The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Cecil reflected on Leicester's liabilities as a consort for Elizabeth in 1566, and listed them succinctly. The earl had nothing but himself to offer—no "riches, estimation, or power." He was hounded by scandal. Not only did most people think him a murderer, but they were convinced that he was the queen's lover; to marry him would seem to give final confirmation to that belief. As king consort he would devote his energies to enriching his many allies and dependents, and to giving maximum offense to those who had been his enemies; he was a vindictive man. He was very deeply in debt, and the queen would have to pay his creditors. And finally, Cecil wrote, "He is like to prove unkind, or jealous of the queen's majesty." 8

  In fact Leicester's nerves were frayed, his patience exhausted by the long, stressful years of waiting for Elizabeth to make up her mind to marry him. He confided his exasperation to the French ambassador La Foret. "The earl has admitted to me," La Foret reported, "laughing and sighing at the same time, that he knows not what to hope or fear. He is more uncertain than ever whether the queen wishes to marry him or not; she has so many and great princes suitors [sic], that he knows not what to do, or what to think."

  Leicester's position was a very difficult one, and Elizabeth, with her endless coquetry and changes of mind and mood, made it much worse. She maddened him with her attentions, her gifts of estates and incomes and offices, her solemn vows to marry him—but not this year. He bore her ill-tempered outbursts. "Her blasts," he commented, "be very sharp at times to those she loves best." He was forever on the point of achieving his ambitions—which were boundless—yet he forever remained the queen's handsome pawn, shorn of pride and will. It was no wonder he felt used, and wanted revenge.

  Yet despite the open quarreling between the queen and her erring favorite their intimacy seemed, if anything, more entrenched than ever. Their private hours together had a comfortable, domestic flavor. Norfolk came into Elizabeth's privy chamber unannounced one day, and saw her sitting just at the threshold, with Leicester kneeling beside her, talking quietly to her. She heard him, but her attention was divided; she was also listening "with one ear to a little child, who was singing and playing on the lute to her."

  There were scurrilous stories about what else went on during these private hours. Leicester "kissed her majesty when he was not invited

  thereto," and indulged in "familiarities with the queen which disgraced the crown she wore." He entered her bedchamber early in the morning, it was said, before she was up, and "took upon himself the office of her lady in waiting, by handing to her a garment which ought never to have been seen in the hands of her master of borse." As always, the gossip recorded in ambassadorial dispatches sent abroad from the English court stopped short of saying explicitly that the queen and Leicester were lovers, but they meant to imply it, and the result was to make the English look ridiculous.

  Arundel and Norfolk, who bore the oldest titles represented in the privy council, determined to speak frankly to the earl, putting politics and personal enmity aside in the hope that openness might clear the air. Norfolk spoke for both, calling Leicester "to a sharp account" for the unforgivable informality and lack of ceremony he showed in Elizabeth's presence, and for what went on between them behind closed doors. "Neither the English nobility nor her subjects," he told the earl, "would permit the continuance of such proceedings." Norfolk recited a list of specific allegations to support his claims, then backed off from his aristocratic hauteur and spoke man to man. He urged Leicester "to be candid, and say if the queen really wished to marry him." If she did, then he and Arundel would use their influence to persuade the rest of the nobility and the people at large "to sanction their honorable union, and stop all this scandal."

  Apparently Leicester told him what he had told the French ambassador earlier: that he "knew not what to do, or what to think." Embarrassed uncertainty had become his customary state, and well as he knew her, Elizabeth was as much an enigma to him as she was to everyone else.

  She did make up her mind about one thing. She decided not to marry Archduke Charles. The usefulness of the diplomatic wooing of the Haps-burgs as a counterweight to the French was over, at least for the time being, and besides, the archduke had proven to be difficult about the delicate issue of allowing the queen to approve him in person before agreeing to become his wife. After first saying that he would come to England to be inspected he thought better of it, and declined. Meanwhile the even more important stumbling-block of his Catholicism had raised serious objections among the English. (Leicester, desperate not to lose his chances as a potential royal consort, was trying his best to spread alarm in the council and outside it about the dire consequences of a Catholic king.)

  In the end, the negotiations ceased. Leicester breathed more easily, and ceased to be hounded by his political enemies and by Sussex with his armed bodyguard. Indeed Leicester's peril may well have influenced Elizabeth's decision, for she was caught on the horns of a dilemma. If she did not want to marry him, she did not want to destroy him either, and his ruin seemed

  inevitable once she married someone else and he lost his precarious status as her protected, intimate favorite.

  Leicester's affection had been the one fixed point in Elizabeth's highly mutable emotional universe. His devotion to her had always seemed to be as boundless as his ambition, and by the late 1560s she assumed the two had fused together to bond him permanently to her side. His disloyalty with Lettice Knollys unsettled that assumption, but did not dislodge it altogether. However their union might be defined, whatever strains they put upon it, he was hers, reliably and permanently.

  She boasted of his slavish, self-sacrificing loyalty. "She is quite certain that he would give his life for hers," the Spanish ambassador wrote after a talk with the queen, "and that if one of them had to die, he would willingly be the one." 9

  Now in the spring of 1570, in the aftermath of the northern rebellion, Elizabeth took stock of the damage that had been done to her authority, and felt doubly betrayed. It was in a way understandable—though inexcusable—for her disgruntled councilors to plot against her, bitter over her refusal to marry and over their own profound discomfort at being ruled by a woman. It was also understandable, if thoroughly reprehensible, for her northern Catholic subjects to rise against her, led on by their own lords and misled into allying themselves with Mary Stuart. These disloyalties were one thing, but Leicester's was another. She had always relied on him to stay with her to the uttermost. Yet as it proved, he had been the chief conspirator against her.

  For twelve years she had used the earl as a decoy, a whipping-boy, a smokescreen to put between herself and marriage. She had abused him, but only because she had assumed he would put up with infinite abuse. Now she saw, with some remorse, that she had gone too far.

  Time, cruel Time, canst thou subdue that brow That conquers all but thee, and thee too stays, As if she were exempt from scythe or bow, From Love or Years, unsubject to decays?

  I

  n her late thirties Elizabeth engaged a Dutch alchemist to concoct an elixir of perpetual youth. She was still a very handsome woman, as she would be for many years to come, but she had entered the twilight of her youth and already the planes of her fine skin bore the shadow-mask of middle age. The rapidly passing years were transforming her from a commanding yet compelling young woman to an eccentric spinster. In her twenties and early thirties the softness and tenderness of her youthful looks had blunted her acerbity; as she approached forty her strong, spare physical presence reinforced her flinty personality and deepened the impact of her brash, often vulgar tongue. She was getting older, and she hoped to defeat age by alchemy.

  The Dutchman, Cornelius Lannoy, was installed at Somerset House, where he worked on the queen's elixir in a secret laboratory and made vaunting promises to the money-hungry nobility that he could turn their base metal into gold. In time, however, when the base metal began to pile up in corners and no gold issued forth from it, the alchemist proved to be a fraud. There was no youth
potion either; Lannoy was imprisoned in the Tower, guilty of deceiving the queen.

  The incident with the alchemist must have sent ripples of laughter through the privy chamber, for there was much ridiculing of the queen

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  among her waiting women. If the men around Elizabeth found her unduly assertive and offensively magisterial, the women who attended her found her to be hilariously, outlandishly unfeminine.

  She was under their scrutiny from the time she rose in the morning— usually bad-tempered—until she got undressed late at night. They knew her habits, her moods, when she was ill and when she had trouble sleeping. Others saw her when she was prepared and presentable; they saw her when she was off guard, and none, except possibly Leicester, knew her better.

  And they thought she was ludicrous. Her loud, vehement swearing and soldierly boasting made a strange counterpoint to her elegant dress and coquettish adornments. Flowers in her hair, round oaths on her lips, she stormed through her apartments, slapping and stabbing at her women when they displeased her and demanding to be told how beautiful she was. 1 Only the most wildly extravagant compliments would do. She had to be told that no one dared look at her directly, for her face shone like the sun, or that she was as fair as a heavenly goddess, or she would not be satisfied.

  In a less strident woman such vanity would have been pathetic. But in Elizabeth it was the stuff of caricature. For with every whoop of her loud laughter, every stab of her mordant wit, every jerk of her restless, wiry body she undermined her womanly beauty and coarsened herself in others' eyes. Bess of Hardwick, countess of Shrewsbury, confided to Mary Stuart, "doubled over with laughter" as she spoke, how the ladies of the court ridiculed Elizabeth and played tricks on her. When Bess herself and Lady Lennox, Darnley's mother, were together talking to the queen "they didn't dare look at one another for fear of bursting into gales of laughter." And Bess's daughter Mary Talbot was in on the joking, mocking Elizabeth with every curtsy she made while "never ceasing to laugh up her sleeve" at her royal mistress.

  Of course, Bess and the others were Catholic partisans of the Queen of Scots, and were naturally predisposed to mock their Protestant sovereign. But there was more than partisan sentiment behind the ridicule, and it was not confined to an insolent few. Mean tricks, broad derision and backbiting gossip followed Elizabeth everywhere. Once she went to her dressing table and found it swept clean. Invisible hands had snatched away her comb, her looking glass, her gold bodkin and the silver-gilt lye pot which held the lye in which she washed her long fair hair. There were whispered conversations among the women, and smothered laughter. They gossiped about her fading looks, her quirks and personal oddities, and about Leicester's new sweetheart Douglas Sheffield. They "played and counterfeited" the queen in her absence, one taking the part of Elizabeth, an absurd mannish maiden, the others her servants and victims.

  Not all of the serving women were disloyal. Kat Ashley, who held the post of mistress of the maids until her much-lamented death in 1565, was utterly devoted, as were Blanche Parry and Leicester's sister Mary Sidney, who was "as foul a lady as the smallpox could make her" as a result of her faithful attendance on Elizabeth during her grave illness in 1562. Anne Russell, Bedford's daughter, who had married Ambrose Dudley, was a beloved intimate of the queen, while Elizabeth's cousin Catherine Knollys was equally dear to her. When Lady Knollys fell ill of a fever Elizabeth provided her with every possible remedy, and kept her near at hand, visiting her sickbed frequently and sending messengers every hour to inquire about her condition. In the end she died, and Elizabeth mourned her with such fervency that she cought cold and had to take to her bed herself.

  Among the most venomous of the privy chamber stories was that the queen "was not as other women" and that therefore all talk of marriage for her was futile. 2 The issue became pressing in the early 1570s, when renewed marriage negotiations began, this time with the French. Of the three sons of Catherine de' Medici, two were left available. (The eldest son, King Charles IX, was married.) Henry, the middle son—the future Henry III—was the prospective bridegroom, and though he was eighteen years younger than Elizabeth the match seemed at first to be a possibility. The young prince was said to be unusually good-looking, with fine eyes and a charming mouth and a manner as sweet as a girl's. His health could not be vouched for, but he seemed to throw himself into lusty pastimes with a good deal of vigor and energy.

  And so he did—but it was the unnatural energy of a manic depressive, and a seasoned voluptuary. Further reports from envoys to the French court disclosed the sordid truth. Prince Henry wore more makeup than Elizabeth herself, who wore a good deal. He smelled overpoweringly of strong perfume, and affected a double row of bejeweled earrings. His liaisons with women were surpassed in their decadence only by his assignations with the long-haired, effeminate "Princes of Sodom" who were his preferred companions.

  These unseemly habits would have made the French prince thoroughly unsuitable, even without the religious bigotry that also showed itself and soured the English diplomats irrevocably on the marriage. But to add insult to injury, Prince Henry rejected Elizabeth. "He would not marry her," he announced tactlessly, "for she was not only an old creature, but had a sore leg."

  That she had a sore leg, at least, was true. She limped badly throughout the summer of 1570, and had to be carried from place to place in a coach —even to the hunt. An "open ulcer above the ankle" gave her much pain

  and forced her into weeks of invalidism. The affliction did nothing to enhance her marriageability, which even her own envoys had begun to doubt. ('The more hairy she is before," one of them wrote in 1571, "the more bald she is behind.")

  Prince Henry's ungentlemanly reference to Elizabeth's lameness was bad enough, but his unkind allusion to her age wounded her vanity intolerably. She alone could joke about that, as she had been doing ever since she turned thirty, "which she called old." At thirty-four she had referred to her possible marriage with a nineteen-year-old as "a comical farce," "an old woman leading a child to the church doors." People would say she was marrying her son, she remarked gaily when young men were proposed to her, yet though she expected those around her to laugh at this she also expected them to reassure her that it was nonsense, given her youthfulness and beauty.

  Conversing with Elizabeth about age was a dangerous pastime. When the queen asked Lady Cobham what she thought of the French Prince Henry as a husband the gentlewoman was rash enough—or malicious enough—to speak her mind. "Those marriages were always the happiest when the parties were the same age, or near about it," she said, "but here there was a great inequality."

  "Nonsense!" Elizabeth stormed back. "There are but ten years' difference between us!" The extravagant lie was telling. Ten years' difference might just possibly have been smoothed over, but eighteen was a disturbingly wide gulf, especially when the prospective husband was just across the threshold of manhood and the woman was nearly forty.

  Lady Cobham was as brave as she was frank, for the women who angered Elizabeth risked injury. According to Mary Talbot, who told Bess of Hard-wick who passed it on to Mary Stuart, several women bore the marks of her wrath. One had a broken finger—though to camouflage the truth Elizabeth made the courtiers believe it was an accident, the result of a blow from a falling candlestick—and another had a scar on her hand where the queen had stabbed her with a knife while she was serving her a meal. 3

  It was a sordid picture, more suited to the stalls of fishwives or the squabbling of prostitutes in the stews than to the queen's privy chamber. The violence, the envy, the climate of backbiting and hidden mockery were yet one more element in Elizabeth's odd, unprecedented role as spinster queen. By the early 1570s, as the French marriage project was abandoned —and with it, all serious hope of children—the limited dimensions of that role were becoming sadly clear.

  From the start, it had never really been a fair choice. Either she had to

  go the way of her tragic half-sister Mary, who by taking a
husband had traded what precarious authority she possessed for the privation and humiliation of a loveless royal marriage, ending as a victim of the enmity and feigned fidelity that surrounded her. Or she had to endure the extreme, ultimately dangerous disapproval of the men in government—not to mention the shame of public scorn and the undercurrent of ridicule and ugly gossip at court and elsewhere—by remaining single. The second course had seemed the wiser one, and the one best suited to Elizabeth's temperament and gifts. Yet spinsterhood hobbled and wounded her; she cannot have relished her eccentricities, or the foul reputation that followed her, or the poisonous atmosphere of her bedchamber, even though she relished the very real sovereignty she wielded in their despite.

  What strength, what brittleness of spirit were required to counteract the pressures and blows that surrounded her—to parry disloyalty in the council, to negate severe personal criticism, to ward off the pain of Dudley's infidelities—only she knew, and she did not record her inner thoughts. And with it all, she now had to watch her youthful features settle into the frowning, careworn rictus of middle age.

  To be sure, Elizabeth had ample resources to offset despondency. Youth could be counterfeited—up to a point—by cosmetics and embroidered silk gowns and flattering jewels. Intellectual pleasures were heightened rather than dimmed with maturity, and the queen continued to read and reread the Greek and Latin texts she had learned to love as a young girl. No doubt Elizabeth was often pleased with herself; her large and small political victories and her frequent strokes of luck must have given her immense private satisfaction.

  So too did the everpresent absurdities of court life and the wit and word-play of her clever courtiers. She delighted in jokes and funny stories; they made her laugh as if "she had been tickled." Humorlessness and formality invariably amused her. Catherine de' Medici sent a stiff, correct envoy to the English court who addressed the queen with unbearable solemnity. "Monsieur Pasquier (as I believe) thinks I have no French," Elizabeth wrote to Queen Catherine, "by the passions of laughter into which he throws me by the formal precision with which he speaks and expresses himself." 4 At bottom, it may have been that Elizabeth's sharp sense of the absurd made her own life, with its inevitable accretions of artifice and insubstantiality, easier to bear. In any case, while taking out her frustrations on her hapless waiting maids and reading Seneca to "calm turbulence of mind," she bore her sorrows silently, and kept her self-pity to herself.