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MANY OF POSTERITY’S most enduring images of Elizabeth and her era derive from the last decade of her reign. It was seen as a time of dashing chivalric adventurers and of the greatest flowering of English literature, most notably in the works of William Shakespeare, which still dominate the world stage today. At the centre of this golden age – its inspiration and patroness – was Elizabeth, hailed as Gloriana, Cynthia, Astraea and the Faerie Queene. She was the Virgin Queen, the goddess, who with her eternal youth and ageless beauty ruled over men’s hearts.
There was a dark underside to all this. The assertion that Elizabeth ruled as a goddess among men, eternally virginal and ageless, became more strident in the 1590s, as she entered her sixties and her death inevitably drew closer. The more decrepit the reality, the more excessive was the adulation. It was a sign of desperate insecurity, as the childless Queen was still refusing to name her successor. Either men wanted the Queen to live for ever, or they were impatient for the coming of a king. Isaac Oliver was one of the few artists privileged to draw the Queen from life and had been so rash as to depict her in 1592 as she really was: the red hair, obviously false; the long thin face, gaunt and wrinkled, with its sunken cheeks; the hooded, watchful eyes, so like those of her grandfather, Henry VII; the thin lips carefully closed to conceal discoloured teeth and toothless gums.
Perhaps stemming from insecurity about her looks as a young woman, and encouraged by years of flattery from aspiring suitors and fawning courtiers, Elizabeth was inordinately vain. The French ambassador, André Hurault de Maisse, noticed how she would constantly speak of her beauty, fishing for compliments. It was not altogether unfounded. The Venetian ambassador reported that he could still see the traces of beauty in her. She would proudly draw attention to her exquisite white hands with their long, thin fingers, by drawing her gloves on and off. Thanks to her natural gracefulness, fine posture, spare diet and lifelong habit of exercise, she had retained her youthful figure, so that from a distance, according to one observer, she looked ‘no more than twenty years of age’.
Elizabeth was extremely sensitive about her age. When one of her bishops was tactless enough to preach a sermon in which he referred to a time of life ‘wherein men begin to carry a calendar in their bones, the sense begins to fail, the strength to diminish, yea all the powers of the body daily to decay’, Elizabeth impatiently pushed open the window of the royal closet, where she sat during services in her chapel, and shouted that ‘he should have kept his arithmetic to himself’. Her temper was not improved by careless young maids of honour who could not be bothered to do their job properly. Lady Mary Howard had failed to bring her cloak at the hour when the Queen liked to walk in the garden and answered back rudely when reprimanded. Elizabeth was furious: ‘Out with such ungracious, flouting wenches!’ she fulminated. She had always had a fiery temper and a tendency to lash out at those closest to her, but her older female attendants, such as Lady Dorothy Stafford, Lady Mary Scudamore and Mrs Mary Ratcliffe, who had been with her for years, understood her many cares and preoccupations and made allowances.
The Queen still possessed a powerful aura and the ability to charm. De Maisse noticed that ‘she preserves a great gravity amidst her people’ and that ‘she walks in a manner marvellous haughty’. Paul von Hentzer watched her process to chapel at Greenwich in 1598:
Her air was stately, her manner of speaking mild and obliging … as she went along in this state and magnificence, she spoke very graciously, first to one, then to another … in English, French and Italian … Whoever speaks to her, it is kneeling; now and then she raises some with her hand … Wherever she turned her face as she was going along, everybody fell down on their knees … In the ante-chapel where we were, petitions were presented to her, and she received them, most graciously, which occasioned the acclamation of ‘God save Queen Elizabeth!’ She answered it with ‘I thank you my good people.’
Foreigners remarked on the curious custom of the Virgin Queen leaving her breasts uncovered, ‘as all the English ladies have it, till they marry’. A German visitor in 1595 noted that ‘over her breast, which was bare, she wore a long filigree lace shawl, on which sat a hideous large black spider that looked as if it were natural and alive.’ When de Maisse first entered the royal presence, Elizabeth was recovering from some minor illness and she received him in her undress. His description is of a curiously eccentric figure:
She was strangely attired in a dress of silver cloth, white and crimson, or silver ‘gauze’, as they call it. This dress had slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta, and was girt about with other little sleeves that hung down to the ground, which she was for ever twisting and untwisting. She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom … and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot … On her head she wore a garland of the same material and beneath it a great reddish-coloured wig, with a great number of spangles of gold and silver, and hanging down over her forehead some pearls, of no great worth … Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled … but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate.
In conversation with de Maisse, Elizabeth would call herself ‘old and foolish’, but in reality she was as sharp as ever. He concluded that ‘she is a very great princess who knows everything’ – as indeed she should, she reminded him, as she had reigned for forty years. She had once commented sagely that ‘Men do adore the rising than the setting sun.’ James of Scotland was tacitly considered to be her most likely successor and Elizabeth cannot have remained ignorant that many of her leading ministers and courtiers, from Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex downwards, were in correspondence with him. Men were showing her less reverence now her life and reign were drawing to a close. She was not so vain or foolish that she did not know what was happening.
Now, when she made her summer progresses, the voices of reluctant hosts grew louder and uglier as they warned the Queen away from their homes. Times were hard. They had done their sums and there was nothing to be gained any more from offering the Queen hospitality. Even Sir Henry Lee, who had commissioned the Ditchley portrait after Elizabeth’s visit to his home in Oxfordshire in 1592, did not scruple to write to Sir Robert Cecil eight years later, excusing himself from receiving his sovereign. All his efforts to court royal favour had been a waste. He had not been rewarded with high office. He was not prepared to spend any more: ‘my estate without my undoing cannot bear it, my continuance in her court has been long, my charge great, my land sold and debts not small: how this will agree with entertaining of such a prince your wisdom can best judge.’
After the glory of the Armada, the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign was full of troubles, a time of prolonged war with Spain, high taxation, inflation, failed harvests and epidemics. Vagrants were a scourge, their ranks swelled by deserters from the army and navy, so that it was said that ‘the Queen is troubled wherever she takes the air with these miserable creatures.’ At court, self-interest, greed and venality were rife. Bribery had become endemic, even among the judges, and there was a ‘black market’ in court offices, which were overtly traded. When Elizabeth had first appointed Sir William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, to office, she trusted that he would ‘not be corrupted with any manner of gift’. Burghley – first, always and last the Queen’s servant – might not have been corrupted, but as Master of the Court of Wards he was pocketing considerable sums in ‘arrangement’ fees. Many blamed Elizabeth for not paying her servants properly, but she in turn was being systematically fleeced, especially by corruption among the commanders of her sea and land forces.
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth cultivated more than ever a public image of quasi-divinity, as the fissures in her government started to widen. Dissatisfaction often took the form of revived doubts as to the efficacy and validity of female sovereignty. There was a re-emergence of misogyny – even an increase in witchcraft trials. De Maisse observed that although Elizabeth was still greatly loved by the people, ‘if by chance she should die, it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman.’
Elizabeth’s grip seemed to be slackening. Long-standing counsellors were dying and she was not replacing them; the Council, which had consisted of twenty-one members at the outset of her reign, was down to eleven. She was reluctant to create new peers and mean with her knighthoods. The rewards of royal service were much diminished; no wonder it was degenerating into a free-for-all. Some of the angriest scenes of the reign took place in Parliament over the crown’s flagrant abuse of monopolies. Poverty forced the Queen, as the fount of all patronage, to reward her favoured courtiers with these monopolies – taxes on the import of commodities or domestic manufactures – rather than with much depleted crown lands, so shifting the cost of royal largesse from the crown to the commonwealth.
In this way, she financed her favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, by granting him the lucrative ‘farm of sweet wine’ for a ten-year period. The monopoly would revert to the crown on Michaelmas Day 1600; it must have seemed an unimaginable length of time to the twenty-three-year-old. It suited Elizabeth admirably that young Essex was one of the poorest noblemen in the kingdom, since she liked to bestow her largesse on men who had no fortune of their own, who therefore found themselves entirely beholden to her. By the time the lease expired, Essex was in disgrace and Elizabeth declined to renew it. Essex, encumbered by an extravagant lifestyle and debt, was ruined. It tipped the mercurial and unstable courtier over the edge into rebellion.
But before that, Essex was Elizabeth’s last love. Tall, auburn-haired, gracefully athletic, cultured and chivalrous, he was very much Elizabeth’s ideal man. It helped that he was Leicester’s stepson. Elizabeth might even have seen in the young man the son they had never had together. Essex’s mother was Elizabeth’s kinswoman, Lettice Knollys, who had long ago incurred her jealousy and banishment from court for her secret and underhand marriage to Leicester. His natural father, the first Earl of Essex, boasted among an array of noble ancestors Edward III and the Plantagenets; he had died of disease in Ireland, losing his fortune in the Queen’s cause.
The charming youth was able to make Elizabeth feel young again. ‘When she is abroad, nobody near her but my Lord of Essex, and at night my Lord is at cards, or one game or another with her, that he cometh not to his lodgings till birds sing in the morning.’ He filled an emotional void in Elizabeth’s life when she was lonely and vulnerable. Her beloved Leicester was dead and soon she would lose her old friend and admirer, Sir Christopher Hatton. Essex’s rival for the Queen’s favour, Sir Walter Raleigh, was banished from court in 1592 for conducting a secret affair with her maid of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and marrying without the Queen’s consent. It was not so much a case of sexual jealousy; after all, when Essex married Sir Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, she dismissed it as unimportant, something far less than the love they shared. In Raleigh’s case, she was angry that a favoured courtier and one of her maids of honour should deceive her in this way. It would be five years before Raleigh could find his way back into royal favour, leaving the field clear for his young rival.
Courtiers who wanted to win the Queen’s favour had to speak the language of love to her. Essex was able to carry off the absurdity of playing lovesick suitor to a woman thirty years his senior with apparent ease, writing her passionate love letters. It might have been Essex who commissioned Hilliard to paint him as the Young Man among the Roses. Certainly, the miniature depicted someone very like him, apparently pining for his love, symbolically wearing the Queen’s colours of black and white and surrounded by her favourite flower and emblem, the white eglantine. It was the sort of gracious compliment Elizabeth relished.
The charismatic Essex was a disruptive and ultimately destructive influence. Harmony, which Elizabeth had always encouraged among counsellors who operated in friendly rivalry, gave way to factionalism, as Essex, representing the old aristocratic values of natural law and martial valour, vied with Sir Robert Cecil, the modern, professional administrator, to influence the direction of royal policy. Lord Burghley had been one of Essex’s guardians as a boy and he retained a modicum of respect for the old man, but he bitterly resented the fact that he was quietly grooming his son, Sir Robert Cecil, as his successor. Surely he, Essex, as a leading member of the old nobility, had a natural right to be the Queen’s chief counsellor; more than that, he wanted total domination of the Queen’s government.
For forty years Elizabeth had governed by consensus; she was hardly likely to change now. Nor was she so besotted as to give in to Essex’s pleas for the post of Secretary of State, vacant after the death of Sir Francis Walsingham, especially when there was a better man for the job. Sir Robert Cecil was the antithesis of Essex. Crippled by a spinal injury when his nurse dropped him as a baby, he was clever, cool and calculating, where Essex was rash, impulsive, a man of action. Pressed for a decision, Elizabeth, as ever, took refuge in prevarication. The post remained unfilled for the time being.
If Essex could not win political advancement for himself, he was determined to promote the cause of his ‘clients’, Anthony and Francis Bacon. The Bacons were Burghley’s nephews, but he was not prepared to further their ambitions to the detriment of his own son. They switched their allegiance to Essex, who showed his lack of judgement by putting Francis forward for the post of Attorney General. He was hardly qualified, but Essex pestered the Queen remorselessly, until she was heard to mutter that she would ‘seek all England for a solicitor’, rather than give the job to Bacon.
Essex’s failure to impose his will on the Queen badly damaged his standing at court but, undeterred, he sought to upstage the Cecils by setting up an independent foreign-intelligence-gathering department as a rival to Burghley’s, under the aegis of Anthony Bacon. The upshot of this was the ‘discovery’ of a Spanish-inspired plot to kill the Queen. ‘I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason,’ Essex wrote self-importantly to a friend. ‘The point of conspiracy was her Majesty’s death. The executioner should have been Dr Lopez; the manner poison.’
Under torture, various so-called conspirators pointed the finger at the Queen’s physician, Dr Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew. In vain, Lopez explained that Walsingham had encouraged his correspondence with the Spanish court to pass false information to the enemy; unfortunately, Walsingham was no longer around to verify Lopez’s version of events. In Essex’s excitable mind, it was essential to prove the existence of the plot and the efficacy of his intelligence service by making the Queen believe her life was really in danger. Elizabeth was less than convinced but, inevitably, the plot took on a momentum of its own. Lopez was duly found guilty and, after three months’ delay in which Elizabeth hesitated to sign the warrant, he was executed.
Elizabeth’s susceptibility to flattery had encouraged Essex to believe he would be able to manipulate her, but this was proving far from the case. He failed to appreciate the power of her intellect or her strength of character. Rash and impulsive himself, he could not understand the Queen’s cautious approach or her tendency to prevaricate, which had always served her well. Elizabeth knew her own mind, even when she procrastinated, but Essex dismissed it as womanly weakness. He began to treat her dismissively as a typically unpredictable, wilful and irrational woman – and an old one at that. In a court riddled with resentment at the lack of royal largesse and tired of the old Queen’s regime, Essex became the most vociferous voice of dissent, telling the French ambassador that ‘they laboured under two things at this Court, delay and inconstancy, which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen.’
Nowhere was this more apparent than when the two clashed over war. The Queen and the Cecils, conscious of the depleted state of the treasury, were united on a cautious and largely defensive maritime strategy, whereas Essex – who had espoused Leicester’s stance as defender of the beleaguered Protestant cause in Europe – advocated military engagement on the Continent to quell the power of Catholic Spain and prevent an attack on England. Left to herself, Elizabeth would have liked to restrict military activity to the artificial world of the tournament and joust, the Accession Day tilts, of which Essex had made himself the undisputed hero.
Given a command and let off the leash, Essex soon realized all Elizabeth’s worst fears. At Cadiz, the Queen’s instructions were to make a quick, pre-emptive strike; instead, Essex showed every sign of hijacking the whole expedition to suit his own view of how England should fight the war. He quarrelled with his fellow commander, the Lord Admiral, Howard of Effingham. He took the town, but he was so intent on plundering and laying it waste that he failed to take account of a merchant fleet, laden with £3 million worth of goods, moored in the harbour. Similarly, when he was sent to destroy Philip’s new Armada in Spanish ports, he disobeyed instructions and dashed off to the Azores on a useless quest to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet. It was Elizabeth’s nightmare scenario: England left unprotected with Spanish ships roaming freely in the Channel, while her own fleet had been taken off on Essex’s mad quest. By the time he did return to England, much of the booty he had taken at Cadiz seemed to have gone astray. Elizabeth was absolutely furious at this poor return on her investment and ordered an investigation into the disappearance of the prize goods.
Essex had flouted his sovereign’s explicit commands and she was not slow to retaliate. Sir Robert Cecil was given the coveted post of Secretary of State. Howard of Effingham was created Earl of Nottingham, with the letters patent mentioning his distinguished service at Cadiz, a glory Essex felt belonged to him alone. When he tried to publish a pamphlet emphasizing his heroic role in the Cadiz expedition, Elizabeth had it suppressed. Victory belonged to the Queen, not the subject. It seemed that Essex – whose militant policy accorded well with the prevalent mood of nationalistic Protestantism – was trying to subvert the Queen’s power and cultivating public popularity in opposition, or as an alternative focus, to her.
The increasingly strained relationship between the Queen and her favourite finally exploded in a Council meeting in 1598 over the question of whom to appoint as Lord Deputy in Ireland. Essex belligerently suggested Sir George Carew, a supporter of the Cecils. Elizabeth, well aware of the intensification of factionalism at her court since Essex’s return from Cadiz, spurned his suggestion. With studied insolence, the Earl turned his back on the Queen. Infuriated, she boxed his ears, bidding him go and be hanged. Essex then did the unthinkable. He reached for his sword, at which Nottingham stepped forward to interpose himself between the Queen and the madman. Shouting that he would not have put up with such an affront to his dignity even at the hands of Henry VIII, Essex stormed out of the Council chamber. That was surely the point: he would never have dared behave so disrespectfully to a king.
Essex genuinely believed that the Queen owed him an apology. Lord Keeper Egerton tried to give him some friendly advice. It was not for monarchs to apologize. Even if the Queen had given cause for offence, it was Essex’s duty to ‘sue, yield and submit to your sovereign’. Essex was unable to contain his fury, returning a reply that was revolutionary in its doctrine: ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite?’
He would have sulked in the country indefinitely, but for the fact of Lord Burghley’s death in August 1598. It was imperative for Essex to return to court if he wanted to be a beneficiary of the general reshuffle. Much to his amazement, the Queen at first refused to receive him. He confidently expected to obtain Burghley’s lucrative office, the Mastership of the Court of Wards, and wrote indignantly to protest when he did not. The only way he could think of to win back the Queen’s favour was to offer his services as her commander in Ireland, to quell the rebellion of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Having plenty of experience by now of Essex’s reckless behaviour on military expeditions and his disregard for orders, Elizabeth seriously doubted his ability for the task, but no one else could be found to do the job.
Ireland was to be Essex’s nemesis. No effort was spared to give him all he needed in terms of men, money and provisions. All he had to do was carry out the Queen’s instructions by seeking an immediate confrontation with the rebel Tyrone in his Ulster stronghold. Four months later, Essex still had not done so, and his fine army was being depleted by disease. He began to talk of deferring the invasion of Ulster until the following year. Elizabeth, as ever impotent in the military field owing to her sex, could only watch the unfolding disaster in mounting fury. Nothing could have prepared her, however, for his next stunt. He wrote that he had agreed a truce with Tyrone, but failed to apprise the Queen of its terms. ‘You have prospered so ill for us by your warfare as we cannot but be very jealous lest you should be as well overtaken by the treaty,’ she wrote. Her indignation was justified: the terms as good as gave Ireland back to the Roman allegiance and the Irish people, showing Essex to be a man of the most spectacular misjudgement.
In late September 1599, the Queen was at Nonsuch when Essex suddenly burst without warning into her bedchamber. He had ridden post-haste from Ireland, having impetuously decided that the only way to explain his conduct was to the Queen in person. Without even bothering to stop to clean the mud of the journey off him or announce himself properly, he strode resolutely towards her apartments. He found Elizabeth ‘newly up’, still in her undress, her wig on its stand, her face not made up. But she had her wits about her. Realizing that Essex might have brought what was left of the army with him, she was careful to conceal her outrage. She talked to him calmly and then suggested he go to change, before they met again.
Having ascertained that the Earl’s arrival did not herald a coup d’état, the Queen’s attitude was markedly cooler when she received him later in the day. Why had he deserted his post without a warrant? How could he justify his conduct in Ireland? Without listening to his excuses, she lambasted him for his disobedience and for disregarding her wishes, especially in bestowing countless knighthoods. Why, she mocked him, the Irish were laughing that he never lifted a sword except to dub a knight!
Guilty of gross contempt and disobedience, Essex had lost the Queen’s favour and could not hope to return to court. He had badly underestimated her. By unhappy coincidence, his monopoly on the importation of sweet wines was just about to expire. He wrote begging to ‘kiss her fair correcting hand’, but she knew what he was about. If she did not renew the monopoly he would be ruined. She decided that the revenues should return to the crown. He had already contemplated rebellion, fantasizing about a situation where Elizabeth would be forced to listen to his demands and grant them. Now he embarked on a treasonable correspondence with James of Scotland, inviting his support. Whether he imagined that he would dethrone Elizabeth and hold the regency or that James of Scotland would succeed straight away with Essex the kingmaker his right-hand man is open to conjecture.
By the beginning of 1601, Essex House on the Strand was a hotbed of anti-court activity. A group of conspirators were meeting at the lodgings of Essex’s friend, the Earl of Southampton, to discuss Essex’s proposals for seizing the court, the Tower, and the City to force the Queen to change her advisers, namely, to replace Robert Cecil with Robert Devereux. Violence against the Queen’s person was not ruled out. There was great unease at court. Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, who was regretting that he had accepted a knighthood from Essex in Ireland, wrote to a friend: ‘The madcaps are all in a riot, and much evil threatened.’ The Queen
is quite disfavoured, and much unattird, and these troubles waste her muche … Each new message from the City doth disturb her, and she frowns on all the ladies. I had a sharp message from her brought by my Lord Buckhurst, namely thus, ‘Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to get home; it is no season now to foole it here.’… I must not say much, even by this trustie and sure messenger; but the many evil plots and designs have overcome her Highness’ sweet temper. She walks much in her privy chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage.
On Saturday, 7 February, Essex’s followers ostentatiously attended a special performance at the Globe of William Shakespeare’s Richard II with its politically contentious deposition scene. As Elizabeth wearily told William Lambarde, Keeper of the Records at the Tower, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ She must have been aware that it was only one of a number of plays in the last decade of her reign in which the problems of kingship and of a state in crisis were explored and developed. That evening, Essex was summoned to appear before the Council, but refused. All hope of taking the court by surprise was lost.
The next morning, 8 February 1601, he and about 200 young noblemen and gentlemen made their way into the City, with Essex shouting, ‘For the Queen! For the Queen! A plot is laid for my life!’ Cecil had hurriedly sent a message to the Lord Mayor and a herald was proclaiming Essex a traitor in the streets of London. Essex had been immensely popular while he was the Queen’s favourite, but now he found his support melting away. The citizens of London remained mute and unresponsive and at the word ‘traitor’ many of his followers slipped away. The Earl returned to Essex House by water. That evening, after burning incriminating correspondence, he surrendered and was put under arrest. Less than two weeks later, he and his fellow conspirators were brought to trial. The guilty verdict was inevitable and he was condemned to death. This time, Elizabeth behaved with uncharacteristic haste, signing Essex’s death warrant within twenty-four hours. He was beheaded within the confines of the Tower.
It is a wonder that Elizabeth tolerated the antics of this deranged young man so long. Normally such a shrewd judge of character, she had been foolishly fond and over-indulgent of him. Her crown had been in jeopardy, perhaps even her life, but in the final resort the establishment had rallied round.
In the aftermath of Essex’s insurrection, she was depressed. She would still weep for Lord Burghley, who had been dead three years now. She continued to keep a sword by her side. Sir Robert Sydney wrote to Sir John Harington: ‘I do see the Queen often; she doth wax weak since the late troubles … she walketh out but little, meditates much alone, and sometimes writes in private to her best friends.’ With a slight limp now, Elizabeth no longer danced, but had always enjoyed watching others. ‘The Queen smiled at the ladies,’ Sydney continued, describing Elizabeth’s visit to his home, ‘who in their dances often came up to the steps on which the seat was fixed to make their obeisance, and so fell back into their order again.’ She ate little and ‘at going upstairs she called for a staff, and was much wearied in walking about the house.’
She rallied herself to address a delegation of Parliament, assembled in the Council chamber at Whitehall, for the last time. She had taken note of parliamentary opposition to monopolies and promised to look into the matter. Little had been done to address the issue, but now she deftly met their criticism with a gracious response, which quite disarmed them. The speech has come to be known as her Golden Speech and it was effectively her farewell:
There is no jewel, be it never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel – I mean your loves. For I do more esteem it than any treasure or riches … and though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves. This makes me that I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a queen, as to be a queen over so thankful a people. Therefore I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subjects, and that is a duty which I owe. Neither do I desire to live longer days than that I may see your prosperity … My heart never was set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again … There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is not my desire to live nor reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will be more careful and loving.
When she finished, she commanded the Speaker, ‘before these gentlemen depart into their countries, you bring them all to kiss my hand.’
Elizabeth spent her last Christmas at Whitehall. It was particularly jolly, with the Queen in good spirits. In January she moved to Richmond, in foul weather, and was able to give audience to the Venetian ambassador, who was impressed by her ‘lively wit’. At the end of that month, decline set in. Her dear cousin, Lady Nottingham, died, plunging her into depression. Her coronation ring, which had become embedded in her flesh, had to be sawn off. The ring had been the symbol of Elizabeth’s marriage to her kingdom; now it seemed that she and her beloved people were being torn asunder. Her godson Harington came to court and ‘found her in most pitiable state’. He tried to cheer her up, reading her one or two of his rhyming epigrams. ‘When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate,’ she told him, ‘these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters.’ Next her young kinsman, Robert Carey, tried to cheer her by saying how well she looked. ‘Nay, Robin,’ she told him, ‘I am not well.’
Elizabeth was refusing to eat or take physick. She might have been suffering from a septic throat, for at some point an abscess burst and she felt a little better, but, in reality, she had lost the will to live. She sank down on the cushions strewn about her chamber and lay for hours, staring at nothing, sucking her finger. Sir Robert Cecil ventured boldly, ‘Your Majesty, to content the people, you must go to bed.’
‘Little man, little man,’ she roused herself to reprove him, ‘the word must is not used to princes.’
Eventually, Nottingham persuaded her to go to bed. Her dear William Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, knelt beside her, holding her hand and praying aloud. She had lost the power of speech and frowned when the archbishop prayed for her longer life, but when he spoke of heaven and its joys, she would press his hand. Whenever he stopped, she nudged him to continue. In the early hours of 24 March 1603, in her seventieth year, Elizabeth slipped away ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’.
Towards evening the bells were ringing. ‘We have a King! We have a King!’ the people rejoiced. Right to the end, Elizabeth had refused to name her successor, but she had tacitly trusted Sir Robert Cecil to arrange the smooth transfer of power to James of Scotland – ‘they that have most right’. As Robert Carey was galloping north with the ring, which was to be token of James’s accession to the crown of England, Elizabeth’s body was being carelessly wrapped in cerecloth. No longer king and queen both, just the carcase of a mortal old woman, she was disgracefully neglected in death. Only her friend, Anne, Lady Warwick, sat with the body until the black-draped coffin was taken by river to Whitehall to lie in state. She was buried with appropriate pomp in her grandfather’s splendid chapel at Westminster Abbey on 25 April.
‘The Queen is dead. Long live the King!’
Before long, those who were celebrating the coming of a king were looking back with nostalgia to the golden days of Elizabeth. Her reputation grew through the first half of the seventeenth century as disillusion with the Stuarts set in and, closely identified as she was with her country’s greatness, continued to rise through succeeding centuries. Four hundred years after her death, the subject of plays, films, operas and novels, she has been hailed as perhaps the greatest English woman who ever lived, certainly England’s greatest sovereign.