The other queen

1569, APRIL, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

Word comes from Cecil that the queen is to prepare for her journey to Scotland. First we are all to be released from this imprisonment at Tutbury. He says that at last we can take the queen to a palace which is fit to house her, where we can live as a noble household and not as a straggle of gypsies in the shelter of a ruin.

Everything is to change. The queen is to enjoy greater freedom: she can see visitors, she can ride out. She is to live as a queen and not as a suspect. Cecil even writes me that the cost of her keep will be settled, the arrears paid to us, and our claims will be met promptly in future. We are to give her the honor and the hospitality that a queen deserves, and she is to set off for Edinburgh later in this month and be restored by midsummer.

Well, I concede I was mistaken. I thought Cecil would never let her go, but I was wrong. I thought he would keep her in England and have one trumped-up inquiry after another until he had found or forged enough evidence to imprison her for life. I thought she would end her days in the Tower in a long miserable imprisonment. But I was wrong. He must have another plan in mind. He was always too deep to predict; those of us who are his friends and allies have to keep our wits sharp just to follow him. Who knows what he intends now?

Perhaps it is the marriage with Norfolk; perhaps he has come to think that a queen of royal blood, a queen anointed by God, cannot be kept forever under house arrest. Or perhaps my lord is right and Cecil is losing ground in the counsels of Queen Elizabeth. His star, which has been rising for so long, may be in eclipse. Perhaps all the other lords who have resented his influence will have their way, and my old friend Cecil will have to bow to their authority again, just as he did when we were both young and on the rise. My son Henry, serving at court in the Dudley household, writes to me that he thinks this is the case. He says that twice recently Cecil clashed with a nobleman and came off worse both times. The scandal of the Spanish gold has hurt him badly; even the queen acknowledges that he was mistaken and we will have to repay to the Spanish the bullion that Cecil stole.

“Even so, retain your friendship with him, as I will,” I write cautiously to Henry in reply. “Cecil plays a long game and the queen loves those who protected her as princess.”

My whole household is to move to my husband’s great palace at Wingfield with the Scots queen, and she is radiant at the chance of getting away from Tutbury. Nothing is too much trouble for her: she arranges her own household’s packing into wagons; her own goods, clothes, and jewels are ready to go at dawn. Her pet birds are in their boxes; she swears her dog will sit on anyone’s saddlebow. She will ride ahead with my husband, the earl; as usual, I am to follow with the household goods. I shall trail behind them like their servant. I shall ride in the mud churned up by the hooves of their horses.

It is a beautiful morning when they set off, and the spring birds are singing, larks rising into the warm air as they go over the moor. It starts to rain by the time I have the baggage train packed and ready to go and I pull my hood up over my head, mount my horse, and lead the way out of the yard and down the muddy hill.

We go painfully slow. My husband the earl and the queen can canter on the grassy verges, and he knows the bridleways and shortcuts through woods and leads her splashing through streams. They will have a pleasant journey through the country with half a dozen companions. They will gallop on the high moors and then drop down to the shaded paths beside the rivers where the trees make an avenue of green. But I, fretting about the wagons and the household goods, have to go as slowly as the heaviest cart can lumber along the muddy lanes. When we lose a wheel, we all halt for several hours in the rain to make repairs; when a horse goes lame, we have to stop and take it from the shafts, and hire another at the next village. It is hard labor and I might begrudge it if I had been born and raised as a lady. But I was not born a lady; I was born and raised as a working woman and I still take great joy in doing hard work, and doing it well. I don’t pretend to be a lady of leisure. I have worked for my fortune and I take a pride in it. I am the first woman in my family to rise from poverty by my own efforts; actually I am the first woman in Derbyshire to own great property in my own right. I am the first woman that I know to use my own judgment to make and keep a fortune. This is why I love the England of Elizabeth: because a woman like me, born as low as me, can make and keep my own fortune.

The last few miles of the journey to Wingfield follow the course of the river. It is evening by the time we get there and at least the rain has lifted. I am wet through, but at any rate I can put back my hood and look around me at the most beautiful approach to my lord’s favorite house. We ride along the floor of the valley, with moorhen scuttering away into the water of the river and lapwing calling in the evening sky, then we round the corner and see, across the water meadows, the beautiful palace of Wingfield, rising above the trees, like a heavenly kingdom. The marshes lie beneath it with mist coiling off the waters; I can hear the croaking of frogs and the booming of the bittern. Above the water is a thick belt of trees, the ash coming green at last, the willows whispering in thick clumps. A throstle thrush sings, its warble sharp against the dusk, and there is a whisper of white like a ghost as a barn owl sweeps past us.

This is a Talbot property, belonging to my husband, inherited from his family, and I never see it without thinking how well I have married: that this palace should be one of the great houses that I may count as my home. It is a cathedral, it is an etching of stone against sky. The high arched windows are traceries of white stone, the turrets ethereal against the evening sky, the woods like billowing clouds of fresh green below it, and the rooks are cawing and settling for the night as we ride up the muddy track towards the house and they throw open the great gates.

I had sent half my household ahead of us to prepare, so that when the queen and my husband the earl rode in together, hours earlier, they arrived in afternoon sunshine and to a band of musicians. When they entered the great hall there were two huge fires either end of the room to warm them, and the servants and the tenantry lined up, bowing. By the time I arrive, at dusk, with the rest of the household furniture, the valuables, and the portraits, gold vessels, and other treasures, they are already at dinner. I go in to find them seated in the great hall, just the two of them at the high table, she in my husband’s place, her cloth of estate over her throne, thirty-two dishes before her, my husband seated on an inferior chair just below her, serving her from a great silver tureen, collected from an abbey, with the abbot’s own golden ladle.

They do not even see me when I enter at the back of the hall, and I am about to join them, when something makes me hesitate. The dirt from the road is in my hair and on my face, my clothes are damp, I am muddy from my boots to my knees, and I smell of horse sweat. I hesitate, and when my husband the earl looks up from his dinner I wave and point towards the great stairs to our bedchamber, as if I am not hungry.

She looks so fresh and so young, so pampered in her black velvet and white linen, that I cannot bring myself to join them at the dining table. She has had time to wash and change her clothes; her dark hair is like a swallow’s wing, sleek and tucked up under her white hood. Her face, pale and smooth, is as beautiful as a portrait as she looks down the hall and raises her white hand to me and smiles her seductive smile. For the first time in my life, for the first time ever, I feel untidy; worse, I feel…old. I have never felt this before. All through my life, through the courtships of four husbands, I have always been a young bride, younger than most of their household. I have always been the pretty young woman, skilled in household arts, clever at managing the people who work for me, neat in my dress, smart in my clothes, remarkable for wisdom beyond my years, a young woman with all her life before her.

But tonight, for the first time ever, I realize that I am not a young woman anymore. Here, in my own house, in my own great hall, where I should be most at ease in my comfort and my pride, I see that I have become an older woman. No, actually not even that. I am not an older woman: I am an old woman, an old woman of forty-one years. I am past childbearing; I have risen as high as I am likely to go; my fortunes are at their peak; my looks can now only decline. I am without a future, a woman whose days are mostly done. And Mary Queen of Scots, one of the most beautiful women in the world, young enough to be my daughter, a princess by birth, a queen ordained, is sitting at dinner, dining alone with my husband, at my own table, and he is leaning towards her, close, closer, and his eyes are on her mouth and she is smiling at him.