The Essex Myth in Jacobean England

Abstract

William Barlow, in his 1 March 1601 Paul’s Cross sermon on the rebellion and execution of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, described the Earl’s unsuccessful 8 February attempt to seize Whitehall and Queen Elizabeth as ‘the most daungerous plotte that euer was hatched within this land’.1 Less than a quarter of a century later, near the end of the reign of King James I, one writer remembered the same executed traitor as ‘Robert, (surnamed the Great) Earle of Essex’.2 The 1603 accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I had marked a pivotal moment in the life of the myth of the executed Elizabethan traitor. James’s public attitude towards his former ally Essex was to prove enormously influential in portrayals of Essex for decades to come. The King’s early public promotion of a favourable image of Essex would, ironically, allow later writers to turn it against James, and against James’s own son as it provided the basis for the heroic tradition exploited by the 3rd earl of Essex and fellow Parliamentarians in the 1640s. The tradition capitalized upon by the 3rd Earl as commander of the Parliamentary army was the product of a lengthy, complex, and sometimes contradictory myth-making process beginning largely with King James’s accession in 1603 and achieving its own momentum by his death in 1625. In the intervening years, representations of Essex intensified and their emphases varied in response to and participation in a number of events and crises, among them the accession itself, the 1604 peace with Spain, the trial and eventual execution of Sir Walter Ralegh, the establishment of the court of the Prince of Wales, and the negotiations with Spain in the 1620s.