Elizabeth I

by Margaret George

  “It seems to me that you are at least as disappointed that your own fortunes will not rise as you are that mine are stranded.”

  “We are a family, and our fortunes are one. But you are wrong. I am more distraught about you, because your life is just starting, and to start with angering the Queen makes for a poor prognosis. You could have risen high, higher than anyone else at court. Now—?”

  “Then I’ll content myself with the quiet life,” he said. “Many virtuous men recommend it highly. As Henry Howard wrote,

  ‘Martial, the things that do attain

  The happy life, be these, I find:

  The riches left, not got with pain;

  The fruitful ground, the quiet mind:

  The faithful wife, without debate;

  Such sleeps as may beguile the night.

  Content thee with thine own estate;

  No wish for Death, nor fear his might.’ ”

  “Where did you learn that? Cambridge? Well, Henry Howard was executed for treason. I would not trust his wisdom!”

  16

  ELIZABETH

  November 1590

  Your Glorious Majesty’s Accession Day, ever may we hold it upon the highest altar of our thankfulness.” Archbishop Whitgift bent low, so that the top of his miter was pointing at me like an accusatory finger.

  “Oh, John.” I sighed. “Pray straighten yourself up.”

  He seemed to unfurl himself, one vertebra at a time, until he was at full height, looking sternly at me. His new celebratory robes, ordered for the upcoming commemoration, glittered with embroidery and gold thread. “Your Majesty, I am not jesting. The words in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating your coming to the throne, are not exaggerated. ‘We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for that thou wast pleased, on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, upon the throne of this realm. Let her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and prosperous.’ ”

  “It has been long, John, it has been long, and who could have foreseen that? As for prosperous, we do not do badly considering we are a little island with no gold. My gold is my people. The prayer is correct; I want always to possess that gold. And as it is not carried on ships, it is not liable to theft by the Spanish as is the other kind.”

  “Still, the Spanish will rob you of that love if they can,” he warned.

  “The way to keep my people’s love is never to take it for granted,” I said. “But tomorrow, as ritual and custom decree, you will preside over the service celebrating my Accession Day and recite that very prayer in St. Paul’s. And the bells will toll, as they do every year, the trumpets and cornets will sound from the cathedral rooftop, cannons will boom from the Tower, and people all over England will light bonfires and take a holiday. You will come to the tilts here at Whitehall, will you not? They promise to be more spectacular than ever.”

  “I find the tilts too ... pagan,” he said.

  “Oh, surely not pagan,” I said. “King Arthur, after all, had knightly contests, and he was a most Christian king.”

  “I mean the extravagance, the vanity, the display ....” He shook his head. “The poor—”

  “Ye have with ye always,” I finished for him. “Even Jesus said, ‘You can help them any time you wish. But not on Accession Day.’ ”

  “I do not believe those were his exact words, Your Majesty.”

  I laughed. “What? Do you mean that Christ did not observe my day?”

  He scowled, unable to jest. Whitgift’s stiffness, his aloofness, made him unpopular. His theology suited me, but his personality was so dour.

  “In any case,” I continued, “your own raiment is so dazzling Essex would take second place to you. He would be crushed. Some might even accuse you of vain display—unfairly, of course.”

  Another sore point. Whitgift’s high church trappings had earned him the nickname of “Pope,” and he liked to be accompanied by a retinue. But I liked my clergy to look like clergy, my priests to look like priests. If that made me popish, so be it. Unfortunately, this only angered the plain-scrubbed Puritans and tantalized the crypto-Catholics.

  It was almost impossible to balance these two contesting parties. Alone of all Protestants, the Church of England had come into being by royal decree, not by a popular movement. When my father broke from Rome, he never broke from his basic conservatism in ritual and formalities, and thus retained many of the old Catholic usages. It was an odd, tense marriage between inward Protestant theology and outward Catholic trappings. Much of my reign was troubled by these turbulent currents. My person, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, held them together, but not easily. The compromise I had enacted at the beginning of my reign had not satisfied all.

  “I shall absent myself,” Whitgift said.

  “You will miss a good show. Ah, well, then, ring the bells all the louder, and pray all the harder for me. I have needed prayers to sustain me all the thirty-two years I have sat on the throne, and will need them all the more from now on.”

  After he departed, I thought of those first moments when I had become Queen, the day so long ago now enshrined and encapsulated and turned into a holy day.

  People were relieved when I became Queen. I had been popular with the people, but primarily because they disliked the reign of my sister. She was half Spanish and married to a foreigner. I was seen as “mere English,” fully one of them, and my looks recalled my father’s in his prime. In retrospect, his time was seen as a golden era. They wanted it back.

  The rejoicings that first Accession Day were spontaneous; as the years went on, they grew increasingly more ritualistic and scripted. In the two years since the Armada, they had become rather disturbingly idolatrous. They had now been extended to St. Elizabeth’s Day, two days later, and dedicated to Armada celebrations.

  I did not instigate any of these things, but neither did I forbid them. Still, the excesses of the celebrations were making even me a bit uneasy.

  At high noon on November 17 I and my honored guests walked to the tilt gallery, a long room at one end of the course, where we could see the whole tiltyard, its barrier cutting like a razor down its middle, its pennants fluttering in the brisk wind. Beyond the barricades were stands and scaffolds where the common people, for a fee, could watch. An immense roar rose as the people saw me passing through the open air, just before we mounted the stairs and entered the gallery. I stood and waved at them, letting them know I welcomed them.

  I had my favorite ladies around me—Marjorie Norris, Catherine Carey and her sister Philadelphia, Helena van Snakenborg. They were all autumnal ladies, being of that mature age I liked to say bestows wisdom and others say bestows wrinkles. The younger ones—I despair of them. They seem lacking in character, flighty, obsessed with men. I need young ones about me, lest it be said that my court is no longer a magnet for the best in beauty, strength, and wit, but they irritate me. Today I made them sit farther back, behind the people of note. Flanking me on one side was the French ambassador, on the other, Robert Cecil.

  The fanfare sounded, announcing the entry of the first pair of contestants. Like everything else at court, it was not simple. First a pageant car with its theme must make its way around the course, then the servants of the men mount the stairs and present their masters’ decorated shields and read a poem proclaiming the theme—usually allegorical, of course. In this case, the first pair was Sir Henry Lee, my personal tilt champion, master of ceremony of the annual tilt, versus George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. Henry had been my champion for twenty years now. I settled myself back as he came into the tiltyard, drawn in a cart decorated with crowns and wilting vines. Then he stepped out and made his way over to me, bowing low. He himself was covered in drooping, limp greenery. A buzz arose from the stands.

  “Your Most Gracious Majesty,” he said, “the time has come when I must yield up my tilt staff. I am a vine withered in age by royal service.” He fingered one of the dying vines, evoking laughter. “Here, I present t
o you my successor, who I pray finds favor with you—the Earl of Cumberland.” Just behind him came the pageant car of the earl, representing his family castle, with the earl dressed in dazzling white.

  Sir Henry Lee was my age—fifty-seven! And was there a person in the arena who would not be aware of this? I stiffened.

  “As you can see, I am bent and overtaken by age,” he said. “The years have taken their toll, robbed me—”

  I waved him to silence. “Go about your tilt,” I said. “Now.”

  I was shaking with anger. The fool. If he had wearied of managing the tilts—which was a taxing job—why had he not come to me in private? Staging such a reminder of his age was impolitic. And if he was so old, why did he still indulge his lusts with the young women of my chamber? Yes, I knew about his little forays, his assignations with Anne Vavasour, among others. I’ll warrant he did not remind them of his drooping vines, or drooping anything else.

  I barely saw the tilt. I heard Lee’s lance break, but then, he would have planned it that way.

  The French ambassador ... Who would have thought I would find the mess in France preferable to think about? I turned to him brightly and began to murmur about the distressing turn of events over there, what with the Spanish invasion in northern France. “Philip of Spain—the French king’s enemy and mine.” I sighed. “Can the man not leave a single Protestant prince to draw breath in peace?”

  “That is why it is urgent that you aid him!” the ambassador said. “You have been delivered from the Spanish menace. Grant, in your mercy, the opportunity for others to be as well.”

  “Grant—ah, now, that is the problem.” Robert Cecil leaned forward and joined in, as I had known he would. “ ‘Grant’ is another word for ‘loan,’ or ‘gift.’ Money. War is so expensive,” he said petulantly.

  “A good investment is never expensive,” said the ambassador. “It often saves expense.”

  “I could bankrupt myself saving money,” I retorted.

  “Help us!” the ambassador said. “You will never regret it.”

  I would regret it before I released the first penny. “We ourselves are not free of the Spanish menace,” I reminded him. “The humiliation of the defeat of the Armada stings Philip, and he is determined to send another and complete the mission. Preparing to defend ourselves is costly. Defense is always more dear than offense, as the enemy gets to choose the point of attack, whereas we must be prepared on all fronts.”

  “We need your troops,” he begged. “I look around me here, see all these men thwarted in their military longings, able to do nothing but play in a tiltyard!” He waved toward the latest pair, strutting and preening before mounting their horses. Lord Strange was strange indeed with his forty squires and their azure tilting staves. A pageant car fitted up as a ship and bearing his eagle emblem rumbled behind. The ambassador had a point.

  “We shall see,” I said in my most lofty tone, the one that meant “No more now.”

  Shortly thereafter, the sad strains of funeral music pervaded the tiltyard, and then a funeral cortege appeared, driven by a gloomy figure of Time, drawn by a pair of coal black horses, black feather plumes waving. Within the funeral car sat a knight dressed in mourning—dark sables and black robes. His head was bent and he affected the pose of a penitent.

  The funeral car stopped. The penitent got out and made his way to the gallery, where he stood before us. It was the Earl of Essex, who did not raise his eyes to mine but smote his chest and cried, “Forgive this heavy fault,” and fell on his knees.

  I let him kneel there for a long time before ordering him up.

  We were still estranged over his hasty and secret marriage. My disappointment in him had been deepened when he refused to apologize or approach me again. And now he chose this showy, public manner of contrition—something that would win him attention and admiration. Always he sought to draw all eyes to himself.

  I did not motion him to mount the steps to the gallery and address me. He stood many long moments, expecting that I would do so. I could almost hear the cessation of breathing by all the onlookers. The midafternoon sun caressed his reddish hair, exposed now that he had removed his helmet with its engraved pattern. The rest of the armor imprisoned him, making him stand stiffly.

  “You and your opponent may commence the joust,” I said.

  His companion, Sir Fulke Greville, now emerged from the funeral car and motioned for their horses to be brought.

  They mounted quickly and ran at each other at the barrier as quickly as possible. Greville did not flinch when he was unhorsed and his lance broken. He rolled a little way in the dust, got to his feet, and scrambled away, after bowing in our direction. Essex also beat a retreat.

  “That boy is bold beyond words,” said Helena, leaning toward me from her seat. Even after twenty-five years in England, I could hear her Swedish accent. I found it charming. “He needs a spanking.”

  “But who will give it to him?” Marjorie said. “His mother? She needs a spanking herself.”

  “A punishment. That’s what he needs,” insisted Helena.

  But I was punishing him, keeping him from court. It had just made him more demanding.

  “He is a plaything, Your Majesty,” said Robert Cecil, from the other side. “Negligible. This is all he is fit for—dressing up and playing a knight at a staged tournament.”

  I was well aware that there was no love lost between the two Roberts, Cecil and Essex. For a time, in their childhoods, they had lived under the same roof, Essex being a ward of Burghley’s. But the tall, gangly, aristocratic Essex had had nothing in common with small, scholarly, stooped Cecil. As they grew to manhood, their indifference had turned to rivalry. Essex could not comprehend that the indoor talents of Cecil might be more valuable to me than the outdoor ones he excelled at.

  I shrugged and lifted my jeweled fan. The jousts went on, another nine pairs after Essex and Greville, thirteen in all. The sun was setting when the last pair broke their lances, ending the tournament.

  Then, suddenly, another elaborate pageant car entered the field, lurching over the paths. A blare of music from players hidden near the barricades enveloped us, and the decorated car rumbled toward us before halting. It was draped in white taffeta, and a sign claimed it was the sacred Temple of the Virgins Vestal. It rested on pillars painted to look like porphyry, with lamps glowing inside. Three girls, in flowing, light gowns, emerged and dedicated themselves to me as Vestals, then sang out, “To you, the chief Vestal Virgin of the West, we dedicate our lives in service.”

  Then Sir Henry Lee stepped out of the temple, plucking a poem from one of the pillars. He proceeded to read it, praising me as a mighty empress whose empire now extended to the New World.

  “She hath moved one of the very Pillars of Hercules,” cried Lee. “And when she leaves this earth, she will be borne up to heaven to receive a celestial diadem!”

  Had I known about this, I would have forbidden it. Instead, I was forced to endure it, knowing that people would assume I had ordered it.

  There was, of course, a gathering afterward, to display the shields before they were formally hung in the riverside pavilion alongside the ones from former meets. The price of participation, as it were, was a pasteboard shield from each knight, especially designed for the tilt. There were many variations on the theme of knight: there had been enchanted knights, forlorn knights, forsaken knights, questing knights, and unknown knights. Sometimes they combined as forsaken unknown knights, and so on. There were also wild men, hermits, and the inhabitants of Mount Olympus. A man could be anything he wished for one of the tilts.

  17

  The jousters kept to their chosen personae in the Long Gallery, where the gathering was held, so the chamber swarmed with Charlemagnes, Robin Hoods, and King Arthurs. I liked moving among them, imagining I had been transported to another time and realm. Outside, clearly visible through the gallery windows, bonfires were blazing in the fields and along the riverbank, fiery necklaces of joy. O
nly two years ago signal fires across the land had announced the first sighting of the Armada, and now the memory of that victory added to tonight’s celebration.

  In the hills, at the signal stations, the brush and wood had been replaced, ready to be lit again if—when—the Spanish returned, as they had vowed to do.

  But tonight, tonight, inside and out, fires meant only harmless play. Mid-November could be mild—as it had been the actual day I had become Queen—or it could be raw, as it was now. I was glad of the warming fires in the gallery, thankful to be indoors.

  The gallery was so long there were two sets of musicians, one to play at each end. At the west end, lutenists and harpists played soft melodies and sang plaintive verses; at the east, sackbut players, drummers, and trumpeters made thumpingly good dance music. A bagpiper was to join them at the end of the evening for a rousing finale.

  Unlike the jousters, I had changed my costume. I was now attired formally, as befitted this high national holiday. My ruff was so enormous, so pleated and starched, I could barely move my chin. My gown was stretched so widely across its hoops I was obliged to move sideways between people. I had chosen my tallest and reddest wig, piled high with curls and then made dazzling by jewels scattered throughout the tresses. Upon my bodice hung various emblematic tokens to please certain of my courtiers. I wore the replica of the glove of Cumberland, the eglantine pendant given me by Burghley, the ropes of white pearls bequeathed to me by Leicester, and from my ears hung emeralds from one of Drake’s voyages. I was a veritable trophy of commemoratives.

  The younger people were dancing at one end of the chamber; others warmed themselves before the arching stone fireplaces. Burghley was gamely standing despite his gout. Such gatherings were a trial to him, but he did not want to give in to his infirmities. He relied on his son Robert to protect him from overzealous jostling or too-long standing. The two of them were huddled together, murmuring, but they broke off as I joined them.