Elizabeth I

  The physician returned with a pail of ice and began rubbing her arms and legs with jagged pieces. One icicle was ideal, being slender, allowing him to rub one leg down its entire length. She moaned and cried, “Cold, cold, cold!” but otherwise did not stir.

  Charles, standing beside the bed, burst into tears. I took his hand and led him out into the larger chamber.

  “She’s gone, she’s gone,” he cried. “She has passed the boundary line. She has gone over there. There’s no pulling her back.”

  “No, Charles.” I argued fiercely. “Let the ice do its work. They gave me up for dead when I had smallpox. But I came back.”

  “You were twenty-nine. She is nearing sixty.”

  “She is strong.”

  Charles kept shaking his head. “Not so strong,” he said. “She kept much from you.”

  The physician emerged from the chamber. “She seems to be weakening. I cannot get her to drink, and without that, she will lose all her water in the sweating.”

  “What is it?” I cried. “Is it the sweating sickness?”

  “I do not know,” he said. “I have never seen a case of that. It has not struck in England for twenty-five years.”

  Was he that young? God’s teeth, was I served only by children?

  “But does it not cause just such a sudden collapse, and much sweating?”

  “So they say,” he said.

  “Some recover from the sweat,” I told Charles. “I remember.”

  “Not many,” he said. “It left thousands dead in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Half the students perished.”

  “Perhaps it is not the sweating sickness. Perhaps it is just tainted food.” But I had eaten the same food and I was well.

  Catherine moaned from within the room, and we rushed in. The bed was soaked with sweat, the linens looking dark around her. Touching them, I could feel the moisture. “Oh, my dear.” I smoothed her brow, slick with sweat.

  I had fed Burghley in his final days. I had seen Walsingham’s sickbed. But I had never witnessed as swift and complete a collapse as this one. She seemed changed from just the few minutes we had left her.

  The young physician’s assistant arrived, but together they stood helpless at the foot of the bed. “Make her comfortable,” one said. “We must change the linens again.”

  I knelt down beside her. If there was little time left, then I must use it to speak. Later I could not. “My dearest companion, my cousin, do not hurry away,” I said. I took her hand, like a burning coal. “I have lost so many, but I cannot lose you.”

  I felt a slight squeeze on my hand. Her eyelids fluttered open. “I feel my feet slipping away. I am being pulled down, into a tunnel. I promise you, I do not wish to leave. Help me. Hold tight. Keep me here!”

  I gripped her hands, together. “I have you. I will not let go.”

  “They are pulling ... pulling ... I slide ...”

  “No, no.” I tightened my hold on her. “You are right here. In the bed. You are lying flat. No slant, no slide. It is a bad dream.” I looked around. “The room is here. You are here. Why, just beyond is the water closet we laughed about. It is still here. All is just as it was. Nothing is changed.”

  Charles knelt on the other side and put his big hands on her forearms. “I will keep you here. I can hold you. I am stronger than the tunnel.”

  For a few moments her eyes closed and I could feel the resistance in her limbs, as if she were pushing against the lid of the opening beneath her. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “They call. I must go. But I cannot. I remain here. Get the pillow.”

  “No,” I said. “Not that.”

  “It will ease my going,” she said. “I must go, but it is hard. I pray you, as one last favor, get the pillow.”

  Charles looked quizzically at me. But I knew what she meant.

  If I sent for it, I was acquiescing in her death. But it was her last request. I stood up, my body stiff from the odd position it had been in. I went out into the privy chamber and told one of the guards, “Go to the Bishop of Ely. Request the black lace pillow. He will know what I mean.”

  The black pillow of Ely: It had been woven by a nun in that village, and when death approached, it was placed under the sufferer’s head, then gently pulled away. When the head hit the mattress, the person was released.

  Within an hour the pillow was delivered. I turned it over gingerly. The pillow of death. But no, it merely eased death. It could not cause it. As some babes come into the world with difficulty, some of the dying have difficulty leaving it. Both are hard passages.

  The pillow was a small one, worked all over with lace. It was black as a moonless night. I carried it into the room and held it before Catherine.

  Her sunken eyes opened and she smiled, as if recognizing the pillow, although she had never seen it before. “My friend,” she murmured. “I have long expected you, and dreaded you. Come here.” She seemed to be seeing only the pillow, not anyone else in the room. She stared at it in rapture, as if it were the Holy Grail.

  Carefully Charles and I placed it under her wet head. Then, each of us taking our leave of her, kissing her forehead, together we pulled it out from under her. Her head fell back on the bed.

  She gave a little sigh, a muffled cry. Then she was silent, and her breathing stopped.

  I clutched the pillow, digging my fingers into it. She was gone.

  In the privy chamber, the letters from Ireland and Venice sat on my desk, my triumph of the day, of the decade. But matters of state and matters of the heart run on different tracks. It would be days before I would think of them again.

  I could not order the court into mourning, for Catherine was not royalty nor a personage of state, but its mood was one of mourning nonetheless. For myself, I dressed all in black, but my thoughts were darker still.

  Filled with grief, I noticed Charles, who showed the strain of mourning. He was bent with despair and suddenly looked much older than his sixty-seven years. He looked as old as Old Parr. Charles looked at the black pillow with loathing and kept muttering, “It should be destroyed. It should be destroyed.” Once he tried to throw it in the fire, but I took it away, reminding him that it belonged to the Bishop of Ely and was revered in that region.

  “We destroy papal relics, and this is worse,” he said.

  “It has helped many people, and Catherine asked for it,” I reminded him.

  John Harington attempted to amuse me, kneeling before me with some of his satirical verses, but I waved him away. “When you feel creeping time at your door, such frivolities will no longer please you. I am past my relish for such matters.” My relish for everything had fled, leaving a featureless landscape of the mind as bereft of life as the wintry one surrounding us. I felt a stab of regret at robbing my godchildren of care and company, so I summoned Eurwen and told her, “I give my first and last godchildren to one another. John, take Eurwen under your wing, and look after her. Eurwen, consider him your older brother at court.”

  “Ah, but this sounds too biblical!” said John. “Surely we are not at the foot of the cross, being told, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ and ‘Son, behold your mother.’”

  “I told you, I am in no mood for jesting,” I warned him. “Begone!”

  The remaining ladies of my chamber moved like shades drifting through fields of asphodel in Hades. Helena had returned. She was my last companion from the old days, and she acknowledged it.

  “I cannot make up for all the ones who have left us,” she told me, “but I will never desert you.”

  “I will not hold you to it,” I said, attempting to smile.

  “After almost forty years at your side, I have learned to disregard your low moods,” she said.

  She did not understand. This was not a low mood but an unflinching look at what lay ahead.

  It was time. I heard the summons, not far off, like a rumble of thunder when I dined outdoors.

  As she helped me prepare for bed, brushing out my hair—contrary to rumor, I s
till had hair, quite a bit of it, but gray now, no longer red—Helena was solicitous. She told me what her children were doing and inquired about the coming season at court.

  It does not matter, I thought, while answering her as best I could.

  Lying in bed, I wondered what I had left undone. Nothing that others could not finish. There was Ireland, but only the surrender treaty, with its terms, remained to be signed.

  The succession. It was obvious that James would succeed me. I did not regret never having named an heir. There always was an heir, of the body or not, and the kingdom went on. The only problem came when it was disputed. But my adversary the Scots queen had solved that for me admirably, providing only one candidate.

  Parliament. It was growing in strength, demanding to be elevated into an arm of government, no longer content to style itself advisory only. That was an ominous development, but I had done my best to retard it. Another challenge for James.

  Religion. In spite of predictions, the Catholics had survived. Not everyone had been won to my sensible middle way, to the Church of England. The Puritans found it still too popish, the Catholics, heretical. Well. One cannot satisfy everyone.

  Finances. I had begun my reign with a dismal financial situation, had rectified it, only to find myself dragged backward into desperate straits by the wars. Now the kingdom stood as I had first found it—in debt, sliding toward bankruptcy, despite my personal sacrifices to stem it.

  But with the Spanish war essentially over, and the Netherlands launched as a successful independent entity, those expenses should vanish. Ireland, too, would no longer drain us. James should have no trouble restoring the treasury to solvency.

  Had I pleased people? Certainly the protection from civil war had conveyed a great blessing upon them. Perhaps that was my greatest gift—years and years of quiet at home, so English life could flourish. The French, torn by religious wars, did not enjoy the theater, country fairs, or taverns. Ordinary life—that was what civil war robbed people of.

  The defeat of the Armada had given the people the conviction that they were protected by God, that England was a chosen land, for it was the “English wind” that had saved us in the end. Our seamen were skillful, but it was the wind that had destroyed the Spanish fleet. And not once, but over and over again, in the Armadas of 1595, 1596, and 1597, as if to make a point.

  And the question others would ask long after I was gone: Was I wrong not to marry? Wrong politically, that is? And I could answer that one resoundingly: No, I was not wrong. As the Virgin Queen, I had united my people far more than I could have done with any consort. They knew they had my undivided loyalty.

  I touched my coronation ring. This bound me to them. It had from the beginning, and I had never betrayed those vows. I twisted it. It had, lately, been difficult to move, as if it were adhering to my very flesh.

  All the doubts—of not having loved enough, not having given enough, not to my country but to one person, one beloved person who might have reigned with me as my consort. Those doubts—it was time to let them go now.

  What was done was done.

  96

  March 1603

  My pervasive sadness did not depart, and the coming of March, with its promise of spring to follow, made no difference. I forced myself to grant an audience to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, a charming young man, as the best Italians are. One part of me delighted in the belated diplomatic recognition; the other part barely grasped it, as if something far away tugged at my hem.

  I heard from Ireland. The O’Neill would acquiesce to my terms. We had won. Along with the dispatch, a chunk of stone from the smashed coronation chair of Tullaghoge was enclosed.

  I withdrew it from its pouch and fingered it. It was about the size of my palm, irregular and gray brown. Within it lay the mystery of what made a king in Ireland. Had we the right to destroy it?

  “It seems a simple enough thing,” I said.

  “So was the bread at the Last Supper,” said Cecil.

  “This is more easily destroyed,” I answered. How prescient of Jesus to leave behind no relics, no holy of holies, merely a piece of bread that must be baked, over and over, in its own time.

  I pointed to my own coronation ring as an equivalent. I tried to pull it off, but I could not move it.

  Cecil tried to help me, but he only succeeded in irritating the finger. “It has grown into the flesh,” he said.

  “As it has grown into my soul,” I said. It was part of me.

  “I fear it is cutting off your blood. Look how the finger swells.”

  “It has done so before,” I assured him. “It is my blood rushing out to unite with my people.”

  “Symbols must not disguise dangerous events,” he said. “I must call a physician. We need his opinion.”

  Over my objections, he called the physician. One look at my red and throbbing finger, and he shook his head. “It must come off, Your Majesty.”

  “Never!” I snatched my hand away and enveloped it in my other one for protection.

  “It will cause your finger to die and rot,” he said.

  “I am wedded to my people, my land, and my realm,” I said. “The ring is my pledge of that.”

  “It will kill you,” he said.

  “I accept that. I have always known it. Did I not tell my people at Tilbury, ‘I will lay down my life in the dust for you’?”

  “A swollen ring finger is not the same as a Spanish invasion. Be reasonable, Your Majesty.”

  “No!”

  “It is only a piece of metal. Do not risk your life.”

  “Please, my dear Queen. My father’s voice joins with mine, as we would not lose you for such a trifling thing,” said Cecil.

  Before I could hide my hand, the physician had his pliers out, pulled my finger, and cut the metal. Warmth flooded my finger.

  “There. You are saved.” He handed me the twisted remnants of the ring.

  I took it sorrowfully. Its intricate pattern had been severed. Then I picked up the stone fragment from Tullaghoge.

  “So we are both shorn of our authority, The O’Neill and I,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Cecil. “He lost his by military defeat. No one has deprived you of yours.”

  But I felt naked, disenfranchised, as though the realm had divorced me, revoked my power.

  The place on my finger where the ring had been was deeply indented. I rubbed it; the mark felt engraved, stamped on the flesh. Perhaps it would remain.

  The heaviness of soul did not depart from me, and in its wake came heaviness of body. My legs were cold, my bones ached, and I was troubled with sleeplessness. Then my throat was seized with pain, developing an abscess that made speaking torture. I put off a meeting with De Beaumont, the French ambassador. I did not feel up to it. Instead, I wrote a letter to my old fellow ruler and friend Henri IV, admitting that bit by bit, the fabric of my reign was beginning to tear and fade away. Somehow the confession was easiest to make to another monarch.

  My physician tried to dose me with potions, but I refused them all, despite the urgings of Helena, Cecil, Harington, and cousin John Carey. “Poison!” I said. “It will hasten my end.” I saw them exchanging pitying looks, agreeing silently that the Queen had lost her wits. But I had no wish to prolong whatever road it was I had embarked on.

  Charles came to see me. It was difficult to see who was in a worse state.

  “They told me Your Majesty was not well,” he said, bowing.

  “I—” I clutched at my throat. It stung to talk. “They have yoked my neck with an iron chain,” I croaked out. “I am tied, I am tied. All is changed for me.”

  “It is changed for us all, dear friend,” he said. “Catherine, your companion and cousin, my wife, is gone. Rather than feeling bound, I feel cast adrift.”

  “Oh, Charles,” I rasped. “We have lost so many. It grows harder, not easier.”

  “Perhaps there comes a point at which losses no longer matter,” he said. ??
?I have not attained that wisdom yet.”

  “Nor I,” I admitted. “Nor I.”

  My conviction grew that I would never leave Richmond. I glanced around me, imprinting it all in my mind. The privy chamber, with its inlaid writing table. The frieze of blue plaques ornamenting the passageway. The ridiculous flush privy in the bathroom. At the same time, these things seemed to be receding into a past that grew ever more ghostly.

  John Dee begged audience, and I allowed him in. As soon as I saw him, I rasped, “You sent me to Richmond to preserve me. But look! I fail, I am languishing. You misread the charts.” I glared at him. “You sent us here to die! Catherine has fallen already, and I am not far behind. This place has undone us.”

  He grasped his bony hands, twisting them fiercely. “Perhaps I misread the signs. Forgive me! The devil tricks us. Richmond may prove another Samarra! You must leave tonight!”

  “You will have me chase throughout the kingdom?” I smiled. “I am done with hasty removals. And what do you mean by Samarra?”

  “It is an old tale I learned in Europe, from an Arab physician. It goes thus: A servant went to the Baghdad market for his master. There he saw a pale woman he knew instantly was Death. He turned away, rushed back to his master, and requested permission to flee to Samarra. His master granted it, and the servant set out on a swift horse. Troubled, the master went to the marketplace himself and confronted the pale woman. ‘What did you do to frighten my servant so?’ She demurred and said, ‘I was startled to see him here in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him this afternoon in Samarra.’ That, my Queen, is the tale.”

  “So this is my Samarra,” I said. “I will remain and greet the dark angel.”

  Dee looked distressed. I attempted to assure him. “Sooner or later we must stand our ground, or be branded cowards. That is not a label for a queen.”