Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 16
ОглавлениеChapter Eight
Over the wide roads, a winter firmament of black glass, from which the hooves of a thousand horses splintered great stars, moons, planets, and meteors, the procession made its way towards the capital, and, at the head of the cortège, a blazing comet in the melancholy day, rode the Queen, and next her, a magnificent figure whose face, as yet, could not be seen clearly—Lord Robert Dudley, her Master of the Horse. As he was born on the same day of the same year as his Queen, their lives were ruled by the same planet, and according to Camden this was the reason for their lifelong infatuation with each other.
It was along this road that she had been carried in a litter, to enter the Tower by the Traitor’s Gate, and to die by the axe if her sister’s counsellors and lawyers could encompass that death.[1]
At Cripplegate she was received by the Lord Mayor and civic authorities. Riding along London Wall (then a fortification), which was hung with tapestries, she was greeted by exultant crowds. Then, as she reached the entrance to the Corn Market, the guns from the Tower began their thunder.
As she entered the Tower, the Queen said to the company: ‘Some have fallen from being princes of this land, to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being prisoner in this place to be prince of this land. That dejection was a work of God’s justice; as they were to yield patience for the axe, so I must bear myself to God thankful and to man merciful for the other.’
She remained in the state apartments of the Tower until the 5th of December 1558, holding each day Councils of state; the main purpose of which was to decide who among the dead Queen’s Catholic advisers could remain in harmony with the new members of the Council—Cecil, Bacon, Parr, Russell, Sadler, Lord Robert Dudley—many of whom had served under King Edward. The other purpose was to formulate the religious policy.
The clergy and the lawyers alike were consulted about the latter. In a paper named ‘Distresses of the Commonwealth’, the writer (possibly Armagil Wade, Clerk of the Council at the time of King Henry’s death) advised ‘wary handling’. ‘The Catholics were in the majority in every county except Middlesex and Kent.’ ‘The Pope was a dangerous enemy.’ ‘Theological intolerance was not found by experience to produce healthy convictions.’ Goodrich, a lawyer, advised that in the coming Parliament, it would be better to do nothing but repeal the Lollard Statutes of Henry the Fourth, and Henry the Fifth, revived by Queen Mary. ‘Her Majesty’, he continued, ‘might by licence of law use the English Litany and suffrages used in King Henry’s time’, and ‘Her Majesty ... might use the Mass, without lifting up of the Host, according to the ancient canons; and might also have at every Mass some communicants with the Minister in both kinds’.[2]
This, the Protestants felt, was good as far as it went. And yet, they could not but feel disappointed. They had looked forward to persecuting the Catholics to their hearts’ content. But now they were forbidden even to irritate them—and as for invectives and persecutions, they were told these must be kept for Arians and Anabaptists!
•••••
On the 5th of December, the Queen left the Tower, going by water to Somerset House ‘with trumpets playing, and melody and joy and comfort to all true English men and women’.[3]
For the Queen, in her daily progresses through the streets of London, had already fired the imagination and hearts of her people ... ‘in coupling mildness with majesty as she did’, wrote a contemporary, ‘and in stately stooping to the meanest sort.... Her eye was set upon one, her ear listened to another, her judgement ran upon a third, to a fourth she addressed her speech; her spirit seemed to be every where. ... Some she pitied, some she commended, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittily jested, contemning no person.’
She was gracious equally to the poor and to the richer citizens; she reined in her horse to speak, long and sweetly, to the ill Marquis of Northampton, the brother of her stepmother Queen Catherine Parr, whom she had espied at a window.
But King Philip’s Ambassador, the Count (afterwards Duke) de Feria, told his master that the reason for that graciousness was that Lord Northampton had been a great traitor to her sister; and as for the shouting in the streets, he was not at all sure that these were entirely due to the new Queen’s popularity. Could they not be the echoes of the shrieks that still haunted the heaps of ash in Smithfield?
The happy days flew by, but there was still a dark memory that must be buried and forgotten.
On the 13th of December 1558, the late Queen was borne to her grave.
The procession started early in the day from St. James’s Palace, where she had died. A herald who was an eye-witness wrote: ‘So up the highway went the foremost standard, the falcon and the hart. Then came a great company of mourners. Then another goodly standard of the lion and the falcon, followed by King Philip’s servants, riding two and two. Then the third standard with the white greyhound and falcon. The Marquis of Winchester bore the banner of England on horseback; Chester herald, the helm, the crest, and the mantle; Norroy, the target, with the crown of England and the order of the Garter; Clarencieux, the sword, and Mr. Garter King-at-Arms her coat armour—all on horseback. The Somerset, Lancaster, Windsor, and York heralds carried four white banners of saints embossed in fine gold. Then came the corpse, in a chariot, with an exact image representing Queen Mary dressed in crimson velvet, with many gold rings on her hands. The pall over the coffin was black cloth of gold, intersected by a cross of cloth of silver. The body was followed by the chief mourners; the Queen’s ladies came after on horseback, but their black trains were long enough to sweep after them on the ground.
‘Before the corpse and following after it, came processions of monks, mourning their own fate as well as the death of Mary. Such was the procession that passed by Charing Cross, and arrived at the great door of Westminster Abbey, where everyone alighted from their horses. There, waited gentlemen, ready to take the Queen out of her chariot. The Earls and Lords went before her.... The effigy above mentioned was carried between men of worship. At the great door of the Abbey, four Bishops and Abbot Feckenham in pontificalibus met this procession and censed the corpse. The royal corpse was then placed on the hearse, and watched the live-long night of December the 13th. A hundred poor men in good black gowns and hoods, bearing long torches, with the Queen’s guard in black coats, bearing staff torches, stood round the hearse that night, and wax-chandlers were in attendance to supply any torch that burnt out.
‘The next morning, December the 14th, was the Queen’s Mass, and all the people offered; the Queen’s body armour, her target, her banner of arms, and three standards, were all offered, her heralds standing round the coffin. The Bishop of Winchester preached....
‘Then Her Grace was carried up to that chapel King Henry VII builded, attended by mitred Bishops. When the heralds brake their staffs and flung them into the grave, all the people plucked down the hangings, and the armorial bearings round the Abbey, and everyone tore him a piece as large as he could catch it.’
Long years afterwards, the sister from whom she was so deeply divided in life was carried to a grave beside her. And, a lifetime after that second burial, when, in 1670, the royal vault was opened, a mischievous little boy dipped his hand into the sisters’ urns, and, for a moment, held in that small hand the heart of fire and the lesser heart—‘now but a kind of glutinous red substance, somewhat resembling mortar’.[4]
•••••
The new Queen listened with some interest to Dr. White’s funeral sermon. It was in Latin, which the Queen understood as she understood English, and it could not be said to be fortunate. Sir John Harington, the Queen’s godson (always addressed by her as ‘Boy Jack’), called it ‘a black sermon’.
After sobbing so violently, as he described the late Queen’s sufferings, that for some moments he was unable to continue his sermon, the Bishop (when at last his speech returned to him) added, perhaps as an afterthought, ‘that Queen Mary had left a sister, a lady of great worth, also, whom they were bound to obey’: for, he reminded the congregation, ‘melior est canis vivus leone mortuo ... better a living dog than a dead lion’.
It is scarcely surprising that as the Bishop left the pulpit, the Queen ordered him to be arrested. He defied her, and threatened her with excommunication. The order was not withdrawn. It is said that the Bishop desired martyrdom. But the Queen had not, as yet, descended to persecution.
On the 23rd of December, the Court removed to Whitehall for the first Christmas of the reign.
It had been thought by all that Christmas would have been celebrated in the Palace according to the rites of the Catholic Church. On Christmas morning, the Queen appeared, in great state, in her closet in the Chapel, accompanied by her ladies and the officers of state. Oglethorpe, the Bishop of Carlisle, was at the High Altar, preparing to celebrate the Mass. But at the end of the Gospel, when all present expected that the Queen would make the usual offering, she rose to her feet and, followed by her whole train, withdrew from her closet to her apartments—greatly to the astonishment of the spectators.
Was the Queen ill? So it might be supposed. But shortly afterwards, a proclamation was issued that from the first day of the New Year, the Litany, Epistle, and Gospel should be read in English in the Queen’s Chapel and in all churches.
It had, however, been determined that the Queen should be crowned according to the rites of the Catholic Church, and the time having now come when the date of the Coronation must be fixed, the Master of the Horse, Lord Robert Dudley, and Lord Pembroke, rode through the bear-furred winter woods to the house of the mathematician, scientist, and (it was supposed) necromancer, Dr. John Dee, to enquire the most auspicious day foretold by the stars for the holding of the ceremony.
John Dee, the inventor of the Paradoxicall Compass, was the future friend and adviser of twenty-six-year-old Mr. Hakluyt, of the Middle Temple—whom he told about the conquest by King Arthur of Gelindis, ‘recently called Friseland’—the future friend and adviser of young Mr. Gilbert, John Davis, and young Mr. Hawkins ‘who had been with Mr. Drake’ (and who, long years after Dr. Dee had been consulted about the time for the Coronation, ‘had been to my house in Mortlake’.) Indeed, Dr. Dee was the friend of all mariners and adventurers. Did he not, in 1580, draw a chart and write instructions for Captains Charles Jackson’s and Arthur Pett’s North-East voyage to Cathay?
He was a cousin of the elderly Blanche Parry, who had held the little Elizabeth, as a child, in her arms. He had a firm friend in Secretary Cecil, having been introduced to him and presented to King Edward by the King’s tutor and Cecil’s brother-in-law, Sir John Cheke. Queen Elizabeth was in the habit of consulting him, and he was tutor in alchemy and astronomy to her confidential maid-of-honour, Blanche Parry.
But his future had not always seemed so clear. In the reign of Queen Mary he had been in considerable danger. During the early spring of 1555, certain members of Princess Elizabeth’s household at Woodstock were accused of witchcraft, ‘for that they did calculate the King’s, the Queen’s, and my lady Elizabeth’s nativity, whereof one Dee, and Gary, and Butler, and one other of my lady Elizabeth’s (household) are accused that they should have a familiar spirit, which is the more suspected, for that Ferys, one of their accusers, had, immediately on the accusation, both of his children stricken, the one with death, the other with blindness’.[5]
But nothing could be proved against the accused, and Dr. Dee, with the others, was acquitted.
The day blessed by the stars for the Queen’s Coronation, he told the two emissaries, was Sunday the 15th of January 1559.*
NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT
* For more information about Dr. Dee see Appendix A.
[1] Froude, History of England, Reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
[2] Froude, op. cit.
[3] Neale, Queen Elizabeth.
[4] Manuscript Diary of William Taswell, D.D., Rector of Newington and St. Mary, Bermondsey.
[5] Thomas Martin, Letter to Earl of Courtenay.
