Elizabeth I (10 page)

I kept my armor on even after the soldiers had been dismissed back to their quarters. In the officers' pavilion, a mumbling group of leaders circled nervously around me, dropping one by one to their knees to do obeisance. Their usual hearty demeanor was subdued, and some had tears in their eyes. Would no one break this spell? For I felt I could not breathe again as a mortal until someone did.

Jack Norris, the plain speaker, did. “Three cheers for Her Majesty, a prince and better than a king!” he cried. The cheers resounded, the glasses clinked, and we were on earth again.

Leicester stood by my side, his eyes beholding me like a stranger. “I have known you since childhood,” he said in a low voice. “But now I know I never shall know all of you. What I heard today I never could have imagined.” He reached out for my hand, bent, and kissed it. “No one who was there will ever forget it. And I shall have copies made so all can savor it in all its meaning.”

“It is your day as well, my friend, my brother. I am grateful beyond words that this supreme moment was our moment together.” God, who had not permitted us to have any other life together but a public one, had crowned it with today's glory and let us share it as one. Our eyes locked together and said more than our inadequate words ever could. This unique and irreplaceable moment had sealed our lifelong bond.

Refreshments were spread out on a long table, but I had no appetite. Would I ever feel hunger again? Had the adoration and utter trust of my people satisfied all lacks within me? The rest of the company, however, fell on the meats, cakes, and flagons with unbridled gusto.

While the men were busy eating, the Earl of Cumberland sought me out. But at the sight of him, people flocked to hear the latest.

“At the height of your address, Your Majesty, I received a dispatch. The Armada succeeded in reassembling itself—”

A groan went up.

“—but they were shaken by the experience with the fireships the night before, and the fiercest battle of the war so far is even now being fought at Gravelines, off the Flanders coast. Word is that we have the upper hand and are pressing them hard. The main problem we have is the very real possibility of running out of ammunition. Some of the Spanish ships have already been blown into the North Sea and out of the Channel altogether. The rest are still fighting but drifting closer to the sandbanks. It looks as if they are a spent force.”

“Is it too soon to declare victory?” asked Henry Norris.

“Yes. They might regroup and return. It depends on the wind. If it continues blowing north, they cannot.”

“What of Parma?”

Cumberland shook his head. “I was told that, even if the Armada has passed him by, he plans to embark his army on the flat-bottomed transports he already has and float them over to England on the coming high tide. He can't get out of the estuaries in low water, but a high tide will answer that problem.”

Walsingham hung over me. “You must return immediately to London,” he said. “You must not be here when he arrives with his fifty thousand men!”

Did the man not understand? I fixed him with a sharp look. “My dear secretary, how can I leave? Did I not just promise, less than two hours ago, that I would lay down my life in the dust? Did I not claim to have the courage and resolve of a king of England? What would it say of my word if I turned tail and ran at even a hint of danger? I think foul scorn of
you
, sir!”

I meant it. Better to die here, standing firm, than to run away, than to betray my own words almost as soon as I had uttered them. The world respected the Trojans, the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Jews at Masada, Cleopatra facing the Romans. It did not respect cowards.

His sallow face grew even darker and, muttering to himself, he turned back to the food table.

“We stand here with you,” said Leicester, and Essex, who had joined him.

“As do we,” said the Norrises, father and son.

“We do, too,” said Marjorie and Catherine. “We women are no cowards.”

W
e watched. We waited. A thousand rumors flew over the whole of Europe. The Armada had won. Parma had landed. Drake was dead—or captured, or had his leg blown off. Hawkins and the
Victory
had gone to the bottom of the sea. Across England, too, the rumors flew. But Parma never rode over on that spring tide; it came and went without him.

No one knew what had happened to the Armada. Admiral Howard and the English fleet had chased it as far north as the Firth of Forth in Scotland, near Edinburgh. When it kept going, our ships turned back. They knew what awaited the Armada when it attempted to loop over the top of Scotland and then head south to Spain, skirting Ireland. The fierce seas and rocks in that inhospitable sea would destroy it. It destroyed even ships whose captains knew the waters, and these did not.

That is exactly what happened. While the Spanish were ordering Masses of thanksgiving in their cathedrals for the glorious victory of the Armada, it was being wrecked, ship by ship, on the rocky western coast of Ireland. Almost thirty ships met their doom there, and the few sailors who managed to struggle ashore were killed by either native Irish or English agents. All told, seventy or so ships did not return to Spain, and those that did were in such ruinous state they were worthless. By contrast, we did not lose a single ship.

It was September before the first bits of this information reached King Philip, who was puzzled. “I hope God has not permitted such evil, for everything has been done for his service,” was all he said.

But God had sent his winds to aid England instead.

We celebrated. Church bells rang for days. Ballads were composed. Commemorative medals were struck. Services of thanksgiving were held all across the land.

In Lisbon, a street cry gloated over the Spanish defeat:

Oh, we did. And we knew the names of all our own ships, and all our heroes. We even had an eighty-nine-year-old captain who had commanded his ship in Howard's squadron so well that he was knighted for bravery on the deck by the admiral himself. Such was the stuff
our
men were made of.

For the first month, I was lifted high on a cloud of exhilaration. It was beyond normal time, something extraordinary. It was as if I had only just now been born, learned to see, hear, taste and smell and feel. All my senses were heightened, to an almost painful degree. There are places far to the north in Norway and Sweden where in the summer it never grows dark. They say that during those weeks the people don't need sleep, that they exist in an extreme state of animation. Such were the weeks for me just after the threat of the Armada lifted.

We were preparing for a service of national thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral. The banners Drake had captured from the
Nuestra Señora del Rosario
flagship would be dedicated, a mirror image of the service when the pope had blessed the Armada's flagship banner. I wondered if it even survived and, if so, where they would hide it away in shame.

The pope, however, in keeping with his vigorous peasant mind, seemed to delight in the outcome, as if he had never opposed it. In Rome, he declared, “Elizabeth is certainly a great queen, and were she only a Catholic, she would be our dearly beloved daughter. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all!” When his assistant chided him for his endorsement, he cried, “If only I was free to marry her. What a wife she would make! What children we would have! They would have ruled the whole world.” He sighed.

“Your Holiness,” the priest objected, “you are speaking of the archenemy of the church!”

“Ummm.” Then he blurted out, “Drake—what a great captain!”

I suspected it was a case of one pirate respecting another.

When Robert Dudley related this story to me, we laughed together.

“He seems to have forgotten his principles, if ever he had any,” said Dudley. “Of course, he is probably relieved not to have to make good on his promise of a million ducats to Philip. I trust you are not tempted to become Mrs. Sixtus?”

“Well ... you know I fancy adventurers,” I said. Then I slid into seriousness. There were things that must be said. “Robert, the question of marriage—it has always been there between us. The big questions have all been answered, and we have learned to live with those answers.” I looked straight into his eyes. “Nothing can separate us now.”

Our bond had survived the ghost of his first wife, Amy, the strong earthly presence of his second wife, Lettice, and my dedicated virginity.

He took my hand. “No. Nothing can.”

I clasped his hand in both of mine. “Friend, brother, heart of my heart,” I said.

Then we dropped our hands. Someone had entered the work chamber.

Burghley limped in. “Has he told you about Sixtus's comments?”

Dudley nodded, and I said, “They are amusing.”

“Most likely not to Philip,” Burghley said. “He is brooding and this will sour him further. But these dispatches”—he waved several letters—“confirm what I have heard. Your Majesty, you are now the most respected ruler in Europe. The King of France praises you and says”—he opened one of the letters and stabbed at it with his finger—“that your victory ‘would compare with the greatest feats of the most illustrious men of past times.' Even the Ottoman sultan has sent congratulations.”

“Perhaps he'll send a eunuch as a gift?” I laughed.

“And the Venetian ambassador in Paris”—another letter—“writes that the queen did not ‘lose her presence of mind for a single moment, nor neglected aught that was necessary for the occasion. Her acuteness in resolving the action, her courage in carrying it out, show her high-spirited desire for glory and her resolve to save her country and herself.' ”

“I did not do it alone,” I said. “Without my sailors, without my army, without my councillors, I would now be chained before Sixtus, not joking about his marriage proposal.”

My head was ringing with all the praise bestowed upon me. Take care, I told myself, that the head grows not larger than the crown. It was time to put compliments aside. “My dear senior councillor,” I said to Burghley, “I trust you will join us at Whitehall for the celebratory military review?”

He demurred. “I have seen enough soldiers the last few months.”

“Ah, but there will be jousting as well.”

“Spare me.” He winced. “It's a big bore.”

“You are wise but not always diplomatic. Very well, then. We shall not look for you. But Leicester and I will be in the gallery, if you change your mind.”

The afternoon was the best an English summer could offer. The sky was not pitilessly bright but was softened by the fluffy clouds of August. The air held us in a warm embrace. Seated in the gallery overlooking the tiltyard, Leicester and I waited to see the military review of the company that the Earl of Essex had raised for Tilbury. He had done it at his own expense, and now was adding more expense by sponsoring this display.

Settling himself, Leicester gave a violent shiver. Even on this warm day, he reached for a cloak to wrap around himself. Seeing me eyeing him, he said, “I fear my old tertian fever has returned. It is making me quite miserable. I missed going to Buxton for the waters at my normal time because King Philip made another appointment for me.”

“As soon as this is over, you must go,” I said. “The national thanksgiving service will not be held until November, at the thirty-year anniversary of my accession. You must be cured by then.”

“If that is an order, I must obey,” he said. “But I am loath to leave London now, with all the joy and celebration.”

“It is an order.” I had noticed that he seemed unwell, sometimes unsteady on his feet. I was relieved to have an explanation for it.

“Oh, look! Here he is!” Leicester pointed to Essex coming out into the tiltyard, followed by his men, all wearing the tawny and white Devereux livery. They marched over to the window of the gallery and all saluted me, Essex with the grandest flourish.

Then the tilting began, and Essex led off, jousting with the Earl of Cumberland. I looked over at Leicester. It had been many years since he had ridden likewise, but my mind supplied the image of it. Young, straight, strong, with gleaming red glints in his hair—this is what I saw. But the man beside me today was white haired, wheezing, and shivering. He needed the healing waters of Buxton.