Elizabeth

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Elizabeth

A Novel of Elizabeth I

Evelyn Anthony

Author's Foreword

Elizabeth Tudor was the greatest of all the sovereigns of England and in writing the story of the first thirty years of her reign, I have tried to be as accurate as possible. Many of the conversations and all the extracts from letters are authentic; I have compressed the Northern rebellion and the Ridolfi Plot and changed the details of its disclosure for the sake of cohesion, and given a shortened account of the long marriage negotiations with Alençon. No one knows the true facts of who killed Amy Dudley; I have advanced a theory of my own, based on a study of the slight evidence still in existence, but it is only a theory and cannot be supported by proof. However, it is generally accepted that Robert Dudley was responsible for her death. This is the first riddle in the story of Elizabeth Tudor; the second, and the more impenetrable, is the extent of her sexual relations with men. Whatever the psychological injuries she suffered through her appalling childhood and her initiation with her own stepfather, I believe that she remained unmarried because for her “the passion for power was truly greater than the lusts of the flesh”. Ruthless, cynical, brilliantly clever, she remains one of the most fascinating women in the history of the world. I have tried to present her, and her Royal cousin and antagonist, the unhappy Mary, Queen of Scots, as fairly and as faithfully as I could.

Evelyn Anthony

London 1960

CHAPTER ONE

It was November, the saddest of all the English winter months, when the last yellow leaves had been stripped from the trees by a vicious wind, and the ground was soft with rain. The year 1558 had only two more months to run, and it had been a year of tragedy and unrest, symbolic of the rule of the Queen of England who was lying ill in her Palace in London.

Mary Tudor had reigned for six years, and the majority of her subjects hoped that the illness she was suffering would be the last. The country was desperately poor, riven with religious strife, engaged in a war with France which had brought nothing but humiliation and defeat, and the Queen herself was a sick fanatic, wasting of dropsy and heartbreak.

Thirty miles outside London, in the County of Hertfordshire, Queen Mary's half-sister Elizabeth stood by the window of her room at Hatfield House, looking out over the drenched park and the skeleton trees. She had known that view for the most part of her life; as a child she had played in the same room and ridden through the grounds on her first pony. Hatfield was her only home. Elizabeth had very few attachments, but she loved the old red-brick house with its association of her childhood. She spent long hours alone, preferring solitude and her own thoughts to the companionship of the women who attended her and spied on her for Queen Mary. She was not as tall as she appeared; her very slim figure and erect carriage gave the illusion of height, her pale features were striking rather than conventionally beautiful, with a high-bridged nose and heavy-lidded eyes. They were strange eyes, large and brilliant and as black as pitch, inherited from her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had been so infamously beautiful; but she had the fair skin and blazing red hair of her Tudor father, the enormous, tyrannical Henry VIII. The wintry daylight was fading into dusk and it was too dark to sew or read; the house was very quiet and Elizabeth stood staring out at the rain.

So much of the past belonged to Hatfield, so many of her earliest memories, confused and dim, belonged to the old house where she had come to live, when she was heiress to the throne of England—a tiny child of two years old, with a retinue of servants and pages and ladies-in-waiting. There were visits from a strange, dark woman who smelled very strongly of scent, whom she knew to be her mother, and a memory of a huge, fair man, so heavy that the floor shook under him as he walked, lifting her up to the window. By the time she could climb the window-seat herself all her ladies and pages had been sent away and she was suddenly addressed as Lady Elizabeth. The spoilt, bewildered child had beaten her fists against the glass, demanding to know where everyone had gone, and why the few remaining members of her household did not curtsy and called her by her Christian name. No one had been able to explain to her that she was no longer a princess, that her mother was divorced and she had been made a bastard by her father's order.

There were no visits from her mother, and when her governess Lady Bryan told her gently that Anne Boleyn was dead, Elizabeth had only stared at her, not understanding. Death was a word which meant nothing to a child. She was fretful and insecure and the more questions she asked the less she understood the answers, but years later, when she could look out of that window without climbing up, a servant girl had whispered to her how her mother the Queen had died, and Elizabeth screamed and ran to her washing bowl and vomited. For a long time she woke shrieking after nightmares where she saw her father standing with a bloody axe uplifted in his hands.

She could remember her half-sister Mary, who was an old maid of twenty-two, coming to her once in the middle of the night, and lighting the candle and sitting by the bed until she fell asleep. Mary did not like her, but she did strange things which puzzled the child; she made her presents at Christmas and New Year, and she assured her that their father was a good and kindly man, deserving of his children's love, in spite of what Elizabeth and she knew he had done.

And when their father finally died, Mary went to Mass every morning and prayed for the repose of the soul of someone who must surely be in hell, if he possessed a soul at all. She never understood Mary.

Mary had fallen in love with Philip of Spain and she had married him against the wishes of her people. But as a woman with a husband, as a Queen with undisputed power, she had never known as much about human passions and political opportunities as her sister. Love had come early to Elizabeth in the guise of the boisterous, handsome man who had married her stepmother Katherine Parr, after the old King's death. She had lived in their house and at thirteen her immature body had been subjected to the cunning assaults of the Lord Admiral, and her immature feelings had been roused into a dangerous passion, dangerous and fatal, because the intrigue had brought the Admiral to the scaffold and put the girl he had used for his ambitions in peril of her life.

He had not seduced her completely; he was widowed when she was fifteen and his design was marriage; so Elizabeth was still a virgin, but mentally he had despoiled her innocence, and his violent death and her own danger nearly crippled her emotionally. She had grown up within days; she had lied to her accusers with terrible precocity, stifled her feelings and repressed her tears when the man she loved had died. And through her own cunning, she had escaped the traps set for her. At fifteen she had learnt the, perfidy of men and the cruelty of relations; her own brother Edward was King, and Edward would have signed the warrant for her execution as lightly as he signed the Admiral's, who was his blood relation and his friend. Elizabeth had saved herself, but the shock to her system was so violent that for four years she was prostrate with ill-health.

When she recovered properly she was nineteen and she desperately wanted to live, and to live in the one way which would bring her fulfilment. She wanted to survive her sister Mary and succeed to her throne.

And she had known then what simple, stupid Mary Tudor only learnt at the cost of her happiness and her people's loyalty; there was no place for love in the heart of a Prince.

“Madam!”

Elizabeth turned round slowly. Her lady-in-waiting, Frances Holland, stood in the doorway. She held a candle and it lit her excited face, the flame wavering in a strong draught.

“What is it? I was just about to ring for you; the fire is low and I need lights.”

“Madam, Sir William Cecil is downstairs in the Great Hall. He is asking for you urgently.”

“Cecil?”

Elizabeth's thin brows raised. William Cecil was Mary Tudor's Secretary but he had always been her very good friend. Through the vicissitudes of the last six years, when the affectionate older sister had been transformed into a jealous sovereign who saw Elizabeth as a rival for her throne, Cecil had managed to advise her secretly on several occasions.

“Shall I send him up, Madam?”

“Not till I can offer him more than a pauper's welcome in a place without heating or light! Ask him to wait, and have this fire mended and candles brought and something hot to drink. And hurry!”

Twenty minutes later Cecil found her sitting in a high-back chair sewing tranquilly by a blazing log fire. She looked up at him and her pale, chiselled face was quite expressionless.

“This is an agreeable surprise, Sir William. Forgive the delay in admitting you, but I am not accumstomed to visitors. I have ordered a hot cordial. It's a dismal journey from London in this weather and you must be chilled to the bone.”

“Your Grace is very kind.”

He was a slight man with prematurely grey hair and a stoop, the legacy of a life spent at a writing-desk. He looked older than his thirty-eight years; his voice was quiet, almost toneless; there was nothing about him to suggest that he was one of the few men clever enough to stay in office under the Protestant rule of Edward VI and the turbulent Catholic revival of Mary. Elizabeth glanced at the door. It was shut, but she knew that her sister had spies in her household.

“I understand that you come with the Queen's knowledge, sir: you must assure me of that before we proceed any further.”

“Madam, the Queen is in no condition to know anything. I am here to tell you that she is dying.”

“Dying? What are you saying?”

“She has named you as her successor. I have ridden from her sick bed to tell you. It is only a matter of days, perhaps hours, before you will be Queen of England, Madam. And may God grant you a happier reign that the one which is closing now.”