Elizabeth sends Mary some clothes; she has nothing but the riding dress she escaped in. But when they come to unpack the parcel it is little more than rags: two torn shifts, two pieces of black velvet, two pairs of shoes, nothing else.
“Why would she insult her cousin the Queen of Scots?” my stepgrandmother asks me. “Why would she treat her with such contempt?”
Both of us look at the tattered footstool and the two ragged tapestries that have been my household goods for so long, at the battered cup that Elizabeth sent from the servery for my use.
“To warn her,” I say slowly. “Like she warned Katherine, like she warns me. That we are poor without her favor, that we are prisoners without her favor. She may say that she cannot arrest another queen, but if Queen Mary is the guest of Francis Knollys and cannot leave, then what is she if not Elizabeth’s prisoner? Do you think Cousin Mary understands the message? That she is a prisoner like me?”
GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE,
LINCOLNSHIRE, SUMMER 1568
The Privy Council meets at Greenwich Palace and announces that Mary Queen of Scots will have to face a trial. She cannot be returned to Scotland by an English army without her innocence proved. She must be accused of killing her husband and the penalty for killing a husband—a crime of petty treason since it is a rebellion against the natural order as well as a murder—is death by burning. Amazingly, Elizabeth does not reprimand the council for disagreeing with her—which tells us all that they are her mouthpiece—saying what she does not dare. But Elizabeth does rule that Mary may not come to court to explain her actions, as one queen to another. She says that she and Mary cannot meet, that the Scots queen’s reputation is sullied by the rumors. The idea that a woman guilty of adultery cannot attend Elizabeth’s court would be funny if it were not so terrible when applied to our kinswoman Mary. How will she ever get a fair hearing if she is not allowed to speak? And if the Privy Council, that chorus inspired by Elizabeth and Cecil, are saying that she must be tried for murder without being able to speak in her own defense, then those two have surely decided that she is guilty and must die.
But Mary is too clever for them. She rejects the scraps of velvets and the old shoes, she calls it “a cold calling,” and Sir Francis, embarrassed with rags in his hands, says there has been some stupid mistake from the groom of the wardrobe. Mary says that she is a queen: she wears ermine, she is royal. Nobody should send her clothes for any rank less than royalty. And—equally—no one can try her, she is an ordained monarch: only God can judge her.
Elizabeth backs down, swiftly and speedily, as only Elizabeth can. She writes to her cousin that it is not to be a trial, for—of course!—a queen cannot be put on trial. It is an inquiry into the behavior of the Scots queen’s half brother Lord Moray. She is not accused: he is. They will inquire if he has been treasonous, and then restore her. They will clear her name and return her to her throne. She will be freed of scandal and able to take her son into her keeping again.
“She will be free,” I say. “Thank God that at least she will be free.”
In July I finally receive a reply from my aunt Bess. She writes to me under her new seal, a lion rampant. I smile as I look at it and break the seal. I like to think of my aunt Bess with a rampant lion as her crest, it’s very apt.
Dearest Mary, I am sorry that I cannot give you a better answer for I should be glad to have you at my home (at any one of my many homes!) for the love that I bear your mother and yourself, dear Mary. But before I could ask the queen if I might house you, she has asked me to undertake a greater task than keeping you. My husband, the earl, and I are to take a house guest—perhaps you can guess who? And we are to keep her safe, and keep her from our enemies, and watch over her letters, and report on all that she does. She is to be a guest but she is not to leave until we return her to Scotland. She is to be a guest but we are to inquire into every letter that she has in her casket, and discover everything that we can, and then judge as we see fit.
You will guess by now who is coming into my keeping, and why I cannot invite you! The queen is trusting my husband, the earl, and me to keep Mary Queen of Scots safe in our keeping until such time as the queen is ready to return her to Scotland. We will do this without error, and imagine what honor and profit it will be for us to house the Queen of Scots and to return her to her throne. When she has gone back to Scotland, I will ask the queen if you may be freed to live in one of our little houses with great pleasure.
I drop the letter to the floor. I feel as sick as the day that Katherine was taken to the Tower and Elizabeth had me hand her her gloves. “She will never get away,” I predict. “Mary Queen of Scots will never get away. Elizabeth has her in her web, as she has me. Both of us will die in our prisons.”
GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE,
LINCOLNSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1568
It is a bright cold Christmas at Grimsthorpe and my stepgrandmother is with the court so her household and I celebrate the season quietly in her absence. I am allowed to walk in the gardens, down to the stables and all around the courtyard of the beautiful castle, but when the snow falls and the drifts lie thick in the lanes, I cannot go farther. I don’t mind being imprisoned by snowdrifts, I know that a thaw will come.
My stepgrandmother sends me one letter with a Christmas gift of a gold cup and tells me the news. She writes carefully, so that no spy can claim that she is conspiring with me.
I have happy news of Ned Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, she writes, avoiding reiterating any claim that he is my brother-in-law. He has been released from imprisonment and is able to live freely at his home in Wiltshire, Wulf Hall. His sons, Teddy and Thomas, remain with their grandmother at Hanworth, but they can write to their father, and they may write and receive letters from you. I know this will give you great joy.
I pause in my reading and think of my little nephews, Katherine’s sons, and of their father still parted from them, but able at least to write to each other. Truly, Elizabeth has become a monstrously powerful queen. We are all placed only where she will allow us to be.
My stepgrandmother makes it clear that the inquiry that was to examine the treason of Mary Queen of Scots’ wicked half brother has been turned around completely. Lord Moray has supplied the inquiry with a casket of letters that are said to prove that the queen was her husband’s murderer, and Bothwell’s adulterous lover. It is not the treasonous half brother but the queen herself who is on trial—as Elizabeth swore she would never be.
The letters do not all appear to be in her true handwriting, my stepgrandmother tactfully explains. So some people doubt they are hers.
I am very sure of this. I imagine that William Cecil’s spies are cutting and copying letters like good children bent over their schoolbooks in a frenzy of forgery. But in any case, Elizabeth lacks the courage to come to a definite conclusion and we enter the new year with the Scots queen and me in confinement in our separate prisons, me at Grimsthorpe, she at Bolton Castle, dressed in her royal finery, which she insisted was sent on from Lochleven, both of us hoping for our freedom with the spring.
She does more than hope: she writes to Philip II of Spain, claiming that she is being held, without cause, by Elizabeth. This may gain her freedom, but will certainly win her the absolute enmity of William Cecil and all Protestants. Unlike her, I have no one to write to. My only royal kinswoman is my only enemy: Elizabeth.