Elizabeth I

by Margaret George

  Southampton, free to roam, moved into Essex House at Robert’s invitation. He, his wife Elizabeth Vernon, Penelope, and Rutland took up theater-going and lolled their days away in idleness, seeing a new play almost every day. No one had been punished, no one curtailed, for the injudicious gallop back from Ireland but Robert.

  On the rare occasions we all dined together, I could not help looking at Southampton in wonder that I had ever involved myself with him. Had that truly happened? I could not imagine it now. He seemed a feather-pated child, laughing and playing while my son languished in prison. Rutland was no better. What pitiful material crept around court these days. No wonder Robert Cecil had no rivals.

  “What’s it to be this afternoon?” my own daughter Penelope—a companion to them in idleness—asked before dinner was over. Her paramour, Lord Mountjoy, to his credit, was attending to state business and seldom came with them.

  “There’s something new at the Swan,” said Southampton. “But I understand it was just dashed off in a fortnight.”

  “Blah,” said Rutland. “It’s a comedy, too. I can’t stand another romp with clever servants and fat masters. No!”

  “Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour is said to be amusing,” said Elizabeth.

  “I saw it. I don’t mind sitting through it again,” said Rutland.

  They turned accusatory eyes at him. “When? You went without us?”

  “You were riding,” said Rutland.

  Children: riding and plays and amusements. I was angry at all of them, as if it were their fault Robert was in disgrace.

  “Essex! Essex!” wavering voices from outside carried into the chamber. I rose and looked out to see a group of at least twenty people, held back by the iron gates, shouting into the courtyard. “Brave honor graces him! Foul envy has struck him down! Set him free! Set him free!”

  “He is not here! Shout your demands at York House!” Frances leaned out the window to answer them. “Shout them at Whitehall!”

  “Frances,” I said. “Sit back down. Do not shout such things in public.”

  She turned to me. “This is my home and I’ll shout what I please. Let it come to the Queen’s ears!”

  “There is nothing that does not come to the Queen’s ears,” I hissed. “And do you think this”—I gestured to the gathering, murmuring crowd—“is helping Robert’s cause?”

  “Cause? His cause should be justice!” she said.

  “Justice is a prostitute,” said Southampton. “For sale to the best customer.”

  Then I remembered what I had liked about him. So young and so world-weary.

  October turned into November. The crowds grew in front of the gates, and soon members of my household were inviting some into the courtyard and mingling with them. Christopher seldom missed an opportunity to go down and talk with them. Since his return from Ireland he seemed changed; once in a while I had even come across him in the chapel, sitting motionless and staring at the altar. I knew he had Catholic leanings, due to his upbringing, but he had always seemed cheerily indifferent to religion. Had his exposure to Irish Catholicism converted him? The wayside shrines, the Celtic crosses, the legends about saints and snakes and whatnot were said to be seductive. There is no one more vulnerable to the lure of religion than an uncommitted person, assuming he is not outright hostile to it. Christopher had never cared enough to be hostile. I hoped my suspicions were wrong. This was not the time to turn Catholic. We had enough trouble as it was.

  Ever-larger crowds gathered in front of York House. Egerton, distressed at his role as jailer, ordered them away. But all his warnings had no effect. When his guards came out, the crowds melted away, but a few hours later they returned, like ants to a source of honey.

  Suddenly Elizabeth Vernon and Penelope announced they could no longer stand the commotion around the house and left for the country. Once they were gone, the men felt free to indulge in all the tavern- and playgoing they wished, and to drink themselves silly. Frances, her daughter Elizabeth, and I remained sober and kept watch, while Christopher spent more time in the courtyard with the accusatory crowd.

  Then the word came down: The Queen announced that the Court of Star Chamber was to issue a public pronouncement about Robert’s misdeeds.

  “She seeks to defend herself,” said Christopher. “If we hear the murmurs and accusations in the streets, so does she. She cannot rest until the matter is settled.”

  “It will never be settled in any way detrimental to herself,” I said. “Robert told me she plays with loaded dice, so as never to lose.”

  “That’s Robert talking. Foolish of him not to see all along that if you are Queen you do not need loaded dice.”

  As the day neared for the hearing, I noticed Southampton suddenly curtailing his carousing and huddling with Christopher and Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in my house. I asked Christopher several times what they were concerning themselves with, and he gave evasive answers. I disliked being shunted aside like that.

  That they were plotting was obvious. What they were plotting was less obvious. Clearly it was in my own interest to be ignorant of whatever it was, so I would be innocent of any accusation of collusion. But the feeling of uselessness, of not mattering enough to anyone to be consulted, was painful.

  If I had planned it, I could not have come into Southampton’s empty rooms at a better time. But I had not planned it; I had merely come to deliver an invitation to a dinner at the Earl of Bedford’s house nearby. I laid it on his writing table, and as I did so the unmistakable royal seal of James VI of Scotland glared up at me, affixed to a letter.

  Before I even touched it I knew it was treasonous. Did I wish to keep my ignorance and my technical innocence? No, I was mistress of this household and I must know what went on here. Before I could read it, however, I saw beneath it a draft of the letter it must be an answer to. Quickly I took it up and read it.

  Lord Mountjoy was continuing a correspondence with the Scots king that Robert had apparently started. He assured James that Robert entirely supported his succession after Elizabeth and had no designs on the throne himself. But he “suggested” that James might bring a Scottish force south to rescue Robert from his unfair imprisonment.

  Oh, saints defend us! If Elizabeth got wind of this—! How could he be so rash as to commit this to writing?

  I switched letters and saw that James, wisely, refused to commit himself or even name the thing he refused to embrace.

  There were more papers on the table. Frantic with apprehension and fear, I took them up one by one and read them. They listed possible actions open to Robert. The first was that he should escape from Egerton and flee to France, where King Henri IV would be forced to shelter him. The second was that he raise a force of Welsh loyal to the Devereux name and foment a rebellion. The third was that he engineer a takeover of the court and hold the Queen hostage until she agreed to purge herself of evil advisers like Cecil, Howard, and Cobham.

  Mountjoy was facilitating all this! Mountjoy, who had the Queen’s confidence ! Did Penelope know this? She must. They were all in on it together. Their playgoing and tavern drinking was just a screen, and I had not seen through it. My Essex House was a center of plotting and subversion.

  We would all be turned out, at best, or imprisoned and executed, at worst. Christopher had joined them; my own husband was part of the plot.

  Another letter in an envelope. Shamelessly, I took it out. If they had the right to endanger my life and my home, reading their private letters was certainly my right. It was from Robert, obviously smuggled out of York House. He said he rejected the idea of going to France, because he could not bear to live the life of a fugitive. But he did not repudiate the other two suggestions. What was he thinking? Did he seriously want to try one of them?

  More letters. These were in a heap and were short, consisting of one or two paragraphs. Robert lamented his ill health. He was suffering from what he called “the Irish flux.” He was like to die. But if he did not, he wish
ed to retire into private life in the country. Evidently he had written to the Queen requesting just such a release. She must have ignored or refused it.

  Others were lengthy exhortations to Southampton to repent and lead a good life, to turn from sin. They would have made John Knox proud. He told Southampton that they must honor the Sabbath. That they must spend all their time in prayer. He even wrote to his erstwhile boon companion, “You must say with me, ‘There is no peace to the wicked and ungodly. I will make a covenant with my soul.’”

  Had his wits quite turned? Had the strain driven him mad? Or was he so broken in body that he no longer had the strength to persevere? His friends still had energy and wits enough, it seemed, to endanger us all. Oh, if only I could go to him, see him! But I knew better than to ask the Queen. If she would not allow his wife to see him, she certainly would not allow me. Even to remind her of my existence now would harden her heart further against Robert.

  That night as we made ready for bed, I looked over at Christopher, wearily pulling off his boots. At least he was home at a decent hour tonight. I tried to make myself as alluring as possible, wearing a sleeping gown that was made for beauty rather than comfort. I left off my nightcap and brushed out my hair. I even dabbed some violet perfume on my neck, something I had not done in a long time. Instead of getting into bed in the usual way, I slid in. Christopher did not seem to notice and threw back the covers and flopped down. This was going to take work. I had almost forgotten how.

  I inched up to him and leaned on my elbow, looking down at him. His eyes were already closed; he was not even going to look at me. I leaned down and kissed him, and he opened his eyes, surprised.

  “I have missed you, Christopher,” I said.

  “I was gone almost half a year,” he admitted.

  “I have missed you since you have been back,” I said.

  “I have been preoccupied, I know.” He sighed. “Life is not normal. We all worry about Robert. As long as he is imprisoned, we are prisoners along with him.”

  “He would not want that,” I said, parroting the phrase people use of the dead.

  “I cannot help it. It is hard to lie here, warm and safe and beside you, when he is denied his own wife and a mind at peace.”

  How was I to get him to confide in me? “Do you think something might ever alter his situation?” I asked. I slipped my arm around him.

  “In what way?”

  “That someone—or something—might persuade the Queen to look at things in a different light?” I was so close to him now I could almost whisper in his ear.

  “Only if Cecil stops blocking her light,” he grunted. Still he made no move to turn toward me or kiss me.

  “There is nothing you or I or anyone can do about that,” I said, tempting him to follow that thought.

  “I am not so sure.”

  I waited for him to elaborate but he did not.

  Suddenly I was angry at his aloofness and made up my mind to end it, if only to prove something to myself. But I must not show my anger; no, I must be soothing and seductive. Surely I must remember how! I began caressing his hair and kissing his lips in a rain of swift, teasing pecks. Slowly, very slowly, he warmed to me. It was like rousing a bear from his den. So much work. But I prevailed. I still knew my business, that business. But I failed to achieve my goal—that he make me his confidante.

  71

  The bells were tolling again, as they did to mark every Accession Day. The city of London rang with them—deep-throated peals from St. Clement Danes, shriller ones from St. Helen’s, mellow ones from Lambeth, doleful ones from Westminster Abbey. They blended together like a choir with voices ranging from the high purity of a boy’s slender throat to the resounding bass of a barrel-chested man’s. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, they announced. Queen, Queen, Queen ...

  “Forty-one years the old harridan’s been on the throne,” said Southampton, buffing his nails as the sound poured relentlessly into the room.

  “Shush. None of that talk. Someone might report it,” said Christopher. As if to prove his point, there was a rustling in the curtains, and a servant entered with ale, bowing and pretending to be deaf.

  “I was not born when she came to the throne,” said Southampton. “I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t Queen. Sort of like God. Always there, looking and watching. Rewarding sometimes, punishing other times.”

  “Christopher asked you to stop that,” I said. “If you cannot remember, I do. I can tell you that what she replaced was so dreadful even a child was aware of it. We like to think that England passed directly from the hands of King Henry to those of Elizabeth, but in truth we had to endure the rule of a child, and then the rule of an old bitter woman. Neither was able to lead the country. I tell you, when the word came that Mary Tudor was dead and Elizabeth was Queen, we rejoiced like a man let out of prison.”

  “And now she keeps us in prison.”

  “If you are in prison it is because you fancy yourself to be so. You insult Robert, who truly is in prison.”

  “I am in prison alongside him in sympathy.”

  I looked around him, at the finely polished table with its silver candle-sticks on its tapestry runner that his arm was flung carelessly across. “A prison you can walk out of any time you choose,” I said.

  Robert, I had heard, was so ill he could not even stand to let his bedding be changed, and had to be moved in a sling. The Irish flux, they called it. But I suspected it was his crushed spirits that debilitated him. He had been summoned to attend the hearing at Star Chamber but replied that he was too ill to attend.

  The Lord Keeper, by tradition, delivered a speech to the people from Star Chamber at the end of the legal term, and the pronouncement about Robert was yoked to this. The fact that the truce had expired in Ireland and O’Neill had rearmed made the government even more hostile toward Robert. The session was scheduled for November 29. But five days before that, a royal summons arrived for Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy.

  “What can it be?” cried Southampton. “Don’t go! They will arrest you!”

  “I’ve done nothing,” he said.

  The letters. The government had found out about the correspondence with King James. It was treason even to discuss the succession or Elizabeth’s death. “Are you sure?” I asked him.

  “I wasn’t even in Ireland,” he said. “I stayed here, manning the defenses against the Armada. Which, as it turns out, was wrecked once again on its way here. God is truly an Englishman. Or a Protestant. In any case, I must go. It is too late to run away.”

  “God protect you,” I said, and it was more than just a polite phrase.

  He returned at dusk, clutching a bulging sheath of papers. He was almost grinning. Stepping in and throwing off his mantle, he announced, “I am appointed lord deputy of Ireland in Robert’s place.” He seemed stunned, but not as stunned as the rest of us.

  Was the Queen ignorant of what had gone on here? Had her vaunted ability to know all that passed within her kingdom declined? Or ... did she know very well, and far from rewarding Mountjoy with this post, was offering him up as a sacrifice?

  So Robert was to be replaced, never restored. The waters were closing in around him.

  At the Privy Council hearing in Star Chamber—which Robert did not attend—before laymen and judges of the kingdom, the government read out its grievances. Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton began by lamenting the tide of rumors and false reports that were causing unrest in the kingdom. He mentioned the libels against court members, the cowardly writings on palace walls. Far from being spontaneous, these were orchestrated by a traitor somewhere, or a group of them. He did not accuse Robert directly, but he had no need to. Everyone understood whom he meant. He then went on to stress the gravity of the Irish situation and the shocking deportment of the commander in leaving his post abruptly and contrary to royal command.

  Lord Buckhurst, the treasurer, followed with specific figures of the expense of this large, lavishly provisioned army, which
could have mowed through Spain if it had been turned in that direction. Instead, it had dissipated all its advantages. The truce, dictated by The O’Neill, negating all the English achievements, or hope of them, mocked the Queen’s honor. And Essex had agreed to them—and who knew what else, in the privacy of their unwitnessed talk.

  Others chimed in, accusing Essex of wasting public money, disobedience, gross incompetence in the campaign, and making a dishonorable and unauthorized treaty with the enemy.

  But there was no sentence from the Queen. No indication of what she intended to do with him. He was to remain at York House. And—almost as an afterthought—his household was to be dispersed. He had no need of retainers or servants now, and they were to quit Essex House immediately.

  “We are stripped,” I said, stunned. All around me the servants were taking their leave, finishing their last tasks. They dared not linger with the Queen’s explicit orders that they vacate—had not their master come to his sorry pass by disobeying a direct order from her?—yet they did not wish to leave things in chaos. One hundred and sixty were to be dismissed. We were allowed to retain only the ones absolutely necessary to keep the household running—a very few cooks, groundsmen, stable hands, boatmen, and chamber scourers. I had no experience of living this way.

  “I had little thought of becoming a dairymaid at my age,” I said to Frances. “Yet I will have to learn to milk.”

  Southampton decided to decamp; he certainly would not remain in an echoing, empty space like the ruined Essex House.