‘I have a present for you, Mistress Bess.’ Humphrey came up importantly, holding his hands behind his back.
‘Lady…’ interrupted one of the waiting women, absurdly.
‘Be quiet,’ snapped Elizabeth. Why should a five-year-old be made aware of what she did not need to know.
‘Cuckoo buds!’ said Humphrey, and thrust into her hand a nosegay of cowslips, their stems limp and warm from his clutch.
Elizabeth’s heart nearly stopped again. What had he said? ‘Let that be a warning to a newly married man.’ Well, it hadn’t been. Her own bunch of cuckoo buds had been wasted on Tom Seymour, that May morning at Chelsea. Little Humphrey watched her face.
‘Don’t you like them?’ His confidence was about to dissolve in tears.
‘Oh, Humphrey, they’re the prettiest flowers of all.’ Elizabeth hugged the child to her, hiding her face from the watchers. ‘They can never grow here, in the Tower, surely?’
‘No, the milk girl brought them this morning, from Finsbury Fields.’ Humphrey still looked very anxious about something.
Not to be outdone, Susannah pressed something hard into her hand. It was a bunch of little keys. Elizabeth stared.
‘I have some keys for you, to let you out of the Tower, if you’re in prison. You are, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. It was all she could manage to say. She wanted to lie down flat on the grass and howl, and drum her feet, like little Bess in a tantrum.
That night she gave the keys back to Mr Partridge the Gaoler, with apologies. ‘Don’t beat Susannah, Mr Partridge.’
‘The child meant well. There’s no knowing what they’ll get up to, Madam.’ He was obviously embarrassed, and moved by the contrast between the little keys to his wife’s spice cupboard and the jangling monsters in his hand. The business of Lady Jane had distressed him, and he did not want to see it repeated.
When Elizabeth went to put the cowslips in a little ointment jar of water on the huge stone window shelf in the Bell Tower, she found a slip of paper hidden in the middle of the stems, tightly rolled and only an inch or so wide. She unrolled it very carefully, for it was all damp from the stems. The ink had run pale, and blurred.
Madam Princess, I am your faithful servant. Believe me, and remember me in happier days to come.
Robert Dudley
Cheeky Cock Robin Dudley! Well, the effrontery and sheer dangerous stupidity! Sending her notes might land them both with their chins on the block. Elizabeth did not want to know how he had contrived it — bribery probably. The Beauchamp Tower, where the Dudley brothers were, adjoined Mr Partridge’s house on the other side. There was only one thing to be done — the watchers were coming — she would be seen dropping it on the fire. She chewed. Paper and ink and cowslip juice were not a taste she wanted to know again.
Yet even as she silently rated the daring Robert for his rashness her spirits lifted. That he was her servant, on her side, waiting for better days to come to them both, allowed her to believe in the possibility of those days. It was the only real pledge of support and comfort that she had received, beyond the unspoken, in these dark prison days.
A couplet of her own composing ran insistently through her head:
Much suspected of me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.
A prisoner. She had been unjustly accused. She would live to shame them, as Susannah had the elders.
But it was the not knowing whether you would live that was the worst part of being a prisoner. Even if she lived, it might be for the rest of her life a prisoner. She thought of Edward Courtenay, whom Wyatt had wanted as her husband. He had been a prisoner in the Tower from the age of twelve until his release last year at twenty-seven. When he came out, though well educated enough, he could not ride a horse. Suppose she forgot how to ride a horse? Mary had once told an even worse story of her governess Lady Salisbury’s brother, the Earl of Warwick, who had been shut in the Tower when he was ten, only to die on the block, addled in his wits, nineteen years later. Nineteen years! Elizabeth would rather die.
Yet when the time came, only two weeks after little Susannah had offered her those useless kitchen keys, Elizabeth left the Tower, though still a prisoner. She was afraid that she would be taken to moulder in some obscure country house, where it would be easy to poison her. Bishop Gardiner was behind it all, she was sure, trying to get rid of her, one way or another. As they rowed in the barge up river to Richmond, they passed the Hanse citadel of the Steelyard, by Queenhithe, and the German merchants set off their cannon in a royal salute. A thanksgiving for what they imagined to be her freedom. Elizabeth covered her ears.
In the Beauchamp Tower, the Dudley brothers heard the thunder of guns and stared at each other in amazement. ‘Only the Queen should be treated to guns,’ Ambrose said. ‘London loves its Princess, I think.’
‘One day,’ Robert told them, ‘she will go upon the river, and the guns will salute her as a Queen. You wait and see; I feel so certain it will happen in the end.’
*
‘Robert Recorde’s Ground of Arts is a useful introduction to mathematics for a student such as yourself. But you are probably familiar with it already, as I see it on the shelves of this excellent library.’
‘That there is a library at all is largely due to my mother. She collected books as some women do jewels. Now she is gone we’ll probably have to sell most of them.’
Robert Dudley sat in the library of the manor house at Chelsea, warming his feet at the only decent fire in the place. A few days before he had seen his mother buried in the parish church. The royal appraisers were in, making inventories of the pathetically few goods she had managed to retain after her husband’s beheading eighteen months before. Robert tried to take his mind off his dismal situation in a half-empty house by continuing his rather desultory study of mathematics, with Dr John Dee to tutor him.
The man who sat at the other side of the library table was one of the most remarkable men in the world. Robert had come to this extraordinary conclusion without much knowledge of the rest of the world’s scholars, but he was sure that he was right. Dee was remarkable not only for his immense scholarship, but for his whole personality; his intellect soared into realms of thought where mere scholars dared not go. The young philosopher was only four years older than Robert himself, but already, at twenty-seven, had acquired learning such as Robert knew he would never attain even in a lifespan of a hundred years.
‘I’m always willing to be the first customer for books, within the limits of my income,’ Dee said. ‘It’s a tragedy to see a good library broken up. I’ve seen priceless manuscripts used to kindle fires too often. What we need is a campaign to save these treasures. Knowledge is irreplaceable. A royal library, full of ancient manuscripts and printed books, a repository of learning available to all scholars… If I could have the support of the Queen and her ministers, I would travel Europe at my own expense to copy the remaining treasures, so that England could have a library worthy of her scholars. I’d make it a lifetime’s work, if need be.’
John Dee was an odd mixture of arrogance and humility. Robert was often surprised to find someone so brilliant and personable not rising high at the University of Cambridge nor in the Queen’s service. Dee followed his own road among the books and papers, and it was a more elevated, devious way than that of his Cambridge associates. On the rare occasions when he left his study for the outside world, he looked like the Son of the Morning, a tall, fair-haired, handsome man, with a long blond beard, striding out like some angel visitant. He had extraordinary eyes, set deep in his head, penetrating and fathomless. He looked inside men’s minds, and when they looked into his eyes it was like looking into the midsummer sky at noonday, limitless distances in the deep blue.
This dreary winter was the first time Robert had been able to give himself entirely to study and speculation. It was largely due to Robert’s mother, and her devotion to learning, that Dee was here n
ow at Chelsea. He had first arrived about three years ago, to demonstrate some navigational instruments to Robert’s father, and bearing a great globe map of the world made by the Dutchman, Gerard Mercator. He had been sent by William Cecil, one of the group of Cambridge scholars of whom Dee had been the pupil. Both the Duchess and Robert’s brother John had seen at once the exceptional qualities of Dee, though Robert himself had not had the opportunity to study with him then, as he had been living mostly in Norfolk.
John would study no more. Last October, when they had been freed from the Tower, he had caught the sweating sickness while still within its walls, and died at his brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney’s house at Penshurst after only a few days of freedom. As if the beheadings had not been enough — their father, and Guilford — but to lose John, just when they had new hope of life… John, who had held such promise and distinction. Dee had thought him the equal of any university scholar. They were privileged to study with Dee, the first man ever to lecture publicly in Europe on the geometrician Euclid. Dee’s lectures had set Paris on fire — he had ranged in such a daring manner among the forbidden philosophies and their relation to the sciences. If only John could have continued to share this privilege.
John’s death had finished their mother, already worn out with grief for her husband and with pleading on behalf of her sons. But her pleas had helped to save their lives. Robert had his freedom, even though still under attainder; if he behaved himself, this might well be lifted.
It was going to be difficult to behave himself. He had come out of the Tower into an England the vassal of Rome again, with a Queen married to the Prince of Spain, and the Princess Elizabeth, the only hope for the New Faith, still under house arrest at Woodstock. Everything his father had worked to prevent had come to pass. Robert, who had for one week been the brother of a Queen’s consort, was now merely a disgraced Norfolk squire, without a stick to call his own, and nothing to do except plod off to Norfolk and keep his nose in the barley and oats and out of politics.
‘So now the men who burnt the knowledge of the Romish religion on the bonfires go to the fires at Smithfield themselves,’ Robert said bitterly. Today, 4 February 1555, the first martyr went to the stake for his faith.
Dee replied with even greater vehemence than he had used to denounce the vandals of the libraries. ‘Today is a fearful day for England. This burning of John Rogers is only a beginning.’
‘When they smell the burning of the faithful, London will rise up. The horrors of Spain will be so abhorrent to the people they will turn on the Queen and her Spanish gigolo.’ Robert had begun to give vent to his anger.
Dee put a finger to his lips. ‘Walls have ears,’ he said. ‘We will do more to achieve the triumph of reason and humanity out of prison than in it.’
‘True,’ Robert sighed. ‘I’d rather go to Mass, I admit, than to the stake, or into exile like Dr Turner, who married me, or like your friend Sir John Choke.’
‘You and I are not made of the stuff of martyrs.’
‘Dr Dee, you must know of what went on in London while the Princess Elizabeth was a prisoner in the Tower?’
‘Common knowledge. The Londoners have their own methods of making a point. The dead cat hung on a gallows in Cheapside, with its head shaved into a monkish tonsure, in priest’s vestments, with the wafer poking out of its jaws. Blasphemy, of course, but typical London wit. And some clever people got those mobs of children to play at hanging the Prince of Spain. A pity they nearly throttled the poor brat who played the Prince! But clever, no one could prosecute children.’
‘What about the Voice in the Wall — ‘God save Queen Mary’ and deathly silence, but ‘God save the Lady Elizabeth’ and a cheerful ‘So be it!’ A London girl in a cupboard in an empty house. Ingenious. No mistake, they want their Elizabeth.’ Robert leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘When will God save the Lady Elizabeth?’
Dee shrugged. ‘I am scarcely able to speculate on the designs of the Almighty.’
‘But Dr Dee, you are better able than most. You have a great deal of knowledge of the stars. If someone like yourself were to calculate the horoscopes of the Lady Elizabeth and the Queen and the Prince of Spain, it might become clearer whose prospects God does favour. It might encourage those who, like myself, favour the Lady Elizabeth’s title to the throne.’
‘That, Lord Robert, as you are well aware, would be treason. I am a scholar. I refuse to become involved in a rebellion. Frankly, I value my head too much, after all, it is the tool of my trade.’
‘But a little astrological speculation need not go beyond these four walls.’
‘Which, as I have said, have ears.’
‘The Queen has had her birth calculated before; she cannot regard it as a crime. You have drawn horoscopes for other people. There would be nothing criminal…’
‘Hmm. It would certainly be an interesting exercise. I would have to have the necessary details of time of birth, etcetera. I have two distant Welsh cousins in the Lady Elizabeth’s household, Thomas Parry and Mistress Blanche, one of her ladies. A discreet inquiry at the village inn at Woodstock could perhaps be managed. But I want nothing to do with the uses to which you wish to put the information.’
‘I don’t know if the opportunity will even arise. It is in God’s hands, not mine. I must tread carefully myself.’
But someone did not tread carefully enough, or talked too much, at the Bull Inn in Woodstock village, and information was laid. As a result, John Dee came home to his London lodgings one day in April to find the Queen’s men had broken in and were waiting to arrest him.
Robert Dudley was lucky to escape involvement, thanks to Dee’s silence on his interest in the matter. Dee had been arrested on a charge of sorcery, which was likely to be difficult to prove in the courts.
The horoscopes had proved exceptionally interesting to Robert. Not so much because the Queen’s likelihood of bearing a child was minimal, and her early death likely, or because of the Princess Elizabeth’s intimations of the greatest destiny and a long life, but because of the comparisons which could be made between the Princess’s horoscope and his own, drawn previously by Dee. Synastry — the comparing of star charts — lovers always wanted this. He was not the Princess’s lover. Compatible in Venus, but contrary in Mars — interesting! But Dee had said it most unlikely that she would ever marry. And Robert was married already.
*
Whoof! A violent gust of rain-laden April wind landed Elizabeth with a mouthful of her own hair, blew her skirts up over her knees, and scattered waterdrops from the hawthorn hedge down her neck. She spat out the hair into the gale, dropped her hairpins in the nettles, cursed, and nearly broke into tears. She grovelled for the hairpins among the weeds, was stung by the nettles, grabbed a velvety dock leaf to wind around her smarting hand. The ditch was brimming with water, edged with duckweed and dotted with pond skaters. In it were reflected clouds, tumbling in the sky like zany lambs, but the wind had a lion’s mouth. Her hair snaked Medusa-like about her head. Wet weather made all the little fine short bits twist into corkscrew curls, tangled the rest into whipping serpents.
‘I’ll never be able to do it out here,’ she wailed. ‘I’ll look as if I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. Sir Henry, I must go indoors — there’s a house over there; I can stand in the porch…’
‘Madam, you cannot go near strangers’ porches. The hedge will have to do.’
‘Oh!’ Elizabeth stamped her foot savagely on the nettles. ‘You are an insufferable man, Sir Henry Bedingfield. How can a Princess do her hair up under a hedge?’
‘Ladies’ hairdressing is a mystery best known to themselves,’ grunted Elizabeth’s keeper. Her much-baited, reluctant gaoler.
Whoof! The wind naughtily wrapped Sir Henry’s cloak round his head and face, stifling and entangling him. When he had fought free of it, Elizabeth was doubled up with laughter. Red in the face, he ordered her back into the litter and the grooms to ride on. Travelling from Woodstock to
Hampton Court in such weather, and only just beyond Oxford the Princess making a monkey out of him as usual. It gave her continual pleasure to laugh at him. St George’s Day was a bad day to travel, with the country folk on holiday and putting on their silly plays about St George and King Arthur and Brutus and whatnot in the streets, everyone wanting to gawp and cheer as the Princess passed by. The same embarrassing basketfuls of gifts, turning the litter into a baker’s shop, the posies of artless flowers, the same joyful greetings, the same semi-regal progress as when they had travelled to Woodstock a year ago. She was still a prisoner. But she rode in triumph. There was nothing Sir Henry could do about it, except hustle on as quickly as possible.
‘We want our Elizabeth!’
‘God save your grace!’
‘Never be down-hearted, Madam!’
‘Time is your servant, Madam!’
‘We want our Elizabeth!’
Sir Henry was heartily sick of his duties as a gaoler. He delivered his prisoner at Hampton Court by way of a back entrance, as if she were a laundress. Or a midwife, she thought, irreverently. Mary was into the eighth month of her pregnancy, or so it was said. Elizabeth felt unable to believe anything until she saw it for herself; she had heard too many peculiar rumours.
But having got her there under the same roof, the Queen would not see her. Elizabeth had not seen Mary since her coronation last autumn, when the battle of the Mass had raged. Elizabeth now went to Mass, but she swallowed a wafer made of flour and water. Elizabeth had not been allowed to plead her innocence of complicity in Wyatt’s rebellion. Mary must not want to believe her innocent. Yet Mary had not killed her, indeed had stood out against Gardiner’s advice to do so. Mary had an honesty and integrity, Elizabeth grudgingly conceded, that even her bitter, beyond-reason, consuming hatred could not break down.
None But Elizabeth Page 9
