Who danced best, Elizabeth demanded to know after she had given him a demonstration of her skill, Mary or herself?
Mary "danced not so high, and disposedly as she did," he told Elizabeth, and did not venture to say anything further.
Before he left her court Melville tried to persuade Elizabeth, who said again and again how much she wanted to see Mary in person (the portraits they had exchanged being no substitute for a face-to-face encounter), not to wait for a formal royal meeting but to escape with him into Scotland in disguise. Seeing that she enjoyed the fantasy he elaborated further. He would smuggle her across the border, disguised as a page; she could then enter Mary's palace incognito and, after a secret conference, return in the same way as she had come. No one need know that she had so much as left her bedchamber; one trusted waiting woman and a groom of the chamber would have to be let in on the secret, but everyone else would simply be told that the queen was ill, and could not be disturbed in her sickbed.
"Alas! If I might do it thus," Elizabeth said with a sigh when Melville had finished. Was she sincere? He could not tell, but he was certainly leaving her in a more amiable mood toward Mary Stuart than he had found her. Elizabeth had enjoyed her long hours of conversation with the urbane, imperturbable Scotsman; his embassy left her more curious than ever to see her cousin.
Leicester, however, was uneasy. Seizing an opportunity to talk to Melville privately the earl asked him confidentially whether there was any chance that Mary might in fact accept him as a husband. Melville responded coldly, as Mary had instructed him to do, whereupon Leicester— perhaps with relief in his voice—became apologetic and fawningly deferential.
Of course he himself was not so pretentious as to presume that he was of sufficient rank and dignity to be a suitor to a queen; he "did not esteem himself worthy to wipe her shoes." No, the suggestion came from his enemy Cecil, who wanted to send him away. He himself would hardly have been so foolish as to put himself forward as a suitor to Mary, since he would
then have been certain to offend both queens, and lose their favor. Surely Melville could see the difficulty of his position, he concluded, and would beg Mary's forgiveness for his apparent presumption. In fact he was guiltless; the entire scheme arose from "the malice of his enemies."
Melville, who had every reason to believe that Elizabeth, not Cecil, was the most enthusiastic proponent of the plan, held his tongue. Either the anxious earl was being duped or, quite possibly, his show of self-protective alarm was itself part of the queen's intricate design, intended to confuse Melville and brake the progress of the suit she had seemed so earnestly to urge. After nine days in Elizabeth's quixotic company he believed her capable of anything.
Melville's leavetaking was as ceremonious as his welcoming had been. Cecil walked with him through the courtyards of Hampton Court to the outer gate, where his traveling party awaited him, and before he mounted his horse the secretary put a valuable gold chain around his neck as a farewell gift. Other gifts Melville had already packed away, chief among them the jewels the countess of Lennox was sending to Queen Mary's officials and the diamond ring she was sending to Mary herself. Melville's negotiations with the countess and her son Lord Darnley had gone well; the countess, he was convinced, was "a very wise and discreet matron," and had "many favorers" in England.
The queen was not there to say goodbye, but she had given Melville a letter at his final audience, expressing her pleasure at his visit and assuring Mary that she had "acquainted him with all her inward griefs and desires."
She had indeed acquainted him to an extraordinary degree with that private self she seldom shared with anyone save Leicester. As he rode northward Melville must have wondered often how he would describe that private self to his mistress in Edinburgh. He would start with externals: Elizabeth's striking looks, her shrewd, agile mind and sharp tongue, her intellectual eagerness and burning thirst to surpass her rival. But for the rest, he was for the moment at a loss. How could he convey the elusive core of the remarkable being who ruled England, whose spirit "could not endure a commander" and whose mercurial temperament embraced so many moods? For this he would have to rely on a few haunting images, describing to Mary how Elizabeth had stalked angrily up and down amid the late-blooming flowers in her privy garden, how she had leaped like an elegant goat in the swift Italian galliard, how she had sat alone at her virginal, her fingers flying over the keys, her concentration intense, determined in her impassioned virtuosity to drive off the inward griefs that assailed her.
To laugh, to lie, to flatter, to face: Four waies in Court to win men grace.
I
n the 1560s, nearly forty years after Cardinal Wolsey deeded Hampton Court to Henry VIII, the fantastic storybook palace was still the chief monument of the Tudor dynasty. Beneath an endless roofline of asymmetrical turrets and pinnacles and whimsically curlicued chimney stacks were some eighteen hundred habitable rooms—"or at least with doors that lock" —set amid formal gardens where painted dragons and lions and unicorns rose above the fruit trees and banks of flowers. The Thames flowed by, "a little pleasantly rapid," to the south of the palace, fish "playing and in sight" within its clear waters. Visitors to England invariably took home tales of "that stupendous place," Hampton Court, and it was here, in fact, that the pageantry of Queen Elizabeth's court and household could be seen to best advantage.
When the queen was in residence the palace was alive with movement and activity. Skilled workmen repaired rotted paneling and patched plaster; painters renewed the faded colors on the royal emblems and crests which decorated the walls, and gilders re-applied liquid gold where vandals had scratched it off. Servants in blue liveries went from room to room, putting up and taking down tapestries, curtains and bed hangings, carrying trays of food or armfuls of bedding or other "rich implements." An army of grooms brought heavy loads of firewood from the woodyard to stack beside
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the palace's thousand hearths, where yeomen waited to lay the fires and warm the rooms.
In the long galleries the officers of the household paced up and down with stiff authority in their long robes, their white staves of office in their hands. They scrutinized the walls, the furnishings, the unsavory carpeting of rushes that covered the floors, peering into the guest rooms to make certain each guest had been provided with a well-made bed, a lively fire and a light meal of wine and white bread. At the dining hour the household officers made their way to the chambers of important visitors, to escort them to their places in the great hall. There another cohort of servants and officials saw to the serving and removing of dishes of food and ewers of wine, while out of sight in the cavernous palace kitchens, lit red with the flickering light of open hearths, cooks and scullions "wrought both day and night" to prepare the hearty roast meats and savory sauces and sweet confections that were brought to the banquet table.
The palace courtyards were never empty. Horses clattered through at all hours, bearing the queen's personal messengers—forty of whom were always ready to be dispatched—or the swift riders with the diplomatic post. Noblemen arrived to take up residence for the winter season, bringing their wives and servants and dozens of trunks, their horses and panoplies of arms, even their hounds and hunting gear. Others departed, some under the cloud of royal disfavor, others disappointed in their ambitions and deeply in debt, their stay at court having broken their spirits as it robbed their purses. Tradesmen came through with carts of foodstuffs and coals and building materials, while tailors and clothiers and purveyors of finery and jewels watched nervously as the carters unloaded their trunks and coffers of precious goods.
An Italian awestruck by the expanse and luxury of Hampton Court praised it for being "replete with every convenience," but he was inexact: the palace had every convenience but one, indoor plumbing.
The stench of the great royal establishment must have been at least as awe-inspiring as its architecture, and detectable from nearly as far away. To be sure, Wolsey had gone to enormous ex
pense to provide fresh spring water to the palace, through some three miles of lead pipe, but it was for drinking and cooking and washing only: there was no sewage system. Combined with the overpowering odors from the discarded kitchen garbage and stable sweepings and foul-smelling rushes, full of spilled food and sour wine and animal droppings, the stink of the servants' privies must have made an alarming assault on the senses.
The "close stools" used by gentlefolk (portable wooden toilets which had to be emptied by hand) were no less odoriferous. Even in the queen's privy
chamber, a contemporary wrote, where the close stools were disguised "in sugared cases of satin and velvet," the air was often so "sour and noisome" that anyone who entered would be strongly tempted to turn around immediately and leave. 1
Rather than attempt to eliminate the malodorous atmosphere the queen and her courtiers tried to counteract it. They held aromatic pomanders to their noses when passing through noxious chambers. They perfumed their persons (which they rarely washed), their garments, even their hats and shoes and jewels. They burned juniper wood or sweet-smelling herbs in their rooms, and surrounded themselves, whenever possible, with flowers. Elizabeth, who loved flowers, wore them pinned to her clothes, ordered them strewn on the floor of the royal barge, and had her revels master construct outdoor pavilions whose walls were masses of fragrant blooms. The queen and those who served her walked through the raw stench and rankness of the palace in a perfumed fog, afraid to venture into ordurous environs unshielded against contamination.
Unswept, unscoured, full of slops and slime, Hampton Court after weeks of habitation became uninhabitable, and the queen and all the others moved on. By then the vermin, engorged by the rich diet of discards that fell to them in the great hall and the private apartments, were multiplying so fast that the queen's ratcatchers and mole men could not keep up with them, and beneath their silken doublets the courtiers were bitten head to foot by fleas.
The expense of the huge establishment invariably surpassed the £40,000 allotted to it by Parliament, and the surviving household records make it easy to see why. Despite the existence of regulations setting out, in extensive detail, the daily menus for the queen, her retainers and servants, and prescribing the exact allowances of bread, wine, beer, fuel and light for all persons authorized to come within the court gates, in practice such constraints were disregarded. 2 The queen's meals were twice as large as they were supposed to be (though the excess was enjoyed by her servants and officials; Elizabeth herself was a very light eater), and featured twice as many delicacies. The "fasting days" the budget called for were ignored completely; when they came around the table was heaped as high as ever. Officials whose positions allowed them prescribed meals from the queen's bounty abused this privilege with spectacular greed. They ordered lavishly from the palace kitchens, far exceeding in quantity and quality the limitations imposed on them by the written rules, and they even detoured to their own country houses shipments of food destined for the royal larders. 3
Economy, where servants and household staff were concerned, depended on uniform meals served to large numbers, but of the hundreds of places
STAATLICHE GRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG, MUNCHEN
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Chalk drawing of Henry VIII in old age, ascribed to Holbein.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Anne Boleyn, painted by an unknown artist.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Catherine Parr c. 1545, portrait attributed to W. Scrots.
M*rra*t
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Mary Tudor, sketched as a young girl, perhaps by Holbein.
REPRODUCED BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION OF HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN; COPYRIGHT RESERVED
King Philip II of Spain.
Elizabeth Tudor as a young girl of about fourteen, painted by a Flemish artist.
REPRODUCED BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION OF HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN; COPYRIGHT RESERVED
Thomas Seymour, by an unknown artist.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Coronation portrait of the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth, painted by an unknown artist c. 1559.
Queen Elizabeth painted by an unknown artist c. 1560, when she was about twenty-seven.
Queen Elizabeth at about age thirty, painted by a Dutch artist.
NATIONAL SWEDISH COLLECTION, STOCKHOLM
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES, THE WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON
Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in a painting attributed to Steven van der Meulen, c. 1565.
Miniature of Elizabeth by Nicholas Hilliard.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary.
The due d'Alencon, Elizabeth's beloved "Frog," whom she hoped to marry in the is8os.
Walter Ralegh in 1588, painting attributed to the monogrammist "H."
BY COURTESY OF LORD ASTOR OF HEVER
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
William Cecil, Elizabeth's principal minister and close associate for nearly forty years.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
The earl of Essex, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Queen Elizabeth, a portrait attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger.
Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's principal minister in the last years of her reign, painted in 1602 and attributed to J. de Critz.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
Mary Queen of Scots, painting by an unknown early seventeenth-century artist after a portrait by Nicholas Hilliard of c. 1578.
BY COURTESY OF THE DEAN AND CHAPTER OF WESTMINSTER
-i " I , i ' ^
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Head of Elizabeth Tudor, from her tomb in Westminster Abbev
set daily for the staff and superior servants only a few were occupied. Most people preferred to dine in their apartments, on food of their own choosing; their uneaten share of the common meal was joyfully appropriated by others further down in the hierarchy of office. Economy also demanded that food be available only to certain persons and at certain hours. But the kitchen never closed, and the wine and beer cellars, far from being properly regulated, were also open all night to all comers.
Worst of all, though, was the burgeoning, uncontrolled overpopulation of the court, with the number of private servants—that is, servants of servants—and personal retainers of the great and lesser aristocrats mounting every year without check. And it was bad enough that there were hundreds of these extra, unauthorized servants, all of them elbowing their way into the dining hall for the large midday meal; what was more appalling was that so many of them brought their wives and children along to be fed as well. There were barely enough accommodations for the staff at the best of times. Servants' rooms were tiny, and meant for sleeping only, and everyone slept two to a bed; with whole families sandwiched into space meant for one the squalor (and irritation) must have been unendurable. 4
No one, whatever his or her rank, was truly comfortable at Hampton Court, but the discomforts had to be balanced against the potential rewards: power, or its illusion; wealth, or its promise; fame, or its counterfeit notoriety. Most of all, there was for ambitious men, ambitious families, the heady, buoyant sensation of constantly being on the threshold of advancement, of having an assigned place in the vast, finely choreographed dance of ascendancy that was court life.
This life had its formal rituals—extraordinary ceremonies such as Leicester's elevation, or the daily solemnities carried out to honor the serving of the queen's meals or the making of her bed, or the formal "good night," following which the courtiers were left to their own amusement and the queen, who slept little, often went to her desk and worked late. On
Sundays there was always the small-scale pageantry of Elizabeth's procession to and from the chapel, the long train of her regal gown carried by a countess, her retinue a showy parade of two hundred tall guardsmen in red velvet, the council members, bearing the royal scepters, and a dozen highborn young ladies. As she passed everyone knelt and, by custom, held out to her "letters of supplication from rich and poor" (some written by people in genuine distress, many by that crowd of eager, insatiable petitioners who had been given one taste of royal favor and lived, as Elizabeth fully meant them to, in expectation of more). She accepted them all "with a humble mien," and responded to the display of deference with a full-voiced "Thank you with all my heart," as the trumpeters blew the fanfare signaling dinner.
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A spectacular annual ceremony was the giving and receiving of New Year's gifts—an affectionate English custom which at court became calculated and mercenary. In return for carefully weighed goblets and basins and other objects in gold and silver, their worth precisely determined in advance, the queen received from the members of her court an array of fantastic and beautiful gifts. Some people gave her purses of coins, to be sure, but others contributed suits of clothing, jewels, ornaments and other personal gifts. In 1562 the array of presents included an elaborately decorated crossbow, a golden hourglass filled with glass sand, table coverings of needlework and a portable desk, upholstered in velvet embroidered with gold. Cecil gave the queen a royal seal carved in bone and tipped with silver; one of the women of her privy chamber, Lavinia Terling, a portrait of "the queen's person and other personages," enclosed in a finely painted box.
The first Elizabeth Page 28
