‘What is it?’
‘The Prince of Wales has died.’
In the corridor, people ran everywhere asking for news, to confirm the news.
‘He’s dead.’
I saw a groom sitting in a heap on the floor of the gallery, wiping his face with his sleeve. Then I heard Frederick’s voice shouting, ‘Where is her grace?’
Hatless and panting, he burst through the far door, followed by four breathless gentlemen. ‘Your brother lives! I swear it! All this clamour lies. Henry is still alive! I saw him alive only a short time ago.’
He had run all the way from St James’s to find me and reassure me.
I clung to him. His heat, even the smell of his sweat comforted me. We went together to pray in the Royal Chapel, then sat side by side in my presence chamber.
‘Don’t weep!’ I shouted at Frances Tyrrell and The Other Elizabeth. ‘There’s no need to weep.’ In one hand, I held my Scottish granite in one hand and with the other gripped Frederick’s hand.
‘Your brother is strong-willed,’ Frederick reassured me. ‘He believes that God has a purpose for him on earth. He will fight.’
I imagined Henry drawing himself up and refusing to go with Death, spurning the outstretched bony hand.
‘England needs him to live,’ I said. I needed him to live.
Frederick stayed with me through the day, saying very little. Holding my hand, touching some part of me while we waited.
‘Go back to St James’s,’ I told him after supper time passed without eating. ‘See that he still fights. Urge him on.’
After he left, I sat on Tallie’s stool in my bedchamber, hugging her lute case as if holding her place in the universe while she filled mine at St James’s.
Shortly before eight o’clock that night, Henry died.
Tallie ran into my room, still in her groom’s clothing.
‘I know already.’ The last unreasoning shred of my hope waited for her to tell me I was wrong.
I heard a faraway howl like a beaten dog, from the King’s Lodgings.
‘How did it happen?’ I asked.
‘The doctors are already agreeing among themselves that he died of an ague brought on by swimming at night.’
‘Of course they will all agree, to save their own necks! That’s not what I mean.’
She looked away and pinched her lips tightly together. ‘Your grace…’
I tried to take her arm but she pulled free. ‘You were there! Tell me!’
‘Please… You know enough,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. That’s more than enough!’
‘Tell me what happened!’ My wolf spoke, rising up through me from the soles of my feet. ‘What did they do to him? Did he feel pain at the end? Was he afraid?’
I heard our breathing loud in the air. ‘Which of us do you want to spare?’ I demanded.
Her eyes searched mine. ‘Though most often out of his wits, he had moments of clarity. I heard him speak once near the end, to ask a question.’
She seemed to hold me up on the beams of her eyes. ‘He asked, “Where is my beloved sister?"’
I gasped as though struck in the belly. ‘Did he know you?’ I begged. ‘Did he know that I had sent my other heart to him because I was forbidden to come?’
‘There’s more,’ she said. Reluctantly she opened the hand she had been holding clenched against her breast. ‘He gave me this ring for you.’
TALLIE
She stumbled and fell as if a hunter’s arrow had pierced her heart. I caught her and called for help. This is the most terrible demand for truth she has ever made of me. God help me, I did not lie, but I did not tell all.
What good can it do her to know?
I have betrayed her trust in me. I have destroyed my own joy in being with her, because I must begin to guard my thoughts and tongue again. I am now the secret keeper of truths that properly belong to her, the prince’s own flesh, sprung from a shared womb. Hiding them, even from kindness, I must begin to be false again. Everything between us will now be false again. As false as it was until I showed her Southwark and my true self. I had been afraid of the truth, of springing a fatal leak. I had feared the effort of truth-telling, but it was so simple in the end. I opened my mouth and allowed truth to be born. The hard work is lying.
I touched his leg to try to pass on her love. The leg was already dead, already gone. No longer part of him. The part of Henry that still lived was shrinking upwards. The fire dying, Dead ash left behind.…
You’re not thinking straight, girl. You still stink of the sickroomand your own retch. Your thoughts are scrambled by close stools and shouting doctors. By seeing Death place its hand over the prince’s face. By fear.
She will hear from others how it was. In time. The tongues, the tongues in this place! Rumour will not spare her.
How the doctors panicked. How they shaved his head and split open live doves to slap against the scalp to ease his headaches. How he screamed and fought them and clutched his head as if trying to pull it off. How they cut open his veins to let his blood flow. How they cupped him until he was covered in bloody welts. How leeches swelled like blisters on his skin and left marks like the small pox. How they dosed and then purged him until he vomited blood and black bile. Then dosed again until his poor body was almost turned inside out. How he struggled and writhed, loosed his bowels, emptied his stomach, and fell back, scarcely breathing. How they split a live cock and slapped it to the soles of his feet. How his pulse faltered. How he struggled for air so that his screams faded to the gurgle in a drowning man’s throat.
‘They are killing me!’
No doctor will report those words. But I heard them and don’t know what to do with them. That was not wild raving. He knew what he said. I saw his eyes.
He knocked away hands holding the cup to his lips. ‘You kill me!’
‘He raves,’ they said. ‘That was always his favourite drink.’
I saw that cup then spilled on purpose onto the floor. It was no accident.
She will learn most, if not all, sooner or later. Then she will know that I did not give her truth. Please God, she doesn’t wake and ask for a consoling tune. My hands shake too much to pull music from the strings.
I must tell her all these things, for both our sakes. But not yet.
‘I knew already,’ I said. ‘By the ring you brought me.’
He would not have sent it if he had merely been afraid to die. He would not betray his own courage at the last moment. The ring had only one message.
Now Tallie had confirmed that message. Someone had murdered my brother.
‘Learn who paid that doctor,’ I said. ‘The one who spilled the cup.’
We stood side by side like two figures carved in ice. I felt her desire to comfort me and was grateful that she did not try. Her simple presence was the best consolation she could give me. A touch, a gentle word would have shattered me into sharp cold fragments. I had failed to rescue my brother.
Until the message arrived from Sir Thomas Lake, acting as Chief Secretary, I had thought I grieved.
Then I learned that Frederick, too, was to be taken from me.
We then are dead, for what doth now remain To please us more, or what can we call pain Now we have lost him?
– Lord Herbert of Cherbury
‘Go back to Heidelberg!’ my father shouted at Frederick. ‘I can’t stomach the sight of yer mooning calf-face! How d’you think I can imagine happiness? Permit music? Tolerate celebration?’
If Frederick obeyed my father and returned to the Palatinate, I knew the marriage would never take place. Frederick could no longer afford me.
I devoured news and rumour, although it made my stomach churn. With Henry dead, I was now second in line to the throne, with only the frail Baby Charles between. If he died, then I would be queen of England, the second Elizabeth. Many thought me likely to be queen. Some wise heads in the Privy Council feared a civil uprising to finish what the Gunpowder Plotters would have begun. The treasonable intention to make me queen grew suddenly more plausible, even likely.
Tallie put on her old re-cut gown from Southwark and went out into the streets of London. At night she whispered to me in little gusts of frosted breath what she heard.
Pssst, pssst! England still remembers its other Elizabeth on the throne. The English yearn to have a female monarch again. Pssst! They had wanted a man but are disillusioned. They’ve lost the future king they had hoped for. They mock Prince Charles. Pssst, pssst, pssst! There are cries in the streets of London for the ‘Elizabeth the Second'.
I wanted to tell her that it was too dangerous even to repeat such words, but I listened greedily, all the same, with the covers pulled up to my neck, unable to stop my shivering.
‘Do they say how Henry died?’
‘Poison,’ she said flatly. ‘That the doctors lied to save their necks.’
‘Who is blamed?’
She clamped her hand over her mouth and looked at me over her fingers.
‘Tallie!’
‘The king,’ she said.
Our father, still writing the Stuart history of blood and violent death.
Don’t jump to conclusions, I told myself.
But the world about me boiled like a wave breaking over rocks and tumbled me on with it.
I had suddenly become a treasure too valuable to throw away on a minor German princeling. If the Palsgrave had been unworthy before Henry died, he sank even deeper now that my value rose. A rush of ambassadors brought renewed suits from abroad. The Scots again pressed for my marriage to the Marquis of Hamilton. My mother again argued for a Catholic match.
In the dark confusion of the days after Henry died, I missed Wee Bobby. I needed to ask him what we should do. I needed him to persuade the king to let the marriage go ahead. I needed Henry, to raise a popular clamour for the marriage by telling the world that it was his last wish.
I was saved by the need for mourning. The king refused to consider proposals till the mourning period was done. In the meantime, no one dared even to speak of celebration, let alone be seen singing and dancing.
I tried to think who could advise the king in place of Cecil, and be heard.
At one moment, the king seemed to be without a care in this world and rode out hunting, noisy with his usual jests and shouting. Then he would sit without moving, staring at the earth, his fingers twitching as if he pressed the strings of a viol. Silent, refusing to answer anyone. He wouldn’t lift his eyes. He neither ate nor drank.
Grief or guilt? I asked. If guilt, then no one was safe.
Then, suddenly, he would raise himself as if he had just remembered an urgent duty and stump off strewing orders and demands behind him.
Only his chamber groom heard him sobbing behind the hangings of his bed after he had ordered everyone to leave. As Tallie had proved, a groom is not truly ‘someone’ but goes in and out as freely as the dogs, collecting the close stool and renewing the candles that always burn in my father’s bedchamber. A groom sees the truth.
I told myself that I didn’t know why the king wept so violently, unless at the loss of such an expensive piece of gold which he had meant to trade. I asked again how much of his anguish sprang from guilt. I could not forget the look in Bacon’s eyes the night Henry had banished him.
I put Henry’s ring on a chain and wore it around my neck. I remembered what he had told me – that an armoured man is vulnerable at only two points. You can kill him if you know these points.
I would have died of my grief if it were not for Frederick. With one limb torn off, I found another beginning to grow. And yet, I almost wished I had never seen him. My father had ordered him to be sent away again. I might have lived without him if I had not known he existed. Now, I could not let him go.
Tallie brought me pieces of Bacon’s writings, which I studied for signs of his true nature. A man of clear sight and no compassion, I decided. She had bribed one of Bacon’s secretaries to make a copy of the
Eulogium
for Henry that Sir Francis had written but not yet published.
‘It hinted at possible patronage,’ she said.
I read it. ‘The secretary is as much of a fool as his master then. It’s a vile piece of work.’
Although nothing in it was false, these were clever, insinuating words that seemed to praise while nicking a vein here, slicing a tendon there. Bacon’s praise for Henry was, in truth, his revenge for his public humiliation. A coward’s revenge against a dead youth who could not fight back.
THE PRAISE OF HENRY, PRINCE OF WALES
Henry, prince of Wales, eldest son of the king of Great Britain, happy in the hopes conceived of him, and now happy in his memory, died on the 6th of November 1612… being a youth who neither offended nor satiated the minds of men. He had by the excellence of his disposition excited high expectations among great numbers of all ranks; nor had through the shortness of his life disappointed them… In his countenance were some marks of severity and in his air some appearance of haughtiness … He was unquestionably ambitious of commendation and glory… he breathed himself something warlike… He showed his esteem of learning in general more by the countenance he gave to it, than by the time which he spent on it… His affections and passions were not strong, but rather equal than warm. With regard to that of love, there was a wonderful silence…
I saw the brutal truth in Bacon’s words but also his blindness to my brother’s true nature. This was truth without understanding. Truth tinged with malice. I wondered, too, at the man’s strange inability to read the king’s immoderate grief. I saw suddenly the terrible handicap of extreme Reason. If a thing were true, he saw no reason not to say it. Anything else was unreasonable.
This failure to understand the power of other men’s unreason had doomed him as a courtier. His trust in pure reason had undone him with my brother. If Henry had become king, Bacon’s career at court and perhaps even his life would have been finished. Bacon had far more reason than my father to wish Henry dead.