After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

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.