Elizabeth I Page 11

  Enough of this. I motioned to Dee to stop. “This is not a good day for you,” I said. “You are seeing little of matter. Show us some of your other toys.” It had been a mistake to come here.

  After a polite interval had passed, I thanked Dee for his hospitality in our impromptu visit. On the way out, his mother appeared and Monsieur and Simier bowed and flattered her, asking if she were Dee’s younger sister rather than his mother.

  While they were so engaged, Dee whispered urgently in my ear, “I did not tell you the worst,” he said. “I saw in the duke’s horoscope his miserable end. It is biothanatos, Your Majesty.”

  It was so dire he had not dared to put it in English. But I knew my Greek, and what it meant was “violent death by suicide.”

  With all these things before me, I knew it could not be. Part of me was relieved; the other part mourned. François arrived ceremoniously in a few days and was formally received at court. Our secret courtship was ours to remember and cherish, but under public scrutiny it was a different matter altogether. We were no longer our own selves but belonged to others.

  Yet still I confounded even myself with the betrothal declaration before witnesses in the gallery at Whitehall. Why did I do it? There are those who see me as the master of all subtle games and political gestures, but in this case I was the slave of my own confusion. Perhaps I wanted to experience, just for a day, the emotions of a bride-to-be. For it lasted only a day. That night shrieks of fear and misgivings in my own mind kept me awake all night.

  When the sun rose that morning, I knew I could not go through with it.

  I told François that I could not pass such a night, ever again. I took the ring back. And closed the door on marriage forever.

  Dee was right that François was doomed. He died a sad death from fever—not violence or suicide, unless it be suicide to venture onto a battlefield—only two years after leaving our shores—still fighting to claim some glory for himself in the ugly fields of the Netherlands. I wore mourning. I was mourning the death of my youth.

  And Dudley? Eventually we resumed our relations, but always she was there between us. True, she stayed away from court, but that was small consolation. She was in the background, plotting and planning, like a spider. Their son died early, and they had no others. Dudley was heartbroken; besides his love for the boy, he was in desperate need of an heir. What good the granted title of Earl of Leicester, the vast estate and castle of Kenilworth, without a son to leave it to? And that had come true.

  Both François and Dudley were gone, leaving no family trace, while Lettice and I remained, abiding.

  A stirring, a strong burning smell wafted toward me. The sun had set on Mortlake, out the western window. Walsingham was groaning, turning. The past had flitted, full formed, all in only a moment; now it vanished. I was here once again. Frances had returned, her arms full of herbs, and she was putting some new ones on the fire. That had brought me back.

  I smiled at her. The diary was gone off her chair. She had seen to that herself.

  Walsingham died three days later. He was buried at night, for fear that his creditors would take advantage of his funeral to demand their payments. It was not fitting. As I said, if England had the money, a loyal servant would not meet such an end, but retire rich and fat. Those who served me paid a high price. I hoped heaven could reward them in the fashion I could not.

  14

  May 1590

  I was concerned about Frances. My glimpse into her diary and her love-smitten sighs over Essex alarmed me. To be in love with Essex was a recipe for misery for someone like her. He held a high title and would doubtless make a marriage only from the ranks of his equals. And he was a womanizer, a man who enjoyed women’s company overmuch. Like others of his sort, he was able to convince his quarry that his interest was genuine and singular. Obviously he had inherited this talent from his mother. It was no place for a girl like Frances to venture. The sooner she realized it, and, in self-preservation, stamped on her feelings for Essex, smothered them like a dangerous campfire, the better for her.

  Was it my business to find a husband for the fatherless, dowryless girl? Did I owe my faithful Walsingham that? And was it my business to call Essex off, tell him to cease teasing Frances?

  I disliked meddling in people’s private lives. As Queen, I knew I had the prerogative, which is another reason I avoided it. It built up resentment, and to what end? It served no ultimate purpose.

  I was debating this one fine May morning, sitting glumly at my desk, when Marjorie came to me and said, “Your Majesty, there is important news.” She waited for me to look up, then said, “Frances Walsingham has married the Earl of Essex.”

  “What?” was all I could say. Then: “When?”

  “Supposedly—although I don’t know for certain—they married right after, or even before, Walsingham died.”

  “Secretly!” Oh, she was a clever girl, cleverer than I had given her credit for.

  But my original feelings were not altered. He would not make her happy. She was no fit mate for Essex, who would need a fiery and strong woman to balance him. I had a chill thought: Had he married her because she was Sir Philip Sidney’s widow, and Sidney had bequeathed his sword to Essex? Surely he did not feel duty bound, in an Old Testament sense, to take on his relict wife as well?

  “This is a tragedy for them both,” I said. “I need to speak to Essex. Summon him here.”

  We met in the privacy of my inmost chamber. I was sitting when he arrived. I did not rise. He knelt before me. I let him remain there a long time before granting him leave to stand.

  “Well, Essex, what have you to say for yourself? Marriage is for life. I have heard of some yeomen having the same wife for fifty years. Is that what you want—to have Frances Walsingham your wife forever?” He had already made quite a name for himself among the ladies of the court. His amorous eyes roved everywhere. He far outdid his stepfather. “You must be faithful to her, if I allow this marriage. How like you that?”

  His expression revealed that he had not expected this demand. So, he sought to both be chivalric and wed his dead hero’s widow but to pleasure himself among more sensual, obliging ladies.

  “I bow before Your Majesty’s wisdom and request,” he said, his head still bowed.

  “Think carefully,” I said. “I am the Virgin Queen and, regardless of rough humor in some quarters and abroad, I know I am what I claim to be. From that purity and that virginity I draw my power. I do not tolerate deviations in my court. Do you wish to remain in my service? For I am willing to grant you leave to retire to the country, along with your mother.”

  “Oh, I do wish to serve you!” he cried. “Oh, pray, do not cast me aside! I want to be the knight in your livery!”

  He looked so earnest, standing there: straight and keen eyed.

  “You are no longer Galahad, that purest of knights,” I told him. “There was a time when I saw you as such.”

  “That was Sir Philip Sidney,” he said.

  “Bah!” Before I could stop myself, it was out. “His death was a waste!”

  Essex went white. I had uttered a sacrilege. “It was noble! ‘My need is greater than thine’—when he gave his water to another suffering knight!”

  “Oh, you’re a fool, Essex!” That came out, too, before I could stop it. “He had no business being there at all. The entire campaign to help the Dutch was mismanaged. He should never have left his leg armor off. He should not have given his water to another. It was all posturing!” There, I had said it.

  “You strike at the foundation of my values,” he said. “All that I believe in, you lay the ax to its roots.”

  “So you married Frances in order to feel noble? Very well then, feel noble. That will be your reward. Do not expect any other.”

  He bowed his head again. I could see that he was shocked. He had expected applause and reward for his chivalric duty. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Absent yourself from court for a while,” I said. />
  He opened his mouth to complain but shut it again.

  He was gone. The foolish boy—his head all aswim with the flattery of having Frances swoon over his shirts, no doubt, and his perceived death duty to his dead friend. I shook my head; this jolt had certainly awakened me. But the lingering miasma of memories of Leicester now intertwined themselves, like smoke, around the living Robert Devereux, his stepson. Why did I care what he did? My own motives became suspect to me.

  I needed to leave this stuffy chamber. A ride out in the countryside promised to be just the thing. No one could talk to me while I was galloping across fields.

  Marjorie rode with me, as did my guards, but in essence I was alone. We left the environs of London behind swiftly once we had passed beyond Moorfields, those open fields lying outside the Moor Gate where laundresses stretched out their drying sheets on hooks and mischievous boys practiced archery.

  This May the plowed fields were already springing with wheat. In wild meadows, the bluebells were in bloom, waving bravely. The air was clear and fresh, scented with flowering hawthorn from the hedgerows.

  Robert Devereux’s face as he pleaded his case floated before me as I galloped along. His big brown eyes, his newly sprung beard, his bluster and bravado all made him seem younger rather than the mature man he would claim to be. He was—how old? Twenty-two this past autumn. At twenty-two I had still been playing the dutiful subject of my tyrannical sister, subject to house arrest and constant vigilance that my slightest word might not be misinterpreted. By God! What luxury young Essex had. He did not have to worry that he would lose his life for a wrong answer!

  We rushed under a low-hanging oak branch, and I ducked. Out on the other side, open fields beckoned. We emerged out of the shadows and into the bright sunshine.

  Essex, Essex—what drove him? He was the last of an old breed of man—feudal, noble, seeking glory for its own sake. It stirred me in some ways, for I, too, was of an older time. My father had sought battlefield recognition on the fields of France, even when he was near to death, so incapacitated and swollen with his mortal illness he had to be lifted onto his horse with a hoist.

  But the truth was that military commands, and heroes, had not held much political sway in a century in England. Essex had come too late. His time had passed him by.

  My horse tired, and I felt his pace slackening. I would not urge him past his capacity, and so I pulled him up. I had finished thinking, in any case. What else was there to consider? Only what place I would give Essex. I would await his actions before deciding.

  Marjorie reached me and halted by my side. She was panting, and her horse was lathered. “No one can keep up with you!” she said. Then our grooms pulled up as well, and we all rested.

  The fields spread out around us. In the stillness of midday, only butterflies were stirring—small white ones flitting from row to row. In the distance a village nestled in a hollow, shaded by trees planted long ago. I could see a maypole sticking up like a finger on its outskirts. The old ways, the old customs. I felt a great pang at the rate at which they were disappearing.

  “Come,” I said to Marjorie and my companions. “A maypole. Let us go see!”

  15

  LETTICE

  May 1590

  The rain kept falling, as it had for the past two days. Farmers were glad of it after our dry spell, I was sure, but their concerns were far from pressing to me. I wanted juicy pears and cherries as much as anyone else, but without the money to pay for them, I could not have them grace my table, for all that they grew in the orchards. Money. Money. What did my dear father like to quote from Proverbs? “The wealth of the rich is their fortified city.” Puritans knew how to keep one eye on the practicalities of life, while keeping the other on the Scriptures.

  Frances started to enter the room, then saw me and backed out. I could barely stand the sight of her, she who had wrecked the ship of our possible fortune. I was trying to master my feelings, but they must still show. It was not her fault, and I should not resent her. No, it was my son’s!

  He was, wisely, hiding from me. Ever since he had slunk back here with his bride, he had avoided being alone with me. A week now. They had been here a week, and then this wretched rain started. Turning away from the doorway, so Frances would not know I had seen her, I stared out at the dripping trees and the misty fields. The oak leaves had lost their bright new color and were halfway to their summer size; water ran off their scalloped edges and splattered on the ground.

  Robert had made a gross misstep in marrying Frances Walsingham. Elizabeth was furious, sending them both from court. It was hideously like what had happened eleven years ago when I married Leicester. I thought all that would be put behind us, that Robert would work patiently to restore our fortunes. What if Elizabeth banished him forever? But no, that could not be. If he had betrayed her by marrying without her consent, I, his mother, was doubly betrayed. For he was meant to be our deliverance.

  A particularly big gust of wind hit the trees, swaying them and slapping their branches against the window. Just then I saw Robert dashing between them, ducking down to protect himself. A moment later he stumbled into the hall, soaked. Thinking himself alone, he stamped the water off and shook out his hat.

  “Don’t spray water all over the chest!” I barked.

  Startled, he dropped his hat to the floor.

  “And not on the carpet, either!”

  Sheepishly, he bent down to retrieve it. “I beg pardon,” he said.

  “And well you should,” I replied. “When you have changed your clothes, you shall come to me in the solar.”

  He was caught at last.

  Now he stood before me in the warmest room in the house, while the rain lashed outside. I stood looking at him for a moment, trying to see him not as a mother but as a stranger would. His physical presence was so commanding. He also had a sweetness of nature that revealed itself only after one had been in his presence for a while. On first and second impressions he won hearts. Oh, he had been gifted in all things, my son. The gods must be laughing at us.

  “Mother?” he asked as I stood silently with my thoughts.

  All my sharpness drained away. I had no rapier to thrust into him. I was overwhelmed with sadness and disappointment, with, yes—defeat. “Oh, Robert,” I said. “Why?”

  “That was her question,” he said.

  “Not for the first time, then, we think alike,” I said. “And what answer did you give Her Majesty?”

  “I could not give the true one,” he said. “That having made her pregnant, I must now marry her.”

  “Must history always repeat itself in our family?”

  “Your father looked after your virtue when you were in Frances’s condition, and Walsingham, on his deathbed, glanced balefully at me—what was I to do? His widowed daughter was expecting—would be disgraced.”

  “Yes, we widows have a difficult time of it when our bellies swell, after our husbands have been in heaven a good long time already.” I looked at my handsome son once again. “I am sure his looks were baleful, since his whole skin was yellow. But without belaboring the point, I must ask—why? Why did you seek her bed at all?”

  “Do you mean, without belaboring the point that you were—are—beautiful and Frances is not? Your modesty was always one of your most becoming traits, Mother.”

  “Never mind my looks, that isn’t what I meant—I meant her prospects, what she brings to the marriage.”

  “Her dowry, as it were?”

  “If you must put it that way, yes. Everyone has a dowry, unspoken or not, invisible or not. And mine was not my face—there are girls here in Drayton Bassett with prettier faces, but you’ll never see an earl pursuing them to the altar. In fairy fantasies, yes, but not in the world of the Tudor court.”

  “So it wasn’t your face. Are you going to tell me what it was? Or would that be unseemly, to describe the lure of a courtesan to her son?”

  What a naïf he was! I laughed. “First your lin
e of sight is on the face, then it descends to the seat of Venus. Neither one is much of a dowry. Look elsewhere, to the practical—to lineage and fortune.”

  But of course a noble knight was not supposed to do that. He was supposed to think only of love, and of beauty. After that, of duty. Robert looked puzzled.

  “I speak of bloodlines, power, and money. What else is there in a dowry?”

  “I fail to see how you provided any of those in your own dowry.”

  “Then your education is faulty, for which I blame myself. Let me rectify that.” I took a deep breath. Where common sense is present, this should not need explaining. “Bloodlines: I am at the very least the Queen’s near cousin.... Some say more than a cousin; some say my mother was the Queen’s half-sister. But that is gossip, impossible to prove. Power: My father is a trusted Privy Councillor, high in the Queen’s esteem, and has been for almost her entire reign—over thirty years. My first husband, your father, was an earl, and his family had risen to prominence under the Tudors. The only thing I lacked was money. But court entrée or position can be used as earnest for money.”

  Was he following this? Did I have to draw it for him? He was jutting his chin out in the way he did when he wanted to be stubborn.

  “Whereas Frances”—I hoped she was not listening anywhere—“has no notable family. Her father, rest his soul, achieved his position all by himself, by remarkable industry and cleverness. Admirable. But he came from nowhere and his family is back in nowhere. With his death, all power at court ended for them. And money! He was so in debt you know he had to be buried at night, for fear his creditors would swoop down upon his funeral procession if it were held in the daylight. So he could not even afford a simple funeral. In marrying his daughter, you have married only obligations and no future benefits. She’s sweet and will be loyal. Had you had no money worries, that would be enough. A rich earl could afford her. The poorest earl in England—for that’s what you are—cannot. And now you have thrown away your chance to improve your fortunes by that time-honored method, an advantageous marriage!”