The other queen

1571, APRIL, TUTBURY CASTLE: GEORGE

This is a most unnatural thing, I am sure, a most illegal thing. A damned wicked and dishonorable thing. Wrong, against custom and practice, another innovation, and another injustice.”

I come to my senses and find I am muttering to myself as I walk along the outer wall of Tutbury Castle, gazing out but not really seeing the fresh greenness of the spring landscape. I don’t think I will ever look out to the north again without fearing that I may see an army coming to besiege us.

“Illegal surely, and in any case wrong.”

“What is the matter now?” Bess says, coming to my side. She has thrown a shawl over her head and shoulders and she looks like a farmer’s wife run outside to feed the hens. “I was just in the garden and I saw you striding about and muttering to yourself like a man driven insane. Is it the queen? What has she done now?”

“No,” I say. “It is your great friend, Cecil.”

“Burghley.” She corrects me just to irritate me, I know. That nobody is now a baron and we must all call him “my lord.” And for what? For persecuting a queen of the blood until she is driven halfway to treason?

“Burghley,” I say mildly. “Of course, my lord Cecil. My lord Cecil the baron. How glad you must be for him. Your good friend. How grand he has become, what a pleasure for all who know and admire him. And he is building his grand house still? And he has substantial money from the queen, posts and preferments? He grows wealthier every day, does he not?”

“What’s the news? Why are you so angry?”

“He has pushed a bill through Parliament to disinherit the Queen of Scots,” I say. “Disinherit her. Now we see why he ordered us here where she could be so closely guarded. If ever the country would rise for her, you can see they might rise now. Declaring her invalid to inherit! As though Parliament can determine who is the heir to the throne. As though it does not go by blood. As though a bunch of commoners can say who is a king’s son! It makes no sense, apart from anything else.”

“Burghley has achieved this?”

“She must see this as false dealing to her. In the very month when she is due to go back to Scotland as queen, Cecil sends us here and pushes through a bill that says that no one of the Roman Catholic faith can ever be a monarch of England. Their faith is to disbar them as much as if they were…” For a moment I am speechless, I cannot think of an example. It has never been like this in England before. “A Jew…,” I manage. “If one can imagine such a thing as a Tudor Jew, a Stuart Jew. A Mussulman, a Hindoo pretender. They are treating her as if she were a Turk. She is a child of the Tudor line—Cecil is saying she is a foreigner to us.”

“It makes Elizabeth safe from a Papist assassin,” Bess says shrewdly. “There is no point in any hidden priest making a martyr of himself by killing her if it does not put a Papist on the throne.”

“Yes, but that’s not why he’s done it,” I exclaim. “If he cared so much to protect the queen, he would have rushed the bill through last year when the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth and commanded every Papist criminal in the country to murder her. No. This is just to attack the Queen of Scots at the very moment when we have a complete agreement. This is to drive her into rebellion. And I will have to be the one to tell her what he has done. It was to be an act of absolute faith between the two queens, and I am the one who has to tell her that she has been cheated of her inheritance.”

“You can tell her that her plotting has all been for nothing then.” There is a vindictive pleasure lilting in my wife’s voice. “Whatever she has written to Norfolk or to her foreign friends, if she is debarred from the throne she can promise what she likes but they will know her to be a liar without friends in England.”

“She is no liar. She is the heir,” I say stubbornly. “Whatever anyone says, whatever Cecil says in Parliament. She has Tudor blood, she is nearest to the throne, whether they like it or no. She is the next heir to England. What else do we say? That we pick and choose the next king or queen depending on our preference? Are monarchs not chosen by God? Are they not descended one from another? Besides, all the kings of England before this one have been Papist. Is the religion of the fathers of the kings of England now to be an obstacle to their being king? Has God changed? Has the king changed? Has the past changed too? Has Cecil—I beg your pardon, Baron Burghley—has he the power to disinherit Richard I? Henry V?”

“Why should you be so upset?” she asks unpleasantly. “Has she promised you a dukedom as reward when she is Queen of England?”

I gasp at the insult on my own castle wall from my own wife. But this is how things are now. A land steward is a baron, a queen is disinherited by the House of Commons, and a wife can speak to her husband as if he were a fool.

“I serve the Queen of England,” I say tightly. “As you know, Bess. To my cost.”

“My cost too.”

“I serve the Queen of England and none other,” I say. “Even when she is ill advised. Woefully ill advised by your friend.”

“Well, I am glad that your loyalty is unchanged and nothing is wrong,” she says sarcastically, since it must be clear to everyone that everything is all wrong in England today. She turns to go back down the stone stairs to the mean little herb garden in the castle yard. “And when you tell her, be sure she understands that this is the end of her ambition. She will be Queen of Scotland again as we have agreed, but she will never rule in England.”

“I serve the Queen of England,” I repeat.

“You would do better to serve England,” she says. “Cecil knows that England is more than the king or the queen. All you care about is who is on the throne. Cecil has a greater vision. Cecil knows it is the lords and the commons too. It is the people. And the people won’t have a burning, persecuting wicked Papist queen on the throne ever again. Even if she is the true heir ten times over. Make sure you tell her that.”