The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (60 page)

A week later Essex set forth against O’Neill. Their armies never fought. Instead, O’Neill came to the ford at Bellaclinthe on the Ulster border, gravely submissive, waded up to his horse’s belly in the river, and there he and Essex parleyed, alone and unoverheard. They agreed a truce. To Elizabeth, that truce was as illusory as it was dishonourable: ‘To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust a devil upon his religion.’ What they said was their secret. But there were soon fears that the English Lord Lieutenant and the Irish ‘arch traitor’ had promised each other kingdoms. Essex admitted to his intimates that O’Neill incited him ‘to stand for himself and he [O’Neill] would join with him’. Suspicions of Essex grew. Why the secrecy of their meeting? Why had Essex not fought O’Neill? The Queen came to believe that he had other things on his mind in Ireland than to serve her, and she forbade his return. Before leaving Dublin for Ulster, Essex had rehearsed a desperate scheme to his friends: he was resolved to go to England, and to go defended against his enemies. He would take an army with him, land in Milford Haven, and march to London to capture the court. They dissuaded him from taking an army to England – an act of aggression which would be an ‘irrecoverable blot’ – but not from returning. Riding hard, Essex reached the court by 28 September. The mud-stained favourite encountered the haggard, unbedizened queen in her bedchamber. ‘By God’s Son,’ swore Elizabeth, ‘I am no queen; that
man
is above me.’

From that night Essex was detained, at the Queen’s interminable, procrastinating pleasure. Since his offence was still only disobedience and dishonour to the Queen, there were no formal charges against him. He grew ill as the Queen’s glacial hostility continued. At Christmas 1599 John Donne wrote that ‘my lord of Essex and his train are no more missed here than the angels which were cast down from heaven nor… likelier to return’. In February Lord Mountjoy was sent to Ireland as the
new Lord Deputy, Essex’s unwilling successor. The Council urged the Queen to release Essex, ladies at court pleaded for clemency, his popular following proclaimed his innocence. In May Essex wrote reminding the Queen of her message that she meant to chastise, not ruin him, but after a semi-public trial in June, Essex was removed from all his offices, save Master of the Horse. The desolate Queen took great walks about her park in Greenwich. Among Essex’s friends, hopes remained; Elizabeth, unlike her father, had been forgiving towards errant nobles, and even though she mortified him, she had advanced none of Essex’s adversaries. But her refusal at the end of October to renew his monopoly for sweet wines he took as the sign of her vindictiveness, of his irredeemable oblivion and dishonour. He listened now to his secretary, his sister and his steward, who harped upon his loss of honour and his imminent recourse to the alms basket.

Essex was now an earl without place or income; a patron without patronage; a commander without an army. Even retreat into books and scholarship, which had often appealed to him, had its dangers. His reading in John Hayward’s
Life and Reign of Henry IV
of the ancient nobility rising to free the kingdom from Richard II’s upstart favourites was soon seen as sedition. According to Ben Jonson, Essex was the ‘AB’ who had written the lapidary preface to Sir Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus, the Roman historian, in 1591. In Tacitus Essex found a world of vicious courts, of ‘privy whisperings’, dissimulation, spies, informers, and barely contained violence. Essex grew convinced of the menace of his enemies; he believed that they set spies in his household, suborned witnesses against him, forged his handwriting, and plotted against his life. (It was true that his letters had been stolen, his handwriting forged.) He was convinced too of the utter devotion of his friends, who would venture their lives for him.

Driven to desperation, Essex and his friends sought a way out. Essex spurned flight and exile. Early in 1600 Lord Deputy Mountjoy had offered his services to the King of Scots, even support from the army in Ireland, to aid James against his enemies in England, who were also the Earl’s, and to establish his succession. Essex himself had been in communication with James since 1598. James, wary after endless noble conspiracy in Scotland, held back. Mountjoy, whom Essex implored again to send an army from Ireland – or at least a letter complaining of misgovernment which Essex could present to the Queen – enjoined patience. It was too late. Essex now turned to open treason. Emissaries
were sent to O’Neill asking him to fulfil his promise that ‘if the Earl of Essex would be ruled by him, he would make him the greatest man in England’. At the end of 1600 Essex House in the Strand was the resort of diverse groups: discontented swordsmen, and citizens who came to hear sermons. On 3 February 1601 at Southampton’s lodgings at Drury House, Essex’s friends met to consider three plans of action: should they seize the court, the Tower or the City? The plan decided upon was to surprise the court and arrest Ralegh, Captain of the Guard, so that Essex could prostrate himself before the Queen and demand the removal of his adversaries. Instead, Essex’s summons before the Council precipitated revolt.

On 8 February – a Sunday, shockingly, blasphemously – after the sermon at Paul’s Cross, bewildered Londoners came upon Essex, leading a band of noble followers and their retinues, crying, ‘Murder, murder, God save the Queen.’ As he marched from Essex House through Ludgate, and through the City, the Earl shouted that his life was endangered, and the realm sold to the Spaniard. Like Wyatt before him in 1554, he believed that the citizens would rally to the patriotic cause, but beyond that he thought, from his old popularity there, that they were ‘at his devotion’. None joined him. Essex retreated by river to Essex House, and there, after a siege, he was taken. Quixotic apprentices planned to raise 5,000 to rescue him from the Tower and entreat the Queen’s favour. Too late. Essex never saw the Queen again, never pleaded for mercy; and there could be none. At Tower Hill on Ash Wednesday, 25 February 1601, he went to the block while his old enemy, Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, watched. A month later Elizabeth wrote to Essex’s dying friend Lord Willoughby, one of the last ‘men of service’, how it ‘appeareth now by one’s example more bound than all or any other’s, how little faith there was in Israel’.

Essex’s revolt was perhaps the last time that turbulent nobles took up arms to demand their – to them – rightful place as counsellors; the last time that English lords expected a popular following to rise for their private quarrels. Essex and his friends were torn between two worlds: a lost world of ‘overmighty subjects’, bound by friendship in arms, with unimpeded power in their local communities and the military support of a loyal tenantry; and the real world of service at court and dependency upon the crown. Of the first world they dreamt; to the second they belonged. Essex’s father might have vaunted his fifty-six heraldic quarterings, but his earldom was a Tudor creation. The 2nd Earl of Essex
lorded it in South Wales and the Marches in the 1590s, and planned to invade at Milford Haven as the Tudor pretender had done over a century before, but his Welsh support never rallied, and the fated rising he led was in London, an attempted palace coup.

Essex’s overweening demand for rewards fitting his extraordinary honour had excluded him from court and given power instead to Cecil and the ‘base pen clerks’ whose rise he had so resented. By her inability to restrain Essex, Elizabeth had lost that balance at court which had brought stability and assured her control; even Essex’s fall could not restore it. Cecil, confiding court secrets, in code, to Sir George Carew (President of Munster) in Ireland, told of suspicions and jealousies. The adventitious alliance Cecil had made with Ralegh and Cobham against Essex now dissolved in renewed rivalry. Ambition, according to Elizabethans, was like the crocodile, which grew while it lived. The Queen’s own will to power was undiminished, but she was haunted by Essex’s betrayal, and feared that of others. She paced her Privy Chamber, sometimes thrusting her sword into the arras in rage, according to her godson, Sir John Harington. Now she kept few around her, except Lord Buckhurst, Burghley’s successor as Lord Treasurer. As the natural end of her reign drew closer, her properties as goddess of the moon were no longer venerated, except publicly: privately it was said that ‘she reigns as the moon in borrowed majesty’.

In November 1599 O’Neill, at the height of his power, issued a proclamation to the Irish, a Catholic and nationalist manifesto. He set out twenty-two articles for the English, his terms for peace. His demands were extreme: the restoration of the Catholic Church, governed by the Pope, with an exclusively Irish clergy; all posts in the civil government, save the chief governor, to be held by Irishmen; O’Neill, O’Donnell, Desmond and their confederates to hold their ancient lands and privileges. If these demands were met, Ireland would be virtually an independent kingdom once again. Upon his copy of the articles Cecil wrote ‘Ewtopia’, but was it?

At this climacteric, it seemed as though Ireland would be reconquered not by the English but by the Irish. Essex had left, achieving nothing; his army, under the failing command of Ormond, was in disarray and the Dublin government on the point of collapse. Only the English Pale and the walled towns stood out against the rebels. O’Neill promised to pierce
to the heart of the Pale, and even if he could not break the walls of the towns with artillery, he might undermine them by treachery within. The Pale itself was full of Gaelic settlers. Even if lords like the Earls of Thomond and Clanrickard, and Christopher Nugent, Lord Delvin, remained loyal, could they prevent their tenants and followers from joining the rebels? In Munster, the surviving New English fearfully awaited another massacre. Everyone expected a Spanish Armada to arrive.

The Anglo-Irish had, for the most part, not forgotten their English descent and their loyalty, but it was the hope of O’Neill and the fear of the English governors that they could be persuaded of a higher loyalty to Ireland and their Catholic faith than to England and a Protestant queen. O’Neill’s whole purpose, he proclaimed, was to fight for the ‘Catholic religion and liberties of our country’. With deliberate intent he wrote of ‘Ireland’ and ‘we Irishmen’, as though love of their native land would cause the Palesmen to forget their historical identity and difference from the Gaelic Irish who surrounded them. The Gaelic bardic poets, once employed to celebrate the renown of their own lords and lands, began to eulogize the whole land as the fatherland (
athardha
). In
Richard II
, Shakespeare had celebrated England’s island state as ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress’. Ireland was no less an island, no less Edenic: ‘a fortress of paradise’, wrote Maolmhuire Ó hUiginn (d.
c
. 1591). And within it, its two historical communities, Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, might now unite against the heretic Protestant newcomers.

Preachers, especially those fired by Counter-Reformation ideals – members of reformed orders, papal emissaries, Jesuits and seminary priests – insisted that the Irish fight for the faith; that to be Irish was to be Catholic. The papal legate preached in Munster during the revolt: ‘What hath England to do with us? What right hath
their
queen over us, but by force?’ Scotland, though confined within the same island as England, had her own king; why not Ireland? The rebels’ reward would be a kingdom and liberty. What had they to lose but their lives? The preachers offered threats as well as promises: hell as well as heaven. The Catholic bishop of Cork and the Vicar-Apostolic, Owen MacEgan, threatened Viscount Barry with his ‘soul’s destruction’ and his country’s ruin if he did not join the rebels. Disingenuously, they told him they had a papal excommunication, but Pope Clement VIII never gave one to the rebels: instead on 18 April 1600 (n.s.) he gave a crusading indulgence to supporters of O’Neill, ‘captain general of the Catholic army in Ireland’. The people stood in ‘awful obedience’, wrote Carew, the President of
Munster, to ‘Romish priests’ whose ‘excommunications are of greater terror unto them than any earthly horror’.

In January 1600 O’Neill and his northern confederates marched south to Munster. It was a terrible winter journey. The Maguire bard, Ó Heóghusa, lamented the hardships suffered by his patron:

Hugh Maguire never returned to Fermanagh. On 1 March he was killed by Sir Warham St Leger, whom he fatally wounded. O’Neill called his campaign a ‘holy journey’, and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Cross in Tipperary. But it was a journey more military than holy. He had made James Fitzthomas Earl of Desmond by proxy; now, in person, he created Florence MacCarthy the MacCarthy Mór, ‘chief of the Irishry’ of Munster. O’Neill threatened not only hellfire to those who refused to join him, but also the earthly hell of having his followers ‘come and sojourn with you for a time’. News of Lord Deputy Mountjoy’s move to plant a garrison on the shores of Lough Foyle on the north coast of Ulster sent O’Neill north, and he left the Munster rebellion in the command of Florence MacCarthy.