Life of Elizabeth I (60 page)

The newly-knighted Drake presented his sovereign with a map of the voyage and 'a diary of everything that happened to him during the three years he was away'. Neither the log-book, nor the
Golden Hind,
survive today; the ship was rotting by 1599. By then, Drake was himself dead, and already a legend, occupying an enduring place in the affections and imagination of Elizabeth's subjects and successive generations for many centuries.

On June, Elizabeth having had another apparent change of heart, the French commissioners were permitted to draw up a marriage treaty at Whitehall. However, the Queen insisted that it would have to be endorsed in person by Anjou himself, and thereupon the French delegation went home in disgruntled mood.

By the summer, Anjou was desperate, realising that he might soon have to abandon his ambitions in the Netherlands and return to a hostile France. Although Elizabeth sent him a loan of 30,000, it was not nearly enough, and in one of her letters she implied that she had changed her mind about marrying him: 'Though her body was hers, her soul was wholly dedicated to him.'

Nevertheless, when she heard that the Queen Mother was suggesting to Anjou that he marry a Spanish princess, Elizabeth sent a reluctant Walsingham to France with instructions to maintain the fiction that she did indeed mean to marry the Duke, whilst attempting to negotiate an alliance that did not necessarily involve marriage. This was to be no easy task, especially in view of the contradictory stream of instructions that would arrive from England, and it was not long before Walsingham, supported by Leicester and Hatton, was urging that the Queen forget about the marriage. This plea fell on deaf ears.

'I should repute it a great favour to be committed to the Tower, unless Her Majesty may grow more certain her resolutions there,' wrote Walsingham to Burghley. 'Instead of amity, I fear Her Highness shall receive enmity, and we, her ministers here, be greatly discomfited.'

Walsingham told Henry III that Elizabeth would be 'content to marry, so as the French King and his brother will devise how she will not be brought into a war therewith.' But there was no guarantee that, 
even were this condition to be fulfilled, she would go ahead with the marriage. 'When Her Majesty is pressed to marry', Walsingham grumbled to Burghley, 'she seemeth to affect a league, and when a league is proposed, then she liketh better of a marriage. And thereupon she is moved to consent to marriage, then hath she recourse to a league; when the motion for a league or any request is made for money, then Her Majesty returneth to marriage.'

Henry III and Catherine de' Medici, on the other hand, were insistent that any alliance would be dependent on the marriage taking place. They, like Elizabeth, were anxious to be rid of the Spanish presence in the Netherlands, and if they could get Elizabeth to fund the war there, so much the better.

After several weeks of negotiations, Walsingham told Elizabeth plainly that she would have to make up her mind: 'If you mean it not, then assure yourself it is one of the worst remedies you can use (howsoever Your Majesty conceiveth it that it may serve your turn).' If she prevaricated for much longer, she would lose the friendship of other princes. Elizabeth chose to take this to mean that Walsingham was in favour of her concluding the marriage, and when he returned to England, teased, 'Well, you knave, why have you so often spoken ill of him [Anjou]? You veer round like a weathercock!'

In July, Campion was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. On the following day, he was taken to Leicester House and examined by Leicester and other councillors. According to a Milanese source, 'He answered them with such learning, prudence and gentleness as to draw praise from the earls, [who] greatly admired his virtue and learning, and said it was a pity he was a papist. They ordered that his heavy irons be removed and that the Keeper of the Tower should treat him more humanely, giving him a bed and other necessities.' This did not, however, prevent Campion from being racked three times to make him reveal the names of his associates and recant, both of which he steadfastly refused to do. After that, his fate was inevitable: he was hanged, and the Roman Catholic Church would later make him a saint.

It was inevitable that the new, draconian laws against Catholics would have repercussions, and in the autumn, Philip II threatened Elizabeth with war, Mendoza warning her that, if she did not heed his words, 'it would be necessary to see whether cannons would not make her hear them better'. She answered him levelly, 'without any passion, but as one would repeat the words of a farce, speaking very low'. If he thought to threaten and frighten her, she said quietly, she would put him 'into a place where he could not say a word'.

Capitalising on this situation, Anjou decided that it would benefit his 
cause, and his treasury, if he went to England again to woo Elizabeth in person. Leaving his troops in winter quarters, he landed after a perilous journey at Rye in Sussex on 31 October, and when he arrived at Richmond on 2 November, the Queen received him openly and affectionately, and placed a house near the palace at his disposal: Elizabeth had personally supervised the furnishing of it, and joked that he might recognise the bed. She also presented him with a golden key, which fitted every door in the palace, and a gem-encrusted arquebus, while he gave her a costly diamond ring.

Immediately, both slipped into their erstwhile roles of adoring lovers, Elizabeth whispering sweet nothings to her 'Prince Frog', her 'Little Moor', or her 'Little Italian', and telling him he was 'the most constant of all her lovers'. Mendoza noted that 'the Queen doth not attend to other matters but only to be together with the Duke in the chamber from morning till noon, and afterwards till two or three hours after sunset. I cannot tell what the devil they do.' Nothing was too good for 'Francis the Constant', and it was rumoured at court that every morning, as he lay in bed, the Queen visited him with a cup of broth. Anjou was heard to say that he longed day and night to be allowed into her bed to show her what a fine companion he could be. Elizabeth even went as far as to have the Duke escort her to a service in St Paul's Cathedral, in order to allay the fears of her subjects, and kissed him in full view of the congregation.

On 1 November, Mendoza informed Philip II that the French ambassador and all of Anjou's entourage 'look upon marriage as an established fact, but the English in general scoff at it, saying that he is only after money. It is certain that the Queen will do her best to avoid offending him, and to pledge him in the affairs of the Netherlands, in order to drive his brother into a rupture with Your Majesty, which is her great object, whilst she keeps her hands free and can stand by, looking on at the war.'

By now, Anjou was becoming concerned at Elizabeth's failure to make any public declaration of her intentions towards him. Mendoza heard that 'when the Queen and Anjou were alone together, she pledges herself to him to his heart's content, and as much as any woman could to a man, but she will not have anything said publicly'. She was also demanding of the French ambassador that Henry III help to support Anjou financially.

On 22 November, knowing that the Duke's patience was wearing thin, Elizabeth staged an astonishing charade for his benefit. According to Mendoza, as she walked with him in the gallery at Whitehall, with Leicester and Walsingham in attendance, 
the French ambassador entered and said that he wished to write to his master, from whom he had received orders to hear from the Queen's own lips her intention with regard to marrying his brother. She replied, 'You may write this to the King: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband,' and at the same moment she turned to Anjou and kissed him on the mouth, drawing a ring from her own hand and giving it to him as a pledge. Anjou gave her a ring of his in return, and shortly afterwards the Queen summoned her ladies and gentlemen from the Presence Chamber, repeating to them in a loud voice, in Anjou's presence, what she had previously said.

Her announcement caused a sensation both at home and abroad. When William of Orange was told that Elizabeth had publicly accepted Anjou as her husband, he ordered that the bells of Antwerp be rung in celebration. The Duke was 'extremely overjoyed', but Leicester and Hatton, along with many of the Queen's ladies, burst into tears. Camden wrote: 'The courtiers' minds were diversely affected; some leaped for joy, some were seized with admiration, and others were dejected with sorrow.' Burghley, bedridden with gout, exclaimed, 'Blessed be the Lord!' Later, Elizabeth would claim that 'the force of modest love in the midst of amorous discourse' had prompted her to say more than she had intended. Nevertheless, what she had just done, before witnesses, constituted a formal betrothal.

That night, she sat doubting and pensive among her ladies, who 'wailed and laid terrors before her, and did so vex her mind with argument' that she could not sleep. She tried to ignore her doubts, anticipating that the French King would refuse the terms submitted for his approval by her envoys, thus releasing her from her promise. If he did not, she would make additional, even more impossible, demands. And if that did not work, she could be certain that Parliament would veto the marriage.

The next morning, Elizabeth told Anjou that if she endured two more such nights, she would be in her grave, and that she had come to the conclusion that she could not marry him just at present: she must sacrifice her own happiness for the welfare of her subjects, even though her great affection for him was undiminished. The Duke professed himself sad and disappointed, but after he had had time to reflect, he resolved that, if he could not fund his Netherlands venture through marriage to the Queen, then he would make her pay to get rid of him.

Elizabeth's new understanding with the French prompted Philip II to extend, in November, an olive branch, saying he would forgive the 
Queen's past offences against Spain, and offering to renew the old Anglo-Spanish alliance. This meant that Elizabeth stood in less danger than hitherto, although her government could not afford to relax its vigilance.

As Elizabeth had expected, Henry III received her list of terms with a 'sour countenance', swearing that it was outrageous for her to refuse to contribute a penny towards Anjou's venture in the Netherlands, and impossible for the French to agree to her demand that they promise to render military assistance should the Spaniards invade England. Not surprisingly, the King rejected the terms out of hand, and when Anjou learned what they were, he was heard to mutter something about 'the lightness of women and inconstancy of islanders'.

In December, Elizabeth, jubilant at having wriggled out of a difficult situation, told Anjou that, if it pleased him to depart for the Netherlands, she would send him a loan of - 60,000 to finance a campaign against the Spaniards. He accepted this, and arranged to leave England on 20 December. Mendoza heard that Elizabeth danced for joy in the privacy of her bedchamber at the prospect of being rid of the Duke, and she told Sussex she hated the idea of marriage more every day.

However, Anjou was still at court at the end of December and showed no sign of budging, declaring to the Queen that he would rather die than leave England without marrying her. In alarm, she asked sharply 'whether he meant to threaten a poor old woman in her country', and said that from now on he must try to think of her as a sister, a remark which caused him to burst into such a torrent of weeping that she had to lend him her handkerchief.

By now, Elizabeth was desperate to be free of him. This time she had never had any intention of marrying him, and his insistence on continuing the pretence of courtship was imposing an embarrassing strain. Leicester suggested bribing him with 200,000 to leave, but the Queen was appalled at the thought of wasting so much money. She told Burghley to advise Anjou to leave before New Year, in order to avoid the expense of providing her with the customary gift, but this did not work. When, on 3 1 December, the Duke became difficult, reminding Elizabeth that she had pledged herself to him, she paid him _ 10,000 on account. Yet still he lingered, fearing, no doubt, that if he went abroad, he would not see any more money.

In the midst of her worries about Anjou, the Queen still had some consolation. That December, she was greatly taken with the charms of an impoverished Devon gentleman, Walter Raleigh, who had just arrived at court with dispatches from the Lord Deputy in Ireland, and it was not long before the newcomer had been asked to stay on permanently and added to her circle of favourites.

Raleigh had been born around 1552 and educated at Oxford; he was the great-nephew of her old governess Katherine Ashley. In his late teens he had fought with the Huguenots in France, and in 1578 had accompanied his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on a voyage
of
discovery, before securing a post under the Lord Deputy in Ireland.

He was a brilliant and versatile man: in his time he would be a soldier, adventurer, explorer, inventor, scientist, historian, philosopher, poet and scholar, and he also proved to be an eloquent orator and a competent politician and MP, who had a boundless capacity for hard work. He was fearless, daring and overpoweringly virile, being tall, dark and swarthy, with penetrating eyes and pointed beard. He had, wrote Sir Robert Naunton in his anecdotes of Elizabeth's court, 'a good presence in a handsome and well-compacted person'. Elizabeth was impressed by his intellectual skills, his forthright manner and candid views. 'True it is, he had gotten the Queen's ear at a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands. And the truth is, she took him for a kind of oracle, which netted them all.' Mimicking his broad Devon accent, she nicknamed him 'Warter'. He called her 'Cynthia', after the moon goddess, and in 1585 suggested that the English settlement on the Eastern seaboard of America be named Virginia in her honour.