“And who
is
that man, if not Lord Mountjoy?” she asked, her voice suddenly icy.
Essex felt a wrench in his gut.
Sweet Jesus, this was her trap!
“You claim your greatness to be second in the kingdom only to my own,” she went on. “I can now see that
you
are the only person capable of cleansing ‘the Irish stable.’ Do you not agree?”
Yes, he did agree, but not as a military commander trudging round that
wretched country, but as an
adviser—
replacement for her beloved Burleigh
.
Essex saw the beginning of a smile form on Elizabeth’s thin lips and he felt blood and gorge rising in him. She was still as sharp as a blade, this skinny old harridan. How could he have been so easily fooled by her? Of course, in some part of her she trusted him like no one else to vanquish the Irish rebels. But that was not all. He knew in his heart that the wily old queen was finally exacting her revenge on him, revenge for the exasperating paces he ’d put her through these last years. With great glee she would send him off to that savage land and its endless, bloody conflict.
’Twas a means to rid herself of a troublesome competitor for her people ’s love. She had finally realized there was no way that a faded, feeble old woman could compare with a young, wildly popular soldier. A hero.
A
man.
God damn the woman! She was aware that he, like so many before him, would likely fall into disgrace in Ireland. He could very well die. With her gentle concern and subtle trickery, Elizabeth had taken his boastful words, twisted them into a dangerous web, and reeled him in.
Now the only honorable way out, he realized with growing horror, was passage to a blighted hellhole.
“Then you name me Lord Lieutenant of all the armed forces in Ireland?” he said.
“I do, my lord Essex. I will inform the Council of it. There is no one more suitable than yourself for the position. No one but myself and you are—by the grace of Mistress O’Malley,” said the queen, smiling at her own pun, “so intimate with the workings of the Irish mind. Do you not agree?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Shaken by her deception Essex searched desperately to discover one last opening into the queen’s softness. “Elizabeth—” he said, ashamed that his voice was pleading, but she quickly interrupted him.
“I’m very tired, Robin,” she said. “You must leave me now. Call my women for me as you go.”
“Of course.”
Thunderstruck by this old woman’s utter triumph, Essex backed to the door. As it slammed shut behind him, the guards dipped their heads in respect. But as he exited the queen’s chamber shaking with rage, the new Lord Lieutenant of the Crown’s army in Ireland was sure he could hear Elizabeth laughing.
AM I GREAT, Essex?
Elizabeth’s question had clung fast to his mind like a barnacle to the hull of a carrack. Now as Essex moved round his bedchamber, packing his most personal belongings in a stout wooden chest, he was struck again by the memory—the guilelessness of the queen’s query, and her desperation for an answer both truthful and pleasing. He wondered why the words haunted him so, then realized one day during his preparations for departure to Ireland that he had, with this commission, finally been given the opportunity to prove his
own
greatness.
That idea, of late, had kept him awake more nights than he could remember, Frances lying beside him in that irritatingly sound sleep of hers. She possessed the same imperturbable quality in the daytime as well, and he supposed that without it their marriage would never have survived as it had. She was not unaware of his present obsession and his great, simmering cauldron of fears, but she refused to allow him to endlessly stir the pot in her presence. She had married him, borne his child. She suffered his absences, his mistresses, his transparent lack of love for her, and now his disease. As far as this good wife was concerned, Robert Devereaux had made his bed, and now he could very well lie in it.
Francis Bacon, so long his adviser, had fallen away from Essex’s orbit. He had raged to hear that Francis was fiercely opposed to Robert ’s command in Ireland. Only months before, Bacon had advised him that nothing could be better for England, or his friend ’s career. But since news of his commission, all his attempts to speak to Francis had failed, for the man had invented one excuse after another to be absent from Court.
Southampton might have served as his constant confessor, but he had fled to France after his secret impregnation of and marriage to the queen’s waiting lady Elizabeth Vernon, and on his return had been locked in Fleet Prison—Elizabeth’s punishment for his disgraceful behavior.
Essex had been upset at the thought of Ireland without Southampton beside him, and it had been with the greatest relief that just days ago he ’d learned of his friend’s early release from prison. Elizabeth had simply wished to show the extremity of her displeasure with her recalcitrant earl.
Essex, and Lady Southampton—whom he had taken into his home with her infant son during Southampton’s exile to France, and later, his incarceration—had gone to Fleet to meet the prisoner at his liberty. It had been a joyful reunion, but there ’d been no time in the days since to lay open his heart to Southampton. Instead he ’d spent his time embroiled in a battle with the queen to have his friend named Essex’s Master of Horse in Ireland. Elizabeth had been resolutely against the proposal—as she had been to his request for Robert’s young father-in-law, Christopher Blount, as an Irish Privy Councilor. The idea that Essex, in the coming military adventures, might be surrounded by strangers, and not his dearest friends, made him even more frantic.
Indeed, Elizabeth was making everything very, very difficult. One imagined she would offer Essex—her last hope for success in Ireland—
every possible means to that success. Instead she had pioneered pitfalls at every turn, the worst of which was her denial of his trusted friends as his high officers and councilors.
It was vainglorious, he knew, but Essex could not help but think of himself as England’s savior, willing sacrifice for an ungracious sovereign who would never realize his worth until he was dead. “If by my death,” he had written to Elizabeth the previous week, “I either quench the great fire of rebellion in Ireland, or divert these foreign enemies, I should enjoy such a sacrifice. However much you despise me, you will know you have lost a man who, for your safety, would make danger a sport and death a feast.” Her answer to his passionate missive had been an offhanded refusal of his request for an increasing of supplies and provisions for his troops. They would do well enough with the agreed upon amounts, she ’d said, and victuals could be supplemented with local spoils. Even more maddeningly, she had insisted that he not be allowed to return from Ireland to England as he saw fit, even if his troops were secured. He had objected forcefully to her absurd ruling. “What do you think, madam,” he had argued, face-to-face. “That I would use your army against you?” She had fought bitterly with him on the point, refusing to offer reasons for the prohibitions.
Only yesterday had Elizabeth signed a paper finally granting him the privilege of returning to England of his own volition.
Such irrational decisions—and there were too many to enumerate—
further robbed Essex of sleep. Sometimes, despite Elizabeth’s protestations that subjugating the Irish must be the last great accomplishment of her reign, he wondered at her blatant acts of self-defeat.
But there were other, more personal misgivings about the Irish Expedition. His health, for one. Though the mercury cure seemed to have halted the pox’s progress in his mind and body, much damage had already been done. He was generally weakened, and fell victim to myriad agues and rheums and fevers. His bowels were constantly in an uproar, and a flux had fallen on his left eye.
All these symptoms
, he mused,
and I
am embraced in the comfort of my own home.
So frightened by the prospect of illness in the distant, miasmic bogs of Ireland, Essex had contracted for an apothecary as well as his personal physician to accompany him for the duration of the war.
Perhaps the most troubling were his lapses in judgment. In his military career there had been moments of brilliance, when instinct and action were one, and outrageous chances were transformed into magnificent victories. But there was no denying that lately he had floundered, the Azores proving his nadir.
Worst of all Essex lacked confidence in his assessment of Tyrone.
Now he cursed his laziness in not studying the “Irish question” more rig-orously, and he wished that Grace O’Malley had spoken at greater length about Elizabeth’s once loyal earl who had donned the mantle of The O’Neill, then blithely snatched Ireland from England’s grasp. Essex had already underestimated the Earl of Tyrone once, disparaging his “ragtag army.” The battle at the Yellow Ford had proven his judgment appallingly misguided. Essex could simply not afford to make the same mistake again.
Downstairs he could hear the household bustling with last-minute preparations for his departure. Much of the family had gathered to see him off. Lettice and Christopher, his sister, Penelope, and—quite blatantly—her longtime lover, Lord Mountjoy, rather than her husband, Lord Rich. Mountjoy had fought beside Robert many times and recently had proven quite the gentleman, considering that Essex had wrenched the Irish command from his old friend’s grasp.
At the sharp rapping on his door, Essex looked up from his packing.
“Come in,” he said, wondering who in his family would have manners enough to knock before entering. “Francis!” he cried, openly delighted by the sight of the elder Bacon brother.
“I could not allow my lord Lieutenant to leave without a good-bye.” The words were sincere, but Francis Bacon’s attempts at mildness and levity were an immediate failure, and Robert’s happy surprise dissolved under Bacon’s lugubrious gaze.
“Come and sit down, Francis. I must finish packing before noon. My officers are coming to fetch me, and I mustn’t keep them waiting.”
“Yes, yes, go on with your business,” said Bacon, who moved into the room, carefully shutting the door behind him.
“If you’re going to lecture me or tell me not to go, it’s too late,” said Essex.
“I know that,” said Bacon, taking a seat on the bed. “I simply wish that by your going to Ireland there was even the remotest possibility of your pleasing the queen. But there is not.” Essex laid down the wool scarf Frances had embroidered for him and looked into Bacon’s sad eyes. No one, he realized, better understood the impossible position into which the earl had been placed by Elizabeth, nor the contortions and convolutions of her scheming mind.
“Into Ireland I go!” Essex cried with a theatrical flourish of his hand.
“The queen hath irrevocably decreed it, and the Council doth passionately urge it.” The starch went out of him then and he slumped down on the bed next to Francis Bacon. He sighed deeply and the two men sat in abject silence.
“I have no one to blame but myself,” Essex finally said. “I denied the position to anyone else and it fell to me. I’ve seen the fire burning, Francis, and I’ve been called to quench it. If I slip collar now, give no help, Ireland will be lost.”
“You know that failing will be dangerous,” Bacon said, “and succeed-ing too well even more so.”
“It is a strange world we live in,” Essex mused, “but I think ’tis better to command armies in Ireland than humors at Court.”
“I worry about your enemies at home. They’re sure to be advanced in your absence.”
“Southampton swears that I have a hundred thousand true hearts in England.”
“A lovely thought, and it may be true, but they are common men.
What you need are friends here at Court—in the center of the world.”
“In Ireland I mean to command well,” Essex announced, but even he could hear the uncertainty in his own voice.
“Then you must harden yourself, Robert. Become insensitive to the criticism of subordinates, stifle your impulse that all must love you. I’m no soldier, but I do know that the greatest commanders are those unafraid of being lonely and hated. And you
must obey Elizabeth’s rules.
I cannot stress this more strongly. Whatever you do, submit all major decisions to the approval of the Irish Privy Council. Think independently and your head will surely roll.”
Essex laughed ruefully. “I fear it will roll in any case. Tyrone ’s rebels are the least of our enemies. Disease in that country takes more of our soldiers than guns or swords, and corruption amongst the officers is appalling—worse even than the Netherlands. If disease is survived, desertion, famine, and nakedness sap men’s strength and heart. But the worst enemy of this war is the queen herself. She professes to desire victory, yet she is mean with supplies and victuals to make her army strong.
Even when she sends them, she allows such poor transport they have no way to find the troops.”
Now the two men sat sighing together.
“I suppose our only joy is King Philip’s death,” Bacon muttered.
“By God, he was a madman!”
“Is it unchristian of me to be glad of his horrible end? They say he suffered in full consciousness and excruciating pain for months, his body covered head to foot in odorous, weeping pustules. Still he prayed to God—endlessly. On his deathbed he wondered if he ’d burnt enough heretics.”
“As tormented as he was, I hear he wrote to Tyrone, congratulating him on the victory at Yellow Ford,” said Essex. “Do you suppose Philip’s son will prosecute this war with such enthusiasm?”
“No, I do not. But it makes no difference in the end. This is
Tyrone’s
rebellion now. He may have Spanish guns,” Bacon observed, “but it seems he has the heart and soul of the Irish people behind him. And perhaps that is all he needs.”
“Good God, Francis, if I listen one more minute to you, I shall lie down and open my veins! Give me
some
encouragement.”
“All right.” Bacon inhaled deeply and pinched his forehead beneath his fingers as he searched for some happy thought. “Despite her deviousness and seeming ill will,” he finally said, “I know that the queen still loves you very well. Above all men, Robert.
Above all men.
” Essex felt his eyes fill with tears. He grasped Francis Bacon’s hand and held it tightly. “I pray you’re right, Francis, with all my heart, for I wish to be valued by her above anyone who lives. Else I am ready to forget the world and be forgotten by it.”