The Other Queen (34 page)

“I am sure you could see him…”

“She has no child of her own; she can have no child. She will soon be beyond childbearing years, if she is not dried up already. And so she would steal my son from his cradle. She would take my son and heir and make him her own. She would rob me of my heart, of all that makes my life worth living!”

“You have to think of it from her point of view. She would have him as a hostage. She would hold him to make sure that you kept to this treaty. That is why, when you agree to it, you must realize that you will have to keep to it.”

She hears nothing of this. “A hostage? Will she keep him in the Tower like the poor little princes? Will he never come out at all? Will he disappear as they did? Does she mean to kill him?”

Her voice breaks on the thought of it and I cannot bear her distress. I rise from my seat at the table and I go to look out of the window. In our rooms across the courtyard I can see Bess walking down the gallery, accounts books tucked under her arm. She feels a long way away from me now, her worries about rents and our costs are so trivial compared to the unfolding tragedy of the Scots queen. Bess has always been prosaic, but now I have the very heart of poetry beating wildly in my own house.

I turn back to the queen. She is sitting quite still with her hand shading her eyes. “Forgive me,” she says.

“Forgive my emotion. You must wish you had a cold-hearted queen to deal with, like your own. And forgive my stupidity. I had not read it properly. I thought that they meant only to supervise James’s education, to make him a good heir to the English throne. I did not realize that they want to take him from me altogether. I thought we were talking about a treaty—not about my destruction. Not about the theft of my child. Not about his kidnap.”

I feel too big and too awkward for the room. Gently, I stand behind her and put my hand on her shoulder, and with a sigh she leans back so that her head rests against my body. That little gesture, and the warmth of her head on my belly, fill me with tenderness, and an inevitable rising desire. I have to step away from her, my heart pounding.

“I was parted from my mother when I was just a little girl,” she says sadly. “I know what it is to be homesick and to miss one’s mother. I wouldn’t do that to my son, not for the throne of France, let alone Scotland.”

“He would be well cared for.”

“I was dearly loved in France,” she says. “And my dearest papa, King Henri, loved me better than his own daughters. He could not have been more kind and tender to me. But I longed for my mother, and I could never go to her. She visited me once, just once, and it was as if I became whole again, as if something was restored that had long been missing: my heart perhaps. Then she had to go back to Scotland to defend my throne for me, and your Cecil, your great William Cecil, saw her weakness and her loneliness and her illness and he forced the treaty on her that he is now forcing on me. She died trying to defend my throne against Elizabeth and Cecil. Now I have to fight the same battle. And this time they want to take my child and break my heart. Elizabeth and Cecil together destroyed my mother and now they want to destroy me, and destroy my son.”

“Perhaps we can negotiate,” I say, then I correct myself. “Perhaps you can negotiate. You could insist that the prince stay in Scotland, perhaps with an English guard and tutor?”

“I have to have him with me,” she says simply. “He is my son, my little boy. He has to be with his mother. Not even Elizabeth can be so hard-hearted as to steal my right to the throne and then my own son from me.”

Itry to stay courageous but some days I am exhausted by sadness. I miss my child and I am so fearful as to who is caring for him, and educating him, and watching over him. I trust the Earl of Mar, his guardian, to guide him and educate him, and his grandfather the Earl of Lennox should keep him safe if only for the sake of Darnley, his dead son, my boy’s father. But Lennox is a careless man, dirty and rough, with no affection for me, and he blames me for the death of his son. What would he know about caring for a little boy? What would he know about the tenderness of a little boy’s heart?

The warmer weather is coming and it is light at six o’clock in the morning and I am woken every dawn by birdsong. This is my third spring in England, my third spring! I can hardly believe I have been here for so long. Elizabeth promises I shall be returned to Scotland by the summer, and she has ordered Shrewsbury to let me ride out freely and receive visitors. I am to be treated as a queen and not as a common criminal. My spirits always used to lift at this time of the year; I was raised so long in France that I am accustomed to the warmth of those long beautiful summers. But this year I do not smile to see the primroses in the hedge, the birds flying, carrying straw and twigs for their nests. This year I have lost my optimism. I have lost my joy. The coldness and the hardness that my cousin Elizabeth embodies in her spinster rule seem to have drained my world of light and warmth. I cannot believe that a woman could be so cruel to me, and that I have to endure it. I cannot believe that she could be so unloving, so unmoved by my appeals to her. I have been the beloved of everyone who knows me; I cannot accept that she should remain so indifferent. I cannot understand unkindness. I am a fool, I know. But I cannot understand her hardness of heart.

I am writing at my desk when there is a tap at the door and Mary Seton comes flying into the room, her hood half-pushed off her head. “Your Grace, you will never believe—”

“What?”

“Elizabeth has been excommunicated! The Holy Father himself has published a papal bull against her. He says she is a usurper with no right to the throne and that no Christian need obey her. He says it is a holy duty to pull her down from her borrowed power. He is calling upon every Christian in the world to defy her. He is calling on every Roman Catholic to rebel! He is calling on every Roman Catholic power to invade! He is calling all Christians to destroy her. This is like a crusade!”

I can hardly breathe. “At last,” I say. “I was promised this. The Northern lords told me that Roberto Ridolfi had the Holy Father’s word that this would be done. But when I heard nothing, I thought it had all gone wrong. I even doubted Ridolfi.”

“No! He was true to you. The bull was published last year,” Mary whispers, out of breath. “In time for the uprising. But the bull has only just arrived. Oh! If only it had come before! If it had come during the uprising! All of England would have turned against Elizabeth.”

“It’s not too late now,” I say rapidly. “Everyone of the true faith will know it is their duty to throw her down and that the Holy Father has named me as Queen of England. And besides, it will force my family in France, and Philip of Spain, to act. It is not only justice but now it is their holy duty to put me on my throne of Scotland, and England too.”

Mary’s eyes are shining. “I will see you wear your crown again,” she declares.

“You will see me wear the crown of England,” I promise her. “This does not just mean my freedom, it means that the Pope recognizes me as the true heir of England. If the Holy Father says that I am Queen of England, who can stand against me? And all the Papists in the world are bound by their faith to support me. Mary, I shall be Queen of England and Scotland. And I shall crown my son as Prince of Wales.”

“Thank God that the Holy Father has ruled in your favor!”

“Thank God for Ridolfi, who put my case to him,” I say quietly. “He is a great friend to me. God keep him, wherever he is. And when I come to my own again he shall be among the men who can claim their reward for serving me.”

Ihear them ringing the bells in the church at Chatsworth as I am ordering the linen for the Scots queen’s bed. She is to come here within a few days, and my heart rushes in sudden terror. It can’t be an uprising again. Pray God it is not the landing of the Spanish armada. I send one of the page boys racing to discover what is amiss now. He comes back and finds me in the laundry room, a list of linen in my shaking hand, and tells me that the queen Mary Stuart has been declared the true Queen of England and the Pope has called on all those of the old faith to destroy the bastard Elizabeth and put the true queen, Mary, in her place, and there is an uprising for her in Norwich and they say the whole of the east of England will turn out for the true queen and the true faith.

I am so shocked for a moment that I pretend I want some fresh air and go out to the gallery and sink down on a bench among all the painted saints. I can hardly believe that this nightmare goes on, goes on and on, and we never achieve victory, and we never achieve peace. I look at my painted saints, as if they could tell me the answer to the purgatory of the times that we endure. God knows we are a small country and there are very few of us with a vision as to how the country should be. Now the old scarlet whore of Rome has called down on us the rage of the rest of Christendom: Philip of Spain, Madame Serpent in France—they will think that battle against us is a crusade, a holy war. They will think themselves commanded by God to destroy us. They will come against us; united they will master us.

“We are so few,” I whisper to myself. It is true. We are a little island, with enemies for neighbors in Ireland and France and the Spanish Netherlands just half a day’s sail away. We are so few who really understand what destiny God has given us. We are so few who are prepared to serve as His saints to bring the purity of His true church to England, His chosen country. We are surrounded by enemies, we are tempted by Satan, we are besieged by the superstitions and lies of the old faith; they will destroy us if they can.

I tell the boy to run and order the vicar to stop them ringing the bells. Tell him it is my command. If they are pealing to sound a warning, we none of us need to be reminded that we are on the edge of disaster.

An old woman on the throne, no heir in the nursery, a faith under constant threat, a nation in the making which could be wiped out in a moment. On the other hand, if they are ringing the peal, as they did at Durham and York, at Ripon and even in the end at Barnard Castle, to say that the old faith will triumph, then they can silence the bells and go to hell while my word carries any weight in Derbyshire.

I am a Protestant. I will live and die a Protestant. My enemies will think that is because it has been a religion to profit me; cynics will point to my gold candlesticks and my lead mines and my coal mines and my stone quarries, and even to these stolen painted saints in my gallery. But what the cynics don’t understand is that these are the goods that God has given to me as a reward for the purity of my faith. I am a Protestant through and through. I don’t acknowledge this Stuart Papist queen; I deny the wisdom of the priest of Rome; I deny the sanctity of the bread and wine. It is bread, it is wine. It is not body and blood of Christ. The Virgin Mary was a woman, like any of us; Jesus was a carpenter, a working man proud of his tables, as I am a working woman proud of my houses and lands. The kingdom of the saints will come when the world has earned purity, not when enough money has been poured into the collecting plate of the church. I believe in God—not in a wizard doled out at a price by the priests of the old church. I believe in the Bible, which I can read for myself in English. And more than anything else I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life, and in my accounts books which tell me how well or ill I am doing. I don’t believe in miracles, I believe in hard work. And I don’t believe that Queen Mary is now Queen of England just because some old fool in Rome chooses to say so.

We are at our happiest, eccentric pair that we are, the greatest nobleman in England and the rightful queen, when we are on the road traveling together. I learned that he loved me when we were riding by night, on the way to Coventry. In the heart of danger, he thought only of me. But I had learned to value him long before then, on our first journey: when we were riding from Bolton Castle to Tutbury and I hoped that he would escort me back to Scotland within days. I learned, on those journeys, to enjoy a pleasure in his company that I have never felt with any other man. I do not desire him; the idea is laughable—no woman who has known Bothwell could settle for a safe man, an honorable man, or even a quiet man. But I feel that I can rest on him, I can trust him to keep me safe, I can be myself with him. He reminds me of my father-in-law Henri II, the King of France, who always cared for me so well, who treasured me as his little pearl, who always made sure that I was well served and honored as the Queen of Scotland, the next Queen of France, and Queen of England. Shrewsbury’s quiet constant care reminds me of being a treasured girl, the favorite of the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. With him, I feel like a young beauty again, the girl that I was: unspoiled, untroubled, filled with absolute confidence that everything would always go well for me, that everyone would always love me, that I would inherit my thrones one after another and become the most powerful queen in the whole world by right and without contradiction.

We ride side by side and he talks to me of the countryside and points out the features of the landscape.

He is knowledgeable about birds and wildlife, not just the game, but the songbirds and the little birds of the hedgerows. He cares for the land; he loves it like a countryman and can tell me the names of the flowers and laughs when I try to say their impossible names like “ladies’ bedstraw” and “stitchwort.”

I am allowed to ride ahead of the guards these days. I am a queen with attendants once more, not a prisoner with jailers, and for once we ride in fresh air, untroubled by companions and not surrounded by a crowd in a storm of dust. At every village, as ever, the common people come out to see me, and sometimes they gather around the gibbet at the crossroads where the body of a man, dead for my cause, swings in chains. Shrewsbury would take me quickly past these gruesome puppets but I pull up my horse and let the people see me cross myself and bow my head to say a prayer for the soul of a good man who died for the true faith and the true queen.