The other queen

1569, WINTER, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

How much are we being paid for her?” I ask George as we take a glass of spiced wine seated either side of our bedroom fire. Behind us the maids are turning down our bed for the night.

He gives a little start and I realize that I am, once again, too blunt. “I beg your pardon,” I say quickly. “Only I need to know for my book of accounts. Is the court to pay us a fee?”

“Her Majesty the Queen graciously assured me that she will meet all the costs,” he says.

“All of them?” I ask. “Are we to send her a note of our expenses, monthly?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Bess, dearest wife…this is an honor; to serve is a privilege that many seek but only we were chosen. The queen has assured me that she will provide. Of course we will benefit from our service to her. She has sent goods from her own household for her cousin, has she not? We have the queen’s own furniture in our house?”

“Yes,” I say hesitantly, hearing the pride in his voice. “But really, it is only some old things from the Tower. William Cecil wrote to me that Queen Mary’s household is supposed to be thirty people.”

My husband nods.

“She has come here with at least sixty.”

“Oh,” he says. “Has she?”

For some reason, known only to men and in this instance a nobleman, he has ridden at the head of a train of a hundred people for ten days and failed to notice.

“Well, they don’t all expect to be housed here, I suppose?”

“Some of them have gone to the alehouse in the village, but her household—companions, retainers, servants, and the grooms—are under our roof, and they are all eating and drinking at our expense.”

“She has to be served as a queen,” he says. “She is a queen to her fingertips, don’t you think, Bess?”

It is undeniable. “She is a beauty,” I say. “I always thought they must be exaggerating when they spoke of her as the most beautiful queen in the world, but she is all of that, and more. She would be beautiful if she were a commoner, but the way she carries herself and her grace…” I hesitate. “Do you like her very much?”

The gaze he turns to me is totally innocent; he is surprised by the question. “Like her? I hadn’t thought. Er, no, she is too…” He breaks off. “She is troubling. She is challenging. Everywhere we go she has been a center for treason and heresy. How can I like her? She has brought me nothing but difficulty.”

I hide my pleasure. “And do you have any idea how long she will stay with us?”

“She will go home to Scotland this summer,” he says. “The inquiry has cleared her of any wrongdoing; our queen is certain that there is nothing against her. Indeed, she seems to have suffered much injustice. And her lords put themselves utterly in the wrong by holding her prisoner and making her abdicate her throne. We cannot tolerate this in a neighbor. To throw down a queen is to overthrow the natural order. We dare not let them do it. It is to go against the order of God. She has to be restored and the rebels punished.”

“Will we escort her home?” I ask. I am thinking of a royal progress to Edinburgh, of the castles and the court.

“Our queen will have to send an army to secure her safety. But the lords have agreed to her return. Her marriage to Bothwell will be annulled and they will bring her husband Lord Darnley’s murderers to trial.”

“She will be queen in Scotland again?” I ask. “Despite Cecil?” I try to keep the doubt from my voice but I shall be very surprised if that arch plotter has an enemy queen in his hands and quietly sends her home in comfort, with an army to help her.

“What has Cecil to do with it?” he asks me, deliberately obtuse. “I don’t think that Cecil can determine who is of royal blood, though he thinks to command everything else.”

“He cannot want her restored to power,” I say quietly. “He has worked for years to put Scotland under English command. It has been the policy of his life.”

“He cannot prevent it,” he says. “He has no authority. And it will be something then, my Bess, for us to be the dearest friends of the Queen of Scotland, don’t you think?”

I wait for the two girls to finish turning down the bed, curtsy, and leave the room. “And of course, she is heir to England,” I say quietly. “If Elizabeth returns her to Scotland, she is acknowledging her as queen and her cousin, and so it is to acknowledge her as the heir. So she will be our queen here, one day, I suppose. If Elizabeth has no child.”

“God save the Queen,” George says at once. “Queen Elizabeth, I mean. She is not old; she is healthy and not yet forty. She could yet marry and have a son.”

I shrug. “The Queen of Scots is a fertile woman of twenty-six. She is likely to outlive her cousin.”

“Hush,” he says.

Even in the privacy of our bedroom, between two loyal English subjects, it is treason to discuss the death of the queen. Actually, it is treason to even say the words “death” and “queen” in the same sentence. We have become a country where words have to be watched for betrayal. We have become a country where you can hang for grammar.

“Do you think the Scots queen is truly innocent of the murder of Lord Darnley?” I ask him. “You saw the evidence; are you sure she was not guilty?”

He frowns. “The inquiry closed without a decision,” he says. “And these things are not a matter for women’s gossip.”

I bite my tongue on an irritable reply. “It is not for gossip that I ask you,” I say respectfully. “It is for the safety and honor of your house.” I pause. He is listening now. “If she is the woman that they say—a woman who would murder her husband in cold blood and then marry the man who did the deed for her own power and safety—then there is no reason to think that she would not turn against us, if it was in her interest to do so. I don’t want my cellars packed with gunpowder one dark night.”

He looks aghast. “She is a guest of the Queen of England; she will be restored to her own throne. How can you think that she would attack us?”

“Because if she is as bad as everyone says, then she is a woman who will stop at nothing to gain her way.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that Lord Darnley, her own husband, was in a plot against her. He had joined with the rebel lords and was guided by her half brother, Lord Moray. I think together they planned to throw her down and imprison her and put him as king consort on the throne. Her half brother would have ruled through Darnley. He was a weak creature, they all knew that.”

I nod. I knew Darnley from a boy, a boy horridly spoiled by his mother, in my opinion.

“The lords loyal to the queen made a plot to kill Darnley, Bothwell probably among them.”

“But did she know?” I demand. It is the key question: is she a husband-killer?

He sighs. “I think not,” he says fairly. “The letters that show her ordering the deed are certainly forgeries; the others are uncertain. But she was in and out of the house while they were putting the gunpowder in the cellar; surely she would not have taken the risk if she had known of the danger. She had planned to sleep there that night.”

“So why marry Bothwell?” I demand. “If he was one of the plotters? Why reward him?”

“He kidnapped her,” my loyal husband says quietly, almost in a whisper. He is so ashamed by the shame of the queen. “That seems certain. She was seen to be taken by him without her consent. And when they came back to Edinburgh he led her horse by the bridle so that everyone could see she was his captive and innocent of a conspiracy with him.”

“Then why marry him?” I persist. “Why did she not arrest him as soon as she was safe in her castle and throw him on the scaffold?”

He turns away; he is a modest man. I can see his ears going red from a blush. He cannot meet my eyes. “He did not just kidnap her,” he says, his voice very quiet. “We think he raped her and she was with child by him. She must have known herself to be utterly ruined as a woman and a queen. The only thing she could do was to marry him and pretend that it was by consent. That way at least she kept her authority though she was ruined.”

I give a little gasp of horror. A queen’s person is sacred; a man has to be invited to kiss her hand. A physician is not allowed to examine her, whatever her need. To abuse a queen is like spitting on a holy icon; no man of conscience would dare to do it. And for the queen to be held and forced would be like having the shell of her sanctity and power broken into pieces.

For the first time, I feel pity for this queen. I have thought of her so long as a monster of heresy and vanity that I have never thought of her, little more than a girl, trying to rule a kingdom of wolves, forced in the end to marry the worst of them. “Dear God, you would never know to look at her. How does she bear it? It is a wonder that her spirit is not broken.”

“So you see, she will be no danger to us,” he says. “She was a victim of their plotting, not one of the plotters. She is a young woman in much need of friends and a place of safety.”

There is a tap at the door to tell me that my private household is assembled in our outer chamber, ready for prayers. My chaplain is already among them. I have household prayers said every night and morning. George and I go through to join them, my head still spinning, and we kneel on the cushions that I have embroidered myself. Mine has a map of my beloved Derbyshire, George’s shows his family crest, the Talbot. All of my household, from page boy to steward, kneel on their cushions and bow their heads as the chaplain recites the prayers for the evening. He prays in English so that everyone may speak to God together in language that we all understand. He prays for the kingdom of God and for the kingdom of England. He prays for the glory of heaven and the safety of the queen. He prays for my lord and for me and for all these souls in our care. He thanks God for the gifts we enjoy, as a result of Elizabeth on the throne and the Protestant Bible in the churches. This is a godly Protestant household and twice a day we thank God who has rewarded us so richly for being His people, the best Protestants in Christendom. And so we remind everyone—me as well—of the great rewards that come from being a godly Protestant household in the direct charge of a Protestant God.

This is a lesson that the Catholic queen may learn from me. We Protestants have a God who rewards us directly, richly, and at once. It is by our wealth, our success, and our power that we know that we are the chosen. Who can doubt God’s goodness to me, when they see my house at Chatsworth, now three stories high? Who, if they saw my accounts books with the figures marching so strongly down to the bottom line, could doubt that I am one of the chosen, one of the specially favored children of God?