‘How would you conquer the world for me, my Warrrter?’ Elizabeth mimicked his speech. When he had first come to court some months before, she had noticed him immediately, as he had intended her to do, and asked his name. Walter Raleigh, at Your Majesty’s service, he had said, in that rich West Country way, as if he were someone very important, and not merely a poor and obscure relative of dear dead Kat Ashley.
‘With ships,’ he said, as if he already had the plan in operation. ‘I am having a ship built — the best ship in the world.’
How could he afford to both build a ship, and wear jewels on his shoes as big as Leicester and Hatton wore on their chests? Clearly he could not, and the shoes were unpaid for, and the doublet, and the hat, and the jaunty cloak slung over one shoulder, bordered with pearls.
‘Where will you send your ship?’
‘To the New World, where else?’ Again the amazing arrogance, as if the Old World were in decline and insignificant already.
‘Will you bring back gold, Warrrter?’ Elizabeth wafted her fan to and fro, the fan of red and white feathers that Sir Francis Drake had given her. What a pair of pirates they would make.
‘Gold beyond Your Majesty’s dreams.’ Like Dee, he had his head in the realms of angels, but his feet on the ground. Elizabeth approved.
‘In the west,’ he said, fixing his eyes upon unknown horizons within the glowing heart of a winter fire, ‘lies the land of El Dorado.’ Like Dee, he had very bright blue eyes, a watcher of the skies and seas. He opened windows in the Queen’s mind upon a verdant Arcadia in the west, and upon a treasure house of gold.
‘There is a pleasure garden on an island, where golden birds sit on golden boughs in golden trees, where the feet touch golden grass and the hands pluck golden flowers. Since I cannot transport Your Majesty to the magic island, I must take you there in name only. The first land that we take for England in the Americas shall be called Virginia. The land of our Virgin Queen!’
‘Such bounty King Philip can never have had laid at his feet!’
‘It shall be the first territory of England’s empire.’
‘King Philip! The King of figs and oranges. Let him keep to his orange groves. We shall have America!’ So Elizabeth dismissed him, ageing Philip, to whom she had once sued for her life.
‘“The world is not enough.” The King of Spain wants England too. He wants my life. He wishes to lay waste to my realm with his devilish armies, and he will pay a good price to the assassin who can reach me. What shall I do?’
‘Take precautions, madam. Trust in God, or in your destiny. Send your ships out, so that our world shall wax, as Spain’s shall wane.’
Destroy the object of King Philip’s enterprise, Burghley would have said. Destroy the Queen of Scots. He was steadfast in his policies. So was she, and that was the one thing she would always hold out against.
Philip the mole sent others to do his tunnelling in England. The Jesuit priests, Englishmen, who worked to bring back the rule of Rome. Traitors to the state, who must suffer traitors’ death. The case of Father Campion had distressed her most, because she had been powerless to make him compromise in even the slightest degree. Her own words, spoken from her deepest conviction and experience, meant nothing to him. Likewise, his blind faith was beyond her own understanding, as her own sister’s religion had been. His words had hit her hard: ‘We are and have been as true subjects as ever the Queen had. In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors, all the ancient priests, Bishops and Kings, all that were once the glory of England.’ All those whose presence Elizabeth had felt in the Abbey at her own coronation. But they would try to restore that glory with the Spanish fury — what glory would ever shine in England again after that?
*
The bullet, of course, was most likely. The knife was too much of a problem to administer, though in her case her subjects had such free access to her, it might well prove easy. An assassin might lurk almost anywhere. Behind a curtain, a hanging, a garden hedge, a roadside bush, a gift in one hand, or a kiss, like Judas, and a knife in the other. In the year of the rebellion in the north, Elizabeth had lived in fear, her sleep disturbed by dreams of fire and death. This time she must find the strength to live with these things. She found strength in prayer. At forty, she had felt her strength diminished, and wondered if she had long to live. At fifty, she was ready for many more years. ‘My time is in the hands of my God.’
‘While I now enjoy the peace Thou didst give me, my most merciful Father, I yet know that grave and deadly dangers hang about me, for I have many enemies to Thy truth as I have received it in my kingdom. Do Thou, my Supreme Shepherd, defend me. Thou alone, the all-wise, can defend and instruct me in all my difficulties.’
At her side still, Burghley, half-crippled with gout, but as wily and indefatigable as ever. Walsingham, the one man, had she not been the Queen, whom she would have feared, whose methods were as dark and secret as his looks. Leicester, who, after all, had never really left her. Hatton, as reliable as the rain, and one of her chief Parliamentary spokesmen. Time had preserved them. All the Queen’s men.
At New Year 1583, the Earl of Leicester gave the Queen a gold necklace of linked letters, each letter the code belonging to a cipher, which hung in the middle, picked out in diamonds.
And graven with diamonds, in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about —
R. Leicester, and, Elizabeth.
In June, Robert’s lifelong enemy the Earl of Sussex died at his house in Bermondsey. To the last, Sussex nursed his enmity. ‘Beware of the gipsy!’ was his deathbed warning to Kit Hatton. ‘You do not know the beast as I do. He will prove too hard for you all.’ So, it would appear, he had. Still the grand Earl, still cherished by Her Majesty; the gipsy never wandered far from her side now. Hatton, uninfluenced by the grudges of others, was a good friend, and Lettice, Countess of Leicester was, as her royal cousin had vowed, never, ever received at court.
*
‘It was a bullet!’
‘Fired from only a foot away!’
‘He died within minutes!’
William, Prince of Orange, had been shot by a Catholic assassin. The inner courtyard of Nonsuch was filled with people, the Queen just returned from hunting. The evening sun turned Henry VIII’s court, with its gilded relievo panels, into a treasure chamber of El Dorado. A search was made of the house immediately. People had begun to be afraid that an assassin might lurk among the Queen’s beasts, or up the chimneys, or in a stairway, to jump out as William of Orange’s killer had at Delft.
Elizabeth saw no reason to spoil her hunting or to behave at Nonsuch in any way differently from previous visits. The death of the Protestant leader of the Netherlands was a shocking blow, but she would not cower. More than ever, her courageous example was needed.
‘One leader of Protestant Europe accounted for. One to go. It terrifies me daily, hourly. It is as if she were the last lamp of the Faith alight. May the Prince of Spain never extinguish her.’
‘Amen to that. We must keep the lamp burning — at all costs.’
Looking at the narrow, dark face of Sir Francis Walsingham, Robert could see that no cost would be too high. His intimacy with Walsingham — if one could be intimate with such a man — had increased in recent years. His nephew Philip Sidney had recently married Walsingham’s daughter, Frances. This had proved a happy family alliance, both for Philip and himself
‘She will have to see reason,’ Robert said. The royal she was, as ever, profoundly unreasonable on the subject of the Queen of Scots.
‘Mortui non mordent,’ said Walsingham in his tight, precise way. ‘Dead men don’t bite.’
‘Mary Stewart has proved the serpent in all our bosoms. It’s too old a story now, and it can only have one ending, and that the sooner the better. I pray that God may guide the Queen to see it.’
‘I work only towards that.’ Walsingham spoke with the conviction of a man who knew that his work must soon bea
r fruit.
A couple of days later, Robert’s attention was diverted from the problem of the Queen’s safety, and he was forced to leave her immediately. He would have gone for almost no other cause.
‘Rob! What is it?’ She could sense bad news.
‘My son. I’ve had word that he’s ill. I’d like Your Majesty’s leave to go to Wanstead.’
‘Go at once.’ The urgency of his manner told her that the child, always frail, must be seriously ill. Robert’s face, high-coloured with middle age and good living, was seldom pale. It was now, and his jowls sagged, as if all the life had drained out into his panic-stricken heart, which had galloped on ahead to Wanstead.
‘I may not be in time.’
‘We must pray that you are. But it may not be as bad as you fear. Go now, Robert. Tell him…’ She clutched his hand, nearly as distraught as if she were the mother. ‘Tell him — if he can listen — that the Queen will come to see him when he is better.’
‘I’ll tell him.’ Robert kissed her hand, hard enough to leave a white mark, then was gone.
Elizabeth wept uncontrollably for a while, as she was prone to do now. The Book of Proverbs said that the house of the wicked man — the adulterer — shall be childless for ever. No child to be heir to an earldom. No child either, to be heir to her crown. Elizabeth had been weeping like this ever since Monsieur died, a month ago, her Frog, who would never leap jauntily into her life again. She felt death near to her, and to Robert, who had long lost his jauntiness. Only the young ones, like Raleigh, provided this. A world inhabited by her middle-aged contemporaries had no appeal for Elizabeth. The footsteps of Time sounded too loud in their ears.
Her subjects prayed that Time should cherish her, and steal a march on his cousin, Death.
‘We do, being assembled together, join our hearts and minds together in prayer unto Almighty God for the long continuance of the most prosperous preservation of her Majesty.’ Sir Christopher Hatton had an impressive Parliamentary manner, his large frame and splendid booming voice grown larger and richer with years. The entire House of Commons knelt with him in prayer for the Queen’s safety from the hand of the assassin. This had been the main preoccupation of this autumn session. There had been two plots against the Queen’s life in the previous year. The first proved the chimera of an over-obedient servant of the Pope. The second, though, was an abortive attempt to invade England with Spanish troops, murder the Queen, and replace her with Mary Stewart.
Yet Elizabeth had come to open this Parliament, in state, as she always had, in a coach drawn by six Hungarian horses, beautifully matched greys, their manes and tails dyed orange-tawny, diamonds and pearls studding their harness. She had been an open target for the assassin, but no one had been able to persuade her to go skulking to her Houses of Parliament incognito. Emotions gathered protectively, reverently, about the person of the Queen. Her Accession Day that year roused a fervour of devotion, for the ‘best flower of flowers that grows both red and white’.
The Queen’s Privy Council, afraid, and finding their mistress as usual beyond their control, put their names to a Bond, swearing in the event of a rising against her, or successful murder of her, to hunt down the instigators and ‘to prosecute such persons to the death’. Everyone knew that such persons would include the Queen of Scots.
*
‘He was received like a prince!’
‘England owns only one prince!’ said Elizabeth grimly. Her head ached. Someone was applying a hammer and chisel over her right eye. She felt that Leicester was wielding the hammer.
She had sent her grand Earl with soldiers to aid the Netherlands against Spain, and his progress through Rotterdam, Haarlem, Delft, the Hague and Amsterdam had been that of a King — no, indeed, of a Roman Emperor in triumph. The Dutch had offered Elizabeth the sovereignty William of Orange had held, and she had refused. Would Robert Dudley accept against her better judgement? He already had accepted the title of Supreme Governor — her Viceroy, without her authority. ‘His Excellency’, indeed! There was nothing excellent about him, and never had been. Fury at his presumption, fury at his absence, that she could not reach him to screech out her rage at him, led her to seize her pen, and commit searing words to paper.
‘We’ — regal, peremptory — ‘could never have imagined that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort, broken our commandment…’
‘Called to heel like a naughty schoolboy on a spree!’ raged the grand Earl to his nephew Philip Sidney upon receiving the post from England. ‘Or the hairy lap dog,’ he spat, savouring his cup of bitterness to the full.
Sidney knew that his uncle had only himself to blame — the adulation of the Dutch had gone to his head. He should have known the royal reaction.
‘It must have been made worse by my Lady’s plans to come out to join you,’ Philip said, knowing better than to apportion blame where Leicester himself would not admit it.
‘Lettice has no sense of moderation,’ Robert growled. ‘One day she will ruin me. First my money, then my reputation.’
He had been taken by surprise by the violence of the Queen’s anger. Only last September, when his enemies had launched their vituperative book against him, ‘the most malicious-written thing that ever was penned since the beginning of the world’, as Walsingham had called it, she had sprung to his defence. Letters were issued, saying that ‘the books and libels against the Earl to be most malicious, false and scandalous, and such as none but an incarnate devil himself could dream to be true’.
Why single out him for such a catalogue of villainy? Why make him chief poisoner, seducer, bigamist at a court where others had plenty to answer for that he had not even contemplated? It was as if his father’s and grandfather’s ghosts had walked by his side all his life, tainting him with their old treasons. His enemies would have him old, and empty of achievement.
He had lost his only child, his heir. Surely Elizabeth would not deny him some compensation for himself? Maybe, as he had heard her say, ‘Persons who begin to grow old willingly take with two hands but give only with one finger.’ After a lifetime, he still did not know where he was with her. Why did he think ‘a lifetime’, as if it were nearly over? He was not going to bow out now, even if his face turned mulberry when he stooped down, and his head rang to his heart beat. Soon, though, he knew, the young, in the persons of his nephew Philip Sidney and his stepson Robert Essex, should inherit his earth.
*
‘Seven men to kill one woman?’ Strange how little confidence men seemed to have in their superior strength.
‘Not only you, Your Majesty, but my Lord Burghley also, and my Lord Leicester, and, of course, myself.’
Seven Catholic gentlemen, young and rash. Walsingham had laid the bait and the poor fish had swallowed it. Now upon the hook was the victim most desired, the Queen of Scots. Walsingham had worked for it, that was sufficient; it was the only reward he would get from her.
‘Sir Moor,’ said Elizabeth, ‘your heart is as black and secret as your face.’ That face held more secrets than she would ever know.
‘Sir Anthony Babington and the other six who would have laid murdering hands upon the Lord’s anointed must be made a grave example.’
Yet in a sense, they were already superannuated traitors. It was Mary’s blood that was wanted.
‘No one shall attempt to murder me, and escape the full penalty!’ William of Orange’s killer had been torn apart with red hot pincers as his penalty.
‘The law executed to the letter is sufficient. So much is seldom done.’
The law, as it now stood under the Act passed for the Queen’s safety the previous year, could not be diverted from taking its course, and it must do so with the sanction of Parliament. Beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of the law, Elizabeth felt herself falling. To detach herself from Parliamentary proceedings at Westminster, she removed to Richmond.
Even here, t
here was no escape. In the gardens she watched autumn passing by, soon to become winter. The peach trees were being moved inside. The gardeners were dead-heading the summer flowers. Elizabeth turned aside her eyes.
She prowled up and down paths, in and out of arbours, following the path of a fitful sun. ‘My care is like my shadow in the sun… Stands and lies by me, does what I have done.’ The shadow of Elizabeth fell upon familiar paths, across the sundial, blotting out the hour, a shadow that copied her every action, twisting its long hands together, pacing to and fro.
To and fro in her head went words like a bell’s toll. ‘Aut fer, aut feri — ne feriare, feri…’ Suffer or strike — strike or be struck… The fate of Mary, or herself, could not be decided by the petals of past summers’ daisies. The destiny of Mary, and of herself, was as indivisible as her shadow and herself.
Early in October, at Fotheringhay, Mary was tried, and found guilty. At the end of the month, Parliament met to bring things to a formal conclusion. A committee was sent to the Queen, to extract the death warrant.
‘You have laid a hard hand upon me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that I must give directions for her death. We princes are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world. The theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England. We must be careful, for our enemies will seek vengeance. What will they say, when for the safety of her life, a Queen is content to spill the blood of her own kinswoman?’
Whatever other nations might say, the heart of Parliament was hard, and its mind made up; they said, yea, yea!
Yet she would defer. ‘Is this,’ cried Burghley, ‘to be a mere Parliament of words?’ Always, always — he ground what teeth were left in his head — she would defer. This time until St Valentine’s Day in the year of God 1587. She had ten weeks, and if she had not signed the warrant by then, the year would be a godless one. He and Walsingham would kill themselves working for this end; it had been going on for years, the prevarication, the abuse, the tantrums and tears. He wanted Elizabeth to act according to the dignity of her office as God’s anointed, but, as ever, she acted only as her determination led her. He only wished he were more deaf than he was, for Elizabeth had a lion’s roar. Burghley was old and exhausted and he saw worse to come. Indignatio principis mors est, the wrath of a prince is death. True of Henry, true of Elizabeth. This time it would fall upon himself.
None But Elizabeth Page 31