She remembered Mr William Cecil’s advice, ‘to conform as much as might be necessary for your safety, and to avoid entanglements or engagements of every description’. So she would, and after the coronation go quietly away to Hatfield or Ashridge, as Cecil had done to his estate at Wimbledon, and avoid all entanglements.
*
‘I want the Calais headsman — with the sword! I won’t have the axe, I won’t!’
‘Madam, there is no question of…’
‘She must be raving…’
Elizabeth, waking, could not distinguish between her nightmare and the reality of this night. She leapt out of bed, and was at the window before anyone could stop her.
In the Great Hall of Whitehall Palace the red glare of a huge fire cast shadows of men at arms like fifteen-foot giants, their halberds twenty feet tall with blades a yard across — axe-shaped. The Palace gardens, dark as hell’s pitch kettle, swarmed with soldiers, in their white coats legless, armless ghosts bobbing in midair like Jack o’ Lanterns.
They had taken away her own people and left six of the Queen’s stony-faced women instead. Her sister, Mary the Queen, who had made her a prisoner. Tomorrow she would be taken to the Tower. In the darkest hours before dawn, Elizabeth was as certain as she had been of anything in life that once in the Tower she would not come out again.
She let her gaolers lead her back to bed. Under the covers, shivering, she began to count the tally of heads in this first seven months of Mary’s reign. Like counting the hours on a dandelion clock, huff-puff, until the flower was headless. Duke Dudley on 21 August, with two of his men. Lady Jane and her husband Guilford Dudley on 12 February. Jane’s father, Suffolk, on 23 February. John, Robert and Harry Dudley prisoners in the Tower and condemned to die. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet’s son, condemned to die. Now the Princess Elizabeth as good as condemned to die also.
Mary was merciful. Poor little Jane and her husband might have lived if Wyatt had not hatched his wretched rebellion, which had fizzled out so hopelessly in the January rain. Elizabeth had been dragged down into its sodden, tangled wreckage. It would have made little difference if Wyatt had never written her those letters — beastly things — she would not have touched his treason-filled letters with a barge pole. But she was implicated by her mere existence. The more people took her part, the more they endangered her. She was the heir of the New Faith, the white hope of Mary’s enemies, the heir of the word of God waiting to bring God’s truth to an England in the toils of Rome once more. How could she avoid entanglements? Mr Cecil’s advice was good, but not good enough for a Princess.
Mary was determined to marry the Prince of Spain. Wyatt would have no Roman Catholic, Spanish Prince ruling England, so he had wanted Elizabeth as Queen. In addition he had proposed that she marry Edward Courtenay, the Earl of Devon, great-grandson of King Edward IV, the very last Yorkist heir. Damn Courtenay, she would never have married him. She would not marry anyone. She would not live to marry anyone.
Elizabeth stuffed the sheet into her mouth and screamed hard into it so that the noise which burst out of her, the hysterical scream of the condemned, produced only a throttled gurgle. How many of the others had screamed like that when they were condemned to go as prisoners to the Tower, and to die? Would her own scream sound like her mother’s, as did her laugh? She could scream herself sick, to no avail. She stopped screaming and lay still, listening for slanderous whispers. Whispers! Even her screams could scarcely be heard above the racket going on upstairs. Bashing, crashing and shrieks of laughter at two in the morning. Those were the Countess of Lennox’s rooms. Margaret Lennox, her cousin, and one of the Queen’s Catholic ladies. Haughty bitch! Deliberately making misery for the prisoner below. Elizabeth put her fingers in her ears. She had been ill. She still felt abominably ill, too ill to be tormented with noise. Too ill to be shut up in a cold, dank place like the Tower. She clung to this reasoning in righteous indignation, but knowing that it would not wash.
Neither did it. The hostile daylight sprang upon her, as the bed curtains were unceremoniously yanked back. Mary had sent the Earl of Sussex and the Marquess of Winchester to fetch her. Sussex’s face revealed that he disliked his task. This gave Elizabeth not hope, but a weakness in the enemy she might exploit.
The barge was ready. ‘The tide waits for no man,’ Sussex said gruffly, as if he wished he might sail away on it.
Then it might be stayed a little while by a woman.
‘My Lord, I am unprepared. The next tide…’
‘Madam, no. The Queen’s orders.’
‘My own sister refuses me an audience?’
‘Her Majesty refuses.’
‘Then I must send a letter. I had hoped to have time to write without haste…’ Festina lente — make haste slowly; the pen could be used to defeat the tide.
‘This is no time to be writing letters. I have no authority to allow it. The Queen’s Majesty is in no mood to listen to last-minute pleas.’ The ever-plausible tones of Winchester grew tetchy with exasperation.
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ exploded Sussex. ‘Even the Queen’s poorest subject has a right to speak in his own defence. The Queen is a merciful and just woman, and as I am her true loving subject, I put my confidence in her. The Lady Elizabeth shall write, and I will see her letter is delivered, and bring her an answer, too. And I’ll take the consequences, Paulet; your nose will be clean.’ Elizabeth had not had to work on the weakness of the enemy.
The Marquess shrugged. ‘On your head then,’ he said and turned to the door to speak to the waiting barge master.
Ink, pens, paper, sand, wax, taper, seal… Elizabeth had no such items in her bedroom. A writing tray was brought, a table found, a chair placed. Usually she would have had all to hand and ready in a second. Protracted minutes were now valuable. Elizabeth tried a pen. Split and spluttery. Another, no, another.
‘Madam,’ shot out Winchester, buzzing like an elderly little wasp, ‘haste!’
She began to write. The letter had been in her head all night; she had seen the sentences spaced upon the page. An appeal to Mary’s tender conscience.
‘If any did try this old saying, that a King’s word was more than another man’s oath, I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to verify it…remember your last promise and my last demand, that I be not condemned without answer and due proof, which it seems that now I am…’
Remind Mary of Cain (surely it applied equally to sisters as to brothers?), of Lord Protector Seymour, who would have saved his brother the Admiral if he had not had his hand forced by evil counsel. Was Mary too obstinate to be forced? ‘I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other…’
‘Madam! The tide!’ Winchester had begun uncharacteristically to shout. The Earl of Sussex went outside the door to relieve himself.
They could carry her out into the barge by the arms and legs, struggling, as Catherine Howard had been taken to the Tower. Elizabeth forced her hand under control, but her handwriting came out stilted, as it had been in childhood, her fear making her rigid and shaky at the same time. Her pen hurried, in spite of her wish for delay. It tripped and jumped, and left linking words out, as her thoughts raced ahead of it — omission marks and scribblings-in multiplied. She repeated herself feverishly.
There were two-thirds of a blank page left. Her hand unsteady, she drew slanting wobbly lines across it eleven times, the pen scratching in protest and using up great gouts of ink. No forger could write false confessions on top of that. The postscript she could not resist and it came as a relief, neatness regained. ‘I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself.
‘Your Highness’s most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning, and will be to my end. Elizabeth.’ Splotch! The nib let fly a dollop of ink all over the ‘Eliz’, and the pen faltered over the usual streamers on the ‘b’ and ‘h’, cramped for space, so they came out like deflated bladders. As she shook the sand pot she felt relieved, almost invigorated, as if she had just
lived out a scene of high tension with her sister, and won. The feeling did not last. She looked up from the dripping sealing wax at the furious face of the Marquess of Winchester.
‘Madam, the tide has gone. You have fooled us with this trickery. I will wait upon you tomorrow. We cannot risk the midnight tide, with mad fools trying to rescue you in the dark.’ He turned on his heel and stomped out. He, the smoothest time-server and tide-waiter in the business, had been outwitted.
Elizabeth had won a day. That seemed a triumph, but as the day wore on, with an ominous silence from Mary, she began to wonder what use it was. None, except that she had won it. When night came, she could not lie down to sleep, but waited fully dressed, looking out again at the soldiers in hall and garden. She had a headache again and a queasy liver. She squeezed her limbs carefully, to see if the swellings were coming up again. She had been ill with some debilitating, dropsical complaint, with difficulty in passing water, so that she had a few months previously been as bloated as a drowned corpse taken from the river. Then she tried, not for the first time, putting her hands round her neck, feeling it, narrow and long, a row of little bones like fivestones up the back. I have a little neck, too, she thought. Her mother had said that. Easy to slice through. Foolish to imagine her destiny would be a throne. Now it seemed as if the dead end would be the block.
During the night, the rain came on. At nine in the morning the rain had set in for the day. Palm Sunday. The eighteenth day of March 1554. The Lords Sussex and Winchester came back, doom in their faces, with wet hats. Sussex had taken considerable risk, being her letter bearer.
The Queen’s little face had swelled, her eyes and mouth slitted, so that she looked like Jane the Fool mimicking King Henry VIII, and she roared like a small lion — more of a man’s voice in a woman than King Henry’s had been in a man. Sussex had found his confidence misplaced. ‘If my father were alive now,’ she had roared, ‘you would never have dared! How I wish he were alive, if only for a month, a week, a day, to bring you all to heel!’ What a typical woman’s utterance, topsy-turvy thinking. Five feet tall wishing herself six feet two and of the other sex.
‘Madam Elizabeth, you must come with us,’ Sussex said heavily. Between them, he thought, these two daughters of Old Harry made a pair.
Elizabeth went, her feet in inadequate shoes for wet weather, dragging as if lead-soled. ‘If there is no remedy,’ she whispered, like an abandoned child, a hand to her aching head, ‘I must be content.’
The Queen was indoors, taking part in a procession with people waving willow palms, and priests swinging smelly censers and Latin chanting of many ‘mumpsimuses’. The Palace windows were steamed up inside, sluicing rain outside. The gutters gurgled, dripped and leaked, puddles spread over the paths. A bird having a bath in an overflowing cistern was the only living thing about on such a foul morning. Whitehall sheltered its inmates; only she was turned out in the cold and wet.
Elizabeth yelled at the impassive faces of bricks, stones and mortar. ‘My Lords…! Who are you? Lords of the realm who have let me be led into captivity, God knows where,’ she wailed, holding out supplicating hands. But the walls of Whitehall, which had heard many pleas with deaf ears, were silent and only rain fell into her hands. Many of those same lords had by their silence at her mother’s trial, condemned. The bird, scared off by her voice, left his bathing without stopping to tidy his feathers and flew to perch on a garden post.
By the time they reached the Privy Garden stairs, Elizabeth was wet. The rowers pulled strongly out into a choppy river, the rain relentlessly drumming the yeasty water. They had all gone this way, the other prisoners, and not come back. The tide had flowed for them, as the tide of their lives had run out. Poor ghosts, poor Elizabeth.
The wooden starlings at London Bridge showed a towering, slimy wall. The barge was heavy in the water. They had left even this tide a little too late. Sure enough, they grounded — a horrible grinding which sounded as if it would rip out the boat bottom. But they scraped off somehow, and were through, approaching the wharf and Watergate under St Thomas’s Tower.
Even at low tide the steps of the Watergate were awash; slip-slop, the wavelets broke. Debris collected by these steps, a dead cat, a cork fishing float, a turd, dead leaves.
‘Step out, Madam,’ Winchester said, as he did so. The men were wearing stout boots.
‘What? Here? My shoes will float away. I won’t get out.’ She sat, clutching the edge of her seat. ‘I’m no traitor!’ she cried, an inhuman cry like a gull’s, and like the cries of the wheeling gulls, tugged away by the wind.
‘I won’t get out!’
Winchester turned back, his patience and his manners deserting him. ‘You can’t stay there for eternity. Get out!’
Elizabeth got up. The barge swayed and rocked. The slimy stones looked so dangerous. If she missed her footing she might drown. Maybe it was better to drown. She hitched up her skirts and put one foot out. The river submerged her shoe and it wavered under the running water. She brought her other foot out to join it.
The Marquess of Winchester offered his arm. She was looking vaguely up at the sky.
‘Hurry,’ he said. Another minute and his boots would let in the river. ‘Here, Madam, you are wet, have my cloak.’ He slung it off his shoulders in an almost gallant gesture.
‘Ssst!’ His prisoner spat like a cat, and her paw flashed out in a swipe, and his cloak rose in a billow to subside upon the water. ‘Noli me tangere!’ Her voice hissed, shuddering with venomous anger. Winchester stepped hastily up out of the river and saw his cloak washed like a sodden corpse against the wharf further downstream. He cursed.
Elizabeth, still in the water, clasped her hands in prayer, turned her eyes skywards and spoke as if to a multitude. In reality, only a band of yeomen warders and a party of soldiers were her audience.
‘Here lands as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs! Before Thee, oh God, I speak it, having no friend but Thee alone!’
God having borne witness to this, Elizabeth came up the steps. In front of the soldiers she stopped again, where they could see her wet feet, removed her shoes, and tipped a measure of water out of each. She wrung her hands. Then she put her shoes back on, shakily. She was weeping, shivering, her head splitting, her face working, but the rain washed away her tears.
A ‘God save your grace!’ or two, or three, four, five, broke defiantly out of the soldiers.
‘Are all these men here to restrain me?’
‘No, Madam.’
‘Madam, there is always a guard on the wharf when a new prisoner is brought in.’
Madam this and that. Madam, the block awaits. Madam prisoner.
‘But they are for me, I know they are. Sent to frighten me. I am only a weak woman.’ Her voice high and thin, mewing like the gulls again.
Soon there would be more than a few wet eyes. Sussex had them already. Sir John Bridges, Lieutenant of the Tower, wished she would move on and allow them all in out of the rain.
Then Elizabeth sat down. Like a mule at the end of its tether, she plonked herself down on a stone block and sat, slowly shaking her head from side to side. Corkscrew curls of hair wormed their way out of her cap onto her brow, dark brown in the wet, hung with raindrop jewels. Panic had robbed her of the use of her legs. The Yeoman Gaoler Mr Partridge had a bunch of enormous keys hanging from his waist. The streaming slimy dark underneath of the gateway smelt of dead fish in a jakes.
‘Madam, you had better come in out of the rain. You will catch cold.’
Her death of cold, no doubt. ‘It’s better to sit here than in there. I am ill. God knows where you will put me. Little Ease, or the White Tower dungeons, or the rat hole…’
This wild surmise had the effect of reducing her gentleman usher to tears. Hearing him blubber into his sleeve, Elizabeth could have hit him. She was the one who should cry, she was the condemned prisoner.
‘Be quiet!’ she snapped. ‘What are you doing? You are supposed
to be a comfort and support, a tower of strength. A poor fish piping his eye is no use to me. In any case, I am innocent, you don’t weep for the innocent. I’m not a traitor. Stop this guilty weeping and wailing — stop it!’
He did. Elizabeth, finding scolding a stimulant, got to her feet. The rain was really intolerable, finding its way down her neck to her navel, and she had lost all feeling in her feet. She was certain to be ill again.
‘Let us go in,’ she said.
Her destination turned out to be the tall Bell Tower, on the west corner of the inner wall, nearest the river. It was not a bad lodging, as such lodgings went. The only access was from the Lieutenant’s own quarters. Elizabeth’s position as a close prisoner was made clear. She was not allowed outside or to speak to anyone at all. The Yeoman Gaoler would come every morning and evening to check the locks of windows and door. A yeoman warder would be on duty day and night. All messages to her would be delivered by the Gaoler, all gifts minutely searched. For exercise she could walk in the Queen’s Lodgings next door, though only when the windows were shuttered, in case she might look out or others look in. As the Lieutenant talked, the Gaoler brandished a huge key.
‘All this to contain me? I am ill still, I cannot climb out down the blankets, or swim the moat.’
The Earl of Sussex, who had been bottling it up since he had disembarked, gave vent to his indignation. ‘Bridges, this is unnecessary. A mouse couldn’t escape from its own hole in here. This is the daughter of King Henry VIII. She is the Queen’s sister. Queens, like Kings, can change their minds. Queens may also come, and go… We will be answerable in the future for our actions now.’
In those adjacent buildings, the Lieutenant’s Lodging, Elizabeth’s mother had been a prisoner. Sometimes, when she woke in those first nights in the Tower, in her prison bed, with one of her women beside her, she would hear her heart thud against the mattress and think of fists hammering on locked doors, of crow’s wings flapping at the window.
None But Elizabeth Page 7
