He draped her in the pearls. They lay, cool yet silkily warm against her neck. She let them pour into her lap, fondling them. Robert, looking at her, knew that after dallying a while with temptation she would buy.
‘Queen of the May this morning,’ he said, ‘Queen of love this evening!’
Elizabeth preened. Venus wore pearls. She forgot she was thirty-four and no Venus, though striking enough in her way. Her Robin was still good for her.
A cold wind rattled the windows. It was a chilly May Day. Mary Stewart lay prisoner in the island fortress of Lochleven. Far in the north, far away in Scotland — did the cold wind rattle her prison windows, and whip the water of the lake?
‘Tell the Earl of Moray,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that I accept the price he named.’
Business having been done, one half of the moral dilemma was solved. The other remained, a cause which Elizabeth firmly espoused. Mary must regain her throne if not her pearls. A Queen must not be kept a prisoner, as a Princess had once been.
Just as Elizabeth wished, the Queen of Scots escaped from her prison the day after her pearls were sold. Two weeks after this quite a different escape was made. Mary flew like an albatross across the border, coming to rest, as had her pearls, upon the neck of her sister Queen.
‘The Queen of Scots has fled her realm in a borrowed petticoat!’
‘With her hair cut off and her skirts kilted to her knee like in some ballad singer’s tale!’
Queen Elizabeth sat among her excited women, turning in her fingers a diamond ring. A large diamond cut in the shape of a heart. She had sent this ring to Mary as a token of friendship. Mary had sent it back as if it were a talisman which could not fail to summon aid.
‘So she is now in my realm,’ Elizabeth said, ‘and would like to borrow my petticoat.’
‘A petticoat,’ said Ann, Countess of Warwick, as she pinned a nosegay of spring flowers to the Queen’s shoulder, ‘is insufficient to clothe a woman.’
‘What is sufficiency?’ Elizabeth stood up. ‘You would do better, Ann, to gird me with a sword.’
But Judith had not faced enemies in her own camp. Elizabeth faced her Privy Council in a minority of one. A tableful of men, grave, bearded men of various ages, shapes, sizes and degrees of intellect, united in opposition. As a woman’s weapon the sword was useless. Yet ultimately she ruled the Council, and that was what she would do now.
‘In my opinion, there has been no legal abdication. The Queen of Scots, as a Queen regnant, should be treated as such, and as she is in my realm, surely it is my duty to receive her? She bombards me with letters begging for an interview.’ Just as Elizabeth had once begged her sister for a chance to plead her innocence from false accusation.
Mr Secretary Cecil looked down into his beard. ‘If Your Majesty supports her in that way, she would have the freedom to summon a French army to make war on Scotland. A French army on Your Majesty’s back doorstep. Moray governs Scotland de facto. To refute this would be to destroy ten years of work to achieve better relations with Scotland.’ Ten years of Cecil’s work. He did not look as if he would let his achievement go easily.
Elizabeth was outvoted.
‘My Lords of Leicester, Norfolk and Arundel are absent. This matter must be put to full Council. I shall call another meeting.’ Elizabeth did not give up easily either.
But she could not move them; even Leicester refused to support her. All they could agree upon was that there must be an inquiry into Mary’s innocence or guilt. Mary must have an opportunity to clear herself of false report before she could be restored to her throne. Meanwhile, she must be kept in polite custody. This unenviable task Elizabeth entrusted to her cousin’s husband Sir Francis Knollys, an upright, fair-minded man, whose eldest daughter Lettice was Mary’s age — an unfortunate comparison that Elizabeth chose to ignore as no credit to an upright father and mother. ‘She must eat nothing which has not been prepared by her own trusted servants. If she is taken with colic, I do not wish to be blamed.’ Elizabeth remembered her own fear of the food in those first days in the Bell Tower, and all the petty privations even a polite custody would inflict.
Mary was already resentful; the exchanged letters were beginning to be as unanswerable as Elizabeth’s attempts to communicate with her own sister had been. ‘I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against another,’ she herself had written, and the present persuasions were exceptionally evil.
The evidence of Mary’s guilt put before Elizabeth’s commissioners at York in October was nasty and incriminating beyond belief, and difficult not to believe. Mary swore that her love letters to Bothwell, found in a casket hidden under the bed of Bothwell’s tailor, were vile forgeries. Elizabeth indeed hoped that they were, so sordid and perverse a story of infatuation, plot, homicide, rape and enslavement did they tell. The Darnley marriage had been bad enough, but the Bothwell one unimaginably worse. Thank God Robert had not been inclined to rape like the scandalous Bothwell. Cecil’s view of Mary, aside from the abuse, was similar to that of John Knox. While this fact disgusted Elizabeth, she knew that Mary’s behaviour was inexcusable in the sight of God and man. In an ordinary woman reprehensible enough, but in a Queen inexcusable.
*
Elizabeth found herself suspicious of her commissioners, debating the guilt of Mary far away in the north. She had never been to York. Indeed she had never been further north than Lincolnshire, and the north scarcely began until the Humber was crossed. The places Mary was held in — Carlisle, Bolton Castle — were mere names, conjuring only bleak, hidden places where no Tudor monarch had found loyalty.
The church bells in Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmorland had rung to celebrate Mary’s escape from imprisonment and, even more, her arrival in England. The English Catholics, whose stronghold was the north, rejoiced, lit bonfires, came to pay court to Mary as if she were a Princess of England. In Elizabeth’s ears the bells rang for danger with clashing, urgent clamour, as they did when warning of raiders riding over the border.
‘We wish for our Elizabeth,’ the bells had said to her that long russet autumn at Hatfield when she had been twenty-five years old and waiting to gain a kingdom, the same age as Mary was now, she who had already lost her kingdom. Would the bells now call for Mary, the old names fatally reversed?
Ten years of peace, as Mr Cecil had said, and he was right when he said that it could not last for ever. Mary was already writing to Elizabeth’s arch enemies, the Pope, the French and Philip of Spain. Ah — Philip — the game of Prisoners’ Base was now being played by different players. The English Catholics wished to be rid of their Protestant Deborah. Some had been heard to brag that Philip’s general, the Duke of Alva, would pay his troops in Cheapside and go to Mass in St Paul’s by Candlemas. Alva’s troops, the instrument of Spanish terror who raped and roasted babies and pregnant women. Elizabeth had spoken to Dutch refugees, heard of sufferings no nation calling itself Christian should inflict on another. God defend England from that! If the English Catholics had their way, Elizabeth would be proclaimed a bastard again and Mary Stewart Queen of England. A bastard as she had been at five years old, without an undarned petticoat to her name. She would face the Tower again, and, inevitably, the block. Would she too walk to death on Tower Green, where her mother’s blood had nourished the weeds springing in the gravel?
Elizabeth, hounded by fear, and the galloping ghosts from the past, turned at bay like the hunted hind…
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, although I seem tame.
Caesar’s daughter. No one should forget that. She summoned all her weapons of wit, wisdom and experience and knew that she must attack.
Mary’s destiny, as Mr Cecil had observed, seemed to be for marriage. Now she was menacingly eligible again, for the Pope would be only too willing to grant a divorce from the exiled Bothwell. Who would be the first to bid for her? Elizabeth must be vigilant to cheat that destiny.
The inquiry at Y
ork adjourned without reaching any satisfactory verdict. Mary was now being held at Tutbury in Staffordshire, a captive in fact if not in name, and her letters had become increasingly irate, injured and unanswerable. Elizabeth had compromised herself, as all monarchs must do sooner or later. Before her commissioners came home, Mary had sounded out a suitor, someone in whom mere interest was a betrayal of Elizabeth. Her only Duke, Thomas Howard of Norfolk, her kinsman, became immediately suspect in her eyes, because she had trusted him, knowing his limitations, but respecting his good qualities also. But because he was essentially a little man, designed to function in a little world, his ambitions did not fit and swallowed him up.
*
‘There are those at this court who should observe the seventh commandment!’
Sunday morning chapel often caused the Queen to reflect upon the moral tone of her court. Today’s sermon had been upon John iv, the story of the woman of Samaria, from which parallels might be drawn with the Queen of Scots.
Elizabeth was walking between respectful people, hats in hands, bowing, kneeling, while she talked to the Earl of Leicester over her shoulder. The court, following, were always agog for what they could glean of these conversations. The Queen’s skirts, stiff and glistening with cloth-of-gold roses and honeysuckles, swished with a disapproving shhsh-ing as she walked.
‘How may that commandment apply to the single?’
‘Adultery is committed as much by the single seducer as by the partner seduced out of wedlock.’
This was not the first condemnation Robert had received. He determinedly kept sweet reason in his answers. Sometimes these answers without answer led quickly to a truce, sometimes to a running sore, and he resorted to diversions, presents, witticisms and withdrawals from court to bring them to terms. This time the lady in question was one of Elizabeth’s Howard cousins, Douglas, Lady Sheffield. The affair had begun in the summer when Robert had left the Queen upon her progress and gone on to the Earl of Rutland’s house at Belvoir. There he had encountered one of the most dazzling blonde women he had ever seen and she had the misfortune to have a dull husband.
‘Lord Sheffield is dead.’ Elizabeth was at times like a dog with a bone.
‘Yes.’
‘Some think he was poisoned.’
‘Some think the least fly that expires with its legs in the air on a Whitehall windowsill has been poisoned.’ She was not really accusing him of poisoning, merely being provocative.
‘My court is full of sinners,’ she sighed.
‘None knows that better than the Queen.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate my position, Robert.’
All the ploys, acid comment, barbed coyness, oblique questions, frosty mornings, thundery afternoons were familiar to Robert, and dealt with according to formula. Elizabeth would have scarcely recognized them. She only knew the compulsion to attack, to bait, to disdain. Jealousy had the reverse effect to its requirement; it drove away the closeness of love and affection. But she could not stand distance for long. A state of truce sooner or later asserted itself. Elizabeth set up Leicester in her expectations, was angry when he fell short of them, but always wanted to reinvest them again.
***
Elizabeth, lying in bed, burrowed further under the dove-soft sheets and swan’s-down coverlet, trying to enter that darkest core of dark. Her head felt as if it had been riven with lightning all down one side. New Year’s Day 1569 and it was raining. She had not yet inspected her gifts.
Roger Ascham was dead. He who had led her into the paths of learning, into the world of the occupied mind, the refuge from the vilenesses of life. Elizabeth cried gently under the covers, tears oozing from her eyes as if from wounds. Isolated, threatened, hunted by baying packs of men, egged on by that rival Diana. And now her friends deserted her for the arms of Death.
Kate Knollys was dying. Harry Hunsdon’s sister and Mary Boleyn’s daughter, only three years older than Elizabeth herself. A sad New Year for Sir Francis Knollys, doing his duty as guardian of the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth wondered wretchedly if she would ever see forty. It seemed as if she never could have a rest from fighting for her crown and life.
Danger and treachery lay not only in the unknown north, but at home within Her Majesty’s Privy Council itself. That impressive body of men who wagged their beards over a long table, dipped pens in ink, scraped their chairs, coughed and hummed and hawed and sometimes bawled and shouted like schoolboys in a football fight. Even Leicester, the one member whose loyalty she had taken for granted and whose betrayal hurt more than most, allied himself with the rest.
But Leicester’s sister did not. Mary Sidney still came to court but usually kept quietly to her rooms, never letting herself be seen without a mask or veil upon her face. A day or two after St Valentine, Mary Sidney asked the Queen for a private word.
‘Madam,’ said Mary, ‘we all know that men and women at court make bets on anything that moves, and on every flip of life’s dice, but I have recently heard of wagers on something more serious. I think Your Majesty should know.’
‘Upon who shall be Queen of England?’ enquired Elizabeth bitterly, for it seemed to her that her subjects aligned themselves in factions, and she was uncertain of her own support.
‘No, not that. But I have heard men bet on the probability of Mr Cecil doing Lenten penance in the Tower.’
Elizabeth had not expected this. She swore angrily. ‘How would they dare to do this?’
‘By presenting Your Majesty with a deed accomplished.’
‘The reasons?’
‘The embargo on Spanish trade after the ships with money for Alva’s paymasters were seized by us. The house arrest of the Spanish ambassador. Loss of trade and money in the City. It so happens that these grievances give the Council an excuse to be united. I think the real reasons for them wishing to be rid of Mr Cecil are more diverse.’
‘It amounts to a vote of no confidence in myself. Mr Cecil is the victim because he is my chief minister.’ Elizabeth had begun to pace up and down in agitation, driving her alarmed mind to formulate some plan of self-defence.
‘I thank God,’ she said, ‘for what they would undoubtedly call a woman’s indiscretion. If they all served me as well as some of their wives and sisters my task in governing this realm would be a great deal easier. How far is Robert embroiled in all this?’
‘Far enough,’ said Robert’s sister carefully. ‘But he would never stand against Your Majesty if he were confronted by your opposition and anger.’
‘Hmm. If I act now, to kill this plot, I think most of them will be of the same mind. I must show my hand first, with a sword in it!’
The Queen summoned a Council meeting for 22 February, Ash Wednesday, at which she intended to preside. Ash Wednesday was a dark day, so dark and dismal that the candles had to be lit in the morning. Rain streamed down the windows. The meeting began in haste, without Elizabeth.
The sound of raised voices came out to her as she approached; belligerent, hectoring, hostile voices, raised in concert. The noise was so great they did not hear her coming until she was over the threshold. An extraordinary sight met her eyes. Mr Secretary Cecil, who had survived confrontations with Henry VIII, Duke Dudley and Elizabeth herself, was on his knees.
This Privy Council, this collective windbag with as many opposing policies blowing around in it as a jester has jokes, had got Mr Cecil down on his knees. The only man in it who had a coherent policy to offer which was not formulated solely in his own interest. Because he was too clever for them, they chose to exert lordly force.
‘Policies that endanger the state… Too much aid to Protestant rebels in France — England cannot afford to alienate their Catholic majesties of France and Spain… Mishandling of the Queen of Scots situation…’ Hostile words of this kind had sent other men to the block. Elizabeth had heard of the fall of Thomas Cromwell who had served her father well. On his knees before the Council, that old thug Norfolk (this present Norfolk’s grandfather) yanking the Ga
rter collar from his neck.
The hostile words came to a lame halt as the Councillors realized the Queen’s arrival. If Elizabeth had been her father she would have raised meaty fists and knocked their heads together. Instead, she scared them with a presence of ice. She did not even waste words on them. Only one of them needed her words.
‘I,’ she said, ‘would pardon that — and more. Stand up Mr Secretary and sit in your usual place. There is only one present now to whom you may be called to kneel.’
In frozen silence they sat, while Cecil quietly did as he was told. It proved exactly as she had gambled; not one of them dared outright to cross swords with the Queen.
Afterwards came the excuses, the protestations of loyalty, the patching over of the cracks. Neither Elizabeth nor Cecil were deceived, they knew that the nest of serpents still lived and bided its time to strike.
*
‘Richmond grows the best fruit in England.’ The Queen was as proud as any good housewife and gardener. ‘The King my father had most of these trees planted, and so many new kinds of fruit and vegetables have been brought to England since his time.’
In the walled fruit gardens at Richmond, trees as orderly as soldiers were under royal inspection. How neat they were; an army of women with hoes waged unceasing war on weeds.
‘Kit, you can reach the cherries — pick me some.’ Royal command.
Christopher Hatton, whose large head with its bushy dark hair reached into the lower branches, put up a large white hand and picked. Eager male obedience. Elizabeth selected cherries he held out to her. She carried a basket lined with green fern and the cherries nestled prettily. She popped a couple into her mouth. ‘Carnation and Cherry Cluster,’ she said. Hatton nodded sagely. She had been giving a lesson on fruit varieties. She must have long mysterious talks with the gardeners when she went out for her walks in the early morning. If she were a farmer’s wife, she would supervise orchard and dairy with notable efficiency.
‘Leathercoats and Apple John, Nonpareil and Sops-in-Wine,’ she remarked as they crossed the apple orchard. The trees were loaded with hard green tennis balls.
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