Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  They entered Whitehall Palace through the garden – to prevent a rescue? Elizabeth asked herself ironically. There had been little fear, or hope, of that, with two hundred guards close round her, among all those tearful but tame herds.

  Now she was in the great hall, bracing herself to stand erect, to smooth her face from any over-anxious lines that might look like a guilty conscience, seeing Mary’s face in her mind so clearly before her that already her eyes were searching it for signs of hysteric rage or cold and bitter determination; already her lips were beginning to move to say the things she had rehearsed. But they all flew out of her head, all the convincing clear-cut proofs of her innocence, all the dignified implied reproaches of her sister’s unworthy suspicions.

  There were no thoughts left in her head, only words running round and round in a circle like rats in a trap, words chasing a silly rhyme as barely, crudely defensive as a rat showing its teeth.

  ‘“Much suspected of me,

  Nothing proved can be,”

  Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.’

  She need not have troubled. She could have nothing after all these frantic searchings to say to the Queen, for the Queen refused to see her.

  For three weeks she waited in her rooms at Whitehall with guards set close about them, to know what Mary would do with her. She knew that the Queen was being urged to take this heaven-sent opportunity to cut off her sister’s head; that ambassadors and bishops alike were telling her that she was ‘too busy chopping at the twigs of the rebellion when she ought to chop at the root,’ and that the root was her own long white neck. Her only hope lay in the fact that Bishop Gardiner would find it difficult to get the Princess beheaded without his beloved protégé Courtenay being beheaded with her.

  But Mary did not seem anxious to behead her, at any rate in a hurry. She would have to go presently to Oxford to open her Parliament, since that was now a safer place to hold it than London so soon after the rebellion; and asked which of her lords would undertake the charge of the Lady Elizabeth in his household to keep her out of harm’s way – and out of mischief, was the clear corollary. Elizabeth drew her first easy breath at that. But she drew it too soon, for she quickly heard that not one of the lords would risk such a responsibility.

  ‘I’ll make them pay for that!’ she cried. ‘When I am Queen I’ll stay with every one of them, and if the expense of my gracious royal visit ruins them, so much the better!’

  ‘When I am Queen!’ She hastily touched wood, crossed her fingers and muttered ‘In a good hour be it spoken!’ to propitiate the jealously listening fates. They knew what would happen to her. It was incredible that she could not know. The future was dark as the night all round the sleeping Palace and her wakeful bed. At any moment the curtain of the dark might crack into a splinter of light, widening to show the black shape of an assassin – the surest service Mary’s friends could render her, to rid her of her dangerous rival thus quietly without her responsibility.

  She strained her eyes against the thick dark that pressed upon her eyelids like a palpable weight, till she could bear it no longer, called for lights and began to read again. History should help. It gave one a sense of continuity, made one believe that life went on. Yes, but whose life? Her own; as Queen Elizabeth? Or Queen Mary’s? Hall’s Chronicle could not tell her.

  There lay his list of chapters before her:

  I. The unquiet time of King Henry the Fourth.

  II. The victorious Acts of King Henry the Fifth.

  III. The troublous season of King Henry the Sixth.

  IV. The prosperous reign of King Edward the Fourth.

  V. The pitiful life of King Edward the Fifth.

  VI. The tragical doings of King Richard the Third.

  VII. The politic governance of King Henry the Seventh.

  VIII. The triumphant reign of King Henry the Eighth.

  How would it go on? What would the future historians have to say?

  IX. The brief reign of King Edward the Sixth.

  X. The pitiful life of Lady Jane Grey.

  XI. The merciful and religious? – or the bloody reign of Queen Mary? (Depending on her success or failure.)

  XII. The triumphant reign of Queen Elizabeth?

  Or

  The tragical brief life of the Lady Elizabeth?

  One or other of those two was going to happen, and no one could tell which, certainly not ‘this rude and unlearned history’ written to extol her father and grandfather for bringing a golden age of peace to England. But would she ever have the chance to continue it? Were the Tudors finished? Mary was none of them, she was all Spanish; if she should ever bear a child, it would be Philip’s of Spain.

  Hall was dead, and all the kings he wrote of; his book was to be burned by order of the Queen for upholding the new religion; worse, it was criticised severely by modern taste and Mr Ascham had accused it of being written in ‘indenture English’ with its high-flown tropes such as the ‘cankered crocodile and subtle serpent’ of rebellion that ‘lurked in malicious hearts and venomous stomachs.’ But modern authors and authors not yet born would continue to write the chronicle of history yet to be lived; and no one knew what it would be. She could not see a year, a month, a day, even an hour ahead, as she waited in the night.

  All around her England waited too, stirring uneasily in its sleep, aware of no such ‘inevitable trend of events’ as the histories would come to chronicle, but only of a breathless uncertainty. For the world was turning topsy-turvy and nobody knew from day to day what was the law and what was a crime.

  A tradesman had just said in the street, ‘That jilt the Lady Elizabeth was the real cause of Wyatt’s uprising,’ – it seemed safe enough but you never knew – people had been whipped last year for saying Archbishop Cranmer had two wives now living, and punished this year for saying he had none; both were false but if the lies had been reversed in time, both would have been commended.

  Old Goody Crickle had been burnt to death a few months ago for approaching the Cross on her knees, but young Tom of Ramsden had just been flogged for refusing to kneel to it. Parson Plucky had been heavily fined for letting his village girls play before the image of the Virgin, but Parson Manly put in the stocks for throwing her image on the dunghill. Images were being thrown down and put up again all over the country, and Mrs Tofts, who never could keep up with the times, thought it sound to say ‘They be devils and idols,’ whereupon she found herself in jail and threatened with burning alive unless she instantly recanted. Little Lady Jane had been proclaimed Queen last summer and now lay headless in her grave, and the woodsmen at her home rose up and took their axes and cut off the tops of the oaks to show their grief and anger at her death for as long as the trees should stand.

  But her mother, the Lady Frances, who had forced her into the course that led to her death, was so little dashed by it, still less by her husband’s, that within a fortnight of their executions she flung off her brand-new mourning, put on a bridal dress of scarlet taffeta and married Mr Adrian Stokes, ‘a smart red-headed young gent,’ twenty-one years old, who had been a servant in her household, some said a footman, others, more kindly, an equerry. The Duchess of Suffolk was so well pleased with her exploit that she had their portraits painted by Lucas de Heere immediately after the wedding, a memorial to last as long as the sad dwarfed oaks of Bradgate. There young Mr Stokes still stands today, looking very dapper, with no hint of nervousness, beside his large and elderly bride whose hard grey eyes, with their alarming likeness to her uncle’s King Henry VIII, show a bright indifference to the fact that while they were being painted her recent husband’s head was rotting on a spike of the Tower gates.

  She was only following the new fashion for tragically widowed duchesses, for Anne Duchess of Somerset, whose intolerable pride had helped drag her husband Edward Seymour the Protector to the block, had married her groom, Sergeant Newdigate, as soon as Queen Mary had released her from the Tower; nor did Mary show any disapproval of these matrimonial jaunts: t
he Duchess of Somerset was still ‘her Good Nan,’ the Duchess of Suffolk continued to take precedence at Court, and her now eldest daughter Catherine was given the post of lady-in-waiting to the Queen, presumably to make up for her sister Jane’s death. An element of horrible farce hung about the family’s tragedy ever since the Duke of Suffolk was nosed out by his own dog from that wet hiding-place in a hollow tree. The world had gone mad, a monstrous anarchy now held sway in thought and feeling, as in politics and religion.

  A deputation of nine grave members of the Queen’s Council came and questioned Elizabeth for hours; they told her that Wyatt had accused her and Courtenay of being the instigators of his rebellion. Could that be true? She remembered his voice as they had danced in the firelight and shadows,

  ‘I promised you

  And you promised me

  To be as true

  As I would be.’

  No, he would never have shown a ‘double heart’, he was true, and this report a lie, the usual common ruse to make her confess; she remembered the tricks they had tried for that purpose when she was fifteen – ‘They have told all. Confess, and you will be forgiven.’

  But she had given nothing away then. She was determined to give nothing away now, but it was harder, in spite of her added years and experience, for the long suspense and her illness made her shaky and uncertain.

  She made a bad slip when they accused her of receiving a warning from Wyatt to go to Donnington; in the confusing terror of the moment she declared she did not even remember she had a house of that name, then saw it would not do and tried desperately to cover it. ‘Donnington – Donnington? Oh yes, Donnington! I have heard of it, but never been there, even when, so you say, Wyatt warned me I would be safer there, so of what are you accusing me? Of not going there?’

  Was she overacting her petulant stammering? But it was impossible to keep her hands from shaking, so it was better to twist them nervously together and seem innocently perplexed by all these pointless questions, to push her hair up off her forehead and hold an ice-cold hand to her hot head as she turned wide bewildered eyes from one grim bearded face to another. There was more behind those faces than what they were saying; soon they would say something worse, something she had been waiting through weeks and months of dread to hear, and now she heard it.

  It was the Chancellor speaking, Bishop Gardiner, his shaggy eyebrows working up and down – if he did not shave them soon they would meet in the middle over his jutting nose. She did not hear a word he said, but she knew what he was telling her; she was to go tomorrow to the Tower.

  She shook her head. ‘Oh no,’ she said softly, ‘no, no! Not after all this – no, no, it can’t be so.’ She did not know what she was saying, not even that she was crying, until a warm tear splashed down on her cold hand. Their faces made a blur round her; some gradually came distinct, looking at her sheepishly, Winchester’s with a smirking satisfaction, taking an evident pleasure in making a pretty woman cry. That pulled her up sharply; she rounded on them and there was the ring of a threat in her voice as she told them to remember who she was; it was unwise to go so far in trying her loyalty. This royal defiance in cold measured terms, though the tears were still running down her ashen-white face, had yet another effect from another of the ring of dogs baiting the young lioness.

  One of them she had noticed as hitherto more sturdily impassive than his fellows, more determined not to be led astray by any feminine wiles, but he was now regarding her with a baffled expression, trying to conceal an emotion that she had forgotten any of these men might still be made to feel. Who was he, the tall burly elderly fellow with the rubicund face, now slightly purplish, who stood four-square with his thumbs in his belt as if defying any softer impulse to get the better of him, quite unaware that his large round eyes were scanning her with rueful tenderness?

  ‘My lord of Sussex’ (his name came to her even as she turned to him), ‘surely Her Majesty will not – surely she will be too gracious—’ She turned quickly from him, as he pulled a thumb out of his belt to rub his nose in embarrassment, to one after another of all those shut faces, imploring them to intercede for her to the Queen not to commit a true and innocent woman to – she could not say ‘the Tower’ – ‘to that place.’

  Some of them promised to do so, with expressions of pity for her sad case. The Earl of Sussex said never a word. But it was at him that she looked in yearning entreaty as they left her room.

  She waited an hour but gained nothing. Sussex came back with a hangdog look, and Gardiner and Winchester with him, to order the discharge of nearly all her attendants on the instant. Guards were placed against both the doors to her bedroom, an armed force in the hall and another two hundred strong in the garden beneath her windows. Elizabeth rushed to look out at them in a sudden frenzy of hope. Did it mean that they suspected some plot to rescue her at the eleventh hour, before the Tower gates shut on her tomorrow, perhaps for ever?

  She stayed awake and fully dressed all night, straining at every creaking night-noise that might mean the beginning of such an attempt; but the raw daylight came and the Earl of Sussex came and Lord Winchester and the guards, and told her the barge was ready to take her to the Tower and she must prepare to leave at once, ‘for the tide is now right, and time and tide wait for no man.’

  ‘The tide. The tide,’ she repeated stupidly. She had told herself so short a time ago that she would be safe as in a cave in the rocks, if only the tide did not rise. But the tide had risen, the roaring waves of the rebellion had flowed up into her cave and washed her out, to be swirled away on its flood and stranded at Traitors’ Gate.

  If only she could contrive that they should lose this tide it would gain her, well, twelve or perhaps twenty-four hours’ respite certainly, and who knew what might happen in twenty-four hours?

  ‘The Queen promised me,’ she cried, ‘the very last time she saw me, she gave me her word that she would let me speak to her in my own defence. By the Queen’s own word I demand to see the Queen.’

  ‘No use,’ grunted Winchester. ‘Her Majesty says that at all costs she’ll not see Your Grace.’

  Sussex, looking like a worried bulldog, confirmed this with an unwilling shake of his massive head.

  ‘If I am so dangerous she can at least see my writing. I can send no letter to her from the Tower – once there I shall be as shut off as in the grave, perhaps soon in my grave. Let me send her but one word before I leave this outer world.’

  ‘The tide!’ Winchester interrupted. ‘We daren’t risk losing it.’

  ‘At least six lines. It will not take me five minutes.’

  ‘I tell you, Madam, in my opinion it is inconvenient.’

  A sudden roar from Sussex cut across Winchester’s boorish irritation. ‘By God, I say she shall write. I’ll answer for it to the Queen. Aye, and I’ll see to it, Your Grace, that she gets the letter. Write, and I’ll take it to her myself.’

  Heedless of Winchester’s grumbling protests, he bundled him into the anteroom and left her to write her letter undisturbed, with only one word of admonishment, ‘Hurry, Madam, hurry.’

  Now her brain must move like the wind, snatch at all she had planned to say to her sister in these past weeks and cram it into a few words – but for an instant her head whirled in a dull void and no words would come. Then she remembered those she had spoken just now, ‘the Queen promised me.’ That was the note to strike. She struck it, hard, right at the top of the sheet of paper, without any preamble or opening address:

  ‘If any ever did try this old saying “that a king’s word was more than another man’s oath,” I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to verify it in me, and to remember your last promise and my last demand that I be not condemned without answer and due proof. Without cause proved, I am by your Council from you commanded to go into the Tower, a place more wanted for a false traitor than a true subject. And therefore I humbly beseech Your Majesty to let me answer before yourself – and that before I go to the Tower (if it be pos
sible), if not, before I be further condemned.’

  Would this move Mary? Would anything that came from her young sister? Mary hated her and was glad of this chance to put her out of the way. But she was conscientious, she would not do what she knew to be wrong. ‘Let conscience move Your Highness to take some better way with me.’ That was bold, but she had written it now, there was no time to start again.

  Sussex was putting his great head round the door – ‘Madam, the tide! We must—’

  ‘One moment!’ she cried, her pen scratching furiously, yet still keeping the bold upward strokes well formed and even. ‘I have heard in my time,’ she wrote, ‘of many cast away for want of coming to the presence of their Prince.’ Did she dare mention the man she had loved? Mary had never forgiven her the scandal that had made his own brother condemn the Lord High Admiral to the block. But she dared. ‘I heard my lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him he had never suffered. I pray God that evil persuasion persuade not one sister against the other.’

  A great blot spread over ‘evil’ in her haste to turn the page and give more assurance of her truth. ‘And to this truth I will stand in till my death.’ But now Sussex was by her chair and she must stop with three-quarters of the page still blank.

  ‘If I leave it like that, some cunning rogue might get hold of it and add some forgery to my hurt.’

  ‘Does Your Grace suspect—?’

  ‘Not you, you fool! The only true friend I’ve made in my troubles.’ She glanced up at him with a quick look of compelling intimacy as she rapidly scrawled lines all down the rest of the page to prevent a possible forger thus using it; they slanted wildly downwards from left to right towards her signature at the bottom in the right-hand corner, and another dreadful blot must needs come and smear the flourishing twirligigs of the ‘z’ in Elizabeth. Sussex had seized the sand-castor and was sprinkling the page, laying hold of it to fold it.