1598. V. 2. him that the Roman Catholics will now be his best friends. The plotters lay down their plans. To surprise the Queen they must have the command of an armed force; Raleigh must be killed; a military faction formed, an army raised, and the places of trust secured to the principal leaders in the plot. Sept. Oct. 3. As the Queen will trust Essex with no more regiments for Rouen, no more ships for Spain, he begs for a command against the Irish kernes. Ireland is ablaze. That Hugh O'Neile, son of the bastard of Dundalk, who owes to the policy and generosity of Queen Elizabeth his life, his education, his nobility, even his ascendency in his sept, has turned on his benefactress: laying down his earldom of Tyrone; assuming the sovereign and rebellious style of The O'Neile; raising the unkempt, unclothed Ulster hinds; and filling the valleys from Inishowen to Monaghan and Down with the tumult of war. Fires burn on the hill-tops. Churches are profaned, innocent homesteads razed. The Galloglass, mounted on his brisk marron, pricks through the country, spearing his enemies, driving off their kine. A horde of ferocious kernes, shaggy and illfed, their arms a skean and pike, their dress a blanket or a shirt, plunge into the houses of English gentlemen, wreaking such woe and shame on the Protestant settlers as pen of man refuses to describe. An English force keeps front to the rebellious horde; but the fire darts out in a hundred places: Connaught kindles into insurrection; Munster defies the Saxon; Ulster presses on the Pale; Spanish ships stand off the coast; Spanish regiments form at Ghent and at the Groyne. A day may bring the Basques, the 3. Irish Correspondence, 1595-98, S. P. O.; Annals of the Four Masters, 591-645; Council Reg., Oct. 29, 1595, July 19, 1598. TROOPS LEVIED FOR IRELAND. 97 Walloons, and Pandours to Kinsale. Drogheda is in danger. V. 3. Dublin itself is not safe. 1598. Oct. 4. Shakespeare gives the English passion voice: "Now for our Irish wars! We must supplant these rough, rug-headed kernes, But only they, hath privilege to live!" So cries the English king in that new play of Richard the Second, which is now drawing crowds of citizens and courtiers to the Globe. Troops are being raised and fines imposed for this new war; the recusants who will not fight for their country against their creed-such men as Tresham, Talbot, Rookwood, and Throckmorton-being mulcted in heavy rates. The force is of imposing strength. Two thousand veterans cross from the camp of Vere, their ranks filled up by a levy of youngsters from the loom and plough. In all, some twenty thousand horse and foot are on the march. Who shall conduct them to the coasts of Down, the passes of the Foyle ? 5. Essex asserts his claim. Those who would see the fire of the insurrection stamped under foot propose to send out Raleigh, Sydney, or Montjoy. But events at Court disturb these preparations against O'Neile. The great Lord Burghley, Bacon's uncle, dies, leaving the Treasury and the Court of Wards vacant. Essex wants them both; and Cecil, 4. Shakespeare's Richard II., editions of 1597 and 1598; Camden, Ann. Eliz., 1598; Chamberlain to Carleton, May 4, 17, 30, 1598, S. P. O.; Council Reg., July 19, Dec. 22, 1598. 5. Chamberlain to Carleton, May 30, Aug. 30, Nov. 8, 1598, S. P. O.; Lytton to Carleton, Aug. 29, 1598, S. P. O.; Mathews to Carleton, Sept. 15, 1598, S. P. O. H 1598. Oct. V. 5. who thinks that offices held by his father ought to descend upon himself, becomes, as he has been before, a secret and powerful advocate for his rival's nomination to a distant post. For a time the Queen will hear of no such a thing; yet, as Raleigh will not go, and Vere is in the field, Essex, with an underground and treacherous aid from Cecil, gains his suit. 6. Cecil's beautiful young niece still wears her widow's weeds: a prize with which he may either bribe an enemy or fix a friend. She has rejected Pembroke as well as Bacon. To the surprise of her gay and youthful suitors, she allows her uncle Cecil to buy with her hand the unscrupulous arts and venomous tongue of Coke. A first wife, who brought him love and money, not yet cold in her grave, the grisly old bear of an Attorney-General marries this dainty and wilful dame. How she is persuaded to such a match no soul can tell. Old, grim, penurious, every way opposite to herself and to everything that she seems to like, Coke has neither the wit that wins nor the fame that fills a lady's ear. Wags whisper that she hopes to be able to break his heart. He, too, is rich. She has got one fortune through Sir William Hatton, why not a second fortune through Sir Edward Coke? Her kinsman's motives are, no one doubts, coarse. Cecil has need for such an instrument as Coke: close, supple, learned, grinding, cold to his dependants, cringing to his superiors: nor is he disappointed in the match. On Coke's marriage into the Cecil house, though the wife whom he vows to love rejects his name and destroys his peace, he becomes to Cecil and to Cecil's faction a brutal and obsequious slave. 6. Autobiographical Notes of Coke in Harl. MSS. 6687, transcribed by John Bruce for the Collectanea Top. et Gen., vi. 108. PLAN FOR CALMING IRELAND. 99 7. At a private meeting of the Privy Council held at Essex House, only Cecil, Fortescue, and Buckhurst present, a commission for the lord-lieutenancy is drawn. Essex has had no speech with Bacon for eighteen months. Their ways now lie apart. In the conferences on his bills for restoring tillage and increasing population they stood in hostile ranks; yet, on the eve of his fatal voyage to Ireland, Essex rides once more, and for the last time now, to Gray's Inn Square. Had he come to seek counsel, no man could have given him safer. More than any one alive -more than Chichester or Montjoy-Bacon sees through the Irish question. Sure that Ulster will not be calmed by the sword and the rope, that no dash from Cork to Coleraine will make a savage sept, ruled by a Brehon law, prefer husbandry to theft, his plan is to clear the forests, to drain the bogs, to lay out roads, to build ports and havens, to plant new towns. His hope lies in the plough, not in the sword. "We must supplant these rough, rug-headed kernes." He would have the great officers of the Queen's government and army live in the country, build in it their houses, as Sir Arthur Chichester, whom Cecil has sent from Flanders to Dublin, afterwards builds his house on the Lough of Belfast. But a man like the Earl of Essex, living only in the air of courts and the light of camps, has neither temper, hardihood, nor patience for such a work. Bacon tells him to give up an enterprise in which he can neither serve his country nor secure himself from shame and loss. Essex has not come to learn. With soul cor 7. Council Reg., Mar. 8, 1599; Bacon's Remains, 39, 48; Certain Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland, 1606; Bacon's Apologie, 23; Essex to Cecil, Mar. 29, 1599, Add. MSS. 4160. V. 7. 1599. Mar. 8. V. 7. 1599. Mar. April. rupted by disloyalty, he turns his back on the one honest voice which even yet might save his fortune and his fame from wreck. 8. Father Wright consults Cresswell and Parsons, the experienced chiefs of the English conspiracy in Madrid and Rome, on these bold and perilous plots. The Jesuit Fathers, doubtful if it be not sin and folly to shed Catholic blood that Essex may gain a throne, urge him through Wright to adopt the Infanta's claim in preference to his own; a course to which Essex, when pressed by Wright, most sternly demurs, as becomes a descendant of John of Gaunt. Philip and Clement, less deep in guile than the Jesuits, agree to recognise, and if need be to aid, a rebellion of the Earl and his partizans against the Queen, on this understanding: that Essex, when king, shall become reconciled to the Church, shall leave Ireland to be ruled by O'Neile as viceroy, shall abandon the Protestant Netherlanders, shall yield up Raleigh's conquests and plantations in America, and shall recognise the rights of Spain to an exclusive possession of both the Indies. It is understood that the Irish army is to effect this plot, of which all the details are to be settled with O'Neile. 9. Twenty thousand men march to the coast and cross the sea. Lee, Danvers, Percy have all commands in this force. Constable, broken for bad conduct, is restored by Essex to his rank. Father Wright begs hard to be taken with them; but, although a Privy Councillor may fetch a prisoner to his house, a lord-lieutenant of Ireland has no 8. Abstract of the Evidence against Essex [July 22, 1600], S. P. O.; Examination of Wright, July 24, 1600, S. P. O. 9. Council Reg., Mar. 11, April 2, 1599; Essex to Cecil, Add. MSS. 4160; Abstract of Evidence against Essex, July 22, 1600, S. P. O. |