The Other Queen

1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: George

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

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

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.

The waiting, the feverish preparation, the arrival of the queen’s own goods all build to a sense of such anxiety that when the lad I have posted at the top of the tower yells out: ‘I see them! They are coming!’ the whole household takes to their heels as if they feared a Spanish invasion instead of one young queen. I can feel my stomach lurch as if I had the flux, and I take off the sacking I have tied at my waist to protect my gown, and I go down to the courtyard to greet this unwanted guest.

It is snowing again, just a flurry, but she has her hood pulled forward over her head to shield herself from the bitter weather, so all I see at first is a big horse and a woman huddled in cloaks in the saddle. My husband is riding at her side and I have an odd, actually, a very odd feeling, when I see him lean towards her as the horses halt. He inclines towards her, as if he would save her the least discomfort or trouble, he looks as if he would spare her the cold wind if he could; and I have a moment when I think that in our businesslike courtship, our well-advised marriage and our cheerful consummation in the big marital bed, that he has never yearned towards me as if he thinks I am fragile, as if he desires to protect me, as if I need protection.