Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  “My troops and arms are assembled at St. Thomas Waterings. I shall keep them there in case of need.”

  “You shall disperse them immediately! We can have no private armies within a day’s march of the capital!”

  “I brought them there on the queen’s orders.”

  “Have you a written request from the queen?” was my father’s insistent question.

  “You are well aware that the queen hardly bothers to put her requests in writing, not when the person she is requesting to act is standing right beside her!”

  “Or lying beside her,” I heard my father mutter.

  Ignoring this remark, Lord Robert said, “Nevertheless I shall obtain what you seem to require. I shall return in a few hours, after I have made myself presentable to the sovereign, and ask her for the request in writing.” And having made this announcement, he took his leave.

  But Lord Robert did not return when he said he would, nor did he come to court the next day, or the next. Meanwhile the queen sank deeper into the arms of the pox, seemingly losing what was left of her will, refusing to eat and turning her face to the wall, her eyes blankly staring. The only sign of life left in her, the weeping Mistress Clinkerte reported, was one bony hand fingering a gold crucifix, her thumb rubbing the face of the Christ, her lips moving in a sibilant whisper.

  We all were on the point of despair, even my father, and were preparing ourselves for the worst news to come from the queen’s bedchamber.

  Lord Robert appeared then, wearing not his mourning black but a doublet and hose of a subdued deep green color. He had come, it seemed, because his sister Mary had to be removed from court, having been stricken with the pox as were several others who had frequented the inner chamber of the queen. Young Dr. Meadowcroft had died, and Elizabeth’s fool Graziella, and the bride of Lord Hazelton who had been married only a week, and one or two of the tirewomen. My sister Cecelia, whose case was not as severe as Lady Mary’s, was taken to our family home at Rotherfield Greys to recover and Lord Robert hoped that if his sister was removed to the country she would survive.

  He had no sooner accompanied Lady Mary to her coach than he returned to the royal apartments, bringing a priest with him.

  “This is Father Lockton,” he said to me. “I have brought him to anoint the queen with holy oil, to aid her recovery. Please accompany us to her bedchamber.”

  “But the physicians have forbidden us all from entering—”

  “She asked to see me, didn’t she?” Lord Robert snapped.

  “That was several days ago, my lord. Her condition is much worsened—”

  “All the more reason for us to be admitted, and for her to welcome priestly comfort.”

  I shook my head. “I cannot enter her apartments without permission.”

  Lord Robert bent down so that he spoke close to my ear.

  “Lettie! We are friends, we share secrets! Let us be allies in this! Besides, it is only a matter of time before I am the one to give and withhold permission in these royal apartments!”

  I did not know what to say to this.

  “I am told the queen wishes to receive the blessing for the sick,” Father Lockton said in a surprisingly high voice. “I am prepared to succor her.” He smiled wanly. “Please, take me in to her.”

  Instead of doing as he asked I went out into the corridor, hoping to see one of the councilors or physicians there. But there were only three grooms playing dice, and one of the gentleman ushers who lounged against the wall, drifting off to sleep. I heard voices coming from other parts of the palace, but saw no one. Ever since the queen fell ill there had been fewer and fewer people to be found in or near her apartments.

  “Lettie!” Lord Robert was calling me impatiently. “Where have you got to? I need you.”

  Why he needed me I couldn’t imagine just then, though it became clear enough soon afterward. Worried that I was doing the wrong thing, and exasperated and flustered by Lord Robert’s demands (it was hard for me to say no to him), I resigned myself to give in. Nodding my assent, I led Lord Robert and the priest into the queen’s private domain.

  There was a stench in the royal bedchamber, my blunt sister would have called it the stench of death. The painfully thin, pale woman in the broad cedarwood bed lay inert, apparently unaware of our entry into the room. But when she heard Lord Robert say, “Your Majesty,” she blinked her tired eyes and turned her head. When she saw him her lips turned upward in a faint smile and she slowly held out her hand.

  He grasped it and, bending down over the bed, raised it to his lips.

  “I have brought Father Lockton to bless you,” he said.

  Fear came into her eyes. “Is it over then?” she murmured.

  “No, dear. This is just in case.”

  There was no need to say “in case you die.”

  The priest invoked the blessing in his shrill voice, and I saw the queen smile again, this time from amusement, as she caught Lord Robert’s eye.

  “Now then,” Lord Robert said briskly when the prayer had come to an end, “there is something else we need to do just in case.” He turned to me.

  “Lettie, find Clinkerte. She must be near by. No one else, mind. Only Clinkerte.”

  I went in search of Mistress Clinkerte and found her, wrapped in a cloak, napping on a pile of pillows in the antechamber. I shook her and said that she was needed.

  Frightened and disheveled, she followed me into the bedchamber.

  “Now, Your Majesty,” Lord Robert said once we were standing beside the bed, “in the presence of these two witnesses, Letitia Knollys and Mistress Clinkerte, Father Lockton can join us in marriage, so that if the Lord should call you to heaven, you will leave your kingdom in the best and strongest hands.”

  SIXTEEN

  “No!”

  The queen’s scratchy, muffled voice was indistinct but the word she spoke was clear enough.

  “No! Not that!”

  Using all her remaining strength, she struggled to sit up in her bed—Mistress Clinkerte supporting her as she did so—and I put a pillow behind her back.

  “There will be none of that!” she said hoarsely.

  Lord Robert waved the priest away and sat down on the bed. He reached for the queen’s hand, which she had snatched away when he said he wanted Father Lockton to marry them. She withheld it.

  “You are weak, dear. You are not thinking clearly. Let me make the decisions now.”

  “Never!” she muttered. “I am still queen here! Call my council!”

  “But my dearest girl,” Mistress Clinkerte said, weeping, “I don’t want you to die a spinster!”

  “Hush, old woman! Remember who I am, and who you are!”

  The voice that came from the bed was so low I had to strain to hear it, but the queen’s accents were sharp. Still, her frail body trembled as she spoke, and the stink of decay in the room seemed to increase. Even as I admired her toughness—the toughness my father had been so sure of in her—I could not help but wonder whether the effort to resist Lord Robert’s wishes would put too great a strain on her weak body.

  I watched her. Her head drooped, as she clutched at Mistress Clinkerte’s supporting arm. Would she collapse?

  “Letitia! Summon your father,” I heard her say. “Bring the council here.”

  “Wait, Letitia,” Lord Robert was saying. “Wait until Father Lockton has heard our marriage vows.”

  I hesitated, and in that moment I heard the queen emit a scratchy sound, a muffled shriek. “Though death possess every joint of me, I will not be forced to marry! Do as I command you!”

  Without waiting to hear more I hurried out into the anteroom and the corridor beyond, calling my father’s name and Lord Cecil’s. The servants, alarmed, began rushing around in their turn, looking for the men who customarily attended the queen.

  “Is she dead?” they called out to me.

  “No!” I shouted. “She wants her councilors!”

  I finally found my father, sitting at a lo
ng table with two of the militia commanders, eating bread and cheese and poring over a map.

  “Come quickly, father! Lord Robert is trying to make the queen marry him! She wants you and the other council members!”

  “By the beard of the Lord!” he burst out, getting up from the table in such haste that he overturned his tankard and hurrying out into the corridor. When we got back to the royal apartments we found that several of the other councilors were already in the royal bedchamber, and that a secretary sat in a corner of the room, writing, the scratch of his quill the only sound.

  The queen, alarmingly pale and thin, had wrapped a length of red flannel around her shoulders. Lord Robert no longer sat on the bed but stood against the wall, to one side of the bed, looking, I thought, somewhat wilted.

  “Take this down with care,” she was saying to the secretary, who turned his head toward the bed and shut his eyes, straining to hear her, before turning once again to his paper and quill.

  “I, Elizabeth, queen of this realm, declare that upon my death Lord Robert Dudley—” she paused to allow the secretary to write—“that upon my death Lord Robert Dudley shall become Lord Protector, with full and free powers to rule in my stead.”

  “But Your Majesty!” my father cried out.

  “I should advise caution,” Lord Cecil said at the same moment.

  “Silence!” the queen croaked. “I have not finished. As Lord Protector,” she went on, “he shall have an income of twenty thousand pounds a year from the royal treasury.”

  At this Lord Robert, who had been standing open-mouthed, knelt beside the bed and took the queen’s hand.

  “My good lady!” he managed to say through his tears. “My dearest, good lady!”

  “Never mind, Robin, I may outlive you all,” I heard her whisper to him.

  “I doubt whether the treasury has enough coins to meet this requirement,” was Cecil’s acid response.

  “Then let it be your charge to fill it!”

  The secretary completed his writing, and blotted his paper. Gritting her teeth with the effort, the queen grasped the quill offered to her and signed her name to the paper, handing it to Lord Cecil.

  “There! Now everyone is satisfied. And my back still aches. Let me sleep!”

  She waved everyone out of the room except Mistress Clinkerte and myself, who helped her to lie down again, turned on her side, and obediently began rubbing her back.

  SEVENTEEN

  The spots on the queen’s face and neck and arms became pustules, then turned to sores with ugly red scabs.

  But she did not die. Night after night she slept beside the fireplace, wrapped in layers of red flannel, while Dr. Burcot gave her potions to drink and braved her threats and obscenities.

  I was with her much of the time. Many of her ladies and maids of honor had withdrawn from court because of illness—real or feigned—but my father insisted that I stay with her, even serving her in her bedchamber though he knew—we all knew—I was risking coming down with the pox as Cecelia had, or even dying from it.

  I took heart from Mistress Clinkerte, who remained entirely free of the red spots despite remaining with the queen night and day. And I could not help but notice that Lord Robert too stayed well, as did my father and most of the other councilors.

  Gradually, day by day, the queen began to recover her appetite and called for quinces and game pies.

  “But Your Majesty cannot eat such delicacies! Not when you have the pox!” Dr. Burcot burst out—to which the queen responded “Get out! I will have no such dour words spoken here!”

  By this time those of us in her household were beginning to believe that she was improving, and would soon be fully restored to health. She ate more and more, she got out of bed and walked—haltingly at first—around her bedchamber. Her voice grew stronger, and her limbs as well, until once again she was stubborn enough and energetic and forceful enough to vilify us all in her usual fashion.

  “I can’t bear ugly women!” she cried one afternoon as we maids of honor were dressing her. She called for a tankard of small beer and drank it with relish. While enjoying her beer, she scanned our faces. Her gaze came to rest on my poor ill-favored sister Cecelia, whose face bore the marks of the pox and whose hair—shorn to make the queen a wig she hardly ever wore—had not yet fully grown back. Cecelia always kept her head covered with a French hood or round cap, but her ears were prominent and her sparse short hair could not cover them, their outline was evident even under the tightest headgear.

  “Why do that girl’s ears stick out so?” the queen demanded to know.

  No one knew what to reply.

  “I cannot help it, Your Majesty,” Cecelia said. “We cannot all be as beautiful as you.”

  The sarcasm in her tone was not lost on the queen, whose face was similarly marred by pits and scars (though they would fade in time) and who was only too aware that the marks made her unsightly. She picked up the near-empty tankard and threw it in Cecelia’s direction. It shattered into a hundred pieces.

  “Leave my court!” the queen shouted hoarsely. Cecelia, predictably, burst into tears and ran clumsily out of the room. Despite my father’s efforts to mollify the furious Elizabeth, she remained adamant: Cecelia had to go. She retired once again to Rotherfield Greys where, according to mother, she sulked and pouted and wept, blaming the queen for her unfair fate and lamenting that her life was over.

  As I have said, all the maids of honor were eager to be married—to the wealthiest, most highborn men their families could secure for them. I was no exception, I suppose, except that, as Lord Robert had guessed, I was not eager to become the wife of Walter Devereux, the man my father had chosen for me and clearly intended for me to marry.

  “He’ll be a titled lord one day,” my younger brother Frank remarked speculatively one morning not long after the queen was restored to health and the court returned to its usual state. Frank, who had grown into a lanky, amusing boy, sharp-witted and acid-tongued, with a capacity for cool appraisal, was observing Walter as the latter went about his favorite task of helping our father draw up lists of foodstuffs needed for the court’s summer visits, or progresses, to the great houses of the nobles.

  Every June, when the weather turned warm, we had to pack up the queen’s things (nearly a hundred chests for her gowns alone) and our own and set out in a huge caravan, traveling at the speed of snails, to stay at country houses. It was torturous, that slow crawling travel. The packing and unpacking. The making of fires in cold rooms, the fleas lurking in the ill-tended rushes, the waiting along the roadside when carts broke down or horses died or serving women unexpectedly went into labor.

  I dreaded the coming of summer because of all the work and fuss, but Walter looked forward to it. Helping my father plan for the great progresses was something he enjoyed almost as much as hunting. He was a born listmaker, I liked to say.

  “Someone has to make the lists, Lettie,” was my mother’s practical reply whenever she heard me call my future husband a listmaker. “Imagine a progress with no organizing! What a commotion that would create!”

  It seemed to me that whenever the court traveled, there was always commotion, but I held my tongue. I had no wish to argue with my mother about Walter, I much preferred discussing him with Frank.

  “No one can ride rough horse better, or stalk with a bow,” was Frank’s admiring comment on Walter’s proficiency as a hunter. “I once saw him come back from a hunt with three couple of coneys and a mallard and a doe—all killed in a single afternoon. And then there is Chartley—” he broke off, giving me a significant look.

  “Yes, Chartley.” The Devereux family castle, said to be three hundred years old, had walls that were twelve feet thick and a great hall the size of a throne room. Its hundred or so rooms were small and cramped, and the wind whistled fiercely through the old stonework, or so Walter told me when describing his childhood. But he added that the park was beautiful and well stocked with game, and the castle was very impressi
ve in its size and undeniable strength.

  “A very solid piece of masonry, Chartley,” Frank said. “Not unlike Walter himself. And don’t forget that he will have other estates some day, when he inherits, along with chests of gold and silver and offices and titles and subsidies from the queen, who likes him. No doubt she will make him a Garter knight. And he is not bad-looking, would you say?”

  I had to admit that Walter, with his broad chest and shoulders and manly strength, his dark hair and eyes, his brawn and vigor on horseback, was the sort of young man most girls would be proud to marry. But when I looked at him I saw that, young as he was, his hair had already begun to grow thin like his father’s (his father was not at all a good-looking man), and his nose was too long for handsomeness, and his eyes were small and set close together, not large and widely spaced and beautiful like Robert’s.

  “He is highly moral, so they say,” Frank continued drily, still talking about Walter. “He will make a fine Justice of the Peace. And I know of no bastards he has fathered—”

  I yawned, making Frank laugh. “And he is the dullest man I have ever met!” My exclamation, I felt sure, could be heard throughout the royal apartments.

  “I quite agree,” Frank said. “And mother does too, though she would never admit it. You were made for excitement, Lettie. Walter Devereux is not the man for you.”

  He paused, shaking his head. “Will father not consider anyone else?”

  “Apparently there is no one else,” I had to admit. “Cecelia has spread the tale of my supposed immoral doings in Frankfurt throughout the court and the maids of honor have told it to all their relatives and acquaintances. Half the servants in the household have heard the stories, the other half soon will. My reputation is all but ruined. Who would marry me now? Cecelia blames me for her having been sent away from court. She is spiteful. As usual, she chooses to vent her spite on me, and as usual, father does nothing to silence her or punish her. Now I am said to be the most forward virgin in the court. Which means no virgin at all.”