The other queen

1570, APRIL, TUTBURY CASTLE: GEORGE

Ihave become, despite myself, Queen Mary’s advisor. I have to: it is a duty of honor. She cannot be left without someone to talk to. She has no one that she can trust. Her betrothed, the Duke of Norfolk, is imprisoned and can only write to her in secret; her ambassador, the bishop John Lesley, has been silent since the arrests; and all the time Cecil is pressing her to come to an agreement about her return to Scotland, on terms that even I can see are relentless.

“You are too hasty,” I scold her. “You are too eager. You cannot agree to these terms.”

They want to impose on her Cecil’s old Treaty of Edinburgh, which makes Scotland a subject nation, subservient to England, incapable of making its own alliances, banned from having a foreign policy at all. They want her to agree to make Scotland a Protestant country, where she may worship only in private, almost in hiding. They even want her to surrender her claim to the English throne; they demand that she disinherit herself. And like a queen in very truth she is prepared to accept this humiliation, this martyrdom, to win again her throne of Scotland and return to her son.

“These are impossible demands; they are wicked demands,” I tell her. “Your own mother refused them for you, as she was dying. Cecil would have forced them on her; he should be ashamed to force them on you.”

“I have to agree,” she says. “I know they are onerous. But I will agree.”

“You should not.”

“I will, because once I am there…” She shrugs, a gesture so utterly French that if I saw only the movement of her shoulders among a crowd of other women, I would know her at once. “Once I am on my throne again I can do as I please.”

“You are joking. You cannot mean to sign an agreement and then renege?” I am genuinely shocked.

“No,non ,jamais , no. Of course not. But who would blame me if I did? You yourself say these terms are wickedly unfair.”

“If they thought you would go back on your word, then they would never agree with you at all,” I point out. “They would know that you could not be trusted. And you would have made your own word, the word of a queen, utterly valueless.”

She flicks a smile at me like a naughty child. “I have nothing to put on the table,” she says simply. “I have nothing to barter but my word. I have to sell it to them.”

“They will make you keep your word,” I warn her.

“Ah, bah!” She laughs. “How can they? Once I am on my throne again?”

“Because of this last condition,” I say, pointing it out to her. The document is written in English; I fear that she has not fully understood it.

“They say that my son James shall be raised a Protestant?” she queries. “It is unfortunate, but he will be with me. I can instruct him in private. He will learn to think one thing and say another as all clever kings and queens must do. We are not as normal people, my Chowsbewwy. We learn very young that we have to act a part. Even my little boy James will have to learn to deceive. We are all liars under our crowns.”

“He will be raised as a Protestant in England.” I point to the words. “En Angleterre.”Usually she laughs at my attempts to speak her language, but this time, as she understands me, the color and the smile drain from her face.

“They think they can take my son from me?” she whispers. “My boy? My little boy? They would make me choose between my throne and my child?”

I nod.

“Elizabeth would take him from me?”

I say nothing.

“Where would he live?” she demands. “Who would care for him?”

Of course the document, drawn by Cecil under instructions from Elizabeth, does not trouble itself with this most natural question from a young mother. “They don’t say,” I tell her. “But perhaps the queen would make a nursery for him at Hatfield Palace. That’s the usual—”

“She hates me,” the Scots queen says flatly. “She has taken my pearls and now she would take my son.”

“Your pearls?”

She makes a little dismissive gesture with her hand. “Most valuable. I had a great string of black pearls and my half brother sold them to Elizabeth the moment he forced me from the throne. She bought them. She outbid my mother-in-law. See what vultures I have around me? My own mother-in-law bid for my looted pearls while I was held in prison, but she was outbid by my cousin. Elizabeth wrote to me of her sorrow at the injustice that was being done to me and yet she bought my pearls. Now she would take my son? My own son?”

“I am sure you could see him…”

“She has no child of her own; she can have no child. She will soon be beyond childbearing years, if she is not dried up already. And so she would steal my son from his cradle. She would take my son and heir and make him her own. She would rob me of my heart, of all that makes my life worth living!”

“You have to think of it from her point of view. She would have him as a hostage. She would hold him to make sure that you kept to this treaty. That is why, when you agree to it, you must realize that you will have to keep to it.”

She hears nothing of this. “A hostage? Will she keep him in the Tower like the poor little princes? Will he never come out at all? Will he disappear as they did? Does she mean to kill him?”

Her voice breaks on the thought of it and I cannot bear her distress. I rise from my seat at the table and I go to look out of the window. In our rooms across the courtyard I can see Bess walking down the gallery, accounts books tucked under her arm. She feels a long way away from me now, her worries about rents and our costs are so trivial compared to the unfolding tragedy of the Scots queen. Bess has always been prosaic, but now I have the very heart of poetry beating wildly in my own house.

I turn back to the queen. She is sitting quite still with her hand shading her eyes. “Forgive me,” she says. “Forgive my emotion. You must wish you had a cold-hearted queen to deal with, like your own. And forgive my stupidity. I had not read it properly. I thought that they meant only to supervise James’s education, to make him a good heir to the English throne. I did not realize that they want to take him from me altogether. I thought we were talking about a treaty—not about my destruction. Not about the theft of my child. Not about his kidnap.”

I feel too big and too awkward for the room. Gently, I stand behind her and put my hand on her shoulder, and with a sigh she leans back so that her head rests against my body. That little gesture, and the warmth of her head on my belly, fill me with tenderness, and an inevitable rising desire. I have to step away from her, my heart pounding.

“I was parted from my mother when I was just a little girl,” she says sadly. “I know what it is to be homesick and to miss one’s mother. I wouldn’t do that to my son, not for the throne of France, let alone Scotland.”

“He would be well cared for.”

“I was dearly loved in France,” she says. “And my dearest papa, King Henri, loved me better than his own daughters. He could not have been more kind and tender to me. But I longed for my mother, and I could never go to her. She visited me once, just once, and it was as if I became whole again, as if something was restored that had long been missing: my heart perhaps. Then she had to go back to Scotland to defend my throne for me, and your Cecil, your great William Cecil, saw her weakness and her loneliness and her illness and he forced the treaty on her that he is now forcing on me. She died trying to defend my throne against Elizabeth and Cecil. Now I have to fight the same battle. And this time they want to take my child and break my heart. Elizabeth and Cecil together destroyed my mother and now they want to destroy me, and destroy my son.”

“Perhaps we can negotiate,” I say, then I correct myself. “Perhaps you can negotiate. You could insist that the prince stay in Scotland, perhaps with an English guard and tutor?”

“I have to have him with me,” she says simply. “He is my son, my little boy. He has to be with his mother. Not even Elizabeth can be so hard-hearted as to steal my right to the throne and then my own son from me.”