Elizabeth I

by Margaret George

  “Those are the people we come to minister to, my lady,” said Gerard. “They have no one but us to sustain them. So we gladly risk our own lives if that can preserve their faith. The great households provide some shelter, but they still need priests. There has been trouble at Cowdray, one of the mainstays. The new heir there is more militant and has run afoul of the government authorities, more’s the pity. Many a baptism was performed there until recently.”

  “I did know both Robert and Gelli at Cambridge,” said Aylward. “And I knew they were Protestant. But I also knew . . . forgive me ... that recently Robert has had a falling out with the Queen, so I was hoping that it might be safe to come here. I am sorry to presume, but we were desperate.”

  I smiled. “We are a Protestant house,” I said. “My father, in fact, was so staunchly Protestant he left England when Queen Mary reconciled it to the church. But now ... it is less a conviction than a political necessity,” I admitted. Suddenly I felt ashamed. In the light of such pure faith—like that of my father, even if at the opposite end of the spectrum—I always felt soiled and compromised. But how many among us burn with a true religious flame? “I am glad you are here,” I said. “Please rest well.”

  “We will,” said Gerard. “And we promise to be gone before first light!” In the gentleness of his voice, in his quiet humor, I saw the charm that had won so many.

  True to their word, before I was up, the men were gone. They had neatly folded the linens and blankets. Resting on one of the pillows was a saint’s medal. I picked it up as if it were poisonous. In a way it was. I turned it over. It was St. Lucy.

  St. Lucy ... St. Lucy ... What did I know about her, indifferent Protestant that I was? She had something to do with eyesight, and her day was the shortest of the year. That would make her a good patron saint for me, since I liked nighttime. But Protestants did not have patron saints. Perhaps I could ask Christopher. He had been brought up Catholic. He might know.

  I folded it in my palm. It was their thank-you gift, the only proof they had been here, and I treasured it.

  “They’re gone?” Behind me Robert was standing, seeing the folded bedding. “Almost without a trace. Thank God!”

  “I had never seen a Jesuit,” I said. “I had been told they were demons with cloven hooves and tails. Instead I found a humane and intelligent man.”

  He laughed dismissively. “They say the devil himself can appear to be humane and intelligent.”

  “He’s certainly intelligent, and good enough company that the Puritans fear the rivalry,” I said. “Although they don’t give him much competition in that regard.”

  “Nonetheless, I’m glad they’re gone. I hope no one links them to us. That’s all my enemies at court would need to use against me!”

  51

  ELIZABETH

  August 1597

  You must watch this play with me,” I told Marjorie and Catherine. “I know you don’t fancy plays but I need your opinion. But you,” I turned to the younger ladies, “might enjoy it. They say the actor playing Richard is quite dreamy. He has to be, for his face to match his poetic words.”

  The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were to present the controversial Richard II this afternoon at Windsor. London had talked of little else, and although I had sent observers to the theater to report back to me, I needed to see it for myself.

  It should have been an easy summer, with all the quarrelsome and strutting men away. No Raleigh, no Blount, no Essex. But once again we had foul weather; this was the fourth bad summer in a row, the fourth ruined harvest. Now it was seeming truly unnatural, and the people were growing more desperate and there was more talk of violence in the countryside. Parliament would meet and we would try to find a remedy, or failing that, immediate help for the destitute. There were few rides out through the countryside, and, sensing my unpopularity and not wishing to inflame it further, I did not go on Progress.

  This Richard II did fan the flames. The Puritans had tried to close the theaters again and I was determined not to let them. But what irony that my power to keep them open allowed a play to put questionable ideas in people’s heads.

  The Puritans, that thorn in my side! I must contend with the stiff-necked, self-righteous Puritans on one side and the recusant Catholics and their sneaky secret priests on the other. I had been sorrowed by the actions of the new heir at Cowdray. Dear Anthony Browne had died, passing on the title to his grandson, who had openly flouted my religious laws, daring me to move against him. There had even been a small, secret monastery on the grounds. Reluctantly I had done so, closing their chapel with its Catholic rites and shutting the monastery, barring it up. Someone had tried to burn it down, as if to make that prediction of Guy Fawkes’s come true.

  Out in the countryside, the escaped Jesuits from the Tower were still at large working their mischief.

  The Puritans, for their part, especially hated the theater, because actors pretended to be what they were not. Men dressed as women, posed as Julius Caesar, and so on. They cited Scripture—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—to prove these things were abominations. Their scrutiny of Scriptures meant they could find a verse to support just about anything—one of the dangers of letting the unlearned have free access to Scripture. But as someone said, not without truth, the Puritans were against bearbaiting not because it brought pain to the bear but because it brought pleasure to the spectators.

  Taking our places in the Great Hall, we settled ourselves. Rain was drumming on the roof overhead. Another fair summer’s day denied us. It was just as well to be indoors.

  The handsome young actor playing Richard was the first out on the stage and the first to speak. “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,” he said with a flourish. The play then plunged straightway into the story, a story any Tudor child had written on his or her heart. It was the wellspring of our dynasty, the act that set in motion the bloody civil war that lasted a century. It began when King Richard II was forced to resign his crown to his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke. This deed was a great transgression. Could an anointed sovereign ever truly resign the crown? A coronation was a sacrament, the right of it conveyed by blood, and the act of anointing and crowning permanent and inviolable. Could anyone undo it?

  I assumed that was what the play would explore, and in one sense I was not disappointed. The play’s King Richard made his case for that, saying,

  Not all the water in the rough rude sea

  Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;

  The breath of worldly men cannot depose

  The deputy elected by the Lord.

  But others made the point that a king forfeited his right to be king if he neglected his kingdom; that the king could sin by harming his own land. It sounded dangerously close to Puritan doctrine.

  Richard himself admitted that “we are enforced to farm our royal realm,” while John of Gaunt put it more bluntly, saying, “This dear dear land ... is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it—like to a tenement or pelting farm,” and “Landlord of England art thou now, not king.”

  I felt great relief. No one could accuse me of that. I was criticized for being penny-pinching, but better that than mortgaging the country.

  King Richard went off to Ireland, and while he was gone his disgruntled nobles defected to Bolingbroke. By the time he returned, the Crown was all but lost. However, he refused to fight for it and even offered to resign it before Bolingbroke asked.

  What must the King do now? Must he submit?

  The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?

  The King shall be contented. Must he lose

  The name of king? O’ God’s name, let it go.

  What sort of king was this? Even my sister Mary, who people assumed was a soft, pious woman, fought for her crown, wrested it from Lady Jane Grey’s illegal grasp.

  Richard was dispatched to the Tower, then transferred to Pontefract Castle, where he
was murdered, following a hint of Bolingbroke that someone needed to rid him of “this living fear.”

  The way Richard was presented in the play, one could only conclude that he was a poor sort of king, but that the man who usurped his place was a villain, albeit a competent one. I was descended from both of them. I liked to think I had Richard’s artistic sensibility and Bolingbroke’s realism and practicality, rather than their weaknesses.

  The play seemed abnormally short. And the action moved too quickly from the crisis to the end. “Something is missing,” I said. It did not feel right.

  The master of revels, Edmund Tilney, stood up. “There is an injunction against performing the actual abdication scene. I have forbidden it to be seen.”

  “But it is written?” I asked.

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “And the actors know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I command that it be performed here before me. Censor it for the mutable crowds, but let me judge it for myself.”

  The actors quickly reassembled and begged leave to study their lines.

  In a short while the lead actor appeared. “We are ready, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing.

  It opened, this subversive scene, in Westminster Hall, which served as a venue for both celebration and state trials. My mother had been tried here, to her woe; so had Thomas More. If all the sad trials held here had weight, the carved roof beams would sag to the ground, kissing the stone floor.

  Bolingbroke was ready to assume the crown in a legalistic manner before his accomplices, when the Bishop of Carlisle objected and said it was meaningless without Richard’s presence. Richard himself then came onstage, where, after much posturing and wordplay, he was forced to hand his crown directly to Bolingbroke. Asked if he was contented to resign the crown, he hemmed and hawed, first yes, then no. Then he acquiesced, saying,

  Now mark me, how I will undo myself.

  I give this heavy weight from off my head,

  And this unwieldy scepter from my hand,

  The pride of kingly sway from out my heart.

  With mine own tears I wash away my balm,

  With mine own hands I give away my crown,

  With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,

  With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;

  All pomp and majesty I do forswear.

  The effect was shocking. There is no formula for an abdication, but we were hearing one. One by one he flung off the pieces of his kingly armor until he was totally unprotected.

  But could he? Had he not himself said, earlier in the play, that not all the water in the rude, rough sea could wash off the balm from an anointed king? If not the whole ocean, even less his own tears.

  I had taken solemn oaths at my coronation and nothing could undo them. A deposed or murdered sovereign was still an anointed sovereign. Mary Queen of Scots was still Queen of Scotland all those years in England, and remained so on the scaffold.

  But if this play convinced people that it was possible to reverse a coronation? It was dangerous, and this scene was downright revolutionary, even though the events it depicted were two hundred years old.

  “Come, my ladies,” I said, rising. I twisted my coronation ring around my finger, as if to prove it was still snugly there.

  Shortly thereafter I received a request for an audience from the Polish ambassador. Things being placid (although it was a placidity I welcomed), I thought the court—what remained of it these days—would enjoy the diversion. So I invited him, not for a private audience but for a full reception in the presence chamber with the whole court and officers of the realm attending.

  I had a soft spot in my heart for the King of Poland, for he was actually Swedish, and one of my fondest memories was the oddly touching courtship of King Eric XIV of Sweden—before he went mad, that is. His brother, the elegant and sophisticated Duke John, had come a-courting in his brother’s name. In any case, Duke John’s son, who sat on the Polish throne as Sigismund III Vasa, had been elected. His country was now a commonwealth, whatever that was. The Poles had made this transition over twenty years ago. But it was obvious such an anomaly could never last. How could a king be elected, for all the reasons of majesty examined in Richard II? A king or queen was not merely someone holding an office, like a sheriff, but appointed by divine will.

  The August day was heavy and lowering, threatening a downpour at any moment. Turbulent black clouds tumbled through the sky, rumbling ominously. Inside, the fluctuating light through the windows made winking patterns on the floor.

  I stood beneath my canopy of state, with its rich embroidery and scalloped border, flanked by both Cecils. Burghley leaned on a cane but refused to sit; young Robert was attired in his most solemn, statesmanlike gown, even wearing a hat. Farther on the side were the other council members: Charles Howard, lord admiral; George Carey, the new lord chamberlain; Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst; William Knollys; Archbishop Whitgift. Their ladies, along with other courtiers, stood on either side of the long aisle where the ambassador would walk. I saw Francis Bacon and John Harington among them, and young Robert Dudley, numerous Carey and Knollys brothers and sisters and cousins, my maids of honor and ladies of the privy chamber. This would be enjoyable—panoply without deeper meaning.

  The ambassador was announced, and he made his way down the long aisle. He was a stout little man, dressed all in black velvet with a high buttoned collar and a jeweled chain, from which dangled a star-shaped insignia of some Polish order. As he passed the smiling faces, he gave a tight-lipped twitch in response.

  He approached, took my hand, and kissed it with papery-dry lips. Then he stepped back, and I took my seat on the throne to hear his formal address.

  He began in sonorous Latin reciting his master’s titles. “Sigismundus Tertius Dei gratia rex Poloniae, magnus dux Lithuaniae Russiae Prussiae Mascoviae Samogitiae Livoniaeque, necnon Suecorium Gothorum Vandalorumque hoeredicatrius rex.”

  My Latin secretary obligingly translated. “Sigismund III Vasa, by the grace of God King of Poland, grand Duke of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Masovia, Samogita, Livonia, and hereditary king of the Swedes, Goths, and Wends.”

  I nodded in approval and motioned him to proceed. He continued in Latin, but not in a polite address. Instead, standing truculently before me, he said that his king was angry that after numerous polite requests that we stop hindering their ships and merchants trading with Spain, we continued our outrageous conduct, against all international law and custom. We were prohibiting their free trade and assuming a sovereignty over other kings, which was intolerable. The King of Poland would trade with whom he pleased, Spain as well as anywhere else, and hereby warned the Queen of England that if she would not stop this behavior, he would make her stop.

  There was a stunned silence. Such a breach of manners and protocol had never been witnessed between a representative ambassador and his sovereign host. I opened my mouth to reply, but realized he did not speak English. Latin it must be, then, although I had not spoken it in years.

  Anger coursed through me, but I put my thoughts in orderly columns like well-trained soldiers and marshaled them out.

  “Expectavi legationem, mihi vero querelam adduxisti.” “I expected an embassy, but you have brought me a quarrel.”

  He looked surprised and annoyed that I would respond. What did he expect, the fool? Did he think I had not understood his Latin? “Oh, how I have been deceived!” I continued. “Your letters assured me that you were an ambassador, but instead I find you a herald. Never in my lifetime have I heard such an oration. I marvel much at so insolent a boldness in open royal presence; neither do I believe if your king were present that he himself would deliver such speeches.”

  Would these words be correctly reported back to his master? “But if you have been commanded to use suchlike speeches—which I greatly doubt—we must lay the blame here: that since your king is a young man and newly chosen, not by right of blood but by right of election, he does not so per
fectly know the protocol of managing diplomatic affairs with other princes as his elders do.”

  The man still stood smugly—or perhaps he was having trouble following my rapid speech. “And concerning yourself, you seem to have read many books, but the books of princes you have not so much as touched, but show yourself utterly ignorant what is proper between kings,” I informed him—the little snail. “Know you that this is the law of nature and of nations: that when hostility arises between princes, it is lawful for either party to obstruct the other’s provisions for war, no matter where they originate from, and to foresee that they be not converted to their own hurts.”

  Enough of him. “For other matters, which this time and place do not serve, you may expect to be questioned by some of our councillors. In the meantime, fare you well and repose yourself quietly.”

  I turned to my court and said, “God’s death, my lords! I have been enforced this day to scour up my old Latin that hath lain long rusting.” A burst of applause filled the chamber, and the ambassador backed out. It was a long way to walk backward.

  If this performance was an indication of the competence of elected kings to fill royal shoes, it was damning.

  As evening drew in, I invited guests to gather in the privy chamber for a music recital. The rain was still dripping, making a measured background to the virginal and the lutes. Our mood was mellow after the incident with the Polish ambassador, and John Harington challenged Francis Bacon to carry on a conversation with him entirely in Latin for five minutes.