My Enemy, the Queen (49 page)

She gave me her hand to kiss and then she said: ettice!And we looked at each other. I tried to compose my features, but I could feel the tears coming into my eyes.

od breath!she said. hat a fool your son is!

I bowed my head.

nd he has brought himself to this,she went on. never wished it for him.

adam, he would never have harmed you.

oubtless he would have left that for his friends to do.

ay, nay, he loves you.

She shook her head. e saw through me the way to advancement. Do not all of them?

She signed for me to get off my knees and I rose saying: ou are a great Queen, Your Majesty, and all the world knows it.

She looked at me steadily and said grudgingly: ou still have some beauty left. You were very handsome when you were young.

o one could compete with you.

Strangely enough I meant it. She had something more than beauty, and she still retained it, old as she was.

crown is becoming, Cousin.

ut it does not suit all who wear it. Madam, it becomes you well.

ou have come to ask me to spare them,she said. was of a mind not to see you. You and I have nothing to say to each other.

thought we might offer each other comfort.

She looked haughty, and I said boldly: adam, he is my son.

nd you love him dearly?

I nodded.

did not think you capable of loving anyone but yourself.

ometimes I have believed that to be so, but now I know it is untrue. I love my son.

hen you must prepare yourselfs I musto suffer his loss.

s there nothing that can save him?

She shook her head.

ou plead for your son,she went on. ot your husband.

plead for them both, Madam.

ou do not love this young man.

e have lived pleasantly together.

heard that you preferred him to

here are always evil rumors, Madam.

never believed you could prefer any other,she said slowly. f he were here today She moved her head impatiently. ife was never the same after he went

I thought of Leicester dead. I thought of my son who was condemned to die, and I forgot everything but the need to save him.

I threw myself to my knees again. I felt the tears running down my face, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

ou cannot let him die,I cried. ou cannot.

She turned away from me. t has gone too far,she murmured.

ou could save him. Oh, Madam, forget all the enmity between us. It is over and done with and have either of us long to live?

She flinched. As always she hated people to refer to her age. I should have known better. My grief had robbed me of my good sense.

owever much you hated me in the past,I went on, beg of you now to forget that. He is dead our beloved Leicester gone forever. Were he here with us today, he would be kneeling here with me.

e silent,she shouted. ow dare you come here you She-Wolf! You ensnared him with your wanton ways. You took the finest man that ever lived. You lured him into deceit and now this rebel son of yours deserves well the ax. And you you of all women dare come here and ask me to spare a traitor.

f you let him die, you will never forget it,I said, all caution deserting me in this desperate need to save my son.

She was silent for a while, and I saw that the shrewd tawny eyes were glistening. She was moved. She loved him. Or once she had loved him.

I kissed her hand fervently but she withdrew itot sharply, though, almost tenderly.

ou will save him,I pleaded.

But the Queen was replacing the emotional woman whom 1 had briefly glimpsed.

She said slowly: have seen you, Lettice, for Leicester sake. He would have wished it. But even if he knelt before me now and asked this of me, I could not grant it. Nothing can save your son nor your husband now. They have gone too far. I could not, if I would, stay their execution now. There is a time when one must go forward. There is no looking back. Essex has walked into this with his eyes open and a determination to destroy himself. I must perforce sign his death warrant, and you and I must say goodbye forever to this foolish boy.

I shook my head. I think I was mad with grief. I knelt and kissed the hem of her robe. She stood looking down at me, and as I lifted my eyes to her face I saw a certain compassion there. Then she said: ise. I am tired. Goodbye, Cousin. Methinks it is a strange matter this mad dance of our livesine, yours, and these two men we loved. Yes, we have loved two men, dearly. The one is lost to us; the other soon will be. There is no turning back. What is to be will be.

How old she looked with the marks of real grief on her face.

I was about to plead once more, but she shook her head and turned away.

I was dismissed. There was nothing to do but leave her and return in my barge to Leicester House.

I would not let myself believe that she would not relent. I told myself that when it came to signing his death warrant she would not be able to do it. I had seen it in her face that she loved him. Not as she had loved Leicester, of course, but still she loved him. My hopes were high.

But she signed the death warrant, and I was in despair. Then she recalled it. How happy I wasut, oh, how briefly so, for she changed her mind, urged no doubt by her ministers.

Once more she signed the warrant, and this time she did not withdraw.

On Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of February, my son, dressed in black, came out of his prison in the Tower and was taken to the high court above Caesar Tower.

He was praying as he laid his head on the block.

There was mourning throughout London, and the executioner was seized by the mob and rescued just in time before they could kill him. Poor man, as though it were his fault!

The Queen shut herself away and mourned him, and in Leicester House I remained in my bedchamber and waited for news of my husband.

About a week after Essex death, poor Christopher was tried and found guilty; and on the eighteenth of March he was taken out to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded.

The Old Lady at Drayton Basset

Blame but thyself that hast misdone, And well deserved to have blame; Change thou thy way, so evil begone, And then my lute shall sound that same; And if till then my fingers play, By thy desert their wonted way, Blame not my lute.

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-1542

SO I was once more a widow, and I had lost the son who, in spite of the follies I deplored, I had loved more than anyone. My young husband, who had been devoted to my comforts, was dead with him, and I must make a new life.

Everything was changing. The Queen no longer pretended to be young. I was sixty, so she must have been sixty-eightwo old women, who no longer cared very much about each other. It all seemed so long ago when Leicester and I made secret love and secret marriage and had feared her wrath.

I heard that she mourned for the men she had lovedhief of these being Leicester and Essex; but she still wept for Burleigh, Hatton, Heneage and the rest. There were none like them now, she was heard to say, forgetting that they had seemed like gods because she was then a goddess. Now she was merely an old woman.

Two years after the death of Essex, she died. She kept up her royal pride until the end, and although she had had several bouts of sickness, she would go on walking and riding as soon as she was up from her bed, so that people could see her. Finally she took cold, and decided to go to Richmond, which she considered the most sheltered of her palaces. Her cold grew worse, but she would not go to bed, and when Cecil begged her to and told her that to content the people she must do so, she replied with the familiar regal touch: ittle man, the word must is not used to sovereigns.And because she found she could not stand she had cushions brought and lay on the floor.

When we heard that she was dying a great silence fell on the land. It seemed an age ago when a redheaded young woman of twenty-five had gone to the Tower and declared her determination to work and live for her country. So had she done, never forgetful of her mission, even as she had vowed. It had come before everything, before love, before Leicester, before Essex.

When she was so weak that she could not resist she was carried to her bed.

It was the twenty-fourth of March in the year 1603 she diedn the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, it was noted.

She had even chosen an appropriate time to die.

So they were gonell those who had made life worthwhile for me.

I was now the old womanhe grandmother, who must pass her time in retirement.

A new king had come to the throneing James VI of Scotland had become James I of Englandn untidy, not very prepossessing monarch. Gone was the brilliance of Elizabeth Court, and I had no desire to be of the new one.

I went to my house at Drayton Basset and there I decided to live the life of a country lady. It was almost like being reborn. It was remembered of me that I had been the mother of Essex and the wife of Leicester, and soon I was holding court like a queen, which gave me pleasure.

My grandchildren visit me often. There are many of them and I take an interest in them and they like to hear stories of the past.

Only one event disturbed me during those years. That was when in the year of the Queen death, Robert Dudley, the son of Leicester by Douglass Sheffield, tried to prove that there had been a legal marriage between his parents. Naturally I could not stand by and let him prove that, for had he done so, I should have been robbed of the major part of my inheritance.

It was an unpleasant case, as these cases always are, and there is always an element of fear in them that what is suggested may prove true.

This odious man insisted that his father and mother had gone through a form of marriage and that he was indeed Leicester legitimate son.

He had been with Essex at Cadiz, and it was when he returned, a widower, that the trouble began, for he married and his wife was the daughter of a very forceful gentleman, Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh. It was this man who urged him to take his case to court. This he did, and I am glad to say that it did not succeed, and so angry was he that he applied for permission to leave the country for three years.

This being granted, he left England, taking with him his beautiful cousin, who had to dress as a boy and pose as his page. He left his wife and children in England and never returned to them, so he was not a man to take his responsibilities seriously.

Penelope continued her colorful career. After the death of Essex, Lord Rich divorced her and she and Mountjoy married. There was a great controversy about this marriage, which was performed by Mountjoy chaplain, Laud. Many said that Laud had no right to marry a woman who had been divorced. For years Laud bemoaned the fact that this had prevented his preferment, although he was to leap into prominence later.

Poor Mountjoy, though honors had been heaped on him and he became the Earl of Devonshire, he did not live long after his marriage. He died in 1606, three years after the Queen death; and Penelope died one year after him. She left me several grandchildren, not only Lord Rich but three by Mountjoyountjoy, Elizabeth and St. John.

It seemed strange that I should live on and my vital daughter be dead. But that was my fate. Sometimes I used to think: I shall live forever.

My daughter Dorothy died in 1619, three years before her husband release from the Tower, whither he had been sent at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, suspected of having a share in it. He had been deprived of all his possessions and was sentenced to stay there for the rest of his life; and it was sixteen years later that his release was brought about through his daughter husband. It had been a most unhappy marriage and often Dorothy had come to me to escape from him. When she died I was approaching eighty, but I still lived on.

I have seen so much in my long life. I lived on after Sir Walter Raleigh had gone to the scaffold. He had been unable to charm James as he had Elizabeth. I heard he had said as he laid his head on the block: hat matters it how the head lies, so the heart be right.Wise brave words, I thought, from Essex enemy.

I sat in my chamber at Drayton Basset, and thought of Raleigh as he had once beenandsome, arrogant and sure of himself. So are the mighty brought low.

And still I lived on.

The King died and his son came to the throneapper Charles, whom I saw once or twice man of great dignity. Life had changed. It could never be as it had been under great Elizabeth. There would never be another like her. How she would have been saddened to see her beloved England fall into the hands of these Stuarts. The Divine Right of Kings! How often did we hear that phrase! She had believed in it, of course, but she had known that the sovereign ruled by the will of the people, and never would she have displeased them if she could help it.

James Charles what did they know of the glorious days when the handsomest men of the Court had circled round the Queenoths to the candle and the cleverest of them knowing how to avoid singeing their wings. Her loversll of them, for they had loved her and she had loved them. But they were her fantasies; her true love was England.

Her death had taken something vital from my life, which was strange, for she had hated me and I could not say I ever loved her. But she was a part of my life, as Leicester wasnd part of me died with them.

This sedate old lady in her manor house at Drayton Basset, caring for her tenants, playing lady bountiful, repenting her wild youth to make sure of a place in heaven, is this Lettice, Countess of Essex, Countess of Leicester, and wife of Christopher Blount? Poor Christopher! He did not really count. I had ceased to live dangerously and gloriously when Leicester died.

All this I lived through. These people flitted across the life of the times, played their parts and passed, while I lived on.

Now that I have written this story of the past I live it all again so vividly that it seems as though it happened only yesterday. When I close my eyes I sometimes feel that when I open them I shall see Leicester bending over me, raising me up to kiss him, to arouse in me that desire which we both found irresistible. I can fancy I am at the Queen toilette, and that suddenly I receive a nip in the arm because I am dreaming and forgetting to bring her ruffs.