Виктория Холт - My Enemy the Queen

He was praying as he laid his head on the block.

There was mourning throughout London, and the executioner was seized by the mob and rescued just in time before they could kill him. Poor man, as though it were his fault!

The Queen shut herself away and mourned him, and in Leicester House I remained in my bedchamber and waited for news of my husband.

About a week after Essex's death, poor Christopher was tried and found guilty; and on the eighteenth of March he was taken out to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded.

SO I was once more a widow, and I had lost the son who, in spite of the follies I deplored, I had loved more than anyone. My young husband, who had been devoted to my comforts, was dead with him, and I must make a new life.

Everything was changing. The Queen no longer pretended to be young. I was sixty, so she must have been sixty-eight—two old women, who no longer cared very much about each other. It all seemed so long ago when Leicester and I made secret love and secret marriage and had feared her wrath.

I heard that she mourned for the men she had loved—chief of these being Leicester and Essex; but she still wept for Burleigh, Hatton, Heneage and the rest. There were none like them now, she was heard to say, forgetting that they had seemed like gods because she was then a goddess. Now she was merely an old woman.

Two years after the death of Essex, she died. She kept up her royal pride until the end, and although she had had several bouts of sickness, she would go on walking and riding as soon as she was up from her bed, so that people could see her. Finally she took cold, and decided to go to Richmond, which she considered the most sheltered of her palaces. Her cold grew worse, but she would not go to bed, and when Cecil begged her to and told her that to content the people she must do so, she replied with the familiar regal touch: "Little man, the word must is not used to sovereigns." And because she found she could not stand she had cushions brought and lay on the floor.

When we heard that she was dying a great silence fell on the land. It seemed an age ago when a redheaded young woman of twenty-five had gone to the Tower and declared her determination to work and live for her country. So had she done, never forgetful of her mission, even as she had vowed. It had come before everything, before love, before Leicester, before Essex.

When she was so weak that she could not resist she was carried to her bed.

It was the twenty-fourth of March in the year 1603 she died—on the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, it was noted.

She had even chosen an appropriate time to die.

So they were gone—all those who had made life worthwhile for me.

I was now the old woman—the grandmother, who must pass her time in retirement.

A new king had come to the throne—King James VI of Scotland had become James I of England—an untidy, not very prepossessing monarch. Gone was the brilliance of Elizabeth's Court, and I had no desire to be of the new one.

I went to my house at Drayton Basset and there I decided to live the life of a country lady. It was almost like being reborn. It was remembered of me that I had been the mother of Essex and the wife of Leicester, and soon I was holding court like a queen, which gave me pleasure.

My grandchildren visit me often. There are many of them and I take an interest in them and they like to hear stories of the past.

Only one event disturbed me during those years. That was when in the year of the Queen's death, Robert Dudley, the son of Leicester by Douglass Sheffield, tried to prove that there had been a legal marriage between his parents. Naturally I could not stand by and let him prove that, for had he done so, I should have been robbed of the major part of my inheritance.

It was an unpleasant case, as these cases always are, and there is always an element of fear in them that what is suggested may prove true.

This odious man insisted that his father and mother had gone through a form of marriage and that he was indeed Leicester's legitimate son.

He had been with Essex at Cadiz, and it was when he returned, a widower, that the trouble began, for he married and his wife was the daughter of a very forceful gentleman, Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh. It was this man who urged him to take his case to court. This he did, and I am glad to say that it did not succeed, and so angry was he that he applied for permission to leave the country for three years.

This being granted, he left England, taking with him his beautiful cousin, who had to dress as a boy and pose as his page. He left his wife and children in England and never returned to them, so he was not a man to take his responsibilities seriously.

Penelope continued her colorful career. After the death of Essex, Lord Rich divorced her and she and Mountjoy married. There was a great controversy about this marriage, which was performed by Mountjoy's chaplain, Laud. Many said that Laud had no right to marry a woman who had been divorced. For years Laud bemoaned the fact that this had prevented his preferment, although he was to leap into prominence later.

Poor Mountjoy, though honors had been heaped on him and he became the Earl of Devonshire, he did not live long after his marriage. He died in 1606, three years after the Queen's death; and Penelope died one year after him. She left me several grandchildren, not only Lord Rich's but three by Mountjoy—Mountjoy, Elizabeth and St. John.

It seemed strange that I should live on and my vital daughter be dead. But that was my fate. Sometimes I used to think: I shall live forever.

My daughter Dorothy died in 1619, three years before her husband's release from the Tower, whither he had been sent at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, suspected of having a share in it. He had been deprived of all his possessions and was sentenced to stay there for the rest of his life; and it was sixteen years later that his release was brought about through his daughter's husband. It had been a most unhappy marriage and often Dorothy had come to me to escape from him. When she died I was approaching eighty, but I still lived on.

I have seen so much in my long life. I lived on after Sir Walter Raleigh had gone to the scaffold. He had been unable to charm James as he had Elizabeth. I heard he had said as he laid his head on the block: "What matters it how the head lies, so the heart be right." Wise brave words, I thought, from Essex's enemy.

I sat in my chamber at Drayton Basset, and thought of Raleigh as he had once been—handsome, arrogant and sure of himself. So are the mighty brought low.

And still I lived on.

The King died and his son came to the throne—dapper Charles, whom I saw once or twice—a man of great dignity. Life had changed. It could never be as it had been under great Elizabeth. There would never be another like her. How she would have been saddened to see her beloved England fall into the hands of these Stuarts. The Divine Right of Kings! How often did we hear that phrase! She had believed in it, of course, but she had known that the sovereign ruled by the will of the people, and never would she have displeased them if she could help it.

James ... Charles ... what did they know of the glorious days when the handsomest men of the Court had circled round the Queen—moths to the candle and the cleverest of them knowing how to avoid singeing their wings. Her lovers—all of them, for they had loved her and she had loved them. But they were her fantasies; her true love was England.

Her death had taken something vital from my life, which was strange, for she had hated me and I could not say I ever loved her. But she was a part of my life, as Leicester was—and part of me died with them.

This sedate old lady in her manor house at Drayton Basset, caring for her tenants, playing lady bountiful, repenting her wild youth to make sure of a place in heaven, is this Lettice, Countess of Essex, Countess of Leicester, and wife of Christopher Blount? Poor Christopher! He did not really count. I had ceased to live dangerously and gloriously when Leicester died.

All this I lived through. These people flitted across the life of the times, played their parts and passed, while I lived on.

Now that I have written this story of the past I live it all again so vividly that it seems as though it happened only yesterday. When I close my eyes I sometimes feel that when I open them I shall see Leicester bending over me, raising me up to kiss him, to arouse in me that desire which we both found irresistible. I can fancy I am at the Queen's toilette, and that suddenly I receive a nip in the arm because I am dreaming and forgetting to bring her ruffs.

I see the three of us, side by side: Elizabeth and Leicester ... myself in the background ... important to them as they are to me. And then strangely enough Essex, the Queen, myself.

And they are gone and I live on.

I am over ninety. It is a very great age. I can be forgiven for fancying I am sometimes back in the past.

I like it best when my grandson, Essex, comes to see me. He is a man of great strength, punctilious in his zest for the right, a man who will do his duty, however unpleasant. He does not seek great honors. He is a great soldier—he could not be less like his father.