by Susan Kay
On the 14th of July, Northumberland rode out from the Tower with a vast escort of horse and artillery to settle with this stupid, middle-aged woman for good. What did she know of men and battle tactics, what did she know about anything for that matter, this semi-cloistered near-nun? He’d smash her forces without mercy and when they trotted her into his camp he’d make her sorry for this undignified scramble to arms. All the way through Shoreditch he sat his horse in grim silence and thought of ways to teach a sheltered old maid the folly of playing fast and loose with soldiers. The crowd along his way stood mute and at last their ominous silence penetrated the armour of his rage.
He turned in his saddle and looked back in surprise towards the city.
“The people press to see us,” he remarked bitterly, “but I see not one of them cries ‘God speed.’”
* * *
Northumberland’s desperate coup took exactly nine days to crumble into ignominious defeat, foundering on the treachery of the Council and that most unpredictable of all factors, the mood of the people. Behind his back, unwilling and cowardly associates began to waver and when they heard that the crews of the royal ships at Yarmouth had gone over to Mary’s side to a man, it was inevitable that they too would do the same. On the 18th of July Mary Tudor was proclaimed the rightful Queen of England and the city of London erupted into a sea of waving caps and blazing bonfires, as the people came out to dance in the streets, singing and cheering while the bells rang furiously.
There was no accounting for the people, that moody, headstrong, fickle race. It was against all rational supposition that Protestant England should now rise in support of a Catholic Queen, but it happened, and no one was more astonished than Mary Tudor to find herself at the heart of a resounding victory over the most powerful man in the land.
The news of Mary’s unlooked-for triumph was swiftly carried to Hatfield, stunning the entire household, but not its mistress.
“Nothing surprises you, does it?” said the governess tartly, sweeping an assorted jumble of books and sweets off the bed. “I suppose you’re about to say you expected this all along?”
“Had I expected it,” said Elizabeth with an infuriating smile, “you and I, my dear Kat, would now be sunning ourselves at Framlingham in the royal favour. But nothing about Mary would ever surprise me—she’s a tangled mass of contradictions.”
“It must be in the family,” sniffed Kat and ducked the pillow which immediately flew at her head. After a moment, Elizabeth followed the pillow, running barefoot across the room like some wild creature suddenly let out of a cage.
“If you get up now,” said Kat severely, “everyone will say your illness was feigned.”
Elizabeth mocked a deep curtsey.
“It was a highly contagious affliction, Your Majesty. I understand there’s been a lot of it about.”
Kat stared down at her in alarm. In her present mood she looked quite reckless enough to say it, and impertinence, flippancy, were the very last things to display before Mary Tudor.
“Madam, are you mad? You of all people must guard your tongue in your sister’s presence.”
“Oh yes, I know she’s never liked me.”
“Then you must admit the need to stay in bed and play out your farce to the end.”
Elizabeth pouted. “But I’m so bored.”
“Better bored than dead,” snapped Kat, sharp-tongued with nerves. “For the love of God, madam, get back between the sheets before someone sees you prancing at the window.”
Elizabeth turned and regarded the curtained cave with repugnance.
“I hate beds,” she said slowly. “They stand there night after night waiting for you to die in them. It’s like lying in a tomb.”
She shivered in the hot sunlight and Kat, watching her bleakly, recognised the signs that heralded a new cycle of nightmares and migraines. For all her hard self-sufficiency that childhood legacy could still reduce her to suffocating panic each time she woke in mindless terror, screaming for lights. Kat knew she would be needed tonight, when the brittle air of nonchalance had run its course. But for the moment, high as a kite and careless of the risk, Elizabeth sat in full view in the window-seat and her eyes, scanning the parched gardens below, sparkled with taut anticipation. Kat had once heard it said that people who lived overlong with danger were sometimes unable to live without it; increasingly, she was beginning to fear that Elizabeth was one of them. That look on her face was a euphoria more properly appertaining to the steady consumption of wine.
Certainly, she was still in peril. Everyone knew the new Queen instinctively disliked her sister and had more reason than most to consider her a bastard. She was now in a position to secure her own legitimacy by Act of Parliament and to bar Elizabeth from the line of succession. A treacherous quagmire of ugly emotions surrounded Elizabeth and one false step while crossing it was likely to prove her last. Already, by sitting quietly on the sidelines during Northumberland’s coup, she had let the first round with her sister go by default. She had measured the situation with the yardstick of expediency and Mary, who so despised compromise, would distrust her for it. But that could not be helped and however quickly the Hatfield entourage was assembled now to join the new Queen, it would still be too late to allay Mary’s suspicions.
So why hurry? It would only look ignoble, place her on the same level as those rats of the Council who had already scuttled towards the rising sun. She might as well take her time and go in style. What could not be done with any hope of success could at least be done with panache. And the people dearly loved a good show—
Kat, waiting with scant patience for her mistress to return to bed, tapped her foot ominously, but Elizabeth uncurled her legs in a leisurely fashion and began to study the curls which tossed loosely round her shoulders in an auburn cascade.
“I think I’ll wash my hair,” she announced thoughtfully. “It ought to dry well in this heat.”
Kat was speechless. An hour later she exploded into the antechamber to inform Blanche Parry that certain people had no sense of priority.
“…and they say Nero fiddled while Rome burned—doubtless the Lady Elizabeth would have taken a bath!”
* * *
Elizabeth met Mary on the road to Wanstead, with an escort of a thousand strong sprawling behind her spirited gelding. The Queen beckoned her forward and she dismounted, kneeling on the roadside to kiss the shrivelled little hand so formally presented.
“Madam, permit your humble servant to lay her loyalty at your feet.”
A trifle too glib, it irked the new Queen, rubbing an old sore. With veiled insolence such as this had Ann Boleyn curtsied to Mary’s mother in the days when Henry had first begun to show his preference. The gesture, the voice, even the arrogant set of her head—oh, the likeness was unnerving!
Dear God, is it really only I that see it?
But Mary could not complain of any genuine lack of respect on her sister’s part, and she had already sworn, in gratitude for her wonderful delivery from Dudley, to allow no past bitterness to mar the future. So when the two retinues halted at White Chapel, she dismissed her ladies, detained her sister, and made a deliberate effort to be pleasant.
“How well you look, my dear.”
Even as she spoke, Mary was aware of saying the wrong thing with that old lack of tact for which she was renowned. Elizabeth’s pale cheeks instantly suffused with hot colour.
“The news of Your Majesty’s victory did much to restore me, madam.”
“I’ll warrant it did.” Mary’s smile was not pleasant. “I imagine you were warned of Northumberland’s intent?”
“No, madam.” Cecil had publicly made his peace with the Queen and been duly acclaimed as “a very honest man”: she owed him silence.
Sensing the lie, Mary frowned and began to finger her crucifix. In spite of good intentions, the old, unreasoning hostility was cl
amouring suddenly for expression. Everything about her sister irritated and alarmed her, even to her choice of dress. Virgin white—after all that scandal!
Mary’s shortsighted eyes narrowed on the girl’s face.
“You swore to serve me,” she began slowly. “Your mother served mine—in what manner the whole world knows.”
Elizabeth fell to her knees in the dusty straw, frightened by that far-off look in Mary’s eyes.
“Madam, I beg you, let the dead past go, and remember the loyalty of blood ties.”
“As you remembered it, sister, when you chose to sit safe at Hatfield rather than ride with me against the traitor’s forces?”
Mary’s hand beneath her chin tilted her face sharply upwards, and Elizabeth was silent, trapped for once by her own instinctive need for subterfuge. Safer by far to have confessed to her sham, admitting deceit and making fear her excuse. But lying to Mary had always come naturally to her. She did it on almost every occasion they met, because the temptation to do it, as a sort of mark of her own mental superiority, was irresistible.
But now, it was no longer safe to play games with Mary—
She was not even aware that she had begun to bite nervously at her fingernail, until the moment the Queen reached out and tapped the offending digit away.
“I thought Ashley would have cured you of that silly habit by now,” Mary sighed, and her voice was suddenly quite sane and kind. Her mood had shifted in the manner which made her so unpredictable. She was the officious elder sister now, reaching for the pair of scissors which hung at her waist, a relic of those years of cloistered domesticity.
“Such dreadful nails,” she grumbled, snipping with quick efficiency, “like an eagle’s talons! No wonder they irritate you. There now—doesn’t that feel better?”
Elizabeth looked at the Queen’s handiwork. Nails grew again; heads were not quite so obliging. She agreed it felt much better, and for a while their conversation was devoid of rancour and suspicion. At length, aware of time pressing, the Queen laid both hands upon her shoulders and kissed her cheek lightly.
“It gives me real pleasure to have you at my side again, Elizabeth. You and I have known so little family life these past troubled years. But now, once we are safe in London, the two of us shall hear Mass together once more as we used to do when you were a small child. Remember how you would say a Paternoster for me before you went to bed? Barely two and every word in perfect Latin. You were such a forward little girl—”
“Yes, madam—I remember.” Elizabeth had stiffened and the faint note of hesitancy was unmistakable.
Mary removed her hands from the girl’s shoulders and the light of indulgence went out of her eyes like a snuffed candle.
“You do of course intend to support the restoration of the Roman Church by attending Mass with me? There can surely be no question of you continuing in your heret—” she broke off and continued hastily, “in your misguided practices.”
Elizabeth looked away uncomfortably.
“Madam, did you not yourself demand freedom of conscience in our late brother’s reign?”
“Naturally,” Mary rejoined frigidly. “Mine was the true faith, for which I would gladly have died. Would you die willingly, sister, for the beliefs you now profess to hold?”
Talking to the Queen, thought Elizabeth suddenly, was like walking a tightrope over a yawning chasm. The prospect of weeks, even months, of these swift veering confrontations set all the nerves in her stomach jumping. She was suddenly very glad to see Susan Clarencieux appear in the doorway looking flustered.
“By Your Majesty’s leave, the night is drawing on. If we are to enter London while it’s still light—”
“Yes—yes, of course. Tell them I am coming.” Mary turned to look at her sister steadily. “Elizabeth, you had better go down. We will speak further on this issue when I have more time. But think on what I have said—think very carefully.”
Suspicion, like bread, rises rapidly in a warm environment. Though London was red-hot in its welcome for Mary, there was no mistaking the tremendous ovation which greeted Elizabeth’s entry to the capital, and the Queen, with the cheers for her sister ringing hollowly in her ears, struggled with a serpentine quiver of jealousy. It was no use, even in this sweet moment of victory, pretending that the years between them did not show. The girl was nineteen and the people worshipped her glowing youth.
Mary rode on stiffly and bit her lip until she tasted blood.
Oh, God, teach me how to trust her…
Chapter 10
The new reign began briskly with the trial and execution of its principal opponent. Most unsuccessful traitors displayed a certain degree of dignified restraint, even cheerful resignation, to this inevitable act. Northumberland took the opposite course. All that could be done by recanting his Protestant faith, grovelling, and begging shamelessly for mercy he did and more.
“Oh that it would please her good Grace to give me life, yea the life of a dog, that I might but live and kiss her feet…”
People said it was a disgraceful exhibition and only went to show what Dudleys were, a low lot that wanted breeding as badly as they would shortly want heads. But Northumberland cared nothing for the ridicule. Even at the last moment, when he stood on Tower Hill, he was still gazing steadily down at the city, scanning the narrow streets desperately for a royal messenger bearing his written reprieve.
But that message never came. The Tower guns boomed and Robin Dudley, alone in his damp cell at the bottom of the Beauchamp Tower, awaiting his own imminent trial and execution, sat on his flea-bitten mattress and wept harsh, difficult tears for the fallen idol of his childhood.
Further along the river, Elizabeth, sitting with the Queen a little apart from their attendant women, heard that same dismal booming and thought of Robin. Her throat closed and her fingers trembled as she drew a thread of gold silk through her tapestry frame.
Mary leaned forward a little in her chair and frowned.
“Unpick that rose, Elizabeth, it’s wildly uneven.”
Elizabeth looked up, carefully expressionless.
“Madam—do you not hear it?”
“Of course I hear it, do you imagine I’m deaf?”
“Then—the Duke is dead.”
“I think we may safely assume that,” said the Queen drily. “Never sit there and tell me that his death disturbs you.”
“Not his, of course,” retorted Elizabeth hastily, “but some of his sons are very—young.”
“The youngest will naturally be pardoned,” said Mary primly. “Henry is barely fifteen, I understand.”
Elizabeth took a tremulous breath.
“Only Henry, madam?”
Mary dug her needle deep into the tapestry and pushed the frame aside with a pettish gesture of irritation.
“Guildford, as Jane’s husband, I cannot possibly pardon. Both Ambrose and Jack are of an age to answer for their crime. And as for that impertinent young man who set out with armed men to capture me,” she snapped her fingers impatiently, “the wretch’s name escapes me—”
“Robert.” It came on a whisper.
“Oh yes, Robert! I can well imagine what my fate would have been had he succeeded. There can of course be no question of clemency for him.”
The needle slipped through Elizabeth’s nerveless fingers and was lost in the dusty straw at their feet.
“But, madam, he was only obeying his father’s instructions. Surely, in your great mercy—”
Her voice wavered to a halt; Mary’s gaze was hard and shrewd.
“You must not concern yourself so greatly with the fate of traitors, sister,” she said coldly. “It could be quite grievously misunderstood.”
Elizabeth took her embroidery scissors to the ragged rose and was silent.
In the event, however, Mary proved remarkably merciful to those in
volved with Northumberland’s disastrous coup d’etat. Jane Grey, though tried and found guilty, was kept in honourable custody and given to understand that her life was in no danger; Jane’s father, Suffolk, was released; winter crept closer and still the Dudley boys lived on under sentence of death in their comfortless prison cells. For Mary had better things than revenge to occupy her narrow mind.
After all the bitter, barren years of persecution, she was free at last to consider matrimony, assured, in fact, on every side, that it was her duty to consider it. The list of suitors made her blush like a schoolgirl. There was Edward Courtenay, of course, the last of the Plantagenets, recently released from his lifetime’s imprisonment in the Tower, very young, very handsome, but frankly not very ardent—at least not to her. At every evening reception he made it blatantly obvious where his interests lay. He ogled Elizabeth quite shamelessly, admittedly, Mary was forced to acknowledge, with very little active encouragement from that young lady, who retired pointedly behind her pomander whenever he approached.
But Courtenay was merely a red herring in the ambassadors’ nets, disguising the Queen’s true interest which lay with Prince Philip of Spain. Simon Renard, the Spanish Ambassador, had done his job well, painting a haloed image of his young master which was irresistible. Mary, in love with the idea of love, wished to be left alone with her dream for a while and forget the unpleasant. And by the unpleasant she meant Elizabeth.
But Renard would not let her forget. He was a smooth, polished, ruthless little Spaniard, working with single-minded purpose for marriage and alliance with Spain, and he had rapidly become the Queen’s closest adviser. As such, he was acutely aware of the steady hostility from his rival.
