Chapter 8
None of what came next makes any sense without understanding Ireland, and I have never been able to tell the story of my brother’s ruin without starting there.
He went straight to the queen’s bedchamber, unannounced.
He found her before she was dressed, painted, or wigged for the day.
It was an intrusion so far past the bounds of what any subject owed his sovereign that I still do not fully understand what he believed it would accomplish.
Queen Elizabeth received him with a composure I imagine cost her a great deal to maintain.
It did not survive the day. By that evening, he was confined to his rooms. And within months, he was stripped of his offices, his freedom, and finally the one thing that had kept him solvent - the monopoly on sweet wines that Elizabeth declined to renew that October.
A man who had once measured his worth by how completely the queen adored him now measured it by how completely she had turned him away.
I watched him take that turn as a wound rather than a warning.
Charles was in Ireland through all of it.
Queen Elizabeth had sent him to finish what Robert could not, and, by every account that reached me, he was making quiet and steady progress against Tyrone in the very hills where my brother’s ambitions had gone to die.
I did not know, reading those reports with a strange, divided heart, whether to be proud of him or simply exhausted by the unfairness of it.
The same war was breaking one man I loved while making a hero of the other.
Charles would not see London again until Elizabeth herself was dead, and by then there would be less of my family left for him to come home to.
***
I have spent years turning over what I might have done differently in the weeks before February 1601, and I have never arrived at an answer that absolves me entirely.
My husband Robert took ill that same year.
It was serious enough that I moved into his sickroom despite everything standing between us by then.
I nursed him through it as though the years of coldness between us had never happened.
Whether the illness was as convenient as it later looked - since it kept him safely apart from my brother’s faction in the very months it began to unravel - I never asked him directly.
And he never offered to tell me. I only knew that whatever I felt toward my husband, I could not sit in a house and watch the father of some of my children suffer without tending him.
So I did, and he let me. Neither of us spoke of what that meant.
I had less patience left over for my brother that year than I would like to admit, tending one man’s illness while watching another court his own ruin.
By the final months of 1600, my brother’s frustration with Queen Elizabeth had curdled into something more dangerous than ordinary court resentment.
He believed the queen had wronged him. He believed her advisers had poisoned her against him.
He believed, with a conviction that frightened me even as I understood it, that only decisive action could restore what he considered his rightful place.
I did not counsel restraint as forcefully as I should have.
I encouraged him toward the belief that his cause was just and that he deserved better treatment than he had received.
By January of 1601, my brother had been confined to Essex House for months.
He was ill and humiliated after the failure of his Irish campaign.
He was forbidden to be in the queen’s presence and stripped of the offices that had once supported him.
My sister Dorothy and I went together to Richmond to beg Queen Elizabeth for mercy on his behalf.
We dressed head to foot in mourning garb, as though our black gowns might argue what our words could not.
The queen received us kindly enough, but would not be moved.
I kept writing after that. I kept sending letters, gifts, and jewels.
All of it was accepted. None of it was answered with anything resembling relief.
One letter went further than the others and further than I should have allowed it to go.
I had written it in a fury of my own. I was certain that Robert Cecil, the queen’s chief secretary and my brother’s most patient rival for her favor, meant Robert nothing but ruin.
And my certainty showed itself so plainly on the page that it was read as something closer to a warning of rebellion than a sister’s plea.
I was summoned before Lord Sackville to explain myself.
I do not know, even now, whether the account I gave him satisfied his suspicions or merely exhausted his patience.
I later learned that copies of my letter circulated through London in manuscript.
My private appeal was transformed into something closer to a public manifesto for my brother’s grievances.
I do not know whether gentler counsel would have changed anything for my brother.
By that point, his temperament resisted counsel of any kind, gentle or otherwise.
But I have carried the weight of my own encouragement for decades since.
I have understood that whatever role I played in strengthening his resolve, I played it willingly.
It does not matter if it was out of love and loyalty.
The rebellion itself, when it finally came, unfolded with a speed that left no room for anyone to intervene meaningfully once it began.
Robert marched into London on the eighth of February, 1601.
He led a small group of followers, believing he could rally the city to his cause and force Elizabeth’s ministers to answer for their supposed treachery against him.
My stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, rode with him.
I was not present for the march itself, but I heard the accounts within hours.
Each version was more alarming than the last. London did not rise to support him.
The queen’s forces mobilized quickly. And what Robert had imagined as a bold correction of injustice collapsed within a single day into an unmistakable act of treason against the crown.
I did not escape the aftermath unscathed myself.
Within days, I was placed under house arrest and summoned before the Privy Council for questioning.
My letter and my known encouragement of my brother’s cause had marked me as something more than a grieving bystander.
I had already written to the queen once, in the anxious months before the rising, that I had been “more like a slave than a sister” to Robert.
I had written that whatever I had done sprang from devotion rather than any political scheme of my own making.
I offered the council the same defense now because it was the only honest one I had.
Whether they believed me entirely, I could not say.
But, in the end, Queen Elizabeth chose to take no formal action against me.
I was released - shaken and diminished - but not charged.
Even as relief washed over me, I understood how narrowly I had escaped a fate that might have matched my brother’s.
I had gambled with treason’s edges and walked away only because a queen who despised my mother apparently found insufficient cause, or insufficient appetite, to destroy the daughter as well.
Robert received no such mercy. He stood trial for treason before a panel of his peers, my own husband among them, and was convicted.
He was executed on the twenty-fifth of February, less than three weeks after his rebellion had begun and collapsed within the same single day.
Christopher Blount died on his own scaffold within weeks.
I lost both my brother and the second stepfather who had once made a fractured family feel briefly whole again.
I did not watch my brother die. I have been grateful for that mercy every day since, and ashamed of the gratitude in equal measure.
Because someone else had to watch it for me, and that person came to me after with an account I have never been able to fully set down, even now.
I was told it took three strokes of the axe to finish what a single stroke should have accomplished.
I have spent twenty years trying not to picture it and failing every single time.
They told me, too, that the queen was at her virginals when the news reached court. She reportedly stopped playing and sat in a silence no one in that room dared break. And then, after a while, she began again. I do not know what that silence held for her. I know only that mine has never ended.
Because I do not have adequate words for what his execution did to me.
I had adored Robert since childhood. My brother, whose confidence and charm had carried both of us through court intrigues that might otherwise have crushed us separately, was gone.
His life had ended by the same queen whose favor had once elevated him beyond anyone’s expectations.
I grieved him as a sister grieves, but I also grieved him with the guilt of someone who understood that she had fed the fire that eventually consumed him.
I did not know what it cost my husband to sit among the men who condemned my brother.
He never told me. By then, I had stopped expecting him to tell me anything at all.
And whatever protection my brother’s power had extended over my life collapsed the moment the executioner’s blade fell.
Robert Rich did not wait long to act on the fury he had swallowed for years.
My brother’s shadow had kept my husband’s resentment behind careful silence.
But with Essex dead, nothing remained to restrain what Robert had suppressed since the first child I bore that was not his.
He confronted me within weeks, his contempt no longer disguised behind composure.
He told me that he would no longer live the lie that our marriage had become.
Whatever debt he felt he owed me for the sickroom the year before, if he felt any at all, it did not survive my brother’s death.
He did not cast out all of my children. He only banished the ones he had never truly claimed as his own.
My children by Rich - five of them - remained under his name and in his household.
They were legally and permanently his, regardless of whatever coldness existed between their parents.
But the children I had borne to Charles were expelled alongside me.
My husband refused to continue sheltering children he had only ever tolerated out of fear rather than forgiveness.
I remember the cruel way my family fractured along lines of paternity rather than affection.
Some of my children remained behind while others left with me.
In my heart, all of them were still mine regardless of which surname the law had assigned them.
But whatever discretion had once protected the fallacy of my marriage evaporated entirely.
For the first time in my adult life, I found myself entirely without the protection that a respectable marriage, however hollow, had always provided.
Charles took me in without hesitation. That, at least, offered some measure of comfort amid everything collapsing around me.
We no longer needed to pretend. We no longer needed to arrange careful meetings or maintain plausible explanations for why we were so often in each other’s company.
I moved into his household openly, and the scandal that had simmered for years finally boiled into something the entire court could see plainly, whether they approved of it or not.
I will not claim that this transition brought complete relief.
I had lost my brother and my marriage. I had lost custody of children who remained legally bound to a man who no longer wanted me anywhere near them.
I had lost whatever remained of my reputation as anything other than the queen’s disgraced cousin repeating her mother’s pattern of scandal and defiance.
But I had Charles. I had the children we had made together. We were finally under one roof without division. At last, I had the open acknowledgment of a relationship I had spent nearly a decade defending in whispers.
Still, I had lost nearly everything a woman in my position was supposed to value: my brother, my marriage, half my children, and my standing at a court that had once celebrated me.
I sat some nights in Charles’s house, grieving children I could visit but no longer raise.
And I wondered whether the life I had chosen was worth the ruin that surrounded it on every side.
I did not have a clear answer. Not in those first raw months of grief and displacement. I only knew that whatever else had been stripped from me, Charles remained. He was steady and unwavering, exactly as he had been since the first evening I admitted what I felt for him.
Everything else I had built - my family’s power, my reputation, and the careful respectability I had maintained despite years of scandal - lay in ruins around me. I had chosen a man over all of it, years before I understood how completely that choice would cost me everything else.
Now, standing amid the wreckage, I understood exactly what that choice had meant. And exactly how little I was prepared to take it back, whatever it might yet cost me still.