The next day, a Sunday, 300 armed men gathered in the courtyard at Essex’s house. About a third of the rebels were soldiers who had served alongside Essex at one time or another. Many were Catholic, and they included several names later associated with the Gunpowder Plot: Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham. Others were Puritan; some, like Sir Henry Bromley, with City connections. A few were blood relatives of Essex. Most strikingly, however, the rebels included what the courtier John Chamberlain called the ‘chief gallants’ of the time: the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, Lords Lumley and Monteagle amongst them, united, above all, by hatred of Cecil.
Essex led his followers through Ludgate towards Paul’s Cross. A small black taffeta bag containing a letter from the King of Scots hung around his neck. The streets were too narrow for the rebels to ride their horses and so they walked, brandishing their swords and crying out: ‘For the Queen! For the Queen!’ People came out from their tall, narrow, shop-fronted, timber and plaster houses and crowds began to gather – but no one came forward. Essex, sweating freely, shouted that Ralegh, Cobham and Cecil were plotting to put the Infanta on the throne and murder him, but the people simply gaped and ‘marvelled that they could come in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday’.58 They did not hold Elizabeth responsible for the actions of her officials, as the court did.
At noon Essex paused at the churchyard of St Paul’s. He had intended to make a speech but by the time he reached it he knew the revolt had failed. Within a fortnight Elizabeth had signed a warrant for Essex’s execution. She had it recalled, but if she was waiting for her one-time favourite to beg for mercy he did not oblige. When the final warrant was signed his only request was to be executed in the privacy of the Tower, so as not to stir up the multitude.
Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 25 February, 1601, the Lieutenant of the Tower Sir John Peyton ‘gave the Earl warning as he was in his bed to prepare himself to death’. At seven or eight he conducted him to the scaffold. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, was obliged to be present at the execution, but the atmosphere was so charged he withdrew to watch from a window in the Armoury. When Essex had finished praying he took off his doublet. His secretary in Ireland, Fynes Moryson, had noticed that he suffered from the cold, but no one saw him shiver in the winter air, nor did he move after the first of the three blows which it took to sever his head from his body. The long lock of hair Essex grew in Ireland was cut off and kept as a relic.*
Elizabeth was careful to show mercy to the young noblemen who had followed Essex. His friend, the Earl of Southampton, was imprisoned in the Tower where he still remained. Of the rest, only four of the principal conspirators were executed: Essex’s father-in-law, Sir Christopher Blount, another Catholic called Sir Charles Davers, his secretary Henry Cuffe and fellow Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick. Blount made amends to Ralegh and Cobham on the scaffold for accusing them of supporting the Infanta’s claim. Their names, he said, had only been used ‘to colour other matters’. He also confessed that he and others had been prepared to take things as far as the shedding of the Queen’s blood. But neither Elizabeth’s mercy, nor this confession did anything to dent the Earl’s posthumous reputation. When the official version of what had occurred was delivered in a sermon at the Cross at St Paul’s weeks later it was ‘very offensively taken of the common sort’ and the minister fled the pulpit in fear of his life.59
In subsequent months Ralegh was accused of blowing smoke in Essex’s face as he mounted the scaffold and Cecil’s life was threatened in places as far apart at Wales, Surrey and Mansfield. But although this anger was not directed against the Queen it was she who felt it most. A few years earlier a French ambassador recorded that Elizabeth had given him ‘a great discourse of the friendship that her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would die rather than see any diminution of the one part or the other’.60 Now she believed the bond between them was broken, a view encouraged by those in her government who did not wish to see blame cast upon themselves.
In the months following the Essex revolt Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated markedly and by the time Harington saw her at court in October of 1601 she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. She was eating little and was dishevelled and unkempt. A sword was kept on her table at all times and she constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news, occasionally thrusting her rusty weapon in the tapestry in blind fury. Every message from the City upset her, as if she expected news of some fresh rebellion. Eventually she sent Lord Buckhurst to Harington with a message: ‘Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to go home: it is no season now to fool it here’.61 He did as he was told and so missed the opening of Elizabeth’s last parliament, in November 1601, when she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes.
The Spanish had invaded Ireland in September, hoping to take advantage of Tyrone’s rebellion and gain a stepping-stone to England. Subsidies were needed for the war and MPs soon granted them, but many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks launched against the granting of monopolies. During the 1590s Burghley had altered the system of royal patronage based on the leasing and alienation of crown lands in their favour in order to shift the cost of reward away from the crown. It had since fallen on ordinary people. The price of starch, for example, had tripled over the three years that Cecil had held the monopoly on it.62 He railed in the Commons against those ‘that have desired to be popular without the house for speaking against monopolies’ and Ralegh defended his monopoly in tin so vehemently that it almost brought the debate to a halt. Elizabeth, however, was sufficiently concerned by the attacks on her prerogative to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.63 When the news was announced MPs wept and cheered.
A few days later Elizabeth received a deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall. Once they had delivered their thanks, she took the opportunity to remind them of what was later seen as the central philosophy of her reign.
Mr Speaker, We perceive your coming is to present thanks to us. Know I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desire to offer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches; for these we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks, I account them invaluable. And although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves … Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strict, fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set upon worldly goods but only for my subjects good. What you do bestow on me, I will not hoard up, but receive it to bestow on you again; yea, my own properties I account to be yours, to be expended for your good, and your eyes shall see the bestowing of it for your welfare.64
They were described as ‘golden words’ but Elizabeth was only too aware that things had changed and when Parliament was dissolved in December she recalled the bitter truth of ‘so many and diverse stratagems and malicious practises and devises to surprise us of our life’.65 That spring, Elizabeth began complaining of an ache in one of her arms. A doctor suggested that her discomfort was rheumatism and might be helped with ointments. She reacted furiously, telling him he was mistaken and ordering him from her presence, but it was soon reported that ‘The ache in the Queen’s arm is fallen into her side.’ She was ‘still thanks to God, frolicy and merry, only her face showing some decay’, yet sometimes she felt so hot she would take off her petticoat while at other times she would shake with cold.