Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

These precursors allow us to interpret Essex’s Apologie . Essex’s tract maps neatly onto the generic conventions of the classical apologia: the earl defends himself from his detractors, explains their malice against him, advances a narration of his life in defence of his purpose, and ‘transcends’ his personal objectives with a ringing peroration in defence of the survival of the realm, of protestant religion and of Christendom itself: ‘ iustissimum ii bellum, quibus neccessarium, copia arma, quibus nulla, nisi in armis, spes est [war is most just to whom it is most necessary, to whom there is no hope unless it is in arms]’. 36 This is a direct Latinised quotation of Machiavelli’s call for the liberation of Italy that concludes The Prince . And the impact of Orange’s tract on Essex’s is palpable. Essex’s treatise defends war with Spain not just for England’s strategic ends, but in the name of the liberty of the Dutch, whose now monarch-less constitution Essex defines as intrinsic to its freedom. As Malcolm Smuts has shown, this tract is one of the first – the first? – whereby an English author employs a new language of patriotism derived from the Dutch as an ethical imperative. 37 By echoing Orange’s self-fashioning, Essex defines himself as ‘zealous patriot’ to his state and country rather than merely a subject of his queen. Just as Orange’s tract denounces the supporters of the Spanish as ‘people of no account … [with] the tongue of some litle serpent’, Essex’s detractors are denounced as irreligious enemies of the realm, ‘injurious to the countrey whiche bredde them … injurious and most unthankfull to God himselfe’. 38 Thus the unique character of Essex’s Apologie becomes clearer. The earl’s decision to frame his treatise as an autobiographical apologia is distinctive in an English tract of its era, and marks a clear shift from the manner in which polemical exchanges about politics in English discourse had been conducted under Elizabeth. This personalised mode of engaging with a public audience has been defined as characteristic of Essex’s failures of character and as a statesman: his deluded self importance; his inclination to view his personal circumstances as a synecdoche for the greatest affairs of state; his vainglorious desire for ‘popularity’. And yet Essex’s choice of the genre of autobiographical apology was intended to give weight and credibility to the anti-peace movement. It was another example of the earl’s erudition, and political gravitas – and Elizabeth did not make peace with

36 Essex, Apologie, sig. Ev. 37 Smuts, Political Culture, the State, and the Problem of Religious War, p. 337. 38 Orange, Apologie , sig. B3r; Essex, Apologie , sig. D2v.

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