It was so near, in time and place. In here, in the Bell Tower, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder — the poet — had been shut, when Anne Boleyn was locked next door. He wrote of the thing which happened while he was there:
The Bell Tower showed me such a sight,
That in my head sticks day and night,
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory or might,
That yet circa regna tonat.
The echo of her mother’s beheading thundered around the kingdom still. In the bitterest days of their enmity Anne Boleyn had said of Mary, ‘She is my death, and I am hers.’ The mother’s words were now the daughter’s predicament. To Mary, there was no difference.
Wyatt had written as if he had seen that beheading from a window here. The window was the first thing Elizabeth had looked for; from it she could see if Jane Grey’s scaffold on Tower Green had been dismantled, or left for further use, for herself. But none of the Bell Tower windows overlooked Tower Green. There had been a thick stone wall between. Yet Wyatt had needed no window to see the injustice and barbarity outside. For Elizabeth was now convinced that her mother’s death had been an injustice. Courted in a wild dance, perhaps, but nevertheless, the trial, the evidence, the execution, an enacted lie. She had made too many enemies and a Queen who makes enemies will in the end be brought down by them. Cromwell was such a clever man; he spun a web where the truth and lies were indistinguishable. Only one man escaped his net, Wyatt the poet, and that was because everyone knew that Anne Boleyn had rejected him more than once, years before.
‘Wyatt!’ Damn the name. Now the poet’s son had incriminated the daughter. The next thing would be a trial. Would they rake up old scandals, the Lord Admiral’s ghost, to soil her reputation again?
At Anne Boleyn’s trial, unmentionable things had been mentioned. Upwards of two thousand people heard how Elizabeth’s mother had kissed her own brother George, with open mouth: ‘the Queen’s tongue in the mouth of the said George, and George’s tongue in the mouth of the Queen’
That was how lovers kissed. Elizabeth had first-hand experience of that. No one could know, though, how the Lord Admiral had kissed.
Soon, the interrogators would come. Bishop Stephen Gardiner, now Mary’s Lord Chancellor, who had tried so long ago to destroy Katherine Parr. Now he was determined to destroy Elizabeth. Because he was a tough, clear-sighted man he knew that Mary could not live in peace while Elizabeth lived. It was imperative that she be tried and sentenced before Philip of Spain came to England. Philip would not put his head in a double noose by both marrying the Queen and risking attack by rebels who wanted Elizabeth as Queen.
When they came, on 12 April, there were nine of them altogether, but Gardiner put most of the questions. Questions put across a table by a heavy-faced, hard-eyed, hard-witted cleric lawyer. Questions plain and questions devious. She knew what he wanted; he knew that she knew and that she was determined not to give it to him: one scrap of real evidence that she had plotted with Wyatt. Without it, the Queen’s scruples could not be overcome. Just one was enough to send her to the block. Luckily it did not exist, but one foolish statement might give Gardiner something he could make into it. He was determined to trip her. Her previous interrogations on the subject of the Lord Admiral had taught Elizabeth that every word must be guarded, unimpeachable.
It was always across a table. The Bishop, ‘Wily Winchester’, leaned forward menacingly, eyes probing, searching her face for betrayal of her fears, for lies, for evasions. Elizabeth had learned how to hood her eyes with long white lids, how to watch the enemy surreptitiously. They sifted her answers to catch one word more significant than another. The Bishop again, quasi-benevolent, leaning back in his chair to disarm her for a moment. Stephen Stockfish, who had once been Quartermaster to the army, and purveyor of that nauseous commodity. Confess and the Queen will be merciful. Nothing to confess. The contemptuous dismissal of her most adamant statement as if transparent untruth. The production of an incriminating witness, as if by conjuring. Stephen Gardiner had every trick up his bishop’s sleeve, and more. ‘Lord Doctor Doubleface’ was another of his nicknames. He had the staying power of an ox.
Elizabeth had not. She stumbled. Seeing the white-faced girl in the black gown becoming glassy-eyed and greenish and sway in her chair, some of the Lord Chancellor’s co-deputation began, in a spirit of dissent, to ruin his scenario. The Earl of Arundel could stand it no longer. Gardiner was making a breakfast of this girl, exceeding his commission. This was the Queen’s sister, not a milkmaid caught in tittle-tattle at the back door. This was still the heir to the Queen’s throne. He saved Elizabeth just when Gardiner would have broken her down. She sent them all away empty-handed. But they might come back. She had been a prisoner for three weeks. Three weeks soon became a month.
Elizabeth feared poison. Bishop Gardiner’s minions might short-cut the formalities of a trial. Her servants had to buy food within the Tower precincts from supplies brought in by the warders, and since in the usual way of things Tower staff creamed off the best and diddled everyone else, the supplies were bad quality, short weight, and an insult to a prisoner who was the Queen’s sister.
Elizabeth was constipated. The food did not suit her. She roused herself from her misery and torpor to complain. If she complained hard enough, people usually capitulated. She was good at complaining. ‘I want my own cook,’ she demanded. ‘He must buy food out in the City, and see it brought in. My digestion won’t suffer this hog wash. If I am poisoned, the Queen will want to know why.’ She got her cook. So did the Lieutenant. One had to bargain for favours.
‘I must have fresh air and exercise, or I shall die.’ Another ultimatum. Her walks in the Queen’s Lodging were airless expeditions in shuttered dusty gloom. She got permission to walk along the leads of the inner curtain wall between the Bell and the Beauchamp Towers. At least she would see the sky, and breathe fresh, if moat-perfumed, air. But she must walk always at different hours of the day and never without two yeomen warders clumping in front of her and two behind, carrying halberds, in case she attacked them, or tried to jump over the wall to drop forty feet into the nasty moat!
The first time she walked the wall, and saw exactly where she was, Elizabeth nearly broke down altogether. ‘Oh God, help me!’ she cried, staring over the wall crenellation at the place Wyatt the poet had written about. She saw what he had seen. Tower Green, smooth and neatly mowed, with pecking, scuttling starlings. Tower Green was the place of execution for persons of royal rank. The scaffold was not there, but she saw it, the scattered straw, the buckets of sawdust, the same as was laid down in butcher’s shops to soak up the drips.
Blood. The swish, a snake’s hiss of shining sword. Like slitting the throat of a hunted hind — Caesar’s hind. Her mother had been forced to watch five men die by the axe on Tower Hill, one after the other, to make sure she went to her own death in a spirit of repentance. Five men. Why did not women go mad? But mostly they died with fortitude.
They had said that Lady Jane Grey’s little neck had fountained blood enough for a felled ox, not a sixteen-year-old girl no bigger than a child of ten. Not royal crimson blood, but scarlet, vivid, shocking scarlet, shooting out beyond the sawdust. The botched jobs were unthinkable, yet recent in memory. There on Tower Green old Lady Salisbury, Mary’s beloved governess, King Edward IV’s niece, had been dealt with like a chine of beef. A dozen strokes of the axe, it was said. Nowhere near enough sawdust. Elizabeth had been seven at that time. Outside the walls, on Tower Hill, a dreadful, endless procession. The last one, only days ago on 11 April, Wyatt the rebel, who had exonerated Elizabeth with his last words. Who would the next one be? The Dudley brothers had been tried and condemned and awaited Her Majesty’s pleasure. Would Robin Dudley be the next to lay his handsome dark head on the block? Elizabeth began suddenly and surprisingly to weep. She had thought herself beyond tears. But she had a vivid memory of Robert on horseback — she had never admired any rider so much. Th
e thought of that young horseman’s life extinguished at a stroke… One stroke?
Tom Seymour, the tall, handsome Lord Admiral. Three strokes had been needed for him, and he had jumped up in the middle like jack-in-the-box, defying God and refusing to die. His tongue would not be silenced. Gory, gibbering ghost, the thought of his blood spurting from his severed neck now revolted Elizabeth as much as the memory of his spit. She was promptly sick on the wall walk, as quick as a dog bringing up its dinner. Half fainting, putty-legged, she was hauled back into her prison.
But she came out again. She kept the yeomen warders walking, briskly up and down, wet or fine, morning, noon and afternoon, until they groused. She walked right up to the little door at the other end of the leads, leading into the Beauchamp Tower, until the two leading warders were forced to turn. From up there, she had a fine view of London. Her short sight prevented her from seeing distant things, but she could see the steeple of St Paul’s, the glint of its weather vane, the church towers, the nineteen white arches of the bridge, and the ships unloading at Galley Key and Brown’s Wharf. On the Southwark shore, there were green trees.
Lions roared. They were the only prisoners in the Tower to whom blood might give life and strength. Elizabeth remembered Daniel, and prayed for preservation in the lions’ den, for herself, and for jolly Robin Dudley.
Inside the Beauchamp Tower, the Dudley brothers were locked, still all four under sentence of death, but after nine months of imprisonment cautiously daring to hope for reprieve. Robert was sure that if they were not freed soon, boredom and lack of exercise would do the headsman’s job for him. Chronic yawning made his jaws ache. At least they were all together now, those first six months on his own in the room below had been misery. The April weather, making delightful the world outside, the cheeping of sparrows round the windows, was driving them mad. Henry had a boil on his neck. They were all pasty and pimply and had fur on their tongues.
They took it in turns to look through the keyhole in the door onto the leads, to get a glimpse of the Princess Elizabeth walking. A glimpse was all they got, a sliver of view, a piece of black cloth gown, a serviceable shoe, an untrimmed sleeve, a ringless hand. The figure was usually ominously headless because of the height of the keyhole.
‘Sweet and twenty?’ whispered Ambrose, with a grin.
‘I don’t know.’ Then Robert heard, for the first time, the Princess’s voice.
‘Damnation and hellfire! My cap’s blown off!’ A high, irate voice. Nothing sweet about that.
Her head as she bent, presumably to pick up her cap, was for an instant in view of the keyhole. Hair blown out like a fiery, streaming cresset. Delicately beaky profile. Black and white, nunlike, she had shown a flash of colour like a passing comet.
Robert turned to Ambrose with a grin. ‘Hmm,’ he whispered. ‘Sweet and twenty after all!’
Tart sweetness though — if she had known they spied from the keyhole she would have boxed their ears and sworn at them, Robert thought, as he and Ambrose went back to join the others in the room below. He laughed, and they all laughed too, for no reason except that it made a change from yawning.
They sat around watching John at his carving. Tack, tack, tack, the sound of the hammer and chisel punctuated the long hours of the day. The carving grew, at eye level in the stone wall by the fireplace. John had drawn it out first, with pencil and paper. He was skilled at drafting, designing and carving. He had always thought a knowledge of mechanical skills necessary to a well-educated man.
The design, a square plaque, centred on the Bear and Ragged Staff of Warwick, John’s lost earldom, entwined with roses for Ambrose, oak leaves and acorns for Robert, gillyflower pinks for poor dead Guilford, and honeysuckle for Harry. How close they all were in misfortune; Robert followed John, Ambrose followed Robert, and Harry followed them all, like a Benjamin.
While they chipped away the time, Elizabeth thanked God every night after the curfew bell had been rung from the turret over the Bell Tower, sounding the hour of the Gaoler’s lock-up rounds, that she had reached the end of another day alive. Time dragged, yet seen in terms of life ran perilously short. After some more assiduous complaining, she got permission to walk in the small enclosed garden of the Gentleman Gaoler’s house. Even then, all the windows overlooking it were shuttered and barred when she was there.
On the morning of May Day, she emerged at ground level for the first time since her arrest. It was an extraordinary little garden to find tucked away among the ranges of gabled houses and high stone walls and the bleak shadows they cast. Someone had been there earlier, weeding and planting out summer seedlings; they had left a basket and a hoe, a dibber and a pair of gardening gloves. Elizabeth was tempted to take them up and scratch at the soil herself; it would have helped her to forget her troubles. But she did not, for most gardeners were jealous of their preserve, and the gardener here was probably a woman — men did not bother with gloves.
There was a medlar tree, old and grown in crooked, gnarled deformity against the wall that caught the sun. Its blossom was sparse, like a snow shower in May. Elizabeth was not alone; she never was for an instant left alone. But she turned her back on the two women and two warders, and stood very still, breathing very quietly. The scent of wallflowers pleased her nose, a delight after the walks redolent of moat. She could not let fear leave her altogether but for a few breaths it relaxed its grip. As she stood, looking at the medlar tree, which must have been there before the Tudors came, she remembered how her mother had waited that morning after a May Day spent alone and in fear at Greenwich, under the snowy apple trees, to be arrested and taken here. Apple blossom — cherub’s wings white and cherub’s cheek pink, dying as it fell.
Elizabeth shook herself; she must not indulge in fantasies which fed her fears. Just then a child on a hobby horse ran out of a door in the Gaoler’s house into the garden. He was followed by a girl rather smaller, and a tiny mite of uncertain sex, weaving about at its latest discovery — walking. The boy galloped furiously for about twenty paces, so busy lashing his steed that he did not look where he was going, and nearly cannoned into Elizabeth.
Her attendants were about to send the children indoors again, with sharp words, when Elizabeth said, ‘Let them stay.’ Her women shrugged, and looked at the warders; what harm could it do.
The boy, who was about five years old, was completely unabashed. ‘Why are you in Mr Partridge’s garden?’ he demanded.
‘Because he has let me come,’ Elizabeth replied, logically.
‘Have you been before?’
‘No.’
‘Do you like my horse?’
Its mane was suspiciously like unravelled knitting. ‘Oh, yes, he’s handsome. Is his name Layard?’ The creature’s head was greyish and darned — a stuffed old sock — and its body merely a broomstick.
‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘I know a lot of things.’
‘Do you know what I’m called?’ asked the little girl, touching Elizabeth’s skirts, indignant at not having first conversation with the new visitor.
‘That’s one of the things I don’t know.’
‘I’m Susannah.’
‘Hello, Susannah. Is this your brother?’
‘No, he isn’t. I don’t want him for a brother. He’s Humphrey Orme. I’m Susannah Partridge.’
‘Who’s this?’ The mite had arrived, staggering, burbling nonsense, it being below the age of talking. It clutched at Elizabeth’s knees, glad of an anchor after the long journey from the door.
‘That’s my sister.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Little Bess.’
‘Well, that’s my name, too, what a coincidence!’ All three children beamed their approval.
‘Mistress Bess!’ the two said. ‘Theth,’ said the mite.
‘I can jump over that flower bed, on my Layard,’ Humphrey said. ‘Watch me!’
Elizabeth watched, hoping he would not land with a plonk in the nicely hoed soil. H
e did not.
‘Will you come again?’ he said as he circled round again at a canter.
‘I hope so.’
‘There’s a blackbird’s nest in that tree.’ He pointed at the medlar. ‘I can climb up and see in it.’
‘Not too far.’ His mother was more likely to wallop him for climbing trees than for taking up with an imprisoned princess. In the end, Elizabeth felt obliged to hold his legs while he stood on a bend in the tree trunk, and peered into the nest. ‘They’re blue,’ he said.
‘Leave them now, or the mother bird will be upset, and not come back.’ It felt strange to Elizabeth to be holding a child, something she rarely did. His breeches were woolly and serviceable, with a darn in the seat. The girl Susannah’s apron was freshly starched, and unlikely to remain so for long. The tiny girl managed to transfer something to Elizabeth’s hand, some sticky mess which might have once been a sweet or a crust with a scrape of honey. It glued her fingers together, until she went back from her airing in the garden to the Bell Tower and washed her hands.
On the next sunny day, when she went into the garden again, the children were already there. Bess, bottom in the air, was scooping in the flowerbed. Susannah was sitting on a low-stool, in front of a small washtub, armed with a ring of bent wire and scraps of soap. She was blowing bubbles through the wire. None of them floated over the walls.
‘Do you like blowing bubbles?’ Susannah said.
‘I never have.’ Royal children were not let loose with soap, or allowed to eat earth and pebbles or worms, or whatever Bess was eating; Elizabeth was not inclined to look too closely.
‘Neither had Lady Jane.’
Elizabeth’s heart nearly stopped. Of course, little Jane Grey had stayed here, in Partridge’s own house, a prisoner, waiting to die. She had played with these children, spent Christmas with them. It did not surprise Elizabeth that Jane had never blown bubbles; the Duchess of Suffolk would have beaten the life out of her if her daughter had dared to try. Jane’s life, so short, the last days perhaps lightened by the prattle of these little girls.
None But Elizabeth Page 8