WHITEHALL, MAY – JUNE 1610
The stir had reached all the way to the stable yard. Throwing dignity to the wind, with my attendants puffing behind me, I trotted back from the stables after an early morning ride in St James’s Park. There had been unfamiliar French grooms and strange horses still steaming in the yard. The stable hands had goggled at me wide-eyed until I wanted to shout ‘What ails you? I don’t know either, do I?’
As if I could explain anything yet. But I meant to learn.
As I crossed the Great Court, the hair lifted on my neck. My father’s roar of unreasoning fury could be heard throughout the Riverside of Whitehall. I heard a distant crash. The maid scrubbing the floor of the passage lifted her head and froze. A groom paused as he replaced a burnt candle with a new one. Two more stood motionless with their chins hoiked up over armloads of firewood. They all scrambled to attention when they saw me, but no one spoke.
Was it possible that he had learned about my trespass to see the picture in his absence? I crept closer, into the next corridor, to try to hear what he said.
Hearing the shouts, a secretary paused, turned back, thenchanged his mind twice more in a way that in other circumstances would have been comical. At last, reluctantly, seeming not to have noticed me, he continued onwards towards the source of the outcry.
I’m the First Daughter, I reminded myself. I couldn’t run away to hide just because my father was enraged. I walked on into the great gallery of the king’s lodgings.
‘That Papist viper cunt!’ His voice carried clearly along the gallery. ‘So! Ma
bairn’s
no a fit match for the spawn of that great whore of France? Are ye tellin’ me that? The royal widow’s got her nose up the arse of Spain, has she?’
Not my trespass, after all. France.
I entered an antechamber filled with silent petitioners. Everyone listened, not daring to breathe.
‘She’ll marry her whelps with Spain now, will she? A double marriage, you say? She spits in the eye of the king of England, does she? Weel, you go tell her that I’ll marry my daughter to…’
Someone closed the door of the room where the king was. I could still hear my father ranting, but his words would no longer be distinguished.
I rushed back to the stables and found the groom just leading Wainscot into her stall.
‘Please saddle her up again,’ I said.
Henry sat with his head on his arms. When he raised his face, I saw that he had recently been crying. Several of his gentlemen sat around him in postures of dejection. The Seigneur de St Antoine leaned against the wall, head down and red-eyed.
‘My other father is dead,’ said Henry. ‘Cecil had word three days ago, but I refused to believe it until confirmation came today from France.’
I took off my cloak and slung it into a pair of waiting arms.
Henri IV of France had been assassinated.
I decided not to announce that our father was in a rage at Henri’s widow. I sat down and let Henry pour out his grief to me.
‘On the eve of setting off to make war against Germany,’ said Henry. ‘Oh, Elizabella, why does God allow the great men to die too soon? I had looked forward to having him as your father-in-law. He had every virtue our father lacks. He would have taught me how to be a king.’
I knew it was wicked of me to be secretly grateful that I might not now have to marry the great man’s son. I should be grieving, not wondering who would replace the Dauphin in my father’s ambitions.
How did you judge a man, anyway? I wondered. How could you guess, from the glimpse of a portrait, or the official language of a letter, whether he would make a tolerable husband or would wither you into an empty, half-mad shell, like the queen?
No matter how often I went to stand on the privy stairs, I could not see where I was. I visited the Haringtons at Kew. I received petitioners, even though they wanted only insignificant trifles from me – a place for their niece among my chamberers, or a commission to make me a new wired collar or saddle for one of my horses. Men offered to give me a puppy or silver goblet engraved with all the Muses, if I would ask Henry to hear their petitions for weightier favours than I could offer. They did not ask me for licences, military commissions, interventions or backing for founding settlements in the New World. Nor for my consent to marriage.
At Tallie’s suggestion, I gave new jackets to my gentleman musicians. Remembering her very first warning, I also gave Anne a magnificent pair of velvet sleeves, closely cross-hatched with golden threads and a pearl set at every crossing. Also, a dainty chain of gold and enamel flowers very like my own.
My ladies were now wondering openly how soon I would make a match for Tallie with the free-born Peter Blank, great-great-grandson of the royal trumpeter.
‘Do you like him?’ I asked her. It would be easy enough to arrange. Though I could not bear the thought of her leaving to live with a husband in my brother’s household.
‘I believe that we share chiefly the colour of our skin,’ she said. ‘And even that’s not as great a resemblance as it might seem. His mother’s as white as you are. But I don’t discourage him. He’s pleasant enough company and more than happy to gossip with me about the prince’s household.’
Tallie continued to play her lute and listen. She continued to widen her acquaintance among the palace serving people. She read people as I did and understood what I wanted to know, beyond the names of future husbands. Who attended on whom. Who quarrelled and passed each other in silence with averted eyes, or else smiled too civilly. Who exchanged quick secret smiles, or else looked away too quickly. Who waited to petition my father, who petitioned my mother, and who sought favours from Henry. And which men, like Sir Francis Bacon, petitioned all three.
She failed only in learning how Frances Howard progressed with setting her cap at my brother. My brother never spoke with his gentlemen about their relationship, or lack of one. His intimate servants deflected bribes. The Howards had built a wall of loyal retainers around themselves that even Tallie could not penetrate.
I listened to her evening reports when she came into my chamber with her lute, as if to sing me to sleep. Every time I added the name of a prospective husband to our list in dark oak gall ink, I waited for the pen to leap or twitch in my fingers as a sign. But each new name oozed from the nib and lay inert on the page, as lifeless as the others.
The murder of the French king by a crazed Catholic, and the newly proposed alliance through marriage of Bourbon
France and Hapsburg Spain continued to dominate concerns in Whitehall. For once, the king and prince were in agreement. For different reasons, they both saw the possible alliance of the two greatest Catholic powers of western Europe as a threat.
Though Henri IV had been a convert to Catholicism, he had nevertheless given French Protestants ‘liberty of conscience and impartial justice'. Henry and his band of knights now talked of retaliatory war with the Catholic powers.
Our father, the Peacemaker King, took Marie de Medici’s refusal to have me as a daughter-in-law as both a personal and a political insult. I could not have been the only person in Whitehall to suspect that a part of his fury was terror that a regicide had succeeded. A crazed French Papist had succeeded where the English Gunpowder Plotters had failed. All recusant Catholics in England were stripped of their arms and forbidden to come within ten miles of the court. I amended my list:
The Dauphin of France, now Louis XIII of France. Catholic
Edward Seymour. Protestant
William Seymour…
I asked Henry what he knew of these two brothers, now being discussed as serious candidates by the Privy Council after the withdrawal of the French marriage.
‘Our Seymour cousins are too ambitious for the king’s liking,’ he told me. ‘And too close to the throne in their own right. Our father will never let any of them get a grip on real power by marrying you.’
I was third in line to the English throne. The Seymours were descended from Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, the line named in Henry’s will as his heirs. Their claim had been set aside. My father’s line were descended from the monarch’sother sister, Margaret. I could see how some people might argue that we were usurpers.
‘I hear that the Howard women are ambitious too,’ I said wickedly.
‘I don’t know where you hear such things,’ said my brother coldly.
So far as Tallie and I could learn, France had never, in fact, made me a firm offer of marriage. Nor, for that matter, had any of my other suitors. My portrait was painted, copied, sent abroad. Portraits of my possible husbands were sent back in return. From the documents that Tallie managed to read, copy or steal, I learned only that negotiations ebbed and flowed at a stately pace and resolved nothing. Then I sat for yet another requested portrait.
On the 5th of June, Henry was invested as Prince of Wales. The poets and other chroniclers suffered feverish transports over my brother’s noble bearing, the feasts, the tilts, the fireworks. And I was invited at last to perform in one of my mother’s masques.
Tethys’s Festival,
with the queen herself as Tethys, Queen of the Ocean. I was to play the River Thames.
At last, I thought, I will be able to show that I can do more than stand to be gawped at by marriage-brokers. I would show my mother that I could sing, and dance any figure asked of me.
Throughout most of the masque, I reclined silent and unmoving on a shell. My cousin Arbella appeared, likewise shelled, as the Derbyshire Trent.
When I did speak, to pay homage as a tributary river to an Ocean Queen, she looked through me. Then I had to keep a smile on my face while Baby Charles played a much larger role, which included giving the new Prince of Wales a sword set with diamonds.
That should have been my part, I thought, behind my painful, fixed grin.
Then my younger brother stirred the court to cries of acclaim and delight when he danced prettily with a flock of noble girl-children.
I tried to rejoice for Henry, who played his part with all his accustomed grace and dignity. He triumphed in the tilts like a true warrior prince. He was cheered in the streets. Men threw their hats in the air as he passed on horseback. Women threw him flowers and kisses. He smiled and was kind to those who struggled out of the crowds to touch him. He danced with all the ladies, but most of all with Frances Howard.
I told myself that I must try to be more like him, to rise above my own petty concerns. Watching him smile and shine, you would never have guessed that only a month before, an assassin had broken out of a crowd to kill the king of France, for whom my brother still grieved. You would never have guessed his rage at our father, which he later confided to me in private. The king had cut the prince’s budget for the celebrations, blaming the failure of parliament to agree relief from the royal debts.
‘And his majesty’s reasons for scanting me?’ Henry was angrier than I had ever seen him. ‘I am mounted too high in the people’s love! And for that sin must be punished.’
I scolded myself. I knew I was ignoble. But this private confidence from my brother was my favourite part of the celebrations.
Then, suddenly, Henry cut himself off from me. Something happened to him shortly after his installation as Prince of Wales and I could not learn what it was. He became withdrawn and moody. He slipped away from questions. He no longer laughed at my attempts to amuse him. He even lost his temper unexpectedly when his friends teased him once, as they had always done.
‘What ails him?’ I begged Sir John Harington one night when he was escorting me back across the park after another glum evening at St James’s.
He looked down at me, undecided whether to speak or not.
‘Is is that Howard girl?’ I demanded.
‘Do you know about her, then?’
‘I know only that she’s dangerous. I fear that she’ll either break my brother’s heart or ruin his reputation.’
Sir John walked in thoughtful silence. ‘His highness keeps his own counsel,’ he said at last.
Except to me, I wanted to shout. Except to me. He talks to me. Always until now! I thought my heart would break. I wanted to kill Frances Howard for coming between us. I hated her for having those knowing eyes that suggested female weapons in her armoury that I could not even name.
Harington sighed. ‘She did come to St James’s several times, rode out with him twice, and went once with him on his barge to Greenwich. But she seems to have stopped coming.’
‘Thank God!’ I exclaimed before I could stop myself. ‘Do you know why? Did my brother send her away, or did she change her mind about him?’ Women did not reject an heir to the throne, but Frances Howard did not seem to heed any rules.
I stopped and seized his hand. ‘I beg you, Sir John. You’re almost kin. Don’t try to protect my innocence like your uncle. Or are you obeying my father’s orders to keep me ignorant?’
‘I would tell you if I knew,’ he said unhappily. ‘I swear it, your grace. All of us are as perturbed as you. But I don’t know.’
I did not dare ask Harington if he thought Frances Howard had taken Henry’s maidenhead as she had promised.
I felt grief like that which I imagined would follow a death. I visited my brother at St James’s several times but could notreach him. I might, even so, have abandoned all delicacy in my urgent need to make him respond to me, if a further piece of news had not warned me off.
One afternoon, during a picnic on the banks of the Thames, my ladies went into ecstasies of outrage. Frances Tyrrell had just learned from her cousin, who was one of his gentlemen, that Sir Robert Carr had fallen in love. With a married woman, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex.
Poor Henry, I thought. Now sure to be the subject of humiliating gossip, whether he cared for the woman or not.
Even I could recognise dangerously thin ice, cracking in so many different directions at once, with such cold dark currents rushing beneath it, that I dared not move at all.