Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  The offstage military advance was getting so loud that Ginny could only hear this commentary by Elizabeth and others courtesy of her hearing aid.

  When the TV camera, held aloft by the eagle that was gulping down some unidentified prey as it concentrated on its task, zoomed onto him, Sir Walter added, “Then, English ships had been designed for raids and war. Our priority was speed and armaments—not carrying long distance cargoes of gold from the New World. That was the Spanish obsession.”

  Now the advancing sound was unmistakeable: a veritable battalion of orchestra instruments. It was a crescendo all right. But was it a march? “No,” thought Ginny. The rhythm had a lilt, a jerky rhythm with sudden short silences and way beyond orthodox 4/4 time. It made everyone itchy, enticing them to get up and move.

  Until then, Mary Tudor had always thought Elizabeth did better in the publicity stakes by her power dressing and her emphasis on looks over substance. Now she was to learn that getting the Spanish eagle to control the TV pictures and choose the best angles to cover the Armada was no match for Lizzie’s words and Geoffrey Chaucer’s comments. As ever, the writer to expose the gulf between truth and spin, emcee Chaucer said laconically, “Whatever the words of bravado on both sides, the actual battle of the Armada turned out to be an anti-climax—not really a battle at all. Look at the map.”

  He pointed to the abbey floor. Scraps of paper had been folded to become competing ships. Ginny told Georgie that the Japanese word for paper folded into decorations was origami. These paper ships on the abbey floor now separated into English and Spanish fleets.

  Geoffrey Chaucer explained, “On 14 July 1588, the double Armada comprised 140 ships.” He added, “Between 20 and 27 July, the two fleets sailed up the English Channel but,”—and he said this with a contented smile—“the ships of one of the commanders, the duke of Parma, were not ready. They anchored off Calais with 27,000 troops where the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to adverse weather. Don’t be surprised. You can always rely on English weather to be unreliable. I’m sure you know that by now,” he said as an aside for the benefit of his American guests.

  “And this unsettled weather aided Dutch Protestants with sporadic attacks on the Armada,” explained Sir Walter with glee. “On 28 July, we English sent in eight fire ships to enlighten the Spanish.” He stressed the word enlighten lest his meaning should escape anyone. “This sparked a first, partial scattering of the Armada. It was then damaged by gunfire.”

  As if on cue, the paper ships on the floor divided into rival flotillas and scattered. Then some broke into flames.

  Ginny thought all this information was too detailed for Georgie. Surely, he must be nodding off. It seemed even Mary Tudor must be having the same reaction for Mary was now swaying to the menacing music as in a trance. Ginny realised that Mary was purring, no longer worried that she had lost her pro-Armada argument. She was using her arms to cradle herself in a sort of personal dance with—could it be?—a Latin American lilt—a habanera or a rumba—while standing still.

  Dance—yes, that was it. Was the music a fandango, a seguidilla, a tango, a bolero? It was certainly Spanish or maybe Latin American. Ginny looked around. Everyone around her was swaying this way and that. The younger, lither animals had started jiving and twisting. The older, bulkier animals contented themselves with hand jives. At the end of one climatic phrase, the offstage advancing troops cried out, “Mambo!”

  Suddenly wide awake again, Mary looked at Ginny sharply and said matter-of-factly, “You’re wondering what the music is, aren’t you? It’s the ‘Wedding Samba’.”

  Ginny thought but did not say, “If this is dancing, it’s dancing to defeat.”

  The crescendo of drums and what surely must be a full modern orchestra had reached its final climax when the advancing troops shouted, “Ole!” The final musical crash was deafening. With one loud exclamation, the tremendous sound was silenced—almost, Ginny thought, like an immense musical candle being snuffed out by a gasp of threatening wind.

  Katherine of Valois had stood by patiently during all this. Now she showed everyone that she was au courant with foreign affairs. To camera, she kindly gave the audience yet more historical detail:

  “And so, the Armada escaped into the North Sea proper where it sailed around the east coast of England and up and around the upper coast of Scotland and down between the coasts of Ireland and the west coast of England and Wales.”

  To illustrate Katherine’s explanation, Chaucer pointed out details of land and sea. And the paper ships on the abbey floor obeyed this account as he concluded, “England lost only about 100 men in the fighting. More died from disease. Spain lost 12,000 men and a third of its great Armada.”

  And at these words, Westminster Abbey itself seemed to widen. It was as if the youngsters and the little animals were not looking at something in conventional movie-frame proportions but wider in landscape-proportioned Cinemascope. Elizabeth I now stood in the middle of the accidental map on the floor. She was an outsize figure in a resplendent costume. Ginny noticed that Elizabeth’s puffed-up sleeves were decorated with pink-beige bows.

  “How girlie,” Georgie thought. But he said nothing.

  Chaucer said satirically, “Only on 18 August after England was safe did Elizabeth go to join her troops at Tilbury.”

  Geoffrey Chaucer also sensed Georgie’s disappointment at the lack of spectacle. He said nicely, “Georgie, forget all the legends—especially those about Sir Francis Drake and his game of bowls at Plymouth Hoe. The onion here is our English weather. Philip II overreached himself and the English weather made him pay a heavy price.”

  The offstage dance music had evaporated and the impromptu dancing onstage had come to an end.

  A consummate PR pro, the Virgin Queen now spoke also to camera for a close up, whether the eagle was recording her or not:

  “I am come to live or die among you all, and to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,”—said with a sultry swagger like the femme fatale Mary Stuart could no longer be—“but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too.”

  “Typical royalty,” cooed Geoffrey Chaucer from the side. “Her Majesty of Caution comes onstage to brave danger when the danger has already passed.”

  At this, the queen slapped one of her non-existent thighs to underline her points. Georgie was surprised to see dust rise from her skirt like a mini cloud, as if Elizabeth’s costume (far from being conjured up from splintered bones) had been stored in an old chest for centuries where it had gathered lots of grime.

  Mary Tudor, now awake again, said quietly to Ginny and Georgie, “Each year, she always repeats these words and always without any horse. You know she can’t bear anything to draw attention away from her, not any child, not a pet animal, not even a horse.”

  “But she had an ermine with her on one of her frocks,” protested Georgie.

  “Yes, but she considers the young ermine a fashion accessory, not a living being,” Mary answered back.

  Chaucer asked Sir Walter, “And what would you say were the lasting consequences of the farrago of the Armada?”

  “Well, Philip II never got to Plan B of his grand design: occupation of England. It would be many years before any foreign power would risk invading England. Queen Elizabeth gained immense popularity through people’s widely held belief that it was she who had saved England from invasion. She had survived.”

  “You can say that again,” said Mary Tudor. “Yes, Lizzie is a survivor. She survived herself.”

  “Say what you like,” countered Elizabeth. “I’m the undisputed queen of this genre.”

  “Which is?” rasped the Spanish eagle on behalf of Mary Tudor.

  “Victory at Sea.”

  “Not even Mary Stuart would tell such a whopper,” Mary Tudor cried out. “You don’t control the seas any more than King Canute. That’s the English weather.
”

  Smiling away unconcerned at this jibe, Elizabeth I was still centre stage. Now she had her right hand on a globe. Ginny recalled that this costume was what Elizabeth had worn for her Armada portrait. Elizabeth was almost caressing the globe. A large pearl dangled from a chain on her neck. Turning to Ginny, Elizabeth said, rather like an affectionate old aunt, “The pearl symbolises chastity as do the colours and decorations of my elegant sleeves.”

  This was Ginny’s first complete sight of the Virgin Queen at her most splendid. She was overwhelmed, especially by Elizabeth’s gorgeous auburn hair. Without any sense of mischief, Ginny asked, “Ma’am, your appearance is lovely. How long does it take to do your hair?”

  Without any self-deprecation, Elizabeth I answered simply, “I don’t know. I’m never there.”

  “As ever, she has no sense of irony,” thought Mary Tudor who, for once, knew it would be better to say nothing. Philip II had lost the war and Mary knew she had lost history’s retelling of it.

  To draw matters to a close, Chaucer asked Katherine of Valois, “Do you draw any conclusions from all this?”

  “Certainement, mon cher,” answered Katherine without any hesitation.

  “What are they?”

  “That it’s okay to be a queen—provided you’re a nice one.”

  At that, the Spanish eagle dropped the camera and swooped upwards to the ceiling. After closing the hole in the roof with its claws, it disappeared into the midnight sky. Mary I set her face grimly. She took the disappearance of the Spanish eagle as a symbol of the end of her hopes of bringing the English people back to the true Catholic faith. But she was not going to reward her political foes with any tears.

  His part in the little history lesson to his young American friends over, Sir Walter Raleigh bent down and picked up his cloak, folded it into a bundle and carried it away on his shoulder. Ginny was disturbed that she might be losing this prince among pirates yet again. Georgie thought he saw gold objects like cups peering out of the improvised cloak-turned-knapsack as Sir Walter moved away and glanced back.

  Still incensed at the aspersions Sir Walter had cast on her dear Felipe, Mary Tudor said threateningly, “Watch it, sailor.”

  The remaining Armada paper ships were stumbling across the shallow water representing the four seas around the British Isles. Suddenly, the zigzagging paper boats burst into more flames that got bigger and bigger—not so much like fireworks exploding but more like gunpowder fizzling out: the detritus of a failed bomb. The crowd and crew for the TV show had disappeared.

  Lively spirit voices cried out from somewhere. The men sang, “Elizabeth was king.”

  To which women’s voices replied, “Now James is queen.”

  And there, instead of the various queens, stood two men armed with a workman’s hammer and linked together as just one.

  TWO-FOR-ONE: JAMES VI AND I

  Georgie thought this man was an odd-looking fellow as he moved around the chancel. He had a coil of rope twisted around his upper left arm and shoulder and he was bobbing around inspecting this and measuring that. What ‘this’ and ‘that’ were Georgie could not see clearly from the middle of the nave. Sometimes the little fellow disappeared around a corner and then quickly reappeared. Bobbing around him—almost interwoven with him—was the other odd fellow, almost identical to the first. And he had a large bag of what must be pegs slung over his shoulder from which he handed individual pegs to the first worker who then hammered them into the ground one by one as markers.

  As Georgie walked up to the double figures their bobbing about and interweaving became blurred. It was as if Georgie had developed double vision. When Georgie was almost upon the pair, he saw that they were not really two people but one whose head and shoulders kept uniting and dividing. Georgie would never have used such an old-fashioned expression as ‘curiouser and curiouser’—especially since he was with Ginny—but that was what he thought.

  Without any introduction, the workman laid down his tools, looked Georgie up and down with his four eyes and said not unkindly, “Confused, are you, laddie? There’s no need. You see, I am the original Two-For-One. I am James VI of Scotland and James I of England.”

  Georgie saw it was true. For behind the compact body of King James VI of Scotland, a king with brown hair tinged with red, was a look-alike figure. So this was James I of England, distant cousin and successor to Elizabeth I.

  Now standing beside Georgie, Ginny sensed what was coming—not just two characters in one divided person but two heads and two busts. Just as Ginny and Georgie were guessing what might happen next, the king would divide and appear twice. His Scottish upper body seemed strait-laced and confined yet with slightly tousled hair and scruffy clothes. His English persona seemed more sophisticated and composed.

  The young guests also noted two shadowy attendants waiting patiently in the murky background: a lion and a unicorn. Georgie wanted to go straight up to the fabulous unicorn and inspect it but Ginny signalled that this might be thought rude by a king hide-bound by ritual and etiquette. Besides, the double-sided king was diverting enough to compel complete attention.

  As James switched seamlessly from his English to his Scottish persona and back again, the two images changed places—the Scots figure supplanting the English persona and vice versa. When James spoke as king of Scotland, it was with a Scots accent, punctuated with such expressions as ‘Ochs’ and some Scottish burrs. When he spoke as king of England, it was with a Brit-twit accent polished like upper-crust glass so as to make him intelligible to his English courtiers and interspersed with some theatrical, ‘luvvies’, ‘darlings’ and, ‘dear hearts’. Whether English or Scottish, where there was an ‘r’ in a word, James rolled it out with exaggerated relish. Sometimes his two voices spoke to one another.

  Impatient with Georgie’s confused stare, James VI said, “Och, laddie, you’re in a gurney mood. Just like my dear wife, the old bism,” James VI added to his raggedy lion rampant attendant. The weary lion yawned politely. He had heard it all before.

  The sudden resurrection of their Stuart successor was most unwelcome to the two Tudor queens, now obliged to stand aside in the shadows. They tolerated James VI and I holding court with the American youngsters with ill-disguised irritation. But James did not care a whit what the queens regimen thought. These guests were a new audience and most welcome. Speaking with the unchallenged supposition that the only possible reason such advanced young people could possibly have for visiting Westminster Abbey after hours was to sit at his feet, he now assumed they must want to bask in his sunshine.

  “It was the otherwise forgettable Anthony Weldon who said in 1650 that I was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. He wouldn’t have dared to say it to my face in my lifetime,” said James VI. “But, on reflection, I think he did me a favour. He was keeping my reputation—good and bad—alive and bubbling.”

  James I said, “And in that light, what would you say was my greatest achievement? Tell me—just between ourselves now that your criticisms can’t hurt me and I can’t hurt you for making them. Was it surviving the Gunpowder Plot?”

  James VI explained: “That was the explosion and fire you just saw represented on the floor of the abbey. The Gunpowder Plot was the conspiracy of Guy Fawkes and other Catholic terrorists to blow up king, queen and everyone at the state opening of Parliament in 1605. The plot was betrayed by a covert hint in a letter to one of the hundreds of intended victims. In the UK, we celebrate discovery of the plot, the elimination of the terrorists and our survival every November 5th by having a fireworks party and a bang of our own.”

  James I added for good measure, “It was ironic really because I disliked Parliament. My enemies said I misunderstood it.”

  “Besides, I was no stranger to assassination attempts,” said James VI. “Some say that was why I wore larger, padded breeches than were fashionable in the days of Elizabeth—to provide more upholstery between any dagger and my tight ass.”

  Then he jiggled that
very same tight ass.

  “The Gunpowder Plot planned to eliminate the entire political leadership at one fell stroke,” said James I. “Moreover, the explosion would have maimed or killed thousands of Londoners and started fires across the city. The aim was then to use the supposed fiery chaos and reverse the Protestant Reformation that Henry VIII had begun in the 1530s.”

  Ginny dug deeper into the persona of the double-dealing two-faced monarch than Georgie did. She recognised that James was a sharp political operator and one with enough slimy arrogance to bully others into silence when he had made a social gaffe or a political mistake. It was clear to Ginny that, once ensconced in London, King James must have felt free of the rigorous Scottish tutelage by the seemingly endless series of guardian uncles and the po-faced elders of Scottish Presbyterianism that he had endured in youth. He was free at last.

  And so, the two Jameses moved on to their Jacobean achievements.

  “I took as much credit as I could from what later writers called the Renaissance in English literature,” said James I. “And not just on stage but from the pulpit, so to speak, for my part in making the Bible in English a reality.”

  James VI qualified that: “The great scholars and churchmen assigned to this task cribbed from previous English translations that so many of their ilk had derided and sworn against for years beforehand. Sometimes they had burned the pioneer translators. An act of Henry VIII had forbidden people to read pioneer Protestant William Tyndale’s bible. But because there was all this material already available in English (albeit hidden—sort of)—well, that was why the self-important scholars could get their version done in a few short years.”

  “My part was not a disinterested act of royal benevolence,” added James I. “It was a cunning act of royal control—if I do say so myself. Yes, the authorised version of the Bible, aka the King James Bible, is indeed named after me.”

  When the double-faced king went back to his private world of measuring things on the abbey floor, Geoffrey Chaucer was back with the young visitors, parchments once again poking out of crumpled pockets.