Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  All through this long hot ride from London, when he ought to have been rehearsing his approaching interview with Elizabeth, he had found himself remembering instead that letter he had written to Aylmer about Jane. He had written it in the midst of the hotbed of international politics at the Council of Trent, the air seething with the tumult in Africa; with the attempts to organise all Europe into a concerted front against the invading onrush of the heathen Turk, already far advanced into the Christian States; with the expected march of the German Emperor into Austria, which Ascham himself was to attend. Yet in the thick of it all, and the welter of his secretarial duties, and his eager efforts to make himself as good a statesman and courtier as he was a scholar and sportsman, he had sat down late one night and written till two in the morning all about the last visit he had paid to little Lady Jane just before leaving England.

  He had ridden to her father’s new mansion at Bradgate, the finest house in Leicestershire, and in the great park he had met her parents, and a chattering laughing crowd of young guests, and all the huntsmen glittering in their harness and green livery, out hunting in the early autumn sunshine.

  But not the daughter of the house. He had found her quite alone in her study, a girl who looked like a small child, curled up in her chair with her head bent over a volume of Plato in Greek, ‘with as much delight,’ he wrote to Aylmer, ‘as gentlemen read the merry tales of Boccaccio.’

  He asked Jane why she was not out amusing herself with all the rest of the household at their sport. She replied, ‘Alas, good folks, they have never felt what true pleasure means. All their sport is but a shadow to that pleasure I find in Plato.’

  And her great grey eyes shone as she raised them to his. It was too much for Roger Ascham. ‘You are so young, so lovely,’ he blurted out, ‘how can you prefer to sit all alone and read the Phaedon – even when your tutor is absent?’

  The grey eyes clouded over, but they looked at him with the same clear candour of spirit that prevented her first answer from sounding pretentious, or her second harsh. ‘I will tell you,’ came after a pause in low, measured tones; ‘the reason is that my parents are so sharp and severe to me that whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand, go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or anything else, I must do it as perfectly as God made the earth – or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yes, persecuted with pinches, nips and bobs that I think myself in hell while with them.’

  His furious exclamation cut her short. It looked as though he, not she, would burst into tears. But without any alteration in her deliberate tone she presented the reverse side. ‘One of the greatest benefits God ever gave me is that He sent me, with such parents, so gentle a schoolmaster as Mr Aylmer, who teaches me so pleasantly that I think all the time of nothing while I am with him. And when I am called from him I weep, because, whatever else I do than learning is full of great trouble and fear to me.’

  The sad little monotone ceased on that note of prophecy – as it now struck him, now when the Crown that was being forced on her might well prove ‘full of great trouble and fear’ to this child who had become a scholar before she had learned to be a woman.

  The contrast with her cousin Elizabeth struck him as strongly. He admired Elizabeth’s brilliant wits, but he worshipped Jane’s disinterested love of scholarship for its own sake. It had once been his own ideal and when with her he felt guilty at having forsaken it in his pursuit of the full and complete life.

  But Elizabeth could never hold it even as an ideal. She had worked as a schoolgirl with the fiery untiring concentration of a grown man, but always, he was certain, for an ulterior motive: to fit herself for the chance she might one day get to be Queen of England.

  Jane, now Queen, had never wanted it. Her love for learning was as pure as he, sometimes, wished his own could be.

  Elizabeth teased, intrigued, defied, fascinated him.

  But Jane was his guiding star, an image that he did not even think of connecting with the grave beauty of her oval face and steadfast eyes.

  He envied Aylmer, but he was not jealous of him.

  And so he wrote to Aylmer what was really a love-letter to Jane, describing that last delicious meeting with her in the cool shadowed study where the green light came filtered through the great trees outside, and the silence was very still after the blare of horns and shouts of the huntsmen in the park; he had proffered to him his ‘entreaty that the Lady Jane may write to me, in Greek, which she has already promised to do’; his prayer that she and Aylmer and himself should ‘keep this mode of life among us. How freely, how sweetly, how philosophically then should we live, enjoying all these things which Cicero at the conclusion of the Third book, De Finibus, describes as the only rational mode of life.’

  ‘You and I and Amyas,

  Amyas and you and I,’

  the bells were now chiming in his head to that old song by William Cornish of the perfect trio,

  ‘You, and I and Amyas,

  Amyas and you and I,

  To the greenwood must we go, alas,

  You and I, my life, and Amyas.’

  (Why ‘alas’? Why, to rhyme with Amyas!)

  But the only rational mode of life could not be the only mode for him. If only he could live six lives at the same moment! He had them all in his capacity; but he had not the time. One life was not enough. It had not been enough to make himself the finest Greek scholar in England, to set all the Cambridge students acting the new glories of Greek drama, and with brilliant modern stage effects, instead of gabbling their tedious old-fashioned Latin plays; not enough to shape the new beauties of English prose into an instrument as fine for scholarship as it was vigorous and flexible for common life, for his books on sport, hunting, archery, even the cockpit. Not enough even to mould the mind of the young Princess Elizabeth, that cynically practical, strangely poetic mind, incarnating in itself the daring spirit of the New Learning that had flamed up all through Europe, springing phoenix-like from the ashes of the new-found ancient classic lore; not enough to invent new methods of education that should make learning a delight to her.

  No; one life was not enough. He had wanted, not the study, but the world for his province.

  Now, thinking of Jane in the deep shadow of this avenue where he rode so far below the still green branches that he seemed to be riding at the bottom of the sea, he had dropped out of the world, out of time. He forgot his feverish demands on it. He wished instead that he were single-minded, bent only on one pursuit noble enough to fill a man’s whole life.

  What then was he doing here, riding towards the advancement he had hoped to win?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He stood in the hall and Mrs Ashley swept down the stairs towards him, hands outstretched, a welcoming smile pinned on her face, her inquisitive nose all ready to probe his secrets, a host of flattering exclamations and inquiries fluttering from her.

  Once he had flattered her and given her presents, pulling strings to help him become the Princess Elizabeth’s tutor. Now he must give her another present. He gave it. He staved off her questions. He would not drink the heavy sweet Tokay.

  There was nothing for it but for her to lead him off with many protestations of Her Grace being too ill to see any ordinary visitor, but that she knew she would never forgo the pleasure of meeting her former tutor, if she were awake. Only let him tread softly as he approached her room, for Her Grace was very drowsy, had had no rest at all these last few nights, and had signified her intention of going to sleep the instant the doctor left.

  Roger Ascham followed her out of the sunlight from the open doorway of the great hall. The sound of bells in the outer air became muffled, then drowned.

  In the cool corridor, secluded from the sultry afternoon outside, he heard music dropping in small faint notes like the drops of water from a fountain splashing into the basin below. The instrument was modern, either the virginals or clavichord such as he played himself and had taught his pupils to play. But th
e tune was ancient, barbarically wild and simple, in a mode long since neglected by the musicians. He thought he had heard it before, he tried to think where and when, and stood still to listen while Mrs Ashley harried on, her steps now clacking noisily with, he fancied, a deliberately warning note, and as she advanced the music swung abruptly into another tune, the popular air of ‘My Lady Greensleeves.’ It stopped as Mrs Ashley opened a door and went through, shutting it behind her. Presently she returned and admitted him to the Lady Elizabeth’s bedroom. A lady-in-waiting was sitting at the end of the room and went out through a door at the end as he entered. Mrs Ashley took her place.

  The Lady Elizabeth was leaning back on the pillows with a green brocade bedgown thrown somewhat carelessly, he thought, across her shoulders. True, the day was very hot. But if the glimpse he got of the young rounded breasts under her thin shift was inviting, the glance she gave him was cold as steel.

  He flicked some invisible dust off his fine new cloak, hoping she would notice its impeccable cut; she had always liked him to be well dressed and not like a musty pedagogue, she used to say, wrinkling her nose. He flattered himself he was now a long way from the pedagogue as he flung back his head after his courtly bow and squared his broad shoulders that even his frequent practice in archery could not entirely cure of the literary stoop he had acquired from years of study. He felt uneasily that she was summing it all up; he did not guess her answer to the sum – that his mild brown eyes were just the same as she had known them, eager, ingenuous, the eyes of a man who had dreamed of life through books, and wanted to wake up.

  He apologised for intruding on her illness, made polite enquiries and, a trifle breathlessly, as though to gain time, he congratulated her on having kept up her music – he hoped she still composed her own songs, words and tunes, as every performer should – he was glad, anyway, she was not too ill to play.

  ‘That was my woman playing,’ she said curtly.

  Was it? He had remembered by now the tune he had first heard as he came down the corridor, a lament for some savage mountain chieftain killed centuries ago, which King Henry’s old Welsh harper had sometimes played at Court; and he remembered, too, the Princess Elizabeth as a little girl listening to it, her small face pale and fierce in its intentness. He did not believe it was her woman who had played that tune.

  ‘Cat,’ said she, ‘you can follow Mag into the next room.’

  Mrs Ashley stared. It was nothing for a man to visit a princess in bed; balls and receptions had been held before now in state bedrooms with the hostess in bed; but for him to be left alone with her there, that was quite another matter!

  ‘Cat!’ repeated her mistress.

  She went.

  ‘Why have you come?’

  The question was shot at him so suddenly that he found all the careful answers he had thought out for it evading him.

  ‘I come from Court—’ he began.

  ‘Whose Court? My sister’s or my cousin’s?’

  So there it was. He had got to declare himself at the first instant, on whose side he stood. He struggled for a moment’s respite.

  ‘I went straight to London, naturally, with my master on his return to this country. I have seen the little Queen.’ The sheet jerked from a kick. ‘Believe me, Madam, she has no love for the title. She has sobbed and prayed them not to force the Crown on her – she is but a child of sixteen. She could not withstand her parents.’

  ‘She could when she chose. They could force her to wear the Crown, but not to share it with her bridegroom. Queen Jane, oh yes! But King Guildford, oh no!

  ‘When I am queen, diddle diddle,

  You shan’t be king!’

  So she sang on a high note, and ended in a peal of wild laughter.

  There it was again, that sudden levity, that pale flash of the eyes, that baffling mockery that had disconcerted him when she was his pupil. Girlish hysteria he had thought it, and that she would grow out of it, but there it was again after two years’ absence from her, and he badly disconcerted in his uncertainty as to what the laughter might hide, or bode. She was what the song sang, ‘a lady bright,’ but ‘strangeness that lady hight.’

  He had to pluck up all his courage to say what he had resolved. ‘Your Grace, the – your cousin – is utterly ignorant of the world. She has lived her whole short life in the schoolroom, intent only on her Greek and Hebrew studies. She has been persuaded by all those elders whom she has been brought up to believe so much wiser than herself, that this is the only way to save the country from the horrors of another civil war, worse even than the Wars of the Roses. You, too, love this country. You saw it in danger of invasion as a child on board your royal father’s flagship, The Great Harry, you remember. Even then you swore no foreigners should bring havoc to our shores. But worse may come from within. Will you not help to avoid the horror of internal strife-even at the cost of laying aside your ambitions?’

  ‘And so furthering your own! I take it you have been sent by Duke Dudley to exercise your new trade of diplomacy on me. Well, what’s your message from him?’

  Not much chance to exercise diplomacy after that! And he had prepared such persuasive arguments – he might have known he’d never get the chance to use them. Gulping them back, he blurted out:

  ‘To offer you what you will, riches beyond any man’s in England, if you will resign your claim on the throne, and consent to that of your cousin.’

  Well, he had said it. He looked at her and saw her as a white flame of wrath, tipped with the red fire of her hair.

  But she did not speak. The silence hung over the room. He would have welcomed now any outburst of mocking laughter, even of rage. Once she had thrown a ruler at his head. Would she do that now? He wished she would, that she would do anything rather than lie and look at him with eyes that seemed to be turning to glass, in a face and body already stone.

  Then it came on him what the moment must mean to her. Not only her chance of the throne, but her life or death might hang on her answer. She must speak, but utterly in the dark. She could know no more than he what had happened to her sister Mary, who might well by now have been taken prisoner by young Robert Dudley. And if Elizabeth refused Duke Dudley’s offer, she too was certain to be imprisoned and most probably beheaded. Yet if she accepted it, she would declare herself his open partisan against Mary, who might even now be fighting Dudley’s army – and winning.

  There was the horrid silence of suspense, not only in this room, but in all the quivering sunlit air outside it, all through England.

  At last he heard her voice, and with a shock of surprise, for it was low and indifferent, almost nonchalant. ‘Why should they try to make any agreement with me? My elder sister is the only one concerned. As long as she is alive I have no claim whatever on the throne.’

  She had done it again! She had given the only answer that could safeguard her from either side. So had she answered her jailors through weeks of torturing questioning when she was an utterly friendless girl of fifteen, fighting for her honour, her life, and the life of the man she had loved. He felt an absurd impulse to cheer.

  But it would never do to take back such an answer to Duke Dudley. He replied judicially, ‘The people of England will never accept the Lady Mary as Queen, and with her the old foreign tyranny of the Pope and the priests. They have done with all that, they are Protestant now to the core.’

  ‘You speak very certainly of England after being out of it for two years, Mr Ascham. Did you ever know much of it beyond London and Cambridge, the centres of advanced foreign ideas? But the English do not care for ideas.’

  He drew himself up, and spoke stiffly. ‘I may not know much of England, Madam, but I know something since I last saw Your Grace of what is happening in Europe.’ (Did he sound offended, or, worse, like a pompous schoolmaster? He tried a lighter, though still impressive note.) ‘It is even betting there as to whether this country will become the satellite of France or of Spain, both of which are eager to enslave her under th
e Papal yoke on ideas. The English may not care about ideas – but they care very much about the yoke. We may yet have another invading armada from France or Spain, sailing against these shores. I have come from the Council of Trent – it was to have been a league of nations to settle all questions of religion and policy in friendly discussion between Papists and Protestants – but I heard more of repressive counter-measures against the Protestants than of fair dealing with them. And now it has broken up and fled helter-skelter at the fresh outbreak of war in Germany. If this country is not prepared—’

  He broke off, hardly able to believe his ears. The incurable levity of this wild creature trapped in a satin bed (he could hardly think of her as a woman) had broken out again – she was whistling a tune like a schoolboy. And then sang, rolling out the words in a solemn chant as she made them up:

  ‘The Council of Trent

  It came and it went.

  No one knows what they meant

  At the Council of Trent.

  Only Mr Ascham, who knows everything. But—

  All his money was spent

  At the Council of Trent

  And he borrowed more than be lent

  At the Council of Trent!’

  ‘How the devil did you know that?’ he burst out, knocked completely off his guard and his manners. She fell back on the pillow in helpless laughter. He ought to be thankful, but he longed to shake her.

  ‘Was it the dice or the birds?’ she demanded. ‘Confess how much. Come, I’ve helped my good tutor out of my pocket-money before now, when his good tutor only sent him long lectures that play and cock-fighting would be his ruin. Let Cheke look down his handsome nose at your follies! As purely Greek a nose as Alcibiades, so befitting the Greek Reader at Cambridge! But he’d never understand as you do, Alcibiades Ascham, how Greek it is to love sport and play as well as learning. So how much?’