Elizabeth I (71 page)

In the meantime we hung on. The fort on the Blackwater River in Ulster was still in English hands but running low on supplies, and would be easily besieged and taken by O’Neill. Although it would be difficult to hold, we could not afford to lose it, so a relief convoy was to be dispatched from nearby Armagh.

The Privy Council continued meeting, in a hand-wringing way, minus its two polar anchors—Burghley and Essex. Until Essex apologized (the very least I demanded of him) he was not to set foot at court. Burghley was unable to, growing weaker at his London home on the Strand. The last meeting he had attended was the one in which he had quoted the psalm about violent men dying early.

Even so, I was unprepared for the news Robert Cecil brought me in late July. Requesting a private meeting, he told me that his father was no longer able to sit up in bed.

“No!” How had he gone down so far, and so quickly? “When last I saw him—”

“Forgive me, Your Majesty, but a month is a long time for him as he slides, against his will, away from us, and indeed, from life.” He drew a deep breath. “I did not want it to progress any further without your knowledge,” he said.

“Misguided humility would have had Father keep it from you.”

“I’ll make ready and we shall go together,” I said.

As I got ready, I could not permit myself to think the unthinkable. I would go to him. We would talk. I would send my own special physician to him. He would mend. Perhaps he would have to retire after all. Poor man, he had tried to, and I would not let him. But now, anything he wished. Anything. Anything to keep him with us, within calling distance.

Calling distance. I smiled in spite of myself. His hearing had grown so bad, I thought, I should rather say “within shouting distance.” Certainly he had earned a rest. And relieved of his duties, he would grow strong again. He would flourish in retirement. He was only seventy-eight. Hunsdon had lived longer. “Come,” I said. Suddenly it seemed urgent that we go.

Like many at court, he maintained a London residence. His lay on the Strand, a modest house with no river frontage. Considering his rank and station, it was remarkably self-effacing and humble. When I had visited him in the past, it had always been at his magnificent country homes, Theobalds and Burghley House. Indeed, his only nonpolitical preoccupation had been the building and furnishing of Burghley House, a project that went on for years.

The house was dark, its shutters drawn to keep out noise and dust. It had the peculiar, coffinlike feel of a closed house in warm weather. The servants showed us upstairs to the room where the fallen minister lay.

I was ill prepared for the shrunken wraith that lay in the bed. He had changed utterly from the frail but lively man in the council. There was so little left of him that he barely dented the mattress or made a mound under the covers.

Oh!
I almost cried, then stopped myself. I saw Robert looking at me, observing how I reacted, hoping that I would not say anything unguarded. But saying unguarded things was a luxury I had never been permitted, and I would not begin now. “Why, William, we must make you strong again!” I said heartily, coming over to him. I bent down to kiss his cheek and saw his bright eyes, prisoners of his wizened face, beseeching me silently.

What was he thinking? Did my healthy form, moving briskly, make him feel weaker? Or did it restore him, if only briefly, to a lost connection to the larger world?

“The game broth you sent, Robert, appealed to him, but he was too weak to sit up and eat,” one of the servants said.

“Heat it up,” I said, “and I myself will feed you.”

Now his eyes registered alarm. He mumbled and muttered protests.

“What medicines are you taking?” I asked. His servant obediently brought a box containing various bottles and vials. I pulled each out to examine. “I will send you others,” I assured him. They would make him well. They had to.

The reheated broth was brought up, pleasantly warm in a serving bowl. I sniffed it. “It smells strong and nourishing,” I said. One of the servants gently lifted him and, putting pillows behind him, propped him up.

He could barely sit straight, but kept slipping to one side, unable even to right himself. Then I knew. The strength was gone, utterly fled. It could not be called back; it had vanished forever.

Trying to keep my hand from shaking, I took a spoonful of the broth and slipped it between his lips. Only a little. He could not swallow much. I willed myself not to tremble, but once my hand wobbled and I spilled some broth on the covers.

He was eating to please me, as he had always tried to do my bidding. He was the bridge to my past, the support of my reign, the underpinning that made all the rest possible. It could not be over.

“Try, William,” I told him. “I do not wish to live longer than I have you by my side.” I felt that when he died, part of me would, too. How large a part, how vital a part, I could not know until it happened.

Tears sprang up in his eyes.

“You are, in all things to me, alpha and omega.” I wept, his tears giving me permission to shed mine.

His hand scrabbled across the covers—he had strength only to move it that way, not to lift it—and he sought my hand and squeezed it.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The next morning Robert Cecil brought me a letter. “Father dictated it after you left. It will be his last letter. Your visit meant more to him than he could express, but even you cannot stay the inevitable.”

“I have sent new medicines,” I said helplessly.

“Knowing who the sender is is the best medicine for him,” said Robert.

I opened the letter. It was advice to Robert from his father.

“I pray you, diligently and effectually let Her Majesty understand how her singular kindness doth overcome my power to acquit it, who, though she will not be a mother, yet she showeth herself, by feeding me with her own princely hand, as a careful nurse; and if I may be weaned to feed myself, I shall be more ready to serve her on the Earth. If not, I hope to be, in Heaven, a servitor for her and God’s Church. And so I thank you for your porridges.

“P.S. Serve God by serving the Queen, for all other service is indeed bondage to the Devil.”

The letter, light as it was, seemed as heavy as a piece of wood.

His last letter.
There was already one with those doleful words scratched upon it. Now I would have two.

As twilight fell, I sat quietly in my inmost chamber. The sunbeams were picking out the very last contours and moldings on the wall as the day came to an end. Even in summer the sun sets. I hated to see it setting, knowing that Burghley’s last day on earth was ending. As long as the sun stayed above the horizon, that last day was not over. Even as I watched, the sunbeams faded from the picture frames and lamps they were caressing, and the room grew dark.

Never had I felt more alone or more abandoned. One by one they had slipped away, the people from my youth.

There were the few, the very few, whose deaths caused deep wounds in my being. Burghley was one. And then there was my mother, Anne Boleyn.

It was not in my early days that I most keenly missed my mother, but later. Each year, as I grew in understanding, her vacancy seemed to expand until being motherless threatened to engulf me. Even today that gap is still there, when, if she still lived, she would be an elderly lady of ninety-one. But the dead never age, and a motherless child is always a child, even if she is a queen and sixty-four.

Then I had become a true orphan when my father died eleven years later. Well. We go on. We go on because we have to, and because the road is one way only, and there is no turning back to find these people, these people who have deserted us, as surely as a runaway soldier deserts his post. I know that is not fair to them, but that is what it feels like.

Burghley, how could you leave me?

After the death of a great one, there is silence and quiet. The palace felt as if it were under a spell, all movements suspended. The sun rose higher, and all of nature was stirring—bees droning from flower to flower, gulls soaring high above the wide river, gardeners clipping the bristly hedges—but within, it was closed and dark.

I must take charge. It was I who was muffled, I who was suspended. I had to take my first steps without Burghley. But at least they concerned him. I must order his funeral.

It would be as magnificent a one as I could command. Burghley was called the father of his country by both the common people and his fellow councillors, and he had surely earned this tribute.

Five hundred mourners, clad in black-cowled robes, attended the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. I hoped it was some comfort to Robert Cecil. It was small comfort to me.

57

T
wo weeks passed, and the drowsiness of high summer blended with my lassitude and low spirits over the death of Burghley. Since then, I had barely eaten much more than the sort of broth I had fed him. I had no appetite, so my women ordered only fruit, cheese, and bread brought to my chamber in the evening.

As I entered, Marjorie was waiting, not anxiously but calmly, along with Catherine. We would have another quiet night reading and sewing until I sought the oblivion of sleep. From outside the cries of night creatures came faintly to our ears—crickets, frogs, and owls. It was their turn now, while we rested. The heat of the day had lifted, and the air coming in was cool.

“Magical time,” said Marjorie, standing by the window. “The balm of Gilead.”

But from the gallery I heard footsteps, running footsteps. The tap-tap-tap sounded almost like a woodpecker. I rose, alert as a hunting dog.

In a moment my chamber guard admitted Robert Cecil, swathed in black. My first thought was,
Nothing could have happened today, as the terrible thing already happened many days ago.
That made us immune, did it not?

“Forgive me,” he said, falling to his knees. His cloak spread out on the floor around him like a stain.

“No, forgive me,” I said. “For no state business should intrude on you at this time.”

“Only the highest of state business can do that, and this is urgent. Urgent!” He rose and handed me a dispatch, folded and wrinkled. “Oh, read it and add grief upon grief.”

It was a notification of a massive military defeat in Ireland at the hands of The O’Neill. My marshal of the army, Sir Henry Bagenal, had taken four thousand foot soldiers and three hundred cavalry to relieve the fort on the Blackwater, a key stronghold guarding the approach to Dublin and the south that O’Neill was trying to starve out. They had marched into a bloody ambush at Yellow Ford. Bagenal was killed, along with thirteen hundred of his soldiers; another seven hundred deserted. The English army was destroyed, and all over Ireland the English settlers fled. Our officials in Dublin begged O’Neill for an armistice in the most cowardly terms.

“The O’Neill rules,” said Cecil. “They tremble before him. He can dictate his terms.”