Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (43 page)

In 1596, Ralegh suffered the humiliation of having Essex put over his head to command the expedition which took Cadiz and burned a Spanish fleet, with Ralegh serving as his deputy. The closeness that had seen Essex act as godfather to Ralegh’s first child had been replaced by a jealous mistrust curdling into mutual hatred. Ralegh resented Essex for having
taken his place in the queen’s heart; while Essex became convinced that Ralegh was conspiring with Robert Cecil – who had replaced his father Lord Burghley as Elizabeth’s senior statesman – to destroy him. But Essex needed no extra enemies; he was, as Francis Bacon would point out at his trial, his own most dangerous foe.

Elizabeth was determined to quell a grumbling guerrilla war led by the Irish nobleman, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, against rapacious English colonisation. In 1599 Essex was given command of a large army, with orders to crush the revolt. But instead of ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ as Shakespeare flatteringly wrote of him in
Henry V
, Essex negotiated a truce with Tyrone, before rushing back to England after only six months’ absence to explain his actions to a furious Elizabeth.

Deliberately defying the queen’s orders to stay at his Irish post, Essex, sweaty and mud spattered, stormed unannounced through the queen’s privy chamber into her bedchamber. It was early and he caught the old lady at her toilette. Bald and wrinkled as she was, denuded of the powders, potions, wigs and stays she used to prop up the illusion of youth, it was a cruel revelation of the Goddess Gloriana’s mortality. Icily, Elizabeth refused to listen to Essex’s excuses and his furious denunciations of his enemies. He was placed under arrest. Kept sequestered from his family, Essex’s disgrace can be judged from the fact that Elizabeth denied him permission to write to his wife after she had given birth to a baby girl. Only when Essex sank into what appeared a terminal decline did the queen allow him home.

Brooding on his wrongs in Essex House, his luxurious riverside home on London’s Strand, Essex plunged deeper into the mire. Believing that Cecil and Ralegh had poisoned the queen’s mind against him, he took the final, fatal step into treason. Cursing the queen as ‘crooked in her mind as she is in her carcass’, he gathered a wild assortment of malcontents: unemployed former officers who had served under him, Catholic conspirators, and Puritan preachers. He sent messages to King James VI in Scotland appealing for aid to overthrow Elizabeth. The messages were intercepted by Cecil’s secret service as he allowed Essex to stretch his neck further on the block awaiting him. He was only too obliging.

On the morning of Sunday 8 February 1601, Essex assembled a small army in the courtyard of Essex House. His chief lieutenant was the dandified Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. The grandson of the Henry
Wriothesley who had been Henry VIII’s chief enforcer and Tower torturer, young Southampton was a thug who also appreciated the arts. A close friend and patron of Shakespeare, and the dedicatee of the Bard’s poems
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, Southampton has been plausibly suggested as the mysterious ‘Mr W. H.’ to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated. The Bard and his patron may have enjoyed a homosexual affair. Southampton was certainly reported to have had a gay relationship with a fellow officer in Ireland, where he served Essex as captain of the cavalry. It was probably Southampton who suggested bribing Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Company to revive
Richard II
, with its theme of the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch, to put Londoners in the mood to back Essex’s revolt. Although the cast were innocent of any prior knowledge, the play was indeed staged at the Globe Theatre on Saturday 7 February: the eve of the rebellion.

The government, learning what was afoot, sent a Privy Council delegation to dissuade the rebels. For their pains they were locked in a room in Essex House. Then Essex’s 300 braves, with the earl at their head, sallied into the streets and headed east to capture the Tower. As he galloped along Essex yelled to bemused onlookers that there was a court plot to kill him. But Cecil had already proclaimed Essex a traitor and rebel, and no one joined him as he headed up Fleet Street to Ludgate. Surrounded, as Wyatt had been in the same streets half a century before, Essex and his men defended themselves with their swords, and in the melee several men were killed.

Essex and Southampton cut their way through to the river, found a boat, and rowed back to Essex House. They barricaded themselves in, refusing to surrender until guns were brought from the Tower armoury and fired a warning cannonade. At last, the earls bowed to the inevitable and gave up. The confused rebellion had lasted less than twelve hours. Soon, in the dead of night, Essex and Southampton were back on the river – this time being rowed downstream to the Tower. On arrival at Traitor’s Gate, Essex was taken to his new quarters: the tower in the north-west corner of the fortress behind St Peter ad Vincula that ever since has been called the Devereux Tower in honour of Essex’s family name. Southampton’s first thought was for his wife, and in a hurried note he told her of the failure of their revolt:

Sweet hart I doute not but you shall heare ere my letter come to you of the
misfortune of your frendes, bee not to[o] apprehensive of it, for gods will must be donn, & what is allotted to us by destiny cannot bee avoyded …

The queen had had a narrow escape. London was placed under martial law and Lord Thomas Howard was made constable of the Tower, charged with guarding the two earls. Eighty of Essex’s followers were examined at the Tower – none too gently – to provide the necessary evidence, and on 19 February the earls were rowed to Westminster Hall to stand trial.

Tried by their peers, the earls sat within a square of benches surrounded by their judges. Essex was dignified in black, while Southampton wore a gown with long sleeves in which his trembling hands were concealed. In an eloquently vicious speech, the chief prosecutor, Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke, called attention to the earl’s black garb, saying that if he had succeeded he would have worn ‘a gown of blood’. ‘It hath pleased God,’ Coke concluded, ‘that he who sought to be Robert the First of England should be Robert the last of his earldom.’ Essex replied that Coke’s eloquence was ‘the trade and talent of those who value themselves upon their skill in pleading inocent men out of their lives’. The trial was full of high drama. At one point, the tiny, hunchbacked figure of Robert Cecil appeared to deny Essex’s claim that he had plotted to put the Infanta of Spain on England’s throne. At another, Southampton claimed unconvincingly that he had tried to talk Essex out of their enterprise.

At last, as the wintry shadows gathered in the ancient hall, and candles were lit, the lords called for food, beer and baccy. The French ambassador, Monsieur de Boissise, wrote scornfully:

For while the Earl and the Council were pleading, my Lords guzzled as if they had not eaten for a fortnight, smoking also plenty of tobacco. Then they went into a room to give their voices; and there, stupid with eating and drunk with smoking, they condemned the two Earls.

Once back in the Tower, Essex refused to see his wife or children. Under the evil influence of the Revd Abdy Ashton, a Puritan preacher spying for the government, he wrote a four-page statement naming co-conspirators, including his own sister.

Although Essex claimed to have done with the ‘baubles’ of this world and to have his eyes firmly fixed on eternity, a tale about his last days in the Tower suggests that he still had hopes of the queen’s mercy. The story goes that a besotted Elizabeth had once given Essex a ring, telling him that
if he ever returned it, whatever his crime, he would be forgiven. Essex decided that the time had surely now come. Wrenching the ring from his finger and leaning out of the Devereux Tower, Essex entrusted his ring to a passing pageboy. He ordered the lad to take it to Lady Scrope, a female admirer of his at court, and via her to give it to the queen. The boy sped off on his mission. But instead of presenting the ring to Lady Scrope, he gave it to her sister, Lady Nottingham, wife of Lord Charles Howard, the Tower constable and one of Essex’s worst enemies. Lady Nottingham kept the ring and the secret to herself. Two years later, when both Lady Nottingham and the queen were near death, she told all to Elizabeth. The monarch cried in anguish, ‘God may forgive you – but I never can.’

Essex’s execution was fixed for Ash Wednesday, 25 February 1601. Elizabeth, fearing a violent popular reaction to the killing of the celebrity earl, had decreed that he be privately beheaded within the Tower’s walls. Essex would be the last person – and the only man (unless we count the messy deaths of the Duke of Clarence and Lord Hastings) – to be executed inside the fortress until a series of German spies were shot there in the two world wars. Elizabeth had ordered two executioners to attend, lest, as she explained, ‘should one faint the other may perform it’.

Informed that he would die the next morning, Essex told his guards that for all his former wealth he would be unable to tip them: ‘For I have nothing left save that which I must pay to the Queen in the morning.’ The earl spent his last night on his knees praying. They came for him at 7 a.m. It was a wet and chilly winter morning, and Essex wore a black felt hat, and a black velvet cloak over a black satin suit. He walked through the drizzle accompanied by several Puritan preachers. The earl mounted the scaffold on the same spot when Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Jane Grey had died.

Essex must have looked askance at his hated rival Ralegh, who, with grim satisfaction, was present in his capacity as captain of the Yeoman Guard. Ralegh had written a vicious letter to Cecil warning him not to reprieve Essex: ‘If you take it for good counsel to relent towards this tyrant, you will repent when it shall be too late.’ Now, after some in the crowd protested at his tasteless presence, Ralegh withdrew from the scaffold to the White Tower, where he watched from a window; although the story that he callously puffed a pipe of his imported tobacco as Essex died may be a malicious rumour.

Raising his voice against the wind and rain, Essex told the crowd that he had been justly tried and condemned; and rightfully ‘spewed out of the realm’. His sins, he said, were more numerous than the hairs on his head. ‘I have bestowed my youth in wantonness, lust, and uncleanness. I have been puffed up with pride, vanity and love of this wicked world’s pleasures.’ He protested, however, that he had never intended to harm the queen. Nor, he added, with a sly dig at Ralegh’s supposed atheism, had he ever disbelieved in God. His greatest regret, Essex concluded, was that men had died for his pride and ambition. Now he would atone. He asked those present to pray for and forgive him – as he ‘forgave the whole world’.

He was ready. From force of habit, he called for his manservant Williams to help him disrobe. But Williams was not there. Hair plastered against his wet skin by the rain, Essex had to remove his cloak and ruff himself, then unbutton his black doublet to reveal a splash of colour – his waistcoat, soon to be spattered with his own blood, was bright scarlet. Refusing a blindfold, he lay flat on the wet straw as psalms and prayers were intoned, before he flung out his arms and called on the headsman to strike home. But the man botched his job. The first blow of the slippery axe bit into the earl’s shoulder. The second also went astray. Only with the third stroke was that proud head off and in the executioner’s hands as he held it by the hair and asked the crowd to behold the head of a traitor.

Southampton’s obsequious conduct in court, and the intervention of Robert Cecil on his behalf, were enough to win him a reprieve – though he stayed in the Tower for the two years that Elizabeth had left to reign. The earl was comfortably lodged in an apartment at the east end of the Tower’s royal palace. Here he had a sitting room and bedchamber with mullioned windows rather than bars. The queen was merciful to the young dandy, allowing Southampton’s mother to visit her errant son. Elizabeth also allowed him medicines for his frequent chills and fevers which were exacerbated by the unsalubrious Thames and the Tower’s filthy moat.

Southampton had companions in his captivity. He had one attendant, Captain Hart, who grumbled that he was a prisoner too. More welcome than the grouchy Hart was Southampton’s pet, a faithful black and white cat, which, Tower legend alleged, had made its way to his quarters via the chimney. The cat featured in a famous portrait that Southampton had painted of himself after his imprisonment. An inset shows a picture of the Tower itself with the defiant Latin tag ‘
In vinculis invictus
’ (‘In chains unbowed’).

CHAPTER TWELVE

PAPISTS, PLOTS AND POISONS

DESPITE THE RIVALRY
of Ralegh and Essex, real power in Elizabethan England was in the hands of less glamorous figures who had never boarded a Spanish galleon, sunk in an Irish bog, sought for El Dorado, or singed the King of Spain’s beard, but who controlled the destinies of the kingdom from behind the scenes. These were her secretaries of state William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and after him his hunchbacked second son Robert Cecil, who equalled and perhaps surpassed his father in guile, ruthlessness and his dedication to maintain England as a Protestant power. The Cecils were sustained by the queen’s lifelong companion Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and by the creator and master of her secret service, the austere Sir Francis Walsingham.

This quartet were responsible for resisting the twin threats of Spanish invasion from without and Catholic conspiracy to kill the queen from within. So long as Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, lived – especially after her Scottish subjects kicked her out and she fled to England in 1568 – she would pose an intolerable threat to a Protestant England. As a succession of plots were uncovered by Walsingham’s spies, so the cells of the Tower filled with genuine Catholic conspirators, compromised Catholic noblemen, innocent Catholic citizens and hunted Catholic priests. Elizabeth’s promise not to ‘make windows into men’s souls’ was forgotten in the interests of the state’s survival.