I live quietly, I attend the castle chapel twice a day, walking there with the guards before and behind me. I read, I study, I sew, and I make music. There is nothing to do, but at least I am not on my knees to a tyrant who hates me.
I write to my sister Katherine that I, too, have married for love and I, too, meant nothing wrong by it but to be happy with a good man. I write that I, too, have offended the queen by this but that I hope that she will forgive me, and forgive Katherine, too. I give it to the commander of the castle but I don’t know if it will get beyond Cecil’s spies to my sister.
I write to Thomas Keyes. This is a harder letter. He is no poet like poor Ned Seymour. Our courtship was never one of words and pretty sayings. So I write briefly and I don’t expect anyone to deliver my letter to him. If I am writing only for the spies, it does not matter. Thomas does not need assurances of my love, nor I of his. We are lovers, we are married, we know each other’s heart. However brief the letter, he knows that I love him as passionately and as powerfully as the greatest poet, though the lines are short.
My dearest husband,
I am being held at the pleasure of Her Majesty at Windsor Castle. I hope she will pardon us both very soon, as soon as she learns that we meant no ill by our marriage and only hoped for our happiness.
I miss you very much. I love you very dearly. I do not regret our marriage (except that it has displeased the queen). You are the heart of a heartless world.—your wife, Mary
The trees in the park are as bright as the queen’s bronze, copper, and gold chains, and the flowers in the herb garden lose their color and their petals and become tatter-headed sticks. The summer ends in long warm days and every day I climb the circling steps to the top of the tower where I can see the river and the boats coming to and fro. Although I always look for it at sunset, the royal barge never comes for me.
The commander of the castle stops me as I walk back to my room one evening and says that I am to pack and leave the next morning.
“Am I released?” I ask him.
He bows his head to hide his embarrassment, so I know that I am not. “To stay with Sir William Hawtrey,” he says quietly. “A brief stay, I understand.”
“Why?” I ask bluntly.
He bows again. “My lady, they don’t tell me.”
“But why Sir William Hawtrey?”
He makes a helpless little gesture. “I know nothing more than that I am to escort you to his house.”
“It seems I am to know nothing, too.”
CHEQUERS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE,
AUTUMN 1565
It takes us all day to ride from Windsor, over the river and through the Chiltern Hills, and my happiness comes back to me as soon as I am on horseback and looking around at the green horizon, the stooks of straw in the fields, and the neat little villages where people come out to stare at the guards and at me, and my groom who rides beside me, and my maid who rides pillion behind one of the guards.
We carry no standard, so nobody knows that I am a prisoner of the queen. This is another sign of Elizabeth’s fears. She does not want the country to know that she has arrested yet another of her cousins for no good reason. From the very start of Katherine’s imprisonment people have demanded that she should be free, and complained that Margaret Douglas cannot be held because her son has married the queen’s rival. But I don’t expect anyone to call my name as they called for Katherine or called for Jane. There is no one who will ride to my rescue: my friends are all at Elizabeth’s court, in her power. My family is lost to me. My dearest and most trustworthy ally is my husband, and I don’t know where he is, nor how to get a letter to him.
Sir William Hawtrey, a good old man of nearly forty-five years, with his wealthy young wife standing behind him, greets me at the doorway of his handsome house of Chequers and takes me by the hand to lead me inside. He treats me with an odd mixture of deference—for I am sister to the only heir to the throne—and anxiety—for he has been forced to agree to keep me as his prisoner.
“This way,” he says pleasantly, leading me up the stairs to the northeast wing. He opens a door to a tiny room, big enough for a bed and a table and chair. At once, I recoil.
“Where are my rooms?” I ask him. “I cannot stay here.”
“The queen commanded it,” he says uncomfortably. “I think you are just staying for a night or two. There was no other room that was secure . . .” His voice trails away.
“Sir William,” I say earnestly, “I have done nothing wrong.”
“I am sure,” he says gently. “And so you are certain to be pardoned and recalled to court. This is just for a little while, a night or two.”
I look round. My maid hovers on the threshold; there is hardly room for her to serve me.
“Your maid will be housed nearby, and she will sit with you during the day, and serve your meals,” Sir William says. “You are to walk in the garden as you wish, for your health.”
“I cannot live like this,” I say.
“You won’t have to!” he assures me. “This is just for a short stay. I don’t doubt that she will forgive you, and you will return to court.”
He makes a gesture again, ushering me into the room, and I go in. I have a horror of him touching me. I hate to be pushed about, or lifted up. Nobody must ever think that they can just pick me up and place me where they want me to be without my consent. I go to the little window and pull up a stool so that I can stand high enough to look out over the parkland. It is beautiful, like Bradgate, like my home. Dear God, it feels like years and years since Jane and Katherine and I were children at our home.
I can see the sunset in the little square panes of my high window. It is a beautiful evening, the sun going down and the moon rising. I wish on the moon, as I have done since I was a little girl and my sister Jane told me that it was pagan nonsense and I should pray for my desires and not throw away my thoughts on vain wishing. The evening star sits like a little diamond on the horizon and I wish for my freedom on the star, too, and for Thomas on every star in the sky.
The tap and then the noise of the opening door behind me makes me turn. It is poor Sir William looking weary and troubled. “I just came to make sure that you had everything that you need.”
I nod my head without answering. It was a mean dinner, and he knows it. One of royal blood should be served with twenty courses. I ate tonight like a poor woman.
“I shall write to the queen and ask her to release me,” I say. “Will you take my letter and see that it gets to her?”
“I will,” he says. “And I will add a petition of my own. She must show mercy to you, and to your sister, and to your cousin Lady Margaret. And Lady Margaret’s younger son.”
I am alarmed for the little boy. “You can’t mean Charles Stuart? He cannot have been arrested? He’s only a child.”
His face is unhappy as he nods. “He’s being held in a private house in the North.”
“He’s only ten years old!” I exclaim. “His mother is in the Tower of London, his father and brother in Scotland—why would the queen not leave him at his home among his servants and friends? He’s not strong, and he is all alone in the world. He is no threat to anyone. He must be lonely and frightened as it is, all on his own at home. Why put him in a strange house and declare him a prisoner?”
There is a silence. We both know why. As a warning to all of us that the queen’s displeasure will fall on us and even on our children, even on innocent babies. As a warning to all of us that she is a Herod. She loves none of her kin until they are dead and she can honor them with a funeral. She likes none of her cousins anywhere but in prison. She loves them in the tomb.
Sir William shakes his head. “For sure, I pray that she will release all her cousins soon.”
I write to William Cecil to ask him to represent to Her Majesty that Katherine and I have never spoken one word of conspiracy against her, that—unlike the Queen of Scots or Lady Margaret—we have never spoken of our closeness to the throne. We have bot
h fallen in love, but this is no crime. We have married without her permission, but this is not illegal.
I get a brief unsigned note in reply saying that my sister and her little boy are well at Ingatestone, her elder son is with his grandmother at Hanworth, her husband still imprisoned in London. My husband, Thomas Keyes, is in the Fleet Prison. The anonymous author of the note says that the queen will be approached to release us all into more generous keeping—especially Thomas Keyes, who is very confined. The matter will be put before the queen “as soon as is convenient.”
I sit in my little room with the note in my hand for a long time before I come to my senses and thrust it into the embers of the fire. I understand that the queen is still in such a vile mood that nobody dare suggest anything to her, not even William Cecil. I know something else—which I knew already—that she has no kindness or generosity to me or to my sister. And now I know that Thomas is suffering for me. I wonder exactly what the writer means by “very confined.” I am afraid that they have put Thomas into a small room. There are cellars in the Fleet Prison that are low and damp. The rats run across the floor. Have they put my handsome big-boned husband in a cage?
He will be shamed, I know, to be imprisoned in the Fleet Prison—the common jail for criminals, forgers, and drunkards. When Sir William comes the next day, before the serving of my poor dinner, I ask him if he has any news of Thomas Keyes.
I recognize his anxious look now. His gaze goes to the floor, his face folds into lines of worry, he touches his silvery gray hair. “I have no news, I have only heard gossip,” he starts.
“Please tell me,” I say. I can feel a pain extending from my belly to the back of my throat and I realize this is grief and longing. I love Thomas and I have been his undoing. I never thought that I would wish that we had not married, but I will learn to wish it, if he is suffering for my sake.
“Please tell me everything you know, Sir William.”
“They have put him in the Fleet Prison,” he says. “But at least winter is coming and the plague season is past us.”
So the letter is true, as I knew it was. Thomas’s prison is on the River Fleet, the dirtiest river in London. It will be damp and bitterly cold in winter. Prisoners have to pay for their own firewood, for blankets for their bed. If Thomas’s family do not send him money and food, he will starve. He’s not a young man; he will get sick, held in close confinement there.
“They have given him a very small cell,” Sir William says very quietly. He glances around my little room, the small space either side of the bed, the table and chair tucked into the corner, the small high window and the cramped interior. “Of course, he is a very big man.”
I think of Thomas as I first saw him, standing tall before the great gate of Whitehall Palace, his thumbs tucked in his shining leather belt, his broad shoulders set square, his towering presence, his grace. For a big man he is light on his feet, a quick thinker. I remember how he smiles when he sees me, how he drops to one knee to talk to me.
“How small is his room?” I can’t imagine what Sir William is telling me. “How small exactly?”
He clears his throat. “He can’t stand up in it,” he says reluctantly. “He has to bow over. And he is too long for it as well. He can’t lie in his bed stretched out. He has to fold up.”
I remember Thomas, his feet sticking out of the foot of his bed. He is nearly seven feet tall. They have not imprisoned him; they are crushing him.
“He will be in pain,” I say flatly.
“And they don’t feed him,” he says, shamefaced. “He is hunting game and little birds with a slingshot from his cell window so that he has meat to eat.”
I put my hand to my mouth to hold back a retch. “It is a death sentence,” I say quietly.
Sir William nods. “I am so sorry, my lady.”
So, she has won. I will deny my marriage and beg her for pardon like a slave. She can have me as her court dwarf, as her eunuch. If she will release Thomas before he is crippled, I will agree never to see him again, and never mention his name. I write to William Cecil a letter in which I humble myself to the ground. I beg for forgiveness as if I am a sinner of the most vicious disposition. I say I would rather die than displease her. I sign my maiden name, my old name, Mary Grey. I do not mention Thomas. I show that he is nothing to me, that I have forgotten him, that our marriage never was. And then I have to wait. I have to wait to see if she is generous in total victory, though she has never been generous before.
CHEQUERS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE,
WINTER 1565
Agnes Hawtrey has no great kindness for me, since my keep comes out of her housekeeping, and her neighbors who visit her for Christmas cheer may not meet me. She gains nothing from having me in her house; she cannot even exhibit me. But since I am the only person other than her old aunt and cousin who would appreciate the gossip that she hears from London, she has to come to me, for she is bursting to speak.
“I have to tell you,” she says. “I have to tell someone—though you must never tell my lord, nor anyone, that I have spoken with you about the queen.”
“I won’t hear anything treasonous,” I say quickly. “I cannot listen.”
“This isn’t treason and it’s general knowledge,” she says quickly. “Lord Robert Dudley has proposed marriage to the queen and she has agreed to marry him at Candlemas!”
“No!” I say. “You must have heard it wrong. I would have sworn she would never marry him, nor anyone.”
“She will! She will! They are to marry at Candlemas.”
“Where did you hear this?” I am still skeptical.
“It’s widely known,” she says. “Sir William told me himself, but I also had it from a friend of mine who has a cousin in service to the Duke of Norfolk, who swore that the marriage must never take place but cannot prevent it. Oh!” She suddenly starts as the thought comes to her. “What about you? If she marries, will she release you?”
“There is no reason why she should not release me now,” I say. “I am hardly a rival to her for Lord Robert’s affections. But certainly, if she is married and if she were to have a son, there would be even less reason to keep me confined or my sister. If she marries, perhaps she will allow her ladies-in-waiting to marry, too.”
“What a wedding it will be!” she exclaims. “Surely, she will have a pardon for prisoners for her wedding.”
“Candlemas,” I say, thinking of Thomas, cramped in his cold cell, lying on the damp floor, starved. “That’s not till February.”
CHEQUERS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE,
SPRING 1566
There is no Christmas feasting for me at Chequers. I am afraid that there is no joy for my sister at Ingatestone, nor for her husband in London at Sir John Mason’s house. Perhaps Teddy at Hanworth gets a fairing from his grandmother for Christmas, perhaps a gingerbread man; but he will know by now that he will never get a Christmas blessing from his mother or father. I know that my husband, Thomas, will be desperately cold and starved. As the weather grows colder and it snows in January I think of him, bent over his little window, peering out to see if he can catch a sparrow for the morsel of meat on its little bones. I expect he traps and eats rats. I think of him sitting over a tiny fire of kindling and trying to get warm. I think of him hunched in his bed at night, and the strange agony of never being able to stretch out, standing all day with his shoulders bowed, sleeping with his legs folded up.
I hear that there is little joy in the court in London either. Elizabeth has been thrown down into a jealous despair at the news from Edinburgh that her rival queen and cousin is with child. Mary Queen of Scots and her young husband, Henry Lord Darnley, are about to give Scotland a royal heir, and England yet another child with a claim to Elizabeth’s throne. When Sir William tells me this, I have a rare moment of being glad that I am far from court. I cannot imagine the torment that the ladies-in-waiting will suffer at Elizabeth’s hands if Queen Mary has a boy. I so wish I could be with Katherine and hear her giggle at the thought o
f it. As fast as Elizabeth denies her heirs, we give birth to new ones. It would be funny if it were not so bitter.
Robert Dudley remains confident that Elizabeth will marry him at Candlemas, according to her sworn word; but January comes and goes and then Candlemas passes him by, without Elizabeth’s consent. I don’t know how she puts him off—probably with another promise or another convincing delay—but her chaplain preaches a sermon that Candlemas no longer exists, it is now a heresy, so perhaps Robert’s betrothal day disappears with the old tradition.
Elizabeth’s irritable rivalry turns to fear when Queen Mary announces that she is the rightful Queen of England. The question of who should be named as heir to Elizabeth is suddenly made irrelevant as Queen Mary declares Elizabeth to be a usurper. She has the support of the new pope, Pius V, to make such a claim, and so all of Europe turns against Elizabeth. The Spanish support Queen Mary for her faith; the French support her for family reasons; and half of England would rise for her if she came over the border at the head of a papist army. She could lead a holy war into the heart of England and win the throne by right and with the blessing of the papist Church. Of course, all I think, as I am allowed into the icy garden for a short half-hour walk, is that my offense and Katherine’s offense are diminished even more in comparison with the declaration of war from Queen Mary. But I know that the announcement will have plunged Elizabeth into jealous terror. She will not be able to think of anything else. She will not speak of anyone else. She will have mercy for no one.
I write to William Cecil, reminding him that Katherine and I have done nothing to further our claim to be Elizabeth’s heirs, that we will never claim our rights. That we are Protestants, coreligionists to him and to the queen, that if she is threatened by papist cousins, she can turn to us for our friendship; she can show everyone that she supports our shared religion. We can stand beside her, before the court. We can support her claim to the throne in the country. At the very end, I write that I beg him—if nothing else—to allow Thomas Keyes a bigger cell and permission to walk outside.
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