedicated the book to Spain’s leading enemy at court: the Earl of Essex – he who had attracted such a large Catholic following. ‘No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity,’ Doleman wrote; ‘no man likes to have a greater part or sway in deciding this great affair.’

In his Tract Harington recalled that, as the pivotal year of 1598 opened, the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge ‘did both light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’.⁵⁴ The Privy Council was half the size it had been at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and Burghley was so old and ill he had to be carried into meetings in a chair. He still pursued the cause of peace with Spain without success and the costs fell on a country burdened by a growing population and a series of harvest failures. As food prices rose, wages fell, men impressed for the war returned to vagrancy and theft and sedition increased. There were reports of the poor claiming that Philip II of Spain was the rightful King of England and that life had been better under his wife Mary I. The greatest danger for Elizabeth, however, was the discontent at court.

Years of simmering resentment between the Cecil and Essex factions reached boiling point in June when Philip II was dying and there were new hopes of peace. Burghley was keen to press ahead with negotiations with Spain. There was another terrible famine and he warned of ‘the nature of the common people of England [who are] inclinable to sedition if they be oppressed with extraordinary payments’. Essex, however, realised the power of Spain was waning and wanted to push home the advantage. The Queen supported the Cecils, and Essex’s irritation with her came out into the open in dramatic fashion at a Council meeting attended by Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Admiral and Sir Francis Windebank, Clerk of the Signet. The pretext for the argument was the choice of a new deputy for Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice was Essex’s uncle and principal supporter in Council, Sir William Knollys. Essex tried to dissuade her. When he knew he had failed he lost his temper and as the others looked on with horror, Essex suddenly revealed his pent-up contempt for the Queen, turning his back on her with a scornful look. Furious, Elizabeth hit him around the head and ordered him to be gone and be hanged. His hand went to his sword. Admiral Nottingham grabbed him and Essex checked himself, but he swore that he would not have put up with such an indignity from Henry VIII himself.

As Elizabeth absorbed the implications of her favourite’s behaviour Burghley left court for Bath hoping to recover his deteriorating health. Harington was also making use of the medicinal waters when Elizabeth sent Lady Arundel with a cordial for Burghley’s stomach along with a message, ‘that she did intreat heaven daily for his longer life – else would her people, nay herself stand in need of cordials too’. Burghley’s death, shortly afterwards on 4 August, came as a crushing blow to the Queen; all the more so when it was followed within weeks by the massacre of her troops at Yellow Ford in Ireland. For a decade the administration in Ireland had tried to curtail the power of Ulster’s greatest chieftain, the Earl of Tyrone, feudalising land tenure and centralising power. Tyrone had kept his freedom of action for a time by bribing corrupt officials and fighting proxy wars through followers he claimed he could not control. He had even seduced and married the young sister of Ulster’s chief commissioner Sir Henry Bagenal in an attempt to trap him in a blood alliance. This phoney war had ended on 16 August as Tyrone led an all-out fight for liberation, leaving Sir Henry Bagenal amongst the 2,000 loyalist dead.

The events that followed haunted Harington, as they did the Queen. Essex and his army had reached Dublin in mid-April 1599. The Irish Council advised him against attacking Tyrone in Ulster before the late summer and so he led the army south into Leinster, ‘the heart of the whole kingdom’, before going on into Munster. It was an arduous and bloody campaign. Harington wrote home thanking God, ‘that among so many as have been hurt and slain … and some shot even in the very ranks I was of, I have escaped all this while without bodily hurt’. Essex furthermore was no longer the confident, handsome young soldier he had once been. At thirty-two his hair had grown thin and he had to wear it short, except for one long lock behind his left ear, which he tucked into his ruff. His once round and amiable face was pinched, ‘his ruddy colour failed … and his countenance was sad and dejected’.⁵⁵ He suffered terrible headaches – possibly a symptom of syphilitic meningitis – certainly his sense of judgement was abandoning him.

When Essex heard that his military successes were ignored at court and that he was being criticised for his failure to take on Tyrone directly, he considered bringing the army back from Ireland. He intended to use it to force Elizabeth to name James her heir and dispose of Cecil, Cobham and Ralegh once and for all, but his friend, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, dissuaded him. Instead Essex made the fateful decision to make a truce with Tyrone against royal orders and return to court to secure royal support for his military strategy. In the months that followed Essex’s subsequent arrest, his supporters had approached James asking him to invade England in support of the Earl. While James worked to raise the necessary funds they published pamphlets justifying Essex’s actions in Ireland. In the autumn of 1600 Elizabeth responded to these paper darts by stripping the Earl of his right to collect a tax on sweet wines. It left him facing financial ruin and Harington had looked on aghast as Essex shifted ‘from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proves him devoid of good reason or right mind’. He had guessed what lay ahead: ‘The Queen well knows how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knows not how to yield.’⁵⁶

Increasingly unstable, Essex was ready to accept the most paranoid theories about Cecil. He knew his rival must be looking for a stronger candidate than Lord Beauchamp, whose candidature had been seriously weakened by the Doleman book. The Jesuit Robert Persons believed that Cecil was interested in Arbella’s claim. Cecil’s wife had died in 1598 and there were rumours in Europe that he even wanted to marry Arbella. Essex, however, became convinced that Cecil was plotting to place the Infanta Isabella on the throne together with her husband and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albert.^* He reasoned that Cecil was the leading exponent of peace with Spain and his suspicions were raised further by the mysterious appearance of Cobham and Ralegh at a peace conference that took place in Boulogne in July 1600. They had not been sent in any official capacity and Essex was convinced they were acting with Cecil to make a secret deal with the Infanta and her husband.

Essex’s paranoia was fuelled by those around him, notably his sister Penelope Rich and his secretary, Henry Cuffe. The latter pointed out that Cecil was placing men he could trust in the crucial offices on which the defence of the realm rested. Ralegh had been given the governorship of Jersey in September 1600, ‘there to harbour [the Spaniard] upon any occasion’. Meanwhile, ‘In the east, the Cinq Portes, the keys of the realm,’ were in the hands of Lord Cobham, ‘as likewise was the county of Kent, the next and directest way to the Imperial city of this realm’. The navy and Treasury were in the hands of Cecil’s allies, Admiral Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, and Cecil had ‘established his own brother, the Lord Burghley’ as President of the North.⁵⁷ Essex ignored the obvious point, made by the intelligence gatherer Thomas Phelipps, that Cecil was too closely associated with the persecution of Catholics to risk promoting a Catholic claim. Instead he decided to pre-empt Cecil’s supposed plans and seize the court.

On 7 February 1601, one of Essex’s inner circle of friends, the Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick, paid Shakespeare’s company 40 shillings to perform Richard II, the story of a feeble and indecisive king who allows the country to go to rack and ruin and is deposed by a glorious subject who then becomes king himself. Cecil had introduced Essex to Shakespeare’s play during a brief reconciliation in 1597 and it had since become something of an obsession with the Earl. This was doubtless what Cecil intended: it was part of his modus operandi to give his enemies the rope with which they later hanged themselves.

The next day, a Sunday, 300 armed men gathered in the courtyard at Essex’s house. About a third of the rebels were soldiers who had served alongside Essex at one time or another. Many were Catholic, and they included several names later associated with the Gunpowder Plot: Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham. Others were Puritan; some, like Sir Henry Bromley, with City connections. A few were blood relatives of Essex. Most strikingly, however, the rebels included what the courtier John Chamberlain called the ‘chief gallants’ of the time: the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, Lords Lumley and Monteagle amongst them, united, above all, by hatred of Cecil.

Essex led his followers through Ludgate towards Paul’s Cross. A small black taffeta bag containing a letter from the King of Scots hung around his neck. The streets were too narrow for the rebels to ride their horses and so they walked, brandishing their swords and crying out: ‘For the Queen! For the Queen!’ People came out from their tall, narrow, shop-fronted, timber and plaster houses and crowds began to gather – but no one came forward. Essex, sweating freely, shouted that Ralegh, Cobham and Cecil were plotting to put the Infanta on the throne and murder him, but the people simply gaped and ‘marvelled that they could come in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday’.⁵⁸ They did not hold Elizabeth responsible for the actions of her officials, as the court did.

At noon Essex paused at the churchyard of St Paul’s. He had intended to make a speech but by the time he reached it he knew the revolt had failed. Within a fortnight Elizabeth had signed a warrant for Essex’s execution. She had it recalled, but if she was waiting for her one-time favourite to beg for mercy he did not oblige. When the final warrant was signed his only request was to be executed in the privacy of the Tower, so as not to stir up the multitude.

Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 25 February, 1601, the Lieutenant of the Tower Sir John Peyton ‘gave the Earl warning as he was in his bed to prepare himself to death’. At seven or eight he conducted him to the scaffold. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, was obliged to be present at the execution, but the atmosphere was so charged he withdrew to watch from a window in the Armoury. When Essex had finished praying he took off his doublet. His secretary in Ireland, Fynes Moryson, had noticed that he suffered from the cold, but no one saw him shiver in the winter air, nor did he move after the first of the three blows which it took to sever his head from his body. The long lock of hair Essex grew in Ireland was cut off and kept as a relic.^*

Elizabeth was careful to show mercy to the young noblemen who had followed Essex. His friend, the Earl of Southampton, was imprisoned in the Tower where he still remained. Of the rest, only four of the principal conspirators were executed: Essex’s father-in-law, Sir Christopher Blount, another Catholic called Sir Charles Davers, his secretary Henry Cuffe and fellow Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick. Blount made amends to Ralegh and Cobham on the scaffold for accusing them of supporting the Infanta’s claim. Their names, he said, had only been used ‘to colour other matters’. He also confessed that he and others had been prepared to take things as far as the shedding of the Queen’s blood. But neither Elizabeth’s mercy, nor this confession did anything to dent the Earl’s posthumous reputation. When the official version of what had occurred was delivered in a sermon at the Cross at St Paul’s weeks later it was ‘very offensively taken of the common sort’ and the minister fled the pulpit in fear of his life.⁵⁹

In subsequent months Ralegh was accused of blowing smoke in Essex’s face as he mounted the scaffold and Cecil’s life was threatened in places as far apart at Wales, Surrey and Mansfield. But although this anger was not directed against the Queen it was she who felt it most. A few years earlier a French ambassador recorded that Elizabeth had given him ‘a great discourse of the friendship that her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would die rather than see any diminution of the one part or the other’.⁶⁰ Now she believed the bond between them was broken, a view encouraged by those in her government who did not wish to see blame cast upon themselves.

In the months following the Essex revolt Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated markedly and by the time Harington saw her at court in October of 1601 she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. She was eating little and was dishevelled and unkempt. A sword was kept on her table at all times and she constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news, occasionally thrusting her rusty weapon in the tapestry in blind fury. Every message from the City upset her, as if she expected news of some fresh rebellion. Eventually she sent Lord Buckhurst to Harington with a message: ‘Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to go home: it is no season now to fool it here’.⁶¹ He did as he was told and so missed the opening of Elizabeth’s last parliament, in November 1601, when she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes.

The Spanish had invaded Ireland in September, hoping to take advantage of Tyrone’s rebellion and gain a stepping-stone to England. Subsidies were needed for the war and MPs soon granted them, but many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks launched against the granting of monopolies. During the 1590s Burghley had altered the system of royal patronage based on the leasing and alienation of crown lands in their favour in order to shift the cost of reward away from the crown. It had since fallen on ordinary people. The price of starch, for example, had tripled over the three years that Cecil had held the monopoly on it.⁶² He railed in the Commons against those ‘that have desired to be popular without the house for speaking against monopolies’ and Ralegh defended his monopoly in tin so vehemently that it almost brought the debate to a halt. Elizabeth, however, was sufficiently concerned by the attacks on her prerogative to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.⁶³ When the news was announced MPs wept and cheered.

A few days later Elizabeth received a deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall. Once they had delivered their thanks, she took the opportunity to remind them of what was later seen as the central philosophy of her reign.

Mr Speaker, We perceive your coming is to present thanks to us. Know I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desire to offer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches; for these we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks, I account them invaluable. And although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves … Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strict, fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set upon worldly goods but only for my subjects good. What you do bestow on me, I will not hoard up, but receive it to bestow on you again; yea, my own properties I account to be yours, to be expended for your good, and your eyes shall see the bestowing of it for your welfare.⁶⁴

They were described as ‘golden words’ but Elizabeth was only too aware that things had changed and when Parliament was dissolved in December she recalled the bitter truth of ‘so many and diverse stratagems and malicious practises and devises to surprise us of our life’.⁶⁵ That spring, Elizabeth began complaining of an ache in one of her arms. A doctor suggested that her discomfort was rheumatism and might be helped with ointments. She reacted furiously, telling him he was mistaken and ordering him from her presence, but it was soon reported that ‘The ache in the Queen’s arm is fallen into her side.’ She was ‘still thanks to God, frolicy and merry, only her face showing some decay’, yet sometimes she felt so hot she would take off her petticoat while at other times she would shake with cold.⁶⁶ Depression dogged her and in June Elizabeth was overheard complaining desperately to Cecil about ‘the poverty of the state, the continuance of charge, the discontentment of all sorts of people’.⁶⁷ She told the French ambassador, the Comte de Beaumont, that she was weary of life. Then, sighing as her eyes filled with tears, she spoke of Essex’s death, how she had tried to prevent it and failed.⁶⁸

By August Elizabeth’s pains had gone to her hip. Defiantly she continued to hunt every two or three days but a Catholic spy writing under the name ‘Anthony Rivers’ reported that a countrywoman who saw her on her progress had commented that the Queen looked very old and ill. A guard terrified the woman by warning that ‘she should be hanged for those words’. Courtiers, however, were less easily intimidated and whispers about the succession were on everyone’s lips.⁶⁹ The spy described how James’s agents were working hard to gather support from powerful families offering ‘liberty of conscience, confirmation of privileges and liberties, restitution of wrongs, honours, titles and dignities, with increase according to desert etc’. Individuals were responding with shows of affection: ‘for the most part it is thought rather for fear than love’. He named Cecil as one such, adding, ‘all is but policy it being certain he loves him as little as the others’.⁷⁰ It is now believed that the spy ‘Rivers’ was William Sterrell, Secretary to the Earl of Worcester, which would have placed him at the heart of Elizabeth’s court.⁷¹ His letters to Persons and others make it clear that few actively wanted a Scots king and he reported that a group of courtiers were planning to marry Arbella Stuart to Beauchamp’s seventeen-year-old elder son, Edward Seymour ‘and carry the succession that way’. To all outward appearance, however, it was business as usual.

In October 1602, Cecil entertained Elizabeth at his new house on the Strand and presented her with ten gifts, mostly jewels. She left in excellent spirits, refusing any help to enter the royal barge. As she climbed aboard, however, she fell and bruised her shins badly. It left her in considerable pain. She began to talk of moving from Whitehall to the comforts of Richmond Palace, but in the end the lassitude of depression had kept her at Whitehall where Harington had found her weeping at Christmas.

Now that Elizabeth’s godson was certain she was dying he intended to follow the Tract on the Succession sent to James in Scotland with a New Year’s gift, the traditional time for giving presents. He designed a lantern constructed as a symbol of the dark times of Elizabeth’s last years and the splendour that was to come with James’s rising sun. It was engraved with the words: ‘Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ and a little underneath, ‘After the cross, light.’⁷²

* Elizabeth, who was conservative in religious matters, wanted a single man as her senior cleric. After Whitgift’s appointment Harington recalled how Whitgift had always cut a dashing figure. When he was Bishop of Worcester, he would arrive at Parliament attended by large numbers of retainers in tawny livery. When another bishop asked how he could afford so many menservants he quipped ‘it was by reason he kept so few women’ – a reference to the fact he had remained unmarried (Harington, State of the Church, pp. 7–8).

* Thomas Wilson had also observed that the law against foreigners inheriting the English throne need not apply to James if it ‘be alleged that the King of Scots is no alien, neither that Scotland is any foreign realm, but a part of England, all be it the Scots deny it’ (Wilson, State of England in 1600, p. 8).

* It was, perhaps, because Elizabeth was seriously ill with smallpox in 1562 that she did not think to ensure that Edward and Catherine were kept apart in the Tower. In consequence another ‘illegitimate’ child, Thomas, was born on 10 February 1563. Edward was fined £15,000 and Elizabeth saw to it that he never saw Catherine again.

* Mary Grey married in 1565. Within months it was discovered and she was placed in custody until her husband died, after which she lived an impoverished and childless life until her own death in 1578.

* The subsequent ruin of many Catholics was remembered in the 1930s as the Vatican considered how best to confront Adolf Hitler. Voices recalled the terrible effects of the bull and the Pope backed off from issuing a condemnation of Nazism (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, p. 334).

* Puritans wanted to see the restitution and continuation of Edward VI’s reforms, dispensing with ‘papist’ rituals such as the cross in baptism and instituting sermons in order to achieve a more godly church and society.

* Though the bleeding from the stomach might equally have been caused by stomach cancer or an ulcer, or a result of porphyria inherited through his mother Eleanor Brandon.

† The Earl’s followers had approached the King as early as 1589, but James had not shown any interest in Essex’s offers of loyalty until he had his place on the Privy Council.

* The name probably represented a team of writers.

* One of Philip II’s last actions had been to create the new kingdom of the Netherlands. The Spanish had been fighting the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands for twenty-five years without making progress. Philip hoped that a sovereign state that included the France-Comte of Burgundy, as well as the Netherlands south of the Maas and Waal, would be better able to defeat the Dutch rebels and would remain allied to Spain. He planned to marry Isabella to her first cousin, the Archduke Albert, who was already Governor of the Netherlands. The Act of Cession creating the kingdom was made on 6 May 1598 and that autumn, shortly after Philip’s death, the Infanta married Albert.

* His daughter, Frances Devereux, Duchess of Somerset, wore it along with his ruby earring when she sat for a portrait by Vandyke, both of which are still preserved at Ham House. Her husband was Lord Beauchamp’s younger son, William Seymour.