The Boleyns (24 page)

The Queen disliked war for a number of reasons, several of them gender related. In the first place it was very expensive, and she hated asking her subjects for money almost as much as they disliked paying it. However, she was also very aware that, unlike a king, there was no glory to be gained for her upon the field of battle. Women, even queens, did not lead armies, and this meant that she was deeply suspicious of those men who could. Like her father, she disliked the pretensions of the nobles of lineage, and especially their military culture, which had survived half a century of discouragement from her father and grandfather.
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The best way to avoid calling upon their services was to avoid war, and that she did successfully for nearly thirty years. Such limited campaigns as were fought in the early years saw the Duke of Norfolk commanding in Scotland in 1560, and the Earl of Warwick in France in 1562–3, but the latter was a peer of her own creation and the Duke was no great soldier. Neither was likely to come home in triumph and upstage their mistress. When she was forced into war in 1585, she gave the principal land command to her favourite the Earl of Leicester, and then recalled him in disgrace when he accepted (on her behalf) the governor generalship, which was contrary to his instructions.
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For serious fighting, both in the Low Countries, Brittany and Ireland she preferred to rely on professionals like Sir John Norris and Lord Mountjoy, who had technical competence and no social pretensions. One of the reasons why she favoured the ‘sea dogs’ was that they were good sea fighters, the other reason was that they were men of humble origin, and entirely dependent upon her for their wealth and status. Elizabeth was very conscious of the fact that her mother’s principal opponents had been the old nobility, who had regarded her as a parvenue, a description which they also applied,
sotto voce
, to the Tudors.
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When Elizabeth donned armour and went to harangue her troops at Tilbury in 1588, she was consciously abandoning her habitual gender role, but that was in an emergency, and in spite of her rhetoric she was not called upon to fight. Although Elizabeth was very reluctant to admit that there were any aspects of government not ‘pertinent to women’, war was definitely off limits. Ironically, she was to spend almost a third of her reign fighting Spain, and successfully outfaced that most military of monarchies.

If Elizabeth had been a consort, then her husband would have condemned her for adultery with Robert Dudley, in much the same way as her mother had been condemned for her liaison with Henry Norris. The evidence would have been similar, persuasive but circumstantial and probably misleading. As it was, their relationship continued, sexual in its nature, but increasingly political in its expression. In 1585 she sent him to the Low Countries, in command of her forces there, but recalled him when he became embroiled in the politics of that divided country.
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He resented this and they quarrelled bitterly, but he never forfeited his special relationship, and when he died in September 1588, it transpired that the Queen had kept all his letters, even those which most revealed his hurt at her lack of trust in him. In spite of his marriage and her continued celibacy, it was a lovers’ relationship in every respect short of full consummation.
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When she had invested him with the Garter, way back in 1559, she had deliberately tickled the back of his neck, and that kind of playfulness endured in their dealings with each other, until the very end of his life. We do not, of course, know what kind of a woman her mother would have been if she had lived into her fifties, but the similarities between mother and daughter are so marked, that we can probably reconstruct the hypothetical Anne of the 1550s in the person of Elizabeth.

The Earl of Leicester left no legitimate son, and he was eventually, in 1618, followed in his title by his nephew Robert Sidney. He did, however, leave a stepson, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, Lettice’s son by her first marriage, who had succeeded to his father’s title at the age of ten in 1576.
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As a ward of the Crown, his education was in the hands of the Master of the Wards, Lord Burghley, who sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge at the precocious age of twelve in 1578. His mother appears to have had little or no say in this process, which was probably just as well because she was barred from the court after her marriage to Leicester, and the Queen never forgave her. Unlike many young noblemen, Devereux seems to have taken his education seriously, and actually proceeded to the Master of Arts degree in 1582.
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He may well have seen very little of his stepfather by that time, and it was probably Burghley who introduced him to the court in 1584, when he was eighteen years old. He was an immediate success, particularly with the Queen, being very handsome and having excellent manners. He was to become in due course the son which she had never had, and he quickly became his stepfather’s protégé. In 1585 he accompanied Leicester to the Netherlands, and raised a band to serve under him, for which either Leicester or Burghley must have paid since he had not yet achieved his majority. In the field he quickly began to display that combination of personal courage and bad military judgement which was to mark his later career. In spite of his irresponsible conduct, he showed bravery in some small scale actions, and that gave his stepfather sufficient excuse to knight him. He also earned the friendship of Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney, and inherited the latter’s sword when he was killed in action at Zutphen in 1586.
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When Leicester was recalled in November of that year, the Earl of Essex accompanied him, but was not politically important enough to share the former’s disfavour. Indeed he quickly slotted back into the routines of the court, and by the spring of 1587 was clearly the Queen’s new favourite. Still short of his twenty-first birthday, it was noted that he was spending a great deal of time in her company:

When she is abroad, nobody [is] near her but my Lord of Essex; and at night my Lord is at cards, at one game or another with her [so] that he cometh not to his own lodging till the bird sing in the morning …
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Perhaps it is also true that she enjoyed his conversation, being a young man (relatively) fresh from the university, and no doubt well stocked with that classical lore which she so much appreciated. The Earl of Leicester had become lord steward of the household in succession to the Earl of Lincoln in 1584, and his former office of master of the horse had been left vacant. Now in September 1587 it was conferred upon the Earl of Essex, who thus acquired a post not only famous for the intimacy with the sovereign which it carried, but also worth £1,500 a year. Since he would have taken livery of his father’s lands at about the same time, on achieving his majority, he became within a few weeks a man of substance, which was just as well because his tastes were running to expensive clothes and entertainments, and his expenditure was soon running ahead of even his sizeable income.
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When the Earl of Leicester died in the following year, it seemed to observers that he was immediately born again in the person of his brilliant twenty-two-year-old stepson. Yet those who were close to the Queen knew that their relationships were very different. Robert Dudley had been an old and dear friend, in spite of their tiffs and disagreements – a former lover with a very special place in her heart. Robert Devereux was young and handsome and dashing, just the kind of lad to bowl over an ageing spinster, but the sexual element in their relationship, if it existed at all, was quite different in its nature. Elizabeth would never have taken Devereux as a lover, even if he had been willing; rather he was part of the fantasy world of sexual delusion which she created around herself in the later years of her life.
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This was a world in which courtiers were still supposed to love the Queen, and bombarded her with flattery, telling her she was the most beautiful woman in the world, a pathological lie which both she and they understood. It was world of make believe, and into this world the Earl of Essex with his youthful good looks and skilful word play fitted perfectly. He was to an extent also self deceived, believing himself to be great soldier and a statesman who was only waiting his chance to take over the realm as he had already taken over its mistress. Elizabeth loved these fantasies, and pandered to them, but they did not for a moment deceive her. Beneath the powder and the paint and the wigs which appearances demanded, her shrewd political brain was still in full working order. Which was why the Earl of Essex found himself less important than he thought that he should have been in the political world of the 1580s.
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In truth, Essex was a deeply flawed character, lacking the substance that Robert Dudley had had, even as a young man. He was incurably vain – proud of his ancient lineage, his good looks and his imagined talents. He was intelligent, but chronically lacking in judgement, and was a slave to passionate emotions which he could neither conceal nor control. He made all the mistakes which an impulsive young man could make, but never learned from them, choosing to regard the hostile reactions of his fellow courtiers as evidence of jealousy and of conspiracy against him, never of his own impulsiveness. In July 1587, in the course of the summer progress, he quarrelled with Elizabeth herself, taking umbrage at some disparaging remarks about his mother which the Queen (who could not stand her) had made in a fit of bad temper. He then compounded his error by trying to blame Sir Walter Raleigh, a rival favourite, for turning the Queen against him, and stormed out of the house where the court was assembled, declaring that his affections were ‘so much thrown down’ that he was off to Flanders – no doubt to seek redemption on the battlefield.
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He seems to have regarded his success at court as some kind of birthright, and reacted with blank incomprehension to Elizabeth’s ill humour. Such a reaction would have been suicidal for most courtiers, but not for Essex. The Queen chose to regard it as an amusing tantrum, and peremptorily summoned him back to court. He seems to have had no idea what a narrow escape he had had, and in April 1589 he again left the court without licence, this time in a desperate effort to repair his parlous financial situation by joining what he took to be the plundering expedition led by Drake and Norris to Portugal. On 1 April he wrote to Sir Francis Knollys that his debts were ‘at least two or three and twenty thousand pounds’, and that her Majesty had been so good to him that he could not ask her for more, so there was ‘no way left but to repair myself by mine own adventure’.
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He apparently commandeered one of the Queen’s ships and set off as a kind of freelance addition to the expedition. A few days later Drake and Norris were appraised of this unwanted addition to their party, and instructed that when located he was to be returned to London. After a brief panic he was found, and ignominiously sent back.
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Again his transgression was forgiven, and in 1590, when he returned to pleading his financial plight, the Queen granted him his stepfather’s monopoly on the importation of sweet wines, which brought him an income of £2,500 a year, and transformed his circumstances – for the time being.

In 1591 he was humoured, if that is the right word, by being given command of an expeditionary force sent to help Henry IV in Normandy.
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He made a mess of his assignment, and this again led to a falling out with the Queen, but once again when he returned in October he managed to wheedle and flatter his way back into favour, aided on this occasion by the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh had disgraced himself by getting one of the Queen’s young ladies (Bess Throgmorton) with child in the summer of 1592. Against all the seeming odds, he was appointed to the Privy Council on 25 February 1593, and gathered round him a clientele of young hopefuls who saw him as the rising star in the political firmament.
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By this time he was locked into a feud with Lord Burghley’s equally up and coming son, Sir Robert Cecil, and petulantly regarded every set back to one of his clients as the result of Sir Robert’s scheming. Having aroused the hostility of the powerful Cecils, he was skating on thin ice, but for the time being continued to lead a charmed life in the eyes of the Queen. In 1596 he was given what he craved most, a chance to redeem his military reputation, and on 1 June sailed as joint commander (with Lord Charles Howard) of the expedition against Cadiz. This was one of the great successes of the war against Spain, and Essex should have returned covered with glory. Instead he chose to sulk, because his rash strategic advice had been rejected by the council of war, and he felt that Howard had been given more than his due credit for the victory.
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To add insult to injury, Sir Robert Cecil had been appointed to the vacant secretaryship while he was away. As usual, the Queen blandly ignored his tantrum, and gave him the command of another fleet, this time to intercept the Spanish American treasure fleet, in July 1597. The so-called ‘Islands voyage’ was a complete fiasco. That was not the Earl’s fault, because it was the weather which ruined it, but it did not sweeten his temper, or improve his standing in the council, which now began to matter to him. Lord Burghley died on 4 August 1598, and his lucrative mastership of the Court of Wards, which Essex coveted, was not immediately reassigned. This was probably due to Elizabeth’s distress at the death of her old friend and servant, rather than anything to do with Devereux, but he typically took it as a personal affront and made his displeasure clear. Then in 1599 he inadvertently talked himself into appointment as Lord Lieutenant in Ireland.
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His brief was to tackle the growing menace of the Tyrone rebellion, and he could have regarded it as a golden opportunity to display himself as England’s finest soldier. Instead he interpreted it as a plot by Sir Robert Cecil to get him away from the court, and he went to Ireland in a dangerous frame of mind. Having wasted his resources, and signed a disadvantageous truce with Tyrone, he decided to return to England without licence to explain his actions in person. Preceded by rumours of treason, on 24 September he quitted Dublin and headed straight for the court.
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Intending make his peace as usual with the only person who mattered, he burst unexpectedly upon the Queen, and was immediately placed under arrest. If Sir Robert Cecil was responsible for his disfavour, then Essex had walked straight into a trap, because this time Elizabeth was not to be placated. After nearly a year under house arrest, in August 1600 the Earl was released, but he was not permitted to return to the court, and his sweet wine monopoly was reassigned, threatening him with complete ruin. After more than a decade, he could no longer be regarded as a wayward youth, and the Queen was bitterly disappointed in him.
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For all his charm, he was taking himself far too seriously, and this time he had been dramatically disobedient. She may also have remembered that he claimed an ancient lineage, and may have been taking her favour for granted. The one thing Elizabeth Tudor could not endure was to be taken for granted. It had been part of her royal strategy from the beginning of her reign never to allow her ministers to do that, and she was not going to endure it now from the hands of a wayward noble. As she observed when terminating his monopoly ‘an unruly horse must be abated of his provender, that he may be the easier and better managed’.
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By the end of 1600 Essex’s debts had mounted again to £16,000 or thereabouts, and he was desperate.