The Queen's Fool

Autumn 1554

The queen said nothing to the king nor to the court, but Jane watched her with the devotion of a mother and next month, in September, when the queen did not bleed, she gave me a small triumphant nod and I grinned back. The queen told the king in secret, but anyone seeing his redoubled tenderness toward her must have guessed that she was carrying his child, and that it was a great hidden joy to them both.

Their happiness illuminated the palace and for the first time I lived at a royal court that was alive with joy and delight in itself. The king’s train remained as proud and as glamorous as when they had first entered England, the phrase “as proud as a Don” became an every day saying. No one could see the richness of their velvets and the weight of their gold chains and not admire them. When they rode out to hunt they had the very best horses, when they gambled they threw down a small fortune, when they laughed together they made the walls shake and when they danced they showed us the beautiful formal dances of Spain.

The ladies of England flooded to the queen’s service and were all lovesick for the Spanish. They all read Spanish poetry, sang Spanish songs, and learned the new Spanish card games. The court was alive with flirtation and music and dancing and parties and in the heart of it all was the queen, serene and smiling, with her young husband always lovingly at her side. We were the most intellectual, the most elegant, the richest court in the whole of Christendom, and we knew it. With Queen Mary glowing at the head of this radiant court we danced at a very pinnacle of self-satisfied pleasure.

In October the queen was informed that Elizabeth was sick again. She asked me to read Sir Henry Bedingfield’s report to her as she rested on a daybed. Woodstock, and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s many ploys for attention seemed far away as the queen gazed dreamily out of the window at the garden where the trees were turning yellow and golden and bronze. “She can see my doctors if she insists,” she said absently. “Would you go with them, Hannah? And see if she is as bad as she claims? I don’t want to be unkind to her. If she would just admit her part in the plot I would release her, I don’t want to be troubled with this, not now.”

It was as if her own happiness was too great not to be shared.

“But if she was to admit a fault, surely the council or the king would want her to face trial?” I suggested.

Queen Mary shook her head. “She could admit it privately to me, and I would forgive her,” she said. “Her fellow plotters are dead or gone away, there is no plot left for her any more. And I am carrying an heir to the throne, an heir for England and for the whole Spanish empire, this will be the greatest prince the world has ever known. Elizabeth can admit her fault and I will forgive her. And then she should be married; the king has suggested his cousin, the Duke of Savoy. Tell Elizabeth that this time of waiting and suspicion can be at an end, tell her I am with child. Tell her I shall have my baby in early May. Any hopes she had of the throne will be over by next summer. Make sure she understands, Hannah. There has been bad blood between us but it can be over as soon as she consents.”

I nodded.

“Sir Henry writes that she attends Mass as good daughter of the church,” she said. “Tell her I am glad of that.” She paused. “But he tells me that when the time comes in the service to pray for me she never says “amen.” She paused. “What d’you make of such a thing? She never prays for me, Hannah.”

I was silent. If the queen had been speaking in anger I might have tried to defend Elizabeth, and her pride and her independence of spirit. But the queen was not angry. She looked nothing more than wounded.

“You know, I would pray for her, if our places were reversed,” she said. “I remember her in my prayers because she is my sister. You could tell her that I pray for her every day, and I have done ever since I cared for her at Hatfield, because she is my sister and because I try to forgive her for plotting against me, and because I try to prepare myself for her release, and to teach myself to deal with her with charity, to judge her mercifully as I hope to be judged. I pray for her well-being every day of her life; and then I hear she will not say so much as ‘amen’ to a prayer for me!”

“Your Grace, she is a young woman and very alone,” I said quietly. “She has no one to advise her.” To tell the truth I was ashamed of Elizabeth’s stubbornness, and meanness of spirit.

“See if you can teach her some of your wisdom, my fool,” the queen suggested with a smile.

I knelt to her and bowed my head. “I shall miss being with you,” I said honestly. “Especially now that you are so happy.”

She put her hand on my head. “I shall miss you too, my little fool,” she said. “But you shall come back in time for the Christmas feast, and after that you shall bear me company when I am confined.”

“Your Grace, I shall be so pleased to bear you company.”

“A spring baby,” she said dreamily. “A little spring lamb of God. Won’t that be wonderful, Hannah? An heir for England and for Spain.”

It was like traveling to another country to leave Whitehall for Woodstock. I left a happy court, filled with amusements, exulting in optimism, waiting for an heir; and arrived at a small prison, victualed and managed by Elizabeth’s old servants who were not even allowed in the ramshackle gatehouse to serve her, but had to do all their business in the tap room of the nearby inn, where they dealt with some very odd customers indeed.

At Woodstock I found Elizabeth very ill. No one could have doubted her frailty. She was in bed, exhausted and fat, she looked years older than twenty-one. She looked older than her older sister. I thought that her earlier taunts about her youth and beauty and the queen’s sterile age had rebounded most cruelly on her this autumn when she was swollen up, as fat as old Anne of Cleves, and the queen was blooming like Ceres. With her jowls bloated by illness Elizabeth bore a startling resemblance to the portraits of her father in his later years. It was a horror to see her girlish prettiness change into his gross features. The clear line of her jaw had disappeared into rolls of fat, her eyes were occluded by the red eyelids, her pretty rosebud mouth was hidden by the fat flesh of her cheeks and the grooved lines running from nose to chin.

Even her beautiful hands were fat. She had laid her rings aside, they would not go on her fingers, the very fingernails were half hidden by the monstrous growth of the flesh.

I waited till the physicians had seen her and bled her and she had rested before I went into her bed chamber. She threw me one resentful look and lay still on her bed, saying nothing. Kat Ashley flicked out of the door and stood on the outside to guard us from eavesdroppers. “Don’t be too long,” she said as she went past me. “She’s very weak.”

“What is wrong with her?” I whispered.

She shrugged. “They don’t know. They have never known. It is an illness of water, she swells with water and cannot rid herself of it. But she is worse when she is unhappy, and they have made her very unhappy here.”

“Lady Elizabeth,” I said and dropped to my knees by the bed.

“Faithless,” she said, hardly opening her eyes.

I had to choke back a giggle at her irresistible tendency to drama. “Oh, my lady,” I said reproachfully. “You know I have to go where I am bid. You must remember that I came to you in the Tower when I need not have come at all.”

“I know you went dancing off to Winchester for the wedding and I have not seen you since.” Her voice rose to match her temper.

“The queen commanded me to go with her to London and now she has sent me to you. And I bring a message.”

She raised herself a little on her pillows. “I am almost too sick to listen, so tell me briefly. Am I to be released?”

“If you will admit your fault.”

Her dark eyes flared under the puffy eyelids. “Tell me exactly what she said.”

As precisely as a clerk I recited to her what the queen had offered. I spared her nothing, not the news of the pregnancy, her sister’s sadness at Elizabeth’s resentment, her willingness to be friends again.

I had thought she would rage when she heard the queen was with child, but she did not even comment. I realized then that she had known the news before I told her. In that case, she had a spy so well positioned that he or she knew a secret I had thought was known only to the king, the queen, Jane Dormer and me. Elizabeth, like a cornered dog, should never be underestimated.

“I will think about what you have told me,” she said, following her usual instinct to buy time. “Are you to stay with me? Or take an answer back to her?”

“I am not to go back to court until Christmas,” I said. Temptingly, I added: “If you were to beg her forgiveness perhaps you could be at the court for Christmas. It’s very gay now, Princess, the court is filled with handsome grandees and there is dancing every night and the queen is merry.”

She turned her head away from me. “I should not dance with a Spaniard even if I were to go.” She considered the picture for a moment. “They could throng around me and beg me to dance and I would not get to my feet.”

“And you would be the only princess,” I reminded her persuasively. “The only princess in court. If you refused to dance they would all gather round you. And there would be new gowns. You would be the only virgin princess in England, at the greatest court in the world.”

“I’m not a child to tempt with toys,” she said with quiet dignity. “And I am not a fool. You can go now, Hannah, you have served her and done her bidding. But for the rest of your stay here you shall serve me.”

I nodded and rose to my feet. For a moment I hesitated; she did look so very sick as she lay on her bed facing the prospect of either a confession to treason or an unending imprisonment and disgrace. “God guide your ladyship,” I said with sudden compassion. “God guide you, Princess Elizabeth, and bring you safely out of here.”

She closed her eyes and I saw her eyelashes were darkened with tears. “Amen,” she whispered.

She did not do it. She would not confess. She knew that her stubbornness would condemn her to stay at Woodstock perhaps forever, and she feared that her health would not outlast the queen’s resentment. But to confess was to throw herself into the queen’s power absolutely, and she would not do that. She mistrusted Mary’s mercy, and the relentless Tudor stubbornness drove both sisters. Mary had been named as heir, and then named as bastard, and then made heir again. Exactly the same ordeal had been endured by Elizabeth. Both of them had decided never to surrender, always to claim their birthright, never to despair that the crown would come. Elizabeth would not relinquish the habit of a lifetime, not even for a chance to shine at a wealthy happy court and be received with honor. She might or might not be guilty, but she would never confess.

“What am I to tell the queen?” I asked her at the end of a long week. The physicians had declared her on the way to health once more, they could take a message back to court for me. If Elizabeth continued to mend she could have ridden in triumph to court for Christmas, if only she would confess.

“You can tell her a riddle,” Elizabeth said with feeble malice. She was seated in a chair, a pillow thrust behind her back to support her, a blanket wrapped around a hot brick under her cold feet.

I waited.

“You are a rhyming fool, are you not?”

“No, Princess,” I said quietly. “As you know, I have no fooling skills.”

“Then I will teach you a rhyme,” she said savagely. “You can write it to the queen if you wish. You can engrave it on every damned window in this hellhole if you wish.” She smiled grimly at me. “It goes like this:

“Much suspected of me

Nothing proved can be

Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.

“Don’t you think that is neat?”

I bowed and went to write my letter to the queen.