All the squabbling, the resentment, the silent censure would end once she married—or at least designated a successor. There would be an end to the tiresome suitors, the secret meetings to discuss the succession which, when she heard of them, made her "weep with rage," the tremors of fear that passed through the court whenever she caught cold or suffered with diarrhea or was merely "cumbered with pain in her nose and eyes." Ever since her brush with death two years earlier there had been heightened alarm about her mortality; the prophecies "everybody talked of," together with the vigilant presence of Mary Stuart just over the border, combined to make Elizabeth "much in fear" of falling ill, and put her under even more stress. Then, too, there was always the nightmare possibility that through inadvertence Elizabeth might lose her precarious balance on the highwire of diplomacy and England might be plunged into full-scale war. To save herself and her realm she might then be forced to marry—or unalterably commit herself to marry—in great haste, without time to choose wisely, without time even to see the man to whom she would have to hand over herself and her authority.
To exorcise these bedeviling vexations Elizabeth was willing, at times perhaps eager, to make Mary Stuart a present of Dudley—whom she could not realistically marry—as the price of her peace of mind.
Melville had no sooner settled into his Westminster rooms than he received a visitor from court. Christopher Hatton, a resplendent courtier, arrived bringing a message of welcome from the queen and informing him that she would see him the next morning at eight, when she customarily went for a walk in her privy garden. Then an old friend of Melville's came calling—Nicholas Throckmorton, long in the thick of Scots affairs and a partisan of Mary Stuart. Throckmorton brought Melville up to date on
current affairs and counseled him on "how to proceed with the queen." In case Elizabeth became recalcitrant, Throckmorton said, Melville should "use great familiarity with the ambassador of Spain," for that would spur her to be more cooperative.
Nothing could be accomplished without the assent of Cecil and Dudley, Throckmorton warned. Although he himself "had no great kindness" for either of them, he instructed his friend on the best approach to use with them, and with "every courtier in particular," for at Westminster as in Edinburgh personalities counted for as much as issues.
In the morning Hatton reappeared to escort Melville to the palace. With him came a gift from Dudley—a fine horse trapped in a footmantle laced with gold, led by a servant. The horse, he was told, would be at his disposal throughout his stay.
When he arrived Elizabeth was walking briskly up and down an alleyway in the garden, not only to improve her circulation in the chilly morning air but out of anger—or a pretense of anger. She was blunt and brusque with Melville, interrupting him with questions and "tossing words" with him about the injurious language of Queen Mary's last letter.
They spoke French, Melville apologizing that he had been in France for so long that his lowland Scots-English was rusty and Elizabeth, perhaps with some feigned reluctance, conversing with equal fluency. It was her cherished conceit that, whatever language a foreign envoy spoke—and none of them spoke English—she was sure to have trouble with it, as she was more practiced in other tongues. Thus she boasted to one ambassador in 1564 that she "found some difficulty in speaking French, having so long been accustomed to speaking Latin." But to another man she claimed that her Latin was poor, as she "had more practice in the Greek, Italian and French languages." 2 "I understand German quite well," she told an imperial envoy haughtily, "although I do not speak it." Early in her reign, when Count Feria was still at court, Elizabeth had attempted, with a remarkable degree of success, to read documents in Portuguese, though she had to ask for Feria's help. 3 And invariably, whatever foreign language she spoke, she made certain it was highly audible, speaking "in so loud a tone as to be heard by everybody."
Thus she loudly announced to Melville that she had written a "despiteful" letter to Mary and had delayed sending it only because she feared it was not vehement enough. The Scotsman, no doubt prepared, thanks to Throckmorton's counsel, to have Elizabeth try to throw him off balance by just this sort of tactic, was quick with his response. Elizabeth, he said— possibly with faint condescension—though her French was excellent for one who had never been to France, was obviously misled by Mary's
"French court language," which was full of double meanings and tended to be "frank and short." They debated the matter, and finally Elizabeth allowed herself to be won over, tearing up her own angry letter and declaring herself ready to renew the former friendship.
Then she came to the really important issue. Had Mary decided whether or not to marry Dudley? Here Melville did not have to improvise. He had his instructions. Such an important decision, he said, could not be made until there was a formal meeting between representatives of both queens —for Mary, her half-brother the earl of Murray and her secretary Maitland, and for Elizabeth, he supposed, the earl of Bedford, governor of the border castle of Berwick, and Dudley.
Here Elizabeth interrupted. Melville "made but small account" of Dudley, she objected, whereas in fact she was about to make him a very great nobleman, far greater than Bedford, and he, Melville, would witness the ceremony before he left her court. She expanded on Dudley's merits and on what he meant to her, as they continued to stroll up and down beside the clipped hedges in the privy garden.
"She esteemed him as her brother and best friend," Melville wrote later in his Memoirs, "whom she would have herself married, had she ever minded to have taken a husband. But being determined to end her life in virginity, she wished that the queen her sister might marry him, as meetest of all other with whom she could find in her heart to declare her second person."
Above all, Elizabeth explained, the marriage would quiet her apprehensions. Once Dudley became prince consort in Scotland, "it would best remove out of her mind all fears and suspicions, to be offended by any usurpation before her death. Being assured that he was so loving and trusty, that he would never permit any such thing to be attempted during her time." 4
The more he saw of Elizabeth in the following days, the more Melville was convinced of her determination to remain single, despite her surprisingly candid demonstration of her infatuation with Dudley. She might threaten to marry if Mary's "harsh behavior toward her" made it necessary, she said, yet Melville called her bluff.
"I know the truth of that, madam," he told her. "You need not tell it me. Your majesty thinks, if you were married, you would be but queen of England; and now you are both king and queen. I know your snin't ran not endure a commander."
But when in a mood of self-disclosure she took him into her bedchamber and opened up a little cabinet of treasures, among them a miniature of Dudley, she was as coy and secretive as a young girl in love. On the paper
wrapping of the tiny portrait Elizabeth had written "My Lord's picture," and when Melville asked to see who her lord was she "appeared loath to let him see it," drawing it away from the candlelight and refusing to unwrap it until his "importunity prevailed." Dudley was in the room at the time, "at the farthest part of the chamber," talking with Cecil; perhaps Elizabeth's coquettishness was directed to him. In any case, she refused to let Melville take the miniature home to Mary, also refusing to send her Scots cousin "a fair ruby, as great as a tennis-ball," that she kept in her little cabinet along with the portraits.
The coyness vanished, the shrewd negotiator reappeared. If Mary would follow Elizabeth's advice and marry Dudley, she said firmly, the portrait, the ruby, and everything else she had would come to her in time. Meanwhile, as a token of the wealth to come, she would send Mary "a fair diamond," which would have to content her.
The ceremony creating Dudley earl of Leicester was the high point of Melville's stay in Westminster. It was done in the vast presence chamber at St. James's, "with great solemnity," the new peer bearing himself with all the gravity of a nobleman born, not made. The title he was to receive had an extraordinary significance, fo
r the earldom of Leicester had traditionally been a royal title, held by a younger son of the reigning sovereign. This distinction, together with the queen's gift of the manor of Kenilworth and of a number of lucrative offices and grants, swept Dudley into the highest rank of the aristocracy; it made him, in fact, a worthy husband for a queen.
Elizabeth sat on her throne, flanked by the nobles in their robes and by the foreign dignitaries then present at court. Dudley appeared clothed in the surcoat and hood of a baron—for he had to be created baron before he could be made earl—and made a threefold obeisance. Escorted by Hunsdon, Clinton and others Dudley came and knelt before the queen, who as his patent was read aloud put on his baronial mantle. Then, "the trumpets sounding before him," Dudley retired to change into the rich robes of estate of an earl, and reentered the chamber in more exalted company.
The earl of Sussex (an outspoken enemy of Dudley's) walked at his right, and the earl of Huntingdon (whom Dudley had supported as successor during Elizabeth's near-fatal illness two years earlier, and who was said to "walk in his shadow") was on his left. Dudley's elder brother Ambrose, an old-fashioned lord who was said to prefer the company of huntsmen to courtiers, walked in the procession carrying his brother's golden sword; Elizabeth had created Ambrose Dudley earl of Warwick earlier in the reign. The Garter King of Arms bore the patent of nobility, and the other officers of arms led the way.
Again Dudley knelt before the throne, stiff and solemn and exceedingly handsome in his velvets, and as Cecil read out the words of the patent creating him earl of Leicester Elizabeth took the sword from Warwick and girded it on around his neck. But the excessive dignity of the moment, and the embarrassing habit she had of caressing Dudley in public, made her mischievous; she "could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck, smilingly tickling him," in view of all the court. 5
Melville stood near her as she did this—indeed to a large extent the entire spectacle was for his benefit, so that when he returned to Scotland he could impress Mary with Dudley's personal importance and exalted rank —and as Dudley rose, now a peer, she asked Melville "how he liked him."
The reply was bland and diplomatic, and Elizabeth decided to bring up the sensitive issue of Dudley's chief rival for Mary Stuart's hand.
"Yet you like better of yonder long lad," she said, pointing to the tall, blond nineteen-year-old who carried her royal sword of honor. He was Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a grandson of Henry VIII's sister Margaret Tudor. Like his cousin Queen Mary he had been excluded from Henry VIII's will despite his royal blood, and his intriguing mother Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox (herself a claimant to the English throne), had been promoting a match between Darnley and Mary for the past several years.
Elizabeth was not entirely averse to Darnley as a husband for her cousin in Scotland—in fact, Melville believed Darnley was her second choice, after the new earl of Leicester—but his Catholicism, his youth, and above all the ambitions of his parents made her very uneasy about him. 6 Darnley's father Matthew Stuart, earl of Lennox, was just then in Scotland, ostensibly looking after his estates but actually, Elizabeth knew, working to advance his son's cause. And she may have known, or correctly guessed, that Melville had come to London not only to meet with Elizabeth herself but to see the countess and to further Darnley's chances.
Melville must have been taken off guard by Elizabeth's frank question. "No woman of spirit would make choice of such a man," he said presently, "who more resembles a woman than a man." Darnley was in fact notably athletic and lusty, yet beardless and, in Melville's view, "lady-faced." Compared to Leicester he was only a good-looking boy, while the earl was a broad-shouldered, full-bearded man with an imperious eye and a commanding presence. There was no question which Elizabeth preferred; Mary's taste was to differ.
During the nine days he spent at Westminster Melville was "favorably and familiarly used," passing his days and evenings at the palace and habituating himself to the quotidian activity of the huge royal household
and to the habits and life of the now candid, now impenetrable personality at its center.
Elizabeth talked with him every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and he always found her full of eager, insistent questions. She wanted to know everything about the books he liked to read, the countries he had seen, the people he had encountered in his wide-ranging travels. Queen Mary had specifically advised Melville to "leave matters of gravity sometimes, and cast in merry purposes," knowing that Elizabeth loved to laugh and also liked her conversation varied. So, knowing how vain she was and how much attention she gave to dress, he described the styles and costume women wore in the various countries.
Here he had nothing new to teach her; Elizabeth already possessed clothes from all over Europe. To prove it she put on a different mode every day from then on, one day French, the next Italian, and so on. Melville was much taken by her in her low-cut Italian gown and abbreviated bonnet, and when in her forthright way she asked him which of the styles most became her he pleased her by answering that he liked the Italian gown on her best. She too liked it, she wrote, because the bonnet covered very little of her "golden colored hair," of which she was very proud. "Her hair was more reddish than yellow," hewent on, "curled in appearance naturally." Elizabeth was as competitive as she was vain. "What color of hair was reputed best?" she asked him, her own reddish gold or Queen Mary's auburn waves? And which was fairer, Mary or herself?
The fairness of both queens, Melville pronounced judiciously, "was not their worst fault."
Elizabeth brushed this diplomatic answer aside and insisted on a real response. Which of them was fairest 7
Elizabeth was the fairest queen in England, Melville said, and Mary was the fairest queen in Scotland.
The question was a perilous one, if Elizabeth wanted the truth, for her own complexion was pitted with the marks of smallpox—not hideously, but noticeably—and she was a mature thirty-one, to Mary's fresh-faced twenty-two.
Melville inched closer to giving her the compliment she demanded. Both queens were the fairest ladies in their respective lands, he said. Elizabeth's skin was of a more ivory hue, although Mary was "very lovely."
Which of them was taller?
Without hesitation Melville admitted that Queen Mary was taller.
"Then she is too high," was Elizabeth's triumphant response. "I myself," she added, "am neither too high nor too low."
Elizabeth asked next what sort of outdoor pastimes and other accom-
plishments Mary enjoyed, and the ambassador told her that as he left Scotland Mary had just returned from a hunting expedition in the highlands. As for more sedentary pursuits, when the work of government was not too pressing she read histories, and sometimes played the lute and virginal.
"Does she play them well?" inquired Elizabeth.
"Reasonably well, for a queen," was Melville's somewhat jaundiced reply, which gave Elizabeth just the opportunity she sought to win another point of comparison with her absent rival.
She went about it craftily, contriving to have Melville discover, as though by chance, how gifted she was at the keyboard. That evening after dinner Hunsdon came up to Melville and took him to a gallery in the queen's wing of the palace. There, if they were lucky, Hunsdon said, they could hear Elizabeth playing the virginal; she would not know she was being observed, and so they could count on hearing her play with full feeling and abandon. They listened, and sure enough they could detect, in the next room, the playing of a skilled keyboard performer.
Perhaps to assure himself that it was really the queen playing and not someone else, Melville pushed aside a tapestry covering the doorway of the room where the performer was. It was indeed Elizabeth, and as she had her back to the doorway Melville quietly stepped into the room and stood there for a while listening to her play "excellently well." But as soon as she caught sight of him she stopped and, appearing to be surprised to see him, strode frowning toward him "seeming to strike him with her hand." She never played pub
licly, she said, but only when alone, "to shun melancholy." Melville apologized, saying that he was so charmed by the sound that he could not help himself, and she forgave him, inwardly pleased to know that he would be forced in candor to report to Queen Mary that Elizabeth was a better musician than she was.
But this incident did not lay the rivalry to rest. Before he left her court Elizabeth insisted that Melville watch her dance, for in this arena as in that of musical performance she felt confident of her superiority.
Most likely reports of Elizabeth's agile dancing had already made their way to Scotland, for the French envoys who had escorted Mary there three years earlier had been entertained at Elizabeth's court on their way home, and had been treated to a memorable scene. One of the banqueting halls at Greenwich was prepared for a feast, the walls covered by a celebrated set of glowing tapestries representing the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins. After the French guests had enjoyed a sumptuous meal of many courses, Elizabeth's maids of honor entered the room to perform a ballet. The queen had dressed them exactly as the virgins in the tapestries
were dressed, and each carried an exquisitely chased silver lamp. In the course of the charming ballet the maids—who were "very pretty, well behaved and very well dressed," a discriminating observer wrote—invited the Frenchmen to dance with them, and even persuaded the queen to join in. All eyes were on Elizabeth as she began to dance, and her measured, rhythmic steps and lovely coloring showed to great effect in the torchlit chamber. She danced, the same observer recalled, "with much grace and right royal majesty, for she possessed then no little beauty and elegance." 7
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