Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘You must put aside thoughts of your own death,’ he said firmly.

  Surprisingly, Amy gave him the sweetest smile. ‘Father, it is my only comfort.’

  He felt, as he had felt before, that he could not advise a woman confronted with such a dilemma. ‘God must be your comfort and your refuge,’ he said, falling back on the familiar words.

  She nodded, as if she were not much convinced. ‘Should I give my consent to a divorce?’ she asked him. ‘Then he will be free to marry the queen, the scandal will die down in time, the country will be at peace, and I can be forgotten.’

  ‘No,’ the priest said decisively. He could not help himself, it was such a deep blasphemy against the church he still served in secret. ‘God joined you together, no man can put you asunder, even if he is your husband, even if she is the queen. She cannot pretend to be Pope.’

  ‘Then I have to live for ever in torment, keeping him as my husband but without his love?’

  He paused for a moment. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even if it earns me his hatred and her enmity?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Father, she is Queen of England, what might she do to me?’

  ‘God will protect and keep you,’ he said with a confidence he could not truly feel.

  The queen had summoned Cecil to her privy chamber at Whitehall, Kat Ashley was in one window bay, Robert Dudley behind her desk, a few ladies in waiting seated at the fireside. Cecil bowed politely to them before approaching the queen.

  ‘Your Majesty?’ he said warily.

  ‘Cecil, I have decided. I want you to sue for peace,’ she said rapidly.

  His glance flickered to Sir Robert, who smiled wearily but offered no comment.

  ‘The French ambassador tells me that they are sending a special commissioner for peace,’ she said. ‘I want you to meet with Monsieur Randan and find some way, some form of words that we can agree.’

  ‘Your Majesty …’

  ‘We cannot fight a long war in Scotland, the Scots lords will never maintain a long campaign, and Leith Castle is practically impregnable.’

  ‘Your Majesty …’

  ‘Our only hope would be for Mary of Guise to die, and though they say her health is poor, she is nowhere near death. And anyway, they say the same of me! They say that I am ground down by this war, and God knows, it is true!’

  Cecil heard the familiar tone of hysteria in Elizabeth’s voice and took a step back from her desk.

  ‘Spirit, we must have peace. We cannot afford war, and we surely cannot afford defeat,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Certainly I can meet with Monsieur Randan, and see if we can agree,’ he said smoothly. ‘I will draw up some terms and show them to you and then take them to him as he arrives.’

  Elizabeth was breathless with her anxiety. ‘Yes, and arrange a ceasefire as soon as possible.’

  ‘We have to have some sort of victory or they will think we are afraid,’ Cecil said. ‘If they think we are afraid they will advance. I can negotiate with them while we maintain the siege, but we have to continue the siege while we talk, the navy must maintain the blockade.’

  ‘No! Bring the men home!’

  ‘Then we will have achieved nothing,’ he pointed out. ‘And they will not need to make an agreement with us, since they will be able to do as they wish.’

  She was out of her seat and striding round the room, restless with anxiety, rubbing at her fingernails. Robert Dudley went behind her and put his arm around her waist, drew her back to her chair, glanced at Cecil.

  ‘The queen is much distressed at the risk to English life,’ he said smoothly.

  ‘We are all deeply concerned, but we have to maintain the siege,’ Cecil said flatly.

  ‘I am sure the queen would agree to maintain the siege if you were meeting with the French to discuss terms,’ Robert said. ‘I am sure she would see that you need to negotiate from a position of strength. The French need to see that we are in earnest.’

  — Yes — Cecil thought. — But where are you in all of this? Soothing her, I see that, and thank God that someone can do it though I would give a fortune for it not to be you. But what game do you seek to play? There will be a Dudley interest in here, if only I could see it. —

  ‘As long as the negotiations go speedily,’ the queen said. ‘This cannot drag on. The sickness alone is killing my troops as they wait before Leith Castle.’

  ‘If you were to go to Newcastle yourself,’ Dudley suggested to Cecil. ‘Take the French emissary with you and negotiate from there, at Norfolk’s headquarters, so that we have them completely under our control.’

  ‘And far away from the Spanish representative, who still seeks to meddle,’ Cecil concurred.

  ‘And close enough to Scotland so that they can take instruction from the queen regent, but be distanced from France,’ Dudley remarked.

  — And I shall be far from the queen so she cannot countermand me all the time — Cecil supplemented. Then the thought hit him: — Good God! He is sending me to Newcastle too! First her uncle, that he made commander of the Scottish border, and put in the front line of fighting, and now me. What does he think to do while I am gone? Supplant me? Appoint himself to the Privy Council and vote through his divorce? Murder me? —

  Aloud he said: ‘I would do it, but I would need an undertaking from Your Majesty.’

  Elizabeth looked up at him, he thought he had never seen her so drawn and tired, not even in her girlhood when she had faced death. ‘What do you want, Spirit?’

  ‘That you promise me that you will be faithful to our long friendship while I am so far from you,’ he said steadily. ‘And that you will undertake no great decision, no alliance, no treaty,’ – he did not dare to even glance towards Dudley – ‘no partnership until I come home again.’

  She, at least, was innocent of any plot against him. She answered him quickly and honestly. ‘Of course. And you will try to bring us to peace, won’t you, Spirit?’

  Cecil bowed. ‘I will do my very best for you and for England,’ he said.

  She stretched out her hand for him to kiss. The fingernails were all ragged where she had been picking at them, when he kissed her fingers he felt the torn cuticles prickle his lips. ‘God bring Your Grace to peace of mind,’ he said gently. ‘I will serve you in Newcastle as I would serve you here. Do you keep faith with me too.’

  Cecil’s horses and great train of soldiers, servants and guards were drawn up before the doors of the palace, the queen herself and the court arrayed to see him off. It was as if she were signalling to him, and to everyone else who would take careful note, that he was not being bundled north to get him out of the way, but being sent off in state and would be badly missed.

  He knelt before her on the stone step. ‘I wanted to speak to you before I left,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘When I came to your presence chamber last night they said you had retired and I could not see you.’

  ‘I was tired,’ she said evasively.

  ‘It is about the coinage. And it is important.’

  She nodded and he rose to his feet, gave her his arm and they walked down the palace steps together, out of earshot of his waiting train. ‘We need to revalue the coin of the realm,’ Cecil said quietly. ‘But it has to be done in utter secret or every beldame in the land will be trading coins away, knowing that they will be no good at the new value.’

  ‘I thought we could never afford it,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘We can’t afford not to do it,’ Cecil said. ‘It has to be done. And I have found a way to borrow gold. We will mint new coins and in one move, overnight, call in the old, weigh them and replace them with new.’

  She did not understand at first. ‘But people with stocks of coins will not have the fortune they thought they had.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cecil said. ‘It will hurt the people with treasuries, but not the common people. The people with treasuries will squeak but the common people will love us. And the people with treasuries are also merchants and
sheep farmers and venturers, they will get good value for the new coins when they trade abroad. They won’t squeak too loud.’

  ‘What about the royal treasury?’ she asked, alert at once to her own diminished fortune.

  ‘Your councillor Armagil Waad is dealing with it,’ he said. ‘You have been converting to gold since you came to the throne. We will make the coinage of this country solid once more, and they will call this a golden age.’

  Elizabeth smiled at that, as he knew she would.

  ‘But it has to be an utter secret,’ he said. ‘If you tell one person,’ — and we both know which person it would be — ‘then he would speculate in coins and it would alert everyone who watches him. All his friends would speculate too, they would copy him, even if he did not warn them, and his rivals would want to know why and speculate also. This has to be an utter secret or we cannot do it.’

  She nodded.

  ‘If you tell him you will be ruined.’

  She did not glance back up the steps at Dudley, she kept her eyes fixed on Cecil.

  ‘Can you keep such a secret?’ he asked.

  Her dark Boleyn eyes gleamed up at him with all the bright cynicism of her merchant forebears. ‘Oh, Spirit, you of all people know that I can.’

  He bowed, kissed her hand and turned to mount his horse. ‘When shall we do it?’ she asked him.

  ‘September,’ he said. ‘This year. Pray God we have peace then as well.’

  Summer 1560

  It took Cecil and his entourage a week to reach Newcastle from London, riding most of the way on the Great North Road through fine early summer weather. He spent one night at Burghley, his new, beautiful half-built palace. His wife, Mildred, greeted him with her usual steady good humour, and his two children were well.

  ‘Do we have much coin?’ he asked her over dinner.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘When the queen came to the throne you told me that we should not save coin and since then it’s easy to see that matters have got even worse. I keep as little as possible. I take rent in kind or in goods wherever I can, the coin is so bad.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. He knew that he need say no more. Mildred might live in a remote area but there was not much happening in the country and in the city that she did not know of. Her kin were the greatest Protestants in the land; she came from the formidably intelligent Protestant Cheke family, and constant letters of news, opinion, and theology passed from one great house to another.

  ‘Is everything well here?’ he asked. ‘I would give a king’s ransom to stay and see the builders.’

  ‘Would it cost a royal ransom for you to be late in Scotland?’ she asked shrewdly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am on grave business, wife.’

  ‘Will we win?’ she asked bluntly.

  Cecil paused before replying. ‘I wish I could be sure,’ he said. ‘But there are too many players and I cannot know the cards they hold. We have good men on the border now, Lord Grey is reliable and Thomas Howard is as fiery as ever. But the Protestant lords are a mixed bunch and John Knox is a liability.’

  ‘A man of God,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Certainly he acts as if divinely inspired,’ he said mischievously, and saw her smile.

  ‘You have to stop the French?’

  ‘Or we are lost,’ he concurred. ‘I’d take any ally.’

  Mildred poured him a glass of wine and said no more. ‘It’s good to have you here,’ she remarked. ‘When all this is over perhaps you can come home?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Hers is not a light service.’

  The next morning, Cecil had broken his fast and was ready to leave at dawn. His wife was up to see him off.

  ‘You take care in Scotland,’ she said as she kissed him farewell. ‘I know that there are Protestant rogues as well as Papist ones.’

  They made good time to Newcastle, arriving in the first week in June, and Cecil found Thomas Howard in good spirits, confident of the strength of the border castles, and determined that there should be no peace negotiations to cede what a battle might win.

  ‘We are here with an army,’ he complained to Cecil. ‘Why would we bring an army if we are just going to make peace?’

  ‘She thinks that Leith will never fall,’ Cecil said shrewdly. ‘She thinks this is a battle that the French will win.’

  ‘We can defeat them!’ Norfolk exclaimed. ‘We can defeat them and then open negotiations for peace. They can ask us for terms when they are beaten.’

  Cecil settled down to the long process of negotiating with the French commissioner for peace, Monsieur Randan. At once Thomas Howard drew Cecil to one side to object to the French entourage.

  ‘Cecil, half the so-called courtiers in his train are engineers,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them looking over our dispositions and checking out the walls of the castle here and at Edinburgh. If you give them free rein they will see everything I have done here. The other half are spies. As they travel to Edinburgh and Leith, they will meet with their agents and their news will go straight back to France. Randan has to negotiate on his own word, he can’t go galloping up to the queen regent at Leith and back every other day, seeing God knows what and talking to God knows who.’

  But Monsieur Randan was obdurate. He had to take instructions from Mary of Guise herself, and he could offer no peace proposals, nor answer the English proposals, without speaking with her. He had to go to Edinburgh, and he had to have safe conduct through the siege lines into Leith Castle.

  ‘Might as well draw him a map,’ Thomas Howard said irritably. ‘Invite him to call in at every damned Papist house on the way.’

  ‘He has to see his master,’ Cecil remarked reasonably. ‘He has to put our proposals to her.’

  ‘Aye, and she is the one who is our greatest danger,’ Thomas Howard declared. ‘He is nothing more than her mouthpiece. She is a great politician. She will stay holed up in that castle forever if she can and prevent us from talking with the French. She will get between us and them. If we let Randan speak with her she will order him to ask for one thing and then another, she will agree and then withdraw, she will hold us here until the autumn, and then the weather will destroy us.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Cecil asked anxiously.

  ‘I am sure of it. Already the Scots are slipping away, and we lose men every day to disease. When the hot weather comes we can expect the plague and when the cold weather comes we will be destroyed by the ague. We have to move now, Cecil, we cannot let them delay us with false offers of peace.’

  ‘Move how?’

  ‘Move the siege. We have to break in. No matter what it costs. We have to shock them to the treaty.’

  Cecil nodded. — Yes, but I have seen your plans for the siege. It calls for phenomenal luck, extraordinary courage, and meticulous generalship, and the English army has none of these. You are right only in your fear: if Mary of Guise sits tight within Leith Castle we will be destroyed by time, and the French can occupy Scotland and the north of England at their leisure. You are right that the French have to be frightened into peace. —

  Elizabeth was too weary to dress properly. Robert was admitted to her privy chamber as she sat with her women wearing a robe over her nightgown, with her hair in a careless plait down her back.

  Kat Ashley, normally an anxious guardian of Elizabeth’s reputation, admitted Robert without a word of complaint. Elizabeth’s long-standing friend and advisor Thomas Parry was in the room already. Elizabeth settled herself in the window seat and gestured to Robert to sit beside her.

  ‘Are you ill, my love?’ he asked tenderly.

  Her eyes were shadowed so darkly that she looked like a defeated bare-knuckle fighter. ‘Just tired,’ she said. Even her lips were pale.

  ‘Here, drink this,’ Kat Ashley offered, pressing a cup of hot mead into her hand.

  ‘Any news from Cecil?’

  ‘None, yet. I am afraid they will attempt the castle again, my uncle is so hasty, and Lord Grey so determi
ned. I wanted Cecil to promise me a ceasefire while the French commissioner was in the north, but he said that we must keep up the threat …’ She broke off, her throat tight with anxiety.

  ‘He is right,’ Thomas Parry said quietly.

  Robert pressed her hand. ‘Drink it while it is hot,’ he said. ‘Go on, Elizabeth.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said, obediently taking a sip. ‘We have no money. I can’t pay the troops if they stay in the field another week. And then what will happen? If they mutiny we will be destroyed, if they try to make their own way home with no money in their pockets they will pillage from the border to London. And then the French will march freely behind them.’

  She broke off again. ‘Oh, Robert, it has all gone so terribly wrong. I have ruined everything that was left to me. Not even my half-sister Mary failed this country as I have done.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said, taking her hand and pressing it to his heart. ‘None of this is true. If you need money I will raise it for you, there are lenders we can go to, I promise it. We will pay the troops, and Howard and Grey will not attack without a chance of winning. If you want, I’ll go north, and look for you, see what is happening.’

  At once she clutched his hand. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to wait without you at my side. Don’t leave me, Robert, I can’t live without you.’

  ‘My love,’ he said softly. ‘I am yours to command. I will go or stay as you wish. And I always love you.’

  She raised her head a little from the gold cup and gave him a fugitive smile.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s better. And in a moment you must go and put on a pretty gown and I will take you riding.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t ride, my hands are too sore.’

  She held out her hands to show him. The cuticles all around the nails were red and bleeding, and the knuckles were fat and swollen. Robert took the hurt hands into his own and looked around at Kat Ashley.