Elizabeth I

by Margaret George

  “There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is not my desire to live nor reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will love you better.”

  Oh, it was true. I touched my coronation ring, rubbing it softly. “I have been content to be a taper of pure virgin wax, to waste myself and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me.”

  There was silence in the room. Then I said, “Thus, Mr. Speaker, I commend me to your loyal love, and you to my best care and your further counsels. And I pray you, Mr. Comptroller and my councillors, that before these members depart for their home counties, you bring them all to kiss my hand.”

  I sat and waited as they filed up, one at a time. I extended my hand for them to kiss. Each took his leave, until the chamber was empty.

  89

  LETTICE

  March 1602

  I have been a widow for a year today, I thought with stunned wonder. There was supposed to be a magic in crossing that threshold, the equivalent of applying a soothing bandage to a wound. No longer was it open and raw, but sealed up and healing. That was the belief, in any case. I say it depends on how deep and how wide the wound was.

  I had worn black ever since the black day on which Robert stepped onto the scaffold platform. Gradually it had come to seem odd that I would wear any other color.

  I had not, of course, been able to visit Christopher’s grave. I was not even sure it was marked. He may have been thrown into a trench beside the church. I could not visit Robert’s grave either, but I had heard that he had a plaque marking it. But since the Tower was royal property, I could not be admitted to the church inside.

  My first husband was buried far away in Wales, my second in Warwick, along with our son. So I could not be one of those widows who haunted graves like a ghost. As a three-time widow, I could say that it is far more hurtful to lose someone to politics than to nature. In a sense, Christopher brought it upon himself, but that was no comfort. It meant he could have avoided it, still be here with me. Neither Walter Devereux nor Robert Dudley had a choice in the matter.

  People still sang ballads about Robert, still wrote an occasional slur against Cecil on walls, but it was dying away. Memories are short. The Queen counted on that. Her popularity sagged in the aftermath, but her latest performance in Parliament has restored her to the people’s goodwill. She graciously gave in and abolished the hated monopolies, then gave what is being called her “golden speech.” It was an elegy, a farewell. She expressed her bond to her people—her version of a marriage vow—and reflected on what it meant to her to be a queen. It was rapturously received.

  But people wondered: Does she know she is ill? It had that ring, the tone of an announcement of mortality. She, who had seemed eternal, was reminding her people that she is not.

  And they were preparing for the change. Eyes were looking to Scotland, and King James, as Robert’s had done. They were looking discreetly, but they were looking. I had heard that even Cecil had put out feelers. He will need to secure his place in the next reign. If James brings his own councillors, then Cecil may find himself dismissed. He must gain the future king’s confidence now.

  The Queen had been her inconsistent self in regards to the people involved in what was being called “the Essex rebellion.” Southampton still languished in the Tower, although he was pronounced guilty alongside Robert. No execution date had been set, no fine announced. Many others were fined and freed. Will got off with a questioning from the Privy Council about the special performance of Richard II but seemed to have suffered no consequences. His plays were still shown at court and he was received there. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, for all the incriminating evidence that he had had knowledge of the plot and was even toying with contributing troops to it, got off completely. Doing so well in Ireland meant that he was too valuable to sacrifice, and so the Queen looked the other way.

  Then she did the oddest thing she has ever done. No, I cannot say that. But it was the oddest thing she has ever done in regard to our family. When Robert had returned without permission from Ireland, Frances had gathered up letters and papers she thought the government might confiscate to incriminate him. After his death, the people to whom she had entrusted the papers blackmailed her. At first she paid the fee, but they kept demanding more. Somehow the Queen got wind of it and had the blackmailer arrested, tried, and fined. She gave the fine to Frances, as well as the papers, saying, “I would have my winding-sheet unspotted.” Elizabeth never loses the power to amaze and surprise us.

  Frances, who cried to Elizabeth that she would not draw breath one hour after Robert had been executed, still lived and breathed. She, too, wore black, and busied herself with her children, especially the youngest, who had just begun walking. But I had the feeling that, at thirty-four, she would lay it aside before long and consider a third husband. She was the sort who should be married.

  But for myself, no. I was well past that now.

  I had withdrawn to Wanstead, six miles outside of London. I would grow old here. It was a house free of all the dark associations that Essex House had for me. Here there had been laughter and lovemaking, music, summer’s pleasures, and happy liaisons. After the opprobrium died down, I would be welcome enough for charitable work. Since I had become an outcast myself, I saw unfortunates in a new light. Looking down upon them from my heights of wealth and safety, I had shrugged them off. The poor you have with you always, Jesus had said. If they were poor, they must be lazy. Or happy. Odd how to assuage our own consciences we assume they must be happy, and spin tales to ourselves about their dancing and singing and laughing. We even envy them! Drowning in our obligations and worries, we ride past them and imagine their lives free of striving and competition, and sigh with longing.

  But I knew now they were not to be envied for the weight of poverty that left them unrecognized. It was the children I most wanted to rescue; it was too late for their parents. I would make them my mission.

  I was visited occasionally by my respectable daughters. Dorothy seemed far removed from both court and family, still married to the “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland and spending most of her time at Syon House, on the other side of London, upstream on the Thames. Penelope was the acclaimed woman of the hour, the consort, if not the wife, of the hero of Ireland.

  Yes, Charles Blount had done the seemingly impossible, had achieved what Robert had so signally failed to do. His hard-fought campaign in Ireland had brought victory. The great turning point came in December. Charles and his forces had been in the north, chasing The O’Neill, when the Spanish landed at Kinsale with their reinforcing units. Suddenly his mission was not to smash the rebels in Ulster, but to prevent their joining forces with the Spanish in the south. He executed this brilliantly. But as always, fate played a part. O’Neill suffered a lapse in judgment and chose to meet the English in the field, in a traditional battle, handing them the victory. He was ill suited for it and was soundly routed. The Irish fled north once again, and the Spanish set sail, never to return. Now all that remained was to capture O’Neill and extract his surrender. He was a beaten man, and the Irish rebellion was smashed.

  Elizabeth would be able to add the subjugation of Ireland to her victory over the Armada in the annals of her reign. A worthy achievement for a woman warrior, no matter how reluctant a one she was.

  To be honest, for all his blustering, his engraved armor, and his golden tents, her father achieved nothing militarily. His excursions into France were costly and pointless, yielding nothing permanent. She, on the other hand, has saved her realm from invasion and has slammed the back door of Ireland shut to foreign meddling. And she knew what she wanted. In order to press ahead in Ireland, she was willing to overlook Charles Blount�
��s transgressions to get the important job done. Her father would have focused on the “treason” of Blount. Elizabeth wanted to use him, treason or no. Who, then, was the better monarch? Elizabeth would demur even at hinting at a competition between herself and her father, but that might be because in her heart she knew she had surpassed him.

  I was shocked to receive a letter from Will, two months after the anniversary of Christopher’s death. It was very short, saying merely that he wished to offer his condolences and that, on his way back to Stratford, he would like to pay a call. Would that be acceptable?

  I had received few condolence visits, and even fewer guests had come to Wanstead, although in the heady days twenty years past they had begged for invitations. Part of me wished to say no, to keep myself away from anything that smacked of the old life. The other part of me wanted to say yes, still to be connected to the world beyond Wanstead.

  I said yes.

  He arrived on a May day, one of those so fine that we would not want to be anywhere else. Let Rome and Sicily have their wildflowers and warm, sweet evenings; we had May in England.

  “Will,” I said, taking his hat. “I appreciate your coming.”

  He stepped in. “I have wanted to ever since ... You understand.”

  “Yes. You had to be careful.” I looked at him. He had aged little, and he had a contentment about him that I noticed. “Shall we go out in the garden?” Let me add another pleasant memory to it.

  I guided him outside, and he exclaimed over the profusion of gillyflowers, hollyhocks, and climbing roses and the neatly trimmed maze. It was odd, but I did not feel awkward around him. It was as if he were from another life, another version of myself. The Lettice who now stood before him owed nothing, had nothing to apologize for. The stroke of the ax on Tower Green had severed my past from my future.

  “Will you sit?” I indicated a bench, wreathed all around with climbing vines twining overhead in a protective canopy. He nodded and did so. I sat beside him.

  “I was sorrowed by what happened,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I replied. “I still have difficulty believing it. I wake up expecting Robert or Christopher to be there. Then I remember.” I smiled. “But there is less and less time between the expectation and the remembrance.”

  “The gap will always be there,” he said.

  “Will the realization always be painful?” I asked him.

  “As long as you live,” he said.

  “You give no balm,” I said. “Should not a friend do so?”

  “A friend must not lie,” he said.

  “Ah, Will. You were always difficult.”

  “I was always honest.”

  “Always?”

  “As far as I could be.”

  I did not desire him any longer, yet I loved him. This confused me. Far from losing him forever, as I had once thought, I knew now he would be a part of me forever.

  “Tell me of your life. Mine you know already. I am sorry you were caught up in the rebellion.”

  “All that was an accident. I wish I had never written that play! But as for my life now, I have been buying property in Stratford. I find my thoughts turning more and more to my old home.”

  As I had retreated to Wanstead. The past pulled us back with urgent hands.

  “My father recently died,” he said. “Only a few months after your son.”

  “His life was not cut short.”

  “No, he was almost seventy.”

  “The same age as the Queen.”

  “Yes. But ...”

  It must go unsaid. “Is your mother still living?”

  “Yes. And they had been married forty-four years.”

  “And you?”

  He looked uneasy, embarrassed. “I’ve been married since I was eighteen,” he said. “I am now almost forty.”

  And I almost sixty. I had forgotten how much younger than I he was. When we were together, he had seemed the elder.

  “And how is your wife?” I asked primly.

  “The same.” He suppressed a smile.

  “Shall we not speak of her?”

  “That is agreeable to me.”

  “Why do you return to Stratford, if not to see her?”

  “My mother, my children ... It is odd. When I was a child, I wished nothing more than to escape it. Now I find that if I wish to leave any sort of legacy, it will exist only in Stratford. London swallows me up. I will not survive there. In a generation, I will vanish. The country has longer memories.”

  “But your plays ...”

  “For the moment only,” he said. “They amuse the crowds. But plays are not the stuff that endures. My company owns the scripts. And we dare not publish them, else others would enact them and rob us of our rightful earnings.”

  I looked hard at him, trying to memorize his features, his fine nose and penetrating eyes. I wondered what women had loved him, and where they were now.

  “My younger brother is here now,” he suddenly said. “Edmund. He, like me, was afire for the theater. He has played bit parts, but nothing that would make his name. I should write something for him. But I cannot construct a play around such a need. I can only write a character that calls me. Edmund cannot play the ones that are clamoring for me to give them birth. They are too old for him. A Scottish noble who is drawn to murder to fulfill a prophecy, an old king who realizes too late that he cannot give away his office and retain its privileges, a Moor who is undone with jealousy—no, a young man from Stratford cannot play any of these.” He broke off suddenly. “But all this is talk. Laetitia, how are you? My heart wants to know.” He grasped my hands so I could not pull away.

  How could I answer? I was empty; I was a changed creature. “I survive,” I said, aware of his hands, their warmth, their hold.

  “Can you forgive me?” he said.

  “For what? For warning me what to expect from you, and then following through?”

  He smiled, a slight smile. “I was a coward.”

  “It was better for us that you were. You were wiser than I. You could see what must ultimately come of it. And you did not want it.”

  “I could not endure it. I can write about it, but I cannot live it.”

  “Better, then, for others. You can leave them something.”

  “I told you, Laetitia. I leave nothing behind for anyone. My works will not survive me. They are played to crowds at the Globe, then forgotten. I can behold tumultuous emotions, record them—but not fall victim to them. My weakness.”

  “Never mind, Will. You are here now. Few have come. You have given me a precious gift. Now kiss me. In friendship.” I leaned over to him, closed my eyes.

  90

  ELIZABETH

  July 1602

  I looked up at the threatening sky; black and blue clouds were racing past, and the wind had picked up. I steadied my hat to keep it from blowing off and turned in the saddle.

  “Ladies, we are like to have a wet welcome!” I called to my companions.

  “How far are we from Harefield?” asked Catherine.

  “Five or six miles, at least,” said my horse master. “Perhaps it will hold off that long.”

  A blast of wind tore at my skirts, and I clutched the reins. The horse’s mane was flapping. “Let us gallop, then,” I ordered, spurring him on. He leaped under me and it was all I could do to keep my seat.

  We were on an abbreviated summer Progress. Originally I had intended to go west, leaving London and stopping first at Elvetham House, then on to Bath and Bristol. But the journey was too ambitious and I had to curtail it, substituting an eastern Progress. We had stopped first at Chiswick and now were heading for the house of Thomas Egerton and his new wife, the dowager Countess of Derby. Two years ago he had begged to be released from supervising Essex at York House, because his wife was dying. Now both his prisoner and his wife were gone, and he had taken a new one, a lady with literary tastes—or pretensions. Well, he deserved his happiness. Good for him.

  I took less with
me on this Progress, and fewer people. People grumbled about the inconveniences, so I had jokingly said, “Let the old stay behind and the young and able come with me!” That had given the ailing ones an excuse to stay home.

  There were a number of “young and able” along. I had, as I wished, invited Eurwen back to court, and she rode now in company with some of the younger maids of honor, and there were handsome young men, like Richard de Burgh, the Earl of Clanricarde, one of the “good” Irish. I found myself disliking him, though, and it took me a while to realize it was because he resembled Essex. That was not fair to the man, but the other ladies made much of him, so he was not lacking. There was also the saturnine John Donne, Egerton’s secretary and lately a member of Parliament, who skulked in the back and did not seem eager to reach his master’s home. He had been jolly enough at Chiswick, but every mile closer to Harefield drew his already long face even longer.

  The ride here had immersed us in the glory of a high English summer. Rich midsummer flowers had replaced the delicate hues of spring in the meadows, and fledglings were practicing their flying, swooping skillfully from their nests. Cottage doors stood open, and housewives were spreading linens out on hedgerows to dry. Boys practiced archery in the open fields. Summer was the time of village festivals, and we passed several on our way. It was also the time of weddings, and from a distance I saw a bridal party making its way through the fields to a little stone church. The fields stood high, and this harvest promised to end the run of poor ones.

  My realm was faring well. It grew and prospered under the sun.

  Now the weather had turned. We dashed to the shelter of Harefield Place, just beating the rain. Our horses were whisked away to the stables, and Sir Thomas and his new wife, Alice, welcomed us into the house. Just as Alice was making her curtsy, the skies opened up and rain pelted the courtyard.