The Other Queen (50 page)

She lost in their constant rivalry for the throne of England, but she will win when the histories are written.

The historians, mostly men, will fall in love with her and make up excuses for her, all over again.

They tell me that my husband watched her execution with the tears pouring down his face, speechless with grief. I believe it. I know he loved her with a passion that cost him everything. He was a prosaic man to be overwhelmed by love—and yet it was so. I was there and I saw it happen. I believe no man could have resisted her. She was a tidal queen, a force of the moon, irresistible. He fell in love with her and she broke his fortune, his pride, and his heart.

And she? Who knows with her? Ask anyone who has loved a beautiful princess. You never know what she may be thinking. The nature of a princess is enigmatic, contrary, just like the sea. But it is my honest opinion that she never loved anyone at all.

And I? I saved myself from the storm that was Mary Queen of Scots and I know myself to be like a cottager who fastens his shutters and bolts the door and sees the gales blow over. George and I parted, he to his houses and me to mine. He guarded the queen and tried to keep her safe and tried to hide his love for her and tried to meet her bills, and I made a life for myself and for my children and I thanked God that I was far away from the two of them, and from the last great love affair of Mary Queen of Scots.

The years have gone by but my love of houses and land has been constant. I lost Chatsworth to my husband the earl when we quarreled and he turned against me, but I built a new house, a fabled house at Hardwick near the home of my childhood, with the greatest windows in the North of England, the most wondrous stretches of glass that anyone has ever seen, in great stone frames that look everywhere. The children even made a nursery rhyme about it:Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall , they sing. I have built a legend here.

I had my initials stamped on every side of the house in stone.ES it says, in stone at the edge of the towering roof, carved against the sky, so that from the ground, looking up, you can see my initials stamped on the clouds.ES the coronet bellows at the countryside, as far as the eye can see, for my house is set on a hill and the topmost roofs of my house shoutES .

Elizabeth Shrewsbury,my house declaims to Derbyshire, to England, to the world. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house from her own fortune, with her own skill and determination, built this house from the strong foundations into Derbyshire rock to the initials on the roof. Elizabeth Shrewsbury built this house to declare her name and her title, her wealth, and her dominance over this landscape. You cannot see my house and not recognize my pride. You cannot see my house and not know my wealth. You cannot see my house and not know that I am a woman self-made, and glad of it.

I have made my children secure in their fortunes; I have done what I set out to do for them. I have founded dynasties: my children own the titles of the earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire, and Lennox. My son William is the first Earl of Devonshire; my daughter Mary will be the Countess of Shrewsbury. And my granddaughter Arbella is a Stuart, as I planned with Queen Mary. The half-joking scheme that we dreamed over our sewing, I made real; I brought it about. Against the odds, against the will of Queen Elizabeth, in defiance of the law, I married my daughter to Charles Stuart, and their child, my granddaughter, is heir to the throne of England. If luck goes with her—my luck, by which I mean my utter determination—she will be queen one day. And what woman in England but me would have dreamed of that?

I say it myself: not bad—not bad at all. Not bad at all for the daughter of a widow with nothing. Not bad at all for a girl from Hardwick, who was born into debt and had to earn everything she owns. I have made myself, a new woman for this new world, a thing that has never been before: a woman of independent means and an independent mind. Who knows what such women will do in the future? Who knows what my daughters will achieve, what my granddaughters might do? The world of Elizabeth is full of venturers: both those who travel far away to distant lands and those who stay at home. In my own way, I am one of them. I am a new sort of being, a new discovery: a woman who commands herself, who owes her fortune to no man, who makes her own way in the world, who signs her own deeds and draws her own rents and knows what it is to be a woman of some pride. A woman whose virtue is not modesty, a woman who dares to boast. A woman who is glad to count her fortune and pleased to do well. I am a self-made woman and proud of it.

And nobody in this world will ever call me Mrs. Fool.

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Mary, Queen of Scots, is one of the great iconic characters of English history, and the research for this book has been a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to the reader. Recent work on the queen suggests a very different picture of her from the romantic and foolish woman of the traditional version. I believe she was a woman of courage and determination who could have been an effective queen even of a country as unruly as Scotland. The principal difference between her and her successful cousin Elizabeth was good advisors and good luck, not—as the traditional history suggests—one woman who ruled with her head and the other who was dominated by her heart.

Of course, a character who lives as long and in such dramatically contrasting circumstances as Queen Mary experienced will be interpreted in different ways by different writers. As in my version she suggests:

“A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore.”

My version of Queen Mary’s story focuses on her years in captivity, when she was held by one of the most fascinating women of the Elizabethan era: Bess of Hardwick. Interestingly, Bess is another woman whom popular history has defined in terms of her husbands. The new biography by Mary S. Lovell shows Bess laying the foundation of her fortune less as a gold digger and more as a businesswoman and developer with an eye for good investment and management. Her last husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is not a man who features much in the history books, but there is strong evidence to suggest that he was in love with Mary, with whom he lived as her host and jailer for sixteen years and whose death he did indeed oversee with tears pouring down his cheeks.

The story of these three is a tragedy at the very heart of dramatic times. Their hopes and disappointments in one another is set against the great rising of the North that aimed to free Mary, restore her to her throne in Scotland, guarantee her inheritance of the throne of England, and provide freedom of religion for Roman Catholics. If they had triumphed—as they looked certain to do—then Elizabethan England would have been a very different place.

The Northern rebelllion has been portrayed as the greatest challenge to the reign of Elizabeth, and yet it hardly features in the history books and fades into insignificance beside the excited descriptions of the less threatening Armada. Indeed, the Northern army amassed a fighting force strong enough to take the kingdom, far greater than that of Henry VII at Bosworth, and their defeat was, as I relate here, a failure of conviction rather than military strength.

The defeat of the Northern army proved to be the final blow in the decline of the North, which was always feared and hated by the Tudors and which still bears the scars today.

I am indebted, as always, to the fine historians whose works are listed in the bibliography, and the novel is heavily built on the historical record. But, also as always, when matters of fact are in dispute, I make up my own mind based on the evidence as I understand it; and when there is a gap in the historical record, I invent, as a novelist should, a fiction that accounts for the known facts.

For more background on this and all my other novels, for discussion with readers, and for many other features, please visit my website, www.philippagregory.com.