I shake my head and go to the window. This is no good. I am not a fanciful man, but I cannot shake off this dream. It was not a dream, it was a foreknowing. The details were so clear, my pain was so strong. This is not simply a dream, it is how it will be, I know it. For me; for her.
It is dawn. It is the very day of Howard’s death. After such a terrible night, the terrible day has come. Today we are going to behead the Duke of Norfolk and I must be a man today, and servant to a queen who can do no other but kill her own kin. God save me from such dreams. God save the Queen of Scots from such an end. God save my beloved, my darling, from such an end; and God spare me from being a witness to it.
February 8th, 1587, Hardwick Hall: Bess
God save them both today, and all days.
I have no cause to love either of them and no cause to forgive them either; but I find I do forgive them, this day of her death and this day of his final heartbreak.
She was an enemy to my queen, to my country, to my faith, and to me, certainly to me. And he was a fool for her, he laid down his fortune for her and in the end, as most of us think, he laid down his reputation and his authority for her as well. She ruined him, as she ruined so many others. And yet I find I can forgive them both. They were what they were born to be. She was a queen, the greatest queen that these days have known; and he saw that in her, knight errant that he was, and he loved her for it.
Well, today she paid for everything. The day that he dreaded, that she swore could never come, turned out to be a cold wintry morning when she came down the stairs at Fotheringhay to find a stage built in the great hall and the great men of England, my husband among them, to witness her death.
The final plot that could not be forgiven, that could not be overlooked, that she could not blame on others, was a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and take her throne. The Scots queen, fatally, signed her name to it. Anthony Babington, now a young man, who had been little Babington, my darling pageboy, was the chief deviser of this treasonous scheme and he paid for it with his life, poor young man. I wish to God I had never put him in her way, for she took his heart when he was just a child, and she was his death, as she was for so many others.
After all the thousands of letters that she had written, after all the plots she had woven, despite her training and being so well warned, she was finally careless; or else she was entrapped. She signed her own name to the plan to murder Queen Elizabeth and that was her death warrant.
Or they forged it.
Who knows?
Between a prisoner as determined on freedom as her, and jailors as unscrupulous as Cecil and Walsingham, who will ever know the truth of it?
But in a way today, despite them all, the Scots queen has won the battle. She always said that she was not a tragic figure, not a queen from a legend, but she saw in the end that the only way she would defeat Elizabeth – fully and finally defeat her – was to be the heroine that Elizabeth could not be: a tragic heroine, the queen of suffering, cut down in her beauty and her youth. Elizabeth could name herself the Virgin Queen and claim great beauty, surrounded by admirers; but Mary Queen of Scots will be the one that everyone remembers as the beautiful martyr from this reign, whose lovers willingly died for her. Her death is Elizabeth’s crime. Her betrayal is Elizabeth’s single greatest shame. So she has won that crown. She lost in their constant rivalry for the throne of England, but she will win when the histories are written. The historians, mostly men, will fall in love with her, and make up excuses for her, all over again.
They tell me that my husband watched her execution with the tears pouring down his face, speechless with grief. I believe it. I know he loved her with a passion that cost him everything. He was a prosaic man to be overwhelmed by love – and yet it was so. I was there and I saw it happen. I believe no man could have resisted her. She was a tidal queen, a force of the moon, irresistible. He fell in love with her and she broke his fortune, his pride and his heart.
And her? Who knows with her? Ask anyone who has loved a beautiful princess. You never know what she may be thinking. The nature of a princess is enigmatic, contrary, just like the sea. But it is my honest opinion that she never loved anyone at all.
And I? I saved myself from the storm that was Mary Queen of Scots and I know myself to be like a cottager who fastens his shutters and bolts the door and sees the gales blow over. George and I parted, he to his houses and me to mine. He guarded the queen and tried to keep her safe, and tried to hide his love for her, and tried to meet her bills; and I made a life for myself and for my children and I thanked God that I was far away from the two of them, and from the last great love affair of Mary Queen of Scots.
The years have gone by but my love of houses and land has been constant. I lost Chatsworth to my husband the earl when we quarrelled and he turned against me; but I built a new house, a fabled house at Hardwick near the home of my childhood, with the greatest windows in the North of England, the most phenomenal stretches of glass that anyone has ever seen in great stone frames that look everywhere. The children even made a nursery rhyme about it: Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall, they sing. I have built a legend here.
I had my initials stamped on every side of the house in stone. ES it says, in stone at the edge of the towering roof, carved against the sky, so that from the ground, looking up, you can see my initials stamped on the clouds. ES the coronet bellows at the countryside, as far as the eye can see, for my house is set on a hill and the topmost roofs of my house shout: ES.
Elizabeth Shrewsbury my house declaims to Derbyshire, to England, to the world. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house from her own fortune, with her own skill and determination, built this house: from the strong foundations into Derbyshire rock to the initials on the roof. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house to declare her name and her title, her wealth, and her dominance over this landscape. You cannot see my house and not recognise my pride. You cannot see my house and not know my wealth. You cannot see my house and not know that I am a woman self-made, and glad of it.
I have made my children secure in their fortunes, I have done what I set out to do for them. I have founded dynasties: my children own the titles of the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire and Lennox. My son William is the first Earl of Devonshire, my daughter Mary will be the Countess of Shrewsbury. And my granddaughter Arbella is a Stuart, as I planned with Queen Mary. The half-joking scheme that we dreamed over our sewing, I made real, I brought it about. Against the odds, against the will of Queen Elizabeth, in defiance of the law, I married my daughter to Charles Stuart and their child, my granddaughter, is heir to the throne of England. If luck goes with her – my luck, by which I mean my utter determination – she will be queen one day. And what woman in England but me would have dreamed of that?
I say it myself: not bad – not bad at all. Not bad at all, for the daughter of a widow with nothing. Not bad at all for a girl from Hardwick, who was born into debt, and had to earn everything she owns. I have made myself, a new woman for this new world, a thing that has never been before: a woman of independent means and an independent mind. Who knows what such women will do in the future? Who knows what my daughters will achieve, what my granddaughters might do? The world of Elizabeth is full of venturers: both those who travel far away to distant lands, and those who stay at home. In my own way, I am one of them. I am a new sort of being, a new discovery: a woman who commands herself, who owes her fortune to no man, who makes her own way in the world, who signs her own deeds, and draws her own rents, and knows what it is to be a woman of some pride. A woman whose virtue is not modesty, a woman who dares to boast. A woman who is glad to count her fortune, and pleased to do well. I am a self-made woman and proud of it.
And nobody in this world will ever call me Mrs Fool.
Bibliography
Baldwin Smith, Lacey, Treason in Tudor England: Politics & Paranoia, Pimlico, 2006
Bindoff, S. T., Pelican History of England: Tudor England, Penguin, 1993
Brigden,
Susan, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603, Penguin, 2001
Cheetham, J. Keith, Mary Queen of Scots: The Captive Years, J. W. Northend, 1982
Childs, Jessie, Henry VIII’s Last Victim, Jonathan Cape, 2006
Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual Religions and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, OUP, 1977
Darby, H. C., A New Historical Geography of England before 1600, CUP, 1976
De Lisle, Leanda, After Elizabeth, HarperCollins, 2004
Dixon, William Hepworth, History of Two Queens, vol. 2, London, 1873
Drummond, Humphrey, The Queen’s Man: Mary Queen of Scots and the Fourth Earl of Bothwell – Lovers or Villains?, Leslie Frewin Publishers Ltd, 1975
Dunlop, Ian, Palaces & Progresses of Elizabeth I, Jonathan Cape, 1962
Dunn, Jane, Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens, HarperCollins, 2003
Durrant, David N., Bess of Hardwick: Portrait of an Elizabeth Dynast, Peter Owen Books, 1999
Edwards, Francis, The Marvellous Chance: Thomas Howard and the Ridolphi Plot, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968
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Fellows, Nicholas, Disorder and Rebellion in Tudor England, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001
Fletcher, Anthony and MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Rebellions, Longman, 1968
Guy, John, Tudor England, OUP, 1988
Haynes, Alan, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services 1570–1603, Sutton, 1994
Haynes, Alan, Sex in Elizabethan England, Sutton, 1997
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Hubbard, Kate, A Material Girl: Bess of Hardwick 1527–1608, Short Books Ltd, 2001
Hutchinson, Robert, Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006
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Author’s Note
Mary Queen of Scots is one of the great iconic characters of English history and the research for this book has been a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to the reader. Recent work on the queen suggests a very different picture of her from the romantic and foolish woman of the traditional version. I believe she was a woman of courage and determination who could have been an effective queen even in a country as unruly as Scotland. The principal difference between her and her successful cousin Elizabeth was good advisors and good luck, not – as the traditional history suggests – one woman who ruled with her head and the other who was dominated by her heart.
Of course, a character who lives as long and in such dramatically contrasting circumstances as Queen Mary experienced will be interpreted in different ways by different writers, as in my version she suggests: ‘A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore.’
My version of Queen Mary’s story focuses on her years in captivity when she was held by one of the most fascinating women of the Elizabethan era: Bess of Hardwick. Interestingly, Bess is another woman whom popular history has defined in terms of her husbands. The new biography by Mary S. Lovell shows Bess laying the foundation of her fortune less as a gold-digger and more and more as a businesswoman and developer with an eye to good investment and management. Her last husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is not a man who features much in the history books but there is strong evidence to suggest that he was in love with Mary Queen of Scots, with whom he lived as her host and jailor for sixteen years and whose death he did indeed oversee with tears pouring down his cheeks.
The story of these three is a tragedy at the very heart of dramatic times. Their hopes and disappointment in each other is set against the great rising of the North which aimed to free Mary Queen of Scots, restore her to her throne in Scotland, guarantee her inheritance of the throne of England, and provide freedom of religion for Roman Catholics. If they had triumphed – as they looked certain to do – then Elizabethan England would have been a different place.
The Northern rebellion has been portrayed as the greatest challenge to the reign of Elizabeth; and yet it hardly features in the history books and fades into insignificance besides the excited descriptions of the less threatening armada. Indeed, the Northern army amassed a fighting force strong enough to take the kingdom, far greater than that of Henry VII at Bosworth, and their defeat was, as I relate here, a failure of conviction rather than military strength.
The defeat of the Northern army proved to be the final blow in the decline of the North which was always feared and hated by the Tudors and which still bears the scars today.
I am indebted as always to the fine historians whose works are listed in the bibliography, and the novel is heavily built on the historical record. But, also as always, when matters of fact are in dispute I make up my own mind based on the evidence as I understand it, and when there is a gap in the historical record I invent, as a novelist should, a fiction which accounts for the known facts.
For more background to this and all my other novels, for discussion with readers, and for many other features, please visit my website, www.PhilippaGregory.com.
From the bestselling author of THE WHITE QUEEN, now a hit BBC TV production – the first three novels of her Tudor Court series: THE CONSTANT PRINCESS, THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE.
The Tudor Collection Volume 1: 9780007518739
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An astonishing story of an untold love st
ory which changed the fate of a nation.
Katherine of Aragon is born Catalina, the Spanish Infanta, to parents who are both rulers and warriors. Aged four, she is betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and is raised to be Queen of England. She is never in doubt that it is her destiny to rule that far-off, wet, cold land.
But her faith is tested when her prospective father-in-law greets her arrival in her new country with a great insult; Arthur seems little better than a boy; the food is strange and the customs coarse. Slowly she adapts to the first Tudor court, and life as Arthur’s wife grows ever more bearable. But when the studious young man dies, she is left to make her own future: how can she now be queen, and found a dynasty? Only by marrying Arthur’s young brother, the sunny but spoilt Henry. His father and grandmother are against it; her powerful parents prove little use. Yet Katherine is her mother’s daughter and her fighting spirit is strong. She will do anything to achieve her aim; even if it means telling the greatest lie, and holding to it.
The Constant Princess: 9780007370122
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Now a hit movie, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana.
Politics and passion are inextricably bound together in this compelling drama. Set in the court of King Henry VIII, the Boleyn family is keen to rise through the ranks of society, and what better way to attract the attention of the most powerful in the land than to place their most beautiful young woman at court?
But Mary becomes the king’s mistress at a time of change. He needs his personal pleasures, but he also needs an heir. When it’s no longer enough to be the mistress, Mary must groom her younger sister, Anne, in the ways of the king.
Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Page 142