Queen's Pleasure

by Brandy Purdy

  As for his elder brother, the Archduke Charles, I found reports regarding the size of his head too contradictory to reassure me, and portrait painters were not to be trusted. Had my own father not learned that when he chose to wed Anne of Cleves after admiring her portrait? And my sister had come to no good end when Titian’s portrait of Philip first aroused love in her heart. “I have taken a vow never to marry a man I have not seen in person,” I declared. “I will not put my trust in portrait painters.” So, unless the Archduke Charles would deign to visit me, that was the end of the matter; I would discuss it no further. And I imperiously waved his Ambassadors away and grandly bade them, “Trouble me no more; my mind is quite decided, and no pretty words or even prettier portraits can ever change it. I will not consider the Archduke again until he is standing before me.”

  Many deplored my highhanded ways with the Ambassadors and despaired of my ever taking a husband; they all thought me maddeningly capricious. One was even provoked to complain of me: “She behaves like a peasant upon whom a barony has been conferred. Since she came to the throne, she is puffed up with pride and imagines that she is without peer.” But I laughed all the more when I heard and declared loudly and often that I would sooner be a nun than a wife. I flaunted my coronation ring before all and said, “Behold, I am married already—to England!” And more than once I heard Cecil sigh and complain of that heady summer: “Here is a great resort of wooers and controversy amongst lovers; would that Her Majesty would settle upon one and the rest would depart honorably satisfied.”

  And there were gifts aplenty, all luxurious and grand, and ardent envoys sent to woo me by proxy for the Dukes of Savoy, Nemours, Saxony, Holstein, Bohemia, and Bavaria, with each ambassador wearing a miniature portrait of his master proudly pinned upon his breast. I would have them all line up before me, standing at attention, straight as soldiers, and walk up and down viewing the portraits as if I were taking my leisure on a rainy day inside a portrait gallery and causing their hopes to rise or plummet by the comments I made and the questions I asked. One actually wept when I dismissed his royal master on the basis of his portrait as “a lady-faced lad” who would not do at all, as “I have a great liking for a strong, handsome, virile man.” I would not squander even a moment’s thought considering any dainty and effeminate lad, laughing inside at the way some of them winced, squirmed, and nervously shifted their eyes, being all too aware of their masters’ unnatural predilections.

  The Scottish Earl of Arran, Jamie Hamilton, the handsome, red-haired, and bearded Protestant claimant to the Scottish throne, came to visit me. He arrived concealed in a carpet, like Cleopatra for her fateful first encounter with Julius Caesar. When it was unrolled before me, he sprang up to dance a boisterous jig to the tune of bagpipers who had accompanied him disguised as merchants, the hem of his kilt bouncing and bobbing up to show off his fine, muscular, though quite hairy legs. And later he would speak words of tender love and vehement ardor that tried valiantly to penetrate his thick Scottish burr. He delighted me no end, and again and again I clapped my hands and cried “Dance, Jamie, dance!” until he fell down exhausted and beneath his silver-buckled shoes his toes bled and his band of bagpipers must carry him to bed and bandage them. But Cecil favored the match, sagely noting that if I married him, it would bring peace and unite England and Scotland and prevent France—which had a foothold in that sparse and barbaric land through its Catholic queen, Mary Stuart, and her mother, the regent Marie of Guise—from using Scotland to mount an attack against us and financing further Scottish raids upon our borders.

  And my English suitors were still buzzing around me, all ravenous for the honey of my attention and affection. Faithful old Arundel, who had taken to sporting a vividly gaudy and outlandish wardrobe far better suited to a much younger and more flamboyant man while leaning upon an elegantly wrought silver staff to ease his gouty foot, and telling anyone who would listen that my bravery during the reign of my sister had first led to the flowering of love in his heart for me. Shy, bashful, stammering Gooseberry was still tripping over his own tongue and feet in his eagerness to please me. And the debonair Sir William Pickering, who didn’t try too hard because he knew he did not have to and had privately accepted my word that I meant to live and die a maid, but who was content to continue wooing me just for the pleasure of my company and to tweak Arundel’s beard.

  The Duke of Prussia’s ambassador sent yet more falcons so that I might enjoy good sport with them while on progress, as he knew I delighted in hunting. He also brought a handsome miniature that might be worn as a brooch or a pendant depicting the Duke with a hooded falcon upon his wrist and earnestly implored me to wear it when I flew the birds so that in this way, “in spirit” we might hawk together until the day he hoped and prayed for arrived, when we could hunt together as husband and wife.

  Robert was in such a fury over them all. I had never seen a man so flustered and feverish with jealousy; I fancied I could see the blood sizzling in his veins and feel the heat when I touched him. A perpetual scowl replaced his smile, and his mutinous dark eyes scorched me like embers on my naked skin whenever they turned my way. “Any man who advises the Queen to marry a foreigner is neither a good Englishman nor a loyal subject to Her Majesty!” he roared, boldly leaping up onto the banquet table, his eyes flashing a challenge to every man seated around it. And his band of liveried rogues, a surly bunch of cudgel-and-dagger-toting street toughs dressed up in blue velvet, often clashed swords with the retinues of our foreign visitors. He even tried, with money borrowed at enormous rates of interest from the London moneylenders, to bribe my foreign suitors to quit the field and sail away, assuring them with a grave mien and a serious and confiding tone that, “I have known her better than any man alive since the age of eight, and from that time forth she has always said, ‘I will never marry.’ She will go a maiden to her grave.” I reminded him that it was treason to speak of the death of the sovereign and refused to see or speak to him for a week, during which I allowed the delightfully blushing Gooseberry or the dapper, unflappable Pickering into my bedchamber each morning to hand me my shift as I stood naked behind a screen, while Robert, who had been accustomed to performing this most intimate duty, fumed outside my door and had to be restrained from running them through with his sword. Sometimes I even sent him away. “Leave my court—you grow insufferable,” I would say. “I cannot bear to have you near me,” and he would ride off with his surly band and go I knew not where, or to the Devil for all I, in those heated moments, cared.

  And to confound them all, my homegrown and foreign-born suitors alike, I lavished attention and favors upon the man I called my “Sweet Robin.” I would, during plays or musical recitals, playing the absentminded and besotted woman for the ambassadors’ avid eyes, reach out a hand and let my jewel-laden fingers toy with Robert’s dark hair or tickle the back of his neck. And when the perplexed ambassadors, concerned about my morals and chastity, discreetly queried the affection I showered upon Lord Robert, I would reply, “Nature has implanted so many graces in him that, if I wished to marry, I would prefer him to all the princes of the world.” Or I would tantalize them and leave them wondering just how far I had fallen by saying, “It is true, I am no angel, and I cannot deny that I have some affection for Lord Robert, for the many fine qualities he possesses.” Then, to increase their confusion, I would add, “He is like my brother and best friend. I regard and honor him as my brother, for thus do I love him and will love and regard him my whole life long, for he deserves it.” And sometimes I took an indignant stance, declaring, “I am insulted both in England and abroad for having shown too much favor to Lord Robert. I am spoken of as if I were an immodest woman.” With a doleful sigh, a shake of my head, and downcast eyes, I would continue in a resigned tone, “I really ought not to wonder at it! I am young, and he is young, and therefore we have both been slandered! Though my life is lived in the open, and I have so many witnesses—a thousand eyes watch my every move—truly I cannot underst
and how so bad a judgment can have been formed of me.”

  It vexed Robert no end. He would sulk and sometimes storm red-faced into my room after having heard my words repeated, accusing me of using him as a tool, a toy, or ranting and raging because I said I loved him like a brother. But I would only laugh and, depending on my mood and whim, draw him into my arms and let the two of us be engulfed by passion, only pushing him away at the last moment, or else fling the nearest object at his head, stamp my foot, and order him from the room and banish him from my presence for several days to come.

  I loved being the unobtainable object of desire for so many men, to encourage, then discourage, to change in an instant from hot to cold. I loved the power of holding all the power in my hand and beneath my skirts, to feel them yearn and burn but to refuse to grant them their desire, for my person or my throne. And Robert suffered the worst for my shifting whims and fancies, my mercurial moods, where one moment he held Aphrodite in his arms and the next was being pushed away by chaste Diana.

  No one could understand why I took such pleasure in Robert’s company. Indeed, at times, I could not understand it myself. Perhaps it was that he did not behave as one awed by me; with him I did not feel as one mounted upon a tall pedestal of ivory. We had known each other since childhood, when I was still thought of as a disgraced bastard of no real importance; he knew me when no one thought I would ever amount to anything. And there was such an easy camaraderie between us, though at times it did indeed border on the presumptuous or even pass that border, but I felt easy and relaxed in his company, free to let down my guard and just be myself, free to revel in bursts of passion like fireworks without the risk of being burned or singed or bound and chained in holy matrimony. In truth, had Robert been free, that might have tarnished his allure and attraction in my eyes; I felt in control with Robert. I, Elizabeth, the woman, not Robert, the man, was in command of our relationship, and that was exactly the way I wanted it.

  Robert delighted in devising novelties and spectacular entertainments so that every day brought something fresh, exciting, and new for us. One evening there was an entire sugar and marzipan menagerie to delight my sweet tooth, with animals of every kind from beasts of the barnyard to the most exotic. There were lions, tigers, peacocks, sheep, camels, swans, ostriches, snakes, rabbits, elephants, rams, placid milk cows with swollen pink udders and teats, and fierce-tempered bulls, butterflies, pigs, bright-plumed parrots, lizards, leopards, turtles, sure-footed mountain goats and barnyard billies and nannies, strutting roosters and docile hens, stallions and mares, monkeys, frogs, giraffes, donkeys, flocks of ducks and geese, sharks, dolphins, great schools of rainbow-colored fish, eagles and hawks, bears, graceful swans who mated for life, porcupines, porpoises, anteaters, wild boars, zebras, and walruses, even the fabled cockatrice, the monstrous manticore, the Kraken that was the sailors’ dreaded peril, sea serpents undulating over blue sugar waves, and the mermaids that formed the stuff of the sailors’ dreams during their long, lonely voyages at sea away from feminine company, the glorious golden phoenix rising resplendent from fire and ash, fierce dragons with gleaming scales, and magnificent snowy white unicorns garlanded with flowers and accompanied by flowing-haired virgins. Each one was painstakingly crafted, perfect down to the least little detail, by an expert confectioner and served to us by servants costumed as animals. Whilst Robert, splendidly garbed in a doublet of crimson and gold, his handsome legs sheathed in white hose that fit like a glove and black leather boots polished to a high gloss that came up to his thighs, smartly cracked a whip and danced, pivoting, spinning, doing high kicks and grand leaps in the midst of my ladies and gentlemen, all of them elaborately and sumptuously appareled and masked as wild and exotic beasts that capered and leapt or snarled and showed their claws at each crack of Robert’s black leather whip.

  In another masque he arranged, all the ladies danced and swayed in gowns of leafy satin greenery adorned with red cherries, which the gentlemen, sauntering and dancing past with baskets of gilded straw slung over their arms, plucked until the trees were bare. And in another, most symbolic of those heady days of courtship unabated, I, with my eyelids painted gold, gowned in shimmering tinsel cloth of red, orange, and gold, with my hair stretched high and sculpted and lacquered over a tall wire frame, was a flame, and the gentlemen of my court danced about me dressed as moths being burned by me and falling dead at my feet. And at yet another banquet we sat down to eat off dishes crafted entirely out of sugar. I remember our Swedish guests were quite baffled by them, and at the next banquet one of them, thinking these sugar dishes were customary, cracked a tooth biting into a porcelain plate.

  Once, like an alchemist transforming lead into gold, my Sweet Robin helped me change a looming scandal into a morning’s delight. I was always slow to rise, liking to linger long in my nightclothes, in a state of loose dishabille, with my hair unbound and my body comfortable and unimpeded by the corseted confines and weighty layers of skirts, reading my beloved books, perusing state papers, walking in my private garden, and eating a leisurely breakfast before dressing and beginning the business of the day. I was not always as careful as I should be, and once, as I sat at my window early one morning, my pink dressing gown falling loosely about my shoulders as my elbow rested on the windowsill while I sat, with the morning sun warming my face, smelling the roses and listening to the birdsong, my night shift slipped from my shoulder and exposed a breast. A carter saw me and with an admiring whistle called up that he had seen with his own eyes that the Queen was all woman. I laughed good-naturedly as I adjusted my garments and tossed a coin down to him. But word quickly spread, no doubt due to my admirer gossiping in the alehouse, and the ambassadors were aghast, and my Councilors went about wringing their hands and worrying lest I be branded a woman of loose morals and my suitors desert me. Word had already spread by a volley of scandalized whispers that each morning when I dressed, Lord Robert always stopped in to hand me my shift, that most intimate of undergarments, as nothing lay between it and a woman’s bare skin, as I stood modestly shielded by a screen. So one morning Robert decided that I should have them all—my courtiers and our foreign guests—come directly from their beds, still clad in their nightclothes, to partake of an early-morning breakfast with me. And we all sat about on cushions strewn across my bedchamber floor in our dressing gowns and slippers and disordered hair eating a hearty English breakfast and gossiping like old friends with the windows thrown open so we could smell the flowers and hear the birds sing. We had a fine time, and the ambassadors were soon assuring their sovereigns that all the lurid tales of me were naught but silly gossip based on tidbits of fact outlandishly embroidered.

  Our Progress ended with a splendid banquet at my father’s great palace of Nonsuch, which my aging but nonetheless ardent swain, the Earl of Arundel, was leasing from the Crown. It lasted until three in the morning, with music, dancing, and masquing, where I dared, masked in silver and mantled in diaphanous midnight blue spangled with silver stars to hide my hair and gown, lead my gray-bearded host into a fragrantly flowered and darkened bower and let him embrace and kiss me, just once, to keep his hope alive, and with it the belief that selling some of his lands to pay for this costly evening had been well worth it. And when I departed the next morning, he made me a present of the ornate silver plate that had adorned the banquet table, replete with an inscribed presentation cabinet to keep it in.

  Our idyllic summer ended in August with our return to Windsor Castle, where I spent whole hot and humid days riding and hunting in the Great Park with Robert, tiring out, one after another, the strong and swift Irish hunters he chose for me and laughing, flush-faced and sweat-sodden, each time I called for a fresh mount. He gave me a gittern studded with emeralds, and often, after the banquets and dancing, where many shook their heads, sighed, and pursed their lips in disapproval of the intimacy with which Robert handled my person as we danced—the way he lifted, caressed, and held me, and even dared steal kisses—we would sail upon the moonl
it river while I strummed it and sang to him. When Cecil came frowning into my apartments and told me that it was being said that I was “a wild and raving coquette insatiable in my lusts” and rumors were rife in London and spreading farther every day, even being carried across the sea by travelers, that I was carrying Lord Robert’s child, I laughed defiantly and ordered my corsets laced even tighter to show off my board-flat stomach and tiny waist and danced with even greater abandon, leaping and kicking ever higher, shaking my hair free of its pins so that strands of it clung to Robert’s sweat-glazed face as he lifted me high in the volta, and returning his kisses and caresses with equal fervor. I was determined to let no one spoil my pleasure. And the louder they grumbled, the more I gave them to grumble about. Willfully, and rebelliously, I fed the flames of scandal. I was young and free, and I wanted to live while I was alive!

  23

  Amy Robsart Dudley

  William Hyde’s Mansion House in Throcking, Hertfordshire

  Late May 1559

  Lavinia had to return to court. I was sorry to see her go, but she had many commissions awaiting her, including miniatures of my husband and the Queen. Though coaxing the truth out of her was like pulling a tooth, she wanted so to spare me, in the end she confessed that these were gifts they meant to exchange; she would have his, and he would have hers. What had happened to my own miniature, the one Robert had ridden away from Hemsby wearing against his heart? I never saw it again. It was like a prophecy made in paint but fulfilled in flesh and blood. I had indeed become that melancholy, solemn-faced young matron, even though I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be that happy, smiling, loved and loving bride again, that radiant, confident, carefree, girl with the wild, tumbling, harvest gold hair, who lay with her yellow skirts rucked up in a bed of buttercups by the river, safe in the arms of the boy she loved, watching the clouds roll by and dreaming of the future that lay before them. I wanted a beautiful, radiant, golden phoenix to rise from the ugly black and gray ashes of my life.