IN SEPTEMBER 1598, Elizabeth lost the last of the three men of her life, her brother-suitor-enemy Philip of Spain. For all the vagaries of their relationship, his portrait was still kept in the royal bedroom, which was also the site of Elizabeth’s final stand-off with Essex, who had left for Ireland several months previously. English authority there, never particularly strong, had received a serious blow in the defection in 1595 of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Although plagued by almost incessant rebellion, English subjugation of Ireland had proceeded throughout the previous five years until some form of consistent English government had been established all over the country, with the exception of Ulster. Tyrone had been an effective instrument in this, but now he demanded that he should be given Ulster to govern in Elizabeth’s name. When he was refused, he rebelled. In the summer of 1598, O’Neill was besieging the English castle of Blackwater in the north, overpowering the English Army sent to relieve it at a cost of two thousand lives. With Cecil gone and Ireland in need of a commander, Essex saw an opportunity and returned to court. When Elizabeth refused to see him, he feigned illness, at which the queen relented, sending her own doctors to tend him and allowing herself to be persuaded, against her better judgment, that the earl should have the command in the next Irish campaign. Essex realized too late that he was a victim of his own arrogance, admitting that the role was “the hardest task that ever gentleman was sent about,” but unable to back down. Elizabeth, whose own view of Ireland as an albatross on England’s neck was summed up in her remark, “The like burden and charge is not found in any place in Christendom,” hoped that for once, Essex’s bragging might turn to the good, and was prepared to equip him far more thoroughly than she had been Leicester in the Netherlands fourteen years earlier.
Elizabeth later remarked angrily that she had paid Essex £1,000 per day to strut about the countryside. The purpose of the 1,400 horse, 16,000 foot (with quarterly reinforcements of 2,000), and £23,000 worth of materiel was the immediate subjugation of Tyrone. Essex had vaunted his view that anything “that was done in other kind in Ireland was but waste and consumption.”1 Yet after a summer of what Elizabeth scornfully referred to as a “progress,” he had not only failed to engage Tyrone but complained loudly that he received nothing from England except discomfort and wounds to his soul. Essex was disobedient, promoting his crony the Earl of Southampton to General of the Horse, a position Elizabeth had forbidden as Southampton was in disgrace over his entanglement with Elizabeth Vernon, whom he had married after a spell in the Fleet Prison. Essex also continued his scatter-gun dubbings, not having learned from Elizabeth’s disapproval of the number of knights he had made in France. The queen was altogether disgusted, particularly as, rather than admit his faults, Essex whined and wheedled and blamed others. Essex returned to Dublin for three weeks in the middle of the summer, then set off again on campaign, but still he failed to do anything definitive about Tyrone. In August, Elizabeth wrote sardonically that,
if sickness in the army be the reason, why was not the action undertaken when the army was in better state. If winter’s approach, why were the summer months of July and August lost? . . . surely we must conclude that none of the four quarters of the year will be in season for you . . . for you had your asking, you had your choice of times, you had power and authority more ample than any ever had.2
Finally, on 5 September, Tyrone himself took the initiative and organized a private conference with the earl on the banks of the River Lagan, where a truce was settled. Essex did not see fit to inform Elizabeth of the terms he had negotiated, throwing the council into a panic. He had been specifically instructed not to return without formal permission, yet now he considered that his only course was to explain his conduct in person.
The eglantine, the delicate rose so often associated with Elizabeth, and which she had taken as her badge from her grandmother Elizabeth of York, flowers in late spring and early summer. To Elizabeth, who was well accustomed to discovering the messages of imprese, the verbal/visual conceits displayed at the tilt and in miniature paintings, one of Essex’s gifts might now have attained a sorry irony. One of the best-known paintings of the period, Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man Amongst Roses, is widely considered to be a portrait of Essex. The earliest dating for the picture is 1585, so if it is indeed Essex, he would have been about nineteen, which fits well with the beardless face, the moustache barely discernible, the elegantly posed youth depicted. Dressed in Elizabeth’s colors, the black and white she had worn so long ago to indicate her commitment to virginity, the boy stands with his hand to his heart, the first time such a gesture is deployed in English painting and reminiscent, in its exaggerated suppleness of line, of the Mannerist stucco works at Fontainebleau which influenced Hilliard’s style at this point in his career. The portrait may be read as an impresa expressing love for a woman (the queen), but possibly also of friendship with a man, a suggestion reinforced by the powerfully upsurging trees in the background. This would fit appropriately with the mingling of genders often applied to Elizabeth as master/mistress, and the composition also recalls Elizabeth’s figuring in this fashion as the source of erotic authority in Paulus Melissus’s rendering of his entrapment in the tangled rose fronds in his contemporaneous poem. The motto, Dat poenas laudata fides (My praised faith is my pain), is from Lucan’s De bello civili, which Elizabeth would have recognized as associating the young man with Pompey, the great Roman general who by the age of twenty-five had already been granted two triumphs. The size of the picture, slightly too large to be worn as a miniature, reinforces the hand-on-heart gesture, its “status as a precious object to be held and admired in the palm of the hand deepens its iconographic focus upon physically touching the heart.”3 If the picture was made as a gift to the queen, its resonance had altered considerably between its production and the autumn of 1599. That Elizabeth held Essex’s faith in her hand, that his heart was hers, twined perennially in her motto, was an elegant conceit, but now the roses were browned and faded, and the career of the ambitious young general proved to be as deceptive as the carefully laid-on colors of his lover’s complexion.
Essex left Dublin on 24 September and made straight for the court at Nonsuch, which he reached at about ten o’clock in the morning on the 28th. Of a previous absence from court he had written to her,
The delights of this place cannot make me unmindful of one in whose sweet company I have joyed as much as the happiest man doth in his highest contentment; and if my horse could run as fast as my thoughts do fly, I would as often make mine eyes rich in the beholding the treasure of my love as my desires do triumph when I seem to myself in a strong imagination to conquer your resisting will.4
Now Essex’s image would be put to the test. For both players in the charming game of love which had sustained the relationship between the young aristocrat and his queen, it was a cruel encounter with reality. The swooning lover crashed into Elizabeth’s chamber in his filthy travelling clothes, “so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of it,” to confront his fair mistress, barely out of bed, her wrinkles brutally exposed in the morning light and her wig off. Elizabeth kept her countenance and played for time, uncertain as yet whether his precipitate arrival was yet more recklessness, or if it heralded the beginning of a coup d’état. Once she was assured that Essex had arrived with only a small party of servants, she dismissed him to bathe and dress and received him again to dine. By the afternoon, now dressed and made up, Elizabeth was ready to attack. She demanded that he account for his disgraceful conduct, and after two sessions of interrogation by council, Essex was instructed to keep to his rooms. Effectively, he was under arrest, confirmed three days later when Elizabeth commanded that he should be confined at the residence of Lord Keeper Egerton, York House, where he remained until the following March, when he was permitted to return to Essex House, though still under arrest. On 6 June, the earl was called before a committee of judge and councilors, and knelt bare-headed as he was censured for contempt and insubordination. He was deprived of all his offices excepting Master of the Horse and warned that he had narrowly escaped perpetual imprisonment in the Tower and extensive fines. In August, Essex was once again a free man, only to be rendered ever more desperate by Elizabeth’s decision that the tax monopoly he had been granted on the import of sweet wine should revert to the crown now that the ten-year lease was up. Furious, humiliated, and in terrifying debt, Essex took himself off to stew in the country.
By the winter of 1600, Essex’s anger and paranoia had reached a boiling point. Sir John Harington recorded that he seemed “devoid of good reason or right mind,” so suddenly did he shift between “sorrow and repentance, rage and rebellion.”5 During his last disgrace, Essex might have written to Elizabeth, begging to be permitted to kiss her hand and claiming that until he was able to see her, “time itself is a perpetual night and the whole world but a sepulchre to your humblest vassal,”6 but among the rowdy cabal of chancers he was assembling around him at Essex House, he sneered at the “treasure of my love” as “an old woman . . . no less distorted and crooked in mind than she is in body.”7 Until now, Essex’s own plans had been wild and formless. Convinced that Elizabeth was no more than a puppet of the Cecil faction, which he had convinced himself was barring him from his proper place in government, Essex had as early as his service in Ireland talked of collecting “two hundred resolute gentlemen” to take control of the queen’s person. He had also attempted to enlist the services of Lord Mountjoy in bringing over a force from Ireland, and had long been engaged in a correspondence with James VI in an attempt to persuade him that, as he confided in a letter of Christmas Day 1600, James must intervene “to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country which groans under her burden.”8 It has been suggested that James fell for Essex’s arguments as to Cecil’s “unquenchable malice,” and that his agreement to send an ambassador to demand a change of ministers from Elizabeth once Essex had effected his plan was an endorsement of the earl’s aims, but given that Cecil was in covert negotiations with James over his accession from 1601 onwards, his acquiescence is more likely to have been a means of giving Essex a little more rope with which to hang himself. Nonetheless, Essex was sufficiently encouraged to lay out his scheme at a meeting at the Earl of Southampton’s house in early February 1601. Along with Essex and Southampton, the key conspirators were Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Sir John Davies, Sir Christopher Blount, and John Littleton. The object was to isolate Elizabeth, after which Essex would beg her contritely to bring his enemies to trial, “and having called a Parliament, to alter the form of commonwealth.”9 Blount would man the gate, Davies the hall, Danvers the Great Chamber and the Presence Chamber, upon which Essex would emerge from the stable called the Muse with his escort and throw himself upon the queen’s mercy. Once the court was controlled, the plotters would take the Tower and subdue the City.
That Essex was able to convince his supporters that this was a plausible scheme was a testament to his personal charisma, as the project was patently fantastic, if not merely stupid. First, Essex had severely underestimated the scope of Cecil’s intelligence network and therefore overestimated the support of James VI. Second, in believing that he was standing up for the “countless host of the discontented,” he had not considered how paltry his backing was among powerful magnates and wealthy burghers.10 Third, he was utterly unable to keep his mouth shut. Under Essex’s steward, Meyrick, who dished out provisions to anyone with a sword, Essex House had become a general canteen for “bold confident fellows, men of broken fortunes, discontented persons and such as saucily used their tongues in railing against all men.” Obviously, the authorities knew something was going on. Essex gave out that the increase in guests at his home was for the purpose of hearing sermons, but this pretext only made matters worse when it was suggested that “some words . . . had dropped from the preachers’ mouths as of the superior magistrates had power to restrain kings themselves.”11 Unlike the network Elizabeth herself had constructed around her in the last year of Mary’s reign, this was no efficient court-in-waiting but an inchoate mass of discontents with no real program and no real power.
On 7 February, Essex was summoned to appear before the Privy Council, but he rejected this, and a further summons, claiming that he was ill. He learned that a barricade of coaches had been erected between Whitehall and Charing Cross, preventing access to the palace, and that the guard in the Great Chamber had been augmented. That evening, a specially commissioned performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II was given at the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Supporters of Essex, including Charles and Joscelyn Percy, younger brothers of the Earl of Northumberland, paid 40 shillings to persuade the Chamberlain’s Men to stage the piece, which the actors felt was too out of date to appeal to many spectators. Eleven of Essex’s men (though not the earl himself) were in the house. At ten the next morning, four councilors, headed by Lord Egerton, arrived at Essex House to persuade Essex to petition the queen in correct form if he felt that there was a wrong to be redressed. Essex had already spread a rumor that he had refused to attend council because a fatal ambush was planned for him, and now set off into the city with about two hundred armed followers, having locked the delegation in the library at Essex House. Just as Essex entered the City, en route for the Tower, Thomas, Lord Burghley (Burghley’s older son), Garter King of Arms, arrived, proclaiming Essex and all his followers to be traitors. Elizabeth was at dinner at Whitehall while Essex’s rabble confronted her guards at Ludgate Hill. The only allusion she made to the menace in the streets was that “He that had placed her on that seat would preserve her in it,” and whatever she was feeling, she concealed it “marvellously.”
The skirmish at Ludgate cost the life of Essex’s page, Henry Tracey, but the earl escaped with a couple of bullet holes in his hat. There was never any possibility of attaining the Tower—the rebels scattered at the first sign of a serious engagement, and Essex’s small remaining party commandeered a few boats to row themselves desperately back downriver from Queenhithe, hoping to use the hostages to negotiate a settlement. Back at Essex House, now surrounded on the land side by royal troops, Ferdinando Gorges had had the sense to see that holding the councilors could only make matters worse, and freed them before Essex returned. At about nine that evening, Essex surrendered his sword to the Earl of Nottingham. He spent the night at Lambeth Palace before being rowed to the Tower, already a condemned man. To the last, Essex would maintain that he had never intended any harm to Elizabeth’s person, refusing to sue for pardon and insisting that he had only wished to state his grievance. Might Elizabeth have forgiven him one last time?
Robert Cecil was determined to preclude this possibility. Immediately following the failed coup, the details of the earl’s treason were proclaimed in London and thanks given to the people for refusing to join the rebels. With the citizens’ resistance praised so publicly, Elizabeth could not fail to execute Essex without appearing impossibly weak. Yet this time, the queen gave no sign of wavering. From the moment Essex had exposed her aging frailty in her bedchamber to the staging of Shakespeare’s drama, his actions had struck not only at Elizabeth’s government but at the mystical core of her personal power.
Elizabeth Tudor was the granddaughter of a usurper and the product, according to many, of an illegal marriage, if not of an ignominious adultery. From the moment of her coronation, she had identified herself with Richard II, the last undisputed possessor of the divine right, and linked herself further to him through mystical virginity. These latter had been the compasses of her queenship. But Elizabeth was also a modern ruler, a monarch who had absorbed the principles of Renaissance political theory, combining in her person that uneasy blend of might and right which had fractured the consistency of her father’s theory of kingship, as exposed in Henry VIII. In the drama which was played out with Essex, Elizabeth’s self-identification with Richard inevitably casts Essex as Bolingbroke, the rationalist who sees through the “deeply Machiavellian” construct that royal magnificence is merely a device for control: as the play has it, “Art thou aught else but place, degree and form / Creating awe and fear in other men?”12 The tragedy of Richard II is that of the dismantling of the king’s “two bodies,” the gradual and brutal demystification of Richard’s person until he is rendered a man as other men.13 From the moment the king acknowledges that he is human, that he “live[s] with bread like you, feel want / Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus / How can you say to me, I am a king?” to the point when he reverses the sacraments of his consecration as monarch (a scene performed but never printed or published in Elizabeth’s reign), the audience witnesses the undoing of a sacred fiction. Time and time again, Elizabeth herself had played on the distinction between her “body natural” and her “body politic,” but no exposure of the dislocation between those entities could have been more brutal than the scene played out with Essex in her bedroom. But might Elizabeth not be seen as a Bolingbroke? Might that not, ultimately, have been Essex’s error? For, as Marlowe’s Machiavel has it, did not “Might first make kings”?
Essex was a jouster, not a soldier, a sonneteer, not a politician. Elizabeth was serenely assured of her own divine right (or at least, she played it that way), and no one knew better than she the importance of image to the making of monarchy, yet throughout her reign, she had undertaken, albeit sometimes reluctantly, to preserve her state at any cost, the first principle of the Renaissance prince. Essex, not Elizabeth, was the throwback, the believer in chivalric kingship. His glamour and his aristocratic birth may have made him popular, but the future belonged to the “goose-quilled gentlemen,” the pen-pushers, who so offended his sensibilities. Elizabeth suffered from no such delusions. As she wrote to James of Scotland, she was not so unskilled in kingship that she would wink at any fault. To the French ambassador, when he congratulated her on her delivery from the rebellion, she declared that if Essex had made it to Whitehall, she should have gone out to meet him, “in order to know which of them ruled.” Perhaps Elizabeth’s particular qualities as a Renaissance prince can be cast as the inheritance of her mixed Yorkist and Lancastrian blood—York, the house of romance and chivalry; Lancaster as pragmatism and statecraft. If Elizabeth, rather than Essex, was Bolingbroke, then she showed that when it came to an emergency, she was Lancastrian through and through.
PERHAPS ESSEX CAN be seen, like Anne Boleyn before him, as yet another victim of the game of love. He never quite appreciated that Elizabeth only saw it as a game, that he would never be master of his mistress. Essex maintained a jaunty insouciance throughout his trial, which began at Westminster Hall on 19 February, persisting in his refusal to plead for mercy. Only when the Dean of Norwich visited him in the Tower to warn him of the danger to his soul did Essex apprehend that he was actually going to die. His nature had always been depressive and mercurial—Elizabeth dismissed him as a “mad ingrate.” Now he suffered some form of hysterical nervous breakdown. Elizabeth signed his death warrant the next day. Five days later, his head was struck off as he recited Psalm 55. Although she subsequently confided to the French ambassador that she would have spared Essex if she could, this was merely a formulaic echo of Elizabeth’s professed grief at the execution of Mary Stuart. To the public, responsibility for Essex’s death fell firmly upon Cecil, but the promptness of Elizabeth’s action suggests that the decision was hers.