The Men Who Would Be King (27 page)

On St. George's Day, April 23, a banquet was held in the new hall, and for the occasion Elizabeth was bedecked as gorgeously as the surroundings, in a golden dress studded with glittering jewels. The canvas outer walls of the hall were painted to represent stonework, and the queen's elderly face was painted to represent beauty. Some of the highest members of the French nobility, with hundreds of their servants, had come to the English court for a mighty masquerade—a great expenditure of time and money for a marriage that would never take place. Leicester, who, with his fondness for the arts, would have been familiar with the English poets of the previous generation, might have echoed Wyatt's bitter words:

Who list to hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain.

Alençon, like many suitors before him, was spending his time in vain, pursuing the Queen of England.

A broad hint to that effect was given in a “Triumph” that was enacted for the visitors on May 15, in the tiltyard. In this chivalrous spectacle Desire and his foster children, one of whom was young Philip Sidney, endeavored to storm the Fortress of Perfect Beauty, using “pretty scaling-ladders” and “flowers and such fancies.” They addressed the queen, pleading with her to render up her beauty to the forces of desire, but at last they were driven back by Virtue, leaving the maiden fortress intact. The challengers were rebuked by an angel, who proclaimed: “If in besieging the Sun you understand what you had undertaken, you would destroy a common blessing for a private profit.” The symbolic reference to Alençon's wooing was unmistakable.

The envoys found their mission almost impossible. Their mouths were stopped with sweetmeats; they tried to talk business and were given entertainments. Elizabeth was anxious for an alliance with France, but she would not be tied to a marriage pledge—she would only discuss that with Alençon himself, she told them. A treaty was drafted for the marriage, but Elizabeth was adamant that it should have no force as yet, and that it was merely being drawn up for future use. Considering the “growing greatness of Spain” it seemed necessary that “some straiter league should be made between the two crowns whatsoever became of the marriage,” but the nature of that league could not be agreed on while the envoys were insisting that the basis for any alliance must be marriage. Henry III knew that no paper treaty would bind the Queen of England; he wanted her held fast in the arms of a Valois. Walsingham stated Elizabeth's attitude succinctly in a letter he wrote from France in August: “The principal cause why I was sent over,” he reminded her, “was to procure a straiter degree of amity between the King and you without marriage, and yet to carry myself in the procuring thereof, as might not altogether break off the matter of the marriage.” It had been a difficult undertaking, he added, “considering the determination they had put on here not to yield to a league without marriage, so long as there was hope of marriage.”

The “hope of marriage” that Elizabeth had so successfully exploited throughout her reign was still very strong in Alençon's breast, even though the queen was approaching her forty-eighth birthday. The prince's love letters shamelessly ignored reality, and in their eroticism they added a new dimension to the fiction of Elizabeth's personal desirability. “Kissing and rekissing all that Your beautiful Majesty can think of,” Francis the Constant, “he who burns with desire,” waited for “the sweet consummation that I desire more than my life.” It must have given this elderly maiden who so craved admiration a delicious frisson to read that one of the greatest princes in Christendom was almost beside himself with desire to be her husband, “in bed between the sheets in your beautiful arms,” after which happy event he had no doubt that she would soon be nursing an infant Prince of Wales, “made and forged by the little Frenchman who is and will be eternally your humble and very loving slave.” Alençon apologized charmingly for the liberty of his style, but the frankness with which he expressed his passion was excitingly novel for the queen. A Valois prince could be permitted freedoms that no lesser person might assay. The fact that Elizabeth no longer had any intention of marrying her Frog and sharing her great bed with him did not detract from her pleasure in contemplating the prospect.

A gift of £30,000 helped to keep Alençon's desires at fever pitch during the summer of 1581, and in October, after raising the siege of Cambrai, he returned to England to pursue his quarry in person once more. Catherine de' Medici had again been talking of a Spanish bride for him, which called for the appearance of great interest in her suitor from Elizabeth. Alençon scarcely knew what to expect as he made the stormy crossing to England. He needed money for his Netherlands venture; whether or not he would obtain it by marrying the Queen of England remained to be seen.

“The principal object of his visit is to ask for money,” Mendoza stated baldly, but Elizabeth's intense pleasure in being courted ensured an atmosphere of romance for the Prince's visit. Alençon left his first interview with the queen with his spirits high and his hopes rekindled. He was Elizabeth's ardent young lover again, sighing out the raptures that her aged face and figure inspired in him, whispering of the joys he longed to know in her withered arms, eager to hear her call him her Frog and tease him about the smallness of his fingers in her most archly coquettish manner. Scandal found fresh fuel in reports that the queen had taken to visiting Alençon in his bedchamber, carrying little cups of soup to him while he was still in bed—“There goes much babbling” ran a contemporary letter, “and the Queen doth not attend to other matters, but only to be together with the Duke in one chamber from morning to noon, and afterwards till two or three hours after sunset. I cannot tell what a devil they do.” What a devil the queen and her last suitor might or might not have done together, it certainly did not include sexual intercourse. Elizabeth's purpose was, as it had ever been, to provoke desire, not to satisfy it.

Rumors were rife; Elizabeth was treating Alençon with every sign of affection, and the courtship seemed to be prospering, but something was wrong. Leicester should have been glowering with jealous anger; instead, he was as courteous and affable as could be, and he announced in public that the only way for Elizabeth to “secure the tranquility of England” was for her to marry Alençon. Such complaisance could only mean that he was confident the queen would do nothing of the sort. Walsingham, who had opposed the match so long and so vehemently, seemed equally well disposed towards Alençon. Elizabeth was enjoying a political pretense as she dallied with her French prince, and they knew it; however, the remarkable scene that took place on November 22 was enough to shake their equanimity.

On November 21 Alençon and his company “displayed, not discontent alone, but entire disillusionment as to the marriage taking place.” Their grim faces and resentful murmurs would not foster a spirit of amity between France and England; Elizabeth promptly took action to show her suitor how much in earnest she was. On the following day at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was strolling in a gallery of the palace with Alençon, while Leicester and Walsingham stood near. The French ambassador approached, and told her that his master Henry III had ordered him to “hear from the Queen's own lips her intentions with regard to marrying his brother.” Elizabeth did not hesitate. Regally, decisively, she spoke the words that one suitor after another had waited to hear, throughout the twenty-three years of her reign. “You may write this to the King,” she told the ambassador clearly, “the Duke of Alençon shall be my husband.” She turned to the astonished Alençon, kissed him on the mouth, and drew a ring from her finger, which she gave to him “as a pledge.” Incredulous and delighted, he gave her a ring of his own in return, and then the queen summoned her ladies and gentlemen from the presence chamber to the gallery, “repeating to them, in a loud voice, what she had previously said.” The gloom of the day before had turned to rapture. Alençon and his followers were “extremely overjoyed,” and a messenger was immediately dispatched to carry the news to Henry III. Leicester and Walsingham must have exchanged anxious glances as the little French prince proudly escorted his aged betrothed past the congratulating courtiers.

The Queen of England had capitulated at last. She had accepted the proposals of a suitor young enough to be her son; it must have been a strange, unreal sensation for her to hear herself agreeing, at last, to marry. But unreality was the keynote of the event. The Spanish ambassador, for one, sensed that Elizabeth's startling announcement was not what it seemed. “People in London consider the marriage as good as accomplished, and the French are of the same opinion,” he reported, but in his view “the display she has made is only artful and conditional.” The art lay in her ability to make Alençon believe that she was in earnest; the condition was whether or not her people would accept her decision. Mendoza thought that the scene in the gallery had been staged in the presence of Leicester and Walsingham as “an artifice to draw Alençon on, and make him believe that the men who were most opposed to it are now openly in its favour.” She had put on a convincing show for the French, so that it appeared that she was determined to marry, but all the time she was comfortably certain that Parliament and public opinion would relieve her of the necessity of honoring her promise by showing implacable resistance to the marriage. As Mendoza put it, “By personally pledging herself in this way, she binds him to her.” He explained, “She rather prefers to let it appear that the failure of the negotiations is owing to the country and not to herself, as it is important for her to keep him attached to her, in order to counterbalance his brother, and prevent anything being arranged to her prejudice.” Strange as it might have seemed for Elizabeth to make a public announcement that she would marry, it was a characteristically clever move.

Instead of giving one of her ringing reprimands to any who dared to question her decision, she received such interference with a suspicious degree of equanimity. When one of her long-established favorites, Sir Christopher Hatton, burst into tears and sobbed that she might be deposed if she insisted on marrying against the will of the people, on whose affection the security of her throne depended, Elizabeth was not at all angered by his temerity, but answered him very tenderly. Leicester, who, despite his confidence that Elizabeth did not mean to marry, had been unnerved by the certainty of the French that the marriage would take place, went even further in his plain speaking. He asked Elizabeth point-blank whether she were “a maid or a woman.” The effrontery of the question was appalling. To ask the unmarried Queen of England whether she was a virgin or not was insolence beyond belief—though the fact that Leicester should have been in doubt on the subject served to indicate that he himself had never physically possessed the woman he had courted for so long. Elizabeth had always set limits to how far Leicester might carry his intimacy with her, in every way, yet on this occasion no infuriated “God's death, my Lord!” greeted his presumption. Quite tranquilly the queen answered that she was still a maiden; possibly she was flattered to have been asked such a question at her age. Leicester then told her roundly “that she had not acted wisely in carrying the matter so far and so ostentatiously,” which Elizabeth seemed to agree with. Meekly she said that she would send Alençon a message to inform him that if she married him she was sure she would not survive for long. “She would be very glad if he would allow her to defer the matter” was the gist of the message, “and she would be very much more attached to him as a friend even than if he were her husband.”

It was put about that Elizabeth had spent the night of November 22 in torments of indecision, while her waiting women, in floods of tears, begged her not to embark on the hazardous undertaking of marriage and childbirth. But there was little evidence to suggest that she still had any serious thoughts of doing so. The real conflict that followed the scene in the gallery was over the question of Alençon's departure. Elizabeth and her ministers made it increasingly plain that they wanted him to go, but having come so near to winning the great prize that he had pursued for so long the prince was determined to stay on at court and secure his quarry or be compensated for his loss. He had nothing to lose by remaining there, kept and fêted at her expense, and he had high hopes of winning the queen, or, should the prize be denied him, receiving recompense. The situation soon became embarrassing. Elizabeth's gallant guest and his entourage remained resolutely where they were, while Alençon insisted jocularly that the queen had promised to marry him, or created dramatic scenes in which he ranted that he would kill himself, or carry her off by force. The pretense of affection became very thin, though it was not abandoned; Elizabeth used “a hundred thousand false words and oaths” to reassure her little Frog of her love for him, while he pouted that he was hurt to find her so eager for his departure. When, at long last, the moment of his leaving arrived, Elizabeth put on a moving display of grief, although the Spanish ambassador learned from his spies that in the privacy of her own chamber she “danced for very joy at getting rid of him.” When Elizabeth Tudor could long for a suitor, a great prince who professed to adore her, to leave her side, the end of an era had arrived.

Persuading Alençon to go away was an expensive business. Elizabeth joined in the laughter when it was said that “Alençon was a fine gallant to sell his lady for money,” and at first she swore that she would neither marry him nor pay him, but on December 15 she agreed that he should be lent £60,000, to be paid in two halves and repaid within six months. It was not until February 7 that he finally embarked, at Sandwich.

Eager as Elizabeth had been for her suitor's departure, when he had gone she seemed to be stricken with a sense of what she had lost. She cried that she would give a million to have her Frog swimming in the Thames again, instead of in the stagnant waters of the Netherlands, and there were moments when she was painfully melancholy. It was not playacting this time. Whatever his motives, Alençon had ardently wanted to marry her; he had flooded her with expressions of devotion and promises of a happy, fecund future. Now that he had gone the dream was over, and she knew that she could never have a husband and children, even if she had wanted to. The deep resistance to marriage that nothing had been able to overcome was in conflict with the fears of loneliness and yearnings for love that Elizabeth felt. She expressed her dissatisfied feelings in a revealing poem “On Monsieur's Departure”: