A Court Affair
A COURT
AFFAIR
EMILY PURDY
Carnal marriages begin in joy but end in sorrow.
—Sir William Cecil commenting on the marriage of Robert Dudley and Amy Robsart
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Amy Robsart Dudley and Queen Elizabeth I
Prologue: Elizabeth
1. Amy Robsart Dudley
2. Amy Robsart Dudley
3. Amy Robsart Dudley
4. Amy Robsart Dudley
5. Amy Robsart Dudley
6. Amy Robsart Dudley
7. Amy Robsart Dudley
8. Amy Robsart Dudley
9. Amy Robsart Dudley
10. Amy Robsart Dudley
11. Amy Robsart Dudley
12. Amy Robsart Dudley
13. Amy Robsart Dudley
14. Amy Robsart Dudley
15. Elizabeth
16. Elizabeth
17. Elizabeth
18. Amy Robsart Dudley
19. Amy Robsart Dudley
20. Elizabeth
21. Amy Robsart Dudley
22. Elizabeth
23. Amy Robsart Dudley
24. Amy Robsart Dudley
25. Amy Robsart Dudley
26. Elizabeth
27. Amy Robsart Dudley
28. Amy Robsart Dudley
29. Elizabeth
30. Amy Robsart Dudley
31. Elizabeth
32. Amy Robsart Dudley
33. Elizabeth
34. Elizabeth
Epilogue
Postscript
Further Reading
A Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Amy Robsart Dudley
and
Queen Elizabeth I
I used to think of her. She used to think of me.
PROLOGUE
Elizabeth
The Church of Our Lady in Oxford
Sunday, September 22, 1560
I told Kat to fetch a chair and be my dragon, to sit outside my bedchamber door and guard my lair after I was gone.
“Let no man or woman cross my threshold and enter here. Say I have a black and red beast of a headache, and any who dare disturb my rest do so at their own peril,” I instructed as, one by one, the regal layers of pearl-and-jewel-encrusted, gold-embroidered, white-brocaded satin tumbled to the floor, followed by the cumbersome farthingale, stays as stiff as armour, rustling layers of starched petticoats, bejewelled ribbon garters, and the silk stockings Robert bought me, specially ordered from Spain by the score—twenty pairs at a time, in a typically extravagant gesture—and, lastly, like a bridal veil, a shift of cobweb lawn thin enough to read a book through if the light were good and the ink black enough.
With all my court finery pooled around my naked feet, the jewels on my discarded gown seeming to float like ruby red and sapphire blue flowers upon a froth of rich cream, I stood straight and breathed deeply, stretching my arms high above my head. If Robert had seen me thus, he would no doubt have compared me to Aphrodite emerging newborn and naked from the surf. But I could not think about that now; I could not think about Robert. I took another deep breath before stepping out of the rich, luxurious fabric froth and trading it all for a shirt of unbleached linen and the plain brown leather and cloth of a common man’s clothes.
I ignored Kat’s concerned queries and anxious pleas as I sat and pulled on the high leather riding boots while she circled and flapped around me like a bird futilely squawking and batting its wings in a gilt-barred cage, pinning my hair up tightly even as she implored me not to do this foolish, insane, and dangerous thing.
The moment my telltale flame-coloured tresses were tucked out of sight beneath a brown cloth cap, I stood and imperiously waved her aside, cutting off Kat’s chatter like a headsman’s axe with one flourish of my long-fingered, marble white hand. And, in the stark silence that followed, I snatched up the leather gloves and riding crop and headed for the secret door and stairs that descended into my private garden, where I so often walked in the mornings still wearing my nightgown before I girded myself in queenly regalia to face the business of the day, the heavy responsibility of ruling the realm, and feeling, sometimes, like one lone woman against the whole world.
I hugged tightly to the wall as my booted feet felt carefully for each one of the stone steps in the dim and close torchlit stairway. A staircase, my mind kept repeating. It all ended with a staircase. By mishap or murder, it all ended with a staircase.
A common hired barge waited for me upon the river, then a horse, a fleet bay stallion, muscular and lean, yet another gift from Robert. It was a dangerous and heady sensation to be out in the world anonymous and alone. I, the Queen of England, unencumbered by escorts, chaperones, and guards, was making my way as a lone woman, disguised in male attire, on a secret pilgrimage. Anything could happen. I could be set upon by a gang of ruffians or thieves; I could be murdered, or, if my sex was discovered, raped, then left for dead in a ditch, or, my identity unknown or disbelieved if I proclaimed it, forced to live out my days catering to the lusts of men as a prisoner in a bawdy house. Every step I took was fraught with danger, but we were old friends, danger and I; danger of one kind or another had dogged my steps since the day I was born. Safety was a stranger and a state more illusory than real to me. I had outlived the shifting moods and murderous rages of my father, and even when my own sister wished me dead and futilely and painstakingly sifted the haystack to find a shiny silver needle of guilt with which to condemn me, still I managed to prevail and preserve my life.
I was alive, but another woman was dead—a life for a life. She had died alone and unloved with no one to protect her from danger, to keep Death at the hands of cruel Fate, her own desperation, fatal mischance, or all too human villainy, at bay. That was the reason for my solitary journey; that was why I had stripped myself of my royal persona and raiment and was riding hard to Oxford in a pouring rain that cloaked my sorrow as silent tears coursed down my face.
I was in time to see the funeral procession pass. Mourners, and those just curious to catch a glimpse, lined the roadside and stood bareheaded in the pounding rain, the men clasping their caps over their hearts.
I closed my eyes and thought of Amy, weeping and raging, pounding her fists upon the mattress of the bed she should have been sharing with her husband in a home of her own instead of sleeping in alone as a perpetual houseguest of some obliging friend or gentleman retainer of Robert’s, eager to do the high-and-mighty lord, the Queen’s Master of the Horse and rumoured paramour, a favour by providing lodgings for his unwanted and inconvenient wife. How she must have hated me and raged against the unfairness of it all: at the cancer marring the pink and white perfection of her breast and stealing her life away, sapping her vitality and strength like an ugly, bloated, blood-hungry leech that could never be sated until her heart ceased to beat; at the husband, once so in love with her, who desired her death and might even have schemed to hasten it, so he could have another who came with a crown as her dowry; and at the woman—the Queen—she thought had stolen the love of her life away. She had every reason to be angry, bitter, and afraid, and to hate me.
When the embalmers opened the body of my father’s first queen, the proud and indomitable Catherine of Aragon, they found her heart locked in the ugly black embrace of a cancerous tumour. Some took it as a sign that the woman who had used her last reserve of strength to write to my father, Lastly, I vow that my eyes desire you above all things, had actually died of a broken heart. Was Amy’s deadly malady of the breast also physical proof of the pain inside it, a visible manifestation of the broken heart of a woman mortally wounded when Cupid’s arrow was forcibly pulled out? If that were true, the gossip and rumours were right: we—Robert and I—had murdered Amy. Robert had pulled the arrow out, carelessly and callously, leaving her alone to suffer and bleed, while he gave his love to me. And I, a selfish and vain woman, exulting in the freedom and new-come power to control my own destiny, eager for passion without strings, had accepted it, like an offering of tribute and desire laid at the feet of an alabaster goddess.
The black plumes crowning the staves carried by the men who walked before and aft the coffin hung limp and bedraggled, beaten down by the rain, like squiggles of black ink running down a wet page, like the tearstained letters Amy used to send her husband. The eight-and-twenty men—one for each year of Amy’s life—who walked in solemn procession, two by two, down that long and winding road, escorting Amy to her final rest, wore long, hooded black robes. I shivered, remembering the letter I had once found on Robert’s floor, crumpled into a ball on the hearth. He had flung it at the fire in a fit of annoyance but had missed. He hadn’t cared enough to disturb himself and rise from his chair and cross the room to pick it up and feed it to the flames. Instead, he had left it lying there, where any, whether they be servant, queen, or spy in the Spanish Ambassador’s pay, might pick it up and read those smeared, hysterical words scrawled frantically across tearstained pages about a phantom friar who haunted Cumnor Place in a grey robe with a cowl that hid his face—the face of Death!—in blackest shadows no human eye or light could pierce. I know I have seen Death, Amy had insisted. He is stalking me!
Now, as the church bells tolled mournfully, robed men with hoods that hid their faces in black shadows carried Amy to her tomb on a grey and gloomy day when even the sky wept. The coffin was leaden and heavy, and they took turns shouldering it, those who had borne the burden falling back to walk in seamless step whilst others took their places beneath its weight; it was all done as precisely as military manoeuvres, as perfectly choreographed as a court masque, with not a single stumble or misstep. What little family she had and the women and servants who had borne her company at Cumnor followed the casket, a few of them weeping copiously and volubly, the others enjoying the notoriety of being, however slightly and momentarily, at the centre of a maelstrom of raging scandal. Each of them was outfitted in new mourning clothes paid for by the absent widower, who remained closeted in his milk white mansion at Kew, feeling sorry for himself instead of grieving for the wife whose so-convenient death he now realised was a grave inconvenience. And a choir of solemn-faced little boys in white surplices brought up the rear, clutching their black-bound songbooks and singing dolefully.
At the black-draped, candlelit Church of Our Lady, as the boy choir sang, the coffin was opened and draped with black sarcenet fringed with gold and black silk, surrounded by candles and mounted escutcheons supporting the Dudleys’ bear and ragged staff, and Robert’s personal emblem of oak leaves and acorns, and Amy lay in state, to be entombed in the chancel on the morrow.
The Doctor of Divinity, Dr Babington, a round little man with a bald pate ringed by a fringe of grey, and lopsided spectacles slipping from his nose, then came forth to preach his sermon, “Blessed are they who die in the Lord,” but few bothered to listen and instead sat in the pews or stood in the back with their heads bent together, gossiping about how Lady Dudley had met her death, by villainy or mischance or, “God save her,” her own desperation, and the fact that her absent husband was rumoured to have spent the astounding sum of £2,000 on this splendid funeral, and that not counting the cost of his own mourning garb, which was said to be the very epitome of elegance. But there was a gasp and a lingering, horrified pause when Dr Babington misspoke and recommended to our memories “this virtuous lady so pitifully slain”. He stood there for a moment with his mouth quivering and agape. “Oh, merciful Heaven, did I really say that?” he gasped before he hastily continued and completed his sermon in a babbling rush, his face highly flushed as he stumbled and tripped over the rest of the words as though his own poor tongue were falling down a staircase, going from bad to worse with each bump and thump. Then the mourners came forward, in solemn procession, to pause for a moment by the coffin and pay their last respects to Lady Dudley. For those who needed more than a moment, Robert had thoughtfully provided a pair of impressive—and no doubt expensive—mourning stools fringed in Venice gold and black silk and upholstered in quilted black velvet, placed at the head and foot of the coffin, so that any who wished to might sit and mourn in comfort.
As the mourners filed out, to go and feast at the nearby college and honour Lady Dudley’s memory, a plump, greying woman—she reminded me of my own dear old governess, Kat Ashley—her round, wizened face red and swollen from crying, lingered to lovingly lay a bouquet of buttercups upon the coffin before she buried her face in her hands and, her shoulders shaking convulsively with loud, racking sobs, turned away and followed the others out. “Mrs Pirto,” I heard someone in the crowd say, identifying her as Amy’s maid, who had “loved her lady well and dearly and been with her her whole life long”.
When the church was quite deserted, I steeled myself, squared my shoulders, and approached the black-draped bier, supremely conscious of the sound of my booted footsteps upon the stone floor; no matter how softly I tried to tread, they rang like a tocsin in my ears, and more than once I glanced guiltily back over my shoulder as though I were committing some crime by coming here. I knew I was the last person Amy would have wanted or expected to come; she would have thought I came to gloat over her coffin, to bask in my triumph, now that she was dead and Robert was free to marry me.
Tall white tapers, arranged like a crescent moon, stood behind the coffin. Had someone known that Amy was always nervous of the dark, afraid of the encroaching shadows and what they might hide, and ordered the candles placed there as a comforting gesture just for her, or was this merely thought a becoming touch, or done for the simple sake of providing light?
Burnished golden curls, perfectly arranged, gleamed in the candlelight, framing her pale face, white as the candle wax. A wreath of silken buttercups crowned those perfect curls; real ones would have soon wilted and withered away within the coffin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; so it is in the end for all that lives, from buttercups to beautiful girls too young to die. Who had fashioned that wreath of yellow silk flowers and her hair into those perfect curls? Surely it must have been the devoted Mrs Pirto. I could picture her, near-blinded by grief, sitting by the fire, tears dripping down onto the gnarled and thick-veined hands that laboriously cut and stitched silken semblances of the yellow flowers that had always been Amy’s favourite as a final act of love. Amy loved buttercups; I remembered that from her wedding day, when she had carried a great bouquet of them and worn a crown of them upon her head and had them embroidered in gold upon the creamy satin field of her gown, the very one she wore now. Amy was going to her grave in her wedding gown. Mayhap in death, I prayed, she would find a love better and more worthy of her than she ever found in life.
“Love,” I softly mused aloud, “so kind to some, so cruel to others.” That fickleness was one of Life’s harsh realities that blessed some and damned others.
She was much and sadly altered, though the times I had gazed upon her were scant—a mere three times, twice up close and once from afar—and the difference was startling to behold. The first time I saw her, on her wedding day, I thought this petite, plump, buxom blonde would soon be as round as she was tall with all the children she would bear. I thought surely to hear that she was pregnant every year. With her full breasts and round hips, she looked ripe for motherhood, born for breeding. But it was not to be. Amy Robsart had prospered neither as a wife nor as a woman; even the joys and consolations of motherhood had been denied her. And now she lay pale, wan, and wasted in her coffin, cancer had consumed her curves, and Life and Love’s cruelties had taken all the rest. This was a woman whose hopes and dreams had died long before she did.
Her wedding day—that beautiful June day—had been the happiest day of Amy’s life. And I had been there to bear witness to it. I had seen the joy alive and sparkling in her blue green eyes, and the radiant smile of pure delight that lit up her face, the love and trust that shone from her, like a sunbeam, every time she looked at Robert. It had felt like an intrusion, almost, to witness it, and I had felt something else: the hard emerald bite of envy when I looked at the bridal couple, resenting them—resenting Amy, to be more honest and precise—for something I could never have and wasn’t sure I even wanted. Watching her, I had felt a tug-o’-war within my soul; part of me wanted to be her, yet another part of me obstinately pulled back, remembering my mother’s warning, urgently spoken the last time I saw her, “Never surrender!” and in my memory’s eye at the foot of my bed the ghost of Tom Seymour, winking and grinning lasciviously, his cock pointing adamantly out at me from between the folds of his brocade dressing gown, before he leapt and pounced on me, the giggling, giddy girl I used to be, writhing and revelling in my newly awakened sensuality.
Now Amy lay in her coffin. The future that had seemed so golden had turned out to be as false as the trinkets the peddlers at the country fairs sold to the gullible, touting them as genuine gold and gems, though they were in truth but glass and tin from which the gold paint would all too soon flake to reveal the base metal beneath. All that glitters is not gold.
Her hands were folded across the bodice of her gold-lace-garnished wedding gown. The vast golden profusion of buttercups embroidered all over the cream-coloured satin seemed to sway as if caressed by a gentle breeze, an illusion wrought by the play of the candles’ flickering flames upon the gilded threads, tricking out their shimmer, causing them to appear to dance. How sad that the flowers on Amy’s gown seemed to live when she herself lay dead.
Someone—Mrs Pirto’s loving hands?—had filled in the low, square bodice with a high-collared yoke of rich, creamy lace veined with gold and topped by a tiny gold frilled ruff to support her broken neck and hold it properly in place. If I looked closely, I could just discern the white bandages beneath, wound tightly—too tightly for life—lending further support to that frail, shattered neck. And, as another remembrance of the happiest day of her life, someone had tied around her waist the frilly lace-, pearl-, and ribbon-festooned apron she had worn over her brocaded satin gown. I could picture Mrs Pirto leaning down as she dressed her lady for the last time, stroking that pale face, tenderly kissing the cold brow, and whispering in a tear-choked voice, “Take only the happy memories with you, my sweet, and leave all the rest behind.”
Amy’s hands, I noticed then, were nude and nail-bitten, gnawed painfully down to the quick; they must have throbbed and bled. Robert would not want to waste jewels upon the dead; to him that would be the same as throwing them into the Thames. Even the golden oak leaf and amber acorn betrothal ring had vanished, just like the love it had once symbolised. Where had it gone? I shuddered and hoped fervently never to find it on my pillow or presented to me in a velvet box.
It wasn’t right; Amy, who so loved pretty things and delighted in the latest fashions—Robert complained that she ordered as many as fourteen new gowns a year—should have something more than lace and flowers, even if they were silken and embroidered.
I took off my gloves and stared down at my hands, perfect, gleaming nails on long white fingers sparkling with diamonds her husband had given me. In my haste, I had forgotten to remove my rings. All save the gold and onyx coronation ring that had wedded me to England were gifts from Robert; he stroked my vanity like a cat and loved to cover my hands with cold jewels and hot kisses.
She really should have something! I started to remove my rings, but then I remembered that Amy didn’t like diamonds. I could hear Robert’s voice cruelly mocking her, calling her a fool, insisting that every woman loves diamonds and would sell her soul for them, adopting a high-pitched, timorous, quavering parody of a woman’s voice, parroting words Amy had once spoken, likening diamonds to “tears frozen in time”. Yet somehow now it seemed most apt; Amy herself, at only eight-and-twenty, had become a tear frozen in time.
I took the rings from my hands and, one by one, put them onto the thin, cold, death-stiffened fingers, knowing all the while that not all the diamonds in the world could make up for all the tears that Robert and I had caused this woman to shed. And she had shed tears aplenty—oceans and oceans of tears. She had been drowning in tears for two years at least, perhaps even longer. Robert’s love had died long before Amy did. Love is cruel; it kills its victims slowly.
I gave a dead woman a fortune in diamonds, but not even I, the all-powerful Elizabeth of England, could give her back her life or undo the hurt I had caused her. Robert had married her in a flight of youthful fancy fuelled by hot-blooded young lust, a fit of impulsive passion for a pretty country lass of rustic, pure, unvarnished, fresh-faced charm, lacking the hard, sophisticated polish and rapier-sharp or flippant wit of the bejewelled silk-, satin-, and velvet-clad ladies of the court with all their exotic perfumes, ostrich plumes, intricate coiffures of coils, curls, and braids, artfully plucked brows, rouged lips, and painted faces, a woman he went to bed in love with and woke up to find he had nothing in common with. Robert came to resent and blame her for the rash act that had bound him to her. Though he was quite a prize for a squire’s daughter, as a duke’s son he could have found himself a far better dowered and pedigreed bride, as his father, brothers, and friends had all tried to tell the deaf-to-reason, love-struck lad of seventeen who was determined to listen to the bulging and throbbing need inside his codpiece rather than good common sense. Robert had married in haste and repented at leisure. And his kindness, often doled out as a careless afterthought, eventually turned cruel as, more and more, he repented his youthful folly, and because of me, a woman he wanted but could not have, a woman who could, if she would, make him king but wanted him only in her own way and would not wear the ring of a subservient wife or bow to any man as her master. Robert thought he could change my mind, and others feared he would, and Amy, like an innocent child wandering into the midst of a raging battlefield, got caught in the cross fire.
I had wanted to protect Amy, though I doubt any would believe that if they knew. And for that I cannot fault them; if I weren’t me, I wouldn’t believe it either. My failure was a secret I kept locked up inside my heart in my private lockbox of regrets. I could not save Amy from a marriage where love was only in one heart, not in two, and I could not save Amy from cancer, her husband’s ambition, or my own cruel, coquettish caprice that kept me dangling myself before Robert as a prize almost within his grasp, which he could even at times hold in his arms and kiss and caress but could never truly win. I played with him like a cat does with dead things, the way I toyed with all my suitors; Robert was unique only in that I loved him. But even though I loved him, I had no illusions about him. My love for Robert, in spite of what others thought, was never blind; I always saw him as sharply and clearly as if I were blessed with a hawk’s keen and piercing sight. Life long ago taught me not to idealise Love; I leave that to the poets and ballad singers. I learned the hard lessons taught by Love’s illusions long ago; I was scarcely out of my cradle before the lessons began. My father and his six wives, amongst them my mother and cousin, whose lives ended upon the scaffold; my stepfather, Tom Seymour, that handsome and foolhardy rogue who bounded into my bedchamber each morning to tickle and play and teach me anatomy in an infinitely more intimate way than is printed in books; my poor, mad, deluded, love-starved sister, pining her life away for want of Spanish Philip; and my cold and imperious Spanish brother-in-law, who courted and caressed me behind his wife’s back, hung my neck with jewels, and even had a tiny peep-hole drilled so he could watch me in my bath and as I dressed and undressed and availed myself of my chamber pot—they were all excellent teachers, and all my life I have been an apt pupil, and education doesn’t begin and end in the schoolroom.