The other queen

1569, OCTOBER, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

Half the things we need are left behind at Wingfield and I cannot buy fresh vegetables for love or money in a radius of twenty miles. The countryside is exhausted and the men have run off to join the Northern army, which is mustering at Brancepath under the Earl of Westmorland, swearing loyalty to the Scots queen and a holy war for the Church of Rome. The country is on a war footing already, and when I send my steward to market he says they will sell him nothing; he feels as if he is the enemy.

It is terrifying to think that out there, in the wilderness of the North, there are squires and gentry and lords calling their tenants together, mustering their friends, arming their followers, and telling them to march under the banner of the five wounds of Christ to find me, to come to my house, to free my prisoner. I wake in the night at the slightest noise; in the day I am forever climbing to the castle wall to look out over the road; continually I see a cloud of dust and think it is them coming.

I have lived all my life as a private woman, on good terms with my neighbors, a good landlord to my tenants, a fair employer. Now I find myself at odds with my own people. I don’t know who is a secret enemy. I don’t know who would free the queen if they could, who would come against me if they dared. It makes me feel like a stranger in my own land, a newcomer in my own country. The people whom I think of as my friends and neighbors may be on the other side, may be against me, may even be my enemies. My friends, even my kin, may take arms against me, may see me as a traitor to the true queen, my prisoner.

She herself is demure, like a novice in a convent, with an escape plan hidden in her sleeve, and my husband trustingly remarks to me, “Thank God that she has not tried to break free. At least she knows nothing about the uprising.”

For the first time in my married life I look at him and I think: “Fool.”

It is a bad moment when a wife thinks her husband a fool. I have had four husbands and I have had bad moments with all of them, but I have never before been married to a man whose stupidity could cost me my houses and my wealth.

I cannot bear it. I wake in the night and I could weep for it. No infidelity could be worse. Even with the most beautiful woman in Christendom under my roof, I find I think more about whether my husband might lose my fortune than whether he might break my heart. A woman’s heart can mend, or soften, or grow hard. But once you lose your house it is hard to get it back again. If Queen Elizabeth takes Chatsworth from us to punish my husband for disloyalty, I know that I will never set foot in it again.

All very well for him to plot against Cecil like a child with naughty friends, all very well to turn a blind eye to the Queen of Scots and her unending letters. All very well to delight in the company of a woman young enough to be his daughter, and her an enemy of the realm, but to go so far that now the court will not repay us what they owe! They are beyond arguing over the bills; they do not even reply to my accounts. To go so far that they might question our loyalty! Does he think of nothing? Does he not look ahead? Does he not know that a traitor’s goods are at once, without appeal, forfeit to the Crown? Does he not know that Elizabeth would give her own rubies if she could take Chatsworth off me? Has he not given her that excuse with his stupid indiscretion with the Northern lords? Is he not exactly a fool? A wasteful fool? And wasting my inheritance as fast as his own? My children are married to his children, my fortune is in his care: will he throw everything away because he does not think ahead? Can I ever, ever forgive him for this?

I have been married before and I can recognize the moment when a honeymoon is over, when one sees an admired bridegroom for what he is: a mere mortal. But I have never before felt that my marriage was over. I have never before seen a husband as a fool and wished that he was not my lord and master and that my person and my fortune were safe in my own keeping.