Elizabeth (30 page)

She often wore the ring given her by Felton, and she had bought Mary's fabulous rope of pearls from the late Earl of Moray at a third of their price; they were always round her neck. She dismissed the Bull of Excommunication with the remark that the Pope was trying to lean out of the Vatican and spit across the ocean, and she paid out two thousand treasured pounds to the Scottish Regent for the Earl of Northumberland, who had been made a prisoner, and had him executed at York. Then she wrote a personal letter to Catherine de' Medici, her good sister of France, and hinted that she was willing to reconsider marriage with her unmarried son the Duc d'Alençon.

Elizabeth was thirty-seven, her suitor was nineteen. Shrewd and cunning as Catherine was, she was obsessed with power, power for herself and her children, and it was just possible that the Virgin Queen of England was prepared to marry and safeguard herself after the recent rebellion and the Papal sentence, which Catherine blandly ignored. For once she fell foul of her own greed; Mary Stuart wrote impassioned letters complaining of her treatment and her danger and trying desperately to involve France in an intrigue on her behalf, but there was no response. The marriage negotiations opened, and Elizabeth could be sure of French neutrality as long as any hope of self-interest remained.

In spite of his experience of past courtships, Cecil was unable to resist the temptation to take Elizabeth's overtures seriously; he had never abandoned his hope that the Queen would overcome her scruples and take a husband; he longed to see her with a child and he was sufficiently desperate to support a bridegroom who was a Catholic and still in his teens. He disapproved of Elizabeth's familiarity with men, but he regarded it as a sign of susceptibility to the more regular relationship instead of the empty substitute it really was. He could not see how a woman could be content with flattery, flirting with Leicester and Heneage and Sir Christopher Hatton, all of them young and distinguished by physical attractions, without secretly yearning for the felicities of marriage. It was his one blind spot, and it led him into the same error as the Dowager Queen of France. It was always possible that Elizabeth meant what she said when she talked about marriage, and his enthusiasm infected her Council who wasted as much time over the negotiations as the French. Elizabeth did not disillusion any of them; it rather amused her to deceive Cecil a little—he was so seldom wrong about anything. But she did not pretend with Leicester; he was not concerned with this new suitor whom he knew would be rejected like all the others, but he was mortally afraid of losing his own comfortable position of favourite to younger men like Hatton, who deluged the Queen with love-letters and presents exactly as he had done when he had hopes of marrying her years before. He was jealous, and he exaggerated his jealousy to please her. She was becoming very vain, a common symptom in women approaching middle age, and the satisfaction of her vanity was an exhausting and uncertain occupation. He could never afford to be tired or depressed or anything but a mirror to reflect the Queen's mood; if he relaxed in his role of adorer, Hatton or Heneage made up the deficiency, and Elizabeth retaliated by encouraging them and snubbing him when he competed. It was a hectic life, bedevilled by the caprices of a woman who seemed to become less predictable as she grew older, who danced till the small hours and hunted all the afternoon and yet always seemed to be working with Cecil and her Council. Leicester was also nearly forty and he grew tired long before she did. He escaped to Lettice with increasing affection and relief, and left Elizabeth to his rivals because he could not endure the pace she set without an occasional respite. He had a great many enemies, but Cecil was no longer active among them. After his betrayal of the Norfolk plot, the Secretary had intimated that there was a permanent peace between them instead of a truce. He had shown himself loyal to the Queen and Cecil was prepared to forgive him the riches, his influence and his arrogance on that account. He was a fixture who would only be removed by a husband, and he now caused less scandal than the conduct of Hatton and half a dozen others. He accepted Leicester and Leicester no longer resented him. When Elizabeth made Cecil a peer and gave him the title of Lord Burleigh, Leicester was the first to congratulate him. There was only one supreme power in the country and that was the Queen; he was content to share what remained with William Cecil.

The marriage negotiations dragged on; Elizabeth showed enthusiasm one moment, and maidenly reticence the next; so great were her powers of dissimulation, so brilliant was her acting, that the French Ambassador saw nothing ridiculous in the nervous scruples of an experienced woman of almost forty over the character of the bridegroom who was now twenty-one. Neither side betrayed impatience over the lapse of months which spun into two years. It was not uncommon for a Royal marriage to be agreed upon after a year or more of bargaining by both parties. Nor was it incongruous when the Queen spoke wistfully of children. She was as slim and active as a girl; her handsome features defied an analysis of her age, and since she had adopted the fashion and wore a variety of wigs in different styles, it was impossible to detect a grey hair. Certainly her health was delicate. She ran high temperatures, suffered from violent stomach upsets and was inclined to hysterical outbursts of tears and temper. But there was no reason to suppose her incapable of bearing children, and if she died in childbirth, then Queen Catherine's grandchild would be the ruler of England. And the French would be less scrupulous than Queen Elizabeth about executing Mary Stuart and securing the infant its inheritance.

In February, 1572, the Treaty of Blois was signed between England and France as a preliminary to the marriage contract. It was a defensive treaty aimed against Spain; both countries were bound to send troops in the event of an invasion by a third and to abstain from interfering in Scotland. It was a triumph for Elizabeth's diplomacy and, more significant still, it ignored the existence of that other protagonist whose mother had been a Guise, who was still held a prisoner in England and still writing hopeless letters to France reminding Catherine that she was proposing to marry her son to an excommunicated usurper.

Elizabeth's fears were calmed by another outbreak of revolt in the Netherlands, more violent than the first. Earlier she had opened her ports to hundreds of Flemish refugees, most of them skilled craftsmen who enhanced native trade; now she released as many as wished to volunteer to fight in their own country, and at the same time expressed her regret at the rebellion to the Spanish Ambassador, promising absolute neutrality.

Again her policy was vindicated, but it was a cautious policy based on making as much trouble for the Spanish as possible without direct intervention. Elizabeth wanted to avoid war with Spain at any cost, but the young King of France was persuaded that at last the moment had come to interfere and sweep Alva and his troops out of the Netherlands and annex the country for himself. His adviser was the Huguenot leader Coligny who wanted a religious war on behalf of his fellow Protestants, and for the first time Catherine de' Medici's advice was overruled by her son.

Consumed by possessiveness for her son and fear for her own power, the Queen Dowager decided to murder her rival while he and the heads of the great Huguenot families were all gathered in Paris.

Elizabeth was out riding when a courier delivered the despatch from her ambassador in Paris telling of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve. She stopped her horse and broke the seals and read through it slowly. Her first reaction was incredulous horror, followed quickly by astonishment that Catherine de' Medici, whose intelligence she respected, could have committed such an appalling blunder. She had bungled the murder of her enemy Coligny; the assassins had wounded but not killed him, and the Queen Mother had been forced to arrange the wholesale murder of the Huguenots within twenty-four hours of the attempt, to prevent them taking their revenge upon her. The wording of the despatch was almost as violent as the event it described. She knew the ambassador in Paris; his name was Francis Walsingham and he belonged to the increasing sect of dismally Puritan reformers whom Elizabeth instinctively disliked. He was more anti-Catholic than Cecil at his worst and, when he wrote of the hideous brutalities committed in Paris on that day, he spared the Queen no details. Men and women and children, even babies at the breast, had been dragged into the sreets and slaughtered; their homes were looted and burnt, the city was running with blood and the Seine carried hundreds of mutilated corpses. Not only the Queen Mother and her son and their Court were responsible for what Walsingham described as the greatest crime next to the Crucifixion; the common people of Paris had joined them and after them the people of France. In every town and village, the populace were murdering the Huguenots. He called Catherine de' Medici the female anti-Christ and prophesied the downfall of the nation which had shown itself capable of such atrocities. But in his indignation, in Elizabeth's opinion, Walsingham had completely overlooked the salient point. Public outcry would force her to drop her marriage negotiations with France. She rode on slowly, still holding the despatch under her arm and one of her companions asked her what was in it. They knew it must be serious when she gave the order to turn back.

On reflection, Catherine de' Medici had retrieved her initial mistake as well as she could. Coligny was dead and the whole Huguenot faction which had threatened her power and rent France with religious wars, was destroyed root and branch. Horribly and cruelly—Elizabeth winced, remembering Walsingham's descriptions of the murder of little children—but none the less destroyed. And the French people had participated in the crime. The Queen Mother had ineffably blackened her name and the honour of her country, but she had made France a first-class power for the first time in a hundred years. She would have to express her horror, and she was horrified, Elizabeth admitted, not only by the needless cruelty to the innocent, but by the mismanagement which made it necessary, and she would have to pretend aversion to the marriage. But only for a time. The negotiations could be shelved, but they must not be closed.

It might be easier if she recalled that hothead Walsingham from his post and sent someone more politic and less religious to take his place.

She refused to receive the French Ambassador for fourteen days, and then gave him an audience dressed in the deepest mourning, accompanied by her Council and ladies and gentlemen, al lof whom were dressed in black. She made her public disapproval plain to the satisfaction of her people and her Government, and wrote one of her brilliant, involved letters to Catherine de' Medici expressing horror, grief and censure in the correct proportion. But she also intimated with great delicacy, that when her sorrow for her coreligionists had faded, the French Prince might be allowed to revive his suit.

The Earl of Shrewsbury had not been relieved of his duties as guardian of the Scots Queen. His letter was shown to Elizabeth who remarked that the safest custodian was one sufficiently unmoved by his prisoner to want to be rid of her, and ordered him to remove Mary to Sheffield where she was kept in a suite of rooms which were dry and comfortable by comparison with Tutbury. The Earl had said her health was bad, and the Queen was very anxious to keep her alive. It was a wish the English Parliament did not share. Protestant fury at the French massacre was concentrated in an attack on the Catholic Queen who was a prisoner and in a position to pay for the crimes committed by her fellow Catholics. Parliament met and demanded the head of Mary Stuart for her part in the defunct Norfolk plot; when the Queen refused them, they put forward a Bill by which anyone of any degree or station could be executed for treason against the State. Elizabeth vetoed this proposal. She had no doubt that there would be other plots and that if such a Bill reached the Statute Book, Mary's head would fall within twelve months. She refused in the lofty language which never failed to stir the emotions of those whose wishes she was frustrating, and within a year she judged it safe to reopen the marriage negotiations with France. This had such a disturbing effect upon the mind of King Philip of Spain that he sent his ambassador on a special visit to Elizabeth to protest Spanish friendship and make sure that her intentions of a matrimonial alliance with the French were only a political feint.

The courtship began once more; the question of the Queen's marriage was discussed in every tavern and in every great house throughout the country; romantic speculation was focused on the Queen, and it was noticed that the Queen showed signs of enjoying the attention for its own sake.

But while Elizabeth began the game of marriage with a man she had never seen, another marriage took place within forty miles of her own Palace at Whitehall.

The Earl of Essex had died in Ireland where he was performing his duties as Governor with the brutality and oppression customary in that obstinately Catholic and independent country. On 20th September Leicester married his widow.

The new Countess of Leicester held out her left hand and admired the wedding ring on her finger.

“Even now I cannot believe it,” she said. Leicester pulled himself up on the pillows and laughed. The bedroom at Wanstead was full of the bright autumn sunshine; it was nearly noon and no one had disturbed them. The marriage had been performed in secret at his private chapel, witnessed by Lettice's father, Sir Henry Knollys, who had left immediately after the ceremony. He was a member of the rising sect of Puritans and he had never approved of his daughters' mode of life or of the scandals which resulted from her choice of the Queen's favourite as a lover. He also strongly disapproved of the lover. When Lettice was widowed, he made it clear that Leicester must marry his daughter or he would petition the Queen to intervene and place Lettice under his control.

Leicester never considered losing Lettice for a moment; he agreed to the marriage on condition that it was kept a secret, and on that autumn morning he awoke feeling strangely contented, and far less frightened of the results of discovery than he had imagined. He watched his wife with amusement and tenderness as she stood by the side of the bed in her satin bedgown, admiring her wedding ring and smiling at him. He was always amused and a little envious of her sensuality. She was unashamedly in love with warmth and food and bodily pleasures, with a quick wit and a lively mind which prevented her capacity for indulgence from becoming a bore to herself or to him. He could never understand how he had once compared her to Elizabeth just because they both had red hair.