Elizabeth felt that the world into which she had come at her accession was a more threatening place than before. She had been allowed so short a time in those Arcadian fields. As Parry had lain on his deathbed, news came of another death, less of a bereavement, but the cause of great change in Elizabeth’s world. The young King of France died on 5 December, leaving his wife, Mary Stewart, no longer Queen of France. But Mary was Queen of Scotland still, and it was to Scotland that she would soon return. England and Scotland were two kingdoms uneasily bound together into an island. How would things be with two Queens inhabiting a common shore when one laid claim to the other’s kingdom?
Two Queens, and neither of them had a husband. Mr Cecil said, in hope, ‘God send our mistress a husband and by time a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.’ It was the only way Elizabeth could forestall Mary and destroy the threat of her claim to the English throne. Who would get a husband and a son first? Elizabeth thought back to that day, Sunday, 7 September 1533, between three and four in the afternoon, when a red-haired girl child had squalled for the first time and the thunderbolt of King Henry’s wrath had fallen. God worked in a mysterious way, and sent quite as many daughters as sons. And that would solve nothing for posterity.
Mary Stewart was eighteen, auburn-haired and beautiful, but six feet tall — how could such a beanstick be beautiful? The arbitrators of beauty were men, and they were so often led to make false report. They said Elizabeth was beautiful — how would she compare with a six-foot beanstick? How did the shades of their hair differ, red and gold? How could her intellect and experience compare with Elizabeth’s? Mary had led a sheltered life.
Robert Dudley was the one man above all others who made Elizabeth feel beautiful. Therefore she could not bear to have him leave her. For this reason, those perceptive enough to see it began to wish she would marry the fellow and put an end to uncertainty, for was not a woman most likely to bear fine sons to the man she married for love? Books ran at court on the likelihood of Lord Robert becoming the Queen’s husband, and were still running at midsummer next.
On 4 June 1561 came the worst storm Londoners had ever heard or seen. Lightning like the sword of a terrible judge struck St Paul’s. Some saw a long flame like a pointed dart which seemed to pierce the steeple, like an arrow a hapless tree. A whirlwind, a fearful smell of brimstone, some said. St Paul’s steeple began to burn. The bells fell down, the golden eagle melted and a London landmark for hundreds of years was gone. People were frightened, for such a horrible event must surely herald disaster or be a punishment for past or present sins. Did God register his disapproval of the Queen’s unnaturally single state, of England’s lack of an heir, by this?
Such superstitious ideas did not trouble the Queen or Lord Robert. On Midsummer Day the recalcitrant weather managed a crooked smile, and it was fine enough for a water party on the Thames. The Queen invited to share her royal barge the Spanish ambassador Bishop De Quadra, and Lord Robert.
‘No one can whisper tales with a Bishop as chaperon!’ she said. The Queen enjoyed Bishop-baiting. She also enjoyed talking what he called nonsense, like blowing rainbow bubbles and watching them burst in his face, and she could do it in Latin, Italian, or French.
‘Queen, bishop, knight — or would you say pawn? No, no pawn, Robin, a splendid knight — a red knight today?’ She flicked a finger at the fantastically tall collar of Lord Robert’s splendid scarlet doublet.
Robert laughed; he enjoyed these occasions as much as she did. ‘White queen’s move,’ he challenged. She was all silver tissue and white Venetian lace.
‘The play is to be a wedding!’ Elizabeth said naughtily, and laughed, high and chiming, so that the occupants of nearby barges craned to see and hear what was going on.
The Spanish ambassador looked at the Queen and Lord Robert in horror. She could not, by some fearful mischance, be serious?
‘Who better to officiate, than the distinguished Bishop of Aquila in the Kingdom of Naples, his most Catholic Majesty’s ambassador!’ Lord Robert stared mockingly with bold dark eyes, the height of insolence. The Bishop wished he was sailing elsewhere.
Before he could think of an adequate reply, the Queen laughed again. ‘But we in England have the marriage service in English. The good Bishop has little English, I think. I will not be married in Spanish! Or in Latin, or in Italian, or in any foreign language. Robin, he will not do!’ And she went off into gales of laughter, which embarrassed De Quadra even more. She was outrageous, possessed, surely, by forty-thousand devils!
*
It seemed as if devils indeed possessed Elizabeth that summer. She was pale, she was thin, she ate like a wren, she was irritable, and when she was irritable, everybody knew it. One cause was that the White Queen of England had been outmanoeuvred. The young Queen of Scots was coming home. All Elizabeth and Cecil’s efforts to prevent her were of no avail. Elizabeth refused to give her a passport to travel through England, so she would have to go all the way to Scotland on a ship. Perhaps she would be sick.
Ten days after Elizabeth had enjoyed that brief interlude laughing at Bishop De Quadra, she set out on a progress into Essex and Suffolk. The storms came back, and the rain, and the roads were bad for travel. The Queen took to her coach, and however her public face smiled, her private was cold, damp and peevish. She made it clear that the outspoken Protestant clergy of East Anglia gave her offence, and the fact that so many of them were married even greater offence. The clergy should not have wives, and if they did, these should be neither seen nor heard. Elizabeth was in no mood now to tease on the subject of weddings. Mr Cecil spent his time trying to appease her, Lord Robert in trying to lighten her moodiness. Neither had much success. In order to annoy Robert, she flirted with one and another. She told the Archbishop of Canterbury that she considered the state of marriage the worst affliction in the world, and that she intended to die a virgin.
On this question of virginity, her own, and others’, everything seemed to rest. Mr Cecil pleaded with her to exchange it for the marriage bed, saying that the safety of England depended on it. But did it? A sterile marriage, a girl child, a disorderly, disaffected husband — there were too many pitfalls, all as unsafe for England as for herself. In any case, she was not inclined to marry. She inclined only to Robin, and he was no guarantee of England’s safety. England’s safety was more at risk on the question of Mary Stewart’s next marriage. She must at all costs be prevented from an alliance with one of England’s enemies.
Lord Robert was thankful when after nearly a month of sodden, mud-stained progress they came to Ipswich for a stay of six whole days. There might for once be time to dry clothes and saddlery. It was August, and Virgo wore no golden garment this year, but a grey and dripping cloak. The sight of Mr Withipoll’s fine new brick house on the outskirts of town, away from the river damp, where the Queen was to lodge, was a cheering one.
On the last day but one of the stay, Sunday, Robert went to bed at about midnight, buried his head and stopped his ears against the too familiar rumble of thunder and drum of rain on the window. He slept — he always slept easily and in strange places. The Queen had to demand absolute quiet within earshot of her bed, for she could not sleep through noise. She would not like the thunder. Into his sleep, some time when the August dawn should have come but was still lying in bed under a heap of dark clouds, intruded an unwelcome guest. A woman in his room at dead of night would in most circumstances have been welcome, but when he rose from his pillows like Morpheus disturbed, the female that he confronted filled him with horror. He sat up, trying to smooth his hair and beard with one hand and to blink the sleep from his eyes.
On the edge of his bed, tiny as a child, terrified and trembling, with a face like a sliver of curds, leant the Queen’s cousin, Lady Katherine Grey. Lady Jane Grey’s sister. As his eyes travelled downwards, he saw that she could not in fact lean against the bed, her belly was too large. Lady Katherine Grey was unmistakably pregnant, and had
not long to go by the look of it.
‘How the devil,’ he said, with hostility, ‘did you get in?’
Unreassured by this surly welcome, the girl burst into tears.
‘Be quiet!’ ordered Robert so savagely that she did.
‘If you are found here, or found to have been here, we will both be hung and quartered.’ He felt trapped, there in his bed, with this woman importuning him.
‘Please! Lord Robert help me — help me…’ She was luckily not so far gone that she could not manage to wail in a stifled manner. ‘I know no one else who will help me.’ She was pathetically tiny, ginger-haired, like Jane had been but less indomitable.
‘You can best help yourself by getting out of my bedroom. I won’t be held responsible for that, you know.’
‘But I am a virtuous married woman!’ she exclaimed indignantly.
‘Oh God,’ said Robert, falling back on the pillows, ‘that is infinitely worse.’ Lady Katherine was, after the Queen of Scots, heir to England’s throne. Married, without the Queen’s knowledge or consent. Pregnant. Robert groaned.
‘Who is he?’ he said.
‘Lord Hertford.’ Lady Katherine sounded so proud, poor little wretch. Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, son of executed Protector Seymour. Robert’s father had killed Seymour, and brought poor Lady Jane to her death. Now her sister begged his help. In breaking the news to the Queen, of course, he did not need to be told.
‘You have burdened me with a task that I would rather run a hundred miles than perform. I must do it, because you have made me your confidant. I wish you had not. I have enough problems without shouldering yours too. I suppose I must try to mitigate the royal wrath, which, you realize, will descend upon me also. There’s little hope, you know, the time is most inauspicious.’
He yanked angrily at the bed linen. ‘You bribed my man to let you in — now remove yourself from here. If she, the royal she — hears of this…’
To his surprise, she went meekly. Having got to him and delivered her dreadful news, she was satisfied that the Queen would be told by the person closest to her and the one most likely to be able to soften her anger.
But the time was, as Lord Robert said, inauspicious. In the morning, he faced the Queen. He told her without preamble, and waited for the storm to break.
‘She came to you!?’ The first clap of thunder.
‘She seems friendless. There was, Your Majesty remembers, a family association.’
‘Remember! Remember! I remember, Robin Dudley!’ The clouds were rent apart with lightning to equal that which had struck St Paul’s.
‘Your father took her sister, my Lord Robert, and put aside my sister and myself from our rightful inheritance, from our throne! Who will try doing the same with her, I wonder? She will not have my throne, not her, nor the brat she carries! Never! There is no marriage — it shall be annulled at once! Send Archbishop Parker here to me!’ She was railing like a fishwife. Robert kept silent, letting the storm spend itself
‘The Tower!’ He had never heard such a purely vindictive shriek. ‘She shall not escape the consequences of this “marriage”!’ The word spat out, as if it were the vilest in the language. She stamped her foot loudly on the tiled floor — she was wearing wooden clogs over her shoes after her morning walk in the wet garden. All her jewels tinkled and clashed together with her shuddering fury. She threw her gloves deliberately at Robert’s head and they plopped harmlessly on the floor.
Horrible spectres from the past were conjured. The Grey girl had married Seymour, Admiral Tom Seymour’s nephew, in secret, at dead of night, like Queen Katherine Parr had done that May morning at Chelsea. Now she was pregnant. She had dared to do what Elizabeth could not, would not — supposing she, the Queen, had married Robert secretly in some church nearby Nonsuch, on the downs, what harm would this have done to England? Lady Katherine was heir to England’s throne. Worse, she was defiant, in love. How dared she defy Elizabeth, how dared she share her Tudor blood and be so irresponsible. How dared she be in love and marry! A clandestine marriage!
‘The Bell Tower!’ Elizabeth hissed.
Robert stared at her and began in part to understand. At least he knew that much of her venom was explicable. The Bell Tower — yes, there, to look out from the leads, to see what Wyatt had seen, what Elizabeth had seen, and remember her sister Jane, who had brought England to civil war, and married a Dudley.
The Queen was beside herself, shaking like a reed, her face ugly as a witch ill-wishing. Suddenly she moved, like a terrier on a rat, grabbed an inkpot, and hurled it. Robert ducked instinctively, but she had not aimed at him this time. It hit a chair, and the ink spilled on the wooden seat, splashed in great gouts down the legs, dripped from the edge onto the floor. Elizabeth stood watching, still now, as still as death. The shining spreading black, the dribbling ink, the pool below. Too like the block, too like the sight the Bell Tower showed. She was sick at heart.
They left Ipswich the next day, the Queen bound for Essex and Lady Katherine for the Tower. At Lord Morley’s house, Elizabeth heard that Mary Stewart had landed in Scotland. So she had come home, in the fog and wet, brave and beautiful and tall as a tree, to the admiration of all. It would be short-lived. John Knox and his henchmen snarled like dogs. Elizabeth had a brief sisterly feeling for her. So many feelings invaded her when thinking of Mary. Sympathy, jealousy, hope for trust, suspicion, the unsheathing of a sword both to attack and defend. All too sisterly, as Elizabeth had good cause to know.
The past walked with Elizabeth more than she could bear. She celebrated her birthday this year at Hatfield, on the Eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, though the feast was no longer observed. Here at Hatfield she had passed so many dripping summer days, and so many golden ones too. This was where she had suffered calumny on her own virginity, where she had suffered over Tom Seymour, and forgotten him. But not quite. Here, she could scarcely bear to look at Robert, yet neither could she bear him to be out of her sight. She treated him badly sometimes, she knew, and sometimes grieved over her sharp words and was contrite, but sometimes she wanted so fiercely to injure him as if revenging herself on an enemy, that she was afraid. Always some devil in her led her to bait him. He gave back as good as he got, though, as far as he dared. She would have cared less for him if he had not.
As if by some uncanny influence from the past, while she was at Hatfield Elizabeth began to feel ill. Her arms and legs and face became puffy, with signs of the old disease which had swollen her like a watery pumpkin all those years ago when she was twenty. Only eight years, but so long. When she had been taken to the Tower, she had still been ill and weak. Of Lady Katherine Grey, soon to bear a child in those dismal rooms in the Bell Tower, she would not, could not, think.
***
It was said that before the death of young Francois II, France had been ruled by three Kings, the sickly boy, his uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the Cardinal’s brother, the Duc de Guise. At the end of October Elizabeth entertained these great men, the Guise brothers, and the old Constable Montmorency again, at Whitehall. She had allowed them passports, so with a train of a hundred French nobility they were able to travel home from Scotland on dryish land as far as Dover. These were still the most powerful men in France, though the loss of their niece Mary from the throne had opened up a treacherous future. They must be nobly entertained.
Elizabeth herself devised a mask for their pleasure. She chose for subject the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. The French, who must be well aware that Mary was in all probability a virgin herself, her young husband having been by repute incapable, and had just delivered her into the hands of the ravening Scots, should appreciate that. The Maids of Honour, and a few others, were to be the maskers. In the Great Hall a set of magnificent tapestries was put up, illustrating the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, and on the woven examples were modelled costumes for the Maids, antique draperies, all white, so that they would appear like the figures come down from the wa
ll, breathed into life. Elizabeth would sit, with the Guise brothers and Montmorency, on a dais in front of the great Holbein mural of her father, so no one could forget his might or that she was his daughter.
Most of the lights in the Hall were extinguished as the mask began, so only the girls’ procession was illumined by their torchbearers and the five winking lamps of those who were wise. They moved across the floor like will-o’-the-wisps, as if weightless, in floating white. Lord Robert, catching, found the effect as eerie as it was beautiful. The Queen had seemed to want to conjure spirits, to bewitch beholders. The Virgin Queen and her five Wise Virgins — he was sorry for the five Foolish who were shut out. One of the Wise caught Robert’s eye. She always caught his eye and she was catching French eyes by the dozen now. Sir Francis Knollys’s daughter Laetitia was soon to be married to Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford. Lettice — no one called her by her full name — was one of the Queen’s favoured Boleyn cousins. She was twenty-one and conspicuously unsuited to play the part of a virgin, wise or foolish, though with a father like Sir Francis her chastity would be strictly guarded. But he could not guard now against the glimpse of an ankle, revealed by a slide of white, the outline of a breast, all shadowed with a crescent rim of light, as an arm was raised. An arm of slim but shapely contours, trailing draperies. A lamp held high, lighting rich russet hair spangled with gold.
The maskers came gracefully among the guests, inviting them to dance, and the Queen led out the Duc de Guise. Elizabeth dripped with pearls like the morning dew; she was all in white and silver gauzy stuff, so her outline seemed to blur and shift — a veil upon the moon tonight. Later, when the French had been honoured, Robert had his turn, and danced with the Queen in their usual brilliant partnership, so that all fell back to watch them. After that, he contrived to dance with Lettice Knollys.
None But Elizabeth Page 20