“Be calm, my sweeting. Be quiet, my sweet Bess. Let me get you a little wine.”

“You know I do not like wine.”

“I’ll mix water with it. It will revive you, dearest. There … there … that’s better.”

“It is not better, Kat. It will never be better. You know how I loved him.”

“But you did not marry him, dearest.”

“Stop all this talk of marriage. You do it but to torment me.”

“Dearest Majesty, remember you are the Queen. You must not show your jealousy like this. You are above such things.”

“I am indeed. I am above them all, and I’ll have obedience. They shall go to the Tower at once … both of them.”

“Yes, yes, my love. They shall go to the Tower.”

“If you try to soothe me, Madam, and continue to talk to me as though I am four years old, you shall accompany them to the Tower.”

“Yes, darling, so I shall.”

“Oh Kat! What a deceiver! What a scoundrel!”

“He is the worst man in the world,” said Kat.

“How dare you say it! You know he is not. It is all her fault. Ha! Little does he know the woman he has married. Let him discover.”

She stood up suddenly. Kat watched her fearfully as she strode to the door.

She said to the guards there: “The Earl of Leicester is here at Greenwich, is he not?”

“He is, Your Majesty.”

“Then go to his apartments with a party of the strongest guards. Place him under close arrest, and tell him he may expect to leave shortly for the Tower.”

She came back to her couch and, flinging herself upon it, gave way to bitter weeping.

All England was talking about the “Mounseer.” He had come to England, and he had come without ceremony, and in disguise had appeared suddenly at Greenwich with only two servants, asking to be taken to Her Majesty that he might throw himself at her feet.

He was very small and far from handsome; his face was dark and pock-marked; but he could murmur the kind of compliment that delighted the Queen as none of her courtiers—not even Robert—had been able to do. His clothes were exquisite; he could foot a measure with such grace as to make Christopher Hatton appear clumsy; he displayed French graces of such elegance that Elizabeth, smarting under what she privately called Leicester’s betrayal, declared that she was charmed with him.

Robert and Lettice were under arrest, and Elizabeth had the satisfaction of knowing that they could not meet. She had not sent Robert to the Tower as she had at first intended; Burghley with Sussex had begged her not to do so and thereby expose her jealousy and passion to the world. To keep him a prisoner at Greenwich until her anger cooled was one thing; to make him a state prisoner in the Tower quite another, they cautioned her.

She saw the wisdom of this advice, and kept Robert prisoner at Greenwich in his own apartments, while she amused herself with Monsieur.

And how she seemed to enjoy herself! At least it was some balm to her misery. Kat, who loved her so tenderly, in dismay watched her caressing the little Prince in public. She had quickly nick-named him her Frog, and continually wore on her bosom a jeweled ornament in the shape of a frog.

But the country was not pleased with the suitor. The marriage would be a ridiculous one, it was said, since the Queen was forty-six and Anjou twenty-three. Was it possible for the Queen to have a child at her age? it was asked. And what other reason could there be for the marriage?

A man named Stubbs published a pamphlet he had written denouncing the match.

“This man,” he wrote, “is the son of King Henry, whose family ever since he married with Catherine of Italy is fatal as it were to resist the gospel and have been, every one after the other, as a Domitian after a Nero.”

Stubbs and his publisher were imprisoned by order of the Queen, and both condemned to have their right hands cut off. Crowds gathered in the market place at Westminster to see this done, and the people murmured against the Queen.

This grieved Elizabeth; but she had, in a moment of passion, sent for the Duke, and she dared not risk offending the French by allowing their royal family to be insulted while the Duke was actually her guest.

Philip Sidney—who was handsome, gifted and charming as well as being Robert’s nephew—was one of the Queen’s favorite younger men. He now wrote to her in a manner which was more insulting to the French Prince than even Stubbs had been.

“How the hearts of your people will be galled,” he wrote, “if not aliened when they see you take as husband a Frenchman and a papist, in whom the very common people know this: he is the son of that Jezebel of our age, and his brother made oblation of his own sister’s marriage, the easier to massacre our brethren in religion …”

Philip Sidney was banished from the Court.

There were storms in the Parliament. Some of her ministers were quite blunt, saying she was old enough to be the Duke’s mother. Others, more politic, implied the same thing in a more courteous way: They did not wish to see the Queen risk her life by attempting to bear children.

And Elizabeth, when she was not flirting with Monsieur, or raging against Robert—or fretting for him—was thinking of what was happening in the Netherlands, and how Philip of Spain was gaining domination over the poor suffering people of that land; and she wondered what would happen when he had completely subdued them.

Then, all the world thought, and Elizabeth must think it too, his attention would turn to England, for was not his dream to abolish Protestantism throughout the world, and was not England a refuge for the Huguenots of France and the Netherlands?

Elizabeth could tremble when she thought of that day. The great dread of her life was war; and even now that dread seeped through her miseries caused by Robert’s defection, and curbed her gaiety in the French Prince’s wooing.

While her statesmen wondered how a woman of her age and genius could act with such girlish folly, simpering, giggling, urging her wooer on to what—in the eyes of Englishmen—seemed the most foppish folly, she was flattering him as he was flattering her. Not only did she lead him to believe that he was a very fascinating man, but she let him know that she considered he was born to command an army; and since it was the destiny of France to go to war with Spain, and she was sure there was a kingdom to be won in the Netherlands by a man of courage, spirit, and genius, such as Monsieur undoubtedly possessed, she wondered why he did not seek his fortune in Flanders.

His brother, a young man, was on the throne of France; it was a sad thing, she knew from experience, to be near the throne and have serious doubts of ever reaching it. There were always plots and counter-plots; it was a wise thing to make a kingdom for oneself; and if one were a man, brave as a lion, a military genius—as she was convinced her little Frog was—he should first win his kingdom, and then come for his bride.

She knew the man with whom she was dealing. He had need to assert himself. As little Hercule, the youngest of his family, he had suffered much humiliation. To be small and ugly and to have been marred by the pox was bad enough, but to be called Hercule into the bargain had been an intolerable insult which Fate had given him. Mercifully his name had been changed to François, but no one could change his face. His mother disliked him because he was his brother’s enemy, and he believed that she had tried to poison him. He needed to show the world what a great man he was, and he was determined that all should see him as Queen Elizabeth had. He would go to the Netherlands and fight the Spaniards.

The Queen, he believed, was so much in love with him that she would help him to finance his expedition.

So the Queen sat smiling, and her ministers marveled that the seemingly foolish woman was sending Anjou away in the utmost amity to fight England’s war in the Netherlands. Should the money be granted? Indeed it should! This was a master-stroke of policy.

The Queen was so pleased with her plan—and glad in truth to say good-bye to her little Frog, who was beginning to tire her—that she smiled on all the world.

He must have an escort to take him across the sea, she declared.

“Master Leicester has been idle too long. I will put him in command of my dear Frog’s escort and make some use of the man.”

This was a sign to all that once more she had forgiven Robert.

TEN

She took him back, but whenever she saw him with Lettice she was jealous and alert.

She was angry because the marriage seemed to be successful. Robert had ceased to look at other women. Was it his age? wondered the Queen. Or had that she-wolf some magic power? She was sure the wolf was capable of anything. Wolves were treacherous animals.

A son was born to them—another Robert Dudley—and Elizabeth did not know whether she was pleased or angry. He had once said that she should perpetuate her beauty. She thought: He has perpetuated his, mayhap, and I am glad of that, though I would the boy were not that woman’s son.

Lettice already had one son, and the Queen could not help being attracted by him in spite of his mother, for young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the handsomest young man she had seen since the days when his stepfather had enchanted her.

Often she would look sadly at her Robert and think: We are getting old now—too old for jealousy, too old for enmity. She would compare him with the young man who had ridden to her at Hatfield on a white horse, to tell her she was Queen. Poor Robert, he had put on much weight; his face was over-red from too much good living; that sensuality which had been virility in youth became grossness in old age.

And she herself? She was a goddess; she would not be frightened by the encroaching years. All about her were men—men of her Robert’s age and others of young Essex’s age—to tell her she was a goddess who—without Cornelius Lanoy’s elixir—had found eternal youth.

Anjou had failed in the Netherlands, but William the Silent was waging furious war there for his people’s freedom. All eyes in England were on the Netherlands; the outcome of that war for freedom was of the utmost importance.

And the eyes of the Spaniards were on England. What sort of a woman is this? was being asked in Spanish Councils. What sort of a country does she rule? It is only part of an island, yet she acts as though she rules the world. Her seamen are arrogant pirates. They are diverting treasure from Spanish coffers. They are bold and adventurous; they have no respect for His Most Catholic Majesty. They insult the Holy Inquisition itself.

There were names which were spoken of with horror and dread in Spanish ships and Spanish territories: Drake, Hawkins … the fearless ones. How could men be so fearless as these were? How could they always win? It was because they were in the pay of the Devil. They were not men; they were sorcerers.

Clearly these men and their arrogant Queen would have to be taught a lesson. Francis Drake came sailing home from Chile and Peru with all the treasure plundered from Spanish towns in the new world, and from Spanish galleons. He had rounded the Cape, and by so doing, the world. And what did the Queen do when this pirate arrived home? Did she hang him as he deserved? Did she treat him as a thief, a robber, and a murderer of His Most Catholic Majesty’s subjects?

No! He was a handsome man, and she liked him for that among other things. She liked his Devon burr and she liked his flashing eyes. He was a man after her own heart, for, in his country way, he could pay a gallant compliment.

The Queen told him that the Spaniards went in fear of him. They called him a bold and wicked man.

“Are you such a man, sir?” she asked. “I believe you may be, and I must perforce cut off your head with a golden sword.”

She thereupon called for a sword, and bade him kneel that she might with all speed perform the task which would put an end to plain Francis Drake.

She laid the sword on his shoulders and she said: “Arise, Sir Francis.”

He rose, bowed low and kissed her hand, and said that he would sail the world twenty times and bring back twenty times as much treasure for one smile from Her Majesty’s lips.

There came a tragic year for Robert. His son—in whom he had taken great pride—died suddenly. They buried him in Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. “Robert Dudley, aged 4 years, the noble Impe,” were the words inscribed on his tomb.