None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  Robert had given her the letters from Scotland to read. She was obviously very angry at the more outspoken lines. The pale, arched eyebrows were raised high, the white lids hooded, those pink lips, still so often pretty, were clamped one upon the other.

  ‘“Woe is me for you, when David’s son shall be King of England,”’ she read out, her voice dangerous.

  ‘Then we can only hope he will be a modem Solomon!’ Robert said, witty but unappreciated.

  ‘And if a she? Will that be a judgement upon us all?’ she retorted acidly. ‘The Queen of Scots in my opinion is grossly slandered.’

  To show her solidarity with her sister Queen, Elizabeth took to wearing a medallion portrait of Mary dangling from her waist on a gold chain. Elizabeth remembered Mother Dowe and other rumour mongers. In her black and white Robert thought she looked like the nun of Whitehall again.

  Just before Lady Day, a letter came from the Queen of Scots herself. Elizabeth read in disbelief and horror. ‘Some of our subjects and council have slain our most special servant in our own presence…’ In England if a man so much as drew a weapon in the presence of his sovereign, he had his right hand cut off. Riccio had been stuck as full of holes as a pincushion. ‘And thereafter,’ worse to come, ‘held our own person captive treasonably.’

  Elizabeth took up her pen immediately, all shocked sympathy that royalty had been so grossly misused. ‘We are so tired and evil at case,’ Mary wrote, ‘what with riding twenty miles in five hours of the night, as with the frequent sickness and evil disposition by the occasion of our child…’ It brought tears to Elizabeth’s eyes to hear of such treatment of a pregnant woman. What was it Sir William Maitland had said of Darnley? ‘He misuses himself so far towards her that it is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.’ Heartbreak. That was the truth. Elizabeth had seen it before. She remembered that other Mary, Queen of England, standing at the window of Greenwich palace, watching Philip leave for Spain.

  Elizabeth’s woman’s heart bled for Mary Stewart. Would she lose the child? Darnley had watched while the viol player was murdered before his pregnant wife’s eyes. What would that do to the child? Would he fear the bright blade all his life? If he was born to life. If he were ‘he’. If he were ‘she’, a woman could fear the blade too, be it axe, or sword, or knife. What would she herself have done, if wicked English lords had murdered Robert in her sight? Why, she would have snatched Darnley’s dagger and stuck it into him before it could be used on Riccio. Only one fate was deserved by such an evil husband. Elizabeth’s imagination leapt for an instant — heroic, amazon-like — she could have cut his throat — she knew she could! She would not have feared his blood. The English lioness. Old Harry’s daughter. The moment passed. The scratch of her pen was the only blow she would ever strike. As Robert had said, Elizabeth knew that a long tale of strife was yet to be told. No woman could ever live again in harmony with a husband who had behaved as Darnley had. Elizabeth feared the outcome because she knew the ways of Kings and Queens and that violence begat violence. She feared that Darnley had not long to live. Mary would have her revenge, one way or another, and it remained to be seen whether in that would be her end, or her beginning.

  *

  The Queen was dancing with a handsome Irishman. The Earl of Leicester’s nose was out of joint. But he stood by and took his turn when invited, as usual. Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde, was thirty years old, had no money, no following and no hope of much better at the English court. But he was in a wild way the match of Leicester on a horse, a tall man with a head of crow-black hair, which gave him the nickname of Black Tom, and bright blue eyes to wink at the women. The Queen found much appeal in the black hair and blue eyes, and the Irish music in his tongue. He could dance, too, for he had been brought up at the court of Henry VIII as a page and had learned the graces.

  The Queen was playing with cherries, dangling double ones from her ears and from Ormonde’s, so that they both wore shining, red, bobbing earrings, glossy as enamel fruit but fresh from the Greenwich orchards. The red flattered her white skin, nodded coyly on her cheek. Her black velvet gown was so simple, so slender in line, yet rich with gold thread, embroidered in a trellis work of vine leaves.

  If, Robert thought unpleasantly, that Irishman has any more of the fruit of the vine, he will be cavorting like a proper Bacchus. From where he stood he could hear them laughing. From where he stood he witnessed the arrival of Sir James Melville. News from Scotland. News of Scotland’s heir, and England’s too. Uncertain news of the birth had come some days before. At last they would know it if were boy or girl.

  Robert watched a play enacted, it seemed to him, in silence. Words must have been spoken, but were somehow secondary to the actions.

  Melville knelt, the Queen standing, arrested in her dance with Ormonde. She was graceful, alert, expectant, as if she expected words other than those Melville spoke.

  ‘The Queen of Scots was delivered of a fine son on the morning of Wednesday last.’ The words took away the Queen’s grace, took her apparently like a blow, by surprise.

  Her first action was to seek a chair to sit in. Robert was at her side in time to hear her utter in a faint voice, a stranger’s voice, sentiments he had never heard her utter before and never would again.

  ‘The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.’

  Into the silence Elizabeth smiled wanly, as if she wondered why the news had struck her such a blow.

  ‘That is good news, Sir James,’ she said, more like herself. ‘He is my godson.’

  *

  The Diana fountain at Nonsuch was frozen. Crystal ribbons, clear as boiled sugar, curved from canopy to basin, filled with candle-wax ice. Diana’s breasts were guarded by frost. The yew hedges looked as if they were cut from blocks of feathers, and the morning was peopled with topiary ghosts, of centaurs, nymphs and shepherds and fauns, frosted images of their green selves.

  A flake of snow presented itself on the fur under Elizabeth’s nose. ‘White bird featherless…’ Elizabeth looked up towards paradise in the snow clouds behind the weather vanes of Nonsuch. She thrust her hands further into her muff, sable muff and black velvet cloak lined with sable. She stood out, the only living thing in the kingdom of frost. Her face looked as if it were frosted into a mask. She walked briskly, her breath trailing like smoke. The news from Scotland was bad, and she tried to get rid of the taint of it like a foul smell in the January air at Nonsuch.

  The King of Scotland had the pox. Not the smallpox, but the kind the English called the French pox, and the French the English. The kind that rotted the noses off its victims. Darnley — revolting creature — could have infected his wife and the infant Prince. Elizabeth shuddered. What was more appalling to contemplate — that Mary should remain married to the creature or that she should rid herself of him? Divorce seemed the only way, unless he could be destroyed upon criminal charges. Elizabeth shuddered again. He had set himself to defeat the Protestant Lords in Scotland and to usurp his wife’s throne.

  Only the previous autumn, Elizabeth’s own Parliament had tried to blackmail her into marriage by withholding grants of money. She had given the members some very sharp words. ‘I will never be by violence constrained to do anything… I know no reason why any of my private answers to the realm should serve for a prologue to a subsidy book!’ In the end she had squashed them with a haughty, ‘My Lords, do whatever you wish. As for me, I shall do not other than pleases me. Your bills can have no force without my assent and authority.’ So her father might have spoken. It had been the greatest victory she had ever won. It was the sort of victory no Queen could have won encumbered by a Darnley.

  Within a month the Queen of Scots was disencumbered of Darnley in a way that Elizabeth, even at her most pessimistic, could scarcely have foreseen. Darnley was strangled trying to escape being blown to pieces by his wife’s lover. False report rampaged through the two realms. Elizabeth refused to believe Mary’s complici
ty, though she saw now, as she had feared, that the death of Riccio the viol player had been avenged. All now depended upon Mary’s behaviour in her adversity, as it had upon Elizabeth’s after Amy Dudley’s death.

  It was so difficult to communicate what she felt, what she knew from bitter experience to be the right course of action to influence Mary when the only medium was pen and ink. The Earl of Bothwell must be tried by proper legal process. Elizabeth would have tried Robert if she had been forced to, and seen him condemned, if he were guilty. She bore heavily upon her pen, agitated beyond words, with only words at her service. ‘I exhort you, I counsel you, I beg you, to take this event so to heart that you will not fear to proceed even against your nearest.’ In playing the part of a Queen, with dignity and decorum, might lie Mary’s salvation.

  Even when the worst was summed up by a gloomy, gout-tortured Secretary Cecil, Elizabeth was reluctant to believe that Mary had rejected the path of salvation. Cecil wrote: ‘The Scottish Queen means to avenge her husband’s death, as men say, by marrying the Earl of Bothwell that was accused to be the murderer. But she has first ordered to have him found by a certain verdict, not guilty. It is lamentable to hear such lewd language as her subjects spread.’ Lamentable indeed. Elizabeth had plenty of previous experience of lewd language directed against herself.

  ‘“Heading and wedding go by destiny”, the proverb says. My destiny is to avoid both these fates!’ The Queen’s voice could be heard two rooms away. Mr Secretary Cecil’s cars were tired, his head ached and his gout was excruciating.

  ‘The Queen of Scots’ destiny is clearly the marriage bed, Bothwell or not. I hope she is preserved from the other.’

  ‘That, Sir William, is exactly what I fear so much.’ Indeed, she harped upon this fear all the time, as if she too were threatened. Sometimes Cecil wished the Scots would take off their Queen’s head and be done. It would save his own Queen from compromising herself and antagonizing everyone by this defence of what in his opinion was a foolish, loose young woman.

  Another old proverb Elizabeth knew from experience was ‘Marry in May, and rue it alway.’ In May, Mary Stewart did what Cecil had foretold and married Bothwell. Within a month she had cause to rue her action.

  Elizabeth’s fears were amply justified. The citizens of Edinburgh screamed, ‘Burn the whore!’ The great whore, the concubine of Bothwell who had married her. Elizabeth’s mind was in turmoil and the worst of it was that her ministers seemed to set themselves against her, Cecil to a greater, Leicester to a lesser extent. It seemed that she was the only one in England or Scotland who would champion Mary. She knew that her sister Queen had acted with near-criminal unwisdom, but that was not the point. ‘They have no warrant nor authority by the law of God or man to be as superiors, judges or vindicators over their prince,’ the English lioness roared.

  ‘The lack of a warrant has never deterred the Lords of Scotland.’

  ‘She must be set free.’ To keep a Queen a prisoner was a crime against the Lord’s anointed.

  St Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, said: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to themselves condemnation.’ Elizabeth would willingly have engaged Scotland’s John Knox in debate, for he was one of those risking damnation. Knox would bring down plagues of frogs and flies and locusts on Scotland if he could, to punish it for its subjection to the monstrous regiment of a woman.

  *

  The Earl of Leicester was invariably to be found, wherever the court might be, somewhere in the vicinity of the Queen’s Presence Chamber. Because she liked to have him in her sight, and his conversation in snatches, this attendance had become over the years an accepted ritual. Almost ten years her Eyes had kept watch and been watched fondly by her own. More often fondly than not.

  A routine day, the court at Richmond, a day of commonplace audiences, with nothing to single it out from any other. The Queen went to work most days in just the same way as she had done since the beginning of her reign. The sound of feet in corridors, discreet voices — she did not like to hear them raised in her presence — questions, submissions of names, waitings, departures.

  Privy Chamber, the inner sanctum, led out of Presence Chamber. The guardian of its door was the Gentleman of the Black Rod. No one got past Black Rod without an official appointment noted in his book. One midsummer day when the windows were opened on the sparkling river and the birds called the Queen and her subjects away from the Presence Chamber and duty, a suppliant came to the portal of Black Rod without an appointment. No appointment, no entry.

  ‘But my Lord of Leicester had arranged…’

  ‘These,’ Black Rod pointed at his book, ‘are the only arrangements here.’

  ‘But my Lord of Leicester knows…’

  ‘Go away, and apply by the usual procedure, and come back another day.’

  ‘I’ll see you in hell — and dismissed from here!’

  Leicester, hearing raised voices, appeared frowning. He did not wish any arguments within earshot of the Queen.

  ‘No appointment? I have already spoken to Her Majesty. An appointment is not necessary in this case.’

  ‘But that has always been the procedure here, as long as I have held this office…’

  ‘Which will not be much longer, if you are so obstinate!’

  There was an undignified shuffle aside, as both men had the same thought, to reach the Queen and complain. For once Robert was outmanoeuvred and the irritating, argumentative official got there first, on his knees in front of the Queen.

  ‘What is this?’ Irritability reigned. Elizabeth did not like unannounced interruptions.

  Black Rod was both angry and frightened, which made him blurt out words he would not have dreamed of using to the Queen when governed by a cool head.

  ‘Who has charge of the appointments here if I have not? The present system has operated since time out of mind. Has Your Majesty seen fit to alter it? If not, who has altered it? Is the Earl of Leicester King in this place, or your Majesty Queen?’

  Rash words, which were guaranteed to provoke a royal outburst. But this time the outburst was not aimed at the presumption of the speaker.

  Elizabeth swore a tremendous and unseemly oath. ‘God’s death, my Lord,’ she hissed at Robert, ‘I have done well for you!’ She jerked her skirts aside, as if she would spurn him with her foot. ‘But my favour is not so locked up in you that others shall not participate in it!’ Her voice was rising, high and dangerous, like the winds of change.

  ‘I have many servants on whom I have conferred my favour and will do so at my pleasure — and likewise reassume the same!’ She was in deadly earnest, and her words could be heard by everyone waiting in the Presence Chamber, by Cecil who had just arrived, by Norfolk, by everyone.

  ‘If you think to rule here…’ Robert had never before known her turn on him with such venom. ‘Then I think differently!’ she shouted. ‘I will have here but one mistress and no master!’ With that, she swivelled round, turning her back.

  Robert, on his knees, his humiliation made appallingly public, was for the first time afraid of Elizabeth, of this woman he had wooed so long, had thought he loved, had so nearly conquered. He remembered how Henry VIII, great gross hulk, had turned, swift as a snake, upon those who presumed.

  Black Rod, the cause of this scene, was terrified too, and horror-struck at what his words had unleashed.

  ‘And look,’ Elizabeth said, without turning her head, or deigning to glance at either of them, ‘look that no ill befalls him, lest I hold you responsible.’ There was no need to tell either man who was ‘him’, and who ‘you’. No sweet Robin now, just a cold ‘you’. The Queen’s creature whom she had made and now let see how easily he could be unmade.

  A far from routine day had passed, there in the Privy Chamber. Something had happened to mark out this day from all others that had gone before it, and all that would come after
it. Robert, if he were to survive, must know his master.

  Book Five

  Ebb and Flow

  IX

  Discord and Danger

  1568 – 1572

  The pearls shone in the candlelight with infinitesimal rainbows. Six rows of them, strung like Popish rosaries; the twenty-five gauds were the size of muscat grapes, bloomed like black grapes. The rest were as near perfectly matched as possible. They made a soft sound as the ropes were lifted, between a rattle and a rustle. One wanted to feel their sheen against skin, hands, neck, lips. They looked edible, so smooth, so rounded, so pearly peerless. To be swallowed dissolved in wine. Elizabeth would not have consigned a single one to wine.

  The Queen of Scots had lost her throne, and her pearls. Pearls of great price. They were on offer to Elizabeth with one-third knocked off their market price. The huckster of this tempting offer was the new Regent of Scotland, the Earl of Moray, Mary’s bastard half-brother. Moray ruled Scotland for the infant James VI, who was King in his mother’s place. Moray’s envoy stood displaying his master’s ill-gotten wares.

  The pearls presented Elizabeth with a moral dilemma. Moray had appropriated them and had little right to offer them for sale. But Mary had signed away her crown and with it her jewels. Yet Elizabeth maintained that Mary should not have been deposed or imprisoned, and that Moray had violated his obedience to God’s creature, his Queen. In this case, the pearls were not his to sell. But fact was fact. If Elizabeth did not buy the pearls and take advantage of the offer, the French Queen, fat, ugly Italian Catherine of the Medici family of usurers, might. Catherine coveted them. If no offer was made, the matchless ropes might be split and lost. They would be an ornament to the English crown. Elizabeth’s eyes coveted the pearls, knowing how they would ornament her own person.

  ‘Robert,’ she said, ‘try them round my neck.’ That Leicester should preside at such occasions was now taken for granted.