Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  The red-haired one shivered when she heard of it and thought what the grey-haired one must be thinking.

  Mary was ill with thinking. She had shown mercy beyond reason, and her people had repaid her with black ingratitude. They had struck at her heart; delayed and darkened the hopes of her marriage. The Emperor said he could not endanger the life of his beloved son in a country that had shown such hatred of him. She had done all she could to make it safe for him – all those executions, gibbets at every street corner, heads on every gate.

  Yet still the bridegroom delayed, making elaborate preparations for a sort of farewell tour through his own country, as though to look his last on all he cared for, before embarking for an alien and hostile land and an elderly bride. And every day she looked more elderly, her hair more grey, her face more lined, and felt more ill, and below her Palace windows drunken revellers shouted ‘Long Live Elizabeth!’ and the night sky was reddened with rejoicing bonfires, and wild stories were afloat of ghostly voices proclaiming Elizabeth as Queen, and the Mass idolatry.

  Had she done all she could? No, not all. There was still ‘that jilt, the Lady Elizabeth, the real cause of Wyatt’s rising’; the chief danger to Philip’s security. She could not leave Elizabeth in the Tower till Philip’s arrival without continuing these uproars – and what a shameful welcome they would make for him!

  She could not set her free without precipitating a revolution to put her on the throne.

  She could not cut off her head – but why could she not? demanded her friends, who seemed to think it the least she could do to clear the way for her prospective bridegroom. But Mary still could not feel it was right to do so without proof of her guilt. She had sworn when she took her marriage oath in Renard’s presence that never again would she betray her conscience; not for anyone in the world, no, not even for the man she was to marry, would she again do what her heart told her to be wrong.

  But the effort to keep this resolution tore her heart in two. Of what use to do good if she could not feel it? Again and again she read her mother’s last letter to her, telling her that whatever troubles God sent to prove her, to accept them ‘with a merry heart.’ But her dumpy dowdy little mother had been a saint as well as a heroine. Mary had shown she could be heroic, but she knew she was not saintly when she felt sick with baffled rage and hate because the jury acquitted one of the suspected rebels, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. A dozen tailors, fishmongers, etc., humble insignificant citizens from the streets of London, had dared withstand the will of a Tudor monarch, and won. It was the first time such a thing had happened since the Tudors had come to the throne.

  ‘I spend my days shouting at the Council,’ she sobbed, ‘and it makes no difference at all!’ If only her father were alive to deal with them!

  Though she read her mother’s letters, it was of her father that she thought most now, and it was noted that the shrunken little round of her face was beginning, for all its physical difference, to look very like his. And she did in some sort ‘deal with them’ by fining and imprisoning the jurymen; but she found herself powerless to reverse their verdict. She was neither good like her mother, nor strong like her father. ‘I am nothing, nothing, nothing,’ she wailed to herself, and indeed every day she seemed to be shrinking, dwindling, becoming the mere shadow of the woman who, only two months since, had rallied her people to her side by her sheer courage.

  If life could always be a crisis, Mary Tudor would have been great indeed. But life fell back, became petty, nagging, anxious; an interminable wrestling with an ungrateful changeable, turbulent people; in intolerable waiting for a man who could not want her, she knew, as she wanted him.

  ‘But one thing especially I desire you,’ said that tear-stained letter, the last she had ever had from her mother before she was hunted and harried into her grave, ‘for the love that you do owe unto God and unto me, to keep your heart with a chaste mind, and your body from all ill and wanton company.’ She had done that to the very utmost of her powers all these long drab years, and to what odds now at the end of them?

  An utter weariness of her own body beset her, of all the dressings and undressings of it, and all, she sighed, to no purpose. It was thin, and yet it sagged and was flabby. She could tell Philip she had kept herself pure for him, but to what odds, what odds? If she had kept herself beautiful that would have been more to the purpose. No young man could desire her now.

  He was prolonging his departure from Spain to the last moment, on the pretext of these disturbances in her country, of multiform business in his own; but the plain fact was that he could be in no such hurry to come to her as she was in for him to come.

  So listless had she grown, so devoid of any desire to get the better of her mysterious illness, that they were afraid that she would die.

  Gardiner had especial reason to fear it. He could have nothing to hope, not even his life, from Elizabeth’s hands if she should now come to the throne.

  Elizabeth herself knew the danger of such fears and watched her household double their precautions against poison. But there was no way to guard against assassination. It was only seventy years ago since the two small brothers of her grandmother had been secretly murdered in the Tower, so that their uncle King Richard III should sit safely on the throne.

  There was yet a third way for her to die, and many in the Tower were convinced that Gardiner attempted it; rumours scuttled like rats along the walls, telling of a warrant from the Privy Council for her immediate execution, of furious disputes between the Chancellor and Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant of the Tower, who had noticed that the Queen’s signature was missing and refused to carry out the warrant until he had sent to enquire her exact wishes in the matter.

  And small thanks he’d get for that, was the common opinion. The Queen would surely have been thankful to have her worst enemy removed without having to lift a finger in the matter, without even knowing of it – and now her too honest servant had shoved the onus all on her again! So Elizabeth argued to herself, thinking she knew exactly how Mary must feel.

  But she did not know all about Mary.

  She did not know whether Mary praised Bridges or blamed him, she did not know what was happening, the days stretched themselves out ever longer and lighter, and she heard the throbbing and thrumming, the shouting and laughing of the Maytime dances and revels on the river-banks far down below the Tower. Her mother had died in May, and with her the five men reputed to be her lovers.

  If she too were to die this May, it was a pity she had not taken Robin Dudley for her lover, she thought. It would, after all, have made no odds, except to give sweetness to life before she lost it.

  Then one sunny morning she saw armed men in bright blue coats come marching into the inner courtyard of the Tower, and a sturdy elderly knight with a bushy beard riding at their head. More and more of them came through the arch till the courtyard was a pool of blue, spattered with shining halberds and brown weather-beaten faces, more and more till there must be a hundred in the courtyard. She knew that they had come for her. In panic she sent for Bridges and demanded, ‘Is the Lady Jane’s scaffold removed?’

  ‘Yes, Madam.’

  ‘But have these men come to lead me to execution?’

  He quickly denied it. He told her there was no need for fear. They had come in the service of Sir Henry Bedingfeld, the knight on horseback, and he, Bridges, had had orders to hand her over into his charge.

  She stared at him with blank eyes and he could only just catch the words she whispered – ‘His name was Sir James Tyrrel then.’ He thought she had lost her wits, until he remembered that Tyrrel had been given charge of the Princes in the Tower before they were murdered, and in horror he began to stammer reassurances. She cut him short. ‘I know nothing of Bedingfeld. What do you?’

  ‘A most worthy and respected knight, very devout, and a man of honour and conscience.’

  ‘Yes – a devout Papist. And would his conscience approve of murder, if such an order were entrusted
to him?’

  ‘Madam, you wrong him, and the Queen. She has shown that she will not have your life taken by foul means. Sir Henry and his men have come to have guard of you and take you out of the Tower.’

  It sounded like liberty, but she knew better. ‘Where am I to go?’

  ‘To Woodstock, Madam.’

  ‘Where Queen Eleanor killed her rival, Fair Rosamond!’

  ‘Well, Madam, they thought first of Pontefract, but remembered that that was where King Richard II had been done to death. It is difficult to find a place without a murder.’

  He spoke testily as though combating a foolish girl’s fancies. Elizabeth was just about to flare up at him but remembered the service he had done her and never taken this chance to tell her of it. She held out her hand to him ‘Do not blame me for my fears, now I am leaving your guardianship. I know what reason I had to trust it.’

  He went red as he kissed her hand and silently called himself an old churl, and then, as he saw her smile at him, an old dotard.

  She stood very still as he took his leave of her, a model of maidenly patience and dignity, and then the instant he had left her she swung round and whirled away to find Mrs Coldeburn.

  ‘Fetch Robin Dudley here without fail some time in these next few hours!’ And then, as the lady-in-waiting stammered expostulations, her utter inability to carry out such a command, Elizabeth let out a roar:

  ‘Do you think you can deceive me as you do the Council? I know that you have taken his bribes, that it was through your agency he came to me in the garden.’

  ‘Madam, I beg you – not so loud—’

  ‘Loud enough to reach the Council, you think? So it shall be, if you do not obey. Go and do so.’

  She had no fear of her now. She marvelled that she had ever had any as she saw the plump white face before her shake like a blancmange, the sharp nose thrusting out of it, greenish with fear, like a stick of angelica.

  But Mrs Coldeburn’s fear could not work the impossible. Sir Henry Bedingfeld’s charge of the Princess made itself felt instantly in a far stricter guard than even in these last days since the Council had suspected the children’s visits.

  Elizabeth raged, Mrs Coldeburn sobbed and shook her pendulous cheeks, and then Isabella Markham, so gentle and timid, became the storm-centre by declaring that no power on earth should force her to leave the Tower. Sir John Harington had asked leave of the Council to marry her, and Gardiner had been so much amused by the ‘saucy sonnet’ the indignant prisoner had sent him that he declared it would get him out a year sooner than he deserved. They were to be allowed to marry, and they would soon be free, though Isabella’s earnest Protestantism was held against her, and her stout refusal to hear Mass.

  ‘Oh, Bell,’ sighed Elizabeth, ‘I would much sooner hear a thousand masses than cause the least of the million villainies that are springing out of these disputes.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  She was leaving the Tower, and nothing could alter that. Every step she took down the stairs of the Tower wharf was taking her away from that old grey pile of hidden iniquities. The barge was waiting for her, rocking slightly on the ruffled sparkling water. She would step into it and be rowed away upstream in the fresh air, rowing over the swift-running water past fields and woods where people moved in freedom, away from these mouldering stones that bred rheumatism in winter and plague in summer.

  Three wild swans came skimming over the water, beating up from it, and flew over her head, the mighty strokes of their wings making a steady triumphant noise, their necks stretched out like spears, pointing the way that she would go. Her eyes followed them as she stood before the barge, then turned back and looked once more at the Tower, scanning the windows for a hand that might be waving, a face that might be looking out at her. But there was none. She was leaving the Tower, and with it any chance of seeing Robin Dudley for a long time, perhaps for ever. To her own amazement she found herself passionately envying Isabella, who remained.

  Sir Henry Bedingfeld was waiting to hand her into the barge. She gave him her hand with a quick glance that found his face as impenetrable as if it were carved on a tombstone. She would have small chance to get her way with him.

  But she received a gallant compliment as she was rowed upstream, three cannon shots fired in royal salute from the offices of the Hanseatic League. The Government were trying to smuggle her out of the Tower as secretively as they had brought her into it, by water, so that no one in the streets should see and acclaim her. But here was a foreign power recognizing her princely quality and the virtue of her release from the Tower, and how furious Mary would be!

  They never paused to land till they reached Richmond, and there, for the first time, Elizabeth learned that she was to spend the night and see the Queen, who was staying in Richmond Palace.

  She was not even allowed time to change her dress as she instantly asked to do, pleading that it had got splashed and crumpled on the barge and her hair untidy, and that it would show disrespect to Her Majesty to present herself in such a state.

  But— ‘Your Grace’s appearance is immaculate,’ Sir Henry informed her, averting his eyes. Was there the slightest emphasis on the word ‘appearance’? She could not be certain but was convinced to her dismay that his feelings to her were worse than fear or hatred – a cold dislike. He probably guessed that her reason for wishing to change was that she had dressed and had her hair arranged with as gay a show of beauty as possible, in the hopes that Robin would see her thus for his last sight of her – and that she now felt this out of character with the role of the pitiful suppliant for the Queen’s mercy. But indeed she felt pitiful enough, unable to swallow anything at supper, and a sick cold throbbing at her heart as she went to the interview.

  The Queen was in bed between curtains of purple velvet. She looked very small, and her shrunken face seemed to have a spider web spun over it, so grey and lined it had grown. And the Princess, rising from her deep curtsy at the door and timidly approaching her, felt herself to be a long gaudy fly being drawn irresistibly towards the little spider.

  If only she had not put on the white and scarlet! If only she had not let her hair fly loose in tossing curls! If only the Hanseatic League had not shown their sympathy in a royal salute! Had Mary already heard of it?

  A glance at her face convinced her that she had.

  What was to happen now? Questions on her religion? She had heard the Mass several times in the Tower, it had been forced on her, but she had not much protested. Would that go in her favour for obedience? or against her for insincerity? She could not answer Mary about the Mass as she had done to Isabella. But she could answer nothing, till the Queen spoke. The silence spread and flattened down the air, it was crushing down on her head until she could no longer keep upright and sank on her knees by the bed, closing her eyes.

  When she opened them again, she saw Mary looking at her, but not only Mary. Another face was looking at her out of Mary’s eyes, the face of their father, in those moments when he had become a monster of suspicion and cruelty.

  ‘I have sent for you,’ said a thin hollow voice, scarcely more than a whisper, ‘to offer you a free pardon, without further question; your life, which has been forfeit, and your full liberty.’

  ‘My – liberty, Madam?’ faltered Elizabeth. This could not be true, but could Mary, even in this mood, be so cruel as to tantalise her with such a promise?

  ‘As much liberty,’ the dreadful little voice went on, ‘as is consonant with the bride of a young man who passionately desires to marry you.’

  The blood flew up into Elizabeth’s cold face. God’s death, what was this? Did they plan to marry her to Robin Dudley? Even in her wild uprush of joy at thought of it, she knew her answer would be ‘no.’ If they intended this, it was to put her out of any chance of the Succession, as the wife, not only of a subject, but of a younger son of a disgraced family of upstarts.

  Mary’s short-sighted eyes were watching her so closely that they seeme
d to be devouring her thoughts. ‘So you can still blush, sister, at mention of a young man.’

  Elizabeth did not answer as she rose from her knees at the Queen’s signal. This cat-and-mouse business was to make her ask who was her intended bridegroom, an unwise move; it would be safer to show complete indifference as to any choice. So she stood silent, and not an eyelash fluttered as she heard that Philibert of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, was again making offers for her hand, having, said Mary, fallen in love with her portrait and with all – yes, all – that he had heard of her.

  But Elizabeth knew well there were more substantial reasons for the match from Mary’s point of view. Philibert had been expelled from his own principality and was protected by the Emperor. As his wife she would be an exile from England, a dependent of Spain, penniless, powerless, with very little hope of ever getting back to her country, still less to the throne of it.

  ‘I gave you this offer before,’ said the Queen, ‘but the case has altered, there has since been a rebellion – in your name. Before you again protest your desire to stay in England, think whether you would not rather enjoy your liberty abroad, than stay here in an English prison. What have you against this handsome young Prince to make you prefer such an alternative?’

  ‘Nothing, Madam.’ She was shaking with fear but also with a sudden aching longing to be free, to sail across the sea into strange lands, to meet new people who would talk with her and admire her, with no need to guard every word, to ride and hunt and hawk again and hear the arrow whizzing from her bow, and feel her horse’s willing muscles spring beneath her and the wind rush past her face – to dance again in halls glittering with lights and crowded with gallant figures and musicians thrumming in the gallery, spinning their enchanting harmony over all the scene, instead of just practising steps by herself or with her ladies to the playing of one thin lute – yes, and to dress her finest and even paint her face and deck her hair with jewels that should bring out the brightness of her eyes.