The Marriage Game (36 page)

“This day should be observed every year!” Robert declared, overcome by loyal fervor. Let England’s enemies see how much her queen was loved!

“It shall be, so my people wish it,” Elizabeth said. Already she had heard people calling it the Golden Day, and her subjects’ observance of it touched her heart like nothing else, stiffening her resolve to stay wedded to her kingdom rather than taking a husband, and to be the mother of her people instead of having children of her own.

1571
 

Elizabeth’s heart was bursting with pride and gratitude as she fastened the mantle of nobility across Cecil’s chest. He was Baron Burghley now, as a reward for his manifold services to her. No prince, she kept telling everyone, had ever had such a counselor. She was blessed in him, and in her other advisers. Cecil, Leicester, Sussex, and Walsingham—these were the men now closest to her, especially since Throckmorton had died and Bacon was aging; and while they did not always see eye to eye among themselves, they were united in their loyalty to her.

The new Baron Burghley and the Earl of Sussex were in favor of the Anjou marriage; Robert, Earl of Leicester, predictably, was not, although he saw the need for England to have a strong ally. He knew that the others thought he was still hoping to marry the Queen himself, but he was aware that the likelihood of that was receding day by day. If they wed, he knew, it would be almost as brother and sister. They were no longer young, and their desire for each other had burnt itself out. Yet even now he hoped to fan the embers.

“You do not need to marry Anjou to obtain King Charles’s friendship,” he told Elizabeth as they rested by the fire one chill February evening. Elizabeth sat with a bandaged leg resting on a footstool. She had an ulcer that had been slow to heal, but it was much improved now.

“Ah, but I am more bent to this marriage than I have ever been,” she said. “I am sending an envoy to Paris to inform King Charles that I am ready thankfully to accept their proposals and treat with them. It is to be a secret for now, my Eyes.”

And you will not go through with it, Robert thought. He pitied Walsingham, now resident ambassador at the French court, and the man who would have the task of keeping the negotiations afloat while the Queen blew hot and cold.

He leaned forward impulsively and took her hand. “You would not consider me, Bess?”

She smiled at him affectionately. “You deserve the laurel for trying, but no, Robin. Not now, at any rate. I have to be seen eager to wed Anjou.”

Yet that did not stop her from openly flirting with the infuriating Heneage, and with a newcomer at court, the lawyer Christopher Hatton, whom rumor said had been advanced by the Queen after she admired his accomplished performance—and his good looks—in a masque. He was strikingly, masculinely beautiful, a paragon in the tiltyard—and how he danced! Robert looked on in envy as Elizabeth twirled, dipped, and jumped for Hatton’s benefit before the whole court. She was as slender as ever, lithe and supple now that her ulcer had healed—whereas he, Robert, had put on weight and was less impressive on the dance floor than he had once been. His jealousy surged when he heard her calling Hatton her Lids, just as she had called him her Eyes. He much preferred it when she called the interloper her Mutton—she affecting to be a shepherdess, with Hatton as her sheep—although of course he would have preferred her not to call him anything at all. Certainly he could think of a few choice names for him!

Hatton bombarded the Queen with compliments and gifts. He made love to her with his dark, intent eyes. He wrote her eloquent love letters. He told her that to be absent from her was Hell’s torment. His wits, he declared, were overwrought with thoughts of her. Love me, he begged her. She was in her element.

“Look at him jig!” she enthused to Robert as they watched the debonair
Hatton leaping about the floor, a chain of fair ladies in his wake. He had eyes for none of them, she noticed with approval.

“I can send you a dancing master who can do far better,” Robert retorted sourly, unable to resist a barb.

“Pish!” Elizabeth shrugged. “I will not see your man. He does it only for a trade.” And her eyes remained firmly fixed on Hatton’s tantalizing muscular physique.

“I am going to marry the Duke of Anjou,” Elizabeth announced to her council.

“All things considered?” Burghley asked.

“All things considered, dear Spirit,” she said firmly. Robert gave a snort of disgust, but she ignored him.

“This will make the Pope’s malice vanish in smoke,” Burghley observed. His voice was suffused with relief.

“Is the duke not too young to be married to Your Majesty?” one impudent councillor piped up.

“How dare you speak to your queen like that!” Robert flared, as Elizabeth flushed in anger. “Of course he is not too young for one so beautiful.”

“So you had best keep your silly opinions to yourself,” the Queen snapped.

“I do beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” stammered the councillor, seeing his hopes of preferment and a dazzling career at court rapidly sliding away.

“Do you think she will really go ahead with this marriage?” Sussex asked later, when Elizabeth had retired.

“Who knows?” Burghley shrugged. “At least she is keeping the French friendly when we most need them.”

An envoy from Queen Catherine duly arrived with a portrait of her son, a formal proposal, and a long list of demands, none of which Elizabeth was prepared to concede. She looked at the portrait and saw a dark man with heavy jowls and an earring resting on his wide ruff—Catherine de’ Medici to the life (if you discounted the mustache) which was enough to deter any ardent bride. She was reluctant to proceed
further, but the wearisome pretense must be kept up for as long as it served her purpose.

Anjou was reluctant too. A report reached Elizabeth that he had publicly declared that he would not marry an old creature with a sore leg. He could probably have heard the resultant explosion in Paris, and Queen Catherine felt obliged to send a profuse apology for her son’s unforgivably rude words. Elizabeth, in turn, felt obliged to dance in front of Fenelon at every opportunity, just to prove there was now nothing wrong with her leg.

“I hope,” she said to him, “that the Duke of Anjou will not have cause to complain that he has been tricked into marrying a lame bride.” There was no question in her mind that she could ever marry Anjou now, the spoiled brat. Even so, his cruel remark had hurt.

“The age gap does concern me,” she was moved to confide to Lady Cobham, her close confidante since Kate Knollys’s death two years earlier.

“Well, madam, my advice would be not to press ahead with your plans,” Lady Cobham agreed. “The great inequality in age concerns me too.”

“Pah!” cried Elizabeth, much affronted. “There are but ten years between Anjou and myself!”

Lady Cobham—realizing rapidly that while it was perfectly all right for the Queen to refer to such things, it was most certainly not all right for any lesser mortal to do so—did not dare correct her.

Elizabeth was furious with Anjou for making his antipathy to the marriage so public. It was mortifying! She was the greatest catch in Europe, was she not? The best match in her parish, as Walsingham put it. Far greater princes than Anjou had vied for her hand. It was humiliating to have this young coxcomb wax unenthusiastic about the glorious prize being offered him. Well, she would make it clear that there was a price to be paid for such insulting behavior.

“This marriage contract leaves much to be desired,” she declared, pushing it away from her. “William, you can tell the French that the return of Calais is the price of my hand.”

“They will never agree to that!” Burghley protested.

“Tell them also,” she went on, ignoring him, “that my conscience will not allow me to permit the duke to hear Mass in private. I do not see why he cannot worship as an Anglican.”

“All this talk of his being staunch in religion is just a ruse,” Robert said, unhelpfully in the circumstances, she felt. “He is merely pretending, to wring more concessions out of us. Your Majesty is justified in taking a stand.”

“You just want to marry her yourself, don’t you?” Burghley muttered in his ear.

“Not at all,” he muttered back. In fact, he had secretly advised the French to stay firm in the matter of the Mass. In the end, he had told them, Elizabeth would give in. Now he was not so sure, and it was clear to everyone that she was up to her old tricks, stalling, procrastinating, and stringing out negotiations. It was clear also that she had no real intention of marrying Anjou. And good riddance too, Robert thought savagely. The thought of that pervert doing with her what he himself had longed to do for years made him feel sick.

Another French envoy came and went without any progress being made. A stalemate had been reached. The negotiations skidded to a halt, then collapsed, gasping, in the dust.

Burghley came to the Queen, his face pained, barely able to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “Madam, I see how it is with you in regard to the French marriage. I will instruct your council to devise other means for your preservation, although how Your Majesty shall obtain remedies for the perils that threaten you is, I think, only known to Almighty God.” And he took himself off, muttering in his distress, to commiserate with Walsingham and Leicester.

“We should have known at the outset,” Robert reflected. “Her Majesty’s heart is not inclined to marry at all. We did our best to smooth the way for her, but at each point she made the usual difficulties.” In fact, he himself had done his best to make difficulties, although mercifully the others were not to know that. “Fear not,” he went on. “We still have a good understanding with France that may yet lead to an alliance.”

Elizabeth’s face was white with rage. In her hand she held incontrovertible evidence that Norfolk—who out of magnanimity she had graciously freed and forgiven—had been plotting to marry the Queen of Scots, plainly to overthrow Elizabeth and reign jointly with Mary over England. But the duke’s letters had been intercepted. Dangerous plotter he might be, but an inept one. Worse still was his betrayal. She was his cousin as well as his queen.

“Draw up a warrant for his arrest,” she commanded, her voice icy, and within hours Norfolk was in the Tower.

“But if the common people had their way, he would have been liberated,” Burghley reported, frowning. “He has ever been popular with them, and when word spread that he had been taken, there were crowds outside the Tower when he arrived, all protesting his innocence.”

“They will soon find out the truth!” Elizabeth seethed.

“Indeed they will, madam, for he has already confessed to some of the charges, although he denies that he ever meant to harm Your Majesty. For all that, the evidence we have against him is enough to send both him and the Queen of Scots to the block.”

Elizabeth hesitated. Her face was drawn.

“Norfolk is a fool,” she said at length. “He has been seduced into treason by his misguided devotion to Queen Mary.” God rot that brainless, aggravating woman! “But must I send him to his death? It is a deed much against my stomach. And he is of my blood.”

“Madam, the duke has committed treason. It is the most heinous of crimes, being against your sacred person. Was he thinking of ties of kinship when he plotted with the Scottish queen? I think not.”

Then Robert spoke. “Madam, to show weakness now would be to encourage others who would play traitor,” he said.

“Then I must consider what to do for the best,” Elizabeth said. “As for Mary, she is an anointed queen, and not a subject. There can be no question of doing violence upon her person, treacherous though she is.”

“Madam,” Burghley bristled, “we have proof that she will stop at nothing to gain her freedom and the English crown.”

“To execute her would set a dangerous—and doubtless illegal—precedent,” Elizabeth insisted, twisting her hands in agitation. Her cousin, she realized, was virtually untouchable, and therefore doubly menacing, for she could never be rid of her. “From now on she must be held more securely and closely watched. And Burghley, have the Casket Letters published, so that the world might know what she really is. We cannot have scenes like those at the Tower repeated. I will not have traitors cheered or my justice derided.”