Elizabeth I

by Margaret George

  “And now my despair shall be as my love was, without repentance. Wishing Your Majesty all comforts and joys in the world, and no greater punishment for your wrongs to me than to know the faith of him you have lost, and the baseness of those you shall keep.”

  He was a child, and his missive would have been laughable were he not so dangerous. His very ability to recast events to construct an interpretation that no sane person could come to was frightening. That ability coupled with real power was lethal. He did not have the power yet. But his ability to invent and abjure himself of all blame was a skill to watch. My wariness toward him increased. And that wariness, tinged with fear, heightened my guard.

  58

  The morning made things clearer. The council meeting in the afternoon would be grim, but that was hours away. So I was startled when Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, asked for an audience. I would see him in the afternoon—could it not wait?

  He was a good and honest servant, and if he asked to see me, it was not for anything frivolous. I bade him come in. He entered the chamber, and as he did so, a puff of hay-scented air came through the window. His yellow, strawlike hair seemed to go with it. He was one of the few adults to keep the blond hair of a child.

  “Have you received word from the Earl of Essex?” he asked, kneeling.

  “No, nothing. Why? I summoned him to the council meeting. I expect to see him there.”

  “It is as I feared,” he said. “I received this memorandum of advice from him regarding the Irish crisis. I had stressed in no uncertain terms that he must attend. Instead, he sent this.” He handed me a sheet of paper with a long list of items.

  “I did not ask for a list; I asked for his person.” I flung the list onto my table.

  “He is not coming,” said Egerton. “He sent word that you should digest his ideas set forth here, and then he shall come.”

  “By God!” I cried. “He dares to disobey my summons?”

  “He feels slighted.” Egerton held up his hands as if to ward off blows. What, did he think I would strike him, too?

  “He has lost his reason!” I shouted.

  “If you would know his mind, you must read this. He wrote it to me. It is no treason to our friendship if I show it to you. If a man writes something down in black and white, he must be prepared for others to read it. It would be treason against my loyalty to you for me not to let you see it.” He drew forth another letter, a much longer one.

  With grave foreboding I took it and began to read.

  “If my country had at this time any need of my public service, Her Majesty would not have driven me into a private kind of life. I can never serve her as a villein or slave. When the vilest of all indignities are done to me, doth religion force me to sue? I can neither yield myself to be guilty, or this imputation laid on me to be just.

  “What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Pardon me, pardon me, my good Lord, I can never subscribe to those principles. I have received wrong, and I feel it.”

  First the sword, now this. He refused to submit to me. What other word was there for it but “treason”?

  “I must think on this,” I said carefully. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”

  Walking like one possessed back into my bedchamber, I found Marjorie and Catherine staring at me. “Has someone died?” Catherine asked, her soft voice even more soothing than usual.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh, who?” cried Marjorie, well acquainted with sudden news of death.

  My safety, I wanted to say. The unqualified love of my subjects. “Many have died in Ireland,” I murmured, not wanting to pour my heart out, even to her. If I waited a moment, perhaps the feelings would subside. It is never good to blurt things out.

  She cocked her head knowingly. “This is not new tidings,” she said. “The Lord Keeper did not rush here to tell you what you already knew.”

  “It’s Essex,” said Catherine. “The naughty boy has gone astray again.”

  “Why do you suppose that?”

  “Only he seems to have this ability to trouble you,” she said. “As my children do me.”

  “Oh, it is more than that!” I protested. “He is hardly my child.” Both more than and less than that he was.

  “You behave erratically toward him, and always have,” said Catherine. “I know, as a mother, that to do so confuses children. They need to know what to expect.”

  “She speaks true,” said Marjorie. “It is more like training a hunting hound than we would like to admit. A whistle, a clap, should mean one thing and one thing only. But you have given Essex so many signals it is little wonder he rotates like a weather vane.”

  “I have showered him with recognition and gifts. If anyone has been erratic, it has been him. He always wanted more and felt slighted.” Her observation did not seem to fit.

  “ ‘That which is obtained too easily is esteemed too lightly,’ ” said Marjorie. “You know that saying. You never made him earn his rewards, so he did not link effort or merit with them.”

  I was incredulous. “If you saw this, why did you keep silent? I charged Burghley with the responsibility of pointing out truth to me, and he did. But you saw and said nothing?”

  “Matters of state are different from matters of the heart. Besides, you are the Queen. We are friends, close friends, but there is a gulf between us. As Jesus’ parable says, ‘A great gulf fixed.’ ”

  “That is between heaven and hell! It is hardly the same as between queen and friend, or subject.”

  “It may seem so to you, being on the upper level. But for us below, it is hard sometimes to reach across that gulf.”

  I had known this, of course, but thought the two here almost exempt from the stricture. I saw now that was not so. Oh, in how many ways had I been blind?

  “Ecclesiastes says, ‘Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?’ ” said Catherine. “I am sorry, dear friend, but you are also my Queen. A friend will always speak out; a subject must not. I must be a subject first and a friend second. You would not have it any other way.”

  She was right, but it was a cruel rule.

  “So tell me now, and speak as friends: What do you make of the Essex situation? It is too late to undo what has gone before. When your hounds have not been trained properly but they are still good dogs, what do you do? You cannot make them pups again.”

  “You must bring them to heel immediately. There is no truth in the common saying—my, I am quoting so many today—that an old dog cannot learn new tricks. If he feels he has to, believe me, an old hound can change his ways,” said Marjorie.

  “Meet with him. Stick strictly to the business at hand. Treat him as a statesman and perhaps he can assume the mantle,” said Catherine.

  “Stop grooming him like a lapdog,” said Marjorie. “First to be cuddled and then to be dumped on the floor. It is demeaning.”

  “When he nips and bites, I push him off my lap.”

  “Don’t let him up there to begin with,” said Marjorie. “He has no business there.”

  I looked from Marjorie’s big-featured, plain face to Catherine’s round, almost childish features, immensely grateful for these women. “Well,” I finally said, “you have spoken boldly and told me a few things well overdue. I see now that country wisdom about hounds can be well applied at court.” My jest faded. “Dear friends, do not keep your wisdom from me again.”

  The councillors were standing stiffly as suits of armor around the table. I told them to sit, and they did, equally stiffly. I could almost hear their joints creak. Everyone able to attend was there—with the exception of Essex. Even his uncle Sir William Knollys, fresh from the troubled island, had managed to come.

  “Before we begin yapping like a pack of hounds, baying here and there, I would like a summary of the entire Irish situation, in simple terms. Sir William, you have just come from there. Tell us all. Feel free to go back as far as need be to pa
int a fuller picture.” I would say nothing about the Essex absence.

  Knollys, usually so jaunty and jolly, was white faced and drawn. The pallor of his cheeks made his odd three-colored beard—white at the roots, dun in the middle, brown at the bottom—even more noticeable. “First let me say, I did my best,” he said. “But the situation is beyond control. The wild Irish are on the rampage, like a torrent overflowing its banks.” He gave a nervous laugh. “Of course, in rainy Ireland, brooks are always overflowing.”

  “We know Ulster has rebelled, but what of the other regions?” asked Buckhurst, sitting up straighter.

  “All in a boil,” said Knollys. “Our deputies in Munster and Leinster cannot protect the settlers there, and all authority has collapsed. In the west, Connaught is making its usual nuisance of itself. The O’Malleys and the Burkes have been all but dancing with glee to see our downfall.”

  Grace O’Malley. Oddly enough, I wished she were here so we could talk. I wondered exactly what part, if any, she was playing in this rebellion. But she would claim it was no rebellion, merely an assertion of native rights.

  “Ireland is not to be had on the cheap, and yet what is it worth?” said young Lord Cobham, scratching his head.

  “Until now, little,” said Admiral Howard. “She was so far off the main concerns of Europe she might as well have been in Africa. But when the Jesuits poured in in the 1580s, all that changed. Suddenly she got onto the Catholic bandwagon and sold herself to Spain.”

  “It is a given, then, that our policy there, of English settlements, a protected Pale of English authority, and a minimum military presence, is a failure,” I said. “A second given is that Ireland’s reinvigorated Catholicism means that there is now a Catholic presence in what had been a solidly Protestant line of demarcation in the north, an ally of our greatest enemy, Spain. Perhaps, as dreadful as this uprising is, it forces us to take action before the Spanish can secure their victim,” I said.

  “How are we going to afford a military capable of doing what needs to be done?” asked Knollys.

  “We have stopped the raids into foreign territories,” I replied. “We will not be having that expenditure again.” The Essex policy had been as monumental a failure as the Ireland one. “Nor are we obligated in the Netherlands for much longer.”

  “We have other problems that hamper us besides direct war expenditures—the dismal quality of enlistments in the army and the corrupt officers overseeing them,” said Egerton, the Lord Keeper. “They rob Your Majesty, pocketing the money allocated for clothes and weapons, recruiting men unfit for service, half of whom never muster at all.”

  “If you want to see such men in action, watch Falstaff onstage.”

  “At least Falstaff reports for duty,” said Egerton. “In real life, the Falstaffs never go near a battlefield.”

  “We have had four failed harvests in a row,” said Archbishop Whitgift. “I obeyed Your Majesty’s instructions to have priests report grain hoarders and profiteers to me and preach that the better off voluntarily fast and give the saved money to the poor. I’ve had reports that in the north people have to travel twenty miles to buy bread. Where will the food come from to feed a large army? We have to supply it all. There’s nothing to be had in Ireland.”

  “The Irish themselves live on reeds and moss,” said Cobham. Titters went round the table.

  “And who will lead such an army?” asked Carey. “No one has been successful. It calls for a great warrior, a nobleman who can attract followers rather than the motley Falstaff sort, and someone whom the Irish will fear.”

  “Where can such a man be found among us?” said Egerton.

  The empty chair of Essex glared at us.

  59

  LETTICE

  September 1598

  I heard wild laughter coming from Robert’s chamber. It screeched out into the gallery, sounding like a flock of agitated parrots. For days he had taken to his bed, drawing the curtains and refusing all food. He had also refused all medical attention, saying it was a fever sent from God and nothing could vanquish it. His wife had hovered just outside the door but, apart from timid knocks, had not dared to enter.

  Earlier this morning a messenger had brought him a dispatch of some sort. He had slipped it under the door and departed. Now this.

  The laughter was hideous, demented. I must see what was happening. If the door was locked, I would summon someone to break it down.

  But the door pushed open with no resistance. The laughter was so loud now it hurt my ears. The midday sun was blasting full into the room, making a curtain of light it was difficult to see through.

  Was he in the bed? I fumbled my way to it and yanked the curtains open. But there was nothing there. The laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started, as if a ghoul or hell creature had come into the room and then fled. I turned, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the harsh difference between the sunlight and the dark recesses. Then I saw his feet, long white things like roots ripped untimely from the earth, stretched out, his toes in the sunlight. The rest of him was in darkness.

  “Why, Mother, you come to pay a visit?” His tone was light, detached, faint, perhaps, from the raucous laughter torn from his throat.

  “I was alarmed,” I said, squinting to see him. His nightshirt was open, soiled, its drawstrings hanging down. He was sprawled, sloping, in the chair, as if he had no spine. I bent over him. I did not smell any beer or wine on his breath.

  “I’m quite sober,” he said. “No need to sniff.”

  I felt relief flooding through me at the assurance that he was neither drunk, hysterical, nor deathly ill. “What were you laughing at?” I asked, as if this were a normal encounter, as if he had not been hiding away for days, prostrate with anger and frustration over the Queen.

  “Huh, huh ...” He started guffawing. I was afraid it would change back into that hyena howl. He said, “He’s dead. He’s dead. The old boy is dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Who is dead?”

  “Ph—Ph—Philip!” He burst out with a spray of spittle as he tried to stifle his hoot. “You know, the king of Spain. Or—what did Raleigh call him?—the king of figs and oranges?” He waved airily toward the letter on the floor. “After all these years of tormenting us, of being the dark shadow directing our actions, poof! He’s gone.” He lurched forward to pick up a goblet perched on the windowsill, gulping down whatever was in it. “Not quickly, no, it took him fifty days. He had a coffin in his room, ready. It was made of timber from one of the Armada ships!” He hiccupped. “Fifty days—that’s even before I was in disgrace with the Queen. A long time ago, that was.”

  “What did he die of?” I stooped to pick up the dispatch. I read it quickly, but it did not say.

  “Whatever it was, it was horrible,” he said. “He was in agony, they say. Something in his jaw was eating him up. Oh, that is a reversal—being eaten by a jaw.”

  “He was seventy-one,” I said. “One by one they leave us, those oaks that served to hold up the ceiling of our world.” Elizabeth was only six years younger. Her turn was coming. “I remember when he came to England to marry Mary Tudor. I saw his entourage passing; little boys pelted his carriage with garbage. He was unpopular even then among us, as a Spaniard and a Catholic. But he was in his twenties, an attractive man who flattered the older spinster princess. She was wild with love for him. Made a fool of herself.” Had watching her sister warned Elizabeth never to do such a thing? She had certainly taken it to heart. And learned a lesson in the perfidy of men, when her devout brother-in-law had flirted with her, with an eye to marrying her and keeping his hand in England after his sickly wife died.

  “Well, Elizabeth is making a fool of herself now,” snorted Robert, showing more liveliness.

  “In what way?”

  “Dressing up like a virgin and wearing those low-cut gowns that show her wrinkled old bosom.”

  “I thought she was a virgin.”

  “Yes, yes, she is ... b
ut just because a code of dress is prescribed for a certain station, if we have grown far beyond it, we should take heed. It’s assumed most virgins are young and therefore flattered by loose hair and open bosoms. An old woman who dresses that way looks like a witch.”

  “Robert!” Such words were dangerous. “Have a care.”

  “I have no care. I have no station. I am nobody. I can say what I like.”

  “You are a fool,” I said. “Shut your mouth. Get dressed. Act according to your station. The most famous noble in the land, sitting in the dark, wallowing in his nightshirt, is more ridiculous than anything the aging Queen has ever done. She is always a queen. At this minute, you are less an earl than anything I have ever yet seen.”

  Chastened, he emerged from his darkened chamber within the hour, dressed appropriately, seemingly alert and engaged. I sent him off to eat while I sat, shaken, at his reckless words. He had already almost taken an irretrievable step, a step too far. The dreadful folly of having tried to draw his sword on her, his hotheaded words comparing her to her father—and saying she was lesser than he and commanded less respect—and then his refusal to apologize, put his career, if not his life, in jeopardy. As she had reminded him, had she been her father, he would not have gone free from that room. And now she looked for some gesture on his part to show contrition. But he refused to take even the smallest step toward her, shooting out angry letters to others (which undoubtedly had been shown to her) and then staying away from the council, even for emergency sessions in the wake of the disaster in Ireland. The greatest military defeat the English had ever suffered there, and when the hour had come to make decisions, he had absented himself.

  The Queen. I was still smarting from her insulting rejection of me and my gift, when she had invited me to court. It was a mean-spirited little drama, meant to humiliate me. It was unworthy even of her. Well. I would never see her again, except at a distance. But my son still must make his fortune by pleasing her. Perhaps he was so hostile to her on account of me. But it was too dangerous. She could be spiteful, but we could not afford it. Robert must make his peace with her.