Reluctantly, in the next years, the Haringtons were forced more and more often, on the king’s orders, to return me to Sodom and Gomorrah to be viewed by the foreign marriage brokers.
‘You can’t sell a horse unseen,’ I overheard Lady H say briskly to her husband on one occasion. ‘If you fear so much for her soul, don’t loosen your protective grip until the king orders it. We must take a house closer to London.’
So they set up a household in Kew, little more than an hour’s journey by river from Whitehall. I acquired my own barge, with eight rowers and a fine, sonorous drum to keep the strokes in unison, so that I could continue to live with them but still travel easily to Whitehall when summoned. Even better, I could also visit my brother Henry, who now had his own household at St James’s, diagonally across the park from Whitehall.
Although I continued to find the Haringtons’ stern faith and endless prayers as tedious as ever, I always returned from Whitehall with secret relief. Lady H’s brusque questions were a purge for my glutted senses. Lord H’s pinched lips and raised brows settled my slight giddiness after supping of a court that tasted both rich and a little rotten, like a lustrous, overripe fruit. On the other hand, continuing to live with them slowed my own learning about court ways.
My father wanted me kept ignorant, in any case. ‘You should no more educate a woman than tame a fox,’ he once told me. ‘It makes them both dangerous.’
Though he summoned me to stand on show for envoys from a prospective husbands, he denied me all information and had ordered that no one answer my questions. I was to be protected from all ‘signs of love’ from my suitors as if from a contagion. I was not allowed even to see their portraits.
In those years at Kew, I saw the court only in bursts when attending state events. I tried to string together the beads of these events into a coherent tale. Like a magpie, I collected every other bead of information that I could, by keeping my eyes and ears open. In trying to keep me ignorant, my father had forgotten rumour and poets.
Poets, essayists, letter writers and pamphleteers drained barrels of ink as they detailed the extravagant masques and feasts of dreamlike richness, where sugar flowers bloomed on tables and silver fountains bubbled with wine, some of which I had seen for myself. They spent their ink on the heroic tilts and prize-givings, the king’s lavish gifts to his favourites, the royal opening of grand new shops, the hunting, the launching of ships. They described the fireworks and the processions on the Thames of gilded barges accompanied by golden dolphins and whales. They evoked the coronet fanfares that ushered in the king. Made their readers smell the perfumes, and squint at glittering acres of cloth of gold and silver. They eulogised the royal family – king, queen, two surviving princes and a princess, the living image of the new stability of the Crown in this glorious ‘New English Age'.
And there I was, from time to time, trapped in all those words, described as ‘spirited', ‘witty’ and ‘beautiful’ (or ‘handsome', depending on the writer).
Some of what they wrote was even true. My difficulty lay in knowing which parts to believe. I could judge the lies about what I had myself experienced. Much of the rest belonged to a world I did not yet understand, the affairs of men and of state.
The king was reported to spend most of his time away from Whitehall, hunting at Theobald’s, Royston, or Newmarket. Whatever the reasons for his frequent absences, I was deeply grateful.
Henry, on the other hand, could often be found in the brick and stone palace at St James’s that had been built by the last King Henry for his children. The busy pens told, truthfully, how my brother and I rode together and sometimes dined quietly at St James’s with the growing band of young Protestant noblemen who gathered round him. These young knights were, as reported, chiefly English but included Huguenot French and Germans among them, most of these young men as earnest and sober as my brother.
The occasional reports of my high spirits may have reflected the fact that one or two delightful flirts in this band were happy to let me practise my upward glances and sideways looks, whose power I was just discovering.
My presence was noted, watching these young men practise swordplay or tilting. Nowhere, however, did I read of the hours I spent listening to them talk of art and religious wars, while all the time I was comparing their different mouths and the smoothness of their cheeks. No one wrote that I fell in love with three of them at the same time, or that I became breathless at the way their slim legs cut the air and their strong young male hands gripped a sword hilt. To my grief, none of these men was suitable for a royal husband. A princess cannot marry her brother’s master of horse, even when he is a French seigneur.
In any case, Lady Harington’s voice always whispered in my head, even as I – ‘The Pearl of England', the ‘Second Gloriana’ – tossed back pleasantries, and smiled at the extravagant compliments.
‘They all want something from you,’ Lady Harington had said. ‘Dismiss all compliments as hopeful flattery.’
I did not need Lady H to point out the flattering lies in what the poets and other chroniclers scribbled. Of my own accord, I could see their ignorance. And sometimes their malice. In my father’s new Age of Peace, I soon saw for myself that men not only flattered but also drew blood with their pens.
Almost the very first time I had been rowed from Kew to London after we moved there from Combe, Henry had taken me into his pale-plastered study and shown me the copy of a secret letter that had fallen into his hands. This writer, intending his words only for the eyes of a trusted friend, described how the king took pains never to let the prince make progresses nor arrive alone on state occasions. His majesty would always arrive first, to receive the first wave of cheers, and let Henry follow.
‘Lest I gather the love of the people to myself,’ said Henry bitterly. ‘There are many more letters like this. If my father ever knew half of what is written or said about him, he would leave a trail of bloody footprints.’ He locked the copied letter into a chest. ‘But the flattery of his courtiers, the protection of Cecil and his own armour of self-satisfaction protect him.’
‘Not entirely,’ I said, thinking of the padded doublet and that scene in Coventry. ‘Sweet Hal, take care!’
‘Don’t fear, Elizabella.’ He picked up a paper from his table and began to read it.
‘It’s so hard to know all the dangers.’ I swallowed. This was the moment to ask him about my warning letter. If I didn’t take it now, I never would.
‘Our mother is not spared neither,’ said Henry. ‘She’s charged, by tittle-tattle and pen-pushers alike, with frivolity and wilful extravagance at her household, which she insistson keeping in Greenwich – charges that the king does not trouble to deny.’
‘Hal,’ I began.
‘Perhaps he believes that her extravagance distracts from his own,’ said Henry.
‘Surely, the charges are false,’ I managed to reply. ‘Hal…’
‘You’ll learn the truth for yourself when you are more at Whitehall,’ said my brother. ‘I’ve seen the reports by Cecil’s accountants, detailing in dry columns of figures the royal extravagance, both hers and the king’s, and noting the absence of money in the Exchequer to pay for it all.’
‘Hal,’ I said. ‘Did you ever get my letter?’
‘What letter?’ he asked.
‘From Combe,’ I said. ‘When I still lived there. I sent my groom, Abel White, to find you.’
Henry shook his head. ‘Never saw the man. What did you write?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember now.’
My letter was lost! Floating with other dangerous letters, like those Henry had locked away, in a deeper, secret layer of words, bald, unadorned and brutal, flowing through England in a hidden current. Someone, very likely a man who bowed to me and murmured compliments, knew that I was a traitor.
Then, I found that I had to sit down on the nearest stool. Perhaps my father had my letter, after all.
I had assumed that he would confront me with my treason at once. A false assumption, I saw now. For all his outward coarseness, my father had a subtle turn of mind. He would enjoy playing cat-and-mouse with me.
‘I will tell you something in confidence.’ Henry settled onto the stool beside me and leaned his head close to mine. ‘Now that I’m here at St James’s, Cecil has begun to groom me secretly for kingship, just as he once tutored our father on how to gain the English throne.’
‘Our father doesn’t know?’
‘Of course not. He would believe that we were weaving his winding sheets. But Cecil says that it is always best to be prepared for any great change. That preparing is not the same as wishing for it.’
I should warn him, I thought. That I may already have drawn him into treason. On the other hand, if my letter had never reached Henry, then he could not be blamed. Until I knew more, I decided, I would leave my brother unmarked by my crime.
At Holyrood, before we left for England, I heard a terrible story told in whispers like cold drafts from a cellar. The Countess of Mar had refused to hand Henry over to travel south with my mother, who had had him torn from her arms at birth to be given to these severe strangers to raise. Confronting the implacable countess, my mother had beaten her fists on her pregnant belly in despair and rage (the whispers said) and thereby killed the first of my two lost sisters.
I could almost have disbelieved it if I had not seen my sister’s tiny coffin for myself when I kissed my mother goodbye. I had clung to her hand to stop her mounting into her seat beside the little gilded box. But the tiny body had ridden south with my mother in the royal coach while Henry and I were left behind to catch up later.
After we arrived in England, she and I never met alone. I saw her only on state occasions. I curtsied to her and exchanged formal greetings. I walked in her train, in her progress through the court. Sometimes I was allowed to sit with both my parents on the royal dais during masques or other entertainments. But we had not exchanged two words that were not formal, let alone repeated the deliciousintimacy of our last days at Holyrood. I told myself that her life was always too busy with court affairs, and that I always vanished back to Kew just when she might have found time to see me in private.
Then, after three years of increasingly frequent travel by barge from Kew, I was instructed to move to Whitehall, where my lodgings in the Small Closed Tennis Court were now ready. When I arrived, I learned that my mother had also moved to Whitehall from Greenwich.
I wrote to her at once.
‘I am near to you again at last,’
I wrote.
‘My heart overflows with joy at the thought of seeing you once more as soon as your highness wills it.’
I reminded her of our suppers together in her little closet at Holyrood. I asked my tutor to see that my grammar and spelling were perfect. I signed in gold,
‘Your most hopeful, loving daughter, Elizabeth.’
I prepared a gift to take her, an engraved silver box to be filled with sweetmeats.
I told myself that I was not disappointed when she did not reply at once, that same day. That night, I polished the last finger marks off the silver box with the hem of my shift.
The next day while I waited for her reply, I explored my new lodgings, as eager and restless as a cat. The tennis courts, which were near the Cockpit and Tiltyard, had been floored and divided into a suite of rooms to accommodate me and my new household. Behind the tapestries, the drying plaster walls still smelled of damp earth. The frescos of Greek gods and goddesses in my big receiving chamber still gave off the sulphurous taint of egg. The flesh of freshly-painted infant angels on the Tennis Court Gallery ceiling still glowed a lurid pink.
But my familiar enclosed, four-posted bed which had followed me from Dunfermline to Combe, had been waitingfor me, with its faded red silk coverlet and plump down-filled pillows. My velvet-covered box of combs, a New Year gift from my parents, lay on a table.
I stroked my old friends, the four upright Scottish lions that served as stout oak bedposts. I smiled back at my new chamberer, who looked as uncertain as I felt. I dared to ask her to lay a folded blanket across the foot of the bed, so that my dogs could sleep on my feet, as Lady Harington had never allowed. She obeyed at once.
Watching the unfamiliar young woman… Jane, I reminded myself… as she smoothed out every last wrinkle so that my dogs could sleep in perfect comfort, I felt something shift under my heart.
Suddenly, my life seemed to be rushing me on. I tumbled forward, all arsvy-varsy, struggling to find my footing. I already inhabited a new unfamiliar body with breasts and startling hair that turned my armpits and the fork of my legs into strange, small animals. Like Henry, I gave off new smells that I sometimes sniffed secretly at night. Sometimes, like now, watching an unfamiliar serving maid obey an order I had never before dared to give, I did not know where to put myself.
I called for Belle but she did not come. I paced the length of the tennis court gallery and back again. I wandered from room to room in my new lodgings.
Why had my mother not yet answered me?
‘Belle! Cherami! Bichette!’ Then I saw the little dogs through a window, below me in the orchard with Anne and my French maid. They were waiting for me, but suddenly I did not want to join them.
Alone, I fled like a thief through a high closed gallery that crossed the public thoroughfare of Whitehall itself. From the Parkside, where my lodgings lay, I arrived on the Riverside of Whitehall, where my parents lodged and the state apartments lay.
For a time, I wandered, lost in the maze of courts, alleys and random jumble of buildings. I entered state chambers and quickly left them again before I was noticed. I found the royal chapel. I looked into a presence chamber filled with petitioners to the king. I crossed and re-crossed a large open courtyard. A few times, I was recognised and received startled curtsies and bows. The rest of the time, a single, purposeful, cross-looking girl – I saw my reflection in a hanging glass – reminded no one of the distant doll in silks seen from time to time on the royal dais or on horseback in processions.