Elizabeth is still remembered as the Queen who defied the Armada in 1588, and the figure of Gloriana as encapsulated in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene the following year. But as one court servant warned, this was to see her ‘like a painted face without a shadow to give it life’11. Elizabeth had reached the apogee of her reign in the 1580s. Thereafter came a decline that lasted longer than the reigns of her siblings, Mary I and Edward VI, put together. Her victory over the Armada was tarnished by the costs of the continuing war with Spain and the woman behind the divine image had grown old. To Essex’s vast following of young courtiers Elizabeth was a dithering old woman, dominated by her Treasurer Lord Burghley and his corrupt son, Sir Robert Cecil. Her motto ‘Semper Eadem’ (I never change), once perceived as a promise of stability, came to be taken as a challenge.
When Burghley died in August 1598, Essex hoped to become the new force in Elizabeth’s government but within weeks a long simmering rebellion in Ireland had turned into a war of liberation. Essex, as Elizabeth’s most experienced commander, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and sent to confront the rebel leader, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Instead, in September 1599, in defiance of royal orders, Essex arranged a truce and returned to court. Elizabeth was furious and as Essex fell into disgrace he turned his hopes to finding favour with the candidate he hoped to succeed her. In February 1601 he led 300 soldiers and courtiers in a palace revolt to force her to name James VI of Scotland her heir and overthrow Robert Cecil together with his principal allies, Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh. The revolt quickly failed and the Earl was executed, but Essex remained a popular figure in national memory. Stettin’s journal records that ballads dedicated to Essex were being ‘sung and played on musical instruments all over the country, even in our presence at the royal court though his memory is condemned as that of a man having committed high treason’.12 They mourned England’s ‘jewel … The valiant knight of chivalry’, destroyed, it was said, by the malevolence of the Cecil faction.
Brave honour graced him still,Gallantly, gallantly,He ne’er did deed of ill,Well it is known But Envy, that foul fiend,Whose malice ne’er did endHath brought true virtue’s friendUnto his thrall.13
Beneath the smiles of the courtiers as they played cards that Christmas lay the deep bitterness of old enemies; those who had admired Essex and those who had rejoiced in his downfall.
The gallery above the tiltyard where Essex had jousted was linked to the second group of buildings through a gatehouse over King Street. Here, in the Privy Gardens, thirty-four mythical beasts sat on thirty-four brightly coloured poles overlooking the low-railed pathways. The buildings had a similarly fairy-tale quality. They were decorated in elaborate paintwork, the Great Hall in chequerwork and the Privy Gallery in black and white grotesques. The theme of these distorted animal, plant and human forms extended into the interior where they were highlighted with gold on the wood pillars and panelling. The visiting Duke of Stettin thought the ceilings rather low and the rooms gloomy. Elizabeth’s bedroom, which overlooked the Thames ‘was very dark’ with ‘but little air’. Nearby in Elizabeth’s cabinet, where she wrote her letters, Stettin observed a marvellous silver inkstand and ‘also a Latin prayer book that the queen had written nicely with her own hand, and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father’.14
Harington had been granted an audience with the Queen soon after his arrival at Whitehall. As usual he was escorted from the Presence Chamber, where courtiers waited bareheaded to present their petitions, along a dark passage and into the Privy Chamber where his godmother awaited him.15 A mural by Hans Holbein the Younger dominated the room. The massive figure of Henry VIII stood, hand on hips, gazing unflinchingly at the viewer. His third wife Jane Seymour, the mother of his son Edward VI, was depicted on his left and above him his mother, Elizabeth of York, with his father, Henry VII. The mural boasted the continuity of the Tudor dynasty, a silent reproach to the childless spinster Harington now saw before him. Contemporaries remarked often on Elizabeth’s similarity to her grandfather. When she was young they saw it in her narrow face and the beautiful long hands of which she was so proud. As she grew older she developed her grandfather’s wattle, a ‘great goggle throat’ that hung from her chin.16 But she did not now look merely old. She appeared seriously ill.
Harington was shocked by what he saw and frightened for the future. Elizabeth had been increasingly melancholic since the Essex revolt, but he was now convinced that she was dying. He confided his thoughts in a letter to the one person he trusted: his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at home in Somerset caring for their nine children.
Sweet Mall,
I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity, too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery. Dear Mall, How shall I speak what I have seen, or what I have felt? – Thy good silence in these matters emboldens my pen … Now I will trust thee with great assurance, and whilst thou dost brood over thy young ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in the court …17
Elizabeth received Harington seated on a raised platform. Her ‘little black husband’ John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose plain clerical garb contrasted so starkly with her bejewelled gowns and spangled wigs, was beside her.* It was believed that Elizabeth used her glittering costumes to dazzle people so they ‘would not so easily discern the marks of age’, but if so, she no longer considered them enough. Increasingly afraid that any intimation of mortality would attract dangerous speculation on her successor she had taken to filling out her sunken cheeks with fine cloths and was also ‘continually painted, not only all over the face, but her very neck and breast also, and that the same was in some places near half an inch thick’.18 There were some things, however, that make-up could not hide. When Elizabeth spoke it was apparent that her teeth were blackened and several were missing. Foreign ambassadors complained it made her difficult to understand if she spoke quickly. But during Harington’s audience this was not a problem; her throat was so sore and her state of mind so troubled that she could barely speak at all.
The rebellion in Ireland that had cost Elizabeth so much in men, money and peace of mind was near its end. The arch rebel Tyrone was offering his submission, but it brought Elizabeth no joy; memories of Essex’s betrayals were crowding in. She whispered to Whitgift to ask Harington if he had seen Tyrone? Harington had witnessed Essex making the truce with Tyrone in 1599 and later met him in person. He still trembled at the memory of Elizabeth’s fury with him about it when he had returned to England, and he now answered her carefully, saying only, ‘I had seen him with the Lord Deputy.’ At this, Elizabeth looked up with an expression of anger and grief and replied ‘Oh, now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere,’ and she began to weep and strike her breast. ‘She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in sooth her heart seemed too full to lack more filling,’ Harington told his wife.
As the audience drew to a close Elizabeth rallied and she asked her godson to come back to her chamber at seven o’clock and bring some of the light-hearted verses and witty prose for which he was famous. Harington dutifully returned that evening and read Elizabeth some