Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

They thought more of her for responding to the sailors, to the apprentice boys, to the old peasant from the Midlands, than for all the glory of her harness and the pace of her horse. When she stopped for the pregnant merchant’s wife and asked her to call the baby Henry if it was a boy, they cheered her till she pretended to be deafened by applause. She kissed her hand to the wounded soldiers, noticed an old man turn his face aside to hide his tears, and she called out that she knew they were tears of joy.

She never asked Robert, neither then nor later, if these people had been paid to cry out her name or if they were doing it for love. For all that she had spent her life in the wings, Elizabeth belonged to the center of the stage. She did not really care whether the rest of them were players or groundlings. All she desired was their acclaim.

And she was enough of a Tudor to put on a good show. She had the knack of smiling at a crowd as if each and every one had her attention, and the individuals who cried out to her—placed so that all corners of the route would have their own special experience of her—made a succession of apparently natural stopping places for Elizabeth’s procession, so that everyone could see her and everyone would have their own private memory of the princess’s radiant smile on her most glorious day.

The next day, Sunday, was the day of her coronation, and Dudley had ruled that she would go to the Abbey high on a litter drawn by four white mules, so that she appeared to the crowd as if she were floating at shoulder height. Either side of the litter marched her gentlemen pensioners in crimson damask, before her went her trumpeters in scarlet, behind her walked Dudley himself, the first man in the procession, leading her white palfrey, and the crowd that cheered her gasped when they saw him: the richness of the jewels in his hat, his dark, saturnine, handsome face, and the high-bred, high-stepping horse that curvetted so prettily with his hand steady on the bridle.

He smiled, turning his head this way and that, his heavy-lidded eyes running over the crowd, continually alert. This was a man who had ridden before a cheering crowd and known that they adored him; and had later marched to the Tower amid a storm of booing, knowing himself to be the second worst-hated man in England, and the son of the worst. He knew that this crowd could be courted as sweetly as a willing girl one day, and yet turn as spiteful as a neglected woman the next.

Today, they adored him; he was Elizabeth’s favorite, he was the most handsome man in England. He had been their bonny darling when a boy; he had gone into the Tower as a traitor and come out again as a hero. He was a survivor like her; he was a survivor like them.

It was a perfect procession and a perfect service. Elizabeth took the crown on her head, the oil on her forehead, and the orb and scepter of England into her hand. The Bishop of Carlisle officiated in the pleasing conviction that within a few months he would be celebrating her marriage to the most devout Catholic king in the whole of Christendom. And after the coronation service the queen’s own chaplain celebrated Mass without uplifting the Host.

Elizabeth came out of the dark Abbey into a blaze of light and heard the roar of the crowd welcome her. She walked through the people so that they could all see her—this was a queen who would pander to anyone, their love for her was a balm for the years of neglect.

At her coronation dinner her voice was lost in her tightening throat, the blush in her cheeks was from a rising fever, but nothing would have made her leave early. The queen’s champion rode into the hall and challenged all comers and the new queen smiled on him, smiled on Robert Dudley, the most loyal ex-traitor of them all, smiled on her new council—half of them constitutionally unfaithful—and smiled on her family who were suddenly recollecting the bonds and obligations of kinship now that their niece was no longer a suspect criminal, but the very lawmaker herself.

She stayed up till three in the morning until the trusted Kat Ashley, presuming on the intimacy of having been governess when Elizabeth was a girl and not a great queen, whispered in her ear that she must go to bed now or be dead on her feet in the morning.

God strike her dead on her feet in the morning, thought Amy Dudley, sleepless, waiting through the long, dark winter night for the cold dawn, in far-away Norfolk.

Robert Dudley, rising like a young Adonis from the bed of one of the court ladies, giving her a nonchalant parting kiss while he unclasped her hands from about his neck, and coming into the queen’s presence chamber at Whitehall smartly enough next day, was still too late to catch Elizabeth alone. He found her already in close-headed conference with William Cecil, seated over a little table with papers before them. She glanced up and smiled at him but she did not wave him to approach, and he was forced to stand against the wood-paneled walls with the dozen or so other men who had risen early to pay their compliments and found that Cecil had got in first.

Dudley scowled and tried to overhear the low-voiced conversation. Cecil was dressed in dark clothes: like a clerk, Dudley sniffed; but his wealth showed in the quality of the rich velvet and in the expense of the cut. His ruff was of the finest lace, lying in soft folds around his neck, his hair long and lustrous, spread on his collar. His eyes, warm and compassionate, never wavered from Elizabeth’s animated face, answering her remarks about the great kingdom with the same steady quietness that he had used when he was advising her how best to run her country estates. Then it had been Cecil alone who had kept the princess from folly, and now it was Cecil alone who had the reward for those years of service.

She trusted him as she trusted no other; he could advise her against her own desires and she would listen. Indeed, when she appointed him to be her Secretary of State she had made him swear that he would tell her the truth without fear or favor, and sworn to him a pledge in return: that she would always listen to his words and never blame him if his advice was not to her liking. No other member of the Privy Council had exchanged such an oath with the new queen; there was no one else who mattered.

Elizabeth had seen her father dismiss advisors whose counsel was against his wishes; she had seen him arraign members of his own council for treason because they brought him bad news. She did not care that her father had become a tyrant, hated by his closest advisors; she believed that was the very nature of kingship; but she was warned by the fact that he lost the best minds of the kingdom because he could not bear to take advice.

And she was not yet old enough to want to rule alone. The crown was unsteady on her head, the country was filled with her enemies. She was a young woman, only twenty-five years old, with neither mother nor father nor a beloved family to advise her. She needed to be surrounded by friends whom she could trust: Cecil, her teacher Roger Ascham, her former governess Kat Ashley, and her plump, gossipy cofferrer Thomas Parry with his wife Blanche, who had been Elizabeth’s nanny. Now that Elizabeth was queen she did not forget those who had been faithful to her when she had been princess, and there was not one old friend who was not now enjoying a small fortune in rich repayment for the years of waiting.

Why, she actually prefers the company of inferiors, Dudley thought, looking from Cecil at the table to Kat Ashley at the window. She was brought up by servants and people of the middling sort and she prefers their values. She understands trade and good housekeeping and the value of a well-run estate because that is what they care about. While I was walking around the royal palaces and spending my time with my father commanding the court, she was fussing over the price of bacon and staying out of debt.