Philippa Gregory: The Virgin's Lover

He hung around court like a handsome leper and learned to the last chilly note the voice of rejection. Many men who had been glad to be his friend and his follower when he had been Lord Robert now denied that they had ever known him. He found that memories were extraordinarily short. He was outcast in his own country.

Philip of Spain’s favor now counted for nothing. He seemed to have abandoned England and her queen. He was living in his glamorous court in the Netherlands and was said to have taken a beautiful mistress. Everyone said he would never come to England again. His deserted wife, Queen Mary, confessed that she had been mistaken for a second time—she had failed to conceive his child, she would never now give England an heir. She shrank inside her clothes, and hid inside her private rooms, more like a widow than a ruling queen.

Robert, unable to trade in his own dishonored name, sign a legal bond, or join a company of merchants, knew that he would never progress until the slur of treason was lifted from his name, and only Queen Mary could restore him. He borrowed a new hat and a new cape from his brother-in-law Henry Sidney and stood in the queen’s presence chamber one damp, misty morning, waiting for her to come out of her rooms on the way to her chapel. Half a dozen other petitioners waited nearby, and they stirred as the door opened and the queen, head down and dressed in black, came out, accompanied only by a couple of women.

Robert feared she would go past him without looking up, but she glanced at him, recognized him, and paused. “Robert Dudley?”

He bowed. “Your Grace.”

“You wanted something of me?” she asked wearily.

He thought he would have to be as blunt as her. “I wanted to ask you to lift the attainder for treason against my name,” he said frankly. “I served your husband at St. Quentin and Calais and it cost me what was left of my fortune, and also my young brother’s life, Your Grace. With this mark against my name I cannot enter into business nor hold my head up. My wife has lost her inheritance, a little farm in Norfolk, and you know I have lost all my father’s gifts to me. I would not have my wife demeaned and in poverty for marrying me.”

“Women always share in their husband’s fortune,” she said flatly. “Good and bad. And a bad husband is a wife’s despair.”

“Yes,” he said. “But she has never admired my fortunes. She only wanted to live quietly in the country and I would have done better for her if I had done as she wished. We cannot even live together now; I cannot endure her family, and I cannot buy her a roof to put over her head. I have failed her, Your Grace, and it is wrong of me.”

“You were at the fall of Calais,” she remembered.

Robert met her eyes with a look that was as bleak as her own. “I never forget it,” he said. “It was an ill-managed business. The canals should have been flooded to serve as a moat, but they did not open the sea-gates. The forts were not maintained and manned as we were promised. I did the best I could with my troop, but the French outnumbered and outmastered us. I did not fail you for lack of trying, Your Grace. Your husband himself commended my fighting at St. Quentin.”

“You always were silver-tongued,” she said with a little ghost of a smile. “Your whole family could charm their way to Paradise.”

“I hope so,” he said. “For too many of them are there already. Those of us who are left are brought very low in these days. I had seven brothers and five sisters in the nursery with me, twelve bonny children; and now there are only four of us left.”

“I too am very low,” she confessed. “When I came to the throne, Robert, when I defeated you and your father, I thought that all my troubles would be over. But they were just beginning.”

“I am sorry it brought you so little joy,” he said gently. “The crown is not a light burden, especially for a woman.”

To his horror he saw her dark eyes fill with tears, which spilled down the tired skin of her cheeks. “Especially a woman alone,” she said softly. “Elizabeth may yet find that out for herself; though she is such a proud spinster now. It is unbearable to rule alone, and yet how can one share a throne? What man could be trusted with such power? What man can take the throne, and take a wife, and yet let her rule?”

He dropped to his knee and took her hand and kissed it. “Before God, Queen Mary, I am sorry for your sadness. I never thought it would come to this.”

She stood for a moment, comforted by his touch. “Thank you, Robert.”

He looked up at her and she was struck with what a handsome young man he was: as dark as a Spaniard, but with a new hard line of suffering drawn deeply between his black eyebrows.

“But you have everything ahead of you,” she said wryly. “You have your youth, and good health, and good looks, and you will believe that Elizabeth will have the throne after me, and restore your fortunes. But you must love your wife, Robert Dudley. It is very hard for a woman if her husband neglects her.”

He rose to his feet. “I will do,” he promised easily.

She nodded. “And do not plot against me, or my throne.”

This was an oath he took more seriously. He met her eyes without flinching. “Those days are gone,” he said. “I know you are my rightful queen. I bend the knee, Queen Mary, I have repented of my pride.”

“So,” she said wearily. “I grant you the lifting of your attainder for treason. You can have your wife’s lands back, and your own title. You shall have rooms at court. And I wish you well.”

He had to hide the leap of his delight. “Thank you,” he said, bowing low. “I shall pray for you.”

“Then come with me to my chapel now,” she said.

Without hesitation, Robert Dudley, the man whose father had powered the Protestant reformation in England, followed the queen into the Catholic Mass and bent his knee to the blaze of icons behind the altar. A moment’s hesitation, even a sideways glance, and he would have been questioned for heresy. But Robert did not glance sideways nor hesitate. He crossed himself and bobbed to the altar, up and down like a puppet, knowing that he was betraying his own faith, and betraying the faith of his father. But bad judgment and bad luck had brought Robert Dudley to his knees at last; and he knew it.

Autumn 1558

ALL THE BELLS IN HERTFORDSHIRE, all the bells in England were ringing for Elizabeth, pounding the peal into her head, first the treble bell screaming out like a mad woman, and then the whole agonizing, jangling sob till the great bell boomed a warning that the whole discordant carillon was about to shriek out again. Elizabeth threw open the shutters of Hatfield Palace, flung open the window, wanting to be drowned in the noise, deafened by her own triumph, and yet still it went on, until the rooks abandoned their nests and went streaming into the dawn skies, tossing and turning in the wind like a banner of ill omen, and the bats left the belfry like a plume of black smoke as if to say that the world was upside down now, and day should be forever night.

Elizabeth laughed out loud at the racket which hammered out the news to the unresponsive gray skies: poor sick Queen Mary was dead at last, and Princess Elizabeth was the uncontested heir.

“Thank God,” she shouted up at the whirling clouds. “For now I can be the queen that my mother intended me to be, the queen that Mary could not be, the queen I was born to be.”

“And what are you thinking?” Elizabeth asked archly.

Amy’s husband smiled down at the provocative young face at his shoulder as they walked in the cold garden of Hatfield Palace.

“I was thinking that you should never marry.”

The princess blinked in surprise. “Indeed? Everyone else seems to think I should marry at once.”