Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘But think of this hour ahead! Think of Philip’s triumphal procession so slowly but surely approaching us. Some of his nobles are even selling their lands and houses in order to take up rich new estates in this country – as much the conquerors as if they had come with fire and sword to lay waste the land. England will be a Spanish province and fight Spain’s wars for her, give her the wealth of her trade. And worse, for in the past conquerors might enslave men’s bodies – but now their very souls are to be in subjection. Men must think as they are told, or face ruin and death.’

  The dog pranced up to them in fantastic gyrations as though wagging five tails instead of running on four legs; coyly, ingratiatingly he wriggled up to his master and deposited a muddy object at his feet, then barked loudly in demand of thanks.

  ‘Is that a bishop’s cap?’ asked Elizabeth.

  He gave her an astonished glance from the corner of his globular spectacled eyes. ‘You remember I’d trained him to fly at a bishop’s cap! That will make you a true Queen. Men will put their souls in subjection to you of their own free will, a greater triumph than Philip’s procession here. He’ll get as much profit from it as men shear wool from hogs! But the country will follow you like St Anthony’s pig, yes the true country, not just the London lickpennies and the sweet-lipped courtiers. Do not fear for the country.’

  She was pulling a draggled wet curl between her teeth and answered despondently, ‘There is no order anywhere in the world. The new dogmas have undermined it. Everywhere a hideous discord instead of harmony. This must be our darkest hour since the fall of the Roman Empire.’

  ‘And now we may be seeing the fall of the Roman Church.’

  ‘With the same result. Once again the civilised world is torn in pieces. Christendom is split, country against country, and, worse, a country is split against itself, and fellow-countrymen hate each other as much as they hate the Papacy and the Papacy them. God knows what can ever knit the world together again. It needs to live and let live. But it chooses death – for the sake of Opinion, that bloody Moloch, that self-conceited idol that seeks to make all the world think the same, and so tears it asunder into chaos.’

  He was silent, frowning abstractedly, and when he began to speak she thought at first that he had not heard what she had said. ‘When I was a small boy there was an old man used to come and sit in my father’s tanning shed who’d tell me what he’d heard as a child of the Black Death. Whole villages were wiped out in a few days, and the few that were left in others ran mad and would do nothing but dance through the land, dancing to forget and escape from death, or rather, I say, from life, and all that they might still have done with it, even if only a few hours were left to them, still they were there to be used and thank God for. For only one thing lies ahead for all of us, and that is Death, and what does it matter if it come from what cause, or now or later, or to a whole town together or one by one? So use life while it is here and unfold your petals to the sun, without thinking how they will fall to the ground, for when they do you will have the seed of eternity in you.’

  ‘And what am I to do, pray, till then?’ she demanded bitterly.

  ‘Pray till then. Pray as in your father’s primer that “we may labour and travail for our necessities in this life, like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, without care”.’

  ‘Oh no, you do not know for what I would pray!’ and she tossed back her head and flung out her hands in a savage gesture of impatience. The birds were shouting with joy that the rain had stopped and the sun come out; a cuckoo hooted derisively from the wood; a milkmaid, crossing the fields behind the hedge, with her pails dangling from the yoke on her shoulder, was singing a country song at the top of her voice,

  ‘For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.’

  ‘I wish I were that milkmaid going to meet her Hodge. My sister shows me what I shall be like, if I do not have my youth in its true time.’

  Why had she not given herself to Robin that night in the Tower? she asked herself, beating her hands together. But a fierce and lonely pride told her, even in this moment of passionate regret, that he was not the mate equal to, no, greater than herself, who must compel her to the ultimate surrender of herself. Had she ever met him? No, and most probably never would.

  ‘But you will have your youth both in and out of its true time,’ the old man was saying to her, ‘so take it for the things you care for most.’

  ‘And what are they?’

  ‘Your lovers.’ And as she exclaimed, he added placidly, ‘All England will be your lovers.’

  A rustle of feminine voices rose in the air.

  ‘Here comes the gaggle of geese again!’ He unhitched the reins from the hawthorn branch, and she held his stirrup while he bundled himself into the saddle and told her by way of thanks, ‘Put hawthorn and may among the wild flowers in your palaces, Lady, and never heed the vulgar who say they are unlucky.’

  Her women flocked round her, exclaiming in inquisitive astonishment at sight of her companion, explaining and apologizing for their delayed return – a bull had come and stood directly in front of their barn and it was suicidal to try and pass it until a milkmaid had opportunely passed that way and shooed it off.

  Dr. Turner rode away, his hunched back dwindling down the narrow lane, the tails of his two little horses flicking their rumps, the one rusty and shaggy, the other a polished piebald. He was off on his travels again, ill, old, homeless and without money, but Elizabeth heard him singing as she went back with her women to the patched-up litter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The clouds blew away and the cold crisp sunshine flickered out over the newly green world. She was driving towards Windsor and passed the King’s College at Eton, its warm red brick glowing in the late afternoon light. Some boys coming out of school set up a yell and ran out through the gates towards her litter, shouting ‘The Princess!’ and a cluster of them playing marbles on the steps of a corner house sprang up cheering at first sight of the cortège.

  Word of her coming had evidently sped in front of her during the delay of the litter’s breakdown, for more and more boys were running up from the side streets, cheering and calling her name, ‘The Princess!’ ‘The Lady Elizabeth! Floreat Elizabeta!’ These must be the Oppidans, who lodged with the Fellows or the townsfolk, in accordance with the growing fashion among the gentry of sending their sons to share the free education of the scholars in College, but with fat allowances for their board and lodging.

  She leaned forward, looking with interest at this new type of schoolboy and cried her thanks in Latin for their greeting, hoping, she said, laughing, that they always spoke Latin at their play in accordance with the rule.

  ‘Only when there’s a lupus among us!’ called out one of the Scholars, a thin hungry-looking lad who had outgrown his shabby clothes. A dandified Oppidian, his yellow doublet slashed to show an embroidered shirt, told her, ‘Lupus, a wolf, means a sneak, Princess. Beware of wolves!’

  A grubby cherub chimed in, ‘There’s a pack of ’em round you now!’ and shot his hand out from his ragged sleeve in a very vulgar gesture at Bedingfeld’s back.

  Sir Henry gave a sharp command to the troop to hasten their pace, and the horses trotted on, leaving the boys running after them. The litter jogged and jolted over the bridge and the glittering river to where Windsor Castle towered above the town. But here it was out of the frying-pan into the fire for Sir Henry, for all the people in the town were prepared for her coming. They had hung gay cloths and rugs out of the windows as for a royal progress, they had come out into the streets to greet her, the crowds thronging thicker and faster every minute round her litter, their cheers swelling louder and louder in the increasing volume of a mighty welcome. Men were shouting in a deep-throated roar – ‘God save Your Grace!’ ‘God bless our Princess!’ ‘Long live our Lady Elizabeth!’

  A blue-aproned butcher with a thrust of his enormous bare arm flung a bunch of daffodils into the litter with a shout of ‘God bless y
our pretty face!’ and a grinning chimney-sweep, his white teeth splitting his black cheeks, roared ‘Cheer up, sweetheart, you’ll soon be out of prison!’ A farm labourer returning to his supper, with his wooden spoon sticking up in his hat all ready for it, waved both hat and spoon so furiously that they flew out of his hand and landed in her lap.

  Women fought their way through the men, their white napkins flapping about their heads like a flock of pigeons. They were laughing and crying with joy, throwing more and more flowers into the litter and little loaves and cakes and sweet biscuits until she was almost smothered, interspersing their respectfully loyal cries of ‘God save our Princess – our Lady Elizabeth!’ with such homely adjurations as – ‘Eat that, my pretty!’ ‘Don’t let ’em starve you in prison!’ ‘You’ll soon be out!’

  The soldiers guarding her tried to push them back, but not very roughly, they only grinned as their commander yelled himself red in the face – ‘Traitors! Rebels! You are defying the Queen!’

  But the crowd shouted rudely back, booing and calling him ‘Old turkeycock!’ and ‘Traitor yourself, ill-treating the Princess!’ And then the church bells started ringing in vociferous peals of joy and welcome, a treasonable act indeed since it was an honour reserved for the reigning Sovereign alone. Sir Henry shouted to some of his men to go and arrest the bell-ringers and put them in the stocks, and a small body of them marched off, not too fast, thinning the ranks round the litter.

  Suddenly they were met by a fresh attack. The Eton boys had mustered their forces together and came charging in a young army across the bridge from the College. Their concerted roar of ‘Floreat Elizabeta!’ cut across the seething turmoil, they swarmed through the crowd and the gap in the ranks, they were all round her, stopping the litter and holding the frightened plunging horses. She was looking into a sea of schoolboy faces, flushed and many grimy, grinning from ear to ear as their Latin greeting warmed to more personal cries of ‘Our Lady Elizabeth!’ ‘You’ll be our Queen – our Queen Bess!’

  Bedingfeld, looking desperately worried, could not command his troop of horse to ride over a crowd of schoolboys, he shouted instead to know why the bells hadn’t stopped ringing.

  ‘Yah! Wolf!’ they yelled in answer, ‘Lupus the sneak!’ and a big lad called out, ‘You can’t stop the bells from ringing or the boys from singing,’ and in a moment they were all singing at the tops of their voices,

  ‘Sing up, heart, sing up, heart,

  Sing no more down,

  But joy in Elizabeth

  That will wear the crown.’

  It was the Coronation song they had sung for King Edward on high days and holidays, and since last summer for Queen Mary – sheer treason now to substitute Elizabeth’s name. She was in terror lest Bedingfeld should complain to the College authorities and get them all flogged; she cried to them to stop and let her pass, but those nearest her had joined hands and were dancing in rings round her. One sprang up on to the step of the litter and flung his hoop, which he had twisted round with sprays of periwinkle in an enormous wreath, over her shoulders.

  ‘Floreat Elizabeta!’ he shouted.

  ‘And you have made me flower,’ she laughed in answer and held it up to her chin. ‘Shall I ever wear a ruff as big as this?’ she called to them.

  A strapping lad, not to be outdone, thrust a grubby fist on to her lap and opened it to leave his best marbles rolling over her skirt.

  She threw to them some of the loaves and cakes that had been showered on her. ‘Do you get enough to eat?’ she called. ‘No!’ they shouted, and scrambled and fought for the cakes, scattering a little as she had hoped. The litter was able now to move on, though very slowly, but at that they all came swooping back and ran along beside it. ‘Come back!’ they shrilled. ‘Come and see us when you are Queen.’

  ‘And bring more loaves,’ she cried. ‘Floreat Etona!’

  They were leaping round her in a goblin multitude, and all the townsfolk waving and shouting with them in a tremendous rhythmic chant, ‘Our Lady Elizabeth! Our future Queen!’ The late sunlight slanted on to the soldiers’ helmets and halberds that tried to keep a steady course through the crowd, and behind them rose the huge thundercloud of Windsor Castle. Stone walls, armed guards still held her in thrall, but at this moment they counted to her for nothing. She sat amazed, almost stunned with elation, her bright unbelieving eyes gazing at all these loving people, her people.

  ‘This is the happiest moment of my life,’ she breathed to herself. Here was she a prisoner, an outcast, disgraced, yet in spite of it she rode crowned with triumph, and by the will of the people. She who had been utterly alone, a shivering solitary among the icy terrors of the Tower, was now ‘one of a crowd’, but more, she was the burning heart of the crowd.

  They felt for her with all the rugged chivalry of their nation, their affection for the dispossessed, the unfairly treated, for the younger son or daughter despised and turned out by the family, who became the hero and heroine of their fairy-tales. All these people who did their daily chores and found life a drab painful racket from cockcrow to the next night’s snores, all who ever felt injured, downtrodden, put upon, who complained ‘They never give me a chance,’ and wondered if life would ever open suddenly for them like a door into Heaven, and turn everything topsy-turvy so that they would be on top of the world and all who oppressed them would be down-trodden in their turn, all these could identify themselves with the flame-haired Princess now riding in her shabby old broken litter among her prison guards.

  And she knew herself at one with them, as she had not been even at that glorious entry into London when they had taken her for their own; as she would not be even in that day when she would have become a great Queen – and well she knew at this moment that that day would come. But it was now, when she was young and powerless and dispossessed, that she was winning her tenderest place in their hearts; now, when she was travelling only from one prison to another, that her journey was as royal a progress as any that she would ever enjoy.

  As she drove on, the cold wind brought the sound of bells from all over the countryside; everywhere the church bells were clashing and flashing in the golden air, winging among the startled birds, singing and ringing as they should only ring for King or Queen.

  They had rung before for Queen Jane.

  ‘Long live Queen Jane!

  Nine days to reign.’

  They had rung, and should be ringing now, for Queen Mary.

  ‘Long live Queen Mary!

  All things contrary.’

  Now they were ringing for herself, ‘Elizabeth, prisoner’; but the Queen to be.

  ‘Long live Queen Bess!

  England says “Yes”.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Philip of Spain had set sail with a hundred gilded ships fluttering with scarlet silk standards thirty yards long.

  Philip of Spain had landed in England and married the Queen.

  Philip had been unfailingly polite. The English had been very rude.

  The Lord Admiral Howard had compared the gorgeous Spanish ships to mussel-shells. Philip had said he would endeavour to build bigger ones.

  The Spaniards were impressed by the English display of gold and silver plate, a hundred huge pieces on a single sideboard, fountains rimmed with pure gold, a glittering clock half as high as a man. But they were disgusted with the coarse and excessive food and the natives’ habit of putting sugar in their wine; they were shocked that their gentlemen greeted strange ladies by kissing them on the mouth. The stout Earl of Derby nearly caused an uproar by thus saluting the stately Duchess of Alba, who bounced back off his stomach in furious indignation and told everybody later that he had only managed to touch her cheek.

  The visitors wrote home that ‘We Spaniards are miserable here’; that they were being robbed and insulted; that the English had not begun to be civilised like the rest of Europe but were ‘such barbarians that they do not understand what we say, nor we them’; that their palaces, though very large,
were overcrowded, and with ‘such a hurly-burly in all the kitchens as to make each a veritable hell’; that the gentlemen wore too many ornamental buttons and the ladies showed too much leg, in black stockings too; moreover, they were not at all beautiful. The Queen, though a saint, also dressed badly, not to say vulgarly, and committed the further solecism of showing that she was madly in love with her husband; nevertheless she took precedence over him – the greatest Prince on earth! – and this wretched little island, lost in the fogs and rains of the northern seas, refused to acknowledge the lord of half the world as their superior.

  To crown all, it never stopped raining, and they were always having to hide the splendour of their wedding garments under cloaks of red felt.

  But Philip, to the indignation of his followers, was as much determined to please as if he were wooing a country equal in importance to his own. He left off his favourite sober colours and wore Mary’s presents of purple velvet with silver fringe, and white brocade with gold bugles; he was lover-like in public to the wife whom he wrote of as ‘our well-beloved aunt’; he was affable to everybody; he practised smiling so frequently that he asked his friend Ruy Gomez to massage his jaws at night; he drank beer, which he detested.

  Through all this, Elizabeth stayed quiet at Woodstock, though not secure. She was guarded as closely as in the Tower, with sixty soldiers on guard by day and forty by night, and when she walked in the gardens half a dozen locks went click-clack after her, to remind her, she told Sir Henry Bedingfeld, of her invisible chains. For even now she could not resist teasing her jailor. She kept him in agonies of apprehension by demanding liberties he dared not permit without first applying to the Council for a form of leave.