Elizabeth I (4 page)

“When did the Armada sail?” asked Burghley. “Has it sailed?”

“It is still in Lisbon. My reports say there are some hundred and fifty ships in it. Not all, of course, are fighting ships. Many are merchantmen and supply ships.”

“It will be the largest such fleet ever to sail,” said Leicester. “
If
it manages to sail. Losing their commander two months ago”—he mockingly crossed himself—“set them back. Santa Cruz knew what he was doing. This replacement, this Medina-Sidonia, does not know much. He even gets seasick. Some admiral!”

“Getting their hands on Portugal eight years ago, with her ships and her harbor at Lisbon, was the best stroke of fortune they could have had, and the worst for us,” said Burghley. “The wonder is it has taken them so long to organize. Of course, they kept hoping that someone would put Mary Queen of Scots, on the throne here for them, and make England Catholic without their lifting a finger.”

“We have
you
to thank for ending that,” I said to Walsingham.

He allowed his saturnine features to soften a bit. He always looked so dour, my spymaster. Even in victory he could not celebrate. He merely nodded. “She ended it. I only exposed her plots and lies.”

“Today England remains the greatest threat to the triumph of the Counter-Reformation. Rome has turned the tide elsewhere and begun rolling back the Protestant victories, retaking territories. But we have emerged as the one country where someone opposing Rome can be safe and pursue a career and a life. For that reason, they need to eliminate us. It’s religious, but it’s also political,” said Burghley.

“Is there any difference?” asked Leicester.

“How long do you think we have before they strike?” I asked Walsingham. “How long do we have to prepare?”

“They may sail any day,” he said.

“We’ve been readying the beacons and repairing the coastal fortifications all winter,” said Burghley.

“But we all know—and we can speak freely here with one another—that we have virtually no castles that can withstand Spanish siege artillery. They would most likely land in Kent, just across from Flanders. Kent is open country and easy to traverse. We don’t have enough weapons, and those we have are outdated. And then there is the great unknown—what about the English Catholics? Will they rally to the Spanish? Where does their primary loyalty lie? For that reason, my good councillors, our only hope of victory lies in preventing the Spanish from landing to begin with,” I said.

“Summon Drake,” said Burghley.

“Where is he?” asked Leicester.

“In Plymouth,” said Walsingham. “But he’ll come quickly.”

5

A
s they rose to take their leave, I motioned to Robert Dudley, Lord Leicester, putting on his hat. He halted and waited expectantly.

“Come, stroll with me in the garden,” I invited—ordered—him. “I have seen little of you since your return from the Low Countries last winter.”

He smiled. “I would like that,” he said, turning on his heel to follow me.

Back in the Queen’s garden, three gardeners were busy setting out herbs in the raised beds, their backs bent over their task. Should I send them away? Whatever we said would be overheard and, doubtless, repeated. No, they should stay. I did not plan to say anything that could not be repeated.

“You are looking well,” I began.

“I would take that as a compliment, but I was ill and looked dreadful when I first returned. So anything is an improvement.”

“True.” I studied him. His face had regained some of the flesh and animation that the Low Countries had drained from him. Still, he did not look healthy. And he would never look young, or handsome, again. Time had not been kind to him, my “Eyes,” the man who had been the most glorious creature in my court thirty years ago. The thick chestnut hair had thinned and turned gray; the luxuriant mustache and beard, sleek and shiny as a sable pelt, were wispy and pale. The soul-searching deep hazel eyes now looked watery and pleading. Perhaps it was not just the Netherlands that had wasted him but the ten years he had spent with the notorious, demanding Lettice Knollys as his wife. “The Netherlands were cruel to you,” I told him. “And to me.” I thought of all it had cost, and no resolution in sight. “So many deaths, so much drain on our resources.”

He paused in our slow walk down the grassed path. “Without us, the Spanish would have crushed the Protestant rebels already. So never think it was in vain.”

“Sometimes I think all we have done is to give the Spanish some battle practice, the better to attack us here.”

We resumed our walk, winding our way toward the sundial in the middle of the garden, its centerpiece. “I have seen the Duke of Parma’s army firsthand, and it is all it is reputed to be,” he said.

“You mean, the best fighting force in Europe? Yes, I know.”

“But it is weakened by illness and desertion like any other. He started out with thirty thousand men, and hearsay is that he is down to seventeen thousand. That counts the one thousand English exiles, the ones fighting against their own country. They are also”—his eyes lit up like the Robert of his youth—“short of money, and there will be no more until the next treasure fleet arrives from America.”

I joined him in a mischievous smile. “Which our loyal privateers will try to intercept. You were out of the country, but did you know that Drake’s raiding meant that in the last half of 1586, no silver at all reached Spain?”

We both burst into gleeful laughter, as we had done so many times, and so many places, together. His laugh was still young. “None?” he cried.

“Not a sliver,” I said. “Not an ingot. And besides that, the raid he led on Cádiz last spring injured their ships and supplies so greatly that he single-handedly has delayed the sailing of the Armada for a year. That has given Parma’s men more opportunities to die or desert.”

“Even we knew all about that. Sailing right into their own waters, striking over a thousand miles from his English home base—it was brazen and unthinkable. At least, the Spanish did not think it possible. Now they are all frightened of him. A captured Spanish captain I myself questioned believed that Drake had supernatural powers to see into faraway ports. I did not disabuse him of the notion. Certainly Drake seems to have an uncanny ability to guess where treasure is, what’s guarded, and what’s not. And he moves with the speed of a striking cobra.”

“Amusing, isn’t it? He looks so innocent, with his round face and red cheeks.”

“His ships are his fangs. He uses them like an ordinary man uses his own hand or foot—as if they were part of his own body.” Robert shook his head in wonderment.

We had reached the sundial, a faceted cube that told time in thirty different ways as the sun played on each surface. It had been a gift from Queen Catherine de’ Medici as her princely sons, one at a time, came courting me. Perhaps she thought one big gift from the mother of them all would make more of an impression than many little gifts. It was an ingenious device. One of the faces even told the night hours by moonlight, if the moon was bright enough.

It said four o’clock on all of its faces. Today it would stay light until almost nine, one of those sweet lingering twilights of spring. There was even a face that could read the time as the last light ebbed, a twilight dial.

Robert leaned on one of the sundial faces. “Did you mind the lily?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, feeling bad that I had been so dismissive of it. But it was out of place for him to offer it there, then. “It was so like you to do it.”

He looked around the garden. “Why do you have no roses here? How can a Tudor garden have no roses?”

“They are too tall for the rails. It would upset the order of the garden. But near the orchard, there is a whole plot of them.”

“Show me,” he said. “I have never seen them.”

We left the little enclosed garden and made our way out along the path leading past the tiltyard with its viewing galleries. Iron brackets lined the fence for torchlight tournaments. Robert had taken part in many but would ride in them no longer. I noticed he was out of breath from the short walk. Then I remembered something else.

“You resigned your post as master of the horse,” I said. “Robert, why?”

“All things must pass,” he said, lightly.

“But Burghley is still serving me! You two were my first appointments, at my very first council meeting!”

“I still serve you, my Be—Your Majesty,” he said. “Just not as master of the horse. Although I will still breed horses.”

“So ... who now serves?”

“An energetic young man I discovered. Christopher Blount. He did well in the Netherlands. Got wounded. I knighted him. You’ll be pleased with him, I am sure.”

“That title belongs to you.”

“No longer.”

“In my mind, it always will.”

“Our minds see things that our eyes cannot,” he said. “I suppose something continues to exist until the mind that sees it no longer exists.”

Yes, the young handsome Robert Dudley existed now only in the mind of Elizabeth and in portraits. “You are right.”

We had reached the rose garden, where beds were laid out according to color and variety. There were climbing eglantines, their pink petals spread open like frames; small ivory musk roses studding their prickly bushes; sturdy shrubs with many-petaled reds and whites, damask roses and province roses; beds of yellow roses and pale red canell roses that smelled like cinnamon. The mingled scents were particularly sweet this afternoon.

“I was wrong to call you a lily,” he said. “I see now that roses reflect your true nature better. There are so many different kinds, just as there are so many sides to you.”

“But my personal motto is ‘
Semper eadem
’—‘Always the same, never changing.’”I had chosen it because I thought unpredictability in a ruler was a great burden for the subjects.

“That is not how your councillors would describe you,” he said. “Nor your suitors.” He looked away as he added, “I should know, having been both.”

It was good that I could not see his face, read his expression. “I only play at being fickle,” I finally said. “Underneath it I am steady as a rock. I am always loyal and always there. But a little playacting adds spice to life and keeps my enemies on their toes.”

“Your friends, too, Your Majesty,” he said. “Even your old Eyes sometimes does not know when to believe what he sees.”

“You may always ask me, Robert. And I will always tell you. That I promise.”

Robert Dudley: the one person I could almost bare my soul to, could be more honest with than anyone else. Long ago I had loved him madly, as a young woman can do only once in her life. Time had changed that love, hammered it out into a sturdier, thicker, stronger, quieter thing—just as they say happens in any long-term marriage. The Russians say, “The hammer shatters glass but forges iron.”

I once told an ambassador that if I ever married it would be as a queen and not as Elizabeth. If I had ever been convinced marriage was a political necessity, then I would have proceeded despite my personal reluctance. But at my coronation I promised to take England itself as my spouse. Remaining a virgin, not giving myself to anyone but my people, was the visible sacrifice they would prize and honor, binding us together. And so it has proved.

And yet, and yet ... at the same time I spared them the horrors of foreign entanglement and the specter of domination, I left them with the very thing my father turned his kingdom upside down to avoid: no heir to succeed me.

I cannot say it doesn’t worry me. But I have other immediate decisions to make, of equal and urgent concern to the survival of my country.

It took Francis Drake the better part of a week to travel the two hundred miles separating Plymouth and London. But now he stood before the full Privy Council, and me, in the meeting room at Whitehall. He had wanted not to rest but to come straight to us.