The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  He nodded. Half the country would agree with her. Unfortunately the other half would as passionately disagree. To them the communion wafer was the living God and should be worshipped as a true presence; to do anything less was a foul heresy that only last week would have been punishable by death by burning.

  “So, who have you found to preach at Queen Mary’s funeral?” she asked suddenly.

  “The Bishop of Winchester, John White,” he said. “He wanted to do it, he loved her dearly, and he is well regarded.” He hesitated. “Any one of them would have done it. The whole church was devoted to her.”

  “They had to be,” Robert rejoined. “They were appointed by her for their Catholic sympathies; she gave them a license to persecute. They won’t welcome a Protestant princess. But they’ll have to learn.”

  Cecil only bowed, diplomatically saying nothing, but painfully aware that the church was determined to hold its faith against any reforms proposed by the Protestant princess, and half the country would support it. The battle of the Supreme Church against the young queen was one that he hoped to avoid.

  “Let Winchester do the funeral sermon then,” she said. “But make sure he is reminded that he must be temperate. I want nothing said to stir people up. Let’s keep the peace before we reform it, Cecil.”

  “He’s a convinced Roman Catholic,” Robert reminded her. “His views are known well enough, whether he speaks them out loud or not.”

  She rounded on him. “Then if you know so much, get me someone else!”

  Dudley shrugged and was silent.

  “That’s the very heart of it,” Cecil said gently to her. “There is no one else. They’re all convinced Roman Catholics. They’re all ordained Roman Catholic bishops, they’ve been burning Protestants for heresy for the last five years. Half of them would find your beliefs heretical. They can’t change overnight.”

  She kept her temper with difficulty but Dudley knew she was fighting the desire to stamp her foot and stride away.

  “No one wants anyone to change anything overnight,” she said finally. “All I want is for them to do the job to which God has called them, as the old queen did hers by her lights, and as I will do mine.”

  “I will warn the bishop to be discreet,” Cecil said pessimistically. “But I cannot order him what to say from his own pulpit.”

  “Then you had better learn to do so,” she said ungraciously. “I won’t have my own church making trouble for me.”

  “‘I praised the dead more than the living,’” the Bishop of Winchester started, his voice booming out with unambiguous defiance. “That is my text for today, for this tragic day, the funeral day of our great Queen Mary. ‘I praised the dead more than the living.’ Now, what are we to learn from this: God’s own word? Surely, a living dog is better than a dead lion? Or is the lion, even in death, still more noble, still a higher being than the most spritely, the most engaging young mongrel puppy?”

  Leaning forward in his closed pew, mercifully concealed from the rest of the astounded congregation, William Cecil groaned softly, dropped his head into his hands, and listened with his eyes closed as the Bishop of Winchester preached himself into house arrest.

  Winter 1558–59

  THE COURT ALWAYS HELD CHRISTMAS at Whitehall Palace, and Cecil and Elizabeth were anxious that the traditions of Tudor rule should be seen as continuous. The people should see that Elizabeth was a monarch just as Mary had been, just as Edward had been, just as their father had been: the glorious Henry VIII.

  “I know there should be a Lord of Misrule,” Cecil said uncertainly. “And a Christmas masque, and there should be the king’s choristers, and a series of banquets.” He broke off. He had been a senior administrator to the Dudley family and thus served their masters the Tudors; but he had never been part of the inner circle of the Tudor court. He had been present at business meetings, reporting to the Dudley household, not at entertainments, and he had never taken part in any of the organization or planning of a great court.

  “I last came to Edward’s court when he was sick,” Elizabeth said, worried. “There was no feasting or masquing then. And Mary’s court went to Mass three times a day, even in the Christmas season, and was terribly gloomy. They had one good Christmas, I think, when Philip first came over and she thought she was with child, but I was under house arrest then, I didn’t see what was done.”

  “We shall have to make new traditions,” Cecil said, trying to cheer her.

  “I don’t want new traditions,” she replied. “There has been too much change. People must see that things have been restored, that my court is as good as my father’s.”

  Half a dozen household servants went past carrying a cartload of tapestries. One group turned in one direction, the others turned in the other, and the tapestries dropped between the six of them. They did not know where things were to go, the rooms had not been properly allocated. No one knew the rules of precedence in this new court; it was not yet established where the great lords would be housed. The traditional Catholic lords who had been in power under Queen Mary were staying away from the upstart princess; the Protestant arrivistes had not yet returned in their rush from foreign exile; the court officers, essential servants to run the great traveling business which was the royal court, were not yet commanded by an experienced Lord Chamberlain. It was all confused and new.

  Robert Dudley stepped around the tumbled tapestries, strolled up and gave Elizabeth a smiling bow, doffing his scarlet cap with his usual flair. “Your Grace.”

  “Sir Robert. You’re Master of Horse. Doesn’t that mean that you will take care of all the ceremonies and celebrations as well?”

  “Of course,” he said easily. “I will bring you a list of entertainments that you might enjoy.”

  She hesitated. “You have new ideas for entertainments?”

  He shrugged, glancing at Cecil, as if he wondered what the question might mean. “I have some new ideas, Your Grace. You are a princess new-come to her throne, you might like some new celebrations. But the Christmas masque usually follows tradition. We usually have a Christmas banquet, and, if it is cold enough, an ice fair. I thought you might like a Russian masque, with bear baiting and savage dancing; and of course all the ambassadors will come to be presented, so we will need dinners and hunting parties and picnics to welcome them.”

  Elizabeth was taken aback. “And you know how to do all this?”

  He smiled, still not understanding. “Well, I know how to give the orders.”

  Cecil had a sudden uncomfortable sense, very rare for him, of being out of his depth, faced with issues he did not understand. He felt poor, he felt provincial. He felt that he was his father’s son, a servant in the royal household, a profiteer from the sale of the monasteries, and a man who earned his fortune by marrying an heiress. The gulf between himself and Robert Dudley, always a great one, felt all at once wider. Robert Dudley’s grandfather had been a grandee at the court of Henry VII, his son the greatest man at the court of Henry VIII; he had been a kingmaker; he had even been, for six heady days, father-in-law to the Queen of England.

  Young Robert Dudley had been running in and out of the halls of the royal palaces of England as his home, while Elizabeth had been in disgrace, alone in the country. Of the three of them it was Dudley who was most accustomed to power and position. Cecil glanced at the young queen and saw, mirrored in her face, his own uncertainty and sense of inadequacy.

  “Robert, I don’t know how to do this,” she said in a small voice. “I can’t even remember how to get from the king’s rooms to the great hall. If someone doesn’t walk before me I’ll get lost. I don’t know how to get to the gardens from the picture gallery, or from the stable to my rooms, I…I’m lost here.”

  Cecil saw, he could not be mistaken, the sudden leap of something in the younger man’s face—hope? ambition?—as Dudley realized why the young queen and her principal advisor were standing outside her premier London palace, looking almost as if they did not dare to go
in.

  Sweetly, he offered her his arm. “Your Majesty, let me welcome you to my old home, your new palace. These walks and these walls will be as familiar to you as Hatfield was, and you will be happier here than you have ever been before, I guarantee it. Everyone gets lost in Whitehall Palace; it is a village, not a house. Let me be your guide.”

  It was generously and elegantly done, and Elizabeth’s face warmed. She took his arm and glanced back at Cecil.

  “I will follow, Your Grace,” he said quickly, thinking that he could not bear to have Robert Dudley show him his own rooms as if he owned the place. Aye, Cecil thought. Go on, take your advantage. You just had the two of us at a loss. We stood here, the newcomers, not even knowing where our bedrooms are; and you know this place like the back of your hand. It’s as if you are more royal than her, as if you were the rightful prince here, and now, graciously enough, you show her round your home.

  But it was not all as easy as Elizabeth learning her way round the corridors and back stairs of the warren that was Whitehall Palace. When they went out in the streets there were many who doffed their caps and cried hurrah for the Protestant princess, but there were many also who did not want another woman on the throne, seeing what the last one had done. Many would have preferred Elizabeth to declare her betrothal to a good Protestant prince and get a sensible man’s hand on the reins of England at once. There were many others who remarked that surely Lord Henry Hastings, nephew to King Henry, and married to Robert Dudley’s sister, had nearly as good a claim as Elizabeth, and he was an honorable young man and fit to rule. There were even more who whispered in secret or said nothing at all but who longed for the coming of Mary, Queen of Scots and Princess of France, who would bring peace to the kingdom, a lasting alliance with France, and an end to religious change. She was younger than Elizabeth, for sure, a sixteen-year-old girl but a real little beauty, and married to the heir to the French throne with all that power behind her.

  Elizabeth, new-come to her throne, not yet crowned or anointed, had to find her way round her palace, had to put her friends in high places and that quickly, had to act like a confident Tudor heir, and had somehow to deal at once with her church which was in open and determined opposition to her and which would, unless it was swiftly controlled, bring her down.

  There had to be a compromise and the Privy Council, still staffed with Mary’s advisors but leavened by Elizabeth’s new friends, came up with it. The church was to be restored to the condition in which Henry VIII had left it at the time of his death. An English church, commanded by Englishmen and headed by the monarch, that obeyed English laws and paid its tithes into the English treasury, where the litany, homilies, and prayers were often read in English; but where the shape and content of the service were all but identical to the Catholic Mass.

  It made sense to everyone who was desperate to see Elizabeth take the throne without the horror of a civil war. It made sense to everyone who longed for a peaceful transition of power. Indeed, it made sense to everyone but to the church itself, whose bishops would not countenance one step toward the mortal heresy of Protestantism, and, worst of all, it made no sense to the queen, who was suddenly, at this inopportune moment, stubborn.

  “I won’t have the Host raised in the Royal Chapel,” Elizabeth specified for the twentieth time. “When we have Christmas Mass, I will not have the Host raised as an object of worship.”

  “Absolutely not,” Cecil agreed wearily. It was Christmas Eve and he had been hoping that he might have got to his own home for Christmas. He had been thinking, rather fondly, that he might have been there to take Christmas communion in his own chapel, the Protestant way, without drama, as God had intended it, and then stayed with his family for the rest of the days of Christmas, returning to court only for the great feast of present-giving on Twelfth Night.

  It had been a struggle to find a bishop who would celebrate Mass in the Royal Chapel before the Protestant princess at all, and now Elizabeth was trying to rewrite the service.

  “He will let the congregation take communion?” she confirmed. “Whatever his name is? Bishop Oglesham?”

  “Owen Oglethorpe,” Cecil corrected her. “Bishop of Carlisle. Yes, he understands your feelings. Everything will be done as you wish. He will serve at the Christmas Mass in your chapel, and he won’t elevate the Host.”

  Next day, Cecil cradled his head once more as the bishop defiantly held the pyx above his head for the congregation to worship the body of Christ at the magical moment of transubstantiation.

  A clear voice rang out from the royal pew. “Bishop! Lower the pyx.”

  It was as if he had not heard her. Indeed, since his eyes were closed and his lips moving in prayer, perhaps he had not heard her. The bishop believed with all his heart that God was coming down to earth, that he held the real presence of the living God between his hands, that he was holding it up for the faithful to worship, as they must, as faithful Christians, do.

  “Bishop! I said, Bishop! Lower that pyx.”

  The wooden fretwork shutter of the royal pew banged open like a thunderclap. Bishop Oglethorpe turned slightly from the altar, and glanced over his shoulder to meet the furious gaze of his queen, leaning out from the royal pew like a fishwife over a market stall, her cheeks flaming red with temper, her eyes black as an angry cat’s. He took in her stance—up from her knees, standing at her full height, her finger pointing at him, her voice commanding.

  “This is my own chapel. You are serving as my chaplain. I am the queen. You will do as I order. Lower that pyx.”

  As if she did not matter at all, he turned back to the altar, closed his eyes again, and gave himself up to his God.

  He felt, as much as he heard, the swish of her gown as she strode out of the door of the pew and the bang as she slammed it shut, like a child running from a room in temper. His shoulders prickled, his arms burned; but still he kept his back resolutely turned to the congregation, celebrating the Mass not with them, but for them: a process private between the priest and his God, which the faithful might observe, but could not join. The bishop put the pyx gently down on the altar and folded his hands together in the gesture for prayer, secretly pressing them hard against his thudding heart, as the queen stormed from her own chapel, on Christmas Day, driven from the place of God on His very day, by her own muddled, heretical thinking.

  Two days later, Cecil, still not home for Christmas, faced with a royal temper tantrum on one hand and a stubborn bishop on the other, was forced to issue a royal proclamation that the litany, Lord’s Prayer, lessons, and the ten commandments would all be read in English, in every church of the land, and the Host would not be raised. This was the new law of the land. Elizabeth had declared war on her church before she was even crowned.

  “So who is going to crown her?” Dudley asked him. It was the day before Twelfth Night. Neither Cecil nor Dudley had yet managed to get home to their wives for so much as a single night during the Christmas season.

  Does he not have enough to do in planning the Twelfth Night feast, that now he must devise religious policy? Cecil demanded of himself irritably, as he got down from his horse in the stable yard and tossed the reins to a waiting groom. He saw Dudley’s eyes run over the animal and felt a second pang of irritation at the knowledge that the younger man would see at once that it was too short in the back.

  “I thank you for your concern but why do you wish to know, Sir Robert?” The politeness of Cecil’s tone almost took the ice from his reply.

  Dudley’s smile was placatory. “Because she will worry, and this is a woman who is capable of worrying herself sick. She will ask me for my advice, and I want to be able to reassure her. You’ll have a plan, sir, you always do. I am only asking you what it is. You can tell me to mind my horses and leave policy to you, if you wish. But if you want her mind at rest you should tell me what answer I should give her. You know she will consult me.”

  Cecil sighed. “No one has offered to crown her,” he said heavily. “An
d between you and me, no one will crown her. They are all opposed, I swear that they are in collusion. I cannot trace a conspiracy but they all know that if they do not crown her, she is not queen. They think they can force her to restore the Mass. It’s a desperate position. The Queen of England, and not one bishop recognizes her! Winchester is under house arrest for his sermon at the late queen’s funeral, Oglethorpe in all but the same case for his ridiculous defiance on Christmas Day. He says he will go to the stake before he gives way to her. She wouldn’t let Bishop Bonner so much as touch her hand when she came into London, so he is her sworn enemy too. The Archbishop of York told her to her face that he regards her as a heretic damned. She’s got the Bishop of Chichester under house arrest, although he is sick as a dog. They are all unanimously against her, not a shadow of doubt among them. Not even a tiny crack where one might seed division.”

  “Surely a scattering of bribes?”

  Cecil shook his head. “They have become amazingly principled,” he said. “They will not have Protestantism restored to England. They will not have a Protestant queen.”

  Dudley’s face darkened. “Sir, if we do not have a care, they will make a rebellion against the queen from inside the church itself. It is a very small step from calling her a heretic to open treason, and a rebellion by the princes of the church would hardly be a rebellion at all. They are the Prince Bishops; they can make her look like a usurper. There are enough Catholic candidates for the throne who would be quick to take her place. If they declare war on her, she is finished.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Cecil said, keeping his irritation in check with some difficulty. “I am aware of the danger she is in. It’s never been worse. No one can ever remember a monarch in such uncertainty. King Henry never had more than one bishop openly against him, the late queen, at her very worst of times, had two; but Princess Elizabeth has every single one of them as her open and declared enemy. I know things are as bad as they can be, and the princess clinging to her prospects by her fingertips. What I don’t know is how to make an absolutely solid Roman Catholic church crown a Protestant princess.”