Revenger

Historical Note

Queen Elizabeth is a bit-part player in this novel, yet her relationship with twenty-four-year-old Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, stands at the heart of the story-and of the late Tudor age itself.

What did the fifty-eight-year-old sovereign want from this ambitious yet hopelessly inadequate young man? Yes, she loved his charm and good looks, but I believe she also enjoyed goading his beautiful mother, Lettice, the cousin she despised for marrying her own great love, Leicester. It was as if she were saying “You may have won Leicester, but I have your son.”

And what did Essex want from Elizabeth? He wanted money, because he was desperately short of the stuff, and he wanted power. Indeed, he wanted her job, as the world was to discover with his wretched coup attempt in 1601.

At his trial, Sir Robert Cecil accused him: “You would depose the Queen. You would be King of England.” The Earl of Northumberland asserted that Essex “wore the crown of England in his heart these many years.”

Essex’s “affair” with Elizabeth-and his deadly rivalry with both Cecil and Ralegh-dominated the Queen’s declining years. The Earl had become her favorite courtier in 1587, yet the cracks were immediately apparent. In the summer of that year, they had a furious and very public quarrel that set the scene for many rows to come.

That first fight was over the Queen’s snub of his sister Dorothy when she was barred from the royal presence for a perceived misdemeanor. In a rage, Essex accused Elizabeth of listening to gossip from his rival Sir Walter Ralegh. The more he insulted Ralegh (who had nothing to do with the snub), the more the Queen threw back insults against Essex’s mother, Lettice.

Essex stormed out in the middle of the night, taking Dorothy with him. The Queen sent a courtier after him to apologize and ask him back. And so the morbid, hot-and-cold affair of the aging Queen and the moody young swain began. He would walk out and sulk; she would beg him to come back.

Yet she never trusted him with the power he craved. He continually demanded promotion, but she invariably gave the best jobs to someone else and, in doing so, fed his paranoia.

He often defied her. During his 1591 military campaign in northern France, he knighted twenty-four officers against the express orders of the Queen. When she heard what he had done, she was livid. She would not normally knight half that number in a whole year, and he hadn’t even won a battle, let alone a war.

The year of Essex’s “cheap knights” was the beginning of his drive for the top. By giving knighthoods-as he was entitled to do when leading an expeditionary force-he was buying loyalty. The following year, Essex set about becoming a statesman. He took on the Bacon brothers, Francis and Anthony, and they advised him that intelligence-gathering was the way to make a political impact.

His lust for power was stoked up by certain Machiavellian friends such as Gelli Meyrick and Henry Cuffe, but mainly by his ruthlessly ambitious sister, Penelope Rich. She pushed him to rebellion and was a prime cause of his downfall.

And then there was Arbella Stuart. Essex would have easily seen how advantageous a match might be with the young girl, a serious claimant to the throne of England. He used his charm well, supporting her at court and flirting with her when others avoided her because of her haughtiness. There was court tittle-tattle about their closeness, and he is also believed to have conducted a secret correspondence with the impressionable girl, though this does not survive.

Did he have plans to marry her? Surely he considered it. His marriage to Frances Walsingham was an inconvenient formality and easily disposed of if necessary. That was the way the Essex clan did things. His mother had married Leicester knowing that he was still married to Lady Douglass Sheffield. And many believed Leicester had murdered his first wife, Amy Robsart, to enable him to marry Elizabeth and share her throne.

And yes, Arbella did have a tutor called Morley who was sacked by Bess of Hardwick in 1592. Was he spying on Arbella? Historians have speculated that he was a Walsingham intelligencer (some have even suggested he might have been the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who had been a spy). After Walsingham’s death, who controlled this Morley? By 1592, Essex House was quickly becoming one of the main centers of espionage.

In the end, Essex was a weak, contemptible character. He attempted a coup, but he accused others of provoking him to it, turning on Penelope with venom. He had nothing to gain, for he was already under sentence of death, but he wrote a confession in which he laid the blame on her. “I must accuse one who is most nearest to me, my sister, who did continually urge me on with telling how all my friends and followers thought me a coward, and that I had lost all my valor. She must be looked to, for she hath a proud spirit.”

It is easy to see parallels in the story of Macbeth-the proud but flawed soldier urged on to treachery by women. Shakespeare would have known the Essex tale at the time of writing his great tragedy. Penelope as Lady Macbeth? Or the three of them-Penelope, Dorothy, and Lettice-as three witches stirring a cauldron of sedition?

In the event, Penelope (whose bedroom at Essex House was, indeed, draped all in black) was spared-probably because of her relationship with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was winning victories in Ireland and was needed by Elizabeth.

Finally, Elizabeth allowed the axe to fall on the neck of the young man she had once loved, just as her father had severed the heads of two young wives he once loved. The brittle young modernizer Sir Robert Cecil had won the day, though he never won the love of his Queen, nor of the people.