Elizabeth I (60 page)

Lent began, slow, creeping Lent. In Catholic countries wild carnivals snaked their way through streets and bawdy clowns entertained crowds; masked men seduced young women who pretended not to know them. But here in Protestant England, we contented ourselves with using up the butter and eggs that were forbidden during Lent, along with meat. On the Tuesday before Lent began, households ate pancakes all day. In some towns there were pancake races, housewives running with skillets, tossing pancakes. Then stretched the dreariest, drabbest days of the year, the sparkling cold of winter and snow gone, the green of spring not yet here. It was a time of quiet reflection. If anyone had a tendency to brood, Lent would bring it out. The religious said this was their favorite season.

Burghley had worsened over the winter and made many apologies for skipping council meetings. I worried about him, as one always does about the elderly. He had been failing, little by little, for a long time. But I would not allow myself to envision my government without him. I was not a brooder; had I been, I never could have survived so long. I needed Burghley. He must rally; he must go on. My right arm could not lose its strength.

After five weeks of Lent, Holy Week, leading up to Easter, arrived. I knew all the services by heart, but each year I heard something different in them. Palm Sunday: the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was hailed by ecstatic crowds. He was the people's hope, their Messiah. By Wednesday his disciple Judas was making arrangements to betray him. By Thursday he was having his farewell meal with his disciples. Here in England that day was called Maundy Thursday and there was a curious custom attached to it, a ceremony in which the monarch washed the feet of as many poor people as his or her age and distributed twenty shillings to each of them as well as gifts of food and clothing. As I was in my sixty-fourth year, there would be sixty-four candidates. It was like to be a long ceremony.

It was held in the afternoon in the chapel royal at Whitehall, Archbishop Whitgift presiding. I wore a suitably dark gown, with removable sleeves so that I could plunge my arms freely into the deep silver basin of warm, scented water. The sixty-four poor women were seated on stools before the altar steps, and all had removed their shoes. I looked them up and down—they were young, middle-aged, and old, to represent all the stages of life. To be chosen was a high honor; after all, there were many more than sixty-four poor in the realm, and this year in particular.

Whitgift read the Scripture that described the origin of the custom. Before the Last Supper, Jesus had washed his disciples' feet, over the protests of Peter, who had refused to let Jesus perform the rite. Jesus had said, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” At that the impulsive Peter had cried that he should wash not only his feet but all of him.

The ceremony was supposed to teach humility on both sides. I had to kneel before each woman, take her feet, wash them, and then kiss them. It was a very intimate act. The feet are oddly private. We shake hands, but no one touches our feet. One by one I took them in my hands. Some were sleek and calloused, others bony. Some felt like claws. Only one young girl had soft insoles, and I knew her hard life would soon change that. As I handled each foot, I could feel my coronation ring pressing against the flesh, like a kiss. Each touch sealed the vow I had made in wedding myself to my people, one at a time.

There was no sound but the splashing of the water and the words I spoke to each in turn, commending them to God and reminding them to obey the great commandment that Jesus had given on this occasion, to love one another. I dried each foot and then passed on to the next person. Afterward the gifts would be distributed and we would part. I would never forget them; even though I might never see or talk to them again, they would remain a part of me, as Jesus had said. It was a great mystery how that happened, but it did.

The next day, Good Friday, the most solemn of the year, was dark and overcast, fitting the occasion. I could remember the old customs of rigorous fasting, creeping to the cross, and children dragging figures of Judas through the streets to be thrown on a bonfire. No one would wash clothes, as blood might spot them, and blacksmiths would not shoe horses, because they refused to work with nails that day. Fishermen considered it bad luck to put to sea, and miners would not go down into the mines. Now the preachers tried to dispel all this as popish superstition, but it was not so easily cast off.

When I came to the throne, England had just gone through three wrenching religious changes in only a quarter century. First my father had brutally broken a thousand years of loyalty to Rome and founded his own national church. Then my brother had imposed a radical Protestantism on the land. Next my sister had sought to annul all these changes and restore Roman Catholicism. So when I became Queen, the nation was dizzy from this religious whirligig. My “Elizabethan Settlement,” as it was called, was meant to be a compromise and stop these violent changes. Like all compromises, it left elements on both sides unsatisfied.

The most fervent Puritans sought to ban all church calendar observances, declaring each Sunday the same. Some of them refused to celebrate either Easter or Christmas and would spend Good Friday working as usual. But they had made little dent in popular practice. If every day were the same, life would quickly grow tedious. Even nature varied the seasons.

Their Catholic brethren, on the other hand, would spend today in prayer and meditation, counting their forbidden papal-blessed rosary beads, perhaps even suffering with a hair shirt. Come Easter morning, both Catholics and Puritans had all better be found at the services of the Church of England, or pay a stiff fine.

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.

Some of the richer Catholic families, the ancient, noble ones, were wealthy enough to pay the fines week after week, but the ordinary man was not. Gradually, through rote attendance, he began to adhere to the new faith and forget the old. There was another factor as well: Most people did not care to squander their money paying religious fines, so all but the most stubborn and devout spared themselves that unnecessary expense. The memories of religious practice before 1558 were fading, and only the rabid Puritans and most stubborn Catholics continued to resist the Church of England.

When I was a child, the city and countryside were dotted with the empty shells of the monasteries. They had been so recently closed that the nation had not had time to absorb them. Many were quickly sold for private use and converted into homes; some were turned into parish churches. But others lingered on the landscape, their roofs stripped of lead, their stones plundered, their walls fallen. Even today there were some whose ruined arches looked like ribs against the sky, skeletons left unburied.

There was no denying that with the disappearance of the monks and nuns, a font of charity had vanished. The poor were left to wander and fend for themselves; the welcoming monasteries were now as derelict as they. The alms boxes were gone, the wayfarers' dole ceased. The answer to this was not to bring back the monasteries, as some had suggested, but for the state to assume these duties. That was what the upcoming parliament must address.

Most of the monastic ruins in London had been cleared, but there still remained, near Aldgate, what was left of Holy Trinity Priory, once the grandest foundation in the city. I decided to have a prayer service there, as a reminder that the ruins had been neglected long enough. The land should be used, even if the buildings were beyond redemption.

We wended our way through the London streets, going up Cornhill and past the Royal Exchange building, thence along Leadenhall Street. The city was quiet and few were out, as if in deference to the awful remembrance of the day. No one crowded around crying out “God Save the Queen!” and “Our Blessed Queen!” I saw a few curious eyes looking out the windows, a few tentative hand waves. Then we were there, at the great gray relic of the order of Augustinian canons.

The roof was long gone, and the floor of the nave had been stripped of its marbles and brasses. Water lay in puddles in the sinking, uneven stones, where weeds and seedlings sprouted between the cracks. The windows were gaping holes, no glass remaining. Birds nested in the high crevices, and straw and mess in corners bespoke both human and animal vagrants. I had brought my chaplain to lead the private prayers, as well as some of my women. As we walked between the stumps of pillars, the grayness of the day and the grayness of the flooring making for no shadows, our footfalls echoed.

Once this nave had reverberated with chants; now it was silenced.

“Please direct our prayers,” I told the chaplain. “This is a fitting place to be on Good Friday. It reminds us that all our human plans may lead us to nothingness.”

We could see traces of the base of the great altar, and my chaplain stood before it, opening his prayer book. He bowed his head and then read, “Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed....”

The short but affecting service over, we left to make our way back through London. Rain was threatening, the roiling, dark clouds puckering in the sky over the unprotected nave. The darkness of noon in Galilee years ago was being reenacted.

I wished we had come in the royal barge; it would have been a quicker trip back. But I had wanted to give my bargemen a rest on this day. So we would have to ride back through the quiet streets and hope the rain held off. Turning out of the Holy Trinity grounds—and they were extensive, as the monastery had had cloisters and kitchens, bakehouses, brewhouses, workshops, dormitories, and refectories—we headed west toward St. Paul's. Abutting the priory grounds was the church of St. Katharine Cree, where my dear Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon lay, as well as, reputedly, Hans Holbein, who had perished in the plague in 1543 and been hastily buried like so many others. So there lay the man who had given the world the image of my father with his hands on his hips and his legs spread wide, in an unmarked grave.

Had we hugged the wall to go west, we would have found the grounds of another former abbey, St. Augustine's. But this one had been thoroughly digested by the city and, keeping only the name “the Papey” as a memento, was a place where ordinary men made their homes. Walsingham had lived there, as well as Thomas Heneage of my Privy Council and Thomas Gresham, who founded the Royal Exchange.

Turning left on Cornhill Street, we passed the poultry, mercer's, and other markets, closed now. Swinging toward the sprawling grounds of St. Paul's, we saw the Eleanor Cross at Cheapside standing guardian over the cross-roads. It was as tall as a two-story building and impossible to miss. I had always loved the Eleanor Crosses and hoped to one day see all twelve of them. King Edward I had set them up three hundred years ago to mark the overnight resting places of his queen's funeral cortege from Lincoln to London. I brushed aside the knowledge that if I truly meant to see all twelve, I had best start the journey soon; only two were in London. The crosses served as landmarks and gathering places wherever they were. Farmers brought sacks of food, hunters game, and dog breeders their dogs, hawking their wares from the cross's base. Today, of course, it was empty. But tattered notices still clung to the pillar, which served as a posting place. They flapped and fluttered like flags. I asked one of my guards to dismount and inspect them. I was curious about them. He read several, frowned, and returned, shaking his head.

“Just trash, Your Majesty,” he said.

That meant he did not wish to disturb me about it. “What sort of trash?” I asked.

“Low, ruffian sort,” he said.

Were prostitutes openly selling themselves? At this tender memorial to love? Or was it mercenaries, assassins? Smugglers? “Let me see,” I ordered him.

He ripped a few off and brought them to me. Sure enough, there was a testimonial to the expertise and skill of one Jill, working out of Mother Fool's tavern; a soldier recently returned from Cádiz who would fight for anyone's quarrel, and a political one—calling for the Earl of Essex to be lauded and celebrated. It also wished him to be elevated, to be named my heir. There was a sketch of him with his new beard and a ballad lamenting that the Queen did not appreciate him.

“Take them all,” I ordered him. I would examine them later. The Essex movement was gaining ground, so it seemed.

St. Paul's was the one place swarming with people, but it always was. Not only were services held inside but it was also a setting for many a business rendezvous. People who preyed on the hapless, such as pickpockets and beggars, gathered there. Outside, the bookstalls were discreetly closed, but the hawkers were still prowling about selling things less legal.