Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 7

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After the Atridaean tragedy of King Henry, the imagined incest and curse from Heaven, the coming and death of the witch-Queen, there was a pause, during which Edward, son of Anne Boleyn’s supplanter, Jane Seymour, reigned—the phantom of Henry’s huge passions. But the little ghost-King dwindled, like a sorcerer’s wax image before the flame.

For days before the King’s death, it was rumoured that he had gone.... Then a white despairing face was seen looking through a window of the Palace—a face with no hair.

After his death, the rumour spread everywhere that he had been poisoned. A contemporary letter^[1] said: ‘That wretch, the Duke of Northumberland’ (who had wrested the Protectorship from the Duke of Somerset, and had plotted that his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, should reign instead of her cousin Mary after the King’s death), ‘has committed an enormous crime. Our excellent King was taken off by poison; his hair and nails fell out.’

It was thought that the Duke, having induced the dying boy-King to disinherit his sisters Mary and Elizabeth in favour of their cousin Lady Jane (married to Lord Guildford Dudley, the Duke’s fourth son), had considered it dangerous to wait, and so assisted the King to his death with poison.

The Emperor’s Ambassador, Simon Renard, told his master that when, on Mary’s accession, she had the King’s body examined, it was found that ‘les artoix des pieds et des doigts lui estoient tumbez et qu’il a esté empoisonné’.

At one moment, it was suggested that the Duke should be charged with his King’s murder. But opinion varied as to who actually administered the poison. John Hayward, in his life of the young King, wrote that another of the Duke’s sons, Lord Robert Dudley (afterwards Earl of Leycester), had been sworn one of the King’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and that ‘after his entertainment into a place of near service, the King enjoyed his health not long’.

At that time Lord Robert was but nineteen. And it is probable that the King died from the effects of minerals mixed, with the best intentions, with his medicines; and from some form of tuberculosis.

July 1553 was a month of flame. But on the afternoon of the 6th an appalling blackness enveloped the city, the houses shook beneath the rolling thunder as if in an earthquake. The tempest increased in terror, and after the young King’s death (at six that evening) it was said that the rolling, earthquaking noise was not that of thunder, but of King Henry the Eighth bursting open his tomb in his rage at this defiance of his will, the death of his son.^[2]

The young King dwindled away to nothingness on that evening when hail the colour of fire fell in the city, through the burning heat, melting in the yet more fiery hearts of the roses and carnations in the city gardens. And all night long a horseman galloped in wild haste to Hunsdon to warn Mary, the rightful Queen, that she must fly immediately. The Duke of Northumberland’s fellow conspirators and followers had risen and were in arms. She was to be inveigled to the Tower to receive the crown, the gates would be locked behind her, and she would be at their mercy, and her cousin crowned in her stead.

Not an instant must be lost. She must fly to Norfolk, where the Howards awaited her, and, as she went, must issue proclamations that she was the true Queen, and that all loyal Englishmen must rise to defend her.

Early next morning, when Lord Robert Dudley arrived to take her to the Tower, she had gone.

•••••

The Northumberland rebellion rose like a wind, died like a wind.

The boy and girl who Northumberland had hoped would be King and Queen of England were prisoners in the Tower, where they had spent Jane’s nine days of Queenship.

Then the rightful Queen made a triumphal entry into the city, and beside her rode Elizabeth. On all state occasions, Elizabeth took her place as Princess of England and the Queen’s successor. The Queen embraced her warmly. They walked hand in hand.

But not for long.

•••••

The red-haired Queen reigned, and, walking behind her in the rooms of the Palace, came Renard the Fox, the Emperor’s Ambassador (successor to Queen Catherine’s friend and adviser). A marriage between Philip, the son of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and the Queen of England would mean almost world-domination for the Emperor. For what could the ambitions of France united with Scotland achieve against such a force? It would mean, also, the restoration in England of the Catholic Church.

Therefore, under the insinuating whisper of Renard, the real Philip was replaced, gradually, by a being who was the evocation of Mary’s sick and disordered fancy.

It has been said of Philip that he sealed the doom of Mary. But that doom sprang from her own heart, and from the tragedy of her early youth. By the very circumstances of that youth she had been taught to distrust all thoughts of love. Had she not lived under the shadow of an evil enchantment masquerading under that name?

She had known, in the thirty-eight years of her life, little affection, and no love. But for all that original distrust, she had always longed to give and to receive it. Surely, somewhere in the world, she told herself, there was a being who would value her heart at its true worth.

This forlorn and unloved creature had once bestowed a timid kiss on a Prince to whom her father had, at the moment, determined to marry her. But then the King changed his mind, and the Prince went away, never to return. And though the King her father, and, later, her brother, had engaged her, in all, seven times, any talk of her marriage had never been for long.

In her youth, knowing that happiness could not exist for her in the actual world, she had spun for herself, web by web, a world of fancy which, she told herself, would suddenly be made real (she did not know how, or when) by some romantic and unexpected happening. Spain and Flanders formed the landscape of that world. Spain had been the home of her mother, that beloved and betrayed being. And was not the Emperor, when Mary was a girl, her only hope of safety? Would she not have been sent to her death, had it not been for fear of his vengeance? Surely, then, the only chance of happiness must lie with those trusted beings, the Emperor and his son.

The task of Renard was easy.

Under the spell of the Ambassador’s insinuating speeches, the Queen was already half in love with the cousin she had never seen; but she succeeded in persuading herself that she was contemplating entering this marriage only for the good of her people.

Her mind was still not wholly made up, when a rumour reached her. It was hinted that Don Carlos, born of Philip’s first marriage, was by no means his only child. He had numerous other children, born out of wedlock. (The Prince of Orange, in his Apologia, wrote that even before Philip’s first marriage he had conferred the title of wife on Doña Isabel de Osario, the sister of the Marqués d’Astoya. This is incorrect, but he had lived with her since his wife’s death, and she had borne him several children.)

On hearing this rumour, the Queen summoned Renard, and begged him to tell her truthfully if the Prince was the paragon of virtue he had described to her. ‘Madam’, said the Ambassador, ‘he is the very paragon of the world.’

The Queen took his hand. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Do you speak as a subject whose duty it is to praise his sovereign—or do you speak as a man?’ ‘Your Majesty may take my life’, was the reply, ‘if you find him other than I have told you.’

‘Oh, that I could but see him!’ she murmured.

A few days later the Ambassador was summoned again to a room in the Palace in which he found, besides the Queen, only Lady Clarencieux. On an altar was the Holy Wafer.

She had spent her days and nights in tears and in prayers to God to guide her, she told him. And, falling on her knees with her two companions, they sang the Veni Creator. Then, rising to her feet, she told him of the Divine message. The Prince of Spain had been chosen by Heaven as husband to the virgin Queen. No malice of the world should cause her to disobey God’s word. No one should keep the Chosen from her. To him alone would she give her love, her utter devotion, and not even by a wayward thought would she give him cause for jealousy!

The Ambassador noticed, with cynical amusement, that since she had begun to think of Philip, all dark colours had been banished from the Court, which was now as bright as a flower-garden with the Queen’s preferred colours—ruby, crane, drake, ‘flybert’ (filbert?), ‘goselinge’, horseflesh, Isabella (a pale yellow), and willow. The Queen’s hoarse laughter was heard more frequently than formerly.

She was seen, more than once, examining her face in a mirror, as if it were the face of someone she had once known but had long lost sight of. But she never scrutinised that face when the sun was likely to shine upon it.

•••••

A second rebellion, that of Wyatt—its purpose, Wyatt said, when captured, being to dethrone the Queen and give Elizabeth the crown—rose like a wind, died like a wind.

And, walking behind the red-haired Queen in the rooms of the Palace, came Renard the Fox. Wherever the Queen went, that figure stepped from the shadows, and, after bowing profoundly, moved, darker than those shadows, behind her, whispering in her ear, fanning the latent sparks of madness in her.

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN CORONATION ROBES

Old King Henry’s body lay in earth, his spirit was in Heaven or in Hell. (The child of his rightful wife had masses said for his soul. But the people said of her that she had instigated an ecclesiastical Council to exhume her father’s bones that they might be burnt for heresy.)

Anne Boleyn, the light laughing woman, ‘la grande putain’, she, too, was gone, and the son who was to save England. Only the child of the woman for whose sake so much blood had been shed, and for whom Henry’s soul, many believed, had been plunged into eternal damnation—only Elizabeth, and Mary, the child of the rightful wife, only these remained.

The tragedy of the real or imagined incest was forgotten by the busy world, but there was a dark place in Mary’s heart in which that terrible memory remained—a spark to be fanned into flame by the whisper. The Atridaean tragedy was not dead, but sleeping.

‘Traitors’, said the whisper, ‘require to be taught that for the principals in treason there is but one punishment.’

(The wind that came and was gone!)

‘Your Majesty’, the whisper had said, even before the Wyatt rebellion, ‘would do well to discover if Madam Elizabeth does not see her reign as near.’

(Madam Elizabeth, whom she had loved and befriended when her sister was a little disinherited child, Madam Elizabeth whom the Court was bound to treat as a Princess and the Queen’s sister, Madam Elizabeth who had plotted, so she was told and believed, to take both her crown and her life.)

Ah, she was the true daughter of ‘la Manceba’, ‘la grande putain’, the witch-queen who had said of Mary, ‘She will be my death, or I shall be hers—so I will take good care she does not laugh at me after my death.’

The head of La Manceba had rolled in the dust, and Mary was Queen.

But still there was no laughter.

And now what was the whisper saying?

‘While such dangerous traitors live as the lady Elizabeth, the precious person of Prince Philip could not be entrusted to her.’

This was said on the 8th of March 1554. Elizabeth must be condemned to death. This was the Emperor’s price for the marriage. And in an agony of fear for her happiness, the Queen cried that this should be arranged. Yes, she must die!

‘The Queen’s blood is up at last’—the exultant Ambassador told the Emperor.

Elizabeth, who was seriously ill and in the country, received an urgent command to come immediately to London.

At first she was unable to travel, then was carried in a litter to London, by slow degrees, the journey taking several days.

On the day when she reached the city (‘crowded with gibbets, and the public buildings crowded with the heads of the bravest men in the kingdom’—so the French Ambassador wrote) the Princess Elizabeth was thus described by Renard: ‘the lady Elizabeth arrived here yesterday [the 23rd of February 1554] dressed all in white surrounded with a great company of the Queen’s people, besides her own attendants. She made them uncover the litter in which she rode, that she might be seen by the people. Her countenance was pale and stern, her mien proud, lofty and disdainful, by which she endeavoured to conceal her trouble.’

She passed through the silent crowds, staring at her as they had stared at her mother on that afternoon when a barge took her to the Tower, and she disappeared through the Traitor’s Gate, to be seen no more....

The cortège passed Smithfield, where the fires of the martyrdoms were soon to be lit, passed down Fleet Street, and on to Whitehall, entering through the garden to the Palace.

Arrived at Court, the Queen refused to see her.

Death was now very near....

The letter written to her by Wyatt, which she denied receiving, had been found, and Renard decided to use Lady Wyatt as a tool. He swore to her that if her husband would implicate the Princess still more fully, his life would be spared.

This he did. But unfortunately, wrote Renard, there were not enough proofs to bring about, by English law, the Princess’s death on the block. She was, however, sent to the Tower on Palm Sunday, the 18th of March 1554.

As she was being led through the garden of the Palace to the barge, she, looking up at the windows of the Palace, cried, ‘I marvel what the nobles mean by suffering me, a Prince, to be led into captivity; the Lord knoweth wherefore, for myself I do not’.

She declared she would not be landed at the Traitor’s Gate, ‘neither could she, unless she should step into the water over her shoe’. And when one of the lords in attendance told her she could not choose but do so, and then, as the rain was pouring down upon her, handed her his cloak, ‘She dashed it from her, with a good dash’, wrote Speed, and, mounting the stairs, said, ‘Here lands as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs. Before Thee, O God, I speak it, having no other friend but Thee alone.’

After Wyatt exonerated the Princess, at his execution, of any implication in the plot, it was rather difficult to know what to do with her. She might, perhaps, be sent to Pomfret Castle. After all, the cries of King Richard the Second within those walls had not been heard. But then might there not be the danger of vengeance from Lord William Howard, her great-uncle, who was Lord High Admiral, with the whole of the Navy under his command? What if he should join the French and the exiled rebels? It might be better to take her to Woodstock, where she could be kept in semi-imprisonment until they dared take her to Pomfret....

She was released from the Tower on the 19th of May 1554, and taken down the Thames—as she believed, to her death.

The Queen, listening at a window of the Palace, heard the firing of guns from the Steelyard—the sign of the people’s joy that their Princess was freed from the Tower.

The Queen’s misery, already great, was increased by that sound, and it grew from day to day. Already she foresaw, perhaps, the terrible passion that was to devour her like fire, and which would set alight the fires of the martyrdoms, knew that she was to love one who would never love her in return—one whose bride, whose love (so her people believed) was the flame that, burning men’s bodies on earth, would cast their souls into the flames of Hell.

Her days were given up to waiting for news of Philip. He did not write. Or, if he wrote, his words were lost.

But worst of all was the sadness of awakening before dawn, from dreams in which she was young and beloved, to the truth that she was growing old. Of those nights when she saw the truth and was filled with despair. Then her agony was such that de Noailles, the French Ambassador, reported it to his King, who, though not her friend, pitied her.

‘Quelques heures de la nuict’, wrote the Ambassador, ‘elle entre en telles rêveries de ses amours et passions que bien souvent elle se met hors de soy, et croy que la plus grande occasion de ses douleurs vient du déplaisir qu’elle a de voir sa personne si diminuée et ses ans multiplier en tel nombre....’

‘The unhappy Queen’, wrote his master, before these revelations of her ladies to his Ambassador had reached him, ‘will learn the truth when it is too late. She will wake, too late, in misery and remorse....’