Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Hardly that. Only a nuisance. And she’s not aboard ship yet, and won’t be. I’m setting a watch on all the ports along the East Coast. Either abroad or here in England, she must not escape.’

  In the same even tones as before he explained his apparent volte-face. He had only wished to make it clear to them that be would, of course, have to put Mary away. It was only common sense. He bore her no ill will – ‘no more than I bore any to her father King Harry for executing my father as soon as he came to the throne. My father, as a clever lawyer, was very useful in procuring money for the Crown by somewhat sharp practice, which made him unpopular – so the new young King, having benefited, put him out of the way. Purely a popularity measure, no ill-feeling on either King Harry’s side or on mine. In fact, he looked after my interests as an orphan child and advanced me steadily in favour and power at the Court. Both of us understood that these matters of political expediency are a necessary part of public life.’ He blandly concluded, ‘As I hope you all understand that it is of course impossible to allow a potential claimant to the throne to live.’ And he let the penholder fall flat.

  Ambrose whistled. It was plain that Mary’s goose was cooked, and that was flat.

  Mr Secretary Cecil came in, a youngish man who had never looked quite young. With an air of quiet competence he laid some papers before the Duke that required to be stamped with the royal seal made for the new Queen. Dudley nodded his approval, but with a curious sense of irritability such as some show at the approach of a cat; then, as the Secretary moved to a corner to stamp the papers, his master shot at him, ‘What do you know of the Lady Elizabeth’s change of plan?’

  ‘Your Grace, I did not even know she had a plan.’

  ‘What! Do you not know that she had ordered her bodyguard, dressed for the journey, and had all but set foot in the stirrup to ride to London in answer to her dying brother’s tender appeal?’ The Duke had taken particular credit to himself for the wording of that appeal; no woman’s heart could have resisted the old nickname the boy had for her – ‘to my sweet sister Temperance.’ He burst out, ‘But she has no heart – and she changed her mind.’

  ‘She is always changing it,’ said Mr Cecil; ‘it is a feminine infirmity grown to excess in her.’

  ‘Then she’s made good use of it.’

  ‘Mary changed her mind too,’ piped Guildford.

  Duke Dudley had sent her an even more pathetic message in the dead boy’s name; the messenger saw her weep, and she had sent word by him that she was thankful that her young brother ‘should have thought she could be of any comfort to him’; she had instantly set out.

  But she had never arrived.

  Guildford flung back to his table and buried his head in his hands. ‘If only Robin would send word!’ he groaned.

  His father’s cool stare at him concealed some anxiety as well as annoyance. It was a pity he had had to choose the boy for his throw against fate. Robin would have made the better adventurer, but Robin was already married to that moody lass Amy Robsart. Even the thick-witted Ambrose would at least have more stamina, but he too was married, as was Jack. All his plans were being cluttered by young women in every direction; and the figurehead for those plans not even a woman, but that squeamish little schoolgirl Jane, who gave trouble whenever she could, refused to go to bed with her young husband, quarrelled with her mother-in-law, and now had come out in spots since her arrival at the Tower and complained that the skin was peeling off her back – as it certainly should if she got the treatment she deserved.

  Here he was at the pinnacle of his wild flight towards sovereign power; for years he had manoeuvred his way up with consummate skill, first catching his sovereign’s eye by his horsemanship in the tilt-yard (King Hal loved good sport), and winning the highest command in the field by his brilliant qualities as a soldier; and then at Hal’s death he had got rid of the new boy-King’s uncles by egging on the conflict between them until Ned Seymour killed his brother Tom, and Tom’s death helped to destroy Ned. ‘Divide et impera,’ – and he had by then won entire empery over King Edward.

  No longer any need for the private door that he had had made in the royal bedchamber, so that he could slip in unobserved and instruct the lad overnight in how he was to act and speak the next day. The boy openly looked to him for guidance before speaking to the ambassadors and awaited his signal before dismissing them. Dudley’s power was then absolute, and it delighted him to see how his flagrant show of it infuriated all observers. Ned Seymour had spoken of him as one of the ‘Lords sprung from the dunghill’; the Lady Mary at bay had roared at him and his fellow-councillors, ‘My father made the most part of you out of nothing.’ Well, he had shown what can be made of nothing; he had sprang to a Dukedom, the first Englishman with no drop of royal blood to take the title; he made the Lords of his Council wait on him every day to learn his pleasure and kept the highest nobles waiting for an audience.

  And now the boy had died on him, and he had to make do with the girl Jane. He felt himself a lion with his paw on England’s neck – but everywhere he had to deal with mice. He found that he was gnawing his penholder so hard that it hurt his teeth; in exasperation he snapped it between his hands.

  The door burst open. A servant, pop-eyed with excitement, ushered in a dusty messenger in riding-boots – ‘From Robin!’ cried Guildford again, and was told by his father to stop his parrot squawk.

  The messenger did not come from Robin. He handed a letter to the Duke, who stared closely at the superscription in the dimming light before he broke the seal. His three sons surged forward. Who is it? Is there news of her? ‘Is she –?’

  He burst in to a roar. ‘Get back, you cubs! And you, you grinning fool,’ to the servant, ‘bring a light.’

  His sons stepped back quickly and stood stock-still. Silence quivered over the room as the servant brought candles and went, and the Duke read the letter, and read it again.

  ‘By God!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘She shall pay for this!’

  He crumpled up the letter in a tight ball in his fist, then unfolded and smoothed it out and stared at it again as though the words must turn into something else.

  ‘This,’ he said at last, ‘is from Mary herself. She writes’ – he gulped and drew a deep breath, then adopted a mincing old-maidish archness of tone – ‘that “it seems strange” – there’s a dainty piece of sarcasm! – that we “should have omitted to inform her on so weighty a matter as that of our dearest brother the King dying upon Thursday night last—”’

  ‘Devil doubt her!’ muttered Jack.

  His father glared at the interruption and went on, ‘“Yet,” says the bright lass, “we are not ignorant of your consultations to undo our preferment – nor of the great bands and armed force you have prepared – to what end, God and you know, and nature can but fear some evil.” But she will graciously forgive all my plots if I instantly relinquish them and “cause our right and title to the Crown,” says she, “to be proclaimed in our City of London.” Further, she intends to proceed herself to London to see to it.’

  He leaned back, feeling as though a sheep had bitten him.

  Ambrose broke into a blare of laughter. ‘Let her proceed herself to London! She’ll do it faster than she thinks, and in worse company. We’ll have her here now in no time. Where is she?’

  ‘Written from Kenninghall in Norfolk,’ his father read out.

  ‘It looks as if she’s given Robin the slip,’ said Guildford.

  ‘It does,’ said his father drily.

  So she had turned aside from the London road after meeting the goldsmith at Hoddesdon, and gone to Kenninghall secretly, perhaps in disguise. Who was that mysterious goldsmith, and who had told him to give her the hint? He eyed the Secretary.

  Mr Cecil was at that moment stamping another letter patent ‘Jana Regina’. He looked up with mild eyes as the Duke spoke, commanding him to call a Council on the instant.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘This is nothing,’ the Duke
said at the Council table, ‘a silly woman’s flourish, that is all, but it must and shall be stopped instantly. I shall at once proclaim a muster of men in Tothill Fields, not mentioning any rebellion but telling them that the object is to fetch in the Lady Mary. As it will be such a brief affair I shall offer high pay – 10d. a day.’

  The Council gasped. Even the little Queen saw it must be fairly serious to offer such pay. But she only sat and twisted her fingers while her mother, that hard-riding, hard-tempered woman whose stout frame and high colour proclaimed her King Harry’s niece, burst into noisy sobbing. So much for the Tudor courage, thought the girl, wincing in contempt, and then her mother-in-law must needs follow suit, though more quietly, the tears running down her still beautiful face. The Duke put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and she instantly stopped crying. He eyed the startled faces before him.

  ‘A mere nothing,’ he repeated coldly, ‘not worth calling a rising even. If some few hundred wretched peasants are fools enough to flock like sheep after that woman, well, they will be sheep to the slaughter. Haven’t I put down three rebellions in this last reign, and of far greater force than this one will ever have time to gather? Remember how I hanged the canting Kett from his own Oak of Reformation!’

  The Queen’s father, Henry Grey, lately created Duke of Suffolk, nodded solemnly over his stiff collar. ‘True, true,’ he said, ‘the Emperor’s ambassadors say they wouldn’t give a fig for Mary’s chances. I find she’s written to them asking them to keep in touch with her – the last thing they want! They are calling her attitude “strange, difficult and dangerous” and give her four days at most before she’s in the hands of the Council. Her messenger has had to go back without a word from them. Why, they daren’t even go out in the street for fear of being charged as her supporters.’

  That was very encouraging. Everyone felt better at the thought of Simon Renard the Fox not daring to poke his nose into the street – ‘Wise fellow!’ said Dudley, smiling; ‘these ambassadors are good straws to show the way the wind blows. Here’s the draft of a letter that I’ve written at once in answer to her insolence, for one must speak her fair.’

  He read out his ‘fair’ speech, reminding the Lady Mary that she had been ‘justly made illegitimate and uninheritable to the Crown Imperial of this Realm’; commanding her not to vex and molest any of our Sovereign Lady Queen Jane’s subjects; and assuring her that ‘if you will show yourself quiet and obedient, as you ought, we will bid you most heartily well to fare.

  ‘Your Ladyship’s friends, showing yourself an obedient subject – And now sign, all of you,’ he commanded, pushing forward the paper under the line of unwilling noses.

  But they signed, Cranmer first, to give it Archiepiscopal authority, then the Bishops of London and Ely, the Dukes of Suffolk and Bedford, the Lords Arundel, Shrewsbury and Pembroke, Mr Secretary Cecil and his College friend Sir John Cheke, tutor to the late King. As the paper passed from one slightly hesitant hand to another, its writer encouraged them with arguments even more forcible than it contained.

  ‘I’ve three hundred horses already hunting for the Lady Mary; in a day or two it will be three thousand. I’ve sent ships to Yarmouth to cut off her escape by sea. I hold the navy and the army; I hold the Tower here and all its armoury, and who holds the Tower holds London; who holds London holds all England. Mary is quite alone, skulking with her women and a few old Papist serving-men in a lonely country house. No man with a grain of common sense would dare go to her help. Long before the week’s out I’ll have her here, captive or dead, like the rebel she is.’

  There was a burst of applause. Only the sixteen-year-old girl for whose sake ostensibly were all these armaments and threats, looked rather more unhappy than before. Jane did not like to hear of Mary being quite alone with no one to dare help her, of her being brought in captive or dead. Mary had been kind to her in her fashion, had given her a pearl necklace and gown of cloth of gold, mere worldly toys such as Jane had been right to despise; but captivity or death was a poor return for them. She wished with all her heart that her cousin could have been allowed to be Queen instead of herself. Mary might even think that she was doing right to insist on being Queen, even as Jane herself had been told that she was doing right to be Queen. It was very puzzling.

  She sat as still as a mouse among the company of great cats in all their fur and claws, their gleaming staffs and jewels, and here and there the wicked narrow streak of a dagger. She sat with her hands crossed demurely over her wide velvet cuffs, her hair tucked away out of sight in a big white kerchief, and another folded over her narrow shoulders. A small nosegay of jasmine and heliotrope was tucked into the front of her bodice where it opened into the fluting white embroidered collar, and she kept her straight little nose bent down to sniff at it.

  The candlelight flickered on the faces round her, for the windows had been left open in the heat of the summer night, though they admitted foul smells from the river, and moths, midges and mosquitoes as well as the faint breeze. The faces round her were those she had known all her life as her elders and betters, ever telling her incessantly what it was right for her to do; yet at this moment they looked more like the faces of conspirators.

  A white moth flew straight in from the night outside into the candle before her eyes and fluttered to its death in the molten wax. And Mary was to come to the Tower to die. They were all planning it. How could it be right?

  But then she remembered Mary was a Papist, so it could not be right for her to be Queen. That settled it.

  She drew a breath of relief, but it fled as she heard that her father, the Duke of Suffolk, was to lead the army that was to bring back Mary. That would mean she would be left alone, here with these Dudleys. Her mother did not count. She would be at the mercy of that dark terrible man at the head of the table, who cared nothing for what was right, whatever he might pretend; and of his callow son, who talked about his rights as a husband and swaggered about the other women who admired him, in loud boastful tones so different from Mr Aylmer’s gentle voice, and gave himself the airs of a man when he was only a nasty boy; and of his mother, who seemed gentle but could become a fury on behalf of her precious son.

  Her heart felt as though it were bursting; she struggled for speech and instead collapsed into tears.

  Duke Dudley’s look at her was enough to justify her fears. ‘The Queen is overwrought,’ he said in a voice like steel snapping. ‘She is not well and had better retire. No doubt it is past her bedtime.’

  Her mother was pulling her out of her chair, telling her furiously to come away this instant.

  Jane stood up but did not budge further. She hung on to the back of her chair as though afraid of being dragged from it; she panted out, ‘I won’t be left alone here. My father must stay with me.’

  Suffolk looked pleased. He had always known the girl was fond of him. It wasn’t true she was an undutiful daughter without any heart.

  ‘Perhaps it might on all counts be better,’ he began, glancing nervously to right and left, and was encouraged to see the Earl of Arundel nodding in assent while Archbishop Cranmer pulled the two prongs of his long beard approvingly.

  But Duke Dudley broke in with a roar that made Suffolk’s long face sink rapidly into his collar.

  ‘Are you so mad as to listen to the whine of a crying child? Wants her father to stay here and hold her hand while we’re at this crisis! Who but her father should ride out to defend his daughter’s right as Queen? Who, I say?’

  ‘You,’ said Jane.

  She was not crying now. Her fear of Dudley had boiled up into rage. How dare he shout like that at her and her father?

  ‘I am Queen, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it, but you made me be. Then you must obey me. I won’t let my father go to lead this army. If he goes, I won’t go on being Queen. I’ll tear the crown from my head when you put it on. I won’t – I won’t—’ The strangled sobs surged up again and choked her words; they only heard as she clung to the bac
k of the chair, ‘I won’t – I won’t be Queen.’

  ‘It’s against all common sense. Here I hold the capital and its citadel the Tower. Here I can direct all things from the centre. All that you have to do is to ride out in the Queen’s name and quell a small rabble of the common people.’

  ‘They are not all common. Sir Henry Jerningham has joined Mary, and they say the High Sheriff for Suffolk and the Knight of the Shire are on their way. Sir Henry Bedingfeld is already there and half a dozen other country gentry, all bringing supplies of bread, beef and beer to feed her followers, as well as money or plate.’

  ‘Bread, beef, beer, butter, what in God’s name is there in that? Have they got guns? Answer me that!’ roared the Duke.

  But Jane’s father actually protruded his neck a little further from his collar instead of hastily retreating into it. ‘And beside them,’ he continued as though he had not even heard his master’s voice, ‘innumerable small companies of the common people as you so lightly call them – but they pulled down the chivalry of France at Agincourt.’

  ‘God’s blood, man, when will you or any English fool recognise that Agincourt is an old song and Harry the fifth is dead – all the King Harrys. We are living now, in this year of grace 1553, and no bows and arrows, but the great guns are even now rumbling out through the Tower gateway for the army towards Cambridge.’

  Duke Dudley paused for those carts of artillery to give point to his words as their thunder echoed out over the Tower Bridge through the dead silence of the night. ‘What country gentleman and his following of shepherds and swineherds is going to withstand that?’ he demanded. ‘War has changed, and with it the whole world. Whoso commands the guns commands the world. It is I who command them. We,’ he hastily corrected. Maddening that he had to remember to be conciliatory once again! But after all, this foolish mulish fellow with the long weak moustaches was the Queen’s father.