The Young Elizabeth

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Night wind, and the wind-driven shadows of the winter night, stirred through the stone passages of the palace at Whitehall. A phenomenal silence hung like a dense mist wreathing from the river. It was so short a time since Christmas that you might almost have thought to hear the echoes of the revels, and on any such winter night, to hear something more live and sparkling than echoes and to see something more tangible than shadows. There would be the log fires spurting and the candles wavering, voices shouting, murmuring, laughing, the clash of platters and goblets, the fragile music of lutes and virginals and viols, the swirl and rhythm of dances with the circling whisper of women’s voluminous silks and the spring and thud of men’s velvet-shod feet.

Never in man’s memory was there a King who so loved revels as Great Harry, Golden Harry. In his sun-god youth and peerless prime, he was the center of them. In the hours when the shadow of his own black deeds lay deep in his secret heart, he encouraged them, dancing in a mad carnival to beat down the voices that he would not hear… There were a ball and masques the night he had the news that his first true wife, Catherine of Aragon, had died at last. The King and his Queen, Anne Bullen, came in golden satin. And it was not entirely the doing of the new queen with the black eyes who held him in thrall by her witchery. Partly, of course: because Anne Bullen could never miss a chance to do some ugly and flaunting thing that would insult the memory of Henry’s first wife or her daughter, the Princess Mary. But partly, too, because Henry must set music to sound, and feet to dance and voices to laugh loudly, to drown inadmissible memory.

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