None But Elizabeth
Page 36
Another day they draped her in a robe of gold tissue, woven in all the colours of the spectrum, blue to purple, red to orange, yellow to green, blue again, a robe of rainbows, rare and strange, and shimmeringly beautiful. An old lady, leaning upon a stick. She touched her angel’s robe with a right hand swollen and distorted in the joints.
‘Non sine sole iris,’ she said, and they all bowed down before the sun.
It was an offering from St Swithin. Outside, he was well into the traditional forty-days offering of English rain. This made her farewell gift, of an anchor, rather too apposite.
‘I pray to Him who made both Time and Place, that in all places wherever you shall arrive, you may anchor as safely, as you do and ever shall do in the hearts of my owners.’ And so she might in the hearts of all her subjects, which was the place best loved by Elizabeth in all the world. She asked no other resting place. So she went away warmed as if St Swithin had provided forty days of sunshine instead.
The bells rang in the morning of the Queen’s Accession Day, the glorious 17 November, as usual. All through the City of London, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, over at Lambeth, and along the Southwark shore, poured the hymn of the bells. From end to end of her realm, bells called to other bells and pealed merrily for hours, until the ringers were ready to drink the alehouse dry. The churches echoed with prayers for Elizabeth, with defiance of the Pope, and the righteous triumph of the true Church. London erupted in noise, the Tower guns fired a salute heard at Whitehall, bonfires blazed on every open space, and as night fell, the sky was lit red with their flames and rained golden showers of fireworks.
As usual the Accession Day Tilt was held at Whitehall; as usual the Queen sat in the gallery to watch. Behind her stood the Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, Sir Walter Raleigh, watching the tilt, and Her Majesty, with a cynical eye. The void left by Essex had not been filled. Cumberland and Sussex lacked the flamboyance and heedless accumulation of debt. Old Sir Henry Lee, retired twelve years, had been resurrected to be one of the judges, but he was seventy and doddered, and it saddened the Queen to see her Laelius so aged. She did not want to be seventy. If great Leicester were alive, Raleigh pondered, he would be an old man. Raleigh’s own hair was grey.
Sir Robert Dudley rode into the lists. Sir Robert Dudley was fair and good-looking, but the fact that he was Robert’s son meant little to the Queen. He was Douglas Howard’s bastard.
Elizabeth’s mind went back to other days in the tiltyard at Whitehall. The first time Robert had worn her favour, when she dropped her handkerchief to lure him. She laughed out loud. Raleigh, watching her, thought that he had heard the bells ring in the 17 November for the last time. The Queen was not ill but she was frail, and failing in small ways that unobservant people missed.
Elizabeth looked happy. Her mouth, sunken for lack of teeth, wore a gentle expression, her eyes, half-veiled, pensive, watched some scene below, though whether it was the same scene that others saw, one could not say. Next year, Raleigh thought, will bring a different Accession Day.
In early December, the Queen was entertained by her Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, at his new house in the Savoy. There was a mask of Astraea’s Shrine, where a picture was unveiled. Afterwards, Cecil took her to see it close. He was smaller than she, even with her bent back and recalcitrant legs. She knew he hated her calling him pygmy, and knew it was cruel, but she had never felt it necessary to woo him. She had not wooed his father much, either, but William had been given her respect and affection.
Robert Cecil revealed his picture, in which he had invested a considerable sum. Whoever was that — that full-faced, prim-mouthed young lady, with long golden ringlets, bosom bared to the nipples, plumply suggestive? Fantastic robes, and ruffs, and towering headdress. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt? But no, it was Elizabeth, a rainbow in her hand. Non sine sole iris, written in letters of gold. The peace-bringer. A robe of orange-tawny satin, painted with ears and eyes and mouths. Eyes, ears and mouths had been this Queen’s servants, her woman’s weapons of war. Up one arm wound Minerva’s jewelled serpent of wisdom, holding in his mouth a ruby heart upon a short chain. Thus had this Queen kept her woman’s passions enchained.
Her doublet was that of Flora, fresh with English flowers. This interested Elizabeth enough for her to peer closer, at pink and rose, eglantine and honeysuckle, heartsease, cowslip and woodland acorns. She lifted short-sighted eyes. That headdress exceeded anything she had ever actually worn, and she had worn a good few amazing devices. It held an imperial crown, topped by a crescent moon. This was the Empress of the Golden Age, the Virgin Queen. This Queen they had made immortal, not like herself. That frail old body they would allow to die.
‘Her sun, Mr Cecil, is surely in the east,’ was Elizabeth’s comment. She was past the age when she could flatter. The picture was very fine, and that was that. The conceit would have pleased her better if reality had not given her twinges in her joints and dimmed her eyes.
*
A gull perched upon the prow of the Queen’s barge. But he did not want a passage to Richmond, and he flew away, a flash of white like a handkerchief waved in farewell.
The wind was from the north-east, enough to turn the heart to ice, the rain half sleet. But the cabin of the barge was enclosed with glass, like a house of ice. Inside, the windows steamed up, because of their breath, and because of the charcoal stove and footwarmers. The Queen wore a muff of black velvet, lined with carnation plush, her only concession to January. She would not wear her furs.
As she sat, there was not even enough of her to fill her clothes. Her back was curved now, a chain of knobs like buttons ran all the way down. Her arms were very thin, and though they could still move briskly, her hands could not keep pace with them. The right one would take up the pen sometimes, but then find writing too painful. Had she lost the power of the pen? Nonsense, what were secretaries for? But her pen had made such beautiful shapes upon the paper.
The left hand was naked in her muff Her coronation ring had been taken off her finger, filed off, because the flesh had swelled around it, and the doctor said it was that or lose the finger. It felt naked. She kept trying to flex it, because it felt as she would if out in the street in her smock. It would not flex much.
Lady Warwick sat at her feet on one side, Lady Scrope on the other, while Lady Southwell, Kate Carey’s daughter, reheated footwarmers. Kate Carey, Lady Nottingham, was not there; she was sick, dying, her cousin Harry Hunsdon’s daughter. Sometimes it was difficult to keep track of the generations.
‘Mrs Ashley is not here,’ said Elizabeth, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Her ladies looked at her anxiously. Ann Russell, little Lady Warwick, long a widow herself, held her hand inside the muff.
‘No Madam, she is not. But I am here.’ She did not think Elizabeth was wandering, but her head was thick with a cold, and she did have this tendency to slip her generations.
Lady Scrope, Philadelphia Carey, Kate’s sister, held her other hand. These Carey girls were her cousins, her Boleyn family in the second and third generation. They all looked different. What were Boleyn looks? Elizabeth could not remember a single feature of her mother, and the portraits she had seen were indifferent. Yet one of them was not unlike herself, though she wore a Tudor mask over the likeness. Her mother had never known what it was to grow old, to feel the body fail, to know the cruelty of the mirror.
Elizabeth looked out of the windows as she sat. The steam obscured everything, but it did not matter, for she saw the Thames more clearly in memory. The journey was so familiar; she knew it in every season, every hour and tide. The perpetual motion of water under sunshine and cloud, evenings of liquid gold, nights of fireworks. A dancing river. They had all known this river, Anne Boleyn when she had gone to Hampton Court, HAs and love knots painted on her barge. Those were the easiest knots in the world to untie. There had been music as Henry VIII went by, and Will Somers his jester, with a monkey chattering on his shoulder.
There should be music now.
‘Let the lute play,’ Elizabeth said. She had been given a lute for a New Year gift, a lute inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold. The fingers of her right hand could no longer play a lute.
They were out of hearing of the church bells of Lambeth, pealing for the Queen going on the river. The fields of Chelsea were waterlogged and wintry. By May Day they would spring green again, and cuckoo buds gild the banks, and lady’s smock blanket the pastures. The morning dew with a chain of footsteps, leading to a wedding. Her own steps had always led her away from weddings. Her days of walking in the dew were over. May Day was not a day for being old on. She did not want to see another.
The lute player’s fingers plucked strings of memory. She did not hear the notes of a modern composer, but the words of the poet Wyatt, written when Time’s hours were young.
‘My lute, awake! Perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute be still, for I have done.
‘Perchance thee lie withered and old,
The winter nights that are so cold,
Plaining in vain unto the moon;
Thy wishes then dare not be told;
Care then who list, for I have done.
‘And then may chance thee to repent
The time that thou hast lost and spent,
To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon;
Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,
And wish and want as I have done.’
‘Be still,’ said Elizabeth, and the lute player ceased, with a soft, uncaring little twangle. The song was sung, and past now.
Elizabeth took one hand from her muff and wiped steam from the window. That must be the tower of Mortlake Church. Once she had ridden to Mortlake from Richmond to look into Dr Dee’s magic mirror. In it, he told her, you could see past, present and future all at once. Robert had been there; he had lifted her down from her horse by the churchyard wall and she had looked into the mirror. It was of some shiny, black stone, and Dee said an angel had brought it to him.
‘Do you see past, present and future?’ Robert had asked.
Elizabeth had looked into the mirror. She saw, as one did in mirrors, a reflected image of herself. She considered Robert’s question for a moment, then, divining Dee’s meaning, smiled.
‘Yes.’
‘What does Your Majesty see?’
‘Why, past, present and future, all in one!’ She had laughed, and he never found out what she saw.
Dee might have seen angels and realms beyond the sky, but for her the lesson was simpler. Past had made her, present she was, and future, what was left of it, she would be. Semper eadem.
They swept down past Isleworth Ait soon, beside Syon, where whistle pipe and viol had sent guests cavorting in country dances at Robin Dudley’s wedding. She too had danced ‘Hey Jolly Robin’, once upon a time. Her legs, so neat an ankle in a stocking of finest knitted silk, so narrow and neat. Now her legs made her shudder. She avoided looking at them, as if thus they might be denied the status of her extremities. Wasted and skinny and scaly as a lizard’s where the ulcer had been — all purple and blotchy. How her father must have hated those traitors, his legs.
‘Oh, Robin,’ she murmured, ‘jolly Robin.’ But her ladies thought she sighed for Essex.
At last, the turrets and singing weather vanes of Richmond. Her grandfather had been Earl of Richmond, and rode a white horse. Owen’s crown — England’s crown. That was her past, present and future. In the place where she was going, she might wear a crown among the angels, but a crown of a different kind, incorruptible. She held up her half-crippled right hand. Sometimes the familiar loops and twirls of ‘Elizabeth’ were beyond its power. The word which spelled life, or death, or, too often, deceit.
Here is my hand, my dear lover England,
I am thine both with mind and heart,
For ever to endure,
Thou mayest be sure,
Until death us two do part.
The wedding ring had to be cut away, but she had always been England’s bride. Wedding had after all been her destiny. One mistress and no master had been right. None but Elizabeth.
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