Elizabeth’s face was peaked with the loss of him. ‘It’s not a good day’s work done; your congratulations are too early,’ she said sulkily. ‘It is a sacrifice I have to make fresh, every day. It was not the work of one day, Kat, every single day of my life I have to live without him and to know that he is living without me. Every morning I wake and know that I may not smile at him and see him look at me with love. Every night I lie down to sleep aching for him. I don’t see how to bear it. It has been fifty-one days since I sent him from me, and still I am sick with love for him. It does not ease at all.’
Kat Ashley looked at the young woman that she had known from girlhood. ‘He can be your friend,’ she said consolingly. ‘You don’t have to lose him altogether.’
‘It’s not his friendship I miss,’ Elizabeth said bluntly. ‘It’s him. The very person of him. His presence. I want his shadow on my wall, I want the smell of him. I can’t eat without him, I can’t do the business of the realm. I can’t read a book without wanting his opinion, I can’t hear a tune without wanting to sing it to him. It’s like all the life and colour and warmth has bled out of the world when he is not with me. I am not missing my friend, Kat. I am missing my eyes, I can’t see without him. Without him I am a blind woman.’
The doors opened and Cecil came in, his face grave. ‘Sir William,’ Elizabeth said without much warmth. ‘And bringing bad news, if I judge you rightly.’
‘Just news,’ he said neutrally, until Kat Ashley stepped away from the two of them.
‘It’s Ralph Sadler,’ he said shortly, naming their agent in Berwick. ‘He sent our money, a thousand crowns of it, to the Lords Protestant, and Lord Bothwell, a turncoat Protestant serving the regent Mary of Guise, intercepted him and stole it. We can’t get it back.’
‘A thousand crowns!’ She was appalled. ‘That’s nearly half of all the money we raised for them.’
‘And we were right to do so. The Lords Protestant are selling their very knives and plates to arm their forces. And who would have thought that Bothwell would dare betray his fellow lords? But we have lost the money, and, worse than the loss, the queen regent will know now that we are arming her enemies.’
‘It was French crowns, not English coins,’ she said rapidly, rushing to a lie. ‘We can deny everything.’
‘It came from our man, Sadler at Berwick. They can hardly doubt it was our money.’
Elizabeth was appalled. ‘Cecil, what are we going to do?’
‘It is sufficient reason for the French to declare war against us. With this, we have given them just cause.’
She turned and walked away from him, her fingers rubbing at the cuticles on her nails. ‘They won’t declare war on me,’ she said. ‘Not while they think I will marry a Hapsburg. They wouldn’t dare.’
‘Then you will have to marry him,’ he pressed her. ‘They will have to know that it is going ahead. You will have to announce your betrothal and name the date of your marriage: Christmas.’
Her look was bleak. ‘I have no choice?’
‘You know you have not. He is making ready to come to England right now.’
She tried to smile. ‘I shall have to marry him.’
‘You will.’
Robert Dudley came back to find the court in feverish mood. Duke John of Finland had arrived to represent his master, Prince Erik of Sweden, and was scattering money and promising favours to anyone who would support his proposal of marriage to the queen.
Elizabeth, sparkling with counterfeit gaiety, danced with him, walked and talked with the archduke’s ambassador, and mystified them both as to her real intentions. When Cecil drew her to one side the smiles fell from her face like a dropped mask. The news from Scotland was grim. The Lords Protestant were encamped before Leith Castle, hoping to starve out the regent before reinforcements arrived from France; but the castle was impregnable, the queen regent inside was well-supplied, and the French would be coming soon. No-one trusted the Scots to hold the siege. They were an army for a speedy attack and victory, they had no discipline for a long war. And now everyone knew that it was a war, not some petty rebellion. It was a full-blown, perilous war and none of the court’s brittle gaiety could conceal its anxiety.
Elizabeth greeted Robert pleasantly but coolly, and never invited him to be alone with her. In return, he gave her a slow, sweet smile and kept his distance.
‘Is it all over between you for ever?’ Mary Sidney asked him, glancing from the queen seated very straight on her chair, watching the dancing, to her brother’s dark gaze, watching Elizabeth.
‘Doesn’t it look like that?’ he asked.
‘It’s obvious that you no longer seek each other out. You are never alone with her any more,’ she said. ‘I wondered what you were feeling.’
‘Like death,’ he said simply. ‘Every day I wake and know that I will see her and yet I cannot whisper in her ear, or touch her hand. I cannot tempt her away from her meetings, I cannot steal her away from others. Every day I greet her like a stranger and I see the pain in her eyes. Every day I hurt her with my coldness and she destroys me with hers. It is as bad being away from court as it is being near her. The coldness between us is killing us both and I cannot even tell her that I pity her.’
He glanced briefly at his sister’s aghast face and then he looked back at the queen. ‘She is so alone,’ he said. ‘I see her holding herself together by a thread. She is so afraid. And I know that, and I cannot help her.’
‘Afraid?’ Mary repeated.
‘She is afraid for her own life, she is afraid for her country, and I imagine she is utterly terrified that she is going to have to take us into war with the French. The old Queen Mary fought the French and they defeated her and destroyed her reputation. And they are stronger now than they were then. And this time the war will be on English soil in England.’
‘What will she do?’
‘Delay as long as she can,’ Robert predicted. ‘But the siege has to break one way or another, and then what?’
‘And what will you do?’
‘Watch her from a distance, pray for her, miss her like a mortal ache.’
In the middle of November Robert’s question was answered. The worst news came: the French queen regent’s forces had stormed out of the trap of Leith Castle and thrown their Protestant tormentors back to Stirling. The regent, for her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, held Edinburgh once more, and the Protestant cause in Scotland was utterly defeated.
Winter 1559–60
Amy travelled on the cold, wet roads back to Stanfield Hall, her girlhood home in Norfolk, for the winter season. The skies arching above the flat landscape were grey with rain clouds, the land beneath was brown speckled with grey flints, as drab as homespun and as poor. Amy rode through the cold with her hood up and her head down.
She did not expect to see Robert again before Christmas, she did not expect to see him at any time during the twelve days of the Christmas feast. She knew that he would be engaged at court, planning the festivities, organising the masques, the players, the parties and the hunting, for the court was determined to celebrate the winter feast, thinking, but not saying aloud, that it might be their last with Elizabeth as queen. She knew that her husband would be constantly at the side of the young queen: her lover, her friend, her intimate companion. She knew that whether they were lovers or whether they were estranged there was no-one in the world for Robert but Elizabeth.
‘I don’t blame him,’ she whispered on her knees in Syderstone parish church, looking towards the blank space on the altar where the crucifix had once stood, looking to the plinth where a statue of the Virgin Mary had once raised her kindly stone hand to bless the faithful. ‘I won’t blame him,’ she whispered to the empty spaces that were all that Elizabeth’s new priest had left for the faithful to turn to in prayer. ‘And I won’t blame her. I don’t want to blame either of them, anyone. I have to be free from my own rage and my own grief, I have to say that he can walk away from me, he can go to another
woman, he can love her more than he ever loved me, and I have to release my jealousy and my pain and my grief from my heart. I have to let it all go, or it will destroy me.’
She dropped her head to her hands. ‘This pain in my breast which throbs all the time is my wound of grief,’ she said. ‘It is like a spear thrust into my heart. I have to forgive him to make it heal. Every time I pluck at it with my jealousy the pain breaks out afresh. I will make myself forgive him. I will even make myself forgive her.’
She lifted her head from her hands and looked towards the altar. Faintly against the stone she could see the outline where the crucifix had hung. She closed her eyes and prayed to it as if it were still there. ‘I will not go along with the heresy of divorce. Even if he was to come back to me and say that she had changed her mind and she wanted them to marry, even then I would not consent to it. God joined Robert and me together, no-one can put us apart. I know that. He knows that. Probably even she, in her poor sinful heart, knows that.’
In his grand rooms in Whitehall Cecil was labouring over the writing of a letter. It was addressed to the queen, but it was not in his usual brisk style of numbered points. It was a far more formal letter, composed by him for the Scottish Protestants to send to her. The circuitous route of the letter, from Cecil to Scotland, copied by the Scots lords in their own hands and sent back south urgently to the queen, was justified in Cecil’s mind because something had to shake Elizabeth into sending an English army into Scotland.
The French garrison at Leith had burst out of the siege and defeated the Scottish Protestants encamped before the castle. In the horror of his defeat the Earl of Arran, Cecil’s great hope in Scotland, was behaving most oddly: alternately raving with rage and lapsing into silence and tears. No feats of heroic leadership could be expected from poor James Hamilton, and no triumphant marriage with Elizabeth; the poor, sweet-faced young man was clearly half-mad and his defeat was pushing him over the brink. The Scottish lords were leaderless, on their own. Without Elizabeth’s support they were friendless too. What was a retreat now, would be a rout when the French reinforcements landed, and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, newly arrived from Paris, frantic with fear, warned that the French fleet was massing in all the Normandy ports, the troops were armed and would set sail as soon as there was a favourable wind. The ambassador swore that the French had no doubt that they would first conquer Scotland, and then march on England. They had no doubt at all that they would win.
Your Grace,
Cecil wrote for the Scots.
As a fellow religionist, as an ally who fears the power of the French, as a neighbour and a friend, we beg you to come to our aid. If you do not support us, we stand alone against the usurping French, and there can be no doubt that after Scotland falls, the French will invade England. On that day, you will wish that you had helped us now, for there will be none of us alive to help you.
We are not disloyal to Queen Mary of Scotland, we are defying her wicked advisors, the French, not her. We are defying the regent Mary of Guise who is ruling in the place of our true Queen Mary. The regent’s countrymen, French troops, are already engaged, any treaty you have with the French is already broken since they have taken up arms against us, on our soil. The regent’s family are our sworn enemies, and yours.
If we had appealed like this to your father, he would have defended us and so united the kingdom, it was his great plan. Please, be your father’s true daughter and come to our aid.
You can add what you like,
Cecil wrote in a postscript to the Scots lords,
but take care that you do not sound like rebels against a legitimate ruler; she will not support an outright rebellion. If the French have murdered any women and children by the time you come to write, you should tell her of it, and do not stint in the telling. Do not mention money, give her good reason to think that it will be a swift and cheap campaign. I leave you to tell her the current situation when this letter comes to you and you copy it and send it on. God speed, and God help you.
— And God help us all — he said fearfully to himself as he folded it up and sealed it in three places with a blank seal. He had left it unsigned. Cecil only rarely put his name to anything.
A new masque, planned by Robert, was to have the ever-popular theme of Camelot; but not even he, with his determined charm, could put much joy in it.
The queen played the spirit of England, and sat on the throne while the young ladies of her chamber danced before her and the players came later with a specially written play to celebrate the greatness of Arthur’s England. There was an anti-masque of characters who threatened the golden glory of the round table, let no-one doubt that one of the signs of a great kingdom was the existence of its enemies, but they were thrown down without much difficulty; in Robert’s fictional England there was no sign of Elizabeth’s constant terror of war.
Elizabeth, looking around the court through the dancers, saw Robert and made herself look past him. Robert, standing near enough to the throne to be summoned, should she want to speak to him, saw her dark eyes go by him and knew that he had been caught gazing at her.
— Like a greensick boy — he said angrily to himself.
She looked once directly at him and gave him a faint smile, as if they were ghosts already, as if the shade of Elizabeth had dimly seen, through mist, the young man she had loved as a boy; and then she turned her head to Caspar von Breuner, the archduke’s ambassador, the ally that she must have, the husband she must marry, to ask him when he thought the archduke would arrive in England.
The ambassador was not to be diverted. Not even Elizabeth, with all her charm deployed, could bring a smile to his face. Finally he rose from his seat, pleading ill health.
‘See the trouble you have caused?’ Norfolk said sharply to Dudley.
‘I?’
‘Baron von Breuner thinks my cousin the queen unlikely to marry while she is openly in love with another man, and has advised the archduke not to come to England yet.’
‘I am the queen’s loyal friend, as you know,’ Dudley said disdainfully. ‘And I want nothing but what is best for her.’
‘You are a damned aspiring dog,’ Norfolk swore at him. ‘And you have stood in her light so that no prince in Europe will have her. D’you think they don’t hear the gossip? D’you think that they don’t know that you are all over her like the Sweat? D’you think they believe that you and she have called it off now? Everyone thinks that you have just stepped back for her to pick her cuckold, and no man of honour will have her.’
‘You insult her, I will see you for it,’ Dudley said, white with anger.
‘I may insult her; but you have ruined her,’ Norfolk threw back at him.
‘Because some archduke won’t come to pay court?’ Dudley demanded. ‘You are neither a true friend nor a true Englishman if you think she should marry a foreigner. Why should we have another foreign prince on the English throne? What good did Philip of Spain do us?’
‘Because she must be married,’ Norfolk said in a heat of rage. ‘And to royal blood, at any rate to a better man than a dog like you.’
‘Gentlemen.’ The cool tones of Sir Francis made them turn. ‘Noblemen indeed. The queen is looking your way, you are breaking up the pleasant harmony of the feast.’
‘Tell him,’ Norfolk said, pushing past Dudley. ‘I am beyond listening to this nonsense while my kinswoman is ruined and the country sinks without allies.’
Robert let him go. Despite himself he glanced at the throne. Elizabeth was looking towards him, the ambassador had left and in her concern for what her uncle was saying to the man she loved, she had not noticed his farewell bow.
The Scots Protestants’ letter, duly travel-stained and authentically rewritten, came to the queen’s hand at the end of November. Cecil brought it to her and laid it on her desk as she was prowling around the room, unable to concentrate on anything.
‘Are you ill?’ he asked, looking at the pallor of her skin and her restlessness.
/>
‘Unhappy,’ Elizabeth said shortly.
— That damned Dudley — he thought to himself, and moved the letter a little closer so that she would open it.
She read it slowly.
‘This gives you cause to send an army to Scotland,’ Cecil said to her. ‘This is an appeal by the united lords of Scotland for your help in resisting a usurping power: the French. No-one can say you are invading for your own ends. No-one can say that you are overthrowing a legitimate queen. This is your invitation from the legitimate lords, citing their justifiable grievances. You can say “yes”.’
‘No,’ she said nervously. ‘Not yet.’
‘We have sent funds,’ Cecil enumerated. ‘We have sent observers. We know that the Scots lords will fight well. We even know that they can defeat Mary of Guise, they threw her back right to the very shore of the sea at Leith. We know that the French will come, but they have not yet set sail, they are waiting for the weather to change. Only the wind stands between us and invasion. Only the very air stands between us and disaster. We know this is our moment. We have to take it.’
She rose from her desk. ‘Cecil, half the Privy Council warn me that we are certain to lose. Lord Clinton, the High Admiral, says he cannot guarantee that our navy could hold off a French fleet; they have better ships and better guns. The Earl of Pembroke, the Marquess of Winchester advise me against going into Scotland, your own brother-in-law, Nicholas Bacon, says the risk is too great. Caspar von Breuner warns me in secret that although he and the emperor are my friends, they are certain that we will lose. The French court laughs out loud at the thought of us trying to make war against them. They find it laughable that we should even dream of it. Everyone I ask tells me that we are certain to lose.’
Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Page 85
