Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (61 page)

Cecil’s cool eyes looked him up and down, from dust encrusted beard

to muddy riding boots.

Susan Kay

“You could not possibly appear before Her Majesty in such a state,

Melville. You are familiar with Her Majesty’s fastidious taste and if I may

say so without giving offence, sir—you do stink of horse and sweat. Go to

your chamber and rest and I will see food is brought to you. Her Majesty

will receive you tomorrow.”

“
Tomorrow
!” Melville opened his mouth to protest further, but the

resolute little figure had already turned away and begun to thread his way

through the swirling mass of silks and satins. Melville crept close to the

door to watch.

The Queen was dancing with Leicester, but at the Secretary’s approach

they swung out of the measure and stood waiting for him to reach them.

Leicester murmured something in her ear. She laughed, tapped his cheek

playfully, and stepped forward alone to hear what Cecil had to say.

Even from that distance Melville saw the colour leave her complexion.

She staggered back a step and fell into the chair behind her, turning her

face away from the company and covering it with one long white hand.

The music died in mid-beat, the dancers froze and stared as a cry of savage

anguish tore through the summer air and splintered the gay, informal

atmosphere into a deathly hush.

“
The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son and I am but a barren stock
!”

For a dreadful moment no one moved, then Cecil made a quick

commanding gesture. A clutch of women rushed around her, closed her

from sight, and a moment later hurried her from the crowded room.

Melville drew into the shadows as they swept past, but Cecil, limping

slowly in their wake, caught a glimpse of his triumphant face, and his own

lips set in an angry line.

He went at once to her private apartments expecting to be refused

admittance, but, to his surprise, he was shown into her bedchamber

almost immediately. He found her alone, standing with her back to him

and with one hand resting against a carved bedpost. She did not look

round, but with her free hand she made a quick, furtive gesture and he

guessed that she was hastily wiping away tears.

“You’ve come to scold I take it. ‘An appalling loss of self-control in

public, madam!’ So what do you propose as punishment? Shall I go to

bed with no supper?”

Standing there, listening to her petulant defiance, he suddenly saw her

as she must have been as a child and he forgot to be angry.

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“It’s not my place to criticise you, madam,” he said gently. “I came

merely to tell you that Melville saw and heard it all.”

“And will tell his mistress, who will gloat!” She clenched her fist.

“Well, I’ll give him the lie tomorrow. I’ll dance with joy for him—I’ll

even be godmother to the infernal brat! Will that suffice?”

“For Melville, no doubt,” he said grimly, “but not for the rest of

your countrymen, I fear. Madam, you described yourself as barren—have

you any idea what uproar that will cause among those who fear for the

Protestant succession?”

“Oh, the succession—good God, I’m not dead yet!”

“Not yet—pray God not for many years—but the birth of a Scottish

prince will cause a public outcry for your own marriage from Parliament

and people alike.”

She swore softly and swung away from him.

“Cecil, I rule this country and I rule it well—is that not so?”

“You know it is, madam.”

“Then why can’t they be content? Why must they try to force me in

to something that I cannot—”

She broke off and he stared at her in silence. After a moment he went

over and put his hand on her arm.

“Is it still Leicester?” he asked quietly. “Is it?” She did not answer and

he shook his head.

“If I had known it was going to mean this—” He stopped as he saw

her look and continued hastily, to cover his slip, “I sometimes think Your

Majesty does not mean to marry at all.”

She turned away from him impatiently.

“Is it a crime then, not to marry?”

“Madam,” he was suddenly aghast at the implication behind her

truculence,” in your case it would be a crime against the state—aye, and

an unnatural crime at that. No woman can be happy in your position,

alone and childless.”

She looked over her shoulder with a sudden, mocking smile.

“You speak very knowledgeably on the pleasure of womanhood,

Cecil—when did you last climb out of childbed?”

He refused to be baited or side-tracked. He had come here tonight to

know the answer to one question and he did not intend to be gainsaid by

any of those “answers answerless” with which she placated the Commons.

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And because the empathy between them was now so sound, she knew

the question in his mind, and held up her hand to stay him.

“Don’t ask it, my friend—believe me, you don’t want to know the

answer. I have reasons against marriage that I would not divulge to a twin

soul. All I will tell you now is that I do not mean to marry—ever!”

He went out of her presence like a man in a trance.

t t t

Among the first to make capital out of the birth of Mary’s son was the new

Earl of Leicester. Still flushed with the triumph of his title, he brooded

long and hard over Elizabeth’s curious outburst and managed to convince

himself that their marriage was its only natural corollary. Nothing would

induce him to abandon his dream and he was ready to bully or grovel to

anyone who might help him attain his object. Less than a year since, he

had even approached Cecil openly, begging him to give up his plans for

a foreign marriage and to support his own suit, promising that he would

see Cecil handsomely advanced in return.

It had been rather worse than just a waste of effort. Cecil had smiled,

thanked him warmly for his confidence, and then repeated the whole

conversation to the French Ambassador, carefully accentuating Leicester’s

presumption in a manner which was calculated to infuriate the Queen

when she heard of it. Leicester had not dared to approach the Secretary

again on the subject.

His tentative overtures of marriage to Elizabeth resulted in some of the

bitterest quarrels they had ever had. There was a succession of ugly, public

scenes between them and once they were both seen to be in tears. He

simply could not understand her attitude. Since the sudden death of Kat

Ashley the previous June she had been very difficult to live with. After the

first day when she had been utterly silent and bewildered by the shock,

she had thrown herself into the pursuits which filled her life, working,

hunting, and dancing like one driven by the devil, until everyone around

her was on their knees with exhaustion. Leicester had waited patiently for

the passionate breakdown which he sensed lurking beneath the surface of

her indecent gaiety and insatiable restlessness, waited to take her in his

arms and comfort her. But it never came. If she wept, he didn’t know

about it; and whatever comfort she craved she appeared to find in the

attentions of another man.

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When she transferred her favours to Thomas Heneage, Leicester was

devastated. She announced publicly that she was sorry for the time she

had wasted on him—“and so is every good subject…” wrote Cecil with

acid triumph in his diary.

The court turned cool to Leicester and Cecil gloated quietly,

watching him panic and resort to desperate means. An ostentatious flir-

tation with Lettice Knollys brought him nothing but a long exile from

court and the knowledge that there was little to be gained by provoking

the Queen’s jealousy.

Exile was costly and showed him great glaring gaps in his own

defences. His enemies closed in gleefully, reviving the scandal of Amy’s

death by persuading her half-brother, John Appleyard, to intimate that he

knew more than he had said at the time. There was loud talk of payments

to Appleyard by his brother-in-law and a strong implication that they

had bought his silence. Leicester’s recall to court came only just in time

to warn his enemies off. John Appleyard faded back into the limbo from

which he had been bribed to emerge, and for the time Leicester was spared

the indignity and the danger of answering these libellous accusations.

The incident had unnerved him and shown him the depth of his

dependence on the Queen’s protection; he was less the man for the expe-

rience. He dropped Lettice hastily and rushed back to court in a hopeful

mood, expecting to find the Queen waiting tearfully for him with open

arms, as all his women waited for him after a quarrel. Instead he found her

so surrounded by younger men—Heneage, Christopher Hatton, the Earl

of Ormond—that he could hardly get near her, and he was aghast at the

apparent ease with which she seemed to have replaced him. It was hard,

very hard, to admit that he might not be indispensable to her happiness.

And she played her part so well that only a man as perceptive as Cecil

could have gauged the depth of her suffering.

Jealous, frightened, tormented beyond endurance, Leicester cursed the

cruel fate that had made him want the one woman who did not want

him. Savage desire had begun to eat into his nature, making him ruthless

and haughty and aggressively virile. He snapped his fingers about the

court and a woman was his—any woman, except the one who mattered.

He took them all wherever he found the opportunity, without love

or gratitude or inner satisfaction, and indulged in violent fantasies. He

wanted to drag Elizabeth from her exalted pedestal and rape her in full

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view of the court; he wanted to beat her into abject submission and cover

that alabaster body with bruises. He suspected that she had a taste for

rough handling, but he lacked the basic courage to follow that conviction

to its logical conclusion. For he just might be mistaken; and, if he was,

he knew that raping Elizabeth would be the last mistake he ever made.

So he was forced to stand by and watch while she behaved like a

goddess promising favours to a fawning group of humiliated men. None

of them could resist the oblique suggestion that at any moment she might

indeed be prepared to take a lover—or a husband—from their midst and

so they hovered like moths around a candle. She had a cruel genius for

stalking men’s hearts.

When she could bear the game no longer, she softened at last, agreed

to see him alone, and laughed at his jealousy, telling him that all her

friends were men and he need read no more than that into it. He was

unconvinced, but so grateful to be taken back into her affections that he

returned meekly to the place she had allotted him, like the lap-dog she

had once called him. Her attendants tiptoed discreetly from the room

and he sat at her feet in the bright firelight. There was a relaxed and

comfortable silence between them and neither of them spoke, as if they

feared to disturb some magic spell.

It was as though they both felt it was the only way to avoid another

quarrel.

t t t

It was a bad year for lovers. While Robin was struggling to cement his

return to favour, the Queen of Scots began to eclipse all lesser events

with the scandal of her own private life. With a sudden, shocking pace

her life was circling in a downward spiral to disaster beyond her control,

and Elizabeth watched with genuine horror as her rival fell helplessly into

the trap of personal relations, which she herself had eluded so successfully

eight years before. No one shed any tears when the villainous Darnley

met his deserved end in an explosion at Kirk-o’-fields, but everyone

knew—or at least believed they knew—that Mary’s lover, the Earl of

Bothwell, was responsible for it.

Mary now stood on the edge of the very same disaster which had once

threatened her royal cousin. Her only hope of escaping the consequences

of Darnley’s murder was to abandon her lover to his fate and a public

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execution. It was a plain choice between her lover and her crown, and

Elizabeth, who had already made that painful choice, was filled with a

terrible foreboding, a sharp, anxious sense of watching her own younger

reflection in a mirror, rushing relentlessly towards self-destruction.

For the first time, acting a little out of self-interest, but a great deal

more from a wealth of sympathetic understanding, she stretched out her

hand to Mary in a gesture of real friendship with a frantic, scolding letter

that begged her to come to her senses before it was too late.

“Oh, madam, I should not fulfil the office of a faithful cousin or an

affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than to endeavour