The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland

By James Charles Roy

Queen Elizabeth’s bloody rule over Ireland is examined in this “richly-textured, impressively researched and powerfully involving” history (Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600–1972).

England’s violent subjugation of Ireland in the sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth I was one of the most consequential chapters in the long, tumultuous relationship between the two countries. In this engaging and scholarly history, James C. Roy tells the story of revolt, suppression, atrocities, and genocide in the first colonial “failed state”.

At the time, Ireland was viewed as a peripheral theater, a haven for Catholic heretics, and a potential “back door” for foreign invasions. Tormented by such fears, lord deputies sent by the queen reacted with an iron hand. These men and their subordinates—including great writers such as Edmund spencer and Walter Raleigh—would gather in salons to pore over the “Irish Question”. But such deliberations were rewarded by no final triumph, only debilitating warfare that stretched across Elizabeth’s long rule.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526770738

James Charles Roy

JAMES CHARLES ROY is an independent scholar with an international reputation as an expert in Irish history. He is a well-known member of the Irish-American academic community, and also a former editorial contributor and American representative of the Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society, co-founded by Lady Gregory in 1900. A prolific author of books and articles on history and travel, he has been published by leading imprints in the US, Ireland and Germany. Also a gifted photographer, his work has been exhibited at the Boston Public Library, the National Library of Ireland and numerous other venues.

Book preview

Introduction: Bryskett’s Cottage

In the evening, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes I have worn all day, mud spotted and dirty, and put on regal and courtly garments. Thus appropriately clothed, I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men, where, being lovingly received, I feed on that food which is mine alone and which I was born for; I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask the reasons for their actions, and they courteously answer me. For four hours I feel no boredom and forget every worry; I do not fear poverty, and death does not terrify me. I give myself completely over to the ancients.

Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

On a lovely spring day in 1582, or thereabouts, eight gentlemen took a walk out into the countryside from the walled town of Dublin, the principal seat of English government in Ireland. The settlement, defined by its walls and sixteen gates, stood on the south side of the river Liffey, and occupied a site of about seventy acres. A census in 1660 established a population of 9,000 inhabitants; we may presume that in the 1580s that figure may have been in the 5,000 range. The streets were dirt, cramped, and hemmed in by wooden buildings, most with roofs of straw. For Barnaby Rich, an English soldier who spent over forty years of his life in Ireland, it was not a vision that reminded him of London, the housing stock being neither outwardly fair nor inwardly handsome. Sanitation, however, may have kindled memories of home, being primitive and unwholesome, and the atmosphere about the byways, rough and burly. Some of our party of eight would probably have passed Christ Church Cathedral, founded in 1035 by a Norse chieftain (Dublin was first settled by Vikings), one of the few stone buildings in the place. Others might have left work early, treading through the courtyard of Dublin Castle with which they were all familiar, being officials (more or less) who had business there, many on a daily basis (as Bryskett was to write, each of these men lay in the bosom of the state). Their way would have been over the castle’s stone bridge, depicted in a woodcut by John Derricke printed in 1581, which crossed a boggy moat, a diversion of a stream called the Poddle, full of garbage and stink. Joining with the others, and continuing through a city gate, they would have found themselves in more or less open countryside. Much of what they saw and walked through had originally been owned by the church, but Henry VIII had changed all that beginning in 1533. Every one of these gentlemen stood in full sympathy with that greedy king’s acquisitive behaviour. The pope, after all, was the Anti-Christ. ¹

After about a mile they arrived at a country idyll built by their mutual friend, Lodowick Bryskett, who had recently resigned as clerk to the Irish privy council. Bryskett says he was delighted to leave that position, the work being onerous and the hours long. He states as well that his health had grown impaired, that he was now happy to be living in a retired state so as to concentrate on gardening and his true love, the world of letters and philosophical contemplation; to, as it were, gather myself into a little compass, as a snail into its shell. However, a hermit he was not, and desirous of good company he had invited like-minded companions to gather at his newly built cottage for an afternoon or so of elevated conversation. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, St Augustine – these paragons of the intellectual past would flow back and forth, but mostly forth from Bryskett’s learned tongue. When he took the time to recover his breath, one or another of his colleagues would throw in a question or assertion, and then Bryskett would continue his monologue. The whole point of the exercise was to be the exposition of moral philosophy, how a gentleman traversing the halls of power and responsibility in the service of his queen, Elizabeth I, could and should comport himself while keeping true to the highest principles of ethical conduct. A weighty subject, and it took Bryskett three days of exposition to make his points.

Who called on him that morning? All but one were Englishmen like himself. Six were university-trained: three at Cambridge (as was Bryskett), one at Oxford, and two (presumably) at the Inns of Court in London.² Four were soldiers by trade, two were important legal appointees in the Dublin administration (a judge and the queen’s solicitor); one, a clergyman, was primate of all Ireland (the Protestant version), and one was a civil administrator. Also present, but only briefly, was Thomas Smith, an apothecary, who had come out to deliver some concoction or other that Bryskett had ordered. There being no profit to his shop from the philosophical discussion that was to ensue, and the whole purpose of this congregation of like-minded souls, Mr. Smith did not tarry long.

The location of Bryskett’s cottage was not, at this particular juncture, problematic. As he himself described, it stood on a hill overlooking Dublin with a fine prospect of the city, its port (or haven), and the Irish Sea itself. This was the epicentre of the English Pale, and as grand a vista as it undoubtedly was, the reality on the ground was not as pleasing. The queen’s writ no longer extended far beyond the walls of Dublin, merely a few leagues north, west, and south, largely protected by the presence of Anglo-Irish magnates, many under the patronage of the great Kildare family centred in the town of Maynooth, fifteen miles away. This shrunken remnant of royal authority was now referred to as the Pale. The Kildares were descendants of the Fitzgeralds, Norman freebooters who had first come to Ireland in the twelfth century to carve out sword land at the expense of the indigenous Gaels. Beyond the baronial sway of the Kildares and others of their kind lay a no-man’s land of Irish-speaking septs, ancient clans that had corrupted many of these Norman adventurers through centuries of strife, intermarriage, and the Celtic custom of fosterage, whereby young sons were often transferred from family to family for their early upbringing and education, a byproduct of which saw several who forgot their lineage and no longer looked to England as the land of their origin. Even the Kildares could often be seen as suspect by English administrators sitting in Dublin Castle, never certain of anyone’s loyalty. The Kildares, after all, spoke Irish just as fluently as they spoke English. Another of the great Anglo-Irish families of the Pale, the Prestons, took as their motto Sans Tache, or Without Stain, but this was nothing if not black comedy, the stain of treason rarely far below the surface in any of these noble families. The initial colonizing efforts of the foreigners (as Irish chroniclers called the Normans, and then anyone else who conducted their business in English) had thereby been transformed over time by an insidious reaffirmation of Gaelic strength throughout the countryside. The writ of English law and custom often ran no further than Lodowick Bryskett’s garden walls, and there would be moments to come when it did not extend even that far.

As should come as no surprise, the nub of conflict that stood as a silent backdrop to Bryskett’s afternoons of leisurely discussion lay in three subject areas: land, power, and religion, and was largely defined by politics within the Pale. Most of rural Ireland, as well as scattered pockets of Englishness in various small towns, lay under whatever statutes of authority Elizabeth chose to promulgate from London (or those issued by her father), but they rarely mattered in the reality of day-to-day life. In the Pale itself, enforcement of order had traditionally been in the hands of the Kildares and others of their rank. They vigorously resented the efforts begun by the second Tudor king of England, Henry VIII, to curb their power. Henry, ever financially needy, saw – or, more precisely, heard from councillors, as he had never seen the place himself, nor would any of his progeny – that his kingdom of Hibernia was a rich and fertile agricultural breadbasket that, to date, had done little to fill his coffers with silver, to say nothing of gold. Henry’s appetite was temporarily sated by his seizure of church lands in England, but this outsized individual had run through most of this treasure by the time his children followed him to the throne. Under Elizabeth’s rule especially, the English crown sought to tighten the vice: to bring Ireland under its control, to extend English law, custom, and religion, and to extract revenue from Irish shores. Instead of relying on local barons for arms and men, the queen gradually introduced her own professional soldiery into the country. This grieved the Anglo-Irish: not only were they to be replaced as commanders-in-chief, but they were expected to pay the expense through taxation and the furnishments of supply. To make matters worse, most of these great magnates were Catholic. The men Elizabeth sent to govern them were, by and large, Protestant.

Bryskett and his guests, with the exception of Robert Dillon, who was from an old Anglo-Irish family (he spoke some Irish), were all interlopers. Christopher Carleill, a soldier deeply enmeshed in the upper echelon of the English Puritan establishment, was the stepson of Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s doctrinaire principal secretary. There was not much Walsingham would not do to further the Reformational cause. Captain Thomas Norris was university-educated, the son of a prominent political and military family. His grandfather had been executed on the no doubt spurious charge of adultery with Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, which made the Norrises something special in the queen’s opinion when she came to power in 1558. Despite his humanist upbringing, however, he was nothing if not a hardened professional soldier, reputed to have hanged on one expedition ninety rebels in Munster in little more than a week. His notable father, the first baron Norris, had sired six sons, five of whom would predecease him, dying abroad serving the queen under arms, four in Ireland alone.³

Nicholas Dawtrey and Warham St Leger were less auspicious military figures, but both did and would see long service in the Irish wars, Dawtrey mentioned in reports sent back to London as being in charge of various bands or companies of soldiers, 100 to 200 men at a time. Like most English captains, this was (aside from loot, which was scarce in primeval Ireland) his best chance for profit, collecting the pay of dead men on his regimental list. When 100 troopers were accounted for on payroll sheets, oftentimes, depending on the venality of the officer in question, only half that number might muster for review. Aside from pocketing their pay, it was often the case that such officers cheated their men on the purchase of supplies as well. Whether Dawtrey was guilty of such behaviour we may suspect, but never truly know. Considerably more information is available on St Leger’s career. By the time of Bryskett’s discourse, St Leger had already won, and then lost, huge estates in Ireland, mostly as a colonizer in Munster after the break-up of Desmond’s rebellion, about which this narrative will deal in due time. St Leger, in Irish and Anglo-Irish eyes, was the epitome of a robber baron, a man of no scruples who would stop at nothing, be it brazen theft however disguised by legal chicanery, or the hangman’s noose, to further his land-grabbing schemes. In the ethos of Bryskett’s guest list, however, St Leger would not have been unduly condemned. Anything that might forward the queen’s agenda, right and proper as it was to reform this barbarous country, was deemed permissible. St Leger’s later career would be the usual scramble to exploit properties from native owners, balanced by the pitfalls of trying to finance their colonization with supplies and settlers from England. St Leger failed on both counts and died engulfed in debt. In Bryskett’s narrative St Leger contributes not a word, and Dawtrey not much more other than to ask for wine during dinner, for the scriptures telleth us that wine gladdeneth the hearts of man, a sentiment St Leger no doubt seconded, noted as he was as a stalwart who tiples all day at [his] ale bench.⁴

Little is known of George Dormer, the queen’s solicitor, but much is on record regarding Robert Dillon, who was born in the Pale of a long-standing Anglo-Irish family, and received his legal training in London. There he had feuded with another Anglo-Irish gentleman, one Nicholas Nugent, a quarrel that would have longstanding consequences and which epitomizes the list of who, and who not, would have been welcomed as a guest at Bryskett’s cottage.

Nugent, in terms of this narrative, represents the old Anglo-Irish caste. A judge of the court of common pleas in Dublin Castle, he was a loyal servant of the queen’s government and had participated in several schemes aimed at extending and legitimatizing Tudor administrative reforms into the countryside, however intrusive he may have felt them to be. He drew the line, however, with the cess, a universally detested tax that Elizabeth introduced through her various lords deputy, now all Englishmen sent from London. The idea was for the Pale to finance its own protection, not only with its corn and cattle but in actual cash. It was bad enough that the Anglo-Irish were being politically undermined in their own backyards, as it were, but to throw money into the bad bargain as well was intolerable. Nugent picked the side of his family and relations (incredibly complicated, but fruitless to explain here) and agitated strenuously against the cess, which earned him two confinements in the dungeons of Dublin Castle. Robert Dillon, due partly to antipathy for Nugent but also with an eye to the main chance and personal gain, chose the crown instead, earning him the intense dislike of men like Kildare.⁵ In the summer of 1580, Nugent’s nephew rose in rebellion, whereby several magnates of the Pale were implicated, including Kildare, who was briefly imprisoned. The uprising, though serious, was eventually suppressed after seventeen months of turbulence. The nephew fled Ireland for France, a course Nugent should have emulated. Arrested and hounded by Dillon, then a judge himself, Nugent was tried and, evidently, acquitted of treason, there being little credible evidence, but Dillon applied pressure and perhaps bribery on the jury, who then formally returned a guilty verdict. Nugent was hanged with unseemly haste on Holy Saturday, 1582 (a day of popish idolatry), a death to which he went resolutely and patiently, protesting that since he was not found true, as he said he ought to have been, he had no longing to live in infamy.⁶ This was universally agreed to have been an act of judicial murder, but Sir Robert Dillon was not unduly disturbed, no matter the false reports thundered against him (his phraseology). What he wanted was to have some reward other than words, a goal he pursued for the rest of his long life in a never-ending barrage of suits and appeals, often carried on his own person as he roamed the corridors of power in London. As a result of importuning, in fact, he was granted Nugent’s escheated estates. He died a wealthy man.⁷

One contributory element to the Nugent rebellion was religion, a principal figure in their plot, Viscount Baltinglass, being primarily motivated by the insistent and shrill lamentations of Jesuits under his protection, which eventually earned him a long exile in Lisbon, Rome, and finally Madrid. He did better than several of his compatriots, who ended up being hanged, drawn and quartered, but the fact remains that faithful Catholics among the gentry of the Pale far outnumbered their Protestant counterparts in Dublin Castle. Bryskett’s seventh guest was emblematic of the religious divide, John Long, the primate of Ireland, better known as the archbishop of Armagh, the episcopal seat of Ireland. This title was mostly honorific, as Armagh in 1582 was a dirty hovel of mud and wattle cabins inhabited by the usual collection of beggared kerns.* Not only that, it was under the control of the clan O’Neill, an inveterate thorn in the side of Dublin Castle, an enduring symbol of futility in the ongoing struggle to anglicize the island. But the poverty of Armagh notwithstanding, its long association with St Patrick made it the emotive centre of the Irish church.

John Long, of course, could call himself whatever he wanted. The real primate of Ireland was Richard Creagh, the Catholic archbishop of Armagh, whose adventure-filled career ended in the Tower of London, where he was allegedly murdered with a poisoned piece of cheese on the orders of Francis Walsingham, who considered him too dangerous a man to be among the Irish.⁸ John Long, on the other hand, was considered dangerous by no one. He spent most of his time in the old English city of Drogheda, about thirty miles up the coast from Dublin, surrounded by sturdy stone walls and multiple turrets. Long was a primate of Ireland in name only, a lonely representative of the reformed religion who despaired of ever making a dent in the entrenched hold of Catholicism among the Irish. The ordinary kern, of course, was little better than a heathen, but some of the Anglo-Irish gentry were even worse. Many were educated men who should have known better, but they refused to send their children for proper religious instruction, or gave a cold shoulder to Protestant divines like Long sent from England. These missionaries might as well have decamped to Africa for all the success they were to have in Ireland. As far as Long was concerned, you could count off the names of genuine native Christians in less than a minute. In this poor Ireland, it sendeth old and young, clergy and laity, in a wild gallop to the devil.⁹

Perhaps the only reason anyone has paid the slightest attention to Bryskett’s garden party was the identity of his eighth guest, a minor functionary in the Tudor administration, Edmund Spenser, with whom we shall later deal at length. On occasion, Bryskett had, and would, help further Spenser’s career both in England and Ireland; Spenser, in his turn, would teach Bryskett Greek. In intellectual terms, there can be little doubt that Bryskett held Spenser in awe, as did so many of his friends and peers. As one once wrote him, Your hot iron is so hot it striketh me to the heart; I dare not come near.¹⁰ On the first day of conversation, Bryskett attempted to tease out of Spenser a reading of his work in progress, an epic poem, The Faerie Queene, one of the earliest recorded references we have to this most pivotal work of English literature.¹¹ Spenser demurred, and asked instead that Bryskett soldier on with the topic at hand, The Instructing of a Gentleman in the Course of a Virtuous Life. This he proceeded to do, in an exercise of mind-numbing drudgery.

Most of Bryskett’s discourse, which was finally printed in 1606, just three years before his death, was of artificial construct, an imitation of classical convention where invited guests exchange learned exposition back and forth for the edification of the reader. Bryskett simply copied the conventional plot structure, did a rough précis of three Italian books on philosophy that he had purchased in Padua or Genoa some years before, and invented the conversation of his friends to advance his narrative. Even the bucolic notion of retiring from society was artificial, borrowed in all likelihood from Machiavelli (Here I am, Machiavelli wrote a friend, I am living on my farm … I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch).¹² In point of fact, however, Bryskett was unhappy in his present situation. He had not left the clerkship position in good grace, but had submitted his resignation in a fit of pique, having failed to receive an appointment of more stature and pay; not only that, his patron, Lord Deputy Arthur Grey of Wilton, had been recalled to the English court under less than auspicious circumstances, further diminishing his prospects. Bryskett was a man without a job.

The invented aspects of Bryskett’s Discourse of Civill Life need not bother us.He knew these men, they shared a mutual interest in literature and philosophy to some degree; they no doubt, whether singly or in combination, had repaired to his humble lodgings in the countryside to share in a philosophic dinner and conversation at one time or another (perhaps regularly), united as they all were in their political views, their ambitions, and their prejudices. They reflect the ethos of England’s Protestant intelligentsia – the men, and a few women – who sought to figure out Ireland in rational terms but, when frustrated by this perplexing, discouraging, and indecipherable country, discovered within themselves no remedy in books or ruminations on Plato, but turned instead to its alternative, the naked sword (as Dawtrey would later put it, to root out and extirp these viperous people).¹³ So much for the study of philosophy.

Bryskett was, if anything, a pedant, and his long exposition covered well-tilled ground within the circles he emulated, best personified by the person of Philip Sidney, knight and gentleman, the author of The Defence of Poesy, an enormously influential tract, if indeed unread today. Even so, this may have been a difficult matter for his guests to absorb, and not just beyond the capacities of the soldiers there present, as even Archbishop Long admitted, at one point saying, I cannot see how this hangeth together. Bryskett may have sighed at that … Philip Sidney would have understood.

But Philip Sidney was in England, and his gaze was not directed in Bryskett’s direction, nor in Spenser’s either. Sidney would not have had much interest in a land where no trace of learning is to be seen, but unfortunately the eight guests of Lodowick Bryskett were stuck there, all wishing they were somewhere else. As Bryskett was to ask Spenser a decade later, and recorded in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,

Why didst thou ever leave that happy place [meaning England]

In which such wealth might unto thee accrue,

And back returnest to this barren soil,

Where cold and care and penury do dwell,

Here to keep sheep, with hunger and with toil?¹⁴

The answer to that question was simple. In the pursuit of preferment, all (save Dillon and perhaps Carleill) had proved wanting. They had attained no offices, salaries, or advancement worth much of anything, and Ireland was their last throw.¹⁵ They were willing to give the place a try, willing to advance the Anglo-Protestant agenda, and willing to put their trust in the foremost patron of them all, the queen, but in the end she betrayed them. She was, after all, weak and ever changeable.

Ireland had a reputation in London, it was deemed a place of humours where the very air itself could overwhelm a gentleman’s otherwise good sense. It was also considered a land of quagmires.

The queen had little sense of the place, it was distant and remote. Throughout her long reign she sent dozens and dozens of administrators, soldiers, and churchmen to this island realm, some of whom she valued, others she was relieved to be rid of. Troublesome men were a constant curse; troublesome women she could manage, but the men were more trying. Generally desirous of steering a middle course in whatever difficulty she encountered, Elizabeth dealt instead with a wide range of fanatics, people so strident in their points of view that even a royal tantrum could not always suffice to quell their spirits. Bryskett’s guests were a case in point. They pushed the Protestant agenda too stridently for her liking, they were all inclined to take extreme measures that the queen had little taste for. But then again, they were the ones whose lives, properties, and fortunes (what little there was of it) were at stake. For them, the native Irish, indeed, the Anglo-Irish as well, were too Catholic, too proud, too rebellious, too stiff-necked, and too obstinate. It must be stated unequivocally that none of this was a matter of patriotism or love of country. As said before, these long quarrels were about, in order, land, power, and religion.

As the following narrative will make clear, the queen’s army in Ireland was rarely at full strength, rarely up-to-date in pay, supplies, and encouragement, and rarely the effective fighting force that those who financed its existence (however poorly) from London imagined it to be. Nonetheless, it was an armed force whose potential menace was rarely far from the queen’s mind. There was no standing army in England, only troops of the queen’s personal guard. Elizabeth’s Continental contributions to her various allies of the moment, often the Dutch or the French, were generally ad hoc bands raised for a specific expedition. Only in Ireland did a professional, garrisoned force, paid for by the queen, exist but, as she often asked, to what purpose?¹⁶

The timing of Lodowick Bryskett’s entertainment is intriguing, and goes to the heart of Elizabeth’s concerns. All Bryskett’s guests were diehard Protestants, some leaning to Puritanism. This is not to say that all were religiously pious – what their spiritual beliefs were, or how strongly held, we will never know – but politically they were uncompromising in their antipathy to Spain and its king, the monk-ridden Philip II; to the pope of the moment, whomever he might be; and just about anything to do with Catholicism. When Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, to whom Bryskett wrote an introductory note of praise in his Discourse of Civill Life, massacred over six hundred unarmed papal mercenaries during the course of one of his sanguinary marches through Ireland, no one in this group raised any complaint. Spenser, who was there, thoroughly approved. The thought of Queen Elizabeth I actually marrying a Catholic, which she patiently considered for over six years beginning in 1572 (two Frenchmen presented themselves as candidates), was a horrific prospect. Walsingham’s secretary called the notion near treason and Philip Sidney, the idol of this group, was banished from court for criticizing one of the proposed matches. What would have happened if Elizabeth had gone through with it?¹⁷

One possibility, if hot heads lost control of themselves, would have been to transport the Irish army back to England as the champion of Protestant order–to march on London, as it were, to save the queen from herself. Rural England was still strongly Catholic, so any such force might not have attracted much strength marching east to the capital, but London and nearby Cambridge and Oxford were different matters, citadels of the reformed religion. Added to this was a powerful and anxious aristocracy that had profited enormously from the dissolution of church properties over the preceding five decades, and who saw no good tidings in a return to the Catholic orbit. The queen, after all, was a woman. Some good Protestant could rule in her name.

A far-fetched scenario? Not really.¹⁸ During the forty-five-year reign of Elizabeth, more than one man had given the idea good thought. If Robert Devereux, the ill-starred earl of Essex, had done it in his wild flight to London in 1599, the course of his life and career might well have been different, but he lacked the nerve and lost his head, literally, when he might not have had to. What some people might label treason, a man like Essex would call devotion to the queen. He might even have believed it.

Bryskett and his friends were, on the whole, in mostly good cheer, however, at this mid-point in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Prospects in Ireland had seldom looked better: Foreign enemies had so been vanquished (meaning the 600 mercenaries massacred by Lord Grey); the domestical conspiracy discovered and met withal (meaning the Nugent/Baltinglass rebellion); and the rebels clean rooted out (meaning the Pale, at the moment, was secure). What was needed now was constancy from the queen: no letting up on the treasure to be expended to further Tudor control throughout the kingdom, no temporizing with the recalcitrant Irish, and a transfer of wealth, meaning land, from Irish to English ownership. Constant military pressure was the key, and ruthlessness of purpose. By the time Elizabeth finally learned this lesson, and achieved the desired results, every one of Bryskett’s guests would be dead, the only exception being their host. This book is the story of their struggle to conquer Ireland, and it is told mostly through the viewpoint of these men and that of the queen. The disparity of their visions finally joined in mid-stream by the end of the century. By then, it was too late for all of them.

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*Kern is the anglicization of the Middle Irish (or medieval Irish) word ceatharnaigh , signifying lightly armed skirmishers or foot soldiers, who are not to be confused with the more formidable axe-wielding gallowglass, who were professional shock troops. English soldiers expanded the definition by using derivations such as woodkerns and bush kerns to signify bandits and vagrants. In more settled times kern came to signify, with disdain, a rural layabout.

Part I

The Young Queen

Chapter 1

The Family Her Father’s England

It would be interesting to know, intimately, what forces really shaped the young queen’s character. What she understood about the past, how precise her knowledge of English history, and the intricacies of her Tudor forebears, truly were; what insights she may have had about that heroically embellished figure, her father Great Harry and equally, her disgraced mother. Whatever she knew on these subjects would not, in all likelihood, have been gleaned from books. The formal discipline of writing current history, or for that matter, contemporary encyclopaedias, was not an English accomplishment of the mid-1550s. The young Elizabeth would certainly have had some texts available, and chronicles as well, but more likely than not most formal education on the niceties of the immediate political past came to her in genealogical tables and charts, for these were studied scrupulously. Most of her earliest lessons in Tudor lore were probably verbal, anecdotal, and highly prejudicial conversations – the running commentary of great deeds, great marriages, great controversies touched upon as passing fingers scrolled about on the lineage and ramifications of aristocratic couplings. All this would have been embellished by those individuals closest to her in youth: the teachers such as John Ascham, many from Cambridge, who were summoned to educate her, in competition with the nurses and guardians of her own household, the people who actually brought her up, embodied by the dangerously talkative Kat Ashley, for example, for whom Elizabeth had genuine and familial affection similar to that of a mother and daughter. ¹

What she felt about England and its role in the Europe of 1550 may well have been dramatically different from the historical appraisals of today, a full four centuries later. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, who between the two of them ruled for eighty-three years of the sixteenth century as figurative Tudor bookends, are larger-than-life figures, at least to the English-speaking world. They seem to epitomize a sort of Renaissance dynamic whereby the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the suppressing of superstition by Protestantism, colonies in the New World, and the age of Shakespeare, all blend to coalesce into new beginnings, new hopes, great progress and excitement in an explosion of human energy. The afterglow of victory over Spain’s armada in 1588 typifies the mindset: vigorous, dynamic, enlightened England crushes a retrograde, backward opponent, one rooted in the Inquisition and rosary beads. In point of fact, it took Philip II of Spain just a year to recover from this financial and military fiasco. In 1589, he was busy rebuilding his fleet for further ventures.² Scholars past and present who think and write in Philip’s Spanish tongue, or the Burgundian his father Emperor Charles V spoke (along with the French king, Francis I), or the Italian of any number of wily popes, have a substantially different perception of Tudor England than we do.³ To many of these commentators, England was a peripheral kind of place, the outsider, a meddlesome pest of a nation always ready to pick and scavenge along the sidelines as the true powers of Europe, epitomized by the royal dynasties of Habsburg and Valois, battled all over the mainland. The vulgar English language, for example, was not considered by foreign ambassadors as even a requirement for service to their postings at the court in London: Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and even Turkish, could be deemed essential, but not English, a signal sign of Continental contempt.⁴ If Henry VIII, a man of enormous vanity, did not accept this reality, his daughter certainly did.

Henry VIII succeeded the seventh Henry in 1509. He was seventeen years old, a handsome, athletic, though hardly carefree young man. His father, the first Tudor, had seized the throne at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. This fierce, two-hour fray brought an end to almost forty years of civil war, an evil memory that lingered in folklore for generations. Shakespeare gave Richard III a noble death at Bosworth Field, but popular relief at his removal from the scene was widespread. When the naked, mutilated corpse of the last Plantagenet was unceremoniously dumped in a horse trough at Leicester Castle, the populace threw garbage on it and spittle.⁵

This was the primary military adventure of King Henry VII. He married with prudence, ruled quietly, and taxed prodigiously. His son inherited a very ample treasury and his deceased brother’s wife, the Spaniard Catherine of Aragon. He would squander the first and discard the second, with disastrous results.

In the Plantagenet worldview, inherited by the Tudors, England could almost be seen as tangential, a watery spur from the jewel that truly counted, Aquitaine and France. As Shakespeare’s Henry V had so memorably cried, No king of England, if not king of France!⁶ The Plantagenets, after all, beginning with the famous Henry II and his progeny, Richard the Lionheart and John, had all been French-speaking nobility, and their cares and primary attentions had always been the Continent. King Richard, for example, king of England for ten years, had spent only six months of his reign on English soil. His ambitions, and those of most who followed him, were aimed at augmenting their power in France.

By the 1400s, however, English control of French territories had greatly diminished. On Henry VIII’s ascension, only the coastal town of Calais and the surrounding marches were left. Henry would spend prodigious treasure trying to expand that foothold, vital to any military endeavour as a point of entry to the mainland. What little success he achieved, through thirty- eight years of effort, was mostly the result of dynastic ambitions by men more powerful than he, and beyond his ability to control.

The great powers of the Continent were those of the French Valois, embodied by Francis I from 1515 to 1547, and the House of Habsburg, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Charles ruled his vast and complicated mélange of kingdoms from today’s Belgium; Francis, as king of France, operated from a variety of royal palaces, mostly those grouped around Paris and the Loire valley to its south. Henry was a lucky man that throughout the first years of his reign, Charles and Francis competed mostly in Italy, wasting money, armies, and attention in yearly campaigns that more often than not also embroiled the papacy. In moments of conscience, Charles even engaged the infidel Turk. Henry Tudor, however, navigated from the outside, entering and abandoning alliances as circumstance demanded. Like his wily father-in-law, King Ferdinand of Aragon, he had no moral compunctions. While negotiating a treaty of mutual assistance on the one hand, he could contemplate with complete self-assurance a secondary option to betray his partner simultaneously. These were the days, after all, of autocratic monarchies. Henry and all the others did as they pleased.

This is not to suggest that men like the king of England did not feel apprehensive or insecure. Far from it. Dangers lurked (real or imagined) on many and varied levels. Poor harvests, onerous taxation, religious hysteria, might all boil over into more or less spontaneous disturbances that could seriously shake a monarch’s composure. England, after all, was not a modern state as we understand that term today. Roads and communication were primitive, standing armies non-existent, and the king largely restricted to London. Henry himself hardly ventured more than 120 miles from his capital (Elizabeth not much farther); thus reaction time to a crisis out in a far-flung corner of the realm was necessarily limited.⁷ In Henry’s time, and that of his three children, peasant rabble often assembled to converge on London, and many of these alarums were extraordinarily threatening. The loyalties and devotion of his principal nobles were, accordingly, essential. Could he trust these men, could he count on them? Henry spent a great deal of time thinking over this question.

As he did so, he used the same criteria employed when dealing with Charles V and Francis I, and studied the same weapons at his disposal. Most broadly put – or as a last resort – the issue was soldiers and military might, but conceptually the main ingredient was the wedding bed.

Marriages, and the brokering thereof, was an essential tool of conspiracy. It is ironic that aristocratic women – many poorly educated and virtually ignored in terms of psychological development – should on the other hand be deemed invaluable as diplomatic commodities, but such was the case. Bloodlines, dynastic potential, geographical advantages, financial considerations, and simple vanity, all played their part in what were, essentially, business transactions. These marriages were by and large loveless, and expected to be so. Very few women foresaw any personal satisfaction to come from such unions, instead viewing these barterings in the fatalistic context of familial duty over which they had little say. The expectation for them was to be quiet and produce children.⁸*

Marriage alliances were critical in both foreign and domestic politics. Henry could, and often did, approve or disapprove of marriages among his nobility, as these were avenues whereby factions within court could solidify positions that might bolster, or threaten, the monarch. Likewise on the international scene, the diplomatic correspondence of Francis, Charles, and Henry is often obsessed with questions of matrimonial complexity. Some of Henry’s most prodigious temper tantrums were directed towards the marital difficulties of his sisters, of whom, it was said, he was fond. No matter, when their liaisons did not engender appropriate political results, his mood turned sour.

Likewise the necessity to have male heirs. Henry’s wayward, greedy eyes looked over the ladies of his court more or less as a cattle mart, there for the choosing. Catherine of Aragon did not appreciate these roving appraisals, but she knew it to be more or less standard royal behaviour and, as her husband advised, she put up with it. Henry, for example, took both Boleyn sisters as mistresses, and never would have married the younger as his second wife had Catherine delivered him a son. But Anne Boleyn was not a docile subject, perhaps because her origins were not sufficiently royal to grant her the unique patience of which Catherine – indisputably lineaged – was capable. Anne Boleyn had a sharp tongue and used it freely. She had smitten the king with the dart of love, but when she too did not produce the requisite male heir, only the brat Elizabeth, her subsequent jealousy of rivals imperilled her dangerously. I can put you down, Henry famously warned her, but Anne evidently did not believe him. When she was beheaded in 1536, all the intricate spiders’ webs of relationships created matrimonially among the Howard and Boleyn families stood endangered. And Henry, as he aged and grew familiar with processes of divorce and intemperate execution, put all factions on notice that marriage alliances held equal odds for disaster as they did for advancement.⁹

Henry’s wretched failure with his various wives aside, history may well have viewed this gluttonous individual as no more or less interesting than any of his contemporary despots had it not been for one crucial twist in his otherwise pedestrian career: religion. Had Catherine of Aragon done her duty as a royal spouse and produced the desperately required son rather than a superfluous daughter in Princess Mary, who knows if the Protestant Reformation would ever have achieved the Tudor’s eventual sanction? Henry was cynical enough and shrewd enough to see in the rising religious turmoil a useful tool that could shed the unwanted Catherine. It took him time to figure this out, as his minister Cardinal Wolsey first attempted conventional, and absurd measures to secure a divorce (claiming Henry’s marriage to be a sin against God, as he had taken his brother’s wife, citing a convenient Biblical text as justification. Unfortunately, rebutting texts were also abundant).¹⁰ Sexual tension heightened the cardinal’s plight, as Anne Boleyn, taking note of her sister’s fate as a royal concubine, initially refused to sleep with the king unless she was his legal consort. Wolsey in the end could not survive the challenge or the strain and was purged, replaced by his able assistant, the lawyer Thomas Cromwell. It is felt by most historians that it was Cromwell who advised the king that he could have his divorce and solve a second problem as well – his growing financial deficit – in one policy move against the church. This was astute advice from Cromwell, albeit amoral and perilous to all involved, but Cromwell, like everyone else around the king, was avaricious for power and spoil. He took advantage of Henry’s lack of self-control and formulated schemes that appealed to his master’s lustful nature. He should have realized that Henry’s appetites were uncontrollable, that once freed from restraint he would never be satisfied. As the king discarded one wife after another, Cromwell would lose his head as well, because a woman he chose for Henry, Anne of Cleves, had sagging flesh and droopy breasts. I like her not, the king announced, and a mere two months after being created Earl of Essex, Cromwell was dead (but not before doing his king the favour of working over the details, from his cell in the Tower of London, that freed Henry from his fourth marriage).¹¹

Henry confronted the church, though not its religious principles, a distinction made many times by many historians, though this is a point that general observers sometimes miss.¹²

With Wolsey’s, and then more sharply, Cromwell’s guidance, Henry essentially replaced the pope as head of the Church of England, turning that figure into a pariah, most graphically depicted in Girolamo da Treviso’s propagandistic painting The Four Evangelicals Stoning the Pope, an important addition to the king’s collection.¹³ Henry was thereby enabled to dissolve his marriages without papal interference and, more pointedly, take possession of everything the church owned: its property, its gold, plate, and jewels, its endowments that generations of the faithful had put aside for the chantries, where monks and priests spent their time praying for specific souls in purgatory. These sorts of pieties were, of course, a prime instance of genuine abuse, and thus a prime target for reformers. Through compliant churchmen and anti-clerical parliaments, Henry satisfied the social clamour for cleaning up scandal, while simultaneously amassing tremendous wealth, in terms of ecclesiastical plunder, to pay his accumulating bills.¹⁴

The financial figures were staggering. During Henry’s reign, around 650 monasteries, friaries, abbeys, and religious hospitals were suppressed. The manors and farmlands of these churchly portfolios generated approximately £400,000 in ready money annually, dwarfing Henry’s rent rolls from crown lands ten times over. The king gave away about three per cent of these properties as gifts to powerful favourites, sold a goodly portion too, and rented the rest for his yearly income, which immediately doubled. By 1547, however, his extravagances had seen a full two-thirds of this appropriated spoil alienated from royal ownership, and the demand for additional cash forced the king to sell off a large proportion of what remained. After exhausting this particular source of loot, he turned his attention to the next pie, the episcopal estates of his powerful bishops. By the time he and his son were finished with them, their landed wealth had largely evaporated and they ceased, as a class, to exist as secular magnates in their own right. None of this inventory includes the portable wealth of the church, its chalices, reliquaries, and assorted treasures. It is said that after the stripping of Canterbury Cathedral, a royal mule train numbering over twenty carts would rumble its way westwards to London and Henry’s coffers.¹⁵

During his daily ritual of interminable dinner parties – some lasting seven hours with twenty-course meals, washed down by the finest wines of Aquitaine Henry – had cause for merriment, as did his courtiers. They were not heretics, merely pragmatists. By the 1540s, however, Henry may (or may not, depending on his alcoholic intake) have understood what a Pandora’s box this had turned out to be. His own solution, typically, was brutish: to hang, draw, and quarter those who, mistaking his intentions, caused spiritual or social unrest, unless he happened to be in a merciful mood. It was a sign of the king’s humanity to adjust a death sentence from horrific torture to simple beheading.

Midway through Henry’s reign, the geopolitical nexus on the Continent shifted. The Habsburg/Valois rivalry was more focused now on the Flemish Low Countries, a traditional area of English concern, and the struggle there was taking on decidedly religious overtones. The teachings of Luther, spreading from the German principalities, and then Calvinism from Geneva, were finding receptive havens in the mercantile, cosmopolitan trading cities of the Netherlands and Flanders. The Habsburg Emperor Charles V was staunchly Catholic, and his French counterpart, Francis, outwardly orthodox. It was not soothing to either of them to see Henry condoning religious innovations that, ultimately, were proving subversive to their own authorities. Charles in particular could imprison the pope and plunder Rome, but he had no use for heretics.

Henry would have agreed. An amateur theologian himself, he enjoyed disputatious give and take on religious questions (though not with his wives – it was a court rumour in 1546 that Catherine Parr, his last wife, would be taken to the Tower and executed because she was less than submissive in arguments over religion). His response would have been that tweaking here and there was justified: should the Bible be available in English? Should not rank superstition be removed? Where did Christ say anything about purgatory? Should priests marry? What did any of this have to do with theology? Henry was no more radical than Erasmus, at least in his own opinion.¹⁶

But the English king had failed to recognize one self-evident fact. By attacking the ecclesiastical structure; by despoiling, insulting, and degrading the clergy; by effecting the largest wholesale transfer of property from one segment of society (the church) to another (the crown) ever seen in England since William the Conqueror, Henry in fact imploded confidence in the spiritual edifice as well.¹⁷

Everywhere, ordinary people saw their religious familiarities uprooted. Churches torn down for building materials, monastic choir stalls housing cattle, the bones of St Thomas Becket torn from his coffin, burnt and scattered to the winds; even place-names, known for centuries, altered to reflect the transfer of power, the ancient port of Bishop’s Lynn changed to reflect its new master, King’s Lynn.¹⁸ Is it at all surprising, given such ferment, that theological certainty would be challenged as well?

It is doubtful Henry foresaw what was to come, and also doubtful whether he would have behaved any differently. His imperial ambitions were such that without huge injections of ready money they were bound to remain unfulfilled, yet these, in his mind, were far more important than religious difficulties at home. But growing agitation and turmoil by adherents of reform and spiritual rejuvenation were decidedly irritating, indeed, heretical. As the physical church crumbled, so too did its theological underpinnings. Confused himself, Henry attempted to tread water by endorsing conservative Catholic dogmas such as the mass and transubstantiation. In 1538, flaunting his expertise in theological subtleties, he publicly debated a learned, though wayward, priest who had denied that the bread and wine of the eucharistic sacrifice were literally transformed into Chris’s flesh and blood. This propaganda exercise, in front of the entire court, lasted an entire afternoon, and its conclusions were inevitable. Henry, with considerable vehemence, declared himself the oratorical victor. Six days later the priest was arrested and burnt alive. This did not prevent a flood of other evangelical extremists from crowding into London with their pestilential deviations: Lutherans, Anabaptists, Lollards, Sacramentarians (or Zwinglians), all roiling a sudden doctrinal vacuum, and all violently detested both by sectarians of their own reforming cadres and by conservative Catholics. Periodic pronouncements from the king over what was to be believed, and not believed, added little comfort to his confused subjects. Royal whim could take a woman any time, but could it dictate spiritual conformity or true belief? Many loyal subjects, seeing the possibility of treason in every utterance, sought safety in ignorance. The duke of Norfolk thanked God he had never read scriptures, nor would ever do so in the future.¹⁹

Henry waffled from one religious stance to another, many shifts reflecting momentary political differences with either the Habsburgs or Valois. Perhaps the single most conspicuous example of royal vexation was the simultaneous execution of three heretics and three Catholics at Smithfield, a traditional killing ground outside the medieval walls of London. The Catholics included the former chaplain of his first wife, the ever-pious Catherine, and a schoolmaster to Henry’s first daughter, the ever-stubborn Mary. Among the Protestants, Robert Barnes stood out. Barnes was a more or less moderate Lutheran who, in Henry’s employ, had undertaken important diplomatic missions to the Continent. He was one of those constants in reform circles, a man who had made the pilgrimage to Germany as papists would to Rome, to visit the spiritual font of his religious bent. He returned to England with a sense of mission: his hatred of Catholicism was extreme (swill from the polluted Thames was more wholesome than holy water blessed by a priest), but so too was his abhorrence of radical Protestants (he had no compunction sentencing them to the pyre). In a display of royal impartiality, or perhaps annoyance, the condemned were divided evenly on the sleds that were dragged to the place of execution, one of each persuasion to each hurdle. Barnes could be heard arguing theological matters with his Catholic counterpart, each railed against the other as to which was the true martyr and which the deluded imposter. Barnes made it a point to ask, before he died, what his crime was, as he himself had no idea. No one of his executioners had an answer – no one knew – but they lit the fires anyway and Barnes was consumed. By the end of Henry’s reign, a person could die for denying transubstantiation (which would have included most reformers), or declaring the pope as head of the Church of England (which would have included most Catholics). As in most matters of state or conscience, it could all depend on the king’s disposition. Harry will be God, as Luther contemptuously put it, he will do as he craves.²⁰

Her Brother’s England

Elizabeth was just over two years of age when Anne Boleyn was executed and what, if anything, she may have recalled of her mother is uncertain. When Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1558, and for the following years of her early reign, the only references she ever made to her parents were adulatory nods to Henry, and not a word about Anne. As was customary for royal children, Elizabeth had had her own household and guardians, and often lived apart from court in various manors or estates. Anne Boleyn, like other royal consorts, was not a conventional mother. She would not, for example, have breast-fed the baby, as this would have delayed her ability to conceive another child, which in 1534 was her primary objective. Henry’s original passion, while still capable of arousal, was showing signs of abatement, about which Anne was aware. Producing a male heir, a promise she had made to Henry, was her guarantee of safety, whereas producing girls was not. Anne’s preoccupation was to preoccupy Henry, and the king, though ostensibly an affectionate parent, spent most of his daylight hours hunting. There was little time to visit Elizabeth and her household. One of the last-known occasions when Anne and Elizabeth were together was, apparently, driven by the politics of survival. Anne, losing favour quickly, took Elizabeth in her arms and waved her back and forth for the king to see, as he stood above her by a window, meeting with his privy council. Angry words were evidently exchanged, mostly by Henry. Twenty days after this episode, Anne was beheaded.²¹

She had been accused of committing adultery with six individuals, one of whom was her brother. At her trial in May 1536 where, said a spectator, the stench of bawdy overwhelmed everyone, Anne denied all charges. The future archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, professed himself clean amazed. I had never better opinion of woman, he said. Others were more sensible. Anne’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, saw how things were running: she was a great whore, he said, washing his hands of her, running for cover. Anne was killed before a crowd of two thousand spectators. Henry divorced her just before the executioner, imported specially from France, swung his lethal sword. She thus died a common strumpet, not a queen. Thomas Wyatt, the poet and courtier, and himself implicated in the scandal, watched from his cell in the Tower, according to legend. These bloody days have broken my heart.²²

It is hard to reconcile our notions of royalty, nobles, crown jewels, and sumptuous coronation robes with the reality of life in Henry’s court, which defines the word tawdry with exact precision. Henry’s feelings of humiliation must not have been so extreme as to allow a public trial with such salacious (and certainly fabricated) details of his private affairs to be bruited about; and to be followed by an execution that most people with a sense of propriety might well have preferred to be private. Instead, Henry dispatched his second wife in a circus-like atmosphere, a woman he had spent seven years wooing, having implemented policies that profoundly altered his kingdom in many dangerous ways. But then again, we must remember the times and circumstances. Henry’s court was bitten with intrigue and faction; spies abounded, and no private conversation was ever secure. Bribery, corruption, betrayal, all infected the processes of what passed as government. The king had murdered or purged the people closest to him in affection and loyalty, many without a drop of remorse (as he said when Catherine of Aragon died, Praised be God! and refused to wear black at her funeral).²³ In the last days of his reign, his own lord chancellor decided that a certain heretic was not forthcoming under torture. Removing the golden chain of office, his elegant ermine robe and garter, he rolled up his sleeves and worked the rack himself. The fact that his victim was a young woman of unimpeachable character mattered little. Into this violent, morally bankrupt world, young Edward VI stepped to the throne.

Henry’s third surviving child, the long-awaited male heir, had been born to Jane Seymour in 1537. He was christened Edward, and though his mother died of complications a few days after birth, the boy lived to succeed his father in 1547 at nine years of age. At his accession, his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were thirty-one and fourteen respectively.

This was a wonderful moment for the Seymour family, yet another factional entity thrust forward by an advantageous marriage. Two brothers of the late, lamented Queen Jane, Edward and Thomas Seymour, were particularly favoured. Edward, the elder (referred to hereafter in this text by his title, the duke of Somerset), had prospered prodigiously from the forced sale of monastic properties, a process that continued full bore under his nephew. Henry VIII, aside from being a glutton and sensualist, was an avid builder and collector as well. Through construction and appropriation, he was the master of fifty-five palaces and manors, in which were hung or displayed over 2,000 tapestries and 150 works of art. His dinner settings consisted of some 2,000 plates and assorted utensils. Dwarfing the monies spent to accumulate such a horde was the £2,000,000 he had squandered on foreign adventures. Edward VI began his reign hard-pressed for revenues. Even at the tender age of fourteen, his notebooks are full of entries discussing royal finance, as he was a studious boy and eager to learn. His uncle Somerset, officially designated the Great Protector in his role as regent, taught the king economy. Somerset dealeth very hard with me, the king noted in his diary, and keepeth me so straight that I cannot have any money at my will. What Edward did not realize was that his dour and parsimonious uncle was gorging himself in much the same fashion as Great Harry, both personally and, as he would have claimed, for the common weal. While enriching himself on what monastic pickings still remained, he simultaneously continued Henry’s fruitless spending on foreign wars, wasting over £1,000,000 for no worthwhile gains.²⁴

These were heady days for the ruling junta, as one historian has labelled the Protectorate.²⁵ Unfortunately for Somerset, he enjoyed the enmity of both his fellow privy councillors – in particular John Dudley, of whom more will be related – and his own striving, jealous brother, Thomas, who resented the Great Protector’s ascendancy. In time-honoured fashion, Thomas Seymour attacked his sibling at the exact source of his power, the king. But Edward VI was no Harry, a man to be taken advantage of as he sat drunk at the dinner table, susceptible to whisperings and gossip about treason, real or imagined. Edward was a child, and Seymour attempted to seduce his affections accordingly, through roughhouse games, mock tournaments and, in truly tragicomic fashion, pocket change. Seymour smuggled into Edward’s hands a purse of coins every now and again, to finance whatever trinkets the young lad felt most deprived of by the regent. Along with the money came importunings – would the king approve of, for instance, Seymour’s projected marriage with the queen dowager (Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr)? Sprinkled in with such requests were subtle critiques of Somerset, and inevitably a few hints for regime change, a switch of uncles at the helm. Like so many of his political countrymen, Thomas lacked any semblance of restraint or judgment that might temper his indiscriminate ambitions. One night he was caught skulking about the king’s bedchamber, giving rise to rumours that he intended to take Edward into his control to supersede Somerset. This landed him in the Tower, and his brother made no effort to save his life. He was beheaded on 19 March 1549. Three years later, the Protector followed, his head struck by the axe, the result of a coup engineered by John Dudley. The Great Protector wrote a note to himself in his cell: Fear the lord and flee from evil. From the Tower the day before my death.²⁶ It is alleged that Edward, looking over a genealogical tree, grew distraught. "How unfortunate I have been to those of my blood, my mother I slew at birth, and since have made away with two