Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Victory was certain,’ but the only sign of it was the smoke of burning houses and barns hanging heavy and acrid on the lucent air. Dudley had ordered that the property of Mary’s known friends should be destroyed and pillaged; the younger men, meeting no enemy in the field, found it amusing to ride off on such forays.

  Lord George Howard returned from one of them tossing a silver chalice which had been used at Mary’s own Mass a few days before; Jack Dudley jeered at him for a common looter, George sneered that it was because Jack coveted the pot, and rode off, with his followers to join Mary at Framlingham. Duke Dudley could hardly keep his hands off his son in his rage at the result of this squabble; but within a few hours he himself had exploded into one even worse. Lord Grey, a distant cousin of the little Queen, told him angrily that to burn and lay waste the countryside was no wise course; the Duke, so long unused to criticism, flared into an uncontrollable passion and actually struck him in the face. Grey hit back, the noble lords had to be pulled apart as though they were a couple of schoolboys. Grey flung out of the room with a bloody nose, summoned his followers, and, staunch Protestant though he was, rode off also to Framlingham.

  Political parties and the new religion, even the sacredness of new-won property, were in fact beginning to seem less and less important; what the nobles were increasingly inclined to murmur was that they had stood enough from this jumped-up son of a shady lawyer, and that Mary was true Tudor and King Harry’s daughter.

  ‘Let the fools and traitors go!’ said Duke Dudley as he marched on to Bury, burning now without any hindrance, ‘I’ll get my foot on their necks yet.’

  He had 4000 troops, and a quarter of them horsemen, and had got them into a good strategic position to cut off the forces in Buckinghamshire who had declared for Mary and were marching to join her.

  And, as he kept telling himself and his supporters, he had the navy.

  If only he could feel as sure of his Council that he had left back in London, a pack of shifty self-seekers who had sent him no reinforcements, only letters of discomfort!

  Two days after leaving London, he reached Cambridge, that foster-nurse of the new religion, where Cranmer as a young Fellow had drunk small beer at the Dolphin with Erasmus and planned to reform the world.

  It was Sunday, and the sermons were all sound on Queen Jane. He heard one from Dr. Sandys in the beautiful chapel that King Henry VI had managed to build for King’s College in the midst of his civil wars – a shocking waste of money the Duke calculated, especially now all those superstitious frescoes were decently covered with a coat of Protestant plaster. Afterwards he dined at King’s College and the dons praised his daughter-in-law to him; her wisdom, her learning, her modesty, her gentleness, above all her passionate zeal for Protestantism, would make all England thankful to have her as Queen. The Duke listened absently while he sent messengers to discover where were the reinforcements that he had again sent for from London.

  The weather had broken at last; a strong easterly gale was driving scuds of rain and torn leaves across the pleasant College lawns leading down to the river. He looked out at them, wondering what chance might lie for him in this change; weather should be one of the chief factors in a campaigner’s calculations – but then this was no campaign as yet; that is what was frazzling everybody in a tangle. So he thought as he watched the wind and rain tearing the green summer garden to pieces, and sipped the College malmsey of fine vintage, and bit into the peaches that had ripened early on the south wall.

  Old Dr. Bill, a sturdy pillar of the Reformed Church, was telling him with a chuckle that he had found the Lady Mary an honest woman who always paid her debts, for she had once paid him as much as £10 that he had won from her in an idle bet that few people would have bothered to remember – but for all that, there was no chance at all for her against the new world and the new ideas; she was for ever remembering the old days when her mother and King Harry had heard Mass together; ‘She has never learnt, poor soul, that men’s minds march forward and not backward.’

  There was sense in that and solid comfort, and he repeated it determinedly, for the Duke was not attending; he was staring at the door as it swung open, and his eldest son stood there an instant, splashed with mud up to his thighs, wiping his sleeve over his face, which ran with rain and sweat, and looking round with haggard eyes for his father. In a couple of strides he was beside him, pulling him away from Dr. Bill, who had just begun to repeat his moral for the third time. It dawned on Bill as well as the other dons that he must tactfully retire.

  The Duke turned savagely on Jack.

  ‘What the devil is it this time?’

  ‘Sir, it’s this gale – there’s one at sea—’

  ‘So I should suppose! What of it?’ He leaped at it. ‘My ships are all sunk!’

  ‘No, sir, no. They’re safe in harbour at Yarmouth – put in there for shelter from the east wind.’

  ‘Safe, are they? Then why do you gape at me with a face as long as a wet week? For Christ’s sake speak – and wipe the sweat off your nose!’

  ‘They’re safe,’ Jack stammered, ‘but—’

  ‘But what?’ roared his father as the young man mopped his face again and said nothing, then gasped—

  ‘Sir, they’re safe but – sir – Sir Harry Jerningham – you know—’

  ‘I know. Mary’s creature – what could he do against my navy?’

  ‘He went to Yarmouth, with what men he had been able to get together in Mary’s name. He rowed out into the harbour in a little boat and stood up in it and shouted a speech to the crews, inciting them to desert to Mary.’

  He came to a, pause, then said, ‘Can I have a drink?

  ‘No, by God’s blood, till you tell me the rest! What happened – they had the guns – didn’t they shoot him down in his cockleshell?’

  ‘No, sir. They said – they said—’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said, “Will you have our captains on your side too? or not?” He said yes, if they would come over willingly. Then the crews said, “You shall have ’em, or else they shall go to the bottom.” So the crews brought the captains up on deck and they said they would declare for Queen Mary and gladly. Sir, they had to – it was rank mutiny,’ Jack added, in terror at the look on his father’s face.

  ‘Take your drink,’ said Duke Dudley, shoving the bottle over to him.

  Rank mutiny on the part of the common people. It was happening everywhere. Queen Jane had learning and wisdom and zeal for the new ideas. But her backing was that of a lot of old grey-bearded doctors and dons.

  The navy had guns, but it had gone over to Queen Mary. The crews had told the captains what to do, ‘or else they shall go to the bottom.’

  Duke Dudley rode out from Cambridge the next day, towards Bury again. He rode east and he rode west through the mud, his cloak weighing heavier and heavier from the wet; he gained no new followers, and his old ones were drifting away on the wind, deserting right and left, slipping away by one and two and tiny companies of men, drifting in a zigzag course across country to avoid the dykes and marshes, all drifting away towards a missish, determined little figure with sandy hair turning grey who sat perched upon the top of one of the towers of Framlingham Castle.

  There Mary sit, peering out of her short-sighted blue eyes at the men coming to her by various ways across the wide countryside, by twos and threes and a few more – men who cared nothing for ideas, new or old, men who had no property to lose, and no guns (except the navy), but who said, ‘Tisn’t right.’

  ‘It’s a shame.’

  ‘We won’t see a poor woman done out of her rights.’

  The Duke still had close on 1000 horse, he still had all the guns of the Tower’s armoury, but what use would they be to him at the latter end?

  ‘Their feet march forward,’ he said to his son Jack, ‘but their minds march backward.’

  England was failing him. Well, there was still France. He had won his spurs in France, and all
his early honours. King Henri II was as much a Papist as the Emperor, and Dudley had no illusions; he knew all about the French plan for the future conquest of England through the little Queen of Scots. But the time was now, July 17th, 1553, and he would give all the future for an ally now against Mary Tudor. He sent his cousin Henry Dudley off to France with a desperate bid for foreign troops; if the French King would send them, now on the instant, Dudley would yield him Calais, the last English foothold on French soil, that had held firm for two and a half centuries.

  That done, he had only to wait, trailing here and there to collect forces that if they did come in to him only vanished again within a few hours. And wilder and wilder reports raced out to him from London.

  Old Lord Winchester had slipped off in secret to his own house and had to be brought back by force to the Tower at midnight.

  Then the Treasurer of the Mint had escaped with all the money in it and could not be found; he was probably on his way to Mary.

  Bishop Ridley of London, after preaching against Mary, the idolatrous rival of Queen Jane, at St Paul’s in the morning, had set out to ask her pardon by nightfall, and actually got as far as Ipswich, where he was arrested.

  The whole Council was ratting, scuttling off from the Tower, some to their several holes, but the most important members with Lord Pembroke to Barnard’s Castle in the Strand. The conclusion to that followed in a few hours; heralds from Barnard’s Castle proclaimed Queen Mary at Paul’s Cross, and all London was running mad with joy.

  It was late at night when the news came to Duke Dudley as he sat at supper at Cambridge, to which he had drifted back again from Bury. He was at King’s College with Dr. Bill and Dr. Sandys and Dr. Parker, who had waited seven years for King Henry to die before he, an ordained priest, had dared marry his patiently waiting Margaret. Queen Mary was now proclaimed, and so Dr. Parker was no longer lawfully married.

  But the dons still sipped their wine and talked theology and made an occasional Latin pun.

  The Duke left them and went and sat in the window-seat, staring out at the thick raining night. All his life he had ridden towards a brilliant future, and as fast as he had made it the present, another still brighter shone before him. But now the mirage had vanished; he saw nothing ahead of him, but stared into a future thick and dark as the night outside the window. He could see into it only as far as tomorrow morning, and what he must then do.

  The heavy rumbling voices round the table fell silent one after the other as the speakers glanced uneasily at the silent figure at the window; finally they took their leave of him and he rose and took their hands in his and asked each of them to pray for him, ‘for I am in great distress.’

  ‘That,’ said Dr. Parker as they went, ‘was the hand of a spent man.’

  The dawn was white and misty when into the marketplace came the great Duke of Northumberland, alone with the Mayor of Cambridge. He had looked for four trumpeters and a herald but could find none. With his own hands Duke Dudley tore down the Proclamation of Queen Jane, and himself read the Proclamation of Queen Mary, waved the white truncheon that he bore as Captain General, and then threw up his cap as though he were glad and shouted, ‘Long live the Queen!’

  People were running into the square, gaping and pointing at the tall figure by the market cross who waved his cap and shouted as if with joy, but on a harsh raucous note, while the team ran down his face. He threw gold coins to them as they came nearer, but nobody cheered.

  That evening Jack Dudley heard that another Proclamation had been drawn up by the Council in London; it offered the reward of £1000 in land to any noble, £500 to any knight, £100 to any yeoman who should lay his hand on the shoulder of the Duke of Northumberland and arrest him in the Queen’s name.

  He galloped to King’s College to find his father.

  The Mayor of Cambridge had been before him. He also had heard of the Proclamation, and went to win easy money.

  But the abject figure of the rebel recanting at the market cross had vanished; in its place sat the great Duke of Northumberland who had ruled England with a rod of iron for these four years. The Mayor stretched out his hand – and withdrew it. £500 lay beneath his fingers for the grasping. But the courage ebbed out of his finger-tips; he backed out, stammering and excusing himself.

  Jack Dudley rushed in to find his father still at liberty.

  ‘Thank God, sir, you’re still here. Sir, we must start at once. There’s been a Proclamation.’

  ‘Another?’ said his father. ‘There’s one every five minutes.’

  ‘But this is for your arrest.’

  ‘I know.’ And as his son stared he added, ‘The Mayor came just now to arrest me. He didn’t dare. Which of the rats – the mice – will dare put a paw on me?’

  Jack had no use for these questions. ‘Well then we’ve still got a chance. I’ve horses outside. We must start on the instant.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Why, sir, the coast – anywhere but here.’

  ‘What odds? What odds?’ said the Duke; then as he saw the young man’s impatient agony, ‘Very well, we’ll start – in the morning.’

  Those few hours of the July night might still hold some strange chance for him. His luck had always held. All the rats in the country might desert him, but he could not believe his luck would desert him. And he must sleep. He could do nothing till he had had some sleep. He had had so little these list nights. In the morning things might be different.

  He went to bed, and his son Jack, still booted and spurred, with his riding-cloak still over his shoulders, ready to start the moment he could get his father to do so, looked in on him, and was amazed to see him dead asleep. Had he gone mad, or suddenly old and childish, that he could not stir himself in this hour of his greatest need? What had happened to that demonic energy that had made him like Lucifer, Son of the Morning, hurtling from plan to plan, no swifter in thought than execution?

  Then he wished he had not thought of Lucifer, who fought God and fell, and crossed himself before he remembered that the action was a crime, and worse, a folly.

  He went away to see what few followers he might still get together by the morning.

  Before it was quite light, the Duke was woken by a knock on his door.

  ‘I have heard that knock before,’ he said aloud, but still half asleep. There was more knocking, louder and louder. He dragged himself awake and out of bed, began to put on his clothes, then, with his boots half on and half off, he went to the door.

  His brother-in-law, Fitzalan, the Earl of Arundel, stood there. He stretched out his arm and put his hand on the Duke’s shoulder.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I am sent here by the Queen’s Majesty, and in her name I arrest you.’

  The Duke gaped at him, stupefied. Less than six days ago Arundel had stood at his stirrup and wished he could ride out with him and spend his blood for him ‘even at his foot.’ He wanted to say that; to remind Arundel that he himself had said that they were ‘all in it together and which of them could now wipe his hands clean of it?’

  But what odds, what odds would it make? He found his knees giving under him, they were sliding to the ground, he was down on his knees clutching at Arundel’s coat, praying him to ‘be good to me for the love of God’ – and then, in oblique but desperate reminder of what he dared not say outright, ‘I beseech you use mercy to me, knowing the case as it is.’

  ‘My lord,’ said the Earl, ‘you should have sought for mercy sooner.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Time took twice as long in the Tower as elsewhere, Jane found. She had more than enough means to tell it by. For she had sent for her personal belongings to make her feel more at home, especially her books, and the stupid servants had brought few books, but a mass of things she did not want; among them, mufflers of purple velvet and sable (in this heat!), black velvet hats, ostrich feathers, three pairs of garters, a dog-collar with gold bells (none of her dogs was here), a box with a picture of her mother inside the
lid, which Jane opened and shut firmly down again, and an extravagant number of clocks – striking clocks, alarm clocks, and one with the figure of a little man who held a sphere on his head and an astronomical device in his hand.

  Her cousin King Edward had given it to her. There was also a small image of Edward carved in wood. It had a real look of the delicate eager boy. She looked at it and listened to his clock ticking. It was strange they should still be here with her, when he had now lain dead for more than a week. So short a time ago he had played cards with her.

  She had always been told that when he was a grown man as well as King, she would be his Queen. Now she had to be Queen all alone. But Queen alone she would be. No upstart should usurp the Crown that he had left to her.

  Edward was dead; young Guildford Dudley stormed and sulked; Queen Jane lived on and on alone, so long it seemed, while all the clocks struck or rang their alarms, and the heat-wave melted, and a gusty east wind blew up the Thames which cooled her hot head but only a little, for it ached all the time and she felt sick and feverish and worried about those spots. Was it some fever, or were Guildford and his mother really poisoning her? Or was it, as Lady Throckmorton said, only the Tower fleas, more venomous than other fleas because they had bred on the bodies of traitors?

  The Tower itself grew less and less like a royal palace-fortress and more and more like a prison, whose walls closed in nearer and nearer to her, shutting her in more and more alone.

  Other people were trying to escape from it, she knew that. Lord Pembroke and Sir Thomas Cheyne the Warden of the Cinque Ports had wanted to slip out unobserved that they might talk somewhere else in private, so her father told her, proud of having circumvented them. She heard how old Lord Winchester had had to be brought back at midnight; that Bishop Ridley had gone, and the Treasurer of the Mint with all the money in it.