Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  She left all that remained of her armed forces at the gates of the City, in accordance with their ancient statutes, and in spite of much cautionary advice that it was scarcely wise to disband her army completely when London had only a few days before been so full of turbulence and rebellion. But Mary was determined to show her trust in her people.

  It was seven o’clock as they entered the City of London. The sun was setting in a fury of flame and storm-clouds. All the dark rickety wooden houses leaning top-heavily across the streets as though they were nodding to each other, all but rubbing each other’s foreheads, all seemed to have put on scarves and petticoats, so many bright cloths fluttered from the windows, while the gaily painted shop signs flaunted and creaked and clattered in the breeze. The streets below were a sea of dim white faces surging forward from all the dark corners and alleys, blackened with swaying shadows cast by the leaping flames of the bonfires and tossing flicker of torches. And like the sea in a great storm came the roar of welcome from all those grinning gaping mouths.

  Mary had to put a tight hold on herself to keep from bursting into tears. It made her face go wooden and she held herself as stiffly as possible in accordance with all she had been taught on the proper behaviour of a Queen.

  It annoyed her that her half-sister, whom she had graciously placed only a horse’s head behind her in the procession, seemed to have no such companion notions on the proper behaviour of a Princess. In the tail of her eye she could see Elizabeth sitting her horse as upright as an arrow, and nearly half a head taller than herself; but otherwise her whole behaviour lacked dignity, not to say decorum. She was looking to right and left among all those faces as though she knew them personally; she held her reins with hands drooping from exaggeratedly raised wrists, in order to show off her long white fingers and rosily gleaming nails, and Mary was sure that it was with the same intent that she patted her horse’s neck or waved, smiling at the crowd as though their smiles were for her – as perhaps many of them were. Her ears caught the laughing applauding murmurs,

  ‘Look at the lass!’

  ‘There goes Old Harry’s own!’

  ‘That’s the Tudor red-head!’

  These murmurs were not for Mary and her greying head.

  An extraordinary elation was mounting in Elizabeth as she rode through this roaring City in the sunset light, knowing that it crowned her hair with a halo of fire, that she was alive and free, instead of in the Tower under Duke Dudley’s dread thumb, that she was not yet twenty – and that anything might happen!

  These people were greeting their Queen loyally, but they laughed with gladness as they looked at herself. They looked to her as next heir to the throne; they threw flowers at her and she dexterously caught a red carnation and flourished it – another opportunity to show off her long white lovely hands, and how clever of Cat Ashley to have discovered that new stuff for the finger-nails just in time! But her excitement was far deeper than the mere personal vanity of a girl showing herself off to the crowd.

  It was the crowd itself that intoxicated her; the queer sense that she was part of them, that she and they lived at their fullest when in conjunction.

  All these long, desperately quiet years when she had worked in solitude at her books and music, danced only with her dancing master, seen hardly anyone outside her household, all through that nunlike retirement, when Time crawled on leaden-soled boots, she seemed to have been waiting, living for this moment when Time would gallop for her yet again. Always it had shone at the back of her mind, lighting her loneliness, sometimes her despair.

  And it had not been a hope so much as a memory. They said she could not have remembered what had happened in her infancy, she could only have imagined it from what she was told later. But she did remember; or dreamed of it so often that it was as vivid as if she did. From the very day she was born, and again and again through the first two and a half years of her life, a gigantic glittering figure would swoop upon her, hoist her up in his arms and hold her at an open window above a wavering sea of faces that flickered white, red and black in the flamelight and shadow cast by the torches, and roared ‘Long live the princess!’ ‘Long live Elizabeth!’

  Until one day the giant, clad all in yellow satin like a towering toad, with a white feather in his cap at which she clutched from her perch upon his enormous padded shoulder, went prancing through his Court, showing her off to his English nobles and foreign ambassadors alike, shouting, ‘Thank God the old harridan is dead! And this is your future Queen Elizabeth!’

  That had been the last of Elizabeth’s royal progresses on the shoulder of her dread sire, King Harry VIII.

  The old harridan had been Mary’s mother, Good Queen Katherine, who died in January. But in May, Elizabeth’s mother Nan Bullen was dead too, not only in accordance with King Harry’s desire, but by his command.

  January and May were dead; their daughters lived on. And all these things now cast their leaping flickering light on Elizabeth’s mind, throwing a strange glow of exhilaration on the present huge untidy turbulent crowd of people thronging out of their obscure homes, jostling and struggling to get near her, stare at her, grin at her, toss flowers to her, shout silly joking intimate things in welcome to her. These people, rough, poor, ragged and drunk, tramps and drabs, and respectable shopkeepers and their wives in their Sunday best, all these people whom she could never hope nor probably want to know personally, all seemed a close and integral part of herself. She could delight in their delight and know what caused it. The fear and horror of civil war, of ruin to their homes and death to the men-folk, must have hung heavy on them these past two weeks; and now they saw the shadow lifting. They could go back to their work and carry on their multitudinous little lives and loves and activities in peace and safety. What intricate network of custom, law, business, work and payment, supply and demand of food and goods and clothing, held all this thrumming, passionate, rough-tempered, good-humoured swarm together, so much more complicated than any hive or ant-heap whose workings were a miracle of nature? But this miracle, of order among the tangle of humanity – who could work it?

  From deep down in her unremembered infancy came the answer, ‘I could.’

  This human hive, this swarming ant-heap, had so nearly been kicked over. These hot grinning faces bobbing round the triumphal procession of their rightful Queen and her heir might so easily have been shrieking in terror, trampled by advancing troops of rebels; these bonfires might have been the flames of their burning homes; the gutters might have been running with blood instead of wine.

  What hand could be both strong and sensitive enough to wage rule and harmony among these wild and discordant elements? Once again she raised her own.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The grim gates of the Tower stood open. A little group of captives stood there awaiting them, dark in the dimming light of the courtyard; and at the approach of the Queen, fell on their knees.

  There was the Duchess of Somerset, widow of Edward Seymour the late Protector whom Dudley had executed two years before – a handsome haggard woman whose ravaged face showed none of the softening of grief but only a fierce determination to grab what she could from life.

  There was Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, rugged, indomitable, with his blunt nose and humorous eye, whom King Harry had cut out of his will and the place he had expected to find on the Council because, ‘though he himself could manage Gardiner, nobody else could.’

  There was the old Duke of Norfolk, under sentence of death, no one quite knew why, ever since King Harry, whom he had served as faithfully as any savage mastiff ever served his master, had died six and a half years ago, just before his failing hand could sign the death-warrant for his most doggedly devoted servant.

  And there was young Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter beheaded fifteen years before; he was tall and handsome, with pale transparent skin, like a fine plant grown in the dark; the only reason for the imprisonment that had dimmed his lot since childhood had been hi
s Plantagenet blood, which gave him too dangerously near a claim to the throne.

  In the last flush of the sunset Mary dismounted and advanced with her quick-short steps towards the huddled group of kneeling figures in the shadow of the Tower wall. She raised them one by one and kissed them, saying, ‘These are my prisoners,’ while the tears ran down her face. ‘You shall come back into the Tower, but as my friends and guests, to stay with me in the royal apartments until my Coronation,’ she told them laughing through her tears.

  To the Duchess of Somerset she said, ‘My good Nan’ and to Bishop Gardiner, ‘You shall be my Chancellor,’ and then she came to the Duke of Norfolk, who had bullied her into compliance with King Henry and told her that if she were his daughter he would have beaten her to death and knocked her head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple.

  She raised him too, and kissed his grizzled cheek, and then for an instant she stood silent, thinking of his cruel words to her all those years ago, and thinking too of his son, the magnificent young Earl of Surrey, the finest poet, soldier, sportsman of his day, swinging down in his scarlet coat to the tennis courts at Hampton Court – whose death-warrant her father had lived just long enough to execute.

  Then she said, ‘Your castle at Framlingham has done me good service, my lord.’

  He answered, ‘Madam, when King Harry confiscated it, I asked that it should go to no lesser hands than those of his children, for it is stately gear.’

  ‘My lord, the stately gear is yours again.’

  And she turned to young Edward Courtenay, calling him ‘Fair Cousin,’ but it seemed he hardly heard her. His wide eyes were fixed on the slight commanding figure behind her, on the face like a white flame of pride and glory beneath its red-gold crown of hair. Youth and gaiety of living, from which he had been debarred, now shone before him; he knelt, not to Queen Mary, but to the Lady Elizabeth.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  To beget a male heir for England had been the one persistent purpose through all King Henry’s murderous philanderings and six marriages, cut short only by his death. But now that his one male heir had died, a woman had become the Sovereign of England for the first time since, four hundred years before, the savage Norman Queen Matilda had provided good reason why there should never be another.

  But no gloomy comparisons with Queen Matilda seemed likely to be justified. ‘Merciful Mary’ was what everyone was calling her, and declaring that

  ‘Her honest fame shall ever live

  Within the mouth of man.’

  John Heywood’s birthday poem to her had come back into fashion as fast as the sturdy playwright-poet himself had returned to London (for, being a Papist, he had found it convenient to travel abroad during King Edward’s reign) and presented himself before her with, he said, two objects: ‘the first, that I should see Your Majesty; the second, that Your Majesty should see me!’

  She guffawed in answer to the hint and promptly reinstated him in his appointment as manager of the children’s theatrical companies at Court, and moreover insisted that she should claim no royal privilege but always pay for her own seat in the audience.

  Everyone was delighted with her; except her supposed ally, the Imperial ambassador. His master Charles V had instructed him to advise the new Queen to go slow on the executions of the rebels so as to ensure an easy start for her reign. Mary’s immediate response, as eager as that of a schoolgirl anxious to obey fully, was, ‘Would the Emperor like me to forgive Duke Dudley?’

  Forgive Dudley himself, arch rebel and traitor of the whole revolt, who had tried to sell Calais back to the French (and indeed Mary found that hardest of all to forgive) so as to bring foreign troops into England to help overthrow the lawful Sovereign! It was going beyond the bounds of reason, even of possibility.

  But the Duke himself thought otherwise. The Dudleys were not good losers. He had been utterly crushed at first. The crowds that stared in silence as he rode out from the Tower had surged round him on his return to it as a helpless prisoner, hooting and howling their jeers of hatred, throwing stones, spattering him with filth. His son Jack, who rode behind him, broke down and cried. Duke Dudley himself had been almost too dazed to realise the nightmare. His health, never strong, had cracked under the strain and he was in a high fever.

  But when quiet in the Tower he began to struggle for life like a drowning fly.

  He had climbed so high above all others, he had helped pull down the powerful Seymour brothers to the block; it could not be that he should now share their fate.

  He set to work to pull every string he knew; his beautiful wife sent round to all their influential friends (it was surprising how they all declared now that they had no influence whatever) with what presents of jewels and sables she could muster. He changed his religion, of course; he said he had always ‘certainly thought best of the old religion; but seeing a new one begun, run dog, run devil, he had let it go forward.’ But he did not put it like that to Queen Mary.

  His behaviour at the trial was noted as ‘very obsequious,’ though he politely pointed out that the judges were as guilty as he; and his fellow-prisoner, Sir Thomas Palmer, not so politely, roared out the unpalatable truth – ‘The judges are traitors too – they deserve punishment as much as me and more!’ It did not help them.

  Even after he had been sentenced and warned that he would be executed the next day, Dudley made a last frantic attempt and wrote to Arundel imploring imprisonment, confiscation, banishment, anything as long as it was life. ‘Oh my good lord, remember how sweet life is, and how bitter the contrary! – An old proverb there is, that a living dog is better than a dead lion. Oh that it would please Her good Grace to give me life, yea the life of a dog, that I might but live and kiss her feet!’

  The lion had fallen very low. But he fell lower on the scaffold when he turned to his second-in-command, Sir John Gates, and holding out his hands, told him, ‘I forgive you with all my heart. Although you and your counsel was a great occasion of my offence.’

  Sir John Gates promptly offered his forgiveness in return, with the reminder, ‘Yet you and your authority was the cause of it altogether.’

  Old connoisseurs of decent scaffold behaviour shrugged contemptuously and reminded each other that the Duke had acted just like his father the lawyer, who had laid all the blame on others in his before-execution speech.

  Tom Seymour had died like a tiger, and his brother the Protector like a gentleman, both victims of John Dudley, who now died like a craven. The London crowds had wept and groaned for the first two; they cheered themselves hoarse for the third, shouting, ‘The dog is dead!’

  One of the connoisseurs, Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant of the Tower, dropped in to dinner at Mr Partridge’s house in the Tower, where the Lady Jane Grey had been lodged ever since her eviction from the royal apartments, but with as much respect and deference as if she were an honoured guest. She happened to come down to dinner that day instead of having it in her rooms, and they all apologised for the intrusion of a chance visitor. Jane was gracious, told the men to keep on their caps in her presence, and asked for the news of the town – was it true they were already hearing Mass in the churches?

  They told her yes, in some places, and there had been some riots against it, a priest nearly killed in the pulpit at Paul’s Cross, and anonymous leaflets blowing about in the gutters telling people to rise against ‘the detestable Papists who follow the opinions of the Queen.’

  But the Queen’s Proclamation against all this had been surprisingly mild, exhorting her subjects to give up ‘those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic and apply instead their whole care to live in the fear of God.’ Since then things had quietened down a bit – with the help of 200 guards to keep order at the Paul’s Cross sermons. One or two London churches had even begun to give Mass at the people’s own wish, without any command, and there had been no disturbances.

  ‘It may be so,’ said Jane, and then, bitterly, ‘it is not so strange as the s
udden conversion of the late Duke. Who would have thought he could have done that?’ she demanded, opening wide astonished eyes. It was an awkward moment; she evidently did not know that her own father had also just got converted – at a price of twenty thousand pounds.

  Mr Partridge coughed judicially and said that no doubt Dudley had hoped to get his pardon by it.

  ‘Pardon – for him!’ she flashed out, all her grave composure shattered – ‘he has brought me and our stock into most miserable calamity. His life was wicked and full of dissimulation, odious to all men. So was his end.’

  Sir John Bridges cheerfully supplied further details of his odious end; the executioner limping up, for he was lame in one leg, in a white apron like any common butcher; the scarf slipping from the Duke’s eyes as he laid his head upon the block, so that he had to get up again to have it refastened, and in that minute ‘surely he figured to himself the terrible dreadfulness of death; then struck his hands together once as if to say “this must be,” and cast himself down again.’

  The connoisseur told it well, but Jane was not attending. No scarves nor white aprons were needed to impress on her the true dreadfulness of Dudley’s end. Her lips moved as if in silent prayer, and then aloud, though very low, she said, ‘I pray God that neither I nor any friend of mine shall die so. I am young, but would I ever forsake my faith for love of life? God forbid! But to him, an old man of fifty who had not long to live in any case, to him life was sweet it seems! So long as he might live he did not care how – perjured – captive. He would have lived in chains if he could!’