by Susan Kay
To be burned or beheaded…at the King’s pleasure…
She stood and watched until there was nothing left to see. And somewhere in an unplumbed depth of darkness, her shadow laughed and said:
“Well done!”
Chapter 6
February 25th was a bitterly cold morning and the palace was strangely silent, but for the steady twang of the virginals which echoed from the Privy Chamber.
When the messenger from the Tower arrived, he fell on his knees before the Queen, who sat dressed from head to foot in black on a cushioned stool at the instrument.
She stopped playing and looked down on his bare head, a chill, silent glance that made him stammer with nerves as he said his piece.
“If—if it please Your Majesty—just sentence upon the Earl of Essex was carried out this morning. Today a traitor died.”
There was a moment of absolute silence in the tense room before, without a word, she turned her back on the company and began to play once more. The men who were watching her closely exchanged looks of gaping astonishment and it was a full five minutes before mumbled conversation returned slowly to her staggered attendants.
But she would not weep; not in public. Her fingers played on by instinct alone; she could no longer see the music and when at last the inward trembling forced her to stop, before her clumsy touch betrayed her, she looked up and found Raleigh looking down at her. Beneath his glowing sea-tan, his clever, handsome face was pale. As Captain of the Guard, it had been his duty to stand and watch while Essex’s blood was spilt on the scaffold. Essex had been his enemy, but Raleigh had a heart beneath his cold mask of pride and he, more than any other, guessed what the Queen must feel. He looked at her with silent sympathy, white-faced beneath a red wig which seemed harsh and garish in comparison. He had never seen her look so old, nor her dark eyes so desolate; he wondered how much longer she would be able to maintain that rigorous self-control.
When she rose stiffly, he offered his arm and she laid her hand on the white ruffle at his wrist with a look that might mean gratitude. They moved apart to the fireplace, where he threw some more logs into the fire; her hand on his had been chill as ice.
“Shall I send for wine, madam—aqua vitae?” he said, very low, but she shook her head slowly. She was staring at him, with haunted eyes.
“You saw him die?” she asked at last, still quiet and controlled, betraying nothing.
“Yes, madam—he met his death with calm and courage, repenting his error and his treatment of you.”
“Was it—” There was tremor in her voice now. “Was it clean and quick?”
He hesitated. It was useless to lie. She would only find out later and be enraged that he had deceived her.
He shook his head faintly. “Three blows of the axe, madam.”
Three blows! Three blows to kill the Scottish Queen and the Admiral, a man of much wit and very little judgement. Like Essex!
She said, very low, for his ears only, “It should have been a sword.”
“Madam—” He laid a hand on her arm in concern. She had the grey, glazed look of shock, a look he remembered seeing before now on the faces of men who had lost a limb in battle and only afterwards begun to register the pain.
“My thoughts are not for sharing,” she said dully. “You may leave me to them.”
He bowed reluctantly, leaving her sitting alone by the hearth, staring into the fire with fixed eyes.
The flames were leaping and dancing on the spitting logs, making a strange shifting landscape of light and dark.
She felt as though she was staring into the deepest pit in Hell.
* * *
In his dull little study Sir Robert Cecil sat and dealt with the vast correspondence on his cluttered desk. When the door opened to admit the Captain of the Guard, he unobtrusively slid a letter into the darkest recess of an open drawer and pushed it closed. He had no desire for Raleigh to catch a glimpse of his secret correspondence with the King of Scotland, England’s obvious, but unnamed, heir presumptive. It was littered with one or two darkly subtle hints that the notorious Sir Walter Raleigh, wit, poet, and adventurer par excellence, was unlikely to prove King James’s loyalest subject in the future. Cecil had no intention of sharing power in the next reign with the flamboyant adventurer who had once been his best friend. He was obsessed with the future and his own part in it; and the future, as Cecil saw it, was King James. With Elizabeth he was merely marking time, waiting with carefully concealed impatience for the moment when that remarkable old bitch would drop dead.
He looked up now and smiled as Raleigh lowered himself stiffly into a chair, easing the old wound in his thigh which was his personal legacy of Essex’s exploits at Cadiz. Cecil’s physical disabilities had ruled out any possibility of vigorous military activity when he was no more than a boy, dreaming of conquering the world by himself. Now he saw Raleigh bite his lip at a stab of pain and felt a faint throb of malicious pleasure to see this magnificently-built man at the mercy of a physical weakness which would cause him to limp for the rest of his life—however long that life should be. He had not rid himself of Essex simply to put a more dangerous and able man in his place and, sooner or later, Cecil mused quietly, cold-bloodedly, it might be necessary to dispose of Raleigh too. King James had a most unhealthy preference for strong, virile men and Raleigh would always bear watching. Certainly he stood high in favour with Elizabeth once more, his marriage forgotten if not forgiven, the last of the men who remembered her with passionate friendship from the autumn days when she had still been a handsome woman.
“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” Cecil inquired at last, turning to cast an eye over his papers in a desultory fashion. “I thought this hour would have seen you with the Queen.”
Raleigh frowned and began to peel the feathers of a freshly cut quill from the neatly tied stack which stood in a pewter holder on the Secretary’s desk. “Lady Warwick tells me she has shut herself up in a darkened room where she weeps alone and calls on Essex’s name.”
“Oh?” Cecil glanced at the ivory clock on his chimney-piece and compressed his lips in a tight, humourless little smile. “Now, let me see—” He studied his papers thoughtfully and patted the stack in front of him. “If that runs true to form we can expect her to emerge from her room some time this afternoon, reduce her women to tears, and then settle to state affairs shortly before dusk. I don’t suppose I’ll see my bed before dawn in that case—thank heaven there’s nothing here that can’t wait till this evening. It would be so much more convenient if she confined these morbid frenzies to the hours of darkness.” He saw Raleigh raise his dark eyebrows and he shrugged his hunched shoulders indifferently. “There’s a great deal that requires her attention—the show must go on, you know, even if the principal actor is no longer up to the role. Have you noticed how violent her moods are growing? I can tell you I don’t much care for the way she keeps that sword beside her all the time, as though she expects an assassin behind every curtain. She gave me a nasty fright the other day, leaping out of her chair and plunging it into the arras, then coming back to the table and taking up our conversation just where it had left off. I scarcely knew where to put myself. Not the first time it’s happened either, I understand. If she keeps on like this, there’ll be no tapestries left in the Privy Chamber. It will cost the devil to replace them—”
Raleigh looked at him steadily, with a flicker of dislike and disgust.
“It doesn’t trouble you at all does it, Cecil—witnessing the slow disintegration of the finest mind in Europe? For my own part I find it remarkably painful to watch.”
“Her Majesty’s mind has always been beyond a mere mortal like myself,” said Cecil calmly. “I have never presumed to understand her. As long as she remains capable of transacting state business that is all that concerns me. I’m surprised it concerns you so much—I never marked you as a sentimental man
for all your poetry. And you’ve felt her injustice more than once—look at your marriage.”
Raleigh lifted his elegant shoulders.
“I knew the price, I chose to pay it, that’s all. I could never complain she didn’t make the risks quite clear.
“Fain would I climb but that I fear to fall…”
Cecil sighed. Everyone knew how Raleigh had once scratched that on a window with a diamond ring to test the Queen’s affection. And how the Queen had written below it:
“If thy heart fail thee, then climb not at all.”
He considered it vain and ostentatious of Raleigh to draw attention to the occasion and now said coldly, “I see you did not take her advice. You climbed and you fell. Was it truly worth the effort to climb again?”
Raleigh smiled absently into the fire.
“My wife’s question—almost, my wife’s tone. You are surprisingly like her and half the wives in England—jealous of the Queen.”
“Jealous—I, jealous?”
Raleigh turned in his chair to look at Cecil shrewdly.
“You hold no place in her heart. Do you suppose no one has ever guessed what eats you from within, Robert?”
Cecil’s hand clenched on the desk in front of him. Raleigh would never know it, but in that quiet, unguarded moment, he had uttered words which would lead him relentlessly to the block in the next reign.
“She cared for you,” Cecil said at last, controlling his cold outrage. “And little enough you have to show for it, apart from Sherbourne and a justly bitter wife.”
Raleigh shrugged, twirled the quill between his fine fingers.
“‘She gave, she took, she wounded, she appeased,’” he quoted softly.
“Aye,” snapped Cecil. “To all her lovers.”
“England was her lover,” murmured Raleigh, suddenly lost in thought. “The rest of us were shadows—mirror images—even Leicester! She spurned us like spaniels and made us all fawn upon her. And then Essex broke the mirror, shattered her world. To see her mourn, one would think she had killed her own child—”
He fell silent, his dark face etched with lines of grief which goaded Cecil into real rage. That a man as hard and intelligent as Raleigh should still sit there immortalising his cruel goddess in verse was beyond bearing.
She is old, he wanted to shout, old, old! Can’t you see it?
But Cecil had never been admitted to the magic circle of her intimacy and the knowledge was a poisonous awareness of inferiority in his galled heart. He was forever on the outside looking in, of insufficient personal stature to gain entry to her heart. Little man, she called him—and now he would never know, never understand the secret of her charm, so envied by all, so fatal to some.
“What was she to you?” he burst out unexpectedly in a tone of bitter frustration that made Raleigh glance at him with quick surprise. There was a moment’s uneasy silence while Raleigh chewed the feathers of the quill, considering the question.
“She was my friend,” he said at last, softly, looking inward, “the only woman who has ever been that to me. She struck sparks from my mind. Even my wife, dear as she is to me—and dearly bought—even she could never do that. A whole era dies with her, my friend—an era, the like of which will not be seen in England again.”
“So”—a light lit suddenly in Cecil’s eyes—“you also think the end is near.”
Raleigh sighed.
“She puts me in mind of a candle flickering in a draught. She may go out at any moment or burn on indefinitely.”
“God forbid,” muttered Cecil to that last, and hastily covered it with a cough. He picked up the ragged quill that Raleigh had carelessly dropped on his desk, disposed of it methodically in the paper-basket at his side. He could not bear things out of place.
“I only hope your candle can produce one more flare,” he continued with a wry smile. “The writs for Parliament go out next week and given the present mood in London I’d say it’s likely to be the most mutinous session she’s ever been driven to hold. She’ll need to play an ace this time and no mistake. I pray she can rouse herself sufficiently to do it.”
Raleigh was silent and his wordly eyes were sad; like Cecil, he had very little hope of seeing such a miracle take place.
* * *
She had killed his body, but the martyred memory of Essex lingered on, almost more powerful in death than it had been in life. The wind on the streets whispered his name with sad and reverent sighs, while in the taverns new songs sprang up to mourn him in the maudlin clink of tankards and the acrid haze of tobacco smoke.
“Sweet England’s pride is gone…” sang the men who had not troubled to join his rebellion, yet viciously condemned those who had brought him down: Cecil, Raleigh—and the Queen. The death of Essex had cast a shadow over the crown and a slow, moody questioning of the sovereign’s rights had begun to gather momentum.
Elizabeth was acutely aware of it and the knowledge weighed heavy on her heart at a time when there was much to cause her anxiety. Tyrone had received his Spanish troops and she was in desperate straits to finance Mountjoy, her new Lord Deputy in Ireland. She had sold land and jewels and forced loans from niggardly allies in France and the Netherlands. But it was not enough. She was forced to turn reluctantly to the one source of income she had instinctively sought to avoid throughout her reign.
And so it was that in October, Parliament gathered to consider her request for the extraordinary measure of taxation.
* * *
She thought of this Parliament as Pandora’s box; she did not want to open it for fear of what she would release. But autocracy would not serve her now, nor would age and increasing infirmity excuse her the ordeal of a public appearance, a slow, jolting journey past sullen crowds, an endless walk down rows of grim-faced parliamentarians, whose traditional, deafening roar, “God save Your Majesty,” had shrunk to a few isolated cries.
She had faced some cruel moments in her varied life, but this was the worst, this was the one thing she had believed inviolate—the love of the people, that had been hers so long it seemed no man could take it from her. Yet one man had. Hundreds of hostile eyes were on her now and saw not the Virago of Tilbury, but the murderess of a national hero. And the bitter irony of it was that no one grieved for that death more than she who had set her hand to it.
The great hall was airless, the robes of state too heavy for her shrunken frame, and at the foot of the throne she suddenly knew she was going to faint.
Not now, she thought with anguished panic, not here—But the ringing in her ears, the darkening of her vision were unmistakably familiar. She was suddenly dimly aware of men’s urgent hands on her arms and the indignity was like a crutch against the threatening veil of darkness. How dared they touch her! How dared they show that they had noticed a momentary weakness she could have conquered without their aid?
Rage upheld her through the weary hours of ceremony and at length it was over and the shrill voice of a gentleman usher cried out, “Make way for the Queen to pass.”
But no one moved in all that press of bodies that barred her path to the door; and someone shouted in a rude, raucous voice that they’d be hanged if they would make more room.
England is a fickle shrew who may one day break even your stony heart…
She drew a shuddering breath. The voice was so clear in her memory that it seemed impossible more than fifty years had passed since the Duke of Somerset had spoken those very words. She felt as though she had run upon the point of a sword; she wanted to crumple up with a pain beyond bearing. But she did not move, or show by a flicker of an eyelash what she felt. She stood alone and outfaced their silent hostility until, one by one, their eyes fell from hers and dropped shamefaced to the floor. Slowly the Lower House began to jostle and shuffle and fall back, so that a pathway opened before her, cut out of petty defiance by the strength of her unwavering s
tare. No man among them was man enough to stand his ground beneath her bitter scorn, and the drum farthingale of her gown was unimpeded as she swept down their ranks.
There was new vigour in her movements now, new purpose in her resolute stride, for there was something left for her to do after all, one last, impossible challenge to face.
She had lost the love of a people notorious for their fickle hearts; but she would win it back. She would make them love her again in spite of all the odds against it; and when that love was hers once more, she would be free to die of the wound she had received at their hands.
* * *
The houses sat taut and tense, like a pile of tinder-dry wood waiting for a spark. When one angry member rose in a passionate denunciation of the royal monopolies tax, it was like the sudden flare of a torch. Seconds later the whole of the Lower House was in uproar, as lists of articles subject to this tax were read out.
“Is bread there?”
“If order’s not taken it will be before next Parliament!”
The nebulous, simmering, sulky resentment had suddenly become a raging conflagration, a flaming attack on the privileges of the royal prerogative which couched the first real attack on the security of the throne in England.
“I never saw the house in such confusion,” sighed Cecil in alarm as councillors and courtiers alike struggled to make themselves heard above the stamping and jeering of open brawls. The noise of it spilt out into the streets and soon they too were filled with jostling crowds, roaring their support for their Parliament.
Elizabeth sensed the wave of revolutionary discontent which threatened to break against her shores, sweeping the reins of government from her hands, like driftwood after a shipwreck. Whatever else had decayed within her, her political instinct remained true and unerring; she had ridden too many storms to sink now for want of bending to the prevailing wind. Her reign was crumbling round her like some brittle sugar ornament left over from an age-old banquet, but for her there would be one last flowering before the field of loyalty was laid waste in a barren future.