Elizabeth seemed immemorial—and unique. For forty years she had governed alone, without a husband (though certainly not without lovers, it was said), showing, at least in retrospect, an amazing capacity for stubbornness as well as for rule. Her unmarried state—which in fact she had several times been on the point of cheerfully abandoning—had become in her old age the centerpiece of her legend. By an irony of history, this woman of exceptional passions would be known as the Virgin Queen.
Her gorgeous palaces had become half-museums, half-mausoleums where aristocratic tourists paid to see the great queen's perfumed virginal made all of glass, her bed with its gilded beasts and multi-colored ostrich plumes spangled with gold, her brown velvet throne ''studded with very large diamonds, rubies, sapphires and the like that glitter among other precious stones and pearls as the sun among the stars." They were shown her "bathing rooms" at Windsor, their walls and ceilings all mirrors, and the breathtaking throne room at Hampton Court, called the Paradise Chamber for its incomparable richness in gold and silver and gems. A very few of these tourists received brief audiences with the queen herself, but none of them wrote down their impressions of her with anything like the penetrating scrutiny of De Maisse.
As he waited on his cushion in the presence chamber the ambassador must have had in mind all that he had been told about the old queen's habits and personality. 1 For his own part he was already favorably impressed, for she had paid him the honor of giving him apartments "wherein Drake had formerly lodged," pleasing him very much. His informants, however, described her as an aging termagant, "a haughty woman, falling easily into rebuke," inclined to think herself far wiser than her councilors and mocking them contemptuously and holding them up to ridicule. Diplomats found her exceedingly difficult to confront, it was said, because she only listened to them as long as what they said was agreeable; as soon as they raised a disagreeable subject she interrupted them with a harangue of her own, often managing to misinterpret their point of view in the process. Usually she misrepresented the entire conversation to the council afterward, so De Maisse was advised to write out his message and arguments and present the written document to her advisers. Worst of all, he learned, Elizabeth was particularly inclined to show her noisy bad temper whenever she heard the name of France or of Henry IV.
After a while the Frenchman was led along a dark passage into the privy chamber, the inner sanctum of the queen, and there, "seated in a low chair, by herself," he found Elizabeth.
Her appearance was startling. She wore, not the customary English gown and kirtle, but a gauzy dressing gown of cloth of silver, unfastened in front
so that "one could see the whole of her bosom." Her high-piled red wig was stuck full of gold and silver spangles, and was made still higher by a crowning garland of silver cloth. Two long, fat curls hung down almost to her shoulders, ending at the high jeweled collar of her gown.
She rose and came forward to embrace him, and De Maisse noted that, although her body was still youthful and her movements graceful, her face was long and thin and "very aged." As she greeted him, and began to apologize for not having received him sooner, he found it hard to understand her. She was missing a great many teeth, especially on the right side of her face; those she retained were "very yellow and unequal," and unbecoming in the extreme.
Straining to catch her words through her lisp, he managed to grasp her meaning. She had been ill, she said, looking at him kindly, with a swelling in her right cheek—indeed she could not remember ever having been so ill before. Then glancing down at her robe, she began to excuse her informal dress. "What will these gentlemen say to see me so attired?" she said, looking over at her councilors who were grouped together at the far end of the room and scolding them. "I am much disturbed that they should see me in this state."
De Maisse was a diplomat seasoned in years and experience, yet he found this bizarre mixture of bawdiness and coquetry disconcerting, especially as the queen punctuated her talk by continually grabbing the open front of her gown and flapping it back and forth as if she were too hot, "so that all her belly could be seen." Though her neck was wrinkled, he noted, the skin below was "exceeding white and delicate" all the way down to her navel; the display, though grotesque, made its intended impression.
The ambassador proceeded to the subject matter of his mission, the issue of peacemaking, and found to his relief that the queen neither interrupted him nor flew into a rage at the mention of France. Yet he found her difficult to talk to all the same, for she was never still. At first she sat in her chair, twisting and untwisting the fringe of her gown, then she got up and began to pace around the room—remarking that this was a habit of hers which often tired out ambassadors—and all the time she fairly trembled with nervous energy, showing marked impatience and agitatedly opening and shutting her gown. The fire was too hot, she complained, it was hurting her eyes. She called for her servants to put it out, and the Frenchman paused in his discourse while buckets of water were poured on the sizzling logs.
Elizabeth's overabundant vitality amazed him. He had prepared himself to confront a very old woman, crotchety perhaps, but frail. Instead he found himself faced with a fidgety, restless being whose animal spirits appeared
to be waxing rather than ebbing. There was an air of the macabre about Elizabeth; she was like a lively, clacking skeleton whose energetic jerkiness belied her wrinkled cheeks and bare gums. She had in fact lived through her grand climacteric, the dreaded age of sixty-three which few of her contemporaries reached and fewer passed. In that ''fatal" year she had for a time seemed to be near death; prolonged insomnia and fevered swellings of her chest and head had prompted her advisers to prepare for a change of reigns, fortifying the court with arms and ordnance and taking steps to guard the treasury at Westminster. But she had recovered quickly enough, and there had been no repetition of the crisis. Even the leg ulcer that had made her limp as a much younger woman seemed no longer to affect her, nor were her hearing or her vision impaired. She had in recent months been troubled by a "desperate ache" in her right thumb, which was as annoying as it was painful since it prevented her from writing. But she hid it, and vehemently denied that it could be gout ("the gout it cannot be nor dare not be"), and by denying it, she seemed at least for the moment to have cured it. 2
Under the circumstances, De Maisse made his audience a brief one. He rose to go, and Elizabeth, walking with him to the door, reiterated her coy chagrin "that all the gentlemen he had brought should see her in that condition," and called for them to say their goodbyes. Then, embracing them all "with great charm and smiling countenance," she let them go.
While talking with the queen De Maisse had recognized individuals among the councilors in the room: Cecil, "very old and white," Admiral Howard, much at the heart of affairs and highly honored since his Armada victory, and Cecil's son Robert, who had become principal secretary the year before and who was generally accounted to be "the greatest councilor in England," with whom Elizabeth spent hours in "private and secret conference."
Young Cecil, in 1597 just entering his mid-thirties, was as startling in his appearance in one way as the queen was startling in hers. Elizabeth called him "Pygmy"—a name she knew he detested—but he was not only short, he was hunchbacked, and according to De Maisse, "had small grace and appearance." In an age that believed a crooked soul went with a crooked spine, Robert Cecil was at a severe disadvantage, and his self-consciousness about his appearance did nothing to improve it. He was an urbane and clever man, at home in the witty world of the theater and loving the excitements of gambling and high society. Precocious as a politician and man of affairs, he had sat in Parliament at the age of eighteen and had risen rapidly in Elizabeth's government. Robert Cecil was a worthy successor to Walsingham, to his own father and, reaching back through the century, to
Cromwell and ultimately to Wolsey among the great Tudor drudges who bore the title of royal secretary. All had shared, beyond intellectual force and keen judgment, a capaci
ty for long hours of exceedingly detailed labor; young Cecil was cast in their mold. A man who saw him at court wrote how he hurried his slight, oddly shaped body through the presence chamber on his way to meet with the queen, walking "like a blind man, his hands full of papers and head full of matter."
One figure had been conspicuously missing from the privy chamber: the most flamboyant, the most popular, and many said the most able man at court, the earl of Essex.
Leicester's stepson clearly had greatness of a kind in him. He was built along heroic lines. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the bluff, slightly awkward movements of an athlete and soldier, Essex had the clear, wide forehead, soulful eyes and sensitive expression of a poet. His long face was ruddy in color and grew more so when he talked heatedly of the subject that obsessed him: warfare, and in particular, his own military exploits. "He is entirely given over to arms and the war," wrote De Maisse when he finally met and talked with Essex, "courageous and ambitious, and a man of great designs, hoping to attain glory by arms, and-to win renown more and more." 3 The Frenchman also detected his principal flaw. "He is a man of judgment," he wrote, "but one who believes no counsel save his own; when once he has undertaken a thing it is impossible to get it out of his head."
Yet De Maisse would have agreed that, by the mid-i590s, Essex's judgment (coupled with Leicester's patronage and his own marked physical prowess) had brought him a long way. After the death of his penniless, debt-ridden father, Lettice Knollys' first husband Walter Devereux, nine-year-old Essex had been brought up in Cecil's household, along with the hunchbacked boy Robert. By age seventeen he was being advanced at court by his stepfather Leicester, and brought attention to himself by insulting Ralegh and striking him. "What comfort can I have to give myself over to the service of a mistress that is in awe of such a man?" he declared dramatically, running away and hoping to join the fighting in the Netherlands.
He did fight there, and later in France, with considerable distinction, acquiring a reputation not only for brave and audacious soldiery but for old-fashioned chivalry as well. Duels and challenges to single combat suited his temperament perfectly, while drawing attention to his fighting ability and making him popular. But he did not entirely neglect civil for military affairs, and managed to convince Elizabeth of his statesmanship so that she appointed him a member of the council in 1593.
The queen found Essex as exasperating and delightful as a man as he had
been as a boy. She called him her "Wild Horse," and felt toward him not only a strong tie of blood—they were cousins, as Elizabeth and Lettice were —but an even stronger one of sentiment. Essex was, after all, the stepson of her lifelong love, and even before Leicester's death she was installing Essex in his court apartments. 4 She put up with his hotheadedness and disobedience, his dueling and violence, though she did complain loudly "that someone or other should take him down and treat [sic] him better manners." He was an intelligent, exuberant, extremely handsome man, good company and a brilliant escort for her, and he knew how to please and flatter her. He sat up late partnering her at cards; he sat at her side for the first performance of A Comedy of Errors; he wore her favor in the tiltyard and organized athletic entertainments for her pleasure. She was in her sixties, he in his thirties, yet there was nothing grandmotherly in her affection for him. His marriage to Sidney's widow infuriated her—though her fury abated in record time for a secret marriage, two weeks—and she rushed at "the fair Mistress Bridges," one of her waiting maids, with "words and blows of anger" when she learned that the girl was flirting seriously with Essex.
Essex was clearly the rising star at court, yet his absence from the privy chamber on the day of De Maisse's audience was not only conspicuous but eloquent. He felt wronged, and he was showing his feelings, as he customarily did, by staying away from the queen and the council table.
"The court is ordinarily full of discontent and factions," De Maisse commented in his written observations, "and the queen is well pleased to maintain it so." In 1597 the factions were very clearly defined: the Cecils, with Admiral Howard, were on one side, opposing Essex, some of the younger men in government and the young military men who admired Essex's swashbuckling style and who had come to maturity during a decade and more of war. Between the elder Cecil and Essex there was respect and a kind of courtly mutuality ("they render strange charities to one another," De Maisse wrote), but greed corroded their relations; Essex was waiting impatiently for Cecil to die so that he could take over the latter's lucrative post as keeper of the wardrobe.
For their part, the two Cecils and their adherents eagerly pushed the bellicose Essex into hazardous military ventures—he hardly needed their encouragement—and then waited smugly for him to kill himself or, equally to their advantage, to damage himself financially and politically. "If he comes back victorious they take occasion thereby to make him suspected by the queen, and if nothing is accomplished then to ruin him." In time, they sensed, Essex would overreach himself and bring about his own destruction.
If he did, it would very likely be because he was blind to the immense personal capacities of the queen. Their relations fell into the time-honored mold of disdainful lady and flattering, admiring courtier. "Most fair, most dear, and most excellent Sovereign," he addressed her in his letters. "While your Majesty gives me leave to say I love you, my fortune is as my affection, unmatchable. If ever you deny me that liberty, you may end my life, but never shake my constancy." But Essex thought little of the abilities of women, and saw no reason to exempt the queen from his belittling censure. The English court, he told De Maisse confidentially, "labored under two things, delay and inconstancy, which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the queen." 5
These ungallant sentiments were shared by a great many of the men at Elizabeth's court in her last years. "Ah, silly woman! now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me 1 " blurted out one of the blunt soldiers who resented a woman's authority. "God's wounds! This is to serve a base, bastard, pissing kitchen woman; if I had served any prince in Christendom, I had not been so dealt withal." The offender was tried for his slanderous remarks—among them, that Elizabeth had "pissed herself with fear" at the time of the Armada—yet it was not possible to bring charges against every man who looked forward to the day when the kingdom would again pass into male hands. However the common people might cheer for the old queen whenever they caught a glimpse of her, the aristocracy and political elite were more than ready for her presumed successor James VI of Scotland to assume power. Her government, the French ambassador noted, "was little pleasing to the great men and the nobles, and if by chance she should die, it is certain that the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman." 6
Over the next several weeks De Maisse saw Elizabeth a number of times, and with each audience he came to appreciate her more. Her eccentricities of dress and manner continued to disconcert him. Constantly in motion, she talked constantly as well, digressing into long, musing anecdotes or memories so that the ambassador had often to bring her back to the business at hand. She repeated herself, she indulged her musing memory, yet De Maisse was astute enough not to confuse this deliberate, self-flattering self-indulgence with senility.
He had often to humor her vanity. She was forever calling herself foolish and old, "saying she was sorry to see him there, and that, after having seen so many wise men and great princes, he should at length come to see a poor woman and a foolish." This called forth, as it was meant to, overstated reassurances about her "blessings, virtues and perfections," her prudent sovereignty and wise ludgment.
Her concern for her appearance was clearly obsessive. "When anyone speaks of her beauty she says that she was never beautiful," De Maisse wrote, "although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless she speaks of her beauty as often as she can." Concern for her looks caused Elizabeth to cancel an appointment with the ambassador one day. She had made herself ready, and had already sent her coaches to fetch him and his entourage to the palace, when she thou
ght better of it and called it off. 'Taking a look into her mirror," she said that she looked too ill to be presentable, and "was unwilling for anyone to see her in that state."
When presentable she was breathtakingly garbed, either in robes of her favorite silvery white or in elegant black and white. At one meeting she "wore innumerable jewels on her person, not only on her head, but also within her collar, about her arms and on her hands, with a very great quantity of pearls, round her neck and on her bracelets. She had two bands, one on each arm, which were worth a great price." 7
Yet striking as her appearance was, it was nearly eclipsed by the force of her personality, and by her remarkable sway of mind. Her arrogance about her talent for rulership was absolute. Having been "intended for affairs of state, even from her cradle," she governed with a degree of astuteness none of her present councilors could match. ("They were young," she said, "and had no experience in affairs of state.") She impressed De Maisse as a "very great princess who knows everything," yet her manner was endearingly candid and on occasion playful. De Maisse introduced to her a secretary who was a member of his legation. She "made good cheer to him" as he knelt before her, saying that she remembered having seen several of his letters. "She began to take him by the hair," De Maisse wrote, "and made him rise and pretended to give him a box on the ears."
The more he saw of her the more the Frenchman was astonished by Elizabeth's liveliness. One afternoon she remarked "that she was on the edge of the grave and ought to bethink herself of death," but then abruptly contradicted herself. "I think not to die so soon, Master Ambassador," she said, "and am not so old as they think." And indeed as De Maisse watched her leave the room at the conclusion of his audience, "retiring half dancing to her chamber," he could well believe it.
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