Now she was possessed by such rage as she had never felt before.

“Where is this document, man?” she cried harshly.

“Here … here, Your Majesty.” Simiers turned from her to hide the triumph in his eyes. He spread the papers on a table and handed her a pen.

Even her signature was an angry one.

“Your Majesty, my master will be enraptured. This will be the happiest day of his life …”

“Leave me now,” she said.

Sly and knowledgeable, hiding his delight, he bowed low and hurried away before she could change her mind.

Now there was no longer need for restraint. “Where are my women?” she shouted. “Why do they not attend me? Kat … you sly devil, where are you? What have you been doing all these weeks?”

They came running in and stood before her, trembling.

“What news of Leicester?” she spat out at them.

They were silent, each waiting for another to speak first.

She stamped her foot. “What of that snake?” she screamed. “What of Leicester?” She took the woman nearest her and shook her until she begged for mercy.

The Queen’s hair had broken loose from her headdress; her eyes grew wilder and purple color flamed into her face.

No one dared speak until at last Kat said: “Dearest Majesty … dearest … dearest …”

“Did you not hear me?” shouted the Queen. “I said: ‘What of that snake who calls himself a man?’ So he has married that sly animal, has he? He has married that low creature, that she-wolf?”

“Majesty,” said Kat, “it is true. They married …”

“They married!” cried Elizabeth. “Did they ask my consent? Did they keep it secret? Did you? Did you … and you?” Each “you” was accompanied by a stinging blow on the cheek for all those nearest. “And you … and you and … you … knew this, and thought it meet to keep it from me?”

“Dearest, dearest!” begged Kat. And in an agonized whisper she added: “Remember … remember … do not betray your feelings thus.”

Elizabeth was swaying vertiginously with the intensity of her emotion.

“Quick!” cried Kat. “Help me unlace Her Majesty’s bodice. There, my love. Kat has you. Come, lie on your couch, darling. You’ll feel better then. Kat’s here beside you.”

With great presence of mind Kat dismissed all the women; she knelt by the couch, chafing the Queen’s hands while the tears ran down Kat’s cheeks and words babbled from her lips. “Oh, my darling, I would have given my life to spare you this. But, dearest, you would not marry him. You must not blame him …”

“Blame him!” flared Elizabeth. “By God’s Body, I’ll blame him! He shall pay for all the pleasure he has had with her.”

“Darling, it was only natural. You see, he has been so long unmarried.”

“Have I not been long unmarried?”

“But it was my darling’s royal wish.”

“They shall lose their heads for this, and I’ll see the deed done.”

“Be calm, my sweeting. Be quiet, my sweet Bess. Let me get you a little wine.”

“You know I do not like wine.”

“I’ll mix water with it. It will revive you, dearest. There … there … that’s better.”

“It is not better, Kat. It will never be better. You know how I loved him.”

“But you did not marry him, dearest.”

“Stop all this talk of marriage. You do it but to torment me.”

“Dearest Majesty, remember you are the Queen. You must not show your jealousy like this. You are above such things.”

“I am indeed. I am above them all, and I’ll have obedience. They shall go to the Tower at once … both of them.”

“Yes, yes, my love. They shall go to the Tower.”

“If you try to soothe me, Madam, and continue to talk to me as though I am four years old, you shall accompany them to the Tower.”

“Yes, darling, so I shall.”

“Oh Kat! What a deceiver! What a scoundrel!”

“He is the worst man in the world,” said Kat.

“How dare you say it! You know he is not. It is all her fault. Ha! Little does he know the woman he has married. Let him discover.”

She stood up suddenly. Kat watched her fearfully as she strode to the door.

She said to the guards there: “The Earl of Leicester is here at Greenwich, is he not?”

“He is, Your Majesty.”

“Then go to his apartments with a party of the strongest guards. Place him under close arrest, and tell him he may expect to leave shortly for the Tower.”

She came back to her couch and, flinging herself upon it, gave way to bitter weeping.

All England was talking about the “Mounseer.” He had come to England, and he had come without ceremony, and in disguise had appeared suddenly at Greenwich with only two servants, asking to be taken to Her Majesty that he might throw himself at her feet.

He was very small and far from handsome; his face was dark and pock-marked; but he could murmur the kind of compliment that delighted the Queen as none of her courtiers—not even Robert—had been able to do. His clothes were exquisite; he could foot a measure with such grace as to make Christopher Hatton appear clumsy; he displayed French graces of such elegance that Elizabeth, smarting under what she privately called Leicester’s betrayal, declared that she was charmed with him.

Robert and Lettice were under arrest, and Elizabeth had the satisfaction of knowing that they could not meet. She had not sent Robert to the Tower as she had at first intended; Burghley with Sussex had begged her not to do so and thereby expose her jealousy and passion to the world. To keep him a prisoner at Greenwich until her anger cooled was one thing; to make him a state prisoner in the Tower quite another, they cautioned her.

She saw the wisdom of this advice, and kept Robert prisoner at Greenwich in his own apartments, while she amused herself with Monsieur.

And how she seemed to enjoy herself! At least it was some balm to her misery. Kat, who loved her so tenderly, in dismay watched her caressing the little Prince in public. She had quickly nick-named him her Frog, and continually wore on her bosom a jeweled ornament in the shape of a frog.

But the country was not pleased with the suitor. The marriage would be a ridiculous one, it was said, since the Queen was forty-six and Anjou twenty-three. Was it possible for the Queen to have a child at her age? it was asked. And what other reason could there be for the marriage?

A man named Stubbs published a pamphlet he had written denouncing the match.

“This man,” he wrote, “is the son of King Henry, whose family ever since he married with Catherine of Italy is fatal as it were to resist the gospel and have been, every one after the other, as a Domitian after a Nero.”

Stubbs and his publisher were imprisoned by order of the Queen, and both condemned to have their right hands cut off. Crowds gathered in the market place at Westminster to see this done, and the people murmured against the Queen.

This grieved Elizabeth; but she had, in a moment of passion, sent for the Duke, and she dared not risk offending the French by allowing their royal family to be insulted while the Duke was actually her guest.

Philip Sidney—who was handsome, gifted and charming as well as being Robert’s nephew—was one of the Queen’s favorite younger men. He now wrote to her in a manner which was more insulting to the French Prince than even Stubbs had been.

“How the hearts of your people will be galled,” he wrote, “if not aliened when they see you take as husband a Frenchman and a papist, in whom the very common people know this: he is the son of that Jezebel of our age, and his brother made oblation of his own sister’s marriage, the easier to massacre our brethren in religion …”

Philip Sidney was banished from the Court.

There were storms in the Parliament. Some of her ministers were quite blunt, saying she was old enough to be the Duke’s mother. Others, more politic, implied the same thing in a more courteous way: They did not wish to see the Queen risk her life by attempting to bear children.

And Elizabeth, when she was not flirting with Monsieur, or raging against Robert—or fretting for him—was thinking of what was happening in the Netherlands, and how Philip of Spain was gaining domination over the poor suffering people of that land; and she wondered what would happen when he had completely subdued them.

Then, all the world thought, and Elizabeth must think it too, his attention would turn to England, for was not his dream to abolish Protestantism throughout the world, and was not England a refuge for the Huguenots of France and the Netherlands?

Elizabeth could tremble when she thought of that day. The great dread of her life was war; and even now that dread seeped through her miseries caused by Robert’s defection, and curbed her gaiety in the French Prince’s wooing.

While her statesmen wondered how a woman of her age and genius could act with such girlish folly, simpering, giggling, urging her wooer on to what—in the eyes of Englishmen—seemed the most foppish folly, she was flattering him as he was flattering her. Not only did she lead him to believe that he was a very fascinating man, but she let him know that she considered he was born to command an army; and since it was the destiny of France to go to war with Spain, and she was sure there was a kingdom to be won in the Netherlands by a man of courage, spirit, and genius, such as Monsieur undoubtedly possessed, she wondered why he did not seek his fortune in Flanders.

His brother, a young man, was on the throne of France; it was a sad thing, she knew from experience, to be near the throne and have serious doubts of ever reaching it. There were always plots and counter-plots; it was a wise thing to make a kingdom for oneself; and if one were a man, brave as a lion, a military genius—as she was convinced her little Frog was—he should first win his kingdom, and then come for his bride.