Philippa Gregory: The other queen

Damning indeed, utterly damning. Except that someone asks Nicholas Barham if this letter was intercepted on its way to the Scots queen or taken from her rooms. Everyone looks at me, of course, who should have caught such a letter. I am in the wrong now, for I did not catch this letter. I shake my head and Barham smoothly reports that this extraordinary letter was somehow lost, mislaid. It was not sent and I did not intercept it. The Queen of Scots never saw it. He tells us, straight-faced, that a copy of this most incriminating letter was hidden in a secret room, found as if by a miracle, years later, by James, Earl of Moray, and handed by him to the Queen of England shortly before his death.

I cannot help but look incredulously at Cecil, that he should expect men—not children enjoying fairy tales but men of the world, and his fellow lords—to accept this complicated fable. The look he returns to me is smilingly blank. I am a fool to expect something more convincing. To Cecil it does not matter if none of this makes sense; what matters is that the letter is entered on the record, that the record is part of the trial, that it will serve as evidence to justify the verdict to the world, and that the verdict will be guilty.

“Shall we have our dinner now?” he asks pleasantly.

I rise and we go out. I am so foolish that I look for Norfolk as we lords go for our dinner, and think I will put my arm around his shoulders for a moment and whisper, “Be of good courage; there is no escaping the verdict, but the pardon will follow.”

Of course, he does not dine with us. I had forgotten. We all go to eat our dinner in the great hall; he goes alone, to eat alone in his cell. He cannot dine with us, he is banished from our company, and I will never put my arm around his shoulders again.

Ihave no great love for the Scots queen, God knows, but it would take a woman with a harder heart than mine not to defend her against our new house guest and temporary jailer, Ralph Sadler. He is a hard-hearted bad-tempered old man, utterly immune to any form of beauty, whether it be the white hoarfrost on the trees here at Sheffield Castle or the pale, strained beauty of the Scots queen.

“I have my orders,” he says hoarsely to me after she has withdrawn from the dinner table, unable to bear his slurping his pottage for another moment. She whispers of a headache and takes herself from the room. I could wish I could escape so easily, but I am the mistress of a great house and I must do my duty by a guest.

“Orders?” I ask politely, and watch him spoon up another great swallow in the general direction of his big mouth.

“Aye,” he says. “Defend her, protect her, prevent her escape, and if all else fails…” He makes a horrible gesture with his flat hand, a long cutting movement across his own throat.

“You would kill her?”

He nods. “She cannot be allowed to get free,” he says. “She is the greatest danger this country has ever faced.”

I think for a moment of the Spanish armada that they say Philip is building right now in his fearsome shipyards. I think of the Pope demanding that all of the old faith disobey Queen Elizabeth, authorizing them to kill her. I think of the French and the Scots. “How can she be?” I ask. “One woman alone? When you think of all that we face?”

“Because she is a figurehead,” he says harshly. “Because she is French, because she is Scots, because she is Catholic. Because none of us will ever sleep sound in our beds while she is free.”

“Seems a bit hard that a woman should die because you can’t sleep,” I say waspishly.

It earns me a hard look from this hard old man, who is obviously unaccustomed to a woman with opinions. “I heard that she had won you over, and your lord,” he says nastily. “I heard that he, in particular, was very taken.”

“We are both of us good servants to the queen,” I say staunchly. “As Her Grace knows, as my good friend Lord Burghley knows. No man has ever doubted my lord’s honor. And I can be a good servant to Her Grace and yet not want to see the Scots queen murdered.”

“You might be able to,” he says gloomily, “but I cannot. And in time, I expect there will be more who think like me than think like you.”

“She might die in battle,” I say. “If, God forbid, there was a battle. Or she might be killed by an assassin, I suppose. But she cannot be executed: she is of blood royal. She cannot be charged with treason: she is a consecrated queen. No court can judge her.”

“Oh, who says?” he asks suddenly, dropping his spoon and turning his big face on me.

“The law of the land,” I stammer. He is almost frightening in his bulk and with his temper. “The law of the land which defends both great and small.”

“The law is what we say it is,” he boasts. “As she may yet discover, as you may one day see. The law will be what we say it should be. We shall make the laws and those who threaten us or frighten us will find that they are outside the protection of the law.”

“Then it is no law at all,” I maintain. After all I am the wife of the Lord High Steward of England. “The law must defend the high and the low, the innocent, and even the guilty until they are shown to be criminal.”

Sadler laughs, a rough loud laugh. “That may have been so in Camelot,” he says crudely. “But it is a different world now. We will use the laws against our enemies, we will find evidence against our enemies, and if there is neither law nor evidence, then we will make it fresh, specially for them.”

“Then you are no better than they,” I say quietly, but aloud I turn to my server of the ewery and say, “More wine for Sir Ralph.”

My betrothed is fighting for his life in a courtroom, judged by men as fearful as he. My son is far from me. The only man who could save me now is far, far away, himself imprisoned, and I don’t expect ever to see him again. My worst enemy is my new keeper, and even Bess, the falsest friend a woman ever had, is repelled by his harshness towards me.

I am starting to feel afraid. I would not have believed that Elizabeth could put me in the charge of such a man. It is to dishonor me, to make such a man my custodian. She would know this: she has been a captive herself. She would know how a harsh jailer destroys a prisoner’s life. He will not let me walk in the park, not even in the frozen snow in the morning, he will not let me ride out, he will allow me no more than ten minutes’ walk in the cold yard, and he has been talking to Bess about reducing my household once more. He says I cannot have my luxuries from London, I may not have letters from Paris. He says I should not have so many dishes for dinner, nor fine wines. He wants to take down the cloth of estate which marks my royal status. He wants me to have an ordinary chair, not a throne, and he sits without invitation, in my presence.

I would not have believed that this could happen to me. But neither would I have believed that Elizabeth would put her own cousin, her closest kin, on trial for treason, especially as she must know that he is guilty of nothing but his ambition to marry me—which, though disagreeable to a woman of Elizabeth’s gross vanity, is hardly a crime. He rode out in no rebellion, he sent no money of his own to any rebellious army—why, he lost the French gold he was supposed to send. He obeyed her order to go to court though his followers hung on to the leathers of his stirrups and the tail of his horse and begged him not to go. He surrendered Kenninghall, his own great house, disinheriting his own children: just as she asked. He stayed obediently at his London house and then went, as ordered, to the Tower. He met Ridolfi, several times, it is true. But I know, as they must know, that he would not have laid a plot with him to murder Elizabeth and overthrow her country.