Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction
Of the actual ceremony of the knighting of Mr. Drake they had a very fair
view, though the figures were little and far away. The first intimation
they had that the banquet was over was the sight of the scarlet-clad
yeomen emerging one by one up the little hatchway that led below. The
halberdiers lined the decks already, with their weapons flashing in long
curved lines; and by the time that the trumpets began to sound to show
that the Queen was on her way from below, the decks were one dense mass
of colour and steel, with a lane left to the foot of the poop-stairs by
which she would ascend. Then at last the two figures appeared, the Queen
radiant in cloth of gold, and Mr. Drake, alert and brisk, in his Court
suit and sword. There was silence from the crowd as the adventurer knelt
before the Queen, and Anthony held his breath with excitement as he
caught the flash of the slender sword that an officer had put into the
Queen's hand; and then an inconceivable noise broke out as Sir Francis
Drake stood up. The crowd was one open mouth, shouting, the church bells
burst into peals overhead, answered by the roll of drums from the deck
and the blare of trumpets; and then the whole din sank into nothingness
for a moment under the heart-shaking crash of the ship's broadside,
echoed instantly by the deeper roar of the dockyard guns, and answered
after a moment or two from far away by the dull boom from the Tower. And
Anthony leaned yet further from the window and added his voice to the
tumult.
As he rode back alone to Lambeth, after parting with the others at London
Bridge, for they intended to go down home again that night, he was
glowing with national zeal. He had seen not only royalty and magnificence
but an apotheosis of character that day. There in the little trim figure
with the curly hair kneeling before the Queen was England at its
best--England that sent two ships against an empire; and it was the
Church that claimed Sir Francis Drake as a son, and indeed a devoted one,
in a sense, that Anthony himself was serving here at Lambeth, and for
which he felt a real and fervent enthusiasm.
He was surprised a couple of days later to receive a note in Lady
Maxwell's handwriting, brought up by a special messenger from the Hall.
"There is a friend of mine," she wrote, "to come to Lambeth House
presently, he tells me, to be kept a day or two in ward before he is sent
to Wisbeach. He is a Catholic, named Mr. Henry Buxton, who showed me
great love during the sorrow of my dear husband's death; and I write to
you to show kindness to him, and to get him a good bed, and all that may
comfort him: for I know not whether Lambeth Prison is easy or hard; but I
hope perhaps that since my Lord Archbishop is a prisoner himself he has
pity on such as are so too; and so my pains be in vain. However, if you
will see Mr. Buxton at least, and have some talk with him, and show him
this letter, it will cheer him perhaps to see a friend's face."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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