The Queen’s Progresses.
I spoke but now of her love of pageants; every visiting prince from every great neighbor kingdom was honored with a pageant; every foreign suitor to her maidenly graces—whether looked on with favor or disfavor (as to which her eye and lip told no tales)—brought gala-days to London streets—brought revels, and bear-baitings, and high passages of arms, and swaying of pennons and welcoming odes. Many and many a time the roystering poets I named to you—the Greenes, the Marlowes, the Jonsons, the Peeles, may have looked out from the Mermaid Tavern windows upon the royal processions that swept with gold-cloth, and crimson housings through Cheapside, where every house blazed with welcoming banners, and every casement was crowded with the faces of the onlookers.
Thereby, too, she would very likely have passed in her famous “Progresses” to her good friends in the eastern counties; or to her loved Lord Burleigh, or to Cecil, at their fine place of Theobalds’ Park,[122] near Waltham Cross. True, old Burleigh was wont to complain that her Majesty made him frequent visits, and that every one cost him a matter of two or three thousand pounds. Indeed it was no small affair to take in the Queen with her attendants. Hospitable people of our day are sometimes taken aback by an easy-going friend who comes suddenly on a visit with a wife, and four or five children, and Saratoga trunks, and two or three nursery-maids, and a few poodles and a fox-terrier; but think of the Queen, with her tiring-women, and her ladies of the chamber, and her ushers, and her grand falconer, and her master of the hounds, and her flesher—who knows the cuts she likes—and her cook, and her secretary, and her fifty yeomen of the guard, and her sumpter mules, and her chaplain, and her laundry-women, and her fine-starchers! No wonder Lord Burleigh groaned when he received a little notelet from his dear Queen saying she was coming down upon him—for a week or ten days.
And Elizabeth loved these little surprises overmuch, and the progress along the high roads thither and back, which so fed her vanities: She was a woman of thrift withal, and loved her savings; and the kitchen fires at Nonsuch palace, or at Greenwich or at Richmond, might go out for a time while she was away upon these junketings.
I know that my young readers will be snuggling in their minds a memory of that greatest Progress of hers, and that grandest of all private entertainments—at Kenilworth Castle; wondering, maybe, if that charming, yet over-sad story of Walter Scott’s is true to the very life? And inasmuch as they will be devouring that book, I suspect, a great deal oftener than they will read Laneham’s account of the great entertainment, or Gascoigne’s,[123] I will tell them how much, and where it varies from the true record. There was a Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—a brilliant man, elegant in speech, in person, in manner—at a court where his nephew Philip Sidney had shone—altogether such a courtier as Scott has painted him: And the Queen had regarded him tenderly—so tenderly that it became the talk of her household and of the world. It is certain, too, that Leicester gave to the Queen a magnificent entertainment at his princely castle of Kenilworth, in the month of July, 1575. There were giants, there were Tritons, there were floating islands. Lawns were turned into lakes, and lakes were bridged with huge structures, roofed with crimson canopies, where fairies greeted the great guest with cornucopias of flowers and fruits. There was fairy music too; there were dances and plays and fireworks, that lighted all the region round about with a blaze of burning darts, and streams and hail of fire-sparks.
In all this there is no exaggeration in Scott’s picturing; none either in his portraiture of the coquetries and princely graces of the Queen. It is probable that no juster and truer picture of her aspect and bearing, and of the more salient points of her character ever will or can be drawn.
Thither, too, had come—from all the country round—yeomen, strolling players, adventurous youths, quick to look admiringly after that brilliant type of knighthood Sir Philip Sidney, then in his twenty-first year, and showing his gay trappings in the royal retinue: amongst such youths were, very likely, Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare, boys both in that day, just turned of eleven, and making light of the ten or twelve miles of open and beautiful country which lay between Kenilworth and their homes of Atherstone and of Stratford-upon-Avon.
It is true too, that Leicester, so admired of the Queen, and who was her host, had once married an Amy Robsart: true, too, that this Amy Robsart had died in a strangely sudden way at an old manor-house of Cumnor; and true that a certain Foster and Varney, who were dependants of Leicester, did in some sense have her in their keeping. But—and here the divergence from history begins—this poor Amy Robsart had been married to Sir Robert Dudley before he came to the title of Leicester, and she died in the mysterious way alluded to, some fifteen years before these revels of Kenilworth: but not before Elizabeth had been attracted by the proud and noble bearing of Robert Dudley. Her fondness for him began about the year 1559. And it was this early fondness of hers which gave color to the story that he had secretly caused the death of Amy Robsart. The real truth will probably never be known: there was a public inquiry (not so full, he said, as he could have wished) which acquitted Leicester; but his character was such that he never outlived suspicion. I observe that Mr. Motley, in his History of the United Netherlands, on the faith of a paper in the Record Office, avers Leicester’s innocence; but the tenor of a life counts for more than one justifying document in measuring a man’s moral make-up.
In the year 1575, when the revels of Kenilworth occurred, the Earl of Leicester was a widower and Amy Robsart had been ten years mouldering in her grave: but in the year 1576 the young Countess of Essex suddenly became a widow, and was married privately, very shortly afterward, to the Earl of Leicester. In the next year, 1577, the story was blazed abroad, and the Queen showed her appreciation of the sudden match by sending Leicester straight to the Tower. But she forgave him presently. And out of these scattered actualities, as regards the Earl, Sir Walter Scott has embroidered his delightful romance.
But we have already brought our literary mention up to a point far beyond this in the Queen’s life; up to a point where Shakespeare, instead of tearing over hedge-rows and meadows to see the Tritons and the harlequins of Kenilworth, has put his own Tritons to swimming in limpid verse, and has put his bloated, dying Falstaff to “babbling o’ green fields.” The Queen, too, who has listened—besides these revels—to the tender music of Spenser and outlived him; who has heard the gracious courtliness of Sidney, and outlived him; who has lent a willing ear to the young flatteries of Raleigh and seen him ripen into a gray-haired adventurer of the seas; who has watched the future Lord Keeper, Francis Bacon, as he has shot up from boyhood into the stateliness of middle age; who has seen the worshipful Master John Lyly grow up, and chant his euphuism and sing his songs and die: she too, now, is feeling the years—brilliant as they may be in achievement—count and weigh upon her.
Long as she could, she cherished all the illusions of youth. That poor old face of hers was, I suspect, whited and reddened with other pigments than what the blood made, as the years went by. Such out-of-door sports as bear-baiting became rarer and rarer with her; and she loved better such fun as the fat Falstaff made, in her theatre of Whitehall. But only nicest observers saw the change; and she never admitted it—perhaps not to herself.
The gossiping Paul Hentzner, who had an ambassador’s chances of observation, says of her, on her way to chapel at Greenwich:—
“Next came the Queen, in her sixty-fifth year, as we are told—very majestic: her face, oblong, fair but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked. She had in her ears two pearls with very rich drops; and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels. She was dressed in white silk bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and over it a mantle of black silk shot with silver threads.”
This, observe, was over twenty years after the revels of Kenilworth: and two years beyond this date, when the Queen was sixty-seven, a courtier writes: “Her Majesty is well, and every second day is on horseback.” No suitor could say a pleasanter thing to her than—“Your majesty is looking very young!” She danced, when it made her old bones ache to dance.
No suitor could say a more inapt thing than to express a fear that a revel, or a play, or a hunt, or a dance might possibly fatigue her Majesty. It would bring a warning shake of the head that made the jewels rattle.
But at last the days come—as like days are coming to us all—when she can counterfeit youth no longer. The plays entice her no more. The three thousand court dresses that she left, hang unused in her wardrobe: weaknesses hem her in, turn which way she may. Cecil, the son of her old favorite Burleigh, urges that she must quit her chair—which she clung to, propped with pillows—that she must take to her bed. “Must,” she cries, with a kindling of her old passionate life, “little man, little man, thy father never dared to use such a word to his Queen.” The gust passes; and she clings to life, as all do, who have such fast, hard grip upon it. In short periods of languor and repose, taking kindly to the issue—going out, as it were, like a lamp. Then, by some windy burst of passion—of hate, flaming up red and white and hot—her voice a scream, her boding of the end a craze, her tenacity of purpose dragging all friends, all hopes, all the world to the terrible edge where she stands—the edge where Essex stood (she bethinks herself with a wild tempest of tears)—the edge where Marie Stuart stood at Fotheringay, in her comely widow’s dress; thinks of this with a shrug that means acquiescence, that means stubborn recognition of a fatal duty: that ghost does no way disturb her.
But there are others which well may. Shall we tell them over?
No; let us leave her with her confessor, saying prayers maybe; her rings on her fingers; the lace upon her pillow; not forgetting certain fine coquetries to the last: strong-souled, keen-thoughted, ambitious, proud, vindictive, passionate woman, with her streaks of tenderness out of which bitter tears flowed—out of which kindlinesses crept to sun themselves, but were quick overshadowed by her pride.
Farewell to her!
In our next talk we shall meet a King—but a King who is less a man than this Queen who is dead.