Tudor (57 page)

Debate on the succession was now forbidden as treason, but the rival Essex and Cecilian factions made frantic – if secret – efforts to secure the throne for the heir who they believed would best represent their future interests.
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William Cecil's association with the execution of King James' mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, saw him remain allied to the cause of Katherine Grey through his continued friendship with her widower, the Earl of Hertford. Unfortunately for the Cecils, Katherine Grey's eldest son had married the daughter of a mere gentleman, which did nothing to boost his royal status.

Essex was allied to by far the stronger candidate, King James. He was indisputably royal, and his wife, Anne of Denmark, delivered their first son, Henry, in 1594. James' candidature also had the advantage of attracting followers from across the religious spectrum. The so-called Puritans backed James because the Scottish church was far more Protestant than the one Elizabeth allowed. Catholics, on the other hand, saw James as the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they
regarded as virtually a martyr, and many believed he would allow Catholics the freedom to practise their faith.

There was, however, to be one last attempt to move the succession out of the Tudor bloodline. This came from another group of Catholics: those who suspected that James would never grant religious toleration, and who sought a Catholic successor to Elizabeth. In November 1595 a book written by English members of the Jesuit order was published under the name R. Doleman. Entitled
A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland
it was to have a huge impact on the succession debate.

‘Doleman' claimed that England had long been what was, to all intents and purposes, an elective monarchy. Henry VII had no blood claim to the English throne, yet his crown was endorsed by Parliament. Clearly ‘ancestry of blood alone' was not of primary importance. It was, however, accepted as vital that a monarch have all the attributes of honour necessary to majesty and, Doleman argued, there was no such candidate within the Tudor family. All were tarred by illegitimacy or poor marriages, save James, who was disqualified under English law because his mother had plotted against Elizabeth.

Having dismissed the Tudor candidates, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth, ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion'.
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It was an argument that Protestants had made in the 1550s, and in the next century the exclusion of Catholics from the throne would become incorporated into English law. On this basis England would accept Dutch and German Protestants as their reigning kings. Doleman's argument was a precursor to this with Catholics told they could look to Europe for a monarch of their own faith, and that they were blessed with an excellent candidate: Philip II's favourite daughter, the twenty-nine-year-old infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia.

Like her father, Isabella was a descendant in a legitimate bloodline from John of Gaunt. ‘A princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety', she also came from a rich kingdom, and was less likely to
‘pill and poll' her English subjects than James, the king of poverty-stricken Scotland.
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The Doleman arguments severely damaged the cause of Katherine Grey's eldest son, while also tapping into nationalist sentiment against ‘the old beggardly enemy', the Scots. Everything was thus left to play for when André Hurault Sieur de Maisse, the ambassador of the French king Henri IV, arrived in England in 1597.

Elizabeth's kingdom had sunk into the kind of malaise it had known at the close of Mary I's reign. The people were bowed by successive harvest failures, disease, and the costs of war. The national mood was cynical and Elizabeth often ill, as de Maisse soon found. His first audience was put off because the queen had toothache, but on 8 December he was at last invited to the court at Whitehall. The Frenchman's barge pulled up near the entrance, a dark, covered alley from where he stepped into a low hall. A flight of steps took de Maisse to a series of small and gloomy rooms above. From there he was escorted to the Privy Chamber, with its giant Holbein mural of Henry VIII, codpiece thrust forward, and the fragile, receding figures of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. On the far side of the room were the queen's ladies and several councillors. Amongst them William Cecil, so ‘very old' he had to be ‘carried in a chair'. Also sitting, but under a cloth of estate, and on a raised platform, was the shrivelled figure of Elizabeth I.

As the queen rose to greet the ambassador, de Maisse saw she was decked out in an extravagant dress of silver gauze and white satin, the sleeves slashed with scarlet and sown with false sleeves that hung to the ground. Her red wig was spangled with gold and silver, and two girlish curls fell almost to her shoulders. Her face, however, was ‘very aged', ‘long and thin, her teeth . . . very yellow and unequal'. Indeed she had lost so many teeth that he found ‘one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly'. Elizabeth seemed fretful, twisting and untwisting her false sleeves, and she complained the winter room was too warm. This sensitivity to heat and anxious fiddling may be symptoms of the thyroid disease that her sister Mary I also suffered
from. Despite the bitter December cold she kept pulling open her silver dress, exposing her wrinkled breasts, and eventually demanded the fire be doused with water.
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De Maisse came to notice that Elizabeth often wore low-cut dresses, after the fashion for unmarried girls. She feared that the older and nearer to death she was assumed to be, the bolder her enemies would become, so she dressed youthfully, wore thick make-up, and she would skip off to her rooms after their meetings, almost coquettishly. When she joked that she was ‘foolish and old', de Maisse recognised that he was expected to demure. He often heard Elizabeth talk proudly ‘of the friendship her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would rather die than see any diminution of the one part or the other'.
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But it was also clear to him that the ordinary people hated her favoured servant William Cecil ‘strangely', and some courtiers seemed to view her almost with contempt.

In the previous century it had been noted a king had ‘a prerogative in his array above all others, whereby his dignity is worshipped'. The same held true for a reigning queen, yet there were times when Elizabeth had to remind her attendants of this. A famous story told by Elizabeth's godson, Sir John Harington, described how once she was so irritated by the envious attention being attracted by a maid of honour's wonderful gold and pearl trimmed velvet gown, that she decided to dress in it herself. It was far too short for her and, as she showed it off, she asked the owner if she agreed it was ‘ill-becoming'. The girl nervously admitted it was; ‘Why then if it become not me, as being too short, I am minded it shall never become thee, as being too fine, so it fits neither [of us] well', Elizabeth snorted. The girl never wore it again at Elizabeth's court, but she did put it aside, hoping to wear it when the queen died.
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More dangerous than the impertinence of Elizabeth's maids were the views of senior figures expressed to de Maisse by the royal favourite, the Earl of Essex (‘a man of great designs', the ambassador judged). The earl complained bitterly to the Frenchman of Elizabeth's
habit of stalling decisions, saying ‘they laboured under two things at this court, delay and inconstancy', and these he judged ‘proceeded from the sex of the queen'.
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Essex was keen to pursue the war with Spain vigorously, but was being frustrated at every turn. William Cecil feared the military costs were driving social unrest. The queen shared his concern, although, being a woman, her wish for peace was ascribed merely to a lack of martial qualities. De Maisse reported a strong feeling at court that England would never again submit to female rule.

That new year of 1598, there was, one courtier recalled, ‘a kind of weariness of the time,
mundus senescit
, that the world waxed old'.
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William Cecil died on 4 August 1598, aged seventy-seven, leaving the queen bereft. The tenth anniversary of the Armada was approaching, there was no end in sight to that war, and only twelve days later she was faced also with a war of liberation that exploded in Ireland. It was to be there that Essex's contempt for the queen as a military leader emerged most strongly. Sent by Elizabeth to crush the rebel leader Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Essex ignored her orders and made a truce, before returning to court in September 1599, hoping to justify his actions. Elizabeth had, however, lost all trust in her former favourite. She froze him out and denied him income, leaving him facing financial and political ruin. ‘The queen knows well how to humble the haughty spirit', her godson Harington observed, but he also predicted ‘the haughty spirit knows not how to yield'.
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On the evening of 7 February 1601, a group of Essex's inner circle of friends paid the Lord Chamberlain's players forty shillings to perform William Shakespeare's play ‘of the deposing and killing of that king, Richard II'. The players warned the men that the play was so old and out of use they would have little company for it. But their clients insisted, and if the stands were largely empty in the Globe for the play, the clients, at least, were there: Sir Charles and Sir Jocelyn Percy, Lord Monteagle, and many other court gallants. As the play unfolded the character of John of Gaunt bemoaned an England that has been allowed to go to rack and ruin: ‘this scepter'd isle . . . This
precious stone set in the silver sea . . . This earth, this realm, this England' was ‘leased out' and ‘bound in with shame'. The audience of swordsmen in silk and lace were now ready to right such wrongs, with the play signalling the launch of a coup.
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The following day Essex marched from Ludgate to St Paul's with 300 of his young followers. They included the most glamorous of the new generation of noblemen: the Lords Monteagle and Lumley, the Earls of Southampton and Rutland. All Essex needed was the people to rally to his call and the last of the Tudors would be overthrown. But Londoners, whom Elizabeth had wooed since her smiling appearance following her coronation in January 1559, remained loyal to their queen. As Essex had marched down the narrow streets with his friends they merely gaped at his swordsmen, and ‘marvelled that they could come out in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday'.

Within a fortnight of Essex's surrender Elizabeth had signed his death warrant – but in death he became the hero he had never quite managed to be in life. Shakespeare's Gaunt had died with the hope that ‘Though Richard my life's counsel would not hear/My death's sad tale may yet undeaf his ear'. The anger that had fuelled Essex's popularity still burned: the ‘scandal' of the condition of England had not changed, and if William Cecil was dead, his son Robert ‘the devil' had taken his place. People hoped Elizabeth would now remember Essex's complaints, and ballads romanticising him were soon heard being sung even at court and despite his traitor's death.
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Elizabeth's health and spirits deteriorated over the following months and by October she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. At the opening of her last parliament in November 1601, she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes. Many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks on the monopolies Elizabeth had granted to favoured servants. Robert Cecil had tripled the price of starch since he had been granted the monopoly on it. But, while he and other monopoly holders argued fiercely in their defence,
Elizabeth was sufficiently concerned by the expressions of public anger to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.

A few days later Elizabeth received a parliamentary deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall, where they delivered their fulsome thanks. The men then listened in silence as the queen spoke. ‘Although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves', she told them; ‘Of myself I must say this . . . my heart was never set upon worldly goods, but only for my subjects' good. What you do bestow on me, I will not store up, but receive it to bestow on you again.' Her speech was described as one of ‘golden words'. But when Parliament was dissolved in December 1601, Elizabeth recalled in her closing statement those who had sought to kill her by ‘many and divers stratagems'.
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Elizabeth feared the bond with her people was breaking. In June 1602 she was overheard complaining desperately to Robert Cecil about ‘the poverty of the state, the continuance of charge, the discontentment of all sorts of people'. She admitted to the French ambassador that she was weary of life, and wept over Essex's death.
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He had been all she had had left of the man she had loved as a young queen, yet he had betrayed her, and now he was being idolised, even despite the threat he had posed to her life. The last pageants held in Elizabeth's honour that year venerated her as the ‘queen of love and beauty', timeless and unchanging; but as Elizabeth's depression deepened, whispers about the succession became urgent once more.

King James' agents were working hard to gather support from powerful families offering ‘liberty of conscience, confirmation of privileges and liberties, restitution of wrongs, honours, titles and dignities'. Many responded positively, but this was only because there was no outstanding English candidate. People did not wish to be ruled by either the Spanish Isabella or the Scottish James. There were rumours that, in order to create a viable English successor, a group of courtiers were planning to marry Margaret Douglas' granddaughter, the twenty-seven-year-old Arbella Stuart, to Katherine Grey's grandson,
the sixteen-year-old Edward Seymour, ‘and carry the succession that way'.
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Such a marriage would recall that between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, in that it would unite the lines of Henry VIII's sisters in a new union dynasty. But did it also offer the promise of peace to a nation on the brink of an uncertain future? That seemed less likely.