Despising this wife of mine, this straightforward, vulgar, lovable wife of mine, I set my heart and spent my fortune on a woman whose word is like the wind; it can blow wherever it wants. She can speak three languages but she can tell the truth in none of them. She can dance like an Italian but she cannot walk a straight line. She can embroider better than a sempstress and write a fair hand, but her seal on the bottom of a document means nothing. Whereas my Bess is known throughout Derbyshire for fair trading. When Bess shakes on a deal it is sealed and you could stake your life on it. This queen could swear on a fragment of the True Cross—and it would still be provisional.
I have spent my fortune on this will-o’-the-wisp of a queen; I have put my honor on this chimera. I have squandered Bess’s dowry and the inheritance for her children on keeping this woman as a queen should be served, never knowing that under the cloth of state was seated a traitor. I let her sit on a throne and command a court in my own house and order things just as she would have them, because I believed, deep in my faithful heart, that this was a queen like no other had ever been.
Well, in that I was right. She is a queen as no other has ever been. She is a queen with no kingdom, a queen with no crown, a queen with no dignity, a queen with no word, a queen without honor. She has been ordained by God and anointed by His holy oil, but somehow He must have forgotten all about her. Or maybe she lied to Him too.
Now it is I who will have to forget all about her.
Bess comes tentatively to my privy chamber and waits on the threshold, as if she is not sure of a welcome.
“Come in,” I say. I mean to sound kind but my voice is cold. Nothing sounds right between Bess and me anymore. “What d’you want of me?”
“Nothing!” she says awkwardly. “A word, only.”
I raise my head from the papers I have been reading. My steward insisted that I see them. They are long lists of debts, money that we have borrowed to finance the keeping of the queen, and they fall due next year. I know of no way to pay them except by selling my lands. I slide a sheet of paper over them so that Bess cannot see—there is no point in worrying her too—and I slowly get to my feet.
“Please, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she says apologetically.
We are always saying sorry to each other these days. We tiptoe around as if there is a death in the house. It is the death of our happiness, and this is my fault too.
“You don’t disturb me,” I say. “What is it?”
“It is to say I am sorry, but I cannot see how we can have open house this Christmastide,” she says in a rush. “We cannot feed all the tenant farmers and their families, not as well as all the servants. Not this year.”
“There is no money?”
She nods. “There is no money.”
I try to laugh but it sounds all wrong. “How much can it cost? Surely we have coin and plate in the treasure room enough for a dinner and ale for our own people?”
“Not for months and months.”
“I suppose you have tried to borrow?”
“I have borrowed all that I can, locally. I have already mortgaged land. They don’t accept it at full value anymore; they are starting to doubt our ability to repay. If nothing improves, we will have to go to the London goldsmiths and offer them plate.”
I wince. “Not my family goods,” I protest, thinking of my crested plates being melted down as scrap. Thinking of the goldsmiths, weighing my silverware, and seeing my family crest, and laughing that I have come to this.
“No, of course not. We will sell my things first,” she says levelly.
“I am sorry for this,” I say. “You had better tell your steward to tell your tenants that they cannot come for their dinner this year. Perhaps next.”
“They will all know why,” she warns me. “They will know we are struggling.”
“I imagine everyone knows,” I say drily. “Since I write to the queen once a month and beg her to pay her debts to me, and the letter is read in public to her. The whole court knows. All of London knows. Everyone knows we are on the brink of ruin. No one will offer us credit.”
She nods.
“I will put this right,” I say earnestly. “If you have to sell your plate, I will get it back for you. I will find a way, Bess. You will not be the loser for marrying me.”
She bows her head and bites her lip so she does not blurt out the reproach that is on her tongue. I know she is already the loser for marrying me. She is thinking of her husbands who carefully amassed their fortunes for her. Men I have sneered at as upstarts, with no family to speak of. She gained from marrying them: they founded a fortune. But I have squandered it. I have lost her fortune. And now I think I have lost my pride.
“Will you go to London this season?” she asks me.
“Norfolk’s trial is delayed until after Christmas,” I say. “Though I doubt they will be very merry at court, with this ghost at their feast. I shall have to serve at his trial. I’ll go down to London then, after twelfth night, and when I see Her Majesty, I will speak again about her debt to us.”
“Perhaps she will pay us.”
“Perhaps.”
“Is there any plan to send the Queen of Scots home?” she asks hopefully.
“Not now,” I say quietly. “They have sent her bishop into exile in France, and her spy, Ridolfi, has fled to Italy. The Spanish ambassador has been ordered to leave in disgrace, and everyone else is in the Tower. The Scots won’t want her—seeing the company she keeps and how faithless she has been, breaking her parole, and her word, and her promise to Lord Morton. And Cecil must be certain that Norfolk’s evidence will incriminate her. The question can only be, What will he do with evidence that damns her?”
“Will they put her on trial? What could be the charge?”
“If they can prove that she invited Spain to invade or plotted the queen’s death, then she is guilty of rebellion against a lawful monarch. That would carry the sentence of death. They can’t execute her, of course, but they can find her guilty and put her in the Tower forever.”
Bess is silent; she cannot meet my eyes. “I am sorry,” she says awkwardly.
“The punishment for raising a rebellion is death,” I say steadily. “If Cecil can prove that she tried to assassinate Elizabeth, then she would face a trial. She would deserve a trial, and lesser men have died for what she has done.”
“She says that Elizabeth will never kill her. She says that she is untouchable.”
“I know it. She is sacred. But a guilty verdict will see her in the Tower forever. And no power in Europe would defend her.”
“What could Norfolk say against her that would be so very bad?”
I shrug. “Who knows what she has written to him, or what she wrote to the Spanish, or to her spy, or to the Pope? Who knows what she promised them?”
“And Norfolk himself?”
“I think it will be a treason trial,” I say. “I shall have to be chief justice. It hardly seems possible. That I should sit as judge on Thomas Howard! We practically grew up together.”
“He will be found innocent,” she predicts. “Or the queen will pardon him after the verdict. They have quarreled as cousins do, but she loves him.”
“I pray that it is so,” I tell her. “For if I have to turn the axe towards him and read out the death sentence, then it will be a dark day for me, and a worse one for England.”
1571, DECEMBER,
CHATSWORTH:
MARY
Iam hobbling painfully in the courtyard, as my legs are so stiff and painful I can hardly walk, when I see a stone flung in an arc over the wall from the outside, and it falls near my feet. A piece of paper is wrapped around it and, disregarding the twinge in my knees, I step over it at once, hiding it with my skirts.
My heart races; I can feel my lips smile. Ah, so now it begins again, another proposal, another plot. I had thought that I was too hurt and defeated for any more conspiracies, but now one has fallen at my feet and I feel my hopes leap up at th
e prospect of another chance of freedom.
I glance around; no one is watching me except the little page boy, Anthony Babington. Quick as a lad playing football, I kick the stone towards him, and he bends and snatches it up and puts it in his pocket. I stagger another few steps, wearily, as if my knees are worse, and then I call him to me.
“Lend me your shoulder, boy,” I say. “My legs are too weak for walking today. Help me to my room.”
I am almost certain that no one is watching us, but it is part of the delight of the plot to wait until we are on the turn of the stair and to say urgently to him, “Now! Now!” and he slips his little hand into his breeches’ pocket, unwraps the stone, and gives me the crumpled paper.
“Good boy,” I whisper. “Come and see me at dinner time and I will have a sugared plum for you.”
“I serve you for faith alone,” he says. His dark eyes are bright with excitement.
“I know you do, and God Himself will reward you for it, but I would like to give you a sugarplum as well,” I say, smiling at him.
He grins and helps me to the door of my chamber and then bows and leaves me. Agnes Livingstone helps me in.
“Are you in pain? The countess was coming to sit with you this afternoon. Shall I tell her not to come?”
“No, let her come, let her come,” I say. I shall do nothing to let them know that a fresh plot has started, a new war is beginning.
I open a book of devotional poems and spread the paper out over the leaves. The door opens, and Bess comes in, curtsies and sits at my invitation. From her stool, placed low, she cannot see my letter. To my amusement, she settles down to sew with me while I have this letter, this new invitation to the undoing of her queen and herself, open before me.
I let myself glance at it, and then gasp in horror. “Look at this,” I say suddenly to her. “Look! Look at this, which was flung over the courtyard wall!”
It is a drawing of me as a mermaid, a bare-breasted whore, and beneath it is a filthy poem listing my husbands and remarking that they all die, as if my bed were a charnel house. It says that poor Francis of France was poisoned by me, Darnley was murdered by Bothwell, and I took him to my bed as a reward. It says Bothwell is kept as a lunatic in a barred cave facing the North Sea. It calls me his French whore.
Bess tosses it into the fireplace. “Filth,” she says simply. “Think nothing of it. Someone must have got drunk on Christmas ale and sung a little song and scribbled a picture. It is nothing.”
“It is directed at me.”
She shrugs. “News of the Ridolfi plot will spread throughout the kingdom and you will be blamed for it. You have lost the love that people had for you when they thought you were a princess tragically ill-treated by the Scots. Now they think you bring us nothing but trouble. Everyone fears and hates the Spanish. They will not quickly forgive you for inviting them in against us. Even the Catholics blame you for inciting the Pope against Elizabeth. They wanted to live in peace, we all want to live in peace, and you are spoiling it.”
“But this is not about the Spanish and all that,” I say. “It says nothing about Ridolfi or the Duke of Norfolk. It is all about Darnley, and Scotland, and Bothwell.”
“Men in an alehouse will repeat anything filthy. But it cannot matter to you what they say. They will say anything, and this is old scandal.”
I shake my head, as if to clear my thoughts, and I pick up my little dog and hug him for comfort. “But why this old scandal? Why now?”
“They gossip about what they hear,” she says steadily. “Isn’t it perennial news? An old scandal?”
“But why speak of it now?” I demand. “Why don’t they blame me for inciting the Pope or calling in the Spanish? Why this old story in preference to the new? Why now?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I hear no gossip here. And I don’t know why it would come up again now.”
I nod. I think I know what is happening, and I am certain who is doing it. Who else would slur my name but him? “Do you think perhaps, Bess, that the men sent out to spy in the alehouses and markets for your queen can talk as well as listen? When they listen for any threat against her, do you think that they also supply scandal about me? About all her enemies? Do you not think that as they listen at keyholes, they also drip fear and poison into the minds of ordinary people? Do you not think that they abuse me, that they spread fear of strangers, terror of war, accusations about Jews and Papists? Do you not think that this whole country is loyal to Elizabeth because she makes them terrified of anything else? That she has agents whose job is to go around spreading terror to keep her people loyal?”
“Well, yes,” Bess agrees, a child of Elizabeth’s England where truth is a thing for sale in the market and scandal is priced to sell. “But why would anyone tell old scandals about you? And why now?”
“That is the very question,” I say simply. “Why now? At this particular, useful moment? Just before Norfolk comes to trial? Could it be that he has refused to say anything against me? Could they fear that they will take him to the very steps of the scaffold and he will not accuse me of treason? Because he knows he is innocent of a rebellion against Elizabeth and I am innocent too. All we wanted was to be married and for me to be released to my country. All we conspired to do was to free me. But they want to hang Norfolk and destroy me. Don’t you know that’s true?”
Bess’s needle is still above her tapestry. She knows I am right and she knows my enemy. She knows how he works and she knows how he succeeds. “But why traduce you with an old scandal?”
“I am a woman,” I say quietly. “If you hate a woman, the first thing you destroy is her reputation. They will name me as a woman of shame, unfit to rule, unfit to marry. If they ruin my reputation, then they make Norfolk’s crime seem even worse. They make him look like a man who was ready to marry an adulteress and a murderess. They make him look insane with ambition and me lower than a whore. Who would follow Norfolk or serve me? No loyal Scotsman or even Englishman would ever want me on the throne. They would think I was guilty of treason against Elizabeth because they believe I am a whore and a murderess.”
Bess nods reluctantly. “To dishonor you both equally,” she says. “Even if they cannot get you both to trial.”
“And who would whisper such a thing? Who do you think, Bess Talbot? Who do you know who uses rumor and false accusation and terrible slanders to destroy another’s reputation? To finish them forever? When he cannot prove them guilty in an inquiry, but when he is determined to give them the reputation of guilt in the world? Who would do this? Who has the men already in his service and the power that he could do this?”
I see in her stricken face that she knows full well who runs the spies, and that it is the same man who runs the slander makers. “I don’t know,” she says stoutly. “I don’t know who would do such a thing.”
I let it rest. I have heard worse ballads than the one we have just burned on the fire, and seen worse portraits too. I let Bess cling to her denial rather than force her to name her friend Cecil as a spy and a pitcher of filth. “Well, well,” I say lightly. “If you do not know, having lived at court as you have done, having seen who rules and who has power, then I am sure that I do not know either.”
1572, JANUARY, COLD
HARBOR HOUSE, LONDON:
GEORGE
As I get to London, after a bad journey in terrible weather, and open up a few rooms of my London house, I learn that Cecil, having kept the terrible letters of the Scots queen as a state secret on the command of Elizabeth for over three years, has now seen fit to publish this odd and obscene collection of poetry, threat, and evil.
Having refused to see them as a secret document, and insisted that they were presented as evidence in court or not shown at all, I now find these most secret papers, which we all agreed were too dreadful to be discussed by an official inquiry, are now available at the stationers as a little booklet, priced for sale, and the poor people are writing ballads and posting drawings based on this
filth. The supposed author of these vile and lustful scribbles, the Queen of Scots, is unanimously reviled in London by everyone who has bought and read them, and even the common people throughout England seem to have learned of the letters and now claim to know, with the absolute certainty of the ignorant, that she is Bothwell’s lover and Darnley’s murderer, the poisoner of her first husband and the lover of her French father-in-law, and in league with the devil to boot. They are creating ballads and stories and more than one vile riddle. She, whom I first saw as a creature of fire and air, is now notorious; she is become a figure of fun.
Of course this makes Norfolk look even more of a fool in the eyes of everyone. Before he stands his trial we all think that he must have been drunk with ambition to have been seduced by such an obvious Jezebel. Before a word of evidence has been posted, before he has even walked into court, every right-thinking man in England condemns him for stupidity and lust.