Elizabeth I (98 page)

“In being kind, you are being cruel,” said Catherine. “You set him loose but forbid him to come to the one place where he draws his strength.”

“Exactly. He grew too strong, and at my expense. I fed a cub who turned on me. Let him find his food elsewhere.”

I was worried about my own expenses. I could not ask Parliament for any more subsidies. I sold more Crown lands and jewels and was even reduced to having a sale of marketable items from the treasury.

I sat staring at the Great Seal of my father, one of my proud inheritances. Its design was old-fashioned now, but it was historic, and its silver would bring a good price. But oh! To surrender it was to lose part of him. His fingers had held it, his hands had carefully slid it into its velvet bag.

“Forgive me,” I murmured, putting it out of sight lest I lose my determination. I must get money wherever I could find it. The exclusive right to duties on sweet wines held by Essex for ten years was due to expire in late September. I would take it back. I could not afford to let a fallen courtier reap its rewards any longer while I pawned my father's inheritance.

Essex announced that since he was no longer welcome at court, he was retiring into the country. He began pelting me with letters.

“Now, having heard the voice of Your Majesty's justice, I do humbly crave to hear your own natural voice, or else that Your Majesty in mercy will send me into another world. If Your Majesty will let me once prostrate myself at your feet and behold your fair and gracious eyes, yea, though afterwards Your Majesty punish me, imprison me, or pronounce the sentence of death against me, Your Majesty is most merciful, and I shall be most happy.” This had the ring of a man who could not comprehend that he had had his last audience with me. He still thought he could charm his way into any arena he wished. I did not answer. Soon another letter followed.

“Haste paper to that happy presence, whence only unhappy I am banished. Kiss that fair correcting hand which lays new balms to my lighter hurts, but to my greatest wound applies nothing. Say thou come from shaming, languishing, despairing Essex.”

The fair correcting hand set the letter aside and gave no answer.

Others arrived, each more groveling than the last. He was always a superb letter writer.

“This day the lease which I hold by Your Majesty's beneficence expires, and that excise of sweet wines is both my chief income and my only means of satisfying the merchants to whom I am indebted. If my creditors will take for payment as many ounces of my blood, Your Majesty should never hear of this suit.”

Then, as the day passed when the lease on the wines expired, he ratcheted up his appeal.

“My soul cries out unto Your Majesty for grace, for access, and for an end to this exile. If Your Majesty grant this suit, you are most gracious, whatever else you deny or take away. If this cannot be obtained, I doubt whether that the means to preserve life, and the granted liberty, have been favors or punishments; for till I may appear in your gracious presence, and kiss Your Majesty's fair correcting hand, time itself is a perpetual night, and the whole world but a sepulcher unto Your Majesty's humblest vessel.”

All told, he wrote over twenty letters. That he was in pain I believed, and regretted it. But what sort of pain? Was it the pain of public embarrassment or the pain of being denied the things he felt were his due? Or the fear of financial ruin? He owed huge amounts of money, all advanced to him on the security of his income from the sweet wines. While he had been imprisoned he had been out of his creditors' reach, but now that he was a free man he was at their mercy. But he had had his chance to enjoy the wine license, and now the time for that was past. England needed the money more than he did.

Francis Bacon, perhaps feeling guilty for his part in the hearing, pleaded for him and commented on his eloquent appeals. I merely said that I had been touched by them until I saw that they were just ploys to get his hands on the sweet wine license again.

“He warbles like a nightingale, but his song is only to trick me, Master Francis,” I said.

“He is destitute,” said Francis.

“I forgave him the debt of ten thousand pounds he owed the Crown when it was obvious he couldn't repay it. He should be grateful for that,” I said. “I never forgave any other man's debt.”

“Desperate men seek desperate remedies,” he said.

I looked at him. His smooth brown eyes gave nothing away. “Is that a threat? And does it come from you or from him?”

“It is merely an observation, Your Majesty. There are certain animals that will not attack unless they have exhausted all other means. Some snakes are that way—they must be provoked and cornered before they strike. But their poison is deadly.”

“He has missed his opportunity. If he had meant to strike, he should have done it when he had an army at his back. Now he has not the means.” But even as I said it so certainly, I knew assassination did not require an army, just someone close at hand. “I know he has been in correspondence with James in Scotland,” I said.

Francis's face registered his surprise. “He has?”

“Don't pretend you didn't know. If I do, so do you. He wanted James to send an ambassador here, along with troops, and set him free. Then, I suppose, he planned to ingratiate himself with James, having exhausted my bounty and my goodwill. Of course, I would have to have been removed first.”

Now Francis looked truly horrified. “I am sure—I am sure he had no such thing in mind.”

“Then why did he ask Lord Mountjoy to proclaim his case and then return from Ireland with troops to back him up?”

“I know nothing of this.” His expression told me he was telling the truth. His falling-out with Essex was permanent, then, and he was barred from his confidence.

“Mountjoy has tasted his own success now and is not tempted to give it up to bolster his old friend. Away from England and the soft, subtle wheedlings of Essex and the strident ones of his mistress, he has become his own man. A man just as selfish and ambitious as any other. His way to power does not lie in being subservient to Essex but in bringing home peace—what was the phrase?—broached on his sword. Mountjoy is no fool. I always liked him.”

“This is all very ugly,” said Francis.

“This is what court is behind the masques and sonnets,” I said. “I wonder that you did not write an essay about it.”

“Even I did not comprehend the venality of it,” he said. “But I will remedy that.”

“No one will believe you,” I said. “Generation after generation of young people will have to learn this lesson firsthand.” I sighed. “Look you, Francis, I have not given up all hope that Essex might be redeemed. But first he must accept his situation and not seek to evade it. For once corruption has set in, in any entity, if it is fed, it grows. It must be purged out. Hence, I will not feed him with more corrupting income.”

“I bow to your wisdom, Your Majesty,” he said.

“Don't mock me, Francis.”

“I do not. Perhaps you see what I cannot. I see only a broken man pursued by angry creditors. You see danger. You cannot afford to be wrong; I can.”

“You understand my position.”

“But you must understand his. He is not evil but an Icarus—he has flown recklessly too near the sun, melting his waxen wings, hurling him to earth.”

“His life lends itself to such poetic interpretations. That may be his lasting legacy.”

To fill Marjorie's empty place, Catherine's younger sister Philadelphia came to court. She had served me in the past and I welcomed her back. She was very different from Catherine, having spent about half of her life on the Scottish borders, where her father and then her husband commanded the western marches. They were the Barons Scrope of Bolton, whose castle had first housed Mary Queen of Scots. Philadelphia had taken on some of the rough talk and mannerisms of the north, but I always found them refreshing after the simpering niceties of court talk.

She took to pestering me to restore Essex, or at least grant him the sweet wine license so he could repay his debts.

“What a charming advocate he has,” I said. “He is fortunate in that way. But you don't know him as I do. He is not broken yet. To rule an unruly horse, you must deprive him of his provender.”

“But if he appears at the Accession Day tilts, will you look gently upon him?” she asked.

There had been rumors that he was planning a spectacular reappearance at the tilts, since they were not technically at court. Icarus would soar again, or try to. “I will certainly look upon him. In what manner I cannot say.”

How like him it would be to swoop down at the tournament and act as if nothing had changed.

The day, November 17, drew near. We had had a warm, dry autumn, and the weather held, to everyone's relief. I received many letters and gifts of congratulation on my forty-second anniversary of accession. The French king sent a public letter of praise, along with two horses. The estates of the Netherlands sent a dark, carved cabinet with ivory insets. We had just won a joint victory over the Spanish at Nieuport, and the end of the seemingly endless war was in sight. Sixteen hundred had been a good year after all.

The court was swarming with visitors for the celebration. I had decided to order a new gown for the occasion, something that would seem more martial than usual. I wanted the bodice to imitate the decorated breastplates of ancient Rome, with the pattern outlined in beads and pearls. The theme of the tilts would be
victory
.

A few days beforehand I received another letter from Essex. He congratulated me on the day and begged once again to be forgiven. “I sometimes think of jousting in the tiltyard and then I remember what it would be to come into that presence, out of which both by your own voice I was commanded, and by your own hands thrust out,” he hinted, inviting me to respond with an invitation. I did not.

It was the last letter he wrote me.

I
walked between the lines of clothes flapping, drying in the brisk November wind. Since our return to Essex House, I had had to take on many of the former staff's duties. We simply could not afford to have all the servants back. This particular chore I did not mind. I liked feeling the stiff cleanliness of the linens and the shirts; it reminded me of my time in Holland when I had been in charge of that task for the family. Everyone in Holland seemed to wash all the time; the billowing laundry on a thousand lines mirrored the sails on their boats constantly plying the harbor. The sharp, fresh smell of the clothes as I pulled them off the line made me feel clean as well.

I tried not to think of other things, just pluck the laundry off and fold it into a large basket. There is a balm in mindless tasks. So from dawn to night I tried to keep my mind from wandering to our plight. That, of course, was impossible.