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CHAPTER I

A Knot of Ribbons for Robin Aubrey

THROUGH two drowsy hours of a golden afternoon the scholars of the foundation droned their Latin odes in the lower school; and the Queen’s Grace sat upright in her high chair and listened. The door stood open to the disturbing invitations of summer: an oblong of sunlight on the dark floor, the clear notes of birds, a rustle of wind in the trees, the distant cries of labourers in the fields, the scent of hay. But the queen had neither eye nor ear for them. She sat with her great farthingale spread about her, her bodice of blue and silver with the open throat and the high collar at the back all slashed and puffed and sewn with pearls the size of beans; and she bore with schoolboys’ Alcaics and Sapphics and dicolons and distrophons and monoclons as though July were her favourite month for such diversions. A dragonfly buzzed into the long room, a noisy, angry flash of green and gold beat fiercely against the walls and was gone again. The queen never so much as turned her head.

This was the year 1581 and Elizabeth’s third visit to the school at Eton, and the odes to do her honour were her appointed occupation for the day. So she gave her whole mind to it. Also she enjoyed it; which is more than can be said for her court behind her, with the exception perhaps of her secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had a passion for learning. At one moment the voice of a boy cracked as he recited his piece and ran up into a squeak. The queen caught the eye of another boy in the second row and exchanged the glimmer of a smile with him as though the pair of them had a little private joke of their own, and so made him her slave for life. This was the last of the recitations, and when it was finished the provost stepped forward in his scarlet gown. He made a little speech, he too using his best Latin, and presented Her Grace with a printed copy of the odes bound in covers with ornaments of scarlet and gold. Elizabeth raised her hand to take the book, and her arm caught upon the carving of her chair. A knot of silk ribbon with a gold button in the middle of it was half torn from her sleeve and hung dangling. Anywhere else she would have sworn a good round trooper’s oath, but today she was in her most gracious mood, and, seeing the look of agony on the provost’s face, she burst out laughing.

“Nay, good Doctor, you shall keep that look for my funeral. If I leave a bow behind me, you have twenty-five pretty scholars here who will string it for me at my need.”

Readiness is the better half of wit, and the little quip served its turn. A full-throated yell of applause rewarded her. She rose to her feet with the book still in her hands and addressed the school.

“There was a day when I could have bartered verses with you and perhaps not had the worst of it. But the business of government has so rusted my Latin and abolished my Greek that you can have nothing but my mother tongue from me. Ah, if only I had the leisure I once enjoyed!” And she closed her eyes and fondled the book and sighed.

There had been an occasion when Philip’s ambassador had complained to her that she had stolen all the wages of his master’s troops on their way up the Channel. She had sighed disconsolately then and answered that if only she could sit in a nun’s cell and tell her beads quietly for the rest of her days she would be happy. The ambassador had been neither impressed nor amused. He had written off angrily to his master that she was a woman possessed of a hundred thousand devils. However, she had an easier audience in the scholars of Eton. They believed in her yearning for the simple life. Little murmurs of sympathy broke out. Not one but would have given years to ease the load of government from her shoulders.

“But you will forgive me my lack of scholarship,” she continued, “if I ask in plain English for a holiday for you to commemorate the day.” And as the cheers burst out again she turned to Dr Thomas, the school’s master, who could do nothing but bow his consent.

“I thought that would commend me to your hearts,” she added drily, and indeed holidays were shining rarities in those days at Eton. “Yet with no less warmth take this old saying of Demosthenes to your bosoms. The words of scholars are the books of the unlearned. So persist in your studies for the good of those less fortunate than you.”

And so, having delivered her little necessary tag of erudition, she handed the book to a maid of honour and stepped down from her dais.

In the court outside the school a very different scene greeted her eyes. Gone were the frieze gowns and sober habiliments of the scholars. Her coaches, her lackeys, her red halberdiers waited, and slanting outwards from the door like the spokes of a painted wheel, the oppidans were ranged to speed her on her going. They had no place that day in the lower school. It was only by a breach in the old charter that they got their education there at all. They lived in appointed houses in the village under the tutelage of dames or hostesses, as they were called then. Now, with their private tutors amongst them, they stood gracious in their youth and eagerness, and glowing in silks and velvets and the bravery of their best attire. Elizabeth’s eyes shone and her heart quickened as she looked at them–the buds, lusty and colourful, on that tree of England whose growth she had tended with such jealous care for three-and-twenty years. It is true that she pruned a bough here and there with a sharp axe when she needs must, but for the most part she watched that it grew, its bark untapped, spaciously and freely and turbulently to its own shape. All the scraping and paring that her people might not be taxed, all her long vigils with her statesmen, all the delicate, perilous corantos she trod–now with the emperor, now with the Valois in Paris, now with Philip in Madrid–here in the sunlit yard were proved to her well worth the while even if she had not enjoyed every minute of them. These lads, tall and sturdy, with the shining eyes, as she was their glory, were her prop and her pride.

She looked along the row to her right, and a movement stayed her eyes. A tutor was thrusting one boy forward into the front of the line and dragging another boy back out of it.

“Stand you back, Robin, behind me,” he said in an impatient whisper which reached the queen’s ears. “And you, Humphrey, in your proper place in front.”

A favourite pupil was being set where he might catch the queen’s eye if he were fortunate, and that favourite pupil was smiling contentedly with little doubt that he would be so favoured.

The other lad, Robin, fell back without a struggle and without a sign of resentment. He was used to the second place, but not because he was stupid or dull or inferior or the worse-looking of the two. A single glance at his face proved that. But for him humiliation would have lain in making a to-do over an affair so small. He fell back, eager to see rather than to be seen. The great queen who held their hearts in her hand was to pass them by on her way to her coach. To watch her as she went was contentment enough, and he watched with shining eyes and parted lips a goddess rather than a woman.

But a woman she was, and very much of a woman. She had no taste for busy and officious people who must be giving orders when they should be standing modestly in their places. A grim little smile tightened her mouth. She would put that forward tutor in his place. Moreover, she liked beauty and straight limbs and the clean look of race; and all those qualities were plain to see in the young oppidan now forced back and half hidden behind the tutor. She turned to the master with a smile.

“Call me out that young dorado, good master,” she said.

Her voice in ordinary talk was thin, but it reached across the yard to the tutor, and that unhappy man rushed upon his undoing.

“It’s you, Humphrey, whom Her Grace calls,” he said, pushing his favourite forward from the line. “Be quick! It’s you,” he urged excitedly, and the queen’s voice rang out, strong now and alarming, whilst her black eyes widened and hardened till the tutor drooped his head and quailed before them.

“No, it is not!” she cried. “What! You will hold out against me, will you? And expound my meaning to me like a lawyer? Know, Mr Ferret–” She had a pretty gift for nicknames, and she could have invented none apter than this one. The tutor was a thin, long creature, with small, twinkling, reddish eyes and a little nibbling mouth ridiculous in a man; and what with a steep sloping forehead and a sharp receding chin, his face seemed to be drawn to a point at the end of a long nose.–“Mr Ferret”–Elizabeth repeated the name with relish, and a ripple of laughter ran along the ranks of the boys. Even the provost and the master smiled. The tutor’s face was bent towards the ground, so that no one could see the malignant fury which swept across it. But he was never to forgive her the phrase and never to forgive one, at all events, of those boys for the gust of joyous laughter which welcomed it.

“–Know, Mr Ferret, that in this realm it’s I who say which one shall stand forward and which one stand behind. God’s wounds! Dr Provost, there are tutors at Eton who need a stiffer schooling than your pupils, and let Mr Ferret see to it that I don’t take the cane in hand myself.”

She could play tricks like a tomboy on her courtiers, she could exchange a jest with any peasant in the fields, but she could be right King Harry when she chose, and she chose now. The tutor cringed before her. His mortification was drowned in a wave of fear. She was terrifying, and there was no one to gainsay her. The sweat gathered upon his forehead; his knees shook. She had made a public fool of him. She could set him in the stocks like a rogue if she would.

But she was content with the lesson she had given him. She looked again towards the master.

“Call me out that brown lad.”

“Robin Aubrey,” cried the master, and the ranks parted and Mr Ferret, with a gasp of relief, stood aside. But he kept his head still lowered, lest his eyes might be seen even in their fear to hold a threat.

Robin Aubrey himself was hardly in a happier state. A boy of fourteen years, he was made up of one clear purpose and great dreams, and at the heart of those dreams the great queen was enshrined. Now she had chosen him from amongst his companions. She had called him out from them. He would never be able to cross that patch of sunlit ground to her, he felt sure. His heart so clamoured within his breast that he would stifle before he had gone half the way. His tears so blinded him that he would never see her. The most that he could hope for was that he would swoon and die at her feet. Yet by some magic–how he could never explain–he was there on his knees before her. He dared not lift his eyes to her face, but he felt her slim hand upon his shoulder and heard her voice–oh, miracle! just a woman’s voice, but very warm and friendly–in his ears.

“Robin Aubrey,” she said slowly, relishing the English sound of the name.

“Of Abbot’s Gap in the County of Dorset.”

Was it really his voice he heard so clear and steady? Someone started as he spoke, a pale, black-bearded, sickly man who stood a couple of paces behind the queen and at one side.

“What!” she cried gaily. “My good Moor knows you. Were you his page at the court of the emperor?”

Her good Moor was her principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham; he was more fortunate in his nickname than Sir Christopher Hatton, her vice-chamberlain, who was her “mutton,” but he did not relish it overmuch. He smiled without any amusement.

“Your Majesty, Mr Aubrey’s father was my friend,” he said sedately, and Robin knew who he was.

“Robin Aubrey,” Elizabeth repeated. “Mere English, then!”

“And on my knees to England.”

Had Robin sat up of nights for a twelvemonth conning phrases he could have lit upon none which could so delight his queen as this one spoken in an honest burst of passion. That she was mere English was her pride, and no doubt she owed something of the witchcraft with which she drew so many hearts to her kinship with her people, her liking for their sports, her share in their homely humour.

“These lads, Sir Francis,” she said with a sigh of pleasure. “And how old are you, boy Robin?”

“Fourteen, Your Majesty,” and then in a hurry: “But I shall be fifteen next month.”

“God bless my soul, a man!” cried she. “And whither go you from Eton?”

“To Oxford.”

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