by David Field
‘And what does it say, as if I cared?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘It is of course in French, but it translates as follows, “I am pleased to advise your Highness that the ambitions of Sir Thomas Wyatt to which the Lady Elizabeth has given her wholehearted consent are about to be put into action and in this regard please advise the Admiral to dispatch the ships from Boulogne.” What say you to that, my Lady?’
‘I say that you require someone in Chancery with greater skill in the French language, if that is to be interpreted as confirmation that I knew ought regarding the planned insurrection of Wyatt, or the involvement of the French Ambassador. As for the latter being my friend, he would certainly hover about me when we were in company together, mainly — or so I was told — because he admires my bosom.’
‘You do not deny the truth of what he has written?’
‘How can I confirm or deny it, since I neither wrote it nor consented to it being written? Insofar as it accuses me of giving encouragement to Wyatt, I deny it wholeheartedly. I suspect that it was written in order to make de Noailles appear more credible in his dispatch. Always assuming, of course, that the entire document is not a forgery.’
‘In the matter of forgeries,’ Gardiner replied, ‘you would recognise the hand of the Earl of Devon, would you not?’
‘Courtenay? Why would I, since he has never written to me?’
‘Liar!’ Gardiner yelled without warning, causing Elizabeth to start despite herself. ‘This was found within your jewel case in your bedchamber at Hatfield, at the time of your arrest. It is in Courtenay’s hand and pray allow me to read it. It says “It is with profound regret that I am obliged to advise you that I can no longer pursue those matters we had planned to advance your cause, since the Queen’s forces are closing in on me and I fear that I shall be taken. Would that you had become my Queen and perhaps something more personal. Sent with my undying love, Edward”. Now madam, what say you to that?’
‘I have never seen such a letter and I cannot believe, either that it was written in the first place, or — if written — that it was found in my jewel case. You become even more desperate in your anxiety to lower me in the eyes of my sister the Queen. Once she agrees to meet with me — which I have been humbly requesting these two weeks past — I have no doubt that I shall be able to reassure her that these documents are forgeries of the vilest nature.’
‘The Queen is currently in Oxford, preparing to summon a Parliament. These documents that you dismiss as forgeries have already been sighted by the Council and it is with their authority that I instruct you to prepare yourself for transfer to the Tower.’
‘But I am innocent!’ Elizabeth screamed.
‘That is for others to determine, madam,’ Gardiner said triumphantly. ‘I have passed on the instruction and now I am free of these tedious interviews, which I may confess I have no more enjoyed than have you. And so I take my leave. Be ready by two o’clock today.’
As Gardiner turned and swept out from the chamber, Elizabeth watched his retreating figure as she sat down heavily, her stomach churning.
The solemn procession wound down through the gardens on its way to Whitehall Steps, where a royal barge sat bobbing up and down in the wake from other vessels that were plying their trade back and forth, both upstream to Mortlake and beyond, or downstream as far as the encampment at Tilbury. It was raining heavily and an attendant was holding a cover of sorts over Elizabeth’s head as she shivered her way down the lawns towards the riverbank. She was fortunate that others were also shivering in the chill of a wet March morning, so hopefully no-one would report her visible fear.
There was a canopy at the rear of the barge and Elizabeth was accommodated underneath it, to protect her from the incessant downpour. Attendants, Tower Yeomen and oarsmen partially blocked her view ahead and given the cascading fountains of water from the front of the canopy it was not until the vessel began to slow, and the oarsmen shipped oars and held them upright, that it became obvious where they were heading. But as the barge slipped past Tower Steps and the helmsman steered to his left, the intended landing point was revealed and Elizabeth was heard to emit a light scream, which she immediately stifled with a hand over her mouth. They were planning to disembark her at Traitor’s Gate.
It was several minutes before Elizabeth could be persuaded to step onto the landing under the archway of St Thomas’s Tower and when she did so she glared ahead at the reception party on the far slope inside the Tower, headed by its Lieutenant, John Brydges and yelled defiantly in a quavering voice that betrayed her nervousness: ‘I never thought to have come here as a prisoner and I pray you all bear me witness that I come in as no traitor, but as true a woman to the Queen’s Majesty as any as is now living.’
There was an awkward silence until the Lieutenant cleared his throat and replied, ‘God preserve your Grace. The chosen entrance was not intended to insult you, or to proclaim your guilt. I merely discharge my duty on the orders of Queen Mary and there was no entrance more convenient, give the inclement weather.’
‘Inclement weather or no, my Lord Lieutenant, I shall proceed no further,’ Elizabeth insisted as she sat down firmly on a bollard onto which water was dripping from the guttering above, ‘thereby confessing to the world by my acquiescence that I am fit to be called traitor — to my own sister, no less.’
Brydges tried to reason with her. ‘You had best come in, madam, for here you sit unwholesomely.’
‘Better sit here,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘for God knows where you will bring me.’
She had every reason to feel more than apprehensive. Her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had entered the Tower by Traitor’s Gate and had ended her days on the block on Tower Green. That same Green had witnessed several other high born deaths and had most recently hosted the beheading of the simple country girl Jane Grey who had been regarded as a threat by Mary. How much more of a threat did Elizabeth herself pose, given the false information and forged papers that someone had supplied in an effort to shorten the line of succession?
The impasse went on for several minutes, until one of the ladies from Whitehall who Elizabeth had been allowed as an attendant moved forward and pleaded with her to ‘Pray have mercy, madam, else we shall all die of the cold,’ before bursting into tears and sliding onto the muddy ground, from which two male attendants lifted her and held her sagging form partly upright by her armpits. Elizabeth took pity on the girl and rose from her bollard with a defiant toss of her head that sent a shower of raindrops spraying off the hood of the cloak that she had been handed as they had entered the barge.
‘Very well, my Lord Lieutenant,’ she shouted across at Brydges, ‘I am content to make entry to your dismal fortress, but only under protest that I have done nought to deserve such treatment, as my sister shall come to learn in due course.’
As she took the arm held out to her and picked her way carefully across the wet and mossy stone slabs, there were sighs of relief all round. In the Lieutenant’s Residence she was given wine and a bowl of stew and escorted into the Lieutenant’s Lady’s quarters to change out of her soaking garments into a simple woollen gown that would be her prison garb for the foreseeable future. She was then invited to stand before the blazing fire in the main hall while her conditions of detention were explained to her by an embarrassed Lieutenant.
‘As I was previously at pains to explain, madam, I merely carry out the orders of Her Majesty, albeit with a heavy heart. I had hoped to be allowed to accommodate you here, as your late mother was once accommodated, but Earl Marshall Norfolk has insisted that you be lodged within one of the Towers. I have selected a first floor suite of rooms in the Bell Tower, which is the small one you may observe through yonder window. A fire has been lit these past few hours and there is room for one attendant. There is access to a closed stool down the hallway and beyond that is a covered walkway to the Beauchamp Tower along which you may take exercise daily, under escort. I regret that I cannot offer you any greater comfort, madam, but I
have done all that I can.’
Elizabeth was almost in tears as she assured him, ‘In truth, my Lord Lieutenant, you have shown me greater kindness than anyone since I was rudely removed from my country estate and brought hither for reasons of which I remain ignorant. I thank you for your charity and shall ensure that you are adequately rewarded once my sister comes to her senses and learns that she has been wickedly misled by the malice of others.’
With that, Elizabeth allowed herself to be escorted to the relative luxury of the rooms she had been allocated, which compared with other cells in other towers around the complex were the last word in comfort. Unknown to her, they had until recently been occupied by Lady Jane Grey and her attendant Grace Ashton. Jane had been executed on the same day as her husband Guildford, while Grace Ashton had been released on Mary’s order, when advised that Grace’s father had granted continued existence to a convent on his estate of Knighton that had been founded by her mother Queen Katherine in happier days.
Elizabeth’s fear of an early beheading receded as the days passed and she settled into a mind-numbing routine. She was allowed books, and her needlepoint had been transferred from Whitehall as part of her personal belongings, although not before they had all been carefully searched. The meals were edible, if hardly appetising, and although she recalled the concerns of possible poisoning harboured by her dear friend and companion Blanche Parry during their time together at Whitehall, by the time that her daily meal was delivered by a surly attendant she was so hungry that she ate it without demure. Elizabeth also reasoned that if someone was determined to bring about her death by poison, she would welcome that rather than the cold steel of an axe.
In her first few days she was hopeful of receiving some sort of response to a letter she had written to Mary when first advised that she was to be conveyed to the Tower. In it she had written: I humbly crave to speak with your Highness, which I would not be so bold to desire if I knew not myself so clear as I know myself most true. And as for the traitor Courtenay, he might peradventure write me a letter but on my faith I never received any from him and I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter by any means. Let conscience move your Highness to take some better way with me that to make me be condemned in all men’s sight.
Now acutely aware that someone who wished her evil was skilled in planting forgeries to bring her down, she carefully drew lines down and across the remainder of the vellum before signing it: I humbly crave but one word of answer from yourself. Your Highness’s most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end. Elizabeth.
It was not until after she had handed it to Gardiner as he stood smiling mockingly at her final departure from Whitehall, with a demand that he lose no time in delivering it, that she reflected sadly on the pass to which she had come. The woman to whom she had written the humiliating letter, all but begging for her release, was her own sister, her companion in play during those days, now of misty memory, when they had resided together in Hatfield. Then again, she reflected, the difference in their ages had resulted in Mary being more like a governess than a sister and she had always contrived to convey to the younger, and more playfully inclined, girl her contempt and disregard for her childishness and frivolity.
Mary’s attitude, unknown to Elizabeth as she clung to the hope that her older sister would have her eyes opened to the treachery by which she was surrounded, was not about to change. Not only did she decline to read the letter when it was delivered to her in Oxford, but she sharply rebuked Gardiner for his temerity in allowing it to be written.
Acutely aware of Mary’s antagonism towards Elizabeth, even if he could not fathom any reason for it beyond a difference of religious beliefs, Norfolk was anxious to ingratiate himself with the Queen by supplying such evidence as he could either acquire or manufacture that would allow her to give vent to her bile without pointing it in his direction. He was feeling the pressure of his years and was not in the best of health. He wished to spend his declining days in the peace and reassuring comfort of his favourite estate at Framlingham and was even prepared to abandon any plans he might have entertained to seek out the remaining Ashton brood and silence them regarding his own murky and traitorous past. Then one day, when reading a weekly report from the Lieutenant of the Tower regarding the welfare, or otherwise, of his many prisoners, he spotted another opportunity to cast suspicion on Elizabeth’s loyalty.
During what he pretended was a routine inspection of the Tower facilities in his capacity as Earl Marshall of England, he first sought confirmation of the identities of those incarcerated in the Beauchamp Tower that was linked with the Bell Tower by a covered walkway across the ramparts of the outer Tower walls. He then gave order that a certain prisoner who had been languishing for some time in Beauchamp be allowed daily exercise along that walkway. It was then a simple matter of slipping a handful of coins to two guards and the latest instalment of Elizabeth’s downfall could be launched.
Elizabeth experienced a shock of elation as she saw the man looking down over the moat towards Tower Hill while leaning on the parapet. He was now a mature man, rather than the somewhat brash youth that she remembered, but there was no mistaking the handsome face, even if it was now furrowed with deep lines of care.
‘Robert?’ she called out as she quickened her pace, obliging her guard to scurry after her in pursuit, ‘Robert Dudley — is that really you?’
He looked round with a pale face and smiled in astonishment. ‘I had heard you were here — but why?’
Elizabeth shook her head sadly. ‘We live in changed times, dear Robert. Gone are the carefree days of our childhood, when we would delight to sit with Edward in a royal nursery that rang with our laughter as we played at shuffleboard, or attempted to dance a Galliard, with you as my partner. Even then, you may recall, my sister Mary would sit in a corner and glare at us, as if we were doing something wicked. She was never one who enjoyed life and she has become a fearful and untrusting Queen — one who has listened only to the voices of those whose loyalty she believes she has bought, and she has been convinced by them that I seek her throne.’
Dudley nodded. ‘It was the same for me. My father sought to put my sister-in-law Jane on the throne ahead of Mary and I am under sentence simply for being my father’s son. At least I am allowed occasional visits from my wife, but this only serves to make me miss her all the more between those visits.’
‘You are married?’
‘Indeed I am, to Amy, the daughter of the Robsarts of Stanfield Hall, a year or so past. You yourself have not yet married, as I hear?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth confirmed with a wry smile, ‘but that does not stop rumour travelling abroad regarding my alleged love of matters carnal and my numerous indulgences with older men — such as Thomas Seymour, for example. He would have had my honour, had I let him, but we merely played games around my bedchamber.’
‘Would that I could have played with you in your bedchamber,’ Robert chuckled as he looked her up and down with an appraising eye.
Elizabeth blushed and dropped her eyes to the ground. ‘Away, Robert — you were always wont to say such outrageous things. And I doubt that I now look such an inviting prospect, in this drab robe and with my hair like a rats’ nest.’
‘Your beauty was always in your face,’ Robert observed as he looked into her eyes with old longing. ‘That has not deserted you, although it is more gaunt than I remember it. Gaunt and pale.’
Elizabeth smiled back into his warm eyes and nodded. ‘It is this infernal prison that they keep us in. When first I saw you, as I walked up from my cell in the Bell Tower, methought that I was encountering your ghost, so white was your face and so lacking in life.’
‘Do you recall when we would each take a horse from the stables at Hatfield and race each other through the lower paddocks until our mounts were spent and we each had a rosy red glow to our cheeks from the hot wind that we had summoned up?’
‘
Indeed,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘and it remains one of my happiest memories. But tell me, are you allowed to walk here at this time every day? I must own that this is the first I have seen of you.’
‘It is the first time for some weeks,’ Dudley told her. ‘Someone must have given order that I might take the air, since I have requested it in vain on previous occasions.’
‘I am allowed out here every day at this time,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘Perhaps we can meet here every day and dull the monotony of our separate existences?’
‘That would be a welcome relief,’ Robert agreed as he looked over his shoulder apprehensively at the approach of his armed escort. ‘I fear that I am about to be returned to my solitude. Allow me to kiss your hand, ere I am dragged off.’
He just had time to take the offered hand, lower his head and plant a warm kiss on the back of it, before the guard placed a firm hand on his shoulder and told him sternly that it was time to return.
VIII
William Cecil was surprised and more than a little anxious, to be summoned to Oxford for an audience with Queen Mary. He did not normally report directly to her, since the master with whom he was required to lodge his regular reports was the Chancellor Gardiner, and if a face to face meeting was required, then Gardiner would usually delegate this to an Exchequer official, much in the same way that he was reputed to leave the celebration of holy offices in his Cathedral to his Dean.
But one did not ignore a summons from Mary, given her known suspicion of anyone who did not openly grovel in her mere presence and her obsession that her throne was under threat. Her exaggerated fears with regard to both matters would be laughable, were it not for the fact that she appeared to combine them with a ruthless disregard for human life when it stood in the way of her peace of mind. He was therefore in Oxford, bowing the knee and doing his best to appear loyal and non-threatening.