Elizabeth I (15 page)

My Lord of Essex, attired all in blue, which flatters him well, had his hose in a contrasting shade, the color of newborn lambs’ fleece ....

I clapped the book shut. She was in love with him! She was swooning like a green girl in the country. But he was far above her. She was sure to be disappointed. And she was no milkmaid but a widow with a child. I must warn her. What a fool she was to leave it there. I replaced it quickly on her chair.

I stood up, as if by so doing I could keep better guard over Walsingham. Fuzzy light was coming through the windows; the setting sun made the surface of the Thames gleam out the east window and enveloped the western, land, side in a golden haze. We were very near to Mortlake, where Dr. Dee, my astrologer, lived. Smoke from the burning herbs, curling up through the air, stung my nostrils and made my head swim. I swayed, felt unsteady. So I walked slowly to the east window and opened it a crack, hoping for fresh air.

Below me the river slid past, a sleek, winding snake. My head was spinning, and the blurry light made me feel I had entered a dream.

Sailing on the Thames, long ago ... going to Mortlake ... Trust not the French....

The French ... I remembered how foolish I had acted—as foolish as Frances about Essex—over the little Frenchman I had almost married. The little French prince who had so recently, and insistently, haunted me near the staircase at Whitehall sprang back to life again, as if I had opened a magical casement that transported me over time. So many things had ended then, with the Frenchman.

François had been my last, and in many ways my only, serious marriage possibility. I had been wooed by twenty-five foreign suitors over the years. I never intended to marry any of them, but it was my best tool of diplomacy. I had never met any of these men, never laid eyes on them. So they were suitors on paper only, not real, as I would never marry anyone I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. (My father’s example with Anne of Cleves was warning enough.) In any case I knew time was running out for this ploy. I was in my midforties and could not play this hand much longer. So when another round was started, this time with François Valois, Duc d’Alençon, the younger brother of King Henri III, I thought, why not? Even though he was seventeen years younger than I, reputedly ugly, and very short—what difference did it make? It was all a diplomatic sham. And so it might have remained, if my people had been more amenable even to the idea that I might at last marry.

But they hated the French and attacked François’s envoy, saying he represented “an unmanlike, unprincelike, French kind of wooing.” Someone even took a shot at him, frightening him mightily. And that shot changed my world. The French envoy blamed it on Robert Dudley, saying that he knew he was in back of it—since he had murdered once, why not again?

I was aghast. He accused my dearest friend and companion, the man I trusted so much that when I lay ill with smallpox I had named him Protector of the Realm, of being a murderer! I cried out that this was vile slander.

“Ma’am, there have been poisoning attempts as well,” Simier, the envoy, said, “which I did not see fit to mention. It is well known that Leicester is a poisoner. He poisoned Walter Devereux, the Earl of Essex. He dosed him when he was on leave from Ireland, and it took effect once he was back in Dublin.”

“This is not true! The earl died of natural causes! And why would he wish to poison the earl, in any case?”

Simier looked at me pityingly.

“I demand to know what you mean about the Earl of Essex!” I cried.

“Why, Ma’am, he poisoned him so that he could have his wife.” He waited to see if I had heard him. “Lettice. They were lovers, and the earl was inconvenient. So Leicester poisoned him, just as he was about to open an investigation.”

“Evil whispers!” I said. God knew they swirled around anyone of note.

He drew himself up, as if readying himself, reluctantly, for a coup de grâce. “It’s no whisper, Your Majesty, that he and Lettice are married, and have been for a year.” He paused. “Everyone knows this but you. While Leicester opposes your own marriage—even attacking me!—he is enjoying his own. He has a wife but begrudges you a husband.”

I heard the words, but at first they were only that—words. But then I was forced to put them together, absorb them without letting Simier see how they rocked my world.

“I see,” I said. “So the wayward shot has brought many things to light. I am thankful, sir, that you were not harmed, although other things have been.”

A year. For a year Dudley had been lying to me, hiding the truth. And his wife still served me in my chambers, pretending to be a widow. It was impossible to say which hurt more: the betrayal, the loss, or feeling an absolute fool.

How she must have laughed at me, Lettice, my wayward cousin. With every step she took in my chambers, she mocked me. So she had had her way at last, triumphed over me, taken Dudley away? The merry widow, I had called her. No wonder she had been so merry. Man-hungry and aggressive, she had bagged her prey.

I dismissed her from my service, told her she was banished from court. I told her why. Instead of cringing or even being embarrassed, the hussy said, “You know now. And I am glad of it.” The smug satisfaction on her face infuriated me. “It was a strain, keeping it from you.”

When I am most angry, I am rigid. I was stone, clenching my fists, as I watched her leave my chambers, where she was never to set foot again.

So when Simier whispered to me that his master the prince, known affectionately in France as “Monsieur,” had come secretly to England and was waiting in a hidden place to meet me, it was balm to my wounded vanity. No one had ever come courting in person before. Leicester had duped me, but here was another—a
prince
—who had come across the Channel to seek my hand.

I studied his miniature carefully in its oval frame. It showed a person with a pleasing enough face, dark, searching eyes, a wisp of a mustache, a pointed and weak chin. I wished I could say it was the portrait of a man, but it showed a boy. Of course, it had been painted some time ago. It also did not show the pockmarks that everyone mentioned, and it could not depict his height. People said, too, that his nose was bulbous, but it did not appear to be so here. Well, portraits say what we wish them to, or we do not pay the painter.

He was waiting, hidden in the summer pavilion where I had housed the French contingent away from the main palace buildings at Greenwich. I had joked to Simier that he must indeed be a frog, to have swum the Channel to come to me. I wondered how François would take the jest—that was my first test of him.

I was ready for the meeting. I wanted so much to like him. I wanted to seriously consider him; I needed to. For the first time there was no more Dudley in my landscape, blocking my view. Did I see more clearly because of that, or was my vision distorted?

I entered the summer house.

“Oh!” There was a French-accented gasp, and someone was clasping my hands and kneeling before me. Then my hands were being kissed, and the man was murmuring, “To clasp these hands at last. It is enough for me to touch them; but they are beautiful as ivory, slender and graceful as the Virgin in heaven. You, our Virgin on earth!”

I could not discount it as clumsy flattery, for I knew my hands were my finest feature. They
were
the color of ivory, and my fingers were long and smooth. I displayed them whenever I could, especially against dark gowns.

The person rose slowly, standing to his full height—which was not very high. My eyes, now growing accustomed to the dim light, looked down on a head of dark, thick hair. The top of his head only came up to my eyes.

Oh, he was tiny! A ripple of disappointment passed through me. The rest of the hearsay must be true as well. Now he was lifting his face and I beheld it. His nose
was
large, outsized for the rest of his face. His beard was patchy, his chin receding, and his face
did
have pockmarks. They were not the craterlike circles of gossip but were quite noticeable, and his poor excuse of a beard did little to hide them. Now he smiled. At least he had good teeth—white, even, and none missing.

“Your Majesty is disappointed,” he said. “I can read it in your eyes. Ah, well, poor François is used to it. Why, my original name was Hercules, but after I took the pox and did not grow very big, I changed it to François. I did not deserve the glorious name of Hercules. And besides,” he said cheerfully, “this way I was not expected to slay lions, clean disgusting stables, or battle a venomous Hydra—unless, of course, you count my mother!”

I let out a laugh at Catherine de’ Medici’s expense. A Hydra indeed, with her many-headed ambitions.

François was attired in a shiny green doublet, with green hose as well, and a patterned half-length cloak. “I only need a lily pad, Your Majesty,” he said. “To be your true frog.”

Had he worn this just so he could remind me of the frog nickname? He was so sweet, so disarming. He had passed the first test. “I am touched,” I said, truthfully. “And I shall cherish my dear frog.”

“I shall swim in your good graces,” he said. “But I hope to be more than that.”

And so ensued our curious courtship. There were secret picnics, outings, and dinners. The very furtiveness of it was part of its lure. He was gallant, amusing, and humble. In the soft predawn of those summer mornings, I could stretch under my covers and murmur to myself, “Elizabeth, betrothed to a French prince.” The very words, “French prince,” had a magic to them.
Once upon a time there was an English queen who loved a French prince ....

I could still have children. It was not too late. I could embrace all those experiences of womanhood I had denied myself. What had begun as a cynical political gesture on my part—a protracted marriage negotiation between England and France would keep the French from signing a pact with Spain, and if Alençon would fight in the Netherlands at French expense, I then saved money and men—was turning into something more complicated.

I had not reckoned on his wooing in person, I had not reckoned on his being so personable, and I had not reckoned on losing my quasi-official consort to another woman at the same time. There were many things that were right about him. He was a prince, an heir of a royal house. His dignity and his credentials were equal to mine.

But my council, reflecting the feelings of my people, were not in favor of it. They did not know he was actually here, but they knew he was coming, having granted him a passport. After all these years of urging me to marry for the sake of the succession, suddenly they realized my wisdom in holding back and appreciated the advantages of having a Virgin Queen. Suddenly they could see nothing good about such a union. One of my subjects even had the temerity to write a pamphlet alleging that no young man without nefarious motives would be interested in a woman my age, and that if I had a child I would probably die, since I was too old. He also called Monsieur “an instrument of French uncleanness, a sorcerer by common vice and fame.” Outside my palace walls I could hear taunting voices singing “The Most Strange Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse.”