Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory

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      John Dee’s prediction that the men of England would rise up to prevent the queen marrying a Spaniard was proved every day in dozens of incidents. There were ballads sung against the marriage, the braver preachers thundered against a match so dangerous to the independence of the country. Crude drawings appeared on every lime-washed wall in the city, chap books were handed out slandering the Spanish prince, abusing the queen for even considering him. It was no help that the Spanish ambassador assured every nobleman at court that his prince had no interest in taking power in England, that the prince had been persuaded to the match by his father, that indeed Prince Philip, a desirable man of under thirty years might well have sought a bride to bring him more pleasure and profit than the Queen of England, eleven years his senior. Any suggestion that he wanted the match was proof of Spanish greed, any hint that he might have looked elsewhere was an insult.

      The queen herself nearly collapsed under the weight of conflicting advice, under her great fear that she would lose the love of the people of England without gaining the support of Spain.

      ‘Why did you say my heart would break?’ she feverishly demanded of me, one day. ‘Was it because you could foresee it would be like this? With all my councillors telling me to refuse the match, and yet all of them telling me to marry and have a child without delay? With all the country dancing at my coronation and then, minutes later, all of them cursing the news of my wedding?’

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘I could not have foretold this. I think no-one could have foretold such a turn-around in such a little time.’

      ‘I have to guard against them,’ she said, more to herself than to me. ‘At every turn I have to keep them at my beck and call. The great lords, and every man under them, have to be my loyal servants; but all the time they whisper in corners and set themselves up to judge me.’

      She rose from her chair and walked the eight steps to the window, turned and walked back again. I remembered the first time I had seen her at Hunsdon, in the little court where she rarely laughed, where she was little more than a prisoner. Now she was Queen of England and still she was imprisoned by the will of the people, and still she did not laugh.

      ‘And the council are worse than the ladies of my chamber!’ she exclaimed. ‘They argue ceaselessly in my very presence, there are dozens of them but I cannot get a single sensible word of advice, they all desire something different, and they all – all of them! – lie to me. My spies bring me one set of stories, and the Spanish ambassador tells me others. And all the time I know that they are massing against me. They will pull me down from the throne and push Elizabeth on to it out of sheer madness. They will snatch themselves from the certainty of heaven and throw themselves into hell because they have studied heresy, and now they cannot hear the true word when it is given to them.’

      ‘People like to think for themselves …’ I suggested.

      She rounded on me. ‘No, they don’t. They like to follow a man who is prepared to think for them. And now they think they have found him. They have found Thomas Wyatt. Oh yes, I know of him. The son of Anne Boleyn’s lover, whose side d’you think he is on? They have men like Robert Dudley, waiting on his chance in the Tower, and they have a princess like Elizabeth: a foolish girl, too young to know her own mind, too vain to take care, and too greedy to wait, as I had to wait, as I had to wait honourably, for all those long testing years. I waited in a wilderness, Hannah. But she will not wait at all.’

      ‘You need not fear Robert Dudley,’ I said quickly. ‘D’you not remember that he declared for you? Against his own father? But who is this Wyatt?’

      She walked to the wall and back to the window again. ‘He has sworn he will be faithful to me but deny me my husband,’ she said. ‘As if such a thing could be done! He says he will pull me from the throne, and then put me back again.’

      ‘Does he have many on his side?’

      ‘Half of Kent,’ she whispered. ‘And that sly devil Edward Courtenay as king in waiting, if I know him, and Elizabeth hoping to be his queen. And there will be money coming from somewhere to pay him for his crime, I don’t doubt.’

      ‘Money?’

      Her voice was bitter. ‘Francs. The enemies of England are always paid in francs.’

      ‘Can’t you arrest him?’

      ‘When I find him, I can,’ she said. ‘He’s a traitor ten times over. But I don’t know where he is nor when he plans to make his move.’ She walked to the window and looked out, as if she would see beyond the garden at the foot of the palace walls, over the silver Thames, cold in the winter sunlight, all the way to Kent and the men who kept their plans hidden.

      I was struck by the contrast between our hopes on the road to London and how it was, now that she was queen crowned. ‘D’you know, I thought when we rode into London that all your struggles would be over.’

      The look she turned to me was haunted, her eyes shadowed СКАЧАТЬ