The Queen's Cipher (45 page)

“Do you really think she would have let Dudley run the country?” Cheryl wanted to know. In her experience, powerful women never wanted to share anything.

Guest nodded solemnly. “If something happened to her, yes, she was prepared to see him rule in her place.”

In 1562 Elizabeth contracted smallpox and thought she was going to die. Regaining consciousness after a feverish coma, she left instructions that Dudley should be made Lord Protector.

“She also requested that a groom called Tamworth, who slept in Dudley’s chamber, should receive an income of £500 a year,” he added.

“That’s hush money,” Freddie gasped. “An annuity of £500 was a hefty sum, enough to buy a servant’s silence about what had gone on in his master’s bedroom.”

But Cheryl was still not convinced. Like any modern girl, she had difficulty in imagining a concealed pregnancy. “How could Elizabeth carry a child to full term without anyone noticing that she was pregnant?”

“Perhaps her courtiers were afraid to speak out. Actually, that’s not true.” The barrister corrected himself. “Early in 1561 one of her ladies-in-waiting, the Duchess of Suffolk, remarked waspishly that Queen Elizabeth looked very pale, ‘like one lately come out of child-bed.’ A delicious piece of gossip, don’t you think?”

“What about underclothes,” she persisted. “Could they conceal a swollen belly?”

“You mean those whalebone hooped petticoats, I suppose. They were originally designed for that purpose.
Guardainfante
was a Spanish word for the farthingale.”

Freddie’s eidetic memory supplied an example from Jacobean drama. “Webster wrote about ‘bawd farthingales’ disguising a pregnancy in
The Duchess of Malfi
.”

“I suppose Elizabeth had lots of farthingales,” said Cheryl, brightening.

“Cupboard loads,” Guest dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “I tend to soft-pedal the royal birth theory. It’s hard enough convincing people Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays without adding a second conspiracy. However, within these four walls, let me stoke the fires of controversy. Have you heard of Roger Ascham?”

“Royal tutor, greatest teacher of his age,” Freddie ventured.

“That’s the fellow. Ascham was the ultimate insider.”

“What’s this leading up to?” Cheryl inquired rudely.

“Forgive me, my dear, lawyers tend to take their time. Ascham’s
The Schoolmaster
contained a very strong hint about a royal birth.”

The book had been written at Elizabeth’s request to provide a ‘right order of teaching’ for young noblemen and princes. When it was finished, Ascham gave her a manuscript copy which included a preface,
Divae Elizabethae
, in which he mentioned how King David fell into ‘the deepest pit of wickedness,’ committing adultery and murder, yet received divine forgiveness. Ascham thought this Bible story mirrored the ‘good dealings of God with your Majesty.’

Freddie whistled aloud. “He’s actually accusing Elizabeth of the sin of David. David commits adultery with Bathsheba, making her pregnant, and then plots the death of her husband Uriah the Hittite so he can marry her. For Uriah read Amy Dudley. Elizabeth must have hated this. She’d get rid of the preface, if not of Ascham.”

“Yes, well, Ascham not only survived, he must have kept a handwritten copy of his seditious preface because it appeared two hundred years later in an anthology of his works.”

“Did anyone else risk the royal wrath by publishing lewd stories about her?”

“Only when she was dead,” Guest extracted a copy of
Albion’s England
from a drawer in his desk. William Warner’s epic poem had been an Elizabethan best-seller. Long after the queen’s death, in 1612, a version appeared which included a new couplet: ‘Hence England’s heirs-apparent have of Wales been princes, till Our Queen deceased concealed her heir, I know not for what skill.’

“He’d obviously been waiting to get that one in,” was Cheryl’s verdict on the matter.

Guest paused for dramatic effect. “Guess who also hinted that Elizabeth had a child?”

His visitors shook their heads in unison.

“Francis Bacon! Four years after her death he publishes an essay on her reign,
A Collection
of the Felicities of Queen Elizabeth
, in which he says: ‘Childless she was, and left no issue behind her, which was the case of many of the most fortunate princes, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Trajan and others.’ Bacon liked to be succinct but here he was wasting words. If the Queen was childless, she couldn’t have had any issue. While none of the rulers he mentioned had legitimate heirs, Alexander and Julius Caesar had bastard sons. Indeed, Alexander had two of them by different women.”

“Perhaps Bacon didn’t know about these illegitimate offspring.”

Guest pursed his lips. “Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Bacon also wrote a
Discourse in Praise of Queen Elizabeth
which wasn’t published until after his death in which he returned to the question of her virginity, saying that great leaders either died childless or were ‘unfortunate’ in their children like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and a string of other Roman emperors who had sons in and out of wedlock that did not succeed them. You see what he’s saying, don’t you?  It’s hard for the modern mind to comprehend the subtle innuendos and coded language of a bygone time when we live in an age of massive indiscretion where everything is spelt out in capital letters.”

There was a knock on the door and his legal secretary came into the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt but the instructing solicitors have arrived.”

“Thank you, Miss Beckett; perhaps you’ll give them my apologies while I wind up here.”

Guest stood up and shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, we’ve run out of time …”

“Just one more question.” Cheryl fixed her green eyes on the barrister. “Did anyone even hint that Francis was the Queen’s bastard?”  

“That’s a fascinating subject, Miss Stone, but it will have to wait for another day.”

“No, it won’t, you can keep those lawyers waiting. Come and sit next to me Seymour,” she said, patting the sofa’s soft leather upholstery with the palm of her hand.

The temptation was too great. “Well, I suppose I could spare a few minutes.”

As he joined her on the couch Cheryl winked at Freddie. “Right, what about all that lovely innuendo you were promising us.”

“Lawyers don’t always hit it off,” he began. “Sir Edward Coke was Bacon’s rival and the two men hated one another. Their rivalry was very evident in the Essex trial where, as Attorney-General, Coke led for the prosecution but made such a mess of the case that Bacon had to take over from him. This brought matters to a head and Coke publicly taunted Bacon for his unfortunate birth calling him ‘less than the least’ and saying he would clap a writ of
Capias Utlagatum
on his back.”

“What on earth is that?”

“It’s a writ of outlawry and, of course, bastards were outside the law. Bacon replied that he had been Coke’s better and may be again, when it pleased the Queen.”

“That’s a coded remark, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure,” said Guest snuggling up to Cheryl, “but that’s how it was in those days, my dear. Secrets were supposed to be kept, particularly in a country ruled by a ruthless old woman who’d spent the previous forty years stressing her virginity.”

Freddie felt like the forgotten man. “Okay, let’s assume Elizabeth was Francis’ mother. That makes Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon his foster parents. My problem is this. I find it impossible to believe that a devout Puritan like Lady Anne would agree to fake a pregnancy.”

“I’ve given that some thought,” Guest said smoothly. “Lady Anne is one of Elizabeth’s principal ladies-in-waiting; her husband is the Lord Keeper and her brother-in-law is Secretary of State. The family has invested everything in the Protestant succession. Think what they might have lost if the truth had got out about the Queen’s condition.”

The desk top became Guest’s living theatre as he objectified the inkwell, blotter and paper clips to visualize this Tudor melodrama. His speech was low and rapid as he painted a dystopian picture of a pregnant queen unable to marry the man she loved, turning to her chief minister Cecil for guidance.

“He tells her not to worry, he’ll sort something out. He thinks of his sister-in-law Anne, who had had one sickly child and doubted whether she could have another. As a good wife she had sublimated her hatred of the Catholic faith to support her husband when he served Mary Tudor. Having swallowed her religious principles once, surely she could do so again, this time to protect a Protestant queen. If Elizabeth lost the throne, the true faith would go with her. By pretending to give birth Anne would prolong her husband’s career, gain a desired second child and earn the thanks of her sovereign. That’s a tempting pitch, don’t you think?”

“I’d do it in her shoes,” Cheryl said without hesitation.

Freddie disagreed. Lady Anne was a religious fanatic: a woman who believed her infant daughter Mary died because she had been given the name of the Catholic queen.

Seymour Guest waved an admonishing finger. “My dear chap, you are hoist with your own petard. If Anne believed God was punishing her for conspiring with Papists, she might well fear his wrath if she didn’t do everything in her power to prevent the Catholic faith from returning to England. In any case, there are hints that she went through with the deception.”

“Let’s hear them then.”

The barrister patted his bald head – surely designed for a horsehair wig – and sank further into his sofa, torn between a wild enthusiasm for his subject and the rigid code of a profession that expected its practitioners to make careful, responsible statements. Slowly, he began to assemble the dry bones of disconnected fact.

Rawley’s biography of Francis Bacon stated he ‘was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand.’ York House was the Bacon family home while York Place was Queen Elizabeth’s Whitehall palace. Surely Bacon’s chaplain would know where his master was born? Bacon’s first French biographer Pierre Amboise claimed he was ‘born to the purple,’ the royal colour. Sir Nicholas Bacon made virtually no provision for his youngest son in his will and, after his death, Francis pressed an undisclosed suit with the queen for a decade or more before telling his uncle Burghley he was prepared to settle for ‘the kingdom of the mind.’

“What about Lady Anne? Did she drop any hints?”

“One big one, you might think. In a 1593 letter to her elder son Anthony she said of Francis that she had never set out ‘to treat him as a ward; such a word is far from my motherly feeling for him.’ In law, the term ‘ward’ conveys guardianship. Why should a mother talk of her son in such a fashion?”

“Because he had brought the matter up and she was responding to the charge?”

Guest wiped his forehead with a fine silk handkerchief. “Precisely so and I would add this. In talking about his relationship with the queen Bacon used such graphic language. He called himself a lost child, a hawk tethered to the royal wrist, and a ‘withered branch’ of the Queen’s ‘roots.’”

Having run through these arguments, Seymour Guest sat back to study the effect they were having on his visitors. “There is also some genetic evidence,” he added. “Bacon didn’t look remotely like his supposed parents and he had dark brown eyes while they had light grey ones. The odds against this happening are 100 to 1.”

“Queen Elizabeth had black eyes and Leicester was so dark he was called ‘the Gypsy,’” Freddie said excitedly. “They could easily have been Francis Bacon’s parents.”

“Well, I hope that’s been helpful.” Guest stood up to bring the meeting to a close.

“There’s one thing that puzzles me,” he added as an afterthought. “If I was a man of mystery, secret author and royal bastard, I’d want to leave something behind to explain my strange life.”

“That’s interesting,” Freddie said after a long pause. “Didn’t Bacon talk about writing some kind of treatise for the people, Seymour?”

Guest flicked imaginary dust off his suit lapel. “He did but Bacon theorists have wasted too much time searching for such Holy Grails.”

“What about a second copy of Elizabeth’s secret marriage certificate,” Cheryl interjected. “Mightn’t Bacon have acquired that and hidden it away somewhere?”

Guest looked at his watch. “It’s possible.”

She grabbed a well manicured hand and stroked it. “Come on, Seymour, pretty please. Tell us where such a document might be.”

“Well, if you must know, I’d plump for Canonbury Tower which Bacon leased in 1616 when he was Attorney-General. The building has a mysterious stone carving and secret passageways and meetings of the so-called ‘Invisible College’ took place there.”

“It sounds absolutely wonderful. Can we go there, Freddie?”

“You’d better ask Seymour. The Bacon Society has rooms in the building.”

Guest smiled. “How about three o’clock tomorrow? I’ll get the caretaker to show you around. Miss Beckett will send you a confirmatory email.”

He glanced at the wall clock. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of time. My instructing solicitors will be champing at the bit. Freddie, it’s been a pleasure. Cheryl, I hope to see more of you later.”

“Not a chance,” she muttered, once they were out in the corridor.

1 JULY 2014

The Met Office’s wet weather forecast hardly did justice to the torrential rain and gale force winds that buffeted them as they left the shelter of the tube station.  Freddie’s umbrella was blown inside out, forcing them to walk briskly, heads down against the driving rain.

“You wouldn’t think it was midsummer,” Freddie yelled above the rumbling thunder as they splashed their way through one of Canonbury’s gentrified garden squares.

Cheryl shook some of the water out of her bedraggled locks and raised her voice to the heavens. “‘Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched the steeples, drowned the cocks!’”

She looked at his soaking jeans. “Your cock looks pretty drowned in those trousers.”

“Don’t you like it? I call it my Tsunami look.”

“Of course I like it,” she shouted back at him. “You know me. But what about you and that American bitch? Do you still love her?”