‘Windsor Pear, Bon Chretien and Wardens.’
Then, on the south walls, apricot and peach trees in large tubs, to be taken indoors in winter and specially prized as royal tokens of favour. On the walls were espalier plums and damsons, bullaces, quinces, medlar and mulberry trees, and green Turkey figs. Hatton hoped for figs in August. Alleys of green nut trees. Melon beds with nets and boys with bird scarers.
‘I remember as a child,’ said Elizabeth, ‘the treats when the new vegetables were sent to us from Hampton and Richmond. Artichokes and asparagus.’
By the time they had got past the strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries the Queen’s basket had overflowed, and Kit Hatton’s fingers were dyed red. So were Elizabeth’s lips. Apart from sugar confections, fruit was the only food she had real interest in. Hatton found the enormous privilege of being her chosen companion for the garden somewhat overwhelming. The fact that she would stroke, pat, fondle and even kiss him, as if he were a large, friendly hound, was entrancing. Elizabeth found something reassuring in Christopher’s size, so tall, so big-boned, and solid. Yet a graceful dancer and a man of intelligence and learning. He was in love with her — really in love — besotted, in fact. He quivered when he kissed her.
In order to produce this flattering effect, Elizabeth reached up and kissed him. He blushed and looked as if the sun had fallen out of the sky into his lap. His moustache felt like sheep’s wool, soft; this was the first observation she had made about his person. ‘My Mutton,’ she had dubbed him, to rhyme with Hatton. He wanted to possess her. Elizabeth amused herself by egging him on, and warding him off; he would soon learn her order of play. She chose not to let his passions disturb her, except in delightful and permissible ways.
Through a green-painted door stepped Hatton, ducking, and held it wide for his Queen, who came through to meet face to face the Duke of Norfolk. On his way from this to that interview and hugger-mugger conference, no doubt. Every time she saw Norfolk alarm bells rang in Elizabeth’s head.
‘What news have you to tell me, Thomas?’ She concealed a pertinent regal question with a coquettish tone.
‘Err,’ — he did a lot of err-ing whenever she asked him anything. ‘Errm, no news I would presume to bother Your Majesty with.’
Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up. She was not satisfied with errs, and errms, and she was undoubtedly bothered when she knew that he was operating devious Howard policy behind her back. Surely he realized that she wanted an answer, an honest answer, and that she was giving him the opportunity to allay her fears.
‘None? You come from London and have no news to tell me of a marriage?’ Did he not know that Mr Cecil’s spies were intercepting his correspondence with the Queen of Scots? Did he not know how seriously she regarded the whole affair? In her estimation if he, her cousin and only Duke, married the Queen of Scots, Elizabeth would end up in the Tower inside four months.
Norfolk opened his mouth and another err came out, like a silly fly out of a window. Elizabeth’s irritation rose. Why could he never entirely close his mouth? It gave him an air of irresolution and consequently shiftiness. She ascribed this to a guilty conscience. But before she could swat at his conscience they were interrupted by a lady offering a basket of flowers to the Queen for her choice. Elizabeth turned her head to smile at Lady Clinton and selected marigolds for herself. ‘Summer’s bride!’ she said, for Norfolk’s benefit, and pinned love-in-a-mist on Christopher. When she turned back to speak to her erring Duke she found he had slunk away. This confirmed her suspicions, though she did not realize that he was afraid of her, that her kind of woman terrified him into this apparently shifty behaviour.
Three times Elizabeth asked, and three times was denied. At summer’s end, certain that Norfolk would now raise the standard of war against her, Elizabeth acted.
*
‘Leave the windows open!’ Elizabeth snapped. They had moved to shut them against the chill of October dusk. She was listening.
‘No — shut them — the mist rises.’ Instant obedience, as before.
Five minutes later —’It’s stifling in here. Open the windows!’ She was sitting huddled, the bedclothes under her chin, as if cold.
The crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy nailed boots, masking lighter steps. Leaden boots, military steps. She did not need to look out.
Under the autumn trees it was almost dark. The barge would slide along the Thames like the sleek back of a swimming otter, almost soundless but putting the river birds to flight. The oars would splash a knell, toll on toll. The mist would creep upon the banks as if upon a graveyard. The journey from Windsor to the Tower took many hours.
The little breeze stirring the reeds, the bushes and the trees was the last air of freedom that Norfolk would breathe. The Tower moat stank of other things than decaying rushes and old leaves.
Elizabeth knew how it would be to step aboard that barge, knew the indifferent faces of the rowers, the long sweeps, each bringing nearer imprisonment and death. Taken by river at night, so his sympathizers should not see him. She knew all the tricks for dealing with traitors, though he was the first one. The first one. They had called him a roaring lion — the Howard silver lion — but poor Norfolk was a mangy beast now, his roar a stuttering ‘er-r’. The way his slightly gaping mouth had opened wider, aghast… It had both stirred her conscience and revolted her; she had felt like pinning it shut. Why could he not have manly straight lips, held firmly together? She would have preferred him resolute and defiant.
Elizabeth dreamed of fire. Fires along the border. Fires in London; Whitehall burning. In the Great Hall, the red glare of a fire cast shadows of men at arms like fifteen-feet giants, their halberds twice their height with blades a yard across. One was armed with a great sword as tall as himself, outlined in black upon the wall. The Calais headsman, a shadow thrown by firelight; he stepped from the wall and his sword fell from him. He had shoulders five feet wide, and a flat hat with a white ostrich feather. Henry VIII, in the brush strokes of Holbein, stepped down from the wall and towered beside his daughter’s bed, glaring down in disapproval at her.
Elizabeth woke coughing and sweating and distressed as if her bed had been on fire. The room was dark but for a few harmless candles and quiet embers in the hearth. She sniffed, frightened, but smelled no smoke. There was no one there, except one of her ladies on a little bed at the foot of her own. She lay with pounding, hunted-hare’s heart, and tried to recall the dream, but it had dissolved, leaving only the lees of fear.
The Five Wounds of Christ, how familiar that device had once been. Her sister Mary had embroidered it upon a hanging, and Elizabeth had helped a little where big stitches did not matter. The rebels in the north were marching under a banner of the Five Wounds, as they had in 1536, in the Pilgrimage of Grace. In Hoc Signo Vinces; no such Popish sign should conquer.
Their proclamation: ‘Forasmuch as divers evil disposed persons about the Queen’s Majesty…’ Familiar words, masking familiar threat. ‘To see redress of those things amiss, with restoring of all ancient customs and liberties to God’s Church and His whole realm.’ God’s Church! The Pope’s, they meant. It did not say how they wanted to set free the Queen of Scots and to make her Queen of England in place of Elizabeth. They wanted Norfolk as her King, third in the disastrous line of Darnley and Bothwell. They had taken Hartlepool, where Alva might land his Spanish fiends.
Elizabeth moved Mary further south and sent her cousin Harry Hunsdon and Ambrose Warwick north to challenge the rebels. Then she waited, and prayed. Because she could not bear to wait alone, she kept the Earl of Leicester with her. Her Eyes was very watchful on her behalf, and for his benefit. The denouement of the Privy Council attack on Mr Cecil had shown him which side his bread was buttered. He opened a window upon the nest of serpents. By Christmas the march of the rebels had been stopped and they had fled; by the following February all unrest and resistance had been crushed.
Spare neither man, woman nor child,
Hang
them, and head them, and burn them with fire.
Seven hundred and fifty of them had been hung; more waited sentence. Gibbets on wayside and village green, the moorland wind swaying tenantless bodies left to rot in chains to the bare bones, where crows made their breakfast. The poor who could not buy their lives, the ignorant, those with simple devotion to the Roman faith, those with simple devotion to their liege lords; they were made an example, crushed by the dread power of her hand. The cruel Queen. It was a woman’s nature to be pitiful; she had repudiated her sex. Elizabeth had dreamed of fire and it had dried the well of pity in her.
If she ever went north, it would be very different from the south, no kneeling and ‘God save Your Majesty’, no rosemary branches, no nosegays, no cakes — at least, not unless they were well paid to provide them. Bitter women would see a Queen who was an unnatural mother to her people, who had destroyed husbands, sons and lovers. The sad story of the Earl of Northumberland’s children found in a deserted house, starving and cold, their father fled to Scotland. But the rebels and Alva’s barbarians would have wreaked far worse destruction, far greater pains on little children than hunger and cold. Mary of Scotland had laughed with glee when her half-brother Moray had been assassinated, and she urged Spain to send its terror to England. Elizabeth must exchange her woman’s heart for the stern heart of a King and judge.
Her emotion she committed to pen and paper. Flights of alliteration fluttered in her head, pertinent words, falsehood, faith and future foes…fruitless all their grafted guile… Perhaps it was not a sonnet worthy of the great poets, but it was how she felt.
Those dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights, whose foresight falsehood blinds,
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow,
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow.
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port,
Our realm it brooks no stranger’s force, let them elsewhere resort.
‘Marriage!’ It was not the first time the Queen had spoken that word in such a way. ‘He has woken up to find a wolf on his pillow! Norfolk is a traitor! I will not see him. I give you that for his excuses and confessions.’ That was a snap of long white fingers.
‘I fear Your Majesty must stand corrected there. He is not a traitor in law. There are no legal grounds for putting him on trial.’ Cecil could see what the result of his correction of his royal mistress would be.
‘Legal grounds! Is not treachery to his Queen, his blood relative, sufficient grounds?’
‘Only if there is evidence to present to the court to convict him.’
‘Surely you have enough evidence, Mr Secretary?’
‘No, Madam, I do not.’
‘Oh!’ Elizabeth squealed like a furious horse and stamped her foot. ‘You would shield him, would you!’
‘In spite of my regard for him, I assure Your Majesty I do not. I will send you some extracts from the Statute of Edward III relevant to the definition of treason.’
‘Damn your beastly memoranda, Cecil,’ she yelled. ‘Damn them to hellfire! I will have his head of my own authority — and may I remind you that my authority is above the law!’ She was stamping both feet now, and bright red in the face with rage.
‘I will have his head!’ she screeched again.
Then she suddenly stopped her violent movements of rage and stood as if turned to marble. Her face gradually lost its colour and grew white as a statue. She stared at the ground as if Norfolk’s head already rolled at her feet, and drew back slightly, as if to keep her shoes clean. Then Elizabeth crumpled quietly into a faint.
Cecil found himself for the first time supporting his Queen in his arms. He yelled for vinegar and help. Mildred was not given to fainting or hysteria when thwarted.
‘A touch of “the mother”,’ he said, disapproving, as he gladly relinquished Elizabeth to female ministrations.
*
Elizabeth the pretended Queen of England, the Servant of Wickedness… This very Woman, having seized on the Kingdom, and monstrously usurped the place of Supreme Head of the Church in all England…hath again reduced the said Kingdom into a miserable and ruinous Condition, which so lately reclaimed to the Catholic Faith and thriving…
Miserable and ruinous! Where peace had reigned for ten miraculous years, where the period of Catholic reclamation had seen hanging, heading and burning and earnt its Queen the title of ‘Bloody’, all in the space of five miserable years!
To have incurred the Sentence of Excommunication, and to be cut off from the Unity of the Body of Christ…to be deprived of her pretended Title to the Kingdom, and of all Dominion, Dignity, and Privilege whatsoever… And We do command and charge all the noblemen, subjects, people and others that they presume not to obey her, or her Orders, Mandates and Laws; and those which shall do the contrary, We do include them in the Sentence of Anathema.
Anathema, anathematis — the Pope’s curse. That — Elizabeth made an unqueenly noise — for the Pope’s curse.
But the incitement to treason was a different matter. Many of her subjects were Catholics, and loyal to her; how could they continue to be so under threat of anathema? Some would turn nominally Protestant, some would go into exile, some would obey the Pope and disobey the Queen and pay the penalty as traitors.
‘Deprived of her pretended title…’ What nonsense — the Pope knew nothing about the English succession. Yet it meant that more English Catholics than ever would look to the Queen of Scots.
‘If ye strike not at the root, the branches that appear to be broken will bud again,’ Cecil had quoted a letter from that arch villain John Knox. He wanted to pluck out the root and serve her the Queen of Scots’ head on a silver dish.
*
The lions roared. It was feeding time. Elizabeth walked across the lawn, her nose pressed to a pomander. The smells of the moat and the lions turned her stomach. At a respectful distance, followed the Lieutenant of the Tower. When she had crossed the lawn once, she turned round and retraced her steps. Then she did the same thing all over again. The Lieutenant plodded after her, exasperated by this aimless perambulation. The clock struck seven. The roaring stopped.
He occupied the same lodgings as his grandfather had in the last days of Henry VIII, in the Garden Tower. The old man had been saved from the block by hours, for he was due to die on a cold February morning, but it was King Henry who had died instead, in the dark hours of the night. Elizabeth remembered that February day with astonishing clarity, when the very globe itself bounced and rolled out of control, when Atlas had died. She remembered old Norfolk too, with loathing, and she remembered his son Surrey, the poet Earl, who had gone to the block at Tower Hill a week before that night of the fall of the world. Now Surrey’s son, the present Duke, was to die tomorrow morning, before the dew was off the grass. He had been twelve when his father was beheaded; his own son Philip was fourteen. Tragedy strikes hard at fourteen. The disease of treason seemed hereditary. God help the wretched brood of children Norfolk left behind.
Four times she had countermanded her own orders and postponed it. Now the evil moment could be deferred no longer. He had been tried and condemned in January; now it was 1 June and he was being thrown to the lions, like the knacker’s meat which had just silenced the Tower beasts, to silence their roaring after blood. The whole voice of the Parliament of the realm roared for blood, the Queen of Scots’ blood, her head upon the block. Instead, they were being given Norfolk. His offence was great, he deserved punishment, but Elizabeth hated this proxy beheading. If only she could have found a way to save his life. But not one among his fellow peers would speak for him. Not even that newly made Lord Burghley, William Cecil, whom Elizabeth had relied upon. He only roared as loud as the rest.
How far had Burghley encouraged a Catholic conspiracy to inflame hatred of the Catholic Queen of Scots? Had he employed the Pope’s agent Ridolphi and intercepted secret letter
s which were no secret and coldly watched while Norfolk, whom he had professed to care for, splashed like a foolish water spaniel right into the middle of the treacherous marsh he had created? Old Saturnus would sell his own grandmother to his single-minded pursuit of policy, or necessity, as he saw it. This both chilled Elizabeth and reminded her of why she had made him a lord and her chief minister. ‘Sir Spirit,’ she called him, for it was said spirits have no feelings. Yet he had taken Norfolk’s ‘unfortunate brats’ into his care and no doubt would bring them up with generosity and concern. How tortuous were the passages in the human heart. The most necessary thing he saw in the world was the destruction of the Queen of the Castle, as he called Mary; achieve that he had served Elizabeth with the head of an erstwhile friend upon a silver dish. Who was now the dirty rascal?
When she had appointed him, at that first Council meeting at Hatfield, she had charged him that, ‘without respect of my private will, you will give me the counsel which you think best.’ So he had, when he could get a word in edgeways, but in this case her private will was going to prove very strong indeed.
Norfolk would die at seven in the morning. A new scaffold had to be set up on Tower Hill. The old one, unused for fourteen years, had rotted and become unsafe. Unsafe for whom? Why, the headsman might fall through and break a leg.
Elizabeth left the Tower before dark. She had meant to see that everything was prepared for the morning, that Norfolk would suffer no unnecessary humiliation other than that of kneeling down in straw and putting his neck on a block of wood in order that it might be severed by an axe. The chaplains were with him; he had no last requests, for he had over the months had plenty of time for them. The Lieutenant of the Tower failed to understand why the Queen had come in person at all. Her manner made him nervous; women should not be present at such times, even if they were the Queen and had signed the death warrant. She looked sombre and small and wore unrelieved black, like a mourner. She limped slightly because she had a sore leg.
None But Elizabeth Page 26