In the meantime I will have to send to my steward at Chatsworth and tell him to take some of the smaller pieces of silver down to London and sell them for cash. I cannot wait for the rents at quarter day; I have to buy things in Tutbury and pay extra servants, and for this I need more coin than I earn. I could laugh at my own sense of loss when I write to him to sell half a dozen silver plates. I have never used them but they are mine, hoarded away in my own treasure room. To sell them for their value as scrap is as painful to me as a personal loss.
At midday the hunting party comes home. If they have killed on the hunt then the meat goes straight to the kitchens and is an essential addition to the provisioning of this great household. We dine all together in my lodgings, on this sunny side of the courtyard, and in the afternoon the queen often sits with me in my presence chamber, for the light is better for sewing, and the room brighter, and her women can sit with mine and we can all talk.
We talk as women always do: inconsequentially but with enthusiasm. She is the greatest needlewoman I have ever met; she is the only woman I have ever known whose ability and love of sewing matches mine. She has wonderful pattern books that arrive, travel-stained but intact, from Edinburgh Castle, and she falls on them like a child and shows me the pictures and explains them to me. She has patterns for Latin inscriptions and classical designs that all mean different things. They are beautiful and all carry hidden meanings, some of them secret codes, and she says that I can copy them out.
Her designer joins our household after a few days—he had been left behind at Bolton Castle. He sets to work for us both, drawing up designs, and I watch him as he sketches freehand on canvas the wonderful symbolic flowers and heraldic beasts as she commands him. She can say to him, “And put an eagle over it all,” and his chalk arcs like a child scribbling in the sand, and suddenly, there is an eagle! With a leaf in its beak!
It is a great thing, I think, to have an artist such as this man in your train. She takes him quite for granted, as if it were natural that a man of great talent, a truly fine artist, should do nothing but sketch designs for her to sew. I think of King Henry using Hans Holbein to draw designs for his masques, which would be broken up the day after the dance was done, and employing great musicians to write songs for his chamber or the way that the poets spend their talents writing plays for Queen Elizabeth. Truly, these are the luxuries of kings. Of all the riches that have surrounded this spoiled young woman from childhood, this employment of such a gifted man gives me the best sense of what her life has been like until now. Everything she has had around her has been supreme, the best of the very best; everyone who works for her, or follows in her train, is the most talented or charming or skilled. Even the design for her embroidery must be a work of art before she will touch it.
Together we work on a new cloth of estate for her. It will hang over her chair to proclaim her royalty. Hertapissier has already started stitching the dark red background. In gold curly script the letters will say. “En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She is seated on the best chair, between the window and the fire. I am on a lower chair, though this is my own room in my own house, and our ladies-in-waiting are on stools and benches near the windows for the light.
“It was my mother’s motto,” she says. “It means, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ I have been thinking of it in these troubled days and decided to take it as my own. When I lost my husband and was no longer Queen of France, then I began my life as Queen of Scotland. When I fled from Scotland, my new life in England begins. Soon another phase of my life will start. I will return to my throne; perhaps I shall remarry. In every end is a new beginning. I am like a queen of the sea, I am a queen of tides. I ebb, but I also flow. One day I shall cease to be queen on earth of any kingdom and be a queen in heaven over all kingdoms.”
I scowl at my women, whose heads bob up like rabbits at this un-seemly and Papistical assurance.
“Should you like to do the gold lettering?” she offers. “The silk is such a pleasure to work with.”
Despite myself, my hands go out to touch it. The silk is very fine, I have never worked with anything so beautiful, and I have loved needlework with a passion for all my life. “How is it so smooth?”
“It is spun gold,” she says. “Real gold thread. That is why it glitters so. Do you want to sew with it?”
“If you wish,” I say, as if I don’t much mind.
“Good!” she says, and she beams as if she is genuinely delighted that we will work together. “You will start at that end and I shall start at this and bit by bit we shall come closer and closer together.”
I smile in reply; it is impossible not to warm to her.
“And at the end we shall meet in the middle, head to head and the greatest of friends,” she predicts.
I draw up my chair and the fine fabric loops from her lap to mine. “Now,” she says quietly, when we are settled with our gold thread. “Do tell me all about my cousin the queen. Have you been much to her court?”
Indeed, I have. I don’t boast but I let her know that I have been a senior lady-in-waiting at the queen’s court, at her side from the earliest days of her reign, her friend when she was nothing more than a princess, friends with her friends, loyal informant to her advisor.
“Oh, so you must know all her secrets,” she says. “Tell me all about her. And tell me about Robert Dudley. Was she really so desperately in love with him as they all said?”
I hesitate at that. But she leans forward to engage me. “Is he still so very handsome?” she whispers. “She offered him to me, you know, in marriage, when I first came to Scotland. But I knew she would never part with him. She is lucky to have such a loyal lover. It is a rare man who can love a queen. He has devoted his life to her, has he not?”
“Forever,” I say. “From the moment she came to the throne and formed her court. He came to her then and he has never left. They have been hand in glove for so long that they finish each other’s sentences, and they have a hundred secret jokes, and sometimes you see her just glance towards him, and he knows exactly what she is thinking.”
“Then why does she not marry him, since he is free?” she asks. “She made him an earl so that she could propose him for me. If he was good enough for me he must be more than good enough to marry her.”
I shrug. “The scandal…,” I say very quietly. “After his wife’s death. The scandal has never gone away.”
“Can she not defy the scandal? A queen of courage can live down a scandal.”
“Not in England,” I say, thinking. And probably not in Scotland either. “A queen’s reputation is her crown; if she loses one she loses the other. And Cecil is against him,” I add.
She widens her eyes. “Cecil commands her in even this?”
“He does not rule her,” I say carefully. “But I have never known her to go against his advice.”
“She trusts him with everything?”
I nod. “He was her steward when she was a princess with few prospects. He managed her small fortune and he saw her through the years when she was under suspicion of treason by her half sister Queen Mary. He kept her safe. He guided her away from the rebels whose plans would have destroyed her. He has always stood by her; she trusts him as a father.”
“You like him,” she guesses from the warmth in my voice.
“He has been a true friend to me also,” I say. “I have known him since I was a young woman living with the Grey family.”
“Yet I hear he is ambitious for his own family. Building a great house, seeking alliances? Matching himself with the nobility?”
“Why not?” I ask. “Does not God Himself command us to use our talents? Does not our own success show that God has blessed us?”
She smiles and shakes her head. “My God sends trials to those He loves, not wealth, but I see that your God thinks like a merchant. But of Cecil—does the queen always do as he commands?”
“She d
oes as he advises,” I temper. “Most of the time. Sometimes she hesitates so long that she can drive him quite wild with impatience, but generally his advice is so good and their strategy is so long-planned that they must agree.”
“So he is the one who makes her policy? He decides?” she presses.
I shake my head. “Who knows? They meet in private.”
“This is a matter of some importance to me,” she reminds me. “For I think he is no friend of mine. And he was an inveterate enemy to my mother.”
“She usually follows his advice,” I repeat. “But she insists that she is queen in her own country.”
“How can she?” she asks simply. “I don’t know how she dares to try to rule without a husband. A man must know best. He is in the very shape of God; he has a superior intelligence. All else aside, he will be better educated, he must be better taught than any woman. His spirits will be more courageous, his determination more constant. How can she dream of ruling without a husband at her side?”
I shrug. I cannot justify Elizabeth’s independence. Anyway, everyone in the country would agree with her. It is God’s will that women are subject to men, and Elizabeth herself never argues against it. She just does not apply it to herself. “She calls herself a prince,” I say, “as if being royal exceeds being a woman. She is divinely blessed, she is commanded by God to rule. Cecil acknowledges her primacy. Whether she likes it or not, she is set above everyone—even men—by God Himself. What else can she do?”
“She could rule under a man’s instruction,” she says simply. “She should have found a prince or a king or even a nobleman who could be trusted with the good of the country and married him, and made him King of England.”
“There was no one…,” I begin defensively.
She makes a little gesture with her hand. “There were dozens,” she says. “There still are. She has just got rid of the Hapsburg courtier, has she not? In France we heard all about them. We even sent our own candidates. Everyone believed that she would find a man that she could trust with the throne and then England would be safe. He would rule and make treaties with other brother kings. Treaties that could be based on the word of an honorable man, not on the changeable views of a woman, and then she could have conceived sons to come after him. What could be more natural and right? Why would any woman not do that?”
I hesitate. I cannot disagree. It is what we all thought would happen. It is what Queen Mary Tudor, Elizabeth’s half sister, tried to do, obedient to her wisest advisors. It is what this Scots queen did. It is what Parliament went down on their knees to beg Elizabeth to do. It is what everyone hopes will happen even now, praying that it is not too late for Elizabeth to have a baby boy. How should a woman rule on her own? How did Elizabeth dare such a thing? And if she does, if she continues on this unnatural course, how shall she secure her succession? Very soon it will be too late. She will be too old to have a child. And however great the achievement of a reign, what is the use of a barren throne? What use is a legacy if there is no one to inherit? What will become of us if she leaves the kingdom in turmoil? What becomes of us Protestant subjects under a Papist heir? What of the value of my property then?
“You are a much-married woman, are you not?” The queen peeps at me.
I laugh. “The earl is my fourth husband, God bless and keep him,” I say. “I have been so unlucky to be widowed three times. Three good men I have loved and lost, and mourned each one.”
“So you, of all people, cannot believe that a woman is best left alone, living alone, with only her fortune, and neither husband nor children nor home?”
In truth, I cannot. I do not. “For me, there was no choice. I had no fortune. I had to marry for the good of my family and for my own future. My first husband died when we were both children and left me with a small dowry. My second husband was good to me and taught me how to run a household and left me his estate. My third husband even more so. He left me his houses and all his lands entirely to me, in my own name, so that I could be a fit wife to the earl, Shrewsbury, who has given me my title and greater wealth than I could ever have dreamed of when I was nothing more than the daughter of a poor widow at Hardwick.”
“And children?” she prompts me.
“I have borne eight,” I say proudly. “And God has been good to me and I have six still living. My oldest daughter, Frances, has a babe in arms; they called her Bessie for me. I am a grandmother as well as a mother. And I expect to have more grandchildren.”
She nods. “Then you must think as I do, that a woman who makes herself a barren spinster is flying in the face of God and her own nature, and cannot prosper.”
I do think this, but I am damned if I would say it to her. “I think the Queen of England must do as she prefers,” I declare boldly. “And not all husbands are good husbands.”
I am speaking at random, but I score such a hit at her that she falls silent and then to my horror I see that she has looked away from her sewing and there are tears in her eyes.
“I did not mean to offend you,” she says quietly. “I know full well that not all husbands are good husbands. Of all the women in the world, I would know that.”
“Your Grace, forgive me!” I cry out, horrified by her tears. “I did not mean to distress you! I was not thinking of you! I did not mean to refer to you or your husbands. I know nothing of your circumstances.”
“You must be unique then, for every alehouse in England and Scotland seems to know everything about my circumstances,” she snaps, brushing the back of her hand across her eyes. Her lashes are wet. “You will have heard terrible things about me,” she says steadily. “You will have heard that I was an adulteress against my husband with the Earl of Bothwell, that I urged him to murder my poor husband, Lord Darnley. But these are lies. I am utterly innocent, I beg you to believe me. You can watch me and observe me. Ask yourself if you think I am a woman that would dishonor herself for lust?” She turns her tear-stained beautiful face to me. “Do I look like such a monster? Am I such a fool as to throw honor, reputation, and my throne away for the pleasure of a moment? For a sin?”
“Your life has been much troubled,” I say weakly.
“I was married as a child to the Prince of France,” she tells me. “It was the only way to keep me safe from the ambitions of King Henry of England: he would have kidnapped me and enslaved my country. I was brought up as a French princess; you cannot imagine anything more beautiful than the French court—the houses and the gowns and the wealth that was all around me. It was like a fairy tale. When my husband died it all ended for me in a moment, and then they came to me with the news that my mother had died too, and I knew then that I would have to go home to Scotland and claim my throne. No folly in that, I think. No one can reproach me for that.”
I shake my head. My women are frozen with curiosity, all their needles suspended and their mouths open to hear this history.
“Scotland is not a country that can be ruled by a woman alone,” she says, her voice low but emphatic. “Anyone who knows it knows that to be true. It is riven with faction and rivalry and petty alliances that last for the length of a murder and then end. It is barely a kingdom; it is a scatter of tribes. I was under threat of kidnap or abduction from the first moment that I landed. One of the worst of the noblemen thought to kidnap me and marry me to his son. He would have shamed me into marriage. I had to arrest him and execute him to prove my honor. Nothing less would satisfy the court. I had to watch his beheading to prove my innocence. They are like wild men; they respect only power. Scotland has to have a merciless king, in command of an army, to hold it together.”
“You cannot have thought that Darnley…”
She chokes on an irresistible giggle. “No! Not now! I should have known at once. But he had a claim to the English throne; he swore that Elizabeth would support him if we ever needed help. Our children would be undeniable heirs of England from both his side and mine; they would unify England and Scotland. And once I was married I would be
safe from attack. I could not see otherwise how to protect my own honor. He had supporters at my court when he first arrived, though later, they turned against him and hated him. My own half brother urged the marriage on me. And yes—I was foolishly mistaken in him. He was handsome and young and everyone liked him. He was charming and pretty-mannered. He treated me with such courtesy that for a moment it was like being back in France. I thought he would make a good king. I judged, like a girl, on appearances. He was such a fine-looking young man; he was a prince in his bearing. There was no one else I would have considered. He was practically the only man I met who washed!” She laughs and I laugh too. The women breathe an awed giggle. “I knew him. He was a charming young man when he wanted to be.”
She shrugs her shoulders, a gesture completely French. “Well, you know. You know how it is. You know from your own life. I fell in love with him,un coup de foudre . I was mad for him.”