Elizabeth I Read Free Page B

crumble, and on all sides there will be great lamentation.’”
    “Yes, but which empires?” I replied. “Didn’t the oracle at Delphi tell King Croesus that if he invaded Persia, a great empire would be destroyed? It turned out to be Croesus’s, not the Persians’.”
    “There are supposed to be three eclipses this year,” said Blanche, undeterred. “One of the sun and two of the moon. We have already had the one of the sun, in February.”
    “Let them come,” I said. As if I could do anything to stop them.

    I needed to be alone. Even my faithful trio did not soothe me. After dinner was over, I went out into the Queen’s garden. Whitehall was an enormous, sprawling palace that had grown from a riverside mansion into a near-city of its own that even boasted a street running through it and two gatehouses. With its tiltyards, cockpits, tennis courts, and pheasant yards, it was difficult to find a secluded spot. But the garden, folded between the brick walls of other buildings, shielded me from curious eyes.
    Grass walkways, bordered by low white and green striped railings, made geometric patterns, crisscrossing the plot. Everything neat and within its own boundaries. God’s death, if only the world were like that! If only Spain would stay within its boundaries. I had never had any territorial ambitions. Unlike my father and his vainglorious attempts at warfare abroad, I have been content within my own realm. They murmur that it’s because I am a woman. They ought better to say it is because I am sensible. War is a sinkhole that sucks money and men into it and is never filled.
    I took a sharp turn as one path dead-ended into another. A painted pole marked the corner, with a carved heraldic beast, flying a standard, atop it. This was the red Welsh dragon, its beak open wide, its wings spread, its talons gripping the pole. The Tudors were a Welsh family, supposedly descended from King Cadwalader. Blanche had filled my childish ears with tales of Wales, and even taught me the language. But I had never been there. Staring at the carved wooden dragon was as close as I had ever come. Someday ...
    But that day was not now. Now I must make sure that England herself survived, and that included Wales.
    I knew one thing: We could not withstand the Spanish army. It was the most finely honed fighting force in the world. We did not even have an army, just armed citizen militias, and whatever private retainers could be mustered by the wealthy on an ad hoc basis.
    So the Spanish must not be allowed to land. Our ships would have to protect us and prevent it. The ships, not the soldiers, must be our salvation.

    The three most powerful men in the realm stood before me—William Cecil, Lord Burghley, lord treasurer; Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary and head of the intelligence service; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, most recently supreme commander of the English forces sent to help the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands as they fought to free themselves from Spain—using English money, of course.
    It would be a long session. “I pray you, sit,” I told them. I myself remained standing. Behind me was the massive Holbein mural that covered one entire wall, depicting my father and grandfather. In it, my father crowded the forefront of the painting, making his own father look as if he were cowering in his shadow. Now I stood in front of him . Did I draw strength from him, or was I telling him I now dominated the monarchy?
    Instead of obeying, Robert Dudley stepped forward and handed me a lily, unfurling on its long stalk. “An unspotted lily for an unspotted lily,” he said, bowing.
    Both Burghley and Walsingham looked long-suffering, shaking their heads.
    “Thank you, Robert,” I said. Instead of calling for a vase, I pointedly laid it on a table behind me, where it would quickly wilt. “Now you may sit.”
    Burghley said, “I trust everyone has seen the ‘Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of