The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  Westminster Palace

  March 14th 1560

  William Cecil to the Commander of the Queen’s Pensioners.

  Sir, 1. It has come to my attention that the French have hatched a conspiracy against the life of the queen and of the noble gen tleman Sir Robert Dudley. I am informed that they are determined that one or the other shall be killed, believing that this will give them an advantage in the war in Scotland.2. I hereby advise you of this new threat and commend you to redouble your guard on the queen and to command them to remain alert at all times.

  Be alert also for anyone approaching or following the noble gentleman, and for anyone hanging round his apartments or the stables.

  God Save the Queen.

  Sir Francis Knollys with Sir Nicholas Bacon sought out William Cecil.

  “For God’s sake, is there no end to these threats?”

  “Apparently not,” Cecil said quietly.

  Sir Robert Dudley joined them. “What’s this?”

  “More death threats against the queen,” Sir Francis told him. “And against you.”

  “Me?”

  “From the French, now.”

  “Why would the French want to kill me?” Dudley asked, shocked.

  “They think the queen would be distressed by your death,” Nicholas Bacon said tactfully, when no one else answered.

  Sir Robert took a swift, irritated turn on his heel. “Are we to do nothing while Her Majesty is threatened on all sides? When Frenchmen threaten her, when the Pope himself threatens her? When Englishmen plot against her? Can’t we confront this terror and destroy it?”

  “The nature of terror is that you don’t know quite what it is or what it can do,” Cecil observed. “We can protect her, but only up to a point. Short of locking her up in a gated room we cannot preserve her from danger. I have a man tasting everything she eats. I have sentries at every door, under every window. No one comes into court without being vouched for and yet still, every other day, I hear of a new plot, a new murder plan against her.”

  “How would the French like it if we murdered the young Queen Mary?” Sir Robert demanded.

  William Cecil exchanged a glance with the other more experienced man, Sir Francis. “We can’t reach her,” he admitted. “I had Throckmorton look at the French court when he was in Paris. It can’t be done without them knowing it was us.”

  “And is that your only objection?” Robert bristled.

  “Yes,” Cecil said silkily. “I have no objection in theory to assassination as an act of state. It could be a great saver of life and a guarantee of safety for others.”

  “I am utterly and completely opposed to it,” Dudley said indignantly. “It is forbidden by God, and it is against the justice of man.”

  “Yes, but it’s you they want to kill, so you would think that,” Sir Nicholas said with scant sympathy. “The bullock seldom shares the beliefs of the butcher, and you, you are dead meat, my friend.”

  Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell, escorted by Thomas Blount, with men in the Dudley livery riding before and behind them, came in silence to the Hyde house. The children, watching for them as usual, came running down the drive toward them and then hesitated when their aunt had nothing more for them than a wistful smile, and their favorite guest, the pretty Lady Dudley, did not seem to see them at all.

  Alice Hyde, hurrying out to greet her sister-in-law and her noble friend, felt for a moment as if a shadow had fallen on their house and gave a little involuntary shiver as if the April sunshine had suddenly turned icy. “Sister! Lady Dudley, you are most welcome.”

  Both women turned to her faces that were pale with strain. “Oh, Lizzie!” Alice said, in shock at the weariness on her face, and then went to help her sister-in-law down from the saddle as her husband came out and helped Lady Dudley to dismount.

  “May I go to my room?” Amy whispered to William Hyde.

  “Of course,” he said kindly. “I will take you myself, and have a fire lit for you. Will you take a glass of brandy to keep out the cold and put some roses in those pretty cheeks again?”

  He thought she looked at him as if he addressed her in a foreign language.

  “I am not ill,” she said flatly. “Whoever told you that I was ill, is lying.”

  “No? I’m glad to hear of it. You look a little wearied by your journey, that’s all,” he said soothingly, leading her into the hall and then up the stairs to the best guest bedroom. “And are we to expect Sir Robert here, this spring?”

  Amy paused at the door of her room. “No,” she said very quietly. “I do not expect to see my husband this season. I have no expectations of him at all.”

  “Oh,” William Hyde said, quite at sea.

  Then she turned and put both her hands out to him. “But he is my husband,” she said, almost pleading. “That will never change.”

  At a loss, he chafed her cold hands. “Of course he is,” he soothed her, thinking that she was talking at random, like a madwoman. “And a very good husband too, I am sure.”

  Somehow, he had said the right thing. The sweet smile of Amy the beloved girl suddenly illuminated the bleak face of Amy the deserted wife.

  “Yes, he is,” she said. “I am so glad that you see that too, dear William. He is a good husband to me and so he must come home to me soon.”

  “Good God, what have they done to her?” William Hyde demanded of his sister, Lizzie Oddingsell, when the three of them were seated around the dinner table, the covers cleared and the door safely closed against prying servants. “She looks near to death.”

  “It is as you predicted,” Lizzie said shortly. “Just as you said when you were so merry about what would happen if your master were to marry the queen. He has done what you thought he might do. He has thrown her off and is going to marry the queen. He told her to her face.”

  A long, low whistle from William Hyde greeted this news. Alice was quite dumbstruck.

  “And the queen has proposed this? She thinks she can get such a thing past the Lords and Commons of England?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “He speaks as if all that stands in their way is Amy’s consent. He speaks as if he and the queen are quite agreed and are picking out names for their firstborn.”

  “He will be consort. She might even call him king,” William Hyde speculated. “And he will not forget the services we have done him and the kindness we have shown him.”

  “And what of her?” Lizzie asked fiercely, nodding her head to the chamber above them. “When he is crowned and we are in Westminster Abbey shouting hurrah? Where do you think she is then?”

  William Hyde shook his head. “Living quietly in the country? At her father’s old house? At the house she fancied here—old Simpson’s place?”

  “It will kill her,” Alice predicted. “She will never survive the loss of him.”

  “I think so,” Lizzie said. “And the worst of it is, that I think in his heart, he knows that. And I am sure that the she-devil queen knows that too.”

  “Hush!” William said urgently. “Even behind closed doors, Lizzie!”

  “All her life Amy has been on a rack of his ambition,” Lizzie hissed. “All her life she has loved and waited for him and prayed long, sleepless nights for his safety. And now, at the moment of his prosperity, he tells her that he will cast her aside, that he loves another woman, and that this other woman has such power that she can throw a true-wedded wife to the dogs.

  “What do you think this will do to her? You saw her. Doesn’t she look like a woman walking toward her grave?”

  “Is she sick?” asked William Hyde, a practical man. “Does she have this canker in her breast that they all say is killing her?”

  “She is sick to death from heartache,” Lizzie said. “That is all the pain in her breast. And he may not understand this, but I warrant the queen does. She knows that if she plays cat and mouse with Amy Dudley for long enough then her health will simply break down and she will take to her bed and die. If she does not kill herself first.�
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  “Never! A mortal sin!” Alice exclaimed.

  “It has become a sinful country,” Lizzie said bleakly. “What is worse? A woman throwing herself headfirst downstairs or a queen taking a married man to her bed and the two of them hounding the true wife to her death?”

  Thomas,

  Cecil wrote in code to his old friend Thomas Gresham at Antwerp.

  1. I have your note about the Spanish troopships, presumably, they are arming to invade Scotland. The great numbers that you have seen must indicate that they plan to invade England as well.

  2. They have a plan to invade Scotland on the pretext of imposing peace. I assume that they are now putting this into practice.

  3. On receipt of this, please inform your clients, customers, and friends that the Spanish are on the brink of invading Scotland, that this will take them into war with the French, with the Scots and with ourselves, and warn them most emphatically that all the English trade will leave Antwerp for France. The cloth market will leave the Spanish Netherlands forever, and the loss will be incalculable.

  4. If you can create utter panic in the commercial and trading quarters with this news I would be much obliged. If the poor people were to take it into their heads that they will starve for lack of English trade, and riot against their Spanish masters, it would be even better. If the Spanish could be brought to think they are facing a national revolt it would be very helpful.

  Cecil did not sign the letter nor seal it with his crest. He rarely put his name to anything.

  Ten days later Cecil stalked into the queen’s privy chamber like a long-legged, triumphant raven and laid a letter before her on her desk. There were no other papers, her anxiety about Scotland was so great that she did no other work. Only Robert Dudley could distract her from her terrified interrogation of the progress of the war; only he could comfort her.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “A report from a friend of mine in Antwerp that there has been a panic in the city,” Cecil said with quiet pleasure. “The respectable merchants and tradesmen are leaving in their hundreds; the poor people are barricading the streets and firing the slums. The Spanish authorities have been forced to issue a proclamation to the citizens and traders that there will be no expedition to Scotland or against England. There was a run on the currency, there were people leaving the town. There was absolute panic. They feared a rebellion would start that would flare into a civil war. They had to give their word that the ships in port are not headed for our shores. The Spanish have been forced to reassure the traders of the Spanish Netherlands that they will not intervene in Scotland against us, that they will stay our friend and ally, whatever takes place in Scotland. The risk to their commercial interest was too great. They have publicly declared their alliance to us, and that they will not invade.”

  The color flooded into her cheeks. “Oh, Spirit! We are safe!”

  “We still have to face the French,” he cautioned her. “But we need not fear the Spanish coming against us at the same time.”

  “And I need not marry the archduke!” Elizabeth laughed merrily.

  Cecil checked.

  “Although I still expect to do so,” she corrected herself hastily. “I have given my word, Cecil.”

  He nodded, knowing she was lying. “And so shall I write to Lord Grey to take Leith Castle at once?”

  He caught her for once in a confident mood. “Yes!” she cried. “At last something is going well for us. Tell him to set the siege and win it at once!”

  Elizabeth’s bright, confident mood did not last long. The attack on Leith Castle in May failed miserably. The scaling ladders were too short and more than two thousand men died scrabbling against the castle walls, unable to get up or down, or fell wounded into the blood and mire below.

  The horror of the injury, illness, and death of her troops haunted Elizabeth as much as the humiliation of failing before the very windows of Mary of Guise. Some said that the stone-hearted Frenchwoman had looked out and laughed to see Englishmen spitted on lances at the top of their scaling ladders and falling down like shot doves.

  “They must come home!” Elizabeth swore. “They are dying as they drown in the mud before her door. She is a witch; she has called down rain on them.”

  “They cannot come home,” Cecil told her.

  Her nails shone with the frantic polishing of her fingers, her cuticles were pushed back till they were red and raw. “They must come home; we are fated to lose Scotland,” she said. “How could the ladders be too short? Grey should be court-martialed. Norfolk should be recalled. My own uncle and a treacherous fool! A thousand men dead on the walls of Leith! They will call me a murderess, to send good men to their deaths for such folly.”

  “War always means death,” Cecil said flatly. “We knew that before we started.”

  He checked himself. This passionate, fearful girl had never seen a battlefield, had never walked past wounded men groaning for water. A woman could not know what men endured; she could not rule as a king would rule. A woman could never learn the determination of a man made in the image of God.

  “You have to adopt the courage of a king,” he said to her firmly. “Now more than ever. I know you fear that we are failing, but the side that wins in a war is often the one which has the most confidence. When you are at your most fearful, that is when you have to appear your bravest. Say whatever comes into your head, put up your chin and swear that you have the stomach of a man. Your sister could do it. I saw her turn the City of London around in a moment. You can do it too.”

  Elizabeth flared up. “Don’t name her to me! She had a husband to rule for her.”

  “Not then,” he contradicted her. “Not when she faced the Wyatt rebels as they came right up to the City and camped at Lambeth. She was a woman alone then; she called herself the Virgin Queen and the London militia swore they would lay down their lives for her.”

  “Well, I cannot do it.” She was wringing her hands. “I cannot find the courage. I cannot say such things and make men believe me.”

  Cecil took her hands and held them tight. “You have to,” he said. “We have to go forward now because we cannot go back.”

  She looked pitifully at him. “What must we do? What can we do now? Surely it is over?”

  “Muster more troops, reinstate the siege,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I would put my own life on it.”

  Reluctantly, she nodded.

  “I have your permission to send out the orders?” he pressed. “For more men, to put the siege back on Leith?”

  “Very well.” She breathed the words like a coerced girl.

  Only Robert Dudley could comfort Elizabeth. They rode out less and less, she was too exhausted by sleepless nights of worry. Day flowed into night in the queen’s private rooms when she paced the floor till four in the morning and then fell into an exhausted dream-filled doze in the early afternoon. They closed the door of her privy chamber, defiant of the gossips, and he sat with her beside the fire in the cold gray afternoons. She took off her heavy jewel-encrusted hood and let down her hair and laid her head in his lap, and he stroked her long bronze locks until the strained, anxious look melted from her face and she sometimes closed her eyes and slept.

  Kat Ashley sat in the window seat for form’s sake but she kept her eyes fixed on her needlework or read a book; she never so much as glanced at the lovers as Robert nursed Elizabeth as tenderly as a mother. Kat knew that soon Elizabeth would collapse under the strain. She had watched Elizabeth through a dozen nervous illnesses. She was accustomed to examining Elizabeth’s slim fingers and wrists for any telltale signs of swelling which would show that her recurring disease of dropsy was about to exile her to bed. And Kat knew, as only Elizabeth’s closest friends knew, that nothing brought on her illness faster than fear.

  Outside the door, seated in the presence chamber trying to look as if nothing was wrong, Catherine Knollys, sewing a shirt for her husband, was acute
ly aware of the empty throne and the waiting court, of the whispers that the queen and Sir Robert had been locked up for half the day and would not come out till dinner time. Catherine kept her head up and her face blank, refusing to reply to people asking what her cousin the queen was doing alone with Sir Robert, refusing to hear the muttered comments.

  Mary Sidney, aghast at where her brother’s ambition was taking him, but unswerving in her family loyalty, dined with Catherine Knollys and walked with Kat Ashley, avoiding anyone who might question her as to what Robert Dudley thought he was doing.

  The Privy Council, the Lords, any man who was not on Dudley’s payroll, swore that someone would soon run the man through for dishonoring the queen and bringing her name into the gossip of every alehouse in the land. Some said that Thomas Howard, desperately fortifying castles along the northern border and trying to persuade men to enlist, had still found time to send an assassin south to court to kill Dudley and have done with him once and for all. No one could deny that the world would be a better place if Dudley were to be gone. He endangered the realm more than the French. Locked up with the queen in her own rooms, whoever was in with them, whoever was on the door, was to bring the queen into fatal disrepute.

  But no one could stop Dudley. When reproached by someone he trusted, like Sir Francis Knollys, he pointed out that the queen’s health would break under her anxiety if he did not comfort her. He reminded any loyal friends that the queen was a young woman all alone in the world. She had no father, no mother, no guardian. She had no one to love her and care for her but himself, her old and trusted friend.

  To everyone else he merely gave his impertinent, dark-eyed smile and thanked them sarcastically for their concern for his well-being.

  Laetitia Knollys strolled into Cecil’s apartments and took a seat at his desk with all the dignity of a betrothed woman.