The Men Who Would Be King

by Josephine Ross

  Rumors were rife; Elizabeth was treating Alençon with every sign of affection, and the courtship seemed to be prospering, but something was wrong. Leicester should have been glowering with jealous anger; instead, he was as courteous and affable as could be, and he announced in public that the only way for Elizabeth to “secure the tranquility of England” was for her to marry Alençon. Such complaisance could only mean that he was confident the queen would do nothing of the sort. Walsingham, who had opposed the match so long and so vehemently, seemed equally well disposed towards Alençon. Elizabeth was enjoying a political pretense as she dallied with her French prince, and they knew it; however, the remarkable scene that took place on November 22 was enough to shake their equanimity.

  On November 21 Alençon and his company “displayed, not discontent alone, but entire disillusionment as to the marriage taking place.” Their grim faces and resentful murmurs would not foster a spirit of amity between France and England; Elizabeth promptly took action to show her suitor how much in earnest she was. On the following day at eleven o’clock in the morning, she was strolling in a gallery of the palace with Alençon, while Leicester and Walsingham stood near. The French ambassador approached, and told her that his master Henry III had ordered him to “hear from the Queen’s own lips her intentions with regard to marrying his brother.” Elizabeth did not hesitate. Regally, decisively, she spoke the words that one suitor after another had waited to hear, throughout the twenty-three years of her reign. “You may write this to the King,” she told the ambassador clearly, “the Duke of Alençon shall be my husband.” She turned to the astonished Alençon, kissed him on the mouth, and drew a ring from her finger, which she gave to him “as a pledge.” Incredulous and delighted, he gave her a ring of his own in return, and then the queen summoned her ladies and gentlemen from the presence chamber to the gallery, “repeating to them, in a loud voice, what she had previously said.” The gloom of the day before had turned to rapture. Alençon and his followers were “extremely overjoyed,” and a messenger was immediately dispatched to carry the news to Henry III. Leicester and Walsingham must have exchanged anxious glances as the little French prince proudly escorted his aged betrothed past the congratulating courtiers.

  The Queen of England had capitulated at last. She had accepted the proposals of a suitor young enough to be her son; it must have been a strange, unreal sensation for her to hear herself agreeing, at last, to marry. But unreality was the keynote of the event. The Spanish ambassador, for one, sensed that Elizabeth’s startling announcement was not what it seemed. “People in London consider the marriage as good as accomplished, and the French are of the same opinion,” he reported, but in his view “the display she has made is only artful and conditional.” The art lay in her ability to make Alençon believe that she was in earnest; the condition was whether or not her people would accept her decision. Mendoza thought that the scene in the gallery had been staged in the presence of Leicester and Walsingham as “an artifice to draw Alençon on, and make him believe that the men who were most opposed to it are now openly in its favour.” She had put on a convincing show for the French, so that it appeared that she was determined to marry, but all the time she was comfortably certain that Parliament and public opinion would relieve her of the necessity of honoring her promise by showing implacable resistance to the marriage. As Mendoza put it, “By personally pledging herself in this way, she binds him to her.” He explained, “She rather prefers to let it appear that the failure of the negotiations is owing to the country and not to herself, as it is important for her to keep him attached to her, in order to counterbalance his brother, and prevent anything being arranged to her prejudice.” Strange as it might have seemed for Elizabeth to make a public announcement that she would marry, it was a characteristically clever move.

  Instead of giving one of her ringing reprimands to any who dared to question her decision, she received such interference with a suspicious degree of equanimity. When one of her long-established favorites, Sir Christopher Hatton, burst into tears and sobbed that she might be deposed if she insisted on marrying against the will of the people, on whose affection the security of her throne depended, Elizabeth was not at all angered by his temerity, but answered him very tenderly. Leicester, who, despite his confidence that Elizabeth did not mean to marry, had been unnerved by the certainty of the French that the marriage would take place, went even further in his plain speaking. He asked Elizabeth point-blank whether she were “a maid or a woman.” The effrontery of the question was appalling. To ask the unmarried Queen of England whether she was a virgin or not was insolence beyond belief—though the fact that Leicester should have been in doubt on the subject served to indicate that he himself had never physically possessed the woman he had courted for so long. Elizabeth had always set limits to how far Leicester might carry his intimacy with her, in every way, yet on this occasion no infuriated “God’s death, my Lord!” greeted his presumption. Quite tranquilly the queen answered that she was still a maiden; possibly she was flattered to have been asked such a question at her age. Leicester then told her roundly “that she had not acted wisely in carrying the matter so far and so ostentatiously,” which Elizabeth seemed to agree with. Meekly she said that she would send Alençon a message to inform him that if she married him she was sure she would not survive for long. “She would be very glad if he would allow her to defer the matter” was the gist of the message, “and she would be very much more attached to him as a friend even than if he were her husband.”

  It was put about that Elizabeth had spent the night of November 22 in torments of indecision, while her waiting women, in floods of tears, begged her not to embark on the hazardous undertaking of marriage and childbirth. But there was little evidence to suggest that she still had any serious thoughts of doing so. The real conflict that followed the scene in the gallery was over the question of Alençon’s departure. Elizabeth and her ministers made it increasingly plain that they wanted him to go, but having come so near to winning the great prize that he had pursued for so long the prince was determined to stay on at court and secure his quarry or be compensated for his loss. He had nothing to lose by remaining there, kept and fêted at her expense, and he had high hopes of winning the queen, or, should the prize be denied him, receiving recompense. The situation soon became embarrassing. Elizabeth’s gallant guest and his entourage remained resolutely where they were, while Alençon insisted jocularly that the queen had promised to marry him, or created dramatic scenes in which he ranted that he would kill himself, or carry her off by force. The pretense of affection became very thin, though it was not abandoned; Elizabeth used “a hundred thousand false words and oaths” to reassure her little Frog of her love for him, while he pouted that he was hurt to find her so eager for his departure. When, at long last, the moment of his leaving arrived, Elizabeth put on a moving display of grief, although the Spanish ambassador learned from his spies that in the privacy of her own chamber she “danced for very joy at getting rid of him.” When Elizabeth Tudor could long for a suitor, a great prince who professed to adore her, to leave her side, the end of an era had arrived.

  Persuading Alençon to go away was an expensive business. Elizabeth joined in the laughter when it was said that “Alençon was a fine gallant to sell his lady for money,” and at first she swore that she would neither marry him nor pay him, but on December 15 she agreed that he should be lent £60,000, to be paid in two halves and repaid within six months. It was not until February 7 that he finally embarked, at Sandwich.

  Eager as Elizabeth had been for her suitor’s departure, when he had gone she seemed to be stricken with a sense of what she had lost. She cried that she would give a million to have her Frog swimming in the Thames again, instead of in the stagnant waters of the Netherlands, and there were moments when she was painfully melancholy. It was not playacting this time. Whatever his motives, Alençon had ardently wanted to marry her; he had flooded her with expressions of devotion and promis
es of a happy, fecund future. Now that he had gone the dream was over, and she knew that she could never have a husband and children, even if she had wanted to. The deep resistance to marriage that nothing had been able to overcome was in conflict with the fears of loneliness and yearnings for love that Elizabeth felt. She expressed her dissatisfied feelings in a revealing poem “On Monsieur’s Departure”:

  I grieve, and dare not show my discontent;

  I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

  I dote, yet dare not say I ever meant;

  I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate.

  I am and am not—freeze and yet I burn,

  Since from myself my other self I turn.

  My care is like my shadow in the Sun—

  Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it . . .

  In those lines she showed something of the conflict of her heart and mind, the confusion of her desires; she was a woman desperate to be loved, yet ever flying from the realities of commitment, unable to reconcile her differing needs. Doting, yet divided in herself, Elizabeth would remain a virgin all her life.

  Though the last fierce flare of the emotion that Alençon had lit up in Elizabeth’s heart in 1579 had died away, the ashes of the courtship continued to smolder faintly. The queen and the prince continued to exchange ardent letters, and the marriage was talked of as a matter of expediency long after it had become impossible. Alençon’s quest for glory in the Netherlands proved as unsuccessful as his wooing of Elizabeth. He played tennis in Antwerp while his soldiers grew mutinous; finally he had to flee the country, his ventures a failure. In the summer of 1584 he ended his ignominious career in death—he died of fever on June 10. Elizabeth grieved for him. She went into mourning, and she wrote to Catherine de’ Medici, “Your sorrow cannot exceed mine, although you were his mother. You have another son, but I can find no other consolation than death, which I hope will soon enable me to rejoin him. If you could see a picture of my heart, you would see a body without a soul; but I will not trouble you with my grief, as you have enough of your own.” She was sincerely moved by Alençon’s death. She had come near to marrying him, and for a time she had been happy in his company. She had received from him the passionate homage that she had always longed to win from a great prince; now, with his death, her last courtship was irrevocably ended, and she would never again receive sweet letters from her Frog. The last and most loving of the political suitors to the queen was dead, and now there would be no more.

  9

  Mistress of England

  Some call her Pandora; some Gloriana; some Cynthia; some Belphoebe; some Astraea: all by several names to express several loves. Yet all those names make but one celestial body, as all those loves meet to create but one soul,” wrote the playwright Thomas Dekker. “I am of her own country, and we adore her by the name of Eliza.” The almost mythical maiden who was the subject of those lines was then an old, old woman, whose sallow, lined skin was sometimes painted half an inch thick, right down to her sagging bosom, and whose thin cheeks had sunk where her teeth were missing. The physical realities of Elizabeth’s appearance were irrelevant to the cult that had grown up around her. At an age when most noblewomen were grandmothers or great-grandmothers several times over, surrounded and supported by their children and their children’s children, Queen Elizabeth was still a virgin, set apart from the majority of mortals by her eternal maidenhood. She had never known the satisfactions of the wife and mother; instead, she clung greedily to the pleasures of youthful adulation, many years after such homage had ceased to be in any way appropriate to her fading charms. In a society that had, during Elizabeth’s lifetime, worshipped the Virgin Mary, and which was still steeped in the medieval traditions of courtly love, the image of a virgin queen under whose benevolent rule England prospered, defying even mighty Spain’s Armada, was easily assimilated. The special powers and properties belonging to virginity were well known to the literate members of Elizabethan society, and as a chaste maiden their queen commanded a reverence that could easily spill over into idolatry. Since she was a woman who craved admiration and attention, a vain, insecure, and lonely woman, she cultivated such extravagant adoration.

  Leicester, who knew the queen better than anyone, understood her need for ardent love. When the Alençon match was in the air, he had written to Walsingham to warn him not to destroy her illusions about the French prince’s desire for her. “You know her disposition as well as I,” he had written urgently. “I would have you, as much as you may, avoid Her Majesty’s suspicion that you doubt Monsieur’s love to her, or that you had devotion enough in you to further her marriage; though I promise I think she has little enough herself to it. Yet what she would have others think and do, you have cause to know.” The fact that the queen had no wish for marriage and sexual love did not lessen her desire that others should pine for her. It had been the same with all her suitors—she had reveled in their protestations of passion, while remaining elusive and unobtainable, only pretending to yield when there seemed to be a danger of their withdrawing from the pursuit. In her old age, when marriage had ceased even to be a remote possibility, Elizabeth’s consuming need to be courted and adored was greater than ever, and the men who became suitors to the queen in the last two decades of her life contributed their fantastical flatteries, in speech and in writing, to the mythology that was growing up around England’s Gloriana. She was wooed now not as a wife, but as a chaste mistress in the courtly love tradition—she represented the fair and virtuous lady of chivalric legend, whose smile alone was sufficient to bind a knight to her service forever, in the kind of hopeless love that found informal expression in the sixteenth century verse that ran,

  I did but see her passing by,

  And yet I love her till I die.

  Successful suitors to Elizabeth could hope for more substantial rewards than occasional kindly glances, however. To win her favor was to acquire influence and income; in the bright sunlight of the queen’s good graces a man could step from the shadows of insignificance into the forefront of court life, and there make his fortune. Elizabeth had become a haggard and temperamental old woman, but the image of herself that was reflected back to her by her courtiers and subjects was that of a radiant nymph, a paragon of beauty and virtue, and no one who had anything to gain from her favor would dare to shatter the magic glass.

  By the 1580s, when Elizabeth’s flare of feeling for Alençon had died away and her anger at Leicester’s marriage had cooled, Leicester’s position in her life was unassailable. The relationship that she had built up with him over the years had passed through passion to a deep and lasting tenderness that was closer to a normal loving partnership than anything she experienced in any of her other affairs. As long as Lady Leicester never showed her face at court, Elizabeth could ignore her existence; she had indeed had to become accustomed to the fact that most of her admirers were married men, and once her rage over his faithlessness in taking a wife had abated, her Robin was as high as ever in her favor. Yet his attentions alone had for years been insufficient to satisfy Elizabeth’s hunger for male admiration. Even while he was by her side, eager to marry her, and foreign princes were making flattering proposals from abroad, she had delightedly flirted with a series of handsome young men. Her intimates had been given pet names; she called Leicester her “Eyes,” and charming Sir Christopher Hatton had become “Lids,” nicknames that they fondly represented in their letters by the symbols ÔÔ and ΔΔ. Hatton, who genuinely believed himself to be infatuated with the queen, and remained unmarried for her sake, contributed a great many words and tears to the cult of her peerless beauty; in 1573, when she was only forty, and still busy with the first stage of her Alençon negotiations, Hatton had written passionately, “I will wash away the faults of these letters with the drops from your poor Lids, and so enclose them. Would God I were with you but for one hour. My wits are overwrought with thoughts. I find myself amazed. Bear with me, my most dear sweet Lady. Passion overcometh me. I can writ
e no more. Love me; for I love you,” and he had a great deal more to say in the same throbbing vein. Such outpourings of desperate love were highly acceptable to Elizabeth, as were the exquisite jewels and presents that Hatton gave her; through the 1570s, while her French marriages were under discussion, his star shone brightly. It was he who broke down in tears after the scene in the gallery when she promised, albeit falsely, to marry Alençon. But although his career advanced steadily—he was to become Lord Chancellor in 1587—Elizabeth’s fancy for Hatton fluctuated, and his constant uncertainty as to her feelings towards him kept him in a state of anguished worship. “I should sin, most gracious sovereign, against a Holy Ghost, most damnably, if towards Your Highness I should be found unthankful,” he groveled in the autumn of 1580, but his almost religious devotion to the queen could not save him from being obscured by the shining meteor Sir Walter Raleigh, who rose at the beginning of the 1580s, when Elizabeth’s dealings with Alençon were almost at an end and her sterile old age was upon her.