Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (107 page)

are all under lock and key.”

She picked up a chicken wing and began to issue a series of crisp and

businesslike instructions for the defence of the city.

t t t

London had not seen a rebellion for nearly half a century and the few

laggard citizens straggling home to dinner from the Sunday service at

St. Paul’s regarded the rebel cavalcade with polite bewilderment. A few

cheered halfheartedly; some waved, for there was no treason in a wave

after all; and then the passed quietly on to their homes and their food.

Excitement was all very well in its place, but London had its priorities.

Little boys, eyeing the armed body with awe and envy, were swept in

off the streets by angry, irritated mothers who were tired of calling them.

Soon the position was horribly clear, as Essex rode up the filthy streets in

despair, soaked with sweat and calling for a fresh shirt. What the devil was

amiss with this lethargic, chicken-hearted multitude that had once roared

itself hoarse in support of him?

While they rested in Fenchurch Street, a royal herald roamed the

twisting roads, promising the Queen’s pardon to all followers who

deserted the Earl’s cause.

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“A herald will proclaim anything for a few shillings,” jeered Essex

loudly, but behind his back his men were already creeping away down

side streets, seeing the way the cat had jumped.

It was useless. Even Essex could see that, as he struggled with his dwin-

dling force back to Lud Gate. The Council had been busy on the Queen’s

orders and now a small band of pikemen barred their way, repulsing all

their frantic efforts to break the line and pass. The Queen’s men were

moving in to trap the little band of traitors, like rats in a maze.

Back up Lud Gate Hill they fled from the pikes, desperate for some

means of escape from this dreadful fiasco; but Friday Street had been

barred with chains against them. At length a few citizens came out of their

houses and quietly raised the chains to let the shattered band creep away

down to the Thames. They scrambled with undignified haste into the

little boats which were moored there and struggled back to Essex House

through the falling dusk.

“We’re not lost yet,” muttered Essex grimly. “We have the Privy

Councillors as hostages—we can bargain.”

But when they got back, it was to find that the birds had flown the

coop, freed behind their backs. He had no more cards to play and the

Queen’s forces were already surrounding Essex House and demanding

his surrender. He flew to his room and began feverishly burning all his

incriminating correspondence, among it a letter from King James, that

alone would be sufficient to claim his head.

At the end of a brief siege, the rebels left the house one by one, fell on

their knees, and surrendered their swords to the Lord High Admiral, who

waited grimly in the light of the flickering torches.

At three in the morning Essex and Southampton were removed from

Lambeth Palace to the Tower; and at Whitehall Raleigh bowed before

the Queen and informed her that the day’s business was at an end.

“A senseless ingrate has at last revealed what has been long in his

mind,” she said bitterly to the French Ambassador.

An hour later the candles in her bedchamber were finally extinguished;

snuffed out like tiny traitors in the dark.

t t t

The trial was over and a silence descended on Westminster Hall, as the new

Lord Treasurer declared sentence on the Earls of Essex and Southampton.

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“You shall both be led from hence to the place whence you came and

there remain during Her Majesty’s pleasure; from thence to be drawn

upon a hurdle through the midst of the city and so to the place of execu-

tion, there to be hanged by the neck and taken down alive—your bodies

to be quartered and your heads and quarters to be disposed of at Her

Majesty’s pleasure.” The Lord Treasurer paused and added with grim

irony, “And so God have mercy on your souls.”

Southampton was visibly trembling, his face gaunt and deathly white,

but Essex walked out of the crowded hall like a man in a trance.

He could not believe she had let it go so far; he had hoped to be

spared the indignity of public trial. But
execution
—she could not do it,

surely she could not do it. Why, all these years he had only to pout and

pester and at length she gave in, for peace and quiet, as a weary mother

does to spare herself the tantrums of a spoilt child. He saw himself

clearly in his own mind for the first time then—saw what she had made

of him; it was all that his mother had feared, and worse. He had not lost

his manhood in the Queen’s service—he had simply never attained it;

she had warped and stunted his natural growth. So much that he had

missed in her was clear to him now, above all that dark look in her

eyes as far back as that evening after Leicester’s death when he had first

claimed her against her spoken wish. He could not deny that she had

tried to warn him.

Partner me now and I promise you will live to regret it.

He had never given those words a moment’s serious thought, but now

he dwelt on them with morbid fascination and saw how relentlessly she

had danced him to his death.

He had admitted publicly during his trial that the Queen would never

be safe while he lived. He had no idea what insane impulse had prompted

him to stand there and sign his own death warrant, when he longed so

passionately for life. Something had compelled him to speak, and as soon

as he had spoken he had known he was a dead man.

“I have nothing left,” he said hopelessly after the trial, “but that which

I must pay the Queen.”

t t t

She sat alone with the death warrant before her on the desk, her chin

propped in her hands as she stared, unseeing, into the fire.

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The room was deathly silent except for the occasional crackle of the

flaming logs in the hearth—she had always hated coal. The windows

were patterned with white frost and beyond them the February morning

lay bleak and indifferent to all that would be decided within this room

today. She could hear the wind rattling the casements and her own rest-

less, shallow breathing, the echo of her rapid heartbeat thudding dully in

her head. In spite of her furs and the blazing fire, she was shivering and

her hands were blue with cold. She felt frozen inside, a block of ice which

no fire could ever hope to penetrate.

Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, Queen of England…

She could get no further than the first line of the warrant, but she

knew what it said. He was to enjoy the privilege of his rank and die

by the axe; no hanging, no quartering—they should not butcher that

beautiful body.

He was to die virtually alone, for she had shown mercy to most of

the captured rebels. Of the eighty-five arrested, thirty-two had been

released without penalty and in all only six were to go to the scaffold.

Southampton, that miserable, timid, lily-livered youth, she had spared to

life imprisonment, moved unbearably by the sight of his mother, debasing

herself at her feet and begging for his life.

Lettice too had knelt, and wept and begged. She ought to have enjoyed

that, savoured the sweet revenge of seeing the She-wolf on her knees,

a pitiful supplicant, grovelling without shame before her. Yet strangely

there was no triumph, only a tired, sick sense of pity that compelled her

to raise the weeping woman to her feet and try to speak kindly.

Lettice clung to her hand and made it wet with tears, till she was aware

of a scalding dampness seeping beneath her rings.

“Madam, I beg you—pardon him. You have shown mercy to others,

why not to him?”

“I will not pardon him,” said the Queen unsteadily, “because I cannot.”

Lettice’s eyes, huge in a white face and mad with grief, centred on her

with one mute question:
Why?

Why? Because his death was inevitable, unavoidable, written in the

stars a lifetime ago and sealed by another death.
A life for a life.
They all

expected her to pardon him because, after all, his rebellion had been so

pathetic, so futile, that it seemed a gross exaggeration to even term it

treason. There had been times when she was sorely tempted to do it, to

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shy away from this dreadful act and hope that he had learnt his lesson.

But he would not learn—he was not free to do so. Like her, he was

caught up and controlled by a dreadful whirlpool from the past—the

chosen sacrifice which would expiate her father’s crime in murdering her

mother. He had no choice but to work against her; and now she had no

choice but to kill him for it.

All her life with slow and fatalistic tread had led her to this moment.

The time had come for her to cut off the head of the one she loved

and to do it almost without hesitation, cold-bloodedly, self-righteously

atoning for Anne’s death, as Anne’s spirit relentlessly demanded. Leicester

had narrowly escaped the satisfaction of this morbid vendetta against

manhood. Leicester she had loved too much, while Essex she loved just

too little to spare him from his allotted fate.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad…

She took up her pen and paused, looked back to that night after

Leicester’s death when he had sealed his doom with that irresistible

arrogance, remembering how her heart had leapt in recognition of that

which she had sought throughout her restless life. The man who would

make a crazy bid to master her; the man she could kill for it. She had

taken him—young, high-bred, unstable—and sent him reeling into an

abyss of insanity. Utter madness, men had castigated his last rash act of

rebellion—she alone knew how true the charge was and how great the

weight of guilt was on her tortured soul.

And yet she could not help herself. She seemed to stand apart from

that other self, grimly fascinated, and watch a black-haired, black-eyed

woman scrawl the flamboyant signature of Elizabeth of England in letters

two inches high at the head of the warrant.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,

Follows me flying, flies, flies when I pursue it,

Stands and lies by me, does what I have done

Does what I have done…

She laid the pen down. For a moment she sat very still, staring at

nothing, then she got up and went blindly through into her bed chamber.

It was empty; she had already sent all her women away. Beside her bed

the casket still stood, silent, glittering, magnificent as a miniature tomb.

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She unlocked it and searched beneath her most precious possessions for

the little headless doll.

The black satin skirts had faded to silver grey with age and were

creased with long confinement. She shook them out and smoothed the

creases, stood for an endless moment staring at the doll, before she turned

and flung it into the hearth where a great log fire burned.

The flames leapt up in a sudden flare as the material caught, shrivelled

and disintegrated around a charred stick.

To be burned or beheaded…at the King’s pleasure…

She stood and watched until there was nothing left to see. And some-

where in an unplumbed depth of darkness, her shadow laughed and said:

“
Well done
!”

627

Chapter 6

F
ebruary 25th was a bitterly cold morning and the palace

was strangely silent, but for the steady twang of the virginals which

echoed from the Privy Chamber.

When the messenger from the Tower arrived, he fell on his knees

before the Queen, who sat dressed from head to foot in black on a cush-

ioned stool at the instrument.

She stopped playing and looked down on his bare head, a chill, silent

glance that made him stammer with nerves as he said his piece.

“If—if it please Your Majesty—just sentence upon the Earl of Essex

was carried out this morning. Today a traitor died.”

There was a moment of absolute silence in the tense room before,

without a word, she turned her back on the company and began to play

once more. The men who were watching her closely exchanged looks

of gaping astonishment and it was a full five minutes before mumbled

conversation returned slowly to her staggered attendants.

But she would not weep; not in public. Her fingers played on by

instinct alone; she could no longer see the music and when at last the

inward trembling forced her to stop, before her clumsy touch betrayed

her, she looked up and found Raleigh looking down at her. Beneath

his glowing sea-tan, his clever, handsome face was pale. As Captain