Elizabeth I (81 page)

There was more. I am reciting it from memory now, summarizing it. But I think I have captured its main meaning. I sent it as fast as mortal means could carry it.

I was adamant that he should not return, excusing himself, posturing before crowds, until he had carried out my orders. He was a deserter ever. I would not allow him to desert his post this time.

In the meantime we had a glorious summer in England. All the rain must be falling in Ireland, for we had fair weather and mild sunny days. After four failed, soaked harvests in a row, we were finally granted a reprieve. Flowers shot up in the royal gardens, hollyhocks and Canterbury bells taller than I, boxwood spreading thickly and robustly with glossy new leaves, spears of lavender waving in the gentle breezes. Boats plied the Thames, banners flying, and people thronged the river footpaths. In the open fields, archers practiced at the butts and falconers trained their birds.

“The last summer of this century,” said Marjorie, as we strolled along the riverbanks at Greenwich, our guards discreetly following. Flocks of children came up to me, and I welcomed them. Their elders looked on, hesitating to approach, but I waved them over and spoke to each one. Overhead the soft clouds drifted, aimless as youths let out of school.

“It will be hard to write ‘16’ instead of ‘15,’” said Catherine, hurrying along. Her short legs meant she had to use more steps to keep up with us. “My pen has a will of its own.”

“It will be strange to think of its being 1600. I did not think I would ever see it,” Marjorie said. “To live a long time is to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A dubious blessing?”

In the lovely lull that is twilight, we returned to the palace, there to find our peace shattered. A messenger delivered a letter to Marjorie, straight from Ireland. With misgivings, she took it. News from Ireland is never good. Before opening it, she sat down. Then, slowly, cautiously, she broke the seal and read, quickly.

The letter fluttered to the floor and she stared dumbly across the room, seeing us no longer. She was silent, as we are after true devastation. Her arm hung limply, her hand suspended over the letter.

I bent and picked it up. She did not protest. Indeed, she seemed not to see me.

My eyes flicked over the writing. Without my glasses, it was hard to read. But I could make out the important things: Thomas Norris, governor of Munster, and his brother, Henry, had both died. They had both been wounded on August 16. Thomas had died quickly, but Henry had survived an amputation and lived another five days. Thomas had died in Henry’s arms.

Six soldier sons, and now five of them gone, four claimed by Ireland.

Marjorie slumped in the chair, unmoving. I motioned to Catherine to help me move her to a place where she could lie down. Together we took her into my chamber and laid her upon my bed. There she could remain as long as she wished.

One son left. I would order him home from his post in the Netherlands. It was all I could do. Once again I was helpless when it mattered most. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Its fruit was bitter indeed.

65

N
ow the war had invaded my own chambers, felling Marjorie. She awoke from her sleep on my bed an altered woman—hesitant where she had been sure-footed, diffident where she had been outspoken. Even her voice changed. Her hearty laugh and booming timbre were replaced by a quiet, low tone. It is said that grief can turn someone’s hair stark white overnight. That is, of course, impossible, since the ends cannot change. But from that night on, the part in her hair was white as a swan’s wing, and as her hair grew, the white spread.

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.