Elizabeth I (18 page)

“Mother?” he asked as I stood silently with my thoughts.

All my sharpness drained away. I had no rapier to thrust into him. I was overwhelmed with sadness and disappointment, with, yes—defeat. “Oh, Robert,” I said. “Why?”

“That was
her
question,” he said.

“Not for the first time, then, we think alike,” I said. “And what answer did you give Her Majesty?”

“I could not give the true one,” he said. “That having made her pregnant, I must now marry her.”

“Must history always repeat itself in our family?”

“Your father looked after your virtue when you were in Frances's condition, and Walsingham, on his deathbed, glanced balefully at me—what was I to do? His widowed daughter was expecting—would be disgraced.”

“Yes, we widows have a difficult time of it when our bellies swell, after our husbands have been in heaven a good long time already.” I looked at my handsome son once again. “I am sure his looks were baleful, since his whole skin was yellow. But without belaboring the point, I must ask—why? Why did you seek her bed at all?”

“Do you mean, without belaboring the point that you were—are—beautiful and Frances is not? Your modesty was always one of your most becoming traits, Mother.”

“Never mind my looks, that isn't what I meant—I meant her prospects, what she brings to the marriage.”

“Her dowry, as it were?”

“If you must put it that way, yes. Everyone has a dowry, unspoken or not, invisible or not. And mine was not my face—there are girls here in Drayton Bassett with prettier faces, but you'll never see an earl pursuing them to the altar. In fairy fantasies, yes, but not in the world of the Tudor court.”

“So it wasn't your face. Are you going to tell me what it was? Or would that be unseemly, to describe the lure of a courtesan to her son?”

What a naïf he was! I laughed. “First your line of sight is on the face, then it descends to the seat of Venus. Neither one is much of a dowry. Look elsewhere, to the practical—to lineage and fortune.”

But of course a noble knight was not supposed to do that. He was supposed to think only of love, and of beauty. After that, of duty. Robert looked puzzled.

“I speak of bloodlines, power, and money. What else is there in a dowry?”

“I fail to see how you provided any of those in your own dowry.”

“Then your education is faulty, for which I blame myself. Let me rectify that.” I took a deep breath. Where common sense is present, this should not need explaining. “Bloodlines: I am at the very least the Queen's near cousin.... Some say more than a cousin; some say my mother was the Queen's half-sister. But that is gossip, impossible to prove. Power: My father is a trusted Privy Councillor, high in the Queen's esteem, and has been for almost her entire reign—over thirty years. My first husband, your father, was an earl, and his family had risen to prominence under the Tudors. The only thing I lacked was money. But court entrée or position can be used as earnest for money.”

Was he following this? Did I have to draw it for him? He was jutting his chin out in the way he did when he wanted to be stubborn.

“Whereas Frances”—I hoped she was not listening anywhere—“has no notable family. Her father, rest his soul, achieved his position all by himself, by remarkable industry and cleverness. Admirable. But he came from nowhere and his family is back in nowhere. With his death, all power at court ended for them. And money! He was so in debt you know he had to be buried at night, for fear his creditors would swoop down upon his funeral procession if it were held in the daylight. So he could not even afford a simple funeral. In marrying his daughter, you have married only obligations and no future benefits. She's sweet and will be loyal. Had you had no money worries, that would be enough. A rich earl could afford her. The poorest earl in England—for that's what you are—cannot. And now you have thrown away your chance to improve your fortunes by that time-honored method, an advantageous marriage!”

“It seems to me that you are at least as disappointed that your own fortunes will not rise as you are that mine are stranded.”

“We are a family, and our fortunes are one. But you are wrong. I am more distraught about you, because your life is just starting, and to start with angering the Queen makes for a poor prognosis. You could have risen high, higher than anyone else at court. Now—?”

“Then I'll content myself with the quiet life,” he said. “Many virtuous men recommend it highly. As Henry Howard wrote,

“Where did you learn that? Cambridge? Well, Henry Howard was executed for treason. I would not trust his wisdom!”

Y
our Glorious Majesty's Accession Day, ever may we hold it upon the highest altar of our thankfulness.” Archbishop Whitgift bent low, so that the top of his miter was pointing at me like an accusatory finger.

“Oh, John.” I sighed. “Pray straighten yourself up.”

He seemed to unfurl himself, one vertebra at a time, until he was at full height, looking sternly at me. His new celebratory robes, ordered for the upcoming commemoration, glittered with embroidery and gold thread. “Your Majesty, I am not jesting. The words in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating your coming to the throne, are not exaggerated. ‘We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for that thou wast pleased, on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, upon the throne of this realm. Let her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and prosperous.' ”

“It has been long, John, it has been long, and who could have foreseen that? As for prosperous, we do not do badly considering we are a little island with no gold. My gold is my people. The prayer is correct; I want always to possess that gold. And as it is not carried on ships, it is not liable to theft by the Spanish as is the other kind.”

“Still, the Spanish will rob you of that love if they can,” he warned.

“The way to keep my people's love is never to take it for granted,” I said. “But tomorrow, as ritual and custom decree, you will preside over the service celebrating my Accession Day and recite that very prayer in St. Paul's. And the bells will toll, as they do every year, the trumpets and cornets will sound from the cathedral rooftop, cannons will boom from the Tower, and people all over England will light bonfires and take a holiday. You will come to the tilts here at Whitehall, will you not? They promise to be more spectacular than ever.”

“I find the tilts too ... pagan,” he said.

“Oh, surely not pagan,” I said. “King Arthur, after all, had knightly contests, and he was a most Christian king.”

“I mean the extravagance, the vanity, the display ....” He shook his head. “The poor—”

“Ye have with ye always,” I finished for him. “Even Jesus said, ‘You can help them any time you wish. But not on Accession Day.' ”

“I do not believe those were his exact words, Your Majesty.”

I laughed. “What? Do you mean that Christ did not observe my day?”

He scowled, unable to jest. Whitgift's stiffness, his aloofness, made him unpopular. His theology suited me, but his personality was so dour.

“In any case,” I continued, “your own raiment is so dazzling Essex would take second place to you. He would be crushed. Some might even accuse
you
of vain display—unfairly, of course.”

Another sore point. Whitgift's high church trappings had earned him the nickname of “Pope,” and he liked to be accompanied by a retinue. But I liked my clergy to look like clergy, my priests to look like priests. If that made me popish, so be it. Unfortunately, this only angered the plain-scrubbed Puritans and tantalized the crypto-Catholics.

It was almost impossible to balance these two contesting parties. Alone of all Protestants, the Church of England had come into being by royal decree, not by a popular movement. When my father broke from Rome, he never broke from his basic conservatism in ritual and formalities, and thus retained many of the old Catholic usages. It was an odd, tense marriage between inward Protestant theology and outward Catholic trappings. Much of my reign was troubled by these turbulent currents. My person, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, held them together, but not easily. The compromise I had enacted at the beginning of my reign had not satisfied all.

“I shall absent myself,” Whitgift said.

“You will miss a good show. Ah, well, then, ring the bells all the louder, and pray all the harder for me. I have needed prayers to sustain me all the thirty-two years I have sat on the throne, and will need them all the more from now on.”

After he departed, I thought of those first moments when I had become Queen, the day so long ago now enshrined and encapsulated and turned into a holy day.

People were relieved when I became Queen. I had been popular with the people, but primarily because they disliked the reign of my sister. She was half Spanish and married to a foreigner. I was seen as “mere English,” fully one of them, and my looks recalled my father's in his prime. In retrospect, his time was seen as a golden era. They wanted it back.

The rejoicings that first Accession Day were spontaneous; as the years went on, they grew increasingly more ritualistic and scripted. In the two years since the Armada, they had become rather disturbingly idolatrous. They had now been extended to St. Elizabeth's Day, two days later, and dedicated to Armada celebrations.

I did not instigate any of these things, but neither did I forbid them. Still, the excesses of the celebrations were making even me a bit uneasy.

At high noon on November 17 I and my honored guests walked to the tilt gallery, a long room at one end of the course, where we could see the whole tiltyard, its barrier cutting like a razor down its middle, its pennants fluttering in the brisk wind. Beyond the barricades were stands and scaffolds where the common people, for a fee, could watch. An immense roar rose as the people saw me passing through the open air, just before we mounted the stairs and entered the gallery. I stood and waved at them, letting them know I welcomed them.

I had my favorite ladies around me—Marjorie Norris, Catherine Carey and her sister Philadelphia, Helena van Snakenborg. They were all autumnal ladies, being of that mature age I liked to say bestows wisdom and others say bestows wrinkles. The younger ones—I despair of them. They seem lacking in character, flighty, obsessed with men. I need young ones about me, lest it be said that my court is no longer a magnet for the best in beauty, strength, and wit, but they irritate me. Today I made them sit farther back, behind the people of note. Flanking me on one side was the French ambassador, on the other, Robert Cecil.

The fanfare sounded, announcing the entry of the first pair of contestants. Like everything else at court, it was not simple. First a pageant car with its theme must make its way around the course, then the servants of the men mount the stairs and present their masters' decorated shields and read a poem proclaiming the theme—usually allegorical, of course. In this case, the first pair was Sir Henry Lee, my personal tilt champion, master of ceremony of the annual tilt, versus George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. Henry had been my champion for twenty years now. I settled myself back as he came into the tiltyard, drawn in a cart decorated with crowns and wilting vines. Then he stepped out and made his way over to me, bowing low. He himself was covered in drooping, limp greenery. A buzz arose from the stands.

“Your Most Gracious Majesty,” he said, “the time has come when I must yield up my tilt staff. I am a vine withered in age by royal service.” He fingered one of the dying vines, evoking laughter. “Here, I present to you my successor, who I pray finds favor with you—the Earl of Cumberland.” Just behind him came the pageant car of the earl, representing his family castle, with the earl dressed in dazzling white.

Sir Henry Lee was my age—fifty-seven! And was there a person in the arena who would not be aware of this? I stiffened.

“As you can see, I am bent and overtaken by age,” he said. “The years have taken their toll, robbed me—”

I waved him to silence. “Go about your tilt,” I said. “Now.”

I was shaking with anger. The fool. If he had wearied of managing the tilts—which was a taxing job—why had he not come to me in private? Staging such a reminder of his age was impolitic. And if he was so old, why did he still indulge his lusts with the young women of my chamber? Yes, I knew about his little forays, his assignations with Anne Vavasour, among others. I'll warrant he did not remind
them
of his drooping vines, or drooping anything else.