She had already asked Nicholas Hilliard to make a jewel for him. A portrait of herself in a locket, with on the back the ark of the true Church unharmed upon stormy waters. Inside the lid, a red rose, a lover’s rose, Beauty’s rose, and Latin words saying, ‘Alas! that virtue endued with so much beauty should not enjoy perpetual life unspoiled,’ as a reminder that time cannot be halted.
On the last day of August, a letter came from Rycote, a note scrawled before Leicester had set out in the morning. He was still taking her medicine, she was glad to hear. ‘Your poor old servant,’ he wrote, and the double ‘oo’ had eyebrows, as usual. ‘I humbly kiss your foot…’ What nonsense! Yet he had, sometimes, in times best forgotten, yet still remembered. He must be feeling better.
Thus she was not prepared for the news when it came. It came the day before her birthday — their birthday. He had died of a low fever become high, at Cornbury on 4 September. At first she seemed unable to understand. How could he have died? He was getting better.
Young Essex, who was with her, offered to stay, or to go, whichever she wanted. She sent him away. She did not want him; he would not do.
Elizabeth turned her back on condolences, and shut the door. One of the first things she did was to find that letter he had sent from Rycote. She folded it, unfolded it, and read it again. Then, methodically, as she did with all her correspondence, superscribed the reverse, before filing it away. ‘His last letter,’ she wrote, and the words looked unfamiliar, as if not in her handwriting. The pen must have wobbled. She went to the little Italian-inlaid cabinet by her bed, opened the doors, and then one of the drawers. She took out an object wrapped in paper, unwrapped it and stood holding it in the palm of her hand. Robert, as he had been at thirty, stared up at her as arrogantly as he had in life. So like a blood horse, only more beautiful. In his orange-tawny satin and pearls. The light shone softly upon the tiny parchment. She put the miniature back in its drawer, and tucked the letter in beside it, closed the drawer and shut the doors, locking them with a little key.
Elizabeth, as she so rarely was allowed to be in her life, was entirely alone. The room was so silent. Outside, the sun shone, on the deer in St James’s Park and the ducks on Rosamund’s pool. Virgo, crowned with ears of corn. She had lost those golden ears of corn he had given her at Kenilworth. Robert would hunt the deer no longer, nor shoot the ducks. The sun had stopped shining upon him. The winds of God had taken him, as if in forfeit for her own preservation. In the morning, she would be fifty-five. Robert would not be fifty-seven. His hourglass had stopped.
Elizabeth lay down on her bed, and began to weep. She wept with abandon for a long time. Then she began to think of how he had died. A fever which would not abate, the old enemy, caught in the Low Countries. Lettice had been with him when he died. Lettice!
Lettice had been his wife, his wife! With him when he died, as of right. She had stolen him in life, and stolen his death. Elizabeth threw a pillow across the room violently. The she-wolf! Waiting at his deathbed for the pickings. Well, the pickings would fall short. She, the Queen, would be claiming every farthing of the debts he owed her, all £25,000 of them. She would send the royal receivers in to Wanstead, and Kenilworth, and Leicester House, to inventory every stick; she would have all his goods sold rather than let Lettice get her hands on them.
There were rumours that Lettice was having an affair with Kit Blount, her husband’s horsekeeper! The slut had pulled a whole fleece of wool over Robert’s eyes, and, poor old Eyes, he had been sadly blind. Lettice wanted a younger man. Elizabeth felt this as an insult to herself. Why, Lettice was only eight years younger than she was! Lettice had not known Robert in his splendid youth. Neither had Elizabeth, not in the sense the Bible means, not as Lettice had, and had for ten precious years.
The first, terrible sense of loss, which had torn Elizabeth when he betrayed her by marrying the bitch, fell upon her like a sword. She yowled with rage and misery, like an enraged child, for what she had never had, what birth and circumstance had denied her. She roared with rage, because she could not bring her Robert back to life.
A great while later, Elizabeth became aware that someone was forcing the lock on her door. There was no need. She got up, and went to turn the key herself. Then she walked out into the land of the living.
A week or so later, she read his will.
‘First of all, before and above all persons, it is my duty to remember my most dear, and most gracious Sovereign, whose creature under God I have been…’ As she had so often told him. She wished it had been less often. ‘Who has been a most bountiful, and most princely Mistress unto me, as well in advancing me to many honours, as in maintaining me many ways by her goodness and liberality.’ Yes, she had been liberal, he had fared well.
‘And as it was my greatest joy, in my lifetime, to serve her… Yet I am not able to make any piece of recompense of her great goodness, yet will I presume to present to her a token of an humble, faithful heart, as the least that ever I can send her, and with this prayer, that it may please the Almighty God, not only to make her the oldest prince, that ever He gave over England, but to make her the Godliest, the most virtuous, and the worthiest in His sight, that ever He gave over any nation.’
The oldest prince. May the Queen live for ever. He had left her the token, a pendant of emeralds and diamonds, hung on a rope of six hundred fine pearls. Emeralds, whose colour is so intense that they colour the faces of those who gaze into them. Something of Robert had coloured her, over the years, and much of her had certainly coloured him. He had looked into her emerald of Tudor green, and been as the chameleon.
His bequests, he said, ‘cannot be great… I have always lived above any living I had (for which I am heartily sorry)…’ So he had, and he had never been sorry before. He owed her £25,000. But he had tried to stop time for her. She owed him a debt too, which she would never pay, for being what he had been to her.
The jewel Hilliard made, Elizabeth gave to Sir Thomas Heneage, who had once caused Robert to be jealous, and had been for years his friend and colleague. It was a token deserved by Heneage, who had been her Treasurer at War and kept her fleet afloat.
A portrait was painted of Elizabeth, as ruler of the waves. Behind her, as if seen through open windows, the Spanish Armada was painted sailing upon English seas, on one side in its pride by day, on the other wrecked in the eternal night of its eclipse, driven by the Protestant wind. Elizabeth sat, secure in throne and crown, the whole world under her hand. It was how she would go on. The fight was not over, it would not end until death, but ‘Dux Femina Facti’; the woman ruler had triumphed once, and would again.
XIII
The Sequel
1601 – 1603
The steps to the throne were steep, and slippery, though covered with red cloth. The Parliament robes of crimson velvet and ermine were heavy, too heavy for a lady whom Time had surprised, and whose legs and body were frail. One of her Lords caught her in strong, man’s arms, before she could fall. Her legs would snap like dry twigs, if she lost control of them.
Once seated upon her throne, her sceptre in her hand, and crown firm upon her head (wedged securely in her wig, which was pinned securely to her hair), she was in command again. She sat, as she had sat in every Parliament since that very first, the living image of herself, taken from the picture on her Rolls. Semper eadem, always the same. Consistency, constancy, integrity. She could remember her words to that first Parliament: ‘What credit my assurance may have with you, I cannot tell, but what credit it shall deserve to have, the sequel shall declare.’ The sequel had lasted forty-two years. The Queen’s credit had been assayed, and found pure gold.
Yet, as they had often been in the past, they were unruly, even hostile, in defence of their grievances. Did they think because she was old, and because she had lost her teeth and her speech was sibilant and its edge blurred, that she had lost her powers of reasoning, and of outwitting them? Her voice was not less imperious, but more so, for a monstrousl
y long term of power lay behind it. For their grievances, she offered immediate redress by her own intervention, which took the angry puffs of wind out of their sails. They were diverted into channels of gratitude and loyalty. They sent a deputation to thank her, and to answer them, she set herself to write a speech. It was, she considered, when she had read it and reread it, an extremely satisfactory piece of work.
The deputation found their Queen dressed all in white, her head lit by a positively ruby wig. White taffeta shot with silver tinsel, trimmed with gold lace. Sprays of pearls, on fragile stems, like harebells, nestled and nodded in her curls. Her bosom, which was on the point of extinction, was deeply exposed in the latest fashion. Both her face and this area had been plastered over with whitening, so when she moved her jaws or blinked her eyes, little cracks and crumples appeared in the surface. The lobes of her ears were stretched and weighed down with pearls like pigeon’s eggs. Close to, her eyes, black and startling in that lime-washed wall of face, had a bloom in them, a mist, which afflicts the eyes of the old.
This apparition gave the Parliamentary envoys something they had not expected, which left them amazed, each in their different ways, that age and freaks of female fashion and whitening and wigs, lay lightly on the finest speechmaker they had ever heard.
First she wooed them. ‘There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love… And though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown — that I have reigned with your love.’ She talked of love, and held out hands still white and delicate, though no longer straight and strong, as if to a lover.
Then she gave them the truth that forty-two years had taught her. ‘To be a King and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than pleasing to them that bear it. For myself, I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King, or royal authority of a Queen, as delighted that God has made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend this kingdom, as I said, from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care for my subjects and that sooner with willingness will venture her life for your good and safety, than myself.’
She sat back in her chair then, as if coming to the end of a long story.
‘For it is not my desire to live nor reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise, sitting in this state, yet you never had, or shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.’ As always, she repeated herself, but this gave additional weight to her rhetoric.
When she had finished, they filed by to kiss her hand, some with tears, for her speech, she knew, was designed to move stones to emotion. Yet she also knew that these English worshipped the sun in the east rather than in the west, and her sun was low in the west, nearing the garden of the Hesperides. They wanted her to name her successor. Her winding sheet. Well, she would not oblige them. They knew who he was, and knew that she knew they knew. Scotch James. What happened when the messenger at last pelted off to Scotland did not concern her, for she would be relieved of the responsibility.
Meanwhile, they might say ‘Mortua sed non sepulta’ — dead but not buried — but she was not lying down yet, though the weary core of her old bones longed and longed to. Sometimes she felt like the living dead; nearly all her friends were gone. Their shades clustered round her, less willing to forsake her dead than they had been when alive. Within a year or two of the Armada, soon after her poor old Eyes had closed his in last sleep, so many had gone. All the Queen’s men. Ambrose Warwick, old ursus major, lost without his brother, Kit Hatton, Lids closed upon his Queen, Mildred Cecil, acid Mildred, who had been sweetly loved, then followed Blanche Parry, who had rocked Elizabeth’s cradle, Sussex, Sir Francis Knollys, Harry Hunsdon her cousin, and Thomas Heneage. Then, ‘Sir Spirit’, withered and pain-racked in body, for so long her right hand; Burghley’s loss was England’s, he had not been called the Atlas of the Commonwealth for nothing. With him, something of her own spirit died. His son Robert, no sprite, but an earth-bound pigmy. Without William Cecil, Elizabeth would not have survived to see this day.
Too recent, Essex. Young Robin, the wild horse, who like another with red hair, betrayed. His shade she deliberately kept at bay, but it had a way of cornering her and mauling her heart. Raleigh was left, but he had forsaken her long ago for another, as Robert had, and there was no more ‘Warrter’ left in the bucket. Dr Dee was left, but he was old and sick and blighted by poverty.
She thought of Robert sometimes, and Time gilded his memory for her. He, who had been assayed, and found wanting. In the drawer of the cabinet beside her bed, lay his last letter, and his picture. She did not seek to look at them often, but they were lodged as permanently and securely in her mind as in her cabinet.
Why had they left her all alone? Yet her aloneness had always been her strength. She had lived in it, and would die in it, and felt that day was not far off. Queens of sixty-eight years could not live by ‘this year, next year’, but only by the God-given day. Her destiny had almost run its course, and she was afraid, as she had been afraid always, of heading, and wedding, and dying.
*
Next spring and summer, Elizabeth’s subjects wooed her with words and music, to charm her into forgetting she was old and tired. Sometimes, she forgot. On May Day of 1602, she rode forth a few miles to bring in the May at Sir Richard Buckley’s at Lewisham. There, among the woods and streams, she was Queen of the May for a day. But there was a conspiracy to remind her of Time’s presence at her shoulder.
In August, at Harefield, she was welcomed by a mask of Time and Place. They brought her a chair, with cushions, so she might sit and watch, for she found standing a strain these days. Her Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, had wanted to put on an entertainment for the Queen’s sixty-ninth year, which would recall those halcyon days of such shows, at Kenilworth and Elvetham. But to Elizabeth it seemed but an echo of other times and places.
Time had long yellow hair, a beautiful person in a robe of shining emerald, no bearded ancient, but a benign presence, holding an hourglass, which had ceased to run. Place wore an amazing gown, cleverly painted with bricks and windows, in an imitation of Harefield itself Place was apparently female. Time was inclined to be patronizing.
‘I stay to entertain the Wonder of this time, wherein I would pray you to join me, if you were not too little for her greatness. It were as great a miracle for you to receive her, as to see the Ocean shut up in a little creek…’
‘Too little!’ exclaimed poor Place, ‘I have all this day entertained the sun, he’s but even now gone down yonder hill, and now he is gone, methinks if Cynthia herself would come in his place, the place that contained him should not be too little to receive her.’
Ah, Cynthia, Virgin pure, and Beauty’s rose, her legs would no longer let her stand through such paeans of praise, and shows bravely enacted in English rain.
‘Your wings are clipped,’ said Place of Time, ‘and your hourglass runs not.’
‘My wings are clipped indeed, and it is her hands that have clipped them, and my glass runs not — it can never run as long as I wait upon this mistress. I am her Time, and Time were very ungrateful, if it should not ever stand still, to serve and preserve, cherish and delight her, that is the glory of her Time and makes the Time happy wherein she lives.’
‘We have clipped the wings of Time’ — had not Robert said that to her that first evening at Kenilworth, when he had stopped the clocks on Caesar’s Tower? Still, gold numerals, winking in the sun, to deceive the eye. He had thought he could make Time his servant. But he could not.
‘We are all his servants,’ said Elizabeth.
‘But he is Your Majesty’s, at Harefield,’ said Lady Egerton, her host.
Time, and his daughter Truth, had sat on a green hill at her coronation. ‘Time has brought me here,’ she had said. Now he was waiting to take her away
, to another place.
‘Time turns sugar to salt,’ replied Elizabeth, and she could not these days prevent the sour salt from creeping onto her tongue.
But she smiled, and charmed everyone when she accepted the gift of a diamond heart from Time.
‘As I was passing to this place,’ he explained, ‘I found this heart, which my daughter Truth told me, was stolen by one of the nymphs from this Goddess, but her guilty conscience informing her that it belonged only of right to her that is mistress of all hearts in the world, she cast it from her, and opportunity, finding it, delivered it to me. Here, Place, take it, and present it to her as a pledge and mirror of their hearts that own you.’
‘It is a mirror indeed, for it is transparent. It is a clear heart, you may see through it. It has no closed corners, no darkness, no unbeautiful spot in it.’
Unlike the human heart, unlike her own, Elizabeth thought. Unlike her Robin Dudley’s too. She remembered Kenilworth. Her eyes filled with tears.
They were reading a poem in her honour, an ode to Cynthia.
Th’ ancient readers of Heaven’s book,
Which with curious eye did look
Into Nature’s story,
All things under Cynthia took
To be transitory.
This the learned only knew,
But now men find it true,
Cynthia is descended,
With bright beams and heavenly hue,
And lesser stars attended.
Lands and seas she rules below,
Where things change, and ebb and flow,
Spring, wax old, and perish;
Only Time, which all doth mow,
Her alone doth cherish.
Time’s young hours attend her still,
And her eyes and cheeks do fill,
With fresh youth and beauty.
All her lovers old do grow,
But their hearts, they do not so,
In their love and duty.
None But Elizabeth Page 35