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       TWO Machiavelli

      ON A COLD JANUARY DAY IN 1606, a messenger walked inconspicuously across the cobbles of London’s Strand, carrying a parcel for delivery to an address opposite the Savoy. It was a journey of only a few hundred yards, but one that crossed from one era of history to another. Just beyond Charing Cross lay York House, where, in 1599, the Earl of Essex, ‘a man of great designs’, had been imprisoned for his attempts to rouse Queen Elizabeth’s hesitant government to a heroic war against the ‘tyranny’ of Catholic Spain. A few yards further on was Durham House, once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, the swashbuckling adventurer who had tried, and failed, to make North America an English colony, and a beachhead for attacking the Spanish empire. Essex had been executed for his rebellious behaviour in 1601. Raleigh was arrested for treason two years later, and now languished in the Tower of London, his bold schemes mere echoes in the empty halls of his great residence.

      Past these mausoleums to old follies and glories lay the messenger’s destination, a brand-new, flat-fronted, perpendicular brick building. At each corner stood a tower, soaring as high as the famous lantern or ‘little turret’ atop Durham House, from which Raleigh had once beheld a ‘prospect which is pleasant perhaps as any in the World’.¹ This building was the London residence of Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, the man who had contrived the downfall of these political giants, shaped the emergence of a new regime under a new king, and cemented his astonishing rise by commissioning the turreted edifice soaring overhead.

      The messenger knocked on the door, and was admitted to a small antechamber. Being Secretary of State to King James, and the monarch’s most trusted servant, the Earl was daily assailed by crowds of applicants, supplicants, petitioners and messengers competing for his much divided attention, and the antechamber had been especially set aside to receive them.

      A clerk entered the room. He approached the messenger, who handed over the parcel. The clerk broke the wax seal and cursorily glanced at a covering letter, addressed to ‘the Right honourable the Earle of Salisbury of his Majestes privie Councell’. It was from Thomas and Edward Hayes, known to Cecil’s staff as ‘projectors’, agents who tipped off the Secretary of State to speculative schemes that might attract a profit or some political advantage. Attached to the letter was a long, formal document. Its title concerned a controversial subject, and marked it for the Secretary of State’s personal attention. It read: ‘Reasons to move the High Court of Parliament to raise a stock for the maintaining of a colony [in] Virginia’.²

      The word ‘Machiavellian’ came into currency in England in the early 1600s, and it was Robert Cecil who in the minds of many personified its meaning. One of the Earl of Essex’s servants, defending his master before a commission of inquiry called following the Earl’s fall from grace in 1599, described the Secretary of State as ‘an atheist, a Machiavel’ who literally embodied the warped morality of political opportunism. ‘It was an unwholesome thing to meet a man in the morning which hath a wry neck, a crooked back or a splay foot,’ said the servant, referring to various deformities with which Cecil had suffered from birth.³

      Cecil’s cousin and long-time ally Francis Bacon argued that it was these deformities that conferred upon the Secretary of State the callousness and determination a great political operator needs, making him ‘void of natural affection’, and mindful ‘to watch and observe the weakness of others’.⁴ These were certainly the qualities he had displayed in his dealings with Sir Walter Raleigh.

      Raleigh had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s most cherished, if exasperating, favourites, and in 1584, to demonstrate her affections, she had granted him an exclusive licence to colonize North America. His efforts had resulted in establishing a small settlement on the island of Roanoke, on the Carolina Banks. On this basis he claimed the entire region for the English Crown, naming it ‘Virginia’ in honour of the Virgin Queen. But hostilities with Spain had prevented him from sending supply ships to service the fledgling colony, and in 1590, it was found abandoned, the only clue to the inhabitants’ whereabouts being a word carved in one of the fort’s wooden posts: ‘Croatoan’, the name of a local tribe. Attempts to find the missing settlers came to nothing, and the supply ship had returned to England.⁵

      Even after 1591, when his licence officially expired, Raleigh had continued to claim Virginia as his, on the basis that his Roanoke settlers may have survived, and established a permanent base elsewhere in the region. But several follow-up missions sent to find his ‘lost colonists’ had proved fruitless. In 1602, a rival mission was dispatched to ‘Norumbega’, in the area of modern-day New England, to find alternative locations for an English colony. Raleigh knew nothing of it until it returned with a lucrative cargo of cedar wood and sassafras (an aromatic bark used to fumigate bedlinen and treat syphilis). His fury at a flagrant attempt to challenge his monopoly over North America resulted in an attempt to confiscate the goods, and an appeal for help and support from his ‘friend’ Cecil. ‘I shall yet live to see [Virginia] an English nation,’ he had promised. But his letter coincided with the final days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and Raleigh was emerging as an obstacle to Cecil’s complex manoeuvres to ensure the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne.

      Elizabeth had died on 24 March 1603, and within days the Scots King took her place as James I of England. Soon after, Cecil confronted Raleigh with accusations that he had attempted to plot against the succession, and had him arrested. Sir Walter was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and thrown in the Tower to await his fate, leaving Virginia conveniently available for the new regime to dispose of as it saw fit.

      And now Cecil had in his hands this new proposal for ‘the maintaining of a colony in Virginia’. Thomas and Edward Hayes began in a suitably humble tone: ‘Pardon us (right Honourable), that we presume to move this project presented herewith unto you, so remote from the course of your great affairs as America is from England.’ These ‘great affairs’ were the knock-on effects of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt by a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen to blow up the House of Commons on 5 November 1605, the day the King and his entire Privy Council, together with most of the English nobility, had assembled at Westminster for the start of a new session of Parliament. Cecil was leading the official investigation into the plot, which was conveniently sweeping up a great many opponents of the new regime.

      In their proposal, the Hayeses argued that ‘so great a business’ as colonizing America ‘can never ever be duly effected by private means’, as previous experience had shown. So they and certain associates had ‘devised another way, where by the cause may be completely set forward’: a great public scheme performed under the auspices of Parliament.⁶

      Attached to the letter was the motion they intended to be set before the Houses of Parliament. It proposed setting up a large fleet of modern, well-armed and well-equipped

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