by Susan Kay
“Come here,” she said. He came back to the bed and lay down beside her dully.
“There is a better way to kill Elizabeth,” she whispered, “a way that may just leave your head on your shoulders for you to enjoy it.”
When she had told him, he laughed and slapped her bare buttocks and told her she was an impertinent little minx. She could see he had not taken her suggestion seriously and at the time it had angered her, made her aware of the inferiority of her position as his mistress. But she had had the good sense not to show it and they had parted amicably.
“My dear,” he had said, in a sudden excess of maudlin gratitude, “if only it were possible.”
The seed was safely sown, and each unkind rebuff from Elizabeth would nurture it tenderly—Lettice was quietly confident of it.
Now she slipped off the couch and began to dress slowly, fastening the lawn ruff over the red love bites on her neck, and smiling with soft malice into a tiny pocket mirror.
“You had better be careful, Elizabeth, my bastard bitch cousin,” she whispered to her reflection, “very, very careful with your precious possessions from now on, or I may deal you a blow which will make you wish you were dead.”
* * *
While the court was on progress at Leicester’s castle of Kenilworth later that year, news came of an event which seemed calculated to destroy the new alliance between England and France.
Elizabeth was out riding with a small party of courtiers when a despatch from Francis Walsingham, her ambassador in Paris, was brought to her side.
Leicester brought his horse alongside hers as she opened the seal and began to read. He saw the look of incredulous fury which stole over her face and heard her curse vehemently under her breath.
“Bad news, madam?”
“I must return at once!” she said curtly and swung her horse’s head around. They rode back in total silence and he hurried after her to her private apartments, where she flung herself into a chair.
“Find Burghley—have him brought to me at once, and the rest of you women, out of my sight. Leicester—you stay!”
She was in no mood to be questioned, that was obvious, so he took up his position beside her chair and waited until Burghley hobbled into the room.
“Sit down,” she said before he got the chance to bow, “and read this.”
Burghley took the despatch. As he read, his white eyebrows knit together and his normally bland features hardened.
While he absorbed details of the most unprecedented religious massacre in history which had taken place on St. Bartholomew’s eve in France, Elizabeth paraphrased the more horrific passages for Leicester’s benefit.
“…the Protestants lie dead in their thousands, the nobility in Paris, the rest in villages throughout France. Women, children, and babies—yes, babies!—were dragged from their homes and butchered in the streets—the River Seine is choked and rotten with festering bodies. And all done at the hands of the French king—or, to be more precise, his damnable mother—simply because she botched the assassination of a political rival.”
“Not Coligny?” murmured Leicester, aghast. Coligny was the leader of the French Protestants.
“Yes, he’s dead! The rest were murdered for fear of revenge when blood lust took control. Catherine has wiped out the entire Protestant faction in France—the Puritans here will make an endless meal out of this!”
Burghley looked up from the despatch and announced with awesome pomp, “Madam, this is the greatest crime since the Crucifixion.”
She had expected this and her glance was suddenly hostile.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Burghley, spare me the noble sentiments—I happen to know that were this only a massacre of Catholics you personally would be lauding it to the heavens. Why is it that all bigots are such hypocrites?”
Burghley flushed as red as a beetroot at her rebuke and Leicester was unable to resist a smile. There was an uncomfortable silence as the Queen swept angrily up and down the narrow stone room across an oriental carpet, then stopped and glared at Leicester, who turned off his smile hastily.
“Well? And what have you to say about this—as if I couldn’t guess!”
Catching sight of Burghley’s pleading glance, he coughed and took up his cue at once.
“Madam, when the news of this gets out the fury against the Scottish Queen will become uncontainable.”
She put her hands on her hips in what he read as an uncomfortably threatening gesture.
“You dare to tell me to my face that Mary is responsible for this outrage?—the woman is a friendless prisoner, not a second Eve.”
“The Daughter of Debate can scarcely be called friendless,” Burghley interposed quietly. “She is the Queen of the Castle and her friends will be held responsible for this, justly or not.”
“Then God preserve her from her friends, my lords, as I once prayed he would preserve me from mine!”
It came on an angry note and the two men exchanged looks of alarm. These odd moments of personal and political sympathy with her rival were quite beyond their comprehension. Leicester cleared his throat hesitantly.
“Surely Your Majesty will not continue to protect her after this? France is in no position to object to her execution now—it’s the perfect opportunity to be rid of her.”
“I fear I must agree with Leicester, Your Majesty,” said Burghley drily and the Queen laughed outright.
“I suppose that is indeed a miracle—the two of you in agreement after all these years! But you waste your breath, both of you. I will not take responsibility for the judicial execution of a sister queen.”
“Assassination then, madam,” suggested Leicester, a trifle too smoothly.
Elizabeth frowned.
“If she dies mysteriously in an English prison every finger will point to me.”
“She could be returned to Scotland,” said Burghley calmly. “The Scottish Regent would no doubt be glad to execute her for us—at a price, of course.”
Elizabeth walked away from them, as though suddenly deep in thought. Whatever the price, it would be too high, she would see to that. Once it was accepted that a sovereign was answerable for common crimes, like any ordinary man, the whole concept of monarchy would be in the melting pot. She wondered why they could not see what a dangerous precedent it would set. They were too obsessed with Mary to see the issue objectively, worrying at her life like dogs with a bone, blind to all reason. Even a man as astute as Burghley was unable to divorce himself from the present and see that Mary dead might ultimately be a great deal more dangerous than Mary alive.
She glanced at the two men, so dear to her in different ways, both desperately trying to read her mind. The advice they gave was but an echo of what she could expect to hear from her Council and the country at large. “Cut off her head and make no more ado with her,” Parliament had said months ago. “The axe must give the next warning.” One day there was going to be real trouble with Parliament; Elizabeth sensed it in the growing outspokenness of the Commons. Each session seemed just a little more difficult to rule than the last, testing her powers of autocracy, making her stoop to flattery and dissemblance. She was not afraid of the Lords—they were easily brought to book—but she had a deep, instinctive wariness of conflict with the Lower House. Their readiness to consider judicial disposal of a monarch filled her with foreboding, for what was done once might be done again.
So—play for time now—dissipate their energies on a wild goose chase by pretending interest in Burghley’s plan. Negotiate terms for Mary’s execution in Scotland, knowing she could thwart them whenever she chose—indeed, she could probably rely on the greedy treachery of the Regent to do that for her. And in the end there would be another negation, one of those perfect impasses for which she had gained a formidable reputation.
She turned to Burghley and sighed.
�
�You may approach the Regent, my lord, but be discreet. I shall want exact details of his terms before we proceed any further.”
Burghley exchanged a quick look of triumph with Leicester, and Elizabeth bit her lip to curb a smile. How easy it was to manoeuvre them all when she wished, little men—little chessboard men—who never felt the hand that moved them.
“As for the French,” she continued calmly, “my ports will naturally be open to refugees—but there are to be no attacks on French shipping. A little restraint now will salvage the alliance.”
“But not the marriage, of course,” said Leicester aggressively.
“No, not the marriage, I fear.” She answered Leicester without looking at him and glanced obliquely at Burghley. “I will leave it to you, Robin, to keep the French Ambassador out of my sight until I can bring myself to receive him civilly.”
“It will be my pleasure, madam.” Leicester bowed and retired in accordance with her gesture. When he had gone, she sat down again and looked up at Burghley shrewdly.
“How long before we can resume the marriage negotiations?”
“When the outcry has died down, madam—six months, perhaps a year—who can say?”
She nodded and picked up the despatch once more, glancing at it with a frown.
“What kind of maniac can murder children and believe that God will say ‘Well done!’”
Burghley shrugged.
“Madam, when a country tolerates two religions forever at war with each other, I fear such atrocities are inevitable.”
“One castle must fall, eh?” She glanced at him sardonically. “I hope that’s not the preamble to a cry for more persecution here.”
“Madam, I feel most strongly on the subject. Do you wish to see St. Bartholomew’s Eve repeated here in England?”
“Don’t take that sanctimonious tone with me, Burghley. You had your way after the Excommunication Bull, against my better judgement I may add. I advise you not to make capital out of this, if you value your place.”
He bowed, his dignity ruffled as only the Queen was capable of ruffling it.
“I am, of course, Your Majesty’s to command in all things,” he said stiffly.
She gave him a strange, compelling look, a piercing gaze that suddenly made him feel very uneasy and caused him to drop his eyes to the floor.
“Just see that you remember that, my friend—at all times.”
The words went on ringing in his ears as he left the room and he was suddenly rather relieved to get away from her. It was as though he had received a warning not to overreach himself again.
* * *
Fenelon, the French Ambassador, spent three days of ostracism at Woodstock, kicking his heels among hostile glances and waiting uneasily for a summons from the Queen. When at last he entered the Privy Chamber, he augured the worst from the stony silence which greeted him and he walked awkwardly past rows of courtiers, all dressed in mourning black, who pointedly turned their faces away from him as he approached. His own footsteps clicking nervously across the floor seemed to be the only sound in that tense room.
At the end of the Chamber the Queen awaited him, likewise dressed in black and surrounded by a semicircle of long-faced councillors; her own face was pale and sad and very stern. She advanced a few steps to meet Fenelon, drawing him coldly aside to a window embrasure.
“Well?” she said quietly, looking at him with just a small glimmer of sympathy. “You had better make your excuses, if you have any.”
Whatever diplomatic suavity had been left to him deserted him abruptly beneath the glare of so many hostile eyes.
“Madam,” he began hesitantly, “it would seem a conspiracy was discovered against the King’s life. Justice demanded the most severe reprisals—”
“Did it demand the murder of women and children—the slaughter of babes in arms?” she inquired coolly.
He flushed with humiliation and muttered something hopelessly inadequate about the confusion of the moment.
“The King and Queen Mother,” he continued hastily, “are most anxious that you of all people, madam, should understand that no enmity was entertained against the Protestant powers in Europe.”
Her eyes were cynical, hard as polished stones.
“I fear those who led your King to abandon his natural subjects will easily persuade him to abandon his alliance with a foreign queen.”
“Madam, my King has sworn to take revenge for this outrage. I swear he had no hand in the matter, no say at all in this as in other—”
“Enough.” She laid her hand on his sleeve, but her command was gentle and he realised that his efforts to exonerate his master would only reveal the unfortunate man for the hagridden mother’s boy he was. “Tell your master that I grieve for him,” she continued gently.
There was something quite genuine in her voice as she said that and the warm pressure of her fingers on his hand was remarkably reassuring. He watched her leave the room with regret and as he turned and saw the hatchet-faced council descending upon him, like a pack of black wolves closing in for attack, he was even more sorry to see her go. By the time they had finished with him, he wrote home that no one would speak to him “but the Queen, who treats me with her accustomed urbanity.”
Elizabeth, satisfied that she had handled a sore situation with kid gloves, made a mental note to recall that Puritan hothead, Walsingham, from France before his rudely expressed outrage earned him a dagger in the back. The recent promotion of Burghley to Lord Treasurer had left a gap in the Secretariat which would need more than one man to fill it. She had no liking at all for Francis Walsingham, but he knew his job and did not object to footing his own bills for his expenses. There was not a great deal of that sort of loyalty about and she was inclined to agree with Burghley that Walsingham would be a fitting choice as Secretary—always supposing she could stomach that long Puritan face about her apartments at all hours. Certainly she could make far better use of the man’s fanaticism at home—a less able brain and a more tactful tongue would serve her better in Paris for the moment.
* * *
Burghley sent his own brother-in-law up to Scotland with the offer of Mary’s life and found the Regent interested, but greedy; in return for staging the execution he would expect three thousand English troops as a safeguard and an annual payment equal to that being spent on Mary’s upkeep at the moment. In short, the English would have to sanction the deed to such an extent that they might as well have done it in England.
Having made his outrageous demands, the Regent promptly dropped dead after dining out; Scotland dissolved into chaos once more and the negotiations faded into limbo, to the intense chagrin of Elizabeth’s ministers.
Elizabeth, tongue in cheek at the failure, moved Mary to closer confinement at Sheffield Castle, doubled the guard, and talked no more of murder, judicial or otherwise, continuing to protect the woman Walsingham castigated as the “bosom serpent.”
The months following the St. Bartholomew massacre were curiously quiet and uneventful. Days were long and memories were short, the outcry against Mary slowly died. But when Elizabeth talked of reopening marriage negotiations with France, Leicester was truly alarmed. Throughout her reign, suitors had risen and fallen with the ceaseless regularity of the tide, to be used shamelessly and then cast aside, but this little Frenchman seemed inclined to linger on the scene with remarkable persistence. The Queen’s interest grew steadily and that broody look was more prominent than ever. It occurred to Leicester that if she was really sickening for a severe attack of maternal instinct, he would do well to incubate it on his home ground.
So in the summer of 1575, with the desperation of a gambler who has placed everything on a long shot, he threw a fortune into preparing a fairytale scene for her at Kenilworth, an entertainment which was to become a legend. His great castle was a show-piece of scintillating grandeur, a brilliant setting a
waiting the finishing jewel; and no one was left in any doubt of the identity of that jewel.
When Elizabeth entered the castle to a cannon salute, the great blue-dialled clock with gold figures that stood high and solitary on Caesar’s Tower was stopped; and at the same moment every clock in the castle was stopped also. “Time stands still for you,” he whispered and saw her smile.
It was the hottest summer in living memory and the glittering pageants shimmered beneath a July heat haze. The air was filled with the savage roars of bears in the baiting pit; music, dancing, plays, and masques passed the days away in endless frivolity and at night the black summer sky was hidden behind a multicoloured blaze of fireworks which lit the countryside for miles around. Night after night the castle windows shimmered in the light of thousands of perfumed candles, all supported in glass candelabra, while within the company dined from a choice of three hundred dishes served on plates of crystal.
One sultry evening, Elizabeth stood on the long drawbridge which spanned the castle moat and watched the Lady of the Lake float towards her on an artificial island lit with tiny lights. A mermaid drew a tail eighteen feet long through the dark water and on the back of a giant mechanical dolphin Arion prepared to address his Queen. A hush fell over the watching court for the climax of this spectacular water extravaganza, but Leicester’s hospitality had been generous, even to minions, and Arion was gloriously drunk. At some critical point in his speech he forgot his lines and pulled off his mask, waved it at the Queen, and informed her that he was none of Arion.
“Not I, ma’am—honest Harry Goldingham, that’s me!”
The Queen glanced at Leicester’s murderous face and went into paroxysms of laughter, from which she eventually emerged sufficiently to inform honest Harry that he was the best part of the show.
Leicester was aggrieved as they strolled back into the gardens in the summer dusk.
“That fool—that village idiot!—I’ll hang him fort his!” he grumbled.
Elizabeth glanced sideways at him with amusement.
