Except me. Except me. I do not condemn him. How can I? She took me in, as she took him in; I desired her, as he desired her. He, at least, had the sense to think that though she might have been a bad woman, she might still be Queen of Scotland and make him king. He had at least had the old Howard sense of ambition. I was a greater fool than he was. I just wanted to serve her. I didn’t even want a reward. I didn’t even mind the cost. I just wanted to serve her.
1572, JANUARY,
SHEFFIELD CASTLE:
BESS
We have to wait for the verdict on Thomas Howard from London and there is nothing we can do to speed this time of waiting. Queen Mary is impatient for news and yet dreads to hear. One would almost have thought her truly in love with him. One would almost think that the man she loved is on trial.
She walks on the battlement and she looks south, where he is, instead of north. She knows that no army will come for her from the north this year. Her dupe Norfolk and her pander Ross are imprisoned and her spy is run away; she is a woman alone. Her master plotter Ridolfi has conspired only to win his own safety. Her last husband, Bothwell, will never be released from his prison in Denmark; both the Scots lords and the English are determined that such a dangerous enemy shall never be set free. He can be of no help to her anymore. Her besotted admirer and only loyal friend, my husband, is nursing a broken heart and finally remembering his duty to his queen and his country, and his promises to me. None of the men she has enchanted can help her now. There is no army of rescue for her; there is no man sworn to be hers till death; there is no network of friends and liars, gathering secretly and silently in a dozen hidden places. She is defeated; her friends are arrested, screaming on the rack, or run away. She is finally a true prisoner. She is quite in my power.
Odd then, that I should take such little joy in it. Perhaps it is because she is so roundly defeated: her beauty is dissolving into fat, her grace made clumsy by pain, her eyes swollen with crying, her rosebud mouth now permanently folded into a thin line of suffering. She, who always looked so much younger than me, has suddenly aged like me, grown weary like me, grown sorrowful like me.
We form a quiet alliance: we have learned the hard way that the world is not easy for women. I have lost the love of my husband, my last husband. But so has she. I may lose my home and she has lost her kingdom. My fortunes may come good again, and so may hers. But in these cold, gray winter days we are like two hangdog widows who cling together for warmth and hope for better days though doubting they will ever come.
We talk of our children. It is as if they are our only prospect of happiness. I talk of my daughter Elizabeth, and she says that she is of an age to match with Charles Stuart, her husband Darnley’s younger brother. If they were to marry—and this is a game to play over our sewing—their son would be heir to the English throne, second only to her son James. We laugh at the thought of the consternation of the queen if we were to make such an ill-starred, ambitious match, and our laugh is like that of old ill-natured women, plotting something bad, as revenge.
She asks me about my debts and I tell her frankly that the costs of her lodging have taken my husband to the very brink of ruin and that he has drawn on my lands and sold my treasure to save his own. The fortune that I brought him on marriage has been mortgaged, bit by bit, to meet his debts. She does not waste her time or mine in regret; she says that he should insist that Elizabeth pay her debts; she says that no good king or queen ever lets a good subject be out of pocket: how else can they rule? I tell her, and truly, that Elizabeth is the meanest sovereign that ever wore a crown. She gives her love and affection, she gives her loyalty, she can even give honors and sometimes (more rarely) money-earning positions, but she never hands over cash from her treasury if she can possibly help it.
“But she will need his friendship now,” she points out. “To get the verdict of guilty on the duke? She must realize that she should pay her debts to him now; he is the master of the judges, she must want him to do her will.”
I see from this that she does not know him at all, she does not begin to understand him. I find I love him for his proud folly, even though I rail at him for being a proud fool. “He won’t bring in a verdict that depends on whether she pays her debt to him,” I say. “He’s a Talbot, he can’t be bought. He will look at the evidence, weigh the charge, and come to the just sentence, whatever he is paid, whatever it costs.” I hear the pride in my own voice. “That is the sort of man he is. I would have thought you would know that by now. You can’t bribe him, and you can’t buy him. He’s not an easy man, not even a very sensible man. He does not understand the way of the world and he is not a very clever man. You might even call him a fool—certainly he was a fool over you—but he is always, always a man of honor.”
1572, JANUARY,
SHEFFIELD CASTLE:
MARY
The night that they start the trial I send my women to bed and sit beside my fire and think, not of the Duke of Norfolk, who faces the judges tomorrow for my sake, but of Bothwell, who would never have turned himself in to arrest, who would never have let his servants confess, who would never have written state secrets in a breakable code, who would never have let those codes be found. Who—God knows, above all other—would never have trusted a turncoat such as Ridolfi. Who—God forgive me—would never have trusted my assurance that Ridolfi was the man for us. Bothwell would have seen at once that my ambassador John Lesley would break under questioning; Bothwell would have known that Ridolfi would brag. Bothwell would have guessed that the plot would fail and would never have joined in it. Bothwell—it makes me laugh to think of it—would never have sent a queen’s ransom in an unmarked bag by a Shrewsbury draper, trusting to luck. Bothwell was a thief, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer, a wicked man, a despicable man, but never a victim. No one has ever held Bothwell for long, or cozened him, or tricked him, or had him serve against his own interests. Not until he met me, that is. When he fought for himself he was unbeatable.
I think of my palace at Holyrood in the early days of my marriage to Darnley. Within weeks I had discovered that the beautiful boy I had fallen in love with was a foul young man whose only charms were in appearance. As soon as we were married he let me see what everyone else knew, that he was a drunk and a sodomite with a burning ambition to put me aside from rule and take the power himself as king consort.
I blamed my distaste for him on my discovery of the sort of man he was, but the truth was worse than that—far worse. I remember Bothwell coming to my court at Holyrood, the shabby ladies and the uncouth men of my Scottish court falling back to make way, as they always did, for Bothwell, who came forward, unsmiling and powerful, head and shoulders above everyone else. Someone gave a little hiss of distaste, and someone left slamming the door, and three men drew away and fingered their belts where their swords should be, and instead of being angered at the disrespect, I just caught my breath at the scent of a man who was at least a man and not a half peasant, like these Scots lords, nor a half girl, like my lightweight husband, but a man who would stand to look a king in the face, a man like my father-in-law, the King of France, who knew himself to be the greatest man in the room, whoever else was there.
I see him and I want him. It is as simple and as sinful as that. I see him, and I know he can hold this throne for me, defeat these lickspittle turncoats for me, confront John Knox and the men who hate me, knock these warring lords together, command my allowance from France, defend me from England, and make me queen here. No one else can do it. They fear no one but him. And so I want no one but him. He is the only man who can keep me safe, who can save me from these barbarians. A savage himself, he can rule them. I look at him and I know he is the man who will take me to my destiny. With him I will command Scotland; with him I could invade England.
Does he know this, the minute he sees me—composed and beautiful on my throne? I am not such a fool as to let my desire show in my face. I look at him calmly and I nod my head at him and remark that my m
other trusted him above all the other lords and he served her with honor. Does he know that as I am speaking so coolly I can feel my heart pounding underneath my gown and my body prickle with nervous sweat?
I don’t know; even later, I still don’t know. He will never tell me, not even when we are lovers whispering in the night; he won’t tell me then, and when I ask, he laughs lazily, and says, “A man and a maid…”
“Hardly a maid,” I say.
“Far worse,” he says. “A married woman, a much-married woman, and a queen.”
“So did you know I wanted you?”
“Sweetheart, I knew you were a woman, so you would be bound to want somebody.”
“But did you know it was you?”
“Well, who else was there?”
“Will you not say?”
“There were you, clinging to your throne, desperate for help. Someone was going to kidnap you and marry you by force. You were like a wild bird waiting for the net. There was I, longing for wealth and position and the chance to settle some old scores and rule Scotland. Would you not say we were born for each other?”
“Do you not love me? Did you never love me?”
He pulls me into his arms and his mouth comes down on mine. “Not at all. Not at all, you French whore, you precious vixen, mine own, all mine own.”
“No,” I say as his weight comes down on me. It is what I always say to him. It is the word which means desire to me, to us. It is the word which means yes: “No.”
JANUARY 16TH, 1572,
WESTMINSTER HALL,
LONDON:
GEORGE
London is like a city in mourning; I have never seen anything like it since the young Elizabeth was taken from the Tower to imprisonment in the country and we were so afraid that she would never come home safe again. Now her cousin makes another fearful journey, from the Tower to the Star Chamber at Westminster Hall. But this time it is ordered by us, the Protestants, the Englishmen, against another Protestant and an Englishman. How has this happened?
It is a cold morning, still dark—for God’s sake, why are people not still in their beds? Or going about their business? Why are they here, lining the streets, in a miserable silence, filling the lanes with foreboding? Cecil has ordered the queen’s guards and the mayor’s men to keep order, and behind their broad shoulders, the white faces of ordinary men and women peep out, hoping to see the queen’s cousin go by, hoping to call out to him their prayer that he will be saved.
They don’t get a chance to do even that. Of course Cecil trusts no one, not even the sorrowful good nature of the English crowd. He has ordered the guards to take Norfolk to Westminster Hall by royal barge along the river. The oars cut through the water to the drumbeat; there is no flag at the pole. Norfolk is traveling without his standard, without his herald, without his good name: a stranger to himself.
This must be his darkest time; he must be lonelier than any man in the world. His children are banned from seeing him; Cecil will not allow him any visitors. He has not even had a lawyer to advise him. He is as solitary as a man already on a scaffold. More so, for he does not even have a priest at his side.
There is not one of us, not one of the twenty-six of us peers called to judge him, who does not imagine himself in his place. So many of us have lost friends or kin to the scaffold in these last few years. I think of Westmorland and Northumberland—both gone from me, both driven from me and from England, the wife of one in exile, a widow to a dead traitor, and the wife of the other in hiding on her lands, swearing she wants to know nothing of anything. How can this have happened in England, in my England? How can we have fallen so quickly into such suspicion and fear? God knows we are more fearful and more faithless to each other now, while Philip of Spain threatens our coast, than we were when he was married to our old queen and sitting on our throne. When we had a Spaniard as our king consort, ruling over us, we were less fearful than we are now. Now we are terrified of him and his religion. How should that be? A man who does not know who his friends are, does not know what the world is, a man who does not know his servants, his allies, is a man utterly alone.
I shall have to sit in judgment on my friend and fellow peer Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, and I shall have to listen to some dirty stuff. I don’t trust evidence which has been racked out of prisoners screaming with pain. When did torture become something that happens as a matter of course in the prisons, with the silent complicity of the judge? We are not in France, where torture is a legal practice; we are not Spanish with an artistry of cruelty; we became Protestant so that religion should be a private matter, not imposed by fire and the stake. We are Englishmen, and such savagery is illegal except at the specific request of the monarch in the gravest of times. This is how it is in England.
Or at any rate, it should be.
Or at any rate, it once was.
But since the queen is advised by men who do not flinch from a little barbarism, I find all sorts of evidence is now presented to me and I am expected to wink at it. Men I have counted as my friends for years can be declared treasonous and led to the scaffold, their road lined with confessions from their broken servants. This is the new justice of England, where stories are crushed out of men by piling stones on their bellies, and the judge is told beforehand what verdict to bring in. Where we break the spirits of page boys so that we can break the neck of their master.
Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. It was not for this that we prayed, when we longed for our Elizabeth. This is not the new world of peace and reconciliation that we thought the new princess would bring to us.
I mutter all this to myself as I go, sluggishly enough, in my own barge down the river to the Westminster steps, to alight from a rocking boat on a dark river and to walk up the damp steps and through the terrace of the palace towards the hall, never more downhearted than now, as Cecil’s great plan to make England safe from Papists, from the Spanish, from the Scots queen reaches its powerful final act. My fortune destroyed, in debt to my own wife, my own peace in wretched scraps, my wife spying on me, the woman that I love dishonored by her own lies, a traitor to my liege lord and queen, the other once-beloved queen my ruin. I lift my head and walk into the hall as a Talbot should walk, like a lord among his peers, as my father would have walked, and his father before him, all of us in a long line, and I think, Dear God, none of them can ever have felt as I do: so uncertain, so very uncertain, and so lost.
I have the highest seat, and on either side of me are the other lords who will try this miserable case with me, God forgive them for serving here. Cecil has picked this court well for his purposes. Hastings is here, the Scots queen’s inveterate enemy; Wentworth, Robert Dudley, and his brother Ambrose, every one of them Norfolk’s friend in the good times, not one of them ready to risk his reputation for him now; none would dare defend the Scots queen. All of us, who whispered against Cecil just three years ago, are huddled together now, like frightened schoolboys, to do whatever he says.
Cecil is here himself—Burghley, as I must remember to call him. The queen’s newest and freshest creation: Baron Burghley, in his bright new robes, his ermine collar all white and fluffy.
Below us lords are the judges of the Crown, and before us all, a draped stage where Howard will stand to answer the charges. Behind him, seats for the nobility, and behind them, standing room for the thousands of gentry and citizens who have come to London to enjoy the unique spectacle of a royal cousin on open trial for treason and rebellion. The royal family turning on itself once again. We find we are no further forward at all.
It is still dark and cold at eight when there is a stir at the door and Thomas Howard comes in. He exchanges a quick look with me and I think these last three years have not been kind to either of us. I know my face has lines of worry from my care of the queen and the destruction of my peace, and he is gray and fatigued. He has that terrible prison pallor which comes to a man whose skin has been burnished from being out in all weathers, every day, and then ha
s been suddenly confined. The tan is on the skin like dirt but the healthy color beneath has faded. It is the pallor of the Tower: he will have seen it on his father, on his grandfather. He stands on the dais, and to my shock, I see his stance—always haughty, always overproud—has become bowed. He stands like a man weighed down with false accusation.
The duke raises his head as the clerk of the Crown reads the charge, and he looks around, as a weary hawk will scan the mews, always alert, always ready for danger, but there is no bright Howard pride in his eyes anymore. They imprisoned him in the room where they kept his grandfather charged with treason. He can overlook the green where they executed his father for offenses against the Crown. Howards have always been their own greatest danger. Thomas must feel his line is accursed. I think if his cousin the queen could only see him now she would forgive him from sheer pity. He may have been wrongly advised, he may have done wrong, but he has been punished. This man is at the end of his strength.
He is asked for his plea but instead of answering guilty or no, he asks the court for a counsel, a lawyer to help him answer the charge. I don’t have to look to Cecil for his refusal; the chief justice Catline is already there before us all, up on his feet like a little moppet, explaining that in trials for high treason no lawyer is allowed. Howard may answer only if he has been treasonous or not. And there is no mitigation either; in a trial for high treason, if he answers guilty he is saying he wants to die.