Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (36 page)

give that life. It was the only way to repay the debt she owed, perhaps had

always owed from the moment of her birth. She would justify her birth

and her existence that had cost so many lives, her own mother’s among

them. Bloodshed and waste, bitter controversy and religious war had

attended her entry to this world. But she could atone for it by becoming

the greatest monarch in the history of her country. She could atone for it

all when she was Queen—and she
would
be Queen. Suddenly, for the first

time, she was sure of it. She had been right to hold her ground, to refuse

Savoy, to spurn hope of sanctuary and safety.

The people pressed about her litter in hope and she swore in that

moment never to betray their trust. Now when she was only twenty,

when her coronation might be ten, even twenty, years ahead, when the

world had narrowed to the short distance between one prison and another,

she could swear to do it. Now, surrounded by guards, without benefit of

an abbey and choirs and candles, without the holy oil of the annointing

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and the high solemn voices—now in the midst of a hot, loving crowd she

took the final vow of service.

t t t

All semblance of a royal progress ended at their destination.

The old stone palace of Woodstock stood on a small slope, surrounded

on all sides by enormous trees. Even from a distance Elizabeth could see

the broken windows and the crumbling stonework. The privy gardens

were choked and overgrown with weeds and the countryside littered

with uprooted trees. Winter was evidently unkind in this area.

Bruised and weary from the constant jolting of the broken litter,

Elizabeth stood on the uncut grass and stared with horrified disbelief at

the dilapidated building. It had not been in use as a royal residence for

many years and it was not difficult to see why.

Bedingfield escorted her to the primitive little gatehouse, where he

told her four rooms had been prepared for her use.

“
Prepared
?” Elizabeth blew on the chimney-piece and a thick cloud of

dust flew up into his heavy face.

“I can’t stay here—the damp is running down the walls.”

He glanced in a cursory fashion at the mildewed tapestries and the

paltry furniture. A fierce draught blew in through a broken window and

the ancient rushes were alive with cockroaches.

“I shall see what can be done about the window, madam, but I have

no orders to lodge Your Grace elsewhere in the meantime.”

She bit her lip and turned away. Mary had been right—she had been

a great deal better off in the Tower! She sat down wearily on the rickety

window-seat and stared out at the bleak countryside through the hole

in the dirty green glass. Dimly she became aware of Bedingfield’s angry

voice in the next chamber.

“How can I be expected to keep her close confined if only three

doors out of the four can be locked? You—fetch me a locksmith from

the village—and you, arrange the rota for her guard. I want sixty soldiers

around the house by day and forty at night. I want—” He broke off

abruptly as he suddenly saw her standing in the doorway. “Your Grace

desires something? I shall send your ladies to attend you.”

He treated her as though she were a high-born leper, avoiding her

company and the touch of her hand on his. Her eyes narrowed as he

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Susan Kay

bowed curtly and withdrew from the room; she had heard the tales about

him—taciturn, intractable, immune to all female charm.

So he thought he could safely keep his distance, did he?

We’ll see about that, gaoler! she thought. A month from now will see

you eating out of my hand like a tame wolfhound. You’ll go the way of

all the rest, my friend. I swear it!

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Chapter 2

P
hiilip of spain sat with stiff dignity beneath the canopy of

estate and his bride sat beside him. She was smiling and holding his

cold hand and chattering nervously like a young girl, though she was by

no means a girl, and he could see, with a flicker of mild distaste, that it

was some considerable time since she had been one—rather longer than

he had been led to believe by Renard and his father.

Grey spectacles of distaste had coloured Philip’s view of England since

the moment he landed in a summer downpour. Had he been a man

to show his feelings, he would be kicking his personal attendants in his

private apartments, strangling Renard, or maybe losing his frustration in

the soft curves of a whore’s body, on this, his last night of freedom. Instead

he sat here dutifully performing in this public peep-show, following the

Emperor’s orders to the letter, as always. No one could say he hadn’t

done his best—he always did his best. He had been impeccably charming

to these crude barbarians; he had drunk their foul beer, kissed the Queen

on her dry lips and tried not to notice that none of her simpering women

were on the right side of thirty. But all the time he was bored and

wretched and a little voice at the back of his mind whined persistently:

What have I done to deserve this?

The same thought found an echo in Mary’s mind, but on a note of

ecstasy rather than despair. She could not tear her eyes away from him,

this handsome symbol of her unity with Spain and the Catholic Church,

her husband—her
lover
! She kept him endlessly at her side, while they

conversed in broken foreign tongues, but at last, with her rigid sense of

Susan Kay

etiquette, she knew she could delay the moment of parting no longer.

One more night alone in the big state bed and then tomorrow—oh,

tomorrow!—she would be a woman at last.

“What shall I say?” His hand was on her arm, his bland face vaguely

anxious; he had a horror of losing his dignity in public, of being made to

look foolish and inadequate. “What shall I say to your court, madam, as I

take my leave—the correct form of address?”

His French was surprisingly poor, it took her a moment to follow his

meaning. And then she smiled gently.

“Goodnight, my lords and ladies,” she said slowly, in English.

He practised the phrase with grave persistence and Mary listened

indulgently. They had told her he was serious and moody, that he never

smiled, but he had smiled upon her tonight—smiled upon everyone. She

never noticed how cool and expressionless the china-blue eyes remained.

She thought only how truly Renard had spoken; they had indeed sent

her perfection itself !

Philip bowed courteously to the nobles of England and mumbled the

objectionable line; and at long last his duties for that day were behind him.

A lifetime of unremitting duty lay behind Philip, who had spent his

twenty-seven years mastering the rigid servitude of a Spanish prince. In all

of Europe there was no court which equalled the cold formality of Spain

and Philip had learned to subordinate his own personal desires beneath

the needs of the state. This would be his second marriage. The fruit of

the first remained behind in Spain—Don Carlos, a deformed, half-witted

creature of whom Philip was secretly bitterly ashamed. No one spoke

openly of Carlos’s disabilities because nobody dared to; but Philip knew

the Emperor looked now for a sane heir, rather than a gibbering lunatic.

He was stuck in this miserable, rain-sodden land until he produced the

goods and this time the raw materials were less than promising. A with-

ered old maid in place of the lusty little cousin he had first married—he

was frankly less than hopeful. He lay alone in his bed the night before his

wedding, stiff as a sacrificial offering on an altar, and wondered why God,

whom he had always served so faithfully, should have chosen to lay this

extra burden upon his shoulders.

For if he
had
to marry one of Henry Tudor’s misbegotten daughters,

surely it was only human to wish that it might have been the younger one.

t t t

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Winter crept on Woodstock, making the tumbledown palace bleaker and

more uncomfortable than ever. Sir Henry Bedingfield felt old and cold.

Seven months of his prisoner’s company had changed him almost beyond

recognition, into a weary elderly man pressingly aware of his years.

He had come to this post in full command of his faculties, a wooden,

uncompromising, vigorous knight who knew his orders and his own

mind. Accordingly, he had been quick to dismiss Elizabeth Sands, an

outspoken girl overready to complain on her mistress’s behalf. He had

believed that by exerting his authority so early and in so cavalier a fashion,

he would totally demoralise his prisoner. With the loss of her friend, she

was quite alone in a house full of unfriendly women and he ought, from

that time on, to have had little further trouble with her.

But the incident merely served to mark the beginning of his prob-

lems. Nothing cowed her. Nothing discouraged her endless, outra-

geous demands for one indulgence after another. She had even asked

for an English Bible, in spite of the Heresy Bill which was presently in

Parliament. He couldn’t understand her. She was like an irritating moth

flitting round him in a dark room and there was no way he could avoid

the touch of her wings against his face. Slowly he was being ground

down, reduced to a state of dithering mental anarchy which found him

“marvellously perplexed whether to grant her desires or say her nay.”

There were times when she flatly refused to speak to him. She would

withdraw to her room in a huff and against his will he would find himself

coaxing her out again, wooing her to walk in the gardens. Day after day

he scurried between her rooms and his own like a hunted lackey. Her

pitiful tears wrung his hard heart; her continual indispositions caused him

countless hours of anxiety; her outbursts of temper unnerved him. And

her smile—he had learnt to fear her smile above all else; it manipulated

him mercilessly. He was like a puppet dancing jerkily on the strings of her

emotions. She even persuaded him to act as her secretary and write her long

list of complaints to the Council in his own hand. Afterwards, he was in

such a flat panic at what he had done that he was forced to send a desperate

covering note with the document excusing, “this my evil writing, trusting

Her Highness will forgive my rudeness, and you, my lords, also.”

What had happened to him? He did not know. He only knew that he

was behaving like a fool and that all his letters to the Council marked him

as a very silly old man, so interminable and confused were they.

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He resorted frequently to his written commission from the Queen, by

now much thumbed and rather crumpled, seeking desperately for some

indication of where he had gone wrong.

“Item: he shall, at convenient times, suffer our said sister for her

recreation, to walk abroad and take the air in the garden…as he himself

shall be present in her company.”

Behind this apparently innocuous instruction lay long hours of panting

up and down the winding gardens locking and unlocking endless gates

behind the teasingly restless figure of “our said sister.”

“Item: he shall generally have good regard not only to the Princess,

but shall also do his best to cause the country thereabouts to continue in

good and quiet order.”

But down in the village the Bull inn was swarming with her unde-

sirable friends, of which the most suspicious was her Steward, Thomas

Parry, who complained loudly of the fare provided for his mistress and

exhibited “great doubts” over the strain on her funds.

Bedingfield was so terrified of what might be hatching down at the

Bull, that he summoned three of his brothers from their comfortable

estates and begged them to keep watch for treason.

But inside the house, he was mesmerised by the endless circles Elizabeth

ran around him. At every opportunity he besieged the Council, with many

apologies, to grant “the importunate desires of this great lady,” and he wrote

“this great lady” without realising how much it betrayed his capitulation to

hostile outsiders. He was harassed from morning to evening by an endless

series of smal crises, while his charge mimicked his orders to his face and

cal ed him “gaoler,” and uttered al manner of reproaches “too long to write.”

But the day she called him gaoler, he went down on his knees and

begged her not to give him that harsh name.

“I am only an officer appointed to serve you and guard you from

danger on the Queen’s instructions.”

“God bless the Queen,” observed her sister sharply, “and from such

good officers, dear Lord deliver me!”

She looked down on his bowed head and knew a moment of intense

satisfaction. This old stallion had had more kick in him than most—but