Читать книгу The Virgin’s Lover - Philippa Gregory - Страница 12

The court always held Christmas at Whitehall Palace, and Cecil and Elizabeth were anxious that the traditions of Tudor rule should be seen as continuous. The people should see that Elizabeth was a monarch just as Mary had been, just as Edward had been, just as their father had been: the glorious Henry VIII.

‘I know there should be a Lord of Misrule,’ Cecil said uncertainly. ‘And a Christmas masque, and there should be the king’s choristers, and a series of banquets.’ He broke off. He had been a senior administrator to the Dudley family and thus served their masters the Tudors; but he had never been part of the inner circle of the Tudor court. He had been present at business meetings, reporting to the Dudley household, not at entertainments, and he had never taken part in any of the organisation or planning of a great court.

‘I last came to Edward’s court when he was sick,’ Elizabeth said, worried. ‘There was no feasting or masquing then. And Mary’s court went to Mass three times a day, even in the Christmas season, and was terribly gloomy. They had one good Christmas, I think, when Philip first came over and she thought she was with child, but I was under house arrest then, I didn’t see what was done.’

‘We shall have to make new traditions,’ Cecil said, trying to cheer her.

‘I don’t want new traditions,’ she replied. ‘There has been too much change. People must see that things have been restored, that my court is as good as my father’s.’

Half a dozen household servants went past carrying a cartload of tapestries. One group turned in one direction, the others turned in the other and the tapestries dropped between the six of them. They did not know where things were to go, the rooms had not been properly allocated. No-one knew the rules of precedence in this new court, it was not yet established where the great lords would be housed. The traditional Catholic lords who had been in power under Queen Mary were staying away from the upstart princess; the Protestant arrivistes had not yet returned in their rush from foreign exile; the court officers, essential servants to run the great travelling business which was the royal court, were not yet commanded by an experienced Lord Chamberlain. It was all confused and new.

Robert Dudley stepped around the tumbled tapestries, strolled up and gave Elizabeth a smiling bow, doffing his scarlet cap with his usual flair. ‘Your Grace.’

‘Sir Robert. You’re Master of Horse. Doesn’t that mean that you will take care of all the ceremonies and celebrations as well?’

‘Of course,’ he said easily. ‘I will bring you a list of entertainments that you might enjoy.’

She hesitated. ‘You have new ideas for entertainments?’

He shrugged, glancing at Cecil, as if he wondered what the question might mean. ‘I have some new ideas, Your Grace. You are a princess new-come to her throne, you might like some new celebrations. But the Christmas masque usually follows tradition. We usually have a Christmas banquet, and, if it is cold enough, an ice fair. I thought you might like a Russian masque, with bear baiting and savage dancing; and of course all the ambassadors will come to be presented, so we will need dinners and hunting parties and picnics to welcome them.’

Elizabeth was taken aback. ‘And you know how to do all this?’

He smiled, still not understanding. ‘Well, I know how to give the orders.’

Cecil had a sudden uncomfortable sense, very rare for him, of being out of his depth, faced with issues he did not understand. He felt poor, he felt provincial. He felt that he was his father’s son, a servant in the royal household, a profiteer from the sale of the monasteries, and a man who earned his fortune by marrying an heiress. The gulf between himself and Robert Dudley, always a great one, felt all at once wider. Robert Dudley’s grandfather had been a grandee at the court of Henry VII, his son the greatest man at the court of Henry VIII, he had been a kingmaker, he had even been, for nine heady days, father-in-law to the Queen of England.

Young Robert Dudley had been running in and out of the halls of the royal palaces of England as his home, while Elizabeth had been in disgrace, alone in the country. Of the three of them it was Dudley who was most accustomed to power and position. Cecil glanced at the young queen and saw, mirrored in her face, his own uncertainty and sense of inadequacy.

‘Robert, I don’t know how to do this,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I can’t even remember how to get from the queen’s rooms to the great hall. If someone doesn’t walk before me I’ll get lost. I don’t know how to get to the gardens from the picture gallery, or from the stable to my rooms, I … I’m lost here.’

Cecil saw, he could not be mistaken, the sudden leap of something in the younger man’s face – hope? ambition? – as Dudley realised why the young queen and her principal advisor were standing outside her premier London palace, looking almost as if they did not dare to go in.

Sweetly, he offered her his arm. ‘Your Majesty, let me welcome you to my old home, your new palace. These walks and these walls will be as familiar to you as Hatfield was, and you will be happier here than you have ever been before, I guarantee it. Everyone gets lost in Whitehall Palace, it is a village, not a house. Let me be your guide.’

It was generously and elegantly done, and Elizabeth’s face warmed. She took his arm and glanced back at Cecil.

‘I will follow, Your Grace,’ he said quickly, thinking that he could not bear to have Robert Dudley show him his own rooms as if he owned the place. — Aye — Cecil thought. — Go on, take your advantage. You just had the two of us at a loss. We stood here, the newcomers, not even knowing where our bedrooms are; and you know this place like the back of your hand. It’s as if you are more royal than her, as if you were the rightful prince here, and now, graciously enough, you show her round your home. —

But it was not all as easy as Elizabeth learning her way round the corridors and back stairs of the warren that was Whitehall Palace. When they went out in the streets there were many who doffed their caps and cried hurrah for the Protestant princess, but there were many also who did not want another woman on the throne, seeing what the last one had done. Many would have preferred Elizabeth to declare her betrothal to a good Protestant prince and get a sensible man’s hand on the reins of England at once. There were many others who remarked that surely Lord Henry Hastings, nephew to King Henry, and married to Robert Dudley’s sister, had nearly as good a claim as Elizabeth, and he was an honourable young man and fit to rule. There were even more who whispered in secret or said nothing at all; but who longed for the coming of Mary, Queen of Scots and Princess of France, who would bring peace to the kingdom, a lasting alliance with France, and an end to religious change. She was younger than Elizabeth, for sure, a sixteen-year-old girl; but a real little beauty, and married to the heir to the French throne with all that power behind her.

Elizabeth, new-come to her throne, not yet crowned or anointed, had to find her way round her palace, had to put her friends in high places and that quickly; had to act like a confident Tudor heir, and had somehow to deal at once with her church which was in open and determined opposition to her and which would, unless it was swiftly controlled, bring her down.

There had to be a compromise and the Privy Council, still staffed with Mary’s advisors but leavened by Elizabeth’s new friends, came up with it. The church was to be restored to the condition in which Henry VIII had left it at the time of his death. An English church, commanded by Englishmen and headed by the monarch, that obeyed English laws and paid its tithes into the English treasury, where the litany, homilies and prayers were often read in English; but where the shape and content of the service were all but identical to the Catholic Mass.

It made sense to everyone who was desperate to see Elizabeth take the throne without the horror of a civil war. It made sense to everyone who longed for a peaceful transition of power. Indeed, it made sense to everyone but to the church itself, whose bishops would not countenance one step towards the mortal heresy of Protestantism, and, worst of all, it made no sense to the queen, who was suddenly, at this inopportune moment, stubborn.

‘I won’t have the Host raised in the Royal Chapel,’ Elizabeth specified for the twentieth time. ‘When we have Christmas Mass, I will not have the Host raised as an object of worship.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Cecil agreed wearily. It was Christmas Eve and he had been hoping that he might have got to his own home for Christmas. He had been thinking, rather fondly, that he might have been there to take Christmas communion in his own chapel, the Protestant way, without drama, as God had intended it, and then stayed with his family for the rest of the days of Christmas, returning to court only for the great feast of present-giving on Twelfth Night.

It had been a struggle to find a bishop who would celebrate Mass in the Royal Chapel before the Protestant princess at all, and now Elizabeth was trying to rewrite the service.

‘He will let the congregation take communion?’ she confirmed. ‘Whatever his name is? Bishop Oglesham?’

‘Owen Oglethorpe,’ Cecil corrected her. ‘Bishop of Carlisle. Yes, he understands your feelings. Everything will be done as you wish. He will serve at the Christmas Mass in your chapel, and he won’t elevate the Host.’

Next day, Cecil cradled his head once more as the bishop defiantly held the pyx above his head for the congregation to worship the body of Christ at the magical moment of transubstantiation.

A clear voice rang out from the royal pew. ‘Bishop! Lower the pyx.’

It was as if he had not heard her. Indeed, since his eyes were closed and his lips moving in prayer, perhaps he had not heard her. The bishop believed with all his heart that God was coming down to earth, that he held the real presence of the living God between his hands, that he was holding it up for the faithful to worship, as they must, as faithful Christians, do.

‘Bishop! I said, Bishop! Lower that pyx.’

The wooden fretwork shutter of the royal pew banged open like a thunderclap. Bishop Oglethorpe turned slightly from the altar, and glanced over his shoulder to meet the furious gaze of his queen, leaning out from the royal pew like a fishwife over a market stall, her cheeks flaming red with temper, her eyes black as an angry cat’s. He took in her stance – up from her knees, standing at her full height, her finger pointing at him, her voice commanding.

‘This is my own chapel. You are serving as my chaplain. I am the queen. You will do as I order. Lower that pyx.’

As if she did not matter at all, he turned back to the altar, closed his eyes again and gave himself up to his God.

He felt, as much as he heard the swish of her gown as she strode out of the door of the pew and the bang as she slammed it shut, like a child running from a room in temper. His shoulders prickled, his arms burned; but still he kept his back resolutely turned to the congregation, celebrating the Mass not with them, but for them: a process private between the priest and his God, which the faithful might observe, but could not join. The bishop put the pyx gently down on the altar and folded his hands together in the gesture for prayer, secretly pressing them hard against his thudding heart, as the queen stormed from her own chapel, on Christmas Day; driven from the place of God on His very day, by her own muddled, heretical thinking.

Two days later, Cecil, still not home for Christmas, faced with a royal temper tantrum on one hand and a stubborn bishop on the other, was forced to issue a royal proclamation that the litany, Lord’s Prayer, lessons and the ten commandments would all be read in English, in every church of the land, and the Host would not be raised. This was the new law of the land. Elizabeth had declared war on her church before she was even crowned.

‘So who is going to crown her?’ Dudley asked him. It was the day before Twelfth Night. Neither Cecil nor Dudley had yet managed to get home to their wives for so much as a single night during the Christmas season.

— Does he not have enough to do in planning the Twelfth Night feast, that now he must devise religious policy? — Cecil demanded of himself irritably, as he got down from his horse in the stable yard and tossed the reins to a waiting groom. He saw Dudley’s eyes run over the animal and felt a second pang of irritation at the knowledge that the younger man would see at once that it was too short in the back.

‘I thank you for your concern but why do you wish to know, Sir Robert?’ The politeness of Cecil’s tone almost took the ice from his reply.

Dudley’s smile was placatory. ‘Because she will worry, and this is a woman who is capable of worrying herself sick. She will ask me for my advice, and I want to be able to reassure her. You’ll have a plan, sir, you always do. I am only asking you what it is. You can tell me to mind my horses and leave policy to you, if you wish. But if you want her mind at rest you should tell me what answer I should give her. You know she will consult me.’

Cecil sighed. ‘No-one has offered to crown her,’ he said heavily. ‘And between you and me, no-one will crown her. They are all opposed, I swear that they are in collusion. I cannot trace a conspiracy but they all know that if they do not crown her, she is not queen. They think they can force her to restore the Mass. It’s a desperate position. The Queen of England, and not one bishop recognises her! Winchester is under house arrest for his sermon at the late queen’s funeral, Oglethorpe in all but the same case for his ridiculous defiance on Christmas Day. He says he will go to the stake before he gives way to her. She wouldn’t let Bishop Bonner so much as touch her hand when she came into London, so he is her sworn enemy too. The Archbishop of York told her to her face that he regards her as a heretic damned. She’s got the Bishop of Chichester under house arrest, although he is sick as a dog. They are all unanimously against her, not a shadow of doubt among them. Not even a tiny crack where one might seed division.’

‘Surely a scattering of bribes?’

Cecil shook his head. ‘They have become amazingly principled,’ he said. ‘They will not have Protestantism restored to England. They will not have a Protestant queen.’

Dudley’s face darkened. ‘Sir, if we do not have a care, they will make a rebellion against the queen from inside the church itself. It is a very small step from calling her a heretic to open treason, and a rebellion by the princes of the church would hardly be a rebellion at all. They are the Prince Bishops, they can make her look like a usurper. There are enough Catholic candidates for the throne who would be quick to take her place. If they declare war on her, she is finished.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Cecil said, keeping his irritation in check with some difficulty. ‘I am aware of the danger she is in. It’s never been worse. No-one can ever remember a monarch in such uncertainty. King Henry never had more than one bishop openly against him, the late queen, at her very worst of times, had two; but Princess Elizabeth has every single one of them as her open and declared enemy. I know things are as bad as they can be, and the princess clinging to her prospects by her fingertips. What I don’t know is how to make an absolutely solid Roman Catholic church crown a Protestant princess.’

‘Queen,’ Dudley prompted.

‘What?’

‘Queen Elizabeth. You said “princess”.’

‘She’s on the throne but not anointed,’ Cecil said grimly. ‘I pray that the day comes when I can say “queen” and know it is nothing more nor less than the truth. But how can I get her anointed, if no-one will do it?’

‘She can hardly behead them all,’ Dudley said with unwarranted cheerfulness.

‘Quite so.’

‘But what if they thought she might convert?’

‘They’ll hardly believe that, after she stormed out of her own chapel on Christmas Day.’

‘If they thought that she would marry Philip of Spain, they would crown her,’ Dudley suggested slyly. ‘They would trust him to forge a compromise. They saw him handle Queen Mary. They’d trust Elizabeth under his control.’

Cecil hesitated. ‘Actually, they might.’

‘You could tell three men, in the strictest confidence, that she is considering him,’ Dudley advised. ‘That’s the best way to make sure everyone hears it. Suggest that he will come over for the wedding and create a new settlement for the church in England. He liked her before, and she encouraged him enough, God knows. Everyone thought they would make a match of it as soon as her sister was cold. You could say they are all but betrothed. She’s attended Mass almost every day for the last five years, they all know that well enough. She is accommodating when she has to be. Remind them of it.’

‘You want me to use the old scandals of the princess as a mask for policy?’ Cecil demanded sarcastically. ‘Hold her up to shame as a woman who bedded her brother-in-law as her own sister lay dying?’

‘Elizabeth? Shame?’ Dudley laughed in Cecil’s face. ‘She’s not been troubled by shame since she was a girl. She learned then that you can ride out shame if you keep your nerve and admit nothing. And she’s not troubled by lust either. Her “scandals” as you call them excepting the one with Thomas Seymour, which got out of hand are never accidental. Since her romping with Seymour led him to the scaffold, she has learned her lesson. Now she deploys her desires; they do not drive her. She’s not a fool, you know. She’s survived this far. We have to learn from her, learn to use everything we have: just as she has always done. Her marriage is our greatest weapon. Of course we have to use it. What d’you think she was doing all the time that she was flirting with Philip of Spain? She wasn’t driven by desire, God knows. She was playing the only card she had.’

Cecil was about to argue but then he stopped himself. Something in Dudley’s hard eyes reminded him of Elizabeth’s when he had once warned her of falling in love with Philip. Then she had shot him the same bright, cynical look. The two of them might be young people, only in their mid-twenties, but they had been taught in a hard school. Neither of them had any time for sentiment.

‘Carlisle might do it,’ Cecil said thoughtfully. ‘If he thought she was seriously considering Philip as a husband, and if I could assure him that by doing it, he would save her from heresy.’

Dudley put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Someone has to do it or she’s not queen,’ he pointed out. ‘We have to get her crowned by a bishop in Westminster Abbey or all this is just mummery and wishful thinking. Jane Grey was queen as much as this, and Jane Grey’s rule was nine days long, and Jane Grey is dead.’

Cecil shrugged involuntarily, and moved away from Dudley’s touch.

‘All right,’ Dudley said, understanding the older man’s diffidence. ‘I know! Jane died for my father’s ambition. I know that you steered your course out of it at the time. You were wiser than most. But I’m no plotter, Sir William. I will do my job and I know that you can do yours without my advice!’

‘I am sure you are a true friend to her, and the best Master of Horse she could have appointed,’ Cecil offered with his faint smile.

‘I thank you,’ Dudley said with courtesy. ‘And so you force me to tell you that that animal of yours is too short in the back. Next time you are buying a saddle horse, come to me.’

Cecil laughed at the incorrigible young man, he could not help himself. ‘You are shameless like her!’ he said.

‘It is a consequence of our greatness,’ Dudley said easily. ‘Modesty is the first thing to go.’

Amy Dudley was seated in the window of her bedroom at Stanfield Hall in Norfolk. At her feet were three parcels tied with ribbon, bearing labels that read ‘To my dearest husband from your loving wife’. The writing on the labels was in fat irregular capitals, like a child might write. It had taken Amy some time and trouble to copy the words from the sheet of paper that Lady Robsart had written for her, but she had thought that Robert would be pleased to see that she was learning her letters at last.

She had bought him a handsome Spanish leather saddle, emblazoned with his initials on the saddle flap, and studded with gold nails. His second present was three linen shirts, sewn by Amy herself, white on white embroidery on the cuffs and down the front band. Her third present to him was a set of hawking gloves, made of the softest, smoothest leather, as cool and as flexible as silk, with his initials embroidered in gold thread by Amy, using an awl to pierce the leather.

She had never sewn leather before and even with a cobbler’s glove to guard her hand she had pricked her palm all over with little red painful dots of blood.

‘You could have embroidered his gloves with your own blood!’ her stepmother laughed at her.

Amy said nothing but waited for Robert, secure that she had beautiful gifts for him, and that he would see the work that had gone into every stitch, into every letter. She waited and she waited through the twelve days of the Christmas feast; and when finally she sat at the window, and looked south down the grey road to London on the evening of Twelfth Night, she acknowledged at last that he was not coming, that he had sent her no gifts, that he had not even sent a message to say he would not come.

She felt shamed by his neglect; too ashamed even to go down to the hall where the rest of her family was gathered: Lady Robsart, merry with her four children and their husbands and wives, their young children, screaming with laughter at the mummers and dancing to the music. Amy could not face their secret amusement at the depth and completeness of her fall from a brilliant marriage into the greatest family in England, to being the neglected wife of a former criminal.

Amy was too grieved to be angry with Robert for promising to come and then failing her. Worst of all – she felt in her heart that it was no surprise he did not come to her. Robert Dudley was already being spoken of as the most handsome man at court, the queen’s most glamorous servant, her most able friend. Why should he leave such a court, all of them attuned to joy, ringing with their own good luck, where he was Master of the Revels and lord of every ceremony, to come to Norfolk in midwinter to be with Amy and her stepmother, at a house where he had never been welcome, that he had always despised?

With this question unanswered, Amy spent Twelfth Night with his presents at her cold feet, and her eyes on the empty road, wondering if she would see her husband ever again.

It had been Dudley’s Christmas Feast as much as Elizabeth’s; everyone agreed it. It had been Dudley’s triumphant return to court, as much as Elizabeth’s. Dudley had been at the heart of every festivity, planning every entertainment, first up on his horse for hunting, first on the floor for dancing. He was a prince come to his own again in the palace where his father had ruled.

‘My father used to have it so …’ he would say negligently, choosing one style or another, and everyone was reminded that all the most recent successful Christmas feasts had been ordered by the Lord Protector Dudley, and Elizabeth’s brother, the young King Edward, had been a passive spectator, never the commander.

Elizabeth was happy to let Dudley order the celebrations as he thought best. Like everyone else she was dazzled by his confidence and his easy happiness in his restoration. To see Dudley at the centre of attention, in a glittering room while a masque unfolded to his choreography, and the choir sang his lyrics, was to see a man utterly in his element, in his moment of glory, in his pride. Thanks to him the court glittered as if the decorations were gold and not tinsel. Thanks to him the greatest entertainers in Europe flocked to the English court, paid in notes of promise, or sweetened with little gifts. Thanks to him the court went from one entertainment to another until Elizabeth’s court was a byword for elegance, style, merriment and flirtation. Robert Dudley knew, better than any man in England, how to give a party that lasted a long, glorious fortnight, and Elizabeth knew, better than any woman in England, how to enjoy a sudden leap into freedom and pleasure. He was her partner in dancing, her lead on the hunting field, her conspirator in the silly practical jokes that she loved to play, and her equal when she wanted to talk of politics, or theology, or poetry. He was her trusted ally, her advisor, her best friend and her best-matched companion. He was the favourite: he was stunning.

As Master of Horse, Robert took responsibility for the coronation procession and entertainment, and shortly after the final great celebration of Twelfth Night he turned his attention to planning what must be the greatest day of her reign.

Working alone in the beautiful apartment at Whitehall Palace that he had generously allocated to himself, he had a scroll of manuscript paper unrolling down a table big enough to seat twelve men. From the top to the bottom the paper was covered with names: names of men and their titles, names of their horses, names of the servants who would accompany them, details of their clothing, of the colour of the livery, of the arms they would bear, of the special pennants their standard-bearers would carry.

Either side of the list of the procession marched two more lists of those who would be spectators: the guilds, the companies, the waits from the hospitals, the mayors and councillors from the provinces, the organisations who had to have special places. The ambassadors, envoys, emissaries and foreign visitors would watch the parade go past, and must have a good view so that their reports to their homes would be enthusiastically in favour of the new Queen of England.

A clerk danced from one end of the table scratching out and amending the scroll to Robert’s rapid fire of dictation from the lists in his hand. Every now and then he glanced up and said, ‘Purple, sir,’ or ‘Saffron, nearby,’ and Robert would swear a fearful oath. ‘Move him back one then, I can’t have the colours clashing.’

On a second table, equally as long as the first, was a map of the streets of London from the Tower to Westminster Palace, drawn like a snake along a vellum roll. The palace was marked with the time that the procession should arrive, and the time that it would take to walk from one place to another was marked along the way. A clerk had painted in, as prettily as an illuminated manuscript, the various stopping places and the tableaux that would be presented at each of the five main points. They would be the work and responsibility of the City of London, but they would be masterminded by Robert Dudley. He was not taking the chance of anything going wrong on the queen’s coronation procession.

‘This one, sir,’ a clerk said tentatively. Robert leaned over.

‘Gracechurch Street,’ he read. ‘Uniting of the two houses of Lancaster and York pageant. What of it?’

‘It’s the painter, sir. He asked was he to do the Boleyn family too?’

‘The queen’s mother?’

The clerk did not blink. He named the woman who had been beheaded for treason, witchcraft and incestuous adultery against the king, and whose name had been banned ever since. ‘The Lady Anne Boleyn, sir.’

Robert pushed back his jewelled velvet cap and scratched his thick, dark hair, looking in his anxiety much younger than his twenty-five years.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘She’s the queen’s mother. She can’t just be a gap. We can’t just ignore her. She has to be our honourable Lady Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, and mother of the queen.’

The clerk raised his eyebrows as if to indicate that it was Robert’s decision and would fall on his shoulders and no-one else’s; but that he, personally, preferred a quieter life. Robert let out a crack of laughter and cuffed him gently on the shoulder. ‘The Princess Elizabeth is from good English stock, God bless her,’ he said. ‘And it was a better marriage for the king than others he made, God knows. A pretty, honest Howard maid.’

The clerk still looked uneasy. ‘The other honest Howard maid was also executed for adultery,’ he pointed out.

‘Good English stock,’ Robert insisted unblinkingly. ‘And God Save the Queen.’

‘Amen,’ the clerk said smartly, and crossed himself.

Robert noted the habitual gesture and checked himself before he mirrored it. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Are all the other pageants clear?’

‘Except for the Little Conduit, Cheapside.’

‘What of it?’

‘It shows a Bible. Question is: should it be in English or Latin?’

It was a question that went to the very heart of the debate currently raging in the church. Elizabeth’s father had authorised the Bible in English and then changed his mind and taken it back into Latin again. His young son Edward had put an English Bible into every parish church, Queen Mary had banned them; it was for the priest to read and to explain; the English people were to listen, not to study for themselves. What Elizabeth would want to do, nobody knew. What she would be able to do, with the church full-square against her, nobody could guess.

Robert snatched his cap from his head and flung it across the room. ‘For God’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘This is state policy! I’m trying to plan a pageant and you keep asking me questions about policy! I don’t know what she will decide. The Privy Council will advise her, the bishops will advise her. Parliament will advise her, they will argue over it for months and then make it law. Pray God people will obey it and not rise up against her. It is not for me to decide it here and now!’

There was an awkward silence. ‘But in the meantime?’ the clerk asked tentatively. ‘The cover of the Bible for the pageant? Should it be English or Latin? We could put a Latin copy inside an English cover if she preferred it. Or an English copy. Or one of both.’

‘On the cover write BIBLE in English,’ Robert decided. ‘Then everyone knows what it is. Write it in big letters so it is clear it is part of the pageant: a prop, not the real thing. It is a symbol.’

The clerk made a note. The man-at-arms at the door walked delicately over to the corner, picked up the expensive cap, and handed it to his master. Robert took it without acknowledgement. Other people had been picking up for him since he was a child of two.

‘When we’ve finished this, I’ll see the other procession,’ he said irritably. ‘Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. And I want a list of horses, and check that the mules are sound.’ He snapped his fingers for another clerk to step forward.

‘And I want some people,’ he said suddenly.

The second clerk was ready with a writing tablet and a quill in a little pot of ink.

‘People, sir?’

‘A little girl with a posy of flowers, an old lady, some sort of peasant up from the Midlands or somewhere. Make a note and send Gerard out to find me half a dozen people. Note this: one old lady, frail-looking but strong enough to stand, and with a strong voice, loud enough to be heard. One pretty girl, about six or seven, must be bold enough to cry out and take a posy of flowers to the queen. One bright apprentice boy to scatter some rose petals under her horse’s feet. One old peasant from somewhere in the country to cry out, “God bless Your Grace”. I’ll have a couple of pretty merchants’ wives as well and an unemployed soldier, no, rather, a wounded soldier. I’ll have two wounded soldiers. And I’ll have a couple of sailors from Plymouth or Portsmouth or Bristol, somewhere like that. Not London. And they are to say that this is a queen to take the country’s fortunes overseas, that there is great wealth for the taking, for a country strong enough to take it, that this country can be a great one in the world, and this queen will venture for it.’

The clerk was scribbling furiously.

‘And I’ll have a couple of old men, scattered about,’ Robert went on, warming to the plan. ‘One to cry for joy, he’s to be near the front so they all see him, and the other one to call out from the back that she’s her father’s daughter, a true heir. Get them all spaced out: here …’ Robert marked the map. ‘Here, and here. I don’t mind what order. They are to be told to call out different things. They are to tell no-one they were hired. They are to tell anyone who asks that they came to see the queen out of love for her. The soldiers in particular must say that she will bring peace and prosperity. And tell the women to behave with propriety. No bawds. The children had better come with their mothers and their mothers should be told to make sure that they behave. I want people to see that the queen is beloved by all sorts of people. They are to call out to her. Blessings, that sort of thing.’

‘What if she doesn’t hear them, sir?’ the clerk asked. ‘Over the noise of the crowd?’

‘I’ll tell her where she is to stop,’ Robert said firmly. ‘She’ll hear them, because I’ll tell her to.’

The door opened behind him and the clerk stepped swiftly back and bowed. William Cecil came into the room and took a sweeping glance at the two tables covered with plans and the sheets of paper in the clerks’ hands.

‘You seem to be going to much trouble, Sir Robert,’ he remarked mildly.

‘I would hope so. Her processions are entrusted to me. I would hope that no-one found me wanting.’

The older man hesitated. ‘I only meant that you seem to be going into much detail. As I remember, Queen Mary had no need of great lists and plans. I think she just went to the Abbey with her court following.’

‘They had carriages and horses,’ Robert observed. ‘And an order of procession. Lady Mary’s Master of Horse made a list. I have his notes, actually. The great skill of these things is to make them appear that they have simply happened.’

‘Triumphal arches and tableaux?’ William Cecil inquired, reading the words upside down from the plan.

‘Spontaneous demonstrations of loyalty,’ Robert said firmly. ‘The City Fathers insisted on it.’

He stepped between Cecil and the table, obscuring his view. ‘My Lord Secretary, this is a very young woman whose right to the throne has been contested almost since the day of her birth. The last young woman whose right to the throne of England was contested had a crown crammed on her head in secret and lost it in hiding. I think it important that this young woman is seen as the true heir, is seen as the people’s delight, and is seen to take her crown as publicly and as gloriously as possible.’

‘Lady Jane was not the true heir,’ Cecil pointed out to Lady Jane’s brother-in-law, not mincing his words. ‘And the crown was crammed on her head by a traitor, also beheaded for treason. Your father, actually.’

Dudley’s gaze did not waver. ‘He paid the price for that treason,’ he said simply. ‘And I paid for my part in it. I paid in full. There’s not a man in her court that has not had to loosen his collar and turn his coat once or twice in recent years. Even you, sir, I imagine, though you kept yourself clear of our disgrace.’

Cecil, whose hands were cleaner than most, let it go. ‘Perhaps. But there is one thing I should tell you.’

Dudley waited. Cecil leaned towards him and kept his voice low. ‘There is no money for this,’ he said heavily. ‘The treasury is all but empty. Queen Mary and her Spanish husband have drained England dry. We cannot pay for tableaux and fountains running with wine, and cloth of gold to drape around arches. There is no gold in the treasury, there is barely enough plate for a banquet.’

‘It’s as bad as that?’

Cecil nodded. ‘Worse.’

‘Then we will have to borrow it,’ Robert declared grandly. ‘For I will have her crowned in state. Not for my vanity, which I know is not of the smallest, not for hers, and you will find she is no shy violet either; but because this puts her more firmly on the throne than a standing army. You will see. She will make them hers. But she has to come out from the Tower on a great white horse and with her hair spread over her shoulders and she has to look every inch a queen.’

Cecil would have argued but Robert went on. ‘She has to have people crying out for her, she has to have tableaux declaring her as the true and only heir: pictures for the people who cannot read your proclamations, who have no knowledge of the law. She has to be surrounded by a beautiful court and a cheering, prosperous crowd. This is how we make her a queen indeed: now, and for the rest of her life.’

Cecil was struck by the vividness of the younger man’s vision. ‘You really believe it makes her safer?’

‘She can make herself safe,’ Robert said earnestly. ‘Give her a stage and she will be the only sight anyone can see. This coronation gives her a platform that will put her head and shoulders above anyone else in England, her cousins, rival heirs, anyone. This gives her men’s hearts and souls. You have to get the money so that I can build her the stage, and she will do the rest. She will enact the part of queen.’

Cecil took a turn to the window and looked out over the wintry gardens of Whitehall Palace. Robert drew closer, scanning the older man’s profile. Cecil was nearing forty, a family man, a quiet Protestant through the Catholic years of Mary Tudor, a man with an affection for his wife and for accruing land. He had served the young Protestant king, he had refused to be a part of the Jane Grey plot, and then he had been steadily and discreetly loyal to Princess Elizabeth, taking the inferior job of surveyor so that he might keep her small estates in good heart, and have an excuse for seeing her often. It was Cecil’s advice that had kept her out of trouble during the years of plotting and the uprisings against her sister Mary. It would be Cecil’s advice that would keep her steady on this new throne. Robert Dudley might not like him, in truth, he would never like any rival; but he knew that this man would be making the decisions for the young queen.

‘And so?’ he said finally.

Cecil nodded. ‘We’ll raise the money from somewhere,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to borrow. But for God’s sake, for her sake, keep it as cheap as possible.’

Robert Dudley shook his head in instinctive rejection. ‘This cannot be cheap!’ he declared.

‘It cannot look cheap,’ Cecil corrected him. ‘But it can be affordable. Do you know her fortune?’

He knew that Robert did not know. Nobody had known, until the clerk of the Privy Council, Armagil Waad, had emerged from the royal treasury which he had last seen filled with gold with the most rudimentary of inventories shaking in his hand, and whispered aghast: ‘Nothing. There is nothing left. Queen Mary has spent all King Henry’s gold.’

Robert shook his head.

‘She is sixty thousand pounds in debt,’ Cecil said quietly. ‘Sixty thousand pounds in debt, nothing to sell, nothing to offer against a loan, and no way to raise taxes. We shall find the money for her coronation but we will serve her best if we keep it cheap.’

Elizabeth’s triumphal procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Palace went just as Dudley had planned. She paused and smiled before the pageant representing her mother, the Lady Anne, she took the Bible offered her by a little girl and kissed it and held it to her breast. She drew rein at the points he had marked for her.

From the crowd came a small child with a posy of flowers. Elizabeth bent low in the saddle and took the posy, kissed the flowers and smiled at the cheers. Further on she happened to hear two wounded soldiers call out her name, and she paused to thank them for their wishes and the crowd near them heard them predict that peace and prosperity would come to England now that Harry’s daughter was on the throne. A little later an old lady called out a blessing for her and Elizabeth miraculously heard the thin old voice above the cheers of the crowd, and pulled up her horse to acknowledge the good wishes.

They thought more of her for responding to the sailors, to the apprentice boys, to the old peasant from the Midlands, than for all the glory of her harness and the pace of her horse. When she stopped for the pregnant merchant’s wife and asked her to call the baby Henry if it was a boy, they cheered her till she pretended to be deafened by applause. She kissed her hand to the wounded soldiers, noticed an old man turn his face aside to hide his tears and she called out that she knew they were tears of joy.

She never asked Robert, neither then nor later, if these people had been paid to cry out her name or if they were doing it for love. For all that she had spent her life in the wings, Elizabeth belonged to the centre of the stage. She did not really care whether the rest of them were players or groundlings. All she desired was their acclaim.

And she was enough of a Tudor to put on a good show. She had the knack of smiling at a crowd as if each and every one had her attention, and the individuals who cried out to her – placed so that all corners of the route would have their own special experience of her – made a succession of apparently natural stopping places for Elizabeth’s procession, so that everyone could see her and everyone would have their own private memory of the princess’s radiant smile on her most glorious day.

The next day, Sunday, was the day of her coronation, and Dudley had ruled that she would go to the Abbey high on a litter drawn by four white mules, so that she appeared to the crowd as if she were floating at shoulder height. Either side of the litter marched her gentlemen pensioners in crimson damask, before her went her trumpeters in scarlet, behind her walked Dudley himself, the first man in the procession, leading her white palfrey, and the crowd that cheered her gasped when they saw him: the richness of the jewels in his hat, his dark, saturnine, handsome face, and the highbred, high-stepping horse that curvetted so prettily with his hand steady on the bridle.

He smiled, turning his head this way and that, his heavy-lidded eyes running over the crowd, continually alert. This was a man who had ridden before a cheering crowd and known that they adored him; and had later marched to the Tower amid a storm of booing, knowing himself to be the second worst-hated man in England, and the son of the worst. He knew that this crowd could be courted as sweetly as a willing girl one day, and yet turn as spiteful as a neglected woman the next.

Today, they adored him; he was Elizabeth’s favourite, he was the most handsome man in England. He had been their bonny darling when a boy, he had gone into the Tower as a traitor and come out again as a hero. He was a survivor like her, he was a survivor like them.

It was a perfect procession and a perfect service. Elizabeth took the crown on her head, the oil on her forehead, and the orb and sceptre of England into her hand. The Bishop of Carlisle officiated in the pleasing conviction that within a few months he would be celebrating her marriage to the most devout Catholic king in the whole of Christendom. And after the coronation service the queen’s own chaplain celebrated Mass without uplifting the Host.

Elizabeth came out of the dark Abbey into a blaze of light and heard the roar of the crowd welcome her. She walked through the people so that they could all see her – this was a queen who would pander to anyone, their love for her was a balm for the years of neglect.

At her coronation dinner her voice was lost in her tightening throat, the blush in her cheeks was from a rising fever, but nothing would have made her leave early. The queen’s champion rode into the hall and challenged all comers and the new queen smiled on him, smiled on Robert Dudley, the most loyal ex-traitor of them all, smiled on her new council – half of them constitutionally unfaithful – and smiled on her family who were suddenly recollecting the bonds and obligations of kinship now that their niece was no longer a suspect criminal, but the very lawmaker herself.

She stayed up till three in the morning until the trusted Kat Ashley, presuming on the intimacy of having been governess when Elizabeth was a girl and not a great queen, whispered in her ear that she must go to bed now or be dead on her feet in the morning.

— God strike her dead on her feet in the morning — thought Amy Dudley, sleepless, waiting through the long, dark winter night for the cold dawn, in far-away Norfolk.

Robert Dudley, rising like a young Adonis from the bed of one of the court ladies, giving her a nonchalant parting kiss while he unclasped her hands from about his neck, and coming into the Queen’s presence chamber at Whitehall smartly enough next day, was still too late to catch Elizabeth alone. He found her already in close-headed conference with William Cecil, seated over a little table with papers before them. She glanced up and smiled at him but she did not wave him to approach, and he was forced to stand against the wood-panelled walls with the dozen or so other men who had risen early to pay their compliments and found that Cecil had got in first.

Dudley scowled and tried to overhear the low-voiced conversation. Cecil was dressed in dark clothes: — like a clerk — Dudley sniffed; but his wealth showed in the quality of the rich velvet and in the expense of the cut. His ruff was of the finest lace, lying in soft folds around his neck, his hair long and lustrous, spread on his collar. His eyes, warm and compassionate, never wavered from Elizabeth’s animated face, answering her remarks about the great kingdom with the same steady quietness that he had used when he was advising her how best to run her country estates. Then it had been Cecil alone who had kept the princess from folly, and now it was Cecil alone who had the reward for those years of service.

She trusted him as she trusted no other, he could advise her against her own desires and she would listen. Indeed, when she appointed him to be her Secretary of State she had made him swear that he would tell her the truth without fear or favour, and sworn to him a pledge in return: that she would always listen to his words and never blame him if his advice was not to her liking. No other member of the Privy Council had exchanged such an oath with the new queen; there was no-one else who mattered.

Elizabeth had seen her father dismiss advisors whose counsel was against his wishes, she had seen him arraign members of his own council for treason because they brought him bad news. She did not care that her father had become a tyrant, hated by his closest advisors, she believed that was the very nature of kingship; but she was warned by the fact that he lost the best minds of the kingdom because he could not bear to take advice.

And she was not yet old enough to want to rule alone. The crown was unsteady on her head, the country was filled with her enemies. She was a young woman, only twenty-five years old, with neither mother nor father nor a beloved family to advise her. She needed to be surrounded by friends that she could trust: Cecil, her teacher Roger Ascham, her former governess Kat Ashley, and her plump, gossipy cofferer Thomas Parry with his wife Blanche, who had been Elizabeth’s nanny. Now that Elizabeth was queen she did not forget those who had been faithful to her when she had been princess, and there was not one old friend who was not now enjoying a small fortune in rich repayment for the years of waiting.

— Why, she actually prefers the company of inferiors — Dudley thought, looking from Cecil at the table to Kat Ashley at the window. — She was brought up by servants and people of the middling sort and she prefers their values. She understands trade and good housekeeping and the value of a well-run estate because that is what they care about. While I was walking around the royal palaces and spending my time with my father commanding the court, she was fussing over the price of bacon and staying out of debt.

— She is small scale, not a queen at all yet. She will stick at the raising of the Host because she can see it; that is real, it happens before her nose. But the great debates of the church she would rather avoid. Elizabeth has no vision, she has never had time to see beyond her own survival. —

At the table, Cecil beckoned to one of his clerks and the man stepped forward and showed the young queen a page of writing.

— If a man wanted to dominate this queen, he would have to separate her from Cecil — Robert thought to himself, watching the two heads so companionably close together as she read his paper. — If a man wanted to rule England through this queen he would have to be rid of Cecil first. And she would have to lose faith in Cecil before anything else could be done. —

Elizabeth pointed to something on the page, Cecil answered her question, and then she nodded her agreement. She looked up and, seeing Dudley’s eyes upon her, beckoned him forward.

Dudley, head up, a little swagger in his stride at stepping forward before the whole court, came up to the throne and swept a deep elegant bow.

‘Good day, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘And God bless you in this first day of your rule.’

Elizabeth beamed at him. ‘We have been preparing the list of my emissaries to go to the courts of Europe to announce my coronation,’ she said. ‘Cecil suggests that I send you to Philip of Spain in Brussels. Shall you like to tell your old master that I am now anointed queen?’

‘As you wish,’ he agreed at once, hiding his irritation. ‘But are you going to stay indoors at work all day today, Your Grace? Your hunter is waiting, the weather is fine.’

He caught her longing glance towards the window and her hesitation.

‘The French ambassador …’ Cecil remarked for her ear only.

She shrugged. ‘The ambassador can wait, I suppose.’

‘And I have a new hunter that I thought you might try,’ Dudley said temptingly. ‘From Ireland. A bright bay, a handsome horse, and strong.’

‘Not too strong, I hope,’ Cecil said.

‘The queen rides like a Diana.’ Dudley flattered her to her face, not even glancing at the older man. ‘There is no-one to match her. I would put her on any horse in the stables and it would know its master. She rides like her father did, quite without fear.’

Elizabeth glowed a little at the praise. ‘I will come in an hour,’ she said. ‘First, I have to see what these people want.’ She glanced around the room and the men and women stirred like spring corn when the breeze passes over it. Her very glance could make them ripple with longing for her attention.

Dudley laughed quietly. ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ he said cynically. ‘It needn’t take an hour.’

She tipped her head to one side to listen, and he stepped up to the throne so that he could whisper in her ear. Cecil saw her eyes dance and how she put her hand to her mouth to hold in her laughter.

‘Shush, you are a slanderer,’ she said, and slapped the back of his hand with her gloves.

At once, Dudley turned his hand over, palm up, as if to invite another smack. Elizabeth averted her head and veiled her eyes with her dark lashes.

Dudley bent his head again, and whispered to her once more. A giggle escaped from the queen.

‘Master Secretary,’ she said. ‘You must send Sir Robert away, he is too distracting.’

Cecil smiled pleasantly at the younger man. ‘You are most welcome to divert Her Grace,’ he said warmly. ‘If anything, she works too hard. The kingdom cannot be transformed in a week, there is much to do but it will have to be done over time. And …’ He hesitated. ‘Many things we will have to consider carefully, they are new to us.’

— And you are at a loss half the time — Robert remarked to himself. — I would know what should be done. But you are her advisor and I am merely Master of Horse. Well, so be it for today. So I will take her riding. —

Aloud he said with a smile: ‘There you are then! Your Grace, come out and ride with me. We need not hunt, we’ll just take a couple of grooms and you can try the paces of this bay horse.’

‘Within the hour,’ she promised him.

‘And the French ambassador can ride with you,’ Cecil suggested.

A swift glance from Robert Dudley showed that he realised he had been burdened with chaperones but Cecil’s face remained serene.

‘Don’t you have a horse he can use in the stables?’ he asked, challenging Robert’s competence, without seeming to challenge him at all.

‘Of course,’ Robert said urbanely. ‘He can have his pick from a dozen.’

The queen scanned the room. ‘Ah, my lord,’ she said pleasantly to one of the waiting men. ‘How glad I am to see you at court.’

It was his cue for her attention and at once he stepped forward. ‘I have brought Your Grace a gift to celebrate your coming to the throne,’ he said.

Elizabeth brightened, she loved gifts of any sort, she was as acquisitive as a magpie. Robert, knowing that what would follow would be some request for the right to cut wood or enclose common land, to avoid a tax or persecute a neighbour, stepped down from the dais, bowed, walked backwards from the throne, bowed again at the door and went out to the stables.

Despite the French ambassador, a couple of lords, some small-fry gentry, a couple of ladies in waiting and half a dozen guards that Cecil had collected to accompany the queen, Dudley managed to ride by her side and they were left alone for most of the ride. At least two men muttered that Dudley was shown more favour than he deserved, but Robert ignored them, and the queen did not hear.

They rode westerly, slowly at first through the streets and then lengthening the pace of the horses as they entered the yellowing winter grassland of St James’s Park. Beyond the park, the houses gave way to market gardens to feed the insatiable city, and then to open fields, and then to wilder country. The queen was absorbed in managing the new horse, who fretted at too tight a rein but would take advantage and toss his head if she let him ride too loose.

‘He needs schooling,’ she said critically to Robert.

‘I thought you should try him as he is,’ he said easily. ‘And then we can decide what is to be done with him. He could be a hunter for you, he is strong enough and he jumps like a bird, or he could be a horse you use in processions, he is so handsome and his colour is so good. If you want him for that, I have a mind to have him specially trained, taught to stand and to tolerate crowds. I thought your grey fretted a little when people pushed very close.’

‘You can’t blame him for that!’ she retorted. ‘They were waving flags in his face and throwing rose petals at him!’

He smiled at her. ‘I know. But this will happen again and again. England loves her princess. You will need a horse that can stand and watch a tableau, and let you bend down and take a posy from a child without shifting for a moment, and then trot with his head up looking proud.’

She was struck by his advice. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And it is hard to pay attention to the crowd and to manage a horse.’

‘I don’t want you to be led by a groom either,’ he said decidedly. ‘Or to ride in a carriage. I want them to see you mastering your own horse. I don’t want anything taken away from you. Every procession should add to you, they should see you higher, stronger, grander even than life.’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘I have to be seen as strong, my sister was always saying she was a weak woman, and she was always ill, all the time.’

‘And he is your colour,’ he said impertinently. ‘You are a bright chestnut yourself.’

She was not offended, she threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, d’you think he is a Tudor?’ she asked.

‘For sure, he has the temper of one,’ Robert said. He and his brothers and sisters had been playmates in the royal nursery at Hatfield, and all the Dudley children had felt the ringing slap of the Tudor temper. ‘Doesn’t like the bridle, doesn’t like to be commanded, but can be gentled into almost anything.’

She gleamed at him. ‘If you are so wise with a dumb beast, let’s hope you don’t try to train me,’ she said provocatively.

‘Who could train a queen?’ he replied. ‘All I could do would be to implore you to be kind to me.’

‘Have I not been very kind already?’ she said, thinking of the best post which she had given him, Master of Horse, with a massive annual income and the right to set up his own table at court and to take the best rooms in whichever palace the court might visit.

He shrugged as if it were next to nothing. ‘Ah, Elizabeth,’ he said intimately. ‘That is not what I mean when I desire you to be kind to me.’

‘You may not call me Elizabeth any more,’ she reminded him quietly, but he thought she was not displeased.

‘I forgot,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘I take such pleasure in your company that sometimes I think we are still just friends as we used to be. I forgot for a moment that you have risen to such greatness.’

‘I was always a princess,’ she said defensively. ‘I have risen to nothing but my birthright.’

‘And I always loved you for nothing but yourself,’ he replied cleverly.

He could see her hands loosen slightly on the reins and knew that he had struck the right note with her. He played her as every favourite plays every ruler; he had to know what charmed and what cooled her.

‘Edward was always very fond of you,’ she said softly, remembering her brother.

He nodded, looking grave. ‘God bless him. I miss him every day, as much as my own brothers.’

‘But he was not so warm to your father,’ she said rather pointedly.

Robert smiled down at Elizabeth as if nothing of their past lives could be counted against them: his family’s terrible treason against her family, her own betrayal of her half-sister. ‘Bad times,’ he said generally. ‘And long ago. You and I have both been misjudged, and God knows, we have been punished enough. We have both served our time in the Tower, accused of treason. I used to think of you then; when I was allowed out to walk on the leads, I used to go to the very threshold of the gated door of your tower, and know that you were just on the other side. I’d have given much to be able to see you. I used to have news of you from Hannah the Fool. I can’t tell you what a comfort it was to know you were there. They were dark days for us both; but I am glad now that we shared them together. You on one side of that gate and me the other.’

‘Nobody else can ever understand,’ she said with suppressed energy. ‘Nobody can ever know unless you have been there: what it’s like to be in there! To know that below you, out of sight, is the green where the scaffold will be built, and not to know whether they are building it, sending to ask, and not trusting the answer, wondering if it will be today or tomorrow.’

‘D’you dream of it?’ he asked, his voice low. ‘Some nights I still wake up in terror.’

A glance from her dark eyes told him that she too was haunted. ‘I have a dream that I hear hammering,’ she said quietly. ‘It was the sound I dreaded most in the world. To hear hammering and sawing and to know that they are building my own scaffold right underneath my window.’

‘Thank God those days are done and we can bring justice to England, Elizabeth,’ he said warmly.

This time she did not correct him for using her name.

‘We should turn for home, sir,’ one of the grooms rode up to remind him.

‘It is your wish?’ he asked the queen.

She gave him a little inviting sideways smile. ‘D’you know, I should like to ride out all day. I am sick of Whitehall and the people who come, and every one of them wanting something. And Cecil with all the business that needs doing.’

‘Why don’t we ride early tomorrow?’ he suggested. ‘Ride out by the river, we can cross over to the south bank and gallop out through Lambeth marshes and not come home till dinner time?’

‘Why, what ever will they say?’ she asked, instantly attracted.

‘They will say that the queen is doing as she wishes, as she should do,’ he said. ‘And I shall say that I am hers to command. And tomorrow evening I shall plan a great feast for you with dancing and players and a special masque.’

Her face lit up. ‘For what reason?’

‘Because you are young, and beautiful, and you should not go from schoolroom to lawmaking without taking some pleasure. You are queen now, Elizabeth, you can do as you wish. And no-one can refuse you.’

She laughed at the thought of it. ‘Shall I be a tyrant?’

‘If you wish,’ he said, denying the many forces of the kingdom, which inevitably would dominate her: a young woman alone amid the most unscrupulous families in Christendom. ‘Why not? Who should say “no” to you? The French princess, your cousin Mary, takes her pleasures, why should you not take yours?’

‘Oh, her,’ Elizabeth said irritably, a scowl crossing her face at the mention of Mary, Queen of Scots, the sixteen-year-old princess of the French court. ‘She lives a life of nothing but pleasure.’

Robert hid a smile at the predictable jealousy of Elizabeth for a prettier, luckier princess. ‘You will have a court that will make her sick with envy,’ he assured her. ‘A young, unmarried, beautiful queen, in a handsome, merry court? There’s no comparison with Queen Mary, who is burdened with a husband, the Dauphin, and ruled by the Guise family, and spends all her life doing as they wish.’

They turned their horses for home.

‘I shall devote myself to bringing you amusements. This is your time, Elizabeth, this is your golden season.’

‘I did not have a very merry girlhood,’ she conceded.

‘We must make up for that now,’ he said. ‘You shall be the pearl at the centre of a golden court. The French princess will hear every day of your happiness. The court will dance to your bidding, this summer will be filled with pleasure. They will call you the golden princess of all of Christendom! The most fortunate, the most beautiful, and the most loved.’

He saw the colour rise in her cheeks. ‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed.

‘But how you will miss me when I am at Brussels!’ he slyly predicted. ‘All these plans will have to wait.’

He saw her consider it. ‘You must come home quickly.’

‘Why not send someone else? Anyone can tell Philip you are crowned; it does not need to be me. And if I am not here, who will organise your banquets and parties?’

‘Cecil thought you should go,’ she said. ‘He thought it a pleasant compliment to Philip, to send him a man who had served in his armies.’

Robert shrugged. ‘Who cares what the King of Spain thinks now? Who cares what Cecil thinks? What d’you think, Elizabeth? Shall I go away for a month to another court at Brussels, or shall you keep me here to ride and dance with you, and keep you merry?’

He saw her little white teeth nip her lips to hide her pleased smile. ‘You can stay,’ she said carelessly. ‘I’ll tell Cecil he has to send someone else.’

It was the dreariest month of the year in the English countryside, and Norfolk one of the dreariest counties of England. The brief flurry of snow in January had melted, leaving the lane to Norwich impassable by cart and disagreeable on horseback, and besides, there was nothing at Norwich to be seen except the cathedral; and now that was a place of anxious silences, not peace. The candles had been extinguished under the statue of the Madonna, the crucifix was on the altar still but the tapestries and the paintings had been taken down. The little messages and prayers which had been pinned to the Virgin’s gown had disappeared. No-one knew if they were allowed to pray to Her any more.

Amy did not want to see the church she had loved stripped bare of everything she knew was holy. Other churches in the city had been de-sanctified and were being used as stables, or converted into handsome town houses. Amy could not imagine how anyone could dare to put his bed where the altar had once stood; but the new men of this reign were bold in their own interests. The shrine at Walsingham had not yet been destroyed, but Amy knew that the iconoclasts would come against it some day soon, and then where would a woman pray who wanted to conceive a child? Who wanted to win back her husband from the sin of ambition? Who wanted to win him home once more?

Amy Dudley practised her writing, but there seemed little point. Even if she could have managed a letter to her husband there was no news to give him, except what he would know already: that she missed him, that the weather was bad and the company dull, the evenings dark and the mornings cold.

On days such as this, and Amy had many days such as this, she wondered if she would have been better never to have married him. Her father, who adored her, had been against it from the start. The very week before her wedding he had gone down on his knee before her in the hall of Syderstone farmhouse, his big, round face flushed scarlet with emotion, and begged her with a quaver in his voice to think again. ‘I know he’s handsome, my bird,’ he had said tenderly. ‘And I know he’ll be a great man, and his father is a great man, and the royal court itself is coming to see you wed at Sheen next week, an honour I never dreamed of, not even for my girl. But are you certain sure you want a great man when you could marry a nice lad from Norfolk and live near me, in a pretty little house I would build for you, and have my grandsons brought up as my own, and stay as my girl?’

Amy had put her little hands on his shoulders and raised him up, she had cried with her face tucked against his warm homespun jacket, and then she had looked up, all smiles, and said: ‘But I love him, Father, and you said that I should marry him if I was sure; and before God, I am sure.’

He had not pressed her – she was his only child from his first marriage, his beloved daughter, and he could never gainsay her. And she had been used to getting her own way. She had never thought that her judgement could be wrong.

She had been sure then that she loved Robert Dudley; indeed, she was sure now. It was not lack of love that made her cry at night as if she would never stop. It was excess of it. She loved him, and every day without him was a long, empty day. She had endured many days without him when he had been a prisoner and could not come to her. Now, bitterly, at the very moment of his freedom and his rise to power, it was a thousand times worse, because now he could come to her; but he chose not to.

Her stepmother asked her, would she join him at court when the roads were fit for travel? Amy stammered in her reply, and felt like a fool, not knowing what was to happen next, nor where she was supposed to go.

‘You must write to him for me,’ she said to Lady Robsart. ‘He will tell me what I am to do.’

‘Do you not want to write yourself?’ her stepmother prompted. ‘I could write it out for you and you could copy it.’

Amy turned her head away. ‘What’s the use?’ she asked. ‘He has a clerk read it to him anyway.’

Lady Robsart, seeing that Amy was not to be tempted out of bad temper, took a pen and a piece of paper, and waited.

‘My lord,’ Amy started, the smallest quaver in her voice.

‘We can’t write “my lord”,’ her stepmother expostulated. ‘Not when he lost the title for treason, and it has not been restored him.’

‘I call him my lord!’ Amy flared up. ‘He was Lord Robert when he came to me, and he has always been Lord Robert to me, whatever anyone else calls him.’

Lady Robsart raised her eyebrows as if to say that he was a poor job when he came to her, and was a poor job still, but she wrote the words, and then paused, while the ink dried on the sharpened quill.

‘I do not know where you would wish me to stay. Shall I come to London?’ Amy said in a voice as small as a child’s. ‘Shall I join you in London, my lord?’

All day Elizabeth had been on tenterhooks, sending her ladies to see if her cousin had entered the great hall, sending pageboys to freeze in the stable yard so that her cousin could be greeted and brought to her presence chamber at once. Catherine Knollys was the daughter of Elizabeth’s aunt, Mary Boleyn, and had spent much time with her young cousin Elizabeth. The girls had formed a faithful bond through the uncertain years of Elizabeth’s childhood. Catherine, nine years Elizabeth’s senior, an occasional member of the informal court of children and young people who had gathered around the nursery of the young royals at Hatfield, had been a kindly and generous playmate when the lonely little girl had sought her out, and as Elizabeth became older, they found they had much in common. Catherine was a highly educated girl, a Protestant by utter conviction. Elizabeth, less convinced and with much more to lose, had always had a sneaking admiration for her cousin’s uncompromising clarity.

Catherine had been with Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, in the last dreadful days in the Tower. She held, from that day on, an utter conviction of her aunt’s innocence. Her quiet assertion that Elizabeth’s mother was neither whore, nor witch, but the victim of a court plot, was a secret comfort to the little girl whose childhood had been haunted by slanders against her mother. The day that Catherine and her family had left England, driven out by Queen Mary’s anti-heresy laws, Elizabeth had declared that her heart was broken.

‘Peace. She will be here soon,’ Dudley assured her, finding Elizabeth pacing from one window in Whitehall Palace to another.

‘I know. But I thought she would be here yesterday, and now I am worrying that it will not be till tomorrow.’

‘The roads are bad; but she will surely come today.’

Elizabeth twisted the fringe of the curtain in her fingers and did not notice that she was shredding the hem of the old fabric. Dudley went beside her and gently took her hand. There was a swiftly silenced intake of breath from the watching court at his temerity. To take the queen’s hand without invitation, to disentangle her fingers, to take both her hands firmly in his own, and give her a little shake!

‘Now, calm down,’ Dudley said. ‘Either today or tomorrow, she will be here. D’you want to ride out on the chance of meeting her?’

Elizabeth looked at the iron-grey sky that was darkening with the early twilight of winter. ‘Not really,’ she admitted unwillingly. ‘If I miss her on the way then it will only make the wait longer. I want to be here to greet her.’

‘Then sit down,’ he commanded. ‘And call for some cards and we can play until she gets here. And if she does not get here today we can play until you have won fifty pounds off me.’

‘Fifty!’ she exclaimed, instantly diverted.

‘And you need stake nothing more than a dance after dinner,’ he said agreeably.

‘I remember men saying that they lost fortunes to entertain your father,’ William Cecil remarked, coming up to the table as the cards were brought.

‘Now he was a gambler indeed,’ Dudley concurred amiably. ‘Who shall we have for a fourth?’

‘Sir Nicholas.’ The queen looked around and smiled at her councillor. ‘Will you join us for a game of cards?’

Sir Nicholas Bacon, Cecil’s corpulent brother-in-law, swelled like a mainsail at the compliment from the queen, and he stepped up to the table. The pageboy brought a fresh pack, Elizabeth dealt the stiff cards with their threatening faces, cut the deal to Robert Dudley, and they started to play.

There was a flurry in the hall outside the presence chamber, and then Catherine and Francis Knollys were in the doorway, a handsome couple: Catherine a woman in her mid-thirties, plainly dressed and smiling in anticipation, her husband an elegant man in his mid-forties. Elizabeth sprang to her feet, scattering her cards, and ran across the presence chamber to her cousin.

Catherine dropped into a curtsey but Elizabeth plunged into her arms and the two women hugged each other, both of them in tears. Sir Francis, standing back, smiled benignly at the welcome given to his wife.

— Aye, well might you smile — Robert Dudley remarked to himself, remembering that he had always disliked the smug radiance of the man. — You think you will have the high road to power and influence with this friendship; but you will find you are wrong. This young queen is no fool, she won’t put her purse where her heart is, unless it serves her interest. She will love you but not advance you unless it is for her own good. —

As if he sensed Robert’s eyes on him, Sir Francis looked up, and swept him a bow.

‘You are heartily welcome back to England,’ Dudley said pleasantly.

Sir Francis glanced around, took in the court of old allies, conspirators, reformed enemies and a very few new faces, and came back to Robert Dudley.

‘Well, here we are at last,’ he said. ‘A Protestant queen on the throne, me back from Germany and you out of the Tower. Who’d ever have thought it?’

‘A long and dangerous journey for all us pilgrims,’ Robert said, keeping his smile.

‘Some danger still in the air for some of us, I think,’ Sir Francis said cheerfully. ‘I’d not been in England five minutes before someone asked me if I thought you had too much influence and should be curbed.’

‘Indeed,’ Robert said. ‘And you replied?’

‘That I had not been in England five minutes and I had yet to form an opinion. But you should be warned, Sir Robert. You have enemies.’

Robert Dudley smiled. ‘They come with success,’ he said easily. ‘And so I am glad of them.’

Elizabeth reached out her hand to Sir Francis, still holding Catherine tight by the waist.

Sir Francis stepped forward and dropped to his knee and kissed her hand. ‘Your Grace,’ he said.

Robert, a connoisseur in these matters, admired the sweep down to his knee and then the style with which he rose. — Aye, but it will do you little good — he said to himself. — This is a court full of dancing-master-tutored puppies. A graceful bow will get you nothing. —

‘Sir Francis, I have been waiting and waiting for your arrival,’ Elizabeth said, glowing with happiness. ‘Will you accept a post on my Privy Council? I am in great need of your sound advice.’

— Privy Council! Good God! — Robert exclaimed to himself, shaken with envy.

‘I shall be honoured,’ Sir Francis said, with a bow.

‘And I should like you to serve as Vice Chamberlain of my household, and Captain of the Guard,’ Elizabeth continued, naming two plum jobs that would bring with them a small fortune in bribes from people wanting access to the queen.

Robert Dudley’s smile never wavered; he seemed delighted at the shower of good fortune on the new arrival. Sir Francis bowed his obedience and Dudley and Cecil made their way over to him.

‘Welcome home!’ Cecil said warmly. ‘And welcome to the queen’s service.’

‘Indeed!’ Robert Dudley agreed. ‘A warm welcome for you indeed! You too will be making your own enemies, I see.’

Catherine, who had been in rapid conversation with her cousin, wanted to introduce her daughter who was to be Elizabeth’s maid of honour. ‘And may I present my daughter Laetitia?’ she asked. She beckoned towards the doorway and the girl, who had been standing back, half-hidden by the arras, came forward.

William Cecil, not a man to be overwhelmed by female charms, took a sharp breath at the beauty of the seventeen-year-old girl and shot an astounded look at Sir Francis. The older man was smiling, a quirky corner upturned at his mouth as if he knew exactly what Cecil was thinking.

‘By God, this is a girl in the very image of the queen,’ Cecil whispered to him. ‘Except …’ He broke off before he made the mistake of saying ‘finer’, or ‘prettier’. ‘You might as well declare your wife to be Henry VIII’s bastard, and have done with it.’

‘She has never claimed it, I have never claimed it, and we don’t do so now,’ Sir Francis said limpidly, as if the whole court were not nudging each other and whispering, as the young girl’s colour steadily rose but the dark eyes fixed on the queen never wavered. ‘Indeed, I find her very like my side of the family.’

‘Your side!’ Cecil choked on a laugh. ‘She is a Tudor through and through, except she has all the allure of the Howard women.’

‘I do not claim it,’ Sir Francis repeated. ‘And I imagine, in this court and at these times, it would be better for her if no-one remarked on it.’

Dudley, who had seen the likeness at once, was watching Elizabeth intently. Firstly she held out her hand for the girl to kiss, with her usual pleasant manners, hardly seeing her as the girl’s head was bent in her curtsey, her bright copper hair hidden by her hood. But then, as the girl rose up and Elizabeth took her in, Robert saw the queen’s smile slowly die away. Laetitia was like a younger, more delicate copy of the queen, as if a piece of Chinese porcelain had been refined from an earthenware mould. Beside her, Elizabeth’s face was too broad, her nose, the horsy Boleyn nose, too long, her eyes too protruding, her mouth narrow. Laetitia, seven years her junior, was rounded like a child, her nose a perfect tilt, her hair a darker copper to the queen’s bronze.

Robert Dudley, looking at the girl, thought that a younger man, a more foolish man than himself, might have thought that the odd sensation he was feeling in his chest was his heart turning over.

‘You are welcome to my court, Cousin Laetitia,’ the queen said coolly. She threw a quick, irritated glance at Catherine as if she should somehow be blamed for raising such a piece of perfection.

‘She is very glad to be in your service,’ Catherine interposed smoothly. ‘And you will find she is a good girl. A little rough and ready as yet, Your Grace, but she will learn your elegance very quickly. She reminds me very much of the portraits of my father, William Carey. There is a striking similarity.’

William Cecil, who knew that William Carey was as dark as Henry VIII and this girl were matching copper, concealed another indrawn breath by clearing his throat.

‘And now you shall sit, and you can take a glass of wine and tell me all about your travels.’ Elizabeth turned from the young beauty before her. Catherine took a stool beside her cousin’s throne, and gestured that her daughter should retire. The first difficult step had been achieved; Elizabeth had faced a younger, far prettier version of her own striking looks, and managed to smile pleasantly enough. Catherine set about telling her traveller’s tales and thought that her family had managed their return to England rather well, considering all the circumstances.

Amy was waiting for a reply from Robert, telling her what she should do. Every midday she walked from the house half a mile down the drive to the road to Norwich, where a messenger would ride, if he was coming at all that day. She waited for a few minutes, looking over the cold landscape, her cloak gathered around her against the achingly cold February wind.

‘It is too bad of him,’ Lady Robsart complained at dinner. ‘He sent me some money for your keep with a note from his clerk, not even a word from himself. A fine way to treat your stepmother.’

‘He knows you don’t like him,’ Amy returned spiritedly. ‘Since you never wanted a word from him when he was out of favour, why should he honour you with his attention now that half the world wants to be his friend?’

‘Well enough,’ the older woman said, ‘if you are contented to be neglected too?’

‘I am not neglected,’ Amy maintained staunchly. ‘Because it is for me and for us that he is working all this time.’

‘Dancing attendance on the queen is work, is it? And her a young woman as lustful as her mother? With a Boleyn conscience to match? Well, you surprise me, Amy. There are not many women who would be happy being left at home while their husbands wait on the word of such a woman.’

‘Every wife in England would be delighted,’ Amy said bluntly. ‘Because every woman in England knows that it is only at court that there is money to be made, offices to be won and positions to be granted. As soon as Robert has his fortune he will come home and we will buy our house.’

‘Syderstone will not be good enough for you then,’ her stepmother taunted her.

‘I will always love it as my home, and admire my father for the work he did there, and I will always be grateful to him for leaving it to me in his will,’ Amy said with restraint. ‘But no, Syderstone will not be good enough for Robert now he is high at court, and it will not be good enough for me.’

‘And don’t you mind?’ her stepmother suggested slyly. ‘Don’t you mind that he dashed off to Elizabeth at her accession and you have not seen him since? And everyone says that she favours him above all other men, and that he is never out of her company?’

‘He is a courtier,’ Amy replied stoutly. ‘He was always at King Edward’s side, his father was always beside King Henry. He is supposed to be at her side. That is what a courtier does.’

‘You are not afraid that he will fall in love with her?’ the older woman tormented her, knowing that she was pressing Amy at the very sorest point.

‘He is my husband,’ Amy said steadily. ‘And she is the Queen of England. She knows that as well as he does. She was a guest at my wedding. We all know what can be and what cannot be. I will be happy to see him when he comes, but until that day I shall wait for him patiently.’

‘Then you are a saint!’ her stepmother declared light-heartedly. ‘For I would be so jealous that I would go to London and demand that he take a house for me there and then.’

Amy raised her eyebrows, the very picture of scorn. ‘Then you would be much mistaken in how a courtier’s wife behaves,’ she said coldly. ‘Dozens of women are in just such a situation as mine and they know how they must behave if they want their husband to further his fortune at court.’

Lady Robsart left the argument there, but later that night, when Amy was in bed asleep, she took up her pen and wrote to her unsatisfactory stepson-in-law.

Sir Robert,

If you are now indeed as great a man as I hear, it is not suitable that your wife should be left at home without good horses or new clothes. Also, she needs diversion and company and a genteel lady to bear her company. If you will not bid her to court, please command your noble friends (I assume that you now have many once more) to have her to stay at their houses while you find a suitable house for her in London. She will need an escort to go to them and a lady companion as I cannot go with her, being much concerned with the business of the farm, which is still doing badly. Mrs Oddingsell would be glad to be asked, I daresay. I should be glad of your immediate reply (since I lack the sweetness and patience of your wife), and also of a full settlement of your debt to me, which is £22.

Sarah Robsart.

Cecil was at his heavy desk with the many locked drawers in his rooms at Whitehall Palace, in the first week of February, reading a letter in code from his agent in Rome. His first act on Elizabeth’s accession to the throne was to put as many trusted friends, kin and servants in as many key courts in Europe as he could afford, and instruct them to keep him informed of any word, of any rumour, of any ghost of a rumour, which mentioned England and her new, fragile monarch.

He was glad he had got Master Thomas Dempsey into the Papal court at Rome. Master Thomas was better known to his colleagues in Rome as Brother Thomas, a priest of the Catholic church. Cecil’s network had captured him coming to England in the first weeks of the new queen’s reign, with a knife hidden in his bags and a plan to assassinate her. Cecil’s man in the Tower had first tortured Brother Thomas, and then turned him. Now he was a spy against his former masters, serving the Protestants, against the faith of his fathers. Cecil knew that it had been a change of heart forced by the man’s desire to survive, and that very shortly the priest would turn again. But in the meantime, his material was invaluable, and he was scholar enough to write his reports and then translate them into Latin and then translate the Latin into code.

Master Secretary, His Holiness is considering a ruling that will say that heretical monarchs can be justly defied by their subjects, and that such a defiance, even to armed rebellion, is no sin.

Cecil leaned back in his padded chair and re-read the letter, making sure that he had made no error in the double translation, out of code and then out of Latin. It was a message of such enormity that he could not believe it, even when it was in plain English before him.

It was a death sentence for the queen. It assured any disgruntled Catholic that they could plot against her with impunity, actually with the blessing of the Holy Father. It was a veritable crusade against the young queen, as potent and unpredictable as a Knights Templar attack on the Moors. It licensed the deranged assassin, the man with a grudge, indeed, it put the dagger into his hands. It broke the eternal promise that an anointed monarch commanded the obedience of all his subjects, even those who disagreed with him. It broke the harmony of the universe that placed God above the angels, angels above kings, kings above mortal men. A man could no more attack a king than a king could attack an angel, than an angel could attack God. This madness of the Pope broke the unwritten agreement that one earthly monarch would never encourage the subjects of another earthly monarch to rise up against him.

The assumption had always been that kings should stick together, that nothing was more dangerous than the people with a licence. Now the Pope was to give the people a licence to rise up against Elizabeth and who knew how many might avail themselves of this permission?

Cecil tried to draw a sheet of paper towards him and found that his hands were shaking. For the first time in these anxious months, he truly thought that they would be defeated. He thought that he had aligned himself to a doomed cause. He did not think that Elizabeth could survive this. There were too many who had opposed her from the start; once they knew that their treasonous plotting was no longer a sin, they would multiply like headlice. It was enough that she had to struggle with the church, with her council, with her parliament; none of which were in full support, some of which were in open opposition. If the people themselves were turned against her she could not last long.

He thought for a moment, for only a moment, that he might have done better to have supported Henry Hastings as the best Protestant claimant for the throne, since the Pope would surely not have dared to summon a rebellion against a king. He thought for another moment that perhaps he should have urged Elizabeth to accept the raising of the Host, to have kept the church in England as Papist for a year or so, to ease the transition of Reform.

He gritted his teeth. What was done had been done, and they would all have to live with their mistakes, and some would die for them. He was fairly certain that Elizabeth would die, to name only one. He clasped his hands together until they were steady again, and then started to plan ways to try to ensure that an assassin did not reach Elizabeth at court, when she was out hunting, when she was on the river, when she was visiting.

It was a nightmare task. Cecil stayed up all night writing lists of men he could trust, preparing plans to see her guarded, and knew at the end that if the Catholics of England obeyed the Pope, as they must do, then Elizabeth was a dead woman, and all that Cecil could do for her was to delay her funeral.

Amy Dudley had no letter from her husband to invite her to court, not even one to tell her where she should go. Instead she received a very pleasant invitation from his cousins at Bury St Edmunds.

‘See? He has sent for me!’ she said delightedly to her stepmother. ‘I told you that he would send for me, as soon as he was able to do so. I must leave as soon as his men arrive to escort me.’

‘I am so happy for you,’ Lady Robsart said. ‘Did he send any money?’

Robert’s work, as Master of the Queen’s Horse, was to order her horses, to run the royal stables, to care for the health and welfare of every animal from the great hunters to the lowliest pack animals of the baggage train. Visiting noblemen, with their hundreds of men in livery, had to have their horses accommodated in the stables, guests of the queen had to be supplied with horses so that they could ride out with her. Ladies of her court had to have sweet-tempered palfreys. The queen’s champions had to stable their warhorses for jousting tournaments. The hounds for the hunt came under his jurisdiction, the falcons for falconry, the hawks for hawking, the leather and harness, the wagons and carts for the enormous royal progresses from one castle to another, the orders and delivery of hay and feed, all were the responsibility of Sir Robert.

— So why then — Cecil asked himself — did the man have so much time on his hands? Why was he forever at the queen’s side? Since when was Robert Dudley interested in the coin of the realm and the deteriorating value? —

‘We have to mint new coins,’ Sir Robert announced. He had inserted himself into the queen’s morning conference with her advisor by the simple technique of bringing a sprig of greening leaves and laying them on her state papers. — As if he had gone a-Maying — Cecil thought bitterly. Elizabeth had smiled and made a gesture that he might stay, and now he was joining the conference.

‘The smaller coins are shaved and spoiled till they are almost worthless.’

Cecil did not reply. This much was self-evident. Sir Thomas Gresham in his huge mercantile house at Antwerp had been studying the problem for years as his own business fluctuated catastrophically with the unreliable value of English coin, and as his loan business to the monarchs of England became more and more precarious. — But now apparently, far superior to Gresham’s opinions, we are to be blessed with the insights of Sir Robert Dudley. —

‘We have to call in the old coins and replace them with full-weight good coins.’

The queen looked worried. ‘But the old coins have been so clipped and shaved that we will not get half our gold back.’

‘It has to be done,’ Dudley declared. ‘No-one knows the value of a penny, no-one trusts the value of a groat. If you try to collect an old debt, as I have done, you find that you are repaid in coins that are half the value of your original loan. When our merchants go abroad to pay for their purchases, they have to stand by while the foreign traders bring out scales to weigh the coins and laugh at them. They don’t even bother to look at the value stamped on the face; they only buy by weight. No-one trusts English coin any more. And the greatest danger is that if we issue new coins, of full value gold, then they are just treated as bad, we gain nothing unless we call all the old ones in first. Otherwise we throw our wealth away.’

Elizabeth turned to Cecil.

‘He is right,’ he conceded unwillingly. ‘This is just as Sir Thomas Gresham believes.’

‘Bad coin drives out good,’ Sir Robert ruled.

There was something about the ring of his tone that attracted Cecil’s attention. ‘I did not know you had studied mercantile matters,’ he remarked gently.

Only Cecil could have seen the swiftly hidden amusement on the younger man’s face.

But only Cecil was waiting for it.

‘A good servant of the queen must consider all her needs,’ Sir Robert said calmly.

— Good God, he has intercepted Gresham’s letters to me — Cecil observed. For a moment he was so stunned by the younger man’s impertinence, to spy on the queen’s spymaster, that he could hardly speak. — He must have got hold of the messenger, copied the letter and re-sealed it. But how? And at what point on its journey from Antwerp? And if he can get hold of my letters from Gresham, what other information does he have of mine? —

‘The base drives out the good?’ the queen repeated.

Robert Dudley turned to her. ‘In coinage as in life,’ he said intimately, as if for her ears alone. ‘The lesser joys, the more ignoble pleasures, are those that take a man or a woman’s time, make demands. The finer things, true love or a spiritual life between a man and his God, these are the things that are driven out by the day to day. Don’t you think that is true?’

For a moment she looked quite entranced. ‘It is so,’ she said. ‘It is always harder to make time for the truly precious experiences, there is always the ordinary to do.’

‘To be an extraordinary queen, you have to choose,’ he said quietly. ‘You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise, without listening to your advisors, guided by your own true heart and highest ambition.’

She took a little breath and looked at him as if he could unfold the secrets of the universe, as if he were his tutor, John Dee, and could speak with angels and foretell the future.

‘I want to choose the best,’ she said.

Robert smiled. ‘I know you do. It is one of the many things that we share. We both want nothing but the best. And now we have a chance to achieve it.’

‘Good coin?’ she whispered.

‘Good coin and true love.’

With an effort she took her eyes from him. ‘What d’you think, Spirit?’

‘The troubles with the coinage are well known,’ Cecil said dampeningly. ‘Every merchant in London would tell you the same. But the remedy is not so generally certain. I think we all agree that a pound coin is no longer worth a pound of gold, but how we restore it is going to be difficult. It’s not as if we have the gold to spare to mint new coins.’

‘Have you prepared a plan of how to revalue the coin?’ Dudley demanded briskly of the Secretary of State.

‘I have been considering it with the queen’s advisors,’ Cecil said stiffly. ‘Men who have been thinking on this problem for many years.’

Dudley gave his irrepressible grin. ‘Better tell them to hurry up then,’ he recommended cheerfully.

‘I am drawing up a plan.’

‘Well, while you are doing that we will walk in the garden,’ Dudley offered, deliberately misunderstanding.

‘I can’t draw it up now!’ Cecil exclaimed. ‘It will take weeks to plan properly.’

But already the queen was on her feet; Dudley had offered his arm, the two of them fled from the presence chamber with the speed of scholars escaping a class. Cecil turned to her ladies in waiting who were scrambling to curtsey.

‘Go with the queen,’ he said.

‘Did she ask for us?’ one of the ladies queried.

Cecil nodded. ‘Walk with them, and take her shawl, it is cold out today.’

In the garden Dudley retained the queen’s hand, and tucked it under his elbow.

‘I can walk on my own, you know,’ she said pertly.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I like to hold your hand, I like to walk at your side. May I?’

She said neither yes nor no, but she left her hand on his arm. As always with Elizabeth, it was one step forward and then one step back. As soon as she allowed him to keep her little hand warm on his arm she chose to raise the question of his wife.

‘You do not ask me if you may bring Lady Dudley to court,’ she began provocatively. ‘Do you not wish her to attend? Do you not ask for her to have a place in my service? I am surprised that you have not mentioned her to me for one of my ladies in waiting. You were quick enough to recommend your sister.’

‘She prefers to live in the country,’ Robert said smoothly.

‘You have a country house now?’

He shook his head. ‘She has a house that she inherited from her father in Norfolk but it is too small and too inconvenient. She lives with her stepmother at Stanfield Hall, nearby; but she is going to stay with my cousins at Bury St Edmunds this week.’

‘Shall you buy a house now? Or build a new one?’

He shrugged. ‘I shall find some good land and build a good house, but I am going to spend most of my time at court.’

‘Oh, are you, indeed?’ she asked flirtatiously.

‘Does a man walk away from sunlight to shadow? Does he leave gold for gilt? Does he taste good wine and then want bad?’ His voice was deliberately seductive. ‘I shall stay at court for ever, if I am allowed, basking in the sunshine, enriched by the gold, drunk on the perfume of the headiest wine I could imagine. What were we saying: that we would not let the base drive out the best? That we should have, both of us, the very best?’

She absorbed the compliment for a long, delicious moment. ‘And your wife must surely be very old now?’

Dudley smiled down at her, knowing that she was teasing him. ‘She is thirty, just five years older than me,’ he said. ‘As I think you know. You were at my wedding.’

Elizabeth made a little face. ‘It was years and years ago, I had quite forgotten it.’

‘Nearly ten years,’ he said quietly.

‘And I thought even then that she was a very great age.’

‘She was only twenty-one.’

‘Well, a great age to me, I was only sixteen.’ She gave an affected little start of surprise. ‘Oh! As were you. Were you not surprised to be marrying a woman so much older than you?’

‘I was not surprised,’ he said levelly. ‘I knew her age and her position.’

‘And still no children?’

‘God has not blessed us as yet.’

‘I think that I heard a little whisper that you had married her for love, for a passionate love, and against the wishes of your father,’ she prompted him.

He shook his head. ‘He was opposed only because I was so young, I was not yet seventeen and she just twenty-one. And I imagine he would have picked a better match for me if I had given him the chance. But he did not refuse his permission once I asked, and Amy brought a good dowry. They had good lands in Norfolk laid down to sheep, and in those days, my father needed to increase our friends and influence in the east of the country. She was her father’s only heir, and he was happy enough with the match.’

‘I should think he was!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Duke of Northumberland’s son for a girl who had never been to court, who could barely write her own name and who did nothing but stay home and weep the moment that her husband encountered trouble?’

‘It must have been a fairly detailed little whisper that came to your ears,’ Robert remarked. ‘You seem to know my entire marital history.’

Elizabeth’s gurgle of guilty laughter was checked when the lady in waiting appeared behind them. ‘Your Grace, I have brought your shawl.’

‘I didn’t ask for one,’ Elizabeth said, surprised. She turned back to Robert. ‘Yes, of course, I heard talk of your marriage. And what sort of woman your wife was. But I forgot it until now.’

He bowed, his smile lurking around his mouth. ‘Can I assist your memory any further?’

‘Well,’ she said engagingly. ‘What I still don’t know for sure is why you married her in the first place, and, if it was love, as I heard, whether you still love her.’

‘I married her because I was sixteen, a young man with hot blood and she had a pretty face and she was willing,’ he said, careful not to let it sound too romantic to this most critical audience, though he remembered well enough how it had been, and that he had been mad for Amy, defying his father and insisting on having her as his wife. ‘I was eager to be a married man and grown up, as I thought. We had a few years when we were contented together but she was her father’s favourite child and in the habit of being spoiled. In fairness, I suppose I was a favoured son and I had been richly blessed. A pair of spoilt brats together, in fact. We did not deal very well together after the newness had worn off. I was at court in my father’s train, as you know, and she stayed in the country. She had no desire for court life and – God bless her – she has no airs and graces. She has no courtly skills and no wish to learn them.

‘Then, if I must tell the truth, when I was in the Tower and in terror for my life, I fell out of the way of thinking of her at all. She visited me once or twice when my brothers’ wives visited them; but she brought no comfort to me. It was like hearing of another world: her telling me of the hay crop and the sheep, and arguments with the housemaids. I just felt, wrongly, I am sure, as if she was taunting me with the world going on without me. She sounded to me as if she was happier without me. She had returned to her father’s house, she was free of the stain of my family’s disgrace, she had taken up her childhood life again and I almost felt that she preferred me to be locked up, safely out of the way of trouble. She would rather I was a prisoner, than a great man at court and son of the greatest.’

He paused for a moment. ‘You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘When you are a prisoner, after a while your world shrinks to the stone walls of your chamber, your walk is to the window and back again. Your life is only memories. And then you start longing for your dinner. You know then that you are a prisoner indeed. You are thinking of nothing but what is inside. You have forgotten to desire the outside world.’

Instantly Elizabeth squeezed her hand on his arm. ‘Yes,’ she said, for once without coquetry. ‘God knows that I know what it is like. And it spoils your love for anything on the outside.’

He nodded. ‘Aye. We two know.

‘Then, when I was released I came out of the Tower a ruined man. All our family’s wealth and property had been forfeited. I was a pauper.’

‘A sturdy beggar?’ she suggested with a little smile.

‘Not even very sturdy,’ he said. ‘I was broken down low, Elizabeth; I was as low as a man could go. My mother had died begging for our freedom. My father had recanted before us all, had said that our faith had been a plague upon the realm. It bit into my soul; I was so ashamed. Then, even though he had knelt before them to make his peace, they still executed him for a traitor, and, God keep him, he made a bad death that shamed us all.

‘My dearest brother John took sick in the Tower with me and I could not save him, I could not even nurse him, I didn’t know what to do. They let him go to my sister Mary but he died of his sickness. He was only twenty-four, but I couldn’t save him. I had been a poor son and a poor brother and I followed a poor father. There was not much to be proud of, when I came out of the Tower.’

She waited.

‘There was nowhere for me to go but to her stepmother’s house at Stanfield Hall, Norfolk,’ he said, the bitterness in his voice still sharp. ‘Everything we owned: the London house, the great estates, the house at Syon, were all gone. Poor Amy had even lost her own inheritance, her father’s farm at Syderstone.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Queen Mary had put the nuns back into Syon. Imagine it! My home was a nunnery once more and they were singing the Te Deum in our great hall.’

‘Did her family treat you kindly?’ she asked, guessing the answer.

‘As anyone would treat a son-in-law who had presented himself as the greatest man in the kingdom, and then came home as a penniless prisoner with a touch of gaol fever,’ he said wryly. ‘Her stepmother never forgave me for the seduction of John Robsart’s daughter and the collapse of his hopes. She swore that he had died of heartbreak because of what I had done to his daughter, and she never forgave me for that either. She never gave me more than a few pence to have in my pocket. And when they learned I had been in London to a meeting, they threatened to throw me out of the house in my boots.’

‘What meeting?’ she asked, a conspirator from long habit.

He shrugged. ‘Oh, to put you on the throne,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘I never stopped plotting. My great terror was that your sister would have a son and we would be undone. But God was good to us.’

‘You risked your life in plotting for me?’ she asked, her dark eyes wide. ‘Even then? When you had just been released?’

He smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ he said easily. ‘Who else for me, but England’s Elizabeth?’

She took a little breath. ‘And after that you were forced to stay quiet at home?’

‘Not I. When the war came my brother Henry and I volunteered to serve under Philip against the French in the Low Countries.’ He smiled. ‘I saw you before I sailed. D’you remember?’

Her look was warm. ‘Of course. I was there to bid farewell to Philip and to taunt poor Mary, and there were you, as handsome an adventurer who ever went away to war, smiling down at me from the royal ship.’

‘I had to find a way to raise myself up again,’ he said. ‘I had to get away from Amy’s family.’ He paused. ‘And from Amy,’ he confessed.

‘You had fallen out of love with her?’ she asked, finally getting to the part of the story that she had wanted all along.

Robert smiled. ‘What pleases a young man who knows nothing at sixteen cannot hold a man who has been forced to look at his life, to study what he holds dear, and to start from the bottom once again. My marriage was over by the time I came out of the Tower. Her stepmother’s humiliation of me as she stood by and watched only completed the end. Lady Robsart brought me as low as I could go. I could not forgive Amy for witnessing it. I could not forgive her for not taking my side. I would have loved her better if we had walked out of that house together into disaster. But she sat by the fireside on her little stool and reminded me from time to time, when she looked up from hemming shirts, that God orders us to honour our father and our mother, and that we were utterly dependent on the Robsarts.’

He broke off, his face darkened with remembered anger. Elizabeth listened, hiding her relish.

‘So … I went to fight in the Low Countries, and thought I would make my name and my fortune in that war.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘That was my last moment of vanity,’ he said. ‘I lost my brother and I lost most of my troop and I lost Calais. I came home a very humbled man.’

‘And did she care for you?’

‘That was when she thought I should be a teamster,’ he said bitterly. ‘Lady Robsart ordered me to labour in the fields.’

‘She never did!’

‘She would have had me on my knees. I walked out of the house that night and stayed at court or with what friends would have me. My marriage was over. In my heart, I was a free man.’

‘A free man?’ she asked in a very quiet voice. ‘You would call yourself a free man?’

‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘I am free to love once more, and this time I will have nothing but the best. I will not allow base coin to drive out gold.’

‘Indeed,’ said Elizabeth, suddenly cool, withdrawing rapidly from dangerous intimacy. She turned and beckoned forward the lady in waiting. ‘I will have that shawl now,’ she said. ‘You may walk with us.’

They walked in silence, Elizabeth taking in what he had told her, sifting the evidenced truth from the gloss. She was not such a fool as to believe the word of a married man. At her side Dudley reviewed what he had said, determinedly ignoring an uncomfortable feeling of disloyalty to Amy whose love, he knew, had been more faithful, and continued more strongly than he chose to portray. Of course his remaining love for her he had completely denied.

Cecil, Sir Francis Knollys, and the queen’s young uncle, the twenty-three-year-old Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, were head to head in the private window bay of the presence chamber; behind them, the queen’s court stood around, chatting, plotting, flirting. The queen on her throne was talking with the Spanish ambassador in fluent Spanish. Cecil, one ear cocked for any danger from that quarter, was nonetheless very intent upon Sir Francis.

‘We have to find a means to search everyone before they come to the queen, even the gentlemen of the court.’

‘We would give much offence,’ the duke demurred. ‘And surely the threat comes from the common people?’

‘It comes from every convinced Papist,’ Cecil said bluntly. ‘The Pope’s declaration, when it is published, will make her a lamb for the slaughter as she has never been before.’

‘She cannot dine in public any more,’ Sir Francis said thoughtfully. ‘We will have to refuse permission for people to come in and see her at her dinner.’

Cecil hesitated. Access to the monarch, or even to the great lords in their halls, was part of the natural order, the way things had always been done. If that were to be changed, then the court would have signalled very clearly to the people that they trusted them no more, and that they were retreating behind locked doors.

‘It will look odd,’ he said begrudgingly.

‘And she can hardly make any more public processions,’ Sir Francis said. ‘How can it be done?’

Before Cecil could stop him, Sir Francis beckoned Robert Dudley, who excused himself from the group around him and started to come towards them.

‘If you add him to our councils I’m away,’ the duke said abruptly, and turned aside.

‘Why?’ Sir Francis asked. ‘He knows how this can be done better than any of us.’

‘He knows nothing but his own ambition, and you will rue the day you ever include him in anything,’ Thomas Howard said rudely and turned his back as Dudley joined the others.

‘Good day, Sir William, Sir Francis.’

‘What ails young Howard?’ Sir Francis asked as the duke pushed past another man and strode away.

‘I think he mourns the rising of my little star,’ Dudley said, amused.

‘Why?’

‘His father hated mine,’ Dudley said. ‘Actually, Thomas Howard arrested my father and my brothers and me and marched us into the Tower. I don’t think he expected me to come marching out again.’

Sir Francis nodded, taking it in. ‘You must be afraid that he will influence the queen against you?’

‘He’d better fear that I will influence her against him,’ Dudley replied. He smiled at Cecil. ‘She knows who her friends are. She knows who stood as her friends through the years of her troubles.’

‘And the troubles are not over now,’ Sir Francis said, turning to the matter in hand. ‘We are talking of the safety of the queen when she goes abroad. Sir William here has news that the pope has sanctioned the use of force against her by ordinary men and women.’

Dudley turned a stunned face to the older man. ‘It cannot be true? He would never do such a thing? It is ungodly!’

‘It is under consideration,’ Cecil said flatly. ‘And we shall hear the confirmation soon enough. And then the people will learn of it.’

‘I’ve heard nothing of this,’ Robert exclaimed.

— Oh, have you not? — Cecil hid his smile. ‘Nonetheless, I am sure of it.’

Dudley was silent for a moment, shocked by the news, but noting at the same time that Cecil had a spy in the very court of the Bishop of Rome. Cecil’s network of intelligencers and informers was growing to impressive proportions. ‘It is to overthrow the natural order,’ he said. ‘She was anointed by one of his own bishops. He cannot do it. He cannot set the dogs on a sacred person.’

‘He will do it,’ Cecil said, irritated by the young man’s slowness. ‘Indeed, by now, he probably has done it. What we are considering is how to prevent anyone obeying it.’

‘I was saying that she must be kept from the people,’ Sir Francis said.

A bright laugh from the throne made all three of them break off, turn and smile at where the queen was flirting with her fan and laughing at Ambassador Feria, who was coloured up – torn between frustration and laughter. They all three smiled at her, she was irresistible in her joy, in her playfulness, in the brightness of her energy.

‘The people are her greatest safety,’ Dudley said slowly.

Cecil shook his head, but Sir Francis checked him with a hand on his sleeve. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘The Pope makes this a matter of the common people, he invites them to attack her; but he does not know this queen. She should not hide from the few men or women who would do her harm, she should go out and draw the love of all the rest. Her greatest safety would be if every man, woman or child in this country would lay down their lives for her.’

‘And how would we achieve that?’

‘You know it already,’ Dudley said bluntly to Cecil. ‘You saw it. In the coronation procession she won every single heart in that crowd. We have to take the risk to take her out to the people and know that they will be the ones that protect her. Every Englishman should be one of the queen’s guard.’

Sir Francis slowly nodded. ‘And when it comes to an invasion they would fight for her.’

‘A single man with a single poignard is almost unstoppable,’ Cecil said bleakly. ‘She may win over a hundred, but if one is against her, and he is the one with the knife, then she is dead, and it is at our door.’ He paused. ‘And a Catholic queen inherits, and England is a cat’s-paw of France, and we are ruined.’

‘As you say, unstoppable,’ Robert rejoined, not at all overwhelmed by the gloom of this picture. ‘But your way, you give her twenty guards, perhaps thirty. My way: I give her the whole of England.’

Cecil grimaced at the younger man’s romantic language.

‘There will still be some places that we cannot admit the people,’ Sir Francis pursued. ‘When she is dining, when she goes through the halls to her chapel. There are too many and they press too close.’

‘That, we should restrict,’ Robert concurred. ‘And we can serve her dinner without her being there.’

Cecil drew breath. ‘Without her being there? What is the purpose of that?’

‘The people come to see the throne and the plate and the great ceremony,’ Robert said airily. ‘They will come anyway. Provided that there is a good show they don’t need to see her in person. High days and holidays she must be there to show that she is well and in good spirits. But most of the time she can eat in private with her friends, in safety. As long as it is grand enough and the trumpets play and it is served in state, then the people will go away feeling that they have seen a good show. They will go away knowing that the country is wealthy and secure. That is what we need to do. We need to give them the show of the throne. The queen need not always be there herself, as long as everyone can feel her presence.’

‘Serve her dinner to an empty throne?’ Cecil demanded quizzically.

‘Yes,’ Dudley replied. ‘And why not? It’s been done before. When the young King Edward was sick they served his dinner on gold plates every night to an empty throne and the people came to watch and went away satisfied. My father ruled it so. We gave them a great show of grandeur, of wealth. And when they do see her, she has to be beloved, reachable, touchable. She has to be a queen for the people.’

Cecil shook his head but Sir Francis was persuaded.

‘I shall speak with her about it,’ he said, glancing back at the throne. The Spanish ambassador was taking his leave, he was handing over a letter sealed ostentatiously with the royal coat of arms of the Spanish emperor. With the eyes of the court upon her, Elizabeth took it and – apparently unaware that everyone was watching her – held it against her heart.

‘I think you will find that Elizabeth understands how to put on a show,’ Robert said drily. ‘She has never disappointed an audience in her life.’

Robert Dudley’s own steward came himself from London to escort Amy for the short journey to Bury St Edmunds, and to bring her a purse of gold, a length of warm red velvet for a new dress, and her husband’s affectionate compliments.

He also brought a lady companion with him: Mrs Elizabeth Oddingsell, the widowed sister of one of Robert Dudley’s old and faithful friends, who had been with Amy at Gravesend and then went with her to Chichester. Amy was glad to see the little dark-haired, brisk woman again.

‘How your fortunes do rise,’ Mrs Oddingsell said cheerfully. ‘When I heard from my brother that Sir Robert had been appointed Master of Horse I thought I would write to you, but I did not want to seem to be pushing myself forward. I thought you must have many friends seeking your acquaintanceship now.’

‘I expect my lord has many new friends,’ Amy said. ‘But I am still very secluded in the country here.’

‘Of course, you must be.’ Mrs Oddingsell cast a quick glance around the small, chilly hall which formed the main body of the square stone-built house. ‘Well, I hear we are to make a round of visits. That will be pleasant. We shall be on progress like a queen.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said quietly.

‘Oh! And I was forgetting!’ Mrs Oddingsell unwound a warm scarf from her throat. ‘He has sent you a lovely little black mare. You are to name her as you please. That will make our journey merry, won’t it?’

Amy ran to the window and looked out into the yard. There was a small escort loading Amy’s few trunks into a cart, and at the back of the troop was a sweet-faced black mare, standing quite still.

‘Oh! She is so pretty!’ Amy exclaimed. For the first time since Elizabeth’s coming to the throne she felt her spirits lift.

‘And he sent a purse of gold for you to settle his debts here, and to buy yourself anything you might like,’ Mrs Oddingsell said, delving into the pocket of her cape and pulling out the money.

Amy took the heavy purse into her hand. ‘For me,’ she said. It was the most money she had held for years.

‘Your hard times are over,’ Mrs Oddingsell said gently. ‘Thank God. For all of us, the good times have come at last.’

Amy and Mrs Oddingsell started their journey a little after dawn on a cold winter morning. They broke their journey at New-borough, and rested two nights, then they went on. It was an uneventful journey marred only by the cold, the wintry darkness and the state of the roads. But Amy enjoyed her new horse, and Mrs Oddingsell kept her spirits up as they rode down the muddy lanes and splashed through icy puddles.

Mr and Mrs Woods at Bury St Edmunds greeted Amy kindly, and with every appearance of pleasure. They assured her that she was welcome to stay as long as she liked; Sir Robert had mentioned in his letter that she would be with them until April.

‘Did he send a letter for me?’ Amy demanded. The brightness drained from her face when they said ‘No’. It was just a brief note to tell them when to expect her and the duration of her stay.

‘Did he say that he was coming here?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Mrs Woods said again, feeling uncomfortable at the shadow that passed over Amy’s face. ‘I expect he’s very busy at court,’ she continued, trying to gloss over the awkward moment. ‘I doubt he’ll be able to get home for weeks.’

She could have bitten off her tongue in irritation at her own clumsiness as she realised that there was no home for this young woman and her husband. She fell back on the good manners of hospitality. Would Amy like to rest after her journey? Would she like to wash? Would she like to take her supper at once?

Amy said abruptly that she was sorry, that she was very tired, and she would rest in her room. She went quickly from the hall, leaving Mrs Woods and Mrs Oddingsell alone.

‘She is tired,’ Mrs Oddingsell said. ‘I am afraid she is not strong.’

‘Shall I send for our physician at Cambridge?’ Mr Woods suggested. ‘He’s very good, he would come at once. He’s very much in favour of cupping the patient to adjust the humours. She is very pale, is she of a watery humour, d’you think?’

Elizabeth Oddingsell shook her head. ‘She is in much discomfort,’ she said.

Mr Woods thought that she meant indigestion, and was about to offer arrowroot and milk, but Mrs Woods, remembering the glimpse she had seen of Robert Dudley, dark-eyed on a black horse at the coronation procession, riding behind the queen as if he were prince consort himself, suddenly understood.

It was Cecil, not Dudley, who was at the queen’s side after dinner. She had been served with all the grandeur of the Tudor tradition, great plates passed down the long dining hall of Whitehall Palace, checked by the taster for poison, and presented to her on bent knee. Three of the servers were new and clumsy. They were Cecil’s men, spies put in place to watch and guard her, learning how to serve on bended knee at the same time.

Elizabeth took a very little from each plate and then sent them to her favourites, seated in the body of the hall. Sharp eyes watched where the best dishes went, and when a dish of stewed venison was sent to Dudley there were a few muttered complaints. The loud, joyful rumble of the court at dinner filled the great hall, the servants cleared the tables and then Cecil was beckoned up to the dais and stood before the queen.

She gestured that the musicians should play; no-one could hear their quiet conversation. ‘Any news of any hired killers?’ she asked.

He saw the strain on her face. ‘You are safe,’ he said steadily, though he knew he could never truly say that to her again. ‘The ports are watched, your gates are guarded. A mouse cannot come in without us knowing.’

She found a weak smile. ‘Good. Tell them to stay alert.’

He nodded.

‘And as to Scotland: I read your note this afternoon. We cannot do what you propose,’ she said. ‘We cannot support rebels against a queen, that is to subvert the rule of law. We have to wait and see what happens.’

It was as Cecil had expected. She had a mortal terror of making a mistake. It was as if she had lived on the brink of disaster for so long that she could bear to step neither forward nor back. And she was right to be cautious. Every decision in England had a hundred opponents, every change had a thousand. Anything that threatened a man’s individual prosperity made an enemy of him, anything that was to his benefit made him a grasping, unreliable ally. She was a queen new-come to her throne and the crown was dangerously unsteady on her head. She did not dare consider anything that might undermine the power of queens.

Cecil made sure that no sign of these thoughts showed on his face. It was his deep-rooted belief that the intelligence of a woman, even one as formidably educated as this, could not carry the burden of too much information, and the temperament of a woman, especially this one, was not strong enough to take decisions.

‘I could never support a rebellion against a ruling queen,’ she specified.

Tactfully Cecil avoided mentioning the years when Elizabeth had been the focus and sometimes instigator of a dozen plots against her pure-blood, anointed half-sister.

‘It is all very well you wanting us to support the Scots Protestants against the regent, Queen Mary of Guise, but I cannot support any rebels against a ruling king or queen. I cannot meddle in another’s kingdom.’

‘Indeed, but the French princess will meddle in yours,’ he warned her. ‘Already she has the arms of England quartered on her shield, she considers herself the true heir to England, and half of England and most of Christendom would say she has the right. If her father-in-law, the French king, decides to support her claim to your throne, the French could invade England tomorrow, and what more useful stepping stone than Scotland and the north? Her mother, a Frenchwoman, holds Scotland for them as regent, already the French soldiers are massing on your northern border; what are they doing there, if not waiting to invade? This is a battle that must come. Better that we fight the French army in Scotland, with the Protestant Scots on our side, than we wait for them to come marching down the Great North Road when we do not know who might rise up for us and who might rise up for them.’

Elizabeth paused; the appearance of the English leopards on the shield of the daughter of Mary of Guise was an offence which went straight to her jealously possessive heart. ‘She dare not try to claim my throne. No-one would rise up for her in preference to me,’ she said boldly. ‘No-one would want another Catholic Mary on the throne.’

‘Hundreds would,’ Cecil said dampeningly. ‘Thousands.’

That checked her, as he had known it would. He could see that she lost a little colour.

‘The people love me,’ she asserted.

‘Not all of them.’

She laughed but there was no real merriment in her voice. ‘Are you saying I have more friends in Scotland than in the north of England?’

‘Yes,’ he said bluntly.

‘Philip of Spain would stand my ally if there was an invasion,’ she declared.

‘Yes, as long as he thinks that you will be his wife. But can you keep him thinking that for much longer? You cannot really mean to have him?’

Elizabeth giggled like a girl and, unaware of betraying herself, glanced across the room towards Robert Dudley, seated between two other handsome young men. Effortlessly, he outshone them. He tipped back his head to laugh and snapped his fingers for more wine. A servant, studiously ignoring other thirsty diners, leapt to do his bidding.

‘I might marry Philip,’ she said. ‘Or I might keep him waiting.’

‘The important thing,’ Cecil said gently, ‘is to choose a husband and get us an heir. That is the way to make the country safe against the Princess Mary. If you have a strong husband at your side and a son in the cradle, no-one would want another queen. People would even overlook religion for a safe succession.’

‘I have been offered no-one I could be sure to like as a husband,’ she said, warming to her favourite, most irritating theme. ‘And I am happy in my single state.’

‘You are the queen,’ Cecil said flatly. ‘And queens cannot choose the single state.’

Robert raised his goblet in a toast to the health of one of Elizabeth’s ladies, his most recent mistress, her friend nudged her and she simpered across the room to him. Elizabeth apparently saw nothing, Cecil knew that she had missed none of it.

‘And Scotland?’ he prompted.

‘It is a very great risk. All very well to say that the Scottish Lords Protestant might rise up against Mary of Guise, but what if they do not? Or if they do, and are defeated? Where are we then, but defeated in a war of our own making? And meddling in the affairs of an anointed queen. What is that to do, but to go against God’s will? And to invite a French invasion.’

‘Either in Scotland or in England we will have to face the French,’ Cecil predicted. ‘Either with the Spanish on our side or without them. What I am advising, Your Grace – nay, what I am begging you to understand – is that we will have to face the French and we should do it at a time and a place of our choosing, and with allies. If we fight now, we have the Spanish as our friends. If you leave it too long, you will have to fight alone. And then you will certainly lose.’

‘It will anger the Catholics in England if we are seen to join the Protestant cause against a rightful Catholic queen,’ she pointed out.

‘You were known as the Protestant princess, it will come as little surprise to them, it makes it no worse for us. And many of them, even stout Catholics, would be glad to see the French soundly beaten. Many of them are Englishmen before they are Catholics.’

Elizabeth shifted irritably on her throne. ‘I don’t want to be known as the Protestant queen,’ she said crossly. ‘Have we not had enough inquiry into men’s faiths that we have to chase after their souls once more? Can’t people just worship in the way that they wish, and leave others to their devotions? Do I have to endure the constant inquiry from the bishops to the Commons as to what I think, as to what the people should think? Can’t it be enough for them that we have restored the church to what it was in my father’s time but without his punishments?’

‘No,’ he said frankly. ‘Your Grace,’ he added when she shot him a hard look. ‘You will be forced again and again to take a side. The church needs leadership, you must command it or leave it to the Pope. Which is it to be?’

He saw her gaze wander, she was looking past him to Robert Dudley who had risen from his place at table and was strolling across the room to where the ladies in waiting were seated on their table. As he approached they all turned towards him, without seeming to move; their heads all swivelled like flowers seeking the sun, his current favourite blushing in anticipation.

‘I shall think about it,’ she said abruptly. She crooked her finger to Robert Dudley and smoothly, he altered his course and came to the dais and bowed. ‘Your Grace,’ he said pleasantly.

‘I should like to dance.’

‘Would you do me the honour? I have been longing to ask you, but did not dare to interrupt your talk, you seemed so grave.’

‘Not only grave but urgent,’ Cecil reminded her grimly.

She nodded, but he saw he had lost her attention. She rose from her seat, her eyes only for Robert. Cecil stepped to one side and she went past him to the centre of the floor. Robert bowed to her, as graceful as an Italian, and took her hand. A faint hint of colour came into Elizabeth’s cheek at his touch. She turned her head away from him.

Cecil watched the set of dancers form behind the couple, Catherine and Francis Knollys behind them, Robert’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney, and her partner, other ladies and gentlemen of the court behind them, but no pair even half as handsome as the queen and her favourite. Cecil could not help but smile on the two of them, a radiant pair of well-matched beauties. Elizabeth caught his indulgent look and gave him a cheeky grin. Cecil bowed his head. After all, she was a young woman, not only a queen, and it was good for England to have a merry court.

Later that night, in the silent palace, under an unbroken black sky, the court slept, but Cecil was wakeful. He had thrown a robe over his linen nightshirt and sat at his great desk, his bare feet drawn on to the furred edge of his gown against the wintry coldness of the stone floor. His pen scratched on the manuscript as he made out his list of candidates for the queen’s hand, and the advantages and disadvantages of each match. Cecil was a great one for lists; their march down the page matched the orderly progression of his thinking.

Husbands for the Queen.

1. King Philip of Spain – he will need dispensation from the Pope/ he would support us against France and save us from the danger of the French in Scotland/ but he will use England in his wars/ the people will never accept him a second time/ can he even father a child?/ she was attracted to him before but perhaps it was spite, and only because he was married to her sister.

2. Archduke Charles – Hapsburg but free to live in England/ Spanish alliance/ said to be fanatically religious/ said to be ugly and she cannot tolerate ugliness even in men.

3. Archduke Ferdinand – his brother so same advantages but said to be pleasant and better-looking/ younger so more malleable?/ She will never brook a master, and neither will we.

4. Prince Erik of Sweden – a great match for him and would please the Baltic merchants, but of no help to us elsewhere/ Would make the French and the Spanish our bitter enemies and for the scant benefit of a weak ally/ Protestant of course/ Rich too, which would be a great help.

5. Earl of Arran – heir to the Scottish throne after Princess Mary/ could lead the Scottish campaign for us/ handsome/ Protestant/ poor (and thus grateful to me). If he were to defeat the French in Scotland our worst danger is gone/ and a son to him and the queen would finally unite the kingdoms/ A Scottish-English monarchy would solve everything …

6. An English commoner – she is a young woman and sooner or later is bound to take a liking to someone who always hangs about her/ This would be the worst choice: he would further his own friends and family/ would anger other families/ would seek greater power from his knowledge of the country/ disaster for me …

Cecil broke off and brushed the feather of the quill against his lips.

It cannot be, he wrote. We cannot have an overmighty subject to further his own family and turn her against me and mine. Thank God that Robt Dudley is already married or he would be scheming to take this flirtation further. I know him and his …

He sat in the silence of the night-time palace. Outside on the turret an owl hooted, calling for a mate. Cecil thought of the sleeping queen and his face softened in a smile that was as tender as a father’s. Then he drew a fresh piece of paper towards him and started to write.

To the Earl of Arran:

My lord,

At this urgent time in your affairs the bearer of this will convey to you my good wishes and my hopes that you will let him assist you to come to England, where my house and my servants will be honoured to be at your disposal …

Elizabeth, in her private apartment at Whitehall Palace, was re-reading a love-letter from Philip of Spain, the third of a series that had grown increasingly passionate as the correspondence had gone on. One of her ladies in waiting, Lady Betty, craned to see the words upside down but could not make out the Latin, and silently cursed her poor education.

‘Oh, listen,’ Elizabeth breathed. ‘He says that he cannot eat or sleep for thinking of me.’

‘He’ll have got dreadfully scrawny then,’ Catherine Knollys said robustly. ‘He was always too thin; he had legs like a pigeon.’

Lady Mary Sidney, Robert Dudley’s sister, giggled.

‘Hush!’ Elizabeth reprimanded them primly; she was always sensitive to the status of a fellow monarch. ‘He is very distinguished. And anyway, I daresay he is eating. It is just poetry, Catherine. He is just saying it to please me.’

‘Just nonsense,’ Catherine said under her breath. ‘And Papist nonsense, at that.’

‘He says he has struggled with his conscience, and struggled with his respect for my faith and my learning, and that he is sure that we can somehow find a way that allows us both to continue in our faith, and yet bring our hearts together.’

‘He will bring a dozen cardinals in his train,’ Catherine predicted. ‘And the Inquisition behind them. He has no affection for you at all, this is just politics.’

Elizabeth looked up. ‘Catherine, he does have an affection for me. You were not here, or you would have seen it for yourself. Everybody remarked it at the time, it was an utter scandal. I swear that I would have been left in the Tower or under house arrest for the rest of my life if he had not intervened for me against the queen’s ill wishes. He insisted that I be treated as a princess and as heir …’ She broke off and smoothed down the golden brocade skirt of her gown. ‘And he was very tender to me.’ Her voice took on its typical, narcissistic lilt. Elizabeth was always ready to fall in love with herself. ‘He admired me, to tell the truth; he adored me. A real prince, a real king, and desperately in love with me. While my sister was confined we spent much time together, and he was …’

‘A fine husband he will make,’ Catherine interrupted. ‘One who flirts with his sister-in-law while his wife is in confinement.’

‘She was not really confined,’ Elizabeth said with magnificent irrelevance. ‘She only thought she was with child because she was so swollen and sick …’

‘All the kinder of him then,’ Catherine triumphed. ‘So he flirted with his sister-in-law when his wife was ill and breaking her heart over something she could not help. Your Grace, in all seriousness, you cannot have him. The people of England won’t have the Spanish king back again, he was hated here the first time, they would go mad if he came back again. He emptied the treasury, he broke your sister’s heart, he did not give her a son, he lost us Calais, and he has spent the last few months in the most disgraceful affairs with the ladies of Brussels.’

‘No!’ Elizabeth said, instantly diverted from her love-letter. ‘So is that what he means when he says he neither eats nor sleeps?’

‘Because he is always bedding the fat burghers’ wives. He is as lecherous as a sparrow!’ Catherine beamed at her cousin’s irresistible giggle. ‘You must be able to do better than your sister’s left-overs, surely! You are not such an old maid that you have to settle for cold meats, a second-hand husband. There are better choices.’

‘Oh! And who would you want me to have?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘The Earl of Arran,’ Catherine said promptly. ‘He’s young, he’s Protestant, he’s handsome, he’s very, very charming – I met him briefly and I lost my heart to him at once – and when he inherits the throne, you join England and Scotland into one kingdom.’

‘Only if Mary of Guise were to helpfully drop dead, followed by her daughter,’ Elizabeth pointed out. ‘And Mary of Guise is in good health and her daughter is younger than me.’

‘Stranger things happen to further God’s will,’ Catherine said confidently. ‘And if the regent Mary lives, why should she not be pushed off her throne by a handsome Protestant heir?’

Elizabeth frowned and glanced around the room to see who was listening. ‘Enough, Catherine, matchmaking doesn’t suit you.’

‘It is both matchmaking and the safety of our nation and our faith,’ Catherine said, unrepentant. ‘And you have the chance to secure Scotland for your son, and save it from the Antichrist of Popery by marrying a handsome young man. It sounds to me as if there is no decision to take. Who would not want the Earl of Arran, fighting on the side of the Scottish lords for God’s kingdom on earth, and the kingdom of Scotland as his dowry?’

Catherine Knollys might be certain in her preference for the young Earl of Arran, but at the end of February another suitor appeared at Elizabeth’s court: the Austrian ambassador, Count von Helfenstein, pressing the claims of the Hapsburg archdukes, Charles and Ferdinand.

‘You are a flower pestered by butterflies,’ Robert Dudley smiled, as they walked in the cold gardens of Whitehall Palace, two of Elizabeth’s new guards following them at a discreet distance.

‘Indeed, I must be, for I do nothing to attract.’

‘Nothing?’ he asked her, one dark eyebrow raised.

She paused to peep up at him from under the brim of her hat. ‘I invite no attention,’ she claimed.

‘Not the way that you walk?’

‘For sure, I go from one place to another.’

‘The way you dance?’

‘In the Italian manner, as most ladies do.’

‘Oh, Elizabeth!’

‘You may not call me Elizabeth.’

‘Well, you may not lie to me.’

‘What rule is this?’

‘One for your benefit. Now, to return to the subject. You attract suitors in the way that you speak.’

‘I am bound to be polite to visiting diplomats.’

‘You are more than polite, you are …’

‘What?’ she said with a giggle of laughter in her voice.

‘Promising.’

‘Ah, I promise nothing!’ she said at once. ‘I never promise.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘That is the very snare of you. You sound promising, but you promise nothing.’

She laughed aloud in her happiness. ‘It’s true,’ she confessed. ‘But to be honest, sweet Robin, I have to play this game, it is not just my own pleasure.’

‘You would never marry a Frenchman for the safety of England?’

‘I would never turn one down,’ she said. ‘Any suitor of mine is an ally for England. It is more like playing chess than a courtship.’

‘And does no man make your heart beat a little faster?’ he asked, in a sudden swoop to intimacy.

Elizabeth looked up at him, her gaze straight, her expression devoid of coquetry, absolutely honest. ‘Not a one,’ she said simply.

For a moment he was utterly taken aback.

She crowed with laughter. ‘Got you!’ She pointed at him. ‘You vain dog! And you thought you had caught me!’

He caught the hand and carried it to his mouth. ‘I think I will never catch you,’ he said. ‘But I should be a happy man to spend my life in trying.’

She tried to laugh, but at his drawing closer, the laugh was caught in her throat. ‘Ah, Robert …’

‘Elizabeth?’

She would have pulled her hand away, but he held it close.

‘I will have to marry a prince,’ she said unsteadily. ‘It is a game to see where the dice best falls, but I know that I cannot rule alone and I must have a son to come after me.’

‘You have to marry a man who can serve your interests, and serve the interests of the country,’ he said steadily. ‘And you would be wise to choose a man that you would like to bed.’

She gave a little gasp of shock. ‘You’re very free, Sir Robert.’

His confidence was quite unshaken, he still held her hand in his warm grip. ‘I am very sure,’ he said softly. ‘You are a young woman as well as a queen. You have a heart as well as a crown. And you should choose a man for your desires as well as for your country. You’re not a woman for a cold bed, Elizabeth. You’re not a woman that can marry for policy alone. You want a man you can love and trust. I know this. I know you.’