After Elizabeth Read online

  Arbella arrived at court accompanied by her Cavendish aunts and uncles, a slim, full-faced girl with dark blond hair and slightly bulging blue eyes. Elizabeth allowed her the honor of dining in the Presence Chamber and courtiers showered the eleven-year-old with attention. Essex talked to Arbella loudly of his devotion to the Queen and Burghley invited her to supper. Arbella went accompanied by her youngest uncle, Charles Cavendish, who reported all that passed in a letter to his mother.29 Ralegh, whose fate would later become strangely bound up with Arbella’s, was sitting next to Burghley, the elder statesman with his long gray beard; Ralegh was dark and sleek, “long faced and sour-eye lidded.”30 Cavendish was struck by how polite, even ingratiating, Ralegh was with Burghley: the fading favorite needed a powerful ally to match the support that Essex had in his stepfather, Elizabeth’s first and greatest love, the aging Earl of Leicester.

  Burghley “spoke greatly in Arbella’s commendation, as that she had the French and the Italian; danced and writ very fair” and wished “she were fifteen years old.” Cavendish then saw him whisper in Ralegh’s ear. Ralegh replied in his distinctive low voice and Devonshire accent that “it would be a happy thing.”31 The two men appeared to be discussing a possible marriage. The name soon circulating as the most likely groom was that of Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, Philip II’s lieutenant in the Spanish Netherlands, and, like him, a descendant of John of Gaunt. Elizabeth hoped that personal ambition might dull Parma’s effectiveness in the coming invasion. She also hoped that the promise of marrying Arbella to a Catholic might salve feeling about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, and with this in mind she advertised to the French ambassador’s wife that Arbella “would one day be as I am.” The ambassador duly reported the conversation home, observing that Arbella “would be the lawful inheritress of the crown if James of Scotland were excluded as a foreigner.”32

  Childish and spoiled, Arbella was delighted “that it pleased her Majesty to . . . pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind,” but she would soon discover that her position depended on the prevailing political climate. When the Armada was defeated in August 1588, Arbella ceased to be seen as useful, though she failed to sense the change in her circumstances and continued to play the role of Elizabeth’s heir. On one notorious occasion she insisted on taking precedence over all the other ladies at court. Elizabeth seized on it as an excuse to order her to return home to Derbyshire.

  In December 1591 Burghley began pursuing fresh attempts for a settlement with Spain. Burghley had always been the most enthusiastic advocate for peace and his chief rivals from the war party, Leicester and Walsingham, were now dead (Leicester had died in September 1588 and Walsingham in November 1591). New plans were made for Arbella’s marriage to Farnese, and in order to underscore her importance in the line of succession she was invited back to Whitehall for the Christmas celebrations.

  Harington recalled that Arbella had matured into an attractive young woman. He often admired her elegance of dress, “her virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music.”33 Elizabeth, however, began to fear that a party was building behind her and, according to Harington, Essex or his followers had made some “glancing speeches” that suggested she had cause for concern. When the Duke of Parma died the following December, Elizabeth let the marriage plans drop. The friendship with Farnese was now of no use to her and she decided to put the eighteen-year-old Arbella back in her Derbyshire box. She would not be invited back to court during Elizabeth’s lifetime. While Arbella’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the latest political gossip—a Catholic plot to kidnap her, a new husband who had been found for her—it was only as a bit part in a much bigger story.

  In 1593, the first year of Arbella’s exile, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Essex was appointed to the Privy Council. The average age of his fellow councilors was almost sixty, with the sclerotic Burghley holding a position of unrivaled authority. The only other young member was Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, who had been appointed to the Privy Council in 1591, when he was twenty-eight. Just as Leicester had marked Essex out as his heir, so Burghley was grooming Cecil for his. A contemporary described Cecil as having a “full mind in an imperfect body.” 34 He was short—no more than five foot two—and hunch-backed. His face was almost feminine, with large, vivid eyes that suggested his quick wit. Elizabeth would sometimes refer to Cecil as her “pygmy” and sometimes as her “elf.” Others preferred the sobriquet “Robert the Devil.”

  Unfailingly polite, watchful and measured, Cecil had been raised as a courtier from infancy. He was therefore completely familiar with the complex network of human relations that bound people at court by blood, marriage, love, friendship, honor and dependency and he was precisely attuned to its mores. Here the normal rules of morality did not apply. Harington complained that you ended up a fool at court if you didn’t start out a knave—but this did not trouble Cecil. As one discourse argued: “The courtier knows the secrets of the court, judges them not, but uses them for his particular advantage.”35 Essex did his best to push his young clients forward for high office, but as Elizabeth’s old Councilors died she preferred to leave their posts vacant rather than replace them, arguing that younger men were too inexperienced—and Burghley was no keener on finding new talent than the Queen. He surrounded himself with fifth-rate men who could pose no threat to him. In this stagnant pool corruption flourished. 36

  Burghley’s servant John Clapham admitted that “purveyors and other officers of [the Queen’s] household, under pretence of her service, would oft-times for their own gain vex with many impositions the poorer sort of the inhabitants near the usual places of her residence.” And it wasn’t only the poor who suffered. “Certain it is,” he recalled, “that some persons attending near about [the Queen] would now and then abuse her favour and make sale of it, by taking bribes for such suits as she bestowed freely.”37 There had always been bribery: since official salaries were very low it was expected, but the scale shocked court and country alike. Burghley claimed to be dismayed by it, but his son was well known for his predilection for taking large bribes and Burghley himself covered up or ignored financial scandals involving his appointees at the Treasury and the Court of Wards. Some cost the crown tens of thousands of pounds. 38 This mismanagement, combined with the problems of an outdated system of taxation, encouraged Elizabeth’s carefulness with money to become obsessive. As the Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman later wrote, the aging queen “was ever hard of access, and grew to be very covetous in her old days . . . the court was very much neglected, and in effect the people were weary of an old woman’s government.”39

  Harington’s tract complained that a few servants got everything and he had observed even then that “envy doth haunt many and breed jealousy.”40 The old Catholic chivalric families, who had lost most to the “goose-quilled gents” in the Cecilian elite, remained particularly resentful and they joined their Protestant peers in turning to Essex as the new leader of the nobility. Essex’s stepfather, Christopher Blount, was a Catholic, but his own religious allegiance was advertised by his having a Puritan chaplain. The term “Puritan” had been coined as an insult, implying extremist views, and the Puritans referred to themselves simply as the “hotter sort” of Protestant or as “the Godly.” 6 Some had all the bullying fanaticism we associate with the term. There was a joke recorded in the winter of 1602–3 that a Puritan was “a man who loved God with all his soul and hated his neighbour with all his heart.”41 But what attracted Essex was their integrity.

  Even the Jesuit Robert Persons admitted: “The Puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other . . . that is to say most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side.”42 Many Puritans hoped for political reforms that would sweep away corruption in public life, as well as for religious changes on Calvinist lines. Elizabeth had expected and even hoped that Ess
ex and Cecil would hold differing views and attitudes. She had often used the arguments between Leicester and Burghley to give her the freedom to choose her own path. But Essex and Cecil became more than mere rivals in the Council. They dominated opposing factions, with Cecil shoring up his father’s preeminence and his agenda of peace with Spain while Essex promoted the aggressive foreign policy previously advocated by Leicester.

  Essex often tried to bully and badger Elizabeth into accepting his policies, but his view that she “could be brought to nothing except by a kind of necessity” was not the best way to gain her trust. It became increasingly clear to Essex that Elizabeth was becoming more, rather than less, reliant on Burghley and the only hope for change would lie with her successor. The first determined attempt to browbeat the Queen into naming her heir had come in February 1593 when the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name her successor. Her reply was to put him in the Tower.

  Harington recalled how from his cell Wentworth wrote “to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death.”43 He remained in the Tower for four years, until his death, all the while stubbornly refusing to keep silent on the issue of the succession—a promise that would have given him his liberty.

  Meanwhile, beneath the surface of public life, opposing groups continued to make frantic efforts to secure the succession. The question, after all, was not merely one of who would inherit the throne but also who would be the leading men in their government. In the autumn of 1593 Catholic exiles approached Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (a junior descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Brandon). Derby was known to have Catholic sympathies and the group appeared to hope that he would accept the role of a candidate for the succession. Derby, however, took their letter to the Queen. The incident had all the hallmarks of an attempt by Robert Cecil to “waken” a plot with agents provocateurs, a much-used method of gaining kudos with Elizabeth and destroying enemies, particularly Catholics. Derby’s action may have saved him from the scaffold, but within a few months he was dead anyway, having endured a violent sickness in which he produced vomit colored “like soot or rusty iron.”44 The description indicates bleeding in the stomach and the rumor was that he had been poisoned. 7 Some said the Jesuits had murdered Derby in revenge for his betrayal of them, others that the Cecils had arranged it in order to clear the path for Beauchamp. Elizabeth had become dangerously ill with a fever and the issue of the succession had taken on a new urgency.

  Renewed efforts were being made to have the decision on Lord Beauchamp’s legitimacy reversed and the following year Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught stockpiling weapons for Beauchamp’s father, the Earl of Hertford, in the event of Elizabeth’s death. The Earl was put in the Tower with his son. The Cecils and Hertford’s brother-in-law, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard of Effingham (later the Earl of Nottingham), worked hard for their release, which came remarkably quickly in January.

  Essex was by now firmly allied to James, with whom he had been in correspondence since 1594. 8 The King’s candidature appealed to Essex on several levels. The first was that he was a man. Essex once voiced the view that “they laboured under two things at this court delay and inconstancy which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen.” 45 Second, James, unlike Beauchamp, was indisputably royal. Third, James disliked the Cecils, blaming Burghley for his mother’s death and resenting his championship of Beauchamp’s cause; and last, but significantly, it was believed he could attract support from across the religious spectrum. James had already shown himself to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause. In 1590, for example, he had ordered that prayers be said in Scotland for those in England suffering for the “purity” of religion. Catholics, meanwhile, saw James in terms of his being the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they regarded as virtually a martyr. Some hoped that he might convert when he left Scotland and there was widespread belief among Catholics and Protestants that, at the very least, he would offer Catholics toleration. Harington observed that James had never been subject to a papal excommunication and “had no particular cause to persecute any side for private displeasure.” James’s accession, therefore, offered a golden opportunity to “establish an unity, and cease the strife among us if it be possible.”46

  Perhaps the most effective enemy of this vision of religious freedom came, however, from among the Catholics themselves: the former missionary Robert Persons. Since Campion’s death, Persons had risen to be Prefect of the English Jesuits and was usually resident in Rome, where he was described as a courtly figure of “forbidding appearance.” To Persons any Catholic hopes of toleration were a threat to the higher goal of a total restitution of Catholicism, and he was now to use his talents as a brilliant propagandist to change the whole basis of arguments on the succession. In November 1595 a book entitled A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England appeared in England published under the pseudonym “R. Doleman.” 9 It took advantage of the fact that the Tudors had failed to assert the strict hereditary principle, and claimed that “ancestry of blood alone” was not enough to gain a crown. A monarch should have all the attributes of honor necessary to majesty and, the book argued, there was no such candidate within the Tudor family. The Doleman book took advantage of every consideration ever raised against the Tudor candidates, crystallized popular prejudices and added new disqualifications. Readers were invited to reflect that in the Suffolk line, Beauchamp and Lord Derby had damaged their royal status by marrying the daughters of mere knights (the daughters of Sir Richard Rogers and Sir John Spencer respectively).47 Beauchamp and Derby were therefore simply not royal enough to command respect. Of the senior Stuarts, Arbella was said to be of illegitimate descent because Margaret Tudor’s second husband, the Earl of Angus, had another wife living at the time of their marriage, while James was disqualified under the Bond of Association. The book further argued that James’s Scots nationality made him a particularly undesirable choice—and here Persons had hit on a raw nerve.

  Historically, Scotland was “the old, beggardly enemy,” and although the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had ended three centuries of armed conflict the English still despised their impoverished northern neighbor. 48 For many, the idea of a Scot becoming King of England suggested a ridiculous reversal of fortune. Doleman played up to these feelings, claiming that there was no possible advantage to England in joining with an impoverished country whose people were known for their “aversion and natural alienation . . . from the English” and for their close ties with England’s Irish and French enemies: James would fill English posts with Scottish nobles and might even oppress the English with foreign armies.

  Furthermore, Doleman warned, while some claimed that England and Scotland shared the same religion, the truth was that Scottish Calvinism was “opposite to that form which in England is maintained,” with its rituals and bishops. If James became king the nobility would find the Church hierarchy torn down and themselves subject to the harangues of mere Church ministers.49 His words echoed something the Earl of Hertford had once said of the Puritans: “As they shoot at bishops now, so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.”50 The fact that episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland in 1593 added credence to the claims.

  Having thus dismissed all the Tudor candidates as unworthy, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth “the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion.”51 If this seems a strange argument now it is worth remembering that the rights of the present royal family have been based on this premise since the reign of William and Mary. It held still greater force at a time when kings were believed to rule by divine right.

  The Doleman book accepted that each faith would prefer to choose a monarch of its own religion, but it expressed no doubt that a Catholic choice would win since Catholics were strengthened by the persecution “as a little brook or river, though it be but shallow . . . yet if many bars and stops be m
ade therein, it swells and rises to a great force.” 52 It was a belief shared within the Protestant establishment. Even Walsingham had once observed that the execution of Catholics “moves men to compassion and draws some to affect their religion.” The book’s comments were not, however, designed to spread dismay among Protestants so much as to attract the attention of Catholics. Doleman informed Catholics that they were not only bound to choose a Catholic candidate as a religious duty but also blessed with an excellent choice: Philip II’s favorite daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her claim through her father (and thus Edward III) was strengthened by that of her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, a descendant of the Dukes of Brittany, to whom William the Conqueror had pledged feudal obedience.

  The book claimed Isabella also had the personal attributes necessary in a great monarch. She was “a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety” and, as she came from a rich kingdom, she was less likely to “pill and poll” her English subjects than a poverty-stricken Scot.53 The arguments made the Infanta a powerful and believable candidate overnight. As a final touch, Persons mischievously dedicated the book to Spain’s leading enemy at court, the Earl of Essex—he who had attracted such a large Catholic following. “No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity,” Doleman wrote; “no man likes to have a greater part or sway in deciding this great affair.”

  In his Tract Harington recalled that as the pivotal year of 1598 opened, the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge “did both light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old.”54 The Privy Council was half the size it had been at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and Burghley was so old and ill he had to be carried into meetings in a chair. He still pursued the cause of peace with Spain without success and the costs fell on a country burdened by a growing population and a series of harvest failures. As food prices rose, wages fell, men impressed for the war returned to vagrancy and theft, and sedition increased. There were reports of the poor claiming that Philip II of Spain was the rightful King of England and that life had been better under his wife Mary I. The greatest danger for Elizabeth, however, was the discontent at court.