‘Ambassador,’ I say quickly, embarrassed at Father’s neglect, ‘if my father promised assistance in your war, I’m sure …’
‘Bella Francesca,’ Giavarina chuckles at me, his dark eyes dancing as he leads me over to a quieter corner. ‘How little you know of my world. Why would your father sacrifice his dear, fine English soldiers to the gaping jaws of the Turk? How dearly our republic would appreciate his assistance but I am under no illusions. See how I wander the banquet alone? Look with me.’ Giavarina guides my vision around the room where the MPs and courtiers attempt to stroll off their supper, mingling, forming knots and breaking out of them in a swirl of copper-coloured candlelight.
‘See your brother-in-law General Fleetwood at the window, talking with his ally, the French ambassador Bordeaux. And there, look: Signor Thurloe sits with our friends from the Swedish embassy, telling them no doubt of his great plans for a league of Protestant nations. They each speak where their sympathies lie. General Fleetwood,’ he nods again at Charles, ‘who believes in this alliance with France so many years in the making. England and France allied! Such a thing … And there General John Lambert, your latter-day “Hammer of the Scots”.’
Giavarina takes my eyes now to the tall, spare figure of Lambert, who is stalking alone around the edge of the room as if he is patrolling one of his encampments. ‘Lambert, who hates France and would ally with Spain. And all the while England makes enemies of its most natural allies in the Dutch Republic and Denmark, all in the name of protecting its precious trade in the Baltic. Is it any wonder that your father will not discuss foreign affairs in public at court, or that he will not entertain me? His Council is so riven with disagreement. It is the Lord Protector who must achieve the daily feat of keeping them together and, through them, keep the army and your Parliament from coming to blows. But there are more storms to come, mark my words. It takes an outsider at the court to see it.’
Beside us a curl of smoke spirals from a guttering candle before a liveried footman pounces to replace it, hot wax splashing onto his white gloves. I catch the first discordant notes of the orchestra tuning their instruments on the dais at the far end of the hall.
‘You do not think much of the Council members, Ambassador?’ I ask quietly, leaning close to him so he catches my words. I am so used to hearing these great men praised to the skies: tales of Major-General Lambert – second only to Father in power and popularity – and his brilliant conquest of Scotland; stories of Charles’s ruthless ruling of Ireland; and accounts of Lord Commissioner Nathaniel Fiennes’s efforts at negotiating a peace with the king. It is refreshing, if unnerving, to listen to the ambassador’s frank views.
Giavarina tuts into his wine cup. ‘Not one of these men is a true diplomat, not one understands the subtlety of our craft. Not one understands where England could place itself in the world if it chose to.’
‘And is that not then the role of my father?’
‘Exactly, my dear. The role of a king – though I know this too is the cause of great disagreement within your government. Your father tried to mediate between the Council factions several years ago, with that pitiful compromise fighting Spain in the Caribbean. The Western … I forget.’
‘Design. The Western Design,’ I answer.
‘Precisely.’ He gives me a little bow. ‘And now, after many lives lost, England clings on by her fingertips to some small godforsaken diseased island called Jamaica which the Spanish will doubtless retake at any moment. Foreign affairs require leadership and the making of decisions. And I hope soon that your father will begin to make them – for England’s sake, not mine, you understand. You truly will be a principessa when that happens.’
And what if I become a princess in name as well, I wonder, as I search the Italian’s bronze face for further wisdom. What would this mean for my freedom?
‘Signor Giavarina.’ The wine-soaked voice of Bulstrode Whitelocke slides over us as he approaches on light, prancing feet. ‘My friend, you must cease boring the most beautiful woman in the room with your chatter. Highness.’ He bows and grins at me.
Giavarina smiles at him. Bulstrode Whitelocke – lawyer, MP, Commissioner of the Great Seal and Father’s great friend – was once an ambassador himself, representing Father at the court of Christina, the former Queen of Sweden. Because of this, I know Giavarina has more respect for him than most of the politicians of our court. I myself am pleased to see my friend Bulstrode who, though he has known me since I was a child, has never treated me as one; we have long had the measure of each other.
‘I was merely restating that Christendom itself must be defended,’ Giavarina answers Bulstrode smoothly, without missing a beat. ‘Venice cannot be expected to keep the borders of Europe secure on her own. The Turks’ new Grand Vizier is giving them renewed fire and I do not see how we can hold the Dardanelles against them; it’s only a matter of time before the Ottomans will look to Greece, Austria and then who knows. And, for myself, I do not have the funds to wait at this court for many months more. His Highness must decide soon.’
His voice is smooth and congenial though his eyes darken under the hat which only he and the other ambassadors in the room are permitted to wear in Father’s presence: a symbol that they represent his only equals, the other heads of state.
‘I will speak again with His Highness and Secretary Thurloe, my friend,’ Bulstrode reassures him, his own uncovered head thick with waves of black hair that sway gently as he beckons to a servant to fill up Giavarina’s glass.
Keen to help smooth the conversation, I ask Bulstrode about Queen Christina, famed for her learning and love of the arts. Long a heroine of mine, Christina abdicated the Swedish throne and now travels around Europe collecting artists in what seems to me an impossibly glamorous fashion.
‘Did the queen really refuse to marry?’ I ask. ‘Give up her throne rather than be forced to marry where she did not wish to?’
Bulstrode smiles, his unusual coal-black eyes dancing in a face I cannot help thinking rather too small for his large features. I know well his love of gossip, flirtation and the chance to tell a witty anecdote.
‘Do you know, Highness, I heard Her Majesty say once that it takes greater courage to marry than to go to war.’
I laugh at that before sinking into more sober thoughts as I contemplate the campaign that lies before me. ‘Did she really? She thought women as brave as men?’
‘Indeed.’ Bulstrode strokes his narrow beard, thumb and index finger meeting at the point. ‘Though I liked to think her admiration extended to bridegrooms too as then my three marriages rendered me especially brave in her sight.’
He grins at his joke and waits for our laughter to trickle away before dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. Signor Giavarina and I lean towards him.
‘When I told Her Majesty I had had three wives,’ Bulstrode continues, ‘she asked me if I had had children by each. Then when I answered in the affirmative, do you know what she said to me? “Pardieu, vous êtes incorrigible!”’
We laugh heartily at this, Signor Giavarina too, his crusading warships momentarily forgotten. Flushed with my conversational success I look around, hoping to catch Mary’s eye, or those of my parents, but the only gaze I meet is that of Robert Rich, who smiles and raises his glass to me from across the room.
Robert comes to find me later after the concert of entertainment has finished, while I am still basking in the music. Master Hingston’s new compositions were sublime and every piece on the mixed programme – from the choral to the instrumental – held the vast room and its hundreds of listeners spellbound. Father was particularly delighted and his beams of pleasure, cheers and claps led the audience in its reactions. Of all the performances, it was that of the two boy trebles of the court that stirred me most, their voices calling out from the dais and swirling around the columns of the room like a pair of nightingales singing in a silent wood.
‘We must ask Master Hingston if we can learn that piece,’ I say to Mar
y as we sit with Dick’s wife Dorothy, eating lavender cakes in a pool of evening candlelight.
‘I would dearly love to hear that, Your Highnesses.’ Robert bows before us, flanked by some of the young Members of Parliament I saw him with earlier. They all look flushed with wine. I have no words to answer his, always caught off-guard by the courtesy Robert shows to me when others can hear.
Robert introduces his parliamentary colleagues and a conversation about the entertainment strikes up. I open my mouth to contribute but find Robert lowering himself into a chair on my other side, forcing me to turn away from the others as he speaks to me alone.
‘I have brought you some more potential suitors,’ he winks, nodding at the MPs now thronging around Mary and Dorothy. ‘Just tell me if you like the look of one of them and I’ll engineer a private conversation.’
I look at him coldly and he smiles back, helping himself to a cake. ‘Very well, Highness, I will confine myself to more polite topics of conversation. I think it is delightful that you and your sister should so enjoy your singing lessons. It is a charming way for young ladies to pass their time.’
‘But not young gentlemen?’ I ask, drawn as always into our discordant duet.
‘Oh no. Frightful waste of time, music. I have little interest in it.’
I gape in horror. ‘You cannot mean it! How could anyone dismiss one of the finest pleasures known to man or woman? My father would cast you from court for such heresy.’
He tilts his head to one side, a cheekbone catching the light from the great sconce beside us, his auburn hair glinting. ‘Well, I will admit that Hingston has a fine ear, even if I do not. The harmony produced by the countermelody of the first piece was exquisite and, in the last, the way the line of the bass viols mirrored that of the second treble voice quite transported me.’
I tut in irritation at his games. ‘You are confounding, sir. Do you delight in appropriating and professing opinions which you clearly do not hold?’
Robert grins. ‘A gentleman must have some occupation.’
‘At last!’ I exclaim. ‘Something on which we can both agree. And pray, tell me, what is your occupation to be? Besides drinking, playing billiards and posturing. I was raised among busy, industrious men – men who believed that honest, arduous work is the greatest way to honour God.’
I think of Father always toiling, thinking, planning. And of Harry learning at his elbow. Even Dick, for all his love of hunting and horse racing, was no shirker of hard work when it was allocated to him. What could this spoilt brat with his smooth hands and aristocratic vowels understand about work and responsibility?
‘Oh, it hardly matters,’ Robert laughs, though I catch the effort with which he attempts his casual tone. His levity angers me. I imagine life has always been a game for him, while every day of mine has felt precarious; we Cromwells know we could lose everything in a second.
‘You are right,’ I smile. ‘It hardly matters what you choose to do with your life when every option under heaven is laid at your feet.’ It is my turn to draw him out now.
‘Every option?’ He sits forward, looking at me intently. ‘You mean the ceremonial offices of a courtier where I run errands and process through the palaces in brocade? Or a seat in Parliament where I can sleep the afternoons away? Perhaps I should join the navy and sail off to the West Indies to join our General-at-Sea Robert Blake in harrying the Spanish treasure ships. I hear they’re seeking another new governor for Jamaica – I could die of plague like the last one. Or a commission in the army where I am forced to listen every day to the heroic war stories of the radical old veterans I would have to command?’
‘Ah.’ At last I think I begin to understand him – to discover his true nature as he challenged me to. ‘We come to the root of it. It is jealousy that you must overcome, not indolence.’
His mouth twitches. ‘Do enlighten me.’
I look down at the satin pink of my lap and twist the pearl bracelet at my wrist, steeling myself to speak my true understanding, as my father would do. ‘You are jealous of the extraordinary times that have just passed. Our fathers’ generation turned the world upside down, proved themselves on bloody battlefields, spoke, fought and died for their principles. You are sick of listening to men only a few years older than you talk of “their war”. You feel shut out of it; that anything you achieve, now you have come of age in peacetime, will pale by comparison. And that being so, you would rather not bother.’
Robert stares at me, all his former composure gone.
‘You speak harshly, my lady,’ he says at last, after taking a gulp of wine. ‘But the very fact that you imagine such feelings for me suggests you have some sympathy for them.’
‘Sympathy?’ I smile in my amazement. ‘How you can imagine that as a woman I could feel sympathy for any man at the lack of opportunities open to him is astonishing. Please tell me, sir, what chances I am likely to have to prove myself worthy of my father? Besides marrying a man of his choice, bearing children and passing my time with music and other hobbies you have identified as charming occupations for ladies though you count them a waste of your own time. Whereas you,’ I look at him, resplendent in a suit of red velvet, silk ribbons at his knees, perhaps only seeing him fully for the first time, ‘you can do whatever you wish with your life. What I wouldn’t give to be in your buckled shoes: a young nobleman with my life before me. Bright and vital. Vivid. Handsome, some might say. Clever – though you pretend otherwise. Charming, when you choose to be. Sympathy? No, sir, I have none for you.’
I stop, my mouth hanging open at the rashness of what I have said. I do not believe I have ever spoken to anyone besides my sisters in this way, my thoughts forming free and uncensored into words which pour from me without check. My heart races with a nervous excitement. I glance at Robert and see I have unsettled him. He smiles at me politely but I can see his mind working feverishly, weighing and storing my words so closely that he has no spare capacity for speech. We sit in silence for a minute, the room buzzing about us oblivious to our confessional.
‘So you too wish to rebel,’ Robert says at length, his voice much quieter now. ‘But how do we rebel against our parents when they rebelled against the world? If they who were the rebels are now the rulers, where does that leave us? The old rules don’t apply to us, yet we know not what the new rules are.’
I move his words around in my head like pieces of patchwork. He is right: how does our generation find a way to measure up to the previous one? What is left for us to achieve? Gradually the patchwork pieces settle and knit together in an answering pattern.
‘We don’t rebel against our parents,’ I begin slowly, as if I am carving each word from stone. ‘We take up their beliefs like a battle standard and advance them further even than they could have imagined. We take their victories for liberty and apply them to our own lives. The freedom to find fulfilment. The freedom to shape our futures. The freedom to choose whom we love.’ I think of Queen Christina choosing a life of her own outside marriage and of Katherine having no choice but to marry a man she had probably never spoken to on a whim of my father’s.
‘I cannot remember life before the war,’ I go on, ‘but my sister Bridget tells me that the war changed the lot of women: took them out of their kitchens and parlours and onto their battlements, into the printing houses and onto the streets around Parliament. This is a new age for women and I want my part of it.’ I pause, taken aback by the clarity of my thoughts and, even more so, by the fact that it is Robert Rich who has drawn them from me.
He smiles at me then. A broad, honest smile, not the smirk that usually curls his lips. ‘You are most enlightening, Lady Frances. I must confess to scant knowledge of modern women and how they think about such issues.’
His playfulness has returned and so I reach for mine in answer.
‘You do not discuss the views of modern women with your lady friends?’ I ask, my allusion to his dissolute lifestyle as pointed as a rapier.
‘Ha h
a!’ Robert laughs as his wine-flushed cheeks deepen in colour. ‘My lady friends, as you call them, concern themselves solely with the contents of my … purse.’
It is my turn to blush at that. ‘And you do not discuss such things with the women in your family?’ I ask quickly, keen to cover my embarrassment.
The smile fades from his handsome face. ‘No, I do not. My mother died when I was four. I only have a few, fleeting memories of her. Her smell, like woodland violets after a rain shower. A curl of her blonde hair dangling above me in the morning light. A sea shanty she used to sing to me.’ Robert is lost in thought for a moment before he pulls himself back, continuing quickly in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘And my stepmother takes as little interest in me as my father does. I have two half-sisters who I am fond of, but they are only little girls.’
I feel a rush of sadness for him, a sickness swelling within me at the thought of life without my own mother or sisters. I am struggling to find a reply adequate to his revelation, when Elizabeth appears before us, prompting Robert to spring to his feet and offer her his chair. She smiles at him gratefully, her swelling stomach just visible under the generous cut of Master Hornlock’s new dress now that she is in her fifth month of pregnancy. Without a word, Robert bows to us both and melts away into the crowd. As his crimson back disappears into a sea of candlelit colours that seems to reflect Rubens’ swirling heavens themselves, I lean back in my chair, my mind scrabbling to make sense of what has passed between us.
That night, while the court sleeps off the excitement of the day and the last revellers finally fall into their wine-cushioned beds in the early hours of the night, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Tower, Miles Sindercome kills himself with poison reportedly brought to him by his sister. I wake to the grim news, my own head sore with the poisonous effects of wine, and yet it gladdens my heart to think that he has escaped the worst of all possible deaths on the scaffold. Mary is even more forgiving; that night she adds Sindercome to our prayers. ‘He had a soul too,’ she says when I protest.
The Puritan Princess Page 7