Essex Rebellion

11 Key excerpts on "Essex Rebellion"

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  Elizabethan Rebellions

  Conspiracy, Intrigue and Treason

  • Helene Harrison(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword History

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6

  Essex Rebellion 1601

  ‘What is allotted to us by destiny cannot be avoided’1

  The Essex Rebellion of 1601 is singular among Tudor rebellions and among most rebellions in English history. This is because it happened essentially for selfish reasons and the Earl of Essex’s overwhelming belief in his own importance. Rebellions more generally tend to have a political or economic aim. Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, had lost the favour of Elizabeth I, having been her favourite since the death of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, in 1588. It had been suggested at the beginning of her reign that Elizabeth might marry Leicester, but it never happened. Perhaps Essex reminded her of this youthful dalliance. Essex was also a tenuous link to Leicester, as Leicester had married Essex’s mother after the death of her first husband. Essex had lost sight of the fact that Elizabeth was a queen, ruler, and monarch first, and a woman second. He did not treat her with the respect due to her rank, but as an equal. This upset Elizabeth’s equilibrium and her sense of her own majesty.

  Essex’s failure in Ireland in 1599 was the straw that broke the relationship completely. Essex had had ups and downs with the queen as he had been involved with several failed military and exploratory expeditions over the previous few years. He had also married in secret Frances Walsingham in 1590, the daughter of Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Essex was one of only two councillors in Elizabeth’s reign to be executed. The other was Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who was executed in 1572 after the failed Ridolfi Plot the previous year. Elizabeth’s reluctance to execute is demonstrated in the fact that, of all rebellions, only two of her councillors were executed despite several being implicated. Possibly Elizabeth remembered her own time in the Tower under threat of execution, or the fate of her mother, Anne Boleyn. She seems to have avoided executing her nobility if she could help it, and Essex was no exception, but she did capitulate in the end when faced with incontrovertible proof.

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  Emotion in the Tudor Court : Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling

  • Bradley Irish(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Northwestern University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the coming weeks, a plan evolved: Essex and a group of sympathetic nobles would make their way into the queen’s presence, where they would (with appropriate reverence) expose her ministers for their corruption. On Sunday, February 8, 1601, Essex and his followers were fnally pushed to action, when there arrived at Essex House a delegation of 146 Chapter 4 councilors with a “message from her Maiestie that Robert Earle of Essex should speedily dissolue his company, and he himselfe should presently Come to the Cort, with promise that his greefs should gratiously be hard.” 34 (Essex had been called to appear before the council the night before, inciting panic in his followers.) Still fearing a trap, and heeding rumors that Raleigh and Lord Cobham sought his life, Essex refused the order, as he and his confdants scrambled to put their premature plans into action; the messengers were imprisoned in Essex House, and the earl and his roughly 300 followers set off, armed but not armored. Banking on his popularity, Essex decided frst to appeal to London before engag-ing the queen herself: his men marched through the streets, proclaiming that they came only in self-defense, intending to forestall a plot against the earl. The action, however, was a disaster. The townspeople didn’t rise to his aid, and the Privy Council had preempted the mob’s arrival, alert-ing several of London’s key of fcials. The city gates were shut, streets were blocked, and a counterforce was deployed; Essex and his ever-shrinking company narrowly escaped by boat to Essex House, where they would surrender after a brief siege. The fallout of the uprising was immediate. In the Star Chamber, Essex and his followers were denounced by members of the Privy Council; in London they were (by of fcial instruction) denounced from the pulpit.

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  The Elizabethan World

  • Susan Doran, Norman Jones, Susan Doran, Norman Jones(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 And indeed, despite the many hardships of the Elizabethan years posed by demographic explosion, religious reformation and, in the later years, near constant warfare, rebellion was rare. There was an abundance of riot and much criminal disorder, but almost no mass revolts during Elizabeth’s long reign. Certainly, a few people tried. Steer’s attempt is reasonably well recorded, thanks to the legal innovations it inspired, but other efforts are often known only by passing references in the pardon rolls, assize files or state papers. Some carpenters, weavers and husbandmen did, like Steer, preach rebellion to market-day crowds or alehouse gatherings of people with deeply felt grievances, but, like Steer, few got very far. Despite the authorities’ fears of vagrant armies overthrowing all order and of petty criminals banding together to destroy the State, no truly popular rebellions transpired.

  Even elite conspirators, with better resources and more social capital at hand, rarely managed to move from conspiracy to effective action. The abortive coup led by the Earl of Essex in January 1601 is the best-known case in point. Essex had long been the Queen’s well-rewarded favourite, using the gifts she bestowed to cultivate a sizeable clientele. His largesse and profligacy left him in hard financial straits when the royal bounty ended. With that, his thwarted ambition and injured pride motivating him, Essex gathered his aristocratic followers to seize the Queen. When bemused Londoners offered no help, the attempt collapsed, and Essex died a traitor’s death. The scarcity of rebellion in this era stands in marked contrast to the many armed protests that bedevilled Elizabeth’s predecessors and is often cited as further proof of Elizabeth’s acumen and good governance. Yet, given that there were discontents – and discontented persons – aplenty, one must ask whether Elizabeth kept her subjects better contented or better controlled.

  A brief examination of the one serious rebellion that did take place in Elizabethan England, the Northern Rising of 1569, might suggest answers. There had already been several serious riots that year. In Derbyshire, a group of men had armed themselves, camped on disputed land and associated with a man suspected to be peddling political prophecies, which were always feared by the authorities for their radicalising potential. In Cumberland, a group, variously estimated at 300 to 400 or 1,000 strong, destroyed the enclosures in a local forest and had as one of their leaders a man wanted for ‘his notorious abusing of the Queen’s Majesty’s name and authority’; the authorities took their efforts seriously enough to try charging many of them with felony. In Suffolk, disruptions in the cloth trade prompted some to rise against foreign workers and, according to one alarmed local JP, ‘to have spoiled all the gentlemen and worthy personages that they might overtake … and so marching towards London, to have provoked with this example the whole realm to the like uproar’.11 The confession of one man confirmed the seriousness of the plotters’ intent. James Fuller, a Suffolk sawyer, said that he and others had planned to rebel for lack of work or money. Once they had rung the bells to gather men, they planned to ‘proceed and bring down [the] price of all things at our pleasure’. He had pledged his fellow plotters that this time, ‘we will not be deceived as we were at the last rising, for then we were promised enough. But the more was a halter. But now we will appoint them that shall take the rich churls and set them on their horsebacks under a tree … and so let them hang.’12

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  Elizabeth I

  • David Loades(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  103 By this time he had accumulated long- and short-term debts in the region of £16,000, and the loss of that income bade fair to ruin him. Whether Elizabeth realised this at the time that she made the decision we do not know, but it seems likely that she did. By the end of 1600 Essex was desperate. He had lost all respect for his sovereign, believing her to be the virtual prisoner of Cecil and his friends. He had also convinced himself that he stood at the head of a great following: all those who were weary of Cecil's mismanagement and monopolistic control of patronage; all those soldiers and seamen whose services had been slighted and undervalued; all the disappointed, and those who believed that the realm was being dishonoured. In other words, the countless host of the discontented. There had already been some hot-headed talk of a coup before Essex was released, but it was not known about, and the earl's professions of penitence and contrition were taken at face value. One account speaks of him 'reviving his former resolution, which was the surprising and pos- sessing the Queen's person and the court'. 104 This 'earlier resolution' seems to have been formed in Ireland, when there had been some wild talk of returning with 'two hundred resolute gentlemen' and 'executing the surprise of her Majesty's person'. 105 What happened in November and December 1600 was in pursuit of the same aim. There were five ringleaders (apart from Essex himself, who remained in the background): the earl of Southampton, Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Sir John Davies and John Littleton. 106 Southampton 2/8 ELIZABETH I was almost as deep in debt as Essex himself; the others were swordsmen, who had long been the core of the earl's following. They met secretly at Drury House, because Essex feared that his own residence would be under surveillance. Three key elements were identified: the court, the Tower and the City of London.

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  Theatrical Unrest

  Ten Riots in the History of the Stage, 1601-2004

  • Sean McEvoy(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Essex has also been associated with radical opponents of absolute rule in England, as a precursor of the parliamentarians who would challenge Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and his son Charles I, who believed that their right to rule was absolute because God-given. In 1598 he challenged royal absolutism in a letter to Lord Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal: ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to these principles’ (Lacey 1971 : 213, full text of letter in Harrison 1937 : 199–201). Essex was all things to all malcontents. Elizabeth and her ministers had no doubt about the danger of the popular association of the Queen with Richard II and of Essex with Bullingbrook. When the historian Sir John Hayward published his First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV in February 1599 he dedicated his book to the Earl of Essex. The clumsy Latin dedication contained the words magnus siquidem es, et presenti iudicio, et futuri temporis expectatione (‘Since indeed you are great both in present opinion, and in the expectation of future time’) (Harrison 1937 214–15, 267; Palmer and Palmer 2000: 112). Was Essex aiming at the crown itself? Three weeks later the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered the dedication to be removed from all copies. The scandalous history now became much in demand, and a second edition of 1,500 copies was printed at Easter with an ‘epistle apologetical’ in which Hayward sought to explain himself. But it did little good; at Whitsun all copies of the book were called in and burned. In July Hayward was arrested and put in the Tower where he remained until Elizabeth’s death in 1603. In the August after Essex’s rebellion the antiquary and Tower of London archivist William Lambarde was presenting to the Queen a catalogue of his records at Greenwich Palace, including some from the reign of Richard II

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  Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe

  • Andrew Hiscock(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  25. 170 The Conflict-Ridden Careers of Robert Devereux always he is exceeding weary, accounting it a thrall he lives now in, and wishes the change.’ 106 By the mid-1590s, Essex’s support seems to have strengthened significantly for the monarch north of the border – ‘a king of so much worth, whose servant I am born by nature . . . such as I am, and all whatsoever I am (tho’ perhaps a subject of small price) I consecrate unto your regal throne’. 107 Henri IV’s envoy, de Maisse, was similarly convinced that preparations for change were afoot: ‘[should the queen die] il est certain que les Anglois ne se soubmettroient jamais plus à la domination d’une femme’. 108a Essex and Ireland In August 1595 Thomas Lake – Walsingham’s personal secretary and, later in the Elizabethan period, an MP – wrote anxiously to Robert Sidney in Flushing, ‘I am wary in sending letters as the postes letters are often viewed.’ He nonetheless confided that ‘In Ireland we do little good, and consume much money on small hopes.’ 109 By 1598, unrest and outright rebellion in that land warranted the most urgent attention of Elizabeth and her counsellors. De Maisse gave report of the desperate state of affairs whereby ‘Les Anglois et la Reyne mesme désireroient que l’Irlande fust abismée en mer car elle n’en peut retirer aucun proffict et ce pendant la despence et le soin en est tres grand et ne se peut aucunement fier à ces peuples.’ 110b By the autumn Contarini was writing from Paris back to Venice that ‘The Queen intended to send the Earl of Essex to Ireland to put down the rebellion. He refused on various pretexts. She became exceedingly angry and he retired from Court.

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  Elizabeth I and Ireland

  • Brendan Kane, Valerie McGowan-Doyle(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This historiographical distinction – be it implicit or explicit – does not accord with the views of the monarch herself and as such serves to sep- arate the queen’s realms from one another and to drive an anachronistic wedge between the actions and motivations of their residents. Third and finally, then, Elizabeth’s views highlight the domestic aspects of even the most violent of Irish affairs: they can be studied alongside other instances of unrest in the realms and, thus, they demonstrate the con- tinuing phenomenon of internal rebellion throughout the entire Tudor period. It is a historiographical commonplace, though not a historical fact, that Elizabeth’s reign experienced fewer rebellions than did those of her predecessors. What is a matter of historical record, of course, is that the incidence of rebellion in England fell off dramatically during her monarchy, the only major episode being the Northern Rebellion (or Elizabeth on rebellion in Ireland and England: semper eadem? 263 Rising, as it is sometimes called) of 1569. Much historical freight has been attached to this stunning pax Elizabeth, namely the triumph of the modernising/centralising state over the centripetal, local powers of a medieval aristocracy. Key to this interpretation was the work of Mervyn James, who saw in the Northern Rebellion the last of the regional risings that had characterised monarch–noble relations for centuries. 2 To James, however, the true ‘end of an era’ was the tragi-comic Essex Rebellion: the lack of popular support in London that it garnered, and the ease with which it was quashed and its principals punished, demonstrated clearly the inability of aristocratic principles to challenge a regnant, Protestant monarch for either practical power or the people’s hearts and minds. 3 The end of rebellion, in short, meant the coming of the modern, an era in which the mobilisation of state forces was undertaken primarily for external theatres.

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  Rebellion and Riot

  Popular Disorder in England During the Reign of Edward VI

  • John A. Andrew, III(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  4

  Rebellion played a smaller role during the reign of Elizabeth, but even Gloriana felt the sting of revolt in 1569 when the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland restored the Latin mass at Durham Cathedral, called for the arrest of Sir William Cecil, the queen’s leading adviser, and demanded the restoration of Roman Catholicism. Less threatening than the mid-Tudor rebellions, the rising of the northern earls revealed the deep-rooted discontent of the aristocracy and its tenants. The last rising of the Tudor era took place in 1601, only two years before the death of Elizabeth, when the Earl of Essex, frustrated by his loss of royal favor, led 200 supporters up Fleet Street, London, in a desperate and futile attempt to restore his political ascendancy.5 A survey of Tudor rebellions leads to the inescapable conclusion that every rebel captain whether artisan or earl and every popular cause — religious, political, or economic — suffered defeat. What is remarkable and usually overlooked by historians is the courage of generations of Tudor rebels to resist oppression and go down to defeat in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Although popular disorder was endemic throughout the sixteenth century, the pattern of rebellion and riot was extremely diverse. The rebellion of Henry Tudor in 1485 began as a royalist conspiracy against the Yorkists, and the dynastic interests of the Courtenays and Mary Stuart played important roles in later risings. When political opposition to the Tudors was not dynastic, it usually included conflict between court and country. For example, the northern aristocracy in 1536 and 1569 and the western gentry in 1549 vigorously opposed policies emanating from the court. The leadership of Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil aroused regional discontent; remote counties feared centralizing reforms of all kinds; and in 1549 the western gentry saw the Edwardian Reformation as little more than the program of court politicians supported by a clique of heretical clergy. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s, religion emerged as a divisive issue that fired political and social instability. Only under Edward VI did Catholics and Protestants rise at the same time. Religious unrest during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth came primarily from Catholics opposed to the royal supremacy, the monastic dissolution, and innovations in the church, while Mary’s opponents were exclusively Protestant. Real or imagined social and economic grievances played a part in many rebellions, particularly the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk. Riots almost always stemmed from economic issues; frequently heard grievances concerned rent payments, food prices, enclosure, and property rights.

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  Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith

  History, Religion and the Stage

  • J. Mayer(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  England would indeed have been reduced to slavery by the agents of the counter-reformation: ‘And such a slauery and misery, assure your selues, had ours been for Prince and religion, if we had stoode to the courtesie of armed Papistes and their reformation’. 120 All of this concurs with the spirit of Cecil’s private notes about the insurrection in which – citing also randomly as examples Watt Tyler, Absalom, Jack Cade and Richard II – he compares the arguments used by Essex to justify the uprising to those of the partisans of the dukes of Anjou and Guise on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre in Paris: ‘The night before the massacre in France the Papists gave forth that the Hugenits [Huguenots] went about to murder and root out the famely and faction of Guise’. 121 As this conscious reference to one of the bloodiest episodes in France’s wars of religion seems to point out, Cecil had chosen a distinctly sectarian and Manichaean leading thread for his own very personal account of the events. Setting aside for one moment the wild story of collusion with Spain or Rome concocted by the authorities, it appears that Essex’s will to embrace oppositional social forces had in fact been mistaken for mere opportunism. His belief that it was the nobleman’s duty to mend the wrongs of government led him straight to disaster. Had the political system been different the earl would no doubt have fared better for The Chamberlain’s Men and the 1601 Essex Rising 127 ‘Essex’s disposition attuned him to the problem of multi-culturality, as manifested during the 1590s in the conflicting claims of rival religions, and of honour, law and providentialist obedience, which heralded the breakdown of the Tudor Conformist synthesis’. 122 In the mid-1590s a Catholic petition had been addressed to Essex, asking the earl to support the authors’ ‘humble suite of tolleracion or Relaxacion’, while tolera- tionist writers also dedicated works to him.

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  Shakespeare's Politics

  A Contextual Introduction

  • Robin Headlam Wells(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 Rebellion A central concern of Shakespeare's two English historical tetralogies is whether subjects have the right to judge and if necessary depose their rulers. For a generation that had not only witnessed a growing power struggle between Elizabeth and her parliaments, but was also, in the words of a contemporary foreign observer, 'shaken by religious feuds, by plagues, and other internal troubles', 1 the deposition of Richard II in 1399 was of topical interest. As the queen herself remarked when a play (possibly Shakespeare's) 2 dealing with these events was revived on the day before the Essex Rebellion in February 1601, 'I am Richard II: know ye not that?' 3 In Elizabethan and Jacobean England debate on the rights of subjects to challenge royal authority usually took the form of discussion of the remedies for tyranny. While strongly deprecating rebellion, medieval writers conceded that a king who violated his coronation oath could no longer expect obedience from his subjects. In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas argued that, while it might be more expedient for subjects to tolerate a mild form of tyranny than to rebel, in extreme cases deposition of tyrannical rulers was justifiable. If to provide itself with a king belongs to the right of a given multitude, it is not unjust that the king be deposed or have his power restricted by that same multitude if, becoming a tyrant, he abuses the royal power. It must not be thought that such a multitude is acting unfaithfully in deposing the tyrant, even though it had previously subjected itself to him in perpetuity, because he himself has deserved that the covenant with his subjects should not be kept, since, in ruling the multitude, he did not act faithfully as the office of a king demands. Thus did the Romans, who had accepted Tarquin the Proud as their

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  King Richard II

  Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition

  • Charles R. Forker(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  Such assumptions endorsed the new historicist position that the play itself dramatized subversive ideas. If Mayer’s essay also seemed to suggest that one’s apprehension of the subversive theme in Richard II depended on one’s knowledge of its revolutionary context – distinguishing as it does between thematic reading and extra-literary or historical context – his widely shared dialectical approach made Shakespeare’s play itself important to our perception that the Essex uprising was, in fact, a political rebellion. To be sure, important critics continued to focus on evidence supporting a relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the Essex uprising. Stanley Wells, for instance, reported in 2003 his discovery of a work of literary criticism exploring Richard II that was written by an Essex conspirator. William Scott’s The Model of Poesy or the Art of Poesy Drawn into a Short or Summary Discourse (pre-1601) is a new critical source that may well belong in this anthology, and, as Wells noted, its existence tends to endorse the Essex connection. In 2008 the distinguished Shakespeare biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones argued reasonably but with no new facts that the decision to commission a performance of Richard II on 7 February 1601 implied the Earl (or his 66 King Richard II supporters) intended to include London’s citizenry in his conspiratorial actions. Even as late as 2018, Stephen Greenblatt concurred, suggesting that for Essex’s men, ‘there was a benefit to be gained from representing to a large public . . . a successful coup d’etat’ (p. 21). On the other hand, archival investigations in the period provided very different readings of the Essex material, so it seems safe to say that support for the connection between Shakespeare’s and Essex’s mutual radicalism is not, in the aggregate, growing. A convenient starting point is a 2003 piece in the London Review of Books by Blair Worden.

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