Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  All this she would be free to do at last and spread her butterfly wings, after years immured like a chrysalis in a tightly swathed cocoon of Protestant propriety.

  No, she had nothing to say against such an alternative to prison – except her hopes and fears for England. And those she could not say. So she said, very low, ‘Nothing except – that I shall never marry.’

  Suddenly Mary shouted at her – ‘You still think to be Queen!’

  Elizabeth panicked. ‘I would rather be a beggar and single than a Queen and married.’

  ‘You! You stand there and tell me you desire perpetual spinsterhood! What possible reason can you advance? Answer me that.’

  ‘Natural inclination,’ said Elizabeth, hardly knowing what she said.

  ‘Out of my sight, you lying harlot!’ roared the Queen.

  Elizabeth fled to the door.

  ‘Come back!’ said the thin hollow voice this time.

  She came back, not too near.

  ‘What is it you do to me?’ said the thin voice. ‘I am not like this with anyone but you. It must be that you are evil, to make me so at odds with my true self. I am like this with no one else – no one – no one but you. It is because you are evil, false all through. You stand there and talk of eternal spinsterhood and doubtless chastity, when I know that you have seduced honourable men from their loyalty to me.’

  A horrible thing happened, she began to sob and wail. ‘Only tell me how you do it and I will pardon you everything. What is the secret of this power you have over men? People say you have only to look at them! Yet there are many women far more beautiful who have not got it – and you are not womanly, for all your sly wantonness and pretence at meek airs and embroidery, you are not all woman, there is much of the man in you, like myself – I too live best in danger, in action. But I have no power to win men to me – and you, who have, dare to say you would rather be a beggar than marry. Holy Virgin, if only I could feel that! Virgin – and that is what you call yourself! But it’s not true, it’s not true. You are what I have always known you to be – you are your mother’s daughter.’

  She beat her fists upon the velvet pillows, the tears ran down her distorted face. Elizabeth stared in disgust. This was the woman she had thought like her father, even at his worst! How could she – dared she – lower herself to this? Her anger was shot with terror – for more than herself; she seized her sister’s wrist, never knowing that she gripped it so hard as to hurt. ‘You are driving yourself to madness,’ she cried. ‘For your own sake, for all England’s, take care of what you do.’

  Mary screamed in rage. Her women rushed in, calling on the guards, who quickly surrounded the Princess.

  ‘Take her away,’ shrieked the Queen – ‘remove all her servants from her, double the sentinels about her rooms, make sure that there is no chance of escape or rescue. I have given her her last chance and she has denied it, she has defied me, attacked me, she is false as Judas – he also had red hair!’ she cried on a wild sobbing peal of laughter; and fell into a weeping storm of hysterics.

  The sentries were doubled; the Princess’s servants, huddled together like a flock of frightened sheep, had to take their leave of her. ‘Pray for me,’ she said to them, ‘for this night I think I must die.’ She was too tired to care; that last horrible half-hour with Mary had left her sick even of life itself, and she knew that it had done the same with Mary.

  What was it that flared up and took shape like an evil genius between them, so that neither was capable of acting or speaking as she wished? She had been mad to try and warn Mary of herself, to grip her wrist and speak urgently, forcibly, as man to man, instead of trying to soothe a hysterical woman. She would never have taken such a risk with any other enemy – and Mary was her worst enemy. But she was not only that. She was her half-sister, and even while she asked, she knew what was the evil genius between them, for it lay deep in both, the murderous jealousy of their father.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘It’s the Gab of May,’ said Dr. William Turner as a gust of wind and sleet blew off his cap and sent it bowling down the rough grassy cart-track of a road, ‘always cold and gusty at this time in the month, I’ve marked it many a year. Hey, Billy-boy, fetch him out now, there’s a good dog!’

  The wind took the cap over the hedge, the dog yapped and pranced after it, but in no serious pursuit, and the piebald pony, that Turner was leading beside the shaggy rough-haired one he rode, kicked up his heels and tried to follow the dog. Turner managed to drag him round the bend in the road and then pulled up short. There was a fine to-do going on there; he had thought he had heard the shouts and clatter against the wind, and here was the cause of them, a litter lying on its side in the ditch with one wheel off, horses stamping and champing, men scolding and shouting orders, more and more men he saw as he rounded the bend, and he’d no mind to ride into their midst. Men asked too many questions these days, they could not let a man alone to go about his business. A narrow lane branched off to the side of the road, be decided to pursue it and his cap together; a sharp shower in the Gab of May was no time in which to leave one’s nearly bald head uncovered.

  So he turned down the lane instead, and hadn’t ridden many yards when he checked again at sight of another cluster of people, but this time they were all women, their hoods fluttering like banners, their petticoats blowing and billowing like sails, their voices squawking and chattering like a flock of starlings, and then a voice he’d know in a thousand ringing through their toneless clatter – ‘Away with you, all of you! I’m sick of the sight and sound of you! Be off to your shelter if you’ve really found one, your shed, hovel, pigsty or what not, and leave me alone. Alone, I say,’ as there shrilled another uprush of exclamation, expostulation, ‘I’ll not have one of you stay with me, shoo! shoo!! shoa-oo!!!’

  She had scared them off at last, there they were all sweeping off towards the little barn farther down the lane.

  ‘Gee up, my beauties,’ said William Turner to his ill-assorted pair of steeds, ‘far may ye travel and farther may ye go, but it’s not every day you’ll come on a Princess crying under a hedge.’

  For she was crying now that she was alone, and doubtless that was why she had wanted to be; the tears ran down her pale, rain-spattered face, and her hair, which had fallen down to its full length, was blown across it in long twisting strands darkened by wet to a purplish copper, like the shining dark red of the willow branches that had not yet burst their buds this late cold spring. Her dress was splashed with mud and had a great rent in the front of the skirt, her head-dress lay crumpled on the ground beside her. The hollow of the hedge where she sat could have given her more shelter, but she did not crouch back under the hawthorn branches that were scattering snow showers of blown blossom over her; she sat leaning forward and, behind and above her wet dishevelled head, an army of grey clouds swept towering and swirling up over the ice-blue sky.

  With an angry gesture she swept her green sleeve across her face, wiping away her tears and the teasing hair in the same movement, then looked up startled from its clammy folds at the slow squelching sound of approaching hoofs. She saw two ponies and an old man bunched up on one of them, huddling his bare head and rusty black shoulders against the rain. A smile fought its way through the tears.

  ‘There must,’ she said, ‘be a special Providence watching over me, for you are the one man in the world that I could bear to see me now.’

  ‘My Lady Elizabeth’s Grace,’ he said, ‘is the Herb of Grace, not to be crushed by a storm of cold rain. And the wind’s blowing it away while we speak of it.’

  It was true, the sleeting rain was stopping even as he bundled himself out of the saddle and slithered to the ground beside her, and the cloud that brought it sped away on the crying wind over the endless sky.

  He stood there in front of her, clumsily trying to disentangle the reins of the two ponies that were passively humping their wet backs against the wind, and lucky for him they were so passive, thoug
ht Elizabeth, her smile growing wider and brighter as she looked up at the queer face of her old friend, discoloured and gnarled like the bole of a tree, its peering eyes almost hidden behind the rain-blurred spectacles – what a blind wet old mole he looked fumbling with the reins – ‘Here, give them to me, butterfingers!’ she commanded, suddenly springing up beside him and pulling them out of his hands, ‘and put on your cap – was it your prophetic sense bared your head before I’d even seen you?’

  ‘No, Lady, it was the wind, which has also bared yours, no doubt. Princess or professor, it’s all one in this weather. What happened to the litter?’

  ‘Overturned with a loose wheel spinning off it. The Queen – she didn’t kill me, I don’t know why – but she gave me the oldest and shabbiest litter that could be found, so as to disgrace my progress. So deeply disgraced that I may not even take shelter from this storm in a gentleman’s house on the road. He came out to offer it, but the curmudgeon Bedingfeld refused, lest I plot treason with him, so I had to shelter in a ditch to do up my hair.’

  ‘You have not done it,’ said Dr. Turner, plucking away a long strand that had blown across his face.

  Her laugh answered his growling chuckle, but hers was shrill as a bird’s cry, a young laugh, a schoolgirl’s laugh, as it should he for one who was only sweet and twenty, and so he told her, but she mocked him for it, there was no sweet in her twenty years, she said. ‘There is more for you in your fifty, sixty, how many years of life? For you have your two little horses and you are going to leave this sad frightened country, with yourself on one of them, and I only wish I were on the back of the other. Where are you going to, my learned old friend?’

  ‘I have no notion,’ he replied happily.

  ‘And no money either?’

  ‘Enough to leave home.’

  ‘But no home to go to!’

  ‘God keeps open household in all places, and provides for old bustards as well as for young eagles,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘And wherever I go there will be flowers, fishes, birds and stones to be observed. As one grows old one has time only for the things one cares for. There is still a little time for me, and many flowers still unknown, many too that do not yet grow here, but shall when I return.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘When your sad sister lies dead, Lady, and you sit young and golden on the throne.’

  ‘A pretty prophecy! Did you never hear I’d been in the Tower since Palm Sunday?’

  ‘When the lying priests say “Bless these palms” to their congregations who are all carrying branches of sallow willow!’ he answered in hot indignation. ‘It is a lie to call a sallow a Palm.’

  ‘You old purist! I see why you became a gospeller!’

  ‘And a herberist, for the truth is as necessary in the one as the other. But yes, I knew Your Grace had gone under Traitors’ Bridge and come out again alive, which none is apt to do. What better augury that you can keep your head? Yes, and a steady hand, as it is now among this tangle of wet leather. Never cloud the sunshine of your eyes with weeping – make a verse of your sorrow instead.’

  ‘I made one lately.’ She wanted to tell him the verse she had made on the spur of the moment (and a very sharp spur!) when her questioners in the Tower had tried to catch her out in heresy by commanding her to state her belief in the miracle of the Last Supper.

  But it had gone clean out of her mind. She could only remember the desperate little rhyme that had chattered on and on in her head like a rat running round in its cage all these past weeks in the Tower, as she fought again and again for her life against her tormentors.

  ‘“Much suspected of me,

  Nothing proved can be,”

  Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.’

  ‘Humph, you’ve made better, and will again.’

  ‘No, it has all dried up inside me. I have fought too long a fight.’

  ‘And you have won that fight. It is not your sister you’ll have to cross swords with now, for she will no longer be herself, she will see all things only through her husband. He will be an adversary far more worthy of your steel. It is a young man, the most powerful Prince in the world – who is now preparing to advance against you.’

  It was an odd way to encourage her with further and worse fears, but he knew his Princess. And in spite of herself she flushed with pleasure. It would be much more exhilarating to fight a young man than an old maid! She swung up the reins which she had finally disentangled, and tied them over a stout hawthorn branch that was sticking out from the hedge. The two ponies began placidly to tear up mouthfuls of the coarse grass in front of them. She leaned against the piebald, resting her elbows on his load, a heaped bundle of a few clothes wrapped round piles of books and tied precariously with rough straw rope. She propped her chin in her hands, and her face grew grave again as she stared over the scrawny windswept fields and the dark fringe of forest that overhung them.

  ‘Philip of Spain will be King of England,’ she said, ‘and half the country are his already, for a country is no longer the land that it holds, but the opinions of the men within it. Many of those in England owe allegiance to foreign powers, to the Papacy and Spain. Less than a fortnight ago Mary brought back the laws against heresy. Her new Parliament passed them without a murmur. Have you heard?’

  He chuckled. ‘I have indeed. That is why I have become a Newcastle grindstone yet again, that travels all the world over, since no ship’s carpenter would sail without one. And so I, a Newcastle man, will heal myself of the stone by Rhenish wine where it is cheap at Bonn, for that is the best cure.’

  ‘What, will you give thanks to my sister for turning you out of the country?’

  ‘As I gave to your father for doing it the first time; else I would never have found new plants in Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Italy. Nay, I would never have taken my degree as Doctor of Medicine at Ferrara, nor’, his eyes goggled at the dreadful thought, ‘studied botany from Luca Ghini under the leaning towers of Bologna.’

  ‘And what of your crying childer who kept you from your book – have you strangled the lot?’

  ‘Dean Badman has now won back his own name, Goodman,’ he replied blandly, ‘for he has taken charge of them. He has compounded with the Queen’s laws, he will run no risk of charges of heresy and as a Popish priest he dare not marry. But he is fond of children and will salve his conscience by caring for mine. It is well that man is both good and bad, for if he had been all good he would not have compounded and would be fleeing the country like myself.’

  ‘Are you “all good”, all you flocks of black-robed crows now flying abroad? Eight hundred of you already have flapped away, I hear, and Messrs. Knox, Foxe, and Cox squawking their loudest at their head. Mr Knox is safe across the Scottish Border, writing furious pamphlets to all his luckless brethren here, inciting them to rebel against the Queen and so inciting her to revenge against them, while he sits snug in his Edinburgh house. An easy way to be a revolutionary!’ She spat.

  ‘But what faith do you hold yourself, Princess?’ he asked, and for the first time there was anxiety in his voice.

  The thin face framed in the long hands turned its intent gaze from the countryside towards him. It looked like that of a wild young nymph with the wisps of red hair blowing loose across it, and the eyes reflecting the stormy sky with flecks of blue light. Yes, one could see her as a pagan nymph, never as a Christian saint or martyr. She belonged to the Renascence of beauty and splendid life that he had seen in Italy, and she would bring that to England if she could and make the country a glittering palace for the arts. But what of the Reformation? ‘What of your faith?’ he cried.

  She answered slowly, ‘Little doctor, do you seek a window to peer into my soul? That is what I will never do to the meanest of my people. But I will say this – that there is only one faith, one Jesus Christ, and all the rest is dispute about trifles.’

  ‘God’s true worship—’ he began, but she cut across his words as quickly as the crack of a whip.
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br />   ‘Every man jack of you now thinks he is God’s spokesman. Let’s not talk of God when men are wrangling about Him in every alehouse, in every pulpit, some of ’em struggling into it two or three at a time, each bawling a different sermon against the other. The world has grown grey with dispute, there’s a bitter east wind blowing over it, the breath of millions who teach the love of God as shown by hatred of their fellow-man.’

  ‘No,’ said he, ‘let us not talk of God. Let us look at Him instead.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked. ‘There?’ she asked turning, laughing, to look into his face.

  But he answered seriously, ‘Yes, you will get a glimpse of Him in this shambling body He has created though not perfected. But look at his perfect creation, the heavenly harmony that binds the life of earth in unity and knits it together into the round globe, so that, though the several parts of nature war against each other, yet they are one whole. Look at this stone, this lump of clay, these bluebells and primroses that spatter the blue sky and shining stars upon the mud for a few fleeting hours, but leave their thousands of seeds to spring towards eternity. Here is life made perfect – here in this fleur delice.’

  He pulled up the long stem of a wild yellow iris growing in the ditch beside them and handed it to her, touching its nine petals one by one as reverently as a priest handling the pyx upon the altar.

  ‘Here is God made manifest, the Three in One and One in Three, three times over, the flower of the Trinity in Unity, all the delicate veins tracing the same completed pattern of His purpose. What this is, we too could be, if we followed the law of our true nature. But we lost the way to that when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.’

  ‘And argued about it ever since!’

  ‘Because we struggled to know more. When we know all, we shall need to struggle no more than the flowers, who do not know nor need to know. We shall have reached the harmony that is perfection. And if even one of God’s works has reached perfection like this bright flower, then why not all, in God’s good time? But His time is not ours. We can only see an hour or two ahead, where He looks through eternity.’