essex and the city

Or, a very shouty portrait of Robert Deveraux, Head Himbo in Charge.

Hello friends!

First, some news, updates, and housekeeping. You can jump to the break if you don’t care and just want today’s dirtbag.

One, we’re about five months out from the release of Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and its preorder campaign is now underway! If you preorder a copy (in any format, from anywhere, in any country where you can do that) and fill out this form, I’ll send you four pieces of original character cards designed by the incredibly talented Ari Kiser, as well as a signed bookplate if you want. You can also order signed hardcovers from Bookends & Beginnings, one of my favorite indie bookstores, which ships.

Brief pause to look at the art, because I love it and literally have it framed on my wall:

my BABIES

Two, thanks for your patience as we re-enter promo season. Preorders are one of the biggest metrics my publisher uses to see whether readers are interested in my work—which influences print run, press coverage, and also whether they want to buy more books from me in the future. So when you hear your favorite authors bang on about preorders, that’s why, and we appreciate you heaps for bearing with us.

Three, if there are any playwrights in Dirtbag Nation, my incredibly talented partner is teaching a virtual workshop with The Porch this summer on mastering the 10-minute play! Registration is open now, and I can personally vouch for the quality and delightfulness of your instructor.

Four, it’s been a real heck of a two weeks for me professionally, personally, spiritually, allegorically. Let’s just say I’ve been wearily eating a lot of pasta salad out of coffee mugs from underneath my weighted blanket. So this newsletter is a bit late, and the next one might be a bit late too. Sorry. This is why I don’t charge money.

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Now, down to business.

Thank you to reader Kit for suggesting this week’s dirtbag, who I haven’t profiled yet because honestly I assumed I had already done it. This newsletter has been around for more than two years, so it seemed like this guy should have been knocked out in the first round. But he wasn’t, so we’re gonna do it now:

Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex, the Whiniest Little Man-Child in All of Tudor England

Yes, this is the second Wessex-Sussex-Essex situation in a row. Check last month’s map if helpful.

Robert Deveraux was born in Herefordshire, England in 1565, seven years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Essex’s father died when he was about nine years old, but his mother—a badass lady whimsically named Lettice Knollys—got remarried a few years later to a guy named Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

History recalls Robert Dudley for two things. A of all, he’s the guy statistically most likely to have slept with Queen Elizabeth. B of all, he probably threw his wife down the stairs so that he could continue sleeping with Queen Elizabeth. These facts are gonna get weirder in about three paragraphs.

[to the tune of Bananas in Pajamas] Rob Dudley, in Pajamas, throws Amy down the stairs…

Essex came to royal court in 1586 at age 21, determined to be of service to Elizabeth. And obviously I mean “of service” in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense. I feel obligated to say, again, that there’s no shame to this. Essex was young, he was hot, he was horny, and he wanted to be in power. With that combination of assets, what else was he going to do? Become a monk? His resume screamed Royal Favorite, and a royal favorite he became.

If you just scrolled up a couple paragraphs to double-check whether Essex is actually now seducing his stepdad’s girlfriend, congrats. He is. Like father, like son.

In Which I Would Seriously Be A Great Royal Favorite if Someone Would Only Give Me the Chance

Essex quickly found his way into the queen’s favor, earning a reputation as a flirty, handsome man who could tell jokes and looked good on horseback. When Leicester died, Elizabeth gave Essex all of his stepfather’s lands, titles, job as Master of the Horse, and seat on the Privy Council. In effect, this was Elizabeth saying “this good-looking 20-something himbo is my boyfriend now, and you all can deal.”

Now! Most people would be happy with this! I certainly would be! If I was the boyfriend of a queen, I would simply smile and nod and accept my palaces and caskets full of jewels and take my barge out on the river and feast upon swans and wild boar for the rest of my life! It does not seem like that hard of a job to do!

But Essex and I, obviously, are very different people.

As the 1590s rolled on, Essex became increasingly over-confident in his skills as a Privy Counsellor and a statesman generally. This is because he labored under the fatal misapprehension that Elizabeth had elevated him to power because he was smart and good at politics, instead of because he was young and hot. He started talking out of turn during Council meetings and contradicting Elizabeth’s political decisions in front of the court. Elizabeth, unsurprisingly, did not love this.

the face of a man about to “well actually” the queen of england

About this time, Essex also married Frances Walsingham, the daughter of Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, whose hot husband had recently died in the Netherlands. Elizabeth was not wild about this either, as she found it very inconvenient when her favorites had wives. (See the Bananas in Pajamas gif, above.)

(Aside: If I could raise any historical figure from the dead, it would be Sir Francis Walsingham, first so I could learn all of his sneaky gossipy secrets but second so I could yell at him for giving his daughter his own name. For three full seconds I thought this research book was trying to tell me Essex had married Sir Francis Walsingham. I almost plunged my face into a bucket of bleach.)

Panic! at the Privy Council

In addition to sashaying around court showing off his calves, Essex also held a military post—I have to assume because Elizabeth secretly wanted his head blown off but didn’t want to do it herself. He fucked around in England through most of the 1590s, uselessly engaged in not one but two dumb battles with the Spanish Armada. Then, he took that show on the road.

For a while now, Elizabeth had been fretting over who to put in charge of Ireland. (“Irish people,” surprisingly, was never on the table.) Essex had developed a reputation at home for being a real “shoot first and ask questions later” kind of guy, which was worrying. Elizabeth’s other right-hand guy, Lord Burleigh, strongly disagreed with Essex’s methods and thought his own son, Robert Cecil, should be in charge instead.

Essex was not thrilled about being contradicted. He started yelling at Burleigh and making spooky threatening predictions about his death. Eventually, Elizabeth got so fed up that she slapped Essex upside the head during a council meeting. He responded by whining and running away, because of course he did.

be real, you would also slap this face

Eventually, though, Elizabeth had to send somebody to Ireland. Maybe it occurred to her that if Essex was in Ireland, he couldn’t also be in the Privy Council making an ass of himself. Either way, she gave in and sent him to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1599, and he sailed off across the Irish Sea with 16,000 troops. One can imagine both Elizabeth and Frances Walsingham breathing twin sighs of relief.

Pike’s Poke

Essex turned up in Ireland in March 1599 to a decidedly less-than-warm welcome. The Irish weren’t thrilled to see him, obviously, but neither were the English. There’s a delightful anecdote about an English soldier poking him in the butt with a pike, which I would have paid money to see.

This “pike up the ass” situation set the tone for the whole Irish campaign, which Essex spent getting royally fucked over. As his military endeavors went from bad to worse, Essex gave up, agreeing to a secret meeting with Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone and the leader of the Irish forces. Behind closed doors, he agreed to a truce with Tyrone without asking for Elizabeth’s permission: a thing he definitely would not have gotten if he had asked for it.

assuming Elizabeth made more or less this face for a full day afterward

When word reached Elizabeth of what he’d done, she was hopping mad. “If I wanted to surrender Ireland,” she reportedly said, in what I’m imagining to be a Maggie Smith sort of voice, “I hardly needed to send you there to do it.” Not only was this a step backward for the British empire, it also started to look suspiciously like treason—because what if Essex and Tyrone joined forces against her? Essex was obviously hot and stupid enough to try it.

Double, Double, Treason and Trouble

The right move here would have been for Essex to be super deferential. A million apologies. Keep a low profile. Quietly go back to being hot and in charge of the horses. Grovel.

Essex, of course, did the other thing. He sailed back to England, a thing Elizabeth had explicitly told him not to do. He broke into her bedroom while she was still only half-dressed and demanded an audience, a thing she hadn’t explicitly told him not to do because one would think that was implied.

artistic rendition of Essex’s return to London, September 1599

Elizabeth had him put on trial for treason: ostensibly for the Ireland thing, but I believe also for kicking down her bedroom door. Essex put up a good show at the trial, and it seemed like the queen might come around. However, Robert Cecil, aka Essex’s lifelong nemesis, was absolutely not having it. “Fuck Essex,” I imagine him muttering, “and the sexy calves he walked in on.” He kept up the pressure, and in 1600, Essex was found guilty of disobedience and dereliction of duty. As punishment, he was banished from court and stripped of most of his fancy jobs and titles.

Again! Cannot emphasize this enough! If Essex had just minded his own business at this point he would probably have been fine!

But he was so upset about losing a lot of money that he started to fortify his house against attack—a thing you should not do when suspected of treason—and gathered followers to join him in an uprising against the Queen—another thing you should definitely not do. Whether his goal was actually to murder the queen and instate himself as king is debatable, but it definitely looked like that from the outside. And honestly, I believe it. He has Kendall Roy energy and I think he’d probably go for it.

You At The Barricades Listen to This!

Essex was charismatic and also hot, so he didn’t have too hard a time getting people to follow his lead. He whipped his people into a frenzy, calling Elizabeth and her court “caterpillars of the commonwealth,” a phrase that makes me think of this:

But made Elizabeth think of this:

In February 1601, Essex and his band of followers gathered together in a group not dissimilar to an angry mob (Figure 2) above. He and his minions marched on London and tried to storm the palace. He expected thousands of loyal Londoners would flock to his side and rise up in favor of him as the new king of England.

However, as all Les Miserables girlies know, you simply cannot rely on the people to rise when they are called upon to do so, and Essex’s rebellion was quickly crushed. He was arrested and put on trial for treason again, this time more aggressively. Lifelong Anti-Essex Activist Robert Cecil played a dramatic role in the trial, once popping out from behind a tapestry to loudly call Essex a liar. (My first book is 300 pages of me explaining how much I dislike Robert Cecil, but in this moment I am on his side. Bitches love a tapestry.)

In due course, Essex was found guilty of treason and attempted regicide. He was sentenced to die alongside many of his followers, which included a guy named Thomas Lee. Why am I bringing up Thomas Lee, you ask? Because this picture of him exists:

And I need you all to see it. There is literally no other reason.

Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex, was beheaded at the Tower of London on February 25, 1601. He tried to pin the blame on his sister during his final confession, for which an extra “fuck him” is offered.

The executioner fucked it up the first two attempts and only decapitated Essex on the third try. This is awful, but it’s worth noting that the executioner was a convicted rapist who had basically no axe-related qualifications and was only doing the job because he’d been commanded to do it as a way of avoiding the death penalty.

Guess who made that call? Yep: Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex. Please join me in whispering “ha” quietly into the past.

Anyway, thus ends the saga of absolute shitstain Robert Deveraux. He has no redeeming qualities and I hope his ghost is having an awful Wednesday.

Until next time, be well, and if you also remember Bananas in Pajamas feel free to let me know in the comments because for a while I was convinced that show was a fever dream I shared only with my siblings,

-Allison