by David Field
‘It is to be hoped that you are still minded towards such religious tolerance when you are Queen,’ Cecil observed.
Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I have taken lately to the notion that I do not wish to be Queen — ever. I’ve see what it’s done to my poor sister; God knows she was never the most frivolous of women when we were younger together at Hatfield, but it is as if the burdens of State bear down upon her so heavily that she cannot think good of anyone. She seems to be forever surrounded by a fog of suspicion and distrust, with evil counsellors such as Gardiner urging her further into the darkness of uncertainty and apprehension regarding the security of her throne. If one day I am obliged to become Queen, my Court will be full of gaiety and light, music and laughter. It will also be lacking miseries like Bishop Gardiner.’
‘He will likely be gone from this world by then anyway,’ Cecil observed. ‘But what were you able to observe of the Queen’s condition? Is it true that her ailments are not related to childbirth?’
‘I am no physician, obviously,’ Elizabeth reminded him. ‘It was clear enough to me that she suffers greatly, but is that not meant to be confined to the moment of birth — not the weeks ahead of it? Blanche, you were there also — what thought you?’
Blanche shrugged. ‘I am an unmarried lady, so what would I know? But my Lady is correct regarding the Queen’s suffering. It felt more like she was on her death bed, much like I remember the final days of my aunt in Bacton, when my sisters and I were obliged to gather at her passing.’
Cecil was deep in thought and only tentatively expressed what was troubling him. ‘Let us suppose for one moment that Mary is indeed dying and not in childbirth at all. This would mean that the Council would be required to implement King Henry’s will immediately, in order to avoid any want of a monarch. Philip of Spain would not take kindly to being ousted, I feel sure, and may already be making plans to assume the throne as King, once Mary is no longer. Some unkind souls have already suggested that he only desired the throne and not Mary’s person and his Ambassador Renard admitted as much to me. We must therefore make plans for a smooth transition to the throne and be prepared to back it up with armed force.’
Elizabeth grimaced. ‘You may now readily appreciate why I have no wish to be Queen.’
‘You will one day have little choice, my Lady,’ Cecil reminded her. ‘The question now is how soon that moment will come.’
‘Please God it is not yet,’ Elizabeth murmured. ‘I am hardly in the best spirit to receive the poisoned chalice that threatens to kill my sister.’
‘We have no way of knowing if she is dying, or merely undergoing a bad lying-in,’ Blanche pointed out tactfully.
Cecil nodded. ‘None of us is qualified in physic and I doubt that any of her physicians would risk death by disclosing her true condition.’
‘What about her attendants?’ Thomas suddenly chimed in. When all eyes turned to him, he blushed, but continued, ‘Mistress Parry, can you advise us, as a lady-in-waiting yourself and without any embarrassment to your mistress, how much knowledge a personal attendant such as yourself might have regarding their mistress’s bodily condition?’
‘Depending upon the condition and of course the mistress, quite a good deal, although clearly not with the eyes of a physician.’
‘But do such physicians share their confidences with ladies in attendance?’
‘Obviously, in the matter of what physic to administer, what simples to acquire, how often they must be taken and so on. Why do you ask?’
‘Were there any ladies in attendance on Her Majesty when you visited her and if so do you know any of their names?’ Thomas persisted, his eyes widening in excitement.
‘For someone who was struck dumb on our first acquaintance, you now have a great many questions,’ Elizabeth observed.
Cecil nodded. ‘Occasionally he has been known to make a worthwhile point, my Lady. Most of the time he talks nonsense, but sometimes — rarely — what he says is worth hearing, so pray allow him to continue.’
Aware of all eyes upon him, Thomas suddenly felt very self-conscious. But he was too far committed to fall silent, so he persevered. ‘If I might be permitted the opportunity to meet with one of the Queen’s attendants — one who is constantly by her side when the physicians are also in attendance — I might be able to obtain better intelligence of Her Majesty’s true condition. Certainly enough to know whether or not she is marked down for death.’
‘Blanche, might this be made possible?’ Cecil asked.
Blanche thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘There was one girl in attendance when we attended upon the Queen who I thought I knew from a chance meeting in the Common Buttery. That’s where all the lowly staff of the Palace go for their daily meals,’ she added for Thomas’s benefit. ‘She approached me, seeking a place at Hatfield, when someone told her who I was. It seems that she has family in St Albans and a sick mother that she wishes to visit more often. I wasn’t able to employ her and she seemed to me to be somewhat simple in the head, if that doesn’t make me seem too uncharitable. Anyway, we had enough laundresses in Hatfield at the last count, particularly since the place is all but closed down and has been for some time, but should you accompany me to the Buttery I could point her out to you. But do you think you might be able to worm your way into the confidence of a simple laundry girl sufficient to obtain the information you seek?’
‘We have both seen the boy at work, Blanche,’ Cecil said, ‘and the simpler they are, the closer they come to his own natural humour. Remember Lucy Barton?’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget,’ Blanche said, before looking across at Elizabeth. ‘This young man played such a fine tune on your own seamstress that she was able to reveal the falsity of the allegation regarding the letter found in your jewel case.’
‘You played the fiddle to her?’ Elizabeth asked with a wry smile.
‘No, my Lady, I fiddled with her,’ Thomas replied with a chuckle.
Elizabeth burst out laughing, then turned to Cecil with a broad grin. ‘You had best remove him from here, Cecil, before my sister learns that I entertain bawds in my chambers and adds that to the list of her grievances.’
‘You heard the Lady,’ Cecil glowered at Thomas. ‘You go from being tongue-tied to being lewd. Is there no limit to your aspects?’
‘You will hopefully be more kindly disposed when I return with the information you are seeking,’ Thomas said as he bowed to Elizabeth and turned to go. As Blanche walked with him to the chamber door, they agreed to meet outside the Buttery at noon the following day and Thomas took his leave.
Blanche walked back into the chamber with a smile. ‘He’s certainly comely. Should he turn the charm on me, even I would find him hard to resist.’
‘You might have warned me that she was so ugly,’ Thomas complained as they stood in the doorway to the Common Buttery and Blanche indicated a girl seated alone near the end of a bench in front of a long table. There were baskets of bread, tureens of broth and less popular cuts of various meats in the centre of the table and the room was almost entirely full of Palace menials of all descriptions and ranks eagerly filling their stomachs for the day.
‘What should her looks matter?’ Blanche demanded. ‘You are surely more interested in what she can tell you regarding the Queen’s health? Besides, I would have thought that a less comely wench would be more susceptible to the greasy charm of an adventurer like you.’
‘Quite the contrary,’ Thomas replied with no hint of offence having been taken. ‘The ugly ones seem to guard their virtue with added determination — perhaps it’s all they have to recommend them and men are attracted to them because they pose such a challenge.’
‘Talking even briefly to you only serves to remind me why I have not married,’ Blanche retorted. ‘Anyway, I have completed my part of the task and may now happily return to more uplifting company. Good luck.’
Thomas sidled slowly over towards the table near the end of which the rather overweight
girl sat with a sour expression on her mottled face, marred by a vivid red birthmark down one cheek. Looking around slowly, as if searching for an appropriate place to sit, Thomas eventually stopped alongside the girl and eyed the few feet left on the end of the bench, which was filled on the other side of the girl by a somewhat lively collection of Palace guards dressed in the royal livery and doing their best to empty the table of its modest dishes.
‘May I squeeze in beside you?’’ Thomas asked in his best apprehensive voice, as if expecting a rejection.
‘And why would yer want ter do that?’ the girl asked grumpily.
‘Well, it’s just that you look as if you might be new around here, since you’re sitting on your own. I’m new here as well — only got here yesterday and I was told I could eat here.’
‘Please yerself,’ the girl replied without any warmth of welcome and Thomas slid onto the end of the bench, deliberately allowing his thighs to press against the girl’s. He extracted his knife from his belt and carved himself a slice from the fatty looking pork roast that sat in the centre of the table, then as an afterthought turned to the girl.
‘Would you like me to carve you some?’
The girl twisted her mouth in an expression of displeasure as she answered, ‘I don’t eat meat.’
‘By the look of this, I don’t blame you,’ Thomas continued, undeterred. ‘I must own that I’m used to better than this. I can only hope that my master is being better fed — he’s a physician and he reckons that fatty meat makes you ill.’
‘I’ve seen enough of physicians ter last me a lifetime,’ the girl grumped. ‘They flock around me mistress like crows what’s seen a dead sheep they can feed off. An’ at the end o’ the day, they don’t seem ter know owt abaht what’s made the mistress so ill.’
‘Who’s your mistress?’ Thomas asked guilelessly. ‘One of the ladies of the Court, perhaps?’
‘The Queen,’ the girl replied without any trace of pride. ‘I’m ’er laundress, an’ a fine ’eap o’ dirty sheets she makes me these days. They reckon she’s due ter ’ave a baby, but I were there when me sister back ’ome ’ad ’er two, an’ it were nowt like this.’
‘We might get to see each other again,’ Thomas said, ‘since my master’s one of the new physicians who’s been called in to minister to Her Majesty. I’m Tom, by the way.’
‘Anne,’ the girl revealed almost grudgingly. ‘An’ if yer master’s no better than the others what’s bin ’angin’ rahnd the bed lately, yer won’t be arahnd ’ere long.’
‘My master’s delivered hundreds of children in his time,’ Thomas announced with mock pride. ‘Even some really complicated ones, or so he tells me.’
‘This one’s a bit more than complicated.’
‘But everyone says that she’s about to deliver and that’s why my master’s been called in,’ Thomas pointed out.
The response was a snort of sorts. ‘Everyone don’t wash ’er bed linen. The mess that’s on ’em some days ’as nowt ter do wi’ babies, I’m tellin’ yer. More like summat’s messin’ wi’ ’er insides, an’ I ’eard one o’ them so-called physicians tellin’ another that ’e reckoned it were either a blocked gut or a canker.’
‘Sounds like I won’t be here for very long,’ Thomas said as he tried to sound disappointed.
‘Chances are the Queen won’t, neither,’ came the reply.
XIV
An uneasy and embarrassed silence fell over Hampton Court Palace as April became May, then passed into June, without any sign of a royal birth. Thomas managed to maintain almost daily contact with Anne Medley, the royal laundress, at the cost of having to consume dinners that were almost an ordeal, despite his normally voracious appetite. But after a few weeks she seemed to grow suspicious of him and demanded to know the name of the physician who he claimed was his master. At this point, with Cecil’s reluctant agreement, he was allowed to cease associating with Anne when he vehemently refused to seduce her as the next level of the ploy to obtain news from the royal bedchamber. In any case, it was now obvious to all that whatever it was that Mary was suffering from, it most certainly was not a pregnancy and everyone was relieved when in the first week of August, the Queen withdrew, with her ladies, to Oatlands Palace, on the banks of the upper Thames and amid rolling Surrey parkland.
There was no more reference to any impending royal birth, and the fact that the army of nurses and nursery attendants that had been previously assembled at Hampton did not make the journey to Oatlands was regarded as a public announcement that England was still without any immediate prospect of an infant heir. However, Mary was still not enjoying good health, even though her previously distended stomach had subsided to half its size and she was regularly attended by fussing physicians who, one by one, prescribed powders, special diets, ominously smelling herbs and exercise regimes which, if anything, only exacerbated the problem.
They certainly did nothing to sooth the royal temper, and one of its victims was Elizabeth, who was ordered to vacate the relative luxury of her apartments in Hampton and follow the royal move to Oatlands. Not to the Palace itself, but to a small hunting lodge within its grounds that their father had built while he was still physically fit enough to hunt the game with which the park had been stocked for that purpose.
During this period, while outwardly obeying every command that reached her in messages conveyed from the royal chambers by grim-faced attendants who would advise her only that her sister was a sick woman, in body and heart, Elizabeth kept her visits to Mary to a discreet minimum. She did so on the advice of Cecil, who was busily occupied in assessing the nation’s mood in his capacity as Member of Parliament for Lincolnshire. The weather had not improved, there were still poor harvests and the people had stopped hoping that a return to the Catholic form of worship might mean an improvement in the economy. Instead, it seemed to have resulted in a reign of terror being waged against those even suspected of Reformist beliefs, with burnings at the stake an almost daily horror in marketplaces throughout the depressed and cowed nation.
During her reluctant audiences with the Queen, Elizabeth was uncomfortably aware of Mary’s seeming preoccupation with the continued absence of Philip. He was known to still be in England, but spending most of his time in the royal dockyard at Portsmouth, where he was reported to be commissioning a fleet of vessels to transport English soldiers across the Channel in support of Spain’s ongoing war with France over the occupation of the Low Countries.
This was disconcerting news for two reasons. For Mary it meant that Philip had a legitimate excuse from being absent from her side at a time when she needed both the comfort of his presence and his reassuring support during her ill-health. For Council, Parliament and the nation it was an indication of Philip’s apparent intention to dishonour his promise that England would not be expected to become embroiled in Spain’s seemingly endless war with France. Against this, it was argued by some that domination of the Low Countries by a nation friendly to England was important, not only to suppress Reformist religious practices but also to keep open the crucial garment trade with Flanders.
Then one day, during a routine audience in which Elizabeth was finding it increasingly difficult to suppress her irritation at Mary’s persistent complaints regarding her health and the absence of her husband, the conversation took an alarming turn.
‘Have you thought in terms of marriage yourself, sister?’ Mary asked.
Elizabeth was inclined to reply that if it led to the sort of whinging self-pity that she’d been listening to for several weeks, then she had no wish for a husband, but she checked herself and opted to be both diplomatic and evasive. ‘As recent events have transpired, I’ve not really had much opportunity to consider the matter,’ she replied.
Mary frowned. ‘I can recommend it,’ she insisted unconvincingly, ‘and we must really think, between us, of perpetuating the Tudor line begun by our grandfather. It was ever our father’s concern to leave a male heir, instead of which he left only the
two of us, after our weakly brother Edward died. One or other of us has to keep the line going and it begins to look as if that duty will fall to you.’
Elizabeth was stunned. Not only was Mary openly conceding that she did not believe herself capable of defying the challenge of age in order to have children of her own, but she was, if only by inference, acknowledging Elizabeth’s right to inherit once Mary was gone and the obligation that they shared to continue the family line. Then the motive behind all this began to become clear.
‘Philip is forever prevailing upon me to raise with you the prospect of your marrying into a royal house within the Habsburg family connections. Perhaps if you were to show some inclination in this direction, he might be a more regular visitor to the Court.’
So that was what this was about, Elizabeth concluded. If she appeared to be interested in wedding some spindly-legged, foreign speaking inbred from some obscure corner of a family that was known in the past to have been tainted with insanity, then Philip would return to his marital bed with Mary. It was all she could do to keep the laughter from her voice as she opted to test her sister’s eagerness, while at the same time seeking some immediate benefit for herself.
‘I would naturally, out of loyal deference to the wishes of both yourself and your husband, give due consideration to any prospective suitor that might be suggested. You are, after all, my Queen as well as my sister. But I would need to present as a more attractive prospect than I do at present, confined to a hunting lodge with a household more appropriate for a country lawyer.’
