Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  “But Douglass is lying, father! She and Robert were never married. She plagued poor Robert unbearably until he gave her his pledge, but that was all. He never repeated any vows, as he has with me.”

  “Nevertheless,” father said in his gravest tones, “it is necessary to have a written understanding between Robert and Lady Sheffield, in case any question should ever arise as to whether they were married or not.”

  He continued to lecture me and harangue Robert until, in the end, a document was drawn up for Douglass to sign. We all met in a secluded bower in the gardens of Greenwich Palace, a place far from the noise and business of the court. Robert’s steward brought the document in a pouch, and placed it on a table, inkwell and pen prepared and ready.

  Douglass was in distress, her blond hair in disarray under her hastily-arranged cap, one of her sleeves hanging loose, having come untied, her eyes red-rimmed. I wondered whether she would bring her son with her, and was glad to see that she had not. She picked up the document and began to read it. She had not read far before she looked up from the paper, with tears in her eyes, and shook her head.

  “No!” she said. “I cannot! I cannot!”

  She looked at Robert, then at me and finally at my father. She shook her head again, more decisively this time.

  “Look at me!” she cried, tearing the cap off her head to reveal a strange sight. Among the thick curling blond locks were bald patches. And the scalp revealed was not white but red, an angry red.

  “See this!” she shouted. “Look at this! I am being poisoned! Everyone knows that a slow-working poison makes a person’s hair fall out! I am being poisoned, and there is only one poisoner here! My husband, Robert Dudley!”

  A growl escaped Robert’s throat and he reached out to slap Douglass. My father quickly stepped between them.

  “Hush, girl, and do as you are bid. I assure you, it is the queen’s wish as well as the wish of those of us gathered here.”

  “My stomach hurts all the time,” Douglass insisted, grasping her waist. “I retch. I am ill.”

  “You are probably pregnant,” Robert snapped. “And certainly not by me! Half the men in the court have bedded you!”

  “But since my first husband died, only you have married me! And now you are trying to kill me!”

  My father took a step toward Douglass and, firmly grasping her by the arm, helped her to sit down at the table.

  “Lady Sheffield,” he began, deliberately choosing not to call Douglass “Lady Dudley,” did you love your late father, and obey him in all things as was his due?”

  “I did.”

  “If he were here now, he would guide you as I am doing. He would tell you to sign this document. All we need today, is for you to sign. What is happening to your hair, or any churning in your stomach, is of no account.”

  “But I am being poisoned!”

  My father picked up the pen, dipped it in the inkwell, wiped it, and handed it to Douglass. She wept, her shoulders crumpled. But she signed.

  I heard Robert heave a sigh of relief. And then I saw him draw a heavy pouch from his doublet and hand it to his steward, murmuring “Give this to her.” It was, I felt sure, a pouch of coins. For Douglass, and for their son. And in return for signing a paper filled with words she believed to be false.

  As for me, I was not certain what to believe. I wanted to trust my Robert, my dearest husband, who I knew to be a man of many failings as well as strengths. I hoped fervently that Douglass’s falling hair and stomach pains were caused by something other than poison. I prayed that it was so. I prayed that we would have a long and happy marriage, blessed with children who would love us as much as we would love them. I prayed for our future, knowing that nothing is ever certain in this world, and that in marrying Robert I was taking a chance.

  To satisfy my father, Robert and I were married a second time—this time at Wanstead, which became our favorite home, with my father and Robert’s brother Ambrose and other relatives and witnesses present. Robert’s chaplain married us, and was careful to follow the ceremony as written in the communion book.

  When asked, no one in the small group of witnesses protested that he or she had anything to say against the marriage. But then, Douglass Sheffield was not present, nor was the queen. And the queen, in time, had a great deal to say, once she discovered that I, her rival, had at long last married the man she loved.

  THIRTY-ONE

  She did not find out right away. Indeed it was many months before word of our marriage reached her, and when it did, she was in a state of near panic because she had just survived another attempt to kill her.

  Or so everyone believed.

  I had never seen the queen so frightened as on the day of that attack, when she came into her bedchamber soon afterward, clutching her chest and short of breath. Her always pale face was ashen-white, her eyes were large and startled, with a stricken look—not unlike the look in Douglass Sheffield’s eyes when she signed the document saying she had never truly been married to Robert.

  I was to remember that look in the queen’s eyes for a long time to come.

  According to what Whaffer told us all, gathering the bedchamber staff and tirewomen around him in a small room where we would not be disturbed or overheard, the attack happened just as the queen had been about to board the royal barge for a trip upriver. It was to have been an important trip, for she had with her a French courtier named Simier, a Frenchman who had come to England to discuss her future marriage to the French prince Francis.

  Suddenly, Whaffer said, as she was about to step down into the barge, there was a loud shot.

  An arquebus had been fired. The bargeman, standing very near the queen, cried out and fell. Blood spurted from both his arms. The French courtier Simier ran for his life, deserting the queen. Others ducked or ran or shouted for help.

  Amid the chaos, Elizabeth cried out for Robert and in an instant he was at her side, Whaffer told us, shielding her with his body, hurrying her back into the palace for safety. Once she was there, and surrounded by trusted guardsmen, Robert went down into the vessel and wrapped the bargeman’s wounds with his shirt, shouting for Dr. Huick and demanding that the man who fired the shot be brought to him.

  We were full of questions. Had the assassin been found? Was he taken to the Tower? Who was he?

  For several hours these questions remained unanswered, while we bedchamber ladies took on the difficult task of trying to soothe the queen’s nerves. We brought her cordials. We urged her to lie down and take some rest, though she was unable to sleep; her eyes remained wide open with that haunting startled look which made me so uneasy.

  “Strike, or be stricken! Strike, or be stricken!” she murmured again and again. Unable to rest, she paced in her bedchamber, drawing aside the curtains and bedhangings again and again and even looking behind the tapestries for hidden assassins.

  “You need not fear, Your Highness,” my father told the queen. “The assassin was not firing at you, but at the Frenchman Simier. Simier is a criminal. He killed his own brother! And do you know why? Because his brother was sleeping with Simier’s wife! The assassin was sent by the wife’s relatives, or so it is said.”

  “Can you be certain of this?” Elizabeth asked. “The assassin at Kenilworth was not shooting at any Frenchman, but at me. I believe it is the Spanish who send the assassins. They want me dead.”

  Father shrugged. “The French are all sunk in wickedness. They are capable of anything. The idea that Your Highness should consider choosing a husband from among them sours my stomach, if I may be so bold as to say so.”

  “You may not! Besides, you know as well as I that England needs an alliance with France, as a counterweight to the evil designs of King Philip.”

  Hearing this exchange, as I stood with the other bedchamber ladies in attendance, I was glad to see that talking with my father was bringing Elizabeth back to something of her old courage and confidence. But she was still pale, and somewhat short of breath, and her e
yes were wide with fear.

  “After what happened today, will you agree to send this Simier back where he came from, at least until you have had a chance to weigh the consequences of a French marriage?”

  “Certainly not! I have already given the matter more than enough thought. Simier may be a coward and a criminal, and he certainly showed me no chivalry today, but I will allow him to stay. Now, leave me in peace.”

  With a respectful bow, father left the room. The Frenchman Simier was allowed to remain at court, and after a brief investigation it was determined that the arquebus shot was not the deliberate act of an assassin, but an accident. The man who fired the shot apologized and was not punished. Such was the official response—but I knew the queen persisted in her belief that the Spanish were seeking to kill her.

  “Two near-fatal accidents within the space of a few years?” I remarked to Robert. “The queen nearly killed both times? That could hardly be coincidence.”

  “Fatal accidents do occur at royal courts,” was Robert’s response. “The queen’s own father, King Henry, had a terrible accident on the tilting ground and nearly died. Queen Anne Boleyn was so frightened that she miscarried her child. And the father of the French Prince Francis died of wounds suffered in just such an accident, riding at the tilt.”

  I remained unconvinced.

  “Do you think Elizabeth will marry this French prince?” I said after a time. “Even though he is said to be as small as a dwarf and weak and horribly pockmarked?”

  “Marry she must—and soon. The stronger the Spanish grow, the more she needs an ally. Besides, she likes this boy. They write to each other in Greek and Latin, as I have told you. He is witty, and she likes a witty man. She can’t wait to meet him—even though I am sure that the thought of marriage frightens her. She can’t stand the idea of anyone having rule over her, and the husband is the head of the wife, even if he is much younger, and even if she is a queen.”

  “Then you have doubts.”

  “Some, yes. But she may surprise us all, and fall in love with the prince once he arrives.”

  I did not think so, but I said nothing further to Robert just then.

  Prince Francis did arrive very soon after the frightening episode with the arquebus, though he came without pomp and was received without ceremony. I glimpsed him once or twice during his brief visit, as he sat talking to Elizabeth, both of them laughing, clearly enjoying each other’s company. He was even uglier than I had been led to believe. Truly the runt of Queen Catherine de Medici’s royal litter. Her eldest, also named Francis, had been the childhood friend and frail young husband of Mary Queen of Scots and had died before he was seventeen. Her second boy, Charles, had not lived to be much older. The next to inherit the throne, Henry III, was then king, and had survived to the age of twenty-eight, but was said to be in fragile health, with weak lungs and an infirm heart. So this prince, Elizabeth’s pet, was not likely to be long-lived or strong—which, I supposed, could well have been a part of his appeal for the vigorous, hardy Elizabeth. If she married him he would soon make her a widow, but a widow who in time of need could call upon the armies of France.

  The very private visit was over within days, and the prince went back to France, leaving it to his royal brother’s ministers to discuss the possible terms of a marriage treaty. But he left his creature Simier behind, to accomplish a final task. A fateful task.

  To persuade the queen to marry the French prince Simier told her, first, that she was right in thinking the Spanish were hoping to kill her, and that he had been told that assassins were on their way to England to accomplish this gruesome mission. And when she responded with fear, he told her that she could no longer count on Robert to protect her, for Robert now had a wife to protect—a wife named Lettice Knollys, to whom he was bound by ties not only of loyalty, but of love.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Elizabeth was frightened. But not too frightened to banish Robert from court and to summon me into her presence, in such a cold fury that I feared I might be locked in the Tower and sentenced to death.

  “I have never trusted you, you She-Wolf,” she began. “I knew when you entered my household that you were a wayward girl, not to be trusted. I was told what happened in Frankfurt. The shame you brought on your family! But your father promised me he would keep you on a tight rein. I thought that he had. Now I find that you have stolen from me the man I hold dearest in all the world.”

  How I found the strength to answer her as I did I will never know. All I know, all that I can remember of that long-ago morning, is that when she looked at me with such chill fierceness in her light eyes I suddenly realized what it was that she was seeing.

  For it came to me all of a sudden (having caught a glimpse of myself in one of her many pier glasses) that she was seeing, standing before her, not a She-Wolf but a beautiful woman, much younger than herself and still very lovely—enviably lovely, so that men still wrote her poetry, and sought to paint her portrait. (Yes, it happened. And not infrequently.) A woman of whom she had been jealous ever since I first came to her court.

  I realized that the sight of me must be extremely vexing to her, and not only because I possessed the beauty that she lacked, but because I had triumphed over her! I, Letitia Knollys, now Countess of Leicester, was reveling in the love of the most handsome, the most desirable and splendid man at her court.

  I possessed the love of her life.

  And this gave me strength. I straightened up. I felt my power. And then I spoke.

  “Where is my Robert?” I demanded, ignoring her rebuke. “Have you put him in prison? I insist on seeing him. I am his wife.”

  She continued to regard me with a flinty stare. She refused to be roused to passion.

  “And it is only because you are his wife that your life has been spared. If I ordered your execution, he would never forgive me!”

  “You would execute a woman of royal blood then? A woman whose right to the throne may well be higher than yours! My mother was King Henry’s bastard and if the gossip about Anne Boleyn’s infidelity is to be believed, you are not royal at all! You are the daughter of the musician Mark Smeaton, or some other lowborn man!”

  She raised her hand as if to slap me, and I stepped back. She did not pursue me. Instead she motioned to her guards to leave the room. We were alone.

  She paced for a moment, frowning, thinking. Then she came to rest.

  “You will leave court as soon as I dismiss you from this room,” she said. “And you will not return. But before you leave, we will have an understanding.”

  “You will not harm me or my children or anyone in my family,” I began. “You will not deprive Robert of his lands or offices. If you do, I will reveal all that I have read in your daybook and all that I know of the death of Robert’s first wife.”

  I could tell that this last threat startled her. I knew the truth about Amy Dudley’s death, and it seemed evident to me that the queen did not—and that she would very much like to.

  “You will allow us to live together quietly, and will not trouble us.”

  I could think of nothing else. I grew quiet.

  “Clearly you are a child when it comes to striking a bargain, She-Wolf. Are these the strongest terms you have to offer?” She smiled. “As long as I am sovereign, Lord Robert will continue to serve me, in whatever fashion and whatever place I determine. Your life and his will remain mine to command, as befits loyal subjects. I may, if I choose, snuff them out at any time. Never forget that.

  “Robert may love you, certainly he lusts after you. But those bonds, however firm, will fray in time. While his bond to me is enduring, more enduring than you can know. And while it endures, you will always take second place in his heart, and in his life. Never forget that. Now go!”

  I would have liked to speak, to deny all that she had said, even though deep down I knew it to be the truth. But I had no words. I had run out of defiance. As the queen spoke, I began to feel a tremor of fear, faint at first, and the
n stronger and stronger. In the end I was glad to leave her presence, which I did promptly and with the curtest of bows.

  Where was Robert? What had she done with him?

  Once out of the queen’s apartments I ran, picking up my skirts and hoping I would not trip, racing down the narrow dark corridors of the palace, slipping on the uncarpeted stairs, praying with every step that Elizabeth would not change her mind and send her soldiers to seize me and imprison me, shutting me in the deepest of her dungeons and telling my jailer to throw away the key.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Our son Robert was born in June of my fortieth year. He was large and long, with blue eyes and reddish hair, and unlike my fifteen-year-old son Rob, who had been a lusty baby, crying a lot and wriggling and never at peace, this boy was calm. I nursed him myself and he ate well. He slept beside us in his carved wooden cradle trimmed in crimson velvet. He was barely two months old when Robert ordered a very small suit of armor made for him, and when he was home he liked me to dress the baby in it and take him out in my carriage.

  “There now, Baron Denbigh,” Robert said to him, using the title that came to the boy as heir to the earldom of Leicester, “you are fit to guard the queen. When you are a little older I will teach you to use a sword.”

  Robert’s delight in our son was beyond measure. His face shone with pleasure whenever he saw him, taking him in his arms and talking softly to him, lifting him onto his shoulders and doing his best to gallop around the kitchen garden—limping on his sore foot—neighing like a horse and laughing. All his life, ever since the time, decades earlier, when he had lost most of his family in the bloody aftermath of his father’s plot to seize the throne, Robert had longed for an heir. A son to carry on the Dudley name and restore honor to the Dudley line and ancestry. Little Denbigh was all he could have wished for, he said, ignoring the baby’s slight physical imperfection—one of his legs was a good deal shorter than the other—and his somewhat glassy-eyed stare.