After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

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Northumberland’s marriage to one of Essex’s sisters was an unhappy one and it seems she was content to betray her husband’s confidences – or even to invent stories against him – and she wasn’t the only wife to do so. Howard found another useful instrument in Cobham’s wife, the widowed Countess of Kildare. Born Frances Howard, she was the daughter of Cecil’s ally the Earl of Nottingham and had married Cobham in 1600 – as the tenth richest man in England he had one obvious attraction to an ambitious woman. Like several other Howard women of the day, Lady Kildare (it was usual to keep the name of your first husband in cases where the first husband’s title was superior) was beautiful but scheming, and she had a reputation as a vicious gossip. Essex had once labelled her ‘the spider of the court’, and whether she intended to harm her husband or not, she provided Howard with plenty of ammunition against him, complaining that he and Ralegh frequently railed against James’s title. Cecil’s letters to James supported Howard’s efforts, praising the ‘wisdom and sincerity’ of ‘faithful 3 [Howard]’, and assuring James that if he did not ‘cast a stone into the mouths of these gaping crabs [Cobham and Ralegh] they would not stick to confess daily how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to be under your sovereignty’.

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As James absorbed these missives, Howard began to suggest to Cecil ways in which Ralegh and Cobham might be finished. Elizabeth was extremely anxious about the unpopularity of her government and Howard suggested that she be encouraged to be suspicious of Cobham and Ralegh and ‘taught the peril that grows unto princes by protecting, countenancing or entertaining persons odious to multitudes.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Ralegh and Cobham soon felt the deepening royal chill and struggled to retrieve the Queen’s good opinion, on one occasion complaining to Elizabeth that the prisoners from the Essex revolt were being treated too leniently and on another drawing up a paper supporting her decision not to name an heir.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such actions took them further from any hope of James’s favour and Howard intended that in the longer term other matters could be used against them. Howard had discovered that Cobham and Ralegh had decided to divide their labours so that if the policy of peace with Spain prospered Cobham would benefit, if war, then Ralegh. Howard hoped that Spain could be used to bring them both down: ‘The glass of time being very far run, the day of the queen’s death may be the day of their doom’ he wrote to Cecil in June 1602.

(#litres_trial_promo) Northumberland, however, was going to prove more difficult to destroy.

The thirty-eight-year-old Northumberland was an unconventional figure with an equally unconventional background. His father, Thomas Percy, the eighth Earl, had faced execution for his involvement in the 1569 revolt of the Northern earls, but was found dead in his cell from gunshot wounds. It was said to be a suicide, although some had suspected murder. Either way his escape from the executioner saved his vast estates from being forfeited to the crown under the rules of attainder, and young Northumberland inherited land stretching over eight counties across England and Wales. His immense wealth had allowed him to stand apart from the Cecil and Essex factions during the 1590s, which was as well since he cared for neither of them. He saw Cecil, who was descended from Welsh farmers, as a social upstart, and felt no commensurate warmth for Essex whose enemy, Ralegh, shared his interests in navigation, astronomy and mathematics.

Science was a risky area for study at a time when it was confused with magic and Howard had deliberately laced his letter to James with references to diabolic meetings at Durham House to stir up James’s horror of the occult. To Howard’s dismay, however, James was anxious to gain the support of a man who might otherwise have blocked his route south and in the winter of 1602/3 they were in close contact. Northumberland used his links with James to defend Cobham and Ralegh from accusations of disloyalty to James’s cause, but he did not to wish to be too closely associated with them and told James that Ralegh ‘will never be able to do you much good nor harm’: in other words, that he was expendable. Northumberland had a much bigger agenda than Ralegh’s career to consider – the cause of toleration of religion. While Northumberland was content to conform in religious matters, Catholicism remained strongly rooted in the north of England where he had most of his land base and he saw himself as a natural protector of Catholics.

As Elizabeth’s health deteriorated Northumberland offered James a detailed analysis on how toleration would help achieve a bloodless and successful accession. According to Northumberland, there were two outstanding questions that concerned James’s supporters: ‘Would he succeed peacefully without opposition?’ and ‘Would he invade England and try and seize the crown before Elizabeth was dead?’

Northumberland explained to James that widespread fear of a Scots invasion sprang from the knowledge that the Scots had invaded England in the past, that they had many allies amongst England’s traditional enemies and that England was vulnerable. Large numbers of her military men were employed in Ireland, in the Netherlands and on the high seas, while in England itself, ‘all men are discontented in general [and] … look rather for the sun rising than after the sun setting’. In his Tract to the King Harington had suggested that things were so bad a Scots invasion might succeed, but Northumberland warned James that even if it did, a small country like Scotland would never be able to maintain its domination of its richer southern neighbour. It would be best for James to wait for nature to take its course with Elizabeth for ‘it is most certain young bodies may die, but old ones must out of necessity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Once Elizabeth was dead, Northumberland was certain James’s cause would prove a powerful one:

When we look into your competitors at home we find the eyes of the world, neither of the great ones nor the small ones, cast towards them, for either in their worth they are contemptible, or not liked for their sex, wishing no more Queens, fearing we shall never enjoy another like to this.

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Northumberland acknowledged, however, that James’s candidature had two obvious problems. The first was that he was Scots. He warned – as Harington had – that ‘the better sort’ feared James might give public office to the Scots while ordinary people found ‘the name of Scots is harsh in the ears’. He advised therefore that James enter England as an Englishman; if he succeeded in keeping ‘the better sort’ happy ordinary people would also accept him ‘and the memories of the ancient wounds between England and Scotland will be cancelled’.

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The second potential source of serious opposition James might face, Northumberland wrote, was from the Catholic population. Harington had told James that ‘a great part of the realm, what with commiseration of their oppression, and what with the known abuses in our own church and government, do grow cold in religion and in the service of both God and prince’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Northumberland confirmed ‘their faction is strong, their increase is daily’. Indeed so many young men were being drawn to the Catholic seminaries on the Continent that there were now too many English priests to be supported at home. The numbers of converts were also growing and were found even in the families of the most bitter enemies of Catholicism: Leicester’s son became a Catholic, as would Walsing-ham’s daughter, while the children of recusant-hunting bishops such as the Bishop of Durham, Tobie Matthew and John Thornborough had already done so.

(#litres_trial_promo) Northumberland admitted that ‘the purer sort’ of these Catholics – those influenced by the Jesuits – preferred the candidature of the Infanta Isabella to that of James. ‘I will dare say no more,’ Northumberland concluded, ‘but it were a pity to lose so good a kingdom for not tolerating a mass in a corner.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The unspoken advice was clear enough: the moderates needed to be encouraged – but James already knew that well enough.

The English Jesuits, led by their Principal, the Somerset-born Robert Persons, were the most determined and dangerous opponents of James’s succession. They had been behind the Doleman book on the succession and in February 1601 they had persuaded Philip III to promote the candidature of the Infanta Isabella despite her own opposition to it.

Three main issues governed the Spanish Council’s outlook in matters of foreign policy, and as the Jesuits were aware, their relations with England affected them all: the first – the Dutch rebellion in the Netherlands – was backed by England; the second – trade in the Indies – was frequently interrupted by English privateers; the third – the threat posed by France – had been countered in earlier centuries by an Anglo-Spanish alliance. It was vitally important therefore for Spain to have a friendly monarch on the English throne. The Infanta and Albert believed this would be best achieved by peaceful relations with whoever naturally succeeded Elizabeth; but Scotland was a traditional enemy of Spain and the Jesuits had persuaded the Spanish Council that if they did not provide a candidate themselves the English Catholics would support James in return for toleration and that would be a disaster for Spain. Philip III followed their advice and the Infanta’s objections were overruled.

Spain’s invasion of Ireland in September 1601 followed. Intended as a stepping stone to an invasion of England, it proved to be a military fiasco and in December Spanish forces were obliged to surrender to Essex’s replacement in Ireland, Lord Mountjoy. By the early summer of 1602, however, the Spanish Council had devised new plans to invade England in the following March and started laying groundwork, giving the soldier and spy Thomas Wintour a large sum of money (100,000 escudos) to try to buy the loyalty of discontented Catholics. Within weeks, the Archduke Albert had admitted he was in touch with James and had offered his support in the hopes of future friendship. Clearly the Catholic campaign for the English throne required a new and more convincing candidate.

In Rome, English and Welsh Catholics were still petitioning the Pope to consider a marriage between Arbella Stuart and a member of the Farnese family, to whom she had been linked before the death of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in December 1592. Others suggested she marry the young Earl of Arundel whose father had died in the Tower and who was considered a Catholic martyr.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even Robert Persons accepted that a new candidate was required, one that might fulfil the Pope’s desire to choose one on whom Spain, France and the Vatican could all agree – and here he had a stroke of good fortune. Henri IV had always been a strong advocate of James’s claim. The Scots King had a French grandmother, their countries were traditional allies and Henri had hoped to gain goodwill from the Pope by encouraging James to grant toleration of religion to Catholics, as he had offered it to Protestants in France. Henri’s attitude, however, underwent a revolution in the summer of 1602.

After discovering that Cecil was working for James, Henri had realised that if James became king, it might mean a settlement between Spain and England, a cause that had always been close to Cecil’s heart. Although France and Spain were at peace, it was an uneasy one and Henri spent half his revenue on defence. Not only did he fear better Anglo-Spanish relations, but under James the English and Scots crowns would be united and France would lose the benefits of the Auld Alliance, which he called France’s ‘bridle on England’. In October 1602 Spanish spies reported home that Henri IV of France was ‘no less worried about the King of Scotland than we are’. Robert Persons approached the leader of the curia’s French faction, Cardinal D’Ossat, and urged him to encourage the opening of discussions between Spain, France and the Papacy. The Pope meanwhile had issued a secret brief to his nuncio in Flanders ordering all English Catholics to oppose any Protestant successor to Elizabeth, ‘whensoever that wretched woman should depart this life’.

Alarmed by the prospect of Jesuit plots in England, James wrote a furious letter to Cecil in January, attacking his pursuit of peace with Spain. If any treaty were achieved, he complained:

it would no more be thought odious for any Englishman to dispute upon [i.e. argue for] a Spanish title; … the king of Spain would … have free access in England, to corrupt the minds of all corruptible men for the advancement of his ambitions … and lastly, Jesuits, seminary priests, and that rabble, with which England is already too much infected, would then resort there in such swarms as the caterpillars or flies did in Egypt, no man any more abhorring them.

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He demanded to know why Cecil had not carried out a royal proclamation issued in November ordering the expulsion of all priests from England.

I know it may be justly thought that I have the like beam in my own eye, but alas it is a far more barbarous and stiff-necked people that I rule over. Saint George surely rides upon a towardly riding horse, where I am daily struggling to control a wild unruly colt … I protest in God’s presence the daily increase that I hear of popery in England, and the proud vaunting that the papists make daily there of their power, their increase and their combined faction, that none shall enter to be king there, but by their permission.

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Cecil tried to put James’s mind at rest. He insisted he was indeed ferocious in his pursuit of Jesuits – ‘that generation of vipers’ – and if he was reluctant to see the secular Catholic priests ‘die by dozens’ it was because by and large they shared moderate Catholic opinion. Many were loyal to James’s candidature and they were useful tools against the Jesuits. Why, some secular priests had published pamphlets accusing the Jesuits of treason and were even prepared to betray them to their deaths.

(#litres_trial_promo) Unconvinced, James replied with what amounted to an order:

I long to see the execution of the last edict against [the priests], not that thereby I wish to have their heads divided from their bodies but that I would be glad to have both their heads and their bodies separated from this whole land, and safely transported beyond the seas, where they may freely glut themselves on their imagined Gods.

James explained that he was not interested in ‘the distinction in their ranks, I mean betwixt the Jesuits and the secular priests’. Both were subject to the Pope, he pointed out, arguing that if the secular priests appeared harmless it actually made them more dangerous.

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On 20 January 1603 the Spanish Council finally submitted their recommendations on the succession issue to Philip III. They suggested that an English candidate should be chosen because it would satisfy the ‘universal desire of all men to have a King of their own nation … whilst the King of France will have reason to be satisfied, and to refrain from helping the King of Scotland, as it cannot suit him for Scotland and England to be reunited’. The Marquis de Poza added that if the English could not agree on a Catholic candidate ‘it would be better to have any heretic there rather than the King of Scotland’. The Count de Olivares agreed:

the worst solution of the question for us may be regarded as the succession of the King of Scotland. He is not only personally to be distrusted, but the union of two kingdoms, and above all the increment of England … with the naval forces she possesses, would be a standing danger to your Majesty in a vital point, namely the navigation to both Indies. To this must be added the hatred which has always existed between the crowns of Spain and Scotland and the old friendship of the latter with France.

The Council noted that there was a faction within the curia that believed James might be converted. It recommended that English Catholics might be informed that the truth was otherwise. They pointed out that James was notoriously dishonest and Henri IV’s ambassador was complaining that it was being made difficult for him to hear mass in Edinburgh. Furthermore: ‘There is a strong belief that he consented to the killing of his mother, and at least he manifested no sorrow or resentment at it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) They advised that their new candidate should support religious toleration for Protestants and observed that Catholics and Protestants shared ‘a common ground of agreement … their hatred of the Scottish domination’, and concluded that ‘the greatest aid to success will be … the liberal promises made to Catholics and heretics, almost without distinction, particularly to other claimants and their principal supporters, who should be given estates, incomes, offices, grants, privileges, and exemptions, almost, indeed, sharing the crown amongst them’ – as James was already doing.

The Council then emphasised to Philip that the means of approaching France had to be decided immediately, ‘in case the Queen dies before we are fully prepared. If this should happen we should not only be confronted with the evils already set forth, but the Catholics, who have placed their trust in your Majesty, will be handed over to the hangman and religion will receive its death blow’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Orders were made ‘that the building and fitting out of high ships should be continued with high speed, and also that the [military] efforts already recommended to be made in Flanders should proceed …’

News of a build-up of Spanish forces had already reached England. On 17 January, an English courtier wrote to a friend that a former prisoner in Spain had described military preparations and that the Queen’s ships had captured several vessels heading to Spain laden ‘with arms and munitions’.

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There was also shocking news about Arbella Stuart emerging at court. That Christmas she had at last attempted to escape from her grandmother’s house, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. It was said that she had planned a marriage with Edward Seymour, the senior grandson of the Earl of Hertford and Catherine Grey. Hertford had betrayed her plan and Cecil had tried to assure James that, as far as he knew, Arbella was no Catholic, just a lonely spinster. Courtiers in England now anxiously prepared for whatever violence lay ahead. Northumberland added fifty-three war horses to his stables. The Earl of Hertford reinforced the gateways to his house and erected defensive structures. Bess of Hardwick’s elder son, Henry Cavendish, began stocking Chatsworth with new pikes and other arms.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cecil, meanwhile, busily began shoring up his personal financial position. Even the prospect of a peaceful Stuart inheritance did not make his future secure. James might sack or demote him after he had served his purpose and if that occurred he would be brought down by the weight of his debts. The building of his new grandiose palace on the Strand had almost bankrupt him. Harington had heard a rumour in the summer that Cecil was being forced to sell Theobalds, the fabulous palace in Hertfordshire that his father had left him. Cecil denied it, but the Secretary of State was in a delicate position and the easiest way for him to make money was to take it from the crown.

Cecil had never been above making money from Elizabeth in morally dubious ways: when he offered his ship the True Love for an official expedition to the Azores in 1597 he had charged the Queen twice for the victuals. He now sold her his unprofitable estates for £5,200 and acquired the valuable royal Great and Little Parks of Brigstock in Northamptonshire behind the back of Elizabeth’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, the lessee. His action, he hoped, would offer some security of income, whatever lay ahead.

As James looked on watchfully from Scotland the final duel between Cecil and Persons for the English crown was about to begin.

* (#ulink_3594d67e-221f-5971-80c6-446e8987e84f) The Treaty of Berwick, signed in July 1586, entitled James to an annual pension of £4,000; James seems to have interpreted it as recognition of his claim to the English throne.