Tudor (58 page)

42

THE HOLLOW CROWN

E
LIZABETH'S GODSON
, S
IR
J
OHN
H
ARINGTON, WAS SHOCKED WHEN
he saw the queen at Whitehall for Christmas 1602. She was sipping from a golden cup to soothe her sore throat and could only whisper. She confessed she was eating little, and when the subject of the rebellion in Ireland came up, and with it Essex's name, she wept and struck her breast repeatedly.

Over the next few days it became apparent that Elizabeth was also growing forgetful. A number of men arrived at her request only to be dismissed in anger for appearing without an appointment. No one dared voice the seriousness of her condition, but Harington was convinced she only had months to live and, he noted, already courtiers were looking to the future, ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get'.
¹

A day or two later, on 30 December, Katherine Grey's widower, the sixty-three-year-old Earl of Hertford, received a visitor at his house in Tottenham. The man was a messenger from Arbella Stuart. It had been ten years since the twenty-seven-year old princess had last appeared at Elizabeth's court. Blonde and blue-eyed, she had been admired for her elegance of dress, ‘her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music'.
²
Elizabeth had become anxious that a party might build behind her claim, and had kept her ever since in rural exile, living at her grandmother Bess's new Hardwick
Hall. Arbella was lonely and desperate to marry, which she knew the queen would never permit. Arbella had heard often, however, about the secret marriage of her father, Charles Stuart, the brother of Lord Darnley, to Bess's daughter, and also of Hertford's secret marriage to Katherine Grey (her mother's godmother). She hoped Hertford would now not only sympathise with her plight, but help her do something about it.

One of Arbella's pages had suggested to her that Hertford's grandson Edward Seymour was the perfect groom for her. The child of Arbella's kinsman, David Owen Tudor, this page was a descendant of her ancestor Owen Tudor, through his illegitimate son, Sir David Owen. Before sinking into obscurity Owen's ‘other' family were now poised to play a small but significant role in the last chapter of the Tudors' royal story. According to the page, Hertford had once approached his father as a possible intermediary with Bess, to test the water for the arrangement of a marriage between Arbella and his grandson. Although she realised this had been some years in the past, Arbella was desperate for Hertford to know that she now wanted such a marriage to go ahead immediately. Her messenger relayed to Hertford her suggestion that Edward Seymour come to Hardwick Hall in disguise. If her grandmother, Bess, realised who he was, he would be shut out, Arbella warned. She suggested that by way of identification Seymour bring ‘some picture or handwriting of the Lady Jane Grey'.
³
‘The best thing', Arbella proposed, would be the farewell letter Jane wrote to her sister Katherine on the eve of her execution.

Hertford listened to Arbella's messenger with mounting fear and anger. Essex's death had enabled Robert Cecil to come to a secret accommodation with King James. Robert was not associated with the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, as William Cecil had been. Hertford accepted that without Robert Cecil's support, he could not hope to win the crown for his heirs. He was certain James VI of Scots would soon be James I of England, and intended to make the best of it. He certainly did not want any attention drawn to his former plans and
hopes. Hertford sent the messenger under guard to Robert Cecil the following day.

The queen took the news of Arbella's actions badly. It reminded her of the dark time when she had learned of Katherine Grey's marriage to Hertford over forty years earlier, and which had left her ‘the colour of a corpse'. When Arbella and her servants were interrogated at Hardwick, however, only a few servants and close family were found to have known anything about her plans. Robert Cecil judged it safe to leave Arbella in the care of her grandmother – safer, certainly, than placing her in the Tower where her presence might attract a little too much interest. Elizabeth was relieved and her health even seemed to rally. By mid-February she was well enough to grant an audience to a visiting Venetian ambassador at her grandfather's favourite palace, Richmond, with its towers and fourteen ‘cloud capped' cupolas.
⁴

The Venetian's first sight of Elizabeth was of her seated on her throne, dressed in a low-cut dress of silver and white taffeta trimmed with gold, and wearing a dramatic wig ‘of a colour never made by nature'. Elizabeth's powerful personal image would prove as durable as any of the palaces the Tudor kings had built, and the Venetian was fascinated by Elizabeth's crumbling magnificence: her bony forehead wrapped in vast pearls ‘like pears', her head bearing an imperial crown, her stomacher jewelled, and her wrists wrapped in ropes of yet more pearls. Alongside Elizabeth were her councillors, while the remainder of the Presence Chamber was ‘full of ladies and gentlemen and the musicians who had been playing dance music up to that moment'. Elizabeth had enjoyed dancing in her youth, and in her old age she had continued to take pleasure in watching others do so. As she rose to greet the ambassador, they had a tart exchange, with the ambasador complaining about English piracy, and she observing ‘the Republic of Venice . . . has never made herself heard by me except to ask for something', and wondering if ‘my sex has brought me this demerit'.
⁵

The Venetian spotted no signs of ill health in the queen, but her long hands were now swollen and, later that week, her coronation ring
had to be cut off. Since Mary I had instituted the tradition that the coronation ring symbolised a queen's ‘marriage' to her kingdom, its removal triggered new fears that Elizabeth's reign was soon to end, leaving a vacant throne and a battle for power.
⁶
Arbella's attempts to contact Hertford had convinced many at court that she was part of a plot to stop King James inheriting the throne. The two grandchildren of Margaret Douglas were, it seemed, being pitted against each other for the crown and the Venetian ambassador dispatched to the senate how their relative chances were being judged.

James believed he was the new ‘Arthur . . . Come by good right to claim my seat and throne', and it was said he bore the birthmark of a lion, which proved it was his destiny.
⁷
His most significant support came from the Privy Council, but there was much talk about the legal objections to his candidature: ‘first that he was not born in the kingdom and is therefore ineligible for the crown; and the second, that his mother, after her execution was declared a rebel by Parliament, and incapable of succession, and this incapacitates her son'. This put Arbella in the frame. She was English-born, ‘of great beauty and remarkable qualities, being gifted with many accomplishments, among them the knowledge of Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, besides her native English'.
⁸
Elizabeth had forced her to live far from court in the hopes she would be forgotten, but Arbella's attempted marriage project had ensured she was now very much remembered. It had emerged that the infanta Isabella was uninterested in the English crown, yet there were also reports of a build-up of Spanish naval forces. Some conjectured that Spain hoped now to back Arbella's candidature against James, and perhaps later marry her to a Spanish ally.

Elizabeth remained concerned not only about Arbella's actions, however, but also the news from Ireland. There had been times – before Essex's attempted coup – when Elizabeth had been able to joke with her current Lord Deputy there. After he had moaned once that his task was as disagreeable as that of a kitchen wench, she had written addressing him as ‘Mistress Kitchenmaid', and praising him for doing
more harm to the rebels with his ‘frying pan and other kitchen stuff . . . than those that promised more and did less'.
⁹
The rebel Earl of Tyrone's war of national liberation was now drawing towards Tyrone's defeat. Her Lord Deputy was pressing her hard to grant Tyrone a pardon so that a final peace could be agreed. Robert Cecil supported him, arguing that if they were to defend themselves from the Spanish, they had to secure Ireland. Elizabeth refused, concerned about ‘how to terrify future traitors' if this one was allowed to go free.
¹⁰
Eventually Cecil persuaded her to change her mind, but her pardoning the enemy Tyrone – where she had been obliged to behead the English hero Essex – triggered another bout of deep depression.

On 25 February, the second anniversary of Essex's execution, Elizabeth disappeared to her chambers. One of her Boleyn ladies-in-waiting had died the previous day, and this only added to her misery.
¹¹
Showing affection to the descendants of her aunt Mary Boleyn had been the only way she had been able to honour the memory of her mother, whose image she wore secretly in a closed ring. It was days before she appeared in public again and when she did she was described as in such ‘a deep melancholy that she must die herself'. Her misery was made worse by letters that had arrived from Arbella, reminding the queen about Essex's fate and claiming she had a secret admirer at court. Rambling and accusatory, they were full of the self-obsessed paranoia of a woman who had spent too much time on her own, and Cecil marked one of Arbella's letters with the comment, ‘I think she has some strange vapours to her brain.'
¹²

Elizabeth remained extremely anxious. She voiced her suspicions that the men around her were ‘ill affected', and complained frequently about Arbella and whoever might be supporting her.
¹³
On 9 March Cecil wrote to the English ambassador in Edinburgh, George Nicholson, describing the queen as eating little, her mouth and tongue dry and her chest hot; she couldn't sleep and wouldn't stay in bed or take physic. Instead, to everyone's dismay she had spent the previous three days walking restlessly in the garden in summer clothes. The
mood at court was gloomy, with everyone ‘in a damp'. Senior figures were stockpiling arms and buying up war horses, while James' supporters were doing their best to damage Arbella's reputation, spreading the rumour that she was mad.
¹⁴

James remained in the strongest position to succeed, but was a far from popular choice, and the Venetian ambassador observed that agents of the Kings of Spain and France had now made it known that their masters both backed Arbella's cause, rather than accept James. Henri IV of France was horrified at the idea of a united Britain, and the end of the old alliance with Scotland. At the same time, Philip II's son, the current King Philip III of Spain, was prepared to back anyone – even a Protestant like Arbella – if they could stop James becoming King of England. James was judged a liar, who encouraged Catholics to believe he would allow them to practise their faith while having no intention of doing so, and beyond the pale for his complicity in his mother's death.

Many courtiers feared they faced the imminent prospect of either a Spanish invasion in favour of Arbella, or one by Scotland in favour of James. But the Spanish council was not yet ready for an invasion, and James was willing to wait for Robert Cecil and the Privy Council to deliver him the crown. What concerned these councillors most was the possibility of a revolution by the long-suffering poor. To pre-empt any social unrest on Elizabeth's death, the council was convened in perpetual session at Richmond on 15 March, and the guards were doubled at the royal palace. Peers were summoned to court, and potential troublemakers were impressed into the army or locked up.

Elizabeth was still not sleeping. It was reported she was weak, but otherwise she had no obvious symptoms ‘except that a slight swelling of the glands under the jaw burst of itself, with a discharge of a small amount of matter'.
¹⁵
Two days later she was described as sitting on her cushions, staring at the ground, her finger in her mouth. She remained sitting on them on Saturday 19 March, when she gave an audience to Sir Robert Carey, the youngest grandson of her late aunt,
Mary Boleyn. Elizabeth wrung Carey's hand hard and told him sadly, ‘Robin I am not well.' He tried to raise her spirits but found her ‘melancholy humour . . . was too deep rooted in her heart'. The French had informed Elizabeth that several members of her court were in secret contact with James. Happily she did not know that Carey was amongst them, but he wrote to King James that night telling him Elizabeth was dying and promising to deliver the news of her death in person. His sister, Lady Scrope, who served in Elizabeth's bedchamber, had a blue ring James wanted as confirmation.

The next day Elizabeth did not appear in the royal chapel for the Sunday morning service. Instead she remained on her cushions in the Privy Chamber, and there she stayed, refusing to move, for a further two nights and two days, while frightened Londoners shut themselves in their houses. On the Tuesday, Elizabeth was, at last, lifted up from her cushions and walked to her bed. She had not written a will and the council were aware that her father's will therefore remained extant. Under its terms the crown passed from Elizabeth to the descendants of Frances Brandon (Katherine Grey's children and grandchildren) and in default of them, to the descendants of Eleanor Brandon; James was only to be king if these were excluded. A decision was therefore made to ask the dying queen to name her heir one last time. On the Wednesday afternoon Elizabeth responded and called for them.