The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  She did not expect to see Robert again before Christmas; she did not expect to see him at any time during the twelve days of the Christmas feast. She knew that he would be engaged at court, planning the festivities, organizing the masques, the players, the parties, and the hunting, for the court was determined to celebrate the winter feast, thinking, but not saying aloud, that it might be their last with Elizabeth as queen. She knew that her husband would be constantly at the side of the young queen: her lover, her friend, her intimate companion. She knew that whether they were lovers or whether they were estranged there was no one in the world for Robert but Elizabeth.

  “I don’t blame him,” she whispered on her knees in Syderstone parish church, looking toward the blank space on the altar where the crucifix had once stood, looking to the plinth where a statue of the Virgin Mary had once raised her kindly stone hand to bless the faithful. “I won’t blame him,” she whispered to the empty spaces that were all that Elizabeth’s new priest had left for the faithful to turn to in prayer. “And I won’t blame her. I don’t want to blame either of them, anyone. I have to be free from my own rage and my own grief. I have to say that he can walk away from me, he can go to another woman, he can love her more than he ever loved me, and I have to release my jealousy and my pain and my grief from my heart. I have to let it all go, or it will destroy me.”

  She dropped her head to her hands. “This pain in my breast which throbs all the time is my wound of grief,” she said. “It is like a spear thrust into my heart. I have to forgive him to make it heal. Every time I pluck at it with my jealousy the pain breaks out afresh. I will make myself forgive him. I will even make myself forgive her.”

  She lifted her head from her hands and looked toward the altar. Faintly against the stone she could see the outline where the crucifix had hung. She closed her eyes and prayed to it as if it were still there. “I will not agree to the heresy of divorce. Even if he was to come back to me and say that she had changed her mind and she wanted them to marry, even then I would not consent to it. God joined Robert and me together; no one can put us apart. I know that. He knows that. Probably even she, in her poor sinful heart, knows that.”

  In his grand rooms in Whitehall Cecil was laboring over the writing of a letter. It was addressed to the queen, but it was not in his usual brisk style of numbered points. It was a far more formal letter, composed by him for the Scottish Protestants to send to her. The circuitous route of the letter, from Cecil to Scotland, copied by the Scots lords in their own hands and sent back south urgently to the queen, was justified in Cecil’s mind because something had to shake Elizabeth into sending an English army into Scotland.

  The French garrison at Leith had burst out of the siege and defeated the Scottish Protestants encamped before the castle. In the horror of his defeat the Earl of Arran, Cecil’s great hope in Scotland, was behaving most oddly: alternately raving with rage and lapsing into silence and tears. No feats of heroic leadership could be expected from poor James Hamilton, and no triumphant marriage with Elizabeth; the poor sweet-faced young man was clearly half mad and his defeat was pushing him over the brink. The Scottish lords were leaderless, on their own. Without Elizabeth’s support they were friendless too. What was a retreat now would be a rout when the French reinforcements landed, and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, newly arrived from Paris, frantic with fear, warned that the French fleet was massing in all the Normandy ports, the troops were armed and would set sail as soon as there was a favorable wind. The ambassador swore that the French had no doubt that they would first conquer Scotland, and then march on England. They had no doubt at all that they would win.Your Grace, Cecil wrote for the Scots. As a fellow religionist, as an ally who fears the power of the French, as a neighbor and a friend, we beg you to come to our aid. If you do not support us, we stand alone against the usurping French, and there can be no doubt that after Scotland falls, the French will invade England. On that day, you will wish that you had helped us now, for there will be none of us alive to help you. We are not disloyal to Queen Mary of Scotland; we are defying her wicked advisors, the French, not her. We are defying the regent Mary of Guise who is ruling in the place of our true Queen Mary. The regent’s countrymen, French troops, are already engaged, any treaty you have with the French is already broken since they have taken up arms against us, on our soil. The regent’s family are our sworn enemies, and yours. If we had appealed like this to your father, he would have defended us and so united the kingdom; it was his great plan. Please, be your father’s true daughter and come to our aid. You can add what you like, Cecil wrote in a postscript to the Scots lords, but take care that you do not sound like rebels against a legitimate ruler; she will not support an outright rebellion. If the French have murdered any women and children by the time you come to write, you should tell her of it, and do not stint in the telling. Do not mention money; give her good reason to think that it will be a swift and cheap campaign. I leave you to tell her the current situation when this letter comes to you and you copy it and send it on. God speed, and God help you.

  And God help us all, he said fearfully to himself as he folded it up and sealed it in three places with a blank seal. He had left it unsigned. Cecil only rarely put his name to anything.

  A new masque, planned by Robert, was to have the ever-popular theme of Camelot; but not even he, with his determined charm, could put much joy in it.

  The queen played the spirit of England, and sat on the throne while the young ladies of her chamber danced before her and the players came later with a specially written play to celebrate the greatness of Arthur’s England. There was an anti-masque of characters who threatened the golden glory of the round table, let no one doubt that one of the signs of a great kingdom was the existence of its enemies, but they were thrown down without much difficulty; in Robert’s fictional England there was no sign of Elizabeth’s constant terror of war.

  Elizabeth, looking around the court through the dancers, saw Robert and made herself look past him. Robert, standing near enough to the throne to be summoned, should she want to speak to him, saw her dark eyes go by him and knew that he had been caught gazing at her.

  Like a greensick boy, he said angrily to himself.

  She looked once directly at him and gave him a faint smile, as if they were ghosts already, as if the shade of Elizabeth had dimly seen, through mist, the young man she had loved as a boy; and then she turned her head to Caspar von Breuner, the archduke’s ambassador, the ally that she must have, the husband she must marry, to ask him when he thought the archduke would arrive in England.

  The ambassador was not to be diverted. Not even Elizabeth, with all her charm deployed, could bring a smile to his face. Finally he rose from his seat, pleading ill health.

  “See the trouble you have caused?” Norfolk said sharply to Dudley.

  “I?”

  “Baron von Breuner thinks my cousin the queen unlikely to marry while she is openly in love with another man, and has advised the archduke not to come to England yet.”

  “I am the queen’s loyal friend, as you know,” Dudley said disdainfully. “And I want nothing but what is best for her.”

  “You are a damned aspiring dog,” Norfolk swore at him. “And you have stood in her light so that no prince in Europe will have her. D’you think they don’t hear the gossip? D’you think that they don’t know that you are all over her like the Sweat? D’you think they believe that you and she have called it off now? Everyone thinks that you have just stepped back for her to pick her cuckold, and no man of honor will have her.”

  “You insult her; I will see you for it,” Dudley said, white with anger.

  “I may insult her, but you have ruined her,” Norfolk threw back at him.

  “Because some archduke won’t come to pay court?” Dudley demanded. “You are neither a true friend nor a true Englishman if you think she should marry a foreigner. Why should we have another foreign prince on the English throne? What good did Philip of Spain do us
?”

  “Because she must be married,” Norfolk said in a heat of rage. “And to royal blood, at any rate to a better man than a dog like you.”

  “Gentlemen.” The cool tones of Sir Francis made them turn. “Noblemen indeed. The queen is looking your way; you are breaking up the pleasant harmony of the feast.”

  “Tell him,” Norfolk said, pushing past Dudley. “I am beyond listening to this nonsense while my kinswoman is ruined and the country sinks without allies.”

  Robert let him go. Despite himself he glanced at the throne. Elizabeth was looking toward him. The ambassador had left and in her concern for what her uncle was saying to the man she loved, she had not noticed even his farewell bow.

  The Scots Protestants’ letter, duly travel-stained and authentically rewritten, came to the queen’s hand at the end of November. Cecil brought it to her and laid it on her desk as she was prowling around the room, unable to concentrate on anything.

  “Are you ill?” he asked, looking at the pallor of her skin and her restlessness.

  “Unhappy,” Elizabeth said shortly.

  That damned Dudley, he thought to himself, and moved the letter a little closer so that she would open it.

  She read it slowly.

  “This gives you cause to send an army to Scotland,” Cecil said to her. “This is an appeal by the united lords of Scotland for your help in resisting a usurping power: the French. No one can say you are invading for your own ends. No one can say that you are overthrowing a legitimate queen. This is your invitation from the legitimate lords, citing their justifiable grievances. You can say ‘yes.’”

  “No,” she said nervously. “Not yet.”

  “We have sent funds,” Cecil enumerated. “We have sent observers. We know that the Scots lords will fight well. We even know that they can defeat Mary of Guise; they threw her back right to the very shore of the sea at Leith. We know that the French will come, but they have not yet set sail. They are waiting for the weather to change. Only the wind stands between us and invasion. Only the very air stands between us and disaster. We know this is our moment. We have to take it.”

  She rose from her desk. “Cecil, half the Privy Council warn me that we are certain to lose. Lord Clinton, the High Admiral, says he cannot guarantee that our navy could hold off a French fleet; they have better ships and better guns. The Earl of Pembroke, the Marquess of Winchester advise me against going into Scotland; your own brother-in-law, Nicholas Bacon, says the risk is too great. Caspar von Breuner warns me in secret that although he and the emperor are my friends, they are certain that we will lose. The French court laughs out loud at the thought of us trying to make war against them. They find it laughable that we should even dream of it. Everyone I ask tells me that we are certain to lose.”

  “We are certain to lose if we leave it too late,” Cecil said. “But I think we can possibly win if we send our army now.”

  “Perhaps in the spring,” she temporized.

  “In the spring the French fleet will be moored in Leith dock and the French will have garrisoned every castle in Scotland against us. You might as well send them the keys now and be done with it.”

  “It is a risk, it is such a risk,” Elizabeth said miserably, turning to the window, rubbing at her fingernails in her nervousness.

  “I know it. But you have to take it. You have to take the risk because the chance of winning now is greater than you will ever have later.”

  “We can send more money,” she said miserably. “Gresham can borrow more money for us. But I dare not do more.”

  “Take advice,” he urged her. “Let us see what the Privy Council has to say.”

  “I have no advisors,” she said desolately.

  Dudley again, Cecil thought. She can barely live without him. Aloud he said bracingly: “Your Grace, you have a whole council of advisors. We shall consult them tomorrow.”

  But the next day, before the meeting of the Privy Council, there came a visitor from Scotland. Lord Maitland of Lethington came in disguise, authorized by the other Scots lords secretly to offer the queen the crown of Scotland if she would only support them against the French.

  “So, they have despaired of Arran,” Cecil said, his joy so great that he could almost taste it on his tongue. “They want you.”

  For a moment Elizabeth’s ready ambition leapt up. “Queen of France, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England,” she breathed. “Lands from Aberdeen to Calais. I would be one of the greatest princes in Europe, one of the richest.”

  “This makes the future of the kingdom a certainty,” Cecil promised her. “Think of what England could do if joined with Scotland! We would be safe at last, and safe forever from the danger of invasion from the north. We would break the risk of invasion from the French. We could use the strength and wealth of Scotland to go onward and forward. We would become a mighty power in Christendom. Who can tell what we might achieve? The Crown of England and Scotland together would be a power in the world that would be recognized by everyone! We would be the first great Protestant kingdom that the world has ever known.”

  For a moment he thought he had managed to give her his own vision of the destiny she could claim.

  Then she turned her head away. “This is to entrap me,” she complained. “When the French invade Scotland I would have to fight them. They would be on my land; I could not ignore it. This would force us to fight them.”

  “We will have to fight them anyway!” Cecil exclaimed at the circularity of her thinking. “But this way, if we win, you are Queen of England and Scotland!”

  “But if we lose then I am beheaded as Queen of England and Scotland.”

  He had to control his impatience. “Your Grace, this is an extraordinary offer from the Scots lords. This is the end of years …no…of centuries of enmity. If we win, you have united the kingdom, as your father wanted, as your grandfather dreamed. You have the chance to be the greatest monarch England has ever known. You have the chance to make a united kingdom of these islands.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said unhappily. “But what if we lose?”

  It was Christmas Eve, but the court was far from merry. Elizabeth sat very still in her chair at the head of the table, her Privy Councillors around her, her only movement the constant rubbing at the cuticles of her fingernails, buffing her nails with her fingertips.

  Cecil concluded his arguments in favor of war, certain that no one of any sense could disagree with the relentless plod of his logic. There was a silence as his peers took in his long list.

  “But what if we lose?” the queen said bleakly.

  “Exactly.” Sir Nicholas Bacon agreed with her.

  Cecil saw she was in an agony of fear.

  “Spirit,” she said, her voice very low. “God help me, but I cannot order a war on France. Not on our own doorstep. Not without certainty of winning. Not without—” She broke off.

  She means not without Dudley’s support, he thought. Oh, merciful God, why did you give us a princess when we so desperately need a king? She cannot take a decision without the support of a man, and that man is a fool and a traitor.

  The door opened and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton came in, bowed to the queen, and laid a paper before Cecil. He glanced at it and then looked up at the queen and his fellow councillors. “The wind has changed,” he said.

  For a moment Elizabeth did not understand what he meant.

  “The French fleet has sailed.”

  There was a sharply indrawn breath from every councillor. Elizabeth blanched a paler white. “They are coming?” she whispered.

  “Forty ships,” Cecil said.

  “We only have fourteen,” Elizabeth said, and he could hardly make out the words, her lips were so stiff and cold she could hardly speak.

  “Let them set sail,” Cecil whispered to her, as persuasive as a lover. “Let our ships get out of harbor where they can at least intercept the stragglers of the French fleet, perhaps engage them. For God’s sake, don’t keep them in port whe
re the French can sail in and burn them as they go by!”

  The fear of losing her ships was greater than her fear of war. “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “Yes, they should set sail. They must not be caught in port.”

  Cecil bowed swiftly, dashed off a note, and took it to the doorway for a waiting messenger. “I am obliged to you,” he said. “And now we must declare war on the French.”

  Elizabeth, her lips nipped raw and her cuticles picked away, walked through the court on her way to take communion on Christmas Day like a haunted woman, a smile pinned on her face like a red frayed ribbon.

  In her chapel she looked across and found that Robert Dudley was looking at her. He gave her a little smile. “Courage!” he whispered.

  She looked at him as if he was the only friend she had in the world. He half rose from his seat, as if he would go to her, crossing the aisle of the church before the whole of the court. She shook her head and turned away so that she should not see the longing in his eyes, so that he should not see the hunger in hers.

  The Christmas Day feast was carried out with joyless competence. The choristers sang, the ranks of serving men presented course after course of elaborate and glorious dishes, Elizabeth pushed aside one plate after another. She was beyond eating; she was beyond even pretending to eat.

  After dinner, when the ladies were dancing in a masque specially prepared for the occasion, Cecil came and stood behind her chair. “What?” she said ungraciously.

  “The Hapsburg ambassador tells me that he is planning to return to Vienna,” Cecil said quietly. “He has given up hopes of the marriage between you and the archduke. He does not want to wait anymore.”

  She was too exhausted to protest. “Oh. Shall we let him go?” she asked dully.

  “You will not marry the archduke?” Cecil said. It was hardly a question.