Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  “How they fought! Especially the Portuguese, in their immense carracks, standing high and rocking mightily with each wave. The Portuguese ships were the best of the lot, they would not give up, no matter how many holes we blew in their sides! The wreckage from those ships . . . the sea was filled with spars and masts and shredded sails. And bodies too, though the mariners of that fleet gathered their own, and saved many.

  “The greatships of the fleet were heavier than ours, but ours were faster, and we kept them always to windward, so they were never able to run in toward our coast, not even the pinnaces. We chased them up the Channel, and fought them again off Portland Bill, and then again off the Isle of Wight. Drake in the Revenge was fierce and daring, but the Marianna was often in the van, I had her fitted with culverins that could throw a nineteen-pounder right onto their decks at a thousand yards.

  “They hove off toward the French coast and we followed, until we had them trapped before Gravelines. I tell you, Lettie, that was a grand day! We brought so many of them down, and would have taken many prizes but a storm blew up and the wind changed and they got away before we could run them up onto the banks. They were lucky! I brought the Marianna back south as I was ordered to do, but most of the others in our squadron stayed on beating northward in pursuit. The Channel is full of ships, but the Most Fortunate Fleet has suffered much, that I can say for certain.”

  I looked over at Frank, wanting to tell him once again how proud I was of him, but knowing that he would only wave my praise aside. Unlike Robert, he did not seek the glory of victory or success, but to carry out the task, and to carry it out well and thoroughly. I thought, not for the first time, what a fine man my brother was. Yet even as he recounted his adventures I noticed that he still carried the mark of sorrow on his features. The old sadness from his youth, that had never left him. He was a widower, but had never loved his late wife, theirs had been a partnership based solely on commerce, the commerce of the sea. His heart had always belonged to the girl for whom his ship was named, his long lost Marianna.

  “It sounds as though you have them on the run, like frightened hares,” I said. “And what of the hundreds of barges full of Spanish footsoldiers that Robert told me of, have they been sighted as well?”

  Frank shook his head. “We have had no sign of them as yet. But when they come, they will find a strong army waiting at Tilbury.

  “Before I deliver you to father,” he added, “I must go to Rundle Head. I promised to talk with the men of the land watch there and take word of any sightings they may have made to Robert.”

  We rode to the coast and climbed a hill, leaving our mounts with the escort waiting below. Frank climbed nimbly, I more slowly and with some care.

  “Forgive me but I must go on ahead, with all speed,” Frank said, adding “I was due hours ago.”

  I nodded assent.

  The August day was fair, the sun hot on my back as I continued the ascent up Rundle Head. When I finally neared the top I paused, looking out across the expanse of dark blue water, a brisk wind lifting my skirt and threatening to pluck off my hat, which was tied securely under my chin. The water frothed with whitecaps—wild horses, we used to call them as children—and at the base of the outcropping, wave after wave rolled in to smash against the rocks, sending spray high into the air. The smell of the sea was strong and pungent. I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the welcome coolness, glad to catch my breath.

  As I looked down I caught sight of a small stretch of beach, and what looked like a tiny cottage built in against the rocks, away from the foreshore. A lone figure stood before the cottage, a woman dressed in black, one arm up to shade her eyes. Like me, she was looking out to sea.

  Turning my glance back toward the wide blue emptiness that stretched to the horizon, I was aware of the outline of a ship coming into view, rising and falling on the shifting rollers, her wide sails bellied out by the wind. One of the sails was tattered, and the wind blew through it, sending the shreds out like streamers.

  I heard shouting and looked over to where Frank stood with half a dozen other men, all watching the ship as I was. Then a second ship, smaller than the first and faster, hove into view, overtaking the other. There came the shattering boom of a gun. Was it from one of the two ships? I could not tell.

  As I watched, the figure on the beach below me caught my attention once again. She had begun to walk out toward the rocky shore. It crossed my mind that she intended to signal to the ships. Why? Was she a Spanish spy? Or was she luring them to their doom on the rocks?

  Squinting, I thought I could barely make out a man, leaning on the taffrail of the ship nearest the promontory. But then a wisp of spume arose to obscure my view.

  Clouds were scudding in across the Channel. I scanned the horizon for more ships but did not see another sail. Frank was waving to me, then clambering over the cliff edge toward where I stood.

  Out of breath when he reached me, he managed to gasp out, “See, there, it is the great Biscayan! I sank her twin off the Isle of Wight! And the other is her storeship. See how light in the water she rides! She is nearly empty. That means the Biscayan is out of arms and food. Without powder and shot and food, the fleet will have to refit or retire. I must get word to Robert—to father—to the queen.”

  He grabbed for my hand. But just then, as I turned to accompany him, I glanced down at the shore below, and saw the black-clad woman leap into the water.

  I gasped. “Frank! That woman! She’s going to drown!”

  “What woman?” His voice was gruff.

  “I’ve been watching her. She walked out along the sand. I thought she might be signaling to the ships. Now she’s jumped into the sea.”

  “A madwoman. Some madwoman.”

  “No, Frank, no.” I began to scramble down the hillside, in the direction of the beach below, dislodging rocks as I went. If Frank would not help the woman, I would.

  “Lettie! There is no time for this! We must get to Tilbury, to tell the good news!”

  But I went on, nearly falling as I half-slid, half-ran down the cliffside, my impatient brother following me, unable to catch up with me as we both plunged, nearly losing our balance, toward the wet yellow sands.

  FORTY-TWO

  I arrived first, my boots sinking down as I tried to run toward the water’s edge. Frank was calling out, but by this time he too could see the woman’s flailing arms as she fought the oncoming waves and tried to stay afloat. She was not far from us—the beach was narrow—but the sucking sand held me back, and I felt myself moving with frustrating slowness. Frank went past me. He was still shouting, but now his shouts were for the woman.

  “Hold on! You there! Hold on!”

  As I watched, still moving forward as quickly as I could, I saw Frank reach the shore and press on, running out along the slippery rocks to where the woman was fighting the waves, clutching at the flinty shingle, trying in vain to gain a handhold.

  Frank flung off his doublet and dove into the water. For a moment there was no sign of either the woman or my brother. Then, suddenly, both burst up into view, gasping, just as a wave crashed over them and I thought, they are both going to drown for certain.

  There was nothing I could do. I watched, I prayed. I waited for what seemed an age, willing the surge to recede.

  Eventually it did, leaving two supine bodies in its wake.

  Frank managed to get to his feet and, taking the woman in black by the wrists, dragged her up onto the sand until she was out of danger of another breaking wave. I went toward them.

  “Is she dead?” I called out.

  Instead of answering Frank turned the woman over onto her back, and looked down into her face, gently lifting away the long strands of black hair that obscured her features.

  He looked down, puzzled, then leaned down farther to look more closely.

  “It can’t be,” I heard him mutter. “It can’t be.” Then, more loudly, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Is she alive? Is she bre
athing?” I asked. But even as I said it I could see the rise and fall of her chest. And in a moment she opened her eyes.

  Frank was kneeling over her, and I knelt too.

  She saw us, she looked at Frank—and then she smiled. Such a smile as I had never before seen on a human face. And Frank smiled back, and took her in his arms, and wept.

  For there, on the rocky foreshore of that windswept beach, he had at last found his love.

  FORTY-THREE

  When the queen rode into Tilbury Camp on her proud, high-stepping white gelding, her head held nobly aloft, her lined, aging countenance full of cheer and exuberance, the silver corslet that encased her bony chest gleaming in the sunlight, such a cheer went up from the men that might have been heard twenty miles away in London.

  They roared, they clapped, they whistled into the rising wind off the river.

  “Gloriana! Gloriana!” came the sound again and again. “Long live Gloriana!”

  She rode in among them, her red wig glittering with diamonds and waving purple plumes, and halted to salute them as they stood in their ranks, with only the yeomen of her guard in close attendance.

  “You are all my guardsmen!” she shouted back to the cheering men. “I need no others! I know I am safe among you.”

  She raised her silver truncheon and shouted “Strike or be stricken” and once again an outcry rose from ten thousand throats, and echoed out over the camp and out to the palisaded walls and beyond to the river and the crowds gathered on its far shore.

  “See how she laughs in the face of danger,” I heard a man near me say. “See how brave she is, our dear old queen! She’s not a whit frightened of a few Spaniards!”

  From where I was standing inside Robert’s blue and purple pavilion I could peer out through a small opening and watch the soldiers standing in their ranks, the queen riding amid them, with Robert on his powerful grey stallion on her right hand and my Rob, her Master of the Horse, on her left.

  “The Great Lord, the Earl of Leicester,” I heard some voices call out as Robert passed. Hated he might be, and despised for his failure in Flanders, yet he was nonetheless the queen’s chosen champion in this tense time, and all the men in camp knew it. Despite his years, his scraggly white hair and beard and puffy scarlet cheeks, he carried the weight of command, he was the queen’s man. On this day he disguised his inward dismay well, and waved to the soldiers with the hearty enthusiasm of a much younger man. Only I could detect the lines of worry on his sagging features. And when the queen’s horse stumbled, nearly throwing her, and alarm spread through the massed ranks, it was Robert who was at her side in an instant, grasping her by her corslet and arm and saving her from a fall.

  “No hurt! No hurt!” she cried, grinning. “Milord Lieutenant is at hand!”

  I saw that Rob joined in the applause and shouting that greeted these words, graciously yielding the pride of place to Robert though he himself was by far the nimbler rider and his mount, I happened to know, the faster steed.

  The contrast between Robert’s cumbersome, stout figure and my son’s graceful svelte form could not have been more pronounced. My husband, once the most handsome man at court, had long since yielded that honor to young Rob, whose beauty was of a different order entirely. Robert had the dark, empassioned countenance of an irresistibly seductive gypsy, while Rob’s face, with its wide brow, deeply thoughtful dark eyes and sensitive, curving mouth was the face of an alluring poet, manly yet tender, even visionary. Not for him, on that afternoon, the concerns that plagued Robert: worries over the army’s small size (Robert had been expecting forty to fifty thousand men to come to Tilbury Camp), over the dearth of arms and provisions, over the as-yet-uncompleted bridge of boats to connect Tilbury Fort with Gravesend, where, according to the reports of spies, the Spaniards were expected to land.

  I knew what weighed on my husband’s mind: how could the queen be kept safe? And when would the great fleet arrive, what day and what hour, with its accompanying horde of barges loaded with Spanish fighting men?

  When I arrived in the camp with Frank and Marianna I was told that my father had arranged for all of us in the family to be sheltered in the largest of Robert’s three pavilions, where we would be guarded by a troop of eighty elderly veterans, volunteers from the old soldiers’ home Robert had built. Frank went at once to convey his information about the Spanish ships to the queen’s officers, taking Marianna with him, but I went right to the largest of the blue and purple pavilions, and once inside I found Penelope and her two oldest boys, Dorothy and her little girl, and my sister Cecelia, who to my amazement came up to me and kissed me on the cheek. Whaffer, standing guard at the tent flap, nodded to me while my father, nearly bald and stooped and looking even older than his seventy-four years, came up to me and wrapped his thin arms around my shoulders.

  “I should be out there, among the men, following your husband’s orders,” he confided, his cracking voice forlorn. “I can still shoulder a musket, after all, and every man is needed. But his officers sent me back here. They said I would only be in the way when the fighting started. I can still carry water, though. They are going to let me carry water to the wounded.”

  I quickly learned that Penelope’s husband Lord Rich had raised a band of two hundred men from his estates and was training with them, there in the camp. As a pikeman. Dorothy’s husband Ned was helping to build the bridge of boats. And Cecelia, fat as she was (Walter’s old phrase for her, “fat as butter,” came to mind unbidden), was a good horsewoman despite her girth and had volunteered to carry messages.

  “What can you do, Lettie?” she asked me.

  “Isn’t it enough that she is here to support her brave husband and son?” was my father’s tart reply. I had to smile, as I had never before heard my father defend me against his favorite Cecelia. Apparently I had earned his favor at last.

  The tumult in the camp went on for days, and each day the queen, who was staying at a nearby manor house, came to visit the men and hearten them with her cries of “Strike, or be stricken!” and her impetuous bolts into their midst on her white horse.

  On the third day a shaggy-looking, dirty man was brought in chains to stand before Robert and the queen. As he passed, dragging the heavy, clanking metal attached to his wrists and ankles, the soldiers spat on him and worse, shouting “Traitor! Judas! Scoundrel!” and throwing him to the ground again and again. As he struggled to rise I caught a glimpse of his bleeding face and stony, glaring eyes.

  It was Roger Wilbraham!

  “We found him trying to sell his white eagle to some fishermen off Gravesend,” said Frank at my elbow. “The Spanish buyers never arrived, so he tried to find others. We took him. He’ll be hanged at first light.”

  Cecelia came out of the pavilion and, marching up to her former husband, began beating him with her riding crop.

  “See here,” Elizabeth shouted to Cecelia. “Let the rogue pass. He’ll find himself without a head soon enough.”

  Reluctantly Cecelia obeyed, but not before she had flung a curse at Wilbraham, and added a swift kick. Then she retreated behind the tent flap.

  “My good people,” Elizabeth’s voice rang out, only slightly hoarse from having addressed the men of Tilbury loudly and often in recent days, “you may well wonder why it is that I stay here among you, rather than seek the safety of a strong castle far from the coast.” She tossed her head. “Well, this is why! Englishmen do not run, nor English women neither. And I am safest here, where traitors are brought to die for their treasons and good men are gathered to defend our land.”

  When the shouting and clapping had died down she went on. “Besides, I am told this very hour by our brave mariners that the mighty Spanish fleet is going down to destruction. Their ships are leaking, they lack powder and shot, they have lost their rigging and many men have perished. Their decks are full of wreckage and the sea is a grave for many a great ship. They have gone north in hopes of finding safe harbor and threaten us no more.”

 
Rising as high as she could in her saddle, Elizabeth cried out in her loudest voice, “THE LORD GOD HAS DESTROYED OUR ENEMIES!!”

  Now the cheer that broke was like a mighty thunderclap, a great crash of sound, a blow upon the ear, a noise so shattering that I had to cover my ears with my hands and squeeze my eyes shut to endure it.

  “And while we must remain vigilant,” Elizabeth said, her small light eyes shining as she spoke, “and pray for His continuing miraculous favor, I am resolved, whatever comes, to live or die amongst you all, and lay down for my God and my kingdom and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust.”

  In that moment I could not deny that, for all her petty malice and deceit, all her jealousy and selfishness, her vanity, her infuriating need to control and torment those around her, she was marvelous. I joined the cheering, and clapped until my hands were nearly raw, and embraced all those around me, Penelope and Dorothy and my weeping old father, and Frank and Marianna too, and sent up a prayer of thanks for what we had been spared. For even though I had seen with my own eyes the menacing galleons that threatened us, I was no longer afraid.

  “Let them do their worst,” I heard Frank say. “Let them come again if they dare. We will stand firm with our queen, and die as one, before we let them take our England.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  My Robert!

  It was all too much for him, the constant effort, the strain, the fear. The ceaseless work of superintending the military camp. He collapsed into Rob’s arms, just as Rob was helping him try to mount his horse despite the pain of his swollen foot. Rob, Chris and Whaffer carried him to his pavilion and from there he was brought home to Wanstead.

  Three physicians were in attendance when he arrived, along with the bonesetter Monsieur Ezard. Robert was put to bed in our large airy bedchamber, dressed in his soft nightgown of patterned velvet, the windows closed to keep out the first chill draughts of autumn.