On the eve of his departure she gave him one final fright. She withheld
the money to pay the six thousand footsoldiers and the thousand mounted men that were to make up his army. In panic, he sent a hurried message to Walsingham. If only she would release the funds, he begged, he would sell her some of his lands at a tremendous loss. The lands were worth sixty thousand pounds; she could have them for thirty, and if she sold the wood on them as well, she could make a profit of forty thousand in all. 3
The funds were released, and the fleet set sail from Harwich, the queen's proud lieutenant Leicester in the van.
As soon as they caught sight of the English ships the citizens of Flushing signaled a noisy greeting. With every encouragement from Sidney, who had been made military commander of the town, bells were rung and cannons fired in a cacophony of welcome. The earl of Leicester was here at last, the mighty English peer, great Elizabeth's devoted lover—almost a king himself.
Certainly he came with a king's retinue. Over a thousand fighting men made up his personal train, and their huge warhorses and grooms and chests of weaponry weighted down the Sea Rider, the Golden Rose, the Swan, the Crah-Joint, the Golden Hag and the other English vessels as they anchored in the harbor. Leicester's household was enormous—a hundred yeomen and grooms, six dozen titled lords and gentlemen, scores of menials to wash and clean and serve and carry. His chaplains with their gowns and books and golden candlesticks, his choirboys, his cooks and stable staff and company of actors added another hundred at least to the rolls, and beyond these there were the purely military personnel—paymasters and purveyors, messengers, engineers, armorers and ordnance men, trumpeters, drummers and fife-players to march with the troops. Even so the list was not quite complete. Somehow Leicester had overlooked the office of herald, and had to send home for one—hoping to be supplied with a reliable man who could speak Dutch, Latin and French as well as English.
It was a splendid retinue, and Leicester himself looked splendid walking through the streets of Flushing surrounded by his soldiers and liveried servants, as the townspeople cried out "God save the Queen!" and threw down wreaths of flowers in his path.
Leicester was clearly the savior—more than that, the ruler—they had been waiting for. Elizabeth had refused to accept the sovereignty of the United Provinces—the rebel areas, chiefly Holland and Zeeland, still resisting Spanish domination—when it was offered her five months earlier, but Leicester would accept it, or so Sidney told the Dutch.
The idea of an Anglo-Dutch state had been mooted for a decade, but never before had it seemed so inevitable. The United Netherlands brought into being in 1576 by the Pacification of Ghent had split apart three years
later, when the predominantly Catholic southern provinces came to terms with the Spanish governor Parma. The north sought to save itself by appealing to Alencon, then to Henry III, and most recently to Elizabeth, but Parma and his Spanish armies marched virtually without resistance into Brabant and Flanders, seizing Ypres, Bruges and Ghent in 1584 and finally capturing Antwerp in this year of 1585. If Holland and Zeeland were to be spared a similar fate, England would have to rescue them, and this meant virtually annexing them to the English crown.
It would have to be England, not France: France had become little more than a feeble ally of Spain. This more than any other recent shift in continental affairs had pushed England into war. In 1584 Alencon, heir to his brother Henry's throne, had died—plunging Elizabeth, his "widow," as she called herself, into deep mourning and causing her to lay aside business for a time while she wept for him. The Protestant Henry of Navarre was next in line, and to make certain he never made good his claim the Catholic duke of Guise conspired with Philip to exclude him. France, once strong and hostile to Spain, had become weak and submissive to her, and this, plus Parma's series of successful campaigns in the Netherlands, left England directly in the path of Philip's devouring armies.
On the day Leicester reached Flushing news came to the English court that in fact the Spanish were preparing for "some great enterprise against England." Military and naval forces were converging on Lisbon: there were sixty ships in the harbor, twenty of them great warships, or galleons, and over sixty thousand troops were billeted in or near the town. 4 Leicester's modest fleet and minuscule army were toys by comparison. Yet the courage of the English made them admired. Elizabeth, one French courtier remarked, seemed "determined to lose like a man, and not like a woman." Whether Leicester would prove to be as manly remained to be seen.
He came to make war—and found himself compelled to make merry instead. For four months he and his train were escorted from town to town, greeted with fulsome Latin orations and poetry, music and cannonades. They walked under gorgeous triumphal arches, admired pageants in which Leicester was likened to the biblical Joshua, sat down to sumptuous banquets of baked swan and roast pheasant and spitted pork. There were fireworks, water spectacles, plays and a "variety of all sorts of wonderful welcomes." There was wine in great abundance, and the English became abundantly, extravagantly drunk—so drunk that, at a banquet in Amsterdam, they amused themselves by throwing puddings and cakes out the windows and watching them splatter over passers-by in the street below.
In letters to the court in London Leicester tried to put all this frivolity in a serious light. The Dutch towns were valuable to Elizabeth; the lavish
hospitality of their devoted citizenry was worth whatever delay it meant in warmaking. "I could be content to lose a limb/' he wrote enthusiastically, "could her majesty see these countries and towns as I have done." But there was much that he left out of his letters. He did not tell the queen how flattered he was to be the honored, praised center of attention when for nearly thirty years he had been forced to remain in her shadow. He did not send an accounting of all he had had to spend—out of money designated to pay soldiers and wage war—on expensive gifts to the Dutch towns and feasts for the town officials. Most important, he did not tell Elizabeth that, contrary to her express command, he had accepted the title governor-general, and had taken on, for all practical purposes, the sovereignty she had explicitly ordered him to refuse.
Ignorant as yet of this intolerable disobedience, Elizabeth spent the dark winter days in her privy chamber, within whose richly adorned, perfumed confines she worked and read, interviewed ambassadors and councilors, received visitors and friends and supervised and reprimanded her women.
Smothered in adornment, the chamber was dim and stuffy—there was only one window—and frequently overcrowded. For it was here that the sixteen or so women of the queen's entourage dressed their mistress and served her meals and waited for her orders. They were always present or on call, the four chamberers who slept at the foot of her bed, the half dozen "great ladies," all married, who were her official companions and the six young, unmarried waiting maids or maids of honor whose youth grew more offensive to her with each passing year and whose virtue she guarded as possessively as she did her jewels and treasure.
The great ladies had few formal tasks, which meant that during their long hours of attendance on the queen there was much idle time for gossip and flirtation and malicious spreading of rumors. These were Elizabeth's peers, the women she played cards with and talked with and scolded, the women from whom she expected flattery and pampering. They knew what pleased and what offended her, how she liked looking at handsome young men and hated men with bad breath ("Good God," she burst out after meeting with one malodorous ambassador, "what shall I do if this man stay here, for I smell him an hour after he is gone from me!"). They knew— and dreaded—her dark moods, her infirmities, her womanly secrets.
They saw her, as very few others did, without the elaborate mask of creams and lotions which softened and clarified her pockmarked skin and the oily cosmetics, mixed with egg and spread on in thick swathes of dead white and blazing vermilion, that brightened it. They knew intimately that proud, suspicious, handsome, careworn face, the small, squinting, deepset eyes, the nose growing sh
arper and more hooked with age, the sagging
cheeks and jowls and wrinkled neck. Elizabeth's scent, compounded of her syrupy perfume of musk and rosewater, the sweet oil she used on her hands, and the sharp lemon and vinegar odors of her toiletries, must have hung in the air and clung to her attendants even after they left court or retired to their own beds for the night.
To the young maids of honor the queen was a less familiar and more terrifying figure, a strident, querulous taskmistress who though capable of generosity and even of rough good humor was more treacherous than affable. She expected them all to be well educated and to play the lute and have sweet singing voices. More important, she expected them to be docile and decorous, to form a pleasing backdrop for her own overpainted maiden-liness. They dressed to complement her dress, and unless they were very foolish indeed they toned down their youthful good looks so as not to outshine her—at least from a distance.
When walking behind the queen on her way to the royal chapel on Sundays or when waiting on her while she ate her dinner in the privy chamber the maids were at least marginally well behaved, though occasionally they talked back to her in a way that "did breed much choler" in her. But when on their own, especially in the coffer chamber where they all slept, they laughed and shouted and created such uproar that the household officers—who slept in nearby chambers—complained indignantly about the noise.
The maids flirted, were occasionally seduced, occasionally married in secret or became recusants, calling forth the queen's fearsome wrath. They were the object of ribald attention. "The maids of honor desire to have their chamber ceiled, and the partition that is of boards there, to be made higher," reads an instruction to the surveyor of the works at Windsor Castle in 1580, "for that their servants look over." 5 It was bad enough that the maids kept the senior servants awake at night; peeping servants added intolerably to the chaos.
While the great ladies and waiting maids gossiped and fondled their lapdogs and pet squirrels and monkeys, the more humble chamberers took on the laborious tasks that fell to them as practical caretakers of Elizabeth's person, hygiene and wardrobe. With their assistants they attended her while she bathed, cleaned her teeth by rubbing them with tooth soap and then with a linen cloth, and applied her beautifying creams and waters and oils. They dressed her hair, combing and brushing it into mounds of curls, building it outward with swatches of false hair, fastening into its serpentine involutions an array of pearls and rosettes and jewels to match those in her gowns and at her ears. They laced and tied and fastened her into eight layers of clothing—from smock to petticoat to bodice, skirt, kirtle, gowns,
and sleeves—and then added to these collars, cuffs, stomachers, a ruff, high-heeled shoes in colored leather or silk, scented gloves, jewelry (a great deal of it, the rings tied to the wrists by a twist of black silk), a ribbon at the waist on which were fastened a pomander, a watch, a fan, perhaps a silken mask.
In middle age Elizabeth abandoned the flattering pastels of her youth for dramatic gowns of black and white. In the mid-1580s, while in mourning for Alencon, she wore only black, though an envoy who saw her at court at Christmastime in 1584 recorded how she brightened her costume for the holiday. She was dressed in black velvet, he wrote, "sumptuously embroidered with silver and pearls. Over her robe she had a silver shawl, that was full of meshes and diaphanous like a piece of gossamer tissue. But this shawl gleamed as though it were bespangled with tinsel." Swathed in this shimmering mantle, sitting under her canopy of cloth of gold, Elizabeth must have resembled a goddess, and her regal air and fragile physique can only have added to the otherworldly effect.
Beyond the chamberers were scores of servants and tradespeople who made their contributions to the vast royal wardrobe: seamstresses, dressmakers, jewelers, wigmakers, milliners who supplied gilded trinkets, ornament-makers who brought glittering spangles and tiny golden or silver aglets to besprinkle a gown, grooms to clean, brush and tend the delicate fabrics between wearings, laundresses for the linen and silk women to provide the stuffs from which new petticoats and kirtles were made. The household rolls recorded one woman whose sole daily work was removing the tiny seed pearls that decorated certain garments and sewing them onto others.
Surrounded by the women who served and attended her—women whose unremitting companionship she could never easily escape—Elizabeth resigned herself, in her fifties, to life as a spinster. With Leicester away in Flanders she was more acutely aware of her unenviable status than ever before. To be sure, she had male companions as well. There were the "handsome old gentlemen" of her council—gouty Cecil, flinty Walsing-ham, tortured now by kidney stones but still driven to untiring labor by his convictions, silver-haired, lovesick Hatton, who was to become chancellor in 1587. There was young Walter Ralegh, a dark, good-looking intellectual and adventurer whose poetic gifts and brilliantly speculative turn of mind nourished Elizabeth's own ever-hungry intellect even as his infatuation with her soothed her vanity. In Ralegh's eyes she was, if not young, at least womanly and desirable, a mysterious and alluring being to be saluted in delicate rhymes.
But there was no substitute for Leicester, and as the weeks passed and
there was no news from Flanders of military activity—only of pageantry and overeating, and requests for money—Elizabeth became more and more uneasy about his campaign, and more and more crotchety and unbearable toward her women.
The mood of the court did nothing to soothe the queen's temper. The palace was a hothouse of frenzy and anxiety. The excitement of war and of mounting danger, the growing conviction among the courtiers that theirs was an age writ large in human destiny, and that they must secure for themselves leading roles in the coming drama, made them desperate. The climate of frenzied desperation fed on itself; every time word came of new belligerence from Spain the tension mounted, with whispers of fear alternating with bullying shouts of defiance.
A new generation of gorgeous, swaggering young men came into their own in these tense years, "sword and buckler men" who burned to engage with England's enemies and to stifle fear in the oblivion of slashing combat. Most of them knew only the glory to be gained in war, not its dust and pain and bloody destruction. As they fitted themselves out with fine horses and gilt swords and richly engraved armor they thought little of the risk they undertook; their arrogance and narcissism eclipsed all else.
With their armor off they paraded in gaudy, grotesquely cut painted doublets, huge, jewel-encrusted sleeves and monstrously wide padded breeches, stuffed with wool or rags or bran until they stood out stiffly from the legs and made walking an art. Friends kissed one another's well-tended hands when they met, enemies squared off and glared at one another through intervening knots of admirers. Detached onlookers, new to court or precariously neutral in its web of internal politics, stood nervously apart, balancing themselves carefully on their high-heeled, diamond-studded silk shoes, sniffing their golden pomanders or elegantly picking their teeth with gilded toothpicks.
All was flash, harsh color, vulgar display, along with the din of intense, insistent voices. The queen, with her blazing gowns and high-colored cheeks, her roaring oaths and free talk of severed heads, seemed at one with the strident young warmongers. She sat in the presence chamber at Whitehall amid "pictures of the wars she had waged," plucking the men by their cloaks and pulling them over to talk with her in private.
A visitor to court watched her one day, and afterward described how she "summoned old and young" to her side, one after another, talking constantly and at the same time watching the acrobatics of a group of dancers. She "chatted and jested most amiably" with all who came before her, and singled out Ralegh to tease. "Pointing with her finger at the face of one Master or Captain Ralegh," the visitor wrote, she "told him that there was
smut on it. She also offered to wipe it off with her handkerchief, but he anticipating her removed it himself." The incident evoked whispers. "They say that she now loves him beyond all others," the foreigner recorded, "and this one
may easily credit, for but a year ago he could scarcely keep one servant, whereas now owing to her bounty he can afford to keep five hundred." 6
Neither the queen nor Ralegh seem to have danced that day, but those who did caught the tone of hysteria in their mad leaps and "sprightly fire and motion." Slow dances were gone forever, at least for the young and middle-aged; instead they danced the volta, a violent, whirling two-step punctuated by strenuous high jumps and hectic turnings. The Puritans were outraged at this new example of worldly folly, which called for men to embrace women "lasciviously" while turning and lifting them and which led to the unseemly eroticism of skirts raised as high as the knees. But their protests only fed the mania for dance. New steps, old steps quickened to double time, entirely new and tortuously difficult patterns were invented.
What "new kind of dances, and new devised gestures the people have devised, and daily do devise," only God could say, a contemporary wrote. Dancing schools sprang up, with dancing-masters who "leapt, flung, and took on" wonderfully as their eager students watched. Court gallants tried to keep pace with the professionals, but their fevered efforts—made all the more awkward by their outlandish, restricting costumes—often resulted in injured dignity or worse. Often they leaped high—only to fall down hard on their padded breeches. Some "broke their legs with skipping, leaping, turning and vaulting." A few broke their necks.
It was as if they sought to pour all their restive energies into the galliard and volta, to exorcise the infuriate spirit that possessed them through the mindless exertions of dance.
In everything they courted excess: in flirtation and lust, the "ordinary infection" of the court, in the extravagantly flowery language the queen exchanged with her cultured admirers, a language coruscated with excessive alliteration and topheavy with overwrought metaphors, in the inordinate number of epithets—Lady of the Sea, Phoenix of the World, Peerless Oriana, Astraea, Cynthia, Belphoebe, Gloriana—with which the new generation of poets saluted the aging Elizabeth.
The first Elizabeth Page 44
