Philippa Gregory - The other queen

With him as my husband, and a good Protestant queen on the throne, I knew there would be no questioning the history of a pair of gold candlesticks that once stood on an altar and now my best table. No one would worry about some three hundred handsome silver forks, a couple of dozen golden ewers, some exquisite Venetian glass, and chests of gold coins which suddenly appeared in the accounts of my household goods. Surely, to the Protestant God whom we all worship and adore, no one would trouble a loyal widow who has done nothing but love things of beauty that have come her way? There would be no great anxiety about lands that had once belonged to the church and now belong to me. And nor should there be. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn,” my Cavendish used to say to me, and sometimes, only half in jest, “the Lord helps them who help themselves.”

But neither of us—I swear to Our Lady—neither of us, at our most acquisitive, would have taken Tutbury Castle even as a gift. It will cost more to put right than it would to pull down and start again. I can just imagine my Cavendish looking it over and saying to me, “Bess, beloved, a castle is a very fine thing, but where is the profit in it?” And the two of us would have ridden away to a better investment: something that we could buy cheap and make better.

When I remember Cavendish, I have to marvel at my new husband, the earl. His family have owned half of England for centuries, and leased this property of Tutbury forever, but they have let it get so rundown that it is no good for them, nor for any fool that might have taken it off their hands. Of course, my husband the earl has no mind for detail, he has never had to trouble himself with the vulgar questions of profit and loss. After all, he is a nobleman, not a merchant like my Cavendish. He is not on the rise as my Cavendish had to be, as I was then proud to be. My husband the earl has such great lands, he has so many people as servants and tenants and dependents, that he has no idea what profit he makes and what are his costs. Cavendish would have been sick to his heart to do business like this, but it is the noble way. I don’t do it myself, but I know enough to admire it.

Not that there is anything wrong with Tutbury village. The road that winds through it is broad enough and well-enough made. There is a moderately good alehouse and an inn that once was clearly a church poorhouse in the old days before someone put in their bid and seized it—though looking at it and the fields around it, I doubt there was a great profit. There are good farms and fertile fields and a river that runs deep and fast. It is low-lying land, not the countryside I love: the steep hills and low valleys of the Derbyshire Peaks. It is all rather flat and dull and Tutbury Castle sits atop its own little mound like a cherry on a pat of syllabub. The road to the castle winds up this little hill like a path up a midden and at the top is a handsome gateway built of good stone and an imposing tower which makes you hope for better, but you are soon disappointed. Inside the curtain wall to the left is a small stone house which all but leans against the damp wall, with a great hall below and privy rooms above, a kitchen and bake-house on the side. These, if you please, are to be the apartments of the Queen of Scots, who was born in the Castle of Linlithgow and raised in the Chateau of Fontainebleau and may well be a little surprised to find herself housed in a great hall which has next to no daylight in winter and is haunted by the lingering stink of the neighboring midden.

On the opposite side of the courtyard are the lodgings for the keeper of the castle, where I and my lord are supposed to huddle in a part-stone, part-brick building with a great hall below and lodgings above and—thank God—at least a decent fireplace big enough for a tree at a time. And that is it. None of it in good repair, the stone outer wall on the brink of tumbling into the ditch, the slates loose on every roof, crows’ nests in every chimney. If the queen takes herself up to the top of the tower at the side of her lodgings she can look out over a country as flat as a slab of cheese. There are some thick woods and good hunting to the south but the north is plain and dull. In short, if it were a handsome place I would have pressed my lord to rebuild it and make a good house for us. But he has taken little interest in it and I have none.

Well, I am taking an interest now! Up the hill we toil with my good horses slipping and scrabbling in the slush and the wagoners shouting, “Go on! Go on!” to get them to strain against the traces and haul the carts up the hill. The castle doors are open and we stumble into the courtyard and find the entire household, mouths agape, in dirty clothes, the spit boys without shoes, the stable lads without caps, the whole crew of them looking more like slaves just freed from a Turk’s galley than the staff of a nobleman’s house, waiting to serve a queen.

I jump down from my horse before anyone has the wit to come and help me. “Right, you scurvy knaves,” I say irritably. “We have to get this place in order by the end of January. And we are going to start now.”

She is a plague and a headache and a woman of whims and fancies; she is a nightmare and a troublemaker and a great, great queen. I cannot deny that. In every inch of her, in every day, even at her most troublesome, even at her utterly mischievous, she is a great, great queen. I have never met a woman like her before. I have never even seen a queen such as her before. She is an extraordinary creature: moody, mercurial, a thing of air and passion, the first mortal that I have ever met that I can say is indeed truly divine. All kings and queens stand closer to God than ordinary men and women, but this is the first one in my experience who proves it. She is truly touched by God. She is like an angel.

I cannot like her. She is frivolous and whimsical and contrary. One day she begs me to let her gallop over the fields to escape the drudgery of plodding along the muddy road (I have to refuse); then the next she is too ill and too weary to move. She cannot face the cold, she cannot tolerate the icy wind. Her health is fragile, she has a persistent pain in her side. I believe she is frail as any weak woman. But if so, how did she find the courage and the strength to come down the walls of Bolton Castle on a rope? Or ride for three days from a bitter defeat at Langside, Scotland, to Whitehaven, England, three days of dining on nothing but oatmeal, with her hair cropped short as a boy’s for disguise? Riding hard and sleeping rough, with rough soldiers as her companions? What powers can she draw on, that we mere mortals cannot have? It has to be God Himself who gives her this tremendous power and her female nature that undermines her strength with natural delicacy.

I must say, she does not inspire me either to love or to deep loyalty. I would never trust her with my oath—as I have trusted my own queen. This one is quicksilver: she is all fire and light. A queen who wants to hold her lands needs to be more of the earth. A queen who hopes to survive the hatred that all men naturally have for women who contradict God’s law and set themselves up as leaders has to be a queen like a rock, a thing of the earth. My own queen is rooted in her power. She is a Tudor with all their mortal appetites and earthly greed. My queen, Elizabeth, is a most solid being, as earthy as a man. But this is a queen who is all air and angels. She is a queen of fire and smoke.

On this journey (which feels as if it will last forever) she is greeted all along the road by people turning out to wave to her, to call their blessings down on her, and it makes a hard journey ten times longer. It amazes me that in midwinter they would leave their firesides to wait all day at the crossroads of the cold lanes for her small train to come by. Surely they must have heard the scandals about her? Every drinker in every alehouse in the kingdom has smacked his lips over the rumors which have somehow spilled out from the inquiries into her character, and yet I have to send orders ahead of us, wherever we go, that they are not to ring the church bells for this queen’s entry into their village, they are not to bring their babies for her blessing, they are not to bring their sick for her to touch against the King’s Evil, they are not to cut green branches and throw them down in the road before her as if she were riding in triumph: as blasphemous as if she were Jesus going into Jerusalem.

But nothing I say prevents them. These northern superstitious, feckless people are besotted with this woman, who is so far removed from them that they might as well love the moon. They honor her as if she were more than a queen, more than an ordinary woman whose reputation is already shadowed by gossip. They honor her as if they knew better than me—as if they knew a higher truth. As if they know her to be, indeed, the angel that she resembles.

It is a matter of faith, not wisdom. These are a stubborn people who don’t agree with the changes that our queen—Elizabeth—has introduced into their churches. I know that they keep the old faith as best they can, and they want a priest in the pulpit and the Mass said in the old ways. Half of them still probably hear the Mass behind closed doors on a Sunday and none the wiser. They would rather have their faith and their God and their sense of Our Lady watching over all of them than obey the new ever-changing laws of the land. The whole of the North has always been determinedly unimpressed by the reform of religion, and now that this other queen is riding down their lanes, they are showing their true colors: their loyalty to her, their constancy to their faith. They are hers, heart and soul, and I do not know if Cecil had considered this when he ordered me to move her to Tutbury. I don’t know if he understands how little sway Queen Elizabeth, and her faith, has in these northern counties. Perhaps he should have taken her further south? But perhaps everywhere she goes she will be passionately loved. There are Papists, God knows, everywhere in England; perhaps half the country believes that this is our true queen, and the other half will love her when they see her.

This queen, as equally famous for her piety as she is notorious for her lust, wears a rosary at her belt and a crucifix at her throat where I sometimes see her blush rise; she flushes pink like a girl. The Pope himself prays for her by name as she rides through mortal peril. At the worst moments, when we are half-mobbed by a crowd of people quietly whispering blessings on her, I am afraid they would prefer her on the throne and the church unreformed and unchanged than all the benefits that Queen Elizabeth has brought them.

Because these are not people like my Bess—middling people who saw their chance and snatched at profits in the times of change; these are the poor who used to go to the abbey for their hurts and their fears, who liked the priest coming to them for their deathbeds and christenings. They don’t like the churches pulled down, the sanctuaries made unsafe, the nuns with their healing hospitals driven away. They don’t know where to pray, now that the shrines have been destroyed; they don’t know who will help them, now that they cannot light a candle for a saint. They don’t understand that holy water is not holy anymore, that the stoups are dry. They don’t know where they can claim sanctuary now that the abbeys are closed; they don’t know who will feed them in time of need now that the abbey kitchens are destroyed and the kitchen fires gone cold. Barren women cannot go on pilgrimage to a sacred well; sick men cannot hobble to a shrine. They know themselves to be bereft. Undeniably, they have been robbed of much that made their lives happier. And they think that this exquisite other queen, dressed in black with a veil of white, as seductive as a novice nun, will bring back all the good things for them, and they crowd around her and tell her that good times will come again, that she must wait, as they will wait for her, until I have to shout at the guard to push them away.

Perhaps it is no more than the trivial matter of her beauty. People are so foolish over a beautiful woman, they attribute all sorts of magic to her for nothing more than the set of her dark eyes and the thickness of her dark eyelashes. They come to the roadside to stare for curiosity and then they stay and call blessings on her in the hopes of seeing her smile. She raises her hand in thanks; I have to say, she does have extraordinary grace. She smiles at each and every one of them as a private greeting. Everyone who sees her is besotted: hers for life. She has such a presence that nobody ever asks me which of the women in the traveling cloaks is the queen. She is slim like a thoroughbred horse, but tall, tall as a man. She carries herself like a queen and every eye is drawn to her. When she rides by, there is a whisper of admiration like a breeze, and this adoration has blown around her all her life. She carries her beauty like a crown and she laughs and gives a little shrug at the constant admiration she attracts, as if it is a cloak that someone has dropped: ermine, around her pale shoulders.