Elizabeth I and the men she loved: How the Queen gave an Essex toyboy her heart, then lopped off his head
In his major new examination of the Elizabethans, historian A.N. Wilson details the passionate love Queen Elizabeth I felt for several men throughout her reign. Here, in the final part of the Mails exclusive serialisation, Wilson reflects on the Queens later years and her disastrous infatuation with a courtier young enough to be her grandson...
By the time she was in her mid-60s, the Virgin Queen had grown prematurely old, with a goggle throat and a great gullet hanging out.
But if Elizabeth was long past her springtime, so was her once dynamic country. The new French ambassador travelled from Dover to London in 1597 through a landscape he described as wild and untilled.
In her palace in Whitehall, he was taken to meet her as she sat in a low chair, all by herself and melancholy, almost as if she had been abandoned. Her long, thin face was lined. Her teeth were very yellow and unequal. On either side of her ears, two great curls hung from beneath a somewhat fantastical red wig.
Off with his head: Hugh Dancy, as the Earl of Eseex, and Helen Mirren as Quen Elizabeth I in a TV drama portraying their love and subsequent soured relationship
The front of her dress was open to keep her cool, he presumed and the ambassador had a glimpse of the whole of her bosom.
She was festooned with jewels. A chain of rubies and pearls encircled the turkey-throat. Spangles of gold and silver and more pearls were in the wig. And she had six or seven rows of pearl bracelets on each wrist.
But by far the most glittering thing about her was the young man who had taken her old womans fancy the wild and wonderful Earl of Essex, now cast in the role of tragic hero for the closing scenes of her reign.
Robert Devereux was the stepson of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the childhood sweetheart Elizabeth might have married until, tired of waiting for her, he wed the widowed Lettice Devereux. The Queen loathed the strong-minded Lettice and referred to her as the She-Wolf. Strange, then, that she should pour such affection on the cub.
But Robert, with his curly auburn hair, dark eyes, curling satirical mouth, fiery temper and total selfishness, had inherited not only his mothers looks but also her gift for causing mayhem and living dangerously.
Ruthless: Queen Elizabeth I, although privately mocked for doting on her favourites, showed no mercy when they offended her
He was ten when he first appeared at court, and from the outset his relationship with his monarch was arch and combatively flirtatious. He refused to allow her to kiss him and kept his hat on in her presence.
At 18, he accompanied his stepfather on a military campaign in the Netherlands, returning to London two years later to be the Queens bosom friend at court. He knew how to flatter the wrinkled old crone for her beauty, whisper in her ear and lead her round the dance floor in the elaborate steps of the galliard. She hung on the brash young mans arm.
It was not a healthy relationship. He behaved with the conscious bullying of the toy-boy towards a pathetic older woman who was grateful for his love. She allowed him to get away with outbursts of rage or disobedience that would have cost others their heads.Occasiona! lly, she would remember who she was and insist upon his penitence, or even banish him from her favours, but only for a while.
He always came back. She even ignored it when he married, on condition that his wife, Frances, who bore him five children, lived very retired and away from court.
But Essex resented being treated as a mere piece of court decoration and punctuated his attentions to the Queen with displays of derring-do on the international scene. He led an army into France and a squadron of ships against Spain, determined to prove himself as great a hero as her previous favourite, the intrepid explorer Sir Walter Raleigh.
What drove him on was his huge ambition as he openly jockeyed to become the most powerful man in the kingdom. With the Queen slipping into her dotage becoming, as he saw it, increasingly indecisive, irascible and capricious he was determined to be the man who took control.
His hand would then be on the tiller when the new captain her cousin James, King of Scotland, was her most likely successor though she had not named him as such took over.
Essexs ambition was not so fanciful. He was related by blood to a large proportion of the tiny peerage of England. Many of them might loathe him for the brash bully that he was, but they were bound to him by kinship. He also had a talent for wooing political allies as well as the public. His appeal went far and wide.
Beheaded: Robert Devereux
This is why what began as a very embarrassing crush formed by a lonely old woman on someone almost young enough to be her grandson developed into one of the greatest political threats of her reign.
It was trouble in Ireland that sparked events. There was a rebellion. The Queen hurriedly forgave Essex they were in the middle of a tiff and summoned him back from his sulk to deal with it and its leader, the Earl of Tyrone.
ButTyrone ! got the better of Essex, who fought a lacklustre campaign, despite heading the largest army ever to leave English shores during theentire reign 16,000 on foot and 1,300 forces mounted.
Hecowered in Dublin, totally ineffectual. Exasperated, the Queen sent messages telling him to move decisively against Tyrone. If we had meantthat Ireland should be abandoned, then it was superfluous to have sent over a personage such as yourself, she wrote sarcastically.
But Essex went his own way and parleyed a truce with Tyrone, on ridiculously easy terms that annoyed the Queen.
Realisinghe had blundered, he then made matters worse by playing the lovers card. Had he stayed at his post in Ireland and taken the fight to the rebels, he might have saved his political career. Instead, he panicked and hurried back to London to make a personal appeal to the woman who sofar had been able to refuse him nothing.
He rode all night to get to her and, brushing past her ladies-in-waiting, walked straight into her bedroom. Swaggering, mud-spattered and oozing testosterone, he caught the old woman in a state of undress with her grey hairs about her ears, and herwig several feet away on its stand.
Atfirst, it looked as if his gamble had paid off. She patted him softly on the head and listened sympathetically to his explanations of events in Ireland. But his goose was cooked. Not only had he failed in his duties as her supreme general, but he had seen his Queen without wig, make-up or day-clothes.
Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth and Joseph Fiennes as Robert Dudley, the stepfather of her new love interest, in the film Elizabeth
And she, not before time, had seen him for what he was an incompetent public servant who had outlived his usefulness and over-stepped every royal protocol.
At another meeting later that day, in the presence of her councillors, s! he merci lessly spelt out to him his failings. He stammered out his responses but it was too late.
There and then, she dismissed him from all his offices, banished him from court and put him under house arrest. In just hours, he had fallen from the Queens most beloved favourite to a nobody.
For a year, there was a stand-off between them, both perhaps hoping for reconciliation. When he sank into illness, she sent him broth and doctors. A more serious malady for him was that, without the financial rewards of high office, he was broke and deeply in debt, but she refused to bail him out. Essex was now a desperate man. He needed to do something to save himself, and such was his personal magnetism that a significant number of his friends joined him in a rebellion, even though it was plainly a madcap scheme.
It was aimed ostensibly at Elizabeths closest advisers, now delighting in Essexs downfall, rather than the Queen herself but its true intent was clear.
Final straw: Queen Elizabeth I was mortified when her toyboy broke all protocol and burst in her without her wig
As the coup was being planned, its young aristocratic supporters took a barge over the Thames to the Globe Theatre and paid for a special performance of Shakespeares Richard II, a play in which an English monarch is de-throned, as an audacious declaration of intent.
More than 400 years after it happened, the Essex rebellion still beggars belief both that they thought they could get away with it and that so many powerful men, with so much to lose, were prepared to take part.
The actual uprising on February 8, 1601, lasted a mere 12 hours before it was snuffed out. Yet it might have succeeded. If Essex and his friends had marched directly on the Queen in Whitehall, they stood a chance of apprehending her and seizing the Great Seal, symbol of sovereignty. Instead, they headed off in the opposite di! rection, towards the City, whose Lord Mayor had promised support and where 1,000 armed men of the London mob aggrieved by years of rising food prices were supposed to be waiting to join him.
It was all fantasy. By the time the rebels turned back towards Westminster, cavalry loyal to the Queen blocked the way. Within hours, the principals were behind bars.
At his show trial for treason, Essex was defiant, knowing he had no chance of acquittal. The Queens last concession for the toy-boy who, for all his faults, had consoled her in her declining years, was the privilege of a private death. He was beheaded in an inner courtyard at the Tower rather than before the crowd on Tower Green.
His popularity lived on, however, in drinking songs that hailed him as sweet Englands pride. He was everlastingly preserved in his youth, the victim of an old lady supposedly too stubborn, too stingy and too indecisive to be a great national leader any more.
Yet the steely way in which she dealt with the crisis showed that for all her foolish capacity to dote on her favourites, she had lost none of her ruthlessness and cunning. But there was a personal price to pay, and her life was undoubtedly sadder after Essexs death. She retained much of her vigour and enjoyed dancing almost to the end. Right up to her 69th birthday she could still ride ten miles in a day and go hunting afterwards. Her mental faculties were undiminished. But she could not die happy.
She had foresworn marriage and children. Favourites like Leicester, Raleigh and Essex had come and gone, all betraying her in one way or another. The burden of her office was a heavy one. To wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it, she said in her final speech to Parliament.
Though her end approached, the old spirit was still there. When a courtier told her she must take to her bed shortly before her death, she told him: Little man, must is not a word to be used to princes.
But ! take to her bed she did, and she died there in March 1603. By now, her finger had swollen so much that the Coronation Ring had eaten into her flesh and had to be sawn off. Only by such means could the Virgin Queen, who had reigned for 44 years, be separated from her hold on power.
Adapted from The Elizabethans by A. N. Wilson, to be published by Hutchinson tomorrow at 25. 2011 A. N. Wilson. To order a copy for 18.99 (inc p&p), tel: 0843 382 0000.
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