The King's Daughter (26 page)

I felt frozen likewise by the cold torpor that now infected the subject of my marriage. I was beginning to understand that putting royal urgency into action could take a very long time. Marriage negotiations were so protracted, with so many different prospects, and messages took so long to travel back and forth between countries, that I began to fear that I would share the fate of my royal cousin, Arbella Stuart.

Arbella was a plain, quiet, but sometimes erratic woman, who had been at Whitehall for as long as I could remember. Floating in and out of my notice, she trailed after my mother as her waiting woman, carrying her train, or kept to herself in her house at Blackfriars. She was distant royal kin, raised to be queen by an over-ambitious grandmother in Derbyshire. But she never stood as part of the family when we were on show, and her status at court was unclear. She would swallow an insult from the queen without blinking, then take offence at a trifle, like a server giving her the wrong slice of a roast.

My first friendly overtures several years earlier had fallen back at my feet as if I were tossing roses against a pane of glass. Once, provoked by her blandness, I dared to ask her if it were true that she had almost married my father andcould therefore have been my mother. She had slammed the door of an empty pleasantry in my face, as I no doubt deserved.

Ever since I could remember, my ladies had whispered that my father kept her constantly on offer as a wife but refused to give her. I wondered if this were also to be a further torment for me that he had forgotten to mention in Coventry.

One night as Anne and I prepared for bed, Tallie told me what a clerk had told her of a letter written by the king to the widowed queen of France. It seemed that my father stubbornly refused to give up on marrying me to the former Dauphin, after all, in spite of the French rebuff.

I added the Melancholy Trout to my list again.

‘I almost want to marry and be done with it,’ I said dully. Even to the Melancholy Trout who might, at least, be manageable. To any husband so long as he was not Frederick Ulrich of Brunswick. ‘It’s like knowing that in the next day or two, you are sure to be beheaded. It would be better to end the fear.’

‘Don’t say such things!’ cried Anne, who imagined that she was in love with one of Henry’s gentlemen.

Tallie settled on her stool beside the bed and played the first bars of a Scottish folksong I had taught her.

‘Stop, stop,’
(sang Tallie)
‘My father is coming.

Oh Father, hast brought my golden ball

And come to set me free?’

‘I’ve neither brought thy golden ball

Nor come to set thee free

But I have come to see thee hung

Upon this gallows-tree.’

‘How gloomy!’ said Anne. ‘You’ll give us evil dreams.’

At a nod from me, Tallie continued.

‘Stop, stop, I see my sweetheart coming!

Sweetheart, hast brought my golden ball

And come to set me free?’

‘Aye, I have brought thy golden ball,

And come to set thee free.

I have not come to see thee hung

Upon the gallows-tree.’

‘Once, I believed in such tales,’ I said.

38

WHITEHALL, JUNE 1610

No copy of an old portrait was good enough. The king must have a new one for this suitor. Frederick, Elector Palatine, had confirmed the earlier rumour of his interest in marrying me. His envoy, the Duc de Bouillon, had recently arrived in London with a statement of firm intent. Perhaps. The marriage itself would depend on the negotiated terms.

No miniature portrait would do for Frederick. It seemed that the German state of the Palatine must have me life-size, standing, with the painted image of Richmond Palace behind me, flags flying from the turrets, wrapped in the distant gleam of the Thames. A whole kingdom implied in the image of a girl. The covering of so many square inches seemed to take a very long time.

Being almost exactly my height and shape, Tallie had stood for me for eight days, wearing my gem-encrusted blue satin gown and jewellery while each pearl, lace spider web and glittering, faceted proof of English wealth was recorded. Then the jewellery was removed from her. She was taken out of my clothes and I put them on, still warm from her body.

I stood in the light from a window in the Great Presence Chamber, watched by ten pairs of male eyes. Once again, I was goods for sale, wrapped up in jewels, rich silken stuffs, military alliances and favourable trade terms with England.

My father watched me. With him were the Duc de Bouillon, the marriage-broker for the Palatine who had brought the news of the German prince’s intentions, and Cecil. Among the rest were Sir Francis Bacon, now Solicitor-General, and Sir Robert Carr, who was still my father’s chief favourite as he had been for the last three years.

I sniffed the smells of resin and oil, and thought about what I was wearing and whether it had meant something different when Tallie wore it. You didn’t have to be a fool to read the message in this display of riches. But what would anyone looking at the picture learn about me?

One of the wires supporting my hair dug into my scalp behind my left ear. My nose itched. My eyes began to water from the itching. I wanted to scream with the effort of keeping still. I turned my head towards the shape of a bird on the window ledge outside.

I gave in and scratched my nose.

‘Your grace…!’ protested the artist. ‘I must refine the details of your face. Will you be kind enough to look at the far wall again.’

I shot him with a fire-arrow glance but obeyed. He stared at my nose then touched his brush to the large wooden panel on his easel.

Even looking at the wall, I felt the pressure of eyes on me. Belle had nosed at the hem of my skirts and disappeared under them. I had nowhere to hide.

My father stood with his arms crossed, studying me. Close at his back, Carr, the Golden Weasel, fiddled with the point of his silly new yellow beard. The Duc de Bouillon stood beside the king. I forgot the artist’s reprimand and turned my head to look at the little scene more clearly.

The small bent shape of Cecil stood a little aside from themall, farther from the king than Bacon. As he talked to the German duke, my father pointedly ignored his Chief Secretary. Now that I looked, the scene was easy to read. Carr had taken Cecil’s place at my father’s side, whispering in his ear. Cecil was set at a distance, with Bacon baring his teeth in would-be smiles and shuffling his way forward as if playing a child’s stealth game.

I rejected what I thought I saw.

It could not be possible that Wee Bobby had begun to fall from royal favour. The king needed him too much.

Cecil looked pale. A damp sheen glistened on his high forehead.

The king said something under his breath so that only Carr and de Bouillon could hear. They both laughed loudly. Cecil seemed preoccupied by looking for a handkerchief. Bacon pinched his thin lips and pulled them into a smile, as if he, too, had heard.

I glanced again at Cecil and wondered what the Chief Secretary really thought about the royal children’s marriages. I remembered how Henry had said that Cecil did not take sides, that he had his own private intentions for England and used people for that end. I knew that Cecil opposed the Savoy marriage for me but not what part he meant for me to play in his schemes.

Perhaps, like Henry, my father had seen that even he was a mere tool in Cecil’s vision for the future of England. But because he lived only to be at the centre of his own world, my father, unlike Henry, would not forgive it.

The little man did look ill.

I tried to imagine Whitehall without Wee Bobby. It was impossible. Both his late father, Lord Burleigh, and then he himself had advised first Elizabeth and now my father. Father and son were both called the
de facto
rulers of England, by friends and enemies alike.

The king would recover from his fit of anger with Cecil, Idecided. With his love of constant hunting and his distaste for the details of governing, he needed the little man too much.

I tried to imagine gathering my courage at last and asking Cecil how much he knew about my letter to Henry, and why he had seemed to protect me in Coventry, and what his silence might still cost me.

I looked at the distance between the two cousins now and wondered if Cecil had seen the essay that Bacon had written, being secretly passed around the court. Tallie had brought me a copy. Reading it told me all I needed to know about their rivalry and mutual dislike. Bacon’s essay, titled ‘On Deformity’ argued that outward deformity reflected a man’s inward nature.

The Golden Weasel caught my eye as he bent to rest his handsome chin playfully on my father’s padded shoulder.

I wish that bottle had scarred that smug, pretty face of yours, I thought. It was hard to believe that such a light brainless creature, with that girl’s complexion and pink, petulant mouth, had stolen the love my father should have given Henry.

Does my father know that you love Frances Howard? I asked him silently.

Carr smirked at me across my father’s shoulder. Lack of brains had not prevented him from taking on many of the powers that rightfully belonged to the Prince of Wales.

Last year, it was said, Carr had persuaded the king to dissolve Parliament for threatening to criticise my father’s Scottish favourites. I had no doubt that Carr dripped poison about my brother into my father’s ear.

I held his pale blue eye until he looked away. Soon to be viscount, indeed! Viscount Legs! I thought scornfully. Viscount Oil! Did he pretend secretly to be a prince in my brother’s place, just as he begins to advise in place of Cecil?

Wee Bobby and I might share a common enemy.

I glanced sideways at the dark awkward shape of my father. I had learned a great deal about him in the past months as I studied him for the gaps in his armour. He was unpredictable, restless and wilful. He showed open disregard for my mother along with a taste for beautiful young men. He gave extravagant gifts to his favourites but borrowed from his courtiers to pay a gaming debt. He had an unshakeable belief in his own wisdom and goodness. He found the details of governing tedious and much preferred to hunt.

Having seen him ride, I suspected that he felt most like a king when mounted on a horse. On horseback, he became a centaur – part man, part noble beast, powerful and graceful, as he could never be on those two awkward legs of his.

‘Your grace…’ said the painter unhappily.

I returned my eyes to the wall.

My father was also a man of hungry scholarship and prolific, if changeable, enthusiasms. Uneasily, I remembered how Henry had once said that I was like a squirrel, always dashing off after some new nut. I did not wish to resemble my father in any way, but he too seemed to have a taste for new nuts.

While we were still in Scotland, it was witchcraft. Wide-eyed and frightened out of my wits, I had read his
Daemonology,
a detailed study of witches and demons.

Then came the proper conduct of princes. Still in Scotland Henry had shown me a copy of the
Basilkon Doron,
the king’s admonitory treatise written for his oldest son on the correct behaviour of princes.

‘He must think me a fool,’ Henry had said unhappily. ‘To tell me to keep my clothes neat and my nails short… And, listen. “… select loyal gentlemen…” Does he think me such a gowk that I would seek to be served by traitors?’

Henry turned to another page. ‘And here… Hunting on horse-back, he permits. But not football or tumbling. I am to use “(although but moderately) running, leaping, wrestling,fencing, dancing and tennis.” He even tells me how to rhyme my poetry, should I write it, being sure to choose a worthy subject – nothing that is full of vanity… And he warns me to behave with piety and to give thanks to God!’

He shoved the pamphlet at me. ‘Not content with giving me this private counsel, he must publish it so that everyone may know how he fears my short-comings! And I must make public show of filial gratitude.’

I detected some good sense in the work as well as condescension but thought it best not to say so. To study the laws of the country, to invite in foreign merchants and to study history for foreign policy, all seemed to me like sound advice for a future king. And in those days, in Scotland, I was still in awe of our father, just as Henry still sought his praise.

‘At least he thinks to advise you,’ I had said. ‘I await similar instructions for a princess.’

Shortly after his accession to the English throne, our father had taken a passion against the smoking of
tabacco,
Walter Ralegh’s gift to England from the New World, and published his
Counterblaste to Tabacco.
Even now, six years later, Ralegh was still out of royal favour, and Whitehall courtiers still slipped out into the alleys and gardens to smoke their pipes in secret.

Then, after the Gunpowder Treason, the king turned the force of his mind onto Jesuits and treason. As if his restless wits needed yet more exercise, he also set some two score of scholars to work on a new version of the Bible and began to lecture the Commons on the God-given authority of kingship. But his chief game since the Spanish treaty of 1604 had been to play ‘The Peacemaker King’ in Europe, and I was a mere piece on his board.

‘A handsome lass, is she not?’ My father’s voice cut through my thoughts. ‘Perhaps too costly for your master to maintain?’

I risked a glance.

He nudged de Bouillon and nodded at me. ‘She’s my paving stone. In my
via media.’
His middle way as he sidled between embattled Catholic emperors and Protestant princes.

‘A handsome paving stone,’ replied the duke. His eyes were noting every jewel, gold thread, military treaty and trade alliance hanging on my body, lingering on the inventory.