None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

Finally, the procession came to the western limit of the City, at Temple Bar. Here the famous giants, Gogmagog and Corineus appeared in Roman armour and plumes, and London said farewell.

  ‘O worthy Queen, and as our hope is sure,

  That into error’s place, thou wilt now truth restore,

  So trust we that thou wilt our sovereign Queen endure,

  And loving Lady stand, from henceforth, ever more.’

  No, not evermore, but until Time’s hourglass should cease to run, and she felt his scythe catch at her skirt hem. She held up her hands and cried, ‘Be assured, I will stand your good Queen!’

  Their prayers followed her like doves, as the winter sky darkened over the City. Doves of peace, whose message she would never forget.

  Elizabeth woke to the day of her coronation with that feeling of sandiness at the back of her nose and throat which is forewarning of a cold in the head. But there was no time to heed forewarnings. The first face she saw that day was Kat Ashley’s, dear, familiar, comforting Kat, who was going to make her ready for this most important day of her life. Kat greeted her as she would a bride, bursting with motherly joy and importance, breathless with awe, expectation and haste. A forty-year-old Kat, with a face chubbier than ever and grey hairs.

  ‘Happy Kat!’ Elizabeth smiled, and hugged and kissed her.

  The day was bitterly cold again, the windows at Whitehall curtained with frost lace, the Thames’s icy flow hidden.

  ‘I am going to have a cold,’ announced Elizabeth. She had too many weighty things on her mind to put into words, so trivia came out instead.

  ‘These shoes are too thin for this frosty weather,’ said Kat Ashley, holding them up disapprovingly. Cloth of gold, with red satin linings. ‘Your Majesty should have lambswool, or fur.’

  ‘Too late,’ was Elizabeth’s only comment. There was little need to worry about her being cold. The layers and weight of her robes ensured an unhealthy heat, and a good deal of effort was needed to move at more than a snail’s pace.

  Blanche Parry, that other faithful familiar, helped to robe Elizabeth for her coronation.

  ‘Her Majesty is like a bride!’ Kat Ashley cooed, doting.

  ‘It is to be hoped this will be her only wedding day,’ Blanche said tartly, but this comment was brushed aside with laughter by the others.

  ‘At the end of it, I will wear a wedding ring!’ Elizabeth said, amused to provoke further remarks from Blanche.

  ‘A union unusurpable by any other — to the people of England!’ Mrs Parry liked the last word as much as her royal mistress. As she smoothed Elizabeth’s hair loose over her shoulders like a bride’s, she said, ‘Ah — Sidanen — the Silky One — in the Welsh language. Beautiful Majesty…!’ This made Elizabeth embrace and kiss her, purring with pleasure, because the compliment was the truth, and because it came from the least fulsome of flatterers.

  Elizabeth went forth from Whitehall in silk and silver and gold, as she had done the day before, carried in her litter, with her Master of Horse riding behind. At Westminster Hall the law courts had been converted to robing rooms and the company assembled to greet their Queen. Among them were the bevy of Bishops who had declined to crown her and the reluctant Carlisle, who now wished he had not agreed to the delicate, arduous task. England not only lacked an Archbishop of Canterbury, but could boast only one Duke still owning a head on which to wear his coronet. However, in dearth of Dukes, make do with Earls. The one thing which was not lacking though among the Queen’s subjects was good will, from the lords who carried her sceptre and crown to the London apprentice in the street.

  The blue cloth rolled out for the passage of the royal feet from Westminster Hall to the north door of the Abbey was fenced with posts and rails, behind which those more privileged of the Queen’s subjects were crammed. As she walked, now in her Parliament robes of crimson velvet and ermine, she greeted them with smiles and words, speaking to those she knew, so that some lords were scandalized by her informality. When she came to Solomon’s porch and entered the Abbey, she heard the commotion behind her, as the crowd fell upon the cloth over which she had walked, cutting it to shreds for souvenirs, trampling and fighting to get a piece.

  Elizabeth came into the Abbey as if into the tomb of her ancestors, though not all of them lay there. The vaulted sweep of darkness reminded her of a sepulchre, twinkling with constellations of candles and tapers, all winking and wavering as lights seen through a film of tears, and she blinked to find out if there were tears in her eyes. The hot, ancient, embalmer’s smell of incense prickled at her nose. Elizabeth always protested that she disliked incense as a Popish extravagance, but all the same it conjured for her all those past coronations; she heard the echo of their trumpets, their acclamations, the fourfold shouts of Yea! Yea! She could almost see their faces in the bluish wreaths of incense rising into the height of the roof: her father, in all his splendid, gilded youth, his beard shining like spangles, and her grandfather, a little less young and less gilded, but none the less a conqueror, crowned by law of right and might.

  The sound of the organ accompanied the mutter of hundreds of voices, the voices of the lords and ladies squashed into narrow scats around the Abbey, though who knew whose voices were mingled with them. Elizabeth would have liked to hear her father’s approval, but could not. She found herself unable to tell if the Latin chanting of a psalm she heard were real or some other echo from the past. She even felt that she had been here before, and when she was seated in her crimson chair on the great dais, like a scaffold, that it was a favourite seat which she had used all her life.

  Then the trumpets were for her, braying to the four corners of the dais, loud enough to bring down plaster. North, south, east and west, the Bishop proclaimed the Queen: ‘Sirs, here present is Elizabeth, rightful and undoubted inheritor to the crown,’ and shouts answered: ‘Yea! Yea! Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth!’ No one could now deny her destiny.

  Elizabeth had rehearsed herself thoroughly in what she had to do, and enjoyed showing herself to effect in the rituals. Having a perfect memory, she found herself occasionally prompting the Bishop, who was nervous. She was able to perform a King’s part with the grace and elegance of a woman; her offering at the altar, her taking of the oath, which Mr Cecil held up for the Bishop to read, were faultlessly done. During the singing of the ‘Veni Creator’ — ‘Come Holy Ghost’ — the customary prostration was avoided — it reminded the Queen of her sister’s coronation and of idolatry; kneeling was more proper.

  The anointing was done with what was apparently rancid drippings, not wholesome olive oil, which spoiled the consecration, the ritual with the long-handled spoon and the dove, which had served every sovereign since John. Elizabeth could not concentrate on anything if her nose was offended; her deep emotions took fright and buried themselves in her, far away from her waking self. The Bishop’s finger might have been an unsavoury cook’s, and the chrism soiled her hair. Only afterwards would the solemnity of her anointing assert itself.

  More pleasing was the actual crowning, first with the huge, heavy lump of St Edward’s crown, then with the one made for her brother, the nine-year-old King, which weighed less upon her than it had upon him, a toy crown, made not with tinsel, but with some of the most priceless gems in the realm. The sapphire ring could have encompassed two of her fingers, being made for a man, and was exchanged for a ring made to fit, which she would continue to wear from that day until the end of her life.

  When at last the ceremony was over and the Queen withdrew, to be changed into her robes of royal purple and to take some refreshment, she realized as she swallowed a morsel that her throat was very sore. The holy oil had not been efficacious against the oncoming cold in the head.

  During the feast in Westminster Hall, all nine hours of it, Elizabeth spoke as little as she could, which was unlike her enough to be noticed. By the end, she had patches of high colour in her checks, and a glazed look in her eyes. But the one thing she did keep doing was turning the ri
ng on her finger, her coronation ring, remembering Blanche Parry’s words that morning, and wondering if that ring should ever be joined by another, the gold band of a man’s wife.

  *

  ‘It cost sixteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-one pounds, nineteen shillings and eightpence three farthings to crown me. Too much.’ Elizabeth sniffed; the tip of her nose was a winter strawberry and her voice a croak, but she seemed remarkably lively for one resting in bed with a cold after a gruelling coronation.

  ‘Spend and God will send,’ Lord Robert said cheerfully. ‘Money well spent, Your Majesty.’

  Elizabeth sniffed again. She did not like prodigal spending, and he did. But the spectacle had proved worthy of the occasion, and thus the expense justified even in the realm’s present state of bankruptcy. She smiled, and flicked a feather which had escaped from her pillow in his direction, and he blew it back again. On the other side of the Queen’s bed her ladies viewed this privileged visitor with delight. Elizabeth had consented to see only two men that day, Mr Cecil and Lord Robert. Work and play.

  Five days later, the Queen was up, hard at work on preparing for the opening of her Parliament, and at play in the torchlit winter evenings. Lord Robert dressed himself as a Moor, in cloth of gold and blue velvet and scarlet silks, with a wig of black curls. He and a dozen others wore masks of black velvet on their faces, and the same material as a covering for their bare arms and legs. This proved a fascination for the women, who kept coming up to them and stroking them, as if they were furry animals or genuine Moors. The women clamoured to dance with them.

  The Queen laughed her naughty laugh and said, ‘I did not know that among my many suitors I would find a Moorish prince!’

  So she danced with her Moor, a virginal figure of snowdrop white, the pale tendrils of her fingers resting on his black velvet glove. Perhaps she wished that a real prince from High Barbary had come to woo her.

  Her suitors, or their proxies, looked on jealously. Elizabeth enjoyed her suitors, English or foreign, and she enjoyed witnessing their rivalries and absurdities even more. They occupied the minds of her ministers perhaps even more than they did her own. They were on the corporate mind of her Parliament.

  When she opened her first Parliament, on 25 January, she appeared just as she knew she would be pictured on the Rolls of her courts of justice, in robes of crimson velvet and ermine, the orb and sceptre in her hands. She wooed the unruly assembly with words. They would have to accept that she was a woman of her word, she said. ‘What credit my assurance may have with you, I cannot tell, but what credit it shall deserve to have, the sequel shall declare.’

  The Parliament opened a window on a new England. Gone was the hated allegiance to Rome, the priests, the incense of Mary’s reign. The Mass was abolished and the prayer book of King Edward VI re-established. The Queen, who would not have gone so far, found herself carried by the tide and learnt the power of her Parliament. Having established a Protestant England, they wanted her to ensure that it had a Protestant heir.

  *

  Fizz, phut, sizzle, bang! A cacophony of squibs rained bouncing gold hail through the trees overhanging the wall of Durham House to a hissing death in the river. It was not yet full dark, the trees in delicately unfurling April leaf, a tracery edging of black work upon a sickly green sky. The Thames was as sleek as a mourning ribbon, already jewelled with lanterns and torches, all double-imaged in their water-borne reflections. The Queen loved to hold court upon the river, and she loved the explosion of fireworks as night drew on. Today, a celebration of St George’s Day, reminded the Venetian ambassador of his own people’s water festival, the Sposalizio del Mare, when the Doge placated the all-powerful sea with a gold ring thrown into its hungry mouth — the wedding of the sea. The English, he had to concede, were nearly as much of a seafaring nation as the Venetians. He paid the English Queen the compliment of such a comparison, and saw her smile.

  ‘The Wedding of the Sea? Not just to the sea, Mr Ambassador, but to the land also. To England.’ She wanted a ring — not one of her own, they were not expendable. Another barge, as close to her own as if held by a grapple, bumped the fenders — her hand stretched out, a ring from Lord Robert’s passed into her fingers, the two hands touching, sliding apart with the movement of the craft. A gold ring spun suddenly into the air like a squib, fell as swiftly to extinction in the water.

  ‘Desponsamus te, Mare. There, Father Thames, I’ll take you for husband!’ Elizabeth laughed and the Venetian ambassador thought her frivolous, with her parody of the Doge’s solemn words.

  They stayed on the river until long after dark, so much music and light preventing the water birds from roosting, and outfacing the stars with fireworks.

  Down the star-shower of gilded days Elizabeth spun, saluted by fireworks, accompanied always by music, masks and dancing. Dancing until birds sang in the morning. The eyes of the court were fixed upon the leg of the dancing Lord Robert. Elected a Knight of the Garter at the St George’s Day Chapter, Lord Robert had lost no time in buckling below his knee a new garter so obviously costly beyond his means that everyone knew that it, like the privilege, had been a royal gift. He had been admitted to the elect together with the realm’s only Duke, a Marquess who had been the brother of a Queen, and an Earl. Lord Robert, offspring of two generations of beheaded traitors, had been honoured before even the Queen’s cousin Lord Hunsdon, before his elder brother Ambrose had more than hopes of being restored to the earldom of Warwick. Ambrose was not jealous — he said that, like their father, Robert was lucky beyond all hopes or expectation.

  Fireworks celebrated May Day when the Queen kept court upon the Thames from morning to night, the river a mass of Tudor white and green, blossom and leaf, by day, and of golden flowers and rain by night. One May morning Elizabeth leaned from the windows of her rooms at Whitehall to watch a mock battle between two ships on the river, and fireworks instead of shot burst like flame flowers from the cannons’ mouths. They fired broadsides, as if they had taken on the might of French or Spanish galleons in the Channel. But England’s ships were no longer at war.

  Peace with France was finally ratified that May, and what better way to begin the new summer of the new reign than in peace. To impress the French envoys, Elizabeth welcomed them with fireworks, entertained them under the stars at a banquet in the piazzas at Whitehall, and mingled them in starstruck wonder in a mask of astronomers. Above them the heavens smiled in tender early summer weather. Elizabeth shone like the evening star, a sphere of diamonds dangling from her ear, gold stars in her red hair, and constellations of diamonds spun like a Milky Way across her skirts. She set out to woo that crusty old man, the Constable of France. England did not possess a relic quite like the Duc de Montmorency, who had been the companion of youth of King Francois I. It was like talking to someone who had witnessed her own father’s youth, someone like the old Duke of Suffolk, whom Elizabeth had been too young to know. She asked of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, of how King Henry had looked, and whether her own court made as fine a show as that of Great Harry in the old days, and the old man said cryptically that a woman’s court was a very different thing.

  The next day there was a baiting in the tiltyard. The Queen sat in the gallery and made bets on the royal dogs with the French, and on the bear with Lord Robert. ‘Harry Hunks is out!’ There was always a bear called Harry Hunks, since King Henry’s day — the biggest and most grizzly. Harry Hunks got a chunk bitten out of his nose, and stood with a mastiff’s guts dangling from his claws like a garland of red ribbons. Robert said someone had measured Harry Hunk’s claws and they were one and a half times the length of a man’s fingers. He held up his hand. Robert had long fingers. Everyone made some money out of Harry that day, and at its end the blood was swept neatly away with sawdust, together with the wilting flowers from last night’s banquet.

  Soon after, the court moved to Greenwich. Elizabeth had displayed herself for the admiration of the French among the flowers and stars of Whit
ehall, and given them good sport with the bears too; now she intended to impress them with a muster of England’s soldiers. In Greenwich park there were drillings and mock fights and reviews, and after them, more banquets among the summer flowers of England, and martial exercises such as tilting by torchlight beside the summer river. Fireworks made a crown of gold over Greenwich, to show that the Queen was there.

  The Queen went to Woolwich dockyard to name a new-built ship, the Elizabeth Jonah, because she had been delivered from imprisonment and death like Jonah from the belly of the whale. Woolwich lay downstream, beyond the last great U-bend in the Thames, after which the river began to straighten out towards Gravesend and Tilbury. They took the long route to Woolwich by river, a fleet with all the royal flags flying, trumpets blowing, white gulls swooping round the gold prow of the royal barge. The Queen dined upon her new ship and was saluted once more by fireworks and by the crash of real guns. One old man remembered the launching of the Great Harry, when King Henry had blown his gold whistle loud as a trumpet and drunk good luck to his ship in half a pint of Malmsey. Then Elizabeth dined upon her Elizabeth Jonah, just as her father and Queen Katherine Parr, her dear mother, had done on the Great Harry at Portsmouth, just before the Mary Rose went down.

  The Queen wore success and enjoyment like a crown of delight, and for those about her this summer was spent half delirious with joy and feasting and wine, dazzled by the explosions of fireworks and falling golden rain. She surely heralded a new Golden Age upon the earth of England.

  *

  ‘All the villains in the world are to be found on Shooter’s Hill at one time or another, or camped on Blackheath.’

  ‘So I take to the road among the vagabonds! Robin, will you protect me?’

  ‘To the death, your Majesty!’ Lord Robert’s manly voice ran like a counterpoint to the Queen’s high one. Their voices danced, wove patterns in the July sunshine, with the playful ease and harmony of lovers.

  The Queen had taken to the road into Kent on the first short progress of her reign. Her Master of Horse, as was his duty, rode at her side. Blackheath had a holiday look, the normal users of the road drawn up on either side to have a look at the court. Besides, they had to get out of the way. Splendid as the Queen and her court were, the people of the road were a colourful lot also. Some wore the castoffs of the great, some outrageous gear of their own fancy. Bright but dirty, and offensive to the nose. There was a band of roving players, all in tatty feathers and tarnished gold lace — one raised a Roman helmet and bowed.