The Queens and the Hive Read online

  Edith Sitwell

  The Queens and the Hive

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Appendix A Dr Dee

  Appendix B Witchcraft in Elizabethan England

  Appendix C Cecil’s deplorable son, Thomas

  Appendix D Don Carlos

  Appendix E The Mariners

  Appendix F The Queen’s Progresses

  Appendix G The Bishop of Ely: Leycester in the Marriage Market

  Appendix H The War in Ireland

  Prologue

  The clangour of mailed footsteps, sounding like a storm of hail in the passages of the Tower of London, died away; and now a black frost of silence sealed the world from all life.

  The outer world seemed dead. The memorials of King Henry’s vengeance, the eternal smiles, the unheard laughter fixed to the turrets of the Tower, did not relax their soundless merriment at the thought—visiting, perhaps, the heads from which the brain had long since disappeared—that the daughter of the woman for whose sake they had reached this show of gaiety might soon be going to join her.

  Round that laughter, black rags (of cloud? of some remnants left of their humanity? of the wings of birds of prey?) flapped lazily.

  The young girl with the lion-coloured hair and the great golden haunting eyes who had just entered the Tower by the Traitor’s Gate sat, quite quietly, looking at the door of her prison, as if she waited for someone.

  And still there was no sound, save that of distant weeping.

  The tears of Mrs Ashley, the governess of this twenty-year-old girl waiting for death, if this could be encompassed by the Council and her sister’s lawyers, fell from a heart that knew the nobility, the Christian love and forgiveness of that elder sister’s soul and heart, before these were poisoned, when she became Queen, against the forlorn being she had befriended. Black bitterness, a slow, sure poison, had been skilfully instilled into that noble heart, assured at last of Elizabeth’s treachery towards her—indeed that she had connived at the plot of the traitor Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of the poet, to seize the Crown on her behalf, and end not only Mary’s reign, but her life. Had not Wyatt denounced her, when he was taken, in the hope of saving himself?

  Mary, now thirty-eight, had forgiven, had not visited upon her half-sister the endless and intolerable insults, injuries, and dangers that had fallen upon her since Elizabeth’s birth—had forgiven her own bastardization brought about in order that the baby Elizabeth should take her place as heiress to the throne, had forgiven being sent to the baby’s household, not as a Princess, but as a dependant, with the order from her stepmother, the usurper-Queen, Anne Boleyn, that if she persisted in retaining her state as Princess, and refused to eat at the common table, she was to be deprived of food, and ‘beaten and buffeted like the cursed bastard that she was’.

  But soon the baby who had been proclaimed heiress to the throne of England in Mary’s place was, following her mother’s execution, pronounced, in Parliament, a bastard.

  It was then that Mary’s true nobility showed itself. In answer to the dying prayer for forgiveness from the woman who was the author of the tragedy, she protected and loved the little creature, aged three and a half years, who now had ‘neither gown nor kirtall [slip], nor petticoat, nor no manner of linnen, nor foresmocks [pinafores], nor kerchief, nor rails [nightgowns], nor mofelers [mob-caps], nor biggens [nightcaps]’, and who now shared the nursery palace with her.1 Her tenderness, her care for that forlorn child were endless.

  And this was the being who all the while (so she was told) had laughed at her, mocked her, and who had now plotted her death.

  Before Elizabeth was sent to the Tower, she wrote Mary a letter, imploring her to admit her to her presence, saying ‘I pray to God I may die the shamefullest death that any one ever died, if I may mean any such thing’ (as to try to encompass Mary’s destruction) ‘… practised, counselled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way, or dangerous to the state by any means …

  ‘I pray God … evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that they have heard false report, and the truth not known….’

  But the Queen did not answer.

  To come to any understanding of the being in whose reign the greatness of England began, and to understand her relations with her sister Mary, we must consider the circumstances of her birth.

  To Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, and to many others, that birth in 1533 had been like the birth of Fate.

  It was preceded by the Sophoclean drama of King Henry’s escape from a real or imagined incest (that of his marriage with his brother’s widow, Mary’s mother)—cursed by Heaven with the decree that no male child born of that marriage should live.

  That drama of passions, faiths, lusts, and ambitions that had the fever of lust, was brought about in part by a spiritual upheaval in the history of mankind, in part by the absolute necessity, if the country were to be preserved from civil war, that King Henry should provide a male heir to the kingdom.

  King Henry, that lonely being, a giant in scale, a creature of powerful intellect and insane pride, of cruelty, vengeance, and appalling rages, of regal generosity and breadth of understanding, helped to bring about a tragedy through two factors—his kingly sense of duty to his people, and his curious power of self-deception, which enabled him to see his long infatuation for Queen Catherine’s maid of honour, Anne Boleyn, as a part of his duty.

  He put aside his Queen, and married the object of his infatuation, who was young, and would surely bear him a son.

  The King, the Princess of Aragon who was his Queen -a dark and sombre Niobe, weeping for the death of her sons—and Anne, the light summer existence that supplanted her, these played out their tragedy lit by the fires in which the martyrs perished, kindled in vindication of Henry’s regency under God in place of the Pope—who had refused to allow the King’s divorce from Queen Catherine, and whose power, therefore, the King defied—and in homage to the son who was soon to be born to the witch-Queen Anne and to Henry, that almost supreme being.

  But ‘to the shame and confusion of the physicians, astrologers, witches and wizards’, who had assured the King that the coming child would be a son, ‘the Lady’, as the Ambassador to the Emperor Charles the Fifth persisted in calling her, was delivered of a daughter.

  The King’s fury, raging for three days, breaking from the fires and darkness of his nature, had been terrifying to see…. The child a girl? Was it for this that he had defied the Pope, denied his supremacy, overthrown the established church in England? Was it for this that he had risked war with the Emperor, Queen Catherine’s nephew, so that he might marry Anne Boleyn, with the great slanting black eyes and a long throat on which was a mole like a strawberry -this being kept hidden by a collar of big pearls which, from time to time, she would pull aside with her left hand, on which was a rudimentary sixth finger, the sure sign of a witch. It had been whispered—and now the King was sure of it—that not Sir Thomas Boleyn, but the Prince of the Powers of the Air, was the new Queen’s father.

  Listening to her, as in her rages she revealed her vanities, her self-seeking greed, the King began to notice things to which he had blinded himself. He still watched her every movement, as he
had done in the long years of his infatuation for her before their marriage—these seven years in which he had longed for her, and she had resisted him. But he did not watch her, now, from love. He was seeing, for the first time, her empty pretensions, her unfitness to be Queen.

  She saw that he looked at her strangely—she knew that something was happening in his mind, a change that she did not understand.

  But she had never understood anything in his nature, excepting the elementary fact that if something was withheld from him, his desire for it grew. She did not understand his gigantic vanity, nor his sense of kingship. Above all, she did not understand that with all the deformities, the monstrous pride of his nature, he was yet a great King.

  She had raged at him. And she had tried to rule him.

  What, he asked himself, had he got from this marriage for which he had risked the threat of excommunication, involving not only earthly ruin (the sentence that no son of the Church must speak with him or give him food, and that his body must lie without burial) but the appalling sentence of everlasting damnation—that his soul, blasted by anathema, should be cast into Hell for ever?

  This he had risked. And what had he obtained from that marriage? Gusts of rage. An endless emptiness. A useless daughter.

  The King was bored. To this she had brought him, after all those years of infatuation.

  But still he must show his omnipotence. And to do this, he must prove that he still lay under the spell of his new Queen. Any person who denied that she was the rightful Queen was executed as a traitor. And three months after the birth of Elizabeth, the Imperial Ambassador told his master: ‘The King, at the solicitations of the Lady, whom he dare not contradict, had determined to place the Queen [Catherine] in a house surrounded by deep water and marshes…. And, failing all other pretexts, to accuse her of being insane’ (like her sister, Queen Juana of Castille, the Emperor’s mother, who lived for forty-nine years in raging madness).

  She was not taken to that house, but lived in one equally gloomy, rising in the depth of each night to pray, as if she were a nun, wearing under her dress the rough habit of St Francis of the Third Order, and fearing, each hour of the day or night, to die by poison, or to be struck down by assassins hidden in her room.

  The Imperial Ambassador was warned that the King said he had grave doubts if Catherine, who was his Queen, would live long. She had a dropsy, he said.

  The Ambassador replied sternly that the Queen had no dropsy. But he knew, or thought that he knew, the meaning that lay behind the King’s words. This illness was to be induced by artificial means, or she would die by some subtle poison which would produce the symptoms of dropsy.

  Anne, the supplanter Queen, had, it was thought, laid her plans. And she had become openly threatening, both to the life of the true Queen and that of Mary. In the summer of 1534, she was overheard telling her brother Lord Rochford that when the King went to France and she was left as Regent, she intended to have Mary executed for disobedience. Rochford warned her of the King’s rage (for, in spite of his threats, he still loved his elder daughter) but she replied, violently, that she would do it, even if she were skinned or burned alive as a punishment.

  In November 1535 the King uttered a threat against the life of his first Queen and their daughter Mary. Four weeks later, Catherine was seized with a mysterious illness, that came and went for a little, leaving the waxen figure a little more shrunken and twisted.

  Her death took place on 7 January 1536. And, although it was a cold winter day, the Keeper of the house decided that she must be embalmed that same night, and enclosed in lead, far from the eyes of men. The work was done quickly, as if the fires of the sun that flare over the dead woman’s native Granada were at their height.

  In the early morning following the night they had spent with the dead Queen’s body, the embalmers told her devoted Spanish servants that her heart, when it lay exposed to their eyes, was entirely black, and hideous to the sight…. They washed the heart, strongly, in water that they changed three times. But the frightful blackness did not alter. Then one of the embalmers clove the heart in two, and they found a black thing clinging to the core, with such force that it could not be dislodged. That black heart, and the body it had consumed as a fire melts wax, were shut away in a covering of lead before the light of day could witness the fate that had befallen them.

  Next day, which was a Sunday, the Court rang with the noise of balls and feasts.

  The King exclaimed, ‘God be praised that we are free from the danger of war’—with the Emperor. And the father and brother of Anne, openly exulting, declared that the only thing they regretted was that the Lady Mary was not keeping her mother company.

  The King and his new Queen wore yellow- for mourning, it was said.

  At the Court Ball in the afternoon, the King sent for the baby Elizabeth and, wrote the Emperor’s Ambassador, carrying ‘his little bastard’ in his arms, he ‘showed her first to one, then to another’.

  Watching the little child, leaping up and down in her father’s arms, where the great fires lit the winter dusk, who could imagine this being as she would be in sixty-five years’ time?—the old sandalwood body smelling of death, the beautiful hands, that were like long leaves, grown a little dry from age, so that the lines on the palms were like those on a map. Then, too, she would leap into the air like a thin flame—like the flames she saw as she was about to die. (‘I saw one night,’ she told one of her ladies, ‘my body thin and fearful in a light of fire.’)

  In the last days of her life she danced to the sound of a pipe and a drum, alone in a small room, excepting for the musicians and her faithful friend and lady-in-waiting, Lady Warwick. She danced, as she did everything, to fight the shadow of Death. When she could no longer dance, she would sit and watch the maids of honour dancing—to the sound of the Dargason or Sedany, Flaunting Two (a country dance), Mopsy’s Tune, Turkerloney, Frisks, the Bishop of Chester’s Jig, Dusty, my Dear—and perhaps the wonderful Lachrimae Pavanes of Dowland, published three years after her death, with a number of other Pavanes, Galliards, and Almands, in a book with the title Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, figured in Seaven Passionate Pavanes, the last words being:

  Happy, happy they that in Hell feel not the world’s despite.

  But, a little child, she knew nothing of that despite, and sang in imitation of the music.

  Yet even then she was the heroine of a triumph brought about by Death—that of her mother’s rival—Death, that was to follow her everywhere. But the triumph was to be that of Death, not of her mother.

  Three weeks after the funeral of Catherine, whom she had once served, after some hours of a slow-dragging agony, the new Queen gave birth to a dead child. And that child was a son.

  Entering her room, merciless, without pity for her pain or her humiliation, the King, fixing her with his formidable state, told her that he knew, now, that God would not grant him male children. ‘I will speak to you,’ he said, ‘when you are well.’

  For the rest of the time that remained to her—she was led to her death less than five months after the death of the Queen she had supplanted—Anne was alone with her splendour. But she continued in her pride.

  This being whose extraordinary will to live and conquer was such that it seemed as if it must stain the air through which she passed, leaving upon it some colour of summer and its wilfulness, impressing upon the air for ever some memory of her being—how could she dream that one day she would be enveloped by the waiting darkness, and that all her thoughts and hopes, and all her summer existence would soon be forgotten!

  Like her daughter, she ‘danced high’. But she did not, like that daughter, ‘dance disposedly’.

  The year before, an old and great man, Sir Thomas More, waiting for death in the Tower because he refused to renounce the power of the Pope, or to acknowledge the usurper Queen, had asked his daughter one day how the Queen fared. ‘Never better,’ she answered. ‘There is nothing in the Court but dancing and sporting.’

  ‘Alas,’ he sighed, ‘it pitieth me to think into what misery she will shortly come. Those dances of hers will spurn off our heads like footballs, but it will not be long ere she will dance headless.’

  She had borne a useless daughter and a dead son. The violence of her pride, her interference with public affairs, the fact that her continued existence prevented friendship with the Emperor—these were a menace to England. So she must go.