Elizabeth I (63 page)

“Let them stay,” I said. “I believe them.”

“Bless you, lady,” said Gerard. He sank back down.

“Lay out pallets here,” I said. “They need to sleep.” While the men went to get them, I said, “I am not of your faith but admire your courage—and those of you who still remain steadfast even though your country affords you little reward.” Catholics could not sit in Parliament or hold university positions. There was no Catholic in any government circle. To persist in Catholicism meant no career in public service.

“Those are the people we come to minister to, my lady,” said Gerard. “They have no one but us to sustain them. So we gladly risk our own lives if that can preserve their faith. The great households provide some shelter, but they still need priests. There has been trouble at Cowdray, one of the mainstays. The new heir there is more militant and has run afoul of the government authorities, more’s the pity. Many a baptism was performed there until recently.”

“I
did
know both Robert and Gelli at Cambridge,” said Aylward. “And I knew they were Protestant. But I also knew . . . forgive me ... that recently Robert has had a falling out with the Queen, so I was hoping that it might be safe to come here. I am sorry to presume, but we were desperate.”

I smiled. “We
are
a Protestant house,” I said. “My father, in fact, was so staunchly Protestant he left England when Queen Mary reconciled it to the church. But now ... it is less a conviction than a political necessity,” I admitted. Suddenly I felt ashamed. In the light of such pure faith—like that of my father, even if at the opposite end of the spectrum—I always felt soiled and compromised. But how many among us burn with a true religious flame? “I am glad you are here,” I said. “Please rest well.”

“We will,” said Gerard. “And we promise to be gone before first light!” In the gentleness of his voice, in his quiet humor, I saw the charm that had won so many.

True to their word, before I was up, the men were gone. They had neatly folded the linens and blankets. Resting on one of the pillows was a saint’s medal. I picked it up as if it were poisonous. In a way it was. I turned it over. It was St. Lucy.

St. Lucy ... St. Lucy ... What did I know about her, indifferent Protestant that I was? She had something to do with eyesight, and her day was the shortest of the year. That would make her a good patron saint for me, since I liked nighttime. But Protestants did not have patron saints. Perhaps I could ask Christopher. He had been brought up Catholic. He might know.

I folded it in my palm. It was their thank-you gift, the only proof they had been here, and I treasured it.

“They’re gone?” Behind me Robert was standing, seeing the folded bedding. “Almost without a trace. Thank God!”

“I had never seen a Jesuit,” I said. “I had been told they were demons with cloven hooves and tails. Instead I found a humane and intelligent man.”

He laughed dismissively. “They say the devil himself can appear to be humane and intelligent.”

“He’s certainly intelligent, and good enough company that the Puritans fear the rivalry,” I said. “Although they don’t give him much competition in that regard.”

“Nonetheless, I’m glad they’re gone. I hope no one links them to us. That’s all my enemies at court would need to use against me!”

51

ELIZABETH

August 1597

Y
ou must watch this play with me,” I told Marjorie and Catherine. “I know you don’t fancy plays but I need your opinion. But you,” I turned to the younger ladies, “might enjoy it. They say the actor playing Richard is quite dreamy. He has to be, for his face to match his poetic words.”

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were to present the controversial
Richard II
this afternoon at Windsor. London had talked of little else, and although I had sent observers to the theater to report back to me, I needed to see it for myself.

It should have been an easy summer, with all the quarrelsome and strutting men away. No Raleigh, no Blount, no Essex. But once again we had foul weather; this was the fourth bad summer in a row, the fourth ruined harvest. Now it was seeming truly unnatural, and the people were growing more desperate and there was more talk of violence in the countryside. Parliament would meet and we would try to find a remedy, or failing that, immediate help for the destitute. There were few rides out through the countryside, and, sensing my unpopularity and not wishing to inflame it further, I did not go on Progress.

This
Richard II
did fan the flames. The Puritans had tried to close the theaters again and I was determined not to let them. But what irony that my power to keep them open allowed a play to put questionable ideas in people’s heads.

The Puritans, that thorn in my side! I must contend with the stiff-necked, self-righteous Puritans on one side and the recusant Catholics and their sneaky secret priests on the other. I had been sorrowed by the actions of the new heir at Cowdray. Dear Anthony Browne had died, passing on the title to his grandson, who had openly flouted my religious laws, daring me to move against him. There had even been a small, secret monastery on the grounds. Reluctantly I had done so, closing their chapel with its Catholic rites and shutting the monastery, barring it up. Someone had tried to burn it down, as if to make that prediction of Guy Fawkes’s come true.

Out in the countryside, the escaped Jesuits from the Tower were still at large working their mischief.

The Puritans, for their part, especially hated the theater, because actors pretended to be what they were not. Men dressed as women, posed as Julius Caesar, and so on. They cited Scripture—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—to prove these things were abominations. Their scrutiny of Scriptures meant they could find a verse to support just about anything—one of the dangers of letting the unlearned have free access to Scripture. But as someone said, not without truth, the Puritans were against bearbaiting not because it brought pain to the bear but because it brought pleasure to the spectators.

Taking our places in the Great Hall, we settled ourselves. Rain was drumming on the roof overhead. Another fair summer’s day denied us. It was just as well to be indoors.

The handsome young actor playing Richard was the first out on the stage and the first to speak. “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,” he said with a flourish. The play then plunged straightway into the story, a story any Tudor child had written on his or her heart. It was the wellspring of our dynasty, the act that set in motion the bloody civil war that lasted a century. It began when King Richard II was forced to resign his crown to his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke. This deed was a great transgression. Could an anointed sovereign ever truly resign the crown? A coronation was a sacrament, the right of it conveyed by blood, and the act of anointing and crowning permanent and inviolable. Could anyone undo it?

I assumed that was what the play would explore, and in one sense I was not disappointed. The play’s King Richard made his case for that, saying,

But others made the point that a king forfeited his right to be king if he neglected his kingdom; that the king could sin by harming his own land. It sounded dangerously close to Puritan doctrine.

Richard himself admitted that “we are enforced to farm our royal realm,” while John of Gaunt put it more bluntly, saying, “This dear dear land ... is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it—like to a tenement or pelting farm,” and “Landlord of England art thou now, not king.”

I felt great relief. No one could accuse me of that. I was criticized for being penny-pinching, but better that than mortgaging the country.

King Richard went off to Ireland, and while he was gone his disgruntled nobles defected to Bolingbroke. By the time he returned, the Crown was all but lost. However, he refused to fight for it and even offered to resign it before Bolingbroke asked.

What sort of king was this? Even my sister Mary, who people assumed was a soft, pious woman, fought for her crown, wrested it from Lady Jane Grey’s illegal grasp.

Richard was dispatched to the Tower, then transferred to Pontefract Castle, where he was murdered, following a hint of Bolingbroke that someone needed to rid him of “this living fear.”

The way Richard was presented in the play, one could only conclude that he was a poor sort of king, but that the man who usurped his place was a villain, albeit a competent one. I was descended from both of them. I liked to think I had Richard’s artistic sensibility and Bolingbroke’s realism and practicality, rather than their weaknesses.

The play seemed abnormally short. And the action moved too quickly from the crisis to the end. “Something is missing,” I said. It did not feel right.

The master of revels, Edmund Tilney, stood up. “There is an injunction against performing the actual abdication scene. I have forbidden it to be seen.”

“But it is written?” I asked.

“Indeed, yes.”

“And the actors know it?”

“Yes.”

“I command that it be performed here before me. Censor it for the mutable crowds, but let me judge it for myself.”

The actors quickly reassembled and begged leave to study their lines.

In a short while the lead actor appeared. “We are ready, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing.

It opened, this subversive scene, in Westminster Hall, which served as a venue for both celebration and state trials. My mother had been tried here, to her woe; so had Thomas More. If all the sad trials held here had weight, the carved roof beams would sag to the ground, kissing the stone floor.

Bolingbroke was ready to assume the crown in a legalistic manner before his accomplices, when the Bishop of Carlisle objected and said it was meaningless without Richard’s presence. Richard himself then came onstage, where, after much posturing and wordplay, he was forced to hand his crown directly to Bolingbroke. Asked if he was contented to resign the crown, he hemmed and hawed, first yes, then no. Then he acquiesced, saying,

The effect was shocking. There is no formula for an abdication, but we were hearing one. One by one he flung off the pieces of his kingly armor until he was totally unprotected.

But could he? Had he not himself said, earlier in the play, that not all the water in the rude, rough sea could wash off the balm from an anointed king? If not the whole ocean, even less his own tears.

I had taken solemn oaths at my coronation and nothing could undo them. A deposed or murdered sovereign was still an anointed sovereign. Mary Queen of Scots was still Queen of Scotland all those years in England, and remained so on the scaffold.

But if this play convinced people that it was possible to reverse a coronation? It was dangerous, and this scene was downright revolutionary, even though the events it depicted were two hundred years old.

“Come, my ladies,” I said, rising. I twisted my coronation ring around my finger, as if to prove it was still snugly there.

Shortly thereafter I received a request for an audience from the Polish ambassador. Things being placid (although it was a placidity I welcomed), I thought the court—what remained of it these days—would enjoy the diversion. So I invited him, not for a private audience but for a full reception in the presence chamber with the whole court and officers of the realm attending.