The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron: Investigating the Deat ...

is that Essex had been so pessimistic about the Queen’s health in those days that he had said privately that she would likely not last a year.⁸ Some people did not believe he was “pessimistic” at all about this possibility, but rather quite the opposite. Even more critically, Sir Robert possessed a most damning piece of spy intelligence revealing what Hesketh had said to Ferdinando about Essex at either their first or second meeting in Lancashire. Father Hugh Owen, the Jesuit spymaster in Brussels, had told his spy Thomas Phelippes that Hesketh had reported that when Ferdinando had asked if Essex would support him in an uprising against the Queen to take the throne, Hesketh had answered that Essex would not, because “the earl of Essex wisheth to have the crown for himself.”⁹ Phelippes had passed this information on to Sir Robert, for whom he was also working as a double agent, and of course Sir Robert never forgot it. How could he? In any event, although Elizabeth may have flirted with the idea of naming Essex before his failure in Ireland and his 1601 uprising against her, so much did she love and admire him, she probably would not have. As an earl, he too brought up too many fears of the territorial “Barons’ Wars” civil strife, and she knew that he exacerbated those fears by already appearing to be extremely controversial and divisive. She thought he was in the perfect position where he was. He, of course, did not agree.

All of this left Ferdinando, still standing there, in the mind’s eye, in front of his palace at Lathom, trying to dodge trouble from this apparent witch and her prophesies. Amongst the English contenders, he had the strongest viable blood claim, and that claim was double-sided—he was “blood royal” on both sides. His father’s (Earl Henry’s) great-uncle was Henry VII, and his mother (the aforementioned Countess Margaret Clifford Stanley, who wanted the throne herself) was the daughter of Henry VIII’s niece, Eleanor Brandon. Perhaps most important of all, Henry VIII had laid down the “official” bloodline claim in his will—according to which Ferdinando’s mother, Margaret, would technically become the first in line in 1594, followed by Ferdinando.¹⁰ However, as mentioned, Margaret was not viable. But Ferdinando was. To all appearances, and according to everything the Queen said, she loved him. Counting against him were