Philippa Gregory - The other queen

There is something in the set of her head, like a beautiful figure in a tableau, that makes one long for an army in the fields below her, an army to rescue her and take her away. Even though she is my prisoner I long for her escape. She is too fine a beauty to wait on a tower without rescue. She is like a princess in a child’s fairy tale; you cannot see the picture that she makes and not want to set her free.

“She has to be free,” I say unguardedly to Bess. “When I see her like this, I know she has to be free.”

“She is certainly a trouble to keep,” she says unromantically.

Bothwell,

They are taking me to Tutbury Castle now. The Northern lords and Howard will rise for me on October 6th. If you can come, you shall command the army of the North and we will ride out in battle again with everything to win. If not, wish me luck. I need you. Come.

Marie

I swear by Our Lady, this is the last time that I will ever be taken back to this hateful prison of Tutbury Castle. I go quietly now, but this is the last time they will take me up this twisting road to this stinking prison where the sun never shines into my room and where the wind blows steadily and coldly over the flat fields. Elizabeth hopes that I will die of the cold and the damp here, or of disease from the fetid mists from the river, but she is wrong. I will outlive her. I swear I will outlive her. She will have to murder me if she wants to wear black for me. I will not weaken and die to convenience her. I will enter the castle now but I shall leave it at the head of my own army. We will march on London and I shall imprison Elizabeth and we shall see how long she lasts in a damp castle of my choosing.

They can rush me back here, they can march me all the way back to Bolton Castle if they like, but I am a queen of the tides and the current is flowing fast for me now. They will not keep me prisoner for more than another week. They cannot keep me. This is the end for the Shrewsburys; they do not know it yet but they are about to be destroyed. The Northern lords will come for me with Norfolk at their head. The date is set, it is to be October 6th, and I shall date my reign from that day. We will be ready. I am ready now. Then my jailers will be my prisoners and I shall treat them as I wish.

Norfolk will be calling up his tenants now; thousands will answer his call. The Northern lords will muster their great army. All the Shrewsburys achieve by bringing me here, to their most miserable dungeon, is to imprison me somewhere that I will be easy to find. Everyone knows that I am kept at Tutbury; everyone knows the road to the castle. The Northern army will come for me within weeks, and the Shrewsburys can choose whether to die in defense of their dirty castle or surrender it to me. I smile at the thought of it. They will come to me and ask me to forgive them and to remember that they have always treated me kindly.

I respect the earl himself: no one could fail to admire him; and I like Bess well enough, she is a good-hearted woman, though very vulgar. But this will be the end of them, perhaps the death of them. Anyone who stands in my way, between me and my freedom, will have to die. October 6th is the day and they must be ready, as I am ready: for victory or for death.

I did not choose this road. I came to Elizabeth in need, as a kinswoman imploring her help. She treated me as an enemy and now she treats her own lords and her own cousin as enemies. Everyone who thinks she is a great queen should note this: in triumph she was suspicious and ungenerous. In danger she is filled with panic. She has driven me to despair and she has driven them into rebellion. She will have no one to blame but herself when they storm her castle and throw her into the Tower and put her on her mother’s scaffold. She and her archadvisor Cecil have such suspicious, embittered minds that they have imagined their own undoing and so brought it about. Like fearful, suspicious people always do, they have dreamed the worst and made it real.

I have a letter from my ambassador, the Bishop John Lesley of Ross, who is in London, watching the unraveling of Elizabeth’s power. I found it tucked into my saddle when we mounted helter-skelter for the ride to Tutbury. Even in the terrified rush to get from Wingfield Manor to Tutbury Castle there was time for a loyal man to serve me. The Shrewsburys’ own grooms are already turned to my side. Bess and her husband are betrayed in their own household. The place is full of spies, well paid with Spanish gold, waiting to serve me. Lesley’s note, scribbled in a mixture of French and code, tells me of panic in London, of Elizabeth in a frenzy of fear at hourly reports of an uprising which is breaking out all over the country.

The Northern lords are commanded to report to Elizabeth in London on pain of death, and they have defied her. They are summoning their men and as soon as they have an army they will come for you. They have confirmed the day as October 6th. Be ready.

Norfolk too is ready. He has disobeyed her command to attend court and fled to his house, Kenninghall, in Norfolk, to muster his army. All of the east of England will march for him.

The court has abandoned the progress and dashed back to London; now they are preparing Windsor Castle for a siege. The armed bands are being called out to defend London, but they cannot be mustered and armed in time. Half the citizens are hiding their goods and getting away from the City. The place is deserted at night, filled only with fear. The Spanish will have an army landed from the Netherlands within weeks to serve your cause, and they have sent gold through their banker Ridolfi, which I have passed to Norfolk to pay your soldiers.

Victory will be ours: it is a matter of weeks,

Ross

I scrunch up the letter and put it in my pocket. I will burn it as soon as we stop for dinner. I ride with my hands loose on the reins, hardly aware of the horse. I have a picture in my mind of Elizabeth, my cousin, rushing to Windsor Castle, looking around her court and seeing in every face the overly enthusiastic smile of betrayal. I know how it is. I have seen it myself. She will feel, as I felt at Holyrood, that there is no one she can trust; she will know, as I knew at Dunbar, that her support is draining away and her followers are promising their loyalty even as they are abandoning her. Now she knows that even Dudley, her friend from childhood and her lover for years, has plotted with Norfolk to rescue me. Her own lover, her own cousin, and every lord of her Privy Council are all on my side. Every lord in her court wants to see me freed. The common people are mine, heart and soul. She is utterly betrayed. When she came to the throne they called her “our Elizabeth” and now she has lost their love.

I think of Shrewsbury riding gravely beside me, his hurrying forward to lift me down from the saddle, his quiet pleasure in my company at dinner, his little gifts and his constant courtesy. He is her sworn liege man but I have won him over. I have won every lord in England to my side. I know it. I can see it in Shrewsbury and in every man in Bess’s household. All of them long to set me free.

Half the things we need are left behind at Wingfield and I cannot buy fresh vegetables for love or money in a radius of twenty miles. The countryside is exhausted and the men have run off to join the Northern army, which is mustering at Brancepath under the Earl of Westmorland, swearing loyalty to the Scots queen and a holy war for the Church of Rome. The country is on a war footing already, and when I send my steward to market he says they will sell him nothing; he feels as if he is the enemy.

It is terrifying to think that out there, in the wilderness of the North, there are squires and gentry and lords calling their tenants together, mustering their friends, arming their followers, and telling them to march under the banner of the five wounds of Christ to find me, to come to my house, to free my prisoner. I wake in the night at the slightest noise; in the day I am forever climbing to the castle wall to look out over the road; continually I see a cloud of dust and think it is them coming.

I have lived all my life as a private woman, on good terms with my neighbors, a good landlord to my tenants, a fair employer. Now I find myself at odds with my own people. I don’t know who is a secret enemy. I don’t know who would free the queen if they could, who would come against me if they dared. It makes me feel like a stranger in my own land, a newcomer in my own country. The people whom I think of as my friends and neighbors may be on the other side, may be against me, may even be my enemies. My friends, even my kin, may take arms against me, may see me as a traitor to the true queen, my prisoner.

She herself is demure, like a novice in a convent, with an escape plan hidden in her sleeve, and my husband trustingly remarks to me, “Thank God that she has not tried to break free. At least she knows nothing about the uprising.”

For the first time in my married life I look at him and I think: “Fool.”

It is a bad moment when a wife thinks her husband a fool. I have had four husbands and I have had bad moments with all of them, but I have never before been married to a man whose stupidity could cost me my houses and my wealth.