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‘There is nothing about the countess and her abilities that does not befit her position,’ he says smoothly. ‘And her position is very grand indeed. You are the greatest nobleman in England, Talbot, we all know that. And you do right to remind us, should we ever make the mistake of forgetting it. And all of us at court appreciate Bess’s good sense, she has been a favourite amongst us all for many years. I have watched her marry upwards and upwards with great pleasure. We are counting on her to make Tutbury Castle a pleasant home for the Queen of Scots. The countess is the only hostess we could consider. No-one else could house the Queen of Scots. Any other house would be too mean. No-one but Bess would know how to do it. No-one but Bess could triumph.’
This flattery from Cecil should content me; but we seem to be back to Bess again, and Cecil should remember that before I married her she was a woman who had come up from nothing.
1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: Mary (#ulink_b38fc42f-54c0-5cf3-9cd2-ce0524022ff7)
It is to be tonight. I am going to escape from Bolton Castle, their so-called, soi-disant, ‘impregnable’ Yorkshire castle, this very night. Part of me thinks: I dare not do this; but I am more terrified of being trapped in this country and unable to go either forward or back. Elizabeth is like a fat ginger cat on a cushion, she is content to sit and dream. But I must reclaim my throne; and in every day of my exile, the situation grows worse for me. I have castles holding out for me in Scotland and I must get relief to them at once. I have men ready to march under my standard, I cannot make them wait. I cannot let my supporters die for lack of my courage. I have Bothwell’s promise that he will escape from Denmark, and return to command my armies. I have written to the King of Denmark, demanding Bothwell’s freedom. He is my husband, the consort of a queen, how dare they hold him on the word of a merchant’s daughter who complains that he promised marriage? It is nonsense, and the complaints of such a woman are of no importance. I have a French army mustering to support me, and promises of Spanish gold to pay them. Most of all, I have a son, a precious heir, mon bébé, mon chéri, my only love; and he is in the hands of my enemies. I cannot leave him in their care: he is only two years old! I have to act. I have to rescue him. The thought of him without proper care, not knowing where I am, not understanding that I was forced to leave him, burns me like an ulcer in my heart. I have to get back to him.
Elizabeth may dawdle; but I cannot. On the last day of her nonsensical inquiry I received a message from one of the Northern lords, Lord Westmorland, who promises me his help. He says he can get me out of Bolton Castle, he can get me to the coast. He has a train of horses waiting in Northallerton and a ship waiting off Whitby. He tells me that when I say the word he can get me to France – and as soon as I am safe at home, in the country of my late husband’s family, where I was raised to be queen, then my fortunes will change in an instant.
I don’t delay, as Elizabeth would delay. I don’t drag my feet and puzzle away and put myself to bed, pretending illness as she does whenever she is afraid. I see a chance when it comes to me and I take it like a woman of courage. ‘Yes,’ I say to my rescuer. ‘Oui,’ I say to the gods of fortune, to life itself.
And when he says to me: ‘When?’, I say, ‘Tonight.’
I don’t fear, I am frightened of nothing. I escaped from my own palace at Holyrood when I was held by murderers, I escaped from Linlithgow Castle. They will see that they can take me but they cannot hold me. Bothwell himself said that to me once, he said: ‘A man can take you; but you cling to your belief that he can never own you.’ And I replied: ‘I am always queen. No man can command me.’
The walls of Bolton Castle are rough-hewn grey stone, a place built to resist cannon; but I have a rope around my waist and thick gloves to protect my hands and stout boots so that I can kick myself away. The window is narrow, little more than a slit in the stone, but I am slim and lithe, and I can wriggle out and sit with my back to the very edge of the precipice, looking down. The porter takes the rope and hands it to Agnes Livingstone and watches her as she ties it around my waist. He makes a gesture to tell her to check that it is tight. He cannot touch me, my body is sacred, so she has to do everything under his instruction. I am watching his face. He is not an adherent of mine, but he has been paid well, and he looks determined to do his part in this. I think I can trust him. I give him a little smile and he sees my lip tremble with fear for he says, in his rough northern accent, ‘Dinnae fret, pet.’ And I smile as if I understand him and watch him wind the rope around his waist. He braces himself and I wriggle to the very brink and look down.
Dear God, I cannot see the ground. Below me is darkness and the howl of air. I cling to the post of the window as if I cannot let it go. Agnes is white with fear, the porter’s face steady. If I am going to go, I have to go now. I release the comfort of the stone arch of the window, I let myself stretch out on to the rope. I step out into air. I feel the rope go taut and terrifyingly thin, and I start to walk backwards, into the darkness, into nothingness, my feet pushing against the great stones of the walls, my skirt filling and flapping in the wind.
At first, I feel nothing but terror; but my confidence grows as I take step after step and feel the porter letting out the rope. I look up and see how far I have come down, though I don’t dare to look below. I think I am going to make it. I can feel the joy at being free growing inside me until my very feet tremble against the wall. I feel sheer joy at the breath of the wind on my face, and even joy at the vast space beneath me as I go down; joy at being outside the castle when they think I am captive, cooped up in my stuffy rooms, joy at being in charge of my own life again, even though I am dangling at the end of a rope like a hooked trout, joy at being me – a woman in charge of her own life – once more.
The ground comes up underneath me in a dark hidden rush and I stagger to my feet, untie the rope and give it three hard tugs and they pull it back up. Beside me is my page, and Mary Seton, my lifelong companion. My maid-in-waiting will come down next; my second lady-in-waiting, Agnes Livingstone, after her.
The sentries at the main gate are careless, I can see them against the pale road, but they cannot see us against the dark of the castle walls. In a moment there is to be a diversion – a barn is to be fired, and when they hurry to put out the fire, we will run down to the gate where horses will come galloping up the road, each rider leading a spare, the fastest for me, and we will be up and away, before they have even realised we are gone.
I stand quite still, not fidgeting. I am excited and I feel strong and filled with the desire to run. I feel as if I could sprint to Northallerton, even to the sea at Whitby. I can feel my power flowing through me, my strong young desire for life, speeding faster for fear and excitement. It beats in my heart and it tingles in my fingers. Dear God, I have to be free. I am a woman who has to be free. I would rather die than not be free. It is true: I would rather die than not be free.
I can hear the soft scuffle as Ruth, my maid, climbs out of the window and then the rustle of her skirts as the porter starts to lower her. I can see the dark outline of her quietly coming down the castle wall, then suddenly the rope jerks and she gives a little whimper of fear.
‘Sshh! Sssh!’ I hiss up at her, but she is sixty feet above me, she cannot hear. Mary’s cold hand slips into mine. Ruth isn’t moving, the porter is not letting her down, something has gone terribly wrong, then she falls like a bag of dusters, the rope snaking down from above her as he drops it, and we hear her terrified scream.
The thud when she hits the ground is an awful sound. She has broken her back, for sure. I run to her side at once, and she is moaning in pain, her hand clamped over her mouth, trying, even at this moment, not to betray me.
‘Your Grace!’ Mary Seton is tugging at my arm. ‘Run! They are coming.’
I hesitate for a moment, Ruth’s pale face is twisted with agony, now she has her fist thrust in her mouth, trying not to cry out. I look towards the main gate. The sentries, having heard her scream, are turned questingly towards the castle, a man runs forward, shouts to another, someone brings a torch from the sconce at the gateway. They are like hounds spreading out to scent the quarry.
I pull my hood up over my head to hide my face, and start to duck backwards into the shadows. Perhaps we can get around the castle and out of a back gate. Perhaps there is a sally-port or somewhere we can hide. Then there is a shout from inside the castle, they have raised the alarm in my chambers. At once the night is ablaze with the bobbing flames of torches and ‘Hi! Hi! Hi!’ they bellow like hunters, like beaters driving the game before them.
I turn to one side and then the other, my heart thudding, ready to run. But now they have seen us silhouetted by their torches against the dark walls of the castle, and there is a great bellow of ‘View halloa! Here she is! Cut her off! Run round! Here she is! Bring her to bay!’
I can feel my courage drain from me as if I am bleeding to death, and I am icy. The taste of defeat is like cold iron in my mouth, like the bit for an unbroken filly. I could spit the bitter taste. I want to run and I want to throw myself face down on the ground and weep for my freedom. But this is not the way of a queen. I have to find the courage to push back my hood and stand straight and tall as the men come running up and thrust their torches in my face so they can see what they have caught. I have to stand still and proud, I have to be seen to be a queen, even dressed like a serving woman in a black travelling cape. I have to enact being a queen so they do not treat me as a serving woman. There is nothing more important now, at this moment of my humiliation, than preserving the power of majesty. I am a queen. No mortal man may touch me. I have to make the magic of majesty all alone, in the darkness.
‘Je suis la reine,’ I say, but my voice is too quiet. I can hear it tremble with my distress. I stand taller and lift up my chin, I speak louder. ‘I am the Queen of Scotland.’
Thank God they don’t grab me, nor put so much as one hand on me. I think I would die of shame if a common man were to abuse me again. The thought of Bothwell’s hand on my breast, his mouth on my neck, makes me burn even now.
‘I warn you! You may not touch me!’
They form a circle around me with their bowed-down torches, as if I am a witch that can be held only by a ring of fire. Someone says that Lord Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is coming. He was at his dinner with Sir Francis Knollys and Lord Scrope, and they have told him that the Scots queen was running away like a thief in the night, but she is caught now.
And so that’s how he first sees me, when he comes at a stumbling run, his tired face scowling with worry. He sees me standing alone, in a black cape with my hood pushed back from my face so that everyone can recognise me and know that they may not put a hand on me. A white-faced anointed queen of the blood. A queen in every way, showing the power of defiance, a queen in the authority of her stance, a queen in everything but the ownership of her thrones.
I am a queen at bay.
1568, Winter, Bolton Castle: George (#ulink_d710b937-7c2f-5bf9-ba05-d95e84ef6bef)
They have her ringed with torches, like a witch held in by fire, ready for burning. As I run up, my breath is coming hard and my chest is tight, my heart is pounding from the sudden alarm, I sense the stillness around her as if they are all frozen by an enchantment. As if she were a witch indeed and the mere sight of her has turned them all to stone. Her hand holds back her hood from her face and I can see her dark hair, cropped jagged and short as an urchin’s, the white oval of her face and her dark luminous eyes. She looks at me, unsmiling, and I cannot look away. I should bow, but I cannot bow. I should introduce myself, at this, our first meeting; but I am lost for words. Someone should be here to present me, I should have a herald to announce my titles. But I feel as if I am naked before her: it is just her, and just me, facing each other like enemies across the flames.
I stare at her and take in every aspect of her. I just stare and stare like a schoolboy. I want to speak to her, to introduce myself as her new host and her guardian. I want to seem an urbane man of the world to this cosmopolitan princess. But I gag on words, I can find neither French nor English. I should reproach her for this wanton attempt at escape; but I am struck dumb, as if I am powerless, as if I were horrified by her.
The blazing torches give her a crimson halo, as if she were a burning saint, a fiery saint of red and gold; but the sulphurous smell of the smoke is the very stink of hell. She looks like a being from unearthly regions, neither woman nor boy, a gorgon in her cold forbidding beauty, a dangerous angel. The sight of her, ringed with fire, strange and silent, fills me with wordless terror as if she were some kind of portent, a blazing comet, foretelling my death or disaster. I am most afraid, though I don’t know why, and I stand before her and I can say nothing, like an unwilling disciple terrified into adoration; though I don’t know why.
1568–9, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess (#ulink_741f59e8-9208-5470-8662-799bb557c86e)
Mary, this most troublesome queen, delays as long as she can. Someone has told her that Tutbury Castle is no fit place for a queen of the blood and now Her Grace refuses to come here, and demands to be sent to her good cousin’s court, where she knows well enough that they are celebrating the twelve days of Christmas with feasts and dancing and music, and at the heart of it all will be Queen Elizabeth, with a light heart and light feet, darting around and laughing because the Scots, the greatest threat to the peace of her country, are all falling out amongst themselves, and the greatest rival to her power, the other Queen of England, their queen, is a prisoner without plans for release. Or honoured guest, as I believe I am to call her, as I set about making Tutbury something more than a rapidly improvised dungeon.
I must say that Mary Queen of Scots is not the only one who would rather be at Hampton Court this Christmas season, and can find little joy in the prospect of a long cold winter at Tutbury. I hear from my friends who send me all the gossip that there is a new suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, the Austrian archduke who would ally us with Spain and the Hapsburgs, and Elizabeth is beside herself with the sudden surging of lust for her last chance to be a wife and a mother. I know how the court will be: my friend Robert Dudley will be smiling but guarded – the last thing he wants at court is a rival to his constant courtship of the queen. Elizabeth will be in a fever of vanity, every day will bring new pretty things to her rooms, and her women will rejoice in the spoil of her cast-offs. Cecil will manage everything to the outcome of his choosing, whatever that may be. And I should be there, watching and gossiping with everyone else.
My son Henry, at service in Robert Dudley’s household, writes me that Dudley will never allow a marriage which would displace him from Elizabeth’s side, and that he will oppose Cecil as soon as that old fox shows his hand. But I am for the marriage – any marriage. Pray God that she will have him. She has left it as late as any woman dare, she is thirty-five, dangerously old to give birth to a first child; but she will have to grit her teeth and do it. We have to have a son from her, we have to have an heir to the throne of England. We have to see where we are going.
England is a business, an estate like any other. We have to be able to plan ahead. We have to know who will inherit and what he will get, we have to foresee what he will do with his inheritance. We have to see our next master and know what his plans will be. We have to know whether he will be Lutheran or Papist. Those of us living in rebuilt abbeys and dining off church silver are especially anxious to know this. Please God this time she settles on this suitor, marries him, and gives us a new steady Protestant master for the trade of England.
Elizabeth is a hard mistress to serve, I think, as I command the carpenters to mend the gaps in the floorboards. This would have been our first Christmas at court, for me and my lord the earl. Our first Christmas as newlyweds, the first Christmas I would have been a countess at court, where I should have sparkled like a snowflake and taken great joy in settling old scores from my newly raised position. But instead, the queen allowed my husband the earl only a couple of days with me before dispatching him to Bolton Castle to fetch the Scots Queen while I set to work on this hovel.
The more I repair this half-ruined wreck of a house the more ashamed of it I am, though God knows it is no fault of mine. No house of mine would ever fall into disrepair like this. All of my properties – most of which came to me through the good management of my second husband, William Cavendish – were renovated and rebuilt as soon as we acquired them. We never bought anything without improving it. Cavendish prided himself on parcelling together plots of land and swapping one farm for another till he made a handsome estate, which I would then run at a profit. He was a careful man, a great businessman, an older man, over forty when he married me, his bride of nineteen.
He taught me how to keep an accounts book for our household, and make it up every week, as faithfully as reading a sermon on Sunday. When I was little more than a girl, I used to bring my household book to him like a child with her schoolwork, and he would go through it with me on a Sunday evening, as if we were saying our prayers together, like a pious father and daughter, our heads side by side over the book, our voices murmuring the numbers.
After the first month or so, when he saw that I had such an aptitude and such a love for the figures themselves, as well as the wealth they represented, he let me see the accounts book for the small manor he had just bought, and said that I could keep it too, to see if I would manage it well. I did so. Then, as he bought more properties, I took care of them. I learned the wages of field labourers as well as housemaids, I learned how much we should pay for cartering as well as for washing the windows. I started to run his farms as I ran our house and I kept the books for them all the same.
He taught me that it means nothing to own land or money as the old lords own their estates and waste them from one generation to another. Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have. He taught me to love the order of a well-kept accounts book and how the bottom of the page at the end of each week should show the balance between money coming in and money going out; so that you know, and know to a penny, whether you are ahead in the world or behind.
Cavendish told me that this is not how the great lords do it. Many of their stewards do not even keep the books like this, the new way, with receipts and expenses put side by side for comparison, and this is why, at the end of the day, we will do better than them. He told me that they treat their houses and their lands and their tenants and their fortunes as if they were all a great mass that cannot be calculated. So – since this is what they believe – they never try to calculate their wealth. They inherit and pass it on wholesale, without inventory. They lose and gain without keeping account. They have no idea whether a townhouse should rent out at a greater profit than a wheatfield. When they are taxed they guess at what they are worth, when they borrow money they cannot calculate their fortune. When they are paid a huge sum in war, or inherit treasure on marriage, they tumble it into their strongroom and never even list it. Whereas we, the new men and women who have risen so recently, we look at every field, at every trade, at every ship, and we see that it pays for itself.
Slowly, as Cavendish and I added property and houses to our fortune, each one chiselled from the dying body of the old church, I created new books, a new one for each new estate, each one showing a good balance of profit on rents, or sale of wool, or hay or corn or wheat or iron ore, or whatever goods each land could bring to us. Slowly I learned the prices of trees standing in a forest and the value of timber when they were felled. Slowly I learned to estimate the price of wool on a sheep’s back or the profits to be made from a flock of geese at Christmas. My husband Cavendish hired good reliable men who had served the monks in the abbeys and the nuns in the nunneries and knew how lands should yield good rents and revenue, and I set myself to learn from them. Soon it was my task to read the accounts brought to me by the stewards of our growing estates, I was overseer as well as house manager. Soon it was I who knew to the last penny that our properties were well-run and our wealth was increasing.
None of this happened overnight, of course. We were married ten years, we had our children – eight of them, bless them all, and bless the good husband who gave them to me, and the fortune to endow them. He rose high in the favour of the court. He served first Thomas Cromwell and then directly the king. He served in the Court of Augmentations, that prime position, and travelled the country valuing the church properties and turning them over to the Crown, as one after another proved to be unfit for the work of the Lord and better closed down.
And if it happened that the houses that were the richest, and the most profitable, were the first to attract the attention of godly reform, then it was not for us to question the mysterious ways of Providence. If they had been good men they would have been good stewards of the wealth of the Lord and not squandered the church’s fortune: encouraging the poor in idleness, and building churches and hospitals of excessive beauty. Better for God that poor stewards be replaced by those who knew the value of money and were ready to set it to work.
Of course my husband bought on his own account. God knows, everyone in England was buying land on his own account, and at the most desperate prices. It was like the herring fleet coming in, all at once. We were like fishwives on the harbour wall, revelling in a glut. We were all mad to get our hands on our share of the old church lands. It was a banquet of land-grabbing. No-one questioned William as he valued for the Crown and then bought and sold for himself. It was expected by everyone that he should supplement his fees by trading on his own account, and besides, he took no more than was customary.
How did he do it? He valued land low in his own favour, sometimes for the benefit of others. Sometimes he received gifts, and sometimes, secret bribes. Of course! Why not? He was doing the king’s work and furthering the reform of the church. He was doing God’s work in expelling corrupt priests. Why should he not be richly rewarded? We were replacing a rotten old church with one in the true image of His son. It was glorious work. Was my husband not on God’s own work, to destroy the old bad ways of the Papist church? Was he not absolutely right, directed by God Himself, to take wealth away from the corrupt Papal church and put it into our hands, who would use it so much better? Is that not the very meaning of the sacred parable of the talents?
And all the while I was his apprentice, as well as his wife. I came to him a girl with a burning ambition to own my own property and to be secure in the world. Never again would I be a poor relation in the house of a richer cousin. He taught me how I could do it. God bless him.
Then I told him that the Chatsworth estate was for sale, near to my old home of Hardwick in Derbyshire, that I knew it well and it was good land, that the original owner was my cousin but he had sold it to spite his family, that the new owner, frightened by claims against the freehold, was desperate for a sale, that we could make a sharp profit if we were not too particular at taking advantage of a fool in trouble. William saw, as I did, the profit that could be made from it, and he bought it for me at a knockdown price, and swore it would be the greatest house in the North of England, and it would be our new home.
When the new queen, Mary Tudor, came to the throne – and who would have thought she could defeat the good Protestant claimant, my friend Jane Grey? – they accused my poor Cavendish of defrauding his office, of taking bribes, and of stealing land from the Holy Roman Catholic church – which now rose again from the dead like Jesus Himself. Shameful accusations and frightening times: our friends held in the Tower for treason, dearest little Jane Grey facing death for claiming the throne, the reformation of religion utterly reversed, the world turned upside down again, the cardinals returned and the Inquisition coming. But the one thing that I was sure of, the one thing that comforted me through all the worry, was the knowledge that he would know to a penny how much he had stolen. They might say that his books at the palace did not account for the huge fortune he had made, but I knew that he would know; somewhere there would be accounts that would show it all, good and clear, theft and profit. When he died, my poor husband Cavendish, still under suspicion of theft, corruption, and dishonest accounting, I knew that he would make his accounts in heaven, and St Peter (who I supposed would be restored also) would find them exact, to the last penny.
In his absence, it fell to me, his widow, all alone in the world, to defend my inheritance on earth. He had left me everything in my own name, God bless him, for he knew I would keep it safe. Despite every tradition, custom and practice which makes widows paupers and men the only heirs, he put every penny in my name, not even in trust, not to a kinsman. He did not favour a man, any man, over me, his wife. He gave it wholly to me. Think of that! He gave everything to me.
And I swore that I would not betray my dearest Cavendish. I swore, with my hand on his coffin, that I would keep the sacks of gold under the marriage bed, the lands that I had inherited from him, the church candles on my tables and the pictures on my walls, and that I would show my duty to him, as his good widow, by fighting to prove their title as my own. He left his fortune to me; I owed it to him to see that his wishes were honoured. I would make sure that I kept everything. I made it my sacred duty to keep everything.
And then, thank God the claims against me were cut short by another royal death. God Himself preserved my Protestant fortune. Queen Mary the Papist would have clawed back all the church lands if she could have done. She would have had monasteries rebuilt and abbeys re-dedicated, and certainly everything taken back from good officers who were only doing their duty – but God quickly took her to Himself and she died before she could dispossess us all, and the new ruler was our Elizabeth.
Our Elizabeth, the Protestant princess who knows the value of good property as well as the rest of us, who loves, as we do, peace, the land, and a reliable currency. She understands well enough the price of our loyalty to her. We will all be good Protestants and loyal subjects if she will leave us with our stolen Papist wealth, and make sure that no Papist ever gets the throne and threatens our fortunes again.
I had placed myself close to her from the earliest years, both by calculation and preference. I was raised in a Protestant household, in service to the great Lady Frances Grey, I was companion to Lady Jane Grey, and I served a God who recognises hard work. I was at Hatfield when my friend Robert Dudley himself brought the news that the old queen was dead and Elizabeth was the heir. I was at her coronation as a beautiful and wealthy widow (God bless my husband Cavendish for that) and my next husband, Sir William St Loe, was her chief butler of England. I caught his eye on the night of her coronation dinner and knew that he looked at me and saw a pretty woman of thirty, with great lands that marched temptingly beside his own. Dearest Cavendish had left me so prosperous that perhaps I could have made a deal for an even better husband. Sir John Thynne of Longleat was mentioned as one, and there were others. But to tell truth, William St Loe was a handsome man and I liked him for himself. Also, although Sir John has Longleat, which is a house any woman could covet, William St Loe’s lands were in my home country of Derbyshire and that made my heart beat faster.
With him as my husband, and a good Protestant queen on the throne, I knew there would be no questioning the history of a pair of gold candlesticks that once stood on an altar and now my best table. No-one would worry about some three hundred handsome silver forks, a couple of dozen golden ewers, some exquisite Venetian glass, and chests of gold coins which suddenly appeared in the accounts of my household goods. Surely, to the Protestant God whom we all worship and adore, no-one would trouble a loyal widow who has done nothing but love things of beauty that have come her way? There would be no great anxiety about lands that had once belonged to the church and now belong to me. And nor should there be. ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn,’ my Cavendish used to say to me and sometimes, only half in jest, ‘the Lord helps them who help themselves.’
But neither of us – I swear to Our Lady – neither of us, at our most acquisitive, would have taken Tutbury Castle even as a gift. It will cost more to put right than it would to pull down and start again. I can just imagine my Cavendish looking it over and saying to me: ‘Bess, beloved, a castle is a very fine thing, but where is the profit in it?’ And the two of us would have ridden away to a better investment: something that we could buy cheap and make better.
When I remember Cavendish, I have to marvel at my new husband, the earl. His family have owned half of England for centuries, and leased this property of Tutbury forever; but they have let it get so run down that it is no good for them, nor for any fool that might have taken it off their hands. Of course, my husband the earl has no mind for detail, he has never had to trouble himself with the vulgar questions of profit and loss. After all, he is a nobleman, not a merchant like my Cavendish. He is not on the rise as my Cavendish had to be, as I was then proud to be. My husband the earl has such great lands, he has so many people as servants and tenants and dependants, that he has no idea what profit he makes and what are his costs. Cavendish would have been sick to his heart to do business like this; but it is the noble way. I don’t do it myself; but I know enough to admire it.
Not that there is anything wrong with Tutbury village. The road that winds through it is broad enough and well-enough made. There is a moderately good ale house and an inn that once was clearly a church poorhouse in the old days before someone put in their bid and seized it – though looking at it and the fields around it, I doubt there was a great profit. There are good farms and fertile fields and a river that runs deep and fast. It is low-lying land, not the countryside I love: the steep hills and low valleys of the Derbyshire Peaks. It is all rather flat and dull and Tutbury Castle sits atop its own little mound like a cherry on a pat of syllabub. The road to the castle winds up this little hill like a path up a midden and at the top is a handsome gateway built of good stone and an imposing tower which makes you hope for better; but you are soon disappointed. Inside the curtain wall to the left is a small stone house which all but leans against the damp wall, with a great hall below and privy rooms above, a kitchen and bakehouse on the side. These, if you please, are to be the apartments of the Queen of Scots, who was born in the Castle of Linlithgow and raised in the Chateau of Fontainebleau and may well be a little surprised to find herself housed in a great hall which has next to no daylight in winter and is haunted by the lingering stink of the neighbouring midden.
On the opposite side of the courtyard are the lodgings for the keeper of the castle, where I and my lord are supposed to huddle in a part-stone, part-brick building with a great hall below and lodgings above and – thank God – at least a decent fireplace big enough for a tree at a time. And that is it. None of it in good repair, the stone outer wall on the brink of tumbling into the ditch, the slates loose on every roof, crows’ nests in every chimney. If the queen takes herself up to the top of the tower at the side of her lodgings she can look out over a country as flat as a slab of cheese. There are some thick woods and good hunting to the south but the north is plain and dull. In short, if it were a handsome place I would have pressed my lord to rebuild it and make a good house for us. But he has taken little interest in it and I have none.
Well, I am taking an interest now! Up the hill we toil with my good horses slipping and scrabbling in the slush and the wagoners shouting, ‘Go on! Go on!’ to get them to strain against the traces and haul the carts up the hill. The castle doors are open and we stumble into the courtyard and find the entire household, mouths agape, in dirty clothes, the spit boys without shoes, the stable lads without caps, the whole crew of them looking more like they had just been freed from a Turk’s galley than the staff of a nobleman’s house, waiting to serve a queen.
I jump down from my horse before anyone has the wit to come and help me. ‘Right, you scurvy knaves,’ I say irritably. ‘We have to get this place in order by the end of January. And we are going to start now.’
1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: George (#ulink_846fa2c5-b626-5881-b4d4-2020d3c5a6a1)
She is a plague and a headache and a woman of whims and fancies, she is a nightmare and a trouble-maker and a great, great queen. I cannot deny that. In every inch of her, in every day, even at her most troublesome, even at her utterly mischievous, she is a great, great queen. I have never met a woman like her before. I have never even seen a queen such as her before. She is an extraordinary creature: moody, mercurial, a thing of air and passion, the first mortal that I have ever met that I can say is indeed truly divine. All kings and queens stand closer to God than ordinary men and women; but this is the first one in my experience who proves it. She is truly touched by God. She is like an angel.
I cannot like her. She is frivolous and whimsical and contrary. One day she begs me to let her gallop over the fields to escape the drudgery of plodding along the muddy road (I have to refuse); then the next she is too ill and too weary to move. She cannot face the cold, she cannot tolerate the icy wind. Her health is fragile, she has a persistent pain in her side. I believe she is frail as any weak woman. But if so, how did she find the courage and the strength to come down the walls of Bolton Castle on a rope? Or ride for three days from a bitter defeat at Langside, Scotland, to Whitehaven, England, three days of dining on nothing but oatmeal, with her hair cropped short as a boy’s for disguise? Riding hard and sleeping rough, with rough soldiers as her companions? What powers can she draw on, that we mere mortals cannot have? It has to be God Himself who gives her this tremendous power and her female nature that undermines her strength with natural delicacy.
I must say, she does not inspire me either to love, or to deep loyalty. I would never trust her with my oath – as I have trusted my own queen. This one is quicksilver: she is all fire and light. A queen who wants to hold her lands needs to be more of the earth. A queen who hopes to survive the hatred that all men naturally have for women who contradict God’s law and set themselves up as leaders has to be a queen like a rock, a thing of the earth. My own queen is rooted in her power. She is a Tudor with all their mortal appetites and earthly greed. My queen Elizabeth is a most solid being, as earthy as a man. But this is a queen who is all air and angels. She is a queen of fire and smoke.
On this journey (which feels as if it will last forever) she is greeted all along the road by people turning out to wave to her, to call their blessings down on her; and it makes a hard journey ten times longer. It amazes me that in midwinter, they would leave their firesides to wait all day at the crossroads of the cold lanes for her small train to come by. Surely they must have heard the scandals about her? Every drinker in every ale house in the kingdom has smacked his lips over the rumours which have somehow spilled out from the inquiries into her character; and yet I have to send orders ahead of us, wherever we go, that they are not to ring the church bells for this queen’s entry into their village, they are not to bring their babies for her blessing, they are not to bring their sick for her to touch against the King’s Evil, they are not to cut green branches and throw them down in the road before her as if she were riding in triumph: as blasphemous as if she were Jesus going into Jerusalem.
But nothing I say prevents them. These Northern superstitious feckless people are besotted with this woman, who is so far removed from them that they might as well love the moon. They honour her as if she were more than a queen, more than an ordinary woman whose reputation is already shadowed by gossip. They honour her as if they knew better than me – as if they knew a higher truth. As if they know her to be, indeed, the angel that she resembles.
It is a matter of faith, not wisdom. These are a stubborn people who don’t agree with the changes that our queen – Elizabeth – has introduced into their churches. I know that they keep the old faith as best they can, and they want a priest in the pulpit and the Mass said in the old ways. Half of them still probably hear the Mass behind closed doors on a Sunday and none the wiser. They would rather have their faith and their God and their sense of Our Lady watching over all of them than obey the new ever-changing laws of the land. The whole of the North has always been determinedly unimpressed by the reform of religion, and now that this other queen is riding down their lanes, they are showing their true colours: their loyalty to her, their constancy to their faith. They are hers, heart and soul, and I do not know if Cecil had considered this when he ordered me to move her to Tutbury. I don’t know if he understands how little sway Queen Elizabeth, and her faith, has in these northern counties. Perhaps he should have taken her further south? But perhaps everywhere she goes she will be passionately loved? There are Papists, God knows, everywhere in England, perhaps half the country believes that this is our true queen, and the other half will love her when they see her.
This queen, as equally famous for her piety as she is notorious for her lust, wears a rosary at her belt and a crucifix at her throat where I sometimes see her blush rise; she flushes pink like a girl. The Pope himself prays for her by name as she rides through mortal peril. At the worst moments, when we are half-mobbed by a crowd of people quietly whispering blessings on her, I am afraid they would prefer her on the throne and the church unreformed and unchanged than all the benefits that Queen Elizabeth has brought them.
Because these are not people like my Bess – middling people who saw their chance and snatched at profits in the times of change; these are the poor who used to go to the abbey for their hurts and their fears, who liked the priest coming to them for their deathbeds and christenings. They don’t like the churches pulled down, the sanctuaries made unsafe, the nuns with their healing hospitals driven away. They don’t know where to pray, now that the shrines have been destroyed, they don’t know who will help them now they cannot light a candle for a saint. They don’t understand that holy water is not holy any more, that the stoops are dry. They don’t know where they can claim sanctuary now that the abbeys are closed, they don’t know who will feed them in time of need now that the abbey kitchens are destroyed, and the kitchen fires gone cold. Barren women cannot go on pilgrimage to a sacred well, sick men cannot hobble to a shrine. They know themselves to be bereft. Undeniably, they have been robbed of much that made their lives happier. And they think that this exquisite other queen, dressed in black with a veil of white, as seductive as a novice nun, will bring back all the good things for them, and they crowd around her and tell her that good times will come again, that she must wait, as they will wait for her, until I have to shout at the guard to push them away.
Perhaps it is no more than the trivial matter of her beauty. People are so foolish over a beautiful woman, they attribute all sorts of magic to her for nothing more than the set of her dark eyes and the thickness of her dark eyelashes. They come to the roadside to stare for curiosity and then they stay and call blessings on her in the hopes of seeing her smile. She raises her hand in thanks; I have to say, she does have extraordinary grace. She smiles at each and every one of them as a private greeting. Everyone who sees her is besotted: hers for life. She has such a presence that nobody ever asks me which of the women in the travelling cloaks in the queen. She is slim like a thoroughbred horse; but tall, tall as a man. She carries herself like a queen and every eye is drawn to her. When she rides by, there is a whisper of admiration like a breeze, and this adoration has blown around her all her life. She carries her beauty like a crown and she laughs and gives a little shrug at the constant admiration she attracts, as if it is a cloak that someone has dropped: ermine, around her pale shoulders.
They throw evergreen leaves down on the road before her since they don’t have flowers in this wintry season. At every stop someone presses pots of honey and preserves on us for her pleasure. The women bring out rosaries for her to touch as if she were a saint, and I have to look the other way, for the rosaries themselves are against the law now. Or at any rate, I think so. The laws change so often I can’t always keep up. My own mother had a rosary of coral, and my father had a candle lit before a marble crucifix every day of his life; but Bess keeps these hidden in our treasure room now, jumbled up with the icons her previous husband stole from the abbeys. Bess treats them all as profitable goods. She does not think of them as sacred, Bess does not think of anything as sacred. This is the new way.
But when we pass a roadside shrine where a statue or a crucifix once stood, there is now a candle new-set and burning with a brave little light as if to say that the statue may be broken and the crucifix thrown down; but the light on the road and the flame in the heart still burn. She insists on pausing before these empty shrines to bow her head and I cannot hurry her because there is something about her in prayer … something about the turn of her head, as if she is listening as well as praying. I cannot make myself interrupt these brief communions though I know that when people see her, it just encourages Papacy and superstition. I can see that these little prayers strengthen her as if someone – who? Her mother? Her lost husband? Perhaps even her namesake, the very Mother of God? – is speaking to her in the silence.
How should I know? I am a man who simply follows my king. When my king is a Papist, I am a Papist. When he is a Protestant, I am a Protestant, if he became a Mussulman I suppose I would do so too. I don’t think of these things. I have never thought of these things. I pride myself in being a man who does not think about such things. My family do not struggle for their faith, we remain faithful to the king and his God is our God. But when I see her face illuminated by the candle from a roadside icon and her smile so rapt … well, in truth, I don’t know what I see. If I were foolish like the common people I would think I see the touch of God. I would think I see a woman who is as beautiful as an angel, because she is an angel, an angel on earth, as simple as that.
Then she laughs in my face some evenings, feckless as the girl she is. ‘I am a great trial to you,’ she says, speaking French. ‘Don’t deny it! I know it and I am sorry for it. I am a great trouble to you, Lord Shrewsbury.’
She cannot pronounce my name at all. She speaks like a Frenchwoman; you would never know that her father was a Scot. She can say ‘the earl’ well enough. She can manage ‘Talbot’; but ‘Shrewsbury’ utterly defeats her. She puckers up her mouth into a kissing pout to attempt it. It comes out ‘Chowsbewwy’ and it is so funny that it almost makes me laugh. She is charming; but I remember that I am married to a woman of great worth and I serve a queen of solid merit.
‘Not at all,’ I say coldly, and I see her girl’s smile falter.
1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: Mary (#ulink_e18c491e-ab28-5621-9f30-30c4dbc59d5d)
Bothwell,
They are moving me to a new castle, Tutbury, near Burton-on-Trent. I shall be the guest of the Earl of Shrewsbury but I am not free to leave. Come as soon as you can get free.
Marie
I keep my head down and I ride like a nun on her way to Mass but everywhere I go, I am taking in everything. I ride as Bothwell the tactician taught me to ride: constantly on the lookout for ambush, for opportunity, for danger, mapping the land in my mind as he would. This England is my kingdom, my inheritance, and these Northern lands will be my especial stronghold. I don’t need secret letters from my ambassador, the good Bishop John Lesley of Ross, to tell me that half the country is mine already, longing to be rid of the tyranny of the usurper, my cousin Elizabeth; for everywhere I go, I see that the common people want to go back to the old ways, the good ways, they want the church restored and a queen that they can trust on the throne.
If it were the common people alone I would take their praise and their gifts and smile my thanks and know that they can do nothing; but it is so much more than them. At every stop on the road, when the wine comes in for dinner, a server drops a message into my lap or palms me a note. Shrewsbury is a hopeless guardian, bless him. He watches the door but forgets all about the windows. Half a dozen lords of England have sent me assurances that they will never let me be held captive, that they will never let me be sent back to Scotland as a prisoner, that they have vowed to set me free. They will make Elizabeth honour her word to restore me to my throne, or they will challenge her in my name. There is a conspiracy against Elizabeth smouldering, like a fire in heather, spreading, hidden at the very roots. In hesitating to restore me to my throne she has gone too far for her court to support. They all know that I am her only legitimate heir; and they all want me to be secure of my kingdom in Scotland and assured of my inheritance in England. This is nothing more than simple justice, this is my right; and the English nobility as well as the commoners want to defend my right. Any English queen of any sense would make this clear for me, clear for her lords, clear for her country. Any queen of any sense would name me as her heir and put me back on the throne of Scotland and order me to bide my time until her death. If she would treat me fairly like this, I would honour her.
For many of them Elizabeth is a pretender to the throne, a Protestant bastard who has played on her Tudor-red hair and my absence to put herself where I should be. All of Europe and half of England accept that I am the true heir, descended in a straight and legitimate line from King Henry VII, whereas she is an acknowledged bastard, and worse: a known traitor to the queen who went before her, the sacred Mary Tudor.
It is a tricky path I have to tread. No-one would blame me if I escaped from this compulsory hospitality. But everyone, even my own family, even Elizabeth’s enemies, would condemn me if I raised a riot in her kingdom. She too would be within her rights to accuse me of troublemaking, even treason, if I made a rebellion against her; and I dare not risk that. These lords must be led on to free me, for I must be free. But they must do it of their own choice. I cannot encourage them to rebel against their crowned sovereign. In truth: nor would I. Who believes more strongly than I that an anointed queen should reign? A legitimate sovereign cannot be questioned.
‘But is she a legitimate sovereign?’ Mary Seton, my companion, asks me slyly, knowing that she is only repeating my old words back to me, as we rest one evening in a poor inn on the road to Tutbury.
‘She is,’ I say firmly. At any rate, when we are in her lands and with no power of our own, we will treat her as such.
‘The child of Anne Boleyn, conceived outside wedlock when the king was married to a Catholic princess,’ she reminds me. ‘Declared a bastard by her own father, and that law never revoked. Not even by her … as if she is afraid to ask the question … Heir to the throne only because the king named her on his deathbed, after his son, after his legitimate daughter, the desperate last words of a frightened man.’
I turn away from her to the fire and push the most recent note, a promise of help from Mary’s faithful brother, Lord Seton, to the back of the logs and watch it burn. ‘Whatever she is, whatever her mother was, even whatever her father – even if he was Mark Smeaton a singer – nonetheless she is an anointed queen now,’ I say firmly. ‘She found a bishop who could bring himself to crown her, and as such she is sacred.’
‘All but one of her bishops refused. The whole church but one Judas denied her. Some of them went to prison rather than crown her. Some of them died for their faith, and died denying her. They called her a usurper, a usurper on your throne.’
‘Peut-être. But she is on it now, and I will never, never be a party to overthrow an ordained queen. God has allowed her to be queen, for whatever reason. She has been anointed with sacred oil, she has the crown on her head and the orb and sceptre in her hand. She is untouchable. I shall not be the one to throw her down.’
‘God has made her queen but not authorised her to be a tyrant,’ Mary observes quietly.
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So she may rule her kingdom but she may not tyrannise over me. I will be free.’
‘Amen to that,’ Mary says devoutly. I look at the scrap of paper falling to ash in the red heart of the embers.
‘I will be free,’ I repeat. ‘Because, in the end, no-one has the power to imprison me. I was born, bred, crowned, anointed, and wed to a king. No-one in Christendom is more a queen than I. No-one in the world is more of a queen than I. Only God Himself is above me. Only He can command me, and His command is that I must be free and take my throne.’
1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Bess (#ulink_ec6b1f99-1b79-5a3b-92ec-e1f5bc534faf)
We do it. I do it. By using the men I have brought from Chatsworth – good men who have served me well, who know how I like things done – by using the hard-working women that I recruit from Tutbury and train into doing things my way, by scattering around the handsome things I have brought from Chatsworth, by patching and nailing and cleaning and thatching as best we can. By hanging tapestries over damp plaster, by lighting fires in blocked chimneys and burning out vermin, by glazing some windows and blocking up others, by curtaining doorways and hammering down loose floorboards; in the end we make a place that, if not fit for a queen, cannot be – of itself – grounds for complaint. The queen herself, Queen Elizabeth, sends me goods from the Tower for the extra comfort of her cousin. Second-rate I have to say, but anything which makes these dark empty rooms look a little less like a dungeon and more like a house must be regarded as a vast improvement.
It is a great job of work that I and my workmen have done. I don’t expect thanks for it, a nobleman like my husband the earl thinks that houses build themselves, sweep their own floors, and furniture strolls in and arranges itself. But I take a pleasure and a pride in my work. Others in this kingdom build ships and plan ventures far away, raid like pirates, discover new countries and bring back wealth. My work is closer to home. I build, I establish, I run at a profit. But whether it is Sir Francis Drake’s work or mine, it is alike; it is all in the service of the Protestant God, and my clean floor and the gold in my purse both honour His Holy Name.
