None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  *

  The little ship, his own pinnace, was all black. Black sails, black tackle, the sides draped in black, as she sailed up the Thames on Philip Sidney’s last journey. In an accompanying ship, the young Earl of Essex wept as they moored at Tower Wharf, to bring the coffin ashore. Frances Walsingham, Philip’s widow, nearly seven months pregnant, sat as if the child in her had turned to lead and weighed her down. Essex had promised to marry Frances, though God knew what either would get out of such a match. Leicester felt that he contained the misery of both. Only the second time he had gone to war overseas in his life; the first time he had lost a brother, now he had lost his sister’s son. Within a year, Henry and Mary Sidney were gone, and now their darling Philip. Philip had always been like his own son, more so since the death of Lettice’s little boy. Essex, Lettice’s big boy, could not replace him, though their relationship had grown from resentment to affection. At Zutphen a bright star had been put out, and England was the darker for his loss.

  England was a dark place to come home to — out of the frying pan of the chaos in the Netherlands, to a sizzling fire. Robert found the news that Elizabeth had deferred the execution of the Queen of Scots utterly beyond his understanding, igniting in him a multitude of fears.

  At about ten in the evening, he came to Whitehall. He found the Queen sitting melancholy in her chamber, her grey streaked hair unadorned under a plain cap, and wearing a loose gown of hare-coloured velvet, embroidered with raised work in dull colours and gold. It had a curious design of dead, bare tree stumps, and on the shoulder, a gold butterfly. She flew to him, put her arms round him and hung on, as she had not done for many, many years. She was weeping.

  ‘I cannot see,’ she sobbed, like a little girl, and her eyes were veiled with crystal tears. ‘I need my Eyes!’

  Robert let her weep upon his shoulder. He had expected anything but this. Relief that he was not only welcome, but necessary, mingled with anxiety at finding her so distraught.

  ‘Your Eyes can see that you must be brave,’ he said. ‘Sign.’

  ‘Not yet!’ That all too familiar note of hysteria.

  ‘Borrowed time. You are paying a heavy interest.’

  Yet she kept her creditor, Time, at bay over a Christmas season of unreal jollity, at Greenwich. Robert’s players entertained the court, were well received and rewarded, as usual. One young man, new to the band, holding up a spear behind James Burbage, and with only a line or two to speak, was selected for royal favour.

  A long white finger pointed. ‘I have seen you before, young man.’

  ‘Your Majesty?’ He had fair curls, a rosy countryman’s face, and a jaunty moustache.

  ‘I seldom forget a face.’

  ‘Not Kenilworth, Your Majesty?’

  ‘Why yes — you were little more than a child, and you looked upon the players as if they were angels.’

  ‘I am flattered that Your Majesty can recollect a fleeting glimpse of a boy on holiday, eleven years later. I remember how I longed to see the Queen.’ Indeed, he was more impressed than flattered.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘William Shakespeare, Your Majesty, of Stratford in the county of Warwick.’

  ‘So you have achieved your ambition to dwell among the angels! I fear their wings are of tinsel and spangles. Learn to guard yourself in this place, William Shakespeare, while you work for this master — and God bless you.’

  ‘God bless Your Majesty.’

  As he knelt, gracefully, Robert, upon whom the Queen had bestowed a naughty, teasing look, thought, Memory, majesty, and the magic of a smile; how could she, whatever her faults, fail to keep the hearts of her subjects?

  *

  The sun was shining. It was shining full in her eyes. She must be facing the east, because she knew it was almost nine o’clock in the morning. She was having to climb up some steps. Her skirts occupied each hand, and what with the skirts and the sun, she had to be careful not to trip. It seemed very important not to trip, because people were watching her. She was wearing a loose gown of crane-coloured damask, lined with some smooth brown fur. Sad colours. Once up the steps, she felt very high up, as if isolated upon a mountain top. Something rustled under her feet. Straw. Her feet led her forward.

  She began to speak, her voice thin, lost upon the mountain top, and she had to keep turning her head because the sun in her eyes was so bright. Whichever way she turned, she saw grey walls. She put up a hand to feel the back of her head. It was important to make sure that the pins secured her hair, that it should not come cascading down her back. Someone was holding something out towards her; it looked like a linen towel. There was something on the ground in front of her, blocking her path, but she could not quite make out what it was — the wretched sun again. It was black, square, lumpy. She could hear her own voice saying, ‘God save the Queen, and send her long to reign over you. For a gentler and more merciful prince was there never’ Then, obedient to a command, she took off her hood.

  The sun flashed in her eyes again — no, not the sun, but its light, sharp as the steel, glancing along the blade of a great sword. Elizabeth screamed. The sword, the grey walls, and the blue sky collapsed around her, and she woke.

  The scaffold, the block, the sword. She had woken, escaped to the safety of her bed. The others had only known a bed of cold clay. Why the sword? Mary would suffer by the axe. Once again, she had to escape.

  ‘How can I send her to the block — have her head cut off — severed entirely from her neck?’ Elizabeth linked her thumbs on her throat, her fingers round the back of her neck. ‘She is a big woman — has she a big neck?’

  She looked like a picture of a Christian martyr, but Raleigh had more sensible observations to make.

  ‘It is Your Majesty’s duty to send her, as much as it is hers to pay for her misdemeanours by submitting. There are times when duty must be done.’

  ‘Would you do your duty thus, Walter?’

  ‘As time and place demanded, with, I hope, my dignity intact.’

  ‘It was such a dreadful dream.’

  ‘Dreams,’ said Raleigh, ‘are the creations of a disordered brain. Collect your mind, Your Majesty. Once it is done, the disorder will become order once more.’

  So, scarcely reassured, she went to chapel, because it was Sunday morning. She had signed the warrant on the previous Wednesday, but not actually ordered its dispatch. Another answer answerless.

  But Her Majesty’s Privy Council, her signature obtained, the Great Seal affixed, decided to provide the answer. Ten members hastily met. They sat, grave, bearded men, around a table covered with a scarlet Turkey carpet, an inkstand in front of each. Burghley, Leicester, Hatton, Walsingham risen from his sickbed for this supreme triumph. Burghley recommended that the warrant be sent without further consulting the Queen, and that this be kept from her until the deed was accomplished. The word of the elder statesman gave weight to the unanimous agreement. No minutes were taken of their doings.

  Wednesday, 8 February was a beautiful day, one of those misplaced February days which should belong to April. Just before midday, the Queen sat eating her small dinner by an open window at Greenwich, overlooking the river. Watered wine, a sliver of chicken, fine white bread, an orange and a handful of raisins. She threw half the bread out to the voracious, raucous gulls. The sun fell gently upon her face.

  The next day, at noon, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s son brought the news from Fotheringhay. At hand to catch the first blast of thunder and lightning was the unfortunate Hatton. Secretary Davison was consigned to the Tower, Burghley dared not show his face. Elizabeth raved, hurling her burden of guilt at every head in sight, ridding herself of it by blaming others. Meanwhile, the bells of London rang for joy, and the bonfires blazed, because the bosom serpent was dead.

  The real story, when she let herself hear it, was very different from Elizabeth’s dream of heading. It took place indoors, in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay, with the fires lit in the hearths as if for a banquet.
The sun slanting in the windows had no warmth. A crowd of more than two hundred people, armed soldiers around the scaffold. The towel to cover her eyes, yes. But no crane-grey gown, no hairpins, no sword. It had taken two strokes of the axe. Mary had been wearing a wig, and underneath, her crop was as grey as a badger’s. Elizabeth had somehow expected to hear her dream recounted, something familiar. The reality seemed curiously remote, and mundane in comparison. Why had the dream been so real? She dared not think of whose heading she had dreamed.

  Elizabeth thought that she was going a little mad. She could not eat or sleep. She turned like a viper upon those who had served her best. Burghley feared that she was sufficiently unhinged to pervert the channels of justice, and he feared once more the Tower. She, her feelings flailing about in search of victims on whom they might be expressed, desperately prayed for strength to survive her devastated emotions.

  ‘Thus in these last and worst days of the world, when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all Kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable and my realm a receptacle to Thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of mine enemies frustrate.

  ‘Thou seest whereof I came, of corrupt seed: what I am, a most frail substance: where I live, in the world full of wickedness, where delights be snares, where dangers be imminent, where sin reigneth, and death abideth.

  ‘This is my state. Now where is my comfort? In the depth of my misery, I know no help O Lord, but the height of Thy mercy…’

  Her inward state could only be resolved by herself, and God. Outside, in the theatre of the world, Mary’s death had provoked no cataclysm. Indeed, the saying was proved, that dead men do not bite. But the living continued to gnaw. Philip of Spain, once his mind was made up, would adhere with utmost tenacity to ‘God’s obvious design’, that he should conquer England, for Spain and Rome. Elizabeth’s mind had been made up for her by her ministers who ordered Mary’s execution. Conflict was inevitable. Tall galleons grew on the slipways of the ports of Spain; an Armada was being prepared, the like of which the world had never seen. Within the next year, 1588, that fleet would sail.

  Book Six

  All Things Transitory

  XII

  Dux Femina Facti

  1588

  The trumpeters sounded a fanfare for war. The Queen should go upon the river like all the rulers of Britain there had ever been: Brutus, Imperial Caesar, Arthur and Alfred the Great, the Conqueror… Like her line of Plantagenet forebears, and her Tudor father and grandfather. The banners on the trumpets bore their arms. A mere woman, but Caesar’s daughter. No King had ever been sounded aboard his barge with a more martial, defiant fanfare. The trumpets blared into a gusty wind, unseasonable for early August, as if to make their notes carry to all four corners of the kingdom.

  The beacons had been fired, from Plymouth to Gravesend. Elizabeth, who had feared fire and sword, did not fear now. She had feared imprisonment and death, and now that the King of Spain threatened both she would defy him to the last breath. Even now, the Spanish Armada, the towering galleons, each like a floating town, with their Popish names and Popish banners, were being harried by her navy in the Channel. Philip the Mole thought to play the part of a conquistador, to conquer the world, but he should never have England.

  The Queen came down to the Privy Stairs at Whitehall, and boarded her barge, with a guard of her Gentlemen Pensioners on either side, glittering halberds with nodding gold tassels held upright, so that her barge was armed as it had seldom been seen. She would have liked her handsome Captain to be among them, but Sir Walter Raleigh had gone to sea, to fight the Spaniards. Few other Pensioners were left. But Sir Henry Lee, the Queen’s Champion, had come, though he had talked of retiring from martial events. A boatload of the Yeomen of the Guard provided an escort, wearing their crimson uniforms braided with black velvet, a crowned rose on their chests, and the letters ER. Elizabetha Regina. She had fought for thirty years to keep those initials unchanged; they should only go at her death.

  The trumpeters and musicians embarked too, so that the drums and fanfares of war should accompany the Queen all the way down to Tilbury. They sounded the advance as the rowers pulled out on the ebb tide, towing the royal barge out into mid-river. Over on the Lambeth shore, they must have been looking out from the church tower for the moment of cast-off, for the bells began to peal. Not the merry ringing usual when the Queen took her pleasure upon the river, but a more urgent, clamorous peal, an alarm, a challenge, to make the frightened people of London feel brave.

  The bells rang in Elizabeth’s head and heart, made her skin prickle with excitement. The prophet Isaiah said that the horse scents the battle from afar, and makes the earth tremble under his pawing hooves in his eagerness for the battle. It was a good way of describing the feeling. Today she would visit her army, in camp at Tilbury, to somehow inspire the inadequate force with enough courage to repel an army of Spaniards outnumbering them two to one. Elizabeth could not allow herself to imagine it coming to that, nor let anyone else imagine it. If it did come, it would be the end of Protestant England, the triumph of the Popish Antichrist, the triumph of Philip, the end of Elizabeth. He had failed to conquer her before, and he should not do so now. She had courage within her, wore it like a breastplate of steel, and there must be enough of it for every man jack of her soldiers and sailors to have a share. Enough courage for twenty thousand.

  That morning, one of the Queen’s women had asked her, ‘Madam, how long would it take the Prince of Parma to march to Tilbury?’ Parma’s army waited at Calais, to invade England when the Armada had won its victory.

  ‘Laying waste as he goes?’ As if the Spaniards could get up the Thames and be putting London to the sword by nightfall. ‘Since the Prince of Parma cannot walk on water, though I hear he has ordered seven thousand pairs of wading boots,’ Elizabeth said, ‘he must embark his army in barges. We would have ample warning. We can be assured of a safe passage to Tilbury!’

  Mr Secretary Walsingham was uneasy about the visit and feared mishap. What special mishap, Elizabeth could not herself imagine, other than those risked every day, such as assassination, storm, or act of God, such as the capsize of her barge. None of these disasters had yet happened. Her Moor was going about looking even more long-faced than Philip of Spain — indeed Walsingham looked far more like a Don than Philip did.

  The Queen’s Lieutenant General, the Earl of Leicester, had invited her to inspect the army at Tilbury. It was one of those splendid ideas only Robert could conceive. He had written to her, saying that her coming would comfort and cheer not only the few thousand present there, but every one of her subjects who should hear about it. Her old Eyes, he said, would be so gladdened by the sight of her, that he would work fresh wonders on her behalf, conjure soldiers from the air.

  The bells of Lambeth were left behind, and those of Southwark and the City churches took up the peal. As the royal party came to London Bridge, the trumpeters blew more fanfares, the rowers shipped their oars, and the barges shot the rapids of the bridge. This always brought out a crowd, people dodging from one side of the bridge to the other, to see the Queen emerge into safety. Elizabeth enjoyed shooting the bridge, it brought pink to her cheeks and a catch in her breath, like putting her horse at a high fence. She caught in mid-flight a flower thrown from a window, as neatly as a schoolboy, and the bunches of heads and shoulders sticking out of every vantage point burst into louder cheers than ever. Elizabeth smiled into a gillyflower the small, satisfied smile that she did when she had scored such a little triumph.

  Beyond the bridge, Tower Wharf was heaped with sandbags, and fenced with cannon like crocodile’s teeth. These were, like the crocodile’s tears, meant only to deceive, for if Parma’s army should land and march upon London, they would not be halted by these popguns letting off across the river. They had stormed far greater obstacles. London would be the sack of the century; Rome or Antwerp could offer no better.r />
  There were no English warships moored at Wapping. They were all gone to fight the Spaniards. This was a source of hope. The last news from the fleet had been of successful ripping of the skirts of the great galleons, and of Spanish losses and no English. Since then there had been no news, but no news was good news.

  The noise of martial music and the wash of so many barges put up a pair of swans. They planed the water, black feet trailing. The Queen watched until they were as small as sparrows in the sky, then small as ants, screwing up her eyes, because they faded and blurred faster for her than for her companions, who were not short-sighted. She was always delighted by the sight of swans taking off — it seemed such a glorious flouting of the laws of nature, those heavy birds leaving their element for the dangerous air. From up high, the swans might see the puny human craft which had intruded upon them, small as a child’s game upon a tub of water. The barges, pea pods, the oars a straw split with a thumb nail, the gaudy awnings a cockerel’s neck feather, and the music, from high up in the air, no louder than the song of a wren.

  Now was no time to ponder upon the insignificance of human activity, and of war in particular. It was not possible for the swans to see all of England as they flew, the island kingdom with its pastures and forests, a fair emerald set in a silver ocean (Wales was naturally part of England, and one had to forget that Scotland was unfortunately attached, like a barnacle). Once Elizabeth had coveted Philip of Spain’s emerald buttons. She had written a prayer, for the defence of the island kingdom: ‘Set a wall about it, O Lord, and evermore mightily defend it.’ So He had, the sea itself. Map-makers showed the island kingdom with rippling waves guarding the shores, the four winds blowing for all they were worth, their cheeks ballooning, driving the shipping up the Channel and across the German Ocean. English shipping, carrying the wealth of England in freedom. That freedom had never been so threatened as now. Not in all the thirty years of her reign, not in many hundreds of years before that.