elizabeth

2. Amanda [2]

Amanda walked towards the register, picking up a bag of miniature chocolate-chip cookies, an orange juice and a rather unappetizing ham-and-cheese sandwich along the way. She smiled at the woman who rang up her things, gave her student ID to be swiped and then carried her dinner over to the furthest table she could find that was still more or less clean. She sat down, tipping her things onto the table, and pulled out her cell-phone. She had found Jake’s number in her phone book and was almost about to hit the “SEND” button to dial it when she stopped herself. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t bug Jake too much this summer. He had told her that he was doing much better and needed her to give him some space. It was hard, though, after spending all of her freshman year calling him two or three times a day to see if he was doing okay – and he hadn’t been, at first. He had forgotten to buy groceries and had gone hungry, not knowing what to do. He’d gotten so engrossed in his latest novel that he’d forgotten to go to job interviews. He’d been as helpless as a puppy, and Amanda’s heart ached for him.

But he’s doing better now, she reminded herself sternly. Ever since he’d gotten the job waiting tables at Lila’s, a twenty-four hours diner that was in downtown Hartscreek, he’d been able to pay his bills, he’d been buying groceries and had learned to make himself mac-and-cheese and some other basic dishes, and he was even doing his own laundry. Amanda suspected that the change had to do with a certain Bo, another waiter at Lila’s, who’d been slowly creeping into her conversations with Jake. That was a good thing, though. Maybe he’ll be able to get over what Mom and Dad did to him after all.

Putting her phone firmly back in her bag, Amanda pulled out a well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice instead. She had a biography of Elizabeth I in her bag, as well as a stuffy book about politics – she was doing some reading in order to decide which courses to sign up for in the coming semester. But it was still vacation time, damn it, and she was going to read a comfort book and not study for a while.

Advertisement

A Monarch’s Responsibilities

History is a vast and incomprehensible mystery to me in many ways. We have facts about things that have happened in the past – we have dates, records of events, paintings reproducing the faces involved in those events, poems and diaries devoted to giving opinions and preserving what happened in a biased manner. We have all these things. Mystery, to some people, seems like a wide-open book, its contents there for us to look through, sift for what interests us, and indulge ourselves in knowledge of old.

I don’t feel this way. In my opinion, history is full of so much that we don’t know and so much that I wish I could know. True, we know when Martin Luther began to speak and write about his emotions about being a monk and part of the Catholic Church. In his instance, we can find quite a lot of emotional and sentimental writings from his own pen, or maybe quill, and we can see into his mind, as far as he lets us.

But what about others? What about the farmers and the spinners and the dye-makers that England had in such profusion in the sixteenth century? What were the children running barefoot through the streets of London, so much smaller than it is today, thinking? What games were they playing? What was the man smuggling illegal documents from Europe into the English Empire thinking as he worked? Was he scared for his life or merely waiting to get paid so he could go home to his wife and child? What were the nuns, sequestered in their cloisters, talking about? How did they speak to their young students, and how did they infuse them with a love and a belief for the divine? Through fear? Through love? Through simply offering worship as a fact of life?

And if these so-called simple people’s lives aren’t interesting enough for historians to dwell on – well then, what about the monarchs? How could Henry VIII hold such power in his hands and play with it so lightly at times? What did Katherine of Aragon feel as she was condemned? We can guess, surely, but how can we know? What of Elizabeth? How did she feel when she was sought after for marriage through the years? Did she decide on her own to remain a single ruler in order to maintain a stable throne? Did she, perhaps, not find men pleasing in the manner she would have been expected to? Had she fallen in love with someone who never returned her love or never could?

It’s bad enough, thinking of the power that politicians and governments hold today. At least it’s distributed power, and is more or less given by the people. But monarchs… They were born. Some of them believed they were chosen by divinity to be kings or queens. They held so much power in their cupped hands, that they’d let some of it run through their fingers to those sitting at their feet, just waiting for a pearl or jewel to drop from those mighty hands. I can’t imagine how such responsibility could be held without driving the holder mad with indecision, worry, guilt. Such are the things that the annals of history can’t reveal to us. Thoughts, emotions, private sighs of elation or grief.