The Virgin’s Lover

Dudley waited. Cecil leaned towards him and kept his voice low. ‘There is no money for this,’ he said heavily. ‘The treasury is all but empty. Queen Mary and her Spanish husband have drained England dry. We cannot pay for tableaux and fountains running with wine, and cloth of gold to drape around arches. There is no gold in the treasury, there is barely enough plate for a banquet.’

‘It’s as bad as that?’

Cecil nodded. ‘Worse.’

‘Then we will have to borrow it,’ Robert declared grandly. ‘For I will have her crowned in state. Not for my vanity, which I know is not of the smallest, not for hers, and you will find she is no shy violet either; but because this puts her more firmly on the throne than a standing army. You will see. She will make them hers. But she has to come out from the Tower on a great white horse and with her hair spread over her shoulders and she has to look every inch a queen.’

Cecil would have argued but Robert went on. ‘She has to have people crying out for her, she has to have tableaux declaring her as the true and only heir: pictures for the people who cannot read your proclamations, who have no knowledge of the law. She has to be surrounded by a beautiful court and a cheering, prosperous crowd. This is how we make her a queen indeed: now, and for the rest of her life.’

Cecil was struck by the vividness of the younger man’s vision. ‘You really believe it makes her safer?’

‘She can make herself safe,’ Robert said earnestly. ‘Give her a stage and she will be the only sight anyone can see. This coronation gives her a platform that will put her head and shoulders above anyone else in England, her cousins, rival heirs, anyone. This gives her men’s hearts and souls. You have to get the money so that I can build her the stage, and she will do the rest. She will enact the part of queen.’

Cecil took a turn to the window and looked out over the wintry gardens of Whitehall Palace. Robert drew closer, scanning the older man’s profile. Cecil was nearing forty, a family man, a quiet Protestant through the Catholic years of Mary Tudor, a man with an affection for his wife and for accruing land. He had served the young Protestant king, he had refused to be a part of the Jane Grey plot, and then he had been steadily and discreetly loyal to Princess Elizabeth, taking the inferior job of surveyor so that he might keep her small estates in good heart, and have an excuse for seeing her often. It was Cecil’s advice that had kept her out of trouble during the years of plotting and the uprisings against her sister Mary. It would be Cecil’s advice that would keep her steady on this new throne. Robert Dudley might not like him, in truth, he would never like any rival; but he knew that this man would be making the decisions for the young queen.

‘And so?’ he said finally.

Cecil nodded. ‘We’ll raise the money from somewhere,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to borrow. But for God’s sake, for her sake, keep it as cheap as possible.’

Robert Dudley shook his head in instinctive rejection. ‘This cannot be cheap!’ he declared.

‘It cannot look cheap,’ Cecil corrected him. ‘But it can be affordable. Do you know her fortune?’

He knew that Robert did not know. Nobody had known, until the clerk of the Privy Council, Armagil Waad, had emerged from the royal treasury which he had last seen filled with gold with the most rudimentary of inventories shaking in his hand, and whispered aghast: ‘Nothing. There is nothing left. Queen Mary has spent all King Henry’s gold.’

Robert shook his head.

‘She is sixty thousand pounds in debt,’ Cecil said quietly. ‘Sixty thousand pounds in debt, nothing to sell, nothing to offer against a loan, and no way to raise taxes. We shall find the money for her coronation but we will serve her best if we keep it cheap.’

Elizabeth’s triumphal procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Palace went just as Dudley had planned. She paused and smiled before the pageant representing her mother, the Lady Anne, she took the Bible offered her by a little girl and kissed it and held it to her breast. She drew rein at the points he had marked for her.

From the crowd came a small child with a posy of flowers. Elizabeth bent low in the saddle and took the posy, kissed the flowers and smiled at the cheers. Further on she happened to hear two wounded soldiers call out her name, and she paused to thank them for their wishes and the crowd near them heard them predict that peace and prosperity would come to England now that Harry’s daughter was on the throne. A little later an old lady called out a blessing for her and Elizabeth miraculously heard the thin old voice above the cheers of the crowd, and pulled up her horse to acknowledge the good wishes.

They thought more of her for responding to the sailors, to the apprentice boys, to the old peasant from the Midlands, than for all the glory of her harness and the pace of her horse. When she stopped for the pregnant merchant’s wife and asked her to call the baby Henry if it was a boy, they cheered her till she pretended to be deafened by applause. She kissed her hand to the wounded soldiers, noticed an old man turn his face aside to hide his tears and she called out that she knew they were tears of joy.

She never asked Robert, neither then nor later, if these people had been paid to cry out her name or if they were doing it for love. For all that she had spent her life in the wings, Elizabeth belonged to the centre of the stage. She did not really care whether the rest of them were players or groundlings. All she desired was their acclaim.

And she was enough of a Tudor to put on a good show. She had the knack of smiling at a crowd as if each and every one had her attention, and the individuals who cried out to her – placed so that all corners of the route would have their own special experience of her – made a succession of apparently natural stopping places for Elizabeth’s procession, so that everyone could see her and everyone would have their own private memory of the princess’s radiant smile on her most glorious day.

The next day, Sunday, was the day of her coronation, and Dudley had ruled that she would go to the Abbey high on a litter drawn by four white mules, so that she appeared to the crowd as if she were floating at shoulder height. Either side of the litter marched her gentlemen pensioners in crimson damask, before her went her trumpeters in scarlet, behind her walked Dudley himself, the first man in the procession, leading her white palfrey, and the crowd that cheered her gasped when they saw him: the richness of the jewels in his hat, his dark, saturnine, handsome face, and the highbred, high-stepping horse that curvetted so prettily with his hand steady on the bridle.

He smiled, turning his head this way and that, his heavy-lidded eyes running over the crowd, continually alert. This was a man who had ridden before a cheering crowd and known that they adored him; and had later marched to the Tower amid a storm of booing, knowing himself to be the second worst-hated man in England, and the son of the worst. He knew that this crowd could be courted as sweetly as a willing girl one day, and yet turn as spiteful as a neglected woman the next.

Today, they adored him; he was Elizabeth’s favourite, he was the most handsome man in England. He had been their bonny darling when a boy, he had gone into the Tower as a traitor and come out again as a hero. He was a survivor like her, he was a survivor like them.

It was a perfect procession and a perfect service. Elizabeth took the crown on her head, the oil on her forehead, and the orb and sceptre of England into her hand. The Bishop of Carlisle officiated in the pleasing conviction that within a few months he would be celebrating her marriage to the most devout Catholic king in the whole of Christendom. And after the coronation service the queen’s own chaplain celebrated Mass without uplifting the Host.

Elizabeth came out of the dark Abbey into a blaze of light and heard the roar of the crowd welcome her. She walked through the people so that they could all see her – this was a queen who would pander to anyone, their love for her was a balm for the years of neglect.

At her coronation dinner her voice was lost in her tightening throat, the blush in her cheeks was from a rising fever, but nothing would have made her leave early. The queen’s champion rode into the hall and challenged all comers and the new queen smiled on him, smiled on Robert Dudley, the most loyal ex-traitor of them all, smiled on her new council – half of them constitutionally unfaithful – and smiled on her family who were suddenly recollecting the bonds and obligations of kinship now that their niece was no longer a suspect criminal, but the very lawmaker herself.

She stayed up till three in the morning until the trusted Kat Ashley, presuming on the intimacy of having been governess when Elizabeth was a girl and not a great queen, whispered in her ear that she must go to bed now or be dead on her feet in the morning.

— God strike her dead on her feet in the morning — thought Amy Dudley, sleepless, waiting through the long, dark winter night for the cold dawn, in far-away Norfolk.

Robert Dudley, rising like a young Adonis from the bed of one of the court ladies, giving her a nonchalant parting kiss while he unclasped her hands from about his neck, and coming into the Queen’s presence chamber at Whitehall smartly enough next day, was still too late to catch Elizabeth alone. He found her already in close-headed conference with William Cecil, seated over a little table with papers before them. She glanced up and smiled at him but she did not wave him to approach, and he was forced to stand against the wood-panelled walls with the dozen or so other men who had risen early to pay their compliments and found that Cecil had got in first.

Dudley scowled and tried to overhear the low-voiced conversation. Cecil was dressed in dark clothes: — like a clerk — Dudley sniffed; but his wealth showed in the quality of the rich velvet and in the expense of the cut. His ruff was of the finest lace, lying in soft folds around his neck, his hair long and lustrous, spread on his collar. His eyes, warm and compassionate, never wavered from Elizabeth’s animated face, answering her remarks about the great kingdom with the same steady quietness that he had used when he was advising her how best to run her country estates. Then it had been Cecil alone who had kept the princess from folly, and now it was Cecil alone who had the reward for those years of service.

She trusted him as she trusted no other, he could advise her against her own desires and she would listen. Indeed, when she appointed him to be her Secretary of State she had made him swear that he would tell her the truth without fear or favour, and sworn to him a pledge in return: that she would always listen to his words and never blame him if his advice was not to her liking. No other member of the Privy Council had exchanged such an oath with the new queen; there was no-one else who mattered.

Elizabeth had seen her father dismiss advisors whose counsel was against his wishes, she had seen him arraign members of his own council for treason because they brought him bad news. She did not care that her father had become a tyrant, hated by his closest advisors, she believed that was the very nature of kingship; but she was warned by the fact that he lost the best minds of the kingdom because he could not bear to take advice.

And she was not yet old enough to want to rule alone. The crown was unsteady on her head, the country was filled with her enemies. She was a young woman, only twenty-five years old, with neither mother nor father nor a beloved family to advise her. She needed to be surrounded by friends that she could trust: Cecil, her teacher Roger Ascham, her former governess Kat Ashley, and her plump, gossipy cofferer Thomas Parry with his wife Blanche, who had been Elizabeth’s nanny. Now that Elizabeth was queen she did not forget those who had been faithful to her when she had been princess, and there was not one old friend who was not now enjoying a small fortune in rich repayment for the years of waiting.

— Why, she actually prefers the company of inferiors — Dudley thought, looking from Cecil at the table to Kat Ashley at the window. — She was brought up by servants and people of the middling sort and she prefers their values. She understands trade and good housekeeping and the value of a well-run estate because that is what they care about. While I was walking around the royal palaces and spending my time with my father commanding the court, she was fussing over the price of bacon and staying out of debt.

— She is small scale, not a queen at all yet. She will stick at the raising of the Host because she can see it; that is real, it happens before her nose. But the great debates of the church she would rather avoid. Elizabeth has no vision, she has never had time to see beyond her own survival. —

At the table, Cecil beckoned to one of his clerks and the man stepped forward and showed the young queen a page of writing.

— If a man wanted to dominate this queen, he would have to separate her from Cecil — Robert thought to himself, watching the two heads so companionably close together as she read his paper. — If a man wanted to rule England through this queen he would have to be rid of Cecil first. And she would have to lose faith in Cecil before anything else could be done. —

Elizabeth pointed to something on the page, Cecil answered her question, and then she nodded her agreement. She looked up and, seeing Dudley’s eyes upon her, beckoned him forward.

Dudley, head up, a little swagger in his stride at stepping forward before the whole court, came up to the throne and swept a deep elegant bow.

‘Good day, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘And God bless you in this first day of your rule.’

Elizabeth beamed at him. ‘We have been preparing the list of my emissaries to go to the courts of Europe to announce my coronation,’ she said. ‘Cecil suggests that I send you to Philip of Spain in Brussels. Shall you like to tell your old master that I am now anointed queen?’

‘As you wish,’ he agreed at once, hiding his irritation. ‘But are you going to stay indoors at work all day today, Your Grace? Your hunter is waiting, the weather is fine.’

He caught her longing glance towards the window and her hesitation.

‘The French ambassador …’ Cecil remarked for her ear only.

She shrugged. ‘The ambassador can wait, I suppose.’

‘And I have a new hunter that I thought you might try,’ Dudley said temptingly. ‘From Ireland. A bright bay, a handsome horse, and strong.’

‘Not too strong, I hope,’ Cecil said.

‘The queen rides like a Diana.’ Dudley flattered her to her face, not even glancing at the older man. ‘There is no-one to match her. I would put her on any horse in the stables and it would know its master. She rides like her father did, quite without fear.’

Elizabeth glowed a little at the praise. ‘I will come in an hour,’ she said. ‘First, I have to see what these people want.’ She glanced around the room and the men and women stirred like spring corn when the breeze passes over it. Her very glance could make them ripple with longing for her attention.

Dudley laughed quietly. ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ he said cynically. ‘It needn’t take an hour.’

She tipped her head to one side to listen, and he stepped up to the throne so that he could whisper in her ear. Cecil saw her eyes dance and how she put her hand to her mouth to hold in her laughter.

‘Shush, you are a slanderer,’ she said, and slapped the back of his hand with her gloves.

At once, Dudley turned his hand over, palm up, as if to invite another smack. Elizabeth averted her head and veiled her eyes with her dark lashes.

Dudley bent his head again, and whispered to her once more. A giggle escaped from the queen.

‘Master Secretary,’ she said. ‘You must send Sir Robert away, he is too distracting.’

Cecil smiled pleasantly at the younger man. ‘You are most welcome to divert Her Grace,’ he said warmly. ‘If anything, she works too hard. The kingdom cannot be transformed in a week, there is much to do but it will have to be done over time. And …’ He hesitated. ‘Many things we will have to consider carefully, they are new to us.’

— And you are at a loss half the time — Robert remarked to himself. — I would know what should be done. But you are her advisor and I am merely Master of Horse. Well, so be it for today. So I will take her riding. —

Aloud he said with a smile: ‘There you are then! Your Grace, come out and ride with me. We need not hunt, we’ll just take a couple of grooms and you can try the paces of this bay horse.’

‘Within the hour,’ she promised him.

‘And the French ambassador can ride with you,’ Cecil suggested.

A swift glance from Robert Dudley showed that he realised he had been burdened with chaperones but Cecil’s face remained serene.

‘Don’t you have a horse he can use in the stables?’ he asked, challenging Robert’s competence, without seeming to challenge him at all.

‘Of course,’ Robert said urbanely. ‘He can have his pick from a dozen.’

The queen scanned the room. ‘Ah, my lord,’ she said pleasantly to one of the waiting men. ‘How glad I am to see you at court.’

It was his cue for her attention and at once he stepped forward. ‘I have brought Your Grace a gift to celebrate your coming to the throne,’ he said.

Elizabeth brightened, she loved gifts of any sort, she was as acquisitive as a magpie. Robert, knowing that what would follow would be some request for the right to cut wood or enclose common land, to avoid a tax or persecute a neighbour, stepped down from the dais, bowed, walked backwards from the throne, bowed again at the door and went out to the stables.

Despite the French ambassador, a couple of lords, some small-fry gentry, a couple of ladies in waiting and half a dozen guards that Cecil had collected to accompany the queen, Dudley managed to ride by her side and they were left alone for most of the ride. At least two men muttered that Dudley was shown more favour than he deserved, but Robert ignored them, and the queen did not hear.

They rode westerly, slowly at first through the streets and then lengthening the pace of the horses as they entered the yellowing winter grassland of St James’s Park. Beyond the park, the houses gave way to market gardens to feed the insatiable city, and then to open fields, and then to wilder country. The queen was absorbed in managing the new horse, who fretted at too tight a rein but would take advantage and toss his head if she let him ride too loose.

‘He needs schooling,’ she said critically to Robert.

‘I thought you should try him as he is,’ he said easily. ‘And then we can decide what is to be done with him. He could be a hunter for you, he is strong enough and he jumps like a bird, or he could be a horse you use in processions, he is so handsome and his colour is so good. If you want him for that, I have a mind to have him specially trained, taught to stand and to tolerate crowds. I thought your grey fretted a little when people pushed very close.’

‘You can’t blame him for that!’ she retorted. ‘They were waving flags in his face and throwing rose petals at him!’

He smiled at her. ‘I know. But this will happen again and again. England loves her princess. You will need a horse that can stand and watch a tableau, and let you bend down and take a posy from a child without shifting for a moment, and then trot with his head up looking proud.’

She was struck by his advice. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And it is hard to pay attention to the crowd and to manage a horse.’

‘I don’t want you to be led by a groom either,’ he said decidedly. ‘Or to ride in a carriage. I want them to see you mastering your own horse. I don’t want anything taken away from you. Every procession should add to you, they should see you higher, stronger, grander even than life.’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘I have to be seen as strong, my sister was always saying she was a weak woman, and she was always ill, all the time.’

‘And he is your colour,’ he said impertinently. ‘You are a bright chestnut yourself.’

She was not offended, she threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, d’you think he is a Tudor?’ she asked.

‘For sure, he has the temper of one,’ Robert said. He and his brothers and sisters had been playmates in the royal nursery at Hatfield, and all the Dudley children had felt the ringing slap of the Tudor temper. ‘Doesn’t like the bridle, doesn’t like to be commanded, but can be gentled into almost anything.’

She gleamed at him. ‘If you are so wise with a dumb beast, let’s hope you don’t try to train me,’ she said provocatively.

‘Who could train a queen?’ he replied. ‘All I could do would be to implore you to be kind to me.’

‘Have I not been very kind already?’ she said, thinking of the best post which she had given him, Master of Horse, with a massive annual income and the right to set up his own table at court and to take the best rooms in whichever palace the court might visit.

He shrugged as if it were next to nothing. ‘Ah, Elizabeth,’ he said intimately. ‘That is not what I mean when I desire you to be kind to me.’

‘You may not call me Elizabeth any more,’ she reminded him quietly, but he thought she was not displeased.

‘I forgot,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘I take such pleasure in your company that sometimes I think we are still just friends as we used to be. I forgot for a moment that you have risen to such greatness.’

‘I was always a princess,’ she said defensively. ‘I have risen to nothing but my birthright.’

‘And I always loved you for nothing but yourself,’ he replied cleverly.

He could see her hands loosen slightly on the reins and knew that he had struck the right note with her. He played her as every favourite plays every ruler; he had to know what charmed and what cooled her.

‘Edward was always very fond of you,’ she said softly, remembering her brother.

He nodded, looking grave. ‘God bless him. I miss him every day, as much as my own brothers.’

‘But he was not so warm to your father,’ she said rather pointedly.

Robert smiled down at Elizabeth as if nothing of their past lives could be counted against them: his family’s terrible treason against her family, her own betrayal of her half-sister. ‘Bad times,’ he said generally. ‘And long ago. You and I have both been misjudged, and God knows, we have been punished enough. We have both served our time in the Tower, accused of treason. I used to think of you then; when I was allowed out to walk on the leads, I used to go to the very threshold of the gated door of your tower, and know that you were just on the other side. I’d have given much to be able to see you. I used to have news of you from Hannah the Fool. I can’t tell you what a comfort it was to know you were there. They were dark days for us both; but I am glad now that we shared them together. You on one side of that gate and me the other.’

‘Nobody else can ever understand,’ she said with suppressed energy. ‘Nobody can ever know unless you have been there: what it’s like to be in there! To know that below you, out of sight, is the green where the scaffold will be built, and not to know whether they are building it, sending to ask, and not trusting the answer, wondering if it will be today or tomorrow.’