Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  The Government had already sued Wyatt for terms. The Court had panicked, and the citizens; the streets were a pandemonium of terror and confusion, and so was the Palace, where armed men stood on guard in the Queen’s bedchamber, and her women ran shrieking through the corridors, and Gardiner was begging the Queen on his knees to fly for her life. The Imperial ambassadors had already fled disguised as merchants, all except Renard, who had refused to leave the Queen in her hour of utter defeat.

  And now Wyatt was across the river. He swam the swollen Thames himself at Kingston, got hold of a boat, and with a few of his men worked to restore the bridge until he got 7000 of his troops across at night, and by half-past two in the morning was pressing up the Strand towards Fleet Street, driving back the Queen’s forces to Lud Gate, and cutting off Whitehall from any help.

  A man drenched to the skin came flogging his horse through torrents of rain to say he had seen a wild mob surging round St James’s and Whitehall and that they had broken into the Palace. Wyatt had stopped their looting and put the Queen under a strong guard. Her battle was broken and he had the mastery.

  The rain-soaked messenger, a younger brother of Sir Hare Isley, asked to kiss the hand of the Princess Elizabeth and assure her of the devotion of every man in their ranks. But she would not see him.

  ‘What more does Your Grace want?’ cried Cat Ashley as she leaned over the bed and chafed the long hands that were still blue with cold in spite of this glorious news. ‘Are you not as good as Queen of England?’

  ‘I will wait,’ said the chill whisper from the bed, ‘till I am Queen of England.’

  ‘But, my love, my lamb, Your Grace, Your Majesty, you have only to stretch out your hand—’

  Elizabeth withdrew it from her governess’s warm compelling grasp and replaced it in the bed.

  ‘Tell Mr Isley to go away, tell him that I refused to receive him or any message from him. Tell him that I am too ill to hear of any business. Go out of the room, Cat, put out the candles, and leave me alone.’

  Cat Ashley did as she was told. Elizabeth was left alone, at the leaping flames in the fire. She did not believe the tale had ended. She knew her sister.

  She was right. Mary was Tudor too.

  She had already rallied the citizens by her magnificent appeal at Guildhall when in movingly simple words she told them, ‘I cannot tell how naturally the mother loves the child, for I was never the mother of any – but assure yourselves that I do as earnestly and tenderly love you, and cannot but think that you as heartily and faithfully love me – and then I doubt not but that we shall give these rebels a short and speedy overthrow.’

  They had thronged to her aid after that; they had closed the City gates and cut the bridges; the very lawyers on their way to hear their legal cases had flung off their gowns and seized arms to go to her help.

  But she herself was her best ally.

  When arrows were shooting in at the Palace windows and her officers came crying to her that all was lost to Wyatt, when her guards forsook their posts and hid in the pantries and out-houses, and her sobbing women implored her to escape by boat to the Tower, she stood her ground; or rather, she advanced, and coming out on to a balcony cried to the people below, that rather than surrender, she would come down into the battleground and die with those who were still faithful to her.

  Wyatt was indeed within an ace of capturing the Queen, but neither he nor any of his men actually got inside the Palace, though in the howling confusion round it many people thought at one moment that he had done so.

  That was the moment when young Isley rode headlong to Ashridge to be the first to give the glad news to their future Queen.

  But from that moment came the rebels’ overthrow, and the moment had been lost by the day wasted earlier in taking Cooling Castle. If Wyatt had reached London a day sooner, the Queen would have had no chance to make her appeal at Guildhall; it was that, and her stand at bay in the Palace, that won the day.

  A charge of the loyal troops shouting the cheerful battle-cry of ‘Down with the daggletails!’ drove down on the drenched disorderly mob and cut off Wyatt from his followers. With a handful of men he straggled towards Fleet Street, and a few hours later was found, with only one follower left to him, sitting on a bench by a fishmonger’s stall near Lud Gate. The rain sluiced through the links of his mail shift, his clothes of velvet and yellow embroidery were torn and muddy, his face was covered with blood.

  But in his dilapidated lace-trimmed hat was something that showed him his father’s son, for, knowing a price was on his head, he had put a label on it with his name, so that anyone could sell him who had a mind to. No one took the opportunity.

  The Norroy Herald, Sir Maurice Berkeley, came to arrest him and stood looking down on the exhausted figure, abusing him for a rebel and traitor. Wyatt did not seem to hear him; he got slowly to his feet and his dulled eyes looked grimly at his captor.

  ‘It is no mastery now,’ was all he said.

  Mary had won, and gave thanks to God in a Te Deum sung the next day in St Paul’s, and the church bells rang for joy all over the country. But it was not the happy victory that her first had been. She had then shown such mercy as had never been seen after a rebellion to put a usurper on the throne. Only three people had been executed. And look at the result! exclaimed Mary’s advisers – another rebellion within six months, and far more widespread and dangerous than the first! Useless to expect gratitude; the people did not understand it, only the simple law of reward and punishment. Her mercy was cruelty, since it had been so abused and led to worse crimes which must now be punished with the utmost rigour.

  Her bitterness made it easier for her to agree. Dudley’s revolt had been for ambition only, impersonal to herself. But now she had become known to her people, had been as good to them as she knew how, and they had repaid her by attacking her through all that was most dear to her: her faith, and the husband she longed to marry while she could yet bear him a child.

  Already his coming had hung fire through all the disaffection openly shown, the rumours and threats of revolution. Now it would have to be delayed much longer before the country could be counted as settled and the Emperor and his indignant Spanish nobles would consider it safe for their Prince to venture into this barbarous island that had shown so violent a hatred of him. Mary wept tears of humiliation at the thought, and was only too ready to believe it was all her own fault for having been too obstinate in her leniency before.

  She promised she would not be so again.

  She quite understood that all the ringleaders would have to be executed, including the Duke of Suffolk, who had so foully repaid his free pardon by yet another attempt to usurp the Crown for his daughter Lady Jane Grey. And Jane herself, though innocent, was far from innocuous.

  Reluctantly the Queen was made to understand that, for the safety of the Kingdom and of the man she hoped to make King of it, the daughter too must die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  So now it had come to this; it was Jane’s last evening on earth and nothing awaited her on the morrow but the narrow grave dug for her within the Tower grounds. Her enemies had done their best for her, Mary had tried to save her; it was her own flesh and blood that had betrayed her, her own parents who had used her remorselessly as a tool to further their insensate ambition. It was not fear but anger that Jane had to fight in these last days, to keep her spirit pure for its final ordeal. For death was common, it came to half the population far earlier than to herself. A brother and sister had died by the will of God before she was reared. But her death was by the will of unjust man. ‘It isn’t fair,’ had been the constant cry of her childhood against the harshness of her parents, their eternal complaints that she was ‘stubborn and needed a strong rein.’

  But what could have exceeded her father’s stubbornness in raising rebellion yet again in the name of his unwilling daughter and sending her to the block? Yet he could not be stubborn in defeat. Jane had heard with sheer disgust how he had been sce
nted out by a dog – his second treachery too rank even for a cur! – from a hollow oak where be had hidden for three days in icy February rain. And that was the last of the ‘daggletails,’ when the sodden wretch that had been Duke of Suffolk was hauled down through the slimy branches and fell on his knees in the mire.

  Surely the daughter then had the more cause to complain that the parent ‘needed a strong rein.’ Her strong sense of justice could not forbear writing to her father that her end had been hastened ‘by you, by whom my life should rather have been lengthened.’ But now that her last night on earth was drawing in, she wished she had not written that. The thing was done. Nothing could lengthen her life beyond these few hours; it was feeble to reproach as to pray for mercy. She could even feel pity for him who was so soon to die himself. She wrote now again a letter to be given him after her death – ‘the Lord comfort Your Grace,’ telling him to ‘trust that we have won immortal life.’

  She did not write to her mother.

  She wrote to her young husband, Guildford Dudley, who also was to be executed on the morrow just before herself, refusing his request to see her again, though the Queen had granted it. But Jane wrote that she would rather wait till they could meet in Heaven. He might be different then.

  She might have thought him different now, if she had known that at that moment he was chipping away at the last letter of her name, which he had been patiently carving night after night with his penknife on the hard stone of his prison wall. JANE – his mute appeal to her would remain as long as the Tower should endure; thousands of eyes would look on it with pity; but not hers.

  The living lusty youth who had tried to bully her into loving him had nothing to do with her lonely childhood. That belonged to herself alone, and alone she would go to meet its end.

  She wrote a long letter to Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant of the Tower, sending him some books, and a far longer one to her sister Catherine, sending her own Greek Testament and telling her ‘it will teach you to live and learn you to die.’ All her learning now had come to that. She must do her last lesson perfectly.

  So she wrote on and on, giving all of herself that she could in these last moments, to the world that had known her so little; like a very young plant grown in the dark reaching out eagerly towards the sun, before she went where she would see neither sun not moon. The world did not know her. The world should know her. ‘God and posterity,’ she wrote, ‘will show me favour.’

  It was growing dark. Her women brought candles for her and shut out the oncoming night. She asked to be left alone again, and they spoke to her gently through their tears, but though her lips moved she did not answer them. She was saying to herself, ‘O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shades lengthen and the evening come and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done.’ Her work was done.

  She took up her lute to sing the psalm that went with the evening prayer. She found she was not singing it, but a song that Mr Ascham had sung to her and her tutor Mr Aylmer.

  ‘You and I and Amyas,

  Amyas and you and I,

  To the greenwood must we go, alas,

  You and I, my life, and Amyas.’

  She did not know why she remembered that strange pagan song now, which had nothing to do with her, nor with her tutor Mr Aylmer, who was safe abroad, long miles from her, nor with Roger Ascham, who was once again knocking at the door of her cousin Elizabeth, that bright strange creature whom Jane had adored since a child and vainly tried to follow as one might follow a will-o’-the-wisp, never knowing what it was.

  ‘The portress was a lady bright,

  Strangeness that Lady hight.

  She asked him what was his name,

  He said, ‘Desire, your man, Madam.’

  She said, ‘Desire, what do ye here?’

  He said, ‘Madam, as your prisoner.’

  Yes, that was Elizabeth, whom men desired; who held the hearts of men in thrall, as she now knew, and bewitched them to her service.

  ‘You will live on,’ she cried, striking the wailing notes on her lute,

  ‘You and Amyas will live on,

  But I shall die alone, alas!’

  Her lute slid from her grasp, tears came hot and heavy into her smarting eyes, they would not keep open, like a child she was crying herself to sleep. What need had she of sleep who so soon would sleep never to wake again? But her head slipped down on to the table among all the letters she had written, and there lay while her exhausted spirit rose out of the small tired body and wandered back to her home.

  She passed round the great palace of red brick at Bradgate that her grandfather had built to show how rich and proud he was and how secure against his neighbours – no moat, no drawbridge, only warm red walls enclosing orchards and pleasure-gardens full of scented flowers, for this was February but her dream was summer. And her spirit did not stay in those trimly ordered gardens, nor on the terrace where she had played with Catherine, the younger sister so much smaller than herself that it was like playing with a doll that had come alive.

  She wandered down the trout stream that went tumbling and tossing over the smooth boulders to the Wishing Well where once for a few moments she had sat with Mr Ascham and Mr Aylmer and all had wished and none had told their wish, but she had had a notion that it was the same – that all three should continue in their friendship, and in their common purpose, to promote both the advancement of learning and the worship of God in the true way, divested of superstition. That was how her mind had put it into words as she leaned over the clear water that her two friends told her was the image of herself, a well of water undefiled – that was how her mind had put it, but her heart had sung,

  ‘You, and I and Amyas

  To the greenwood must we go, alas.’

  Why ‘alas’? Why, now she knew, for now she was walking all alone under the tall trees, and they were no longer tall, they were writhing and twisted, stunted like mighty dwarfs that should have been giants. She cried aloud, asking what had happened to her beloved oaks, but nobody heard her, nobody saw her, though there were people walking all round her, and then she heard one of them say, ‘They cut off all the heads of the oaks hundreds of years ago. They say it was when Lady Jane Grey was beheaded.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘This morning at 8 o’clock the Lady Jane was beheaded on Tower Green, and the body still lies there.’

  Elizabeth heard this as she stood on Highgate Hill, forcing herself to lift her foot and step into the litter that was waiting to drive her down into the smoky dark smudge of the City below. The Queen’s invitation had turned to a command enforced by armed troops; if she disobeyed she was to be carried by force. It had all been of no use to snatch at straws, to struggle and resist, to feel very ill and exaggerate her illness, to prolong the journey because of it so that she only travelled four or five miles a day and finally rested for a whole week at Highgate. But every time she had looked from her window there, she saw London below, waiting for her, and now she was driving down into it, on the very day that Courtenay had been committed to the Tower, and Jane Grey executed.

  She tried to pray for Jane’s soul, though Jane would have forbidden it. Her last words on the scaffold were already being repeated: ‘Good people, pray for me, as long as I am alive’; faithful, even in that last moment of fearful loneliness, to the Protestant faith that forbade prayers for the dead.

  But Elizabeth could only think of Jane and herself as two little girls at a Christmas party, and Mary the kind elder sister and cousin giving her five yards of yellow satin to make a skirt, and fastening a gold and pearl necklace round Jane’s thin little neck – and today Mary’s executioner had cut through that neck.

  All her life she had thought of her sister as ‘poor old Mary,’ always in bad health and badly treated, tearful and tactless but kindly, always trying to do the right thing in the wrong way – and now she had acted as swiftly, boldly and terribly as ever their dread
sire had done. ‘Off with his head!’ to right and left, and even ‘Off with her head!’ for Jane. No doubt it was expedient, perhaps necessary. But how had Mary come to see it as right?

  After that, anything might happen. One was no longer walking on firm ground, but a quagmire. She herself had split nuts and played ‘Bon jour, Philippine’ with Mary and won a valuable present from her, and said, ‘You will win next time, won’t you?’ and Mary had answered with a bitter laugh, ‘Oh no, you will always win.’

  But now Mary was winning.

  Elizabeth’s journey was over, she was driving down from Highgate into the night, diving down into that deep pit of darkness where lay her doom.

  For it was already evening and the chill February mists from the river made the streets shadowy and the silent faces that lined them all pale as ghosts, thronging thicker and thicker, stretching up and peeping over each other’s shoulders, peering and gaping, aghast and staring, and tears running unchecked down their long worried faces – but not a sound from them, not a groan nor murmur of indignation among those quickly stifled sobs, not a voice to cry aloud, ‘God save Your Grace!’

  These mice would never save the lion. The springing hope with which she saw their pity changed to contempt. Gibbets stood at street corners, hung with grinning corpses, some many days dead; heads were stuck on spikes on the public buildings; not a hand in all this weeping crowd would be raised to save her from a like fate. It was a funeral procession, they were all sure of that; nothing they enjoyed so much as a good funeral! Her lip curled with scorn as she sat well forward in her litter with the curtains drawn back so that all could see her upright body in its white dress, her pale proud face that never turned nor looked at them, nor flinched at the ghastly sights she passed, all through the City, now Smithfield, now Fleet Street. She was suspected more deeply than any of these dead traitors; ‘but nothing can be proved,’ she told herself again and again.