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The last days of Elizabeth

The safe money and significantly, the money of Robert Cecil, was on James Stuart, King of Scotland to succeed Elizabeth. James was Protestant, experienced and conveniently, male. More problematically, he was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had had executed. But that was nearly fifteen years ago, in another time. Now it was understood that the Queen herself favoured James VI of Scotland, who in his turn had made it clear that his mother’s treason did not affect his title to the English throne.

James’s claim was, nevertheless, far from incontrovertible. As for Elizabeth, she refused, despite pressure from the Scottish King, to formally recognise him as her heir. Her reasons were political and they were sound. The Queen distrusted both James and her own subjects. So did Ralegh. In 1593, he had warned that England needed to be ready for a military response from Scotland if James did not become King of England. At the time, Ralegh was, ostensibly, writing in support of a clampdown on any discussion of the succession, in the aftermath of a foolhardy attempt by Peter Wentworth to have the matter debated in parliament. As one MP and lawyer put it, ‘if we should enter into dealing with titles of the Crown we had need (I think) hold a parliament a whole year long’. Ralegh concurred but could not resist weighing in with his own advice to the Queen, mocking those who sought to influence her and warning her of the potential threat from James if he were overlooked.

The Queen’s commitment to not naming a successor may have made shrewd political sense but it did nothing to silence the political whispering in the post-Essex era. In 1601, one observer identified twelve competitors who ‘gape for’ the death of the Queen: ‘Thus you see’, he declared, ‘this crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted’. The ambition and the anxiety of these years are hard to underestimate, not least because, just over the Channel, France had suffered its own war of succession, creating fears of something similar in England.

Nor did it help that all the claims to the Crown were problematic. Edward and Thomas Seymour had a strong case by right of their lineage: they were the sons of Katherine Grey who, being the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary and sister of the nine-days’ Queen, Lady Jane Grey, had been the most likely successor to Elizabeth in the first years of the Queen’s reign. Elizabeth ensured that the boys’ lineage meant nothing; she had Edward and Thomas proclaimed bastards, excluding them from the succession. The reason: their mother had made the grave error, as a ‘virgin of the blood royal’, of marrying Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, without the Queen’s permission, and becoming pregnant. This was not a moral issue but one of national security, reflected in the act of 1536 that had made it treason for a person of royal blood to marry without the monarch’s approval. Katherine ended up in the Tower of London, where her son Edward was born in 1561. That her child was a boy made a bad situation worse, since a Protestant male heir could so easily become a rallying point for those of Elizabeth’s subjects who might not tolerate the (necessarily monstrous) regimen of a woman. In 1562, Seymour and Katherine’s marriage was declared void and their children illegitimate. The story of Katherine’s next six years makes painful reading. This younger sister of the nine-day Queen was, her biographer argues, probably anorexic and certainly deeply melancholy. She died, still a captive, on 27 January 1568.

Sir Walter Ralegh knew all about the unhappy Grey sister, Bess’s stepsister, the previous occupant of her childhood bedchamber. Sir Walter also knew all about the consequences of secret marriages and less secret male heirs. He had a clear grasp of exactly how likely it would be for Elizabeth to overturn the Seymour brothers’ illegitimacy. It was not going to happen.

Ralegh was, it seems, looking elsewhere. His monarch-in-waiting was not James but – and one has to add ‘it seems’, because Ralegh would not put such a thought in writing in such dangerous times – Arbella Stuart. He was not alone: Lord Burghley was rumoured to support the claim of this great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII. The Queen, for her part, did not and ensured her cousin was kept isolated in faraway Derbyshire.

Others were quite sure that the new King would come from Scotland. The words and actions of two men were to seal Ralegh’s fate. One was the elderly, intellectual, crypto-Catholic Lord Henry Howard, the Earl of Northampton, a political outcast for much of his career despite being a member of one of the great ancient noble families of England. He re-emerged after 1600 and became someone to whom James was willing to listen. Howard, with Robert Cecil, instigated a secret correspondence with the Scottish court, in which he savaged the claims of other English courtiers. The two men created a picture, partially true as all powerful fictions are, that James had many enemies in England and that only they could defend him.

Enemy number one was Sir Walter Ralegh, closely followed by Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham. They were easy targets, not least because of their perceived animosity to the Earl of Essex, who James much admired.

Ralegh appears to have no idea how much he was hated or how brutally his political hopes were being undermined. Perhaps he had become inured to the vitriol. After all, he had survived thus far. He continued to foster the friendship between Will Cecil and his son, continued to send Cecil gifts of gloves and cheerfully passed on his wife’s ‘best wishes notwithstanding all quarrels’, noting happily that it only took two days and two nights for Cecil’s letter to reach him. He writes, oblivious: ‘I pray believe that when all hearts are open and all desires tried that I am your poorest and your faithfullest friend to do you service’. Meanwhile, Sir Walter was being ripped to shreds in secret letters for his ‘accursed duality’.

The fact that Howard and Cecil saw Ralegh as a threat was quite an achievement. Not a Privy Councillor, not from a great family, someone who was used by his Queen to take foreign princes to the theatre. Why was he so feared? Was he a contender in the struggle to control the succession? Howard thought he might be and intended to stop Ralegh before he ascend ‘into those high regions’.

Ralegh may have been unaware of the secret correspondence but he was not entirely open with Cecil, despite his assurances. When he received a letter from Cecil, he immediately forwarded it to his friend Cobham, keeping him informed as to what their rival was saying, while responding equally promptly to Cecil. This kind of moment shows why Ralegh was perceived as a threat, since it exudes the sheer energy of the man. He writes ‘Sherburn the 13th of August at night when I received yours’ on his letter to Cecil, then copies Cecil’s letter and writes to Cobham. The thrust of his letter to Cobham is to suggest that he was right to get away when he did: ‘if you were not loose [travelling? or a free man?] you should be tied above [at Court?] for a while. If you needs will unto Cornwall, then make haste or I think you will be sent for. I can say no more.’ Hints and warnings abound and there’s even a postscript from Bess: ‘And if I could disgest this last word of Sur Waltars letta I wold expres my love likewies, but unly this I agree and am on in all with Sur Waltar and most in his love to you. I pray hasten your returne for the elecket sake, that we may see the bathe to gether. Your trew poour frind, E Ralegh.’ Lady Ralegh was clearly important to the Ralegh/Cobham alliance, or her husband thought she was, because her voice becomes increasingly audible in their correspondence, whether writing about elections or the danger of her oysters and partridges becoming stale.

Ralegh with his son Wat in 1602 (artist unknown)

Ralegh had plenty of energy but he (and Cobham) were not perhaps as powerful as Henry Howard feared or Ralegh and Cobham desired. For all their stratagems, on 14 July 1601 Ralegh found that he had once again not been made a Privy Councillor, despite Essex’s removal: ‘You hear of our new counsellors. I am left out till the parliament, they tell me, but I take no thought of it’. The senior knight of Cornwall doth protest too much. Ralegh could entertain foreign dignitaries, offer advice about Ireland and Cornwall and he knew a lot about boats. But there were limits, always limits.

Once again, he found himself on the sidelines. Once again, he pulled himself up, dusted himself down and re-entered the fray. Ralegh’s renewed confidence in 1601 is visible in a portrait of him with his son. It is an image of quiet ambition. Both are dressed in splendid costumes: Ralegh’s jacket is embroidered with seed pearls and his son’s blue suit is silver-braided. Man and boy – young Wat mimics his father’s confident stance – stand in the balletic pose favoured by the Elizabethans: ‘one foot in front of the other and each slightly turned out to emphasise the shapely male leg, the ideal form of which was lean, muscular and exaggeratedly elongated with a curving calf and strong swelling thigh disappearing into the trunk hose’ (according to the historian Anna Reynolds).

Ralegh knew that he was useful to his Queen, if only as a man of action. He wanted to be a warrior for Elizabeth: ‘I my self went it in half a day less, and if there [be is crossed out] were any danger it would be no otherwise handled’. The danger is, as ever in Ralegh’s mind, Spain: ‘If they hover about the mouth of the Channel, I am here nearer my charge than at London’.

The parliament of the winter of 1601 was remarkable because Elizabeth did at last allude to a time when she would not be Queen. Her acknowledgement of her mortality, even her exhaustion, was embedded in a speech characterised by words of humility and service. She began:

To be a king, and wear a crown, is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant for them that bear it: for myself, I never was much inticed with the glorious name of a King, or the royal authority of a Queen, as delighted that God hath made me His instrument to maintain His Truth and Glory, and to defend this kingdom from dishonor, damage, tyranny, and oppression. But should I ascribe any of these things to myself, or my sexly weakness, I were not worthy to live, and of all most unworthy of the mercies I have received at God’s hands, but to God only and wholly all is given and ascribed.

Elizabeth claimed that if it were merely her ‘own disposition I should be willing to resign the place I hold to any other, and glad to be freed of the glory with the labors, for it is not my desire to live nor to reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good’. It was an astonishing admission, immediately softened by her claim that, although Parliament would have had ‘many mightier and wiser Princes sitting in the Seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will love you better’.

With the Queen now speaking of her end, was Ralegh’s star at last in the ascendant? Attacks on him certainly increased. Howard wanted the present Queen’s (as well as the potential King’s) eyes opened as to what was going in Durham House and had some very practical suggestions. They could expose Ralegh’s secret communications with the Duke of Lennox in Scotland. They could encourage Ralegh to negotiate with Spain. Or they could deny him money and see what he did. Howard was going for Sir Walter’s jugular; coming from a great family himself he knew very well that Ralegh had no similar dynastic safety net. Starved of cash, Ralegh, the fifth son of a mere gentleman from Devon, with expensive tastes, would reveal his true colours, his ‘great sauciness’. Breeding would out.

A fourth strategy was to launch an all-out attack on Durham House, ‘to prove what sport he could make in that fellowship’. It is just possible that a burglary in April 1602, in which only two ‘linen pillowbears…fitted with silk and gold worth 10 pounds [and] a linen cushing cloth adorned with silk and gold, worth five pounds’ were taken, was cover for an attempt to get evidence against Ralegh.

Intriguingly, there are hints, and sometimes more than hints, that the real power at Durham House lies with Lady Ralegh. She is a ‘most dangerous woman’, ‘full of her father’s inventions’, writes Howard. Here, he invokes the ghost of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Queen’s representative in Elizabeth’s dealings with, and execution of, Mary Queen of Scots, the Scottish King’s mother. Howard notes that the ‘league is very strong’ between Lady Ralegh and Lady Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick, and, significantly, grandmother of Arbella Stuart. The word is that Bess is very close to regaining her old place in the Privy Chamber. The Queen, writes Howard, ‘must be told what canons are concluded in the chapter of Durham, where Rawley’s wife is precedent: and withal how weakly Cobham is induced to commend the courses that are secretly inspired by the consent of that fellow-ship’.

The horrific inversions of Durham House are laid bare. Lady Ralegh commands her husband and the monstrous couple control the spineless Cobham. There was more: Ralegh’s ‘wife, as furious as Proserpina with failing of that restitution in court which flattery had moved her to expect, bends her whole wits and industry to the disturbance of all motions, by counsel and encouragement, that may disturb the possibility of others’ hopes, since her own cannot be secured’. Bess is Proserpina, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, abducted by Hades to be his Queen, dangerously ‘precedent’ in the lower world, her movements between hell and the upper world a symbol of the naturally fecund cycle of the seasons. Ralegh is no better: ‘the greatest Lucifer’. Howard reveals Bess and Sir Walter as monarchs of hell, although even ‘Hell did never show up such a couple’.

Howard was wrong. The Raleghs were getting nowhere, again. Sir Walter was still courting Robert Cecil, vaguely aware that he is being more and more pushed to the side. His letters to Cecil make queasy reading, lurching between passages of business (between men of the world) and expressions of love and flattery (obviously, and optimistically, addressed to the Queen). Ralegh was grieved to:

Find with what difficulty and torment to my self I obtain the smallest favour. Her Majesty knows that I am ready to spend all I have, and my life, for her in a day, and that I have but the keeping of that I have for all I have I will sell for her in an hour and spend it in her service. Let the Queen then break their hearts that are none of hers: there is little gain in losing her own. These things should not torment me if I were as other[s] are, but it is true, ubi dolor, ibi amor, exue amorem, exueris dolorem [where there is pain, there is love; cast off the love, you cast off the pain].

These passionate lines, whose Latin phrases are taken from Ficino, the Renaissance poet of neo-Platonic love, are embedded in a letter whose main theme is parliamentary proceedings and some business about taverns. All the lovesick (and egotistical) lamenting in the world wasn’t going to do any good. The time for this kind of language from Ralegh had long gone, even if Cecil intended to pass the message on to the Queen. Which he didn’t.

Ralegh understood how court life worked. It was a world dependent on personal access. What mattered was being close, physically, to the person in charge. Ralegh had been there: he knew he was nowhere near it now. It was particularly galling that others were using the same language of love with more success, suggesting it was not the language that had gone out of fashion but the man. Lord George Carew was fulsome in praise of the Queen’s beauty, which adorned the world for which he, George, would of course sacrifice himself at her feet. Cecil, who supported Carew, was rather pleased with the effort, and reported that the Queen ‘liked your letter very well’.

Meanwhile, Cecil was playing Ralegh and not just regarding the secret correspondence with Scotland. He even invested £2,000 in one of Sir Walter’s naval ventures. Ralegh is all gratitude: ‘If we cannot have what we would, me think it is a great bond to find a friend that will strain himself in his friend’s cause in whatsoever as this world fareth’. Cecil, more canny, asks Sir Walter to ‘conceal our adventure’. Cecil had, of course, ‘no other meaning than becometh an honest man in any of my actions’. Ralegh fell for it.

By the spring of 1602, Ralegh was in Jersey, politically increasingly impotent and thoroughly despondent. Even his enemies were less concerned about him. One wrote to James in Scotland, labelling Ralegh ‘insolent [and] extremely heated’ but having, nevertheless, ‘excellent good parts of nature’. Sir Walter likes to think of himself, and be regarded, as someone able ‘to sway all men’s fancies’ but the truth is that, when the time comes, he won’t do James ‘much good nor harm’. Ralegh’s status as B-list courtier could not have been made clearer. The man himself knew that he was cut off, politically and physically. The wind is in the wrong direction; he is in ‘desolation’. He sends the same letter to Cobham and to Cecil, one a dangerous friend, the other a dangerous enemy: ‘I arrived here the 3rd so I have walked here this 17 days in the wilderness’.

August 1602; a glimmer of hope at court: the Lord Chamberlain has died. Is this Cobham’s chance? His father had held the office. September; Ralegh is ‘in pain and cannot write much’. Cobham is not Lord Chamberlain.

It was not the despair that Sir Walter could not stand, it was the hope. And every time, those hopes had been dashed. Then, something in the winter of 1602–3 prompted Ralegh to act to protect himself. This is new territory. He was driven not by a desire for power but by fear for his own life.

Perhaps he heard that the Queen’s physical and mental health was deteriorating rapidly. It may have been a genuine crisis of funds: Ralegh had complained of poverty so often that it is hard to assess whether his claim that his estate was ‘weak and far in debt’ was true or not. Or his actions might have a far more sinister significance: Ralegh was on the brink of risking everything.

He took two crucial steps. One was to sell his Irish estates for a paltry £1,000 to Richard Boyle, later the Earl of Cork, on 7 December 1602. The other was to place his estate at Sherborne in trust. The first straightforwardly increased Ralegh’s liquid assets but the second suggests a deeper anxiety. Lying behind this legal move was the spectre of treason charges. Ralegh knew precisely what happened, physically, to those convicted of treason but he also knew there were those who gained from others’ falls: he had done so himself. The process was grounded on the principle of ‘escheat’, whereby if no successor was qualified to inherit under the original grant, the property and land (the ‘fief’) of a tenant reverted to the lord when the tenant died. As, according to the doctrine of corruption of blood, an attainted person could have no legal heir, his property suffered automatic escheat: his heirs, however innocent, could not inherit. Instead the estate ‘lapsed’ into the control of the Crown. The fear of escheat provoked Ralegh to place Sherborne in trust for his ten-year-old son. If convicted of treason, Ralegh could not forfeit to the Crown what he did not possess. If he lived, he could receive income from the estate. If he died the property would stay in the Ralegh name.

The tantalising question remains: did Ralegh fear a treason charge because he was plotting treachery, or did he fear his enemies’ ability to frame him for the crime?

He set up the Sherborne trust just in time. The Queen had been ‘by fits troubled with melancholy some three or four months’. By the close of February 1603, her end was drawing close. For two weeks she was ‘extremely oppressed’: she would neither eat nor see a doctor, nor go to bed to rest. Finally, her will gave way and she was persuaded to lie down. She knew that death was near. The most important men of the land, led in prayer by the Archbishop of Canterbury, stood to watch her die. Then night fell, and the important men departed, leaving the Queen in her Privy Chamber alone ‘all but her women that attended her’. The Queen died at 2:30 in the morning.