All the Queen's Men (11 page)

Surprisingly her incredibly harsh words which flew around the Royal Court like hordes of angry hornets could create a curious feeling of camaraderie. The beleaguered courtiers would shake their heads and chuckle to each other how much like her father the Queen was and carry on as if nothing had happened. In this respect her legendary temper sometimes proved counter-productive. Perhaps that was all part of the act: ‘
Per ardua ad astra
'.

Burghley, Leicester, Hatton and Walsingham were the four major long-serving members of Elizabeth's Privy Council and she was indeed fortunate to have such a formidable quartet of statesmen at her disposal during the critical years in the countdown to inevitable conflict with Spain. By the time the Spanish Armada had been sighted off the Cornish coast in the summer of 1588, they had collectively served on her Council for more than a decade and thus knew each other intimately. They recognized one another's strengths and weaknesses and had developed a strong mutual understanding. In turn, the Queen was wholly confident of their abilities, having known Burghley as a Councillor throughout her reign, while Leicester had served for more than a quarter of a century, Walsingham for seventeen years and Hatton more than a decade. Elizabeth by then was into her fifties, a highly experienced monarch on a very secure throne.

However, the Queen displayed an irritating tendency of being quick to take the credit for the actions of her Privy Council, while being equally agile at distancing herself from anything that went wrong or might be seen by the world at large as unpopular, being extremely conscious of her image, particularly overseas. A classic example of this was the execution of Elizabeth's cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots in February 1587. Mary had sought political asylum in England in 1568 but had progressively become the focus of Catholic conspiracies and had ultimately been confined at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. There existed the unthinkable scenario of Elizabeth being assassinated and an attempt mounted to place Mary on the throne, being the most obvious claimant by virtue of being the granddaughter of James IV of Scotland, whom Henry VIII's sister Margaret had married. There was a grave risk of civil war in the event of this happening, something the Council were determined to avoid at all costs; this was an aim shared by everyone concerned, rapidly uniting all those of differing viewpoints.

Walsingham's agents had unearthed first the Ridolfi Plot, then the Babington Plot, both conspiracies implicating Mary, Queen of Scots. Once more, the Council was strongly motivated in its thinking by the fact that Elizabeth was unmarried, with no obvious direct successor within England. Hatton and Sir Walter Mildmay, another shrewd Privy Councillor and friend of Lord Burghley, holding similarly strong Protestant beliefs, mustered parliamentary support for Mary's execution. Burghley masterminded the trial at Fotheringhay and subsequently persuaded Elizabeth to sign the death warrant. The Council then acted with great speed, carrying out Mary's execution before the Queen could change her mind and countermand her own order.

When Elizabeth discovered that the axe had fallen on her cousin's head, she predictably fled into one of her famous rages. Burghley was berated, ‘traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch, and all about the death of the Scottish Queen'.
¹¹
A huge display of grovelling by Burghley was to no avail – the Queen was unimpressed and it was many months before the chastened Lord Treasurer was allowed back into favour. Burghley was more fortunate than the hapless Secretary, William Davison, who had brought the death warrant for Elizabeth to sign. In classic ‘shoot the messenger' mode, the wretched Davison was thrown in the Tower and although released some eighteen months later, his political career was in ruins. While the Queen might rant and rave against her advisers for the execution of her cousin and fellow queen, these tantrums, partly brought about by guilt, were mainly play-acting in an attempt to quieten public opinion, particularly abroad. In this instance her theatrical posturing proved effective. Reaction from the rest of Europe was relatively muted. Even in Scotland, the mood was surprisingly low-key as James VI appeared more mindful of his prospects of succeeding Elizabeth than the fate of his mother. It was the clever, yet politically naive James whom the French King Henry IV later dubbed, ‘the wisest fool in Christendom'.
¹²
Ultimately it was Elizabeth's failure to marry and produce an heir that had sealed her cousin's fate.

These were, however, desperate times: the Armada was gathering at Cadiz and both Queen and Council needed to maintain a strong united kingdom in the face of this mounting external threat, one to which nobody knew how the extensive Catholic population in England would react. ‘The cutting away of the Queen of Scots has wonderfully eased the body of the state',
¹³
was the satisfied Council's collective view after the Queen's rage had finally subsided; sometimes it was difficult to know precisely who was pulling the strings.

Ultimately, the burden of office, coupled with the passage of time, ended the lives of the Queen's key Councillors in the golden years of her reign. The Earl of Leicester died, probably from malaria, in the autumn of 1588 not long after the defeat of the Armada, closely followed by Sir Walter Mildmay, her astute Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1589. Walsingham exited a year later, then Sir Christopher Hatton in 1591 and finally Lord Burghley in 1598. The Council was never to be quite the same again. The loss of so many of her long-standing trusted advisers in such a short period made the Queen very cautious in her choice of replacements. She developed an unfortunate tendency to replace fathers with their sons, in a hopeful belief that ability was somehow hereditary. Thus Sir Francis Knollys was succeeded by his son William, and Lord Admiral Howard and the Barons Hunsdon and Buckhurst by their offspring. None of them were the men their fathers were. Paradoxically, the Queen stubbornly refused to countenance the possibility of either of Sir Nicholas Bacon's sons becoming Councillors, particularly the highly talented Francis who was not destined to be a member of the Privy Council until the reign of James I. He was then made successively Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor, but later was accused of accepting bribes and dismissed from office in disgrace, thereby belatedly justifying Elizabeth's judgement of him.

Francis Bacon had been constantly touted for office by Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, Leicester's stepson, who towards the end of the sixteenth century had become a major influence on Elizabeth, the last of a long line of good-looking young men to catch her eye and become a royal favourite. He was created a Privy Councillor in 1593, arguably one of the few bad mistakes in a major appointment that Elizabeth ever made, although to his credit Essex initially tried hard to assimilate the demands of his new post, thereby justifying his appointment. It is difficult to try and visualize precisely what Elizabeth had hoped to achieve with this uncharacteristically precipitous action. If it was an attempt to repeat her success upon elevating Essex's stepfather and former royal favourite, the Earl of Leicester, to the Council all those years ago, then her actions failed miserably. Essex was the ultimate spoilt child, handsome, pampered, privileged, doted on by parents and a besotted aged Queen. Perhaps she was nostalgic for her own lost youth and unconsummated love. If she regarded Essex as a child substitute and wished to indulge him, she was to be bitterly disappointed, muttering disconsolately that it would be most fitting if someone could teach him some manners.

On one occasion Essex insolently turned his back on the Queen, an unpardonable breach of Court etiquette. The outraged Elizabeth boxed his ears, Essex in turn lost his temper and instinctively reached for his sword to the consternation of the watching courtiers who quickly hustled him away. The Queen may be seen to be at fault: like many long-serving rulers, her reign had gone on too long and, like many of advancing years, she was out of touch with current thinking, unable to identify with the younger generation, happy for them to adorn her Court but not prepared to listen to their advice – ‘she said that they were young and had no experience in affairs of state'.
¹⁴
Essex was a typical young man in a hurry, despising the old ways, contemptuous of his elders and betters, impetuous, emotional, irrational, absurdly jealous often for no particular reason, and prone to sulking when thwarted in his endeavours. If all this was not bad enough, Essex was faced with a formidable adversary, equally young and determined, yet different in all respects – Robert Cecil, the diminutive younger son of Lord Burghley.

Robert Cecil was the total antithesis of the usual Elizabethan stereotype who rose to prominence in the Royal Court. Barely five feet tall with a disproportionally large head, he also suffered from a curved spine, giving him the appearance of a hunchback, the result so it was said of being dropped as a baby. In Elizabethan days those who were particularly small were at a distinct disadvantage, unless seeking a post as a court jester. Dwarfs were either objects of derision or depicted as the embodiment of evil. Furthermore, Tudor historians had branded Richard III as a hunchback, something Elizabethans were reminded of every time Shakespeare's play was performed.

The Queen nicknamed Robert Cecil ‘my pigmy'. ‘I mislike not the name she gave me, only because she gives it',
¹⁵
he dolefully wrote to his father, who lobbied the Queen endlessly on his son's behalf, once for ten whole days when Elizabeth visited him at Theobolds. Robert Cecil was disliked and mistrusted by most of the Court and Council and was under no illusion in that respect. ‘The world is not apt behind one's back to speak well,'
¹⁶
he said to fellow courtier Sir John Puckering in 1592. ‘Robert the Devil' was one of many unkind nicknames Cecil was given in his lifetime and history continues to view him in the same light. ‘One of the ablest yet at the same time nastiest members of Elizabeth's Privy Council', says a modern historian, conjuring up a vision of an Elizabethan Joseph Goebbels. Even today, prominent politicians of diminutive height are often disparaged.

Cecil was a loner who would have to succeed by sheer ability and dedication rather than grace and favour. He was, however, supremely self-confident: John de Critz's portrait, commissioned by Cecil himself, captures a quite handsome face with a coldly inquisitive stare, elegant, fastidious and rather arrogant. In Council, he was an eloquent speaker, both articulate and succinct in marshalling his argument; these qualities stood him in good stead in Parliament where he was in regular attendance while in session. At all times, the inscrutable Cecil elevated discretion to an art form, ‘so subtle is the Secretary that hardly can it be judged which way he will take',
¹⁷
observed an admiring onlooker of this Elizabethan prince of darkness.

If Burghley was a pragmatist, then his son took the art of pragmatism to its outer limits. The description ‘Machiavellian' which is often applied to Robert Cecil is highly appropriate, for like his father he had read Nicolo Machiavelli's definitive
Discorsi
published in 1531, a revolutionary exposition of the art of statesmanship. Robert Cecil firmly embraced Machiavelli's fundamental principle that a ruler holds a kingdom not by grace of God, but by proficiency in government. While Burghley had a profound love and reverence for the Queen as a person, his son regarded her merely as a symbol of the Head of State, part of the apparatus of power but not its defining element, to be judged like anyone else in government, purely by performance. What the Queen made of Robert Cecil is impossible to fathom – their relationship is possibly best summed up in Cecil's classic comment on his sovereign, ‘More than a man and in truth sometimes less than a woman',
¹⁸
one of those pithy short phrases for which the Elizabethan era is justly famous and which may well have delighted the Queen had it come to her ears.

Not surprisingly Essex and Robert Cecil hated one another. This time the Queen's well-used stratagem of placing opposites on her Council came violently unstuck. The snobbish Earl of Essex branded Cecil as an upstart newcomer, the latter responding with a rare flash of humour by incorporating the phrase, ‘
Sero Sed Serio
' – ‘Late But Earnest', on his coat of arms. In turn, Cecil disliked Essex's privileged background, his unwarranted promotion to the Council and the characteristics displayed by his impetuous rival which were so fundamentally opposed to everything that Cecil believed in so fervently. Most of all, Robert Cecil was alarmed by the disenchanted and dangerous faction of impressionable young courtiers who were collecting around the charismatic Earl, which he considered threatened both the Queen and the security of her kingdom. Essex's wanton behaviour and headstrong actions became so outrageous that Cecil was able to persuade the Queen to act without too much difficulty. Essex was arrested and tried for treason, having led an armed march through the city of London demonstrating against the Queen. One of the state prosecutors was his erstwhile friend and protector, Francis Bacon. The Earl of Essex was executed at the Tower in the early spring of 1601, the Queen declaring, more in sorrow than in anger, that he should not have touched her sceptre. This tragic episode clouded the last few years of an otherwise glorious reign, causing the very thing that the Queen most dreaded – unpopularity with her subjects, many of whom had held the Earl in considerable regard. Characteristically, Elizabeth tried to shift the blame onto Robert Cecil. Not that he cared: Essex's demise had left him in total control. ‘Little Cecil trips up and down, he ruleth both Court and Crown',
¹⁹
ran a popular poem of the day.

Though physically short in stature, Cecil intellectually towered above his fellow Privy Councillors in the final years of Elizabeth's reign, in a manner which was to the detriment of the nation. The dynamic blend of passion and
realpolitik
characterizing the days of Burghley and Leicester that had served the Queen so admirably were well and truly past – Elizabeth was a spent force. ‘A notable decay of judgement and memory, in so much as she cannot abide discourses of government and state, but delighteth to hear old Canterbury tales to which she is very attentive',
²⁰
wrote a courtier to a friend in Venice. It was almost as if senility was beginning to manifest itself in the sovereign. ‘The Queen is wholly directed by Mr Secretary who now rules all as his father did,'
²¹
bemoaned another courtier.