GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, SUMMER 1569
The court is on progress when the most extraordinary news reaches us in London. It seems that our cousin Mary Queen of Scots has outwitted her host, my aunt Bess, and offended, just as Katherine offended, just as I offended. Absurdly, though married to the missing Earl of Bothwell, she has promised herself in marriage and—if that were not dreadful enough for the spinster queen—her choice has fallen on a great English nobleman. Everyone says that she is betrothed to marry Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk—Elizabeth’s kinsman from the Boleyn side—and he has fled from Elizabeth’s court and nobody knows where he has gone.
Sir Thomas dashes out of his house first thing in the morning and does not come back till midnight. Nothing is more hateful to merchants than uncertainty, and if Elizabeth has to send an army against her mother’s own family, the Howards, then she will have to fight most of Norfolk, and it is impossible to predict how it will end. It will be the Cousins’ Wars all over again. It will be a war as bad as those in France—a war of religion. It will be two queens fighting over the future of England. It will be a disaster for my country and for my sisters’ throne.
Elizabeth abandons her summertime progress and rushes the whole court to Windsor Castle to prepare for a siege. She has spent her life in terror, waiting for this one event; and now she has brought it on herself. She has always feared that her heir would marry a mighty subject and together they would turn on her, and now she thinks that Thomas Howard will raise the whole of the east of the country against the court, and the Northern lords will call out their hardened forces to rescue the Queen of Scots. Both regions are known papist; neither region loves the Tudors.
I can hear the bands of citizens and apprentice boys training to defend London. And I swing my window open to look out and see them parading up and down with broom handles over their shoulders in place of pikes.
They say that the Duke of Norfolk will march on Windsor, they say that the Northern lords will march on my aunt Bess’s house and take her guest from her by force. Aunt Bess and her husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who were so proud of hosting a queen, have to bundle her from Wingfield Manor to Tutbury Castle and prepare the place for a siege. England is breaking into two camps again—as it did before—and Elizabeth’s long game of playing one religion against another, one ally against another, one cousin against another, has collapsed into panic.
The Northern lords are riding under a banner that shows the five wounds of Christ. They are making this a holy war and every papist in England will support them. This is a new Pilgrimage of Grace like the one that nearly overthrew the old king Henry VIII, and the treasonous Northern parishes are ringing the bells backwards in every church to signify that they are rising for the old religion and the young Scots queen.
My poor aunt Bess! I have news of her from my host, Sir Thomas, who speaks to me briefly as he meets me, walking through the great hall to go into the garden. He tells me that she is fleeing south, riding hard with a little force, trying to get away from the advancing Northern army, which is sweeping down through England. Aunt Bess is ordered to get Queen Mary behind the walls of Coventry Castle before the Northern lords capture her and her household and massacre them all. Elizabeth has mustered an army from among the London merchants and apprentice boys, Sir Thomas has sent his own men and they are marching north, but they will be able to do nothing if every village is against them and every church is holding a Mass and declaring itself for the freedom of Mary Queen of Scots. They are almost certain to arrive too late. Elizabeth’s Council of the North is pinned down in York, surrounded by the forces of the Northern lords. And still there is no news of the army from Norfolk and Thomas Howard at the head of it who could be marching to Coventry to save his bride or marching on London to claim her throne.
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, WINTER 1569
Sir Thomas tells me that there is a Spanish armada armed and waiting to sail from the Spanish Netherlands, coming to reinforce the army of the North and release Mary Queen of Scots. He says that it will be possible to make peace with the Spanish—they will probably settle for the return of Queen Mary to her Scots throne, and the declaration of her as Elizabeth’s heir—but the Northern lords may not settle so easily.
“You think that the Duke of Norfolk and the Spanish and the Northern lords can be made to betray each other?” I ask.
He makes a face, a moneylender’s, gold merchant’s face of judging one risk against another. “Betrayal is always possible,” is all he says. “It’s all we’ve got left.”
Elizabeth is lucky, Elizabeth always was lucky, and now fortune smiles on her again. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, is the first to break—he submits to her authority. He does not raise an army but he surrenders to her, and for his reward she arrests him and sends him to the Tower. The Spanish don’t sail because they doubt the Northern army will march with them; the Northern army give up and go back to their own cold hills because without the Spanish they dare not challenge Elizabeth; and Elizabeth, who did nothing but hide behind the stout walls of Windsor Castle, comes triumphantly to London and proclaims herself the God-given victor.
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, SPRING 1570
My poor aunt Bess has lost her fourth husband, everyone says. But not this time to death, leaving her a handsome inheritance: she has lost her earl to love, to scandalous adulterous love, for everyone says that he is in love with my cousin Mary Queen of Scots and that is why he failed to guard her, or warn of the uprising.
There is enough in this to make Elizabeth hate him for admiring Mary, and to hate poor Aunt Bess—blaming her for the irresistible attraction of the beautiful queen. Bess falls from royal favor, which she has worked all her life to win. Even worse for Aunt Bess, she and her unhappy husband cannot live in her lovely house (I remember her writing to me of her many houses) because they have to keep the Scots queen under close guard and she is to be locked up in the dismal and damp Tutbury Castle. Mary is miserably imprisoned, and Aunt Bess is imprisoned with her, just as I am imprisoned in the handsome house at Bishopsgate and my unwilling hosts are imprisoned with me.
But there is no predicting anything. My host, Sir Thomas, tells me that changeable times are bad for the value of currency and now he does not know what a shilling is worth against a sou. When I ask him what has happened now, he tells me that Lord Moray—the queen’s faithless half brother and Regent of Scotland—has been shot dead and now the Scots lords are calling for the return of the Queen of Scots. Last summer they would not have her when Elizabeth was going to return her, now they want her back but Elizabeth has learned to fear her. Instead of the rightful queen, Elizabeth sends my cousin Margaret Douglas’s husband, the Earl of Lennox, to be regent.