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| Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone |
After hearing about the defeat in Ireland of the English under Henry Bagenal, Essex offered his service to the Queen who was at Whitehall. The Queen's demand for an apology and Essex's refusal to do so stalled the favor between them but over time, Essex found himself in her favor once more. It was after the death of Richard Bingham, that Elizabeth relented and allowed for Essex to regain his fame by subduing the Irish Rebels. Essex took on the challenge and chance at winning glory for the Queen and boasted in a letter to his fellow expeditionary John Harington that:
I have beaten Knollys and Mountjoy in the Council, and by God, I will beat Tyrone in the field; for nothing worthy of her Majesty's honour hath yet been achieved.[1]
This was an highly important post for Essex and a chance to win a valuable position at court and redeem the role of the Devereux's in Ireland.
The importance of the post to his family honor was due in part that Essex was the son of the ill-fated Protestant expeditionary leader in Ireland, Walter Devereux, the 1st Earl of Essex who fought a undulating struggle against the Irish rebel Brian MacPhelim, a member of the O'Neil Sept in Ulster. After years of failure and mishaps in Ireland, Essex’s father died at Dublin Castle of the less than glorious ailment of dysentery. While there he dealt with the lack of resources and proper intelligence that seem to parallel Leicester's experience in the Netherlands and his son's endeavor into Ireland. The policy in Irish warfare had not changed much in the nearly thirty years between the 1st and 2nd earls of Essex expedition there. An O'Neil was leading a devastating rebellion, the troops were ill supplied and the lack of organization and exchange of information was prohibiting the cause. The lack of proper intelligence on the condition in Ireland was due the covetous protection the Burghley and now his son, Robert Cecil.
Essex was very much a man of honor and distinction in the military and political spheres in the Elizabethan age but his sense of duty base on honor, virtue and social hierarchy was archaic and did not fit the world of politics he was thrust into in the 1590s. He placed too much trust in low ranking men like the Cecils who only nominally shared his vision of honor and loyalty. Essex was also placed in a position under a female ruler which upset the natural order of masculine dominion of state and religious affairs. Elizabeth's reign did nothing to prove him wrong as she was vain, indecisive, parsimonious and timid in her foreign and domestic policies. Essex push for an Anglo-French alliance would have created a power bloc in Western Europe that would have stopped the Spanish advance in its tracks and formulated strong ties in the future European wars. His distrust of the Spanish was rightly supported and had he been able to secure a garrison in Cadiz, it would have consolidated government policy and focus it on the destruction of the Spanish Empire. This would have given England access to a great deal of wealth and would have prevented the breakdown of government that occurred when the Stuarts inherited the quagmire of Elizabethan and Cecilian policies. It was the manipulation and subversive behavior of the Cecils' Machiavellian political policies and beliefs that controlled the reign of Elizabeth and pushed the noble ambitions of men like the earl of Essex into a position where the only way to preserve of the honor of England is to revolt.
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