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.