The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (51 page)

By the end of January, Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys, the Countess of Leicester, had left her country estate to come to London to petition for her son’s release.
14
The following month she sent a gown for Elizabeth that was presented by Mary Scudamore, one of the Queen’s favoured women, who was sympathetic to Lettice’s cause and had known her from her time in the Queen’s service.
15

Her Majesty liked it well, but did not accept it, nor refuse it, only answered, that Things standing as they did, it was not fit for her to desire what she did; which was to come to her Majesty’s Presence, to kiss her Hands … and her Majesty’s Displeasure nothing lessened towards him, nor any Hope of his Liberty.
16

Lady Warwick also tried to promote Essex’s case and sent him a message assuring him that if he came to Greenwich, where the court was then in residence, she would contrive an opportunity to let him into the palace gardens, when the Queen was in a good mood, so that he could plead forgiveness in person.
17
In March, Essex was allowed to return to Essex House, but still under conditions of house arrest, ‘by her Majesty’s express commandment’, with his wife and friends all removed from there.

On 5 June, the earl was taken to York House to appear before a special commission of enquiry which was to hear the charges against him. He was found guilty of disobedience and dereliction of duty, although cleared of the most serious charge of disloyalty. In an act of humility, Essex knelt for much of the twelve-hour-long hearing, but he refused to admit insubordination. He acknowledged he had ‘grievously offended’ her Majesty, but pitifully urged that it was ‘with no malicious intent’. He was stripped of his offices and was to remain a prisoner at his house at the Queen’s pleasure.
18

Essex continued to plead his case with the Queen. Philadelphia Carey, Lady Scrope, daughter of the late Katherine Knollys, wrote to tell him how favourably Elizabeth had received his letters: ‘She seemed exceedingly pleased with it yet her answer was only to will me to give you thanks for your great care to know of her health.’ Lady Scrope continued, ‘I told her that now the time drew near of your whole year’s punishment and therefore I hoped her Majesty would restore her favour to one that with so much true sorrow did desire it but she would answer me never a word but sighed and said indeed it was so.’ She added, ‘I do not doubt but shortly to see your Lordship at the court.’
19

*   *   *

On the night of 2 October, Essex returned to the deserted Essex House where, ‘he lives private, his gate shut day and night’. His petitions to the Queen were now desperate. Sir John Harington met with the earl and warned him that he was an example of how ‘ambition thwarted in his career doth speedily lead on to madness’. Essex now ‘shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason or of right mind’.
20

Essex believed that his path back to the Queen’s favour was only blocked by the evil counsel of his enemies at court. By the end of the year he was gathering around him other ‘discontented persons’, deployed soldiers, persecuted Catholics, failed courtiers and bankrupt nobles. Essex House was becoming something of an anti-court. ‘These things are brought to the Queen’s ears,’ it was reported, ‘and alienate her affection from him more and more, and especially one speech inflameth her most of all, for he said that being now an old woman, she is no less crooked and distorted in mind than she is in body.’
21
Elizabeth might have begun to fear the dangerous plottings of her former favourite, but she was, and would remain, always acutely sensitive to comments that slighted her royal majesty.

56

Dangerous and Malicious Ends

In early February 1601, ‘a concourse of people and great resort of Lords and others’ gathered at Essex House.
1
Fearing disorder, the Privy Council met in urgent session on Saturday 7 February and summoned Essex to appear before them to explain himself and to reprimand him for holding unlawful assemblies.

The earl ignored the first summons, and the second, pleading ill health. He had been in disgrace for more than a year, was heavily in debt and was convinced that a plot had been laid by his enemies to entice him from his home and then ‘bring about his death’.
2
Throughout the night, as Essex fortified his house and more nobles assembled with their followers, the council moved to secure the court by erecting a barricade of coaches between Whitehall and Charing Cross.
3

At ten the following morning, a delegation from the court was sent to Essex House. The four commissioners, who included the earl’s uncle, Sir William Knollys, came to offer the chance for Essex to have his grievances heard on condition that the gathering at his house disperse. Fearing another attempt to lure him to his death, Essex rejected the commissioners’ overtures. He placed the delegation under armed guard in his library and then set off with a group of two hundred friends and followers, carrying firearms, for the city, to take control of the Tower and force their way to the Queen.
4
Essex urged the people of London to join with him against the forces that threatened the Queen and the country.
5
He claimed that his enemies were going to murder him and that ‘the crown of England was offered to be sold to the Infanta [Isabella of Spain]’.

The Queen received the news that Essex had entered the city while at dinner at Whitehall. She responded calmly, ‘only said [that] He that had placed her on that seat would preserve her in it; and so she continued at her dinner, not showing any sign of fear, or distraction of mind, nor omitting anything that she had been accustomed to do at other times’.
6
The Queen’s Guard were immediately deployed and when Essex’s band moved to Ludgate Hill they were met by a company of soldiers.
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As Essex’s followers scattered, several men were killed, including the earl’s page, Henry Tracy, and Essex himself was shot twice in the hat. The remaining fifty or so men were forced to withdraw and at Queenhithe, taking as many boats as they could, they rowed furiously back to Essex House.

As dusk fell, Essex returned to find his house surrounded by the Queen’s forces. By nine that evening he surrendered and was rowed across the river to spend the night a prisoner in Lambeth Palace. The next day he was taken to the Tower. A proclamation was issued announcing his arrest and ordering people to remain vigilant ‘to the speeches of any that shall give out slanderous and undutiful words or rumours’.
8

On Thursday 12 February, Captain Thomas Lee, one of Essex’s Irish captains, was discovered and arrested outside the door of the Queen’s Privy Chamber at Whitehall.
9
He admitted he was going to break in that evening, at supper time when, he said, Elizabeth ‘is attended with a few Ladies, & such as that are known in court and have credit might easily come to the Privy Chamber door without suspicion’. He planned to take the Queen captive and force her to sign a warrant for the earl’s delivery from the Tower.
10
Lee had demonstrated that the Queen’s privy lodging could be penetrated. Although the Irishman swore that he ‘would not have hurt her Royal person’, he was tried at Newgate two days later and, as Robert Cecil wrote from court, ‘he received the due reward of a Traitor at Tyburn’, two days later.
11

On 19 February the Earl of Essex was brought up river from the Tower to Westminster Hall to be tried. Essex and the other conspirators were accused of plotting to deprive the Queen of her crown and life as well as imprisoning councillors of the realm and inciting Londoners to rebel. The Attorney General Sir Edward Coke was determined to prove that Essex had intended to take ‘not a town, but a city, not a city alone, but London the chief city; not only London, but the Tower of London; not only the Tower of London, but the royal palace and person of the prince, and to take away her life’. Essex protested that ‘he never wished harm to his sovereign more than to his soul’.
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The coup, it was claimed, was merely intended to secure access for Essex to the Queen.
13
He believed that if he was able to gain an audience with Elizabeth, and she heard his grievances, he would be restored to her favour. Despite his protestations, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

On the day after his trial, Elizabeth signed Essex’s death warrant.
14
She had made up her mind that no mercy could be shown to a man who had threatened to take up arms against her.
15
In the Tower, after his trial, Essex broke down claiming he had been pressured by his followers and his sister, Lady Penelope Rich, to take seditious action.
16
Lady Penelope denied her brother’s claim and argued that she had been drawn into the conspiracy against her will. After a brief period of confinement, and examination by the Privy Council, she was released.
17

In the early morning of 25 February, Ash Wednesday, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, attended by three priests, sixteen guards and the Lieutenant of the Tower, walked to his execution. Elizabeth had granted him one final favour: in deference to his rank, his beheading would take place in private, within the grounds of the Tower of London. As he knelt before the scaffold the earl made a long and emotional speech of confession in which he acknowledged that his ‘courses’, if successful, might have imperilled the Queen, with ‘more dangerous and malicious ends for the disturbance of her Estate’.
18
His head was severed in three blows. Elizabeth was playing the virginals in the Privy Chamber when a messenger brought confirmation of Essex’s death. She received it in silence. No one else spoke. After a time she began to play again.

*   *   *

The first Sunday after the execution, William Barlow, the royal chaplain, delivered the sermon from the pulpit at St Paul’s Cross on what he called a ‘matter of state rather than divinity’. Sir Robert Cecil had drawn up specific guidelines on what the chaplain could say about Essex’s plot. Barlow described how the Jesuit Robert Persons had corrupted the late earl, persuading him ‘that it is lawful for the subject to rise against his sovereign’.
19
He emphasised the danger to the Queen, dismissed the earl’s claim that he meant her no harm and said it was the most dangerous plot that had ever been hatched within the land.
20

Shortly afterwards, orders were sent out to preachers across the country to disseminate the official version of events and copies of William Barlow’s sermon. Francis Bacon’s
Declaration of the Practices and Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert, Late Earl of Essex …
was also published.
21
This authorised account described how a serious threat to the crown had been narrowly defeated; that the earl had planned to overthrow Elizabeth and then either take the crown for himself or King James VI of Scotland. In the weeks following the rebellion, defences in London were increased and on 5 April a proclamation described how a number of ‘traitorous and slanderous’ libels had lately been discovered ‘tending to the slander of our royal person and state, and stirring up rebellion and sedition within this our realm’. A reward of £100 was offered for anyone who named the ‘authors, writers or dispersers of such libels’.
22

The Queen was visibly broken by Essex’s death and slipped into a deep melancholy. Many were surprised that she had been able to have the sentence carried out at all. Beaumont, the French ambassador, described her great grief and how, with her eyes full of tears, she had told the envoy how she had warned Essex that ‘he should beware of touching my sceptre’. She later said, ‘when the welfare of my state was concerned, I dared not indulge my own inclination’.
23

57

No Season to Fool

In the months following Essex’s death, Elizabeth’s health deteriorated and she suffered bouts of depression that drove her to seek sanctuary, away from the public glare of the court, among her women in the Privy Chamber. Dorothy Stafford and Mary Scudamore remained in loyal service and were ready to comfort the Queen by day and in the royal bed at night. Elizabeth had also grown particularly close to the widowed Katherine Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.
1
It was noted that ‘she governs the Queen, many hours together very private’.
2
Catherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham, was also now at the heart of the court; she was one of the few bedchamber women who had known Elizabeth before she had become Queen. Although Catherine Howard had five children, she had always returned to court soon after each birth. The Earl of Nottingham had played a key role in securing Essex’s surrender and conviction and now his wife gave support to Elizabeth following the earl’s execution.

Whilst it was among these women that Elizabeth now sought solace, her relationship with another of her long-serving ladies and confidantes, Anne Dudley, Lady Warwick, the sister-in-law of the Countess of Nottingham, was strained. Lady Warwick had supported Essex and now appealed in desperation to his old adversary, Sir Robert Cecil to secure a return to the Queen’s favour. ‘Your help is sought for and found,’ she wrote, ‘now let it be obtained for one that hath lived long in court with desert sufficient, being coupled with others.’ The countess insisted that she did not by nature have ‘much of the fox’s craft or subtlety and as little of the lion’s help; having lost friends almost all, not face to crave, no desire to feign’.
3
Perhaps Cecil did speak for the countess or maybe Elizabeth simply missed her old friend, as Lady Warwick was soon restored to favour.

When Sir John Harington arrived at court in early October he was shocked by what he saw. His letter to his friend, Sir Hugh Portman, paints a vivid picture of Elizabeth’s lonely, diminished state and how much the Essex affair had taken its toll on her. ‘So disordered is all order,’ that she had not changed her clothes for many days, she was ‘quite disfavoured, and unattired, and these troubles waste her much.’ She ate little but ‘manchet’ and ‘succory pottage’ (wheaten bread and chicory soup) and ‘disregardeth every costly cover that cometh to the table’. The ‘evil plots and designs’ which had been focussed against her in the previous few years had left her suspicious and anxious and had ‘overcome all her Highness’s sweet temper’. She ‘swears much at those that cause her griefs in such ways, to the small discomfiture of all about her’. She now kept a sword close by her and, as Harington described, ‘constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news and thrusting her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage’. Every new message ‘from the city doth disturb her’ and she ‘frowns on all her ladies’, clearly taking out her fears and frustrations on those closest to her. Even Harington himself, her favourite godson, received a sharp message from her to ‘get home’ as it ‘is no season to fool it here’.
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