Elizabeth I (73 page)

As twilight fell, I sat quietly in my inmost chamber. The sunbeams were picking out the very last contours and moldings on the wall as the day came to an end. Even in summer the sun sets. I hated to see it setting, knowing that Burghley's last day on earth was ending. As long as the sun stayed above the horizon, that last day was not over. Even as I watched, the sunbeams faded from the picture frames and lamps they were caressing, and the room grew dark.

Never had I felt more alone or more abandoned. One by one they had slipped away, the people from my youth.

There were the few, the very few, whose deaths caused deep wounds in my being. Burghley was one. And then there was my mother, Anne Boleyn.

It was not in my early days that I most keenly missed my mother, but later. Each year, as I grew in understanding, her vacancy seemed to expand until being motherless threatened to engulf me. Even today that gap is still there, when, if she still lived, she would be an elderly lady of ninety-one. But the dead never age, and a motherless child is always a child, even if she is a queen and sixty-four.

Then I had become a true orphan when my father died eleven years later. Well. We go on. We go on because we have to, and because the road is one way only, and there is no turning back to find these people, these people who have deserted us, as surely as a runaway soldier deserts his post. I know that is not fair to them, but that is what it feels like.

Burghley, how could you leave me?

After the death of a great one, there is silence and quiet. The palace felt as if it were under a spell, all movements suspended. The sun rose higher, and all of nature was stirring—bees droning from flower to flower, gulls soaring high above the wide river, gardeners clipping the bristly hedges—but within, it was closed and dark.

I must take charge. It was I who was muffled, I who was suspended. I had to take my first steps without Burghley. But at least they concerned him. I must order his funeral.

It would be as magnificent a one as I could command. Burghley was called the father of his country by both the common people and his fellow councillors, and he had surely earned this tribute.

Five hundred mourners, clad in black-cowled robes, attended the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. I hoped it was some comfort to Robert Cecil. It was small comfort to me.

T
wo weeks passed, and the drowsiness of high summer blended with my lassitude and low spirits over the death of Burghley. Since then, I had barely eaten much more than the sort of broth I had fed him. I had no appetite, so my women ordered only fruit, cheese, and bread brought to my chamber in the evening.

As I entered, Marjorie was waiting, not anxiously but calmly, along with Catherine. We would have another quiet night reading and sewing until I sought the oblivion of sleep. From outside the cries of night creatures came faintly to our ears—crickets, frogs, and owls. It was their turn now, while we rested. The heat of the day had lifted, and the air coming in was cool.

“Magical time,” said Marjorie, standing by the window. “The balm of Gilead.”

But from the gallery I heard footsteps, running footsteps. The tap-tap-tap sounded almost like a woodpecker. I rose, alert as a hunting dog.

In a moment my chamber guard admitted Robert Cecil, swathed in black. My first thought was,
Nothing could have happened today, as the terrible thing already happened many days ago.
That made us immune, did it not?

“Forgive me,” he said, falling to his knees. His cloak spread out on the floor around him like a stain.

“No, forgive me,” I said. “For no state business should intrude on you at this time.”

“Only the highest of state business can do that, and this is urgent. Urgent!” He rose and handed me a dispatch, folded and wrinkled. “Oh, read it and add grief upon grief.”

It was a notification of a massive military defeat in Ireland at the hands of The O'Neill. My marshal of the army, Sir Henry Bagenal, had taken four thousand foot soldiers and three hundred cavalry to relieve the fort on the Blackwater, a key stronghold guarding the approach to Dublin and the south that O'Neill was trying to starve out. They had marched into a bloody ambush at Yellow Ford. Bagenal was killed, along with thirteen hundred of his soldiers; another seven hundred deserted. The English army was destroyed, and all over Ireland the English settlers fled. Our officials in Dublin begged O'Neill for an armistice in the most cowardly terms.

“The O'Neill rules,” said Cecil. “They tremble before him. He can dictate his terms.”

“Never!” I cried. How could my authorities have collapsed like that? “Upon my honor, this renegade Irishman shall not overthrow me!”

“Let us weigh the cost before making any pronouncements,” he said. “It is likely to be very high. We have never yet found an answer to how to manage Ireland. It does not help that no one—soldier or official—wants to be assigned there. It is a thankless, futile task.”

“Up until now,” I said. “But I confess, I have not given it my full weight of attention in the past.” I felt my eyes narrowing, as if I were entering an arena. “But when I do that, I will find a solution to the ‘Irish problem,' as some call it.”

I sent him on his way with instructions to make copies of the report and call the council first thing in the morning.

Hugh O'Neill. I had known him when he was in England, a ward in Leicester's household. We encouraged many of the highborn Irish to spend time here, thinking it would convert them to our ways. What fools we had been! All it did was give them a glimpse into our weaknesses.

Hugh was born about the same year as I took the throne. When I knew him he was in his early teens; he returned to Ireland when he was fifteen. He was short, stocky, and dark haired, with a large head, but with an ease of manner far older than his years. He came from one of the oldest Irish clans, a nobleman among them, and stood to become the next chieftain of the O'Neills, although the Irish did not go by strict primogeniture, as we did. There was always some confusion and suspense about who would succeed, often solved by a timely murder or riot.

He mastered our tongue and our ways; he could speak like a man from London, and when he returned to Ireland he helped quash—fighting alongside English troops—a rebellion in Munster fomented by the one of the clans. For that I rewarded him with an earldom, making him Earl of Tyrone. But it was never clear what side he was on. He had contacted the Spanish and invited their help. And now this triumph at Yellow Ford. It was the greatest military defeat the English had suffered since losing Calais almost exactly forty years ago. My sister Mary had said, “If you open my heart, you will find written on it ‘Calais.'” I must not allow “Ireland” to be written upon mine!

I remembered Leicester standing with his arm around the boy's shoulders, saying, “He's a good lad,” and ruffling his hair. Hugh had looked up at him (being so short, he looked up at most people) and smiled a guileless smile. A serpent's smile! And when I think of it, it was almost the same pose Leicester had used with young Essex. Another fetching lad, grown up to be dangerous. The shadow of these men fell across Leicester, as if to hang upon them was to hang upon poison.

The hastily assembled Privy Council met midmorning, and the disaster was laid before them. As I had been, they were stunned.

“More information has come in,” said Cecil, spreading out his papers. “Thirty officers were killed at Yellow Ford, along with the loss of horses and cannon. Made bold by this, the Irish have risen in the other counties and overrun the English settlements. Our people are fleeing to Dublin, but there's no protection there, with only a five-hundred-man garrison. They are loading onto the first boats they can find to take them back here, abandoning the settlements. We stand to lose all of Ireland. And if the Spanish land, holding it against us, we can never get it back.”

“Where are they now?” asked George Carey.

“The rebels have been burning and looting to within three miles of the walls of Dublin; they may capture it any day.”

“Tell them about the way our brave authorities have sought to solve the problem,” I said. As I had lain awake, thinking of it had heated me to a white-hot heat.

“They have sent offers to O'Neill for a truce,” said Cecil.

“That's a pretty way to phrase it,” I said. “Begged, you mean.” I looked up and down the table. “Yes, we have begged to that man! My own Crown appointments, my deputies, the lord justices, have begged! I tell you, I will not let it be said that the Queen of England, who has faced down the might of Spain, ever bowed her knee to this base, born-in-a-thicket Irish rebel! I shall never endure such dishonor, nor let England endure it.”

“What, then, shall we do?” asked Lord Cobham, warden of the Cinque Ports, mournfully.

I was incredulous. “We must conquer them. We must, at long last, commit enough men and troops to Ireland.”

“But ... where will we raise the money? Parliament has already voted the double subsidy. That only pays off past debts,” said Buckhurst.

“And to raise the army?” cried Cobham. “No one wants to go there. There isn't an able commander available. Our troops can't operate there, in those bogs and wild terrain. The Irish don't fight fair in the open air like real armies; they attack and then melt back into the mists. The rain rots everything—the food, the ammunition, the weapons, even our papers and our clothes. We are felled by marsh fever. The Irish live off the land—or maybe they don't even eat! But we have to bring all the food with us. And where are we going to get it? Four disastrous harvests have left us with starvation in our own country. We are already having to import grain from Denmark and Danzig.”

“Have you quite run out of breath now, Cobham?” I was upset. Everything he had said was true. But it did not change the fact that we had to fight in Ireland. “If you had been Noah, the ark would never have been built.” I looked around at the panicked faces. “We will meet again tomorrow. Draw up a preliminary list of expenses and recruiting and victualing strategies. I expect no excuses.” I turned and left the chamber.

Where was the Earl of Essex? Enough malingering and pouting. I would command his presence, and he had best present himself with no delay. I would pit one of Leicester's old wards against the other.