I looked at the three dogs the prince had chosen to have painted by his feet, their heads raised to him expectantly, waiting to play.
I found myself standing with one hand on my ribs under my breasts as if cradling the sense of possibility that had unexpectedly arrived in my chest.
Tallie took back the picture. ‘Peter borrowed this from the king’s secretary in the name of your brother. I promised to return it at once. Don’t want to make trouble for him.’
And I did not want to ask my brother to lie and say that he had taken the picture himself. He would do it, I was certain, but lying would cause him as much pain as swearing.
I caught Tallie’s hands to see Gustavus Adolphus one more time before the loose gown swallowed him again. The more I gazed at this possible shape of my future, the better I liked it.
Sweden was not so very far away from Scotland.
‘I must have a copy made of this picture,’ I said.
Tallie rolled her eyes and said she would try. I set off to learn what Henry thought of the Swedish prince.
‘I hear that he’s a more eager scholar of Latin and Greek than I am.’ My brother was in the small armoury at Whitehall, having the buckles adjusted on a bright new steel breastplate. ‘But shares my taste for tilting, swordplay and military strategy. And he’s a good Lutheran Protestant. He would be a good match, Elizabella.’
‘That means that you would have to marry a Catholic,’ I said.
‘One battle at a time.’
I left Henry to the oiling of the wood-louse joints of his steel gauntlets.
Tallie reported that all the talk at dinner had been of how much the king liked the Swedish prince.
I asked my secretary to find a tutor to teach me to speak Swedish. Falling asleep that night, I let myself remember those fine long legs and serious blue eyes.
Three days later, Tallie brought me a pencil copy of Gustavus Adolphus’s portrait.
‘Tank,’
I said, having completed my first Swedish lesson. ‘How did you manage this miracle?’
‘You’ll have to remember the colour of his eyes,’ she said. ‘The artist had only an hour in which to work.’
‘The prince is very handsome,’ Anne agreed when I showed her the picture that night. ‘He could be an Englishman.’
I tried out my new Swedish words on her.
‘Man.’
Husband.
‘Kärlek.’
Love.
For the next week, I kept his picture on my pillow. ‘Gustavus,’ I whispered. ‘Goostaaaavoooos…’ It was a beautiful name, echoing itself at the beginning and end, with that open ‘aaaah’ of wonder in between.
I asked Henry to let me study his maps of northern Europe. I imagined I was a gull, soaring over the coast of my new country, swooping down into the intricate folds of its painted coastline, circling the spires of golden domes. As I fell asleep, Gustavus Adolphus flew beside me. While I spiralled with the sun on my wings, he plummeted down to scythe the water with a beak the colour of coral. Then he beat his way back up again into the sky, carrying a glittering silver fish.
I was afraid to give words to the thought lest I frighten it away. I thought I could be happy with Gustavus Adolphus.
Fågel.
Bird.
Hund.
Dog. Even his language felt familiar.
Alas, I had learned little more Swedish than
‘ja',
yes,
‘nje',
no, and
‘God dag',
good day, when, one morning, my ladies fell suddenly silent as I entered the room.
I wagged my finger at them. ‘I know that silence. What news do you not want me to hear?’
They exchanged looks.
Frances Tyrrell was boldest. ‘The Swedish envoy has just left London, your grace, wearing a long face. The king didn’t send a guard-of-honour to see him to his ship.’
‘He’s gone back to Sweden,’ added Anne, to be certain that I understood.
I nodded. Tallie and I had missed the rumours of this one.
‘Adïo'.
Goodbye.
‘Why not Gustavus Adolphus?’ I raged at Henry. ‘He’s royal. He’s wealthy. One day he will rule a powerful kingdom.’ I knew that my liking for him mattered not a jot, except to me.
‘Sweden is at war with Denmark in a struggle to control the Baltic coast.’ My brother sounded almost as upset as I was. ‘I believe that the queen, our mother, balked at a son-in-law who was at war with her native country.’
‘But the king entertained his suit all the same.’
‘That was yesterday,’ said Henry. ‘Today, he has his sight trained on an alliance with the Netherlands.’
Maurits van Nassau, Stateholder of the Netherlands. Protestant, but not royalty…
And at least forty years old. ‘He’s older than our father!’ I cried in dismay. I tried to imagine living with such an ancient man. I wondered if he smelled old, like so many of the courtiers, or like my poor Trey who now trembled in the haunches when climbing stairs and farted vilely.
I tried to live my daily life as usual. I received petitioners. I signed household budgets, approved wine orders and commissioned gifts for my ladies. I rode. I embroidered a curse of cushions. I walked in the gardens and stood while new gowns were fitted. I sat for still more portraits, ate meals, slept, watched entertainments. I visited the raccoons in the new aviary at St James’s, which was slowly growing to include a menagerie as well. I attended the unhappy launching of my brother’s new warship,
The Prince Royal,
when the king grew impatient and stormed out after the ship got stuck inthe dock gates. I visited the Haringtons at Kew in my barge. I played cards, diced and gossiped with the Herd.
Each night in my sleeping chamber, while her fingers brought the strings alive, Tallie reported what she had learned that day. Sometimes, she even sang her reports in improvised couplets to make me smile. But all the time I felt that I was waiting in the dark for the Combe ghost to arrive.
We added names and details to the list of my suitors, as we learned them.
The Marquess of Hamilton. Third in line of Scottish succession. The Queen’s choice. Therefore, unlikely.
Prince Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine. Protestant. Also called the Palsgrave. Also known as the Elector Palatine because he will helps choose the next emperor of Holy Roman Empire. Protestant. Henry likes him. Says he matches me in lineage, has emperors in his bloodline, but the Privy Council worry about limited finances. The Queen of course against. Suit advancing.
I remembered my father’s gibe to de Bouillon when my portrait was being painted. ‘Perhaps too costly for your master to maintain?’
Early in 1611, de Bouillon returned from delivering my portrait. In exchange, he brought my father a detailed description of Prince Frederick and proposed terms for the marriage. Tallie tried but failed to obtain a copy of this document.
‘And if there’s a portrait of the prince, I can’t find it,’ she said. ‘As for gossip, the word is that he’s your equal in years, superior in breeding, with influence in Europe but no money.’
‘Then I might escape him yet,’ I said.
The king publicly weighed this suitor’s Protestantism against the likelihood of a balancing Catholic bride for my militantly anti-Catholic brother.
Henry petitioned the king on the Palatine’s behalf. ‘This Frederick,’ he assured me, ‘even more than Frederick of Brunswick, would be a strong and reliable ally in any future war between Protestant Princes and the Catholic monarchs of Europe.’
Prince Otto of Hesse, firm proposal. Rejected.
I never learned why.
Victor Amadeus, Catholic. Prince of Piedmont, heir to Duke of Savoy who controls northern Italy. Portrait has mouth like a girl. Said to be lecherous and sly. Sister proposed for Henry.
The Count of Cartignana turned rumour to reality when he arrived in London with a commission from the Catholic Duke of Savoy, proposing a possible double marriage. Henry would marry the duke’s daughter, the Infanta Maria of Savoy. I would marry his son.
The king set aside the Palatine proposal to me to parlay with Savoy on the double marriage.
‘I will not marry a Catholic!’
My father and brother stood facing each other down the central aisle like champions in a list, preparing to charge. Neither had seen me. I retreated swiftly and silently towards the door of the royal chapel, where I had come to seek a few moments of solitude.
‘I will never go to bed with the Church of Rome!’ said my brother quietly. He stood with his back to the altar, as if interrupted at prayer.
I paused to listen, half-hidden behind one of the facing double rows of high-backed pews. Two choristers slipped past me out of the door. Near me, in the narrow aisle behind the pews, the sexton froze with a burnt-down stub in one hand and a clutch of fresh candles in the other.
‘Ye’ll do as yer told by yer king!’ My father’s bellow echoed back down from the painted, gilded ceiling.
‘What will you do?’ demanded Henry. ‘Lock me in the Tower like Seymour? Do you imagine you’d be allowed?’
I listened to the long silence.
‘I’ll be allowed by a war-weary people to preserve the peace abroad that I’ve laboured so hard to achieve. You and your sword-waving love for the Protestant cause will destroy the balance and tilt us all into war again.’
From my hiding place, I could not see my father but I could hear his heavy breathing. I could just see my brother.
‘Your
via media
will give the Papists a straight road back to power in England,’ Henry said. ‘My first care is for England, not Europe. We’ve already had Protestant martyrs burned in Smithfield and Lewes. Never again!’
‘Are ye trying to say that I don’t care for England?’ Ice formed on my father’s words. ‘So spit it out like a man. Don’t hide behind insinuation like a gossiping slut. D’ye say that I don’t care about England? Take care how y’answer.’
Henry looked down. ‘No, sir. I forget myself.’
‘You’re a dangerous fool,’ said the king. ‘The most dangerous. A simple mind that knows itself to be right. Leave me. Go play your soldier games. Leave me to rule England, and you.’
Henry rushed past me out of the chapel, head down, without seeing me.
‘The prince imagines that he is already king!’ our father shouted after my brother’s retreating back. ‘He would bury me before my time!’
I stepped deeper into shadow behind the pews and waited until the king, too, had left the chapel, while the sexton tried to pretend that he was not there.
For reasons that neither Tallie nor I ever managed to learn in spite of all our efforts, the king rejected the Savoy matchfor Henry but accepted Victor Amadeus for me. With the
provisos,
however, that I would not convert and that my children were to be raised, in Italy, as Protestants with English sympathies. Three different children of Henry VIII had ruled England in turn, the king argued. My children might well find themselves on the English throne. Cartignana left to take this reply back to Turin.
The king made Carr a viscount, and, therefore, the first Scotsman to be elevated to the Lords. Meanwhile my ladies fell in love and pined. They were betrothed, then married. One fortunate woman, the Other Elizabeth, loved and married the same man.
JUNE 1611
On the third of June, my cousin Arbella rode away from house arrest in Barnet, with a small party of attendants and dressed in men’s clothes, headed for the Thames and a ship to the Continent. At the same time, her husband William Seymour escaped from the Tower. His reported means ranged from wearing a false beard to being bundled up in dirty linen. However he did it, he made it away safely to France.
Arbella reached her own ship safely. But she was overtaken on the sea, brought back, and locked in the Tower. My father claimed that she and her husband meant to shelter with one of the chief Catholic powers and mount a Papist attempt on the English throne. The tongues of rumour wagged. Here was a new Catholic threat, as great as the earlier Gunpowder Treason.
Arbella would never leave the Tower, the king promised. And should thank God that he let her keep her head.
The pressure of this Catholic threat brought into the open the battles between my brother and father over both Henry’s marriage and mine. Henry now dropped his pose as a dutiful son, on this subject at least. He openly denounced the king’sattempt to make balanced alliances with both Catholics and Protestants, and began to argue fiercely in public against my match in Savoy with Victor Amadeus.
He was said to be influenced in this by his friend Ralegh, who continued to write him long advisory letters from his imprisonment in the Tower. These rumours further enraged the king.
My heart had leapt so often from one possible husband to the next that I no longer knew what I felt. I spoke some Italian and so would not be completely adrift in Savoy. My excellent French was not now likely to be required. I had not progressed beyond the word ‘love’ in Swedish. I did not speak German and thought it a barbaric language. I was almost past caring.
Philip III of Spain. Catholic. Ruling monarch. Newly widowed. Very old. Father of my earlier suitor, Prince Felipe.
‘I’d have the mighty monarch of Spain as my son-in-law!’ the king crowed. ‘Now there’s a dutiful reverence from an old enemy that I’d be happy to accept!’
Both the Savoy and Palatine matches seemed forgotten.
‘I won’t let him send you to become a prisoner in a Catholic court!’ Henry vowed to me privately. Publicly, he said that anyone who advised the king to marry me to Spain was a traitor to England.
‘I begin to wonder if the devil would be so bad after all!’ I said to Tallie. ‘So far as I can learn, he’s neither Catholic or Protestant.’
I had no strength left to speculate nor to prepare myself. The Herd began to drive me mad. I would eavesdrop and then wish that I hadn’t, as they speculated about whether or not my heart had been broken, and which failed match had done it.