Virtual Grub Street: Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, to the Doge and Senate; March 27, 1603.

In this series:
Lady Southwell on the Final Days of Queen Elizabeth I.
Queen Elizabeth I’s Heart and the French Ambassador.
William Camden to Sir Robert Cotton. March 15, 1603 [1602 O.S.].
Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, to the Doge and Senate; March 20, 1603
Sir Robert Carey’s Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth
Scaramelli, Venetian Secretary in England, to the Doge and Senate; March 27, 1603.

Secretary Scaramelli’s letter of the 27^th of March makes a number of matters clear. Three days after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the event has yet to be made fully public. Again we find him reporting rumors he is being told rather than facts. There are trustworthy sources that report that Elizabeth had been constantly revisiting Essex’s execution, since at least December, thus giving her deep sense of guilt a reason. Her choice among the available reasons was a report that Essex had, in fact, parleyed with the Irish Rebel, Tyrone, and come to believe that there was a viable road to peace among the countries, and that his insubordinate return to the Royal Court was to inform her of the offer. Perhaps leniency had been in order.

The claim that as the result of her extremes of grief she “then fell ill of a sickness which the doctors instantly judged to be mortal” is little more than a fine romantic rumor. An anonymous letter (very likely from Henry Carey) to King James tells the actual story:

Our queen is troubled with a rheum in her arm, which vexeth her very much. . . . She sleepeth not so much by day as she used, neither taketh rest by night. Her delight is to sit in the dark, and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail Essex.[1]

The endlessly energetic Queen had been sleeping at length during the day for some time previous to the immediate crisis. Now she is not managing even that. The pain she has been feeling for months now in her left arm and fingers has gotten more worrisome.[2]

The grandest of the romantic claims around her death, of course, would be that of Louis Aubery, the Lord Maurier (1609-1687), [3] who spiced his memoires with a number of salacious tidbits including a story he said his father had told him that he had been told, decades earlier, by Prince Maurice, who had been told it by the then English ambassador to Holland, to Dudley Carleton.[4] This is the source of the grand romantic story of Queen Elizabeth visiting the dying Catherine Howard, a few weeks before her own death, who confessed on her death bed that she had withheld a ring Essex tried to have delivered to her as a last minute plea for pardon.

As for Arabella Stuart, it is unlikely the Elizabeth knew of her imprisonment which was ordered to prevent any power struggle upon the Queen’s death. Scaramelli — or his informant — is probably confusing grief over Stuart with the Queen’s over the death of her old friend Catherine Howard (sans confession). The rest of the account he has actually witnessed firsthand and it is entirely correct.

Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WC94FGW

I’ve just released a new Shakespeare study. This one on what the 16th century German translations of Titus Andronicus and Hamlet teach us about the earliest versions of the plays. Turns out they teach us quite a lot including hitherto unknown sources for various portions of the plays. I think it’s fair to say that there is a lot of meat on the bone here.

I was right when in my last dispatch I said that her Majesty’s mind was overwhelmed by a grief greater than she could bear. It reached such a pitch that she passed three days and three nights without sleep and with scarcely any food. Her attention was fixed not only on the affairs of Lady Arabella, who now is, or feigns herself to be, half mad, but also on the pardon which she has given at last to the Earl of Tyrone, leader of the Catholic rebels in Ireland. She fell to considering that the Earl of Essex, who used to be her dear intimate, might have been quite innocent after all; for when he was her general in Ireland he had a meeting with Tyrone, each on horseback on different sides of a river, and he concluded an agreement with Tyrone that was both more advantageous for the kingdom and more honorable for the Queen than the present one. But the Council, condemning the conduct of Essex in coming to England in person to explain his action without leave given, persuaded the Queen to put him in the Tower, whence followed all those events which led to his decapitation on the first day of Lent 1601. So deeply does her Majesty feel this, that on the first day of Lent this year, which in the English calendar was the nineteenth of this month, she recalled the anniversary of so piteous a spectacle and burst into tears and dolorous lamentation, as though for some deadly sin she had committed, and then fell ill of a sickness which the doctors instantly judged to be mortal. The Privy Council was convened in perpetual session at Richmond; the Peers were summoned to Court with all speed, especially the Catholics; and the guards were doubled at the Royal Palace, and the pensioners armed. The town council of London met and took certain steps for the safety of the city, which, as everyone knows, is extremely rich, and incredibly unprotected by walls. This perturbation of a population, composed of various religions, and reckoned but little inferior to Paris in numbers, causes an universal dread of dangerous risings; and, although in a single night not less than five hundred vagrants were seized in the taverns and elsewhere, under pretext of sending them to serve the Dutch, and are still kept as a precaution under lock and key on that pretense, and though the same is done every market day, for it is the custom here to press all those who do not pay taxes, and, therefore, have neither property nor profession. Still, the idea that the leaders of factions and of the malcontents may rise, more especially as not a single Catholic has, as yet, obeyed the order to come to Court, a belief that: many of the ministers are hated by the people, and above all the question of religion, are considerations to make most men blench.

The Queen’s illness is want of sleep, want of appetite, labour of the lungs and heart, cessation of the natural motions, irresponsiveness to remedies. There is but little fever but also little strength; nor are there any good symptoms except that a slight swelling of the glands under the jaw burst of itself, with a discharge of a small amount of matter.

There are rumours of amendment, but the truth hangs in doubt, nor is anything certain save this, that the Queen is seventy-one years old, and. this is the first serious illness which she has had in the whole course of her life.

London, 27th March 1603.

[1] The private character of Queen Elizabeth (1922). 74. Citing Advocates' Lib., Edinb., AI, 34, n. 35.

[2] See my “Queen Elizabeth I’s Heart and the French Ambassador.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2019/04/1602-queen-elizabeths-heart-and-french.html

[3] Mémoires pour servir à Histoire d’Hollande, par Messire Louis Aubery, Seigneur de Maurier, p. 260. Paris, 1688.

[4] Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex In the Reigns ..., II.178-9, citing Aubery. “Il ne sera pas inutile ni désagréable d’ajouter ici ce que le méme Prince Maurice tenoit de M. Carleton, ambassadeur d’Angleterre en Hollande,…. que mon père avoit appris de M. le Prince Maurice. ”

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