‘He suffers from gout and often stays close to his bed. Does he not, Anne?’
‘Indeed he does.’
Frederick looked from one of our eager faces to the other, then down at the George again. ‘At first, he stared at me with such a puzzled frown that I was certain he had forgot why he summoned me.’
‘He often pretends that, in order to cause discomfort,’ I said. ‘What did you do then?’
‘Ventured my good wishes for his recovery – to which he did not reply. Then I pretended to play with his dog, to try to make him laugh, as you told me.’
‘But he didn’t send you away again?’
‘On the contrary, he seemed to remember himself all of a sudden and motioned me close to the bed. Then he mumbled a few words in English and dropped this over my head.’
My rising hope sank back down onto its haunches. ‘Did he first dub you a knight?’
Frederick looked stricken. ‘No.’ He frowned at the wall. ‘He did not,’ he said firmly. ‘I have created knights myself. I believe I would have known.’
Chilled by a sudden thought, I leaned close and looked more closely at the George.
Not a taunting counterfeit. Not a wheelwright or barber’s livery badge. Not the arms of an executed enemy. I exhaled in relief.
‘It was Henry’s, the king told me. Then asked me if such a thing was known in Heidelberg.’
Henry’s George. Henry, who might have been poisoned on the king’s orders. A garter but no knighthood. The king had just given Frederick a gift of the most tender sort from a grieving father-in-law to-be, or else a taunting threat.
I had lost Henry, Tallie, Belle. I had lost my mother, if I had ever had her. My younger brother had become a chilly enemy. My father would continue to waver and change his mind. He had ordered my brother to be murdered – or he had not. I would marry Frederick – or I would not. I was to wed a Catholic. I was to wed a Protestant. I was never to marry at all and would wither in the Tower like Arbella when desperation at last drove me to folly. I could bear no more uncertainty.
I handed back the George. ‘Enough,’ I said.
‘What do you mean to do?’ Frederick had already learned to read my face. ‘Bessie, you are frightening me. You know what he threatened, if you defied him.’
‘I mean to be my father’s daughter,’ I said.
WHITEHALL, NOVEMBER 1612
Where did I get the stomach? The sheer effrontery? What gave me the courage?
I think it was the memory of courage, now almost forgotten, the memory of saying that I would rather die than submit, then turning my back and walking away.
Once she had been born, that fierce unthinking girl-child had survived secretly, hidden deep inside me, stubbornly, silently triumphant. She pulled a dark cloth over her face. She lay quiet and waited, a moth camouflaged against tree bark, detectable only by the faintest suggestion of an outline. Now, she sat up and revealed her face. She laid her hand over the face of reason. As if giving up were not a choice, she said, ‘Do it.’
WHITEHALL, NOVEMBER 1612
My father had dressed in a loose gown but wore his diamond-studded hat when I presented myself at his lodgings the next morning. He was still in his bedchamber, drinking beside the fire with his inflamed unshod foot propped on a stool.
Sir Thomas Lake stood near him, looking wary. Bacon leaned in the window alcove. Apart from Lake and Bacon, only two secretaries and Carr attended the king. The half-dozen grooms and running footmen waiting by the wall had a head-down-I’m-not-here air. The only creatures at ease in the room were the two hounds asleep by the king’s chair.
I noted the absence of other attending gentlemen. The whispers of diplomatic reasons for absence appeared to be accurate.
‘My honoured father…’ I curtsied. ‘I heard that you are troubled with the gout and have brought you a hopeful remedy.’ I offered a tincture of crocus in a gilt-edged bottle.
He turned the little bottle in his hand, thoughtfully. ‘So dutiful? So sudden?’
‘I’ll swallow some first, if you like,’ I said.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I know that impudence. What d’youwant of me, Bess? It’s not like you to come crawling, all sweet as sugar, like an arse-licking petitioner.’
Sir Thomas Lake cleared his throat. Sir Francis’s moustaches twitched in amusement.
‘May I speak with you alone, sir?’ I said. I watched the challenging swagger of Carr’s back as he left the room with the rest. The door closed.
‘England needs you to make a decision,’ I said.
‘"England needs"?’ The king glanced at me with reddened, heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Or “you need"?’ He was too quick. Unlike Bacon, my father could read the true meaning hiding in the speech of others. ‘Everyone seems to be advising me now on what England needs. Lake advises. Bacon advises. Now even my daughter advises.’
‘Your majesty, England needs me to marry Frederick… the Palsgrave,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Now. The people need to feel solidity in the disorder since Cecil and Henry died. Only you can give them that solidity. They need to know that they are ruled again.’
He sucked on his imaginary sugar lump and studied me with eyes that suddenly reminded me of Sir Francis Bacon. ‘The eyes of a hungry ferret,’ Salisbury had said of his cousin. My father’s eyes were less friendly.
‘I need the advice of a lassie now, do I?’
Driven by desperate will, I ploughed on. ‘Even in their grief, the English people need to feel the possibility of joy as well as sorrow. They need to know that happiness can return. That you will gift them with joy again.’
This, to a man who might have ordered his own son to be murdered. If so, he did it out of fear, I told myself. Out of weakness.
‘The human soul hungers for joy,’ I said.
‘And when did you turn philosopher?’
I chose my path, which until that instant I had not known. I threw the dice. I chose truth, defiant or not.
I knelt and took his hand. ‘Dearest father, my heart, not philosophy, tells me that you feel lost. As we all feel lost. But only you can lead us out of darkness…’
He gasped, flung off my hands so violently that I fell. He rose to his feet, forgetting his gouty foot, stepped on it, stumbled. ‘… Aiee! Shit!’ He hobbled two painful steps to catch his balance.
I scrambled to my feet.
He turned on me, unleashing his rage. ‘How dare ye?’ he shouted. ‘Who are you to dare counsel me? A smock! A vixen! Who are ye, t’think you know anything of what England needs?’
‘I’ve learned a little while standing all those times like a prize heifer on show!’ I shouted back, jutting my chin just as fiercely as he did. ‘I’ve got eyes and ears! I’ve learned that I’m treaties and trade agreements and military alliances! I know enough to know that!’
I held out my hands and wiggled my fingers. ‘I’ve learned that these are worth gold coins!’ I pointed to my right elbow, bruised by my fall. ‘Silver ingot… And here’s another.’ I pointed to my left elbow.
I kicked a foot out under the hem of my skirt. ‘Worth Baltic oak.’ My eyes? I pointed. ‘Diamonds.’ My teeth? ‘Pearls.’ I thumped my skull. ‘D’you think I’ve nothing in here but dried peas?’
‘And what about that little royal cunny? What’s the value of that?’
This question, from a father, snatched the breath from me.
He nodded, pleased with his effect on me. ‘Aren’t ye glad you didn’t challenge me before the whole court? There’s none here now but the fish down there in the river to see ye go as red as a swollen cock.’
I recovered at last. ‘Aren’t you glad I’ve got a royal cunny? And that you’ll be putting the price on it, not me?’
He didn’t even blink. ‘Why weren’t ye the first born…’ For an instant, he disappeared into a private thought. ‘And if you were a boy as well…’ He tilted his head to one side in mock appraisal.
‘But as I’m not a boy…’ I began, giddy with that faint, extraordinary whiff of praise.
‘Don’t let kind words go to your head.’ He took off his hat. The diamond flared in the sun, a deep pool of cold tiny fires, the size of a bantam’s egg.
‘Don’t try to tell me your worth,’ he said in impeccable London English, not a trace of Scots in his voice now. ‘Do you imagine that I hold anything in this world to be priceless? Least of all, you?’
He straightened and seemed to grow taller. ‘Bessie, your heart may well tell you all manner of nonsense. But my heart is as cold as this stone…’ He paused as if listening to the echo of his words. ‘Some plodding poetaster must have written that.’
He wiggled the hat to make the diamond flash until it seemed that a whole constellation of stars had been caught and compressed into its depths. ‘I’ll tell you what I truly feel. Nothing matters to me but to be entertained every minute until I die. In both flesh and in wit. When everyone else fails me, as they must, I amuse myself. You have just entertained me, but that moment is already passing.’
If I were a boy, I wanted to say, I wouldn’t need a keen wit to entertain you.
‘Those pious clack-tongues in Westminster call me greedy for wealth. Here’s how I answer them…’ He ripped the diamond from the hat, pushed open the window and threw the gem into the Thames.
Mouth open, I saw the flashing fall and the little splash where the price of a year’s maintenance for an army sank into the water.
For a moment we both stared down at the opaque muddy water below the window. The king wore a slightly startledexpression, as if he had taken himself by surprise as much as me. Then he slammed the window shut.
‘That’s how much I care for wealth. Or anything else, including you and your advice. The true value of wealth lies in other men’s greed for it and how pliable their hunger makes them.’
All smiles now, the
rex victor
clamped his hands onto my shoulders and pulled me forward to plant a sloppy kiss on my forehead.
‘There’s a good lassie. Just don’t think you can ever outwit your old dad. We think too much alike but my wits will always be sharper.’ He lifted his hands and dropped them on my shoulders again, half blow, half caress. ‘I’m glad I never had you educated. You might have been dangerous. Run along now and leave me to rule England. And you.’
Leaving the king’s lodgings, I passed Frederick, again a helpless captive amongst the king’s other waiting gentlemen in the great reception chamber. I caught his eye and raised my shoulders. I did not know what I had achieved, if anything.
As soon as I was clear of the king’s lodgings, I wiped from my forehead the kiss of a father I suspected of murdering my brother.
Just then, I was grateful that I had escaped arrest. Later, sitting silent among my ladies while they gambled with dice, I felt the full damage of that meeting with my father. It was a clean wound, as I imagined a sword slice would feel. Almost unnoticeable at the time it lands. Only afterwards, when the sinews no longer connect, and the blood drains away, and the pain sets in, do you understand that the blow may have been mortal.
I kept seeing the diamond disappear into the water, as worthless as I was.
He was willing to throw me away, as valueless, except for what I could extract in return for other men’s greed. No father has ever made himself more extravagantly clear about his paternal feelings. Why had I dared to hope for anything else?
I wanted to drop my head into my hands. Instead, I stiffened my neck and accepted the little leather cup of dice to throw in my turn. I had to decide whether my father had thrown away Henry in another fit of half-thinking rage. If he would have his own heir poisoned out of fear, I could think of no reason he would spare a mere daughter.
I set one of my grooms to watch all night on the Privy Stairs. ‘Come at once to report any activity you see.’
Near midnight, the boy came to my elbow as I sat still dicing with a sleepy Anne.
‘Your grace,’ he said. ‘The tide is out, and the king has his men dredging the river by torchlight.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Beneath his bedchamber window.’
‘Please go to bed, Anne,’ I said. ‘This boy will accompany me. I want a walk in the open air.’
I had to see this for myself.
I never learned whether it was Bacon’s advice that prevailed. Or my plea. Or Frederick’s charm. It might have been any or all of them together, or perhaps no more than the king’s own perverse, changeable nature.
The announcement was made and the news cried in the streets. Letters flew in all directions over England. Messengers of foreign envoys sprinted for their ships. The king had chosen his son-in-law.
Though lacking in true power, wealth or large territorial possessions, the Palsgrave Frederick, the Elector Palatine, was now, in the respect owed to him, the premier Protestant prince of Europe. In the interests of preserving the balance of his
via media,
the king of England wished to confirm his friendship with the anti-Hapsburg forces on the Continent by giving his only daughter to the Palatine. However, as counter-balance, Prince Charles, the new heir to the throne, would marry in Catholic Spain. On the 27th of December, three weeks after Prince Henry’s funeral, the king’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart was to be betrothed. Thames would marry Rhine.
WHITEHALL, DECEMBER 1612
On the twenty-seventh of December, a dense crowd waited in the Banqueting House, packed into the long space, jammed between the columns, hanging from the secured boxes. Some of the younger men even balanced on the narrow plinths of the columns.
I had not expected so many people. The court was still in mourning for my brother. Many Catholics at court disapproved of this union that demonstrated the king’s support for the Protestant League in Europe. My mother’s displeasure infected those who followed her. Frederick’s hugger-mugger Gartering had been lost in the general distraction of grief.
Perhaps, as I had told my father, everyone – like my father himself – yearned to forget the heaviness that sucked at their hearts. But in their mourning clothes, they made a field of purple and black, reminding us all of our grief when I should have rejoiced. Gloomy winter daylight fell from the tall windows, partly obscured by the columns marching down each side of the hall. Black silks, black taffetas, shiny black satins, with the darker pools of black velvets, blended into a single sombre shifting mass.