The Queen's Fool

Autumn 1558

In September we moved to Hampton Court in the hopes that the fresh air would clear the queen’s breathing, which was hoarse and sore. The doctors offered her a mixture of oils and drinks but nothing seemed to do her any good. She was reluctant to see them, and often refused to take her medicine. I thought she was remembering how her little brother had been all but poisoned by the physicians who tried one thing and then another, and then another; but then I realized that she could not be troubled with physic, she no longer cared for anything, not even her health.

I rode to Hampton Court with Danny in a pillion saddle behind me for the first time. He was old enough and strong enough to ride astride and to hold tightly on to my waist for the short journey. He was still mute, but the wound had healed up, and he was as peaceful and as smiling as he had always been. I could tell by the tight grip on my waist that he was excited at the journey and at riding properly for the first time. The horse was gentle and steady and we ambled along beside the queen’s litter down the damp dirty lanes between the fields where they were trying to harvest the wet rye crop.

Danny looked around him, never missing a moment of this, his first proper ride. He waved at the people in the field, he waved at the villagers who stood at their doorways to watch as we went by. I thought it spoke volumes for the state of the country that a woman would not wave in reply to a little boy, since he was riding in the queen’s train. The country, like the town, had turned against Mary and would not forgive her.

She rode with the curtains of the litter drawn, in rocking darkness, and when we got to Hampton Court she went straight to her rooms and had the shutters closed so that she was plunged into dusk.

Danny and I rode into the stable yard, and a groom lifted me down from the saddle. I turned and reached up for Danny. For a moment I thought he would cling and insist on staying on horseback.

“Do you want to pat the horse?” I tempted him.

His face lit up at once and he reached out his little arms for me and came tumbling down. I held him to the horse’s neck and let him pat the warm sweet-smelling skin. The horse, a handsome big-boned bay, turned its head to look at him. Danny, very little, and horse, very big, stared quite transfixed by each other, and then Danny gave a deep sigh of pleasure and said: “Good.”

It was so natural and easy that for a moment I did not realize he had spoken; and when I did realize, I hardly dared to take a breath in case I prevented him speaking again.

“He was a good horse, wasn’t he?” I said with affected nonchalance. “Shall we ride him again tomorrow?”

Danny looked from the horse to me. “Yes,” he said decidedly.

I held him close to me and kissed his silky head. “We’ll do that then,” I said gently. “And we’ll let him go to bed now.”

My legs were weak beneath me as we walked from the stable yard, Danny at my side, his little hand reaching up to hold mine. I could feel myself smiling, though tears were running down my cheeks. Danny would speak, Danny would grow up as a normal child. I had saved him from death in Calais, and I had brought him to life in England. I had justified the trust of his mother, and perhaps one day I would be able to tell his father that I had kept his son safe for love of him, and for love of the child. It seemed wonderful to me that his first word should be: “good.” Perhaps it was a foreseeing. Perhaps life would be good for my son Danny.

For a little while the queen seemed better, away from the city. She walked by the river with me in the mornings or in the evenings; she could not tolerate the brightness of midday. But Hampton Court was filled with ghosts. It was on these paths and in these gardens where she had walked with Philip when they were newly married and Cardinal Pole newly come from Rome and the whole of Christendom stretched before them. It was here that she had whispered to him that she was with child, and gone into her first confinement, certain of her happiness, confident of having a son. And it was here that she came out from her confinement, childless and ill, and saw Elizabeth growing in beauty and exulting in her triumph, another step closer to the throne.

“I feel no better here at all,” she said to me one day as Jane Dormer and I came in to say goodnight. She had gone to bed early again, almost doubled-up with pain from the ache in her belly and feverishly hot. “We will go to St. James’s Palace next week. We will spend Christmas there. The king likes St. James’s.”

Jane Dormer and I exchanged one silent glance. We did not think that King Philip would come home to his wife for Christmas when he had not come home when she had lost their child, when he had not come home when she wrote to him that she was so sick that she did not see how to bear to live.

As we had feared it was a depleted court at St. James’s Palace. My Lord Robert had bigger and better rooms not because his star was rising, but simply because there were fewer men at court. I saw him at dinner on some days but generally he was at Hatfield, where the princess kept a merry circle about her and a constant stream of visitors flocked to her door.

They were not always playing games at the old palace either. They were planning how the country would be ruled by the princess when she came to her throne. And if I knew Elizabeth, and my Lord Robert, they would be wondering how soon it might be.

Lord Robert saw me only rarely; but he had not forgotten me. He came looking for me, one day in September. “I have done you a great favor, I think,” he said with his charming smile. “Are you still in love with your husband, Mrs. Carpenter? Or shall we abandon him in Calais?”

“You have news of him?” I asked. I put my hand down and felt Danny’s hand creep into my own.

“I might have,” he said provocatively. “But you have not answered my question. Do you want him home in England, or shall we forget all about him?”

“I cannot jest about this, and especially not before his son,” I said. “I want him home, my lord. Please tell me, do you have news of him?”

“His name is on this list.” He flicked the paper at me. “Soldiers to be ransomed, townspeople who are to be returned to England. The whole of the English Pale outside Calais is to come home. If the queen can find some money in the Treasury we can get them all back where they belong.”

I could feel my heart thudding. “There is no money in the Treasury,” I said. “The country is all but ruined.”

He shrugged. “There is money to keep the fleet waiting to escort the king home. There is money for his adventures abroad. Mention it to her as she dresses for dinner tonight, and I will speak with her after dinner.”

I waited until the queen had dragged herself up from her bed and was seated before her mirror, her maid behind her brushing her hair. Jane Dormer, who was usually such a fierce guardian of the queen’s privacy, had taken the fever herself, and was lying down. It was just the queen and I and some unimportant girl from the Norfolk family.

“Your Grace,” I said simply. “I have had news of my husband.”

She turned her dull gaze on me. “I had forgotten you are married. Is he alive?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is among the English men and women hoping to be ransomed out of Calais.”

She was only slightly more interested. “Who is arranging this?”

“Lord Robert. His men have been held captive too.”

The queen sighed and turned her head away. “Are they asking very much?”

“I don’t know,” I said frankly.

“I will speak with Lord Robert,” she said, as if she were very weary. “I will do what I can for you and your husband, Hannah.”

I knelt before her. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

When I looked up I saw that she was exhausted. “I wish I could bring my husband home so easily,” she said. “But I don’t believe he will ever come home to me again.”

The queen was too ill to transact the business herself, the fever was always worse after dinner and she could barely breathe for coughing; but she scrawled an assent on a bill on the Treasury for money and Lord Robert assured me that the business would go through. We met in the stable yard, he was riding to Hatfield and in a hurry to be off.

“Will he come to you here at court?” he asked casually.

I hesitated, I had not thought of the details of our meeting. “I suppose so,” I said. “I should leave a message for him at his old house, and at my old shop in Fleet Street.”

I said nothing more, but a deeper worry was starting to dawn on me. What if Daniel’s love for me had not grown, like mine, in absence? What if he had decided that I was dead and that he should make a new life elsewhere in Italy or France as he had so often said? Worse than that: what if he thought I had run away with Lord Robert and chosen a life of shame without him? What if he had cast me off?

“Can I get a message to him as he is released?” I asked.

Lord Robert shook his head. “You will have to trust that he will come and find you,” he said cheerfully. “Is he the faithful type of man?”

I thought of his years of steady waiting for me, and how he had watched me come to my love of him, and how he had let me go and return to him. “Yes,” I said shortly.

Lord Robert sprang up into the saddle. “If you see John Dee would you tell him that Princess Elizabeth wants that map of his,” he said.

“Why would she want a map?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

Lord Robert winked at me. He leaned from his horse and spoke very low. “If the queen dies without naming Elizabeth as her heir then we may have a battle on our hands.”

His horse shifted and I stepped back quickly. “Oh no,” I said. “Not again.”

“No fight with the people of England,” he assured me. “They want the Protestant princess. But with the Spanish king. D’you think he’d let such a prize slip away if he thought he could come over and claim it for himself?”

“You are arming and planning for war again?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Why else would I want my soldiers back?” he demanded. “Thank you for your help with that, Hannah.”

I choked on my shock. “My lord!”

He patted the horse’s neck and tightened the rein. “It’s always a coil,” he said simply. “And you are always in it, Hannah. You cannot live with a queen and not be enmeshed in a dozen plots. You live in a snake pit and I tell you frankly, you have not the aptitude for it. Now go to her. I hear she is worse.”

“Not at all,” I said stoutly. “You can tell the princess that the queen has rallied and is better today.”

He nodded, he did not believe me at all. “Well, God bless her anyway,” he said kindly. “For whether she lives or dies she has lost Calais, she has lost her babies, she has lost her husband and lost the throne and lost everything.”

Lord Robert was gone for more than a week and so I could have no news of the release of the English captives. I went to our old print shop and pinned a note on the door. The times were so bad and rents so poor in London that still no one had taken the shop, and many of my father’s books and papers would still be stacked, untouched, in the cellar. I thought that if Daniel did not come to me, and if the queen did not recover, then this might be my refuge once again. I might set up as a bookseller once again, and hope for better times.

I went to Daniel’s old house which was at Newgate, just past St. Paul’s. The neighbors there had not heard of the Carpenter family, they were new in the city. They had come hoping to find work after their farm in Sussex had failed. I looked at their cold pinched faces and wished them well. They promised to tell Daniel, if he should come, that his wife had been seeking him and was waiting for him at court.

“What a handsome boy,” the woman said, looking down at Danny who was holding my hand and standing at my side. “What’s your name?”

“Dan’l,” he said, thumping his chest with his fist.

She smiled at me. “A forward child,” she said. “His father won’t recognize him.”

“I hope he will,” I said a little breathlessly. If he had not received my letter, Daniel would not even know that I had his son safely with me. If he came to me on his release, our whole life as a family could start again. “I certainly hope he will,” I repeated.

When I got back to court there was a scurry around the queen’s apartments. She had collapsed while dressing for dinner and been put to bed. The doctors had been called and were bleeding her. Quietly, I handed Danny to Will Somers who was in the privy chamber, and I went inside the guarded doors to the queen’s bedchamber.

Jane Dormer, white as a sheet and visibly ill herself, was at the head of the bed, holding the queen’s hand as the physicians were picking fat leeches off her legs and dropping them back into their glass jar. The queen’s thin legs were bruised where their vile mouths had been fixed on her, the maid twitched down the sheet. The queen’s eyes were closed in shame at being so exposed, her head turned away from the anxious faces of her physicians. The doctors bowed and got themselves out of the room.

“Go to bed, Jane,” the queen said weakly. “You are as sick as I am.”

“Not until I have seen Your Grace take some soup.”

The queen shook her head and waved her hand to the door. Jane curtseyed and went out, leaving the queen and I alone.

“Is that you, Hannah?” she asked without opening her eyes.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Will you write a letter for me, in Spanish? And send it to the king without showing it to anyone?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

I took some paper and a pen from the table, drew up a little stool and sat beside her bed. She dictated to me in English and I translated it into Spanish as I wrote. The sentences were long and fluent, I knew that she had been waiting a long time to send him this letter. In all the nights when she had wept for him, she had composed this letter to be sent from her deathbed, knowing that he was far away, joyously living his life in the Netherlands, courted by women, fawned on by men, and planning marriage with her sister. She wrote him a letter like the one her mother wrote to her father from her deathbed: a letter of love and constancy to a man who had offered nothing but heartache.

Dearest Husband,

Since it has pleased you to stay far from me in my illness and my sorrow, I write to you these words which I wish I might have said to your beloved face.

You could not have had and never will have a more loving and faithful wife. The sight of you gladdened my heart every day that we were together, my only regret is that we spent so much time apart.

It seems very hard to me that I should face death as I have faced life: alone and without the one I love. I pray that you will never know the loneliness that has walked step by step with me every day of my life. You still have a loving parent to advise you, you have a loving wife who wanted nothing more than to be at your side. No one will ever love you more.

They will not tell me, but I know that I am near to death. This may be my last chance to bid you farewell and to send you my love. May we meet in heaven, though we could not be together on earth, prays

Your wife

Mary R.

The tears were running down my cheeks by the time I had written this to her dictation but she was calm.

“You will get better, Your Grace,” I assured her. “Jane told me that you are often ill with autumn sickness. When the first frosts come, you will be better and we will see in Christmas together.”

“No,” she said simply. There was not a trace of self-pity in her tone. It was as if she were weary of the world. “No. Not this time. I don’t think so.”