Elizabeth by Evelyn Anthony

alone with Robert Dudley. It was incredible but true that, according to the information of Cecil’s snoopers, watching through cracks in the door and holes in the tapestries, the gross liberties Lord Dudley took with her person were always curtailed at the last moment. The Queen still preserved her virginity, if not her modesty, but her reputation was being ruined by the association.
    She had told Cecil to mind his own business when he reproached her; he had picked his words with the utmost care, stressing the harm done to her good name by what he described as her innocent lack of convention, and hinted that her numerous foreign suitors might be offended by the scandals linking her name with a subject. And a subject of somewhat ignoble birth, who already had a wife.
    Elizabeth had replied by laughing in his face. Her conscience was clear in her own sight; she assured him that the subject in question was more dear to her than the opinion of Princes she had never seen, and that if she could ignore the clacking of evil tongues, so could he. Dudley was not her lover. Cecil had been about to say that he might just as well be, but she changed the subject.
    Her conduct was bad enough; it shocked Cecil, whose neat mind regarded it as illogical and depraved, but he lived in terror that her nocturnal indiscretions would lead her either to submission to the scoundrel or else to the marriage he was obviously plotting.
    The climax came when Dudley left for Cumnor, making no secret that his purpose was to secure a divorce from Lady Dudley. When he returned he hedged about the outcome, saying that his wife was ill and unable to discuss the matter yet. Cecil, and everyone else who knew the circumstances, supposed that he had been refused, and the most terrible rumour of all began to circulate. The Queen and Dudley intended Amy Dudley’s death. Death by poison. Death by assassination. The foreign ambassadors’ reports were full of it; the atmosphere surrounding the Court sizzled like a lighted fuse, inexorably burning towards the explosion of scandal which would blast Elizabeth off her throne. Inwardly Cecil raged at his idol for so soon showing feet of more than mortal clay. He had imagined her to be above the weaknesses of women, proof against their fleshy temptations and their emotional instability. He saw her in the Council Chamber, clever, dispassionate, far seeing, and could not believe that she was about to murder a simple country gentlewoman in order to take a self-seeking pimp into her bed and make him King of England.
    But he could not allay his fears, because she would not let him. He could not talk to her on this one subject, by far the most important and the most dangerous at that time, however close they were on things connected with the State. He threw down his pen in despair.
    Her throne was trembling under her; nothing could keep her on it if anything happened to Amy Dudley and she married Amy Dudley’s husband. The whole country would rise against her, and the Queen of Scots, still smarting from English interference in her kingdom across the Border, would descend upon them with the full support of France to claim the English throne. And not even Philip of Spain’s Francophobia would make him protect the interests of a woman who had connived at murder to satisfy a personal lust.
    â€œSir William!”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    One of Cecil’s private couriers stood in the doorway, covered with dust.
    â€œI’ve just come from Cumnor, Sir. Lady Dudley is dead. She was found at the foot of the stairs with her neck broken this morning.”
    Cecil found the Queen in her Privy Chamber. She was seated in the middle of a circle composed of Mary Sidney, who was Dudley’s sister, Kate Dacre, and several young gentlemen of her household. They were all laughing, Elizabeth holding both hands wide in illustration of some story she had been telling them.
    He stood without speaking, looking at her until