The other queen

1572, JANUARY, SHEFFIELD CASTLE: BESS

We have to wait for the verdict on Thomas Howard from London and there is nothing we can do to speed this time of waiting. Queen Mary is impatient for news and yet dreads to hear. One would almost have thought her truly in love with him. One would almost think that the man she loved is on trial.

She walks on the battlement and she looks south, where he is, instead of north. She knows that no army will come for her from the north this year. Her dupe Norfolk and her pander Ross are imprisoned and her spy is run away; she is a woman alone. Her master plotter Ridolfi has conspired only to win his own safety. Her last husband, Bothwell, will never be released from his prison in Denmark; both the Scots lords and the English are determined that such a dangerous enemy shall never be set free. He can be of no help to her anymore. Her besotted admirer and only loyal friend, my husband, is nursing a broken heart and finally remembering his duty to his queen and his country, and his promises to me. None of the men she has enchanted can help her now. There is no army of rescue for her; there is no man sworn to be hers till death; there is no network of friends and liars, gathering secretly and silently in a dozen hidden places. She is defeated; her friends are arrested, screaming on the rack, or run away. She is finally a true prisoner. She is quite in my power.

Odd then, that I should take such little joy in it. Perhaps it is because she is so roundly defeated: her beauty is dissolving into fat, her grace made clumsy by pain, her eyes swollen with crying, her rosebud mouth now permanently folded into a thin line of suffering. She, who always looked so much younger than me, has suddenly aged like me, grown weary like me, grown sorrowful like me.

We form a quiet alliance: we have learned the hard way that the world is not easy for women. I have lost the love of my husband, my last husband. But so has she. I may lose my home and she has lost her kingdom. My fortunes may come good again, and so may hers. But in these cold, gray winter days we are like two hangdog widows who cling together for warmth and hope for better days though doubting they will ever come.

We talk of our children. It is as if they are our only prospect of happiness. I talk of my daughter Elizabeth, and she says that she is of an age to match with Charles Stuart, her husband Darnley’s younger brother. If they were to marry—and this is a game to play over our sewing—their son would be heir to the English throne, second only to her son James. We laugh at the thought of the consternation of the queen if we were to make such an ill-starred, ambitious match, and our laugh is like that of old ill-natured women, plotting something bad, as revenge.

She asks me about my debts and I tell her frankly that the costs of her lodging have taken my husband to the very brink of ruin and that he has drawn on my lands and sold my treasure to save his own. The fortune that I brought him on marriage has been mortgaged, bit by bit, to meet his debts. She does not waste her time or mine in regret; she says that he should insist that Elizabeth pay her debts; she says that no good king or queen ever lets a good subject be out of pocket: how else can they rule? I tell her, and truly, that Elizabeth is the meanest sovereign that ever wore a crown. She gives her love and affection, she gives her loyalty, she can even give honors and sometimes (more rarely) money-earning positions, but she never hands over cash from her treasury if she can possibly help it.

“But she will need his friendship now,” she points out. “To get the verdict of guilty on the duke? She must realize that she should pay her debts to him now; he is the master of the judges, she must want him to do her will.”

I see from this that she does not know him at all, she does not begin to understand him. I find I love him for his proud folly, even though I rail at him for being a proud fool. “He won’t bring in a verdict that depends on whether she pays her debt to him,” I say. “He’s a Talbot, he can’t be bought. He will look at the evidence, weigh the charge, and come to the just sentence, whatever he is paid, whatever it costs.” I hear the pride in my own voice. “That is the sort of man he is. I would have thought you would know that by now. You can’t bribe him, and you can’t buy him. He’s not an easy man, not even a very sensible man. He does not understand the way of the world and he is not a very clever man. You might even call him a fool—certainly he was a fool over you—but he is always, always a man of honor.”