Le Morte d'Elizabeth
Lady Catherine Carey, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, tiptoed down the dim, candlelit corridor toward Her Majesty's bedchamber. Richmond Palace, on the banks of the River Thames, was eerily quiet that evening of March 23, 1603. Even the most boisterous courtiers curbed their usual exuberance in light of the queen's recent illness. When she entered the royal presence to check on the sovereign's wellbeing, Lady Catherine found Elizabeth sitting in an upright position on the floor, propped up by several cushions. The monarch was fully dressed and wearing her red wig and white makeup.
"Where is the archbishop?" the queen demanded to know.
"He has been sent for, Your Majesty. No doubt he will be here shortly."
No sooner had Lady Catherine departed the royal apartments than the stern, unsmiling John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, entered the queen's bedchamber. Wanting to speak to him in private, Elizabeth had already dismissed her other ladies-in-waiting.
"You must excuse me for meeting you in my bedchamber," the queen apologized. "I'm feeling unusually tired this evening."
"In fulfilling my duties, I have often found it necessary to make bedside calls," the cleric said cryptically.
"I wasn't aware an archbishop was required to make house calls."
Whitgift deftly changed the subject.
"I understand you've not been feeling well, Your Majesty."
"Nonsense! I'm as fit as a fiddle! Do you think just because I'm approaching the anniversary of my seventieth year that I'm nearing my death?"
"No, Your Grace, but your physician has said that you suffer from a poisoning of the blood," the archbishop argued.
"What does he know?" Elizabeth thundered, and then winced with the discomfort her outburst caused. "The man is a doddering fool! I assure you, I am no more sick than you are. I am merely tired because I didn't sleep well last night."
The archbishop did not ask his sovereign why she had summoned him. Instead, he waited patiently for an explanation.
"Still, I suppose I ought to be practical," she confessed. "My father was dead before the age of sixty. I ought to at least make some preparations for my passing. After all, I am not immortal. I will die eventually, and I certainly have no desire to leave my kingdom in turmoil when I'm gone."
"Is this about the succession then?"
Elizabeth, the last of Henry VIII's legitimate offspring, never married and, therefore, had no heir—male or female. Furthermore, she had always been reluctant to name a successor to her throne although it was assumed by most people that James VI of Scotland, great-great-grandson of Elizabeth's Tudor grandfather, Henry VII, would become James I of England after her death.
"No. This is about my immortal soul."
The archbishop, suspecting there would be a lengthy conversation ahead of him, asked the queen for permission to sit in her presence. She granted it and pointed to a nearby chair.
"Did you know that Pope Pius excommunicated me?" she asked rhetorically, since the archbishop was well aware of the pope's action. "He claimed I was a heretic. He also declared I was to be deprived of my crown and forbade my subjects to obey me under pain of excommunication."
"That was to be expected, Your Majesty. Pius is the head of the Catholic Church," the archbishop needlessly pointed out. "You are a Protestant ruler. Despite all the pope's efforts, however, you managed to retain your throne."
Elizabeth, her eyes revealing the years of loneliness she had born, turned her head and craned her neck, looking at something behind her.
"Do you see a box on a table beside my bed?" the queen asked, having apparently forgotten about the pope. "Forgive me, but my eyesight has been failing lately."
"I see it."
"There is a letter inside. Would you give it to me?"
From the condition of the pages, the archbishop surmised it was an old and well-read missive. Elizabeth carefully took hold of it, treating it with great care and reverence.
"This was my Sweet Robin's last letter to me," she explained. "It has been at my bedside the past fifteen years since he died."
Sweet Robin, Archbishop Whitgift knew, was the pet name the queen had given to her longtime friend and one-time suitor, Robert Dudley, the late Earl of Leicester.
"I still cannot believe my Sweet Robin is gone," the queen lamented, brought to the point of tears. "I knew him from the time I was a child. Did you know he was imprisoned in the Tower of London at the same time I was? After the Wyatt Rebellion, my half-sister, Mary, feared I was involved in a plot to kill her. Can you imagine how devastating it was for an impressionable young girl to be brought to the Tower through Traitor's Gate? Especially for me as that was the same route my mother took before her eventual execution."
The archbishop frowned. Elizabeth seemed to find it difficult to stay on one subject. He leaned forward and scrutinized the royal personage. Despite the layers of white makeup she applied to her face, he could see the gray, wrinkled skin beneath and the telltale scars from the smallpox she suffered at the age of twenty-nine. The vermillion on her lips and the rouge on her cheeks, made from crushed cochineal beetles, did nothing to disguise the fact that Elizabeth was a sick, old woman, one who did not have long to live. Although her elaborately curled red wig gave somewhat of an impression of youth, he knew that the real hair beneath it was gray and sparse. Even the monarch's once beautiful smile was now marred by missing and rotted teeth, a result of her fondness for sweets.
Suddenly, the candle nearest the queen flickered and went out, and the monarch emitted an involuntary cry of surprise.
"There is no need to worry, Your Highness. It is but a draft that extinguished the light," Archbishop Whitgift declared, quickly relighting the wick with the flame of a nearby candle.
"When I spoke to the troops at Tilbury, I told them I had the heart and stomach of a king. Little did they know I suffer from a fear of the dark and have frequent nightmares and bouts of insomnia. Do you know why I never married?" she asked.
The archbishop took time to consider his answer. He had no wish to offend the queen.
"I imagine it is because you did not wish to have a man rule over you or your country."
"That is true, but I was also afraid."
"Of what, Your Majesty?"
"Childbirth. Oh, I'm not talking about the pain. I could bear that well enough. But it is so ... uncertain. So many things can go wrong. Look at the late Queen Mary. Twice she thought she was with child, only to discover that such was not the case. Her mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon, had at least six pregnancies with only one healthy daughter to show for them. My own mother miscarried two children. Then two of my stepmothers, Queen Jane, Edward's mother, and Queen Catherine Parr, my father's widow, died as a result of childbirth."
"Why do you worry about such things at this time? You have been on the throne for more than forty years. You may not have given England an heir, but none can deny that you have served your country well."
"Darkness and childbirth are but two of the fears I harbor in my heart, archbishop, and neither is the one that haunts me day and night, now as I see the possibility of my own end looming larger and larger in front of me!"
"Are you afraid that your father's break with the Catholic Church and your own excommunication will damn you to the fires of hell?"
Elizabeth's bitter laughter had no hint of amusement.
"Nothing as noble as that, I assure you!"
"What is it then, my queen? What causes you such distress?"
"I cannot sleep due to the nightmares that plague me. When I close my eyes at night, I see him."
"Who is it you see? Your father? The Earl of Leicester? The pope?"
"I know not his name, for he has no face," Elizabeth explained. "He is a tall, massive brute of a man, dressed all in black with a mask of similar color covering his face. His dark eyes, lacking all sign of human emotion, peer menacingly at me through the slits in the fabric. He speaks not a word, but I know he is waiting for me to bend over and put my head on the block."
"Are you talking about an executioner?"
"Yes."
"But you are the Queen of England. He could not harm you."
"My mother was queen, but her crown did not save her."
"That is different. Your father was the ruling monarch and your mother only the queen consort when she was put to death. But you are the sovereign; no one has the power to condemn you."
Elizabeth seemed not to hear the archbishop's argument. An expression of terror transformed her face as she stared at phantoms visible only through her eyes.
"There are so many headless victims of his cruel decapitation. Their hands reach out for me. Perhaps it is my head they want," she cried, her frail, aged hands clutching the elaborate ruff at her neck.
"It is but your imagination, Your Majesty," Whitgift assured her. "There is no one here but you and me."
"My mother's was not the only Boleyn head to fall. There was also that of George, her brother, and his wife, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. So many executions, so much blood spilled, so many severed heads."
Elizabeth temporarily fell silent, and her body slumped forward slightly as though drained of all its energy.
"Does Your Majesty wish me to leave so that you can get some rest now?"
"There is no rest for me."
It was a voice of defeat, one completely void of hope.
"When my brother, Edward, lay dying, he named our cousin Jane Grey as his successor. She was queen for only nine days before Mary deposed her and later condemned both Jane and her young husband, Guildford Dudley, to execution."
"What have these deaths to do with you, Your Majesty?" Whitgift asked, becoming increasing frustrated by the queen's morbid ramblings.
"The headless ghosts of that unfortunate young couple haunt me as does the spirit of Queen Katherine Howard, another wife my father condemned to the axe as he did Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, a harmless old woman whose only crime was having been born into the Plantagenet family. These are accompanied by the hundreds of others whose names I do not know or cannot recall."
"But their blood is on your father's hands, not yours."
"Think you not, good sir, that I have blood on my own hands?"
The archbishop hoped the queen's mea culpa might soothe her conscience and restore her peace of mind, allowing her to fall asleep.
"Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, died by my command. He was not only my Sweet Robin's godson, but he was my cousin, the grandson of Mary Boleyn, my mother's sister."
"Essex was a traitor, tried and convicted his peers. The fault for his death lies solely on his own shoulders."
"Let us not forget Mary Stuart, the tragic Queen of Scotland," Elizabeth continued. "She was another cousin of mine, the granddaughter of my father's sister, Margaret Tudor. Oh, don't bother trying to defend my actions. I know that as long as Mary lived, she was a danger to me and my crown. My Catholic subjects would have liked nothing better than to have her placed on my throne. Still, I condemned her to die despite the fact that she was my blood relative and an anointed queen. After being forced to flee Scotland, Mary came to England to seek my protection, and I had her beheaded."
The archbishop held his tongue, believing the queen was beyond listening to reason. After several minutes of silence, Elizabeth returned to the subject of her late mother, Anne Boleyn.
"I was not yet three years of age when my mother was executed. Growing up, I could not remember what she looked like, and all portraits of her were taken down at my father's command. Sometimes I dream I am a baby, tiny and defenseless, in my mother's arms. I look up and see a blood-stained dress, the ripped flesh of her neck and no head. That's the bizarre aspect of my dreams. There are bodies aplenty but no heads. Where do you think they've gone to?"
Elizabeth turned in Whitgift's direction and let out a blood-curdling scream.
"It's you!" she cried, seeing not the Archbishop of Canterbury but a sweaty, dirty muscular body whose face was hidden behind a black mask.
The Tower Hill executioner raised his strong, massive right arm, stretched out his hand and pointed his index finger at the trembling monarch. The queen, too ill and exhausted to move, sat quivering at his feet as he rose and stood above her. Unable to bear the hideous apparition any longer, Elizabeth closed her eyes.
The door to the queen's bedchamber suddenly opened. It was Lady Catherine Carey again.
"Your Majesty," she announced, her voice echoing in the silent room, empty except for the frail, old queen. "The archbishop has arrived."
John Whitgift entered the bedchamber and found the queen sitting upright on the floor, propped up by cushions, fully dressed and wearing her red wig and white makeup. He spoke to her but received no reply. Realizing the ailing monarch would not last through the night, he called for her attendants to join him in his vigil beside her deathbed. Not one of those in the room with the dying ruler could see the Angel of Death who had entered the bedchamber earlier in the evening in the guise of the Archbishop of Canterbury and later appeared to Elizabeth as the executioner of the Tower of London. He, too, waited for the queen to take her last breath.
In the early morning hours of March 24, Elizabeth's head—still firmly attached to her neck—nodded forward and came to rest on her stiff lace ruff. Gloriana, the Queen of England was dead. Her soul, no longer a prisoner of its time-ravaged body, was free from guilt and fear at last.
The ever-patient Angel of Death, in claiming his prize, announced to the unhearing ears of the mourners gathered around their beloved monarch, "Sic transit gloria mundi: thus passes the glory of the world."
The Lady Cat, Salem's Tudor ancestor, liked to chase mice around Hampton Court Palace.
