‘Are your children as handsome as ever?’
‘I think so.’
‘When young Robert comes to court, he will flutter hearts.’
‘Robert is a child. Chartley is a better place for him.’
‘Much the best, but dull. Which do you prefer, Lettice, court or country?’
‘Wherever Your Majesty is, dullness is banished.’
Bitch! She liked court all right, where she could flaunt and flirt and carry on with the Earl of Leicester behind his Queen’s back. Elizabeth looked at her cousin sourly. How handsome she was at thirty-eight. She reminded one of ripe plums. A fruit susceptible to maggots. Lettice had a plum bloom on her. It came into Elizabeth’s jealous head that widow Lettice was pregnant again. After a gap of nine years or so. The fleeting suspicion quickly grew into conviction. No need to ask who was responsible. Knowing her father, the responsibility would be difficult to dodge. Elizabeth imagined Robert driven by an irate Sir Francis Knollys to a wedding. A wedding! He would not dare. Who was the more fearsome, puritanical Sir Francis or herself? Was there anything to fear?
Making sure Lettice was in earshot, Elizabeth questioned Ann Warwick — her husband was close to his brother, knew his secrets, if anyone knew Robert’s secrets.
‘When do Ambrose and Robert leave Buxton?’ The cure had by now become an annual event.
‘In time to be in London before Your Majesty sets out on progress.’
‘They intend to be with me? Both of them?’
‘Oh yes, they always come back from the wells in better health.’
‘I’m glad to hear that.’ Elizabeth peered at Ann’s small, plain, intelligent face. Did she suspect Lettice was pregnant by her brother-in-law Leicester? Where did her deepest loyalty lie, with her husband (and with Ambrose’s unworthy, adored brother), or with her Queen, her friend? Elizabeth was in the end satisfied that Ann knew nothing. That followed, Robert knew how to make Ambrose deceive his wife. No, Ann’s glances at Lettice, though scarcely friendly, were innocent of suspicion.
But the unease stayed with Elizabeth, even after she had put down the initial alarm to jealous imagination. Robert, in Buxton, dining on stewed prunes and currant juice, had left her as a parting gift a cup carved from crystal in the shape of a slipper, with a gold-mounted lid, a white enamel falcon perched on top. The falcon had been Anne Boleyn’s device, and was one Elizabeth used frequently. She fingered the pretty toy, and wondered if the donor were true or false. Perhaps she had told him ‘noli me tangere’ once too often.
*
The Earl of Leicester’s company of players could not have acted out a better drama, though it was hard to tell whether this was a prelude to bloody tragedy, or a happy conclusion to past sorrows. A strange hour for a play, too, between seven and eight on a Sunday morning late in September, with the dew in the gardens of Wanstead still untouched by the sun.
The expressions upon the faces of the actors were more indicative of a house purchase or the signing of a mortgage than a wedding. Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, cast surreptitious glances at the clock on the wall, Henry Earl of Pembroke did the same, at different intervals. Sir Francis Knollys, grave, grey-bearded, impassive, adamant. Richard Knollys, his younger son, biting his knuckles and frowning.
Lettice Knollys stood at her father’s side, a dangerous commodity for him to give away. She was impassive too, eyes cast modestly down towards an immodestly swollen waist, but slanted eyelids and curling mouth as self-satisfied as a cat after cream. Lettice in a loose — of necessity — robe of orange tawny velvet, lined with gold tissue. Splendid Lettice unmistakably about five months pregnant.
Robert, Earl of Leicester, a middle-aged Son of the Morning, came into his bridal chamber. He looked as if he had a pressing appointment elsewhere which he was in a hurry to keep. But, if not as good an actor as James Burbage, Robert was well rehearsed in putting a smiling face on an unsmiling situation. He took the opulent Lettice as his wife as if it were all he had ever wished. He treated her father with courtesy and humility, which broke no ice at all, and he reassured the anxieties of his brother Ambrose, who disliked hole-in-corner affairs. He tried hard to banish any echo of the age-old drama-stern father, reluctant bridegroom, wronged brother of the bride. This bride was no blushing young thing fallen from grace, but a mature woman, nearing forty, who had got what she wanted.
Immediately after the wedding came the first skirmish.
‘The Queen comes to Wanstead at the end of her progress, on Tuesday afternoon.’
‘So you pack me off in a coach, or hide me in a cupboard?’
‘I suggest you go quietly to Chartley with your brother.’
‘I should be here to greet the Queen as your Countess.’
‘The result of that would be most undesirable.’
‘I have my rank, Robert, thanks, it would seem, to poor dead Essex, and I am the Queen’s cousin, not a dairymaid to send off to the country.’ Lettice was not going to Chartley quietly.
‘If I could appear with the most handsome Countess in England on my arm, I would be proud and joyful to do so.’
Was this to be the pattern of their days, arguments and recriminations? Robert knew the answer to that; he had been the Queen’s creature for too many years for the remainder God allowed him to follow a different pattern.
*
‘I will not have that instrument of torture stuck in my mouth!’
‘But in skilled hands it is so quick, Your Majesty.’
‘Quick! Horrible quick pain, hideous quick crunch — my jaws rent quickly apart — why, I might never be able to speak again!’
The medical gentlemen and Privy Councillors, assembled to persuade their Queen that extraction was the only policy, gave each other suffering looks. Elizabeth was proving exceptionally voluble, and insufferably irritable, over her toothache. She had been denying its existence since April, and it was now December. Her cheek was swollen like a pudding, and her eyesight buzzed and blurred, so she could not deal with her papers.
‘It must come out,’ said her Master of Horse, handling her gently.
Elizabeth glared at Robert. ‘I have never had a tooth pulled before, and I am not starting now.’
‘Madam, if the member is rotten, it will poison the whole.’
‘Poison?’ Elizabeth quailed. Could a rotten tooth do what the Pope and Philip of Spain could not?
How dare her Privy Council make decisions about her body! Her body was her own affair. For two nights it had been kept sleepless by the pain. Even now, as she tried to pooh-pooh the Council’s opinion, her head reeled with pain. The Bishop of London stepped forward like a hero, saying that he had few teeth in his head, but would willingly sacrifice them in the Queen’s service. Then she could see how trivial a thing a tooth extraction was. The Bishop was taken at his word.
The surgeon stepped forward with his pincers; a napkin was tied round the Bishop’s neck. Elizabeth shuddered and shut her eyes, then opened them, because the fascination of such heroism was too great. It was all over in a second, and the Bishop did not yell, but the crunch was horrible.
Greyish in the face, the Bishop said, bravely, ‘It stops bleeding within an hour,’ he mumbled, biting on gory linen.
Elizabeth shut her eyes again. ‘Very well,’ she said, and, at the audible sighs of relief, nearly changed her mind and defied them. They were always putting her feelings down to woman’s whims.
Everything they said proved true, though she did not tell them so. The gum healed quickly and by New Year she had forgotten the ache and was ready to greet the Frenchman who was coming to woo her on behalf of the Duke of Alençon.
Suddenly, all at court was French, which did not please the English lords at all. Elizabeth spoke French, wore French gowns, danced French dances, sang French songs, laughed trilling French laughs, but French manners were laughed at all the same.
Jean de Simier, Baron de St Marc, was about twenty, and as it was said that Alençon was a little man, so was his frien
d. Little twinkling legs nimble in the dance, neat little features, swarthy and Gallic, with close-cropped black hair lying like feathers on a small round head. Little dark eyes ready to laugh, to mock, to pay ardent court, to observe and probe.
Simius, simii in the masculine — an ape. Elizabeth christened him on sight. He would be her Monkey. Leicester said rudely to Hatton that he had monkey’s habits, and danced well to the Queen’s tune. Simier, on the other hand, was soon convinced that she danced to his. He wanted a love token to send to the Duc d’Alençon, for his pillow.
‘He has stolen the Queen’s nightcap!’
‘If that is all he has stolen!’
‘He is a trifle young to be an ambassador,’ Leicester said smoothly, with extreme restraint.
‘He is faithful to his master, trustworthy and discreet beyond his years. I wish I had a servant I could put to such good use,’ replied his Queen with less restraint, getting in a dig at him.
If Robert had known that the prying fingers of the Monkey had found out his great secret, he would have been less restrained. Simier was clever at ferreting out skeletons in the cupboards of influential Englishmen which might be used to serve his master’s purpose.
When one day in July a yeoman of the Queen’s guard fired a shot at him because he was lurking too near her apartments at Greenwich, Simier decided to use his weapon. He was certain Leicester had made an attempt on his life, and that the grand Earl was doing his best to keep Alençon out of England. He had heard often of the Queen’s involvement with Leicester, and of the old scandals. That she had borne him five children was patently untrue, but she had loved him as she had never loved Hatton, Heneage and the rest. Simier would stir up old emotions, and bemused by the murk of jealous reactions, he was sure, the Queen would jump into Alençon’s arms, to the advantage of all good Frenchmen.
The river glittered like glass. The ships’ sails of red and white filled with the breeze. Ships of many nations. Masts and rigging lined either shore. Small craft like cockleshells bobbed hither and thither. The Thames was wide, the tide on the ebb. The Queen blinked, as if she expected the scene to dissolve before her eyes.
‘Married?!’
‘Certainement. Look at milord’s face, if you doubt, madame.’
Three figures, isolated for a moment in time on the Greenwich shore. Two chalk-faced with the horror of discovery, one maliciously triumphant.
Milord Leicester’s face had lost its rich colour and become paler than his whitening hair.
It was true. Only discovery could have made him look like that. Only enlightenment could have frozen the Queen’s face also, to white ice. The Frenchman Simier saw on each face the same emotion — fear.
But emotions succeeded each other with bewildering swiftness. Elizabeth felt first panic and terror, as if her Robin had been catapulted into the river and carried away by the tide before her eyes. Seconds later, she flew at him, ready to push him in.
‘Married!’ Elizabeth screeched the word this time as if she would rip it out of herself, spit it forth, rid herself of it in the force and venom of speech.
Then she hit Robert, slapped him across the face with all her strength. He warded her off with one arm, as if she were a snarling terrier. For once, he was at a loss for words. Simier looked on in horror and delight at what he had unleashed.
Elizabeth grabbed the front of her grand Earl’s doublet and shook him, as if she were a man, and his match in height and strength. The satin tore, his teeth rattled together and he bit his tongue, tasted blood. He could see nothing now but a great dark thundercloud of doom.
‘The Tower!’ The dreadful words were not long in coming. ‘I am insulted — betrayed. This is treason — treason!’ The pitch of her voice had become alarming, fit to be heard on the northern shore, by all the boatmen. It brought the Earl of Sussex rushing up. He saw the Queen hit Leicester again, with the back of her hand this time, cutting his lip with one of her rings, a smear of blood on her knuckles. Recognizing incipient hysteria, Sussex sent the goggling Simier running for her women.
‘Your Majesty,’ he growled, planting his solid, ageing frame between the attacker and the assaulted. ‘This is less than majesty!’
‘Damn your eyes, Thomas,’ she shrieked, hammering on his chest instead. ‘He is married! Married! To that whore Lettice Knollys. I tell you it is treason, and he shall pay for it!’
Robert gazed in despair at her witch-like, distorted face, that of an old, cursing harridan. What would she do when she heard that there was a child six months old already?
‘Nonsense,’ said Sussex bluntly. Few others would dare to call the Queen’s utterances nonsense. ‘My Lord of Leicester is as free a man as I am. Why should he not marry? He’s forty-eight. I’m damned if I’d stay single until I was forty-eight!’
This outburst amazed Robert, for Sussex had always been implacably his enemy. More than once Elizabeth had been obliged to overrule their arguments and forcibly to part them before they forgot themselves and used violence in her presence.
‘I suggest that my Lord Leicester goes quietly from court. Give Your Majesty time to reflect. Less painful that way.’
Elizabeth turned like a snake. ‘Out of my sight!’ she spat.
‘Go and occupy those lodgings in that tower in the Park — the Mireflore. Say you’re ill…’ As Robert began to walk unsteadily away, Sussex said in his ear, ‘Out of sight, calmer mind. I’ll speak for you — if only to stop Her Majesty making a fool of herself with this talk of treason.’
Tears followed on violent rage. Elizabeth could scarcely walk back to the palace herself for trembling. Later, she wept herself sick, in the arms of her women, as she had not since she was fourteen and desolated by the vileness of the world and men.
When she summoned Sir Francis Knollys, Ambrose Warwick and Lord North, the witnesses of the wedding, to account for themselves, she knew already that she was beaten. That she-wolf Lettice had snatched away her Robert almost a full year ago, and she had been kept in ignorance. Elizabeth did not like being kept in ignorance. The duration of the secret wounded her as much as anything.
‘I did not wish to be the grandfather of a bastard,’ Sir Francis Knollys said, unrepentant. ‘May I remind Your Majesty that the child is your cousin in the third generation.’
The child. It was a boy, and it had been born imperfect, with one leg a little deformed. When Sir Francis told her this, Elizabeth burst into such tears that he was taken aback. It was the one thing which evaporated much of her rage. She had never been able to hate a helpless infant, and that Robert’s only legal child should have been born deformed, grieved her more than she understood. Lettice she would never forgive, would never accept at court again. Let Robert be married, but he should never, ever, appear in her presence with his wife. Countess of Leicester, indeed! Well she would never enjoy the privilege of precedence at court as an Earl’s wife again.
Elizabeth knew now what she had always known, though would not admit, that one day she would have to accept Robert’s marriage. But the manner of it had wounded her so. The loss. This was the way the dice had fallen. The year of the comet had indeed foretold great changes. Robert was gone from her, and she was left an old maid. Elizabeth wept. He would marry, would he — why then, so would she. She would accept the suit of the little French prince. Forty-five, too old? Nonsense, she did not feel old. Other women had children as late as fifty — what about John the Baptist, and his mother Elizabeth? Iacta est alea. The die was cast, and there was only one move left to her.
XI
My Other Self
1579 – 1587
The clock heralded its chime upon the hour with a whirr and a click. The hand moved on round a dial of lapis lazuli. The Queen’s beasts, lion, dragon, greyhound, bull, carved upon the bedposts, watched over their mistress’s sleep. Sheaves of multicoloured, spangled ostrich plumes crowned the canopy. The sun filtered through bed curtains of cloth of silver, fringed with gold.
A foot appeared betwee
n the curtains. A foot as narrow and white as a marble nymph’s, high arched, with long, delicate toes, remarkably in accord, as is often the case, with its owner’s hands. The clock’s chime was scarcely allowed its seventh repetition.
‘Up!’ The Queen usually determined her own hour of rising. Her voice, so imperious a summons in so little a word, brought her ladies instantly to her side. This morning they were breathless, excited.
‘Monsieur is here!’
‘Here at Greenwich?’
‘He has come privately, incognito!’
‘This morning?’
‘In time for breakfast. But he asked to see Your Majesty first.’
‘And I was asleep?’
‘He could not see Your Majesty in a night smock!’
‘He could not!’ Elizabeth sprang out of bed, the smock of cobweb lawn of apple-petal pink billowing around her. She clapped her hands and laughed, as she had not for a good many mornings. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we shall make up for lost time.’
She had not been adorned to meet a foreign prince since Philip of Spain, when she had calculated only his value as a protector. Now the Duke of Alençon had come wooing in person, to be her husband. Young, and French — a Prince!
She would, of course, wear white. But first things first. Her face. She was forty-six in four weeks’ time, but they would do their damnedest to make her look like summer’s bride. She washed with soap delicately perfumed with marjoram, splashed on half a gallon of rosewater. They patted her face with the special lotion to blanch the skin, make it translucent as milk glass. Her skin was unblemished, but she had wept too much at the loss of her Robin, and dark circles under her eyes must be concealed.
They spent as long on her hands as her face, making the little crescent moons at the base of her nails show, polishing and softening, until her hands were so exquisite they seemed scarcely human, more like those of saints or angels.
Her gown had skirts of stiff white corded silk, embroidered in raised work in white and silver with roses and lilies, in honour of England and France. It made a seductive swishing sound with every movement. The front of the bodice fastened with silver clasps and silk cord frogging, each finished by a fluffy silk disk. Last of all came Mary Stewart’s pearls, all six ropes of them; she had a sneaking hope that Alençon would notice and tell his mother, who had wanted them.
None But Elizabeth Page 29