The other queen

FEBRUARY 8TH, 1587, HARDWICK HALL: BESS

God save them both today, and all days.

I have no cause to love either of them and no cause to forgive them either, but I find I do forgive them, this day of her death and this day of his final heartbreak.

She was an enemy to my queen, to my country, to my faith, and to me, certainly to me. And he was a fool for her, he laid down his fortune for her, and in the end, as most of us think, he laid down his reputation and his authority for her as well. She ruined him, as she ruined so many others. And yet I find I can forgive them both. They were what they were born to be. She was a queen, the greatest queen that these days have known, and he saw that in her, knight errant that he was, and he loved her for it.

Well, today she paid for everything. The day that he dreaded, that she swore could never come, turned out to be a cold wintry morning when she came down the stairs at Fotheringhay to find a stage built in the great hall and the great men of England, my husband among them, to witness her death.

The final plot that could not be forgiven, that could not be overlooked, that she could not blame on others, was a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and take her throne. The Scots queen, fatally, signed her name to it. Anthony Babington, now a young man, who had been little Babington, my darling page boy, was the chief deviser of this treasonous scheme and he paid for it with his life, poor young man. I wish to God I had never put him in her way, for she took his heart when he was just a child, and she was his death, as she was for so many others.

After all the thousands of letters that she had written, after all the plots she had woven, despite her training and being so well warned, she was finally careless, or else she was entrapped. She signed her own name to the plan to murder Queen Elizabeth and that was her death warrant.

Or they forged it.

Who knows?

Between a prisoner as determined on freedom as she, and jailers as unscrupulous as Cecil and Walsingham, who will ever know the truth of it?

But in a way today, despite them all, the Scots queen has won the battle. She always said that she was not a tragic figure, not a queen from a legend, but she saw in the end that the only way she would defeat Elizabeth—fully and finally defeat her—was to be the heroine that Elizabeth could not be: a tragic heroine, the queen of suffering, cut down in her beauty and her youth. Elizabeth could name herself the Virgin Queen and claim great beauty, surrounded by admirers, but Mary Queen of Scots will be the one that everyone remembers as the beautiful martyr from this reign, whose lovers willingly died for her. Her death is Elizabeth’s crime. Her betrayal is Elizabeth’s single greatest shame. So she has won that crown. She lost in their constant rivalry for the throne of England, but she will win when the histories are written. The historians, mostly men, will fall in love with her and make up excuses for her, all over again.

They tell me that my husband watched her execution with the tears pouring down his face, speechless with grief. I believe it. I know he loved her with a passion that cost him everything. He was a prosaic man to be overwhelmed by love—and yet it was so. I was there and I saw it happen. I believe no man could have resisted her. She was a tidal queen, a force of the moon, irresistible. He fell in love with her and she broke his fortune, his pride, and his heart.

And she? Who knows with her? Ask anyone who has loved a beautiful princess. You never know what she may be thinking. The nature of a princess is enigmatic, contrary, just like the sea. But it is my honest opinion that she never loved anyone at all.

And I? I saved myself from the storm that was Mary Queen of Scots and I know myself to be like a cottager who fastens his shutters and bolts the door and sees the gales blow over. George and I parted, he to his houses and me to mine. He guarded the queen and tried to keep her safe and tried to hide his love for her and tried to meet her bills, and I made a life for myself and for my children and I thanked God that I was far away from the two of them, and from the last great love affair of Mary Queen of Scots.

The years have gone by but my love of houses and land has been constant. I lost Chatsworth to my husband the earl when we quarreled and he turned against me, but I built a new house, a fabled house at Hardwick near the home of my childhood, with the greatest windows in the North of England, the most wondrous stretches of glass that anyone has ever seen, in great stone frames that look everywhere. The children even made a nursery rhyme about it:Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall , they sing. I have built a legend here.

I had my initials stamped on every side of the house in stone.ES it says, in stone at the edge of the towering roof, carved against the sky, so that from the ground, looking up, you can see my initials stamped on the clouds.ES the coronet bellows at the countryside, as far as the eye can see, for my house is set on a hill and the topmost roofs of my house shoutES .

Elizabeth Shrewsbury,my house declaims to Derbyshire, to England, to the world. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house from her own fortune, with her own skill and determination, built this house from the strong foundations into Derbyshire rock to the initials on the roof. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house to declare her name and her title, her wealth, and her dominance over this landscape. You cannot see my house and not recognize my pride. You cannot see my house and not know my wealth. You cannot see my house and not know that I am a woman self-made, and glad of it.

I have made my children secure in their fortunes; I have done what I set out to do for them. I have founded dynasties: my children own the titles of the earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire, and Lennox. My son William is the first Earl of Devonshire; my daughter Mary will be the Countess of Shrewsbury. And my granddaughter Arbella is a Stuart, as I planned with Queen Mary. The half-joking scheme that we dreamed over our sewing, I made real; I brought it about. Against the odds, against the will of Queen Elizabeth, in defiance of the law, I married my daughter to Charles Stuart, and their child, my granddaughter, is heir to the throne of England. If luck goes with her—my luck, by which I mean my utter determination—she will be queen one day. And what woman in England but me would have dreamed of that?

I say it myself: not bad—not bad at all. Not bad at all for the daughter of a widow with nothing. Not bad at all for a girl from Hardwick, who was born into debt and had to earn everything she owns. I have made myself, a new woman for this new world, a thing that has never been before: a woman of independent means and an independent mind. Who knows what such women will do in the future? Who knows what my daughters will achieve, what my granddaughters might do? The world of Elizabeth is full of venturers: both those who travel far away to distant lands and those who stay at home. In my own way, I am one of them. I am a new sort of being, a new discovery: a woman who commands herself, who owes her fortune to no man, who makes her own way in the world, who signs her own deeds and draws her own rents and knows what it is to be a woman of some pride. A woman whose virtue is not modesty, a woman who dares to boast. A woman who is glad to count her fortune and pleased to do well. I am a self-made woman and proud of it.

And nobody in this world will ever call me Mrs. Fool.