Elizabeth (16 page)

He gave an angry laugh.

“I doubt if she'd thank you for the suggestion. You forget I have a murderous reputation, so foul that you wouldn't marry me, and even more foul in her eyes because I am supposed to be your lover. I have never seen Mary Stuart, but I hardly think she'd welcome your leavings.”

“I think she'd welcome anything if a promise of the English succession went with it. Sit back, Robert, and don't lose your temper. Supposing the idea appealed to her, what would your answer be?”

“My answer,” he said coldly, “is ‘no'. You must find another means of getting rid of me.”

“Why is it ‘no'?” she persisted. “You would have great power, equal sovereignty, if you were clever with her.… Why, Robert, you could be a King!”

“Because I am so unmanned through you that I'd rather stay here as a pet dog,” he said. “Find another candidate, Madam. I won't accommodate you.”

“If you were really unmanned, Robert,” Elizabeth told him softly, “you would have said ‘yes'. And that would have been a foolish answer because I have no intention of letting you marry her or anyone else. But I may ask you to play at it for a while. Will you do that for me?”

“Play at it?” He stared at her and then suddenly shrugged. “You are beyond me. You put the idea forward, tempt me with it, and then tell me I had no freedom of choice anyway.”

“On reflection you would have seen that. But first impulses are more valuable than decisions. I am glad you refused. But I shall want you to play at it, as I said. I intend suggesting you as a candidate; firstly because I know she will be outraged, as you pointed out. Then I will sweeten the suggestion with a lot of promises, and at the same time I shall violently oppose another person who is on her list of suitors. It is only an idea, and it's a pity to spoil a lovely afternoon by talking about intrigue, but I cannot do this unless you help me.”

“Who is this other candidate?” he asked her. “And why should you put me forward as the alternative to him?”

“Because it might be the one way of making her choose him. Who he is does not matter yet.”

“Was this Cecil's idea or yours, Madam?” He helped her up, and the Queen smiled coolly into his face.

“Cecil knows nothing of my real reason. Don't credit him with this idea, it is entirely mine. He will think you are pursuing your ambitions and that I am being over-trusting of you. A lot of people will warn me that if you marry Mary Stuart you'll join her in an attack on my throne. You must be prepared for it and bear it patiently. You must bear a good deal in the next few months, but remember two things. You are not going to Scotland. And you must not be surprised when I pretend that you are.”

When the hunting party returned to Hunsdon, Elizabeth said that she was tired and needed rest. She changed out of her dusty riding clothes after inspecting the carcass of the big stag which Lord Hunsdon promised to have skinned and the head mounted for her, and which she then presented to him as a memento of her visit. She dressed in a long robe of crimson brocade with a collar and sleeves trimmed with sable and a little half hood of black velvet, edged with the same fur. Her ladies lit wax candles, part of the luxury her cousin provided for her, since the tallow lights smelt unpleasantly strong, and the Queen sat down at the virginals to play and amuse herself, having dismissed her attendants. She liked solitude when she wanted to think; she often played for hours in an empty room, apparently absorbed in the music, while her mind worked out some tangled problem, separating the threads and re-weaving them into a pattern of her own.

Mary Stuart would reject Robert. Any woman proud of her lineage and her reputation would take the suggestion as a gross insult, and she know from Randolph in Edinburgh and Lethington in London, that the Scots Queen was very sensitive about both. Just as Mary had tried to judge Elizabeth, so the Queen imagined her rival, as her fingers moved over the keyboard of the virginals, bringing the beauty of a Galliard by Herriot to life in the still room.

Mary had done very well, and her life in that barbarous country must have been gall to a spoilt and spirited girl who had been taught to regard her position as inviolate. She had gone from a life of cushioned unreality in France, where her least wish was a law to her uncles and her foolish husband, and survived three years of nominal rule over a pack of undisciplined ruffians and a scruffy, loud-mouthed clergy with no respect for their superiors. She had not made one false step, but Elizabeth's instinct insisted that the credit was mostly due to her advisers. The Guises were masters of diplomacy and intrigue; they had obviously primed their niece how to avoid the dangers implicit in her sex and her religion; and men like Lethington and presumably her bastard half-brother, James Moray, had guided her along the difficult way of conciliation when she might have been tempted by ignorance and temper into a trial of strength with her nobles and her heretic Church.

Unlike Elizabeth, whose childhood had been a succession of upheavals and humiliations, Mary had not learnt the hard lessons of craft by long experience and personal error. She had been told how to avoid mistakes, which was a disadvantage because the only way to learn was from the consequences when one made them. She was not naturally deceitful; Elizabeth had divined enough naïveté in the letters she received to know that when Mary was intriguing she did it badly and with many witnesses. She was ambitious and proud and full of a mediaeval belief in the Divinity of Kings which had somehow survived the monotonous murders of so many of her Scottish ancestors. She probably suffered from the delusion that her sex protected her from that hazard, and as she looked out at the darkening view' from her window Elizabeth remembered her mother, who might well have seen it from a room in the demolished hunting box, and smiled contemptuously.

Mary was not evil, in the sense that Elizabeth understood evil. She was not cruel, like some of the English ladies of rank who had their servants thrashed and branded for petty theft. When Chatelard's head was cut off in front of her, Mary fainted. But she had ordered the execution, and the episode with the poet had done more than anything else to raise her in Elizabeth's estimation. Provided that she had killed the man from policy and not from any fatuous regard for sexual virtue. She had no lovers, and her suitors were encouraged at a strictly political level, but Randolph reported that she had great charm over men; some of the roughest of the Border Lords were making fools of themselves trying to be gallant.

What kind of woman was Mary Stuart? Would she possess the quality of judgment and acumen without which no woman could hope to rule over men? Would she see beyond the apparent blunder of suggesting Dudley as a husband for her, and look into the motives behind the motives? Would she see what manner of man the alternative was, before she committed herself to him through pride and a mistaken idea that she would be defying her interfering cousin?

Would she really be so headstrong and lacking in judgment, as Elizabeth believed and was prepared to gamble on, as to manoeuvre on behalf of Henry Darnley? Darnley. Her hands struck one of Herriot's bright chords, musical and clear as running water. Darnley had Royal blood and an ambitious mother whom Elizabeth personally hated. But he was a stupid, bad natured youth, with a private taste for drink and vice and nothing to recommend him beyond charming manners and a handsome face. He was the sort of man that she would have kicked aside with her foot at the very age when she was involved with the Admiral. At fifteen she would have seen through him. But she had always had that faculty. She had known in her heart that the Admiral was an adventurer, ready to despoil a child in the pursuit of his ambitions, even though she loved him. She had known what Robert was too, though she had loved Robert, and still did. Robert had refused to go to Scotland because he had been taken unawares; he had got into the habit of loyalty to her, and habits did not break down in a few seconds. But if he went to Scotland and acquired a young and beautiful wife, her own remark might have come true, and Robert, the faithful lover and loyal suitor, was not so faithful or so loyal that he might not have marched against her as the husband of the Queen of Scots. It was possible to see men as they were and yet to love them. But her one hope was that Mary woud
not
see through Henry Darnley, if and when he reached Scotland, as Elizabeth intended he should at the right moment. For if she recognized him as a degenerate and a coward, she would know that such a man would not survive in Scotland, and nor would she if she were to become his wife.

All the mistakes Mary had avoided, Darnley would make for her. If only Mary could be tricked into marrrying him.

The sound of Elizabeth's playing drifted out into the corridors, where some of the house servants had gathered to listen. The stately music reached its climax, the climax of the Scottish Court dance, the Galliard, and when the last notes died away, someone said reverently that the Queen's Majesty played like an angel.

Maitland of Lethington had not even blinked; privately Elizabeth admired his self-control. He had listened to her astounding proposal without allowing a sign of surprise to cross his face. It was not a handsome face in the strict sense of the word but it was pleasing, with an intelligent eye and a neat little beard under a rather humorous mouth. He was a clever man, and she liked him; he was polished in his manners, and she liked that too. She also liked him because she knew from the letters to Mary which were intercepted and copied, that he admired her in spite of himself. They were sitting under an artificial awning made of lattice work entwined with flowering shrubs and foliage erected outside on the terrace of Greenwich Palace. The river flowed past them further down, its waters reflecting the light of torches from the barges moored by the jetty. The Queen had invited him to an evening reception, followed by a banquet and a masque. She had left the Great Hall, accompanied by Cecil, and with Lethington on one side of her and the Secretary on the other, she had just suggested Robert Dudley as a husband for the Queen of Scots.

They were very close, their faces lit by the torches burning in sconces against the walls; her dress glittered in the shifting light; it was so stiff with jewels and so heavily panniered that he wondered how she was able to move in it.

On these occasions she looked more and more like the effigy of a Queen, so stately and over-jewelled that she literally dazzled the eye. She had a wonderful sense of the theatrical; she was clever enough to sacrifice mere feminine charm to achieve an effect of glittering majesty. She looked ageless and remote; her deliberate personification of power was inhuman and rather frightening. Lethington could not help regretting his own Queen's warm, informal personality. It attracted many, but it also placed her within reach of her enemies. He could not imagine John Knox arguing with Elizabeth Tudor and reducing her to tears.

“Madam, you surprise me,” he said. “I know your affection for my sovereign but I had no idea it could lead you to such self-sacrifice. How could you bear to part with someone who is so dear to you?”

“Nothing is dearer to me than friendship between your Queen and myself, and peace between our kingdoms,” Elizabeth answered. “My affection prompts me to offer a man whom I know from my experience would make my cousin a most worthy husband. The whole world knows that I would have married him myself, if I had a mind to marry anyone. There is no higher compliment I could pay her than that.”

Cecil moved in his chair. “You know Lord Robert. He is able and loyal; Her Majesty would give him a title and endowments suitable to the husband of your mistress. I can heartily endorse her suggestion, and I know that it comes from her heart.”

“I'm sure it does,” Lethington smiled. He was already imagining the rage and incredulity of Mary when he wrote to her; for a moment he shared her anger at the presumption of this damnable woman and her smooth-tongued Councillor to dare suggest that tarnished adventurer as a possible husband for the Queen of his country. But he gave no sign. He did not really believe that either of them were serious.

“The whole difficulty between our two kingdoms could be solved by such a marriage,” Elizabeth continued. “My fear, and it's one I have never concealed from you, my Lord, is that a foreign Prince may win my cousin and prevail upon her to enter into an alliance against me. I don't doubt her good faith, but I fear her youth and the weaknesses of women where their affections are involved. An unscrupulous Scottish Consort could do irreparable harm; not only to our mutual peace but to my cousin's prospects of inheriting my throne. An Englishman of noble birth and excellent qualities like my Lord Dudley would ensure Queen Mary a happy domestic life and a firm liaison with me. I should be happy to name her my successor as a wedding present. You may tell her that.”

Lethington nodded. It was in fact a serious proposal as well as a gross impertinence, couched in terms of open blackmail.

“I shall be happy to inform my mistress immediately. Naturally she will encounter one doubt, Madam, which has already occurred to me. Lord Robert is known to be deeply attached to you; would he be willing to transfer his affections elsewhere? My Queen is a gentle lady and anxious to make a marriage that is based on mutual love as well as policy. For this reason, I fear she may doubt the wisdom of your proposal.”

Elizabeth smiled.

“My cousin is reputed to be the most beautiful Princess in Europe; my Lord Dudley is certainly a handsome man in the prime of his youth. The sight of her would be enough to banish all sentimental thoughts of me from his mind. Believe me, my Lord, I've given much thought to this and I cannot see a better solution. Let me tell you something—I once drew up letters patent to create Robert Earl of Leicester, did you know that?”

“Yes, Madam.” Lethington glanced sideways at the impassive Secretary. “I also know that you changed your mind and cut the document to pieces instead of signing it.”