‘I might as well be in Norfolk,’ said Robert gloomily. He was supposed to be setting out for Norfolk tomorrow or the next day, if he were wise. This fishing trip had been a final act of defiance. Robert had not been behaving himself as a true subject of Queen Mary. He had spent a good deal of time that summer hanging about St Paul’s, watching the Londoners shelter from the rain, grumble and murmur of sedition. The Privy Council had ordered him and Ambrose to leave London. There was nothing about his father-in-law’s house in Norfolk to recommend it, and he dreaded being cooped up with Amy for more than a few days at a time.
“‘Treason doth never prosper,” Ambrose,’ he said wryly. ‘What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’
They stayed a while, to watch the swans being rounded up and caught. A party of riders on the river bank seemed to have the same idea. Judging from the many liveries of white and green, it was a royal party. The Prince of Spain whiling away the time and fretting to be gone from England. Robert, who had excellent eyesight, under pretence of watching the Swan Uppers, watched the Spaniard. The Prince might be fretting to leave England but he was putting his time to pleasant use by riding out with the Princess Elizabeth.
Robert let out a low whistle. ‘While the cat’s confined, the mice will play! How about that, Ambrose — Madam Elizabeth has made another conquest.’
‘I would call that playing with fire,’ grinned Ambrose from the bows.
Two figures rode out in front of the others and halted at the water’s edge to watch the swans. A man and a woman, in earnest conversation. A small, neat black-velvet man, little as a mole, working away with his shovel paws, undermining England. The mole put out a paw to rest on its companion’s rein. She was in black and white, like a flash of magpie’s wings. Her horse was glossy black too, a big, strong horse like a man’s. The Prince of Spain touched her hand; Robert could see his blond beard wag. Not earnest but intimate conversation! Robert turned his back and sat down suddenly, rocking the boat. He took out his anger, envy, loathing, jealousy and frustration on Ambrose.
‘Row off!’ he barked. ‘We’ve had enough. I’m leaving for Norfolk early tomorrow.’ As they retreated downstream, a swan, escaping the hooks of the catchers, flapped too near the Princess’s horse, which reared several times but failed to unseat her. Under some unknown impulse she pulled its head round, and sprang away from her Spanish escort into a wild gallop along the bank, leaving him to gather his wits and make a half-hearted pursuit.
‘So that’s her game,’ fumed Robert. ‘I might have guessed the weapons she would use, knowing the weaknesses of the Spaniard. She’d better be careful not to bid the Base too often — Philip of Spain is no man to make a monkey out of. We don’t want her his concubine.’
‘You’re jealous,’ said Ambrose.
Robert knocked his brother’s hat off his grinning face into the river. ‘Two can play at that game. Why have I wasted months muttering treason when I could have bid the Base too? I could have been King Philip’s man by now. I’ll sell myself to him as a soldier — a man’s weapon — life and liberty in exchange for services. I hope my Lady Elizabeth does not go that far! Do I look good molebait, Ambrose?’ He rowed splashily, cackling mirthlessly.
‘Poisonous maggot!’ growled Ambrose, and fished for his hat.
*
At the end of August, the Prince of Spain left England. Now that he was going the sun shone as he came out onto the wharf at Greenwich palace. The barge was waiting at the stairs.
Elizabeth, his formal, farewell kiss still on her mouth, watched the Queen’s little back view at the window, craning. How frustrating life was for the short-sighted, and today how cruel. All Mary would be able to see was a blurred figure, a black puppet with a pink smudge of face. She could not know if he were looking up at her, or down the river, towards his freedom, away from England and his wife. She might be able to make out the movement of his arm if he waved, but not to whom he spoke, nor his expression as he left her. She had managed to preserve her dignity during the farewells — that is, not to cry in public — but her hands and body quivered visibly, with the effort of holding back those tears. Her cheeks had been sucked in with effort, her eyes — well, Elizabeth avoided looking at her eyes. But Mary had remained in the upper room, as if she knew that a descent to the river stairs, the actual witnessing with some degree of focus his stepping on board, the casting off of the barge, the splash of oars as he was borne away, would break her down.
Elizabeth, looking out of another window, had a clearer, if not perfect, view of the Prince’s departure. She thought to see him go down those river stairs with the buoyant step of a liberated prisoner. But he went as usual, gravely, carefully, neat-footed and undemonstrative. Philip would have embarked on the river Styx thus. He could have been any age between thirty and sixty. He was twenty-nine. He was always worrying about his indigestion, and consequently about his constipation and piles; he sounded sixty at times.
However exciting she had found the pursuit, the temptation to lure, the desire to provoke, the delight of easily outstripping a slow mind, she had found the quarry essentially both dull and dangerous. She was extremely relieved to see him go. When, at the beginning of August, Mary had at last realized that whatever her condition it was not pregnancy, the court had moved from the over-crowded stink of Hampton to Oatlands. Elizabeth had been free to take up residence with her own household again, not far off. With Mary up and about again it was not desirable to be living under the same root as her and Philip.
The Prince of Spain stepped aboard his barge at last. The ropes were cast off, the oars dipped, rose, dipped, the rowers pulled, the gap between barge and stairs grew wider. Mary was leaning from the open casement. The barge was in mid-river. The tiny black figure stood up amidships, waving its hat. Elizabeth wondered if Mary could see it. Was he waving goodbye to his wife? From the way that hat was flourished, Elizabeth had a notion that Philip was waving it aloft in a gesture which for him was the equivalent of capering for joy.
Mary, unable to see any more, even by screwing up her eyes and craning, at last gave way. She sank slowly down upon her knees, put her hands over her face and sobbed in absolute abandonment. Her women could not comfort her.
Elizabeth felt sick. No man, she vowed, clenching her fists, shall do this to me, reduce me to a grovelling, snuffling, degraded heap on the floor. Philip had used Mary, taken her precious virginity, and left her less of a woman than she had been when single. England hated the Spaniard; there was no heir. The people might have put up with Mary on her own — she had jeopardized her throne and her reputation by this obnoxious marriage. ‘There’s more to marriage,’ the crude saying went, ‘than two pairs of bare legs.’ There was — misery, and humiliation for the woman. The thought of bare legs — Philip uncovering her sister’s nakedness — was too much for Elizabeth. She gagged into her handkerchief, and silently removed herself from the room.
IV
The Right Hand of the Lord
1556 - 1558
Her face was as yellow as a field of mustard. The jaundice. Elizabeth groaned. Why did she have to be ill yet again? She was becoming as sickly as Mary, and nearly as skinny. She was just on twenty-three. After twenty, it was just a journey towards middle age. Wizened, yellow as well — the mortification of it. She had prayed to God to be allowed all her strength this year, but so far He had not answered.
She lay on a day bed in a darkened room with a continuous headache and was sick at intervals. So weak, when her head demanded that she be energetic. The fight had gone out of her. She lost count of the weeks. Doctors came, and buzzed in the room like bluebottles, and went, as if shooed out of the window. It was high summer at Hatfield, and she could not enjoy it, walking or riding in leafy groves, or in sun-parched pastures.
Every day, a milkmaid walked past her window, singing. A merry voice so early in the morning:
‘Sing we and chant it,
While love doth grant it…’
> and again in the evening at six:
‘Not long youth lasteth,
And old age hasteth…’
Elizabeth would never see old age, and she had been unable to enjoy her own youth. She had never loved.
The year 1556 had augured badly, and turned out worse. The summer was as hot and dry as the previous one had been cold and wet. The harvest would be desperately meagre again; the seed had given up at the outset in an arid spring. The comet which had streaked the heavens in March had heralded something resembling those terrible years when Elizabeth had lain sick at Hatfield, in disgrace after the affair of the Lord Admiral, when Kat Ashley had been in the Tower and Elizabeth had feared its shadow on herself.
Kat Ashley had been imprisoned again, this time in the Fleet, a noisome penance in hot summer weather. Kat had been suspected of involvement in a conspiracy hatched by some obscure connection of the Dudley family. A chest of seditious, heretical books and pictures had been found in her rooms at Somerset House. Things like the exiled Dr Turner’s Hunting of the Romish Fox, and the Dialogues of John Bon:
And after that we consecrate very God and man,
And turn the bread to flesh with five words we can.
Or grotesque pictures, libelling that evil old madman, Pope Paul IV. Or the one labelled Maria Ruina Angliae, a hideous, obscene picture of Mary suckling Spaniards at a withered breast. Kat had, of course, denied everything, and Elizabeth supposed that she had been lucky to get off with three months. The amazing thing was that Elizabeth herself had not been accused.
1556 was not a year in which to stand accused. In it, eighty were burned for heresy, one-third of them being women. In March, Cranmer, late Archbishop of Canterbury and Elizabeth’s godfather, had suffered at the stake in Oxford. Elizabeth was not the only subject of Queen Mary secretly to count the days of her reign and to pray that it might be ended.
The Queen’s servant, Sir Thomas Pope, had been put in charge of the household at Hatfield. Surprisingly he soon became a friend to Elizabeth. The only thing he imposed on her was attendance at Mass, but that was no more than she had been doing since the beginning of Mary’s reign.
Sir Thomas had told Elizabeth of the man pretending to be Edward Courtenay who had proclaimed, ‘The Lady Elizabeth, Queen, and her beloved bedfellow, Lord Courtenay, King.’ Bedfellow indeed! Shameful slander again. Yet Mary had defended her, said her good name had been abused by falsehoods. Bedfellow! When was she ever likely to have a bedfellow — horrible thought, some man sharing her bed, with hairy legs and horny, scratchy feet, disturbing her with snores.
But if Philip of Spain had his way, she would soon enough find herself in a marriage bed — if Philip had his way, he would sample her charms first! The mere thought put Elizabeth in such a panic, she was ready to forget reason, do anything, go anywhere, to escape such a fate. Every day on waking the panic gripped her, sent her heart fluttering, in dread of arrest, slander, imprisonment, or marriage against her will. Sometimes she thought that if it went on she would die. She had even begun to doubt that she would one day be Queen. Without that, she had nothing to live for. She prayed, but God had deserted her.
The Prince of Spain wanted to marry his sister-in-law to Duke Emanuel Philibert of Savoy — Duke Filbert, in a nutshell. ‘I will not marry Savoy,’ she had said, ‘I will not marry!’ And she would not change her mind, no, not if she were offered the greatest Prince in Europe.
With the intention of pressing her husband’s scheme, the Queen invited her sister to spend Christmas at Whitehall. Elizabeth went in dread, not feeling well enough for the wary game of meeting her sister face to face, or for the round of feasting. It was scarcely likely to be a joyful season with Philip still absent after nearly a year.
The Queen summoned her to an interview in the Privy Chamber of the palace. Mary sat in a great chair of crimson velvet, or rather perched on it, for her feet could not touch the floor, and she had to use a high footstool. She had shrunk, did not fit her throne any more. Her little face was all lumpy and channelled and brownish shadowed, like a blanched walnut. Surely Philip had taken part of her flesh with him when he went away. Elizabeth preferred to look past her at the towering painted figure of their father on the wall behind her. Large as life, King Henry VIII straddled his shrivelled little daughter. Mary’s head was scarcely level with his codpiece. Hans Holbein had made him immortal, as if he would step down and recover his ill-filled throne. No one could look at that picture without feeling uneasy. The eyes stared straight out at you, caught your own and would not let go. He met Elizabeth’s eyes as he rarely had in life.
‘The King my husband wishes to arrange a marriage for you, sister, to the Duke of Savoy. He would like to have your acceptance before his return to England.’ It was as if Mary blamed Elizabeth for Philip’s reluctance to return.
Elizabeth astonished herself, and her sister, by breaking without warning into frantic tears. She crouched on her knees in front of the throne, at their father’s feet, shaking like a jelly, sobbing so loud the ceiling echoed. She covered her face with her hands and grovelled lower as if wanting the floor to swallow her. All her feelings of the past months, her fears, her panics, had broken loose at this inopportune moment.
Mary frowned, thinking the tears a pretence, but decided more honestly that they were not. She was surprised and did not know what to do. She did not want to touch her weeping sister.
‘Sit up on a cushion and compose yourself,’ she said gruffly, but not unkindly.
When at last Elizabeth was capable of speech, she wailed, ‘I want no husband, I will never marry. Oh Lord God, my afflictions will kill me. I wish I were dead!’ She was scarcely coherent, lost herself in hysterical sobbing again.
Mary stared ahead, ignoring Elizabeth, her face a mask of tragedy, her stubborn mouth with its long upper lip trembling, her myopic eyes blind with tears. Elizabeth had taken words, never meant to be spoken, out of her mouth.
‘You are right,’ she said, half on a sob herself. ‘A husband is an affliction. The love of the heart is an affliction. The absence of a loved one is an affliction. To be forty and barren is an affliction. A month, he said, and he would come back. Now it is December. He went in July. He has left me, he’ll never come back!’ Her voice filled the great room, harsh and desolate as a crow’s croak. ‘To hear how he wallows in adultery in the streets of Brussels is an affliction…’ This amounted to a roar of pain.
Elizabeth was startled out of her own panic-stricken collapse. How could Mary reveal her misery in this way. It was horrible, disgusting. Was this what marriage brought one to? Wedding went by destiny, did it? Then Mary had ordered her own destiny, and chosen the way to destroy herself. Elizabeth had no answer, no words of comfort in her.
‘Mary!’ she snapped out, anguished with revulsion, and pity. It was a mistake; one did not address the Queen by her given name, even if one was her sister.
Mary tore a miniature picture of Philip from round her neck and threw it on the floor and stamped on it, but her shoe was soft, and the Turkey carpet preserved Philip’s face. Frustrated, Mary returned to reason, a startling reversal.
‘If my husband wishes you to marry, then I wish it also. I command it!’
‘I would rather die!’ For once, Elizabeth meant it.
‘You defy me!? You are lucky to be alive. I wish you had never been born — you bastard lute-player’s child of a whore! You are not his daughter!’ A little, bunched-up cannon ball of fury, Mary strode to and fro, swung her arm in the direction of her father’s painted figure and bruised her knuckles on the wall.
‘Out of my sight!’ she roared, if anything louder and deeper than he had. ‘Pack your bags and be off to Hatfield, until you change your mind. I’d rather spend Christmas without your polluting presence at Whitehall!’
Elizabeth, speechless, backed out, scarcely in command of her legs. When she got outside the door, they gave way altogether. She could not get her breath; her heart pounded. She wanted to run, and run, an
d run, away from Mary, away from Whitehall, away from England, away from this miserable life, away from the intolerable burden of her destiny.
‘I cannot bear any more,’ she gasped. ‘I cannot bear it.’
That night she sent to the French ambassador, asking him to help her to escape to France. The English exiles were in France; she would be out of Philip of Spain’s clutches there, and no one could marry her off to nutshell Dukes.
It was the ambassador who brought Elizabeth to her senses. ‘If you leave England now, Madame,’ he told her bluntly, ‘you will forfeit the crown, which will soon be yours, as we all know. The last people to love an exile are his hosts. A Queen, or a fugitive?’
This was the one thing guaranteed to restore reason. Elizabeth stayed. Instead of a midnight passage to France, she rode home the next day to Hatfield. The Queen might storm at her, but there was little way in which this could harm her. Elizabeth, when she got back to Hatfield, began to feel better, and kept a pleasant Christmas in the company of her governor, Sir Thomas Pope.
*
The following Shrovetide proved equally pleasant. Sir Thomas Pope put on a banquet at his own expense for the Princess’s pleasure. He brought in actors to stage a play. On the choice of play he consulted Elizabeth.
‘I think,’ she said, after a little studied thought, ‘the play of Holofernes. The sentiment of virtue overcoming vice is always timely.’
Sir Thomas who, unlike Sir Henry Bedingfield, was not the man to be made a monkey of, gave his charge a shrewd look. Elizabeth was radiating moral rectitude. He suspected her of trying him, to see how far he had forgotten his duty to the Queen, to see that Elizabeth behaved herself. She had chosen a play to demonstrate the victory of a clever woman over a man, and of a patriot over her enemies. Queen Mary herself had been represented as Judith in her coronation pageant.
None But Elizabeth Page 11
