The last years

'The Ditchley Portrait', by
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592
The queen stands upon England depicted
on top of a globe.
Public domain.

The 'second reign'

The fifteen years between the defeat of the Armada and Elizabeth's death was a troubled period, and we should not be deceived by the dazzling images of the Queen produced in the 1590s.

The Armada was a disaster for Spain but not a knock-out blow. In 1589 Drake headed a counter-attack, descending on Lisbon in order to put a pretender on the Portuguese throne and intercept the treasure fleet from the Indies, but this was an ignominious failure. The war with Spain dragged on.

From the point of view of Spain, Ireland was England’s greatest area of vulnerability. It was governed by a thinly-spread English colonial class headed by a Lord Deputy and it remained stubbornly Catholic. English attitudes to the Irish were profoundly racist - shown, for example in Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland.

The new men

On a personal level, the death of Leicester in September 1588 was a grievous blow to Elizabeth.  In November it was observed that she was ‘much aged and spent and very melancholy’.  Leicester’s death was the first of several events which steadily transformed the membership and profile of the Elizabethan establishment. Walsingham died in April 1590, his last years having been spent in comparative poverty because of the debts of his late son-in-law, Philip Sidney. The debt-ridden Lord Chancellor Hatton died from kidney disease in November 1591.

Sir Walter Raleigh seemed likely to become Elizabeth’s third favourite after Leicester and Hatton. She granted him most of the offices in the south-west vacated by the death of the second earl of Bedford, as well as lucrative monopolies in the east Midlands and Ireland. But he blotted his copybook, by seducing Elizabeth's maid of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, daughter of her first ambassador to Paris. In the summer of 1591 Bess discovered that she was pregnant, and the couple secretly married. In February 1592 she gave birth to a boy, but when the marriage was discovered on 31 May she was sent to the Tower.  

Raleigh at this time was on a privateering voyage to the Azores, but in July he was recalled and sent to the Tower. Although both were released in August, when his fleet captured the Madre de Dios, he remained under a cloud for the next five years. 

Burghley became more dominant than ever in the Privy Council, and he exploited his position to ensure that the former advocates of a more interventionist foreign policy were replaced by more cautious strategists. 

Elizabeth’s last years were dominated by factional conflict. Politicians jockeyed for position, ready for her death. The most deadly feud was between the followers of Essex and those of Robert Cecil.

The rise of Cecil

Robert Cecil was Burghley’s second son. Elizabeth knighted him when she visited Burghley’s house, Theobalds (pronounced Tibbalds), in May 1591. In August, aged 28, he was admitted to the Privy Council. Cecil was brilliant but unscrupulous, enjoying intrigue as much as wealth and power. Because of his small size Elizabeth called him her little elf or pygmy. He was much disliked and in the popular imagination he could not compete with the glamorous Essex.

The key vacant post in the Privy Council (now 11 members) was Walsingham’s position of secretary. In view of the increase in factionalism as the reign advanced, Elizabeth was reluctant to fill the post. While it remained vacant, it was contested between Cecil and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.

Essex had impeccable connections. He was related to the Queen through his mother, Lettice Knollys, who had married Leicester as her second husband. 

Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex
then Countess of Leicester,
granddaughter of Mary Boleyn.
Collection of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat.

His sister, Penelope, Lady Rich, was the 'Stella' of Sidney’s sonnets. His circle also included Cecil’s cousin, Francis Bacon, who had been a privy councillor since February 1593. At the time of Walsingham’s death Essex risked his fortunes at court by secretly marrying Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, but by November 1590 he was back in favour. 

The problem of Essex

The Cádiz expedition: By the late 1590s the feud between Essex and Cecil had deteriorated into a factional battle to control the queen’s policy, with public opinion overwhelmingly on the side of the handsome and arrogant Essex. In 1596 Burghley and Elizabeth received intelligence of preparations for a new Armada. On 30 June a fleet of forty warships and 15,000 English and Dutch soldiers sailed to Cádiz under the joint command of two great rivals: Essex, Lord General of the Army and Lord Howard of Effingham. On 1 July the fleet took or destroyed all the Spanish vessels and two hours later the men put ashore and occupied the city. The defenders fled, leaving the English and Dutch in control for two weeks. They left on 16 July, after burning a good part of the town, so that no further armada could sail from there. It was a hugely humiliating moment for Spain.   

The storming of Cadiz, England's last
great success against Spain.

But on 5 July, during his absence, Cecil secured the position of Secretary. 

After the naval expedition, there were ballads, medallions, processions and services to celebrate Essex’s victory, and for a while he was more popular than the Queen. He was now accompanied round London by a horde of military officers - and the Queen had no standing army of her own.  He took the chivalric model of Philip Sidney to excess, fighting duels and cultivating a military clientele. 

His popularity and his hatred of the Cecils made him reckless. Early in 1597 he plunged into conflict with the Queen when she refused to give the lucrative position of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports to one of his followers and gave it instead to his enemy Lord Cobham. He challenged the Queen at a council meeting and when she ignored him, he took to his bed and threatened to leave court. As a conciliatory gesture she made him Master of the Ordnance – but she resented the fact that she had been forced to humour him. 

The Islands Voyage: In May 1597, Elizabeth she gave Essex ‘sole command by land and sea’ in the campaign against Spain. When he left court to take up his position with the fleet, she sent after him love tokens and ‘sweet letters’.  The fleet set sail in July but was driven back by storms. It finally set sail in August, and, acting on his own initiative, Essex set out for the Azores in pursuit of the Spanish fleet. 

The ‘Islands Voyage’ was a shambles. Instead of mounting a direct attack, Essex sailed round in search of a rich prize. He and Raleigh quarrelled over tactics and were unable to prevent a Spanish treasure fleet (carrying bullion valued at three and a half million pounds) from entering harbour. The only prizes taken were six merchant ships. On the way home the fleet was broken up by a storm and then disastrously becalmed, and while it floundered helplessly in the Atlantic England lay open to invasion. It was only a storm in the Bay of Biscay that saved England. This was Elizabeth’s last attempt to win a decisive victory over Spain, and from now on her war aims were less ambitious. When Essex landed at Falmouth, he found that his rivals had gained the upper hand, though his popularity among the population was undimmed. In his absence, Cecil had been made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Lord Howard of Effingham created Earl of Nottingham. 

Essex v. Cecil: The feud between Essex and Cecil was fought as viciously single-mindedly as anything since the days after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey.  Essex pursued ideology as well as patronage, assuming the militant Protestant model of his relations Leicester, Walsingham and Sidney, but he was also advancing his own interests by writing secretly to James VI. 

On 1 July 1598 Essex had had a violent quarrel with Elizabeth over who should be the new Lord Deputy in Ireland. When she rejected his suggestion, he turned his back on her. She recalled him and hit him across the face, telling him to ‘go and be hanged’. He half drew his sword and replied that he had been done ‘an intolerable wrong’.  His loss of self-control in violating the taboo of royal inviolability must have been the most humiliating experience of Elizabeth’s adult life. Would Essex have behaved in the same way to a male ruler?

Convinced that he was the injured party, Essex withdrew to his country house and wrote to Elizabeth criticizing her behaviour. On 4 August 1598 Burghley died. It was the wrong time for Essex, who was forbidden to enter the Queen’s presence. But in October he apologised and a fragile reconciliation took place. He was needed in Ireland.

Essex in Ireland

The Irish revolt – the Nine Years’ War - was the most serious to date. It had begun in Ulster and Connacht and had turned into war throughout Ireland. It was led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who offered his kingdom to Philip. 

On 14 August 1598, O’Neill and his allies ambushed the English at the Yellow Ford on the Blackwater river, a few miles north-west of Armagh, and Elizabeth all but lost control of Ireland.  In October English settlers in Munster were attacked and killed. While almost 35,000 English and Welsh levies were sent to Ireland between 1595 and 1601, Tyrone commanded a remarkable degree of unity and support for an independent Catholic Ireland. This all looked disturbingly like a mirror-image of the Netherlands revolt against Spain. 

The Yellow Ford disaster – the greatest of Elizabeth’s reign – gave Essex the opportunity to regain the queen’s favour. On 25 March 1599 he was appointed her Lord Lieutenant (not merely Deputy) in Ireland - an event mentioned in Henry V.

'Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broke backed on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!'

On 13 April 1599 he landed in Ireland with an army of 16,000 foot and 1,300 cavalry, 2,000 of them veterans of the Netherlands campaigns, and twelve great pieces of ordnance costing £23,000. 

Before he went to Ireland Essex had eloquently and convincingly argued in Council that the overwhelming military priority was to vanquish Tyrone in Ulster. But it was not until August that he finally marched north, by which time his army had been reduced to 4,000 men. In September, he met O'Neill at a ford on the river Lagan and arranged a six-week truce. This was emphatically what he had not been sent to Ireland to achieve. 

Essex’s conduct in Ireland sealed his fate. Elizabeth saw the truce as dishonourable, and there were fears that he and O’Neill had reached a secret agreement, promising each other’s kingdoms.   

Essex’s Rebellion

On 24 September a desperate Essex deserted his post, and hastened to court to justify himself. Four days later burst unannounced into Elizabeth’s bedchamber at Nonsuch, violating the space known only to her and her ladies. Elizabeth was incandescent: ‘By God’s Son, I am no queen; that man is above me.’ After three meetings with the Queen that day, he never saw her again. On 1 October he was transferred to the custody of Lord Keeper Egerton at York House on the Strand. 

In this period a wave of popular sympathy for him broke out in London and was expressed in libels and broadsheets reviling Elizabeth. On 29 November he was charged in Star Chamber with maladministration and with abandoning his command. He was suspended from the Privy Council and on 5 June 1600, after a hearing before a panel of leading councillors and judges, he was put under house arrest at Essex House and removed from all his offices save Master of the Horse. On 25 August his sentence was relaxed, subject to his continued banishment from court.

But at the same time an investigation was begun into the circumstances of the publication of John Haywood’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV, a work dedicated to Essex as ‘futuris temporis expectatione’ a term suitable for an heir apparent to the throne, and printed just before his departure for Ireland.  (It was an account of the ancient nobility rising to free the kingdom from Richard II’s upstart favourites.) The book was censored and its dedication removed.

In the autumn of 1600, a desperate Essex turned his mind to a coup. In September Elizabeth refused to renew his lease of the duties on imported sweet wines (inherited from Leicester). For Essex, this was a catastrophe: he could not pay his creditors nor satisfy his followers. Soon he would have no followers, for a patron who lost royal favour was not worth following.  He now turned to open treason. Emissaries were sent to O’Neill asking him to fulfil his promise that ‘if the earl of Essex would be ruled by him, he would make him the greatest man in the kingdom’. At the end of 1600 Essex House was the resort of diverse groups of malcontents, including Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton. 

On 7 February 1601 Essex paid the Lord Chamberlain’s company to perform a play ‘of King Henry the Fourth and the killing of Richard the Second’ - almost certainly Shakespeare’s Richard II, a play about a deposed king. On the same day he was called before the Council to account for his behaviour – and declined saying he was feverish after a game of tennis. That night he called together his supporters telling them that Raleigh and Lord Cobham were planning to murder him.

On Sunday 8 February, some 300 people assembled at Essex House early in the morning, including many of the younger generation of the English nobility. When four privy councillors called on Essex with a conciliatory message from the Queen, they were taken hostage. Essex then marched his company out into the Strand and up Ludgate Hill. Soon he found himself virtually encircled by the City’s trained bands, while many of his company melted away. Essex retired to Essex House and when heavy artillery was fetched from the Tower, the rebels surrendered. The revolt had lasted 12 hours. 

On 19 February Essex and his accomplice, the Earl of Southampton, were tried at Westminster Hall on charges that they had sought the Crown, had intended to lay violent hands on the Queen, and had engaged in Catholic conspiracy. One of the Crown lawyers was his old friend (now enemy), Francis Bacon. Essex and Southampton were found guilty, and the Queen did not hesitate over Essex's death warrant as she had over those of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots. On 25 February he was beheaded, his death witnessed by Raleigh as Captain of the Guard. His death opened up a rift between the Queen and many of her subjects. (Southampton’s death sentence was never carried out, but he remained in the Tower for the rest of the reign.)

Essex’s revolt was perhaps the last time that turbulent nobles took up arms to demand their rightful place as counsellors. His failure paved the way for Cecil and his men, the technocrats and ‘base pen clerks’ whose rise he had so resented. By her inability to restrain Essex, Elizabeth had lost her ability to balance court factions, and also lost a great deal of her popularity. Public opinion continued to believe that Essex – ‘sweet England’s pride’ -  had been unfairly treated and Cecil was widely vilified.

 The end of the reign

Ireland: Essex’s failure in Ireland left the country open to Spanish and papal influence. In April 1600 Clement VIII gave a crusading indulgence to the supporters of O’Neill, ‘captain general of the Catholic army in Ireland’. But in the first days of 1602 an invading Spanish fleet capitulated, and by July O’Neill was a fugitive in Ulster. Cecil wanted to end the war with a truce, but Elizabeth was adamant that he had to be decisively defeated. In February 1603 she finally agreed to receive his submission, but before he was able to make it she was dead. 

With Tyrone’s capitulation, Elizabeth finished the task set by her father eighty years earlier ... It was the greatest of Tudor enterprises ... achieved in agony and pain... It bequeathed to the Queen’s successors a problem of granite-like intractability. ... In Ireland it was only sustained, consistent long-term policy which could hope to ameliorate the intrinsically painful process of cultural displacement which was posed by English aims. For this Elizabeth was wholly unfitted. Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (1993), pp. 432-3.

Monopolies: The war had carried a huge cost. Between 1599 and 1601 the Queen had sold £212,614 worth of crown lands, but this did not even pay for the army Essex had taken to Ireland, which in six months had cost her almost £300,000.  Elizabeth tried to tighten up expenditure, and that meant she was less ready to grant court sinecures – this greatly lessened her popularity. One way in which she could enrich courtiers at no expense to herself was by the granting of monopolies, which gave the holders the sole right to manufacture or market a commodity. As a result the price of a range of consumer goods rose, and in August 1601 her Lord Treasurer had to admit that monopolies had become so numerous that the situation was in urgent need of review. 

The Parliament that met in November 1601, called to vote supplies for Ireland, was the most difficult of Elizabeth's reign. Members were outraged about monopolies, but to attack them was to question the royal prerogative. Faced with an unprecedented revolt, the Queen capitulated. On 25 November, she sent a message via the Speaker that ‘she herself would take present order of reformation’ and that no monopoly would be allowed to continue which had not been vindicated in a court of law. On 30 November 140 Members crowded into the Council Chamber at Whitehall to hear the Speaker return their thanks and the sovereign accept them. She used the opportunity to deliver her ‘Golden Speech’ to a Commons delegation. 

Her hearers were won over by the emotion of the occasion, but the brilliance of the speech could not disguise the fact that Elizabeth had suffered a profound defeat. The problem of the crown finances was left to her Stuart successors.

Claimants: As Elizabeth grew older, the question of the succession was the topic that was never spoken of openly but was in everyone’s mind. The Puritan Peter Wentworth had been imprisoned in 1593 when the Council learned that he was going to raise it in the House. 

There were at least ten possible claimants to the throne and it was widely recognized that a public debate on their merits would be highly damaging.  The most obvious English candidate was Lady Arbella Stuart (born 1575), the daughter of Charles Stuart (brother of Lord Darnley) and Elizabeth Cavendish. At the end of 1602, she planned a secret marriage to the grandson of the Earl of Hertford and Katherine Grey, which would have linked her to both the Stuart and the Grey lines. But Hertford informed the Council, and Arbella was confined to the house of her grandmother Bess of Hardwick.

James VI had been in correspondence with Essex before his rebellion. Elizabeth chose to turn a blind eye, but Cecil profited from Essex’s downfall to correspond with James in cipher and advised the king that he should not pester Elizabeth to name him as her heir. As a result, his relations with the Queen became more harmonious. 

Death

The last great festival of Elizabeth’s reign was the entertainment Cecil gave her at Cecil House on the Strand on 6 December 1602. Tapers burned before the shrine of Astraea, the virgin daughter of the gods, the bringer of justice.  By the middle of March, she was dying. Throughout the country almost everyone acknowledged the claim of the King of Scots. Leading figures were writing to him, their names encoded. On 23 March Elizabeth (allegedly) at last signalled that James should succeed her. At 2am on 24 March she died. At 11 in the presence of the chief nobility, Cecil read out a proclamation declaring that James was King of England.

For more about the death of Elizabeth, listen to the Melvyn Bragg 'In Our Time' programme here.

Conclusion

1. The belief that England experienced a golden age during the reign of Elizabeth only took root in the 1620s when disillusionment with James I set in. In spite of the extravagant iconography of the later portraits, the last years of her reign were troubled and she was not always popular.
2. Elizabeth's decision not to marry or name a successor was vindicated by her long life and the peaceful accession of James VI, but it was a gamble. What if it hadn't paid off?
3. Far from always getting her own way, she suffered serious setbacks. She was powerless to avoid entangling England in the Netherlands or to prevent the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
4. Her greatest vindication is her success. She presided over a religious settlement that satisfied most of her subjects. She chose (on the whole) able counsellors and was loyal to them. She kept the country safe from foreign invasions. She was a brilliant communicator. 
5. But she died leaving long-term problems for her successors: would the religious settlement hold? how was the crown to be financed? what was to be done about Ireland?