The Men Who Would Be King (28 page)

I grieve, and dare not show my discontent;

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I dote, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate.

I am and am not—freeze and yet I burn,

Since from myself my other self I turn.

My care is like my shadow in the Sun—

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

In those lines she showed something of the conflict of her heart and mind, the confusion of her desires; she was a woman desperate to be loved, yet ever flying from the realities of commitment, unable to reconcile her differing needs. Doting, yet divided in herself, Elizabeth would remain a virgin all her life.

Though the last fierce flare of the emotion that Alençon had lit up in Elizabeth's heart in 1579 had died away, the ashes of the courtship continued to smolder faintly. The queen and the prince continued to exchange ardent letters, and the marriage was talked of as a matter of expediency long after it had become impossible. Alençon's quest for glory in the Netherlands proved as unsuccessful as his wooing of Elizabeth. He played tennis in Antwerp while his soldiers grew mutinous; finally he had to flee the country, his ventures a failure. In the summer of 1584 he ended his ignominious career in death—he died of fever on June 10. Elizabeth grieved for him. She went into mourning, and she wrote to Catherine de' Medici, “Your sorrow cannot exceed mine, although you were his mother. You have another son, but I can find no other consolation than death, which I hope will soon enable me to rejoin him. If you could see a picture of my heart, you would see a body without a soul; but I will not trouble you with my grief, as you have enough of your own.” She was sincerely moved by Alençon's death. She had come near to marrying him, and for a time she had been happy in his company. She had received from him the passionate homage that she had always longed to win from a great prince; now, with his death, her last courtship was irrevocably ended, and she would never again receive sweet letters from her Frog. The last and most loving of the political suitors to the queen was dead, and now there would be no more.

9

Mistress of England

S
ome call her Pandora; some Gloriana; some Cynthia; some Belphoebe; some Astraea: all by several names to express several loves. Yet all those names make but one celestial body, as all those loves meet to create but one soul,” wrote the playwright Thomas Dekker. “I am of her own country, and we adore her by the name of Eliza.” The almost mythical maiden who was the subject of those lines was then an old, old woman, whose sallow, lined skin was sometimes painted half an inch thick, right down to her sagging bosom, and whose thin cheeks had sunk where her teeth were missing. The physical realities of Elizabeth's appearance were irrelevant to the cult that had grown up around her. At an age when most noblewomen were grandmothers or great-grandmothers several times over, surrounded and supported by their children and their children's children, Queen Elizabeth was still a virgin, set apart from the majority of mortals by her eternal maidenhood. She had never known the satisfactions of the wife and mother; instead, she clung greedily to the pleasures of youthful adulation, many years after such homage had ceased to be in any way appropriate to her fading charms. In a society that had, during Elizabeth's lifetime, worshipped the Virgin Mary, and which was still steeped in the medieval traditions of courtly love, the image of a virgin queen under whose benevolent rule England prospered, defying even mighty Spain's Armada, was easily assimilated. The special powers and properties belonging to virginity were well known to the literate members of Elizabethan society, and as a chaste maiden their queen commanded a reverence that could easily spill over into idolatry. Since she was a woman who craved admiration and attention, a vain, insecure, and lonely woman, she cultivated such extravagant adoration.

Leicester, who knew the queen better than anyone, understood her need for ardent love. When the Alençon match was in the air, he had written to Walsingham to warn him not to destroy her illusions about the French prince's desire for her. “You know her disposition as well as I,” he had written urgently. “I would have you, as much as you may, avoid Her Majesty's suspicion that you doubt Monsieur's love to her, or that you had devotion enough in you to further her marriage; though I promise I think she has little enough herself to it. Yet what she would have others think and do, you have cause to know.” The fact that the queen had no wish for marriage and sexual love did not lessen her desire that others should pine for her. It had been the same with all her suitors—she had reveled in their protestations of passion, while remaining elusive and unobtainable, only pretending to yield when there seemed to be a danger of their withdrawing from the pursuit. In her old age, when marriage had ceased even to be a remote possibility, Elizabeth's consuming need to be courted and adored was greater than ever, and the men who became suitors to the queen in the last two decades of her life contributed their fantastical flatteries, in speech and in writing, to the mythology that was growing up around England's Gloriana. She was wooed now not as a wife, but as a chaste mistress in the courtly love tradition—she represented the fair and virtuous lady of chivalric legend, whose smile alone was sufficient to bind a knight to her service forever, in the kind of hopeless love that found informal expression in the sixteenth century verse that ran,

I did but see her passing by,

And yet I love her till I die.

Successful suitors to Elizabeth could hope for more substantial rewards than occasional kindly glances, however. To win her favor was to acquire influence and income; in the bright sunlight of the queen's good graces a man could step from the shadows of insignificance into the forefront of court life, and there make his fortune. Elizabeth had become a haggard and temperamental old woman, but the image of herself that was reflected back to her by her courtiers and subjects was that of a radiant nymph, a paragon of beauty and virtue, and no one who had anything to gain from her favor would dare to shatter the magic glass.

By the 1580s, when Elizabeth's flare of feeling for Alençon had died away and her anger at Leicester's marriage had cooled, Leicester's position in her life was unassailable. The relationship that she had built up with him over the years had passed through passion to a deep and lasting tenderness that was closer to a normal loving partnership than anything she experienced in any of her other affairs. As long as Lady Leicester never showed her face at court, Elizabeth could ignore her existence; she had indeed had to become accustomed to the fact that most of her admirers were married men, and once her rage over his faithlessness in taking a wife had abated, her Robin was as high as ever in her favor. Yet his attentions alone had for years been insufficient to satisfy Elizabeth's hunger for male admiration. Even while he was by her side, eager to marry her, and foreign princes were making flattering proposals from abroad, she had delightedly flirted with a series of handsome young men. Her intimates had been given pet names; she called Leicester her “Eyes,” and charming Sir Christopher Hatton had become “Lids,” nicknames that they fondly represented in their letters by the symbols ÔÔ and 
Δ
Δ
. Hatton, who genuinely believed himself to be infatuated with the queen, and remained unmarried for her sake, contributed a great many words and tears to the cult of her peerless beauty; in 1573, when she was only forty, and still busy with the first stage of her Alençon negotiations, Hatton had written passionately, “I will wash away the faults of these letters with the drops from your poor Lids, and so enclose them. Would God I were with you but for one hour. My wits are overwrought with thoughts. I find myself amazed. Bear with me, my most dear sweet Lady. Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me; for I love you,” and he had a great deal more to say in the same throbbing vein. Such outpourings of desperate love were highly acceptable to Elizabeth, as were the exquisite jewels and presents that Hatton gave her; through the 1570s, while her French marriages were under discussion, his star shone brightly. It was he who broke down in tears after the scene in the gallery when she promised, albeit falsely, to marry Alençon. But although his career advanced steadily—he was to become Lord Chancellor in 1587—Elizabeth's fancy for Hatton fluctuated, and his constant uncertainty as to her feelings towards him kept him in a state of anguished worship. “I should sin, most gracious sovereign, against a Holy Ghost, most damnably, if towards Your Highness I should be found unthankful,” he groveled in the autumn of 1580, but his almost religious devotion to the queen could not save him from being obscured by the shining meteor Sir Walter Raleigh, who rose at the beginning of the 1580s, when Elizabeth's dealings with Alençon were almost at an end and her sterile old age was upon her.

It was remarked that the good-looking West Country gentleman Raleigh had “gotten the Queen's ear in a trice” after he strode into court life. He was just the kind of man who had always fascinated her, a virile, hardy adventurer who was also artistic and intellectual in his tastes, and he shared Elizabeth's love of magnificently showy clothes, in which he far outsparkled such former favorites as Hatton. Elizabeth was fascinated by him. A friend of Spenser and Marlowe, he too was a poet, and he wooed the queen with verses celebrating her loveliness, depicting her as the Moon Goddess, and delicately dismissing the question of her age in such lines as

Time wears her not, she doth his chariot guide,

Mortality below her orb is placed.

By her the virtue of the stars down slide,

In her is virtue's perfect image cast.

In his poetry she was half divine, but she was a woman too, one whose feminine beauties had set his pulses racing with desire:

Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire,

Those crispéd hairs, which hold my heart in chains,

Those dainty hands, which conquered my desire,

That wit, which of my thoughts doth hold the reins.

His words reassured her that it was not her sovereignty alone that gave her power, but her own beauties of body and mind:

O eyes that pierce our hearts without remorse,

O hairs of right that wear a royal crown,

O hands that conquer more than Caesar's force,

O wit that turns huge kingdoms upside down.

Raleigh was a worthy admirer, and the queen flirted delightedly with him. In an obvious play on his christian name she nicknamed him “Water,” which prompted poor jealous Hatton to send her a little gold bucket, as a pointed gesture. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the more admirers she had, looking languishingly at her and glowering at one another, the merrier; she had learned long ago, in the days of her serious courtships, that the presence of a rival did much to heighten a suitor's desire for her. She exulted in the knowledge that, despite her advancing age and dwindling charms, she could still rouse jealousy in her gallants; the total sterility of these postmenopausal love dealings did nothing to lessen their intensity. Now that her failure to marry had been transformed from a fault into a virtue, Elizabeth could indulge her craving for the amorous pursuit without the fear of being captured, for all could see the
noli me tangere
that was “graven in diamonds, in letters plain” about her inviolable beauties.

Raleigh became sickened with the sham by the time the queen had done with him. In 1592, when the queen was nearly sixty and he was in his late thirties, he committed the offense of loving and marrying one of her Maids-of-Honour. The punishment that had nearly fallen on Leicester in the same situation was meted out to Raleigh—he and his wife were sent to the Tower for having married without royal leave. The disgraced favorite poured out a highly colored version of his feelings, in hopes that the letter would come to the queen's eyes; hearing that she was going away on a royal progress through the realm, he wrote,

My heart was never broken until this day, that the Queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet near at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less, but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph, sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel, sometime playing like Orpheus; behold! the sorrow of this world, once amiss hath bereaved me of all.

But he had lost his hold over Elizabeth's changeable fancy. He wrote in a very different style in his poem “The Lie,” expressing a fallen courtier's resentment and defiance:

Tell potentates they live