The murder of the French king by a crazed Catholic, and the newly proposed alliance through marriage of Bourbon
France and Hapsburg Spain continued to dominate concerns in Whitehall. For once, the king and prince were in agreement. For different reasons, they both saw the possible alliance of the two greatest Catholic powers of western Europe as a threat.
Though Henri IV had been a convert to Catholicism, he had nevertheless given French Protestants ‘liberty of conscience and impartial justice'. Henry and his band of knights now talked of retaliatory war with the Catholic powers.
Our father, the Peacemaker King, took Marie de Medici’s refusal to have me as a daughter-in-law as both a personal and a political insult. I could not have been the only person in Whitehall to suspect that a part of his fury was terror that a regicide had succeeded. A crazed French Papist had succeeded where the English Gunpowder Plotters had failed. All recusant Catholics in England were stripped of their arms and forbidden to come within ten miles of the court. I amended my list:
The Dauphin of France, now Louis XIII of France. Catholic
Edward Seymour. Protestant
William Seymour…
I asked Henry what he knew of these two brothers, now being discussed as serious candidates by the Privy Council after the withdrawal of the French marriage.
‘Our Seymour cousins are too ambitious for the king’s liking,’ he told me. ‘And too close to the throne in their own right. Our father will never let any of them get a grip on real power by marrying you.’
I was third in line to the English throne. The Seymours were descended from Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, the line named in Henry’s will as his heirs. Their claim had been set aside. My father’s line were descended from the monarch’sother sister, Margaret. I could see how some people might argue that we were usurpers.
‘I hear that the Howard women are ambitious too,’ I said wickedly.
‘I don’t know where you hear such things,’ said my brother coldly.
So far as Tallie and I could learn, France had never, in fact, made me a firm offer of marriage. Nor, for that matter, had any of my other suitors. My portrait was painted, copied, sent abroad. Portraits of my possible husbands were sent back in return. From the documents that Tallie managed to read, copy or steal, I learned only that negotiations ebbed and flowed at a stately pace and resolved nothing. Then I sat for yet another requested portrait.
On the 5th of June, Henry was invested as Prince of Wales. The poets and other chroniclers suffered feverish transports over my brother’s noble bearing, the feasts, the tilts, the fireworks. And I was invited at last to perform in one of my mother’s masques. Tethys’s Festival, with the queen herself as Tethys, Queen of the Ocean. I was to play the River Thames.
At last, I thought, I will be able to show that I can do more than stand to be gawped at by marriage-brokers. I would show my mother that I could sing, and dance any figure asked of me.
Throughout most of the masque, I reclined silent and unmoving on a shell. My cousin Arbella appeared, likewise shelled, as the Derbyshire Trent.
When I did speak, to pay homage as a tributary river to an Ocean Queen, she looked through me. Then I had to keep a smile on my face while Baby Charles played a much larger role, which included giving the new Prince of Wales a sword set with diamonds.
That should have been my part, I thought, behind my painful, fixed grin.
Then my younger brother stirred the court to cries of acclaim and delight when he danced prettily with a flock of noble girl-children.
I tried to rejoice for Henry, who played his part with all his accustomed grace and dignity. He triumphed in the tilts like a true warrior prince. He was cheered in the streets. Men threw their hats in the air as he passed on horseback. Women threw him flowers and kisses. He smiled and was kind to those who struggled out of the crowds to touch him. He danced with all the ladies, but most of all with Frances Howard.
I told myself that I must try to be more like him, to rise above my own petty concerns. Watching him smile and shine, you would never have guessed that only a month before, an assassin had broken out of a crowd to kill the king of France, for whom my brother still grieved. You would never have guessed his rage at our father, which he later confided to me in private. The king had cut the prince’s budget for the celebrations, blaming the failure of parliament to agree relief from the royal debts.
‘And his majesty’s reasons for scanting me?’ Henry was angrier than I had ever seen him. ‘I am mounted too high in the people’s love! And for that sin must be punished.’
I scolded myself. I knew I was ignoble. But this private confidence from my brother was my favourite part of the celebrations.
Then, suddenly, Henry cut himself off from me. Something happened to him shortly after his installation as Prince of Wales and I could not learn what it was. He became withdrawn and moody. He slipped away from questions. He no longer laughed at my attempts to amuse him. He even lost his temper unexpectedly when his friends teased him once, as they had always done.
‘What ails him?’ I begged Sir John Harington one night when he was escorting me back across the park after another glum evening at St James’s.
He looked down at me, undecided whether to speak or not.
‘Is is that Howard girl?’ I demanded.
‘Do you know about her, then?’
‘I know only that she’s dangerous. I fear that she’ll either break my brother’s heart or ruin his reputation.’
Sir John walked in thoughtful silence. ‘His highness keeps his own counsel,’ he said at last.
Except to me, I wanted to shout. Except to me. He talks to me. Always until now! I thought my heart would break. I wanted to kill Frances Howard for coming between us. I hated her for having those knowing eyes that suggested female weapons in her armoury that I could not even name.
Harington sighed. ‘She did come to St James’s several times, rode out with him twice, and went once with him on his barge to Greenwich. But she seems to have stopped coming.’
‘Thank God!’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself. ‘Do you know why? Did my brother send her away, or did she change her mind about him?’ Women did not reject an heir to the throne, but Frances Howard did not seem to heed any rules.
I stopped and seized his hand. ‘I beg you, Sir John. You’re almost kin. Don’t try to protect my innocence like your uncle. Or are you obeying my father’s orders to keep me ignorant?’
‘I would tell you if I knew,’ he said unhappily. ‘I swear it, your grace. All of us are as perturbed as you. But I don’t know.’
I did not dare ask Harington if he thought Frances Howard had taken Henry’s maidenhead as she had promised.
I felt grief like that which I imagined would follow a death. I visited my brother at St James’s several times but could notreach him. I might, even so, have abandoned all delicacy in my urgent need to make him respond to me, if a further piece of news had not warned me off.
One afternoon, during a picnic on the banks of the Thames, my ladies went into ecstasies of outrage. Frances Tyrrell had just learned from her cousin, who was one of his gentlemen, that Sir Robert Carr had fallen in love. With a married woman, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex.
Poor Henry, I thought. Now sure to be the subject of humiliating gossip, whether he cared for the woman or not.
Even I could recognise dangerously thin ice, cracking in so many different directions at once, with such cold dark currents rushing beneath it, that I dared not move at all.
I felt frozen likewise by the cold torpor that now infected the subject of my marriage. I was beginning to understand that putting royal urgency into action could take a very long time. Marriage negotiations were so protracted, with so many different prospects, and messages took so long to travel back and forth between countries, that I began to fear that I would share the fate of my royal cousin, Arbella Stuart.
Arbella was a plain, quiet, but sometimes erratic
woman, who had been at Whitehall for as long as I could remember. Floating in and out of my notice, she trailed after my mother as her waiting woman, carrying her train, or kept to herself in her house at Blackfriars. She was distant royal kin, raised to be queen by an over-ambitious grandmother in Derbyshire. But she never stood as part of the family when we were on show, and her status at court was unclear. She would swallow an insult from the queen without blinking, then take offence at a trifle, like a server giving her the wrong slice of a roast.
My first friendly overtures several years earlier had fallen back at my feet as if I were tossing roses against a pane of glass. Once, provoked by her blandness, I dared to ask her if it were true that she had almost married my father andcould therefore have been my mother. She had slammed the door of an empty pleasantry in my face, as I no doubt deserved.
Ever since I could remember, my ladies had whispered that my father kept her constantly on offer as a wife but refused to give her. I wondered if this were also to be a further torment for me that he had forgotten to mention in Coventry.
One night as Anne and I prepared for bed, Tallie told me what a clerk had told her of a letter written by the king to the widowed queen of France. It seemed that my father stubbornly refused to give up on marrying me to the former Dauphin, after all, in spite of the French rebuff.
I added the Melancholy Trout to my list again.
‘I almost want to marry and be done with it,’ I said dully. Even to the Melancholy Trout who might, at least, be manageable. To any husband so long as he was not Frederick Ulrich of Brunswick. ‘It’s like knowing that in the next day or two, you are sure to be beheaded. It would be better to end the fear.’
‘Don’t say such things!’ cried Anne, who imagined that she was in love with one of Henry’s gentlemen.
Tallie settled on her stool beside the bed and played the first bars of a Scottish folksong I had taught her.
‘Stop, stop,’ (sang Tallie) ‘My father is coming.
Oh Father, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?’
‘I’ve neither brought thy golden ball
Nor come to set thee free
But I have come to see thee hung
Upon this gallows-tree.’
‘How gloomy!’ said Anne. ‘You’ll give us evil dreams.’
At a nod from me, Tallie continued.
‘Stop, stop, I see my sweetheart coming!
Sweetheart, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?’
‘Aye, I have brought thy golden ball,
And come to set thee free.
I have not come to see thee hung
Upon the gallows-tree.’
‘Once, I believed in such tales,’ I said.
38
WHITEHALL, JUNE 1610
No copy of an old portrait was good enough. The king must have a new one for this suitor. Frederick, Elector Palatine, had confirmed the earlier rumour of his interest in marrying me. His envoy, the Duc de Bouillon, had recently arrived in London with a statement of firm intent. Perhaps. The marriage itself would depend on the negotiated terms.
No miniature portrait would do for Frederick. It seemed that the German state of the Palatine must have me life-size, standing, with the painted image of Richmond Palace behind me, flags flying from the turrets, wrapped in the distant gleam of the Thames. A whole kingdom implied in the image of a girl. The covering of so many square inches seemed to take a very long time.
Being almost exactly my height and shape, Tallie had stood for me for eight days, wearing my gem-encrusted blue satin gown and jewellery while each pearl, lace spider web and glittering, faceted proof of English wealth was recorded. Then the jewellery was removed from her. She was taken out of my clothes and I put them on, still warm from her body.
I stood in the light from a window in the Great Presence Chamber, watched by ten pairs of male eyes. Once again, I was goods for sale, wrapped up in jewels, rich silken stuffs, military alliances and favourable trade terms with England.
My father watched me. With him were the Duc de Bouillon, the marriage-broker for the Palatine who had brought the news of the German prince’s intentions, and Cecil. Among the rest were Sir Francis Bacon, now Solicitor-General, and Sir Robert Carr, who was still my father’s chief favourite as he had been for the last three years.
I sniffed the smells of resin and oil, and thought about what I was wearing and whether it had meant something different when Tallie wore it. You didn’t have to be a fool to read the message in this display of riches. But what would anyone looking at the picture learn about me?
One of the wires supporting my hair dug into my scalp behind my left ear. My nose itched. My eyes began to water from the itching. I wanted to scream with the effort of keeping still. I turned my head towards the shape of a bird on the window ledge outside.
I gave in and scratched my nose.
‘Your grace…!’ protested the artist. ‘I must refine the details of your face. Will you be kind enough to look at the far wall again.’
I shot him with a fire-arrow glance but obeyed. He stared at my nose then touched his brush to the large wooden panel on his easel.
Even looking at the wall, I felt the pressure of eyes on me. Belle had nosed at the hem of my skirts and disappeared under them. I had nowhere to hide.
My father stood with his arms crossed, studying me. Close at his back, Carr, the Golden Weasel, fiddled with the point of his silly new yellow beard. The Duc de Bouillon stood beside the king. I forgot the artist’s reprimand and turned my head to look at the little scene more clearly.
The small bent shape of Cecil stood a little aside from themall, farther from the king than Bacon. As he talked to the German duke, my father pointedly ignored his Chief Secretary. Now that I looked, the scene was easy to read. Carr had taken Cecil’s place at my father’s side, whispering in his ear. Cecil was set at a distance, with Bacon baring his teeth in would-be smiles and shuffling his way forward as if playing a child’s stealth game.
I rejected what I thought I saw.
It could not be possible that Wee Bobby had begun to fall from royal favour. The king needed him too much.
Cecil looked pale. A damp sheen glistened on his high forehead.
The king said something under his breath so that only Carr and de Bouillon could hear. They both laughed loudly. Cecil seemed preoccupied by looking for a handkerchief. Bacon pinched his thin lips and pulled them into a smile, as if he, too, had heard.
I glanced again at Cecil and wondered what the Chief Secretary really thought about the royal children’s marriages. I remembered how Henry had said that Cecil did not take sides, that he had his own private intentions for England and used people for that end. I knew that Cecil opposed the Savoy marriage for me but not what part he meant for me to play in his schemes.
Perhaps, like Henry, my father had seen that even he was a mere tool in Cecil’s vision for the future of England. But because he lived only to be at the centre of his own world, my father, unlike Henry, would not forgive it.
The little man did look ill.
I tried to imagine Whitehall without Wee Bobby. It was impossible. Both his late father, Lord Burleigh, and then he himself had advised first Elizabeth and now my father. Father and son were both called the de facto rulers of England, by friends and enemies alike.
The king would recover from his fit of anger with Cecil, Idecided. With his love of constant hunting and his distaste for the details of governing, he needed the little man too much.
I tried to imagine gathering my courage at last and asking Cecil how much he knew about my letter to Henry, and why he had seemed to protect me in Coventry, and what his silence might still cost me.
I looked at the distance between the two cousins now and wondered if Cecil had seen the essay that Bacon had written, being secretly passed around the court. Tallie had brought me a copy. Reading it told me all I needed to know about their rivalry and m
utual dislike. Bacon’s essay, titled ‘On Deformity’ argued that outward deformity reflected a man’s inward nature.
The Golden Weasel caught my eye as he bent to rest his handsome chin playfully on my father’s padded shoulder.
I wish that bottle had scarred that smug, pretty face of yours, I thought. It was hard to believe that such a light brainless creature, with that girl’s complexion and pink, petulant mouth, had stolen the love my father should have given Henry.
Does my father know that you love Frances Howard? I asked him silently.
Carr smirked at me across my father’s shoulder. Lack of brains had not prevented him from taking on many of the powers that rightfully belonged to the Prince of Wales.
Last year, it was said, Carr had persuaded the king to dissolve Parliament for threatening to criticise my father’s Scottish favourites. I had no doubt that Carr dripped poison about my brother into my father’s ear.
I held his pale blue eye until he looked away. Soon to be viscount, indeed! Viscount Legs! I thought scornfully. Viscount Oil! Did he pretend secretly to be a prince in my brother’s place, just as he begins to advise in place of Cecil?
Wee Bobby and I might share a common enemy.
I glanced sideways at the dark awkward shape of my father. I had learned a great deal about him in the past months as I studied him for the gaps in his armour. He was unpredictable, restless and wilful. He showed open disregard for my mother along with a taste for beautiful young men. He gave extravagant gifts to his favourites but borrowed from his courtiers to pay a gaming debt. He had an unshakeable belief in his own wisdom and goodness. He found the details of governing tedious and much preferred to hunt.
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