Elizabeth I (124 page)

Carefully Charles and I placed it under her wet head. Then, each of us taking our leave of her, kissing her forehead, together we pulled it out from under her. Her head fell back on the bed.

She gave a little sigh, a muffled cry. Then she was silent, and her breathing stopped.

I clutched the pillow, digging my fingers into it. She was gone.

In the privy chamber, the letters from Ireland and Venice sat on my desk, my triumph of the day, of the decade. But matters of state and matters of the heart run on different tracks. It would be days before I would think of them again.

I could not order the court into mourning, for Catherine was not royalty nor a personage of state, but its mood was one of mourning nonetheless. For myself, I dressed all in black, but my thoughts were darker still.

Filled with grief, I noticed Charles, who showed the strain of mourning. He was bent with despair and suddenly looked much older than his sixty-seven years. He looked as old as Old Parr. Charles looked at the black pillow with loathing and kept muttering, “It should be destroyed. It should be destroyed.” Once he tried to throw it in the fire, but I took it away, reminding him that it belonged to the Bishop of Ely and was revered in that region.

“We destroy papal relics, and this is worse,” he said.

“It has helped many people, and Catherine asked for it,” I reminded him.

John Harington attempted to amuse me, kneeling before me with some of his satirical verses, but I waved him away. “When you feel creeping time at your door, such frivolities will no longer please you. I am past my relish for such matters.” My relish for everything had fled, leaving a featureless landscape of the mind as bereft of life as the wintry one surrounding us. I felt a stab of regret at robbing my godchildren of care and company, so I summoned Eurwen and told her, “I give my first and last godchildren to one another. John, take Eurwen under your wing, and look after her. Eurwen, consider him your older brother at court.”

“Ah, but this sounds too biblical!” said John. “Surely we are not at the foot of the cross, being told, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ and ‘Son, behold your mother.’”

“I told you, I am in no mood for jesting,” I warned him. “Begone!”

The remaining ladies of my chamber moved like shades drifting through fields of asphodel in Hades. Helena had returned. She was my last companion from the old days, and she acknowledged it.

“I cannot make up for all the ones who have left us,” she told me, “but I will never desert you.”

“I will not hold you to it,” I said, attempting to smile.

“After almost forty years at your side, I have learned to disregard your low moods,” she said.

She did not understand. This was not a low mood but an unflinching look at what lay ahead.

It was time. I heard the summons, not far off, like a rumble of thunder when I dined outdoors.

As she helped me prepare for bed, brushing out my hair—contrary to rumor, I still had hair, quite a bit of it, but gray now, no longer red—Helena was solicitous. She told me what her children were doing and inquired about the coming season at court.

It does not matter,
I thought, while answering her as best I could.

Lying in bed, I wondered what I had left undone. Nothing that others could not finish. There was Ireland, but only the surrender treaty, with its terms, remained to be signed.

The succession. It was obvious that James would succeed me. I did not regret never having named an heir. There always was an heir, of the body or not, and the kingdom went on. The only problem came when it was disputed. But my adversary the Scots queen had solved that for me admirably, providing only one candidate.

Parliament. It was growing in strength, demanding to be elevated into an arm of government, no longer content to style itself advisory only. That was an ominous development, but I had done my best to retard it. Another challenge for James.

Religion. In spite of predictions, the Catholics had survived. Not everyone had been won to my sensible middle way, to the Church of England. The Puritans found it still too popish, the Catholics, heretical. Well. One cannot satisfy everyone.

Finances. I had begun my reign with a dismal financial situation, had rectified it, only to find myself dragged backward into desperate straits by the wars. Now the kingdom stood as I had first found it—in debt, sliding toward bankruptcy, despite my personal sacrifices to stem it.

But with the Spanish war essentially over, and the Netherlands launched as a successful independent entity, those expenses should vanish. Ireland, too, would no longer drain us. James should have no trouble restoring the treasury to solvency.

Had I pleased people? Certainly the protection from civil war had conveyed a great blessing upon them. Perhaps that was my greatest gift—years and years of quiet at home, so English life could flourish. The French, torn by religious wars, did not enjoy the theater, country fairs, or taverns. Ordinary life—that was what civil war robbed people of.

The defeat of the Armada had given the people the conviction that they were protected by God, that England was a chosen land, for it was the “English wind” that had saved us in the end. Our seamen were skillful, but it was the wind that had destroyed the Spanish fleet. And not once, but over and over again, in the Armadas of 1595, 1596, and 1597, as if to make a point.

And the question others would ask long after I was gone: Was I wrong not to marry? Wrong politically, that is? And I could answer that one resoundingly: No, I was not wrong. As the Virgin Queen, I had united my people far more than I could have done with any consort. They knew they had my undivided loyalty.

I touched my coronation ring. This bound me to them. It had from the beginning, and I had never betrayed those vows. I twisted it. It had, lately, been difficult to move, as if it were adhering to my very flesh.

All the doubts—of not having loved enough, not having given enough, not to my country but to one person, one beloved person who might have reigned with me as my consort. Those doubts—it was time to let them go now.

What was done was done.

96

March 1603

M
y pervasive sadness did not depart, and the coming of March, with its promise of spring to follow, made no difference. I forced myself to grant an audience to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, a charming young man, as the best Italians are. One part of me delighted in the belated diplomatic recognition; the other part barely grasped it, as if something far away tugged at my hem.

I heard from Ireland. The O’Neill would acquiesce to my terms. We had won. Along with the dispatch, a chunk of stone from the smashed coronation chair of Tullaghoge was enclosed.

I withdrew it from its pouch and fingered it. It was about the size of my palm, irregular and gray brown. Within it lay the mystery of what made a king in Ireland. Had we the right to destroy it?

“It seems a simple enough thing,” I said.

“So was the bread at the Last Supper,” said Cecil.

“This is more easily destroyed,” I answered. How prescient of Jesus to leave behind no relics, no holy of holies, merely a piece of bread that must be baked, over and over, in its own time.

I pointed to my own coronation ring as an equivalent. I tried to pull it off, but I could not move it.

Cecil tried to help me, but he only succeeded in irritating the finger. “It has grown into the flesh,” he said.

“As it has grown into my soul,” I said. It was part of me.

“I fear it is cutting off your blood. Look how the finger swells.”

“It has done so before,” I assured him. “It is my blood rushing out to unite with my people.”

“Symbols must not disguise dangerous events,” he said. “I must call a physician. We need his opinion.”

Over my objections, he called the physician. One look at my red and throbbing finger, and he shook his head. “It must come off, Your Majesty.”

“Never!” I snatched my hand away and enveloped it in my other one for protection.

“It will cause your finger to die and rot,” he said.

“I am wedded to my people, my land, and my realm,” I said. “The ring is my pledge of that.”

“It will kill you,” he said.

“I accept that. I have always known it. Did I not tell my people at Tilbury, ‘I will lay down my life in the dust for you’?”

“A swollen ring finger is not the same as a Spanish invasion. Be reasonable, Your Majesty.”

“No!”

“It is only a piece of metal. Do not risk your life.”

“Please, my dear Queen. My father’s voice joins with mine, as we would not lose you for such a trifling thing,” said Cecil.

Before I could hide my hand, the physician had his pliers out, pulled my finger, and cut the metal. Warmth flooded my finger.

“There. You are saved.” He handed me the twisted remnants of the ring.

I took it sorrowfully. Its intricate pattern had been severed. Then I picked up the stone fragment from Tullaghoge.

“So we are both shorn of our authority, The O’Neill and I,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Cecil. “He lost his by military defeat. No one has deprived you of yours.”

But I felt naked, disenfranchised, as though the realm had divorced me, revoked my power.

The place on my finger where the ring had been was deeply indented. I rubbed it; the mark felt engraved, stamped on the flesh. Perhaps it would remain.

The heaviness of soul did not depart from me, and in its wake came heaviness of body. My legs were cold, my bones ached, and I was troubled with sleeplessness. Then my throat was seized with pain, developing an abscess that made speaking torture. I put off a meeting with De Beaumont, the French ambassador. I did not feel up to it. Instead, I wrote a letter to my old fellow ruler and friend Henri IV, admitting that bit by bit, the fabric of my reign was beginning to tear and fade away. Somehow the confession was easiest to make to another monarch.