The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  In his first expansive days as lord steward Leicester encouraged Elizabeth to visit the camp in person to "comfort these thousands" as she had comforted him. Fortunately for him, her coming was delayed for some days; in the interim he was able to turn the chaos of unprovisioned troops, half-erected fortifications and rain-soddened equipment into something like an orderly camp.

  The military crisis with Spain pulled Elizabeth out of an ugly contretemps with her advisers. All the hidden strain in her personal life had broken to the surface with the execution of Mary Stuart, and in the aftermath of that infinitely distasteful event she had lost not only her self-control but, for a time, her governmental sense. The chief scapegoat, William Davison, was sent to the Tower while the queen sought to have him hanged without a trial. (Finding this impossible, she had him tried, condemned to an indeterminate imprisonment and heavily fined.) The councilors feared for their lives.

  It seemed for a time as if the brash, bullying woman with her loud talk of severed heads was about to order executions in earnest. She inquired of the justices "whether her prerogatives were not absolute" and succeeded in calling up, in the minds of her senior advisers, the specter of her terrifying father Henry VIII. With advancing years both the old king and his father, Henry VII, had now and then lapsed into a twilit sanity in which

  they stumbled about, red-faced and speechless with anger, or attacked their companions with lunging violence. The older Henry had withdrawn into secretive paranoia, the younger into raging tyranny.

  There was more than a hint of this affliction in Elizabeth Tudor, but unlike her father and grandfather she had never until now allowed her personal eccentricities to damage her discrimination as queen. In the three or four months after her royal cousin's death she came very close to losing her judgment, and allowing her feelings of resentment to lead her into direct conflict with the men through whom she ruled. In the end she did not provoke a governmental conflict; instead her revenge took the form of excluding from court those she meant to punish, then, after a period of painful exile, allowing them to return but exposing them to savage and bitter abuse. Cecil, whom she at first wanted to imprison in the Tower along with Davison, was exiled, then vilified in this way; though old and ill he was made to suffer through the queen's tirades, being called "traitor, false dissembler, and wicked wretch" in tones far sharper than the words themselves. Walsingham stood up better to such ill treatment than Cecil, though he too was ailing and the stormy scenes must have worn down his nerves. The queen addressed him with icy disdain to his face and spoke viciously about him behind his back; he confessed to behavior toward her that was "nothing gracious."

  The military emergency that began to loom in the spring of 1588 relieved this atmosphere of sordid tensions and turned the queen's enmity in a more appropriate direction. Not that she welcomed the Spanish assault: in fact she shut her eyes to its inevitability until the last possible moment, doling out funds to pay troops and victual her navy with a tightfistedness remarkable even for her ("King Harry, her majesty's father, never made a lesser proportion of supply than six weeks," complained Admiral Howard when he found out he was to be allotted only a month's provisions at a time) and continuing to negotiate with Parma until mid-June, many weeks after the Armada had left Lisbon harbor. But once she accepted its inescapability the danger began to lift her spirits; she rose to meet its challenge, in a flamboyant gesture of self-display that left an indelible mark on English memory.

  On August 8 she sailed on the ebb tide to Tilbury in her royal barge, surrounded by a small flotilla of other rivercraft carrying her trumpeters, her tall gentlemen pensioners and the yeomen of her guard. A flourish of trumpets and drum rolls announced her arrival, and as she disembarked a great shout went up from the men.

  She rode through their ranks on a huge white warhorse, armed like a queen out of antique mythology in a silver cuirass and silver truncheon. Her

  gown was white velvet, and there were plumes in her hair like those that waved from the helmets of the mounted soldiers.

  Every man the queen passed fell to his knees and called on God to preserve her, until the extravagant reverence became as embarrassing as it was repetitious. She sent a messenger to precede her and to beg the men to forbear. Yet the shouts of blessing could not be restrained, and the soldiers appointed to stand guard outside her lodging that night toasted one another with cries of "Lord preserve the queen!" until the early hours of the morning.

  It had been more than two weeks now since the first sighting of the Spanish fleet, and very little news had reached the Camp Royal about the fate of the two navies. Word came that Drake had seized a galleass, and captured the fleet's "admiral or vice admiral" along with it. One of the greatships had sunk. Two Spanish carracks had been taken by the ships of Flushing and Zeeland. So far, it seemed, English losses had been small. The arrival of the queen greatly encouraged the men, but they knew well in what peril they lay. There were perhaps ten thousand in the neighborhood of the camp, all told—a respectable, but hardly an invincible force. They could not stand long against the Spaniards if they landed; they could not even protect London, for the huge boom of ships' masts and chains that had been built across the mouth of the river had collapsed, leaving open to invaders the pathway to the heart of the country, the court and government.

  The following day, August 9, Elizabeth again rode through the camp, this time with a retinue of heralds and sergeants, guardsmen and musicians. Leicester and Lord Grey, marshal of the camp, rode before her, richly dressed "in princely garments of great price, bearing their hats and feathers in their hands." Eight footmen escorted her warhorse, her ladies riding behind her and a troop of guardsmen bringing up the rear.

  This time the queen did more than acknowledge the shouts of the men by energetic nods and waves and brief words of thanks. She made a speech, at once rousing and moving, her words carefully chosen to appeal to their patriotism and to their lifelong affection for her. 8

  "My loving people," she began, "we have been persuaded by some that are careful for our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst

  you all, and to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust."

  She spoke simply, her words interrupted often by cheers. Only the men nearest to her could make them out; to most of those at the camp she was a tiny, gesticulating figure in white, her cuirass gleaming dully and her orange wig bobbing enthusiastically up and down with each shout of approval.

  "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," she was saying, "but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of even' one of your virtues in the field."

  Thunderous noise greeted this appeal of the thin, aging woman to lead her troops into battle, and with a final promise to pay the unpaid, meanly fed men—a promise she was to break—Elizabeth ended her speech.

  Had this been stage drama rather than plain reality battle would immediately have been joined, or word would have come of a decisive clash between the fleets, decisively ended. But in truth the sequel was anticlimac-tic.

  There had been fighting in the Channel, as it turned out, some of it fierce and prolonged. But according to the messages reaching Tilbury, it had been inconclusive, and had ended in confusion in the first days of August.

  The Armada had sailed majestically up the
coast, a massive crescent of seagoing castles. Forbidden by King Philip's orders to land, the fleet had anchored off Calais to wait for Parma's men, fending off the English ships as best they could but suffering a good deal of damage from the furious pounding of the latter's awesome guns. Admiral Howard had been wrong: it was not the English but the Spanish ships which were like bears tied to stakes, lumbering and clumsy for all their strength, with the smaller but more deadly English mastiffs tearing at them from all sides.

  Medina Sidonia sent message after message pleading with Parma to embark with his army, yet there was no sight of them; in fact the Spanish forces were blocked in by the Dutch. Alternately blinded by thick smoke from the English cannonades and by the driving rain and heaving seas that washed over their bows and broke their bowsprits and foremasts, the Armada captains raged against their commander, against Parma, and against their own ill fortune. On the night of July 28, the English sent blazing fireships into the midst of the enemy vessels; they scattered, and several foundered. Pounded on the following day by the English off Gravelines, and then by yet another in the series of gales that made winter of this freak

  summer, the Invincible Armada sailed northward, pursued by the English until, short of powder and provisions, they had to give up the chase off Scotland.

  A wreckage of spars and sails, ropes and bodies floated in the Channel, witness to much destruction, but the English captains felt cheated of victory and speculated anxiously about the Armada's imminent return. Surely the fleet would not sail home to Spain without making another attempt to complete its task; it must have taken shelter somewhere— perhaps Denmark—to refit, and would be back soon. In the meantime Parma must be belatedly preparing his invasion, and would cross in his own ships with the next favorable tides in a matter of days.

  And the English seamen, who had served bravely despite widespread illness from rough seas and sour beer, and had gone on uncomplaining when the fresh water ran out and they were forced to drink their own urine, had now begun to die of typhus by the hundreds. Shipboard mortality left some vessels with too few men to weigh their anchors. 'They sicken one day and die the next," wrote the admiral. "It is a most pitiful sight to see the men die in the streets of Margate." 9

  In all the Catholic cities of Europe the bells were rung for a great Spanish victory. The Newfoundland fishing fleet, on its way to Dieppe, had witnessed a monumental naval battle with the English losing many of their ships. Other reports told how Drake had been captured, and gave assurance that Parma must already be in London. From Paris to Venice to Rome the fantastic news traveled, with the few contrary reports dismissed as unreliable. It was to have been a year of disaster, and disaster had indeed fallen on the English, as all good Catholics had known it should. In the Escorial the royal chapel resounded with masses of thanksgiving; in Seville and Madrid rejoicing crowds gathered around bonfires to celebrate the defeat of the wicked heretic Elizabeth and the capture of the devilish dragon Francis Drake.

  But the revelry, like the misgivings of the English captains, was premature. The Armada, many of her ships listing badly and others damaged beyond repair, was battling vainly to return home, and losing ground with every mile. Another storm caught them nearing the Orkneys, and by the time the fleet was opposite the Galway coast more and more of the great-ships were wallowing low in the water and sinking out of sight. New tempests drove many of the remnants onto the Irish coasts, where survivors were executed by English soldiers or by the Irish in their pay. Of the overmighty fleet assembled in Lisbon in the spring, only half the ships made it back to their home waters.

  Not for many weeks was it known in England that a great victory had

  been won, the great power of Spain checked for a season. Parma and his army did not come, nor did the Armada reappear. Instead, there were stories of dead horses and mules washing ashore—to save water and excess weight the Spanish had thrown all their animals overboard—and of wrecked galleons driven onto rocky shores or broken up by giant waves. Gradually it became clear that the boasting on the continent was nothing more than wishful thinking. The Armada had been shattered, a victim of the English guns, the treacherous weather, and its own inherent weakness.

  "She came, she saw, she fled," read derisive Protestant broadsheets celebrating the miraculous defeat of the unconquerable Armada. In retrospect her proportions seemed impossibly vast, her menace unprecedented. She had come, Ralegh wrote, with "so great and terrible an ostentation" that no other fleet could ever match it; the ships were so huge, Camden recorded with Vergilian pomposity, that the winds were tired of carrying them, and the ocean groaned under their weight. A mistimed, mishandled venture was seen as a providential debacle, an epic chapter in the canon of Protestant history.

  But the depositions of the few Spanish survivors who were not at first killed restored the disaster to human scale. They told stories of slow starvation on the crippled ships, of drownings, of wounded men crying for food and water, of scurvy and maddening despair. By the power of the saints a few, a very few, had come through their hour of martyrdom alive.

  Late in October, nearly three months after the battle in the Channel and its tragic aftermath, Geoffrey Fenton, secretary for Ireland, went walking on the coast of Sligo. The secretary had been an official of the queen's government for many years, and had seen much slaughter and bloodshed in the Irish wars. Yet nothing in his experience matched the spectacle that awaited him on that raw autumn day. In a walk of less than five miles, he wrote to Cecil afterward, he counted more than eleven hundred Spanish corpses on the beach, washed up, bloated and decaying, by the incoming tide.

  PART SIX

  "A Lady Whom Time Had Surprised

  I!

  / weepe for ioy to see the world decay, Yet see Eliza flourishing like May.

  I

  t was a brisk December afternoon when Andre Hurault, Sieur De Maisse, disembarked from the royal barge at the privy stairs of Whitehall Palace and greeted the gentlemen who waited to receive him there. He came as ambassador of Henry IV of France—the former Henry of Navarre —and he had been entrusted with the unenviable task of sounding out Queen Elizabeth on the subject of the war with Spain.

  The year was 1597, nine years after the Spanish had surprised themselves and all Europe by failing to conquer England with the Invincible Armada. But far from ending the war the Armada debacle had, paradoxically, toughened Spain so that a decade later her navy was stronger than ever, far stronger than it had been when Medina Sidonia left Lisbon harbor with his doomed flotilla. The rejoicing in England in 1588 had soon turned to apprehension, for Spain not only rebuilt her warships but moved her land forces into Picardy and Brittany in an aggressive attempt to acquire a French port from which to invade England.

  Recently King Philip had been active in Ireland as well, sending supplies and gold to support the rebel leader Tyrone and ordering soundings taken along the coast to locate a deep-water landing site. Even as De Maisse mounted the river stairs behind his escort and made his way along the covered walkway leading to the lower rooms of the palace, the court was

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  alive with talk of the latest news from Ireland. The English governor had just died—some said of poison—and Tyrone and his Spanish allies had begun to burn dozens of villages and slaughter all who opposed them.

  The ambassador was led into the presence chamber, where he was requested to seat himself on a cushion. The queen, he was told, would see him presently.

  In contrast to the dark, low passage into the palace from the river side, which De Maisse had found "passing melancholy," and "with no appearance for a royal house," the presence chamber was all garish color and coruscation. Tapestries flowed in bright blues and reds and burnished golds on the walls, whose surfaces, where they were not covered by the rich hangings, were painted and gilded. There were thick Persian and Indian carpets draped over every table and cupboard, as well as soft rugs on the floors. Oddities of all sorts—ostrich eggs, coconut cups, earthenware art objec
ts and miniatures in crystal and mother of pearl—were mounted in silver and displayed about the room, while outsize ornaments in the shape of frogs, salamanders, golden flowers and giant walnuts gleamed with semiprecious stones.

  But the dozens of courtiers who stood about the chamber, brilliant in their overstuffed, overembroidered finery, outshone by far all other ornaments in the room. With their orange and purple beards and their flashing earrings, their jeweled swords and daggers and bright doublets in fashionable shades of "Lusty Gallant," "Drake's Color" and "Dead Spaniard," their sheer gaudiness inspired awe.

  But remarkable as they were, the splendors of the presence chamber were not what the Frenchman had come to see. They were nothing more than a backdrop for the principal treasure of the court, and of England—the rare, peerless and altogether extraordinary sixty-four-year-old queen.

  In the forty years since her coronation Elizabeth Tudor had never ceased to be the object of intense speculation and scandal, but in the last decade her fame had transcended itself. She had become the stuff of legend.

  She had outlived most of her contemporaries. Few in Europe could remember a time when she was not England's monarch. She had outlived nearly all of those who, at her own court, had shaken their heads over her sickliness and fragile woman's body, and muttered that her reign could not be a long one. Among her councilors and intimates, Hatton was dead, and godly Walsingham, blind Blanche Parry, and her beloved Leicester. His brief lieutenancy at Tilbury had been his last; he had died, virtually alone and certainly unmourned, save by the queen, a few days after that command ended. Only Cecil, a portable invalid carried from room to room in an upholstered chair, was left to carry on.