father (and thus Edward III) was strengthened by that of her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, a descendant of the Dukes of Brittany to whom William the Conqueror had pledged feudal obedience.
The book claimed Isabella also had the personal attributes necessary in a great monarch. She was ‘a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety’ and, as she came from a rich kingdom, she was less likely to ‘pill and poll’ her English subjects than a poverty-stricken Scot.53 The arguments made the Infanta a powerful and believable candidate overnight. As a final touch Persons mischievously dedicated the book to Spain’s leading enemy at court: the Earl of Essex – he who had attracted such a large Catholic following. ‘No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity,’ Doleman wrote; ‘no man likes to have a greater part or sway in deciding this great affair.’
In his Tract Harington recalled that, as the pivotal year of 1598 opened, the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge ‘did both light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’.54 The Privy Council was half the size it had been at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and Burghley was so old and ill he had to be carried into meetings in a chair. He still pursued the cause of peace with Spain without success and the costs fell on a country burdened by a growing population and a series of harvest failures. As food prices rose, wages fell, men impressed for the war returned to vagrancy and theft and sedition increased. There were reports of the poor claiming that Philip II of Spain was the rightful King of England and that life had been better under his wife Mary I. The greatest danger for Elizabeth, however, was the discontent at court.
Years of simmering resentment between the Cecil and Essex factions reached boiling point in June when Philip II was dying and there were new hopes of peace. Burghley was keen to press ahead with negotiations with Spain. There was another terrible famine and he warned of ‘the nature of the common people of England [who are] inclinable to sedition if they be oppressed with extraordinary payments’. Essex, however, realised the power of Spain was waning and wanted to push home the advantage. The Queen supported the Cecils, and Essex’s irritation with her came out into the open in dramatic fashion at a Council meeting attended by Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Admiral and Sir Francis Windebank, Clerk of the Signet. The pretext for the argument was the choice of a new deputy for Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice was Essex’s uncle and principal supporter in Council, Sir William Knollys. Essex tried to dissuade her. When he knew he had failed he lost his temper and as the others looked on with horror, Essex suddenly revealed his pent-up contempt for the Queen, turning his back on her with a scornful look. Furious, Elizabeth hit him around the head and ordered him to be gone and be hanged. His hand went to his sword. Admiral Nottingham grabbed him and Essex checked himself, but he swore that he would not have put up with such an indignity from Henry VIII himself.
As Elizabeth absorbed the implications of her favourite’s behaviour Burghley left court for Bath hoping to recover his deteriorating health. Harington was also making use of the medicinal waters when Elizabeth sent Lady Arundel with a cordial for Burghley’s stomach along with a message, ‘that she did intreat heaven daily for his longer life – else would her people, nay herself stand in need of cordials too’. Burghley’s death, shortly afterwards on 4 August, came as a crushing blow to the Queen; all the more so when it was followed within weeks by the massacre of her troops at Yellow Ford in Ireland. For a decade the administration in Ireland had tried to curtail the power of Ulster’s greatest chieftain, the Earl of Tyrone, feudalising land tenure and centralising power. Tyrone had kept his freedom of action for a time by bribing corrupt officials and fighting proxy wars through followers he claimed he could not control. He had even seduced and married the young sister of Ulster’s chief commissioner Sir Henry Bagenal in an attempt to trap him in a blood alliance. This phoney war had ended on 16 August as Tyrone led an all-out fight for liberation, leaving Sir Henry Bagenal amongst the 2,000 loyalist dead.
The events that followed haunted Harington, as they did the Queen. Essex and his army had reached Dublin in mid-April 1599. The Irish Council advised him against attacking Tyrone in Ulster before the late summer and so he led the army south into Leinster, ‘the heart of the whole kingdom’, before going on into Munster. It was an arduous and bloody campaign. Harington wrote home thanking God, ‘that among so many as have been hurt and slain … and some shot even in the very ranks I was of, I have escaped all this while without bodily hurt’. Essex furthermore was no longer the confident, handsome young soldier he had once been. At thirty-two his hair had grown thin and he had to wear it short, except for one long lock behind his left ear, which he tucked into his ruff. His once round and amiable face was pinched, ‘his ruddy colour failed … and his countenance was sad and dejected’.55 He suffered terrible headaches – possibly a symptom of syphilitic meningitis – certainly his sense of judgement was abandoning him.
When Essex heard that his military successes were ignored at court and that he was being criticised for his failure to take on Tyrone directly, he considered bringing the army back from Ireland. He intended to use it to force Elizabeth to name James her heir and dispose of Cecil, Cobham and Ralegh once and for all, but his friend, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, dissuaded him. Instead Essex made the fateful decision to make a truce with Tyrone against royal orders and return to court to secure royal support for his military strategy. In the months that followed Essex’s subsequent arrest, his supporters had approached James asking him to invade England in support of the Earl. While James worked to raise the necessary funds they published pamphlets justifying Essex’s actions in Ireland. In the autumn of 1600 Elizabeth responded to these paper darts by stripping the Earl of his right to collect a tax on sweet wines. It left him facing financial ruin and Harington had looked on aghast as Essex shifted ‘from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proves him devoid of good reason or right mind’. He had guessed what lay ahead: ‘The Queen well knows how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knows not how to yield.’56
Increasingly unstable, Essex was ready to accept the most paranoid theories about Cecil. He knew his rival must be looking for a stronger candidate than Lord Beauchamp, whose candidature had been seriously weakened by the Doleman book. The Jesuit Robert Persons believed that Cecil was interested in Arbella’s claim. Cecil’s wife had died in 1598 and there were rumours in Europe that he even wanted to marry Arbella. Essex, however, became convinced that Cecil was plotting to place the Infanta Isabella on the throne together with her husband and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albert.* He reasoned that Cecil was the leading exponent of peace with Spain and his suspicions were raised further by the mysterious appearance of Cobham and Ralegh at a peace conference that took place in Boulogne in July 1600. They had not been sent in any official capacity and Essex was convinced they were acting with Cecil to make a secret deal with the Infanta and her husband.
Essex’s paranoia was fuelled by those around him, notably his sister Penelope Rich and his secretary, Henry Cuffe. The latter pointed out that Cecil was placing men he could trust in the crucial offices on which the defence of the realm rested. Ralegh had been given the governorship of Jersey in September 1600, ‘there to harbour [the Spaniard] upon any occasion’. Meanwhile, ‘In the east, the Cinq Portes, the keys of the realm,’ were in the hands of Lord Cobham, ‘as likewise was the county of Kent, the next and directest way to the Imperial city of this realm’. The navy and Treasury were in the hands of Cecil’s allies, Admiral Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, and Cecil had ‘established his own brother, the Lord Burghley’ as President of the North.57 Essex ignored the obvious point, made by the intelligence gatherer Thomas Phelipps, that Cecil was too closely associated with the persecution of Catholics to risk promoting a Catholic claim. Instead he decided to pre-empt Cecil’s supposed plans and seize the court.
On 7 February 1601, one of Essex’s inner circle of friends, the Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick, paid Shakespeare’s company 40