Elizabeth of Bohemia

by David Elias

  “I would hear more about these underpinnings you speak of.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered why it is your subjects give themselves over to your rule?”

  “They deem that entitlement and authority make it so.”

  “But why should the few rule the many?”

  I allowed myself a closer examination of her features for a moment. She was of substantive build and stature, and as I stood before her I realized that she was a good six inches taller than I, but this did not seem to have an effect on the way our eyes met. Her hair was long and grey, and fell well below her shoulders, which were sloped and wide. If the received requisites of beauty were left wanting, if there was little in her appearance and manner that might be called delicate, she had nevertheless a bearing of graceful strength and feminine power.

  “I will tell you.” Her eyes met mine with a deep and penetrating intelligence. “It is because subject and monarch serve the same master. We are all afraid of the same thing.”

  “I would venture,” Captain Hume put in, “that would be our own impending mortality.”

  “I grant as much,” Sophia said, “but I am thinking of something else, that rather than dread, we profess to strive for above all else.”

  “Now you have my attention.” Captain Hume smiled over at me. “And I would hear tell of this double-edged sword.”

  “We are not willing to live in a state of total freedom, and choose rather to let ourselves be ruled over by one thing or another, be it monarch or deity or even a single compelling idea, whether it be loyalty or privilege, duty or ambition.”

  “Don’t forget honour,” Captain Hume added.

  “I suppose some would say love.” I looked at Sophia.

  “More like to fear,” she answered.

  “But at what cost,” I asked, “are we ruled by none of these, if we must live in solitude and isolation?”

  “It is the only way I have been able to manage it. Perhaps there are other ways to accomplish as much.”

  “A monarch, perhaps,” Captain Hume offered, “might manage it better than most.”

  “In truth it is just the opposite,” I answered.

  “We all serve the master of our own making, I suppose,” the Captain said.

  Sophia turned away a little. “For my part I am beholden to my loneliness.”

  “But why should we fear the very thing we profess to treasure above all else?”

  “The payment for freedom demands a formidable currency.”

  “I have often thought to free myself of my entitlements.”

  “You desire an ordinary life, then?”

  “A royal life can be ordinary.”

  “But surely you don’t consider yourself so.”

  “And yet I suppose there would be a certain freedom in it,” said the Captain.

  “It seems to me you, Sophia, live here as a kind of queen, only that you have not a gaggle of unruly and petulant subjects to rule.”

  “And so I am a ruler of nothing and no one.”

  “How be of your own desires?”

  “What woman can say she is master of these?”

  “Or man, for that matter,” the Captain put in. “Some say the heavens rule our lives and augur our fortunes.”

  “Which brings us to the reason you have come.” Sophia led us toward a doorway that opened onto the veranda.

  “The Captain tells me you have a looking glass that will reveal what the unaided eye cannot yet apprehend,” I said.

  “Now that darkness has fallen you shall witness as much.” She eyed me coolly. “Though I understand it has more to do with ambition than discovery.”

  I looked at Captain Hume. “You’ve told her, then.”

  “There’s no need for recrimination.” Sophia stopped at the threshold and put up her hand. “We’re all guilty of duplicity in this matter.” She picked up a lantern from the table and led us out onto to the back terrace. There, a telescope mounted on a trivet pointed up into the darkening heavens, where already the brightest stars pricked their light down to us. She walked over to a nearby table and placed the lantern on it, shedding light on a map of sorts laid out there. She studied it for a long time, then set about arranging the glass to point at a particular spot in the heavens.

  “Look there.” She pointed. “Take the two bright stars you see before you, draw an imaginary line between them, and then bisect it. From that point let your eye wander a little higher into the heavens until you see what appears to be a hazy smudge of light best observed by looking in the vicinity rather than directly at it.”

  “The technique is known as averted vision,” Captain Hume informed me.

  “It’s nothing I invented,” Sophia was quick to add. “It has been known since ancient times. We see better in the dark by this method. We look away from the object of our interest, but only just a little, and so it comes into better view.”

  I did as she instructed, and there indeed was a small patch of hazy light. “I see it.”

  “Good. Now I am going to bring it into view with this.” She looked into the eyepiece and turned a small knob along the side, made some adjustments in the position of the glass, looked up with her naked eye, looked into the glass again. “I have it,” she said. “Now come and look, but take care not to move the glass inadvertently.”

  I looked through the eyepiece and there before me was a spectacular sweep of scattered light emanating from a small point, as though some celestial fireworks had been set off far out in the darkened heavens.

  “Remarkable,” I said. “Captain, have you see this?”

  “I have, but welcome the chance to look again.”

  “By all means, do.” I stepped aside.

  He bent over the telescope. “It’s grown brighter. And more beautiful.”

  “It will get brighter each night,” said Sophia, “but not enough for people to notice until it has swept around the sun and come out the other side. Then it will be visible for all to see in the heavens, and stream across the sky with a brightness that dwarfs anything we witness now.”

  “And you can calculate the day upon which this will occur?” I asked.

  “That is what you came for, isn’t it?”

  “If you can divine it.”

  “You would use the information” — Sophia fixed me with a stare — “to gain advantage.”

  “I grant as much.”

  “It is not a certainty, understand. It may be that this comet travels too close to the sun, is drawn into it, and so consumed in that roiling fire. But I think not.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I have been at study long enough to understand that even in those vast uncharted places the heavenly bodies that travel there do not do so freely, but are ruled by forces which determine their path with great accuracy.”

  “You are ahead of your time,” said Captain Hume.

  “Soon enough there will be more of these glasses, and more powerful, so that it will become common practice to observe such goings on up in the heavens as the naked eye cannot hope to espy.”

  “But you are one of the very first,” I said. “You deserve recognition.”

  “Why?”

  “Other men will surely seek to have such achievements acknowledged.”

  “They seek advancement — or some such reward.”

  “And you do not.”

  “I have not the need. I hope this knowledge brings you what you want.” Sophia’s mood seemed to change abruptly. “Will you stay the night?”

  “If you will be so gracious as to have me,” I was surprised to hear myself reply.

  “It will be my pleasure. I find you good company, and the Captain has already proven himself in that respect.”

  This brought a somewhat embarrassed smile from Captain Hume. “And so, knowing
my way about, I will take my night’s leave and see you in the morning. Good night.”

  He took himself out of our company, and as he did so I felt a tinge of apprehension at being left alone with so formidable an interlocutor, but it was only for a moment, as it was almost immediately replaced with feeling that I could set aside my reservations, that if I feared this woman’s intellect I need not fear her judgment, that if she thought me in need of humility or insight, she had no desire to impose her will upon me.

  “Now I shall make us both a cup of cocoa,” said Sophia, and took a small urn down out of the cupboard. “Do you know it?”

  “I have only just become familiar with its use a restorative, and find it quite bitter and not to my taste.”

  “I make it with milk and sugar, and so you shall enjoy quite a more pleasant experience of it.”

  The drink Sophia offered me some minutes later was truly marvellous, and I immediately thought to have it made available to me at the castle. It tasted of sweet indulgence, but with a side effect of soothing comfort, and it soon made me quite sleepy.

  “I can hardly imagine what it must be like,” I said idly, “to spend day upon day in the company of only my own thoughts and the natural world around me.”

  “It is an acquired taste.”

  “I seem ever to live in want of something more.”

  “It is the nature of youth, as it was of mine when I was your age.”

  “But now you are satisfied?”

  “It’s still difficult.”

  “Is it our fate to be ever in a state of discontent?”

  “The construction of the world would seem to make it so.”

  “But how did it come to be built this way?”

  “You think it could have been otherwise.”

  “It seems to me we are not where we should be and live in a state other than the one natural to us. What keeps us from it, do you think?”

  “This man you seek to dupe will say the answer lies in sin.”

  “He knows of little else but his received teachings, and looks not beyond them.”

  “But you say he looks to the heavens.”

  “Not as you do. Not with a clear eye.”

  “In truth I know not what I look for, only that I must look.” She set down her cup. “Tell me, what is the natural state of a woman?”

  “It seems to me that left to my own devices as you have been, free from the limitations imposed by the larger world, you should by now have found the answer.”

  “I seek it still.”

  “Better not to search, perhaps.”

  “And yet your search continues.”

  “What has Captain Hume told you of this man Scultetus?”

  “Little, but that he is vainglorious in the usual manner and so vulnerable to his own self-importance. For that reason you shall get the better of him with this artifice, and yet the question remains whether the plot is worthy of its author.”

  “My lady-in-waiting always said that I should refrain from judging myself, as there were so many others already eager to do so.”

  “Come, we’ll to sleep now.”

  Sophia led me to a small room where I found a bed made up for me. It was as modest as any I had ever thought to make use of, a far cry what I was accustomed to, but no sooner had I laid myself down upon it than it welcomed me with surprising comfort. A pleasant drowsiness overcame me and I slept quite soundly through a night as quiet as any I’d ever experienced, although once or twice I heard the Captain snore from the other room.

  In the morning we had breakfast, at which I eagerly indulged in some more of Sophia’s delicious chocolate, and then it was time to make our way back down the mountain. I had what I came for, and the date of the comet’s appearance was firmly etched in my memory. It should happen only a few weeks hence, and so I was anxious to get back and prepare Scultetus. Our journey back to the castle was uneventful, and I tried to take note of any landmarks which might be of help if I ever decided to venture back to the place and visit Sophia again, but I didn’t think that was likely if I should soon find myself in Prague.

  Over the course of the next several days I arranged to meet up with Scultetus in the garden and so began in a subtle manner to make him aware of my daily prayers for guidance in the matter of Frederick’s ascension to the throne. Thereafter I began to allude to a vivid and recurring dream that had begun to visit itself upon my nightly slumber. When I thought he was ready I at last revealed to him, with feigned reluctance, that in these nightly reveries the vision of a fiery comet appeared, which interested him greatly and gave him to question me at length for details. At this I gave over that a particular day of the year flashed before my eyes, followed by an apparition of Frederick seated upon the throne. And so by degrees I gave him to divine the precise date upon which the comet was to appear in the heavens as a sign.

  The weaving and deployment of this deception threw me into an annoying state of ambivalence. It was a less than favourable pronouncement on my character, and yet I felt a tingling anticipation to see it brought to fruition. Would my brother Henry be proud or ashamed of me? If the latter, I should counter that my deceit was for good cause, my reasons for wanting to be queen perfectly understandable. I had been left on my own, after all, and so I had all the more need to accrue as much power and influence as a coronation could muster. Perhaps I might yet aspire to that which Sophia spoke of, and find the means to stand in unfettered freedom.

  I took great pains to feed Scultetus bits of information that should allow him to think he had figured it all out on his own. My methods were many and varied, as by revealing, for example, that in one of my nightly slumberings a symbol had appeared before me, as of something shaped like a horseshoe but with a stem in the manner of a cross. This was of course the astrological symbol for the day of the week the comet should appear, which was a Saturday. I will say that he made an excellent dupe and eagerly gave himself over to my forgeries, so that I increased my embellishments until at last he had determined the comet should arrive on September 6, 1618. In the meantime I was also at work on Frederick, now returned from visiting his mother, and in short, everything was in place that he should soon be counselled to take the appointment and see us off to Prague, if only the comet would appear as Sophia’s reckoning foretold it.

  ***

  On the night in question I had arranged for Frederick, Scultetus, and myself to be upon the balcony of the English Wing at the appointed time. My information decreed that the comet should appear approximately an hour after sunset to the north and east, so that we might be seen to stand overlooking the town and the blackened river below at that time. I could hardly contain my exuberance when it happened exactly that way! No sooner had the sky turned a darker shade of night, than the comet appeared in glorious brightness as though falling out of the sky. There was great excitement about the castle, and soon others came out to the balcony to observe with us. So great was the stir that we witnessed the townspeople pouring out into the streets below us, muttering and exclaiming at every turn as they took in the wondrous sight.

  And what of Abraham Scultetus himself? Even in the darkened light I could see his face go pale. “The prophecy is come to pass.” He kept his eyes to the heavens, his jaw set.

  “We are witness here to a great revelation,” said Frederick.

  “What do you think it can mean?” I asked innocently.

  Scultetus turned after a long while to stare down at me. His expression told me everything I needed to know. It left no doubt he was taking my measure in a whole new way, convinced now that I was a force to be reckoned with. I was content to let him indulge all of his worst fears for the moment, and let the wheels of his own cogitations do my work for me. I had learned by then that in times of great import it was often best to say nothing and let the event speak for itself.

  By and by Scultetus and I found ourselv
es alone on the balcony.

  “Your Highness, what have you to say in this matter?”

  “There is nothing needs saying,” I assured him, “save that I am not the instrument of this celestial harbinger, only its preordained messenger. All glory goes to God.”

  “Your husband shall be king. Of this there is no denying.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Nay, more than seems. The heavens have spoken. I’ll forthwith to your husband and tell him of my decision.”

  “I think it wise, though, not to speak of my premonition. Best we keep that between us. There are some at court who will incline to sorcery.”

  I found it an intoxicating elixir to think someone like Scultetus had reason to be wary of me. From that day forward he revered me, and I was happy to let it be so and use it to my advantage. I found myself luxuriating in the role of merciful prophet, made a great show of offering him assurances that he should not be left behind when the time came to reap the rewards of life as advisor to the king, but in doing so I was always careful to intimate that it would be prudent to side with me on matters concerning the path that should lead us to Prague.

  If I was content for the moment to be thought of as a harbinger of God’s munificence, soon enough I should garner my fair share of his wrath. How could I ever have imagined what was to come? To think my bit of chicanery would set in motion a series of events that tumbled the better part of Europe into a devastating and protracted war that was going to cost thousands upon thousands of lives. All for the sake of advancement. Countless men would be killed in battle, women raped and murdered, children slaughtered. It would start out as a series of skirmishes between Catholic and Protestant interests, but soon escalate into an all-out war for political dominance. The Thirty Years’ War would pit many of the great rulers of Europe against each other, and in the process condemn me to a life of exile and poverty.

  Had I known that goading my husband into pursuing something he never wanted would unleash so much destruction and chaos, I should have acted otherwise. But who among us can divine the full import of our actions? Did Romeo foresee that in trying to keep the peace between the Capulets and the Montagues he would inadvertently cause his cousin Mercutio to be slain, and by that action unleash forces that destroyed both him and his Juliet in the bargain? We miscalculate because we wield not the degree of control we imagine ourselves to possess. The outcome should have been quite different if the Elector of Saxony had but offered his support, or if a few more members of the Protestant Union had elected to favour my husband’s acceptance of the crown. But fate will have its way with us.