Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (70 page)

The word ‘rebellion’ was a dangerous one. Essex wrote to James VI of Scotland proposing that they act together to remove from England Robert Cecil and Walter Raleigh; he told the Scottish king that ‘now am I summoned on all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under their burden’. James seems to have responded with caution. It is likely that Elizabeth and Cecil had some warning of these manoeuvres, but they did nothing; they were waiting, perhaps, for more open treason. Essex heard, for example, that the council was already interrogating certain prisoners in the Tower who had been allied with him. Elizabeth danced the coranto at court that Christmas.

At the beginning of 1601 Essex began to draw up further plans with the more vainglorious of his supporters whom he met at Drury House, the London residence of the earl of Southampton.
He had conceived a plan whereby he and his followers would seize the guard of the palace at Whitehall in order to allow him to enter the queen’s presence; Essex would then, with the threat of force behind him, ask her to remove his enemies from the court. If this were not successful he would demand the recall of parliament to give him justice.

Elizabeth and her councillors watched events with some trepidation. Would Essex strike more quickly than they anticipated? Harrington reported that ‘the madcaps are all in riot, and much evil threatened . . . she is quite disfavoured and unattired, and these troubles waste her much. She disregards every costly cover that comes to the table, and takes little but manchet [fine wheat bread] and savoury pottage. Every new message from the city disturbs her, and she frowns on all her ladies.’ He reported on a later occasion that ‘she walks much in her privy-chamber, and stamps with her foot at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword, at times, into the arras, in great rage’. The last touch is worthy of Shakespeare.

On 7 February Essex was summoned to appear before the privy council, but he declined the invitation. On the following morning, a Sunday, he gathered 300 of his supporters at Essex House; his plan was to proceed with them to Paul’s Cross, where the Londoners were accustomed to hear sermons on this day. He hoped to persuade the citizens and apprentices to join his forces, no doubt on the cry that he would ‘save the queen from her evil councillors’. To his intimates he had said that ‘the old woman was grown crooked in her mind as well as in her body’. There was a spy in his camp, one Ferdinando Gorges, who betrayed the scheme to Cecil. The lord mayor of London was ordered to keep the people of London within their houses, and the palace of Whitehall was given a double guard.

At approximately ten o’clock in the morning the lord chancellor and other royal officers arrived at Essex House and demanded admittance; after a delay, they were allowed to enter. Essex was asked why his supporters were gathered in arms, and he replied with an account of the wrongs to which he had been subject. ‘You lose time,’ his supporters urged him. ‘Away with them! They betray you.’ Essex then took the unfortunate step of imprisoning them within his house and, with his allies, of riding out into the streets.
They wielded pistols and rapiers, calling out ‘England is sold to Spain by Cecil and Raleigh! Citizens of London, arm for England and the queen!’

The citizens of London did not respond. The streets were quiet. Essex rode to Ludgate Hill, where he ordered a charge. Yet now his supporters, realizing their desperate plight, began to desert him. The queen had been given news of the tumult, and reacted calmly. While her attendants were in some disarray she proposed that she should go into the city and confront her opponents and that ‘not one of them would dare to meet a single glance of her eye’.

The confrontation was not necessary. Discomfited by his failure to raise the citizens, Essex rode on to Queenhithe, where he took a boat to Essex House; he then discovered that Ferdinando Gorges had released his prisoners. The house was soon surrounded by the royal forces and, after some tense negotiations from the leads of the mansion, he surrendered himself to the lord admiral. He and his principal supporters were taken to Lambeth Palace and on the following day were removed downriver to the Tower. Elizabeth told the French ambassador that ‘a senseless ingrate had at last revealed what had long been in his mind’. She issued a proclamation on the day after the failed rebellion, thanking the people of London for their loyalty.

Some residual support for Essex still existed in the purlieus of the court. Thomas Leigh, who had served under him in Ireland, proposed that four or five resolute men should force themselves into the queen’s presence and obtain from her a warrant for the release of Essex and Southampton. Leigh was denounced and arrested that night outside the queen’s supper room. On the following day he was tried, convicted and executed. In the middle of February the queen issued another proclamation in which she ordered all vagabonds, idlers, newsmongers and tavern frequenters to leave London on pain of death.

On 19 February Essex and Southampton were tried by their peers in Westminster Hall. Both men denied the charge of treason, but their guilt was taken for granted. They argued with their prosecutors, but to no avail. Essex, dressed all in black, declared ‘I have done nothing but that which by the law of nature and the
necessity of my case I was enforced into.’ These were not concepts recognized by common law, and seem to be borrowed from what might be called the chivalric code. They could not save him. After sentence of execution was passed against him, he remained calm enough. ‘Although you have condemned me in a court of judgment,’ he told his judges, ‘yet in the court of conscience you would absolve me.’ Two days later Cecil and some other councillors were asked to visit Essex in the Tower. They found him much changed, declaring himself to be ‘the greatest, most vilest and most unthankful traitor that has ever been in the land’. He admitted that, while he lived, the queen would not be safe.

It was the last of the aristocratic risings of England, like that of the Percys in the early fifteenth century; Essex did not have the same level of regional or territorial support, but the complex motives of honour and of valour were the same. It was almost a medieval event. As the earl of Southampton had said to Sir Robert Sidney in the final siege of Essex House, ‘You are a man of arms, you know we are bound by nature to defend ourselves against our equals, still more against our inferiors.’ A band of brothers, many of them related by blood, Essex and his supporters were aroused by the old and noble code of honour but, in the court of Elizabeth, it was no longer enough.

The admission of Essex that he had committed treason came too late. Elizabeth graciously consented to his private execution by beheading, and at the same time she commuted Southampton’s sentence to that of life imprisonment. On 25 February Essex was brought to a scaffold that had been erected in the courtyard of the Tower. He was wearing doublet and breeches of black satin, covered by a black velvet gown; he also wore a black felt hat. He always played his part. At the last moment he turned his neck sideways and called out, ‘Executioner, strike home!’ It took three strokes to sever his head from his body. ‘Those who touch the sceptres of princes,’ the queen observed, ‘deserve no pity.’

After the execution of the earl of Essex, some criticized the queen for her hardness of heart. It was said that the people were weary of an old woman’s rule and that her public appearances were not greeted with the old jubilation. One Kentish man was summonsed for saying that it ‘would never be a merry world until Her Majesty was dead’. When a constable told a yeoman to obey the queen’s laws, the man replied, ‘Why dost thou tell me of the queen? A turd for the queen!’

When she summoned her last parliament in the autumn of 1601, it became notable for its fractiousness and confusion. The customary calls of ‘God save your majesty’ were subdued. When passing a group of irritable members of parliament, she moved her hand to indicate that she needed more room.

‘Back, masters,’ the gentleman usher called out.

‘If you will hang us, we can make no more room,’ one member replied. Elizabeth looked up at him, but said nothing.

The matter of taxation was the cause of much turmoil. The cost of Mountjoy’s campaign against Tyrone in Ireland was high, compounded by the dispatch of Spanish troops to that country in the rebel cause. The subsequent financial burden on the English was considered onerous, with the poor having to sell their ‘pots and pans’ to meet the price of the subsidy. When one member remarked
that the queen ‘hath as much right to all our lands and goods as to any revenue of her crown’ the commons proceeded to ‘hem, laugh and talk’. Bad temper was in the air. Speakers were ‘cried or coughed down’ and the voting provoked pulling and brawling. In the end, however, Elizabeth received the subsidy she had asked for.

The other contentious issue was that of monopolies. These were patents granted to individuals which allowed them to manufacture or distribute certain named articles for their private profit. It was a device by which Elizabeth could confer benefits on favoured courtiers without putting her to any personal expense. ‘I cannot utter with my tongue,’ one member said, ‘or conceive with my heart the great grievances that the town and country which I serve suffereth by some of these monopolies.’ Another member began to list the articles so protected, from currants to vinegar, from lead to pilchards, from cloth to ashes:

‘Is bread not there?’

‘Bread?’

‘Bread?’

‘This voice seems strange.’

‘No, if order be not taken for these, bread will be there before the next parliament.’

The queen had heard of these complaints and summoned the Speaker. She told him that she would reform the procedure on monopolies; some would be repealed and some suspended. None would be put into execution ‘but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people’. She had anticipated a crisis and had resolved it.

Parliament sent a deputation to thank her, and at the end of November she addressed her grateful Commons in the council chamber at Whitehall. She told them that ‘I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good’. She added that ‘it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good’. It was not the last of her public speeches but it was one of the most memorable.

There was little, if any, mention of the succession during this parliament. It is likely, to put it no higher, that she had come to
believe that James, the son of Mary, queen of Scots, should ascend the throne after her. She may not have known that Robert Cecil, now her most prominent councillor, had been engaged in secret negotiations with him; she must have suspected, however, that he was now the favoured heir. But she kept her silence. Although she was often accused of indecision or prevarication, there were occasions when she simply wished to conceal her intentions.

In April 1602, at the age of sixty-eight, the queen took part in the energetic dance known as the galliard. At the beginning of the following month she rode out to Lewisham for ‘a-Maying’. She told the French ambassador that ‘I think not to die so soon, and am not as old as they think’. She continued to ride as often as the opportunity occurred. When one of her relations, the second Lord Hunsdon, suggested that she should no longer ride between Hampton Court and Nonsuch, she dismissed him from her presence and refused to speak to him for two days.

Yet the signs of ageing were unmistakable. Her eyesight was becoming weaker and she was growing more forgetful. She could remember faces, but sometimes not names. After she had gone riding her legs were often ‘benumbed’. Sometimes she needed help to mount her horse or to climb stairs. She told one of her ladies, Lady Scroope, that one night she had seen a vision of ‘her own body, exceedingly lean and fearful in a light of fire’. ‘I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck,’ she told the earl of Nottingham. ‘I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’

When in the early spring of 1603 another of her relations, Sir Robert Carey, came to greet her he found her in chastened state. ‘No, Robin,’ she told him, ‘I am not well.’ She described her indisposition to him, a narrative that was punctuated with many sighs. On 19 March the French envoy told his master that for the last fourteen days she had eaten very little and slept very badly. Another contemporary reported that she ‘had fallen into a state of moping, sighing, and weeping melancholy’. She was asked by one of her attendants whether she had any secret cause for her grief. She replied that ‘I know of nothing in this world worthy of troubling me’.

For four days she sat upon cushions in her privy chamber,
gazing down at the floor and rarely speaking. She was by now unclean and emaciated. ‘I meditate,’ she said. Robert Cecil remonstrated with her.

‘Madam, madam, to content the people you must go to bed.’

‘Little man, little man, the word
must
is not to be used to princes.’