Philippa Gregory - The other queen

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.

At almost every village I see the quick, half-hidden movement as the good men and women cross themselves too and their lips whisper the words of a Hail Mary. These are my people; I am their queen. We have been defeated by Elizabeth and her traitorous army once, but we will not be defeated again. And we will come again. We will come under the flag of the Pope. We will be unbeatable. She can be very sure of that.

“We will go from Chatsworth on to Wingfield,” Shrewsbury says to me as we stop to dine on a riverbank, a simple meal of roast meats, breads, and cheeses. “Chatsworth is so much Bess’s house, she begrudges every penny she spends there if it is not on her eternal rebuilding and refashioning. I would rather have you under my own roof, and Wingfield Manor has been in my family for generations. And from Wingfield, if you can agree with the queen, I am to escort you to Edinburgh.”

“I will agree,” I say. “How can I refuse her? She has me as her prisoner; there is nothing worse that she can do against me. We are both entrapped. The only way I can be free, and that she can be free of me, is for us to agree. I have nothing with which to bargain against her. I am forced to agree.”

“Even to her holding your son?” he asks.

I turn to him. “I have been thinking of that, and there is a solution I would consider, if you would help me?”

“Anything,” he says at once. “You know I would do anything for you.”

I savor the words for a moment, then I go to the main question. “Would you serve as his guardian? If Prince James were to live with you, in your house, would you care for him, as you have done for me?”

He is astounded. “I?”

“I would trust you,” I say simply. “And I would trust no one else. You would guard him for me, wouldn’t you? You would care for my boy? You would not let them corrupt him? You would not let them turn him against me? You would keep him safe?”

He slips from his stool and kneels on the carpet that they have laid on the riverbank under my chair. “I would lay down my life to keep him safe,” he says. “I would devote my life to him.”

I give him my hand. This is the last card in the pack that I have to play to get myself back to Scotland and ensure at the same time that my son is safe. “Can you persuade Cecil that James shall come to you?” I ask. “Propose it to him as your own idea?”

He is so in love with me that he does not stop to think that he should ask his wife first, or that he should beware when an enemy of his country asks for a special favor.

“Yes,” he says. “Why would he not agree? He wants a settlement, we all do. And I would be honored to care for your son. It would be as if…to guard him for you would be like…” He cannot say it. I know he is thinking that to raise my son would be as if we had married and had a child together. I cannot encourage him to speak like this; I have to keep him carefully placed: in his marriage, in the esteem of his peers, in the trust of his queen, in his position in England. He is of no use to me if they think of him as disloyal. If they think too badly of him they will take me from him and not trust him with my son.

“Don’t say it,” I whisper passionately, and it silences him at once. “Some things must never be said between us. It is a matter of honor.”

This checks him, as I knew it would. “It is a matter of honor to us both,” I say to make sure. “I cannot bear that men should accuse you of taking advantage of your position as my guardian. Just think how dreadful it would be if people should say that you had me at your mercy and dishonored me in your thoughts.”

He almost chokes. “I would never! I am not like that!”

“I know. But it is what people would say. People have said terrible things about me, for all of my life. They might accuse me of trying to seduce you, so that I could escape.”

“No one could think such a thing!”

“You know that is what they think already. There is nothing that Elizabeth’s spies will not say against me. They say the worst things about me. They would not understand what I feel…for you.”

“I would do anything to protect you from slander,” he declares.

“Then do this,” I say. “Persuade Cecil that you can guard my son James, and I can get back to Scotland. Once I am back on my throne I will be safe from scandal and from Cecil’s spies alike. You can save me. And you can keep James safe. Keep him safe for love of me. It can be our secret. It can be the secret of our two hidden hearts.”

“I will,” he says simply. “Trust me, I will.”

It is agreed, thank God, it is agreed and will shortly be sealed and signed. The queen is to be returned to Scotland and I shall be guardian to her son. Nothing less than this duty would console me for the loss of her. But to stand as father to her boy will be everything. I shall see her beauty in him, and I will raise him as she would wish. My love for her will be invested in him; she will see a good young man come from my care. She will be proud of him; he will be a boy of my making, and I will forge him into a good prince for her. I will not fail her in this. She trusts me and she will find me trustworthy. And it will be such a joy to have a little boy in the house, a boy whose mother is a woman of such beauty, a boy that I can love for his mother’s and for his own sake too.