The laughter of those waiting in their hills and in their castles beneath deep lakes cannot be heard. But the O’Neill, listening to the stories told by the surrendered English captains gathered before him, wrists unbound after the battle at the Yellow Ford, he certainly heard. They told him how their soldiers and recruits had been played tricks by imaginary beings, or perhaps it was by devils, for devils are real enough—everyone knows. Who could fight when such foes had already sapped their faith and their courage?
Hugh O’Neill laughed to hear the tales. He knew what unseen persons the soldiers had perceived: those be-hatted and bearded ones, squat and sullen, holding out things of value that could not be grasped. He himself had had business with one, in the dawn of his life, at the Dungannon rath to which O’Mahon the bard had taken him: blind O’Mahon, who could yet tell young Hugh of the person that had come up from the earth.
What had been forced from the earthy man’s hand on that evening was nothing, a chip of flint engraved as by a child who liked pretending. And here it was, it was in his own hand, voiceless yet seeming to speak, command, advise. He stroked its grained surface with his thumb. What it had done in the making of a victory at the Yellow Ford he couldn’t know; he’d summoned no help by means of it, yet he believed that over the four parts of Eirann, North, South, East, and West, those who had chosen him had laid a net or a network, and it still held: from the North, courage in battle and in peace. From the West, learning and the repeating of histories, so that no great thing would be forgotten. From the East, hospitality and song, to praise both learning and courage, and to reward the kings who keep the world as it is. From the South, Munster, there came music, the coming-forth of good things from the earth, women of great power, deathless, beautiful.
Those four. Yet within Hugh O’Neill, and within everyone, there is another four, different and the same: Left, Right, Before, Behind. And within each four there is still a fifth part, as great as the others: the name of that fifth part was the answer to the riddle that O’Mahon had set for him in that long ago time when he learned the names of the four great divisions of the land. Turn and turn about: the fifth part is not far nor is it near, not before, not behind, but Here: and that part keeps all the rest unchanged amid constant change: the one part that can’t be departed from. Hugh O’Neill pressed to his heart the hand in which he held the stone of the Sidhe, command and promise, and whispered Here.
News of the amazing victory in the North flung out Old English lords and Irish clans of the South, sending them in raids through Connaught and Leinster, like a great sea-wave that washes boats, stones, dead fish, and driftwood up the strand by its power and then rakes it all back to the deep. After the Yellow Ford, whichever among the septs had been afraid of Thomas Butler, or Lord Marshal Bagenal, or the Queen on her throne, need be afraid no more. Fear was for the colonists: they were abandoning their houses, and their titles too, which were being reclaimed by families who’d owned them for three hundred years. By October, Tyrone’s Ulster captains, with Red Hugh, Lord of Tyrconnell, and Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, and a thousand mounted fighters, had crossed the line of low eskers where the land of Leith became the land of Mug.
“Uncle, will you not lead us?” says the Fox. He had asked once, twice, and got no answer but silence. As now, too.
“Let each lead those that follow each,” says the Dog. “We’ll need no chief of all.”
O’Neill smiled upon the dark rider. His black hair, which when undone reached nearly to his waist, was twisted into a knot on the back of his long skull. His broad, wide-nostriled nose pointed south. “Would you, sir, follow me if I led?” he asked gently. “Be a dog nipping at my horse’s hock? You are too proud a man for that.”
Maguire looked from the Fox’s smile to O’Neill’s, uncertain whether he was teased or not.
“I am not too proud to be led,” he said to O’Neill. “I will be a dog for you, my lord, at need. But I will not be your dog.”
“Then you are off the leash, sir. Ride on.” He gave his hand in friendship to Maguire and turned his horse to go, touching Red Hugh’s shoulder as he passed by him; then away, through the men and captains he’d brought this far.
They rode south with them, Fox and Dog.
And now the dead of Munster, those hanged or beheaded by the Lord Lieutenant Henry Sidney or by Sir John Perrot or another, the dead who had lain unburied winter and summer since the Desmonds had failed in their rebellions, rose from the bogs and the low places, the woods and the poisoned fields. They gathered themselves into an army, women and children among them, bearing on their spirits the wounds that English arms and English sheriffs had made. Some carried their heads, some their severed limbs, but unimpaired: a walking army unburdened by need, hunger, or thirst, turning upon the colonials and the local New English squires who had dispossessed them. Living fighters and their captains felt themselves pressed forward by the dead behind them; they couldn’t be seen but they could be sensed, tireless numbers, always growing. The dead couldn’t burn the houses, kill the landholders, but the armed men surely could and did; all the neat villages that old Warham St. Leger and Walter Raleigh had built up were put to the torch. The rumor of their coming on terrified all but the bravest, old Gael names spoken that the English undertakers of Irish lands knew well enough, names of the dead and of the living. They began to flee, leaving their stone houses, their family graves, their English bedsteads and leaded glass windows, their pots and pans. From county Kerry, from Waterford and Tipperary, they tried to make the ports where surely ships would arrive to take them off. The Anglican bishop of Cork fled his estates and barely made it alive to his fortified palace in Cork city. At Dublin the fare for a place on a ship to London had multiplied by ten.
Among the living Munster raiders, bearing actual steel weapons and guns, were the McSheehys of the Awbeg valley, where the poet Edmund Spenser had rebuilt a ruined castle and laid out gardens and farmlands. He had written a description of the abject and degraded Ireland he had come into, and a complementary vision of a new England that Munster could be: an allegory of peace, justice, love, and plenty. The clan McSheehy had long felt robbed by the English and above all by Mr. Spenser, taking what was theirs with his patents and royal grants; and when just before dawn they came out of the woods at the edge of the north pasture and attacked and fired the house, the poet had hardly time to flee with his wife and infant child. Clan McSheehy wanted no English house, only the land on which it sat, which was and always had been theirs and not Spenser’s. And it was the McSheehy himself who drove him out, as the poet had foretold in his verses:
He, armed with blindness and with boldness stout,
(For blind is bold) hath our fair light defaced;
And gathering unto him a ragged rout
Of Faunes and Satyrs hath our dwellings razed;
And our chaste bowers, in which all virtue reigned
With brutishness and beastly filth hath stained.
Leaving their burning house, the Spensers made a night journey with a loyal servant, down the hard road and through a dark dream-wood; soon after he couldn’t remember whether he had invented that wood, or if it had been invented by ghosts for him to suffer in. In London he took to a bed in a King Street inn, and as soon as his knights and ladies, fauns and satyrs, were safely in his publishers’ hands he died of exhaustion, with their adventures nowhere near done.
Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, the richest nobleman in England, paid for Spenser’s funeral and burial at Westminster Abbey, near to Geoffrey Chaucer. Something of a poet himself, and friend of Philip Sidney, Essex invited the poets and writers of the city to gather at the Abbey and toss into the open grave their messages in verse, their sonnets, their pens too, many weeping openly. Not only had the chief poet of the realm died in misery, but in misery caused by one single man, the Earl of Tyrone; nothing would wipe away the stain but his heart’s blood on an English sword.
Tom Butler was recalled, having failed so completely as Lieutenant-General of the English army in Ireland. There was then only one person in England with the standing, and the Queen’s approval, to end the Irish upheaval: the Earl of Essex. And the Earl wanted nothing more than to lay a great victory before her. By God I will beat Tyrone in the field; for nothing worthy Her Majesty’s honour hath yet been achieved, he wrote to the Queen’s Council. He recruited Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, with whom he’d once fought a duel for the Queen’s favor. “It was fit that someone or other should take him down, and teach him better manners,” the Queen had said of Mountjoy in the hearing of the Court. Like Spenser’s noble knights, the two had since made up, and become fast friends.
The old men of the Court warned them: Beware the Irish promise; it lasts as long as it is needed and then is tossed away. Beware the tears of reivers and captains: they weep like dark clouds, without sense. Beware their praise; ignore their curse. My lords: Beware the weather. Beware the weather? What did they think of them, Essex and Mountjoy, English knights? That they would flee a rainstorm or a wind, like a maiden? He had stood out in all weathers, sword in hand, in the Netherlands; he’d led the cavalry at Zutphen where Philip Sidney died—and where he, Robert, at the age of eighteen, was knighted. Hardship held no terrors for him. He knew what he must do: as soon as his force was on Irish ground and Lord Mountjoy in charge of them, he would immediately make an expedition into Ulster and find and take on the Earl of Tyrone: English soldiery against a mob of kerne. Bring him in caged, to answer for his insults and his crimes. Or his head alone, if it came to that. There would be no factitious truce, no waste of time, of men, of talk. It was the only course: on paper, and in his mind, it had already been accomplished.
As this scheme was taking shape, a council of war was called at Dublin Castle that included Lord Mountjoy and a cluster of knights, some Irish strivers, and the graybeard Lords Justices, including Archbishop Jones. The Council could not agree to the Earl’s plan, which Mountjoy had put before them in expectation of the Earl of Essex’s arrival. It was too risky, the Council argued; the gains promised did not warrant it and the likely losses were clear. The general opinion was that Essex should go into the South, and there win over or defeat the clans that were O’Neill’s supports.
Having arrived and heard from Mountjoy what the Council opined, Essex on the following morning came through the chamber door, sublime in black and silver, thanked the members, and announced that he would set aside their opinion. He withdrew Mountjoy from the Council, and forewent an invitation to discuss his plans further. It was Tyrone he wanted. Yet within a week he had agreed to go into the South with a large force, cannon, cavalry, victuals, and all. He would first kick out the props beneath the Earl of Tyrone, and, at a later time, meet Tyrone on the field, he and the rebel.
Why had he chosen to accede to the Council? It was hard for him to explain it to himself. The strangeness of Ireland perhaps, and the little he knew of it, which he did not admit. The softness of the weather, making everything unreal. The clinging mist, which could feel like ghost fingers touching his face. The darkness of the nights, total beyond the city bounds.
The English colonials who had hung on in Connaught and Munster came creeping out of their walled towns and half-burnt farmhouses to greet their savior and cheer him on as he passed on his tour. Old English magnates welcomed him, a force for peace and justice, protection for their holdings, or for their safe evacuation at the least. Gloved hand shook mailed hand: all would be well. What the Earl did not do there was to engage an enemy. None appeared; there was little Essex could send as news to London. By now the mists had become wearying winter rains, and even when glimpsed, or their tracks discovered, the enemy could not be found or fought. Once, in rain at evening, a troop surprised an Irish camp and overran it, slaying some twenty black sheep that had seemed to be fighters sleeping in their mantles. By Christmas Essex was feverish, sick. The weather. He returned his army to Dublin, and took to his bed. He would not reprove himself for it, but under the combined influences of casualties, desertions, disease, and the garrisoning of distant outposts, his army was melting away, and he had somehow accomplished nothing. The Queen discarded his missives.
Summer and the returning sun revived him. His first plan had all along been the only possible one: take O’Neill in a swift, brilliant assault. The Dublin Council may go hang; he would do as his Monarch had commanded. He wrote a fine letter—a last letter, it might be—to the Queen: Since my services past deserve no more than banishment and proscription into the most cursed of all countries, with what expectation and what end shall I live longer? Then, with a picked fighting force rich in young knights that he had made by his own sword, he went out into a gold and green June, a noble knight like Spenser’s, pricking on the plain. Unseen, O’Hagan and O’Cahan scouts followed him along the ways through the woods between Dundalk and Louth Castle, sending runners to O’Neill, returning with his orders: on no account may they attack or interfere with the Lord Deputy’s force. Essex called a halt at the castle grounds, where he was approached by a man on foot, hatless, unarmed, signaling for a word with him, as though they were acquainted. Essex kept to his horse, hand on his sword.
“A parley,” the fellow said to him. “The Earl of Tyrone invites you. He lies not far from here, where there is a ford called Bellaclynthe.”
There is always a ford.
Essex, unsettled by the fellow’s boldness, thought to ride away without a word, but halted and looked down on him. “Queen’s officers do not agree to parleys,” he said. “They call for them.”
The fellow seemed unabashed. He nodded as though to show he understood, and then he said, “Your Irish cohort here can surely bring you to that ford in a matter of two hours. A branch of the river Dee.”
Essex was caught between doubt and possibility. “If this be not what you say, but some entrapment,” he said, “your head will pay for it.”
The fellow bowed, as though pleased to be addressed in this way, and then he turned and was gone as though he hadn’t been there at all, and the woods gathered again around the Earl. He summoned his Irish captain. “The Dee,” he said. “A ford, Bellaclynthe.”
“My lord of Essex,” O’Neill called from the farther bank, taking the hat from his head. “I have come alone and unarmed before you.”
For a long breath Essex simply stared at him. This was he, the running beast. It seemed possible—easy—to leap the stream that ran between them, climb the far bank, and put the Irishman to the sword. “What is it you want of me?”
“I wish, firstly,” O’Neill said, “that you might intercede for me with the Queen, for her mercy to me. My honor and my name have been blackened, and my credit with the Queen whom I have served and honored stolen away.”
“I have no such power,” Essex said.
As though he’d had an answer, O’Neill rode into the shallow river; at midstream he waved to Essex to join him there. Essex looked around at the nervous horses and men of his regiment; they sensed something, but Essex didn’t believe it was treachery; he didn’t know what it was. Lifting his hand to stop anyone following him, he guided his horse through the reeds and into the water. O’Neill turned upstream, already talking, and Essex could only follow.
“I know that Sir Philip Sidney was your friend,” O’Neill said smiling. “He was my friend too.”
“I was near him in the battle when he died fighting.”
O’Neill nodded solemnly, as though he’d been there as well. “We were boys together at Penshurst. See there ahead? That little island. Let us go onto it and rest in the shade of those trees.”
Essex paused, knowing he was entirely alone; but now he had no honorable choice but to follow; he was armed, he saw no reason to fear. They went up onto the islet, their horses shedding water, stepping through the rooty bank with care. A wide flat stone like a table, supported by other stones, filled almost all the open ground at the islet’s center; and around it, as though conferring, was a group of children or small persons, silvery-pale, wavering, insubstantial. He heard laughter, and at that the children slid into the water all together, like startled frogs at a lily-pond.
“Will you dismount?” he heard the Earl of Tyrone say. He had almost forgotten that the man was here with him; he was at the table, sitting calmly on a stone seat. On the table was a jug and cups. So the children were most likely just servants, preparing a refreshment … He dismounted and took the seat opposite O’Neill. A cloud covered the sun, and passed.
How long they sat together was afterward unclear to the Earl of Essex, but he remembered day going; he remembered the insistent argufying that the Irishman wouldn’t cease. He wanted Essex, Essex himself, to bring his appeal again to the Queen, make the Irish case to her. He rambled, seemed at times near tears. And all of it was surely falsity and ill-dealing.
But if that were true, he would later think, how could it have changed him so?
“Why,” he said sharply, “do you suppose I would intercede for you with Her Majesty? You are her enemy, a rebel to her wishes and commands. You have her hate, not her love.”
“There was a time when she spoke to me with kindness, with approbation. Motherly care.” He paused, blinked away tears, displayed his honest open hands. “My lord, you and she are two stars: one in the ascendant, one in decline. Your fortune rises and hers cannot.”
“You are a soothsayer as well as a fighter,” Essex said. “All Irish are so, as I have learned.”
“Then I will tell you what I see,” O’Neill said, suddenly firm. “The Queen is no divinity. She is only an old woman, a woman who is as though encased in a younger woman, with her dresses and her whitened face and her wigs.”
Essex half-rose from his seat, hand on his sword-hilt, hearing a titter from nowhere. “Beware, sir,” Essex said. “You may not speak to me of our Queen in that way.”
“You know it to be so. It’s what any witch or sorceress does, puts on beauty to beguile a man before taking possession of him. And the way to avoid possession? It’s only this: Take possession yourself.”
Why, Essex wondered, does he turn and turn that stone shard in his fingers?
“She is inflamed by your youth and strength, your honor, your sword,” O’Neill said. “Bring home to her a peace we together have made, lay it before her, and prove to her that you, my lord, are what she once was and can no longer be: peacemaker, subtle as the serpent, a wise old fox, unafraid and yet so very cautious.”
“Too cautious. She wants peace and yet she wishes for victory.”
“She wants what you want: that you should take up her burdens, and she be allowed to rest, with every honor and all praise. Don’t you see?”
A sudden flash of heat went through the Earl of Essex’s body. For a moment he couldn’t see, and then could again. The white transparent children were once more around the islet; he saw them, thought he again heard laughter infinitely small. He didn’t see one boy who held, sheltered in his two hands, a sort of golden fly—O’Neill glimpsed it, just as the pale hands released it. Then it was all as before: two men at a stone table on a river island, where green rushes grew.
“My lord,” Hugh O’Neill said softly, as though to wake the Earl’s attention. “My lord, I wish to propose a truce, to extend from this day six weeks, renewed upon both our agreement, as often as needed.”
Essex hardly heard this. He looked around himself, to east and west, not knowing what he sought, not seeing it. “Very well,” he said.
As though truly she was a witch, able to transform herself into fire, the Queen raged against her Lord Deputy to the court and in her private chamber. She wrote in fury, at first in her mind and then to a secretary sent for in haste. What could they be doing on that island of lies? She could not and would not bear being lied to. “If sickness of the army be the reason, why was not the action undertaken when the army was in better state?” she said, and the secretary wrote it in his scribble hand. “If winter’s approach, why were the summer months of July and August lost? We must conclude that none of the four quarters of the year will be in season for you and that Council to agree to Tyrone’s prosecution, for which all our charge is intended.” The Queen paused then in her dictation, her secretary pausing too, pen in mid-air. She folded her long hands with deliberation and laid them in her lap. When she spoke again, eyes raised to the distance, she spoke without anger to one not present: “We require you to consider whether we have not great cause to think that your purpose is not to end the war.” She held out her hand for the sheet and in her own hand she subscribed this: Her right noble and beloved cousin is not to leave Ireland until Tyrone has been attacked and captured or killed.
When Essex had left England—not in a rush of banners, drums, blown horns, but in pouring rain from Welsh ports—no one, not even himself, had expected glory. The Queen had agreed to send him, but not in any certainty he would do what others hadn’t been able to do. She loved him, in her cold and yearning heart; she wanted him not to die. She wanted him by her, but she wanted much more that her Irish isle cease to roil and stir. She wished it to be at peace, and also prayed that it might be humbled. She wanted it to sink beneath the sea. She prayed for Essex too, every day, and didn’t know that while she was at her prayers on a morning in 1599, her commandment still making its way to him, he had quit Ireland accompanied by his closest supporters and friends, and was on his way home with intentions he could not have explained to her or to anyone.
For weeks he had felt that something was eating his brain, and that only if he came home again would it cease; it was a thing close behind him that walked where he walked, stood where he stood, and he often flung his head to the right or left to catch the thing, but it was not to be seen. He never spoke to his council or his company of this Irish disease he had acquired, yet they knew he was in some way possessed. He could conceive only one cure: to kneel before the Queen and throw his wretched soul before her and beg her pardon, without hope or expectation. When he talked that way aboard the ship to England, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, gripped his arm and stared into his eyes, mouth drawn, until Essex righted himself. The Queen is no longer a power, Charles Blount told him; she has lived on past her time, her counselors are flatterers and old men, there is no other course but to … No! Essex would not hear the words, no matter that he’d said them again and again in his own buzzing head.
The knights disembarked at London and dispersed into the city; Essex crossed the river and made for Nonesuch, the palace where he knew he would find the Queen. He was no longer thinking of a coup; he simply needed to see her, be in her presence, be cured by her royal touch of what had seized him. Feeling as much pursued as in pursuit, he mounted the stairs, flung open the doors, and walked in, fluttering the ladies-in-waiting like a hawk in a dovecote, and there she sat: on a stool. Her face unmade, her hair her own—white, wispy, a grandam’s—but he saw nothing of that. It was she.
She did nothing foolish. He might have come to kill her—he looked as though he might—but she was unafraid. She only told him to go and change his filthy clothes, wash, and come back to her. When he returned she was herself again—the person she had made of herself. Though they chatted into the night in the old way, nothing in the old way would stand now. What would become of him would take months of letters, comings and goings, pleadings and submissions and rages, the passage of lords and counselors. Winter came and a new year, and still the Queen had made no decision.
Was it odd that stories were told in that day that the Earl of Tyrone had all along been in league with the Earl of Essex? Tyrone had known the Earl’s father, Walter Devereux, and had even gone raiding with him in the North when he was young and witless. Folk talked in the North that Essex might become King of Ireland, and who else could have started such a rumor as that? If it had been reported in England it would have brought the man to his end all the more swiftly.
“Yet did you not,” Peter Lombard asked Hugh in Rome, “write to the rector of the Irish College in Salamanca that Essex was soon to turn Catholic, abandon his Queen, and make you King of Ireland, with Spanish aid?”
“We understood each other, Essex and I,” Tyrone said, smiling.
In the second month of the new year, four senior sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s company of players were gathered toward evening by the sea-coal fire at a Southwark inn: John Heminges, Augustin Phillips, Tom Pope, Will Kempe. The day was raw, February icy air; a fireside the place to be. They had been approached that day by an adherent of the Earl of Essex, Sir Gilly Merrick; he’d crossed the river to Southwark with an offer for the players: thirty shillings if they would play the play of King Richard the Second. It was obvious why the Essex faction wanted the play to be played, and Sir Gilly made it clear: the City and the people should see that at least once in history an anointed sovereign had been unseated.
Well, the players told him, the play was an old one, and they would lose money on it, and it hadn’t been much liked when it was new. Forty shillings, Sir Gilly said, a huge sum; and—though they were only a plurality of the sharers—they agreed. Now though, when noises of horsemen and cries and shouting in the street reached them, they were unsure. What might become of themselves if they offered the play and thereupon the mad Earl went down? And they were implicated? No one spoke of it aloud, but each one thought it; the thought was a slight grip to the throat: that sort of thought.
“I’d suppose our John Factotum could with little notice make a play that would suit as well, and yet be new.”
“No, no, not so: our Poet he is, and not a play-carpenter. Plenty of those, yes. Our Will’s not that.”
“The whole play played?”
“Sir Gilly said nothing about selecting parts to play. But the whole’d be clumbersome to do.”
“Clumbersome!” said Will Kempe. “A dog of a word, sir.”
“I do remember me,” said Heminges, “that the old Earl of Essex walked with a clumber spaniel of evil temper. Perhaps a wicked spirit.”
“To the point. What they’d like are the scenes where Henry Bolingbroke returns from Ireland with his army, and Richard gives up the throne.”
“Here, cousin—seize the crown.” Will Kempe, holding out an imaginary crown with a slack hand. Just the way Burbage had done it.
“But it isn’t Henry in the play who returns from Ireland,” Augustin said. “It’s Richard. Which seems inapt.”
“It’s an ill day for playing,” Tom Pope said, looking out into the fog. “Few seats filled, over in an hour, lights put out.”
“And all for an old historical.”
“I call that play a tragedy.”
“Tragical historical then. Like the one this day may well bring. And we playing our parts.”
All the next day from dawn onward the Earl’s friends and armed supporters gathered at Essex House on the Strand to which the Earl had repaired, ready to support whatever he determined to do, so long as he would lead them. What did he want? They had to know. Did he mean to attack the Court, denounce the royal council, take possession of the Queen’s body? Should they raise the city, the citizens who had cheered and tossed their hats in the air when he went out to conquer? He’d lead them to Whitehall and overawe the court, he said; but then instead he led them out to walk to the city along the Strand, having no way to get horses. They poured into the city by Lud Gate, but the city sheriffs, constables and churchwardens had already been ordered to keep the Cheapside citizens within doors, and the citizens obeyed. The Earl might be their hero, but the Queen was their queen. At Greyfriars, the theater where in winter the Lord Chamberlain’s troupe played indoors to gentlemen, the old play of Richard II tumbled across the boards until the Provost Marshal’s officers appeared and shut it down, and the players disappeared for the day.
The gate that Essex and his companions entered the city by was now chained shut by Court officials. He had to walk down to the river, to be rowed back to Essex House, followed by a faint chatter of sweet voices he could not interpret; at his water-stairs he heard tiny laughter from behind his left ear; he felt a needle’s prick whose source he no longer sought for.
He would barricade his house, he decided, fight to the last, and called for his servants. But it was too late; the Lord Admiral had now arrived with a large force. From his windows he saw artillery brought up; he marveled at that, thinking for an instant that he was in Ireland, reducing a rebel castle; then he knew he wasn’t. He drew himself up, and with a sign (he found it difficult to speak, with all the voices murmuring in his ears) he had the servants unbar the door. He stood in the doorway mocked, bewildered, trembling, and bathed in sweat—the Lord Admiral had expected defiance, or hauteur at the least. At the Admiral’s gentle request he surrendered the sword he had drawn, and was taken to the Tower. The Queen once, and then again, postponed the thing she must do, and then at last let go. His execution was set for late in February.
The trial, the sentence, the appeals, and the execution were all past, and Essex’s head and body had been laid in the Tower Yard church of St. Peter ad Vincula alongside the other noble dead at rest there. The Queen’s mother, Ann Boleyn, who’d also been beheaded for treason, had whispered a welcome to the newcomer.
When Essex’s gadfly at length ceased its hovering over his sealed tomb and returned to where it had been born or made; when Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had gone into Ireland as Lord Deputy at Her Majesty’s command, having finessed his own part in the coup; when the Spanish were on the sea again and the Irish and Ireland still unquiet, a royal archivist brought to Queen Elizabeth a summary of certain historical documents stored in the Tower of London. She read the summaries of the reign of good Henry III, the horrid death of Edward II. She stopped then at the reign of Richard II, and studied it. When the archivist asked why, she said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” And for a time she said no more.