The other queen

JANUARY 16TH, 1572, WESTMINSTER HALL, LONDON: GEORGE

London is like a city in mourning; I have never seen anything like it since the young Elizabeth was taken from the Tower to imprisonment in the country and we were so afraid that she would never come home safe again. Now her cousin makes another fearful journey, from the Tower to the Star Chamber at Westminster Hall. But this time it is ordered by us, the Protestants, the Englishmen, against another Protestant and an Englishman. How has this happened?

It is a cold morning, still dark—for God’s sake, why are people not still in their beds? Or going about their business? Why are they here, lining the streets, in a miserable silence, filling the lanes with foreboding? Cecil has ordered the queen’s guards and the mayor’s men to keep order, and behind their broad shoulders, the white faces of ordinary men and women peep out, hoping to see the queen’s cousin go by, hoping to call out to him their prayer that he will be saved.

They don’t get a chance to do even that. Of course Cecil trusts no one, not even the sorrowful good nature of the English crowd. He has ordered the guards to take Norfolk to Westminster Hall by royal barge along the river. The oars cut through the water to the drumbeat; there is no flag at the pole. Norfolk is traveling without his standard, without his herald, without his good name: a stranger to himself.

This must be his darkest time; he must be lonelier than any man in the world. His children are banned from seeing him; Cecil will not allow him any visitors. He has not even had a lawyer to advise him. He is as solitary as a man already on a scaffold. More so, for he does not even have a priest at his side.

There is not one of us, not one of the twenty-six of us peers called to judge him, who does not imagine himself in his place. So many of us have lost friends or kin to the scaffold in these last few years. I think of Westmorland and Northumberland—both gone from me, both driven from me and from England, the wife of one in exile, a widow to a dead traitor, and the wife of the other in hiding on her lands, swearing she wants to know nothing of anything. How can this have happened in England, in my England? How can we have fallen so quickly into such suspicion and fear? God knows we are more fearful and more faithless to each other now, while Philip of Spain threatens our coast, than we were when he was married to our old queen and sitting on our throne. When we had a Spaniard as our king consort, ruling over us, we were less fearful than we are now. Now we are terrified of him and his religion. How should that be? A man who does not know who his friends are, does not know what the world is, a man who does not know his servants, his allies, is a man utterly alone.

I shall have to sit in judgment on my friend and fellow peer Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, and I shall have to listen to some dirty stuff. I don’t trust evidence which has been racked out of prisoners screaming with pain. When did torture become something that happens as a matter of course in the prisons, with the silent complicity of the judge? We are not in France, where torture is a legal practice; we are not Spanish with an artistry of cruelty; we became Protestant so that religion should be a private matter, not imposed by fire and the stake. We are Englishmen, and such savagery is illegal except at the specific request of the monarch in the gravest of times. This is how it is in England.

Or at any rate, it should be.

Or at any rate, it once was.

But since the queen is advised by men who do not flinch from a little barbarism, I find all sorts of evidence is now presented to me and I am expected to wink at it. Men I have counted as my friends for years can be declared treasonous and led to the scaffold, their road lined with confessions from their broken servants. This is the new justice of England, where stories are crushed out of men by piling stones on their bellies, and the judge is told beforehand what verdict to bring in. Where we break the spirits of page boys so that we can break the neck of their master.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. It was not for this that we prayed, when we longed for our Elizabeth. This is not the new world of peace and reconciliation that we thought the new princess would bring to us.

I mutter all this to myself as I go, sluggishly enough, in my own barge down the river to the Westminster steps, to alight from a rocking boat on a dark river and to walk up the damp steps and through the terrace of the palace towards the hall, never more downhearted than now, as Cecil’s great plan to make England safe from Papists, from the Spanish, from the Scots queen reaches its powerful final act. My fortune destroyed, in debt to my own wife, my own peace in wretched scraps, my wife spying on me, the woman that I love dishonored by her own lies, a traitor to my liege lord and queen, the other once-beloved queen my ruin. I lift my head and walk into the hall as a Talbot should walk, like a lord among his peers, as my father would have walked, and his father before him, all of us in a long line, and I think, Dear God, none of them can ever have felt as I do: so uncertain, so very uncertain, and so lost.

I have the highest seat, and on either side of me are the other lords who will try this miserable case with me, God forgive them for serving here. Cecil has picked this court well for his purposes. Hastings is here, the Scots queen’s inveterate enemy; Wentworth, Robert Dudley, and his brother Ambrose, every one of them Norfolk’s friend in the good times, not one of them ready to risk his reputation for him now; none would dare defend the Scots queen. All of us, who whispered against Cecil just three years ago, are huddled together now, like frightened schoolboys, to do whatever he says.

Cecil is here himself—Burghley, as I must remember to call him. The queen’s newest and freshest creation: Baron Burghley, in his bright new robes, his ermine collar all white and fluffy.

Below us lords are the judges of the Crown, and before us all, a draped stage where Howard will stand to answer the charges. Behind him, seats for the nobility, and behind them, standing room for the thousands of gentry and citizens who have come to London to enjoy the unique spectacle of a royal cousin on open trial for treason and rebellion. The royal family turning on itself once again. We find we are no further forward at all.

It is still dark and cold at eight when there is a stir at the door and Thomas Howard comes in. He exchanges a quick look with me and I think these last three years have not been kind to either of us. I know my face has lines of worry from my care of the queen and the destruction of my peace, and he is gray and fatigued. He has that terrible prison pallor which comes to a man whose skin has been burnished from being out in all weathers, every day, and then has been suddenly confined. The tan is on the skin like dirt but the healthy color beneath has faded. It is the pallor of the Tower: he will have seen it on his father, on his grandfather. He stands on the dais, and to my shock, I see his stance—always haughty, always overproud—has become bowed. He stands like a man weighed down with false accusation.

The duke raises his head as the clerk of the Crown reads the charge, and he looks around, as a weary hawk will scan the mews, always alert, always ready for danger, but there is no bright Howard pride in his eyes anymore. They imprisoned him in the room where they kept his grandfather charged with treason. He can overlook the green where they executed his father for offenses against the Crown. Howards have always been their own greatest danger. Thomas must feel his line is accursed. I think if his cousin the queen could only see him now she would forgive him from sheer pity. He may have been wrongly advised, he may have done wrong, but he has been punished. This man is at the end of his strength.

He is asked for his plea but instead of answering guilty or no, he asks the court for a counsel, a lawyer to help him answer the charge. I don’t have to look to Cecil for his refusal; the chief justice Catline is already there before us all, up on his feet like a little moppet, explaining that in trials for high treason no lawyer is allowed. Howard may answer only if he has been treasonous or not. And there is no mitigation either; in a trial for high treason, if he answers guilty he is saying he wants to die.

Thomas Howard looks at me, as an old friend that he thinks will deal with him fairly. “I have had very short warning to answer so great a matter. I have not had fourteen hours in all, both day and night. I am hardly handled. I have had short warning and no books, neither a book of statutes, not so much as the breviate of statutes. I am brought to fight without a weapon.”

I look down at my hands, I shuffle my papers. Surely, we cannot hound this man to the scaffold without giving him time to prepare a defense? Surely, we will allow him a lawyer?

“I stand here before you for my life, lands and goods, my children and my posterity, and for that which I esteem most of all, my honesty,” he says eagerly to me. “I forbear to speak of my honor. I am un-learned; let me have what the law would allow, let me have counsel.”

I am about to command the justices to withdraw and rule on his request. We were his friends; we cannot hear him ask us for something so reasonable and refuse it. The man has to have advice. Then a note from Cecil, farther down the table, is passed along and slid under my hand.

1. If he has a lawyer then the full detail of the Queen of Scots’ promises to him will be revealed. I assure you that her letters to him are not those that you would want read out in your court. They show her as a scandalous whore.

2. All this occurred under your guardianship, which must then be called into question. How could you have allowed such a thing to happen?

3. The trial will be prolonged and the Queen of Scots’ honor and reputation utterly destroyed.

4. Her Grace, our queen, will be held up for contempt before everyone, by what these two say of her. We will make a thousand traitors while prosecuting one.

5. Let us have the decency to get to judgment quickly and let Her Grace the queen deal mercifully with the sentence. She can always pardon him once this trial is over.

I read this and then I rule. “You must make your answer to the charge,” I say to Howard.

He looks at me with his dark honest eyes. One long look, and then he nods. “Then I must question the charge,” he says.

I consent, but we all know there is no avoiding a charge of treason. Cecil’s new laws have so enlarged the definition of treason that it is not possible to live in England today without being guilty almost daily, almost hourly. To speculate as to the queen’s health is treason, to suggest she might one day die is treason, to suggest that she might not be Queen of France is certain treason, though it is nothing but the most obvious truth: none of us will ever see an English Calais again. Even to think, in one’s innermost secret heart, any criticism of the queen is now treason. Thomas Howard must be guilty of treason, as indeed we all must be, every day of our lives, even Cecil.

They nag at him, as hounds will bait a tired bear. He so reminds me of a bear, chained with one leg to a post, while fresh dogs dash in and take a snap and shy away again. They take him back to the inquiry at York and accuse him of favoring the Queen of Scots. They accuse her of claiming the throne of England and imply that he would have married her and made himself King of England. They say that he plotted with the Scots lords, with his sister Lady Scrope, with Westmorland and Northumberland.

They take him through every moment of the inquiry at York; they have evidence that the Scots lords met him and suggested the marriage. This cannot be denied, for it is true. It was no secret and we all approved it. Robert Dudley, now sitting at my side as a fellow judge, his face stony, had a hand in it too. Shall he be tried for treason alongside Howard? William Cecil, the chief playwright and choreographer of this trial, knew all about it as well. I know this, for my own wife reported to him, spying on me. Shall Cecil be on trial? Shall my wife? Shall I? But all of us are eager now to forget our parts in the courtship. We watch Howard shake the dogs from his flank and say that he cannot remember everything, that he admits he has neglected his duty to the queen, he has not been the subject and cousin that he should have been—but this does not make him guilty of treason.

He is trying to tell the truth in this masque of mirrors and costumes and false faces. I could laugh if I were not bowed down with my own sorrows and sick to my heart for him. He is trying to tell the truth to this court of spies and liars.

We are all weary and about to stop for dinner when Nicholas Barham, the queen’s sergeant and Cecil’s instrument, suddenly produces a letter from John Lesley, the Bishop of Ross, to the Queen of Scots. He submits it as evidence and we all obediently read it. In it, the bishop tells Queen Mary that her betrothed, Norfolk, has betrayed his own queen to the Scots lords. It says that all Queen Elizabeth’s plans, all the advice of her councillors, all her innermost counsels have been reported by Norfolk in full to the enemies of England. It is a most shocking letter and proof, complete proof, that he was on the side of the Scots against England, and working for Queen Mary. It is an incredible document. It shows Norfolk, without doubt, as a complete and convinced traitor.

Damning indeed, utterly damning. Except that someone asks Nicholas Barham if this letter was intercepted on its way to the Scots queen or taken from her rooms. Everyone looks at me, of course, who should have caught such a letter. I am in the wrong now, for I did not catch this letter. I shake my head and Barham smoothly reports that this extraordinary letter was somehow lost, mislaid. It was not sent and I did not intercept it. The Queen of Scots never saw it. He tells us, straight-faced, that a copy of this most incriminating letter was hidden in a secret room, found as if by a miracle, years later, by James, Earl of Moray, and handed by him to the Queen of England shortly before his death.

I cannot help but look incredulously at Cecil, that he should expect men—not children enjoying fairy tales but men of the world, and his fellow lords—to accept this complicated fable. The look he returns to me is smilingly blank. I am a fool to expect something more convincing. To Cecil it does not matter if none of this makes sense; what matters is that the letter is entered on the record, that the record is part of the trial, that it will serve as evidence to justify the verdict to the world, and that the verdict will be guilty.

“Shall we have our dinner now?” he asks pleasantly.

I rise and we go out. I am so foolish that I look for Norfolk as we lords go for our dinner, and think I will put my arm around his shoulders for a moment and whisper, “Be of good courage; there is no escaping the verdict, but the pardon will follow.”

Of course, he does not dine with us. I had forgotten. We all go to eat our dinner in the great hall; he goes alone, to eat alone in his cell. He cannot dine with us, he is banished from our company, and I will never put my arm around his shoulders again.