by Robert Nye
The Queen was at Richmond when the comet came. She summoned her astrologer, John Dee. Dee I did not dislike; there was no harm in him. Tall and bony, wearing a gown like an artist’s with hanging sleeves and a slit, he used to amuse her Majesty with his so-called magic glass, and indeed she had employed him when she was young to select a favourable date for her coronation. It did not rain on that day, so Dee was made.
That summer in Richmond was the first time I ever saw Dr John Dee in company with a somewhat more sinister creature. This was Edward Kelley, a man who invariably wore a tight black skull cap (it was said that both his ears had been cut off). The two necromancers appeared with their magic glass and the Queen was pleased to grant them a private audience.
Whatever they told her exactly she never told me. I know only that when she emerged from their consultation her face was radiant. She ordered a window of the chamber to be flung open, and she strode across arms-outstretched to contemplate the comet.
‘Jacta est alea? she declared.
Jacta est alea….
The dice are thrown.
*
From Richmond the Court moved on with the Queen to her castle at Windsor. There was nothing unusual in that. Elizabeth always preferred to absent herself from the crowds and smells of London during summer. And that summer of the comet was preternaturally hot.
At Windsor the Queen passed much of the time enjoying the cool green pleasantness of the river. It was often her whim to have me for her waterman, my office to pole the glittering gold punt in which she lay dreaming all the long afternoons. The one I now remember fell that Midsummer Eve.
Elizabeth reclined in the royal punt in a nest of little silver cushions- encrusted with pearls, under a silken canopy that had bells no bigger than cockle-shells attached to its fringes. Those bells made fairy music to my every motion with the pole. They vexed me out of all proportion, and I think she knew it. She hummed tunelessly to herself, offering no idle conversation to break the monotony of our sleepy progress, trailing her slender white hands in the water, reaching up now and again only to caress the flowing fronds of some weeping willow that overhung the bank. Bees buzzed about us, drunk with pollen. They didn’t seem to bother her. Nothing did. She was wearing a brilliant gown of cloth of gold, with a black mantle, a ruff at her neck like gossamer, and a broad white taffeta hat which had gillyflowers pinned with diamonds to its brim. In short, she was overdressed for such an excursion, and I wondered (without remarking so) that her Majesty could keep a cool countenance despite going bedecked in such a weight of finery. For myself, I was dripping with perspiration like one of the damned. My palms soon grew so greasy that I could barely keep a good grip on the pole. My hose stuck to my legs. My doublet felt like a sack. But then mine was all the labour. Elizabeth sat still as some Cleopatra carved of white sandalwood. Under her hooded eyelids her eyes were amused. She always liked, I believe, to see a man hot.
Not a word did she say to me until near the end of our journey. Then, as we drew back within sight of the steps of the royal landing stage, the sound of viols echoing across the Thames to welcome her return, the Queen leaned forward suddenly, holding up her hands, flicking bright water from them to sting my cheeks.
‘Such a sweet pastime,’ she said. ‘An afternoon’s fishing.’
I bowed. ‘But your Majesty has no catch to show for it.’
Elizabeth laughed. Her laughter was light and ethereal, tinkling, teasing, like those wretched bells on the canopy.
‘You think not, Captain Ralegh? Then you can’t know what my Mutton says.’
I must have scowled at this reference to Hatton, for the Queen laughed again.
‘Would you like to learn his pretty compliment? There is much truth in it, perhaps.’
I forced my parched lips into some smiling shape of politeness. ‘If it pleases your Majesty, then I’m sure I’d delight in whatever it was that Sir Christopher had to say in praise of the Queen of England’s propensities as a fisher-woman.’
It was Elizabeth’s turn to frown. Then she shrugged her shoulders lightly, ignoring my gentle disparagement, pulling the edges of the sable mantle together across her breasts.
‘He said that I fish for men’s souls, Captain Ralegh. And he said that I have so sweet a bait that the man doesn’t live who can escape my network.’
I nodded. I managed to manage another smile. Hatton’s homage struck me as clever trivial stuff, more suited to a playhouse than real life, and I was in no matching temper to compete with it. I busied myself by drawing the pole without too much violence through the lily-pads and bringing the punt to rest at the foot of the steps.
As I handed the Queen ashore, I heard her murmur:
Of course, it is no great magic to catch a man’s soul.’
I said nothing. She had spoken as if to herself, with an air of requiring me to overhear her thoughts but to make no comment. I think I guessed the drift of what was coming. Yet I underestimated her pleasure in teasing, her wit, her elusiveness, if I expected anything as crude as some direct reference to a man’s body.
‘Water,’ she said. ‘Now that’s the difficult catch. Water runs through the fingers. You can never be quite sure that you have got it.’
For the first time, her pun upon my Christian name served only to irritate me. I knelt down, leaning from the landing stage, making a cup of my hands. When I stood up again it was to offer her brimming disproof of what she had said.
Elizabeth shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘A handful of Thames? You insult me. I require more than that.’
‘More, Majesty?’
‘All’
‘The whole Thames?’ I cried foolishly. ‘All the rivers? All the streams? Every brook and rill and rivulet?’
Elizabeth did not smile. Her eyes were as cold as gold coins dropped down a well. There was greed in her gaze: a crazy dispassionate lust. Her look made me shiver.
She said: ‘I want every drop of water in the world. The tides themselves, the vasty deep, the floods. You understand, Captain Ralegh? For a Queen, nothing less than the ocean could ever be sufficient’
We stood staring at each other in the bright light that quivered off the river. I let my inch of Thames run through my fingers.
‘It’s not impossible,’ I said. ‘Not for a Queen.’
Elizabeth smiled then, and gave me her hand to kiss. She turned and ascended the marble steps, calling out for her ladies, declaring her desire to feast in the gardens.
I was left to change my clothes and to ponder this miscHicf.
It was easier to wring the sweat from my shirt than to get the Queen’s words out of my head.
*
That was the night of the fire in Windsor’s great park. The Midsummer Eve fire, lit in Elizabeth’s honour. The Court dined at long tables set out in the cool of the rose gardens. Then, at darkfall, blazing torches were carried in procession to the oak tree which they call Herne the Hunter’s. A huge bonfire had been prepared there, wood, furze, bracken, coals heaped high, casks of tar. The Queen, dressed in white, set the first taper to it. Then the Gentlemen of the Body hurled their torches. There was music. We danced in a ring round the fire. She looked like a goddess that night.
Crowned with flames, red hair streaming, she leapt and she danced in the firelight. The moon made her young again. Her fingertips played in my palms.
There was fever in her fingers. Her nails scratched me. She would hurt me, then dance away laughing, then dance back to caress and soothe the wounds, then hurt me again.
How long the dance went on I can’t remember. The fire died. The Queen danced in its ashes. The fiddlers sawed at their strings. The torches guttered. Elizabeth seemed rapt in a trance. She danced on her own now. I walked in the dark and licked the hot blood from my hands.
*
We came back to London. To the Palace of Westminster. The comet had passed. The Queen’s dance with me went on. It was every other night now, there in the Presence Chamber, up and down, ro
und about, in and out amongst the other Gentlemen of the Body, them standing stamping, the same pounding rhythms, each time seeming more savage, more breathless, more and more elemental, their hands clapping, the Queen’s hands slapping, all that touching turning twisting, the whirling skirts, the flashing slipperless feet, her red hair tossed in my face, her nails at their sweet crucifixions in my palms.
The door to the Privy Chamber did not close. Each dance would end with Elizabeth passing through it, dancing on into the Privy Lodgings, but not looking back. That door was never kicked shut in my face, but somehow I knew that the unspoken order of the dance did not permit me to follow her until the Queen herself invited me. What form such invitation might take I could not guess. I danced. I waited. I stood on the brink, on the threshold.
When, finally, it came, the Queen’s invitation was simplicity itself. She did not let go of my hand. We danced through the door together, side by side, no one leading, no one following. Then she stopped and looked at me and by a swift nod told me that it was now up to me to close the door behind us. Which I did. Which I did with a mighty kick that made her laugh.
The Privy Chamber was empty. No Maids of Honour. Her hand still in mine, she danced into the Privy Lodgings. I shut that second door too. But gently, but softly. And the Queen took a golden key from a silver chain that hung about her neck, and turned it in the lock, and made the door fast.
I danced through the door with the Queen for that first time on the night of the 15th of August. Which is in the Romish Church known as the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when they celebrate their belief that Our Lady’s dead body preserved of all fleshly corruption was taken up into heaven to be reunited with her soul. I have no doubt at all that Elizabeth was aware of the date. She always did enjoy her little jokes.
*
Ben Jonson got it wrong. The Queen had no membrane, no deformity, no corporal impediment to keep her from the usual ends of love. I saw her naked that night, and many nights after. Her body was too thin to be called truly beautiful, her breasts pear-shaped, her skin somewhat less than satin to the touch. I will not make an inventory of her parts. Say, if you like, that by the time I became her Endymion this mortal Moon had waned just a whit from the full, from the height of her magic, from the pitch of her perfection. Yet she still took my breath away, aroused my passion, inspired every nerve of my body to burn with desire.
The Queen’s bedroom was dark and low-ceilinged. There was only a single tall candle that burned by the bed. The bed itself, white-silk-sheeted, its ermine-lined counterpane neatly rolled down in a scroll, was hung about with heavy embroidered green tapestries. Candlelight wove another intricate web of shadows over them, making it like some enchanted cavern in an Oriental fairy-tale.
Elizabeth had not undressed herself. From the start, she assumed complete command of our love-making. She held out her hands and she told me to take off her rings. I was impatient. I did it too fast for her liking. She reproved me by rapping my knuckles, her lips in a pout. I wanted to kiss her. The Queen turned her face away angrily.
I had to learn slowness, delay, the delights of long dalliance. That first night did not please Elizabeth as much as some later ones. I was raw. I was new to the game. The excitement of privacy, the fact that here I was locked in a small room with the Virgin Queen of England, that her own hand had led me there and then turned the key in the lock - all this, you will understand, was too much for me. All the teasings, all the dances, and now this. To be plain, I was rampant with desire. I wanted to strip her and enter her. If, as men said (and I had heard the Queen herself claim often enough) - if this woman was really still a virgin, her love-parts intact, pure, unopened, then I wanted to make an end of that. This is not necessarily brutish. I feel no great dishonour in confessing it. I longed to make a woman of the Queen.
The way she refused my kiss was the first instruction. The others followed at intervals, with no words said. Far from this intimacy of her bedroom conferring power on me, it soon became clear that she wanted her lover to behave as no less than a slave. Sidelong looks, flicking fingers, arched eyebrows and frowns when I displeased her, a little cold ghost of a smile when I did right - these were the silent signs of our intercourse. And her very refusal to utter a syllable - she who before and in public I had known for a quick-witted chatterbox - this only made more mysterious and compelling the long-drawn-out erotic ritual which her Majesty now required me to perform.
May the Devil excuse me, it was never my intention to set down on paper a crude record of all that took place that night between me and the Queen. There are details which should remain secret concerning the behaviour of any man and any woman when they are alone together in the modes and moods and luxuries of their love. Even more is this true, I believe, when one of those lovers is the monarch of the realm, the sovereign head of state, God’s earthly regent, however vicious or imperfect. I was never much given to gossip. I maintain now a certain respectful reticence even in this memoir tortured out from the depths of my heart for veracity’s sake.
Once, certainly, in the course of a poem which I composed during my first spell of imprisonment in the Tower, I sought to find metaphors to fit the perverse pattern of what passed for making love with Elizabeth Tudor. The poem was bitter and obscure, bred of too much frustrated passion recollected in despair. I wrote it for her eyes only, making sure that it found its way tight-sealed to Secretary Cecil for transmission to her Majesty. She had shut me in the Tower for faithlessness, for what she saw as my turning aside from devotion to her by my marriage to Bess. Whether the Queen ever read it, I never found out. Robert Cecil was never such a friend to me as it suited him then to pretend to be. I should not be surprised if he used my poor inflammatory verses for firelighters, or more likely hid them away in that rat’s nest of files which he thought it his duty to keep as the master of Elizabeth’s spies. The Ocean to Cynthia - that’s what I called the poem. Myself being the ocean, of course, and Elizabeth that Roman goddess of the moon. These conceits are not fanciful, but accurate. I was as water in our love-games, my function like that of the tides. As for Elizabeth, she was always the moon which controls the tides, holding absolute sway over them, ordaining their comings and their goings. She had floods of her lover, Walter Ralegh. I had to be content with a little moonlight.
It was a burning poem on a hell-fire of a theme. I made myself love’s heretic by writing it. But there are shames and vices unmentionable in prose which can go cloaked in verse, where only the poet knows the naked truth he is at one and the same time revealing and concealing. Not that my cloak of a poem was so very thick. If Elizabeth did deign to walk on it, her feet must have burned. If she did read the poem, for instance, what did she make of my likening the careful charge of her love to some stream by strong hand bounded in from the usual course of nature? More pertinently, more impertinently, did my cry of complaint bewailing my own long erections bring a blush of something better than anger to those viciously chaste royal cheeks? I do not know. And I can no longer care. Suffice it to say that I call up those wretched images tonight. I remember that which bred them, and could breed nothing else. I remember each trick, each cheat, each turn, each parry, each tease, every ugly and pretty perversity which served to keep Elizabeth a virgin that first night with me, every further night (and day) with me, and no doubt with all her other lovers both before my time and after.
I speak of our love-making as a ritual. So it was. But it was a black, a necromanticvrite. A rite in which the Queen herself was the sacrament, and I was her foul priest, her poor adorer. It was all for her, that blasphemy against the name of Venus. She feasted on me. I got nothing back.
To confess this is to acknowledge that she could unman me. I do so acknowledge. While protesting that I had no proper choice. With any other woman, I would have fallen on her, forced her, made her mine. With Elizabeth - God help me, I was no madman who’d try to rape a Queen!
At the end of that night, still denied consum
mation, communion, yet exhausted by plentiful libations of my own manly essence upon the altar of the Queen’s naked body, I crept away, used up, dismissed, dazed with shame, half-hoping perhaps that matters might be different the next time.
They were not. There was never any difference.
The dice were cast. They said the same thing every night and all. They said that Walter Ralegh was now Queen Elizabeth’s lover. They said also that Elizabeth was never more the Queen than when busy in bed with this lover who was not permitted entrance to her cunt.
*
What twist or taint made it so? I cannot pretend understanding. I may only declare what I know from experience: the truth about me and the Queen. There was no physical reason why Elizabeth remained always a virgin. She demanded it that way. She had what she wanted of me.
Sometimes, of course, I have wondered There are deeper deformities.
Consider her bloody inheritance, the forces that shaped her. Her father, King Henry the 8th, was self-murdered by lust. Her mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, lost her head on the block for it. Some say that Elizabeth’s step-uncle, Lord Seymour, laid siege to her maidenhead when she was still a child, with rompings and spankings in the nursery, and sly wicked tricks played on her private parts which the twelve-year-old Princess found exciting but terrifying. She was threatened with the axe because of this. And had to live with the knowledge that Seymour himself had his head chopped off because of what it was alleged that he had done to her, this sin she was too young to understand. Did they tell her also that her first lover (if in fact he was guilty of molesting the child) did not go gentle to that execution. It took a dozen men to hold him down - Seymour got up from the block with his head half-off - There were three more blows of the axe before he was dead.
