0750962615 (N) by John Hall

Author:John Hall
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780750964708
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-04-10T21:00:00+00:00

The early years of the new century witnessed repeated reverses for the earl. As a high-ranking peer, however, he was still called upon to perform official duties, and in February 1601 he was summoned to Westminster Hall for the indictment of the Earl of Essex. A witness of the trial, the French ambassador de Boissie, reported home to his master Henri IV with a biting description of the jury comprised of Lincoln and his fellow senior peers: while Essex and the counsel were pleading, he wrote, ‘my lords guzzled as if they had not eaten for a fortnight, smoking also plenty of tobacco’56 before speedily pronouncing the unanimous verdict of guilty of high treason.

Lincoln was also a juryman at the perfunctory trials of co-conspirators in the revolt, and once again displayed his true colours. During the trial of Essex’s chief lieutenant in Wales, Sir Gelli Meyrick – whose knighthood failed to exempt him from being hanged, drawn and quartered – Lincoln discovered that during the Cadiz raid the Welshman had looted a magnificent set of marble columns, intending them for use on his own tomb. Lincoln wrote to the Privy Council submitting that such pillars were too fine to mark a traitor’s grave, and sought to appropriate them for the grand monument he planned for himself in the church at Tattershall. Cecil was still being pestered on the matter on 18 April. ‘I pray you will not forget your promise to help me to the stones for my tomb,’57 wrote the earl. It was a shameless performance, though nothing less than what one would expect of the man.

But the trial of Essex would come back to bite him.

Notes

52 Star Chamber Records, 5, L1/29.

53 Ibid., 5, L13/33.

54 Ibid., 5, L1/29.

55 Ibid., L34/37.

56 Windwood, R., Memorials and Affairs in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, London, 1725.

57 Historical Mss Commission, Salisbury, x, 38.

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