by David Field
Thanks to their urgings, Drake had been sent — against his own advice — to hit back at Spain with an Armada of England’s own and had lost half his men and a third of his ships in a catastrophic defeat that had only served to encourage Philip to rebuild with a view to launching another attack that was expected at any time. There was no money for England to do likewise, given a run of poor harvests and increasing resistance to new taxes. The Catholics refused to sit quietly under a Protestant regime and most of the daily reports brought to her by the ailing Chancellor Hatton were of covert Jesuit priests being dragged from their hiding places in manor houses throughout the realm and summarily done to death on the lawns in front of the families who had been hiding them. If her people still truly loved her, it was only out of fear of the consequences if they did not and what sort of love was that?
Life went on as if this was still the ‘Golden Age’ that the nation’s poets and playwrights were celebrating, but the reality was that government of the realm had been reduced to competition for patronage and preference and the granting of monopolies to already wealthy nobles that drove up the prices for everything and led to resentment among the common people. The fact that they hadn’t yet risen up in rebellion reflected only their fear of her and she was ashamed of what her reign had become.
She was unable to dominate her Council because, in the absence of sage men such as Cecil who had her interests at heart, she could not be certain which were the wisest policies and therefore dare not impose her will in favour of one or another. Her weakness in this regard had led to factional strife within what should have been — and once was — a body united for the greater welfare of England.
Most grievous for Elizabeth had been the open warfare between Robert Cecil, the pale imitation of his great father and Robert, Earl of Essex, stepson of the great love of her life. Both had eventually proved false and today she must sign the paper that lay at her elbow — the paper that would send the dynastic hope of dear Robert to his death for treason.
Robert Devereux had lost little time in proving that he was no soldier, as he blustered and blundered his way through a series of uprisings in Ireland with an arrogant rule of fist that made him as much reviled by his own men as he was hated by the enemy Irish. Despite her stern order that he remain at his post, he had deserted his command and returned to the softer pastures of London, where he presented himself with a flourish, as if expecting to be welcomed home as a hero. Instead, he was treated to the same humiliation that his stepfather had endured in the Low Countries, when he was obliged to stand, head bowed, while his uncle William Knollys, Earl of Banbury and a fellow Council member, read out a report that condemned him for desertion of duty and consigned him to house arrest in his own York House in London.
Elizabeth added to the humiliation by stripping him of the monopolies he had wheedled out of her in her weaker moments when she was reminded of his beloved stepfather who still visited her in her dreams. All this had at least put paid to further rumours that they shared a bed, but Robert had reacted with the petulant bitterness that ruled his life and had conducted a secret conspiracy with certain Catholic malcontents in London to seize the Queen’s person and invite King James of Scotland to assume the throne of England earlier that anticipated. Robert Cecil’s spies kept watch on him and it was a gloating Robert Cecil who insisted on Essex’s trial for treason and thereafter kept up an irresistible barrage of demands for his execution that threatened to disrupt all other Council business until Elizabeth relented.
She took the warrant in her left hand, picked up her quill, dipped it into the inkstand and signed it. Then the thought crossed her mind that had she married Robert Dudley, any son of theirs could have turned out like Essex. She had just consigned to the block the closest thing she still had to the man who had loved her most truly and she spat the small mouthful of manchet loaf onto the damask cloth before it could choke her.
Elizabeth transferred herself, at her own stubborn request, to Richmond Palace, there to mourn the latest death in a gloomy seclusion that not even her closest Ladies could persuade her to abandon. She had received news of the untimely demise of her long serving Lady, Catherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham. As Catherine Carey she had been the granddaughter of Mary Boleyn and according to rumour the illegitimate descendant of Elizabeth’s own father Henry VIII. On either account they had been cousins and Catherine had served Elizabeth as First Lady of the Bedchamber for over thirty years. She had also been the wife of Elizabeth’s trusted Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham, during the glorious defeat of the Armada and somehow her death symbolised the decline of the Golden Age and the decay of all the fond memories to which Elizabeth had been clinging in her increasing battles with melancholia.
A melancholia that had seemed to begin with the revelation that Robert Dudley had left an illegitimate son — the direct fruit of his loins and the product of his affair with Baroness Sheffield. His name was also Robert and he had been hidden away abroad until his mother had launched a lawsuit in which she claimed to have been married to his father and was supporting the young Robert’s claims to his father’s estates of Kenilworth and Warwick. Elizabeth had been stricken to the core by the realisation that another woman had born Robert’s child and seen him grow into manhood. She could have had all that for herself, had not some ill wind blown her the crown of England.
The death of Catherine Howard somehow plunged the knife in deeper, reviving stories of the sexual freedom that her father Henry had enjoyed and which had been denied to her. Her Ladies began to experience difficulty in persuading her to eat and dish after dish was sent back down to the kitchens untouched. The Cook had to be personally reassured by the new Senior Lady, the Marchioness of Northampton, that this was not due to any fear on the part of Her Majesty that she might be poisoned.
There was soon much more that Elizabeth’s Ladies had to explain to a curious staff at Richmond, in the hope that the truth would not rock the realm, or provoke some sort of uprising. The stark reality was that Her Majesty was no longer in quite her right mind.
It had begun ominously enough with Elizabeth insisting on standing for hours on end in her Bedchamber, mumbling to herself and refusing all offers of food and drink, as if determined to starve herself to death. She insisted, however, on being fully dressed, bewigged and cerused and swore in language more suited to the alehouse on the several occasions when it was politely suggested that she should allow her surgeon to examine her. She would stand in this manner for many hours, until her legs gave way under her and her closest attendants took to placing cushions on the floor in anticipation.
She was only visited once by Robert Cecil, to whom she replied only in monosyllables when he sought her approval for various matters. Sensing that all was not well, he politely suggested that she might consider taking to her bed, to which she replied defiantly that she did not intend to do so. When he pressed his point with ‘But Your Majesty must, for the sake of her health,’ she screamed back at him ‘Must is not a word to use to princes, little man’ and he hastily withdrew from the presence with a sad shake of the head towards Lady Northampton on his way out.
Things deteriorated further when Elizabeth began hallucinating. One morning Lady Northampton bowed into the presence to find Elizabeth already seated on the pile of cushions and staring at the far wall. ‘I don’t suppose you can see what I see, Helena, but my father and sister have come on a visit. It is for me alone to witness, since they have high matters of State to reveal. My father smiles and says that I am his true daughter, while my sister Mary, as usual, chides me for my religion.’
Lady Northampton wasn’t sure whether to go along with this, or to try to talk some sense into her mistress, but before she could decide there was more.
‘Here comes the Scots Mary, smiling in triumph because her son will bid for my crown. We never met and I wish you could see her, for I would wish to know if she was so beautiful as she is to me today. I regret me that I had her put to deat
h and I curse the day that I signed that warrant.’
Elizabeth’s bewildered and embarrassed Ladies could only wait and see how events would turn out, since every effort they made to bring their mistress back to reality was met with wild curses, not always decently worded. But then came the day when their opportunity presented itself.
‘I may finally take to my bed,’ Elizabeth announced, ‘since Robert is here with me and he tells me that my time is come.’
They needed no further encouragement and the clothes were hastily stripped from her where she stood, including the heavily soiled undergarments. She smelled even worse than usual, given her lifelong suspicion of bathing even in good times, but they persevered and eventually got her between the sheets in her nightgown, still wearing her wig and refusing all offers to remove the ceruse from her bony face. Only Lady Northampton remained and Elizabeth beckoned her to the side of the bed, before instructing her in a firm voice that belied the state of her mind.
‘There must be no physicians when I die.’
‘My Lady?’
‘No man shall be permitted to examine between my legs after I am dead, since none did during my lifetime.’
Helena tried not to chuckle, in case it wasn’t intended as a jest and would only later conjecture in her own mind whether Elizabeth was anxious for no-one to learn that she had been living a lie as the ‘Virgin Queen’ and wished to take that secret to her grave.
Over the next few days, Elizabeth seemed to sink into a morbid torpor, refusing to eat with angry shakes of the head whenever sustenance was offered to her. It was obvious that the end was near and Archbishop Whitgift was called in to say prayers with her while musicians played softly at the back of the Bedchamber. Word was sent to Council and Robert Cecil was ushered into the sick room while the Queen appeared to be still alive and he asked her about her succession. Receiving no verbal response, he prompted, ‘James of Scotland?’ and Elizabeth raised a shaky hand and drew the symbol of a crown round her head. Then she appeared to fall into a deep sleep from which she never awoke and the only indication of the moment of death came with a long sigh of apparent relief.
Uneasily aware that her late mistress might have wished to take certain secrets to her grave, Lady Northampton insisted on sorting through the personal and intimate items left in the various receptacles in her bedchamber. In a drawer to the side of Elizabeth’s former bed she discovered the heavily creased vellum on which Robert Dudley had composed his communication to her from Cornbury Park during his last evening of life. She had kept it closely concealed and had written on the top of it, in her own florid hand, ‘His last letter.’
The proclamation of the Queen’s passing was read out loud by Robert Cecil, first at Whitehall, then at St Paul’s, then finally in Cheapside. Given that she had been seventy years old at her passing, there were few among the people of London who had known any other monarch and they packed the streets to demonstrate their grief at the passing of ‘Gloriana’. Her body having been embalmed, it was transported upriver to Whitehall in a lead coffin to await burial, while detailed arrangements were made for an elaborate funeral for an outgoing monarch and a rich reception for the incoming James of Scotland, who lost no time in heading south to claim his inheritance.
The short funeral procession from Westminster Palace to Westminster Abbey had echoes of Elizabeth’s coronation procession all those years ago, although of course the identities of the one thousand official mourners were different from those who had cheered her onto the throne. And again no expense was spared, as a coffin draped in the richest purple velvet was carried on a hearse drawn by four horses decked out in black velvet. Lying on the top of the coffin was an effigy of Elizabeth herself and the crowds gasped as it passed slowly by them carrying a visual representation of a Queen they had all loved, but few of them had ever glimpsed.
Elizabeth was to be interred alongside the body of her long dead sister Mary, the woman whose persecution of her had converted a simple light-hearted girl into a suspicious and at times paranoid shrew of a woman who had opted for celibacy after witnessing what marriage had done to her sister. The inscription on their joint epitaph read ‘Consorts in realm and tomb, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of resurrection.’
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A NOTE TO THE READER
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading this final novel in my Tudor series, and I hope it lived up to your expectations. Elizabeth Tudor was a complex character, but history has assigned her a one-sided epitaph, assisted by talented actresses such as Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchet and Judi Dench, who have given us such a memorable visual image of a strong woman dominating a male world. Hopefully this novel has redressed the balance somewhat.
A different Elizabeth began to emerge as I was researching for this novel. I did what I normally do, which is to examine the established facts and then imagine the effect that those events would have had on the character whose actions they dictated. For Elizabeth, the situation in which she found herself in 1558 would have been challenging, and seemingly beyond her ability to surmount.
Although the death of her half-sister Queen Mary was not entirely unexpected, England looked to Elizabeth to take the reins of power without breaking stride, and she was ill-equipped to rise to the occasion. Barely twenty-five years of age, she had been held in the background by a highly suspicious Mary. Elizabeth therefore came to the throne with little experience of life at Court, no exposure to the major issues that confronted her nation, and very few genuine allies she could trust, and upon whom she might rely. And she had to come to terms very quickly with three major concerns.
The first was the corrosive religious divide that had marked the reigns of her three immediate predecessors. England had been divorced from Catholic Rome by her father Henry, and the new Protestant faith had been thrust down the peoples’ throats by her half-brother Edward. Mary had sought to guide the nation back under the wing of the Pope, and had dealt harshly with those who sought to oppose her. The nation was now anxiously waiting to see what policy Elizabeth would adopt, but her personal wish was to allow her subjects to worship according to their individual consciences. As she was shortly to discover, the diehard Catholics lying in wait for her — most particularly those in Scotland and France — would not allow her this luxury, and forced her hand into actions that she found both stressful and unpalatable.
Associated with this issue was the broader one of England’s relations with more powerful nations across the Channel. France would harbour Mary Stuart and her Catholic ambition to rule England, while Spain would prove less than friendly. King Philip of Spain had, until Mary’s death, been the consort joint monarch of England, and he would not easily relinquish his ambition to add England to the Habsburg portfolio of nations. Elizabeth lost little time in rejecting his marriage proposal, thereby exposing England to the risk of invasion that would eventuate in the later years of her reign. But the availability of the hand of the ‘Virgin Queen’ was the third major issue with which the beautiful young heiress had to contend.
The entire Tudor era was dominated by the need to produce heirs, and Elizabeth’s period as the final Tudor monarch was no different. She was constantly harassed by her Council of State with polite requests that she take a husband, and preferably a suitable one from a European royal house. But very few eligible ones existed, and the ones who did were not to her taste. On top of all her other challenges, Elizabeth had to come to terms with the fact that the man she really yearned for — Robert Dudley — was first of all already married, and then rendered available by the death of his first wife in circumstances that made it diplomatically impossible for them to wed.
If ever a nervous young woman thrust into the most senior role in the nation required those around her that she could trust implicitly, it was Elizabeth. And God at least s
miled upon her in that regard. England under Elizabeth would have presented future historians with a totally different picture had it not been for William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Chief Minister, guide, mentor and friend. Not only was he a very able administrator presiding over an efficient public service, but he was totally loyal. However, even he was insistent that Elizabeth marry, and her instinct and experience thus far inclined her to Robert Dudley, who in Courtly terms was forbidden fruit. We can only imagine what she suffered in her determination to keep him at arms’ length for the sake of her public image, and it is more than likely that she found comfort in the unswerving and unassuming natural friendship of her Chief Lady, Blanche Parry.
So behind the ‘Gloriana’ facade we see a different kind of Elizabeth. A young woman cursed by her natural beauty and earlier life into being considered frivolous and sensual, who was forced by circumstances to override popular perception and rule with a rod of steel, armed with the loyal and constant guidance of the only three people she could trust. I hope that my ‘take’ on Elizabeth did not shatter too many of your preconceptions.
As ever, I look forward to receiving feedback from you, whether in the form of a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Or, of course, you can try the more personal approach on my website, and my Facebook page: DavidFieldAuthor.
Happy reading!
David
davidfieldauthor.com
MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD
The Tudor Saga Series:
Tudor Dawn
The King's Commoner
Justice For The Cardinal
An Uneasy Crown
The Queen In Waiting
Esther & Jack Enright Series:
The Gaslight Stalker
The Night Caller
The Prodigal Sister
The Slum Reaper
