January 1599 opened with the decision not yet made as to who was to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, although most of the Council were inclined towards Lord Mountjoy, and her Majesty was said to be wavering between him and the Earl of Essex. In any event, the Earl was restored to favour and was now pressing his own claim to the position; and it was observed that upon Twelfth Night, when the Queen was entertaining the Danish ambassador at Whitehall, she ‘danced with the Earl of Essex very richly and freshly attired’. Whether this description refers to her Majesty’s own apparel—she was invariably gorgeously dressed and bejewelled—or to Robin Devereux’s own costume is not clear. He was apt to be negligent in this respect, and had been warned of his error in the letter which Francis Bacon had written to him twelve months previously. Nor is it really clear either from the gossip of the day or from historical records how passionately determined the Earl of Essex was to become her deputy in Ireland; like her Majesty, he too blew now hot, now cold on the appointment. One thing is evident: if he was finally offered the position he wanted to accept it on his own terms, with a strong enough army to support him and fellow-officers he could trust, and no niggardly pay arrangement from the Treasury.
Throughout February and March the matter remained unsettled, and then, on March 24th, the Queen signed the document appointing the Earl of Essex Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a decision that was immensely popular amongst the ordinary people, but was accepted with some reserve by the Council and even by certain of his closest friends. The position required a man of great experience, judgement and political understanding, and with some knowledge of the Irish people. The Earl was untested in these qualities, and his predecessors in Ireland, who had possessed them in some measure, had not been conspicuous for their success. Lady Bacon’s cousin, Sir William Fitzwilliam, had been one of them. From 1588 until 1594 he had striven hard to bring some sense of justice and equanimity to the troubled, and troublesome, island; sometimes acting with too firm a hand, laying waste part of the countryside so that ‘not a house was left standing or a grain of corn unburnt’, sometimes attempting pacification. When at the age of sixty-eight he gave way to his successor, Sir William Russell, Fitzwilliam, like his second cousin Anthony Bacon, was ‘old in body, sick in stomach, racked with the stone, bed-ridden with the gout’. How much these disabilities could be laid at Ireland’s door and how much to a constitution inherited from Fitzwilliams before him—this last might well have been Anthony’s inheritance too—remains conjecture.
Sir William Russell, brother-in-law to Anthony’s aunt Elizabeth, had trodden an equally dusty road in Ireland. He told Anthony in 1596 that, ‘Since we have entered into treaties of pacification and cessation from arms, her Majesty hath received more loss by the cunning and treachery of the rebels, than in any likelihood could have befallen her by a course of war in twice so much time, insomuch, if it be not speedily looked into, and horse and foot presently sent over, the whole kingdom is likely to be endangered.’
The Earl of Essex, at thirty-two, having scaled the walls of Cadiz and shown great gallantry in the field, certainly believed he could succeed where older men had been defeated. When he took horse on March 27th from Walsingham House and rode through Cheapside, with all the people acclaiming him and crying out ‘God bless your Lordship!’, the Earl himself ‘very plainly attired’, it was noticed by some that the sky was calm and clear, which was a good omen for the days ahead of him; yet before he had passed Islington a black cloud came out of the north-east, followed by thunder and lightning, hail and rain, and this was not a happy augury.
There was foul weather awaiting him in Wales, fog and much rain, and the passage to Ireland rougher and more dangerous than had been known in years. His close friend, the Earl of Southampton, was with him, appointed General of the Horse, but his nearest adviser at this time, his stepfather Sir Christopher Blount, had been forbidden by the Queen to accompany him to Ireland, which rankled with the Earl as further proof of the Queen’s lingering hostility to his mother, and indeed to most members of his family. Edward Reynolds, his personal secretary, who had been offended two years earlier by what he considered some neglect on the Earl’s part, was now appeased by being appointed liaison officer in London between the new Lord Lieutenant and the Council, while Anthony remained as usual at Essex House to deal with foreign intelligence. What he thought of the Earl’s appointment in Ireland does not appear in any correspondence, but brother Francis had more presumption and some definite ideas on the subject, and wrote a letter of advice to his lordship before he left London. The letter has been often quoted since, and extracts from it give his line of reasoning.
Your Lordship is designed to a service of great merit and great peril; and as the greatness of the peril must needs include a like proportion of merit so the greatness of the merit may include no small consequence of peril, if it be not temperately governed. For all immoderate success extinguisheth merit, and stirreth up distaste and envy…
The goodness and justice whereof [he refers to the cause on which the Earl was employed in Ireland] is such as can hardly be matched by any example; it being no ambitious war against foreigners, but a recovery of subjects, and that after lenity of conditions often tried; and a recovery of them not only to obedience, but to humanity and policy, from more than Indian barbarism…
And if any man be of opinion, that the nature of the enemy doth extenuate the honour of the service, being but a rebel and a savage, I differ from him. For I see the justest triumphs that the Romans in their greatness did obtain, were of such an enemy as this; that is people barbarous and not reduced to civility, magnifying a kind of lawless liberty, fortified in woods and bogs, and placing both justice and felicity in the sharpness of their swords. Such were the Germans and the ancient Britons, and divers others. Upon which kind of people, whether the victory were a conquest, or a reconquest upon a rebellion or a revolt, it made no difference that ever I could find in honour…
Advice… is that which is left to me, being no man of war, and ignorant in the particulars of State. For a man may by the eye set up the white right in the midst of the butt, though he be no archer. Therefore I will only add this wish, that your Lordship in this whole action, looking forward, would set down this position, that merit is worthier than fame… that obedience is better than sacrifice. For designing to fame and glory may make your Lordship in the adventure of your person to be valiant as a private soldier, rather than a general.
If the advice was not heeded—and Francis was well aware that there was little likelihood of persuading the Earl of any course of action that he did not sincerely believe had been instigated by himself—it was because confrontation, then, now, and always, is not only between the commander in the field and the enemy he seeks to subdue, but also between the men of action on the ground and the politicians back at home. The opposing views are seldom if ever reconcilable. Francis Bacon feared for the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, knowing that, wisely or unwisely, he would be willing to listen to brother officers close to him, but would never bend to the will of civilian gentlemen in England, members of the Council and advisers to her Majesty the Queen. Today the commander who has been overruled is posted to a lesser command or retires to write his memoirs. The politician who suffers reverse retreats to the back benches, hoping for office at a later date. In 1599 both commanders and politicians, when subject to reverses of fortune, were more often put to death. The Tower and the axe awaited them.
One of the most striking things about that fateful campaign in Ireland was the fact that then, as in the 1970s, nearly four hundred years later, the Irish employed guerrilla tactics, and regular troops could make little or no impression upon them. Equally, opinion at home failed to realise the nature of the terrain, and the Earl of Essex, trained in battles of assault in France, found Francis Bacon’s warning of ‘woods, and bogs, and lawless liberty’ fully justified. He wrote to the Council from Kilkenny, on May 20th:
This people against whom we fight hath able bodies, good use of the arms they carry, boldness enough to attempt and quickness in apprehending any advantage they see offered them; whereas our new and common sort of men have neither bodies, spirits, nor practice of arms like the others. The advantage we have is in our horse, which will command all campaigns; in our order which these savages have not; and in the extraordinary courage and spirit of our men of quality. But to meet these with our helps, the rebels fight in woods and bogs, where horse are utterly unserviceable; they use the advantage of lightness and swiftness in going off when they find our order too strong for them to encounter; and I protest to your Lordships how unequal a wager it is to adventure the lives of noblemen and gentlemen against rogues and naked beggers, which makes me take more care to contain our best men, than to use their courage against the rebels.
By the end of May Essex had come to know the terrain better, and the type of warfare and defensive measures likely to be undertaken by the enemy; nevertheless, he had not the advantage of trained and disciplined troops, his army being largely raised from levies at home without experience in any sort of battle, let alone ambush from wood and thicket. He admitted, in a dispatch to the Council, that he had difficulty in getting his men ‘to stand firm, to keep order, to forbear noises and speeches of fear and amazement’.
This want of experience amongst the English came as a bonus to the rebel Irish and their leaders, who could lie in wait, then engage in sudden skirmish at will. It was superior numbers, more money, and more victuals that the Earl of Essex needed, and he wrote to the Council from Waterford demanding them. His letter to the Queen showed a far-sighted appreciation of the situation as he saw it.
‘In their rebellion,’ he told her, ‘these people have no other end but to shake off the yoke of obedience to your Majesty, and to root out all remembrance of the English nation in this kingdom. I say this of the people in general; for I find not only the greater part thus affected, but that it is a general quarrel of the Irish; and they that do not profess it are either so few or so false, that there is no account to be made of them. The Irish nobility and lords of countries do not only in their hearts affect this plausible quarrel, and are divided from us in religion, but have an especial quarrel to the English government, because it limiteth and tieth them, who ever have been, and ever would be, as absolute tyrants as any are under the sun.’
The same sentiments have been held by many during the twentieth century, and by substituting Irish Unionists for the nobility his words make sense in the 1970s.
‘No war can be made without munition, and munition this rebel cannot have but from Spain, Scotland, or your towns here. If your Majesty will still continue your ships and pinnaces upon the coast, and be pleased to send a printed proclamation that upon pain of death anyone doth traffic with the rebel, I doubt not that in a short time I shall make them bankrupt of their old store, and I hope our seamen will keep them from receiving any more.’ He warned her Majesty that the course of action he proposed would in the end be successful though costly, and many would be sacrificed in the quarrel.
This was not what the Queen wanted to hear, nor the Council. They did not realise that the native Irish were a people who would continue fighting, in their own guerrilla fashion, no matter how tremendous the odds against them, until the hated English were driven from the territory that was Irish soil. The Earl was blamed for wasting his men and resources by useless marches through the countryside; yet it was only by doing this that he had learnt what to expect from the Irish people and how long-term the struggle was that lay before him.
But the Earl of Essex was not only Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; he also held a very special place in the Queen’s affections, and it was imperative that he should continue to keep this position. Long absence from her Majesty’s side, as he knew only too well, meant that others at home would have the royal ear, and take measures to discredit him. It had happened before, after Cadiz, and after the expedition to the Azores. It could happen again, and judging by warnings from friends at home was indeed likely, more especially since the Queen had expressed dissatisfaction with his conduct of affairs in Ireland up to date. She had relented in that Sir Christopher Blount was now there, but she had demanded that the Earl of Southampton should be replaced and the Earl of Rutland recalled, another vexing factor to the Earl of Essex, who very naturally resented interference in his chain of command; she also desired that he should now march north with his army to the Ulster border and engage the Earl of Tyrone, leader of the Irish rebels, in decisive battle. What was more, she did not wish him to return to England until the enemy was entirely routed and victory had been achieved. This was a royal command.
Despite reinforcements, the troops were in poor shape, some unwilling to continue, a number pretending sickness, others deserting or actually going over to the rebels. It was not a force of which a commander could be proud, nor one, saving a miracle, which he could have the remotest hope of leading to victory.
My Lords (he wrote from Dublin on August 28th) I am even now putting my foot into the stirrup to go to the rendez-vous at Navan; and from thence I will draw the army as far, and do as much, as duty will warrant me, and God enable me. And so, commanding your Lordships to God’s best protection, I rest at your Lordships’ commandment,
And two days later, to the Queen:
From a man that hates himself and all things that keep him alive, what service can your Majesty reap? Since my services past deserve no more than banishment and proscription into the most cursed of all countries, with what expectation or to what end shall I live longer? No, no, the rebel’s pride and successes must give me means to ransom myself, my soul I mean, out of the hateful prison of my body. And if it happen so, your Majesty may believe that you shall not have cause to mislike the fashion of my death, though the course of my life could not please you.
The sequel is known to history. The drawing-up of the opposing sides and the Earl’s proposal to attack Tyrone overruled in a council of war, Tyrone’s troops being more numerous and better placed. Then the request by Tyrone to have a private parley with Essex. The request granted, the upshot, after a second conference and a third the following morning, being a truce for six weeks, and to continue from six weeks to a further six weeks, and this truce not to be broken by either side without fourteen days’ notice. Tyrone then withdrew into his own province, and the Earl, having dispersed his army, retired to Drogheda, it was said to take physic.
An inglorious finale to an inglorious campaign. Had the Earl of Essex been killed in battle, even if that battle had been lost, he would still have been acclaimed a hero. A truce, in those circumstances and in that century, amounted to a defeat, as Essex well knew. It was, of course, a basic flaw in his character that he should so suddenly go to pieces, but it must be remembered that in those days of plot and counter-plot a highly-strung personality would tend to paranoia even more swiftly than his counterpart in modern times. He was convinced that enemies at Court, Robert Cecil and Lord Cobham and others, had been the instigators of the many angry letters from the Queen that he had received in Ireland, that they were determined to displace him for good and so break him entirely.
During his private meeting with the Irish leader, Tyrone had drawn a promise from him that he would communicate the result of their discussion personally to her Majesty, and not in any written document. It seemed to him that his only course was to break the Queen’s express command to remain in Ireland, return home and throw himself upon her mercy, ask forgiveness for any errors that he might have committed in the campaign, and explain the reasons for the truce with Tyrone. Having won her over, he would then be in a strong position to confront his enemies in the Council. He was, apparently, supported in this proposal by both the Earl of Southampton and Sir Christopher Blount.
Immediately after the conference with Tyrone, Essex, at this fateful moment in his life, sent Tom, now Captain, Lawson to England with a dispatch to the Queen, though he did not explicitly state in it that the truce had been signed. Lawson arrived at Court on September 16th and delivered his dispatch. The Court was at Nonsuch Palace at the time. The Queen had her answer ready the following day. It is hardly conceivable that Lawson did not take the opportunity, during the twenty-four hours or so that he was near London, to cross the river and call on Anthony at Essex House, and receive some personal message to take to the Earl. No document exists to prove it. The only surviving letter is that written by her Majesty herself, signed and sealed and dated September 17th. She complained that the ‘management of our forces hath not only proved dishonourable and wasteful, but that which followeth [i.e. truce with Tyrone] is like to prove perilous and contemptible… To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust a devil upon his religion.’
Tom Lawson started immediately for Ireland, and it must be presumed that he arrived in Dublin on September 21st or 22nd. On receipt of the letter the Earl summoned his friends and the decision was made. He appointed the Earl of Ormonde to command the army in Ireland, and he himself sailed for England on the 24th, arriving in London on the 28th, accompanied by the Earl of Southampton, the rest of his household that had been with him in Ireland, and a number of captains and gentlemen.
The sequel, like the campaign, belongs to history; how the Earl rode to Westminster, crossed the river to Lambeth, seized horses belonging to others, and riding furiously arrived at Nonsuch at ten in the morning. ‘He stayed not till he came to the Queen’s bedchamber, where he found the Queen newly up, the hair about her face; and he kneeled unto her, kissed her hands, and had some private speech with her, which seemed to give him great contentment: for, coming from Her Majesty to go shift himself in his chamber, he was very pleasant, and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad, he found a sweet calm at home.’
The calm lasted a few hours only. During a second interview at midday all still seemed well, and her Majesty gracious towards him, but after dinner things were different; she had had time to reflect. That evening, between ten and eleven, Essex was commanded by the Queen to keep to his room.
The news of his arrival spread through London the following day. Some of his household would have stayed at Essex House on the morning of arrival, Tom Lawson undoubtedly, the Earl of Southampton and others; Anthony Bacon would have been amongst the first to learn what had happened, and a message sent to his brother.
Francis went at once to Nonsuch Palace and managed to have a letter delivered to the Earl, still confined in his room. The letter, scattered with Latin phrases, complimented his Lordship as ‘coming up in the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress’, and ended with hopes that he might attend him. He was granted an interview of a quarter-of-an-hour, and the Earl asked him his opinion of the Queen’s decree that he should be confined to his room.
‘My Lord, it is but a mist,’ Francis replied. ‘If it go upwards, it may haps cause a shower, if downwards, it will clear up. Carry it so, as you take away by all means all umbrages and distastes from the Queen… And observe three points. First, make not this peace which is concluded with Tyrone as a service wherein you glory, but as a shuffling up of a prosecution which was not very fortunate. Next, represent not to the Queen any necessity of estate whereby she should think herself enforced to send you back to Ireland, but leave it to her. Thirdly, seek access, seriously, sportingly, every way.’
Essex was willing to hear him but spoke very little, and shook his head sometimes, as if thinking Francis was in the wrong. And there the interview ended. Francis returned to his lodging, whether he was then at Twickenham or Gray’s Inn, and would certainly have reported to his brother at Essex House.
The Earl remained confined to his room at Nonsuch. On September 30th his wife gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Frances like her mother. The Earl was denied permission to visit wife and child, and the next afternoon he was taken under escort in the Earl of Worcester’s coach to York House, to be detained there in the custody of Lord Keeper Egerton.
It is easy to picture the state of mind of his family and friends, gathered at Essex House. His mother-in-law, anxious for her daughter’s health, humbly asked permission that the Earl might at least be allowed to write to his wife: her request was refused. The Earl’s sister, Lady Rich, and the young Countess of Southampton were both at Essex House, and the usual number of attendants, servants, friends and acquaintances coming and going. Rumour of company being there apparently gave offence, and Lady Rich and the Countess of Southampton removed themselves to the country. The Earl himself was allowed no visitors at York House, except for his guardian, Lord Keeper Egerton, the new Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, who had succeeded Lord Burghley, and the Secretary of State Sir Robert Cecil. He had two personal attendants only.
Then rumour had it that he had fallen ill and was ‘troubled with a flux’. He asked that the Queen’s own physician might come to him, but this was refused until early in November, when the Queen relented, and sent Dr Brown to York House. The physician did him little good, apparently, for by the end of the month the Earl was suffering from ‘the stone, strangullion, and grinding of the kidneys, which takes from his stomach and rest’. His wife, dressed all in black, went to Court hoping to move the Queen for her husband, but she was refused the royal presence, and told not to appear at Court again. His sisters the Ladies Northumberland and Rich fared little better, and the French ambassador, Monsieur de Boissise, who had been instructed by His Majesty King Henri IV to intercede for the Earl’s liberty, found her Majesty ‘very short and bitter on that point’.
It was a very different story amongst the common people. The Earl was still widely popular, and that the hero of Cadiz should be confined to York House in custody, not allowed to see his wife and child, aroused great hostility. Pamphlets were scattered in the streets and pinned upon walls, the Queen was blamed for excessive harshness, preachers denounced his secret enemies from the pulpit. When the Earl of Southampton went to the playhouse—which he did that autumn almost every night—he was acclaimed because his friendship with the hero was well known.
And Anthony Bacon? Not one letter to or from him survives this anxious period. His correspondence with friends, with agents, ceases. No letter to his mother. No letter to his brother. The only significant record, indeed, dates back to the preceding autumn, while Essex was living in retirement at Wanstead, having temporarily fallen from the Queen’s favour. The letter, written on September 24th, was from Sir William Cornwallis to Sir Robert Cecil, and said, ‘Mr Anthony Bacon, who lies at Essex House, has sent a gentleman to me to entreat he might be my tenant at Bishopsgate, saying that since he can never hope to live but like a bird in a cage, he would very fain have a fair cage. I could be content he had it so I might get some other place in the other end of the town for the dead time of winter; which makes me presume to make the question if I might be your tenant, if you mean to leave your lodging next my Lord your brother’s, as I have heard.’
Bird in a cage Anthony certainly was, whether at Essex House or elsewhere, and becoming, it would seem, increasingly crippled. Nor is it surprising that he should have written to Sir William Cornwallis for asylum. This gentleman wrote essays after the style of Michel de Montaigne, and lived a life of ‘studious retirement’. They would have suited one another well.
Nothing came of the request, and the reason for it remains a mystery. Anthony stayed in his lodging at Essex House, and continued there throughout the following year, during which Essex became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and returned home to face disgrace. It was not Anthony, possibly bedridden by now, who could offer himself as mediator between her Majesty and his beloved Earl, but brother Francis.