The Pirate Queen (56 page)

Elizabeth’s letters continued to arrive—each one angrier than the last. No longer trusting his written word to calm her, Essex was certain that his detractors—of which there were many—were poisoning the queen against him. Only a personal appearance at court could make her see that he had, in fact, acted for the good of her realm. And so, again, the prideful Essex ignored royal commandment, left his post as lord lieutenant without leave, and hastened to Nonsuch, where on September 24, he barged in on the old queen, who was not fully dressed. To say that his demeanor startled her is more than an English understatement. Elizabeth felt distinctly threatened by her soldier, still muddy from his travels and carrying his sword in his
hand. She famously sweet-talked him, asking him to give her leave to dress before they spoke in earnest. She begged him to go wash the dirt from his travels from him, and rejoin her later in the day. By afternoon, her sails had filled with a good head of wind again, and she blasted him as only Queen Elizabeth could do, in front of the entire Council. It would be the last time that they would ever see each other.

Essex was confined to his chambers before being sent to Essex House under house arrest. He was in a state of near mental and physical collapse. Treason charges were drawn up against him, and perhaps for the first time, he realized that his short life could end in total failure, though by now his paranoia was near complete. He was, however, in one way fortunate: his breakdown did spare him a judgment by the Star Chamber at the end of November 1602 since it was believed Essex would die of his malady. If, after all, he would die, then why make a martyr of him, the Star Chamber argued.

And yet, Essex did recover, though he never fully in strength or sound reasoning again. Though disgraced, a number of young and disaffected noblemen flocked to his side, like the heartthrob Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton; while others, Sir Francis Bacon being the most notable, deserted and betrayed him. Eventually, Elizabeth settled on the best solution: allow Essex his freedom, but continue to bar him from court. His political career was at an end, but she would not otherwise harm him.
¹¹

Had she left matters like that, then things might have turned out differently. In the end, though, the queen’s pride and parsimony got the better of her. When Essex’s sweet wines farm came up for renewal in October 1600, she refused to renew it. From her vantage point, it was an extremely valuable royal gift, and one that had continually shown exceptional royal favor since it was first bestowed in the 1560s onto Robert Dudley. How could she allow a man who had failed to tame Tyrone or even fight him to retain this treasure?

Essex’s reaction was predictably harebrained. He wrote to James VI of Scotland pleading for help. James, the only child of Mary,

Queen of Scots, had been Elizabeth’s putative heir since the time of
Mary’s execution—so long as no one pushed the English queen into making it official. Naturally, the queen’s “intelligencers” knew all. Essex had naturally been put under constant surveillance. Finally, in February 1601, Essex and his followers had hatched a scheme to take over control of court and oust Essex’s enemies by denouncing them to the queen. But their plans were preempted by a summons to appear before the queen on Saturday, February 7. On the one hand, they panicked, resolving to throw themselves on the mercy of the City. On the other, they sought refuge in a final act of defiance, and paid Shakespeare and his players to put on a specially commissioned performance of
Richard II
at the Globe Theater, instead of responding to the summons.

The following morning, Essex led around three hundred men, all wearing their swords and doublets but no armor, on a march into the City. Some of the men carried firearms. Notable among them were the Earls of Southampton, Rutland, Bedford, Sandys, Cromwell, and Monteagle, as well as Sir Christopher Blount. When Essex’s march came to the house of the sheriff of London, Sir Thomas Smythe, they soon realized the folly of their action. Smythe and the lord mayor had ordered the City gates shut, and Essex’s support evaporated. By nine
P.M
., Essex had surrendered, spending the night as a prisoner at Lambeth Palace (the archbishop of Canterbury’s London home) before being transported to the Tower through Traitor’s Gate.

Ten days later, Essex and Southampton were tried for treason. Southampton’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment, but Essex was to die on the scaffold, thanks in no small part to the testimony of his former intimate friend, Sir Francis Bacon.
¹²
It could be claimed that Essex, more than any other adventurer, lost everything in Ireland. He certainly lost his father to the interminable Irish wars, and may have lost his sanity in the guerrilla warfare so expertly practiced by the Irish rebels. Still, at the end of the day, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, had ideas beyond his station in life. He was no Leicester. He was no Francis Drake. He was no Burghley, nor even a Robert Cecil. But if wishing made it so, he had all their cunning and fortunes rolled into one, and the ability to make himself the queen’s master where all the others had failed.

And what of Tyrone and Ireland? Tyrone’s insistence that Ireland could only free itself completely from England’s rule with the help of the Spanish proved a tremendous weakness in his otherwise fine strategy. The notorious contrary winds between Spain and England in the Bay of Biscay shipwrecked Philip’s last two armadas. When the third armada landed at Kinsale with four thousand men, under the leadership of Don Juan de Aguilla, instead of on Ulster’s shores, Irish hopes for a Gaelic Ireland were dashed. In a country full of myth and legend, they claim that early modern Irish had thirty-two words that meant fool, idiot, moron, or imbecile. That is until Tyrone began his insults against Aguilla: “that misbegotten son of a tree stump…that baboon’s droppings…that, that
Spaniard!”
¹³

It must be said that Essex’s desertion was another blessing for England and curse of Ireland at the end of the day. For Essex was replaced by the unbelievably tenacious Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who proved to be the right man—at last—for the job of taming the “wild” Irish. Through Mountjoy’s phenomenal energy and generalship (not unlike Wellington’s two centuries later), Tyrone’s plans were anticipated, and he was stopped at every turn. Raleigh’s cousin, Sir George Carew (also Essex’s mortal enemy), was put in charge of settling Munster, which he did with diplomacy and tact more than by force of arms. New forts at Derry near Lough Foyle provided a base camp near Tyrone’s own lands, from which Sir Henry Docwra could tackle the disaffected O’Neills, Maguires, and O’Donnells for the English as Carew had done in Munster, and Mountjoy had done in Connaught.

Tyrone’s epithets aside, when the Spaniards finally landed their four thousand crack infantrymen at Kinsale in September 1601, it was too late. Naturally, with Tyrone’s strength in the North, there was no chance of victory. The Munster Irish and Tyrone’s supporters were already depleted by Mountjoy’s tactics, and the combined Irish and Spanish forces faced a complete rout. De Aguilla made an honorable surrender in January 1602, while O’Neill fled to Spain. Tyrone was eventually captured in March 1603, and with him died the expectation of Irish independence for nearly a century and a half.
¹⁴

Though there are many who would disagree, England’s conquest of Ireland wasn’t entirely bad for the country. It extinguished tribal warfare on the island, making blood feuds, murder, and cattle raiding illegal. In conquest came the birth of the Irish nation, rising like the phoenix from its ashes. Pride in being Irish, as opposed to an O’Neill or O’Toole, with the accompanying patriotism against the archenemy England, swelled in its people as a whole, and was allowed to take hold and flourish.

41. Raleigh, Virginia, and Empire

A maze wherein affection finds no end

A ranging cloud that runs before the wind

A substance like the shadow of the sun

A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

—SIR WALTER RALEIGH, “
Farewell False Love,”1588

R
aleigh’s income had been severely curtailed as a result of the Munster uprising in the wake of Tyrone’s guerrilla exploits. He had acquired the largest seignory in the country through the English conquest of the Irish chieftains, and had spent a great deal of time in 1589 renovating his mansion and plantation near Youghall. To his friends, he claimed he was retreating “from Court…to take order for my prize.”
¹
The vast forests there provided much of the wooden staves for barrels, which was one of his main trading businesses, selling to the Admiralty and other shipowners. When his estate fell victim to the same scorched earth policy as others had done in the rebellion, the pinch he felt was most certainly real. After Tyrone’s supporters had laid waste to his lands, he was lucky to sell them to Sir Richard Boyle, secretary for Munster, for £1,500 ($360,750 or £195,000 today).

Other than Essex, Walter Raleigh was only other courtier vying for the perfect vision of courtly love at the sunset of Elizabeth’s reign. Essex had been born into the new nobility, and was the handsome portrait of the highly educated, suave, hot-tempered, quick-tempered, and arrogant nobleman until his premature death on the scaffold. Raleigh, too, had bagfuls of arrogance and charm, was quick to anger and slow to forgive. He had been educated at Oxford, but he came down to London without obtaining a degree. Yet Raleigh, despite his pretensions, was only a West Countryman of gentle birth, and he spoke his whole life with a thick West Country
accent. And accents in England, until recently, determined one’s place in society.

Both were adventurers in the true sense of the word—Raleigh earned a fortune several times over from his escapades, while Essex lost his principal capital. Aside from these main points of their lives, Raleigh and Essex would share the reason for their deaths, too: treason.

But that is for the future.

Elizabeth could not live without either of them. Some believed that when Essex was executed, much of the life, vigor, and good humor went out of her. She sank into what can only be described as a deep depression, where even her “Water” could not quench her thirst and bring her back to life. While Raleigh continued to live high on the hog, his expenses far exceeded his income. After Essex’s execution, when the queen didn’t give Raleigh any new and beneficial grants to relieve his often-bemoaned penury, it was clear that Raleigh would not profit from Essex’s demise.
²
The thought of tightening his belt and living within his means was not an option that Raleigh could stomach. And so he fell back again on his adventuring with renewed passion.

He had planned a campaign with Cumberland and Frobisher to capture the West Indies flota in 1592. Yet, shortly before setting sail with the impressive fleet, Elizabeth recalled him to London. Raleigh ignored the order and accompanied his ships until he could give his orders to his new commander Sir John Burgh, at sea. Frobisher was to keep guard on the Spanish coast, while the rest of the adventuring fleet were led by Cumberland to the Azores. There, Cumberland encountered two Portuguese East Indies carracks, the
Santa Cruz
and the
Madre de Díos.
The
Santa Cruz
was burned after her richly laden cargo was taken, while the
Madre de Díos
was sailed back to England.
³

This “campaign” became known as the Islands Voyage to the Azores. Under normal circumstances, Raleigh stood every chance of making good his losses in Ireland and Virginia, and by normal calculations should have cleared around £80,000 for his troubles ($19.24 million or £10.4 million today). Instead, this would be the queen’s ransom. To his abiding anger, it was not meant to be. After
the shares of the spoils were divided, Raleigh complained bitterly to Lord Burghley that

the City of London is to have £6,000 profit by Her Majesty’s order. Then they are to have Her Majesty’s allowance of £2,000 upon all and £4,000 profit as well out of our principal. By that means we are to lose £4,000 of money disbursed…. The Earl of Cumberland is allowed £36,000 and his account came but to £19,000, so he has £ 17,000 profit, who adventured for himself, and we that served the Queen and assisted her service [fitting out her ships] have not our own again. Besides I gave my ship’s sails and cables to furnish the carrack and bring her home or else she [would] have perished…. I was the cause that all this came to the Queen and that the King of Spain spent £300,000 [in] the last year. And I lost in the last year in the voyage of my Lord Thomas Howard, £1,600, besides the interest of £11,000 which I have paid ever since this voyage began.
⁴

All of the figures, and certainly reference to his being solely responsible for the expenditure of the King of Spain, are incorrect. Raleigh’s summary of woe is right, however, when he states that he earned very little from England’s largest adventuring haul. The reason for this was simple: in between the time when Raleigh had initially intended to sail on the voyage and the date of the final accounting in January 1593, Raleigh had been committed to the Tower for lying to the queen about his secret marriage to Bess Throckmorton and the birth of his son Wat.

Still, it is difficult to feel sorry for the man. He was immensely talented, a great strategist, a gifted poet and historian, and he had other varied sources of income. He was an Admiralty officer, and earned a great deal from his declared—as well as undeclared—dealings in this professional capacity. He advised other, more sea loving, admirals and captains about where to go in search of plunder, and duly received his fair portion for his trouble. While vice admiral for both Devon and Cornwall since 1585, his undeclared earnings would have been huge.