The Last Tudor

GREENWICH PALACE,

SUMMER 1564

Elizabeth summons me to her bedchamber as she is dressing for dinner. She is seated before her table; her mirror of Venetian glass is before her, her red wig planted on its stand, candles all around her while her ladies meticulously, carefully paint her face with ceruse. She remains perfectly still, like a marble statue, as the mixture of white lead and vinegar is spread flawlessly from her hairline to her neck and down to her breasts. Nobody even breathes aloud. I freeze like all the other statues in the room until she opens her eyes, sees me in the mirror, and says, without moving her lips where the ceruse is drying, “Lady Mary, look at this.”

Obedient to the downward cast of her eyes, I step forward and when she blinks her permission, I take up the little book that is open before her.

The title is the Monas Hieroglyphica and the author is John Dee. It seems to be dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor and the long preface challenges the reader to consider that the symbols of the planets are meaningful in themselves, and can be read as a language or as a code.

I look up and meet Elizabeth’s dark gaze in the mirror. “Look through it,” she orders through her closed lips. “What do you think?”

I turn the small pages. They are covered with designs and astronomical symbols and tiny print explaining what each one means, and how each fits with each other. I can see that there are some mathematical pages, demonstrating the connection between the symbols, and some that look more like philosophical writing, or even alchemy.

“I can’t understand it at first sight,” I say frankly. “I should have to study it for many days to understand it. I am sorry, Your Majesty.”

“I can’t understand it either.” Elizabeth exhales and a puff of white powder blows against the mirror. “But I think it is an extraordinary work. He brings together the symbols of the ancients, and the studies of the Muslims—he speaks of a universal world that exists alongside this one, behind this one, that we can sense but rarely see. But he thinks that these symbols describe it, and there is a language that can be learned.”

I shake my head in bewilderment. “I could read it carefully, if you wish, and write a digest,” I offer.

She smiles only slightly, so as not to crack the paint. “I shall read it with the author himself,” she says. “He is at my command. But you can sit and listen to our learned conversation, if you wish. I just wanted to see what you made of it, at first sight.”

“I have not had the privilege of your learning,” I say tactfully. “But I should be glad to know more. If I might listen to you, I am sure I would understand more.”

“But I hear on all sides that your sister Jane was such a scholar,” she says. “I hear that Roger Ascham is telling everyone that she was the greatest scholar of her time. He’s writing a book memorializing her. Everyone seems to want to publish these days—don’t they have enough to do?”

“He met her only once or twice,” I say, swallowing the desire to defend Jane against this old jealousy. “He hardly knew her.”

“I studied with the queen Kateryn Parr, too, remember,” Elizabeth says, brooding over long-ago rivalries.

“And I,” says Lady Margaret Douglas from the back of the room, desperate to join in and remind Elizabeth of her kinship. Elizabeth does not even turn her head.

“I am sure she never read anything like this book by Dr. Dee,” I say, trying to return Elizabeth to the present.

“Yes,” she says. “I daresay she would not have understood it.”

They paint her lips and darken her eyelashes and her eyebrows. They drop belladonna into her eyes to make them darken and sparkle. I stand holding the book, waiting to see if I am dismissed. This is not my night to serve her; it is not my night to paint the whited sepulcher that is this old queen. Tonight I should be free to do what I wish; but she keeps me here while she worries if I am clever enough to understand something that is unclear to her, fretting that my long-dead sister was a better scholar.

“At any rate, you don’t think it is heresy?” She rises from the table and they hold the skirt of her gown to her feet so that she can step in, and they can draw it up and tie it at her waist.

“I could not give an opinion,” I say guardedly. “Your Majesty would be the best judge of that. But I have always heard you speak well of John Dee.”

“I have,” she confirms. “And I am glad he has come back to England with such learning! I shall start to read his book tomorrow. You may join us.”

I curtsey as if I am most grateful. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I shall look forward to learning from you both.”

John Dee, dark-eyed, dark-gowned like a scholar, is surrounded by papers. Each one scrawled with a symbol, one pointed to the other, each one annotated with a dozen little notes. I see that he draws little hands with an accusing finger towards a paragraph that he wants us to note well. Elizabeth, his book open on her lap, sits among this scholarly storm, her eyes bright with attention. Thomasina, like an exquisitely dressed lapdog, kneels at her feet. I sit on a stool to one side; I will never cringe on the floor while Elizabeth sits.

John Dee speaks of the symbols of the stars: whatever is shown in the heavens is matched by what happens on the earth. “As above, so below,” he says.

“So can you foretell the marriages of princes?” Elizabeth asks.

“With great accuracy, if I had their dates, time, and location of their birth, which would tell me their astral house,” Dee replies.

“Is that not astrology?” I ask him, warningly.

He nods at my caution. “No, for I am not looking to foretell harm,” he says. “It is illegal to foretell the death of a prince, but it is harmless to foresee their happiness.” He turns his bright look on Elizabeth. “May I choose the best day for your marriage, as I did for your coronation?”

Elizabeth laughs affectedly. “Not mine, good philosopher. You know that I am not that way inclined. I have just been forced to disappoint the archduke Ferdinand. I told him I would rather be a spinster milkmaid than a married queen!”

“Celibacy is a calling,” John Dee replies, and I fight to keep my face grave at the thought of Elizabeth as a nun. I don’t dare to look at Thomasina, who keeps her head down.

At a little distance from our charmed circle the ladies sigh with boredom and shift position. The courtiers stand against the walls, talking among themselves, and one or two lean back against the paneling for weariness. Nobody is allowed to sit, though John Dee has been reading from his book for two hours.

Dee takes up another page and shows it to the queen as William Cecil enters the room quietly and bows.

“Forgive the interruption to your studies,” he says in a low voice. “But you wanted to know as soon as the Queen of Scots gave permission for Lady Margaret Douglas’s husband to enter Scotland.”

The boy my pretty kinsman Henry Stuart, yawning in a corner, catches the whisper of his mother’s name and looks up, but Elizabeth and Cecil are head-to-head.

“Queen Mary has never agreed?” she exclaims, hiding her beam behind a painted fan.

Cecil bows. “She has.”

She takes his sleeve and pulls him closer. Only Thomasina and I can hear their whispered conference. “But I only asked because I was certain she would refuse him admission to his Scots lands,” she whispers. “I only asked in order to distract and trouble Mary while she was negotiating with Don Carlos of Spain.”

“You have won more than you intended, then,” Cecil says smoothly. “You have outwitted her. For she has given permission to both the Earl of Lennox and his son to enter Scotland, and as papists they are certain to divide her from her Protestant advisors. Shall they go, or would it be safer to keep the youth here?”

Elizabeth beckons to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a fair-headed boy as beautiful as a girl. He is a cousin of mine, since he is the son of Lady Margaret Douglas, but I can’t say we share much family feeling. I have never liked his mother, who revels in Elizabeth’s unfairness—she goes free while my sister is imprisoned; her stock rises while my sister’s falls. I swear that she thinks of herself as heir to the throne while everyone knows that it should be Katherine.

Henry Stuart himself came back from France to serve like a little bird in the cage of court: he warbles away to please the queen but the cage door never opens. His mother would put him anywhere that he might be seen: she thinks he is irresistible. It is an open secret that she hoped he would marry Mary Queen of Scots, but the queen managed to resist his rosy-lipped promises in the first days of her widowhood. Now he bows low to Elizabeth, and he nods to me; but we neither of us waste much time on the other. He is a vain young man with little interest in any woman of any size. What he knows to perfection is how to please older indulgent women who enjoy the company of a pretty boy, like his mother or the queen. All he likes for himself is to get drunk and range around the town looking for trouble with other pretty boys. Either way, I do not attract his attention, and he does not waste any on me.

“You may tell your father that he has his passport from the Queen of Scots, at my request,” Elizabeth says to Henry Stuart. He flushes like a girl and drops to one knee. Elizabeth smiles on him. “Will you want to go to Scotland with him?” she asks.

“Not to leave you!” he exclaims, as if his heart might break. “I mean, forgive me, I spoke too swiftly. I will do whatever you command, whatever my father commands. But I don’t want to leave this court for another. Does one go from the sun to the moon?”

“You will have to go, if your father needs you,” Elizabeth rules.

His eyes shine as he flicks his long fringe out of his eyes; he is as adorable as a golden spaniel puppy. “May I not stay?”

Elizabeth reaches out to him and sweeps the blond locks from his rose-petal face. “Yes,” she says indulgently. “I cannot spare you. Your father, Lord Lennox, shall go and settle his business on his lands and you shall stay safe as a little bird in the nest with me.”

Cecil raises his eyebrows at the queen’s doting tone, and says nothing. Henry Stuart presumes to catch Her Majesty’s hand and presses it to his lips. Elizabeth smiles and allows him to take the liberty.

“I shall never leave you,” he swears. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Certainly, I know that he won’t, for Thomas Keyes has orders not to let him out of the gate. But this is the masque of courtly love, and that is more important than any mundane truth.

“I know you never will,” Elizabeth purrs, like a fat cat with the pleasure of his attention.

“I am not like Robert Dudley! Isn’t he going to Scotland to marry the queen?” Darnley asks, dropping poison on the sugarloaf.

Elizabeth’s face convulses under the paint. “He goes for love of me,” she rules.