None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  Elizabeth opened the book she carried. Published earlier that year, the First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Whatever would the second blast be like? The book had been prohibited, burned, but still was read. The author was a Scot, which explained a good deal, called John Knox, a disciple of Calvin of Geneva. Mary, his trumpet brazenly declared, was ‘unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of woman’. Mary, the least bloody of women, had burned her way out of the hearts of her people. They would not defend her against the blast of the trumpet.

  Spare neither man, woman or child,

  Hang them and head them, and burn them with fire.

  So Mary had done, and would be for ever condemned for it. But Knox was a dangerous maniac. He preached general uprising and treason against all women rulers to end what he called their ‘monstriferous empire’. Elizabeth read, with eyebrows lifting ever higher, Knox’s list of women’s deficiencies, and catechized herself. Weak — oh, yes, and frail, too; impatient — very, often!; feeble, foolish — undoubtedly, on occasion; inconstant, variable — none more so!; cruel — maybe, sometimes; lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment — ah, no, not that, she did not think so, not under any circumstances! Elizabeth shut the book with a snap. She could only stand a small dose of Knox at one time and had to stop before she ripped the pages out and stamped on them.

  To restore her calm, she held her pomander watch under her nose, then looked at its dial. The progress of the minutes carried her always nearer to her destiny. As she listened to the watch’s tick, she began to be aware of another sound. Faint at first, it was echoed by the quickening of her own heartbeat. Unmistakably, the sound of drumming hooves, galloping, the sound she had been waiting for. She stood stock still, under an oak, in one hand the Monstrous Regiment, in the other her watch. The sound grew louder, and the riders burst through a spinney and into sight. A knot of riders, going full pelt; the Tudor livery of white and green. White and green, the colours taken from the dragon banner of Cadwallader, under which Henry VII had won his crown at the end of the long yellow summer. It had come.

  They saw Elizabeth standing there, not far from the ride, and came thundering up. Two men projected their middle-aged bodies from the saddle like cannon balls, and landed at her feet. The exultant, sweating faces of those old warhorses, the Earls of Pembroke and of Arundel, made words unnecessary. They knelt among the crisp fallen leaves, their hats in their hands.

  ‘The Queen is dead. God save Your Majesty!’

  So the thunderbolt descended, and knocked Elizabeth to her knees. The words of Psalm 118 came to her as if she had written it herself: ‘A Domino factum est illud et est mirabile in occulis nostris!’ she said, her voice ringing out for all the flying birds to hear. She could have chanted the psalm all through, for she knew it by heart. ‘This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes!’

  The right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass.

  I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.

  ‘Blessed be he that cometh in the Name of the Lord!’ she said, as the two lords took her hand, and kissed it, all of them still kneeling among the rough grass and dry oak leaves.

  The Earl of Arundel, whom she knew was one of her many elderly admirers, offered to take her up on his horse, to ride back to the house.

  ‘I will walk,’ she said. Her first walk as a Queen, across the park at Hatfield, in her milkmaid dress and straw hat. They had not gone far before another rider came in sight, going at a speed which made Elizabeth stop and stare. A white horse flying over the ground like a Pegasus, scarcely skimming it with its hooves, a long, lean rider lying almost flat along its neck. They came to a halt in a flurry of gravel.

  Seeing the two men had arrived before him, Lord Robert Dudley did not dismount at once. He reined in his blowing horse, now seen to be wingless, in front of Elizabeth, until it folded its fore legs and knelt before her, bowing its head and snorting. Elizabeth was entranced. He must have spent days training it to kneel, for her.

  Lord Robert was kneeling in front of her himself, saying, ‘God save Your Majesty!’ and kissing her hand as the others had done.

  Elizabeth made the first decision of her reign. ‘For that, Lord Robert,’ she said, ‘you shall be my Master of Horse!’ It was the very first appointment, before all the important officers of state — well, she was already decided upon who those would be. Lord Robert knew how to pay a clever compliment, and he had a way with horses to marvel at.

  Soon the bells of Hatfield church began to peal, and kept ringing all the afternoon and evening, with joyous vigour and relays of ringers.

  God-sent-us-our

  Eliz-a-beth!

  And the voice of God was in the bells.

  Book Three

  Arcadia

  V

  None Such

  1558 – 1559

  She wore purple, the royal purple — a high-necked riding gown with a long train, and a tight bodice to show off her narrow waist. She had chosen a purple velvet of deepest, richest dye, near violet, which was a perfect foil for a white skin. Hard to find words for that skin — not cold and unyielding, like marble, nor like a lily, still and smooth, but vivid, glowing, like the core of a candle flame drawn up by the air. Hard to put her into words at all — a sibylline mystery. One of those unknown Elizabeths who hid within her eyes had stepped out, and like the peacock unfurling his tail dazzled the onlookers with splendour. This Elizabeth at last had licence to dazzle, adorned with gold and jewels. She was the Queen.

  The Queen’s Master of Horse, Lord Robert Dudley, rode immediately behind her, on a horse as black as hers was white, her shadow, night to her day. The admiring gasps as the Queen rode by merged into yet more for Lord Robert. He was not a self-effacing shadow. His eyes rarely left the Queen’s straight back. She looked as well as any rider could in a cumbersome woman’s saddle. Women had to prove themselves more proficient on horseback than men because their accoutrements and dress were such hazards to be contended with. Even the very best of them could not match a man, and the Queen was one of the very best. He half wanted to see her ride astride like a man, because he admired her skill and daring, but he disliked those Amazons whom he had seen do this.

  Hats flew through the air like windblown leaves, enough to make any horse shy. The Queen — Queen Elizabeth — had come home to her loyal and loving City of London. On this first Monday in Advent, she appeared as a gift from God to her people. ‘The Lord,’ they said, ‘has caused a new star to arise.’

  Such a welcome had never been witnessed before. Elizabeth, who had heard London cheer when Mary had come in triumph five years before, judged by the measure of her ears and eyes that these cheers were louder and more frenzied, the crowds more swarming, and the joy demonstrated not twice as great but tenfold. They were possessive cheers, proprietary cheers, English cheers, for one known to be of true English blood, and not foreign, or Spanish. Almost exactly one hundred years before, Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather Boleyn had been Mayor of London.

  As the Queen came to the end of Mark Lane, within sight of the Tower, the first thunder of cannon saluted her. She moved towards a wall of noise, the cheers for once outclamoured, the church bells outdone. The guns, poking out from their emplacements up on the walls, belched; the whole of the Tower breathed fire and smoke like some monstrous dragon. But Elizabeth no longer feared the dragon’s mouth — what true Tudor could? The Tower was hers to command, a symbol of royal power. The cannonade was for her, a joyous, heart-thudding thunder.

  Behind her, Lord Robert remembered how the guns of the Hanse merchants had saluted Elizabeth when it was thought that she had been delivered from her imprisonment. Now, as he had sworn they would that day in the Beauchamp Tower, they saluted her as Queen. He rode close behind her down the slope towards the Bulwark Gate, keeping an eye on her horse because of the gunfire. It was he who had instructed the gunners to fire a salute such as had never been heard b
efore, not for King Henry, King Edward, or Queen Mary, to go on firing longer and louder than could be imagined. Keep it up for half an hour, he had said, and if the glass breaks in the windows round about, never mind, there will be recompense. The smoke made Robert cough, but the tears which came to his eyes were not the product of gunpowder fumes. He looked for a moment on the cobbles of Tower Hill, at the place where the scaffold was put. Tower Hill, where so many had died, his father, Guilford. Only he and Ambrose were alive to see this day. But they were at the Queen’s side, where the poor ghosts might see their triumph.

  Elizabeth rode down through the first gateway, over the first drawbridge, hooves sounding hollow, through the Barbican, the Middle Tower, the Byward Tower. The guns were making the lions roar. Then she was under the two great portcullises and beside the Bell Tower. As she rode past that place, she did not look up, but she felt its walls, their thickness, the flinty stone, the enclosing dark. She passed on through the arch of the Garden Tower, and out onto the Green. Here she halted. She looked around.

  Smoke poured like fog, though the gun fire had ceased. The Green had not changed. The leafless trees gesticulated like condemned prisoners’ arms against the leaden November sky, the starlings on the grass after worms, the waddling raven, the gulls taking refuge from stormy seas. The White Tower was as it had always been, freshly whitened, its gilded weather vanes twiddling in the breeze, the royal banners hoisted. The Queen had taken possession of her Tower of London, and it no longer held any menace for her. The ghosts rested for the time being, content. She thought of them, though, the prisoners, of her mother, who had been a Queen and had fallen to lie there in the chapel, her little neck severed for all time.

  ‘Some have fallen from being Princes of this land to be prisoners in this place,’ she said aloud. ‘I am raised from being a prisoner to be a Prince of this land. My advancement is a work of God’s mercy. Let me show myself to God thankful, and to men merciful.’

  Robert Dudley reached out and clasped the hand of his brother Ambrose, who was never far away. ‘Amen,’ he said, ‘amen.’ They too had been prisoners here. But now they were the Queen’s devoted subjects, as Robert had pledged to her then for the future, now present reality.

  Elizabeth was now showing herself merciful to the Lieutenant and the Gentleman Gaoler, who knelt before her, remembering with trepidation their charge of her in less happy days. Then she did a curious thing.

  ‘Your keys, Mr Partridge.’ The voice made men jump to instant obedience, as her father’s had once made them. She grasped the heavy bunch of keys, and stood for a moment, weighing them in her hands. Robert knew her thoughts, for looking up from the keys she met his eyes. Hers the power, now, to free or to imprison, to unlock the doors, to turn the rack, to order the death upon Tower Hill. Robert, her subject, recognized her power. ‘I am God’s creature,’ Elizabeth had said. Well, he was most certainly hers. However intimate they became — and he had his hopes and designs — there would be no avoiding this fact. But when she turned to him, putting the Tower keys into his hands, so that he might return them to Gaoler Partridge, he was moved that she should so recognize their old comradeship in adversity, and warmed by the squeeze of her fingers intimating a special regard for him.

  In the ensuing days, in a moment snatched between Council meetings and important discussions, Elizabeth did not forget the children, who had once brought her the keys of the kitchen spice cupboard, wanting to set her free. Four years on, the children were larger and infinitely shyer. They had been told that they would see the Queen, and to bow and curtsy. As they did so, like little courtiers, their eyes stuck to the floor, they did not at first realize who that Queen was, and had been.

  ‘Humphrey, Susannah, and little Bess,’ said Elizabeth, ‘look up —’

  They did so, obedient and frightened.

  ‘Did your father beat you, Susannah, for giving me those keys?’

  ‘No, Your Majesty.’ Only a whisper was managed, in awe at Majesty, but the shy eyes looked up at her face, her bright hair, and recognized her for the first time.

  Elizabeth looked over their heads at Mr Partridge, and smiled. The Gaoler became red, and melted at the edges like a pat of butter in the sunshine. Elizabeth’s smile usually had this effect. It thawed the children, too.

  ‘But you were let out soon, weren’t you, Madam — Your Majesty?’ they said, beaming up at her now with a sort of pride, as if they had been responsible for the whole event.

  ‘Yes, I was, and here I am again, by God’s grace. Today you shall come to see me dine, and there will be a present for each of you. I never forget the people who have been kind to me.’

  They could not take their eyes off her now, eager and curious. Susannah, seeing Robert Dudley standing behind the Queen, remembered the tall, handsome dark man who had given Humphrey a coin to take cowslips to this great lady and sworn him to secrecy. She spoke to him, as the only other person there that she knew.

  ‘Will you be the Queen’s King now?’ she asked.

  An amazed silence fell; eyes swivelled to Robert, outrage, embarrassment, disapproval quivered in the air. A stifled snort of laughter was heard.

  Elizabeth cleared the air by laughing herself, delighted and unembarrassed — her naughty laugh — and smiled even more naughtily at Robert, who had the grace to blush a little.

  ‘Do you think he looks like one?’ she asked Susannah.

  Only she and Robert were listening for the answer, as the others shuffled their feet and laughed uneasily.

  ‘Yes!’ all three children said in chorus, without any hesitation at all.

  *

  Mr Secretary Cecil was going over the order of service for the Queen’s coronation. She insisted upon only one major change in the rubrics of the ancient Latin service set out in the Liber Regalis; she would not be present at the elevation of the Host during the Mass, nor partake of it, but must disappear into a curtained-off pew, to show her disapproval. She was adamant about that. Unfortunately, the Bishop of Carlisle was equally adamant about retaining the Mass, and as he was the only one out of Queen Mary’s remaining seventeen bishops who was willing to do the crowning, a compromise had to be reached. Cecil deeply mourned that Archbishop Cranmer was not alive to crown his goddaughter, as he had crowned her mother and her brother. For his compromises, Cranmer had been burned.

  For himself, Cecil had devised a small, but special role in the ceremony. He would step forward with the copy of the Queen’s coronation oath, holding it up so that the Bishop might read as he administered it. Elizabeth had not been slow to appreciate the significance of this when he had suggested it. The Bishop might sanctify the Queen’s solemn oath to her people, but the chief minister of the secular state would be there giving him the authority to do so.

  ‘By means of small things, great ones may grow,’ the Queen had said. ‘I suggest that the secular peers do homage before the bishops, instead of after. Such a small alteration will not cause much stir.’

  When making him her Secretary of State, during that first Council meeting at Hatfield, Elizabeth had stated her trust in William Cecil’s probity: ‘You will not be corrupted by any manner of gift, and you will be faithful to the state, and without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel which you think best.’ So, in his first memorandum he counselled her ‘that no occasion be given to stir any dispute touching the governance of the realm’, by which he meant its religious complexion. On this point, her will coincided admirably with his. He scarcely expected such harmony to continue.

  Cecil had found himself, at that first Privy Council meeting, in the unaccustomed position of serving a Queen instead of a King. He had never attended a meeting chaired by a woman, having had no part in Queen Mary’s government. It would take a while for everyone to adjust to this predicament. Meanwhile, he would study his Queen. In his painstaking, note-maker’s manner, Cecil gave himself the useful exercise of drawing up a summary of Elizabeth’s immediate ancestry, in order that he mig
ht not forget the influence of heredity on her character.

  Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn — such parentage was a bad start. What he remembered of Anne, from his early days at court, was unpleasing; a small thin, tense creature whose changeability and vile temper had grated on his sensibilities like a rusty file. He did not like such women; vain, capricious, unstable, hysterical. As for King Henry himself: vain, capricious, wilful, ruthless and totally unpredictable, continued the litany.

  The grandparents: Thomas Boleyn had little to recommend him, his wife was a Howard, daughter of the old Surrey who had won Flodden — a proud, hard, devious family. King Henry VII: undoubtedly intelligent and ruthless, but avaricious and mean. Elizabeth of York? At least she had an unblemished reputation, though that was more than you could say for her parents.

  Edward IV: intelligent and ruthless, but promiscuous, his brothers those extreme undesirables, Richard III and Butt of Malmsey Clarence. His Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, half French (this better forgotten, the present Queen being so proud of her pure English blood) and from a nasty, greedy, vain family.

  The Tudor grandparents looked more promising. Lady Margaret Beaufort: remarkable for intellect, of exemplary character, married to a Welshman… The Cecils were Welsh, too.

  However, William Cecil surveyed his result unhappily. He had intelligence, caprice, vanity, wilfulness, and an inborn love of power to contend with. In all a volatile mixture, bad enough in a man, but in a woman, overlaid by all the natural disadvantages of their sex!

  Having surveyed the Queen’s dubious heredity, he turned to the foremost of the urgent problems on his mind, the royal succession. Already, Mary the young Queen of Scots, Dauphiness of France, had quartered the arms of England with her own, proclaiming herself the heir of the Roman religion, who should be sitting in Elizabeth’s throne. The two sisters of poor Lady Jane Grey were still living. Cecil, who at the end of that sad, nine-days’ non-reign had written on his copy of Jane’s title to the throne the annihilating words Jana Non Regina, did not wish to repeat the experience. The succession, and indeed her own survival, depended upon Elizabeth’s marriage and the fulfilment of her female duty to produce England’s heir. The royal lioness must be approached at once, in her lair at the Tower.