Elizabeth I Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then I remembered something else.
    â€œYou resigned your post as master of the horse,” I said. “Robert, why?”
    â€œAll things must pass,” he said, lightly.
    â€œBut Burghley is still serving me! You two were my first appointments, at my very first council meeting!”
    â€œI still serve you, my Be—Your Majesty,” he said. “Just not as master of the horse. Although I will still breed horses.”
    â€œSo ... who now serves?”
    â€œAn energetic young man I discovered. Christopher Blount. He did well in the Netherlands. Got wounded. I knighted him. You’ll be pleased with him, I am sure.”
    â€œThat title belongs to you.”
    â€œNo longer.”
    â€œIn my mind, it always will.”
    â€œOur minds see things that our eyes cannot,” he said. “I suppose something continues to exist until the mind that sees it no longer exists.”
    Yes, the young handsome Robert Dudley existed now only in the mind of Elizabeth and in portraits. “You are right.”
    We had reached the rose garden, where beds were laid out according to color and variety. There were climbing eglantines, their pink petals spread open like frames; small ivory musk roses studding their prickly bushes; sturdy shrubs with many-petaled reds and whites, damask roses and province roses; beds of yellow roses and pale red canell roses that smelled like cinnamon. The mingled scents were particularly sweet this afternoon.
    â€œI was wrong to call you a lily,” he said. “I see now that roses reflect your true nature better. There are so many different kinds, just as there are so many sides to you.”
    â€œBut my personal motto is ‘ Semper eadem ’—‘Always the same, never changing.’”I had chosen it because I thought unpredictability in a ruler was a great burden for the subjects.
    â€œThat is not how your councillors would describe you,” he said. “Nor your suitors.” He looked away as he added, “I should know, having been both.”
    It was good that I could not see his face, read his expression. “I only play at being fickle,” I finally said. “Underneath it I am steady as a rock. I am always loyal and always there. But a little playacting adds spice to life and keeps my enemies on their toes.”
    â€œYour friends, too, Your Majesty,” he said. “Even your old Eyes sometimes does not know when to believe what he sees.”
    â€œYou may always ask me, Robert. And I will always tell you. That I promise.”

    Robert Dudley: the one person I could almost bare my soul to, could be more honest with than anyone else. Long ago I had loved him madly, as a young woman can do only once in her life. Time had changed that love, hammered it out into a sturdier, thicker, stronger, quieter thing—just as they say happens in any long-term marriage. The Russians say, “The hammer shatters glass but forges iron.”
    I once told an ambassador that if I ever married it would be as a queen and not as Elizabeth. If I had ever been convinced marriage was a political necessity, then I would have proceeded despite my personal reluctance. But at my coronation I promised to take England itself as my spouse. Remaining a virgin, not giving myself to anyone but my people, was the visible sacrifice they would prize and honor, binding us together. And so it has proved.
    And yet, and yet ... at the same time I spared them the horrors of foreign entanglement and the specter of domination, I left them with the very thing my father turned his kingdom upside down to avoid: no heir to succeed me.
    I cannot say it doesn’t worry me. But I have other immediate decisions to make, of equal and urgent concern to the survival of my country.

    It took Francis Drake the better part of a week to travel the two hundred miles separating Plymouth and London. But now he stood before the full Privy Council, and me, in the meeting