The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  Then I saw they were not looking at me. They were looking at the queen and their jaws were set and their eyes cold.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered.

  She must have thought it was the end for her, as she rose slowly to her feet and looked from one stern face to another. She knew that the duke could turn his coat in a moment, the council could have mustered a swift plot; they had done it before against Jane, they could do it again. But she did not blench, the face she turned to them was as serene as if they had come to invite her to dine. In that moment I loved her for her courage, for her absolute queenly determination never to show fear. “How now, my lords?” she said pleasantly, her voice steady though they walked into the center of the room and looked at her with hard eyes. “I hope you bring me good news for all you seem so severe.”

  “Your Grace, it is not good news,” Bishop Gardiner said flatly. “The rebels are marching against you. My young friend Edward Courtenay has seen the wisdom to confess to me and throw himself on your mercy.”

  I saw her eyes flicker away, to one side, as her swift intelligence assessed this information; but her expression did not otherwise alter at all, she was still smiling. “And Edward tells you?”

  “That a plot is in train to march on London, to put you in the Tower and to set the Lady Elizabeth on the throne in your place. We have the names of some of them: Sir William Pickering, Sir Peter Carew in Devon, Sir Thomas Wyatt in Kent, and Sir James Crofts.”

  For the first time she looked shaken. “Peter Carew, who turned out for me in my time of need, in the autumn? Who raised the men of Devon for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sir James Crofts, my good friend?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  I kept back behind her. These were the very men that my lord had named to me, that he had asked me to name to John Dee. These were the men who were to make a chemical wedding and to pull down silver and replace it with gold. Now I thought I knew what he meant. I thought I knew which queen was silver and which was gold in his metaphor. And I thought that I had again betrayed the queen while taking her wage, and that it would not be long before someone discovered who had been the catalyst in this plot.

  She took a breath to steady herself. “Any others?”

  Bishop Gardiner looked at me. I flinched back from his gaze but it went on past me. He did not even see me, he had to give her the worst news. “The Duke of Suffolk is not at his house in Sheen, and no one knows where he has gone.”

  I saw Jane Dormer stiffen in the window seat. If the Duke of Suffolk had disappeared then it could mean only one thing: he was raising his hundreds of tenants and retainers to restore the throne to his daughter Jane. We were faced with an uprising for Elizabeth and a rebellion for Queen Jane. Those two names could turn out more than half of the country, and all the courage and determination that Queen Mary had shown before could come to nothing now.

  “And Lady Elizabeth? Does she know of this? Is she at Ashridge still?”

  “Courtenay says that she was on the brink of marriage with him, and the two of them were to take your throne and rule together. Thank God the lad has seen sense and come over to us in time. She knows of everything, she is waiting in readiness. The King of France will support her claim and send a French army to put her on the throne. She may even now be riding to head the rebel army.”

  I saw the queen’s color drain from her face. “Are you sure of this? My Elizabeth would have marched to my execution?”

  “Yes,” the duke said flatly. “She is up to her pretty ears in it.”

  “Thank God Courtenay has told us of this now,” the bishop interrupted. “There may still be time for us to get you safely away.”

  “I would have thanked Courtenay more if he had the sense never to engage in it,” my queen countered sharply. “Your young friend is a fool, my lord, and a weak disloyal fool at that.” She did not wait for his defense. “So what must we do?”

  The duke stepped forward. “You must go to Framlingham at once, Your Grace. And we will put a warship on standby to take you out of the country to Spain. This is a battle you cannot win. Once you’re safe in Spain perhaps you can regroup, perhaps Prince Philip…”

  I saw her grip on the back of her chair tighten. “It is a mere six months since I rode into London from Framlingham,” she said. “The people wanted me as queen then.”

  “You were their choice in preference to the Duke of Northumberland with Queen Jane as his puppet,” he brutally reminded her. “Not instead of Elizabeth. The people want the Protestant religion and the Protestant princess. Indeed, they may be prepared to die for it. They won’t have you with Prince Philip of Spain as king.”

  “I won’t leave London,” she said. “I have waited all my life for my mother’s throne, I shan’t abandon it now.”

  “You have no choice,” he warned her. “They will be at the gates of the city within days.”

  “I will wait till that moment.”

  “Your Grace,” Bishop Gardiner said. “You could withdraw to Windsor at least…”

  Queen Mary rounded on him. “Not to Windsor, not to the Tower, not to anywhere but here! I am England’s princess and I will stay here in my palace until they tell me that they want me as England’s princess no more. Don’t speak to me of leaving, my lords, for I will not consider it.”

  The bishop retreated from her passion. “As you wish, Your Grace. But these are troubled times and you are risking your life…”

  “The times may be troubled, but I am not troubled,” she said fiercely.

  “You are gambling with your life as well as your throne,” the duke almost shouted at her.

  “I know that!” she exclaimed.

  He took a breath. “Do I have your command to muster the royal guard, and the city’s trained bands and lead them out against Wyatt in Kent?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But there must be no sieges of towns and no sacking of villages.”

  “It cannot be done!” he protested. “In battle, one cannot protect the battle ground.”

  “These are your orders,” she insisted icily. “I will not have a civil war fought over my wheat fields, especially in these starving times. These rebels must be put down like vermin. I won’t have innocent people hurt by the hunt.”

  For a moment he looked as if he would argue. Then she leaned toward him. “Trust me in this,” she said persuasively. “I know. I am a virgin queen, my only children are my people. They have to see that I love them and care for them. I cannot get married on a tide of their innocent blood. This has to be gently done, and firmly done, and done only once. Can you do it for me?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. He was too afraid to waste time in flattery. “Nobody can do it. They are gathering in their hundreds, in their thousands. These people understand only one thing and that is force. They understand gibbets at the crossroads and heads on pikes. You cannot rule Englishmen and be merciful, Your Grace.”

  “You are mistaken,” she said, going head to head with him, as determined as he was. “I came to this throne by a miracle and God does not change his mind. We will win these men back by the love of God. You have to do it as I command. It has to be done as God would have it, or His miracle cannot take place.”

  The duke looked as if he would have argued.

  “It is my command,” she said flatly.

  He shrugged and bowed. “As you command then,” he said. “Whatever the consequences.”

  She looked over his head to me, her face quizzical, as if to ask what I thought. I made a little bow, I did not want her to know the sense of immense dread that I felt.

  Winter 1554

  I came to wish that I had warned her in that moment. The Duke of Norfolk took the apprentice boys from London and the queen’s own guard, and marched them down to Kent to meet Wyatt’s force in a set-piece battle, which should have routed the men from Kent in a day. But the moment the royal army faced Wyatt’s men and saw their honest faces and their dete
rmination, our forces, who had sworn to protect the queen, threw their caps in the air and shouted, “We are all Englishmen!”

  Not a shot was fired. They embraced each other as brothers and turned against their commander, united against the queen. The duke, desperate to escape with his life, hared back to London, having done nothing but add a trained force to Wyatt’s raggle-taggle army who came onward, even more quickly, even more determined than they were before, right up to the gates of London.

  The sailors on the warships on the Medway, always a powerful bellwether of opinion, deserted to Wyatt in a body, abandoning the queen’s cause, united by their hatred of Spain, and determined to have a Protestant English queen. They took the small arms from the ships, the stores, and their skill as fighting men. I remembered how the arrival of the ships’ companies from Yarmouth had changed everything for us at Framlingham. We had known then, when the sailors had joined us to fight on land, that it was a battle by the people, and that the people united could not be defeated. Now they were united once more, but this time against us. When she heard the news from the Medway, I thought that the queen must realize she had lost.

  She sat down with a much diminished council in a room filled with the acrid smell of fear.

  “Half of them have fled to their homes in the country,” she told Jane Dormer as she looked at the empty seats around the table. “And they will be writing letters to Elizabeth now, trying to balance their scales, trying to join the winning side.”

  She was harassed by advice. Those who had stayed at court were divided between men who said that she should cancel the marriage, and promise to choose a Protestant prince for a husband, and those who were begging her to call in the Spanish to help put down the rebellion with exemplary savagery.

  “And thus prove to everyone that I cannot rule alone!” the queen exclaimed.

  Thomas Wyatt’s army, swelled by recruits from every village on the London road, reached the south bank of the Thames on a wave of enthusiasm, and found London Bridge raised against them, and the guns of the Tower trained on the southern bank ready for them.

  “They are not to open fire,” the queen ruled.

  “Your Grace, for the love of God…”

  She shook her head. “You want me to open fire on Southwark, a village that greeted me so kindly as queen? I will not fire on the people of London.”

  “The rebels are encamped within range now. We could open fire and destroy them in one cannonade.”

  “They will have to stay there until we can raise an army to drive them away.”

  “Your Grace, you have no army. There are no men who will fight for you.”

  She was pale but she did not waver for a moment. “I have no army yet,” she emphasized. “But I will raise one from the good men of London.”

  Against her council’s advice, and with the enemy force growing stronger every day that they camped, unchallenged, on the south bank of the city, the queen put on her great gown of state and went to the Guildhall to meet the Mayor and the people. Jane Dormer, her other ladies and I went in her train, dressed as grandly as we could and looking confident, though we knew we were proceeding to disaster.

  “I don’t know why you are coming,” one of the old men of the council said pointedly to me. “There are fools enough in her train already.”

  “But I am a holy fool, an innocent fool,” I said pertly. “And there are few enough innocent here. You would not be one, I reckon.”

  “I am a fool to be here at all,” he said sourly.

  Of all of the queen’s council and certainly of all of her ladies in waiting, only Jane and I had any hopes of getting out of London alive; but Jane and I had seen her at Framlingham, and we knew that this was a queen to back against all odds. We saw the sharpness in her dark eyes and the pride in her carriage. We had seen her put her crown on her small dark head and smile at herself in the looking glass. We had seen a queen, not filled with fear of an unbeatable enemy, but playing for her life as if it were a game of quoits. She was at her very best when she and her God stood against disaster; with an enemy at the very gates of London you would want no other queen.

  But despite all this, I was afraid. I had seen men and women put to violent death, I had smelled the smoke from the burnings of heretics. I knew, as few of her ladies knew, what death meant.

  “Are you coming with me, Hannah?” she asked pleasantly as she mounted the steps to the Guildhall.

  “Oh yes, Your Grace,” I said through cold lips.

  They had set up a throne for her in the Guildhall and half of London came from sheer curiosity, crowding to hear the queen argue for her life. When she stood, a small figure under the weighty golden crown, draped in the heavy robes of state, I thought for a moment that she would not be able to convince them to keep their faith with her. She looked too frail, she looked too much like a woman who would indeed be ruled by her husband. She looked like a woman you could not trust.

  She opened her mouth to speak and there was no sound. “Dear God, let her speak.” I thought she had lost her voice from fear itself, and Wyatt might as well march into the hall now and claim the throne for the Lady Elizabeth, for the queen could not defend herself. But then her voice boomed out, as loud as if she were shouting every word, but as clear and sweet as if she were singing like a chorister in the chapel on Christmas Day.

  She told them everything, it was as simple as that. She told them the story of her inheritance: that she was a king’s daughter and she claimed her father’s power, and their fealty. She reminded them that she was a virgin without a child of her own and that she loved the people of the country as only a mother can love her child, that she loved them as a mistress, and that, loving them so intensely, she could not doubt but that they loved her in return.

  She was seductive. Our Mary, whom we had seen ill, beleaguered, pitifully alone under virtual house arrest, and only once as a commander; stood before them and she blazed with passion until they caught her fire and were part of it. She swore to them that she was marrying for their benefit, solely to give them an heir, and if they did not think it was the best choice then she would live and die a virgin for them; that she was their queen — it meant nothing to her whether she had a man or not. What was important was the throne, which was hers, and the inheritance, which should come to her son. Nothing else mattered more. Nothing else could ever matter more. She would be guided by them in her marriage, as in everything else. She would rule them as a queen on her own, whether married or not. She was theirs, they were hers, there was nothing that could change it.

  Looking around the hall I saw the people begin to smile, and then nod. These were men who wanted to love a queen, who wanted a sense that the world could be held fast, that a woman could hold her desires, that a country could be made safe, that change could be held back. She swore to them that if they would stay true to her, she would be true to them and then she smiled at them, as if it was all a game. I knew that smile and I knew that tone; it was the same as at Framlingham when she had demanded why should she not take an army out against tremendous odds? Why should she not fight for her throne? And now, once again, there were tremendous odds against her: a popular army encamped at Southwark, a popular princess on the move against her, the greatest power in Europe mobilizing, and her allies nowhere to be seen. Mary tossed her head under the heavy crown and the rays from the diamonds shot around the room in arrows of light. She smiled at the huge crowd of Londoners as if every one of them adored her — and at that moment they did.

  “And now, good subjects, pluck up your hearts and like true men face up against these rebels and fear them not, for I assure you, I fear them nothing at all!”

  She was tremendous. They threw their caps in the air, they cheered her as if she were the Virgin Mary herself. And they raced outside and took the news to all those who had not been able to get into the Guildhall, until the whole city was humming with the words of the queen who had sworn that she would be a mother to them, a mistress to them, a
nd that she loved them so much she would marry or not as they pleased, as long as they would love her in return.

  London went mad for Mary. The men volunteered to march against the rebels, the women tore up their best linen into bandages and baked bread for the volunteer soldiers to take in their knapsacks. In their hundreds, the men volunteered; in their thousands, and the battle was won; not when Wyatt’s army was cornered and defeated just a few days later, but in that single afternoon, by Mary, standing on her own two feet, head held high, blazing with courage and telling them that as a virgin queen she demanded their love for her as she gave them hers.

  Once again the queen learned that holding the throne was harder than winning it. She spent the days after the uprising struggling with her conscience, faced with the agonizing question of what should be done with the rebels who had come against her and been so dramatically defeated. Clearly, God would protect this Mary on her throne, but God was not to be mocked. Mary must also protect herself.

  Every advisor that she consulted was insistent that the realm would never be at peace until the network of troublemakers was arrested, tried for treason and executed. There could be no more mercy from a tender-hearted queen. Even those who in the past had praised the queen for holding Lady Jane and the Dudley brothers in the Tower for safekeeping were now urging her to make an end to it, and send them to the block. It did not matter that Jane had not led this rebellion, just as it did not matter that she had not commanded the rebellion that had put her on the throne. Hers was the head that they would crown, and so hers was the head that must be struck off the body.

  “She would do the same to you, Your Grace,” they murmured to her.

  “She is a girl of sixteen,” the queen replied, her fingers pressed against her aching temples.

  “Her father joined the rebels for her cause. The others joined for the Princess Elizabeth. Both young women are your darkest shadows. Both young women were born to be your enemies. Their existence means that your life is in perpetual danger. Both of them must be destroyed.”