The Queen's Bastard

by Robin Maxwell

  Leicester had managed, unbelievably, to keep news of the affair with Lettice from her cousin the Queen for more than two years. Lady Essex had, like himself, always traveled within the highest of Court circles. Perhaps, mused Leicester, Elizabeth believed he was still sleeping with Douglas Sheffield. Despite the child he’d fathered on Douglas and her unceasing demands for matrimony, he had promised Elizabeth he would never marry that lady. Perhaps the Queen had been lulled into a kind of passive acceptance of his unfaithfulness. Perhaps she had been overwhelmed with affairs of State, or obsessed with pangs of guilt for sending insufficient aid to the blood-soaked Netherlands. Or perhaps the courtship with the Duke of Alençon, and all the proxies sent to woo her, were more serious than Leicester wished to believe.

  Sometimes it had seemed unreal, the sheer deceit and contrivance of this affair with Lettice — both women together under one roof, Lady Essex at times playing hostess to the Queen. Last summer he had thrown a lavish two-week water party for the Queen at Kenilworth Castle. It had been an extravagant fairy tale of fireworks and musical masques, rustic diversions, exquisite open-air pageants. People from miles round had come, to view their beloved Queen as much as the entertainments. And Elizabeth had been altogether enchanted with the wonders he had created within and without the palace — a pleasure garden of marble fountains rippling with colored water, strange sculpted beasts, walkways bursting with flowers and fruit-bearing trees, beds of sweet strawberries there for the picking. Amongst the small party of guests was his sister, Mary Sidney, Elizabeth’s most beloved and sorely missed companion. Ignoring Mary’s pox-ravaged face they had strolled together like young girls, heads touching, arms round each other’s waist. Lady Essex, like some voluptuous serpent in the Garden of Eden, had watched silently from the shadows, smug with her secret. Leicester had spent the fortnight consumed with guilt and fear of exposure, but he was foremost a showman — the Queen’s Master of the Revels — and in the end Elizabeth was never the wiser.

  He had been surprised that the scandal machine of Court life had somehow failed to manufacture even one scintilla of gossip about its most despised member, to discredit him with the Queen. True, she had once confessed to another of her favorites, Christopher Hatton, that she’d had a bad dream — something about a marriage that would do her harm. But her suspicions, to Leicester’s great relief, had fallen on Hatton. He had had to swear to her that it was not his marriage of which she’d dreamt, and all was soon forgotten.

  Leicester turned from the mirror and stared out at the grounds of Wanstead, a once run-down house Elizabeth had given him, now beautifully restored. He could see the chapel from the window. In a few moments he would enter there and marry the woman who was seven months gone with his child. If Lettice had not become pregnant, he wondered, would he still have wished to wed her? Yes, he thought suddenly. He did in some part of him wish to marry Lettice. He longed for legitimate children. Brothers and sisters as playmates for each other, like he had enjoyed in his own family. An heir. He could admit to himself that he longed for an heir, though the word spoken aloud to Elizabeth was like invoking the Devil himself. Suddenly Leicester felt a flush of warmth creeping from chest to neck to face, and pushed open the mullioned window. Pray Jesus it is not the malarial fever again, he thought, sucking in great gulps of the cool morning air.

  When had he finally come to know that marriage to the Queen was an impossibility? That his greatest of all desires — to be husband of Elizabeth and king of England — had been pulled forever from his reach? She had forgiven him Douglas Sheffield, and he had afterwards moved even higher in her trust and favor than before. Then Elizabeth had taken up with the French prince in a way that defied reason, and Lady Essex had begun to nag him.

  “The Queen will never marry you,” Lettice had said. “She would have done it by now, had she meant to. Do you not wish to be like normal men with wife and family, and not some pathetic, eternally groveling creature of an aging, ridiculous royal hag?”

  Leicester had, in fact, waited until the last moment to make this marriage with Lady Essex. Some perverse idea, perhaps some maudlin memory of his childhood friendship with Elizabeth, or the fullblown passion of their long affair, had caused him to hope against hope that she would come about, like a great sailing ship in an unpredictable wind — shift direction and admit that she would die if she could not marry him. But of course this had not happened, and with each passing month Lettice had grown more ponderous with her pregnancy.

  Oh, why had he not simply told Elizabeth the truth? Asked for her blessings on the marriage? She had scorned his proposals repeatedly for twenty years. Could she be so unreasonable as to assume he should stay a bachelor for the rest of his life?

  At once the answer to his question came to him in the form of an image in his mind’s eye — an image of Elizabeth as she had sat, a pale and furious wraith, waiting to condemn him for mere infidelity with Douglas Sheffield. No, he realized, if he had begged for her royal approval of a marriage with Lettice, Elizabeth would have denied it. Forbidden it. And she would have punished him. Rescinded all of the astonishing gifts of influence, power, prestige, and riches she had bestowed upon him with her loving and generous hand. One day, Leicester knew, the truth of this marriage would come to the Queen’s ear. Perhaps by then he might have found a way to pacify her, make her see reason in it. And perhaps not.

  Oh, how had it come to this! Leicester had always believed in the Machiavellian principle of virtù. That a great man could, by bold endeavor, control some part of his future not ruled by the Fates. Early on, he had concluded that he was indeed destined to be Elizabeth’s husband and king. But if he were somehow wrong and it was not, in fact, written in the stars, then instead all of his patience and hard work and brilliant scheming must finally lay the same prize at his feet. He had believed that once.

  But there was nothing to be done now. He must celebrate his marriage with joy, and look forward to the birth of his child. With any luck it would be a boy, and at least the Dudley blood and name would be passed down into future lineage as it was meant to do. The ceremony would be brief, only three or four witnesses — all family — and a discreet local chaplain presiding. He would not allow himself to think of the Queen’s planned visit to Wanstead in two days time. No trace of the wedding would remain. He would send Lettice away, and in months to come move her up and down the countryside to keep her out of the Queen’s sight. Return to Court as though nothing at all had happened. The audacious deceit of it, thought Leicester, the lies … Was everything his enemies had said of him throughout the years, he wondered, true? Was he the selfish, arrogant, avaricious scoundrel of his reputation, or rather the good, caring friend and kind patron that he insisted to himself every day he was?

  Leicester turned for one more look into the gilt mirror. He tugged at the buckram-stuffed doublet and sucked in his softening belly. He had done all a man could humanly do to calculate his future and defy the Fates. Now he must accept defeat. Slowly he screwed his face into a semblance of a smile, and strode through his bedchamber door and down the great stairs of Wanstead House to marry with Lettice Knollys.

  Thirty-one

  Elizabeth, enthroned, looked slowly about the Presence Chamber and declared herself content. Half a dozen of her councillors stood round in small self-composed groups discussing, she presumed, her great and minor affairs and divers matters of state. Her waiting ladies, loitering nearby at their ease and tittering with gossip, were very pretty in their gowns of the newly fashionable black and white. Amongst them all there was not a jot of color anywhere, except for pink of cheek or vermillion of lip. She herself had become partial to the fashion, and she gazed down with pleasure at her overskirt with its embroidered jet silk pattern stitched into the stark satin background. Black pearls on her white wrists. White pearls in her black periwig. I am still attractive, she thought, her mouth tilting into a subtle smile, even at my age.

  Elizabeth was pleased with good reason. She had managed som
ehow to navigate shoal after treacherous political shoal, pacify warring factions within her government, control her own rampant emotions, and emerge into the clear light of her people’s love. Independent of her own efforts, an adoring cult had actually sprung up to worship their Virgin Queen. All the past scandals naming her and Robin lovers, with hordes of illegitimate children, had vanished.

  Of course the Puritans were a nuisance, and a potentially dangerous one at that. She surveyed the room once more and spotted their numbers amongst her councillors instantly. The men were strange with their wild, shoulder-length hair. They wore all black, not as a fashion but as a sober vestment, morbid and rigid as their faces. But this was an illusion, thought Elizabeth, for Puritans were cloaked in the violence of their speech — their apoplectic sermons damning every fathomable vice, frantic prayer meetings and prophesyings, and condemnation of iniquitous and foolish women. They even gave their children ridiculous names such as Reformation, Tribulation, Repent, and Be Thankful. Oh, they were horrid, these Puritans, chasing players from quiet villages and forbidding Morris dancers from dancing. They had even the audacity to rail hysterically from their pulpits against herself and her “inadequate” efforts to reform the church. Sometimes she wished they would all disappear.

  Leicester, once again absent from Court, was a Puritan but a reasonably one. But Walsingham, in all other ways prudent, sophisticated, and broadly cultured, was a fanatical Puritan who stubbornly insisted on putting Religion before State. If it were up to him, thought Elizabeth with irritation, she would be at war with every Catholic power in Europe, and her cousin Mary would be a headless, rotting corpse. Walsingham had announced — to her extreme annoyance, though of course there was nothing to be done about it — that he “wished first to God’s glory and next the Queen’s safety.”

  Well, despite him, despite them all, she would prevail. Her mind’s Great Plan would bear the fruit her womb would never do.

  Her Great Plan.

  She had taken no one, not one soul, into her confidence. She thought again of her mother, the diary Anne had kept for so long, all her own. And she thought of the lesson within that journal. Trust no man completely, for all men are ambitious or scheming or weak. Even her devoted Cecil — the man who shared most exactly her political aims and fears — was aging. These days he more enjoyed bouncing his grandchildren on his knee, and riding a little donkey round the garden paths at Theobalds, than strategizing with her on matters of foreign policy. And dear Robin was a problem. His fervent opposition to the Duke of Alençon’s marriage proposals and his vehement demands for official military intervention in the Netherlands threatened the perfection of her Plan.

  For months she had spent every waking hour thinking on this puzzle. She had dreamed dreams of it. Seen in her mind’s eye great maps of the world — Europe, the East, the West Indies. She had considered her allies, her enemies. She had consulted the stars, had had John Dee cast horoscopes for all the monarchs of the Continent. She had control of Parliament, and she had surrounded herself with councillors wise each in his way but none, in singularity or conjunction with others, stronger than herself. She had planted herself on this throne and for twenty years waited patiently as the great taproots of her power and authority bored slow and deep into the heart of England. No one knew better than she what was Britain’s future course, for no one loved nor understood it more.

  She was the architect of the Plan and, with God’s help, the arbiter of its outcome.

  ’Twas so simple, Elizabeth thought, leaning against the down cushions at her back. It all rested on her urge for peace being as zealous as King Philip’s desire for war, and the understanding that France and not Spain was the greatest danger to England. Why could no one else see what she so clearly saw? Perhaps in France’s weakened condition it appeared as no threat, but the ancient enmity ran deep, and the country was bigger and more populous than Spain. But worse, for the first time in history it controlled the entire southern coast of the Channel. Threat of invasion from France’s fleet was eminently more plausible than from Spain’s Armada.

  The balance of power, as it stood now with France caught between Spain in the south and the Spanish-controlled Netherlands to the north, had allowed England’s profitable trade with Flanders to flourish for generations. If England destroyed Spain, and the Low Countries came under the protection — or even the domination — of France, all would be lost. The European coast from southern France all the way to the northernmost parts of the Netherlands would be controlled by the French, and England’s intercourse with the Continent entirely compromised. Worse, the cost of keeping the whole of the south and east of England on permanent military alert would devastate her economy. Without financial stability she would lose her capacity to expand her influence in Europe, and in the un-explored lands of the New World.

  There was a way, Elizabeth had decided, a brilliant solution to the puzzle. It hinged on the intricacies of diplomacy, not on barbaric aggression, and it lay within the complicated tangle of her marriage dance with Alençon. Let all, especially the Duke himself, believe she was serious in her intentions to wed him. Ignore all of her subjects’ howls of rage that she should consider marrying a Catholic, and a filthy Frog at that.

  The French prince had already visited her once for twelve days, preceded by his representative Simier, a darkly handsome and elegant courtier adept at the games of love. And whilst Alençon had been as ugly as his reputation made him — uglier even — there was something wonderful about him. A sophistication unknown to Englishmen, and a wicked charm. “Small but mighty,” he would brag of himself. So despite his appearance — Lord Cecil had actually contacted a specialist reputed to be expert at removing the scars of smallpox — Elizabeth found the flirtation bearable, sometimes even enjoyable. She had gritted her teeth and allowed her Court physicians to examine her and pronounce her fit for childbearing, for another seven years at least. Elizabeth smiled. Perhaps she had missed her calling. Perhaps she should have been an actor on the stage, for there was not one amongst her councillors, even Leicester and Hatton, who did not believe her ploy. And they were beside themselves with worry.

  The Plan would be complete when Alençon, encouraged and subsidized by herself, and acting as an independent potentate — independent from his brother the King of France — moved into an alliance with the Dutch. He would become a hero, a defender of their liberty against Spanish tyranny. This would strengthen the Netherlands against Spain without the risk of France’s usurping the Low Countries — and without England’s all-out war with Philip. It would require her moment-to-moment over-sight of the military situation on the Continent, a quickstep of minimal intervention when seriously threatened, balanced by the drawing in of her horns when the threat diminished. There would be countless envoys sent to Flanders, and many mediations with Spain. She would, this way, post-pone any truly bellicose tactics indefinitely, possibly until the danger passed altogether. Elizabeth knew very well she would, with this method, continue to drive her councillors mad with exasperation. But her deepest instincts cried out against confrontation with Philip, and she was as determined as she had ever been in her life to win this battle through compromise alone.

  “Sir Philip Sidney!” shouted the crier as the Presence Chamber doors opened and a courtier, thin and beardless, eyes flashing with intelligence, strode in and dropped to one knee in front of the Queen.

  Elizabeth adored this young man, only son of her dearest friends, Mary and Henry Sidney. She had known him since birth and watched him grow to a superb manhood. Even at his age, Philip Sidney was idol of the most forward circle of young intellectuals, poets, and playwrights in England, and was universally beloved by all generations, having no apparent enemies. Today, however, the Queen had summoned him here for a scolding. Sidney, alarmed by her proposed marriage with Alençon, had written her a long letter of protest, decrying the treachery of the French and begging her to reconsider the match. Now Elizabeth gave him her hand to kiss, and she felt t
he fervidness of his devotion to her as he pressed her fingers to his lips. With a single gesture she waved all courtiers, councillors, and waiting ladies out of earshot, and then spoke only in hushed tones.

  “Come, Philip, sit close at my knee,” she said, and the young man obeyed, staring up adoringly at his Queen. “I am very cross with you, Philip. You have no right to question my decisions or my motives.”

  “Begging your deepest pardon, Majesty, but I must continue to risk your displeasure and stand by my letter. Remember, I was there in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve,” he whispered fiercely. “I saw the butchery with my own two eyes! The family of the man you are planning to marry was behind that slaughter. They are avowed enemies to the Protestant cause. His mother is a very devil! The man himself is repulsive, the marrow of his bones eaten by debauchery. Do you not see how this marriage does offend your subjects, Your Majesty? Do you not care?”

  Elizabeth did all she could not to wince at Philip Sidney’s words, for she knew them to be the truth. But she could not afford to listen, to let them move her. Now she took up his hand and held it in her own. The skin was soft, pale, uncallused — the hand of a gentleman. She leaned down and spoke in an intimate tone.