Elizabeth I (83 page)

Sir Henry came in from the country to be with her. He, too, had changed. For the first time he looked like what he was—an old man. He was in his seventies, one of those men who kept his vigor and strength, but now it was drained away. He almost shuffled, and when he embraced his wife, they leaned on each other, sustained by their tragedy.

“Take her home, Sir Henry,” I said. “Take her home.”

I hoped she would recover, but in bidding them farewell I felt a great finality, the clanging of a door. I had not been able to tell my dear companion good-bye, for she had vanished in a trace, replaced by a broken stranger.

It is usually difficult to carry out duties with a heavy heart, but the challenge of the council chamber and the war served to rescue me, for in those hours I could not think of myself or of my dear Crow. I had to concentrate all my faculties on the desperate problems abroad. Word was that Philip III, the new Spanish king, was eager to continue his father's fight against England, and pursue it with considerably more vigor than that old, ailing monarch. He was readying yet another Armada (dear God, was there no end to the timber available for their shipbuilding?), first to strike at our shores and then to land in Ireland. That made it all the more imperative that Ireland be secured, and quickly.

But nothing was quick in Ireland, except excuses. I was told that Essex still had not set off for the north.

“By God's breath, if that man does not obey and go, I shall have him hanged!” I cried in council.

“Ireland is a great bog, in every way,” said Cecil. “All reputation, honor, and action is swallowed up.”

“I have received word that he has knighted eighty-one men!” I fumed. “Eighty-one, when I warned him against knighting without merit. The Irish are joking, ‘He made more knights than he killed rebels.' There has been no fighting, nothing deserving the honor of knighthood. Essex awards it for strapping on a sword! Even my godson, John Harington, has been knighted, and he's done nothing so far.
I
had better bestowed it for his invention of the ajax! That contraption is more worthy!”

“Calm yourself, Your Majesty,” said Admiral Howard. “You have the power to undo them all.”

“I do not have the power to undo the blow to our reputation that Essex has rendered!”

Besides the admiral, Raleigh and Charles Blount were still in England, and they could serve as commanders to counter whatever Spain sent against us. Blount was a promising military man. It was ironic that Essex had vetoed the idea of my appointing him to lead the Irish campaign, on the grounds that he was too inexperienced, too low-ranking, and too “drowned in book learning.” In an able man inexperience is soon remedied by action, a bullet does not know the difference between an earl and a yeoman, and one could do worse than study the battle tactics of Caesar.

“No, Essex will have to do that.”

To think that England's fate was in his fumbling hands.

As if to underscore the stakes of our future, a crowd of unwelcome guests arrived and would not depart. By that I mean a host of weaknesses and decrepitudes to which I would not give diplomatic recognition and that I hid as best I could. I have already mentioned the glasses I needed to read. Without them print swam and turned into squiggling worms. Still, I kept them in a small purse and only pulled them out when absolutely necessary, and never in front of foreign envoys.

Practical people like my Catherine would tell me to be of good cheer, reminding me that great men who lived in an age before glasses had no help for the condition. “If Cicero had not been executed, he soon would have killed himself, as he would no longer have been able to read,” she said.

“So he should have been thankful he was condemned to early death?” I asked.

“That is certainly one way to look at it,” she answered. “And Marc Antony—he must have been almost blind.”

I laughed, thinking of Antony groping like a mole. “He did not read much anyway, Catherine,” I said. “And yes, I am thankful for this crutch, as any crippled man is, but I resent my lameness.”

“At least you are not truly lame. You ride and hunt and dance well. Much better than ...”

“Than others my age? Is that what you mean?”

“Well, yes.” She looked down at her shoes.

Aha. That meant no one, not even Catherine, was aware of the sprain in my ankle that had bothered me for weeks and seemed never to mend. I felt as if I were hobbling but took great pains to force my steps briskly.

And then there were my looks. I have heard an absurd tale that I never allowed mirrors in my chambers and never saw myself in one past a certain age. It must have started because I banished portraits that were unflattering (some said realistic). It is wisdom to mask one's weaknesses from others, but only a fool masks them from herself. And I saw, all too clearly, how the color had left my face and the shadows—that in a younger person merely meant a sleepless night—never left the hollows under my eyes, no matter how rested I was. Oh, I saw, and did my best to disguise it, with the finest-ground pearls and talc mixture, with false roses made from ground carnelian. My hair, once glorious red-gold, had faded like my cheeks and was a ghost of its beauty, a wan reminder of what once was. So I never appeared in public without a wig, and I had many of them, in many different styles.

There were other things, not so easily disguised, that troubled me. More and more I felt currents were moving fast, moving beyond me, and that I had become old-fashioned, out of step. The clamor from the House of Commons, wanting to make legislation that had not been proposed by me, trying to tread on my prerogative. The notion, abroad in some countries, that they did not need a hereditary monarch with royal blood at all but could elect a commoner to serve as one just as well. (Look at Poland!) The religious sects that claimed no priest of any sort was needed, or other strange ideas about each person being his own priest, and even some that denied the Trinity. The explorations that were stretching us like a piece of leather, nailed to the far corners of the map—the Northwest Passage in the upper left corner, Drake's passage in the lower left, Muscovy in the upper right, the East Indies in the lower right. England must play her part in all these places, but how? We could not even manage Ireland close to home.

I found myself alert to what others denoted as signs of aging. Sleeping during the day. Walking into a room and forgetting what one has come in there to get. Reminiscing about the golden days of yore and how things have deteriorated since then—the manners of the young, the workmanship of craftsmen, the morals of women. Even if I agreed, I did not voice it.

One day I happened upon a letter in which someone wrote that “the giving over of long voyages is noted to be a sign of age,” and it struck worry into my breast, as I had lately found Progresses to be too draining and time-consuming. Especially this year, I thought to stay at my post, ever watchful. But on the spot I decided that I would make an extended Progress after all. Perhaps it would be helpful if I rode out among the people again, those people who kept cheering for Essex, and remind them of who their ruler was and what a true sovereign looked like. I would go south, staying in the maritime counties that were threatened by sea, so that I would not lose sight of the danger and would be ready to respond.

The only concession I would make—and this could not be blamed on age—was to have a smaller train of people with me. So many men were away in Ireland, and there were fewer women attending on me these days, and Marjorie was gone. Logistically it would be an easier Progress because we could stay in smaller homes and move more quickly between them.

The plan called for me to travel south from London into Surrey, then turn eastward into Kent. This would allow me to inspect the defenses at the Cinque Ports—Sandwich, Dover, Hastings, Hythe, Romney—along the coast where the Channel was narrowest—and also the fortifications my father had built in Deal and Walmer when he was threatened by the French.

We were ready and set out on a fair day in late August. My usual number of carts had been cut to a fourth, and as we rode slowly across London Bridge people thronged us, crying out so joyfully that I never would have known their lips knew how to cry “Essex!” We passed under the Great Stone Gateway, the place where traitors' heads bristled like porcupine quills upon spikes. These were old enough to be unrecognizable.

From the gateway we passed onto the wide road that served as the high street for Southwark. It funneled all foot and animal traffic heading for London from the south up this way, and it was always crowded with carts, horses, herds of sheep, and people, although today they were held back for us.

As we rode slowly down the high street a boy with a placard came running out, holding it up and crying, “
Julius Caesar! Julius Caesar!
See it now at the Globe!”

I stopped and motioned him over. “Tell me, lad, who wrote it?”

“One of the company, Will Shakespeare,” he said. “It's just opening. You should stop and see it!”

“Perhaps on my way back,” I said. He must know full well I never attended public theaters, but what was the harm in asking if someone were ready to try something new? “Has he then left our glorious history?” I asked. His last play had been about King Henry V. Perhaps he felt it was dangerous to encroach any closer upon modern times. I must ask for a copy of
Henry V
. I wanted to comb it for references. I knew it mentioned both Essex's traitorous ancestor the Earl of Cambridge and Essex himself.

We left the environs of the Globe behind as we continued south past Southwark's markets spreading out on either side of the road. I was pleased to see that the vendors' baskets were brimming with apples, cabbages, leeks, carrots, pears, cheese, and eggs. At last the heavens had smiled upon my land and blessed her with plenty, after four lean years of biblical proportions. That warmed me as much as the sunlight pouring down on my head.

Farther off the road lay St. Thomas's hospital, once run by monks and nuns, now by lay doctors. It tended to the poor, homeless, and diseased. When the monasteries were dissolved there had been great fears about what would happen to the charitable institutions they left behind. But fifty years later, most of them had been taken up by others.

Still within sight of the river, this area was bucolic. Open fields, groves of trees, cottages, and greens made it feel a world away from London, although the Tower was visible across the water. Now we were out in the true countryside, and I felt myself lose the feeling of captivity I had in the city. We would head toward Croydon, stay with Sir Francis Carew at his manor of Beddington, then stop at Nonsuch on our way toward the coast.

Sir Francis had a medium-sized manor, and I was pleased that my smaller entourage could fit in there. Along with me was Catherine, of course, and my old friend Helena, whom I saw too seldom, Eurwen (whom I could not seem to send back home), Raleigh, and his ever-faithful Percival. Catherine's husband, the admiral, promised to join us at Nonsuch for a few days. It was as jolly an outing as I could make in these times.