Elizabeth I Page 10

  “Here, try to take some broth.” There was a bowl of it by his bed, still warm, with the spoon beside it. I tried to give him some. But it could not pass between his clenched lips. His time had come, then.

  “When they stop eating, that is the signal,” a physician had once told me. “Everything begins to fail, and they no longer need earthly nourishment.”

  I would not weep. Not in his presence. It made it harder for them. Another wise person had told me that.

  I settled myself by his side. I was prepared to wait, to wait with him. Frances crept into the room and took her place on the other side. We flanked him like church candles beside an altar.

  Walsingham had served me twenty years, through the time of Alençon’s wooing, through the tortuous journey the Queen of Scots made from luxurious imprisonment until she stood on the scaffold, caught by Walsingham’s trap, through the supreme test of the Spanish Armada. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had served me longer, but Walsingham had been my ultimate protection and the guardian of the realm. How could we survive without him?

  It is a test, I thought wearily. Yet another test, to see how I can survive. There have been so many.

  Frances was writing in a book. In the silence I could hear her pen scraping across the paper. What could be so important that she must write it at this moment? If it concerned her father’s death, it was impertinent, invasive, now. If other, lesser, then insulting. When she left the room to order some fresh sweet herbs to be burned—to mask the choking odor of death—I picked it up.

  It concerned her service with me. I quickly turned the pages. I had no wish to read how she regarded me. I knew I would brood upon it. Then there were pages and pages about the Earl of Essex. She noted what he wore on various days!

  My Lord of Essex wore today his copper-colored doublet.

  My Lord of Essex, attired all in blue, which flatters him well, had his hose in a contrasting shade, the color of newborn lambs’ fleece ....

  I clapped the book shut. She was in love with him! She was swooning like a green girl in the country. But he was far above her. She was sure to be disappointed. And she was no milkmaid but a widow with a child. I must warn her. What a fool she was to leave it there. I replaced it quickly on her chair.

  I stood up, as if by so doing I could keep better guard over Walsingham. Fuzzy light was coming through the windows; the setting sun made the surface of the Thames gleam out the east window and enveloped the western, land, side in a golden haze. We were very near to Mortlake, where Dr. Dee, my astrologer, lived. Smoke from the burning herbs, curling up through the air, stung my nostrils and made my head swim. I swayed, felt unsteady. So I walked slowly to the east window and opened it a crack, hoping for fresh air.

  Below me the river slid past, a sleek, winding snake. My head was spinning, and the blurry light made me feel I had entered a dream.

  Sailing on the Thames, long ago ... going to Mortlake ... Trust not the French....

  The French ... I remembered how foolish I had acted—as foolish as Frances about Essex—over the little Frenchman I had almost married. The little French prince who had so recently, and insistently, haunted me near the staircase at Whitehall sprang back to life again, as if I had opened a magical casement that transported me over time. So many things had ended then, with the Frenchman.

  François had been my last, and in many ways my only, serious marriage possibility. I had been wooed by twenty-five foreign suitors over the years. I never intended to marry any of them, but it was my best tool of diplomacy. I had never met any of these men, never laid eyes on them. So they were suitors on paper only, not real, as I would never marry anyone I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. (My father’s example with Anne of Cleves was warning enough.) In any case I knew time was running out for this ploy. I was in my midforties and could not play this hand much longer. So when another round was started, this time with François Valois, Duc d’Alençon, the younger brother of King Henri III, I thought, why not? Even though he was seventeen years younger than I, reputedly ugly, and very short—what difference did it make? It was all a diplomatic sham. And so it might have remained, if my people had been more amenable even to the idea that I might at last marry.

  But they hated the French and attacked François’s envoy, saying he represented “an unmanlike, unprincelike, French kind of wooing.” Someone even took a shot at him, frightening him mightily. And that shot changed my world. The French envoy blamed it on Robert Dudley, saying that he knew he was in back of it—since he had murdered once, why not again?

  I was aghast. He accused my dearest friend and companion, the man I trusted so much that when I lay ill with smallpox I had named him Protector of the Realm, of being a murderer! I cried out that this was vile slander.

  “Ma’am, there have been poisoning attempts as well,” Simier, the envoy, said, “which I did not see fit to mention. It is well known that Leicester is a poisoner. He poisoned Walter Devereux, the Earl of Essex. He dosed him when he was on leave from Ireland, and it took effect once he was back in Dublin.”

  “This is not true! The earl died of natural causes! And why would he wish to poison the earl, in any case?”

  Simier looked at me pityingly.

  “I demand to know what you mean about the Earl of Essex!” I cried.

  “Why, Ma’am, he poisoned him so that he could have his wife.” He waited to see if I had heard him. “Lettice. They were lovers, and the earl was inconvenient. So Leicester poisoned him, just as he was about to open an investigation.”

  “Evil whispers!” I said. God knew they swirled around anyone of note.

  He drew himself up, as if readying himself, reluctantly, for a coup de grâce. “It’s no whisper, Your Majesty, that he and Lettice are married, and have been for a year.” He paused. “Everyone knows this but you. While Leicester opposes your own marriage—even attacking me!—he is enjoying his own. He has a wife but begrudges you a husband.”

  I heard the words, but at first they were only that—words. But then I was forced to put them together, absorb them without letting Simier see how they rocked my world.

  “I see,” I said. “So the wayward shot has brought many things to light. I am thankful, sir, that you were not harmed, although other things have been.”

  A year. For a year Dudley had been lying to me, hiding the truth. And his wife still served me in my chambers, pretending to be a widow. It was impossible to say which hurt more: the betrayal, the loss, or feeling an absolute fool.

  How she must have laughed at me, Lettice, my wayward cousin. With every step she took in my chambers, she mocked me. So she had had her way at last, triumphed over me, taken Dudley away? The merry widow, I had called her. No wonder she had been so merry. Man-hungry and aggressive, she had bagged her prey.

  I dismissed her from my service, told her she was banished from court. I told her why. Instead of cringing or even being embarrassed, the hussy said, “You know now. And I am glad of it.” The smug satisfaction on her face infuriated me. “It was a strain, keeping it from you.”

  When I am most angry, I am rigid. I was stone, clenching my fists, as I watched her leave my chambers, where she was never to set foot again.

  So when Simier whispered to me that his master the prince, known affectionately in France as “Monsieur,” had come secretly to England and was waiting in a hidden place to meet me, it was balm to my wounded vanity. No one had ever come courting in person before. Leicester had duped me, but here was another—a prince—who had come across the Channel to seek my hand.

  I studied his miniature carefully in its oval frame. It showed a person with a pleasing enough face, dark, searching eyes, a wisp of a mustache, a pointed and weak chin. I wished I could say it was the portrait of a man, but it showed a boy. Of course, it had been painted some time ago. It also did not show the pockmarks that everyone mentioned, and it could not depict his height. People said, too, that his nose was bulbous, but it did not appear to be so here. Well, portraits say what we
wish them to, or we do not pay the painter.

  He was waiting, hidden in the summer pavilion where I had housed the French contingent away from the main palace buildings at Greenwich. I had joked to Simier that he must indeed be a frog, to have swum the Channel to come to me. I wondered how François would take the jest—that was my first test of him.

  I was ready for the meeting. I wanted so much to like him. I wanted to seriously consider him; I needed to. For the first time there was no more Dudley in my landscape, blocking my view. Did I see more clearly because of that, or was my vision distorted?

  I entered the summer house.

  “Oh!” There was a French-accented gasp, and someone was clasping my hands and kneeling before me. Then my hands were being kissed, and the man was murmuring, “To clasp these hands at last. It is enough for me to touch them; but they are beautiful as ivory, slender and graceful as the Virgin in heaven. You, our Virgin on earth!”

  I could not discount it as clumsy flattery, for I knew my hands were my finest feature. They were the color of ivory, and my fingers were long and smooth. I displayed them whenever I could, especially against dark gowns.

  The person rose slowly, standing to his full height—which was not very high. My eyes, now growing accustomed to the dim light, looked down on a head of dark, thick hair. The top of his head only came up to my eyes.

  Oh, he was tiny! A ripple of disappointment passed through me. The rest of the hearsay must be true as well. Now he was lifting his face and I beheld it. His nose was large, outsized for the rest of his face. His beard was patchy, his chin receding, and his face did have pockmarks. They were not the craterlike circles of gossip but were quite noticeable, and his poor excuse of a beard did little to hide them. Now he smiled. At least he had good teeth—white, even, and none missing.

  “Your Majesty is disappointed,” he said. “I can read it in your eyes. Ah, well, poor François is used to it. Why, my original name was Hercules, but after I took the pox and did not grow very big, I changed it to François. I did not deserve the glorious name of Hercules. And besides,” he said cheerfully, “this way I was not expected to slay lions, clean disgusting stables, or battle a venomous Hydra—unless, of course, you count my mother!”

  I let out a laugh at Catherine de’ Medici’s expense. A Hydra indeed, with her many-headed ambitions.

  François was attired in a shiny green doublet, with green hose as well, and a patterned half-length cloak. “I only need a lily pad, Your Majesty,” he said. “To be your true frog.”

  Had he worn this just so he could remind me of the frog nickname? He was so sweet, so disarming. He had passed the first test. “I am touched,” I said, truthfully. “And I shall cherish my dear frog.”

  “I shall swim in your good graces,” he said. “But I hope to be more than that.”

  And so ensued our curious courtship. There were secret picnics, outings, and dinners. The very furtiveness of it was part of its lure. He was gallant, amusing, and humble. In the soft predawn of those summer mornings, I could stretch under my covers and murmur to myself, “Elizabeth, betrothed to a French prince.” The very words, “French prince,” had a magic to them. Once upon a time there was an English queen who loved a French prince ....

  I could still have children. It was not too late. I could embrace all those experiences of womanhood I had denied myself. What had begun as a cynical political gesture on my part—a protracted marriage negotiation between England and France would keep the French from signing a pact with Spain, and if Alençon would fight in the Netherlands at French expense, I then saved money and men—was turning into something more complicated.

  I had not reckoned on his wooing in person, I had not reckoned on his being so personable, and I had not reckoned on losing my quasi-official consort to another woman at the same time. There were many things that were right about him. He was a prince, an heir of a royal house. His dignity and his credentials were equal to mine.

  But my council, reflecting the feelings of my people, were not in favor of it. They did not know he was actually here, but they knew he was coming, having granted him a passport. After all these years of urging me to marry for the sake of the succession, suddenly they realized my wisdom in holding back and appreciated the advantages of having a Virgin Queen. Suddenly they could see nothing good about such a union. One of my subjects even had the temerity to write a pamphlet alleging that no young man without nefarious motives would be interested in a woman my age, and that if I had a child I would probably die, since I was too old. He also called Monsieur “an instrument of French uncleanness, a sorcerer by common vice and fame.” Outside my palace walls I could hear taunting voices singing “The Most Strange Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse.”

  Before he arrived publicly, I had one thing I must do to settle my own mind. I must take him to see my astrologer, John Dee. Dee saw the future and cast horoscopes; he had selected my coronation day as the most favorable. I trusted him utterly.

  So I enticed Simier and Monsieur out for what I pretended was a little sightseeing excursion on the river. Close-mouthed guards sat discreetly in back of the royal barge—indeed, they accompanied me most everywhere, silently and unobtrusively, but that is necessary for a ruler these days.

  We plied our way upstream from Greenwich, past the wild Isle of Dogs, under London Bridge, past the mansions lined up between the city and Westminster.

  “And now we leave the city for the country,” I said, as we swept past Westminster, continuing upstream. By this point the river was narrowing, and it was easy to see both banks as the barge kept to the middle. Green riverside paths, old oaks with vast, spreading crowns, and half-timbered inns lined the shores, with swans paddling lazily in the shallows. On the left bank, Barn Elms, where Walsingham lived—lived in ignorance of my royal visitor. Just after it came Mortlake, Dee’s home village.

  “We’ll stop here,” I said suddenly. “There is someone I want you to meet.”

  “A hidden suitor?” asked Monsieur. “Do you have them everywhere?”

  That was an amusing thought. “This is where my astrologer and adviser lives,” I said. “He does not care to come to court.” After we docked and alighted, Monsieur and Simier craned their necks, looking for a grand house, but saw nothing of that sort. “It must be a long walk for us,” they said.

  “No, it is just opposite the church.” Already we had attracted a crowd of followers, mainly children. “He lives in his mother’s house.”

  At that Monsieur burst out laughing, until Simier said, “So do you, my lord.”

  Having Catherine de’ Medici for my mother-in-law was not an appealing thought.

  As we reached his cottage, suddenly the door flung open and John Dee peered out. He did not seem surprised or flustered to see me, as most would. “Pray enter.” He snapped the door shut behind us.

  “Allow me to present my noble guests from France, envoys of François, Prince of Valois,” I said. Best to continue the disguise. “John, you were not a tad surprised to see me here? I come seldom. Usually you come to me at court.”

  “I expected you,” he said. “I would be a poor astrologer if I did not.” He was tall, handsome, graceful—he would have made a perfect courtier, except that he lacked the slightest social instincts.

  “I was treating my guests to the pleasures of a river excursion. Nothing is more lovely than a day here in high summer. Then, on a whim, I decided we should stop here, give them a glimpse of a small riverside village.”

  “What of the mysteries of the past that you can call up?” asked Simier. He was strangely subdued.

  “It isn’t the past men fear,” said Monsieur, “but what is to come.”

  “Indeed,” said Dee. He led us back through the cramped hall and then into an annex. I saw an array of skulls and stuffed animals crowded on shelves, as well as flasks filled with bilious green and angry red liquids and piles of rolled scrolls. But we did not stop here; he marched toward a murky chamber at the far end. Dee l
it several candles. “This is better for what I wish to see,” he said. “The crystals and mirrors do not like the bright light.”

  He unrolled some scrolls and began talking about how his studies showed that we English had rights to a world empire, and I could be queen of a British empire, and so on.

  Hideously embarrassed that he should spout this in front of the French, I merely nodded. Dee and I must discuss this in private. Truly, the man had no sense of place and persons. “Let us leave the earthly realm for the stars,” I said. “You, who traffic in the constellations, reveal our immediate destinies.” Well he knew it was forbidden by law to cast my horoscope to predict my life span, but this was safe.

  As did I, Dee turned to the topic with relief. “I always have yours at the ready,” he said, laying hold of a scroll. “I do it every week. This week’s”—he spread its crackling surface out beside a candle—“specifies that in the months to come you will be constrained by conflicting loyalties, very strong ones.”

  “Pish,” I said. “That is a general state of affairs. Come, come, give us a novelty.” Nodding toward Monsieur, I said quickly, “Now for my guest’s horoscope.”

  “I was born on March 18, 1555,” said Monsieur. “At Fontainebleau.”

  Dee spread out two more scrolls and studied them intently, then stopped and consulted the celestial globe.

  “I was the eighth of ten children,” said Monsieur helpfully. “I am of the royal house of France!” he blurted out.

  Dee fastened his amber eyes on Monsieur. “Your birth date has told me well enough who you are,” he said, then bent back over the charts. “Your birth was favorable and so were your early years. Then, I see, there was misfortune—a setback.” He looked alarmed. “I—I see that you may be offered a kingdom ere long. I can tell you this, sir, you should grasp it, because it will make no difference in the end.”