The Virgin’s Lover

Sarah Robsart.

Cecil was at his heavy desk with the many locked drawers in his rooms at Whitehall Palace, in the first week of February, reading a letter in code from his agent in Rome. His first act on Elizabeth’s accession to the throne was to put as many trusted friends, kin and servants in as many key courts in Europe as he could afford, and instruct them to keep him informed of any word, of any rumour, of any ghost of a rumour, which mentioned England and her new, fragile monarch.

He was glad he had got Master Thomas Dempsey into the Papal court at Rome. Master Thomas was better known to his colleagues in Rome as Brother Thomas, a priest of the Catholic church. Cecil’s network had captured him coming to England in the first weeks of the new queen’s reign, with a knife hidden in his bags and a plan to assassinate her. Cecil’s man in the Tower had first tortured Brother Thomas, and then turned him. Now he was a spy against his former masters, serving the Protestants, against the faith of his fathers. Cecil knew that it had been a change of heart forced by the man’s desire to survive, and that very shortly the priest would turn again. But in the meantime, his material was invaluable, and he was scholar enough to write his reports and then translate them into Latin and then translate the Latin into code.

Master Secretary, His Holiness is considering a ruling that will say that heretical monarchs can be justly defied by their subjects, and that such a defiance, even to armed rebellion, is no sin.

Cecil leaned back in his padded chair and re-read the letter, making sure that he had made no error in the double translation, out of code and then out of Latin. It was a message of such enormity that he could not believe it, even when it was in plain English before him.

It was a death sentence for the queen. It assured any disgruntled Catholic that they could plot against her with impunity, actually with the blessing of the Holy Father. It was a veritable crusade against the young queen, as potent and unpredictable as a Knights Templar attack on the Moors. It licensed the deranged assassin, the man with a grudge, indeed, it put the dagger into his hands. It broke the eternal promise that an anointed monarch commanded the obedience of all his subjects, even those who disagreed with him. It broke the harmony of the universe that placed God above the angels, angels above kings, kings above mortal men. A man could no more attack a king than a king could attack an angel, than an angel could attack God. This madness of the Pope broke the unwritten agreement that one earthly monarch would never encourage the subjects of another earthly monarch to rise up against him.

The assumption had always been that kings should stick together, that nothing was more dangerous than the people with a licence. Now the Pope was to give the people a licence to rise up against Elizabeth and who knew how many might avail themselves of this permission?

Cecil tried to draw a sheet of paper towards him and found that his hands were shaking. For the first time in these anxious months, he truly thought that they would be defeated. He thought that he had aligned himself to a doomed cause. He did not think that Elizabeth could survive this. There were too many who had opposed her from the start; once they knew that their treasonous plotting was no longer a sin, they would multiply like headlice. It was enough that she had to struggle with the church, with her council, with her parliament; none of which were in full support, some of which were in open opposition. If the people themselves were turned against her she could not last long.

He thought for a moment, for only a moment, that he might have done better to have supported Henry Hastings as the best Protestant claimant for the throne, since the Pope would surely not have dared to summon a rebellion against a king. He thought for another moment that perhaps he should have urged Elizabeth to accept the raising of the Host, to have kept the church in England as Papist for a year or so, to ease the transition of Reform.

He gritted his teeth. What was done had been done, and they would all have to live with their mistakes, and some would die for them. He was fairly certain that Elizabeth would die, to name only one. He clasped his hands together until they were steady again, and then started to plan ways to try to ensure that an assassin did not reach Elizabeth at court, when she was out hunting, when she was on the river, when she was visiting.

It was a nightmare task. Cecil stayed up all night writing lists of men he could trust, preparing plans to see her guarded, and knew at the end that if the Catholics of England obeyed the Pope, as they must do, then Elizabeth was a dead woman, and all that Cecil could do for her was to delay her funeral.

Amy Dudley had no letter from her husband to invite her to court, not even one to tell her where she should go. Instead she received a very pleasant invitation from his cousins at Bury St Edmunds.

‘See? He has sent for me!’ she said delightedly to her stepmother. ‘I told you that he would send for me, as soon as he was able to do so. I must leave as soon as his men arrive to escort me.’

‘I am so happy for you,’ Lady Robsart said. ‘Did he send any money?’

Robert’s work, as Master of the Queen’s Horse, was to order her horses, to run the royal stables, to care for the health and welfare of every animal from the great hunters to the lowliest pack animals of the baggage train. Visiting noblemen, with their hundreds of men in livery, had to have their horses accommodated in the stables, guests of the queen had to be supplied with horses so that they could ride out with her. Ladies of her court had to have sweet-tempered palfreys. The queen’s champions had to stable their warhorses for jousting tournaments. The hounds for the hunt came under his jurisdiction, the falcons for falconry, the hawks for hawking, the leather and harness, the wagons and carts for the enormous royal progresses from one castle to another, the orders and delivery of hay and feed, all were the responsibility of Sir Robert.

— So why then — Cecil asked himself — did the man have so much time on his hands? Why was he forever at the queen’s side? Since when was Robert Dudley interested in the coin of the realm and the deteriorating value? —

‘We have to mint new coins,’ Sir Robert announced. He had inserted himself into the queen’s morning conference with her advisor by the simple technique of bringing a sprig of greening leaves and laying them on her state papers. — As if he had gone a-Maying — Cecil thought bitterly. Elizabeth had smiled and made a gesture that he might stay, and now he was joining the conference.

‘The smaller coins are shaved and spoiled till they are almost worthless.’

Cecil did not reply. This much was self-evident. Sir Thomas Gresham in his huge mercantile house at Antwerp had been studying the problem for years as his own business fluctuated catastrophically with the unreliable value of English coin, and as his loan business to the monarchs of England became more and more precarious. — But now apparently, far superior to Gresham’s opinions, we are to be blessed with the insights of Sir Robert Dudley. —

‘We have to call in the old coins and replace them with full-weight good coins.’

The queen looked worried. ‘But the old coins have been so clipped and shaved that we will not get half our gold back.’

‘It has to be done,’ Dudley declared. ‘No-one knows the value of a penny, no-one trusts the value of a groat. If you try to collect an old debt, as I have done, you find that you are repaid in coins that are half the value of your original loan. When our merchants go abroad to pay for their purchases, they have to stand by while the foreign traders bring out scales to weigh the coins and laugh at them. They don’t even bother to look at the value stamped on the face; they only buy by weight. No-one trusts English coin any more. And the greatest danger is that if we issue new coins, of full value gold, then they are just treated as bad, we gain nothing unless we call all the old ones in first. Otherwise we throw our wealth away.’

Elizabeth turned to Cecil.

‘He is right,’ he conceded unwillingly. ‘This is just as Sir Thomas Gresham believes.’

‘Bad coin drives out good,’ Sir Robert ruled.

There was something about the ring of his tone that attracted Cecil’s attention. ‘I did not know you had studied mercantile matters,’ he remarked gently.

Only Cecil could have seen the swiftly hidden amusement on the younger man’s face.

But only Cecil was waiting for it.

‘A good servant of the queen must consider all her needs,’ Sir Robert said calmly.

— Good God, he has intercepted Gresham’s letters to me — Cecil observed. For a moment he was so stunned by the younger man’s impertinence, to spy on the queen’s spymaster, that he could hardly speak. — He must have got hold of the messenger, copied the letter and re-sealed it. But how? And at what point on its journey from Antwerp? And if he can get hold of my letters from Gresham, what other information does he have of mine? —

‘The base drives out the good?’ the queen repeated.

Robert Dudley turned to her. ‘In coinage as in life,’ he said intimately, as if for her ears alone. ‘The lesser joys, the more ignoble pleasures, are those that take a man or a woman’s time, make demands. The finer things, true love or a spiritual life between a man and his God, these are the things that are driven out by the day to day. Don’t you think that is true?’

For a moment she looked quite entranced. ‘It is so,’ she said. ‘It is always harder to make time for the truly precious experiences, there is always the ordinary to do.’

‘To be an extraordinary queen, you have to choose,’ he said quietly. ‘You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise, without listening to your advisors, guided by your own true heart and highest ambition.’

She took a little breath and looked at him as if he could unfold the secrets of the universe, as if he were his tutor, John Dee, and could speak with angels and foretell the future.

‘I want to choose the best,’ she said.

Robert smiled. ‘I know you do. It is one of the many things that we share. We both want nothing but the best. And now we have a chance to achieve it.’

‘Good coin?’ she whispered.

‘Good coin and true love.’

With an effort she took her eyes from him. ‘What d’you think, Spirit?’

‘The troubles with the coinage are well known,’ Cecil said dampeningly. ‘Every merchant in London would tell you the same. But the remedy is not so generally certain. I think we all agree that a pound coin is no longer worth a pound of gold, but how we restore it is going to be difficult. It’s not as if we have the gold to spare to mint new coins.’

‘Have you prepared a plan of how to revalue the coin?’ Dudley demanded briskly of the Secretary of State.

‘I have been considering it with the queen’s advisors,’ Cecil said stiffly. ‘Men who have been thinking on this problem for many years.’

Dudley gave his irrepressible grin. ‘Better tell them to hurry up then,’ he recommended cheerfully.

‘I am drawing up a plan.’

‘Well, while you are doing that we will walk in the garden,’ Dudley offered, deliberately misunderstanding.

‘I can’t draw it up now!’ Cecil exclaimed. ‘It will take weeks to plan properly.’

But already the queen was on her feet; Dudley had offered his arm, the two of them fled from the presence chamber with the speed of scholars escaping a class. Cecil turned to her ladies in waiting who were scrambling to curtsey.

‘Go with the queen,’ he said.

‘Did she ask for us?’ one of the ladies queried.

Cecil nodded. ‘Walk with them, and take her shawl, it is cold out today.’

In the garden Dudley retained the queen’s hand, and tucked it under his elbow.

‘I can walk on my own, you know,’ she said pertly.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I like to hold your hand, I like to walk at your side. May I?’

She said neither yes nor no, but she left her hand on his arm. As always with Elizabeth, it was one step forward and then one step back. As soon as she allowed him to keep her little hand warm on his arm she chose to raise the question of his wife.

‘You do not ask me if you may bring Lady Dudley to court,’ she began provocatively. ‘Do you not wish her to attend? Do you not ask for her to have a place in my service? I am surprised that you have not mentioned her to me for one of my ladies in waiting. You were quick enough to recommend your sister.’

‘She prefers to live in the country,’ Robert said smoothly.

‘You have a country house now?’

He shook his head. ‘She has a house that she inherited from her father in Norfolk but it is too small and too inconvenient. She lives with her stepmother at Stanfield Hall, nearby; but she is going to stay with my cousins at Bury St Edmunds this week.’

‘Shall you buy a house now? Or build a new one?’

He shrugged. ‘I shall find some good land and build a good house, but I am going to spend most of my time at court.’

‘Oh, are you, indeed?’ she asked flirtatiously.

‘Does a man walk away from sunlight to shadow? Does he leave gold for gilt? Does he taste good wine and then want bad?’ His voice was deliberately seductive. ‘I shall stay at court for ever, if I am allowed, basking in the sunshine, enriched by the gold, drunk on the perfume of the headiest wine I could imagine. What were we saying: that we would not let the base drive out the best? That we should have, both of us, the very best?’

She absorbed the compliment for a long, delicious moment. ‘And your wife must surely be very old now?’

Dudley smiled down at her, knowing that she was teasing him. ‘She is thirty, just five years older than me,’ he said. ‘As I think you know. You were at my wedding.’

Elizabeth made a little face. ‘It was years and years ago, I had quite forgotten it.’

‘Nearly ten years,’ he said quietly.

‘And I thought even then that she was a very great age.’

‘She was only twenty-one.’

‘Well, a great age to me, I was only sixteen.’ She gave an affected little start of surprise. ‘Oh! As were you. Were you not surprised to be marrying a woman so much older than you?’

‘I was not surprised,’ he said levelly. ‘I knew her age and her position.’

‘And still no children?’

‘God has not blessed us as yet.’

‘I think that I heard a little whisper that you had married her for love, for a passionate love, and against the wishes of your father,’ she prompted him.

He shook his head. ‘He was opposed only because I was so young, I was not yet seventeen and she just twenty-one. And I imagine he would have picked a better match for me if I had given him the chance. But he did not refuse his permission once I asked, and Amy brought a good dowry. They had good lands in Norfolk laid down to sheep, and in those days, my father needed to increase our friends and influence in the east of the country. She was her father’s only heir, and he was happy enough with the match.’

‘I should think he was!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Duke of Northumberland’s son for a girl who had never been to court, who could barely write her own name and who did nothing but stay home and weep the moment that her husband encountered trouble?’

‘It must have been a fairly detailed little whisper that came to your ears,’ Robert remarked. ‘You seem to know my entire marital history.’

Elizabeth’s gurgle of guilty laughter was checked when the lady in waiting appeared behind them. ‘Your Grace, I have brought your shawl.’

‘I didn’t ask for one,’ Elizabeth said, surprised. She turned back to Robert. ‘Yes, of course, I heard talk of your marriage. And what sort of woman your wife was. But I forgot it until now.’

He bowed, his smile lurking around his mouth. ‘Can I assist your memory any further?’

‘Well,’ she said engagingly. ‘What I still don’t know for sure is why you married her in the first place, and, if it was love, as I heard, whether you still love her.’

‘I married her because I was sixteen, a young man with hot blood and she had a pretty face and she was willing,’ he said, careful not to let it sound too romantic to this most critical audience, though he remembered well enough how it had been, and that he had been mad for Amy, defying his father and insisting on having her as his wife. ‘I was eager to be a married man and grown up, as I thought. We had a few years when we were contented together but she was her father’s favourite child and in the habit of being spoiled. In fairness, I suppose I was a favoured son and I had been richly blessed. A pair of spoilt brats together, in fact. We did not deal very well together after the newness had worn off. I was at court in my father’s train, as you know, and she stayed in the country. She had no desire for court life and – God bless her – she has no airs and graces. She has no courtly skills and no wish to learn them.

‘Then, if I must tell the truth, when I was in the Tower and in terror for my life, I fell out of the way of thinking of her at all. She visited me once or twice when my brothers’ wives visited them; but she brought no comfort to me. It was like hearing of another world: her telling me of the hay crop and the sheep, and arguments with the housemaids. I just felt, wrongly, I am sure, as if she was taunting me with the world going on without me. She sounded to me as if she was happier without me. She had returned to her father’s house, she was free of the stain of my family’s disgrace, she had taken up her childhood life again and I almost felt that she preferred me to be locked up, safely out of the way of trouble. She would rather I was a prisoner, than a great man at court and son of the greatest.’

He paused for a moment. ‘You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘When you are a prisoner, after a while your world shrinks to the stone walls of your chamber, your walk is to the window and back again. Your life is only memories. And then you start longing for your dinner. You know then that you are a prisoner indeed. You are thinking of nothing but what is inside. You have forgotten to desire the outside world.’

Instantly Elizabeth squeezed her hand on his arm. ‘Yes,’ she said, for once without coquetry. ‘God knows that I know what it is like. And it spoils your love for anything on the outside.’

He nodded. ‘Aye. We two know.

‘Then, when I was released I came out of the Tower a ruined man. All our family’s wealth and property had been forfeited. I was a pauper.’

‘A sturdy beggar?’ she suggested with a little smile.

‘Not even very sturdy,’ he said. ‘I was broken down low, Elizabeth; I was as low as a man could go. My mother had died begging for our freedom. My father had recanted before us all, had said that our faith had been a plague upon the realm. It bit into my soul; I was so ashamed. Then, even though he had knelt before them to make his peace, they still executed him for a traitor, and, God keep him, he made a bad death that shamed us all.

‘My dearest brother John took sick in the Tower with me and I could not save him, I could not even nurse him, I didn’t know what to do. They let him go to my sister Mary but he died of his sickness. He was only twenty-four, but I couldn’t save him. I had been a poor son and a poor brother and I followed a poor father. There was not much to be proud of, when I came out of the Tower.’

She waited.

‘There was nowhere for me to go but to her stepmother’s house at Stanfield Hall, Norfolk,’ he said, the bitterness in his voice still sharp. ‘Everything we owned: the London house, the great estates, the house at Syon, were all gone. Poor Amy had even lost her own inheritance, her father’s farm at Syderstone.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Queen Mary had put the nuns back into Syon. Imagine it! My home was a nunnery once more and they were singing the Te Deum in our great hall.’

‘Did her family treat you kindly?’ she asked, guessing the answer.

‘As anyone would treat a son-in-law who had presented himself as the greatest man in the kingdom, and then came home as a penniless prisoner with a touch of gaol fever,’ he said wryly. ‘Her stepmother never forgave me for the seduction of John Robsart’s daughter and the collapse of his hopes. She swore that he had died of heartbreak because of what I had done to his daughter, and she never forgave me for that either. She never gave me more than a few pence to have in my pocket. And when they learned I had been in London to a meeting, they threatened to throw me out of the house in my boots.’

‘What meeting?’ she asked, a conspirator from long habit.

He shrugged. ‘Oh, to put you on the throne,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘I never stopped plotting. My great terror was that your sister would have a son and we would be undone. But God was good to us.’

‘You risked your life in plotting for me?’ she asked, her dark eyes wide. ‘Even then? When you had just been released?’

He smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ he said easily. ‘Who else for me, but England’s Elizabeth?’

She took a little breath. ‘And after that you were forced to stay quiet at home?’

‘Not I. When the war came my brother Henry and I volunteered to serve under Philip against the French in the Low Countries.’ He smiled. ‘I saw you before I sailed. D’you remember?’

Her look was warm. ‘Of course. I was there to bid farewell to Philip and to taunt poor Mary, and there were you, as handsome an adventurer who ever went away to war, smiling down at me from the royal ship.’

‘I had to find a way to raise myself up again,’ he said. ‘I had to get away from Amy’s family.’ He paused. ‘And from Amy,’ he confessed.

‘You had fallen out of love with her?’ she asked, finally getting to the part of the story that she had wanted all along.

Robert smiled. ‘What pleases a young man who knows nothing at sixteen cannot hold a man who has been forced to look at his life, to study what he holds dear, and to start from the bottom once again. My marriage was over by the time I came out of the Tower. Her stepmother’s humiliation of me as she stood by and watched only completed the end. Lady Robsart brought me as low as I could go. I could not forgive Amy for witnessing it. I could not forgive her for not taking my side. I would have loved her better if we had walked out of that house together into disaster. But she sat by the fireside on her little stool and reminded me from time to time, when she looked up from hemming shirts, that God orders us to honour our father and our mother, and that we were utterly dependent on the Robsarts.’

He broke off, his face darkened with remembered anger. Elizabeth listened, hiding her relish.

‘So … I went to fight in the Low Countries, and thought I would make my name and my fortune in that war.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘That was my last moment of vanity,’ he said. ‘I lost my brother and I lost most of my troop and I lost Calais. I came home a very humbled man.’

‘And did she care for you?’

‘That was when she thought I should be a teamster,’ he said bitterly. ‘Lady Robsart ordered me to labour in the fields.’

‘She never did!’

‘She would have had me on my knees. I walked out of the house that night and stayed at court or with what friends would have me. My marriage was over. In my heart, I was a free man.’

‘A free man?’ she asked in a very quiet voice. ‘You would call yourself a free man?’