Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 23
ОглавлениеChapter Fourteen
Whether the Queen was the granddaughter of Lord Wiltshire or of the Prince of the Powers of the Air, the suitors of their Ambassadors thronged the Court, and were
... brighter than stars in the sky,
(The stars thick as roses in hot July)—
As bright as the raindrops and roses in June,
And many and merry as notes in a tune.
But still the Queen could not make up her mind which to choose.
In August, Paolo Tiepolo and his Colleague Extraordinary, Marc Antonius da Mula, Venetian Ambassador to King Philip, informed the Doge and Senate that ‘the Ambassador of the King of Denmark in England, to demonstrate his King’s love of Queen Elizabeth, wore upon his gown a crimson velvet heart pierced by an arrow’.
At one moment it seemed as if she favoured the Archduke Charles.... Lady Mary Sidney, sister to Lord Robert Dudley, had come with a secret message to the new Spanish Ambassador, Bishop de Quadra. No word of what she was about to say, she told him, must be even whispered. There were spies everywhere. But the Queen had been in appalling danger. A plot had been discovered to poison the Queen and stab Lord Robert Dudley at a supper-party given by his eldest brother, Lord Warwick. (There had been strange dark rumours about Lord Robert. It was said he was casting a shadow over the name of the Queen, and there were men who thirsted for his blood. And were there not those who wished her dead also?) The Queen knew now, Lady Mary told the Ambassador, that only in marriage with the Archduke could she find safety.
But when questioned, the Queen said she could not marry a man she had never seen. Nor could she invite a man to come to London to marry her. Also might he not, would he not, almost certainly hear rumours against her reputation? And, if so, might he not refuse to marry her?
The Bishop reassured her. The Archduke was a gentleman. He reminded her also (we do not know in what spirit) that he—the Bishop—knew everything that happened at Court. Nothing was hidden from him, and that if there had been any truth in the whispered scandal, he would have known it.
But before the Archduke’s visit could be arranged, the Queen’s fancy—or so it seemed—veered again. Now she was considering the suit of Eric, the eldest son of the King of Sweden, who sent his younger son, the Duke of Finland, to lay the proposal before the Queen.
‘There are ten or twelve Ambassadors of us here’, de Quadra told de Feria (the 29th October 1559), ‘all competing for Her Majesty’s hand, and they say the Duke of Holstein is coming next, as a suitor for the King of Denmark. The Duke of Finland, who is here for his brother the King of Sweden, threatens to kill the Emperor’s man; and the Queen fears they may cut each other’s throats in her presence.’
The Duke of Finland was uncouth, and made a bad impression on Sir William Knollys, who was sent to meet him when he landed. When Sir William was shown into his presence, the Duke, remaining seated, held out his hand to be kissed by Sir William. But Sir William, reporting the matter to Cecil, said: ‘The writer has been brought up otherwise than to kiss the hand of any subject other than of the parentage of his own Prince. Therefore, having with reverence kissed his own hand, the writer joined his hand with that of the Duke after the manner of his own native country.’
But for all the Duke’s uncouthness, he scattered silver like a shower of falling stars in the London streets, and told the crowds that whereas he scattered silver, his brother would scatter gold.
The King of Sweden died, and the Queen’s suitor succeeded him. And nothing could deter him from his wooing—he received refusal after refusal, but would not accept them. Neither seas, enemies, nor any imaginable dangers should keep him from her. He would fly to her side.
Indeed, in August 1560, he started to do so, and though the winds were dead against him, and he was forced to return, he started again. This time his fleet was scattered by the winds. ‘Fortune’, he declared, ‘had been harder than steel and crueller than Mars—but, as he had dared storms and raging seas to come to her side, so would he brave armies of foes to come to her.’
The Queen had retained Roger Ascham, her old tutor, as Latin secretary, and she would sometimes ask his advice about important matters. He told his friend Sturmius, who was corresponding with him, advocating the Queen’s marriage with the Swedish King, ‘I have nothing certain to write to you, nor does anyone truly know what to judge. I told you rightly in one of my former letters, that in the whole ordinance of her life, she resembled not Phaedra but Hippolyta, for by nature, and not by the nature of others, she is thus averse, and abstinent from marriage.’
Was it the ghost of Anne Boleyn, with her gay light laughing movements, bringing down doom upon herself and so many others—and the ghost of Katherine Howard, the later phantom of Anne’s imagined sins, rising from their graves in the warmth of the sun and the fire of the full moon, to bring the chill of their deaths and the real or imagined fever of lust that not even death could assuage—was it these ever-young ghosts that stood between Elizabeth and happiness?
As the months went by, the wooers were anything but ‘merry as notes in a tune’. Discord was everywhere. ‘Here is great resort of wooers and controversy among lovers’, wrote the harassed Sir William Cecil. ‘Would to God the Queen had one, and the rest were honourably satisfied.’
But there seemed little chance of that. For a dark and magnificent tall shadow had been cast upon the realm and the name of the Queen—a shadow dark and glittering as moonlit water, and water-deep—a mysterious being, a
High, hollow, fateful rider,
who seemed always as if attired in dark armour (but under that armour was a human heart, and this was often bruised by a hard and undeserved treatment): Lord Robert Dudley, the only love of his Queen’s long life—Lord Robert Dudley, the son and grandson of beheaded traitors, the husband of a wife, perhaps deserted, certainly hidden from the world.* Lord Robert Dudley, the suspected poisoner, the companion of witches. For was it not believed that he employed Dr. Dee and Dr. Allen as ‘conjurors’ of the dead, and to cast horoscopes and, no doubt, spells? And witchcraft was one of the deadliest perils to the realm.†
