Gloriana's Torch Read online

  Four hundred years before the National Trust, the Queen permits hoi polloi to come chattering into her palace partly so they can see her queenly display of magnificence, but also because she cannot be so free with her physical presence as she was. A few years ago, the Dutch leader, William of Orange was assassinated by a young Belgian priest who walked up to him with a pistol and shot him. The Queen herself has been the object of a number of assassination plots, surviving one or two by the skin of her teeth. She wants her subjects to be intimate with her in a way that does not actually risk her life, hence the daft mummery of the Queen’s Dinner. Her gentlemen eat the delicate meal afterwards and have quite forgotten the taste of hot food, which is a good thing since many of them have bad teeth from eating too much sugar. But this will be the last such occasion for a while, as there are more important things to do.

  On this day, there are more than ever of the sightseers because everyone knows that the Armada is on its way.

  However, nobody knows exactly when it will arrive, as radar and satellite surveillance are waiting another four hundred years for their invention. So there’s tension in the air. The English are rather looking forward to meeting and beating the filthy Spaniards, since they are a bellicose people and have boundless (if often unwarranted) faith in their fighting men. They have even more faith in their navy, which is more reasonable, as it has been transformed by John Hawkins, the first completely honest and experienced seaman to be in charge of the Admiralty for generations. So honest is he that he put two Negroes in chains on his coat of arms as his proud boast that he made his fortune out of the slave trade and therefore had no need to take bribes.

  London is buzzing with rumours, the trained bands are out training every morning at Smithfield, guns, swords, armour and gunpowder have all tripled in price and quite a few people are quietly buying gold to bury in their gardens.

  Behind doors guarded by men who know every face that might have business there, the Queen is the apex of the Kingdom. She must seem accessible but not actually be so. No commoner is likely to get close to her without a very expensive appointment, except when she is on a summer progress.

  So you must become a god again to pass through the walls. They are decorated and sumptuous in the places for common consumption, but whitewashed and raw in the warren of corridors behind the public parts, rather like backstage at a theatre. The corners are urine-stained as young men, who are allocated a daily ration of one gallon of beer, follow their natural inclinations. Ignore the hurrying servants carrying food, clothing, books, a hawk. Up one floor and here is a long panelled gallery that overlooks a garden.

  Turn aside, pass through the door where another young man in buttercup yellow taffeta stands, hungover and bored. The Queen’s audience chamber is lined with walls of stretched white satin, hung with caged and busily singing songbirds. Sitting on velvet cushions along one wall are half a dozen ladies and maids-in-waiting, mostly busy with embroidery or winding wool, chatting quietly. No servants these, they are the Queen’s companions and usually related to the chief men of the kingdom, although their lives are tales of tedium, enlivened by gossip, competitive dressing and a little light, furtive dalliance with the crowds of young men who hanker after them. Three lapdogs, named Francis, Eric and Felipe, after discarded suitors of the Queen, snore in a hairy heap on a cushion. Two more young men in crimson silk doublets, holding halberds, stand behind the throne, also bored, hungover and rather tense. More men are standing around the walls pretending to have business there, including servants of the French, Scottish and Venetian embassies.

  The Queen’s throne has a canopy over it of red brocade enlivened with lions, and is raised on a dais. At last, a fanfare blares. The Queen enters, white-damasked girls rearranging her train, mounts to the throne and sits on it. She has a Tudor’s eye for appropriate ceremony and knows that important news is on its way. The beacons have been burning since the day before yesterday and the man sent post from Plymouth by Drake should be arriving at any time.

  Therefore she is clad in carefully thought-out stark black and white, with turquoise ribbons and the jewel on her sleeve of the Serpent Wisdom. Normally there would also be a midget attending her, Thomasina de Paris, a muliercula in a startling elaborate gown of crimson and gold, trotting behind the pretty girls and waiting while they do their service to the Queen, before quietly coming to sit at the Queen’s feet, like a very gaudy cat. However, at the moment, Thomasina’s cushion on the dias is untenanted.

  What does the Queen know, now, as the Armada of her enemies (with 129 ships remaining to them after the storms of Biscay) travel stately-fashion up the English Channel in their formal crescent formation, the winds for once in their favour? What is she thinking?

  Since we are gods, not historians, we can prise apart the wings of her brows and look directly into the swirling, ten-dimensional maze of her mind.

  Thomasina features in there, causing anxiety by her continued absence on a most dangerous mission, for the Queen loves her dearly. Two men who have done great service to the Queen in the past, David Becket and Simon Ames, also known as Simon Anriques, loom large in her thinking for she wonders where they are and how they are faring. Simon she thinks must be dead, but Becket … Who can tell?

  Ames’s faithful wife, Rebecca, is another main source of concern, although her tall black servant Merula is not. The Queen shares the mental blindness common to most Europeans of her time, and later, which cannot quite apply the definition human to someone with a skin coloured ebony.

  What else preoccupies the Queen as she waits for news, as history sways undecided at a branching point? Is history, like a god, watching her?

  Historians swim happily in the warm, dim waters of history, with documents filing past their noses, sergeant-majored by the card-file index or the database. History is a story they see from above. But when it is happening, history is only current events. And what Elizabeth had been looking at month after month as she played her deadly game of correspondence chess with Philip II of Spain was the view from her bedchamber window, whether of Whitehall or Greenwich or Nonsuch or Hampton Court, looking out over whichever Privy Garden it happened to be. She could not see the vast activity of an empire diverting practically all its resources, its stored food and munitions, its money and able-bodied men, to fit out their original 150 ships of a motley variety against her. If anyone can be said to have seen it, that was the monkish King, Philip himself, battlemented by paper in his small study at San Lorenzo, now known to us as the Escorial.

  What came to Elizabeth was hidden in signs and symptoms. She must diagnose her situation from letters written by men hoping for money, from the drone of one man making a report of what another man had told him he had seen in Antwerp, at the Hague, in Lisbon.

  The idea of the Armada, of the attempt by Philip to take England by force when he had failed humiliatingly to take it by marriage, had hung over her like a Damoclean sword (as she herself remarked) for ten years and more. Was it true? Did it exist? Was there really such an attempt or was it all a bluff? Lord Treasurer Burghley certainly said it was just Philip doing what later generations would call sabre-rattling.

  Important information was often blown in accidentally. A fishing vessel had seen ships in the mist … Merchants had had their ships confiscated at … Sir Francis Drake’s famous attack on Cadiz in 1587 had been something of a reconnaissance in force as well as a barrel-burning expedition. What he had seen convinced most of the Privy Council but not Burghley, who evidently could not understand why the King of Spain would want to do such a silly thing. Letters came from Sir Horatio Palavicino, her banker, spin-merchant and Mr Fixit at the Hague where the money-markets were: Your Majesty’s credit is halved because the money-men fear you will lose your kingdom. The Pope will give a million ducats to the King of Spain when Spanish troops land in England. The harvest is poor.

  Some of her actions are still a mystery. Why, for instance, did she continue the peace talks at Dunkirk all the time the A
rmada was fitting out and indeed until well after it had sailed? It’s true her old friend and ‘Eyes’, the Lord Treasurer Burghley was comfortably certain, as a cool and rational politician, that the whole Armada was a bogeyman, which would vanish into a puff of smoke if nicely spoken to and negotiated with. He had even sent his second son, Robert Cecil, to lead the delegation. Why did Elizabeth humour him with peace commissioners for so long? Did she believe it too?

  More papers, more words trapped like butterflies in cobwebs of paper. And the Queen reads, listens, questions personally, hears testimony gathered by others, in a strange sense forced to be a historian of her own current events, trying to tease out late and inaccurately, what exactly was happening, had happened. Remember, the world was big then. It could take two days to get word from York. Think what can happen in two days.

  She and her councillors had made the best preparations they could, mustered the country’s trained bands, stockpiled shot and powder, poured money into the country’s floating wooden walls. They were a small poor nation, compared to Spain, but … There are no guarantees in war. For a start, Elizabeth and her people – notoriously inefficient, drunken, unruly and inexperienced soldiers on land – were famously good at little raids, crazy plans and seacraft.

  But it all had to wait until the Armada came. The news had arrived that the Armada had left Lisbon – it came to Dr Nunez first, perhaps by pigeon, and Dr Nunez rose from his dinner and went round the corner to Sir Francis Walsingham’s house at Seething Lane to tell him. And then the news came that the Armada had been scattered by a storm and was in Corunna to refit. And then …

  The tension slowly increased as the rumours solidified into fact, as the papers galloped into the sorting rooms of Seething Lane and Whitehall … Still, what Elizabeth saw was only the ceaseless swirl of Court faction and fashion, the gradual victory of spring over winter in her garden and then of early summer over spring. The weather was terrible, cold, stormy, rainy, but still the roses responded with buds.

  At last! The Armada was sighted off Cornwall and the beacons lit, the land taking fire at its highest points from bearing to bearing, smoke rising in the day and fire prickling the land by night. At each place, a delay while watchers debated over what they had seen, saw confirmation from others in the network being lit, and took the slowmatch from their firepot to light their own high metal basket of brushwood and logs. Luckily, it wasn’t raining that day. By evening, the news was in London and the capital was in an uproar, the Queen’s court the very slow central processor from which orders radiated out across the kingdom.

  And now a man gallops into the court gate on a lathered horse. He is met and escorted by Sir Walter Ralegh himself, resplendent in vibrant red silk brocade, straight through the Court, all the people seeing the young man’s exhaustion, his mud-soaked boots and hose, his hair wet with sweat, turning, whispering, knowing why he is there. He has ridden post 200 miles, all the way from Plymouth to bring Her Majesty the true word on the Armada. This was an athletic feat like marathon-running, requiring extraordinary fitness, horsemanship and organisation. Riding post meant that every ten or fifteen miles you changed horses, so you could keep the pace at a canter or even a gallop for long distances. Apart from carrier pigeons, it was the fastest anyone could carry the quick-spoiling fish of military information.

  Other young men are already behind him on the road, carrying further messages, small fast pinnaces likewise beating eastwards up the south coast, milking the land – and sea-breezes to carry their precious information to the place for which it was intended as fast as they possibly could. With luck, judgement, impeccable fitness and no accidents you could manage as much as a hundred miles a day.

  Overwhelmed at being led by the Captain of the Queen’s Guard the young man hurries drymouthed through the whispering passages, through the heavily guarded narrow corridor leading to the Queen’s private chambers, up the stairs to the gallery. At the door to the Presence Chamber, Ralegh stops, reaches in his doublet sleeve pocket and holds out a chased silver flask.

  ‘Drink,’ he says with a nod and the young man accepts gratefully, gulps down excellent aqua vitae.

  Ralegh leads him in, announces him and the young man drops to both his knees in front of the Queen before hurriedly fumbling out the sealed package from the Admiral of England, Lord Charles Howard of Effingham (not Drake, who was not aristocratic enough). The Queen snatches, tears, scans swiftly.

  It tells a tale of disaster narrowly averted, since the English fleet had been resupplying in Plymouth when the Armada was sighted in Cornwall. With the wind against them, there had been a real risk of their being bottled up in the harbour. If Drake rather than the Duke of Medina Sidonia had been in charge of the Spanish, he would have snatched the all-important advantage of time and place and risked everything on a daring raid into Plymouth pool to attack the Queen’s ships while they were helpless.

  Fortunately, Medina Sidonia had orders not to try any such thing. The Spanish Armada hove-to just outside Plymouth for a Council of War and a Mass of thanksgiving.

  The Queen questions her witness intently, while the messenger kneels desert-lipped before her. Yes, the young man has seen the Spanish ships himself, with his own eyes, most numerous, a dark alien forest laid on the sea, flying alien flags.

  The Queen nods, her eyes darkening, and dismisses him with thanks, then leans back in her throne to reread the Lord Admiral’s packet.

  Being gods we can step backwards, rise above the complex wood and stone of Whitehall, high into orbit where we can reverse time and rifle back through the days, weeks, months, before diving low again and skimming down to the sun-soaked tree-plagued West Coast of Africa.

  But we must be careful. Here they understand gods and have men and women who converse familiarly with the unseen. Here is one who might well see us and know what we are, who can speak to us directly.

  Merula

  The Slave Coast of Africa, Autumn 1587

  If I were as moon-white as you, you would call me a witch. You would torture me with water and weights and burn me with fire. But in my home where we are all dark and beautiful, we respect upside-down people.

  I am not small and weak and slender like your pearl-faced women. I am tall and strong: my arms are like the black oak of your bogs; my legs are like the black fir trees of your forests; my body is as strong as any one of you strange pink men with your little pink manpiece. My breasts are towers of ebony, my face is a sculpture in onyx, my hair a wonder of black velvet.

  Why did I come among the strange hairy ghosts of the cold north? There are no real people there, only you ghost-people with your foul milk skins and your hairy faces bristling red like a hog’s, who wear great citadels of heavy and coloured and beautiful cloth. Do you know how badly you smell?

  I am upside-down, so I do the opposite to everyone else. I came to the compound of my King, my brother, walking in on my hands so that his warriors were afraid to stop me.

  I said, ‘The Portingales and Arabs are bewitching us. They offer things such as cloth and guns for our strong fine men, who stumble in chains to the ports and never return. Surely such an evil is sorcery?’

  My King blinked and shifted his golden collar. Behind him an adviser whispered behind the muzzle of his princely leopard skin.

  (I too have a leopard skin.)

  ‘These men in chains are not my people,’ said the King and flicked at a fly with his whisk. ‘I have never sold any of my people. I only sell foreigners and criminals. Why should I not sell foreigners and criminals to the hairy ghosts?’

  ‘Was my son – your nephew – a foreigner or a criminal?’ I asked coldly and he flinched, began to sweat. He thought I did not know what had happened to the lad, or did not care. Wrong.

  ‘Why do you think I sold him?’ asked my King, cautiously. ‘Why would I do that?’

  Now here was a great hole in his speech where the words ‘I did not do it’ should have been. But he was afraid to lie to me as well. I walked up
and down on my hands in front of him, the breasts that suckled my boy hanging down. Then I jumped and came right-side up, my head rushing with the change, smiled to show him my pointed teeth.

  ‘The spirits told me.’

  Strictly this was a lie because I had found it out from one of his own advisers whom I had made drunk and trusting with magic drinks.

  The other adviser, the one the Arabs have bought, tapped his powder horn and tilted forward his gun. It was one of the few in the kingdom, a thing of great power and witchery. But without its magic powder to eat, it is dead. I had heard a great deal about this powder, I had even smelled and tasted some. It is sickening to taste, but nobody knows how to make it except the hairy ghosts.

  So I bowed and touched the earth with my forehead, only I bowed not to my King but to his gun, his god.

  My brother wanted more of the magic powder the guns eat. Any troublesome young man is a fair exchange for more magic powder. This is why there are no men for my sisters to marry, why they must go to old men and cripples for their children, why the fields are becoming smaller and the crops dwindle. And certainly any foolish young man who talks angrily against the King and has a claim to be King instead will be worth more in gunpowder. Most certainly. No doubt my brother the King felt merciful that he had not killed my boy.

  ‘The hairy ghosts are my friends,’ said my King. ‘The English, the Portuguese, the Spanish. Even the Arabs. We have treaties, we have trade and trade is always good.’ He paused, took a deep breath. ‘I know nothing of your son.’