Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  Robert’s other son, the boy he called his “base son” by Douglass Sheffield, was rarely mentioned, though I knew that he too gave my husband pleasure. His son by Douglass was raised by nurses and tutors, in a country house not far from his mother’s. When little Denbigh was born Robert’s base son was seven years old, growing like a weed and showing a fine intelligence. Robert took pride in his quickness, and though he did not see him often, he made his love and regard felt.

  Thankfully, Douglass made no further trouble for us. She married a second time—proving, by her marriage, that she had never really considered herself to be Robert’s wife—and did not go to court often, or so I heard from Cecelia and my father. She was a foolish woman, I thought, selfish and shallow. She cared little for anyone besides herself. To be sure, I was prejudiced against her and secretly envied her her share of Robert’s affection. And it had been affection, not love. Of this I felt sure—and would have, even if he had not sworn to me that he had never loved Douglass, only lusted after her youthful body.

  My own body had grown fuller, more voluptuous, after little Denbigh’s birth. I ate my fill, I napped, I took less exercise, and inevitably my gowns had to be let out. I never grew fat like Cecelia, of course, merely fuller and more rounded. I was pleasing to Robert, and that was all that mattered.

  When brother Frank came to see our boy I could not help but notice that he looked wistful, gazing down into the cradle. He had not brought a pony for our new son, as he had for Rob when he was born, but he did bring a chest made of beautifully carved silver. Inside were coins and gems.

  “Souvenirs from our latest voyage,” he said with a smile, referring to his remarkable journey with Captain Drake, a journey that had taken the small convoy of ships all around the globe. Something no Englishmen had ever done before—and I suppose no others either. “Put this away in a safe place for your son, for when he grows to manhood.”

  Robert and I both thanked Frank heartily, congratulating him on surviving his perilous voyage and telling him he was being entirely too generous—though I knew that Robert, who was always short of money and too much in debt, would undoubtedly take a loan from the baby’s chest as soon as he decently could. He would mean to pay it back of course—he was no thief, and did not covet what did not belong to him—but he was improvident. His good intentions would probably not be fulfilled.

  “Never mind,” Frank said, brushing aside our thanks. “It is only money and money only buys things. Not love. What you two have together is worth more than all the treasure in the world. And now you have your son, to make your love complete.”

  Robert put his arm around me as Frank spoke, and I felt anew the glow of love, and a motherly pride. I thought, no woman was ever happier than I am right now, this moment.

  But at the same time I felt sorry for Frank. I knew that he was thinking of his own lost beloved. His Marianna. After he had been with us a day or two he spoke to me about her, of how he wished he had married her when he had the chance.

  “And your wealthy wife, what of her?” I asked.

  Frank shook his head. “She died several years ago, while I was at sea. And yes, since I know you must be wondering—she left me her fortune. Not that I need it. I have a fortune of my own. We brought back a great many chests of Spanish coins when we finally sailed into Plymouth harbor at the end of our long voyage.”

  Robert ordered little Denbigh dressed in his tiny suit of armor for Frank to see. The baby crowed, and Frank laughed with pleasure.

  “He is a proper lordling!” Frank declared. Then he looked more closely at the child, an expression of concern replacing his pleasure. “What of his leg?” he asked. “Has your physician examined it? What does he say?”

  Robert and I both began to speak at once, but I stopped, letting Robert answer. Our little boy’s short leg troubled us very much, as did his seeming inability to focus on us. He seemed to stare off into nothing, and did not reach for us, or for bright objects the way other babies did. The way all my other children had.

  “We are concerned about his leg,” Robert said. “We have had Dr. Julio and several physicians from London come to examine him. They say the shorter leg will grow to match the longer one—in time. They can find no reason why it hasn’t.”

  “We want to take him to court, to let the queen’s physicians look at him,” I added. “But she is angry with Robert and won’t allow it. And as for me, she refuses to let me come anywhere near any of her palaces. She hates me and calls me the She-Wolf.”

  “Everyone says she is a strange woman,” Frank murmured. “They say she treats her most loyal servants worst of all.”

  I reached down into little Denbigh’s cradle and put my finger into his small white palm. He grasped it firmly.

  “Remember how our father used to say that kings and queens do not act like other people?” I said, looking over at Frank. We exchanged a smile.

  “I hope your boy will soon be running and playing as lustily as any other,” Frank said. “No doubt his leg will lengthen. He will outgrow his armor before you know it. Then he can join this Bond of Association I have been hearing so much about since our return.”

  At Frank’s mention of the Bond of Association a tremor passed through me. Recently Robert had, with other noblemen, formed an organization which he insisted was necessary to protect the queen. Members of the bond were sworn to kill anyone who succeeded in assassinating Elizabeth—or anyone on whose behalf the attempt to assassinate her was made. Intended to prevent violence, in fact it seemed to me that this association might well promote it, by inciting blood feuds and an enduring chain of bloody reprisals. I hoped I was wrong. When I confessed my fears to Robert he merely looked somber and told me that the times called for extreme measures.

  “Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind,” he said at his most earnest, “there is already a war across Christendom. The Spanish King Philip views all Protestants as enemies of God. He is sworn to destroy them—to destroy us—one by one. He has already begun this horrible extermination in Holland and Zeeland and the other Protestant provinces of the Low Countries. Thousands of innocent people are being rounded up and tortured, shut up in dungeons and starved, put on the rack and stretched until their bones break.”

  “Just like the wretched Anabaptists in Frankfurt,” I said. “When I was a girl. They were bound hand and foot and thrown into the river to drown—and not by the Spanish, but by other Protestants. Calvinists like my father.”

  I couldn’t help remembering the horrors I had witnessed in Frankfurt, or the hideous burning of my tutor Jocelyn, a victim of the Catholic Queen Mary. Undoubtedly the most ghastly thing I had ever witnessed. I had seen at first hand what savagery was unleashed when rulers and churchmen decided that other men—and not only men, but women and innocent children too—were following Satan instead of the true God. All sense of our common humanity, I knew, was laid aside when such brutality was loosed. And now Robert was telling me that King Philip was expanding his cruel crusade to destroy all Protestants.

  “Our Bond of Association is only the beginning,” Robert was saying. “There will have to be much larger and stronger bonds, and armies, indeed we must mount a crusade of our own, to defend and protect what is ours.”

  Strong words, and fearsome ones. I thought of them often in the coming days, as I sat by our little son’s cradle, my finger gripped by his tiny hand.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “It is the end of the world,” Mistress Clinkerte announced as she busied herself with my little son’s newly washed laundry, folding his small blankets and stockings and caps and putting them in the great wardrobe that stood in his nursery. His nurse and rocker Margaret looked on, evidently feeling put out that her usual duties were being carried out by someone else.

  “The end is coming. It will be here soon.” She was chewing her herbs as usual as she spoke, and the scent of them filled the room. Little Denbigh, who had been fussing unhappily in his cradle, had fallen silent and was dropping off
to sleep. I sat beside his cradle, watching him, alert to his small movements, his occasional rapid intake of breath.

  “Everyone believes it,” Mistress Clinkerte went on, looking askance at me when I failed to respond to her announcement. “Surely you have heard of it here in Wanstead.”

  “I have,” I said, keeping my tone noncommittal. I had never been one to put much faith in prophecies. I had noticed, in the course of my lifetime, that they rarely came to pass.

  “They say a great empire will fall. That thrones will topple. One throne in particular.” She sniffed.

  “Thank you, Margaret,” I said, addressing the rocker. “Will you leave us please?”

  It seemed to me that the implication of Mistress Clinkerte’s words was clear, and I did not want the servant to hear disloyal things said about the queen.

  Elizabeth had thawed slightly in her attitude toward Robert and even, as I thought, toward me. Robert was just then away, as he so often was, on court business. But before he left court, bound on his diplomatic mission, he got permission from the queen to send Mistress Clinkerte to me, knowing that she would be a comfort and a help as I struggled with my sorrow and frustration over our little Denbigh and his physical troubles. I took this to be a gesture of sympathy on her part, for Robert had told the queen candidly of our son’s stunted growth and his inability to walk or talk. He was just then entering his second year of life and it was clear he was suffering from some mysterious affliction, some curse whose precise nature no physician could seem to discover.

  Cecelia said flatly that I had been too old when I bore him, others that Robert had been too old and ill to sire a healthy son. My father muttered darkly about sin and the wages of sin—but then, he said this about nearly every event he heard of; his view of life was becoming more and more negative as he aged. I wondered what he thought of all this talk of fate and disaster about to fall upon the world.

  “Great harms are sure to arrive in the Year of Doom,” Mistress Clinkerte was saying. “The year fifteen hundred and eighty-eight after the birth of Our Lord.”

  “Hasn’t a great empire already fallen?” I said, more to make idle talk than to argue with Mistress Clinkerte. “That of the Indians in the New World?”

  “Pish! That was nothing . . . a few painted savages dancing around a campfire. No! It will be England that falls—or perhaps the entire world.”

  She went on with what she was doing for a time. I gazed down at my son, who had fallen fast asleep. I pulled his small blanket higher and tucked it in around him. How much he looked like Robert! The same reddish hair (though Robert’s was growing grey), the same bow-shaped mouth, long lashes . . .

  “The queen certainly believes it,” Mistress Clinkerte resumed after a time. “She claims she doesn’t, but I see how nervous she is, how worried. She has a great book of prognostications and reads it nearly every day. Sometimes she even reads it aloud, softly, under her breath.

  “Famine and drought will come,” I have heard her read. “But all the gold will be burned. Plagues will come. All mankind will come to an end.”

  “Dark sayings indeed. But I imagine every generation has heard such things—and we are still here.”

  “This time the stars align against us. I have heard Whaffer say it, and he’s no fool. He told me that when he was a boy he heard about the Year of Doom. He hopes he’ll be dead before it comes.”

  “Good old Whaffer! I hope he lives forever!” I could not help but say.

  Mistress Clinkerte threw up her hands. “The day will come, when you will have to believe that all I say is true. Mark my words, it is the end of the world!”

  I did not put any faith in the alarmist warnings of Mistress Clinkerte, who was growing old and—surely!—even more credulous. I did not want to allow myself to be swept up in the rising fear of doom that I heard so many people give voice to. After all, I had more than enough to worry about with my dear little son failing to thrive, and my daughter Penelope more than old enough to be married, and proving to be far more willful and dangerously independent than I was at her age, and my daughter Dorothy, a good and mild-natured girl, showing far too great a partiality for a common seaman. I needed to find them good highborn husbands, or to find a remedy for my boy’s ills. I did not want far darker worries about the end of the world to invade my thoughts.

  Yet when Robert, weary from the tasks the queen continued to heap upon him, echoed the doom-laden message I had been hearing from Mistress Clinkerte, I had to take it more seriously.

  “It’s true, Lettie,” he said in his tired voice as he gulped some cold roast pheasant and venison pasties and drank deeply from a tankard of beer. He had ridden all night in order to have an entire day to spend with me; the queen could barely spare him even for an hour, he said, but he had stolen a day and a night to be with me at Wanstead. Arriving at dawn, exhausted and ravenous, he had been glad for the food I had waiting for him.

  “I wish I could say otherwise, but the prophecies are too numerous and too believable to be ignored,” he went on. “Remember the predictions about the coming of the Mouldwarp, the monster-king who would kill and maim and cast down the church? No—you wouldn’t remember, you are too young. But it came to pass, that was King Henry. That demon Mouldwarp.”

  He paused to eat and drink, then went on. “And the prophecy about how the earth would shake and a tall monument would be brought low? Sure enough, the steeple of St. Paul’s burned to the ground, and there was a great quaking of the earth—and all in the year it was supposed to happen.”

  “I remember that.” It had been shortly after we returned from Frankfurt I think. Or near that time. London had been full of rumors. And sure enough, we had our earthquake and then the church tower burned—and a lot of the houses nearby burned with it.

  Robert finished his meal and a servant took his plate away.

  “I’m afraid we must prepare to face disaster, in whatever form it may come, in the year fifteen-eighty-eight. The Year of Doom, they call it. Wars, famine, drought, ‘a tumult in the earth,’ one prediction says. ‘An empire will fall.’ ”

  Suddenly his face brightened. The weariness that had been so apparent in his tired eyes and slack mouth disappeared, and a hint of the playfulness I so enjoyed in him came to the surface.

  “Well then!” he said, “if an empire must fall, then it must! But let it be the greatest empire of all! The empire of Spain!”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  To say that Robert and I were happy would be to understate the truth by a long English mile. What mattered to us both was that we were together. That we took great joy in one another, year after year. Our love did not fade, our devotion grew. Only those who have known such happiness can understand my words. And can understand how inadequate words are in trying to convey the great and enduring force of love.

  But the queen, ever the enemy of our love, did her best to separate us, calling Robert to court for months at a time to play his vital role on her council, and at other times also for the most trivial of issues. She summoned him to sit for the portrait painter, saying she wanted a portrait of herself with him in the background. She required his presence at the weddings of minor officials and the christenings of their children. She sent him with his soldiers from town to town across much of southern England, raising trained bands and securing fortifications and reporting back to the council on the state of the realm’s defenses. Anything to take him from me, to weaken his strong ties to me and to our son.

  “She needs me,” Robert would say curtly when a messenger arrived at Wanstead from the court, bringing a hastily scrawled note from Elizabeth. “She is fearful. She requires my presence.”

  And he would go, every time. I knew it would be folly to complain, or to point out the queen’s true motive in demanding so much of his time. He served her. He was loyal to her. And, in a way that caused me a certain amount of jealousy, he loved her.

  They had been lovers, this I knew. But they were lovers no longer. I trusted that Rob
ert was faithful to me, and I did not question that trust. He served her, but his heart was mine. His heart was mine, during the long separations, the nights of missing him and often dreaming of him. The days when I needed him and he was not there to help me.

  I needed him more and more as little Denbigh grew weaker, and I grew more and more certain that he would never walk or talk or grow to be like other boys. For his third birthday Robert ordered another small suit of armor made for him, and had his portrait painted wearing it. Frank sent him a small chair to sit in, beautifully carved and upholstered in red velvet. But I knew by then that he would never sit in it, for he could not sit at all and simply lay in his small bed, all but unmoving, from early morning to late at night.

  I sat beside him, keeping watch, saying my prayers, reading a little from my book of psalms and nibbling at the food Mistress Clinkerte brought me.

  It was Mistress Clinkerte who finally came to me one morning and, after looking down at the still body of my son, his small chest barely rising and falling with each breath, said gently that she thought Robert might be sent for.

  She was right, of course. And the tone of her voice was gentle—which was unusual, as she was normally brusque and firm. Her very gentleness told me just how gravely ill little Denbigh was. Yet my anger flared at her words, and I resisted at first. I resisted admitting the worst, and I resisted telling my dear Robert what I feared.

  In the end I knew what I had to do. I had to tell him myself that he was needed. I called for my maidservant to bring my riding cloak and boots and, with two grooms as escort, mounted my fastest horse and rode, with all speed, to Nonsuch Palace, where Robert was in attendance on the queen.