The Girl in the Mirror (35 page)

The role played by Jeanne is obviously invented with her character, but that apart, there are only a few, and I hope comparatively minor, ways in which I am aware actually of having contradicted the known historical record. The ‘Rainbow’ portrait of Elizabeth that Jeanne describes was probably painted a few months after the end of this story. Elizabeth did not visit Theobalds in the last summers of her reign: her travels in those years took her mostly south of the Thames. Her comportment there was much as I have described, but her last journey northwards had taken place a few years before. After that, Theobalds had to wait for a royal visit until 1603 when King James stayed there on his journey south, liking it so well he took it from Cecil in exchange for Hatfield, where another great garden, designed by the Tradescants, would soon be underway. In July 1600, however, Theobalds was visited by one Baron Waldenstein, whose diary records its many splendours – now, alas, long passed away.

The Cecils’ passion for their gardens is in general well documented. In 1597 Lord Burghley gave Elizabeth a copy of John Gerard’s revolutionary
Herbal
, with eighteen hundred hand-painted colour illustrations. The collection and classification of new plants was a great obsession of the age: Anna Pavord’s
Searching for Order
paints a riveting picture of the work of men like Matthias de l’Obel (writing as Lobelius: no prizes for guessing to which flower he gave his name); of John Gerard, whom Pavord describes as ‘a plagiarist and a crook’; and indeed even of the Twickenham nursery gardener Richard Pointer.

On a more practical level these decades marked a great turning point in garden history: Francis Bacon was only one of many who wrote on the subject. Anyone wishing to monitor the seasonal progress of the gardens described here, however, should remember that while on the one hand England was at this point in the grip of the ‘little Ice Age’ of particularly hard winters, the English calendar had not yet been reformed on European lines, so that Jeanne’s February 1 would correspond to our February 11.

The name Martin Slaughter features several times in the theatrical records of the period. I first encountered it as that of an actor fined for having falsely represented himself as belonging to a licensed theatrical company. But an actor variously called Martin Slater or Slawghter also figures extensively in the documents of the Rose playhouse, as a sharer or partner in the Admiral’s Men, the company patronised by the countess’ husband, Charles Howard: numbered in the first list of the company in 1594, quitting them in 1597 taking with him five books of plays, which had later to be bought back from him. In 1599 he was in Scotland, with an English troupe.

In an age when everyone traded information, the employment of actors in espionage circles was not uncommon, as the career of Christopher Marlowe shows. It might be though that Jeanne’s cross-dressing is likewise a tradition from the world of the stage and only from that fantastical world: we are all, of course, familiar with it from Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, the conceit of the young woman who dons boys’ breeches can be seen in a number of real life cases from the ‘Roaring Girl’ Moll Cutpurse to the maid of honour Mary Fitton. I first came across it in writing about Arbella Stuart, one of Elizabeth’s potential successors, who donned male dress to flee abroad when her cousin King James forbade her to marry – but that too is another story.

Elizabeth and Essex

The relationship of Elizabeth I with the Earl of Essex has always baffled historians: the more so, perhaps, because it does not show either participant in the most attractive light. In 1928 Lytton Strachey’s
Elizabeth and Essex
was the last book to be written specifically about the subject and though Strachey’s analysis is very much of its era, it is a little hard to claim that we have moved on in any real degree. Recent work done on Essex’s political role in the decade one historian calls ‘the nasty nineties’ has had little impact on our understanding of his private relationship with the queen. With all our supposed new elasticity in terms of personal relations, this is still a case that both worries and intrigues today. Had I been writing a biography rather than a novel about Elizabeth and Essex, I would of course have paid far more attention to the political part played by other faces and other forces than I have been able to do here; and perhaps that might have cast an alternative light on the events that ushered in the seventeenth century. But I do not think I would have understood the personal situation any differently.

It was Elizabeth’s great favourite the Earl of Leicester – Essex’s stepfather – who introduced the teenaged Essex into Elizabeth’s favour; he was still only twenty when, in 1587, he was given Leicester’s old job of Master of the Horse, which meant he was by her side whenever she rode out. Perhaps Leicester, now a white-haired fifty-five, knew he himself could no longer offer Elizabeth the warm flirtations they had once enjoyed: perhaps he wanted to provide a counter-attraction to the dashing new Captain of the Queen’s Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. If so the device worked: ‘At night’, it was soon reported, ‘my Lord is at cards, or one game and another with her, that he cometh not to his own lodging till birds sing in the morning.’ Essex was the queen’s ‘wild horse’, whose very gaucheries may have seemed fresh to a palate jaded of more practised flattery. ‘Very comely and beautiful’, as an attendant reported to his onetime guardian Lord Burghley, he was tall and intense, at once educated and athletic – the model, probably, for Nicholas Hilliard’s swooningly romantic ‘Young Man Amongst Roses’. But a prominence based on his personal attractions was never going to satisfy a man who saw himself as England’s champion – as the last representative of the old code of chivalry.

Over the next few years chance favoured him – or, just possibly, injured him, in allowing him to climb faster and further than his experience and his abilities really justified. The Earl of Leicester died in 1588, within weeks of the Armada victory, leaving Elizabeth so distraught she reputedly locked herself in her room, until her councillors were forced to break down the door. Leaving her, perhaps, more inclined than ever towards Leicester’s stepson and surrogate. The stage was being emptied: the queen’s chancellor Sir Walter Mildmay died in 1589, her spymaster Walsingham in 1590, Christopher Hatton in 1591 while in 1592 Ralegh was disgraced for having made an illicit marriage with one of the queen’s maids of honour. (Essex, in 1590, had married the widow of his hero Sir Philip Sidney, but the queen had forgiven him – the more readily, perhaps, since he did not allow marriage to cramp his sexual style.) By 1591 it was already being said that Essex was ‘like enough, if he had a few more years, to carry Leicester’s credit and sway’.

In 1591 and 1592 he persuaded Elizabeth to allow him to command the forces sent to help the Protestant Henri IV against the Catholic League. In 1593 he became a Privy Councillor: greedily gulping down influence and honours, in the memorable image of one contemporary, ‘like a child sucking on an over-uberous nurse’. Even Burghley, early in the decade, seemed to be hitching his son Robert’s wagon to this rising star. Yet with all this in 1592 Essex was described as being ‘of all others, the most discontented person of the Court’: convinced, as he complained to his sister, that ‘I live in a place where I am hourly conspired against and practised upon’. He was already in indirect communication with King James of Scotland.

He was far from alone in his concern for the country’s future – and his own. Elizabeth had been right to fear, as she always had done, that men’s eyes would come to turn towards the rising sun. It is, of course, only hindsight that tells us the queen survived until 1603: as far back as 1589 Essex had been writing that her death could not be far away, and anyone who has ever sat by a protracted deathbed knows how fraying to the nerves the experience can be. These were the years of intense speculation about the succession: speculation all the more desperate for the fact that it had to be conducted in the utmost secrecy. These were the years of debate – in which Essex would play a controversial part – about the very nature of monarchy. And perhaps some of Essex’s frantic ambition might be put down to the spirit of the times – the
fin de siècle
atmosphere as the end approached, both of the queen’s reign and of the long Tudor century.

The fifteen years between the Armada and the queen’s death make up the bulk of what is now often spoken of as Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’; in which her grip on the country did begin to slacken, in which her council did seize the initiative. The queen’s urge towards vacillation which had once served her so well had now become a disability. She, who had always encouraged and manipulated a measure of competition among her courtiers and advisors, now feared that if her councillors united she would be unable to stand against them. To Essex, her hesitation was anathema. ‘I shall never’, he wrote, ‘do her service but against her will.’

If we are to see Essex as a man of vision (albeit a vision, aristocratic and militaristic, that we do not admire today) and a man of principle (albeit living proof that the first thing a principle does really is to kill somebody) then his very strengths must have made the situation more frustrating. In so far as he was, as John Guy has called him, ‘dazzling but paranoid’, it can only have fostered his paranoia. Josephine Ross in her book on the queen’s suitors,
The Men Who would be King
, points out that in many ways, Essex resembled Elizabeth’s first love Thomas Seymour in his vaulting ambition and his death on the block: another man of ‘much wit and little judgement’.

The Cadiz expedition against Spain in 1596 represented the height of his reputation as a soldier, but the conduct of the expedition, and the division of the glory, was a source of controversy. From the end of that year the court was increasingly divided into factions. One Lord Grey wrote of how Essex demanded he should choose sides: to be friendly towards Robert Cecil was to be his, Essex’s, enemy. The earl’s relationship with the Cecils had not been one of simple uninterrupted hostility, at least during old Lord Burghley’s lifetime; nonetheless he clashed with them over everything from control of patronage to foreign policy. And soon Essex’s anger seemed to encompass not only the Cecils, but almost everyone in a world which was failing to give him the influence he felt his due. By the time he went to Ireland, one observer wrote, Essex’s greatness ‘was now judged to depend as much on her Majesty’s fear of him as her love to him’. His appointment there was a poisoned chalice, as he knew himself, but he was trapped by his own insistence on his role as England’s warrior: ‘tied by my own reputation to use no tergiversation’. His unscheduled return from Ireland is well documented – how he caught the queen ‘newly up, with her hair about her face’ – as is his cruel comment that her conditions were ‘as crooked as her carcase’. Elizabeth’s comments were almost as telling: she said to Sir John Harington that ‘by God’s son, I am no queen; that man is above me’; and declared she would not renew his lucrative grant of the duties on sweet wines because ‘corrupt bodies, the more you feed them, the more hurt they do’. But the earl still kept the people’s sympathy. Though the exact site of his imprisonment in the Tower is not known (the ‘Devereux Tower’ actually takes its name from another source), it is recorded that two headsmen were secretly ordered for his execution ‘because if one faint the other may perform it’.

Elizabeth, it seems, finally turned against Essex when he seemed to threaten her sovereignty. Nonetheless she had, until this point, indulged him to an extraordinary degree. In 1928 Lytton Strachey suggested that the queen half liked Essex’s arrogance, his apparent hostility. The fashionably Freudian analysis seems a little too easy now, but it is true that though Elizabeth early declared that ‘it was fit that some one or other should take him down and teach him better manners’, she nonetheless never brought herself to be that somebody. But then Strachey described an Elizabeth whose ‘sexual organisation was seriously warped’; filled with ‘a deep seated repugnance to the crucial act of intercourse’ but nonetheless, ‘filled with delicious agitation by the glorious figures of men’.

At the centre of her being, Strachey wrote, ‘desire had turned to repulsion’: her decision to execute Essex he sees as the final resolution of a lifelong trauma. ‘The wheel had come full circle. Manhood – the fascinating, detestable entity, which had first come upon her concealed in yellow magnificence in her father’s lap – manhood was overthrown at last, and in the person of the traitor it should be rooted out.’ Strachey’s book attracted some dissent even in his own day. His friend Virginia Woolf – whose own
Orlando
, the extraordinary story of the young man-woman embraced by the ageing queen, was in some ways a companion piece – disliked it: and with some reason, Elizabeth’s admirers might say. But has the picture Strachey painted been altogether superseded today? It is true, as he points out, that Elizabeth was a woman who had vacillated over all the most important decisions in her life, from the question of her marriage to the executions of her cousins Norfolk and Mary. Yet she ordered Essex’s execution without apparent doubt, as if instinctively – unless, as she later claimed, it was her council who pushed her to the act. It is certainly true that in what one might call her professional capacity she did mistrust that militaristic aspect of masculinity Essex represented: one field in which a female ruler was seriously disadvantaged, in the sixteenth century.

In the personal sphere, Essex’s feelings are even harder to gauge than those of the queen – if, that is, one is to assume that he was anything other than wholly cynical in his relations with her. Strachey wrote that he was lavish in the protestations of his love: ‘That convenient monosyllable, so intense and so ambiguous, was for ever on his lips.’ ‘Affection – admiration – exasperation – mockery – he felt them all by turns, and sometimes, so it seemed, simultaneously.’ Bewitched, bothered and bewildered by Elizabeth, in other words, as so many had been: but Strachey saw Essex suffering under the conviction that Fate had reversed the ordained gender roles, ‘and the natural master was the servant’.