Elizabeth and Essex A TRAGIC HISTORY by Lytton Strachey. English
Reformation was not merely a religious event it was also a social
one. While the spiritual mould of the Middle Ages was shattered, a
corresponding revolution, no less complete and no less
far-reaching, occurred in the structure of secular life and the
seat of power. The knights and ecclesiastics who had ruled for ages
vanished away, and their place was taken by a new class of persons,
neither chivalrous nor holy, into whose competent and vigorous
hands the reins, and the sweets, of government were gathered. This
remarkable aristocracy, which had been created by the cunning of
Henry VIII, overwhelmed at last the power that had given it being
The figure on the throne became a shadow, while the Russells, the
Cavendishes, the Cecils, ruled over England in supreme solidity.
For many generations they were England and it is difficult to
imagine an England without them, even today. The change came
quickly it was completed during the reign of Elizabeth. The
rebellion of the Northern Earls in 1569 was the last great effort
of the old dispensation to escape its doom. It failed the wretched
Duke of Norfolk the feeble Howard who had dreamt of marrying Mary
Queen of Scots was beheaded and the new social system was finally
secure. Yet the spirit of the ancient feudalism was not quite
exhausted. Once more, before the reign was over, it flamed up,
embodied in a single individual Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The
flame was glorious radiant with the colours of antique knighthood
and the flashing gallantries of the past but no substance fed it
flaring wildly, it tossed to and fro in the wind it was suddenly
put out. In the history of Essex, so perplexed in its issues, so
desperate in its perturba tions, so dreadful in its conclusion, the
spectral agony of an abolished world is discernible through the
tragic lineaments of a personal disaster. His father, who had been
created Earl of Essex by Elizabeth, was descended from all the
great houses of medieval England. The Earl of Huntingdon, the
Marquis of Dorset, the Lord Ferrers Bohuns, Bourchiers, Rivers,
Plantagenets they crowded into his pedigree. One of his
ancestresses, Eleanor de Bohun, was the sister of Mary, wife of
Henry IV another, Anne Woodville, was the sister of Elizabeth, wife
of Edward IV through Thomas of Woodstock, of Gloucester, the family
traced its descent from Edward IIL The first Earl had been a man of
dreams virtuous and unfortunate. In the spirit of a crusader he had
set out to subdue Ireland but the intrigues of the Court, the
economy of the Queen, and the savagery of the kerns had been too
much for him, he had effected nothing, and had died at last a
ruined and broken-hearted man. His son Robert was born in 1567.
Nine years old when his father died, the boy found himself the
inheritor of an illustrious name and the poorest Earl in England.
But that was not all...
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