Elizabeth I (114 page)

“He is recovering, then?” I asked.

“He's mending well,” said the man. “He'll be well enough to stand up at his hanging.”

“Please!” I begged him. “For the mercy of Christ!”

“If I let you in, I would be the next to stand trial. Now go.”

It was no use.

Stumbling home, passing easily through Ludgate, where Christopher had fallen, I felt worse than if I had not gone. Knowing that I could do nothing to help him or even to help myself was torture. I resolved to be there when they took him out for his trial, to at least press close to him on the street.

I expected there would be secrecy surrounding the exact date of the trial, and starting the next day I returned early in the morning and stood watch across the street. Nothing that day. Nothing the next. Or the next. But then, on March 5, almost two months since the uprising, early in the morning (but I had come still earlier), a contingent of armed guards arrived at the house. Soon a litter emerged, with a prone figure lying on it. It had to be Christopher. The guards took their time shouldering the burden, arranging their grip, backing up.
Now!
I darted out from around the corner and grabbed the edge of the litter before the guards could react. I peered into it and saw Christopher's drawn, bandaged face, with a blanket muffling his neck and body.

He had trouble focusing his eyes and clearly did not recognize me. The jolt to the litter startled him, and then he knew what was happening. “Lettice!” he murmured.

“Damned wench!” A guard dug his fingers into my shoulder and yanked me away. The force of his pull tumbled me onto my knees. When I found my feet again, the litter was already halfway down the street. I ran after it, but the ring of guards around it meant I could not get close. I followed it past St. Paul's, down Cannon and Eastcheap, and then finally to the Tower itself. The ugly gray walls, which looked cold even in high summer, loomed ahead. I stopped, knowing I could follow it no farther. Solemnly, like a funeral cortege, it passed across the bridge spanning the moat and disappeared.

I stood, catching my breath. On my left side rose Tower Hill, where the scaffold awaited. I would not be back. I would not join the crowd at the execution.

I cast a last glance at the stone walls enclosing my dead son and now holding my living husband.

The day was interminable. I knew the verdict was already decided and the trial but a legal exercise. Still, I could not help picturing Christopher trying to answer the accusations. Did he have to do it from his litter? Or did they lift him onto a chair? Let it be a chair with a back support, not a stool. Surely they did not make him stand.

It was full dark when an official messenger from the Privy Council delivered an envelope to me with the pronouncement. He looked about furtively and made to leave the moment the envelope touched my hand. But I stopped him. The very least he could do was to formally tell me the verdict.

“Sir Christopher was found guilty,” he said.

“And?”

“Sentenced to death, my lady.”

“When?”

“A fortnight from now.”

They were giving him longer than they had given Robert. Perhaps they wanted him to recover sufficiently. “And the others?”

“Sir Charles Danvers received the same sentence. He will suffer on the same day as Sir Blount, March 18. Gelli Meyrick and Henry Cuffe will go next week, March 13.”

“And the last, Sir John Davies?”

“Not sure of that, my lady.” He looked more furtive than ever, and I thought,
Oh, God, they may reprieve him. Why? Why?

“Did Sir Christopher have any message for me?”

He shook his head. “I did not speak to the prisoner. They dispatched me straightway with this report.”

“I thank you.” I supposed I should reward him. Reward the messenger for evil news. But it was not his fault. “Here.” I gave him some money and let him go.

Now Frances crept into the room. She had barely recovered from her difficult childbirth and was moving slowly. Why had I ever disliked her? She had turned out to be the most steadfast of my daughters. She sank down into a chair and waited, her large, dark eyes fastened on the fatal envelope.

My fingers trembled a bit, but I tore it open and started reading. Obligingly, she moved a candle closer to me on the table so I could read the hateful writing better. “We, the loyal servants and councillors of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, hereby record and testify to the proceedings of the trial of the rebels of the late uprising against Her Majesty....” At least they had the decency not to call them traitors until the verdict had been announced. It went on, detailing the interrogation and Christopher's confession of intent to draw blood from the Queen. Their ends were to seize the Tower, hold the Queen hostage, call a parliament to force the removal of all the “evil councillors”—Cecil, Raleigh, Coke, Cobham. Who would rule in this interim they demurely avoided stipulating.

The councillors remarked that far from seizing the Tower, it was ironic that he was now being tried inside it.

The confessions of the others were included, but I did not concern myself with those. That was between themselves, the Queen, and God.

Frances and I sat quietly in the room, as if in a chapel keeping vigil. She was now twice a widow, and I would be thrice one. Our fates now linked us inexorably. As battle makes brothers out of men, widowhood forged a strong bond between us.

I
had no desire to leave the house and kept as secluded as a desert monk. Indeed, the house was my own monastic cell and within it were all the memento mori I needed to contemplate mortality. I was suspended between two dates—every day was one further removed from Robert's death and one closer to Christopher's. Carefully Frances and I gathered and folded up Robert's clothes and possessions. Some she would keep for the children, others give to the poor, others keep for the memories. I asked only for one of his miniatures and an odd little Spanish church carving of a cherub he had brought back from Cádiz.

“Cádiz,” I said, holding it, examining its gilded wings. “The last time he was happy.” I stroked the angel's head.

“We all have a time that turns out to be our pinnacle of happiness,” she said. “But at the time we think there is more to come.”

“What was yours, Frances?”

She stopped smoothing the cloak she was ready to fold. “I think it was when Robert first made clear his intentions,” she said. “I had had one noble knight in my life. I had not thought to have another. I was seventeen when Philip died and I thought my life was over. Truly, it just began when I married Robert.”

“You said you would not draw a breath an hour after his death,” I reminded her. “Yet here you are, still breathing.”

“We surprise ourselves,” she said. “Each breath I draw, I draw in pain. But I have to keep breathing so my children are not orphans.”

Our pain was compounded when we learned that others had managed to buy their way out of execution. The Earl of Rutland got off for twenty thousand pounds, the Earl of Bedford for ten thousand, and Lords Sandys, Monteagle, and Cromwell for five thousand, four thousand, and three thousand, respectively. The Earl of Southampton, although condemned along with Robert, still lived in the Tower. His mother was said to be pleading powerfully for him, and I knew that she would end up paying a huge fine and he would go free. Technically these men were still prisoners and would be until the last penny was paid, but freedom loomed.

I petitioned the lieutenant of the Tower to be able to see Christopher or to write to him, but he said that was not possible. Then I inquired—oh, dreadful question—whether his body would be released to the family. The answer came back, no. The body of a convicted felon was the state's, and he would be buried in the churchyard of St. Peter ad Vincula—outside, as befitted a man of low rank. Only one glimmer of mercy shone through: The Queen had commuted his sentence to beheading. He would not suffer the horrors of hanging, disemboweling, and being drawn and quartered, as the unfortunate Meyrick and Cuffe did on March 13.

On the morning of March 18 I broke my word to myself. I would force myself to look on at Tower Hill. I, who had brought him into the world, had not witnessed Robert's exit from it. Perhaps the last duty I could perform as a wife was to accompany Christopher on the final steps of his journey. It was to be public, unlike Robert's.

But as I approached the area of Tower Hill, the thick crowds made me regret my decision. I had never attended a public execution, but they were supposed to serve a moral lesson, striking fear into the hearts of the onlookers. In practice, though, they treated it as an amusement, like bearbaiting and cockfighting, only better, since the victims were people and not animals. I tried to shut my ears to the jolly laughter and chatter of the crowd. All these people were free, free to waste their lives and substance, free to abuse their gifts, while Christopher was not even free to write a letter. I hated them.