‘My loving people…’ She began with the right words, her voice warm, affectionate, as if she spoke to them from the other side of a room. ‘We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourself to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery —’ She paused, to bring forth a concerted roar of protest from the armed multitude.
‘But I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people.’ Faithful and loving roars.
Leicester watched the mass of craning faces, the open mouths; she had them in the palm of her hand already.
‘Let tyrants fear!’ She let that one out in a yell, to be answered by a bellicose crescendo. There was a good deal of business with the horse curvetting and swishing its tail. She had, after all, to show off her horsemanship. Robert allowed himself an inward smile.
‘I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects.’
Flattery. If anyone should try anything after that, they would surely be torn in little pieces.
The Queen’s horse swivelled and rose suddenly into a most elegant half-rear, and she turned it in a neat circle to face her audience again. Plenty of loyal hearts in loyal mouths.
Old Robert looked at young Robert, who was frowning.
‘La volte — well done,’ he commented cheerfully, and smiled.
‘Is her Majesty…?’
‘Yes, her Majesty is!’ The horse had its skittishness worked out of it long ago.
‘She will have their eyes out of their heads and their hearts out of their bodies.’ Essex had not seen it so many times as Leicester had. The old magic had not lost any potency.
The Queen’s voice rang out once more, gathering power. ‘I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all…’
The fresh roars drowned her voice, a great beating, steady heart-throb of a roar. If Parma had been coming over the Thames now he would have been hurled back to the Escurial.
The Queen held up her baton, in a gesture of command, and as if by magic she was given silence.
She went on, in a voice quiet and calm, yet every word heard true.
‘To live or die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust…’
Essex was weeping openly. Leicester’s eyes blurred; her Eyes had never seen the like. He did not have to look at her, her voice was enough. If she went on like that the whole army would be blubbering to a man. By God, she was one of God’s marvels, so clever…and she meant every word.
Suddenly they were given the full force of her voice, a taste of her regal power.
‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too!’
This time she was stopped for a full minute, the noise must have been heard miles away, like the thunder of cannon. There she was, Old Harry’s daughter, her red Tudor hair a torch, even if it had once belonged to some Venetian peasant girl. But Robert remembered her hair as it had been, and his heart, which had failed him often in the past months, felt like that of a King also.
The Queen’s horse was tittupping about, tossing its head as she pricked it with spurs, and then made a show of mastering its truculence.
‘I think foul scorn!’ she spat, virago-like, when she could be heard again, ‘that Parma and Spain, or any Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm, to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms.’ She rapped the baton across her breastplate. If she could have brandished a sword in a third hand, she would.
‘I myself will be your general…’ She was stopped again, as she had calculated she would be. Leicester wondered what he had been doing for the last month. This woman could do in five minutes what no one of them could do, whatever the labour. The army would have carried her shoulder high, like a Caesar or Pompey, garlanded her with the laurels of victory.
‘I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know, already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns…’ — both they and she loved the pun —’and we do assure you, in the word of a Prince, they shall be duly paid you!’
Finishing up with that jingling of the paymaster’s bags was sweet music to their ears, and brought forth the loudest roars yet, impossible, but happening, deafening everyone, going on, and on, and on, the stamping of feet, bashing and clashing of arms, the clapping of thousands of horny hands. For a fearful moment Leicester thought that the whole lot would surge forward and engulf her.
But she had not finished.
‘My Lieutenant General…’ She pointed her baton towards Leicester. ‘No Prince ever commanded a more noble or worthy subject. By your obedience to him, by your concord in the camp and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, my kingdom and my people.’
She had paid him a supreme compliment, and the army endorsed it with more cheering. Robert, in that rare moment of emotion, of reward, felt it all had been worth it, all thirty years of it.
Now ready to lead a triumphal parade, the Queen wheeled her horse. Her smile was of pure delight, and a vision from the past, alive before their eyes, the dazzling young Queen of thirty years before, in her victory after having won a kingdom.
Watching her from close to, across the table as she dined in his pavilion, Leicester found the vision faded, but the triumph undimmed. As a sop to his own feelings of ageing and bodily decrepitude, he looked for signs of hers. He found bad and missing teeth, worse than his, skin tight on her face as parchment on a comfit pot, and a bit loose under the chin, the beginnings of wattles, eyelids hooded like a wily bird’s. But the eyes were the same, though sharper and more imperious, the same queer agate grey? black? hazel? gold? looking sometimes like faceted jet in the face, all big holes of pupil, reflecting the spheres. There was no sign of decrepitude.
Robert felt his own chins, and saw a white hair lying on his sleeve, and sighed, tired but content.
The Queen was hugely enjoying her day, the adulation was a diet which acted as the elixir of youth. She sometimes seemed to need to feed upon the company of the young themselves, of young men in particular, which was one reason why the repartee passing between her and young Essex was so sparkling. The other reason was that he was a couple of yards of lanky handsomeness, with the most engaging smile — and pout — seen at court for many a year. Lettice had provided a most useful stepson.
It was into this scene, nearer to heaven than to earth, that the post rode in from the fleet at Margate. Another dispatch from the Lord Admiral, saying much the same as he had the day before, only at greater length. Sir Francis Drake, whose handwriting was at best bad, had sent a scrawl of near illegibility to Walsingham, no doubt from his cabin on the Revenge in the small hours, signing himself ‘most ready to be commanded, but now half sleeping’.
Leicester received a note from Sir Thomas Morgan, whom he had sent off to Margate with a contingent of musketeers; this he passed immediately to the Queen, grimacing as he did so. ‘“The Prince of Parma has in readiness about thirty or forty thousand men, and intends this next spring tide to put out his forces for England.” Parma is embarked!’ she said starkly.
‘So he may be. I have been sent a good many different reports on Parma’s doings. There’s no sense in talking as if he will come over the Channel on wings. It’s no easy thing to land a force of that size on the south coast, especially in the weather which has been sent to make this summer no different from winter. If Parma uses flat-bottomed boats, then tide or no tide, he will have to wait for calmer seas. I would make a wager that he stays where he is until he knows that their fleet has brought itself back from the Danish seas to protect him.’
‘N
either the Lord Admiral nor Drake know what is left of them, or where it is?’
‘Seven or eight are disposed of, the rest lies in the hands of God.’
‘I will stay here. No army can be expected to have courage if its sovereign retreats in time of danger.’
Leicester’s voice advocating calm had no more effect than a squeak. Consternation was to be read in all the faces at table. It was intolerably oppressive under canvas. Outside, thunder grumbled in the distance.
‘Parma would drive for Rochester. Your Majesty cannot remain here — a man trembles to think of it — I cannot consent to it.’ Leicester thought that the Queen had been a little carried away by her performance of the morning. In the end, though, he prevailed, and she returned that evening to St James’s.
The last day of the spring tides had come and gone. On the 17 August, the Queen and her Privy Councillors wrote to Leicester telling him to break up the camp. Parma had not stirred. The Spanish fleet was not coming back. The sea and the water had roared, and it had been the last day for many Spaniards. Spain rang with lamentation, for sons drowned, and starved, and lost. Now Europe would know to whom the calamity of 1588 had fallen. A service of thanksgiving was arranged for the 20th in St Paul’s, when the captured banners would be displayed to all.
The Queen had been told that the superstitious Spaniards had invoked the prophesies on their own behalf, and tried to frighten the English by painting some ships black, and flying such banners as the one with the sun and moon and the legend: ‘Yesterday the full, but now the wane.’ There had been only one eclipse. The Spanish fleet had sailed in the formation of a crescent moon, and so had met its fate.
‘Flavit Jehovah!’ said the Queen triumphantly to her Councillors. ‘God breathed — and they were scattered. The winds of God blew in the Protestant cause. We shall have a medal struck to commemorate our victory. Men shall remember this year.’
The Earl of Leicester came home from Tilbury like a King. This provoked the usual jealousy and ingratitude, though he returned to the rejoicing of victory. The bells of London pealed, but not for him.
‘Dux Femina Facti,’ Robert said, admitting the truth, if not resigned to it. The bells rang for the general who was a woman, and who had won England’s victory.
*
‘If your Majesty will permit, I shall leave here in a day or two. Perhaps the water at Buxton will wash the evil humours out of these old bones. Then I shall be back by November, so that we can celebrate our victory and Your Majesty’s Accession Day gloriously together.’
Leicester, who felt a good deal more ill than he would admit, knew from the concerned peer of the Queen’s eyes that his pretence was wasted. They sat together at the window of the tiltyard gallery at Whitehall. In the yard below, a score of the Earl’s foot soldiers in blue were being laid into by pikemen in the Earl of Essex’s livery of orange and white, in a mock battle. Essex had organized this review to celebrate the victory over the Spanish fleet.
The Queen, beside her Lieutenant, watched, or rather occasionally watched, for she watched Leicester more, her glances frequent with anxiety. Only when young Essex himself paraded below, in orange velvet and silver lace, on a white horse with its mane and tail dyed orange after the Hungarian fashion, did she divert her attention. All the time she languidly wafted a fan in front of her face, the snowy tips of ostrich plumes caressing her nose. Leicester recognized the fan as one of his own gifts, and that it had not been in recent use. On the emerald-studded mounting of the handle was an enamelled representation of a lion rampant over a muzzled white bear. The royal lioness of England baiting poor old ursus minor.
There in the gallery sat Burghley, a sad Old Saturnus, but not too old to take his share of the honours. He was rather deaf, and more crippled by gout than ever, this making him irritable, and he sat with his legs on a stool, his two sticks beside his arm. Still doing the things he had been doing in 1559, squeezing money out of the Queen for defence, bearing her tempers, trying to keep corruption within bounds.
There was Kit Hatton, his presence an effort, for he was in worse health than any of them. Heneage, as purple in the jowls as Leicester himself. All the Queen’s men were old. The field was open to young Essex, young Robin.
Catching the Queen’s eye on one of its frequent visits to his face — she was growing more short-sighted — he offered reassurance on what she saw.
‘Derbyshire air, morning rides and light suppers should work wonders!’
This was a mistake, for it conjured up a picture of him enjoying light suppers in the company of his wife Lettice, whom he had not mentioned as going with him, but the Queen had an instinct for knowing the unsaid, especially when one would rather keep it from her.
‘If more water went into the wine in London, Buxton water would not be so necessary!’
She never could resist making remarks of this kind. His war over the years on encroaching fat, and many cures at Buxton, had given her every opportunity to twit him.
He turned the other cheek. ‘Your Majesty will please me better by being in good health yourself, when I come back.’
‘I am well enough, Robin.’ That tone was unmistakably dismissive of the subject. Since her return from Tilbury, the Queen had been unwell. There seemed no specific ailment, but he had seen her in the aftermath of high tension and excitement or danger too often not to know the symptoms.
‘Well enough, then,’ he assented, in her own words, which would, if she had been on her mettle, have irritated her. Much of their verbal exchanges were armed with barb and counter-barb, and always had been. Old intimacy of this kind was always comfortable.
‘Robert, I have always had a good deal of faith in Dr Goodrowse’s remedy for low fevers. I’ll have some made up at once by my apothecary. You can take a dose tonight.’
Ugh! He knew her remedies of old. But if it pleased her to mother him — she had a most motherly disposition to nurse invalids, spooning broth into toothless gums, or sending pots of vile substances to the sufferer by special messenger. Even now, she visited poor old Blanche Parry, sick and blind and eighty-one. They were all she would have to mother, her friends as they aged and ailed. She had never known the comfort of a family such as he had been blessed with, and, alas, was fast losing. He still felt the deaths of Mary and Philip keenly, and Ambrose was in increasing ill health.
‘I will press my Lord Burghley on the subject of the Lieutenancy.’ Elizabeth reached over, and held his hand.
That would be a better palliative than Goodrowse’s. On her return from Tilbury, full of new faith in him, the Queen had announced her intention of continuing his appointment as Lieutenant General of England and Ireland. In the event of her sudden death, this would probably ensure that he became Protector of the Realm. She had wanted this many years before, when she thought herself dying of smallpox. The reaction had been the same then as now, Burghley, Hatton and Walsingham had thrown up their hands in horror. One Lord Protector in the Dudley family was enough, and Robert had no wish to meet his father’s fate. But he gnashed his teeth in private, and stored this blow to his pride and self-esteem away in a list of slights, slanders and injuries he had received over forty years. It was a long list.
The Lieutenancy was his due. The others took pleasure in baulking him of it. He had worked hard enough, surrounded by incompetents. The Queen was grateful, she was concerned for his health, she had proposed an extension of his office, but her left hand often took away what her right hand gave. She would no doubt agree with Burghley again as soon as he had turned his back on Whitehall.
However, he did not wish to be seen to be eating sour grapes; it would spoil the mellow afternoon. At midday, he had dined with the Queen, just the two of them. This was a thing unheard of since those meals tête à tête of a quarter of a century ago. Then she had popped delicate morsels into his mouth, and the food had been eked out by laughter and kissing. Now their laughter had a sharper edge. She discoursed at length on the properties of each dish, for she was
interested in dietary theories, pressing him to eat this or that, pecking like a jenny wren herself, then poking a forefinger into his doublet and chiding him on what was most certainly sheep’s-wool wadding. He had lost much of the fat in the past year. Worked it off, most of it, harder than he had ever worked in his life, and he had never been an idler. The last few years had been hard, the Netherlands expedition, the trials of royal displeasure. The bitter disappointment and frustration had in part been redeemed by the success of Tilbury, and the thunderclouds of royal displeasure dispelled by extraordinarily mellow sunshine. Elizabeth smiled.
Time, whose footsteps Robert heard closer at his heels every day, had seemed to pass her by. He had received too many intimations of mortality recently. He had still not got over Philip Sidney’s death. His own words, written when Philip was dying, still lay in his memory: ‘He was my greatest comfort, next Her Majesty, of all the world. If I could buy his life with all I have, to my shirt, I would give it,’ and Philip’s last words: ‘In me behold the end of the world, with all her vanities,’ when great Leicester had offered all his worldly goods in vain. After that, Robert had drafted his own will. It was high time, no man should pass fifty-five with this undone.
Elizabeth did not see him ride away. His going was bad enough, though she did not begrudge him his cure at Buxton, only that he was going with Lettice, his wife; this, as ever, gave her a sense of personal insult. However, a day or so after his departure, she sent a messenger after him, with a little gift of two gold buttons set with onyx and silver, to look like two eyes. When he came back, she vowed, she would never undervalue, mistrust or bait him again. To fill the void his absence always left, she invited his stepson Essex to occupy his rooms at St James’s, so she might have a companion for cards, chess and the dance, who was one of the family, so to speak, hers and his. Robert’s wind was not what it had been for the dancing, and neither was Kit Hatton’s.
None But Elizabeth Page 34