The Tudors (84 page)

It was time once again for direct action against the Spanish homeland, which meant naval action, and Essex of course insisted on a prominent part. By 1596 he had been at home for several years and had been sharing power with Burghley for two. He was restless, satisfied neither that he was being adequately rewarded for his services nor that his abilities were being put to full use. The idealist in him had always found the artificial life of the court to be faintly contemptible, especially under an aged queen who persisted in wearing low-cut gowns, demanded to be wooed, and expected every man at court to pretend that she was still as fresh and desirable as a girl of twenty. What was real by Essex’s romantically aristocratic code, what required genuine courage and sacrifice and provided a true test of a man’s worth, was
war
. And England was in need of heroes: nearly a decade had passed since the death of Philip Sidney, and no comparably chivalrous figure had arisen to take his place. (Essex would have said he had not yet had a chance to do so.) In 1595 those old salts Drake and Hawkins had died on a wretchedly unsuccessful last voyage to the West Indies, where improved Spanish defenses had made their tactics obsolete. The time was ripe for new exploits and new men, and Essex set out to provide both. He partnered with Howard of Effingham, the admiral of what there was of an English navy, and Francis Vere, who had long and successfully commanded the queen’s forces in the Netherlands, to find investors for an assault on the Spanish port
city of Cádiz. Getting the queen’s approval was difficult as usual, but when the assault force set out at the beginning of June it was formidable: more than a hundred ships carrying twenty thousand men. Howard commanded the fleet and Essex the troops, with Vere and Ralegh in prominent positions. (For all his faults, Essex was not petty or mean-spirited. Upon getting the upper hand in his long rivalry with Ralegh he had become generous, even serving as godfather to Sir Walter’s son.) The Cádiz expedition turned out to be a stupendous success, one of the greatest achieved by either side in the course of this long and generally sterile war. The defenders were taken by surprise, some three dozen ships including several of Spain’s finest fighting galleons were captured or destroyed, and to the profound humiliation of the Spanish Crown, Cádiz itself was occupied. Essex achieved his dream of becoming a national hero, leading the assault and putting the Spanish to flight. He wanted to fortify the city and make it a base from which to prey on the enemy’s coast and shipping, and perhaps attack inland as well, but was overruled by Howard and the other leaders. They set Cádiz ablaze and sailed home in triumph, only to find upon arrival that Elizabeth was unhappy because so much Spanish cargo had been destroyed rather than brought to England. (Her complaint was justified: the English had carelessly given the Spanish admiral an opportunity to burn his ships rather than handing them over.) Essex was further chagrined to learn that in his absence Robert Cecil had been appointed secretary. Essex himself had no interest in the position; a less suitable appointment for a man of his restless temperament could hardly be imagined. But he was intensely jealous of the Cecils now, and in his quixotic fashion he had somehow decided that he was honor bound to deliver the job to William Davison, who had lost his place in the administration (as well as being sent to the Tower) when Elizabeth used him as a scapegoat, pretending that he was responsible for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Her choice of Robert Cecil seemed to Essex both a gratuitous rebuke and confirmation that Lord Burghley was so committed to his son’s advancement that he had to be considered a rival, even an enemy. As with his Normandy expedition of 1591, from which he had returned to find the younger Cecil seated on the Privy Council, Essex felt that he had gone abroad to perform services of real value only to see the finest rewards in the queen’s gift bestowed upon the paper-shuffling timeservers
at court. Something like paranoia began to fester in his mind and spirit. With each new slight or perceived slight his suspicions would grow more pronounced, generating helpless fury, for example, when Howard of Effingham was made Earl of Nottingham, placed above Essex in the hierarchy of nobility, and given sole credit (or so it seemed to Essex) for the success of the Cádiz venture.

That autumn, in an effort to take revenge for the destruction of Cádiz, Philip II sent another Armada to pillage the English coast. Even more quickly than its predecessor, this new fleet was dispersed by storms, so that once again it was England’s turn to strike a blow. Essex, who had by this time stopped sulking and secured his own appointment as master of ordnance, began preparations for an expedition to be modeled on, but strategically more ambitious than, Cádiz. The original plan was to attack the Spanish port of Ferrol, where many of the ships involved in the abortive 1596 attack were known to have put in for refitting, garrison it as a permanent foothold on the Spanish mainland, and then proceed westward to the Azores for the purpose of intercepting that summer’s treasure fleet from America. This time, however, nothing went smoothly. When Essex set sail in July he ran into viciously foul weather and had to return home. By the time he could set out again his army had been savaged by plague, so reduced in numbers that attacking a target as formidable as Ferrol was out of the question. Probably the entire enterprise should have been abandoned, but the fleet was manned and equipped, there remained every reason for confidence that the Spanish treasure convoy could be found and taken, and Essex badly needed a return on all the money he had invested not only in this venture but in the previous year’s as well. So the flotilla charted a course for the Azores, where angry disagreements broke out between the earl and his vice-admiral, Ralegh, and the Spanish treasure ships managed to slip into the port of Terceira just hours ahead of the English. By the time Essex gave up hope of accomplishing anything and was making his empty-handed way home, the Spanish ships at Ferrol had completed their refitting and put to sea under orders to do to the English port of Falmouth what the English had done to Cádiz. With Essex still too far away to intercept them, the Spaniards faced almost no opposition. But once again Philip’s plans were undone by storms that scattered those of his ships that did not sink and sent them struggling back toward home.
It had been a near thing all the same, and it put a scare into the English court. The fact that Essex’s expedition had left the Spanish fleet not only intact but free to move unopposed against England increased Elizabeth’s disgust at the failure of what would come to be called derisively, as though it had been a holiday excursion, Essex’s “island voyage.”

In the following year, 1598, Henry IV decided that he had had enough of a war that was bankrupting France and bringing severe hardship to many of her people. (The Dutch rebels, he observed sourly, could not expect all of northern Europe to be “miserable in perpetuity” for their sake.) Elizabeth was not pleased with his change of heart, troubled no doubt by the old fear that an end to hostilities could lead to an alliance between the Catholic powers. She decided to send an embassy to France in an attempt to change the king’s mind, and it is rather surprising that her choice to head this mission was not Essex, an old friend of the French king’s, but her secretary Robert Cecil. Possibly this was a measure of her displeasure with the earl after the disappointment of his Azores venture; just as possibly, she remained unwilling to allow her favorite to absent himself from court for months yet again. Essex for his part was undoubtedly mindful that he could ill afford to set forth on new adventures while leaving his enemies at court.

A deal was worked out: Essex agreed to take on the duties of secretary while Cecil was out of the country and pledged not to use the office for the benefit of himself and his friends or to the disadvantage of Burghley (who was in failing health and no longer much at court), Cecil, or any of their faction. During two months on the continent Cecil saw firsthand how severely war had ravaged northern France and how hungry the French were for peace. He saw, too, that the king was determined to make peace and abandoned the idea of changing his mind. Cecil found himself inclined to agree with the king; the status quo was difficult for England as well as for France, and he, unlike Essex, was prepared to let go the dream of destroying Spanish power on its home ground. He returned home in April to find that Essex had not only kept his word to make no mischief but had—much to the surprise of his detractors—done a competent job of managing the queen’s affairs. If this had been the great test of his ability to function responsibly and effectively at the highest levels of administration, he had passed with distinction.

Cecil’s return, however, brought a revival of the old half-submerged
tension between himself and Essex and the two camps whose leaders they were. The strength of the Cecil party lay in the unchallengeable authority of its patron Burghley, who had enjoyed the queen’s confidence longer than most of the courtiers of 1598 had been alive. Thanks to Burghley, it enjoyed a decided advantage in terms of ability to bestow offices and incomes on its friends. Essex on the other hand attracted, more or less by default, those upon whom Burghley (and therefore the queen) had declined to bestow favors: alienated and disaffected nobles and gentleman-adventurers who hoped that when Burleigh died the tables could be turned. Ultimately it would all depend upon Elizabeth, of course. The people who allied themselves with Essex put their hope less in his aristocratic flair or his not-quite-stable brilliance than in the simple fact that even after years of turbulence the queen remained in some deep way powerfully attached to him. Whether he was Rob Dudley reborn for her, or a surrogate son, or proof that she could still win the adoration of the most sublimely elegant young nobleman in the kingdom—there was no need to speculate about such things so long as whatever it was that bound the queen to her last favorite remained intact.

The bond was fraying, however. A month after Cecil’s return from France, the inevitable happened: France and Spain signed the Treaty of Vervins, by which Philip II formally acknowledged Henry IV as rightful king of France and ended hostilities against him. The pact compromised, if it did not violate outright, the terms of the existing understanding between France and England. It came as a keen disappointment to those Protestants (Essex being the most prominent) who regarded themselves as locked in a war to the death with Spain and had no qualms about allying themselves with a Catholic French king for the sake of victory. It also—with consequences that would prove more fateful for Essex than for anyone else at court—freed queen and council to give the Irish problem the attention that it now urgently required.

Ireland had been a problem for centuries, not least because of its way of absorbing the Englishmen sent to subdue it and gradually turning their descendants into Irishmen. But the problem took on new dimensions when England became Protestant and added a new system of religious belief to the political control it had long sought to impose on its neighbor island. Ironies proliferated. The Irish, who if anything had been less loyally Roman Catholic than the English over the centuries,
learned from the 1540s to associate the Reformation with foreign oppression and to resist it ferociously, simultaneously embracing the old religion with a devotion they had not previously displayed. And at the very time when England claimed to be fighting in the Netherlands to defend the religious liberty of the Protestants, it found itself trying to impose its church on Ireland by main force. The Netherlands revolt had been England’s one great opportunity to threaten and torment Philip of Spain, and Elizabeth’s government had seized the opportunity. In the 1590s Ireland was Philip’s best chance to play tit for tat, and though he was perhaps slow to awaken to the possibilities, by 1598 he had done so.

At the end of June 1598 Elizabeth met with her councilors to discuss the worsening of the English position in Ireland. Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was mounting a rebellion bigger and better organized than anything the Irish had previously managed, and, poor worn-out John Norris having died on active service, the council was going to have to dispatch a new commander to restore order. When the queen suggested William Knollys, Essex’s uncle, the earl interpreted this as an attempt to weaken his position at court by removing one of his supporters. In reply, no doubt in an arrogant and even disdainful tone, he proposed a member of the Cecil party. When the queen dismissed this suggestion as ridiculous, a shocking scene unfolded. Essex turned his back on Elizabeth, an unthinkable breach of etiquette. Elizabeth stepped forward and struck him across the head—hit him hard, apparently. Cecil then clutched at the hilt of his sword, but regained control of himself before doing anything more. He stormed out proclaiming that he would accept no such insult from anyone, possibly even saying (historians have been understandably hesitant to believe that even he was capable of such words) that Elizabeth was “as crooked in her disposition as in her carcass.” The witnesses must have looked on in stunned silence.

During the month that followed, while queen and council struggled with the Irish problem, Essex stayed away from court in a deep, self-destructive sulk. He was needed both as the council’s acknowledged military authority and in his capacity as master of ordnance, but he continued to ignore even summonses from the queen herself. Finally he won the test of wills: Elizabeth appointed him earl marshal, which salved his delicate ego by putting him once again above the Earl of Nottingham in order of precedence, and when she heard that he was ill she
dispatched her own physician. At last, like an indulged child, Essex was drawn back to court with flattery and favors—but not until, and largely because, an English army had been ambushed and massacred at Yellow Ford in the north of Ireland. That happened on August 14. Ten days earlier Burghley had died. Essex returned to court to find that he, and therefore the men whose patron he was, had missed out on the great redistribution of offices and honors that the lord treasurer’s death had occasioned. The discovery heightened his already poisonous sense of alienation and grievance.