by David Elias
I sometimes think it better I died early like my brother Henry. For his part he shall remain forever young, as he does even now in my mind’s eye. I cannot imagine him as an old man. To be sure there are no unflattering portraits of him as there are of me, painted after age had done its mordant work. A hundred years from now, in every likeness that hangs upon a wall in one palace or another, the Prince of Wales shall look upon the viewer with youthful vigour. Not so for me. Those portraits I deigned to sit for in my later years, kind as the artist may have imagined himself to be, portray too much of these mottled cheeks, lips withered and hair thinned. I had thought to see about sitting for Judith Leyster when I was still in The Hague, but there was no money for it. Upon my return here to London I had hoped to sit for the artist Mary Beale, as I had seen her recent work Portrait of Lady with a Black Hood and liked it very much. How gently should my progress into old age have been rendered! Her portraits neither adulate nor misrepresent, and yet the paintings convey a deep sense of the subject’s dignity. She should surely have found a way to do as much for me. But now the time for that is passed.
Perhaps I should make one final request of Lord Craven, that he find every portrait painted of me after the age of sixteen and have it taken down and burned. I have little desire to be remembered as an old woman. Let them only see me with hair glorious, torrents of wild curls running in thick red rivers down to my waist, not these grey and meagre strands. Let only those likenesses of me where I sit in youthful beauty, my eyes fresh with promise, be preserved. Naught but the slender waist, the taut and delicate skin upon the cheek. Not this sagging, tired descent into wrinkles. When age looks in the mirror it is with a vinegared vision. I’ll leave mirrors to others. Were it my domain I should arrange the world otherwise — that a woman’s beauty, rather than diminish, increase, year upon year, and the advent of old age become the harbinger of blossoming loveliness. Justice!
The attendant came in just now and handed me some correspondence — another note from Lord Craven, no doubt, but I see that it is accompanied by a letter addressed to me. The seal is an unfamiliar one, though the handwriting gives me pause to think it may be a person of past acquaintance. In any case I shall put it by for now. Indeed I hardly think I shall bother to read it at all. What good can come from it now, or what ill for that matter? What’s left to be said?
It seems to me that in these last days I have become little else but an inconvenience. It is the last thing I could wish for! Must it be the fate of the aged to become a burden? What a sorry lot it is to be a chore. A helpless babe in arms may be malodourous and wrinkled, yet its life is new and so care is given gladly. But what redeems us in feeble age? Why must the road to death be such a trudge? As for the promise of Heaven to come, I say it may turn out to be nothing more than a foolish prank.
It occurs to me that all my life I have been a kept woman. What else does a princess amount to? Or a queen consort? From the time I was a child I was taught that all the considerations of finance were beneath me, and that to even contemplate such matters was unseemly. Money was a vulgar inconvenience relegated to those who lacked the privilege of never having to think about it. Royalty were best to distance themselves from it. Yet looking back, I realize that for most of my life I was not free to indulge in such a dubious luxury. Far too often it was dirty money I grovelled for from one day to the next.
I draw ever nearer the time when I shall have to stand to my transgressions. But am I the same person now as then? Which self is my truer self: the one in which I am sixteen or the one where I am sixty? Surely over the course of my life every single atomie in my body has been replaced by another, whether it be by skin shed or blood renewed, by endless acts of breath, of eating and drinking and later expulsion, so that there can hardly be one iota of me that has not been exchanged for another in all that time. And so it is for every one of us. That which we are is not that which we were. We are ghosts, and it is memory alone that links us to our former selves.
But what purpose do these late revelations serve? Do they move me forward or draw me back? Where is the victory in discovering some long-sought-after truth at the end of life? It seems but another twist of the dagger. Perhaps I shall wake into death as from a dream, having drifted across a vast sea whose currents carry me at last to that final shore. And having landed, what shall I recall of my life on earth? If time cannot be trusted in life how then in death, where an hour may be an eternity, where what is yet to come may already have passed. All my life I have looked for that which is permanent and found only change. Shall the afterlife convince me of eternity? The next world, be it Heaven or Hell, may turn out to be as transitory as this one.
If Sir Walter were yet alive I could send to him for some of his cordial. There is much I would be cured of. A grey mist swirls about my soul. I did not expect to live to such a considerable age and thought I should surely die in childbirth before I had even reached my twentieth birthday. With each subsequent birth it seemed to me I was playing at the odds, and Death must surely have thought himself cheated. Perhaps it had little to do with luck and more with my stubborn insistence that the midwives wash their hands before they undertake to snatch each babe from my loins. By then I had developed my theory that it is creatomies, unseen and undetected, which cause the trouble. To think I might have written it all up in a treatise, as learned men full of their own importance are wont to do.
The afterlife seems an unwieldy proposition to me. Shall my brother Henry be waiting for me there as a strapping lad of eighteen years, healthy and fit, or will he greet me as he would look now? Perhaps I shall be allowed to choose between the two, though I hardly know which I should pick. The clerics should no doubt think me irreverent for conjecturing upon such matters, and my faith doubtless pales in comparison to theirs, but if the spirit world is to be my next home I can be forgiven a few moments’ speculation. For my part I pray there may be some respite from eternal joy, as I have no desire to amble about endlessly in a stupor of silly bliss.
Only the waiting now. Always and forever it seems I have been waiting. I look back and see myself waiting at a banquet table to be introduced to a young prince who will be my husband, waiting in an ornate chapel to be crowned queen of a foreign land, waiting to climb aboard a midnight carriage that will take me into exile. Time and again I have waited, always impatiently, for the child inside me to swell into form and be born. Many a night I waited for the man who was my husband to finish and get off me. How oft even now I hark back to the earliest days of my maidenhood, where I wait yet for Sir Raleigh to undress me and he will not. Must there always be a handsome man in every woman’s life who failed to do what she most wanted him to?
But it shall soon be over. The only thing left to wait for now is that which no mortal can deny. Too oft have I been witness to a loved one breathing their last, be it son or daughter, husband or brother, friend or benefactor. Some greeted death with great dignity, and I pray it may be so for me. And yet, I fear it may not. We die as we are born, but once. The clerics would hasten to assure me I shall be born again into eternal life. I cannot say what lies ahead but the chasm awaits. Leap I must, and soon.
The bothersome priests are nowhere to be found and I am glad for it. The same can be said for those physicians who would no doubt advise that I take some laudanum such as they administered to my husband the better to ease his anguish. Was it mercy or manipulation? Somewhat of both, I suppose, but I’ll have none of it. To have my end made more bearable by artificial means serves but to rob me of the experience. I will not be cheated. I would know whether it be my finest moment or my worst. As for family or friends, better I should take my leave alone. It will be difficult enough without the added inconvenience of insufferable sociability. What need have I to be hospitable in the face of cold death?
When I consider that the experience of romantic love has eluded me all my life I ask myself whose fault it is. Perhaps I failed to plant those seeds that were needed to bring forth such
fruit. At any rate I never tasted it. Yet every manner of fruit will ripen and soon enough thereafter fall into decay. Nothing lasts. It may go to explaining what happened with Lord Craven. Perhaps he sensed that the moment he gave in to his passion would be the moment he started along the path that led inexorably to its extinction.
It draws near, the time when that greatest of all secrets is revealed, at the precise moment I can make no use of it. The very air is precious now, the light, the fading warmth upon my cheek. A stillness final as stone, cold as a star, awaits me. My existence has been a thing borrowed, never mine. We are master neither of our arrival nor our departure. I relinquish all pretense to agency, for I never had any.
I shall take up this latest correspondence from Lord Craven after all, if only to pass the time in these last moments left to me.
Dearest Elizabeth,
The accompanying letter arrived here at Leicester yesterday, and I should gladly have delivered it into your hand personally, but as it is I forward it to you now. I pray you shall yet see fit to grant me a visitation, but until such time, I remain,
Yours in faithful devotion,
Lord William Craven
This letter looks to have suffered somewhat in the passage, and the journey from the writer’s hand into mine appears to have been an arduous one. I suppose no harm can come from reading it. And yet, what words herein may serve to bring about one last disappointment? I have torn open too many letters in hopes they might bring me good fortune and change my life, only to have them effect the opposite. But what is one more?
February 4, 1662
Herford Abbey, Saxony
Dear Mother,
I had hoped to write this letter sooner and the reasons for my procrastination are both naive and ignoble, but now there can be no more putting off. News has reached me of your return at long last to London, and of your recent departure from the Earl of Craven’s residence. You might as well know that Lord Craven and I have been in correspondence of late, and by such means have I learned you are not in good health. He has told me of your refusal to see him, but I plead you may see fit to relent, or at the very least allow yourself to be attended by a physician.
I write to you from Herford Abbey in Saxony, where I am appointed coadjutrix, and where I shall remain for the rest of my life. There is much work to be done here, and I have dedicated myself to providing refuge for the many victims of persecution who seek sanctuary here, among them the Socinians, Quakers, and also some Mennonites. I find the Mennonites of particular interest, inasmuch as they are a religious sect, but also very much a distinct people. They have about them an air of deference, yet also of defiance, and their fierce humility is tempered by a formidable industriousness.
There is someone here at the abbey who will be of interest to you, a woman of my age who has lived here all her life. Her name is Jane and she was brought here in secret from London as an infant. When I first arrived here I wondered after her more than quiet manner, for I never heard her speak so much as a single word, but soon learned she had taken a vow of silence many years ago. It was not until my appointment to this office that her true identity was revealed to me by the departing coadjutrix, who had been sworn to secrecy in the matter, as had her predecessor, and as I have been. Nearly half a century has passed since the events in question, and so I grant myself permission to break that oath for your sake alone.
There are a lot of things I’ve never told you, Mother, among them that I used to make a habit of sneaking your old letters out of that supposedly locked chest you kept them in, to read them over and over. I know I always gave off the outward appearance of caring little for matters that concerned you, and I did my best to nurture that pretense, but the truth is very different. I know quite a lot more about you than you might guess. In any case there were a number of letters in there from your cousin Arabella Stuart, including some she wrote while she was being held by your father, the King, at the Tower of London. I remember vividly one that made a cryptic reference to an event whose details she dared not reveal at the time. Now I can tell you what occurred.
Your cousin Arabella gave birth to a daughter there in the Tower, under the most trying of circumstances. On the very night the infant was born into that dreadful cold and damp she was taken from her mother’s cell and transported far away to be raised in secret, lest your father learn of her existence and seek to do her harm, as she constituted a threat to his lineage. She was brought here to the abbey in Saxony and raised by the nuns in the convent. The arrangements were seen to by Sir Raleigh, and financed by her father, Lord Seymour. She has lived here all her life and never ventured out into the world. That child is Jane, the woman I have been telling you about. I thought you would want to know.
But that is hardly the reason for this letter. I write because there’s something I need to tell you of great importance to me. First, however, I beg that you set aside for a moment my shortcomings as daughter, which are many, and ask that you do the same for yours as a mother. I could never seem to express myself meaningfully to you whenever we were face to face. Being under the eye of your fierce, dispassionate gaze always unsettled me, caused me to lose my composure, and so divided me from my better, surer self. But let me speak frankly to you now, after all this time, from the safe haven of this quiet and contemplative sanctuary.
I want to acknowledge at the outset how grateful I am to you for not forcing me to marry. It would have been perfectly understandable, considering that such was the case for your mother, Anne, brought out of Denmark at the age of fourteen to live in Scotland, and for you, taken away to Bohemia at sixteen. But for you, I should have been spirited away to Poland with that popinjay who came to fetch me, but you spared me that fate, and I thank you for it.
Also, I do not hold it against you in the matter concerning René Descartes. I know you never meant to nurture his affections, or if you did it was inadvertent and not by design. As it is I doubt Monsieur Descartes should have made me happy in the end, though I certainly thought so then. I have come to acknowledge that though we are different in so many ways, in this one thing you and I are alike: that nothing can really make us happy.
But now for the purpose of this letter. It seems we hardly cared to know each other, so much effort did we expend in being at odds with one another. Ours was never a familiar nor an orthodox affection, but as rebellious and intransigent a daughter as I may have been, I want you to know something: I admire you greatly. I always have. I always shall. I think you are the best person I know.
Don’t feel the need to write back. In fact it might be better you didn’t. With a promise to be always faithful and true to your memory, I am . . .
Your daughter in admiration and respect,
Elisabeth
The letter falls from my hand and I am swept up in a vision of walking at day’s end through the wooded hills high above Heidelberg, among forests of oak and pine whose quiet paths are lined with holly and ivy. I run my fingers along an outcropping of granite rock and emerge onto a promontory that provides a spectacular view of the valley below. There lies the town, the great cathedral at its heart, and there overlooking the River Neckar stands the castle walled and moated, its battlements a fiery ochre against the sun’s last rays.
I find myself standing next to a tree of staggering girth whose mighty trunk matches the colour of the castle. Its green boughs rise impossibly high into the heavens until they seem to mingle with the clouds themselves. The sovereign leviathan emanates an air of quiet dignity and kindness as I stand in awe of its immensity, gaze up to ponder whether amid the upper reaches of those massive limbs and branches an entire world might yet exist, all unto itself. I grow light, lighter still, until my feet lift away from the mossy forest floor and I begin to ascend into the sweet-scented and rarefied air. Higher and higher I am carried along the length of that great and ancient trunk, witness now to its many scars and indentations, the wounds and markings of age, here the b
ark scorched by fire, there a great burl where disease sought to take hold, an abrasion where some branch long ago broke away and fell with a great roar and rumbling to thunder onto the forest floor far below. Still I rise while the silent and gentle boughs above me await my arrival.
The End
Afterword
Lord Craven never married after Elizabeth’s death. When the Great Plague struck London three years later, instead of fleeing to the country he stayed and helped with the burial of the dead. He saw to it that Ashdown House was completed as planned and that Elizabeth’s portraits should adorn its walls, as they do today.
Elizabeth’s daughter Princess Sophia of Hanover became heir to the British throne but died two months before her coronation and the title passed on to her son, George Louis. He was subsequently crowned King George I of England, and all succeeding monarchs trace their lineage back through Sophia and ultimately to Elizabeth herself.
Elizabeth’s son Prince Rupert financed a voyage of the sailing ship Nonsuch to present-day Canada for the purpose of developing the fur trade. The venture turned out to be highly successful, and Rupert went on to become the first governor of the newly formed Hudson’s Bay Company. The vast territory of Rupert’s Land was named for him.
Elisabeth of the Palatinate spent the remainder of her life in Herford Abbey, where she oversaw the welfare of as many as seven thousand families. She later became known for her correspondence with René Descartes and today she is a frequent subject of academic study in the history of feminist philosophy.
Tobias Hume spent the remainder of his life at Charterhouse in London, where a plaque has recently been mounted in his honour. His music is enjoying something of a renaissance and his compositions for the viola da gamba are featured on numerous recordings, including those of Jordi Savall and Susanne Heinrich. Captain Hume may also have been the inspiration for the character of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Like Hume, Sir Aguecheek played the viola da gamba, drank and sang wildly, swore profusely, and was generally quarrelsome.
