None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  Her hair was done in little plaits, sewn in place with silk, confined in a silver net, and a garland of pearls. Now that she dyed her hair to conceal the grey, it was a shade redder than its original colour, and she felt this suited her almost better than nature. A fan of white ostrich plumes with a mirror set into its handle added a finishing touch to her appearance, to her satisfaction. She looked into the little mirror, and saw a Queen.

  She decided to meet her Prince out of doors, in the gardens near the fountain, with the shady walk under the rose pergolas near at hand. Then she could not go without a nosegay of fresh flowers, and chose white carnations, with a spray of fern, held in a diamond clasp.

  Francois, Duc d’Alençon popped up from behind a cockerel shaped from yew.

  ‘Your Majesty! At last!’ His great swag of a Valois nose nearly touched his knees as he bowed.

  Elizabeth’s heart fluttered absurdly, and colour flooded her cool marble checks.

  ‘Mon cher Duc!’ She extended her hands for his. She had decided always to speak French with him.

  When the Prince straightened, she found that his head reached little higher than her chin. The scars of his smallpox were rather worse than she had been led to believe, but she scarcely noticed them. He had lovely brown eyes, lit like lamps at the sight of her, and his eyelashes were long and silky, like a child’s.

  Then he stepped back from her, his arms held out, as if he had unveiled a statue of a goddess. ‘They did not tell me,’ he whispered, ‘that you were like this! La plus fine femme du monde.’ From the start, he used the intimate tu.

  ‘No one knows you are here — except myself!’

  ‘The secret is between us alone!’ He had already warmly kissed her hand, now he reached up on tiptoe and kissed her lips. In spite of the pock marks on his nose, Elizabeth was enchanted. If only she were sweet and twenty again… No prince had come wooing her when she was twenty. She thought again of the milkmaid, singing in the pastures at Hatfield, and of how she had envied that girl her simple happiness. But the seat of power had brought compensations, and she intended to enjoy every minute of wooing her Prince, to the full.

  By the time Alençon left, twelve days later, she had christened him her Frog. The Romans used frog charms as tokens of love and constancy. On his departure, each letter and gift brought a new thrill. He left her with a betrothal ring (unofficial) set with an enormous diamond, the stone of constancy. From Boulogne he sent her a gold locket with his picture, in the shape of a flower, with a tiny green frog sitting on a petal.

  It was only when he had gone that Elizabeth remembered her quarrel with Leicester, how she had threatened him with the Tower, how he was now languishing at Wanstead. In her new mellow mood brought about by Alençon, she was disposed to hold out, if not an olive branch, then at least a couple of leaves. When word came from Wanstead that the grand Earl lay ill in bed — genuinely ill with his fever — she immediately went to visit him. No one was more amazed, or relieved, than Robert himself. Yet he must know that this relenting on her part was only because he was ill. When he was better, she would find plenty more hard words for him.

  *

  ‘The doctors give her six more childbearing years.’

  ‘All very well if she had borne a couple already. As it is, a first child at forty-six is a risky business, you must know that, my lord Burghley. It could be the death of her, and it — him. Dead Queen and dead heir — we wouldn’t want to meet to discuss how to cope with that situation. I prefer live Queen and no heir.’ Leicester argued his case vehemently. He thought that Cecil and the doctors relied too much on theory, and not enough upon practical example. Always in his mind was the example of Lettice, who had borne his little Robert late, after her first brood.

  ‘England has survived twenty years of the Queen’s single state,’ said Sir Christopher Hatton, who hated the thought of her marrying, ‘and I believe Lord Burghley never thought it would.’

  ‘Marriage and childbearing would be beneficial to the Queen, would alleviate her migraines and help avoid those touches of “the mother”.’ Cecil, though outnumbered upon the Council, was loathe to let this last chance for the Queen slip. He looked at the watch hanging round his neck. The Privy Council had been sitting since eight o’clock in the morning; it was now getting on for six in the evening. He had dined on bread and watered wine and the wing of a fowl, brought in on a tray. The statements they had just made were but repetitions of those made at the opening of the meeting.

  ‘Let a vote be taken,’ he said wearily.

  The vote of the twelve members present went seven to five against the Queen’s marriage with the Duc d’Alençon.

  ‘However,’ said Leicester, mindful of previous differences of opinion between Her Majesty and her Privy Council, ‘if the Queen is absolutely set upon it, then our objections will probably be waived.’

  When presented with these answers answerless, Her Majesty burst into womanish tears. What she had wanted from them was a unanimous support for the marriage; it was all that was needed to carry her forward into the irrevocable. How could she act without their support? Why could they not take this decision for her? She accused Leicester of grabbing a wife behind her back and denying her the privilege of a husband, and told Hatton that he was jealous, which he was. She, of course, deferred a decision until later.

  The opinions of the people of England were already ominously apparent. They did not wish to see their Protestant Deborah marry one of the perpetrators of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

  The King Of France shall not advance

  His ships on English sand,

  Nor shall his brother Francis have

  The ruling of the land.

  John Stubbs, a ranting Puritan, had written an insulting, lewd treasonable pamphlet condemning a French marriage, while Alençon was still in England. Like John Knox, he worked on the thesis that a woman was a contaminated vessel. They accused Alençon of being poxy, as Darnley had been. They made her sound absurd, and worse, old. An old maid whose lovers, like Leicester, were abandoning her. Elizabeth wept with fury at the salt poured into her recent wound — only days old — and sent author, publisher and printer to the Tower.

  Now she was trying to get them condemned under a statute designed to protect King Philip. A judge had resigned at what he had the impertinence to consider a perversion of justice. This only infuriated her more. How dare her judges condone such insults to her royal person.

  On 3 November, Stubbs and his publisher had their right hands cut off on a scaffold in Palace Yard, Westminster, on the doorstep, so to speak, that they had shat upon. The spectators kept a sullen silence, temporarily having lost respect for their Queen.

  At New Year, the Earl of Leicester gave his Queen a cap of black velvet, with ruby and diamond buttons in the form of ragged staves and true-love knots, and thirty-six small buttons to match. The double knot, intended never to be severed, but so often easy to untie.

  *

  ‘Emeralds from Peru!’ Elizabeth exclaimed at the gems spilled upon the table in front of her. Three were oblong, almost the size of a little finger, the other two round. Bigger than Philip’s buttons had been.

  ‘The King of Spain could find no better to put in his crown.’ Little Captain Drake beamed gleefully across at his Queen.

  Diamonds showered out of a grubby pouch like hailstones. Drake scooped them into a heap with stubby brown fingers, then spread them out in a sparkling web in front of Elizabeth.

  She sat looking at them for a moment, then with her forefinger traced her ER in the web, like a child writing in sand.

  He had sailed round the world, and brought her its treasures. While he had been away, for nearly three years, Spain had taken the crown of Portugal, thus doubling her empire; terrible defeats had been inflicted on the Netherlands by Spanish armies. This rotund, bouncy, bounding little man, full of confidence and Protestant zeal, was, as the Spanish ambassador complained, a pirate. But Elizabeth looked at his pirate’s
plunder, and forgave him the illegalities. What was being brought up from Plymouth to be stored in the Tower strongboxes was Spain’s loss and England’s gain. The investors — herself and Hatton, principally — might expect an interest rate of 4000 per cent!

  ‘You shall be a knight, Sir Pirate!’ she said.

  But the gifts were not only gems and gold. Drake now produced a monster nut, all covered with rusty hair; it was a little like his head.

  ‘Madam,’ he placed it reverently in her hands, ‘a coconut.’

  Elizabeth laughed with delight, and insisted that he should tap a little hole in it there and then, so that she might taste the milk. She made Drake’s head, and heart, swell with his success.

  Drake had the emeralds and diamonds set in a little airy crown, which the Queen wore at New Year, and in April she kept her promise and made her pirate a knight.

  *

  In the gallery of the tiltyard at Whitehall sat Elizabeth, head to foot in gleaming gold tissue, like the sun, diamond rays in her hair.

  ‘Will you subdue the sun?’

  The Four Foster Children of Desire, led by Philip Sidney, besieged the gallery with scaling towers and ladders, and hurled flowers and sweet herbs. Artificial cannon let off charges of scented powder and showers of perfume.

  An angel reproved the challengers: ‘Sir Knights, if in besieging the sun, you understood what you have undertaken, you would not destroy a common blessing for a private benefit.’ The Fortress must never fall to Desire, nor the Sun be eclipsed. Philip Sidney, the shining, blond young knight all in gold and silver and yellow velvet, had devised a plea to the Queen to keep her virgin state. He used flattery and charming allegory to achieve what outspoken comment could not. Sidney was as much opposed to the French marriage as his uncle, Leicester. Yet the show was done in such a way that even the French commissioners, lately arrived to settle a marriage treaty, must approve Beauty’s triumph.

  The Children of Desire were, on the second day of this delightful romance, repulsed from the castle where Perfect Beauty dwelt, ‘reserved for the eye of the whole world, far lifted up from the compass of their destiny’. A boy knelt before the Queen, and rendered up their submission to the ‘most renowned Princess of Princes, in whom nothing can obtain victory but Virtue’, and Perfect Beauty smiled.

  A Dutchman came to paint the Queen as Tuccia, the Roman Vestal Virgin, who was accused of unchastity, and carried water to the temple in a sieve, to prove her innocence. Virtue unsullied, the hope of the Protestant religion, her fight against the dominion of the Pope unceasing: ‘Weary I rest, and having rested, still am weary,’ the artist inscribed in letters of gold, there by the pillar of constant loyalty, the buttress of the Faith. On the other side, the terrestrial globe, so much of which held in thrall to the Pope and Spain, inscribed: ‘I see all, and much is missing.’ So much still to be achieved, so long a labour still left.

  *

  ‘I am between Scylla and Charybdis!’ The wringing of hands had set in.

  ‘If it pleases Your Majesty.’ The trouble was, Her Majesty scarcely knew what pleased her.

  ‘I cannot please both England and France. Yet without a mutual understanding, we cannot ally against Spain. If I do not marry Alençon, he will take French friendship away with him; if I do, my Englishmen will be jealous of my husband.’

  ‘The English jealousy would be mollified if they were to see Your Majesty blessed with an heir.’ Lord Burghley still held to his policy, wringing his hands. Sir Francis Walsingham, however, looked grim. That song was sung too openly in the streets at the moment:

  Therefore good Francis, rule at home,

  Resist not our desire,

  For here is nothing else for thee,

  But only sword and fire.

  Sword and fire. The English had not forgotten St Bartholomew’s Day.

  ‘But if I am not blessed with an heir, William, what then?’

  ‘That is in God’s hands, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Marry, marry not, marry, marry not… There were not enough petals on a daisy to decide.

  ‘God works in a mysterious way,’ Elizabeth said, cryptically, and they all went away wringing their hands harder than ever.

  In Alençon’s absence it was easier to be sure that her mind was unaltered after twenty years, and that she would stay single for ever. How could she put up with them all, Burghley, Walsingham, and even Leicester, bowing and scraping to Alençon, asking to see His Majesty — yes Your Majesty, no Your Majesty — before asking for Her Majesty? A Frog prince was all very well, but a Frog king was a different matter.

  By the time Alençon came back to England in November, he was impatient for an answer. It was two months after Elizabeth’s forty-eighth birthday. Time, not policy, or inclination, had provided the answer that the Privy Council would not, and that the Queen could not, give. Elizabeth knew that the tide of her woman’s life, already on the turn two years ago, had now begun its inexorable ebb. No prince would now storm the fortress of Perfect Beauty. The English must now worship at the shrine of a Virgin Queen.

  Robert, Earl of Leicester, who knew women, knew the signs. Even Burghley, who was a little obtuse in such matters, could see it; Walsingham had known it all the time, and said so.

  ‘It may well cost you £200,000 to get rid of him,’ said Robert gloomily to his Queen, thinking that it would be cheap at the price.

  ‘I don’t want to get rid of him!’ Elizabeth snapped, her temper brittle as glass. Then, ‘If he asks for £100,000, I can only afford £75,000.’

  Robert, accustomed to such amazing contradictions, said carefully, ‘Your Majesty cannot afford to keep him.’

  ‘No.’ The admission was surprising, so were the tears which stole down Elizabeth’s cheeks. The price in terms of cash would be small compared to the loss of her subjects’ esteem. It would also pay for the continued friendship of France.

  ‘I will go as far as Dover with you.’

  ‘Madam, it is winter; you must not.’

  ‘But I will. I am accustomed to travel in winter and summer.’ Did he think she was too old or weak to ride in rain?

  ‘The Channel is a cruel sea for a little Frog to swim in. I am always sick.’

  ‘Poor Frog. One day you will come swimming up the Thames again, to make me happy.’ But even this was an illusion. He was not a fool, and he was bowing out of a situation which could have been humiliating with a good grace. Elizabeth squeezed his hand, because she was fond of him. His blood made him as vulnerable to time and circumstance as she was.

  No one wanted Elizabeth to go to Dover with him, so she became more than usually determined to do so. Many saw such a devoted gesture of farewell as bad taste, considering that she was in fact paying him to go away. But her sister Mary had gone to Dover, that last time Philip of Spain had left her. Mary had stood at the water’s edge and watched her life flow away on the tide, her husband disappear over a horizon she could not see, as the black sails of the ship of death came into view. Philip had despoiled Mary of her woman’s self. Elizabeth would never suffer this fate, yet she felt as if something was leaving her for ever, and she wanted to look on it until the last minute, down by the sea.

  But it was February, and the Kentish roads defeated even Elizabeth’s purpose. From Canterbury she had to watch the men ride away on the Dover road, side by side, the Frog prince and her sweet Robin. She had for the first time allowed Leicester to go over the sea, as the prince’s escort. Sweet Robin. He was fifty years old now, and his hair had gone as white as a goose’s wing. Before he went, she had urged him to make his will, and he had done so, though he laughed and said that he would be very unlucky indeed if he did not survive the Channel. Elizabeth watched his white wings of hair, and high-coloured cheek until her eyes could see no more for tears and distance. He stayed within her vision a little longer than Alençon, because he was bigger. Robert had never left her to go over the sea before. The last time he had gone was when he had fought for Ki
ng Philip, to win back his fortune. She had always hated him to leave her before. But now he had married, and gone from her over a divide in a sense deeper and greater than any sea. Elizabeth wept, and did not know whom she wept for, herself, or those who had left her.

  She wept a dozen times a day, sometimes for no apparent reason. As at other times of tears, she took up her pen and composed what was perhaps the best verse she had ever written.

  I grieve, and dare not show my discontent,

  I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate,

  I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

  I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

  I am and am not; I freeze and yet am burned,

  Since from myself, my other self I turned.

  It was a lament for all her past that had departed across the sea of time.

  My care is like my shadow in the sun,

  Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

  Stands and lies by me, does what I have done.

  A lament for that Elizabeth who, like a shadow of the other, disappeared when she turned round to face her, but would always be there, until death parted them.

  She, who had admired herself in every available mirror, now shunned them.

  Take time while time doth last,

  Mark how fair fadeth fast.

  These versifiers were always men. What woman would write those lines?

  ***

  ‘King Philip of Spain uses a motto: Non sufficit orbis — the world is not enough. I believe he has taken possession of far too much of it already. It’s time England took a slice. I would help carve it.’

  As if the world were an orange to be divided between Princes. He spoke so confidently, arrogantly, in his broad, burry Devon speech. He sounded like a farmer bound in his red clay, but the world was not large enough for his dreams.