Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 12

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For days, the hard black winter roads echoed with the sound of the flying hoofs of horses—a sound like that of black armour clashing on black armour. The courtiers were leaving the Palace in London where the Queen lay dying, for another Court, deep in the country, where a twenty-five-year-old Princess sat waiting for news.

But still she is alone, save for her ladies; sitting, in spite of the winter weather, under an oak tree in the park, looking at the snowflakes flying like bees, she does not see us, and is not trying to deceive us, and so for a moment we may see her, perhaps, as she really is.

Though her face and form are reflected in the mirror of History—her pulses, the tempestuous tides of blood, the depth of that lion-great but fearful heart—a heart that never yielded to its fear—are not seen. Only the outer covering, the swaddling of the sun and darkness of her spirit, these are given us.

We see a thin-waisted gold body, like that of the Bee-Priestesses, with a high ruff and sleeves like the thin wings of these: we see a gown that seems descended from the Minoan or Cretan civilisations.

Her appearance was that of the Plantagenet race. Her ugly face, so full of fire, so full of intellectual power, wisdom, vanity, and a strange fascination, was the face of the Plantagenets. She had the great, hauntingly beautiful eyes of Anne Boleyn, but the high, thin, and arched nose, whose nostrils seemed as if breathing fire, the long carved eyelids, the long and flawlessly beautiful hands, were the Plantagenet nose, eyelids, and hands.

For all this subtlety in the shape of her face and hands, there was a strange animal breath about her, so that we think of the Dauphin’s horse that was ‘all air and fire, chez les narines de feu’. ‘Let me be your Prometheus’, she wrote to Sir Henry Sidney. And she, nailed to the rock of her greatness, under the shadow of the eagle’s wing, brought fire to her countrymen. Those wild sparks fell in the hearts of the adventurers, lit a torch in the blood of the greatest man ever born in England, William Shakespeare.

She was born at the time of the martyrs’ fires under King Henry. At all moments of greatness, her Promethean fires burned in her speech, which was of a transcendental grandeur.

‘I know that my kingdom is small’, she told the French Ambassador; ‘it is therefore all the easier to defend.’ ‘Although I am a woman’, she said, on another occasion, ‘nevertheless I am the daughter of predecessors who knew how to deserve their kingdom.’ To Fénelon she said, ‘Although I may not be a lion, I am a lion’s cub, and I have a lion’s heart’.

One amongst the many contradictions in her was the difference between her speech at times of peril, or at any time when the sun of her greatness was at the height of its heaven, and her speech when an Ambassador was to be drawn into a web. She had learned during the terrible years of her childhood and early youth not to speak unwisely. Hasty speech led to death. She would therefore, in conversation with Ambassadors and certain others, enwrap their senses with a web of words, no thread of which seemed to lead anywhere. Then, having lulled and bemused them into a sense of security so that they were unprepared for shock or danger, she would, without the slightest warning, shoot with a terrifying force and directness straight to the heart of the matter.

A sense of fun would, from time to time, cause her to utter the most bewildering statements, especially to the Spanish envoys, whose grave stateliness, she thought, made them particularly desirable as victims. ‘I yearn’, she told the Spanish Ambassador, when she was twenty-six years of age, ‘to be a nun and pass my days in prayer in a cell.’ Bishop de Quadra, reporting this to his King, remarked: ‘It is a pretty business to deal with this woman who, I think, must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, in spite of her forever telling me the above.’

The impulses, the springs of life in this strange nature, have never been understood. Nor has the greatness of her indomitable spirit.

She inherited, in her blood, a dark strain of animality from her mother, and from the Minotaur, her father. But in spite of all the impulses that sprang from this inheritance, in spite of the frequent pretences at flirtation, those fêtes galantes that were a mask for her misery, she loved but one man in all that long life. That man was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester.

The scandals told of her had no foundation in fact. The contradictions in her nature gave her, together with those impulses, a fastidiousness equally strong.

Only one thing did she love more than Leycester and that was England.

‘Have a care to my people’, said this young woman of twenty-five to her judges on their assumption of office. ‘You have my people—do you that which I ought to do. Every man oppresseth and spoileth them without mercy. They cannot avenge themselves, nor help themselves. See unto them—see unto them, for they are my charge. I care not for myself; my life is not dear to me. My care is for my people. I pray God whosoever succeedeth me, be as careful to them as I am.’

So she spoke when young. Many years later, she said to the crowds in the Strand, as she returned by torchlight from a Council meeting held after the defeat of the Armada: ‘Ye may have a greater prince, but ye shall never have a more loving prince.’

For England’s sake, she renounced all personal happiness.

Sometimes, in the rage of her misery, she would pretend to herself as well as to others that she would marry and have an heir. She would deceive her suitors into believing that she intended to marry them. She would accept their compliments and protestations of devotion with all the appearance of belief in their reality. Then the tragic and bitter humour in her heart would break from her like a flash of lightning; and in that brief flash it could be seen that she had known all the truth from its deepest roots—that she was undeceivable. To the Duc d’Alençon, in answer to his telling her that, rather than give her up, he would see them both perish, the forty-eight-year-old Queen said: ‘You must not threaten a poor old woman in her own kingdom!’

She would pretend to enjoy, perhaps even did enjoy, fulsome compliments on her beauty. This being who was lonely as the sun in his heaven longed to believe that she could be loved for herself.

When the slow wrinkles, soft as the first flakes of snow, fell upon her cheeks, thicker and thicker, until at last winter came to her heart, she could not bear to pass a mirror, so that all these were banished from her presence. This has been regarded, not as the outer sign of her tragedy, of her unspeakable anguish—all chance of happiness gone, no child to inherit her kingdom and save it from civil war—but as the displeasing and laughable vanity of a foolish old woman.

‘Dead but not buried’—‘dead but not buried’—this was her cry, during the last two years of her life. ‘Affection is false’, she said.... (Leycester, whom she loved, and who had married, secretly, her evil and hated cousin Lettice—for whose sake it was supposed by some that he had murdered her first husband.... Essex, that cousin’s son, who she had pretended to herself was her son ... and who must soon die.

Dead and gone and false to the core.)

This strange contradiction of a woman, whose life, seen from one angle, was so barren, but, seen from another, was infinitely fertile, was constant only in her greatness and in her affections. That high courage of the lion, and the lion’s heart, and the lion’s rages, contrasted with the subtle mind. Sir Christopher Hatton, who knew her character, said, ‘The Queen did fish for men’s souls, and had so sweet a bait that no-one could escape from her net-work’.

Sir John Harington, ‘the boy Jack’, her godson, declared: ‘When she smiled, it had a pure sunshine that every one did choose to bask in if they could; but anon came a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in a wondrous manner on all.’

Though the most feminine of women—(the ridiculous female-impersonator’s appearance, the fishwifely back-slapping jollity and familiarity imputed to her by certain writers in later times, are singularly remote from this being of air and fire)—she yet had a masculine sense of justice, evinced, sometimes, in terrible words. She told the French Ambassador, Fénelon, when he begged her not to visit upon the Queen of Scots the guilt for the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve: ‘The Queen of Scots has enough sins of her own to answer for, without ascribing to her those of other people’.

What black and unresolved hatred, resulting, perhaps, from unplumbed depths of suffering, made this otherwise great woman capable of unreasoning, sensual cruelty? Made her capable of permitting the vile horrors, the unspeakable cruelties that were perpetrated by her troops in Ireland—the monstrous cruelties inflicted on the Catholic martyrs?

‘The rack was in constant use during the latter part of her reign’, wrote one Catholic authority, Father Herbert Thurston, S.J. ‘The total number of Catholics who suffered under her were 189—128 being priests, 58 laymen, and three women. To these should be added, as Law remarks in his Calendar of English Martyrs, 32 Franciscans who were starved to death in the prisons.’^[1]

What caused that hideous cruelty? The fear that was ever present with her, but that never caused her to flee from danger? The fear brought upon her by her terrible childhood, by the horror of her mother’s and her stepmother’s executions (so mysterious in their implications to a child of three, a child of nine)—by the danger in which she lived during Mary’s reign, the daily, nightly danger of death by a dagger, a poisoned cup?

What were those unexplained illnesses that fell upon her, going as suddenly as they came, but fear? ‘Queen Elizabeth, going of late to her church, was on the way suddenly stricken with some great Fear, that she returned to her Chamber to the admiration [amazement] of all present’, wrote Thomas Morgan from Paris to Mary Stuart. And there were times when Leycester must sit by her side and, with her ladies, watch over her through the night.

The fires and the rivers of blood of the Henryan martyrdoms heralded her coming. And now, Death’s shadow followed her everywhere, as it had done when she was a little child, seeming, then, only a shadow in the heat of the day. She would be playing, perhaps, and there would be Death, waiting quietly, or playing with her. She would think she spoke with her familiar servants, but through their lips the voice of Death would speak. ‘Has the Queen my mother gone away?’ ‘Gone away.’ ‘Where is she? At Hampton Court?’ Silence.

Then Death would come again. Her stepmother, the lewd, sly, pitiable little ghost Katherine Howard, who came back to haunt the King from the tomb of her cousin, Elizabeth’s mother, vanished. ‘Where is she gone?’ ‘The King’s Grace was angered with her. So she is dead.’ ‘Dead?’ ‘Yes. The King’s Grace had had her put to death because she was wicked.’

Thus the word ‘Death’ echoed through the Palace, throughout that lonely childhood.

In the time of her sister’s reign the shadow was ever there, waiting for her. It followed her to her imprisonment in the Tower, where she must have seen, in imagination, a young head with long black hair, great slanting black eyes, severed from the body of that summer existence that had laughed so lightly. That sight confronted her through all the long days and nights in the Tower when she awaited her own end.

The shadow of Death was not to leave her until that of Mary went to join it, and, together, the two shadows disappeared. For a while only. Then the shadow of Death returned, and this time for ever.

She defied Death in every action of her life. When she danced ‘high and disposedly’ on the threshold of the grave: when she saved, not once, but over and over again, the life of her cousin and enemy for whose sake, and with whose connivance (so she believed), her own death had been plotted, not once, but many times.

But the presence of that shadow cannot possibly excuse the martyrdoms of men who died for their faith, and for no political activities.

And what of the personal cruelties, the delight in bear-baiting, the cruelty to the deer at Kenilworth whose life, after a hunt, the Queen spared, but whose ears were shorn off as ransom?

Thinking of that soft and helpless creature, sobbing in its pain, I see the earless deer rising, upon the Judgment Day, to confront her—one of the flames, perhaps, in which, as she lay dying, she saw her ‘lean and fearful body’ wrapped.

But that death would not be for forty-seven long years. Meanwhile, youth, and love, and glory were hers.

•••••

So we see her as she sits under the oak tree, looking at the snowflakes and waiting for news.

At seven o’clock the next morning, the vast swell and tolling of the great bells and the roar of the cannon sounded like the rushing of the winter seas upon the shores of England.

The waxen form of the Queen whose child was Death lay silent now, her red hair spread on either side of her like spent flames. At the same hour that night, the life of the Papal Legate ceased.