The Queen's Fool

Autumn 1555

The queen retreated into a private world of silent misery in the palace that had been the happiest of them all: Greenwich. Parting with the king had been an agony for her. Like a man, he had hidden from her despair in the elaborate formality of leave-taking, he had made sure they were always attended so she could not cry over him in private. He engineered it so that she said good-bye to him like a doll queen: one whose hands and feet and mouth were worked by an indifferent puppetmaster. When he was finally gone it was as if the strings were cut and she dropped to the floor, all disjointed.

Elizabeth had slid away from him with a smile which suggested to some that she had a better idea of when he would come back to England than his own wife, and was reassured by his plans. He had the decency not to hold her close on parting, but when he boarded ship and leaned over the side and waved, he kissed his hand and it was a gesture directed ambiguously: toward the princess, and the heartbroken queen.

The queen kept to her darkened rooms and would be served only by Jane Dormer or me, and the court became a place of ghosts, haunted by her unhappiness. The few Spanish courtiers left behind by their king were desperate to join him, their anxiety to leave made us all feel that the English marriage had been nothing but an interlude in their real lives, and a mistake, at that. When they applied to the queen for permission to join him she flew into a frenzy of jealousy, swearing that they were going because they secretly knew that there was no point waiting for him in England. She screamed at them, and they bowed and fled from her fury. Her ladies scuttled from the room or pressed themselves back against their seats, trying to hear and see nothing, and only Jane and I went to her, begging her to be calm. She was beside herself, while the storm lasted Jane and I had to cling to her arms to stop her beating her head against the paneled walls of her privy chamber. She was a woman deranged by her passion for him, driven by her conviction that she had lost him forever.

When the queen’s rage subsided it was worse, because she slumped to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face, like a little girl after a beating. We could not make her stand up or even open her eyes for hours. She hid her face from us, deep in despair and filled with shame at how low she had been brought by love. Sitting beside her on the cold wooden floor, with nothing to say that could help her in her pain, I saw the skirt of her gown slowly darken as her tears soaked into the velvet, and she never made a sound.

She did not speak for a night and a day, and the day after she was stony-faced like a statue of despair. When she emerged to sit on her throne in the empty room it was to find that the Spaniards were openly rebelling against being forced to stay, and all the English men and women of the court were angry too. Life in the queen’s service was not what it had been when the king had arrived and taken her with love; not what a court should be. Instead of literature and music, sport and dancing, it was like a nunnery ruled by a mortally sick abbess. No one spoke above a whisper, no feasts ever took place, there were no entertainments or gaiety, and the queen sat on her throne with a face of blank misery and retired to her rooms to be on her own whenever she could. Life at court had become long days of hopeless waiting for the king to return. We all knew that he never would.

With no man to torment, and no chance of making the queen more miserable than she was already, Princess Elizabeth took the opportunity to leave the court at Greenwich and go to her palace at Hatfield. The queen let her go, without a word of affection. Any love she had felt for Elizabeth the child had been worn out by the disloyalty of Elizabeth the young woman. Elizabeth’s flirtation with the king while Mary had been enduring the last weeks of a failed pregnancy had been the final act of willful unkindness that would ever hurt her sister. In her heart Mary saw this as the final proof that Elizabeth was the daughter of a whore and a lute player. What other girl would treat her sister as Elizabeth had done? In her heart she denied kinship with Elizabeth, she denied her as her sister, she denied her as her heir. She took back the love that she had constantly offered the younger woman, and she excluded her from her heart. She was glad to let her go and would not have cared if she had never seen her again.

I went down to the great gate to bid the princess farewell. She was wearing her solemn black-and-white gown, the livery of the Protestant princess, since her way took her through London and the London citizens would turn out for her and cheer. She gave me a roguish wink as she put her boot in a stable lad’s cupped hands and let him throw her up into the saddle.

“I wager you’d rather come with me,” she said wickedly. “I don’t see you having a very merry Christmas here, Hannah.”

“I will serve my mistress in good times and bad,” I said steadily.

“You’re sure your young man will wait for you?” she teased me.

I shrugged my shoulders. “He says he will.” I was not going to tell Elizabeth that watching Mary destroyed by her love for her husband was not a great incentive for me to marry. “I am promised to him when I can leave the queen.”

“Well, you can come to me, at any time, if you wish,” she said.

“Thank you, Princess,” I said and was surprised by my pleasure in her invitation, but nobody could resist Elizabeth’s charm. Even in the shadow of a darkened court Elizabeth was a sparkle of sunshine, her smile utterly undimmed by her sister’s loss.

“Don’t leave it too late,” she warned me with mock seriousness.

I went closer to her horse’s neck so that I could look up at her. “Too late?”

“When I am queen they will all be rushing to serve me, you want to be at the head of that queue,” she said frankly.

“It could be years yet,” I rejoined.

She shook her head, she was supremely confident on this crisp autumn morning. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “The queen is not a strong woman and she is not a happy woman. D’you think King Philip is going to come running home to her at the first opportunity, and make a son and heir on her? No. And in his absence I think my poor sister will just fade away from grief. And when that happens they will find me, studying my Bible, and I will say-” She broke off for a moment. “What did my sister plan to say when they told her she was queen?”

I hesitated. I could remember very vividly her words in those optimistic days when Mary had promised she would be the virgin queen and restore the England of her mother to its true faith and happiness. “She was going to say: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes,’ but in the end they told her when we were on the run and she had to fight on her own for her throne, rather than be granted it.”

“I say, that’s good,” Elizabeth said with appreciation. “‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.’ That’s excellent. I’ll say that. You’ll want to be with me when that happens, won’t you?”

I glanced around to make sure we were not overheard but Elizabeth knew there was no one in earshot. In all the time I had known her she had never put herself at risk – it was always her friends who ended up in the Tower.

The small cavalcade was ready to go. Elizabeth looked down at me, her smiling face bright under her black velvet hat. “So you’d better come to me soon,” she reminded me.

“If I can come, I will. God keep you, Princess.”

She leaned down and patted my hand as a gesture of farewell. “I shall wait,” she said, her eyes dancing. “I shall survive.”

King Philip wrote frequently but his letters were no reply to Mary’s tender promises of love and demands that he should come back to her. They were brisk letters of business and orders to his wife as to what she should do in her kingdom. He did not respond to her pleading with him to come home, not even to tell her, at the very least, when he would come home, nor would he allow her to join him. At first he wrote warmly, bidding her to find things with which to distract herself, to look forward to the days when he would be with her again; but then, as every day he received another letter begging him to come back, warning him that she was ill from unhappiness, sick from the loss of him, he became more businesslike. His letters were merely instructions as to how the council should decide one matter or another, and the queen was forced to go to council meetings with his letter in her hands and lay before them the orders of a man who was king only in name, and force them through on her own authority. They did not welcome her as she came red-eyed into the chamber, and they were openly doubtful that a prince of Spain, fighting his own wars, had English interests at heart. Cardinal Pole was her only friend and companion; but he had been exiled from England so long, and was so suspicious of so many Englishmen, that Mary came to feel like an exiled queen among enemies instead of the commander of English hearts as she once had been.

In October I was looking for Jane Dormer before dinner, and failing everywhere else I put my head around the door to the queen’s chapel in case the lady in waiting had taken a few moments for prayer. To my surprise I saw Will Somers, kneeling before a statue of Our Lady, lighting a candle at her feet, his head bowed, his fool’s peaked hat crumpled in his hand, his fist clenched over the little bell to keep it silent.

I had never thought of Will as a devout man. I stepped back and waited for him at the doorway. I watched him as he bowed his head low, and then crossed himself. With a heavy sigh, he got to his feet and came down the aisle a little stooped, and looking older than his thirty-five years.

“Will?” I said, coming to meet him.

“Child.” His habitual sweet smile came readily to his lips but his eyes were still dark.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Ah, I wasn’t praying for me,” he said shortly.

“Then who?”

He glanced around the empty chapel and then drew me into a pew. “D’you have any influence with Her Grace, d’you think, Hannah?”

I thought for a moment, then honestly, regretfully, I shook my head. “She listens only to Cardinal Pole and to the king,” I said. “And before everyone, to her own conscience.”

“If you spoke from your gift, would she listen to you?”

“She might,” I said cautiously. “But I cannot command it to serve me, Will, you know that.”

“I thought you might pretend,” he said bluntly.

I recoiled. “It’s a holy gift! It would be blasphemy to pretend!”

“Child, this month there are three men of God in prison charged with heresy, and if I am not mistaken they will be taken out and burned to death: poor Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, and Bishop Ridley.”

I waited.

“The queen cannot burn good men who are ordained bishops of her father’s church,” the fool said flatly. “This must not happen.”

He looked at me and he put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me. “Tell her that you have had a gift of Sight and that they must be sent into exile,” he urged me. “Hannah, if these men die then the queen will make an enemy of every man of compassion. These are good men, honorable men, her father’s own appointments. They have not changed their faith, the world has changed around them. They must not die on the queen’s order, she will be shamed forever if she does this. History will remember nothing but that she was the queen who burned bishops.”

I hesitated. “I dare not, Will.”

“If you will do it, I will be there,” he promised me. “I’ll help you. We’ll get through it somehow.”

“You told me yourself never to meddle,” I whispered urgently. “You told me yourself never to try to change the mind of the king. Your master beheaded two wives, never mind bishops, and you didn’t stop him.”

“And he’ll be remembered as a wife-killer,” Will predicted. “And everything else about him that was so brave and loyal and true will be forgot. They will forget that he brought peace and prosperity to the country, that he made an England that we could all love. All they will remember of him will be that he had six wives and beheaded two of them.

“And all they will remember of this queen is that she brought the country floods and famine and fire. She will be remembered as England’s curse when she was to have been our virgin queen, England’s savior.”

“She won’t listen to me…”

“She must listen,” he insisted. “Or she will be despised and forgotten and they will remember – God knows who! Elizabeth! Mary Stuart! – some wanton girl instead of this true-hearted queen.”

“She has done nothing but follow her conscience,” I defended her.

“She must follow her tender heart,” he said. “Her conscience is not a good advisor these days. She must follow her tender heart instead. And you must do your duty to your love for her, and tell her that.”

I rose up from the pew, I found my knees were shaking. “I am afraid, Will,” I said in a small voice. “I am too afraid. You saw what she was like when I spoke out before… I cannot have her accusing me. I cannot have anyone asking where I came from, who my family is…”

He fell silent. “Jane Dormer will not speak with her,” he said. “I already tried her. The queen has no other friend but you.”

I paused, I could feel his will and my conscience pressing against my head, forcing me to do the right thing despite my fears. “All right. I’ll speak with her,” I burst out. “But I’ll do it alone. I’ll do the best I can.”

He stopped me with a hand on mine, and pulled my hand out to see it. I was trembling, my fingers shook. “Child, are you so afraid?”

I looked at him for a moment and I saw that we were both afraid. The queen had made a country where every man and woman was afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, which would lead to a stake in the marketplace and a pile of green kindling that would burn smokily and slow.

“Yes,” I said honestly, pulling my hand from him to brush a smut off my cheek. “I have spent my life running from this fear and now it seems that I have to walk toward it.”

I waited till the queen was going to bed that evening and was kneeling before her prie-dieu in the corner of her bedroom. I knelt beside her but I did not pray. I was going over in my mind what I could say to persuade her not to do this dreadful thing. For a full hour she was on her knees and when I peeped through my half-closed eyelids I could see that her face was turned up to the statue of the crucified Christ and the tears were pouring down her cheeks.

Finally she rose from her knees and went to her chair at the fireside. I drew the poker from the embers where it had been heating, and thrust it into the mug of ale to warm it for her. When I put it in her hands her fingers were icy cold.

“Your Grace, I have something to ask you,” I said very quietly.

She looked at me as if she hardly saw me. “What is it, Hannah?”

“I have never asked you for anything in the years I have been with you,” I reminded her.

She frowned slightly. “No, you haven’t. What is it you want now?”

“Your Grace, I have heard that your prisons are holding three good men on charges of heresy. Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley and Archbishop Cranmer.”

She turned her face to the small fire in the hearth so I could not see her expression, but her voice was flat.

“Yes. It is true that those men are charged.”

“I want to ask you to show mercy,” I said simply. “It is an awful thing to put a good man to death. And everyone says that these are good men. Just mistaken men… just disagreeing with the church’s teaching. But they were good bishops to your brother, Your Grace, and they are ordained bishops in the Church of England.”

She said nothing for a long time. I did not know whether to press the case or to leave it. The silence started to frighten me a little. I sat back on my heels and waited for her to speak and I could hear my own breathing coming too quickly, too lightly for an innocent person. I could feel my own danger coming toward me, like a dog on a scent, and the scent it was following was the sweat of my fear which was prickling me in the armpits and growing cold and damp down my spine.

When she turned to me, she was not like the Mary I loved at all. Her face was like a mask of snow. “They are not good men, for they deny the word of God and the rule of God, and they win others to their sin,” she hissed at me. “They can repent their sins and be forgiven, or they can die. It is to them you should be speaking, Hannah, not me. This is the law: not a human law, not any law, not my law, but the law of the church. If they do not want to be punished by the church then they should not sin. I do not set myself up as judge here, it is the church that decides and they must obey it, as I do.”

She paused for a moment, but I could say nothing against her conviction.

“It is men like them that have brought down the wrath of God on England,” she said. “Not a good harvest, not a wealthy year since my father turned against the church and not a healthy child born into the cradle of England since he put my mother aside.”

I could see her hands trembling and her voice shook with her rising passion. “Do you not see it?” she asked. “You of all people? Do you not see that he put my mother aside and never again got another healthy legitimate child?”

“Princess Elizabeth?” I breathed.

The queen laughed a loud harsh laugh. “She’s not his,” she said derisively. “Look at her. She is a Smeaton, every inch of her. Her mother tried to pass off her bastard as the king’s own child, but now she is grown and behaves like the child of a lute player and a whore, everyone can see her parentage. God gave my father only one healthy child: me; and then my poor father was turned against me and my mother. Since that day there has not been a moment’s good fortune for this country. They persuaded him to destroy the word of God, the abbeys and the nunneries, and then my brother took England deeper into sin. See the price we have paid? Hunger in the country and sickness in the towns.

“God must be appeased. Only when this sin is rooted out of the country will I be able to conceive a child and be able to give birth. No holy prince could come to a country such as this. The wrong that my father started, which my brother continued, has to be reversed. It all has to be turned back.”

She broke off, panting. I said nothing, I was stunned by her passion.

“You know, sometimes I don’t think I have the strength to do it,” she went on. “But God gives me the strength. He gives me the resolution to order these dreadful judgments, to say that they shall continue. God gives me the strength to do His work, to send sinners to the fires so that the land may be cleansed. And then you – who I have trusted! – you come here to me when I am praying, to tempt me to error, into weakness, asking me to deny God and my holy work for Him.”

“Your Grace…” My voice caught in my throat. She rose to her feet and I jumped up. I had cramp in my right leg from kneeling for so long and it gave way beneath me so I sprawled down. I was half on the floor looking up at her and she looked at me as if God himself had struck me down.

“Hannah, my child, you are halfway to mortal sin yourself to ask this of me. Don’t take one step further, or I shall send for the priests to wrestle with your soul.”

I could smell the smoke, I tried to tell myself it was from the fire in the grate, but I knew it was the smoke of my mother burning, the smoke of the other English men and women burning in the market places up and down the countryside, and soon they would take out Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley and the crowd would watch them as Dr. Ridley would tell his friend to be of good heart as they would light such a candle in England that would never be put out. I scrabbled at the queen’s feet like a cripple and she pulled her skirts away from me as if she could not bear me to touch her, and she went from the room without another word, leaving me on the floor, smelling smoke and crying for sheer terror.