Margaret the First (2 page)

So passed two or three years.

FINALLY SOMETHING HAPPENED, OR ALMOST DID: MARIE DE’ MEDICI
came to England. Mother to the King of France and Queens of Spain and England, her entourage traveled in style from coast to town, met by crowds in freezing rains, by boys and girls who ran beside the bouncing carriage hoping to spot the famous beauty, by that time splotched and bald.

In Essex she’d be housed at our estate. A tizzy to prepare—our winter trees were leafless. So John, my middle brother, lashed branches from a neighbor’s fir onto our barren oaks.

Madame took no notice. Madame was rude. She dribbled diamonds. And she was, I decided, quite impressive.

I curtsied, watched from corners. One lady-in-waiting was especially alluring, wore powder on her hands, rose and sky-blue satin, silver parchment lace like a folded paper fan around her face. There were speeches, drums, a harp and horn. On the final night, they’d dance. I put on a stiff new dress, lace cap, laced boots, my mother’s silver openwork brooch—then refused to come out of my room.

When my sisters tried to coax me, I was unable to say why. Bits of lute song rose up through the halls. “Why will you not take more interest in grown-up things?” they asked. It seemed impossible to make myself be any way but wrong. “Baby Peg,” my sisters sighed. But I was then sixteen! And when they returned to the party, I escaped to the yard, soothed myself in the branches of an oak tree, dangling over periwinkle, looking out for swifts.
Sixteen
, I reflected, biting into a stolen pie. By this time in her life, my sister Mary had been pregnant. Ovid had dedicated his life to poetry. Queen Elizabeth had seen a suitor beheaded. Romeo and Juliet were dead. Whereas I, Margaret Lucas, was nothing if not in health, no single true adventure to my name.

Of course I did not know then that war was on its way—that Parliament was working to annul the powers of the king, or that the king would raise his royal battle standard in return. I did not know that by that summer my brother John would have a stockpile of weapons stashed inside our house.

One morning that June, I took only a conserve of marigolds for breakfast, trying to loosen a cough, and, after wandering the halls, went to the garden with two hard plums in my pocket. I ate; the church bell tolled. Eventually, in petal-flecked shoes, I found my way to the sitting room, where my mother dozed and John’s pregnant wife stood absently by the settle. The room was remarkably hot, for Mother believed in keeping windows shut, and a fat summer fly bumped against the glass. I stood at a table fiddling with a vase. I counted thirty-seven stems and dreamt up a ruby coat for a Chinese empress, a watery dress for Ophelia, a series of towering crystalline hats that rattled, sparkled, and shook—until from the hall came a series of noises. A shout, a bump, boots on stone. The door was flung open, and all at once, twenty men were standing on the carpet.

They smelled of sweat and hay, their faces half-covered or angry and red. The scene seemed frozen, like a painting on the wall, as from the darkened hallway came a pillow of cool air. Then one man put his sword to my sister-in-law’s neck and demanded she give up her husband, the guns. My sister-in-law fainted. My mother awoke. They stood us on the lawn.

They were Parliamentarians, of course, though I did not understand. And they apprehended my brother, too, or else he gave himself up.

We were all four marched to the Colchester jail, John’s wife weak and breathless, as hundreds of angry citizens shouted at us from the fields.

This was on a Monday. On Friday they let us go.

We reached the house early, to doors hanging open, mud and leaves on the floor. The mob had slaughtered the deer in Lucas Park, stripped and beaten our parson, driven off our cows. Money and jewels were gone, furniture stolen, our garden walls pulled down. Each night for nights I could not sleep, convinced they would return. Our neighbors, our tenants: I feared they’d drink our blood. For that mob had even broken into the family vaults and—with pistols, swords, and halberds—defiled the coffins and the corpses of our dead.

WAS IT FROM SHOCK, THEN, OR FEAR, OR A NAïVE SENSE OF CIVIC
duty that I asked to join the queen’s court at Oxford? Certainly, the stories were remarkable. One: that French-born Queen Henrietta Maria (Marie de’ Medici’s daughter) had scandalized the English by acting in her own court masques—now a princess, now an Amazon, now a water nymph, and so on. Two: that the glamorous young queen, fond of masquerades even offstage, had roamed along the Thames and through riverside meadows, disguised, in order to look upon the haymakers, and even take up a pitchfork and make hay. Three: that the queen, calling herself She-Majesty Generalissima, led an army from Bridlington to Oxford, straddling her horse like Alexander and eating with the men in the field.

Or had I simply spotted my way out?

Upon hearing the queen had fewer ladies in Oxford than she’d been used to in London, hands at my sides, before a painting of a dog, I requested of my mother that I be allowed to go. “I have,” I said, “a great desire to do so.” My sisters were against it. I’d embarrass myself, the family. Mary insisted it would be kinder to me
not
to let me go.

“Surely you see,” wrote Anne from London, “dear Margaret is eccentric—more apt to read than dance. Why does she never smile? And why does her hat seem never to match her gown?”

“Consider,” whispered John’s wife, “she’s been so infrequently from home.”

“I’d not be surprised,” Catherine wrote, “if she still hunts satyrs and fairies at every summer moon.”

But this war had come like a whirlwind. Our mother was afraid. I’d be safer at Oxford, she decided, than alone in the country at home, thus she rang for me one morning and consented to my plan.

KISSES ON THE LAWN AT ST. JOHN’S GREEN. A PERFECT SUMMER
gloom of vegetal bravado: peonies, bugloss, native beetles singing. The horses stamped a path through the starry dark. Alone in the carriage, flying through England, I imagined myself a beauty in satin; I imagined a crown of diamonds on my head; I imagined I’d soon be married to a celebrated general, but that days after the wedding my husband would fall in battle, so that I, in a silver coat to my waist, with a broad sword in my hand, would have no choice but to rally his troops and lead them onto the field; I imagined a royal reception, the road strewn with petals, bells.

But the coach stopped the following night in an obscure and narrow lane. The horses slobbered, a squat door opened, and I was sped inside, a strange man gripping my elbow. It was a baker’s home, a safe house. I did not sleep, kept my wits. Amid the city’s tolling bells, the smell of yeast and mold, I crept to the window and saw a stack of soldiers’ bodies.

Morning brought another man, rain, a series of crowded hallways, then around a corner and I stood before the queen—the queen!—stunning and Catholic and dressed in red and ermine. Dozens of silent courtiers stood pressed against the walls. But it was as if I’d watched it all unfold within a book, as if I turned the pages from safe inside my room: the dead soldiers, the baker’s house, the courtiers, the queen. Until someone whispered, “How simple she looks,” and all at once I awoke.

I found myself in an unknown universe, whirling far into space: African servants, dogs in hats, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, and ivy-coated quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors. I met Father Cyprien de Gamache, her majesty’s wily confessor; William, a poet, who claimed to be Shakespeare’s son; and a giggling dwarf called Jeffry, who’d been presented to the queen in a pie. I met the ladies-in-waiting, too, who hardly looked my way, busy as they were, bickering over who went where and when, who wore what and when, who fetched what and why, who said what and to whom, and what gave
her
the right to say
that
. Nor was Oxford itself at all what I’d expected: dead horses clogged the waterways, corpses from both sides were flung on Jews’ Mount. Grain was stored in Law & Logic, boots cobbled in the School of Astronomy & Music. At the center of it all, the queen, newly pregnant, rarely left her makeshift palace, and I, as one of her ladies-in-waiting, waited each day by her side. With downcast eyes, I minded her fan. I minded her red fox train.

Worst of all: I was permanently underdressed, in my older sisters’ outmoded hand-me-downs and caps. So I designed in my mind a sugar-spun golden gown to walk the path to church in, trailing crimson flowers and greenish beetle wings. Then someone cupped my breasts—two-handed!—as I passed like a ghost down the hall. I never spoke, but immediately sent word to my mother, begging to be allowed back home. “It is a mistake,” I wrote, “and not where I belong.” Mother as promptly refused. Bad as I thought I had it, life outside was swiftly unraveling for those still loyal to the king. “Be tranquil,” her note advised, “this war will soon be over.”

But the following spring it was not.

IN HIDING AT A ROYALIST ESTATE IN EXETER—THE SEA, THE AIR, THE
double white violet, the wallflower, stock-gilliflower, cowslip, flower-de-lices, cherry trees in pink—the queen gave birth to a princess, soft and yellow, streaked with blood, the labor causing hysterical blindness and a lingering pain in Her Majesty’s chest.

TO BEGIN CAME AN ATTACK BY PARLIAMENTARIAN SHIPS—THE
VICE
Admiral
,
Warwick
, and
Paramour
—just off the coast of Devon. Cannons fantastically loud! Then French ships sailed out to meet us and the Parliamentarians quickly fled, so we unfurled the purple banners—
Long live the King
—but rough winds blew us westward into storms.

The ship pitched, banging doors. England disappeared.

In one small cabin six beds hung like cradles from a beam, and beneath my own a barrel of beans was home to a mischief of rats. My cabinmates were sick, vomiting into chamber pots they took on deck to dump. I sat and watched the sea exhaust itself out a circular glass, swells as high as any hill in Essex. If light allowed, I read.
Twelfth Night
in a gale. Would Viola’s fate be mine, washed ashore in a strange new world and dressed up like a man? I tucked up my feet and waited, swinging in the bed.

But no wreck came. Nor were we mistaken for pirates by fishermen out at dawn. We rowed ashore, at last, on the rocky coast of Brittany, struggled up a cliff. Next, by land, passing monks and bullocks and avenues of walnuts. We stopped in Bourbon to catch our breath, walk our spaniels. An ancient château sat over a monastery and a warm medicinal spring, where the queen soaked, finches whistling, as French physicians pierced her abscessed breast. Finally, in November, queen and court reached Paris, where the Regent of France, on behalf of the six-year-old king, had granted us use of the Louvre. I read, sticking to Spenser and Donne. “She is unsociable,” the others said, “and cannot grasp French.” I paced the cloister, the bells of Notre Dame clanging in the distance. I read. I wrote letters to my mother and sisters. And idly one afternoon, I wrote something else:

“I had rather be a meteor, singly, alone.”

Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.

“I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.”

There was the humidity, the innumerable crashing coaches, and French aristocrats and servants relieving themselves in the halls. All summer, heaps of shit steamed on the palace steps. I swear I nearly died of the purging flux that August, saved by a powder of opium, pearls, and gold taken in a bread-pill each night before I slept.

O the fever. The dreams!

Yet most of all, I was bored—
so
bored. Having arrived at the height of history, the very middle of the world, I was shocked to find myself with less to do than when alone in the country back home. Though marbled and with warbling fountains, the Louvre was vast and always cold. As ladies-in-waiting schemed down endless mirrored corridors, the once-luminous queen retreated, weeping, desperate for the baby she’d been forced to leave in England—safe from the perils of our escape. Some days it seemed as if my fever had never broken: the incessant pointless duels, those ghostly caryatids, a monkey in a doublet roaming halls. Too, I’d grown aware of some new flimsiness in my body—stretching out my long thin arms, the skin as light as muslin, as likely to rip or tear. Even weeks after my illness, my face was white as clay. I refused to run, refused to break a sweat. While ladies-in-waiting pranced and spun, gave chase to honking swans, I only sat and watched them from the knotted flower beds, ignored the book in my lap, and recalled the grounds at St. John’s Green: the fields of purpling wild lettuce, the spidery fern-ringed pond.

Then one downcast afternoon, as I approached my shaded bench, I saw a woman, tall even seated, broad-shouldered and tanned, yet elegantly gowned in gray and pearl ropes. It was a peculiarly informal meeting: I simply sat. My stiff skirts brushed that lady’s, and I opened my book in silence. Yet despite this odd behavior, she took pity on a hushed and sighing girl. “My Mary,” she said, pointing to a child amid the topiary shapes, “who was ten this past July.”

Thus, in a tonsured garden, near a wall of autumn roses, it happened that I made a friend—my first. Lady Browne was newly arrived from London, wife of Sir Richard, French ambassador for our king. Soon I was a regular at their home.

AT THE EMBASSY FOR SUPPER—QUAIL IN BROTH AND OYSTERS—LADY
Browne remembered my father, whom she’d met at Queen Elizabeth’s court. Yet one name only was on the tongue of Sir Richard: William Cavendish, newly made marquess. This gentleman, he reported between oysters, had recently fled to Hamburg after losing badly with a regiment raised near York. A master horseman and fencer, and one of the richest men in England, he wrote plays—oyster—collected viols—oyster—“his particular love in music”—and was by all accounts—oyster—affable and quick. As for official news, the post arrived on Tuesdays. I was sometimes sent to retrieve it from a sympathetic banker in the Rue de Quiquempoit. The queen employed secret couriers for her letters to the king, transported to Oxford in wigs or hollow canes. If apprehended, well, the agents risked death. By now it was clear: the Royalists were losing.