Elizabeth I (33 page)

One would think that a physician who attended the Queen would be loyal, but ...

“But just to be sure, should we test his herbs?” asked Catherine, in her smooth, soothing voice.

“I have already done so. I have tested them on myself.”

“What of the new ones he gave you yesterday?”

I had not yet used the anise and saffron he had presented so grandly in the gold box. I asked for it to be brought, and when I held it in my hands I opened the lid and stared down at the contents. The sweet odor of the anise leaped from the box. I longed to put the seeds under my tongue and let their distinctive taste flood my mouth. But I did not.

“There is no person to test it on, and animals cannot be persuaded to eat these things,” I said. So we would never know.

“Having failed in his invasion attempts, and failed in his call for your subjects to rise up against you,” said Marjorie, “Spain's king now turns to the cheaper alternative—assassination. Did not the Duke of Alba himself say that it was pointless to invade unless you were dead?”

“Yes, I was told that,” I said. “But you—and Essex—are linking Lopez and Spain and poison with no proof. Let us hear what Robert Cecil finds when he interrogates this Tinoco.”

“You are reasoned and calm, as always,” said Catherine.

As always, I kept my exterior self calm. But inwardly, I was shaking. I put the box down carefully to avoid jarring the contents.

S
omething was wrong. Our glorious June had been corrupted, pelted by unseasonable deluges of rain and cold, followed by cruel blasts of heat. The natural world did not know how to respond. Flowers opened, then were stripped and frozen. The sweet Thames smelled foul.

To escape from the stench of the river I was at St. James's Palace, set by its hunting grounds. Beyond it stretched open fields, lanes, and pastures, ordinarily a delightful tapestry of waving grass and wildflowers but now waterlogged and empty of butterflies. This day was clear, for a change. That meant that citizens could emerge out of doors to do the things they had postponed—such as carry out, and watch, executions.

Only a mile away, across the fields, stood Tyburn, fast by the road leading out of London to Oxford, the place where convicted criminals were put to death. There was a gallows there, and a sort of table where the condemned could be laid and cut open, according to the sentence of being hanged, then drawn and quartered. On the way to the gallows, the prisoners were jounced along in a cart, hands bound behind them, jeered by onlookers. Often they would stop at a tavern for a last swig of ale; usually by this time the doomed were making jaunty jests. Not for them the long-faced repentance speeches of noblemen seeking to retain their property for their families. These poor souls had nothing to lose and so they went to their deaths in a jolly fashion, thumbing their noses at the gallows.

By the time they reached Tyburn, a huge crowd would have gathered. Parents pretended they brought their children to teach them the grim wages of crime, but in truth they went for entertainment. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the victims fought back (of course they always lost) or even managed to survive the first round of hanging.

The air was still, but I could hear, faintly smothered by distance but still too loud, the roar of a crowd at Tyburn. Dr. Lopez and his companions were being executed. Essex had had his way.

I leaned on the windowsill of my chamber, smelling the odd earthy smell of soaked bricks. St. James's had been a redbrick leper house before my father had evicted the monks and their wards, the lepers, and made it into a hunting palace. Now I felt the sorrow of those mistreated lepers rising up, accusing, wailing along with the crowd at Tyburn. After our meeting, Essex had written a hysterical note to Robert Cecil saying, “I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of the conspiracy was Her Majesty's death. The executioner should have been Dr. Lopez; the manner poison. This I have so followed that I will make it as clear as noonday.” The tangle of confessions that followed, extracted by the rack, made it impossible to spare Dr. Lopez. Under torture he had admitted to spying for Spain, seeking to promote rebellion in England, and planning to poison the Queen. But under torture might not a man say anything? Cecil then claimed that no torture was used. No one could confirm its use—or would admit to it.

The Jew of Malta
was playing to packed audiences in London, with its line “But to present the tragedy of a Jew, who smiles to see how full his bags are crammed” whipping them on to cry for Lopez's blood. Essex paraded through the streets shouting about the diabolical plot by the dastardly Jew, and soon the crowd howled for his death. Anti-Spanish and anti-Jewish hatred blended into hysteria.

The crowd was duly entertained. Dr. Lopez pleaded innocence on the scaffold, saying that he loved the Queen better than Jesus, and was met with howls of derision. Da Gama suffered the same fate, and then Tinoco provided novelty by surviving the hanging, jumping to his feet after being cut down and attacking the executioner. He had no chance, as two soldiers overpowered him and the grisly sentence proceeded.

Robert Cecil recounted all these details when he came to present me with a ring, taken from Dr. Lopez, that had been given him by King Philip himself, to carry out his deed. It was a dainty gold-encircled ruby.

“It looks like a woman's ring,” I said. “Are we sure it is not his wife's?”

“We are sure, Your Majesty, of nothing,” Cecil said, his face glum. “We just dared not take chances.”

“The grotesque necessity of security,” I said. “Or, as the common saying is, ‘Better safe than sorry'? Except, Robert, we were dealing with a man's life. With
men's
lives.”

“Where
your
life is concerned, there can be no leeway, no room for doubt.”

The crowds were milling around outside the grounds of St. James's, still yelling, half of them drunk. I shuddered. Essex had used these people, had created a wave of public hysteria in order to force an issue. I felt instinctively that there was something else behind the entire case against Dr. Lopez, something self-serving for Essex. That he had been able to get this far with it proved to me that he now had a weapon to use against me as potent as poison—he had proved that he could harness popular opinion for his own ends and would not hesitate to do so.

T
here could be no Progress this year. The icy rains fell day after day, far longer than they had fallen upon Noah. That the land did not turn to ocean and require an ark was only because the downpour soaked into our fields, swelled the rivers to rush the water to the ocean, turned ponds into lakes and lakes into inland seas. Unless a plant could grow underwater, the crops were doomed. Fruit trees had bloomed in what started as a normal spring, but the early fruit had rotted and fallen off.

In classical myths, seasons became disrupted because of some disturbance on Mount Olympus or a foolhardy action by an ignorant mortal. Demeter, in grieving for her vanished daughter Persephone, plunged the world into perpetual winter by withholding the crops. The Scriptures tell us that God will “shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” if we turn our back on him. I could discount rumblings on Mount Olympus, but was there some secret sin in the land that God was punishing?

No, no, I could not go that way. I could examine my own conscience, but I could not lift the covers of all the consciences in the realm. Dr. Lopez ... I twisted the Spanish ring on my finger. I wore it next to the coronation ring, to remind myself that being the anointed ruler of England meant that I could take no loyalty for granted, and must be ever vigilant. But the question of his innocence continued to plague me.

In late June, north winds had plunged us into such cold that newly shorn sheep perished. In July, pellets of hail had fallen; now in August there were reports of snow in Yorkshire. And all the while, this incessant rain.

I decided to move to Nonsuch, my father's hunting palace some twelve miles south of London. It was still a novelty to me; it had been occupied by someone else and only come back into my hands two years ago. At my age, to acquire a palace where I did not know every corridor and every window was a rare delight. And this would afford me a glimpse of the country, let me see firsthand what was happening in the fields and orchards.

I had to ride beneath a swaying canopy erected around my saddle, as the royal carriage could not manage what remained of the roads. Likewise the household items had to be carried by mule and horseback. I would take as little as possible.

As we plodded along the sodden path, people stood watching us, calling out listlessly, bundled in cloaks. The dark skies and brown fields seemed to leech all color from the people as well, their faces blending into the dull hue of fallen leaves. The few animals still in the fields looked mournfully at us, suffering wordlessly.

I had not expected such enervation and defeat. It was the dull underpinning of what would later explode into anger and destruction, like the backing of a fragile Venetian glass mirror. As Queen, I would do what I could to help, but my means of doing so were limited. Had I known it was coming, we could have stored up food from last year's harvest. What use were the astrologers if they could not foresee this?

Shivering, we rode past the forlorn people and dripping orchards. Their faces haunted me.

And now we crested the hill that always gave a glorious view of the palace; from down through the alleyway of trees in sunny autumns you could see the glint of the gold-framed stucco panels on the inner courtyard walls, winking as if to say,
Nonsuch, Nonsuch, there is truly nonesuch in England
. Today it was enveloped in a gray mist, and winds were whipping the trees overhead, sending cold showers spraying across the path.

My father had built this palace to stun his countrymen with the extravagance of Renaissance design, and to match his hated rival, the French king François I, and his hunting palaces of Chambord and Fontainebleau. As if to press his claims to being king of both countries, he had built the outer courtyard in plain Tudor style, calling it “severity,” and the inner one in an extravagance of French Renaissance design, calling it “exuberance.” Exuberant it certainly was, with an enormous statue of himself on his throne to greet his visitors. He meant for the white and gold Italianate panels covering the entire inner courtyard—gods and goddesses, Roman emperors, and the labors of Hercules—to instruct his little son Edward in all he would need to know to be king.

My father had built this palace in 1538 to celebrate his thirty years of reign and the birth of his prince. Well. It was only a building. His prince had not lived. I had celebrated my thirty years of reign by the defeat of the Armada—something much more likely to last, and of import beyond my own family.

Not that I was comparing myself ...

In spite of its opulence, Nonsuch was snug, designed to evoke a retreat, to celebrate the glories of the hunt. I appreciated that coziness now, as the rain drummed outside.

The ceiling in the presence chamber was dripping. Obviously the roof was in need of patching. If the roof of a mighty palace was leaking, what of roofs in cottages? My heart was heavy for those people.