The first Elizabeth

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  secret and indirectly that her majesty was sick and in peril." He was Elizabeth's undoubted successor, though no official statement proclaimed him so; his son Prince Henry was referred to as "Prince of Wales" in anticipation of his father's succession. James now played the role that had been Elizabeth's when her sister was queen. There was discreet correspondence between one of his servants and one of Cecil's about the procedure to be followed when the queen died, how the news would be carried north and the new reign proclaimed, with armed men and ordnance brought in to secure the court against any possible disturbance. Courtiers began to send letters and gifts to the Scots king, flattering him and asking to be remembered "when he came into his kingdom." That they should desert the setting for the rising sun was only natural, yet Elizabeth found her subjects' behavior disconcerting and often muttered, "Mortua sed non sepulta" —dead but not yet buried—under her breath.

  If she showed no remorse over Essex's death it did leave her heavyhearted with regret. She wept for him, and for old Cecil, whose death "often drew tears from her goodly cheeks," as no doubt she wept for the several generations of intimate servants and friends she had outlived. Suddenly, unaccountably, she would burst into tears at the realization of her own mortality, weeping less, perhaps, for the inevitability of death than for the certainty that when it came she would have to face it alone. Essex had been the last of her close companions. Now that he was gone she had no one to confide in, and the thought saddened her.

  "A queen's declining," wrote Essex's secretary Sir Henry Wotton, "is commonly even of itself the more umbratious and apprehensive," than that of a king, and in truth all sunsets are misty. Much as Elizabeth fought to keep melancholy at bay there was much to depress her. She had achieved a reputation for greatness, if not for goodness, yet for all her capacity she would bequeath to her successor a distempered and overburdened realm, cankered by an unsound economic system, huge debts, acrimonious religious differences, brutal persecution of Catholics and widespread poverty and misery.

  The affection her presence invariably called forth from her excitable subjects still heartened her, yet she knew it to be an insubstantial thing. She was under no illusions about their volatile passions, and she knew that when the time came they would cheer as lustily for King James as they now cheered for her.

  The months following Essex's failed rising in 1601 were among Elizabeth's worst. She appeared weakened, physically and emotionally, and contrary to her usual habits she "walked out but little" and "meditated much alone." 2

  She still enjoyed the occasional hospitality of her nobles, however, and Robert Sidney, younger brother of Philip Sidney, described a visit she made to his house in the fall of the year.

  It was a progress-time spectacle in miniature. Six drummers and six trumpeters sounded a greeting at her arrival, and the lord and lady of the house stood waiting in their finest garb, he in "goodly stuff of the bravest cut and fashion," she in a purple kirtle fringed with gold. The son of the house made a welcoming speech, to which the queen replied graciously, and then the musicians in the gallery began to play and the women danced for her, making her smile with pleasure. There were refreshments—the queen ate two helpings of sugary cake and drank a cordial from a gold cup—and then the company went outdoors to watch an athletic youth perform "gallant feats" on horseback, mounting and dismounting with agile leaps and charging with a lance.

  It was a happy afternoon for Elizabeth, who had herself dressed in a rich velvet gown for the occasion and sat contentedly on an improvised throne while the festivities went on around her. It pleased her that the women dancers stepped out of their order and came up one by one to curtsy to her before resuming their places again, and if she did not join them in the dancing she did feel energetic enough to tour the house. She was "much wearied in walking about" from room to room, and though the effort tired her and she had to call for a staff to lean on when going up stairs, she announced that she wanted to come back another day.

  She shone in full glory a few weeks later when in the crowded council chamber at Whitehall she made her last and most heartwarming speech to the Commons, closing out an embittered parliamentary session in which she had lost ground politically. She thanked the members for their loyalty and love, and spoke a little of her troubles ("To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it"). She assured them of her continued commitment to their welfare. "There will never queen sit in my seat," she told them, "with more zeal to my country, care for my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good."

  As always, she moved them by her straightforward eloquence—though she spoke indistinctly now, and her voice was the high, shrill voice of old age—and even more by her presence. There she was, a withered spinster nearing seventy, boasting that God had given her "a heart that yet never feared any foreign or home enemy"; it was enough to make the most recalcitrant of her political opponents want to lay down his life for her. The boast she made had immediacy to it, for there was a Spanish occupation

  force in Ireland five thousand strong. It was not inconceivable that the queen might yet have to heft her rusty sword and brandish it against the enemy.

  But if her heart was still stout the old queen's legs were weak, and growing weaker. At the opening of Parliament, walking in procession in all her heavy robes, she suddenly became unsteady on her feet and would have fallen "if some gentlemen had not suddenly cast themselves under that side that tottered, and supported her." 3 After she had ridden on horseback for a mile or two her legs would become numb, forcing her to dismount and to call her footmen over to massage them; their "earnest rubbing" eventually restored her circulation so that she could go on. 4

  "Lord bless her, lord keep her, lord lengthen her days," the balladmong-ers sang, and to this Elizabeth added a fervent amen. She was in no hurry to die, and the days as they passed were all too short. The unending work of government went far to fill them. Cecil was always at hand with his stacks of papers, and there was much to read if she was to maintain her reputation as "a great princess who knows everything." Her active intellect strove on, always returning to the classics she had first studied with Ascham so many years before.

  She read and reread, translated and retranslated, finding in the Greek and Latin writers much that was enduring, if not eternal. Seneca suited her forthright, fatalistic philosophical stance. "It is best to suffer that thou canst not mend," read her translation of one of his letters. "In this rotten bower our life we must lead." "It is no delighting thing to live, for so thou enterest into a long journey, where sometimes thou must needs slip and then up again, and so sometimes thou fallest, often times art wearied, and driven to cry out."

  Such heavyhanded sentiments suited Elizabeth's mind and temperament. She distrusted subtlety—though no one of her generation was more capable of appreciating it—and turned to Seneca's morose truisms with a sense of relief. For the exquisite complexities of contemporary theology she had no patience whatever, though she read the works of Augustine and Jerome with "great pleasure." Religious disputes seemed to her as fruitless as they were murderous. "If there were two princes in Christendom who had goodwill and courage it would be easy to reconcile the differences in religion," she told De Maisse, "for there was only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and all the rest that they disputed about but trifles." 5

  Though as an old woman Elizabeth presided over a cultural flowering as brilliant as any in European history it would be a distortion to imagine that she had more than a minor role in it. As queen she patronized poets and playwrights both actively and passively; she protected them when they were

  threatened by repressive forces and she was proud to read and attend their plays. But they belonged to the coming generation, not to hers; their effulgent virility was at odds with the reassuring verities she sought in th
e texts of her youth. Shakespeare besought her to rail against fortune; Seneca taught her to accept it, and to soldier cheerfully on. "An evil soldier is he who with sighs follows his captain. Wherefore let us take our charge not like the grudging sluggard, but as the joyful man, nor let us leave this course of fair workmanship, in which all our sufferance is well engraven." 6

  In her long last years Elizabeth slogged on with the determination of a footsore man-at-arms, rousing herself time and again from dark thoughts and casting off physical frailties with a revitalizing burst of vigor. A visitor to Hampton Court caught a revealing glimpse of her in a small chamber, alone save for one attendant, "dancing the Spanish Panic to whistle and tabor." Not realizing that she was being observed, the old queen was tossing her head and stamping her feet with crazy abandon, beating out a measure in defiance of time and death.

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  s

  Wee/?e, /z'tt/e z's/e, dnd for thy Mistris death Swim in a double sea of brackish waters:

  Weepe little world, weepe for great Elizabeth;

  Daughter of wane, for Mars himself begate her, Mother of peace, for she bore the latter. She was and is, what can there more be said, In earth the first, in heaven the second Maid.

  I

  t seemed as if the old queen would go on forever. Day after day she roused herself and set off on long, vigorous walks in her gardens and hunting parks, tiring out with her brisk pace the attendants who marched unwillingly at her heels. She took "great walks out of the park, and round the park," striding as energetically "as though she were eighteen years old," and if it happened to be raining or windy, or if there were frost on the ground, so much the better. Her advisers watched her in wry disbelief, her tall, wiry figure bent against the wind, her voluminous skirts whipping around her, knowing they could not dissuade her from her resolute exercise no matter what they said.

  Her physicians said, simply, that if old age did not soon kill her, all this exertion would. Yet the physicians came and went—Elizabeth buried five or six of them in her last years—while she went strenuously on, taking a perverse pleasure in the way her arduous regimen disconcerted everyone around her.

  With the weather "passing foul," the court was moving from Hampton Court to London. A September storm was blowing, with drenching rain bouncing off the canvas-covered wagons and the roadways a mire of potholes. The queen insisted on making the journey to London on horseback, as she usually did.

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  "It is not meet for one of your majesty's years to ride in such a storm," young Hunsdon told her gravely. (His father, Elizabeth's cousin and lord chamberlain, had died in 1596.) He did not add, though another courtier did in a private letter, that she was "scarce able to sit upright" at the time.

  Elizabeth glared angrily at her relative. "My years!" she called out. "Maids, to your horses quickly!" Before anyone could stop her the queen mounted and rode off, and did not stop until she had reached the capital. Hunsdon was in disgrace for two days.

  It was part stunt, part pure contrariness. Elizabeth had always enjoyed doing what people told her she could not do, and now that she was elderly it pleased her to surpass in physical vigor men and women half her age. But it was partly the result, too, of a strong instinct for self-preservation. She had always had her own ideas about medicine (she avoided it) and doctors (she distrusted them). The physicians advised rest and conservation of strength, yet she knew she had always thrived on combativeness and churning activity, and if her feats of endurance sometimes left her panting and prostrate, they seemed to energize her as well.

  There was, in addition, a grim political purpose behind her relentless exertions. She knew well that King James—along with all the other mon-archs of Europe, and all her enemies abroad—received word of her every faltering step, her every bout of pain or indisposition. Every hint of weakness made the vultures swoop lower. (In Scotland, it was said there was "no talk but England, England, of which they think to make havoc, and every man to be a gentleman with the spoil of the English." 1 ) There had to be news of another sort to contradict the accounts of feebleness, so Elizabeth set about making herself look conspicuously strong.

  So she walked, and rode, and hunted as often as she could, and danced with foreign envoys "to show that she is not so old as some would have her." 2 She drove out in her jewel-encrusted coach, the manes and tails of the horses dyed as orange as her own false hair, and waved and called out to the people she passed with vigorous graciousness. To impress visitors from abroad she paraded in her privy gardens, elegantly dressed and with a fashionable mask covering her face, then lowered her mask and her neckline to reveal her much-faded handsomeness and snow-white skin. ("Even in old age," wrote a German nobleman who saw her in 1602, "she did not look ugly, when seen from a distance.") She never failed to appear when her public expected her to, at the weddings of her courtiers, at the tilts and other celebrations marking her Accession Day, on feast days and other formal occasions. For her to miss the "preaching, singing, shooting, ringing and running" of the Accession Day celebrations would have been seen as a sad foreshadowing of imminent death, and even though her last

  Accession Day in 1602 was marred by suspicion of an assassination attempt, she changed her route to avoid the danger and made her appearance as scheduled.

  That November 17 was, in fact, the brightest in recent years. The harvest had been bountiful, Lord Mountjoy, Essex's successor as commander in Ireland, had beaten the invading Spaniards and checked Tyrone, and the plague, which had been virulent in the summer months, had receded. Londoners ran to see the queen, endured a dull sermon at Paul's Cross, and applauded the host of young men who ran recklessly against one another in the tiltyard. The queen was "very merry" when a fool appeared riding a horse no bigger than a dog, and as always she took keen pleasure in the bear-baiting. A swindler caused a commotion by selling a great many tickets for a play to be staged that day, then disappearing with the money. When the theatergoers arrived to find no play in progress, they took their revenge by tearing the tapestries from the walls and breaking the chairs and generally "making great spoil." But somehow the vandalism was absorbed in the mayhem of merrymaking, and the day ended joyously.

  To an extent the queen's effort to appear forceful and vigorous succeeded. "Her majesty is very well," reported one court-watcher, "and exceedingly disposed to hunting, for every second or third day she is on horseback, and continues the sport long." Another praised her "health and disposition of body," and said he "had not seen her every way better disposed these many years." Yet among those close to her there were always informers ready to tell how, in truth, an hour's riding so enervated Elizabeth that she had to stay in bed for two days afterward, or how often pain in her arm or weakness in her legs made it impossible for her to try to ride at all. She had to take naps during the day to keep up her strength, and even so she was often exhausted, for the sheer effort of appearing to be vigorous was taking as high a toll as the exercise itself.

  In the midst of the Christmas celebrations at the end of the year, Harington found the queen in a "pitiable state." She was sadly in decline, yet she was dying by inches, in an attenuated misery that was as much mental as physical. She continued to govern, he noted, despite failing eyesight and increasing absentmindedness; she shouted hoarsely at her servants for forgetting things, when in fact it was she who had forgotten, and she sometimes sent for her officers, then reacted with fury to see that they had arrived, as she thought, unbidden. 3

  Cecil and the others managed her as best they could. In their letters they cautioned one another against letting her read dispatches containing bad news at night, when it might worsen her insomnia and so make her impossible the next day, and on occasion they misrepresented the true state of

  affairs in small ways in order to quieten her anxieties. Cecil kept up the gallant tradition in his dealings with her, complimenting her, flattering her vanity. The parchment she wrote on, he declared, was the sweeter for the touch of her hand; he praised "the life
of her eyes and color of her lips," the one ruby, the other crystalline topaz. 4 Yet his admiration for her statesmanship was sincere, and as her reign drew to its close he gave some thought to the "memory to be left to all ages" of her papers. Among the records of her rule, he wrote, were to be found the remains of "more piety, learning and dolceness [sweetness] than ever prince did leave behind him." It must have saddened him, as it did Harington, to see her bent over her letters and warrants, squinting vainly in the firelight to make out their words, and then to watch her scribble her name at the bottom, her once fine handwriting now crabbed and spidery.

  Early in 1603 Elizabeth caught cold, and on January 21 the court moved to Richmond, as rain poured down, for the duration of the unusually severe winter. The dark skies and harsh storms worsened the queen's cold to bronchitis and, along with the death of her kinswoman the countess of Nottingham, lowered her spirits alarmingly.

  "The queen loved the countess well," wrote a foreign envoy who had come to join the deathwatch, "and hath much lamented her death, remaining ever since in a deep melancholy that she must die herself." 5

  She had entered her seventieth year, and her body was protesting its burden in a dozen ways. Her head ached, her bones ached, the rheum in her arm made it painfully tender, she had a cough and suffered from a "continual cold in her legs." Food and drink had lost their savor for her completely, and she could no longer escape from her miseries in sleep, for she was wakeful and fretful at all hours of the day and night. She had always enjoyed coming to Richmond, calling it "a warm winter box for her old age," but now, as she fretted out the long night watches in sleepless anxiety, she took no comfort from her surroundings.

  Worst of all her ailments was the heavyheartedness that had become nearly inescapable. She sat on the floor, embroidered cushions under her, staring at one spot for hours at a time, her motionlessness relieved only by noisy sighs and bouts of crying.