Essex and the ‘popish plot’

Abstract

Abstract On 8 February 1601 Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, processed into London declaring that he was taking urgent action to prevent a ‘popish plot’ by his enemies to sell the Crown of England to Spain. Historians have dismissed these claims as fictitious or deluded – the chapter reassesses Essex’s claims. The intellectual and political contexts that framed Essex’s vision of politics provided strong foundations for the Earl’s belief that the Protestant succession was endangered by a cabal of evil counsellors, headed by Sir Robert Cecil, in the pay of Spain. The failure of the earl’s rising obscures the fact that this Elizabethan succession scare was no more ‘irrational’ than the ‘popish plots’ in the seventeenth century.