by Susan Kay
A clamour of contradictory advice was showered on the angry young aristocrat at the centre of the dispute.
“Now the Council are warned of our intentions we daren’t delay, Robin. You must strike at once.”
“Or fly, my lord,” suggested Sir Charles Danvers, a small stocky man with nervous eyes that rolled doubtingly over his patron’s face. “Take a hundred men into Wales and secure some ports.”
Essex tapped his spent pipe angrily into the hearth and spat. Smoking was a filthy habit—he wished it had never become so fashionable. All Raleigh’s fault of course—
“I have no intention of fleeing like a knave,” he observed flatly, lounging against the chimney-piece and pulling fractiously at the silver fringe that adorned his doublet. “I have been wronged—grossly wronged by the Queen and I mean to have my grievances redressed. The people will support my cause—”
“But, my lord, you have three hundred men armed and waiting—sufficient to attack the court tonight and seize the Queen.”
“The Queen is not enough alone. We need Cecil and Raleigh and the rest of the pack—they could be scattered anywhere.” Essex strode from the hearth and snapped his fingers to his secretary. “Temple—find out how matters stand for us in the city.”
Within an hour Temple was back, sweating with his haste, to tell them that a thousand London militia could be roused to fight for the Earl’s cause.
“Tomorrow, my lord—tomorrow.”
And so by dawn messengers were striding through the narrow streets of the capital, summoning his supporters for the final encounter between Essex and his Queen.
* * *
At ten o’clock on that frozen February morning the Privy Council’s delegation arrived and made a futile attempt to push their way through the milling crowds assembled outside the main gates of Essex House. They were kicked and bruised and length admitted through a side entrance, there to be jostled through crowds even louder and thicker in the courtyard. A servant bore the Great Seal of England, symbolic of their authority in this mob, and he clutched it to his chest to protect it from the mocking hands which grabbed at it. They were four in number and they were lost among a press of three hundred men who were saddling horses and distributing arms.
Oblivious to their danger, they shoved and elbowed their way to where Essex stood, surrounded by a knot of cronies.
“My lord!” yelled the Lord Keeper, Egerton, above the hoots and jeers of the crowd. “My lord, what is the meaning of this unlawful assembly?”
“My life was sought, sir,” said Essex haughtily, for this was the line he had opted to take with the people. “I was to have been murdered in my bed.”
Egerton blanched at the blatant lie, but continued courteously, determined to avoid a confrontation if it could be avoided. “My lord, the law exists to protect subjects from such dangers. If you would have recourse to the legitimate channels—”
He was interrupted by Southampton, who spat and informed the crowd loudly that he himself had been murderously set upon by Lord Grey, who was Cecil’s man, only a month before. So much for justice!
“Grey was punished for his assault,” insisted the Lord Chief Justice bravely, as the crowd began to stamp. “My lord, may we talk privately? I give you my word I will be most happy to carry any legitimate grievance of yours to the Queen and see it redressed.”
At this the crowd shifted forward in an angry, ugly mood and began to roar abuse and advice.
“Away, my lord, you lose time!”
“They abuse you, my lord—they betray you.”
Girding his courage to the hilt, the Lord Keeper replaced his hat with dignity and turned to address the chanting crowd.
“I command you all, on your allegiance, to lay down your weapons and depart,” he roared.
Shrugging his shoulders, Essex turned his back and strode into the house. As the crowd surged forward, brandishing weapons and screaming, “Kill them—throw the Great Seal out of the window!” the Privy Councillors made a narrow escape in his wake and bolted the great door.
Essex was waiting for them by the main staircase with a gracious smile.
“If you will be pleased to accompany me, gentlemen, I shall show you to a room where we can talk with more privacy.”
The Lord Keeper inclined his head, closing his lips on a sigh of relief, and the little party swarmed up the stairs at the Earl’s heels. He escorted them to his study, and then, with his famed courtesy, stood back to let them enter first. One by one the councillors smiled nervously as they walked past him into the disordered chamber.
When the last was safely in, still beaming effusively, Essex slammed the door shut on them, locked it, and called for a guard of musketeers to be placed outside.
Shocked silence was followed by a volley of indignant cries from the other side of the door and Essex began to laugh hysterically.
“My lords—my lords, be patient a while. I promise faithfully not to keep you waiting. I go now to take London, but I give you my word on this: I’ll be back in half an hour at most.”
As the uncanny echo of his laughter died away down the corridor, Egerton moved away from the door and slumped down on a stool.
“He was never stable, my lords—I fear his brain is utterly overset. Her Majesty is in the hands of a madman.” He bowed his head and continued quietly, “There is nothing more we can do now, but to pray for her deliverance.”
Essex’s boots thundered on the bare wooden staircase as he ran down the steps two at a time and burst into the courtyard, waving his hat in mad triumph.
The mob stamped and clapped a welcome.
“To the court!” they yelled. “To the court!”
At court, less than twenty minutes distance away, the Queen was defenceless but for her personal guard. He had only to march west, surrounding the palace, cutting her off from outside aid, and she would be entirely in his power.
He paused at the gates of Essex House for a moment, and then, with deliberate determination, turned his horse towards the capital city.
“To the court!” screamed the mob in desperation. “To the court!”
But they screamed in vain.
Essex, stubborn and opinionated to the last, rode east to take London from his Queen.
* * *
They told all this to Elizabeth who sat very calm at dinner in Whitehall Palace and they saw the faint, knowing smile which hovered for a brief moment on the thin line of her lips.
He had had her at his mercy in that one moment, but now her sure instinct warned her he had thrown that chance away. He had turned to win London—London, the city she had held in the palm of her hand for nearly fifty years. Oh, what a fool he was, a blind misguided child; her heart ached with the bitter knowledge of how this all must end. She had tried to avert it—God alone knew how she had tried! But there was no time to spare now for heart-searching and regret, there was room only for action, bold decision, and calm, unquestioned authority. Suddenly, without conscious effort, she found herself possessed by all three qualities. Confidence was what was needed to rally her supporters and stabilise her position; and confidence was what she would give them.
“God who placed me on this throne will preserve me on it,” she said calmly, smiling at Cecil. “I shall not sleep tonight until I hear that they are all under lock and key.”
She picked up a chicken wing and began to issue a series of crisp and businesslike instructions for the defence of the city.
* * *
London had not seen a rebellion for nearly half a century and the few laggard citizens straggling home to dinner from the Sunday service at St. Paul’s regarded the rebel cavalcade with polite bewilderment. A few cheered halfheartedly; some waved, for there was no treason in a wave after all; and then the passed quietly on to their homes and their food. Excitement was all very well in its place, but London had its prio
rities. Little boys, eyeing the armed body with awe and envy, were swept in off the streets by angry, irritated mothers who were tired of calling them. Soon the position was horribly clear, as Essex rode up the filthy streets in despair, soaked with sweat and calling for a fresh shirt. What the devil was amiss with this lethargic, chicken-hearted multitude that had once roared itself hoarse in support of him?
While they rested in Fenchurch Street, a royal herald roamed the twisting roads, promising the Queen’s pardon to all followers who deserted the Earl’s cause.
“A herald will proclaim anything for a few shillings,” jeered Essex loudly, but behind his back his men were already creeping away down side streets, seeing the way the cat had jumped.
It was useless. Even Essex could see that, as he struggled with his dwindling force back to Lud Gate. The Council had been busy on the Queen’s orders and now a small band of pikemen barred their way, repulsing all their frantic efforts to break the line and pass. The Queen’s men were moving in to trap the little band of traitors, like rats in a maze.
Back up Lud Gate Hill they fled from the pikes, desperate for some means of escape from this dreadful fiasco; but Friday Street had been barred with chains against them. At length a few citizens came out of their houses and quietly raised the chains to let the shattered band creep away down to the Thames. They scrambled with undignified haste into the little boats which were moored there and struggled back to Essex House through the falling dusk.
“We’re not lost yet,” muttered Essex grimly. “We have the Privy Councillors as hostages—we can bargain.”
But when they got back, it was to find that the birds had flown the coop, freed behind their backs. He had no more cards to play and the Queen’s forces were already surrounding Essex House and demanding his surrender. He flew to his room and began feverishly burning all his incriminating correspondence, among it a letter from King James, that alone would be sufficient to claim his head.
At the end of a brief siege, the rebels left the house one by one, fell on their knees, and surrendered their swords to the Lord High Admiral, who waited grimly in the light of the flickering torches.
At three in the morning Essex and Southampton were removed from Lambeth Palace to the Tower; and at Whitehall Raleigh bowed before the Queen and informed her that the day’s business was at an end.
“A senseless ingrate has at last revealed what has been long in his mind,” she said bitterly to the French Ambassador.
An hour later the candles in her bedchamber were finally extinguished; snuffed out like tiny traitors in the dark.
* * *
The trial was over and a silence descended on Westminster Hall, as the new Lord Treasurer declared sentence on the Earls of Essex and Southampton.
“You shall both be led from hence to the place whence you came and there remain during Her Majesty’s pleasure; from thence to be drawn upon a hurdle through the midst of the city and so to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck and taken down alive—your bodies to be quartered and your heads and quarters to be disposed of at Her Majesty’s pleasure.” The Lord Treasurer paused and added with grim irony, “And so God have mercy on your souls.”
Southampton was visibly trembling, his face gaunt and deathly white, but Essex walked out of the crowded hall like a man in a trance.
He could not believe she had let it go so far; he had hoped to be spared the indignity of public trial. But execution—she could not do it, surely she could not do it. Why, all these years he had only to pout and pester and at length she gave in, for peace and quiet, as a weary mother does to spare herself the tantrums of a spoilt child. He saw himself clearly in his own mind for the first time then—saw what she had made of him; it was all that his mother had feared, and worse. He had not lost his manhood in the Queen’s service—he had simply never attained it; she had warped and stunted his natural growth. So much that he had missed in her was clear to him now, above all that dark look in her eyes as far back as that evening after Leicester’s death when he had first claimed her against her spoken wish. He could not deny that she had tried to warn him.
Partner me now and I promise you will live to regret it.
He had never given those words a moment’s serious thought, but now he dwelt on them with morbid fascination and saw how relentlessly she had danced him to his death.
He had admitted publicly during his trial that the Queen would never be safe while he lived. He had no idea what insane impulse had prompted him to stand there and sign his own death warrant, when he longed so passionately for life. Something had compelled him to speak, and as soon as he had spoken he had known he was a dead man.
“I have nothing left,” he said hopelessly after the trial, “but that which I must pay the Queen.”
* * *
She sat alone with the death warrant before her on the desk, her chin propped in her hands as she stared, unseeing, into the fire.
The room was deathly silent except for the occasional crackle of the flaming logs in the hearth—she had always hated coal. The windows were patterned with white frost and beyond them the February morning lay bleak and indifferent to all that would be decided within this room today. She could hear the wind rattling the casements and her own restless, shallow breathing, the echo of her rapid heartbeat thudding dully in her head. In spite of her furs and the blazing fire, she was shivering and her hands were blue with cold. She felt frozen inside, a block of ice which no fire could ever hope to penetrate.
Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, Queen of England…
She could get no further than the first line of the warrant, but she knew what it said. He was to enjoy the privilege of his rank and die by the axe; no hanging, no quartering—they should not butcher that beautiful body.
He was to die virtually alone, for she had shown mercy to most of the captured rebels. Of the eighty-five arrested, thirty-two had been released without penalty and in all only six were to go to the scaffold. Southampton, that miserable, timid, lily-livered youth, she had spared to life imprisonment, moved unbearably by the sight of his mother, debasing herself at her feet and begging for his life.
Lettice too had knelt, and wept and begged. She ought to have enjoyed that, savoured the sweet revenge of seeing the She-wolf on her knees, a pitiful supplicant, grovelling without shame before her. Yet strangely there was no triumph, only a tired, sick sense of pity that compelled her to raise the weeping woman to her feet and try to speak kindly.
Lettice clung to her hand and made it wet with tears, till she was aware of a scalding dampness seeping beneath her rings.
“Madam, I beg you—pardon him. You have shown mercy to others, why not to him?”
“I will not pardon him,” said the Queen unsteadily, “because I cannot.”
Lettice’s eyes, huge in a white face and mad with grief, centred on her with one mute question: Why?
Why? Because his death was inevitable, unavoidable, written in the stars a lifetime ago and sealed by another death. A life for a life. They all expected her to pardon him because, after all, his rebellion had been so pathetic, so futile, that it seemed a gross exaggeration to even term it treason. There had been times when she was sorely tempted to do it, to shy away from this dreadful act and hope that he had learnt his lesson. But he would not learn—he was not free to do so. Like her, he was caught up and controlled by a dreadful whirlpool from the past—the chosen sacrifice which would expiate her father’s crime in murdering her mother. He had no choice but to work against her; and now she had no choice but to kill him for it.
All her life with slow and fatalistic tread had led her to this moment. The time had come for her to cut off the head of the one she loved and to do it almost without hesitation, cold-bloodedly, self-righteously atoning for Anne’s death, as Anne’s spirit relentlessly demanded. Leicester had narrowly escaped the satisfaction of this morbid vendetta against manho
od. Leicester she had loved too much, while Essex she loved just too little to spare him from his allotted fate.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad…
She took up her pen and paused, looked back to that night after Leicester’s death when he had sealed his doom with that irresistible arrogance, remembering how her heart had leapt in recognition of that which she had sought throughout her restless life. The man who would make a crazy bid to master her; the man she could kill for it. She had taken him—young, high-bred, unstable—and sent him reeling into an abyss of insanity. Utter madness, men had castigated his last rash act of rebellion—she alone knew how true the charge was and how great the weight of guilt was on her tortured soul.
And yet she could not help herself. She seemed to stand apart from that other self, grimly fascinated, and watch a black-haired, black-eyed woman scrawl the flamboyant signature of Elizabeth of England in letters two inches high at the head of the warrant.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, does what I have done
Does what I have done…
She laid the pen down. For a moment she sat very still, staring at nothing, then she got up and went blindly through into her bed chamber.
It was empty; she had already sent all her women away. Beside her bed the casket still stood, silent, glittering, magnificent as a miniature tomb. She unlocked it and searched beneath her most precious possessions for the little headless doll.
The black satin skirts had faded to silver grey with age and were creased with long confinement. She shook them out and smoothed the creases, stood for an endless moment staring at the doll, before she turned and flung it into the hearth where a great log fire burned.
The flames leapt up in a sudden flare as the material caught, shrivelled and disintegrated around a charred stick.
