Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘One word more, just one!’ she cried, snatching it back, and scribbled in the bottom left-hand corner, ‘I humbly crave but one word of answer from yourself.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  She had won her twenty-four hours’ respite, she had beaten the tide, and the night-tide too, for they dared not take it lest there should be an attempt to rescue her under cover of the dark, though every hour of delay increased that danger.

  But it was all no use. Mary was moved only to rage against Sussex, she roared at him that if her father were alive his servants would never have dared treat him so; and looking on that pale sandy-browed little face suddenly darkened and distorted by passion, Sussex wondered that he had dared so treat the daughter.

  He had learnt his lesson and turned up obediently the next morning just after nine o’clock, with Winchester, to carry the Princess by force if need be into their boat, resolved to stuff his ears with cotton-wool rather than listen to the siren’s pleas.

  It was Palm Sunday and pouring with rain – two safeguards, since everybody would be in church or indoors.

  Elizabeth knew their fears; as they hurried her through the Palace garden between the files of soldiers on guard she looked back up at all the windows in a last vain hope, and cried out in a loud voice that she wondered the nobles would let her be led away into captivity.

  But all the streaming windows looked blankly back at her, not one was flung open, no voice called in answer to her appeal, and the cold rain cut her face. Sussex seized her arm and urged her into the waiting barge, its floor already waterlogged, and now there was no chance for her, the rough grey relentless river was bearing her fast away, so fast that they nearly capsized at the bridge, where the tide was not yet high enough and the fall of water too great to shoot it without appalling risk. So the boatmen urged, but to Winchester, and now even Sussex, no risk could be worse than the presence of Elizabeth still outside the Tower.

  She all but escaped it by drowning, for in shooting the bridge they struck the stem of the barge against the starling and there were frenzied shouts and curses while the water went swooping round her, splashing over the boat’s side, and ‘Which of us, my lords,’ she asked in hysterical mirth of the two elderly faces before her, both grey from fear, ‘is born to be hanged?’

  For now the boatmen had succeeded in clearing the barge and she was caught and borne away again, swirled along by the tide, after all her struggles and clutchings at straws, at a sister’s promise, a Queen’s word, at a scrap of paper that she scrawled with lines – after all these, here she was carried away in the current, only to be washed up now in this supreme and dreadful moment at Traitors’ Gate.

  Here in this sodden moment – or on a shining morning in May seventeen years ago, when all the birds were singing and her mother, a young and lovely woman, had landed, to her death? The moment had waited for her ever since, and now it was in her mother’s rooms that she was to be lodged.

  She looked up at the dark gates frowning at the head of the water stairs, and as she looked they opened and she saw the warders and servants of the Tower drawn up to receive her. Lord Winchester was holding out his hand to help her step from the barge on to the stairs; the river was sloshing up all over the lower steps.

  ‘I’ll not land here,’ she cried wildly. ‘I’m no traitor – and I’d be over-shoes in water.’

  ‘Your Grace has no choice,’ said Winchester gruffly, and threw his cloak over her against the heavy rain. In a fury she dashed it from her and stepped into the swirling water and up the stairs to where that grim body of men awaited her. ‘What – all these armed men for me!’ she almost laughed.

  But a strange thing was happening among them, some were falling on their knees and some cried out, ‘May God preserve Your Grace!’ Their Captain was trying to check them and threatening them with punishment, and they froze into iron again as Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant of the Tower, appeared from behind them and advanced towards her.

  At sight of him her knees gave under her and she sank down on to a wet stone. She would not – could not go further, she would not enter those gates, whence, it was muttered, none came out alive, and many had died without trial. Sir John was standing bare-headed before her, begging her to come in out of the rain or she would get ill.

  ‘Better sit here than in a worse place,’ she answered dully, ‘for God knows where you will bring me!’

  There was a sob behind her. A young gentleman usher had lost all his rigidly correct, self-conscious composure and fairly broken down and burst into tears. That pulled her up, literally, on to her feet, and she swung round on him with a wry smile. ‘That’s a fine way to cheer me, to cry like a baby when you ought to be giving me courage!’

  But no one, she knew, could do that but herself.

  She went resolutely up the stairs, staring up at the dark bulk of the Tower looming over her.

  There was a face looking down at her from behind one of the rain-blurred windows. She could not see who it was but it was a pair of very bright eyes that looked down on her, and something was moving to and fro – was it a hand waving to her?

  Was it Courtenay’s hand?

  He had been sent to the Tower the day she had driven down from Highgate into London. She supposed, without interest, that it was Courtenay’s, and then forgot it as she heard the gates clanged to behind her, the bolts shot fast.

  The thing had come to pass. She was shut in the Tower. Her servants crying and praying round her on their knees made it clear how little hope there was of her ever coming out of it again, except to her death.

  ‘But not by the axe,’ she muttered. She would not suffer that clumsy butchery. Already her frantic thoughts, chasing each other in terror of the dark stillness of this place, were busy composing her final plea to Mary, that an accomplished swordsman should be sent over from France, as had been done for her mother’s execution, to strike off her head with a single stroke of his elegant long blade. Mary, who had not vouchsafed ‘but one word of answer from yourself,’ could not refuse her that.

  There were various signs that she had little else to hope for: the confinement in which she was held, never allowed to go outside her room; the delay in executing Wyatt and the leaders of the rebellion, so as to try and extract further information against her; worst of all, the continual brow-beating examinations of her by different members of the Council. Hour after hour they questioned, argued, tried to catch her out.

  Strangers were appointed as her servants; only pretty Isabella Markham was left of her friends, and there were threats that she too would soon be parted from her on account of her Protestant beliefs.

  The Tower was closing in on her; her prison narrowing until it should take the shape of her grave.

  There was still a window. She gazed out of it continually, at the bare trees tossing in the March wind, and the river where once she had floated at night with the Admiral in his barge, and felt his urgent desire for her and tried to fend it off with the crude coquetry of a very young girl, and they had seen a light in Lambeth Palace and supposed, laughing, it was Cranmer writing another Prayer Book.

  And then one day she saw Cranmer.

  A heavy black barge was drawn up at the foot of the stairs to Traitors’ Gate, and a body of armed men marched down on to it, and in their midst the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops Latimer and Ridley. They stayed up on deck, three forlorn figures bunched in rusty black robes that flapped in the breeze, among all the showy soldiers guarding them; they were looking round them on the busy, noisy river-banks, ‘boisterous Latimer’ still the one most easily distinguished, clapping one or other of his companions on the shoulder, flinging out his arm as they pointed out the familiar landmarks to each other. They passed the Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth and the gardens down to the water’s edge, where King Henry had loved to walk with his friend in their ‘singular quiet.’ and where one night in May the Archbishop had walked alone all night, waiting for the dawn when Nan Bullen was to die.r />
  The oarsmen pulled with long swift strokes, singing as they rowed, and the barge passed quickly upstream out of sight round the bend of the river, on past Somerset House, the palace of Edward Seymour the Protector, Duke of Somerset, and Seymour Place, the palace of Tom Seymour the Lord Admiral, those princely brothers both of late beheaded. The Thames should run blood, not water, the Princess said to herself, and turned to ask where the three priests were being taken. She was told, to prison in Oxford to await their trial for heresy.

  It seemed superfluous. There was quite enough against them as traitors to behead them – nobody could understand why Cranmer especially had not been executed long ago for giving the full weight of his Archiepiscopal authority to Dudley’s rebellion.

  What a bungler Mary was to confuse the issue and win public sympathy for the offenders by bringing in charges of heresy! Treason against herself she could forgive, but ‘heresy,’ she was fond of saying, ‘is treason against God.’ Elizabeth, following her sister’s argument in her mind, suddenly saw to what dark end it was leading.

  Cranmer and his fellow-bishops were being spared execution in the Tower, to meet a worse fate in Oxford. Those three figures on the deck of the barge had looked their last on London. The first Act of Mary’s Parliament would be to bring back Henry VIII’s laws against heresy, condemning those who denied the doctrine of Transubstantiation to be burnt alive. They were to be kept alive till then, so that the Pope of Rome should condemn the Archbishop of England to death, and so reassert his authority over this country. This was to be Mary’s triumph, her expiation of England’s turning away from the Faith!

  ‘Fool! Fool!’ cried the girl, beating on the thick glass of the window-pane between its heavy bars, her rage rising hot from a new cold fear. If Mary could not catch her out as a traitor, would she make sure of her death as a heretic?

  A service of the Mass was given every two or three days in her room, and she had noticed that the examinations of her by different members of the Council were growing more and more theological. It was to this end, then, that they were leading.

  The very next day the test question was suddenly hurled at her; did she or did she not believe in the transubstantiation of bread and wine at the Mass into the actual body and blood of our Lord? To say ‘Yes’ was to declare herself a Papist, and, by Papist belief, a bastard and no heir to the throne; to say ‘No’ was to declare herself a heretic; and that, she now knew, would condemn her to be burnt alive.

  The dark room swam round her, the cruel watchful faces of the men surrounded her like hunters’ drawing in for the kill. They peered at her through the squinnying windows of their eyes into her soul, but they could never get a glimpse of it. They saw her narrow face whitening, sharpening with animal fear, the startled brightness of her eyes scanning them in turn, flashing the thoughts she did not speak.

  She thought – was this religion? – a snare to make one fall into the hands of one’s enemies? Were holy things always to be abused, and words of love and worship turned into a death-trap? Should one man’s belief be set up against another’s, and men kill each other for not holding the same ideas, it would mean wars without end throughout the world, for it was the glory of men’s minds to hold different thoughts, and the only thing by which they could be judged was their actions, right or wrong.

  She could not say this; she could make prayers, especially of late, but never a creed. But she could make a verse; in urgent stress like this, lines and rhymes came into her head, keeping her panic-ridden brain from reeling into insanity. A line, and another rhyming to it, and then another, slowly, so low she almost whispered them, the brief monosyllables dropped one after the other from her lips, as though she were listening to a voice these men could not hear, and repeating the words one by one:

  ‘His was the Word that spake it,

  He took the bread and brake it.

  And what that Word doth make it,

  I do believe and take it.’

  There was an uneasy silence among her questioners; they had looked for some clever evasion from her, but this sincerity, the utter simplicity of the hushed voice inventing and speaking those few lines, disconcerted them, and put them clean off their guard. Gardiner cleared his throat, began to say something sneering about woman’s wit and neat answers; but before he could get it out, the Earl of Arundel astounded everybody by going down on his knees before that slight, still figure.

  ‘Her Grace speaks truth,’ he cried in a harsh voice, so hoarse and rasping that it seemed something he had long tried to smother was now forcing and tearing its way out of his throat; ‘I am sorry to see her so troubled by us all, and, Madam, so help me God, I hope for my own part never to trouble you more.’

  This from Arundel! who had been so merciless to his old associate Duke Dudley and sought ever since to prove his new loyalty to Queen Mary by urging loudly in council that the first safeguard for her reign must lie in putting the Lady Elizabeth to death! None of his comrades could believe their ears, nor could Elizabeth; she looked at him anxiously, seeking for some sign of a fresh ruse, to snare her by a false security.

  But she saw only a stocky elderly gentleman gazing up at her with the wistful eyes of a spaniel that knows he has done wrong and promises to make up for it by a lifetime of devotion. She held out her hand to raise him, checking a mad desire to rap the bald head below her, and giving him instead a faint sweet smile of forgiveness.

  Volleys of angry protest from Gardiner and Winchester cut across each other as Arundel stood up; was this the way to conduct an examination of a prisoner suspected, all but proved guilty of treason and heresy?

  But a louder roar silenced them as Sussex shouted, ‘Take heed, my lords! This is King Harry’s daughter and the Prince next in blood.’

  ‘We have the Queen’s commission to deal with her,’ barked Gardiner, his eyebrows bushing up almost to his hair.

  ‘Don’t go beyond it, then! We’d best take care how we deal with her, so that we may not have to answer for our dealings in the future.’

  Here was plain dealing with a vengeance! Some of them had an uncomfortable qualm, recalling that Queen Mary had been feeling ill just lately; they stole uneasy glances at ‘the Prince next in blood,’ but she cast her eyes demurely on the ground while the men wrangled round her, and gave no hint of her feelings, certainly not of the throbs of wild merriment that were now shaking her in her relief, so that it was all she could do not to shriek in hysterical laughter. First Sussex and then Arundel, who had been one of her worst enemies, now her true knights! She should start a Round Table of Grandfathers vowed to her service!

  As they took their leave of her, with more courtesy than when they came, she raised her long white eyelids as slowly and dramatically as the lifting of a curtain, and let her eyes dwell on Arundel in a look of grave sweetness that made him feel himself a young man.

  He had once tried to marry her to his son, but now the notion shot into his head, why should not himself be the wooer? If Queen Mary died he would have won himself a throne as well as a handsome young woman, who already looked as though she could learn to love him. Her eyes were of remarkable beauty, he noticed, now that they shone on him.

  And it was to him she spoke, though she began, ‘My lords,’ but faltered timidly and waited for his look of encouragement before she could summon enough confidence for her request. ‘You have shown me you would not willingly have me die undeservedly. I have been ill, and if I do not soon get a little air and exercise I think I shall die. You will go out now from this dark room and breathe the first sweet air of April. I beg you think if some way cannot be devised for me to breathe it too, if only for half an hour.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Two small children were hiding in a corner of a narrow garden enclosed by the high walls of the Tower. Only a few windows overlooked it, but there was no one to look out of them, for anyone who might do so had been sent away to prevent any possible danger of communication with the Princess Elizabeth, now tha
t she had just been allowed to take the air every morning, guarded by Mrs Coldeburn, the lady-in-waiting newly appointed by the Council.

  But Harry Martin, the five-year-old son of the Keeper of the Queen’s Robes in the Tower, had made up his mind to see the imprisoned Princess and see for himself if her hair were really like the bright silk embroidered with gold threads of one of the Coronation waistcoats. His father had said it was. Harry, having stroked the waistcoat, did not think any human hair could be like it, but it might be that the Princess herself was not human, as she was shut up in a Tower, a thing apt to happen to fairy princesses. She was therefore of far more interest to him than the boy-King had been, but then King Edward had suffered from always being held up as an example; from the age of three he could, and generally did, turn everything he said into Latin, word for word as he spoke it – ‘Why – cur – so fast – adeo – do you ran – curris?’ – though Harry never wanted to ask such a question and was sure Edward only did so because he had learnt it at the beginning of Erasmus’ Latin grammar for boys.

  That was the way King Edward had accustomed himself from the earliest age to speak Latin as easily as English, and later did the same with Greek. But Harry had thought he looked pale and cross, and what had been the use of his spending all that time in learning those languages when now he was dead and could not speak heathen tongues in Heaven?

  But nobody held up the Princess Elizabeth as an example, not even to his friend Susannah, who was a girl. In spite of this drawback, and that of her age, for she was a year younger than he, she was his most constant playmate, and whatever, he did, that she must do too.