The other queen

1568, WINTER, CHATSWORTH HOUSE: BESS

Cecil’s clerk writes to tell me that Mary Queen of Scots is not to come to us at Chatsworth, where I could entertain her as she deserves: in a great house with a beautiful park and everything done as it should be. No, she is to come to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: one of our poorest properties and half-derelict, and I have to turn my life upside down to make this ruin fit for a queen in the middle of winter.

“If your lord and husband could only have been prevailed on to see all the evidence against her, she could have been returned to Scotland in disgrace already,” Cecil writes, sweet as an unripe apple, in a postscript. “Then we would all have been able to rest easy this Christmastide.”

There is no need for Cecil to reproach me. I warned my lord that the inquiry was a sham and a show, as close to life as are the mummers dressed in motley at Christmas. I told him that if he chose to become a player in this scene of Cecil’s devising then he must follow the playscript word by word. He was not invited there to improvise. He should have found the verdict that Cecil wanted. But he would not. If you hire an honorable man to do dirty work you will find the work honorably done. Cecil chose the wrong lord when he chose my husband to supervise the disgrace of the Scots queen. And so Cecil has no scandal, and no dishonored queen, and I have no husband at home, and I have to clean and rebuild a derelict castle in the middle of winter.

Cecil says, “I am sorry that you have to house this Athalia, but I hope it will not be for long, for certainty, she will follow the destiny of her namesake.”

This obviously means something to Cecil, who has the benefit of a man’s education, but for a woman such as me, the daughter of a farmer, it is as opaque as a code. Fortunately, my darling son Henry is staying with me, on a brief holiday from his place at court. His father, my second husband, Cavendish, left me with instructions and an income to get him educated like a gentleman, and I sent him, and then his two brothers, to school at Eton.

“Who is Athalia?” I ask him.

“Obscure,” he replies.

“So obscure that you don’t know the answer?”

He smiles lazily at me. He is a handsome boy and he knows that I dote on him.

“So, my Mama-Countess. What is the information worth to you? We live in a world where all intelligence is for sale. You pay me well enough to report the gossip from court. I am your spy in the house of your friend Robert Dudley. Everyone has an informant and I am merely one of many of yours, I know. What will you pay me for the fruits of my education?”

“I have paid for it once already in your tutors’ fees,” I reply. “And they were dear enough. Besides, I think you don’t say because you don’t know. You are an ignoramus and my money was wasted on your education. I hoped to buy myself a scholar and all I have is an idiot.”

He laughs. He is such a handsome boy. He has all the disadvantages of a rich boy. Even though he is my own darling, I can see it clearly. He has no idea that money is hard to earn, that our world is filled with opportunity and also danger. He has no idea that his father and I went to the limits of the law and beyond to make the fortune that we would lavish on him and on his brothers and sisters. He will never work as I do, he will never worry as I do. To tell the truth, he has no idea of either work or worry. He is a well-fed boy, whereas I was raised with hunger—a hunger for everything. He takes Chatsworth for granted as his pleasant home, his due; whereas I have put my heart and soul here, and I would sell my heart and soul to keep it. He will be an earl if I can buy him an earldom, a duke, if I can afford it. He will be the founder of a new noble family: a Cavendish. He will make the Cavendish name a noble one. And he will take it all, as if it came easily, as if he had to do nothing but smile as the sun warmly smiles on him; bless him.

“You misjudge me. I do know, actually,” he says. “I am not such an idiot as you think. Athalia is in the Old Testament. She was a queen of the Hebrews and she was accused of adultery and killed by the priests, so as to free her throne so that her son Joash could become king.”

I can feel my indulgent smile freeze on my face. This is no matter for jokes. “They killed her?”

“They did indeed. She was known to be unchaste, and unfit to rule. So they killed her and put her son in her place.” He pauses. His dark eyes gleam at me. “There is a general view, I know vulgar, Mama, but a general view, that no woman is fit to rule. Women are by nature inferior to men and it goes against nature if they so much as try to command. Athalia was—tragically for her—only typical.”

I raise a finger to him. “Are you sure of that? Do you want to say any more? Would you like to expound further on female inability?”

“No! No!” He laughs. “I was expressing the vulgar view, the common error, that is all. I am no John Knox, I don’t think you are all a monstrous regiment of women, honestly, Mama, I do not. I am not likely to think that women are simpleminded. I have been brought up by a mother who is a tyrant and commander of her own lands. I am the last man in the world to think that a woman cannot command.”

I try to smile with him but inwardly I am perturbed. If Cecil is naming the Scots queen as Athalia then he means me to understand that she will be forced to let her baby son take the throne. Perhaps he even means that she will die to make way for him. Clearly, Cecil does not believe that the inquiry cleared her of the murder of her husband and of adultery with his killer. Cecil wants her publicly shamed and sent away. Or worse. Surely he cannot dream that she could be executed? Not for the first time I am glad that Cecil is my friend, for he is certainly a dangerous enemy.

I send my son Henry, and my dear stepson Gilbert Talbot, back to court and tell them that there is no point staying with me, for I have work to do; they might as well see in the Christmas season in comfort and merriment in London, for I can provide neither. They go willingly enough, reveling in each other’s company and in the adventure of the ride south. They are like a pair of handsome twins, alike in age—seventeen and fifteen—and in education, though my boy Henry, I must say, is far and away naughtier than my new husband’s son and leads him into trouble whenever he can.

Then I have to strip my beautiful house, Chatsworth, of hangings and tapestries and carpets, and ship linen by the cartload. This Queen of Scots is to come with a household of thirty persons and they will all have to sleep somewhere, and I know full well that Tutbury Castle has neither furniture nor comfort of any kind. I command my Chatsworth chief steward of the household, the grooms of the servery and of the buttery and the master of horse at the stables to send food and trenchers, knives, table linen, flagons, and glassware by the wagonload to Tutbury Castle. I command the carpentry shop to start making beds and trestle tables and benches. My lord uses Tutbury no more than once a year, as a hunting lodge, and the place is barely furnished. Myself, I have not ever been there, and I am only sorry that I have to go there now.

Then, when Chatsworth is in chaos from my orders and the wagons are stuffed with my goods, I have to climb on my own horse with my teeth gritted at the stupidity of this journey, and at the head of my own wagons I ride southeast for four hard days across inhospitable country on roads that are frosty in the morning and thick with mud by midday, through fords which are swollen with freezing floods, starting at wintry dawn and ending in the early dark. All this, so that we can get to Tutbury and try to put the place into some kind of order before this troublesome queen arrives to make us all unhappy.