‘What?’
‘Something quite plain, all in cloth of silver. With long hanging sleeves, “angel sleeves”.’
‘Ho!’ said Mrs Ashley.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Cousin, will you dance with me?’
‘You have danced with me already, my lord, too often.’
‘I could never do that.’
‘You should ask the Queen again.’
‘She dances so badly, strutting up and down like the water-wagtails in the Tower garden. But you, Cousin, you move like the flight of a swallow. When first I saw you against the sunset I knew what freedom was, what life could be. Will you not dance with me?’
This was going a deal too fast, Elizabeth told herself. But she never could resist a good partner. They touched hands and swung into the pattern of the dance in perfect timing with the tinkling, twanging thrumming little music like the music of birds and insects on a summer’s night. Another hum rose through it, the spontaneous half-laughing murmur of voices in applause.
‘Do you hear what they say?’ whispered Courtenay.
‘They whisper that you are true Tudor, and that I am the last of the Plantagenets.’
She gave a faint groan. ‘Shall we ever hear the last of the Plantagenets?’
He flushed as he swung away to complete the measure, then back to take her hand again. ‘You heard that? Someone said we were made for each other – youp!’ His smiling partner had dug her long finger-nails into his hand as a sharp hint of discretion.
But she too was glowing at what that ripple of praise from the onlookers implied. ‘The old stock’ of English Kings, tall and fair and perfectly moulded as a curled Norman knight on his tombstone, coupled with the red-gold, the quick-changing white and red of the new Celtic blood that had leaped to power and transformed English sovereignty – yes, they might indeed have been made for each other, to rule England together – ‘if only,’ sighed the cold old strain of Visconti blood that twined like a serpent deep within her, ‘if only he were not such a fool!’
Others did not see that so clearly. They saw a fine young man of the blood royal, and if the Queen refused to marry him and so missed her best chance of securing her throne, then why should not the Princess take him? More and more people were asking these questions; Edward Courtenay asked them alternately.
He wooed Elizabeth whenever he got the chance to, and when jogged by Gardiner he remembered to woo the Queen also, in an insouciant absent-minded fashion, like a schoolboy making up to an aunt at odd moments in spasmodic hopes of a tip. He got a good many. She gave him one of her father’s huge thumb-rings with a diamond in it worth 16,000 crowns, and he stuck both his thumbs through it and waggled them at her, telling her she had handcuffed him as her prisoner for life. She laughed indulgently at the silly lad, and appointed one of her gentlemen as his bear-leader, to guide him through the world that was so new to him and keep him out of mischief – in which he was unsuccessful, though he had orders not to leave him alone for a moment – clear sign to de Noailles the French ambassador of the frantic jealousy of a frustrated female for the beloved object.
There were pleasanter tokens of her solicitude for Courtenay; she gave him the choice of whatever house he liked best in London for his own mansion; she reinstated him in his Exeter estates and created him Earl of Devonshire, in a most splendid ceremony when he wore robes that made him look about nine feet high and all the women stared and smiled at him.
All but his cousin the Lady Elizabeth, who unaccountably denied herself this glorious sight on some flimsy pretext of not feeling well enough. Courtenay was certain she only did it to annoy him. Who was she to give herself such airs? A bastard, and of an upstart House, two upstart Houses (some day he’d tell her that!). Mary was at least worthy of him on the distaff side. And there were plenty of other women only too eager for him to play the fool with them. He did so, with the hectic excitement of a colt getting his head for the first time. He had met noble ladies in prison, for the society in the Tower was of the best in England, but their restrained and melancholy company had been poor sport compared with the Cockney wit and freedom of the women of the town that he now enjoyed – whenever he could shake off his bear-leader.
Gardiner scolded him; Mary gave him motherly reproofs; the French ambassador, who was backing him for a royal consort against the Imperial ambassador’s suit of Prince Philip, warned him that he had already spoiled his chances of being made Duke of York and would ruin those of being King. Of course he must amuse himself, but let him do so in discreet privacy. But Courtenay’s notion of discreet privacy was to leave his house at midnight in a ‘disguise’ that was very becoming and strikingly conspicuous; and Mary declared in public that it was not to her honour to marry a subject.
After that the French ambassador decided that Courtenay had better give up any hope of Mary and concentrate on Elizabeth instead, and the two of them make a popular combined head for the discontented Protestant party. So de Noailles had him to dinner one Sunday in order to coach him in this role, tell him to be bold and resolute and he might yet get himself a crown, and with a young instead of an old woman attached to it. It should be an easy matter for him to go down and raise his peasantry on his behalf ‘now that he was the Earl of Dampshire,’ – a combination of Hampshire and Devonshire that the French Ambassador persisted in using even in all his dispatches.
Courtenay showed small inclination to visit Dampshire. He seemed to prefer France, for he asked de Noailles what welcome he was likely to get from his master Henri II if he found it necessary to leave England.
De Noailles then asked Roger Ascham to dinner on the Monday and told him that his previous evening had been engaged in trying to train a young game-cock who had been fed on chicken-feed instead of raw meat and wine; Courtenay could crow and flap his wings with the best of them and strut round the hens, but de Noailles doubted whether it would be much use to sharpen his talons and fasten the steel spurs to his legs.
‘Your true game-cock in this case is the hen,’ Ascham told him.
But de Noailles had to confess that though he had danced with Elizabeth, flirted with her (and she had done both charmingly), when it came to talking politics he had found himself utterly unable to sound her. Her old friend and tutor should have better luck.
‘Abstain from beans’ was still ringing in Ascham’s head. He declared himself more interested in the New Learning than in high politics.
De Noailles, leaning back and picking the gleaming teeth in his thick black beard with a silver toothpick, asked him blandly whether his hopes for the New Learning were likely to be realised under a Queen who had cried, ‘As for your new books, I have never read any of ’em – nor ever will do!’
Young Dr. Dee had come back from his triumphant career abroad – where he had created a furore in Paris by the first lectures on Euclid ever given – expressly to induce her to found a National Library that would be the glory of England. But she would have none of it, and he had begun to collect his own instead.
‘Poor lady, she is born fifty years too late. She cannot see that the world will never go back to the dingy old-fashioned ways of thought to which she clings. She has never taken in the new doctrine of our modern Copernicus, that the world is a round ball rolling through space; it makes her dizzy, for why then should it not drop down through space and crash to nothingness? Ha ha! So she prefers it flat, a safe platform with Heaven above and Hell below, all firm as a rock.’
‘Do you think that makes much difference to belief?’
‘But, my friend, why else did the Church oppose the idea? The Church knows that all that is happening in science now will alter men’s minds for the rest of time. And not only their minds. Life is sweet, is it not? all the more when it may turn out to be the only one. But the Queen’s senses have never had any opportunity to know it; she has never seen that the world is holding out its eager hands to the present life that is so well worth living.’ His rings flashed as he spread his own fine
hands in illustration. ‘The dresses she is introducing at Court, they are gorgeous indeed, but my God, do they render the women desirable? What has happened to the lovely necks, down to the breasts, that we saw in King Henry’s reign? They are covered under a canopy of stiff silk or damask.’ He shrugged in despair, cast his eyes to the ceiling, and saw his argument escaping him. So he compared Mary’s antiquated provincial outlook with the enlightened attitude of his own Most Catholic Sovereign of France, Henri II, and his wife Catherine de Medici, who loved to encourage reform and free thought – within reasonable limits.
‘Within financial limits!’ Ascham remarked drily. ‘The French Monarchy may toy with heresy as a fashionable mental exercise, but it will always have to remain Catholic, for the simple reason that it would be bankrupt if it did not. It still draws its chief revenue from its ecclesiastical patronage, and its best paying vested interests are in the Church.’
De Noailles quickly parried the thrust. ‘Just as those of England are in the Reformation. Yet Queen Mary actually hopes to restore the Church property, filched by practically every one of the English nobles and gentry, to the “poor dispossessed monks and nuns” – many of whom made quite a good thing out of its sales, and most of whom are now married and unwilling to part with their wives and husbands. How is she going to do it? Answer me that.’
But it had already been answered and flatly in the negative, at her first Parliament; all the nobles and gentry had confessed their error against the Pope and begged his forgiveness upon their knees in a most moving scene, but refused point-blank to give up one scrap of the Church property they had amassed.
Mary had been bitterly hurt; and even more by the changed attitude of the common people at her Coronation, where it had been necessary to take all sorts of precautions to guard her safety from those very crowds that had roared themselves hoarse with joy at her entry into London. She could not see how even the notoriously fickle Cockney crowds could have so changed towards her in a few weeks.
But in those weeks she had had the Mass said in public (against even the Emperor’s advice), and while it was still illegal by the existing law of the land.
Many were glad to hear again the old accustomed chanting that had meant religion to them since childhood, where the New Prayer Book only meant a lot of fine-sounding sentences that they understood little better than the unintelligible Latin drone. And then one year there had been a New Prayer Book which everybody had to believe in by law – and then two years later there had been another New Prayer Book which everybody had to believe in instead, and it had suddenly become as illegal to believe in the first New Prayer Book as in the old Mass. It did shake your faith up, a lot of people had complained, to have the form of religion altered every two or three years, instead of sticking to the same one for nine centuries as their fathers had done.
They wanted to hear again the chime of the chapel bell comforting the black silence of the night; to see lights again in the windows of the monastery guest-houses that had long been blind, giving no welcome to tired travellers.
But the people who wanted this were mostly over thirty-five.
The younger ones were agog for change, for release from everything they felt to be stuffy and old-fashioned. The world, to them, had come out of its dark schoolroom; they were not going back into it to be scolded and frightened like children with old tales of hell and purgatory and the unseen figure of the Pope of Rome always behind them like an invisible headmaster. Rome was the interloper, the secret invader, the prying fingers of a distant hand, itself unseen, that groped into every man’s affairs, picked every man’s pockets, even the poorest, for ‘Peter’s Pence’; taking money out of the country, putting foreigners into it.
So they said, in the flush of their new-found national pride that King Henry had given them, not by any spectacular foreign conquests or military victories, but by cutting England loose from the centralizing European power of the Church into a splendid isolation, so they felt it; while to Mary it was merely cutting the ship of state adrift to float rudderless on the high seas.
To the younger generation, England had leaped ahead in one vast stride.
To Mary, England had slid back into lonely darkness. It was her mission to recall it to ‘my father’s day,’ when he and her mother had gone to Mass together, with herself as a little fair-haired girl beside them, and he had not yet broken with Rome.
She intended to bring back not only the Mass, but the old allegiance to Rome. She intended an even worse thing, so ran the growing rumours, and that was to marry the Prince of Spain, to bring thousands of insolent foreigners into the country, spying, interfering, cruel priests, the Spanish Inquisition itself.
While Mary herself still coyly imagined that she had not yet made up her mind, the French ambassador was spreading the news everywhere that the marriage was as good – or bad – as settled. Bad it was, from de Noailles’ point of view. His best hope to prevent it lay in the will of the people of England, and their best hope of a figurehead lay in the boy Courtenay and the girl Elizabeth, a romantic couple, untried, unknown, but good-looking, charming, above all, young.
It was the young who were beginning to group themselves to a man – especially a man – round Elizabeth.
She was the bright crescent slip that might eclipse Mary’s already waning moon. Some of them wrote poems about it. Roger Ascham forgot that he had written letters about Jane Grey. Her pale star was in eclipse; she was happy, he heard, with her books in the Tower and the promise of liberty in retirement. But would Elizabeth ever retire, however meek and obedient her demeanour?
She stood in the full gaze of the Court, she stood very stiff, but her stillness was bright and aware, she could move as swift as a meteor. Watching, he drew near her; he found himself standing by her, looking on at an absurd Interlude acted by John Heywood’s company of boy players.
‘You are the darling of the people of England,’ he whispered to her, ‘and do you know who has said it? No butcher’s or baker’s wife, but Commendone, the Pope’s own envoy, writing in despair to the Papal See.’
‘The devil he does! And so puts me between the devil and the Papal See!’
Ascham laughed on the queer note of rising excitement that Elizabeth’s repartees always it up in him. ‘Yes, he has written that not the Queen, but “her heretic sister is in the heart and mouth of everyone”.’
‘And “her head on the block” will be the corollary – which is no doubt what Signor Renard is suggesting at this moment to the Queen.’ And she nodded to where the Imperial ambassador was bending his head down to Queen Mary’s stiffly resolute little person. ‘But on what possible charge?’ she added complacently; ‘I have done, said, even thought – nothing!’
‘That is the charge. You have done nothing about going to Mass – or nothing much! Your example is giving strength to all London. The royal Chaplain’s sermon has been shouted down with yells of “Papist!” and he had a dagger thrown at him. He was lucky to escape with his life.’
‘And is that due to my example? God’s death, you’ll convert me to the Mass better than any Papist! Rank rebellion and attempted murder, do you think I stand for that?’
‘Your Grace stands for the people. Can you, any more than they, bear to see a foreign despot in power here, England a mere province of Spain, and the Inquisition rooting out all freedom, so that no man shall speak carelessly in his cups without it being reported by his neighbour and he himself cast in a dungeon?’
‘No. Nor can I bear that the Queen’s Chaplain shall not speak in his pulpit without having daggers thrown at him. What freedom of speech is that? And is it the will of the people? Of how many of them? Since you have not abstained from beans, will you tell me how many make five? If the people are divided, is every sermon to be the occasion for a free fight?’
The Interlude was over; it was time for the banquet. Elizabeth swept a deep curtsy as the Queen passed, and rose from it to follow her in the customary order – then froze to the
spot. Mary had held out her hand, not to her sister to take precedence of the Court, but to her cousin the Duchess of Suffolk, the mother of Jane Grey.
By this gesture the Queen stated publicly before all the Court that she regarded a convicted rebel as the first lady in the land, next to herself, rather than her own sister; that she refused to acknowledge that sister as her heir.
What would then be the Queen’s next move? It would never be safe to disinherit Elizabeth and yet leave her at large. Would the next step be to put her in the Tower?
The eyes of all the Court were on her. She could not hear their whispers; she could guess.
With her head high, her face white as stone, she followed the Duchess of Suffolk through the doorway. But no further. Once outside, she broke away from the stately procession – and rushed to her own apartments. All prudence and restraint were flung from her, the meek role that she had played so patiently all these weeks. She was in great danger, the Queen’s insult had shown it clearly, but she cared nothing now for the danger; it was the insult that goaded her to a mad ecstasy of passion that caught her hot by the throat, that blinded her with fire in her eyes, that throbbed hot, hot in her hands with the longing to smash and stab and kill. She raged up and down in a tornado of rustling silks, swearing with shocking and surprising blasphemy, striking at anything in her way – no person dared come in – like a furious swan hissing and swishing its wings across the water – like a lioness raging in her cage, like – like her dread sire Old Harry himself in one of his rages, thought Mr Parry, mopping his damp forehead as he cowered behind his writing-desk in the attempt to make himself invisible.
The attempt was in vain. She pulled up sharply in front of him, her arm raised, her fist clenched. He ducked his head instinctively as it crashed on the table.
‘Write. Write my sister. Write this. That I will not see her again. That I will leave the Court. Take tip your pen, blockhead. What, does your hand shake? Her “permission,” do you mutter? By God’s most precious soul, she shall give her permission, whether she will or no.’
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