Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

They were Parliamentarians, of course, though I did not understand. And they apprehended my brother, too, or else he gave himself up.

We were all four marched to the Colchester jail, John’s wife weak and breathless, as hundreds of angry citizens shouted at us from the fields.

This was on a Monday. On Friday they let us go.

We reached the house early, to doors hanging open, mud and leaves on the floor. The mob had slaughtered the deer in Lucas Park, stripped and beaten our parson, driven off our cows. Money and jewels were gone, furniture stolen, our garden walls pulled down. Each night for nights I could not sleep, convinced they would return. Our neighbors, our tenants: I feared they’d drink our blood. For that mob had even broken into the family vaults and — with pistols, swords, and halberds — defiled the coffins and the corpses of our dead.

WAS IT FROM SHOCK, THEN, OR FEAR, OR A NAïVE SENSE OF CIVIC duty that I asked to join the queen’s court at Oxford? Certainly, the stories were remarkable. One: that French-born Queen Henrietta Maria (Marie de’ Medici’s daughter) had scandalized the English by acting in her own court masques — now a princess, now an Amazon, now a water nymph, and so on. Two: that the glamorous young queen, fond of masquerades even offstage, had roamed along the Thames and through riverside meadows, disguised, in order to look upon the haymakers, and even take up a pitchfork and make hay. Three: that the queen, calling herself She-Majesty Generalissima, led an army from Bridlington to Oxford, straddling her horse like Alexander and eating with the men in the field.

Or had I simply spotted my way out?

Upon hearing the queen had fewer ladies in Oxford than she’d been used to in London, hands at my sides, before a painting of a dog, I requested of my mother that I be allowed to go. “I have,” I said, “a great desire to do so.” My sisters were against it. I’d embarrass myself, the family. Mary insisted it would be kinder to me not to let me go.

“Surely you see,” wrote Anne from London, “dear Margaret is eccentric — more apt to read than dance. Why does she never smile? And why does her hat seem never to match her gown?”

“Consider,” whispered John’s wife, “she’s been so infrequently from home.”

“I’d not be surprised,” Catherine wrote, “if she still hunts satyrs and fairies at every summer moon.”

But this war had come like a whirlwind. Our mother was afraid. I’d be safer at Oxford, she decided, than alone in the country at home, thus she rang for me one morning and consented to my plan.

KISSES ON THE LAWN AT ST. JOHN’S GREEN. A PERFECT SUMMER gloom of vegetal bravado: peonies, bugloss, native beetles singing. The horses stamped a path through the starry dark. Alone in the carriage, flying through England, I imagined myself a beauty in satin; I imagined a crown of diamonds on my head; I imagined I’d soon be married to a celebrated general, but that days after the wedding my husband would fall in battle, so that I, in a silver coat to my waist, with a broad sword in my hand, would have no choice but to rally his troops and lead them onto the field; I imagined a royal reception, the road strewn with petals, bells.

But the coach stopped the following night in an obscure and narrow lane. The horses slobbered, a squat door opened, and I was sped inside, a strange man gripping my elbow. It was a baker’s home, a safe house. I did not sleep, kept my wits. Amid the city’s tolling bells, the smell of yeast and mold, I crept to the window and saw a stack of soldiers’ bodies.

Morning brought another man, rain, a series of crowded hallways, then around a corner and I stood before the queen — the queen! — stunning and Catholic and dressed in red and ermine. Dozens of silent courtiers stood pressed against the walls. But it was as if I’d watched it all unfold within a book, as if I turned the pages from safe inside my room: the dead soldiers, the baker’s house, the courtiers, the queen. Until someone whispered, “How simple she looks,” and all at once I awoke.

I found myself in an unknown universe, whirling far into space: African servants, dogs in hats, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, and ivy-coated quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors. I met Father Cyprien de Gamache, her majesty’s wily confessor; William, a poet, who claimed to be Shakespeare’s son; and a giggling dwarf called Jeffry, who’d been presented to the queen in a pie. I met the ladies-in-waiting, too, who hardly looked my way, busy as they were, bickering over who went where and when, who wore what and when, who fetched what and why, who said what and to whom, and what gave her the right to say that . Nor was Oxford itself at all what I’d expected: dead horses clogged the waterways, corpses from both sides were flung on Jews’ Mount. Grain was stored in Law & Logic, boots cobbled in the School of Astronomy & Music. At the center of it all, the queen, newly pregnant, rarely left her makeshift palace, and I, as one of her ladies-in-waiting, waited each day by her side. With downcast eyes, I minded her fan. I minded her red fox train.

Worst of all: I was permanently underdressed, in my older sisters’ outmoded hand-me-downs and caps. So I designed in my mind a sugar-spun golden gown to walk the path to church in, trailing crimson flowers and greenish beetle wings. Then someone cupped my breasts — two-handed! — as I passed like a ghost down the hall. I never spoke, but immediately sent word to my mother, begging to be allowed back home. “It is a mistake,” I wrote, “and not where I belong.” Mother as promptly refused. Bad as I thought I had it, life outside was swiftly unraveling for those still loyal to the king. “Be tranquil,” her note advised, “this war will soon be over.”

But the following spring it was not.

IN HIDING AT A ROYALIST ESTATE IN EXETER — THE SEA, THE AIR, THE double white violet, the wallflower, stock-gilliflower, cowslip, flower-de-lices, cherry trees in pink — the queen gave birth to a princess, soft and yellow, streaked with blood, the labor causing hysterical blindness and a lingering pain in Her Majesty’s chest.

TO BEGIN CAME AN ATTACK BY PARLIAMENTARIAN SHIPS — THE VICE Admiral, Warwick , and Paramour —just off the coast of Devon. Cannons fantastically loud! Then French ships sailed out to meet us and the Parliamentarians quickly fled, so we unfurled the purple banners— Long live the King —but rough winds blew us westward into storms.

The ship pitched, banging doors. England disappeared.

In one small cabin six beds hung like cradles from a beam, and beneath my own a barrel of beans was home to a mischief of rats. My cabinmates were sick, vomiting into chamber pots they took on deck to dump. I sat and watched the sea exhaust itself out a circular glass, swells as high as any hill in Essex. If light allowed, I read. Twelfth Night in a gale. Would Viola’s fate be mine, washed ashore in a strange new world and dressed up like a man? I tucked up my feet and waited, swinging in the bed.

But no wreck came. Nor were we mistaken for pirates by fishermen out at dawn. We rowed ashore, at last, on the rocky coast of Brittany, struggled up a cliff. Next, by land, passing monks and bullocks and avenues of walnuts. We stopped in Bourbon to catch our breath, walk our spaniels. An ancient château sat over a monastery and a warm medicinal spring, where the queen soaked, finches whistling, as French physicians pierced her abscessed breast. Finally, in November, queen and court reached Paris, where the Regent of France, on behalf of the six-year-old king, had granted us use of the Louvre. I read, sticking to Spenser and Donne. “She is unsociable,” the others said, “and cannot grasp French.” I paced the cloister, the bells of Notre Dame clanging in the distance. I read. I wrote letters to my mother and sisters. And idly one afternoon, I wrote something else: