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---
title: 'Elizabeth and Essex'
metadata:
Author: 'Edward John Thompson'
Keywords: 'history, Elizabeth, Ralegh, Essex, Cecil, court, Spain, victory, defeat, Ireland, Tyrone'
Description: 'Short historical drama of Elizabeth I's relationship with Essex and Ralegh'
taxonomy:
category:
- docs
visible: false
---
## A Play in Four Acts
### Characters
(*in order of appearance*)
+ Lord Burghley
+ Sir Robert Cecil, his son
+ Queen Elizabeth
+ Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
+ Sir Walter Ralegh
+ Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex
+ Maids of Honour
+  Bridges
+  Russell
+  Tracy
+ The Earl of Southampton
+ Sir Christopher Blount
+ Sir Gilly Merrick
+ Sir John Harington
+ Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone
+ Two Pages
+ Officer
+ Despatch Rider
## Act I
*A day in the late autumn,* 1588. *Whitehall, St. James’s Palace: a room in use as the* **Queen’s** *office and sometimes for audience on business. It contains a throne, a table and two chairs. Doors open, right and back.*
[ **Lord Burghley** *and his Son,* **Sir Robert Cecil**, *are seated at the table, with before them papers.* ]
**Burghley**: Is there anything more?
**Robert Cecil**: Sir Francis Drake claims six hundred pounds.
**Burghley** (*placidly*): Drake must pay it himself.
**Robert Cecil**: It is for wine and food supplied to his sick. He says the men would have died without it.
**Burghley**: Drake must pay himself.
**Robert Cecil** (*looking up protestingly*): They served almost starving through ten days of fighting.
**Burghley**: Let us get through the accounts, son.
**Robert Cecil**: Sir John Hawkins wants payment for a thousand pounds’ worth of powder.
**Burghley**: Hawkins must pay it himself.
**Robert Cecil**: Sir Walter Ralegh——
**Burghley**: Ralegh must pay himself. And Ralegh can afford it.
**Robert Cecil**: Then there is our own claim. For shot sent to Dover, on the garrison’s urgent requisition when the Armada entered the Channel.
**Burghley**: We must pay it ourselves.
**Robert Cecil** (*gathering up his papers*): There seems little point in going through the rest of the accounts.
**Burghley**: None whatever. The Queen will pay nothing. (*Restfully.*) And it does not matter! Nothing now matters. England has won her breathing space, (*As* **Robert Cecil** *looks at him questioningly.*) Ten years in which to grow to her strength. It will prove sufficient.
**Robert Cecil**: But what of afterwards?
**Burghley**: Afterwards—no one will care to meddle with us. When once our nation is full grown.
**Robert Cecil**: But will the Queen keep up her Navy for ten years?
**Burghley**: She will not keep it up for ten days, now that she is sure that Spain’s Armada is scattered. A Navy needs money.
**Robert Cecil** (*doubtfully*): Will Europe give us ten years?
**Burghley**: Yes. God has been very good to our Queen. He has made her a legend to her own people and a goblin to her enemies. No one cares to meddle with a goblin—particularly one that controls the tides and winds.
**Robert Cecil**: But the tempests which have broken Spain’s Armada have been out of all nature!
**Burghley**: All that has happened has been out of nature. God has set Elizabeth in a brightness which men will never forget.
(*They start to their feet as the door, right, opens and the* **Queen** *appears. With her is* **Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,** *Commander of her Land Forces: aged* 55, *weak in face and manner, the relic of what was once a handsome physical presence. The two* **Cecils** *kneel.* **Elizabeth** *offers her hand to be kissed.*
**Sir Walter Ralegh,** *Captain of the* **Queen’s** *Guard, follows and takes station at the door, left. The* **Cecils** *rise.*
**Elizabeth**: Accounts, Burghley! When all England is on holiday!
**Burghley**: They are very simple, your Majesty.
**Robert Cecil** (*showing his papers*): Various persons ask for reimbursement, of charges incurred in your Majesty’s service, in the late battles with Spain’s Armada.
**Elizabeth** (*indignantly*): Not one penny! beyond what we ourselves in Privy Council sanctioned before the Armada sailed!
**Robert Cecil**: The war has brought unforeseen expenditure of munitions and food.
**Elizabeth**: Each commander must pay for what he has used.
**Burghley**: That is why, your Majesty, I said the accounts were simple.
**Leicester** (*grandly*): What do accounts matter when God has given your Majesty so great a victory?
**Burghley**: I was telling my son, my Lord—they matter nothing. Nothing at all.
**Leicester**: Not one boatload of Spaniards has come ashore! except as your Majesty’s prisoners!
**Elizabeth**: Walter! (*She summons* **Ralegh** *imperiously.*) Tell Burghley what Carew has written from Ireland.
**Ralegh**: For all their great and terrible ostentation——
**Leicester** (*scornfully*): Spain’s Invincible Armada! Philip’s brag in face of listening Europe!
**Ralegh**: In all their sailing round our Island they have not taken or sunk so much as one ship, bark, pinnace or cockboat of your Majesty’s or your people’s! The seas have dashed them to pieces. Wading ashore in terror and starvation Spain’s warriors have been butchered, like birds that drop to land exhausted. On one beach of less than five miles’ length Carew counted eleven hundred bodies which the waves had cast up. The enemy have suffered miseries to be pitied in any but Spaniards.
[*At the door appears, standing proudly,* **Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex**: *handsome, insolent, self-assured: a boy of twenty.*
**Essex**: (*with a glance of contempt and hostility towards* **Ralegh**) Only traitors could pity the miseries of her Majesty’s enemies!
[ *He strides up to the* **Queen** *and kneels in obeisance.* ]
**Elizabeth** (*exalted—caressing his cheek*): My pretty Robin!
**Essex**: Your most humble—your most happy—adorer!
**Elizabeth** (*fluttered and joyful*): Are you that, Robin? Are you that?
**Leicester**: Your subjects are all your worshippers, madam.
**Essex**: And I the humblest—the most adoring of all! I bring news! of the end of Spain’s Armada!
**Elizabeth**: Ralegh has brought it already. He has news from Ireland.
**Essex**: Doubtless! and from England news of Devon squires anxious to make the most of it, to win your Majesty’s ear! I have news from Spain itself! One-third of their vast Armada has crawled home to safety at last! the men diseased and crying out that your Majesty has Hell itself in your pay!
Your enemy King Philip has shut himself up. No man dare speak with him.
**Ralegh**: If your Majesty will but seize the time, we your servants can complete this victory!
**Robert Cecil**: With an empty treasury, Sir Walter?
**Ralegh** (*eagerly*): Spain herself shall be our treasury while we conquer her. We can beat Spain’s Empire to pieces and make the Castilians kings of figs and oranges—as they were in old times!
**Elizabeth**: Ever war! and still war! This is to fling away happiness when God has set it in our hands! to be enjoyed, not wasted! Why will men always seek for themselves misery upon misery? Have you forgotten the night of fear which darkened all our land?
[ *In the hush which falls* **Burghley’s** *voice is heard speaking solemnly.* ]
**Burghley**: God has raised your Majesty exceedingly high!
[ *The clamour of praise breaks out afresh.* ]
**Leicester**: He has made you divine!
**Essex**: A goddess to us all!
**Ralegh**: To us who serve near your sacred person—a never-ending wonder!
**Essex**: Brightness of our Age! and of all succeeding Ages! O Womanly Perfection! Beauty, which Time, that destroys all else, has God’s leave but to deepen with majesty!
**Burghley** (*rebukingly*): He blew with His winds! And they were scattered! It is God alone Who has wrought this triumph!
**Essex** (*ignoring him*): My life is yours, Lady! (*He kneels impulsively.*) And all I have and am!
**Elizabeth** (*happily*): *All*, Robin?
**Essex** (*with emphasis*): All. Would God it were a thousandfold more, to make the gift worthier!
**Elizabeth**: I will hear the whole of your news, Robin. I will hear it alone with you—as a child who enjoys his own secret happiness.
Burghley, accounts later! Leicester, talk of train-bands and volunteers—later! I must hear alone what Robin has heard from Spain itself!
[ **Burghley** *and* **Leicester** *go out.* ]
Walter, I need no guard while I have my Lord of Essex.
[ **Ralegh** *goes out. The* **Queen** *and* **Essex** *are left alone.* ]
Come, Robin! (*She indicates that he is to sit just below her, on the steps of the throne.*)
**Essex**: His late exultant Majesty of Castille and Arragon—of both Americas and the Indies—now wretched beyond the dreams of those who once feared and loathed him——
**Elizabeth**: Let Philip of Spain rest!
Do you think me all you say, Robin? (*Caresses his cheek.*)
**Essex**: What can any tongue find to utter, that equals your perfection?
**Elizabeth** (*displaying her long famous fingers*): Philip of Spain found these hands lovely—when he was here as my sister’s husband.
**Essex**: An angel in Heaven would find them lovely now! They are the fairest hands in all the world! All Europe so acknowledges.
**Elizabeth**: Do they still speak of them in Europe, Robin?
**Essex**: When I served in the Low Countries, madam—all the talk was that England’s Queen excelled in bodily perfection no less than in perfection of mind and spirit.
**Elizabeth** (*wistfully*): I was once young, Robin.
**Essex**: You are young still, madam. Time has not touched your gracious loveliness. It is the common talk, both among your subjects and your foes, that such a beauty has not before been seen by living men. That is why God has kept your Majesty still our Virgin Queen! Because, all men say, there is no Prince in Christendom who is worthy to possess such a jewel.
**Elizabeth**: Philip himself—since we were speaking of Philip, Robin—desired to wed me.
**Essex**: God has exalted you far above Philip!
**Elizabeth**: Not Philip only. Princes of Spain and France and Germany.
But none of them was to my mind.
**Essex**: Your Majesty was right. I have no opinion of foreigners.
**Elizabeth**: My Councillors said the Queen of England should marry. And for their sake—for England’s sake—I tried to find a man I could love. I could not find one, Robin, out of all these mighty Princes, who did not seem poor and mean beside my own servants. My own glorious servants!
**Essex** (*complacently*): Your Majesty judged rightly. What is the mightiest Prince in all Europe beside one English peer?
**Elizabeth**: And now—since God has given me such a victory——
**Essex**: You are yourself Europe’s mightiest Prince! Where, then, could you find your equal?
**Elizabeth** (*with sudden resolution*): My mind is made up, Robin! I will marry—to please my people!
**Essex**: This decision will give your faithful and loyal people such joy that their adoration of your Majesty will overleap all bounds.
**Elizabeth** (*excitedly*): I will marry, I say. And no foreign Prince! I will marry a noble of my own victorious realm.
**Essex** (*with apparent answering excitement*): Henceforward you are not our Queen! You are England’s Deity! Your temple is wherever there is a true English heart! (*He kisses her hand devoutly.*)
**Elizabeth**: You are young, Robin! A mere boy! But I see you are wise beyond your years!
**Essex**: I have served near your wondrous person. And I know how your faithful people think, for they love me.
**Elizabeth** (*caressing him*): I think everyone must love my own Robin! A boy, yet made knight banneret for valour! on the very field where Philip Sidney died! I think that there Sidney’s spirit became yours, Robin!
**Essex**: This is Sidney’s own sword, madam. To serve you after his death as in his life!
**Elizabeth**: Robin, you must help me! Think of me not as your Queen but as a woman seeking your strength and counsel.
**Essex**: That is my dearest prayer. That God would let me put my whole life at your disposal!
**Elizabeth** (*excitedly*): Is that in truth your prayer, Robin?
**Essex**: Daily, as I rise from slumber and as I retire to rest, this is my petition, that my whole life and being might be yours.
**Elizabeth** (*rising*): Then God has answered my prayers also! Robin, though I am your Queen I am not divine as you say. A Queen must be lonely, Robin.
**Essex** (*growing cautious and courtly*): Your people’s love is always with you, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Yes, but other women have a love that comes closer. Another life, Robin, to which, as the years pass, their own life draws ever nearer, till the two become one life.
**Essex**: How happy would that man be, whom your Majesty should choose out of the number of your loving servants and subjects! to be such a helper, such a companion! your Majesty’s husband!
**Elizabeth**: God has guided me to him, Robin! after all these wasted years of the coming and going of silly Princes! He has opened my eyes to the perfection that lives at my own side!
Do you know whom God has shown me—my own sweet Robin?
**Essex**: Oh, I do, madam!
**Elizabeth**: Then speak, Robin! You have leave to speak the innermost thought of your mind. Have no fear.
**Essex**: It is my Lord of Leicester.
**Elizabeth**: Leicester! (*She is silent.*)
**Essex**: Who else, madam? The Commander of all your armies gathered for this clash with the might of Spain!
**Elizabeth** (*dimly*): Which might our navies scattered—before ever one soldier could come to land! And this was not the least of God’s mercies to my people!
**Essex** (*firmly*): General through all these years of your Majesty’s forces in the Low Countries. Your Majesty’s right hand in all your martial affairs in Europe.
**Elizabeth**: A right hand so nerveless! so feeble!
**Essex**: All Christendom knows with what a devotion he has served and loved you. Through all the thirty years—thirty years, madam——
**Elizabeth**: Need you say that, Robin?
**Essex**: Thirty years, your Majesty, has he watched and fought and lived for you. God knows your subjects will rejoice when they know that your love has fallen at last, and upon one so proved and tested!
**Elizabeth** (*as if stunned*): Leicester! A man twice wedded!
(*She sits down distractedly.*)
**Essex**: A man mature in wisdom and experience.
**Elizabeth** (*slowly*): Your own stepfather, Robin. Then all your words meant nothing!
**Essex**: They meant everything, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Yes. (*Resting her chin on her hands, she stares before her.*) They meant too much, Robin!
[ *The scene fades slowly out into entire darkness. Light opens again on the same scene, at the same time, eight years later, in* 1596. *Two* **Pages** *are standing by the window, right, looking out excitedly; one peers over his fellow’s shoulder.* ]
**First Page**: Can you see what is happening?
**Second Page**: They are lighting a bonfire.
**First Page**: Let me see! (*He presses forward.*)
**Second Page**: A fellow is offering silks and rich hangings for sale!
**First Page**: I saw a couple of soldiers this morning selling nuns’ dresses for anything you chose to give for them. Mobs of sailors were walking about with their arms stuffed with cloth of gold and silver!
**Second Page**: I’m hanged if that fellow isn’t offering an altar cloth for sale!
**First Page**: And isn’t the Queen just savage to think of all the loot our fellows have burnt!
[ *The door opens back, quietly.* **Sir Robert Cecil** *enters unobserved: seeming smaller and more misshapen, as well as older, than on his first appearance: more stoop-shouldered and almost hunchbacked.* ]
Did you hear what Bess called old Burghley yesterday
**Second Page**: No. What was it?
**First Page**: Anything and everything she could put her wicked old tongue to! I was listening—-just off stage! I knew there was going to be some fun!
**Second Page**: How did old Burghley start it?
**First Page**: Why, by talking sense for once.
**Second Page**: I didn’t know old Burghley could do it.
**First Page**: Well, apparently he can.
Just look at that fire, now that it’s fairly got going!
**Second Page**: If it catches that house they’ll burn down half London! (*They press on each other, to see better.*)
**First Page** (*returning to the subject*): Burghley told her she ought to be proud of what our fellows have done at Cadiz. And that Essex deserved anything she could give him or he could get for himself.
**Second Page**: Good for old Burghley!
**First Page**: That wasn’t what Bess said! And when his son put in a word for Walter as well and suggested that
it was time she forgave Ralegh for having dared to notice that Gloriana wasn’t quite as young as she was—well, forty years ago! and that a goddess really wasn’t much use to a fellow (*drawing back the window, he preens himself in his fine court clothes*)—especially a goddess who’s over sixty——
**Second Page** (*awed.*): Did Bob Cecil say all that?
**First Page**: Oh, not in so many words, of course! Bob hasn’t the courage. But he did say it was time she had Ralegh back, especially after what he’s done at Cadiz.
**Second Page**: What had Bess got to say to *that?*
**First Page**: Why, she yelled at him (*he gives a spirited representation*): ‘Little elf! Little elf! be *silent!*’ Then she called old Burghley a lot of things she had forgotten.
**Cecil**: When you young gentlemen have finished your stories (*they jump round in horror and stand to attention*) will you attend to your duties?
Tell her Majesty I await her gracious pleasure as commanded.
**First Page**: Yes, sir. (*Goes out with alacrity.*)
**Cecil**: You might pull back that curtain.
**Second Page**: Yes, sir. (*Pulls back curtain across window.*)
**Cecil**: Now wait in your proper place.
[ **Second Page** *stands at the door, left.* **Cecil** *walks slowly up and down.* ]
Is her Majesty expecting any other Councillor?
**Second Pace**: Your father, sir.
**Cecil**: Ah, yes. Old Burghley.
**Second Page** (*automatically*): Yes, sir.
**Cecil: Is** she expecting anyone else?
**Second Page**: I do not know, sir.
**Cecil**: Is she expecting my Lord of Essex? (*As* **Second Page** *hesitates, he repeats his question sharply.*) I said, Is she expecting my Lord of Essex?
**Second Pace** (*unwillingly*): My Lord of Essex is with her Majesty now.
**Cecil**: What did her Majesty say to my Lord of Essex when he arrived?
**Second Pace**: I was not present, sir.
**Cecil**: No?
**Second Pace**: Her Majesty sent us all outside.
**Cecil** (*stopping in his slow walk: he speaks sternly*): I asked you, What did her Majesty say to my Lord of Essex?
**Second Page** (*after hesitation*): She told my Lord of Essex that he was a traitor.
**Cecil**: And also?
[ *Voices can be heard from the inner door, right, in angry altercation.* **Cecil** *moves towards it and is clearly trying to listen.* ]
**Second Pace**: A fool.
**Cecil**: *And?*
**Second Page**: That he had thrown away her ships and men.
**Cecil**: What did my Lord of Essex answer?
**Second Page**: He said he would wait on her Majesty later.
**Cecil**: *Later?*
**Second Page** (*desperately*): When her Majesty was in a better temper. Her Majesty bade him remain till she had done with him. (**First Page** *re-enters.*)
**First Page**: Her Majesty will speak with you here, sir. My Lord of Essex is coming from audience with her Majesty. (*He resumes his place on duty.*)
**Cecil** (*indicating the door, right*): Wait outside, both of you. Yes, really outside. *Not*—-just off stage—listening!
[ *He shoos them out. The door, right, opens and* **Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex**, *enters: now in the first prime of maturity, his body strong and big yet not unwieldy, his face grave yet eager. He moves and speaks with a mixture of exaltation and extreme exasperation.* ]
**Essex**: I might have known it! That I should find my enemies at her Majesty’s door!
**Cecil**: It is the proper place, my Lord—not for your enemies, if you have any, but for her Majesty’s Privy Councillors. Of whom, my Lord, I am one.
**Essex**: Yes. Her Majesty has Councillors who fight her wars abroad, while others—who have never ventured their persons in peril——
**Cecil**: No doubt. God (*he shrugs his misshapen shoulders*) bestows His gifts in differing measure. It is not everyone who can serve her Majesty in Council and also (*in a more conciliatory, almost flattering tone*) as you, my Lord, have served her now in Spain. Those who know God never meant them to be her soldiers can at least share her joy in your safe and victorious return.
**Essex** (*bitterly*): Joy!
**Cecil**: What else could have given such joy, my Lord?
**Essex**: Why, the news that my body was rotting on Cadiz beach. That would have given you and the Queen joy, Cecil!
**Cecil**: Her Majesty and I talked every night, like angels, of you in your absence.
**Essex**: And like an angel she receives me! I bring her glory. And she treats me like a scullion!
**Cecil** (*composedly*): That is how her Majesty treats us all, my Lord.
**Essex**: I tell her of all Christendom ablaze with her fame and splendour! Of victory complete and unexampled! And she talks—do you know how she talked, Cecil?
**Cecil**: Of course. Of expenditure.
**Essex**: She did. She demands to see the cash returns.
**Cecil**: She always demands that, my Lord.
**Essex**: Because my hands are not loaded with plunder—as if I were a pickpocket emptying out his haul after St. Bartholomew’s Fair!—she beats me down in her fury! (*Striding up and down angrily.*) If her Majesty could once hear the truth!
**Cecil**: Her Majesty *has* heard it! The truth that in her own mind matters!
**Essex**: No! She cannot have heard what all Europe rings with, Cecil! Her glory! Her conquest! Spain’s utter ruin!
**Cecil**: Her Majesty has heard all that. It does not move her. (*He goes to the window and, drawing the curtain, opens it wide. The noise of a mob surging aimlessly in the streets. Shouts in which can be distinguished ‘Essex! Essex! God save the Earl of Essex!’*)
Listen, my Lord. Her Majesty has heard that also.
**Essex** (*leaning towards the window, he drinks in the excitement happily*): Then surely her Majesty knows—she must know——
[ *At the open door, right, can be seen* **Elizabeth**. **Essex** *kneels on the sill and puts out his head, he waves his hand. A wild answering shout of recognition. ‘Essss-ex! Essex! Our Lord of Essex!’* **Elizabeth** *enters.*
**Elizabeth**: Yes, my Lord. Her Majesty knows that all England has lost its foolish heart to a subject! (*She mimics the shout in the streets.*) Essex! Our Lord of Essex! Essex!
**Essex** (*turning, he springs to his feet*): No, madam. You know that the bells are rocking madly in every steeple, for your glory! your greatness! That they are clanging in every city and hamlet ‘Cadiz! Cadiz! Cadiz!’
**Elizabeth**: No! It is ‘Essex! Essex! Essex!’ (*She moves to the window: listens: then turns in fury*) I am not Queen in England while that man is above me, Cecil!
I sent you to Cadiz with fourteen thousand men and a hundred ships. You caught Philip’s navy unprepared. And that navy——
**Essex**: All sunk or burnt. The *San Philip* and *San Thomas*—burnt. Only the *San Matthew* and *San Andrew* escaped. And Walter Ralegh has them in Plymouth.
[ **Cecil** *moves to the window unobtrusively and shuts it.* ]
**Elizabeth**: Did I send you to hunt Apostles? What of King Philip’s treasure fleet from the Indies?
**Essex** (*sullenly*): Burnt. Nothing was spared. Nothing escaped.
**Elizabeth**: Burnt! Flung away and wasted! Pearls and silks and spices that would have paid my debts many times over! All burnt and spoiled and sunk in Cadiz harbour!
(*With menacing calmness.*) Why were they not brought to Plymouth?
**Cecil** (*conciliatory*): Your Majesty, the Spaniards themselves burnt their treasure fleet.
**Elizabeth** (*turning on* **Cecil**): *You* know—and know that *I* know—that the Spaniards before they burnt their fleet offered first to ransom it.
**Essex**: If your Majesty wants huckster service you must look elsewhere.
**Cecil** (*deprecatingly*): For God’s sake, my Lord!
**Essex**: I owe you the duty of an Earl and General of your forces. Not that of a slave!
**Elizabeth**: You owe me the obedience of the place to which I have exalted you! I commanded you, at setting out, that you were to use my ships and men as a lighted match, to burn to the every end.
**Essex**: And I so used them.
**Elizabeth**: No, you tossed them down, to burn out uselessly. Your mind thinks only of fireworks, like the mind of a silly child! Fireworks, and plaudits! My commands might go hang, so long as you could return to hear the crowd shout ‘Essex! Essex! Essex!’
**Essex**: I went to Cadiz to consume your enemies. Not to bargain or compound with them!
**Elizabeth**: I know you better, Robin, than you know yourself! You went to gather what you call honour! So that you might now listen to the music of the mob’s applause!
**Essex**: *They* do me justice when my Queen wrongs me! In their loving looks and words I know that I have done most loyal service—to a most ungracious mistress!
**Cecil** (*appalled*): My Lord! remember yourself!
**Elizabeth** (*astonished and controlled*): You would turn to my own people! against your Queen!
**Cecil**: He meant only, your Majesty, that your loyal people know, as your Majesty knows, that my Lord of Essex is your true and faithful servant.
**Elizabeth**: No. I will tell him what he meant. That he may turn back while there is still time.
Cecil, tell him who the people are—whose shouts have crazed his brain.
**Essex**: They are your Majesty’s most faithful, most loyal, most loving subjects. And they know your true servants, when you yourself are most misled.
**Elizabeth** (*imperiously*): Cecil! tell him!
**Cecil** (*with conviction*): They are headstrong asses. Without sense of purpose.
**Elizabeth**: Would you let them choose their rulers?
**Cecil**: God forbid! They would choose only their biggest and noisiest fools.
**Elizabeth**: You hear, Robin! Whom do they elect to their Parliament?
**Cecil**: Knaves and rogues. Their most plausible dullards.
**Elizabeth**: As they would choose you, Robin! Be advised, my Lord! *You* are not meant to be any Jack Cade or Wat Tyler!
**Essex**: I have not the mind of a Jack Cade or Wat Tyler.
**Elizabeth**: That is what I meant, Robin. It takes mind to make a rebel.
**Essex**: Since your Majesty can only mock your servants——
**Elizabeth**: What you style mockery Cecil can tell you was warning—from your Queen, Robin! You come to her drunk with the people’s clamour and threaten her that you will turn to them! Tell my Lord of Essex what that is, Cecil.
**Cecil** (*shortly*): Treason. If my Lord meant what he said.
[ **Elizabeth** *moves to the window as if to open it.* **Cecil** *moves between it and her. Forgetting himself in his fright and emotion.*
Your Majesty must not open that window.
**Elizabeth** (*again astounded*): *Must*, little man? Is *must* a word to use to Princes? Open that window. I say, Open that window, Cecil.
**Cecil**: It will but disquiet your Majesty with the people’s tumult.
**Elizabeth**: You mean, It will bring me the evidence of this man’s treason and madness! It may yet save him, Cecil.
**Cecil** (*kneeling*): There are some sounds, madam, that we do well to shut out of our ears and hearts.
[ **Elizabeth** *slams the window to.* ]
**Elizabeth** (*addressing herself to* **Essex** *she reads from a paper*): Your follower Sir Gilly Merrick has been seen with a cross of silver three ells long.
**Essex** (*eagerly—picking tip somewhat from his sullenness*): Whatever he has gained he shall surrender to your Majesty’s treasury.
**Elizabeth**: Note that down, Cecil.
[ **Cecil** *produces a parchment and notes it down.* ]
(*Reading again.*) Sir Christopher Blount, my Lord of Essex’s father-in-law, *admits* having secured plate worth two hundred and fifty pounds and—three—no, five hundred and twenty pounds’ worth of women’s dresses and gowns and hangings. Cecil, write down that Sir Christopher Blount owes the treasury sixteen hundred pounds.
**Essex**: He shall pay it.
**Cecil** (*writing*): I have sent out requisitions to all our officers who took part in the late operations against Cadiz, to send in returns of what they have gained.
**Elizabeth**: And doubtless all our loving subjects will render to our treasury true and full statements! Not omitting or overlooking one penny!
**Cecil** (*soothingly*): They will return something, your Majesty. The Treasury Department will see to that.
**Elizabeth**: I have been making my own enquiries—to help your department, Cecil. Take these papers. And write double for every amount that you find set down. Write treble the amount if the name happens to be that of an admiral.
**Cecil**: Yes, madam. (*He takes the papers.*)
**Elizabeth**: This is merely an account of stuff that the thieves tried to conceal. What of the loot that not even
Walter Ralegh could manage to hide? Do you know anything of it, either of you?
**Cecil**: I do not understand your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: I mean prisoners.
**Cecil**: But prisoners, your Majesty, have always been private property.
**Elizabeth**: They shall be private property no longer. Why should one man have to give up a gold madonna, while another man can keep and sell a duke’s daughter?
**Essex**: Her Majesty is right, Cecil.
**Cecil**: It is contrary to all custom, my Lord.
**Essex**: What does plunder matter? Let her Majesty’s treasury have the prisoners.
**Elizabeth** (*softening*): Robin’s heart is still sound, Cecil. It is only his head which the people’s madness has turned.
What has Robin brought home from Cadiz, Cecil?
**Cecil** (*after consulting his papers*): Only a library, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: A—*library?* No women’s dresses, Robin?
**Cecil**: On their return your Majesty’s ships surprised Faro and my Lord took off the Bishop’s library.
**Elizabeth**: What have you done with it, Robin?
**Essex**: I have given it to the University of Oxford.
**Elizabeth** (*bursting into peals of laughter*): Robin sacks Cadiz! burns up Philip’s warships and treasure fleet! and brings back glory and a library—for the University of Oxford! Of what use is the University of Oxford, Robin, when England is fighting for her life?
**Essex**: I love learning, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: You do, Robin. And I love you for it. But the library should have gone where it was needed—to our University of Cambridge!
What did Ralegh get out of Cadiz, Robin—besides his prisoners?
**Essex** (*coldly*): I know nothing of Sir Walter’s business.
**Cecil**: He says, Only a wounded leg.
**Elizabeth**: He says! Ralegh *says!* He has a finely imaginative mind, has Walter! Tell me, Robin. Shall we have Ralegh back at Court?
**Essex** (*angry*): If your Majesty chooses to have a traitor guard your person!
**Elizabeth**: There! You are a child again, Robin!
It was about money that you asked to see me, was it not, Cecil?
**Cecil**: Yes, madam. Sir Walter Ralegh says——
**Essex**: What does it matter what squires of Devon say?
**Elizabeth**: It matters something, Robin. If they happen to be Walter Raleghs!
**Cecil**: Ralegh says Spain will have a new fleet next year.
**Elizabeth**: Ralegh says truth.
**Cecil**: Yes, madam. God knows where you and I are to find money to meet Philip’s counterstroke for Cadiz!
**Elizabeth**: You hear, Robin? You and Ralegh have blazoned your names in the light of flaming Cadiz! have burnt up two million ducats for the sake of glory! And have roused a hornet swarm and returned to me empty-handed, to bid Cecil and your Queen find their own means of beating it off!
**Cecil**: True, madam. I came to ask how you thought we should pay for fresh wars, and still more war.
**Elizabeth** (*in high cheerfulness*): Why, Ralegh and Robin shall find the money for us! Robin, you shall go with Walter again—to bring the Indies fleet to Plymouth, not to burn it! Remember, I will not have two million ducats burnt a second time! (*To* **Cecil.**) Tell Walter I expect the presence of my Captain of the Guard to-night. We will have him back.
**Cecil**: I will tell Ralegh.
**Elizabeth**: You are to stay, Robin. (**Essex** *remains:* **Cecil** *goes.*) Still sulking, Robin?
**Essex**: You recall that knave to your presence! In front of Cecil you put on me shame such as no man should endure even from his sovereign.
**Elizabeth** (*still good-humoured*): Not even when his sovereign is a woman? Come, you shall forget it, Robin! and begin at last to prove it false that you are but a child as I called you, and that you are in truth the statesman and general that your admirers (*with a contemptuous gesture towards the window and the world outside*) din into your ears! and mine! You shall return to Spain for me.
**Essex**: I will not return there with Ralegh.
**Elizabeth**: You will return there with Ralegh. I will have you and Ralegh friends—for both your sakes!
**Essex**: That shall you never do! This your present purpose shall rather drive me to many other extremities!
[ *Enter* **First Page.** ]
**First Page**: My Lord of Burghley, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Bid him enter. (**Page** *goes out.*)
Have a care lest you drive yourself to one extremity you little look for! (**Lord Burghley** *enters.*)
**Essex**: Even that shall be welcome! I have no joy to be near you! (*He makes as if to leave her. With a gesture she forbids this.*)
**Elizabeth** (*with scornful sarcasm*): You may be wise, Robin! Burghley, our Lord of Essex may be wise! though after his own fashion and not ours!
**Essex**: I thank God! I believe I am!
**Elizabeth**: Yes! Wise in desiring to keep with your own servants and those who flatter you! And away from such as Walter Ralegh, whose skill and valour may outshine yours! As has now happened at Cadiz!
**Essex**: All else I might have borne. But not this. I will leave you.
**Elizabeth**: Not till I bid you! Burghley, it is not merely what those fools in the street are shouting! It is what this man’s own proud heart has been shouting in his own ears! all these years in which he has pretended to be serving me! ‘Essex! Essex! Essex!’ It has at last come about that he can hear no other sound.
**Essex** (*goaded beyond endurance*): Has your Majesty ever heard any sound but ‘Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Elizabeth?’
**Elizabeth** (*with a supreme effort controlling herself*): Yes, I thank God that I think I have heard always one other word.
**Essex**: What word but this word? And what thought but the eternal thought of your own greatness? And of the littleness of your own true and faithful servants?
**Elizabeth**: Burghley, it may be that before too late even this madman may hear our word also.
**Burghley**: The word that has sounded ever in our Lady’s ears has been not ‘Elizabeth’, my Lord. But ‘England’.
**Essex.** When you come to your true self again——
**Burghley**: My Lord! Remember the greatness which God has placed in her person! Think what you say! And—leave it unsaid!
**Elizabeth**: I warn you, Robin! You will break even *my* love for you! Now go!
**Burghley** (*as* **Essex** *seems to hesitate*): Go, my Lord, I pray you. You have said things unmeet to be heard by our Sovereign Lady.
**Essex**: I will go. And will pray God to bring her to a sense of herself and of me! To a sense of her faithful servants’ deserts!
[ *He goes out, striding and angry.* ]
**Elizabeth** (*distressed*); You heard him, Burghley!
**Burghley**: I heard something, madam. You have a princely disposition, which can forget even this.
**Elizabeth**: You and I have forgotten too much, old friend! Things that my father would have remembered in the blood and tears of those who had moved him to anger!
**Burghley**: It has been your Highness’s greatness! this gift of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness—when it was not your realm of England that was wronged, but only (*He hesitates.*)
**Elizabeth**: Only— (*almost breaking down*) Ann Boleyn’s child!
**Burghley**: Only Elizabeth. England’s Queen.
**Elizabeth**: Do you remember how it began? Do you remember, Burghley?
**Burghley**: I remember.
**Elizabeth**: All things dark dark! Calais had been lost! A shame that filled every mind!
**Burghley**: I never looked on the loss of Calais as a cause for grief, madam.
**Elizabeth**: England’s greatness and power were finished!
**Burghley**: By God’s goodness, the whole world now knows that they were but beginning.
**Elizabeth**: No! Men’s minds were distressed for misery that had been! which they could not be sure had ended! England was the lamb tethered between wolves! the prey between Spain and France! Every side was cloud and blackness!
**Burghley** (*he speaks composedly*): Yet those of us who were close to your sacred person kept our minds in peace and stillness. For we knew that a star had risen!
**Elizabeth**: No, Burghley! All minds were failing for fear!
**Burghley**: Not all minds, madam. There was one mind that never knew fear! By God’s grace, it was the mind that guided England! It was yours.
**Elizabeth**: No! no! I knew fear. But (*proudly*) it is true, I did not let fear sway my purpose. And there was one friend stood by me, Burghley (*she presses his hand*)—stood by the girl whose father had killed her mother!
**Burghley** (*troubled*): That, too, your Highness should forget. It brings no peace.
**Elizabeth** (*after silence*): You are right. But I do not, and cannot, forget the night of dread and peril which your friendship helped me to overpass! As we went through that night together in trembling and watchfulness—the clouds began slowly to clear! Until I became in truth what I had been only in name before! England’s Queen and Ruler!
**Burghley**: God was exceeding good to England. And to me—— (*He pauses, under deep emotion.*)
**Elizabeth**: To you, old friend?
**Burghley**: I hope to be in Heaven a servitor for your Grace and God’s Church—when my days here end.
**Elizabeth**: They must not end! till mine end also! (*With a kind of desperate sadness.*) I have no wish to live longer than I have you beside me!
**Burghley**: I think that to no man that ever lived did God grant such fortune! to serve such Queen and Mistress!
By serving you—I have served my God!
<p class="center">
CURTAIN
</p>
## Act II
*The* **Queen’s** *withdrawing-room. Evening.* **Bridges, Russell, Tracy**, *Maids of Honour, are arranging the room for her entry and gossiping about the disgrace which has befallen* **Vernon,** *lately of their number but now* **Countess of Southampton**.
**Bridges**: Put her Majesty’s spinet here. And her virginals there.
**Russell**: Better have the spinet there. And the virginals here.
**Bridges**: Why?
**Russell**: Her Majesty so commanded yesterday.
**Bridges**: Which is why her Majesty will command otherwise to-day! No matter! Whatever we do, she will find fault. Since this news from Ireland—— (*She makes a despairing gesture.*)
**Russell**: Have you seen Vernon since her disgrace?
**Bridges**: What did you say?
**Russell**: I said, Have you spoken to the new-coined Countess of Southampton?
**Bridges**: The Queen would have my head if I dared! I told my Lord of Essex as much, when he wanted me to get a note to Vernon from my Lord of Southampton her husband.
**Russell**: How did you phrase it?
**Bridges**: I told my Lord of Essex, Her Majesty walls up her offending vestals as closely as the grave. And I have no mind to be walled up myself—yet!
**Russell**: Then, dear Bridges, be sparing of your company to my Lord of Essex. For, if it is prison for Lady Ralegh—and for my Lady of Southampton—for daring to remember why it pleased Almighty God to create men——
**Bridges** (*composedly*): Well, I cannot be made my Lady of Essex! Not even by my Lord of Essex!
**Tracy** (*looking up, and speaking for the first time*): You may be made something worse, Bridges.
**Bridges**: No. Nothing worse—in her Majesty’s opinion! And, even if I were—I should be glad to suffer for my own sins—for a change! Her Majesty has the hand of a butcher and the temper (*Her utterance freezes as the* **Queen** *enters.*)
**Elizabeth**: Yes, girl? Her Majesty has the temper of what?
**Bridges** (*terrified*): Your Majesty (*she curtsies*) has the temper of an angel.
**Elizabeth**: You are a dull fool, Bridges. Any one of my men could have said that. From a woman I expect better lying. (*As she seats herself.*) Change over that spinet. And those virginals. God’s truth! what made you place them so?
**Russell** (*nervously*): It was your Majesty’s commandment.
**Elizabeth**: Change them, I say! Have you no more sense than to gossip behind my back, while you leave the room sprawling? It is ‘Yes, your Majesty!’ and ‘No, your Majesty!’ and ‘As your Gracious Majesty pleases!’—while all the time you are deceiving me and laughing because the Queen of England has been fooled by those she trusted! (*In a voice of thunder.*) You knew, Tracy!
**Tracy**: Knew what, your Majesty? Oh, no, your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: TRACY! You—KNEW! of Vernon’s misbehaviour!
**Tracy**: Oh, yes, your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: RUSSELL!
**Russell**: Yes, yes, yes, your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: Yes what?
**Russell**: Yes to anything your Majesty pleases.
**Elizabeth**: You are an idiot, Russell.
**Russell**: Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth** (*to* **Bridges**): Come here, girl. (**Bridges** *comes trembling: curtsies.*) Did you see my Lord of Burghley’s funeral?
**Bridges**: Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: What were the people like?
**Bridges**: Exceeding heavy and sorrowful.
**Elizabeth**: Bridges, I shall have to get rid of you! I need someone who is a less clumsy prevaricator.
**Bridges**: Yes, your Majesty. But the people, your Majesty——
**Elizabeth**: Nonsense! London loves nothing better than a fine funeral.
**Russell** (*timidly*): But everyone knows, your Majesty, that Lord Burghley was a great statesman.
**Elizabeth** (*gloomily*): Does that mean anything to the people of England? Come, Bridges! Did you notice the pall-bearers?
**Bridges**: Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Change the spinet and virginals again. (**Russell** *does so.*) What were they like?
**Bridges: As** I told your Majesty——
**Elizabeth**: You did not, girl. For I have not yet asked you. What were the pall-bearers like?
**Bridges** (*terrified*): Solemn and—and If your Majesty will forgive me, they were (*with a sudden rush of words, ending in almost a scream*)—like the people, your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: Rubbish! Not like the people at all! Lie better, Bridges. Or else tell the truth.
**Bridges**: The pall-bearers were solemn, your Majesty—and looked sad and sorrowful.
**Elizabeth**: Not like the people?
**Bridges**: No, your Majesty. Not in the least like the people!
**Elizabeth**: That, at least, I can believe. For one of them was Burghley’s own son.
**Bridges**: Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Which of the pall-bearers looked most wretched? Come! (*threateningly*) I know that you noticed him.
**Bridges**: My Lord of Essex, your Majesty. He looked the most wretched.
**Elizabeth** (*grimly*): That was because of his own affairs.
**Bridges** (*automatically*): Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth** (*in a terrible voice*): I said, Because of his own affairs. And you are part of those affairs, Bridges. Come here! (*As the girl comes up to her* **Elizabeth** *suddenly pulls a necklace out of her dress and tosses it contemptuously.*) Pearls! No wonder that my Lord of Essex is always a beggar when he comes to me! (*She turns again on* **Russell**.) Do you think I do not know what you were all gossiping about when I came in? Call Sir Walter Ralegh in. (**Russell** *goes to the door, back.*)
(*To* **Bridges**): Put those virginals back where they were. God’s truth! what are they doing in that place? (**Bridges** *does as commanded.*) Bridges! (**Bridges** *comes trembling, then breaks down.*)
**Bridges** (*close to hysteria—shouting*): Your Majesty! your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: I can hear you, girl.
**Bridges**: Will your Majesty let me leave you?
[ **Sir Walter Ralegh** *enters and stands silent.* ]
**Elizabeth**: What?
**Bridges**: Leave you. Leave you. For this evening only.
**Elizabeth**: Why?
**Bridges** (*screaming*): I think I shall go out of my mind!
**Elizabeth** (*with a grey smile*): You will not have far to travel, girl! (*More gently.*) You may go, Bridges. To your room. *Not* to my Lord of Essex!
**Bridges** (*curtseying*): Yes, your Majesty. No, your Majesty. (*Goes.*)
**Elizabeth**: I will have you all go. You can gossip outside—about Vernon. I have seen enough of folly for one day.
[ **Russell** *and* **Tracy** *go.* ]
(*To* **Ralegh*)*: Did you send for my Lord of Essex?
**Ralegh**: I sent him your Majesty’s bidding.
**Elizabeth**: What did my Lord of Essex answer?
**Ralegh**: That he would wait on your Majesty—— (*Pauses.*)
**Elizabeth** (*impatiently*): Yes?
**Ralegh**: When his health permitted.
**Elizabeth** (*as if stupefied*): He sends me that answer! when he knows in what straits and sorrows my affairs have fallen! when I bid him to attend my Privy Council?
**Ralegh**: He sent word that he was unwell and was keeping his house.
**Elizabeth**: That is the way his sickness takes him! When I ask his counsel—or loyal service—my Lord of Essex is— unwell!
**Ralegh**: I saw one of his household as I came to Court this morning. (**Elizabeth** *looks up quickly.*) He told me his Lord kept his chamber yet he could not grieve at it, for he knew that his Lord was not ill.
**Elizabeth**: No, it is only my Lord of Essex’s mind that is infected! Only his soul that is sick and in peril!
**Ralegh** (*cautiously*): Men say he is sunk in debt.
**Elizabeth**: Debt! When I have tossed to him with both hands (*she illustrates*) wealth that would have furnished forth armies!
**Ralegh**: He has his own armies to furnish forth.
**Elizabeth**: Your meaning?
**Ralegh**: No man keeps such state as my Lord of Essex.
**Elizabeth**: Yes, he gathers about him the idle and reckless out of all my realm. And I think they form the most part of the people of England! They buzz flatteries into his ears. And in return he keeps their brains astir with hope of a change when the times are ripe! (*With sudden suspicion.*) Walter! You spoke of his debts and these mad followers of his, only to set my mind against him!
**Ralegh**: By the Majesty of God——
**Elizabeth**: I will save you from perjury, Walter. I know you have no love towards Essex.
**Ralegh**: He has given me small cause to love him.
**Elizabeth**: The more reason why Walter Ralegh should beware of being known to be Essex’s enemy. I can foretell your fate, Walter! This anger of you and Essex will bring you both to your graves. (*A* **Page** *enters.*)
**Page**: My Lord of Essex would wait on your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: A quick recovery, Walter! Did you send him one of your Guiana potions? Tell my Lord of Essex I will see him presently. (**Page** *goes out.*)
I tell you, Walter, it would be the part of wisdom to end this folly of wrath between you and Essex.
**Ralegh**: If Essex would but trust my words——
**Elizabeth**: He would be a man in a million, Walter! if he trusted Walter Ralegh’s words! Enough! I have said all that a wise man should need to hear, to be warned! (**Page** *re-enters.*)
**Ralegh**: I will remember.
**Elizabeth**: Do so. And not remember only. Act on it, Walter!
**Page**: Sir Robert Cecil waits for audience.
**Elizabeth**: Admit him immediately. (**Page** *goes out.*) What would *you* do in Ireland, Walter, if you were in my place? Tyrone marches up and down, ravaging and slaying.
**Ralegh** (*after thought*): The Irish are very poor. I would set a price on Tyrone’s head.
**Elizabeth**: I see! I began as a Queen and I am to end my reign as an assassin! Walter Ralegh’s advice! And yet people still ask why I do not make him one of my Privy Council!
[ **Sir Robert Cecil** *enters.* ]
**Ralegh** (*discomfited*): There is no other way—in Ireland. The Irish will always outwit the English.
**Elizabeth**: Yes. Walter Ralegh has reason to know that.
(**Ralegh,** *disconcerted, is silent.*)
I will try the honester fairer way first. Bagnal, my marshal, still has an army.
Is there news from Ireland, Cecil?
**Cecil** (*his manner is grave*): There is news, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Has Sir Henry Bagnal fought with Tyrone at last? (**Cecil** *nods his head.*)
(*Scanning his face*): Bagnal has been worsted? By Tyrone?
**Cecil**: Bagnal’s army has been cut to pieces.
**Elizabeth** (*almost stunned*.): Bagnal’s army—cut to pieces!
**Cecil**: So Carew sends word.
**Elizabeth** (*blazing out*): I might have known Bagnal would turn traitor! He was Tyrone’s brother-in-law!
**Cecil**: Bagnal died with his army.
**Elizabeth** (*crossing herself*): He was a brave man and my loyal servant. God rest his spirit! Did no part of his army escape, Cecil?
**Cecil**: Two men only. The rest lie in the Blackwater bogs with their General.
**Elizabeth** (*rising from her seat, she walks up and down wretchedly*): The greatest loss and dishonour I have known in all my time! I gave Bagnal the fairest army any English king ever sent to Ireland! (*Wringing her hands.*) Am I to be shamed by a handful of savages? (*She looks at* **Ralegh**.)
**Ralegh**: God forbid!
**Elizabeth**: He will forbid it only if *I* forbid it! You stand there saying nothing but God forbid! when you have just heard that Tyrone has cut an army to pieces! Shall I send *you* to these Irish bogs, Walter? You are going to say again God forbid!
**Cecil**: Ralegh is needed in Devon, your Highness. Spain’s war preparations go forward steadily.
**Elizabeth**: What do I care about Spain? I have taken Spain’s measure and Spain knows it! It is these Irish who bring me to shame in the sight of all Europe! Shall I send Essex to Ireland?
[ **Cecil** *and* **Ralegh** *look at each other.* ]
**Ralegh** (*after hesitation*): It might be well.
**Elizabeth**: Walter Ralegh—who is wise!—will not go to Ireland. But Essex, thinks Walter, will go to the right place if he goes to Ireland.
(**The Earl of Essex** *enters unannounced.*) Who is this unmannerly madman?
**Essex**: Your Highness keeps me standing outside your chamber—a scorn to pageboys and maids of honour——
**Elizabeth**: Such as—Bridges?
**Essex**: While my enemies (*he glares angrily at* **Ralegh** *and* **Cecil**) plot to send me to my ruin! In Ireland or in Hell would please them equally!
**Elizabeth** (*dangerously calm and controlled*): We heard that our Lord of Essex was unwell. My Lord of Essex, it seems, has recovered and can do his duty to his Sovereign!
**Essex**: I rose from a bed of sickness to attend my Lord of Burghley’s funeral.
**Elizabeth**: Forget the sickness, my Lord! It may prove mortal. Get on to your cause for coming.
**Essex**: I come because I have news for your Highness, such as a loyal servant must bring to your presence, even though he were dying. (*As* **Elizabeth** *gives no sort of encouragement he goes on with a false air of assurance.*) God has remembered your Majesty. Your greatest enemy has gone.
**Elizabeth** (*starting excitedly*): Cecil! your news then was false!
**Essex** (*disappointed*): What news has Cecil brought?
**Elizabeth**: Is Tyrone dead, Robin? Are his forces scattered?
**Essex**: Would I break into your Highness’s presence with word of Tyrone? A captain of slaves and ragged rebels!
**Elizabeth**: A captain of slaves and rebels who have cut to pieces four thousand men! Always my heart hopes, Robin! and always I find you nothing to the purpose!
(*More quietly*): Who is this greatest enemy whom God has taken?
**Essex** (*brandishing his tidings*): Philip of Spain is dead!
**Elizabeth**: Philip of Spain! You take my mind back into dimness of long ago! I am vexing myself with the wretched present!
**Cecil**: True, madam. Yet it is Spain that provides the sinews for Tyrone’s rebellion.
**Elizabeth**: No, it is my own generals’ folly and incompetency!
**Essex** (*crestfallen*): I thought to have brought you joy——
**Elizabeth**: Joy! By news of the death of my sister’s husband! The man who once——
(*Her voice falls and dies away; she stares at her hands, at her long tapering fingers.*)
You did not come merely to tell me this, Robin?
**Essex** (*sullenly*): I came that you might know your realm was in safety.
**Elizabeth**: Because a long ailing man—a man nerveless and broken in spirit—has passed from men’s midst, you tell me my realm has at last won—safety! Philip of Spain has long since become less than a dream! less than a shadow!
I sent for you because of Tyrone. And you talk of Philip of Spain!
There is no gathering of silks and jewels in Ireland! for your Blounts and Merricks! No one has ever found gold in Ireland! Not even Walter Ralegh, though he found it in Guiana! No one in Ireland has found even reputation.
**Essex**: That is because your Majesty has chosen to send thither servants of small skill and practice in war.
**Elizabeth**: Such as Mountjoy! Or—Walter Ralegh! Or Ralegh’s kinsman George Carew!
(*She looks at* **Essex** *fixedly.*)
There is one man I have not yet sent to Ireland. One man who says he lives only for honour. That he cares nothing for his own gain.
But is this man loyal?
**Essex**: Your Majesty can judge from your knowledge of days that are past.
**Elizabeth**: It is that knowledge which now troubles me. (*Making a quick decision.*) If I should send *you* to Ireland, Robin——
**Essex** (*with proud complacency*): There will be a swift finish of this war which so vexes you.
**Elizabeth**: Others have promised that before. And Tyrone has proved their master.
**Essex**: He shall come in chains to your judgment.
**Elizabeth**: I doubt Tyrone will prove too subtle for you.
**Essex**: I know how to beat down subtlety (*he looks at* **Ralegh**) with valour.
**Elizabeth**: Do you, Robin? Valour, at least, I know you possess. I will trust you, Robin. Even in Ireland!
Cecil, see that my Lord of Essex is given command of such an army of horse and foot as has never left our shores for any realm ere now. Will you go for me, Robin?
**Essex**: I will go. And I will bring you back honour and tidings of rebellion crushed never to rise again.
**Elizabeth**: See that Robin lacks nothing, Cecil! whatever he may ask! Ralegh shall move the Commons to grant me monies.
**Ralegh**: The Commons say they will grant no more monies—— (*He hesitates.*)
They say that their love and loyalty are yours
**Elizabeth**: I do not want phrases. I must have money.
**Ralegh**: They complain that the wealth of your realm is wasted and squandered. That it is engrossed and taken—your Majesty will pardon me!—by a few who are close to your person and presume on that nearness.
**Elizabeth**: For example—Sir Walter Ralegh has the monopoly of all sweet wines sold in the kingdom. Is that what my Commons say, Cecil?
**Cecil**: That—and things of that kind—*is* what they say.
**Elizabeth**: Then tell them, If they keep their Queen as one keeps a goosegirl, with nothing but her clothes and the food she eats—why, their Queen must pay her servants out of what she can find! And her faithful—and loyal—Commons must take the blame, for what is their fault and not the Queen’s!
I will have that army, Cecil. Whatever it costs! It is for one war only. God’s truth! Is England to bleed to death because of a beggarly country whose people are what we know they are?
**Ralegh**: God forbid! Your Majesty, who struck down Philip of Spain
**Elizabeth** (*crosses herself, remembering*): Philip of Spain. He is dead. He was my foe, but is in the land of spirits!
Ralegh is right. England, which struck down Spain, must not perish at the hands of Tyrone!
**Essex**: Only put in my hand a sword that is sharp and weighty! There shall be no second war in Ireland while the world lasts!
**Elizabeth**: See that he has that sword, Cecil! You have heard, both of you, what Robin has promised.
You shall have what you asked, Robin. (*In high good humour.*) And, whatever else you would have for this service, ask and that too is yours.
**Essex**: Then, madam—my Lord of Burghley has died.
**Elizabeth** (*saddened by the recollection*): You say well. Burghley has died, and with him has died the half of all my friends, and of my memories that bring me pleasure God knows almost all! (*Sharply.*) But what is Burghley’s death to the purpose? What has Burghley to do with Tyrone? And with war against Tyrone?
**Essex**: Burghley was Master of the Wards in Chancery.
[ *A long silence. Then with some impatience in his tones* **Essex** *repeals his statement.* ]
He was Master of the Wards in Chancery.
**Elizabeth** (*ominously*): Essex would succeed to his place?
**Essex**: That is my suit. To you, my now most gracious mistress.
[ **Elizabeth** *is silent.* ]
**Elizabeth** (*speaking at last*): What has our Lord of Essex received of public monies in gifts, Mr. Secretary?
**Cecil**: From first to last—some £300,000.
**Elizabeth**: A year’s whole revenue! And I have given you positions of great profit besides! Yet you ask for more! Always for more! (*With an angry gesture.*) This is the man who cried scorn on those who serve in hopes of gold and their own private profit! I have poured out with both hands kindness on a man who sulks and will not serve me unless I pay him still more!
**Essex**: There must be a Master of Wards in Burghley’s stead.
**Elizabeth**: It was for this, then, and not from your pretended haste to let me know of Philip’s passing, that you recovered from your sickness! And answered at last a summons you had spurned! And I, credulous as I am, thought you had returned because of love and loyalty that had flown and like a falcon were now whistled back!
**Essex**: I see well of what brief growth is your Majesty’s trust in your servants!
**Elizabeth**: I see of what brief growth—and how quickly withered!—is my Lord of Essex’s loyalty!
You shall not have Burghley’s post.
**Essex** (*angrily*): I see how it is! It has been promised to Ralegh!
**Elizabeth**: No. It is pledged to my own hard necessities. I have a war in Ireland. I shall discharge the Office myself. Draw up the necessary papers, Cecil. Do it now!
**Cecil**: At once! (*Goes.*)
**Essex**: You will do what none of the kings your predecessors did! The world shall judge between us—and I shall believe!—that you overthrew the Office rather than make me the Officer!
**Elizabeth**: You may believe what you choose! And the world may judge as it pleases! Though I tell you, Robin, one of us is nearer to judgment than you dream!
**Essex**: I have no cause to fear that judgment. All England knows that your mind is warped and made crooked by the knaves you keep about your person! I have now seen you, out of despite to me, take on yourself more than any king has taken before you. You have done this rather than show me kindness!
**Elizabeth**: Be warned! before your tongue runs you too far! Content yourself with doing my person insult and injury on every possible occasion! (*Very gravely.*) But beware of touching my sceptre!
**Essex**: It is your own mood that persuades you to insult and injure your servants! You make me stand and wait while you talk with Cecil and Ralegh. (*Drawing himself up proudly.*) Yet I am of your Privy Council!
**Elizabeth**: So you have remembered that! At last! My Lord of Essex has remembered that he is of the Queen’s Privy Council! Tell me, How long is it since you attended my Council—of which you were sworn a Member when you were scarce older than a boy! How long is it, Walter, since you admitted my Lord of Essex to take his seat at my Council Table? Or admitted him to his place at my Court?
**Essex**: You can ask your own questions and I can answer. A Ralegh is too base to be my mouthpiece.
**Elizabeth** (*sternly*): Then answer!
**Essex** (*haughtily*): Your Highness must excuse my attendance—— (*Pauses.*)
**Elizabeth**: That I have learnt. I am waiting to learn why.
**Essex**: I have a violent throbbing of the temples
**Elizabeth** (*impatiently*): Yes, we have heard that you kept your bed because of sickness.
**Essex** (*with elaborate politeness*): Your Highness mistakes me. I have this violent throbbing of the temples when exposed to cold or to long and tedious speeches. Therefore I have absented myself from your Council. And from your Court.
**Elizabeth** (*unable to believe her hearing: rising from her throne*): You give your Queen this answer! This reply to my face!
**Essex**: Then I can give it otherwise! If it is face to face that offends you!
[ *He turns his back on her. She boxes his ears and he spins round angrily, his hand on his sword.* ]
I would not have taken this from your father King Harry! (*Shouting.*) Though he was a man! and not a King in petticoats!
[ **Ralegh** *stands in front of the* **Queen,** *with drawn sword.*
**Elizabeth** (*forcing her way past* **Ralegh**): Show me what you would have done to my father King Harry! Do you think he would have boxed your ears only? Treating you as the child you are!
Put up your sword, Walter. I am still the Queen, even though this traitor should drive his sword through my body.
**Essex** (*driving his sword home in its scabbard*): I am a man. So must endure from a woman what I would not have suffered from the greatest King that ever lived!
**Elizabeth** (*contemptuously*): I think I could tell you what you would have suffered from the greatest King that ever lived! I will now leave you alone with Walter Ralegh. It may be that to wait awhile will bring you to your senses! may even cure you of that violent throbbing of the temples which you feel always in my presence! (*She goes out.*)
[ *As **Essex** *makes for the door, back,* **Ralegh** *deliberately steps in front of him, his sword drawn.* ]
**Essex**: Captain of the Queen’s Guard! you are in my way.
[ **They face each other.* **Ralegh** *returns his sword to its scabbard.*]
**Ralegh**: By her Majesty’s desire we have been left together.
**Essex**: Neither in private nor in public do I desire speech with Walter Ralegh.
**Ralegh**: We must not think of what you—or I, my Lord!— desire.
**Essex**: For this insolence there can be but one answer, Ralegh.
**Ralegh**: You have threatened your Sovereign. For that boldness, in all England’s history, there has been but one answer, Essex!
Both of us had better forget—as her Majesty wishes—what only ourselves have seen in this room. (*Speaking more swiftly.*) See with the eyes of your spirit, Essex! And know that it was not Walter Ralegh, whom you hate, who stood in your path with drawn sword! It was destiny, that stood against you!
**Essex** (*awed in spite of himself*): Destiny?
**Ralegh**: As the angel stood before the prophet who was riding against his unseen sword.
**Essex**: I see only the ass! I cannot see the angel.
**Ralegh**: Then I can see more clearly. I see—destiny, Essex. Our destinies, which march together to one common destruction.
Why do you hate me, my Lord?
**Essex**: Because I know your poisoned tongue, Ralegh. Because I know you are subtle and dangerous! a machiavel whose lips are steeped in treachery!
That is why, Ralegh.
**Ralegh**: No. You hate me because a woman is our ruler.
**Essex**: Yes. Because she has found you—by her own humours and folly!—a man she wants ever by her side! where you can bring shame on nobler men! By means of a woman’s simplicity!
**Ralegh** (*musingly*): Simplicity! In Ann Boleyn’s daughter! who lived out her childhood under shadow of the headsman’s axe! In Elizabeth the Queen!
I can tell you one thing, Essex. Our rivalry ended when you came to her Court.
**Essex**: No! It began. Began, and grew, until it reached this pitch, that the one world cannot hold us both! (*Recurring to a favourite line of conviction.*) If the Queen would but listen——
**Ralegh**: If Essex would but listen!
**Essex** (*scornfully*): To Walter Ralegh?
**Ralegh**: No! Listen to Essex. And not to Sir Gilly Merrick! Not to Sir Christopher Blount! Or to how many others, who night and day din into his ears but one thing, that either Essex or Ralegh must be destroyed!
**Essex**: And—if Essex would listen to Essex?
**Ralegh**: Why, Essex would hear this. That Ralegh and Essex have been foes in their hours of madness but in hours of England’s peril and dire necessity (*Pauses.*)
**Essex**: It was in those hours that I learnt how subtle and dangerous a mind is yours, Ralegh! And this man—subtle unflinching dangerous!—is Captain of the Queen’s Guard!
**Ralegh**: Yes. I stand beside her and watch her moods and changing face. I hear not only what the Queen says but the unspoken thought under the woman’s words.
You have more than her ear, Essex, even when you are absent. Do you think I can watch her thoughts and yet be unaware that to her I am (*makes a gesture as if dismissing himself*) Walter Ralegh—a man she knows to be a good soldier——
**Essex** (*reluctantly*): Yes, Ralegh, you are that.
**Ralegh**: But I am nothing more to her. It is you whom she loves—not merely as a valiant soldier——
**Essex** (*complacently*): Yes, she would have me go to Ireland.
**Ralegh**: She would have you return victorious from Ireland. I am Ralegh the shipwright, Ralegh the sailor—whose eyes have peered into the straits and isles of all the world, until I know where the Spaniard can hide his navies. My spies slip in and out of his ports. I know his strength and weakness—and know ours also. And the Queen will save Ralegh the shipwright, Ralegh the admiral—even from you, my Lord! Since she is not woman only (*he is thinking aloud to* **Essex,** *speaking slowly*) but also—and in every moment and all her moments—our Queen, Essex, she will save me from your anger, if you are madman enough to give it rein. She will let you slay yourself, as a man who will run his body on an outstretched sword must be left to slay himself—because she is Elizabeth our Queen. She will save me, though you yourself perish. But when you perish, Essex——
**Essex** (*listening despite himself*.): Yes?
**Ralegh**: As woman she will hate me! And that hatred will live on after the woman has died. And afterwards, my Lord?
**Essex**: Why, a fool will be England’s King!
**Ralegh**: And the fool will care nothing for shipwright or admiral! And hatred from the body which has ceased to breathe will find speech and will say to the fool, Fulfil now my vengeance!
**Essex**: Then you seek to save yourself!
**Ralegh**: No. I ask Essex to save me. Essex, whom I know to be generous and noble. If in the fight at Cadiz I had told you, my Lord, ‘This place where you stand will mean your own destruction’, what would you have answered?
**Essex**: Why, I should have answered that, since Ralegh told me I was in a way to destruction, I had reason to believe this was true. But that for my own safety I cared not.
**Ralegh**: But if I had said, ‘By remaining here you will bring destruction to me also and to her Majesty’s high hopes for us all. And by moving elsewhere you can save not merely yourself but save England’?
**Essex**: I should have said, ‘I will save you, if I may do this and yet keep honour’.
**Ralegh**: You can keep honour, Essex. Only your eyes and mine, and those of the Queen, have witnessed our swords drawn against each other. And her Majesty would have you save us both—save us from each other. For her realm’s sake and to serve England!
[ *The door, right, opens silently.* **Elizabeth** *can be seen, listening.* ]
**Essex** (*hesitating*): We have been foes, Ralegh.
**Ralegh**: We have also been comrades. Men who live after us will see us in that storm of battle at Cadiz, where the bolts flew thickest.
They will not see us in this room—with drawn swords! Unless you make them see this, Essex!
[ **Ralegh** *holds out his hand, which after reluctance* **Essex** *takes.* **Elizabeth** *enters.* **Ralegh** *steps quickly to his station outside the room and outside the still open door.*
**Essex** (*kneeling*): My glorious Mistress! I will go for you to the ends of the world!
**Elizabeth**: My faithful—my adorable—Robin!
<p class="center">
CURTAIN
</p>
## Act III
*A Tent in a wild place in Ireland. There are present* The Earl of Essex; The Earl of Southampton, *aged* 27, *a young gentleman of fashion, masquerading as a soldier;* **Sir Christopher Blount**, 35, *a year older than* **Essex,** *in appearance and manner more of the staff officer who has learnt his trade in actual fighting and knows his business;* **Sir Gilly Merrick**, *adventurer and ‘card’, rough and uncompromising; and* **Sir John Harington,** *close on* 40, *miserable away from his fellow-wits and London. Their clothes have lost spruceness, everything shows signs of disordered and disorganised living.*
*It is September,* 1599.
**Southampton**: Is it ever dry in this accursed country? My doublet has been wet for weeks together—ever since we lost our baggage, in that ambush by the ford.
**Harington**: Would God I were back in London!
**Blount** (*as if an idea has struck him*): Robin! Back in London!
**Essex** (*dispiritedly*): You know her Majesty’s orders.
**Harington**: I know the Almighty’s orders for Ireland! Rain! rain! And still rain!
**Essex**: We are to capture Tyrone before we dare set foot in England.
**Merrick** (*growls*): Those orders were Ralegh’s orders.
**Harington**: Capture Tyrone! Her Majesty bids us (*he makes a foppish gesture, as if to grasp the air*) capture a rainbow! Or seize a dragonfly.
**Blount**: When her Majesty gave you this commission, Robin, did you find her alone? (**Essex** *is silent.*)
**Southampton**: Robin will not say.
**Merrick**: Ralegh was with her.
**Essex**: He is Captain of the Queen’s Guard.
**Blount**: Yes. His place is outside her door.
**Southampton**: Was it outside her door that you found him?
**Essex** (*reluctantly*): No.
**Merrick**: That is what I say! Ralegh was with her.
**Blount**: Ralegh is always with her.
**Merrick**: Who is to rule England, once Robin is out of it? Who but this Devon upstart?
**Blount**: Ralegh is with her now. His hand is hid in her letters—as a snake hides its poisoned crest in a meadow of flowers!
**Harington**: Ralegh or no Ralegh, would I were back in London! The pleasant fields of Chelsea are more to me than all these bogs and glory!
**Southampton** (*unpleasantly*): More than your knighthood, Sir John?
**Merrick** (*persistent*): It was Ralegh that sent you to Ireland, Essex. And why?
**Essex** (*to* **Blount**): Is there any word of the messenger from Tyrone?
**Southampton**: Because Ralegh has lived in Ireland.
**Merrick**: Ralegh has soldiered in Irish bogs.
**Blount** (*to* **Essex**): He was reported to be nearing the camp when we assembled here to meet him.
**Southampton**: Who knows this hateful land, its treasons and stratagems, its devouring swamps and marshes, if Ralegh does not know them?
**Merrick**: Ralegh knew he was sending you to your ruin.
**Essex** (*wearily*): Yes, Ralegh knows most things.
**Blount**: He knows there is nothing for any Englishman in Ireland but dishonour and loss of fame.
**Harington**: My Lord, you are further than ever from catching Tyrone!
**Southampton**: You, at any rate, Harington, have caught a knighthood! The rest of us (*He shrugs his shoulders.*)
**Harington** (*confronting him*): Yes, I am now Sir John Harington. By my Lord of Essex’s favour. Yet I fear that this also—like my Lord of Essex’s other gifts of honour to us his servants!—will give small pleasure to our Mistress!
[ *An* **Officer** *enters, and behind him a Despatch Rider with postbag.* ]
**Officer** (*loudly*): Despatches for my Lord of Essex.
**Essex** (*turning quickly*): You are from the Earl of Tyrone?
**Officer**: From her Majesty the Queen, my Lord.
**Essex** (*disappointed*): Her Majesty!
**Messenger** (*coming forward*): Yes, my Lord. Here is her letter.
**Essex** (*to* **Officer**): See he is given entertainment.
[ **Officer** *and* **Messenger** *go out.* ]
**Merrick**: Let us see what her Majesty has to offer—of comfort to her servants in exile. (*All crowd round* **Essex**.) **Essex** *(opens the letter and reads*):
‘My Lord,
‘We have news—and marvel to receive it—-that you have made God knows how many knights in our name. What humour possesses you, not content with your first dozens and scores, at Cadiz and I know not where else, that you should now thus fall to huddle them up by half hundreds? You, a subject that hath never stood six months together in any one action—a weathercock fleeing and swaying to every change of your own headstrong will—now choose, upon so little service and slight desert——’ (*Pauses.*)
**Merrick**: Do they write this from Whitehall? From Court masks and pageants and idle mummeries?
**Southampton**: By my faith, our Sovereign Lady has found a fair wind and sails boisterously before it! Go on, Robin, with your reading!
**Essex** (*reads again*): ‘Now choose to make more knights than are in all our realm beside. If you so persist you will shortly bring in tag and rag, cut and long tail, and so bring the order into contempt!’
**Harington**: Tag and rag! cut and long tail! (*Reflectively.*) Sir John Harington!
**Southampton** (*reading over* **Essex’s** *shoulder*): Yes, there is a special word for you, Sir John! (*Reads.*) ‘What has that idle rhymester, that worthless godson of ours, done that he should receive this honour at your hands? Have you made your camp into a dancing-hall and decked out your soldiers as nymphs and fairies and God knows what? Or are Tyrone’s followers mere children and girls, that they should give up their arms at hearing of some silly sonnet? Tell him I shall ask for an account from his own lips, of that special prowess which has made him Sir John.’
**Harington** (*apprehensively—as they all look al him*): I would rather that all the devils of Hell were at my heels, in full cry for my soul! (*He goes out.*)
**Southampton** (*again reading over* **Essex’s** *shoulder*): ‘We charge you straitly on your obedience, Make not one knight more!’
**Merrick**: She cuts you short in your commander’s prerogative! short in your honours!
**Southampton**: Will you let her keep you as the boy that minds a shop? Who can close and open the doors and must do naught else!
**Merrick**: Is this to be her Marshal in Ireland?
**Blount**: If the Queen is to look into the reason for every knighthood in England—— Is there aught else, Robin?
**Essex**: Far too much! (*Makes as if to fling the despatch aside.* **Southampton** *takes it from his hands.*)
**Southampton** (*reads*): ‘We hear also that for a paltry loss in some skirmish you, my Lord, whose whole service has been wavering and retreat and our realm’s shame and dishonour——’
**Merrick**: Has she forgotten Cadiz?
**Blount**: No. Ralegh has told her that the day was his.
**Merrick**: Ralegh who, against the obedience that he owed you, at Cadiz thrust his ship in front of yours, Essex!
**Blount**: Let Harry finish.
**Southampton** (*reads*): ‘For you make your way through our foes, as a vessel makes its way through the seas. Their ranks dispart like mere waves—to mingle again like waves behind you, my Lord, in scorn and laughter, in no wise broken. Yet we hear that you have dared to put to death
by court-martial one out of every ten who were thrust back in that skirmish. I sent you to guard my soldiers’ lives, my Lord, not to cast them away to cover up your own ill deservings and appease your proud humour! To conclude, am I to spend a thousand pounds a day, to allow a subject to go on progress through Ireland, while Tyrone, that hateful rebel, daily grows stronger? Was it for this that you favoured me with brags and mad boastings? It would have been better had I sent a Ralegh, my Lord! My work needs a soldier. And there is a report—take heed lest it be true!—that you talk of returning, your task unfinished, nay, not even begun! We command you absolutely, on your allegiance, that you presume no such thing, but remain—though you rot in those bogs and foul streams!—till you have conquered Tyrone and bring me his head!’
[ **Essex** *seizes the letter and tosses it down in rage. A man has entered and is talking hurriedly in low tones to* **Sir Gilly Merrick**. ]
**Merrick**: The messenger from Tyrone, Essex.
[ *The* **Messenger**, *a tall strong man, confident in his bearing, comes forward. He speaks with a brogue.* ]
**Messenger**: I see I have come at an ill time, my Lord. (*Pointing to the letter.*) I see her Majesty’s crest. She has written. Doubtless to send her servants some word of cheer and praise.
**Essex** (*curbing anger and speaking with dignity*): Have you come to offer your master’s surrender?
**Messenger** (*laughs*): I demand your surrender, quoth the lamb to the wolf that had him by the throat.
Is your memory so brief, my Lord? Have you forgotten Bagnal, whose army lies in the Blackwater bogs? Their bones have not yet been picked clean by our ravens.
I come to grant you terms of honourable peace.
**Southampton**: Do you think to force English knights and commanders to so base and brisk a parley? To ragged kerns and starving slaves!
**Messenger**: As to the starving—I leave you to judge of your own provisions. You are my Lord of Southampton, are you not? I see not in you, my Lord—or in you, my Lord of Essex—that brightness of apparel which at Whitehall brought shame on a Walter Ralegh!
**Essex**: Since your master rejects my offer——
**Messenger**: What offer, my Lord?
**Blount** (*who has been watching the scene closely*): Of my Lord of Essex’s offices with our Queen.
**Southampton**: That you may be pardoned your long continued treasons.
**Messenger** (*he speaks quietly, with amused confidence*): My Lords, you mistake. O’Neill has sent me to offer his own good offices. That you may all leave Ireland in quietness, with no man seeking to stay you.
**Essex**: You shall have your passports back to him.
**Blount**: Better go swiftly.
**Essex**: I shall attack within the hour.
**Messenger**: It will not need so much time. You will not have far to march, my Lord, to find O’Neill. His men are all about you, to lay you by the heels, as we trap hares in our mountains.
**Southampton**: Will your trap hold lions?
**Messenger**: You will find it will serve. The rush of armoured knights we know well. The knight and his steed sink to their saddlegirths in deep waters whose footing they do not know.
I will tell my master to draw tight his noose.
**Essex** (*goes to a table and takes up a pen*): You shall take my answer.
**Messenger**: At once, my Lord? He is in no mood to wait, now that he has gathered his strength and is ready to pull it in. So (*he illustrates*)—as we pull it round the hare of which I have spoken.
**Essex** (*to* **Blount**): Make ready his passports, Chris.
**Messenger** (*stopping* **Blount** *with a gesture*): You may both of you spare yourselves labour. I can take your reply, my Lord, in person. (*Drawing himself up proudly*) I am Tyrone.
This, I think, should convince you of the straits in which you stand. I have but to blow my whistle (*uncords it*) and my men are in your midst.
(*As they stand amazed.*) Do you think I would have trusted myself in your power if I did not know that I have you all fast?
(*Points again to* **Elizabeth’s** *letter.*) I know well your Lady’s message. Bring me Tyrone’s head. By her leave and yours, I have a different use for my head, my Lords.
Come, Essex! I am your friend if you have the wit to use me.
**Merrick** (*who has been trying to speak to* **Essex**): We should hear him, Essex.
**Tyrone**: I am Tyrone. And this (*he touches it*) is Bagnal’s sword.
**Merrick**: We must hear him, Essex. Anger now is foolery.
**Blount** (*to* **Tyrone**): I warn you, to draw tight that noose of which you talk will cost more lives than you can spare. And afterwards—you know Elizabeth’s fierceness of spirit! She will pour out men until Ireland has been laid waste from end to end, rather than own she has met defeat at hands she despises.
**Merrick**: True, But (*to* **Essex*)* he has a better way to propose, my Lord. We must hear him.
**Tyrone**: It is a way that suits my own neck also—though I think it is in no great danger. I have had my own despatches from Gloriana—your mistress. Sure, she invites me to come to London and be hanged! I have no mind to wear the collar that is proffered me!
**Essex**: She is your Queen.
**Tyrone**: No Queen of mine, my Lord. We in Ireland are of the Faith which you in England have forsaken. For us, she was begotten in adultery. Her mother was what the whole world knows, King Henry’s doxy.
**Essex**: See to his passports, Chris. The parley is finished.
**Merrick**: I say we should hear him out, Essex.
**Tyrone**: Och, have you not said the same things yourself, Essex? Do you think a girl born after her fashion—when her father was neglecting his lawful wife and dallying with a maid at his Court—is the Almighty’s anointed Queen of England?
She shows what she is in her actions! I tell you, my Lord, it is great matter of constant marvel, to us who know your worth, that Essex accepts from this woman such insults and slightings as he would never have taken from any man. Tell me, is it comfort she has sent you in that letter of hers? Is it a great Queen that speaks in it? Or Ann Boleyn’s daughter?
**Merrick**: He is right. It is Ann Boleyn’s daughter.
**Tyrone**: She keeps you here while a rascal like Ralegh—well we know him in Ireland, where he dare not show his face again, for all men hate him for his bloody-mindedness and cruelty!—while a Ralegh, my Lord, orders her counsels.
**Blount**: He is right there, Robin!
**Essex**: If I were sure it was Ralegh!
**Merrick**: Of course it is Ralegh!
**Tyrone**: They are birds of like feather, my Lord. The Devon squire and Ann Boleyn’s daughter.
Are you a man, my Lord? Spain—and all Europe— knows you are a man. Yet you let her thrust you as far towards the sunsetting as she can devise, while she takes her course by Ralegh’s direction! Will you let yourself be pulled hither and thither at a mere woman’s whim— like a bird on a string?
**Essex**: She is my Queen and has a right to command me.
**Tyrone**: And why is she your Queen? How did her grandfather, Henry the Seventh—or Henry the Fourth that was before him—become King? Faith, he landed, and won his right by battle. We in Ireland say that Essex would be King with more right than Ann Boleyn’s daughter. And Essex would be a King whom Ireland would serve gladly.
Why should not Essex be King of England?
**Essex**: She has shown me trust and favour.
**Blount**: Hardly! when she sent you to Ireland, Robin!
**Merrick**: Hardly! when she supplanted you by Ralegh!
**Tyrone**: Come, I will make with you a treaty of peace and friendship. If you cared for England, my Lord, as I care for Ireland—for whose sake and whose safety I am ready to die!—you would return to England. I give you my word, All things in Ireland shall stay in quietness until all is settled. Then Ireland and England shall be friends, this war of hatred shall finish. We know Gloriana, her pride and her mind that shifts and is never in one mood. She is a woman and she understands strength—a man’s strength, such as is yours. Does she understand weakness?
**Essex**: No. She can be brought to nothing but by a kind of necessity or authority!
**Tyrone**: She is an ageing woman. Her hand shakes on her sceptre. For all this pretence that she is—God save us!—a girl of spirit and physical beauty, to whom men must kneel as her suitors and lovers!
**Merrick**: You need but show your strength, Essex, and all will be well.
**Blount**: It might well so prove.
**Merrick**: Ralegh could return to keep sheep on Devon moors.
**Tyrone**: Not to keep hatred between England and Ireland! While Ralegh speaks through Elizabeth, my Lord, there will never be peace between England and Ireland. There are those in Ireland whose spirits are too proud to submit, as you in England submit, to a Devon squire!
Is it to be peace, Essex? (**Essex** *is silent.*)
**Essex**: I will send you my answer within this day.
**Tyrone**: Then for to-day there is a truce?
**Essex** (*reluctantly*): There is a truce.
**Tyrone**: My men shall observe it.
And afterwards—when your Queen has been brought to some wisdom and you, my Lord, rule her affairs—all this sorrow and shame between England and Ireland shall become like an ancient story.
I take my leave of you all. (*He goes.*)
**Blount**: He hit my own thought, Robin.
**Merrick**: Mine also. I am tired of Ann Boleyn’s child.
**Blount**: I was thinking of what Harington said. Back in London! What do you say, Robin?
**Essex**: Why did he run on so about Ralegh?
**Blount**: Every Irishman hates him. With good cause!
**Merrick**: Tyrone had a reason, which he told me at entering. There is a story that the Queen—Tyrone’s spies in London keep him posted (*Pauses.*)
**Essex** (*starling at last into animation*): Yes, yes?
**Merrick** (*with deliberate casualness*): Why, it is said—and Tyrone affirmed it—that the Queen has made Ralegh her Master of the Wards in Chancery.
**Essex**: Not even the Queen would dare put such an affront on me!
**Southampton**: That was Robin’s own suit for himself!
**Blount**: Was not Ralegh present when you asked for the post?
**Merrick**: And were refused!
**Southampton**: Someone has got it.
**Merrick** (*rubbing it in*): Master of the Wards in Chancery.
**Essex**: She told me expressly that she meant to discharge it herself.
**Merrick**: Until Essex was safely in Ireland! Ralegh loves money, does he not?
**Essex** (*angrily*): He is a sack whose mouth is always open to receive it.
**Merrick** (*still rubbing it in*): Warden of the Stannaries.
**Southampton**: Lord Admiral of the West.
**Blount**: Privateer. Shipbuilder for her Majesty’s Navy.
**Merrick**: The Master of the Wards in Chancery receives even more than all these offices and resources bring in.
**Southampton**: So she sends you to Ireland! Ralegh knows there is nothing in Ireland but dishonour and loss of fame.
**Blount**: Did you not with your own ears, as you entered her presence, hear Ralegh advise that she should send you to Ireland?
[ **Sir John Harinoton** *enters. They all become silent.* ]
**Harington**: Well, I have made my own decision. I am no soldier. I am a poor swimmer and dislike the ague. By your leave, Lord Essex, I will make my way to England and try to make my peace with her Majesty. The rest of you, if you are wise, will find a way to do the same.
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CURTAIN
</p>
## Act IV
### Scene I
*September* 28, 1599. *Morning.* **Elizabeth** *in her private room, dressing, her hair disordered about her shoulders.* **Bridges** *is attending her.*
**Elizabeth**: Look outside. What is the day to be?
**Bridges** (*going to window*): The wind is rising.
**Elizabeth**: It was in storm that I came to my kingdom. Calais lost! England’s name sunk and despised!
It is in storm that I shall leave it.
Did I see Jack Harington talking with you yesterday?
**Bridges**: Yes, your Highness. (*Absent-mindedly.*) Sir John is back from Ireland.
**Elizabeth**: Sir John went there without my bidding.
When you again see Sir John—Sir John Harington—tell him to go home. To go home!
**Bridges**: Yes, your Highness.
**Elizabeth** (*savagely*): I say, tell that witty fellow my godson to go home! It is no season for him to fool it here.
Bridges, you have heard that Essex is back also?
**Bridges**: Yes, I have heard it. But, your Majesty——
**Elizabeth**: But what?
**Bridges**: Not my Lord of Essex’s army.
**Elizabeth**: No. He forsook his army. And his duty. Only a hundred of his silliest friends and his knights that he has made. These men have scattered to their estates, to gather troops to dethrone me and to make Essex King.
**Bridges**: Your Majesty surely mistakes my Lord of Essex!
**Elizabeth**: Oh, no, Bridges. The time when I could mistake my Lord of Essex is long past.
What did he do in Ireland but play the King in my stead?
I will have those amethysts.
**Bridges**: Will you not wear your emeralds?
**Elizabeth**: No, for they are jewels of spring. (*She tries the amethysts on.*)
(*She sighs deeply.*) I would have made that reed into a pillar. But it was not to be! It was but a reed—swaying to every gust and flaw of flattery! changing with every mood and moment!
Tell me—for I know that you know——
**Bridges**: I know nothing of my Lord of Essex, madam. Since he went to Ireland.
**Elizabeth**: Is that true, Bridges?
**Bridges**: It is true, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Yes, I will wear these amethysts. (*Sets them aside.*)
Bridges, I believe you. For I know that his mind is now so set in its folly that he has long ceased to think of either of us.
**Bridges** (*wretchedly*): I know that, madam.
**Elizabeth**: He thinks only of his own imagined wrongs. Of his own greatness which, his flatterers tell him, only my own continued living hinders from fulness.
**Bridges**: If your Majesty would but believe what is truth! My Lord of Essex loves you more than his life!
**Elizabeth**: No. He now loves only Essex. Yet even now——
**Bridges** (*eagerly*): Yes, your Majesty?
**Elizabeth**: No. It is too late.
**Bridges**: Your Majesty, it is not yet too late. Robin still——
**Elizabeth** (*sharply*): *Who,* Bridges?
**Bridges** (*recovering*): My Lord of Essex, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth** (*subsiding*): No, you may call him Robin. Nothing of all this now matters.
Bridges, you may say all that is in your mind.
**Bridges**: Then, your Majesty, the people say——
**Elizabeth: Do** I care what the people say?
But go on, Bridges. What do they say?
**Bridges**: Then, madam—if only Sir Walter Ralegh——
**Elizabeth**: Nonsense, Bridges! Walter is a fool. But it is Essex only who brings down Essex. Am I an idle girl like you, that my heart should waver from man to man?
**Bridges**: Yet, if Sir Walter were away——
**Elizabeth** (*thoughtfully*): Walter. My best admiral. If he only had in his nature something of nobleness, Walter Ralegh my wisest head, a brain I could trust and make of my Privy Council! You all choose to take up Robin’s silly cry that it is Ralegh, Ralegh, who ruins all between Essex and his Queen! I tell you, Bridges, it is only Essex. Essex and his friends, his Gilly Merricks and Blounts and Southamptons!
[ *A loud knock.* **Elizabeth** *starts up and her hair falls dishevelled along her dressing-gown.* **Bridges** *goes to the door and opens it. She falters back from it and stands staring.*
What is it? Have you lost your tongue?
**Bridges**: Oh, your Majesty! Yes, your Majesty. I mean, No, your Majesty! I mean, your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: Whatever you think you mean, it is foolishness! Can you not speak to the purpose?
[ **Essex** *bursts in: his hose unfastened, his clothes disordered and mired from travelling.* ]
**Essex**: Most Sacred Majesty! (*He attempts to kiss her hand.* **Elizabeth** *refuses it.*)
**Elizabeth**: What new madness is this? What do you here—your presence hateful, without Tyrone’s head?
**Essex**: I could not remain longer away from the Sun that lights my wretched life.
**Elizabeth**: Is this a crazed man?
**Essex**: It is a man who is lost in misery away from his Queen and Sovereign Lady.
**Elizabeth** (*with icy control*): My Lord, what you have done is to walk to your own death. No man, unless his wits had been blinded most utterly, would have dared to break in on me here and thus!
**Essex** (*wildly*): Let me have walked to my death then! I can live no longer in the unhappiness of your displeasure.
**Elizabeth**: Leave me, Bridges. (**Bridges** *goes out.*)
(*Again with that dangerous calmness.*) We heard you had returned from your post in Ireland.
**Essex**: I could not stay longer banished from your presence.
**Elizabeth**: We heard you were back. As Henry the Fourth, when he came to destroy his lawful Sovereign!
**Essex**: No, madam. I have come to save you.
**Elizabeth**: Save me from what?
**Essex**: Brightest Glory of Our Age!
**Elizabeth**: Have done with this foolery! From what or from whom would you save me?
**Essex**: From those who abuse your trust.
**Elizabeth**: Have a care, Robin! I warned you before. Do what despite you will to my person. But beware of touching my sceptre!
Where are those fools you brought with you?
(*Angrily.*) I mean, those hundred young fools you brought from Ireland.
**Essex**: They are awaiting your Majesty’s commands.
**Elizabeth** (*blazing out*): Now do I know you for the falsest and basest liar that ever lived on earth! They are plotting to raise armies against their Queen! these men who in Ireland were beaten down and made a mock by an army of knaves and ragged beggars!
(*Controlling her anger*) Did you not receive my letters?
**Essex**: I did.
**Elizabeth**: Can you not read? Can you not understand? I bade you—*on your allegiance!* Stir not one foot out of Ireland! unless you bring me Tyrone’s head! Well? (*Sharply.*) Have you brought me that rebel’s head?
**Essex**: If your Majesty would but once listen——
**Elizabeth**: I have listened to you for fifteen years!
**Essex**: If you would but listen now!
**Elizabeth**: I should hear but the ancient story! The wailings of a child in love with itself and its own fancied wrongs and sorrows! What new gift from my treasury do you sue for now? By your appearance you need it, to mend the disorder and baseness of your clothes!
**Essex**: If I owe you allegiance——
**Elizabeth**: *If!*
**Essex**: I know that I owe you allegiance. I know that the greatest of us are but your servants. You have shown me kindness.
**Elizabeth**: You should have remembered that before, my Lord! You should have remembered that before!
**Essex**: Is there nothing that *you* should have remembered?
**Elizabeth** (*again with that dangerous calmness*): What does my Lord of Essex consider that I should have remembered—that I have forgotten towards him?
**Essex** (*angry*): That you owe your servants a steadfast kindness. Not this mad wavering of a woman, whose whims and caprices no man can control!
**Elizabeth**: Now am I sure that your wits have left you! Wavering of a woman!
**Essex** (*beginning to shout*): No! Not of a woman! Of a mere girl! The girl you continue to imagine you have remained all these years!
**Elizabeth** (*amazed*): I command you, begone!
**Essex**: I will not! Till I have shown you a mirror of what you are! Since you dare not yourself look in a mirror, to see what you have become!
**Elizabeth**: You will—show me what?
**Essex**: Tell you truly what you are! What! Cannot princes err? Is earthly power or authority infinite? Cannot subjects receive wrong? As I have received wrong from you! till my heart bids me endure it no further! Wrong upon wrong! a continued injustice!
**Elizabeth** (*her amazement growing*): Injustice! My Lord, what *were* you—until I myself built you up? A pretty boy! Nothing more! And a boy you have stayed, in a world of grown men!
You shall be gone this moment! Your boots stink! Your raiment is all torn and fouled!
**Essex**: If my boots stink, it is from your service.
**Elizabeth**: *My* service! No, it is from the service of your own crazed passions! your self-love and self-deception! You should have stayed at Milford, until I myself bade you come humbly to my presence, in seemly garb and washed, my Lord! Washed, and in clean hose and doublet! If you but saw how you now look! (*She breaks into mocking laughter.*)
**Essex**: Shall I tell you how *you* look—you who these seven years have not dared to confront a mirror! who all your life have feared to look on truth! Your dyed tresses hang about your shoulders like yellow ropes which Time has frayed and worn thin! Your wizened face still pouts itself into the mincing smile it wore as a girl’s! They go well with your misshapen body and twisted shoulders!
Gloriana! Wonder of Our Age! and of all succeeding Ages!
[ *He and* **Elizabeth** *stand silently, facing each other.* ]
And your mind? Your mind is as crooked as your carcase!
[ *From the anger in her face* **Essex** *quails, and rushes from the room. The* **Queen** *sinks into the chair before her dressing-table and throws her head on her arms, her shoulders shaken with weeping.* **Bridges** *enters.* ]
**Bridges** (*kneeling by her*): Your Majesty! your Majesty!
**Elizabeth** (*her hand caresses the girl’s head—then she looks up*): Bridges!
**Bridges**: Yes?
**Elizabeth**: Speak at once to Sir Walter Ralegh. Bid him have all his guards ready. Call out the train bands. Send a summons to all my Privy Council and in especial bid the Lord High Admiral and Lord Thomas Howard call their men together. Tell Sir Walter to expect an assault on the City. In our own palace of Whitehall——
**Bridges** (*pausing at the door*): Yes, your Majesty?
**Elizabeth**: No. We ourselves (*she draws herself up proudly*) need no manner of guard. But the City, Bridges! The City must be closely kept.
**Bridges**: Yes, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Bridges!
**Bridges**: Yes, your Majesty?
**Elizabeth**: Are my shoulders misshapen?
**Bridges**: Your Majesty’s shoulders misshapen?
**Elizabeth**: Come! You have dressed me and must know.
**Bridges**: Oh, no, no, madam!
**Elizabeth** (*warningly*): Bridges!
**Bridges** (*tremblingly*): A slight unevenness of the shoulders, madam. But nothing of any consequence.
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CURTAIN
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<p class="center">⁎  ⁎  ⁎</p>
### Scene II
**Scene** *as in* **Act** I. **Elizabeth** *and* **Bridges. Bridges** *is at the window.*
**Elizabeth**: Do you see anything, Bridges?
**Bridges**: Nothing. Except your soldiers on guard. Some stir from time to time, as if they heard some news. Or a messenger rides up, to speak to their captain. Then goes again, as fast as he came.
**Elizabeth**: I can see more than you, then. (*She throws herself down on a couch in weariness.*) I see my Lord of Essex.
**Bridges** (*she stares at the* **Queen,** *wondering if sorrow and anxiety have affected her mind*): My Lord of Essex, your Majesty? God forbid that we should see him so near to your Grace!
**Elizabeth**: Would God had forbidden that Essex should go so far from us both! (*A sound of guns, far off.*)
You and I, Bridges, have heard that sound before!
**Bridges** (*almost breaking down*): Only for reason of exceeding joy. Would that they were sounding for such reason now!
**Elizabeth** (*as if to herself*): Yes. For reason of exceeding joy!
Do you remember when Robin first went to Ireland? How his silly young gentlemen rode before him and beside him, as if he were King!
**Bridges**: He rode past this window, madam. The guns sounded for greeting!
**Elizabeth**: How my own crazed people marched, and cheered him through the City! And the playwrights went mad—who are all but over madness’s threshold already!
What was it their most crazed and foolish brain of all wrote? When Robin went to Ireland!
**Bridges**: I do not remember.
**Elizabeth**: I told you before, Bridges, Lie better! Or do not lie at all! I know that you saw his conceit of Henry the Fifth.
Come! What was it that Shakespeare wrote?
**Bridges** (*begins, trembling*):
‘Were now the General of Our Gracious Empress——
**Elizabeth**: Stand over there, girl. There, before that window. Now imagine that you see Robin riding through the City. And speak the lines as you heard them spoken when you saw the play.
**Bridges**: ‘Were now the General of Our Gracious Empress (As in good time he may) from Ireland coming——’
**Elizabeth**: Well, Robin has come. And from Ireland!
**Bridges** (*breaking down*): Oh, your Majesty! your Majesty! Must I repeat what now is nothing but sorrow to us both?
**Elizabeth** (*more gently*): Yes. You and I, Bridges, must endure this sorrow to its finish. Let me hear the lines again. (*The guns sound.*)
**Bridges**:
> ‘Were now the General of Our Gracious Empress<br>
> (As in good time he may) from Ireland coming,<br>
> Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,<br>
> How many would the peaceful City quit<br>
> To welcome him!’
**Elizabeth** (*interrupting*): It would be better if poets and playwrights, who in a manner are nothing but children with a fire in their brains, left affairs of state to heads that are wiser! Let a poet once turn politician, and you have but a fool who has made his mind drunk with a wine he should leave to those who know how to use it! (*A **Page** enters.*)
**Page**: Sir Robert Cecil, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Bid him enter. (**Page** *goes out.*)
Robin has come. As Shakespeare foretold. And bringing rebellion. But his own!
These poets like children when God chooses to speak through their lips!—have a power of divination! Though in ways they little guess! (**Cecil** *enters.*)
What is it, Cecil?
**Cecil**: Only my former errand, your Grace. Your Privy Council beg that even now——
**Elizabeth**: I should go from London?
**Cecil**: Yes, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Why, where should I go?
**Cecil**: To my own house at Hatfield.
**Elizabeth**: Hatfield! Where I was once before, Cecil! when I was a girl who lay down each night, to sleep—if she could find sleep!—with over her pillow the shadow of the axe which had slain her mother!
**Cecil**: At Hatfield, madam——
**Elizabeth**: Yes, yes, I know! At Hatfield are your own faithful servants. At Hatfield lived—and died!—Burghley, who was my friend! At Hatfield also—— (*She is silent.*)
**Cecil**: Yes, madam?
**Elizabeth**: No, Cecil! Not to Hatfield! Even though God should send again His great floods, as when all but Noe and his kindred perished! and though of all this world only Hatfield should stand out of death’s reach!
**Cecil**: Your servants of the Privy Council say——
**Elizabeth**: I know all that they say! Do you not understand, Cecil? At Hatfield I shall be again alone with the girl who was helpless in a kingdom whose rulers plotted to seize her life! I have said good-bye to that girl and her sorrows for ever! Here in Whitehall I am Elizabeth the Queen, who has not spoken with fear for these forty years and more!
**Cecil** (*not knowing what to say*): Yes, madam.
**Elizabeth**: If I am not safe here, in London my dear City, where all these years my subjects’ love has been my sole protection! If *I* have now at last lost their love, Cecil——
**Bridges** (*impulsively kneeling*): You have not lost it, madam!
**Elizabeth** (*caressing her hair*): No, I have not lost it—though traitors intend harm to their Queen!
**Bridges**: If England ever forgets what you have done for her, then God Himself will forget England!
**Elizabeth**: Death is able to find me, if death is God’s will, wherever I should go. It is not of death that I am thinking, Cecil.
[ *The guns again sound, apparently nearer.* ]
**Cecil**: All men know that. But those guns!
**Elizabeth**: We heard them, Cecil.
**Cecil**: They tell you how near the rebels have pierced. Will you not make your dear person safe?
**Elizabeth**: Not by flight, when my servants are imperilling their lives. The Queen’s place is in London, if London is threatened.
Are not Ralegh and Tom Howard at their posts?
**Cecil**: Ralegh is guarding the River.
**Elizabeth**: Then the River is lost to my Lord of Essex! What! When Walter has kept the seas safe through all these years that he has watched for me in Devon—safe from the mightiest King in Christendom!—can he not keep a mere ditch such as the Thames is? From a man who knows nothing of generalship—except that he can rush to meet danger! (*More softly.*) As I know well that Robin can!
Where is Howard, Cecil? ( *A* **Page** *enters.*)
**Cecil**: Howard has locked Lud Gate and guards it.
**Elizabeth**: If Tom Howard has locked Lud Gate, Lud Gate will stay locked. My servants will stand to their duty. (*To* **Page*)* What is it?
**Page** (*hesitatingly*): Sir John Harington, your Majesty. (*The* **Queen** *looks at* **Bridges** *questioningly.*)
**Bridges**: Your Majesty bade me tell Sir John to go home. I so bade him.
**Elizabeth**: Well, that was some time since. But bid Sir John wait till Sir Robert has finished.
**Cecil**: I have done, your Grace. (**Page** *goes out.*) I will return when I have news. God grant it may be of rebellion’s utter ruin!
[ **Cecil** *goes out.* **Sir John Harington** *enters.* ]
**Elizabeth** (*as* **Sir John Harington** *kneels*): What! Is this the first of those rebels to make his way to our presence?
**Harington**: God knows I am no traitor to your Majesty!
**Elizabeth**: No, godson! I think you are too much sheer fool to be traitor. Get up! Get up, I say!
You too were with that man in Ireland. Why have you left him?
**Harington**: Love and allegiance bring me, your Grace.
**Elizabeth** (*angrily*): Was it love and allegiance that took you to Ireland? I gave you no commandment to go to Ireland! You went out of love and allegiance to Essex!
**Harington**: Your Majesty——
**Elizabeth**: Who gave him command to return from Ireland? I sent him on other business! You have come because of Essex! As you went because of Essex!
**Harington**: I returned from Ireland before my Lord of Essex. I have not been with him since he returned.
**Elizabeth** (*bursting into haggard laughter*): An omen! And on my side! Bridges, a rat has left the ship because it is seen to be sinking!
(*Savagely.*) But you have not left Essex! Do you think I do not know that he and his foolish crew last Sunday, when they plotted this rebellion, paid that silly playwright of yours, that Shakescene or Shakespeare, to delight you all with his conceit of Richard the Second?
**Harington**: I did not see it.
**Elizabeth**: Know you not that *I* am Richard? All of you were given to understand just that! He that will forget his benefactress, as Essex has forgotten me, will forget his Saviour! (*She crosses herself.*)
**Harington**: Madam, I swear I was not present.
**Elizabeth**: But you have seen it! It was played no less than forty times in open streets and houses, when it was known (I will not ask how it was known!) that the Bolingbroke you followed had returned swashbuckling from Ireland! Forty times (*she strides up and down, angry and wretched*) they played this portrayal of my dethronement and death!
**Harington**: Your Grace, I did not know this.
**Elizabeth**: Did not know it! When Shakespeare and his mob of ragged players have dared to show it again—for some few shillings that my Lord of Southampton gave them! God’s truth! What, I say again, do poets and playwrights do, meddling beyond their reach? Tell that silly fellow Shakespeare that he had better keep to things he understands! to his lecheries of Falstaff and to showing the fat knight in adultery and love! (*A* **Page** *enters.*)
**Page**: Sir Walter Ralegh desires audience of your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Bid Sir Walter enter. (**Page** *goes out.*)
And Sir John—Sir John Harington—can go. (*She snatches at his girdle.*) Begone, I say!
[ **Sir John Harington** *rises and goes out swiftly.* **Ralegh** *enters.* ]
Your news, Walter?
**Ralegh**: Rebellion is finished. Essex is taken.
**Elizabeth**: Essex—taken? But those guns? Those guns!
**Ralegh**: They were breaking in the doors of Essex House. After he found Lud Gate locked against him, he rode through byways, crying that England was sold to the Spaniard. Then his heart failed him and he fled to his lodgings.
He and all his following have surrendered their lives to your Grace.
**Elizabeth** (*looking at him sharply*): Walter! You are glad because of this!
**Ralegh**: God is my witness that nothing in all my life was greater sorrow.
**Elizabeth**: Sorrow! to Walter Ralegh! To know that Essex had compassed his own death!
**Ralegh**: Yes, madam. For I know that all men will now accuse me of my Lord of Essex’s death. Those that set me up against him will set themselves up against me. I know that it will be worse with me when Essex has gone.
**Elizabeth**: I see that you speak truth for once, Walter. You have learnt too late, as Essex will learn, the wisdom of what I commended to you both—while you still had time to see it! Faction is a flame which a sudden wind blows back upon the hand which fans it.
I remember, it was your counsel that Robin should be sent to Ireland! (**Ralegh** *goes out.*)
[ **Elizabeth** *sits brooding. Then she beckons* **Bridges** *to her and sees that the girl is crying.* ]
Bridges, if God had been good—— (*She sighs deeply.*)
Robin has played with life so long—as a child plays with a toy that it does not know is brittle—that life has at last broken in his hands.
**Bridges**: Your Grace has infinite power to save him.
**Elizabeth**: I have no power, since Robin spoke those words when he was last in my presence. They would rise between us like sharp-edged swords.
**Bridges**: Yet your Majesty has forgiven so much that has been said and done against your greatness!
**Elizabeth**: Bridges, if Robin’s words had been spoken only—to Elizabeth the woman—then—I know not!—but God in His pity might give me the will to forget them! But Robin spoke them to the Queen whom he must serve till my life finish.
Bridges, I remember I was angry with you—because Robin gave me fine speeches, but his heart—the little of it that could forget himself!—was yours! I myself was foolish and I loved Robin—as one loves a pretty child that is wayward yet—if God is good—if God is good—— (*She is silent.*)
But God was not good. All that is over.
**Bridges** (*kneeling*): Yet your Majesty——
**Elizabeth**: Bridges—if those words (*she breaks down*)—had been said to me only (*She recovers herself.*)
Bridges, you and I have found our love again, in this last sorrow which is coming.
[ **Elizabeth** *throws her arms round the kneeling girl. Her head bends over the girl’s head. Her expression cannot be seen.* ]
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CURTAIN
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<p class="center">⁎  ⁎  ⁎</p>
### Scene III
**Elizabeth’s** *private room. She lies on a couch, propped against pillows. A rusty sword is beside her and on the wall is hung, in large letters, a motto, VIDEO ET TACEO.*
**Bridges** *is drawing the curtains. It is evening: March* 23, 1603.
**Bridges** (*turning from the window*): Will you not let me call for a fire?
**Elizabeth**: I do not feel cold.
**Bridges**: At least, let me draw this cloak about your Majesty’s shoulders.
**Elizabeth**: I am not cold.
**Bridges**: It is still winter. (*A* **Page** *enters, carrying a brazier of coals.*)
**Elizabeth** (*as* **Bridges** *is about to take the brazier*): Take out that brazier.
**Page**: Yes, your Majesty. Your Majesty, Sir Robert Cecil desires audience.
**(Elizabeth** *signs that he is to be admitted.* **Page** *goes out.* **Cecil** *enters.*)
**Cecil** (*he is clad in a fur cloak yet shivers*): Will not your Majesty (*he shivers again*) accept some comfort against this March wind? I bade your attendant bring in that brazier.
**Elizabeth**: If coldness could have killed me, Cecil, I should have died in my childhood.
[ *She half rises, and thrusts with her sword into the arras behind her couch.* ]
**Cecil**: Dear Majesty, these fears are without all cause.
**Elizabeth.** I thought that once, Cecil. But my servants betrayed me. The man whom of all men I trusted proved false.
**Cecil**: That sorrow is surely ended, madam.
**Elizabeth**: That sorrow can never end, except with life itself. And after him, like Lucifer, he drew a third of the host of heaven! men whom I had raised high! who should have been a wall round their Queen!
**Cecil** (*again not knowing what to say*): Yes, madam.
**Elizabeth**: Do you think I do not know that all eyes are now turned elsewhere? (*Points to her motto.*) *Video et taceo.* I see. But am silent.
*Audio et taceo.* I hear also (*again she thrusts her sword into the arras*)—I hear—as at night I hear the dry feet of mice as they scamper behind this curtain—the whisper of rats who are ready to betray me! They wait for news of my death.
What is it now, Cecil?
**Cecil**: Word from Ireland, your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: God’s truth! Is England never to be quit of that wretched country? I weary of ill news for ever!
**Cecil**: The Spaniards have entrenched themselves at Kinsale. Tyrone with his whole army has joined them. So Mountjoy writes.
**Elizabeth** (*with a gesture of almost despair*): Is Mountjoy also a reed that will break in the storm?
**Cecil**: God forbid! Mountjoy is a skilled and brave soldier.
**Elizabeth**: So was Bagnal. So also—God knows that at least! so thought them!—were others. Is Mountjoy perchance worse than foolish? Is Mountjoy also false?
Did you not hear my question? Come! you know what I mean! Mountjoy’s mistress is Essex’s sister. His brother was Christopher Blount, who died on Tower Hill with Essex for the same rebellion.
**Cecil**: These fears are but the imaginings of sickness, your Majesty. If you would but listen to your servants——
**Elizabeth**: Doubtless! I should wrap myself up in furs, like my Councillors!
**Cecil**: Yes, madam. You would rest and this your distemper would pass.
**Elizabeth**: Cecil, you know—and know that I know you know—that what you style my distemper is a sickness by which God my Saviour (*she crosses herself*) now calls me to His presence! I pray only that I may not die as I have lived! surrounded by those who wish me ill!
**Cecil**: There is none so base and forgetful of all you have wrought, as to wish you ill.
**Elizabeth**: Well, I will believe you. But Mountjoy, it is well known, has murmured against some words of seeming harshness that have been perchance in my letters to him.
**Cecil**: Whatever he said, it was but words cast out to ease the spirit.
**Elizabeth**: I know that is true. I know that is true. Bridges (*she tosses the sword to her*), you shall take that away. If there are traitors about me, I know they are not of this world. Mountjoy (*she laughs with the old gaiety*) said that I treated him like a kitchenmaid. Send him word that his Sovereign’s love and trust pray for him, Cecil! like angels in God’s sight, where all prayers must prevail! Say that I account Tyrone and Spain as conquered already. For I know his skill and worth!
Is there aught else?
**Cecil**: Only that the King of France——
**Elizabeth**: That Antichrist of Unthankfulness! France thinks always that England has but one duty! to serve France! Let us speak of him to-morrow, Cecil! I grow tired, Cecil—I grow tired (*she stretches out her hands in a gesture of unutterable weariness*) of this world’s sorrow and dragging pace to the grave! (*A* **Page** *enters.*)
**Page**: Sir John Harington humbly desires speech with your Majesty.
**Elizabeth**: Bid Sir John enter. Only bid Sir John be brief. (**Page** *goes out.*)
[ **Elizabeth** *holds out her hand to* **Cecil** *to be kissed.* **Cecil** *goes out as* **Sir John Harington *enters and kneels by her couch.*
**Harington**: How fares your dear Majesty?
**Elizabeth**: Ill, godson. No, Jack, in truth I am not well. I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since midnight of yesterday. I cannot sleep, Jack. I think that God has taken from me all sleep in this world for ever, until at last body and brain enter on His everlasting rest. I shall soon be vexed no more by the foolish affairs of men who think themselves wise.
**Harington**: My heart is nigh to breaking to hear these words.
**Elizabeth** (*caressing his head*): I know it, Jack. Truly, I know it.
**Harington**: Your Grace has truly been a mother to me. Thinking of all your love and goodness yesterday—and—and—of your Highness’s grievous sickness——
**Elizabeth**: What! you wrote me some verses, Jack?
**Harington**: I crave your leave that I may now read them.
(*Producing a paper from his doublet, he begins to read*):
> ‘Eliza, fair as fairest lily flower!<br>
> Lily of light, set in Time’s secret bower!’
**Elizabeth** (*interrupting*): Let it be to-morrow, son! your anagram on Eliza Regina. You see, Jack, I know your hand before you show it!
**Harington** (*disappointed*): It is all I can bring of comfort, to show my love.
**Elizabeth**: I know, Jack, and I love thee for it. But when thou dost feel creeping Time at thy gate these fooleries will please thee less. I am past my relish for these matters.
There is word again of war in Ireland, Jack. Tell me! This Tyrone—didst thou ever see him face to face?
**Harington**: Once, madam. Though I did not know it was Tyrone until he had gone.
**Elizabeth**: Did not know him until he had gone? Oh, now I know when you saw him! Oh, now it mindeth me that you was with Robin in Ireland! You was one that saw this man elsewhere!
[ *She strikes her breast in sorrow.* ]
Good godson, now leave me. For you are one whose presence is as Moses’ rod when it struck the hard rock. The fountain of tears and of memory breaks open, and I am no longer the Queen I would be at my death!
**Harington**: Then I may return, your Grace?
**Elizabeth**: To read thy verses to-morrow? Yes, you may return. To-morrow, Jack, you may return. To do whatever you will.
[ *She holds out her hand for him to kiss; then stoops forward and herself kisses his forehead.* **Harington** *rises and goes.* **Page** *enters.* ]
**Page**: Sir Walter Ralegh, your Majesty. With him is Sir Robert Cecil, returned.
**Elizabeth**: Bid them be brief, be brief.
[ **Page** *goes out.* **Ralegh** *and* **Cecil** *enter.* ]
**Cecil**: Ralegh has word from Ireland.
**Elizabeth** (*sharply: she sits up quickly*): Mountjoy also has been slain! Tyrone has overcome yet one more English army! And Spain, whom I beat down to utter weakness, triumphs over me in my death!
**Ralegh**: Spain’s whole army are your prisoners. Tyrone is scattered.
**Elizabeth** (*with a gesture of relief and gratitude*): Walter, I might have known! I might have known! Whenever you have come to me as a soldier you have brought me only heartening tidings! I thank God for His mercy! In my hour of death He has not let my enemies exult over me!
**Ralegh** (*he and* **Cecil** *look at each other*): With Spain’s army have been taken papers. Letters (*again he and* **Cecil** *exchange looks, and* **Ralegh** *hesitates*)
**Cecil**: Letters written by my late Earl of Essex.
**Ralegh**: Is it your Majesty’s will to see them?
**Elizabeth** (*with immense decision*): No! Neither now nor ever! Nor that any other should see them! They shall wait until God’s Day of Doom for all flesh! And even then (*her voice falls low*)—they shall stay unread through God’s Eternity—if the will of Essex’s Prince can be heard in Heaven!
**Ralegh** (*half-protestingly*): These letters treat of affairs which closely touch your Highness’s safety.
**Elizabeth** (*wearily*): You will remain but a fool till you die, Walter! Have a care lest you wake an old quarrel and wretchedness which God, in mercy to you though not to me, has set to rest for ever!
**Cecil**: Yet your Kingdom’s safety!
**Elizabeth** (*ignoring* **Cecil**—*still addressing* **Ralegh**): I told you before, Walter! Blood will have blood! The blood of Robin, whom all this realm of England so loved, cries still from the ground, and its voice is ‘Ralegh! Ralegh! Walter Ralegh!’ You will so find it when I have gone and there is none to stand between you and the many who hate you! Will you not let the dead sleep? The grave has half forgiven you.
**Ralegh** (*sullenly*): I was not the cause of my Lord of Essex’s death.
**Elizabeth**: No. But you were the whetstone that sharpened the axe which slew him.
Come, Cecil! You and Walter have brought those letters.
[ *She sees from their faces that this is so.* ]
Bridges, NOW! Bring in that brazier. (**Bridges** *goes out.*)
**Ralegh** (*shamefacedly—opening a despatch case*): The letters are here.
[ **Bridges** *returns with the brazier.* ]
**Elizabeth**: Set down the brazier where I can see it plainly. Walter shall in my sight burn all those letters.
[ **Ralegh** *burns the letters slowly, one by one.* ]
You have kept back nothing.
**Ralegh**: Nothing.
**Elizabeth** (*with a sigh of relief*): Then all is well! I go where Robin and I shall again be friends. In Christ’s presence, where all is concord and peace and forgiveness.
**Ralegh** (*with sudden conviction*): Her Majesty is right, Cecil.
**Elizabeth**: I have kept my winding-sheet unspotted! Bring me pen and paper, Bridges. You shall write for me. (**Bridges** *brings pen and paper.*)
No, Cecil shall write. (**Cecil** *takes pen and paper.*)
Write.
‘To my trusty and well beloved.’ (*With emotion.*) My well beloved, Cecil.
Bridges, that brazier! At last I feel cold. (**Bridges** *sets the brazier beside her.*)
**Cecil** (*looking up*): Yes, madam?
**Elizabeth** (*warming her hands as she dictates*):
‘To my trusty and well beloved Commons of England.
‘We esteem your gifts of money and treasure, to keep our dear realm safe from her foes who wish her destruction. But we bid you know, that more to us than all this is your love, which has filled us with such joy that I know not—truly, in God’s presence, where I must shortly stand, I know not—how I can find words to express what I feel.’ (*Pauses.*) ‘For your gifts I know how to prize. But love, loyalty, thanks, I account them beyond and above all price.’ (*She is silent.*)
[ *At a sign,* **Bridges** *brings the brazier yet nearer to her hands.* ]
Have you got all that down, Mr. Secretary?
**Cecil**: All but ‘beyond and above all price’.
**Elizabeth**: These hands (*she looks at them*)—they are now wasted thin with Time’s taper, that burns to ashes our glory, our youth, our all we have. Yet I remember, gentlemen—I remember (*Her voice falters.*)
**Ralegh**: They are the fairest hands we have seen in our Age! So all Europe has known, dearest Lady!
**Elizabeth**: No, all that (*looking hard at her worn hands*) is finished. Did you not say that Spain’s army had laid down their weapons in Ireland?
**Ralegh**: Their lives are at your discretion and mercy.
**Elizabeth**: See, then, that no life is taken.
What was I saying, Cecil?
**Cecil**: A message to your faithful Commons of England.
**Elizabeth**: I remember. Write then.
‘Though God has raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my reign, that I have reigned with your loves.’ (*Repeats.*) ‘I have reigned with your loves.’
**Bridges**: That is certain!
**Elizabeth**: Now you shall come to a finish, Mr. Secretary.
**Cecil**: I am ready.
**Elizabeth:**
‘It is not my desire to live or reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And, though you have had, and may have again, many mightier and wiser Princes, yet (*with tremendous energy*) you never had nor shall have one that loved you better. Elizabeth your Queen.’
Cecil, now that you and Walter are both here for witness, after I am gone remember what was my will.
**Cecil**: Yes, madam.
**Elizabeth**: The King of Scots is to be King of England also.
**Cecil** (*with alacrity*): I will surely remember.
**Elizabeth**: Let me see what you have written. Give me that pen. (*She reads the letter over and signs it.*)
(*Looking up.*) Why is Ralegh silent?
**Ralegh**: After a reign so crowded with greatness, is England to descend so low? To be subject to a needy beggarly nation?
[ **Cecil** *looks hard at him.* **Elizabeth** *notices this.* ]
**Elizabeth**: You were always the splendid fool, Walter! Which is why lesser men with ease surpass you and leave you lagging!
**Ralegh** (*persistent*): Is the rich man to serve in the poor man’s kitchen?
**Elizabeth**: If it is God’s will, Walter, yes. Did not the Children of Israel themselves, God’s own Chosen Nation, remain for a season servants to the Children of Midian? A needy beggarly nation who dwelt in deserts and owned neither roof nor hearth-fire!
What would you do instead? I will have no civil wars and dissensions about my body new settled in the tomb.
**Ralegh**: I would keep the staff in our own hands. I would set up a commonwealth.
**Elizabeth**: Those are thoughts, Walter, which a wise man, if he had them, would keep to himself. You will live to lament that you ever gave them utterance.
[ *She looks meaningly at* **Cecil,** *who is uncomfortable.* ]
England has great patience. She has learnt to endure much. She will learn to endure even this, Walter! to be ruled by Scots!
Yes, and to be ruled by a King. Do you not know that England will always desire a King? She desires one now. She is long weary of having been ruled by a woman. If I had been a man, do you think that Robin’s rebellion would have spread so far and have drawn in so many? I am not blind, as you are, Walter! Your brain is always so busy, it sees not that lesser brains are busy also. I see what is in those brains—though I have the wit to stay silent—*Video et taceo!*—till the hour strikes for speech!
(*With weariness.*) That hour too has passed. Only the hour for silence draws ever closer!
**Bridges**: If your Grace would but rest! Your strength would surely come back!
**Elizabeth**: Yes, I must rest. As others now rest. Burghley—who was my friend! Drake and Frobisher. Robin—who was my friend—at Cadiz!
Nothing of all that men will remember when they hear Elizabeth’s name remains. All that is left is strolling vagabond players and worthless playwrights who think only of Richard the Second and whose eyes are towards that shambling Bolingbroke who will take my place when Death has snatched my sceptre!
(*Turning to* **Cecil**.) You must write once, more, Mr. Secretary. I promise you, it shall be for the last time.
**Cecil**: Am I to write to the King of Scots?
**Elizabeth** (*bursting into wild laughter*): No, you have written to him enough, Mr. Secretary! (**Cecil** *again looks uncomfortable.*) The King of Scots will come without any letter from me or you, Cecil! other than those letters you have sent already! He is waiting now! His men and horses are all posted!
No, you must write for me to Mountjoy, who has overcome my enemies. (**Cecil** *takes up pen and paper.*)
Write, Mr. Secretary.
‘Dear Mistress Kitchenmaid!
(*She speaks with energy.*) ‘Tell our gallant soldiers from us, that we never doubted that every hundred of them would beat a thousand, and by their deeds they have doubled our predictions. I am the bolder to pronounce this in His Name Who hath ever protected my righteous cause, and in His Name I bless you all. And, putting you, dear Mistress Kitchenmaid, in the first place, I end, scribbling in haste, Your loving Sovereign, Elizabeth your Queen.’
[ *She leans back, exhausted, on her pillows.* ]
Now England (*she addresses* **Ralegh**) passes to new rule and new ways. She will have a King—and a King of such sort, Walter, as will in the end throw the sceptre into the hands of your own Lords and Commons. To my faithful Commons, as my own true successors, I have written my Last Will and Testament, which Cecil and Ralegh shall see delivered. But only God, Walter, can give into your hands that staff which you desire—as God gave it into mine and as God now gives it (*her voice falters*) to the King of Scots—whose mother also—like mine— whose mother (*She is silent.*)
Is all finished, Cecil?
**Cecil**: There is nothing more. (*He hands her the letter and pen, and after reading the letter* **Elizabeth** *signs it.*) Except to tell you of your people’s love and to pray that God may yet raise you up from this your sickness, to rule over us for many more years.
**Elizabeth**: Yes, I would have your prayers.
[ *With an effort she holds out her hands, which* **Cecil** *and* **Ralegh** *kiss, kneeling. They go out.* **Elizabeth** *lies back, silent.* **Bridges** *moves quietly about the room, seeing that all is ready for the night.* ]
*The* **Queen** *suddenly raises herself on her couch.*
That brazier!
**Bridges**: Let me fetch more coals. There are only ashes.
**Elizabeth**: Ashes are all I desire to see.
Help me to where I can see them more plainly.
[ **Bridges** *props her on her pillows.* **Elizabeth** *peers down into the brazier.*
Robin’s last false letters.
Ashes!
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CURTAIN
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