The other queen

1569, DECEMBER, COVENTRY: BESS

Acold season and little chance of much joy at a Christmas feast for my household this year. This is the second Christmas for me and my lord that has been spoilt by this other queen. I wish to God I had never heard of her, never mind thinking I could make a profit from serving her. Far from my home, and separated from my children, with no news of my mother and sister or my house, we wait in anxiety for the arrival of the army of the North. Hastings sends out scouts three times a day to see if we can get at least some idea of where it is now, and when it will be upon us, but half the time they are riding blind in mist and rain and could be within feet of the Northern army and not see it.

The town is fortified as well as it can be but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that we cannot hold out a siege against an army of nearly six thousand men. We have a handful of men whose loyalty we cannot depend on, nor will the citizens of Coventry defend us. They want to see the queen freed too. We are not popular here; we are an army of occupation.

I cannot stop fretting for my mother and sister at Chatsworth. My girls are safe in the south, in service with friends, learning how to run great households and making the friendships which will serve them in later life, and my boy Charles is at school. But the Northern army could march through Chatsworth, and though my mother has the determination and the courage to order them off my land, what if the soldiers take offense? I worry too for Henry, my son, and Gilbert, my stepson, who are both at court. I cannot stop thinking that they may take it into their heads to volunteer to march with the queen’s army and come north against her enemies. If my Henry is in a battle with the Northern army, I swear I will behead the Queen of Scots myself. I am sure Robert Dudley will not let him go; I am sure the queen would forbid it. But over and over again I start up in the night, certain that my boy will have volunteered for danger and is even now marching north to meet an unstoppable army of traitors.

Hastings has a letter from London, promising relief and pretending to optimism, but it brings the disastrous news that Barnard Castle has fallen to the army of the North. Sir George Bowes was holding out for the queen but his men risked their necks and jumped down from the castle walls to join the rebels. One of them even broke his leg in his determination to change sides, and the townspeople themselves threw open the gates and called the rebels in, singing the old anthems as they advanced. They held Mass in the parish churches; they brought out the hidden stoups for the holy water, the gold, the silver, even the pictures and the stained-glass windows. They declared the return of the faith at the market cross and all the farmers’ wives brought their children to be properly baptized at last.

It will be as it was before, I know it: the church at the center of life, the monasteries and the abbeys rich with their wealth, the faith restored. It is as if the world is knitting itself back together, like a skilled weaver repairing an unraveled cloth. I can hardly believe that I will not walk backwards myself, back past my third good husband, William St. Loe, back past my second good husband, William Cavendish, who gave me Chatsworth and stole the gold candlesticks from the abbey for me, past my first manor, all the way back to my childhood when I married my first husband to escape my life as a poor girl with no prospects at Hardwick and my mother did not even hold the deeds to our home.

I remark to the queen at dinner that every night in this terrible time of waiting, I dream that I am going backwards to my childhood, and her face lights up as if this were a wonderful prospect. “If I could wish anything I would be back in France,” she says. “I would be a little princess in France once again.”

I smile weakly, as if in agreement. God knows, I wish she was there too.