Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

“Would you prevent us from doing it?”

“I am responsible for the safety of the queen. I daresay, sadly, I cannot prevent you.”

The man laughed. “In short you wouldn’t mind him dead but you won’t take a risk,” he taunted.

Cecil had nodded equably. “I think no one in England but the queen and his wife would mind at all,” he said frankly. “But I will not be party to a plot against him.”

“What’s amusing you?” Throckmorton asked, glancing round the court for the reason for Cecil’s smile.

“Thomas Howard,” Cecil answered. “He’s not exactly a master of subtlety, is he?”

Throckmorton glanced over. Thomas Howard had managed to enter the double open doors to the presence chamber just as Dudley was coming out. Everyone gave way to Dudley now, with the exception perhaps of Cecil, and Cecil would never have timed his entrance so that he was head to head with the royal favorite. Howard was standing his ground like an angry heifer.

In a moment, Cecil thought, he will paw the floor and bellow.

Dudley eyed him with the coolest of contempt, and then went to pass him.

At once Howard sidestepped and jostled him. “I beg your pardon but I am coming in,” he said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I! A Howard! And the Queen’s uncle.”

“Oh, please, do not beg my pardon for I am leaving,” Dudley said, the laughter warm in his voice. “It is those hapless men that you are about to join who deserve your apology.”

Howard choked on his words. “You are offensive!” he spluttered.

Dudley went quietly by him, serene in his power.

“You are a damned upstart, from nowhere!” Thomas Howard shouted at his back.

“Will he let that go, d’you think?” Throckmorton asked Cecil, quite fascinated at the little drama before them. “Is he as cool as he seems? Will he ignore Thomas Howard?”

“Not him,” Cecil said. “And he probably knows that he is in real danger.”

“A plot?”

“One of dozens. I think we can expect to see young Thomas Howard as the next ambassador to the Turkish court. I think it will be the Ottoman empire for the Howards, and a long posting.”

Cecil was wrong only in the destination.

“I think Thomas Howard should strengthen our defenses in the north,” Dudley remarked to the queen that night when they were alone, a slight smile warming his glance. “He is so fierce and warlike.”

At once Elizabeth was alert, fearful for him. “Is he threatening you?”

“That puppy? Hardly,” Robert said proudly. “But you do need someone you can trust in the north, and since he is spoiling for a fight, let him fight the French rather than me.”

The queen laughed, as though Robert’s words were meant as a joke, but the next day she awarded her uncle a new title: he was to be Lieutenant General of the Scottish border.

He bowed as he accepted the commission. “I know why I am sent away, Your Grace,” he said with the prickly dignity of a young man. “But I will serve you faithfully. And I think you may find I am a better servant to you in Newcastle than some who hide behind your petticoats in London, far from danger.”

Elizabeth had the grace to look abashed. “I need someone I can trust,” she said. “We must hold the French north of Berwick. They cannot come into the heart of England.”

“I am honored with your trust,” he said sarcastically, and took his leave, ignoring the rumors that swirled around his departure, the gossip that said that Elizabeth had put her own family in the very front of the line, rather than embarrass her lover.

“Why not just behead him and get it over with?” Catherine Knollys asked.

Elizabeth giggled to her cousin, but faced a reprimand from her old governess as soon as they were alone together.

“Princess!” Kat Ashley exclaimed despairingly. “This is as bad as it ever was. What will everyone think? Everyone believes that you are as much in love with Sir Robert as ever. The archduke will never come to England now. No man would risk being so insulted.”

“If he had come for me when he had promised, I would have married him. I gave my word,” Elizabeth said lightly, secure in the knowledge that he would not come now, and that if he did, Robert would think of some way out of it.

But Kat Ashley, Mary Sidney, and all the court were right: he would not come now. The ambassador, deeply offended, asked to be recalled, and wrote to his master that he thought the whole episode of Lady Sidney coming to him and begging him to propose once more to the queen had been nothing more than a plot to take the attention from the clandestine love affair which was notorious once more throughout England and throughout Europe. He wrote that the queen had become a young woman inured to shame, corrupted without hope, and that he could recommend no honorable man to marry her, let alone a prince. She was living as a whore to a married man and their only way out was a semi-legal divorce, or the death of his wife: which was hardly likely.

Cecil, reading the first draft of this letter, retrieved by Cecil’s agent from the ambassador’s kindling paper basket, thought that his foreign policy lay in ruins, that England’s safety could not be guaranteed, and that the Queen of England had run mad for lust and would lose the war in Scotland and then her head, and all for a smile from a dark- eyed man.

But when Elizabeth summoned Cecil by name he came to her at once.

“You were right, I am sure of it now,” she said quietly. “I have found the courage you wanted me to find. I am quite decided on war.”

Cecil glanced past her to where Sir Robert leaned against the shutters of the window, apparently absorbed in a game of bowls taking place in the cold garden below.

So we have the benefit of your advice, do we? And you, in your wisdom, have decided to adopt a policy I have been begging her to deploy for months. Aloud, Cecil asked: “What has Your Grace decided?”

“We shall invade Scotland and defeat the French,” she said calmly.

Cecil bowed, hiding his sense of intense relief. “I shall see that the moneys are raised and the army mustered,” he said. “You will want to meet with the Privy Council and issue a proclamation of war.”

Elizabeth glanced toward Robert. Minutely, he nodded his head. “Yes,” she said.

Cecil, too wise to object to advice that agreed with his own, merely bowed again.

“And Cecil, you will be my Lord Secretary again, won’t you? Now that I have taken your advice?”

“What of the archduke?” he asked.

Robert, at the window, recognized at once that the question was not as irrelevant as it seemed, striking as it did at the very heart of what he was doing there, within earshot of the queen and her most trusted advisor, nodding through her decisions as if he were her husband and king-consort. But this time, the queen did not even look at Robert.

“I shall be betrothed to the archduke as soon as he comes to England,” she said. “I know that the alliance with Spain is more vital than ever.”

“You know very well that he will not come,” Cecil said flatly. “You know that his ambassador is leaving London.”

Robert levered himself up from the shutter. “Doesn’t matter,” he said briefly to Cecil. “King Philip of Spain will stand her ally against France, marriage or no marriage. He cannot risk the French creating a kingdom in England. Their borders would run from Perth to the Mediterranean; they would destroy Spain after they had enslaved us.”

You think so, do you? Cecil demanded silently. And I am to save this kingdom for your bastards to inherit, am I?

“What matters now,” Dudley ruled, “is that we call up the men and arm them. The survival of the kingdom and the queen herself depends on swift action. We are looking to you, Cecil.”